Recently, while hanging out at my friends’ houses, I’ve gotten to listen in as their teens talked about everything from the best new music (who exactly is Yeat?), trending phrases (is 6-7 actually going anywhere?) and their behavioural habits.

Then I asked, for example, where they would go to search for a restaurant recommendation, homework help or advice. The answers to all of these were their friend Chat – as in ChatGPT or similar artificial intelligence chatbots.

Now I knew I was cooked (did I use that right?) years ago when I was still using Google for answers the teens had moved on to TikTok for, but I didn’t fully appreciate – until these conversations – just how all-consuming the use of Chat was in their everyday lives.

So I was also surprised to find out they are overwhelmingly using Chat as not just a friend, but a mental health provider.

As a clinical psychologist, this hits me especially hard. I’ve worked for years to translate information from my studies and the field of psychology to young people in entertaining and easy to understand ways. I have developed programs that help clinicians to work with families and young people to talk through life’s biggest stressors. But at the end of the day, they’d rather go to a bot that doesn’t really know them as a person, just as a data point.

My friend’s children showed me exactly how quickly this generation, very quick to get, well, anything, wanted relief for symptoms of depression and anxiety. They would tell Chat they weren’t feeling well and want to know what could be done about it – all before breakfast.

They said that they didn’t want to schedule an appointment for later or couldn’t hold their distress for a longer period; they wanted to use something that gave them some support in a literal blink of an eye.

As a millennial, I grew up in the “Microwave Generation,” a group of kids known for their desire for instant gratification and having their needs met instantly. What, then, do we need to do to prepare for a generation that not only gets it instantly, but doesn’t even have to move off the sofa to do so? Their expectation that results would be easy to attain and accurate and personalised runs afoul of our current mental health model.

There have been several hit pieces on (and defaced NYC billboards for) the “Friend” device. An orb that goes around the user’s neck, Friend can give unfettered, curated advice throughout the day, accompanying the user through life’s mundane or noteworthy experiences. Many of us have scoffed at it – myself included – but now that I hear what the young people are saying about wanting support after a decade of declining mental health, is it so far-fetched to imagine that they just want to be quickly heard, seen and validated?

Tech companies have spent considerable time and resources to figure out what keeps young people hooked. But young people’s mental health is at stake – they already see themselves less positively, feel more isolated and have learning gaps relative to generations preceding them. Interactive AI – with its capacity to be responsive to youth – may seem like a clear solution.

Except early research hints at what the headlines already show: Great opportunity for “connection” may also come with great danger through compliance. Young people are also less likely to discuss the advice from Chat with loved ones, leading to potentially deadly consequences, such as in cases where teen suicides have been linked to AI chatbots.

These consequences, to say nothing of the known and racial biases of chatbots for Black youth, can lead to greater disparities in mental health outcomes. If Black youth are exposed to high incidents of daily online racism and are engaging in higher rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviours relative to their peers and other times in history, the guidance from internet-culled resources may be dire for that population.

So as adults, we need to think about ways we can support the young people in our lives.

Since Chat, Chatty or any other nickname for the chatbot, is here to stay, how can we learn from what our youth are searching for and be a part of that solution – together? How can we ensure our phones are down long enough for us to actually hear what they are saying? How can we support them knowing that life is in fact filled with ups and downs, not just the most clean or perfect versions of output or editing that we present to the world?

By modelling behaviours that we want to see in them, we can show that it is natural to not know, to ask others, to wrestle with frustration. Show them how you may decide between two choices, or, better yet, use technology to work out a problem together. Use video chat to call someone to talk through a challenging situation so they can hear what conversation skills look, sound and feel like.

Finally, ask them directly about chats with, well, Chat, using questions that open up conversation and invite inquiry and analysis instead of yes or no questions that may close off further discussion.

My hope is that I can intentionally strengthen my relationship with mentees and niblings this year. I might start by asking some simple questions to kick off our discussion: What are the latest songs I should listen to (and will I understand them)? Where did you get those jeans (the back of my storage)? And, most relevant to our conversation here, what are you asking Chat about today?

This latter question may just be the thing that helps one child know they have a friend that is real, all ears and willing to provide steady feedback to life’s tough stuff.

Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson is a licensed clinical and community psychologist, associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, and affiliate with Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. She is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in Partnership with National Black Child Development Institute.

Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.

Parents in the UK are being urged to keep their children rear-facing in car seats until they’re at least four years old.

Rear Face For Safety said children are up to five times safer travelling rear-facing than forward-facing and is trying to raise awareness of this to save lives and prevent life-changing injuries.

Jenny Everson has firsthand experience of the power of rear-facing. She was driving along a 50mph road in December 2023, when a speeding driver crossed through a gap in the central reservation and collided head-on with her car.

Jenny and her mother, who was travelling in the front passenger seat, were both knocked unconscious by the impact and suffered serious injuries which required lengthy rehabilitation in hospital.

But Jenny’s son Marlo, who was almost three at the time and travelling in a rear-facing car seat, escaped with only minor injuries.

“Had it not been for Marlo’s rear-facing seat, I was told by emergency services he likely wouldn’t be here now,” Jenny said.

“I will be forever grateful I did my research as I’m sure his seat saved his life, or at the very least saved him from serious injury.”

She is now on a mission to raise awareness of the importance of rear-facing seats, adding that “if telling our story helps save just one child’s life, then it’s worth it”.

In the UK, it’s a legal requirement for babies under 15 months of age to travel rear-facing. This is because infants’ heads are proportionally heavier than older children’s compared to their bodies, so their necks are more delicate.

According to Halfords, having the car seat in a rear-facing position protects them better in the event of a crash. Yet a 2024 survey by the retailer found nearly a quarter (22%) of parents are breaking the law by having their infant forward-facing.

Some parents switch to forward-facing once their children’s legs become longer or when they become toddlers. But experts want to challenge this view.

They stress that in a frontal collision, rear-facing seats offer enhanced protection for a child’s head, neck and spine by distributing crash forces across the back of the child car seat.

The NHS-run Bedfordshire Luton Children’s Health Service recommends for children to use a rear-facing seat until they’re four years old as they have “less developed skeletons”.

Dr Maria Klingegård, traffic safety researcher at Folksam, said: “Children are not just small adults. They need extra support. A rear-facing child restraint system provides robust protection that is forgiving for misuse, offers synchronised support for the head and torso, and protects the neck.”

She highlighted how Sweden has “among the lowest fatality rates for small children in cars”, which she claimed is “largely because most parents use rear-facing restraints for older children up to four or five years of age, or longer”.

Data suggests around 22% of UK children aged two to four travel rear-facing, compared with 83% in Sweden.

Dr Neale Kinnear, a leading UK behavioural scientist, road safety expert and father-of-two, said: “Many families in the UK remain unaware of the safety benefits or assume that turning children forward-facing earlier is the norm internationally.

“What matters is making sure parents have access to clear, consistent and evidence-based information so they can make informed choices.

“Rear-facing travel is one practical and evidence-informed step that can help better protect children.”

The whole world has been waiting for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey with bated breath ever since the project was announced in 2024.

Nolan’s first film since Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep, The Odyssey is an epic tale of war, love and loss with a stacked all-star cast, and marks the director’s first movie shot entirely with IMAX cameras.

At last, the years-long wait for the British filmmaker’s 13th movie is almost over, with its release now less than two months away.

Excitingly, plenty about The Odyssey is still shrouded in mystery, but here is everything we do know about one of this year’s most talked-about movies…

The Odyssey is based on an epic poem by the ancient Greek writer Homer, which follows the King of Ithaca, Odysseus, on his harrowing 10-year journey home after the Trojan War.

Over the course of his voyage, Odysseus battles numerous mythical monsters, including a cyclops as well as sirens and deadly sorceresses, before finally making it back to his homeland and family.

The story predominantly explores the drive to protect one’s family, loyalty and the use of brain over brawn to succeed.

It’s no great surprise that A-listers are queuing up to work with Christopher Nolan, and the cast of The Odyssey is a real who’s who of Hollywood.

Matt Damon is taking on the lead role as Odysseus, with Anne Hathaway playing his wife Penelope and Tom Holland appearing as his son Telemachus.

Robert Pattinson will play Odysseus’ rival Antinous, a suitor for Penelope, and is joined by his Dune and The Drama co-star Zendaya, who will be playing the Greek goddess Athena.

Also playing pivotal characters are Charlize Theron as the sea witch Calypso, and Lupita Nyong’o, who is also set to play both Helen of Troy and her sister, Clytemnestra.

Rapper Travis Scott also appears in the film, playing a poet figure, with Mia Goth portraying the maidservant Melantho, John Leguizamo appearing as Odysseus’ friend Eumaeus, The Bear’s Jon Bernthal playing Spartan king Menelaus and The Smashing Machine director Benny Safdie taking on the role of Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon.

Rounding out the cast are Minority Report’s Samantha Morton as the mythical Circe and Yesterday’s Himesh Patel as Odysseus’ second-in-command, Eurylochus.

Logan Marshall Green and Elliot Page are also in the film, although neither’s role has been officially revealed.

Christopher Nolan fans will know the director has a penchant for working with the same actors across different projects, and many of his The Odyssey actors have appeared in his past movies.

Anne Hathaway starred in both The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, while Matt Damon also appeared in Interstellar, as well as Oppenheimer.

Robert Pattinson and Himesh Patel both appeared in Tenet, while Elliot Page worked with the filmmaker back in 2010’s Inception and Benny Safdie had a minor role in Oppenheimer.

Compared to many of his peers, Christopher Nolan is known for his love of practical effects and shooting out in the real world, rather than relying on CGI and green-screen technology.

The Odyssey will be no different, with the cast shooting in locations as varied as Scotland, Morocco, Italy and Iceland.

“By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways,” the Dunkirk filmmaker told Empire in November last year. “Because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”

During a recent appearance on The Late Show back in May, Christopher told Stephen Colbert that he considered The Odyssey to be the original Marvel movie.

He claimed: “Even comic book culture, whether you’re talking about Marvel or D.C. or all the rest, a lot of it comes directly from the Homeric Epics.

“The thing about Homer is, nobody knows if that was a person. Homer, in a way, is the sort of George Lucas of his time.”

When asked what made him want to adapt The Odyssey for the big screen, he admitted that a subplot involving Odysseus’ dog Argos had really stood out to him.

He explained: “I’m a new dog owner. I’d never had a dog growing up. I didn’t have a dog when my kids were young. We denied that, and then as soon as they left for college, we got a dog.

“They love the dog, too, when they get to visit. I decided to do The Odyssey because it’s the ultimate dog story.”

Lead actor Matt Damon teased to Empire back in November that The Odyssey is “exactly what you want [from] a summer movie”, describing shooting it as “the best experience of my career”.

In a more recent interview with GQ, he shared how the film felt more like the big-budget films he made in the early years of his career.

He explained: “It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working. And I know that that’s going away.”

Matt theorised that, because of the way that the industry is headed, The Odyssey could well be the last of its kind.

“I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this,” he claimed, adding: “I don’t think people are going to be given the resources to shoot movies that way for much longer.”

Tom Holland also called The Odyssey his “proudest achievement” in an April interview with GQ.

“I can tell you that it is an absolute masterpiece, and I’m taking myself out of that equation. Chris Nolan’s movie is fantastic,” the Spider-Man actor said. “It’s unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before.”

Tom promised fans they are going to be “blown away by the set pieces and sequences,” thanks to the scale of Nolan’s film.

“I was absolutely blown away by the scale, the scope, his ability to navigate such an intricate and heartfelt story in the middle of this insane kind of action movie,” he enthused.

Charlize Theron also backed up Matt and Tom’s comment about the filming experience.

The Oscar winner told Elle that making the Greek epic was “one of the best experiences that I’ve ever had”, stating: “All of us had a certain personality of wanting to push harder. And when you put a group of those kinds of people together, it’s pretty amazing what they can accomplish.”

And rewarding though the experience might have been, the stars have made no secret of the fact that the shoot was an especially tough one.

Matt admitted to GQ in June: “Every time we’d go somewhere, we’d be like, ‘Well, Iceland will be easier’. And then it’s raining sideways and it’s fucking freezing. Iceland was like, ‘Yeah, easy? Hey, hold my beer’.

“I’ve never seen people look so exhausted,” Robert Pattinson added about the experience in the same GQ article. “And this was only a third of the way.”

He continued: “I started a third of the way through the movie, and they’d already been to [two] countries by that point and people just looked like… I mean, at the end of every day people were broken.”

As soon as The Odyssey’s first trailer dropped in December, sceptics wasted no time pointing out how historically incorrect they felt the armour and costumes looked.

In a Time interview from May, the director responded to his detractors, insisting that his research was thorough when putting together The Odyssey, and pointing out that our knowledge of the Bronze Age is based on “very fragmentary archaeological records”.

He said of the cynics: “Hopefully they’ll enjoy the film, even if they don’t agree with everything. We had a lot of scientists complain about Interstellar. But you just don’t want people to think that you took it on frivolously.”

There was also some discourse during filming, when the director’s location choices were met with backlash.

Matt Damon and Zendaya were reported to be filming a sequence in Dakhla, a city in the Western Sahara that has been under Moroccan occupation for the last 50 years.

María Carrión, the executive director of Western Sahara International Film Festival, accused the director, his actors and his crew – whether knowingly or unknowingly – of “contributing to Morocco’s repression of the Sahrawi people and to the Moroccan regime’s efforts to normalise its occupation of Western Sahara” by filming in the region.

While the filmmaker has not directly responded to these comments, The Guardian has claimed that The Odyssey’s shoot in Dakhla was completed in around four days, and was already over by the time the festival organisers raised their concerns.

Although some were concerned with the costume and location choices of The Odyssey, there’s also been a separate backlash centred on its casting.

Some online commentators have questioned why a movie based on Homer’s Greek epic appears to have no Greek actors confirmed in the principal cast.

Greek City Times even published an open letter which argues that Greek people are being ignored in a story so deeply rooted in Greek culture, history and identity.

Similarly, the decision for all of the characters to speak in American accents was one that raised eyebrows.

Meanwhile, certain right-wing parts of the internet regrettably exploded when it was revealed that Lupita Nyong’o would playing Helen of Troy, described in mythology as “the most beautiful woman in the world”.

One such critic was Elon Musk, who has spent the last few months complaining on social media about Lupita’s inclusion.

“Casting a Black woman to play a White woman in a foundational work of European literature is no more right than casting a White man to play Shaka Zulu!” the X owner claimed, referring to the South African king, while also Elon branding Nolan “an anti-White racist”.

Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh claimed in another X post that “not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’” despite the star being named People’s Most Beautiful Woman after first rising to fame.

Lupita has since addressed the racist backlash, reminding those who have an issue with her casting that The Odyssey is a “mythological story”.

“Our cast is representative of the world. I’m not spending my time thinking of a defence,” she told Elle in May 2026. “The criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not.”

She added: “It spans worlds. So that’s why the cast is what it is. We’re occupying the epic narrative of our time.”

Nolan praised the Oscar-winning actor during the same article, enthusing: “The strength and the poise were so important to the character of Helen. And Lupita makes it look effortless.

“I’m sure there’s a tremendous amount of discipline and training that goes into projecting that kind of poise and feeling the emotion bubbling beneath the character, the layers of the character right there underneath.”

While Christopher Nolan’s take isn’t the first adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, it looks to be the biggest and most epic adaptation to date.

Kirk Douglas previously starred in an Italian version of the story in 1954 called Ulysses, while the Coen brothers’ 2000 musical-comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? turned Odysseus into an escaped prisoner in the American South.

The most recent adaptation of The Odyssey came in 2024, with the film The Return.

Starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, the movie covered only the last act of the story, depicting Odysseus pretending to be a suitor to win his wife back – and killing the men trying to pursue her.

Mark your calendars – Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey will hit theatres on July 17 2026.

There certainly is. Give it a watch for yourself below:

The mysterious new horror film Backrooms hasn’t just been a hit at the box office and with critics, it’s also one of the most talked-about films in the world right now.

Kane Parsons’ directorial debut stars Chiwetel Ejifor as a disillusioned man who stumbles upon an alternate universe through the basement of a furniture store, and tries desperately to get his therapist, played by Renate Reinsve, to see things his way.

Backrooms has a completely distinct visual style that has made it immediately iconic, and considering how many people on both sides of the Atlantic have been flooding cinemas to see it, many will no doubt be contemplating exactly how the movie came to be.

Here are 17 facts you probably didn’t know about the making of Backrooms…

Rather than being an adaptation of a book, TV series or even video game, Backrooms started life as a viral photo.

Back in 2019, 4chan members asked fellow users to submit “disquieting images that just feel ‘off’”, with one response featuring an image of an environment similar to the one seen in the film Backrooms, showing a sprawling empty space in the back of a furniture shop.

Shortly afterwards, an anonymous user in the same thread submitted a potential origin story for the space, which read:

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
“God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

The photo and accompanying text then became widely shared across message boards like 4chan and Reddit, becoming its own “creepypasta” (a term that basically refers to a viral meme that’s more scary than funny).

People then began putting their own spin on the concept of the “backrooms”, with Kane Parsons starting a hugely successful YouTube series created using the design software Blender, which is how he caught the eye of production company A24.

One other key adaptation of the “backrooms” trend came in 2024, when an episode of the stand-alone anthology series American Horror Stories brought the concept to the small screen.

“Initially, the hope on my end was TV,” Kane told YouTuber Patrick Tomasso.

He also shared that the “TV show I would have been pitching is not at all the same narrative that this movie is”, and made it clear that he’d still be up for pursuing that previous idea for a series in the future.

First designed using Kane’s go-to tool Blender, the production design team then put together a veritable maze of generic, mono-coloured rooms that spanned a whopping 30,000 square feet.

“I always maintained that I want to go as practical as possible, and we did,” the director told Interview magazine.

“So the vast majority of what you see in the film is built sets. Anytime a character is physically walking on the floor, it’s a real floor. Anytime they’re physically touching a wall, that’s a real wall.”

He added: “Most of the time, if you were on the set, you could stand in the middle of it, do a 360-degree turn, and not see any blue screen and not see anything that breaks the facade of actually being there.”

Production designer Danny Vermette compared the process of piecing each of the rooms together on set to a game of Tetris, telling IndieWire: “We had to go in and measure every square inch of all four sound stages to make sure that we had the room to build and then figure out the Tetris plan of how those sets are gonna fit.”

Danny told Architectural Digest that when Kane sent his original Blender plans over “it was something like 100,000 square feet”.

“It crashed my computer,” he then admitted.

“We wanted it to be awkward and to throw our actors into a world of discomfort, in a sense,” Danny told IndieWire. “Whether it’s crawling through a small space or crawling up a ramp and really sell that we’re in the middle of levels, that there’s multiple levels.”

Clearly it worked, with Chiwetel telling Playlist that being on set was “a kind of psychological torment”.

“You can definitely feel that disconnect with reality and that creeping dread when you’re in there, and that sense that if you were in here endlessly, just what that would mean to your mind,” he recalled. “It’s not a place that is very forgiving for your psychology.”

Chiwetel told YouTuber John Feitelberg: “We had a huge set, and we were wandering around, getting lost, trying to figure our way through it. It was great to have it as a physical space.”

In his IndieWire interview, Danny also recalled: “On some of the stages there’s five or six sets. So, it was day to day. It wasn’t just the first day people getting lost.

“They’d been out shooting in the real world, and then they come in [on the sound stage], and the sound guy hadn’t been there, and the camera crew hadn’t been there. And sure enough, you hear ‘Hello? Hello?’. Like, the sound guy’s lost, and he went in the wrong entrance…”

“We did a lot of tests there to make sure we were getting the general tone that people expected [from] Backrooms,” Kane admitted to Creative Bloq. “We did 50 wallpaper tests to get the right shape of yellow.”

“We started cannibalising parts from other sets and reshaping one of our main stages and adding extra walls,” Kane told Interview. “So it took on a new form and a new layout.

“By the last day, most of the sets were butchered and a lot of the walls were gone and it was in disarray.”

Conversely, other rooms never got used in scenes at all, but they were still important as they would loom in the background, adding to the overall eeriness of the piece.

“There’s definitely areas in the sets that are not used, although technically, each set is at least somewhat shot,” the filmmaker revealed to the horror outlet Dead Meat.

“By and large, what you see in the film is what it felt like to be there,” he told Interview.

“The only places where we do run into VFX would be the stuff that is obviously impossible to build, some of the massive spaces and whatnot.”

He added: “I do love VFX, so I don’t consider it a weakness to leverage them to a certain extent. And then, in the found footage sections, a decent bit of that was done in Blender.”

“I would never lean in a generative AI direction, and I’m personally in opposition to the use of it in the creative workforce, outside of automating menial tasks,” Kane relayed to Interview.

Elaborating further to Variety, he claimed: “[Like] most well-adjusted people […] if I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would. Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.”

Some viewers have suggested that parts of Backrooms are actually an analogy for AI, though Kane has never made this intention clear directly.

Well, it turns out it was more practical than you might have realised.

“We have a portal for the camera and a portal for the actor [and] we have a plug that goes back in, so once the actor’s through, the wallpaper plug goes back up with a seam,” Danny told IndieWire. “It’s fixed in post, there’s seam repair there…”

He continued: “And to rotoscope that, when their hands are going through, moving at a slow pace, that’s incredibly challenging, but they did such a great job with it.”

By the way, “noclipping” is a gaming term that refers to a glitch or cheat code that allows users to pass through walls and other obstacles, which is featured in the original backrooms “creepypasta”.

During an interview with BuzzFeed Canada, Kane claimed that “the zoning” of Vancouver made it a unique setting for his film.

“I don’t know if ‘liminal’ is the right term for Vancouver, it might actually be the opposite,” he said. “I find [the city] very compelling and interesting [visually], but also horrible when it comes to casting the location as Southern California, when ever single building in the suburbs is a completely different architectural trend and design.

“There’s no consistency in any given neighbourhood for the most part. So, you get a brick castle next to a 2016 YouTuber mansion next to just a cube.”

He told Dazed that being in the 90s makes Backrooms feel “far away in time”.

But also, on a more practical level, he needed it to take place in a pre-internet time, because “it would be far easier to uncover the nature of this place” if the characters had access to iPhones.

Kane told Patrick Tomasso that he and his team “do authentically run [what they’ve recorded] through a VCR” to give it a 90s feel, but “it’s all digital”.

“There’s a version that exists where it’s all crystal clear, 4k high quality,” he revealed. “But then after the fact, we reconform the footage to become more fitting of the actual vehicle.”

Elsewhere in the interview, he shared: “Generally speaking, the conversion process is true to the camera – I would never go and do a VHS filter on top of things. We colour grade a lot before and after the conversion, to play into the cultural expectation of that media.”

Speaking to Dead Meat, Kane noted that “because the backrooms is obviously a pretty public concept”, there are “a lot of different interpretations”, some he feels are not as “effective” as others.

He particularly takes issue with the “inclusion or over-reliance on non-euclidean geometry and whatnot”.

Kane explained: “That’s a preference – you can pull it off and it can be great, but I feel as though there’s something I like quite strongly about the backrooms feeling like a building built by people and then it’s just the certain construction choices that don’t make a lot of sense.

“[That could be] a hallway that’s slightly too narrow or a crevice that you couldn’t even fit a desk in, so why is it there in the first place? Stuff like that. It [should get more] absurd and impossible through your continued exploration and probing of it, rather than an immediate ‘walk this way and walk back and shit this is a different room’.”

“I think it’s scarier to me thinking that you end up getting lost in there wandering for a while, knowing that you can backtrack,” he continued. “I feel like if the environment is immediately changing all around you, you lose the game too quickly.”

Forbes has pointed out that in the olden days, seagulls were considered a bad omen among sailors, and that it was particularly bad luck to kill one. This, of course, plays up to the sailing iconography scattered throughout the film, most notably in Clark’s furniture store.

Offering a more vague explanation, Kane told Polygon: “I would say there’s a significance to picking seagulls. Birds evoke a certain kind of imagery that we wanted to be evoking.

“But without explaining the thought process fully — logically, there’s nothing that would prevent anything from getting in there. Logically, literally anything that could walk through a wall could end up in that place. Birds and flies and humans just so happened to be some of the more unfortunate ones in this film.”

“The implication inside the film — I’m not going to be cute about that for a second — the implication when we see the birds is yes, they came from outside,” he added, although he added it “very well could be” a backrooms creation, too.

Unfortunately, Kane just doesn’t feel like sharing it right now.

“It was a pirate from the beginning,” Kane told Dead Meat. “I won’t say more, but I think people will dig into it. I think symbolism can be a crutch a lot of the time, and I wouldn’t ever lead with it… but there’s some specific reasoning behind the pirate steering wheel and ocean and all that.

Backrooms is in cinemas now.

Pete Hegseth has been condemned after he used a D-Day commemoration to accuse Nato countries of not doing enough to tackle illegal immigration.

The US defence secretary was branded “an absolute bum” after saying “European beaches are [being] stormed by different, dangerous ideologies”.

Critics said his comments, at the Normandy American Cemetery in north-west France on the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings, were disrespectful to the memory of those who died in the Second World War.

Nearly 4,500 Allied troops were killed attempting to liberate Nazi-occupied France on June 6, 1944.

Hegseth said: “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive.

“When will European capitals do something about that invasion or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

But his comments sparked a furious backlash on social media.

Former Labour MP Jamie Reed said Hegseth was “a bum with wet hair and a suit that doesn’t fit”.

The row comes after US vice-president JD Vance sparked anger by blaming “the mass invasion of migrants” for Henry Nowak’s murder.

The 18-year-old was handcuffed and arrested by police as he lay dying after being wrongly accused of racism by his killer, Vickram Digwa.

Digwa, who is Sikh, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 21 years at Southampton Crown Court last Monday.

Responding to Vance’s comments, a No.10 spokesperson said: “In recent days we have seen people trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets.

“The Nowak family are grieving after Henry’s horrific murder. They have said they do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension. We should be respecting their wishes.

“Our politics should bring people together even in the most terrible of circumstances. That is who we are as a country.”

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I love a good cooking hack, whether it’s the Gordon Ramsay-approved technique of removing the slimy middles of cucumbers for your salad or Mary Berry’s semolina coating for extra-crispy roast potatoes.

Which means that for years, I salted my aubergines before cooking them. I grew up hearing that it took that bitter taste from the veg and improved its texture.

But on Nigella Lawson’s site entry about her At My Table beef and aubergine fatteh recipe, the chef’s team recommended skipping the step.

After a deeper dive, I learned that everyone from Nigel Slater to Ottolenghi avoids pre-salting for the majority of aubergine dishes.

There are a few reasons people do this, including:

1. Removing their bitter flavour,
2. Drawing out moisture for a crispier/less mushy result.

We’ll deal with these one by one.

Nigella’s site reads: “Some people recommend salting the aubergines before cooking, to draw out any bitter juices. However, most modern aubergines do not have this problem and are quite mild”.

Culinary publication Food and Wine agrees. They write that aubergines date back to 50BC, when the plant was indeed very bitter. They argue that the practice of salting them may have started long, long ago (we don’t know who by), and passed down even though farmers have been growing select, less-bitter veg for generations now.

“Today, most eggplants available at the grocery store and farmer’s market are bred without bitterness,” the publication shared.

In case you needed any more convincing, chef Nigel Slater and cooking bible Larousse Gastronomique agree it doesn’t make the plant less bitter. “The process of degorging [salting] is no longer necessary as commercially cultivated aubergines are not as bitter as they used to be,” the iconic cooking book said.

Verdict: salting an aubergine is not likely to make it less bitter.

Salting very moisture-heavy veg, like courgettes, is undeniably useful when prepping them for e.g. fritters. Salt draws moisture out of the produce, which you can then squeeze through a muslin cloth for a drier, crispier fry; I did this just yesterday for some mucver.

Bitter or not, aubergine does not change the nature of osmosis. It’s true that salt always draws moisture from vegetables.

But the question of whether or not that actually makes it easier to crisp up is not as easy to answer as you might think. Food and Wine said that salting aubergines to dry them is a “double-edged sword for the ultra-absorbent” veg.

Drier aubergine may be less able to take on flavours, they say. On the plus side, it could, in theory, take on less fat when frying, which may make it crispier.

However, a Guardian journalist tried the method and said that while the salted version took up less oil at first, both salted and unsalted versions ended up absorbing the same amount of fat when they fried them. They also said the end results were basically identical, flavour and texture-wise.

Sara Jenkins, chef and owner of Porsena in New York City, said that she doesn’t bother when pan-frying aubergine. “I have rarely found an eggplant that is so bitter that it needs salting. I just cut it up, toss the pieces with olive oil, and start cooking,” she told Epicurious.

Her only exception is deep-frying.

A New York Times Cooking recipe shared another, salt-free way to stop fried aubergine from becoming mushy: “Eggplant is known to absorb liquid like a sponge, so here’s a trick: oil the slices (lightly) just before they hit the pan [instead of laying them in fat] to ensure that they are not oil-logged,” they wrote.

For roasting or baking, recipe tester Anna Theoktisto said it’s not worth the extra time, as aubergine that cooks for that long of a time inevitably breaks down anyway. Ottolenghi omits the step for his roasting recipes, too.

Verdict: Salting might make aubergine crispier when frying, though cooks have seen mixed results, and many chefs don’t bother. For roasting, grilling, baking, marinating, and stewing, lots of experts advise against salting.

This year, the UK’s rules for recycling changed under the “Simpler Recycling” initiative.

That means we should now have four standard bins for collection across the UK, as opposed to the previous up to seven bin options provided by some councils.

As part of the new rules, the government explained on their site, “Plastic film packaging and plastic bags will need to be collected with plastic recycling from 31 March 2027”.

That’s because not all plastic bags can be recycled in all parts of the UK at the moment.

“Generally, plastic film and carrier bags can’t be recycled at home, but some can be recycled at supermarket carrier bag collection points,” London Recycles shared.

That means that in some areas, thin, film-like plastic bags and colourful plastic might not be accepted by the council in your domestic waste. Others allow you to put supermarket carrier bags in your recycling, but say they won’t be processed.

And some bodies like York Council have said they don’t accept black or dark plastics as these can’t be recycled yet. “Stretchy plastics”, like bubble wrap or bread bags, aren’t recyclable in that area’s home waste either.

They also don’t recycle food or drink pouches.

These rules might change according to your local council’s rules, so check those before recycling. But across the board, compostable and biodegradable bags can’t be recycled.

“If they enter the recycling system can potentially cause quality issues in the recycled material. These should be placed in your home composting bin, if you have one,” said Recycle.

And dirty or sticky plastic bags or those that have food residue or grease on them can’t be recycled either.

Not all types of plastic are as valuable as others to recycling plants. They don’t all cost the same to recycle, and there isn’t the same demand for different kinds of recycled plastic either.

Others need specialist recycling facilities, which the UK doesn’t have in large enough quantities yet.

Then, there are the bags themselves to consider.

“Plastic bags and film can… cause problems at recycling plants, clogging up the sorting equipment and potentially causing whole loads of recyclable waste to go to landfill”, said Zero Waste Scotland.

Kent County Council said plastic bags and soft plastics can wrap around their machines, slowing everything down.

Some supermarkets in the UK recycle plastic bags on-site. You can find signs on some carrier bags saying whether they can be recycled, and whether or not you need to do so in the store.