Barclays Center, Brooklyn

The tireless star brings her latest, somewhat over-explained album to the stage for a dazzling and euphoric show

For more than a year now, I have often returned, when seeking a bar for which to measure true pop transcendence, to the memory of Charli xcx taking the Other Stage at Glastonbury: the unofficial headliner, a year out from her culture-shifting opus Brat, commanded a dizzying 60,000 people with an imperious “don’t fucking play with me” and the stunning brute force of a performer at peak power. It was surreal, as a longtime fan, to witness an artist who was as recently as 2022 playing to cult followings in 2,000-cap venues convert thousands more in real time, to see years of hard-earned pop instincts and artistry collide with the zeitgeist in a career-defining, you-had-to-be-there achievement.

But life goes on, of course, and Charli, like the rest of us who surfed the high of Brat summer 2024, found herself on an inevitable comedown. A lesser artist may have confronted the question of what comes next with blunt commercial logic – more, again – but Charli, a self-professed workaholic and tireless interrogator of one’s own image, proved to be creatively restless, if scattered. A cinephile rebrand, three films at Sundance, an Instagram-dominating celebrity wedding, a defanged satire of her own sudden ubiquity, a windswept soundtrack that more or less saved the otherwise dreadful Wuthering Heights – all suggested a self-aware ambivalence with mainstream success that threatened to corrode all that came after. With the release this July of Music, Fashion, Film, her eighth studio album, I worried that she had succumbed to a seemingly manic drive to stay visible. The album, a deceptively vulnerable and winking pivot to rock that was either self-aggrandizing pastiche or genius, depending on what angle/substance/context you beheld it, did not seem to stand up the scrutiny and over-explanation of relentless celebrity promotion.

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Mark Rutte asked UK and Europe to ‘provide the hard power Nato needs’ in face of geopolitical uncertainty

Nato needs “more UK and more Europe in the alliance” to deal with the most dangerous security environment faced by the west in a generation, the secretary general of the 32-country military alliance said this afternoon on a visit to the UK.

Mark Rutte praised Britain for promising to increase defence spending in line with US demands after a meeting with prime minister Andy Burnham – but argued that the military and financial effort must continue into the future.

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Fed committee votes unanimously to raise interest rate by a quarter-percentage point to a range of 3.75% to 4%

• Federal Reserve raises interest rates – live

The US Federal Reserve voted to raise interest rates on Wednesday for the first time since 2023 as the central bank continues to fight to tamp down inflation.

The Fed’s open market committee voted unanimously to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-percentage point to a range of 3.75% to 4%. This is the first time the Fed has raised rates since July 2023 and potentially sets Kevin Warsh, the current Fed chair, on a collision course with Donald Trump.

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⚽ Live updates from four third-round matches
⚽ Manchester United shocked as JJ Gabriel asks to leave
⚽ Get in touch! Email Will with any thoughts

Poor Joshua Zirkzee cannot get a game in the Carabao Cup. I am not sure he will get many minutes in the months to come.

Max Dowman continues to be good. Mikel Merino can similarities to a certain Lamine Yamal, which is high praise.

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Tom Waits

Prettige presentatie van Iris uit Baantjer overigens

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Bericht uit de tijd dat de treinen nog gewoon niet op tijd reden maar dan wel zónder sabotage: afgelopen Keti Koti was het raak op het Haagse station Moerwijk waar twee fatbikers over het perron sjeesden terwijl je dus niet over het perron mag sjezen met een fatbike. Een treinconducteur zou geen goede treinconducteur zijn als hij de fatbikers daar niet op zou aanspreken. Dat deed de goede treinconducteur dan ook, wat hem een klap in het gezicht door een van de fatbikers opleverde. Terwijl het zo simpel is: als je met een fatbike wil reizen, dan moet je trappen, niet slaan. Of je koopt gewoon een treinkaartje voor dat onding. Had ie, naast zelfbeheersing, ook al niet. Derhalve: ZoekZoek.

There's a new kind of agent coming to ChatGPT ads, and this one wants your money. OpenAI has begun testing Sponsored Agents, advertiser-backed bots that try to sell you things as part of a custom conversation. OpenAI said in a Wednesday announcement that Sponsored Agents were now being tested with select US advertisers already using its platform to put sponsored content in front of ChatGPT users. Despite the “agent” label, however, it seems from OpenAI’s description of the new feature that it’s more like a typical sponsored content chatbot that appears unasked on websites, bombarding users with the opportunity to ask a virtual customer service agent what product is right for them. In this case, the customer service agent lives right in ChatGPT instead of users having to go to an advertiser’s actual website to learn more - you wouldn’t want those humans navigating away until the last possible minute, after all. “After seeing a relevant ad, a user can choose to start a clearly labeled conversation with a business-sponsored agent in ChatGPT,” the announcement explains. “The user can explain what matters to them, ask follow-up questions, and follow a link to the business’s website when they’re ready to take the next step.” As an example, a brief video included with the announcement shows a user asking for a recipe and instead being told they shouldn’t worry about trying to plan their meals before being shunted into an ad for a subscription meal kit. The sponsored agent from the meal kit company in the ad simply provided options on which of its kits was the fastest to prepare for a weeknight meal. “For businesses, it’s an opportunity to help interested customers explore their offerings through a personalized conversation,” OpenAI added. In other words, this is pretty much exactly like the chatbots you see on company websites, only run by OpenAI and embedded in its products instead. Yo dawg, we heard you liked AI ads … OpenAI mentioned a couple of other new AI advertising tools alongside the sponsored agents, one of which is sure to make the ads you see in your slop-filled ChatGPT responses even sloppier. “Advertisers can now use simple, natural-language prompts to create, update, and analyze campaigns directly in ChatGPT with the Ads Manager plugin,” the company said. In other words, why even have an advertising professional create the campaigns you cram into ChatGPT when ChatGPT can do it for you? “When drafting an ad, advertisers can now receive suggested copy and imagery based on their landing page and campaign objective,” OpenAI added. Perfect: Slop ads served in slop responses. What more could you ask for? HubSpot users and Shopify merchants are also getting new ChatGPT ads connections, the company said, enabling more businesses to cram more ads in front of more ChatGPT users, we suppose. “These launches reflect how we’re building an advertising platform with AI at its center,” OpenAI said. We get the internet we deserve, and it looks like it’s going to be one with ever more sloppy, artificial content crammed wherever advertisers can find a space. ®

Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag en Utrecht vragen minister Sophie Hermans (Volksgezondheid, VVD) onder meer om toestemming te geven voor een pilot met het verstrekken van dexamfetamine aan dakloze mensen.

Ooit werden aan de Piekstraat in Rotterdam-Zuid stoomboten, oorlogsschepen en jaloezieën gemaakt. Nog langer geleden stond er een galg en een pesthuis, dat nooit werd gebruikt. Nu presenteren op deze historische plek architecten, stedenbouwkundigen en kunstenaars hun visie op de toekomst van de wijk Feijenoord en de stad Rotterdam, tijdens de twaalfde editie van de Internationale Architectuur Biënnale in Rotterdam (IABR).