The lights on the stage remained on. When something went wrong, Hayley Erbert Hough and her husband Derek Hough were just wrapping up their national “Symphony of Dance” tour in Washington, D.C. She started to feel confused, first gradually and then all of a sudden. She was undergoing emergency surgery by the time the medical staff realized what was going on. In the end, forty percent of her skull would be removed. That was in December of 2023. And yet here she is, just two and a half years later, looking good, holding her baby daughter Everley, and telling reporters…
Author: Michael Martinez
Some voices cut you off in the middle of a conversation. One of those belonged to John Farnham. Something changed in the room when he opened up on stage; it’s the kind of change that’s hard to explain logically but obvious when it occurs. For more than 50 years, that presence and voice shaped Australian popular music. This is why it’s so difficult to accept the news from late September. The man who used to hold stadiums captive now needs constant oxygen support, uses a wheelchair to move around, and gets round-the-clock nursing care at home. In a statement issued…
The way that art predicts life has an almost unsettling quality. The portrayal of illness—vulnerability, mortality, and the slow, frequently invisible suffering that viewers weren’t accustomed to seeing on primetime television in the early 1990s—was the foundation of Chad Lowe’s career. For it, he received an Emmy. People were moved to tears by him. And now, decades later, the word “illness” appears around his name once more, but this time it has nothing to do with a character’s burden. It’s much more serious and intimate. The ABC drama Life Goes On, which ran from 1989 to 1993, was Lowe’s pivotal…
During John Malkovich’s December appearance on Bill Maher’s Club Random, there was a moment that felt unlike anything his fans had ever witnessed. He wasn’t portraying a bad guy. He wasn’t giving one of those cool, uninterested performances that brought him fame. He was just sitting there talking, but his words weren’t coming out correctly. Fans took notice. Members of the crew observed. Soon, social media was filled with questions that no one wanted to ask aloud. Born in Christopher, Illinois, in 1953, the 71-year-old actor has always spoken slowly. He has a languid, almost theatrical drawl that is practically…
Drama has always been a feature of Texas Senate races, but the last two weeks felt more like an episode of a disorganized thriller than politics. After receiving a flu diagnosis, Democratic candidate James Talarico, who is running against Republican Ken Paxton for a U.S. Senate seat, withdrew from the campaign trail on September 29. The ensuing wave of conspiracy theories, missing person posters, and requests for “proof of life” reveals a lot about the state of American politics in 2026. Since running for the Texas House in 2018, Talarico, 37, has been transparent about his Type I diabetes. That…
For decades, Kerry Kennedy has been the type of person who appears in places that most of us only read about. She has fought for indigenous land rights in far-flung parts of the world, sat across the table from human rights violators, and pushed legislation through a reluctant state senate. She was no longer the one covering the story in July 2012, and it had nothing to do with politics or policy. It was related to what was going on in her brain. Sometime before eight in the morning on a typical Wednesday, Kennedy’s Lexus SUV collided with a tractor-trailer…
Once you hear a certain number, it keeps coming back and bothering you. 1.8 million individuals. This is the number of Britons who have been receiving sickness-related benefits for up to sixteen years without being reassessed. 16 years. A child who was born at the time of the most recent review may now be old enough to be filing for benefits. A room should be stopped by that number, which was discovered by The Times Welfare Inquiry and verified by a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Work and Pensions. For a very long time, it didn’t. And…
Earlier this autumn, something didn’t feel right. The mornings became chilly a bit earlier than normal, and the flu also arrived early in emergency rooms and general practitioners’ offices throughout England. Not in the dramatic, ward-collapsing manner that occasionally occurs by January. Quietly and persistently, appearing weeks ahead of schedule in test results and A&E logs. Last week, the UK Health Security Agency officially confirmed that there was more flu activity in September than there had been in any of the previous four winter seasons. It’s not a blip. There is a pattern there. Additionally, the data indicates that this…