Six noteworthy articles: the emerging global diplomatic hub, Manchester’s transformation resembling London, and an exemplary nightclub in Qatar

1. ‘All those posh apartments. It’s a playground for the rich’: is Manchester turning into London?

Helen Pidd was the Guardian’s North of England editor, based in Manchester for 12 years. As she changes roles to become a presenter on the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast, she looked at the rapid transformation of her home city and complaints from its proud locals that it’s being “Londonised”. Is it the case, she asked, that Manchester is becoming less Mancunian? Or are Mancunians just changing, along with their ever-expanding, shape-shifting city?

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2. ‘My parents got me out of Soviet Russia at the right time. Should my family now leave the US?’

“I have written dystopian fiction before, and my latest novel, Vera, or Faith, is a continuation of the natural outcome of my birth in Leningrad and my removal, at age seven, to Reagan’s America. I think I have predicted the future with fairly good aim in novels such as Super Sad True Love Story, where social media helps to give rise to a fascist America, although my timeline when that book was published in 2010 was 30 years into the future, not a decade and change.”

When Gary Shteyngart left the Soviet Union for a new life in the US, the novelist never imagined he would live under another authoritarian regime. Then Trump returned to power … Is it, he asked, time to move again?

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3. The go-between: how Qatar became the global capital of diplomacy

“The power Qatar has come to wield has taken many observers by surprise,” wrote Nesrine Malik in this fascinating long read. “As a conservative Muslim monarchy in the Middle East, Qatar is a new kind of location for the sort of high-stakes geopolitical deal-making transacted until recently in Geneva and Oslo. Yet since 7 October, the precarious nation’s investment in becoming the world’s go-between has come into its own.”

She explained how, having long cultivated close relations with both the US and Hamas, Qatar has become the locus of ceasefire negotiations, as well as discussions over aid and evacuating the wounded. “As the conflict expanded into the wider Middle East and drew in the US, Qatar’s mediation has grown from a strategy to enhance its own safety into a role that underpins the entire world’s security.”

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4. In Ukraine’s bombed-out reservoir, a huge forest has grown – is it a return to life or a toxic timebomb?

Two years after the Nova Kakhovka dam was destroyed in Ukraine, nature has returned in abundance to the drained land in a “big natural experiment” – but could it be lost as quickly as it appeared? The journalist and photographer Vincent Mundy headed to Malokaterynivka to find out.

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“Paul Foot’s life,” wrote Paula Cocozza in this great interview, “took a hairpin turn in about three seconds of violent enlightenment one Sunday afternoon while he was driving in the suburbs of south Manchester. It was 4.59pm on 20 March 2022 – the occasion so momentous it’s time-stamped in his memory – when, as he puts it, ‘my consciousness exploded’.”

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6. ‘It can bring you to tears’: is this the world’s most beautiful-sounding nightclub?

“Open Ground is located in Wuppertal, just outside the Ruhr valley, a location known predominantly for its 125-year-old suspended monorail and as the home of the late Pina Bausch’s famous dance theatre. It’s a five-hour train ride from Berlin, a city that has often stolen the electronic music spotlight from the rest of Germany due to its mythologised hedonism and notoriously selective scene, credited to clubs such as Berghain. Yet since opening in December 2023, Open Ground has become a pilgrimage site for nightlife enthusiasts and DJs from all over the world. British musician Floating Points has called it ‘probably the greatest-sounding club in the EU’. Drum’n’bass DJ Mantra said: ‘It can almost bring you to tears’.”

Whitney Wei headed to a former second-world-war bunker that is now Germany’s buzziest dance venue. Could it live up to the hype?

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