Celebrity Life

Buffalo Bill is onstage engaged in fierce battle. He and his scouts are fighting a ferocious group of Cheyenne warriors. The audience holds its breath as the terrifying Cheyenne appear to be gaining the upper hand. But just when it seems all hope is lost, Buffalo Bill—dressed in an elegant black velvet, lace-trimmed, Mexican vaquero…

In October 2019, the Rotary Club of Bugolobi asked me to talk on the environment and climate change. I looked forward to the opportunity. It would be the first time as an activist that I’d be addressing Ugandan professionals, many of whom were my parents’ age (I’m 24). The audience would be civic-minded middle-class men…

Growing up, I believed that my thoughts had an effect on everything, from the role I would get in the school play, to what my future would hold, to how tall I would grow. This habit of magical thinking has persisted. Some of my superstitions: If I plan a trip, I will be sure to…

Artists have failed to depict a complete set of Roman empresses, but we can still learn from the individual stories of those ancient women

I remember my college acting teacher George Morrison telling us that audiences love to watch people eating, drinking or smoking on stage and screen. This always stuck with me. As usual, he was more than right. Having seen countless films and plays since those days, I know there is indeed something very compelling about watching…

The Brethren did not begin as a tory uprising. Ironically, its members—a group of eastern North Carolina yeomen—believed themselves to be responding to a tyrannical conspiracy against Protestant liberty, and in resistance against forced military service. The evils they had been taught to fear their entire lives—popish plots and tyrannical Frenchmen, heretics and an overbearing…

It could have been a screenplay for one of those gentle comedies that British film studios used to do so well: In 1924, a young American from Portland, Maine, was on vacation in England and strolling down the Strand when a colored engraving in a shop window caught his eye. It showed a glimpse into…

In March 2019, I sat in a hotel room in Houston waiting for a conversation that was nearly 28 years in the making. The apology that in December 2017 Joe Biden told a journalist he owed me was about to happen—maybe. For more than a year, as other journalists asked Biden whether he had reached…

The vibration of my phone nudged me awake. It was Sunday morning, and I was sleeping in after a late night out with my girlfriends. I rolled over, thinking it was likely my mother shaming me for not meeting her at church, but the phone buzzed again and I reluctantly opened it. It was not…

In 2016, my doctor, Kelly Baek, a no-nonsense reproductive endocrinologist in L.A., gave it to me straight: “Your best chance for a healthy baby would be surrogacy.” I had been through an adenomyosis diagnosis and more miscarriages than I could confidently count, and all I could do was nod. I was not ready to do…

The story of how Carolyn Sapp, Miss America 1992, became an accidental domestic violence crusader marks the moment that a new era for Miss America came into focus. The pageant had barreled out of the messy 1980s with still-formidable television ratings, a bulwark of corporate sponsorships, its identity in the public imagination secure, but also…

On the final day of Bill Cosby’s sentencing hearing in 2018, as I had prepared to leave the court for the last time, Detective Jim Reape—a witness in the trial where Cosby was found guilty of indecent assault—approached me. “There are a few people who’d like to meet you,” he said. Jim led me into…