Category Opinion

This week, British luxury-car brand Jaguar managed to incite an internet firestorm for two distinct yet related reasons. First, it unveiled a new logo, which…let’s just say the jury is still out on (the titular jaguar is gone??). Then, to help launch its rebrand, it released a rather mystifying 30-second ad.

I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the likes of Elon Musk have pejoratively called the spot woke, presumably because it…features some people who aren’t white or thin or necessarily cisgender presenting? One thing the ad does not feature, though, is a car, which, to be honest, is kind of refreshing. (We’ve seen plenty of cars!)

Watch the ad for yourself, then find (literally) every thought I had about it below:

1. When the elevator doors open to a synchronized beat…you know it’s going down.

2. I need this red turtleneck!

3. And this orange corset, too, while I’m at it!

4. Ooh, these floaty, almost floral layers of fabric are very Simone Rocha.

Growing up in a Reform-meets-atheist household where my H&H bagel-slicing skills were deemed far more important than learning my Torah portion for a bat mitzvah that I didn’t want in the first place and my parents didn’t want to pay for, I gleaned most of my knowledge of Jewish faith and tradition not in temple, but in front of the television.

The first TV rabbi that I can remember seeing appeared—like so many good things—in Sex and the City; I watched, rapt, as Charlotte York attempted to convert to Judaisim out of love for her bald, bullish, very Jewish boyfriend Harry Goldenblatt, only to have her local rabbi reject her three times (which is apparently a real thing?) before grudgingly inviting her over for Shabbos dinner with his family. By Season 1 of And Just Like That… two decades later, Charlotte York-Goldenblatt had become a full-on Jewish mother with Hari Nef as her family’s rabbi. (Quite the upgrade!)

Watching Nef—a Jewish actress who first broke out playing a Weimar Germany-era trans woman on Transparent—perform a joyful, extremely chic “they mitzvah” for Charlotte’s nonbinary child Rock felt like the ultimate sign that we, as a faith, had evolved past staid, Fiddler on the Roof-coded depictions of Jewish spiritual leaders onscreen and into a more vibes-based rabbinical era.

There have, of course, been a few hotties along the way: Mandy Patinkin as a dripping wet yeshiva student in Yentl; Ben Stiller as Rabbi Jake Schram in 2000’s Keeping the Faith. But now, a few years after Kathryn Hahn played the beautiful, good-hearted, fuckboy-dating Rabbi Raquel on Transparent (inspiring me to don a modest dress and a tallit one Halloween), we have Adam Brody starring as a rabbi on the new Netflix rom-com series Nobody Wants This. Seeing The O.C.’s Seth Cohen—one of television’s first truly infatuation-worthy, non-assimilated Nice Jewish Boys—take on perhaps the most exalted role in the Jewish spiritual world makes me feel a) quite old and b) glad to see the rabbi enter cool, down-to-earth, romantic-lead territory.

Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples—or would-be couples—that give us hope for our own romantic futures, and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.

I try to stay reasonably up-to-date on my Hugh Grant news, which is easy enough when said news tends to be along the lines of, “Hugh Grant steps out in London wearing a sweater” (likely place for him to be and likely item for him to be wearing). Yet we Hugh-heads have been blessed with all kinds of interesting news lately. Not only was it confirmed that Grant will reprise his iconic role as Daniel Cleaver in the upcoming fourth installment of the Bridget Jones’s Diary film series, but he is also at the center of a veritable kissing imbroglio this week. On Friday, Real Housewives of New York alum Luann de Lesseps reported that she and the 64-year-old actor had engaged in a little makeout at a Hamptons restaurant on some unspecified prior date.

“A girlfriend of mine called me and was like, ‘Hugh Grant is at Pierre’s.’ I said, ‘I’ll be right over.’ I called and said, ‘Get the table right next to Hugh Grant.’ I had my family over, my brother was visiting me, and I said, ‘Let’s go,’” de Lesseps told the site TooFab. “I pushed out my chair real fast, and I bumped into him—flirting 101—I bumped into him and said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ He knows who I am because I know Andy [Cohen]. I go, ‘I’m so sorry. Can I buy you a shot? I feel terrible.’ He goes, ‘Okay, but I’ll come have a shot with you if you do one with me.’ Before you know it, we are taking shots and making out…heavily at the table! My brother was like, ‘I can’t believe you’re making out with Hugh Grant,’ and I was like, ‘Neither can I.’”

Beautifully enough, Grant actually responded to de Lesseps’s memory of their alleged kissing session on Monday, writing on X: “Steady on. I do remember meeting a charming RHNY in a restaurant, but I’d like to stress it was about 15 years ago. I don’t recall shots or kissing, but her memory might be better than mine.”

If you’ve still yet to fully recover from Saltburn’s bathtub scene, then it’s perhaps best to look away now: Oscar-winning provocateur Emerald Fennell has set her sights on her next project, and her choice is sure to be a divisive one.

On July 12, the director took to X to share an illustration of a ghostly skeleton by artist Katie Buckley. At its heart sits the title Wuthering Heights, and below it the strapline “A film by Emerald Fennell.” Above the image, it reads, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad,” the immortal words Heathcliff utters after the tragic death of Catherine Earnshaw.

Given her last feature, and Promising Young Woman before it, were both about obsession—the former about one student’s infatuation with another, and the latter about a woman’s single-minded determination to avenge the death of her best friend—the decision to adapt Emily Brontë’s seminal tale of doomed love, as well as the accompanying tagline, make perfect sense.

However, it did leave us with a number of questions, too. Will this be a faithful period adaptation, or a modern-day update? How will it compare to the countless other big-screen renderings of this particular story, from Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s 1939 version, to the 1992 film starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 reimagining with Kaya Scodelario and James Howson?

Would it be Barry Keoghan, I wondered, who’d don a waistcoat and scraggly mane to play our brooding Byronic hero? And who could possibly take the part of Cathy? Well, at least on that front, we now have some answers: on September 23, it emerged that it was not the Irish Oscar nominee but—staggeringly—his Saltburn co-star Jacob Elordi who’d be delivering Heathcliff’s impassioned monologues, while Margot Robbie, now the world’s most ubiquitous blonde after Barbie herself, would (presumably) be going brunette to embody his tormented paramour. The latter will also be producing through her company, LuckyChap, after having backed Fennell’s last two films, too.

One morning a few days ago, I received an odd email from someone I’d been writing back and forth with about the US Open: “Could we speak on your cell at 4pm? Something amazing may be possible.” That something, as it turned out, was a chance to hit—one on one—for 30 minutes with two-time US Open champion (and eight-time Grand Slam champion, Olympic gold medalist, Hall of Fame member, and all-around living legend) Andre Agassi the following morning at 7, in Arthur Ashe Stadium, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, a.k.a. the biggest prime-time stage at the Open—followed by breakfast and a chat in the Emirates Suite in Ashe.

Even thinking about it felt ridiculous: Though I’ve been playing tennis for decades, I’m also decades removed from my brief stint competing on the midwestern boys’ junior circuit. These days, I’m a supremely average once-a-week player perpetually on the verge of, you know, getting myself back in fighting form. I absolutely love to find the groove on a big-swing, big-finish crosscourt topspin forehand, I like playing a few sets against friends, but I loathe the notion of putting myself out there for even a local club tournament. Purely going on natural instinct, every fiber of my body told me to say no to this (admittedly mind-boggling) opportunity.

Emotionally, I realized I was going through some kind of inverse of the seven stages of grief, stuck on an odd kind of anger at this once-in-a-lifetime thing landing on my lap. Not one of the many actors I’ve interviewed ever asked me to step in front of the camera and read lines, or leap through a window as part of a big chase scene; zero of the musicians I’ve talked with over the years have asked me to stand in with them at Madison Square Garden and trade guitar solos or take over lead-vocal duties at their sound check—so why this?

Yet here was the offer: Play tennis, with one of the greatest to ever do so, in the largest tennis stadium in the world. I had 90 minutes to make up my mind.

The first thing I did was reach for a box filled with old photographs on a bookshelf in my living room, where I dug up a picture of Andre and me—in 1994—at a pre-Open Nike party at a restaurant near Gramercy Park. I have no idea what we talked about, and in any case I didn’t want to bother him or take up too much of his time, as he was there with Brooke Shields (they’d then been dating for about a year and would be married a few years later), and it seemed obvious that they adored each other’s company. No—I was just over the moon to even be there: a lifelong tennis nerd now, for the first time, around real tennis legends. (Aside from Andre I also met John McEnroe, who had arrived late, wearing a rumpled jean jacket and a scowl on his face, carrying an armful of vinyl records—a.k.a. exactly the Johnny Mac out of central casting that I wanted to see.)

The stakes were high going into Tuesday’s first (and only) vice presidential debate between Democratic Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota and Republican Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, given the 2024 presidential election is just over a month away. No, the faceoff between two vice presidential candidates was never going to move the political needle quite as much as, say, Kamala v. Trump, but Tuesday’s meeting still had its highlights. Below, find the 5 biggest takeaways from the Walz vs. Vance debate.

The mute button was in use

While the Walz-Vance match-up was significantly more polite than Harris and Trump’s debate last month, it was still sort of satisfying to see two women—in this case, CBS moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan—hit the mute button on both men when they spoke out of turn.

Vance and Walz were both pressed on past missteps

While Walz faced some tough questioning about newly unearthed contradictions to his claim that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Vance was asked about once likening of Trump to “America’s Hitler.” Later on, Walz also directly asked Vance if Trump had lost the 2020 election—to which the senator gave what can only be described as a non-answer.

Walz (wisely) referenced his state’s record of restoring post-Roe abortion rights

“We are ranked first in healthcare for a reason. We trust women; we trust doctors,” Walz said of Minnesota after referencing real-life examples of abortion rights activists like Hadley Duvall being denied necessary reproductive care. Walz signed a bill intended to enshrine the right to abortion into the Minnesota state constitution in January 2023—making the contrast between his record on reproductive rights and the Trump-Vance campaign’s outlandish claims about abortion all the more clear.

Childcare costs were centered, for once

Walz and Vance were able to unite (more or less) on the need for more and better childcare solutions for working families. Although their plans aren’t identical, it was nice to hear the American childcare crisis—an issue that diaproportionally affects women—addressed on the national stage.

The civility of it all was almost creepy

It might be easy to forget, given the novelty of getting through a debate without one candidate calling another “mentally impaired,” but Vance’s artful spin on Trump’s agenda is still…the same agenda.

Here, Vogue’s political correspondent Jack Schlossberg shares his own main takeaways from Tuesday’s debate:

Last week, Paul Mescal posted what some might consider a cry for help on his Instagram Stories: a live recording of Bon Iver’s cover of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt. While we all know by now that the actor enjoys a sad bop, Mescal’s attraction to the musical stylings of Bon Iver feels especially apropos this time of year. The weather is changing, summer flings are dying out, and the country feels on the brink of political turmoil. Enter Justin Vernon.

After Brat Summer painted the world chartreuse, it seemed unclear, for a time, what would happen come autumn, when the hangover set in. As it turns out, Charli XCX had the answer all along: This month, the singer released her latest brat variant, brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, a remixed album overflowing with high-profile features—including one from Bon Iver on “I think about it all the time.” (Vernon told The New Yorker that agreeing to do the track was “a no-brainer.”) In its original state, the song is a rumination on Charli’s biological clock, and not wanting to sacrifice her career to have kids. But with a downtempo beat and some vocal modulation, its remix becomes a broader treatise on love and loneliness, as Vernon croons: “You’re lonely and you’re / And you’re asking, ‘When did it get so hard?’” Charli and Vernon also sample Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and interpolate Bon Iver’s “Nick of Time,” engineering a track that neatly bridges the two artists’ sonic universes.

The internet loves a woman who fits neatly into a category. The tradwife, basking in the glow of freshly baked sourdough, her life an ode to nostalgic domesticity. The childfree-by-choice woman, sipping Aperol Spritzes on a sunlit balcony, her autonomy celebrated as liberation.

But the working mother, who exists somewhere in the middle? She rarely commands such a romantic narrative. Instead, she’s cast as the emblem of exhaustion: screaming into the ether, and crushed under the weight of challenges both systemic and deeply personal.

These images are rooted in truth. The working mother does carry a heavy load, navigating systems designed for a reality that no longer exists. She balances work, family, and self in a world that too often feels indifferent to her needs. But to focus only on her struggles is to miss an equally vital truth: the joy that comes from holding two worlds in tandem, and finding pleasure and meaning in both.

I love being a working mother. I love my job, which challenges me to think on my feet, exposes me to interesting people, and allows me to collaborate with colleagues who respect and value me. I love my son, who is funny, insightful, and full of curiosity, and with whom I share a bond that feels both profound and utterly unique. And most of all, I love that I get to do both of these things at the same time.

Part of that joy comes from knowing this life wasn’t a given—not for me, nor for many of the women I grew up around. In the lower-middle-class community where I spent my childhood, most mothers stayed at home—not out of ideological conviction, but because they had few other options. My own mother, a working-class woman who didn’t finish high school, never had the chance to chase her dreams, or even the space to imagine what they might be. I grew up internalizing the idea that motherhood required you to set your ambitions aside, at least for a while.

In contrast to the norms I grew up with, I returned to work just five weeks after my son was born, to help put the finishing touches on a play I’d been producing. I continued working part-time during his baby and toddler years, partly because I wanted to and partly because it was all I could afford. My husband and I saw childcare as a joint expense, but with my earnings so modest, it was hard to justify full-time care.

Today, Tomorrow x Together (TXT) unveiled their seventh mini album, The Star Chapter: Sanctuary, made up of six new tracks that take listeners on a heavenly sonic journey.

The members of TXT—Yeonjun, Hueningkai, Soobin, Taehyun, and Beomgyu—have come a long way since 2019, when they first arrived on the scene as teenagers, attracting a following with pop songs like “Crown” and “Blue Orangeade.” Now that they’re in their early 20s, not only does their new music feature more mature lyrics—some of which were written by the members themselves—but the album also leans into an R&B sound, heard perhaps most plainly on the song “Danger.” In that way, The Star Chapter: Sanctuary could be likened to Justified, Justin Timberlake’s first album outside of NSYNC, which featured raunchier songs like “Rock Your Body”—except, in the case of TXT, the members are exploring who they are as adults all together.

As Taehyun tells Vogue, “The 2000s music scene was filled with incredible hits and legendary R&B artists. While preparing for this album, we explored a diversity of R&B songs, which allowed us to capture a groovy rhythm in our recordings.” Adds Soobin, “The Star Chapter: Sanctuary opens a new chapter in a unique narrative, delving into the universal language of love.”

But while the group members spent some time looking into the past for their latest record, they also wanted to stay true to the infectious modern sound that has so resonated with their fanbase. As Beomgyu puts it, “Instead of simply reinterpreting the sound [of R&B], I wanted to create something fresh that still carries a hint of nostalgia for everyone to enjoy.” When you put two and two together, you get an album from TXT that can be appreciated across generations.

With the new album, we can also expect the members to show off their finely honed dance skills, both in TikTok challenges and across their music videos. For anyone wondering how long it takes a professional boy band to learn their choreography, Yeonjun and Hueningkai let us into the process a bit: “Typically, learning brand-new choreography takes about five hours and around eight days to look fully perfect,” Yeonjun says. “This was the case for mastering the choreography for [the lead single] ‘Over the Moon.’” At other points, Hueningkai explains, “There are times when we need to learn modified choreography for specific tracks, if we’re performing a special remix for our tour or music festival appearances.”