In his 2020 MacTaggart Lecture, which was given to the Edinburgh TV Festival, David Olusoga pauses at one point, seemingly considering whether or not to actually say what comes next. Then he does. He informs the gathered television industry that despite his career’s incredible highs, he had to seek medical attention for clinical depression. Not in private, not in a memoir written years later. In front of the owners of the company that had harmed him, right there. Something was needed for that. It’s not just bravery in the general sense that people use; it’s real, targeted nerve. Because Olusoga…
Author: Michael Martinez
Witnessing someone lose the very thing that made them unique can cause a certain type of grief. The loss came quietly, brutally, and long before anyone realized what was going on for Linda Ronstadt, who once filled arenas with a voice that critics called arguably the most sterling of her generation. According to her own account, it began around the year 2000. Something had changed. Her voice’s top end, which had helped songs like “Blue Bayou” and “You’re No Good” become part of American culture, had started to fade. She initially became aware of it as a sort of gripping…
Some deaths feel like a footnote, while others feel like a wall collapsing. The second type was Bonnie Greer’s death on September 15, 2026. After what her husband called a “brief illness,” she passed away at the age of 77. Those two words did a lot of heavy lifting for a grief that was obviously much deeper. In a statement, her husband, London lawyer David Hutchins, said nearly everything but not quite everything. He started, “It is with profound sadness,” and the weight of his words was almost audible. After meeting Bonnie in a grocery store aisle, which seems almost…
Finding out that the medication you’ve been taking every morning—the one your doctor prescribed to control your blood pressure—might not have been properly dissolving inside your body can be unsettling. In essence, the FDA is currently informing about 13,567 households nationwide. A recent recall of chlorthalidone tablets has been categorized by the agency as a Class II event, which indicates that there is a genuine but minimal risk of health effects. Not disastrous. However, it’s also nothing. The recalled product, chlorthalidone 25mg in 100-tablet bottles, was produced by Inventia Healthcare Limited, an Indian pharmaceutical company with more than 40 years…
One of the most delicate systems in the human body is the thyroid, so it’s a little unsettling when a drug meant to help it turns out to be far more potent than it should be. That is precisely the current situation with Vitruvias Therapeutics Inc., an Auburn, Alabama-based pharmaceutical company whose 30 mg thyroid tablets are at the center of a nationwide recall that currently carries the FDA’s most serious classification. On September 22, a full month after Vitruvias first withdrew the product in August, the FDA formally classified the recall as Class I. I remember that a class…
Nancy Shevell has an almost cinematic quality; she is the type of person who enters a room silently, holds it without trying, and bears the burden of experiences that most people never have to go through. Before she became Lady McCartney and shared stages and red carpets with one of the most well-known musicians in the world, she was battling something much more private and less well-known: a breast cancer diagnosis that came in the late 1990s and altered everything that came after. When she was diagnosed, she was in her late thirties, a stage of life that usually feels…
Tens of millions of people watch Carrie Ann Inaba sitting behind the judges’ table every Tuesday when Dancing with the Stars airs. She is animated and astute, delivering scores with the kind of confidence that makes you forget anything could go wrong. For years, that image has been meticulously preserved: polished, vivacious, and completely composed. The weariness she’s been dealing with since before some of them were born, the dry eyes so bad they once caused corneal damage, or the joint pain that lurks beneath every public appearance like a low hum that never quite goes away are all things…
It seems as though the well-known last name should take care of everything, including the grief, stress, and medical realities, without complaining. There are public figures whose personal struggles remain unnoticed behind the headlines. Among them is Kerry Kennedy. She is best known for her human rights work and her ancestry as Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter. Despite facing health issues that would prevent most people from moving forward, she has spent decades advocating for causes that are important. Spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder affecting the vocal cords, is the condition that attracted public attention. It results in uncontrollable spasms that…