The Brunch round-up for September 20: The week and how it made us feel

Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz have been spotted hand-in-hand. Honestly, it’s a win for everyone: Fans, gossipmongers, fashionistas, music stans. (Doesn’t this romance scream “Grammy-worthy collab” in the making?) Now, we need the perfect portmanteau. Harzoë? Stylitz? We like the sound of Zoerry.

First, he was the jock with abs in The Kissing Booth. Then, the jock with issues in Euphoria. Nobody bet he’d go from dumbbell to Dostoevsky; Jacob Elordi has surprised us all. He’ll play Heathcliff and Frankenstein soon, and has casually been name-dropping Sartre, Steinbeck, and Chekhov at press calls. Well played, Team Elordi.

Colleen Hoover’s upcoming novel, Woman Down, sounds like it will be one of her darkest yet. It’s about an author on the run after the movie adaptation of her book gets embroiled in controversy. Ooh! There’d better be insider info on the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni drama in there. Now, if this were turned into a blockbuster, we’d call it film-ception.

Cillian Murphy just can’t catch a break. When the trailer for 28 Years Later dropped in December, viewers insisted that the emaciated zombie rising up from the field was him. He isn’t even in the film. “That’s great, people think I look like a zombie cadaver. It’s very flattering,” he said then. Now, the web insists that he’s playing Voldemort in the Harry Potter series. Not again. Poor guy!

Here’s a girl trend that isn’t steeped in pink cringe. TikTok’s Hot Girl Curriculum has women designing their own month-long academic courses on everything from literature, psychology and financial wellness, to witchcraft, astrology and Anthony Bourdain. They’re setting their own syllabi, research plans, and reading lists. Finally, a class we’d show up for.

Cat lovers will remember 2025 with pride. It’s when we spotted the real VIP, the elusive Pallas’s cat, for the first time in India, in Arunachal Pradesh. This is the floofy wildcat from the Instagram videos: Resting grumpy face, and a habit of standing on its own thick, bushy tail to keep its paws off the freezing ground. Friend-shaped. But not friend.

Vogue just suggested something called ear-seeding to fix something called cortisol face. Sorry… what, and what? Actually, don’t tell us. We’re still recovering from other supposed problems: Dark underarms, muffin tops, chicken-wing arms, unibrow, FUPA, turkey neck, back rolls, and cankles. The last thing we need is another imagined flaw and bizarre cure.

Olivia Cooke and Robin Wright square off in Amazon Prime’s new show, The Girlfriend. It starts off with saas-bahu vibes: A jealous mother trying to sabotage her son’s relationship. But Cooke’s character Cherry has stuff to hide too. Come on, boy moms and GFs, how will Raja Beta grow up if you don’t?