Evening all,

It’s Imogen here, excited to be bringing you Tuesday’s edition, which, alongside our regular culture hotlist and a powerful column from Deborah Frances-White, features a fantastically lively and revealing conversation between the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and our very own big tech critic Carole Cadwalladr, ahead of Aaron Sorkin’s much anticipated new film, The Social Reckoning, which opens in the UK this Friday.

It’s been 16 years since Sorkin’s The Social Network was released, and eight since Carole’s investigative reporting into the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal shifted the world’s understanding of Silicon Valley – and what we now know about big tech makes Sorkin’s original film look frankly quaint. The new film dramatises how Frances, then a young Facebook engineer, enlisted the help of Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, to disclose the company’s most guarded secrets.

It’s a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from AI hype and the dangers of big tech companies having too much power to how Frances’s undergrad studies into the cold war partly inspired her whistleblowing – and even what Frances’s mum makes of the casting of Mikey Madison as her daughter.

“We have to have different rituals of accountability if we want to incentivise good choices,” says Frances of Facebook and Zuckerberg. That statement could just as well be applied to what columnist Deborah Frances-White is writing about today: the Cornell Seven, a group of former Cornell University fraternity members accused of drugging and sexually assaulting a female student (and allegedly inviting men in a Snapchat group with over 50 members to join them) in October 2024. Nobody was arrested. Several of the students were merely asked to write “reflection papers”. 

It says something about the state of the media in 2026 that the first I heard of the Cornell Seven case last week was via an extraordinarily moving Instagram post by Florence Pugh – a great actor, but not somebody I follow on social media. It takes nerve to use your platform to take such a stand (Ed Sheeran take note!) and the case has since erupted across the media, in chatrooms and campuses across the US. Today, Deborah explores why it isn’t just a problem for Cornell, or US college culture, but throughout society.

Five years ago, Frances Haugen brought thousands of confidential Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal and created one of the biggest whistleblowing scandals in Silicon Valley history. Now she is about to be portrayed in an Aaron Sorkin film – a development, she tells Carole Cadwalladr, that is “surreal, and a huge honour”. And why did she do it all in the first place? “It's not free to keep a secret,” she says simply. “You are a human being first, you're a citizen second and you're an employee third, and your fellow human beings need you.” Read the interview here.

The Cornell Seven gang rape case has made headlines over the past week following an initial lack of response by the authorities to the allegations made by a young woman against seven students at one of the university’s fraternities. The case has now been reopened and “could be a landmark for women who have notoriously been ridiculed, humiliated and sexually abused by men in fraternities – so much so that there is a subgenre of Hollywood films about it,” writes Deborah Frances-White, aka the Guilty Feminist. “Fraternities are where young men’s values are formed and minds are shaped,” she writes – an alarming thought given that so many of the most powerful people in the US today are former frat boys. Read her column here.

More used to creating sets for pop stars such as Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, or for top theatre shows like The Lehman Trilogy, this month Es Devlin has taken the spotlight at London Design Museum for a fabulous mid-career retrospective. Meanwhile at the Courtauld, Salman Toor’s paintings capturing friendship and love, solitude and alienation, dazzle, and it’s a particularly great year for the Turner prize, on show in Middlesbrough, with rich, immersive installations by the four nominated artists. There’s also a cracking eight-part remake of Carrie on TV; some top shows in theatre; and plenty more to see and do in this week’s hotlist. Get our top culture tips here.

That’s it for today. We’ll be back on Friday.

Thanks for reading!

Imogen