Life Style

Food does not always go viral for its flavour – sometimes, it is the story that sells. That is the case with “Ex-Boyfriend Toast”.This simple dish – a slice of toasted bread topped with cream cheese and blueberry jam – has evolved from a viral internet post in Korea to a popular item at a cafe in Brooklyn, New York.“Treat yourself to a delicious toast – made with blueberry preserves and cream cheese – that has an interesting background story as to why it got its name!” reads the item description on PHiL Cafe’s Uber Eats menu.Priced at US$10, it is reportedly one of the cafe’s most frequently ordered items.The backstory involves a Korean woman who missed the toast her ex-boyfriend used to make for her. After their break-up, she texted him asking for the recipe – making it clear she was not ...

Samsung Electronics on Monday rolled out a slimmed-down Galaxy S25 Edge smartphone, kicking off a wave of drastically thinner handsets expected to launch this year.The company’s latest device, which goes on sale in the US on May 30 for US$1,099, is 5.8mm thick and weighs 163 grams, making it about 30 per cent thinner and 25 per cent lighter than the S25 Ultra, the company’s highest-end smartphone.The new handset is about as light as the base-model S25, but includes more premium features like a titanium frame, 200-megapixel rear camera and high-end artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.“The amount of weight we’ve pulled out of this device and the slimness of this device is just dramatic,” Blake Gaiser, the company’s head of smartphone product management for the Americas, said in an inte...

A 95-minute bidding war would have made headlines even when the Hong Kong auction market was at its frothiest a decade ago, so a recent protracted battle over a 14th century Chinese calligraphy scroll was all the more remarkable for coming four years into a market downturn.Rao Jie’s 700-year-old, six-metre long, cursive-script calligraphy of two pieces of prose attracted more than 200 bids when it came up for sale during Sotheby’s 92-lot Fine Classical Chinese Paintings sale on April 10, 2025.Auctioneer CC Wang was positively giddy as she called out the bids. The scroll’s price was estimated in the HK$10 million to HK$20 million range presale; the final hammer price of HK$213.5 million (US$27.5 million) meant the buyer, who bid by phone, would be paying HK$250.1 million after adding fees f...

Just two years ago, Olly, Dexter and Blaise knew little about K-pop beyond its biggest names. Now they are preparing to step onto the stage at SMTown Live London as members of dearAlice, the first British K-pop boy band.Born out of a BBC reality-TV show and trained under K-pop giant SM Entertainment, the band is at the forefront of K-pop’s ambitious global expansion, blending Korean perfectionism with distinctly British charm.Sitting down recently at the Korean Cultural Centre UK, three of the quintet’s members reflected on their journey. Members James and Reese were not able to attend the interview.“It was quite secretive at the start. You didn’t really know what you were walking into,” Dexter said, recalling the early audition process. “It was just an audition to be in a boy band.“We sho...

When country music star Maren Morris voiced support for the LBGTQ community, she thought she was doing it as an ally. She did not realise it at the time, but she was speaking up for herself, too.“I just maybe, internally, hadn’t had the bravery to go there in myself, and say the words out loud,” said Morris, who recently came out as bisexual.“When you spend the majority of your life in straight relationships and you haven’t explored that part of yourself … is now the right time for me to tell everyone [that] while I’m married, ‘Hi, I’m also attracted to women’?”The Grammy winner, who has also stood in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and with immigrants, has experienced drastic life changes throughout the past year, including her divorce from singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd. The...

IU is set to make her return as a singer this month, with actor and K-pop star Cha Eun-woo making a special appearance in her coming music video.“IU is preparing for a comeback in May, and Cha Eun-woo will appear in a cameo,” her agency, EDAM Entertainment, said.IU was recently praised for her role in the Netflix series When Life Gives You Tangerines, which ended on March 28. Playing Ae-sun and her daughter Geum-myeong, she was lauded for her versatile performance and strong emotional range.She is also set to appear in the upcoming MBC drama tentatively titled The 21st Century Grand Prince’s Wife, scheduled to air in 2026, alongside actor Byeon Woo-seok.Korean singer and actor Cha Eun-woo (above) has already collaborated with IU on a photoshoot.Anticipation is growing for IU’s next musical...

“These premises are under CCTV surveillance for your personal safety and security.”This ominous message on wall-mounted screens greets the audience in the auditorium of Kwai Tsing Theatre as they arrive to watch Mr Blank 2.0, by Hong Kong’s City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC). When the curtain rises, the same words appear on the back wall of the stage.The visually dazzling dance work, with its use of multilayered video projections and intense performances, offers a bleak picture of a world from which basic humanity has disappeared.There is no denying its visceral power, but ultimately its lack of hope or possibility of redemption make it more a work of horror than a moral tale.Multilayered projections help paint a bleak picture of a world bereft of humanity in Mr Blank 2.0. Photo: Carme...

Lead cast: Jung Eun-ji, Lee Jun-youngLatest Nielsen rating: 1.7 per centThe cherry blossoms are almost a memory as spring heats up in Korea, and the rise in temperatures has opened the floodgates for the fitness hordes.Exercise and diet have long been part of the lifestyle in South Korea, a country with one of the highest life expectancies in the world. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, activities such as jogging and weightlifting have exploded in popularity and compete with traditional forms of exercise such as walking, hiking and cycling among younger citizens.

The story of how Lovie Simone and Michael Cooper Jr, the stars of Forever on Netflix, first met is like a perfectly scripted meet-cute that was fated to fuel a tender portrait of young love.Cooper was on a flight bound for Los Angeles in the US state of California from Atlanta, in the US state of Georgia, for an audition, stressed because his car had been stolen three hours earlier. But he heeded his agent’s advice to worry about it later.“He’s like, ‘Just go! If you book this, you can buy another car’,” Cooper recalls.Simone was his seatmate, en route to audition for the same television series. Not that they had any clue then – they did not speak to each other on the flight. And they did not encounter each other in that first round. It was not until they both got a callback for the chemis...

This is the 62nd instalment in a series on dementia, including the research into its causes and treatment, advice for carers, and stories of hope.What you eat affects your brain.Food affects cardiovascular health, blood sugar levels and blood pressure. All of these can influence brain health since the gut is connected to the brain via the gut-brain axis.For some time, it has been accepted that gut health may affect mental health, but increasingly doctors believe it could play a significant role in brain health, too.Millions of microbes – bacteria, fungi, viruses – live in our gastrointestinal tract, forming our gut microbiome, which plays a key role in many facets of health – including immunity.An out-of-balance microbiome can lead to a variety of diseases.Professor Simon Carding, who lead...