Brad Pitt’s Return to Drinking Is Not Unsafe, Experts Say, but It’s Not for Everyone

Brad Pitt went seven years without a drink. Then he started again — carefully, he said, and on his own terms.

He mentioned it almost in passing in an Esquire interview published this week: Mr. Pitt had gotten “back off the wagon” and now drinks “in a more restrained manner.” Never in large quantities, he insisted. He had gotten overconfident a couple of times and pulled back.

His comments stirred up one of the oldest and least settled arguments about sobriety: whether someone who once drank dangerously can ever drink safely again.

Mr. Pitt quit drinking in 2016, the year his marriage to the actress Angelina Jolie collapsed. After she filed for divorce, he spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous and has credited the program with getting him sober. “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he told The New York Times in 2019.

Alcoholics Anonymous focuses on abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism and does not comment publicly about members. A representative from the A.A. General Service Office said only that “members of Alcoholics Anonymous have only one purpose: to stay sober ourselves and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.”

It was his history with A.A. that touched a nerve among people who have fought to stay sober, or have friends or relatives who have struggled with recovery. People who figuratively followed Mr. Pitt into a room of folding chairs learned of his exit from it.

Experts and researchers said the reactions split along lines that had less to do with Mr. Pitt than with how the people reacting had gotten sober themselves.

Mr. Pitt, during his interview, offered himself as no one’s model for sobriety. He described where he was and claimed nothing about where he will be later.

Researchers said that account was less unusual than it sounds.

“People with an alcohol disorder show a variety of different paths through which they resolve that alcohol use disorder,” said Christopher W. Kahler, director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Some of those involve being completely abstinent, and some of them don’t.”

Dr. Melissa Weimer, an associate professor who specializes in addiction medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, said that alcohol use disorder is a chronic disease. Those who reacted strongly to Mr. Pitt’s account may have watched efforts to drink in moderation fail, in themselves or in someone they love, she added.

But treatment does not come in one size, she said. She presses instead for individualized plans, including medication such as naltrexone, which dulls the reward of a drink and helps some people cut back.

“We do recommend that people stop drinking entirely and probably continue to stop drinking once they have an alcohol use disorder,” Dr. Weimer said. “But everybody’s different, and they have to make their own personal choices.”

Dr. Alta DeRoo, the chief medical officer of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the largest nonprofit substance use disorder and mental health treatment facility in the United States, goes further.

Dr. DeRoo said she refuses to shame or police how anyone pursues recovery, and she rejects the idea of a single correct route. Demanding abstinence and nothing else, she said, drives away the people who are still trying to quit.

Clinicians should meet patients where they stand, whether that means abstinence, moderation or harm reduction, walking beside them rather than grading them, she said.

Even when someone relapses, or tests moderation after a severe disorder, the sober years still count, Dr. DeRoo said, contrary to some conventional wisdom on addiction. Those people gained coping skills, repaired relationships and improved physical health, she said, and none of that reverses.

She reads Mr. Pitt’s account as a useful one: sobriety, a return to drinking, a recognition that it was going badly, a correction.

“Sometimes it takes several times,” Dr. DeRoo said. “Right now it may just be harm reduction, and that’s what’s working for him, and if it gets him to a better place, I would support anything that helps a patient decrease their alcohol use and live a healthier life.”

Researchers differ on much, but not on this. Recovery, they said, confers no permanent status and has no finish line but rather what a person finds workable now, and whether it holds.

by Mark Walker, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Free Pizza Delivery

Public intrusion is a common experience for the residents of TV-famous homes. In 2015, Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, had to urge fans to stop paying homage to his show – because they were recreating a scene where an entire pizza is thrown on to the roof of the house whose exterior was featured as Walter White’s bungalow. And last year, the owner of the apartment made famous by Sex and the City’s lead character erected a gate outside it because “at any hour of the day or night, there are groups of visitors in front of the house taking flash photos, engaging in loud chatter, posting on social media, making TikTok videos or just celebrating the moment”. Eventually, the owners of the Breaking Bad house followed suit, erecting a 6ft iron fence – not that it stopped fans. “They still try to throw pizzas even though she’s got a gate, she’s got signage,” said Frank Sandoval, who runs Breaking Bad tours to the house in an RV. “They even try to climb the gate.”

‘We get 200 tourists a day’: when your house becomes a TV star (The Guardian)
Image: Walter White’s Breaking Bad home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photograph: Raisa Macouzet/Alamy

[ed. Have to admit: I once tracked down the apartment complex and courtyard in Seattle where Singles was filmed. Stood in the exact same spot as Matt Dillon and Chris Cornell. It was actually kind of fun. (hint: East Thomas somewhere).]

The Extras Are Tired

Less than a decade ago, when I was working on technology stories, my colleagues and I ran into an issue that I’m pretty sure had not occurred to the people who founded this magazine in 1857: how to style the word influencer, which was an occupation and cultural force, but one just emerging. We weren’t sure that all of our readers would know what one was, and we also didn’t know how exactly we would define the word ourselves. I spent the fall of 2018 sending a lot of emails about whether we needed to encase the word in scare quotes.

Quaint! Many—but not all that many—years later, influencer is very much a real job, no explanation required. As of 2023, 27 million Americans were paid to make online content in one form or another, at least according to one marketing consultant company. Enthusiasm from influencers can turn a random business into a sensation, while their ire can do the opposite. Donald Trump’s White House is full of influencers, but Joe Biden’s courted them too, in apparent recognition of their power. This week, Arizona State University announced that it would begin offering a bachelor’s degree in content creation—influencing by another name—through its journalism school.

In some ways, the influencer industry is more legitimate than it’s ever been. But it has always been precarious, and more than a decade into its existence, it is neither novel enough to be exciting nor established enough to have a real professional code. In an oversaturated market, rage bait is the last sure way to get attention, despite the way it alienates people over the long term. AI is swiftly becoming the dominant way many people get personal-seeming advice about how to live their life, which makes the usefulness of aspirational online content even less apparent than it ever was. And so, although influencers—especially lifestyle influencers—have never been universally respected, they lately seem to be openly reviled.

Naturally, much of the influencer backlash lives online. A few months ago, someone asked on Reddit, “What’s an industry that provides zero value to society but makes billions of dollars?” Among the 5,300-plus responses: Ticketmaster, sports-betting companies, multilevel marketing schemes, private prisons, and—several times over—influencers. A hilarious number of people have found internet fame by making content about how much they hate other people who are internet-famous for making content. (“Everyone Is Finally Turning on TONE DEAF Influencers” is the title of one recent video, made by an Australian YouTuber with nearly 300,000 subscribers and a clothing line.)

But the juiciest fights play out in the physical world, which is where influencers very literally bump up against the people who can’t stand them. A few years ago, a coffee shop in Brooklyn banned photography after too many influencers clogged the café with tripods and handheld lights; earlier this month, Indonesia indicated that it would crack down on people creating content for pay while on tourist visas.

Last week, the scene of the debate was a gift shop in Nantucket, an island that has recently been overrun by vacationing influencers, just like Bali, Iceland, and Santorini before it. The store’s operators, evidently fed up with the stream of people filming inside, had a sign made that read No Influencers, hung it up in the store, and posted a picture of it on Instagram. There, it drew the attention of thousands of people, including Paige Paul, who has about 2 million followers across platforms, is married to a famous tennis player, and has been spending time on the island since she was a child. Paul, previously known as Paige Lorenze, declared the sign a misogynistic slight against an industry that is overwhelmingly female. The store’s owner, John Sylvia, said it was meant as a joke for locals, but the sentiment clearly came from an earnest annoyance: “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” he told New York magazine.

The fight felt freighted. Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.

But influencers are unique in how they seem to be everywhere, particularly in places where people are trying to do things other than be on their phone to watch influencers. Of course we love the game and hate the player: It’s much easier to be annoyed by individuals than by concepts, especially when those individuals are, often, pretty annoying.

You’d need to be pretty clueless to not feel a little weird about the online attention economy and all it entails—the vanity; the grift; the slop; the desperation; the calculated intimacy; the endless consumption; the creeping sense that everything and everyone is actually just there to make you feel kind of bad about yourself and then sell you something. Social media can, of course, unite like-minded people, but it can also reward the kind of tribalist reactionaryism that can conflate disliking some women with disliking all women, or make an anti-consumerist folk hero out of a store that sells $2,750 baskets. The industry that Paul and her cohort belong to is unquestionably grim—but the industry isn’t walking around town with a selfie stick. There’s a reason that the sign doesn’t say no influencing, but rather no influencers.

by Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Atlantic/Getty

[ed. I'm a great fan of guitar instruction videos because they teach you something. I guess you could call that a form of influencing. Some instructors have a wide audience and are influencial because of their teaching technique.The opposite (and there are many examples) are so-called "reaction videos" where someone listens to a song and simply records their "reactions". Who cares. Talk about bottom of the barrel. Same goes for opinion influencers, foodies and tons of other niches (Mukbang videos?). If all they have to offer is distraction or entertainment they're a waste of time.]

Catching Up With Keanu

Keanu Reeves' First Original Action Movie Since 'John Wick' Is 'Groundhog Day' With Sharks

I'm sure that’s one of the reasons you guys are doing press today, to raise awareness. Before I run out of time, Keanu, I'm a big fan of Tim Miller. And I know you're getting ready to film something with him in the Dominican Republic.

REEVES: Yeah.

What can you tease about this project, and what made you say, “I need to do this?”

REEVES: Sharks. Time machine. Groundhog Day.

Everything you just said sounds fucking amazing.

REEVES: Yeah, man!

Does that mean you're spending a lot of time in the water? Is that something that you're looking forward to?

REEVES: Yes. And getting eaten by sharks.

by Tamera Jones & Steven Weintraub, Collider |  Read more:

Image: Lionsgate

[ed. All in. Maybe they're Russian sharks and he'll be blasting them left and right for eating his groundhog.]

What's Elon Worth?

[ed. Let's see, by my watch $103,000 every minute. He could own every major league sports team 2.5 times over; buy all the gold in Ft. Knox (with billions to spare)... (more).]

via:

Coastal Grandmother

Imagine Diane Keaton unpacking her farmers’ market bags. It’s all about relaxed, mature luxury, featuring pottery, hydrangeas and at least one bowl of lemons

Name: Coastal grandmother.

Age: Just incredibly well preserved?

Appearance: Easy, breezy, laid-back yet immaculate, with warm neutrals, lots of linen and coastal vibes.

“Coastal vibes” would be a terrible police photofit description. You know what I mean.

Not really, but your granny sounds nice. We’re not talking about her: she lived in a council house in Cinderford. This is about a platonic “coastal grandmother” ideal, the cinema trope turned TikTok microtrend, birthed by the influencer Lex Nicoleta. It’s about adopting the aesthetic of a type of older heroine, usually played by Diane Keaton or Meryl Streep and probably directed by Nancy Meyers, the queen of romcoms (It’s Complicated; Something’s Gotta Give), in aspirational domestic settings.

I see (I don’t). It’s easy: coastal grandmother means relaxed, mature luxury, as lightly worn as the cashmere sweater over your shoulders as you unpack your farmers’ market purchases from your Provençal shopper in a kitchen the size of the O2.

So coastal grannies are rich? It’s more about a comforting fantasy than hard cash, a leisurely, fulfilling life in a beautiful place. Imagine wandering through your bounteous garden picking “arugula” and basil (pronounced bay-sil) for the unpretentious kitchen lunch for 20 you’re hosting: that’s CG.

It doesn’t sound very seasidey: where’s the Mr Whippy and the arcades? Coastal is a state of mind. If you’re struggling, don’t worry: like a latterday Peter York, Nicoleta has spent two months and nearly 50 videos deconstructing the signifiers of coastal grandmotherhood in forensic detail, from hydrangeas to antique ginger jars. She even distinguishes between east coast (pottery and crisp white button-down shirts) and west coast (pilates and dirty martinis) CGs.

And why are we talking about it? Because #coastalgrandmother has gone viral. The hashtag has 7.6m views on TikTok and climbing. It probably doesn’t hurt that Netflix has just announced a new Nancy Meyers film, too.

Huh? Why do the youth want to emulate fictional boomers? Well, would you rather engage with the roiling chaos and existential terror of 2022, or cosplay Meryl Streep fixing a lobster salad in her sun-soaked kitchen, to the soundtrack of nearby waves, a crisp sancerre by her side, as Javier Bardem repaints her garden pottery studio? I thought so.

OK, but I’m not a grandmother and I’m nowhere near the sea. No problem. You can get the vibe anywhere with fresh flowers, “cosy” music (there’s a 79-track CG Spotify playlist), taper candles and the all-important bowl of lemons.

The what now? Nicoleta insists CGs need at least one bowl of lemons: “practical and aesthetically pleasing”.

Do say: “Get cosy in the rattan chair and I’ll fix you a bloody mary; my heirloom tomatoes are gorgeous right now.”

by The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Halfpoint Images/Getty Images
[ed. I know, I know... this microtrend is four years old already. We've probably moved on to 'Pool Hall Grandpa' or something else by now. I'd never heard of it though until I read this: ‘Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?’ How personal taste fell out of fashion', which, in reality, is a much more interesting essay than I would've expected or cared about. Give it a read.]

Wish You Were Her

INT. Deck 7, Le Cabaret Rouge, 11:37 PM

Frank Sinatra, palming a can of Sprite in one hand and the fist of his beautiful redheaded wife in the other, sat in a dark corner across from Jeff Bezos, who looked like he was waiting for him to say something. But Sinatra said nothing. He’d been mostly quiet all evening, and now in this cabaret he seemed even more distant, staring out past fog and strobe and Bezos’s strong bald head and into the large room where at least half a dozen men had basically shattered a bistro table trying to get a better look at Marilyn Monroe. Sinatra’s wife knew, as did Roy Orbison and Austin Powers, who stood nearby, that it was only minutes before he was supposed to go onstage, and that forcing any sort of conversation on him in this mood of focus would be extremely stupid.

The fact was, Sinatra had already been waiting for over an hour for his moment at the mic and at this point would have been more than fine with just heading back to his cabin. He was tired of the constant low-grade pitch in gravity under his feet. He was still annoyed that he’d nearly lost his luggage on the first day here, a fact his wife was not letting him forget; was humiliated that he never really got his onboard Wi-Fi — Wi-Fi he paid for — to work all week; had been viciously massaging his kidneys throughout the past four songs; and now, at this strangulating moment, had to sit through the noises being made by the group of veterans Monroe had just asked to join her in a conga. Sinatra, wincing, was the victim of a condition so common around here that most people accepted it as a given. But when it got to him, shot through his personal plumbing, we were looking at a man in crisis. The fact was — and he’s going to kill me for saying this — Frank Sinatra was seasick.

EXT. Deck 18, Long Island Bar, 3:08 PM

Three nights and about eight hours earlier, select members of the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators boarded a 169,000-ton cruise ship in civilian disguise. They crossed the gangplank by sandaled foot and standard wheelchair, in panama hats and Bermuda shorts, naked of the costumes, pancake makeup, and in some cases false breasts required to faithfully look like their look-alikes. Alongside an estimated four thousand other, non-impersonating passengers slated to set sail with them, these twenty professional plagiarists, under cover of normie human camouflage, slipped silently into the crush.

“LORD I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS MUCH COCONUT RUM IN MY LIFE,” yelled a man on his phone, jabbing his free hand into his free ear.

“MAN IT IS COMPLETELY SUNNY — I SAID SUNNY — YOU KNOW WHAT, I’M GETTING A CALL FROM DONNA — DONNA — YEAH LOOK I’M NOT TRYING TO HAVE HER TRY AND TEAR MY ASS IN HALF AGAIN SO I’M GONNA HAVE HER CALL YOU — ”

Welcome to the open-air bar on the eighteenth floor of the MSC Seashore, a luxury megaship with the fuel economy of an oil-tanker fire and the handling of a Marriott. That was the man seated to my left, silenced by the drink handed to him by a bartender. To my right was a woman in a shirt that read I DON’T GIVE A SHIP. And behind us, beyond the bar — which led out onto the pool deck, the pool deck’s smoking section, and two Jacuzzis — was the Atlantic Ocean, foamy and real under the sun above Port Canaveral, Florida.

I was seated smack in the center of the ship’s “embarkation party,” the Seashore’s farewell-to-land fiesta. In these last few hours of boarding, standard cruisegoers (reunioning families, couples, singles, swingers) were already loudly settling in for the top-hole amenities, pampering, and bacchanalia that the Seashore’s four-day boomerang voyage to the Bahamas had promised. They more or less knew what they were in for. What they didn’t know was that the impersonators of Sunburst walked among them, incognito, settling in for the same.

The occasion of Sunburst’s presence on the cruise was this: Time had been having its remorseless way with our look-alikes. For four days a year for the past two decades, the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators, a three-to-five-dozen-strong troupe of doppelgangers, tribute artists, and hobbyist dead ringers, had assembled in hotels and conference centers across greater Orlando. In its heyday, Sunburst’s annual congress served as the tribute industry’s largest American sanctuary. But the average age for a Sunburster now hovered around 55. The typical status of the celebrities they impersonated was “deceased.” The digital era had swallowed demand for in-person homages to golden-age Hollywood, AI was a wallop to its people en masse, folks were retiring from the trade, aging out of plausible fidelity to their chosen doubles, or, from entirely natural causes, disappearing for good. (One of Sunburst’s most redoubtable talent agents had in fact died just a few weeks before the cruise.) This made the week’s cruise purely leisurely, a hopefully happy sunset for Sunburst’s long reign.

So here I was. Shipping out. Desperately seeking someone from Sunburst. Solitary in the ark of undoubled doubles, figuring out who around here was an impersonator impersonating a non-impersonator was becoming, as you might imagine, unimaginable. In the long mirror above the bar, every woman in the pool, drifting in and out of frame on her inflatables, now had the air of a once-fabulous mid-century minx. On floated a buzzed Garbo, a browned-out Garland. Giant televisions displaying forty-foot-wide walls of text (ƎƧIUЯƆ Ƨ’TƎ⅃, or AИƎЯAƆAM OT ƎMIT Ƨ’TI) flashed before the cabanas, where Elvises of every era groped for their towels. Here walked a plausible Oprah. In came an ayatollah. And there, lanky in her tankini: a Cher. [...]

The man flailing his arms by the bathrooms fifteen yards away was Greg, Sunburst’s founder and figurehead. The phrase ENTERTAINMENT: JUST LIKE YOU REMEMBER! blazed on his T-shirt. Also he was shouting my name.

“We’re here in the back!” he yelled.

“Where?” the guy shouted.

“The BACK BACK!” Greg yelled again.

INT. Deck 8, Uptown Lounge, 3:29 PM

The back back turned out to be a lounge space ten floors down. Rodney Dangerfield, walking in with a rum and Coke, was the first to slap Greg on the shoulder.

“Damn. Wow. Smells like someone’s grilling a raccoon in here,” Dangerfield said, looking around. “You guys just get in?”

An aerial view of the piano hall in the aft of Deck 8 — aft being the rear half of the ship, and Deck 8 being the eighth of twenty floors — would have revealed concentric circles of men and women sucked into orbit around an arrangement of microsuede sofas. In the center was now Greg, struggling with a pair of armpitted clipboards. On the far outer ring was the adjacent cantina, sizzling with orders of the Fajita ‘n’ Rita Feast ($20.95). But the energy in the room emanated from the fusion of Hollywood lovelies  , B- and C-listers, dead musicians, and a few completely imaginary characters, caught in a bubble of babble.

In came the tiny and fabulous Sharon Osbourne, fresh off a flight from London. Near the exit, with his blue eyes and sensible sandals, was Boy George, who swanned over to double-cheek kiss Sharon, then peck the forehead of Martha Stewart, and — skipping over Jeff Bezos — the tip of Fran Drescher’s nose. Sinatra (A), by the banquette, had just politely pumped the hand of Sinatra (B), when both were intercepted by Dangerfield, who seemed interested in explaining the dimensions of his cabin’s toilet. The Dude from The Big Lebowski was tearing a tortilla into pieces; over by the baby grand was Jerry Garcia; Bezos left to go to the bathroom; and Greg, who was beaming richly over his dominion, looked like he might cry with pleasure when someone’s wife started talking about closing on a new condo in Mexico.

Our model of the atom collapsed toward the inner ring, at the center of which appeared a 79-year-old man with brilliant teeth, a chin-length bob, the coconutty tan of the constantly sunned.

“Guess what I am?” he asked several newcomers.

“Dolly Parton?” one suggested.

“Santa?” said another.

“About six-one?” went one more.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Congeniality,” Greg said, coming in to knead his neck. “You’re looking at thirty-four years of Kenny Rogers.”

Every impersonator made for a convincing person. But as the gathering of celebrity doubles milled about the room, it was growing obvious just how broad the spectrum of fidelity within impersonation could get. Some were just blessed with a genuinely miraculous assembly of genetic glitches. Dangerfield, for instance, with big red eyes hot enough to boil water, and now miming his golf swing for Greg, was an amazing, near-perfect dupe, clearly put on this planet as proof of a lazy and hilarious God. (Ditto Boy George, with his stubble, his exemplary androgynous smolder — and same for Walter White of Breaking Bad, who kept pulling out a small bag of laundry beads from his shirt pocket as his prop ounce of crystal meth.)

But the lion’s share of them weren’t so finely biologically determined. The majority looked more like second or third cousins to their doubles. Staring at them yielded a whole other feeling, stranger than the vague awe you might harbor for folks obviously cashing in on their Darwinian dues. The faces of the not-quite-theres held a secret, focused serenity — kin to the quality inborn in the showman, dramatized by the spy, not far from the one on your casual adulterer. It was the flickering, only occasionally visible pact between at least two selves.

by Mina Tavakoli, N + 1 | Read more:
Image: Kate Bancroft, The Devil On My Shoulder. 2026
[ed. Feeling Gay Talese vibes from his famous essay Frank Sinatra Has a Cold; also, David Foster Wallace's Shipping Out (from "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again").]

Mary Tyler Moore

There was a scene that Robert Redford wanted for “Ordinary People” in which Beth Jarrett, played by Mary Tyler Moore, takes a cake out of the refrigerator. The cake has a circle of cherries on top, and the only action in the scene is Beth, the cold, bereaved mother, looking at the cake, adjusting the cherries, then putting the cake back in the fridge. Moore was alone in the kitchen. Redford wanted to capture Beth in an unobserved moment — what was this woman really like? How was she coping with the accidental death of her older son and the recent suicide attempt of her younger son? Had she escaped into her fastidiousness and her uptightness?

He shot it once; no good. He shot it again; no good. She tried to bring a motivation to each take: Was this cake good enough? Or, Did the cake need more cherries? And each time he’d say: “No, no, clear your mind. Let’s go again.” Every time the kitchen was set up for another scene, Redford used the opportunity to try the shot again. Moore called it “the bane of the production.” He shot it over and over, 26 times in total in front of a “mystified” crew, she wrote in her memoir.

Redford knew the role was a change from Moore’s sunny appearances as Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” so much so that he was initially worried to even approach her. But when he did, he told her that when he read the Judith Guest novel that he was adapting, he couldn’t stop picturing Moore as Beth. Redford had a home in Malibu, and sometimes he’d look out on the beach and see her taking walks. She seemed like a sad figure on those walks, so different from the spunky and triumphant walks she took in the opening credits of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He told her that it was the most important role in the film. He wanted someone to play her sympathetically. Moore agreed emphatically. Beth reminded Moore of her father. She also had a little of Beth in her herself — she would realize that eventually. She told Redford that she didn’t think of Beth as a villain but as just another victim in the story.

Moore called “Ordinary People” the “holy grail” of her career, not just because it had a remarkable script and production, or because of the Oscar nomination that she earned from it, but because it saved her from eternal typecasting just when she needed it. She had been so good in sitcoms. But what now? She was only in her early 40s, and it seemed as if she was sentenced to a life of short-lived series and celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms and game shows. Depth and mood and range weren’t things people associated with her.

When “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” debuted in 1970, no one could have predicted how iconic it would become for the way it portrayed women’s experiences in the workplace, and for the way its heroine, Mary Richards, remained plucky in the face of discrimination, both passive and aggressive. That was back when plucky seemed like a good solution to the constant insults of merely trying to function while female, when smiling with moxie at all the crap thrown in your direction seemed like the best way to survive and advance.

Mary Richards struck an exact balance of wit and intelligence with a kind of wise understanding of people’s natures. She was a perfect guide for navigating the a-wokening of the corporate American man (a project that is still ongoing, to say the least). The show’s cultural impact over its seven years was monumental. Mary Richards allowed women to ask themselves questions out loud about what exactly they were hoping for in life, why it was so important for them to marry and how the families we build for ourselves can be as important and sustaining as the families we’re born into.

Mary Richards was a hero for all she represented. But Moore wasn’t Mary Richards. She didn’t have her ease or confidence. She grew up in a house with distant parents; her mother was an alcoholic. Moore lived between her parents’ house and her grandmother and aunt’s house. When she was at her parents’ house, she slept on the couch, because there were only two bedrooms and she felt uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with her brother. She grew up to struggle with diabetes, with rejection, with alcoholism, with divorce, with another divorce, with the death of a grown, only child, with forgiveness. She left her second husband, Grant Tinker, with whom she had so little intimacy that they never undressed in front of each other except during actual sex. She moved to New York, away from him. At night, in her apartment, she made margaritas in her blender that were one-quarter drink mix, one-quarter ice and one-half tequila, so that they had the consistency of a milkshake. She got into her bed at night, next to the air-conditioner, and built a kind of fort around herself with pillows and drank until those margaritas began their work. (She would eventually marry a third time.)

People still mistook Moore for Richards, though. In 1980, Gloria Steinem asked Moore to speak at an Equal Rights Amendment rally in Washington. Moore said yes, but when the time came, she lied and said she had an ear infection and couldn’t fly. Steinem suggested she take a train instead. She told Moore that Tip O’Neill, the speaker of the House, had agreed to meet with Steinem’s group — Bella Abzug, Gloria Allred, etc. — only if Moore was in attendance. So Moore took the train, begrudgingly, now roped into a four-hour trip instead of an hourlong flight. She showed up to the meeting and submitted to the “big hug” that O’Neill demanded of her. (“Where’s that little cutie?” she remembered him saying.) But it was a waste of time. The amendment stalled, and she found the women rallying for equal rights well intentioned and intelligent but off-putting, with their shouting, like “angry children.” This, she believed, was one reason the amendment ultimately failed to become law. Yes, she saw the paradox in all this. Yes, she loved Mary Richards, too. But didn’t all the women in America know by now how exhausting it was to aspire to be Mary Richards?

So there she was, a few years after her show went off the air. She told people she ended it so that they could go out on top, but the real reason was that the producers, the writers and Tinker, who co-founded their production company, MTM Enterprises, saw so much potential in spinoffs — “Rhoda,” “Lou Grant” and others — that it seemed like the smart move. Great for the bottom line, yes, but what about Moore? She had these Maryisms, she called them — referring to the movements and speech patterns that she had absorbed into her own manner after so many years of playing Mary Richards.

She did some theater, including playing a quadriplegic who wants to end her own life, in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” for which she won raves and a special Tony. Then came Redford’s offer. But it wasn’t really an offer, in the end. After they spoke that first time, he took three months to consider if she was right for the role, auditioning just about every actress in town, from what Moore heard.

When he finally returned to her, saying, Yes, please, come be my Beth Jarrett, she nearly fell over with relief. Now she could show something of herself to as big an audience as she’d always had. She had been so afraid that people would find out that she wasn’t Mary Richards. But in the time she waited for Redford’s offer, she realized she was more afraid that they wouldn’t; she was more afraid that she’d never be seen or known or loved for who she was.

Redford continued to try to get the shot of Beth and the cake, but it was never to be. It appears nowhere in the movie. Moore said later that she believed that Redford had been looking for Beth’s soul. But Beth wasn’t the kind of person to reveal her soul. Beth was the kind of person who would rather give you a cake and a smile. She could mourn by overcoming sadness in a lifelong pursuit for perfectionism. Beth’s soul was the act of not showing her soul. How did Redford not see that? How did Redford not see that Beth’s soul was right in front of him the entire time?

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Philippe Halsman

[ed. From the series The Lives They Lived. See also: Delia Graff Fara.]

An Uncanny Moment for Jazz Lovers

Today feels like the end of an era for jazz fans. Something has changed—that’s the pervasive mood right now. And things will never be like they were before.

Yesterday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at age 95. And today is the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth (back in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926). The juxtaposition of those two events is unsettling.

I was planning to celebrate Miles at 100 today, but now I’m also grieving the death of the last superstar of that same generation. Put those two milestones together, and it’s an uncanny moment.

Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month (and less if you sign up for a full year).

Rollins was the last surviving musician who had appeared in the most famous jazz photo in history—the “Great Day in Harlem” image from August 12, 1958. That was when 57 illustrious musicians gathered together at 17 East 126th Street for an Esquire magazine photo shoot.

 

The image was used to illustrate an article called “Golden Age of Jazz”—and it really was golden back then. Most of the jazz greats were still alive, and a star-studded assembly of them had gathered together in one spot.

That photo is like Raphael’s School of Athens for jazz fans. It’s a stirring visual reminder that these legends were once real people, and coexisted in the same time and place.

In 1996, Life magazine commissioned Gordon Parks to gather the survivors for an updated photo at the same location. The building was by now decrepit, bricked up and covered with graffiti—and only 11 musicians appeared for the reunion.

Their numbers continued to dwindle and, after Benny Golson’s death in 2024, Sonny Rollins was the last survivor of that Great Day. But now he’s gone—and this Golden Age survives only in the fading memories of older jazz fans

We still have the recordings, of course. In those grooves, these artists live on forever young, full of funk and fire. Miles and Rollins not only survive this way, but are still joined together as they were in real life in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio back in 1954.

But the permanence of vinyl can’t hide the larger fact—namely that jazz history of this sort can no longer be experienced live and in-the-flesh. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.

When I first became a jazz fan, the recorded history of the music wasn’t even fifty years old. I could see the pioneers of every style of jazz on the bandstand —and that was true whether I focused on Chicago jazz legends of the 1920s or Swing Era stars of the 1930s or the beboppers of the 1940s. And on and on.

You couldn’t even call this jazz history—it was just jazz, plain and simple, in all its living glory. And I nowadays describe this as my education, but it didn’t feel like schooling back then. It was too much fun for that.

I now write books of jazz history—but they are a poor substitute for those kinds of immersive experiences. But still, I try my best to capture in my books the unfettered enjoyment of those direct and unmediated encounters with the jazz greats.

If we ever lose the fun of this music, we will be in bad shape indeed. Preserving it isn’t easy in the present day, when jazz is primarily propagated at schools and colleges—and is permeated with a pedagogical zeal that was completely unknown to the music’s originators.

Don’t get me wrong, Louis Armstrong most certainly educated a bunch of people—but they were rarely aware of it. They thought they were out for an evening of fun and revelry.

Even Miles and Rollins understood that—they knew they were serious artists, but they never tried to demonstrate jazz history. They just embodied it. And brought it to life, night after night, on the road and in front of paying audiences. [...]

First, here’s a film of Sonny Rollins in full flight. This gripping performance from 1986 serves as the opening for Robert Mugge’s documentary Saxophone Colossus. When I first saw it, I was unaware of the injury Rollins had sustained during the filming. That only adds to drama.

And here’s a rare video of Miles Davis playing “So What” (from the iconic Kind of Blue album) alongside John Coltrane. As hard as it is to believe, this kind of music was once on television.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: YouTube

[ed. The beat goes on. Sonny famously used to practice nearly every day at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, in NY. I read they're now thinking of renaming it the Sonny Rollins Bridge. Sounds good to me.]

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, The Rolling Stones: The Biography. He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.

BOB SPITZ: My pleasure, Tyler. Nice to be with you.

COWEN: Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn’t. How did they become so great so quickly?

SPITZ: Actually, they did. They worked in a little club called the Crawdaddy Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. They worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book, the first time they show up, only six kids show up. They’re despondent. They go and talk to the head of the club. He said, “Look, play as if there are 100 people there and next week, there will be 100 people.”

Next week, there was 100 people. They played as if there were 100. The next week, 200 came. They worked in that club for about six months. Then they went on the road. They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles did. Perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.

COWEN: That seems quite short, those six months. You read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he’s age 14, age 16. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?

SPITZ: No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. Their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all. They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted if they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. They gave it a try. This came maybe two years after they were already on the road.

On the sound of the Rolling Stones

COWEN: There’s something they added to the blues. If you were to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X, what’s the X there?

SPITZ: Rock ‘n’ roll. The X is rock ‘n’ roll. They jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. They turned it into a sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley started that sound. Then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar and gave us the sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll today.

COWEN: They also have some songs that are very good. You could say almost Country and Western music, say, circa 1968. There’s some other element musically other than just rocking that they’re adding all along.

SPITZ: Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II. They left thousands of records behind. The majority of them were Country and Western records. The Stones grew up, like the Beatles did too, loving Country and Western music, courtesy of the American servicemen.

COWEN: Viewed objectively, how good are their melodies, just as melodies? If you ask about the Beatles, here, there, and everywhere, that’s an A-double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones?

SPITZ: I would rate them maybe a B minus. Their rock and roll melodies are spectacular. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” these are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles’ better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles. Melodies in a different mode. [...]

On art colleges and rock ‘n’ roll

COWEN: Here’s a sentence from you: “The nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges.” Please explain.

SPITZ: Oh, well, art colleges, we don’t have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11-plus test that is given to every student when they’re 11 years old, and it really determines whether or not they’re going to go on to university or they’re going to go to a vocational school. In those early days, a vocational school meant that you’d wind up working in a factory. You’d wind up working as a clerk for the railroad. You’d take on one of those jobs.

Art schools came into being, and this was a repository for people who had talent but didn’t know what to do with it and weren’t that academic. Art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. We have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, all the great rock ‘n’ roll—

COWEN: John Lennon, also, right?

SPITZ: John Lennon, absolutely, went to Liverpool College of Art. It was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock ‘n’ roll because people brought their instruments to school, and they would play in the cloak rooms. That’s where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. The art school movement really gave us that whole British rock ‘n’ roll thing to this very day. Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They’re still thriving in the UK, and they’re still giving us new, innovative music. [...]

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

He has served as the Rolling Stones’ manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics since 1967. He’s negotiated all of the recording contracts, their publishing contracts. Every tour that comes along, he negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the Stones’ money. So remarkable that this guy, a London School of Economics dropout, let’s call him that, has done so well for the rest of the band. [...]

COWEN: Let’s say we put you in charge of social welfare. Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did? I mean for the world, not for them.

SPITZ: Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and The Who and maybe even The Rolling Stones, after a couple years, after maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves. The Beatles gave us everything they had, and then they stopped. We have 230-some songs, perhaps the most remarkable songbook, aside from Hammerstein and Rodgers, that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles songbook I would put up against anybody’s. I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that spark.

COWEN: Think how many more George songs we got from this split, or Paul songs for that matter.

SPITZ: Absolutely right. George, toward the end, George really came into his own. Even after, in his solo career, we got some real gems out of George. I think it took him a little longer. More than that, I think he learned how to step out of the Lennon-McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet.

COWEN: What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney?

SPITZ: Boy, that was an experience.

COWEN: What year is this, just for context?

SPITZ: 1997. The New York Times Magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and give me a few of his memories of John Lennon. We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expensive house. It was really this tiny two-and-a-half, three-bedroom cottage. I said, “Do you actually live here?” He said, “I do.” I said, “But you have five children. You have three bedrooms.” He said, “Linda said that we all need to live on top of one another. That’s what we do. We are a family here.”

As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, you’re a musician, right? Want to see the studio?” Of course, that was like catnip to a guy like me. We went downstairs, and he shows me. It was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City, but there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had, as well as Bill Black’s bass. Bill Black was Elvis Presley’s bass player. Paul had bought all these instruments and maintained them.

He said, “Sit down.” I said, “Sit down?” Paul sat down at the piano, and he nodded me into a guitar. What did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. It was frightening. I played with some great musicians before, but when you see Paul McCartney nodding you into a song, it’s a different feeling altogether, believe me.

COWEN: He was good?

SPITZ: Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. Then I let him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed” by himself on the piano. That was freakish, having a private audience in a tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before. [...]

On Robert Caro

COWEN: What is Robert Caro like?

SPITZ: Robert Caro is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time, and a guy came over and said, “I hear you’re writing a book about Ronald Reagan.” There were about 150 people in this party. I said, “I am.” He said, “Could you talk to me about it a little?”

We sat down on the couch. I looked, and I saw over the man’s shoulder, my wife was going, “It’s Robert Caro. It’s Robert Caro.” At which point, my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer’s biographer. I don’t know how he does it. A great read.

COWEN: Why doesn’t he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing, or just he’s too busy writing and researching?

SPITZ: I think he’s too busy writing. This guy writes and researches around the clock. I have learned not to do that. From what I’ve gathered, he’s up to his eyeballs in work day and night. He lives to do that. That’s his process.

COWEN: Does he understand how much of a cult surrounds him since he’s not out in public much?

SPITZ: I think he does. When he’s out in public, people stop this guy on the street. He’s like a rock star. He gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he’s ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we’re going to see that any day.

by Tyler Cowen and Bob Spitz, Conversations |  Read more:
Image: uncredited/Conversations with Tyler

Ted Turner, Cable TV Visionary Dies at 87

Ted Turner, a mercurial tycoon and gadfly visionary whose “superstation” TBS was a cornerstone of cable TV’s early success, whose 24-hour news channel CNN revolutionized TV journalism, and whose sprawling legacy encompassed conservation, philanthropy and professional sports, died Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by Phillip Evans, a spokesman for Turner Enterprises. Mr. Turner revealed in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.

A serial entrepreneur known as “the Mouth of the South” for his bellicosity and bravado, Mr. Turner took over his family’s Georgia-based billboard company at 24, after his father’s suicide, and transformed the business into a media juggernaut that would forever alter broadcasting.

“CNN really heralds the world of Twitter and social networks and interactivity,” said Ken Auletta, a Turner biographer and media writer for the New Yorker. “During the Persian Gulf War, you had a live war for the first time, without commercial breaks. You’d see bombs dropping and people screaming and fire engines roaring. Everything is immediate. It’s the world we live in today. He’s the father of that world.”

Mr. Turner’s achievements transcended journalism and business, and his much-publicized personality — charming, vulgar, daring, impulsive, idealistic, titanically self-regarding — made him one of the most captivating public figures of his generation.

He presented himself as a Southern gentleman. But he also boasted of being a Ferrari in the bedroom, and with his incessant philandering, he burned through three marriages, including his last, to actress Jane Fonda.

The billionaire Mr. Turner championed a world free of conflict but was on friendly terms with dictators and despots, including Saddam Hussein and Vladi­mir Putin. A Goldwater Republican turned unabashed liberal, he had friends running the political gamut — from former President Jimmy Carter to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina), from televangelist Jerry Falwell to communist Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who became a duck-hunting companion.

On his cable channels TBS and TNT, Mr. Turner delivered wholesome family fare, including sports and black-and-white reruns. But in his prime, he was a self-confessed absentee husband and father, with family below business and sailing on his list of priorities.

As skipper of the yacht Courageous in 1977, Mr. Turner won the America’s Cup, sailing’s most prestigious trophy. He also brought his competitive drive to ownership of the Atlanta Braves, the long-hapless baseball team he bought in 1976. The team rewarded his vigorous support and patience with a World Series victory in 1995 over the Cleveland Indians.

His interests and ambitions seemingly boundless, Mr. Turner became one of the largest private landowners in the Western Hemisphere, and he used his more than 2 million acres, from Montana to Argentina, to preserve endangered flora and fauna. He underwrote foundations that campaigned against nuclear arms proliferation and for such causes as population control, solar energy and debt forgiveness for developing countries.

In 1986, he created the Goodwill Games to foster brotherhood among athletes after the two world superpowers — the United States and Soviet Union — traded boycotts of the Summer Olympics in Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984) during a surge in Cold War tensions. He lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on the venture before it was shuttered in 2001 because of low television ratings.

Years before Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates rose to the top of world philanthropy, Mr. Turner donated $1 billion to start a foundation to support United Nations projects in developing countries.

In business, as in all his undertakings, Mr. Turner cultivated a renegade persona. The bad boy yachtsman, who galled the elite gatekeepers of sailing in New York and Newport, Rhode Island, was also the Atlanta David battling the media Goliaths of New York. “I was cable,” he once quipped, “when cable wasn’t cool.”

Mr. Turner thrived on the role of buccaneer, and he looked the part with his rugged 6-foot-3 frame, square jaw, cleft chin and tidy mustache. A cigar, a beer can and a quip were ever at the ready. “If I only had a little humility,” he once joked in his booming Southern drawl, “I’d be perfect.” [...]

“Ted is a complicated guy, but he is part genius,” Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, told The New York Times in 2001. “Ted doesn’t mean the harm he causes; he just cannot shut up.”

by Adam Bernstein, Washington Post/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Images:Michael Williamson/Craig Herndon/Washington Post

[ed. What a life. And he married Jane Fonda, too.]

Dr. Bobby

Bobby Wagner, former Seahawks star, earns honorary doctorate from Utah State.

Former Seahawk Bobby Wagner … oops. Former Seahawk Dr. Bobby Wagner had to crack a few jokes when he took the stage at Utah State University’s graduation last week.

Wagner, who played for the Seahawks from 2012 to 2021 and again in 2023, returned to his alma mater on April 29 as the commencement speaker. During the ceremony, Wagner received an honorary doctoral degree from Utah State.

“If you didn’t know, my name is now Dr. Bobby Wagner,” Wagner said. “And to any family members here, you need to update my name in your phone. It’s ‘Dr.’ now. I will no longer respond to ‘Bobby.’ It’s Dr. only.”

The honorary doctorate adds to a long list of accolades that Wagner has collected throughout his career. In addition to his Super Bowl win with the Seahawks, he is a 10-time Pro Bowler and six-time All-Pro. Wagner also was named the 2025 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year.

Wagner’s jokes were on display when he accepted that award, too.

“I really didn’t think I was going to win this award,” Wagner said on stage after learning he won the Walter Payton award. “I almost didn’t even come to be honest. I’m glad I did.”

While accepting that honor back in February, Wagner delivered a speech that balanced humor with thoughtful reflection and gratitude for his mother who died of stroke complications when Wagner was a student athlete at Utah State.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 6,000 graduates in late April, Wagner joked about how lucky the graduating class was to have a Target in town, a luxury that wasn’t around during his time, before telling the story of how he ended up at Utah state.

He recalled a winter visit he made to the university with his mother. On the trip, he was offered a scholarship and despite having no other scholarship offers, Wagner told his mother he wanted to take his chances.

“She told me I either accept the scholarship, or I wasn’t coming back home,” Wagner said standing at the podium. “Back then there was no Ubers. There was no NIL. I wasn’t getting paid. So, I accepted the scholarship.”

“One of the things that taught me was the place you least expect to be is the place you’re exactly supposed to be,” Wagner said.

Wagner went on to be a four-year starter at Utah State, leading the program to their first bowl game in 14 years. He tied the school record with 446 career tackles and earned various other individual honors.

After graduating, Wagner was selected by the Seahawks in the second round of the 2012 draft.

The linebacker’s speech continued on, talking about the importance of building connections and going after personal goals. In addition to his NFL career, Wagner has various off-field pursuits including the Phenia Mae Fund and FAST54 that promote stroke education in honor of his mother. Wagner also recently earned his MBA from the Howard University School of Business.

Wagner’s 15-minute speech was threaded with jokes, including some well received trash talk.

“It’s fun to be able to talk trash to every other school, like I tell them, ‘I don’t know, Stanford’s cool, but it’s not Utah State,’ you know what I mean?” Wagner said.

by Sofia Schwarzwalder, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Dean Rutz/Seattle Times
[ed. Dr. Bobby. Blessed with class and talent. Seattle's been lucky. We've had Ichiro, too.]

Want to Be Friends With a Bravolebrity?

 That’ll be $5,000.

It’s a scorching Sunday in Los Angeles, and Devyn Parrott, a 36-year-old mother of twins from Phoenix, has already made the pilgrimage to a few sites of celebrity worship: the Beverly Hills Erewhon for a Hailey Bieber smoothie, the Four Seasons for a massage, and SUR, the main setting of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules, for a glass of wine. Then comes the highlight: a dinner with Reza Farahan and Mercedes “MJ” Javid of the reality series Shahs of Sunset, The Valley: Persian Style, and The Traitors. It’s her second time meeting Farahan. The first took place in November, when she and her mother had drinks with him at BravoCon. “It was like catching up with an old friend,” she says. “He’s one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.”

Parrott is a client of Fan Social, a start-up launched as a sort of Cameo on steroids: Whereas Cameo allows users to pay around a couple hundred bucks for a personalized video from a celebrity, Fan Social has its clients pay two, three, or ten times that amount to actually hang out with them in person. Parrott’s experience in L.A. would cost you $7,888 ($2,888 for Javid, $5,000 for Farahan); her drinks date at BravoCon was $2,500. On Fan Social’s menu, you can have lunch with Luann de Lesseps for $5,000, grab coffee with Jamie Kennedy for $750, dine with To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen for $3,500, or golf with former L.A. Laker Byron Scott for $20,000. For $10,000, The Real Housewives of New Jersey’s Margaret Josephs will officiate your wedding. For a tenth of that, comedian Tom Arnold will virtually preside over your divorce counseling.

The wealthy have always been able to buy access to celebrities (consider the many pop stars who appeared on My Super Sweet 16), but Fan Social seeks to standardize what were formerly backdoor negotiations with an individual’s management. The idea was born in 2024 when a fan called in to “Jeff Lewis Live,” a two-hour SiriusXM show hosted by the former star of Bravo’s Flipping Out, asking if she could take Lewis to dinner, to which he joked that she could — for $10,000. The dinner never happened, but other fans took him seriously: Soon Lewis was receiving multiple $10,000 dinner invitations over DM, which he accepted. Months later, Lewis started Fan Social along with Southern Hospitality showrunner Michael Beck and Charleston-based software and product designer Shannon Barnes. Fan Social launched with ten celebrities, mostly Lewis’s friends from the Bravoverse. Within a year, the site had hundreds of bookings; the roster now sits at around 50 and includes comedians, actors, and influencers. The founders are currently expanding Fan Social’s talent pool of athletes, who are often based in smaller cities and have local appeal; they’re also hoping to land Andy Cohen, who Lewis expects could charge up to $20,000 per dinner. Barnes describes the pitch as “Uber for celebrities,” a side hustle they can squeeze into their schedules whenever they want. “It’s such an easy way for somebody to make money for one hour of conversation — usually about themselves, which they’re happy to do,” says Beck. 

Like most Fan Social clients, Parrott had heard about the company on “Jeff Lewis Live,” which she listens to “religiously.” (Until now, the platform has done no traditional marketing or press, relying on celebrities to promote their own pages.) Along with her family, she owns three subcontracting companies and was using the trip to L.A. to “capitalize on alone time.” “Here’s the thing,” she tells me, a stack of gold designer bracelets dangling on her wrist, as we wait at the bar for Farahan and Javid to arrive. “You can spend $500 on a Cameo that you watch one time and post. This is more expensive, sure, but it’s the memory of it. That for me is what’s so cool: the memory.”  [...]

The day after Parrott’s meetup, Amy Powers, a 54-year-old from Tennessee, arrives at the SiriusXM offices in Hollywood for her “Jeff Lewis Live” studio visit — a Fan Social experience where, for $5,000, a client can listen in on the prep meeting and taping of Lewis’s show. Powers is a Fan Social power user, a tiny blonde OG Housewives fan with a southern drawl who owns a construction company with the husband she’s in the process of divorcing. ChumpCon, the convention for fans of “Jeff Lewis Live” held last year in Las Vegas, was “the best weekend ever,” she says. Last night, she had a Fan Social dinner at the West Hollywood restaurant Craig’s with Doug Budin ($2,000) and Jamison Scala ($1,500), who both work on “Jeff Lewis Live.” “Any time I’m in town, the first thing I do is call Shannon, like, ‘Where are my boys? Can they do something? Can they have lunch? Can we have dinner?’ ” she says. [...]

Not all “Jeff Lewis Live” listeners support Fan Social; posts on Lewis’s sub-Reddit have criticized him as being “desperate” and “grifting off his fans” for his $4,000 drinks and $7,500 dinner offerings. Lewis waves this off. “My guess is most of those people, if they had the opportunity to do what I’m doing, I’m pretty sure they’d be doing it. Why wouldn’t you?” he says. “You wanna go to a thousand-dollar dinner and have an amazing evening and then sometimes get a gift on top of it and be paid for it? It’s crazy.” Last year, Lewis did 33 Fan Socials and made well into the six figures on the platform (Fan Social takes a commission of around 20 to 25 percent). “I get to go to all my favorite restaurants for free,” he says; he’ll usually suggest Craig’s, the Polo Lounge, Boa, Cecconi’s, or Steak 48.

by Rebecca Jennings, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Michelle Groskopf
[ed. Sad. They'd have to pay me.]

A Humble ‘Jeopardy!’ Champ Ends His Run

For the past month, “Jeopardy!” episodes have followed a pattern.

The theme music plays. The three contestants stand at their lecterns. Then two of them are clobbered by a mild-mannered bureaucrat from New Jersey named Jamie Ding.

But on Monday’s episode, the unthinkable happened: After 31 victories, Ding lost.

His streak is the fifth-longest in “Jeopardy!” history. He fell just one win short of matching James Holzhauer’s 2019 run, and he left the Alex Trebek Stage with more than $880,000 in winnings.

Early in the game broadcast Monday, Ding found himself lagging behind Greg Shahade, an International Master in chess who was lightning-fast on the buzzer. During Final Jeopardy, Ding jotted down the correct response to a clue about South African languages — but it wasn’t enough to make up the deficit.

“It was over, just like that,” Ding, 33, said in an interview.

Contestants who went up against him included a statistician, a librarian and a professor. Ding produced so many correct answers (always in the form of a question) that it seemed he might never run out.

“Who was Trotsky?”

“What are non-Newtonian fluids?”

“What are waffle fries?”

Throughout his reign, he was matter-of-fact as he came up with arcana in a split second (“What is cuneiform?”). He endeared himself to viewers through his comically humdrum banter with the show’s host, Ken Jennings, about such topics as his favorite color (orange), his favorite letter (F) and his favorite number (6).

As the streak continued, the drama-free anecdotes and humble bits of personal information shared by Ding seemed to amuse Jennings, a former “Jeopardy!” champ who holds the record for consecutive wins, with 74.

The depth of Ding’s knowledge went along with a lack of bluster. He proudly identified himself as a “faceless bureaucrat.” When he won a game, he looked pleasantly surprised, as if he had been given an unusually good free sample at Trader Joe’s.

“Put Jamie Ding on the $20 bill,” one fan demanded in a tribute on the newsletter platform Substack.

After his “Jeopardy!” loss had been taped but before it was broadcast, Ding gave a video interview from his two-bedroom apartment in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

There he was, in front of an orange couch and a stuffed orange clown fish. He said he had remained calm throughout his final game, even as he realized that he was on his way to a loss. He went backstage and stared at the mostly orange clothes he had brought along in the hope that his streak would continue.
Advertising

“During it, I was trying to stay grounded,” he said. “Planning to win a whole bunch of games of ‘Jeopardy!’ just feels like asking to lose.”

Ding filmed the show in five-episode chunks in Los Angeles during vacation days from his job as a program administrator for the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency. His work involves administering tax credits to build affordable housing in the state.

In an early appearance, he praised New Jersey’s efforts on the issue compared with those of New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. “If you’re from one of those states, then shame on you,” he said. “Build more housing.”

He spends his time away from his job studying law at Seton Hall University. He said he did not expect his “Jeopardy!” windfall to change his life all that much. He planned to donate some money and put the rest in a high-yield savings account.

In a way, Ding said, he had been preparing for the show since childhood. The son of a neuroscience professor and a high school math teacher, he grew up in Grosse Pointe Shores, a suburb of Detroit. He competed in geography bees and on his high school quiz bowl team. He recalled losing a sixth-grade spelling bee when he misspelled the word “bolero.”

“B-a-l-l-e-r-o,” he said. “Terrible.” [...]

Ding was a relatively conservative player, avoiding the all-in wagers on Daily Doubles that were a go-to stratagem for Holzhauer. But he was unusually fast on the buzzer and seemed to have few weak categories.

“The key to Jamie’s run really has been his incredibly wide base of knowledge in just about any category you can think of,” Saunders said.

Ding used a tactic he called “knight moves” — traversing the board in an L-shaped pattern, like a knight in chess. Maybe it threw his opponents off-balance, or maybe it was just nice to have a simple rule to follow, he said. “It’s basically a guaranteed way to pick something of a different difficulty, and in a different category,” he added.

He watched his first “Jeopardy!” appearance at Pint, a bar in Jersey City, with friends from so many different groups that it felt like a wedding. He is still getting used to the attention that comes with being a TV star.

“Watching my episodes, I can be pretty self-critical — like, ‘Why did you do that?’ Or, ‘What’s wrong with your face?’” he said. The outpouring of support has been worth the discomfort. “I’m trying to keep a list of people who did nice things for me because it’s so many,” he said.

Now that his streak has ended, he can return to his hobbies, like constructing cryptic crosswords and running an Instagram account rating General Tso’s chicken with his sister. He is also part of a group of intervenors seeking to block the U.S. Department of Justice from obtaining New Jersey’s voter registration records.

It won’t be long, though, before he starts studying for the “Jeopardy!” Tournament of Champions. He might even need some more orange clothes.

“I have a reputation to uphold,” he said.

by Callie Holterman, NY Times/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Katy Kildee/The Detroit News/TNS

[ed. Feels refreshing to read about a normal, well-adjusted person who's main goal in life isn't self-promotion in some way.]

Something's Wrong With Tiger Woods

Something's wrong with Tiger Woods. We don't know the struggle’s precise shape, but it's there. It has been there. The evidence is not subtle, and it is not new. That is the sad and disconcerting thing, and until it is reckoned with honestly, everything else is secondary.

What happened with Friday’s two-vehicle crash in Jupiter Island, Fla., and Woods’ subsequent arrest, involved drugs or medication; the Martin County Sheriff said so plainly, because the breathalyzer said 0.00 and the man crawling out of the overturned SUV appeared lethargic, impaired, somewhere other than fully present. That part we know. What we also know, and have known for a while, is the context that surrounds it: all the surgeries, a body that has been broken and rebuilt so many times that the pharmaceutical architecture required just to get through a day is complex, possibly dangerous, and for someone with Woods' injury history genuinely hard to escape. Chronic pain and how people manage it are not moral failures. They are medical realities that have unmade careful, disciplined, strong-willed people for as long as the drugs have existed. Tiger Woods is, whatever else you want to say about him, among the most disciplined human beings to ever stand over a golf ball. That discipline did not protect him. It may have obscured how much protection he needed.

We are looking at a pattern. The 2017 arrest was not an isolated incident. It was a signal. The diversion program, the rehab, the public statement about an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications, these were events that fit a sequence the press was not particularly interested in identifying as one. There was a comeback to cover. There was Augusta to wonder about. And then 2019 came, and the green jacket, and it became nearly impossible to hold both things at once, the miracle of that Sunday and the unanswered question from two years earlier. So we didn't.

Consider 2021. Woods drove off a California road at high speed and shattered his leg, nearly lost it. The Los Angeles County Sheriff called it an accident. No blood was drawn. No substance test was administered. The official account was no evidence of impairment, and that was mostly accepted, because Woods had nearly died and it felt indecent to push. But the absence of a test is not the same as a clean result. It is the absence of a test. What we were left with, in place of information, was a story about survival and the road back. That was covered extensively, and which made it functionally impossible to also say: we don't know what was in his system that morning. That matters. It still matters.

The golf world, this publication included, has organized its Tiger coverage around one persistent question for years: Can he play? It is a reasonable question if you are covering sports. It becomes an incomplete one when the honest answer to a prior question—Is this man OK?—is visibly, and has for some time been, no.

***

We hope we are wrong. Maybe there is an explanation for the refused urine test that has nothing to do with what it appears to suggest. Everyone is entitled to their privacy, and no one should be mocked for their trials. But privacy is a harder argument to make when the struggle keeps arriving in public. On roadsides, in mugshots, in sheriff's press conferences. At some point, looking away is not discretion. It's something closer to abandonment.

The other questions will come. The legal exposure, the Masters, the PGA Tour committee he chairs, what any of this means for a legacy that was secured long ago and cannot be taken back. Those are real, and they will get their due. The sport will process this the way it processes everything: with coverage and debate and hot takes and updates and eventually, probably, a return to the question of whether he might somehow play. That is what we do. That is what we have always done with Tiger Woods, turning him back into a story about golf.

But there is a 50-year-old man who has been in some form of pain, physical or otherwise, for longer than most of his fans have been watching him. Who has been trying, by every public account, to hold together a competitive life and an institutional role and a comeback narrative and a body that has been asked to do more than bodies are meant to do.

The golf can wait. It has waited before. The difference now is that what's at stake isn't a green jacket or a record or a comeback story. It's him.

Joel Beall and Joe Raedle, Yahoo Sports |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Will Crash Shake Golf From Its Dependency on Woods? (BBC)]

McCartney In Tokyo, 1966.
via:

[ed. Tuned left-handed?]