Gawker - Oprah’s trolley problem

By Kelly Conaboy

Ghosts who know who Obama is. Ghosts who had an iPhone

Emily, a lovesick teenager, is said to haunt the bridge in Stowe, Vermont that she jumped from in 1805. President Abraham Lincoln's ghost has been spotted numerous times at the White House since his assassination in 1865. Hardware merchant Seabury Tredwell and his family apparently haunt the New York City home that was in their keep until 1933. Now a museum, the Tredwells are said to remain, roaming the halls, spooking guests, and charming the New York Times.

You’re always hearing about old ghosts like this. A Civil War soldier, an old-timey nun, a sea captain who died when fishing boats were a new concept. They get all of the glory, all of the documentation in books with titles like 32 Ghost Stories of the American South, and all of the attention around Halloween. What you don’t hear about, though, is newer ghosts. Ghosts who know who Obama is. Ghosts who had an iPhone. Maybe a guy who got so frustrated with his lagging smart TV that he had a heart attack, and now his energy won’t let anyone in that location reliably stream anything.

Why is that? Aren’t there newer ghosts? Continue reading

By Tarpley Hitt

It’s the least she could do

In 2013, when the New Yorker published a profile of Dr. Mehmet Oz — the TV doctor who spent years scaremongering about the faux dangers of arsenic in apple juice and pushing so many pseudoscientific cures they have their own Wikipedia page — it ran under the headline “The Operator.”

The pun doesn’t need much explanation, but here’s one nevertheless: To the extent that Oz can still claim medical credentials, they are that he was trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon. He is also a shrewd manipulator who knows how to milk a publicity stunt. This has been obvious since 1996, when he assisted in a heart transplant on the brother of ex-Yankees manager Joe Torre, and then rode the news cycle into modest local celebrity that outshined even the head surgeon on the operation. The Torre transplant, his colleague told the New Yorker, “was his first big splash of publicity, and he loved it.” Oz, with the help of his wife, “Reiki master” Lisa LeMole, parlayed those 15 minutes of fame into a Discovery Channel show called Second Opinion. So one must imagine it was a similar kind of savvy that led the couple to choose their first guest: Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah, of course, had no medical experience. But she did have a massive platform. In 2003, when Second Opinion debuted, The Oprah Winfrey Show had been airing for 17 years and had racked up so many Daytime Emmys (47 in total) that she had stopped submitting it for consideration three years earlier. She also had a track record of turning guests into stars. In 1998, she gave a clinical psychologist named Phil McGraw — who had helped Oprah beat a defamation case over an episode on the beef industry — a Tuesday slot on her show. It proved so popular that, four years later, she spun it off into its own series: Dr. Phil. After appearing on Second Opinion, Oprah gave Oz the same treatment. In 2004, Oz started appearing on Oprah, eventually taking over Dr. Phil’s old Tuesday spot. She dubbed him “America’s Doctor.” Continue reading

By Claire Carusillo

"SPARE"

Prince Harry’s memoir has a title: SPARE. Presumably referring to the expression “the heir and the spare” to describe the tortured circumstances of his birth after older brother and future king Prince William, this is a punk rock memoir title that’s sure to ruffle “King” Charles, even with his unflappable cool customer demeanor.

Look at this cover! Is that a leather choker? Bad arse! Continue reading

By Fran Hoepfner

James Gray's latest film is a Jewish reckoning told through the director's childhood memories

Armageddon Time takes its title from Ronald Reagan, who warned in 1980 that his generation may be the one that sees Armageddon. Did Armageddon happen? No doubt the ‘80s were filled with violence and economic instability, but so too were the ensuing ‘90s and ‘00s. It’s no better now either. Perhaps Reagan foresaw a perpetual end of days, an endless harbinger of disaster. The world has always been ending, and now it’s James Gray’s turn to tell us exactly how.

Gray himself makes films that are polarizing and complicated, rich with empathy and pain. His 2017 film The Lost City of Z was a vastly underrated jungle adventure that was light on swashbuckling and heavy with reckoning, a treatise on colonialism and obsession. Gray’s films, especially in the last decade, are often obsessed with the relationships between fathers and sons. Armageddon Time continues that line of thought, and is perhaps his most emotionally raw work yet. He joins his auteur peers telling their own life stories, a trend that is in no way recent, but certainly recently indulged, starting with Alfonso Cuarón’s meticulous Roma before tumbling into Kenneth Branagh’s weepy Belfast, all coming on the heels of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. Gray, like Cuarón before him, returns to his childhood after a jaunt in space: though Cuarón’s Gravity was more successful than Gray’s Ad Astra, both were harrowing, imaginative space-set dramas that explored the dehumanization of humans out in the cosmos (and secondarily, just how scary it is to be in space). Continue reading