This year is the 40th anniversary of the publication of Sandra Cisneros’s classic The House on Mango Street. The novel tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a Mexican American girl coming of age in a Latino enclave in Chicago, observing her family and community as she decides who she wants to be. Cisneros was only 21 when she started writing the book; it has sold more than 7 million copies, and earlier this year became the first title by a U.S.
Donald Trump has a remarkably binary view of the world: Walls are good; migrants are bad. Tariffs are good; taxes are bad. People who love Trump are good; those who don’t are bad. And women are hot—or not.
Trump cares about everyone’s looks, of course. But as a former owner of the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants, he is a self-proclaimed expert on women’s beauty. He spent multiple appearances on The Howard Stern Show rating women on a numeric scale.
One of the greater indignities of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision—besides stripping millions of American women of their bodily autonomy—was how deeply out of step it was with the majority of Americans’ beliefs. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, a record-high 69 percent of Americans believed that first-trimester abortions should be legal. Considering this statistic, it’s surprising that Democrats haven’t more robustly rallied people around this issue.
Over the weekend, at two campaign events, Donald Trump bragged to audiences about another of his big “ideas,” this one presented to his friend Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Recently, an old friend of mine from elementary school ran a hand over my bookshelf, stopped, and said, “You stole this.”
“I did not!”
“Yes, you did. You totally stole it from school.”
She pulled out my copy of The Once and Future King, and showed me the inside of the front cover. It was stamped: Board of Education, City of New York.
Okay, so I stole it. But I had a good reason. I loved that book so much; I couldn’t bear to return it to the school library.
There comes a time in everyone’s life when they need to stop making excuses, look in the mirror, and confront head-on the gap between who they are and who they want to be. A few months ago, that happened to me. I could no longer put off the full and joyous life I felt I deserved. I decided it was finally time to learn to salsa.
I’m a very good dancer, generally speaking. Get me in a club, and I’ll be in the center of your dance circle.
Few celebrities in the aughts embodied the American dream more than the music mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs. He was one of the most powerful men in music; you could argue that he single-handedly pulled hip-hop from the fringes into mainstream pop. Now he has a very different distinction: He has been accused of what sounds like some of the most vicious domestic abuse I have ever encountered in celebrity news.
In the ’90s, being a low-income student of color in the Ivy League was hard. Our population was minuscule. We were inside a place of privilege, but not fully part of it. The institution wasn’t built for us, and we knew it. We weren’t like the wealthy white kids whose alumni parents came to visit their favorite haunts in their favorite old college sweatshirts. But we were, we believed, part of a different future.
The Hollywood machine—from script writing, to shooting and production, to late-night talk-show PR—has officially ground to a halt.On Thursday, the actors went on strike. The 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, led by Fran Drescher, the fearless sitcom nanny, stopped working after talks with the studios collapsed. They join the ranks of the Writers Guild of America, whose members (myself included) have been on strike since May.Our two unions have not been on strike together since 1960.
Over breakfast yesterday, I read that physicists had discovered a sonic hum perhaps caused by enormous objects like black holes converging and rippling the space-time continuum. I grew up in my grandparents’ railroad apartment in South Brooklyn, and now live a life that stuns me with its privilege and creative freedom—I’m someone who thinks a lot about space and time, and how one traverses them.
In the summer of 2015, one of my best friends died at work. Shannon was 38, childless, single and thriving, and working as an executive at a global public-relations firm, where she handled a major client. She was set to take a family vacation—treating her nephews to a Disney trip or some such—when her boss sent down an edict that no one on her account was allowed to take time off.
The musical artist Bad Bunny—Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—is known on social media as “San Benito”: Saint Benito, perhaps a wink to his anything-but-chaste lyrics. But the nickname has taken on a somewhat literal meaning. Bad Bunny is—particularly after his bomba- and merengue-infused, fully Spanish-language opening-act performance at last night’s Grammys—the official patron saint of Latinidad.
Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses.