In the late nineteen-seventies and into the eighties, Brooke Shields was one of the most famous and most controversial people in America. At age eleven, she appeared in the film “Pretty Baby,” playing a child prostitute; by fifteen she was in the heavy-breathing desert-island love story “Blue Lagoon.” She was the face of a series of ads for Calvin Klein jeans featuring notoriously smutty innuendo. Yet Shields herself—rather than the filmmakers and ad men who developed her roles—became the object of fascination and public reproach, as the new documentary “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” premièring on Hulu, demonstrates in detail. Yet, if she was exploited by adults around her when she was young, Shields denies any sense of being a victim. In a conversation with Michael Schulman, she calls hypocrisy on models who criticize their industry. “You’re making money, and you’re selling something, and, in most cases, sex sells,” she says. “ ‘Oh, I’m being objectified.’ You’re a model! That’s the point!”
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The Conspiracies of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Beyoncé Takes the Stage
Russia’s No-Good, Very Failed Coup, and Jill Lepore on Amending the Constitution
Jonathan Mitchell, a Prominent Anti-Abortion Lawyer, on Restraining the Power of the Supreme Court
A Year of Change for a North Dakota Abortion Clinic, and the Composer John Williams
Singer-songwriter Joy Oladokun, Plus Bryan Washington
Dexter Filkins on the Dilemma at the Border
From “On the Media”: Seditious Conspiracy
The New York Times’ Publisher on the Future of Journalism, and the Poet Paul Tran
A Gay Russian, Exiled in Ireland
Should We, and Can We, Put the Brakes on Artificial Intelligence?
The Director Rob Marshall on Halle Bailey as “The Little Mermaid”
E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan on Defamatory Trump, and Dexter Filkins on Ron DeSantis
Jill Lepore on the Joy of Gardening
Behind the Scenes with Tom Hanks
How Climate Change Is Impacting Our Mental Health
Michael Schulman on the Writers’ Strike, and Samantha Irby with Doreen St. Félix
Germany’s Traumatized Kriegskinder Speak Out
Have State Legislatures Gone Rogue? And Joshua Yaffa on Evan Gershkovich
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