Mark Borkowski has been sharing his insights into Meta’s historic $18bn settlement over harms allegedly caused to children by the platform, including in this Business Insider piece and on LinkedIn - here’s a preview and you can check out Mark’s LinkedIn for the full piece.

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There’s no place like home for Harry

The World Cup didn’t “come home” this summer, but we got the next best thing just in the nick of time. After six years in California, the return of the world’s most polarising Duke and Duchess hit the press last week. While Harry and Meghan sought privacy, that task was nigh impossible, even for the most skilled comms specialists. The family have made a base outside London, with both kids enrolled in schools in the Cotswolds, and they will not return to royal duties.

All makes sense, but the timing invites scrutiny. July concluded Harry’s failed privacy case against DMG, still fresh after six years of litigation against the British press. The battle sandwiched many of Harry and Meghan’s business ventures with varying levels of success, and with enemies across the media landscape, advising them is no mean feat.

The common sense approach to managing their return is clearly the quiet route. Get back into the charity game, decline all media requests and try and let the family “move on”. But this isn’t so straightforward when Meghan has commitments to her As Ever brand. The low-key approach invites scrutiny for a brand ambassador, so managing next steps will take some careful consideration, especially when this hasn’t proven to be in Meghan’s wheelhouse.

Then there’s the thorny issue of security. Harry has been on record about his family’s safety, and the Home Office has said very little about what this practically would look like. The pair must resolve this before engaging in anything else.

Harry and Meghan’s most ardent supporters regularly cite press treatment as the main factor around their initial departure, and their critics allegedly want to see less of them. So while this is mutually beneficial on paper, it’s rarely that simple when there’s money to be made out of their exposure. While their comms team will have hoped an end-of-summer return might’ve been met with less fanfare, front-page galore and the People magazine exclusive will be enough ammo to argue a quiet life is off the cards.

If we had the fortune of managing this situation, it all comes down to weathering the first storm and rebuilding those personal relationships. If they can successfully break bread with their closest family members, even if they accept there’s permanent scarring, then perhaps when their commercial work resumes, they might be able to progress on the front foot while managing the bad press. But sometimes, even the best strategies fall apart if the recipient isn’t fully engaged or something totally out of your control flares up. Who’d be famous, eh?

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And so she’ll go…

This week, we said goodbye to the big-haired, southern drawling, rhinestone-covered, Tennessee darling that was Dolly Parton.

Whether or not you listened to her music, she was an instantly recognisable figure across the generational, and political, divide. We’re in a time where fame is fraught with hot takes and cancel culture, so escaping unscathed is rare. But somehow, nobody disliked Dolly. You might not have loved her, but few would say they hated her.

Dolly Parton actually possessed a quality we tend not to love in our oh-so perfect celebrities: contradiction.

She was a serious songwriter, but wise enough to play the fool. In interviews, she would talk in what has come to be known as “dolly-isms” to avoid controversies or divulging too many details of her personal life, which she was rather good at keeping private.

She was, by her own admission, artificial on the outside and yet completely honest about it. Her rhinestones, implants and blonder than blonde hair, as theatrical and kitsch as it was, was authentic to her. Rather than resist the caricature, she embraced it to the full. After all, it costs a lot of money to look that cheap…

Behind the cartoonish, bubbly and overdone exterior, her music returned often to the uglier parts of ordinary life - poverty, domestic violence, prostitution and addiction. She was hailed a gay icon but just as beloved by conservative Christians. She modelled her look on the ‘town tramp’ but was cast as America’s Godmother figure.

Her politics followed the same trick. She refused to endorse political candidates and built a brand on staying above the fray. She was hardly apolitical, though, backing Jane Fonda through the “Hanoi Jane” backlash and was a fierce advocate for women’s rights and LGBTQ+ equality - she horrified some of her fans with her song for the Transamerica soundtrack back in 2005. Despite that, she was somehow able to avoid political tribalism, uniting people in their adoration of her rather than her politics.

Perhaps that was her biggest secret. She never tried to be everything to everyone, she just allowed people to see themselves in all the different parts of her. She could be glamorous and ridiculous, serious and silly, political and diplomatic. In an age when celebrity is carefully managed, Dolly made just being herself the most powerful PR strategy in living memory.

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Slippery Slop: Why it might be right to worry about WSJ’s AI Op-Ed defence

US newspaper of record, The Wall Street Journal, this week acknowledged that an op-ed by billionaire tycoon Stanley F. Druckenmiller had been written with AI.

WSJ defended the decision to publish on the basis, essentially, that if the ‘op’ is the sincerely-held view of the human being (especially when it comes from such a singularly credible source) then that takes precedence over the ‘Ed’ – herein referring to the quality, or at least humanity of the writing.

A Semafor investigation into 300 op-eds in the USA’s most auspicious newspapers showed that, even if the WSJ are the first to admit it, they are far from alone in allowing AI-written copy to creep onto their opinion pages.

Even the NYT, whose op-ed desk - we can avow from firsthand experience- warn upfront with every commission that they won’t accept AI writing, were found to have published a small minority of articles that scored over 80% AI on Pangram (which in this [human] author’s opinion is quite a lenient taskmaster).

There’s a couple of reasons not to celebrate this Brave New frontier in the perennially advance of AI writing towards total ubiquity.

The first is that AI writing is not all that good. Granted, not everybody absorbs writing even conscious of its quality; Druckenmiller likened the use of Claude to write to using a calculator to add. But that’s a false equivalence; there’s only one way to express that ‘4’ is the answer to 2+2 but there are infinite ways that, for example, Hamlet could have expressed his doubts about whether he wanted to live on – and some would always have been better than others.

There’s also the Orwellian notion, become cliché, that linguistic expression, if limited, is a tool of oppression. AI writing relies on synthesising what others have said and then refining it down to what most often satisfies its promptmaster. It also can’t create new words or using existing combinations of words in novel ways. So the longer we use AI to write, and the more we use it for, the fewer words we will have to express how we feel. First the words will disappear; then the sentiments they convey.

In March we published an entry about a viral NYT quiz in which humans struggled to distinguish classic literature from AI simulacra. We also published an AI version of the same Trends entry and asked our readers to spot the human writing. 65% got it wrong. AI is already prevalent enough that we struggle to recognise it. It may seem trivial, but deep within these little signals that signify humanity or automation lies our ability to think critically and express ourselves creatively; don’t let the sensors become dull.

Ali G: Is It Because I Is Back?

After 20 years spent “chillin’”, Ali G is heading back to cinemas, although Sacha Baron Cohen’s attempt to revive one of the 2000s’ most recognisable comedy characters is already discovering that nostalgia for the Noughties is one thing, but its sense of humour may be rather harder to resurrect in 2026.

Ali G: Who Iz I?, out in October, brings back the tracksuit clad Staines “yoof” whose particular brand of cluelessness, as a white suburbanite appropriating Black British and Jamaican slang while interviewing unsuspecting establishment figures, made him a cultural phenomenon. Not everyone has greeted his return with “restecp”, with ‘Media Watchdog’ NewsCord launching a campaign calling on cinemas to boycott the film. The organisation has accused Baron Cohen of using satire as cover for “enforcing racist stereotypes”, with supporters reportedly sending more than 36,000 emails to cinema chains.

Picturehouse, which operates 25 UK venues, has since said it has “no current plans” to show the film, although it has not linked that decision to the campaign. More awkwardly for anyone tempted to dismiss the backlash as another case of 2026 sensitivities meeting 2000s comedy, the criticism is almost as old as Ali G himself. In 2000, Black British comedian Felix Dexter argued that the character allowed liberal audiences to laugh at Black street culture while retaining the safety of political correctness. Baron Cohen’s defence has long been that the joke is on Ali G, the ignorant white man doing the appropriating, and the powerful people who fail to see through him. The challenge is that this character may have been recognisable to Gen X audiences at the turn of the millenium, but will be totally alien to the Gen Z audiences relied on to make the new film a success.

Baron Cohen seemingly knew exactly which argument he was resurrecting, joking as the trailer launched, writing on X: “In an age where a comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back.”

It is a neat line, but the reaction poses a trickier question than whether Ali G could be made today. Bringing him back is also a test of whether a character built for the cultural landscape of the early 2000s can still work in 2026, when audiences are far more willing to question the stereotypes that comedy asks them to laugh at.

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Hidden in plain sight on the bustling streets of London is a PR battle for the city’s soul. The FT reported this week on how London’s Black Cab community – stricken by the rise of ride hailing apps- plans to deal with its latest existential threat: driverless taxis.

Waymo and Wayve, the purveyors of London’s incoming robot taxis, have in some ways had the easy pre-publicity job; beyond the sensitivities required to clear regulatory hurdles, the basic strategy has been tubthumping about progress, efficiency and cost (with a rigorous footnote about safety to allay any trepidation).

The cabbies have a more difficult job, and it was intriguing to see how they sold an ostensibly more expensive and less convenient option.

It’s important to note that this didn’t have the feeling of a coordinated campaign (at least not in terms of messaging) and there are not many communications strategists who would have advocated the threat of ‘skulduggery’ which became the article’s headline - and included an anonymous suggestion that cabbies might try to bait robotaxis into crashes and then blame them for it.

This kind of discourse will surely only benefit the automatons, but deeper into the discussion came a valid point. Even if the engineers have successfully programmed the vehicles with maxims for the thousands of miniature Trolly Problems inherent in driving in a city like London, these must surely assume that pedestrians and other external forces will play nice.

Anyone who has been to London knows that this won’t be the case; unlike motorist-dominated cities like LA, London’s roads are governed by wildly unpredictable and less than altruistic pedestrians and cyclists.

This led to one interviewee in the FT article to point out a potentially intractable problem: zebra crossings. Surely the maxim programmed into the driverless car is to give pedestrians right of way; so what if the flow of pedestrians never stops?

“Drivers can nudge through the rush-hour stream of commuters at a zebra crossing by a City station, he noted. “These AVs will not move… they will be stuck there till next Christmas!””

These predictions will inevitably collide with the reality of the robotic rollout, but even in a potentially losing battle the cabbies have landed a blow in the fight for the future of London’s streets.

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Tennis “Bad Boy” Kyrgios has actually become, a Bad Boy

This week we found out legendary tennis player Nick Kyrgios has tested positive for cocaine, thus being suspended from playing professional tennis for the foreseeable future.

Kyrgios started his professional career at 19, immediately gaining attention for his tennis skill and “bad boy” attitude, from his style to his demeanour. It was clear from the start that the 19 year old was ill-equipped to deal with the pressures of carrying the hopes of the nation, and his outbursts at referees, coaches, and anyone in his line of sight set the tone for the rest of his career.

The public wanted to believe the bright tennis star would get his act together, frequently granting his apparent benefit-of-the-doubt, but testing positive for cocaine was the final straw.

On top of outbursts and racket smashing, he has been accused of assaulting his ex-girlfriend, he has retweeted the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate and has had allegations of spitting. Unlike other famous tennis bad boy John McEnroe, known for screaming at umpires and making good television, Kyrgios’s aggression has taken on a rather more sombre undertone, crossing the line from entertainment to decidedly problematic.

McEnroe’s tantrums were repackaged as passion and his legacy remains protected. Kyrgios’s Instagram apology, citing injury, loneliness and mental health, perhaps landed with more sympathy than his record warranted, but the broader reaction remains resignation rather than affection.

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So bad it’s good

Niu Lai, a Chinese animated film about a calf earned £7,000 in its first ten days. Made over five years by a self-taught filmmaker and his mother, the 86-minute movie looked destined for quiet obscurity. The New York Times noted the plot was baffling and the animation compared to a PowerPoint presentation. Budget was so low that staff had to hand draw the posters.

@wekaypohWith tickets priced at just S$8, Niu Lai has generated a whopping 5,700% return on investment, far exceeding Ne Zha’s 817% #niulai #牛来 #china #animation #wekaypoh

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Clips spread across Chinese social media. The worse it looked, the more people needed to see it. Users began describing the crude visuals as “handmade,” partly mockery, partly affectionate. Bloomberg noted the film was now on track for 135 million yuan in revenue, rivalling Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in China’s animated film charts.

The so-bad-it’s-good narrative is not new, however the surprising affection with which Niu Lai has been treated (alongside the mockery) speaks to our growing disillusionment with AI. At a moment when audiences are drowning in AI-generated polished ‘perfection’, something visibly flawed, and undeniably human, is a refreshing antidote.

Burnham gets pranked

Andy Burnham has spent the past few days confirming he exchanged text messages with someone impersonating Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s chief of staff and, by most accounts, the most powerful woman in the White House.

He grew suspicious partway through, stopped replying, and reported it. Him and other officials briefed on the matter say “nothing of consequence” was discussed.

Being fooled by a fake senior official is, unglamorously, a British political tradition. Tony Blair was duped by a faux William Hague in ’98. David Cameron did it twice, once as Prime Minister and most recently in 2024 when someone posed as Ukraine’s former president. Boris Johnson once spent 18 minutes discussing Russian sanctions with a hoax caller. Ben Wallace and Priti Patel both took calls from a fake Ukrainian Prime Minister the same year. Amongst that litany of ministerial faux pas, Burnham’s brush with the scammer seems to be more occupational hazard, less grave error.

When asked if he was embarrassed (he definitely was), Burnham said “No, I’m not... I did everything right.” It’s fair to say the story has largely moved on, with most of the headlines concentrated over a one-to-two-day period.

It is worth asking whether the same mistake would have received the same treatment had it been made by Keir Starmer. It’s not difficult to imagine how his critics and the press might have framed the misstep as evidence of a leader out of his depth, questioning his political judgement and competence.

By contrast, the reporting of Burnham’s blunder has remained largely factual rather than turning into a referendum on his judgement. Coverage has also focused on wider security concerns, including reports that a number of MPs’ phone numbers had been leaked, as well as last year’s FBI investigation that took place after Wiles had again been impersonated. Trump said at the time that “nobody can impersonate Susie. There’s only one Susie” which didn’t age well, to say the least.

Perhaps the PM’s political strategy is working after all. His biggest achievement is that he’s largely avoided becoming the story…a trick Keir Starmer never quite mastered.

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For a politician not known for being camera-shy, Farage’s no-show at the vote count spoke volumes, despite winning the Clacton by-election with 63.3% of the vote. Saying he refused to be “demeaned and humiliated by nobodies,” and alleging police warnings of threats, he held a private party down the road and cancelled his victory speech.

Farage declared his victory both “convincing” and “overwhelming.” Having justified his decision to call the by-election as a way to prove that the people did not want him scrutinised and investigated by the parliamentary authorities, it is notable that coverage of the results sits directly alongside the news that the parliamentary investigation, halted for the by-election, has resumed.

Farage’s team held the line, with fellow Reform MP Lee Anderson calling out the “witch-hunt” against Farage and insisting, with the air of a manager after a scrappy home win, that the results speak for themselves. As we’ve discussed before, this was no ordinary by-election, and the majority victory doesn’t simply silence the critics.

Unsurprisingly, the other political parties have drawn different conclusions, calling the £250,000 election, held in one of Britain’s poorest constituencies, a stunt. Comments by Labour and the Conservatives on the result quickly pivot back to the investigation.

After his election loss, Count Binface called the result a humiliation for Farage, comparing his Clacton showing with his earlier run in Makerfield against Burnham, claiming “10,000%” more votes this time round. More striking is his other figure: over one in four would rather a comedian in a bin as their MP. Binface is of course hailing his biggest-ever showing, both in votes and media attention.

Latest IPSOS data shows Farage polling behind Burnham, and his approval rating is down. Farage may have beaten the bin at the ballot box, but with the parliamentary investigation back in full swing, the future is anything but clear for Farage.

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Discontinuing the AI slop shop

When ChatGPT suddenly appeared in 2022 for free, we weren’t sure what hit us. While the advent of GenAI was new and exciting, most were familiar with the perils of AI through sci-fi. But with no practical tool widely available, this seemed like a problem for the future. But GPT was so easy to use that most glossed over how to use it appropriately or safely; the allure of the prompt in all its simplicity was too enticing, with full access to a tool that spits out reams of text in seconds. This created a very dangerous precedent. The art of writing has been cheapened, which the tech companies welcomed for the precious training data. It’s almost four years since that moment, and while many have railed against “AI slop”, only now does there seem to be meaningful pushback.

One major enabler of this change is the EU’s AI Act’s Transparency Code, which came into force on 2 August, requiring AI companies to mark AI content. And there has been action around this: LinkedIn - the unofficial home of AI content - has added a “seems like AI slop” button to flag and block users who rely too heavily on AI. Substack has implemented a similar system to detect blatant use of AI with minimal human intervention, while Snapchat announced that fully AI-generated videos will no longer be findable in its discovery feeds. However, many of these platforms offer their users built-in AI tools to make creating content easier, so really, it’s more quality control than a principled stand against AI writing and editing.

Anthropic has also opted into this framework, announcing that Claude will now embed an invisible watermark in generated text to detect AI, making it easier for the detection tools to sniff out those leaning a bit too heavily on Claude (Google has its own SynthID technology, which does something similar). For those using Claude to proofread and format text, it may also see a detectable mark, so it’ll be very hard to disguise one’s use of AI.

This won’t stop people from using AI, but it will make people think twice about how much they use it for their own content. The activity of trying to decipher what is man or machine-made has grown tiresome, so if it helps eliminate the AIisms that have infiltrated the World Wide Web, then it will be refreshing.

With Great Box Office…

In 2025, not one Marvel film entered the box office’s top 10, which for a once dominant studio leaves many questioning whether the Marvel era is over. One of its saving graces has been the umpteenth instalment of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which has surpassed $700 million in domestic ticket sales, becoming the fastest film to notch the box office benchmark. Globally, with Tom Holland starring, it has brought in $1.8 billion after just two weekends of release. Insiders are even tipping it to surpass Avatar ($2.9 billion).

Is Marvel back, or is it leaning a bit too heavily on its star power? Hollywood’s favourite couple is playing the iconic romance of MJ and Spider-Man. More specifically, it is these roles that Tom Holland and Zendaya landed 10 years ago that mark the start of their love story. From meeting when they were 19, to now being Mr and Mrs Spider-Man. Everyone loves to blur the lines between reality and fiction, but even better when there are no lines. Both starred in Nolan’s The Odyssey, while Zendaya had The Drama earlier this year and has Dune: Part Three due in December. It is some run.

On top of this, Sadie Sink has also played a role in the Marvel revival and is going from strength to strength following Stranger Things. And then of course, the public undeniably loves Spider-Man, with the last instalment bringing Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Men back into the fold, uniting three generations of fanbase in one go. We still see memes from the first film circulate today.

The numbers are eye-wateringly impressive, however you interpret them, and with no sign of slowing down, Marvel must use this as a jumping-off point. After a very slow start to the 2020s, they have a very clear opportunity to build on this momentum. Time will tell if it’s just the Holland/Zendaya bump, or if they actually have something to work with.

Barbie 2: Trouble in the Dreamhouse

Three years after Barbie turned the world pink, Warner Bros is discovering that getting everyone back into the Dreamhouse is rather more complicated than expected.

The sequel is stuck in a standoff between the studio and Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach over new deals, with Warner Bros facing a December deadline before the rights revert to Mattel. According to reports in the New York Times and Variety, the studio has made six offers to the creative team, with Gosling said to be seeking $20m to return as Ken, more than triple his fee for the original. Warner Bros disputes some of the reporting, but the impasse is real enough.

There is an obvious commercial logic to wanting another Barbie. The original made around $1.5bn, becoming Warner Bros’ biggest film ever and, alongside Oppenheimer, one of the defining cinema moments of the post-pandemic era. That logic looks more urgent given Warner Bros’ own recent run: both Supergirl and The Bride failed to recoup their costs this year. Walking away from a franchise with Barbie’s track record, while other bets are struggling, is a hard sell to shareholders.

This impasse has prompted a broader question of whether the public needs, or even wants, a Barbie 2. Hollywood seems to have a growing dependence on what has already worked, between Disney live-action remakes and the latest instalment of the Minions franchise, all released this year alone (Marvel too, as discussed above).

Two of this year’s biggest box office stories suggest that logic may be outdated. Obsession and Backrooms, low-budget horror films from first-time directors in their twenties, have outperformed franchise blockbusters at the box office this summer, evidence that audiences aren’t as risk-averse as studios assume.

Perhaps that is the lesson Barbie should leave behind. Its success came from taking familiar IP and turning it into something nobody had quite seen before, at a very particular cultural moment that is unlikely to be recreated. Trying to manufacture that moment twice may miss the point entirely. Whether a sequel follows or not, the real momentum this year belongs to a younger generation of filmmakers proving there’s still an appetite for something new.

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Jason Arday made history by becoming Cambridge University’s youngest ever black professor, overcoming severe learning difficulties and personal trauma to forge a feted career in academia.

But Arday failed to reckon with a fundamental rule of the media and reputational landscape; if it seems too good to be true, people are going to ask questions.

And so they did: by the bucketload. Major media outlets including Times Higher Education, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and lately The Atlantic have investigated Arday’s academic work and hundreds of his claims about his career, personal life, sporting prowess, charity work and the abuse he recounted suffering. Collectively they found a narrative teeming with inconsistencies and ravaged with plot holes to the point where Arday has resigned from his post pending further investigation. It’s a scandal that makes the Salt Path scandal look like a typo.

Even if Arday had been telling the truth, his downfall reveals tactical errors when it comes to reputation management as a niche public figure.

The first was embracing his public image as a paragon of virtue. Arday did not shy away from the spotlight and at the very least offered a helping hand to those queueing up to drink the Koolaid.

It’s perhaps an unfortunate trait of British society but anyone who seems too perfect or too ready to embrace hero-worship is making themselves a target for several chambers of zealous devil’s advocates. The fervent (continuing) inquisition into Arday’s sometime ally Zack Polanski when he became a public figure – and the way his opponents have been able to gradually necrotise his credibility- is evidence of the precarity of getting too comfortable on the moral high ground.

Arday also leapt headfirst into the culture wars. Of course it’s valid for a black, neurodiverse man to comment on the very real inequalities people at that intersection face. But Arday was, if not actively then at least willingly allowing his growing celebrity to be propelled by his involvement culture war polemics. The rapacious glee of his political enemies at his fall from grace is of the kind historically reserved for the defeat of a hated tribal enemy; this is no coincidence.

It comes down to this; if you’re going to be famous, and if your fame is in any way Political, then you have to be squeaky clean: because fame comes with enemies hellbent on sniffing out any fragment of dirt that could contaminate a reputation. That said…the memoir will still probably shift a few copies.

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The Slime Beneath the Surface

This week City AM reported that a UK court awarded Uzbek businessman Ovik Mkrtchyan £105,000 in damages against 2Trom Media’s London Post, the largest publicly reported payout in a pink slime case.

‘Pink Slime’ has become a monicker for a new type of journalism appearing in the US, where local news websites, many already out of business, were bought or replicated and used for disinformation or propaganda, sometimes domestic but more often international and usually right-leaning.

City AM’s original investigation revealed evidence to suggest the 2Trom existed to use digital media outlets as a smokescreen for a reputation attack which tookt he form of a series of articles designed to poison SEO, tarnish AI summaries, and manipulate banking compliance algorithms.

Mr Justice Fordham found that the ‘London Post’ article (still available online) had seriously damaged Mr. Mkrtchyn’s reputation and business.

The Reuters Institute warned at the start of 2026 that pink slime sites would explode, with platforms unable to distinguish fake outlets from legitimate news. NewsGuard has identified over 1,265 globally, already outnumbering daily newspapers in the US. 2Trom shows that the UK is equally vulnerable.

Unlike previous misinformation campaigns seen around election time, these campaigns require no state sponsor. Private actors can now run sophisticated enough campaigns to noticeably harm SEO, and with the speed of information replication online, correcting wrongfully manipulated AI summaries is becoming increasingly challenging. Traditional media credibility has been decaying for years, pink slime is now oozing through the cracks.

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Sam Fender and Olivia Dean: The Biggest Song Apparently Nobody’s Heard

A week after Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s Rein Me In made British music history by becoming the longest-running No.1 single ever, Olivia Dean found herself explaining the achievement to an audience thousands of miles away.

While headlining Lollapalooza in Chicago, Dean brought Fender on stage for a surprise performance of the record-breaking duet. Before they played the song, she explained that it had spent 19 weeks at the top of the UK charts, prompting a surprising reaction from parts of the crowd: how could the biggest song in Britain be one they had never heard?

That might be dismissed as a simple case of two different markets. Except, as the Guardian reported this week, the confusion isn’t confined to the US. A striking number of people in Britain also say they’ve never knowingly heard the biggest song in their own country.

@guardianAre we witnessing the demise of monoculture? This week, the single ‘Rein Me In’ by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean broke the record for longest-running number one in UK chart history – but some people on the internet are saying they’ve never heard it. Arts and culture correspondent Nadia Khomami explains why, in 2026, a single can smash a 73-year-old record while also passing swathes of the public by. What about you; has the hit been dominating your streams this summer? Let us know in the comments below.

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For previous generations, a No.1 single was almost impossible to avoid. A chart-topper meant radio play, television appearances, magazine covers and a place in the national conversation. Today, streaming platforms and algorithms have replaced that shared experience with a more fragmented landscape, where a song can become a record-breaking success without ever becoming a universal one.

That does not mean Rein Me In has failed to connect, in fact it’s quite the opposite. Its rise has been a masterclass in modern music discovery, built through live performances, TikTok, streaming and a fanbase that has turned a personal song about heartbreak into something much bigger.

The difference is that modern hits are no longer measured by whether everyone knows them. They are measured by whether the algorithm has decided they should be hearing or if the right people care enough to keep them alive.

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The Gianni Infantino supervillain arc has taken another turn for the ridiculous. His notoriety was cemented at the last World Cup in Qatar, where viral speeches still pop up (the “today I feel gay” address being the enduring meme). And while highly concerning at the time, it isn’t a scratch on what’s been brewing over the past few weeks.

Infantino wants FIFA to spin the World Cup and its other events into a new commercial subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise, value it at around $20 billion, and sell up to a 20% stake to private investors. The fund lined up to lead the charge is Thrive Eternal, founded by Joshua Kushner, younger brother of Trump son-in-law Jared. FIFA has dangled $20 million-plus sweeteners in front of each of its 211 member associations to wave it through, and set them a deadline of 19 September to decide.

It is of course nothing short of pure hubris and so brazen that he’s barely trying to disguise his role and motivations. This is the same guy who appeared roughly nine minutes into many a World Cup match just gone, then again in the second half, leading up to his grand moment in the final, cosying up to Trump, having a right old jolly. A bizarre tone to strike on the world stage when you’re planning on major and controversial reforms to the World Cup.

It doesn’t take an expert to tell the private-equity-ification in play with the express aim of squeezing more money from it will not go down well. Infantino is breaking every rule, which begs the question: is the aim even to pass this thing, or is there something longer-term at play? Or has Trump blown so much smoke up his ar*e that he can no longer see the wood for the trees?

It must’ve been sobering when FIFA’s own people made a public point against these plans. Carlos Cordeiro, a senior adviser to Infantino, resigned in disgust this week, calling it “a bad deal for football” and pointing out that FIFA, sitting on $15 billion of revenue from the last cycle, doesn’t remotely need the cash.

And the plans, in all likelihood, will not go through. The bodies whose votes Infantino requires have lined up to shred it. UEFA and its 55 members have not only rejected the proposal but threatened to boycott FIFA competitions outright. Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation have come out against it too.

It feels like the European Super League all over again. The money men ruling football are eagerly trying to push the sport to a more American model - far more commercialisation at every turn. The only shred of hope with all this is their comms have been so bad they haven’t stood a chance. But clearly the impetus is alive and well, and that is a very real worry.

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DIY Music and the rise of ‘UK Poo’

A viral X post this week put a name to a phenomenon which has been increasingly prominent since the dawn of TikTok: UK Poo.

Although mostly rap, UK Poo is less a music genre and more a catch-all term for synthetic sounding bedroom productions whose questionable quality walks the line between sincere and tongue-in-cheek - spawning countless memes.

The response to the original post revealed that there are hundreds if not thousands of examples of this emerging trend running the full gauntlet between a bit of self-aware fun and genuine (usually delulu) attempts to launch a music career.

Since Justin Bieber became a global superstar via YouTube, a fairytale has emerged of DIY artists self-publishing demos and achieving mainstream fame. Rebecca Black became a high-profile early example of the pitfalls of trying to manufacture a career via social media (although she’s done pretty well in the end!) but broadly, this is a fairytale which has come true enough across the past 15 years to persist – it’s even been galvanised by TikTok, the star chamber for artists such as Lil Nas X.

The problem is these outliers have given subsequent generations the hope that they too can become superstars; much in the same way that early Twitter made everyone a journalist, and Instagram made everyone a model, TikTok seems to be driving a belief that everyone can make music. UK Poo is a cultural moment and undeniably entertaining, but it’s also a reminder that, whilst the technological marvels of our age allow us to almost anything, they don’t necessarily allow us to do it well.

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Has spar with The Economist left Elon punchdrunk?

Elon Musk spent 85 minutes with The Economist’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes this week discussing nothing less than the future of civilisation.

It is, at times, a genuinely interesting conversation. Musk predicts AI will surpass the combined intelligence of humanity within five years and usher in an age of such extraordinary abundance that money may become largely meaningless. He repeats his long-held warning that AI poses an existential threat and even suggests he may need to bury the hatchet with OpenAI’s Sam Altman for the good of the world.

Then the conversation turns to politics.

Asked about his time leading DOGE, he becomes combative and insists “zero people died” from the cuts he made to aid programmes. From there, the conversation moved to Europe, where he repeated his belief that Britain is heading towards civil war, claimed the media has misrepresented the far right and suggested there will be a “reckoning”. After the interview aired, Musk slipped out of his role as a visionary into something more familiar – an angry middle-aged man on the internet. He turned to name-calling Beddoes on X as an “unthinking NPC” and a “traitor to the West”.

That extraordinary gap between the first hour of the interview and what came after has become the defining feature of Musk’s public persona. It’s difficult to reconcile the man imagining humanity’s future among the stars with the one spending his afternoons immersed in culture wars on X.

Musk wants the mantle of civilisation’s great futurist, but he also seems unwilling to retire from his side career as the internet’s most powerful reply guy. As Beddoes herself observed, the interview revealed the strange “caricature” at the heart of Musk’s public persona - a man dreaming of the next frontier stuck in the comment sections of the current one.

Can Mango survive questions over founder’s death?

In May, Jonathan Andic was arrested on suspicion of homicide in connection with the death of his father, Isak Andic, founder of fashion retailer Mango, who fell to his death while hiking near Barcelona.

Jonathan gave conflicting accounts of where he was when his father fell. Further evidence has since emerged that, leading up to his death, there was a dispute between the children and their father over inheritance. The ongoing investigation continues to uncover family secrets and leaves the public speculating about the son’s guilt and raises questions about others close to the family, including a therapist who was counselling the family ahead of the incident.

Before we turn on our TVs and watch a Netflix documentary on this case, there is some seriously harmful publicity that should be taken into consideration for the Mango brand. As more stories appear on the news about the case and more social media videos start emerging on speculation and gossip – Mango must work to control the narrative.

Jonathan has stepped down as vice-chairman of the clothing store, distancing the retailer from the scandal. Mango will need to steer away from any association with the ongoing investigation and must now put its products and brands front and centre of its campaigns, highlighting positive stories, new collaborations and every success they can lay their hands on - in tragic and macabre circumstances like this, being a faceless product line may just save the brand.

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Burnham has certainly started his premiership on the front foot, and it all comes down to visibility.

Take the reshuffle: Starmer loyalists culled, several of the people who helped push him out handed senior briefs. John Healey to the Treasury, Ed Miliband to the Foreign Office, Angela Rayner back to Housing, Shabana Mahmood staying put at the Home Office - a cabinet with a distinctly northern spine, which is coincidentally the exact terrain Burnham’s personal brand occupies. More telling was the media discipline with Healey’s name never once surfacing in the press beforehand, which for a party whose last government became acquainted with leaks is a big achievement.

Healey at the Treasury provides an instant hawkish signal on defence, addressing one of the key issues that helped finish Starmer, while quietly transferring the risk (the 3% commitment to defence spending), because finding the money is chiefly his problem.

The policies arrived in the same register with VAT off electricity bills, a £2 bus fare cap, 20% off business rates for pubs and venues. Modest in household terms but instantly legible and unmistakably his. Downing Street is also committing to a “social first” and “authentic to Andy” approach, with less polish, more handheld phone, collaborations with online creators etc.

There’s a neat throughline to all this, and while the funding questions haven’t gone anywhere, the story is movement, and movement is being seen, which was rather the point.

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Unprecedented and unpunished

Wasn’t there a time when hacks, data breaches or things going wrong at tech companies called for a reckoning? Axed CEOs, tumbling stock prices etc etc. Because the latest OpenAI drama had all the ingredients with none of the fallout.

It started when OpenAI disclosed that a combination of new and very powerful models escaped a sandboxed testing environment, reached the internet, and exploited a vulnerability to access the systems of AI startup Hugging Face. Still totally autonomous, the hackees’ first attempts to fight back with rival AI models went nowhere because the safety systems built into them couldn’t distinguish between an attack and a defence, so they refused to help. The company eventually contained the breach using a Chinese-built model it could run on its own servers.

All normal AI stuff, especially when Hugging Face’s CEO called it “mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously” and publicly thanked OpenAI, having concluded there was no malicious human intent.

The bizarre cocktail of hubris, self-congratulation and mutual back-slapping is telling. An autonomous system broke containment and attacked a third party, and the injured party issued thanks.

Crisis comms has always run on accountability, so when you remove the human from the equation, the entire machinery and rulebook begins to blur into obscurity. Note OpenAI’s own framing, describing the episode as “unprecedented” - a word that manages to sound like a warning and a boast at the same time. Plenty of people in this space are clearly marvelling, leaving concerns in the rear view mirror.

Which leaves the uncomfortable question of what a genuine AI crisis would even look like. If a model that breaks its own containment and successfully attacks another company fascinates its peers more than it alarms them, that doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.

United in crap

That the four-week experiment in Americanisation that was World Cup 2026 would end, not with a bang but with Justin Bieber playing the guitar, was somehow a foregone conclusion from the moment the host countries were picked.

Somewhere in the bowels of Fifa HQ, someone decided that America - a country that, rather famously, finds a 90-minute game with a single-digit scoreline boring at best and difficult to follow at worst - would not be able to pay attention without some bright colours and the Muppets in the middle. And so it was, and Chris Martin was telephoned, and the Muppets came out with the best of it.

Alongside them were Madonna (and alongside her, for some reason, Brazil’s Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, driving a buggy), Bieber in aforementioned guitar-bothering mode, Korean boyband BTS, the obligatory children’s choir, and, thankfully, Shakira, who by this point has, and this is genuinely true, appeared in more World Cup finals than Cristiano Ronaldo.

It was, as Wayne Rooney aptly put it, “crap.”

Fifa, and Infantino in particular, have long taken that most timeless of platitudes, that “football unites the world”, as a blank cheque to cuddle up to autocracy - the world, and the worst of it, united not by football itself but by its supervisory body. The results are well documented, from Qatar 2022 onwards. By sneaking a pop concert into the halftime of the most watched sporting event in the world, there was a clear message: the most culturally important figure in the world, the one capable of masterminding something so expensive and also, crucially, grotesquely banal, is Gianni Infantino.

But if “football unites the world” has ever meant anything (and its meaninglessness, one might say, is rather the point), it’s that everybody who watched Sunday’s display of Debordian spectacle and nonsense heard Wayne Rooney and agreed. It was, indeed, crap. Infantino created more unity than he might have ever imagined.

Young, wild, feral and free

Seattle is known for many things - the Space Needle, Starbucks, Grey’s Anatomy. A raccoon with a rare congenital disease.

Kiana, a resident of Ballard, Seattle, spotted a freakish-looking raccoon waddling across the street. He is compact and rotund. Tailless. Alarmed, she asks: “What am I looking at?” Quite right, Kiana. What is anyone looking at?

It’s Jimothy, and he occupies a space between the feral and the bizarre, the whimsical and the wild. Born with Short Spine Syndrome, Jimothy’s unusual appearance has propelled him to internet stardom. Like Ariana Grande’s ponytail or Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, his short spine has become his unmistakable signature, giving him that it-factor.

Jimothy has been added to the internet’s funny-looking animal hall of fame alongside Grumpy Cat, Tuna the chihuahua, and more recent entrants Moo Deng the baby hippo and Punch, the abandoned monkey.

Not much is known about Jimothy’s life before fame - he has, thus far, declined to comment. But Ballard resident Ben recently shared what appears to be footage of a baby Jimothy, claiming he was born in a neighbour’s cedar tree and was “so small and clumsy, but his mother and siblings were always so patient and caring.” It seems a stable upbringing has served him well under the pressures of celebrity.

He’s quickly become gold dust for brands eager to attach themselves. Etsy is awash with Jimothy merchandise, there’s an entire website dedicated to I Love Jimothy t-shirts, and Google now triggers a custom animation when you search his name (give it a go). He’ll also soon appear in World of Warcraft, and Ballard is honouring him with an official City Proclamation this Sunday.

The internet has always had a habit of adopting small, oddly shaped animals in what might charitably be described as collective mania. In feeds increasingly clogged with AI slop, rage bait and engineered content, Jimothy asks remarkably little of anyone. He’s just a slightly unusual raccoon who wandered into the internet’s line of sight, offering a moment of authentically AI-free, unmanufactured joy.

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Andy Burnham danced off stage to New Order’s True Faith and the lyrics’ relevance is not lost.

‘I get this feeling I’m in motion/ A sudden sense of liberty…//I used to think that the day would never come’

Where Keir Starmer has been criticised for letting a focus on process and letting actions speak for themselves, Burnham has become known for his focus on vibes, with a recent TikTok of liked and dislikes replacing any detailed policy or political statements.

@andy.burnhamSlightly worried that last answer might be a bit too controversial… 👀😂

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The Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow called it “a vibes masterclass,” explicitly noting that it was better than anything Starmer had delivered, while the BBC’s Henry Zeffman observed it was the speech of a man who does not believe he will be just the latest in a long line of prime ministers.

The substance was bolder than expected. Burnham explicitly blamed Margaret Thatcher for stripping power from working communities, opened the door to renationalisation and pledged the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period. Reform’s Robert Jenrick called it “twenty minutes of vacuous twaddle.” The lack of granular detail was the substance of the taunt, however it was this very omission that gave the speech its success.

Whilst there is a need for detailed policies and plans, what Labour has been so resolutely lacking has been charisma and a leader whose message is able to resonate with the public, not just inside the Westminster bubble. Burnham is showing us he understands where Starmer went wrong, winning the hearts and minds before he begins the difficult job of governing.

Establishing a narrative of hope and ensuring his voice is heard will go far to securing public trust. Policy change without public trust is insufficient, as we saw with Starmer’s desperate efforts to articulate his own impact as he left Number 10, it is not enough to let the work speak for itself. You must be the one to speak, and Burnham clearly knows how to make sure he is heard.

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After the whistle, the blame game kicks off…

Until England crashed out of the World Cup semi-finals, there was something romantic about the journey. Ever since Thomas Tuchel took charge - the first foreign manager since Fabio Capello, and a German no less - critics have been quick to circle. But as England grew into the tournament, momentum built. Early complaints about Tuchel’s selections, including the omission of Trent Alexander-Arnold and Cole Palmer, gave way to vindication as the surprising picks had their moment: Dan Burn’s heroic defending in the Mexico win, flashes from Djed Spence in the knockouts, and Jordan Henderson’s bone-breaking cameo. Tuchel’s vision was finally taking shape.

And for 85 minutes against Argentina, England were almost there. But we know the rest, and everything Tuchel had built turned on its head with the crash out landing squarely on him.

Unorthodox as some of his selections were, most had a discernible logic, even if the emphasis on defending a lead proved costly. But bitter defeats don’t invite fairness, especially when the nation is collectively gunning for blood. Tuchel has blamed England’s DNA; England, in turn, has blamed Tuchel’s decisions. In painful times, a scapegoat is required, and Tuchel is the obvious target.

What is refreshing is that the players have been largely spared. It may be too ambitious to credit this to Tuchel, but a manager drawing the flak away from his players is, intentionally or not, doing part of his job.

Because the appetite to hold someone to account never dims, even when the players simply looked knackered, pushed to the edge by gruelling Premier League seasons and a high-stakes, high-variance match that could have gone either way. It says a great deal about the British media that the instinct is to hunt for a culprit rather than accept that it wasn’t meant to be. When you consider Germany, the Netherlands and Brazil all exited before England, and France fell at the same hurdle, was it all so bad? It’s another four years until the next opportunity. England sadly just has to be a bit patient.

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Surveillance is back, baby!

When Google unveiled ‘Google Glass’ back in 2013, its success was short-lived because everyone knew exactly what it was - a camera on someone’s face. Worse, we knew the kind of person who would choose to wear it. The “glasshole” became the insult for a gadget that arrived slightly before society was ready for it.

Meta appears to have learned that lesson, just not the one you’d hope. The lesson wasn’t “let’s not build invasive, dystopian technology” but “let’s just make it look like Ray Bans.” And if people still aren’t convinced, sprinkle in a bit of Kylie Jenner.

This month, Meta launched a new Starfire edition of its AI-powered smart glasses, co-designed with Jenner and virtually indistinguishable from those bog standard sunnies that block out the rays. And this week, activists installed a spoof advert at a London bus stop near Meta’s offices, turning her glossy campaign into an anti-surveillance poster inspired by the cult film They Live (spoiler: we’re all being controlled by aliens).

Because however impressed people are by what AI can do, it doesn’t necessarily mean they want it embedded into every part of their lives. Or stuck on their face. Technologies don’t only become mainstream because they’re impressive, but because they’re culturally desirable. The iPod became a fashion accessory and fitness trackers moved from nerdy hardware to a symbol of wellness. Meta is attempting to follow that well-trodden path, mainly so that people forget they’re wearing perverted goggles that violate all norms of privacy and consent.

That is where celebrity comes in, and Meta isn’t alone. Google has also leaned on famous faces like Harry Kane, Andy Murray and Keke Palmer to make Gemini feel less experimental and more like your everyday companion.

Celebrity endorsements have always been about making products desirable. This time, they’re going one step further to try to convince us that surveillance is chic. Whether people buy into that remains to be seen.

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When Nigel Farage took the surprising decision to step down as MP for Clacton, he sought a “people versus the establishment” campaign. Instead, he got Count Binface, who is now causing him a serious headache.

For those unfamiliar with Britain’s political quirks, satirical characters like Binface are part of a proud tradition of joke candidates taking a stand against prominent politicians and stuffy politics. It’s a bit of a laugh, and never has one had any genuine significance beyond the odd funny picture or viral interview. But this week, he became Farage’s principal opponent.

Rewind 72 hours, and the picture was very different. Farage led national polls, so his decision to resign was a confusing gambit, especially when he announced he’d be running in the very same seat. However, Farage is at his most potent on a campaign trail. He’s also facing a major investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner over an undeclared £5m donation from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne (which could lead to criminal proceedings), an investigation his resignation conveniently suspends.

It was a risky move, and all a bit too transparent, prompting critics, including Keir Starmer, to immediately dismiss it as a “desperate stunt”.

While Farage and his team likely accounted for a backlash, what they didn’t account for was all the major parties declining to participate. Labour, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the Greens and even Restore refused to field candidates, denying Farage his establishment showdown and handing the spotlight to Binface.

And to no one’s surprise, Binface has run with it - sharp, funny commentary on the national stage, prime TV interviews, batting away the circus with the kind of comic deflation Farage usually deploys on others.

While Farage will almost certainly win, the stunt has demonstrably backfired. The donation questions haven’t gone anywhere, the establishment fight never materialised, and Britain’s most effective political showman has been out-performed by a man with a bin on his head.

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There’s a reason it’s not called @garyscommunications

Gary Stevenson has evolved from niche content creator to fixture in UK public political discourse by filling a void longing to be occupied by a left-leaning voice who really understands the big economic forces governing our society.

Gary’s rise to old-school, mainstream fame has coincided with the crystallisation of his economic vision into a campaign to introduce a 2% tax on wealth over £10m, which was the subject of this week’s Channel 4 documentary, ‘How to get filthy rich’.

In terms of building a personal brand and a platform for his views, there’s no denying Stevenson’s flair for self-promotion – driven by an unusual biography (elements of which are contested). And it’s often hard to determine the subjective merits of a political campaign that sits on one side or another of the tribal fissures bifurcating the flow of information in our society.

But even taking into account the self-evident success of getting to this point and the impossibility of getting anywhere close to pleasing everyone, the documentary appears at this stage to have failed in its bid to build momentum, or even serious conversation around the issue.

The right-leaning media has naturally been vociferous in its criticism of Stevenson’s ideas: merging ad hominem attacks with the tried-and-tested arguments against the tax (rich people will leave the country, people who are asset-rich but cash-poor will be desolate etc).

This is predictable and could even be a badge of honour for a left-wing populist, but what’s really damaging is the apathy, even antagonism from the left (and centre).

Neither the Guardian nor FT review – the Graun’s a viral two-star - focussed in detail on the wealth tax itself, but both commented at length on what they saw as (to paraphrase) Stevenson’s off-putting screen presence. Dan Niedle, a contributor to the doc, expanded on previous criticism of Stevenson with some behind-the-scenes detail that may have added to this impression.

Nor have any significant political figures really thrown their weight behind the idea; pre-Burnham Labour have kept shtum, and even Zack Polanski – a vocal supporter of both Stevenson’s credibility and the tax - has been more focused on Gaza in the past 48 hours.

Perhaps the most damning response to the documentary is that no significant political figures from the right have felt the need to criticise it. If it were a realistic enough prospect or had inspired enough popular support, then its enemies would feel the need to fight it.

Their silence speaks a thousand words about the difficulty of building an idea (and the person who delivers it) from a tantalising glance on social media to something that can survive the full glare of the public.

Get Out of Red Free

Football has never expected its governing bodies to be popular – shouting “REF!” at the TV screen is a worldwide pastime – but it does expect them to be consistent.

Last Wednesday, USA’s Folarin Balogun stepped on the right ankle of Bosnian centre-back Tarik Muharemović. Balogun was shown a red card and handed a one-match suspension.

Normal.

On July 5, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee announced that Balogun’s one-match suspension would itself be suspended under Article 27, making him eligible to play in the USA’s next match against Belgium. It was the first time this had happened since the automatic one-match suspension for red cards was introduced in 1970.

Not normal.

Unsurprisingly, the football world reacted with disbelief, trying to understand the bizarre deployment of Article 27 that FIFA was being so cryptic about.

The mystery soon became far less mysterious when Trump spoke from the Oval Office and filled in the blanks. On 2 July, Trump had made a phone call to FIFA president Gianni Infantino. In the President’s words: “All I did was ask for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul. I didn’t tell him what to do. I can’t tell him what to do.” These remarks came in the same statement that saw Trump claim he was “good with this kind of stuff” when deciphering football fouls, despite joking just days earlier that he didn’t know what a red card was.

Meanwhile, England defender Jarell Quansah is serving a two-match suspension after also being shown a red card, with the Football Association accepting there was effectively no avenue for appeal.

The optics of two footballers committing comparable offences, both shown red cards, yet receiving completely different outcomes, have rarely illustrated so starkly the perception that influence can outweigh consistency.

The football world quickly rallied behind Belgium, who duly defeated the USA 4-1. UEFA described FIFA’s decision as “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable”.

And yet, for such an extraordinarily visible act of perceived interference, there remains a question mark over whether this will meaningfully damage Trump’s reputation. The consequences of his actions forever seem to receive the same suspension Balogun’s red card did.

How long that perceived influence can continue without meaningful consequence remains an open question. But if this World Cup has proved anything, it’s that Trump will always have his Phone-a-Friend lifeline.

Haaland Crazy

Ahead of Saturday’s England vs Norway quarterfinal, and the aforementioned politics around it all, a well-known figure in English football is taking America by storm. Win or lose, Norwegian superstar Erling Haaland has almost single-handedly carried Norway to an unprecedented World Cup quarterfinal and shown that genuine authenticity, even when it sides on the goofy, is a huge winner stateside, converting an entirely new set of fans in the process.

At a striking 6’5”, with long blond hair and a laid-back, unserious manner, Haaland is a difficult man to dislike - even disgruntled Arsenal fans are having to concede the guy’s alright. With seven goals in only four games, his ability on the pitch is translating into a wave of viral Haaland fever off it. There’s the meme content - dressing up as Santa, posting selfies with “his twin” (a photo of Shrek), and his very public love of Ibiza DJ Solomun’s historic Boiler Room set. He’s even won over the fashion world, sporting a lavish collection of Hermès Birkin bags.

Whether this is a well-structured PR strategy or simply Haaland being Haaland while the world’s media takes notice is hard to gauge. Either way, host-nation fans have fallen for it - the team’s now-famous “Viking Row” celebration, with Haaland at the helm of an imaginary longboat, has become one of the tournament’s defining images, and all eyes inevitably turn to the man rowing at the front.

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This week news outlets and social feeds around the world were treated to a good old-fashioned stunt. It was both a classic of the genre and a rare stunt executed for its own sake (or at least for nothing more sophisticated than to get attention for its perpetrators).

A pair of Russian “rooftoppers” - a couple who have been pursuing thrills (and, let’s be honest, fame) by scaling the world’s highest and most precarious buildings and cliff edges - tackled the Empire State Building.

They broke in, they climbed to the top of the weather tower, they unfurled a banner bearing a platitudinous legend, and then the man proposed to the lady.

The helicopter footage (and commentary) ran on every news channel, every moment – both captured by the Russian couple’s socials and from the outside - went viral, and the pair have caught the world’s attention far more than they did when they were the subject of a 2024 Netflix-distributed documentary.

So why does this stuff captivate even when there’s a World Cup on, and here in the UK, a new government is being anticipated after the latest soft coup, Taylor Swift is getting married, and tectonic geopolitical events occur daily?

There’s something so instinctive about the desire to report, share, like and click a story of this kind that it feels a bit unnatural to break it down, but here goes nothing.

The first thing is the image: although print and television news no longer have the cachet they once did, a striking visual is still guaranteed news; particularly if it’s an instantly recognisable backdrop, with a slight alteration.

The Empire State Building itself is key to this: although now dwarfed by various Middle Eastern megastructures, it has a kind of old-world glamour to it that was perfectly in-keeping with the nature of the stunt. We also don’t hear about it much outside the USA anymore – even as the yardstick for something ‘really big’ the Burj Khalifa has stolen its thunder so it’s just nice to be reminded that it’s still there.

The other obvious factor is the daredevilry. Even stage-managed to within an inch of its life, if the optics suggest the protagonists could die at any moment with one slip, then we’re fascinated.

Various other little touches made this a great story; to quote a great philosopher, ‘the secret ingredient is crime’. Even the minor and basically victimless ‘cosy crime’ of breaking into the building has led to some gentle speculation about how the stunsters pulled it off, as well as the supplementary image and (infinitesimally) minor drama of their arrest.

Then there’s the proposal and constant PDAs. They’re a fairly telegenic couple and although it stretches credibility to believe they were somehow doing it for love rather than attention, there’s an undeniable romance about a big showy proposal.

Finally there’s the content; they’re both clearly professional creators as well as climbers and so the story was being told in HD from the inside as well as the outside - scratching the itch of any curiosity the public might’ve had for a view beyond that of the helicopters.

So there you have it; the anatomy of a classic stunt. Long may they live, and long may the rooftoopers rooftop.

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I do (Taylor’s Version)

Last October, Graham Norton asked Taylor Swift whether 2026 would be her wedding year. “Oh… you’ll know,” she said.

Before anyone has walked down the aisle, Taylor Swift’s wedding already has live news blogs, watermarked digital invites, ironclad NDAs, journalists tracking truck movements and security experts debating whether the venue is actually an elaborate decoy. Guests reportedly didn’t even know where they were going until the last minute. Even New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has found himself fielding questions about it, joking that anyone “getting married at Madison Square Garden” during a heatwave would be wise to stay indoors and hydrate.

There is something faintly absurd, yet entirely on brand, about guests being treated like state witnesses and the entire affair unfolding under military-grade secrecy while Swifties stand outside MSG conducting their forensic analysis of lighting rigs. It’s exactly how Taylor Swift has taught her fans to consume her life.

For two decades, she’s turned pop stardom into an interactive fan experience. Album announcements arrive disguised as puzzles. Outfits, Instagram captions, minor details in a music video that come to bear relevance months later. So, when she appeared courtside at Madison Square Garden in a “Stevie Knicks” shirt, Swifties duly filed this into their evidence folder. Weeks later, Stevie Nicks is reportedly performing at her wedding in, you guessed it, Madison Square Garden. By turning her wedding into a kind of album rollout, she’s transformed a deeply private milestone into a global spectacle.

Nobody entirely agrees on what is exactly going to happen at the wedding, or when. But mystery is all part of the Swiftie fan experience. Whatever anyone manages to see through the barricades, Taylor will find a way to make it feel like it happened to all of us.

Oh, and by the way, Travis Kelce will reportedly be at the wedding too. No word yet on whether that’s another clue.

‘Something is up’: New York prepares for wedding of the century amid Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce …

Is Smoking Cool Again?

We know the brightly coloured, fruit-flavoured vapes are a regular fixture for the news cycle, often blamed for underage nicotine use and targeted by a government crackdown on the illegal shops supplying them. Yet as scrutiny of vapes intensifies, cigarettes themselves appear to be enjoying an unlikely cultural resurgence.

Magazine covers featuring stars mid-drag are back in fashion, and recent front-row appearances by Charli XCX and Madonna at Paris Fashion Week, both photographed smoking with visible ease, have only reinforced the sense that the ciggie is having a moment.

Charli’s “Brat” persona is a great example of this, one built on mess, chaos, and hedonism, and the cigarette played an important part, working as a deliberate rejection of the curated, wellness-obsessed perfectionism defining Instagram-era influencer culture. Kylie Jenner’s cigarette-lit Vanity Fair cover pushes the same idea further, showing a notable indifference to the habit’s long-term cost.

That indifference may not be coincidental. With Botox, fillers, and facelifts now routine among the wealthy, the most visible penalty of smoking - premature ageing - has effectively been outsourced to treatments many of these same figures can comfortably afford.

Whether cigarettes are genuinely cool again or simply photogenic will continue to be debated among culture writers. What isn’t contested is the knock-on effect: teenagers absorbing these images alongside heavily marketed vapes are getting a two-pronged nicotine message, however unintentional the pairing.

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On Monday morning, Britain performed a now-familiar ritual: the lectern was wheeled outside Number 10 to say goodbye to yet another Prime Minister. At this rate, the man doing the wheeling has enjoyed more job stability than the people he’s wheeling it out for. He’s even acquired a fan following who call him “hot podium guy,” which says everything about how accustomed this country has become to prime ministerial departures.

But when Keir Starmer stepped behind the lectern, he wasn’t simply announcing his resignation. He was making one last attempt to answer the question that follows every outgoing leader: what will I be remembered for? As he began, Ode to Joy blared across Whitehall, the same piece Starmer once said best captured the spirit of the Labour Party, turning what had once symbolised optimism into an exit soundtrack.

The rest of his speech was less a farewell and more a closing argument for the defence. Starmer reminded us that he inherited a Labour Party that was, in his words, “politically, financially and morally bankrupt”. He had rooted out antisemitism, restored economic credibility and delivered the party’s first landslide in a generation. On his achievements, he presented these like physical evidence to the jury. See exhibit A: NHS waiting lists, workers’ rights, defence spending, child poverty.

It was, in effect, an attempt to write the first draft of his own political obituary. Starmer wanted the history books to remember the man who rescued Labour rather than the prime minister who struggled to inspire it. He quietly argued that his greatest achievement wasn’t governing Britain but making a Labour government possible at all. A tacit acknowledgement that two years marked by poor approval ratings, caution and an inability to cut through were harder to sell than the journey that got him there.

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Who’s Afraid of Paula Abdul?

Back in the early 1990s, as the previous decade’s flourishing of female pop stars began to mature, there grew a distinct divide within their ranks. There was Madonna, obviously, who is her own beast. There was Janet, Whitney, Kylie, and even Cyndi Lauper. And, then, there was Paula Abdul.

Paula Abdul had six back to back US number ones. Paula Abdul won Grammy awards. Paula Abdul was the people’s darling. And then, between 1991 and 1995, Paula Abdul took a brief hiatus, and, shortly afterwards, ceased to be famous.

It is with this cautionary tale that we turn to the predicament of Lizzo, who you may remember from her jaunty self-love anthems of the late 10s, including Truth Hurts and Good As Hell. At the time of writing, her latest album, the miserably titled ‘BITCH’, has failed to chart on the Billboard 200, and, in it’s second week, sold just 650 copies.

She has, on X, decried a lack of support from her label, and laid the blame squarely with the decline of radio as a format, stating that, in the age of streaming and social media, it was impossible for her to get a hit. While it is undeniable that US radio is not what it was even three years ago, this rather avoids the fact that, while admittedly a radio darling, her initial rise from obscurity was the direct result of her songs being featured in films and as the background audio on various TikTok trends.

In a Rolling Stone post-mortem this week, industry executives opined that, rather than complaining, she should be instead talking to her sizeable fanbase about her music. But this ignores the rather large elephant in the room - that Lizzo, whose songs were hinged on her body-positive, supermarket-advert friendly image, was slapped with a lawsuit in 2023 that accused her of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment for her dancers. Lizzo’s appeal was her fundamental, accept all comers, friendliness. She was the poster child of Resistance-era social media, the face of Woke 1.0 during the first Trump administration. In a world where the worst thing anyone can be is cringe, Lizzo’s rather indelible association with the now passé notion of what we might call ‘Fight Song feminism’ is her cross to bear. That it comes in concert with the fact that she (allegedly) failed to practice what she preached is another black mark — to be unwoke is one thing, but to be unwoke AND embarrassing is a terminal offence.

The phrase ‘Khia Asylum’ is often used in pop parlance to describe singers who, for one reason or another, have failed to break into the mainstream. Escaping from the Khia Asylum is possible - Sabrina Carpenter and Zara Larsson are prime examples of recent parolees who have both, through a combination of canny marketing, social media nous, and sheer luck, climbed to the top of the public consciousness after years of waiting.

But unlike Carpenter and Larsson, Lizzo, to some extent, always had the deck stacked against her: she does not look like a popstar, and her songs were the kind of soupy doo-wop R&B that previously catapulted the likes of Meghan Trainor to one-hit wonderdom. Her success, like Trainor’s, may have been something of a fluke in the first place, a classic, if not particularly kind, example of the right person being in the right place at the right time. But it was also much longer lasting, and much more penetrative — she was, like Abdul, genuinely everywhere, in a way that makes calling her a one hit wonder unfair. If she can get out of her own way, there may be a path back to music stardom. But there also may not be, and scrabbling against the inevitable so publicly only underlines what is arguably the chief criticism laid at her door: that all this is, really, a little bit unbecoming.

So for all that the industry has changed since the early 90s, it’s worth remembering a mantra chez nous: for every Madonna, there always has to be a Paula Abdul.

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The King’s receipts

King Charles III has become the first reigning British monarch to disclose his personal tax bill. He paid £12.9 million in 2024/25, placing him among Britain’s top 100 taxpayers. William followed suit, declaring £7.76 million and directing £1.5 million in prison rent to the local community.

Why now? The royal household has faced mounting pressure following the scandal surrounding Prince Andrew, currently under police investigation over his relationship and participation with Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses. The King framed the decision as encouraging “wider understanding and accountability”, and while this is not completely wrong, the decision to only reveal this information in the wake of a scandal that refuses to go away, screams damage limitation more than it does public good. It might be worth remembering that allegations around Randy Andy have pervaded for decades, and the Royal strategy had, until recently, been largely based on turning a blind eye.

Responses have been mixed. Whilst some news pieces have applauded the seismic nature of the declaration, many have been quick to point out the obvious effort to contain fallout from damaging revelations about the finances of the former Prince Andrew, along with criticism as to all the information conveniently omitted. Most poignantly, the report fails to mention the income on which the taxation was based, making it unclear whether Charles’s payments were substantial, or merely tokenistic pocket change.

The King’s efforts to control the narrative by offering us openness is admirable insofar as twenty years ago it might have reset the story. Now that social media lets everyone be an investigative journalist and any inkling of doubt can spread instantly, Charles’s half-openness may have just prompted many more questions. Image rehabilitation is no longer quite so simple.

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Witch Doctor scores with Kane curse

Even the most hifalutin sections of the media are surprisingly open-minded to reports of the supernatural.

This leniency is particularly evident whenever the FIFA World Cup comes round - when such titans as Paul the Octopus are called upon to gaze through the mists of time on behalf of us mere mortals.

It’s against this liberal backdrop that Ghanian Witch Doctor, Nana Kwaku Bonsam put a curse on England captain Harry Kane ahead of the countries’ group stage clash this week.

A smattering of tongue in cheek media coverage of his announcement of the ‘curse’ pre-match (including a psychic showdown with the legendary Uri Geller) became a deluge as the whistle blew.

Kane, who has broken a number of goalscoring records in the past year, cut a peripheral figure before missing a big chance to help Ghana to a creditable 0-0 draw.

Suddenly, the Witch Doctor was their secret weapon. Dr. Bonsam then showed considerable media (and diplomatic) savvy by appearing as a guest on LBC and declaring that, Ghana having reaped the benefits of his initial hex, he was now ‘releasing’ Kane to score as many goals as he wants for the rest of the tournament.

Clearly unafraid that this increased media scrutiny might impact his magic, Nana has continued to soak up the limelight, revealing that a misplaced malediction from his apprentice was behind Turkiye’s latest failure to live up to their Dark Horse mantle, and even weighing in with his predictions for an Andy Burnham premiership.

It’s a sterling display of showmanship and although it probably won’t lead to sustained fame in the UK (that said, don’t discount the announcement of a Witch Doctor podcast), his successful cursing of Kane, benevolent lifting of the curse, and good humour throughout may just have earned Nana a spot as the media’s resident Witch Doctor for future World Cups.

Qatar’s fake fans show the limits of football soft power

Qatar spent an utterly mindblowing $220 billion on hosting in 2022, but the mixed legacy of this ultimate football-as-soft-power gambit continues after a Telegraph investigation revealed that 1,000 ‘fake fans’ had been given an all-expenses-paid trip to support the team at the world cup.

Qatar’s football association funded flights, hotels and match tickets for thousands of supporters. For those getting déjà vu, Qatar did in fact deny these same allegations back in 2022 before apparently exporting the strategy to North America this time round.

Up to a quarter of supporters interviewed had no links to Qatar. A man born in Saudi Arabia, now living in Washington State, said that “many of us had never even set foot inside of a stadium either”. One American man was literally wearing a Brazil shirt beneath his Qatar jersey.

Naturally, Qatar wanted their “fans” to look the real deal – to be the part you have to look the part - so the drafted supporters were each given a fanbox, all containing the same trashy goodies.

Their aim? To create “a vibrant stadium atmosphere that will help push the players toward the best possible results on the global stage”. And nothing screams “vibrant atmosphere” more than forced fun, paid cheers and choreographed whooping

But to its credit, the drafted fans pushed the Qatar team to the best possible results of… finishing at the bottom of their Group, losing 3 – 1 to Bosnia, 6 – 0 to Canada and a nail-biting draw against Switzerland.

On one level, there is an element of pitying poor Qatar. Everyone’s worst nightmare is throwing a party and no one showing up. However, Qatar hasn’t quite registered yet that when it comes to making friends, their default response of whipping out the cheque book is unlikely to curry much favour from the football-watching public.

Qatar’s manager gave the following farewell statement: “I am grateful for our fans. They are a minority but they tried to support us and stay behind us. I’m sorry for them”.

A sweet sentiment but he needn’t worry about apologising – it’s not like they can ask for a refund.

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The people of Makerfield have come down with a peculiar condition. They’re hot, bothered, and they’re feeling strangely sick.

That’s right: they’ve got Burnham Fever.

We joke, of course. But Andy Burnham’s sizable victory in last night’s by-election confirms what we said in these pages a few weeks ago. Burnham, a tireless retail politician of the kind they seem incapable of making on the Left anymore, happy to gladhand in innumerable community centres and football clubs and Big Tescos, is likely to be the next Prime Minister. The people of Wigan have made it so.

There are things to discuss that are not related to the man himself. Reform’s underperformance was real, and the fielding of a historically weak candidate no doubt played a part. Burnham was clearly the beneficiary of an enormous amount of tactical voting on the left. Restore Britain is not going away. Starmer, for his part, has made it clear that he does not plan to either, at least without a fight.

It is undignified to ask the man who led Labour to their greatest general election victory in a generation to simply slink away. But Starmer, a man with the rare and unenviable talent of making even his greatest passions feel focus grouped, has little choice: go gentle into that good night, or rage against the dying of the light, and lose monstrously and unforgivingly. It’s what we might call a Comms-22: do you want to be seen choosing to give up, or would you like to be seen giving up forcibly and humiliatingly?

Burnham, for his part, is aware of this. This morning, as the alleged-Prime Minister-elect heralded his new dawn from behind the impenetrable walls of the M62, one would’ve been mistaken for thinking you were watching the Ford inauguration. Our long national nightmare is over, he might as well have said, for everyone not named Keir Starmer.

There is, of course, the small issue of Wes Streeting, who is elsewhere, running something akin to the Muppets Babies version of a leadership contest on his own terms. But the battle lines are drawn, the contenders now confirmed, and the country faces either a summer of briefing and counter-briefing, or, perhaps, a swift, merciful coup, where the King in the North makes it quick and keeps it clean.

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Jumping on the banned wagon

The under-16s social media ban is a media minefield. Whichever way you turn, someone has an opinion on a very complex issue, and it descended into a shouting match where participants are all in on emotional arguments. It’s been brewing for months, ever since Australia took action back in December.

Disagreement might be rife, but a rough consensus holds that big tech has engineered these platforms to be highly addictive and children are vulnerable. But just as social media was thrust on us, so now is the decision to cut off children’s access, or at least that’s the theory.

Because once you get into the weeds, treating all social media as one thing guarantees disagreement. The ban sweeps in Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, platforms with very different wrinkles. Of all the big boys, many would agree Reddit and YouTube are two of the ‘better’ ones - heavily moderated, that can act as a powerful educational resource. Yet YouTube has been banned while, for now, Reddit stays. And whichever side of the fence you fall, the platforms trading in parasocial dynamics - X, Instagram etc - are the ones more readily linked to harm. Conflating these two has its shortcomings, with X running very loose on content restrictions, while Meta manages Instagram more tightly.

Amid all this complexity, most of the reporting has hardened into two grooves. Big tech is lobbying hard: YouTube and Meta warned that a blanket restriction could push children into unregulated online spaces (the more we hear this, the more meaningless it becomes). And every piece reaches for Australia, while the evidence remains inconclusive, especially when you hear that roughly 70% of Australian parents polled in March said their children were still on the platforms, bypassing the age gates.

This leaves the government’s handling. On the surface, the politics are easy - more than 90% of consultation respondents backed an under-16 minimum. Dig down though and age verification means handing ID checks to the very tech titans in the dock, and approval drops sharply. We want children kept safe, it seems, right up to the point where it asks anything of us.

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Trump’s Treaty of Versailles?

As more questions emerge around the details and implementation of the US-Iran memorandum signed earlier this week, the irony [or accuracy, it remains to be seen] of its signing at Versailles seem lost on the President.

Declaring that the outcome would amount to “unconditional surrender” by Iran as well as “regime change”, Trump leapt to Truth Social to defend the deal after Iran’s Supreme Leader sneered that he’d struck the agreement “out of desperation.” Trump’s clapback “We didn’t meet out of desperation, Iran did. They are FINISHED!” convinced no-one.

Tehran’s portrayal of the deal as an American surrender has been bolstered by critical analysis which points to a $300bn recovery fund and scrapped sanctions as evidence of Trump’s need to end an unpopular war before the November mid-terms. Cynics have also suggested that Trump is simply bored and wants to focus on Russia.

Today’s signing ceremony in Switzerland was abruptly postponed amid fresh Israel-Hezbollah strikes in Lebanon (ceasefire now declared), further fuelling naysayers. Iran’s murmurs of introducing tolls to the Strait of Hormuz despite Trump’s emphatic rejection is further evidence of the memorandum’s fragility.

With inflation rates high and costs higher, Trump’s words have done little to assuage the crowd, despite the horrors of Iran’s regime, its framing of Trump as ‘desperate’ in these negotiations just might stick. Hopefully so does peace.

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World Cup Awards of the Week

Soft Power Coup of the Week: Scotland Fans getting haggis ‘legalised’ in Massachusetts

Overnight Social Media Star of the week: Vozinha (7 saves and 5 million social media followers later)

Simmering Feud of the Week: Zlatan Ibrahimovic & Thierry Henry vs Alexi Lalas (The Trump of Pundits)

@aleconfox7Zlatan absolutely destroys Alexi Lalas… again! Will this group make it through the World Cup? WOW.

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Most Used Meme: Carrrying a big pig up a hill (the scourge of midfielders whose legs have allegedly gone)

Biggest Fan Impact per Capita: DRC Fans in Enemy Territory

Most Trolled: Cristiano Ronaldo (Leave football before the football leaves you)

Hunter Biden, the former President’s recovering addict-turned-artist-turned-s**tposter son, is not really political. He’s a political football, yes, and has been for many years - it was his conduct, after all, that led to the impeachment inquiry into his father, way back in 2023. Yet, despite the memoir, despite the leaked laptop photos, despite the really rather good paintings, Hunter has rarely weighed in one way or another, until recently finding his voice on Twitter.

On one hand, there is little to say here that Biden hasn’t already said himself - the posts themselves are a mixture of recovery messaging and milquetoast anti-Trump sideswiping of the kind that has so animated the American centre left for the last ten years. He’s taking more than a helping hand from ChatGPT in their composition, and there’s also something a little coy about the son of a career politician railing against fat cats and the “Epstein class”. That, perhaps, speaks to just how much those sentiments have become buzzwords in their own right: post-Sanders, and post-AOC, we are all revolutionaries in a minor key.

But what is interesting, in the ever-evolving world of political comms, is that Hunter Biden is using a candidate’s playbook without being a candidate. He’s running defence for his father as part of a family business, of course. But the reason this is all so charming (and charming it is: AI or not, there’s something increasingly rare about seeing someone actually enjoy themselves on Twitter) is precisely the lack of necessity. He is in it, simply, for the love of the game.

Gavin Newsom, the omnipresent governor of California, has made this kind of messaging central to his inevitable 2028 run. But as with everything behind that man’s gimlet eyes, there is an inherent cynicism - the sense that this is style, and a style, at that, that has been carefully focus-grouped. For Biden, effectively unemployed, it’s attention-seeking with a patina of righteous anger: the ingredients, of course, for the best kind of s**tposter.

For the publicly shamed in modern America, the path to redemption flows directly through a memoir and a handful of podcast appearances, where the contrite pick their poison between Joe Rogan and Adam Friedland. Biden has already done those things, to a general shrug. The carpe diem mode of “owning one’s narrative” seems vaguely passé, long gone in the #MeToo wing mirror. But here is one of the great anti-heroes of American politics being funny, and being weird. If the long heralded ‘Dark Woke’/’Woke 2.0’ is anything, maybe it’s precisely this: Hunter Biden, political scion, calling CNN’s Jake Tapper ‘Brick Tamland’ on the internet. Is that really so dreadful?

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To a trillion… and beyond!

Most companies going public ask the market what they are worth. SpaceX appears to have asked something rather different: do you believe? After all, this is a company whose stated mission is to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

As sci-fi as that sounds, it is remarkably close to the language surrounding the IPO. That’s because the $1.77 trillion valuation rests not on what SpaceX has already done, but on a list of things it might do - Mars colonies, orbital AI data centres, and the domination of a future space economy that barely exists.

SpaceX’s COO Gwynne Shotwell herself said “what folks who invest in SpaceX need to know is that what we’re doing is very futuristic.” It’s an unusual way to drum up support for the cause, but also, arguably, the whole strategy.

The confidence of their position is reflected in how the IPO was structured. Rather than offering a price range and letting demand set the final figure, Musk set a fixed price and invited investors to take it or leave it.

When it comes to the maths, SpaceX is valued at almost 100 times its annual revenue. The sceptics are saying ‘computer says no.’ Musk’s supporters say the sceptics have been wrong before - think reusable rockets, Starlink, self-driving cars. Shotwell’s own pitch to sceptics was that “Elon jokes that we make the impossible, we just make it late.”

That “joke” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It asks investors to suspend their disbelief and focus on Musk’s long record of eventually delivering on seemingly impossible projects.

SpaceX isn’t really selling shares, but a vision that things which currently sound absurd will eventually become real. Perhaps it’s less of an IPO and more like an audition for Starfleet. Investors are being asked to back a company determined to boldly go where no listed company has gone before, and trust that the profits will follow later.

Backrooms, Obsession and Hollywood

For the past decade, there has been a trend in Hollywood, one that has led to recent film lineups and streaming services bloated with never-ending cinematic universes, reboots and unwarranted sequels to beloved franchises. But with the recent major successes of two relatively low-budget horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, it’s safe to say that Hollywood may soon be staring down the barrel of an existential crisis.

Both films come from young directors who, not that long ago, would have struggled to even get a meeting in Hollywood. Both are original ideas that speak to a younger generation bored half to death from endless rehashes of pre-existing IPs, and their runaway successes may rewrite how Hollywood responds going forward. What’s interesting about Backrooms and Obsession is that neither feels like the result of a committee trying to reverse-engineer audience demand.

Even Steven Spielberg weighed in on the phenomenon, praising the achievements of both young filmmakers, but also cautioning that success on one project in no way guarantees success on the next. It’s sensible advice from someone who has spent decades navigating an industry that can build people up as quickly as it tears them down.

These are projects made by people with a clear idea of what they wanted to create and have been rewarded exponentially by audiences as a result. Attention has become the most valuable commodity in almost every industry, and the lesson here is that people will only engage if it gives them a reason to care.

That’s a lesson Hollywood has seemingly forgotten in recent years. Originality has come to be perceived as too great a financial risk, and endlessly repackaging the familiar became the safer bet. Yet the success of Obsession and Backrooms suggests audiences may be far more adventurous than executives have given them credit for.

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“Kieran Tierney should’ve skied it”. Given the diaspora-transcending euphoria when Scotland reached a first (men’s) World Cup in 28 years, it took something particularly egregious to make multiple social media fans to go viral for wishing the spectacular goal that secured qualification out of existence.

Not even the Trump-Infantino axis of draconian immigration rules and remorseless price-gouging elicited such a response, but for long-suffering Scots a far worse apparition has darkened the online and media landscape: crap world cup songs.

Here is a far-from-exhaustive list….

Scottish rock legends Belle and Sebastian drastically out of their comfort zone:

The guy who did the Wellerman during lockdown re-releasing an old single with the lyrics changed to make it about the world cup like Bill Nighy in Love Actually:

Celtic rock band Skerryvore eschewing their traditional roots for something more ‘accessible’

A dance act called ‘The Scheme’ who decided to remix football crowd noises with bagpipes

These middle class teenagers:

@justthebraveGo Scotland Go. Our Scotland song for the World Cup 2026. Full song comes out this Sunday, 24th May. We might not be hitting the right target audience for a boyband but one thing we know that Scotland does best and that's party. And one thing we know how to do is write a fun song. Huge shout out to @Slanj Kilts for kitting us out with kilts and t shirts for the music video. . . . . . #scotlandworldcup #scottishfootball #worldcupsong #scottishtiktok #scotlandworldcupsong

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This middle class teenager using the same sample as Pitbull and J-Lo did in On the Floor:

@irnbruofficialWhatever Summer '26 throws at us, We’re Made In Scotland From Girders.

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This Gerry Cinnamon impersonator:

@pgciarlettaA Scotland World Cup Song. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 A week to go until Scotland returns to the World Cup!   Have a listen to PG Ciarletta ‘The Saltire’s Back (Ole Ole)’ which is out everywhere now!   #Scotland #WorldCup #WorldCup2026 #worldcupsong #fifaworldcup

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This one that came up whilst searching for one of the others:

@euanj.rapsGIE IT LALDY drops at midnight 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿⚽🔥 Get involved 💪 #Scotland #GieItLaldy #HipHop #WorldCup #Rap

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Even Irn Bru got in on the act with a kind of musical theatre-soft rock ballad featuring Susan Boyle, which has caused their (controversially English) ad agency to catch some strays:

@irnbruofficialWhatever Summer '26 throws at us, We’re Made In Scotland From Girders.

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The only one whose overall sentiment is positive is a simple but catchy dance anthem by comedian JJ Bull which achieves the rare plaudit of being football literate and not trying too hard. Most Scotland fans actually really like it and he’s taken it on a world cup tour.

Apart from that last one the general consensus is that this is a remarkable concentration of the worst music ever made. The lesson? The sheer volume of the cacophony of novelty songs vying to assault just over 10 million Scottish ears shows the immense gravity of the world’s biggest sporting event for the fame-hungry, the cynical and the delulu.

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A plug for PREEMPT’s first ever event: a panel of experts on the future of reputation

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Nicola Sturgeon was one of the most enduringly dominant figures in 21st century UK politics.

But after accusations that had already effectively ended her political career, it now seems her legacy has been permanently tarnished by her ‘estranged’ husband Peter Murrell’s admission this week that he embezzled £400,000 from the couple’s own political party’s coffers.

It’s been an undignified fall from grace for Sturgeon, and whatever shred of honour and respectability this once mighty political force may have been clinging to has now been obliterated by the sheer hilarity of the spending spree Murrell embarked on with his ill-gotten gains.

Several media outlets painstakingly listed the cars, watches, pens, Le Creuset, video games and boxsets to which Murrell treated himself. He reportedly spent £275 on fancy chopsticks.

As well as the obvious damage that proximity to such large-scale sleaze will do to the tattered remains of Sturgeon’s reputation (notwithstanding her supposed ignorance of it), there’s an unseriousness to it that will be excruciating for the earnest former first minister.

As for Murrell he is behind bars and being simultaneously (and gleefully) painted in the media as either a self-indulgent weirdo or a tragicomic loser attempting to compensate for the fact that his wife was more important than him with little treats (and big treats to be fair).

The fact that it’s party members’ hard-earned money is no joke, but, by consensus, the cartoonish triviality, superficiality and materialism of the whole caper, sadly, has been enough to reduce even the once-formidable Nicola Sturgeon from a giant of the political landscape to a joke we will occasionally re-tell for a cheap laugh.

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Blah blah Blair

Tony Blair this week accused Labour of “playing with fire” over the Starmer leadership crisis, releasing a 5,000-word essay that ended with a 10-point plan to return the party to what he calls the ‘radical centre’.

With Larry Ellison’s foundation having pledged at least £257 million to the Tony Blair Institute, Blair’s anti-net-zero stance reads less like thoughtful policy and more like a lobbying effort on behalf of its funders. Ellison has expanded TBI to roughly 1,000 employees across 45 countries, with the institute’s research closely aligned with his commercial interests. Blair’s Labour affiliation has long been used to give TBI the credibility of a genuine think tank; this latest essay may have achieved the opposite.

His point that Starmer has “no coherent plan for the country” will resonate with many, but Blair’s own complicated legacy as Prime Minister has blunted his authority to say so. Some of the criticism is arguably fair (that Labour should settle its policy positions before staging a leadership contest), but it has been largely drowned out by the louder argument that Blair is advocating positions that run directly counter to the party’s own traditions.

Blair continues to describe himself as Labour, a framing that appears designed to preserve political relevance. But sustained alignment with right-wing donors and causes has made that label harder to defend. In the court of public opinion, questions of authenticity tend to linger. At some point, the distance between the brand and the behaviour becomes the story, and on current evidence, that point may already have passed.

The Departed Are Staying on the Call Sheet

They say that three things in life are certain: death, taxes and change. Oh, and AI will reboot you. 

AI loves nostalgia and hates goodbyes - so with AI celebrity holograms becoming evermore present, it seems the afterlife has hit big with their new budget. 

The BBC’s well-known topical debate show, Question Time, made somewhat of a statement with the teaser for their latest episode on AI.

The short clip saw Fiona Bruce introduce her AI-generated panel guests: Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Frida Kahlo, and Emmeline Pankhurst. Whilst the impressive yet awkward famous-faced clones didn’t stick around, being replaced by real technology experts, it cannot help but suggest that this is just the start. 

This also comes around the same time that it was announced that Ozzy Osbourne, who died last year, will be collaborating with tech companies Hyperreal and Proto Hologram to create a life-size avatar of him. Unsurprisingly, fans of the Black Sabbath frontman are not too happy with the deal, labelling it as disrespectful. But they really needn’t worry as Jack, Ozzy’s son, reassured the public on his YouTube livestream that, “it’s gonna be so tasteful what we’re doing. It’s not gonna be f**king lame”.  

This ever so slightly contradicts Jack’s initial comments on the wonders of the technology, where he said, “you could shoot a template for a commercial…literally prompt what you want Digital Ozzy to do in that commercial and you just drop it in. It’s that simple now.” 

Drop dead, drop in. Potato, potahto. 

The rapid rise of technology and AI is hardly a shock to anyone, but there is no denying that when mortality becomes negotiable, a new era is well and truly on its way. 

Only time will tell how far the living dead become integrated into our culture. But for now, we have Ozzy’s trajectory from the “Prince of Darkness” to commercial icon… a “tasteful” commercial icon, though of course.

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The Cannes Film Festival has become, at least since the advent of social media, as much about the fashion as it is about the films. In a year that has, by all consensus, been deemed somewhat below par, it was perhaps inevitable that the biggest story from the Croisette would be headwear, not Hollywood.

We speak, of course, about John Travolta’s beret.

In these pages last year, we looked at the slow comeback of Tom Cruise, a man once cast off from the upper ranks of stardom in a haze of Scientology freakery, and now, after a long-gestating reputation overhaul, generally seen as a saviour of populist cinema. Travolta, a fellow Hubbard acolyte, has not been so lucky — stuck in a rut of direct-to-video action slop (having picked up, seemingly, where Bruce Willis left off), Travolta’s last major cinematic release was the 2018 biopic Gotti, often considered one of the worst films ever made. His role in The People vs OJ Simpson aside, he now largely exists in the memories of three distinct generations, in three distinct modes: the practically tantric Travolta of Grease/Saturday Night Fever, the world-weary cool of Pulp Fiction, and the panto dame of Hairspray. John Travolta has not been an actor for quite some time; he is, now, somewhere between a strangely unshakeable sense of deja vu, and the butt of a joke.

Cue, then, the beret.

The beret, of which there are seemingly five versions, each a different colour, was selected by Travolta after scrolling through pictures of film directors of yore. As an actor making his directorial debut, it was a direct visual callback to Bergman and Rossellini - an actor playing, in effect, the part of director. It is also, and we make this point entirely unironically, delightful.

It’s a page straight out the Cruise playbook. In an irony poisoned age, people like sincerity. People especially like sincerity if it’s tinged with an edge of eccentricity that simply doesn’t exist anymore, and that reminds them of the type of movie stars we used to have. The image of John Travolta in a rotation of berets is genuinely charming - he looks well, he looks happy, and there’s something faintly sweet about a legend, in his dotage, LARPing as Cecil B DeMille. When so many celebrities arrive at red carpets with the distinctly uncanny sheen of Hollywood in 2026, it’s genuinely refreshing to see someone enjoy themselves on their own terms. And, crucially, it certainly seems to have reminded people exactly how much they like Travolta in the first place.

So if Tom Cruise can do it....why can’t John Travolta be the biggest movie star in the world again? As long as he keeps the beret on.

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The $1.776 Billion Tell

After more than a year of Trumpism, you may be forgiven for meeting his latest outrage with an eyeroll and a shrug. A man who built his reputation on outrage and transmits his own version of reality through Truth Social, the public has grown increasingly numb, and the news cycle increasingly critical.

Trump’s latest, the ‘Anti-Weaponisation Fund‘, managed to momentarily cut through, in part due to its nearly $2bn cost to the US taxpayer, and the fact that, unlike his very successful Iran peace talks, this actually exists.

The fund emerges from a $10bn lawsuit Trump brought in his personal capacity against the IRS, the agency he oversees, a trial in which all parties involved were controlled by him. To resolve it, the DOJ will make $1.776bn (yes, you read that right) available to anyone who feels harmed by weaponised federal investigations (read: allies of Trump). The sum is itself a deliberate jab, and the administration has left open the possibility of compensating the January 6th insurgents.

So why has this failed to hold the media agenda for more than five minutes? Because Trump’s brazen corruption, repugnant violations, and the persistent diminishment of democratic order have become so pervasive we’ve simply stopped being amazed. We have been groomed to take the latest shocker on the chin.

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Football Crazy

The weird and wonderful world of football comms was at the forefront this week with a dizzying array of PR dark arts, politicking and meme culture taking the beautiful game from the back page to the realms of news and gossip.

With the Trump-Infantino Legion of Doom threatening to turn the World Cup into a humanitarian disaster, a taste of the impending chaos descended on the home front after Southampton were expelled from the Championship playoffs – whose final is widely considered the most lucrative game in world football- having been found to have spied on their opponents.

Said opponents Middlesborough were responsible for a damning dossier including photographic evidence that went public and had Southampton bang to rights, making their complaints about ‘proportionality’ come across as feeble and churlish to most of the onlooking media.

Up in Scotland a similar scenario played out after jilted champions-elect Heart of Midlothian complained about Celtic fans invading the pitch after the late goal that clinched the title for them last weekend, claiming they did so before the final whistle. Celtic were defended vigorously by their curmudgeonly warhorse of an interim manager Martin O’Neill until the Scottish Football Association dealt them a comms ace card by revealing that Hearts manager Derek McInnes had told the referee himself to ‘blow the whistle’ when the final goal went in – begging the question of how much difference another restart would have made.

Arsenal were also crowned Premier League champions this week much to the annoyance of every non-Arsenal-supporting football fan on social media. Arsenal fans have long been stereotyped as deploying a sort of gauche, starry-eyed exceptionalism towards their team and now having an actual accolade (with the Champions League final – club football’s ultimate showpiece to come) there was trepidation that their eulogising of their club and its personnel would become unbearable. True to form the internet is now flooded with hysterical Arsenal heroworship. Kings of England they may be but they have a reputation management job on their hand to prove that their fans don’t include an excess of weirdos-per-capita.

Finally, England, having been major competitors in international football for nearly a decade, announced a squad hoping to finally win the world cup today. However, in circumstances that say little for organisation or harmony, the football media managed to piece the selection together yesterday through a series of leaks, including by omitted players – notably the stalwart and cranially-gifted defender Harry Maguire.

Unity and decisiveness are two factors crucial to big tournament success that can be projected and bolstered by strong communications; announcing your squad through fragments of embittered whispers might do the opposite...

Share Media Trends and Insights by Borkowski

And so to Westminster, where the latest instalment of the national psychodrama once known as “the government” has reached its third act crescendo.

Yet, in a testament to the success of twenty-first-century devolution, rather a lot of this week’s public jockeying has taken place in the People’s Republic of Manchester, where its Supreme Commander, down but not out after his failed coup in January, has reconvened the proverbial politburo for one last putsch. Mr Burnham, riding the Avanti West Coast into London like an Arthurian hero on a noble steed, has cried God for Andy, Everton, and St Helens.

The joke goes that a Blairite, a Corbynite and a Starmerite walk into a bar, and the barman says, “Hi Andy”. Burnham will be immediately looking to address this, and he has a lot to work with. Having spent the last nine years engaged in a political reputation overhaul engineered largely through the twin concerns of being good at his job, and publicly liking pints, football and The Stone Roses. In a world where even a politician’s most genuine enthusiasms (”Keir Starmer is football mad”) are torn apart for the slightest hint of insincerity, it is significant that the latter of these has worked. It would have worked perhaps less well had his mayoralty of Manchester not been a success by any measure and a success, at that, achieved largely under a national Conservative government.

The benefit, of course, of holding every conceivable political opinion to the Left of centre is that eventually you happen upon the right one at the right time. Burnham has spent the best part of a year prevaricating, in a kind of will he/won’t he public dance that would put even Love Island’s most indecisive bachelors to shame. His premature arrival in January was no fault of his own. Now that he has decided, conclusively, that he will, it’s a question only of whether the depth of his personal approval rating can survive in a seat prime for Reform’s taking. If it does, he will be Prime Minister by the autumn.

The country is, in effect, about to witness a Presidential election take place in Wigan. Pie barms all round.

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Starmer’s signal failure

To no one’s surprise, Starmer’s in trouble following a catastrophic set of local election results. With ministerial resignations mounting and his own MPs turning on him, it’s now a case of when, not if. All while, as ever, he tries to plough on.

And that, in a sense, is precisely the problem. Back in July 2024, standing outside Downing Street, Starmer framed his premiership around urgency and diligence - he would “get on with the job.” It was a pitch to a public exhausted by the previous government’s chaos, and an obvious tactic at the time. But governing and leading are different beasts, and it transpired that Starmer wasn’t primed for a fast-moving media environment that would chew him up and spit him out.

We live in a fractured, always-on news environment where vibes-based politics is becoming increasingly important, and if managed correctly, can generate overnight success. With social media “content” turbo-charging the 24-hour cycle, politicians compete against waning attention spans, and those embracing warmth and authenticity are outrunning his eye for policy substance.

Into this mercurial space step figures like Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski - shapeshifters who have bet everything on communications and who are currently winning, at least for now. Both are magnetic in their pockets of the electorate and ferociously amplified by social media. Both speak the language of the disenchanted fluently. And both, it turns out, don’t hold up especially well under closer inspection. Polanski is currently weathering a run of embarrassments around council tax, a falsely claimed Red Cross role and the small matter of not voting in the elections he’d just campaigned in. Farage carries his own considerable baggage, but his Trumpian swagger and iron hide mean he isn’t going anywhere.

What British politics is crying out for is a figure who can be serious on the biggest stage and authentic everywhere else - a Blair-type communicator who treats the media as an ally rather than an inconvenience. But the communication playbook Blair operated under has changed - the entire system is different. Is this political all-rounder even possible in today’s world? It’s been decades since we’ve had one, and the public might be burned by all the casualties. But perhaps it only takes one influential leader to reset hearts and minds; don’t hold your breath.

Back of the net (worth) for billionaire Beckham

It may not be the end of the month yet, but with the Sunday Times Rich List dropping today, it’s payday for the UK elite. Sir David Beckham has become the UK’s first billionaire sportsman - a baller in every sense of the word. However, this is hardly a solo effort, as Posh Spice is also bringing home the bacon. The Victoria Beckham brand has finally managed to resurrect itself and turn a significant profit. And so, after 26 years of marriage, Posh and Becks have grafted their way to a combined fortune of £1.185bn.

Today’s announcement comes four months after their eldest son, Brooklyn Beckham, posted an explosive statement detailing his estrangement from his parents. One standout bombshell from the scathing six-page Instagram post was the accusation that Victoria commandeered the first dance at his wedding, leaving bride Nicola in tears.

However, it is reported that the initial catalyst for the family divide was in fact cold hard cash, or rather, the lack of it. Since 2017, the Peltz family has reportedly had a net worth of $1.5bn, which may explain why they allegedly labelled the Beckhams “tight”, considering that as recently as last year they had a comparatively measly estimated fortune of £500m.

According to Marina Hyde: “From what I hear, I think the Beckhams give Brooklyn a lot of money, but not insane money… Maybe Nelson Peltz would deny this, but I hear that he said to them, ‘I give my daughter a million-dollar-a-month allowance’.”

While Brooklyn may feel embarrassed by his supposedly stingy parents, he can at least pass the time waiting for an apology by checking his £250,000 Patek Philippe, which, funnily enough, David bought him for his 21st birthday.

But now that the former England captain has upgraded to billionaire status, perhaps reconciliation can be bought with a boost to Brooklyn’s pocket money. Perhaps Nelson Peltz will finally feel that Golden Balls is playing in the same league as him. Perhaps they can all go out for dinner and be one big happy family again. Let’s just hope they don’t argue over the bill.

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Another Met Gala, another social media cycle of armchair stylists and fair-weather fashionistas cataloguing the fashion fails and occasional triumphs.

However, this year it was hard to ignore the bad taste left behind after news broke that Amazon’s commander-in-chief, Jeff Bezos, reportedly donated $10 million to the Met. Predictably, protests erupted across New York City as calls for a ‘Bezos boycott’ began to gather momentum. From projections on surrounding buildings and fake bottles of urine smuggled into the museum itself, the backlash certainly wasn’t subtle. Then again, it has never been a secret that money can buy proximity to status and influence, but in the case of House Bezos, it still can’t buy good taste.

Over the last few decades, the Met Gala has steadily become just as important to Anna Wintour’s empire, if not more so, than Vogue itself. Adapting to match the times is the name of the game. This year proves more than ever that the Met Gala is no longer simply fashion’s biggest night out, but an increasingly obvious exercise in political and corporate image laundering.

The timing is almost too neat, with the recently released Devil Wears Prada 2 featuring a classless tech billionaire (à la Elon Musk) attempting to buy out Vogue’s fictional counterpart, Runway, despite having no real appreciation for the culture behind it. The storyline works because it mirrors what we are watching happen in real time: tech billionaires forcing their way into industries they neither understand nor particularly value. Journalism, like the arts, faces the same pressure - the slow encroachment of tech money that mistakes ownership for understanding, and a content ecosystem increasingly flooded with AI-generated filler that nobody asked for.

The disappointment surrounding this year’s so-called ‘Tech Gala’ is just another symptom of a much larger cultural rot. Every industry now seems expected to genuflect to Silicon Valley eventually, willingly or otherwise. Perhaps what left such a sour taste this year is not the outfits themselves, but the creeping sense that nothing remains untouched by the barrage of tech billions for long.

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From Reality TV to City Hall

Back in the early days of 2025, an unknown State Assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani launched an outsider campaign for New York mayor, run predominantly through a slick social media operation.

In the early days of 2026, a former reality star named Spencer Pratt launched an outsider campaign for Los Angeles mayor, run predominantly through a slick social media operation.

We know how one of these stories ended. The second is still a work in progress.

Spencer Pratt is, to the connoisseur of 2000s popular culture, a reality TV villain par excellence. As a cast member on The Hills, a structured reality programme that long predated British equivalents like Made in Chelsea, he was perhaps the first person to realise that being seen as the bad guy didn’t matter as long as you were being seen. In the intervening years, he has mostly used this inherent PR nous to indulge his wife Heidi’s DOA pop music career - that is, until his house burned down in the Pacific Palisades fire and he discovered electoral politics. The somewhat aptly named Pratt, a man who has never let the fact that he is simply not very famous anymore get in his way, has decided that his latest incarnation is what might be called ‘Evil Jimmy Stewart’. Mr Pratt Goes to Getty House, if you will.

American history is littered with washed-up celebrities using politics as an extracurricular. (More than one of them has been President.) No one seriously believes that Spencer Pratt will be the next mayor of LA. But two key things are true.

The first is that he is running an extraordinarily right-wing campaign using the same playbook as that of Mamdani last year. In a series of incendiary social media videos, he has genuinely captured the attention of the right-wing commentariat beyond just the MAGA faithful. Yes, he has the approval of political kingmaker Joe Rogan, but even Jeb Bush (remember him?), a “Never Trump” kind of guy, commented approvingly on one of his ads. Much in the way that Mamdani ultimately united a significant coalition of union members and the young, Pratt has the attention of a large swathe of the Republican base. He also, again like Mamdani, understands how the media works - if, all those years ago, he was effectively self-producing on The Hills, he is now doing so on a much grander, and more essential, stage than an MTV reality show. And, if that’s a war, he’s winning it - would we even be writing about the LA mayoral election if not for him?

The second truth is that, while Los Angeles might be a liberal city, we should all be past the point of counting out upstart Republican challengers simply because “it couldn’t happen here”. The New York Post’s recently opened California outpost is in overdrive in his favour. He’s polling behind incumbent mayor Karen Bass, but largely ahead of socialist challenger Nithya Raman, and he made it to the most recent televised debate. And what do Californians love if not one of their own in office? Stranger things have happened.

Traitors Cast Coup

Just six months ago, the nation watched the epic finale of the first UK Celebrity Traitors as Alan Carr pulled off an absolute blinder to become the show’s first celebrity champion. It was only in 2022 that the BBC launched the now hugely successful format. While the series has been an undeniable hit, the broadcaster has also found itself surrounded by separate controversies, from the Trump documentary editing scandal to Scott Mills’ dramatic recent exit and the handling of Huw Edwards’ dismissal.

Much like the show itself, the BBC has faced its own interrogating and grilling at the roundtable of public opinion, and in actual courtrooms too, as it attempts to defend itself against mounting scrutiny.

However, while there may be plenty of eyes on the broadcaster, there were also 15 million watching The Celebrity Traitors finale. And with the newly announced cast already being devoured by the public, it seems the BBC must be doing something right. More importantly, the lineup suggests the casting directors actually understand what the word “celebrity” means. Among the names heading to the Scottish Highlands are James Blunt, Ross Kemp, Michael Sheen, Richard E. Grant and Miranda Hart, all preparing to either deceive or detect.

Another standout booking is Jerry Hall, who has also been confirmed for the new series. If her marriage to Rupert Murdoch, and his reported decision to divorce her via email, taught us anything, it’s that she can survive even the messiest showbiz drama.

It seems the format itself, along with its endless stream of iconic moments, has become a kind of Traitors-style cloaking device for the wider chaos currently surrounding the BBC. With such a star-studded cast signing on, the corporation is clearly not struggling to maintain its celebrity appeal. Filming is already underway, and the show will return to screens this autumn. Grab the popcorn and prepare to watch famous faces navigate deception, trust, and perhaps most challengingly of all, the spelling of Industry star Myha’la’s name on a chalkboard.

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A viral Daily Mail story this week contained a litany of lurid allegations against a senior JP Morgan executive who, according to a lawsuit, coerced a junior colleague into a series of sex acts. The allegations were breathtaking in their detail, awkwardness and Trumpian humour, and set off a cascade of memes.

The response was swift – a New York Post exclusive unmasking the accuser and labelling his account a ‘fabrication’. Cue thousands more memes ranging from suggestions that he was attempting a bold new genre of erotic autofiction, to his digs about his wife, to the fact that everybody took one look at him and decided the story didn’t add up.

Underpinning the absurdity, there’s a serious point; the allegations saw the light of day because they were included in a (leaked) lawsuit. If it turns out that the lawsuit is without merit and dropped, then it will heighten the sense that this was another case of the weaponisation of the legal system – in both the USA and UK - to inflict reputational embarrassment on an opponent to try to force a settlement.

It’s a thorny issue and hard to legislate against or regulate; something uttered in court or an affidavit, even if its merit as a legal argument is oblique, carries more weight than a social media rant - and that is undoubtedly a tactic certain parties are now using to turn an (often weak) legal argument into a PR offensive. Another deadly weapon on the reputational frontline.

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John Terry’s Own Goal

John Terry has always been his own worst enemy. His time on the pitch sees him as one of Chelsea and England’s most decorated defenders; off it, he’s one of England’s most controversial. And now, not for the first time, dipping his toes into explicitly political territory, endorsing an Instagram post by Rupert Lowe calling for “foreigners” to be banned from claiming benefits, among other things. While this is undeniably ‘bad’ for him, it’s almost so authentically John Terry that we’re surprised a story this size hasn’t appeared in the press sooner.

To understand why this barely registers, you need to understand where ex-pros sit in our collective consciousness. Football is an entertainment business, and increasingly the entertainment happens off the pitch - nowhere more visibly than in the podcast boom, which has been good to former players. Platforms like Goalhanger and The Overlap have turned them into media brands in their own right, rewarded handsomely for the kind of tribal, opinionated chat that once lived exclusively in the pub.

The same infrastructure that amplifies Gary Neville’s tactical insight also amplifies Matt Le Tissier’s vaccine scepticism and Rickie Lambert’s drift into outright conspiracy territory. This landscape continues to fracture - where more traditional news publications share hot takes or anecdotes from yesteryear, the more outlandish content from personalities like Joey Barton or JT circulates and festers on platforms like X.

The podcast doesn’t discriminate - crucially, nor does football. These men remain embedded in the game, welcomed on platforms, invited to events, their reputations largely intact within their core audiences. There are no real consequences to housing extreme views when the platforms that host you are incentivised to reward the most inflammatory takes with engagement.

Which is why Terry’s “100% yes” lands with a thud rather than a full-blown crisis. Condemned, yes. Career-ending, no. Outside the clickbait headline, these interventions tend to disappear into a void of limited return. Terry is a coach, not a pundit with a broadcasting contract to lose. The levers that might once have applied - sponsor pressure, broadcaster sanction, public shaming with teeth - don’t quite reach him where he now operates. Words have consequences, even slow-burning ones, and Terry has reminded everyone who he is. When managing one’s reputation, there are few things harder to recover from than that.

Banksy Suited and Booted

Banksy’s habit of appearing where he isn’t expected still endures, this time swapping walls for plinths. A life-sized statue of a suited figure, flag billowing across its face, appeared in central London on Wednesday, a stone’s throw from statues of Crimean War generals and the gilded Athena of the Athenaeum Club. He confirmed ownership via Instagram, posting behind-the-scenes footage of a low loader, hi-viz vests, and what James Peak, creator of the BBC podcast The Banksy Story, called “the sort of dudes who can set up a Metallica concert in 24 hours.”

The shift from mural to monument is notable. Unlike September’s work of a gavel-wielding judge outside the Royal Courts of Justice, which made a clear, bloody attack on state power, the new installation trades overt violence for something more ambiguous. Peak praised the stunt, suggesting it captures “a very precise moment in time… the flag’s kind of blinding this puffed up, besuited leader who’s about to step off a precipice.” Others have read it as a comment on performative authority, or the way modern political figures become defined more by image than action.

Westminster City Council has been quick to put up barriers, but stated it is “excited” and hopes to preserve the piece. Whether this represents a genuine evolution in Banksy’s practice or simply a clever change of materials, the consensus among onlookers is unusually unified: regardless of whether you like his work, he knows how to start a conversation.

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An article in The Hollywood Reporter this week pinpointed the 2014 Oscars selfie as the beginning of the end for ‘monoculture’ as we once knew it: genuine movie stars, when such a thing still existed, meeting the newly digital moment, and the snake drawing its last breaths before it began to choke on its own tail.

This argument is perhaps not original, even if its chosen point of origin is. Our choice economy has turned us in on ourselves, and the concept of even meagre consensus is rocked daily by the simple proliferation of stuff that surrounds us. If the algorithm caters to our taste, the measure of what makes a ‘popular’ culture, that which once unified and appalled, falls ever lower. The culture of narcissism, as Christopher Lasch once called it, is now the narcissism of culture. This we all know.

But if the argument is not original, it is at least an interesting jumping-off point. The Oscars selfie represents maybe not the end of monoculture as a whole, but the last moment that something ‘new’ (ish) could be put in front of an audience who would all, to a one, recognise it. The last vestiges of popular culture that still exist - tentpole movies, big brand campaigns, new album releases by popstars of yesteryear - now trade almost exclusively on nostalgia. In recognising that nothing new can exist that everyone will know, celebrities and brands work increasingly in the realm of the past: Robert Downey Jnr returns to the Avengers, Madonna revives Confessions on a Dance Floor, Euphoria trades in Y2K aesthetic pastiche for people who didn’t live through it the first time. The instinct is not to push forward, but to retreat. Culture, in other words, is stuck.

The ‘Lindy effect’ holds that the longer something has existed, the longer it will last. The Oscars selfie, and the apex of stardom it represents, holds weight even now, even as a symbol of a dying thing, because it traded on the one currency everyone still understands - the power of twentieth-century celebrity. Not everyone is paying attention to the same thing anymore. But, as a lesson for those wondering how to rebrand a troubled pop star, brand, or actor, one thing is true: everyone still remembers.

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Full speed PR overreach

When F1 world champion Lando Norris sat down for an interview with experienced Guardian journalist Donald McRae to bask in the halo of yet another honour, it must’ve seemed like a fairly low-risk endeavour.

Never mind that his job is to screech round hairpin bends at 100mph in a rocket car, Norris is considered by most to be naturally likeable, and has been an astute media operator since before he was a teenage test driver. He’s at the top of his game with the world at his feet, and it sounds like the Guardian conversation was positive, interesting and flowing naturally - all the hallmarks of a good profile.

But then the PR got involved…

There are times when PRs and management can legitimately save clients from themselves in interviews, but this wasn’t one.

Norris was more than capable of answering and deflecting the (fairly obvious) questions that led to the intervention. Even if things were to get ropey, there’s a cost-benefit analysis between a slick, intelligent media operative having to circumnavigate an awkward question and the Guardian as an outlet that notoriously and gleefully reports on PR interventions in celebrity interviews.

Sometimes the best way for us to justify our existence is just by getting out of the client’s way.

NYT Bestseller exposes parts of Hollywood still ignored

Lena Dunham exploded onto the scene when she created the hit millennial HBO series Girls, and at just 23 years old, was hailed ‘the voice of her generation’.

She stays true to her natural candour in her new memoir Famesick, delving into her experience with fame and chronic illness. Dunham’s long-term battle with health has seen her struggle with EDS, severe endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and a hysterectomy in 2017.

With Famesick landing #1 on ‘The New York Times’ bestseller list, it has had mixed reactions. One journalist said: “I am depressed that Dunham has used her skilful artistic voice to make misery, sickness and despair the leitmotifs of modern feminist struggle”. Whether you agree or not, there is a striking lack of acknowledgement or criticism of her former co-star, Adam Driver, who played her intense and volatile boyfriend in Girls.

Dunham describes Driver as “something feral…half-man, half-beast” and recalls the time when she attempted to throw him a surprise birthday party, only for him to “exit through the back door”. Dunham then received a “stern” warning from his agent saying, “Never try and surprise him again”.

Whilst Driver may not like surprises, it is ironic that he then “hurled a chair at the wall” next to Dunham and screamed “WAKE THE F*** UP” when she had a mind blank during a rehearsal. Dunham also writes about the uncomfortable process of filming their sex scenes, where her “careful blocking went out of the window”, as Driver “hurled me this way and that”.

Driver seemed to have blurred, or actually just completely smeared, the lines between the character and himself - a tale all too familiar with a certain cohort of Hollywood, which is perhaps why the critics might not have batted an eyelid. The focus of Dunham’s brand of feminism and chronic illness is a reminder not just of Hollywood’s standards, but of what it still chooses not to see.

The Onion pursues InfoWars in vow to maintain editorial standards

How does a satirical digital media brand pursue one of the biggest peddlers of misinformation and conspiracy theories with millions of listeners? Because there are layers to this game. The Onion is attempting to strike a deal for Alex Jones’ InfoWars - specifically, a licence to hold the IP of InfoWars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, at $81,000 a month.

It’s been a whirlwind ride for Jones, who founded InfoWars back in 1999, gradually growing its popularity on YouTube and social media, peaking around Trump’s 2016 election. He raised millions in ad revenue, donations, and sales of his dietary supplements, including survival foods marketed as supporting “male vitality”. That was until he went after the Sandy Hook victims, claiming the 2012 school massacre was staged, and his false claims contributed to the harassment of grieving families. This led to a lawsuit against Jones, where he lost and ordered to pay a staggering $1.5 billion in damages.

It was such a financial and legal collapse that InfoWars is now on the chopping block. With The Onion pursuing the remains, it’s a move that affirms what makes the brand special, supports Sandy Hook families who have struggled to recover damages, and needles Jones in the process - The Onion has committed to sharing revenue from the site with the families. Jones is expected to appeal, and the deal still requires sign-off from the Texas state court.

But the irony is hard to miss. The most effective weapon against a misinformation empire, it turns out, may well be a satirical media brand punching considerably above its weight.

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Press tours are often engineered to maximise controversy, well-trodden ground in pastures fine as these. TV and film must scrap for attention against social media’s addictive instant gratification - a highly competitive, expanding ecosystem.

So when it comes to HBO’s hit teen drama Euphoria - the breakout launchpad for stars like Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi - it has served fans aplenty, mostly generated by showrunner Sam Levinson’s decision to leave such a gap between seasons, fueling toxic work environments and the ousting of Barbie Ferreira from the cast.

@amandachristine_1#euphoria #samlevinson #zendaya #greenscreen #fyp

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Yet the conversations amongst pop culture aficionados have been about the perceived chill between Zendaya and Sweeney. Since these stars broke out 7 years ago, both have rocketed: Zendaya via Dune blockbusters and fashion dominance under stylist Law Roach; Sweeney via her own headline-grabbing turns. Fans, poring over The Independent’s verdict of Euphoria as “the most toxic show on TV”, tend to side with Zendaya’s poised restraint. Sweeney, meanwhile, draws flak for wading into culture-war skirmishes - associations her camp appears content to let simmer, even as they fuel the fire.

At the launch event, the pair’s awkward distance spoke volumes, with many observing it as a rift amid Sweeney’s Trump-adjacent whispers. Zendaya’s team, ever image-conscious, skipped joint press entirely - a calculated sidestep that tabloids spun as savvy distancing from potential guilt-by-association. Whether it’s an outright feud or mere professional drift, the optics play into Euphoria’s own lurid vibe.

Sweeney’s provocations have media consensus calling her a lightning rod, while Zendaya’s clean lines earn quiet nods for bulletproof PR. Smart, or just the survivor picking its battles? In press-tour poker, the hand that folds first often wins the pot.

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Being a Belieber

There’s a version of Justin Bieber the public hasn’t seen in years, and Coachella is where it came back to life. In the mainstream press, Bieber has earned a reputation as a walking meme, thanks to his subdued attitude towards interviews and public appearances. A prime example is the “it’s not clocking to you” clip from June last year, which exploded online.

During his headlining slot last weekend though, the set brought audiences closer than ever to the teenage Bieber who defined the decade. Midway through, he slipped into that younger self. For an artist whose adult life has been shadowed by tabloid tension, mental health struggles and headlines about conditions like Ramsay-Hunt Syndrome, it played as an intimate exchange between star and crowd.

In true 2026 fashion, online discourse quickly engulfed the sincerity. Bieber ran parts of the set through YouTube - literally propping a laptop in front of the festival masses. It sparked controversy and discussions around his master’s, which remain with Universal Music Group. Fans theorised that by playing his songs through YouTube, he found a creative way to generate revenue from his catalogue.

In practical terms, that’s not how the industry operates - labels grant artists direct access to masters for live use, embargoed or otherwise. The YouTube route was a deliberate choice: loose, referential, a pop star revisiting his legacy via the very platform his audience uses to relive it.

Of course, not everyone is convinced. Comparisons to Sabrina Carpenter’s high energy set have only sharpened the debate around double standards. Say what you want, but the set took audiences back to 2016 - which might have just been the entire point.

Madonna’s Confessions

In the last seven years, Madonna has done the following things: ended her long-running feuds with Lady Gaga and Elton John, drafted and subsequently scrapped a film about her life, mounted her first Greatest Hits tour, inaugurated the Copacabana Beach concert series, appeared on her first-ever podcast, and, perhaps most notably, nearly died. She has not, in this time period, released an album.

The world is a slightly kinder place for older pop stars in 2026. Madonna, maybe the original victim of twenty-first-century ageism and a woman who has been written off more times than she’s been on, has not yet been able to reap the benefits of TikTok’s nostalgic impact on the charts, or the poptimist resurgence that swept Kylie Minogue back to the top five in 2023. So here she is, at last, the original and the best.

Confessions II, a long-teased sequel to her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor, was announced on Wednesday in an Instagram post that, at the time of writing, has racked up more than 600k likes. The album’s art direction comes courtesy of the masterminds behind Charli XCX’s Brat and Rosalia’s LUX, smartly placing her within a zeitgeist that she invented in the first place.

Madonna’s critics in the late 2010s obsessed over her perceived trend chasing and her steadfast refusal to “go away, old lady”. In taking the longest break of her career, she’s let people miss her. Looking back at her 2000s zenith, she’s smartly capitalising on Y2K nostalgia while reminding people exactly what she’s always been good at - making people dance.

The Messy Katy Perry Saga Continues

Katy Perry’s career has been on a downward spiral for so long now that it’s hard to remember the times when she was deemed pop’s biggest talent, and has the 151 million records sold to prove it. But with the recent allegations made by Ruby Rose, Perry’s career has taken another beating without ever fully recovering from the previous thrashings of all her controversies.

Rose commented on a post of Perry watching Justin Bieber at Coachella and made the statement, “Katy Perry sexually assaulted me at Spice Market in Melbourne”. It is the same music festival where Perry’s boyfriend/ex-Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was labelled a hypocrite after Perry shared an online photo of him drinking from a red plastic cup, even though Trudeau had banned single-use plastic in Canada while in office.

Since then, Rose has given more details of her experience that night in 2010 and said that Perry exposed herself and rubbed against Rose’s face whilst she was heavily drunk on a wild night out partying with Perry. Perry’s team have described the allegations as “categorically false” - a routine that they will be all too familiar with since this is not the first time Perry has come under fire in this regard.

In 2012, the male model in Perry’s Teenage Dream video accused Perry of pulling down his trousers and exposing himself to a crowd. Anna Kendrick claimed on Conan that Perry had groped her chest without consent. There is of course, the deeply unsettling video of her kissing a 14-year-old boy on one of her music tours. Perry also kissed an American Idol contestant, whom he said made him “uncomfortable”. Just to name a few.

The police have now initiated an investigation into Rose’s accusations. The carousel of Perry crashing and burning and burning some more seems to still be in full swing.

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