It is one of the most tantalising – and entertaining – puzzles in art, stretching from the Louvre to the Loire via, well, Norfolk. And our critic thinks he has just worked it out

Increased security after the recent heist has made the queues at the Louvre even slower, yet on this rainswept, very wintry morning, no one grumbles. After all, the Mona Lisa is waiting inside for all these tourists who have come from the world over. Leonardo da Vinci’s woman – swathed in dark cloth and silk, smiling enigmatically as she sits in front of a landscape of rocks, road and water – draws crowds like no other painting. But if the Mona Lisa can attract such attention fully clothed, what would the queues be like if she was nude?

Strangely, this is not just amusing speculation – because in 18th-century Britain, she was. An engraving issued by a publisher called John Boydell gave libertine Georgians the opportunity to hang “Joconda” in their boudoir. It must have been popular because many copies survive. This Mona Lisa sits in a chair with her hands crossed in front of a fading view of distant rock formations. And, like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, she smiles enigmatically. But there is one key difference. She is naked from the waist up.

Amid an affordable housing crisis, renting a room from a friend can seem like the perfect solution. But without clear rules, it can lead to power imbalances, feuds and even unfair evictions …

When Rachel needed a place to live, Maya was only too happy to offer her spare room. What are friends for?

Rachel had recently returned to her home town to start afresh, having been made redundant. Maya, a childhood friend, owned her three-bedroom home, having been helped to buy it by her parents.

His brutal movies put Korean cinema on the map. Now the director of Oldboy is back with a blistering satire about a man driven to murder after redundancy

The Korean wave is being feted around the world right now but Park Chan-wook is not feeling too celebratory. From the outside, South Korea seems to be a well-oiled machine pumping out a stream of world-conquering pop music, cuisine, cars, cinema (especially the Oscar-winning Parasite) and TV shows, as well as the Samsung flat-screens to watch them on. But Park’s latest film, No Other Choice, bursts the balloon somewhat. It paints modern-day Korea as an unstable landscape of industrial decline, downsizing, unemployment and male fragility – with no KPop Demon Hunters coming to save the day.

“I did not mean it for it to be a realistic portrayal of Korea in 2025,” says Park, a serene, almost professorial 62-year-old. “I think it’s more accurate to view it as a satire on capitalism.”

From the V&A to the Stranger Things finale, the pop icon still looms large – but with lower streaming figures than his peers, how many new listeners are discovering his music?

• ‘A perplexing, astonishing finale’: world pays tribute to David Bowie a decade after his death

When David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, such was the scale of media coverage and public mourning that one would have presumed his music would be everywhere for ever, elevated as he was, to misquote Smash Hits, to the position of the People’s Dame. It was briefly – Starman reached No 18, and Space Oddity No 24 – but then it wasn’t.

Each year, Forbes compiles a posthumous celebrity rich list. Bowie appeared in 2016, ranked at No 11 with estimated earnings of $10.5m (£7.8m), and again in 2017, in the same position but with earnings of $9.5m (£7m). This was unsurprising given the enormous spike in interest there is in the immediate aftermath of a superstar’s death. Yet he didn’t appear in the Forbes list again until 2022, when he was at No 3 with earnings of $250m (£195m) – the highest-ranked musician that year – but that was almost all attributable to the sale of his music publishing rights to Warner Chappell.

Elon Musk’s reckless and degrading AI could be built differently. But Americans will have to speak up

Over the past year, Elon Musk has made a series of protocol changes to Grok, the proprietary AI chatbot of his company xAI, which runs prominently on his social media site X, formerly Twitter. Many of these changes have been geared to make the bot more amenable to producing pornography. In August 2025, Grok launched an image generator, branded as Grok Imagine, which featured a service geared toward creating nude, suggestive or sexually explicit content, including computer-generated pornographic images of real women. The feature, which was quickly used to create naked images of celebrities such as Taylor Swift, also allowed users to create brief videos, complete with animations and sounds.

Musk also rolled out AI girlfriends on the platform: animated personas – including female characters with exaggerated breasts and hips – that interacted in sexually explicit ways with users. One of the characters, “Ani”, was an anime-style cartoon blonde with a series of skimpy outfits; the bot blew kisses and addressed users as “my love” while directing the chats toward sexual content.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

An afterlife sitcom, an angry penguin, tossed salad and scrambled eggs, and a Corby trouser press … our writers pick the shows they would happily watch on a loop for ever

I love every character and every aspect of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There isn’t a weak link in the cast and they work together as seamlessly and apparently joyfully as you could wish.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calls protesters ‘vandals’ and ‘saboteurs’ and blames the US for instigating the unrest

Iran’s supreme leader has vowed that authorities will “not back down” in the face of a rapidly growing protest movement, setting the stage for an intensified violent crackdown on the second day of a nationwide internet shutdown.

Protests have raged in cities and towns across the country in recent days, posing a threat to the authority of the regime, which has been significantly weakened since the last large protest movement in the country in 2022. Another round of demonstrations was called for Friday night.

Met Office issues rare red warning as winter storm causes power cuts, travel disruption and school closures

• Storm Goretti – latest updates

Snow and ice are expected to grip much of the UK over the weekend as parts of the country continue to reel from the effects of Storm Goretti, which left thousands of people facing power cuts, school closures and travel chaos.

The storm brought winds of nearly 100mph after forecasters issued a rare red warning for “dangerous, stormy” winds in the south-west.

Spokesperson says limiting access to paying subscribers just makes ability to generate unlawful images a premium service

Downing Street has condemned the move by X to restrict its AI image creation tool to paying subscribers as insulting, saying it simply made the ability to generate explicit and unlawful images a premium service.

There has been widespread anger after the image tool for Grok, the AI element of X, was used to manipulate thousands of images of women and sometimes children to remove their clothing or put them in sexual positions.

Jacques Moretti arrested on Friday as lawyers representing families of victims say investigators are not moving fast enough

Like many young people across Switzerland, Kenzo Ronnow, a university student in Lausanne, slept in on 1 January after celebrating the new year.

But as he scrolled through his phone soon after waking, he saw the lead story of a foreign news website was about Switzerland.