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  • Gavin Newsom Is Playing the Long Game

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    Next, he brought out a stack of canary-yellow index cards, thick as a sandwich. It was covered in his scrawl. From the lined pages, he distills the material and copies things a second time onto the cards. “And, from here, it goes in right in there,” he said, gesturing to his head.

    This process of underlining, copying, and recopying is the backbone of Newsom’s working life. He spends his ninety-minute commute—between Kentfield, in Marin, where he lives with his wife, the documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and their four children, and Sacramento, where he usually overnights once or twice a week—making notations in the back seat of the gubernatorial S.U.V. Between meetings and after dinner, the pads and cards come out. What he described as the resulting “hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands” of pieces of paper lived for a while as ballast in the trunk of his car. Today, they occupy an unofficial archive off the Governor’s office, with a filing system of his own conception. If an adviser tells Newsom something that strikes him as odd, he has been known to vanish into his archive, emerge with a folder (“There are, like, tabs and things,” Jason Elliott told me with horror), and extract a note proving that, months ago, the same adviser told him something else.

    Because of his reading struggles, Newsom rarely gives long written speeches; instead, he memorizes. (He sees the lines of text on a teleprompter screen as a single image, like a Chinese character, which he uses to recall the next line.) Lindsey Cobia told me, “A four-hour podcast where he gets asked about everything from U.F.O.s to his policy on assisted suicide is actually a more comfortable space for him, because of his dyslexia, than reading a ten-minute speech.” Lateefah Simon, a Bay Area congresswoman, who shared consultants with Newsom during the 2020 Democratic National Convention, recalled that they left to help him with speech prep—normally a half-hour task. “ I didn’t see them for, like, three hours,” she said. “He wanted to do it over and over.”

    Simon met Newsom twenty-five years ago, when she was the director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, an organization representing girls in the juvenile-justice system. She was chanting with a bullhorn outside his office in protest of his approach to welfare. “The electeds never come out to see you,” she said. But Newsom did, and he listened to the protesters’ grievances for an hour. “At the end, he said, ‘My office is always open to all of you.’ ” Simon began watching his press conferences. “I would tell my members, ‘Write his stats down, and let’s check them—because he has no notes!’ ” Newsom’s stats checked out; he can “drill down,” as he put it, on almost any subject at the slightest invitation. He sometimes gives the impression of a man with more stamina for talking than people have for listening.

    On the campaign trail, Newsom has a mental stack of cue cards that he riffs on the way a jazz pianist might improvise from a chord chart. His movements through the language can be weird. (“The rule of law, not the rule of Don, and I hope it’s dawning on people” is a construction that he has found fit to repeat on air.)

    “Prove to me you can be nice to people.”

    Cartoon by Frank Cotham

    Hilary, who is now the co-president of PlumpJack, sees his displays of esoteric knowledge as compensatory. In the family, she was thought to take after their brilliant, charismatic father. “My mom was incredibly shy, and always told everyone that Gavin was just like her—but she was super critical of herself,” she said. “I think there was this quiet rebellion in him that wanted to say, I’m not like that.” In high school, he began slicking his hair, wearing suits, and carrying a briefcase, inspired by the TV show “Remington Steele.” He was trying to channel the era’s buffed iconography of masculine power, but came off like Alex P. Keaton. “I remember paying him five dollars to go to the Levi’s store in San Rafael with me and get a pair of Shrink-to-Fit jeans, because I’m, like, ‘You’re bad for my luck in high school,’ ” Hilary said. In light of his trajectory from problem child to aloof entrepreneur, Newsom, who is said to be planning a run for higher office, has an opportunity to become America’s first Gen X President.

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    Nathan Heller

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  • Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News

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    Trump, for his part, was effusive in his praise of Weiss. “I think you have a great new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise,” he said during his sit-down with O’Donnell. “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person.” After the recording concluded, Weiss stepped forward to introduce herself to the President. It was the first time that she’d met the man whose presence now loomed over her installation at the network. They greeted each other warmly, exchanging a kiss on the cheek.

    Weiss grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, “raised in what can be accurately described as an urban shtetl,” she wrote in her 2019 book, “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” Her great-grandfather Philip (Chappy) Goldstein was a successful flyweight boxer who sometimes sported a Star of David on his boxing silks. Her parents worked in the family’s furniture store, where Weiss’s father, Lou, had a flair for marketing, doling out a line of candies called Weiss Krispie Treats to customers. Weiss attended a Jewish day school—which one of her three sisters now heads—and the family spent a couple of summers in Jerusalem, where her parents learned Hebrew. “I grew up in a family where we belonged to three synagogues,” Weiss told an interviewer in 2019. “It was not unusual for me to read Torah at shul and then go, say, to a Chabad family for lunch before heading to basketball practice.”

    The Weisses’ Shabbat dinners featured a rotating cast of guests and were often contentious. “I remember vividly, like, constant debate,” Weiss’s sister Casey told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last year. “Sometimes it got really heated.” Lou, who grew up in a “McGovern liberal” household, had become a conservative at Kenyon College. He kept copies of Commentary magazine and the Financial Times around the house, and frequently contributed op-eds to local Pittsburgh papers. His politics were centered around free markets and support for Israel. “They hate gays, and they subject women to horrible second-class treatment—not every single person, but as a group,” he told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle in 2017, for an article about Syrian refugees. “If you bring them here, ultimately, they will vote. If you think they’ll vote to support Israeli interests, you’re sadly mistaken.” Weiss’s mother, Amy, has described herself as a “very moderate liberal Democrat”; she threatened a Lysistrata-esque sex strike in 2016 if Lou voted for Trump. (He ended up writing in Amy’s name.)

    Weiss’s bat-mitzvah ceremony was held at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, which, in 2018, became the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, a mass shooting that left eleven congregants dead. Weiss covered the massacre for the Times, writing a moving report about the aftermath. “When an anti-Semitic murderer mows down Jews in the synagogue where you became a bat mitzvah, you might find yourself in the sanctuary again,” she wrote. “But instead of family and friends, the sanctuary is host to a crew of volunteers—the chevra kadisha—who will spend the week cleaning up every drop of blood because, according to Jewish tradition, each part of the body must be sanctified in death and so buried.”

    One of Weiss’s elementary-school teachers told the Post-Gazette that Weiss was “a power to reckon with, even in second grade.” At Shady Side Academy, a secular private high school, Weiss led pro-Israel events and organized student groups for interdenominational understanding. Students followed a dress code, inspiring a lifelong practice. “If you’re really getting down to work and you’re Bari Weiss,” her youngest sister, Suzy, told me, “you’re putting on a collared shirt.”

    “Mr. Karamazov is my father’s name. You can call me Dmitri, Mitka, Mitya, Dima, Mityok, D-Man, D. Doggy-Dogg . . .”

    Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers

    After graduation, in 2002, Weiss worked on a kibbutz near the Gaza border and studied at a yeshiva in Jerusalem before entering Columbia the following fall. During her sophomore year, she took an introductory course with Joseph Massad, an assistant professor in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department. Massad, a Jordan-born Palestinian academic, had recently become the subject of student accusations that the department’s faculty trafficked in antisemitism. In 2004, the Boston-based advocacy group the David Project helped produce a short film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” which featured interviews with Jewish students accusing certain professors of harassing them because of their support for Israel. A student who had served in the Israeli Army said that, during a public lecture, Massad asked him, “How many Palestinians have you killed?”

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    Clare Malone

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  • The Making of the First American Pope

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    In Peru every August, throngs of Catholics set out on foot from the remote northern town of Motupe, bound for a cliffside chapel that houses the Cross of Chalpon. The cross, made of guayacán wood and ringed with precious metals, stands about eight feet tall and is believed to have been discovered, as if by a miracle, in a nearby cave in 1868. The ascent takes about an hour, and venders along the way sell religious images and replicas of the cross, as well as roasted corn and Inca Kola. A highlight of the pilgrimage comes when a procession bears the cross downhill, to the church of San Julián, in Motupe’s main plaza. The next day, the Bishop of Chiclayo, the regional capital, leads a Mass for a congregation that fills the square. A brass band plays and helicopters scatter rose petals over the faithful. For decades, the presiding bishop was a member of Opus Dei, a traditionalist movement, founded in Spain in 1928, that has thrived in Latin America. In 2014, however, Pope Francis appointed Robert Prevost, an Augustinian priest from Chicago who had spent a dozen years as a missionary in Peru, to the post.

    Prevost himself, of course, is now the Pope; he was elected on May 8th and took the name Leo XIV. Made famous overnight, he stuck to a Midwestern matter-of-factness: he addressed the cardinals who’d elected him in flat-vowelled English, phoned his family daily, kept up his morning habit of doing the Times’ Wordle puzzle, and sent e-mails and texts from his personal accounts. His election was striking but not altogether surprising: he was on many Vatican watchers’ lists and, since the Second Vatican Council, in the early nineteen-sixties, it has been the pattern that a dynamic, pathbreaking Pope is succeeded by a more sober, deliberate ally. Leo—who in recent years worked closely with Pope Francis as the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, a powerful Vatican office—seems likely to carry forward his predecessor’s emphasis on the poor and those on the margins of society with a steadiness that will complement the Argentinean prelate’s improvisatory style.

    The public was instantly captivated by Prevost’s background. He was called “the first American Pope,” “the pan-American Pope” (as a bishop, he was required to take Peruvian citizenship), and “the three-world Pope” (to account for his time in Rome). Following accounts that his mother’s family was from New Orleans and his maternal grandfather, born in Haiti, was listed as Black in the 1900 census, he was hailed as “the Black Pope”—until reports of his Sicilian, French, Québécois, Spanish, Cuban, and Creole ancestry brought him the tag “the immigrant Pope.”

    “You can settle your check whenever you’re ready to understand my need to turn this table over at least three times tonight in order to make any sort of living.”

    Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen

    The press descended on his childhood home, a modest brick bungalow in Dolton, Illinois, just south of Chicago, and on his boyhood church there, St. Mary of the Assumption, which was shuttered in 2011, its rose window cracked and weeds sprouting near its cornerstone. His elder brother John, a retired Catholic-school principal, confirmed that Leo was a White Sox fan and liked the thin-crust pizza at Aurelio’s; Sox fans started showing up at home games dressed in papal garb, and Aurelio’s introduced a pie called the Poperoni. His eldest brother, Louis, Jr., a retired Navy man, described himself as a “MAGA type” and “Rob” as “much more liberal,” but suggested that he would lead the Papacy “down the middle.”

    The summer had the feel of a soft opening to Leo’s pontificate, in part because many papal events had been arranged before he was elected. In Rome, he arrived by helicopter at the Jubilee of Youth, which drew about a million young Catholics to a park south of the city, and he presided over the canonization of the “first millennial saint,” Carlo Acutis, an Italian teen-ager known as “God’s influencer,” who, before his death, from leukemia, used digital media to promote Catholic values. Leo took part in a Vatican conference on the climate emergency, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, a guest speaker, called him an “action hero” because, as soon as he became Pope, he “ordered the Vatican to put solar panels on the buildings.” He met with people who had a wide range of viewpoints, including Ben Shapiro, the conservative podcaster; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the host of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” who presented him with the Prevost family tree; Father James Martin, a Jesuit who advocates “building bridges” with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics; and Cardinal Raymond Burke, a “rad-trad” advocate for the restoration of the Latin Mass.

    Then, on September 30th, a news correspondent for EWTN, a Catholic broadcaster, asked Leo about a controversy in Chicago: the archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, planned to give an award to Senator Dick Durbin for his long support of migrants’ rights. Traditionalists pointed out that Durbin, a Democrat, has also long supported abortion rights. The Pope replied, “Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life. Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but ‘I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States’—I don’t know if that’s pro-life. So they are very complex issues. I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them, but I would ask first and foremost that there’d be greater respect for one another.”

    Some saw those remarks as a rebuke of the White House (“Holy Smackdown,” the Daily Beast announced, “Pope Leo Trashes Trump’s Signature Policy”), others as Leo giving cover to Cardinal Cupich. (Because of the controversy, Durbin decided not to accept the award.) The website Where Peter Is, which focusses on the Papacy, saw it as a sign of “Leo’s unifying, de-escalation-oriented priorities.” It was, in other words, an instance of Leo going about the Papacy the way his brother said he would—playing it down the middle.

    Man on deserted island waves goodbye to someone who just got airrescued from a neighboring island.

    “I’m so happy for you.”

    Cartoon by Jon Adams

    “I’m just a month and a half into this new mission,” Leo told a friend in an e-mail in July. A man who a decade ago was presiding over pilgrimages in a remote Peruvian town is now leading a global religion with more than a billion followers, and will have to contend with rising authoritarianism and Christian nationalism, a Church divided between progressives and conservatives, clashes over immigration, grinding wars, and a climate crisis rapidly growing more intense. The Pope’s life, since he entered a seminary high school in 1969, as he turned fourteen, has been a series of assignments, each with clear objectives. The question now is: What is the papal mission, as he sees it?

    In 1955, when Richard J. Daley, who went to Mass every morning, became the mayor of Chicago, there were 1.7 million Catholics among the city’s population of some four million people. Irish, Italian, German, and Polish communities each worshipped—in Latin—at their own churches, often within blocks of one another. Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, the archdiocese, led by Cardinal George Mundelein, had been allied with the Democratic Party and labor unions, and had promoted social activism through groups such as Young Christian Workers and the Catholic Interracial Council. During the postwar years, though, tens of thousands of white parishioners chose to move to new enclaves in the city and the suburbs as, owing to the Great Migration, the Black population, long sequestered on the South Side, grew and expanded into other neighborhoods.

    Robert Prevost’s parents—Louis Prevost, from the South Side, and Mildred Martinez, from the North Side—met while pursuing graduate degrees in education at DePaul, a Catholic university in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. After marrying, they moved to Dolton, a mostly white suburb that was thriving along with the nearby steel mills and refineries. He worked as a school principal and superintendent; she was a librarian at Mendel Catholic, a high school run by the Augustinian order, a community founded in 1244 and named for St. Augustine, a fourth-century Bishop of Hippo and the author of “Confessions.”

    The Prevosts raised their three sons in Dolton; Rob was born there in 1955. The boys rode bikes and played baseball with the kids on the block, John told reporters. They knew that their mother’s father had been born in Haiti, he said, but “we never really talked about it.” They were altar boys at St. Mary of the Assumption, often serving at six-thirty Mass before school, a diligence that the priests rewarded by taking them to Sox games. A Spanish Augustinian named Fidel Rodriguez, whom their father had met through a local charity effort involving migrant workers, sometimes came to supper, dressed in the black habit worn by members of the order. “He had quite an impact on me,” Robert Prevost said, years later. “I never forgot it, in terms of his sense of humor, his generosity, his willingness to serve these people who were, if you will, kind of down and out, and just the way he reached out to them.” Rob practiced celebrating the Mass by draping a sheet over an ironing board in the basement and consecrating Necco wafers. “He was going to be a priest,” John said. “Period. End of discussion.”

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    Paul Elie

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  • How Willie Nelson Sees America

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    “That’s his living room,” Nelson’s lighting director, Budrock Prewitt, told me on the road to Camden. He meant the stage—specifically, a twelve-by-thirty-two-foot maroon rug that Nelson’s crew rolls out at each venue before putting every instrument, amp, and monitor in the same spot as always. Whenever Nelson needs to replace the bus, a company that he’s been working with for decades re-creates the same interior in the next one, as precisely as possible. And Nelson keeps his buses leased year-round, whether they’re in use or not. “They park up and wait for us to come back,” his production manager, Alex Blagg, told me. “My bunk is my bunk.”

    “We only go skating because we’re too embarrassed to wear our Christmas sweaters on land.”

    Cartoon by Victoria Roberts

    Nelson’s band does not have its own name. On ticket stubs and marquees, they’re simply Family, as in “Willie Nelson and Family.” For fifty years, Nelson’s sister Bobbie anchored the group from behind a grand piano. She and Willie had a pact: they’d play to the end of the road. When Nelson’s drummer, Paul English, died, he was replaced by his brother, Billy. Jody Payne was Nelson’s longtime guitar player; now his son Waylon plays in the band. Bee Spears started on bass at nineteen and stayed until his death, at sixty-two. Mickey Raphael, who joined the band at twenty-one, is now seventy-four.

    Nelson’s road crew is family, too. His tour manager, John Selman, is the son of Wally Selman, who ran the Texas Opry House; he was hired twenty years ago, straight out of college. Prewitt and Larry Gorham, a Hells Angel who handles security, have been with Nelson since the seventies. So has Nelson’s manager, Mark Rothbaum. Rothbaum’s parents fled Poland in 1937; his mother died when he was thirteen. He stopped caring about school. “I was just fucking angry,” Rothbaum told me. He got a job with a business manager in Manhattan. One day, he saw Nelson behind a glass partition at his office, on West Fifty-seventh Street. “He looked like Jesus Christ,” Rothbaum recalled. “He was glowing.” Rothbaum worked his way into the circle. “I adopted them. But I had to do it. I had to become useful.” He and Nelson have never had a contract. “You couldn’t put a piece of paper between us,” he says.

    Family members call this Willie World, and it, too, is elastic. When the steel player Jimmy Day drank his way out of it, Nelson didn’t replace him. The steel parts simply disappeared. When Spears went on tour with Guy Clark, Nelson brought in Chris Ethridge, of the Flying Burrito Brothers, to play bass—and, when Spears called and asked to come home, Nelson welcomed him back and kept Ethridge on. For a while, he toured with two bassists and two drummers: a full-tilt-boogie band captured on “Willie and Family Live,” from 1978. At around the same time, Leon Russell joined them on piano, bringing along his saxophone player and the great Nigerian percussionist Ambrose Campbell. When Grady Martin, the top session player in Nashville, retired from studio recording, he went on the road, too, upping the number of people onstage to eleven. “Willie ran a refugee camp, to some extent,” Steve Earle told me.

    Bee Spears died in 2011, Jody Payne in 2013, Paul English in 2020, and Bobbie Nelson in 2022. “The biggest change was Sister Bobbie,” Kevin Smith, who now plays bass, told me. Bobbie outlined the chord structure of every song. After her death, Smith was shocked at how little sound there was onstage. These days, Nelson and Raphael take all the solos. Sets are shorter. Lukas sits in when he’s not out touring on his own; his brother Micah, who plays guitar with Neil Young, joins when he can. But Nelson’s sound has been stripped to its essence. “It’s more like spoken word now,” Raphael said. “Like poetry with a rhythm section.”

    Nelson goes from number to number with almost no patter—an approach he learned from the great Texas bandleader Bob Wills, who kept audiences on the dance floor for hours. In Camden, he got through twenty-four songs in sixty-five minutes, pausing only to wipe his brow with a washcloth or to sip from a Willie’s Remedy mug full of warm tea. The set didn’t feel hurried—on “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Nelson gave the song’s ironies and regrets space to sink in—but the crew kept an eye on the clock. After Camden and Holmdel, Nelson was scheduled to play Maryland, Indiana, Wisconsin, and, finally, Farm Aid, at the University of Minnesota: six shows in eight days at the end of eight months on the road. “He just keeps going and going,” Annie said. “He’s Benjamin Buttoning me.”

    I ran into Annie in Camden, doing her laundry backstage by the catering station. She and Nelson met in the eighties, on the set of a remake of “Stagecoach.” Annie is two decades younger than Willie. She is sharp, protective, and unflappable, with a wide smile and long, curly hair that she has allowed to go gray. She told me that the build-out for Farm Aid was supposed to have started that day in Minneapolis. CNN was planning a live telecast. But Teamsters Local 320—made up of custodians, groundskeepers, and food-service workers at the university—had chosen that moment to go on strike. Members of IATSE, the stagehands’ union, would not cross the picket line, and neither would Nelson. Cancelling the concert, though, would break faith with the people Farm Aid was meant to serve. “It’s not great for us,” Annie said. “But who really suffers? The farmers. This year of all years.”

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    Alex Abramovich

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  • Stephen Fry Is Wilde at Heart

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    In “More Fool Me,” Fry speculates that, had he entered Cambridge fifty years earlier, he might have been tapped as a spy. During that era, he writes, “an old fashioned classical English education” was often “given to a certain kind of person equipped with charm, intelligence, duplicity, guile . . . who had an almost pathological need to prove himself, to belong.” He adds, however, that he thinks it unlikely that the intelligence services would have taken him, because of his Jewish heritage: his maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews, and Fry has been outspoken about antisemitism in Britain.

    In the late seventies, however, another Cambridge tradition called—comedy. “I’d always had this nagging feeling that I liked trotting about on a stage,” Fry said. Emma Thompson told me, “Stephen could basically extemporize Shakespeare.” Fry began appearing in numerous productions, and he even wrote a play, “Latin!,” which drew on his experiences at preparatory school. “I’m sure it would be pretty eye-watering now, because it’s a satirical comedy about pederastic schoolteachers,” he told me. He was recruited to join the Cambridge Footlights comedy group by its then president, Hugh Laurie, who had seen Fry in a production of “Volpone.” In an e-mail, Laurie told me, “I was looking to cast a revue for the Cambridge Footlights, and desperately wanted adult roosters in a field of squeaky, prancing cockerels. Stephen walked onstage, and it all fell into place. I remember nothing of the play except this mesmerising giant who stood at the centre.” Fry had, Laurie went on, “such gravity, such authority. Also an odd melancholy that just grabbed me from the first.”

    By the mid-eighties, Fry and Laurie had become fixtures of light entertainment on British television. They appeared in their own sketch show and, later, in “Jeeves and Wooster,” an adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse novels, in which Fry plays an omnicompetent butler. “Over the years, from the first day to this, Stephen and I have laughed more with each other than anyone else I can think of,” Laurie said. “Unless he has other, secret laughing partners, which is possible. Because he keeps secrets, by God he does.”

    In the early nineties, Fry’s financial situation received a boost when he helped revise the book of the 1937 British musical “Me and My Girl,” which went on to a three-year run on Broadway, with Fry reportedly earning three per cent of its box-office revenue. But, in an interview from this period, Fry explained that he was hopeless with money: “If I have a bone, I eat it; I don’t bury it in the garden. I can’t hoard anything, and that includes thoughts. I spend—thoughts, money, myself. I can’t save and conserve anything.”

    Fry’s polymathic talents spilled forth. In 1991, he published the first of four novels, “The Liar,” a semi-autobiographical account of a brilliant and mendacious schoolboy. A best-seller, it includes long fictional extracts from a pornographic manuscript about child prostitution, supposedly written by Charles Dickens. “That you should stand exposed as an amuser of children, nought but a corrector of youth, a pedestal!” a malapropism-prone housekeeper cries. As Fry’s star rose, so did attempts to knock him off his own pedestal. Some were grotesquely literal. Anti-gay insults, and fists, were thrown at a school-reunion dinner at which Fry was the speaker, leading to the levying of fines against Fry’s detractors. In a degraded opinion piece, a Daily Mail columnist wrote, “Why is it that Stephen Fry is so eminently whackable, smackable, kickable, flickable? The answer is that he is simply the most irritating man in the country.” The paper even offered a “blow-up-and-biff” Stephen Fry doll to readers. Jokes about harming celebrities have aged about as well as jokes about pederasty, and perhaps it’s not surprising that such threats left Fry in a state of distress. Things reached a head in 1995, when he co-starred in a new play, “Cell Mates,” in the West End; three shows into the run, which had received mixed reviews, he disappeared to Belgium. He later faxed a note to his agent, explaining that he felt he’d failed as an actor. Fry was missing for several days, and friends feared that he’d taken his own life.

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    Rebecca Mead

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  • David Byrne’s Career of Earnest Alienation

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    In Jonathan Demme’s film “Stop Making Sense,” Byrne wore an oversized suit while performing “Girlfriend Is Better.”Photograph from Collection Christophel / Alamy

    In subsequent years, the influence of Afrobeat—an expansive term for music that combines West African polyrhythms, particularly from Nigeria and Ghana, with elements of jazz and funk—became increasingly palpable in Byrne’s writing. In 2018, the Beninese musician Angélique Kidjo released a track-by-track remake of “Remain in Light,” Talking Heads’ fourth album, from 1980. When I interviewed her that year, Kidjo told me that she was drawn to the record in part because, when she heard the single “Once in a Lifetime” at a party, she presumed it was by African musicians. “That music brought me back home, without me understanding what the Talking Heads were about,” she said. Byrne said that he never worried too much about potential accusations of cultural appropriation. (Incidentally, “Remain in Light” preceded Paul Simon’s “Graceland” by six years.) “I didn’t think about it all that much, because we weren’t directly copying anything,” Byrne said. “There was an obvious influence, and I made that clear.” When “Remain in Light” was released, he provided critics with a short bibliography, including books on Haitian voodoo and African musical idioms. “People thought it was very pretentious at the time,” he recalled, laughing. “But it encouraged people to challenge us with those kinds of questions.”

    One day, I asked Byrne if, when the band was starting out, he would have known what to say if someone had asked him what type of music he played—or, actually, if he knew how to answer that question now. He thought about it for a moment. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t know how to answer it.”

    In 1984, Talking Heads released “Stop Making Sense,” a concert film directed by Jonathan Demme. The movie opens with Byrne walking onstage carrying an acoustic guitar and a boom box, which he places on the floor. He looks gaunt, almost haunted; his affect is erratic, chilly. “Hi,” he says flatly. “I’ve got a tape I want to play.”

    Over a prerecorded beat, Byrne launches into “Psycho Killer.” In a review of the film in this magazine, Pauline Kael described Byrne as having a “withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality,” adding, “He’s an idea man, an aesthetician who works in the modernist mode of scary, catatonic irony.” (To be clear, she loved the film, which she called “close to perfection.”) “Stop Making Sense” is extraordinary on its surface, but if you rewatch it enough you’ll start noticing spontaneous flashes of unmediated humanity that, collectively, do something nutritive for the soul—the moment, say, about four minutes into “Girlfriend Is Better,” when Byrne holds the microphone out to a gaffer clutching a light, who leans forward and very calmly says the words “Stop making sense,” or, about three minutes into “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” when the rhythm guitarist Alex Weir whips around to look at the keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Worrell, who is not in focus, does this glorious little snaky dance, a flawless expression of pleasure. For me, “Stop Making Sense”—possibly the entire nineteen-eighties—peaks with the band’s performance of “Burning Down the House.” By then, Byrne has been joined onstage by the rest of Talking Heads, as well as Weir, Worrell, the percussionist Steve Scales, and the vocalists Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt. At the start of the second verse, Scales turns to the camera and sticks out his tongue. “Strange but not a stranger / I’m an ordinary guy!” Byrne shouts. Watching it, I suddenly feel as though I could lift a small car. Demme lingers on Weir, who is clearly having the time of his life; there’s a moment, not long before the end of the song, when Byrne and Weir start dancing together, running in place, kicking their knees up, and then they exchange the sort of look—pure rapture, a kind of impeccable joy—that I’ve only ever seen on the faces of small children when a beloved parent returns home and throws open the front door.

    A man standing on a staircase while dressed in a marching band uniform

    Photograph by David LaChapelle for The New Yorker

    For “Girlfriend Is Better,” Byrne puts on the enormous suit that makes his head appear tiny. Even now, forty-one years later, the look is striking. In a “self-interview” that accompanied the film, Byrne said that he liked the proportions of the suit because “music is very physical, and often the body understands it before the head,” and that he liked the phrase “Stop making sense” because it’s “good advice.” There is, of course, a strong current of senselessness running through the film. During “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” the band’s most sparsely arranged song, and also its most tender, Byrne dances with a floor lamp. “That’s a love song made up almost completely of non sequiturs, phrases that may have a strong emotional resonance but don’t have any narrative qualities,” Byrne once said of its lyrics. That might be true in some technical way. Or it’s possible that love itself doesn’t have any narrative qualities. Cumulatively, the language adds up to something:

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    Amanda Petrusich

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  • Joachim Trier Has Put Oslo on the Cinematic Map

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    Using this location had personal benefits: on the days he was filming at the house, he could see his daughters for breakfast and put them to bed. Trier deeply understands a director like Gustav, with his art-monster tendencies and half-blundering, half-charming attempts to reach his daughters, but he hardly wants to be Gustav. In fact, much of Trier’s process seems to be about finding ways to buck that model. It helps, as Helle told me, that Trier is “endlessly fascinated” by other people’s psychology—“penetrating the top layer of big emotions and trying to understand why people are like they are. That is a constant conversation, at home and with our friends.”

    Trier, who is tall and slim, with closely trimmed hair, a stubbly beard, blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, and a penchant for black chinos and sneakers, looks like your favorite history teacher. On set, he bounces with a natural athleticism. He used to race down ski slopes; he has gone more slowly ever since an accident in 2019 which nearly necessitated the amputation of his foot. Trier is gregarious and emotionally accessible, prone to clasping his hands together in enthusiasm, uttering an exuberant “Exa-a-actly!” when he agrees with a comment, and tearing up while directing. (He also got misty when I recounted something kind his wife had said about him.)

    This last tendency is one he shares with the director of photography on “Sentimental Value” and “Worst Person,” the Danish cinematographer Kasper Tuxen. “A lot of D.P.s are kind of super-masculine,” Trier said. “Kasper is so sensitive and lovely—he’s really engaged with what the actors are doing.” Tuxen told me that it posed a technical hazard to film scenes he found especially moving. Trier’s movies are shot on 35-mm., and Tuxen scoots in close to the actors, often on a rolling stool ignominiously known as a butt dolly. “Shooting on film, you have an actual optical-glass viewfinder,” Tuxen said. “It’s beautiful for seeing things clearly, but the condensation from a wet eyeball is a problem. When my operating eye gets wet, the glass gets fogged up. So I need to use a heated viewfinder, to cook my tears.”

    The American director Mike Mills (“Beginners,” “20th Century Women”) is a close friend of Trier’s; he also works with Tuxen. Mills and Trier both approach filmmaking with an unabashed sincerity, even as they play around with winking archival montages, flash-forwards, and other arch techniques. The two have regular Zoom conversations that can last for hours, and they share preliminary cuts of their films with each other. Mills said that he and Trier, “two very therapized men,” were uncomfortably aware of film history being “filled with narcissists who maybe made great films but were horrible to be close to.” He went on, “If you’re the type of person who sees a lot of that as being a dead end, or problematic, or not leading toward happiness or a richer life, how do you react to that?” Like Trier, Mills has a tendency to make therapeutically savvy remarks, then worry aloud that they sound pretentious.

    I ran Mills’s comments by Trier when I met him for coffee during the New York Film Festival. In directing, Trier said, “there’s a lot of heavy lifting, both in getting your creative control and in getting everyone on board—leading a big team of people early in the morning when they’re tired, and half of them have undiagnosed A.D.H.D. but you love their energy.” This situation “can encourage macho behavior, because you’re a leader—the militaristic general.” When Trier needs to rally his troops, he deepens his voice, claps his hands, and announces, “politely but sternly, like a teacher—‘We gotta focus, everybody!’ ” He prefers to operate in a mode “of tender encouragement, because people work better that way—at least, the people I want to work with.”

    I visited the set of “Sentimental Value” last October. The shoot was on a soundstage a thirty-minute train ride from downtown Oslo. Inside was a re-creation of the first and second floors of the house in Frogner. To film a montage of the house at various historical junctures, from the nineteen-tens to the nineteen-eighties, it had been easier—though not easy, and not inexpensive—to build a replica than to retrofit the actual house. A production-design team had layered the walls of the imitation house with a palimpsest of wallpapers; when the scenes for one time period were done, the team peeled off a layer to reveal the one underneath.

    That day’s shoot was set at a house party in the sixties, when the place was occupied by Gustav’s aunt, Edith, his mother’s sister, who lives openly with her girlfriend. Gustav’s mother, we’ve learned, joined the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Norway and was imprisoned by the Gestapo. She later died, by suicide, when Gustav was young. Edith likes to crank up the music at her parties when the neighbors complain—one of them, she’s sure, ratted out her sister.

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    Margaret Talbot

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  • Jennifer Lawrence Goes Dark

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    Lawrence liked Scorsese’s idea, and put together an adaptation of “Die, My Love” with her production company. (Scorsese is credited as a producer on the film; next year, he’ll direct Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of “What Happens at Night,” by Peter Cameron, which he read immediately after “Die, My Love.”) Lynne Ramsay, the mercurial Scottish filmmaker, signed on to direct, and Robert Pattinson took the part of the husband, called Jackson in the film. Lawrence’s character is named Grace; rural France has been replaced by Montana. The couple moves there while Grace is pregnant, and we briefly see them wild and free before the baby is born. Their relationship breaks down in the postpartum months, as Grace is driven well past the edge of sanity by isolation, sexual rejection, and the stuff of new motherhood—leaking nipples, laundry baskets, the sight of a man who’s been wearing the same disgusting fucking robe every single day. The film takes a shotgun to certain postpartum clichés: Grace doesn’t care about being a picture-perfect mother, and she’s not too touched-out for sex. She walks around with dirty bare feet and keeps her baby up out of boredom and throws herself violently at Jackson, to no avail.

    To different viewers, the movie might seem like a sideways romantic drama, a psychological thriller, or a very dark comedy. It is certainly, like Ramsay’s other films—such as “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which centers on a boy who goes on a killing spree, and his parents—a tone poem of sublimated misery. Lawrence’s previous film was the comedy “No Hard Feelings,” in which her character, a dirtbag Montauk townie paid to deflower the nerd son of out-to-lunch parents, drew closer to her public image than anything she’d done before. Now, in “Die My Love,” her role diverges from that persona more than ever. As Grace, she crawls through tall grass, clutching a butcher knife, and wanders under the predawn moonlight, desperate for someone to fuck her, or maybe to behead her. Her eyes yawn open, crackling with static. She vibrates with restlessness and fury. You can see the cognitive distance between her and reality increasing, inch by inch, in her face.

    Lawrence has sat for dozens of magazine profiles since she was a teen-ager. She’s drunk cheap bourbon with reporters in her back yard and got in a sauna for scene and color. But she’s become more sparing with press in the past half decade. In late September, she and a publicist sat in a side room at Via Carota, an unflashy but impossibly in-demand celebrity-magnet restaurant in the West Village. I walked in and said hello. Lawrence confessed that, just before she left the house, her too-small mouth guard had got stuck in her mouth. “Can you imagine?” she said. “After ten years of being, like, ‘I used to be folksy, but everyone thought everything was a shtick,’ then I show up for my first day of this, like”—she did a Farrelly-brothers-style impression of clumsy, mouth-guard-wearing Jen. “I was, like, I will do anything to prevent this from happening. It would be like if I tripped and fell on my way into the room.”

    Lawrence has a low voice and is beautiful in a manner that feels unstingy. She was dressed like the wealthy millennial mother that she is: a soft red cardigan over a white shirt, a white skirt with a black sweater around her waist, a gold pendant, black sandals. Her long, dark-blond bangs were a little messy. In person, as onscreen, she’s often very still; her face, with its rounded cheekbones and straight planes, will become marble-like and sculptural. Then everything rearranges in a swarm of sudden feeling.

    “Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again,’ ” Lawrence told her fellow-actor Viola Davis a few years ago, adding, “I feel like I lose so much control over my craft when I have to do press for a movie.” I got the sense that, with me, she was trying to be careful. She seemed conscious of a lesson learned at peak fame: she doesn’t want to be the trick pony; she wants to be the rider holding the reins. Still, frequently, something unbridled would burst through. Soon after I sat down, Lawrence asked me if it was O.K. if she “vaped . . . constantly,” then noted that she’d have to stop in November, when she planned to get her boobs done. (Nicotine constricts blood vessels—bad for tissue healing.) Later, we discussed the cervical details of our respective childbirth experiences, and she cheerfully offered the phrase “huge vagina.”

    Cartoon by Ellie Black

    When I mentioned going through old articles about her, she winced. “Oh, no,” she said. “So hyper. So embarrassing.” I said that it must have been self-alienating to have people demand and obsess over her genuine personality, and then to decide that it was fake. “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” she said. The pedestal of fame had felt treacherous and false: “And so it was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’ ” Lawrence had anticipated the turn in public opinion long before it happened, and rarely felt at ease. “I was young, I lived alone, I was being chased,” she said. Paparazzi followed her when she drove around in Los Angeles; at night, adrenaline threw off her sleep. She had too many projects and was doing too much press, and she felt “pissed,” she said. “I look at those interviews, and that person is annoying. I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying. Ariana Grande’s impression of me on ‘S.N.L.’ was spot-on.” (“I’m just, like, a snackaholic,” Grande said, in 2016, on a “Celebrity Family Feud” sketch, sporting a tight dress and a perfectly groomed blond wig. “I mean, I love Pringles. If no one’s looking, I’ll eat, like, a whole can.”) But the backlash did make her life seem “uninhabitable,” Lawrence said. “I felt—I didn’t feel, I was, I think—rejected not for my movies, not for my politics, but for me, for my personality.”

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    Jia Tolentino

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  • What Zohran Mamdani Knows About Power

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    One of Mamdani’s more poetic campaign motifs is “public excellence”—the idea that socialists need not compromise on quality-of-life concerns. In the past few months, Mamdani has attempted to reframe his suspicion of police as a human-resources issue, an obstacle to excellence: rank-and-file cops are regularly asked to handle distressing situations outside their skill set, such as dealing with the homeless and the mentally ill. He hopes to take those tasks off their hands by creating a Department of Community Safety, though, by his own admission, some of the details are “still to be determined.” At the prompting of a Times interviewer, in September, Mamdani half-apologized for his old tweets about the N.Y.P.D., but he rejects the notion that his views have evolved. “The principles remain the same,” he told me. “There are also lessons that you learn along the way.”

    No small number of Mamdani’s detractors wonder if someone of his age and experience will be capable of running the biggest city in the country. New York has a hundred-and-sixteen-billion-dollar budget, three hundred thousand employees, and a police department larger than the Belgian Army. For more than a century, people have wondered if the city is ungovernable; with the exception of Fiorello La Guardia, who had New Deal money raining down on him, every idealistic leader who has been elected mayor has left City Hall in some way battered by it. “The good mayor turns out to be weak or foolish or ‘not so good’ . . . or the people become disgusted,” the muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1903. A City Hall veteran recently told me, “You’re constantly making bad decisions that you know are bad decisions. You’re presented with two bad options, and you’ve got to pick one, and that’s your day.”

    If Mamdani is elected, the N.Y.P.D. may well continue to sweep up homeless encampments and forcibly remove protesters who block bridges or roads; he hasn’t yet ruled these things out. (“His administration will not seek to criminalize peaceful protest or poverty,” a Mamdani aide said.) At a recent forum on public safety sponsored by the policy journal Vital City, he was asked about police involuntarily detaining the mentally ill. “It is a last resort,” Mamdani said. “It is something that—if nothing else can work, then it’s there.”

    Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. This was the same year that his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, released “Mississippi Masala,” about a romance between a spunky Indian Ugandan exile (Sarita Choudhury) and a straitlaced Black carpet cleaner (Denzel Washington) in small-town Mississippi. While scouting for a location to set the scenes of her protagonist’s childhood in Uganda, Nair found an airy hilltop property in Kampala, overlooking Lake Victoria. The home appeared in the movie, and Nair and her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, bought it. Zohran spent his first five years there, playing in the lush gardens under jacaranda trees. In a Profile of Nair from 2002, John Lahr wrote that the director’s “talkative doe-eyed son” was known by “dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani.” (Mamdani’s staff today still call him Z, though recently some have started, winkingly, to address him as Sir.)

    Nair met Mahmood while she was researching “Mississippi Masala.” The daughter of a stern, high-ranking Indian state official, she studied at Harvard, and by her thirties had garnered attention for films that examined life on the margins of Indian society: among cabaret dancers, street children, visiting emigrants. Mahmood was born in Bombay in 1946 and grew up in Uganda, part of the Indian diaspora that emerged in East Africa during the British colonial period. In 1962, the year Uganda became independent, Mahmood was awarded one of twenty-three scholarships to study in America which were offered to the new country’s brightest students. (Barack Obama’s father had come to study in the U.S., three years earlier, under a similar program for Kenyan students.) He returned home after his studies abroad, and, like the protagonist Nair later imagined for “Mississippi Masala,” was exiled in Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion of some sixty thousand Asians from the country. The event became a focus of Mahmood’s writing on the pains of decolonization; for Nair, it became the backdrop for a love story. “He’s some kind of lefty,” Nair told her collaborator, Sooni Taraporevala, the day they planned to meet Mahmood for an interview.

    In 1996, Mahmood published his breakthrough work, “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism,” which described the persistence of colonial structures in independent African nations. He dedicated it to Nair and to Zohran, who, he wrote, “daily takes us on the trail that is his discovery of life.” Three years after the book was published, Columbia offered Mahmood a tenured professorship. The family moved to New York, into a faculty apartment in Morningside Heights, where they often had Edward and Mariam Said and Rashid and Mona Khalidi over for dinner. “For Zohran, they were ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties,’ ” Mahmood told me in an e-mail.

    During the fall of 1999, Mamdani’s parents enrolled him at the Bank Street School for Children, a private school. The first year, he felt singled out—“being told again and again that I was very articulate with my English,” Mamdani recalled. Eventually, though, he settled into a typical Upper West Side childhood: Absolute Bagels, soccer in Riverside Park, listening to Jay-Z and Eiffel 65 on his Walkman on the way to school. In 2004, Mahmood took a sabbatical, and the family returned to Kampala for a year. One day, Mahmood went to Zohran’s school, to see how his son was adjusting. “He is doing well except that I do not always understand him,” Zohran’s teacher told him. On orders from the headmaster, the teacher had asked all the Indian students to raise their hands. Zohran had kept his down, and, when prodded, he’d protested, “I am not Indian! I am Ugandan!”

    Mahmood Mamdani, Mira Nair, and Zohran in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991.Photograph courtesy Mira Nair

    On a Saturday morning this summer, I met Mamdani outside the Bronx High School of Science, his alma mater, to walk around with one of his favorite old teachers, Marc Kagan, who happens to be the brother of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court Justice. Kagan, the author of “Take Back the Power”—a firsthand account of his years as a radical organizer in the city’s transit union—taught social studies at Bronx Science for ten years. He inspired fervent admiration in his students, some of whom (Mamdani included) called themselves Kaganites. In his classes, Kagan talked about how race, gender, and class had shaped world events. “We got away from the great-man theory of history,” Kagan, a bespectacled, gray-bearded guy in his late sixties, said as we crossed the school’s sunken courtyard. Mamdani caught my eye and mugged. “There’s just one,” he said, nodding toward Kagan.

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    Eric Lach

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  • Keri Russell’s Emotional Transparency Has Anchored Three Decades of TV

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    “I’m not even sure I remember that,” Russell said, sipping a beer.

    Too late: Rhys was already reliving the conflict. “I was outraged at the time,” he said. “I was, like, ‘That is disgusting! This is the fucking culmination of six years of work! You can’t do that to her!’ She was, like, ‘It’s O.K., that’s fine.’ Because she’s prepared and then she kind of . . . does it.”

    “You’re making me sound very professional,” Russell said, amused.

    “No, no, no. I’m just recounting what happened on set. And then I saw it, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, fucking hell, how did she do that?’ ”

    “But the writing was really great,” Russell said.

    Rhys turned toward me, then whispered, “And the quick deflection.”

    I asked how their romance started. “Oh, we just sort of started having sex,” Russell said. “No, I’m kidding. I don’t know.” She turned to Rhys: “How did we get together?” He told me that he’d had his share of on-set romances, and knew the pitfalls: “So, I would say, slowly. With a lot of, kind of, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t. Oh, this is terrible, we shouldn’t!’ . . . Inevitably, a bottle of red wine would be opened.”

    Their bosses found out in stages. Season 2’s opening episode includes a sequence in which the Jenningses’ daughter walks in on her parents having oral sex, 69 style. Schlamme told me that, though he loved emotional risk-taking on set, he had always been “stunningly uncomfortable” shooting literal sex scenes, which could feel invasive. Not this time: “They were so comfortable! It was like we were filming a scene about eating Cheerios. And they had jokes. Matthew kept saying, ‘Hey, Keri, could you do me a favor? When she opens the door, could you jerk your head back really far, so it looks like I have a huge penis?’ ” When the scene was done, Schlamme walked over to the script supervisor and said, quietly, “Those two people are fucking.”

    Soon afterward, thieves broke into Russell’s house, in Brooklyn, while she and Rhys were asleep in a garden-level bedroom. (Her kids were at Deary’s place.) After hearing noises, the couple barrelled up into the living room, naked, with Rhys brandishing a poker from the fireplace. The thieves ran off with items that they stuffed into Rhys’s backpack. (In Rhys’s telling, he feared having a “Force Majeure”-style failure of nerve in front of his girlfriend; Russell laughed when she heard this account and reminded me that he was a storyteller, saying, “He’s not Irish, but he might as well be.”)

    “You have him in your phone as ‘God (Work)’?”

    Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai

    The police arrested the thieves; the district attorney, hoping for a nice news story involving a star, arranged to have the stolen merchandise returned to Russell on set. That’s when a crew member blew the couple’s cover by yelling, in front of the entire production, “Wait, that’s not Keri’s backpack—it’s Matthew’s.”

    At the upstate hotel, Russell’s friends Mollie, a retired nonprofit executive, and Andrea, a coder, arrived for a planned hike in the mountains. The actress’s weekly drinking buddies and frequent travel companions, they were fellow-parents at St. Ann’s School—their kids had nicknamed the trio the Moms Gone Wild. We climbed to a high-up shelter, where four chunky stone seats faced a clearing with a dramatic view of the mountains. The previous day, there had been a tragedy in Texas, in which young girls at a summer camp had drowned in a flash flood. The women talked about the event in quiet tones, trading stories of their own near-misses when their children were small—the sorts of scary stories that become funny anecdotes after nothing bad happens, like the time Mollie’s baby fell off a sled on the way home from Fort Greene Park.

    Did Russell’s kids want to act? She winced, as if she’d tasted sour milk. “They can do it when they’re older,” she said. “I think it’s Creep City.”

    She had recently read Sarah Polley’s memoir, “Run Towards the Danger,” in which the director and actress described, among other things, her misery as a child star on Canadian TV, starring in “Road to Avonlea.” When Polley was nine, she’d been pressured into running through live explosives during the filming of the movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen”; in her teens, she was paralyzed by stage fright while playing Alice in Wonderland. Russell knew that Miller, her lawyer friend, who had recommended the book to her, had started to question whether children should work as professional actors at all.

    Russell sympathized with Miller’s thinking. But when she thought back on her early years, she was struck less by moments of danger than by what she described as “adultification”—being exposed early to enormous responsibility. She explained, “The second you start getting paid like an adult, you’re expected—it doesn’t matter what people say!—to act like an adult.” Russell hadn’t been victimized sexually, she noted, although as a young actress she’d had her share of sketchy moments. (Later, she told me, in broadly comic terms, about the time a married producer—“an ogre”—had tried to play footsie with her under the table.) Like every actress of her era, she’d had an “all-around” meeting with Harvey Weinstein. Hers took place in a room at the Peninsula Hotel, in Beverly Hills; because Russell’s manager insisted on chaperoning her, nothing unusual happened, unless you count her and Weinstein bonding over their shared love of Leon Uris novels.

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    Emily Nussbaum

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  • Carol Burnett Plays On

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    Jody turned up occasionally to take Burnett for a soda, but he failed to stay sober. Louise had an affair with a married man, resulting in the birth of Burnett’s half sister, Antonia Christine, and afterward fell into a deep depression and began drinking heavily, too. Burnett remembers volcanic fights between Mae and Louise, who would accuse Mae of trying to turn Burnett against her. Burnett learned how to disassociate, pretending at bath time to be a mermaid or drawing comics about a fictional happy family. During her teen-age years, Mae and Louise would refer to this behavior as “Carol putting her shade down.”

    Burnett inherited her mother’s fascination with the movies. The Hollywood sign was visible from the roof of their building, and Burnett liked to climb up there and gaze at it. She and Mae would see second-run features at local theatres almost daily, and at night they would “hit the boulevard” to scope out the premières taking place at the grand film houses. Burnett’s favorite stories were always “the happy ones,” in which lovers found each other in the end, justice was served, and everyone tap-danced off into the sunset. (“The movies then, they just weren’t cynical,” Burnett said.) She and other local kids would act out scenes from films. A cousin would play Jane; Burnett, as Tarzan, perfected her yodel. She developed a pretend radio show, which she’d perform out the window, and a recurring bit in which she’d play her own twin. Still, she rarely thought about becoming a professional performer. Her mother was a vain woman, styling her hair painstakingly each day to cover a birthmark on her temple, and she was tough on Burnett about her appearance. By the time she reached middle school, Burnett was five feet seven, with a weak chin that made her feel like a “gopher girl.” Louise advised Burnett to pursue a career as a reporter, telling her, “You can always write, no matter what you look like.”

    In Burnett’s telling, her path to show business involved a series of miraculous breaks, beginning at the end of high school, when she was admitted to U.C.L.A. but couldn’t afford a forty-three-dollar administrative fee. One afternoon, she checked the mailbox and found an envelope addressed to her, with no return address, containing a single fifty-dollar bill. “To this day, I have no idea where it came from,” she said. “But it paid for college.” At U.C.L.A., she discovered that there was no undergraduate journalism major, so she enrolled instead in the theatre-arts program, planning to study playwriting. But in a mandatory acting class she discovered a knack for comedy. She played a country bumpkin in a one-act play, delivering her straightforward opening line—“I’m back!”—in a Texarkana drawl inspired by one of her great-grandmothers. It brought down the house. She soon started doing college musicals, where she learned that she could belt. “I tried out for the chorus of ‘South Pacific,’ and the director told me I was too loud and couldn’t blend,” she said. She did get the part of Nathan Detroit’s fiancée, Adelaide, in “Guys and Dolls,” and found a more fitting register in a number that the character sings with a honking cold.

    “Once they find out you can talk, they never stop asking you questions.”

    Cartoon by Robert Leighton

    Louise came to see her in a college production and Burnett fondly recalls her saying, “You were the best one.” But neither of Burnett’s parents would survive to see her career success. Her father died in 1954, at the age of forty-seven, owing to complications from alcoholism; her mother died a few years later, at forty-six, of the same cause, leaving Burnett as the guardian of her teen-age half sister. (Mae lived until 1967, just before “The Carol Burnet Show” débuted.) Still, Burnett told me, of her childhood, “I always knew I was loved.” Her autobiographical stage play, “Hollywood Arms,” features a scene in which she’s let down by a drunken Jody, then serenaded by her mother and grandmother with a Doris Day ode to positivity: “Live, love, laugh and be happy.”

    Like Barbra Streisand, who had a natural talent for singing and claims to feel almost bored by her instrument, Burnett doesn’t like to analyze where her artistry comes from. In a 1972 Esquire interview, the writer Harold Brodkey pressed her to examine her comedic sources. Had she read Freud? “It’s just comedy,” she replied. “There’s no medicine box—no, there’s no soapbox to my humor.” Still, you don’t need to be trained in psychoanalysis to recognize that some of Burnett’s most iconic comedy routines double as portraits of the malcontented women who raised her, among them her role in “The Family,” a series of sketches from “The Carol Burnett Show” about a riotously dysfunctional working-class clan. The writers behind the sketches assumed that Burnett would play the part of Mama, the mean-hearted matriarch; instead, Burnett chose to be Mama’s daughter Eunice, a whiner in a dead-end marriage who believes that she is destined for Hollywood stardom. Burnett gave the character a Texas twang, as a reference to her own thwarted mother. The sketches ran long, often up to twenty minutes, forcing viewers to endure the family acrimony past the point of comfort. Burnett likes to recount how the cast rehearsed one “Family” sketch without accents or costumes, as an experiment. The effect was very different. “It was devastating,” she said.

    This past year, the comedic writer and actor Cole Escola delivered a distinctly Burnettian performance as Mary Todd Lincoln in the hit Broadway farce “Oh, Mary!” Escola told me, “What Carol did is so important to me, because it really feels like watching someone open a childhood wound, but knowing how to do it for laughs.” Like Burnett, Escola comes from a family marked by poverty and alcoholism, and Escola said, of Burnett’s comedy of repressed or delusional women, “I don’t see it as apolitical at all.” “Oh, Mary!” tells the story of Lincoln’s assassination in an ahistorical spew of dirty jokes and cabaret numbers. The play, which Escola wrote, isn’t explicitly drawn from their personal history, but they described it as “more autobiographical than any memoir I could write,” adding, “I get the same feeling watching Carol perform the broadest, dumbest things, or these kitchen-sink melodramas that are actually surprisingly telling and deep. And, if they don’t hit people, then the next joke is never too far away.”

    Burnett’s singular vice is real estate. “I used to love to move,” she told me, adding that this might be because she’d spent so much of her youth stuck in one tiny room. Throughout the years, she has lived in some combination of a Beverly Hills mansion, a sprawling manor in Honolulu, a compound in Santa Fe, an apartment in Trump Tower, and a condo in the Wilshire, a tony building in L.A. Around 2000, as a sentimental gesture, she rented Room 102, the apartment she’d grown up in, and used it briefly as a writing studio.

    Today, Burnett has whittled her real-estate portfolio down to one property, a relatively modest Mediterranean-style house in a gated golf-course community in the Santa Barbara area. When I first visited her there, in the fall of 2024, she steered me into the main hallway. It was lined, like the walls of a midtown-Manhattan deli, with hundreds of photographs of Burnett with other famous people, including almost every American President since Eisenhower. There were framed notes from Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart. A telegram from Rita Hayworth, sent after Burnett did a sketch parody of Hayworth’s role in the noir film “Gilda,” read, “I loved it. You should have done the original.” One photograph, of Burnett and Dolly Parton standing back to back, was angled slightly, to suggest that it was being weighed down by Parton’s breasts. “Isn’t that great?” Burnett said.

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    Rachel Syme

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  • How Jessica Reed Kraus Went from Mommy Blogger to MAHA Maven

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    The following year, Kraus recalled, Courtney Love, whom she had met during the Depp trial, told her that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was planning to announce a run for President. (A representative for Love said that this was inaccurate.) “She’s friends with his daughter,” Kraus said of Love. “She always knows what’s happening before it’s happening.”

    Kennedy, who, during the pandemic, had been deplatformed for spreading misinformation about vaccines on social media, was a classic Kraus character: a punch line in élite circles who had become a prophet in conspiracy-minded corners of the internet. Kraus was immediately intrigued: “I was, like, ‘Oh, that’s the guy that my friends all liked during COVID.’ ”

    In April of 2023, when Trump was indicted in Manhattan for falsifying business records in connection to hush-money payments to the former adult-film star Stormy Daniels, Kraus travelled to New York City. “I’m, like, ‘I should cover politics, because it’s going to be crazy if a Kennedy’s running and we have Trump,’ ” she said. “I was going to apply the same formula that worked for these trials to politics.”

    That June, Kraus posted an old photo of Kennedy standing in front of his family’s Cape Cod compound, holding an owl. “Someone’s working hard for my vote,” she wrote, adding an owl emoji. During the Maxwell trial, she told me, “I started reading about owls, and it was, like, a sign of intuition and following your intuition.” The post got more than nineteen thousand likes. Kennedy himself reached out. “Nobody liked him at this point,” Kraus said. “He was so happy.”

    Kennedy’s team invited her to his home in Los Angeles. Kraus, who has a photo album on her phone devoted to what she calls “shirtless Kennedys showing off toned torsos in various boating scenes around Cape Cod,” was starstruck. But she soon realized that the purpose of the meeting was to get her to film an endorsement video. When she resisted, Kennedy grew annoyed and scolded his campaign staff. “He’s, like, ‘I thought you said she knew what she was doing!’ ” Kraus recalled. “And they’re, like, ‘She does know what she’s doing. This isn’t what she does!’ ” Finally, Kennedy asked about her audience—did they like his wife? “He’s, like, ‘Cheryl! Cheryl!’ walking around the house,” Kraus said. “And I’m, like, ‘This guy is really weird. I don’t like him.’ ” (A spokesperson for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.)

    But the campaign kept inviting her to events. “I’m, like, ‘O.K., I’ll just go on the road and I’ll follow him for now, because he’s the only one offering access,’ ” Kraus said. “And then that was popular right away.” A photo of Kraus and Kennedy got forty-two thousand Instagram likes, and her three-part Substack recap of their first few meetings received hundreds of comments. (“Literally silent screaming for you right now!” one reader wrote.) In November, Kraus was a guest at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod, along with Mike and their nine-year-old son, Hayes. “It’s like all of a sudden I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m doing politics,’ and then I was on the road,” Kraus said. “I just never came home.” Tang, her assistant, estimated that Kraus had taken fifty trips in the past year.

    Kraus’s campaign coverage was, in many ways, one long party report. In 2024, she spent New Year’s in Aspen with the Kennedy family. That January, she was in Hawaii, where Bovee photographed the candidate and his son Finn posing playfully underwater. “He’s very likable,” Kraus said of Kennedy. “He’s seventy-one, but he can seem very young and like he’s seeing the world through young eyes.” She grew close to the campaign staff, and her posts became more adulatory. After joining Kennedy for a San Diego sailboat outing, which she called “poetically endearing,” she wrote, “Of all of his appearances, it’s events like these that serve as a scenic metaphor for Kennedy’s vision, turning the tide on current politics, shifting the course away from corporate greed, and hoping people will vote out of hope—not fear.”

    The Trump campaign began to notice that Kraus’s posts offered a way to charm a certain kind of swing voter. In February, nine months before the election, she and Bovee were invited to Mar-a-Lago. They stayed in the Tower Suite and attended Trump’s Super Bowl watch party, a private event where Kraus archly observed what she called MAGA’s “dedication to beauty.” “I’m an aesthetic snob,” she told me. “I think Republicans need a lot of help with their image.”

    But Kraus increasingly agreed with their politics. She started posting more often about the Trumps, publishing text messages from Don, Jr., that refuted claims that Trump had never attended his children’s graduations. That May, she made a pilgrimage to Trump’s childhood home in Queens, with Nuzzi as her guide.

    Kraus’s coverage unlocked a new level of access. Previously, she and her family had met Tulsi Gabbard, who has since become Trump’s director of National Intelligence, for acai bowls on the north shore of Oahu. Now Kraus was visiting the former Disney C.E.O. Michael Eisner’s property in Malibu and Lachlan Murdoch’s home in Beverly Hills. “He was so nice,” Kraus said of Murdoch. “It was, like, some event, and it was off record, so I couldn’t say I was there.” Kraus and Bovee often tag-teamed parties. “People trusted us together,” Bovee said. “I was a fly on the wall. I would just snap pictures of who we were talking to and what we were doing.” Kraus would discreetly take notes on her phone. “People, for the most part, they just forgot—they didn’t think of me as media,” she said. “So I got away with a lot. I realized I was at a lot of events where media wasn’t allowed.”

    Cartoon by Harry Bliss and Steve Martin

    For months, pundits had debated whether Kennedy’s campaign would spoil things for the Democrats or for the Republicans. Kennedy himself had found his way to anti-vaccine activism through his work as an environmentalist, advocating to keep water clean from mercury and other pollutants. But by August, when Kennedy dropped out, it had become clear that vaccine skepticism was a more comfortable fit within the Trump coalition. The Kennedy campaign’s website had sold “MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN” hats, a reference to the movement to avoid supposedly toxic seed oils—canola, corn, sunflower—commonly used in American cooking. Now green hats bearing the “MAHA” logo were rolled out.

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    Clare Malone

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  • Patricia Lockwood Goes Viral

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    On a humid evening in May, Patricia Lockwood, who writes with the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid, was scanning the menu at a Mexican restaurant near her home, in Savannah, Georgia. Her husband, Jason Kendall, an agricultural-commodities researcher whom Lockwood calls Corn Man, sat next to her. Both find dining to be a delicate business. Lockwood got COVID in March of 2020 and continues to experience aftereffects from the virus; she has adopted a ketogenic diet—high in fat, low in carbs—to help manage her symptoms. Kendall has had a fragile stomach ever since he suffered a set of catastrophic hemorrhages three years ago and nearly died.

    The Culture Industry: A Centenary Issue
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    When a waitress stopped by, Kendall ordered cauliflower tacos with no sauce; Lockwood asked for fish ones without tortillas. “It’s very embarrassing, because it became a podcast diet,” she said of her keto regimen, in a tone that suggested that embarrassment, for her, is more of a theoretical than a felt phenomenon. Lockwood, who is forty-three, has close-cropped hair, expressive hands, and the rapid-fire, matter-of-fact confidence of someone who speaks even faster than she thinks. The playwright Heidi Schreck, who helped to adapt Lockwood’s life story for television, told me, “The first thing that always comes to mind, when I think of Tricia, is that self-portrait of Hildegard von Bingen”—the twelfth-century German abbess and mystic, who, in a book devoted to her divine revelations, depicted herself with a writing tablet on her lap and flames shooting out of her habit. Lockwood’s lack of inhibition can lead to trouble. At a panel in New York hosted by the Women’s Prize earlier in the spring, she suddenly slid off her stool mid-gesticulation. She no longer allows herself to do karaoke.

    Lockwood began her writing life quietly, as a poet. She found her first major audience on Twitter, posting self-proclaimed “absurdities”—such as a series of Dadaistic sexts that made florid metaphorical use of rock slides, dewdrops, and plot holes in the novels of Dan Brown—that quickly came to define the medium’s zany, waggish ethos. When she returned to the page, it was with a memoir, “Priestdaddy” (2017), which chronicled her improbable childhood as the daughter of a guitar-shredding, action-movie-obsessed Midwestern Catholic priest. Lockwood has since added fiction and criticism to her literary arsenal. Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding “I.” “Due to certain quirks in my upbringing, I love men easily, which is either Christly or some slut thing” is classic Lockwood. So is the fact that this confession appears not in a personal essay but in a review of the works of John Updike.

    When she got sick, her first instinct was to make a joke. “My story will be that John Harvard gave it to me” is how she started an essay published in the London Review of Books in July, 2020. The last thing she had done, before the pandemic hit, was give a lecture at Harvard about the nature of life online; on the plane back home, a man had coughed and coughed. A few days later, she was flattened with a fever. Even after her temperature dropped, things stayed wrong. Her hands would burn or go numb; her skin glittered with pain. She noticed that her body had become attuned to Savannah’s weather, as if its pressure systems affected some mysterious one within. A prickling at the base of her neck, a twinge in her thumb: here comes the storm.

    The worst problem, though, was with her mind. In the L.R.B. essay—“Insane After Coronavirus?” is the title—Lockwood described “stumbling in my speech, transposing syllables, choosing the wrong nouns entirely.” Her memory had crumbled; she could barely read. Still, she thought that she saw a faint glimmering beyond the fog. “I know I used to be able to do this, I will be able to do it again,” she wrote. That oasis turned out to be a mirage—the beginning, not the end, of her ordeal. “That was the last time I felt that I sounded like myself,” Lockwood said, at dinner.

    For a writer like Lockwood, the voice on the page is the whole game; the prospect of losing it is terrifying, the equivalent of a pianist’s crippling arthritis. But it was also uncannily familiar. When she fell ill, Lockwood had just finished writing her first novel, “No One Is Talking About This” (2021). Its unnamed, alter-ego protagonist has found renown for her playful posts on a Twitter-esque platform. But the more she lends her sensibility to the internet, the more she fears that her private stream of consciousness has been swept away in the surge of the collective’s, which has barnacled her language with its own diction, its own clichés. Possessed by the hive mind, she is increasingly haunted by “the unshakeable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head.”

    The cure for a life lived too much online is to unplug, difficult as that might be. But what to do about an illness that no one fully understands, least of all the sufferer? Lockwood now knows that much of what plagued her was a state of perpetual migraine. She typically experienced not headaches but extreme sensory disturbances—a vision of a gorilla in a tree, say—and something that she called “the refrains,” the constant mental repetition of a line of dialogue, a sentence, a phrase from a song. She would jot these down in her “mad notebook,” a blue-covered Moleskine, along with fragments of ideas that she was having, observations from the reading she was struggling to do, and various medical regimens she was trying: gabapentin, rescue triptans, the migraine medications Ajovy and Qulipta. At the restaurant, she recalled that the first thing to really help was a tea steeped with psilocybin mushrooms that had been mailed to her by the writer Jami Attenberg. “A tiny dose,” she insisted.

    “You would be out in the swimming pool, sometimes for hours in the afternoon,” Kendall remembered. He is forty-four, bald and athletic, with the calm, capable demeanor of Mr. Clean’s laid-back little brother. When Lockwood was at her sickest, she became convinced that the floorboards of their apartment were going to collapse under her feet. Kendall took action, moving them out of the city and to a house on nearby Wilmington Island, where she could float freely. “I thought we could therapeutically reorient your body,” he said.

    Two people looking at a painting in a gallery.

    “I particularly like how its abstract qualities make anything I say about it sound plausible.”

    Cartoon by Robert Leighton

    “I could listen to music again,” Lockwood recalled. In the pool, she played “Hosianna Mantra,” by the pioneering German electronic band Popol Vuh, on repeat. The album, from 1972, has been described as a “meditation on faith and uncertainty”—a kind of prayer. “Maybe that’s why the writing came back.”

    Once Lockwood was well enough, she began to shape the fragments from this shattered period of her life into a novel, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” which Riverhead will publish in September. “I wrote it insane,” she told me, “and edited it sane”; it is a collaboration between two different people, both of whom happen to be her. Illness is repeatedly figured as a kind of impostor or thief—not merely as an experience undergone by the self but, Lockwood writes, “the thing that the self had been replaced by.” Getting sick, she said, thrust the questions that lurk at the heart of all novels, and all lives, to the center of hers: “What is the performance of a self? What is a person? What am I?”

    Like other writers to whom the label of autofiction has been applied, Lockwood finds it fruitful to draw on her own experience in her work. Yet, when she writes in a strictly factual mode, she is sometimes accused of fabrication. In 2016, The New Republic sent Lockwood to a Trump rally in New Hampshire, where she described seeing a photograph on the jumbotron of Melania in a bikini embracing an inflatable Shamu. Writing for the L.R.B. about Karl Ove Knausgaard—she is a contributing editor at that publication, brought on not to edit other people’s essays but, she told me, “as an outsider artist” to write freewheeling, minimally edited essays of her own—she recounted a trip that she had made to a literary festival in Norway, only to discover that Knausgaard had cancelled his appearance and been replaced by an Elvis impersonator. Both details were singled out by critics as too outrageously weird, too obviously Lockwood-like, to be unembellished. This makes her indignant. “I almost never make up anything,” she told me. “I just notice different things.”

    So, in her company, did I. There is a kind of Lockwood lens that brings into focus the improbable and hilariously bizarre features lurking in the midst of ordinary life, which a different writer might prefer to smooth over for realism’s sake. One morning in Savannah, I went with Lockwood and Kendall to Fancy Parker’s, an upscale gas-station grocery store, to get snacks. After breaking off to examine the chips selection, I found the two of them in the home-goods corner, where an employee with the bulging biceps and voluminous pompadour of Johnny Bravo was wrangling a massive statue of the Virgin Mary onto a shelf next to some scented candles. Lockwood chatted with him amiably. “We get the Catholic catalogues in my home, and they can be quite pricey,” she said, as if they were discussing the cost of eggs and not a life-size sculpture of the mother of God.

    In Lockwood’s world, the apparition of a saint is not strictly strange. She is the second of five children born to Greg and Karen Lockwood, high-school sweethearts from Cincinnati, Ohio. Karen came from a big Catholic family; Greg was an atheist and, like many atheists, proud of it. After they married, at eighteen, he enlisted in the Navy, serving on a nuclear submarine. It was hundreds of feet under the sea, following marathon viewings of “The Exorcist,” that he met God and found his faith.

    Soon afterward, Lockwood was born, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her father began his career as a Lutheran minister, but converted to Catholicism when she was six. At the Vatican, his case was reviewed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later to be Pope Benedict XVI, who gave him permission, as Lockwood writes, to keep his wife and even his children, “no matter how bad they might be.” Greg Lockwood turned out to be no ordinary man of the cloth. As depicted in “Priestdaddy,” his titanic charisma was matched only by his gale-force whims. Karen, the family’s indefatigable center, kept the household running as Greg moved them from rectory to rectory in what Lockwood has called “all the worst cities of the midwest.”

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    Alexandra Schwartz

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  • Jacqueline Alnes’ The Fruit Cure reveals the truth about extreme wellness trends

    Jacqueline Alnes’ The Fruit Cure reveals the truth about extreme wellness trends

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    We’ve all done it… Something in our body feels a little off. So where’s the first thing we turn to? Most likely, it’s Dr. Google.

    Like the rest of us, that’s what Jacqueline Alnes, the author of The Fruit Cure, did when doctors couldn’t figure out the root of her mysterious illness.

    “You get on a website that you think may help you,” she tells Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani on the Mindvalley Book Club. “I got onto a website that, you know, they said that eating fruit and only fruit would heal you from anything.”

    That’s the claim of most diet fads or wellness crazes, right? Do this or that, and you’ll miraculously be cured… You’ll miraculously lose 10 pounds… You’ll miraculously [enter your illness here]…

    Unfortunately, such promises rarely hold up and can leave even the healthiest of us feeling confused and overwhelmed. And that’s something Jacqueline, a former Division 1 athlete, found out the hard way.

    Her book, The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour, is a heartfelt exploration of her experiences with extreme diets and a journey towards finding true, balanced wellness. And it can be an inspiration for you to do the same.

    There’s no shortage of nutrition-related schemes, scams, and fads, especially given that over 45 million Americans go on a diet each year. From keto to fruit-only to military to a whole list of others, it can be hard to keep up.

    This wellness obsession and diet mentality isn’t anything new, though. In fact, it dates back centuries.

    In the 17th century, for example, people believed that specific diets could purify the body and cure diseases. Jacqueline highlighted one figure (controversial, though) from the early 1900s, Cornelius Dreyer.

    Though he had “no formal nutritional schooling, no scientific evidence, and no formal research,” he advocated extreme fasting, hot water diets, and eating only fruits, claiming they could cure ailments like epilepsy and diabetes. These practices often led to severe malnutrition and even death, as evidenced by the tragic outcomes of his patients​.

    So why are we, as humans, so obsessed with wellness trends? Simply because the promise of quick fixes and miraculous cures is incredibly alluring. What’s more, it’s amplified by social media, a nesting ground of convincing testimonials and dramatic before-and-after photos.

    I think that’s a really alluring promise that someone can make to you. Like, if someone’s telling you, ‘I know the answer,’ it’s easy to want to believe that and to say, ‘I’m so happy someone out there knows how to make me feel better really quickly with very minimal work.’

    — Jacqueline Alnes, author of The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour

    The unfortunate reality is, many of these extreme diets can do more harm than good. For starters, research shows they can lead to weight cycling, also known as yo-yo dieting. Your metabolism slows down, and your fat storage increases… pushing you straight into obesity.

    What’s more, constantly focusing on what you can’t eat can lead to obsessive thoughts about food. You could end up feeling dissatisfied with your body image and even having eating disorders like orthorexia, the unhealthy obsession with eating in a healthy way.

    How Jacqueline Alnes Found Balance in a World of Diet Fads

    So how did Jacqueline, a Division 1 runner, find her way down into the dieting world in the first place? It started with a cough at the age of 18.

    Taking the medication for something that seemed so ordinary led to a spiral of one-thing-after-another. Dizzy spells, first. Then, “my symptoms got stranger, where I started repeating words that people would say,” she recalls. “I started losing my memory of events, which was really disorienting.”

    Desperate for answers (as anyone would be in her situation), Jacqueline turned to the internet. Based on the information she found, she started cutting out food groups without any real reason.

    “I think that’s a really alluring promise that someone can make to you,” Jacqueline says. “Like if someone’s telling you, ‘I know the answer,’ it’s easy to want to believe that and to say, ‘I’m so happy someone out there knows how to make me feel better really quickly with very minimal work.’”

    She believed the claims, thinking they knew what was best for her body. However, as the saying goes, you are what you eat—when you eat bad food, you’ll eventually look and feel bad, and when you eat good, healthy food, you’ll look and feel great.

    For Jacqueline, the restrictive diet failed to deliver, compelling her to abandon it. She realized that true wellness isn’t about following the latest trend. Instead, it’s about finding balance and trusting her body.

    Transform Your Health Approach With Tips From Jacqueline Alnes

    It’s no secret that the food industry has a heavy influence on our eating habits. So the question Jacqueline raises in her interview with Kristina is, “How do we live in our bodies, even if they are flawed, and find comfort and find the ability to be in our bodies in a healthy, happy way?”

    Taking her experience as inspiration, here are three things that you can do to have a more balanced, healthy approach to your wellness:

    1. Take time to rest and heal

    Life moves pretty fast, as Ferris Bueller says. And in this day and age where everything is at our fingertips, we often want instant fixes.

    “We want information quickly, we want healing quickly, we want connection quickly,” Jacqueline says. “For me personally, I bought into those messages to the point where I wouldn’t even take a few weeks off of running to try to heal myself just because I thought I would fall behind or something.”

    That was a major lesson for her. There’s a time to get up and go. And there’s a time to rest and heal.

    “In the grand scheme of things,” she adds, “I wish I would have slowed down and known that it was okay to take breaks, take pauses, take rest, and search for longer, slower answers rather than searching for what was quick and what was right in front of me.”

    2. Advocate for yourself

    No doubt, doctors are essential to the healthcare system, and questioning their expertise can be downright intimidating. It’s important to remember, though, that they’re not always right.

    “At 18, I didn’t know how to advocate for myself,” she explains. “I started distrusting myself quickly instead of saying to the doctor, ‘No, you’re wrong.’”

    But the thing is, doctors are doing their best, just like everyone else. Seeing them from this viewpoint can help you take an active role in your healthcare and empower you to voice your concerns.

    Ask questions, seek second opinions, and trust your instincts about what feels right for your body. If a treatment or diagnosis doesn’t sit well with you, don’t hesitate to discuss it further with your doctor or seek advice from another healthcare professional.

    3. Follow a more balanced approach to healing

    Most things in life work best in moderation. A little bit of this and a little bit of that equals balance. Extreme actions, however, often neglect important aspects for the sake of one focus.

    That’s why extreme diets don’t work. In fact, there’s research that shows most people who diet will likely gain their weight back (or more).

    So instead of relying on a single method, consider integrating various paths to wellness. For example, you can incorporate principles of intuitive eating with other wellness practices like regular exercise and mindfulness.

    “I could have taken a little bit from the doctors, and I probably could have taken a little bit from another path of healing and sort of merged them together in a way that was most helpful instead of viewing one as the right and one as the wrong and vice versa,” says Jacqueline.

    You can benefit from her experience by staying open to multiple approaches and tailoring them to fit your unique needs. By doing so, you create a holistic and flexible routine that supports your overall well-being.

    Fuel Your Mind

    If there’s one takeaway from Jacqueline Alnes’ The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour, it’s this: do not sit on your laurels. 

    That’s exactly what books do—they encourage you to grow, learn, and take action.

    The great thing is, the Mindvalley Book Club with Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani can help you do just that. Every month, she selects thought-provoking self-help books that can transform your life, just like The Fruit Cure.

    Sign up now for exclusive access to these books, insightful discussions, and weekly podcasts featuring brilliant authors.

    The beauty of it is that every book has the potential to be the catalyst for your next breakthrough. All it takes is the simple click of your mouse.

    Welcome in.

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    Tatiana Azman

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  • Fernando Alonso: Aston Martin driver confident of maintaining speed after ‘best’ F1 season yet in 2023

    Fernando Alonso: Aston Martin driver confident of maintaining speed after ‘best’ F1 season yet in 2023

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    Relive how Aston Martin started the season spectacularly before slightly tailing off as the 2023 Formula One season progressed

    Relive how Aston Martin started the season spectacularly before slightly tailing off as the 2023 Formula One season progressed

    Fernando Alonso says he does not expect his performance to drop off any time soon after completing his “best season” in Formula 1 at the age of 42.

    In his first season with Aston Martin after joining from Alpine, Alonso finished fourth in the drivers’ standings to claim his highest finish since 2013.

    Aston Martin got off to an electric start with podium finishes in six out of the first 10 races, unexpectedly competing with Ferrari and Mercedes, as well as being Red Bull’s closest competitors in the early stages of the season.

    While his contract with the team currently only has one season to run, Alonso appears confident of continuing for several years yet.

    “I’ve said many times, even before 2018, the day I stop racing is not because I feel not motivated for driving or I feel slow,” the two-time world champion said at the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

    Ride on board with Fernando Alonso as he takes on Sergio Perez in an epic battle to seal a podium place in Brazil

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    Ride on board with Fernando Alonso as he takes on Sergio Perez in an epic battle to seal a podium place in Brazil

    Ride on board with Fernando Alonso as he takes on Sergio Perez in an epic battle to seal a podium place in Brazil

    “If I feel slow one day, I think it will be noticeable and I will not be happy with my performance and I will be the first to raise my hand and say it’s time.

    “But I don’t think that time will arrive honestly in terms of feeling slow, I have extreme self-confidence in my performance.”

    While falling short of an elusive 33rd career race win, Alonso clinched all eight of Aston Martin’s podium finishes, including second-place finishes in Monaco, Canada and the Netherlands.

    “I’m happy with the personal performance, I think together with 2012, it’s the best season for me,” Alonso said.

    Sky F1's Ted Kravitz sits down with Fernando Alonso to reflect on his career, 20 years on from his first win in Hungary

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    Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz sits down with Fernando Alonso to reflect on his career, 20 years on from his first win in Hungary

    Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz sits down with Fernando Alonso to reflect on his career, 20 years on from his first win in Hungary

    “Personally, I rate the best season in my driving. I was happy with everything, I was motivated, I was fit, I was performing as you said in difficult conditions sometimes, Bahrain, Monaco, Canada, Monza and Brazil will be my top four/five of the year.

    “I put Monza on purpose because it was a ninth place, it was not a podium, it was nothing that people will remember. But probably we had the slowest car in Monza or the second slowest and to be in the points it was one of those weekends everything was very good.”

    ‘Demanding schedule’ could stop Alonso driving

    Cancelled races this year in China and Italy saw F1’s record 24-race schedule reduced to 22, but with a full season set for 2024, Alonso feels the sport’s calendar is the only thing that could wear him down.

    “But it could be with the calendar and the demanding schedule and things like this one day, I will feel it this time because you know there are other things in life,” Alonso said.

    “It’s been a very demanding season only with 22 races, with two cancellations. Next year with 24, the proper calendar, we will have to see how it feels. Even Las Vegas, I saw today it’s a triple header, I don’t know why, I thought Vegas was alone next year and then Qatar and Abu Dhabi together.

    Fernando Alonso just pips Sergio Perez to a podium spot after an epic battle in the final stages of the race

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    Fernando Alonso just pips Sergio Perez to a podium spot after an epic battle in the final stages of the race

    Fernando Alonso just pips Sergio Perez to a podium spot after an epic battle in the final stages of the race

    “I just found out now, like 10 minutes ago, that it was three races together, these kinds of things will drain my battery, not my driving.”

    While Aston Martin surpassed expectations at the start, they struggled in the middle stage of the season, with more disappointing performances in the British and Hungarian Grands Prix, but Alonso accepts the process is part of a learning curve for the team.

    “I see only positives as well; those struggles are part of the job and part of the journey of this team,” he said. “I think we started really strong with a car that was surprisingly competitive even to us the step from last year to this year.

    “Then we found ourselves maybe in a position that we were not ready for it, fighting with Mercedes, Ferrari, top teams. They are used to fighting at the level.

    Fernando Alonso overtakes Lewis Hamilton to move into third place at the restart of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix

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    Fernando Alonso overtakes Lewis Hamilton to move into third place at the restart of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix

    Fernando Alonso overtakes Lewis Hamilton to move into third place at the restart of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix

    “I think we need to find some consistency, maybe some of the weak points is the car has to operate in a very narrow window, it’s the same with everybody but it seems we are struggling a little bit.

    “It would be nice if we can perform always at a stable level and next year see if we can improve the straight line speed.

    “I think that was the [under] performance in numbers, our weak point always (was we were) a little bit too slow on the straights and if we want to be as fast as the others, we need to drop too much the rear wing and we ended up slow on the corners as well, so that was probably the loop we could not go out this season.”

    ‘Stroll commitment was a surprise to me’

    Alonso says the level of commitment shown by his Aston Martin team-mate Lance Stroll, particularly after a poor run of form for the Canadian, came as a pleasant surprise.

    Stroll, who is the son of team owner Lawrence, raced in the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix just 12 days after suffering fractures to his hands, wrists and foot in a cycling accident.

    Alonso was heard on team radio throughout the season attempting to aid his team-mate in any way possible, and once more spoke of a strong bond between the pair.

    Fernando Alonso reacts to Lance Stroll's Alex Albon overtake

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    Fernando Alonso reacts to Lance Stroll’s Alex Albon overtake

    Fernando Alonso reacts to Lance Stroll’s Alex Albon overtake

    “We talk a lot, we are in contact every week on the telephone, in the factory, in the races and we try to make sure we are all in the same direction and we share many things,” Alonso said.

    “He’s been through some difficulties this year; the car was just changing its behaviour a little bit and he was just struggling a little bit more than me and now we fix a few things in the car and now he’s back in top form.

    “It was impressive to see his dedication, his motivation, in the highs and in the lows. At the beginning of the year with the broken hand, as I said, midway through the season with some difficulties. He was so determined to put things back in place again.

    “Eventually he did after I think Mexico and the race in Brazil, the race in Vegas, this was the surprise to me, the level of commitment, the level of motivation he has, this is only good news and good things for the team.”

    24 races in 2024! Watch every round of next season live on Sky Sports F1, starting with the Bahrain Grand Prix from February 29-March 2. Stream F1 on Sky Sports with NOW

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  • F1 2023 awards: Best race, best Martin Brundle moments, biggest surprise and shocks, plus lots more

    F1 2023 awards: Best race, best Martin Brundle moments, biggest surprise and shocks, plus lots more

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    Watch the best moments from Martin Brundle’s Gridwalks this 2023 Formula 1 season

    Watch the best moments from Martin Brundle’s Gridwalks this 2023 Formula 1 season

    Driver of the year: Max Verstappen. Not much else to say, is there? An extraordinary campaign from him and Red Bull.

    Chaos of the year: There are two parts to this award which goes to the Dutch Grand Prix. The opening laps when rain came down and some drivers pitted for intermediates and got a massive undercut. Or, the sudden downpour with 10 laps to go as Zhou Guanyu speared into the barriers and the race was forced to be red flagged. It doesn’t sound that crazy from the description we’ve just given, but trust us, it was chaotic! Just try blogging it.

    Sergio Perez takes advantage of an early first lap pitstop to take the lead in a rain affected Dutch GP

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    Sergio Perez takes advantage of an early first lap pitstop to take the lead in a rain affected Dutch GP

    Sergio Perez takes advantage of an early first lap pitstop to take the lead in a rain affected Dutch GP

    Weather of the year: It’s not often you look out of a media centre window and can’t see the track anymore. A storm in Sao Paulo during the end of Friday Qualifying caused the session to come to a halt and Fernando Alonso exclaimed “it’s night time!”

    Race of the year: The Singapore Grand Prix. We are not saying this because it’s the only one Red Bull didn’t win, it was genuinely a thriller to the end as Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris, George Russell and Lewis Hamilton had a big four-way scrap for the lead in the closing stages. Russell pushed a bit too hard though and crashed on the final lap.

    George Russell crashes out on the final lap of a thrilling Singapore Grand Prix as Carlos Sainz holds on to win, with Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton completing the top three

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    George Russell crashes out on the final lap of a thrilling Singapore Grand Prix as Carlos Sainz holds on to win, with Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton completing the top three

    George Russell crashes out on the final lap of a thrilling Singapore Grand Prix as Carlos Sainz holds on to win, with Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton completing the top three

    Grid walk moment of the year: Air guitar anyone? Machine Gun Kelly was keen to see Martin’s collaborate with him on the grid in Sao Paulo. Understandably, for the treasure that is Martin, he declined and Machine Gun Kelly gave the camera a thumbs down.

    A classic Martin Brundle gridwalk moment with artist Machine Gun Kelly at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix

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    A classic Martin Brundle gridwalk moment with artist Machine Gun Kelly at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix

    A classic Martin Brundle gridwalk moment with artist Machine Gun Kelly at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix

    Dramatic finish of the year: 42 years old? Age doesn’t matter if you’re Fernando Alonso and he brilliantly took third place at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix after re-passing Sergio Perez on the final lap before holding him off at the line by 0.053s.

    Ride on board with Fernando Alonso as he takes on Sergio Perez in an epic battle to seal a podium place in Brazil

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    Ride on board with Fernando Alonso as he takes on Sergio Perez in an epic battle to seal a podium place in Brazil

    Ride on board with Fernando Alonso as he takes on Sergio Perez in an epic battle to seal a podium place in Brazil

    Achievement of the year: Ten wins on the spin is some going. Verstappen was unbeatable from May’s Miami Grand Prix to the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in September.

    It’s really not AI image of the year: Toto and Christian. Honest, it’s real!

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    Calendar of the year: Valtteri Bottas’. Enough said. Sales of the cheeky 2024 offering raised a very impressive £119,000 for Movember too.

    Yodeling of the year: Only one winner here and that’s our very own Craig Slater. Yodeling is a big tradition in Austria and it was only right that Craig had a go himself, or maybe not…

    Ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, Sky Sports' Craig Slater takes on some yodelling lessons while in Austria

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    Ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, Sky Sports’ Craig Slater takes on some yodelling lessons while in Austria

    Ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, Sky Sports’ Craig Slater takes on some yodelling lessons while in Austria

    Toughest race of the year: A flat-out race in Qatar, due to limits on tyre stints, and the high-speed track led to a massive challenge for the drivers. Esteban Ocon threw up in his helmet and Logan Sargeant couldn’t finish the race. Luckily, Qatar will take place in December next year, so it should be slightly cooler.

    Fashion of the year: We’re not talking about Ted Kravitz’s shorts and sandals, but we’re on about an unbuttoned orange shirt and leather trousers when he met Alfa Romeo’s Zhou Guanyu in London.

    Sky F1's Ted Kravitz meets Alfa Romeo's Zhou Guanyu in London as they go to the gym, talk fashion and eat food!

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    Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz meets Alfa Romeo’s Zhou Guanyu in London as they go to the gym, talk fashion and eat food!

    Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz meets Alfa Romeo’s Zhou Guanyu in London as they go to the gym, talk fashion and eat food!

    Rookie of the year: You could argue Liam Lawson for this but Oscar Piastri was pretty good as well, particularly as McLaren team-mate Norris has become one of the most highly rated F1 drivers on the grid. A Sprint win in Qatar was the highlight for Piastri and it will be fascinating to see how he gets on in 2024.

    Rumour of the year: No, not whether or not Lewis Hamilton was going to Ferrari, but whether Fernando Alonso was dating Taylor Swift. Never has a back catalogue of songs been quoted so frequently in the space of four days as was the case in Baku.

    Sky F1's commentary team were in great form in Azerbaijan, making repeated references to rumours that Fernando Alonso has been dating Taylor Swift

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    Sky F1’s commentary team were in great form in Azerbaijan, making repeated references to rumours that Fernando Alonso has been dating Taylor Swift

    Sky F1’s commentary team were in great form in Azerbaijan, making repeated references to rumours that Fernando Alonso has been dating Taylor Swift

    Qualifying of the year: Monaco quite literally was qualifying of the year – although we’ve had some great ones in 2023 – but the drama of Verstappen brushing the barriers in the final sector to steal pole from Alonso was breathtaking.

    Surprise of the year: Hamilton pipped Verstappen to pole position by 0.003s at the Hungaroring to end his pole-less run. It was a brilliant lap from Hamilton, even with a little wide moment at the final corner.

    Watch Lewis Hamilton's pole lap in full as he makes it a record ninth at the Hungaroring

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    Watch Lewis Hamilton’s pole lap in full as he makes it a record ninth at the Hungaroring

    Watch Lewis Hamilton’s pole lap in full as he makes it a record ninth at the Hungaroring

    Opener of the year: How can you not love a bit of Richard Ashcroft and his iconic ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ ahead of the British Grand Prix. Norris and Hamilton were on the podium too at Silverstone which was a brilliant moment.

    Photographer of the year: Another Martin moment for you. This time at the Monaco Grand Prix when MB went up to interview an 89-year-old photographer, who enjoyed the conversation so much that she asked for his card!

    Martin Brundle meets an 89-year-old photographer and the results are hilarious!

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    Martin Brundle meets an 89-year-old photographer and the results are hilarious!

    Martin Brundle meets an 89-year-old photographer and the results are hilarious!

    Big number of the year: That would be the 1,200+ incidents of track limit breaches reviewed by stewards in the 71-lap Austrian GP. That worked out at 17 a lap!

    Not taking no for an answer of the year: Stewart, Federer, security, and Martin’s Miami GP Grid Walk.

    Sir Jackie Stewart defies security guards (and George Russell) to grab Roger Federer to make him speak to Martin Brundle...

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    Sir Jackie Stewart defies security guards (and George Russell) to grab Roger Federer to make him speak to Martin Brundle…

    Sir Jackie Stewart defies security guards (and George Russell) to grab Roger Federer to make him speak to Martin Brundle…

    Overtake of the year: Leclerc threw everything at the Red Bulls in Vegas and caught Perez by surprise on the last lap into the final braking zone. From some distance back, boom, Leclerc chucked his Ferrari in there and beautifully got the car stopped to take second place.

    Ride onboard with Charles Leclerc as he claims second place for Ferrari at the Las Vegas GP with a late lunge on Sergio Perez's Red Bull

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    Ride onboard with Charles Leclerc as he claims second place for Ferrari at the Las Vegas GP with a late lunge on Sergio Perez’s Red Bull

    Ride onboard with Charles Leclerc as he claims second place for Ferrari at the Las Vegas GP with a late lunge on Sergio Perez’s Red Bull

    Saga of the year: Andretti’s bid to enter F1. The outcome of which is still to be resolved.

    Trophy smash of the year: Norris’ trademark celebration of slamming the champagne on the ground in Hungary didn’t quite go right as he knocked over Verstappen’s winning trophy. The $45,000 trophy was replaced thankfully and it’s fair to say Norris was more careful in future podiums during the season.

    Watch the most viral moments so far from the 2023 Formula 1 season

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    Watch the most viral moments so far from the 2023 Formula 1 season

    Watch the most viral moments so far from the 2023 Formula 1 season

    Verstappen and GP moment of the year: We enjoyed this almost married couple relationship throughout the season and the best of it probably came in Belgium qualifying when Verstappen scraped into Q3. Verstappen wasn’t happy about his preparation laps – s*** execution” was how he bluntly described them – and Gianpiero Lambiase, his race engineer, fired back. Verstappen apologised as he inevitably then topped the final stage.

    National anthem of the year: Antoine Delie’s alternative Belgium national anthem performance was quite something. However, it did look like Alonso and Russell were trying not to laugh!

    Antoine Delie sings the national anthem at the Belgian Grand Prix

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    Antoine Delie sings the national anthem at the Belgian Grand Prix

    Antoine Delie sings the national anthem at the Belgian Grand Prix

    Podium of the year: Canada, where multiple champions Verstappen, Alonso and Hamilton were joined by multiple-title-winning designer Adrian Newey. You needed a calculator to work out the combined number of world titles.

    Mistaken weather forecast of the year: Only George Russell thought it was raining at the Spanish Grand Prix. It turned out just to be sweat on the inside of his visor instead.

    Announcement of the year: Now we’re not talking about a piece of news here but an actual announcement. Famous sports announcer Bruce Buffer shouted “Sergio Checo Perez” right in the driver’s face ahead of the Las Vegas Grand Prix. To make it worse, Perez appeared to think he was going to be interviewed, so stood next to Buffer for 20 awkward seconds.

    Sergio Perez was treated to a special introduction from UFC's Bruce Buffer ahead of the Las Vegas GP

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    Sergio Perez was treated to a special introduction from UFC’s Bruce Buffer ahead of the Las Vegas GP

    Sergio Perez was treated to a special introduction from UFC’s Bruce Buffer ahead of the Las Vegas GP

    Shock exits of the year: Nothing quite compares to the triple departures announced by Alpine on the Friday of the Belgian GP. Team boss Otmar Szafnauer and long-serving sporting director Alan Permane were out at the end of that very weekend, while Pat Fry was headed to Williams.

    24 races in 2024! Watch every round of next season live on Sky Sports F1, starting with the Bahrain Grand Prix from February 29-March 2. Stream F1 on Sky Sports with NOW

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  • Mercedes chief Toto Wolff and Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur given formal warnings for ‘unacceptable’ language in Las Vegas

    Mercedes chief Toto Wolff and Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur given formal warnings for ‘unacceptable’ language in Las Vegas

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    Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff and his Ferrari counterpart Frederic Vasseur lost their cool during a press conference in Las Vegas; watch every session from the season-ending Abu Dhabi GP live on Sky Sports from this Friday at 9.30am, with lights out on Sunday at 1pm

    Last Updated: 23/11/23 3:08pm

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    Toto Wolff defended the Las Vegas track and F1 organisers saying it’s not a ‘black eye’ for the sport after a drain cover damage ended FP1 early.

    Toto Wolff defended the Las Vegas track and F1 organisers saying it’s not a ‘black eye’ for the sport after a drain cover damage ended FP1 early.

    Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff and his Ferrari counterpart Frederic Vasseur have been given formal warnings by Formula 1 stewards for using foul language during a press conference at the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

    The bad-tempered exchanges occurred in the same press conference, shortly after the opening practice section in Las Vegas had been cancelled due to a faulty water valve cover coming out of the ground and causing damage to Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari.

    Vasseur was furious at the damage to Sainz’s car, which would ultimately lead to a 10-place grid penalty for the Spaniard for exceeding his allowance of engine parts, and the Ferrari boss reacted angrily when the interviewer attempted to move onto a more generic topic.

    Wolff, meanwhile, was responding to being asked whether the incident had been “a black eye” for F1, when an interjection from another journalist provoked an angry response.

    The Las Vegas Grand Prix Practice One was suspended after eight minutes due to a track defect that forced Carlos Sainz to stop his car.

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    The Las Vegas Grand Prix Practice One was suspended after eight minutes due to a track defect that forced Carlos Sainz to stop his car.

    The Las Vegas Grand Prix Practice One was suspended after eight minutes due to a track defect that forced Carlos Sainz to stop his car.

    With F1 having now moved onto Abu Dhabi for the season finale, the duo were summoned to the stewards at the event on Thursday to explain their actions.

    Both were found to have used “unacceptable” language that “is not consistent with the values defended by the FIA”, but avoided more severe punishment due to extenuating circumstances.

    In Vasseur’s case, the stewards said: “The Team Principal was extremely upset and frustrated by the incident that had occurred in FP1 and that language such as this, by him, was not usual.”

    Frederic Vasseur fumed in the team principal news conference, describing the damage sustained to Carlos Sainz's car as 'just unacceptable' and saying that 'this will cost us a fortune'.

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    Frederic Vasseur fumed in the team principal news conference, describing the damage sustained to Carlos Sainz’s car as ‘just unacceptable’ and saying that ‘this will cost us a fortune’.

    Frederic Vasseur fumed in the team principal news conference, describing the damage sustained to Carlos Sainz’s car as ‘just unacceptable’ and saying that ‘this will cost us a fortune’.

    While in Wolff’s case, the stewards said: “Based on the submission from the Team Principal, the use of the language concerned was in this case unusual and was provoked by an abrupt interjection during the Press Conference and therefore cannot be regarded as typical from this Team Principal.”

    What did Wolff and Vasseur say in rants?

    After explaining the damage that had been done to Sainz’s car, Vasseur lost his cool when being asked a general question about the success of the event as a whole.

    “What Carlos said was he hit something on track and didn’t know exactly what it was. We completely damaged the monocoque, engine and battery. It’s just unacceptable,” said Vasseur.

    “We f***** up the session for Carlos and he won’t be part of FP2, that’s for sure, because we have to change the chassis and set up the car. The show is the show and everything is going well but it’s unacceptable for F1 today.”

    Carlos Sainz says he is in 'disbelief' after receiving a 10-place grid drop for his Ferrari due to a damage that was out of his control at the Las Vegas GP.

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    Carlos Sainz says he is in ‘disbelief’ after receiving a 10-place grid drop for his Ferrari due to a damage that was out of his control at the Las Vegas GP.

    Carlos Sainz says he is in ‘disbelief’ after receiving a 10-place grid drop for his Ferrari due to a damage that was out of his control at the Las Vegas GP.

    Wolff began answering a question from a journalist regarding the damage that the incident could do to F1’s image, when another journalist interjected questioning his defence of the event.

    “It’s completely ridiculous, completely ridiculous,” Wolff said. “FP1 – how can you even dare trying to talk bad about the event that sets the new standards, new standards to everything.

    “And then you’re speaking about a drain ****ing cover that’s been undone. That has happened before, that’s nothing. It’s FP1. Give credit to the people that have set up this Grand Prix, that have made this sport much bigger than it ever was.

    Craig Slater describes how drain covers were forced up and did damage to Carlos Sainz's Ferrari during P1 of the Las Vegas GP.

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    Craig Slater describes how drain covers were forced up and did damage to Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari during P1 of the Las Vegas GP.

    Craig Slater describes how drain covers were forced up and did damage to Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari during P1 of the Las Vegas GP.

    “Have you ever spoken good about someone and written a good word? You should about all these people that have been out here. Liberty has done an awesome job and just because in FP1 a drain cover has become undone, we shouldn’t be moaning.

    “The car is broken. That’s really a shame for Carlos. It could have been dangerous. So between the FIA and the track, everybody needs to analyse how we can make sure that this is not happening again.

    “But talking here about the black eye for the sport on a Thursday evening, nobody watches that in European time anyway.”

    Sky Sports F1’s live Abu Dhabi GP schedule

    Friday November 24

    • 7am: F2 Practice
    • 9am: Abu Dhabi GP Practice One (session starts at 9.30am)
    • 10.55pm: F2 Qualifying
    • 12.45pm: Abu Dhabi GP Practice Two (session starts at 1pm)
    • 2.15pm: The F1 Show
    Sky F1's Anthony Davidson takes a look at the Yas Marina Circuit ahead of this weekend's final race of the season at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

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    Sky F1’s Anthony Davidson takes a look at the Yas Marina Circuit ahead of this weekend’s final race of the season at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

    Sky F1’s Anthony Davidson takes a look at the Yas Marina Circuit ahead of this weekend’s final race of the season at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

    Saturday November 25

    • 10.15am: Abu Dhabi GP Practice Three (session starts at 10.30am)
    • 12.15pm: F2 Sprint
    • 1.15pm: Abu Dhabi GP Qualifying build-up
    • 2pm: Abu Dhabi GP Qualifying
    • 4pm: Ted’s Qualifying Notebook

    Sunday November 26

    • 9.10am: F2 Feature Race
    • 11.30pm: Grand Prix Sunday Abu Dhabi GP build-up
    • 1pm: The ABU DHABI GRAND PRIX
    • 3pm: Chequered Flag: Abu Dhabi GP reaction
    • 4pm: Ted’s Notebook

    After the thrills of Las Vegas, Formula 1 heads to Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Circuit for the 2023 season finale and another stunning spectacle under the lights. Watch the Abu Dhabi weekend live on Sky Sports F1, with lights out on Sunday at 1pm. Stream F1 on Sky Sports with NOW

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  • Las Vegas GP: Max Verstappen hits out over Carlos Sainz’s ‘very harsh’ grid penalty after drain damage

    Las Vegas GP: Max Verstappen hits out over Carlos Sainz’s ‘very harsh’ grid penalty after drain damage

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    Max Verstappen: ‘In this political environment we are in every team thinks about themselves and they are going to say ‘no, he has to take the penalty’; watch Sunday’s Las Vegas GP live on Sky Sports F1 and Sky Showcase. Race starts at 6am with build-up from 4.30am

    Last Updated: 18/11/23 11:08am

    Max Verstappen has called for an F1 rule change after labelling the grid penalty given to Carlos Sainz for Sunday’s Las Vegas GP “very harsh”, in the wake of the major damage caused to the Ferrari by a loose circuit drain cover.

    And following suggestions that other teams may have challenged the matter had stewards not followed the regulations in the matter, the world champion also said rivals should be excluded from having any say as “in this political environment we are in of course every team thinks about themselves”.

    Sainz said on Friday night he had been left in “disbelief” that Ferrari’s request for special dispensation to avoid a 10-place grid penalty for exceeding permitted power unit part changes had been rejected, given the freak circumstances of what happened when the water valve cover failed as he drove over it at high-speed during opening practice.

    Stewards said that while they would have liked to grant the team dispensation, they were hamstrung by the sport’s regulations and so had no choice but to impose a mandatory grid drop on Sainz.

    The Las Vegas Grand Prix Practice One was suspended after eight minutes due to a track defect that forced Carlos Sainz to stop his car

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    The Las Vegas Grand Prix Practice One was suspended after eight minutes due to a track defect that forced Carlos Sainz to stop his car

    The Las Vegas Grand Prix Practice One was suspended after eight minutes due to a track defect that forced Carlos Sainz to stop his car

    As a result, Sainz’s second-place result in Saturday’s qualifying session turns into a 12th-place starting position on Sunday’s race grid.

    Although Verstappen may be the first driver to directly benefit from his Ferrari rival’s demotion, given he qualified third, the Dutchman expressed his disapproval about what happened to Sainz.

    “The rules have to change for that,” said Verstappen, sitting alongside the Ferrari drivers in the post-qualifying press conference.

    “It’s the same if you get taken out and have a big accident. You can lose parts of engine, energy store, all these kind of things.

    Sainz says he is 'paying one of the most unfair penalties I have ever seen' that 'nobody agrees with'

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    Sainz says he is ‘paying one of the most unfair penalties I have ever seen’ that ‘nobody agrees with’

    Sainz says he is ‘paying one of the most unfair penalties I have ever seen’ that ‘nobody agrees with’

    “So, first of all, that needs to change and these things can be taken into consideration that you can take a free penalty or not, it will not be counted.

    “Besides, I think teams should not be allowed to have a say in these kind of things because for sure they are going to vote against that. I do think it’s very harsh on Carlos but in this political environment we are in of course every team thinks about themselves and they are going to say ‘no, he has to take the penalty’.

    Shop the Las Vegas range!

    Get all the gear as Formula 1 makes its long awaited return to Las Vegas! Sign up and save 10% off your first purchase.

    More to follow…

    When to watch Sunday’s Las Vegas GP live on Sky Sports F1 and Sky Showcase

    Sunday November 19

    • 4:30am: Grand Prix Sunday: Las Vegas GP build-up (also on Sky Showcase)
    • 6am: THE LAS VEGAS GRAND PRIX (also on Sky Showcase)
    • 8am: Chequered Flag: Las Vegas GP reaction (also on Sky Showcase)
    • 9am: Ted’s Notebook (also on Sky Showcase)

    Watch the whole Las Vegas GP weekend live on Sky Sports F1 with lights out on Sunday at 6am. Stream F1 on Sky Sports with NOW

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  • Haas bid for United States GP re-investigation into alleged track limits breaches rejected by stewards

    Haas bid for United States GP re-investigation into alleged track limits breaches rejected by stewards

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    Austin stewards ruled after video hearing that the evidence Haaa presented to them over alleged track limits from the October 22 race did not constitute a “significant and relevant new element that was unavailable” at the time of the original decision

    Last Updated: 09/11/23 3:23pm

    Haas’ attempt to get United States GP stewards to re-investigate incidents of additional alleged track limits offences in the October 22 race has been rejected.

    After a video hearing which started on Wednesday and was adjourned until Thursday for further discussion, stewards decided Haas’ submissions in the case did not meet the required criteria for a full right of review investigation.

    A stewards’ statement read: “The Petition for the Right of Review is rejected because there is no significant and relevant new element that was unavailable to Haas at the time of the decision”.

    More to follow…

    This is a breaking news story that is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh this page for the latest updates.

    Sky Sports brings you live updates as they happen. Get breaking sports news, analysis, exclusive interviews, replays and highlights.

    Sky Sports is your trusted source for breaking sports news headlines and live updates. Watch live coverage of your favourite sports: Football, F1, Boxing, Cricket, Golf, Tennis, Rugby League, Rugby Union, NFL, Darts, Netball and get the latest transfers news, results, scores and more.

    Visit skysports.com or the Sky Sports App for all the breaking sports news headlines. You can receive push notifications from the Sky Sports app for the latest news from your favourite sports and you can also follow @SkySportsNews on Twitter to get the latest updates.

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  • Sao Paulo GP: Fernando Alonso relives thrilling last-lap Sergio Perez duel for final podium position

    Sao Paulo GP: Fernando Alonso relives thrilling last-lap Sergio Perez duel for final podium position

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    Fernando Alonso just pips Sergio Perez to a podium spot after an epic battle in the final stages of the race.

    Fernando Alonso just pips Sergio Perez to a podium spot after an epic battle in the final stages of the race.

    Fernando Alonso has admitted he thought a Sao Paulo Grand Prix podium “was gone” before reclaiming third place from Sergio Perez on the final lap of the race to conclude a thrilling battle between the pair.

    Having spent the majority of the race chasing Alonso, Perez finally passed the Aston Martin on the penultimate lap of the race with a move into the first corner that appeared to have sealed a double podium for Red Bull, with world champion Max Verstappen easing to victory.

    However, a small error from Perez gave Alonso the opportunity to retake the final podium spot in the second DRS zone on the run to Turn Four on their final tour, before the Spaniard held on to the position by just 0.053s on a charge to the finish line.

    Alonso explained to Sky Sports F1 that he thought he had blown his chance of responding by running off line on the penultimate lap as he attempted to hit back having been passed.

    “Honestly, I thought that maybe my chances were gone in Turn Six,” he said.

    Red Bull's Sergio Perez and Aston Martin's Fernando Alonso enjoyed an epic battle in the final stages of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

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    Red Bull’s Sergio Perez and Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso enjoyed an epic battle in the final stages of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

    Red Bull’s Sergio Perez and Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso enjoyed an epic battle in the final stages of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

    “I went on the outside to change line but then I picked up a lot of marbles and the tyres were dirty, they were vibrating as well and I thought, ‘ok, this is gone’.

    “But then I wanted to have one more chance into Turn One or Turn Four with the DRS, maybe braking very aggressive, very late.

    “I think he understood that as well, so he broke late into Turn One, missed the apex by one metre and that gave me the run into Turn Four.

    “Unexpected, to be honest, when I lost the place I thought it was gone.”

    Perez: Other drivers can learn from our battle

    Perez, who crashed out of last weekend’s Mexico City Grand Prix and last month’s Qatar Grand Prix Sprint following collisions, said that other drivers could learn from the way he and Alonso had fought for position.

    “It was quite an intense battle,” Perez told Sky Sports F1. “We tried everything.

    “Unfortunately we didn’t succeed on that, but it was well deserved for Fernando.

    The best of the action from a dramatic Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

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    The best of the action from a dramatic Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

    The best of the action from a dramatic Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

    “I think we had a great fight, very fair and to the limit. I think this is something that a lot of drivers can learn from because what we did, the way we fought today, it’s how it should be done.

    “I’m in the wrong side, I end up losing but it’s fine because it was a great fight.”

    Alonso agreed that it had been a “clean” contest, and admitted he was surprised to find Perez had matched his tyre-saving ability going into the final stages.

    “It was nice, it was a clean battle,” Alonso said. “A very aggressive, but clean battle. Always with Checo I think he has a very good record on finishing the races and always battling hard but keeping both cars on track.

    Fernando Alonso overtakes Lewis Hamilton to move into third place at the restart of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

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    Fernando Alonso overtakes Lewis Hamilton to move into third place at the restart of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

    Fernando Alonso overtakes Lewis Hamilton to move into third place at the restart of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

    “I knew that he was coming, I knew that he was a threat, and at the end it was maybe more difficult than I thought, to be honest.

    “Five laps to the end, I thought that I had things under control, so I start pushing and then I look in the mirror and Checo was there, and I said ‘uh oh, I think he was saving tyres as well’.”

    Perez: Matter of time before podium | Alonso happy for ‘united’ Aston Martin

    Perez came into the weekend under major pressure amid continued speculation that Red Bull could look to replace him next season, despite a year still remaining on his contract.

    While his run of races without a podium extends to six, a solid display in coming from a starting position of ninth to finish fourth was an improvement on many of his recent efforts.

    “We’ve seen in the last couple of races that the pace has been there, that we’ve been really strong,” he added.

    Ted Kravitz talks to an elated Fernando Alonso after his dramatic podium finish at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

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    Ted Kravitz talks to an elated Fernando Alonso after his dramatic podium finish at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

    Ted Kravitz talks to an elated Fernando Alonso after his dramatic podium finish at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

    “For some reason or another we haven’t been able to get the final end result, but I just know that it’s a matter of time.”

    Alonso’s podium puts an end to a dismal run of form from Aston Martin, with the Spaniard having retired from the previous two races after qualifying outside the top 10 on both occasions.

    After a stunning start to the season which saw them surprisingly emerge as Red Bull’s closest challengers, the Silverstone-based team have failed to keep up with the development of the likes of Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren.

    However, after choosing not to go with some of the upgraded parts that have failed to provide improvement, they returned to prominence in Brazil, with Alonso’s team-mate Lance Stroll finishing fifth.

    “In the end I’m happy that we did it for the team,” Alonso said.

    “We’re struggling a lot in the last two races but we never lost focus on what were the targets, we went deep in the analysis, we stayed united, we stayed together and this was a very nice thing to witness in the last two events.”

    Get ready for the big one: Formula 1 in Las Vegas! See drivers race down the Strip, and past landmarks like Caesars Palace and the Bellagio, on F1’s newest street track. Watch the whole Las Vegas GP weekend live on Sky Sports F1 on November 17-19. Stream F1 on Sky Sports with NOW

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