Lifestyle
U.S. women’s figure skaters could’ve been rivals. Instead, they’re the ‘Blade Angels’
Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito are representing Team USA in women’s figure skating.
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MILAN — The “Blade Angels” are about to take off.
That’s the official trio nickname for Amber Glenn, Alysa Liu and Isabeau Levito, the figure skaters representing Team USA in the individual women’s competition. They voted on the name last month (it was Liu’s suggestion) and were re-introduced to the world this week in a video narrated by none other than Taylor Swift.
Glenn, Liu and Levito are widely considered the country’s strongest female field in decades: Any one of them — or potentially multiple — could become the first U.S. woman to win an individual figure skating medal since 2006 .

“This is the first time in, I would say, about four Olympic cycles that we have three women who could realistically end up on the Olympic podium,” three-time national champion and 2014 Olympic medalist Ashley Wagner told NPR in January.
The trio — who might have been dubbed the “Powerpuff Girls” or “Babes of Glory” if not for copyright concerns — have an impressive array of accolades between them. Glenn is the three-time reigning U.S. champion, Liu is the reigning world champion and Levito is the 2024 world silver medalist.
But what makes them even more notable is their fierce friendship, which many see as a refreshing change from the dynamic of Olympics past.
“Something that [Liu has] been saying throughout all the press conferences and stuff is… ‘Why is it so shocking that we’re being friendly, that we’re friends?’ They obviously are much younger than I am,” said Glenn, who is 26. “So they don’t know what the atmosphere might have been like before. Not that it was all bad, but there was definitely some intensity.”
Liu is 20 — returning to the sport after her teenage retirement — and Levito is 18.
The three have talked about their friendship as a source of comfort and normalcy in such a high-stakes environment. They have showered praise on each other at every opportunity, including at a press conference at U.S. Figure Skating championships last month.
“I love Isabeau’s wittiness, I’m sure everybody says this, but truly she’s the funniest person I’ve ever met,” Liu said. “And then Amber … you have a lot of love and you give a lot of love. She just radiates that.”

Their support has shone through publicly on social media and in quieter moments. At nationals, Liu, the penultimate skater of the night, bucked tradition by standing rinkside to watch Glenn take the ice — and showered Glenn with hugs after she overtook her for gold. The three were then named to the Olympic team, and reflected on the dynamic they would bring to Italy.
“We all three of us know, OK, yes, we’re competing against each other, but we’re competing to go and do our programs the best we possibly can,” Glenn said. “And wherever that lands us, whatever the judges do, that’s none of our business. As long as we are happy with what we do, I think everyone will be happy.”
Glenn and Liu are already gold medalists, having contributed to the U.S.’ win in the team event — before the week’s series of podium disappointments in the ice dance and men’s categories. The women will compete for the last figure skating medals of these Olympics on Tuesday and Thursday.
Who are the Blade Angels?
Glenn is the three-time reigning U.S. champion, the first woman to hold that title since Michelle Kwan.
She’s also an outspoken mental health and LGBTQ+ advocate. Glenn has been open about her struggles with an eating disorder, anxiety and depression, including the break she took from skating about a decade ago to navigate a mental health crisis.
“I’ve been very outspoken about the ups and downs that I’ve had in my career because I want people to know that that’s okay,” Glenn said last month.

The Texas native has been skating since age 5, but didn’t win an international competition until she was 24. She reached her first Olympics two years later.
Glenn’s artistic power and technical skill — including her consistent triple Axel — make her both a threat and a delight on the ice. She has particularly won over fans with her “Like a Prayer” short program this season, which set a record score at the U.S. championships. Her mantra is “breathe and believe.”
Amber Glenn, pictured on the ice in January, is skating at her first Olympics at age 26.
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Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
Off the ice, Glenn is credited with helping change the culture of the women’s sport by fostering a culture of support and inclusivity, particularly as the first openly queer U.S. women’s champion.
“I saw some of the tension between some of those athletes that are a bit older than me and how it affected their relationship with the sport, with each other, with themselves particularly, and the comparison just got really out of hand,” Glenn told reporters in December. “And I just wanted to be able to feel comfortable in the locker room.”

The younger members of Team USA say they have benefitted from that shift.
“I feel like we’re all so intelligent and mature. And I think it’s also why everyone gets so along in the locker room, because we all realize it’s not that deep,” Levito said at nationals. “And we’re all doing something that we’re passionate about and that we love.”
Liu has also been a positive force for change in that regard.
Alysa Liu (R) takes a selfie at the team event earlier in the Olympics.
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Wang Zhao/AFP
The California native broke onto the scene with her technical prowess at age 12 in 2018, becoming the youngest skater to land a triple Axel in international competition. The following year, she became the youngest-ever U.S. women’s champion. She made her Olympic debut in Beijing in 2022 — then abruptly retired from the sport at age 16, burnt out from years of nonstop training.
Liu used her time away to do regular teenage things like get her driver’s license, travel and enroll in college classes. But a ski trip in 2024 reminded her of what she loved about the sport, and she tentatively returned to the rink. But she hit a full-force comeback when she won the 2025 World Championships, the first American woman to do so since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.

“Quitting was definitely still to this day, like one of my best decisions ever,” Liu said in October. “And coming back was also a really good decision.”
Liu has returned to competition with a renewed love of the sport and sense of self, taking more control over things like costumes and music. She’s stayed true to her own personal style, rocking a smiley piercing and halo hair (“I kind of want to be a tree, add a new ring every year”). And she’s spoken about newly enjoying competition as a chance to showcase her creative artistry.
“I want [the audience] to see my hair, my dress, my makeup, the way I skate,” Liu, now 20, said at the start of the Olympics. “I want people to see everything about me.”
Isabeau Levito channeled Audrey Hepburn’s character in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” short program in the 2024-2025 season.
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Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images
Levito, 18, is the youngest member of the team — though has said she feels wiser after a foot injury forced her to take a break in the 2024-2025 season.
“It just made me more grateful for every opportunity I have to skate,” she said.
She is known for her poise and grace on the ice — earning her the name “Tinkerbeau” from some fans and her sense of humor off of it.
Levito, a New Jersey native whose mom hails from Milan, went viral just this week for her enthusiastic response to an interviewer’s question about how much fun she’s been having in the Olympic Village: “You can’t evict me.”
Who is their biggest competition?
Japan has been the U.S.’ closest challenger in the rink this Olympics, and that is poised to be the case for the women’s event too. The rivalry is a respectful one: Skaters from both countries have spoken highly of each other, and several Japanese skaters have gone viral for their wordless tribute to Glenn’s success at a 2024 competition.

Leading the Japanese trio is Kaori Sakamoto, looking to close out her career with Olympic gold. Sakamoto, 25, has said she will retire after these Games, and picked a fitting song for her short program: “Time to Say Goodbye.”
Silver medalist Mone Chiba, gold medalist Amber Glenn and bronze medalist Kaori Sakamoto pose after the women’s event at the 2024 ISU Grand Prix Finals.
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Laurent Cipriani/AP
The three-time world champion and three-time Olympian won bronze in 2022, and helped Japan win silver in this year’s team event.
She is also seen as a “big sister” to her younger Olympic teammates, 2025 world bronze medalist Mone Chiba and 2026 Four Continents silver medalist Ami Nakai — both of whom are also considered strong podium contenders.
But if figure skating at these Olympics have shown us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected. Potential wildcards include Russia’s Adeliia Petrosian, who is competing as a neutral athlete.
Due to Russia’s exclusion from international competition over its war in the Ukraine, the three-time Russian champion has only taken the ice in one senior competition outside of her homeland: the qualifier that got her this spot in Milan.
Petrosian is coached by Eteri Tutberidze, the controversial and prolific women’s coach whose many former charges include Kamila Valieva — the Russian skater who was disqualified from the 2022 Olympics over a doping scandal.
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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