Friday Things

I think it’s important to note that, while Arday had been the subject of a plagiarism investigation in 2025, a misconduct panel at Liverpool John Moores University, where he earned his PhD, “ruled any similarities between his work and others’ were ‘well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time,’’ per the Liverpool Echo. And, the accusation that he’d lied or exaggerated about his childhood isn’t actually about academic misconduct at all.

I think it was the chuckle that did it. This is convoluted, but stay with me: On Sunday, U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos to weigh in on topics including Wisconsin’s race for governor, and particularly frontrunner Francesca Hong’s stances on issues like police abolition, which she had previously supported but more recently walked back.

Image: instagram.com/arianagrande Content warning: This newsletter contains references to disordered eating. You know when TikTokers post a video reply to a specific comment to make a wider point, and they’re like “Please no hate to this commenter, they’re just a good example of [insert wider phenomenon here]”? Well, I’m about to do the same thing to Craig Jenkins, Vulture’s music critic and a writer whose work I quite like, for his review of Ariana Grande’s eighth album, Petal.

Image: Jono Hirst for KestheBand About a month ago, I was at RBC Amphitheatre (fka Budweiser Stage, forever Molson Amphitheatre, to me at least) with my niece, Haley, and 16,000 other Caribbean people, singing at the top of my lungs and dancing non-stop to KestheBand, one of the biggest soca acts in the world right now.

Last month, you were the keynote speaker at WeLead Women's Leadership Conference in Guyana. Why was this something you wanted to be involved in? It's twofold. In the last year of my life, I’ve been being extremely intentional about saying out loud what I want to do, and being really clear, vision-wise, about who I want to be.

I know it’s not technically a long weekend (I, for one, have a calendar full of meetings today), but the mid-week stat holiday does make it feel like one… and honestly, I did not plan my time in a way that allows me to actually write a full newsletter. But! We definitely have to talk about North West, at least a little bit.

Nicknamed Lumumba Vea (Lumumba Lives), his real name is Michel Kuka Mboladinga and he was there to cheer on his country’s national team, the Leopards, in its ill-fated match against Colombia. If he looks familiar, it’s because he’s gone viral before, most recently during the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) in January, but he’s actually been posing as Lumumba during the Leopards’ games for a long time—since 2013.

Image: instagram.com/spencerpratt Remember Spencer Pratt? Youknow, one half of The Hills’ Heidi-and-Spencer, who was everyone’s favourite reality TV villain for a minute there and experienced a late 2010s resurgence in popularity because of his charming but also kind of random obsession with crystals? And who, alongside Heidi, went on to blow $1 million on said crystals—not to mention another $9 mil on shopping sprees and bodyguards and wine? Yes, that Spencer Pratt.

Image: Commonwealth Foundation If you’re not Caribbean, you may not have heard of indentured servitude. This was a system of labour where workers signed contracts, called ‘indentures,’ to work for free for a set period of time, usually five years, to repay a loan or pay off a debt. While people did choose to enter into indentureship—nominally, at least—this system was definitely exploitative and abusive, especially for women.

And honestly, it probably was. It contains lines like, “They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men” and “coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all,” sentences that make the reader stop and think, what does that even mean?