Oli Franklin-Wallis

London

Journalist and Writer at Freelance

Contributing Editor and Writer at WIRED (UK)

Features director @BritishGQ. Writer for @WIREDUK, @guardian, etc. My first book WASTELAND is out now. ‘Franklin-Wells’ - the New Yorker

Articles

Caroline Darian on her father Dominique Pelicot and the trial that shook the world

2 weeks ago | gq-magazine.co.uk | Oli Franklin-Wallis

Caroline Darian had known that her mother’s rapists were out there in the world, but crowded into the Palais de Justice in Avignon for the opening of the trial, they seemed to be all around her. With too many defendants to fit in the dock – 51 men in total – the court had crammed the accused and their lawyers in on the benches, only feet away from Darian and her family.
How Daredevil rescued Charlie Cox

Feb 18, 2025 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Oli Franklin-Wallis

Years ago, before he was cast as daredevil, Charlie Cox travelled to the Scottish Highlands to relearn how to be a man. “I had read this book about male archetypes, I think it’s called, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover,” Cox explains. The book, about building a healthier kind of masculinity, affected him so much that the actor signed up for a weekend men’s retreat in Inverness.
Kobbie Mainoo & Cole Palmer are just getting started

Nov 13, 2024 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Oli Franklin-Wallis

Ignore, for now, how it ended. Cast your mind back instead to the 70th minute of this summer’s men’s Euros final – a moment that, for England at least, represented a demarcation, a fulcrum, a… sure, why not, a vibe shift. A moment that at the time seemed so prosaic you probably barely noticed. With 20 minutes left to play, the Three Lions having trailed for most of the second half, Gareth Southgate made an uncharacteristic substitution. He took off Kobbie Mainoo.
Simba’s Earth Escape mattress will send you into interplanetary slumber

Nov 8, 2024 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Oli Franklin-Wallis

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission. Pain. If there’s one thing that truly screws up a night’s sleep — and your mood the next day — it’s pain. Choose your fighter: for me, it’s a combination of chronic ulnar nerve pain and a lingering lower back thing that tends to arrive around 3 am. It's been intermittently ruining my nights for the best part of a decade.
Has Piers Morgan figured out the future of TV news?

Sep 24, 2024 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Oli Franklin-Wallis

Piers Morgan cares deeply about many things – vegans, men wearing baby-carriers, the word “babe”, plus-sized models, too-skinny models, people who identify as nonbinary, “wokies” in general – but you should know that one thing he definitely doesn't care about is his critics. “Nothing bothers me,” Morgan says. “I don’t care if some spotty little geek in his mum’s dungeon wants to call me a whatever.
Scientists are finding microplastics in testicles, potentially causing infertility. What can we do about it?

Jun 28, 2024 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Oli Franklin-Wallis

Semen is a miraculous fluid. A single teaspoon can contain hundreds of millions of motile sperm, countless vitamins, citric acid, prostaglandins, proteins and yes – for anyone curious – up to 25 calories. But lately, scientists have been finding something troubling: plastics. In recent years, microplastics (defined as plastic particles smaller than 5mm, as opposed to nanoplastics, which can be as small as 1 nanometer) have been found infiltrating our bodies at an alarming rate.
Tim Spector: “The UK is the least healthy place [in Europe]”

Jun 24, 2024 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Oli Franklin-Wallis

It can be hard to recall in the midst of this, the Great Microbiome boom, that there was a time before everybody drank kombucha, and when kimchi was just an under-loved Korean side dish. “When I wrote my first book [2015’s The Diet Myth], nobody had heard of kefir,” says Tim Spector. That you now can’t pass a Pret without encountering probiotic soft drinks is largely thanks to him.
Why you need to steal her Beauty Pie subscription

Jun 21, 2024 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Oli Franklin-Wallis

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission. My gateway drug was a moisturiser. It’s your typical midlife crisis story: one morning, struggling with early onset wrinkles (thirties, kids) and overdry skin (lizardlike genetics, suboptimal hydration), I asked my wife if she had anything that could make me look less like a Mad Max villain.
The toll on children and doctors in Gaza

Jun 20, 2024 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Oli Franklin-Wallis

For decades, Seema Jilani has been responding to conflict and humanitarian crises wherever they arise. A paediatrician and humanitarian volunteer, her work has taken her to Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, Sudan, Gaza, and the West Bank, among others; she has treated migrants on board rescue ships in the Mediterranean, and responded on the scene after the 2020 explosion in the Port of Beirut, Lebanon, in which her own daughter was injured.
This concrete can eat carbon emissions

Mar 19, 2024 | wired.com | Oli Franklin-Wallis

Concrete: upon this rock-like composite we have built our church – and our houses, roads, bridges, skyscrapers, and factories. As a species we consume more than 4.1 billion tonnes of the stuff every year, more than any other material except water. (You’re almost certainly sitting or standing on it right now.) That’s a problem, because concrete – and in particular cement, concrete’s key ingredient – is catastrophic for the environment.