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Boston Globe
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
They wanted to spice up a humdrum life with an adventure, and got more than they asked for
Oh yes, the crack! It is moments like these, when Elmhirst comes close to breaking the fourth wall, that contribute to the pleasure of this exciting book. You know as a reader that you are in very capable hands. Advertisement The Baileys escape in a small rubber raft and a dinghy, which they lash together, although 'escape' might not be the right word. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up They got off the sinking yacht, yes, but they had no radio, no radar, no communication device. Certainly no motor. It was just some tinned food and water, a book or two, and each other, for the next 118 days, until they were rescued, nearly dead, by a Korean fishing vessel. The story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey is true, one that has been well documented but is not well known, and Elmhirst has fashioned it into a fascinating narrative. She divides the book roughly into thirds — their lives before the journey, their four months on the water, and their lives afterward. Advertisement Maurice was an oddball with a terrible childhood — 'he had a stutter, and a hunched back,' and then he came down with tuberculosis as a teenager and spent months alone, in bed. 'It can stay with you, time like that,' Elmhirst writes. 'Conditioning loneliness, baking it in.' He grew up exacting and persnickety, antisocial to the extreme. That he met and married anyone was almost a miracle, even in his own eyes, but that his wife was someone as lovely and adventurous and strong-minded as Maralyn was almost incredible. They met when he was 30. She was nearly a decade younger and wanted nothing more than to get out of her parents' house and experience adventure. The yacht trip was her idea. England in those years was depressed, cold, confining. One gloomy November evening, she suggested they leave — buy a boat and sail to New Zealand. Maurice was dubious; by then they had a house and security. But 'In the grip of an idea,' Elmhirst writes, 'Maralyn could drill through rock.' That tenacity is likely what saved both their lives. Elmhirst, who has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere, had a wealth of material to draw from — journals, newspaper accounts, filmed interviews, and books that both Maralyn and Maurice wrote. She sifted through it all and chose her details wisely. She doles out the adventures, such as they were, and tells them vividly: the flares that didn't work; the turtles that attacked the flimsy plastic bottom of the boat; the many ships that passed them by without noticing their frantic waving; another whale. And she focuses on the relationship between the two castaways. Before the shipwreck, Maurice had been fully in charge. He was the captain, she ran the galley. But after the shipwreck, it was all Maralyn. She was resourceful and optimistic, unswaying in her belief that they would be rescued. She understood that they needed a schedule and intellectual stimulation to get through each day, and she made it happen. On a raft. In the ocean. While slowly starving. Advertisement She made a deck of cards out of pages ripped from the logbook, and they played whist. She read aloud from the books they had salvaged and they analyzed every sentence. She dreamed of what they would do when they were rescued. (Top on her list: build another boat.) She planned menus for dinner parties — pages and pages of menus. 'When you're dying of starvation,' Elmhirst notes, 'all you can think about is food.' That March night, from the rubber raft, Maralyn had the presence of mind to take a picture of the yacht as it sank, and then one of her husband, 'wearing an expression not of fear, not yet, but of a kind of taut blankness, as if he had not quite grasped what was taking place.' That moment — intrepid photographer and demoralized subject — is symbolic of their ordeal. 'A Marriage at Sea' is so much more than a shipwreck tale. It's a story of love and strength, a portrait of a marriage that — for all its oddities — is a true partnership. Maurice and Maralyn were not equals, but they fit together in a way that made them invincible. Elmhirst skates delicately over the metaphor. 'Somewhere, deep within, unspoken, we must all know, we do know, that we'll all have our time adrift,' she writes. 'For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?' Advertisement A MARRIAGE AT SEA: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck By Sophie Elmhirst Riverhead, 256 pages, $28 Laurie Hertzel's second memoir, 'Ghosts of Fourth Street,' will be published in 2026 by the University of Minnesota Press. She teaches in the low-residency MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia.
Eater
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Eater
The New York Times Names New Restaurant Critics
Following Pete Wells' departure from the New York Times restaurant critic role that he held for 12 years, there has been much speculation about who would replace him. Now, we have the answer: Ligaya Mishan and Tejal Rao are the publication's new restaurant critics. The appointment of Mishan and Rao, both longtime Times employees, marks a departure from how criticism was handled. It is an acknowledgment of the country's vastness and the sensitivity and thoughtfulness required to convey a picture of such a dynamic landscape. Mishan will focus on New York City, as well as occasionally file restaurant reviews outside the city. Rao will take a more national look at restaurants, per the announcement. Both of the new critics are unmasked; a video announcement today provides more information about their reasoning behind the decision to become public figures, distinct from Wells. 'Audiences want to know who's making their recommendations, to put faces to names, to get a sense of their tastes and who they are. We hope these videos will do so, and help bring a new level of transparency and immediacy to our criticism,' the announcement states. After Wells departed from his restaurant critic title in 2024, his column was split into two, with reviews filed by Melissa Clark and Priya Krishna. The duo, alongside editor Brian Gallagher, just completed their version of the 100 Best Restaurants in New York City, focusing more on affordability and, notably, choosing to rank only the top 10 — a move that was different from its two previous editions. Up until recently, Mishan was a columnist for the New York Times Magazine and wrote for T Magazine . Lately, her stories have included one on chawanmushi, 'a Japanese half-custard half-flan;' a new era of West African fine dining; and a collective of creatives working to preserve Chinatown. Previous to that, she ran the 'Hungry City' restaurant column for the Times , from 2012 to 2020, a companion column to Wells' reviews that often focused on mom-and-pop ventures in neighborhoods less covered, outside of Manhattan. Rao has been based in California as the food section's critic-at-large, writing on topics that often thread the needle of food and culture, in reports such as one about the booming business of Kit Kats; how restaurant workers showed up for Los Angeles fire victims; and the history of California's hippie sandwiches. Outside of Los Angeles, she has already had a hand in national restaurant service content, such as the 25 Best Restaurants in San Francisco Right Now. See More:
Los Angeles Times
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
She gave up sex for a year and gained control of her life
After jumping from one relationship to the next, Melissa Febos found herself in bed with a woman she scarcely knew. 'Though I stubbornly tried to prove otherwise, for me, sex without chemistry or love was a horror,' Febos writes in her new book, 'The Dry Season.' 'A few weeks later, I decided to spend three months celibate.' On an unseasonably warm and sunny day in Seattle, I met Febos to talk about the surprising pleasure when those three months turned into a full year of celibacy. 'I had been thinking of this time as a dry season, but it had been the most fertile of my life since childhood,' Febos writes. 'I had run dry when I spent that vitality in worship of lovers. In celibacy, I felt more vital, fecund, wet, than I had in years.' While giving up physical intimacy might sound like the opposite of titillating, those familiar with the demands of monogamy and motherhood could recognize the erotic potential of solitude. 'A friend of mine took a trip without her toddler and said that the time she spent waiting in line to board was borderline erotic because it was a quiet time and space that she hadn't had in years,' Febos said. At 44, Febos has already established herself as a prolific, critically acclaimed and bestselling writer of memoirs and creative nonfiction. 'The Dry Season' is her fifth book. Her first, 'Whip Smart,' chronicles her time as a professional dominatrix. 'Abandon Me' tells of losing herself in a toxic relationship, struggling with addiction and discovering her biological father, and 'Girlhood' is a collection of essays about being in a body that no longer belongs to her. Her most recent, 'Body Work,' is a craft book on embodied writing. The physical body is clearly central to her writing — how it affects our work, our personal relationships and, most importantly, our relationship with ourselves. In a 2022 essay for the New York Times Magazine, Febos described her decision to undergo a breast reduction as a means to reclaim herself. In a society where bodily autonomy is under active and devastating attack, Febos' work is not only provocative, it's absolutely necessary. In the flesh, it's difficult to imagine Febos as anything but perfectly in control. She is warm, compassionate and easy to laugh. She's proud of the work she's done in recovery from addiction. Much of 'The Dry Season' takes inspiration from programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, where the desire for a substance is in reality a desire to be closer to God. It's unsurprising then that Febos discovered that nuns were some of the first women to find freedom in celibacy. She was particularly interested in one medieval sect called the Beguines, who 'took no vows, did not give up their property, and could leave the order anytime. They traveled, preached, and lived more independently than most women in the western world.' But it wasn't necessarily that they rejected sex, as Febos writes, but rather a life focused on men. 'The Beguines did not just quit sex, and it is likely many did not give up sex at all. They quit lives that held men at the center.' When Febos told a friend that she was going to take a break from sex, she rolled her eyes. It's assumed that sex and love addicts are usually straight people, that it's heterosexual men who are sex addicts and heterosexual women who are love addicts. 'There was part of me that hoped I might be SLA [sex and love addict], because it could've been an easy answer,' Febos said. Febos works to dismantle heteronormative stereotypes about love and sex in this book, quoting writer Sara Ahmed: 'When you leave heterosexuality, you still live in a heterosexual world.' Later in the book, she discusses the uniquely queer and effective partnership of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. 'I didn't want to simply relocate within compulsory heterosexual gender roles,' she writes. 'I wanted to divest from them.' Febos said playfully, 'I thank God every day that I am not straight. But we're still socialized to behave a certain way. We all live under patriarchy. But I never had fantasies of marriage or of being a wife,' Febos said. 'My dream was always to be a writer, an artist.' In 'The Dry Season,' Febos processes some of the experience of being celibate through her friendship with a younger queer woman named Ray. Though there is sexual tension between them, the reconfiguring of desire helped Febos realize that some impulses aren't worth acting on. Febos has taught creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Iowa for the past five years and considers herself lucky that she's never felt attracted to her students. 'Teaching helps me to be a better writer,' she said. 'But it is partly about seduction, about being able to hold someone's attention, to get them to feel something you feel passionately about or to help them see something they haven't recognized before.' For Febos, the decision to take a step away from sexual intimacy is similar to the experience of understanding a text. 'There is a difference between how you react to a text and how you analyze a text,' she writes. 'You can be attracted or repelled by the content and still think critically about the response, about your own relationship to the text. As in love among humans, we cannot appreciate a text until we really see it, and in order to see it we have to get out of the way.' In other words, to truly understand your desire, you have to spend some time apart from it. 'The Dry Season' is no marriage plot. Even though Febos' wife, poet Donika Kelly, who Febos met after her period of celibacy concluded, appears briefly at the end of the book, Febos resisted having her there at all. 'That was truly not the point,' she said laughing, 'to say, 'Look, it all turned out great in the end!' ' I told Febos that many women had confided in me (in response to reading Miranda July's novel 'All Fours') that they felt obligated to participate in sex in their marriages with men. 'That's really the point of this book,' she responded. 'Why are you having sex if you don't want to be having sex? This radical honesty not only benefits you but it also benefits your partner. To me, that's love: enthusiastic consent.' Febos has reached the point in her career where she is in control. She told her agent that she would write a brief proposal for this book and nothing more, and it sold quickly. This is a freedom many writers will never achieve. Perhaps it's due to the fact that Febos works not only on her craft but on herself. 'My subject is myself, so this kind of work, in my relationships and with myself, is germane to my writing,' she said. Her inner work has been a wise investment, leading Febos to feel more freedom in her authorial vision, perhaps even moving toward fiction. 'Writing is a process of integration for me,' she said. 'I am so comforted by all of life's surprises.'
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From Prince to Michael Jackson: why are the most controversial documentaries getting canned?
It can be a painful thing, acknowledging that our heroes are both human and flawed, but Ezra Edelman spent five years doing just that. The film-maker behind 2016's sprawling, Oscar-winning OJ: Made in America, was at work for Netflix on what, by all accounts, would have been the definitive Prince documentary: a nine-hour behemoth drawing upon dozens of interviews with the late icon's associates and rare access to his personal archive. The film – according to the few who've seen a rough cut – built a layered portrait of Prince's immense genius and complexities, including a darker side concealed by his playfully eccentric persona: his allegedly cruel treatment of girlfriends and female proteges; his demanding ruthlessness as a bandleader. 'We're asked to sit with Prince's multiplying paradoxes for many hours, allowing them to unsettle one another,' wrote Sasha Weiss, of the New York Times Magazine, after viewing it. We won't, unfortunately, get that opportunity. In February, Netflix scrapped Edelman's documentary after executors of Prince's estate, reportedly upset by its content, fought for months to block its release. The streaming platform plans to develop 'a new documentary featuring exclusive content from Prince's archive.' In other words: a watered-down take, to placate the powers that be. This dispiriting saga reveals much about the bleak state of the celebrity documentary complex in 2025: they are plentiful on streaming platforms yet increasingly indistinguishable from sponsored content. In raw numbers, documentaries are more popular than ever, but they also feel more toothless and risk-averse. Netflix's capitulation lays it all out in the open, reflecting a climate in which dull, sanitised celebrity docs flood the marketplace while distributors balk at complicated and/or unauthorised films providing complex portraits of their subjects. The Book of Prince frightened Prince's estate because they couldn't control it. But some of the most compelling music docs in recent memory are animated by singular directorial perspectives, not transactional access. That includes Questlove's fascinating Sly Lives!, which uses the rise and fall of enigmatic funk legend Sly Stone as a vehicle to explore cultural pressures on Black pop stars. By comparison, the band-authorised Becoming Led Zeppelin feels like a work of sheer legacy-minded mythmaking. The performance footage is electric, but interviews with the surviving members steer away from squirmy subjects, like plagiarism charges or underage groupies; complicating wrinkles are smoothed over. There's a blurring line between journalism and PR fluff in documentaries lately. It is increasingly common for celebrities to produce, or play a significant behind-the-scenes role, in documentaries about themselves. If the gold standard for this category is Beyoncé's concert films, then Netflix's Harry & Meghan, a six-hour exercise in brand management, made with their own production company, may represent the nadir. As Edelman put it, viewers are 'being served slop'. In 2020, Hulu released a four-part series on Hillary Clinton, obscuring the fact that Clinton had chosen the production company and had input over the editing process. Similarly, Taylor Swift selected the director of 2020 documentary Miss Americana, a fitfully revealing glimpse behind the scenes of the Swift empire, then went on to make 2023's massively successful Eras Tour movie through her own production company. The problem isn't that such films exist; it's that they suck up all the oxygen – and money – from documentary distribution. In recent years, streaming services have filled up with docs about beloved celebrities, some quite worthwhile (2020's Zappa, 2021's Tina), others blandly reverential (Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story). Entertainment companies gobble up fawning documentaries about public figures, but won't touch anything controversial. Consider that Leaving Neverland, HBO's bombshell 2019 film investigating child abuse allegations against Michael Jackson, has effectively disappeared. It was permanently removed from Max after a lawsuit from Jackson's estate – a troubling omen, as Slate's Sam Adams argues, 'at a time when media access is under the near-total control of streaming conglomerates'. (A sequel, Leaving Neverland 2, hit YouTube recently to minimal fanfare.) A similar dynamic threatens to spread to the literary world. Last year, the influential rap group De La Soul denounced a book about them by music journalist Marcus J Moore and claimed to be 'exploring all of our legal options'. In a higher-profile case, Meta recently sued to block promotion of a tell-all memoir from a former employee, an effort that backfired deliciously. It will be an impoverished world where authors fear to publish unauthorised biographies because they can't afford to be sued by the subject. The corporate culture of capitulation has only worsened since Trump's re-election. In December, ABC News agreed to pay $15m to settle what some consider a frivolous lawsuit from Trump. In April, the executive producer of 60 Minutes resigned, saying his journalistic integrity had been compromised by corporate higher-ups, who have been considering their own Trump settlement. Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion No wonder film companies fear releasing anything that might upset the tweeter-in-chief. Consider that last year's sleazily gripping Trump biopic The Apprentice struggled to find a domestic distributor until a small company, Briarcliff Entertainment, stepped in. (Briarcliff's founder argued that the bigger studios had spurned it 'strictly based on cowardice'.) Consider, too, that the remarkable documentary No Other Land, which won an Oscar for its wrenching depiction of Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank, still doesn't have a proper US distributor. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime (whose parent company recently donated to Trump's inauguration, which its CEO Jeff Bezos personally attended) is spending $40m to make a Melania Trump vanity documentary, from which the first lady will reportedly profit. Projects like that are closer to propaganda than journalism, and this one's being bankrolled and legitimised by one of the largest and most powerful streaming companies in the entertainment industry. Documentaries ought to challenge and hold power to account more than they flatter. Instead, in a landscape where a few streaming companies owned or run by billionaires dominate the documentary market in the US, viewers are paying the price.
San Francisco Chronicle
29-04-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
Chronicle reporters Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson win prestigious Hillman Prize
Chronicle reporters Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson were awarded the prestigious Hillman Prize for newspaper journalism Tuesday for their investigation of police pursuits and their often devastating consequences. Gollan and Neilson's investigation found that high-speed chases frequently begin with minor offenses or traffic infractions and often kill passengers or bystanders rather than fleeing drivers. In recent years, thousands of people across the United States have been killed — a disproportionate number of them Black and Latino — even as agencies and officials vowed to reduce the toll. Awarded by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, the Hillman Prizes celebrate journalists who 'pursue investigative reporting and deep storytelling in service of the common good.' Judges honor a single piece of newspaper journalism annually, along with giving prizes for work in magazines, books, broadcast, opinion and analysis, and reporting on racial and economic justice. Other winners this year include Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti's report on extremists committing violence with impunity in Israel for the New York Times Magazine, NBC News Studios and MSNBC Films' series on Sing Sing Correctional Facility led by journalist Dan Slepian, whose reporting helped exonerate six men, and author Jonathan Blitzer's book 'Everyone Who is Gone is Here' on the intertwined forces that impact migration between Central America and the U.S. 'This is incredible company to be in, and is a testament to Jennifer and Susie's determination to get to the bottom of this crisis,' said Demian Bulwa, who as the Chronicle's director of news co-edited the investigation. 'By doing the hard work of studying every fatal police chase, they allowed readers to understand a shocking systemic failure and who is responsible.' For 'Fast and Fatal,' Gollan and Neilson spent a year compiling statistics from a range of sources to create a first-of-its-kind national database of fatalities from police pursuits. They uncovered 3,336 deaths from 2017 through 2022, including 15 police officers and at least 551 bystanders. Tens of thousands of additional people were injured by the pursuits. The reporters found that many chases that result in deaths or injuries began after low-level offenses, and the officers involved rarely faced repercussions. 'Fast and Fatal' was edited by Jesse Marx, Dan Kopf, Bulwa and Lisa Gartner, with copy editing by Michael Mayer. Visuals were by Stephen Lam, Jon Cherry and Liz Sanders. Chronicle Visual Director Nicole Frugé edited the visuals, with video production and annotations by Daymond Gascon and icons by John Blanchard. Alex K. Fong and Sophie D'Amato provided design and development, with additional development from Hearst DevHub's Danielle Rindler and Janie Haseman. Danielle Mollette-Parks, the Chronicle's former creative director who passed away in December 2023, contributed to the project's design. 'Fast and Fatal' previously tied with another Chronicle investigation in its division of the IRE Awards, given by the Investigative Reporters & Editors journalism nonprofit, and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. It also won a Sidney Award, given by the Sidney Hillman Foundation to recognize an exceptional piece of journalism published in the previous month. The project has had a swift impact. In response to the Chronicle's report, legislators and policing experts have called for better data on pursuit outcomes and new national guidelines for chases. About The San Francisco Chronicle The San Francisco Chronicle ( is the largest newspaper in Northern California and the second largest on the West Coast. Acquired by Hearst in 2000, The San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young and has been awarded six Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence. Follow us on Twitter at @SFChronicle
