Have you noticed an uptick in Mary-Kate and Ashley headlines these past few days? It’s all because of one interview, with the WSJ, in which the twins discuss their new menswear line for The Row.

The main headline coming out is that they are in a sibling “marriage.” To that I say: duh. They are s…

A post shared by Kylie (@kyliejenner) on Aug 25, 2018 at 9:43am PDT

This is going to sound very dumb and out-of-touch, I KNOW THAT, but my only real exposure to the Adidas brand is through watching tennis. A decent number of top tennis players are sponsored by Adidas, like Garbine Muguruza, Alexander Zverev, Dominic Thiem, Jelena Ostapenko, etc. Maybe the gear is super-comfortable and functional, but I usually think the designs are struggling. One of the worst moments for Adidas-sponsored tennis was when they got Pharrell Williams to “design” the tennis kits for the 2017 US Open and it was some colorblocked ‘70s nonsense.

This goes part and parcel with my disdain for non-athletes getting sponsorships or ambassadorships with athletic-gear companies: I don’t get it. I don’t get why someone would be more likely to wear an Adidas tracksuit if they saw it on Pharrell rather than Garbi Muguruza or David Beckham or whatever. I get that athleisure is an increasingly HUGE business, but doesn’t an athletic-wear company want to retain its athletic-wear roots by getting athletes to be the face of the company? I guess not.

So if you’re going to sign up regular celebrities to be the face of your company as brand-ambassadors, why not go for people who truly seem to live the athleisure life? But no… Adidas just signed Kylie Jenner to be their latest brand ambassador. Kylie had a contract with Puma which she barely represented, and now she’s with Adidas. Kanye West has worked with Adidas on his Yeezy line since 2015, and Kendall Jenner also has a brand-ambassadorship with Adidas as of May 2017 (remember that nonsensical commercial last year?). Knowing that Adidas is in bed with Kanye, Kendall and Kylie, does that make you more or less likely to buy their sweatpants, tracksuits, leggings and t-shirts?

Kylie is an ambassador for Adidas??? #adidas

A post shared by Kylie Jenner (@kyliesnapchat) on Aug 28, 2018 at 9:09am PDT

Courtesy of Instagram.

Dear Gossips,

Yesterday I posted about Naomi Watts on the LifeStyle page and her Venice Film Festival wardrobe. Naomi’s on the jury, led by Guillermo del Toro. Christoph Waltz is there too. And Sylvia Chang and director Malgorzata Szumowska. And Trine Dyrholm. Oh …and Taika Waititi.

So if we…

A post shared by Staci Felker (@stacifelker) on Apr 12, 2017 at 5:37pm PDT

Within one week, two things happened: we learned that Evan Felker’s divorce from Staci Felker had come through, and we learned that Miranda Lambert had dumped Evan Felker. I was going to say that those two things happened at the same time, but we don’t know. I think Miranda got bored with Evan pretty quickly because “the hunt” was over: she successfully homewrecked a married man in a matter of days. She tried to create some drama for herself by stalking Staci Felker a little bit, but even then, Miranda has a short attention span when it comes to men. So Miranda is already on to the next one. What about Evan? Will he somehow reunite with his long-suffering ex-wife?

Evan Felker and ex-wife Staci Nelson will not be moving back into the house that built them following the musician’s split from Miranda Lambert earlier this month. Though fans are speculating about a reunion between the Turnpike Troubadours singer and Nelson, a source close to the pair tells PEOPLE “there is no reconciliation in the works.”

“They’re not getting back together,” says the source. “They haven’t even been divorced for two weeks.”

Multiple sources have confirmed to PEOPLE that Lambert, 34, and Felker’s relationship took off after his band opened for three dates on her Livin’ Like Hippies tour in early February. According to an insider, he served his wife with divorce papers just 15 days after meeting the “We Should Be Friends” singer in person for the first time, and on Aug. 17, a source confirmed that Felker and Nelson’s divorce was finalized. Just one day before news broke that Lambert and Felker called it quits, Nelson defended him on social media.

“She’s defending him now because he gave her what she wanted, which was a divorce,” the source adds.

[From People]

I was saying that Staci would take Evan to the cleaners and move on quickly, but I’ve read that Evan got their Nashville home in the divorce. Staci hopefully moved out of the house already and she’s had enough time (??) to find a new place. Starting over… it’s not such a bad idea. No backsliding, start fresh with a new apartment, new job, new man, whatever. I hope she doesn’t even answer his calls ever again.

A post shared by Staci Felker (@stacifelker) on Nov 10, 2015 at 4:12am PST

Photos courtesy of Staci’s Instagram.

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I’ve started to feel so removed from many of the political stories happening right now, mostly because there are no heroes within the Trump White House or in the Republican Party writ large. There’s no one to root for, no one who seems to be acting out of a sense of patriotism. They’re all garbage people and when they fight amongst themselves, who cares? That’s how I feel about Donald Trump’s beef with Jeff Sessions – I understand all of the breast-beating about “what happens if he fires Sessions” or “how this would affect the Mueller investigation” and all of that. But ultimately, I don’t care about either “side” – Jeff Sessions is a racist elf who wants to throw brown people in cages and black people in prisons. Donald Trump wants the same thing and he wants to do that without Mueller breathing down his neck.

I don’t even believe that Trump understands the Department of Justice’s chain of command, or how special prosecutors operate, or how Justice has insulated and protected the Mueller investigation. Trump is an idiot, and he believes that he could fire Sessions and then end the Mueller investigation all by himself. So why hasn’t he tried? Because other Republicans have been telling him not to. But those Republicans are losing the battle, and GOP congressmen are now pretty sure that Trump will fire Sessions after the midterms.

President Trump, who levied extraordinary public attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions in recent weeks, has privately revived the idea of firing him in conversations with his aides and personal lawyers this month, according to three people familiar with the discussions. His attorneys concluded that they have persuaded him — for now — not to make such a move while the special-counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign is ongoing, the people said. But there is growing evidence that Senate Republicans, who have long cautioned Trump against firing Sessions, are now resigned to the prospect that he may do so after the November midterm elections — a sign that one of the last remaining walls of opposition to such a move is crumbling.

“We wish the best for him, but as any administration would show, Cabinet members seldom last the entire administration, and this is clearly not an exception,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said in an interview Tuesday.

“Nothing lasts forever,” Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) told The Washington Post, describing the Trump-Sessions dynamic as “a toxic relationship.” Added Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), a longtime defender of the attorney general: “My sense is the fix is in.”

At least twice this month, Trump vented to White House advisers and his lawyers about the “endless investigation” of his campaign and said he needs to fire Sessions for saddling his presidency with the controversy, according to two of the people… In subsequent talks with his lawyers and advisers, Trump said what he really wanted to do was fire Sessions, the people said.

His attorneys, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, advised him that Mueller could interpret such an action as an effort to obstruct justice and thwart the investigation — already a major focus of the inquiry, the people said. Giuliani confirmed that he and Trump have discussed Sessions’s possible removal, but declined to offer details of their talks.

“If there is any action taken, the president agrees with us that it shouldn’t be taken until after the investigation is concluded,” Giuliani said. Sekulow referred questions to Giuliani.

[From WaPo]

Later in that WaPo article, Mitch McConnell states plainly that Sessions needs to stay where he is as Attorney General. Interestingly enough, Jerry Falwell Jr. – who fancies himself Trump’s evangelical advisor – has let it be known that the evangelical community is no longer “with” Sessions, and evangelicals would support Trump if he ousted Sessions. I still don’t care though? I’m not going to sit here and argue that Sessions should stay OR go.

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Photos courtesy of Getty.

Later today, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will step out for a gala charity performance of Hamilton. It will be their first public event in some-odd four weeks or so (that private wedding doesn’t count). August has been a month of shenanigans from the Markle family, and I’m completely suspicious that Thomas Markle and Samantha Grant will begin giving a flurry of new interviews as soon as Meghan picks up a public schedule again. According to Us Weekly, Meghan has the same worries:

Duchess Meghan still worries about what her father, Thomas Markle, might do — or say — next.

“She is still anxious wondering if this will go on forever,” a source tells Us Weekly exclusively. “She’s worrying about when it will stop, or if it even will.”

While Meghan may still have issues with her dad, the first source tells Us that her relationship with Harry is “incredible.”

“Her and Harry are truly madly in love,” the source says. “He’s so supportive of her.”

The source adds that the duchess “is still trying to get used to her life there,” but she was prepared for her responsibilities to change when she and Harry wed.

“Her life is dedicated to the monarch – and she knew that going into this,” the source explains. “She doesn’t have much time for anything else.”

[From Us Weekly]

I’m anxious the Markle drama will go on forever too. I’m anxious that every time Meghan steps out for a public event, the Daily Mail or The Sun or whatever tabloid will immediately cut a check to Thomas for his thoughts on how Meghan looks, what she says, and how he still hasn’t heard from her. The tabloid editors are the ones in control of this, not the Sussexes, not the palace, not even Poor Jason. As for Meghan dedicating herself to the monarch… I guess that’s the way you have to think when you marry into this family.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, WENN, ITV.

Wanna know how glamorous tour can be? Jameson has hand, foot, and mouth; and willow has a 102 temp. Both kids laid up and mama @pink still has to push through and do shows. I had Jameson at breakfast yesterday and this vile woman at the table next to us kept staring at him with a shitty look on her face. I told her it was bed bugs ?. #NoRestForTheWicked #LifeInHotels

A post shared by Carey Hart (@hartluck) on Aug 28, 2018 at 2:37am PDT

Carey Hart just keeps oversharing on Instagram. The last we reported on him was earlier this week after he posted a photo of himself on the john with his two kids in the bathroom. It was relatable in that little kids don’t give parents a moment’s peace to do their business. Plus dudes take a long time in the bathroom. More recently he posted a photo of baby Jameson, 20 months, with a rash all over. He wrote that the baby’s rash got comments from another diner when they were out to breakfast. (He didn’t specify whether his wife, singer Pink, and their daughter, Willow, 7, were there too. They’ve been in Australia for Pink’s Beautiful Trauma tour.) Well commenters on Instagram pointed out that Jameson is contagious and he called them judgmental. When people asked if he had brought the baby out to dinner in his diaper, he sarcastically claimed that he had:

Fans took to the post’s comments with criticism against the couple, with one writing, “Pink I love you but why would you take him to breakfast looking like that? … People don’t know what is going on for all they know he has something contagious so it’s only human to be grossed out or at least concerned.”

Another commenter quipped, “As a mom of 3 whose kids have had HFM a few times, I say that you made a mistake. HFM is super contagious and it’s not fair to knowingly expose others. … I don’t think it’s fair to pass judgment on the other patron. She likely was concerned for her own safety as well and probably concerned about your son.”

Hart wrote in response to the first, “Are you serious???? You are what’s wrong with this judgmental world.”

He also responded sarcastically to one user who inquired about him bringing Jameson to breakfast in just a diaper, “Yeah I took my kid to breakfast only wearing a diaper,” and to another who commented about the condition’s contagious nature, “What’s your point? You think I let my kids eat off other people’s plates?”

[From People]

My kid had hand, foot and mouth disease a few years ago, when it was going around his school. It sounds really awful and like a near fatal virus that migrated from animals to people but it’s really quite harmless and clears up on its own (and is not related to foot and mouth disease, which animals get and which only rarely crosses to humans). His rash wasn’t as bad as Jameson’s though. Also, I have to mention that there was dirty toddler in a diaper in the booth behind me at Waffle House on Sunday. He was turning around babble-talking to me and his mom was attentive but the kid was wearing only a diaper and had a face full of snot. So it’s not out of the question that a toddler would be out to eat in a diaper. It seems gross and unhygienic but some people do it. (To be fair it’s possible the child’s onesie got badly soiled and the mom didn’t have a backup outfit but I doubt it.)

I wouldn’t argue with people on the internet disagreeing with my parenting choices but I should not be sanctimonious about that since arguing on the internet is a key part of my job. Pink and Carey have similar approaches to dealing with negative comments. I’ll leave it at that. Also, Jameson is adorable.

Poor lil guy is sick as a dog. Tour life isn’t always fun, but this is part of it. #CountDownTilHomeBegins

A post shared by Carey Hart (@hartluck) on Aug 25, 2018 at 7:12pm PDT

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To celebrate John McCain’s life and legacy last weekend, I watched Game Change for the first time in several years. I hadn’t seen the TV movie since Trump was elected. I was left feeling… unsettled. It was just ten years ago when a Republican presidential campaign manager refused to double-down on lies and dog-whistle racism, even if the base was begging for it. We’re just a decade removed from McCain respecting Barack Obama’s position as the first African-American presidential candidate and refusing to attack his reverend or his church. It feels so long ago. Anyway, I was moved by the fact that McCain wanted former president Barack Obama to speak at his memorial service. As it turns out, McCain even made a point of requesting this from Obama personally back in April of this year.

A parting lesson in American civility from Sen. John McCain lies in the roster of leaders he personally selected to pay tribute at his memorial service Saturday at the National Cathedral. It was a day in early April when Barack Obama received an unexpected call from McCain, who was battling brain cancer and said he had a blunt question to ask: Would you deliver one of the eulogies at my funeral?

Obama, who is responsible for extinguishing McCain’s second bid for the White House a decade ago, immediately answered that he would. He was taken aback by the request, aides say, as was George W. Bush, another former rival, who received a similar call from McCain this spring.

When the 43rd and 44th US presidents stand on the high altar of the soaring cathedral on Saturday, after the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” anthem is sung, they will not only be celebrating the life of John Sidney McCain III. It will be McCain, too, having a not-so-subtle last word, aimed at another president he made clear he did not want to attend: Donald J. Trump.

I’ve been wondering whether McCain and Obama had somehow developed an intimate relationship after Obama left office, if they had been having quiet conversations over the last year or two that haven’t been publicly discussed as McCain neared the end of his journey.
It turns out, after talking to several friends of both men this week, their relationship isn’t intimate at all, but rather one rooted in mutual respect and a shared sense of alarm at today’s caustic political climate. Their telephone call on that April day was first arranged by advisers, not McCain simply dialing up Obama as he would do with his legion of friends, a sign they were hardly tight.

In fact, the two have spoken by phone only a couple of times since Obama left the White House, aides to both men say, most notably last summer when Obama reached out after McCain cast the deciding vote to salvage the Affordable Care Act. He thanked him. The call was brief. Obama has not been among the long parade of visitors who came to see McCain on his Arizona ranch as he fought brain cancer. George and Laura Bush dropped by not long ago, as did former Vice President Joe Biden, a close and longtime friend of McCain’s in the Senate, who will deliver a eulogy at a memorial service on Thursday in Arizona.

[From CNN]

The rest of the CNN piece is about why McCain made such a point of personally inviting Bush and Obama and why he wanted his memorial and funeral to be lessons in civility. While I loathed McCain when he was running in 2008, he of course looks a million times better than Trump right now. Mostly, I think it’s quaint to think that anyone really believes we can put the white supremacist genie back in the bottle – it’s not like all of the Deplorables are just going to *go away* once Trump is out of office. They’ll be absorbed within the Republican Party and we’ll be able to see it every day. Still, it’s a nice gesture that McCain personally called Obama and requested this.

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Photos courtesy of Getty.

In the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter, there’s a fascinating article called “The New Politics of Hollywood Sex Scenes in the #MeToo Era.” It’s all about how some things are different on film and TV sets now that some people are being more careful about nude scenes and sex scenes in general. The article is about how it’s a mixed bag, and how of course some actresses are still being taken advantage of, but no-nudity clauses and sex-scene riders are being enforced and protected. You can read the full piece here. There were some interesting comments by actresses and one unnamed source:

Actresses with leverage: Sarah Jessica Parker, for one, has a no-nudity clause for her HBO series Divorce, as she did with Sex and the City. “I’ve always had one,” she recently told THR. “Some people have a perks list and they are legendary. They have to have white candles in their room. I don’t have a crazy list like that. I’ve just always had [a no-nudity clause].” Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke is said to have scored the right to veto any nude scenes in her most recent renegotiation. And The Handmaid’s Tale star Elisabeth Moss, also an executive producer on the show, recently told THR, “I have 100 percent approval over all the footage and I can literally say, ‘You cannot use that scene.’ I can say, ‘I’m comfortable with this, but I’m not comfortable with that.’ They can’t send out a cut without me approving it.”

Whether unused scenes/footage are truly destroyed: If a shot scene isn’t used, most nudity riders call for the producer to use “good faith efforts” to delete the scene at the artist’s behest. Yet the very vague and nebulous idea of “good faith efforts” elicits a scoff from a number of representatives. Perhaps that’s why an increasing number ?of them are also calling for unused nude footage to be destroyed, though there’s little accountability on that front, either. Sources involved with the 2015 Todd Haynes forbidden-love drama Carol, which included nude sex scenes between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, say there are worries that Harvey Weinstein, who distributed the movie, kept unused footage for his own personal collection. “I don’t even think it’s possible to destroy anything in the digital age,” says one Carol insider. “The idea of anything being erased from existence is naive.” (A rep for Weinstein says he never kept any footage from the film.)

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

I’m so naive that this is the first time I even considered the possibility – and probability – that Harvey Weinstein probably has a vault full of unused footage from all of his films, and that the vault includes sex scenes and nude footage which should have been deleted, and footage which actresses were told was deleted. Of course he does. I bet he has Carol footage and footage from ALL of the films he’s ever produced. Jesus. Now I wonder if he’s ever used that footage for blackmail purposes.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Backgrid.

Here are some photos of Jennifer Aniston in Milan, Italy this week. She’s actually been in Italy for most (if not all?) of August. She’s been filming a movie called Murder Mystery with Adam Sandler. This is a Netflix film AND a Happy Madison film, meaning that Adam Sandler’s surprisingly powerful production company has gotten in bed with the powerhouse of Netflix. Lord help us all. Since it’s a Sandler film, I’m sure hijinks will ensue – for now, all that’s known about the plot is that Sandler plays a NYPD cop and Jennifer plays his wife and they take a trip to Italy to reinvigorate their marriage, and they somehow get involved with a mysterious murder. It sounds like Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, only instead of “assassination threat” plotline, this is just a straight up “who done it?”

Jennifer and Adam have been hanging out a bit off the set, but it’s truly nothing to worry about – his wife and family are in Italy too. Jennifer seems to be enjoying a low-key working summer in Europe, and the most notable thing she’s done (celebrity-notable) is make a stop in Como to visit George Clooney for a few days. She hasn’t offered any opinions or thoughts on the neverending Brangelina divorce, nor do I believe that she’s in “secret contact” with Brad after all these years. If anything, after 13 years of the Uncool Bermuda Triangle, all of the Team Jolie peeps are finally like “oh, now I understand what Aniston was going through back then.” Aniston Vindicated.

Incidentally, we still haven’t heard a peep about Jennifer or Justin Theroux filing for divorce. They were never legally married, peeps.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red and Backgrid.