뉴스 | 🇬🇧 영국 | "SURPRISING"

The Guardian Culture

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‘A metaphor for a nation gone soft in the head’: the bizarre return of Mr Blobby

He’s pink, dotty and as British as a Boots meal deal. In recent months he’s duetted with pop stars, appeared on Saturday Night Live and been declared the UK’s equivalent of Mickey Mouse. What’s behind this strange comeback? Margaret Thatcher wasn’t to blame for the closure of Britain’s coalmines. Mr Blobby was. A harrowing spoof documentary exposed this horrific truth during the finale of Saturday Night Live UK’s debut season. Back in 1992, drilling activity at Nottinghamshire’s Grimethorpe Colliery awoke an evil entity buried underground. Mr Blobby promptly went on an unstoppable murderous rampage, ripping off miners’ limbs and becoming “an atom bomb made flesh”. Mr Blobby being disinterred is an apt metaphor. Recent months have seen the pink-and-yellow agent of chaos unearthed and on the comeback trail. He has appeared on primetime TV shows, duetted with popstars, and convinced nostalgic punters to part with a surprising amount of cash to get their hands on Blobby-themed merchandise. What has prompted the comeback of a character once considered irredeemably naff? Continue reading...

Daily Mail (News)

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I asked my husband which celebs he'd sleep with if he had the chance... his answer revealed something very surprising about our marriage: ANNABEL FENWICK ELLIOTT

Would you let your other half cheat on you with one celebrity of their choosing? I would, and so would my husband. It's called a 'hall pass', apparently.

The Guardian Culture

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My Only Boy by Rosa Rankin-Gee review – a darkly funny near-future dystopia

A surprising romance is set against a backdrop of climate crisis, political instability and corporate corruption in this bleak but witty novel Rosa Rankin-Gee follows her 2021 near-future climate-crisis dystopia, Dreamland, with a similar but more politically focused work. As I read My Only Boy, I kept having to remind myself that the nation it describes is not (yet) real, because, for a reader living abroad, the novel’s England seems unnervingly close to what might come next. Any political dystopia risks being overtaken by reality, but in this case the gap between truth and fiction feels claustrophobic. At the beginning of the novel, Elle is at a party held to mourn that day’s election of a far-right populist government. She’s the communications director for the almost too brilliantly named Gigr, a company connecting people seeking immediate shift work with businesses offering it. Elle is freshly upset by witnessing and immediately containing the reputational damage of a worker’s jump from a balcony. She knows how to do this, because “we’d had a death every four weeks, then every three weeks, then every two”: exhausted, starving people taking underpaid shifts from Gigr after finishing public sector jobs that no longer pay enough for survival. Almost everyone, in this slightly more desperate, divided and unfair nation, ends up doing some work for Gigr sooner or later, to buy faster access to emergency healthcare or food for crisis-stricken family, and Gigr has algorithms to ensure that each person is paid the least their particular circumstances oblige them to accept. Continue reading...

The Guardian World

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IT/기술

Shrinking graduate premium sours views on value of a university education, UK poll shows

Worries over AI and loan debt mean 34% of people think degrees are usually not worth the time and money There was a time when going to university seemed a no-brainer. Better qualifications opened doors to better jobs with greater earning potential. But with the graduate premium shrinking, mounting anger about spiralling student debt and growing fears about AI eating into the graduate jobs market, it is not surprising that attitudes are shifting. Continue reading...

The Guardian Culture

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To YouTube and beyond: how online gen Z directors stormed Hollywood

Record-breaking box office for Backrooms and Obsession has opened the door for twentysomething YouTube creators as the industry rethinks what audiences want At this time last year, the idea of a wide-release feature film-maker cutting their teeth on YouTube was, if not unheard of, certainly still a niche origin story. Siblings Michael and Danny Philippou had just released Bring Her Back, the follow-up to their surprise horror hit Talk to Me, to pretty-good reviews and OK box office; clearly they would continue to work, but the slightly diminished returns didn’t predict a YouTube explosion. Nor did the outright lousiness of Shelby Oaks, from longtime YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann, when it premiered in theaters later in 2025. Generous horror-festival buzz died down as more people actually laid eyes on the movie; Stuckmann was an obvious enthusiast, and some saw promise in his first effort, but a clumsy found-footage pastiche without much emotional sense didn’t seem like the next big thing, either. But in 2026, something has shifted. In January, YouTuber Markiplier self-released his adaptation of the video game Iron Lung to theaters, and it outgrossed any number of big-studio titles. Then Curry Barker, whose comedy sketches have been a YouTube fixture, unveiled his feature debut Obsession. The film, made for under a million dollars, has become the box office phenomenon of the summer so far, managing a virtually unheard-of feat when its second and third weekends actually outgrossed its first. Obsession is sharing multiplex space with Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who previously brought the spooky internet meme to life in a series of YouTube shorts. Despite being set in a series of purgatorial, sparsely furnished, fluorescent-lit “liminal spaces”, it was the top movie at the North American box office this weekend, poised to become the biggest-grossing movie from distributor A24 in a matter of days. Backrooms also opened to bigger numbers than any number of starrier or bigger-brand 2026 titles like Wuthering Heights, Scream 7, The Devil Wears Prada 2 or the last Pixar movie. That makes three YouTube-trained film-makers who have presided over some of this year’s biggest and/or most surprising hits. With them have come countless social media posts about how YouTube, not film school, provides the real training tomorrow’s directors need. Continue reading...

Daily Mail (News)

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My son, 23, died from cocaine addiction he developed at university. These are the hidden signs we missed. Scores of young people are secretly using cocaine to beat social anxiety - this is what EVERY parent must know before it's too late

When Daniel Mervis succumbed to a serious, and fatal, cocaine addiction he developed while studying at St John's College, Oxford, his grieving parents reached a surprising conclusion.

The Guardian World

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The household battery revolution that could change energy bills … and the world

Australia is pioneering a revolution in home renewables and battery use, proving what is possible with the right policies The timing was rich with symbolism. As intense heatwaves pummelled Europe and Asia, and oil markets around the world leapt and sputtered, the two big chimneys of one of Australia’s largest power stations were being demolished. Meanwhile, the Australian energy minister was holding a media conference to hail a fall of up to 10% in the benchmark electricity price in parts of the country. Quietly, and with surprisingly little fanfare from the rest of the world, Australia is pioneering a revolution in home renewables and battery use, proving what is possible with the right policies. The country was already one of the global leaders in domestic solar power, with panels on one in three homes. It also remains, however, a major contributor to the climate crisis through its vast fossil fuel exports.. But it is batteries that are giving Australia a new burst of speed. Continue reading...

The Guardian Culture

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A girl’s best friend: Marilyn Monroe remembered by her closest confidants

Four days before what would have been her 100th birthday, Hollywood legends look back on their friendships with a woman who, underneath the studio sheen, was warm, supportive and empathetic You can judge a woman by the people she surrounds herself with. For the last few months I’ve been talking to the people Marilyn Monroe surrounded herself with, during her eventful 36 years on earth. Ostensibly and primarily, I was doing this to make a radio documentary, which begins on what would have been her 100th birthday. But I also had a secret secondary motive: I wanted to find out if – maybe in another life – Marilyn and I might have been friends. The first thing to say about Monroe’s friends is that she had a lot of them. The fact that more than six decades have passed since her death, and it’s still possible to find enough living people to interview, tells you something. This is all the more surprising because MM (as she’s sometimes referred to in fan circles) seems far too much the archetypal, immortal screen goddess to do anything as ordinary as have mates. And while it’s possible to imagine her trailed by a harem of pathetically adoring men – like Tom Ewell’s character in The Seven Year Itch – her sex-symbol image means people find it harder to envisage her having real friendships with women. Continue reading...

Daily Mail (News)

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Revealed: Why Brits are choosing staycations this summer

Brits are ditching Marbella for Margate as surprising new research reveals many holidaymakers are opting for staycations this summer.

The Guardian Culture

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IT/기술

What We Ask Google by Simon Rogers review – the secrets of our search history

The company’s data editor trawls through billions of queries to deliver a portrait of the world’s preoccupations As anyone who has procreated this century knows, childrearing involves daily rounds of online searching. The most common parenting-related queries feature in What We Ask Google, a valiant attempt by the search giant’s data editor Simon Rogers to create a “surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind” (that’s the subtitle) from searches performed over the past two decades. “Why do babies get hiccups?” we ask. “When do babies teethe?” “Why do toddlers bite?” “How do you know if your child has ADHD?” “How to tell kids about divorce?” Since 2006, engineers have used Google Trends to make sense of common (and anonymised) queries like these, going back as far as 2004, when phones were dumb and less than half of UK households had internet access. Rogers, a British former Guardian journalist based in California, views the results as a kind of social mirror. Continue reading...

The Guardian Culture

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Christo: Air review – surprisingly profound manifestation of the wrapper’s impossible dream

Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London Not only does this giant plastic bag make the intangible physical, it gains a bodily sense of weight and an unexpected emotional resonance When he wasn’t busy wrapping buildings and bridges in vast reams of fabric, Christo was wrapping absolutely nothing. The Bulgarian artist made his name – alongside his partner Jeanne-Claude – with a wrapped Reichstag, a swaddled Arc de Triomphe and an enveloped Pont Neuf. They found a way of containing, embracing, protecting and smothering the whole world. But in the 1960s, he was trying to wrap air. Nothing more. Christo (Jeanne-Claude hadn’t been given full joint credit at this point) wanted to contain the air within a room, but the original idea was limited by technical constraints. Now, 50 years after it was first proposed for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and six years after Christo’s death in 2020, he’s finally pulled it off. The opening room at Gagosian has been bisected horizontally, a huge polyethylene sack splitting the room in two, held to the ceiling by white ropes. It droops low, sinking into the middle of the space, forcing you to crouch to get under it. You’re forced into a physical relationship with the work, bullied into changing how you interact with the environment. Christo: Air is at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, until 21 August Continue reading...

The Independent (World)

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The surprising health benefits of watermelon

Research found watermelon holds surprisingly high levels of antioxidants linked to reduced cancer risk

The Guardian Culture

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Requiem for America review – Brent Michael Davids gives the invisible a voice in his urgent new work

Barbican, London The BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Teddy Abrams performed the world premiere of Davids’ sombre and powerful new work that tells of the colonisation of North America Amid the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of US independence, Brent Michael Davids’ Requiem for America brings an abrupt and necessary shift of perspective. Subtitled “Singing for the Invisible People”, it tells of the colonisation of North America and the systematic erasure of its Indigenous people. We don’t hear the text of the Latin mass; instead Davids, a composer of Mohican heritage, has constructed a patchwork of first-hand sources: newspaper articles, military reports, telegrams, rare accounts from the survivors of massacres. It is, as Davids describes it, both a reckoning and a remembrance: it’s meant to be shocking, and it is. Perhaps it’s not surprising that this premiere should have happened outside the US; nonetheless, a further performance is planned for Boston in November, of an even longer version. Here a lot was packed into 90 minutes by a stageful of musicians: the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, an eight-strong Native American choir, four vocal soloists as if for a traditional setting of the Requiem – and, to the conductor Teddy Abrams’s right, the mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta, a late stand-in who sang the Narrator with tremendous conviction, and Davids himself, playing the Native American flute. Continue reading...

뉴스

타임라인 키워드

‘A metaphor for a nation gone soft in the head’: the bizarre return of Mr Blobby

I asked my husband which celebs he'd sleep with if he had the chance... his answer revealed something very surprising about our marriage: ANNABEL FENWICK ELLIOTT

My Only Boy by Rosa Rankin-Gee review – a darkly funny near-future dystopia

Shrinking graduate premium sours views on value of a university education, UK poll shows

To YouTube and beyond: how online gen Z directors stormed Hollywood

My son, 23, died from cocaine addiction he developed at university. These are the hidden signs we missed. Scores of young people are secretly using cocaine to beat social anxiety - this is what EVERY parent must know before it's too late

The household battery revolution that could change energy bills … and the world

A girl’s best friend: Marilyn Monroe remembered by her closest confidants

Revealed: Why Brits are choosing staycations this summer

What We Ask Google by Simon Rogers review – the secrets of our search history

Christo: Air review – surprisingly profound manifestation of the wrapper’s impossible dream

The surprising health benefits of watermelon

Requiem for America review – Brent Michael Davids gives the invisible a voice in his urgent new work