His name is Khabane Lame, but he is known worldwide as Khaby Lame. Born in Dakar, Senegal, he is the most followed content creator on TikTok.
He became famous for video clips in which he reacts to absurd “life hack” videos with a blank, slightly annoyed face, showing the hack wasn’t needed.
At the time of writing he has over 160 million followers: a world record achieved without uttering a single word. In January he sold his brand rights for nearly US$1 billion.
Khaby Lame attending the 2025 Met Gala Celebrating.
“If that is the best tool you have in your tool box that is telling you something,” says a counsellor, sucking some air out of the #cartime balloon.
Wellbeing
But there’s another dimension to his story that the western media rarely mention: Khaby Lame is a practising Muslim and a hafiz, a Muslim devotee who has memorised the entire Quran. This after being sent to a Quranic school near Dakar at the age of 14.
The tension between the sacred body of the hafiz and the commercialisation of the influencer’s digital life makes his journey a rich case study.
For me, as a researcher of digital identity, his online career also raises questions about turning personal data into digital assets.
From the suburbs of Turin to the top of the global stage
Khaby Lame’s story reads like a modern-day myth. Not because it’s hard to believe, but because it mirrors the core narratives of digital modernity. It starts with hardship, goes through a period of creative isolation and ends with global recognition.
This is what the French thinker Roland Barthes called “mythical speech”, a story that seems natural and simple, but is actually shaped by deeper forces and structures.
In 2020, at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Khaby Lame lost his job as a factory worker. He was stuck at home and locked down in social housing in the suburbs of Turin, Italy, where his parents had moved when he was a baby.
Out of this hardship he made a simple decision: he started filming short videos. Just 17 months later, he reached more than 100 million followers on TikTok. He was the first content creator based in Europe to reach that milestone.
His story reflects the promise often promoted by TikTok that the platform can lift anyone up. All you need, it suggests, is a mobile phone, and talent will quickly be rewarded with global fame.
This should be celebrated. But the myth of instant success also needs a closer look. Behind every viral rise lie smart decisions, hard work, and the powerful, and often unpredictable, role of the platfom’s algorithm.
TikTok account of one of the most followed people on the app, Senegalese-Italian Khaby Lame.
Riccardo Milani / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP
Comic tradition
What sets Khaby Lame apart from almost all the creators before him is the semiotic system (of signs and symbols) he invented – or rather reactivated. He brought back an old comic tradition.
Many compare him to British comedy actor Charlie Chaplin. Others see echoes of US comedian Buster Keaton. Both were masters of Hollywood’s silent slapstick comedy.
Khaby Lame revives the codes of 1930s Hollywood silent comedy cinema: mime, meaningful glances, no dialogue, and burlesque sketches (short theatrical scenes) that convey messages. But the Chaplin connection ends there, as the two men inhabit their bodies in radically different ways.
Chaplin’s films carry emotional weight, driven by social and political themes. His character, the tramp, is a poor wanderer pushing back against an unfair industrial world.
Khaby Lame’s style is closer to Keaton’s. He says nothing. He simply shows how unnecessary and complicated these internet quick fixes are. His absolute impassivity in the face of the absurd is what Keaton perfected with his famous “great stone face”.
But while the comic structure is similar, their relationship to their bodies is not. Throughout his life, Keaton remained completely indifferent to religion or metaphysics in any form. Khaby Lame is the opposite. He is a hafiz. The separation of his digital identity from his physical person is notable.
Wordless humour allowed him to build a global audience because there are no language barriers, just as silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin became global icons a century ago.
TikTok’s algorithm favours content that anyone can understand instantly. Chaplin needed a movie theatre, Khaby Lame needs only a phone and an algorithm. The mechanics are similar. The way it spreads has completely changed.
Digital identity
In January 2026, Khaby Lame’s carefully crafted expressive persona took on a new status. It became a financial asset. He sold his company, Step Distinctive Limited, for US$975 million to Rich Sparkle, a publicly traded company based in Hong Kong. The agreement includes the transfer of rights to use his image, voice and behavioural models to create an artificial intelligence-powered digital twin.
This digital twin will produce multilingual content, including material for advertising and promotions. Companies will be able to run commercials in several countries without Khaby being physically present. According to Rich Sparkle, this could help generate over US$4 billion in annual sales, especially through livestream e-commerce (a format already dominant in Asia), broadcast simultaneously around the world.
This transaction marks a turning point. Digital identity no longer merely represents a person. It becomes an asset that can be separated from the individual who created it. Now, a creator is no longer a brand ambassador, but a brand in its own right. In theory, Khaby Lame’s digital being is now legally separate from Khaby Lame himself.
The digital twin is, in this sense, the Buster Keaton body that digital platform capitalism has always dreamed of – impassive, reproducible, available across all time zones.
Signature gesture
Khaby Lame’s signature gesture is to place both palms open and turned upward. This seems simple and easy to understand, a light and humorous sign of of disbelief. But the gesture carries deeper meanings.
In Islamic tradition, as in many African cultures, this same gesture is linked to dua, the act of raising one’s hand in supplication to God. What millions of viewers read as a comic signature is also a spiritual practice.
Yet Khaby Lame’s digital double is not simply an image. It can act in his name. It can speak with his voice. It can repeat his familiar gestures. This is no longer simple representation. It is a form of transferring his way of expressing himself onto a digital system.
The same open hands, the same expressive gaze, the same voice that once recited the suras of the Quran in a school in Dakar are now the attributes of a commercial transaction valued at nearly a billion dollars.
There is an ethical question in handing over his active identity to financial markets.
An ethical question
For many young Africans, especially in Senegal, Khaby Lame embodies the possibility that digital spaces are territories where Africans can succeed, where the hierarchies inherited from colonial history can, at least symbolically, be overturned.
But the deal raises a difficult question: what does it mean to sell your digital self in a world where Black and African bodies have been used and profited from for centuries without consent and fair compensation?
Is this a win or a new form of exploitation? Can the financial benefits balance the transfer of his identity?
More African creators are building global audiences every year. That means these questions will become harder to ignore. Who owns a creator’s digital twin once it’s sold? Who set the rules for its use?
Khaby Lame is not just a social media success story. He is a revelation of the future and, perhaps unwittingly, a pioneer.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
As Project Hail Mary‘s amnesiac hero problem-solves his way around the spaceship he’s woken up on alone, he asks: “Am I smart?”
It’s a bold question to put in the air at the start of a film that fuses a silly, human-alien buddy comedy and a deeply earnest tale about how science and cooperation may yet save humanity.
And while the answer is that this sci-fi spectacular is perhaps a smidgen goofier than it is clever, it’s also charming, looks stellar, and is non-stop ride fuelled by a message of hope and powered by a star.
This video is hosted on Youtube.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Rebecca Wadey can’t imagine ever cutting her hair.
The Auckland-based writer and former editor of online magazine Ensemble will turn 50 this year. Her hair, which she describes as “big, curly and coarse”, reaches well below her shoulders “to my elbows if I straighten it”.
When she surfs, it blinds her; if it gets wet after in the late afternoon, it won’t dry overnight. “It’s a pain in the arse,” she admits.
Mike McIntyre folded down his client’s ear to get a “clear workspace” for his clippers and spotted an angry-looking skin lesion.
Wellbeing
But she can’t envisage cutting it.
Superstition is part of it. When she was 26 she had breast cancer and the treatment caused her hair to fall out. “For me, long hair represents great health.”
But there are other reasons.
“It is much easer to have it long. I can do pretty much anything with it. I can hide behind it, flick it up in a pony tail or pull it over my face so I can do an amazing air guitar at a party.”
Long hair doesn’t have anything to do with feminity, she says.
“I just think we don’t have play by the rules any more. We’re doing it for ourselves rather than believing we have to cut it off because society thinks we should start conforming.”
She says her hair is an outward expression of who she is: “A little bit wild and lazy.”
Rachel Waldegrove, 52 also has no plans to cut her naturally blonde hair that now reaches the middle of her back.
The Hamilton real estate agent and mother of four has grown her hair long off and on since she was a child.
Rachel Waldegrove.
Supplied
When she became a mother in her 20s, she was influenced by the convention of the day that if you were an at-home mum, you had short, practical hair.
“I took a picture of Halle Berry with a pixie cut into my hairdresser and said ‘cut it like that’.”
She didn’t like it and immediately began to grow her hair again. Apart from a trim every ten weeks, she hasn’t had it cut since.
These women are typical of their generation. says 32-year-old Zac Harries, a senior stylist at Kitzo hair salon in Hamilton.
He estimates 75 to 80 percent of his female clients now wear their hair long.
“Very rarely do they ask for it to be cut short. And if they do, they sometimes regret it.
“Women are far less bound by old rules about hair length,” he says.
“Whereas 20 to 30 years ago, women once cut their hair at a certain age, hair length now is not dictated by convention. It’s an expression of individuality.“
Janine Simons, a hairdresser and executive board member of Hair and Barber New Zealand, agrees.
She says in the early 2000s, she began to notice hair trends change for older women.
“Youth culture stretched; women stayed visible in careers longer and remained socially active. The idea that short hair marked a stage, started to feel outdated.”
She says in the 1950s and 60s, older women’s hair was structured and controlled.
“Above the ears, neat napes and lots of roller sets. And perms were popular.
“Hair was sculpted into place and sprayed solid. It signalled you were grown up, responsible and respectable.
“That was very much shaped by social expectations and, if we’re honest. by a fairly narrow view of how women were meant to present.
“Now there’s less pigeonholing, less subtle pressure to shrink or age visibly on a schedule.”
She says women aged in their 50s last century looked older than women of the same age today.
“The tight sets, helmet shapes and heavily structed cuts of previous decades added years because they were associated with ‘maturity’ at the time. Just compare The Golden Girlswith Sex in the City. The actresses are at similar life stages yet The Golden Girls looked decades older.”
This video is hosted on Youtube.
Wearing hair below the shoulders and loose represents something bigger than hair.
“It reflects women having more say or more freedom over their identity at any stage of their life,” she says.
“Hair signals era, energy and expectation. Change the hair and you change the age we think we are looking at.”
US actress Demi Moore attends the 98th Annual Academy Awards.
AFP / Angela Weiss
Hair products have also meant hair can remain healthy for longer, though some older women with long hair ask for hair extensions to add thickness.
Hairdressers say the trend for women to wear their long hair for longer in life may also have been influenced by Covid.
“Women couldn’t go to a hairdresser for so long, they got used to wearing their hair longer and liked it,” says Harries.
Cost of living is another factor. Long hair requires fewer visits to the hairdresser. Whereas a woman with a short cut may visit the hairdresser every four or five weeks, women with long hair may only need a trim every two to three months. With hair cuts in major salons costing upwards of $100, that represents an annual saving of around $500.
Janine Simons says the industry has seen clients extending time between visits and choosing lower maintenance service as they juggle discretionary income.
So, will the trend continue? Simons thinks things could change again.
“There are subtle shifts to shorter shapes. These things simmer before they surge. All it takes in the right cultural moment and suddenly, what felt dated, looks fresh and directional again.”
A roller set anyone?
Venetia Sherson is a 78-year-old former editor who wore her hair long in her 30s and immediately regretted it. She has never been bold enough to grow it again.
Halle Berry is known for her cool, cropped hair.
SCOTT NELSON
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
The Oscars red carpet is typically viewed as the apex of awards season dressing. What the stars wear to the Dolby Theater is the culmination of months of business negotiations between talent agencies, stylists and fashion houses, generating millions of views for brands and, when successful, can cement an actor’s relevancy in a fast-moving industry.
Once the Academy Awards wrapped up on Sunday evening, stars poured into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where the famed Vanity Fair after-party moved to this year for the first time), several wearing clothes that were sexy, strange and practically R-rated.
It was like a fashion watershed. If the Oscars delivered variations of “tradwife” dressing — think Old Hollywood glamour, with enough embroidered flowers to fill a meadow and dramatic, full silhouettes of a bygone era — then the after-party hinged on 21st century sex appeal.
Mikey Madison attends the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
Nominated for 13 awards, One Battle After Another won six awards. Other top prizes went to Sinners star Michael B Jordan and Irish actress Jessie Buckley.
55 photos
Last year’s best actress winner Mikey Madison arrived in a dress that seemed to capture the moment of getting undressed. The champagne-colored skirt was ruched at the hips, as if the top-half had been seductively unzipped and shunted down to expose her black mesh corset.
Jeff Goldblum and his wife Emilie Livingston, who wore a pair of tights and a thong leotard from the Californian label ERL Artisanal, looked like they had gotten lost on their way to a different kind of party as they seductively posed for photos, both wearing a draped fur boa.
US actor Jeff Goldblum (R) and his wife Canadian dancer Emilie Livingston.
JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX
Renate Reinsve swapped out her minimalist, 90’s-style Louis Vuitton gown for a peek-a-boo second-skin mesh dress, also by the brand.
Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve attends the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX
While Heated Rivalry co-stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams each wore a transparent mesh blouse that exposed their chests, Storrie paired his with a fur stole.
US actor Connor Storrie and US actor Hudson Williams attends the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX
In lieu of a top, Suki Waterhouse wore two peacock feathers, designed by Tamara Ralph, rendered in gold crystal — the glittering tendrils just about protecting her modesty.
Suki Waterhouse and Robert Pattinson attend the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
NEILSON BARNARD
In recent years the after-party has been giving the Oscars red carpet a run for its money when it comes to fashion. Here, the outfits felt less prescriptive and more expressive, as A-listers who may feel hemmed-in by the traditional glamazon gowns and suits expected at the Academy Awards seemed to let their hair down.
Stars might feel emboldened by the fact the event isn’t televised (although it is livestreamed on YouTube and VanityFair.com), so celebrities needn’t worry about wardrobe malfunctions broadcast to the tens of millions of TV viewers, or having their more risqué looks dissected live by red carpet critics. Similarly, the larger guest list means there are more attendees up for causing a stir with their clothes. The result not only tends to be sexier, but outfits that are generally a bit wackier.
Anya Taylor-Joy, for example, was one starlet who opted for the unexpected. Instead of an ethereal floor-length frock, Joy looked like a theater performer of a different time in a short black playsuit from John Galliano’s Fall-Winter 1994 collection for Dior and headpiece that resembled a neatly propped-up ribbon.
British-US actress Anya Taylor-Joy attends the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX
Julia Fox, a deft hand at selecting conversation-driving outfits, wore a surrealist Viktor & Rolf gown whose exaggerated shoulders gave the dress an Alice in Wonderland edge — as if Fox had been snapped shortly after chugging the shrinking potion labelled “Drink Me.”
Italian-US actor and model Julia Fox attends the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX
But it was perhaps Cara Delevingne’s naked dress by Thom Browne that best summed up the energy at the after-party, with its subversive trompe l’oeil print featuring a man’s torso in red, black and white crystals. It was silly, sexy and — most importantly — something you wouldn’t see at the main event.
British model Cara Delevingne attends the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX
More looks from the Vanity Fair Oscar’s After-Party
Danielle Brooks attends the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar.
NEILSON BARNARD
Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner attend the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
AMY SUSSMAN
US singer Lizzo attends the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX
Audrey Nuna attends the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
AMY SUSSMAN
Odessa A’zion attends the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
NEILSON BARNARD
Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Nick Jonas attend the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
NEILSON BARNARD
Teyana Taylor attends the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
AMY SUSSMAN
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Film star Sean Penn stepped out of a train carriage in central Kyiv on Monday, thousands of miles away from the glitz of Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre where he had failed to turn up to receive his third acting Oscar hours earlier.
Penn, 65, won the Oscar for best supporting actor for his role in the political thriller One Battle After Another but skipped the ceremony to travel to meet Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the war-battered capital.
Ukraine’s state railway operator posted a short video clip of Penn getting out of the train in the morning, saying it had kept his trip a secret until the very last moment.
“Now we can say it officially: Sean Penn chose Ukraine over the Oscars!” it said on its Facebook page.
Zelensky posted a picture of him meeting the actor in the presidential office in Kyiv’s barricaded government quarters.
The photo showed the black-clad president talking to Penn who was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. There were no immediate details on their conversation.
“Sean, thanks to you, we know what a true friend of Ukraine is,” Zelensky wrote on the Telegram app.
“You have stood with Ukraine since the first day of the full-scale war. This is still true today,” Zelensky added.
Penn, a long-time advocate for Ukraine, has visited the country several times during the four-year war with Russia.
He filmed a documentary about Russia’s invasion that premiered in February 2023.
Penn also lent Zelensky, a former comedian and actor, one of his other Oscars in 2022.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
New facial recognition technology is being worked on that could detect if someone is driving drunk with just a three second video (file image).123RF
New facial recognition technology is being worked on that could detect if someone is driving drunk with just a three second video.
Researchers in Australia have been working on the project using artificial intelligence for about two years.
The aim is for it be able to detect whether a person is driving drunk or likely to be a dangerous driver because they are angry or fatigued.
Dr Zulqarnain Gilani from Perth’s Edith Cowan University told First Up the algorithm that’s being developed uses a three to 10 second video of a person to see if they are drunk or fatigued, using their expression.
The technology can also determine a person’s blood alcohol level, Dr Gilani said.
“The algorithm currently can detect five expressions, whether a person is happy, sad, angry or showing disgust, whether they are tired or not tired, or fatigues or not fatigued, and their blood alcohol level as well.”
Through testing, Gilani said videos of people driving a simulator in three different intoxication states with differing blood alcohol levels has been used.
The current technology has a 93 percent accuracy level, he said.
Gilani said it was important that AI used be tested thoroughly on all ethnicities and different conditions.
The current algorithm has been tested on a small cohort of 65 – which was a proof of concept test, he said.
The next steps were to collect more and diverse data if they were to implement this in real life.
Asked how the technology could determine mood, Gilani said it all stemmed around psychology.
“Psychology literature tells us that humans display different, either expressions or psychological states, and their faces show that.
“For example, they say that if somebody is drunk, they blink really fast. And the time for which they close their eyes slows down, so they close it for more time.”
They also suffer hot flushes, he said.
“Whereas if someone is tired, their eyes are droopy. Now the interesting thing is that if somebody is very fatigued and someone is intoxicated, they show almost the same sort of behaviour.”
There were two practical scenarios that the researchers saw for implementing this in real life.
Gilani said the first was to have roadside cameras with the technology which could pick up someone who was driving in an impaired condition and somehow, flag it.
“This is a work in progress. How do we do that and how do we flag it and how do we warn the driver?”
The other was to have the technology inside a person’s car. Gilani said many cars these days have an electric ignition. If a camera facing the driver had the technology and detected a person was impaired, the car wouldn’t start.
Gilani said the project required funds.
“We are actively working with different collaborators, partners and also applying for different fundings so that we can collect more data and make this thing practical.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Ever plan to wear your favourite jacket, only to pull it out of the wardrobe to discover it’s got a weird smell and is covered in mould?
“People living in warm, humid climates or coastal regions are often impacted heavily [by mouldy clothing] because their indoor humidity remains elevated for long periods,” explains Nisa Salim, associate professor and director of Swinburne-CSIRO National Testlab for Composite Additive Manufacturing.
“Often wardrobes positioned against cold external walls can also accumulate condensation.”
Seasonal clothing often cops it the most.
ABC
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Ten Solomon Island Cabinet ministers have tendered their resignation in an apparent coalition breakdown.
RNZ Pacific understands that Deputy Prime Minister Frederick Kologeto and every member of the Peoples First Party (PFP) are among them.
Others include Finance Minister Harry Kuma, Justice Minister Clezy Rore and Health Minister Paul Popora Bosawai.
A spokesperson for Government House confirmed that the resignations were received at quarter past nine last night.
Solomon Islands Governor-General Sir David Tiva Kapu is now giving the ministers until 12pm (today) Monday to re-consider their choices.
Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele now faces a third threat to his leadership, having survived a motion of no confidence in April 2025 after six ministers and five government backbenchers walked away.
The opposition grouping would need a majority of 26 in the House to pass such a motion.
The Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Opposition Leader Matthew Wale have been approached for comment.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
The 98th Academy Awards are set to roll out Monday (NZ time) in the heart of Hollywood, with funnyman Conan O’Brien on tap to host the proceedings for the second year in a row.