British GQ May 2021

I think it’s fair to say the past 12 months have pretty much been a series of false alarms, a litany of false hope, recontextualised disappointment and broken promises. Now that the vaccine roll-out has been so swift, so successful and so applauded – and probably saved the government in the process, making a leadership challenge unlikely and unnecessary any time soon – our hearts and minds seem completely focused on the future, giddy with the prospect of returning to what many of us had forgotten was a decent equilibrium. The US system of vaccine distribution has been fragmented and weak, making many Americans as concerned about the future as they have been since the beginning of last year, but here in the UK genuine optimism appears to be quite quickly…

GQ Associate Editor Stuart McGurk interviewed Seth Rogen for this month’s cover. “When I’m profiling someone,” says McGurk, “I try to dig deeper than the public perception, but the remarkable thing about Rogen is that he is exactly as you imagine: good-natured, brilliantly funny and happy staying home and smoking enough weed to comatose a cow.” As Covid-19 fuels conspiracy theories around the world, GQ contributor Sean Williams, with cowriter Florian Neuhof, charted a worrying spike in QAnon adherents in Germany. “During the first wave, the world held up Germany for its decisive pandemic leadership,” says Williams. “But lockdowns whipped up a wellspring of extremists. It shocked us that so many harked back to the darkest days of German history.” Photographer Danielle Levitt shot actor Seth Rogen in a laid-back shoot in…

If you want to pinpoint when, and exactly how, British TV started leading the world, despite the world producing more TV than ever before, you could do a lot worse than turn to the example of Michaela Coel, as she looked to make I May Destroy You – her deeply personal and utterly transcendent drama about a young woman coming to terms with sexual assault – a show that would not only go on to be acclaimed one of the best of 2020 but would also see Coel heralded as one of the creative forces of her generation. Coel, then yet to turn 30, had just come off the back of making Chewing Gum for Channel 4, a peppy and bright comedy-drama about a young Christian girl’s quest to lose her…

Cities used to just happen, as anyone who has walked the twisting, shoulder-width alleys of an old European town will know. A defining axiom of modernity, however, is that we make them happen – and the future is about making them happen better. Where urban planners used to tame or remove natural interference, rerouting rivers and paving over greenery, architects are now devising environments that bring intentional design into harmony with natural surroundings. Exhibit A: the new 4,500-acre “BiodiverCity” off the coast of Penang Island in Malaysia. The brainchild of the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), BiodiverCity is a soon-to-be 400,000 resident-strong city comprising three man-made lily pad-shaped islands – the Channels, the Mangroves and the Laguna – which will each feature 4.6 kilometres of public beaches, 600 acres of parks and…

In 2017, Rado took the watch world by surprise. The Swiss brand is synonymous with forward-thinking design, but that year it delved into a forgotten corner of its archive and rereleased a throwback 1960s dive watch, the 37mm Captain Cook. Beyond the ceramic bezel, it couldn’t have looked more out of character – yet it couldn’t have been better received. What we learned over the years that followed was that it was the start of an evolutionary progression. If 2017’s Captain Cook was about the past, the next iteration, 2019’s Captain Cook Automatic, was about the present. It reinterpreted the timepiece in a modern guise and was later rolled out in a number of versions showing how it could tap into contemporary watch trends. Now, the model is back and it’s…

Many dating apps are more popular for arranging a quick, ahem, rendezvous. Not so Hinge. Justin McLeod founded his app in 2011 and five years later relaunched with a more expressly romantic angle. By 2020, Hinge was facilitating a date every three seconds. Users are your best metric There was Hinge 2011 to 2016 and Hinge 2016 to present. The first thing [I changed in 2016] was customer obsession: moving away from focusing on engagement and retention and instead focusing primarily on what our users came to us for, which meant asking, “How many great dates per user are we setting up?” We started asking our users whether they went on the date and whether it was good. Everything we did to determine whether a feature was successful or not asked, “Did…