Livvy Dunne sizzles in new beach snaps after reigniting her feud with the New York Times
Dunne, 22, had some precious time with her boyfriend during a break in the MLB season for the All-Star game.
The former LSU gymnast shared several pictures of herself with Skenes and their dog, Roux - who appeared to be getting more attention from Dunne than Skenes was.
The MLB pitcher, who plays for the Pittsburgh Pirates, is widely considered to be one of the most talented stars in the game, even at the age of 23.
But this week, it has been Dunne making the headlines as Skenes enjoys some needed downtime at the midway point of the 2025 baseball campaign.
In an interview on the 'What's Your Story?' podcast Dunne repeated a long-standing grievance with the New York Times after posing for a photoshoot with them back in 2022.
Recapping her journey to becoming a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model, Dunne explained: 'It all started because of a hit piece [that] the New York Times wrote about me.
'They came to our gymnastics facility at LSU, took pictures of me. They said, "wear your team-issued attire, put on a leotard," and they took a picture of me standing in front of the beam like any gymnast would and then they blew it up on the screen and put the headline, "Sex Sells".
'Okay well, you just came into the facility and took pictures of me in our team-issued attire and blew it up on a screen. So I was like, well this is crazy. And there was obviously a lot of backlash to the New York Times because of that.
'I decided I was going to put that same picture that they posted and captioned "Sex Sells" on my Instagram story and write "@ The New York Times, is this too much?" Because, come on, you know what you're doing. You just put a picture of me in a leotard for clicks and then caption it "Sex Sells."
'And then people loved that. They were like this is so great because no, it's not too much. You're in your team-issued attire, which is a leotard for gymnasts." [...] There was a lot of positive feedback from that.
'So, Sports Illustrated reached out to my agent. I was so excited about that. That was always a dream of mine. There's some legends and some amazing athletes that have been in Sports Illustrated.'
In May, Dunne, who called time on her athletics career last month, was named as one of four cover stars for SI Swimsuit's 2025 edition after appearing in two previous issues.
In five years at LSU, Dunne became the most-followed and highest-paid female college athlete with over 13 million combined TikTok and Instagram followers and a NIL (name, image and likeness) valuation of $4.1million.
With more time on her hands, Dunne has been at plenty of Pittsburgh Pirates games to cheer on Skenes.
But while he has been a sensation in baseball, his team are struggling and have a 29-59 record so far, which leaves them last by 12 wins in the National League Central.
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Times
a minute ago
- Times
My hair-raising investigation into a Gen Z cult
The idea is absurd. It is my wife's. 'I keep seeing these really young men with moustaches,' she says, planting the seeds of it, one evening. Soon I am seeing them too, downtown and in scruffy Brooklyn. It's a peculiar sight. When I was growing up, moustaches were strictly for tradesmen and grandfathers. Now here they are on the faces of people who barely remember 9/11. Harry Styles starts wearing one. And there are these young dudes who call themselves the East Villains. 'It's a play on East Village residents,' an East Villain aficionado tells me. She is 21, a college student; we're in the garden of a bar in Brooklyn. 'In California, it's Silverlake Men. You have the Silverlake Men and the East Villains. It's a big thing on social media. 'They are these guys that smoke Marlboro Reds, they have hiking carabiners looped in their 501 jean pockets. They have a backwards cap or a frontwards cap, a little bit of a mullet. And these people … will always have a moustache. Always. Bar none.' Does Donald Trump have something to do with this? I ask because whenever something happens now, you have to assume he might be involved. 'I think it goes along with this archetyping, or codification of the idea of James Dean,' the student replies. 'This is my theory: old Hollywood stars, they didn't always have moustaches but the aspirational man, trying to emulate this old Hollywood man, he has to have a moustache … You go for a moustache just to have the facsimile of what is masculine.' Hey, I say to an editor. We should get some old codger in the office to grow a moustache and see if people start treating him as a member of Gen Z. Some guy who is a bit past his prime. 'Good idea,' she says. I stop shaving my upper lip. For about ten days you cannot really tell, except with powerful lighting. 'It's really good,' says one of my son's friends, who has something similar. He is 11. Then I start to glimpse it: a horizon of fur beneath the eye. It gives you the fleeting impression that you are furry all over. This must be what it is like to be a bear. I fear people will treat me differently. Interviewing the actor Kelsey Grammer, I feel obliged to explain that the nostril hedge is just part of an investigation. 'It's a little thin,' he says. 'How many days?' Two weeks. He did not like to mention it, he says. 'I always assume that young men are growing whatever part of their facial hair because that's what they can grow.' By week four, the moustache is in full bloom. 'You've got a mo!' cries an Australian colleague in the office. 'You gotta go and find your mo bros.' I go in search of mo bros on a humid Monday night with James Gallagher, a film-maker and photographer. Alighting in Williamsburg, there are moustaches everywhere. I see five just walking off the subway platform. There's another on the face of a Harvard student named Elio Torres, celebrating his 21st birthday in a beer garden. 'I'm second-generation Latino,' he says. 'It's a little hard to demonstrate that in terms of your physical attitude.' Hence his moustache. It's new. 'I was really thrown off by it,' says his friend Simone Marteo, 21. 'I was like, 'Woah! Are you Orlando?' Which is his dad's name.' In a bar called Alligator Lounge, a tech developer named Brendan Justice, 29, pulls out his phone. 'I'm in a group of men called the Moustache DAO,' he says. It's a Whatsapp group. 'All these men are in crypto,' he says. 'DAO stands for decentralised autonomous organisation. We are all dedicated to advancing moustache-kind.' Brendan's moustache is blond and he has a mullet that spills from his backwards cap — for apparently, these are back in fashion too. A large screen behind him is playing something called Nostalgia TV, with lots of moustaches. There's Hulk Hogan and his bleached walrus bristles; there is Chris Pratt, lavishly whiskered. Members of Moustache DAO post pictures of themselves to the group chat and an AI bot scans them for an evaluation. 'It will give you proof of moustache,' he says. There is a leaderboard charting how often people have given proof. 'The top person has sent their moustache 51 times,' he says. 'I'm at 13.' He looks at mine. 'You should join,' he says. I explain that it is just part of an investigation. Or possibly, a midlife crisis. I cannot quite imagine that anyone would find it attractive. It feels like the defensive pikes of an infantry battalion, repelling all advances. My wife refers to it as 'the chaperone'. But then James, the photographer, tells a story about his girlfriend. She so loves moustaches that he grew one for Valentine's Day. 'Every time I walked into a room, she lit up,' he says. We are by now in a bar called Union Pool, with several luminaries of the moustache movement. One of them is ND Austin, a leader in New York's 'underground drinking' scene who creates pop-up speakeasies. As long as I have known him, he has always had a delicate black moustache that rises at the corners like a smile. 'My experience,' he says, 'since I grew a moustache, is that the people who haven't wanted to kiss me because of the moustache was … far, far outweighed by people who are like: 'Ooohhh.'' I think mine makes me look like a deviant. The other day, delivering a box of coffee to my children's primary school, I caught sight of my moustache in the video screen at the front door. I did not think they should let me in. 'You have a sex-pest moustache!' Austin exclaims. 'One hundred per cent!' 'You do,' concurs his friend Jason Eppink, 41, a bearded artist. Austin says a friend of his had a moustache so fierce that when he went into bars, 'dudes that felt threatened would get into fights with him. He's a total pacifist but he just looked like someone who was about to shiv you', he says. 'His girlfriend made him shave the moustache off. The moment he did that, no problems.' Another of his friends 'has a moustache that makes him look extra sleazy and he works it,' he says. 'He is an international lothario.' This friend arrives. His name is Brendan Burke, 44. 'I think Covid launched a lot of moustaches,' he says. 'You could come out, afterwards, and pretend you always looked this way.' He shows me some photos of earlier models: a handlebar, and then a pencil moustache. The current number, shades of Clark Cable, has a peculiar effect on certain people, he says. 'I go talk to cops, they think I'm on the force,' Brendan says. 'If I put on a suit I can walk into a movie theatre without buying a ticket.' Other men with moustaches nod to him. 'I met someone at a rave in Detroit the other day,' he says. 'We were in the tech booth talking about how well situated each other's moustaches were, to our faces, and what was our whole journey with that.' 'Your journey!' Eppink exclaims. 'Fulfillment!' Austin says. 'You have finally come into your own.' But 'now every freaking person has a moustache', Burke says. 'I used to be different! Now I'm just every other hipster again.' They fall to talking about moustache care. Austin suggests that I mascara my moustache, to give it some oomph. But I think I will get shot of it. If it makes me look any younger, this can only be because it distracts from the other cracks in the painting. It is like wearing a monocle. I take it with me on one last outing, to a book launch in Chelsea. The actress Gina Gershon is there. She was in Cocktail and Showgirls. She has big dark hair and a mischievous half slant to her smile. What do you think of my moustache? I ask. 'If I were a guy, I would have a full beard and moustache and mutton chops,' she says. 'So maybe I'm the wrong person to ask.' I'm just growing it as part of an investigation, I say. 'I think it looks great,' she says. 'I think they make you look … like you are hiding something naughty.' She gives me one of her wicked smiles. And all of a sudden, I start thinking about keeping it.
The Guardian
2 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘What if everyone didn't die?' The queer, Pulitzer-winning, happy-ending Hamlet
When he was still in his 20s and studying for a master's degree in acting, James Ijames was advised to take a swerve away from all things Shakespearean. His tutors thought his southern accent, the product of an upbringing in North Carolina, was not conducive to declaiming Elizabethan verse. Believing them, he did just one professional Shakespeare production in 10 full years of treading the boards. Now Ijames is righting that old wrong, although he does not see it quite that way. Fat Ham, his latest drama, is based on Hamlet and features a queer protagonist called Juicy, who is commanded by the ghost of his murdered father to avenge his death. Significantly, Juicy hails from a Black American family in North Carolina. 'The thing I kept hearing over and over,' he says, 'was that my regionalism – the slowness of my southern accent – would make it difficult for me to do Shakespeare. I did avoid it for those reasons. That's a little bit of what's in this. I wanted to take this thing I was told I couldn't access and see if I could make it work for me.' It worked all right. Fat Ham was feted on Broadway, winning a Pulitzer prize and amassing five Tony award nominations. Next month, the play is coming to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon for its European premiere. Ijames, a playwright with more than 15 dramas under his belt, conceived the idea eight years ago, as he gravitated back to Shakespeare. An easy-going presence with a calm, donnish air, Ijames now makes a robust case for his right to Shakespeare. 'I was raised in a Black Southern Baptist church that reads the St James Bible every Sunday,' he says, speaking via Zoom. 'So I grew up reading Elizabethan English. Yet I was told the way I spoke would prevent me from being able to do that, when I had seen people speak this language with ease and eloquence my whole life. It just rocked my world, at a later age, to realise it belonged to me. So it was a real revelation working on this play.' Ijames has not only embraced Shakespeare but played fast and loose with this most definitive of his tragedies. There are new names, rearranged storylines, with most of the big soliloquies written out. 'I can't compete with those,' he explains. 'I can't be in the room with 'To be or not to be'. That existential crisis won't look that way in my characters.' It's a bold move, not least because of an unconventional programme in the Oregon Shakespeare festival not so long ago, with plays including references to slavery and non-binary actors cast in various roles. Nataki Garrett, the festival's artistic director, received death threats. 'I remember that happening,' says Ijames, 'and thinking, 'This is insane.'' Yet, he points out, Shakespeare hardly wrote from scratch: he took huge liberties with his source material, recycling older stories, borrowing from history. The 'almost scriptural quality' some attach to his texts is not something Shakespeare would have endorsed, Ijames believes. 'He was trying to evoke the audience's imagination because he knew that's where the play actually exists.' Acting, for Ijames, was a circuitous way into writing. In 2001, he says, 'they weren't really taking young people into playwriting programmes. So I went to grad school for acting. But I wrote the entirety of my career, in dressing rooms, wherever, until I'd built up enough work.' Learning about writing through acting sounds rather Shakespearean, I suggest. 'Yes,' says Ijames. 'I don't pretend to be as earth-shattering a writer as he was, but his curiosities are very similar to mine.' Evidently so: Fat Ham is warmer and more comic than Hamlet – but at its core, it is a story about fathers, sons and the cycle of violence triggered by the drive for vengeance. Except that Fat Ham's antihero struggles against the violent masculinity his father represents. 'It's perennial for me as a writer to ask, 'What does masculinity mean?' 'What does the performance of masculinity do?'' One reason he is so defined by this theme, he explains, is because he shares a name with his father. 'I'm a 'junior' – so there's a kind of ownership, an expectation of legacy, that I've lived with my whole life. As an artist, I'm preoccupied with disrupting: this notion of how a man is supposed to act at any given moment.' He wants to explore what lies beneath the ideal of masculinity that young people are fed – an ideal that requires them to stifle many components of their emotional being. 'It takes time,' says Ijames, 'to bring that stuff back to life.' Alongside Juicy in Fat Ham, there is Larry (based on Laertes) who feels a closeted queer passion for Juicy. Shame and homophobia shape their trajectories. 'Many times,' says Ijames, 'homophobia is about not wanting to face parts of yourself. I'm not one of those folks who say you're homophobic because you're actually gay – but I do think you are homophobic because you think that if you get too close to a man's body, then your body might betray you.' Ijames grew up in a large family, in the small town of Bessemer City. His father worked in truck manufacturing ('He's retired military – that type') while his mother taught elementary school ('She wanted us to be surrounded by art'). What was it like growing up queer in this household, in this corner of the south? 'I wasn't in a family that was like, 'Oh, you're gay, get out of here, you're the worst.' They said, 'Just don't get in trouble.'' And the masculinity in his family contained a 'softness', something he puts down to it being mostly comprised of women. 'They were such engines of the family that it changed us. I remember thinking I should be elegant because one of my uncles was very elegant.' What about the greater forces around him, such as the Baptist church? He tells an instructive story about a late family member called Thomas Calvin, who was a theologian. As Ijames's uncle, he believed a Christian had a simple duty: to make the world a better place. 'And that is my framework for Christianity.' Although Ijames has witnessed – and experienced – intense homophobia in churches, he still takes moral direction from the 'social justice aspect of the teachings of Jesus'. Given the changes that have swept America under Donald Trump, it is hard to escape 'strongman' notions of masculinity. Has it ever felt more toxic, more in crisis? 'Well,' says Ijames, 'that's a thing a play can't fix.' He adds, in his even way, that masculinity is hardly one single thing. 'It's a constellation of stuff. I don't feel safer with these strongmen, so what is the strength we're talking about? I don't feel more protected. I don't feel like we're somehow more powerful. I just feel like anxious people – and I'm an anxious person – are being anxious with each other.'All those alternative versions of manhood are there in Fat Ham, rubbing alongside darker elements. But there is playfulness and exuberance, too. Its characters do not seem as villainous as Shakespeare's and the ending might even be described as happy. Is Ijames deliberately creating a state that is good out of Shakespeare's rotten one? 'I was very much doing that. I was curious about what happens if we spend time figuring out what paradise looks like. What if everyone didn't die at the end? What if everyone had a place to live, enough to eat. These are questions about civilisation.' There is violence in Fat Ham and it seems implicitly bound to race and US history, but Ijames does not get into cycles of inherited violence within some Black communities. Instead, he goes down another route. 'I don't write that because I don't know how to be inside that. Joy is a thing I know in excess. It's one of the tricks of being an actor: you understand what offers pleasure to the audience because you have to do it with your whole body. I think marginalised people in general, and Black Americans in particular, are miraculous. I think we should party once in a while.' Fat Ham is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, from 15 August until 13 September
Daily Mail
2 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Kennedy fans have mixed reaction to latest images of Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette for new movie
There is a new movie coming out about the Kennedys. American Love Story will follow JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy's whirlwind romance as they became a power couple then tabloid fodder. The couple tragically passed away in a plane crash in 1999 when she was 33 and he was 38 but there is still massive intrigue about the two. Sarah Pidgeon, 29, is playing Carolyn in the new project. On Tuesday a new look at Sarah as Carolyn was shared with mixed reviews on if she nailed the look. Some fans on Reddit said she was 'spot on with those big eyes' while others felt her hair was not 'blonde enough' to play the glam queen of New York. Many wondered if Sarah was wearing a wig or if she dyed her hair blonde. The movie premieres in February 2026 Pidgeon was seen filming on the street in New York City. The star wore a black turtleneck with slacks and a black purse over her shoulder. Her long blonde hair was worn down in a casual style as she had on brown eye makeup and red lipstick on. Her bails were short as she did not appear to have her wedding rings on. The star was coming out of the subway exit in the midtown area of Manhattan. Carolyn was a fashion publicist who worked for Calvin Klein until her 1996 marriage to JFK Jr. The couple, along with her older sister Lauren, died in a plane crash off the coast of Martha's Vineyard in 1999. Bessette was born in White Plains, New York and had two older sisters, twins Lauren and Lisa. The star with the French background attended Boston University's School of Education, graduating in 1988 with a degree in elementary education. Bessette briefly attempted a modeling career, but it did not pan out. On Tuesday a new look at Sarah as Carolyn was shared with mixed reviews on if she nailed the look During her career at Calvin Klein, she went from being a saleswoman to becoming the director of publicity for the company's flagship store in Manhattan. Then she worked with Klein's high-profile clients like Annette Bening and Diane Sawyer. Bessette first met Kennedy in 1992, while he was dating actress Daryl Hannah. Bessette and Kennedy began dating in 1994, she then moved into Kennedy's Tribeca loft in the summer of 1995, and the couple became engaged later that year. Kennedy and Bessette wed on September 21, 1996 on the remote Georgia island of Cumberland. The couple honeymooned in Turkey. She got a ton of media attention and there were comparisons to her mother-in-law, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Her long blonde hair was worn down in a casual style as she had on brown eye makeup and red lipstick on. Her bails were short as she did not appear to have her wedding rings on. The star was coming out of the subway exit in the midtown area of Manhattan There was talk the Kennedys were experiencing marital problems and contemplating divorce in the months preceding their deaths. In his book, The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family for 150 Years, Klein claimed that the couple's problems reportedly stemmed from Bessette-Kennedy's difficulty dealing with the media attention. Bessette-Kennedy died on July 16, 1999, along with her husband and older sister Lauren, when the light plane John Jr. was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of Martha's Vineyard. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the probable cause of the crash was: 'The pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation. Factors in the accident were haze and the dark night.' After a five-day search, the wreckage was discovered in the late afternoon of July 21. The bodies were recovered from the ocean floor by Navy divers and taken by motorcade to the county medical examiner's office, where autopsies revealed that the crash victims had died upon impact. All tested negative for alcohol and drugs. The new movie has several other Kennedy characters in it. Jackie O - also known as Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis - is being portrayed by Naomi Watts, 56. Onassis was a writer, book editor, and socialite who served as the first lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963, as the wife of President John F. Kennedy. Jackie died in 1994 at the age of 64 in New York City. Blonde actress Watts sported a brown wig as she transformed into Jackie. Watts was filming a scene in a park on Monday afternoon in New York City. Also in the movie is Paul Kelly, who will play Jackie's son John F. Kennedy Jr. Grace Gummer, who is playing Jackie's daughter Caroline Kennedy, was also seen playing in the park with two little girls that are playing Caroline's daughters Rose and Tatiana. JFK Jr's ex-girlfriend Daryl Hannah is being played by Dree Hemingway, 37, whose mother is actress Mariel Hemingway. She gained attention playing the lead in director Sean Baker's feature Starlet. Dree has since become known for her high-profile fashion campaigns and her extensive work in independent film.
