What two packs of weed gummies taught me about America
I stepped into a Manhattan dispensary not long ago and left with a sense of uncertainty about the morality of pinball, going to the circus on Sundays, the rise and fall of transgender rights and the legality of dancing to the national anthem.
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Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Melinda French Gates shares favorite interview from season two of her YouTube series
Melinda French Gates has opened up about season two of her YouTube series, Moments That Make Us. The series follows the philanthropist, 60, as she interviews famous women to discuss the biggest moments of their lives. In an interview with People published Wednesday, French Gates revealed highlights from the new slate of guests. Although she compared picking her favorite interview to choosing between her children, French Gates admitted how much she loved talking to Robin Roberts. 'I always feel like I don't get to see her enough,' she said. 'We have a great connection.' She specifically recalled one moment during the episode where Roberts was talking about her last moment with her mother before she died, as Roberts praised French Gates for making her cry. 'Wow you're — Oprah, is that you? You're getting me to cry,' the Good Morning America anchor said during the episode. 'I mean, what do you say? It's just really, really nice,' the philanthropist said looking back on that moment. 'I have a world of respect for Oprah and who she is and what she's done in society, particularly with her authenticity. So to me that was a huge compliment.' French Gates also mentioned which interviews from this season left her pleasantly surprised. 'The person that I interviewed this time that I had never met before was Jamie Lee Curtis,' French Gates said. 'I mean, obviously I followed her work, but you never know how you're going to connect with somebody.' The Freakier Friday actor 'came in with so much energy and authenticity,' according to French Gates, and the two ended up holding hands by the end of the episode. One particular piece of advice she remembered hearing from the Oscar winner was that your life is based on a couple of seconds that were never seen coming, and the choices made during those moments are what shape our future. 'I had never thought of it that way,' French Gates said, noting that she planned to pass along that advice to her children. In addition to Curtis, French Gates also reflected on talking with Serena Williams about body image. 'I think most women don't realize that all of us struggle with some form of body issue,' she told People. 'You might not like your arms or your legs or your hips or whatever. And here she is, just this incredibly strong, powerful woman on the court. And yet, like me, she's got to think about, 'Okay, you show up at something and everybody else's a size 4, and that's not us, and there's no costume that fits us.''
Washington Post
a day ago
- Washington Post
Her fertility struggles were gutting. Then came her husband's infidelity.
Chloé Caldwell walked through fire to write 'Trying.' Not literally, of course. But how else to describe working in a boutique that sells 'life changing pants' while scrimping and saving for a baby who never arrived, suffering through myriad attempts to get pregnant with a husband who, it turns out, had been blowing thousands of dollars on sex workers? Fire is what Caldwell endured, and fire is what her fifth book became. Like her recently reissued novella 'Women,' a cult classic, 'Trying' traces her queer liberation with breezy candor. 'Trying' was forged in her failure to get pregnant despite taking letrozole and Clomid to increase her egg supply for repeated insertions of her husband's sperm, and despite obsessing about 'digestion, sugar, alcohol, warm food, room temperature water, caffeine, meditation, antidepressants, yoga, walking' and whatever else her doctors, acupuncturists, therapists, friends and culture instructed her to do: 'the herbs, the supplements, and everyone's favorite—putting my legs up on the wall after sex.' Constantly optimizing her body to prepare for conception, she took to googling the ages of pregnant celebrities and avoiding birth announcements on social media, wallowing in the public disappointment of her own efforts: 'I thought it would go like this: I'd tell people I was trying, and six months later I'd be pregnant, and everyone would see that I get what I want when I want it.' Caldwell was foolhardy enough to chronicle her life in real time, which led to stellar moments like depicting her book editor receiving news of a spousal betrayal that would reshape the trajectory of what she had pitched as a memoir about struggling to conceive a child. Instead, 'Trying' becomes more about surrendering to the truth of her marriage's implosion while embracing her own infinite potential outside of timeworn heterosexual norms. Whether in her memoir 'The Red Zone' or her essay collections 'I'll Tell You in Person' and 'Legs Get Led Astray,' Caldwell has built her literary career by disclosing intimate details, from a young life that veered through dabbling in hard drugs, casual sex, bars and indie bookstores to a midlife grappling with premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Her writing slaps, and readers like it. As a teacher of writing, she is practiced enough to subvert common tropes, like the tendency to interweave themes from nature to lend gravitas to a series of personal disclosures. 'If I were a different kind of writer, I'd make this bird's nest a motif, a metaphor, and return to it every twenty pages or so,' she writes. 'But I don't feel like it.' Instead, Caldwell returned to the petty indignities of her retail job. Try selling pants for a living, listening to women deride their bodies in the fitting rooms while you count the hours until you can write. Then you'd see what you're really made of. Showing up for your own life can be harder than it looks, particularly when you had other plans for yourself. Having presumed she'd give birth to her own children, Caldwell received bad news so many times that 'I don't flinch. I'm used to not getting pregnant. It's my normal, resting state.' After she and her husband broke up, Caldwell began a series of queer relationships that didn't end well but also got her through a 'summer of sure' (as opposed to a 'year of yes'). Ignoring the rules about what she should do, whom she should date and how she should write, she reflects on the deferential choices she had made before her divorce, such as accepting his edict that they not adopt, though she had 'always been interested in non-biological bonds and adored being a stepmom.' To summarize: During their marriage, her husband insisted she only have children they could conceive together, despite the corporeal, emotional and financial duress caused by that decision. A touring musician, he tasked her with parenting while he was cheating on her, only to forbid contact with his daughter after his expensive sex and drug addictions came to light. How to invoke the stolen love of a stepdaughter? It would be easy for 'Trying' to descend into revenge, but Caldwell handles her grief with the detached, informed expertise of a clinician, reporting on her own experience with clarity and without bitterness. 'Other women have similar stories to mine. Prostitutes and cocaine. It's not uncommon.' Having left her husband's abuses out of 'The Red Zone,' Caldwell does not dwell on them in 'Trying,' instead chronicling what happens as she relinquished her hold on a predetermined future. Developing aversions to sperm and fertility tests, she patched her life back together with dates, sex, travel and work only to be criticized for a speedy recovery. 'It's funny that people think they know my healing process,' she writes of a journey she expects to last a lifetime. Certain to produce many more books, Caldwell shows readers how to endure catastrophe with aplomb; there can be no better recommendation for literature. Kristen Millares Young is the author of the award-winning novel 'Subduction' and 'Desire Lines — Essays,' forthcoming from Red Hen Press on Oct. 6, 2026.
Fox News
2 days ago
- Fox News
If this 'TikTok creation' is real for you, you might be with the wrong man: Kat Timpf
Fox News contributor Kat Timpf dissects women's complaints about 'emotional labor' from dating on 'The Story.'
