Maddie

The coming-of-age story was produced by Janelle Monae Actress and frequent Sia collaborator Maddie Ziegler is a teenage girl with an unexpected crisis in the trailer for Fitting In. The film, from writer and director Molly McGlynn, stars Ziegler as a 16 year old who has been diagnosed with MRKH syndrome. The movie co-stars Emily Hampshire, Djouliet Amara, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, and Ki Griffin, and was notably produced by Janelle Monae, among others. It will open in theaters on Feb. 2.…

Image: HasbroAs we get closer and closer to the arrival of X-Men ‘97, the rallying cry of “To me, my X-Men merchandise!” just gets louder and louder. Earlier this week we saw Lego get in on the X-mania with a new set, but now it’s Hasbro’s turn with its latest wave inspired by the cartoon series.There’s plenty of X-Men this time around with Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Nightcrawler all getting figures in wave two, but the real highlights are the villains filling out the other half of the wave. Magneto—having appeared in wave…

When my mother died in 2010 at the age of 52, she left behind two teenage daughters, a devoted husband, innumerable friends and an archive of beautifully written diaries chronicling nearly every year of her life from the age of 25 until her final days. My sister and I were aware of this growing collection throughout our childhood; her past selves were stacked neatly at the bottom of the living room bookcase, preserved in their various jackets of worn leather or patterned fabrics. “These diaries have been the only constant…

‘This place is magical,” says Fern Maddie. She’s explaining that she just randomly met an audience member, who was about 50 and went to the same “weird hippy college” as her in her home state of Vermont. Maddie only recently took a break from living in the woods and tending goats there to play her first tour – only to bump into someone with mutual friends more than 3,000 miles away.You suspect the occasion was ordained by the folk musician’s acclaimed 2022 album Ghost Story, which she self-released, but found widespread…

The Lena test image. The original is a 512 by 512 pixel square. Photo: Dwight Hooker, 1972In her new book, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History, Samantha Cole traces the twisting history of the “Lena Centerfold,” an image from Playboy that became an international standard for training computers to recognize images. The image, taken in 1972, persisted for decades in computer science, even inspiring op-eds in 2015 from engineering students. The image and its ubiquity came to…

We’ve all said it (or indeed screamed it) when a song from our past comes on: “What a throwback!”Music soundtracks our lives. It becomes ingrained in our memory alongside our biggest milestones, from weddings to funerals, summer lovin‘ to heartbreak.It can make or break a night (nothing worse than a bad DJ) and it signals the start of the festive season in shopping centres. While we can’t all be in a musical – bursting into song in the street to tell our story – music is with us almost everywhere we go: the supermarket,…

In a world filled with bad actors and snooping governments, surveillance is the one factor that affects almost every business across the globe. While companies like Apple, Signal and LastPass fight against surveillance using end-to-end encryption and by shunning mass data collection — you can’t hand over data you don’t have — too many companies, big and small, remain unaware and deeply vulnerable to prying eyes. The fast-changing surveillance landscape is why we’re thrilled that Jennifer Stisa Granick, ACLU’s…

Image: Titmouse Inc/AMCSomehow Pantheon is AMC Networks’ first traditionally animated series, a style that contrasts with its near-future tale of technological horrors—and how love just might be able to transcend them. Based on short stories by multiple Hugo-winning author and translator Ken Liu (“The Paper Menagerie,” The Dandelion Dynasty), the eight-episode series boasts a tremendous voice cast and a morally complex mystery at its core.Created by Craig Silverstein (Turn: Washington’s Spies, Nikita)—who’s also writer,…

“Spectacular talent” Maddie Mortimer has won the Desmond Elliott prize for her “incredibly inventive” novel Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies.Mortimer was announced as the winner of the prize, which is given for a debut novel published in the UK and Ireland, at a ceremony in London this evening.Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies was inspired by Mortimer’s mother, who died of cancer in 2010, and focuses on the character of Lia and the shapeshifting cancer inside her body. Moving between Lia’s past and present, the book is a look…

Vermont-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Fern Maddie fell for British and Irish traditional music in her teens, then inhaled folk songs and began songwriting, encouraged by her composer father. After his early death, she decided to live her life making music in tribute to him in her own curious way. She now makes a podcast about traditional music, Of Song and Bone, writes music in her woodland cabin, tends goats, and documents her life, without embellishment, on Instagram.Fern Maddie: Ghost Story cover art.Ghost…