Gabourey Sidibe knew she had something special when she took on the role of writer Jenna Clayton in the Realm podcast thriller, If I Go Missing the Witches Did It.
Written by Pia Wilson, the nine-episode series follows Jenna, a woman who “vanishes without a trace” after a summer in Westchester, but leaves behind voice memos as clues to her disappearance. Sidibe tells ABC Audio that she put a lot of “own special brand of sass” into Jenna.
“A lot of the like, ‘I know you didn’t just do that,’ and the ‘Uh-Uh, I don’t like that,'” she notes. “So, that’s a bit of me.”
For Sidibe, who’s previously starred in American Horror Story and Antebellum, making her fictional podcast debut with If I Go Missing the Witches Did It wasn’t a hard decision.
“Psychological thrillers are my favorite,” she says. “I love watching what’s in front of me, but also knowing that there’s an entire world going on around it, a mystery that I need to solve.”
So that’s partly why the Empire actress jumped at the chance to play Jenna, who she describes as “complex.”
“She’s definitely of this generation and has very strong opinions about a lot of things,” Sidibe says. “She seems to have a lot of confidence…but she also has a lot of insecurities at the same time.”
The actress jokes that there are even times when she yells at Jenna in frustration, saying, “Girl, that’s the wrong decision!”
Still, even with Jenna’s obvious flaws, Sidibe says the character was “almost like a real friend.”
“That’s what she became to me,” she says. “And so I tried to breathe life into her that way.”
The first episode of If I Go Missing the Witches Did It premieres Sunday, September 26, on the usual podcast platforms.
(NEW YORK) — The United States has been facing a COVID-19 surge as the more contagious delta variant continues to spread.
More than 682,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 while over 4.7 million people have died from the disease worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The average number of daily deaths in the U.S. has risen about 20% in the last week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The U.S. is continuing to sink on the list of global vaccination rates, currently ranking No. 45, according to data compiled by The Financial Times. Just 64.3% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the CDC.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Sep 24, 6:23 am
CDC endorses Pfizer boosters for older and high-risk Americans
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has endorsed an independent advisory panel’s recommendation for seniors and other medically vulnerable Americans to get a booster shot of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, six months after their second dose.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, also partially overruled her agency’s advisory panel in a notable departure by adding a recommendation for a third dose for people who are considered high risk due to where they work, such as nurses and teachers — a group which the panel rejected in its recommendation. Some panelists said that without further data, they weren’t comfortable with automatically including younger people because of their jobs.
In a statement announcing her decision late Thursday, Walensky pointed to the benefit versus risk analysis she had weighed, and data rapidly evolving.
“In a pandemic, even with uncertainty, we must take actions that we anticipate will do the greatest good,” Walensky said. “While today’s action was an initial step related to booster shots, it will not distract from our most important focus of primary vaccination in the United States and around the world.”
With Walensky’s final sign-off, booster shots will now quickly become available for millions more Americans at pharmacies, doctors’ offices and other sites that offer the Pfizer vaccine as soon as Friday.
Sep 23, 8:40 pm
Leaving nurses out of booster recommendation ‘unconscionable,’ union charges
The nation’s largest union of registered nurses pushed back against the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel’s vote on COVID-19 booster shots, calling not including front-line workers like nurses in its recommendations “unconscionable.”
National Nurses United is urging CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to bypass what the advisory panel, ACIP, recommended and add nurses and other health care workers to the list of eligible booster recipients.
“Nurses and other health care workers were among the first to be vaccinated because of their high risk of exposure to the virus,” Deborah Burger, the union’s president, said in a statement. “Why leave them out of booster shots?”
“It is unconscionable that ACIP would not vote to keep us safer from death, severe Covid, and long Covid,” Burger continued. “We must do everything possible to ensure that the health of our nurses and other health care workers will not be put even more at risk.”
ACIP voted Thursday to recommend a third Pfizer dose for people aged 65 and older, as well as those as young as 18 if they have an underlying medical condition.
In its authorization Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration did agree to make the shots available to front-line workers. But ACIP said there was not yet enough data to support providing booster shots automatically to young people because of their jobs.
Sex and the City star Willie Garson died unexpectedly this week at age 57, but a cause of death was not immediately given.
It was confirmed Thursday in his obituary, which was published in The New York Times, that the actor died at home following a battle with pancreatic cancer.
His adopted son, Nathen Garson, first confirmed his father’s passing on Tuesday by sharing a collage of photos and videos of the late actor while writing, “I love you so much papa. Rest In Peace and I’m so glad you got to share all your adventures with me and were able to accomplish so much. I’m so proud of you. I will always love you, but I think it’s time for you to go on an adventure of your own.”
Garson, who was known for playing Stanford Blatch on Sex and the City and Mozzie on White Collar, was mourned by his former co-stars, including Kristin Davis, Chris Noth, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, Matt Bomer, Chad Lowe and many others.
Sarah Jessica Parker previously said in Noth’s tribute that she isn’t ready to publicly comment on Garson’s passing.
The late actor’s family is requesting fans make a donation to the Alliance for Children’s Rights in Garson’s honor.
Imagine having Bruno Mars as your wedding singer. It happened for one extremely rich couple last weekend, according to The New York Post.
Troy Brown, whose dad is the CEO of Motorola, got married to Kristin Ryan at the Chatham Bars Inn on Cape Cod, MA, reports the newspaper. After the dinner part of the evening, a marching bad led guests to a “secret speakeasy,” where they had to give the password “Magic,” along with keys that said “Join us in room 24.”
Of course, that was a reference to Bruno’s hit “24K Magic,” and inside the speakeasy, the Grammy-winning superstar performed for guests. We’re not sure how much Bruno got paid, but according to Scarlet Events, a luxury party planner, his fee for a private party starts at $3 million.
Bruno is currently working with singer Anderson. Paak in the duo Silk Sonic. Their debut album will arrive in early 2022.
(NEW YORK) — One week after getting her first COVID-19 vaccine shot, Bernadette Ann Bowen said she started her period one day early.
Then, Bowen, a 31-year-old Ph.D. student at Bowling Green State University, said she experienced some of the worst menstrual cramps of her life.
“I started getting a headache and then started feeling cramps coming on,” Bowen told Good Morning America. “My nausea and abdominal pain became so severe at the peak of my cramps that I could barely stomach a few sips of water, as I laid there feeling like I was going to pass out from it all.”
After Bowen saw people on TikTok discussing similar changes in their menstrual cycles after being vaccinated, she said she was “stricken with fear” over what could happen when she received her second dose of the vaccine.
“A lot of people I saw said their experience was after the second shot, so I was literally stricken with fear for a whole month wondering what would happen,” she said. “I was so afraid that it would continue.”
Bowen though, like most women who have reported menstrual changes after the vaccine, experienced only the one-time change to her period.
Nonetheless, she described it as “unacceptable” that people who menstruate did not know ahead of time that the vaccine may cause changes to the timing or severity of their menstrual cycles, even if temporary.
“Not getting a single warning is unacceptable,” she said. “It would be one thing if we were given a single consideration, but just knowing the design of medicine is so biased that this wouldn’t have been reported as a warning, it’s telling.”
Now, nearly one year after the COVID-19 vaccines began to be distributed in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has committed $1.6 million in funding to “explore potential links between COVID-19 vaccination and menstrual changes,” according a news release.
The funding, announced last month, comes as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer booster shots Wednesday for high-risk Americans and adults over age 65. FDA’s acting commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock, said the list of high-risk Americans should include health care workers, teachers and grocery story workers, all industries with largely female workforces.
The research funding also comes months after people began to share on social media their experiences of short-term period side effects after being vaccinated.
Tens of thousands of people documented their side effects in an online database created by researchers Katharine Lee, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Kathryn Clancy, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who each said they experienced unexpected menstrual cycles after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, and began to collect data.
The newly announced NIH funding, for which Lee and Clancy applied but were not selected, will go to researchers at five institutions: Boston University, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University and Oregon Health and Science University.
The researchers will study everything from menstrual cycle changes reported on period tracking apps like Clue to menstrual changes in people with endometriosis and people trying to get pregnant, people who have not been vaccinated and teenagers. They will be examining how the vaccines may have affected flow, cycle length and pain, as well as exploring why COVID-19 vaccines may cause changes, according to Candace Tingen, Ph.D., program director of the Gynecologic Health and Disease Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
“Exactly like you’d see on a medication, that it may cause drowsiness, we want to say to women, ‘If you get a booster, if you get a vaccine, you might have a slightly heavier period for a cycle or two,'” Tingen said. “That’s what we want when we go in to get vaccinated, so we know how to prepare.”
Data on menstrual side effects was not widely collected during clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines, which were conducted by the companies behind the vaccines, Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, according to Tingen.
She said the NIH was motivated to fund research both from reports of menstrual side effects as well as the misinformation that followed around menstrual changes and fertility.
“There was a lot of misinformation out there, and NIH sees its mandate as countering misinformation with accurate information,” Tingen said. “[Research] is something that we could do to step in and provide some real information about whether or not this is this is accurate.”
Experts in the medical community agree menstrual changes potentially linked to COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be temporary, and current evidence suggests that the vaccine has no impact on current or future fertility.
A possible explanation for temporary changes to period timing, flow and pain may have to do with how the body responds to physical and emotional stresses. Prior studies indicate that COVID-19 itself can be a stressor, leading to irregular menstrual cycles for some people.
Menstrual changes are also controlled by the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland in the brain, along with the ovaries, which use hormones as signals. These hormone signals can be disrupted when the body goes through changes that occur with an infection, and even a vaccine.
The research funded by NIH to help solidify these theories will include as many as 500,000 participants, some of whom are already involved in clinical studies, according to Tingen. She said because of the studies’ reach, transgender and nonbinary people will be included.
Dr. Laura Payne, director of the Clinical and Translational Pain Research Lab at McLean Hospital and an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is one of the five researchers receiving NIH funding.
She is studying teens ages 14 to 19 to explore why the COVID-19 vaccines may cause changes in periods.
Specifically, Payne is looking at whether the vaccines cause inflammatory markers to be released, which then affect estrogen, which then affects menstrual cycles.
“Right now, the data on this particular mechanism is pretty limited to animal studies so we don’t really know how inflammation affects estrogen,” Payne said. “I think if we can show that inflammation has an effect on the menstrual cycle, that can help us just better understand the different things that affect the menstrual cycle.”
“In the bigger scheme of things, we’re just putting the menstrual cycle and menstrual health to the forefront as an important part of medical research, and it just hasn’t been,” she said. “It’s certainly an additional variable, but it’s really important and it’s important for women even if it’s not causing any kind of dangerous condition, it’s an important measure of health for women.”
Payne called it a “miss” that changes to menstrual cycles were not looked at during the vaccine trials, but said she is hopeful that the work being done now will help prioritize menstrual research in the future.
“In the vaccine trials, what I’m guessing is that they were just looking for indicators of pretty severe health complications that would land somebody in the hospital and they didn’t feel like changes in the menstrual cycle were part of that,” she said. “There’s certainly an argument to be made for that, but I think with the anecdotal reports and with the research that myself and the other [principal investigators] will be doing, hopefully this will inform future trials to say maybe this isn’t a life-or-death situation, but it’s important to women and it’s important to include.”
In addition to speaking out like so many people did when it came to menstrual changes with the vaccines, Payne said people can also volunteer for clinical research in order to move research on menstruation forward.
“Volunteering for clinical research is one of the best things that you can do to support the type of research that you want to see,” she said. “One of the biggest obstacles that we face in clinical research is finding ways to access participants, particularly participants from diverse backgrounds, and that’s something that we really are focusing on and NIH is really committed so we get an understanding from diverse samples of people.”
(NEW YORK) — A new study found that children whose mothers experienced depression during and soon after pregnancy are more likely to experience depression themselves.
While experts said more research is needed on the subject, they emphasized that this new finding reinforces the urgent need to identify and treat depression among pregnant women — not just for their sake, but potentially for the sake of their child as well.
“It’s definitely been proven that there’s genetic linkage for psychiatric disorders,” Dr. Gabrielle Shapiro, a child psychiatrist from the American Psychiatric Association, told ABC News. “And identifying [depression] in early childhood would be the best way to have an impact on … lifetime trajectory functioning” for children with mental illness.
In the study, researchers in the U.K. reviewed survey data from a large database of women who gave birth during the early 1990s. They focused on a subset of over 5,000 mothers and assessed their reported symptoms of depression, both during pregnancy and after they gave birth.
The children were also surveyed throughout childhood and young adulthood. Researchers found that children of depressed mothers not only had more symptoms of depression themselves but also that the symptoms escalated faster in them than they did in children without exposure to maternal depression.
“We found that the depression scores of offspring of mothers … increased at a greater rate over time — in other words, their scores went up by more points each year than offspring of non-depressed mothers,” Dr. Rebecca Pearson, co-author of the study, told ABC News.
The data also revealed a potential association between a father’s depression and childhood depression, though the study was not constructed to assess that relationship fully.
Although previous research has looked at the link between parental depression and childhood mental health, this study is the first to indicate that the timing of when a parent has depressive symptoms may contribute to a child’s mental health in a unique way.
In a press release, Dr. Joanne Black, chair of the Faculty of Perinatal Psychiatry at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the study “shows that the timing of depression in parents (during pregnancy, after childbirth or both) and if the mother, father or both were affected, are all important risk factors for the child’s future mental health.”
Exactly why this timing appears to be important is still unknown, but may point to the importance of screening for depression during the peripartum period and supporting mothers with mental health conditions. It also begs the question: Are genetic factors that lead to depression passed from mother to child in the womb?
Although the findings are intriguing, it remains unclear if the results are applicable to the population at large, as this study was conducted in a part of the U.K. with little socioeconomic or racial diversity.
This matters to Shapiro, who stressed the importance of recognizing racial disparities in childhood mental health.
“It’s even more important to screen our [Black, indigenous, people of color] population and make it more acceptable for them to have early intervention and be OK with treatment discussions,” she said.
Moving forward, the study’s findings may help health care providers identify and treat children through supporting families with mental health needs.
A person crashed their car into an Alabama club where P.O.D. was performing earlier this week.
The incident happened Tuesday night at the venue Zydeco. According to the Birmingham Police Department, two suspects apparently tried to flee the vehicle on foot before they were apprehended.
An apparent attendee of the concert posted a video of From Ashes to New vocalist Matt Brandyberry, whose band was also on the bill with P.O.D., explaining that he heard the crash was anything but random.
“Apparently, what happened was this dude got kicked out of our show tonight,” Brandyberry says. “I guess he got mad at the security guard for doing that…I guess what ended up happening was after he left, he came back with his car and he tried to run the security guard over.”
P.O.D. is currently on tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of the band’s 2001 album Satellite. The outing is set to continue Saturday in Columbia, South Carolina.
One week ago, Dan + Shay achieved what very few country artists have done, by selling out the famed Madison Square Garden in New York City. Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney spoke out about the achievement in a touching post on social media, along with photos of the unforgettable night.
“It’s been exactly one week since y’all sold out Madison Square Garden for us. and it has taken every bit of those 7 days to fully process it,” Dan + Shay shared on social media. “[We] spent the last few hours scrolling through these photos and all the emotions are coming right back. We’ve dreamed of this moment since we were little kids, and y’all made it come true for us when we needed it most.”
“Can’t say this enough, but thank you,” they continued. “Thank you for absolutely everything. We’re the luckiest guys in the world and will never take a single second of this for granted.”
The concert was part of their rescheduled The (Arena) Tour, which heads to Wisconsin and Minneapolis this weekend.
Red Hot Chili Peppers are returning to the road in 2022.
In a goofy, faux newscast video, the Peppers — Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Chad Smith and returning guitarist John Frusciante — announce that they’ll launch a global stadium tour in June of next year, with the U.S. leg set to kick off in July.
Neither the exact itinerary or ticket details were revealed, but in the video, you see the names of different cites in the background, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, London, Toronto and Barcelona, Spain.
The tour will mark the first full live Peppers outing since Frusciante rejoined the band at the end of 2019. The band had planned dates for 2020, but, you know, COVID.
Fittingly, the tour announcement arrives on the 30th anniversary of the release of RHCP’s hit 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the release of British glam-rock legends T. Rex‘s classic album Electric Warrior.
The record was the Marc Bolan-fronted group’s sixth overall and its second after the band shortened its original moniker, Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Electric Warrior spent eight nonconsecutive weeks at #1 on the U.K. albums chart in late 1971 and early ’72, while peaking at #32 on the Billboard 200. It includes the band’s signature song, “Get It On,” which topped the U.K. singles tally, while reaching #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 — becoming T. Rex’s only top-40 hit in the U.S.
The album also features “Jeepster,” a #2 U.K. hit, and such other gems as “Mambo Sun,” “Cosmic Dancer” and “Life’s a Gas.”
In the U.S., “Get It On” was retitled “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” to avoid confusion with a then-popular song by the jazz-rock band Chase.
Longtime Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman played piano on “Get It On.” Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman of The Turtles and Frank Zappa fame contributed backing vocals to Electric Warrior, while ex-King Crimson multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, who later became a founding member of Foreigner, played saxophone on the record.
Electric Warrior, which was written entirely by Bolan and produced by frequent David Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti, is considered among the first glam-rock albums, if not the very first.
The record’s influence could be heard in the early-to-mid-1970s music of Bowie, Elton John, The Hollies and The Rolling Stones, and went on to inspire many artists who emerged from the punk and new wave scenes.
Here’s the full track list of Electric Warrior:
“Mambo Sun”
“Cosmic Dancer”
“Jeepster”
“Monolith”
“Lean Woman Blues”
“Get It On”
“Planet Queen”
“Girl”
“The Motivator”
“Life’s a Gas”
“Rip Off”
