Adele’s New Album Is Finally Out, and the Internet Is Feeling Things

 We’ve been waiting on Adele’s new album for what feels (conservatively) like an eternity or two, and now the blessed day has come: 30 is finally here, and as Vogue’s Keaton Bell wrote in his review, it’s “a deeply hopeful album...that represents a dynamic leap forward for the Queen of Hearts.” There are sob-inducing bangers like “Easy on Me” and “Cry Your Heart Out”; more upbeat tunes such as “Can I Get It” and “Love Is a Game”; and even one song—“My Little Love”—that was written as a lullaby for Adele’s son. In other words, to paraphrase Saturday Night Live’s Stefon, this album has everything. (Seriously, have you heard “To Be Loved”? Tears!)Adele’s music more than stands on its own, but we’re living in 2021, baby, which means that any successful album release is judged at least in part by the amount of Twitter discourse it inspires. 30 is definitely delivering on that front, with social media users logging on to share just how emotional the album has made them (and throwing in a few memes while they’re at it). Below, find the very best Twitter reactions to Adele’s brand-new album.After her appearance in gold Jenny Packham at the No Time To Die premiere, the Duchess of Cambridge returned to the Royal Albert Hall on 18 November for the Royal Variety Show, accompanied by the Duke of Cambridge. For the occasion, Kate dug another Jenny Packham piece out of her archives: an emerald beaded dress from the British designer’s autumn/winter 2020 collection, which she previously wore during a visit to Pakistan in 2019.

 

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have a long history of supporting the event, first attending back in 2014. For her Royal Variety Performance debut, Kate selected a lace Diane von Furstenberg dress, followed by an ice-blue Jenny Packham gown in 2017 and a floor-length Alexander McQueen look in 2019.The yearly event serves to raise funds for performers across the UK who are in need of help as a result of “old age, ill-health, or hard times”, according to the Royal Variety Charity, of which the Queen is patron. Alan Carr—whose special with Adele airs on ITV on 19 November—served as master of ceremonies this year, introducing performances by everyone from Ed Sheeran to the cast of Moulin Rouge: The Musical.From a new season of Succession to reboots of Gossip Girl and (eventually) Sex and the City, TV has seen plenty of heralded returns in 2021—and bid a few fond farewells, too. (We’re looking at you, Shrill, Pose, and Insecure.) Yet there have also been lots of exciting new additions to the small-screen cannon, spanning the worlds of organized crime, academia, the comedy circuit, fashion, and even veterinary medicine. (In the streaming era, anything goes.)In January, Marley Marius wrote that a “comforting quaintness courses through All Creatures Great and Small,” a series adapted from the writings of veterinary surgeon James Herriot. “In turns engagingly procedural and thoroughly sweet, it would make for pleasant viewing any year, but with, well, everything going on, the show’s verdant landscapes and uncomplicated ethics feel especially welcome this winter.”

 

 

 

In Netflix’s The Chair, Sandra Oh stars as the freshly appointed head of a disintegrating college English department. Enrollment is down; a handful of dinosaur professors have not updated their syllabi for decades; and her closest friend and potential paramour—a rumpled Jay Duplass—cannot seem to make it to his own lectures on time. An older generation (mostly male, mostly white) have long stuck their heads in the sand, and Oh’s character has been rewarded for her years of scrambling with the unglamorous task of digging them out. A gentle-hearted satire, The Chair is neither condemnatory nor celebratory, but rather a sweetly sardonic depiction of campus life, where truth is hard to find.—Chloe SchamaIf the first episode of Hacks, starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, plays like a typical generational comedy—in it, a 20-something comedy writer meets a 60-something comedian about a job—the series soon reveals more complicated and compelling truths about its two central characters. “It’s increasingly clear,” Liam Hess wrote in June, “that their shared flaws transcend any kind of easy generational explanation, instead offering a kind of before and after of what it means to work as a woman in entertainment, carefully leavened with enough silliness to avoid feeling too on the nose.”If the first episode of Hacks, starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, plays like a typical generational comedy—in it, a 20-something comedy writer meets a 60-something comedian about a job—the series soon reveals more complicated and compelling truths about its two central characters. “It’s increasingly clear,” Liam Hess wrote in June, “that their shared flaws transcend any kind of easy generational explanation, instead offering a kind of before and after of what it means to work as a woman in entertainment, carefully leavened with enough silliness to avoid feeling too on the nose.”