The Brunch round-up for January 10: The week and how it made us feel

The spirit of South Park is alive and… shining bright on the Trump–Kennedy Center website, of all places. Epstein references are everywhere. “Ring in the New Year with a performance by: The Epstein Dancers!” reads one event listing. It’s the work of onetime South Park writer Toby Morton, who snapped up the domain right after Trump renamed the Kennedy Center. This is elite-level trolling. We approve.

Spain has offered $1 homes to tourists to move to picturesque villages. Italy is forking out 1 lakh euros for people to move to Trentino. Here’s the latest: Get a free home on Greece’s Syros island if you volunteer at their cat shelters. And here’s the fine print: It’s unofficially reserved for rich White youth, and those destinations are crumbling and empty. Boo. More scam than scheme.

Why does everything at Sweden’s ReTuna shopping centre look familiar? Because everything’s second-hand. It’s the world’s first mall devoted to used items: Furniture, books, art, clothes, tech. Guilt-free consumerism? This is the stuff of Jeff Bezos’s nightmares.

Most of us struggle to remember what we ate for breakfast or why we walked into a room. Not Singapore-based photographer Alistair Ryan. He tracked every hour of his life in 2025, down to the time he spent on dates and what he ate. He’s got pie charts and bar graphs – a bonanza of dull data. Full respect. If you’re going to be self-obsessed, go all out.

No one expected skateboarder Tony Hawk to show up on stage in the Golden State Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker. He wasn’t planning on it either, but his daughter Kady egged him on. He had a blast, kickflipping and sliding to Tchaikovsky. Clara approves. Now let’s skateboard to Swan Lake!

We just saw a video of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez cuddling. Again. Is the world ready for Bennifer 3.0? Thoughts and prayers to the couple’s friends, especially Matt Damon, who’s likely bracing for another messy breakup, only for them to get back together the next day.

BMW is rolling out a special screw that only its own tools can undo. So, you can no longer fix your own car, neither can the neighbourhood mechanic. Screw this. If you own something, you should be allowed to poke under the hood and tinker with it as you please. We’re more than cogs paying for the machine.

One thing we noted in Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s new sci-fi series: Each episode ends with the line, “This show was made by humans”. Hate on the plot if you must, not everyone warmed to the tale about an a benevolent, vegetarian, alien, hive mind. But at least a human is owning up. Not relying on bots and blaming them later.