Name Nerd Her Name Is Thandiwe The May issue of British Vogue features an interview with cover star Thandiwe Newton – and the entire piece is framed by that once-omitted ‘w’, and the correct pronunciation, ‘Tan-DI-we’. The explanation in the piece is that it was ‘carelessly missed out’ from her first credit, which seems both overly generous By Duana • Apr 06, 2021 01:18 pm
Style The Golden Globe Triumphs of Regina King It is very late and lazy to be using “what can’t Regina King do?!” as a framework for a piece – I mean, late in the night, but especially late in her recent run of media domination, even if One Night in Miami didn’t get any recognition last night. By Duana • Mar 01, 2021 11:13 am
Golden Globes 2021 Maya & Kenan & Barb & Star & The Hoodie Once we all dispensed with the pretense that the Globes was going to be fun or glamorous or in any way functional, the unintentional joys appeared, mostly in wardrobe form (and yes, it was mostly men who felt entitled to not GAF) but neither Bill Murray’s cabana shirt nor By Duana • Mar 01, 2021 09:09 am
Golden Globes 2021 Amy & Tina: Separate Coasts, Same Rhythm Did you notice that the Globes kept calling them “Amy & Tina”? No last names, because at this point, they don’t need them. Not in showbiz generally, but not at the Golden Globes specifically, where they’ve had essentially a casual residency, shared with Ricky Gervais, over the past By Duana • Mar 01, 2021 07:18 am
Golden Globes 2021 The Golden Globes Didn’t Bother To Make a Television Production What’s the most common critique of the Golden Globes? I mean, the overarching one (not the one that occurred this weekend when it became clear they have zero Black members to the point where they all remember the last person who applied, and was rejected, somewhere in the 2010s. By Duana • Mar 01, 2021 06:47 am
Name Nerd Duana Names: Man vs. Infant – You Win! Dear Duana, My childhood best friend alerted me to your column and we mutually decided I should write in. I was joking that I HAD to find a name by the time her new baby is born in September. Not for the purpose of being arbitrarily competitive with a baby By Duana • Feb 24, 2021 03:51 pm
Maple Leaf Are You There, Judy? Thanks! I’ve made a point of reading Judy Blume books to my kid. That wouldn’t have even been worthy of writing down 20 years ago, but now that there’s been an explosion of kid and YA- lit, these books are somehow not seen as essential extracurricular texts, never By Duana • Feb 19, 2021 03:26 pm
TV Updates Why Claudia Conway is on American Idol Obviously the TikTok generation, and those who become stars there, know the unwritten rules and customs better than any of us ‘olds’; in ten years time, they’ll have created an entirely new media landscape to befuddle us, based on self-generating everything, especially your image. Self-generation is why Claudia Conway By Duana • Feb 17, 2021 03:15 pm
Top Reads Charisma Carpenter Outlines On-Set Abuse By Joss Whedon Charisma Carpenter is a great name. In the late 1990s, in what was then called stuff akin to ‘the teen TV boom’, there were many sudden household names, generally the stars of the show or movie (with a subset of three named stars like Chad Michael Murray, Rachael Leigh Cook, By Duana • Feb 11, 2021 03:38 pm
TV Updates SAG Awards TV Noms – Discuss Once again we’re splitting discussion of these nominations into TV and Film, and so the actual nominations process, which used to be “televised”, deserves a mention – solely inasmuch as Daveed Diggs’ panic at not being able to add Lily Collins to the IG Live was so real it gave By Duana • Feb 04, 2021 01:08 pm
TV Updates The Golden Globes TV Nominations Are Embarrassing Look, the most generous-to-neutral observation that I can make about these nominations is that there are an awful lot of nominees whose names start with C. The category for Best Actress in a Drama includes Colman, Comer, and Corrin. You know who it doesn’t have? Coel. Yeah, I know By Duana • Feb 03, 2021 11:09 am
Name Nerd George Clooney on “weird-ass names” I am mad at Lainey. It’s kind of amazing how much I say that, here or on the podcast, on a site literally called LaineyGossip – maybe the only thing more amazing is that I do it because we both know that when we say it, it means we’re By Duana • Feb 01, 2021 03:47 pm
Amazingness Amanda Gorman Arrives, On Her Terms My favourite true but not-cool-to-say observation about the inauguration last week was that it was kind of boring, in the most blissfully relieving way – and the exception that proved the rule was the instantaneous and universal reaction to poet laureate Amanda Gorman; everyone fell in love with her at exactly By Duana • Jan 27, 2021 03:33 pm
Baby and Bump Obsession Duana Names: The Ks have it – per Gigi & Zayn …& Kamala? Look, it’s not that I *didn’t* like Gigi and Zayn before, I just didn’t think about them that much. But I guess now I am gonna have to officially add them to my ‘actively enjoyable’ column. I never said I wasn’t fickle, did I? I paid By Duana • Jan 22, 2021 12:57 pm
Show Your Work Podcast Show Your Work: Awkwafina vs. Nora? Lainey correctly pointed out (though I think I shot her down) that this is our first episode in 2021 – and I really like how things are going. We’ve talked a lot about the work we see, who’s doing it, who isn’t, and who should – but now, maybe By Duana • Jan 21, 2021 02:54 pm
Name Nerd Duana Names: Blanket Statements Benefit Balkan Baby Hi Duana! We're trying to settle on a Slavic or international name for our baby girl, but struggling to find a name that feels "right." We want a name that isn't super popular, but also one that both our Balkan families and English-speakers can By Duana • Jan 13, 2021 04:02 pm
