Meryl Streep and Cher Once Saved a Woman From a Mugger

Meryl Streep, America’s most beloved actress, grande dame, political crusader, and Vogue cover queen, is also a crime-fighting superhero, along with—who else—Cher! The dynamic duo apparently saved a woman from a mugger in New York City. Streep and Cher filmed Silkwood together in the ’80s. This was revealed at a speech in front of the Committee to Protect Journalists on Wednesday, when Streep recounted two incidents in which she had to defend herself or someone else from physical violence. The one in question? “Someone else was being abused and I just went completely nuts and went after this man,” Streep said. “Ask Cher—she was there. And the thug ran away, it was a miracle.”

Cher and Streep will reunite for next year’s Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the Mamma Mia sequel. Cher corroborates the mugging anecdote in an Us Weekly “25 Things You Don’t Know About Me” column, in which she said, matter-of-factly, “Meryl Streep and I saved a girl from a large mugger in New York City.” Imagine not only experiencing the trauma, but then the miracle of being saved from a violent mugging and looking up to see that it was Cher and Meryl Streep who chased him away. In our minds, this crimefighting duo is called Cheryl.

This Photo Exhibition Celebrates a Legendary Drag Landmark

Every Sunday night in the mid-1980s, when the Lower East Side was far less scrubbed and congenial than it is now, the Pyramid Club on Avenue A hosted “Whispers,” a gathering of artists, drag performers, musicians, misfits, misanthropes, and the people who loved them.

The photographer Clayton Patterson, who today has golden teeth and a beard to rival R. Crumb’s “Mr. Natural,” was at the club most weeks, photographing the attendees and, over the years, amassing a vast archive. “In 1986, I met Peter Kwaloff, who changed his name to Sun PK, and he invited me to come and document the scene,” Patterson explains at Groupe, a clothing store/collective/gallery on the Bowery that is presenting a selection of Patterson’s “Portraits From the Pyramid”—opening tonight.

Ensembles made of cardboard and fabric, or garbage and found objects, are examples of what the crowd flaunted on those long-lost Sundays—an explosion of creativity that performance artist Kembra Pfahler, who hung out at the club, termed “availabilism,” meaning that you took whatever you could unearth from the trash, or $1-a-yard fabric stores, and turned your discoveries into style and art.

The spectacular results call out to us from across the decades, as loudly as they must have done on those dirty nights 30 years ago. Here is Sun PK, with hands crossed atop a striped halter, a poignant expression on painted lips, with a lampshade serving as a sophisticated chapeau. John Kelly is disguised as a soulful Mona Lisa; Happy Phace, the night’s MC, sports miniature white gloves that serve as swinging ear bobs.

“You can see, they were all posing for me,” Patterson says. Yes, but also for themselves, and for each other, and for the world.

Beyoncé Breaks Out the Balenciaga—Then Goes For Affordable Chic

After spending the past few months immersed in the whimsical world of Alessandro Michele’s Gucci collections, Beyoncé appears to have found a new fashion label to love. On Instagram this morning, the superstar showed off a sexy look from Balenciaga that continued her streak of daring post-pregnancy style. The form-fitting pink satin pants and a coordinating blue floral blouse were accessorized with pale-pink Illesteva sunglasses, plus a pair of crystal-encrusted Louboutin heels so pretty that Blue Ivy couldn’t resist trying them on. (Of course, the pop diva might not be done with Gucci just yet: Today’s outfit also included a python purse with ribbon strap and dragon embellishment from the brand that has become her fashion go to.)

While luxury brands like Balenciaga and Gucci will always be a part of Beyoncé’s repertoire, the superstar has been known to mix high and low. Stepping out in Manhattan last night to check out artist Sadie Barnette’s exhibit at Fort Gansevoort, Beyoncé opted for the affordable combination of a pale pink bodysuit from Mistress Rocks and a sheer skirt from House of CB. With both items costing less than the price of a single Balenciaga accessory, Beyoncé once again proved that great style doesn’t have to be expensive.

Teyana Taylor’s Rock-Solid Abs Steal the VMAs 2017 Red Carpet

For Teyana Taylor, a walk down the VMAs 2017 red carpet was winning in more ways than one. During the pre-show, the actress, singer, and dancer accepted the Moon Person for Best Choreography award for Kanye West’s “Fade” video—which premiered last year and catapulted the rising actress-dancer to instant fame thanks to her steamy Flashdance–inspired performance—while redefining the term #fitspiration with her chiseled six-pack.

In readying for tonight’s event, Taylor traded her usual chest-grazing extensions and braids for a side-parted onyx chop that drew immediate comparisons to Janet Jackson’s 1995 VMAs appearance, during which the iconic pop star claimed a statue for her memorable “Scream” dance video. Dressed in an almost identical white micro-top that revealed her jaw-dropping abs, Taylor traded on the same body-conscious success that was as integral to last year’s “Fade” mania as her dance moves themselves—and proved that an iconic set of abs is officially timeless.

Step Aside, Idris Elba and Chris Hemsworth: Robert Mueller Is America’s New Crush

When the news broke yesterday that special counsel Robert Mueller had tapped a grand jury as part of his investigation into Russia’s interference in last year’s presidential election, there were two common reactions: One, that in beefing up its legal authority, the Mueller probe was plowing full speed ahead. (“You don’t impanel a grand jury if you only have smoke,” Congressman Ted Lieu observed. “Mueller must be seeing fire.”) And, two, that Mueller was beginning to feel extra-special to some of his supporters. Or as Chelsea Handler bluntly put it on Twitter: “I’m starting to have a real crush on Mueller.”

She wasn’t the only one who’d felt a tingle while reading The Wall Street Journal breaking news alert. Handler’s tweet about the 72-year-old grandfather was met with responses like, “Intelligence is sexy”; “It’s Mueller Time” (there are now even T-shirts and trucker hats to this effect); #SilverFox; and from one man, “I wanna have his baby.” Kindly step aside, Messrs. Idris Elba and Chris Hemsworth, because America has a deeply passionate, totally red-hot new crush, and it’s on Robert Mueller.

While he can evoke shades of Humphrey Bogart and has mastered a nearly Zoolander-esque gaze, the sense of adoration going around is less objectification, more idolization. As a nation starved for heroes (though not heroines—see: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and, um, Wonder Woman), Mueller is slaying us with a trait that’s all too rare in Washington these days: good old-fashioned dignity. While President Trump lies and cyberbullies with impunity (not to mention his declared penchant for grabbing women’s genitals), and his cohorts include a former White House communications director who refers to himself in the third person as “The Mooch” (and advertises to The New Yorker that he does not perform self-fellatio), Mueller is a widely-respected-on-both-sides Vietnam vet and career public servant who is silently, stoically suiting up and doing his job (without tweets, leaks, or, God forbid, reference to anybody’s genitals). He towers above the fray in Washington with the authoritative air of a professor emeritus—or, once upon a time, a U.S. president.

It helps, of course, that Mueller also has a mythical white knight vibe going: By some estimations, in the absence of congressional Republicans standing up to Trump in any meaningful way, Mueller’s investigation is the great white—and possibly only—hope for finding out once and for all whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, and whether or not the president himself obstructed justice in the course of the Russia investigation. As Democratic Coalition Against Trump cofounder Scott Dworkin summed it up: “Dear Robert Mueller, Please hurry. The human race.”

This hot pursuit of the truth has made Mueller hot, but he’s not the only one. On the day of his much-watched testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, James Comey drew swoons on Twitter, including suggestions he be the next Bachelor. (It seems we all have a type: former FBI directors.) And hard-charging CNN host Jake Tapper, too, has become a journalistic crush among the resistance. The truth, it seems, has never been sexier.

5 Things You Didn't Know About Barack Obama

With the hourly deluge that is the Trump news cycle, it can be easy to forget that Barack Obama was our president just eight months ago. For some of us, it has felt too long since we’ve seen that familiar—and downright presidential—grin. In hopes of reproducing it, and to commemorate his birthday, we’ve got five factoids you probably didn’t know about the 44th President, from the time he was rejected as a model to a young Obama’s dreams of being an architect.

Happy Birthday, President Obama! We promise we won’t ask you for proof.

While at Harvard, he once attempted to model for a calendar (and he was promptly rejected by the judging committee)
When Obama was at Harvard, a classmate decided to create a calendar featuring 12 of the school’s most promising African-American male law students (as a response to damning portrayals of black men in mainstream media). According to a New York Times article from 1991, the student, Troy Chapman, hoped the project featuring Harvard’s brightest would paint a different picture. With 90 or so black male law students that year, the competition was apparently so fierce that Chapman employed the help of many of the school’s 110 African-American female students to decide who would ultimately make the cut. Obama was a student, and while one might think he’d be a shoe-in, the judges thought otherwise—the fact that he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review apparently didn’t help him, either.

He is baby-crazy

Obama has been known to love children, and told CBS’s Gayle King last year that kids were some of his more memorable visitors over the years at the White House. “I love getting on the ground with babies in the Oval Office,” he said. “And they’re unrestrained so they will run around. They will take out all the apples out of the bowl and set them in various places and then put them back. They’re out of control,” he noted, laughing. His chief official White House photographer would often capture the former president playing with toddlers in the West Wing, and images reveal that he had no qualms about joining them in their crawling adventures on the floor, as he did most notably with Ella Harper Rhodes, the daughter of former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

He carried lucky charms in his pocket during his presidency

For President Obama, personal stories have always been central to not only his campaign, but his belief system of what unites us as people. In January of 2016, he revealed to YouTube vlogger Ingrid Nilsen that he always carried a few pieces of memorabilia or lucky charms given to him over the years to remind him of this. “Ever since I started running for office, people started handing me things when I'd speak to a crowd—little lucky charms or keepsakes, or things that meant something to them. And so now I have a habit of I always carry around . . . a few things that I just stick in my pocket to remind me of all the people I’ve met along the way and the stories they told me.” Among the items Obama procured from his pocket during the interview were rosary beads from Pope Francis, a small Buddha statuette, and a poker chip from a biker guy with a “big handlebar mustache and a bunch of tats.” Though he admits he’s not very superstitious, he looked to them as symbols of the faith of his constituents. “If I feel tired or I feel discouraged sometimes, I can reach into my pocket, and I say, ‘Yeah, that’s something I can overcome because somebody gave me this privilege to work on these issues that are going to affect them. I better get back to work.’”

Speaking of stories, he is a writer of short ones

In an interview with then New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani about the importance of reading fiction—beloved by Obama from the time he was a child for allowing him a sense of escapism after having grown up in several countries and feeling, at times, culturally displaced—he shared that, while he was in college, he wrote short stories. “At that time, writing was the way I sorted through a lot of crosscurrents in my life—race, class, family,” he explained. “And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole.” A believer that fiction can bridge the gaps between even the most different of people, Obama famously quoted To Kill A Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch in his farewell address: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” It received, as one can imagine, roaring applause from the crowd. “Fiction was useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day and was a way of seeing and hearing the voices, the multitudes of this country,” he told Kakutani.

He wanted to be an architect, but didn’t have the creative chops for it

In 2011, while at a dinner for Eduardo Souto de Moura, the recipient of that year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, Obama admitted that he had early dreams of being an architect. He went into politics when he reportedly discovered that he wasn’t as “creative” as he hoped to be. In his speech, he said that, to him, architecture was all about “creating buildings and spaces that inspire us, that help us do our jobs, that bring us together, and that become, at their best, works of art that we can move through and live in.” Revealing that he believed architecture is “the most democratic of art forms,” his switch to politics seemed a natural choice.

Icarus Is a Sports Movie That’s Actually About Putin’s Russia

“The movie I thought I was making was a radically different film than the one that I ended up making,” says Bryan Fogel, director of the new documentary Icarus, which hits Netflix today.

Icarus opens with Lance Armstrong, closes with George Orwell’s 1984, and in between offers a play-by-play of what the director calls “the single biggest scandal in sports history”: the revelation of Russia’s massive state-sponsored doping program, a decades-long operation that reached its zenith during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. The film began as a Morgan Spurlock–style stunt. Best known as the creator and star of the off-Broadway show Jewtopia, Fogel is also a competitive amateur cyclist, and like so many fans of the sport, he’d long wondered whether Lance Armstrong, cycling’s Michael Jordan, owed any of his incredible success to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Then in 2013, Armstrong, under pressure from a criminal investigation, finally confessed. The seven-time Tour de France winner was subsequently stripped of his titles, ordered to pay back his prize money, and became, in the public view, says Fogel, “the criminal mastermind who had essentially created doping, forced people to dope.”

Fogel was surprised, not that Armstrong was using PEDs—“I just kind of assumed he was”—but, that he’d never been caught, despite having been tested hundreds of times. “I was not so much like: ‘What is wrong with Lance Armstrong?’,” the director remembers. “I was going: ‘What is wrong with this system?’ ” Icarus, in Fogel’s original conception, would be a way of vindicating Armstrong, or at least turning the tables on the anti-doping agencies that were quick to claim the cyclist’s downfall as their victory. Fogel would enter the Haute Route, the toughest amateur cycling race in the world (like the “hardest seven days of the Tour de France back to back”). He would enlist the help of a premiere anti-doping scientist to help him self-administer an Armstrong-worthy drug regimen in preparation. And then he would win—or at least beat his previous best time—all the while proving that he could clear myriad anti-doping checkpoints. “I said, Nobody’s ever seen someone dope themselves on camera. We haven’t seen what these drugs do or don’t do. We’re being told as a society that they’re harmful and dangerous to us. Are they? And the bigger question is: If I could evade detection, what did it mean not just for cycling”—among the most rigorously monitored sports—“but for all sports?”

Through some combination of bad luck and natural athletic limitation, months of shooting himself up with steroids did not, in the end, give Fogel the competitive advantage he needed to win the Haute Route. But from that stunt was born a much more interesting movie. Casting for a scientist to help him plan his own doping program, Fogel found his way to Grigory Rodchenkov, director of the World Anti Doping Association–accredited Moscow lab and a one-time competitive runner who had no compunctions about coaching Fogel over Skype in how to dose himself and beat the system. Rodchenkov, a jovial eccentric prone to speaking in charmingly cryptic riddles, even goes so far as to travel to Los Angeles to smuggle the director’s urine back to Russia, where it can be tested.

If the name Grigory Rodchenkov is ringing bells, it’s because he was the whistleblower at the center of a May 2016 New York Times exposé that revealed the extent of Russia’s widespread doping program, and explained how Rodchenkov’s lab, at governmental behest, had enabled Russian athletes to dope their way through the Sochi Olympics (using a special Rodchenkov-designed drug cocktail) and to evade detection through a complex urine-swapping protocol. About halfway through its two-hour run time, Icarus becomes a real-time exploration of the lead-up to and fallout from that Times story. As news of Russian doping conspiracies begin to trickle out in the aftermath of Sochi—first in a 2014 German documentary, then in a report from an independent WADA commission—Rodchenkov, fearing for his life, enlists Fogel’s help to flee Russia. He arrives in Los Angeles bearing hard drive evidence of his country’s foul play, comes clean on camera, brings his story to the Times, and enters a U.S. witness protection program amid a simultaneous investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI (all that, only to watch as the International Olympic Committee, against WADA advisement, decides ultimately to allow most Russian athletes to compete at the 2016 Rio Olympics).

If you’ve paid attention to the news, none of Icarus’s revelations will feel earth-shattering (though the film does show how instrumental Fogel was in delivering the story to the Times). But this documentary distinguishes itself as an exceptionally riveting portrait of an exceptionally fascinating figure: Rodchenkov, the mystifying double agent—by day, a WADA star who worked to develop cutting-edge anti-doping measures, by night, Putin’s henchman, who worked to undermine those same techniques. As Fogel reveals him, Rodchenkov is a sort of gentle-hearted Orwell-obsessed mad scientist—he explains his actions as “pure, exact double-think”—whose inconsistent relationship with the truth can perhaps offer American viewers some window into the Russian mind-set, and the Russian propaganda machine at work.

I spoke to Fogel by phone about the film, his enigmatic main subject, and how he ended up in the middle of a massive global scandal.

Nikki Reed and Ian Somerhalder Reveal a Secret That Only New Parents Know

Celebrity parents have given us some of quirky parenting’s greatest hits, like placenta pills (Kim Kardashian West; allegedly Tom Cruise), mouth-to-mouth (aka “baby bird”) feeding à la Alicia Silverstone, and the hipster-fueled resurgence of the word mama, among many, many others. But this week, actors Nikki Reed and Ian Somerhalder managed to deliver a brand-new gem: When their baby arrives, they’re planning “one month of silence,” Reed told Fit Pregnancy and Baby magazine. “Just the three of us, no visitors, and we’re turning off our phones, too, so there’s no expectation for us to communicate. Otherwise, every five minutes it would be, ‘How are you feeling? Can we have a picture?’ You don’t get those first 30 days back, and we want to be fully present.”

My knee-jerk reaction as a mother of two was, to each his own, but making plans about what you’ll do when you have a baby before you have said baby is always a gamble. Good luck getting the baby on board with a vow of silence; she’ll probably cry as much as she pleases at two-hour intervals throughout the night. That plus does Reed literally mean “just the three of us”? Because taking care of a fresh baby is all sorts of exhausting and emotionally draining—the couple might be wise to make it a foursome, with a baby nurse, babysitter, or family member to help out.

Above all, Reed and Somerhalder are very lucky that they both have a month’s time to dedicate to their baby, quiet or not: Given the U.S.’s abysmal paid-leave policies, many parents don’t have the same luxury. That said, even though I felt the widespread sharing of Reed’s anecdote was intended to spark shock and awe at the crunchiness of it all, I completely cosigned at least one part of their vow of silence: When you have a new baby, visitors are very tricky business.

When you don’t have kids yourself, visiting your friends and their new babies seems like the right and kind thing to do. And it’s true—visitors have the best of intentions! But Reed and Somerhalder blew the lid off what has become an open secret among parents: When you have a new baby, especially for the first time, visitors are, to put it kindly, not the most welcome sight, because your life is in total chaos. You’re exhausted, hormonal, and, if you’re a woman who gave birth, still recovering from the physical trauma (which is to say: wearing disposable paper underwear and an adult diaper). Throwing visitors into this strange mix feels like one more ball to juggle. Especially with my first baby, it always seemed like a visitor was scheduled to arrive at the precise time I either was so ready for a nap or needed to whip out a breast to start pumping. Either that or some lovely chatty friends wanted to stay and chill like old times as I was basically ready to pass out on the couch.

It’s the type of thing that people only learn as they’re inducted into parenthood. After having my daughter, I looked back and cringed at the fact that my husband and I had clearly overstayed our welcome when visiting our good friends’ baby, leisurely sipping wine and tipsily cooing until we were basically thrown out. That lesson came full circle: One very dear friend who didn’t understand why I pushed off her visit for a few days after having my daughter saw the light when she had a baby herself. She texted me something like: “Now I get it. Visitors are horrible.” We both learned that the best kind of visitors are quick drive-bys: the friends and family who come over, cuddle the baby for 10 minutes, and leave lasagna or blueberry cobbler in their wake. Reed and Somerhalder are definitely on to something, but they may want to amend their policy: no visitors, but dessert welcome?