With fans from Conan O’Brien and Alec Baldwin to Nikki Glaser and Robby Hoffman, comedy’s favorite comedian is breaking into the mainstream with a debut HBO special

By Carolina de Armas

“I’m trying to grow my fan base beyond women who brought a knife to prom,” the comedian Chris Fleming, 39, says at the start of Live at the Palace, his first HBO special, which premiered yesterday. If you’ve never heard of Fleming, chances are your favorite comic has. His fans—and Instagram followers—include Nikki Glaser, Seth Meyers (frequently the butt of his jokes), Jim Gaffigan, Kareem Rahma of Subway Takes, Robby Hoffman, Megan Stalter, Alec Baldwin, and S.N.L.’s Chloe Fineman. Because he’s yet to become a household name, we’ll call him the comedian’s comedian. Lucky for those in the know and those still in the dark, he’s only just getting started. READ ON

He shortchanged his band and wrote some truly awful songs, but Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles life succeeded in one respect—he carved out a carefree existence with his family

By Will Hodgkinson

That bad, bad time, exacerbated by the lawsuit McCartney filed on December 31, 1970, after John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr appointed the mob-boss-like New York accountant Allen Klein as the Beatles’ manager, led to McCartney’s remarkable second act. He was in bed one night with his American wife, Linda, having escaped London for a remote three-bedroom farmhouse in Campbeltown, Scotland, when Johnny Cash came on the television, playing with some country musicians he had never heard of. “I thought, here’s Johnny, he’s doing it. So I turned to Linda and said, ‘Do you want to form a band?’ And she went, ‘Sure.’”

So begins the story of Man on the Run, Morgan Neville’s film about McCartney’s post-Beatles life. Neville is adept at tales of adversity — his 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom follows the backing singers whose job it is to make the stars sound good — and the film is really a tale of going back to basics, from fixing up a tumbledown cottage in Scotland to starting a new band from scratch, not easy when you’re the most famous musician in the world. As Mick Jagger says: “I’m not very good at fixing roofs, so I can’t really relate. But he wanted to be grounded in an ordinary life because the Beatles were free of any grounding.” READ ON

Mikhail Baryshnikov’s 33-year-old daughter is stepping into the spotlight with Idiotka, an independent comedy co-starring Julia Fox, Benito Skinner, and Owen Thiele

By Carolina de Armas

On June 29, 1974, the shooting star of the Soviet Union’s prestigious Kirov Ballet was on a foreign tour in Canada. After completing a performance in Toronto, the 26-year-old ran, jumped into a car, and said do svidaniya to his home country forever. A month later, he made his New York debut, as Albrecht in Giselle. The world’s most discerning audience for classical dance bent the knee to a phenomenon named Mikhail Baryshnikov.

“I actually didn’t grow up going to the ballet a lot,” says Anna Baryshnikov, Mikhail’s daughter with the dancer Lisa Rinehart. “I think that’s probably why I never aspired to do it myself.” READ ON

Carolyn Bessette’s biographer talks to the creator of Love Story, a new mini-series about her subject’s well-publicized marriage to J.F.K. Jr. and tragic death

By Elizabeth Beller

Having one’s book optioned for television feels like dropping your child off for the first day of school: Will they make friends or be hung upside down from the monkey bars? Now that I’ve seen the new FX mini-series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, it seems I needn’t have worried. All is upright, and in much better lighting. The two leads—Paul Anthony Kelly, as Kennedy, and Sarah Pidgeon, as Bessette—are so appealing that I was lost in the sun-splashed depiction of the era of cash transactions and newsstands with actual newspapers.

The process brought me back to the gestational period of writing my 2024 biography of Bessette, READ ON

Canceled filmmaker Brett Ratner’s documentary on the First Lady transcends propaganda, or even slopaganda

By James Wolcott

The reviews of Melania (Amazon MGM Studios), still playing at bat caves across the country, constituted a massacre. The blue meanies were out in force. “An abomination,” recoiled the Daily Beast. “A disgrace,” decreed The Atlantic. The Guardian clocked it as two hours of “pure, endless hell.” Collectively, Melania registered a loud splat on Rotten Tomatoes, with a measly aggregated score of 7 percent. (Even the woebegone Ella McCay got a charitable 23 percent.)

Documentaries seldom receive such drubbings, which are usually reserved for elaborate stinkers such as Battlefield Earth or Cats or Ryan Murphy’s Kim Kardashian–starring All’s Fair, but this is no ordinary documentary, scarcely a documentary at all—more like a glossy brochure unfolding in frictionless motion with First Lady Melania Trump’s ethereal voice-over narration piped in from outer space. READ ON

Heathcliff and Catherine go full B.D.S.M. in Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s timeless gothic novel

By Daphne Merkin

T

he wonder of it is that Wuthering Heights, which was declared to be “unquestionably and irredeemably monstrous” upon publication, exists at all, its creative origins forever obscured by the brief and enigmatic life of its author. The novel, published in 1847 under a male pen name (Ellis Bell), was written by Emily Brontë, a 27-year-old virgin so reclusive she makes Emily Dickinson seem positively sociable, who lived in a parsonage together with her gifted sisters and alcoholic brother in the tiny village of Haworth in Yorkshire, England.

The parsonage abutted the moors, where Brontë liked to wander, and the READ ON