It was announced Tuesday that famous Dunham Lena Dunham will soon be portraying a character that is essentially herself on television once again, this time playing a version of Lena Dunham that is hosting Saturday Night Live on March 8. In honor of her hosting debut, let's crawl inside our dark, warm imaginariums and predict every single sketch in which Lena will participate.
Yesterday, our sister site Jezebel put out a $10,000 bounty for unretouched, pre-Photoshopped images from Girls creator Lena Dunham's Vogue fashion shoot. Well: Someone already delivered.
Five months ago, Vogue released a pictorial featuring none other than Adam Driver, one of the stars of Girls. The images were, all in all, quite nice. He wore a live sheep around his shoulders and looked fantastic. As if Vogue would have it any other way.
Our sister site Jezebel, which has a grand history of documenting precisely how grotesquely fashion magazines digitally carve up their cover subjects into impossible avatars of manufactured beauty, is offering a $10,000 bounty for original, unphotoshopped images from Lena Dunham's recent Vogue shoot. Hopefully Dunham will hand them over and collect.
When New York's favorite prostitute-and-black-sock-loving former governor struck out in his bid for comptroller, there were any number of reasons (see: prostitute-and-black-sock-loving) to blame for his loss. Turns out, it involved Terry Richardson, Lena Dunham, and a sleeveless white Dior dress.
Last night, Tina Fey opened Saturday Night Live's 39th season with musical guest Arcade Fire. One of the episode's highlights was this Girls-spoofing digital short that doesn't fall into the easy trap of unnecessary meanness, but rather handily skewers the major characters' self-absorption with the simple introduction of a new Girl, Albanian refugee Blerta. Highly recommended.
Our Generation's Lena Dunham was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser last night for comptroller candidate Scott Stringer. (Dunham's best friend and real-life Marnie is Audrey Gelman, Stringer's press secretary.) Dunham opened her speech by saying,"When Scott told me he was running for comptroller, the first thing I did was Google the word comptroller... I thought the comptroller was the guy who rode on the back of the fire truck and steered!"
Can someone tell me whether we're supposed to be offended by Johnny Depp's portrayal of Tonto or not? Must know for dinner parties/twitter.
How was your Memorial Day weekend? Hopefully great. Hopefully a Memorial Day weekend you will never forget. Us Weekly reports that humble Christmas tree farmer Taylor Swift passed the weekend in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, where she recently purchased a sprawling $17M beachfront mansion filled to the brim with tasteful striped fabrics and whispers and ghosts. A couple weeks ago, a man from Illinois was arrested after allegedly swimming up to the mansion while Taylor Swift wasn't there, but he was not invited to Memorial Day. She was joined by Hailee Steinfeld, the 16-year-old who played a 14-year-old girl in True Grit, and Gossip Girl's Jessica Szohr, who spent the weekend getting cut out of paparazzi photos of Taylor Swift and Hailee Steinfeld.
Disclosure. Disclosure! I like Frank Rich, based on my small but existent amount of contact with him in the course of my work. And as someone who is well-enough employed, in the unstable business of journalism, and who is still not too old to have maybe have a chance to eventually become better employed, I am also wary of Frank Rich. The former New York Times theater critic-turned-columnist, now a New York magazine writer and an HBO something-or-other, exists within a network of powerful goodwill and even more powerful professional obligation.
Christopher Abbott, better (and forever) known as Charlie on Girls, has just announced his abrupt departure from the HBO series, which follows a group of youths with undiagnosed personality disorders as they careen wildly around New York's Brooklyn borough.
Bernard Baruch's famous quote-turned-cliché, "Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter," becomes quainter and more obsolete by the day. Technology has made the public-communicating elite more accessible, and as a consequence, more vulnerable to critique. Feedback lurks in every corner – your inbox, your @replies on Twitter, Facebook, comment sections. If you choose to ignore the criticism, people will inform you of it nonetheless ("Don't let ‘em get you down," they will say.) If you are sensitive enough to be sourcing your emotions for content, you are probably sensitive enough to be affected by these words, especially when they are negative. You may even end up exploring them, sorting them out or just plain responding to them in your further work, which will then be up for public dissection, which could get under your skin some more, causing you to react again, etc. Modern discourse is full of noise, thanks in no small part to these feedback loops.
Three years ago, New York Times media reporter and occult career-bender David Carr was taking a tour through South by Southwest and asked the festival's film person what movie he should see. She tipped him off to a movie called Tiny Furniture and he fell in love. He gave the movie and its creator/star, a 23-year-old woman named Lena Dunham, 1,000 words in the Times.
In much the same way that countless volumes could be composed in ode to the beauty of a single snowflake, countless words could be written about one single Lena Dunham tweet. Well, not countless: 1,139 words.
On Sunday, the self-described "Queen of Mean," standup comedian Lisa Lampanelli, tweeted a photo of herself and Girls lightning rod Lena Dunham. The caption referred to Dunham as Lampanelli's "nigga":
Late Wednesday night, Room Eight broke the major story that millionaire author and recap muse Lena Dunham did not vote in the last election, despite starring in that controversial pro-Obama get-out-and-vote ad last fall. So, huge scandal, right? Maybe. From Room Eight, who really dug deep for this one:
Good news for the entirety of the internet, which it turns out is an entity solely supported by people arguing about "Girls": HBO has picked up another show to be helmed by Lena Dunham hired Dunham to write a new pilot. It's called "Harlem," and will see Dunham profiling the lives of those in New York City's worst projects in a show that insiders are likening to "The Wire." Just kidding.
