Author: Sam Allcock

It wasn’t even ten minutes into the game when Lamine Yamal scored his first World Cup goal against Saudi Arabia. He already knew who he was going to give it to. “My mother, my girlfriend, to my friends and everyone back at home in Mataró,” he said afterwards. That girlfriend is Inés García, a fashion and beauty influencer from Seville who is 21 years old. In the last few months, she has quietly become one of the more well-known faces in the stands at Spain’s games. It wasn’t Yamal who brought García to the public’s attention. Before her relationship with…

A love story that starts on Tumblr and ends on Netflix is just a little bit special. Nick Nelson and Charlie Spring have been drawn by Alice Oseman for more than ten years. On July 17, Heartstopper Forever, a feature film that picks up right where Season 3 left off and takes the couple somewhere the half-hour episodes of the show never quite could, will be their last chapter. The simple question that everyone wants to know is: do Nick and Charlie break up in Heartstopper Forever? Yes, that’s the short answer. It’s more interesting to read the longer answer.…

There are some questions that it almost feels like you shouldn’t ask out loud. One of them is whether Oliver Tree had a girlfriend—not because the answer is hard to figure out, but because the question came up at a terrible time. Two helicopters crashed over Rio de Janeiro on June 14, 2026, killing him. He was 32 years old. And the answer didn’t come from a profile or a publicist. It came from a woman named Fiona Chernavskaya, who wrote on Instagram while she was still angry. You can call Chernavskaya a fashion stylist. When you think about how…

Around the third hour of a very long movie, something changes. The moving stops. You keep the phone in your pocket. Now you want to know what will happen next instead of how much time is left. That moment, which was quiet and hard to see, could be the most honest thing happening in movies right now. Christopher Nolan’s version of Homer’s Odyssey has been getting the kind of press attention that studios used to pay millions of dollars to get. Critics of the movie are calling it an amazing feat. The word “flawless” keeps showing up in reviews. This…

A teen named Simon Beer was putting together electrical meters out of old radio parts and colored cardboard in a potting shed in Surrey, England, sometime in the early 1970s. People would turn a dial to show how happy or unhappy they were with a political decision. The meters were meant to measure public opinion. It’s weird enough to be a hobby project. What was going on in Chile at the time and who his father was make things even stranger. In Santiago, Simon’s dad, Stafford Beer, was helping Salvador Allende’s government build something that had never been done before:…

A small group of critics, industry voters, and publicists watch a movie that doesn’t really exist yet every awards season. They do this somewhere in Los Angeles, usually in a nice private screening room with comfortable seats and good food. There is no date set for the release. So far, no trailer has gone wide. After those two hours, people will quietly talk about the movie, which will decide whether it gets a serious Oscar campaign or is quietly put on hold until February. A lot of people outside the business world never see this system. The reason it works…

Something strange is going on with TikTok, and it’s tough to put your finger on it. If you scroll for a long time on any given afternoon, you will start to notice it: the lines around the jaw, the way they look, and the kind of confidence that doesn’t need your approval. All of a sudden, faces from a different time are everywhere. Not through campaigns that bring back memories or look back at fashion week. Just because an algorithm found something it wasn’t supposed to. Like most things on TikTok, the trend began in a quiet way. People started…

There is a man named Mal Harrison who has worked under Melbourne for almost twenty years. That’s not a figure of speech. Walking through a maze of tunnels that most people walking above don’t know exists is like being under the city, among the trams, coffee shops, and morning commuters. He has a hardhat on. He has high-visibility clothes on. He also says that something surprises him most days. That should tell you something about what’s down there. More than 1,500 kilometers of tunnels run under the central business district (CBD) and the suburbs that surround it. The storm drainage…

At some point during most pitches for independent films, someone says, “I just think people will love it.” You might have said that after watching a few too many movies that changed someone’s life late at night for no good reason. That pitch has both brought people jobs and sunk budgets. But there is a quiet change going on in Australia’s independent film world. It has less to do with gut feelings and more to do with facts. Since the Producer Offset was introduced and Screen Australia was founded almost twenty years ago, the number of movies made in Australia…

For more than ten years, they were one of the most interesting couples in Hollywood. Some of the biggest pop songs of the last ten years were written with Northern Irish songwriter Johnny McDaid and Courteney Cox, who is known to many as Monica Geller. They seemed to have figured out something that most long-distance relationships never do. Then they didn’t at the end of last year. There are already rumors that Johnny McDaid has a new girlfriend, just a few weeks after their breakup became public. Naturally, the timing has made some people wonder. One of Ed Sheeran’s closest…