Welcome to Rated and Slated, the column that is terminally online so you don’t have to be.
At the time of writing, a record-breaking heatwave has got everyone in northern Europe shoving frozen foodstuff into every available orifice. The technical term for the temperatures here at the moment is “mind-bogglingly crazy” (the words of one climate expert, doubtless exhausted from trying to get anyone to actually pay attention to the science). As many a chafed American explorer has discovered during a sweaty quest for cultural enlightenment, AC isn’t as much of a thing in the Old World.
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Instead, in the UK, a dirty old island plagued with obesity and perversion, populated by a modern peasantry whose medieval lusts are barely contained through a regime of porn-site age verification and point-of-sale taxes on anything even remotely pleasurable, women are putting ice lollies in their vaginas. God knows what their husbands and boyfriends are doing—they’re probably shoving family-sized Viennettas and entire tubs of Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough up themselves as we speak.
Anyway, here are some gourmet delights I’ve picked out this week from the ever replenishing frozen food aisle that is the internet. What you choose to do with them is entirely up to you.
RATED
THERE IS A BLUE LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT
“And if my transatlantic flight crashes in the sea / to die by your side the biomarkers all seem fine.”
YOU CAN’T SPELL ONE-NIGHT STAND WITHOUT OSINT
Can the OSINT facial recognition technology that tracked down fugitive Red Army Faction capoeira gran Daniela Klette—this week sentenced to 13 years in jail for armed robberies—be used to find forgotten hookups from the Indie Sleaze era? Asking for a friend, who’s worried he might have an illegitimate chud son lurking somewhere out in meatspace.
COMING SOON TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU: PEDO HUNTING
I was into Phoebe Bridgers’ last solo record, but I’m not sure whether to check out her acting debut in this R Patz film or wait to see if ex-boyfriend Paul Mescal directs, produces, and stars in his own low-budget remake telling the story of British vigilante Stinson Hunter as some kind of weird cinematic power play.
FOIDS AND LOOKSMAXXING IN LAS VEGAS
We were somewhere around Tempe on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like ASU frat leaders, all mogging around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.
THE RETURN OF THE DURUTTI COLUMN 2.0
I swear X is trying to get me back on cigarettes, serving me all these posts about how there are supposedly AI researchers who have picked up smoking because “lung cancer will be cured soon anyway.” And then I learn that the Durutti Column are back with a new track, and there’s Vini Reilly with a rollie hanging out of his mouth, a true holdout in these charmless, synthetic times, the musical equivalent of a battered pack of Newports sitting atop a pile of confiscated vapes.
APPLYING TO BE THE POPE
No wonder the Pope wants AI to be disarmed. You can now use your phone to speedrun a level of psychotic delusion that was once exclusively accessible through a sustained period of alcohol abuse and sleep deprivation at the world’s biggest arts festival, which would inevitably culminate in the realization that you’ve been sent from space to lead the Catholic Church into the future—a fact you simply must proclaim to every passing stranger, all while wearing a padded silver envelope you found in the street and mistook for an intergalactic Papal tiara. Well, bad news, Leo XIV: you might be able to kill the technology, but you cannot kill the idea.
SUSAN BOYLE’S NEW LOOK
On the anniversary of his death, British TV talent show singer Susan Boyle appears to be wearing Harambe’s actual skin as a fur coat. I didn’t have that on my 2026 bingo card.
SLATED
“Rest easy to a true patriot”
So let me get this straight: when the White House publicly honors Harambe’s memory in 2026, it’s patriotic, but in 2016, when I went to my nearest zoo and got my dick out as a tribute to the martyred ape, suddenly it was all “you have to put your name on this register” and “no, you’re not allowed to live within 1,000 feet of a playground.” Talk about double standards, it really is one rule for the global elite and another for everyone else.
DROPSHIP MAFIA
You might feel so sorry for the poor AI boy who was egged while trying to sell his Godzilla resin lamps that you head over to Etsy to buy one, but just wait until he uses the profits to buy double-barreled shotguns and 9mm pistols to shoot up his school in an act of brutal revenge against the bullies who tormented him.
GETTING YOUR CRYBABY COMPLAINING ASS LEFT IN MUMBAI
If Lasse Lund is really Norwegian, then why hasn’t he written a six-part cycle of autobiographical novels scrutinizing every aspect of his life in excruciating detail? Forget Karl Ove Knausgård—I want to know about this guy’s struggle to find weird brown goat’s cheese in the slums of Mumbai.
MEN ARE CLASS SUMMER
Those edits of your favorite directors as footballers may seem like harmless fun, but unlike the idea of David Lynch crashing the box to score a last minute winner for U.S.A, trying to complete a World Cup sticker album is no laughing matter. As a fully salaried, financially independent, adult-seeming wage cuck, you might reasonably think you can afford to buy enough packets of stickers to complete the entire thing. But before you know it, you’ve burned through a month’s salary and all you’ve got to show for it are 30 duplicate N’Golo Kantés. Now you’re headed to the Darkweb swapsies forums, desperately searching for that elusive Neymar shiny.
N0RTH4EVR
Why are you acting like we’re at Gilman Street in ’93? This shit might have worked for Green Day, but it ain’t gonna work for a clouted teenage nepo monster whose dad is literally Kanye West (a man who, for better and worse, has done as much as anyone to eradicate the very concept of an “underground”). Save this energy for when Billie Joe Armstrong’s kid releases a reggae record.
A LITTLE ACCENT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE
Glad I’m not the only one picturing Spanish police smashing their way through the door to find Pancho getting liposuction without painkillers and Joycey drinking a shot of his bloody fat.
ULTIMATE FIGHTING OBJECTS
I’ve clearly been spending too much time reading Project Blue Beam fanfic on X, because this sure as hell looks like a Stargate to me.
Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi
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