Hello and welcome to part 86,747,398,464 of the continuing cataloguing via television documentary of the apparently infinite series Ways in Which Largely Men Terrorise Largely Women and Prevent Countless Millions of Them from Living Their Lives in Freedom and Contentment. This one comprises two episodes and is entitled To Catch a Stalker.
It comes from the corporation’s most youth-oriented arm, BBC Three, which mandates a telegenic presenter better versed in sympathy with the programme’s interviewees than interrogation of wider issues, and who has usually come up through the ranks of reality TV rather than journalism. Here, it’s Zara McDermott (Love Island, Made in Chelsea, The X Factor: Celebrity), who previously fronted entries in the infinite series on “revenge porn”, rape culture and eating disorders.
We meet survivors (although this suggests their ordeals are at an end, which for none of them is the case – but to call them victims would be to diminish what McDermott rightly emphasises as their extraordinary strength and endurance) of different forms of stalking.
Jen has endured the obsessive attentions of a man with whom she briefly crossed professional paths during her work for a recruitment company. It began with a few friendly texts and rapidly escalated to bombardment at all hours with insistent messages about their imminent relationship (“I am the guy you’re looking for. You just don’t recognise it”), naked pictures of himself and – as Jen continued not to respond to this stranger – fury. He repeatedly parked in places she was likely to pass and when the police eventually became involved – which has led to four convictions and three prison sentences for the man – they found multiple searches on his computer for pornographic lookalikes of Jen. She is now counting down the days until he is released from his latest stint in jail with dread. As McDermott says: “I don’t know how she sleeps at night.” It’s likely that she doesn’t. Jen shakes with nerves and has a terrible hunted look about her – because that is exactly what is happening to her. She is the prey of a predator who apparently cannot be stopped.
No more, it seems, than any of them can with the current paltry tools at the law’s disposal – presuming you can find someone willing to wield them in the first place. All the women interviewed speak of police reluctance to take their experiences seriously.
Twenty-year-old Isabel, who has moved five times to try to escape the terrifying attentions of her ex-boyfriend, no longer bothers to call the police when she sees a man, whom she assumes to be him, watching her from the alleyway behind her latest home, because they dropped her case when the original investigating officer left. “If you don’t help me, he’s going to kill me,” she told them. Apparently it fell on closed ears. Maybe they thought she was hysterical. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe you can think of a good enough reason for ignoring a young woman and her toddler trapped in their home because a man has decided he will not let her go. “He knows what he’s done,” she says. “And he knows he’s got away with it. So what is he going to do next?” The best safety plan a charity has been able to give her if he forces his way into her home is to drop from her balcony to the car park roof below and from there to the ground – she will not be able to take her son with her – then contact a neighbour or flag down a passing car.
Victims’ (sufferers’, survivors’) family members attest to the fear and anxiety that stalkers induce in them all. Next week, the remit expands to consider the effects of cyberstalking (“Just ignore it” seems to be the most popular recommendation), and continues to document more women’s experiences with the flesh-and-blood kind of stalker, who message their targets 500 times a day and draw their fingers across throats from afar (far enough that they do not get returned to prison for breaching non-molestation orders), and so on and appallingly on.
It is a documentary designed to raise awareness rather than provide answers, but you do long for a little examination of context; for someone to ask whether this would be so prevalent without, say, an existing culture of male entitlement, or within a society that valued women’s lives and freedom as highly as anyone else’s. If we didn’t have a police force known to be as riddled with bad apples and systemic sexism as it is. If, if, if.
Maigret is the first contemporary television adaptation of Georges Simenon’s beloved novels about the streetwise Parisian Chief Inspector Jules Maigret.
Benjamin Wainwright (Belgravia: The Next Chapter, Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim) stars as Jules Maigret, who heads the elite police unit known as La Crim, responsible for investigating all serious crime in and around Paris. Maigret is an unconventional young detective with something to prove, relentless in his investigations, chasing and a matchless knowledge of Paris and its inhabitants.
Stefanie Martini (The Gold, Last Kingdom, Emerald City) stars as Madame Louise Maigret. Blake Harrison (World on Fire, I Hate Suzie Too), Reda Elazouar (Sex Education, Pirates), Kerrie Hayes (The Responder, Criminal Record), Shaniqua Okwok (The Flatshare, It’s a Sin) and Rob Kazinsky (Star Trek: Section 31, Eastenders) make up the “Les Maigrets,” Maigret’s loyal team of detectives, with Nathalie Armin (Showtrial, Juice) as Prosecutor Mathilde Kernavel.
Maigret premieres on Sunday, October 5, 2025 at 9/8c on MASTERPIECE on PBS.
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An enormous shadow hovers over the characters in “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” and it’s the same one that has been dogging composer Alexandre Desplat ever since he was a teenager in Paris.
That shadow? The music of John Williams.
“He’s such a legend for all of us,” says Desplat, 63, on a Zoom call from London, where he’s been burning the midnight oil on the score for Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming “Frankenstein.” “He’s just the only one to follow.”
Like Williams, Desplat is now a grizzled (though painterly handsome) veteran himself, with hundreds of films to his name. He’s already completed three scores this year alone — for the French-Swedish Palme d’Or nominee “Eagles of the Republic,” Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” and this week’s “Jurassic” heavyweight.
He’s also making his North American conducting debut on July 15 in a grand survey of his film career at the Hollywood Bowl, a fitting, if overdue, coronation of his two-decade reign as an A-list composer in America.
When Desplat began scoring Hollywood films in the early 2000s, his music swept in like a breath of fresh French air — elegant, restrained, melodic, idiosyncratic — and the list of filmmakers who sought him out reads like a sizable section of the Criterion Closet: Terrence Malick, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Greta Gerwig.
“He’s the last tycoon of American movie music,” Desplat said in 2010 of his idol John Williams. “He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
His ride-or-die partner is Anderson, who first employed him on “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in 2007 and who teed up Desplat’s first Oscar win with “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” (He’s been nominated eleven times.) May’s “The Phoenician Scheme” marked their seventh collaboration.
“As I started being a film composer, I had my idols in sight — of course Hitchcock and Herrmann, David Lean and [Maurice] Jarre, [François] Truffaut and Georges Delerue,” Desplat told me in 2014. “All these duets were strong and they showed how important the intimacy between a director and a composer would be for both of them. It’s not only good for the film, it’s good for the composers, because these composers actually developed their own style by doing several movies with the same director.”
In a town too often filled with generic, factory-farmed scores, his were like a gourmet French meal, even though he grew up on the same diet of American movies and their iconic scores. The young Desplat was obsessed with U.S. culture — listening to jazz, watching baseball and the Oscars — and he decided he wanted to score movies after he heard “Star Wars” in 1977. Emblazoned on the cover of that iconic black album were the words “Composed and Conducted by John Williams.”
“That,” Desplat told his friend at the time, “is what I want to do.”
It’s fitting and kind of funny that two decades after charming audiences with a delicate, waltzing score for the 2003 Scarlett Johansson prestige picture “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the composer is now promoting a stomping monster score for a blockbuster behemoth starring Johanssson and a bunch of CGI dinosaurs — and tampering with John Williams’ sacred musical DNA.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” isn’t the first time he’s had to brave the T-rex-sized footprints of his hero: Desplat scored the final two films in the “Harry Potter” series, and he was also the first composer on “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” He left the latter when Tony Gilroy took over the project from original director Gareth Edwards, and before composing any notes.
“I went as far as the change of directors and change of plans,” Desplat explains, “and the weeks passing by, and then I had to move on because I wanted to work with Luc Besson” (on 2017’s “Star Wars”-esque “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”).
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Much like his work on “Harry Potter,” Desplat’s odes to Williams in “Rebirth” are more whispers than shouts — though there are a handful of overt declarations of both the iconic anthem and hymn for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dino-masterpiece. More subtle homages arrive in his use of solo piano and ghostly choir, and in the opening three notes of his motif for the team led by Johansson’s character — a tune that almost begins like Williams’ “Jurassic” hymn.
“So there’s a connection,” Desplat says. “I take the baton and I move away from it.”
He composed new leitmotifs for wonder, for adventure, for danger. His score, much like the original, is an amusement park ride full of sudden drops, humor and family-friendly terror, with a few moments of cathartic, introspective relief.
Mostly, Edwards kept pushing him for more hummable motifs.
“When I was tempted to go back to something more abstract — you know, French movie,” Desplat says, winking — “he would just ask me to go back towards John Williams’ inspiration of writing great motifs that you can remember and are catchy.”
Desplat worries this is becoming an extinct art in Hollywood. “I don’t hear much of that in many movies that I watch,” he says. “It’s kind of an ambient texture — which is the easiest thing to create.”
In college, he would listen to the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” score on a loop, and as his own scoring career developed, he was paying keen attention to John Williams’ more intimate chamber scores like “The Accidental Tourist” and “Presumed Innocent” — as well as juggernauts like “Jurassic Park.” Besides the music itself seeping in, he learned that it was important to score every kind of film, no matter how big or small. Williams’ work also taught him “that I could have something elegant, classical, but with some seeds of jazz in the chords or in the way the melody evolves.”
Whenever he hears someone talking dismissively about Williams, Desplat gets defensive. “I want to punch them,” he says, only half kidding.
“He’s the master, what can I say?” Desplat told me in 2010. “He’s the man. He’s the last tycoon of American movie music. So that’s everything said there. He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”
Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in the movie “Jurassic World Rebirth.”
(Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures )
When Desplat received his first Academy Award nomination, for “The Queen” in 2007, the one person who called from Los Angeles to congratulate him was Maurice Jarre, composer of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago.”
Desplat had met the French legend a few times over the years, including an early invitation to a mixing session for the 1990 film, “After Dark, My Sweet.” Desplat was aghast when he saw director James Foley taking away Jarre’s melody and all the various musical elements on the mixing board, save for a simple electronic thump.
The young composer expressed his dismay and Jarre calmly said: “It’s his film. I have to accept that.”
“That’s a lesson that I learned very early on,” Desplat says. “I’ve never forgotten that, because it’s still the same,” he laughs.
He was also warmly received as a young man by Georges Delerue, the great serenader of the French New Wave in films like “Jules and Jim” and “Contempt.” “They were so kind,” Desplat says, “such sweet men, both of them.” (Michel Legrand? Not so much, Desplat says: “He said awful things about me in books.”)
What they all have in common — besides a penchant for composing beautiful music — is the defiant, transatlantic leap from the French film industry where they started to the highest perch in Hollywood. Jarre left Paris in the early 1960s after the enormous success of “Lawrence” and never looked back, forging meaningful partnerships with directors like Peter Weir and Adrian Lyne. Delerue uprooted from Paris to the Hollywood Hills after winning his first Oscar in 1980 and scored a few hits including “Steel Magnolias” and “Beaches.”
“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy,” says Desplat, who has already completed three scores this year. “That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Desplat started professionally in France in 1985 and wrote roughly 50 scores before “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the English-language film that put him on Hollywood’s radar. He continues to do French films amid the summer blockbusters and American art house pictures.
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”
He enjoys the freedom of a big-budget project. “To be able to have a studio say, ‘Go, write what you need to write.’ The director, he wants an orchestra, he wants 95 musicians. Great! They don’t even say anything. You just go and you record. They book the studio. They book the musicians.”
Still, the limitations he trained under gave Desplat some of his greatest strengths: creativity, resourcefulness, speed. He had to orchestrate everything himself, which means his music bears a distinctive fingerprint. And composing for small, sometimes unorthodox ensembles gave his music a clean, transparent signature as opposed to the all-too-typical wall of mud.
He can’t say much about his 100-minute score for “Frankenstein,” which he just finished recording with a giant orchestra and choir at both Abbey Road and AIR Studios, and which comes out on Netflix in November. The reason he does so many films, Desplat proposes, is because he’s lazy.
“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy. That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”
The sequel to the beloved film The Devil Wears Prada is advancing, but one of the characters from the 2006 original movie won’t be in the follow-up.
Monday, it was announced on social media that the movie begins production this week. Filming takes place in New York and Italy. Stars returning from the first film include Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. Meanwhile, Kenneth Branagh has joined the cast for the sequel. However, Adrian Grenier, who played Hathaway’s character’s boyfriend, Nate, in the first movie, will not be in the second film, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
The 2006 movie is based on the book of the same name and follows Andy Sachs (Hathaway) a recent college graduate, working as an assistant for Miranda Priestly, the editor-in-chief of fashion magazine, Runway. Nate (Grenier), complains about her demanding schedule and is often critical of her working in fashion. That leads them to break up.
At the end of the movie, Andy leaves fashion journalism behind to work at a newspaper as viewers see Andy and Nate reconciling and on good terms, again. So, when it came to casting, fans were wondering if the Entourage star was coming back, too.
However, what’s previously been reported is that the upcoming film will see Priestly deal with print magazines struggling. Her other former assistant, Emily (Blunt) is now a powerful advertising executive that works with Runway. Branagh will portray Priestly’s husband, while Tucci will reprise his role of Nigel, Runway‘s art director.
The Devil Wears Prada2 will hit theaters May 1, 2026. Below, see the announcement about production beginning.
The third and final season of hit Korean series Squid Game has broken records to achieve the biggest ever TV launch for Netflix.
Over its first three days, there have been over 60.1m views, a new high for the streamer with over 368.4m hours viewed. The second season launched with 68m views but over a four-day period last December.
It has already become the ninth biggest non-English language season ever with the first and second seasons occupying the top two slots.
Reviews have been mixed to positive with the Guardian’s Rebecca Nicholson calling it “nowhere near as pointed as it was” in previous seasons.
While this has been called the final season, David Fincher has been rumoured to be developing an English language remake for the streamer. The director has worked with Netflix before on political drama series House of Cards, film industry biopic Mank and Michael Fassbender action thriller The Killer. Earlier this year, it was announced that he would work with them once again to direct a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood based on a script by Quentin Tarantino.
The streamer has already found success with competition spin-off Squid Game: The Challenge with a second season on the way.
When asked about future Squid Game projects, series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told Variety that he hadn’t heard anything official yet about a remake.
“If they wanted to do a following season, then I think it’s obvious I would have to participate and lead,” he said. “But if it’s the US version that they’re making, I think sharing of ideas would be enough. I have no intention of being completely hands-on in a project like that. Having said that, if Netflix asks and if I feel like my contribution is needed, then as long as it’s not something that would interfere with whatever I’m working on at that time, I would be happy to provide what they need from me.”
The International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia holds up a mirror to the industry — not only reflecting current priorities and preoccupations, but also projecting an agenda for what might be possible.
Curated by Carlo Ratti, MIT professor of practice of urban technologies and planning, this year’s exhibition (“Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective”) proposes a “Circular Economy Manifesto” with the goal to support the “development and production of projects that utilize natural, artificial, and collective intelligence to combat the climate crisis.”
Designers and architects will quickly recognize the paradox of this year’s theme. Global architecture festivals have historically had a high carbon footprint, using vast amounts of energy, resources, and materials to build and transport temporary structures that are later discarded. This year’s unprecedented emphasis on waste elimination and carbon neutrality challenges participants to reframe apparent limitations into creative constraints. In this way, the Biennale acts as a microcosm of current planetary conditions — a staging ground to envision and practice adaptive strategies.
VAMO (Vegetal, Animal, Mineral, Other)
When Ratti approached John Ochsendorf, MIT professor and founding director of MIT Morningside Academy of Design (MAD), with the invitation to interpret the theme of circularity, the project became the premise for a convergence of ideas, tools, and know-how from multiple teams at MIT and the wider MIT community.
The Digital Structures research group, directed by Professor Caitlin Mueller, applied expertise in designing efficient structures of tension and compression. The Circular Engineering for Architecture research group, led by MIT alumna Catherine De Wolf at ETH Zurich, explored how digital technologies and traditional woodworking techniques could make optimal use of reclaimed timber. Early-stage startups — including companies launched by the venture accelerator MITdesignX — contributed innovative materials harnessing natural byproducts from vegetal, animal, mineral, and other sources.
The result is VAMO (Vegetal, Animal, Mineral, Other), an ultra-lightweight, biodegradable, and transportable canopy designed to circle around a brick column in the Corderie of the Venice Arsenale — a historic space originally used to manufacture ropes for the city’s naval fleet.
“This year’s Biennale marks a new radicalism in approaches to architecture,” says Ochsendorf. “It’s no longer sufficient to propose an exciting idea or present a stylish installation. The conversation on material reuse must have relevance beyond the exhibition space, and we’re seeing a hunger among students and emerging practices to have a tangible impact. VAMO isn’t just a temporary shelter for new thinking. It’s a material and structural prototype that will evolve into multiple different forms after the Biennale.”
Tension and compression
The choice to build the support structure from reclaimed timber and hemp rope called for a highly efficient design to maximize the inherent potential of comparatively humble materials. Working purely in tension (the spliced cable net) or compression (the oblique timber rings), the structure appears to float — yet is capable of supporting substantial loads across large distances. The canopy weighs less than 200 kilograms and covers over 6 meters in diameter, highlighting the incredible lightness that equilibrium forms can achieve. VAMO simultaneously showcases a series of sustainable claddings and finishes made from surprising upcycled materials — from coconut husks, spent coffee grounds, and pineapple peel to wool, glass, and scraps of leather.
The Digital Structures research group led the design of structural geometries conditioned by materiality and gravity. “We knew we wanted to make a very large canopy,” says Mueller. “We wanted it to have anticlastic curvature suggestive of naturalistic forms. We wanted it to tilt up to one side to welcome people walking from the central corridor into the space. However, these effects are almost impossible to achieve with today’s computational tools that are mostly focused on drawing rigid materials.”
In response, the team applied two custom digital tools, Ariadne and Theseus, developed in-house to enable a process of inverse form-finding: a way of discovering forms that achieve the experiential qualities of an architectural project based on the mechanical properties of the materials. These tools allowed the team to model three-dimensional design concepts and automatically adjust geometries to ensure that all elements were held in pure tension or compression.
“Using digital tools enhances our creativity by allowing us to choose between multiple different options and short-circuit a process that would have otherwise taken months,” says Mueller. “However, our process is also generative of conceptual thinking that extends beyond the tool — we’re constantly thinking about the natural and historic precedents that demonstrate the potential of these equilibrium structures.”
Digital efficiency and human creativity
Lightweight enough to be carried as standard luggage, the hemp rope structure was spliced by hand and transported from Massachusetts to Venice. Meanwhile, the heavier timber structure was constructed in Zurich, where it could be transported by train — thereby significantly reducing the project’s overall carbon footprint.
The wooden rings were fabricated using salvaged beams and boards from two temporary buildings in Switzerland — the Huber and Music Pavilions — following a pedagogical approach that De Wolf has developed for the Digital Creativity for Circular Construction course at ETH Zurich. Each year, her students are tasked with disassembling a building due for demolition and using the materials to design a new structure. In the case of VAMO, the goal was to upcycle the wood while avoiding the use of chemicals, high-energy methods, or non-biodegradable components (such as metal screws or plastics).
“Our process embraces all three types of intelligence celebrated by the exhibition,” says De Wolf. “The natural intelligence of the materials selected for the structure and cladding; the artificial intelligence of digital tools empowering us to upcycle, design, and fabricate with these natural materials; and the crucial collective intelligence that unlocks possibilities of newly developed reused materials, made possible by the contributions of many hands and minds.”
For De Wolf, true creativity in digital design and construction requires a context-sensitive approach to identifying when and how such tools are best applied in relation to hands-on craftsmanship.
Through a process of collective evaluation, it was decided that the 20-foot lower ring would be assembled with eight scarf joints using wedges and wooden pegs, thereby removing the need for metal screws. The scarf joints were crafted through five-axis CNC milling; the smaller, dual-jointed upper ring was shaped and assembled by hand by Nicolas Petit-Barreau, founder of the Swiss woodwork company Anku, who applied his expertise in designing and building yurts, domes, and furniture to the VAMO project.
“While digital tools suited the repetitive joints of the lower ring, the upper ring’s two unique joints were more efficiently crafted by hand,” says Petit-Barreau. “When it comes to designing for circularity, we can learn a lot from time-honored building traditions. These methods were refined long before we had access to energy-intensive technologies — they also allow for the level of subtlety and responsiveness necessary when adapting to the irregularities of reused wood.”
A material palette for circularity
The structural system of a building is often the most energy-intensive; an impact dramatically mitigated by the collaborative design and fabrication process developed by MIT Digital Structures and ETH Circular Engineering for Architecture. The structure also serves to showcase panels made of biodegradable and low-energy materials — many of which were advanced through ventures supported by MITdesignX, a program dedicated to design innovation and entrepreneurship at MAD.
“In recent years, several MITdesignX teams have proposed ideas for new sustainable materials that might at first seem far-fetched,” says Gilad Rosenzweig, executive director of MITdesignX. “For instance, using spent coffee grounds to create a leather-like material (Cortado), or creating compostable acoustic panels from coconut husks and reclaimed wool (Kokus). This reflects a major cultural shift in the architecture profession toward rethinking the way we build, but it’s not enough just to have an inventive idea. To achieve impact — to convert invention into innovation — teams have to prove that their concept is cost-effective, viable as a business, and scalable.”
Aligned with the ethos of MAD, MITdesignX assesses profit and productivity in terms of environmental and social sustainability. In addition to presenting the work of R&D teams involved in MITdesignX, VAMO also exhibits materials produced by collaborating teams at University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Politecnico di Milano, and other partners, such as Manteco.
The result is a composite structure that encapsulates multiple life spans within a diverse material palette of waste materials from vegetal, animal, and mineral forms. Panels of Ananasse, a material made from pineapple peels developed by Vérabuccia, preserve the fruit’s natural texture as a surface pattern, while rehub repurposes fragments of multicolored Murano glass into a flexible terrazzo-like material; COBI creates breathable shingles from coarse wool and beeswax, and DumoLab produces fuel-free 3D-printable wood panels.
A purpose beyond permanence
Adriana Giorgis, a designer and teaching fellow in architecture at MIT, played a crucial role in bringing the parts of the project together. Her research explores the diverse network of factors that influence whether a building stands the test of time, and her insights helped to shape the collective understanding of long-term design thinking.
“As a point of connection between all the teams, helping to guide the design as well as serving as a project manager, I had the chance to see how my research applied at each level of the project,” Giorgis reflects. “Braiding these different strands of thinking and ultimately helping to install the canopy on site brought forth a stronger idea about what it really means for a structure to have longevity. VAMO isn’t limited to its current form — it’s a way of carrying forward a powerful idea into contemporary and future practice.”
What’s next for VAMO? Neither the attempt at architectural permanence associated with built projects, nor the relegation to waste common to temporary installations. After the Biennale, VAMO will be disassembled, possibly reused for further exhibitions, and finally relocated to a natural reserve in Switzerland, where the parts will be researched as they biodegrade. In this way, the lifespan of the project is extended beyond its initial purpose for human habitation and architectural experimentation, revealing the gradual material transformations constantly taking place in our built environment.
To quote Carlo Ratti’s Circular Economy Manifesto, the “lasting legacy” of VAMO is to “harness nature’s intelligence, where nothing is wasted.” Through a regenerative symbiosis of natural, artificial, and collective intelligence, could architectural thinking and practice expand to planetary proportions?
Khloé Kardashian is setting the record straight — and giving credit where it’s due — about the plastic surgery and cosmetic work she’s had done after a London-based surgeon rattled off a list of suspected surgeries in honor of the reality star’s 41st birthday.
Dr. Jonathan Betteridge had a rather suspicious mind: He told followers in an Instagram Reel that he believed Kardashian had undergone a brow lift, an upper-eyelid lift, a nose job, a chin implant, a facelift and a neck lift for “overall tightness and definition” and lip filler.
Referring to side-by-side photos of Kardashian from a while back and from the recent Bezos-Sánchez wedding in Venice, Betteridge said she “looks dramatically different from a few years ago, and whether you see it as glow-up or glam makeover, there’s no denying she’s created a bold new look for herself.”
Then he added a disclaimer, saying he had no personal knowledge of what Kardashian had done and was purely speculating, albeit as a professional.
He also asked people to offer their opinions and voila, along came Khloé.
“I take this as a great compliment! first off I think these photos are about 15 years apart, But here’s a list of things that I have done. I’ve been very open in the past about what I have done so here we go,” Kardashian wrote in a comment.
And it turns out the doc’s speculation was mostly wrong.
Here’s what Kardashian copped to: a nose job. “Laser Hair” for the hairline and “everywhere else,” which we assume means laser hair removal. Botox and Sculptra injectables on her right cheek after she had a melanoma tumor removed. Collagen baby threads under her chin and neck. Sofwave laser treatment for skin tightening.
She lost 80 pounds slowly over time, she said, and has had fillers but not in the past few years. (“I hear it never goes away,” she wrote, “so I’m sure it’s still there but calmed down.”)
Also, in addition to “regular facials, peptides, vitamins and daily skin care,” Kardashian said she gets salmon sperm facials.
Giggle or not — it’s your choice. We giggled. Turns out said facials are all the rage.
She added that in 2025 “there are many other things we can do before surgery but when it’s time, and if I choose to, I know some great doctors.”
Kardashian has indeed been open about her cosmetic work over the years, talking about her nose job in 2021 and saying in 2023 that she hadn’t used diabetic medicine to take off what was about 60 pounds at the time. “Let’s not discredit my years of working out,” she wrote in reply to one Ozempic accusation. “I get up 5 days a week at 6am to train. Please stop with your assumptions. I guess new year still means mean people.”
In her list, the reality star credited all her providers as well.
Kardashian’s youngest sister, Kylie Jenner, also recently got candid on social media about her plastic surgery, revealing to a TikTok user the details of her breast augmentation.
The BBC and the authorities’ response to the chants led by punk-rap band Bob Vylan show the regulatory system is working, says Northeastern professor Adrian Hillman.
Bob Vylan led chants against the Israel Defense Forces during the band’s performance at Britain’s Glastonbury festival (Press Association via AP Images)
LONDON — Members of the British punk-rap duo Bob Vylan have faced considerable backlash since they urged fans to chant “death to the IDF,” the acronym for the Israel Defense Forces, during a weekend show at the Glastonbury festival.
The men have reportedly been dropped by their agency, the United States has revoked their visas ahead of a North American tour this year and U.K. police are looking into whether the incident meets the threshold of a hate crime.
But the duo, who in a statement insisted that they are “not for death of jews, arabs or any other race,” are not the only ones facing flak for the comments made at Britain’s biggest festival — so is the BBC, the official broadcast partner of Glastonbury.
The broadcaster has apologized for allowing the comments by frontman Bobby Vylan to be livestreamed Saturday from the West Holts stage, with its 30,000-person capacity. But that has not stopped the BBC from being singled out for criticism.
The U.K.’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, called it a “national shame” that the chants were shared with a wider audience, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer said there were questions for the state broadcaster to answer.
Adrian Hillman, an assistant professor of communication at Northeastern University in London, says the BBC has a difficult path to tread when it comes to impartially airing views on the Israel-Gaza conflict.
“There is a catch-22 here because, let’s say the BBC editors had seen something coming,” says Hillman. “Let’s say they broadcast it on a delay and that they heard the chants and stopped it from airing. Can you imagine the outcry over freedom of speech if they had done that?
“Let’s be frank — this is a really hard subject to touch upon and not to tread on toes. The BBC has been criticized by the pro-Palestine lobbies and by pro-Israel lobbies for its coverage [of the war]. It is taking flak from everywhere.”
Dan Kennedy, associate professor of journalism, poses for a portrait. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern UniversityAdrian Hillman, assistant professor of communication, and Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism look at the BBC’s handling of the Bob Vylan controversy. Courtesy photo and photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
The BBC has a model that is unique in its funding and mission, explains Hillman. It is largely funded via a TV license fee where those who watch or record live television, or use the BBC’s iPlayer on-demand service, pay £174.50 ($239.60) annually. It negotiates a Royal Charter with the British government every decade that provides the constitutional basis for the BBC and sets out its mission and public purposes.
As well as having to remain impartial with its news coverage, another of its purposes is to provide and spread culture around the U.K., something Hillman argues it fulfills with its yearly wall-to-wall Glastonbury coverage.
And while the BBC has admitted it made an error by not pulling the plug on the livestream of Bob Vylan’s performance after the chants broke out, Hillman points out that it has promised to learn from its mistakes.
The BBC issued an apology and said the Bob Vylan show included “utterly unacceptable” and “antisemitic” comments. The broadcaster livestreamed the chants with a warning on screen about the language.
“Pulling the live stream brings certain technological challenges,” the BBC said in a statement. “With hindsight, we would have taken it down.”
The livestream was viewable online for a number of hours afterward but the BBC has decided the band’s performance will not be made available on its catch-up iPlayer service. It is also set to review its editorial guidance around live events.
Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, issued a statement saying it was “very concerned” about Bob Vylan’s comments being livestreamed and that it was seeking clarity over “what procedures were in place to ensure compliance with its own editorial guidelines.”
Hillman says the responses from the BBC, Ofcom and the police in the aftermath of the incident show that the U.K.’s regulatory and lawful environment are functioning well and that checks against extreme behavior are in place.
“One of my arguments would be,” Hillman continues, “that I’d rather something is aired by the BBC, they correct it, outline the concern and highlight that what was done was incorrect, than it be sent out on YouTube without a disclaimer, without concern and without any moderation.
“So while mistakes will be made, because you cannot have an entity the size and scope of the BBC without making mistakes, those mistakes are brought to the forefront and are corrected.
“Broadcasting is regulated in this country. Regulation has its concerns but it also has its place — wise, thoughtful analysis of broadcasting has prevented a lot of disinformation and misinformation going out there.
“I would make an argument and say, yes, the BBC erred and they need to look at their guidance. But the fact that the BBC is analyzing its processes and the fact that the authorities, as a consequence of this, are looking into this and asking serious questions of what was said, shows that the institutions are actually working.”
Northeastern professor of journalism Dan Kennedy says television broadcasters carrying live performances from major events such as Glastonbury and the Super Bowl halftime show need to be alert to what can go wrong.
“There are risks that something’s going to happen that you don’t want to be on your air,” says Kennedy, who teaches an ethics and issues in journalism course in Boston.
“In the U.S., oftentimes for live events, there’s a seven-second delay. I don’t know whether there was with this [Bob Vylan incident] or not. If there was, it just seems like somebody was asleep at the switch.”
Kennedy argues a distinction should be made between the BBC’s news coverage role during the Israel-Gaza conflict and the broadcaster’s handling of a livestream that would likely have been operated by its entertainment department.
The decision on whether to cut short the Bob Vylan livestream, Kennedy continues, would have been made more difficult for staff due to the fact it was an artist performance that entered into the arena of political commentary.
Those on the ground would have had only seconds to consider whether it was suitable for broadcast, he points out.
“What Bob Vylan was doing was incredibly toxic — it is pure anti-Semitism,” says Kennedy. “But it was also political commentary, so that puts it in kind of a weird gray area. And if there were people back in the booth trying to decide whether this should continue to go out or not, I can see them hesitating and wondering whether they should or not.
“It is really hard to respond in real time. And even if you’ve got seven seconds, that’s not much time to think.”
Celebrity stylist Liat Baruch and NBC Universal media executive David Vickter were set up by mutual friends in the summer of 2021 after a long-anticipated introduction. “I was traveling quite a bit at the time, so we started off as friends,” Liat, whose clients include Kirsten Dunst and the Richie sisters—she was the mastermind behind Sofia Richie Grainge’s viral wedding wardrobe—remembers. “But we quickly found ourselves spending most of our free time together. Whether it was grabbing coffee, running errands, meeting for lunch, or venting about the dating scene in L.A. over drinks, we always found an excuse to hang out.”
Eventually, their relationship evolved into a real-life When Harry Met Sally… story. “In November of 2024, we decided to give ‘us’ a real shot—and it just clicked,” Liat remembers. “We’re still best friends who genuinely love doing life together… only now, we get to do it as partners.”
The two got engaged in March of 2025. On Sunday mornings, they’d made a tradition of hiking Fryman Canyon, and on this particular Sunday, Liat geared up in her weighted vest and ankle weights, ready for their usual loop—but David suggested they take a quieter, less-traveled trail to the top. “It was one of those perfect L.A. days—clear skies, warm sun, and not a soul in sight,” Liat recalls. “As we reached a secluded spot overlooking the horizon, the world felt completely still. The only sounds were the birds and the soft breeze around us.”
And then, David proposed. “I was so surprised and overwhelmed with joy, that all I could say was, ‘This is so cool! And, of course, yes!’ which somehow felt exactly right.” They completed the trail, reveling in the moment, and letting their big news sink in before telling anyone. “It was simple, beautiful, and completely us,” Liat recalls.
Shortly after their engagement, they set their wedding date for June 15, 2025 at Hummingbird Nest Ranch in the Santa Susana Mountains—and jumped right into planning mode, which they somehow pulled off in just two-and-a-half months. “Thankfully, we had Rikki and Mal to help plan and coordinate everything, and it all came together so smoothly,” Liat explains. “With both of us juggling full schedules, we knew from the start that we needed support. Bringing in people we trusted to help guide the vision, handle the details, and make the whole experience feel fun—instead of overwhelming!—was key.”
