Culture

By Yulia Tulegenova, Artist and Film critic You have to hand it to the Golden Globes. For an awards body made up of a few hundred journalists who allegedly like a free lunch, they know how to throw a spanner in the works. Last night’s ceremony wasn't just a glitzy dinner; it was a strategic…

From aphantasia to hyperphantasia, the spectrum of mental imagery divides how we remember, create, and dream - and neuroscience is finally catching up.

By Yulia Tulegenova By Alexander Stone Saturn's rings are one of the most photographed objects in the solar system, yet the story they tell is one of disappearance. In roughly 100 million years - a blink in cosmic time - the planet's most iconic feature will have rained itself out of existence, leaving behind a…

From sovereign AI to fusion reactors, Britain is rewriting the rules of deep tech innovation. Inside the £86bn bet reshaping the UK's future.

By Yulia Tulegenova On 30 September 2021, at the Royal Albert Hall premiere of No Time to Die, the audience watched something no cinema-goer in sixty years of Bond films had ever witnessed: the death of James Bond. Not a fake-out, not a cliffhanger, not a "we'll explain this later" moment. Daniel Craig's 007 was…

The Passerelle Jane-Birkin on the Canal Saint-Martin is the old Customs Bridge of 1860 with a fresh plaque. A sweet gesture, and what renaming a city's iron actually costs.

By Anna Zhila We have a problem with how we think about art theft. It’s the movies, isn’t it? We’ve been fed this diet of laser grids, pressure-sensitive floors, and men in velvet tuxedos sipping martinis while they plan to lift a Fabergé egg. We expect elegance. We expect a certain calibre of criminal that…

By Yulia Tulegenova A man in Singapore has been sent to jail for nine days. His name is Johnson Ven. He’s 26. And his crime? He jumped a barrier at the premiere of the new Wicked film and grabbed Ariana Grande. You read the news, and you see the sentence – nine days – and you have…

By Yulia Tulegenova The Oscar conversation has started. The lists are out. The long, slow, slightly undignified parade of speculation and prediction that takes us from the autumn festivals all the way to a Dolby Theatre stage in March. And every year, you look at these lists of ‘hot tips’, and you have to ask…

By Yulia Tulegenova, Film critic We have a Bruce Springsteen film. Finally. For years, the musical biopic has been churning out these big, glossy cradle-to-grave epics, ticking off the greatest hits and the personal tragedies like items on a shopping list. But Springsteen always felt… different. Too complex, too real, for that kind of treatment.…

By Yulia Tulegenova Another Lars von Trier film lands. And, as always, it doesn’t so much land as crash, leaving a crater. This one’s called The House That Jack Built. On the surface, it’s a film about a serial killer. We’ve all seen films about serial killers. The genre is exhausted. At first, you think, here…

By Anna Zhila Ace Frehley is gone. The Spaceman. And the first thing you think of, of course, is the makeup. The silver stars, the platform boots, the guitar that shoots rockets. The whole ridiculous, brilliant pantomime of it all. Kiss. It was a cartoon, a brand, a lunchbox, before it was ever really a…

By Anna Zhila So the news came through about Baek Se-hee. And immediately, you think of the title of her book. I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. Even now, it’s a perfect sentence. A perfect, heartbreaking, and darkly funny summary of a particular kind of modern despair. The kind where the…

By Yulia Tulegenova So, it’s one of those funny coincidences. The kind that doesn’t feel like a coincidence at all. Two of the most interesting filmmakers in America, Ari Aster and Paul Thomas Anderson, both release major films within weeks of each other. And both films, in their own strange, roundabout ways, are about the…

By Yulia Tulegenova Another Frankenstein is upon us. Guillermo del Toro’s version this time, which means it will be beautiful, and sad, and full of empathy for the monster. Which is a good thing. A necessary corrective, even. Because for two hundred years, we’ve been telling ourselves the wrong story about Frankenstein. The word itself has become…