Life and Art from FT Weekend

The FT’s foreign editor Alec Russell has been reporting on crises around the world for more than 30 years. He was in Romania during the fall of the Ceaușescu regime, in South Africa for the fall of apartheid, and in 1994 he reported on the genocide in Rwanda. So when we recently felt ourselves losing hope at the news from Gaza and Ukraine, we decided to ask him: is this an especially tough time in...

For the third episode in our design series, we’re talking fashion design through the lens of the 2006 classic The Devil Wears Prada . The film is having a moment on the internet. We’re here to revisit it with fresh eyes, and with two experts in fashion: Jo Ellison, the editor of our luxury magazine HTSI, and Rob Armstrong, our men’s style columnist (OK, he’s also our US financial columnist). The f...

Designer Jonathan Adler is known for a style that is classic but eccentric. Think gold chairs shaped like hands, vases shaped like heads, and beautiful cookie jars labelled ”quaaludes”. He got his start as a potter, but he now designs everything from furniture to dinnerware to custom upholstery, which are sold by hundreds of retailers around the world. In the second instalment of our design series...

What do you get when you mix female bodybuilding, guns, and a twisted romance? You get Love Lies Bleeding , the latest film from director and co-writer Rose Glass. When she first emailed Kristen Stewart about appearing as its lead, Rose says she described the film as a “crime, romance, thriller, dark comedy, farce, surreal thing”. She talks with Lilah about how she developed the idea, and the kind...

Park your Lexus, throw your keys up, and let’s get into Cowboy Carter, the new genre-bending, country-angled album by Beyonce. Here are the facts: it’s the second instalment in her Renaissance trilogy. It features Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Post Malone and Miley Cyrus, and spotlights Black country artists such as Linda Martell. But what was Beyonce’s goal with this album? And how does it fit int...

Welcome to the first episode in our special four-part series on design! Today, Lilah speaks with the FT’s longtime architecture and design critic Edwin Heathcote to talk about an often-forgotten element of design in cities. It’s called “street furniture,” and it describes the objects we pass every day: from phone booths and lampposts to manhole covers and park benches. Last year, Edwin published a...

To celebrate the first signs of spring, we’re bringing you a special Easter weekend episode full of tips for spring travel. FT Globetrotter editors Rebecca Rose and Niki Blasina run our insider guides to great cities. They tell Lilah how to make the most out of a holiday in April and May: from where to go and how to pack, to tips on travelling alone, with kids, and with pets. ------- We love heari...

Today, Lilah and journalist Nadia Beard listen to two musicians play the same piece of music: one at 41 years old, and the other at 97. Nadia recently wrote about musicians who are debuting on major stages in their 80s and 90s. She came to this story after deciding to take up piano seriously in her 30s herself. She tells Lilah about the value of amateurism in adulthood: why it’s good to do hard th...

Today we take on 3 Body Problem , the new buzzy Netflix sci-fi series from the creators of Game of Thrones. The show is based on Liu Cixin’s best-selling Chinese trilogy and is about humankind’s first contact with an alien civilisation. It spans timelines, worlds and dimensions. Lilah is joined by the FT’s AI editor Madhumita Murgia and work and careers journalist Emma Jacobs to discuss how well t...

Today we’re sharing an episode from a food podcast that we think you might like called The Sporkful, hosted by Dan Pashman. A few years ago, Dan invented a new pasta shape called cascatelli. It went viral and was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Inventions of the Year in 2021. Dan’s first cookbook, called Anything's Pastable: 81 Inventive Recipes for Saucy People, will be released on March 19. And...

In his new documentary High and Low , Academy-award winning director Kevin Macdonald focuses on John Galliano, the one-time enfant terrible of fashion. Known for dazzling collections and a personal penchant for wearing pirate outfits, Galliano led the House of Dior from 1997 to 2011. He then “lost it all” when a series of videos surfaced showing him making drunken racist and antisemitic remarks –...

We think of fashion and reading as almost polar opposites: one is about creating an image, the other a kind of internal journey. But a number of recent fashion collections have been inspired by books, including by Hanya Yanagihara, Edgar Allan Poe, and Agatha Christie. Fashion brands are producing literature podcasts and hosting salons. And in interior design, TikTok’s latest trend is bookshelf we...

This week, we talk about the new film Dune: Part Two . A star-studded epic featuring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Florence Pugh, and more. It’s the second instalment in the Dune franchise, based on the book by Frank Herbert and directed by Denis Villeneuve. The FT’s global business columnist Rana Foroohar, an avid Dune fan, and associate editor Stephen Bush join guest host Katya Kumkova to talk thr...

If you’ve been to the wine shop lately you may have noticed a trend: wines marketed specifically toward younger drinkers. Many are natural, organic, or biodynamic. Others are made without special certification but boast backstories that focus on the producers, not just the region or grapes. Wine writer Hannah Crosbie joins Lilah to give us a primer on what young wine drinkers want. Why are pét nat...

This week, we talk about ‘The Taste of Things’ with Tim Hayward, the FT’s restaurant critic, and our food and drink editor Harriet Fitch Little. The film is set in France in the 1880s and follows the relationship between a talented cook, played by Juliette Binoche, and the food connoisseur who employs her (Benoît Magimel). ‘The Taste of Things’ has received widespread critical acclaim – with criti...

Jazz singer Samara Joy is just 24 years old. She has more than 1.3mn social media followers and three Grammys. Most notably, she won 2023’s best new artist award, only the second jazz musician ever to join that coveted club. Today, Lilah speaks with Samara about her path: discovering jazz, her thought process as she performs, and how she finds new takes on compositions by greats such as Duke Ellin...

This Friday, we explore Jennifer Lopez’s mind-boggling new movie musical ‘This is Me … Now: A Love Story’, which was released alongside an album of the same name. The film, inspired by her marriage to actor Ben Affleck, is a series of music videos, action scenes and therapy sessions. And it was self-funded, for $20mn. What, exactly was J Lo trying to say with this project? Lilah is joined by two s...

Sitting too much is terrible for you. It leads to early onset heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and anxiety. To fight the effects of our sedentary lifestyle, regular exercise isn’t enough. Scientists have found that if we want to feel better, and be healthier, we need regular movement breaks throughout our days. Journalist and podcaster Manoush Zomorodi recently challenged her listeners to take th...

In this episode we’re discussing the new novel Fourteen Days . The book is a collaboration by 36 authors including Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Celeste Ng, RL Stine, and Dave Eggers – and part of the experience is guessing who wrote which part. So does the premise work as a novel? What do we want from experimental fiction? And are we ready to revisit the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, during w...

Today, we talk to the director of the acclaimed documentary 20 Days in Mariupol , Mstyslav Chernov. Chernov’s film is an extraordinary chronicle of Russia’s attack on one of Ukraine’s largest cities in its first days under siege. The city is now destroyed. Mstyslav’s team of journalists were the only press left in the city during those 20 days: the film documents the harrowing experience of reside...

Let’s get ready to rumble! This week, we’re pregaming this Sunday’s Super Bowl, which could break records as the most-watched television event in US history. The FT’s sports business correspondent Sara Germano and Wall Street reporter / sports fanatic Sujeet Indap join Lilah to set the scene for the Super Bowl as a cultural event: the teams, the history, the drama, the head injuries, the halftime...

Molly Roden Winter was a frustrated mom of two in Brooklyn when she and her husband decided that they should open their marriage. What followed was a 10-year journey of self-exploration that brought Molly not only into some seedy hotel rooms but also to therapy, back to work, and into other activities that added up to a more fulfilling life. Today Molly is on the show to talk about her memoir More...

Today we take on ‘Poor Things’, the latest film from director Yorgos Lanthimos. It stars Emma Stone as a Victorian woman whose brain is replaced with that of her unborn baby. She embarks on a sexual journey of self-discovery through Europe and beyond. The film is a critical darling, with 11 Oscar nominations, but unsurprisingly, it left many viewers feeling uneasy. Lilah invites FT arts editor Jan...

If you have questions about this year's US presidential election, we have answers. Swamp Notes is a new podcast from the FT News Briefing. Listen every Saturday morning as our journalists analyse and discuss the latest happenings in US politics. We’ll go beyond the horse race for the White House and offer a global perspective on the election.   You can subscribe to Swamp Notes here or wh...

Restaurant critic Tim Hayward has been writing about food for the FT for years. He also owns a bakery in Cambridge. So when a friend accused him of being a glutton, his reaction was: “Of course I’m a glutton! Do people still think that’s a bad thing?” Today Tim is on the podcast to share his thoughts on how we came to see food through a moral lens. What does it mean to be a glutton in the age of O...