Life and Art from FT Weekend

It’s a time-honored tradition: for the third year in a row, FT Weekend editor-at-large Matt Vella joins Lilah to reflect on this past year, and muse on the coming one. We’ve asked listeners to send their predictions and wishes for 2025, and today we’re talking through them! Will next year bring an end to meme culture? How do we step away from restaurant reservation wars? Will Lena Dunham make a comeback? Plus, Matt tells us why he ...

Today we are bringing you a winter survival guide, full of deceptively small tips that will make winter unmeasurably better. How do we best appreciate these cold, dark months? How do we stay stimulated, but also reject the grind? Our FT Weekend Magazine’s resident “winter goddesses” Griselda Murray Brown and Cordelia Jenkins join Lilah armed with tons of delightful suggestions, from buying warm lightbulbs to reading your friends’ d...

Elif Shafak’s new novel brings together four stories set in three different centuries: ancient Mesopotamia, 19th century London, a Yazidi village in 2014, and the present day. It connects them through the epic of Gilgamesh, and a single drop of fresh water. Making history come alive is one of Elif’s many talents, and today she shares her thoughts on how novels can fill in the gaps in authorised history. She also talks with Lilah ab...

The FT’s books of the year special is out, and today, our literary editor Fred Studemann and outgoing deputy books editor Laura Battle join us one last time to talk about their top picks of 2024. This year has seen some huge releases from authors including Sally Rooney, Miranda July, Alexei Navalny, Al Pacino and Salman Rushdie. What trends did Fred and Laura notice this year? What books did they love? 

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As you know, the ...

Have you ever wondered about the oldest recipes in history? They were discovered on four clay tablets from about 1,700 BCE at the time of the Assyrian Empire. Did you know that about 5 million Assyrians still live around the world today? This year, a cookbook was published that is the first modern collection of exclusively Assyrian cuisine, food that has a lot of overlap with those ancient tablets. It’s called The Oldest Kitchen in...

December is here, and we’re here to help you sort your holiday shopping. Need to make a last-minute gift feel thoughtful? Searching for something for your dad? Want to give a cheap gift a glow-up? Hoping to also actually enjoy December? Lilah has invited two experts onto the show: HTSI’s deputy editor Louis Wise and FT Magazine’s Food & Drink editor Harriet Fitch Little, the brains behind the FT’s two annual holiday gift guides...

Filmmaker Richard Linklater’s movies span blockbusters, such as School of Rock, cerebral indie classics like Boyhood, and a hard-to-define The Before Trilogy. His most recent film, Hit Man, is a thriller, but it picks up on many themes that Linklater has explored before, such as identity and masculinity. Today, he reflects on the film in conversation with Lilah.  

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Our film critic Danny Leigh’s review of Hit Man is h...

Eli Zabar is the youngest son of the Jewish grocery family behind the famed New York food emporium, Zabar’s. Fifty years ago, he left the family business to open his own shop, where he would pursue the “best”: the best breads, cheeses, jams. He was inspired by the markets of Europe and quickly realised that to get the quality he wanted in America, he would have to do a lot of it himself. Eli is now 81 years old, and over the decade...

Today, we’re taking on the much-hyped film adaptation of the musical smash Wicked. Starring Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Jeff Goldblum, the story is a loose prequel to The Wizard of Oz, following its two star witches before they become Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West. Why is this film such a big deal? How does it hold up to the Broadway show? And what makes a musical work well onscreen? Lilah is joined by...

You probably noticed by their clothes: this summer, men just wanted to have fun. Crop tops, short shorts and even kilts and skirts were in. Long sleeves, and long inseams, were out. Today, two FT men’s fashion experts, Robert Armstrong and Eric Platt, join us to discuss how and why this happened, and what the rise of skimpy menswear tells us about masculinity today.

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We love hearing from you. Lilah is on Instagram @lilahrap. ...

Today we’re talking about Anora, the new critical darling about the whirlwind romance between a Brooklyn sex worker and the hell-raising son of a Russian oligarch. The film follows the couple’s chaotic week together, their impulsive marriage, and what happens when the oligarchs hear the news and demand an annulment. It’s directed by Sean Baker, known for The Florida Project and Tangerine. It won the Cannes prestigious Palme d'Or aw...

If you are someone who has or wants to have wine at your house, this episode is for you. Whether you’re looking to buy a few bottles you’ll drink in the next few months, or you’d like to start collecting and ageing wine for years to come, we’ve got you covered. FT wine editor Jancis Robinson, author of the Oxford Companion to Wine, talks us through what wines we should be on the lookout for and how to make sure they blossom into so...

Today, we explore how to discover new music. Despite having access to more music than ever before, many of us are still falling back on the same old stuff. The algorithms may be pushing us toward uniformity, but how do we break out of the echo chamber? FT pop critic Ludo Hunter-Tilney and music and culture writer Arwa Haider join Lilah to share advice for finding new artists, and recommend new music that they love.

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We love he...

Critics have been warning about the death of photography as an art form for years. Smartphones were going to lead to its demise by making everyone a photographer. Then came warnings about AI, which can create photographic images without a human actually being present at a given time and place. But, the FT’s US art critic Ariella Budick argues that instead of dying, the medium has evolved. She joins us to discuss how it has changed ...

Today we head to Rutshire, to take a crack at the frothy, riotous TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1980s romance novel, Rivals. The eight-episode series follows a cluster of posh English country-dwellers – including TV executive Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) and local heartthrob Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) — as they bonk and bust their way around the Cotswolds. Shoulder pads, extramarital affairs and messy dinner par...

Historian Sir Simon Schama is one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time. So when he replied to our invitation to come on the show ahead of the US presidential election by saying he wanted to talk about “the unprecedented collapse of truth”, we immediately said yes. It’s been a disorienting presidential campaign. For many Americans, it’s hard to understand how statements which are so clearly untrue – such as the g...

Today we are pulling on our striped demon ghost suits for a special Halloween episode: a deep-dive on Tim Burton’s 1988 classic, Beetlejuice. It persists in our cultural memory, remade as an animated series, a theme park ride, a musical, and as of last month, a legacy sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. We talk about why it’s endured with such ferocity, how the sequel compares, and whether films like it even exist anymore. We also sha...

In recent years, critics and jaded diners have deemed the multi-course tasting menu dead. It’s gotten repetitive, the argument goes, with chefs serving luxury courses like caviar at the expense of any point of view. But recently, our host Lilah Raptopoulos had a meal that felt extremely alive, at Victoria Blamey’s restaurant Blanca, in Brooklyn. Victoria is from Chile and worked at Michelin-starred restaurants around the globe befo...

This week, we’re talking about the HBO finance drama Industry, which follows the lives of London bankers as they navigate frantic careers and make chaotic life choices. The third season is out, and snidely pokes at greenwashing and how the corporate world pretends to do good. What is this show reflecting about how we feel about money? Does it take any sort of moral stance on banking? And how well does it land with actual banking an...