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“Nobody has ever attempted to move Napoleon,” says Olivia Fryman, keeper of the Wellington Collection, referring to the huge marble statue at the foot of the staircase in Apsley House, on London’s Piccadilly.

The nude — commissioned by the French emperor but dismissed by him as “too athletic” — was presented to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, by the Prince Regent (later George IV) following his victory at the Battle of Waterloo, which ended the Napoleonic wars.

Antonio Canova’s work, “Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker”, is the most striking of the items associated with the emperor that populate Wellington’s former home. The floor beneath it had to be strengthened to accommodate its 13 tonnes.

The original Apsley House was built in red brick to the designs of the Neoclassical architect Robert Adam for Henry Bathurst, 1st Baron Apsley, in the 1770s. After taking up residence in 1817, Wellington made the house “more fitting for his status” by employing architect Benjamin Dean Wyatt to make extensions and alterations, including facing it with Bath stone, says Fryman. 

The grandest addition was the Waterloo Gallery, completed in 1830 to host his annual Waterloo Banquet celebrating the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. The double-height room has an ornate gilded ceiling and a Versailles-style wall of seven mirrors that act as window shutters, sliding open to reveal views of Hyde Park. On display are paintings from the Spanish Royal Collection that Wellington received from King Ferdinand VII of Spain. Wellington commissioned a lockable glazed cover for his favourite work, “The Agony in the Garden” (c1525) by Correggio — he held the key himself. 

The field marshal received so many gifts from grateful monarchs that he created a museum in his house to display them. A porcelain service from King Frederick William III of Prussia features scenes from Wellington’s life, including his school, Eton College.

The field marshal received so many gifts from grateful monarchs that he created a museum in his house to display them

Many pieces in the house reflect Wellington’s military career but personal items on show when I visit include his false teeth and a walking stick with an inbuilt hearing aid. Fryman says he experienced hearing loss in the 1820s after standing too close to an artillery gun as it was fired. 

There is also a portrait of his wife, Catherine Pakenham, to whom Fryman says he was “very unhappily married”. They had two sons. The 1772 piano in the yellow drawing room probably belonged to Wellington’s father, a professor of music at Trinity College Dublin.

Wellington, who was born in Dublin in 1769, was twice prime minister during his political career that followed Waterloo. Apsley House remained in the family after his death in 1852 until the 7th Duke of Wellington donated it and many of the contents to the nation in 1947. Part of the house remains a family home for the current and 9th Duke, Charles Wellesley. 

In one of the public rooms cared for by English Heritage, William Allan’s Battle of Waterloo painting (1843) depicts Napoleon in the foreground on his white horse. Fryman interprets the preponderance of objects associated with the French leader as showing “a degree of respect” on the part of Wellington. “It’s almost a way of telling the story without blowing your own trumpet as well,” she says.

english-heritage.org.uk

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An out-of-his mind lighthouse keeper. A brooding vampire. A small-time criminal. Batman.

Robert Pattinson has played so many roles that it inspired Korean director Bong Joon Ho to cast him as multiple versions of the same dude – 18 of them, in fact – in a followup to the filmmaker’s Oscar-winning “Parasite.”

In the dark sci-fi comedy “Mickey 17” (in theaters Friday), Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, a guy who owes money to the wrong people and tries to leave Earth ASAP. He signs up to be an “expendable” on a colonizing expedition to an ice planet, but never reads the fine print: Mickey becomes a lowly worker who’s regularly put in ultra-hazardous situations, and when he dies, a new Mickey is printed out with a high-tech machine and discarded organic material, with all his memories intact. Over and over and over again.

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On one mission, Mickey 17 is left for dead but is saved by the planet’s indigenous species. He’s rescued and runs into Mickey 18, which causes all sorts of political, personal and existential issues for the underdog hero.

Watching Pattinson in “The Lighthouse,” “I could just see the madness in his eyes in that performance, and that’s exactly what I wanted for Mickey 18,” Bong says through a translator. Pattinson’s superhero in “The Batman” is “different from Mickey in every single way, but there was this strange sense of melancholy to that character. His version of Batman just constantly was blaming himself. I thought that could resonate with Mickey, in some ways.”

“Mickey 17” examines themes of identity and colonialism, but in adapting Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel “Mickey7,” Bong was most attracted to exploring Mickey as a sad character who’s been printed more than a dozen times. It’s “presented as this advanced technology, but if you think about it, it’s kind of tragic, ridiculous and cruel, all at the same time,” the director says. “And in the middle of it is Mickey and all the struggles and turmoils that he goes through in those circumstances.

“His story felt very much like a journey of him recovering his selfhood (and) his self-esteem, maturing into reclaiming his own humanity.”

Pattinson thought it was an intriguing role, someone with no self-worth haunted his whole life by thinking he caused the accident that killed his mom by pushing a button in their car when he was a little boy. “I found it this fascinating thing to think, when you have a 5-year-old’s mentality, ‘I pressed the button and then my mom died and then my life turned (bad) afterwards,’” he says. “You get 20 years in the future and there’s so many things tangled up in your mind and it becomes more and more true the more things that go wrong.”

But every Mickey is a little different: Co-worker/girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) calls 17 “mild Mickey” and 18 “habanero Mickey.” The latter is essentially a misprint because when the scientists are printing him out, one of them trips and dislodges one of the cables on the machine, so “18 comes out completely insane, basically,” Pattinson says. “It’s almost like he knows he’s only got a little bit of time on the planet and wants to live it up as much as he can and basically just exists to teach 17 a lesson, in a lot of ways.”

Bong joked among fellow filmmakers that “if this film were to be turned into a Netflix series, each Mickey would have his own episode and the episode would begin with the new iteration coming out of the printer,” he says. The film offers glimpses of some old Mickeys – Nos. 12 through 16 die in vaccine trials during a zippy montage ― while others are mentioned in passing: No. 6 is the annoying and clingy one.

“He can only process each individual Mickey as a separate being to himself because it’s like, you are not human anymore. You’re literally made out of trash,” Pattinson says.  “He has empathy for all these previous incarnations of himself. It’s just a way of him dealing with the sort of awful situation he’s got himself in. Instead of saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m having a total existential crisis,’ it’s like, ‘No, that was my older brother Mickey 3 who existed three months ago.’”

The human printing machine itself symbolizes the film’s “tone and manner,” Bong says. “Despite having this fancy printer and going on colony expeditions, humans are still as pathetic (and) foolish as they are now making the same mistakes.” Looking like a souped-up MRI, it was designed to perform like an inkjet printer from the 1990s.

A Mickey moves in and out, in and out in jittery motion while being printed, and Bong says he had “a lot of fun” playing with the switch that controlled Pattinson coming out of the machine.

In those scenes, “you feel very much like a guinea pig,” Pattinson says. He let a stuntman take over when a Mickey falls out of the printer and onto the floor ― “It’s actually quite complicated to flop out onto your head” ― and didn’t love trying to act unconscious while steel rollers pinched his butt.

On one printing day, Pattinson recalls a new background actor getting an unfortunate job: “They’re like, ‘OK, we want to do a closeup where you’re putting a pipe up Rob’s ass.’ The guy just looked so deeply uncomfortable doing it. I’m sort of sitting there like, ’It’s OK, man, just jam it up there,’ ” he adds, laughing. “It was a real character forming experience.”

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NYC, where I live, is a city built in large part from glass. It’s not the famed sheet-glass skyscrapers that catch my eye, though, but something more mundane: the patchwork of glass blocks embedded, unceremoniously, into building facades across town. Glass blocks proliferated globally during the 20th century before falling from fashion, making them today as ubiquitous as they are unloved. And yet this past year, in homes from Kansas City to Kreuzberg, the humble glass block is making a clear comeback. 

Patented by Swiss engineer Gustave Falconnier in 1886, the original glass blocks were faceted to allow filtered light into factories. In the 1920s, with the Art Deco and Bauhaus movements’ fixation on geometry, glass blocks became a mainstay of residential architecture. This period was so bananas for blocks that entire buildings, such as Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, were constructed from them. Then, after fading from fashion mid-century, blocks resurfaced in the 1980s, becoming newly synonymous with that era’s oversaturated, Miami Vice aesthetic — equal parts seedy and sexy. This bad reputation has plagued them ever since.

Glass blocks are, today, the Marmite of building materials, inspiring both love and hate. Abby Happel, a Chicago-based architect, is in the former camp. “I have a thing for buildings with glass blocks,” she says, explaining how last year, this obsession led her to create @sexyglassblock, an Instagram account cataloguing archival and contemporary examples. “Sometimes I have to ask myself: do I actually like this building? Or does it just have a glass block in it?”

Most people said they hated glass blocks, that they reminded them of their grandma’s house. Well, maybe your grandma has better taste than you

While the page’s posts can amass more than 250,000 likes, initially the feedback was polarised. “Most responses were from people saying they hated glass blocks, that they reminded them of their grandma’s house,” she says. “Well, maybe your grandma has better taste than you.”

This bygone association is precisely what drew designer Madelynn Hudson to use glass blocks in a recent Kansas City renovation. The guest bathroom features a partition constructed from alpha glass blocks, which have a circular motif embedded within the block’s square. When stacked, this style of block creates a plane evoking a sheet of bubble wrap. “The geometric repetition — it’s pure Deco,” Hudson says. “History repeats itself, and we’re now experiencing an Art Deco revival. We’re in the 1920s again, after all.”

But the glass block’s 1980s connection is equally compelling for Hudson. “People are afraid of glass blocks because of how cost-effective they are, and so how overused they became,” she says, adding that the material’s relative affordability is an asset with today’s rising construction costs. 

“Were there some gaudy things happening in the 1980s? Oh, of course. But we have enough distance from that decade now to really see the interesting and cool design elements,” she says. “We’re coming out of a period of organic minimalism,” she adds. “That preference is giving way to a desire for something more eventful, expressive and bold.”

The geometric uniformity attracted ceramicist and designer Danny Kaplan to use them in his newly completed Manhattan home and showroom, designed alongside architect Peter Martin of Ashe Leandro. “Their grid-like pattern juxtaposes beautifully with the organic forms of my ceramics,” says Kaplan. He opted for Doric glass blocks, which feature wide vertical ribbing that underscores the material’s clean lines. This more singular style of block, rather than the rippled-water Nubio style overplayed in the last century, ensures the space feels contemporary.

Glass blocks are, in fact, the first thing visitors to Kaplan’s home-slash-showroom encounter. As elevator doors open into the space, diaphanous glass-block partitions create an intimate foyer. Blocks are used in this way throughout the space, segmenting the open-plan loft without making it feel dark. “They delineate spaces in a visually open way,” Kaplan says. “The translucency adds a luminous quality to the interiors, filtering natural light while maintaining an element of privacy.”

Architecture practice Flack Studio is likewise captivated by the visual qualities of glass blocks. “Thanks to their chunkiness, they reflect light in a super dynamic way,” says founder David Flack. For a recent Melbourne project, Flack constructed exterior walls from glass blocks. “A flat glass panel has a direct relationship with the landscape, whereas the glass block is much more abstract, distorting the view,” he says. “It invites your imagination to fill in the gaps between what you can see and what you want to see.”

Recent manufacturing developments have introduced a new breed of glass blocks with enhanced thermal insulation and energy efficiency, akin to your classic double-glazed unit. For Flack, the glass block is chic without sacrificing sustainability.

It’s not just the material itself that’s evolving, but the way designers are approaching it. In a residential project by Studio Beck on Australia’s Gold Coast, for example, glass blocks form the igloo-like structure of a bathtub. For an apartment in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood, meanwhile, architecture practice Studio Karhard created a glass-block wall in the living room, backlit by programmable LED panels.

Glass blocks are well suited for innovative application, says Karhard co-founder Thomas Karsten: “It’s a very old material that has a futuristic quality. It works as well today as it did 100 years ago.”

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“The Amazing Race” is back for its most jam packed adventure in the show’s nearly 25 year run.

Season 37 of the Emmy-winning reality competition series hosted by Phil Keoghan will follow 14 duos traveling across the world, the largest cast in the show’s history, all vying for the $1 million prize.

Though the goal of each team has always been simple – to not be last – the journey is anything but. Competitors must overcome mental and physical challenges at various Pit Stops in order to learn their next location. The teams that are last to reach the Pit Stop will gradually be eliminated with each episode.

The Season 37 cast’s first stop will be in Hong Kong, where the contestants will learn a surprise twist that forces them to choose which direction and route they want to take, CBS confirmed. The twist will create two parallel races where two teams will be eliminated at separate pit stops.

Here’s what to know about Season 37 of “The Amazing Race.”

When does ‘The Amazing Race’ Season 37 premiere?

The new season features 90-minute episodes, including the premiere, which airs Wednesday, March 5 at 9:30 p.m. EDT/PDT on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

Subscribe to Paramount+ to watch “The Amazing Race”

How to watch ‘The Amazing Race’

New episodes of “The Amazing Race” Season 37 will air Wednesday nights at 9:30 p.m. EDT/PDT on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

New episodes will be available to stream the day after the episode airs and on-demand on Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers, or on demand for Paramount+ Essential subscribers. The first 36 seasons are also available on the streaming platform.

‘The Amazing Race’ 2025 cast

“The Amazing Race” Season 37 will feature the following teams of two:

• Alyssa Borden and Josiah Borden: Married couple
• Bernie Gutierrez and Carrigain Scadden: Friends
• Brett Hamby and Mark Romain: Married couple
• Carson McCalley and Jack Dodge: Best friends
• Courtney Ramsey and Jasmin Carey: Dating
• Ernest Cato and Bridget Cato: Father and daughter
• Han Nguyen and Holden Nguyen: Siblings
• Jackye Clayton and Lauren McKinney: Sisters
• Jonathan Towns and Ana Towns: Married couple
• Mark Crawford and Larry Graham: Best friends
• Melinda Papadeas and Erika Papadeas :Mother and daughter
• Nick Fiorito and Mike Fiorito: Brothers
• Jeff ‘Pops’ Bailey and Jeff Bailey: Father and son
• Scott Thompson and Lori Thompson: Married couple

‘The Amazing Race’ Season 37 cast: Meet the 14 teams racing around the world

Who won ‘Amazing Race’ Season 36?

New York City couple Ricky Rotandi and César Aldrete won Season 36 of “The Amazing Race.”

Rotandi is a preschool teacher and Aldrete is a chef. The pair won seven of the 11 legs and came in second place three times.

Best friends Juan Villa and Shane Bilek ultimately came in second place, while married couple Rod and Leticia Gardner came in third.

Contributing: Haadiza Ogwude, Cincinnati Enquirer

We occasionally recommend interesting products and services. If you make a purchase by clicking one of the links, we may earn an affiliate fee. USA TODAY Network newsrooms operate independently, and this doesn’t influence our coverage.

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Russian documentarist Victor Kossakovsky has worked on the very largest scales, and some of the smallest. In his intimate mode, he has made a film studying the view from the window of his flat, while 2020’s extraordinary Gunda offered a close-up portrait of a sow and her litter. At the other end of the spectrum was Aquarela (2018), a quasi-symphonic musing on the various manifestations of water on our planet.

Now in similarly maximalist mode comes Architecton, a largely wordless study of stone. This imagistic essay muses on the problem of man-made structures now and through history, and the urgency of rethinking the art of building when there is only so much natural material left to exploit.

Architecton begins by contemplating destruction, using drone photography to provide sweeping vistas of buildings shelled by Russia in Ukraine or destroyed during the Turkish earthquakes of 2023. Then we contemplate the sheer power of substance, in the form of a colossal stone block in the ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon — a mass that one can barely imagine human machineries ever having manipulated.

The film then becomes a rhapsody to pure materiality, as the camera glides over stone surfaces and contemplates endless slow cascades of rock down the slopes of a quarry, and boulders pulverised in the grinding machineries of a gravel crusher. Through the remarkable clarity of Ben Bernhard’s photography — so precise that at one point, your attention is caught by a tiny ant scuttling along a slab of masonry — gazing at the real becomes akin to a hallucinatory science-fiction experience. Sequences in black and white show an abandoned town reclaimed by nature, its surfaces and surrounding vegetation bleached out like bone or chalk.

Interludes in a more everyday register show Italian architect Michele De Lucchi — himself resembling a visitor from antiquity, bearded like an Attic sage — as he supervises the laying of a circle of stones in his garden. In the film’s epilogue, he and Kossakovsky contemplate the problem of architecture now and in the future. How can we build, De Lucchi asks, with material that is not fated to become garbage? What does it mean that humanity once made structures that endured a thousand years but now makes them to last only decades? The architect ruefully confesses his guilt at working on a building to be made from concrete, a material that he regards as “arid”. Indeed, it is through the manufacture of concrete that we have been watching mountains reduced gradually to rubble and dust.

On one level, Architecton is a semi-abstract reverie on a very material topic; with its often ceremonial-sounding music by Evgueni Galperine, it somewhat recalls Godfrey Reggio’s much-loved “state of humanity” documentary Koyaanisqatsi. Certainly there is a slight flavour of the grandiosely sententious — and the opening images of destruction could be accused of aestheticising catastrophe. But there is also a serious philosophical and environmental inquiry at work here, regarding our future and the urgent need to reinvent the way we make the spaces we inhabit.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from January 10

Jennifer Hudson’s latest basketball game outing wasn’t exactly a common one for her.

The “Dreamgirls” star, 43, seemed to have her glasses knocked off after a basketball flew directly at her head while she was sitting courtside at a New York Knicks game on Tuesday with her boyfriend, Common.

The incident occurred after Knicks player Miles McBride attempted to grab the ball, which was knocked forward toward Hudson. Common, who was sitting next to Hudson, reacted quickly and put his hand out in an attempt to block the ball.

It wasn’t totally clear whether the ball made contact with Hudson or whether Common’s hand blocked it in time. But either way, footage from the game showed Hudson looking frazzled in the aftermath of the incident. Common put his arm around her as she examined her glasses, which did not appear to be damaged.

“Protect Jennifer Hudson!” one commentator exclaimed on the broadcast, while another observed that her glasses looked “real expensive.”

Jennifer Hudson gushes about Common and chats with him about marriage: ‘You are my joy’

USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Hudson.

Hudson has been spotted at Knicks games with Common before, and she performed at an NBA All-Star game in 2024.

Jennifer Hudson gives update on romance with Common: ‘Everything is wonderful’

Hudson and Common slyly confirmed their relationship in a January 2024 episode of her talk show. In an interview, the rapper revealed he was dating an unnamed woman who has “an EGOT” and won “an Oscar on her first movie,” clearly referring to Hudson. She said that she was “very happy” in her relationship, while not explicitly saying it was with Common, while he said that “this relationship is a happy place for me.”

In October, Common appeared on Hudson’s talk show again and doubled down on a previous statement that “if I should be married, it would be to” her. She replied, “I support that idea. I think it’s a beautiful idea!”

Bahrain’s Pearling Path is not quite like anything I’ve seen before. It is a landmark cultural project in the Gulf that privileges carefulness and thoughtfulness over spectacle. It is a project in which the streetlamps and the benches built for the local community are as beautifully considered as the museums, historic restorations and concert venues. It is, in short, a wonderful surprise. 

Bahrain, a small kingdom on an island between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, has largely eschewed the excesses of Gulf brashness. Its capital Manama is a busy, functional, late-20th-century but slightly shabby city.

Just over a short stretch of water is Muharraq, the nation’s original capital, home to migrant workers and the working classes, and a very different city of tight, shady streets and alleys staggered to encourage breezes and to break up the hot winds. And it is here that the Pearling Path has been established, a winding, 2.2-mile trail through backstreets, alleys and courtyards that ties together some new and some old attractions, designed and restored with care and intelligence, each reflecting on the pearl fishing and trading that was once the city’s main source of wealth. 

The route begins at the water and meanders through tightly knit neighbourhoods in something that looks very different from the new cultural quarter destinations we’ve become accustomed to. Rather, this route is punctuated by mostly modest, often surprising, occasionally stunning architectural moments. It is a quite brilliant piece of urban acupuncture.

At its heart is the Siyadi Complex, a collection of buildings that includes the house of an old pearl-trading family and once the tallest building in Muharraq. It encompasses the beautifully restored interiors of the dwelling, as well as a small mosque, a complex network of courtyards and the newly created Pearl Museum, a cool, raw space with a pearlescent interior designed by Anne Holtrop.

Holtrop, an urbane and affable Dutch architect who has made Muharraq his home, is also responsible for the restoration and partial rebuilding of the Suq al-Qaysariya marketplace, which once functioned as the pearling place of exchange but had become rundown from use. Holtrop’s interventions are raw and robust, maintaining the workmanlike character of the neighbourhood, introducing deep, shady eaves and creating a street-level layer of gnarly concrete that evokes the mud and earth of the old city. His own office is here too, in a once burnt-out warehouse amid the restored arcades.

A number of other older houses with their distinctive forms, stark exterior walls and tall wind-catching towers are dotted along the path, each restored and made public, each a potential cultural or community venue.

One of the first of the Pearling Path’s completed structures was the Dar Al Muharraq, a vertical extension to an existing structure by Belgian architects Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen. This enigmatic building appears draped in a steel mesh veil, a little like chainmail, ruched at its bottom edges like a curtain that is theatrically lifted when an event is taking place inside. Reserved mostly for musical performance (particularly the mesmeric, dirge-like folk music of the pearl fishers), the building’s glass panels also open out to allow the breeze to flow in and the music to trickle out. It is, unusually, a modest and highly dramatic piece of public architecture.

Along the route there are other, smaller public buildings, half-hidden and easy to miss while exploring more of the history of pearling and the small city itself. But perhaps the most surprising and inspiring aspect of this intervention is its attitude to public space.

A landscape strategy led by Belgian office Bureau Bas Smets (currently working on the designs for the landscaping outside Notre-Dame in Paris) alongside Holtrop is characterised by the creation of a handful of small new public spaces scattered along the path and meant for locals. When I visited, there were lads playing football and older people sitting and chatting on the new curving stone benches. If the institutions might be meant for tourists, these spaces were resolutely designed for the working-class inhabitants of Muharraq itself. It is determinedly not a project about gentrification.

This does not feel like an imposition on a neighbourhood but an enhancement of routes to make you look at the city

The public route is defined by a coherent language of street furniture, something almost always neglected in urban design and relegated to an afterthought or value-engineered out at the last minute. Here streetlamps are designed like lollipops with translucent shades (reminiscent, of course, of pearls) and concrete columns in which sparkle little fragments of mother of pearl in the aggregate.

Street trees are placed, like the lights, exactly on the junctions of large pavers that themselves evoke a kind of carpet defining the edges of the space. Even the bins have been beautifully considered in the same cylindrical concrete language as the street lights. The coherence of the street furniture allows you to follow the trail, picking up on the breadcrumbs of bins, benches and lights, without ever making it too explicit or exclusive, so that this does not feel like an imposition on a neighbourhood but an enhancement of routes to make you look at the city.

If there is a mis-step, it is perhaps that the exquisite modesty of a meandering walk is contained by four humongous parking garages at its corners. Designed by Swiss architect Christian Kerez, these are remarkable structures in their own right — sculptural forms in which ramps wrap around and create public platforms in the air. But they are also out of place and out of scale, odd in a scheme that is all about the complexities and encounters of walking, such a rarity in the Gulf. 

The final building on the route (or the first, depending on how you approach it) is another out-of-scale blockbuster — but one that works, I think. Designed by Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati, this gateway/grand finale consists of a vast concrete canopy creating a sort of shaded space beneath it but refusing to define what it might be for.

At its heart is an exhibition hall, austere and bunker-like, but mostly this is just covered space. It reminded me of the kind of thing that might have been erected in the 1970s over an archaeological site (and it does, indeed, turn out to be covering some bulky but missable ruins of warehouses) or perhaps an abandoned megastructure in the Iraqi desert. You might criticise the sheer amount of concrete here, the hundreds of tonnes of embodied carbon just to create a canopy, but, with its odd perforated roof (holes in the shape of houses) and chimney-like towers, it is a thing of powerfully enigmatic urban presence.

In its entirety and complexity this is a remarkable work of urban intervention and its genesis can be traced to a single remarkable figure, Noura Al Sayeh. An architect-turned-client who now works for Bahrain’s Authority for Culture and Antiquities, she turned the project into something surprising and in many ways exemplary. That she is also now married to Holtrop, who moved to be with her in Bahrain, might be noted — they met and married during the process.

It is not often that a group of wildly disparate architects are brought together to create something coherent. This could have been a blockbuster cultural quarter or a ragged collection of discrete monuments, but it has turned into something very different indeed. I struggle to think of a better and more thoughtful example of culture and architecture being used to enhance identity and improve everyday life rather than just create a new, generic attraction. You may not find yourself in Bahrain often, but if you do, it’d be a terrible omission not to take a couple of hours or so to indulge in following this remarkable path.

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Dolly Parton’s husband Carl Thomas Dean, who has died at age 82, helped birth one of the most iconic songs of her career.

The country music star, 79, has explained that her 1973 hit “Jolene,” in which she begs the beautiful title woman not to take her man, was inspired by a real bank teller’s interactions with her husband.

“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Parton told NPR in 2008. “And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us — when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.’ So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.”

Parton told “60 Minutes Australia” this occurred after she and Dean first got married in 1966.

Watch Dolly Parton perform hit song ‘Jolene’

Lyrics to ‘Jolene’ by Dolly Parton sparked by young fan

The name Jolene, though, had a different origin. Parton revealed to NPR that she once signed an autograph for a “beautiful little” 8-year-old girl named Jolene, and the name stood out to her.

Dolly Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, dead at 82: ‘Words can’t do justice’

“She had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, these beautiful green eyes, and she was looking up at me, holding, you know, for an autograph,” Parton told NPR. “I said, ‘Well, you’re the prettiest little thing I ever saw. So what is your name?’ And she said, ‘Jolene.’ And I said, ‘Jolene. Jolene. Jolene. Jolene.’ I said, ‘That is pretty. That sounds like a song. I’m going to write a song about that.’”

In the song, Parton sings that Jolene’s “beauty is beyond compare” and tells her, “I’m begging of you, please don’t take my man … Please don’t take him just because you can.””

Dolly Parton reacts to Beyoncé’s ‘Jolene’ cover: ‘Wow’

‘Jolene’ covers, from Beyoncé to Miley Cyrus

Since its release in 1973, “Jolene” has been covered by numerous artists, from Miley Cyrus to The White Stripes.

Beyoncé’s 2024 album “Cowboy Carter” also included a cover of the track. Parton appeared on the album in an interlude prior to the “Jolene” cover, saying, “You know that hussy with the good hair you sing about? Reminded me of someone I knew back when. Except she has flaming locks of auburn hair.” But the Beyoncé version tweaked the lyrics to “Jolene,” including changing “I’m begging of you please don’t take my man” to “I’m warnin’ you, don’t come for my man.”

Parton reacted to the cover at the time by writing on Instagram, “Wow, I just heard ‘Jolene.’ Beyoncé is giving that girl some trouble and she deserves it!” She previously told Knox News that she and Beyoncé have “sent messages back and forth through the years,” adding, “I always thought she was great.”

Dolly Parton’s husband Carl Dean dies

Parton confirmed on Monday that Dean, who was notoriously private during his marriage to the singer, has died. The couple did not have any children together.

Dolly Parton’s rare quotes on Carl Dean – plus what she said just before his death

“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together,” Parton said in a statement. “Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”

Contributing: Liz Kellar, Knoxville News Sentinel