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WagStyle Sunday Special: Three Amigos of Christopher Street Ride Against the Fashion Apocalypse You are reveling in CultureWag, the best newsletter in the universe, edited by JD Heyman and created by The Avengers of Talent. We lead the conversation about culture—high, medium and deliciously low. Drop us a line about about any old thing, but especially about what you want […]

Sundance, Gilded Age, Merle Haggard, the Best Dressed Man in New York, and More… Dear Wag, The social-climbing Bertha Russell, who is attempting to crack 19th century New York high society in HBO’s The Gilded Age, isn’t having much luck. No matter what she does, she keeps getting snubbed by Goelets, Astors, and Iselins, which only […]

Los Angeles in the New Age of Violence I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them.― James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia Los Angeles has a tricky way of being incomprehensibly large and maddeningly small. It’s always been a fractious assemblage of enclaves, swamping an […]

Here Come Your Weekly Recs! Dear Wag, If the movies are over, Spider-Man: No Way Home is like those aggro undead thingies from World War Z. You know, it’s not taking morbidity lying down! Spidey is the first Covid Era Blockbuster, raking in more than $700 million, because the creatures who really terrify Hollywood —fleshbots between 18 and 34— braved […]

A Sample of Our Premium Weekly Recs Dear Wag, We love a bold prediction, so here’s one: It’s going to be The Year of the Dog. As in The Power of the Dog, as in Wag Suprema Jane Campion’s powerhouse Pathos- Western. We’ve been pushing it on you for ages, and if this were 1998, you’d have seen […]

Polly Platt and Peter Bogdanovich loved the movies. During a blazing three-year run, Hollywood loved them back. It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that marriage between two brilliant creative types can be hell. It’s also true that such arrangements can deliver the goods for the rest of us. Polly Platt and Peter Bogdanovich were together […]

Sidney Poitier’s great American life was too big for last week’s tributes Hollywood obituary leans on hyperbole. When a famous person dies, there’s a rush to ring bells loud enough to rouse distracted audiences, in the hope that a little poetry gins up interest. Pressing the case for a legend is only human, because we […]

A few more thoughts on Hollywood’s shyest awards ceremony. Plus: We guess the winners (they won’t be there, but you might as well know). If a Golden Globe falls in the forest, but nobody is around to hear it tumble to earth, does it make a sound? On Jan. 9, the 79th installment of Hollywood’s […]

Oh, we really have no idea what’s going to happen in 2022 … but here’s some stuff we’re obsessed with. Dear Wags, We hate to trouble you at the tail end of a troubling year. Crikey, look how many One More Thing newsletters are already clogging your inbox, reminding you of the best and worst aspects of […]

Huzzah, 2021 is nearly over! We CSI its corpse, spelunking for good stuff. Dear Wags, Happy Holidays: the planet, as we have loved it, is falling to pieces! Dread — reinforced by pernicious social media, exacerbated by Covid-19 lockdowns and the rise of Omicron Variant (best sequel name ever)—is the new black. This being the case, […]

Fame, as we have known it, is over. The Weekend Read examines what we’ll miss about it. On 28 October, 312, Constantine, inspired by divine vision, triumphed over his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and became the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. At that point, Rome, which for thousands of […]

Our obsession with the Princess of Wales is all about persona. The person remains a mystery. Long ago, in Pembroke Square, I glimpsed a mirage. She flashed by within a few feet of me—voluminous blond fluff of hair, octuple scull for a nose, neon blur of workout togs—flanked by thick-necked minders, who bundled her into […]