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Sitting in the restaurant of a Denver hotel, in the middle of a US tour with his band Bleachers, Jack Antonoff shrugs. “There’s this intense need to figure me out,” he frowns, “and I don’t really know where it comes from, because I keep explaining all of it.”He has a point. For the last 12 years, Bleachers have released a succession of albums packed with Antonoff’s strikingly personal and frank songs. Being strikingly personal and frank was the whole point. Antonoff had previously been guitarist in Fun, a pop-rock band who went supernova with their 2011 single We Are Young. Despite co-writing a song that sold 10m copies in the US alone, Antonoff says he “hated” the experience “because I wasn’t the leader, they weren’t my words, and I needed to write a song that if I fucking died tomorrow would be my life story”. He says he insisted his then-record label release said song I Wanna Get Better as Bleachers’ debut single “to let people know what they were in for”. It depicted Antonoff literally screaming in anguish, “losing my mind” with grief in the wake of his younger sister’s death, aged 13, from a brain tumour.

My mother would sing and dance and cook and clean in the kitchen, as many 80s moms did, to divas like Madonna and Paula Abdul. Material Girl made me think: “This is who I want to be.”The first single I bought I bought three records at the same time – Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette, a Sheryl Crow single and Waterfalls by TLC – from Sam the Record Man in Sarnia, Ontario, with money I’d saved up from doing chores around the house. My uncle was always trying to influence me with Canadian music, and he wasn’t wrong for doing so. The song I do at karaoke

His work in the Venice Biennale and at Paula Cooper Gallery turns history’s absences into artworks.

When One Born Every Minute first aired in 2010, viewers loved its fly-on-the-wall take on life in a maternity unit, from midwives idly chatting about unusual pregnancy cravings to parents squabbling over whether to call their child Zeus. Almost two decades later, as the show is rebooted for a generation who spend their lives on social media, much has changed. Parents now share far more about their struggles with miscarriages, infertility and mental health; audiences have to be lured away from watching reels on their phones with more rigorous storytelling. “Quite a bit is different about the way that people have children,” said Will Rowson, executive producer at Dragonfly, which makes the show for Channel 4. “People are so used to sharing. They expect to share, there is a willingness to share, and that is a generational thing.”Peace, who will be featured with her twin newborns, wants viewers to understand the importance of ‘not letting things out of your control get to you’. Photograph: Dragonfly/Channel 4The first episode of the show, which airs on Sunday night, tackles topics that have come to the foreground in the years since the Bafta-winning first run ended in 2018.

The novelist Zadie Smith has said that inequality has made culture clashes feel “existential”, adding that it has become “natural to look to your left and think ‘who the fuck are you?’”In an interview with Dua Lipa as part of the Southbank Centre’s London literature festival, Smith argued that the demise of Britain’s “incredible, historic” welfare system has led to greater divisions. The pair discussed Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth, which was published in 2000 and primarily set in the last three decades of the 20th century. Asked by Lipa about how attitudes towards multiculturalism have changed since the 80s and 90s, and the current “dividing line” on immigration in UK politics, Smith pointed to increased inequality and unemployment. “When you’re living in basically decent housing, when you hurt yourself you know you can go to hospital and be treated just like the rich kid down the road – then the differences [with others] become interesting, sometimes annoying, but not existential,” said the novelist. “Now, they’re existential.