The beat is still there. Slower. Simpler. Charli XCX, who spent last summer demanding we dance all night in sweaty euphoria, now sings that the dance floor is dead. Not dying. Dead. “We’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell,” she announces on “SS26,” her latest single. The cover of her new album […]
The room was not what you would imagine. No entourage. No velvet rope. No handlers signalling when time was up. Taylor Swift leaned against a kitchen counter, drinking white wine from the bottle, talking about Sally Rooney. The journalist she was talking to—the Guardian’s deputy music editor Laura Snapes, who has met Swift multiple times—describes […]
The TikTok video appeared on Monday. Border agents are placing people in handcuffs. People were ushered into cars, then into detention centres. The soundtrack: Ariana Grande’s 2024 hit Bye. The caption: “Bye-bye… President Trump has delivered the most secure border in history.” The song, a sleek pop departure, played under footage of enforcement operations. The […]
The Nike film runs almost six minutes. Erling Haaland waits. Channing Tatum plays his stunt double. Kylian Mbappé appears. Cristiano Ronaldo appears alongside LeBron James, both of them lit like X-Men. Kim Kardashian watches from the stands. Ted Lasso coaches. Travis Scott, Central Cee, and Blackpink’s Lisa—all of them pass through the frame. The football […]
The speech ran 21 minutes. At a ceremony in New York, Taylor Swift stood before the Songwriters Hall of Fame—an institution founded in 1969 that has inducted fewer than 500 people in over half a century—and became the youngest woman ever admitted. Stevie Wonder, inducted at 33, remains the only person younger. Swift is 36. […]
SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Thursday, completing the largest initial public offering in history by raising $75 billion and making founder Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. The company’s shares, offered at $135, surged toward $175 in early trading—a 35% increase that pushed the market value past $2.2 trillion. Musk, who controls […]
The building has stood in Oswestry since the 1460s. It was a grand merchant’s home then, possibly built around an even older medieval hall. For centuries, it held its ground. Then came the structural changes, the poor repairs, the long neglect. Historic England placed Llwyd Mansion on its Heritage at Risk register. The listing is […]
The mural sits inside The Barge Inn near Pewsey in Wiltshire, a pub that served for years as an unofficial headquarters for crop circle researchers and UFO enthusiasts. On the wall, Reg Presley—frontman of The Troggs, voice of “Wild Thing” and “Love Is All Around”—stands against the North Wiltshire Downs. The Alton Barnes White Horse […]
The photograph was small and grainy. A mother holding her baby daughter. Widline Cadet had never seen it before she began hunting for images of her family. She found it. She printed it wall-sized and flanked it with colourful sculptures of aloe plants. She titled it “I put all my hopes on you.” The image […]
The swimming pool was blue. Not the blue of a real pool, but the blue of a place that exists only in memory—flat, electric, impossible. David Hockney painted it in Los Angeles in 1972. His dealer sold it that same year for $18,000. In 2018, the same painting, *Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two […]
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