Squash your beef with pickleball once and fennel

By Claire Carusillo

The Gates Foundation denies any connection to the ultra-popular sport (yeah right)

I was early to the pickleball reportage. Back in November 2021, I posited that somehow, NBC Universal stood to make a lot of money off 1:4 scale game of paddle tennis. Pickleball was featured on nearly every franchise Bravo had in their pandemic-era lineup, and former pickleball power couple Lala Kent and Randall Emmett of Vanderpump Rules even showed off branded paddles. Because Bravo makes a lot of money off of their network stars’ various lines of merch (it’s reportedly called “the Bethenny clause”) like canned espresso martinis and shapewear, I thought we might see some major Bravoleb-backed pickleball bars, $100 paddles, and Spandex-blend court clothing. The bill of goods I was being sold seemed immaculately engineered and uncommonly sinister. In retrospect, I was naive — this thing is bigger than I could have imagined.

By February 2022, pickleball content was everywhere, going beyond Bravo to NPR to the New York Times. ESPN will air the Margaritaville USA Pickleball National Championships. As the rest of the world catches on to the sport that’s been driving the elderly to insanity and perfectly healthy adults to faceplant, I’m starting to make connections that go way beyond Andy Cohen. I’ve had to buy new red string for my corkboard. I hear a dink dink dink rapping at my chamber door as I try to relax. I’ve done everything but pick up a racket. Continue reading

By Tarpley Hitt

A woman identified only as Jane Doe accused Sanz of child sex abuse last year

Last year, a woman identified only as “Jane Doe” filed a lawsuit against comedian and former SNL cast member Horatio Sanz. The suit alleged Sanz had “groomed” her from the age of 15, given her alcohol, and groped her non-consensually when she was 17. Today, Doe’s lawyers announced that they had proposed an amended complaint that adds three new defendants: Jimmy Fallon, Tracy Morgan, and Lorne Michaels. 

The new complaint recounts the same claims as the first in greater detail — describing alleged incidents at afterparties, hosted by both Michaels and Morgan, and online exchanges with Fallon, who shared an office with Sanz and allegedly wrote Doe an email after they first met. Representatives for Fallon, Morgan, and Michaels did not immediately return our request for comment. In a statement announcing the filing, Doe’s attorney, Susan Crumiller of the Crumiller firm, wrote: Continue reading

By Tarpley Hitt 

We’re leaning in and casting girls in lard

With women’s rights melting before our eyes, the 2022 New York State Fair, which starts today in Syracuse, has taken a bold stance for the ladies: an 800-pound butter sculpture of four girl athletes — a lacrosse player, track star, skier and gymnast — doing their little tricks around a giant jug of chocolate milk. The piece is called: “Refuel Her Greatness — Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Title IX.”

The butter tribute, like so many food-based civil rights victories, is sponsored by a trade association. That group is called the American Dairy Association, also known as Dairy Management Inc. — which, as the Atlantic put it in a piece on “cheese lobbying” from 2010, “serves one god: dairy sales.” But dairy marketing money is besides the point here; today is about celebrating the 54th annual butter sculpture unveiling at the New York State Fair. Continue reading

By Claire Carusillo

“Bitch” means female dog, as in the one they just brought home

The charming hamlet of Montecito may be crawling with symbolically loaded wild animals, Katy Kats, and Gloria Steinem in total vacay mode, but one beagle just big-dogged them all. The fabulous Markle twins just enacted a brilliant PR twirl by adopting one of the 4,000 beagles recently rescued from a breeding facility in Virginia owned by the lab-research animal provider Envigo RMS. And there’s even more good news: The Sussexes’ new 7-year-old beagle’s name is inspired either by motherhood (she has eight pups!) or Meryl Streep’s ghost in a musical sequel — mamma mia, welcome to Montecito, Mamma Mia! Continue reading

By Fran Hoepfner

Olivia Wilde keeps talking about her new film without saying anything at all about her new film

There is one week before the start of the Venice International Film Festival, or “La Biennale (chef’s kiss gesture)” as they say over there. Olivia Wilde’s second feature Don’t Worry Darling, in the ten thousandth month of its press tour, will premiere there, and I have to confess some moderate worry, darling, about the state of things.

Everything to know about this movie we’ve known for a year and a half: California 1950’s suburbia gone awry, something something sci-fi, acclaimed script off of the Black List (a collection of popular but un-produced scripts that often go on to make lackluster but cheapish features), Wilde and her male lead Harry Styles hooked up, Florence Pugh has gone silent on the whole thing of it, despite Wilde opening every interview by praising Pugh’s talent, focusing otherwise on Dune 2 and defending her small boobs (solidarity, sister).

A film with a solid marketing team would know how to weaponize its internal drama, using whatever beefs exist to create a sense of intrigue and mystique around the affair(s — romantic and disdainful, alike), but instead, the Don’t Worry Darling press tour has doubled down on a paltry message of female empowerment and blowhard justifications for itself. Continue reading