Just like any other member of Gen Z, thanks to a social media diet of BetterHelp ads and trigger warnings, I am pretty fluent in therapy speak. So the other night, while watching a Netflix documentary on Ozempic, I found myself thinking about how the return of 2000s fashion, coinciding with a renewed obsession with skinniness, felt like too much of a coincidence, especially given how much skinniness dominated that era the first time around. The more I looked into it, the more

For a long time, Molly Burnett understood filmmaking through a fairly traditional lens. As an actor, it was: Get the audition. Get the role. Build the career. She grew up watching Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and Halle Berry and imagining that kind of trajectory for herself. But as the entertainment industry shifted from films toward “content,” and the pandemic, strikes and changing economics accelerated that transition, Burnett began questioning how much of her career she wan

For most of my life, I thought love worked like a promotion. The older I got, the more successful I became, the more I knew myself, the more beautiful and confident I felt, surely I would become more lovable too. There was always something else I could become, and I was strangely convinced that love was waiting for me at the finish line. So I kept becoming. I became more ambitious, more independent, more outspoken, more comfortable with myself. I thought I was building a bett

Hot girl pickles. Man Cereal. Beer Girl. Somehow, even the most ordinary things we consume started developing a gender identity. It is easy to dismiss this as another quirk of internet culture. Of course a pickle company wants to call its product something with ‘hot girl’ in the name. Of course a cereal brand wants to appeal specifically to men. We live in an era where everything needs a personality before it can become content. But the sudden return of aggressively gendered

At the 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the women took the runway, the microphone, the fantasy bra, and perhaps something much bigger: the right to define what being a woman looks like. I watched the 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show last night, and I kept coming back to one thought: where the hell were the men? Not the men in the audience. They were there, of course, watching and cheering. Timothée Chalamet, for instance, was there to watch Kylie Jenner make her

We scroll, react and forget. This is the critical thinking we're practising these days. We can even scroll past genocide the same way we scroll past a shoe advert. Take Afghan women, for example. Weeks ago, this was the only topic people were sharing on their socials. Guess what? This has been happening for five years. Women banned from school, from raising their voices in public, from leaving home without a male relative at their side, barely break through the algorithm befo

I have read every eldest daughter essay on the internet, and I'd like that on the record before I start criticising them. It's a genre now, not a topic, with conventions, the way locked-room mysteries are a genre. Substacks that publish nothing else. An audio clip about being tired since 1998 with hundreds of thousands of videos under it. Tote bags, which is how you know a feeling has completed its journey into a market. I'm not standing outside this thing. I'm deep inside it

I recently got engaged, and the first thing everyone asks is when the wedding is. But they’re really asking something much harder: when will you decide that this is actually forever? The truth is, I don’t even know if I want a wedding. We may be the first generation to enter marriage knowing exactly how it can end, and choosing it anyway. I don’t even need to share the statistics. We all know them. Divorce is not some distant possibility we’ve heard about. We grew up with it.

A crush, by definition, is “a strong but temporary feeling of liking someone romantically”. But in reality, it is a peculiar kind of cruel experiment. Some would even call it a curse. Like Andie Anderson in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and after being a victim of the crush infection for longer than I would like to admit, I decided that, in the same way she explains how to get rid of a man using the typical behaviours that women exhibit and men hate, I would create something

Maybe it's not youth I'm drawn to. Maybe it's the possibility of someone who hasn't yet been convinced that love has to get smaller as you get older. I have reached a rather inconvenient conclusion about myself. I don't think I want to date older men, ever... Actually, let me correct that: I know I don't want to date older men. And before everyone starts preparing their angry little spreadsheets about age gaps, maturity, fertility, emotional intelligence blablabla and

Reading has always existed as a means for me to get out of my own head and go somewhere else. Learning something and, God forbid, developing some empathy for people whose stories are unlike mine are just natural, positive by-products. Regularly reading for pleasure was never something I thought was particularly exceptional until I realised how common it had become for my friends and family to say they hadn't picked up a book in weeks, months or even years.

Everyone goes through pain differently, but there are some experiences that become eerily similar among people who have fallen in love with a narcissist. Different faces, relationships, stories, and somehow you hear the same sentences. Taylor Swift’s Patient Zero feels like one of those sentences made into a song, and watching Dakota Johnson move through the highs, the confusion, the fights, the fear and eventually the physical weight of it, there is an uncomfortable familiar

As adolescents, women are introduced to sex from a very male-centric perspective. It is a world that we will partake in for the rest of our lives but, for some reason, never fully belong to. Sexuality was almost a costume that was given to us from time to time to serve the desires of the male gaze, but we were never really allowed to wear it long enough to understand what it meant. Or what it felt like to us, not to them. Sexuality seemed to inherently belong to men, and it w

There are certain things about the men in our lives that we all seem to encounter at least once. Maybe we just don't talk about them enough. Or maybe we've become so used to them that we've stopped questioning them.

On creative obsession, the pressure to succeed, and why believing in yourself might be the only way to get anywhere. The first time I meet Henry Morris, he's sitting in a Whole Foods somewhere in Oklahoma City. Not a recording studio, not a backstage dressing room, not even a particularly atmospheric café. A Whole Foods. His tour bus, he explains, is somehow