Lifestyle

Amber Glenn Is Carving a New Path for Figure Skaters

Published

10 months ago

March 25, 2025

Amber Glenn Is Carving a New Path for Figure Skaters

When Amber Glenn was named the top U.S. women’s figure skater for a second consecutive year in January, she collapsed in tears, releasing mountains of pressure that had been weighing on her chiseled shoulders.

This week, she is aiming to add another gold medal to her pile at the World Figure Skating Championships in Boston. If she pulls it off, Ms. Glenn would finish her season an undefeated champion and become the first American figure skater to claim the women’s World Championship title in almost 20 years.

It would be Ms. Glenn’s biggest win yet, but only the latest in a series of firsts for a woman who has landed the triple axel jump in all of her competitions this season — one that, for Ms. Glenn, has been filled with triumph and tragedy after a plane crash in January killed 11 figure skaters, some of whom she had shared the ice with just days before they died.

If Ms. Glenn wins or even medals at Worlds, she will be the first openly L.G.B.T.Q. woman to do so in a sport whose female athletes largely tend to mold their likenesses to that of a cookie-cutter ice queen.

Ms. Glenn, by contrast, has grown her profile by celebrating what makes her different.

She is a pansexual figure skater who jumps with the power of a pole-vaulter, models her hairstyles off those of brassy pop stars, collects lightsabers — and is primed to be America’s next big skating star at 25, an age when most of her peers have long retired.

A Story of Perseverance

On a Saturday evening in February, Ms. Glenn darted around the corners of the ice rink at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan at double-digit speeds as her short-program music — “This Time” by Janet Jackson — blared from loudspeakers. She was in New York to fine-tune some of her choreography before the World Championships this month.

Ms. Glenn’s girlish freckles were offset by graphic winged eyeliner and blond hair that trailed behind her like a parachute as she skated.

Earlier that day, Ms. Glenn said in an interview that the last eight months had “been a lot.” She began training for the current season last spring and won her first gold medal last September at the Lombardia Trophy competition in Bergamo, Italy.

She has not stopped winning since. Over the course of several weeks last November and December, Ms. Glenn traversed the globe numerous times, earning first place in three major competitions that included the Grand Prix Final in Grenoble, France, where on Dec. 7 she became the first American woman to be crowned champion in 14 years.

Two weeks later, she clinched gold at Nationals in Wichita, Kan., by a slim margin.

But Ms. Glenn’s career, which began more than two decades ago at an ice rink inside a shopping mall, has not been a linear ride to the top.

At 14, she became the U.S. junior women’s champion. About a year later, Ms. Glenn was hospitalized for depression and anxiety, which stopped her from skating for five months. At the time, she was also restricting her eating — consuming one or two Lean Cuisine meals a day. In more recent years, she has suffered multiple severe concussions and has been haunted by mistakes, like missed jumps, that she has attributed to anxiety. It has not helped that many of her injuries and stumbles have played out on live television.

Terry Gannon, an NBC sports commentator who has called nationally televised figure-skating events since the 1990s, attributed Ms. Glenn’s successes this season to perseverance.

“I feel like I have lived this journey with her and watched her through the years knowing she had the ability but coming up short,” said Mr. Gannon, who described Ms. Glenn’s story as emotionally satisfying to viewers. “Now we see her break through at the highest level,” he added.

Her winning season harks back to the time when American skaters like Dorothy Hamill and Michelle Kwan dominated the sport. As a rising star of women’s singles, figure skating’s marquee event, Ms. Glenn has created some fresh buzz in the run-up to next year’s Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. “It’s hugely important to the success of American skating to have a star who has a chance to win” at the Olympics, Mr. Gannon said.

Sasha Cohen was the last American to do so, earning a silver medal at the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006. If Ms. Glenn’s winning streak carries into next year, when Team USA skaters are determined, the country may have its next best chance at an Olympic medal.

Mastering the Triple Axel

On the ice, Ms. Glenn has become known for certain hallmarks: Landing jumps with her arms stretched vertically in a dramatic V-shape, wearing the dark lipstick of a prima ballerina, performing with a mane of multiple ponytails that she says is inspired by the pop star Kesha.

While she skates with an easy elegance, her approach to the sport has often been described using words like “explosive” and “aggressive.” “That is usually a trademark of men’s skating, they are allowed to be aggressive and muscled,” said Kaitlyn Weaver, 35, a champion ice dancer and two-time Olympian who is now a choreographer for Ms. Glenn.

Ms. Glenn said she had leaned into athleticism rather than “conforming to look smaller.” This approach is embodied by her embrace of the triple axel, a feat in which skaters hurl themselves face-forward into the air and rotate 1,260 degrees before landing backward on a single foot. Ms. Glenn has been the only women’s skater of her level to land a ratified triple axel this season in international competition, according to the International Skating Union.

Ms. Glenn’s free skate program at last year’s World Championships began with a perfect triple axel — and ended in multiple spills onto the ice. She ultimately finished in 10th place, a result that she attributed to her anxiety flaring up during her program. “My brain didn’t know the difference between competing and having to fight a bear,” as she put it.

Last summer, Ms. Glenn began integrating neurotherapy into her two-hour practices as a way to mitigate her performance anxiety. She wires herself to a device that tracks her heart rate and brain waves, which helps visualize when her anxiety spikes.

Caroline Silby, a sport psychology consultant who works with skaters worldwide, suggested neurotherapy to Ms. Glenn. “Throughout her career, she’s always had moments of brilliance, it wasn’t like she wasn’t doing it.” Ms. Silby said. “She just wasn’t doing it consistently.”

She added, “When the whole world talks about how you can’t do the second half of your program, it’s about ‘OK, how can we get the brain to stay quiet?’”

Embracing Her Identity

Ms. Glenn’s mother, Cathlene Glenn, said there had always been hints that her daughter was different from other girls her age when she was growing up in Plano, Texas. Among them: Ms. Glenn, who began skating as a 5-year-old at the rink inside the nearby Stonebriar Centre mall, gravitated toward dinosaur toys over dolls, her mother said.

She added that, by the time Ms. Glenn had turned 8, coaches were remarking that she had exceptional talent. By 11, she had mastered every triple jump except the axel.

But in a sport in which an intermediate pair of skates can cost $800, the money required to keep Ms. Glenn skating at a high level became a source of friction for her parents. To save on lessons and rink fees, her mother worked as a nanny for a former coach of Ms. Glenn’s and at the front desk of the mall ice rink. Her father, Richard Glenn, a law enforcement officer, worked overtime and took outside jobs doing security at movie theaters and hospitals.

Ms. Glenn, for her part, said she did not tell her parents when she was outgrowing her skates. “I still have the bunions and scars to prove it,” she said.

These days, she wears pairs that can cost around $1,500 — and she gets them for free from Jackson Ultima, which uses her image in promotional campaigns.

At Chelsea Piers, her skates’ blades were pushed to the limit as she ripped into the ice with expansive lunges and razor-sharp turns. She typically practices at the Broadmoor World Arena, a U.S. Olympic training site in Colorado Springs, Colo., not far from her home in the city. Above the rink, a flag with Ms. Glenn’s name flies alongside others bearing the names of fellow American champions like Peggy Fleming.

Ms. Glenn’s reputation as a different kind of skater was bolstered in 2019, when she opened up about her pansexual identity in an article for Dallas Voice magazine. Months after it was published, she arrived at Nationals in 2020 to see dozens of fans in the stands holding the Pride flag in her honor.

Ms. Weaver, who at the time had not yet started working as a choreographer with Ms. Glenn, recalled watching the scene on TV and “weeping.” In 2021, Ms. Weaver became the first Olympic female skater to publicly come out as queer. “We work against a stereotype,” she said, likening openly queer female skaters to openly gay N.F.L. players.

Having learned to be more comfortable in her skin, Ms. Glenn now holds a pride flag when she skates a victory lap at competitions. Lately, she had been thinking about the ways she could help people like herself at a time in which Ms. Glenn said “identities are being erased.”

“Sometimes, I’m looking at the world where we are taking so many steps back,” she added. “I want to be part of the people who keep us moving forward.”

She was speaking on a video call in late February from her apartment in Colorado Springs, which Ms. Glenn shares with her dog, Uki, a schipperke who, like Ms. Glenn, has learned to spin on demand.

Tragedies Amid Triumphs

Around Ms. Glenn’s apartment are items that offer glimpses of her personality. There are lightsabers hung on a wall (she is a fan of “Star Wars”) and a cabinet filled with Magic the Gathering and Pokémon cards. Instead of real flowers, she decorates the space with Lego floral arrangements because of her travel schedule. “It’s nice to have ones that stick around,” she said.

She moved to “the Springs” in the summer of 2022, she said, to work with top coaches — and to take advantage of free physical therapy and personal training sessions offered by the area’s Olympic training site, which are subsidized by organizations including the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. It’s also the first time Ms. Glenn has lived on her own.

Her main coach, Damon Allen, said Ms. Glenn’s newly independent lifestyle has helped shift her competitive course. Mr. Allen, 51, will accompany her to the World Championships. “The preparation is the same we have been doing all year,” he said. “We are keeping it simple.”

To earn the women’s singles gold medal, she will need to defeat Kaori Sakamoto, 24, the Japanese skater who has won it the last three years.

Skaters of Ms. Sakamoto’s and Ms. Glenn’s age have historically been rare sights atop the championship podiums in women’s figure skating, a sport in which the last three Olympic gold medalists were between the ages of 15 and 17 when they won. In the wake of a doping scandal involving a 15-year-old Russian skater that rocked the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, the minimum age for female skaters to compete in the games was raised to 17.

At Ms. Glenn’s training rink, she refers to herself as the “fun aunt,” Mr. Allen said. Her friend Gracie Gold, 29, a retired two-time national champion who has spoken about her own struggles as a skater, jokingly said that late bloomers in the sport like Ms. Glenn were “only weird to people in skating that need to go outside and touch grass.”

“I don’t think hockey or football would be as popular if the general public was watching 14-year-old boys do it,” Ms. Gold added.

She is one of many skaters whom Ms. Glenn has fostered friendships with. Through gestures like bringing flowers to fellow athletes at practices, Ms. Glenn has tried to bolster camaraderie in a sport known for a cutthroat culture, which has been embodied by instances like the Olympian Nancy Kerrigan being clubbed in the knee in a hit ordered by a man who was then married to a rival skater.

Ms. Glenn, who was home-schooled from the second grade through her senior year of high school, said she learned social cues largely by being around other young people at the mall where she started skating.

Her kind overtures to peers were motivated by Ms. Glenn’s experiences at competitions during her early days in the sport. “I remember feeling so scared,” she said. “I thought, I don’t want to feel like this. If one day I’m able to, I want to help everyone to be comfortable.’

When the recent plane crash killed a group of 28 athletes, parents and personnel affiliated with U.S. Figure Skating, “it broke my heart,” Ms. Glenn said — especially because of what she had told some of the young skaters while practicing with them about 72 hours before the crash.

“What hit me so hard is I told them to make friends that they would have for the rest of their life,” she said.

Earlier this month, Ms. Glenn participated in Legacy on Ice, a nationally televised event honoring the victims of the plane crash. Days before, her grandmother Barbara Glenn, a longtime rink-side presence at her competitions, died.

“She loves to skate with emotion,” Ms. Glenn’s mother said. “She wants to feel her feelings out on the ice. I think that skate was very therapeutic for her.” The death of Ms. Glenn’s childhood dog, Ginger, this month was another emotional blow.

In a phone interview on Saturday, Ms. Glenn said that the grief she had lately experienced had given her a new perspective going into the World Championships.

“I get upset about my mistakes,” she said. “But there are so many other things that are more serious.”

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Lifestyle

‘Fireworks’ wins Caldecott, Newbery is awarded to ‘All the Blues in the Sky’

Published

5 hours ago

January 27, 2026

Press Room

‘Fireworks’ wins Caldecott, Newbery is awarded to ‘All the Blues in the Sky’

Fireworks, by Matthew Burgess and illustrated by Cátia Chien has won the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children, and All the Blues in the Sky, written by Renée Watson has been awarded the Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature.

Clarion Books; Bloomsbury Children’s Books

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Clarion Books; Bloomsbury Children’s Books

The best books for children and young adults were awarded the country’s top honors by the American Library Association on Monday.

Illustrator Cátia Chien and author Matthew Burgess took home the Caldecott Medal for the book Fireworks. The Caldecott is given annually to the most distinguished American picture book for children. Fireworks follows two young siblings as they eagerly await the start of a July 4th fireworks show. Paired with Chien’s vibrant illustrations, Burgess’ poetic language enhances the sensory experience of fireworks.” When you write poems with kids, you see how immediately they get this,” Burgess told NPR in 2025 in a conversation about his book Words with Wings and Magic Things. “If you read a poem aloud to kids, they start to dance in their seats.”

The Newbery Medal, awarded for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature, went to Renée Watson for All the Blues in the Sky. This middle-grade novel, also told in verse, follows 13-year-old Sage, who struggles with grief following the death of her best friend. Watson is also the author of Piecing Me Together, which won the 2018 Coretta Scott King Award and was also a Newbery Medal honor book. “I hope that my books provide space for young people to explore, and say, “Yeah, I feel seen,” Watson told NPR in 2018. “That’s what I want young people to do — to talk to each other and to the adults in their lives.”

This year’s recipients of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards include Will’s Race for Home by Jewell Parker Rhodes (author award) and The Library in the Woods, by Calvin Alexander Ramsey and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie (illustrator award). Arriel Vinson’s Under the Neon Lights received the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe Award for New Talent.

Los Angeles based artist Kadir Nelson was honored with the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. His work has appeared in more than 30 children’s books.

This year’s Newbery Honor Books were The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli, by Karina Yan Glaser; A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez by María Dolores Águila and The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri.

Caldecott Honors books were Every Monday Mabel by Jashar Awan, Our Lake by Angie Kang, Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave by Drew Beckmeyer, and Sundust by Zeke Peña.

Edited by Jennifer Vanasco and Beth Novey.

Lifestyle

What if Black boys in L.A. were afforded the grace to dream?

Published

6 hours ago

January 27, 2026

Press Room

What if Black boys in L.A. were afforded the grace to dream?

In the soundtrack of his youth, Walter Thompson-Hernández and his friends liked to devise a game of escape. Extending their arms in a v-formation at their side, they would race down the street on weekend afternoons imagining the freedom of the airplanes soaring across the blue infinity of their Huntington Park neighborhood.

Thompson-Hernández never lost that sense of dreaming. This month, he made his feature-length debut at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival with “If I Go Will They Miss Me,” a film of audacious sight and attentive storytelling that unfolds from the perspective of its protagonist Lil Ant, a Watts-raised, 12-year-old obsessed with airplanes and Greek mythology. Where coming-of-age stories often confront the crush of innocence — the fracture and shock of stolen virtue — Thompson-Hernández instead renders one about preservation. A preservation, in part, held together by Lozita (Danielle Brooks), a mom and wife working to keep her family whole now that Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is home from prison.

The film isn’t trying to absorb or recklessly mirror the traumas of the Black family so much as make a case for its nuance. In “If I Go,” Thompson-Hernández scraps the three-act structure for something more novelistic, a risk that a lesser director might have fumbled but one he turns into a profound taxonomy on grace. It is a story that interrogates — with a searching and brutal tenderness — the how, why and who of our emotional being. Even as Lil Ant yearns to be closer to his father, what the film doesn’t do is beg you to empathize with the conditions that its characters war against; instead, it demands that you simply acknowledge their presence, their wounds and their dreaming.

Thompson-Hernández’s cinematic canvas recalls a Los Angeles rarely afforded witness on screen. You won’t find any wasted thinking about the tired pathologies of urban decay; the film takes pleasure in depicting Black Angelenos in the fullness of their complexity, celebrating the toil and wonder of how people come together and fall apart, of how love is broken and remade. “There’s already a lyricism that exists in each of our lives,” he tells me. “In how we speak, in how our bodies move through the world, and how we touch each other. I’m sensitive to that.”

Though today he primarily works in the medium of film, Thompson-Hernández has a kaleidoscopic approach to craft. A former journalist for the New York Times, he’s as comfortable writing about the legacy of Black cowboys in Southern California (his 2020 book, “The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland,” was a New York Times bestseller) as he is directing a Beats By Dre commercial for the Super Bowl or shooting a sports documentary for Netflix. In 2025, his Portuguese-language film “Kites” — a story about personal reclamation in favelas of Rio de Janeiro — won the Special Jury Mention for Viewpoints at the Tribeca Film Festival. What Thompson-Hernández’s art so easily dispels, no matter the genre it finds a home in, are all the knotty, misguided and trite representations of otherness in our contemporary world. He is a seer of the unseen.

(Vladimir Santos) (Kemal Cilengir)

Jason Parham: A major theme in the film wrestles with what it means to find your place at home when you return. Was that a personal story?

Walter Thompson-Hernández: So much happens to the figures in our lives who travel away from us and eventually come back home. Thematically, this movie is about flight and transportation — both the physical flights that one takes, but also the emotional and spiritual flights. Big Ant, the father [character], returns after doing a stint in prison, but what his son sees as a Grecian 10-year war. That’s been my relationship to so many of the men who I grew up around.

JP: How so?

WTH: They would be gone for a while and we wouldn’t know where they would be. Then they would just show up after two or three or four years. We’d ask questions. It would be, “So-and-so was locked up” or “So-and-so had to go away for a while but now he’s back.” Greek mythology became a North Star for understanding very complicated characters in my own life.

JP: Why was that sense of imagination important to explore?

WTH: The aperture from which I lived my life was very small. It was a very contained world that only existed around a few geographic locations and a few blocks. Eventually I was able to leave. But very few of us get to make it out. Which is a weird sentence — get to make it out — because so many people want to be here and come here all the time. But there are those of us that got the chance to travel and to essentially fly. The older I got, the more I realized how small my world was as a child, but also how expansive and imaginative it was. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “Between the World and Me,” there’s a passage that I always think about. I’m paraphrasing, but he tells his son something to the extent of — James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, those are yours. And then he says Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Simone de Beauvoir — listing all these European artists and thinkers — those are also yours. I’m extending that care and grace to the boy in this movie. A lot of us, we don’t get to dream in that way as Black or brown boys in L.A.

On the set of "If I Go Will They Miss Me"

On the set of "If I Go Will They Miss Me." Thompson-Hernandez on the right.

JP: What did young Walter dream about?

WTH: Our home was right in between both LAX flight paths. The sound of these airplanes is something that I’ll never forget. My mom and aunts still live in that neighborhood. When I go back, I forget how strong the sound of the airplanes are, how abrasive and all-encompassing. As a child, I was drawn to the mystery of them — where they were coming from and where they were going. I would imagine who was in them. My friends and I, we made up games where we would race airplanes on our bikes or we’d sprint down the block extending our arms. They had this power over us. The movie is me making sense of that mystery and beauty while also understanding that I have asthma because of them.

JP: You’re referring to the health complications people suffer from in areas downwind of the flight paths.

WTH: Cancer rates and asthma are so prevalent among the people who I grew up around. There is an irony in airplanes. On one hand, we can dream about them and all the places they can take us, but the tangible effects are that they are harming us. Jet fuelers, all those things. As children, how do we wrestle with those complex ideas, while on the ground wrestling with complex ideas about adolescence, about our parents. To say growing up under the LAX flight path is a complicated experience, there’s so much truth in that. Taking the mythology of these airplanes and applying that to the mythology that we create about adults in our lives is something that I hope people really feel in this movie.

JP: There are a lot of smart technical choices in the film, from the sound to the set design. Who were your influences?

WTH: I could reference films like “Killer of Sheep” or “The Battle of Algiers” or “Gummo” or “He Got Game”; there’s a list of at least 50 movies. But there’s something about looking at a Jacob Lawrence painting that offers me the biggest inspiration in terms of the dexterity and freedom and elasticity of Black bodies in space. There’s something about painting as a medium for me that lives outside of the limits of photography and film. There aren’t a lot of barriers and boundaries to how painters experience the world. Whether it’s Jacob Lawrence or Henry Taylor or Winfred Rembert or Kerry James Marshall. I obviously study literature, photography and film, but painting is where I go for ideas around framing and composition.

(Vladimir Santos)

JP: The film plays with different interpretations of light. How would you describe your relationship to light?

WTH: I am so drawn to natural lighting. I’m drawn to patient frames. Usually the frame is a middle shot or a wide shot. And there’s inserts and close-ups sometimes, but I feel very confident in the way that we stage and we block the scene. I feel confident that the information is gonna exist on screen. When I was a journalist at the New York Times, I didn’t just write everything, I also photographed everything I worked on. In terms of creating a visual language, I feel very, very comfortable framing and creating compositions in film. A lot of times you watch movies that feel over-lit. There’s too much information that we are able to gather. Working with our cinematographer, Michael Fernandez, we trust the audience so much, almost too much. If something feels a bit darker, if something is not lit in a way that feels a little too highly produced, I trust that someone will still be able to recognize and find the truth and honesty in every frame.

JP: So much so that L.A. begins to feel like its own character. Was there a certain story — one that hasn’t been told about the city — that you wanted to illuminate?

WTH: So many of us grew up watching ’90s L.A. movies: “South Central,” “Menace II Society,” “Friday.” All the Chicano gangster movies, “Blood In Blood Out.” There was also “Heat.” There’s so many movies about Los Angeles in the ’90s that really got L.A. in a way that most modern day movies about Los Angeles don’t. Something happened along the way where people who weren’t from L.A. started to make movies about Los Angeles. It felt a bit tropey often. It created a checklist. “Oh, it needs a lowrider. It needs a palm tree. It needs perfect orange, cotton candy lighting.” It feels kinda corny, if I’m being honest. For a lot of us, I don’t have to tell you that this movie is set in L.A. You feel it, you hear it.

JP: Yes, you hear it. I appreciated how the sonic texture — whether it was a Nate Dogg track or radio spots from Power 106 — helped ground the viewer not only in what they were witnessing, but why.

WTH: Sonically, I’m having a conversation in this movie about how this once-primarily Black community set in Nickerson Gardens in Watts was once over 90% Black, today is over 80% Latino. Which is a real conversation about change, about how Black people have been getting pushed out for generations, but also a complex story about immigration. It’s not always violence, there’s also peace and all this other stuff. The way I explore that is through sound and music. If you notice, this family, the Harris family, they hear a lot of Spanish-language music coming from a neighbor’s home, coming from the outside. There’s a version of that that feels more soapboxy, where I’m telling somebody in dialogue or in the scene that this community was once Black and it’s almost no longer Black. For me, it just felt more interesting to hear that. We’re hearing a Mexican ice cream truck and all these other things. That’s also telling us that this family is experiencing demographic change.

JP: If we can, I want to talk about the state of Hollywood —

WTH: It was so hard to get this movie made, man. It was a challenge. If I’m being incredibly honest with you, I think there was a run beginning in 2020 or so, where a lot of people felt the urge and maybe pressure to support movies made by women and people of color.

JP: Without question.

WTH: And people were supported in ways that were incredible. But for one reason or another, some of those movies didn’t do too well. They didn’t make the money back, which we can sit here and debate about why that happened. I tried to make this movie at the tail end of that run of support. Everyone in Hollywood loved the script. Everyone in Hollywood loved me. Everyone said, “Hey man, we love this. And we love you so much. But we supported something similar a year or two ago and we’re not doing that anymore.” I heard that so much, and from people that would surprise you. Then, in 2023, I got involved in the Sundance Catalyst program. The program invites financiers to finance eight independent movies. [“If I Go”] really took a lot of support and a lot of effort from people who believed in me and believed in the script. It was an interesting time to make an independent movie about a Black family from Los Angeles.

JP: Does the reality of industry have any bearing on the art you want to create versus the art it’s ready for?

WTH: The art that I want to make looks at humans making sense of their lives and the world in a way that maybe we haven’t seen before. There’s a lot of lyricism. There’s all sorts of things. I don’t know if I’m necessarily thinking about the movie industry when I make the art that I make. People don’t know what they want until they see it, until they feel it. I always say this: Sometimes you make something that exists in time and sometimes you make things that are of time. When people are making things that are of time, it’s responding to the zeitgeist or weird ideas around marketing and what’s popular.

JP: What’s trending on TikTok.

WTH: Exactly. It feels so reactionary. That’s of time. I like to think about making things that are in time. In time, for me, is making art that is in conversation with this beautiful legacy of artistry and of filmmaking. It’s making things without thinking about the moment. It’s thinking about truth in character, truth in dialogue, truth in scene, truth in composition, truth in sound. That’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about honesty. When it comes to my art, I always want to be in time.

Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired and a documentary producer. He is a frequent contributor to Image.

Lifestyle

Pretty hurts (and then some) in Ryan Murphy’s body-horror ‘The Beauty’ : Pop Culture Happy Hour

Published

17 hours ago

January 27, 2026

Press Room

Pretty hurts (and then some) in Ryan Murphy’s body-horror ‘The Beauty’ : Pop Culture Happy Hour

Ashton Kutcher as The Corporation in The Beauty.

Eric Liebowitz/FX

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Eric Liebowitz/FX

The Beauty stars familiar faces from the Ryan Murphy universe, including Evan Peters, as well as new collaborators like Ashton Kutcher. In the show, a genetic biotech serum has been engineered to transform people into ridiculously good-looking supermodels. But there’s at least one problem: Eventually, those supermodels are dying suddenly, horrifically and spectacularly. Is it astute commentary, crass exploitation, or maybe a bit of both? Well, it’s definitely a Ryan Murphy production, through and through.

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