By the time Joan Baez turned 28 in 1969, she’d been on the cover of Time magazine as the face of the folk music movement and was providing protest songs for an anti-war generation. She’d already sung to a crowd of 250,000 at the March on Washington roughly six years before, alongside her friend Martin Luther King Jr.
She was by then “addicted to activism,” she tells Bustle over Zoom. “[Fame] was a struggle. It gave me a lot more panic than I would’ve experienced [otherwise], but it also gave me an identity.”

In 1969, Baez performed at Woodstock while six months pregnant with her first and only child, her son Gabe, but her mood and circumstances that year were darker than those who were cheering the moon landing or vibing through the Summer of Love.  Read More >

Beyoncé and her mother, Tina Knowles, have been designing together for more than five years. As the fall collections of their sophisticated House of Deréon line and edgier Deréon label hit stores, they sat down with PEOPLE to talk about their powerful partnership.

Did you think your mom was stylish when you were growing up?

Beyoncé: I absolutely did. And still do. Her hair, her makeup, the house: Everything she touched became glamorous. She designed all of my friends’ prom dresses. Still, sometimes our fans will call, and my mom will go and design their prom dresses, which I think is the sweetest thing ever.

Tina: As a child Beyoncé was very quiet and unassuming. Read More >

Last month, Maria Shriver stood in the Oval Office and accepted a pen from President Biden, which he’d just used to sign an executive order to invest in women’s health research. It was a goosebumps-inducing moment, in part because it closely echoed a similar occasion from 1963, when Shriver’s mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, was handed a pen by her brother, President John F. Kennedy, who’d just signed a bill supporting children and mental health into law.

But then again, Shriver is accustomed to being an eyewitness to history. Her mother founded the Special Olympics; her father, Robert “Sargent” Shriver, was a vice presidential nominee and U.S. ambassador to France. Their influence on her is palpable.

“I was raised by a woman who wanted to empower me, in a field of all men — starting with my home, I had four brothers — to go out and tackle the world,” Shriver, who’s 68, tells Bustle. Read More >

One of the most electrifying moments in My Window, Melissa Etheridge’s new powerhouse, one-woman Broadway rock musical, comes before she sings “I Want to Come Over.” She tells the audience about sitting in her car outside filmmaker Julie Cypher’s house, willing her would-be lover to leave her then-husband, movie star Lou Diamond Philips, and embark upon their steamy, breathlessly covered affair. (See the situation moodily dramatized by Gwyneth Paltrow, here.)

Etheridge was 28 when she met Cypher, who served as assistant director of the singer-songwriter’s first-ever music video, for “Bring Me Some Water” — the hit single off her self-titled debut album, which she performed at the 1989 Grammys. Their tumultuous relationship and eventual breakup 12 years later inspired songs like “I’m the Only One.”

“I’ve always said that poor choices make great songs,” says the Oscar and Grammy winner, now 62, on a Zoom call from New York. “It’s easy to look back on it now and see I was, in a way... Read More >

"What you see is what you get," Graham says. "I don't change who I am from public to private."

If the women getting mani-pedis at New York City's chic Tenoverten salon recognize Ashley Graham, they're too cool to let on. Still, they can't help sneaking glances at the supermodel in their midst. Graham's energy—accentuated by a bright orange, curve-hugging dress—is electric. In a world in which self-acceptance can seem rare, Graham, 28, happily embraces the obvious: She. Is. Gorgeous. "I look cute today! Where are all the paparazzi?" she says with a laugh. The bold declaration could sound like bravado, but instead, it's somehow refreshing. As women, how often do we proudly acknowledge our own hotness? "I love my hourglass figure," she says, smiling, eye contact game strong. "You can be sexy and feel good in your skin, no matter what size you are." 
Graham's breakout moment came when she was anointed Sports Illustrated's first-ever... Read More >

When Kamala Harris pre-taped her remarks for the Al Smith Dinner last week, she was joined onscreen by a face familiar to comedy fans. As the vice president began an earnest speech, someone scurried in and out of view behind her. Their energy was frenetic, like an over-eager mouse that had spotted some cheese. Was it Ella Emhoff? Or campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez? No. Harris turned to the interloper: Mary Katherine Gallagher.

MKG was created by actor Molly Shannon when she was a student in New York University’s Tisch Drama program, and after graduation in the early ’90s, Shannon introduced her to L.A. audiences on the improv stage. They instantly loved the armpit-sniffing, made-for-TV-movie monologue-spouting, romance-craving Catholic schoolgirl. But as the character gained fans, Shannon was ready to quit showbiz.

“I had kind of given up,” Shannon, now 60, says during a Zoom from her sunny L.A. patio. Read More >

Swisher tells me matter-of-factly over the phone. “Smart people like it.” Indeed, watching Swisher do an interview is the journalistic equivalent of watching Michael Jordan sink three-point shots, one after another. (To Mark Zuckerberg: “How do you look at your responsibility as a leader of a massive company with enormous power? Do you think you grok that at this point? Sometimes I don’t think you do. I really don’t.” To fired CNN anchor Chris Cuomo: “I was with my brother last night. Very close to my brother. I would not have helped him if he was in a situation like that. I just wouldn’t.” And to Hillary Clinton: “The stuff you said about Monica Lewinsky. Really disturbing to me and a lot of women. Do you want a redo on that one? Why say something like that, when she’s a young woman, in a position of not power?”)

Swisher doesn’t engage in “gotcha journalism,” but she does bring a fearlessness to her conversations that sometimes makes her subjects squirm in the moment but ultimately come to respect her... Read More >

Cheryl Strayed became a literary sensation in her 40s with the blockbuster memoir Wild, in which she tells the story of how, in her 20s, still reeling from her mother’s death four years earlier, she clawed her way up from rock bottom by hiking 1,100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail. With each solitary step from California’s Mojave Desert to Oregon’s Bridge of the Gods, she shed sweat, toenails, and shame over her years of grief-driven self-destruction.

Strayed revisits these themes — brokenness, the struggle for redemption — in much of her writing, and they’re front and center in Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things, an eight-episode adaptation of the author’s 2012 book, which anthologizes her advice column, Dear Sugar.

“You can’t let the worst things that happen to you stop you from getting what you want, and if you do, that’s nobody’s fault but your own,” actor Merritt Wever says in one scene, in a sentiment that’s... Read More >

"It speaks volumes about people, and folks our age. And I don’t think it's going to be forgotten." –Judd Winick, The Real World: Reunion, 1995

There’s a throwaway scene, after the credits roll at the tail-end of a drama-rich episode of The Real World: Seattle (the one when David bellows his love for a casting director named Kira). This seconds-long clip only stands out with 24 years of hindsight. In it, we watch roommates Rebecca and Lindsay, hanging out in a ski lodge after snowboarding for the first time, and convincing a group of random snow-bros that Rebecca is a world-famous, corporate-sponsored, pro snowboarder. The girls commit to the lie so effortlessly that one of the guys soon says, “Yeah! I’ve read, actually in the catalog, you had a little blurb in there, about mantras…?” “Yeah,” Rebecca replies coolly. “It’s all about energy…Kama Sutra.” That’s exactly the kind of ridiculousness my friends and I would have pulled in the late ‘90s. And it would be totally impossible today. Read More >

Anna Wintour feels Isaac Mizrahi deserved to have the show we caught her at yesterday — but that not every designer should take them for granted. Asked how the economic downturn was impacting the tents, Anna found the upside of industrywide imperilment. “There’s definitely more presentations [this season], which I actually think is a great thing because a lot of people before were having shows that simply shouldn’t have been having them,” Anna said, front row at Isaac’s less-than-packed New York Public Library bonanza.

“I think a certain amount of winnowing out of who’s going to be on the runway and who’s not is not at all a bad thing,” Wintour continued. “Last season we had so many complaints because it was just back-to-back shows, and to be honest, people that shouldn’t be doing it … it’s much better to see them in the showroom or more of a low-key presentation. It’s more realistic.” Ouch. As for who exactly benefited... Read More >