Celebrity Life

On Nov. 24, in the hour after Judge Timothy Walmsley read out the series of mostly guilty verdicts that could send three white men to prison for murdering Ahmaud Arbery, there was a lot happening around the Glynn County, Ga., courthouse where the trial had taken place. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that a quiet but…

Looking back at 2021, the year was characterized by the challenges and joys of the world opening up again after a year of uncertainty and social distancing. (And then, in recent weeks, locking back down again with the emergence of the Omicron variant.) One of the most cogent ways to see the reach of this…

Homicides as a result of gun violence have remained consistently high across the U.S. in 2021, after a steep increase last year during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Broadly, the year-on-year increase in 2021 is not as large as that in 2020 compared to 2019. But many major cities have in fact have…

After a rare pandemic-related dip in 2020, global carbon emissions bounced back with a vengeance. Climate disasters seemed relentless over the summer, from flooding in Western Europe and China to wildfires in Siberia and the American West. And although world leaders made some headway at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, their new emission-reduction commitments…

(LOS ANGELES) — Wayne Thiebaud, whose luscious, colorful paintings of cakes and cityscapes combined sensuousness, nostalgia and a hint of melancholy, has died. He was 101. His death was confirmed in a statement Sunday by his gallery, Acquavella, which didn’t say where or when Thiebaud died. “Even at 101 years old, he still spent most…

Cool is the word used most often to describe her: the Coca-Colas and the cigarettes each morning, the leotard and the typewriter, the scotch and the shawl. California. Writing for the movies to make a living, making notes for the director, the short tight dispatches from the South and West. But the word cool means…

Former police officer Kim Potter said she mistakenly pulled her gun instead of her Taser, leading to the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright

Jeremy Cady and I first met on the plush green grass in front of the Missouri Capitol. It was the spring of 2009, and once a week or so a group of capitol staffers, reporters, and even the occasional elected official would kick a soccer ball around on a rectangular section of lawn that more…

On Dec. 26, 1996, 6-year-old child beauty pageant contestant JonBenét Ramsey was found dead in the basement of the family’s Boulder, Colo. home, along with a ransom note asking for $118,000. Autopsy results released in Aug. 1997 revealed that JonBenét had suffered asphyxiation due to strangulation. A week after JonBenét’s death, her parents, socialite Patricia…

Today, the Middle Ages are a sort of paradox; the myth of the “Dark Ages,” which survives quite ably in popular culture, allows space for it to be whatever the popular imagination wants. When people want to kick a current problem back into the past—whether terrorism, bungled responses to COVID-19, or even the process for…

Amid contentious national pushback over how much of the full history of slavery in the United States should be taught in schools, the holiday season represents a particularly overlooked period. Around the time Christmas was starting to become a national holiday in the late-19th century, propagandists of the Lost Cause—the myth that the Civil War…

In the hospital parking lot, I pulled a stiff painter’s mask over my nose and mouth. I took a selfie on Snapchat, sent it to my brother and sister. My brother responded: “Whoa. That’s apocalyptic.” This was mid-March 2020, when we feared COVID-19 the way you fear an animal’s yellow eyes in the dark, not…