Lifestyle
In Ben Stiller’s showbiz family, there was little separation between home and stage
After the deaths of his parents, comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Ben Stiller found a stash of their audio recordings. Those tapes are at the center of the documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost.
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When both your parents are in show business, you get used to being stopped on the street. Just ask Ben Stiller, whose parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, formed a hit comedy duo in the 1960s and ’70s.
“My mom usually wouldn’t want to talk to people for a long time … and my dad would talk to people forever,” Stiller says. “As kids … you feel that your parent’s attention [is] being taken away from you.”
Meara died in 2015 and her husband followed in 2020. After his father’s death, Ben Stiller found a stash of audio recordings his dad had made of his conversations and arguments with Meara about their marriage and their act. Those tapes are at the center of Stiller’s new documentary about his parents, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost.
Stiller says his father was always more committed to comedy than his mother, who studied under Uta Hagen and dreamed of being a serious actor. They had been married for several years, both struggling to make it in show business, when Jerry Stiller had the idea to create short comedy sketches together. “He drew her into doing this comedy act,” his son says. “And that changed their lives.”

The comedy team of Stiller and Meara would go on to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show more than 30 times. Later, Jerry Stiller co-starred on Seinfeld, playing Frank Costanza, George’s father. Meanwhile, Ben Stiller was forging his own path in Hollywood, both as an actor and a filmmaker.
Stiller is currently the executive producer and director of the TV series, Severance, about a company that makes its employees get a procedure on their brain that separates the memories of their home life and the memories of their work life. The premise is almost the direct opposite of the lifestyle his parents modeled while he was growing up.
“Their marriage, their relationship … was also what their act was about,” Stiller says. “So I think that concept of the separation is actually really very interesting to me because it’s something I’ve never had.”
Interview highlights
On Jerry Stiller’s desire to be loved by everyone

I think I can identify. … I think most actors have a certain sense of wanting approval. … He’d talk about it very openly. He said, “I need that love from the audience.” It’s kind of armchair psychology, but … he didn’t get a lot of nurturing from [his parents] when he was a kid. … They fought a lot, and they were very poor, and nobody was encouraging him to go into show business. …
He went to Syracuse University and he performed in plays and he found his people and found this warmth and acceptance in the theater, and he was always connecting with people. I think he loved talking to people. He loved when fans would come up and say hi to him. And it meant something to him, and my mother had a very different relationship with it.
On the fun part of having celebrity parents
Married couple Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara formed the comedy team of Stiller & Meara.
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I remember when they played nightclubs in New York and that was really exciting for us. We get to stay up late, hang out with the grownups. Interesting, funny people coming in and out of the house. They would have these New Year’s Eve parties at their apartment in the late ’70s and the ’80s that were just amazing. … As kids, it was really fun to be around. I loved going on sets when they would go out to LA. … To be on the Paramount studios lot … made me want to make movies. Being around that, it was very clear early on that that’s what I wanted to do. It was a lot of fun times and more interesting to my sister and I than school, for sure.
On sneaking out while his parents traveled for work

Our nanny, Hazel, took care of us basically since I think the time that I was probably about 4 years old. She was from Jamaica and she had seven kids of her own and they lived in Brooklyn and we became very close with her family, with her kids, because some of them were Amy and my age. My parents would go away for, like, a two-week stint to LA to do whichever game show or Love Boat or whatever it was. Hazel was so sweet. She knew she had to be the disciplinarian and keep us in line, but … it was kind of like a free-for-all a little bit when we were on our own. We’d stay up late sometimes, trying to sneak out.
As we got older and became teenagers, then there were other things going on, like my sister started going to Studio 54 when I think she was, like, 17 and I was 13. And she would take me to Studio 54 with her friends and they would sneak us in. They put me in a yellow and green polka-dotted Fiorucci shirt … and an Army jacket and these Mickey Mouse sunglasses. And they put this outfit on me and we went up and [the bouncer] Mark saw us and he pointed to us and said, “Come on in.” And we were in. And that happened a few times. So I think I was 13.
On calling his dad when he had a bad LSD trip
I took LSD once when my parents were out doing The Love Boat once. … I was the guy who called his parents on LSD. I called them up in LA because I was scared. I was having a bad trip and [it was] the only time I ever did LSD. My mom got really mad at me. And my dad was actually much nicer and kind of tried to help talk me down. And he said, “I understand what you’re going through. When I was 11 years old, I smoked a Pall Mall cigarette and I was sick for two days.” And I was like, “No dad, you don’t understand. I don’t understand what reality is.” But he was great. He was actually great about it.
On his father being cast as Frank Costanza on Seinfeld
It was life-changing for him. He was a very lovable guy and … people just loved seeing him let out all this emotion and kind of this tamped up rage that he had inside in a very funny way. And I think the fame that it brought in, because Seinfeld was such a phenomenon, was like nothing he had ever experienced before. It was fulfilling for him, I think, a childhood dream of being someone who could be funny on his own. …

For me, I was kind of just starting to experience success on my own. So I was happy that my dad was working and that he was in this show that was such a phenomenon. There was never competition between us. … My mom was the one who sort of was, I think, having to deal with not having that kind of success at that point. But for her, I don’t think it was as important a thing and as relevant to her own personal happiness, though I think she would have liked to have worked more as an actor.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Lifestyle
Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective
Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.
“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”
The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”
L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.
The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.
Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.
“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”
A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.
The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”
Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”
The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”
The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.
All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.
Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.
Lifestyle
Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Lifestyle
Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
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