🔗 Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet is pretentious — but what fun

🔗 Stoicism & Buddhism: Lessons, Similarities and Differences

🔗 Luca is the progenitor of all life on Earth. But its genesis has implications far beyond our planet

Luca – short for the last universal common ancestor, the progenitor of all known life on Earth – seems to have been born 4.2bn years ago.

🔗 Phish: Tiny Desk Concert 🎵

🔗 Gukesh Dommaraju becomes youngest world chess champion after horrific Ding Liren blunder

🔗 I’m intrigued by failure: Kim Deal on death, addiction and releasing her debut solo album at 63

🔗 ‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology

Love, death, grief, power, revenge: Greek tragedies get to the essence of the human experience. Here, writers and artists select their favourite plays, music and films inspired by the classics, from The Hunger Games to a Santana hit

🔗 I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: what Blade Runner 2049’s dystopia tells us about 2017

🔗 Blade Runner 2049 review - a future classic

The sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic manages to be both visually stunning and philosophically profound

🔗 Tears in rain? Why Blade Runner is timeless

🔗 Identity of casts of victims at Pompeii not all they seem, research suggests

Ancient DNA challenges prevailing interpretations of the Pompeii plaster casts

🔗 The Cure: Songs of a Lost World review – as promised, ‘very, very doom and gloom’

The band’s first album in 16 years finds Robert Smith and co on reliably melancholy form

🔗 The Cure: Songs of a Lost World review – dark, personal and their best since Disintegration

The band are at an artistic peak on their first album in 16 years: movingly melancholic, with a punchy sound to match the lyrics’ emotional impact

🔗 John Keats statue to be unveiled near his birthplace in London’s Moorgate

Martin Jennings – whose previous public sculptures include John Betjeman, George Orwell and Philip Larkin – has based his bronze on a life cast of the poet, taken when he was 21

🔗 Venice without the crowds: the inside story by Tracy Chevalier

🔗 Talking Heads with Adrian Belew Live Dortmund 1980. YouTube 🎵

60 fps HD version

🔗 I hate blind baking, can it ever be avoided?

After all, lots of recipes say to blind bake for only 15-20 minutes, which is just not correct. Instead, he insists, you need to do so for at least 35-40 minutes, and at a low oven temperature, too – 160C-170C (depending on your oven): If someone has never blind baked for that length of time, they’ll never have seen a really nice result, which is why it would feel a bit pointless.

🔗 The crunch, the flavours, the rituals: how crisps became a British snack obsession

🔗 Harrison Ford keeps working for ‘human contact’. Could he be any more beloved?

The man is a living legend with nothing left to prove, he doesn’t need to work other than for the simple pleasure of being around talented people – and it’s a joy to watch

🔗 Jad Adams

Author of Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson