The children’s YouTuber has drawn outrage and adoration for her work. As her first album, I’m So Happy, drops, she discusses how she’s surviving her newfound celebrity

There’s a voice in Rachel Accurso’s head. Right now, it’s also coming out of her tote bag — a recorded version of her alter ego’s cheerful tone made tinny by canvas.

“This is so funny,” she says, wrestling with a rainbow-colored plastic toy with her face on it, which is doing the singing in question. “I was walking down the street, and it was like, ‘Hi, friends!’ I don’t know how to shut it off!”

If she donned a pink headband, most people would recognize Accurso as Ms. Rachel, a children’s entertainer who started as an amateur YouTube host and has since crafted an educational universe. She has more than 20 million subscribers, a Netflix deal, a collaboration with Sesame Street, a line of toys available at Target and Walmart, children’s-book tie-ins, and an upcoming debut album, I’m So Happy, out Sept. 25. But there are two people at play here. Yes, there’s Ms. Rachel, a trusted face on the internet using songs to teach tykes how to say “mama,” use the potty, and hop like bunnies. But there’s also Accurso, a 43-year-old Christian mother of two whose conviction to speak out against violence, poverty, and disenfranchisement of children, particularly those in Gaza, has turned her life as a public figure into a melee of controversy.

This duality isn’t immediately obvious in the woman who greets me at her door in New York City with a bulging plastic bag of breakfast food and a wide, open smile. When the construction in the apartment next door makes itself known — clanking and paint smells seeping under the door — our morning at home swiftly turns into a picnic. “Let’s go down to the park,” she says, soft voice carrying only a trace of the singsong intonation that keeps children rapt. “It will be beautiful.”

Originally called Songs for Littles, Accurso started the show in 2019 with her husband, Aron Accurso, a composer and musician who’s worked on Broadway shows like Billy Elliot, Nice Work If You Can Get It, and Aladdin. Ms. Rachel videos, which can run anywhere from 30 minutes to more than two hours, cover a wide range of deceptively simple topics, like playing hide and seek, naming farm animals, or learning how to brush your teeth. But Accurso leans heavily on her master’s degree in early-childhood education, which gives the show a research-backed foundation. The nursery rhyme “The Mama Song,” for example, uses exaggerated mouth movements to encourage babies to mimic the motion. “Icky Sticky Bubble Gum” turns a silly story about gum into a lesson about the parts of the body. The song “Hop Little Bunnies” promotes movement and following instructions like “stop,” “jump,” and “skip.”

Accurso’s show doesn’t contain political material — unless lessons on friendship can be considered dangerous ideals. Nevertheless, Accurso’s activism on her public-facing Ms. Rachel social media accounts has made her and her family a target of harassment, accusations, and even death threats. It’s why, for safety reasons, I cannot share what neighborhood Accurso cheerfully walks me through, stopping to speak to neighbors and pet a fluffy white dog named Daisy dealing with a bout of arthritis. I cannot even describe the park where we set up camp to eat breakfast on the ground. Think being a mom is hard? Try balancing playdates and school drop-offs with security measures and constant vigilance.

On her public Ms. Rachel accounts, Accurso posts anywhere from five to 10 times a day on platforms like Instagram and Threads, calling out politicians, posting fundraisers, and constantly reiterating that children in Gaza deserve the world’s attention. Accurso’s driving belief is that with enough time, enough photos, enough heartfelt pleas, she can change people’s hearts and minds. But that fight comes with a limit — one Accurso is in the process of figuring out.

“‘You’re gonna lose this partnership. You’re gonna lose views.’ That doesn’t faze me because the kids gave me the platform. I’m going to stand with them no matter what,” Accurso says. “People on the ground in Gaza are risking their lives all the time to help kids. I can do it from Manhattan.”

AN IMPROMPTU OUTDOOR BREAKFAST with Accurso involves plenty of food, and what feels like even more apologies. First, Accurso apologizes for not having a picnic blanket. Then, it’s napkins, though she offers pieces of paper, a handful of Ms. Rachel-themed bibs, and at one point, her own tote bag. Then she apologizes for not thinking about dietary restrictions. She’s picked up what feels like every breakfast option, including yogurt, avocado toast and salad, and a fluffy omelet covered in chives. All that’s missing: utensils.

“Oh, my gosh, we are screwed,” Accurso says, laughing. “What are we gonna do?” There’s a shuffle for things we could use to build makeshift forks, but it’s eventually abandoned. Accurso manhandles the omelet, layering the salad on top before folding it in half. “It’s an egg taco!” she says gleefully. When the hand sanitizer I offer her disappears at the bottom of my bag, she waves my empty hands away with a shrug. “I [don’t] care,” she says, ripping a thick slice of sourdough topped with avocado mash clean down the middle. “I [have] a 16-month-old who eats dirt.”

Kids programming has always been an integral part of Accurso’s life. In fact, it probably still would be even if she wasn’t Ms. Rachel. No fewer than six times, she calls Fred Rogers — Mister Rogers — her “hero.” She adores Sesame Street and children’s books like Madeline. Growing up in Maine with a single mother, Accurso’s great love was the theater. She and her older sister — close to three years apart — used to call themselves “Sisteristic” when they put on living-room performances, and were constantly checking ads for community theaters. Accurso was once in a local production of Annie with Anna Kendrick; Accurso was Annie and Kendrick was a precocious voice in the orphan ensemble. (“When she did, ‘I love you, Miss Hannigan,’ she totally stole the show,” Accurso says. “I told her on DM[s] the other day, and then she found the program!”)

Accurso moved to New York in 2009. Soon after, she met Aron at a Unitarian church on the Upper East Side. “It was coffee hour at church. I was about to leave, and I said, ‘Oh, there’s a cute girl.’” Aron says. “When I started talking to her, I realized, ‘What an interesting person.’ Immediately I said, ‘I’ll walk you out.’” (Their first real date was the short-lived Broadway musical In Transit.) The duo are opposites, personality-wise. Aron tends to be quiet and straightforward. Accurso’s mind and mouth run a mile a minute. When an interested squirrel moves to investigate our breakfast, she goes silent midsentence. “I feel like we’re not supposed to feed animals,” she whispers, vocalizing the notes to Snow White’s “I’m Wishing,” hand outstretched. “And it’s so hard because I want to.” But the Accursos share a passion for making music.

“When I was teaching public school, I asked him to make a track because there wasn’t a karaoke [version] for this certain song. I thought he was just gonna sit down and [play],” Accurso says, miming plunking a few solitary keys on a piano. “He was there for hours and hours, adding all these instruments to exactly match the track. I think it’s cool that he [brings] the Broadway level of care and detail to kids’ music.”

The Accursos had their first child, Thomas, in 2018. After his first birthday, Thomas was diagnosed with a severe speech delay that required specialized therapy. It wasn’t cheap — about $175 for every 45-minute weekly session — but the techniques were life-changing. After she realized Thomas remembered more when he was able to watch lessons back on video, Accurso asked her husband to give her a birthday present. “I was like, ‘I want your mouth on a video camera to say cheese or baby,’” she says, curling her lips and baring her teeth to enunciate the syllables. “I’m self-conscious about my teeth. And he’s so nice, he’ll do what I ask. It was [Aron] jumping in right away [that crafted] that first video.”

Ms. Rachel’s popularity wouldn’t be possible without the rapidly developing relationship newer generations have with technology. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, every year, the age at which kids are exposed to screens goes down, and the number of hours they spend in front of screens goes up. And the choices available to them extend far beyond PBS or Disney. The landscape of online children’s content is cluttered with everything from multicolored fruit dancing to EDM to baby influencers, who unpack and play with mountains of toys on camera (à la Ryan’s World) for other kids’ enjoyment. When the Accurso family published their first video in 2019, they offered parents an educational and low-fi alternative. In one of their first videos, “Bubble, Bubble Pop!,” Accurso sings in front of a static underwater background for only two minutes, voice brassy without a professional microphone, before signing off with a cheerful “See you later, alligators!”

“The first things we filmed, we stacked books [to make a] tripod,” Accurso says wistfully. “I didn’t care if it was crooked.” There were also some technical glitches. “I would record a whole show and the mic wasn’t plugged in, and I’d cry.”

But kids were obsessed, as were adults. Parents would leave testimonials praising Ms. Rachel’s videos, saying they helped their children learn new skills, or calmed crying toddlers. There’s even an ongoing TikTok trend where parents play Ms. Rachel’s voice and wake babies out of dead sleep. As the Covid-19 pandemic set in, and millions of Americans became trapped in their homes with no access to mommy-and-me events, toddler classes, or respite, Accurso’s channel hit 1 million subscribers.

IF ACCURSO HAS A SUPERPOWER, it’s invisibility. Groups of screaming preschoolers pass by us in the park, fists clutched tight onto their walking ropes, chubby hands waving hello or pointing to squirrels scampering in their path. “Hi, friends, how are you today?” Accurso calls out as a group stops next to us. Not a single one seems aware that the only thing keeping them from recognizing their biggest idol is a pair of mint-green Lucite glasses and the absence of that signature headband.

“None of them seem to know I’m Ms. Rachel, which is totally great,” Accurso says softly, waving to the group. “Only grown-ups really do. [They] recognize me if they hear my voice. I often wear Mister Rogers socks or a Sesame Street shirt because I love children’s media.” That’s enough to tip people off. “Sometimes I’m not gonna wear the shirt, because I’m doing something with my son and I really want to focus on him. But I love meeting people out and about.”

Accurso describes herself as having an overdeveloped sense of empathy. She says she feels physical pain when someone else is hurting. It’s why she was struck in late 2023 when she saw videos of Palestinian children watching episodes of Ms. Rachel, often with the chaos of a humanitarian refugee camp directly behind them. As videos of the war in Gaza continued to flood in, the images stayed with her. When she saw a video of a starving baby in Gaza wearing a rainbow onesie similar to one her then-infant daughter, Susie, wore, it made her so upset she had to give the item of clothing away.

“When I see a mom who has a baby who is starving and they can’t get any milk, I see that and [think], ‘What if that was me and Susie?’” she says. “With Gaza, I couldn’t not speak out.”

Accurso’s online presence has always been intertwined with politics. In 2020, she shared children’s books about the importance of talking to kids about race, like the Ibram X. Kendi picture book Antiracist Baby. She also posted about the importance of voting in presidential elections. In 2024, she posted a video celebrating Pride Month and LGBTQ+ families (“This month and every month I celebrate you!”) — prompting a boycott from political commentator Ben Shapiro. She lambasted former New York Mayor Eric Adams over proposed cuts to early-childhood education programs in the 2024 city budget. She’s been vocal about the harm poverty and food insecurity can have on developing children, and is quick to condemn racism and homophobia. She remains a staunch critic of the Trump administration’s family detainment practices and xenophobic rhetoric against immigrant children. And she has a demonstrated history of fundraising for kids in war-ravaged areas — including mass displacements in Sudan and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. So she was surprised when her posts about the rising Palestinian death toll were met with aggressive criticism.

When she collaborated with Palestinian war photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who has called Israel a terror state, she was accused of platforming an antisemitic voice in the movement. When she ramped up her posts about starving Palestinian children, critics said she was ignoring Israeli children targeted in the Oct. 7 attacks. In 2025, watchdog group StopAntisemitism put Accurso in the running for “Anti-Semite of the Year,” claiming Accurso inflated death statistics coming out of Gaza, shared “Hamas propaganda,” and ignored the deaths of Jewish children in Israel. The group also sent a formal letter asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Accurso was being funded by Hamas for her post. Accurso denies these claims, stating she has only shared statistics shared by verified sources, like the United Nations. Even then, some disputed their veracity. (“I have to realize that people who believe the U.N. is fake — that’s not people I can engage with,” she says.)

In January, Accurso started a firestorm when she accidentally liked an Instagram comment on her post that said “Free America From the Jews.” Accurso apologized — saying she hit the button by accident and removed it once followers brought it to her attention. “I thought I deleted a comment and I accidentally hit ‘like,’” she said in a tearful video. “I’m a human who makes mistakes. Everyone who knows me knows I would never like that.”

Looking back on the last few years, Ac­curso says, “I thought everyone hated me at one point. I remember calling friends and family members, Jewish and not Jewish, and just being like, ‘Why do people hate that I don’t want kids to be killed and starved?’”

Raffi — the famed children’s per­former known for “Baby Beluga” and “Five Little Ducks” — says that Accurso’s work and activism center around spreading joy and working to protect children everywhere. “In her love of the world’s children, she’s a person after my own heart. Her embrace of Palestinian kids is what Fred Rogers would have done,” he says. “Rachel’s courage and compassion is exemplary. I’m happy we’re friends.”

But while close confidants have been supportive, the in-person backlash is also rampant. Last year, Accurso released a special performance of the song “Hop Little Bunnies” with Rahaf, a then-three-year-old from Gaza who lost both her legs in an Israeli airstrike. In the clip, filmed in New York, the two sing together. Rahaf swings her prosthetics to the song, and at one point, wraps her small arms around Accurso’s neck — following the song’s instructions and pretending to be asleep. But when she attempted to rent out a playroom for Rahaf’s visit, Accurso was turned away from multiple businesses, which cited threats and backlash.

“I finally found a place that would let us come. She had the best time,” Accurso says. “I just was like, ‘Let me just be in the moment with her and follow her lead.’ We played and laughed so much. It was beautiful.”

But even this perpetual optimist can’t hide the fact that constant scrutiny has complicated the life she imagined for her children. “I wouldn’t change anything. Well, I would love for people to not send death threats,” she says. “For a while, we had security, and they were like, ‘Don’t do anything predictable.’ And it was just like, ‘Oh, I have to think about what I’m doing and fear for my family.’ That was tough.”

Aron has always been happy for Accurso to be the public face of their show. “It’s a beautiful face,” he says, squeezing her hand. But he had to come up with emotional strategies for dealing with the threats. “I’m very proud of all the work that Rachel’s doing,” he says. “She wants the best for all the children of the world. She genuinely cares. I know that, and she knows that. And everything else is noise.”

Accurso knows her content can upset people. But she doesn’t see any of her advocacy — for Gaza, for Sudan, for immigrant families in the U.S. — as separate from her job as Ms. Rachel. For Accurso, being a voice for children means accepting the moral responsibility to consider their welfare from all angles. She has always said that she started her show to help people. But teaching phonics or manners or even how to say “mama” has an eventual victory. If Accurso wants to teach the world how to have empathy, she’s got to realize it’s a goal with no end in sight.

“When I first started talking about Gaza, some people didn’t connect. I realized I had to humanize the kids. That was what needed to happen for people to get involved,” she says. “There’s so much attacking in our world, and yelling at each other, it pains me when people don’t have that experience, and so they didn’t see [Palestinian children] that way. But I really believe in people’s ability to learn and change.”

THE MS. RACHEL PEOPLE INTERACT with online is almost always smiling. The real Accurso? Well, she’s tired.

I don’t see the effects until a few weeks a­fter our breakfast, when I meet up with Accurso and her husband at the Ms. Rachel studio, housed in a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. The two used to live here with their children, but now use it to film the show. The center of the living room is almost completely bare, with two chairs on one side and an upright piano pushed against the o­ther wall. Around it are Broadway posters like The Little Mermaid and Rogers’ autograph in a frame (a gift to Accurso from Aron). To the far left is a Silver Play Button award from YouTube, a plaque gifted to creators after they reach their first 100,000 subscribers.

When Accurso enters the room and sits next to her husband, her face, although smiling, is drawn, like someone has turned down her wattage. The night before, she posted a video on Instagram about an independent U.N. Commission of Inquiry, which found Israel deliberately targeted children in the Gaza Strip, even after the October 2025 ceasefire. “Where have you been, people we look up to? You didn’t want to lose your reputation or your power or your money?” Accurso says in the video, holding back tears. “How can you go to sleep at night knowing you didn’t say anything?”

Today, it seems the lack of sleep is weighing on Accurso. “I’m so excited,” she says softly, sinking into a deep chair and covering her face with her hands. “I’m gonna take nine days off. I haven’t taken a vacation in a long time.” She doesn’t want to share publicly where she’ll be going with her family, but the last “vacation” was the birth of Susie, whom the couple welcomed via surrogacy in 2025. “I didn’t go [anywhere] when she was little.”

It’s a reminder that while Accurso believes her advocacy is her responsibility as Ms. Rachel, it happens in a schedule already packed with rehearsing songs, filming videos, and being a parent. Right now, the big focus is the release of I’m So Happy, Aron and Accurso’s first album. It would have been easy enough to take some songs from the YouTube channel, add a new harmony here and there, and slap on a title. But that’s not how the spirit of Ms. Rachel works.

I’m So Happy is 23 tracks of both popular, public-domain children’s songs like “Old Macdonald” and “The Wheels on the Bus” and Ms. Rachel originals — all rerecorded with professional musicians. “When we did the YouTube versions, I would call up some friends and have them lay down other instruments from their home, and then I would try to mix it myself,” Aron says. “For the album, we wanted to take it to that next level of polish and sparkle. Each song has its own musical world.”

For over a year, Aron led the project, enlisting more than 40 musicians for live recordings in studios in New York and Nashville. Aron himself conducted strings for their heart-wrenching song “I Love a Rainbow.” “I’m really excited for families to experience these songs they already know from our show, and see how we expanded them with bigger versions that have new sections and fuller arrangements,” Aron says. “Kids deserve detailed, rich music. Although they can’t verbalize it, I think that [children] notice the care and detail that goes into the music.”

The whole family helped develop the album. “He played it for Susie all the time, and Susie would dance around and sing to it,” Accurso says, laughing. “Aron would be taking notes and thinking about the tracks while Susie pretended to be a dinosaur.”

Accurso suddenly pops up with a request — she wants Aron to play the piano for us. His good-natured protests don’t move her, and before I know what’s happening, the two are seated side by side on the piano bench, the notes to “I Love a Rainbow” already lifting into the air. Accurso closes her eyes next to Aron, the melody to the song already escaping her lips. She’s happy to be singing again.

There’s a childhood memory Accurso returns to often. When she was in second grade, she read Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline, a classic children’s novel focused on a rambunctious girl living in a Parisian boarding house. In the book, Madeline’s adventures are cut short when her appendix bursts and she’s rushed to the hospital. But rather than waiting patiently for Madeline’s return, her classmates require immediate comfort from their minders, believing that they too are deathly ill.

When Accurso read the book, she was immediately struck with pain in her stomach. Her mother hustled her to hospital, only for the doctors to realize Accurso’s active imagination had left her in the same predicament as Madeline’s friends. She was sent home and told that the stinging was in her head, but she couldn’t understand what they meant. The pain felt real. It felt urgent. It demanded action. She was feeling Madeline’s pain. Wasn’t everyone?

“But it hurts,” Accurso remembers saying. “I hurt, too.”

Production Credits

Hair by SAREEN BHOJWANI. Makeup by STEPHANIE POWERS. Photographic assistance: GRANT FLANAGAN and TESSA DILLMAN. Digital technician: FAISAL MOHAMMED.

The following article appeared in the Oct. 25, 2001, issue of Rolling Stone.

The first thing I saw in the parking lot across Liberty Street from the South Tower was luggage. Burned luggage. A couple of cars were on fire. Half a block east, a man who’d been working out in a South Tower fitness club was walking barefoot over shards of glass, wearing only a white towel around his waist; he still had shaving cream on the left side of his face. Bits of glass were falling to the ground like hail. I ventured a block south, away from the towers, and that’s when I started seeing body parts. At first, just scattered lumps of mangled flesh dotting the road and its sidewalks, then a leg near the gutter. Someone mentioned a severed head over by a fire hydrant. Hunks of metal — some silver and the size of a fist, others green and as big as toasters — were strewn for blocks south of the buildings. Shoes were everywhere.

“Oh, Jesus,” I heard someone say. “They’re jumping.” Every few moments a body would fall from the North Tower, from about ninety floors up. The jumpers all seemed to come from the floors that were engulfed in flames. Sometimes they jumped in — one just after the other. They were up so high, it took ten to twelve seconds for each of them to hit the ground. I counted.

What must have been going through their minds, to choose certain death? Was it a decision between one death and another? Or maybe it wasn’t a decision at all, their bodies involuntarily recoiling from the heat, the way you pull your hand off a hot stove.

Moments later, a low metallic whine, quickly followed by a high-pitched whoosh, came out of the south. I looked up to see the white belly of an airplane much closer than it should have been. The South Tower of the Trade Center seemed to suck the plane into itself. For an instant it looked like there would be no trauma to the building — it was as if the plane just slipped through a mail slot in the side of the tower, or simply vanished. But then a fireball ballooned out of the top of the building just five blocks from where we stood.

People were running south down the West Side Highway toward Battery Park — the southern tip, the end, of Manhattan — and west toward the Hudson River. I ran with the crowd that veered toward the river, looking back over my shoulder at the new gash in the Trade Center. Once relatively safe among the tree-lined avenues of Battery Park City, people hugged each other and some cried.

But about five minutes later, a sharp cracking sound momentarily replaced the shrill squeal of sirens, and the top half of the South Tower imploded, bringing the entire thing down. It was the most frightened I’ve ever been. Screaming and sprinting south toward Battery Park, we all flew from the dark cloud that was slowly funneling toward us. At that moment, I believed two things about this cloud. One, that it was made not just of ash and soot, but of metal, glass and concrete; and two, that soon this shrapnel would be whizzing by — and perhaps through — my head. A woman next to me turned to run. Her black bag came off her shoulder and a CD holder went flying, sending bright silver discs clattering across the ground. An older man to my right tripped and took a face-first dive across the pavement, glasses flying off his face.

In the seconds, minutes and hours following the World Trade Center attacks, hundreds — maybe thousands — of ordinary people would find their best selves and become heroes. And then there were the rest of us, running hard, wanting only to live and to talk to someone we loved, even if it meant leaving an old guy lying in the street, glasses gone, a cloud of death and destruction creeping up on him.

I’d always wondered what I’d do in a life-or-death situation. Until that moment, I’d believed I’d do the right thing, would always help the helpless, most likely without regard for my own well-being. All across lower Manhattan at that moment, people were making similar decisions, so many of them so much more critical than mine. September 11th, 2001, at 9:45 a.m. was not my finest moment. As I turned back to help, I saw two younger guys scoop the fallen man up, and we all continued running south.

After about three blocks, I hid for a moment behind a large Dumpster on the west side of the street. But when I looked back toward the towers, I could see that my Dumpster was no match for the cloud, and I took off again. I ran the last few blocks into Battery Park, where the cloud finally did catch up with the thousands of us fleeing it. I could see only a few feet in front of me, and so I followed the silhouettes I could make out. Because Battery Park is the tip of the island, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the crowd would wind up dead-ending at the water. When it happened, the people in the front panicked. So they turned around, screamed, and ran back toward us in a stampede. We had nowhere to go — there were thousands of people behind us and hundreds coming back the other way.

As the crowd doubled back on itself, I jumped over a wrought-iron fence and landed in a flower bed. I stayed down for a second, thinking I’d wait out the panic low to the ground. But then I felt other people jumping the fence and landing near me. Thinking I was about to be trampled, I got up and ran behind a nearby tree. In a minute or two the panic subdued, and I hopped back over the fence and onto a park path. But now the air was heavier with debris and there was no clear path out of the park. I took off my tie and wrapped it around my face. People were coughing and stumbling. Some were crying, others screaming. It was difficult to breathe or even keep my eyes open.

Soon, there was another wave of calm and quiet, and the ash that fell from the sky and settled on the grass and trees gave the park the peaceful feel of a light evening snowfall. Eventually, I found a path that led me out to the east side of the Battery area, and I followed a crowd to the FDR. Thousands participated in the exodus up the highway and into Brooklyn. It was now just past ten, and we looked like refugees. In a way, we were. My tie wasn’t doing much good against the ash, so I took off my shirt and tied it around my head. We walked in the falling gray dust for fifteen minutes, still hacking, and rubbing our eyes. Then the cloud broke, and, covered in soot, we were in the sunlight again. There wasn’t a lot of talking. Some walked in groups, desperately trying to stay together. Others walked alone, crying out the names of friends, co-workers or loved ones from whom they’d been separated.

At 10:25, as I was getting ready to cross the bridge, another cracking sound came out of the west. We looked behind us and to the left to see the remaining tower collapse. Soon, that ash reached the Manhattan foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the bridge was closed. Three hours later, I was finally back in my apartment in Brooklyn. It was nearly one o’clock. There was a thin layer of ash all over my kitchen from the blast. I made my phone calls and cried with my fiancée. Then I called some friends who’d left messages, checking on me. I called my friend Sully in Boston, and we went through the list of names of our friends who worked in the financial district. I was one of the last to be accounted for. When we’d gotten through most of the names — Sims, Kane, T-Bone, Molloy — Sully said, “It’s not all good news. Beazo called his wife from high up in the second building to say he was OK, but she hasn’t heard from him since it fell.” Beazo — Tom Brennan to those he didn’t go to high school or college with – still hasn’t been heard from.

As it turns out, when I was watching that tower fall, I was watching my friend die. His wife was at home, in their brand-new house in Westchester County, amid their still boxed-up life. She’d already turned off the TV when Beazo’s building collapsed. Their seventeen-month-old daughter is too young to have seen the images of her father’s death, but someday — maybe on a distant anniversary of September 11th when each network commemorates the tragedy — I’m sure she’ll be able to see it, along with her little brother or sister who is due in two months.

I hung up with Sully and turned on the television to see what I had seen. Places where I once ate lunch or shopped for a sweater or bought stamps were now buried under piles of concrete and metal, as were thousands of people – some of whom I probably rode the subway with every day. One of whom was my friend.

Since then, I’ve been freakishly fine, given what I’d seen. Maybe it’s because I realize how lucky I was — my experience was like Christmas morning compared to what other people went through. Maybe it’s because I lack the imagination, or the will, to realize the scope of what I’d seen. But sadness works in bizarre ways. The second night after the attack, I sat in front of the news, alone with my eighth or ninth beer, and I listened to a report about NFL officials considering a postponement of the second week of games. I thought about what a nice gesture that would be, and I cried and cried.

The Great Outdoors Comedy Festival has postponed its debut, just days before John Mulaney was scheduled to headline the Mississauga, Ontario event.

The festival was set to take over Erindale Park from September 11 to 13, with Mulaney, Hasan Minhaj, Ronny Chieng, Jeff Arcuri and many others on the bill. Instead, organizers announced yesterday that the entire weekend would be postponed, without providing a specific reason.

“After careful consideration,” the festival said, it decided postponing the event was the best way to deliver the “best possible festival.” Organizers say they are now exploring new dates and will contact ticket holders directly.

The announcement comes after a series of lineup changes in the weeks leading up to the festival. Nick Kroll and Mike Birbiglia were among the comedians originally scheduled to appear alongside Mulaney, while the festival’s published lineup was later revised.

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Mulaney, who has in the past had to cancel many shows in the GTHA, made clear Wednesday that the decision did not come from him. “It was not my decision,” he told Ontario fans, confirming that the festival producers had decided not to proceed with the weekend. He added that he intends to perform in the region soon.

The festival has not yet announced a reason for the postponing, replacement dates or a refund policy. For now, the Great Outdoors Comedy Festival is offering few answers beyond “stay tuned.”

“When things fall apart, men isolate and withdraw from the world more,” says Ronson.

“This story crashed unannounced into my life,” Jon Ronson tells me. It’s a lazy summer afternoon in the hamlet where he lives in upstate New York, and the journalist and author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and The Psychopath Test is explaining the genesis of his latest book. He describes a night, almost exactly three years ago, when he slept through a series of texts that came in from his adult son. The messages told a disconcerting story: His son’s friend, a woman, had connected with a man on Tinder, who invited her to come over to his castle in a rural part of Connecticut and bring some friends. According to his son’s description, Ronson says, the structure was a “vast, newly-built castle, ostentatious even by Gothic castle standards. Like, Count Dracula would think this is a bit much.” There were turrets, and a drawbridge, but in the grand ballroom, there was no sign of a party. “There’s a couple of other young people looking awkward and wondering what the hell is going on, but nobody knows what’s happening. Everyone’s confused.”

When the middle-aged castle owner emerged, he introduced himself as Chris Mark. The assembled twentysomethings asked him what was going on, and he told them they were there to take part in his new reality show, 101 Princesses. “He said, ‘I’m the king. I’m looking for my queen, and I have 101 princesses to choose from.” He sent the women down to the basement, where they could find princess costumes to wear. “They went with it, I guess out of unease, awkwardness,” Ronson says. “A videographer appears. They start filming. It becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that this isn’t a real reality show. One reason being that the videographer kept cutting up [a slab of] meat for the castle owner. Just for him. No meat was offered to anyone else.”

Ronson, who was also host of the hit porn-industry investigative audio project The Butterfly Effect, has made a career of letting his curiosity get the better of him. So, the next day, he went to the castle “to find out what the hell was going on,” he says. “And that’s how the book begins.”

The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men (out now from Riverhead Books), reads like an adventure story. Though much of it is framed around his interviews and interactions with Mark — the wealthy descendent of a Gilded Age baron — it opens up to a larger pursuit to understand the state of men, and how the breakdown of societal support, coupled with the rise of a technological state, has brought so many to the brink.

In the book, Ronson travels to the Midwest to visit a town built by Mark’s great grandfather in the 19th century, a recreation of a British village set under power plants and steel factories, where he talks to the man keeping its history alive. He charts the career path of an early YouTube star, Greg Chism, who went from being one of the first lawn-care influencers to chasing the algorithm by posting videos of his two young daughters. What starts as wholesome family content takes a left turn when he begins dressing up his daughters as babies, then donning a baby costume himself, before he’s ultimately all but run off the platform. Ronson includes chapters about Graham Linehan, the creator of huge British sitcoms like Father Ted and The IT Crowd, who became a prominent anti-transgender activist, and Armie Hammer, whose acting career crumbled after his cannibalism kink was revealed. Ultimately, Ronson develops descriptions of the different kinds of men who thrive online — the Vulnerable Man, the Doofus Man, the Manosphere Man, the Separatist Man, the Disinhibited Man — and what these modern archetypes communicate about the world we live in. And throughout it all, he comes back to his own unease about his place in the world. If a man doesn’t have purpose, what’s left?

Chris Mark is a fascinating character — he built this castle for his daughter, but then turned it into a sort of alternate-reality Playboy Mansion. At what point did you realize that his story was going to lead to your next book?The first thing I heard about the castle owner was that he was a big fan of Hugh Hefner. I thought, this is really funny. He’s trying to be Hugh Hefner at the worst moment in human history. I linked him with my feelings of unease, as well, about not having enough purpose. It felt like there were weird echoes there. I thought, this is a man out of time. He wants a world that’s no longer going to work for somebody like him, and maybe I should write a book about all these other things that men are no longer able to do that they used to be able to do.

One of the things you write about in the book is how people are reflexively dismissive of the problems of straight white men. What made you want to tackle this when you knew that there was going to be pushback?I think [of this] a little bit like my public-shaming book. People may not like the idea of the book, but then when they read it, they realize that their idea was wrong. Many times over my career, I’ve had this. Nobody wanted to read The Men Who Stare at Goats. The only book I’ve ever written which sold itself was The Psychopath Test — if you put “psychopath” in the title, you don’t have to do that much work. But what I do, I think, over and over again in my career, is look at how big changes that happen on high trickle down and impact the inner lives of people down here. But mostly, it was a book that crashed into my life, this big fucking castle that my son was lured to under false pretenses, and I just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

But let me add one more thing, and I think this applies equally to women as to men. One thing that I became really interested in is this: Structures and institutions collapse, and people feel cut adrift from society, and it does seem to be something that happens more to men than women. There’s more of a weakness in men, that when things fall apart, men isolate and withdraw from the world more. But I got really interested in that — like, what does a lack of purpose and structure do to people’s inner lives? And what’s filling the gap? And one thing that I found that’s filling the gap is content creation on YouTube.

Do you think, as these societal structures break down, the fact that men can’t live up to the preconceived notion of masculinity that they were fed as kids — being a provider, a protector — that’s part of what’s making them feel lonely?There’s a moment in the book when Greg Chism is the world’s greatest lawn-care influencer, but then his life spirals in the most bizarre ways. He starts to listen too much to the algorithms, and everything goes wrong. And it ends with him basically withdrawing from the world. But I ask him what his life’s like now, and he says, “Well, I wake up, I take my kids to school. I come home. I fall asleep. I wake up and I bring the kids back home from school.” I mean, what a terrible, depressing life. For me, it’s the erosion of structure which is causing so much horror in people’s lives.

So you think people are dealing with this by becoming content creators?It’s funny, I went to the cage fight at the White House [in July]. Everybody [in the press pool] was allowed to inspect the cage a couple of days earlier, so we all had to be at the White House at like half past five in the morning. Like 100 people were there, and we were all standing on the steps of the Eisenhower Building, and somebody from the UFC came up and yowled, “OK, everybody, content creators and videographers, step to the left, print journalists step to the right. And there was this vast exodus to the left. Like 98 percent of the people there were content creators, and the print line was like me [and a few other journalists]. And we were just laughing, like, “Oh, my God, we’re such redundant dinosaurs.” So that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, like a huge shift from the old institutions that I grew up in, to the sort of post-institution era.

How do you think AI chatbot technology plays into accelerating this?It makes it so much worse. AI trawls the internet, sees how purposeless people feel, how lost, and comes in with a false idea of purpose. Like, “You’re the greatest mathematician on the planet,” or, “You’re creating the greatest reality show ever.” It’s so pernicious. It’s so evil. It’s like they’re swooping in to keep us engaged through sycophancy.

Going back to Greg Chism, the lawn-care influencer, one of the things that I found so stark in that story was how he kept changing his content to please the YouTube algorithm so he could get views. What did you find in reporting this book about people who are trying to contort themselves to the pleasure of the computer?His story has got to be one of the most extraordinary things that ever unfolded on YouTube. Like how he goes from lawn care through to all the stuff that happened after that, which is just nuts. Do you remember that novel, The Dice Man, by Luke Rhinehart? It’s about a character who decides to cede his life to the roll of a dice. Every decision he makes, he makes for the roll of a dice, and that’s what people are doing now on YouTube. If they give themselves over too much to the algorithm and the incentive structures, you end up doing more and more extreme things.

I think it’s partly because YouTube gained the reputation of being this wide-open country, like a post-institution utopia where men and women could thrive through grit and perseverance as an influencer, which is a very compelling idea. I grew up in a world of gatekeepers, and it was awful to have to beg people to give me a chance. It’s very compelling to have a world without that, that feels like it could be a true meritocracy where good people rise to the top. And good people do rise to the top. It’s not like it’s all an illusion. Greg Chism’s story and lots of other stories show that if you cede your life to the algorithm — and not just the algorithm, also what the viewers are encouraging you to do — it just leads to hell, and Greg’s story leads to hell in the most baroque and unexpected ways. But I think you could say the same thing about smaller stories, like anti-woke influencers, is a good example of another way that this manifests in sort of pernicious ways.

Another person you write about is your former friend, Graham Linehan, who went from being pretty universally beloved in Britain to becoming one of the country’s loudest anti-trans voices. He attacked you extensively online after you called him out for being a bully, too. Tell me about your decision to include such a personal story in this book.Well, it was very hard. I’ve been trying to write about Graham since 2020, and I’ve picked it up and put it down many times because I could just feel my stress levels rising. Because, you know, Graham’s story is, he became a gender-critical activist, and just made it his absolute identity. And he has his bêtes noires, and I’m one of them, and he’s posted about me thousands of times by now.

The Graham chapter was much longer, but it stressed me out so much. I cut it in half, but it’s like that scene in Poltergeist when you open the door in the bedroom and there’s all this furniture spinning violently around, and I think I’m a piece of furniture spinning violently around inside Graham’s head. I told him I thought he was acting like a bully back in 2019, and all these years later, he’s still going on about it. But I think there’s three or four reasons why I thought I should write about it. Firstly, the only reason to not write about it is fear, and I just don’t think, as journalists, we can be guided by fear.

Secondly, I’ve often thought about Graham. So Graham, for people who don’t know, was a huge figure in British cultural life, maybe a good equivalent would be like Judd Apatow. He was this showrunner of some of the most beloved comedies in British history, and then he fell into this new world in this extraordinary way. I hope this doesn’t sound glib, but I’ve always thought there was like an epic quality to Graham’s story. It was like if Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard was writing a play about Graham, it would be an incredible play.

But the main reason [I wrote about him] is that I really wanted to do something about disinhibited men. What I discovered was that, when men feel cut out, cut adrift from society, some fold in on themselves. Some adapt. Some lash out. Graham is somebody, and you see it in a lot of different places, who basically decided to just be completely disinhibited, to basically rip off his face, and just allow his head to run wild. It’s as if he’s just decided nothing matters anymore. I thought that felt so extraordinary, but also so resonant to the world we’re living in now of disinhibition.

Tell me about Marktown, the town in Northwest Indiana that was built by Chris Mark’s great grandfather, and modeled after a British village. What did you find when you went there?I really wanted to do something after the castle mystery, you know, exploded into my life, and I decided I wanted to broaden it out into other men, feeling that life was passing them by, and then I thought, well, I’d love to do something about deindustrialization, but how? And also, men who are withdrawing from the world and becoming recluses, but how? And then I discovered, just incredibly fortuitously, that the castle owner’s great-grandfather was a Gilded Age steel tycoon. That’s how he got his money to build his castle, and he had built a utopian theme town in East Chicago, Indiana, for his steelworkers to live in. And over the years, this utopian town, which at the beginning looked great, has completely crumbled into a world of recluses and hoarders. Marktown’s designed to be this lovely English village, like a Miss Marple-type village where some kind of Agatha Christie adventure would happen, but it’s completely surrounded by heavy industry. So it’s like Miss Markle being like scrunched up and thrown into the middle of Wall-E. And when you look at an aerial photograph of Marktown, you just can’t believe it. It’s like nothing on Earth. So yes, so very fortuitously, I got to tell that story of deindustrialization in a way that’s completely relevant to the castle story.

Toward the end of the book, you write a little bit about an interview you did with Armie Hammer after his “cannibalism” scandal broke.So the story is, I got a call. He was filming in New Orleans, and I knew some of the people involved in the film [called Wounds], and they invited me to New Orleans to visit the set. We had dinner with Armie Hammer and his wife and the various movie people, and Armie talked a lot about meat, how much he liked meat, and he was utterly delightful and charming, and it was a great night.

So then a couple of years later, it all happens, the whole cannibal stuff, and then a couple of months after that he contacts me, and I fly to interview him. He says I’m the first person ever to interview him [since the scandal], and he tells me the whole story. But I sit on it. I don’t know what to do with it because there’s some things where he’s definitely right, but then there’s other things where he hasn’t behaved well. Like he would sweep women off their feet and take them to Ojai, and then give them the time of their life, and then come back and drop them off, and completely forget about them. And I thought, I need time. Like I just, you know, this is a story that needs a lot of time. And [eventually] he gave the story to someone else. I felt slightly like one of the women that you take to Ojai. But you know what? I can’t blame him. I was taking way too long. So I have no ill feelings, but this interview was sitting on my computer for the next couple of years, and so I included a little bit of it because there were moments in our conversation which I think shed light on some of the motivations of the castle owner, and privilege, and people not being told that they can’t do things. I cut it down to its absolute minimum, to shed light on other stories in the book.

You’ve got a stage show of the book you’re taking on tour in the States and the U.K. Can you tell us about that?It’s called Enter the Castle. I always do pretty elaborate stage shows. I still do a show called Psychopath Now, based on my Psychopath Test book, where I have mystery guests, and I’ve done shows where I have a band onstage, performing with me as I’m doing the speaking. This time around, I’m using a lot of audio and video clips, and bringing the book to life as a series, almost like a live documentary that I’m narrating onstage. So I always make it ambitious.

Gloria Steinem, pioneering feminist, founder of Ms. Magazine, and the unflagging force behind the Equal Rights Amendment, has died at the age of 92.

Steinem’s death was announced Thursday on social media. “Yesterday, Gloria Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her. Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” her representatives wrote.

“Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard. Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor.” No cause of death was provided.

Her representatives asked her fans to light a candle in her honor and to donate to her charity, Gloria’s Foundation.

Steinem was at the forefront of second-wave feminism in the Sixties and Seventies, and throughout her Presidential Medal of Freedom-winning career, fought for issues like abortion rights, women’s rights, workplace gender equality, domestic violence prevention and more.

As a writer in 1963 — the year The Feminine Mystique and the Bell Jar were published — Steinem wrote “A Bunny’s Tale” an undercover expose about the daily humiliations the cocktail waitresses known as “bunnies” endured — including, for some reason, a pelvic exam — to get and keep a job at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club.

As Steinem liked to say, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."

In 1971, Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine. “For more than half a century, Steinem helped bring feminist ideas, voices and movements into the mainstream through journalism, organizing and activism—and helped build Ms. into what it remains today: not simply a magazine, but a movement. She continued working for equality until the end of her life,” the magazine wrote in its obituary to Steinem on Thursday.

“’At the time that first issue [of Ms.] was published, there were local feminist publications here and in some other countries, but there was no national voice for those of us who had the radical idea that women are people,’ Steinem wrote for Ms.’ 50th anniversary in 2022. ‘I didn’t know what the response would be, especially on newsstands, with no precedent or place for a women’s magazine that wasn’t about home, family and children. The response was shocking. … It sold out in eight days.’”

Katie Couric wrote on social media Thursday, “For more than five decades, Gloria fought tirelessly for women’s equality and reproductive freedom, challenged gender inequality, and helped transform the feminist movement. As a journalist and activist, she brought women’s experiences into the mainstream, and inspired generations of women to find and use their own voices… I am so grateful to have known her and to have been the beneficiary of her wisdom, intellect, and insight.”

Former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden wrote, “Gloria Steinem understood that women’s equality begins with the freedom to make decisions about our own bodies, health, and futures. For decades, she fought to make that freedom real for generations of women and girls. She spoke up when it was difficult, listened to those whose voices too often went unheard, and never stopped pushing our country forward.”

Steinem spent her final years continuing to write, her representatives noted Thursday, including her forthcoming book An Unexpected Life. “I have now lived for more than fifty years in this brownstone, in rooms that have witnessed lives before mine, and will know others after I am gone,” she writes.

“This book, along with her commitment to her home becoming a center for social justice movements, are among the many gifts Gloria has given the world with the hope they have ripple effects for generations to come,” her family added. “Gloria often quoted the adage: ‘The flap of a butterfly’s wing can change the weather hundreds of miles away.'”

Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, during a Medal of Freedom ceremony at the White House on Jan. 4, 2025.

I didn’t know what to expect when I met Hunter Biden. Would he have the Secret Service with him? Would he be cold? Would he be an asshole?

Biden, who is in recovery, was coming on my podcast, Dopey: On the Dark Comedy of Drug Addiction. He is exactly the kind of person I like to have on the show. When I started it in 2016 with my friend Chris O’Connor, our plan was to create a podcast all around the worst things we had ever done in active addiction. Chris wound up relapsing and tragically dying from a fentanyl overdose in 2018. I kept the show going, still focused on the insanity of addiction and ways that we can overcome it.

A few weeks ago, I flew to Los Angeles for the interview with Hunter Biden, and we met in a studio in Santa Monica, near where he lives. Biden casually arrived through the sunny back door. He was alone, came in smiling, and gave me a big, warm hug — not a weird, manipulative hug, which can be prevalent in the recovery community. It turned out we had mutual friends, and he knew about my podcast and how we were basically a for-addict-by-addict operation. He was happy to be there, and he fit right in.

I wanted Biden to come on the show because I know he was a drug addict like the other Dopes in the Dopey Nation. His exploits as a crack addict were legendary, his fall was well known and epic. The only difference between his story and our listeners’ stories was that their fathers hadn’t been president, and they haven’t been on the cover of the New York Post more than, as he puts it, “more than anyone else in history.” There is scrutiny, and there is Hunter Biden-level scrutiny. People struggling with addiction often feel the weight of the world on them. In Biden’s case, it kind of was on him. Pictures of him, naked and high, were plastered on TV screens around the world. His father’s political enemies used his problems with crack to try and erode trust in the Biden administration. His addiction or sobriety became connected to the state of our nation.

How did he get sober? What is it like to have the bar on his recovery set so high? The answers to these questions are very important to our community of addicts and alcoholics, both in and out of recovery.

During the interview, Biden and I covered a lot of ground. There was the basic Recovery 101 stuff, the immense trauma he suffered from losing his mother and sister in a horrific car accident when he was three years old. How his addiction began, and how the death in 2015 of his brother Beau, just 46, pushed him over the edge into crack addiction. And maybe most importantly we spoke of how meeting his now-wife Melissa set him on his current path of over seven years in recovery. We also covered some of his craziest moments using drugs; my favorite being the story of when he moved his crack dealer, whom he called Bicycles, into his apartment, and what it was like when his father, who was then the Vice President of the United States, arrived by presidential motorcade and met Bicycles face to face. It turned out to be one of my favorite talks in Dopey history.

The whole interview can be found on my podcast, but here are some highlights of our conversation.

What is the trickiest part of sharing your recovery story with the public in general?We get to talk about the beauty of our recovery and all the things that we’ve gained, like the amends that we get to make and what a wonderful existence that I am free to talk about anything I want. And I wanna make it clear that the hardest part of recovery and addiction is the effect on the people around us, the traumas that we put them through.

Like I always say, the biggest thing with my daughters was that I just was not available to them. I wasn’t present in their lives during that period of time.

Well, it’s a hell of a lot more fucking complicated than that. And a lot more traumatic than just that. And it’s easy for me to say, and we have a great relationship and we’ve amended everything. But when the shit really hit the fan with my addiction, they were in their formative years, between 16 and 20 and 21.

They really needed me when my brother died — my brother was their rock. My brother was their second dad and in every beautiful way that you can imagine. They loved their Uncle Beau. And when he died, I disappeared.

Cause you were destroyed.I was destroyed. But my reasoning or the rationale or my experience doesn’t matter to the trauma that it creates in a child. I have all my reasons for why I lost my shit. But you know what? Doesn’t matter. What really was the thing is that when they needed me most, I wasn’t there. And you can live a life trying to make amends for that. But I think it’s really important for me to always remember… they’re still living with the trauma of it.

Biden and I spoke about a woman he calls Bicycles, who was a crack-cocaine dealer who moved into his apartment in Washington, D.C. She was a fascinating character in his memoir, and I was dying to hear the story.

Tell the Dopey Nation all about Bicycles, please.Well, Bicycles has been on the street basically her whole life, since she was like 13, 14 years old. She would tell these stories about how, for periods of time, the way that she survived is that she would sneak into motels when they were changing rooms, just to get sleep, and she would hide under the bed and sleep there. She would go into police stations and she would hide underneath the bench, and sleep underneath the bench, when she couldn’t find a place to stay. And she had this incredible story of resilience and survival, and she was incredibly smart. I mean like quick-witted, a fast-thinking survivor.

She was about 15 years older than me, and she rode everywhere on her bike. I knew that she was a crack addict, and so I walked over to Lincoln Park — and I was like, “Hey, I want some crack.”

And she said, “You sure?”

Did she know who you were?No, I don’t think so. She says, “Are you sure?” And I said, “Yeah.”

And she sold it to me. Then she showed me how to smoke it and gave me all the necessary things to smoke it. And I did. And I had what they refer to as a bell-ringer experience, and it was revelatory. It was the answer to everything. I even suppressed the visceral memory of it right now because it was that profound and powerful. And then that began a two-year odyssey of chasing that singular moment.

Does your dad ever meet Bicycles?He’d call and he’d call. And then when he wouldn’t get the calls, he literally would drive over with a motorcade, as small as he could possibly make it.

I’d hear all these cars, and I’d see like six SUVs pull up and my dad get out and and walk with one or two of the guys — because they have to be next to him — and I’d hear a knock on my door and I’d open it. There I would be with all of the obviousness of someone that was in distress. And he’d say, “Please, what are we gonna do tomorrow? What’s the plan?”

And I’d say, “I got a plan, and this is what it is. And I promise you, Dad, I’m all right. I just am feeling really sad. Sad about the divorce, sad about the kids, sad about Beau. Just let me deal.”

We make all of these excuses for all the things that we do.

Tell us about how your dad tried to help get you sober.Here’s the thing: you can’t force anybody. I mean you can; you can grab them and kidnap them like they do with these poor kids, and send them out into the wilderness, and I guarantee you there’s a 98 percent recidivism rate with those people.

Talk about creating more trauma.Yeah, and less trust. And so he was wise enough to know that. And he was wise enough to know this: All you can do is love. And unconditional love is not love without consequences. And unconditional love is not love without accountability. Unconditional love means that no matter what you do, I will still love you. No matter what the consequences of what you’re doing, I will still love you, and that was the door that he always, not just left open, but would always be calling from.

What is your painting process? How do you pick your subjects?I know why I paint owls because there’s a really beautiful story about an owl that I have.

Tell me a little bit of that story, please.Well, I don’t know if it was a hallucination. I think part of it was definitely a hallucination, but it doesn’t matter because it was a real outcome. And the outcome was that I had been up for literally over 10 days and smoking crack. I had agreed to go to this treatment [center] in Arizona.

I kept saying I’d come and I wouldn’t and I wouldn’t, and finally I got my shit together enough to pack everything, put it in a rental car, and drive to Prescott [Arizona]. At one point, there are eight lanes with that giant gully in the middle, and I hit it. I fell asleep. And this is, like, a funny story for me. What if I killed 10 people?

Well you didn’t, thank God.Thank God.

I called the rental car company and they got me a new car. They bring it and they ask, “What happened?”

I said, “Somebody ran me off the road.”

They said, “How are you going in the wrong direction?” I said, “Man, I don’t know,” like this was God’s way.

That’s crazy.I get back in the car, and in order to be able to go to Prescott, you have to go through the mountains. And it’s literally windy roads, and it’s four o’clock in the morning. I mean no amount of crack that I have left to smoke or anything is keeping me awake and if you doze off on that road, you’re done. I mean completely done; it’s like a sheer cliff kind of road. And I swear to God, this giant barn owl flies over — well, I assume over the roof — right in front of the windshield and into the beams of the light of the car in front of me, enough to where it kind of jolts me awake.

I’m looking at this giant owl in front of me, and it makes the turn along the road. So, I make the turn. And then it keeps coming back, and it’s literally guiding me through these windy roads.

Now it had to be a hallucination, right?I don’t know.

I think it was just a psychedelic spirit.You know what I know, though? Whatever that was, it was real to me at that moment, and it saved my life. And I got to Prescott.