It seems that the Duchess of Cambridge switched up her hairstyle prior to arriving in Ireland this week—and royal watchers are very much in favor of her new look.
At her last engagement, just a few days before her and Prince William's royal tour of Ireland, Kate was still sporting her old cut: a long, wavy look, styled with a chic blowout. Her new style is significantly shorter—almost in lob territory—and features side bangs, an old favorite look of the Duchess's.
Kate’s old hairstyle.
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Kate’s newer, shorter hairccut.
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It's already a hit with royal watchers. In a video captured in Galway, fans can be seen complimenting her new 'do. "Love your hair, Kate!" screams one; "You look lovely!" adds another. (Watch the clip above.)
Sadly for Kate's Irish fans, though, her and Prince William's trip to Ireland is nearly over. The Duke and Duchess are currently undertaking their third and final day of royal engagements in the country, and will soon head home to Britain.
This has been the royal couple's first official visit to Ireland, but it seems like it won't be the last. In a statement released in late February, Kensington Palace noted that "the UK’s links with Ireland are extensive, and the Duke and Duchess are looking forward to building a lasting friendship with the Irish people."
During their visit, they also expressed interest in bringing their kids—Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis—along for the next trip. At Teagasc Research Farm on Wednesday, an 11-year-old student spoke with the couple, later telling Town & Country, "They said they wanted to bring their kids over soon to show our projects."
Yesterday, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge enjoyed a romantic clifftop walk through rural Ireland. And today William didn’t miss the chance to tell the public how much he loves his wife as the couple met the crowds in Galway.
On the final day of their three-day trip, the royals visited Ireland’s west coast where they popped into family-run Tig Coili pub in the city centre before carrying out their only walkabout of the tour. Crowds gathered several hours before the royals arrived to get a good spot and didn’t seem to mind waiting even though the couple were around an hour late after their helicopter from Dublin was delayed.
William and Kate on their walk yesterday.
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Angela Moran from Westport, County Mayo, was holding a commemorative banner from the 2011 royal wedding when she spoke to William. “He asked about the flag,” she told T&C afterwards. “I said to him that I really admired him and Catherine and he said thank you very much. I said I love her and he said ‘I do too, nice of you to say so.’”
About meeting the couple, she said: “It was amazing. It’s something you’d think will never happen. We came and stayed here overnight so that we’d be in a good position to see them today. We’ve had a long stand but it was worth every second.”
She said she liked the “class” and “magic” of the royals and always watches the Queen’s speech.
Kate greeting the crowds in Galway.
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Kate also greeted the crowds and spoke to Freya Rose who is the same age as Princess Charlotte and even shares a birthday with the Princess, May 2.
Freya’s mom Aoife Byrne told T&C: “She asked her what her age was and also wished her Happy Birthday for May...She asked if she liked to dance like Charlotte and asked her about school as well.”
They had been waiting since 9 a.m. to see the royals. “We like the royal family. We like the idea of reconciliation and peace,” Byrne said. She also described the couple as “very nice, very down to earth.”
William and Kate at a traditional Irish pub in Galway.
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Kate also dashed over when she saw two little girls calling out her name. “We asked to shake her hand. She is very beautiful,” says Siofre Borke, 8, who was there with friend Hazel McGann, 8.
“We were surprised she came running over,” says Hazel’s mom Paula McGann, 43.
“It was so sweet to see. You can see how Kate is drawn to the kids,” adds Phillida Eves, who was standing behind the children. “She said ‘I’ll be really quick!’ She was making an effort.”
Sandra Codyre, whose nephew Corey Greaney, 11, got to shake the couple’s hands, said the royals' visit is a "privilege."
“It’s a privilege to have them come to the west of Ireland. It will highlight Galway in a nice way,” she says. “It’s also great for the friendship between Ireland and Britain and it’s important for the young people like Corey to say they have met the future King and Queen.”
Victoria MurphyJournalist Victoria Murphy has reported on the British Royal Family for nine years.
Prince William and Kate Middleton are in the middle of a historic trip to Ireland. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are touring the country for three days after what has been a very busy 2020 so far. With the pair reuniting with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for their final royal engagement next week, here is a look at how the couple’s Ireland visit will make history.
Kate Middleton and Prince William | Samir Hussein/WireImage
Prince William and Kate Middleton tour Ireland
William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, flew to Ireland on March 3 and are staying in the country until March 5. During that time, they will make stops in Dublin, County Kildare, County Meath, Galway, and County Kildare.
The mission of the trip is to show how much Britain’s
relationship with the Republic of Ireland has improved over the past decade. In
fact, Kensington Palace has confirmed that the main themes of the tour are
reconciliation and remembrance.
“The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will undertake an
official visit to Ireland between Tuesday 3rd March and Thursday 5th March, at
the request of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office,” the statement
revealed. “The visit, which will see Their Royal Highnesses spend time in
Dublin, County Meath, County Kildare and Galway, will highlight the many strong
links between the UK and Ireland.”
The palace went on to say that Prince William and Kate will be exploring a variety of Irish cuisine and culture throughout their stay. The two are also emphasizing the importance of strong communities, both in the city and in the countryside.
The Foreign Office requested the Ireland tour, which is the first
of its kind since Queen Elizabeth visited the region in 2011.
The Cambridges will make history on their tour of Ireland
Back in 2011, Queen Elizabeth visited the Republic of Ireland in
what was the first tour of the country by a British monarch in 100 years.
According to Express, King George V was the last one to stop in
Ireland way back in 1911.
At that time, Ireland was still in the UK and the country’s relationship with Britain was a lot different from modern times. Prince William and Kate are clearly following in Queen Elizabeth’s footsteps in what will be yet another historic trip to the country.
“Following Her Majesty The Queen’s historic visit in 2011, the
visit will also focus on the relationship between the two countries, and build
on the theme of remembrance and reconciliation.”
Prince William, of course, will one day sit on the throne, so
visiting Ireland now could open the door for future trips when he is the ruling
monarch.
It also shows that the relationship between the two nations has
definitely improved over the years and that the royals are committed to
fostering that bond in the years to come.
Prince William and Kate Middleton prepare for a big reunion
Once they return from their historic tour of Ireland, William and Kate will be reuniting with Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in what might be the last time we see the couples together for a while.
The Cambridges and the Sussexes are scheduled to attend the Commonwealth Day service, which is being held inside Westminster Abbey next week. This will be the first time Prince Harry and Meghan have appeared with other members of the royal family since their dramatic exit in January.
Once the event is over, Harry and Meghan are expected to return
to Canada to continue their new lives outside of the royal spotlight. Their
exit will become official at the end of the month.
Prince William and Kate, meanwhile, will continue their work as senior members of the royal family. This includes numerous public engagements in the coming months as the royals do their best to move past Megxit.
Royal watchers get an adorable pic of Prince George, Princess
Charlotte, and Prince Louis
While fans wait for the big reunion, Prince William and Kate recently shared a super cute photo of their children during their recent trip to Wales. The pair visited the region in honor of St. David’s Day, and during a stop at Tata Steel, their children were given a set of toy dragons.
“Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant Hapus – Wishing you a very happy St
David’s Day to all our Welsh followers!” the couple captioned the post.
The Cambridges were not the only royals who mentioned St. David’s
Day on social media. Queen Elizabeth also got in on the fun and shared a
throwback pic of her visit to North Wales in 2010.
Prince William and Kate have not commented on their upcoming reunion with Prince Harry and Meghan. Their departure has caused a lot of issues within the ranks of the royal family and has also required the Cambridges to increase their workload.
Karl Glusman and Nick OffermanPhoto: Raymond Liu (FX)
When you first start watching the premiere episode of Devs, you’re certain of one thing: This show is supposed to be “high concept.” From the random images at the beginning of the premiere to the eerie music that permeates the first episode, this show is sending a message of what it wants to be: smart and edgy. And that makes sense, as it’s the brainchild of Alex Garland who wrote and directed Ex Machina and Annihilation, the latter of which was based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer. This is a guy familiar with the ins and outs of artificial intelligence and the sheer weirdness that sci-fi can be, and he appears to be putting that experience to great use in Devs.
The entire first episode is meant to unsettle you. Every choice is meant to show that there is something not quite right here. Even on a sunny, beautiful day when people are enjoying the outdoors, I felt cold watching it. This atmosphere is perfectly encapsulated in the strange and creepy plastic-looking statue, modeled after a young girl, that towers over the campus of Amaya, the Google or Facebook-like tech company at the center of Devs. Yes, it might be the “coolest” place to work, but I don’t know that I would ever be able to get used to a giant doll statue hovering over my place of work. How are you even supposed to concentrate knowing that thing is out there just….looking at you? No, thank you. It’s just weird and I do not like it—which is, of course, the point.
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The central question of the show, and one that will likely unspool over the course of its eight-episode limited run, is what in the world is going on at Devs? We see glimpses and hints over the course of this episode. Sergei (played by Karl Gusman) works on artificial intelligence at Amaya and demonstrates he’s able to successfully predict what a single-celled organism will do for about 30 seconds. After the presentation, Forest (Nick Offerman) and Katie (Alison Pill) invite Sergei to join the mysterious world of Devs.
And indeed, it’s a world, not just a team. Devs is indicative of everything that’s messed up about Silicon Valley and startup culture—the invitation to work nights, the lack of interest in “observing weekends,” as if over-working is a treat. The open workspace that is a nightmare in terms of productivity (though, if people have no phones to talk on, it might be less of an ordeal). The complete and utter lack of privacy that is coupled with the expectation that Amaya is watching and recording every single thing that you are doing at any given time.
What is Devs though? Forest says that even the people on the team may be unclear about the end goal, signaling that each of these people may work on a piece of a much larger puzzle. It’s an application of the current quantum computing system they use, but Forest rules out some of Sergei’s guesses: national security, cold fusion, artificial intelligence, encryption, biotech, search engines. At this point, my relatively uneducated theory is time travel, given Forest’s speech about determinism coupled with Katie’s insistence that the code actually changes nothing, even if it is revolutionary. If you think choices are predetermined, then being able to travel through time wouldn’t really affect anything.
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Alison PillPhoto: Miya Mizuno (FX)
The Devs office consists of a machine built within a Faraday cage, which blocks electromagnetic fields. The gold mesh surrounding the building could be to conduct heat and electricity (plus it looks pretty freaking cool), while the vacuum seal may ensure that everything within the building stays in the building (including air). Knowing this doesn’t provide answers necessarily, but it is intriguing information, and shows how many resources Amaya has put into protecting whatever knowledge is hidden in Devs.
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This is why Sergei’s next move is such a surprise. He somehow copies the code that he finds on his computer at Devs onto his wristwatch. That provokes all kinds of secondary questions: Is Sergei some sort of plant? A seemingly normal wristwatch with the capability to receive data isn’t exactly something you’d wear every day—though he is wearing it in his initial meeting with Forest and Katie. This means that the data-watch is either an exact duplicate of his personal wrist watch, switched out after he returns home for the day before starting at Devs, or he’s been wearing it for awhile. Either way, there are unanswered questions about who he’s working for and what his motivations might be.
The result, of course, is Sergei’s brutal murder at the hands of Amaya’s head of security, Kenton (Zach Grenier), while Forest cooly watches. And, to make things even more complicated, they fake footage of him leaving the campus and then returning the next day to light himself on fire, supposedly committing suicide in front of the creepy statue.
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Photo: Miya Mizuno (FX)
Despite the footage, Sergei’s girlfriend Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) is convinced there’s something strange going on. After all, she’s also an Amaya employee, working in their encryption department. She ends up going to an ex-boyfriend, Jamie (Jin Ha), to decrypt information she finds after restoring the contents of Sergei’s phone from a cloud backup. Presumably, this is the code that Sergei downloaded onto his watch. Jamie refuses to help her, but once he finds out about Sergei’s death, I have a feeling he’ll change his mind.
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It will be interesting to see, in future episodes, how Lily comes to grow and develop as a character. She’s at the center of this mystery, thrust into it thanks to Sergei. But she’s still a little bit of a blank—we know a decent amount about her after this first episode, but she doesn’t quite feel fully realized yet. That will likely happen over the course of future episodes, when she’s the focus of the episodes and, presumably, the person driving the narrative forward, rather than just playing her part as she does in this premiere.
Overall, this was a very promising first episode, and it bodes well for the rest of the series. The mysteries presented are intriguing ones, and because it’s a limited series we can be relatively sure we’ll get some answers by its end. (The fact that it’s from the mind of Alex Garland also indicates there probably is a resolution in mind, versus writing a mystery he doesn’t know how to solve, leading to a disappointing conclusion—looking at you, Lost.) All in all, I’m looking forward to seeing where we go from here.
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Stray observations
Lily is incredible at portraying the anxiety of someone who is quietly worried.
The fact that Lily knows all of Sergei’s passwords is a quiet (and tech-oriented) way to show the nature, and closeness, of their relationship.
Before he starts speaking, Nick Offerman is delightfully unrecognizable as Forest, Amaya’s CEO. He’s also utterly terrifying, from his utter lack of regard for any sort of utensils to eat a salad to the stone cold way he watches someone murdered on his orders (even if he shows some emotion about it later on). The acting in this show is generally fantastic, and Offerman is incredible playing against type.
Alison Pill is wonderful in everything she does, and apparently after her role in Star Trek: Picard as a synthetic life expert, she’s getting very good at talking about artificial intelligence.
The role of music in this show is crucial and incredible for setting the scene.
Given what Jamie says about Lily and Amaya, does the company feel a little bit like a cult?
Can I just say, again, that the giant doll statue is creepy?
Any taxonomy of television would need an entire kingdom just for bad TV. There’s bad TV that’s carelessly made, like a sheep with three hooves and a slapped-on beak. There’s bad TV that’s intentionally bad, schlocky and garish, like a sheep with magenta-dyed fleece. And then there’s bad television that’s striving to be great, that’s got ideas and style but sinks under the weight of its own oversize ambition—a sheep with a 50-pound weight tied to its forelegs and dropped in a river. Alex Garland’s Devs, a philosophically minded, prestige sci-fi cock-up airing on FX on Hulu (so, airing on Hulu with FX branding) belongs to this last species—except in Devs, multiple versions of the same sheep inhabit multiple realities. It sinks like a stone in every single one.
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Garland, who wrote and directed every episode of Devs, previously wrote and directed Annihilation, a sonic connection to which you can hear in Devs’ opening moments. Each episode begins with an eerie drone, gonging over otherwise silent images of the cast meaningfully staring at things. People portentously staring—or, in one instance, silently tossing a plate at a wall—is on my “oh, please, no” bingo card, so I won’t pretend that Devs and I got off on the right foot. And since humorlessness and seriosity—like, intoning Yeats levels of seriosity—are also on my bingo card, we never worked it out, though over the course of its eight episodes I did come to believe that, while absolutely none of it worked for me, much of what Devs was doing it was doing on purpose.
The show is made with so much care, sci-fi exposition, and cash—the supercomputer at the center looks like an art deco chandelier!—that its willfully hermetic, claustrophobic vibe; its fussy but swanning beauty; its dramatically deflating structure; and its contained-to-the-point-of-flatness performances must all be intentional, tuned as they are to the show’s central idea about the finite nature of the infinite. But all this control squeezes the life out of everything. The show is what it wants to be, but what it wants to be put me in mind of the big whiffs of the immediate post-Sopranos era, a hefty, pretentious, high-profile exercise in trying to make you Google de Broglie–Bohm theory.
Devs concerns itself with a young woman named Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno) who works for Amaya, a quantum computing giant that has surpassed Facebook and Twitter and Google in Silicon Valley supremacy. Lily, low-key and androgynous, is the type of character whom other characters are constantly saying is singular and exceptional, a woman who does things differently, though that’s mostly expressed by her tendency to use windows instead of front doors. Lily lives with her boyfriend, Sergei (Karl Glusman), a Russian engineer who also works at Amaya. Every morning they step over the homeless man who lives on their San Francisco doorstep to take the company bus out to the valley.
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This setup might suggest that Devs is interested in modern-day tech companies and the anthropology of their social milieu. It’s not. Its climactic insight on this subject is that tech CEOs have too much power—“You know the problem with people who own tech companies? They have too much power. They become messiahs”—which it shares twice, treating it like a revelation each time instead of a San Francisco fortune cookie. The would-be messiah of Amaya is its shaggy-headed beardo of a CEO, Forest (Nick Offerman), a man driven by a personal tragedy announced by the lifelike megastatue of his daughter that towers over the campus named for her. (The statue is further evidence of the show’s general disinterest in actual tech companies: In this age of polished industrial design, none of them would ever plant a 10-story garden gnome with wax museum energy in their front yard.)
Outwardly, Amaya is your standard world-conquering tech outfit, but its hundreds of employees obscure its real purpose, which is known only to the small handful of people involved with the company’s top-secret Devs team. Early on, Sergei is invited to join Devs after giving a presentation to Forest and his right-hand woman Katie (Alison Pill), in which he is able to accurately predict the future behavior of a simple organism. (Forest chomps on raw spinach during the presentation, a techlord with the swagger to eat like a cow, which is about as funny as Devs gets) After 30 seconds, though, the model falls apart: There’s too much data, too much complexity, and the numbers “go insane.” Or maybe, Sergei theorizes, “it’s a quantum-type problem.” Somewhere in the multiverse is an organism that’s behaving exactly as they predicted—it’s just not this universe. “Not a fan of the multiverse theory,” Forrest replies. Is your Reddit sense tingling yet?
It should be. Devs’ best quality is that it will inspire a thriving community of people geeking out about it on the internet—people who will likely work as a ventilator for the show itself, making it seem more alive than it is. (In this, and so many other things, it has a lot of overlap with HBO’s Westworld, another sci-fi show about humans’ limited capacity to change, but one that’s at least real enough to admit technocrats seeking absolute power might be motivated by self-interest, and not “trauma.”) The series concerns itself with all sorts of ideas, scientific and philosophical, that are fun to think and theorize about, while being, itself, no fun at all. Unlike Garland’s other previous directorial effort, the zingily plotted and spacily stylish exploration of artificial intelligence and sex robots, Ex Machina, Devs has no spark. It has no moment anywhere close to being as creepy, strange, funny, or threatening as an Oscar Isaac dance sequence, even if Garland did recast Isaac’s dance partner as Devs’ lead. (In the one scene where she gets to let loose, she’s great.) What it has instead is a good brainteaser, a sci-fi philosophy mashup: What if the multiverse were real, but also deterministic? What if the world that was constantly branching out into different realities showed us that we tend to do the same thing in every one, turning back on ourselves like so many ingrown toes?
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Shortly after being promoted to the Devs team, Sergei disappears, and Lily is left to figure out what happened to him, turning for help to her lovelorn ex-boyfriend Jamie (Jin Ha, definitely the best thing about the show). Lily doesn’t know what happened to Sergei, but we do. Garland has made a choice to have the audience inhabit a kind of all-seeing position—which, like so much about Devs, is structurally elegant but dramatically inert. It puts us in the same position as, say, a tech team that has designed a supercomputer so powerful that it can see the past and all possible futures, a clever bit of mirroring. But it also leads to multiple sequences in which Lily is just catching up to what we already know, recapitulations that are passed off like moments of tension but have all the suspense of a “previously on … ” intro.
Over and over again, Devs’ characters are informed that, no matter how hard they fight it, they are going to end up doing the same thing they were going to do, or already have. Instead of fighting anyway, they accept it. It’s as if Oedipus responded to the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother by saying: “Oof. You sure? I guess I’ll just go do that.” Obviously, that’s the stuff of tragedies that have lasted for thousands of years. By the time someone really tries to break out of what has been preordained, they accomplish it with so much ease that the moment, meant to be remarkable, falls flat: This whole free will thing doesn’t seem that hard—maybe someone should have tried it sooner.
But Devs is the kind of show that’s immune, in some ways, to criticism. On the one hand, it’s a big mood; on the other, it’s a logic puzzle. You feel it and then, if you keep watching, you’ll find yourself trying to solve it, even if that means picking at it. Why would a company hire a corporate spy if it could see the past and the future? Why would two people privately argue about firing someone they already knew they had fired? You could take these questions to r/devs, or you could answer them for yourself.
Lady Gaga has announced a special six-date summer tour dubbed “The Chromatica Ball.” The trek, presented by Live Nation, will kick off July 24th in Paris and continue through London, Toronto, Boston and Chicago before wrapping on August 19th in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
General tickets for The Chromatica Ball go on sale Friday March 13th in Paris, London and Toronto, and Monday March 16th in Boston, Chicago and East Rutherford via Live Nation. Fans can also access VIP packages, which may include premium tickets, a backstage tour, VIP parking and exclusive access to a pre-show lounge, special entry and more. Information on VIP packages is available here.
In addition, Citi cardmembers can take advantage of a special Citi Presale powered by Verified Fan opportunity for tour dates in the United States. Citi cardmembers can register now through Saturday March 9th at 11:59 p.m. EST to access the presale, which runs from Tuesday March 10th at 10 a.m. through Thursday March 12th at 5 p.m.
Every North American ticket includes a CD copy of Lady Gaga’s upcoming releaseChromatica, which drops April 10th via Interscope Records. For all shows in the U.S., $1 from each ticket sold will be donated to the singer’s Born This Way Foundation, which she founded in 2012 with her mother Cynthia Germanotta.
Lady Gaga announced the release of Chromatica after dropping a new single, “Stupid Love.”
The Chromatica Ball tour dates:
July 24 Paris, France – Stade de France
July 30 London, UK – Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
Aug. 05 Boston, MA – Fenway Park
Aug. 09 Toronto, ON – Rogers Centre
Aug. 14 Chicago, IL – Wrigley Field
Aug. 19 East Rutherford, NJ – MetLife Stadium
In the wake of set photos leaking and circulating around the net, director Matt Reeves has now taken to social media to share three official shots from his upcoming The Batman!
The three photos show off Robert Pattinson as The Batman as well as this particular film’s muscle car take on the iconic Batmobile, and you can check them all out down below.
If these first few shots are any indication at all, Reeves’ The Batman is set to be the most downright Gothic trip to Gotham since Tim Burton took us there. And that excites us. A lot.
What say you?!
Jeffrey Wright is co-starring as Commissioner Gordon with Zoe Kravitz as Selina Kyle/Catwoman. Paul Dano is set to play the Riddler, with Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, Colin Farrell as the Penguin, and John Turturro as Carmine Falcone.
