Everyone tells you this as you grow up. Be accommodating. Be understanding. Be patient. Don’t make it awkward. Deal with it. We’ll talk about it later. It’s not a big deal. You’re being emotional. Translation? Shut up and smile. Please don’t make other people uncomfortable by having needs. Stop asking questions. Be respectful. Do as you're told. But we’re never directly told, because that would be absurd. The message, however, is clear: if you want people in your life, be ag

“I’ve always enjoyed her music, but nothing really connected with me personally until this one,” is the statement all over social media after listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. I thought I was the only one under that impression after listening to the first single “drop dead”, but it was suddenly everywhere, as if we were in an episode of Pluribus. The interesting part is that this came from people in their thirties, forties, and beyond. A

No matter where we grew up, we all carry echoes of patriarchal values. Since childhood, we've been taught that a man is the protector of the family, while a woman is supposed to be wise and take care of her hair, nails, and skin with the same level of attention stockbrokers use to analyse the market. And that would be fine, because in 2026 we're already grown adults, fully formed people who supposedly live by different rules. Men cry now, and women make money and build career

Everything is TV now, and it might be one of the reasons we are living through a community recession. In his 2025 essay on the “anti-social century,” journalist Derek Thompson observed something strange about modern media: despite the internet once promising an endless variety of formats, almost every form of media seems to be evolving towards the same destination: a continuous flow of episodic video. The platforms may still have different names, but increasingly, they want u

We talk about reinvention like it’s a rebrand. New city, new job, new person on your arm: some clean before-and-after you can point to and say, there, that’s where the old you ended and someone else began. That’s not how it actually happens. What happens is closer to demolition. Something has to come down before you can even ask what you want to build in its place. For a long time, a lot of us call it healing. The therapy. The books stacked by the bed. The runs that are suppo

As someone who loves to travel and has travelled to many places, the idea of “building a life you don’t want to escape” felt completely foreign to me, almost distant. For the longest time, I didn’t even understand what exactly it meant. Do I need to give up travelling? Or should I just settle down? Should I just accept my life as it is? Should I just not change anything? I think I even feared it, as to me it sounded like a trap: being stuck in one place for your entire life.

There was a time when independence was fashion’s greatest ambition. Before billion-dollar conglomerates, creative directors became celebrities and algorithms could predict next season’s silhouettes months in advance, fashion was built in workshops. I swear! By people?! Around conversations??!! Garments carried the fingerprints of those who made them, not the marketing strategies of those who sold them. Today, that idea feels almost nostalgic… I’m tearing. The global luxury in

Gone are the days when Hollywood glamour shone. Now the studios look tired, the Hollywood sign looks dilapidated, and no one is making good movies anyway. The death of the cinema doesn't just come down to streaming; it's about the death of the star. Marketing firms are throwing millions at trying to revive the traditional celebrity. They're spending fortunes on press tours, but for the most part, Gen Z isn't buying it. The truth is our attention spans are shortening, but tha

I was standing on the train, headphones on, trying to survive the usual rush-hour chaos. There was a woman seated, staring at her phone. I usually make a point of not looking at other people’s screens; I hate when someone does it to me. But this time, something caught my attention. She had received a message. I couldn’t read it, and I wasn’t trying to. What drew me in was her hesitation. She kept trying to type a reply. She would write a word, delete it, tap her fingers again

Picture this: You’ve had a busy day at work. You haven’t had a chance to even look at your phone, let alone post the pics with your friends from over the weekend. After commuting home, making yourself dinner, doing your skincare routine and finally getting into bed later than expected, you get a text from your best friend asking, “Are you awake?” just as you’re about to fall asleep. You know that you are, but you simply don’t have the capacity to let her know you’ll speak to

For a very long time, I thought the vision I once had of marrying three times was actually going to happen. Now, looking back at it, if I even marry once, once will be enough. On building our lives around our jobs and our friends as a response to the dating world, plus not having a belief system. I was recently described by one of my friends as a “trophy wife who’s a star”. I wondered what that meant. I’ve made jokes in the past about being a trophy wife, even though all my f

We’ve glamorised “playing it cool” as effortless, but in reality, it erases boundaries and self-worth. Whether in friendships or something more, I’ve noticed myself constantly playing peacekeeper, the Libra in me wired for balance and diplomacy, avoiding conflict at all costs. The Cool Girl Myth We see it in romantic comedies, where being chill and low-maintenance is portrayed as the key to securing love. Think Andie Anderson in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. We hear it in mus

The new iPhone is exactly what nobody needs or asked for right now. Apple announces the new iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone, with a 7.6-inch internal display designed to give us more room to multitask, work, watch, create and generally do more things on one device. It starts at $1,999, because apparently the financial burden of being permanently connected was not quite enough…

In Spain, there is a famous song called ‘Yo quiero bailar’, which translates to ‘I want to dance’. In the lyrics lies the phrase ‘cuando llega el calor los chicos se enamoran’: when the heat comes, the boys fall in love. As it happens, the summer heat is the key ingredient for the ephemeral act of falling in love and/or indulging in one’s desires. This experience has been coined by TikTok users as having a ‘hot girl summer’: the experience of enjoying oneself during the summe

With Renaissance Fashion x Art Showcase, @LauraMomodu is creating more than an event. She is building a platform rooted in dignity, access, representation, and belief. Renaissance Fashion x Art Showcase was not born from one dramatic moment. For Laura Momodu, it came from years of noticing the same pattern: extraordinary creatives with powerful work, waiting to be seen.

Queer relationships have long modelled forms of connection that mainstream culture struggles to name, let alone practice. Built in a world that rewards avoidance, detachment, and performative independence, queer relational cultures insist on emotional presence, care and truth. Not because queer people are inherently more sensitive or communicative, but because queer love has never had the luxury of autopilot. When your relationships aren’t automatically validated by the world

I find it a hard line to tread: navigating the persona I have created on social media alongside that of my regular corporate job. In both worlds, I have always been quite good at being guarded. I share online in much the same way that I would with colleagues: a little insight, but nothing too revealing; nothing overly emotional; surface-level, with a sprinkle of humour. The perfect recipe for almost all work-based relationships. It is a strange kind of intimacy. Enough inform

Women have spent decades being interrogated about their bodies. Men, comparatively, have been given an extraordinary amount of grace. So why, when the barriers are often different, perhaps even, do I dare say, ‘lower’? Why are so many men perfectly comfortable opting out of taking care of themselves? There is something I've never quite understood about men. We live in a world where women are expected to negotiate with their bodies almost constantly. We menstruate. We get preg

“So what do you do?” I still don’t have a clean answer. I did not leave psychology because it made me miserable. I left because it was going too well. It happened in a gap. There were four months between defending my dissertation and graduating, and a visa hold meant I couldn’t work through any of them. September to January, and for the first time since I was about seventeen, there was nothing to finish, revise, apply for, or prove. I assumed I’d be bored. What happened inste

Ballet has always asked its dancers to fit inside something: a company, a role, a body, a stage. Dasha Schwartz is more interested in what happens when you take those boundaries away. After beginning ballet at five, training at Canada’s National Ballet School and dancing professionally across North America and Europe, Schwartz came to understand both the extraordinary beauty of the art form and the rigidity of the world surrounding it. So she started imagining something diffe

I read one of my old essays recently, and boy, did I cringe hard. I didn’t agree with a great deal of what I wrote and even found myself questioning some of the language I used. But while I am somewhat reluctant to admit it, I think I’m glad that I hate my own work. I guess, in some ways, that means I am growing. In a world where we’ve permitted ourselves to continuously pick things up and abandon them without much thought, staying with something long enough to become agitate

We're not craving nostalgia. We're craving the last time we lived in a shared reality. There was a time when culture unfolded collectively. Millions of people tuned into the same television finale on Sunday night, queued outside cinemas for midnight premieres, and walked into school or work the following morning knowing exactly what everyone would be talking about. Even the early internet, chaotic as it often felt, revolved around common experiences. Viral YouTube videos, Fla

Nora Ephron once said, “Everything is copy”, meaning whatever happens in your life, the extremes, the mundane, is fair game for your art. In fact, she promoted the idea of digging deep into oneself, whether the story is tragic or embarrassing, to use it for a higher purpose. Life’s heartbreaks can be used not only for the benefit of yourself but also for the benefit and entertainment of others. So, what happens if that higher purpose already exists? It’s been originated and

Every era has a preferred spokesperson. The 1950s had the smiling housewife. The 1980s had the celebrities. The 2010s had the influencers. I'm beginning to think the late 2020s will belong to someone else entirely. A few weeks ago I stumbled across Corner, a new maps app with an unusually simple promise: zero ads, zero influencers. Instead of asking Who has the biggest audience? they ask a different question. Who actually knows this place? Their philosophy is almost radical i

As I wandered through the streets of Málaga, absorbing the beauty around me, one question would not leave my mind. When did we stop adding magic to things? Not magic in the grand sense or fantasy. But the small details that make life feel alive. The carved balconies that someone took time to create. The hand-painted tiles. The weathered doors. The cafés that seem to have absorbed decades of conversations into their walls. Details that serve no obvious purpose other than beaut