‘This was our Eras tour!’: Guardian readers on seeing Oasis’s comeback gigs

Last week the Gallagher brothers kicked-off their reunion tour in Cardiff – our readers look back in admiration

I thought the show was going to be a bit of a money grab. I thought they’d turn their backs, play the songs, and not put too much effort into it. But it was just banger after banger. The pace was incredible. For me, it was pure nostalgia, with my brother and best mate. My brother and I had our own falling out earlier in the year, so there was reconciliation all round. Nature’s healing.

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UK government abandons energy ‘zonal pricing’ plan

Plan to split country into pricing zones dropped in favour of ‘fair and affordable’ single national price

The government has abandoned plans for “zonal pricing” that would have charged southern electricity users more than those in Scotland, saying that a single national price would help ensure the system was “fair, affordable, secure and efficient”.

The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, had been considering proposals for zonal pricing that would meandifferent areas of the country paying different rates for their electricity, based on local supply and demand.

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Moderation by Elaine Castillo review – a twisted look at the tech workplace

Castillo’s ambitious second novel, set in the worlds of social media and VR, considers labour and storytelling in a world veering right

Elaine Castillo’s second novel is set within the rotten heart of the US tech industry, where “Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best.” What makes her so effective in her underpaid contract role moderating content for social media giant Reeden is that most prized of workplace currencies: a stoical capacity for labour. Though the job’s mental toll is clear – suicides are common, white staff never stick around and wellness support remains superficial – Girlie proves exceptionally hardy, near-perfect in her ability to identify and scrape feeds free of child sexual abuse content. Behind her productive impassivity, Castillo tells us with a sombre touch of irony, is a “glowing” line of ancestors – Filipina nurses and maids who have long cleaned up after others.

Things look up for Girlie once William Cheung enters the scene, inviting her to become a moderator at Playground, a virtual reality entertainment platform newly acquired by Reeden. Girlie is a perfect fit. As the American-born daughter of immigrants, she carries a cloying sense of filial indebtedness (“there was an unspoken understanding, an ironclad cultural code: if you made money, you had to pay your family back”). With the family home under mortgage, the generous benefits package is hard to resist. And, because we’re partly also in romance territory, so is the man offering it.

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Nine Queens review – Fabian Bielinsky’s brilliant grifter classic offers masterclass in double dealing

The late Argentinian director served up this tale of squalid fraud 25 years ago, but its questions about greed, cynicism and the human condition remain evergreen

Twenty-five years ago, Argentinian director Fabián Bielinsky gave us this grifter satire classic, a deliciously cynical tale of swindling and double-cross. It is confidence trickery perpetrated on the victim in parallel to narrative trickery perpetrated on the audience, who are invited to assume that however hard the fictional characters on screen are falling, the rug under their own feet is perfectly secure. Four years later, Hollywood paid this excellent film the traditional compliment of a well-meaning but inferior (and now forgotten) remake, pedantically renamed Criminal, starring John C Reilly and Diego Luna.

Now restored and rereleased, the original looks sharper than ever: a drama of squalid fraud which is a tale of human greed, but also a specific, prophetic jab at Argentina’s financial shady dealers in a deregulated banking system that crashed soon after the film came out. Ricardo Darín made an international name for himself in one of the tough-guy everyman roles that was to become his brand. He plays Marcos, a hard-bitten conman browsing in a convenience store one evening, and amused to notice fresh-faced wannabe trickster Juan (Gastón Pauls) incompetently trying to pull off a petty scam whereby the cashier is bamboozled into giving him too much change. (It’s a cheap trick to compare with that of Tatum O’Neal in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon or John Cusack in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters.)

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Do we think enough about parents who care for sick or disabled children – and how not to make things harder? | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Mina Holland’s book about parenting her seriously unwell daughter sheds light on the situation faced by so many, and the complicated psychology at play

When you have a baby, especially if you’re in an antenatal class, or friends or family members have a child of about the same age, there is a feeling that you’re all in it together, at least at first. For me this big, life-transforming event might have felt intensely personal, but the shared connection with other new parents, who were also learning on the job, not to mention the books – Your Baby Week By Week, The Wonder Weeks – can trick you into thinking that the path is a predictable one.

From hourly feeds and wake-ups to sleeping through the night, breast- and bottle-feeding to solids, crawling to walking, maternity leave to nursery to school, the journey may have slightly different scenery, but the impression given is that ultimately it ends up in the same place.

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Continue ReadingDo we think enough about parents who care for sick or disabled children – and how not to make things harder? | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett