"Dear L.N.," Epstein begins the letter, which was postmarked Aug. 13, 2019, three days after the financier's body was found in his Manhattan Detention Complex cell.
The Department of Justice posted a video that seemed to show Jeffrey Epstein taking his own life before clarifying that it was a fake and then removing it. Is there a MAGA civil war brewing? Conservative voices are sniping at each other will this impact Trump initiatives? DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has upped the cash...
Son of jailed former Brazilian president says spokesperson for ‘national symbol’ sandals is ‘openly leftwing’
Leaderless since its figurehead was jailed for attempting a coup, Brazil’s far right has found a new nemesis: the iconic flip-flop brand Havaianas, which has been “cancelled” by Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters over a television advert.
The controversy stems from the actor Fernanda Torres – the star of I’m Still Here, the Brazilian film that won an Oscar for best international feature – saying in the ad that she hoped audiences would not start 2026 “on the right foot”, but “with both feet”.
I would never want them to feel that they had been naughty if I couldn’t afford their gifts one year
In my house, Christmas Day looks very normal. My boys will wake me up at the crack of dawn then tumble downstairs, falling over each other, to find presents under the tree. As the tearing of wrapping paper cross-fades into screams of excitement, for a moment, everything feels exactly as it should. Except for one subtle difference: my children have never believed in Santa.
This isn’t the result of an “I don’t want to lie to my children” ideology or some Scroogist attempt to be different. It’s a deliberate choice I have made, one that is rooted in fear. Behind the fairy lights and goodwill of Christmas lurk financial demands that many families cannot meet. According to a YouGov poll for debt charity Step Change earlier this month, about one in three adults with children will struggle to afford Christmas this year. For many, the festive season brings anxiety, overdrafts and guilt rather than joy.
Matt Taylor is a writer, music producer and author of the Underclass Hero Substack newsletter
The 1960 film about a downtrodden insurance worker and his burgeoning crush is full of staccato repartee and unforgettable jokes. It’s barely aged a day
For romantic comedies and Christmas movies alike, a little misery can go a long way. No one understood this balancing act more than Billy Wilder, whose films ran the gamut from bottomless cynicism (Ace in the Hole) to gender-bending farce (Some Like it Hot). His 1960 film The Apartment splits the difference.
Like another yuletide classic, Carol, the film finds inspiration in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which depicts an extramarital affair briefly consummated in the bed of a friend’s apartment. In an old interview, Wilder says he was compelled by a character “who comes back home and climbs into the warm bed the lovers just left”, and so The Apartment’s hero, CC “Bud” Baxter, was born.
She won an Emmy for her electric performance in the Netflix smash hit, but the casting process wasn’t exactly hiccup-free. The actor opens up about a year of success, struggle – and how she nearly became a footballer
For a while, Erin Doherty ignored Stephen Graham’s calls. Not deliberately, she stresses with a laugh. “I’m just really bad at my phone. I’m such a technophobe, and he knew that,” she says. They had made the Disney+ show A Thousand Blows together, in which Doherty plays an East End crime boss in Victorian London, and Graham had talked about an idea he wanted to dramatise, about a teenage boy who is catastrophically radicalised by online misogyny. A couple of months after they’d wrapped A Thousand Blows, Graham and his wife and producing partner, Hannah Walters, kept trying to get in touch. “I was getting voice notes from him and Hannah being like, ‘Erin, pick up your phone!’” Doherty’s girlfriend told her to ring him back and Graham offered her the role in Adolescence. She said yes on the spot, without reading the script.
Since it was screened on Netflix in March, Adolescence has had nearly 150m views. It sparked a huge cultural conversation; it was shown in secondary schools and its creators were invited to Downing Street. Did they have any idea it would become such a phenomenon? “No, and I’m not sure you’re supposed to,” says Doherty when we speak. She is chatty and down-to-earth, even in the year her career went stellar. As well as starring in A Thousand Blows, her role in Adolescence – as Briony Ariston, a psychologist – won her an Emmy for best supporting actress. “But you do know when you’re a part of something that’s good and deserves to be seen, and we knew that about it. I think because it came from such a genuine place, a place of real purity and rawness, it [fed into] the making of it. From day one, it had that electricity.”
Throughout his career, Al Chapman has spent several months cooking “on ice” – that is, in Antarctica. During the summer of 2021-22, the chef was one of three kitchen crew stationed at Scott Base, New Zealand’s only Antarctic research station. The dining hall was the hub of social activity, serving breakfast, morning tea, lunch and dinner for up to 85 people at its peak. It’s like working in a restaurant, says Chapman – one where you can sometimes see penguins from the kitchen.
Speaking of penguins: Chapman is adamant they aren’t eaten, unlike in the early days of Antarctic exploration. Not just because they’re protected under the Antarctic treaty, or that starvation is no longer a serious concern; Chapman says it’s important to serve food people like, especially when they’re working in such an isolated part of the world, in extreme conditions.
The beautiful despair of Cameron Winter, the perfectly imperfect life of Lily Allen, the maximalist R&B of Dijon and more: here’s what our readers have had on heavy rotation • The 50 best albums of 2025
The production is uniquely rhythmic and layered, the instrumental performances are all pretty bulletproof, and Cameron Winter’s writing is just ridiculously good. He is able to show us beauty and despair, and the beauty in despair and the despair in beauty. The best track to me is Islands of Men, which builds over this hypnotic instrumental while Winter sings about isolation and self-illusion. Other highlights would be the title track and Half Real, which feels like a dizzy, intoxicated folk song. Geese are the next big thing. Freddie, 18, Surrey
Photos shared on McKenzie-McHarg’s Instagram page have been filled with emotional tributes from colleagues and fans, with many sharing their devastation and grief at the former star’s sudden death.
The actor has been doing it all to sell his 50s-set ping-pong epic but, as a year of A-list flops shows, there’s no formula for guaranteed success
On 15 November, without prior announcement, one of the defining comedies of the year was posted to Timothée Chalamet’s Instagram account. Captioned only “video93884728.mp4”, the 18-minute video at first appeared to be a leaked Zoom call in which the Oscar-nominated actor pitched marketing ideas for the movie Marty Supreme to bemused staff at the indie production house A24. It might take a few minutes, and at least one shock interjection of “schwap!” from the very serious-seeming star, to realize that it’s a joke. Well, sort of – the meta video, in which an egomaniacal Chalamet proposes they “highlight international cooperation” by painting both the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower a “very specific shade orange”, satirizes the tedium of movie marketing desperate to get people in seats, while also introducing a harebrained marketing strategy that’s unabashedly thirsty to get people in seats.
The “leak” heralded an unconventional and extremely committed press campaign for Josh Safdie’s 50s-set ping-pong epic that has turned movie marketing – so often formulaic, cloying or apathetic – into eye-catching performance art. “Movie marketing is trying to be passive, trying to be chic,” Chalamet says in the video, for which he wrote the script. “We’re not trying to be chic.”
In previous episodes, the "Life of a Showgirl" singer opened up about other emotional moments during the Eras Tour, including her breakups from Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy.
In previous episodes, the "Life of a Showgirl" singer opened up about other emotional moments during the Eras Tour, including her breakups from Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy.
Ownership of Frauen-Bundesliga is being taken over by the clubs, who want to keep pace with game in England
“The reason we started this whole process was a fear of losing more and more the connection to the top,” says Katharina Kiel, the head of women’s football at Eintracht Frankfurt.
Alongside her role at one of Germany’s more successful women’s football teams, Kiel was this month elected president of the new Women’s Bundesliga Association, after all 14 clubs agreed to split from the German Football Federation (DFB) and form their own committee to take ownership of the league to further commercialise and grow it, with the 2027-28 campaign a targeted start date.