Call Me Maybe made the singer-songwriter famous – but also confused. Who was she? Who was her music for? Fourteen years later, about to release the double album Day and Night, she finally has some answers

Carly Rae Jepsen is as bubbly as ever as she comes down for breakfast at Manhattan’s Hotel Chelsea. She’s one of those pop princesses, like Kylie Minogue, whose voice and demeanour remain unchanged whatever the situation. And she feels at home at this New York landmark where, last year, she married the musician and producer Cole MGN. That a wedding at the Chelsea would need to be kept to about 100 people was an immediate selling point. “I loved that it was smaller,” she says. “It felt big to me! I didn’t even get time with all the people that were there.”

We’re here to talk about her new album, though, which comes out 14 years after the song that made her world-famous. Born and raised in the city of Mission in British Columbia, Jepsen had come third on Canadian Idol in 2007, and then released a low-key folk album called Tug of War in 2008, before dropping Call Me Maybe four years later. It became the bestselling global single of 2012; her second album, Kiss, came out in the same year. Now, at the age of 40, she has six more studio albums under her belt. The latest, Day and Night, is her take on marriage and motherhood. And, in its own way – which is to say, a bit coy, a bit breathy – it might also be Jepsen’s horniest album to date.

Three little letters - bnb-side’s name is a play on the local b-side arts festival, but Silicon Valley colossus sees threat to global brand

In one corner is bnb-side, a six-room bed and breakfast on the Isle of Portland – a tiny wedge of limestone tied by a narrow ribbon of shingle to the Dorset coast – that was created to help secure the future of the rock’s much-loved arts festival, b-side.

On the other is Airbnb, the San Francisco-based booking colossus. The battle between them is over the three little letters they share.

Progressive politicians such as Zohran Mamdani offer answers to the bitter post-9/11 legacy of failures at home and abroad

Twenty-five years after 9/11, two pieces of journalism, describing two different phenomena in contemporary New York, tell us a great deal about a city, and indeed a world, caught between two eras. In one, New York Magazine dives into “Habibi City”, a New York where a “cultural shift is underway, led by a generation of New Yorkers coming into its own”. This new generation is labelled as originating in “SWANA” – south-west Asia and north Africa, a region that “includes countries from Palestine to Iran to Sudan”. In the other, Vanity Fair describes calls for Zohran Mamdani to not attend the 9/11 memorial ceremony as partly founded in “inchoate, emotional” impulses, that see “the city’s first Muslim mayor as a stand-in for the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly weapons, part of the ‘them’ who attacked ‘us’.”

Together they capture what has changed over a generation, and what remains stubbornly the same. Members of a diaspora of Muslim background are indeed breaking through and accumulating, as New York Magazine says, “clout”. They are no longer simply a fixture of bodegas and halal carts, but of Saturday Night Live, upmarket dining, entertainment and politics too. Mamdani is both the expression of that cohort and the catalyst of its recognition as an emerging force. They care deeply for their local communities but also for those in Gaza and beyond.

Toronto film festival: Shakespeare in Love director John Madden’s feelgood – and bad – comedy-drama is powered by excellent performances and authenticity

So far at this year’s Toronto film festival, I have seen three films involving someone with dementia and two featuring someone who has Aids. It’s not just a sign that the lineup could perhaps benefit from some more light relief but also that certain conditions and illnesses still tend to be covered more often than others on screen.

Last year’s festival saw Scottish hit I Swear bring an unprecedented level of awareness to people who live with Tourette’s and while there’s perhaps less of an obvious edge to John Madden’s more politely framed comedy-drama Onwards and Sideways, it too acts as both narrative movie and potential educational tool. Our knowledge of Parkinson’s is usually restricted to the celebrities who have it, from Muhammad Ali to Michael J Fox to, most recently, Carly Simon, but for many of us, it’s still seen in an abstract way, a handful of symptoms we know about, but so many more that we don’t.

A bloated ballroom, a six-storey military HQ, a helipad-cum-cocktail patio, a gilded angel on a giant arch honouring himself … our architecture critic deplores the decorator-in-chief’s mutilation of Washington

When you have a developer as US president, you might expect some zhooshing up of the capital. A few buildings renovated, maybe some parks replanted. But when you have a megalomaniac builder in charge, things can get out of hand. A decade ago, when Donald Trump was first elected, I asked what it might mean for the US to be led by a real estate tycoon whose career had left a trail of broken promises, angry buyers and endless lawsuits, with rules flouted, heritage trampled and the world pockmarked by a fleet of aspirational towers clad with a flimsy veneer of luxury. The answer is worse than I could have imagined.

With the air of a nightmarish Hollywood sequel, Trump 2 has seen the president’s true architectural ambitions unleashed: The Blingpire Strikes Back. As America’s self-styled decorator-in-chief, Trump has not only overseen the gilded mutilation of the White House, but embarked on the Mar-a-Lagofication of Washington DC itself, applying his gold paintbrush to statuary, daubing ponds with flaking pool liner, and brewing plans for a colossal triumphal arch – all procured in a blizzard of no-bid contracts. And, in true dodgy salesman style, this programme of bauble-building is turning out to be a high-profile decoy for deeper damage being wrought elsewhere.

The man who once helped Richard ‘Dirty’ Desmond save a load of tax was wheeled out to face Laura Kuenssberg

You wait years for one party donation of £36m and then two come along at once. Reform can hardly believe its luck. All hail the crypto billionaires. Tacky pale turquoise suits all round. And Nigel Farage won’t have to worry about spending any of his own money – if you can call the £5m freebie his own money – on his security. Nor do those champagne and oyster lunches to discuss loose change donations of £500k from people living overseas pay for themselves. From now on Reform won’t need to bother getting out of bed for anything less than eight figures.

Fair to say that if it had been Labour or the Tories trousering £72m from Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo then Reform would be on full outrage rampage. How the political system was rigged against it and how the two main parties are hotwired cash machines. In bed with the super-rich. But since the money is heading towards its own bank account, everyone in the party is totally chilled. This is just the way life ought to be. Who wouldn’t want a country where two billionaires can attempt to buy the democratic process?

From Elizabeth I’s backing of early voyages to royal investment in trafficking companies, generations of monarchs were central to Britain’s slave trade

Enslaved African people were seared with hot metal brands bearing the royal crown, according to research by historians who have documented the monarchy’s centuries-long involvement in Britain’s slave trade.

The Register of British Slave Traders identifies thousands of people who invested in Britain’s trafficking of enslaved Africans, including kings and queens.

PM has so far declined to insert curbs on UK-based donors, despite £72m donations from billionaires to Reform UK

Trade unions, MPs and donors have urged the government to look again at party funding rules, after Reform UK insisted £72m in donations from two crypto billionaires was within the law.

Andy Burnham, a previous backer of caps on domestic donations, has so far declined to insert any curbs in the elections bill that would apply to UK-based donors.

Electoral Commission finds abuse, particularly of women, minority ethnic and disabled people, is affecting candidates’ behaviour

Abuse and intimidation of election candidates is “a serious and growing concern”, the Electoral Commission has said, as a review of this year’s local and mayoral elections in England revealed a surge in threats to those who stood.

More than half of the candidates for Labour or Reform UK reported abuse while those most likely to be targeted were women, people from minority ethnic backgrounds and those with disabilities.

Saudis yet to provide details about damage from drone attack to key east-west pipeline to Red Sea that could affect 4% of global oil supply

Saudi Arabia will run out of oil ⁠stocks for export if it ⁠doesn’t restart a drone-damaged major ​pipeline to the Red Sea within days, leading to the loss of up to 4% of global supply, Saudi oil buyers and traders said.

Satellite photos released on Sunday night appeared to show a pumping station on the key 1,200km (745-mile) Saudi east-west pipeline charred and badly damaged, after drone attacks on Friday.