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Veteran international TV executive Maria Ishak has launched Mischief International, a Paris- and London-based creative studio specializing in IP development, talent curation, financing, and franchise building.

“Mischief International operates as a creative and production partner, focusing on content that blends cultural relevance with strong commercial potential,” it said on Thursday. “The company works closely with creators, producers and writers at every stage of the development and production process, bringing expertise that includes strategic packaging, international co-financing, and marketing.”

Mischief said its slate already includes a feature documentary with Public Square Films directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker David France, a Finnish drama written by screenwriter Camilla Ahlgren, a feature documentary made with All3Media’s StoryFilms, and a French-English fact-based drama co-produced with Fremantle’s Mintee and U.K.-based Indefinite Films.

“Mischief is focused on backing bold ideas with a clear path to market. Whether through traditional commissioning or bespoke funding models, we’re here to get shows made,” said Ishak. “In today’s complex and challenged landscape, the need for creatively driven strategic partnerships has never been greater. Mischief combines a story-first vision with hands-on expertise in developing, financing, and producing content that resonates with international audiences.”

With more than 25 years of experience across the U.S., U.K., and continental Europe, Ishak’s expertise ranges from content development and co-productions to sales strategy and deal negotiations.

Prior to founding Mischief, she was head of international content and co-productions at Asacha Media Group, part of Fremantle, leading co-production and co-financing strategies for both in-house and third-party projects. “While at Asacha, Ishak was instrumental in identifying and packaging high-value titles such as Cicatriz (Amazon Spain, TVE, Telekom Serbia) and Poe (TF1, starring Freddie Highmore),” Mischief said. “She also helped navigate the deal that saw the Oaktree Capital-backed business acquired by Fremantle in March 2023, after Asacha had become the fourth-largest production group in Europe.”

Ishak has also worked on a range of other titles across scripted and unscripted, including It’s a Sin
(Channel 4/HBO Max), Help (Channel 4/The Forge), Dinosaur (BBC/Two Brothers), The Wave (Arrow
Media), RuPaul’s Drag Race (World of Wonder), and Who Is Ghislaine Maxwell (Roast Beef TV).

In the first half of 2025, she racked up over 55 million views on TikTok and four million likes, mostly from tweens glued to their cellphones. Not bad for an artificial intelligence-generated cartoon ballerina with a cappuccino teacup for a head.

Her name is Ballerina Cappuccina. Her smiling, girlish face is accompanied by a deep, computer-generated male voice singing in Italian — or, at least, some Italian. The rest is gibberish.

She is one of the most prominent characters in the internet phenomenon known as “Italian Brain Rot,” a series of memes that exploded in popularity this year, consisting of unrealistic AI-generated animal-object hybrids with absurdist, pseudo-Italian narration.

The trend has baffled parents, to the delight of young people experiencing the thrill of a new, fleeting cultural signifier that is illegible to older generations.

Experts and fans alike say the trend is worth paying attention to, and tells us something about the youngest generation of tweens.

A nonsensical, AI-generated realm

The first Italian brain-rot character was Tralalero Tralala, a shark with blue Nike sneakers on his elongated fins. Early Tralalero Tralala videos were scored with a curse-laden Italian song that sounds like a crude nursery rhyme.

Other characters soon emerged: Bombardiro Crocodilo, a crocodile-headed military airplane; Lirilì Larilà, an elephant with a cactus body and slippers; and Armadillo Crocodillo, an armadillo inside a coconut, to name a few.

Content creators around the world have created entire storylines told through intentionally ridiculous songs. These videos have proven so popular that they have launched catchphrases that have entered mainstream culture for Generation Alpha, which describes anyone born between 2010 and 2025.

Fabian Mosele, 26, calls themselves an “Italian brain rot connoisseur”. An Italian animator who lives in Germany and works with AI by trade, Mosele created their first Italian brain-rot content in March.

Shortly after, Mosele’s video of Italian brain-rot characters at an underground rave garnered about one million views overnight, they said. It has since topped 70 million.

Even as the hysteria over the absurdist subgenre has slowed, Mosele said the characters have transcended the digital realm and become an indelible part of pop culture.

“It feels so ephemeral,” Mosele said, “but it also feels so real”.

This summer, one of the most popular games on Roblox, the free online platform that has approximately 111 million monthly users, was called “Steal a Brainrot”. The goal of the game, as the title would suggest, is to steal brain rot characters from other players. More popular characters, like Tralalero Tralala, are worth more in-game money.

Sometimes, the games’ administrators — who are also players — cheat to steal the characters, a move called “admin abuse” that sent many kids and teens into a frenzy. One video of a young child hysterically crying over a stolen character has 46.8 million views on TikTok.

It’s not supposed to make sense

In the non-virtual world, some have made physical toy replicas of the characters, while others have created real-life plays featuring them.

The nonsensical songs have at times gestured to real-world issues: One clip of Bombardiro Crocodilo sparked outrage for seemingly mocking the war in Gaza.

But ultimately, the majority of videos are silly and absurd.

Mosele said Italian brain-rot consumers largely don’t care about how the images relate to what is being said or sung. They often don’t even care to translate the nonsensical Italian to English.

“It’s funny because it’s nonsense,” Mosele said.

“Seeing something so dark, in a way, and out of the ordinary, that breaks all the norms of what we would expect to see on TV — that’s just super appealing”.

The rise of brain rot

Italian brain rot didn’t go viral in a vacuum. “Brain rot,” the 2024 Oxford University Press word of the year, is defined as the numbing of an intellectual state resulting from the “overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging material”.

It can also be used to describe the brain-rotting content itself.

Lots of content falls into that category. Consider videos of the game “Subway Surfer” split-screened next to full episodes of television shows, or “Skibidi Toilet,” an animated series featuring toilets with human heads popping out of their bowls.

Those not chronically online might instinctively recoil at the term brain rot, with its vaguely gory connotations, especially as concern about the potential harms of social media for adolescents mounts.

When brain rot was crowned word of the year, Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl said the term speaks to “one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time”.

Emilie Owens, 33, a children’s media researcher, agreed that endless scrolling poses dangers for young people. But she said that the concern about brain rot is misguided.

It’s normal to “view the thing the newest generation is doing with fear and suspicion,” she said, pointing to how past generations have had similar concerns about the detrimental effects of comic books, television, and even novels at one time.

Concerns about brain rot — that it is unproductive and pointless — actually reveal a great deal about their appeal, Owens said. Brain rot is an acute rejection of the intense pressures on young people to self-optimise.

“It’s very normal for everyone to need to switch their brains off now and again,” she said.

Manchester is a city so associated with grey skies that the City third kit this season features raindrops. But this week the colour was dialled up to 10 as Manchester fashion week – the first in 10 years – kicked off.

Drew Kent, a designer who trained at Central Saint Martins and whose clothes have been worn by comedian Joe Lycett and the Scissor Sisters, was the first show on the schedule, showing in a large market and event space in the city’s Castlefield district. Focusing on Kent’s trademark crochet knitting, the collection was a riot of pinks and purples, featuring oversized hats, giant sequins and fluffy cardigans. “It’s an extension of my wardrobe,” said Kent ahead of the show. “It’s all about my childhood and me dressing up like Action Men in Barbie’s clothes.” With New York fashion week set to start on Thursday, such pronouncements could be seen as an appetiser for fashion editors.

The timing is notable, coming just a week before London fashion week and shortly after Laura Weir, the new CEO of the British Fashion Council, announced a wider push to shift the focus of the industry away from London. Weir has initiated City Wide, a series of talks and events around the country open to the public in the run-up to London fashion week, with Manchester featured, along with Liverpool and Newcastle. There are additional events in Manchester this week – one at Vivienne Westwood’s store and another with Manchester evening wear designer Nadine Merabi.

Gemma Gratton, the executive producer, says this year’s Manchester fashion week is very much a “proof of concept”, one she hopes will put the event on the radars of the powers that be. Shows were attended by industry figures, fashion writers, educators and students, and some events were open to the public. Unlike London fashion week, this event has been financed entirely by private sponsorship.

“We approached [local government] three times and [received] ‘wet promises’,” Gratton says. “I can understand why certain institutes and organisations in the city are taking a more measured approach, because they had their fingers burned last time with other organisers. It’s just showing them that we’ve got a real, solid team of highly professional organisers and people in industry who are going to deliver an exceptional event.”

The previous iteration of Manchester fashion week was sponsored by Missguided, one of the fast-fashion brands that call the city home. That’s all changed this year, with a new take focused around sustainability. Kent’s collection was made from sustainable materials. “We’re not accepting any sponsorship from people who don’t align with our own business values,” says Gratton. “We’ve been approached by two of the really big fast-fashion brands in the city – one of them has been absolutely banging our door down. We need that money, but we can’t accept it.”

Instead, the focus is on a sustainable future for the fashion industry geared around a programme of events that incorporates catwalk shows such as Kent’s but also workshops and talks covering greenwashing, streetwear, and Manchester’s place in culture and music. London fashion week is not a competitor, says Gratton: “We want to collaborate with them. London’s more the glitzy glamour runway. We want to put a strong emphasis on education.”

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Still, Manchester’s fashion heritage is worth the spotlight of a fashion week. John Higginson, CEO of media partner Eco Age, points to Private White VC, the outerwear brand that has roots dating back nearly 100 years, as well as Manchester’s 200-year-plus involvement in the textile industry. There are, of course, a lot of problems within that history – one workshop will look at colonial legacies in fashion’s supply chain.

Higginson says the event is also a space to showcase a different take on style from that in the capital. “It’s a celebration of all the creativity in the north of England,” he argues. “In London, we tend to not really get dressed up for a lot of things – but you go to Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester: every Friday night people dress up to the nines, and it’s really great to see.”

Wayne Hemingway, who founded the popular 1990s label Red or Dead, grew up in “the satellite of Manchester”, he says, and the city provided a grounding for where he went next: “It was a place that helped me to understand culture and get into the creative industries. I would not have become a designer without having a city on my doorstep like that.”

Hemingway, who is participating in a talk about recent cultural moments, has reservations about how much impact Manchester fashion week can have, especially with London fashion week already being so established in the UK. “There isn’t the time for the fashion editors to do it; buyers haven’t got that budget to go around the world,” he says. “But there is a positioning in the media for Manchester to be a fashion city of importance.”

Kent, who is from Liverpool, struggled during his time studying at Central Saint Martins. “Sometimes I felt like the only working-class person in that building,” he says. In the end, he moved home after graduating. “It’s just far too expensive to be a designer there,” he says of London. He believes Manchester fashion week could be a platform for other creatives like him: “It’s showing that you don’t have to live in London – you don’t have a massive amount of funds behind you to create and be original with what you design.”

Mikaela Strauss, the songwriter and producer who records as King Princess, describes her new album Girl Violence as “almost like a ‘ha ha’ to toxic masculinity”, although not in the way you may initially think. Informed by the drama and infighting that she suggests is inherent in many lesbian communities, Girl Violence touches on the idea that “in a world full of physical violence and anger and war and hypermasculinity, this is the really crazy violence that’s under the surface, that’s subliminal and emotional and thoughtful”, she says. She smirks a little, over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn: “You think that you’re the proprietor of the violence. [But] it’s the girls.”

Girl Violence is the third King Princess album, and the most fully formed. It represents something of a clean break for 26-year-old Strauss, who went viral aged 19 with her debut single 1950, a plush but covertly bitter anthem about a complex queer romance. That single, released on Mark Ronson’s Sony imprint Zelig, broke through to the US charts and established Strauss as a pop sensation in waiting.

But the music she released after 1950 – her gorgeous, unburdened 2019 debut album Cheap Queen and its knottier, more rock-inspired 2022 follow-up Hold On Baby – suggested that, perhaps, Strauss was a more interesting and ambitious artist than that “next big thing” tag allowed for. Girl Violence is her first album on the independent Section1; signing with the label, she says, made her realise that the ideas she had about indies were far from the truth. “Artists are told indie labels have no money … that they’re not going to be able to market you, all these things,” she says. “The reality is, that’s complete bullshit. Indie labels are innovative: they can be even more generous with their spending than majors because they are interested in making the best art possible.”

Although she cherishes her new creative freedom, Strauss doesn’t hide the fact that it was hard to experience such huge success very early in her career, only for it to lessen somewhat. “I’m a simple girl – I want to be famous, you know? It was a bit of a punch to the tit, but I don’t regret my decisions or my music at all,” she says. “I refuse to pity myself or feel disappointed for what does commercially well and what doesn’t. Fuck that: this isn’t a race, it’s a marathon, and I want to have a career for the rest of my life. I am a tortoise. You can’t kill me.”

She says that it’s a common fault of the industry that artists carry so much expectation so early in their careers. “For anyone who’s experienced a career high with their first song, that is not a place you want to be. It is tough,” she says. “People then hold you to the standard of something you wrote in your dorm room when you were 18, you know? It’s not realistic. That song blew up completely arbitrarily.”

Strauss has spent the past few years reckoning with the huge upheaval of her early success. Two years ago, she moved back to her home city of New York after a stint in Los Angeles; she enjoyed parts of the west coast, but missed “the diversity of New York; there’s just cool, constant events and happenings. In LA, I was just really excited that people were paying attention to me, so I kind of partied my way through and luckily found some incredible friendships. But [it was] a lot of transience, a lot of me out raging. I don’t know, LA is good for that, if that’s your scene: just going to parties and meeting people and talking and doing coke. I did that for four years, and then I was like: I need daytime friends.”

There was a moment, after moving back to New York, when Strauss felt as if she had fallen out of love with making music, in part because she “stopped thinking about what I actually liked and enjoyed”, and was instead “focused on what was gonna appease the label”. Salvation came in the form of her first acting role: a part in the second season of mystery series Nine Perfect Strangers, which stars Nicole Kidman as a sinister Russian therapist. Filming in Germany for six months, the musician slowly began to feel more energised about art. “I took so much from the acting experience and brought it back into making my record; it taught me to be silly and less precious,” she says. “You have to relinquish so much control when you’re acting: you do your takes, some are shit, some are not. But at the end of the day, you’re not constructing the show, you don’t have the control. And I think a lot of my issues around music were about feeling this sense of control over myself.”

When she got back to New York, Strauss holed up in a Brooklyn studio owned by her recording engineer father, and began to shape Girl Violence without any outside influence from a label. “The only people who were sharing their opinion in the studio was me, and producers Jake [Portrait] and Joe [Pincus], and maybe my dad if he walked in and heard something he didn’t like – but it was mostly the three of us.” She embraced the idea that “all that matters is what I think and what these two guys think. It forced me to make decisions for myself musically.”

Strauss describes the resulting record as a “guidebook” for people trying to understand “different iterations of girl violence”, which may be a side of the lesbian community that many don’t see. “I am baffled by the level of chaos – it’s inspiring. And I’m someone who loves reality TV and drama and The L Word,” she says. Strauss tentatively describes herself as a “reformed” member of the “girl violence community”. “I have been a chaotic lesbian since I was 14 years old. My worst moments? There’s too many to count.”

That reform has been another big part of the past few years for Strauss. “I’ve spent my entire life dating women and having it be hectic and chaotic and painful; I thought love is pain, that’s what I’ve always believed,” she says. She began to feel that she was “horny for being sad”, then began to ask herself: “Why? Can I be horny for being happy? Can I be horny for being safe? For being respected? Can I be horny for being comfortable, instead of equating my horniness to damage and chaos and danger?”

In the end, she found out that “you can be horny for all the good stuff, but it is like an unworking; you have to unwork that in your brain and break down why. That was part of making this record: why do we want what we want as lesbians? Why are we obsessed with being sad?

“I had to really think about how I was presenting myself emotionally. If I was walking through the world needing the validation of a partner to tell me that I’m good, that’s issue number one,” she continues. “And I had to sit down with myself and be like: who am I alone, without anybody? So that was a lot of therapy. And then I guess it was also just looking at myself in the mirror and realising I’ve been dating the same type of girl since I was 14 years old. Never again.”

That self-reflection is borne out in Girl Violence, which adds new depth and complexity to Strauss’s punchy, sneakily virtuosic pop sensibility. Strauss suggests that this new zone, unburdened by commercial expectation, is exactly where she should have been all along. “Commercial success being the standard of success is tough, and I think that it’s really easy to fall into that trap of comparison. I just don’t want to be there: I want to be me, and I want to make the music I make,” she says. “I’m not at a label where they show me pie charts about how well or not well I’m doing: they love the record and we’re having a lot of fun.

“That’s what I wanted. I shouldn’t be emo and weird and comparing myself,” she says. “I’m 26 – I should be having fun.”

The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the junior partners in Germany’s conservative-led coalition government, have tapped a new candidate for the Constitutional Court, according to the DPA news agency.

The proposed candidate is reportedly Sigrid Emmenegger, who has served as a judge at the Federal Administrative Court in the eastern city of Leipzig since 2021.

Coalition leaders “have each been able to gain a very positive impression of Dr. Emmenegger in personal discussions,” said a letter cited by DPA that was addressed to the SPD parliamentary groups and the conservative bloc of Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The news comes following a political uproar in July when the SPD’s previous nomination for the court, law professor Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, was rejected by conservative elements over her support of liberal abortion laws.

The dispute led to a postponement of a vote on the top court appointments, and Brosius-Gersdorf later withdrew her candidacy, with the whole affair calling the stability of the coalition into question.

Although appointments to the rarely cause political fights, theyrequire a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which means cross-party consensus is essential.

A new vote to confirm Emmenegger and two other candidates for the Karlsruhe-based court is expected later in September. 

To have the candidates accepted, the government will require support from the Greens and The Left Party, as all mainstream parties reject cooperation with the largest opposition group, the far-right Alternative for Germany.