Lifestyle
Rob Reiner said he was ‘never, ever too busy’ for his son
Rob Reiner at the Cannes film festival in 2022.
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
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Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
When Rob Reiner spoke with Fresh Air in September to promote Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Terry Gross asked him about Being Charlie, a 2015 film he collaborated on with his son Nick Reiner. The film was a semiautobiographical story of addiction and homelessness, based on Nick’s own experiences.
Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday evening after Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead inside their California home.


The father character in Being Charlie feels a lot of tension between his own career aspirations and his son’s addiction — but Reiner said that wasn’t how it was for him and Nick.
“I was never, ever too busy,” Reiner told Fresh Air. “I mean, if anything, I was the other way, you know, I was more hands-on and trying to do whatever I thought I could do to help. I’m sure I made mistakes and, you know, I’ve talked about that with him since.”
At the time, Reiner said he believed Nick was doing well. “He’s been great … hasn’t been doing drugs for over six years,” Reiner said. “He’s in a really good place.”

Reiner starred in the 1970s sitcom, All in the Family and directed Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is a sequel to his groundbreaking 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.
“After 15 years of not working together, we came back and started looking at this and seeing if we could come up with an idea, and we started schnadling right away,” Reiner recalled. “It was like falling right back in with friends that you hadn’t talked to in a long time. It’s like jazz musicians, you just fall in and do what you do.”
Below are some more highlights from that interview.
Interview Highlights
Carl Reiner (left) and Rob Reiner together in 2017.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM
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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM
On looking up to his dad, director Carl Reiner, and growing up surrounded by comedy legends
When I was a little boy, my parents said that I came up to them and I said, “I want to change my name.” I was about 8 years old … They were all, “My god, this poor kid. He’s worried about being in the shadow of this famous guy and living up to all this.” And they say, “Well, what do you want to change your name to?” And I said, “Carl.” I loved him so much, I just wanted to be like him and I wanted to do what he did and I just looked up to him so much. …
[When] I was 19 … I was sitting with him in the backyard and he said to me, “I’m not worried about you. You’re gonna be great at whatever you do.” He lives in my head all the time. I had two great guides in my life. I had my dad, and then Norman Lear was like a second father. They’re both gone, but they’re with me always. …
There’s a picture in my office of all the writers who wrote for Sid Caesar and [Your] Show of Shows over the nine years, I guess, that they were on. And, when you look at that picture, you’re basically looking at everything you ever laughed at in the first half of the 20th century. I mean there’s Mel Brooks, there’s my dad, there is Neil Simon, there is Woody Allen, there is Larry Gelbart, Joe Stein who wrote Fiddler on the Roof, Aaron Ruben who created The Andy Griffith Show. Anything you ever laughed at is represented by those people. So these are the people I look up to, and these are people that were around me as a kid growing up.
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On directing the famous diner scene in When Harry Met Sally
We knew we were gonna do a scene where Meg [Ryan] was gonna fake an orgasm in an incongruous place like a deli, and Billy [Crystal] came up with the line, “I’ll have what she’s having.” … I said, we need to find somebody, an older Jewish woman, who could deliver that line, which would seem incongruous. I thought of my mother because my mother had done a couple of little [movie] things … So I asked her if she wanted to do it and she said sure. I said, “Now listen mom, hopefully that’ll be the topper of the scene. It’ll get the big laugh, and if it doesn’t, I may have to cut it out.” … She said, “That’s fine. I just want to spend the day with you. I’ll go to Katz’s. I’ll get a hot dog.” …
When we did the scene the first couple of times through Meg was kind of tepid about it. She didn’t give it her all. … She was nervous. She’s in front of the crew and there’s extras and people. … And at one point, I get in there and I said, “Meg, let me show you what I meant.” And I sat opposite Billy, and I’m acting it out, and I’m pounding the table and I’m going, “Yes, yes, yes!” … I turned to Billy and I say, “This is embarrassing … I just had an orgasm in front of my mother.” But then Meg came in and she did it obviously way better than I could do it.
On differentiating himself from his father with Stand By Me (1986)
I never said specifically I want to be a film director. I never said that. And I never really thought that way. I just knew I wanted to act, direct, and do things, be in the world that he was in. And it wasn’t until I did Stand By Me that I really started to feel very separate and apart from my father. Because the first film I did was, This Is Spinal Tap, which is a satire. And my father had trafficked in satire with Sid Caesar for many years. And then the second film I did was a film called The Sure Thing, which was a romantic comedy for young people, and my father had done romantic comedy. The [Dick] Van Dyke Show is a romantic comedy, a series.
But when I did Stand By Me, it was the one that was closest to me because … I felt that my father didn’t love me or understand me, and it was the character of Gordie that expressed those things. And the film was a combination of nostalgia, emotion and a lot of humor. And it was a real reflection of my personality. It was an extension, really, of my sensibility. And when it became successful, I said, oh, OK. I can go in the direction that I want to go in and not feel like I have to mirror everything my father’s done up till then.
On starting his own production company (Castle Rock) and how the business has changed
We started it so I could have some kind of autonomy because I knew that the kinds of films I wanted to make people didn’t wanna make. I mean, I very famously went and talked to Dawn Steel, who was the head of Paramount at the time. … And she says to me, “What do you wanna make? What’s your next film?” And I said, “Well, you know, I got a film, but I don’t think you’re going to want to do it.” … I’m going to make a movie out of The Princess Bride. And she said, “Anything but that.” So I knew that I needed to have some way of financing my own films, which I did for the longest time. …
It’s tough now. And it’s beyond corporate. I mean, it used to be there was “show” and “business.” They were equal — the size of the word “show” and “business.” Now, you can barely see the word “show,” and it’s all “business.” And the only things that they look at [are] how many followers, how many likes, what the algorithms are. They’re not thinking about telling a story. … I still wanna tell stories. And I’m sure there’s a lot of young filmmakers — even Scorsese is still doing it, older ones too — that wanna tell a story. And I think people still wanna hear stories and they wanna see stories.

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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