“You’ll have to bear with me,” offers Daisy Kelliher in her canorous Irish accent. “I’m in Antigua on a very small sailboat.” I’m on a Zoom call with Daisy, indefatigable chief stewardess of Parsifal III on Below Deck Sailing Yacht, who’s on a sailboat sitting on a small bed in …
Read More »'We Do a Bad Job Dealing With Rape in This Country': Why W. Kamau Bell Needed to Make His Controversial Cosby Doc
In 2018, comedian and TV host W. Kamau Bell was talking to TV producers about comedy documentaries when the question arose: “Could you do a doc about a comedian who has fallen?” Bell recalled his fascination with Ezra Edelman’s acclaimed O.J.: Made in America, the eight-hour series that examined the …
Read More »We Need to Talk About 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' Now
You remember the scene. If you didn’t catch it the first time, way back when, you certainly saw it the second time. You definitely know the meme. The set-up: An evil mastermind has donned a Spider-Man costume before committing a robbery, so the superhero will get blamed for the crime. …
Read More »'I See Myself as Her Bodyguard': Beanie Feldstein on Playing Monica Lewinsky
If there is an archetypal role for Beanie Feldstein, as an actor an a human, it’s the best friend. The 28-year-old became famous for her performances in two portraits of female friendship: Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, and Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. “I’m still doing that here,” Feldstein says of her role …
Read More »Issa Rae Can't Stop, Won't Stop
H ours before the dawn even considers cracking, Issa Rae is awake. The weekday routine is as follows: At 4:20 a.m., she sets out on an hourlong walk, alternating between two routes. With AirPods in and podcasts playing, Rae whips down quiet Los Angeles roads lit only by streetlamps, sometimes …
Read More »'Sophie and the Baron': Inside Baron Wolman's Final Collaboration
Sophie Kipner was working as a bartender in London when she first met Baron Wolman. Kipner, an artist and writer, made Wolman a gin and tonic. As the two began chatting, Kipner learned exactly who her customer was: Rolling Stone‘s first chief photographer, who captured Sixties icons like Janis Joplin …
Read More »Thom Zimny: How I Made 'Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You'
“It’s snowing! It’s snowing!” The man gleefully exclaiming this meteorological fact is watching tiny flakes begin to fall on the ground. Seconds before, he was telling the group of folks milling around the room to gather ’round (“Gen-tle-men, congregate!”) with all the authority of a general assembling the troops. Then …
Read More »'The Social Network' at 10: Fincher, Facebook and the Faking of an Empire
See Mark angry. His girlfriend has just broken up with him at a bar. See Mark run. Run, Mark, run! He gets back to his Harvard dorm room and he opens up his laptop; because it’s 2003, it is already set to LiveJournal.com. See Mark type out several angry missives …
Read More »'Watchmen' Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America's White Supremacy Problem
Watchmen saw this coming. Some fiction offers an escape from difficult realities. Other art holds up a lens to the world we know, magnifying things we haven’t looked at closely enough. Watchmen, HBO’s adaptation of the iconic Eighties comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, fell into the …
Read More »This Is Not an Exit: 'American Psycho' at 20
It is April, in the year of our Lord 2000. I am sighing with relief that the whole Y2K thing had turned out to be just a lot of techno-paranoia. I am discussing the recent political primaries, as both Albert Arnold Gore Jr. and George Walker Bush had secured their …
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