Esme Mazzeo

“I’m a hysterical mess, so you called me at probably the worst time,” Maya Thompson warns me when we get on the phone hours before Red (Taylor’s Version)’s release. “I just got to hear the song.” She’s talking about “Ronan,” the ballad Taylor Swift wrote for and named after Thompson’s 3-year-old son, who died ten years ago of stage-four neuroblastoma, a cancer that develops from “immature nerve cells” throughout the body. Thompson tells me she also just finished watching the lyric video Swift...

This week, the Americans with Disabilities Act turned 31 years old. For the uninitiated, the landmark civil rights law “prohibits discrimination” against people with disabilities in many aspects of life including in the workplace, at school, on transportation, and places open to the general public. While the law has helped enrich the lives of many people within the disability community, we are still a marginalized group. Disabled people still have many issues to fight for themselves and other...

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for the season finale of "Cruel Summer," which aired Tuesday.
"Hostile Witness" saw Kate and Jeanette facing off in court, and the truth finally being revealed.
Insider spoke with showrunner Tia Napolitano, who talked about all those twists and big moments.
If you've found this article while trying to mentally recover from the game-changing last two minutes of the "Cruel Summer" season one finale — don't worry, you're in the right place.
Insider talked to showrun...

In 2007, Melissa Barrera was a junior in high school living in her hometown of Monterrey, Mexico when she went to see In the Heights on Broadway. She was leaning toward studying musical theater in college, but something was keeping her from committing to the path. “ I was scared that it wasn’t a viable career. I was scared that there was no place for me in the industry—that I was gonna go to school for four years and then not be cast in anything because I hadn’t seen a lot of Mexicans on Broa...

[This interview contains spoilers from the movie In the Heights. Read at your own risk!]
One of the most exciting things about watching In the Heights is that, amid huge dance numbers, beautiful songs, and a really great pool scene, there are tons of fresh faces on the screen, including actress Leslie Grace. Grace, whose name might be new to you unless you listen to bachata, a style of dance music that originated in the Dominican Republic. Grace’s career began in earnest when she released her...

Jesse Williams' exit from "Grey's Anatomy" saddened fans but also set up the perfect spin-off.
A show centered on Jackson, April, and their work in marginalized communities is vitally needed.
ABC hasn't announced any plans for a spin-off — just an 18th season for "Grey's" — but they should.
Longtime "Grey's Anatomy" viewers will recall the heartbreaking moment Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams) and April Kepner (Sarah Drew) lost their son Samuel Avery in the season 11 episode "All I Could Do Was ...

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "Cruel Summer" season 1, episode 6, "An Ocean Inside Me."
The May 18 episode of Freeform's buzzy new series finally reveals where Cindy Turner is in 1995.
Sarah Drew, who plays Cindy, broke down her character's big developments for Insider.
Tonight's episode of Freeform's hit drama "Cruel Summer" finally answered one of the biggest questions on viewers' minds throughout the first half of the season — where is Cindy Turner in 1995?
On the surface, it's not sur...

Drew says she jumped at the chance to return to "Grey's" when she learned Williams was departing.
She also opened up about how the two improvised that Japril hug, and why there was no kiss.
Drew also teased a possible "Grey's Anatomy" spin-off about Jackson and April.
This week, "Grey's Anatomy" fans were devastated to learn that Jesse Williams would be departing the series after the May 20 episode, but one thing helped soften the blow: the long-awaited reunion of Williams' character Jackson ...

The portrayal of disability in primetime is all too rare — and ABC is doing a disservice by sticking to an offensive trope.
ABC
“A Million Little Things” — an ABC drama about a friend group that becomes closer in the wake of an unexpected suicide — has covered many important issues for marginalized communities during its three seasons on air, from racism to immigration issues to depression. Creator DJ Nash explained that many of the storylines are based on real-life experiences, and most are ...

Every time The Resident star Manish Dayal sees an orange, he thinks of his late grandmother, Ranjan. “She [could] peel an orange in a way that there's zero rind at all," Dayal told Men’s Health while reflecting on her memory. "You [would] see no white. It's the perfect orange.”
Dayal is thinking about the grieving process a lot lately; his character on FOX's medical drama, Dr. Devon Pravesh, losing his father to COVID-19 in the show’s Season 4 premiere might have something to do with that. Th...

When studying journalism was just a dream of mine, Carrie Bradshaw was my idol. I mused about lugging my laptop to every coffee shop in Manhattan. My column would be called “CP and the City” because I’m a wheelchair user with cerebral palsy (get it?), and a website like Cosmopolitan would expect it weekly. Readers wouldn’t be able to get enough of my witty anecdotes about dating with a disability in the Big Apple. I would wear designer clothes—even at the coffee shop—and have a sprawling, ful...

On election night 2020, I accepted a friend's invitation to watch a movie over Zoom. After Austenland and in between episodes of Schitt's Creek, we checked Twitter. We remained calm as the "red mirage" that news outlets had predicted would appear before mail-in ballots were counted indeed materialized. She's a former field organizer for the Obama campaign, and her lack of anxiety kept my mind from racing. I even got a few hours of sleep.
It was a stark contrast from election night four years ...

On a scale of holiday cheer ranging from the Grinch to Buddy the Elf, I’ve leaned decidedly toward the green guy for most of my adult life. Familial stress aside, it sucks being single during “the most wonderful time of the year.” Because of this, I’d avoided the TV Christmas movie genre like the plague—until a few years ago, that is, when Sarah Drew starred in Christmas Pen Pals. Drew had made a pretty convincing runaway bride on Grey’s Anatomy, and if I could handle that trope, I c...

My mother’s legend has it that one of my first words was “magazine.” I can’t confirm this, but I do have vague memories of demanding an issue from the rack at the grocery store, eager to flip through its glossy pages. As I grew older, I was just as excited to read the words inside those pages, devouring details of my favorite celebs’ personal lives like candy.
But every page that didn’t include an interview with one of my faves was a different story. As a wheelchair user with coordination lim...

Growing up, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to be. It’s a fruitless endeavor at any age, really. But as a young disabled woman, my daydreams were harder to contrive than I imagine they were for my non-disabled peers. I didn’t have grand visions of being a movie star or a doctor or a big shot on Wall Street with all of the glamorous trappings that sometimes come with those professions.
Perhaps this is because I rarely saw anyone who looked like me on my screen. Watching disa...