Ben and Jen’s Sparsely Attended Plantation Wedding: Everything You Need to Know

By Allie Jones

Not even Leah Remini?

The dust is settling on Ben Affleck and Mrs. Jennifer Lynn Affleck’s three-day wedding extravaganza at Ben’s fake plantation house in Georgia, and one question remains: Was anyone there? There were some guests, sure — TMZ has photos of a bunch of random people milling around on the property wearing all white. (Tacky.) But the major players in Ben and Jen’s lives were conspicuously absent. What gives?

Ben’s brother Casey Affleck, who recently beat cancellation and ended up with a 24-year-old girlfriend, did not attend the celebration, and he did not have a good excuse. The aforementioned girlfriend, Caylee Cowan, suggested he stayed home to take one of his sons to soccer practice. Casey himself suggested he was busy getting his other son ready to go to college. In actuality, Page Six caught the couple hitting up Van Leeuwen in Los Feliz for a couple scoops right around the time Bennifer was saying their vows. Hm. Continue reading

By Claire Carusillo

"Archetypes with Meghan" has dropped, and it's destigmatizing ambition

I owe Meghan Markle an apology. For a year, I’ve been peddling a narrative for selfish means that the former senior member of the royal family was never going to finish her $20 million podcast. I was wrong. Archetypes with Meghan, a Spotify exclusive, premiered today with an episode about “ambition,” featuring Markle twin bestie Serena Williams.

My direct apologia to the Duchess: I am sorry, Meghan, for punishing you for being ambitious via blog post. (In actuality, it was more like I was criticizing you for not fulfilling a public promise for over a year moreso than criticizing you for overachieving, but I don’t want us to get bogged down in the specifics. I am sorry.) Maybe I was jealous. I was certainly wrong. To use a turn of phrase: I will eat crow, freshly shot to death by Princess Anne at Balmoral and served with Créme Anglais. To make up for it, I will listen to your podcast every week until I die from being too ambitious. Continue reading

By Nick Ripatrazone

John Cheever's story is the perfect thing to read as August nears its end

I grew up in suburban New Jersey, among a patchwork of swimming pools. Wracked by the guilt of one glorious teenage day spent pool-hopping on the rich side of town (sorry Mom; I went to confession), I resigned myself to a daily pilgrimage to Bee Meadow, the public pool, where I spent summer afternoons hopping across the blazing concrete toward the cool water.

Mid-July was the best time: we were deep, lost in summer. We ate obnoxious amounts of pizza and forgot that school existed. We moved according to the season; life was downright liturgical in its rhythms. But come August, during that last rush of swampy heat, coupled with an earlier sunset, we knew the end was near.

I still live in northern New Jersey, and I still find a strange peace in that late-summer melancholy. The awareness that something good is going to end helps me appreciate that it is happening now.

If you appreciate this feeling, as I do, there is no better work of fiction than “The Swimmer,” John Cheever’s 1964 story, which teems with the languid sadness of summer’s final act. The shift between the promise of freedom and an awareness of the coming cold happens so smoothly, so quickly in the story that I am somehow astounded each time I read it. Continue reading

By Kelly Conaboy

Her name is Lizzy, first of all

After the last disastrous and contemptible season of the Real Housewives of New York — so heinous that the show didn’t even get a single reunion episode — Bravo dumped the whole cast with a plan to start fresh. Today we have a peek at our first new lady, courtesy of a Page Six scoop.

“Bravo found people aren’t responding as well to the constant bickering and fighting of the [previous] cast,” an insider told Page Six about the decision to dump the Singer Squad. “They’re hoping that this new cast will be a bit more inspiring and attract the younger audience.” Unlike our old uninspiring New York ladies, our new inspiring New York ladies are “already strong in the influencer space, and they are more aspirational.” Continue reading

By Brianna Zigler

Fifteen years later, the movie still captures the agony of almost being an adult

I don’t remember the first time I watched Superbad. Some movies you’ve seen so many times it feels like you came out of the womb knowing them. I’m sure it’s the same way for a lot of people my age. It was hard to think about a fake I.D. without immediately seeing the name “McLovin.” You might tell a story and have a friend reply, “That’s the coolest fucking story I ever heard. Can you tell it again? Do you have time?” Probably you expressed, with a great deal of confidence, that you were DTF despite never having kissed anyone before.

Fifteen years later, Superbad still feels like the defining film, not just of my own teenage years, but of all teenagedom. It’s true that it captures the last gasps of a Millennial generation who remembers dial-up and VCRs and renting movies at the video store before we accumulated seven different passwords to various streaming sites. We had flip phones with horrible cell service and hung out at the mall on the weekends. All the while, we increasingly straddled two worlds: one online and one still analog. The kids in Superbad have cell phones that don’t always work. An adult mentions MySpace at one point and receives silence in response. Interactions with other teens unfold entirely in real life without the protection, or peril, of a screen.

In spite of what makes Superbad such a distinctly Millennial teen film, when I revisit — as I have done, and continue to do, countless times — it strikes me as among the most honest cinematic representations of what it feels like to be a teenager. Continue reading