Culture

As far as teaser trailers for summer blockbusters go, it takes quite a lot to make jaded audiences – or cynical critics – sit up and say, “What the hell?” But what’s exactly what the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s eagerly awaited The Odyssey has done. Not because it has featured a couple of new shots of Tom Holland’s Telemachus squaring off with Robert Pattinson’s villainous Antinous, or Matt Damon’s Odysseus participating in the bloody sack of Troy with his fellow Greeks, but because it introduces the most unexpected cameo of the year, possibly of the decade. Ladies and gentlemen, enter the latest feature of Nolan’s all-star cast: the hip-hop

Hello, it’s me, your Gen X auntie who spends too much time online. I regret to inform you that I’ve been on a journey and, like Hermes bringing information from the underworld to mortals, I am here to tell you about the poor, unfortunate lost souls I’ve become aware of against my will. They have names like Sneako and Clavicular – and if I have to know about them, you do too. It starts with a livestream and a boys’ night out, although these aren’t your ordinary frat boys or celebrities. They are some of the internet’s most infamous edgelords, caricatures of men, masculinity and fashion. A limo rolled up

The casting of the new James Bond is the biggest story in Hollywood at the moment. The sheer amount of disinformation and exaggeration that has accompanied snippets of news about the production of a new 007 adventure is remarkable, even by the standards of La La Land. Ever since the Bond franchise was purchased by Amazon, taken out of the restrictive hands of Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, and placed in the care of Amy Pascal and David Heyman, the question of who’s doing what has been a source of fascination. The hiring of Dune’s Denis Villeneuve to direct was broadly seen as a smart, auteur-ish move; the decision

We Americans celebrate July 4, 1776, as our national birthday, and this year, of course, marks our 250th. But the American Revolution began before that. And when did it end? Maybe it never did. In 1812, warhawks in Congress and president James Madison – the man known to posterity as the very father of the Constitution – launched an invasion of Canada in the hopes of completing the American Revolution. Canada was unfinished business. We had invaded Québec in 1775, but that was a disaster. And even though the 13 colonies that became the United States succeeded in winning their independence from Britain, the newborn US was not altogether free.

The news that the producer Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down with immediate effect as president of Lucasfilm, to be replaced by Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, may not sound especially consequential; film executives come and go all the time, and their arrival and departure is normally only of interest to those in the movie business. Yet Kennedy, who has run Lucasfilm – home of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and a great deal more – since 2012, and been in sole charge after the departure of the company’s founder George Lucas the same year, is the most consequential Hollywood studio head of the past couple of decades. And, her millions of

I reached New York for the premiere of the fourth series of Industry in a mild state of delirium. I was traveling from Lamu, and it had taken four flights and 20 hours in the air to reach the US. Lamu is so beautiful that it briefly makes you consider whether to bother with western civilization at all. On the rickety flight to the island from mainland Kenya, I had sat next to a German count I vaguely knew. ‘You looking to get a little fucked up?’ he asked. I mumbled something about ‘family time’. He nodded and wished me luck. On New Year’s Day I ran into him again,

When the actress Claire Foy – still best known for her deservedly award-winning performance in The Crown – was interviewed recently by Harper’s Bazaar to promote her new film H is for Hawk, an adaptation of the Helen MacDonald memoir, she must have expected an easy ride. Estimable title though Harper’s Bazaar undoubtedly is, few would confuse it with a hard-hitting investigative magazine. Yet Foy made some remarks that have blown open the whole vexed question of what the point is of actors getting involved in public discourse, and whether they should, instead, stick to reading other people’s lines. Foy said, when asked about her public opinions, that it was

Did you know we’re living in a dictatorship?

My father went into the kitchen for a cookie, then disappeared into his home office for a phone call. He was arranging a surprise for my mother – hired waitstaff for Christmas Eve dinner, one of the biggest our family would have hosted. Then he died. It took 15 seconds. We found him within minutes. The waitstaff called back 11 times over the next two days. I thought they were debt collectors. Finally, I went into his office, where we had found him, picked up his phone, and yelled, “He’s gone! Stop calling!” That’s how I learned what he’d been doing. They were trying to confirm. And in the corner

If there is one safe prediction we can make about 2026, it is this: public debate and global news will be dominated by artificial intelligence and the anxieties that surround it. And near the top of that swelling list of worries will be “AI porn” – the fateful collision between ever more accomplished image-making machines and humanity’s eternal appetite for audiovisual sexual stimulation. The year has barely begun and already two loud tsunami sirens have sounded. The first is the latest Grok incident. For the uninitiated, Grok is Elon Musk’s AI, conceived a couple of years ago in a fit of pique after Musk’s spectacular falling-out with OpenAI. Despite its