All seems perfect for these rich and successful New Yorkers – until a bond is violently shattered in this sharp and pleasurable debut

Amos and Emerson are the best of friends; everyone knows this. They are a model of male intimacy and understanding: confiding in each other, trusting each other, hugging each other (“real, loving hugs, clutches without irony”). Theirs is truly a friendship for the ages.

Or so it seems. For on the weekend of Emerson’s 52nd birthday, an occasion at the centre of Hal Ebbott’s probing and insightful debut novel, something happens that changes everything – and raises the question of whether we can ever truly know anyone.

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Hind Meddeb’s documentary draws on her on-the-spot experience in 2019 as protesters rose against the 30-year rule of Omar al-Bashir

Franco-Tunisian-Moroccan film-maker Hind Meddeb is based in Paris but it was her on-the-spot experience in Khartoum in 2019 of the Sudanese uprising against the reactionary 30-year rule of president Omar al-Bashir which has led to this intensely engaged and sympathetic documentary study. The film immerses itself in the world of the protesters – particularly the young and female protesters – a whole generation energised and brought together by the insurgent movement; their passion was complicated and intensified by the fact that the revolution, at least at first, only brought in a “Transitional Military Council” or TMC, which did not seem in any great hurry to transition to democratic civilian rule. In fact, it carried out a grotesque massacre against people at a sit-in in June 2019, resulting in 127 people dead and 70 cases of rape.

Meddeb finds among the protesters a vivid, vibrant artistic movement: an oral culture of music, poetry and rap which flourishes on the streets. There is also a kind of subversive, surrealist energy: the camera finds a mock traffic roadworks sign reading: “Sorry for the Delay – Uprooting a Regime”. The most amazing performances from both women and men are witnessed, as well as a kind of soixante-huitard culture of slogans and maxims; young women hold up signs and prose-poems.

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A lively history of the paper from 1986 to 1995 covers global upheaval, internal conflict and a bold but brilliant redesign

In my early career as a cultural historian, I made many journeys along the Northern line in London to the now defunct British Newspaper Library at Colindale. It was a melancholy place, with that vanilla-and-almonds smell of decomposing ink and paper, and little crumbs of disintegrated newspaper on the floor by the reading desks. Like the mayfly, a newspaper is meant to die on the day it is born. News now lives longer on the Guardian website, but prominently displayed warnings tell us when an article is more than a month old. “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” the Rolling Stones sang. “Nobody in the world.”

So newspaper history is a tricky genre that must capture the ephemeral and show why it matters. Ian Mayes’s excellent book follows two previous, quasi-official volumes of Guardian history by David Ayerst and Geoffrey Taylor. It begins in 1986 when the Guardian was still a one-section, inky, monochrome paper full of misprints and poor quality pictures, newly threatened by Rupert Murdoch’s move to Wapping and the birth of the Independent. It ends in 1995 with a radically restyled paper, with new sections such as G2 and the pocket-sized TV and entertainment supplement, the Guide. A second volume will tell the story up to 2008, when the Guardian moved to its current home in Kings Place.

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The US health secretary’s latest report is more interested in vaccine scepticism than the brutal toll inflicted by guns and road traffic accidents

“Make America healthy again”. We can all get behind this slogan and agree that much more could be done to improve the health of people living in the US. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health and human services secretary, recently released a report detailing the challenge of the US’s health. About 90% of it outlines the high rates of obesity, mental health issues and chronic disease, 10% covers vaccine scepticism, and 0% looks at solutions or any discussions of the systemic social and economic issues that drive much of the US’s health problems.

But what surprised me more was a notable omission of the two biggest killers of American children. American children aren’t just unhealthier. They’re more likely to die in the first 19 years of life because of guns – both homicides and suicides – or in a road traffic accident than children in comparable countries. How can an entire report be written without mentioning these factors, and how unique the US is in the burden of disability and death they cause?

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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I don’t want sex, I just long to be cuddled. But she continues to reject any such suggestion, and my resentment is growing

After years of no sexual intimacy with my wife, I am now craving the comfort of somatic connection. Not actual sex, but simply cuddling and being held close while nude. But my wife has refused. I have suggested we try “progressive desensitisation” therapy, which would involve lying down together, with one item of clothing removed, but with no physical contact. We would build from there in the knowledge that this would not lead to sexual contact. My wife, when I suggested it, was not at all interested in this, and in fact, she was actively opposed.

She told me the problem was in my head and that she had zero interest in physical intimacy. She also said that this was normal for older women. I told her it was my impression that older people actually craved appropriate physical touch. She then agreed that I could just lie in her bed fully clothed before retiring to my own bedroom. But this was just awkward and humiliating for me, because it was obvious that she was not in the least invested in my presence. So I gave up the idea completely. In every other regard our marriage is healthy. At times, I consider asking her if she could accept my seeking intimacy elsewhere, but I think this would lead to the end of our marriage. I feel trapped – I love my wife but my resentment is growing.

Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.

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The “Tonight Show” host said it was crazy that the president had “launched an attack on Iran, his own parade and a cellphone in the same week.”

Residencies in storied venues from a panopticon prison to an ancient amphitheatre gave an appropriate backdrop to the Australian band’s existential new record

‘It’s always good to make yourself feel small,” says Stu Mackenzie. We’re sitting behind the stage of the Ancient theatre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, after the second night of his band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s three shows there. The marble-hewn amphitheatre was built between 98-117AD. We’re flanked by columns bearing ancient Greek inscriptions from back when this place was called Philippopolis; the precipitous drop behind us reveals the east side of Europe’s longest continually inhabited city, the glowing cross of the Cathedral of St Louis and the shadow of the hills in the distance.

In front of the stage where the Australian experimental rock band have just spent two hours wilding out is an arena where man and beast used to do battle in front of a far more bloodthirsty crowd than the one that just drank the venue dry of beer. It’s hard not to feel like a speck here, awesomely adrift in all of human history.

The band at Lukiškiu prison, Vilnius, Lithuania

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Lucian Pintilie’s grimly ironic 1968 film is based on real events, in which delinquents are forced to act out their brawl in front of government cameras

Lucian Pintilie’s Romanian film from 1968 is a bizarre and wayward political satire that at first involves just a handful of people – and finally unveils a dreamlike crowd scene with hundreds of non-professionals swarming across the screen, their expressions of incomprehension and incredulity pressed into service for fiction. Yet the whole thing is stranger than fiction – more metaphorical, more metatextual than fiction – and, of course, taken from real life.

Pintilie co-wrote the screenplay with Romanian author Horia Patrascu, based on Patrascu’s novel about an extraordinary event that took place in the early 1960s. Two drunken, hapless youths were caught brawling at a riverside cafe and were made to re-enact the event in detail for a solemn instructional film produced by the communist party authorities to be shown in schools, offices and clubs as a terrible warning against alcohol and anti-social bourgeois delinquency. The two stars of this strange film are moreover tacitly expected to redeem their offence, to expunge their sins moment-by-moment, by recreating their lives in the service of state-sponsored morality. (The actual official film that inspired this, on which Patrascu worked as a crew member, presumably exists in an archive somewhere.)

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Grand Slam semi-finalist, Masters champion and a top-five player - Britain's Jack Draper is a different beast on his Wimbledon return.

The Island of Shuna, which includes a ruined castle, working farm and a holiday accommodation business, is on sale for £5.5m.