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I’m devastated to report the death of the great Neil Sedaka at age 86.
He was one of loveliest, gentle men, a self effacing talent that was one of a kind.
Neil had major hits in the early 60s with songs like “Calendar Girl” and “Breaking Up is Hard to Do.” He was out of fashion for a while but came back like a hurricane in 1975 with the help of Elton John. His songs, “Laughter in the Rain,” “Bad Blood,” and “Solitaire” were huge and remain so to this very day. His song, “Love Will Keep Us Together” was the number 1 hit in 1975 by the Captain and Tenille.
“Our family is devastated by the sudden passing of our beloved husband, father and grandfather, Neil Sedaka,” a statement from the family reads. “A true rock and roll legend, an inspiration to millions, but most importantly, at least to those of us who were lucky enough to know him, an incredible human being who will be deeply missed.”
In January 2025, Neil wowed us at Clive Davis’s private dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He just sat down at the piano and played his hits, always with a big smile. (See below.) He loved his life, his music, and his family. He was a consummate musician, and it’s shameful that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame never inducted him.
The disaster of websites facing a steep decline in internet traffic has reached a crescendo.
In the Financial Times, Conde Nast publisher Roger Lynch waves the white flag with Google, which has ravaged the search function by introducing AI summaries.
Lynch calls what’s happened “another sort of death blow.”
“We assume very dramatic continued declines in search traffic, to the point where in a couple of years it’s just not a meaningful driver of our traffic,” Lynch said.
He doesn’t explain where he’s getting traffic from because every month is more challenging than the last.
Admitting the death of internet traffic is probably the beginning of something good. Lynch does say Conde Nast is doing better than ever. But no one really knows because company is private and doesn’t report numbers.
Still, you can tell from looking at the available numbers on Semrush.com. Vanityfair.com dropped precipitously over December and January. Visits to the site were down a staggering 33%. Was the content suddenly so poor? Or was it that Google screws with algorithm every month, sometimes twice a month, with notice or regulation? They call these changes Core Updates, but what they are is punitive measures that eat into revenue arbitrarily.
Even Vogue.com is suffering, and they’re the biggest of the Conde Nast magazines (apart from The New Yorker, a separate entity at the company). even though Vogue was up by 3% in December/January, the site was way off from October 2025.
And people wonder why the Associated Press, the Guardian, and many sites including this one have “donate” or “contribute” buttons on their sites. Keeping a website going is no easy feat right now.
Jeffrey Epstein, of course, even in death is Public Enemy Number 1.
But when it came to his own health, he was kinda crazy. Epstein was obsessed with cancer — discussing it in emails, funding research, discussing other people’s diagnoses. In 2014 he wrote in an email: “why does solitary confinement make you crazy, what is the good that cancer does. ?”
In 2016, according to many emails found in his files, Epstein must have thought he was having a health scare. It wasn’t his first. From reading the files, he was definitely a hypochondriac. He also had a lot of STDs, that’s for sure, and several skin cancer alerts.
But when Epstein thought he might have cancer he instructed his assistant, Lesley Groff, to arrange for an online appointment with the very alternative Cancer Center for Healing in Irvine, California run by a Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy. He was interested in something called Oncoblot — an online evaluation to detect early cancer — that wouldn’t require his physical presence at their offices in Irvine, California.
His assistant Lesley Groff wrote to Epstein’s closest confidante, Dr. Eva Andersson Dubin — whose breast cancer center he’d underwritten at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital — on May 3, 2016: “I have actually found a way for Jeffrey to become an ‘online patient’.”
For a month starting in mid May 2016, Epstein’s assistants negotiated a Skype appointment with a doctor at the Cancer Center rather than just go a few blocks away on the upper East Side to the famed and respected Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital for Cancer.
Everything about the contract is far more unusual and secretive than going to even a concierge doctor. The third paragraph reads:
“IT IS HEREBY Declared that we are exercising our right of “freedom of association” as guaranteed by the 1st and 14th Amendments of the US Constitution and equivalent provisions of the various State Constitutions. This means that our association activities are restricted to the private domain only.” (See the Memorandum of Understanding below.)
Ordinarily the Cancer Center for Healing charged a one time $1,000 membership fee, but on Epstein’s copy of contract the amount is crossed out.
All of this was tacitly approved by Epstein’s close friend, Eva Andersson Dubin, a breast cancer specialist whose life and work he’d been supporting for years — from the time she was one of his “girls” through her medical education and marriage to billionaire Glen Dubin.
Even Epstein questioned the initial approach, asking Dubin in an email, “Is this for cancer patients?”
For a month, until mid June, the Epstein office and the Cancer Center went back and forth even after Epstein signed the agreement. We don’t know what happened but it’s possible he got cold feet or backed out because the trail of emails stops there. At one point, the Center demand a cancelled appointment fee for missing all of dates that were set up.
The complaint, according to reports, claimed that she failed to properly investigate symptoms that could have indicated cancer. In one case, a patient’s uterine cancer went undiagnosed until they consulted a different doctor; in another, Connealy prescribed estrogen despite an undiagnosed breast lump that persisted for months.
Two years after Epstein’s encounter with Connealy, the doctor turned up on a website called Quackwatch.com.
Ultimately, Epstein returned to his own doctor, celebrity urologist Dr. Harry Fisch from New York Hospital-Cornell Weill. Fisch makes dozens of appearances in the Epstein files. Epstein treats him to a lot of gifts including haircuts with Frederic Fekkai. Epstein’s assistant emails her boss saying Fisch thanks him for the haircut. “And it doesn’t even make him look gay,” she said.
As for the cancer scare, Epstein copies himself in an email in October 2016: “and cancer probably isn’t even a real thing.”
One other note: reading the files, it’s hard to imagine that Eva Dubin has escaped deeper scrutiny or had her situation changed at Mt. Sinai Hospital. She’s in thousands of emails. She’s constantly sending her young children around town in Epstein’s chauffeured limo. There isn’t a part of his life she’s not involved in, including participating in the mini-hotel Epstein ran at 301 East 66th St. for his “friends.”
Here’s the most interesting part of the agreement Epstein signed with the Cancer Center for Healing. Check the last couple of lines — “clear and present danger of substantive evil as determined by the Association.”
You won’t want to acknowledge this, but the “Scream” series was ushered in by a very bad person, Bob Weinstein, Harvey’s brother.
“Scream” was a building block of Miramax’s Dimension Films. It did so well that it supported the hundreds of Oscar nominations for Harvey’s important and well made films.
Who woulda thought we’d still be talking about “Scream” in 2026? Thirty years later?
But we are, and last night’s previews for “Scream 7” brought in between $7.5 million and $8 million.
Amazing, right? The three day weekend total is guessimated at $44 million.
It’s not like this is a “good” movie. The critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a foul 37%. The Audience Meter is at 77%. It’s less frightening than “Melania.”
I guess there’s some sort of core “Scream” audience that cares about how Neve Campbell became a horror queen. Or how Courteney Cox filled her post-“Friends” years. God bless them all.
And where is Bob Weinstein? Argentina? Better yet, Uruguay in Punta del Este, hobnobbing with Maduro and Noriega.
The “Melania” movie is like a snake that keeps moving even after its head is cut off.
When Brett Ratner’s infomercial was released on January 30th, MGM/Amazon put it into 1,778 theaters.
Even though it was a bust by all accounts, “Melania” increased to 2,003 locations for the second week but fell by 67% in total receipts.
MGM/Amazon cut the run to 1,205 venues for the third week, and the till declined by 62%.
Last week, the theater cut was brutal — slashed by 700 theaters — and the movie fell by 76%.
Now, “Melania” has dropped 380 screens, and is down to a measly 125 houses. On Wednesday, still at 505 theaters, the feature took in $74 per location.
The 125 spots where it remains are in Jupiter, Florida, so Melania will think it’s still playing somewhere, a few spots in the rest of Florida with once a day showings, and Staten Island, where people confuse it with a landfill.
Where did they go wrong? I really thought the “Melania” popcorn bucket would be based on one of wide brimmed, low sitting Gaucho hats. It seemed so obvious. Instead, it was a flimsy, plastic bucket that was only good for storing “Marty Supreme” orange ping ping balls.
Amazon has still not set a date for the glorious debut of “Melania” on their platform, where they will claim it broke records. Will there ever be a DVD? A “Melania” disc would make an excellent coaster, which would be right since no one on either coast saw it.
It’s a mother and child reunion for Paris Jackson and her mother, Debbie Rowe.
Paris has posted to her Instagram stories happy pictures of her and Debbie at Debbie’s horse ranch in Palmdale, California.
When I ran into Paris at Clive Davis’s pre-Grammy dinner she told this had happened, but I left it alone because it seemed so private.
As I’ve been covering the Michael Jackson saga for a long, long time, I got to know Debbie — particularly between Michael’s 2003 arrest and 2005 trial. She’s so much fun, and a good egg. But in the maelstrom surrounding Michael, she got caught up in the craziness.
But Debbie stood her ground during those volatile years. She went to court to maintain her parental rights, which a judge said could not be denied. She fought to establish a real business and a ranch, and has been very successful even when a lot of people rooted against her.
As for Paris, she is so well comported it’s amazing. She’s a very unusual and wise young woman who’s navigated the most difficult life in the spotlight. It’s so nice now to see these two together! I’mkvelling!
There are now several reports that Paramount will win the bidding war for Warner Bros. over Netflix.
Game over. Paramount, strings pulled by Trump and the right wing, will own CNN — and CBS News. If true, we are doomed. But Warners said a little while ago the Paramount offer to buy was “superior” to Netflix’s.
Trump is already influencing CBS News through Paramount’s David Ellison. If Ellison gets his hands on CNN, which now seems likely, media chaos is about to ensue.
Ironically, the Ellisons’ takeover of CBS News — in turn jettisoning its legacy for a conservative push — has been a bust. Last week, the CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil dropped to 4.1 million from 4.5 million, and down 21% since it began last month.
Pop star Pink says she just learned from People magazine that she’s separated from husband Carey Hart.
However, she’s not separated, and People looks kinda bad right now.
Pink says in a video:
“I was just alerted to the fact that I’m separated from my husband. I didn’t know—thank you, People magazine; thank you, Us Weekly. Thank you for letting me know. I was wondering: would you also like to tell our children? My 14-year-old and 9-year-old are also unaware.
“Or, do you want to talk about some real news? Do you want to talk about the Epstein files? Do you want to talk about systemic racism, or misogyny in sports, or how classy the women’s hockey team is, or how 8 of the 12 medals won in the Olympics this year for the US were won by women? Or do you maybe want to talk about the fact that I got nominated the first year I was eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
“Do you want to talk about my accomplishments, or do you only want to talk about my supposed demise? So, ‘fake news’—not true. I fucking hate that term. I love you all. Go with God. And trash news: you can do better. Night, night.”
