Daniel D'Addario

As far as the-end-of-something symbolism went, this year’s Burning Man festival was about as sharp as it gets: A social-media optimized version of Woodstock ’99. Consider: The 2023 edition of the Black Rock Desert-based cultural festival in Nevada was disrupted by torrential rainfall that turned the sand of the “Playa” into quicksand-like mud — all […]

Popular on Variety In December 2020, Cord Jefferson sat down with the novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, and saw his life reflected back at him. “It was like someone had written down a Christmas gift for Cord,” he says. So he did the first thing a professional screenwriter might do — he tried to find […]

Popular on Variety The documentarian Roger Ross Williams usually establishes trust by getting a meal with his subjects before shooting. In the case of “The Super Models,” he and co-director Larissa Bills were meeting four legends. Cindy Crawford hosted the pair at her Malibu home; Christy Turlington took them to a bookstore in Manhattan; Naomi […]

Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he is retiring from the boards of Fox and of News Corporation had particularly interesting timing for one journalist. “The Fall,” the new book by Michael Wolff, peers inside what we now know are the final days of Murdoch’s consequential tenure at the heart of global news. To be released Sept. […]

“Where am I going?,” Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of the company now known as X, asked as she wandered onto the stage at the Code 2023 conference Wednesday night. She seemed to feint toward the chair that her interviewer CNBC journalist Julia Boorstin had been sitting in, before finding her footing. It was a telling […]

Madonna’s life — and the relentless ambition that fueled her rise — could be the stuff of a great book. And now Pulitzer finalist Mary Gabriel has taken on the challenge. Gabriel, who wrote about the women who helped invent modern art in “Ninth Street Women,” turns her attention to the Material Girl in “Madonna: […]

Some 25 years ago, Todd Solondz had a hot hand, and he knew it. His film breakthrough, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” was a Sundance sensation and a surprise hit — surprising, in part, because of its scabrous and brilliantly profane view of life among the petty thugs known as middle-schoolers. So he set out next […]

Drew Barrymore’s talk show returned for its fourth season Oct. 16 without its previous writing staff — with its writers from last season having been offered, but declining, the opportunity to return. And it proved that it’s possible to run a show like this without any writers with experience on the show — just so […]

Popular on Variety Michelle Williams has, in an act of profound sympathy and of ecstatic transformation, given another astounding performance in a career full of them. And it’s in the unlikeliest of venues. One might expect the audiobook for Britney Spears’ memoir “The Woman in Me” to have been narrated by its author — herself […]

“Friends” wouldn’t have been “Friends” without Matthew Perry. And neither would have been, as time went by, American culture. The actor, who infused the hit show with its vital, sustaining dose of sarcasm, went on in recent years to publicize his sobriety, and his work bringing others out of addiction through the founding of a […]