When I catch up with Regina Hall via Zoom, it’s a busy, sunshiny day for her in New York City, full of photo shoots and interviews. I can’t help but compliment the jovial actor on the chic headscarf she’s wearing, and when I do, she leans toward the screen with an infectious laugh and says, “It’s Zoom. Girl—the wig is right here. But I was like, ‘I’m not gonna have time to put the wig on. Whoever they are, they’re gonna have to get a...

Ring the alarm! Beyoncé has surprised fans and hinted at a world tour for her album Renaissance scheduled to begin in the Summer of 2023. On Saturday, October 22, Variety reports that at the WACO Theater‘s Wearable Art Gala, the singer auctioned off a package that included two tickets to one of her upcoming concerts a year from now. Although she hasn’t officially confirmed that a tour will take place, fans are ecstatic and shared pictures of the auction online.  Beyoncé confirmed a Renaissance summer 2023...

A depiction of something—be it “bad,” like violence, or “good,” like a strong female protagonist—should never be conflated with the artist’s endorsement of it. But what is the cumulative effect of a medium like film that so frequently shows women being beaten, killed, and violated while simultaneously objectifying them? Nina Menkes’ expansive documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, out October 21st, 2022, touches on those repercussions—the absence of women behind the camera, the lack of agency female actors have in sex scenes—while also picking apart the cishet male gaze encoded...

I love a good queer period drama. Carol is my favorite Christmas movie. Gentleman Jack sent me on a deep dive through the Anne Lister Diaries on Audible.  I’ll even go for a screening of If These Walls Could Talk 2. The stomach-twisting stress of the closet of generations past usually leaves me with an affirming sense of relief. My queer family can move through the world not only safely, but seen.     As my streaming service algorithms predicted, when queer applause exploded for Prime’s reimagining...

ACNE: A Memoir By Laura Chinn (Hachette Books)  Let’s say you were to pick up a copy of a book that had a very straightforward title, something that made you think of your own goofy teen years. Pretend that the first couple of pages in this book neatly adhered to said title and took you to that dorky, hormonal place. Imagine that the book then veered into a painfully funny, raw, and even scary collection of personal essays that—stay with me—still somehow managed to incorporate the title as a unifying...

Amber Tamblyn’s Poetry Corner  We Are Mermaids (Graywolf Press) is a potent meditation on personal excavations, written with wit, honesty, and introspection by the singular trans writer, cultural critic, and poet-at-large Stephanie Burt. Burt’s poems are illuminations of life’s many transitions; of living between worlds, identities, beliefs, and stories. In the poem “My 1994,” Burt writes: “I didn’t know. But I knew. I took off the dress/Kay offered and apologized for my striped boxers./I called myself a kid in a candy store/When I was a teen in...

Throughout her 47 years in show business, Sainte-Marie has always done things on her own terms, and she has piles of awards to show for it, including an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her most widely recognized songwriting credit, “Up Where We Belong,” which she penned for the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman. And despite her unwillingness to fit into the rigid girl-pop mold of the ’60s, she was a success from the very beginning, nabbing Billboard’s Best New Artist award for...

If you’re looking for a song that channels boss-bitch vibes and emphasizes the importance of being yourself and being heard, you should stream M.I.A’s new single, “Beep.” On September 30, 2022, British rapper and singer M.I.A .released the electronic dance-inspiring song of the year: “Beep.” The drop comes just ahead of the release of her sixth studio album, MATA, which is set to hit streaming platforms on October 14.           View this post on Instagram                       A post shared by M.I.A....

For today Oct. 7th only, Good Music and Noise For Now has announced there will be a one time sale for the compilation album Good Music To Ensure Safe Abortion Access To All. The compilation album features exclusive never-before-heard songs, remixes, live demos and much more. Contributing artists such as Wet Leg, Tegan and Sara, Maya Hawke, David Byrne, and many more will be featured on the album. Additionally, you can pre-order t-shirts that feature Kim Gordon’s Liberate Abortion artwork via Noise For Now: https://noisefornow.org/shop The overturning...

Best known for her novels Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017), New York Times bestselling author Celeste Ng is a wildly imaginative creator of family sagas. Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, is a suspense story revolving around a young man and his estranged mom that comes out October 4. Here, Ng shares the routines that keep her writing her way into the future. Your new novel, Our Missing Hearts, is set in a dystopian future America. What elements of today’s world did you draw upon to create...