Most pregnant women experience the same thing around the second prenatal appointment: the doctor or midwife looks at the scale, notes something, and says something carefully neutral. The number has been noted. An update has been made to the chart. And the woman leaves the examination room wondering if she has gained too much, too little, or precisely the right amount by some standard she was never fully informed about. She is already dealing with nausea, exhaustion, and a body that feels like it belongs to someone else. For something so universal, it’s an unexpectedly sensitive topic. There is no…
Author: Michael Martinez
At one point in the mid-2000s, Mark Lamarr just stopped appearing everywhere. Sardonic and perfectly quiffed, he held court on Never Mind the Buzzcocks with a contemptuous ease that made you feel a little uneasy for the pop stars seated across from him. He had been one of those faces you couldn’t help but look at. Then, slowly, he vanished. No spectacular departure. No scandal that makes headlines. Just a gradual fade, the kind that the public seldom inquires about and the television industry seldom explains. The complete picture didn’t become clear until a Tuesday morning in March 2026, inside…
When a place loses someone who felt like its personality, a specific type of grief descends upon it. A person who showed up every day, made noise in the best way, and persuaded everyone around them that life was a little more worthwhile—not a politician or a celebrity in the conventional sense. That’s precisely what Benidorm lost when Graham Boland passed away in January 2024. The music he used to spin was drowned out by the silence that ensued. Graham had spent years creating a life in a place that people either adore or dismiss as a British cliché baking…
Seeing a man who spent his entire career telling the stories of other people’s crises turn into the story himself is subtly unsettling. The blogger, provocateur, and self-described original influencer Perez Hilton spent the first few months of 2026 fighting for his life in a Las Vegas hospital rather than pursuing celebrity rumors. He posted updates from a bed he didn’t anticipate needing. It began with something commonplace, as these things frequently do. an illness. The kind that most people manage with a few days of Netflix, soup, and ibuprofen. However, Perez Hilton’s illness didn’t go as planned. Instead, he…
Jenni Murray wrote about a moment that sticks in your memory longer than it should. She had just had a needle biopsy and was standing outside a breast cancer diagnostic center, screaming, yelling, and cursing. Not within. Before she even received official confirmation of what she already knew, she was outside on the pavement with her partner, David, at her side. That was in December of 2006. She was back on the phone the following morning, making plans, selecting her surgeon, and informing those who needed to know. For several minutes, there was screaming. Almost immediately after, the coping began.…
No one in the Norwegian royal household wanted to see the results of a series of tests that were conducted in the quiet clinical hallways of Rikshospitalet University Hospital in Oslo sometime in the fall of 2025. The scans and evaluations revealed what the medical staff had been anxiously monitoring: a definite deterioration in Crown Princess Mette-Marit’s health. The symptoms of pulmonary fibrosis are not very noticeable. It gradually reduces the amount of space available for oxygen to perform its function by stiffening lung tissue and creating scar after scar. Then, one fall, the statistics show that the word “quietly”…
A 1987 photo of Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot standing outside the Lafayette Parc Hotel in California, with his hat turned backwards and a somewhat guarded yet relaxed expression, captures something easy to overlook if you only know him from his music. He appears to be a man who came to fame unexpectedly and is a little uncertain about what to do with it now. which turned out to be precisely correct. When discussing British pop’s lost stars from the 1980s, Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot’s illness—more especially, hypochondria and Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome—is hardly discussed. Most likely, it should. Chronic alcohol abuse and the ensuing severe thiamine…
Gena O’Kelley entered a hospital in 2013 for what could be considered a standard procedure. MRI scans were required. There was nothing about that moment that would have indicated her life, or the life of one of the most famous people in Hollywood, was about to change forever. However, something went wrong within eight days following the third injection of a gadolinium-based contrast agent. An intense burning sensation that spread from inside her body outward was what she subsequently described. Not a minor unease. beneath the skin, a fire. These injections caused Gena O’Kelley’s illness, which is now recognized as…