Lewis Treston: the 10 funniest things I have ever seen (on the internet)

I am a playwright and PhD candidate, so I’ve wasted much of my life watching crap online. To give you an idea: during Covid, my housemate and I painstakingly ranked different performances of Chicago’s final electrifying dance number, The Hot Honey Rag.Regrettably, this article isn’t about critiquing toe-tapping murderesses vying for a comeback; it’s about what I find funny on the world wide web. These days, my algorithm mostly alerts me to red flags of narcissistic abuse, OnlyFans creators testing Instagram’s boundaries, and some harmless astrology. Sadly, none of the current content is particularly funny, but I’ve gone to great lengths scrolling through innumerable chat histories to a time when the internet still made me lol

Stephen Colbert on Trump’s Scotland trip: ‘A grift for the whole family’

Late-night hosts recap Donald Trump using his taxpayer-funded time to open up a golf course in Scotland and an effort to rename the Kennedy Center after him.“Folks, I read once that if you’re a passenger in an auto accident, it helps if you’re just a little drunk,” said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday evening. “Because – and the science backs this up – a drunk passenger is a little loose. And if you’re a little loose, you’re less likely to get severely injured than if you tense up right before impact.”“Which brings me to our president,” the Late Show host continued

Heritage coalition saves Scottish modernist ‘jewel’ in fiercely fought auction

A coalition of design and conservation charities has won an auction to buy a threatened modernist building in the Scottish Borders after a fiercely contested bidding battle.The group, headed by the National Trust for Scotland, paid a final hammer price of £279,000 for the Bernat Klein Studio near Selkirk in an online auction on Wednesday morning. The final price of the property, which has lain unused and derelict for more than 20 years, could be in the region of £336,000.The building, regarded by conservators as a jewel of late-modernist British architecture, was designed by the highly regarded architect Peter Womersley in 1972. It was created for the textile designer Bernat Klein, whose clients included Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent

The ‘Black Sundance’ honoring film-makers of color and focusing on community building

The voice of the writer Toni Cade Bambara overlays a montage of archival film and photographs of Black people at school and work in a new feature documentary about her life. “The Reconstruction era offers a window into the 1930s,” Bambara says in the film. “There is the same drive for land, for the vote, for labor rights, education. The same need for self-help enterprises, for group cooperation.”So begins TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, the biographical film about the Black author, documentarian and social activist whose work on Black liberation and feminism helped inspire 20th-century social justice movements

Jon Stewart on Trump’s Epstein scandal: ‘How do you expect the media to move on, when Trump has such a hard time doing so?’

Late-night hosts followed Donald Trump and his Jeffrey Epstein scandal to Scotland, where he found new ways to put his foot in his mouth.Donald Trump headed to Scotland this week, nominally to work on a trade deal with the European Union, but also to put “an ocean’s distance between himself and the Epstein scandal”, said Jon Stewart on Monday’s Daily Show.But “how do you expect the media to move on, when Trump has such a hard time doing so?” he wondered.Stewart played a clip of a Scottish reporter asking Trump, “Mr President, was part of the rush to get this deal done to knock the Jeffrey Epstein story out?”“He’s all like, ‘How did you even hear about … I thought you guys just got Baywatch like three months ago?’” Stewart laughed. “‘Doesn’t anybody here have a question about this trade deal sinking both of our economies with tariffs?’”In response to the question, Trump offered what Stewart called his “13 Reasons Why I’m Not Involved with a Pedophile”

By the 30s, Katharine Hepburn was box office poison. Then she made The Philadelphia Story

As a stuck-up socialite tangled in a love triangle, Hepburn delivers one of the most memorable screwball heroines – and we can’t help but love herThese days, Katharine Hepburn is revered as a progressive icon of Hollywood’s golden age, an androgynous (and possibly queer) fashion rebel whose four best actress awards have yet to be topped at the Oscars. But back in 1938, only six years into her illustrious career, she was branded as “box office poison”.She was a star ahead of her time, her domineering screen presence registering as shrill and petulant by the tail end of the 1930s. After the box office disappointments of Bringing up Baby and Holiday – both now canonised romcom classics – she retreated from Hollywood and signed on to a new play penned by her friend Philip Barry: The Philadelphia Story.Like its film adaptation, Barry’s script centres on Tracy Lord, a stuck-up socialite (easily read as a stand-in for Hepburn herself) set to marry a wealthy politician, only for the wedding to be upended by the arrival of two competing romantic prospects: her ex-husband, CK Dexter Haven, and tabloid reporter Mike Connor