Category: Lifestyle & Culture

“It’s important to distinguish between beauty, and the notion of ‘pretty,’” says Stefano Rabolli Pansera, the founder and director of St Moritz Art Film Festival. We’re talking in the Swiss town’s Scala cinema: outside, the mountains are dappled with sunlight and the lake water is a clear, bright blue. This is very pretty stuff. In…

In recent years, MDMA had begun to feel like something of a relic. In the midst of the pandemic, dissociative (and ‘unsociable’) drugs – like ketamine and psychedelics – boomed in popularity, while with festivals and clubs temporarily shuttered, the use of party drugs like cocaine and ecstasy nosedived. Even after the lockdown era lifted,…

“It feels like nothing is holding me back now, finally,” says 24-year-old Kristen* from Ohio. A social worker in a children’s hospital, she’s recently been eyeing an upward career move. Earlier this year, she had a nose job to achieve that goal. “My insecurity was to the point that I would dread meeting people for…

In fan environments, there’s a familiar phrase that gets thrown around: “We made the right person famous.” Usually a testament to a pop star’s character, it’s often overused – and admittedly a little parasocial – but it’s the phrase that comes to mind as I lounge on a sofa in the record label’s office with…

I’m staring at a black-and-white body map for “subcutaneous injection sites” from a peptide clinic which, according to the word on the street, has just opened a “huge office in LA”. You won’t find the wellness clinic anywhere online; there’s only a random email to contact, and you have to be personally sent the multi-page…

Last week, Lil Nas X was arrested after allegedly charging at police officers in Los Angeles when they confronted him for walking naked down Ventura Boulevard. The rapper was arraigned today and formally charged with four felonies, and, per TMZ, he pleaded not guilty to the charges. Lil Nas X is being charged with with…

The AmberSide Collection Print Sale13 Images Since it was founded by the Amber Collective in 1977, Newcastle’s Side has shone a spotlight on working-class photography from north west England and beyond. Its accompanying archive, the UNESCO-registered AmberSide Collection, spans over 20,000 photographs and 100 films by local icons and internationally-celebrated artists alike. No surprise, then,…

Back in January, I was setting my goals and resolutions for the year ahead. For almost a decade, I’d given myself annual targets: a certain number of books to read, films to watch, daily step count to hit. I tracked everything using apps on my phone: Goodreads for books, Letterboxd for films, Strava for runs,…

The Garden, Harley Weir28 Images The garden has always been a mythologised space, from the biblical Eden, to the imagined paradise of Arcadia, to the forbidden Garden of Hesperides. All of these spaces are charged with longing in the popular imagination, representing something perfect or utopian, just out of humanity’s grasp. Even in cities like…

2025 Aveda Hair Congress30 Images The 2025 Aveda Beauty Congress was an absolute feast for the eyes. Amidst the Midwest humidity, four days of over-the-top displays of hair innovation took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota, bringing the hair industry’s brightest minds to inspire and educate global hair professionals across the US from August 16 to 19….