This is going to be a quick run-through of the key points I wanted to highlight about the Met Gala. I genuinely do not want to invest more than the bare minimum of my energy into the tech bros and billionaires who have infiltrated every space and taken so much from us already. I refuse to give them even more of my attention on top of everything else they’ve taken.

You have all the money in the world, your workers are pissing in the plastic bottles to meet the productivity quota, you fund ICE, you enrich yourself from the genocide; can you at least get the fuck out of our sight?

Lauren Sanchez-Bezos did a Met presser on Monday afternoon and said she’s grateful to be there and: “The Met has always understood something the rest of the world is finally catching up to: fashion is art.” Where do you go from here? What did we expect, allowing billionaires to pay their way into creative spaces?

Tech bros and billionaires infiltrated The Met, Art Basel, Coachella, Burning Man, Sundance, Tribeca —…

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In case you haven’t already figured this out, Hollywood isn’t innocent in creating the dystopian world we live in. In fact, it’s an active participant — a creator, an accomplice, an extended hand.

American arrogance doesn’t stop at geopolitics or failed diplomacy; it seeps into culture, cinema, music, entertainment — into the narratives that teach the world how to perceive power. Hollywood is not simply complicit in the global power structure. It’s one of the most morally corrupt cultural institutions of our time.

In a country overwhelmed by political dysfunction, cultural fragmentation, and ideological chaos, people pointed to an actor. A talent emerged in the American landscape, seemingly out of nowhere, and he made people feel something that felt clean, grounded, and human.

Connor Storrie.

I was scrolling through Threads the other day when I came across a post asking, “Is there one good thing about America?” A surprising number of people gave the same answer: “Connor Storrie.”

It’s si…

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The Berlinale stage is not a neutral living room. It’s one of the most visible cultural platforms in the world, where silence is not accidental. Also, a tiny reminder — there is no such thing as “apolitical art.”

Every film, every performance, every red-carpet moment, every acceptance speech carries the fingerprints of the political world that produced it.

This year’s Berlin Film Festival is a parade of spineless, apolitical cowards posing as artists. It’s hard to comprehend the pile of nonsense that came out of so many mouths over the past couple of days.

Being an artist, standing on one of the world’s largest stages, at one of the most political festivals, backed by a government funding an ongoing genocide — while living through deadly ICE protests in the U.S., the Epstein scandal, a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, genocide in Sudan, human rights violations and sexual violence in Congo, and the rise of fascism in the UK, the U.S., and Germany…

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As soon as I saw Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams sign with CAA this past week, I had a feeling of dread overcome me. Am I insane? These two were waiters three months ago, I hear your inside voice, they deserve this! Not insane quite yet, I’m afraid. Experienced in Hollywood shitfuckery, very much yes.

These two men are talented, chill, beautiful, enjoyable, and glorious. They are not a Hollywood product. You might be too excited for their rise in this industry to realize they are a threat to that same industry. To the façade that is Hollywood, the most corrupt industry, probably right after our government.

Let’s unpack the Globes, their first awards show, ever. Connor and Hudson looked majestic on the red carpet. Literally every single media outlet published their faces, over and over again, from every possible angle. Images. Videos. My entire scroll was just them. I saw no one else.

Their red-carpet interviews wer…

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I never imagined that the antidote to watching two years of genocide would be two men fucking their way toward love. I also chose this particular event to be my last collection of words I’ll post in 2025. What a year! What a time to be alive. And what a lesson to arrive at in the closing moments.

For the past two years, I haven’t been able to write about anything beyond the dystopian reality our world has descended into. I’m a cultural writer — I’ve spent nearly fifteen years writing about film, television, and culture — but in the face of the political catastrophe unfolding around us, everything else began to feel trivial, even obscene.

The constant stream of injustice, death, and manufactured narratives consumed all space. There was no room left in me for anything else. Nothing felt worthy of attention while mass suffering played out in real time, normalized and justified before our eyes.

I kept waiting for something, anything, that could pull me out of that paralysis. Something that c…

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A week ago, Disney decided to suspend production on The Jimmy Kimmel Show. Five days of protests and a boycott of Disney followed, resulting in an estimated loss of about $4 billion as viewers canceled their Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ subscriptions. This Monday afternoon, Disney announced they had decided to reinstate The Jimmy Kimmel Show. On Tuesday night, Jimmy was back on air.

What was this? A haiku? A rare moment of swift, undeniable effectiveness? Stories this brief and consequential are almost unheard of. Rarely does a push and change arrive this fast, sharp, and unmistakable.

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Something felt different about Sunday’s Emmy Awards. There was a shift in the air, a sense of … overcoming. But overcoming what, exactly? Everything. A barrier that held some of us from really spouting those words out: genocide, Israel, boycott. Fear of retribution. Loss of jobs, livelihoods. Hateful comments.

As words like overcoming, crossing the bridge, opening the floodgates, breaking the dam circled in my head all day, I noticed others naming the same shift, sharing the same language, as if we’d all felt it at once.

This Substack note from the author Trita Parsi hit the nail on the head. The key barrier in revolutions is the public fearing the dictator. Overcoming that barrier is when the public stops fearing the dictator. Similarly, the fear of retribution by elements supporting Israel’s genocide had been overcome. Do you feel the shift?

Listen to what Javier Bardem said on the Emmys red carpet, when interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter:

“Here I am today, denou…

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When I first heard the news about the ‘Voice of Hind Rajab’ movie being released, backed by a Hollywood A-list producer team, my first reaction was — great, it’s super important this gets made for all the world to see. For everyone who isn’t already aware of what the Israeli army is capable of, to see them pummel 335 bullets into the body of a 6-year-old girl, while claiming self-defense.

I went to sleep and woke up feeling uneasy about it. My digestive system always gives me the best instincts. I began to examine why I felt the way I did. Firstly, I wasn’t ok with Brad Pitt being on the producing team. It felt like he was only doing it to whitewash his domestic abuser reputation. Why on earth would you get on a producer team of a movie covering a war crime you never said a word about?

Brad Pitt’s name alone could help end this genocide. If he stood on any stage in the world, named the perpetrator — Israel, and demanded an end to the offensive,…

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Last week, when Taylor Swift announced her engagement on Instagram, I noticed something peculiar. The reactions all over social media were unhinged, far beyond the usual Swiftie delirium. I’m so tired of constantly discovering new ways people can be awful, in this heightened awareness the universe forced upon us two years ago—the one that usually comes at the cost of witnessing people being slaughtered in front of our eyes.

Funny how mass death, livestreamed directly to your phone, can instantly hand you a litmus test; there’s nowhere to hide, nothing you can ever unsee, and no performance of authenticity can pass if it isn’t rooted in absolute honesty. Living in this world is a privilege, even as I long for the oblivion I once enjoyed before that October.

I mean, just look at the article I wrote in that October, the last one before the world changed on it…

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This moment was inevitable. A collision between two worlds, a fracture between opposing moral realities. One forged by decades of Israeli indoctrination, built on fear and entitlement; the other shaped by the lived values of much of the outside world.

For too long, the Israeli public has been taught to see life, death, justice, and humanity through a lens that justifies prioritizing their own lives and ethnostate above all else, disregarding the lives taken in the process. Now, that narrative is colliding, violently, with a global conscience that no longer accepts it.

A livestreamed genocide that we have been forced to watch and accept as the new normal for the past 20 months may be a part of it. Turns out, people don’t like systematic mass slaughter.

This isn’t rocket science. People don’t support genocide. What’s causing a deep rupture in our societies right now is the inability of Western politicians, mainstream media, and much of the Israeli public — raised to see Arab lives as disp…

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‘No Other Land’ has won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. The fact that this movie doesn’t even have a US distributor but now holds an Oscar is yet another irony in the tangled discourse that has defined Palestine’s reality for the past 76 years. Nonetheless, it’s colossal. The idea of the nation will always find ways to endure—and perhaps even rise on the Oscar stage—despite relentless efforts to erase it from both theaters and the land itself.

The initial shock and disbelief of hearing a Palestinian film announced as the winner quickly gave way to tears—for all of us who have spent the past 17 months witnessing and documenting the live-streamed genocide in Gaza. And then came the division. The heated debates over whether the film represents a victory or a step toward normalizing the oppression of Palestine.

A story.

‘No Other Land’ tells the story of the West Bank's Masafer Yatta community through the lens of Palestinian activist Basel Adra, and Israeli journa…

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The awakening we've experienced over the past year has been nothing short of extraordinary. It's both fascinating and unsettling to realize how many moral and historical distortions were always around us, unnoticed while we were moving through life on autopilot.

I was never naive or gullible about the world and its politics. Coming from the Balkans—a region marked by violence and suffering, where grief has deep roots due to countless conflicts, empires, rulers, and occupations—politics is ingrained in you from birth. Knowing your history is essential for survival. Or countless fiery debates you’ll have for the rest of your life.

When I landed at an American college, one of the courses awaiting me in my required major was World Affairs—not that I needed outside help to understand global dynamics. I've always had a solid grasp of politics. But what I hadn't fully realized was how culture and sports are often exploited to advance political agendas.

Well, now I do.

I realized that using sport…

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I’m not one to comment on anyone’s love life. Especially when it goes awry. With a failed marriage and a slew of other doomed relationships that pepper my past, I am yet to experience and—from what I’ve heard and seen from others, bask in the bliss of a proper, all-consuming, unabashed love.

Hey, it’s out there. I know it. Any day now.

Love is a toughie, though.

You feel like you’ve finally cracked the code to eternal happiness with a person you label your soulmate, your ride or die, your homie for life, because that’s what one does when the ‘when you know, you know’ moment finally arrives.

The wound is still very fresh, even though we had an entire summer of a ring-less, lifeless Affleck and a yacht-posing, selfie-taking Lopez to prepare us for the crash and burn ending, of—you guessed it, the inevitable kind.

Also, that cringy Bridgerton-inspired birthday bash is something we’ll never be able to unsee.

But don’t forget one thing—she is also ju…

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We need to talk about us. The people. Society. And what have we done? I tend not to talk about celebrities in the times of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time unfolding on our phones, but last week, with the Oscars, the celebrity culture intertwined with the Military Industrial Complex, better yet, danced with it, so here we are.

Yesterday, Variety magazine published an Open Letter, signed by over 450 Jewish creatives and professionals, denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Zone of Interest’ Oscars Speech, in which he “refuted (his and his producing partners) Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people”.

Denouncing the refute? Is this real life? More on this below.

All human catastrophe, and especially the ones of this magnitude we are currently witnessing in Gaza, lifts the masks. From the government and the people in power, celebrities you admire, your friends, family, and followers on social media. There’s nothing…

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After seeing the masks drop over the past three months—from the government, the establishment, and especially the media—it’s hard not to view everything through a lens of suspicion. Every piece of information now feels like an attempt at propaganda. Our perspective has changed, and every aspect of our lives is seen differently. We’re on high alert. Who can blame us?

With everything I read or watch, I immediately question who put it there for me to consume. I analyze every historical event presented to me, every beloved public figure or politician—what’s the real story? Is that charming personality just an act? Did that historic event really unfold the way it’s told? Is everything we consume just part of a larger psyop?

Amid this growing distrust, my nervous system craves a break from the relentless flow of information. I call it a mental massage, especially after feeling so helpless watching the daily visuals of slaughtered children—images my government insists I must accept as normal.

I…

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There’s just something about the low-stakes teen dramas that nourishes our soul. Is it a connection to our childhood, a reminder of how the shows we watched influenced our journey in this world? It’s comforting to me, even at this age; I don’t think I will ever outgrow a good TV triangle, and a bit of banter between the lockers. Dawson’s Creek, 90210, One Three Hill, My So-Called Life, I’m powerless to it. It’s my ultimate feel-good indulgence.

This summer, a new TV triangle rolled into town. The Summer I Turned Pretty, an adaptation of Jenny Han’s popular young adult novel. The title held promise, and with my old favorites having been rewatched countless times, I was eager for something new. Also, I was curious to see how this genre is evolving in the current era of television.

The premise of the series revolves around a girl named Belly Conklin, who spends her summers at a beach house with her mother and her mother's best friend's family. The plot focuses on her relationships with two…

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I promised myself I wouldn’t write about this. We are choking with Barbie opinion pieces. What is Barbenheimer anyway? Someone invented a name, a term, and we all just went for it? I’m aware it’s just a PR move to get us all back into the theaters, but it worries me how obedient we became. 

Why are we listening? How are these two movies even related? You can’t tell me there weren’t films worth seeing last year or so. 

I never really dreamt of Barbies. I was one. The last thing I wanted was another me to play with. I did use them to make clothes, try it on them, but I don’t have very many pleasant memories from that time. I used to cut my mother’s fabric to make the clothes, and I didn’t cut from the edge of the fabric, I did it from the middle; an illogical move fitting for a 12-year-old, and my mother wasn’t happy.

I remember her coming home from work, at 3.30 pm, on a dot every day. And every day, I was eager to show her the Barbie with the jacket I made and sewed myself, and she would…

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I was convinced there is no story or a season out of Bridgerton universe that’ll seduce me more than Season 2 and the Viscount/Sharma bonanza, yet it did. ‘Queen Charlotte’ floored me. If you’ve already watched it, proceed; if you still didn’t - this article contains spoilers.

According to Deadline Magazine, the Bridgerton-verse is ruling Netflix. Queen Charlotte has amassed 307M hours viewed and is quickly making its way to becoming one of Netflix’s most popular series of all time. It’s expected to join both seasons of Bridgerton among Netflix’s most-watched series of all time.

Of. All. Time.

Hardly surprising; there is a special kind of imagination in all of Shonda Rimes' work. Magical, even. But magic is not in a fairytale of her tales, but in humanity with which she’s building these three-dimensional characters based on real figures, using historical events to parallel the issues of the society: 250 years ago, and today.

Why does her work speak so much to all of us? Because we think a…

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In 2009, I wrote my first blog. It was the night of the Golden Globes when Tina Fey told her internet haters to suck it on a national stage, and the night Colin Farrell picked up the Best Actor for his role in In Bruges.

When he got on stage, he was sniffing a tad bit or his nose was running, and he said, also on national television, while picking up the award: “This is from the cold, not that other stuff it used to be.”

He came a long way from that night in 2009. Or, he actually made the beautiful circle of exactly where he needs to be. I met Colin in 2004, I did an event for him and you can read about that rollercoaster night in my first published piece.

I watch him differently from that night, having the experience of seeing how much of him he lets stay in his roles. The mannerisms, the way he talks so fast, yet his face has a stillness that shows every tiny drop of emotion; the talent of being nerdy and hot all at the same exact time.

Watching ‘In Bruges’ was a religious experience fo…

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I didn’t expect to be mesmerized by You on Netflix as much as I am. When a movie or a tv-show is made based on a book, I usually want to read the book first. I want to imagine the visuals of the characters, and places on my own, and not have the optics decided for me. Then, I’d like to see how someone else imagined it by putting it on a big screen.

I didn’t read You by Caroline Kepnes first, and I will forever regret it. I watched it first. Then read it. And even in that order, it was an unbelievable experience. Her work is something you can’t even put in words; so different than anything out there, this world she pulls you in, so original, like nothing you've ever read before. You read about this killer, but his social commentary is so on point, he says all the annoying things you are thinking about this world; you forget he kills people.

Even Stephen King was mesmerized by Caroline’s work: “Totally original. Never read anything quite like it. Hope you're working on a new one.”

Steven K…

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