Ever thought about all the secrets your family keeps from one another? Jessi Hempel divulges just what happened when her family grappled with truths about queer identity, personal tragedy, and efforts to become their authentic selves in her debut memoir, The Family Outing, out this month.
Over five years, each person in Hempel’s family came out in some way, in the process transforming their family dynamics and journeys of acceptance. In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hempel began interviewing her mother, father, and her two siblings in an attempt to “stitch together” their stories.
An experienced storyteller as a former magazine writer and host of the podcast “Hello Monday,” which chronicles the changing nature of wor…
No farting without permission.
No looking in the mirror.
No smiling.
These are some of the countless rules that teens had to follow at Academy at Ivy Ridge, a disciplinary boarding institution that operated in upstate N.Y. between 2001 and 2009. Marketed as a school that would help troubled teens, in reality, many Ivy Ridge attendees endured mental and physical abuse and were made to take part in cult-like activities.
Their stories come to light in the new documentary series, The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping, out March 5 on Netflix. Katherine Kubler, a survivor of Ivy Ridge, directs the three-episode series, returning with her former classmates to the defunct campus to unpack their horrific experiences.
“I made this series because ther…
Making a movie about the writing of a book is an almost impossible mandate. How to translate the process—the research, the long, lonely hours of filling screen after screen with prose, the invisible band of self-doubt that can encircle a writer during the toughest times—into terms that work visually on-screen, that draw an audience into a mode of work that’s intensely private? Ava DuVernay pulls it off intelligently with Origin, playing in competition at the Venice Film Festival, which follows journalist Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she brings her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents from conception to completion.
Simply researching and writing this ambitious book would have been enough. But Wilkerson embarked on it, and …