Some people move through the outdoors with the ease of someone who truly belongs there, not someone pretending to belong for a camera. They seem almost constitutionally suited to the outdoors. Among them is Iolo Williams. The Welsh broadcaster and ornithologist has been stalking hillsides, watching red kites through binoculars, and narrating the more subdued dramas of the British countryside with a warmth that television rarely produces for over twenty years. This may be the reason why his body’s most dramatic moment occurred exactly where you might expect it to: by himself, in the middle of a run, somewhere in…
Author: Jack Ward
The majority of people believe they are familiar with one version of Kevin McCloud. He asks insightful questions about cantilevers while standing on hillsides in exquisitely cut jackets and tilting his head at architectural models. He is exact, articulate, and seemingly unflappable; he is the type of man who seems to have thought through every human emotion beforehand and neatly stored it away. However, if you spend enough time watching Grand Designs over the course of its more than 25 years on Channel 4, a different picture becomes apparent. One in which virtually every episode revolves around Kevin McCloud’s personal…
Seeing Alan Hansen stroll through Liverpool’s downtown with his wife Janet, pausing to strike up conversations with strangers who want to know how he’s feeling, is subtly amazing. The warmth of that typical afternoon says more about his relationship with this city than any trophy could, especially for a man who spent decades studying football from a television studio. And no one present during those tense weeks will quickly forget the weight of those conversations after the summer of 2024. Liverpool Football Club confirmed in a June 2024 statement that their former captain was in the hospital with a serious…
Robbie Williams talks about his face in a way that is almost recklessly generous. The majority of celebrities handle cosmetic procedures like classified intelligence; they may mumble something about drinking water, deny everything, or give credit to good genes. In contrast, Williams, who recently turned fifty, still exudes the restless energy of a man who hasn’t quite found his identity. His Instagram posts about it have the kind of humorous timing that makes you forget he’s talking about something that is actually painful. A 2023 caption joyfully described having fillers, Botox, and “something done to my chin that made me…
You can learn more from Tara Jayne McConachy’s Botched appearance than from any headline. The doctors are clearly distressed as she requests larger breast implants while seated across from surgeons Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif. It was the woman who made the request, not the request itself (they’ve heard strangers). Her weight is forty-five kilograms. She has a small frame. Her skin is rippling from the implants she currently has. She’s also requesting more. Following the procedure, Dr. Nassif expressed concern for her general health, “not just as it relates to surgery.” She was rejected by the doctors. By her…
Not too long ago, Mary Magdalene’s name appeared on social media feeds in a nearly consistent pattern. A new process. An issue. A selfie of defiance. People followed her because they couldn’t quite take their eyes off of her, not because they admired or disapproved of her, and she lived in that strange digital realm where fascination and discomfort completely overlap. Her real name was Denise Ivonne Jarvis Gongora. She was born in Canada into a deeply religious family where even Disney movies were allegedly prohibited. By the time she passed away in Thailand last December at the age of…
The scene is remarkably consistent when you walk into any pediatric waiting room in a mid-sized American city, like Syracuse or Charlotte. Parents looking at their phones. Children using tablets to scroll. behavioral checklists on a clipboard. A diagnosis is emerging somewhere between the fluorescent lighting and the cartoon murals. Families now frequently enter those doors for ADHD evaluations, and the statistics supporting this observation are startling. Nowadays, more than 11% of children in America have been diagnosed with ADHD. That’s about one in nine. It was more like one in eleven ten years ago. Something is moving quickly. Is…
The waiting room of a children’s mental health clinic has a certain kind of quiet. It’s not the impatient silence of A&E or the restless silence of a general practitioner’s office. It is not as big. The chairs are lowered. The magazines focus on animals. Additionally, a growing number of the kids seated in them are startlingly young—eight, nine, or ten years old—waiting for appointments that frequently took over a year to come to pass. Anyone watching what’s going on in Britain’s overburdened mental health system should be unnerved just by that image. By now, the numbers are nearly unbearable.…