Faced with a stagnant jobs market, many are spurning children or pets in favour of ‘raising bricks’

Young adults in China looking for a cheaper, low-maintenance alternative to having children or pets have found an answer: raising bricks.

Bricks may not be as cuddly as cats or as life-affirming as human offspring, but they also cost next to nothing. “No cats, no dating, I started raising a brick,” wrote one brick parent on social media.

Maka Gogaladze’s debut feature looks at generational differences in the context of Georgia’s education system and emphasis on collectivism

The scars imprinted on impressionable young minds can never fully fade away. Aiming her lens at a rocky beach thrashed by crashing waves, Maka Gogaladze opens her intimate film with a painful anecdote from her adolescent years. Through on-screen texts against a stormy sky, the Georgian film-maker recalls the time she dumped all of her poems into the garbage. The impulsive decision was a gesture of rebellion against her domineering mother; Gogaladze had wanted her to feel guilty.

This debut feature would appear, at first glance, to be another act of revolt. Putting her mother in front of the camera, Gogaladze asks probing, at times blunt, questions about the strict education thrust on her in childhood. Together, they talk about piano lessons that ended in tears, and tough academic exams that continued to haunt the director well into her adulthood. Their contrasting personalities are fascinatingly revealed across these conversations in all their tension, yet these sequences also represent a moving effort to reach across generational differences.

The basketball star seems proud to leave the job to his partner. That’s so last century

Nobody can accuse the basketball star LaMelo Ball of being bad at his job. That said, the Minnesota Timberwolves point guard doesn’t seem to be a huge fan of dribbling.

Ball has a nine-month-old son, LaOne, with his partner Ana Montana (real name: Analicia Chaves) and is apparently uninterested in dealing with all the body fluids that come with a baby.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

World’s second largest brewer says use of drugs such as Wegovy can reduce desire to drink alcohol

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Heineken has warned British bars and pubs that the boom in popularity of weight-loss drugs could lead to a fall in sales of beer and cider.

The world’s second-largest brewer sent a presentation to British hospitality customers earlier this month that said the use of GLP-1 medication – such as Ozempic and Wegovy – could reduce the desire to drink alcohol. This in turn could result in “fullness and fewer serves” of pints in pubs and bars, it added.