Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau in ‘Babes.’
Gwen Capistran/NEON
Austin, TX
Ilana Glazer Just Wanted To Make A Comedy About 'Real-Ass Women'
Ilana Glazer is so excited to do nothing. It’s T-minus 48 hours to the theatrical premiere of Babes, the millennial mom comedy starring Glazer and Michelle Buteau, and the comedian’s promotional calendar is predictably packed. Think of the busiest day you’ve ever had in your work life, and then triple it — that’s how much Glazer’s life currently resembles a compression packing cube.
“Don’t tell my agents, but I want to Clear. My. Schedule,” Glazer, 37, tells Rolling Stone about what she’ll do (or won’t do) after this press blitz for Babes, which also stars Hasan Minaj, John Carroll Lynch, Stephan James, and Oliver Platt. “I want to get lunches with friends. I want to have a spa day. I want to have dates with my husband. I want to go to the museum. I want to smell my child’s scalp and her feet. I want to pick her up from school. I want to get high, put sunglasses on, and just get lost in Prospect Park.”
That everyone would want a piece of Glazer right now is understandable. Since its premiere at SXSW 2024, Babes, co-written by Glazer (who also produced) and Josh Rabinowitz (Ramy) and directed by Pamela Adlon (Better Things), has been raking in accolades for its absurdist, truthful, and sincere look at pregnancy, motherhood, and ride-or-die best friendship.
Before she can Homer Simpson-into-the-bush, however, Glazer has a flurry of press appointments to make. Currently, she’s seated in the back of a car, zooming through New York. The first time we meet, however, Glazer is mid-glam in her room at the London West Hollywood — the type of establishment where you need a special key card to even ascend beyond the lobby. “I keep saying I’m being shuffled around like Norman Lear,” Glazer cracks as a hairstylist straightens her trademark tight curls into a sleek bob. As we make small talk about New York versus Los Angeles (“The desert makes me nervous,” Glazer, who was born in Long Island and lives in Brooklyn, says firmly), a makeup artist draws on lip liner and nail techs tackle her hands and feet.
This would be an unusual routine for her character in Babes, where Glazer plays Eden, a free-spirited Queens yoga instructor who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after a one-night stand. Beside her is Buteau as Dawn, a married dentist, Eden’s childhood best friend, and mother of two who promises to help shepherd her bestie through pregnancy’s horny highs and lonely lows — possibly at the expense of everyone’s time and sanity. The end result is a funny yet brutally honest look at what no one ever tells you about pregnancy and parenting, and how even the closest friendships are bound to fluctuate amid all of these changes.
“I love that it digs into the unsexy realities of pregnancy and parenthood,” Adlon tells Rolling Stone. “It’s so rare to see that portrayed honestly on the screen. The comedy was there, and I knew I could tap into the emotional honesty. It’s essential for women to laugh at what is uniquely and privately theirs and portray it authentically.”
As Glazer tells it, Babes began to take form when executive producer and manager Susie Fox noticed “a gaping hole for good-ass studio comedies.” Fox envisioned Glazer, who had recently wrapped her 2010s-defining Comedy Central series Broad City, potentially filling that gap. “With my insatiable desire to be loved, I said, ‘I see that as well. I bet I could do that for you,’” Glazer says.
As Fox laid out the broad strokes of her idea for a pregnancy buddy comedy, Glazer says she revealed her own real-life pregnancy to Fox — Glazer and her husband, David Rooklin, welcomed a daughter in July 2021 — and found out that Rabinowitz and his wife were also expecting. “We put together a list of the most surprising and absurd experiences we were having becoming parents and as new parents,” she says.
True enough, Babes showcases birth-ready cervixes (“Your vagina looks like it’s yawning,” Eden tells an in-labor Dawn early in the film), pregnancy-induced horniness, placenta-birthing, and the medieval-seeming nature of prenatal medical procedures, like an amniocentesis.
By the same token, not all of Glazer and Rabinowitz’s list items were physical. “The thread that continued to come up for us was how your friendships change,” Glazer says. “We’d all been on the other side when our friends chose to have kids, and then we watched those friends turn into zombies and eventually return to human form… Josh and I were so naive to the loss when you gain a beautiful child in your life. It’s scary, the shift of your friendships.”
Ilana Glazer and Stephan James in ‘Babes.’
Gwen Capistran/NEON
If anyone can claim expertise in non-romantic companionships, it’s Glazer. From 2014 to 2019, the comedian co-produced and starred in Broad City, a coming-of-age sitcom that captured the wacky and often-humiliating experiences of two twenty-something best friends (Glazer and real-life pal Abbi Jacobson) living in New York. Based on Glazer and Jacobson’s independent web series of the same name, Broad City tended to draw comparisons to HBO’s Girls. But where Girls was cringely provocative and satirical about over-educated, under-employed millennials, Broad City was slapstick, surrealist, and unpretentious. A typical season would escalate young-adult minutia — psychedelic trips to Whole Foods, debating whether to peg your crush — into a farcical comedy of errors.
For all of its situational ridiculousness, the friendship between Glazer and Jacobson was the beating heart of Broad City. Babes follows suit by honing in on the bond between Glazer and Buteau, who have been friends since meeting in the New York comedy scene in the late 2000s. Casting Buteau took a few tries at first — Glazer says she received three or four “no”s before they finally got her on board. “We were looking at these lists of actresses who would guarantee a box office [draw] — women who I so admired,” Glazer says. “But seeing these lists of women reminds me of Mitt Romney’s ‘binders full of women.’ Just a complete flattening of women into a monolith. I found the process so un-sexy. I truly woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, like ‘Michelle. Michelle. Michelle. It’s Michelle.’”
At the time, Buteau was busy filming the first season of Netflix’s Survival of the Thickest. “She passed, and then I called her again, and she passed, and then I called her manager, and she passed,” Glazer says. “But the vision was so clear: to portray a friendship from the inside out with two real-ass women was such an important opportunity that once I got Michelle and her manager to see this vision, they couldn’t unsee it. Thank God.”
“What drew me to Josh and Ilana’s script was the raw honesty,” Buteau tells Rolling Stone. “The emotions that you go through, the emotions that you can’t put a name on or have vocabulary for. But also, I just laughed.”
The “real-ass women” trifecta was completed after Glazer secured Pamela Adlon to direct what would be her debut feature-length film. “The script had a lot of elements that I love,” Adlon tells Rolling Stone. “It’s a rom-com — a bromance, if you will — but the relationship is two lifelong female friends whose lives are hitting the inevitable fork in the road.”
Pamela Adlon on the set of ‘Babes.’
Gwen Capistran/NEON
Glazer didn’t know Adlon before Babes, but she admired how honest Better Things could be about older motherhood. “She has this classic rockstar energy that was so spontaneous and colorful,” Glazer says. “She’s a real champion of actors. If I felt stuck, or was struggling, she would help erase everything that I was holding. She would break off a piece of herself to give to me and take into that scene.”
Understandably, pregnancy and motherhood have been top of mind for Glazer ever since she became a parent. That same year, she co-wrote and starred in the Hulu horror film False Positive, a Rosemary’s Baby-esque story about a young woman (Glazer) who struggles to conceive and seeks help from a fertility doctor played by Pierce Brosnan. “False Positive embodied my fears of becoming a parent,” Glazer says. “It also embodied my fears of the vulnerable experience of entering the misogynist medical system when you are a pregnant person. It’s dehumanizing — our healthcare system in this country.”
However frightened Glazer was about carrying a child and being a parent, she is actively embracing this latest life stage, which she says has “given me new colors to see and sounds to hear… False Positive to Babes definitely illustrates this growth.”
In an age of Millennial mom anxiety and dread, Glazer doesn’t claim to be chasing the zeitgeist. “I think reality is the funniest place to write from,” Glazer says. “Comedy is the tension between joy and suffering. It’s the point where light becomes dark. That’s where the funny thing is.”
After ranking as the third-best large U.S. city for starting a business last year, Austin took a surprising tumble into the 24th spot nationally for 2026.
WalletHub’s annual report, “Best Large Cities to Start a Business (2026)” compared 100 U.S. cities based on 19 relevant metrics across three key dimensions: business environment, access to resources, and costs. Factors that were analyzed include five-year business survival rates, job growth comparisons from 2020 and 2024, population growth of working-age individuals aged 16-64, office space affordability, and more.
Florida cities locked other states out of the top five best places in America for starting a new business: Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Hialeah, and St. Petersburg.
Austin’s business environment ranked 11th best in the country, and the city ranked ninth in the “access to resources” category. The city also tied with Boise, Idaho, and Fresno, California, for the highest average growth in the number of small businesses nationally.
Austin lagged behind in the “business costs” ranking, coming in at No. 80 overall. This category examined metrics such as the city’s working-age population growth, the share of college-educated individuals, financing accessibility, the prevalence of investors, venture investment amounts per capita, and more.
Earlier this year, WalletHub declared Texas the third-best state for starting a business in 2026, and several Houston-area cities have seen robust growth after being recognized among the best career hotspots in the U.S. WalletHub also ranked Austin on its top-10 list of the best U.S. cities to find a job. Entrepreneurial praise has also been extended to 15 Austin-based innovators that made Inc Magazine’s 2026 Female Founders 500 list.
Texas cities with strong environments for new businesses
Multiple cities in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex can claim bragging rights as the best Texas locales for starting a new business. Dallas ranked highest overall — appearing 11th nationally — and Irving landed a few spots behind in the 16th spot. Arlington (No. 23), Fort Worth (No. 30), Plano, (No. 35), and Garland (No. 65) followed behind.
Only six other Texas cities earned spots in the report: Houston (No. 26), Lubbock (No. 36), Corpus Christi (No. 39), San Antonio (No. 64), El Paso (No. 67), and Laredo (No. 76). Corpus Christi and Laredo also topped WalletHub’s list of the U.S. cities with the most accessible financing.
“From the Gold Rush and the Industrial Revolution to the Internet Age, periods of innovation have shaped our economy and driven major societal progress,” the report’s author wrote. “However, the past few years have been particularly challenging for business owners in the U.S., due to factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Great Resignation and high inflation.”
Austin, TX
‘I want to be louder’: Austin Drag King Bobby Pudrido refuses to be deterred by Texas ban
Jay Thomas grew up like any kid, laughing at silly things and making up funny names.
So in the ’90s, when Tejano superstar Bobby Pulido’s songs played on the radio, young Jay and his peers couldn’t help but rhyme his last name with the Spanish word pudrido (which means rotten in English).
“We grew up calling him that just because it was funny,” he told Austin Signal host Jerry Quijano.
When he was thinking of a name for his drag persona, Thomas created a list.
“I was thinking of some queer icons and some not queer icons,” he said. “This one just resonated because he is a Tejano star. And in the ’90s he was this really big heartthrob that everybody wanted to be or be with.”
And three years ago, Thomas became Drag King Bobby Pudrido.
He thought it would be fun to impersonate a masculine figure from the Latino community and perform for an audience attracted to that type of energy. He also wanted to bring his culture into his drag.
Pudrido’s name has new recognition these days: Tejano singer Pulido decided to retire from music and go into politics. He’s running for Congress in South Texas’ District 15 against incumbent Republican Monica De La Cruz.
Both in an out of drag, Pudrido is also politically vocal. He advocates for trans rights and against the drag ban that went into effect statewide in March. The law prohibits drag performances in public properties or in front of children. Venues that host these performances can be fined up to $10,000.
“As a drag artist, one of the things we need to do is get booked so we can pay our bills,” Pudrido said.
Even though it’s unclear whether the ban affects some venues, he said, he thinks certain business owners won’t book drag performers because of the risk of being fined.
But as a working-class artist, he doesn’t have the luxury to dwell on it.
“You have to go to work, because you need to pay your bills,” he said.
The law has taken an emotional toll on him, too.
“The way it chips away at a queer person to hear any type of anti-queer legislation pass is something that is really big for me,“ he said. “We are constantly — just as human beings — trying to maintain our mental health. “
But that doesn’t mean his love for performing has been diminished. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
“It has fueled me,” Pudrido said. “Right now I’m in the angry phase where I want to be louder.”
As a performer and producer, the drag king has put on shows in the Austin area and recently traveled back to his hometown in Laredo for a show.
“It’s hard for drag kings to get booked sometimes, so we are still far away from the perfect ideal world for [them],” he said. “But the fact that I have a platform at all is huge.”
Pudrido’s passion for performing comes from his drag ancestors, “who started the art form as a way of being political and of being against the systems that were oppressing queer people.”
Drag King Bobby Prudido is currently producing his second queer quinceañera, “Con Mucho Amor,” with an anticipated show date in the fall.
Austin, TX
Men wrongly accused of grisly yogurt shop murders in Texas reach $35 million settlement with city
The city of Austin will pay $35 million to three men and the family of a fourth who were wrongly accused of the 1991 rape and murder of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop, a case that initially sent one of the men to death row and another to life in prison, under a tentative settlement reached Tuesday.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn and Maurice Pierce had all insisted they were innocent of one of the city’s most notorious crimes. They were finally declared innocent by a judge in February after investigators determined the crime was committed by a suspect who died in 1999.
The settlement must still be approved by the city council at a later date. Details of the payments to the men and their families were not released.
“This settlement closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history,” Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a statement. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted in this case and hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event.”
Scott and his attorney Tony Diaz said in a joint statement they are hopeful the settlement will help improve investigation practices and safeguards against wrongful convictions.
“Discussions and negotiations are ongoing regarding police reforms that would help ensure that nothing like what occurred in this case ever happens again,” they said.
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men, who were teenagers when the girls were killed, were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed. He died in 2010 in a confrontation with police after a traffic stop.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 and the previous trials revealed another male suspect.
Investigators determined in 2025 that new DNA science and reviews of old ballistics evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the sole killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 killing.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
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