Nothing in the world is quieter when the silence falls over a room when an officiant says the words “speak now or forever hold your peace.” Everyone looks at the floor. Someone's aunt coughs. Nothing happens. That silence is the entire reason the line survives; it is four seconds of free suspense in an otherwise scripted event, and we have all been quietly hoping someone would ruin it.

Just like every other alternative kid in the 2010s, I have been obsessed with Dan and Phil for the majority of my childhood and teenage years. For as long as I can remember, I’ve just felt an intrinsic pull towards the pair as I watched them grow bigger and bigger while I fell deeper into my obsession with them.

Like most British people growing up in the 2000s, I had harboured a hatred for Jamie Oliver before I could even read. His healthy eating campaign in schools, which began in 2005, eventually led to promises from Prime Minister Tony Blair and official legislation in 2008 banning junk food in primary and secondary schools. Although his actions meant I could no longer clog my arteries into obesity on a crisp Tuesday lunchtime in 2012...

The phrase is a joke, but it’s also an accurate description of a viewing experience. You watch a woman make a series of decisions that get worse and worse, and you have a wonderful time.

A friend of mine once explained her boyfriend to me over brunch the way you’d explain a sensible car purchase. He wasn’t her usual thing, she said. But that was sort of the point. He’d know what he had. He wouldn’t get complacent. She said this with the calm of someone reading out a weather forecast, and then she ate a piece of toast.

You’ve finished the thing you were watching. You don’t want to start a series. You want someone clever to talk at you for a while about something you didn’t know you cared about: the history of the corset, why every girl on your feed now has the same slicked-back bun, what actually happened to the it-girl.

We all have that one show. The one we put on when reality becomes mildly offensive. The one we watch curled up in a dressing gown with a cup of tea, demolishing aggressively spicy ramen like it’s a form of self-harm, procrastinating when we’re meant to be revising, or (most dangerously) waiting for him to text back.

It has been nearly five years since the world collectively forgot the boy beneath the mask. When Spider-Man: No Way Home ended, Peter Parker was left entirely alone - stripped of his friends, his family, and his identity. Going into Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the most pressing question wasn't about which costumed supervillain our friendly neighbourhood web-slinger would have to punch next, but rather, what was actually left of the hero underneath the spandex?

charli xcx has spent the better part of her career making pop music that never quite fit the mold of the mainstream, even as she edged closer and closer to it, until eventually she simply was the mainstream. on music, fashion, film, she sounds far less interested in recreating that moment than picking apart what it costs to survive one. if brat was the sound of becoming a cultural icon in real time, this album is more interested in what happens after the culture stops moving

Gilmore Girls merch has colonised autumn. We investigate why the pyjamas arrive in August, who is actually profiting, and whether owning a Luke’s Diner mug makes you tacky. It is the first week of August. The sun is still out, nobody has thought about a coat, and yet the shops have already filled up with burgundy pyjamas printed with pictures of a fictional gazebo in Connecticut.

Last weekend, two of the five biggest films in cinemas were built on stories roughly 2,800 years old. One was Christopher Nolan's three-hour adaptation of The Odyssey, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm for a reported $250 million. The other was a filmed recording of a West End musical about Orpheus, Eurydice and a bad marriage in the underworld.

“Ask a child to draw a car and he will certainly draw it red.” That quote from Enzo Ferrari has always resonated with me, especially after former F1 driver Sebastian Vettel’s claim that “everyone is a Ferrari fan” even if they “say they aren’t”. I hate to admit it, but he’s right. I’ve never outwardly called myself a Ferrari fan- choosing to support RedBull and Williams instead- but something Ferrari’s two wins this year have made me jump out of my seat with joy.

Somewhere in the last few years, reading quietly became cool again. Actual, physical, dog-eared-paperback reading, not just the Kindle-in-secret kind. Bookshops that were meant to be dying out are opening in record numbers, teenagers are picking Colleen Hoover over their phones (well, sometimes both at once), and “what are you reading” has become a genuine icebreaker rather than something only your English teacher asked.

Lana Del Rey has never done anything the simple way, and this week she proved it again. After years of speculation, false starts and no fewer than three title changes, fans expected one album. Instead, they got two.

There is a very specific feeling Katie Dippold has been chasing her whole career. She traces it back to a haunted house on the Long Branch boardwalk in New Jersey—one she was far too young to be inside. She remembers screaming. She remembers laughing so hard she could barely breathe. She remembers those two things happening at exactly the same time.

Some break-ups stay contained to the people involved. This one has implications for the next Taylor Swift album, whatever Sabrina Carpenter does next, and possibly the entire emotional register of mainstream pop for the next few years. That is not an exaggeration. It is just what happens when the man who has shaped the sound of a decade’s worth of heartbreak anthems ends up living through one himself.

When the new cinematic DC Universe officially launched its flagship hero back into the sky, the world looked up in awe. Superman was exactly what audiences and critics had been begging for over the last decade: a pitch-perfect execution of the classic superhero mythos. It deserved every single ounce of the hype it received. It was a triumph of modern blockbuster filmmaking that knew precisely what it was. But less than a year later, the skies have darkened over Metropolis.

You know the feeling. Endless fluorescent-lit corridors. Carpet that smells faintly of damp. A room that should have an exit but somehow doesn’t.

There was a brief, glorious window, roughly 1995 to 2004, when Hollywood decided the Middle Ages didn’t need to be grim. No mud-caked realism, no muted colour palettes, no dragons brooding in the rain. Instead we got glitter eyeshadow under coronets, jousting tournaments soundtracked by classic rock, and castles that looked like they’d been decorated by a teenager with a Claire’s Accessories card.

Christopher Nolan’s three-hour, IMAX-only, star-stuffed adaptation is finally in cinemas, and there’s a good chance you’re going in having last thought about Homer during a English lesson you mostly slept through. Good news: the actual plot of The Odyssey is somehow both messier and more entertaining than anything a school syllabus let on. Here’s what happens, minus the ancient Greek and minus three years of your life reading it properly (I did so I’m here to explain it to yo