
With You Can See Everything, Holmes joins other such high-profile subjects as Lance Armstrong, Imelda Marcos and Anthony Weiner to allow film-makers to document their lives. But do they ever come out well?
In You Can See Everything, convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes invites film-makers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim into her home in a supposed act of “radical transparency”. Holmes is filmed, along with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two young children, in the weeks before starting a prison sentence for defrauding Theranos investors. “The best way for people to see who she is,” Evans says, “is to give as much access as possible into our daily lives”. It may also be the best way to market “Theranos 2.0”, which the couple are working on during filming. But the documentary questions whether Holmes is presenting her authentic self or a manufactured persona. Fielder speaks for the audience when he asks Holmes in a tense exchange whether she’s “being real” with him. “I’m always being real,” she says.
That question of authenticity is at the heart of documentary film-making. You Can See Everything is as much about the ambiguous relationship between film-maker and subject as it is about Holmes herself. There is often a power struggle over narrative control in documentaries, with both sides of the dynamic wanting different outcomes from the final film. Watching You Can See Everything inevitably prompts the question: why would Holmes, days before she heads to jail, invite the scrutiny of a film crew?
Continue reading...Hospice and end-of-life workers discuss what they’ve learned from their work and patients in their last moments
“Hospice” can be a loaded term. Some see it as synonymous with death and “giving up”, as Courtney, a full-time hospice nurse practitioner in Missouri, puts it. But Courtney, who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, doesn’t see it that way.
“Hospice is giving someone a gift,” she says of her patients, who have typically received a terminal diagnosis with a timeline of six months or less. “It is giving them the gift of being able to stay at home and eat or not eat whatever they want. It is the gift of comfort.”
Continue reading...In honour of Claudia Jones’ memory, I reflect on how diasporic reporting provides community and avoids being defined by the western white experience
This week, I had the great honour of delivering the Claudia Jones memorial lecture, hosted by the UK National Union of Journalists. It is partly inspired by the Long Wave and the extraordinary response it continues to receive from readers. As the newsletter turns two, I reflect, in the abridged version of the lecture below, on the importance of making space in an embattled political climate.
It feels like a particularly difficult time to say anything with much certainty. We stand today in the shadow of the Black Lives Matter Movement – as well as the wreckage brought about by neoliberalism, the rise of the far right, and ongoing culture wars. In the last decade, several moments have swelled with possibility and then melted away – not quite into nothing, but certainly, less than we would like. Where do we go from here?
Continue reading...The Overlap has gone daily, with Steven Gerrard and Joe Hart among the latest additions to an ever-growing family
Viewed in 2026, Nathan Barley, Chris Morris’s 2005 sitcom, shows remarkable prescience about the last two decades of metropolitan life, from smartphone addiction and digital derangement to sheer existential vapidity. When Barley’s character referred to his occupation as “self-facilitating media node”, Morris and co-writer Charlie Brooker were way ahead on the creator economy. What the pair failed to predict was ex-footballers joining the sector in droves. These days, if you are a former footballer without a podcast or YouTube channel, then did you ever really play the game?
Setting aside the Gary Lineker Goalhanger empire, manspreading its centrist-dad agenda into issues way beyond guffaws with Micah Richards and Alan Shearer, there is Gary Neville to rule them all. Manchesterism’s second-most influential practitioner has been on heavy manoeuvres. Unlike Lineker’s productions, the Overlap’s output continues to stick largely to football; a rugby podcast was mothballed in February, though its cricket equivalent continues.
Continue reading...An ‘all British, all day’ station is a nativist dream come true – but good luck with the playlist. And anyway: how many artists will want to be on Farage FM?
If you want a quintessential “It wouldn’t happen now” story, try this. Two months before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979, a national Militant Entertainment Tour was organised by Rock Against Racism.
On 20 March 1979, it came to the West Runton Pavilion near Cromer, the (very) small town on the coastal edge of East Anglia. The bill mixed the black and white musicians in three bands then at their artistic peak – the post-punk maestros Gang of Four, the punk-reggae hybridists The Ruts, and Misty in Roots, the renowned reggae collective from Southall in west London – and thereby made a stark symbolic point: that the multiracial nature of large swathes of the UK was not to be decried or attacked, but actively celebrated.
Continue reading...As a documentary celebrates the late US musician, friends and collaborators describe an incomparable storyteller who brought ‘myth and magic to everyday life’
Jason Molina grew up in a trailer in the working-class city of Lorain, Ohio. The city’s skyline once flickered with blue flames and a warm orange glow emanated from clattering steel mills, but by Molina’s teenage years, Lorain was in a tailspin. “Things were really on the economic decline,” says Tommy Nickoloff, Molina’s childhood friend and director of a new documentary: You Fuckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story. “Nobody had any money and we were encouraged to get out. It’s a place where the American dream was born and died. And we watched it die.”
Molina did indeed get out: the singer-songwriter released almost 20 studio albums and numerous EPs, primarily under the monikers Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co, spanning lo-fi to slowcore via polished Americana and alt-country. By 2009, he estimated he had written thousands of songs. But he died in 2013, aged 39, after years of alcoholism.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Officials say Miatta Fahnbulleh minded not to give approval in victory for climate campaigners
Miatta Fahnbulleh is minded to reject the giant Rosebank oilfield, sources have told the Guardian, in what would be a blow for the North Sea energy industry and a major victory for climate campaigners.
After approving the smaller Jackdaw gasfield on Wednesday, officials say the energy secretary is leaning towards refusing approval for what would be one of the biggest oilfields in the North Sea.
Continue reading...Met police investigating after referral from PSNI about allegation former DUP leader raped woman in 2016
The Metropolitan police are investigating an allegation that the former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson raped a woman inside parliament in 2016.
Scotland Yard confirmed it received a report from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) on 13 October about an alleged rape in the Palace of Westminster involving a man now aged 63.
Continue reading...Precautionary takedowns come as experts say bad actors could exploit vulnerability in language used by 70% of sites
Websites around the globe have gone dark after a serious vulnerability was found in a computer language used to build much of the world wide web.
Belgian, Dutch, Finnish, French and German sites were among those that governments took down temporarily as they scrambled to patch the critical weakness in PHP, a language used by almost 70% of websites.
Continue reading...US photojournalist describes ‘protective shield’, vows to return to work in West Bank and criticises Netanyahu comments on incident
The Washington Post photojournalist who was attacked and seriously injured by Israeli settlers in the West Bank on Friday has described how she was saved with the help of local Palestinians.
Heidi Levine sustained four fractured vertebrae, two broken ribs and four puncture wounds when she was knocked to the ground and repeatedly beaten by a crowd of masked settlers while she and other journalists were covering the olive harvest in the Palestinian village of Abu Falah, north of Ramallah.
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