You remember the moment that Baylen Dupree talks about. Her Tourette syndrome symptoms are getting worse every day as she sits in a neurologist’s office. Instead of suggesting a course of action, the doctor looks at her mother and says bluntly, “She will do nothing.” It’s not a query. Not a problem. a decision. The kind of declaration that is meant to sound like a door shutting. For Baylen Dupree, it didn’t close anything. However, nobody should have said it. In the May 26 episode of Howie Mandel’s podcast Howie Mandel Does Stuff, Dupree—now 23 and the face of TLC’s…
Author: Michael Martinez
Alison Hammond has discussed a certain moment multiple times, and it sticks with you. Before she died in 2020, her mother, Maria, sat with her daughter and told her bluntly, “Alison, sort out your weight.” Not in a cruel way. Not in a big way. To be honest, moms sometimes can say things that no one else will. It was heard by Hammond. She carried it for a while. Something changed when a pre-diabetic diagnosis was made. Type 2 diabetes affected her mother. Hammond was familiar with that route. She told Good Housekeeping, “That was frightening,” and there’s no reason…
Dan Aykroyd acknowledges, almost joyfully, in a 2004 NPR interview with Terry Gross that he feels naked without a police badge. Not literally nude. Incredibly uncomfortable. He always has one with him. That would be nothing more than a peculiarity that most people would find amusing. However, Aykroyd saw it as an indication to himself, his physicians, and ultimately the general public that the mind behind some of the sharpest humor in television history was also negotiating something more complicated underneath the surface. In the 1980s, Aykroyd was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome after his wife urged him to visit a…
Tai Chi walking surreptitiously made its way out of the community center and onto the internet at some point in the last six months. Millions of people have watched videos of it, which feature slow, deliberate, almost meditative movement patterns set against park or living room floors. AI-generated characters with unlikely muscles can be seen in some of the clips. Some claim that spending seven minutes a day will change your body. That’s mostly noise. However, there is something truly worthwhile to comprehend hidden beneath the algorithm bait. Fundamentally, Tai Chi walking is a stepping method derived from traditional Chinese…
The fact that Garry Trudeau, a man whose entire career has been devoted to documenting the weaknesses of others, hardly ever shows himself has a subtle poetic quality. The 77-year-old Doonesbury cartoonist, who has depicted wars, presidents, AIDS crises, and traumatic brain injuries with unwavering clarity, is still one of the most closely guarded figures in American journalism and art. However, he once spent four hours hiding in a bathroom to evade a newspaper interview. As a result, when inquiries about Garry Trudeau’s illness—past or present—come up, the responses usually come in bits and pieces, filtered through decades of purposeful…
Developing a career around excess has a subtle peculiarity. For four seasons, Adam Richman traveled from city to city on Man v. Food, staring down enormous plates of wings, monstrous sandwiches, and buckets of chilli while a nation applauded and a camera crew watched. It produced amazing television. Additionally, it created a body under extreme, continuous pressure. Anyone who paid attention could see the weight gain during those years. Richman has never concealed that. He has candidly discussed in interviews and on social media how the show’s increasing physical demands caused him to gain weight. Less frequently discussed is the…
There is a specific type of fatigue that is not detected by any blood panel or scan. It resides behind the eyes. It would have been evident to anyone watching Scott Pelley’s first interview since his dismissal from CBS News in early June 2026—that somewhat hollowed-out expression of a man who has endured more than a career setback. He is 68 years old, has worked for the same network for 37 years, has covered genocide in Darfur, entered combat zones in Iraq, and conducted interviews with warlords and presidents. However, it wasn’t a bullet that ended the working relationship. It…
The image of the dusty troubadour with “This Machine Kills Fascists” painted on his guitar, the voice of the dispossessed, and the man Bob Dylan drove across a frozen country to meet are all details that are sometimes overlooked in the mythology surrounding Woody Guthrie. It is often forgotten that Woody Guthrie was completely incapable of playing that guitar during the final ten years of his life. He couldn’t because of his hands. For years, neither he nor his doctors fully comprehended how his body was turning against him. On October 3, 1967, Guthrie passed away at the age of…