Horror stories about detainments at the border have also soured some from visiting during Trump’s second term

Keith Serry was set to bring a show to New York City’s Fringe festival this year, but pulled the plug a few weeks out. After 35 years of traveling to the United States, he says he no longer feels safe making the trip.

“The fact that we’re being evaluated for our opinions entering a country that, at least until very recently, purported to be an example of democracy. Yeah, these are things that make me highly uncomfortable,” said Serry, a Canadian performer and attorney.

I’ve sung at the Royal Albert Hall, made friends with people I would otherwise never have met and felt the power of being seen and heard for who I really am

It is April 2022 and I am standing in the middle of the stage at Cadogan Hall in London. As the pianist plays a plucky staccato intro, it dawns on me that I am about to sing the West Side Story classic I Feel Pretty, with choreography, in front of a packed audience, alongside 200 gay men.

This was my first time performing with the London Gay Men’s Chorus (LGMC) – Europe’s largest gay choir. I first saw them perform years earlier in Soho, where they sang Bridge Over Troubled Water at a vigil for the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida in 2016. After making it through the pandemic, the chorus’s years-long waiting list and months of rehearsals, I was under the bright stage lights, trying to remember the first line of the song and thinking: “what have I got myself into?”

Increasingly bored of bland ‘white people food’, our palates crave more intense stimulation. But as I learned the hard way, you can have too much of a good thing

Are we in a chilli arms race? The US is, according to the Atlantic, which recently explored the country’s growing enthusiasm for hot stuff (more than half of Americans in a survey said they were likely to buy an item described as “spicy”, up from 39% in 2015) and killer chillies. Americans have certainly thrown themselves into it – I spent an entertaining hour in a Brooklyn hot sauce emporium last year having tasting profiles of various skull-emblazoned, jokily named bottles earnestly sauce-splained to me by mulleted men– but it’s happened in the UK too. Our cupboards and fridges suggest “little treat” condiment culture has a masochistic edge: I just counted 19 bottles and jars of angry-looking red stuff in ours; I’m forever succumbing to the must-have small-batch chilli crisps the algorithm offers.

Why? Capsaicin, the active component of chilli peppers, supposedly delivers an endorphin buzz, but it’s surely more cultural than physiological. We’re all global culinary sophisticates these days – no one wants to admit to being the kind of wimp who craves flavourless “white people food”. Chilli’s expanding geographic penetration has probably been helped along by Hot Ones, the YouTube show where celebrities writhe as they submit to ever-spicier chicken wings; Demi Moore’s steely, unbothered performance on it merited many Oscars. I suspect mouth-boredom plays a part too – there’s so much flavour everywhere now it would give my Celtic ancestors heart failure, so our jaded palates crave more intense stimulation.

This visually stunning historical drama follows the rise of warrior-king Ibanichuka and combines dazzling pageantry with themes of power, faith and empire

Set in the 19th-century kingdom of Okrika in the Niger delta, this Nollywood epic has a satisfying core of realpolitik and Kulturkampf that wouldn’t shame the likes of old-school classical-era equivalents such as Ben-Hur. Revolving around the accession to the throne of elite warrior Ibanichuka (Patrick Diabuah), it touches on questions of political legitimacy, politics as the art of the possible, the proselytisation of west Africa by Christians and – that still-simmering hot potato – white colonialism.

One minute Ibanichuka is on leave for overzealously butchering enslaved people, the next the goddess Tamunoba anoints him in a lake as Okrika’s saviour. Though ratified by the elders, he is still under general suspicion for his devotion to his wife, Mboro, (Monalisa Chinda Coker), who is unable to bear children, and for generally being a soft touch. He also has a monotheism problem: the local priest has switched sides to Christianity, desecrating his former idols, and chief Ogan (Nkem Owoh) is slyly pushing the lord’s agenda in Okrika – which may include free trade with the British.

Victorious festival organisers apologised for cutting off the Irish band after they led chants to ‘free Palestine’, and said they would donate to humanitarian relief efforts

The Last Dinner Party pulled out of their set at Portsmouth’s Victorious festival at the weekend after Irish band the Mary Wallopers saw their set cut short after showing their support for the people of Palestine.

On Friday, the Mary Wallopers unveiled a Palestinian flag and called for a “free Palestine”. Video appeared to show a crew member confronting the band about the flag, which was draped on the stage, and then removing it. After calls from the band and the crowd of “free, free Palestine”, the sound was cut. The band briefly retrieved the flag to cheers.