Richard Gadd has now written, created, and starred in two of the most critically bruising series in recent memory — Baby Reindeer and Half Man — and he’d like you to stop calling them manosphere content. On the latest episode of VICE Culture Club, host Jackson Garrett sits down with the Scottish writer-actor to talk about where Half Man actually comes from, what it took to play a villain he almost didn’t cast himself as, and whether making art out of your own worst moments counts as therapy. The short answer: not really.
Garrett opens with a bracket-style game — ranking the greatest writer-actor-creator combos in TV and film history. Gadd works through Always Sunny, Fleabag, Girls, Atlanta, and Good Will Hunting with hard opinions, landing on Phoebe Waller-Bridge as his winner. He calls Fleabag a top-ten all-time show, and specifically praises the second season, which he’d been dreading. “I remember when it was commissioned for a second series, I remember being like, oh no, no, no, don’t ruin it,” he says. “They somehow surpassed the first season, which I thought was almost like an impossible artistic feat.”
From there, the conversation turns to Half Man — or rather, what it’s actually about. Gadd pushes back on the “toxic masculinity” label, not because he thinks the phrase is wrong, but because he thinks it steamrolls everything underneath it. “I never really set out to explore like a political agenda,” he says. For him, the show is about two men who can’t communicate with each other or themselves, and what that silence costs over decades. “A lot of destructive behavior comes from a lack of expression,” he says, which is about as unguarded a thesis as the show ever offers.
Playing Ruben — the show’s volatile, menacing antagonist — wasn’t even part of the original plan. It was actor Jamie Bell who suggested Gadd for the role. Gadd almost talked himself out of it. “I realized all my thinking was based around what people would think, whether people would judge me, whether it would fail,” he says. He changed his body, his voice, his entire physicality, then went looking for the thing underneath all of it: “Ruben ran on a river of pain.” The Emmy nomination that came after proved people bought it.
Those same Emmys come up again when Garrett brings in an LA Times quote: some Emmy voters reportedly found Half Man so off-putting they didn’t make it past the first episode. Gadd takes the note in stride, more or less. “There should always be a place for television to test people, to push buttons, to try things different,” he says. “My big worry with television right now is that I never wanted it to become so homogenized that people no longer recognize the human struggle in it.” Jackson, for his part, is less diplomatic about the voters.
The therapeutic question gets the most lucid answer of the episode. Making Baby Reindeer — which drew directly from Gadd’s own life — wasn’t a release in the moment. “I don’t think it was therapeutic at the time,” he says. “It was extremely tough, actually.” The catharsis came later, in the messages from strangers who recognized something in it. “People come up to me, and they say, I related to it. God, I thought I was the only one who had those feelings.” That, he says, is where the catharsis lives — not on set, but in the shared recognition afterward.
Watch the full VICE Culture Club episode with Richard Gadd to hear how he built two of TV’s most unsparing series, why he thinks art should disturb the comfortable, and what it actually felt like to root for Scotland at the World Cup.
In 2015’s “Jurassic World” — the first of the “Jurassic Park” franchise’s largely interminable bastard step-children — there’s a moment of action that briefly suggests the film might exist for reasons other than to extend its source material and make oodles of cash. In the scene, which occurs just as things fall apart (as they always seem to do in these films), dinosaurs break loose and attack all of the theme park’s patrons.
In the ensuing chaos, a woman is snatched up by a flying Pteranodon and swooped into the air, where others of its species take turns throwing her between their beaks. She’s then dropped into the water, where the winged creatures swarm her once more. Just as the dinosaurs pluck her out of the depths, a Mosasaurus leaps from the water and swallows both the woman and the dino attacking her. It’s downright cruel and undeniably entertaining. But namely, this sequence of dino-terror suggests that “Jurassic World” might actually provide audiences something they’d sorely lack for the next decade: fun.
That was, of course, not the case. In the years that followed, three more “Jurassic World” films saw the light of day, and none of them came close to reaching that first movie’s brief, brutal height. A swath of other summer blockbusters would be released alongside them; A “Spider-Man” here, a “Mission: Impossible” there. But finding a popcorn movie that could entertain beyond nostalgia alone was rare. (Though not entirely inconceivable.) Perhaps, in an ironic twist of fate, the truly original summertime creature feature went extinct before the onscreen dinosaurs could.
(Warner Bros. Pictures) “The End of Oak Street”
Audiences seldom get to experience summer fun at this caliber anymore. But as depressing as that may be, “The End of Oak Street” could very well be a blueprint for a fresh era in popcorn movies. They might not make ‘em like this anymore, but that doesn’t mean they can’t.
Cue Anne Hathaway, stepping into frame sensible sandals first, pointing a shotgun at her own ancient adversary in David Robert Mitchell’s delightful “The End of Oak Street.” That alone is the kind of image powerful enough to make any viewer believe that mainstream cinema is still kickin’. Everything that follows is simply further confirmation.
Mitchell’s film, which follows a family of four in 1982 as they realize their entire quaint suburban neighborhood has somehow been transported back to the Mesozoic era, has understandably swept audiences off their feet. “The End of Oak Street” has everything a viewer could want — especially a viewer fatigued by the Hollywood sequel system and all its shortcomings. There’s action, romance, suspense, creatures, creatures having sex, large piles of excrement, interdimensional portals, pizza, a comical amount of split-diopter shots, and what looks to be a pleasantly well-funded public library. What’s more, Mitchell’s film is feisty and unpredictable, always managing to stay one step ahead of the viewer.
“The End of Oak Street” has all the elements that Hollywood studio executives love to pluck from box-office hits of the past in their never-ending attempts to Frankenstein a decent modern blockbuster out of spare parts. Yet, here, there are no visible stitches, no scars or seams. Mitchell’s film succeeds where others have failed because it runs on its feelings rather than its features. It’s still pastiche, but unbeholden to the nostalgia-obsessed, highly referential style that has plagued so much contemporary media, like “Stranger Things,” “Super 8” and “Wonder Woman 1984.” The more Mitchell conjures joy and fear from thin air with the snap of his fingers, the more frustrating it becomes that audiences seldom get to experience summer fun at this caliber anymore. But as depressing as that may be, “The End of Oak Street” could very well be a blueprint for a fresh era in popcorn movies. They might not make ‘em like this anymore, but that doesn’t mean they can’t.
But that will require some convincing. For a few years now, studios have had it in their heads that the ideal way to merge art and commerce is to hire stylish, auteur-minded filmmakers to helm their franchise movies. Think Chloé Zhao taking on Marvel’s “Eternals,” or Amazon MGM tapping Denis Villeneuve to pilot “James Bond” into its next era. By and large, this formula has not worked because studios demand accessibility, even from the artistes. That cool camera setup isn’t worth it because viewers don’t care about that kind of stuff, executives say. Unless you’re Steven Spielberg, with enough money and success to have final-cut privilege, everything in a franchise blockbuster is bound to look flat, feel drab, and be nauseatingly overexplained.
That’s a big part of why “The End of Oak Street” feels like a break in the pattern from the jump. Mitchell is the film’s sole screenwriter and director, working with a clear reverence for the kinds of story-first features produced under Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment label — the movies that sprang from big, bold ideas, not financial bottom lines. The story has elements similar to popular summer blockbusters, but they’re so finely remixed and retooled that they don’t bear such exhausting resemblance to their forebears.
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Perhaps best of all: The movie has a gritty, charming meanness to it; a stickiness that’s hard to shake off. Where “Jurassic World” balked at doubling down on its single cruel sequence, “The End of Oak Street” has at least 10 stomach-dropping thrills. With a PG-13 rating that gets away with quite a bit, the action harkens back to the days of “Poltergeist,” a PG-rated film that had whole families walking out of the theater traumatized and silent. “Poltergeist” was, notably, a summertime Amblin release that similarly riffed on classic creature scares — updating dusty, old ghost tropes with new ideas — much like Mitchell does with his dino-time-travel extravaganza.
But Mitchell wants you to make those correlations, too. When the film opens at Oak Street’s idyllic summer block party, complete with cookouts and kids happily pedaling together on their bikes, he purposefully evokes the atmosphere of the movies he covertly cites. There’s some bickering between the Platt parents, Denise (Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor), that their kids, Brian (Christian Convery) and Audrey (Maisy Stella), pick up on. But Mitchell cleverly avoids setting any tone in stone. When a storm followed by a flash of blinding light sends their house and the surrounding neighborhood back in time, the entire Platt family quickly understands that they’re in deep sh*t — or, more precisely, dinosaur feces, of which a large amount has accumulated in the neighbor’s backyard.
(Daniel McFadden/Warner Bros. Pictures) Christian Convery, Anne Hathaway and Maisy Stella in “The End of Oak Street”
So much recent blockbuster filmmaking has been about embedding heart-wrenching pathos into the nostalgic elements we know and love. But more often than not, the combination comes off forced; corny at best, insipid at worst.
From here, Robert carefully stacks a Jenga tower of suspense-laden set pieces and surprisingly moving family drama, without so much as letting the structure teeter. Where other filmmakers would painstakingly elucidate every thematic detail to make their silly popcorn movie “say something,” Mitchell restrains himself. “The End of Oak Street” doesn’t need to be “about” anything, which is the best way to make a film feel like it’s actually about several things.
On one hand, “The End of Oak Street” exists to be entirely what it is and nothing more. It’s a piece of delicious, fluffy cotton candy, sweet and quick-dissolving. On the other hand, when a director isn’t trying so hard to convey a message, that’s typically when they can conjure an emotion to fill the space left empty by thematic contrivance. This movie is about family dynamics and love, sure. It’s even got a dash of trauma. But Mitchell says so much more by saying nothing overt about those things, and instead, depicting a family who wants nothing more than to get out of the bind they’ve found themselves in. It’s as if he recognizes that so much recent blockbuster filmmaking has been about embedding heart-wrenching pathos into the nostalgic elements we know and love. But more often than not, the combination comes off forced; corny at best, insipid at worst.
(Warner Bros. Pictures) Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway in “The End of Oak Street”
Mitchell’s self-imposed moderation might not look radical at first. But in a blockbuster landscape like the one we’re in now, thoughtful constraint is welcome and needed. I’m reminded of “The Odyssey,” which felt, to me, crushed by its own ambition, hoping to be everything at once simply because it could be. “The End of Oak Street” couldn’t be more different. It’s just as ambitious and loaded with ideas and surprises, but Mitchell isn’t trying to make this story anything more than it needs to be.
As with his last two films, “It Follows” and “Under the Silver Lake,” Mitchell has found a winning, thrilling formula in throwing ordinary people into extraordinary situations and searching for the resonance in the results, even if the answer is simple. That’s the real key in making something feel nostalgic, without nostalgia-farming. His latest film succeeds because it’s not trying to make audiences say, “I like this, because it reminds me of that.” Rather, “The End of Oak Street” recalls a time when both life and the movies seemed simpler, but were really much more complex than most people remember. They just didn’t feel the need to spell it out for us, allowing the movies to do the talking instead.
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about old-school-style blockbusters worth your time
The app now allows men to make the first move, suggesting its women-first positioning was limiting growth. It joins other dating apps now throwing everything at the wall in a bid to stay relevant.
The West Coast house-party scene has long been iconic. For these young, tech-savvy entrepreneurs, it was also inspiration for MyPlots, a party-promotion empire.
I mean, who could possibly believe the suggestion that brainrot videos “literally suppress activity in the parts of your brain responsible for cognitive control, the systems that help you resist impulses?”
It’s not like I recently went to a music festival and, instead of enjoying Turnstile and Lorde, just held my mobile phone up in front of my face and watched videos of Tommy Lee playing bongos for a chimpanzee.
No, I also spent a significant amount of time with my headphones in, listening to ambient reimaginings of Limp Bizkit tracks.
But none of this influenced my behavior negatively. It’s just a coincidence that I gorged myself on oysters and Chardonnay until I shit my pants and had to be hosed down while screaming about how “my body is a machine for turning natural wine into a natural disaster.”
Further research is clearly needed. Don’t worry nerds, I got you.
If you’re rapidly hurtling towards your fourth decade in the doomed planet simulator, you might find this video funny. But whatever you do, don’t actually laugh at it. To our omnipotent, all-seeing machine overlords, the sound will be proof that you’re ready for the liquefaction process, whereby you’ll be reduced to a human lather they use to cool the servers.
When I saw the footage of Hannah Einbinder talking about her favorite “dipping sauce,” I assumed, like everyone else, that she was simply trying to become a reaction GIF—now I wonder if she’s been playing “danger can” with her new podcast pals. After spending an evening smashing an entire six-pack against your frontal cortex, you might well find yourself drooling in front of a pot of ranch dressing, trying to work out how to operate a pizza crust.
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) August 17, 2026
They say you know you’ve been online too long when you mourn lost webpages like dead friends. I say now you know why I’ve been drinking 12 beers and crying in the street every night this week.
London literary impresario Tom Willis is launching his own talk show, which means that surely it’s time for London’s version of Future Islands—Jimothy Lacoste—to have his own Letterman moment, growling around onstage like he’s possessed by the ghost of Martin Amis. For those of us haunted by the memory of a dead literary culture, life is getting quite exciting right now.
SKIPPING LEG DAY WITH GLENN DANZIG
Danzig's workouts are the most straight guy gymbro routine ever, I may replicate it some day for fun. Entirely ipper body, with training legs replaced by kicking a punching bag and occasional cardio, all inspired by Nietzsche and Arnold Schwarzenegger. https://t.co/gN6TjRt5WOpic.twitter.com/yimDGo6G0P
Danzig is what, 5 foot 3 or something? So he’s probably not used to touching the ceiling very often. He’s skipping leg day, too, so he won’t be beating Clavicular’s record for the vertical jump anytime soon. Still, most manlets would probably be better off following his workout routine than taking advice from the famous monsters on TikTok and Kick. Look kid, the original Misfits are the only ones worth listening to.
With Ye announcing new tour dates in St. Petersburg, it’s good to see that he’s got his mobile air-defense system sorted out so no one will have to worry about drones when they’re “Putin their hands to the constellations.”
A TRILLION HUMANS IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Jeff Bezos on why he wants a trillion humans in the solar system
"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a 1,000 Mozarts and a 1,000 Einsteins"
1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins? Sounds like one of those Epic Warz videos with a Wolfgang Amadeus horde battling an army of Alberts to the death. Which side are you on, my friend? The piano-playing poo-joke man? Or the guy who nuked Japan?
H.R, you’re finally awake! You hit your head pretty hard while practicing that backflip. UK poo? Bloc Party? Kele Okereke sitting by the sea in his Bad Brains T-shirt singing about “Pigwig”? C’mon bro, get up, we’ve got to go on stage at CBGBs and inspire future generations of guitar bands to keep spreading that sweet P.M.A..
We used to argue over whether the kids who shot up Columbine were or weren’t goths, now I’m sliding into the Twitch chat demanding that alt-girl streamers name me three Marilyn Manson songs. These days, it’s impossible to tell who’s shooting content for OnlyFans and who’s doing target practice in the woods.
AI LAPTOP OTTER ON A PLANE
rapid progress, yet I cannot name a single AI-generated video that has moved me and lingered in my memory as something honestly worth watching, nor even a single good adaptation of an existing work
at some point "rapid progress" in tech demos is insufficient. will there be art? https://t.co/wFqICO4RLC
Can u imagine terrorists tryin to hijack a plane that the laptop otter was on? Box cutters vs cutest little remote worker on the planet? Game over, AI.
Before the heatwave, I thought the worst part of living in France was no Diet Coke, only Coke Zero.
Diet Coke, specifically, is one of humankind’s most perfect technologies, because unlike all my other vices, it provides a disproportionately high level of pleasure with virtually no drawbacks or consequences.
According to Newton’s third law of motion, forces come in pairs; every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
According to Sir Isaac Newton, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
According to my psychiatrist, the reason I’ve been having horrific night terrors is because of the beta-blockers I’ve been taking. They are remarkably effective at tempering the physical symptoms of my anxiety during waking hours. I am finally able to withstand minor inconveniences without experiencing the cortisol spike of someone being hunted for sport, the only drawback being that I wake up to the sound of my own screaming several times a week, damp, in a puddle of my own cold sweat.
It turns out, all that cortisol has to go somewhere.
“Despite backlash, Louis Vuitton is going ahead with a beach-themed runway show on actual sand with a simulated tidal wave as its centerpiece”
I believe Diet Coke may be as close as it gets to a biological free lunch. I know some studies point to aspartame, the artificial sweetener, being allegedly linked to cancer, but a cashier at a grocery store once warned me to wash my hands immediately after touching the receipt she was handing me because the heat-sensitive paper was “insanely carcinogenic” (it was a receipt for a pack of cigarettes).
Stress is the real killer, and by that logic, things that make me happy must be good for me. What makes me happy is Diet Coke, not Coke Zero, which uses a combination of aspartame and acesulfame potassium. I do not know if this makes it more or less carcinogenic than Diet Coke, which uses only aspartame in its formula, but believe me when I tell you that it changes the flavor in some truly ineffable way, and up until the heatwave I thought that was the worst part of living in France.
In France, they call it Canicule. La Canicule, to be exact, because it is a feminine word, a word with a delightful and ancient origin story. It comes from the same root as the English word “canine”, the Latin canicula, meaning “little dog.” It refers to the star Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, which rises with the Sun in those late summer days that I grew up calling “the dog days of summer,” without ever knowing why. In the ancient Mediterranean, the little dog’s appearance in the sky from late July into August became symbolically intertwined with oppressive summer weather. Which is why, in the dog days of summer, when Paris becomes unbearable, you go to Normandy, Corsica, Provence, maybe Marseilles if you’re basic like that, Biarritz, Hydra, Ibiza, Mallorca, maybe Menorca if you have kids. This collective emptying, les grands départs, has been going on, same time every year, for generations. So when the little dog showed up early this year without warning or precedent in the third week of June, right in the middle of Men’s Fashion Week, no one was ready.
No one I know in Paris has an air conditioner, because it is easier to leave the home than to cool it. The Parisian apartment is a winter object, designed to retain heat. Window AC units are totally incompatible with the ubiquitous French window, rendering them virtually non-existent in the city, which would leave the portable corrugated single-hose variety as your only remaining option for in-home climate control.
I am told that in France, owning a residential AC is a sign of, and synonymous with, conservative politics. An exhaust hose dangling from a Parisian window has taken on an implicit subtext, a subtle but unmistakable symbol of ecological indifference and bad faith. As an American, there is something about it that feels spiritually reminiscent of a MAGA hat in its sly antagonism. And there is something grotesque about it, a flaccid tube dangling out an open window like that. Something obscene about the innards turned outward, the organs of a private place revealed, its bowels exposed, a prolapsed rectum.
It’s making me think about how every single thing has a metabolism, and how people are really just tubes that take things in at one end and release them at the other, and somewhere along the course of thousands of years of evolution, our tubes managed to grow appendages like arms and legs, and how those appendages are really the only things that separate people from worms, and how our metabolism is the thing that both keeps us alive and then ultimately kills us.
It’s making me think about how a few years ago, during a low-grade but prolonged manic-depressive episode, I accidentally got addicted to colonics and started going twice a week to have a tube lubed up and inserted into my tight little asshole by an Australian woman with long gray pigtails who called herself a healer. Upon first insertion I would always burst into tears and sob uncontrollably, and the healer would gently explain to me again that I had lots of trauma stored in my colon, and that an emotional release was to be expected. She told me that people cry during colonics all the time, and not just from the pain.
“I accidentally got addicted to colonics and started going twice a week to have a tube lubed up and inserted into my tight little asshole by an Australian woman with long gray pigtails who called herself a healer”
Climate control in France is generally reserved for museums, department stores and hotels that cater to American tourists, because the American solution is to cool a place, not to leave it. Even in the case of these exceptions, air conditioning is pretty generally looked down upon throughout the country. I’d guess that the contemporary attitude towards energy consumption may have a lot to do with a lingering, inter-generational guilty conscience from France historically being one of Europe’s most prolific coal-burning polluters. The country finally got its shit together in the 1970s, when it radically decarbonized its power sector, becoming a global leader in nuclear energy and a relentless proponent of eco-friendly legislation and red tape.
But defiance has always had its own libidinal appeal. I believe this heatwave may have radicalized me.
Day two of La Canicule, the mid-day temperature has hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit. At least 18 heat-related deaths have already been recorded, including two young children who were left in a car with the windows rolled up. Dior and Rick Owens have rescheduled their runway shows and I’ve developed a strange rash around my collarbone and clavicle where beads of sweat pool and collect. All of my plants are dead.
Inside my second-floor one-bedroom, opening the window is like opening an oven. Somehow, the only thing worse than moving around is standing still. There is no relief. All I can do is take a cold shower every 20 minutes and air dry, and then do it again.
I wonder what I did to deserve this, what anyone did to deserve this.
I open my laptop and type into the search bar: “air conditioner no tube discreet.” I am desperate but guilty, ashamed of my weakness and reluctant to expose it, my inability to participate in the shared performance of endurance and restraint. I’m imagining a technology that simply eliminates heat, rather than relocating it.
“Have you listened to a word I’ve said?” says Sir Isaac Newton, rolling his eyes.
“Shut the up, nerd,” I mutter, as I type into the search bar: “how does ac work.”
It turns out, the technology I’m imagining violates every law of thermodynamics, and now I’m learning about cold fusion, a radiation-free form of limitless free energy that, although much hypothesized within the physics community, exists only in theory.
It turns out, all that heat has to go somewhere.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
It would be really hard to have air conditioning in outer space. On Earth, an air conditioner cools a room by moving heat through either a window or a tube, and dumping it outside, where the atmosphere carries it away. In space, there is no atmosphere to absorb that heat and no air to carry it away. The first country, corporation, or individual to solve cold fusion will be the first country, corporation or individual with data centers in space.
Day three of La Canicule is the hottest day in France’s recorded history. The only places on Earth hotter than France right now are parts of the Middle East and the American Southwest. The mysterious rash has spread to my neck and back. Despite backlash, Louis Vuitton is going ahead with a beach-themed runway show on actual sand with a simulated tidal wave as its centerpiece, and I’m thinking about this Jean Baudrillard essay from 1993:
“Not much snow this winter… So the pistes are made up with artificial snow, providing a real basis for the simulacrum of leisure … The carbon gas produced by all the winter tourist industries is contributing to the warming of the atmosphere, and as a result, an absence of snow.”
On the fourth day of La Canicule, the mysterious rash has spread to my chest and a South African art collector is texting to invite me to meet him and his museum-board member wife for tapas at a hotel in the 5th arrondissement. His family’s wealth is, allegedly, directly tied to the extraction and exportation of a certain rare mineral from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the contemporary Mediterranean small bites place at his hotel has AC and he’s saying I can use his pool access.
No such thing as a free lunch.
The pool is indoors, and the floor surrounding it is made of cool white marble that matches my bikini.
For the first time in days I experience a level of physical comfort I’ve forgotten was even possible. I think to myself, “I don’t deserve this.” And then, “Who deserves anything at all?”
I cool down so much, I decide to spend a few minutes in the sauna.
It’s difficult to get one’s hopes up when it comes to the dicey state of Hollywood filmmaking, and even more difficult to keep them there. Mergers and consolidations threaten to dictate which films can get made. Theatergoing is only starting to boast consistent numbers again, taking six years to bounce back from its pandemic freefall. And Netflix has a Rolodex of movie stars trapped in terrible roles. But when things get tough, and our spirits wane, there’s no better pair to summon than Mulder and Scully, who are returning (technically) to the feature-length format with “The X-Files: I Want to Believe — Vrach Frankenshteyn.”
This version of Mulder and Scully’s widely panned 2008 outing has more gore, more grit and more gothic delights, courtesy of its director and “X-Files” series creator, Chris Carter, returning to clean up the mess left by Fox 18 years ago. Following the FBI duo as they search for a missing colleague, Carter’s director’s cut is for the most staunch sci-fi fans, those who crave every little bit of “X-Files” lore they can get.
Carter says that when the original film was in production, he faced intense pressure to cut enough grisly material to get a PG-13 rating so the movie could reach as many people as possible. That’s not an uncommon phenomenon, especially when working with a big, financially successful, well-loved property, but it is frustrating. And more often than studios realize, fans and even the average moviegoer can sense when a studio has tampered with a film.
But, notably, Carter’s director’s cut arrives on Hulu on the heels of Ryan Coogler finishing an “X-Files” reboot pilot for the streamer. Coogler’s recent deal with Warner Bros. to regain ownership rights to his smash hit “Sinners” was a boon for filmmakers who’ve long been frustrated with studio greed and meddling. That Carter’s been able to release the film he always intended to make, and Coogler’s helping to turn Hollywood in favor of artists, movie fans may finally have enough proof to believe again — though Scully, as always, would be skeptical.
Overwhelmed theater apps and a scarcity mindset around exclusive big-screen formats for blockbusters like Dune: Part Three and The Odyssey have led to the “concertification” of movies.
Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are quickly changing the healthcare landscape. An estimated one in seven people have used AI for a health-related question instead of seeing a general practitioner. One in ten people have used AI for mental health support. Within the Venn diagram of people using AI for health-related information lies a cohort for whom access to accurate information is of the utmost importance: those seeking information on abortion care. In an era when the internet is already rife with abortion-related misinformation, LLMs entering the chat have complicated the landscape — and abortion rights advocates are fighting back.
“Unfortunately, we live in a world where it feels like some days you need a law degree to even understand abortion policy and legality on any given day,” Kelly Baden, Guttmacher Institute’s vice president of policy and communications, told Salon. “And the presence of AI has complicated that even further.”
On June 24, 2022, the SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a case that challenged a Mississippi ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy — overturned Roe v. Wade, which effectively ended the federal constitutional right to choose to have an abortion in the United States. As a result, many states enacted so-called “trigger bans.” Since then, it’s already been difficult for people searching for information on abortion care as they’ve had to wade through misinformation and anti-abortion propaganda online. Today, organizations with dedicated staff and resources to share accurate information are feeling the effects of AI’s presence. Baden said, for example, that Guttmacher Institute has an interactive abortion policy map, which is a popular resource for people to understand the laws in all 50 states. Now, with AI summaries and LLMs, Baden and her colleagues have to be creative with how they write updates to this map to ensure LLMs aggregate the information accurately.
In an era when the internet is already rife with abortion-related misinformation, LLMs entering the chat have complicated the landscape.
“Our job now is to also think about how the information that we share is getting translated by other tools that didn’t exist, or weren’t on our radar, a few years ago,” Baden told Salon. “And now, these tools are a big part of how people understand their rights and their ability to get abortion care.”
While published data on how many people are using AI to access abortion-related information falls short, many organizations are seeing referral traffic from AI. Amy Merrill, co-founder of Plan C Pills, told Salon her organization — which provides resources for self-managed, at-home abortions with pills— has seen spikes of traffic from ChatGPT to her website. Rebecca Nall, founder of I Need an A, which is a free website that helps people find abortion providers, telehealth services, financial support and travel information, said they’ve also seen referral traffic from ChatGPT.
“We see in our data the referrals from AI assistants,” Nall said. “Referrals have been increasing over the last two years pretty significantly.”
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The mirage of privacy and convenience could be causing more people to turn to AI for health-related information. However, when it comes to abortion care, there are concerns about AI’s ability to provide unbiased, accurate information.
“It feels like you’re dialoguing with your healthcare provider,” Merrill said. “Whereas you’re actually just talking to a tech company and giving them all your personal data, and that’s a real concern within the movement.”
In July, Open Democracy’s team of international investigative journalists found that AI chatbots were “nudging” pregnant women to anti-abortion resources. In 2025, a team of healthcare providers and researchers concluded that only 65% of ChatGPT-3.5’s responses to abortion questions were “acceptable.” A separate 2024 study found that ChatGPT was actively spreading misinformation about self-managed medication abortions. “The chatbot’s tendency to perpetuate health misinformation and associated stigma regarding self-managed medication abortions poses a threat to public health and reproductive autonomy,” the researchers wrote. This can have real-world impacts on patient care.
The mirage of privacy and convenience could be causing more people to turn to AI for health-related information. However, when it comes to abortion care, there are concerns about AI’s ability to provide unbiased, accurate information.
“Any day that you are delayed in getting the care that you need because you might have gotten confusing information, conflicting information, or wrong information potentially puts you out of reach of getting the care that you need,” Baden said. She gave an example of someone living in Louisiana, a state that prohibits in-person abortion care at all stages of pregnancy without exceptions. However, that person can still seek abortion care in Florida or Georgia before six weeks of pregnancy. “If you, for some reason, got misleading information or wrong information because of an AI model, and miss that cutoff, then you are that much farther away geographically and financially from getting an abortion that you need after six weeks.”
Nall, from I Need an A, said one of the biggest pieces of misinformation that they see come from AI is a lack of a comprehensive overview of a person’s options. While some states like Louisiana have highly restrictive laws, people can still choose to self-manage an abortion at home by receiving medication abortion pills in the mail. Abortion pills being shipped to states with bans are becoming more common. For example, in Missouri — where abortion access is highly restrictive with limited exceptions for medical emergencies— the number of medication abortions has quadrupled since 2023. “Many people are getting pills by mail in every single state,” Nall said. Nall added that they’ve seen LLMs recommend crisis pregnancy centers in restricted states as well.
The good news is that AI is currently influenced by SEO strategies. “We have been changing our language and encouraging other reproductive activists to change language on their websites,” Nall said. Advocates encourage media outlets reporting on abortion restrictions to keep in mind how their articles will affect how LLMs aggregate abortion-related information as well. Specifically, the use of the word “ban.”
“We’ve been talking about this with colleagues and journalists, but when the words ‘abortion ban’ are used, like ‘abortion is banned in Texas,’ some AI tools will interpret that to mean that there is no abortion available in any form, and factually, that’s just incorrect,” Merrill told Salon. “There’s a risk of oversimplifying, and that’s what we saw happening with the word ‘abortion ban.’”
Merrill emphasized it’s important to communicate that “in-person care is restricted,” but that people are still accessing pills by mail. When it comes to navigating the abortion landscape in the U.S. in the age of AI, she recommends website directories like PlanCPills.org, INeedAnA.com, or the Repro Legal Helpline if someone wants to talk to a human.
Nall said while she is hesitant to use the word “optimistic,” she has been seeing improvements in AI’s answers since they’ve been doubling down on their efforts to influence LLMs. However, Nall said, she wouldn’t recommend AI as a go-to source. “I highly recommend skipping Google, skipping ChatGPT, and going straight to INeedAnA.com.”
BRUSSELS — EU countries will be able to fund small local media without asking Brussels for permission, according to a draft of the bloc’s revised state aid rulebook obtained by POLITICO.
Government subsidies to businesses are strictly disciplined by Brussels under state aid rules, but there are exceptions. These are spelled out in frameworks, with the master one, the General Block Exemption Regulation (GBER), up for revision at the end of the year.
The European Commission put out an initial draft for public consultation in February with a view to finalizing it by year’s end. The updated, 200-page draft gives a leg-up to local and independent journalism by allowing governments to fund small- and medium-sized outlets without formal vetting by Brussels.
“SMEs active in the press sector play an essential role in safeguarding media pluralism, cultural and linguistic diversity, democratic participation and citizens’ access to reliable information, particularly at local and regional level,” the Commission writes, highlighting structural challenges arising from the digital transformation of media markets.
To qualify for assistance, beneficiaries would need to fulfil at least one item in a Commission checklist that includes preserving media pluralism and diversity of opinion, transitioning to digital content while also preserving print editions.
“The exemption covers aid pursuing cultural objectives — including linguistic diversity, the digitalization of press publications or the promotion of printed publications,” said Carole Maczkovics, of Counsel at Covington & Burling, of the press measures.
Many European media outlets are struggling to stay viable, with print readership declining and publishers complaining that online platforms, such as search giant Google, are reducing referral traffic to their websites.
Broad scope
The GBER covers most sectors of the economy, from agriculture to transport, and is the target of intense lobbying from EU capitals, traditionally torn between big government spenders led by Germany and smaller member states, including the pro-free-trade Nordics, which complain that national subsidies distort the EU single market.
Countering the stereotype, Denmark was a leading advocate to extend GBER exemptions to the media. In a consultation response last year, the Danes said the state aid framework should be broadened to include private and public media providers “to promote harmonisation and simplify the general management of state aid in the media sector.”
The latest GBER draft focuses strongly on SMEs and innovation, as well as on the social dimension of state aid — as it expands on conditions for money that governments can put in training programs and the inclusion of disadvantaged workers.
But it may not necessarily make things easier.
“Although the revision aims to simplify the State aid framework, it may ultimately make it more detailed and prescriptive,” warned Maczkovics. She added that the Commission’s gradual shift from broad aid categories to narrowly defined exemptions may sway EU countries to design measures that don’t quite fit the real needs of companies — for the sake of avoiding a notification.
Industry, for its part, is keeping a close eye on state aid exemptions, with airport lobby ACI Europe quick to react to the latest leak.
“The revised GBER remains too restrictive for Europe’s smaller regional airports,” said Philippe Sacré, the association’s secretary general. He was referring to aid exemptions that would be restricted to airports handling over 500,000 passengers a year, according to the Commission’s draft.
The Commission’s latest State aid Scoreboard shows that EU countries spent €168.2 billion in state aid in 2024, with Germany, France and Italy the top spenders. Capitals are increasingly taking advantage of block exemptions, with GBER representing close to 70 percent of all active exemption measures.
NBC’s “Heroes” made Hayden Panettiere a household name by making us believe she was unstoppable. Not her, of course, but Claire Bennet — the Odessa, Texas high school cheerleader who couldn’t be killed.
In the series premiere, Claire throws herself off an oil derrick’s rusty platform, plummeting at least 70 or 80 feet in a fall that should have broken her body. Instead, she stands up, pops her dislocated shoulder back into its socket and grimly declares to the shocked classmate filming her, “This is Claire Bennet, and that was attempt No. 6.” Later, in that same episode, she runs into a burning building to rescue a man trapped inside. He suffers horrible burns, but she dashes away unscathed.
Claire wears her cheerleader uniform in both scenes — the identifying outfit that generated the first season’s catchphrase, “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”
There are so many dark stories about child stars that make us wonder what might have been, if only. Panettiere, who died on Sunday at 36, lived one of them. She rocketed to stardom with starring roles on “Heroes” and “Nashville,” where she played up-and-coming country star Juliette Barnes opposite Connie Britton.
Both productions also transgressed personal boundaries that pushed Panettiere to lows no one should endure, but so many stars growing up in the spotlight unfortunately do. During her time on “Heroes,” she wrote in her recently published memoir “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” someone in her orbit began slipping her pharmaceuticals to amp up her energy for public appearances.
Later, the writers on “Nashville” mined Panettiere’s private battles for her character’s storylines: Her postpartum depression and struggles with substance dependency began turning up in scripts. Since she was raised to be a good soldier, she took it all in stride. Privately, Panettiere spent time in and out of rehab to treat her addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs.
When emergency responders in Greenville, S.C., found Panettiere in an apartment on Sunday, she was unresponsive and in cardiac arrest. An anonymous source told The New York Times that the cause was an apparent drug overdose.
It is easy to regard a former child star’s troubles as an inevitability of the profession. From the looks of where Panettiere was steering her life, it didn’t have to be. Yes, she grew up in front of TV cameras, landing her first regular roles on soap operas, including ABC’s “One Life to Live” and CBS’ “Guiding Light.” Four seasons on “Heroes” launched her to a level of celebrity few child actors achieve.
There are so many dark stories about child stars that make us wonder what might have been, if only. Panettiere, who died on Sunday at 36, lived one of them.
But she also defied the industry tendency to pigeonhole performers based on the breakout success of characters like Claire Bennet. Panettiere’s high school hero emerged on TV during the “sheroes” era of the aughts, arriving in the wake of Sydney Bristow on “Alias” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” another cheerleader turned supernatural brawler.
But where Jennifer Garner and Sarah Michelle Gellar struggled to shake the action-hero personas that made them stars, Panettiere followed “Heroes” with ABC’s “Nashville,” a series created by “Thelma & Louise” writer Callie Khouri that showcased the full range of her acting ability. Playing Juliette earned Panettiere two Golden Globe nominations, and her performances of the character’s songs landed her on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs charts 11 times.
What we saw onscreen, along with the catchy music she made, was, in her telling, the fruit of a creative yield achieved by pressing beyond her breaking point.
In “This Is Me,” she describes spending time in and out of rehab, losing custody of her child and rebuilding her life to a place that, as of this year, included plans to produce and direct new projects, as she mentioned in a recent New York Times profile.
“This is Me” also depicts her mother, former soap actress Lesley Vogel, as demanding her daughter’s absolute best at every step in her career and leaving her with no alternative path. Panettiere’s first national TV gig came at 11 months old with a Playskool toy train commercial, the start of around 50 advertising appearances she’d rack up before she was 5 years old.
Her feature film debut came in 1998, when she voiced Princess Dot in “A Bug’s Life.” She was 9. After that, she became one of the youngest Grammy nominees ever in the best spoken word album for children category thanks to her voice work on “A Bug’s Life Read-Along.”
As Panettiere told Jay Shetty on a May episode of his podcast “On Purpose,” those early achievements came at the cost of enjoying a normal childhood. By the time she was 11, she’d already acted alongside Denzel Washington in “Remember the Titans,” which led her teachers and classmates to treat her differently. Vogel bought an apartment for her daughter when she was 16, Panettiere recalled, and the whole family lived in it. She parted ways with Vogel professionally when she was 19.
Her father, Alan “Skip” Panettiere, worked for New York City’s fire department and was the parent she leaned on for emotional support. “That has kind of continued in my life,” she told Shetty, “just wanting to know that if I found myself in a terrible position, that I could call somebody to help me. I could rely on somebody . . . I wasn’t the person that everybody else was relying on, and therefore nobody was there for me.”
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Panettiere was 17 when “Heroes” became a breakout hit and made her and co-stars Milo Ventimiglia, Masi Oka and Zachary Quinto sought-after talents. But she was the one that the paparazzi hounded most fiercely, feeding malicious tabloid coverage focused on her body image and weight.
The news that she was dating Ventimiglia kicked the frenzy into overdrive, especially since he was 30 years old at the time while she was 18.
Not long ago, she told The Messenger that, overall, she looks back on her career with a sense of curiosity. “Because [‘Nashville’] took six years of my career when I was at my physical prime, my mental, my everything, I just wonder what it would have been like in the hiatuses, [if I] did one project or film, or was encouraged to do that,” she remarked. “Where would I be today?”
Reading decline happens during the big transition all middle-grade readers go through: moving from short illustrated chapter books to fully fledged novels. | Ryan McVay/Getty Images
Something happens to kids when they’re about 9 years old. Before then, they’re voracious little bookworms, with most of them saying they read for fun at least five days a week. After their ninth birthday, only 35 percent still do.
Experts call this phenomenon “the decline by 9,” and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to stop it. They talk up and cherish the books that break through: the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons, which got so many kids to keep reading through those danger years and which sold so well through millennial and Gen Z childhoods. Publishers keep looking for new books compelling enough to keep kids away from their screens and glued to the page.
But for the past 10 years, books for kids ages 8 to 12 (known as middle grade) have been selling less and less.
“It had been happening for maybe a decade, very very slowly,” said Joanne O’Sullivan, a children’s book author and reporter for Publishers Weekly. What had been a gradual slope got dramatically worse in 2020. And in the years since the pandemic, publishers have shut downmultiple middle-grade imprints, culminating in it happening twicethis year.
No one in publishing is entirely sure why kids books stopped selling, but there are two major theories. One says that children are no longer reading as much as they used to, because they are worse readers than previous generations were. The age group that used to happily devour Harry Potter is now distracted by iPads and YouTube shorts, so they never developed the ability to sit down and focus on a printed page. Their reading scores, which started falling in 2014, tell the tale.
The other theory says that the kids aren’t the ones who changed — publishers are. Starting in the 2000s, middle-grade books began getting long, with the average going from 174.5 pages in 2006 to 290 in 2016. According to this narrative, publishers flooded the market with books too difficult for their target audience. Kids responded by tuning out.
Whichever theory is true, the fact remains that all those ravenous 8-year-old bookworms depend on middle-grade publishers to keep on reading after they turn 9. The publishers who sell these books have built massive businesses on their ability to supply kids with exciting, addictive stories. If they’re failing, what will kids turn to for entertainment instead?
Key takeaways
Sales of middle-grade books have been declining for over a decade, but the decline worsened during and after the pandemic.
Some industry insiders argue that, under the influence of Harry Potter, publishers started putting out books too long for their young readers.
Others argue that today’s overscheduled kids no longer have the free time to devote to reading for pleasure and that the pandemic broke the middle-grade book discovery chain.
Looking forward, publishers are focusing on short and funny books heavily loaded with graphics.
The middle-grade novel of the future looks like the Dog Man books.
Why did tweens lose interest in books?
Reading decline happens during the big transition all middle-grade readers go through: moving from short illustrated chapter books to fully fledged novels. It’s a pain point.
“They’ve been doing short chapter books; they’ve been doing those leveled readers in the classroom; and, then, all of a sudden, what’s available to them is a lot chunkier, more challenging,” O’Sullivan said. She described the transition as “abrupt,” adding, “that’s not necessarily just for kids who are struggling with reading. That’s also for kids who like reading and are capable.”
“If you have a kid who’s not a very confident reader, a long book is very intimidating,” Kelly Dickinson, a middle school librarian in Bethesda, Maryland, told Vox. “They just stall out before they can even pick one, because they look at it and they think, ‘I can’t read that.’”
The shadow of Harry Potter, with its doorstopper volumes approaching a thousand pages, looms large here. Before Harry, a standard middle-grade novel might look like The Baby-Sitters Club volume The Truth About Stacey, which clocks in around 35,000 words. In a Substack post in April, Vicky Weber, an author, literary agent, and author coach for middle-grade books, pointed out that Sorcerer’s Stone was 76,944 words long, already pushing the limits of a middle-grade reader’s attention. After the books became phenomenons, they got much longer; Order of the Phoenix was 257,045 words, which is heftier than most adult novels. As publishers raced to catch up, their books began to expand, as well.
“When something becomes really popular, other publishers try to replicate that success,” Weber told Vox. “I think one of the things we didn’t take into account is how many Harry Potter readers were adults.”
While middle-grade books really did get longer, everyone I spoke to also acknowledges that kids’ reading scores really did drop, too. Kids have lost a lot of their unstructured play time to the grind of organized sports and music lessons, which means the empty childhood hours that are such perfect reading opportunities have vanished. “That time to just sit down and read is so truncated for a lot of kids, probably a lot of the kids who would have chosen to read a 400-page book if they had the time,” O’Sullivan said.
Then, there was the trauma of Covid, which smashed right into kids’ reading habits. “There were factors like schools and libraries closing, not much time with peers, and plenty of screen time during the pandemic,” said Kristen McLean, who runs the thought leadership collective Circana Entertainment Knowledge Group. All these bad effects, McLean said, that essentially “broke the discovery chain” for middle-grade fiction, in what she describes as “a perfect storm for lower literacy.”
The graphic novel pivot
The good news is that kids didn’t stop reading entirely during the pandemic. A few categories spiked: illustrated books, graphic novels, and manga. Jackie De Leo, now the chief merchant and publisher at Scholastic, was a vice president at Barnes & Noble during the pandemic, and she describes seeing kids with an unquenchable thirst for manga all through 2020.
“If you sat in a store and watched the manga section, you’d see little kids at lunch; you’d see them through the day; and, then, it would move into being adults,” De Leo said. “The only real constraint was actual inventory.”
Now, O’Sullivan says she keeps hearing middle-grade publishers say, “Let’s meet them where they are.” In practice, that appears to mean they’re focusing on books like the wildly popular Dog Man, a graphic novel series featuring a hero with the head of a dog and the body of a police officer.
“Dog Man is full color — so immersive,” De Leo said. “There’s these fun parts about the physical book, too, where you actually have to flap the pages and it makes an animation reel.” More importantly, she said, the books are funny. “Kids like things that are funny, and we were giving them some pretty serious things for a while — books for adults packaged as middle-grade books.”
The new ideal middle-grade book is short, punchy, and comedic and comes with a hefty dose of graphics. “Maybe it’s comics, maybe it’s illustrated novels,” O’Sullivan said. “Maybe, instead of just running text, they’ll have a panel with some text messages in it or something, just to break up the text to make the entire experience of reading less intimidating.”
This focus on breaking up the text means that publishing isn’t going back to what middle-grade books looked like before Harry Potter: short, simple chapter books à la The Baby-Sitters Club and Encyclopedia Brown. Those series weren’t hefty or overly serious, but they were massive bestsellers on the strength of their words, not their images. (It’s also worth noting that Scholastic adapted a few of the BSC books into graphic novels in 2006 and, then, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, picked up the project again in 2021.)
I asked De Leo if she thought the industry’s shift to including more illustrations suggests that kids have lost an ability to handle pure text, even when it is short and sweet.
But De Leo said that reading graphic novels represents a “different type of literacy” from that required to read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, not a lesser one. She said that when she reads a graphic novel, she has trouble forcing herself to look at the images, not just the words. When she sees kids focusing on the pictures with ease, she takes it as evidence of “a real visual literacy that they have that I am jealous of.”
Dickinson, the librarian, said she wishes that publishers would put out comedic fiction in more formats. “A lot of kids want funny books, and a lot of the funny books are the illustrated hybrid stuff,” she said. “There’s not enough other funny books, in my opinion.”
Reenvisioning middle grade books
Experts are hopeful that publishers’ new direction will be enough to get kids reading again — and to get their parents to buy books. “This is probably the first year where I’ve heard people being optimistic and feeling excited about the new ideas that are coming,” O’Sullivan said. “People are beginning to be able to re-envision middle grade.”
The publishing shutdowns reflect the industry’s new direction. One of the three people to survive the March closure of Dial Books for Young Readers was an editor specializing in picture books and graphic novels. Macmillan is replacing the now-defunct Roaring Brook Press imprint, which also closed in March, with a new imprint specializing in nonfiction and illustrated books for kids, although it’s not yet clear what age group the new imprint will cater to.
With kids becoming stronger readers and books getting shorter, the hope is that they’ll meet in the middle.
“Kids in the middle-grade age are extremely self-centered and view everything through how it impacts them. Developmentally, that’s very normal,” Dickinson said. “But also, they’re incredibly empathetic at this age.” Reading fiction, which allows us to imagine how other people’s minds work, can be deeply impactful for this malleable age if kids can hold onto their love of reading long enough to reap the benefits.
“This is a time when reading habits and interest in reading can really die,” Dickinson said. “The hope is to help kids discover what kinds of books or what formats they like — and to show that there are ways in.”
The early website Hot or Not taught its users to rank people at scale. Twenty-six years later, dating apps are trying to escape the culture the site helped create.
The fame machine is a distinctly American invention. In what other country is it wired into people’s heads from the moment they can coherently string together five words that they, too, can be a star if they work hard enough and dream big enough? Here, “fame” doesn’t merely suggest flashy movie-star celebrity; it’s a status you can attain in any industry, so long as you climb to its upper ranks. Fame is a bedfellow of the newer, more modern American dream, which promises not only contentment, but success, as a reward for ambition, ravaging the lifestyles of millions of people in the process. It’s getting harder to be happy with what one has, and even more difficult to stop destroying ourselves — either with contempt for others or regret for what we perceive as imperfection — in striving for more. America might not have a monarchy, but that doesn’t mean most of us won’t try to bow at fame’s feet at some point. Each trade has its kings and queens, its princes and princesses.
When news broke of actress Hayden Panettiere’s death at the age of 36 late last week, the immediate aftermath felt like watching the fame machine go on the fritz, rumbling and sputtering before outpouring a swath of both genuine grief and rubbernecking greed. Those who grew up watching Panettiere light up screens both big and small were devastated. Others — maybe even a subset of the same people — jumped to alarmism and misinformation. After an extended hiatus from acting, Panettiere was returning to work and primed for an even bigger comeback. Earlier this summer, she detailed her struggles with postpartum depression, abuse, child stardom, addiction and recovery in her memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning.” Many assumed her death was a result of any one of these. (First responders found Panettiere in cardiac arrest, but no exact cause of death is known at the time of writing.)
Considered alongside its stars’ tragically brief lives, “Ice Princess” conveys the critical need to give teenagers both stalwart encouragement and the tools to speak up when they need help. And while the movie’s legacy looks a little more macabre now, Panettiere and Trachtenberg’s glimmering performances are enough to push through the darkness.
Within hours, conspiracies about Panettiere being killed for speaking out about Hollywood appeared online. A TikTok search for her name brings up ghoulish videos with thousands of views: “Last video of Hayden Panettiere alive”; “Nobody realized Hayden made three unusual moves before her death.” CBS News posted audio of the 911 response call to their TikTok page just this morning. It’s as if, in the untimely death of a famous person — especially a former child star — particles of their fame dissipate into the air, leaving the desperate and discontent to try to snatch a piece of their own before it dissolves completely.
Some of Panettiere’s most notable roles point back to this phenomenon, with her TV arcs in series like “Heroes” and “Nashville,” at their cores, tracking the effects of the whole world watching and depending on you. But it’s her 2005 Disney film, “Ice Princess” — one of my first experiences with Panettiere’s work — that’s most illustrative of both fame’s pitfalls and the culture that cosigns them in the name of success. In the movie, Panettiere plays Gen Harwood, an archetypal most-popular-girl-in-school and less-than-standard teenage ice-skating prodigy. Though her form and marks in the sport are good, real success is just out of Gen’s reach. That is, until physics geek Casey Carlyle (Michelle Trachtenberg, another child star gone far too soon) begins studying the science of Gen’s skating in hopes of scoring a college scholarship.
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Casey and Gen’s journey from competitors to confidantes is the film’s familiar emotional center, but tucked into an unfamiliar narrative. Beneath its Disney dialogue and some smoothed-over depictions of the harsher realities of competitive sports, “Ice Princess” boasts winning messages about the pressures put on young people to achieve greatness at an age when they’re too young to define personal success. That the film is led by two young women who accomplished such greatness in their childhood and teenage years at the risk of their privacy and potentially their well-being is a tragically meta asterisk that will now hang over the movie forever.
But that doesn’t mean “Ice Princess” doesn’t still come loaded with hope and pertinent themes of personal choice, active listening, and cheering young people on in whatever they choose to do (within reason). Considered alongside its stars’ tragically brief lives, “Ice Princess” conveys the critical need to give teenagers both stalwart encouragement and the tools to speak up when they need help. And while the movie’s legacy looks a little more macabre now, Panettiere and Trachtenberg’s glimmering performances are enough to push through the darkness.
Casey and Gen are, for a Disney movie, as different as they come. Casey lives with her mother, Joan (Joan Cusack), in a cozy, rural house outside of town, where Casey skates for fun on the frozen pond in their backyard. Gen is your typical blonde suburbanite who wishes she could spend her Saturday nights at parties or with her friends, instead of in intensive training on the ice, coached by her mother, Tina (Kim Cattrall). Gen and Casey aren’t enemies, but they’re not exactly friends, either. But when Casey’s science teacher encourages her to apply for a college scholarship that could change her entire life — and make the project she submits as part of her application personal — Casey’s affection for ice skating becomes a thorn in Gen and Tina’s side.
The two girls are thrown together by their mutual commitment to their passions, science and skating. What Gen and Casey want is to enjoy these things for the personal thrills they offer. Fame or excellence in either field seems to be the desire of their parents and other adult figures in their lives. “People wait their whole life to find their calling,” Casey’s teacher tells her about the scholarship, asserting that a natural fluency in science means it must be her destiny. These sentiments are reflected by Joan, who desperately wants more for her daughter than she’s been able to provide on her own teacher’s salary.
Tina, on the other hand, gets to the point with candor. “You’re not like other girls,” Tina tells Gen when her daughter asks why she can’t take a half-hour break from training to be with her boyfriend. “Winners make sacrifices.” For Gen, those sacrifices come at the expense of joy. Gen knows the exact measurements of her salad order and is strictly forbidden from eating any bread. Her practice doesn’t stop when the sun goes down. And attending a high school party is entirely out of the question. There is something genuinely quite heartbreaking about watching Panettiere, a young woman just coming to understand Hollywood industry standards, repeat the sickly refrains of a similarly demanding profession. When Gen orders cheese (in a strict one-quarter cup measurement) for her salad one afternoon, her friends poke fun at her. “It’s Saturday,” she replies, “I can pig out if I want to.”
With its focused screenplay, “Ice Princess” quickly cultivates an atmosphere that’s sympathetic to Gen and Casey. The film frames their lapses in rigor as the joys of being a teenager, rather than imperfections — or worse, weakness in the pursuit of glory. No 16-year-old should be so strictly confined to a routine that prevents them from actually living their life.
(Alli Harvey / Getty Images for Stuart Weitzman) (L-R) Hayden Panettiere and Michelle Trachtenberg attend the unveiling of Stuart Weitzman’s Young Hollywood Cares Collection in aid of ovarian cancer research during Fashion’s Night Out at Stuart Weitzman Boutique on September 8, 2011.
It’s ironic that, in the aftermath of Panettiere’s death, so much of the response has been about the lack of protections offered to child stars in the film and television industries, and not the content creation field. Social media is the new breeding ground for the kind of toxicity that the people mining Panettiere’s death for views purport to abhor.
But that’s not the message that America is selling. The same tracks to success still exist for young people gifted in sports or science. But fame as a general concept also seems much more attainable than it did 21 years ago. Teenagers want to grow up to be influencers or TikTokers, spending a significant portion of their youth creating content about life instead of actually living it.
It’s a lifestyle not entirely dissimilar to the rigorous training of an ice-skating prodigy, putting in the work at all hours to hone their skill. But it does strike me as odd that, in the aftermath of Panettiere’s death, so much of the response was about the lack of protections offered to child stars in the film and television industries, and not the rapidly booming content creation field. How ironic that social media is the new breeding ground for the kind of toxicity that the people mining Panettiere’s death for views purport to abhor.
That dissonance is a big part of why “Ice Princess” holds up today. One could even argue that it’s now an even more critical part of Panettiere and Trachtenberg’s legacies. The film is no longer just a tender-hearted story of fame and all its drawbacks, but also a look at two women who bravely wrestled with those flaws, making a major impact in the short time they were here. When they’re on screen, Panettiere and Trachtenberg shine through all the Disney conventions, their characters pointing back to their real selves.
Each one has her singular presence — Trachtenberg plucky and inspiring; Panettiere charming and bold — but together, they’re beautiful complements. Panettiere’s grounded presence helps untether the film from its somewhat corny conceit, giving it authentic complexity. She deviates from the one-note mean girl role, supplying Gen with dimensionality and kindness that characters like these were rarely afforded. That Gen’s growing discontent with skating is so closely linked to Panettiere’s real-life trajectory — trying to figure out where she fits in a ruthless industry — is a sour cherry on top: unexpected, but worth embracing. Though the importance of “Ice Princess” is obscured by histrionic high school drama and feel-good fluff, it remains a vital work for teaching parents and kids of all ages that success is what you make of it. And none of that would be possible without its two forever-shining stars.
Disney superfan Toni Kulusich has been accused of stalking her favorite character, sparking discourse about boundaries with park actors. She tells WIRED the backlash is unfair.
In 1958, London's Daily Express newspaper started running a comic strip adapting Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. This was well before the first James Bond movie (Dr. No, 1962), so cartoonist John McLusky created the first non-literary published images of the fictional spy. — Read the rest
Beneath the shadows of indigo-streaked clouds, a young woman strolls through a fog-covered city, stopping at the base of a skyscraper. She looks up, eyes following every square inch of the structure until the point where it juts past the clouds and into the dark atmosphere above, beyond where she can see. She is the princess, and this is the castle she’ll be locked in, an indomitable beast of a citadel fittingly titled the Tower Hotel.
“How hokey,” you might say, “a modern princess trapped in a luxury high-rise.” But really, everything in “Her Private Hell” is contrivance. Writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn — “NWR,” as he’s taken to branding himself — isn’t exactly known for his subtlety. His previous feature, 2016’s love-it-or-hate-it loony toon “The Neon Demon,” was a modeling industry semi-satire that featured beauties quite literally gobbling up their ingenue competition. It’s really no surprise that his first film in 10 years would arrive with its thematic commentary just as legible.
But that’s where the fun begins. Once the viewer understands where Refn is headed, they can submit themselves to his grotesque neon visions. His appeal as a filmmaker lies in his stylistic flair; the joy comes from watching him marry the aesthetically manicured with the ideologically bizarre. Whether it’s a union of love or force is another matter. NWR’s high concepts and their abrasive execution don’t always coalesce. But when they do, it’s like watching a magic trick play out before your eyes, leaving you so stunned you’re stammering, unable to utter even a single “How?”
(Neon) “Her Private Hell”
Refn’s cold, theoretical violence and Thatcher’s knack for affected, high-glamor drama are a match made in DayGlo heaven. Her work is unlike anything I’ve seen this year, a ruthless and surprising turn from someone who’s struggled to find the right type of script for her unique style and physicality.
“Her Private Hell” is Refn’s greatest trick yet: A beguiling fairy tale for a lost lamb named Elle (Sophie Thatcher). In this story, Elle is the archetypal royalty figure, thrust through a kaleidoscope of Refn’s signature bright pinks and blues and spit back into the tower where she passes her days, waiting for her savior to arrive. But as she greets her fate and rides the elevator to her penthouse prison, Elle strolls past Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a real-life Sleeping Beauty, napping on the lush chairs in the hallway outside. Elle and Hunter are due to shoot a movie together, which Elle’s father, the filmmaker Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), will produce. “The airline lost my luggage because of the Mist,” Hunter tells Elle. Ugh. Of course. The Mist seems to be screwing up everything these days.
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In the extraordinary abstraction that follows, Thatcher finds her ideal role as one of NWR’s stilted avatars, gussied up in couture and spouting riddles. Her energy rises and falls alongside the mysterious mist, which has engulfed the city and brought whispers of a mysterious ancient entity lurking in its haze. Thatcher performs as if this was the part she was born for, and it very well may be.
Refn’s cold, theoretical violence and Thatcher’s knack for affected, high-glamor drama are a match made in DayGlo heaven. Her work is unlike anything I’ve seen this year, a ruthless and surprising turn from someone who’s struggled to find the right type of script for her unique style and physicality. If there is a God, somewhere amid all this mist, “Her Private Hell” will be Thatcher’s entrée to a new era of hyper-ostentatious, Elizabethan — Taylor, that is — cinematic elegance, a large void in the once-plentiful pool of subgenres that only she can fill.
Thatcher has been searching for her niche for a moment, but the delay hasn’t been for lack of trying. Since her breakthrough in Showtime’s “Yellowjackets” in 2021 — where she plays the troubled teenager Natalie, fighting for survival in the Canadian wilderness alongside her high school soccer teammates after their plane crash-lands — Thatcher’s had more than a few substantive roles. In 2024’s “Heretic,” she played a Mormon missionary lured into a violent theological maze by a wicked Hugh Grant. And in 2025’s “Companion,” Thatcher scored a decent turn as a sex robot with her programming on the fritz after she’s implicated in a murder plot. If those films sound preposterous, it’s because they are. “Heretic” was underbaked and half-thought, while “Companion” tried to create big laughs and bigger action from minuscule ideas. Thatcher, though, was far and away the best part of both films, bringing a striking depth to her thinly sketched characters.
But one gets the sense that Thatcher’s worried about being pigeonholed. “Yellowjackets,” “Heretic” and “Companion” are all horror-thrillers. And Thatcher’s other film roles in 2023’s “The Boogeyman” and a bit part in the following year’s “MaXXXine” certainly don’t help Hollywood’s perception of her as a wannabe scream queen. The perennial problem with horror, even contemporary horror, is that it’s an extremely difficult genre to migrate from. But Thatcher’s talents extend past genre confines. She conjures a bewitching onscreen presence that many of her contemporaries could only dream of, pulling the viewer’s gaze with a single glare from her steely eyes or the quiver of her chin. The same grin can look menacing or jovial, depending on how Thatcher contorts the rest of her features. What’s more, there’s an ease to all of these things — a soft tenderness that counterbalances the frigidity — as if such intensity comes casually. And maybe it does.
With “Her Private Hell,” Thatcher has found an auteur who matches her refreshing self-assurance. Here, Refn lets it all go and indulges in his every artistic impulse, drenching a Brian De Palma-inspired deception in neon (and bringing in De Palma’s longtime collaborator, Pino Donaggio, for a resplendent score better than anything you’ve heard this decade). Thatcher isn’t so different from De Palma’s muses either. The naive exuberance of Nancy Allen, the innate sex appeal of Melanie Griffith and Michelle Pfeiffer, the informal immorality of Amy Irving; Thatcher has it all, rolled into one captivating package. When Elle and Hunter witness the brutal murder of a neighbor across the way — presumably by the mist’s fabled entity, The Leatherman — Refn completes the thread that ties his violent vapidity, where pretty girls do ugly things, to De Palma’s voyeuristic dreaminess. If you’re a fan of film and all the places it can take you, you can’t do much better than this.
“Her Private Hell” is not merely glittering debris, as some have posited, nor is it style over substance; it’s a campfire story told by Thatcher’s unearthly orator, with just as much chilling impact.
That is until Thatcher ratchets up the eerie tension tenfold while Refn builds his gorgeous fantasy around her. When Elle’s father unexpectedly departs, leaving her to finish shooting her movie in the care of her not-so-wicked stepmother, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), the pair’s psychosexual strain further complicates matters. Before Dominique married Elle’s father, the two were the best of friends. As strange as it is, their dynamic seems to alter everything around them, as if their mutual destiny were written in the stars — not that anyone can see the stars with all this mist, that is.
For a director who’s staked a name on films and television shows that are narratively impenetrable, “Her Private Hell” may feel like a big ask for some viewers. And I get that, I do. The movie sways almost imperceptibly between Elle’s quest for the truth and the haunting story of Private K (Charles Melton), a soldier who lost everything to the mist and its monstrous entity the last time it immersed the city. It can occasionally feel as if Refn is playing a game with you, softly whispering if you’re still there. But though some have complained about what they call “a total lack of plot,” I simply must object, and not just on behalf of Thatcher, whose work is worth seeking out even if you don’t jive with Refn’s aesthetic obsessions.
There is so much to admire with “Her Private Hell” — too much for just one go-round. It’s not only gripping, but extremely intricate if you’re brave enough to get on its level. Two women witness the strange murder of a neighbor and begin to believe that something could be lurking in the mist that’s enveloped the Earth. When they start shooting a movie together, they begin to understand their connection to this ancient evil, and their place in a cyclical inferno wrought by absent parents and bad weather. They soon understand that to be heartbroken is to be damned to know the exquisite pain of being alive. This film is not merely glittering debris, as some have posited, nor is it style over substance; it’s a campfire story told by Thatcher’s unearthly orator.
As the night grows black and the last embers start to dull, “Her Private Hell” sends you off to bed wondering if it could all be true. Thatcher’s warbly voice hangs in the air; tales of the Leatherman and lost daughters spinning around your brain as you try to fall asleep. “None of this is real,” you tell yourself, turning off your brain for a good night’s rest. But just then, a piercing pink light appears outside, and a low, opaque mist begins to creep through the seams of your tent. As it turns out, the fantastical has much more grounding in reality than we ever want to imagine.
Beyoncé performs onstage during the Renaissance World Tour at Arrowhead Stadium on October 1, 2023, in Kansas City, Missouri. | Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood
From a fan perspective, seeing the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, attending the US Open and sipping on Honey Deuces, and getting a seat to Olivia Rodrigo’s Unraveled Tour and sing-screaming to “Stupid Song” couldn’t be more different. But they do have one thing in common: They’re all expensive.
Attending a live event has become a luxury purchase. Not that long ago in 2019, the average price of a concert ticket was $92. Maybe your seats weren’t great, but you could afford to be in the room. Now the average price has risen to around $133 for face value, and you’re likely spending way more to see the biggest names in music and sports. And thanks to Live Nation’s grip on the music and sports ticketing industry, ever-increasing service fees, and features like dynamic pricing and a ruthless secondary resale market, it certainly feels like we’re not seeing any relief from these sky-high costs anytime soon.
For those who, say, can’t afford a $1,845 nosebleed ticket to see the Nova Knicks or a $2,000 Olivia Rodrigo resale seat, that means watching at home, or, if something isn’t eventually streamed, just missing out entirely.
Looking at a seating map and seeing exactly how much ticket prices are changes your perception of the people lucky enough to attend. Like, what kind of person is spending that much money to sit in the very last row? How do they move through this universe with that much money to spend on bad seats? Is everyone secretly rich? Is this just a matter of fiscal irresponsibility? What is going on????
While Vox cannot speak to how everyone in attendance is paying for their tickets, we did talk to one person who was willing to share.
Enter: Craig, a 44-year-old living in the Bay Area, who makes roughly $180,000 per year. Craig spent more than $15,000 seeing Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour six times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why tickets for live events cost so much
The price of going to see concerts and sporting events in the US is expensive, and it always feels like the next thing you’re going to is going to be even pricier. There are a few reasons for this:
Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment’s tight grip on the industry: Live Nation controls so much when it comes to artists, ticketing, and venues that it’s virtually impossible to field any kind of competition. In April, a federal jury in New York ruled that Live Nation was an illegal monopoly, but the ramifications of this verdict still remain to be seen.
The resale market: An ongoing problem for fans is the resellers and bots that gobble up tickets. This shuts fans out and leaves them with few options other than hopping onto the resale market where prices can skyrocket.
“Service” fees: If you want to buy a ticket to the LA Olympics in 2028, you’ll also have to pay a 24 percent service fee per ticket. These fees are now standard with live events — despite crackdowns — and are an enduring source of frustration for fans.
I want to know, are you a secret heiress? A billionaire oligarch? How does one afford to see Beyoncé six times?
No, I’m not an heiress. I’m not unfortunately a billionaire — well, no, billionaires are bad, so don’t quote me on that. But it’s funny, one of the first things that comes to mind is my fandom for so many artists is expansive, but also I just spend money on certain things and not other things. My mom’s big motto in life was, “We’re making memories.” And so for me, I’m never going to regret going to Beyoncé six times. I’m going to regret only seeing her Renaissance tour twice.
One of my big regrets is not going to the Renaissance World Tour.
I realized a lot of it is — it’s the only place where you can really have this communal experience with people that are in your same delusional mindset. With Cowboy Carter, I was at the very first show in LA, and then I had planned to go to three shows. But then it just became this thing that got into my soul and was like, “I need to keep going.”
I don’t mind putting this into print or whatever, but I’m an addict, an alcoholic who’s been in recovery for decades, and so it’s easy for me to get hooked on things, but this is such a pure, very expensive way to have joy.
What was it about Cowboy Carter that compelled you to keep going? Was it because you knew Renaissancewas amazing? Was it because you saw the movie?
Yeah, I saw the movie four times, but I just kind of knew. And my big three are Björk, Fiona Apple, and Beyoncé. And so Björk is in Iceland most of the time, thank God. Fiona Apple as much as —
Wait, wait, thank God because of your wallet?
Yes.
And Fiona Apple, I’ve seen her many times, but she just doesn’t tour. As much as I’d love her to, she just doesn’t. And I will see Robyn three times this year. I’ve seen Carly Rae Jepsen as many times as I can. But with Beyoncé, it’s like I know there’s a limited amount of how much she’s going to be doing what she’s doing. And with Act III at some point coming up, there’s a real push that I need to get as much as I can. And it sounds greedy, but I don’t feel bad taking up a ticket or space, when I enjoy it as much as I do.
Take me through Cowboy Carter. You said you were going to initially see it three times.
Right.
You ended up seeing it how many times? Six?
I saw it six times.
Take me through that mentality — from three, how’d that balloon six?
I knew that I was going to see the first three shows. I had planned with a boyfriend who’s now an ex that was part of this whole process. I was going to go to the first show, the second show, and the third show, and then I was going to be done. But I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn’t probably done. And it’s so funny because my first outfit was pretty homegrown, a just-barely-put-together cowboy hat that I bought at the show. And then by the time I was at the fifth and the sixth show, I had a custom-made gold outfit.
It became this thing where I can’t quite explain how I ended up going to six shows other than it was this snowball rolling downhill.
What kind of tickets did you have? Were they all the same?
I was in the section right by the catwalk. So it was like, Oh shit, I have to go do this againin the same spot. What I would’ve done differently is I would’ve seen it from way up above. I would’ve seen it from cheaper seats.
What was your more expensive ticket?
I mean, honestly, my most expensive ticket was the last show and I paid $2,200. And at that point, it had built so much that there was no way I wasn’t going to not be where I wanted to be. It just was like, “Nope, this is happening.”
Tell me about that. You have amazing tickets. You’re up close…
The last show, I was alone in Club Ho-Down. The amount of friends that I made and the amount of celebrities that I saw — to be in that environment with people that are on your same level and people are screaming and crying and know exactly what’s going to happen. And then when Shaboozey comes out or Jay-Z comes out or Destiny’s Child comes out — I’m getting chills just thinking about it. I can’t explain how I led myself to going to six, but once you’ve got $8,000 on your credit card, what is $12,000?
I — well, $4000 more?
I know.
Did you buy them all at one time or was it after you saw the first two?
I had planned the first three and then I had a friend who I went to New York with and we talked ourselves into going to New York. And then in the back of my mind I was like, “I have to go to the last two shows.”
I don’t regret it. I honestly probably will go to eight for Act III. But I will also be more strategic and I will get a seat that is a lot cheaper for a couple of shows.
Now I’m going to ask you about the painful stuff. So you said if you’re already $8,000 down, what’s $12,000. But did you plan for it? Can you talk me through the financial planning of this?
There wasn’t really any. The breakup that I had happened after my New York show. And so I think my delusional sort of mania kicked in and I was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to spend $800 on an outfit that’s custom-made.” I’m going to go to both shows at the end and just — it got me through a really tough summer, and it was something that I don’t regret.
How does that work on a credit card? You said that you recently paid it off, right? Is that two years later?
It’s a year later. I live in San Francisco. I have a pretty good job, but also I work in education, and I’ve worked in education my whole life. So it was a lot of my interest, I paid a lot of fees, I’m sure, it takes so long to pay it off, and I was adding to it the whole year. I am not good with money. I wish I were. But again, I don’t have aspirations to own property yet, and I don’t have children.
Beyoncé is your big expense of the last couple years.
Yeah, pretty much.
And again, I feel embarrassed about that a little bit because I have friends where one spouse, their entire salary goes to childcare. And I’m like, oh, that sounds not fun.
But think of it this way: that’s so much Beyoncé that you could be experiencing instead of having a kid.
Yeah.
So Act III is rumored. Would you do it again?
Oh, absolutely. Like I said, I’m going to possibly go to, I think, between five and eight shows depending on. And one of my work friends, we talk about what’s happening in the world and we kind of decided that 2026 is Jay-Z’s year.
He has his shows. He has a show on her birthday. So I’m hoping that means the album doesn’t come out until 2027, which means the tour would be 2028, which means I have enough time to save, enough time to put some money away and be a little bit more strategic.
Do you have a limit of how much you’re willing to spend?
On Beyoncé? I think the gay math, the boy math, that I do in my head is if I see it in chunks, it’s not as bad. The first time I looked at the whole thing was yesterday, and I looked at hotels and flights, merch, and tickets. But if I see it in little bits, I’m like, “Well, that’s not that much.” And I don’t think about how it adds up.
If Beyonce was like, “Oh, here’s my last show.” Is there a limit?
Anything up to $5,000 probably if it was a super important show or last show and I had the opportunity to do that. My parents have seen a lot of shows. That’s something sort of that I had grown up with — going to see artists.
And the real problem is Beyoncé has set this financial bar that now I almost feel like I could spend that kind of money on anyone. The fact that I’m seeing Robin in LA for $300, I’m like, “Oh my God, of course I’m going to go to three shows that week.”
Can I ask you, when was the first time you saw Beyoncé?
I mean, this is embarrassing to admit, but it was Renaissance.
Oh my gosh.
I know. And one of my big regrets is not going to see her earlier.
It was 2016, and I just was like, “I can’t afford $1,000.” It’s ridiculous to say that now. And I’ve always been a fan. I had mix tapes in the ’90s with “Say My Name” and all the Destiny’s Child songs, and I’ve always been a fan of hers, but it really kicked into gear at self-titled or Lemonade. And that makes me sound like a fake fan, but that’s not true. It’s just seeing her live, it really brought it to a new level.
I was going to tell you that I saw her when she was touring that album — the “Love on Top” album…
4.
4. I saw her at Barclays and it was only, I want to say, $200 for the lower bowl right off the floor. It’s obviously a lot more now.
I honestly don’t know how some people afford it. I know some people save and save and save to go to one show and they don’t have a credit card or they don’t want to put things on a credit card. I know how privileged I am to have the ability to put something on a credit card, pay it off eventually — I live in the Bay Area and have a job that’s a pretty good job, blah, blah, blah.
For a normie, what you spend on Beyoncé is mind-blowing, but I’m sure there are people that you met at Cowboy Carterthat may have spent a lot more than you, right?
Oh, yeah. There was some video that popped up, I think it was from Renaissance, but it was like, “This is my 26th show.” And Beyoncé read the sign and stepped back a bit. I don’t remember what the exact number was [it was 35]. When I was in the pit at the very last show, it wasn’t abnormal to be where I was, and be like, “I’ve seen her six times.”
So when it comes to the most serious Beyhivers, some may consider you a casual fan?
Yeah. I mean, I’m in it, but I also feel like I’m a person that always goes to a lot of shows, and this is a little bit of a light year for me just because no one huge is touring for me, but she’s coming.
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