Jessica Olin lives in Massachusetts.
Almost twenty years have passed since Amanda Knox, an American exchange student in Perugia, was arrested for the murder of her British housemate, Meredith Kercher, and it is nearly impossible, at this far remove, to convey the chaos that engulfed her. The lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, pursued a case based on circumstantial evidence, gut instinct and his fantasies of female depravity,...
Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s only child and heir, was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, the year of the Comeback Special, the year that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony in the west of the city. Five foot two, green-eyed, a self-described ‘gypsy-spirited tyrannical pirate’ with a face that was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa...
Many of the contributors to Meghan Daum’s new anthology once thought they’d have children. For some, it seemed ‘an interesting future possibility’, like ‘joining the Peace Corps’. Rosemary Mahoney ‘used to imagine what my children would look like, and those pleasant imaginings made me love them so much that when I finally snapped to I would...
For the 30th anniversary gala of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art on 14 November, Francesco Vezzoli’s Ballets Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again) featured a performance by Lady Gaga that defied parody. Wearing a hat designed by Frank Gehry and a mask designed by Baz Luhrmann, Gaga played on a rotating Pepto-Bismol-pink Steinway grand piano decorated with blue butterflies painted by Damien Hirst while Prada-clad dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet pliéd around her. In other words, an average Saturday night. Everyone’s a little Gaga these days.
Until last week, American fans of 30 Rock, the behind-the-scenes-of-a-TV-comedy-show sitcom, had to make do in 2009 with Tina Fey taking her creamy décolletage on David Letterman and announcing that she was a virgin until the age of 24; a short-lived, thrilling rumour that Alec Baldwin was going to try to steal Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat; and the antics of RealTracyMorgan, who set fire to his Trump Place apartment via a blown-out light in his fish tank and whose Twitter feed started out promisingly enough (‘My dick is so fat it looks like r2d2’) before devolving into work complaints and self-props like everyone else’s.
As Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley was burdened from birth with extraordinary, largely unwanted fame. Before her death in 2023, she spent years as tabloid fodder, less for her sporadic music career...
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