For Online Returns Wednesday, Buckingham Palace will be decolonizing

By Olivia Craighead

This is a plea and a warning

The Hollywood superhero industry has killed a lot of things. In its wake lie the mid-budget studio film, the notion of an actor who can open a film on star power alone, and any semblance of an interesting career for Anthony Mackie after The Hurt Locker. But the thing it has destroyed most effectively is the male body.

Chris Evans, Jonathan Majors, Chris Hemsworth, Ben Affleck, Kumail Nanjiani, and countless others in the pages of Men’s Health and GQ Hype (whatever that is) all look nuts right now. Over the past 15 years, being an actor has become less about passing as a normal guy in an unlikely situation, and more about embodying a superhuman for whom unlikely situations are the norm. There was once a time when you could look like Dustin Hoffman and be the most bankable star in America, but that era has been left behind. Before you know it, Timothée Chalamet will be ignoring the advice of Leonardo DiCaprio — one of the few leading men who to have made it out unscathed, meaning he can still plausibly star as a regular-guy math professor — and putting on 30 pounds of muscle to play Blop the Destroyer or whoever the fuck.

It’s time to stand up for what’s right. Timothée, Lucas Hedges, every Stranger Things boy, hear my plea: Do not get jacked. It will not look right, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of dangerously bulging veins and body image issues, and you will no longer be able to act naturally in a movie that isn’t shot entirely on green screen. If you don’t believe me, I have compiled mountains of evidence showing actors we’ve lost to action hero beauty standards. Let’s take a look and see if it’s humanly possible to look better after switching your diet to boiled chicken and (possibly, allegedly, whichever word I have to use here) a steady stream of HGH.

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By Tarpley Hitt

No word on Matt Damon's progeny

The Left is accustomed to taking Ls. For every win (the Child Tax Credit), there is a loss (the Child Tax Credit ending) — usually several (student loans, blocked rail strike, Sean McElwee). But today is an unambiguous victory for DSA members nationwide: Ben Affleck’s daughter is a Marxist.

This promising news emerged at the New York Times Dealbook conference, the annual confab where business guys shell out $2,500 to hear 40-minute musings from figures like Volodymyr Zelensky, Benjamin Netanyahu, and, incredibly, Sam Bankman-Fried. Mr. Jennifer Lopez himself was there today to talk about his new production company, Artist’s Equity, with DealBook’s public face, Andrew Ross Sorkin. The conversation was a dry exchange of platitudes, advice Affleck would give his younger self, and a prolonged back-and-forth about how to cut down on bloated production budgets. But in the middle of a long answer about Affleck’s experience with becoming “very uncool, very fast,” the new CEO dropped this fascinating aside:

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By Claire Carusillo

It's a new holiday I made up and it should be a paid day off

Gather round the warmth of the external monitor, children, or bask in the glow of an open refrigerator if you’re overheated. I have a cozy Yuletide story for you, and it’s about how I miss the country America used to be in 1999.

When I was just a girl, the day after Thanksgiving was all about jarring applesauce, stocking up the dirt-floored cellar with potatoes and alliums for the winter, darning socks, and waiting outside Best Buy at 11:59 to bum rush the automatic doors for a good deal on the Wild Thornberrys game for Gameboy Color.

Black Friday used to be simple. But institutions evolve, and as of late, the spirit of Black Friday appears to extend throughout the post-Thanksgiving weekend. The new millennium saw the introduction of Cyber Monday, of course, and then a few years ago someone just decided to add something called Giving Tuesday to the mix (“It’s giving Tuesday,” you say into your phone, as a joke to yourself, like a prayer). But now that the fake holiday floodgates are open, I can’t get enough.

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By Claire Carusillo

"Hey, that's my ice breaker!" Camilla said. Just kidding, sort of.

Are you holding onto your butt for dear life? You may want to affix your hands to the inside of your bloomers’ elastic, because another hanger-on to the British monarchy has said something racist. And no, it wasn’t Camilla the doting grandmum, nor the late Queen Mother doing her classic Ali G impression (RIP). This time, it was allegedly one of Camilla’s ladies-in-waiting (oops, I mean “royal companions”).

The aide, who has been confirmed to be a certain “Lady Susan Hussey,” reportedly questioned Ngozi Fulani — a Black British woman who was invited to a 300-person event at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday to represent her domestic abuse charity Sistah Space — about where in Africa she and her “people” were “really from.”

After the troubling event, which has been corroborated by eyewitnesses, Fulani shared an account of the conversation on Twitter.

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By Kelly Conaboy

The answer is NOT Gigi Hadid

What goes on in the mind of Leonardo DiCaprio? There are only a handful of people on earth who may know, and one of them is Lukas Haas. The rest of us have to guess. My guess is that an inordinate amount of time is dedicated to conceiving of something like “a cooler version of a plane” in order to impress Rihanna, but the fact is I’ll never know. I do know one thing, though: whom the elusive chanteuse was hanging out with at Art Basel Miami. Can you guess?

I’ll give you a hint — the answer is not Gigi Hadid. Although the two have been linked in the press lately, most recently after going on a very sexy date at Cipriani Downtown with the venture capitalist Vivi Nevo, Gigi-my-love was not spotted partying at Art Basel with the king of St. Barts. Could there be trouble in their perfect lovers paradise built just for two? We’d have to ask Yolanda.

I’ll give you another hint — the answer is not Jared Leto, Floyd Mayweather, or Odell Beckham Jr. Although they were also spotted at the invite-only event, Leonardo DiCaprio did not hang out with them, according to eagle-eyed spies.

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