The Ballad of Ron and Dorinda |
Around the nursing home where she lives, in Phoenix, Dorinda Lopez, seventy-one, mostly keeps to herself. People can tell she's from somewhere else, on account of her southern accent. When she gets angry, as she sometimes does when she talks about the past, it gets thick. The word "aggravate gets like ten syllables." Dorinda was one half of the most romantic jailbreak in American history, and for a long time no one in her life knew it. But then, this spring, Dorinda's telephone rang, and she answered it. The man who broke her out, Ronald J. McIntosh, looked increasingly likely to get out of prison himself. Now that the story might finally have an ending, she was ready to tell it from the beginning. "I bet you're gonna ask me a lot of questions no one's ever asked me before," she said to me before launching into her tall tale. Dorinda knew one thing for sure: "Being with Ron was the best ten days of my life." |
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| Ashton Kutcher Has Been Through It |
Ashton Kutcher is in pain. He's been running for ten miles through the streets of Brooklyn, surrounded by thousands of people, and suddenly his body is sending him an emergency distress signal. Kutcher is battling his way through the New York City Marathon on an uncharacteristically humid late-fall morning. The high of 75 degrees is tied for the hottest November 6 on record in New York. But Kutcher isn't focused on the weather. It shouldn't be a factor anyway. He's been prepping for this race all year in balmy Los Angeles, and he did a gnarly twenty-miler in Palm Springs in temps twenty-some degrees above this. None of that is on his mind at this moment. No, all Kutcher can think about right now is the stabbing pain in his side. He's telling me the story over lunch at the Soho House in West Hollywood, not far from his Beverly Hills home. Over lunch, and in a follow-up conversation, Kutcher is reflective. The passage of time has given him new perspective on fame and fortune, including his past tabloid travails. |
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Searching the Tyre Nichols Footage for What the Media Missed |
This likely isn't the first thing you've read about Tyre Nichols, and likely won't be the last. It's not the first you've read about a police "killing"—the word we use until murder has been proven in court or when, despite evidence, a court says it hasn't—and it surely won't be the last. What more can be said? Death, video, outrage, repeat. Once I watched a woman watch her son murdered on repeat on her living room TV. Each time she'd pause at what she said was a different moment, but it was always the same moment, right before he died. "See?" she'd say. She'd point to a blossom of smoke from the barrel of a policeman's gun: the bullet not yet arrived. What did she see in that moment? We all know by now the truth and illusion promised by such a video. The facts of a killing, but also the cycle, the way we spin video round, as if such facts in themselves equal justice, and as if justice—the bullet or the fatal blow never arriving all—could be made possible by hitting pause. Just before 6 pm on Friday, January 27, Memphis police released four videos of the tortuous killing by five officers of 29-year-old, unarmed Tyre Nichols following a traffic stop. Many news organizations edited the four videos into a single short one, or even less. Two minutes and twelve seconds at the New York Times. Four still frames leading off the Washington Post's first response, and a one minute, 39-second video of Nichols' mother calling for peace. The four videos combined total 67 minutes and 30 seconds. The short cuts are the facts; the full sequence is the cycle. |
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Why Skinamarink Scares You Shitless, According to the Man Who Made It |
When I meet Kyle Edward Ball, the soft-spoken and thoughtful director of viral, vibes-forward horror hit Skinamarink, I mention that my friends and I have been jokingly turning the title of his movie into a verb: "Getting Skinamarinked." It gives him a good laugh. "That's been interesting—the different names that people call the monster," Ball says. "The monster in the script is always referred to as just 'Voice in the Dark.' But people call it the Entity, the Demon, the Skinamarink, the Monster." Movies like Skinamarink, where so much is left up to interpretation, take on a life of their own—becoming a sort of colloquial shorthand, as well as a collaborative experience. It probably why, after running the festival circuit over the summer, Skinamarink received a theatrical release in January, where it grossed a whopping $1,150 per screen. But Ball, while speaking to me ahead of his movie's streaming premiere on Shudder, mentioned how much fun he has looking up everyone's galaxy-brain fan theories. "First of all, every fan theory is true, and every fan theory is false," he explains. "Someone had a theory that I'm the monster. And then someone had a whole theory based around the dollhouse that appears in the movie, that they're all in the dollhouse. That's so neat, right?" |
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It's Time to Break Up With Your Phone at Night—For Good |
If you enjoy staring at your phone until exactly one second before you click off your lamp and close your eyes to sleep, this product is not for you. (Also, seek help?) However, if you are like me, attempting to curate the perfect bedtime space, both psychologically and physically, like an asshole, then you might very well be tempted by what follows. This product, Loftie, is an alarm clock. Seen it, but don't know exactly what it does? Well, it's a clock, with an alarm built in to wake you up each morning. It has a snooze button. But it is more than that. It is a nighttime phone-replacer, a piece of bedside decor, and a sleep machine in one. Let me explain. Many people will tell you many things about sleep and how much you suck at it. Unfortunately, those people are usually right; I suck at sleeping, almost as much as I suck at waking up. I tried the whole don't-look-at-your-phone thing before bed, but I had to set alarms, and once I was setting alarms, I was scrolling through baseball Twitter and then watching old Hole performances on YouTube and then getting around to answering some texts, and suddenly it was 45 minutes later and I was wide awake and bathed in blue light. In the morning, I'd hit that snooze button on the iPhone screen about seven times before even acknowledging wakefulness as an option. Habits are hard to break, but Loftie gave me an excuse to change mine. |
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Pamela Anderson: What I've Learned |
People say I'm the ultimate California girl, which is funny, being that I'm Canadian. Come on, people! It's never what it seems. My grandfather was a healer from Finland. My real last name is Hyytianen. He changed it to Anderson when he came to Canada. All of his brothers changed their names, too, so I have a feeling that maybe something bad happened in Finland. My breasts have a career. I'm just tagging along. I'm a soccer mom. I'm T-ball, soccer, karate, homework, keeping them on their schedules. I love being the snack mom, when I get to bring the cut oranges. I have one of those coolers with wheels. I'm at every game, every practice, sitting on my blanket. I love it. I had kids to raise them myself. I'm kind of proud of myself. I've been able to keep a certain grace about me, even in the times of disgrace and craziness. |
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