The singer’s memoir recounts a life of ups and downs, with record-breaking success accompanied by critical snobbery and racial bias

Darius Rucker will be the first to admit his memory can be hazy – he says on page one of his memoir that his years as the lead singer of the American rock band Hootie & Blowfish were a blur of fame, drugs and his “close personal friend Jim Beam” – but he’s still armed with numbers. There’s the wild success of the band’s debut album Cracked Rear View, which became the most popular record of 1994 and remains the 11th bestselling album of all time in the US. There’s the backlash to the band’s mid-90s ubiquity and their precipitous downslide in fame, playing to 8,000 people in a 14,000-seater just two years after rocking stadiums. Then there are the odds Rucker faced as a middle-aged Black man trying a second career in country music, when he became the first Black artist to score a #1 hit in 25 years.

Rucker, now in the second decade of his country career and a bona fide Nashville star, deploys these figures and more casually in Life’s Too Short, his new memoir, and in amiable conversation peppered with a barreling laugh. Among them: the number of times he sang Nanci Griffith’s I Wish It Would Rain on his mother’s deathbed (at least 100); the amount his largely absent father asked for when he got back in touch at the height of the band’s popularity ($50k); the number of radio stations he personally visited in 2008 to get his first country single any airplay (110); the number of ecstasy pills bought off a dealer on a whim during a Hootie stadium tour (2,000, for $30,000 in cash – “and we did ‘em all”, he laughs over Zoom from his home in Nashville). “I thought about about taming it down, but then I always said if I wrote the book I was going to tell the truth,” he says of that last stat, “and the truth is when we were going, I don’t think anybody went harder than us.”

New Netflix docuseries Dancing for the Devil details strange story of young dancers enrolled in a mysterious religious organisation with allegations of abuse

Since they were young girls, Miranda and Melanie Wilking danced together. The sisters, two years apart, grew up exceptionally close in suburban Detroit, dancing in their basement, in competitions and eventually in pursuit of a professional career. When Miranda graduated high school and moved to Los Angeles to chase the dream, Melanie followed as soon as she could. The duo, who looked nearly identical – long brown hair, bright blue eyes, sharp features, deep tans and lithe physiques – found modest work auditioning together, but greater success online. By this point, in the late 2010s, TikTok was on the rise; short, peppy dance videos to a front-facing camera were the fastest avenue to a following, and thus a living, via sponsorships. Miranda and Melanie started an account together as the Wilking Sisters; by 2020, they had over 3 million followers on the platform.

But in 2021, the sisters suddenly stopped posting new videos together, as things fell apart behind the scenes. Through her boyfriend James “BDash” Derrick, a dancer well-known for the LA-based street-style krump, Miranda and several dancer friends had joined a management company called 7M as well as its affiliate Christian church, Shekinah, both run by a man named Robert Shinn. Melanie always followed her older sister, but was put off by Shinn’s “weird” messianic vibe and the pressure to attend services. Soon Miranda began acting strangely, distancing herself from her formerly close family and anyone not associated with 7M. She chopped her hair short, dyed it blonde, and started new social channels, posting dance videos that followed a distinct 7M template: punchy, polished, slightly hypnotic, with aspirational backdrops – expansive patios, mansions, Hollywood landmarks. By January 2021, she cut off contact with her family entirely. Though Miranda was posting frequently to social media, to those that knew her, she wasn’t Miranda any more. “I literally feel like my sister died. She’s everywhere, but nowhere,” Melanie explains in the new Netflix docu-series Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult.

With new chapters in the worlds of Mad Max and Planet of the Apes out now, Guardian writers have picked their favourite big screen franchises to date

When a blockbuster franchise is seven movies in (and counting), and the consensus choice for worst entry was directed by John Woo, arguably the most influential action film-maker of his time, you’re looking at an uncommonly consistent series. Though the Mission: Impossible movies have cycled through many directors – one apiece for Brian De Palma, Woo, JJ Abrams and Brad Bird, before settling on Christopher McQuarrie – the first film, particularly the astounding Langley break-in sequence, established the franchise as a showcase for impeccable crafted set pieces. The plots may be an enjoyably hokey tangle of global threats and clever unmaskings, but the series’ determination to keep topping itself, leaning on the physicality of stunt work and practical effects, has provided reliable thrills for approaching three decades. With each film, Tom Cruise continues to outrun his own mortality and another classic sequence or two is added to the inventory, from Cruise dangling from the Burj Khalifa high-rise during a sandstorm in Ghost Protocol to him zipping off a cliff on a motorcycle in Dead Reckoning Part One. It’s a high-wire act that has yet to tumble off the line. Scott Tobias

Daddy Changed the World will tell the story of the man whose murder sparked anti-police brutality protests across the US in 2020

George Floyd, the 46-year-old man whose murder by a Minneapolis police officer sparked nationwide anti-police brutality protests in 2020, will be getting the biopic treatment.

The family-authorized film, titled Daddy Changed the World, will depict the life of the man who became a national symbol of racial injustice, Deadline reported on Wednesday.

LAPD and DEA begin joint criminal inquiry into how Friends star, who died of acute effects of ketamine, got the prescription drug

Half a year after the death of Matthew Perry from acute effects of anesthetic ketamine, the Los Angeles police department (LAPD) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have launched a joint criminal investigation looking into how the Friends star got the prescription medication, law enforcement sources confirmed to the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday.

Perry died at the age of 54 on 28 October 2023 in a hot tub at his Pacific Palisades home. Trace amounts of ketamine, which is sometimes used to treat depression, were found in his stomach, according to the Los Angeles medical examiner.