When a female actress appears slightly different on screen than she did a season ago, there’s a certain type of internet moment. Forums come alive. Reddit threads proliferate. A screenshot is shared by someone. Another person responds with a viewpoint that shouldn’t be typed aloud. And somewhere in the midst of all that cacophony, the real story—the human one—is totally obscured. That’s essentially what transpired with Rose McIver and the internet speculation surrounding her appearance in the most recent Ghosts seasons. Fans noticed a change as they browsed social media and Reddit. Words like “weight gain” began to show up…
Author: Michael Martinez
Every retail story has a point at which a business stops doing what it should be doing and starts doing something that causes you to stop reading. For Lidl, that moment came quietly last week when workers began construction on the supermarket chain’s first-ever pub, which is, of all places, situated in an east Belfast parking lot. It has been long overdue. Actually, six years. There must have been a lot of internal discussion during the six years of planning applications, licensing hearings, a High Court challenge, and whether or not a German discount supermarket should be involved in the…
Convenience store chains foster a certain kind of loyalty in their patrons that is difficult to describe to those who did not grow up close to one. Along the Mid-Atlantic coast, Wawa has it. With its beaver mascot and cathedral-sized restrooms, Buc-ee’s has it in Texas and the Southeast. Then there is Sheetz, a family-run chain based in Altoona, Pennsylvania, which has spent decades developing a more regional identity than a commercial enterprise. “Sheetz” is a reflex, not a response when you ask someone from central Pennsylvania where they stopped on a road trip. This week, Sheetz, Inc. formally announced…
Today, April 10, marks the official start of Coachella 2026 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. This is the same area of desert where the event has been held for the past 25 years, baking under a sun that seems determined to remind everyone that they forgot to wear sunscreen. From a distance, the polo fields appear the same as they always do: art installations catching the late afternoon light, stages rising out of flat, dusty ground, and crowds moving between tents in that particular festival shuffle that is part urgency, part wandering. However, this year feels different…
One of the first things that viewers would have noticed when Ross Douthat and Ben Sasse sat down to record an episode of his “Interesting Times” podcast in Austin, Texas, was Sasse’s face. It had dried blood on it, which is a side effect of daraxonrasib, the medication his oncologists at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston have prescribed to treat Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He claimed that his skin feels “nuclear.” Nevertheless, he arrived. In the first minute, he made a joke. The combination of Ben Sasse’s blood, humor, and willingness to simply sit there and be seen…
The lawsuit contains a detail that is difficult to refute. An emergency room physician was called to assist with Conor Hylton’s intubation when his condition collapsed in the early hours of August 15, 2024, when his eyes rolled back, and his body started to seize in a hospital bed in Milford, Connecticut. Despite working in the same building, the doctor was unable to locate the intensive care unit. He had to pause and get directions from a nurse. It took about ten minutes to complete that detour. At the age of 26, Conor Hylton was running out of time. As…
When Annabelle Gurwitch was eighteen, she heard a Samuel Beckett play in a theater and thought it was kind of funny. She keeps thinking about this line. “I am unable to continue. I’ll continue. At that moment, she laughed. When she went to urgent care in November 2020 for a COVID-19 test and left with a Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, she wasn’t laughing. At that moment, she remembered the Beckett line, and the gap between those two sentences felt like a chasm she truly didn’t know how to cross. Gurwitch doesn’t act like she knows what to do, which…
His hometown was East Providence, Rhode Island, a bustling waterfront town founded by Portuguese, Irish, and Cape Verdean immigrants seeking factory jobs and a place to settle in the United States. One of twelve kids. When Davey was still a toddler, his father passed away. Mary Rose, his mother, was a domestic worker. When he was old enough to comprehend his neighborhood, he gave a straightforward description of it: rats, roaches, and drugs that were as ubiquitous as candy. Davey Lopes found the exit door through sport and kept it open for 45 years in a row while playing professional…