BREAKING NEWS Beloved HGTV host Loren Ruch dead at 55: Emmy award winner passes away after battle with cancer
HGTV Content Chief Loren Ruch has reportedly died at the age of 55 after a battle with cancer.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ruch had been battling acute myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer that starts in the bone marrow.
During his time at HGTV, Ruch was an enthusiastic and well-known co-host for HGTV House Party, and was a producer for and HGTV Dream Home and HGTV Green Home, among other titles.
In recent years, as the head of content at the network, Ruch managed the programming of a number of hit shows, like My Lottery Dream Home, Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge, and Celebrity IOU.
The beloved host had been a part of the company since 2008, and was named as the head of content in January 2023.
Before that, he also had served as the VP of development and programming for HGTV, DIY Network and Great American Country.
Ruch was an accomplished producer even before his time at HGTV, working as the senior producer of morning news shows Good Day LA and Good Day Live.
He was the recipient of five Emmy Awards for his outstanding work.
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The Independent
17 minutes ago
- The Independent
Luigi Mangione, Diddy, and SBF walk into a jail: Wild musical about UnitedHealthcare assassination debuts in San Francisco
Truly excellent satire is like great delivery pizza: it should arrive right on time, nearly too hot to touch. That's certainly the case for Luigi: the Musical, a satirical comedy about — and no, you are not hallucinating — accused UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione, which premiered Friday in Mangione's former home of San Francisco. Standing in line at the Taylor Street Theater, there was a palpable crackle of excitement, and even some trepidation, in the air. After all, it was a musical. About Luigi. The guy who (allegedly) gunned down CEO Brian Thompson in broad daylight outside a Manhattan hotel in December, using a ghost gun and bullets engraved with the words 'deny,' 'depose,' and 'delay,' thought to be a reference to Mangione's struggles with the healthcare industry while treating a debilitating back injury. He hasn't even gone to trial to face his various state and federal charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty. How in the world would Luigi pull this off? And should they have even tried? Plenty, it seemed, wanted to see the show from creators Nova Bradford, Caleb Zeringue, Arielle Johnson, and André Margatini go for it, come what may. When the musical was announced in April, it rapidly sold out and made headlines around the world. As the playbill notes, the show was front page news in Iceland before it had ever been performed. By the time the June 13 premier rolled around, Mangione's legend had only grown, though his meaning as a national figure remains hotly debated. The Trump administration wants to give the accused CEO-killer the death penalty, while in other quarters, the 26-year-old has become an anti-corporate folk hero, a meme object, and even a sex symbol. He's reportedly been deluged with fan mail in jail, and he's already been subject of multiple documentaries. In the crowd at Luigi, opinions ran the gamut. Tom, who asked to use only his first name, said making a musical out of Mangione's story was a 'fabulous criticism of the issues in society that lead people to commit violent acts, all things that bother me.' Mary Lukanuski, who came to see the show from nearby Oakland, was more ambivalent. 'Street assassinations are never a good development,' she said. 'That said, he is the avatar of very understandable rage at healthcare in the U.S.' A nearby theatergoer leaned in and added that healthcare should not be for profit in America. Another patron, Kyle Reiley, of San Francisco, said, 'He was justified in his actions.' The show was landing in a city and a state alive with militancy. For the previous week, thousands turned out to protest immigration raids in Los Angeles, prompting federal officials to send in the Marines and the National Guard in response, despite objections from state authorities. The crisis prompted former San Francisco mayor and current California Governor Gavin Newsom to become the most prominent face of the Democratic opposition to the Trump administration, suing the White House in federal court over the Guard deployment and daring Trump's border czar to arrest him. In Newsom's old stomping grounds, meanwhile, over 150 have been arrested in anti-ICE protests that at one point shut down a San Francisco immigration court. The show itself had a police car in front, a security guard with a metal detector wand, and signal-blocking bags for audience members' cell phones, where were required to be turned off. We were clearly in for a happening. Things only got more heightened from there. The show takes the actual fact that crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced music mogul Sean 'Diddy' Combs, and Mangione all overlapped for a time at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center and runs riot with the possibilities. There's a tap dance duet. Margatini is hilarious as an insufferable SBF, particularly in the song, 'Bay Area Baby,' where the exec, the child of Stanford professors in real life, sings, 'I'm a Palo Alto nepo baby extraordinaire / and if you say something is illegal I just don't care,' or a during cringy attempt to bribe a guard with a pitch to 'take the concept of incarceration and tokenize it.' The hometown crowd, all of whom probably had a crypto bro yelling in their ear at a bar at some point, lapped it up. Meanwhile, Diddy, played by Janeé Lucas, struts and shimmies around the stage with an orange prison jump suit and a wolf smile, entering with a twirl to show the mogul's name embroidered on the back, in sequins no less. Luigi also gamely revels in its own position in the Mangione-verse. At one point, as the Ivy League grad reads his mail, his lawyer informs him a musical is being made about his story. 'What sick f***s would buy tickets to that?' Mangione, played by Jonny Stein, wonders. Meanwhile, the playbill, in its legal disclaimer section, urges anyone who sues the show to 'spell our names right in the headlines.' For all the outrageous antics, the show seems to veer sincere when dealing with Mangione himself, who wrestles not only with the broken healthcare system, but the fact that the action he is accused of doing in protest did little but land him in prison. Right when you think the musical might be pure assassination apologia — there's a scene where Mangione and a prison guard, played by Zeringue, bond over both getting insurance rejections — well, Luigi pulls the rug out from that too, like any madcap satire should. The final number sees a shirtless Magione carried, figure skater style, in a cloud of smoke, as he sings, gleefully oblivious to the irony, of his dream of escaping prison and making sure 'every single human being's life has worth / so I'll shoot everybody until there's peace on Earth.' It got a standing ovation. Once the cheers faded, and the fifty-some people in attendance filtered out, the serious questions Luigi posed through its haze of absurdity remained. What should be done in the face of systems with major problems? How far is far enough, and what lines shouldn't be crossed? In the cool San Francisco night, many of those problems instantly were manifest. The theater is in the Tenderloin, a small neighborhood of highly concentrated, extreme poverty and homelessness. (It's where conservatives like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis go when they try to paint blue cities as liberal hellscapes.) Multiple people slept on the sidewalk just outside the venue, as well-heeled theatre-goers waited for their Ubers home. Normally, some might've taken self-driving Waymo taxis back to their apartments, but the company had temporarily dialed back service in San Francisco because Los Angeles protesters kept setting the modified Jaguar SUVs on fire. The day after the premier, thousands were set march through San Francisco as part of Saturday anti-Trump ' No Kings' rallies taking place across the country. Luigi, at its core, is a show about the relation between individuals and the system. To see the system at work means becoming a witness, and becoming a witness means being, on some level, implicated in the system, for good or for ill. ' Luigi: the Musical is now part of the spectacle,' Nova Bradford writes of the show in a director's note. 'And so are you.' The same goes for politics. We are all part of the spectacle of being alive in 2025. So what are we going to do about it?
Telegraph
23 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Literary star Catherine Lacey: ‘The editor saw my draft and worried about libel laws'
As I sit on the patio of a French restaurant in Brooklyn, the beautiful and intimidatingly tall sommelier comes over, and tells me that there'll shortly be a reading in the bar. I ask who's reading. 'A novelist!' she says, beaming. I decline, and resist telling her that not only do I have my own novelist on the way, but it's Catherine Lacey. It would be easy to be awed by Lacey; many people in the literary world are. She has only just turned 40, but she's already on her fifth book, the first four having earned critical acclaim; her second, The Answers (2017), in which an ill young woman becomes a narcissistic actor's hired girlfriend, is being adapted for television by the director Darren Aronofsky. She was named one of Granta's best young American novelists in 2017; she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Lacey, in other words, has scored the rare hat-trick, among leading young writers, of accolades, prolificity and cultural cachet (or to put it more bluntly, coolness). Her extraordinary new work, The Möbius Book, is a tête-bêche, meaning that it's formed of two autonomous though related parts. You can start reading from either end, and when you get to the middle, you flip and restart. In one direction, it's non-fiction, a relatively straightforward chronological catalogue of the mental disarray that followed the end of a relationship between Lacey and her partner of several years, known as 'The Reason', a man whose behaviour is portrayed as coercive, controlling and obliterating. Lacey doesn't use the word 'abusive' in her account, but readers are bound to ask whether it's applicable. The Reason's behaviour is depicted as imbued with rage. He has a tantrum when Lacey wants to leave a light on in the stairwell for a female friend sleeping in their guest room. When Lacey looks at her phone during a film he had wanted her to watch, he punches a wall so hard that he breaks a part of it. He habitually slaps her on the backside – ' playfully (his word)' – despite her voicing her dislike of it, and then is outraged at how she reacts. Until their 2021 break-up, Lacey had been in the relationship for six years. The end came when Lacey received an email from her partner, who was in another part of their house, to tell her he'd met another woman the previous week and so was ending the relationship. She writes: 'This isn't what I want so much as what you want, he told me, and when I said it wasn't what I wanted he simply said yes, it was.' 'The first chapter of the non-fiction,' she explains to me today, 'is exactly what I wrote in the bedroom as it [the break-up] happened. I was like: 'This is what's f------ going on.' And I didn't edit that part, I think, at all.' She wrote the non-fiction part of The Möbius Book first. The fictional part introduces us to two friends, Marie and Edie, who meet around Christmas and discuss the painful fallout of their failed relationships. Across the hall, a substance that may or may not be blood emerges from beneath a neighbour's door. Why the two-part form? 'I showed the non-fiction to my agent,' Lacey says, 'and she was really happy with it... I'm close to my agent and she was p----- off for me [about the relationship], so I think she was happy to see a book that was this fire-pit of p------off-ness.' Not everyone was satisfied. 'My editor told me that with memoirs, because libel laws are different, sometimes things that can be published safely and legally in the US can't really be published in the UK. And I was thinking: my very angry book, yes, there might be things in there... 'But I also started thinking: why did I have to write about this thing? Why does it have to be non-fiction? I started thinking about rewriting the whole work as fiction, in a different shape. Or maybe I could publish it in the UK as a novel and in the US as non-fiction, but give it the exact same title. I think, now, that the libel issue was an excuse for me not to publish the book as it was. There was nothing untrue, but it wasn't fully right.' Lacey wrote a piece on Substack last year about adding to The Möbius Book, late in the editing process, a scene between herself and The Reason that she had tried, in real life, to forget. The passage, she tells me, describes him observing that Lacey had gained a negligible amount of weight, and providing her with a workout plan and guidance on what to cut out of her diet. 'He was concerned,' she writes. 'He didn't want this to begin a pattern.' 'His logic would be there,' Lacey says now, 'and I would go along with it because it was rhetorically very powerful. That was one of the details [where] I was kind of sickened by the idea of it being published – partially because of my own self-betrayal in accepting that from him, and then the idea of my whole family knowing it. I got kind of mangy for a few years. There was nervousness around my basic mental and physical health. And here was more evidence that when I had thought I was doing fine, I was not.' Lacey was born in 1985, and raised devoutly religious in Mississippi. She wanted to be a preacher as a child. When she began to lose faith in God at the age of 15, the shock took away her appetite. Though Pew (2020), her third novel, was also concerned with faith – a mercurial stranger with no memory arrives in a devout town and reflects its contradiction back – The Möbius Book is her most direct addressing of the subject so far. It investigates faith in many different forms: cycles of existence; the impossibility of conclusion when it comes to portraying a life. Why return to the topic? 'I've been trying to write about faith for as long as I've been an adult,' she says. 'But I think I needed to get a lot further away from the period of time [in which] I stopped believing in order to see it. I needed to have my metaphysical understanding of the world changed a few times. 'I needed to stop being so p----- off and self-righteous about the culture I grew up in. And I needed to have experiences that humbled me again out of my just-as-dogmatic atheism. What was going on in my life in my mid- to late-30s changed the way I saw the past. It uncovered things I'd been unable to look at or understand.' How does she think of romance now? 'I see my friends as angels sent from God, the finest human beings to ever walk the planet. And I have seen them at their worst, but I still think that. There's something kind of Christian there – the idea that you should treat everybody like they're Jesus. That radical idea of Christianity is part of what I connected to as a child. I felt very odd.' She smiles as she describes what an ideal, rather than realistic, rendering of Christian faith might look like, a faith where the radical offering of acceptance and love was actually universalised: 'In my Southern town, I didn't fit in, and I was always attracted to this beautiful idea of that Christianity. All these people say they're Christian. I'm like, if they can only see it, right? We can be in paradise.'
Daily Mail
30 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Trace Cyrus slams ex-GF Brenda Song for allegedly using fake blood to feign pregnancy and illnesses
Trace Cyrus has accused his ex, Brenda Song, of stealing from him and pretending to be pregnant. In a series of shocking social media posts Wednesday, the older brother of Miley Cyrus said she used fake blood to fool he and his mother Tish into thinking she was expecting. Trace claimed the 37-year-old former Disney Channel star 'stole thousands of dollars from me and faked multiple pregnancies [and] lied about being terminally ill to make my family and I think that she had breast cancer [and a] brain tumor.' Trace, who has more than 680,000 followers online, continued that 'it was all a lie.' Trace said Song 'was humiliated to ever show her face around my family again once we figured it out and my mom confronted her and called her out on all of it.' He added of Song: 'Oh, she also faked an abortion with fake blood covering the bathroom floor in my mom and I register her to the OB/GYN - that's when all the lies started unraveling and we realized it was fake.' Trace has previously said of their relationship, which ran on and off from 2010 till 2017: 'She inspired me to write countless songs and was such an important part of my life. 'I will always cherish songs I have … to remind me of our crazy 7 years together.' Trace later said on Instagram Stories that Song claimed she got the brain tumor removed by the 'best surgeon in Chicago.' Trace added: 'She didn't realize we were catching on to her lies.' Dating life: After courting Song, Trace - pictured in 2020 - was in a relationship with Taylor Lauren Sanders from 2018 to 2020
