Monday brings the annual July 4th Nathan’s Famous hot-dog eating contest on Coney Island, a spectacle teased 365 days of the year with a giant billboard outside the chain’s beautifully grimy mothership. So let’s revisit the scene at the stand one day in the 1950s.
Olivia de Havilland, legendary star of classics like Gone With the Wind and (my personal favorite) Lady In a Cage, was born on this day in 1916. The newly minted centenarian has called three continents her home (she was born in Japan), lived through two world wars, had two husbands, and won two Oscars.
This is Sophia Loren, holding a lion club named Sophia, on a 1973 outing to the newly opened West Midland Safari Park in Bewdley, Worcestershire, England. But it could be you, with a little attitude, openness to synthetic fibers, and access to exotic wildlife.
After twelve years, Nancy Grace is leaving HLN. Who will now canvass the court dockets of America for perfectly viral cases involving potentially villainous and somewhat conventionally attractive white women is an open question.
Fun fact from five millennia ago: The British Museum owns a tablet covered in cuneiform that’s essentially a Mesopotamian paystub—maybe the world’s oldest—and it shows that some dude in ancient Mesopotamia got paid in beer.
The folks at Flavorwire called it “a raw, merciless portrait of human hunger.” The Daily Mail called it “cringey.” But I call it foreshadowing. If I’d been a Sydney resident in the mid 90s and seen Cate Blanchett appear on my TV screen asking a 3,000-year-old Australian genie for a magical carton of Tim Tams, I’d have…
Twitter tells us it is National Sunglasses Day, a strange and branded American occasion that, despite its relatively unofficial capacity, is still useful in reminding us that we gotta protect those peepers.
Like so many young girls, I saw Disney’s The Little Mermaid and was entranced. I spent hours at the pool trying to perfect my “part of your world” hair flip. Now I am 33, and I watch my four-year-old daughter do the same thing, dipping under water and flipping her long blonde hair over and over, bobbing between air…
Quick question: This postcard, circa 1902, is definitely sexual in nature, right?
Yas, knights! Lance your way straight through that glass ceiling!
On this day in 1982, Prince William made his first public appearance. If you could call it that, considering he could’ve easily been mistaken for a blanket-wrapped butternut squash.
I am unabashedly addicted to You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth’s podcast dedicated to “exploring the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century.” But either you are too, or will be soon—the podcast is increasingly popular and, more and more, name-checked as one of the best out there.
One scholar will have you know that contrary to received wisdom, Charlotte Brontë almost certainly did NOT underdress for a dinner party thrown by her hero, William Thackeray.
See here, we’ve got a pretty young woman in a swimsuit we’d like to display to her best advantage. What’ll we do? Oh, obviously—we’ll perch her on the diving board.
As American men flooded into the military during World War II, women took over many of the jobs on the home front, most famously wartime manufacturing. And—apparently—coffee tasting.
When I saw this news, I made a stupid joke about Tom Leppard dying as he lived—loving leopards. It was especially stupid, because it was untrue. Reading more about him, it appears that the 80-year-old’s true love was solitude, and he went to extreme measures to find it.
The Watergate Hotel, part of the complex that was the site of the break-in that brought down Richard Nixon and put a permanent dent in America’s trust in its government, is being reopened after a thorough revamp. Apparently the key cards will boast, “No Need to Break In.”
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
It’s the opening day of the Royal Ascot horse races in the UK, which reliably unleashes a flood of photos of fancy folks dressed to the nines. It’s been wire service fodder for decades, and news archives are full of glamorous photos going back to the 1920s or even before.
A legend is with us no more: Margaret Vinci Heldt, creator of the beehive, has died at age 98.
