Hannah Giorgis

No matter how much has changed over the past decade, one thing remains true: Saturday Night Live never brings in Dave Chappelle for a filler episode. The comedian has now hosted the show four times in just more than eight years, each stint coming on the heels of a pivotal election. Last night, in the SNL installment preceding President-Elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, Chappelle opened his monologue by detailing his attempts to turn down the daunting gig this time around.

On Abbott Elementary, celebrity sightings are as common as a back-to-school flu outbreak or drama with the PTA. The show’s Season 2 premiere kicked off with the spunky second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (played by Quinta Brunson) trying to surprise Abbott students with an appearance from “the only celebrity that matters”: Gritty, the internet-famous mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers.

Five years ago, at the 2020 Golden Globes, the comedian Ricky Gervais issued a scathing critique of celebrity activism. During his opening monologue as the ceremony’s host, Gervais took attendees to task for their apparent hypocrisy: “You say you’re woke, but the companies you work for—I mean, unbelievable,” he said, pointing out how Apple TV+ shows are “made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.

By the time Martha Stewart rose to fame, family life in the United States looked very different than it had during her childhood. American mothers had entered the workforce en masse, and when Stewart’s first book was published, in 1982, many women were no longer instructing their daughters on the finer points of homemaking fundamentals like cooking meals from scratch or hosting holiday gatherings.

Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, the premiere of the comedy juggernaut’s 50th season, started with a battle of vibes. The lengthy cold open ping-ponged between campaign rallies for the two main presidential candidates, turning first to Vice President Kamala Harris (played by Maya Rudolph). “Well, well, well.

When Jean Smart stepped onto the Emmys stage last night to accept the award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, the six-time Emmy winner took a cue from Deborah Vance, the veteran comedian she plays on Hacks. Almost immediately, Smart told a joke: “It’s very humbling, it really is. And I appreciate this, because I just don’t get enough attention.

In 1957, Ladies’ Home Journal printed a letter from a reader, identified solely as “Registered Nurse,” imploring the publication to “investigate the tortures that go on in modern delivery rooms.” She cited examples of the “sadism” she’d witnessed in an unnamed Chicago hospital: women restrained with cuffs and steel clamps; an obstetrician operating without anesthetic.

Preparing a birth plan requires considering the many things that could go wrong during childbirth—or, in the best-case scenario of everything proceeding as normal, how you might attempt to mitigate earth-shattering pain. In Babes, a new comedy about two best friends navigating pregnancy and the delirium of postpartum life, one woman is determined to approach her birth plan differently.

During Nickelodeon’s golden era, the network captivated young viewers by introducing them to an impressive roster of comedic talent—who happened to be kids, just like them. Starting in the mid-1990s, actors such as Amanda Bynes, Kenan Thompson, and Ariana Grande became household names, as popular children’s shows including All That, Drake & Josh, and Zoey 101 helped propel Nickelodeon to astronomical ratings.

Ramy Youssef has spent much of his career mining heartfelt humor from experiences that straddle the sacred and the profane. So it was no surprise that the actor, writer, and comedian opened last night’s Saturday Night Live monologue with an amusingly wide-ranging celebration of worship: “This is an incredibly spiritual weekend,” he said. “We’re in the holy month of Ramadan. Tomorrow is Easter. And yesterday, Beyoncé released a new album.

Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier
The steel industry was already collapsing by the time the photographer and visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier was born, in 1982. Like many Rust Belt communities, her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, has suffered both economic and environmental distress: Thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, but chemicals from the steel plants still pollute Braddock’s skies.
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Nearly 13 years after the final episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, it’s easy to forget just how vicious the public scrutiny of Winfrey’s body was during her talk show’s decades-long run. But those memories haven’t left Winfrey, and they take center stage in her new prime-time special, Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution.

Last night, Bradley Cooper basked in the warmth of an adoring audience. It didn’t happen at the 96th Academy Awards, where his film Maestro had been nominated in several categories—and ultimately went home winless. Instead, at the beginning of the latest Abbott Elementary episode, which aired immediately after the Oscars, Cooper sauntered into a Philadelphia classroom’s show-and-tell at the behest of a student who excitedly introduced him as “a famous person I saw outside.

Nearly 20 years ago, during one of many family trips back to Ethiopia, I spent months wandering through the sprawling capital city. All summer, it seemed, the drivers and cyclists of Addis Ababa were blasting the Ethiopian pop star Teddy Afro’s “Promise,” an infectious, reggae-inflected ode more often referred to by the name of the musician it lionizes: “Bob Marley.

Designing a Super Bowl halftime performance is, in many ways, an exercise in sacrificial concision: Artists must whittle decades of songs into a crowd-friendly, roughly 13-minute reprieve from athletics and multimillion-dollar commercials. It’s no wonder that many sets end up feeling like lackluster interruptions of the main events.
But during tonight’s Super Bowl LVIII halftime show, the veteran R&B singer Usher breathed life into the annual musical diversion.

One of the first presenters of Monday’s 75th Emmy Awards responded to a standing ovation by gently mocking the audience. As the crowd cheered, the actor Christina Applegate added some wry humor to her expression of gratitude. “Thank you so much. Oh my god, you’re totally shaming me with disability by standing up,” she said. Applegate, who has multiple sclerosis and walked onto the stage with a cane, continued: “It’s fine. Body not by Ozempic. Okay, let’s go!”
But the audience continued to clap.

The renowned television producer Norman Lear, who died yesterday at 101, pursued his craft with an assiduous fervor throughout his seven decades in the entertainment industry. But when I interviewed him back in 2020, for a story that focused in part on his role in ushering in prominent Black television shows of the 1970s, Lear characterized himself as an enthusiastic viewer above all. “My primary role has been to have a great time!” he said, with a laugh.

The first Saturday Night Live episode since the end of the months-long writers’ strike started with a somber message from the series alum Pete Davidson.

“Out here I spent my early childhood in a wild state of happiness,” the Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair writes of growing up by the water, “stretched out under the almond trees fed by brine, relishing every fish eye like precious candy, my toes dipped in the sea’s milky lapping.”Born, in her words, “just beyond the margins of the postcard idea of Jamaica,” Sinclair has been publishing poetry about her island since she was 16.

In the 1989 surrealist satire Chameleon Street, two Black men bicker after one says that he prefers women with light skin and “good hair.” After being criticized for the comment, the man makes a self-deprecating joke: “I’m a victim, brotha. I’m a victim of 400 years of conditioning. The Man has programmed my conditioning. Even my conditioning has been conditioned.

If you’ve watched a Netflix original in the past few years, you might recognize the comedian Michelle Buteau as the platform’s punchiest voice of reason. At the beginning of the 2019 breakup comedy Someone Great, Buteau’s character delivers a brisk self-esteem boost to the film’s protagonist, whom she encounters as a crying stranger on a subway platform: “Why he won’t try? Look at you with your pretty teeth and shit.

Nothing about Barbara Costello’s favorite Christmas recipe is all that fancy. The overnight breakfast casserole she makes every year doesn’t call for much more than eggs, milk, sausage, cheese, and bread thrown into a baking dish—a recipe she clipped from a local newspaper nearly 50 years ago.

This article contains spoilers through the finale of Barry, Season 3.The first murder on Sunday night’s devastating Season 3 finale of Barry, the HBO series about a listless hitman, happens silently. Barry (played by Bill Hader) watches in horror from outside a makeshift sound stage as Sally (Sarah Goldberg), his former acting classmate and ex-girlfriend, bludgeons a man who tries to choke her after she gets in the way of his attempt to kill Barry.

Zora Neale Hurston once observed that America’s most prominent historical narratives prioritize “all these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold.” Much of American life is built on the knowledge and labor of Black people, especially those who were once enslaved.

Sitting in a New York City hotel room with a plastic flute full of prosecco and strappy black Manolo Blahnik heels resting near her bare feet, Issa Rae looks like the kind of woman who would have petrified an earlier avatar of herself.

This article contains spoilers through the series finale of Pose.In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the actor Billy Porter explained the monumental meaning of his role in the FX drama Pose, which aired its series finale tonight. Yes, he won his first Emmy in 2019 for portraying Pray Tell, the cantankerous fashion designer who moonlights as an emcee in New York City’s underground ball scene.

This article contains spoilers through the third season of Master of None.Of all the unnerving things I’ve witnessed in the anxiety cauldron that is New York’s Penn Station, one stands out. Back in 2019, I noticed a couple arguing in the middle of the squalid Amtrak waiting area. There was something transfixing about their escalating row—even before one of them stormed off, presumably leaving the other to board a train alone or cancel their trip altogether.

Atsushi Nishijima / Amazon Studios
What does freedom sound like? For Barry Jenkins, the answer started with the Earth. While filming The Underground Railroad, the new limited series adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, the director was caught off guard by a rumbling beneath his feet. The source was a nearby construction site, but to Jenkins, the vibration felt like a train was passing under him.

The morning after the 2020 presidential election, as ballots were still being counted in several battleground states and then-President Donald Trump drummed up dangerous conspiracy theories about the impending results, many Ethiopians in the U.S. woke up to distressing political news from back home, too. The Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, had announced a military offensive in Tigray, the northernmost region of the East African country.

When she took the stage to accept the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress last night, Youn Yuh-jung claimed something else, too: her name. The South Korean actor said it clearly for everyone watching and then noted how often it is mispronounced. “Tonight, you are all forgiven,” Youn said cheekily—effectively pardoning Brad Pitt, who had made such a mistake when he announced her victory.