I’ve always kept diaries in the style of a catch-all notebook: flipping through them reveals poems, dated journal entries, to-do lists, quotes from books, phone numbers, and overheard dialogue. I found this page in the middle of my diary circa freshman year of high school. I was practicing my grown-up-style handwriting and forgery of my mother’s signature in order to excuse myself, and sometimes my friends, from school. I was failing pretty spectacularly to be convincing, at least to my eye now, but as I recall it mostly worked. I was fourteen or fifteen and immensely frustrated that my teachers insisted on droning about mathematics and the branches of government and books by boring straight people when I had my own reading list to attend to, as well as drugs with which I was eager to experiment. At this point, I had already known for some years that I wanted to be a writer. At the end of the year, I would drop out to pursue a different sort of education.

Melissa Febos is the author of four books, most recently, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Barbara Deming Foundation, the British Library, and others. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa.

We’re here to react to the news that surprised absolutely no one at the weekend: Ralf Rangnick will not be continuing as a consultant at Manchester United! At least he can retire to Austria and reflect on a job thoroughly well done. 

Kate, Luke and Jim wave Ralf off, discuss certified wily veteran Ivan Perisic’s imminent arrival at Spurs, and there’s news that travelling salesman Romelu Lukaku is on the move again. Get involved!

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Borgen returns and Marvel gets its first Muslim superhero

May 6 – June 4, 2022

April 15 – May 28, 2022

Marcus, Luke and Jim roll into the studio after another win for perennial underdogs Real Madrid - that’s just what King Carlo do to ya. We also give props to a brilliant Liverpool season and address the distressing scenes outside the stadium across the night.

Nottingham Forest are in dreamland too, as they return to the big time for the first time since 1999, while Gary Neville has been disrupting local pubs in the wider Manchester area.

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How a Danish TV series depicts politics with a rare 'clear-eyed realism'

April 23 – June 4, 2022

Lille are claimed to be interested in a deal to sign Omar Rekik from Arsenal this summer, but he is happy with his progress in north London.

The defender joined the club from Hertha Berlin in 2021 but is yet to make a senior appearance since joining the club. While his skills are recognised as he continues to perform for the Under-23 side, he is yet to be called up for a single matchday squad, and it will be interesting to see if the club decides to send him out on loan ahead of the new season.

While he could well be the subject of a interest for a move, he insists that he is happy to continue his progress in his current surroundings, and is eager to repay the faith shown in him by Arsenal.

“Of course, it would be a dream to be worth €60million (£51 million) or even more,” he told German publication Bild (via Football.London). “Because that would mean that I’ve made great athletic development. But sporting success is more valuable to me.

“I don’t have a specific goal. If Arsenal had waited a few months, they would have got me without a transfer fee. Now they have spent so much money on me. I want to repay that with performance. The club is serious about me, and I’m grateful for that.”

More details are emerging over just how long law enforcement took to stop the Uvalde school shooting this week, including horrifying descriptions of how children suffered while police waited outside gathering resources and preparing themselves to intervene. As it becomes apparent that law enforcement delayed up to an hour before storming the building, criticism of their performance and their previous account of the event is growing. On Saturday, Texas’ lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, a conservative who has made attacking those who criticize law enforcement a key part of his political brand, said on Fox & Friends that he and others in the Texas government “were not told the truth” following the Uvdale shooting that killed 19 children and two adults.

Initial reports, provided by law enforcement sources immediately after the shooting, described armed school security and local police officers engaging in a gun battle with the shooter, and then working to quickly rescue surviving children. That narrative changed over subsequent hours and days as details began to emerge of the scene both in and outside the school. Parents, who frantically waited outside the school as the shooting continued, fought with law enforcement who tried to prevent them from entering the building, even as they failed to move into the school themselves and confront the shooter. One mother who wanted to gain access said she was handcuffed by US marshals and threatened with arrest. On Friday, transcripts of 911 calls made by children begging for help from the classrooms for as long as an hour were released. 

Investigators now say that the school district’s police department chief ordered officers to hold back from confronting the shooter because he thought it was a siege situation, in which shooter was isolated and could be approached by law enforcement, and not an active shooter continuing to threaten children’s lives. School shooting experts say that was the wrong choice and goes contrary to training in the decades since the Columbine shooting in 1999.

On Friday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott acknowledged that he was mistaken in his earlier praise for law enforcement’s response. At a press conference on Wednesday, Abbott had claimed, “As horrible as what happened, it could have been worse. The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do. They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives.”

On Friday, Abbott said he was “livid” that he had been given wrong information.