His wife died, he became a single parent and his next marriage swiftly ended. After these trials, the hugely acclaimed singer-songwriter explains why he’s turning outward to consider the world around him

For almost two decades, Phil Elverum’s life centred around performing and recording music. First as the Microphones and then as Mount Eerie, he had accumulated a catalogue of songs through which he made sense of his world, written with a diaristic honesty that won him a loyal following. But in July 2016, after the death of his wife, the cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, a distraught Elverum began “rejecting my life’s work” and focused on single parenthood with their daughter, Agathe.

From his home in Anacortes, Washington, Elverum reflects on those darkest days. “Geneviève and I had both been artists, obsessed with our creative lives,” he says. “That was our focus, our devotion, our identity. But when she died, I asked myself: why had drawing at a table 16 hours a day or making all these dinky little LPs been so important to us? I questioned the existential value of art and music and poetry. These had been my tools to understand life. But when Geneviève died, they felt useless to me.”

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Mobbed, groped, overworked, paid a pittance and given little time off … ahead of a major TV series about boybands, former members of 5ive and 911 reveal what success was really like for many

‘People often don’t get it,” says Ritchie Neville. “They think being in a famous band is a dream. But I’ve had situations where I’m out with friends and, when I start talking, jaws drop to the floor. They’re like, ‘Oh my god, is that really what it was like?’”

Neville was a member of mega boyband 5ive. Formed in 1997, the five-piece were famous for singles such as Got the Feelin’, When the Lights Go Out and Slam Dunk (Da Funk). And Neville is one of many former boybanders taking part in a new documentary series about the era when ab flashes, knee slides and vocal harmonies ruled.

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Her vessels are often inspired by people’s gestures in the supermarket – and have sold for six-figure sums. She talks about childhood bereavement, why she hated making ads – and the spiritual significance of cooking pots

Stare at one of Magdalene Odundo ’s vessels for long enough and you start to wonder if you might just have seen it breathe, its rounded belly imperceptibly expanding. The ceramic artist has often talked about the “body-ness”, as she puts it, of her pots, but standing close to one is to be struck by how alive they feel. Her current London show, comprising six vessels, is Odundo’s first solo exhibition in the capital for 20 years. It’s a continuation of her show earlier this year at Houghton Hall, the stately home in Norfolk. Odundo has found new recognition in recent years – a significant 2019 Hepworth Wakefield exhibition , and she showed at this year’s Venice Biennale. Her work set a new record price for a living ceramicist when one of her vessels sold for £200,000 in 2020, the same year she was made a dame.

If Odundo’s professional life is at a high, her personal life has been difficult in recent months, after a period of ill health, and recovery from surgery. It has been tough, she says, but adds with a laugh: “I’m still standing – just about.” Her mobility has been affected, and she thinks it will be another few months before she can get back to her clay. How is she coping? “Not very well,” she says with a smile – we’re talking over Zoom, Odundo at home in Farnham, Surrey. Although she says she’s tired, she laughs often.

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The Jennings Creek wildfire has burned more than 3,000 acres and caused the death of at least one person

Fire crews are continuing to battle a large wildfire spreading across New Jersey and New York amid an increase in wildfires in the north-eastern US.

Much of the region is currently facing a drought and dry conditions across almost the whole country have made wildfires a more frequent occurrence, with windy periods further exacerbating potential or existing fires.

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US government wrote to Israel a month ago threatening sanctions if there was no increase in humanitarian supplies

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The amount of aid reaching Gaza has dropped to the lowest level since December, official Israeli figures show, despite the US having issued a 30-day ultimatum last month threatening sanctions if there was no increase in humanitarian supplies reaching the territory.

The ultimatum was delivered on 13 October, so will expire on Tuesday or Wednesday. It is unclear what measures Israel’s apparent failure to fulfil US demands will trigger, but they may include a temporary halt to the supply of some munitions or other military assistance.

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Pep Guardiola’s team have lost four in a row. While they have overcome hurdles before the nature of their problems this season present a fresh challenge

• Sign up to Soccer with Jonathan Wilson here

The danger is always of overreacting. We’ve seen Manchester City have a blip at this stage of the season before. But still, defeat to Brighton on Saturday means that, for the first time in his career as a manager, Pep Guardiola has lost four successive games. It would be extremely premature to suggest the empire is crumbling but, equally, for the first time in a long time there is a sense that City’s aura may be beginning to wane.

But first, some context. One defeat was in the Carabao Cup and another was in the Champions League, where City sit 10th in the table ; even if they do miss out on the top eight who go through to the last 16 automatically – they have Feyenoord (home), Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain (away) and Club Brugge (home) next – they will surely at the very least be in the play-offs. But two of the recent defeats were in the Premier League, away at Bournemouth and then Brighton, and as a result City sit five points behind Liverpool .

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com , and he’ll answer the best in a future edition

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• Norwegian claims milestone success in 6-1, 7-5 win
• ‘I knew he was maybe dealing with a bit of a cold’

Carlos Alcaraz made a stuttering start to the ATP Finals in Turin as he suffered a shock first career defeat to the world No 7 Casper Ruud.

The two-time Wimbledon champion, who won the first of his four grand slam titles by beating Ruud in the 2022 US Open final, went in to the contest leading the head-to-head results 4-0.

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Trump outperformed his 2016 and 2020 election runs substantially among key groups such as young men and Black people

Donald Trump defied the polls and pundits and received both a majority of the popular vote and of the electoral college. His margin of 3.4 percentage points (thus far) was well beyond anything that anyone projected and it is the first time a Republican candidate for president received a majority of popular votes since 2004. It is probably safe to say that even his own pollsters did not see this tornado coming, otherwise the president-elect’s team would not have issued statements earlier in the day attacking voting irregularities and election tampering. Certainly not if you are expecting to win.

Published polls and the television network-sponsored exit polls both revealed some new truths that help explain what really happened and must be studied by winners and losers, academics and both political strategists and junkies.

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The ultra-wealthy talk about solving the climate crisis or ending inequality. But what they’re really interested in is outliving or escaping anyone poorer than them

Nearly three years ago, I started working on an idea for a book. It started out with the pretty mild proposition: we’re in a class war, but it’s a weird one, because one side is curiously coy. The capital class used to strut its stuff. It used to build libraries and great estates; it used to tell you it thought it was superior, and why. Now that it is billionaires on one side and everyone else on the other, they are like ghosts. They might tell you what they think, in TED talks, at Davos, but it can’t be real: according to them, all they care about is fixing climate change, solving inequality and bringing about world peace. Mysteriously, none of those things ever come about.

I dragged my feet a little bit, and while I did so, the billionaires got louder, and maybe truer to their authentic selves. Vladimir Putin, estimated to be worth billions, invaded Ukraine. Elon Musk bought Twitter. Sam Bankman-Fried got outed as not-a-billionaire – the billions turned out to either belong to someone else, be fictional, be priced in crypto, or all three – and a lot of his fantasies for the future came tumbling out in the same legal proceedings: a plan, stated in a memo, to purchase the sovereign nation of Nauru in order to construct a “bunker/shelter” that would be used for “some event where 50%-99.99% of people die [to] ensure that most EAs [effective altruists] survive” and to develop “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement, and build a lab there”.

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