FluxDash

Past meets present … a first-century Roman amphitheatre near the Luma Foundation arts complex in Arles, France. Photograph: Iwan BaanPast meets present … a first-century Roman amphitheatre near the Luma Foundation arts complex in Arles, France. Photograph: Iwan BaanArchitectureThe Luma Foundation’s gleaming Gehry-designed arts centre towers over a French city struggling with debt, drugs and poverty – so who really benefits from the city’s resurgence? As wildfires rake the steep canyonsides of a digital landscape, I fly over the terrain searching for an elusive mountain lion I keep glimpsing in the distance.

The ObserverTennisLike Emma Raducanu, the Canadian has found it difficult after her breakout 2021 but the skills and fighting spirit are still there Within a few games of Leylah Fernandez’s second-round match against Belinda Bencic at the Miami Open on Friday, defeat already seemed inevitable. As Bencic squeezed up to the baseline, suffocating the young Canadian with her early ball-striking and sharp redirections, Fernandez could not keep up. She tried to hold her own position inside the baseline, but was easily pushed back.

Sexual healingRelationshipsI like him, but I’m not attracted to him. While I don’t want to hurt his feelings, it has become a thorn in my side I am a 58-year-old woman, married for 30. Although I like my husband, I find him physically repulsive. His lovemaking is so boring and always has been. I have tried to explain that foreplay is important, but it goes in one ear and out the other.

Old musicTom WaitsOld music: Tom Waits - MarthaTom Waits is such a one-off that even his juvenilia suggests wisdom beyond his yearsWritten in 1973, when Tom Waits was just 24, Martha finds this earliest incarnation of one of the US's most intriguing musical characters dropping comfortably into the slippers of a much, much older man. Calling long-distance to an old flame, he lays his heart bare about their past together, his current married status, and offers the beautifully underplayed revelation that he is still in love with her.

MoviesReviewAvoiding schmaltzy pitfalls, this moving drama about two friends nearing adulthood offers a modern ideal of masculinity Unlike many queer coming-of-age films – which can lapse into sentimental self-flagellation – Argentinian director Mariano Biasin’s light-touch drama handles the thorny process of coming out in refreshing fashion. Friends since childhood, Manu (Martín Miller) and Felipe (Teo Inama Chiabrando) are inseparable during their teenage years. When not playing together in a band, the pair hang out at the beach or simply lounge about in their rooms, talking about everything and nothing.

Genoa holidaysToday’s Ligurian hotspots are the Cinque Terre and swanky Portofino. But head west of Genoa for now-quiet resorts such as Alassio where, a century ago, Brits went to see and be seen As the plane circled over the Ligurian coast towards Genoa, my fellow passengers were getting excited. They all seemed to be heading east – to glamorous Portofino, or the Cinque Terre for hiking. But I was going west, along a road that was practically built by the British but has been curiously forgotten by them.

ThrillersReviewDemocracy is a pantomime and Los Angeles is one big Chinatown in this playful future-set thrillerThe Guardian’s own Jonathan Freedland has written five effective, bestselling thrillers under the nom de plume Sam Bourne. Like its predecessors, the first under his own name inhabits a comfortable middle ground between Dan Brown and Robert Harris, and fans of arrestingly Orwellian opening sentences will enjoy the first line: “It was the last day of January and the New Year was approaching.

Wisconsin This article is more than 6 months oldWisconsin teacher fired for criticizing school district ban of song RainbowlandThis article is more than 6 months oldMelissa Tempel dismissed after she tweeted frustration at ban of Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus song exalting virtues of inclusivity A teacher in Wisconsin has been fired from her job after she criticized her public school district’s decision to ban the song Rainbowland, which exalts the virtues of inclusivity, from a children’s concert at her campus.

Book of the dayScience and nature booksReviewIn Rovelli’s formative book, now published in English for the first time, he argues that a little-known Greek philosopher invented the idea of the cosmos Something very startling happened in Miletus, the ancient Greek city on the modern Turkish coast, in about 600BC. That something, physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in this enjoyable and provocative little book, occurred in the interaction between two of the place’s greatest minds.