(meta data) TITLE: Dow Chemical urges Trump administration to ignore pesticide findings

# Dow Chemical urges Trump administration to ignore pesticide findings

A group of three pesticide makers, including Dow Chemical, sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency demanding they throw out a study showing the impact of three pesticides on endangered species.

A crop duster sprays a field of crops just outside Headland, Ala., in 2009.(Photo: Dave Martin, AP)

Dow Chemical is pushing a Trump administration that's open to scrapping regulations to ignore the findings of federal scientists who point to a family of widely used pesticides as harmful to about 1,800 critically threatened or endangered species.

Lawyers representing Dow, whose CEO is a close adviser to President Donald Trump, and two other manufacturers of organophosphates sent letters last week to the heads of three of Trump's Cabinet agencies.

The companies asked them "to set aside" the results of government studies the companies contend are fundamentally flawed.

Dow Chemical wrote a $1 million check to help underwrite Trump's inaugural festivities, and its chairman and CEO, Andrew Liveris, heads a White House manufacturing working group.

The industry's request comes after EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced last month he was reversing an Obama-era effort to bar the use of Dow's chlorpyrifos pesticide on food after recent peer-reviewed studies found that even tiny levels of exposure could hinder the development of children's brains.

In his prior job as Oklahoma's attorney general, Pruitt often aligned himself in legal disputes with the interests of executives and corporations who supported his state campaigns.

He filed more than a dozen lawsuits seeking to overturn some of the same regulations he is now charged with enforcing.

Pruitt declined to answer questions from reporters Wednesday as he toured a polluted Superfund site in Indiana.

Agency spokesman J.P. Freire later told AP that Pruitt won't "prejudge" any potential rule-making decisions as "we are trying to restore regulatory sanity to EPA's work."

The letters to Cabinet heads, dated April 13, were obtained by The Associated Press.

As with the recent human studies of chlorpyrifos, Dow hired its own scientists who produced a lengthy rebuttal to the government studies.

Over the past four years, federal scientists have compiled an official record running more than 10,000 pages indicating the three pesticides under review — chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion — pose a risk to nearly every endangered species they studied.

Regulators at the three federal agencies, which share responsibilities for enforcing the Endangered Species Act, are close to issuing findings expected to result in new limits on how and where the highly toxic pesticides can be used.

Strawberries and these other foods have the most pesticides

The office of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Natural Marine Fisheries Service, did not respond to emailed questions.

A spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, referred questions back to EPA.

The EPA's recent biological evaluation of chlorpyrifos found the pesticide is "likely to adversely affect" 1,778 of the 1,835 animals and plants accessed as part of its study, including critically endangered or threatened species of frogs, fish, birds and mammals.

Similar results were shown for malathion and diazinon.

In a statement, the Dow subsidiary that sells chlorpyrifos said its lawyers asked for the EPA's biological assessment to be withdrawn because its "scientific basis was not reliable."

"Dow AgroSciences is committed to the production and marketing of products that will help American farmers feed the world, and do so with full respect for human health and the environment, including endangered and threatened species," the statement said.

"These letters, and the detailed scientific analyses that support them, demonstrate that commitment."

FMC Corp., which sells malathion, said withdrawal of the EPA studies would allow the necessary time for the "best available" scientific data to be compiled.

Environmental advocates said Wednesday that criticism of the government's scientists was unfounded.

The methods used to conduct EPA's biological evaluations were developed by the National Academy of Sciences.

Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said Dow's experts were trying to hold EPA scientists to an unrealistic standard of data collection.

"You can't just take an endangered fish out of the wild, take it to the lab and then expose it to enough pesticides until it dies to get that sort of data," Hartl said.

Organophosphorus gas was originally developed as a chemical weapon by Nazi Germany.

Dow has been selling Chlorpyrifos for spraying on citrus fruits, apples, cherries and other crops since the 1960s.

It is among the most widely used agricultural pesticides in the United States, with Dow selling about 5 million pounds domestically each year.

As a result, traces of the chemical are commonly found in sources of drinking water.

A 2012 study at the University of California, Berkeley found that 87 percent of umbilical-cord blood samples tested from newborn babies contained detectable levels of chlorpyrifos.

Dow, which spent more than $13.6 million on lobbying in 2016, has long wielded substantial political power in the nation's capital.

When Trump signed an executive order in February mandating the creation of task forces at federal agencies to roll back government regulations, he gave the pen as a souvenir to Dow's chief executive and thanked Liveris.

Rachelle Schikorra, the director of public affairs for Dow Chemical, said any suggestion that the company's $1 million donation to Trump's inaugural committee was intended to help influence regulatory decisions is "completely off the mark."

"Dow maintains and is committed to the highest standard of ethical conduct in all such activity," Schikorra said.

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In December 2016, Liveris was named by Donald Trump to lead his American Manufacturing Council.  Liveris said Trump created a climate that is conducive to business effectiveness for his company. On 27 January 2017, Trump publicly announced the names of the 28 members to make up the council,  with Liveris heading the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. In February 2017, Liveris was standing next to Trump when the executive order "mandating the creation of task forces at federal agencies to roll back government regulations" was signed. Trump gave him the pen.


Duraid Hikmat is an expert on minority relationships.

(meta data) TITLE: ISIS Forces Last Iraqi Christians to Flee Mosul - The New York Times

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.nytimes.com/by/alissa-j-rubin

Skip to contentSkip to site indexMiddle EastLog InToday's PaperMiddle East|ISIS Forces Last Iraqi Christians to Flee Mosul

# ISIS Forces Last Iraqi Christians to Flee Mosul

ImageIraqis attending Mass in June at a church in Al Qosh, where many Christians have fled after being intimidated into leaving their homes in Mosul.CreditCreditAssociated Press

BAGHDAD — By 1 p.m. on Friday almost every Christian in Mosul had heard the Sunni militants' message — they had until noon Saturday to leave the city.

Men, women and children piled into neighbors' cars, some begged for rides to the city limits and hoped to get taxis to the nearest Christian villages.

They took nothing more than the clothes on their backs, according to several who were reached late Friday.

The order from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came after Christians decided not to attend a meeting that ISIS had arranged for Thursday night to discuss their status.

"We were so afraid to go," said Duraid Hikmat, an expert on minorities who had done research for years in Mosul.

He fled two weeks ago to Al Qosh, a largely Christian town barely an hour away, but his extended family left on Friday.

Since 2003, when Saddam Hussein was ousted, Mosul's Christians, one of the oldest communities of its kind in the world, had seen their numbers dwindle from over 30,000 to just a few thousand, but once ISIS swept into the city in early June, there were reports that the remaining Christians had fled.

Interviews on Friday with Christian elders and leaders suggest that in fact many had hung on, hoping for an accommodation, a way to continue the quiet practice of their faith in the city that had been their home for more than 1,700 years.

Chaldeans, Assyrians and other sects, including Mandeans, a Gnostic community who revere John the Baptist, could still be found in Iraq, and many made their home on the plains of Nineveh in the north of the country, an area mentioned in the Bible's Book of Genesis.

ImageFriar Gabriel Tooma at the Chaldean Church of the Virgin Mary of the Harvest, part of a seventh-century monastery overlooking Al Qosh, Iraq.

Friday's edict, however, was probably the real end.

While a few scattered souls may find a way to stay in secret, the community will be gone.

A YouTube video shows ISIS taking sledgehammers to the tomb of Jonah, something that was also confirmed by Mr. Hikmat.

The militants also removed the cross from St. Ephrem's Cathedral, the seat of the Syriac Orthodox archdiocese in Mosul, and put up the black ISIS flag in its place.

They also destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary, according to Ghazwan Ilyas, the head of the Chaldean Culture Society in Mosul, who spoke by telephone on Thursday from Mosul but seemed to have left on Friday.

"They did not destroy the churches, but they killed us when they removed the cross, this is death for us," he said.

Christians are among several minorities who are being systematically expelled or killed by ISIS, according to a United Nations report on civilian casualties in Iraq released on Friday.

Among them are Yazidis, a tiny sect that has survived for centuries and whose theology fuses elements of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism; Shabaks, who are often described as Shiites whose language is close to Persian and who take beliefs from different traditions; and Shiite Turkmen.

The Yazidis and the Shabaks are being persecuted in the Sinjar area west of Mosul, according to the United Nations and interviews with members of both communities.

The United Nations has documented scores of abductions and killings as well as the destruction of shrines.

In the past few days, ISIS has been setting up checkpoints along a road that the Shabaks have been using to flee the area and apprehending them, according to Shabak families who have escaped.

While sometimes ISIS appears to abduct people for ransom, in many cases there have been summary executions.

## Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi

Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State.

The United Nations report noted that extrajudicial killings had also been carried out by Iraqi security forces and allied militias, and warned that the executions on both sides might constitute war crimes.

At least 1,531 civilians were killed in June alone, bringing the civilian death toll in the first half of the year to a minimum of 5,576, according to the joint report by the United Nations human rights office in Geneva and the United Nations mission in Iraq.

More than 600,000 people were driven from their homes during June alone, doubling the number of internally displaced people in Iraq to more than 1.2 million, the report added.

For the Christians displaced from Mosul, sudden departure has meant a series of treks — first to nearby Christian villages like Bartella and Hamdaniya, already badly overcrowded, then to Kurdistan, a semiautonomous region of Iraq where there is more tolerance for Christians.

As the Christians leave Mosul, ISIS has painted the Arabic letter that means "Nasrani," from Nazrene, a word often used to refer to Christians, on their homes.

Next to the letter, in black, are the words: "Property of the Islamic State of Iraq."

The militants have also told Muslims who rent property from Christians that they no longer need to pay rent, said a businessman who rents from a Christian.

Many Christians interviewed expressed a sense of utter abandonment and desolation as well as a recognition that the sound of church bells mingled with the Muslim calls to prayer, the ultimate symbol of Mosul's tolerance, would likely never be heard again.

"We are not thinking of going back to Mosul, we have left homes with our memories," said Omar who had just arrived in Bartella and did not give his surname.

An article on Saturday about the flight by Christians and others from the Iraqi city of Mosul after an ultimatum by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the militant group that overran Mosul in June, referred incorrectly to the Mandeans.

They are a Gnostic community that reveres John the Baptist; they are not Christians.

Omar Al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and a New York Times employee from Mosul.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: ISIS Expels Last Iraqi Christians From Mosul.

Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

## Exodus From North Signals Iraqi Christians' Slow Decline

## Last Christians Ponder Leaving a Hometown in Iraq

## Church Attack Seen as Strike at Iraq's Core

## Violence in Mosul Forces Iraqi Christians to Flee

History.:Government by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).:Persecution of religious and ethnic minorities and destruction of cultural sites.

ISIL issued an edict expelling (in effect ethnically cleansing) the remaining predominantly ethnic Assyrian and Armenian Christian Mosul citizens, after the Christians refused to attend a meeting to discuss their future status.


(meta data) TITLE: ISIS Forces Last Iraqi Christians to Flee Mosul - The New York Times

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.nytimes.com/by/alissa-j-rubin

Skip to contentSkip to site indexMiddle EastLog InToday's PaperMiddle East|ISIS Forces Last Iraqi Christians to Flee Mosul

# ISIS Forces Last Iraqi Christians to Flee Mosul

ImageIraqis attending Mass in June at a church in Al Qosh, where many Christians have fled after being intimidated into leaving their homes in Mosul.CreditCreditAssociated Press

BAGHDAD — By 1 p.m. on Friday almost every Christian in Mosul had heard the Sunni militants' message — they had until noon Saturday to leave the city.

Men, women and children piled into neighbors' cars, some begged for rides to the city limits and hoped to get taxis to the nearest Christian villages.

They took nothing more than the clothes on their backs, according to several who were reached late Friday.

The order from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came after Christians decided not to attend a meeting that ISIS had arranged for Thursday night to discuss their status.

"We were so afraid to go," said Duraid Hikmat, an expert on minorities who had done research for years in Mosul.

He fled two weeks ago to Al Qosh, a largely Christian town barely an hour away, but his extended family left on Friday.

Since 2003, when Saddam Hussein was ousted, Mosul's Christians, one of the oldest communities of its kind in the world, had seen their numbers dwindle from over 30,000 to just a few thousand, but once ISIS swept into the city in early June, there were reports that the remaining Christians had fled.

Interviews on Friday with Christian elders and leaders suggest that in fact many had hung on, hoping for an accommodation, a way to continue the quiet practice of their faith in the city that had been their home for more than 1,700 years.

Chaldeans, Assyrians and other sects, including Mandeans, a Gnostic community who revere John the Baptist, could still be found in Iraq, and many made their home on the plains of Nineveh in the north of the country, an area mentioned in the Bible's Book of Genesis.

ImageFriar Gabriel Tooma at the Chaldean Church of the Virgin Mary of the Harvest, part of a seventh-century monastery overlooking Al Qosh, Iraq.

Friday's edict, however, was probably the real end.

While a few scattered souls may find a way to stay in secret, the community will be gone.

A YouTube video shows ISIS taking sledgehammers to the tomb of Jonah, something that was also confirmed by Mr. Hikmat.

The militants also removed the cross from St. Ephrem's Cathedral, the seat of the Syriac Orthodox archdiocese in Mosul, and put up the black ISIS flag in its place.

They also destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary, according to Ghazwan Ilyas, the head of the Chaldean Culture Society in Mosul, who spoke by telephone on Thursday from Mosul but seemed to have left on Friday.

"They did not destroy the churches, but they killed us when they removed the cross, this is death for us," he said.

Christians are among several minorities who are being systematically expelled or killed by ISIS, according to a United Nations report on civilian casualties in Iraq released on Friday.

Among them are Yazidis, a tiny sect that has survived for centuries and whose theology fuses elements of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism; Shabaks, who are often described as Shiites whose language is close to Persian and who take beliefs from different traditions; and Shiite Turkmen.

The Yazidis and the Shabaks are being persecuted in the Sinjar area west of Mosul, according to the United Nations and interviews with members of both communities.

The United Nations has documented scores of abductions and killings as well as the destruction of shrines.

In the past few days, ISIS has been setting up checkpoints along a road that the Shabaks have been using to flee the area and apprehending them, according to Shabak families who have escaped.

While sometimes ISIS appears to abduct people for ransom, in many cases there have been summary executions.

## Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi

Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State.

The United Nations report noted that extrajudicial killings had also been carried out by Iraqi security forces and allied militias, and warned that the executions on both sides might constitute war crimes.

At least 1,531 civilians were killed in June alone, bringing the civilian death toll in the first half of the year to a minimum of 5,576, according to the joint report by the United Nations human rights office in Geneva and the United Nations mission in Iraq.

More than 600,000 people were driven from their homes during June alone, doubling the number of internally displaced people in Iraq to more than 1.2 million, the report added.

For the Christians displaced from Mosul, sudden departure has meant a series of treks — first to nearby Christian villages like Bartella and Hamdaniya, already badly overcrowded, then to Kurdistan, a semiautonomous region of Iraq where there is more tolerance for Christians.

As the Christians leave Mosul, ISIS has painted the Arabic letter that means "Nasrani," from Nazrene, a word often used to refer to Christians, on their homes.

Next to the letter, in black, are the words: "Property of the Islamic State of Iraq."

The militants have also told Muslims who rent property from Christians that they no longer need to pay rent, said a businessman who rents from a Christian.

Many Christians interviewed expressed a sense of utter abandonment and desolation as well as a recognition that the sound of church bells mingled with the Muslim calls to prayer, the ultimate symbol of Mosul's tolerance, would likely never be heard again.

"We are not thinking of going back to Mosul, we have left homes with our memories," said Omar who had just arrived in Bartella and did not give his surname.

An article on Saturday about the flight by Christians and others from the Iraqi city of Mosul after an ultimatum by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the militant group that overran Mosul in June, referred incorrectly to the Mandeans.

They are a Gnostic community that reveres John the Baptist; they are not Christians.

Omar Al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and a New York Times employee from Mosul.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: ISIS Expels Last Iraqi Christians From Mosul.

Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

## Exodus From North Signals Iraqi Christians' Slow Decline

## Last Christians Ponder Leaving a Hometown in Iraq

## Church Attack Seen as Strike at Iraq's Core

## Violence in Mosul Forces Iraqi Christians to Flee

ISIL issued an edict expelling (in effect ethnically cleansing) the remaining predominantly ethnic Assyrian and Armenian Christian Mosul citizens, after the Christians refused to attend a meeting to discuss their future status. Duraid Hikmat is an expert on minority relationships.


According to Duraid Hikmat, the Christians were fearful to attend.

(meta data) TITLE: ISIS Forces Last Iraqi Christians to Flee Mosul - The New York Times

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.nytimes.com/by/alissa-j-rubin

Skip to contentSkip to site indexMiddle EastLog InToday's PaperMiddle East|ISIS Forces Last Iraqi Christians to Flee Mosul

# ISIS Forces Last Iraqi Christians to Flee Mosul

ImageIraqis attending Mass in June at a church in Al Qosh, where many Christians have fled after being intimidated into leaving their homes in Mosul.CreditCreditAssociated Press

BAGHDAD — By 1 p.m. on Friday almost every Christian in Mosul had heard the Sunni militants' message — they had until noon Saturday to leave the city.

Men, women and children piled into neighbors' cars, some begged for rides to the city limits and hoped to get taxis to the nearest Christian villages.

They took nothing more than the clothes on their backs, according to several who were reached late Friday.

The order from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came after Christians decided not to attend a meeting that ISIS had arranged for Thursday night to discuss their status.

"We were so afraid to go," said Duraid Hikmat, an expert on minorities who had done research for years in Mosul.

He fled two weeks ago to Al Qosh, a largely Christian town barely an hour away, but his extended family left on Friday.

Since 2003, when Saddam Hussein was ousted, Mosul's Christians, one of the oldest communities of its kind in the world, had seen their numbers dwindle from over 30,000 to just a few thousand, but once ISIS swept into the city in early June, there were reports that the remaining Christians had fled.

Interviews on Friday with Christian elders and leaders suggest that in fact many had hung on, hoping for an accommodation, a way to continue the quiet practice of their faith in the city that had been their home for more than 1,700 years.

Chaldeans, Assyrians and other sects, including Mandeans, a Gnostic community who revere John the Baptist, could still be found in Iraq, and many made their home on the plains of Nineveh in the north of the country, an area mentioned in the Bible's Book of Genesis.

ImageFriar Gabriel Tooma at the Chaldean Church of the Virgin Mary of the Harvest, part of a seventh-century monastery overlooking Al Qosh, Iraq.

Friday's edict, however, was probably the real end.

While a few scattered souls may find a way to stay in secret, the community will be gone.

A YouTube video shows ISIS taking sledgehammers to the tomb of Jonah, something that was also confirmed by Mr. Hikmat.

The militants also removed the cross from St. Ephrem's Cathedral, the seat of the Syriac Orthodox archdiocese in Mosul, and put up the black ISIS flag in its place.

They also destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary, according to Ghazwan Ilyas, the head of the Chaldean Culture Society in Mosul, who spoke by telephone on Thursday from Mosul but seemed to have left on Friday.

"They did not destroy the churches, but they killed us when they removed the cross, this is death for us," he said.

Christians are among several minorities who are being systematically expelled or killed by ISIS, according to a United Nations report on civilian casualties in Iraq released on Friday.

Among them are Yazidis, a tiny sect that has survived for centuries and whose theology fuses elements of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism; Shabaks, who are often described as Shiites whose language is close to Persian and who take beliefs from different traditions; and Shiite Turkmen.

The Yazidis and the Shabaks are being persecuted in the Sinjar area west of Mosul, according to the United Nations and interviews with members of both communities.

The United Nations has documented scores of abductions and killings as well as the destruction of shrines.

In the past few days, ISIS has been setting up checkpoints along a road that the Shabaks have been using to flee the area and apprehending them, according to Shabak families who have escaped.

While sometimes ISIS appears to abduct people for ransom, in many cases there have been summary executions.

## Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi

Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State.

The United Nations report noted that extrajudicial killings had also been carried out by Iraqi security forces and allied militias, and warned that the executions on both sides might constitute war crimes.

At least 1,531 civilians were killed in June alone, bringing the civilian death toll in the first half of the year to a minimum of 5,576, according to the joint report by the United Nations human rights office in Geneva and the United Nations mission in Iraq.

More than 600,000 people were driven from their homes during June alone, doubling the number of internally displaced people in Iraq to more than 1.2 million, the report added.

For the Christians displaced from Mosul, sudden departure has meant a series of treks — first to nearby Christian villages like Bartella and Hamdaniya, already badly overcrowded, then to Kurdistan, a semiautonomous region of Iraq where there is more tolerance for Christians.

As the Christians leave Mosul, ISIS has painted the Arabic letter that means "Nasrani," from Nazrene, a word often used to refer to Christians, on their homes.

Next to the letter, in black, are the words: "Property of the Islamic State of Iraq."

The militants have also told Muslims who rent property from Christians that they no longer need to pay rent, said a businessman who rents from a Christian.

Many Christians interviewed expressed a sense of utter abandonment and desolation as well as a recognition that the sound of church bells mingled with the Muslim calls to prayer, the ultimate symbol of Mosul's tolerance, would likely never be heard again.

"We are not thinking of going back to Mosul, we have left homes with our memories," said Omar who had just arrived in Bartella and did not give his surname.

An article on Saturday about the flight by Christians and others from the Iraqi city of Mosul after an ultimatum by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the militant group that overran Mosul in June, referred incorrectly to the Mandeans.

They are a Gnostic community that reveres John the Baptist; they are not Christians.

Omar Al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and a New York Times employee from Mosul.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: ISIS Expels Last Iraqi Christians From Mosul.

Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

## Exodus From North Signals Iraqi Christians' Slow Decline

## Last Christians Ponder Leaving a Hometown in Iraq

## Church Attack Seen as Strike at Iraq's Core

## Violence in Mosul Forces Iraqi Christians to Flee

ISIL issued an edict expelling (in effect ethnically cleansing) the remaining predominantly ethnic Assyrian and Armenian Christian Mosul citizens, after the Christians refused to attend a meeting to discuss their future status. Duraid Hikmat is an expert on minority relationships. Duraid Hikmat is a resident of Mosul.


It was important that Serena was blonde and Blair was brunette.

(meta data) TITLE: Gossip Girl 10 Years Later: Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, and More Reflect on the Zeitgeist They Created | Vanity Fair

(meta data) COPYRIGHT: Copyright (c) Condé Nast 2017

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: August 30, 2017 7:00 AM

Organization: Internet Archive Global Events

This is a collection of websites, news articles, advisories, social media feeds, and other online materials related to Hurricane, later Tropical Storm, Harvey in 2017.

To add to this collection, please use the following contribution form: https://goo.gl/forms/PKvXnR3Zc59QzBU12 / / Esta es una colección de sitios web, artículos de prensa, avisos oficiales, feeds de las redes sociales y otros materiales en línea relacionados con el huracán, y luego clasificado como tormenta tropical, Harvey en 2017.

Para agregar a esta colección, utilice el siguiente formulario de contribución: https://goo.gl/forms/VrD0Y0Ixsr2pwQks1 / / Translations by Ana D. Rodriguez and Natalie Baur.

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20170830235955/https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/08/gossip-girl-ten-year-anniversary

You Know You Love MeWhen Gossip Girl Ruled the WorldA decade ago this fall, just as social media was fracturing pop culture into a million pieces, a pair of sophomore show-runners, a start-up network, and a cast of barely of-age millennials aligned to capture one last old-fashioned teenage zeitgeist.

On the tenth anniversary of the CW's flagship series, Gossip Girl 's actors, producers, and crew members reflect on the frenzy, contemplate the series's lasting impact, and, yes, dish on its on-set dramas.

XOXO . . .by Josh DuboffGossip Girl cast members Jessica Szohr, Penn Badgley, Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Leighton Meester, and Taylor Momsen, photographed by Mark Seliger in Coney Island for V.F.'s August 2008 issue.

The blonde Tarzana, California, native—who, one imagines, leaves a trail of sunflower emojis and the scent of cupcake icing in her wake wherever she goes—had had enough.

Eighteen years old at the time, she had just appeared in a small independent film and come to a crushing conclusion:

"I realized that [acting] was a business as much as a craft," she told me more than a decade after the fact, while on the West Coast, where her husband, Ryan Reynolds, was about to start shooting Deadpool 2.

"People will go see your movie based on your standing and all of that, and it didn't make sense to me because I was 18 and being an artist."

She decided, having deferred from college a year earlier, that she would jump off the Hollywood carousel and enroll in school.

It was at about this time, in 2007, that The O.C., a prime-time soap opera about beautiful, articulate, sun-kissed teenagers living in Orange County, was wrapping up its four-year run.

The show had arrived on the scene with a tidal wave of buzz, its actors almost immediately splashed on magazine covers and pushed out onto red carpets; but after burning through plot at a rapid pace (its leading lady, Mischa Barton, saw her character get killed off somewhat unceremoniously in the third season), the show sputtered to a close, ending with a truncated final season.

But The O.C.'s creators and show-runners, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, already had the beaches of Newport in their rearview mirror, with their sights on a next project.

They had been sent Cecily von Ziegesar's popular Gossip Girl book series, centered on a group of affluent, conniving New York private-school students.

As soon as they finished reading the first book, the duo knew this was it.

"We learned a lot of lessons [on The O.C.] and its kind of crazy four-year run that we wanted to take and apply to something moving forward, and we were really excited about doing something in New York," Schwartz said over lunch in Los Angeles this past winter.

Meanwhile, a new television network, the CW, was simultaneously in the midst of a delicate birthing process.

Formed by the union of the WB and UPN, the new network—led by then President of Entertainment Dawn Ostroff—was searching for an identity.

"We knew we needed the defining show," Ostroff (currently president of Condé Nast Entertainment) said.

"You have to sort of catch the wind at your back.

You have to really hit something that's in the zeitgeist, or really going to matter to people in a way that becomes an emotional connection.

And it was even more difficult for us, because we were going after a younger, more finicky audience."

It was a perfect storm: a buzzy property, a hot creative team, and a new network.

The official green light was a mere formality: Schwartz and Savage were off to the races.

Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Blake Lively, and Penn Badgley, at a gala at Cipriani Wall Street in October 2008.

Photograph by BILLY FARRELL/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images.

There were two core figures at the center of the books—Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen—and casting them was at the top of Schwartz and Savage's agenda.

Waldorf is a brunette queen bee—controlling, poised, meticulous.

Van der Woodsen, by contrast, is the blonde, effortlessly cool free spirit.

Blair, the Veronica, inspires fear; Serena, the Betty, inspires envy.

When they started to cast the show, Savage and Schwartz looked at online message boards, where fans of the book series had already decided that Lively—known at this point primarily for her role in 2005's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—would be the perfect Serena.

"We didn't see a lot of other girls for Serena," Schwartz said.

"She has to be somebody that you believe would be sitting in the front row at Fashion Week eventually."

Then they said, 'O.K., you can go to Columbia [University] one day a week.

After the first year [of the show], it'll quiet down.

Your life will go back to normal and you can start going to school.

We can't put it in writing, but we promise you can go.'

So that's why I said, 'O.K. You know what?

When I asked Lively if that arrangement ended up working out (even though I already knew the answer), she responded, laughing: "This is advice to anyone: when they say, 'We promise, but we can't put it in writing,' there's a reason they can't put it in writing."

She added, "But no, the show didn't slow down.

If every generation has its one or two shows that prove defining, that essentially everyone seemed to watch as if there were no other choice in the matter, Gossip Girl—which is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its premiere this September—would be that show for anyone who was a teenager or twentysomething (or, in many cases, older than that!) when it first aired.

The show premiered before Instagram or Snapchat had launched, and before Facebook and Twitter had become the juggernaut forces they are today.

But the premise of the series—an anonymous blogger, who goes by "Gossip Girl," monitors the goings-on of a small group of glamorous Upper East Side high-schoolers—predicted, to an almost eerie extent, what was to come for our culture.

The notion of a group of people being callously gossiped about online by an anonymous troll certainly has resonance in our current climate, in which celebrities (as well as politicians and public figures) are often blogged about with a blithe and biting disregard.

As Kristen Bell, who voiced "Gossip Girl" for the show, said to me, "[Schwartz and Savage] were spearheading: 'What if the Internet is just a place to judge people? What if that's what it turns into?'

(On a meta level, the actors on the show were among the last wave of young television stars who were not broadcasting their every move on social media—which perhaps helped to create a certain air of mystery and intrigue about them, one that doesn't exist in the same way for young television stars now.)

The show also debuted at the very end of the period during which people regularly watched shows live when they aired (as opposed to on their DVRs or laptops or phones).

As Ostroff put it, "It holds such a place in pop culture and in society where people just really say, 'I remember everything around that show.

I remember where I was [when watching it] and what I was doing in my life.'"

Viewers wanted to dress like the characters; they wanted their haircuts and jewelry and ringtones; they wanted to talk like them and listen to the music they listened to.

At some New York City private schools, the show—which featured its lead characters partaking in all sorts of illicit antics—was in fact "banned," which of course only served, in all likelihood, to make the students want to watch it more.

New York magazine featured the (scantily clad) cast of the show on its cover toward the end of the first season, proclaiming in its cover headline (only semi-tongue in cheek), "BEST. SHOW. EVER."

At its core, though, while the fashion and music and Lively-ness of it all no doubt drew a large swath of viewers, the central, relatable dilemmas faced by the main characters—Blair and Serena, as well as Brooklyn "lonely boy" and eventual Serena boyfriend Dan Humphrey, ostentatious bad boy and Blair soul-mate Chuck Bass, and pinup prepster Nate Archibald—were what kept people tuning in.

"Phones get updated, but the inner life of teenagers, and the things that they struggle with, are pretty timeless, regardless of what device they're on," Schwartz said.

At many New York City private schools, the show—which featured its

lead characters partaking in all sorts of illicit antics—was in fact

There was no shortage of high-profile guest stars throughout the run, either, as luminaries from the world of fashion, publishing, music, and art appeared on the series.

Lady Gaga performed "Bad Romance" on the show, right as she was approaching the height of her fame; David O. Russell filmed a multi-episode arc, as, yes, a director.

And, that's right, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner made an appearance, in a club scene filmed at the Boom Boom Room.

("They did it for the money," Schwartz said, with a laugh.)

Trump said in an interview at the time that she never missed an episode of Gossip Girl.

"I think I'm a cross between Blair Waldorf and Lily van der Woodsen when it comes to the style," she told InStyle.

While the show was as zeitgeist-y as zeitgeist-y gets, Gossip Girl never did particularly well in the ratings.

But it has enjoyed a continuing popularity, even 10 years later.

It's currently available on Netflix, where a new generation is discovering the show for the first time.

(Chace Crawford, who played Nate, noted, "It's so weird how the same demographic has been frozen in time.

Fourteen- to 20-year-olds still come up to me freaking out and it's because they binge [the show] on Netflix.")

And in other countries, the show has come to represent the allure and glamour of New York.

Nearly every cast member I spoke with—from Crawford to Wallace Shawn—reported that they, to this day, are regularly stopped by foreigners who recognize them from the show.

Ostroff recalled that, about seven or eight years ago, she had a meeting with Chinese executives, who told her that the most illegally streamed show in China was not C.S.I. or Lost, but Gossip Girl.

During the filming of the pilot in 2007—the cast now assembled in New York—Schwartz and Savage felt confident they had magic on their hands.

In addition to Lively as Serena, they had cast relative unknowns Leighton Meester, Crawford, Penn Badgley, and Ed Westwick as Blair, Nate, Dan, and Chuck, respectively.

Savage remembered an early cast outing as the moment it hit her that things were clicking: "We all went to see Blades of Glory and [we were] walking with them [and thinking], 'I don't know what the rest of the world is going to think, [but] when I see these kids together, I feel excited.'"

The actors felt they were a part of something that could be quite special, as well.

Crawford said he remembers meeting Meester at his audition and thinking, at first, "I just don't see her as Blair Waldorf.

But then she turned around "slyly in her chair," with Blair's soon-to-be-trademark headband on, and she snapped into character.

"I just remember thinking, 'That girl can act.

Schwartz recalled Meester's audition, and her determination to get the part, vividly: "She came in and she was really funny, and really smart and played vulnerable.

But there was one problem: she was blonde.

And Blake was blonde, obviously; Serena had to be blonde.

So, [Leighton] went to the sink and dyed her hair.

Lively said, frankly, she was scared about the attention that was to come.

"I'm actually a very shy person and the idea of losing my anonymity was one that was scary to me," she said.

"I remember saying when I read this script, 'Whoever does this will not be able to walk out of their house ever again and be the same as before they started this.'

You could tell it was a cultural phenomenon.

That was both exciting and thrilling, but also very scary."

(Meester, who actually auditioned first for Serena before telling the producers she felt she was a better fit for Blair, was a bit more blasé in reflecting on the project's beginnings: "I think it was just the normal, typical pilot season audition for me.

I auditioned and then I tested once and then we did a screen test with everybody.

On the precipice of what promised to be great fame, Texas native Crawford and Westwick, a young Brit in America on a work visa, decided to move into a two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea together.

(Schwartz and Savage said they were adamant about casting Westwick, who had initially auditioned to play Nate; when the network asked them to prep a backup in case his visa situation did not work out, the duo refused.)

Before the show had even aired, but after casting had been announced, Westwick and Crawford were already getting swarmed when they ventured out in the wild.

Crawford recalled attending an Arctic Monkeys show with Westwick, where they got a sense of what their future might hold.

"We had these girls coming up to us, and they were kind of freaking out about it: 'Oh, we love the books.'

[Ed and I] kept looking at each other like, shit, man."

The CW moved ahead with the series after seeing the pilot, and Ostroff now says the show was essentially to the CW what House of Cards is seen as for Netflix—the singular series that came to represent an entire network.

While Schwartz and Savage were able to develop an audience over the fall, it was the spring of 2008 that the show really hit its stride, in part thanks to the timing of the writer's strike.

"The CW, because they couldn't just run repeats or game shows, [Gossip Girl is] all they had," Schwartz said.

"They kept re-running the show during the strike so more and more people were watching."

The show's return was preceded by a controversial "OMFG" marketing campaign, featuring stills of the cast in states of undress, with pull quotes saucily warning that the show was, "Every parent's nightmare" and "Mind-blowingly inappropriate."

(Again, what better way to make sure teenagers did whatever it took to watch?)

When the writers returned to craft the new batch of episodes post-strike, "people knew what the show was," executive producer Joshua Safran said.

It was not long before packs of paparazzi were stalking the set, not dissimilar from the way in which "Gossip Girl" and "her" sources snapped Serena and Blair on the show itself—and it was impossible for the cast to so much as walk to set without getting swarmed.

Hairstylist Jennifer Johnson said, "I had a little S.U.V. at the time and I had it parked out front of our location at the school.

There were just so many fans everywhere, and when we wrapped at the end of the day, there were handprints all over my car.

Sam Robards, who played Nate's father, laughed as he remembered what it was like to shoot scenes with Crawford: "It was a Friday night around midnight, and we were up on Fifth Avenue and 95th Street, and I looked across the street and there were, like, 200 kids with cell phones, and I said to Chace, 'Hey buddy, there are 200 kids on a Friday night in the city [here] . . . and they ain't taking my picture.'"

Michelle Trachtenberg, who played impeccably dressed menace Georgina Sparks, said she remembers fans trying to "pet [her] hair" as she made her way through the set: "I opened up my trailer door to see, literally, on my first day, I think 40 paparazzi.

That's when I was like, 'O.K., I need my own bodyguard.'"

Crawford said while he didn't necessarily mind the frenzy at the time, he reflects on it now somewhat differently.

"I think I used to feel like I was fine with it, but looking back on it from a different perspective now, I never really got used to it. . . .

I'm a private person and I don't like being the center of attention."

Meester was somewhat flippant about the initial fan attention: "I think they were mostly there for the guys."

While Sex and the City had blazed the trail for a New York-based show that enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the worlds of fashion and commerce, Gossip Girl set trends for the coveted 18 to 34 demographic in a particularly emphatic way.

"It was very clear from the beginning that we wanted to editorialize television and give it this high-fashion, international flair," costume designer Eric Daman explained.

Savage said, "We talked about how the show, on the one hand, is telling this fictional story about these characters, but it's also kind of working as a lifestyle magazine."

Johnson, who remains close friends with Lively, said she was amazed to see how much interest there was in how Lively's hair was styled, comparing it to Jennifer Aniston's iconic haircut on Friends:

"A lot of magazines would call and want to do interviews on how you get the 'Serena look.' . . .

A 2008 New York Times story noted, "Merchants, designers, and trend consultants say that Gossip Girl . . . is one of the biggest influences on how young women spend," with a Bloomingdale's fashion director explaining that the show had had a "profound influence on retail."

Daman said, "When we came back with Season 2, so many designers were lining up and wanting to be a part of it—they wanted their stuff on either Blake or Leighton."

Daman said the bold looks Westwick's Chuck Bass, ostensibly the show's romantic male lead, wore on the show—which involved purple suits, patterned handkerchiefs, and bowler hats—had a profound impact on the marketplace, as well.

"I think because he was a Brit and had a different understanding of clothing and what it means, he was game day one," Daman said.

"He had a very big influence on menswear and how men dress today, and on what getting dressed up means.

Menswear, at that point, was still very Jersey Shore.

I'm very proud we got to break through to the men and be like, 'No, it's O.K. to dress up.

You're not gonna look like some big pansy because you're in a fucking suit, dude.

While men may have taken fashion cues from the show, they perhaps gleaned other recreational benefits from it as well.

Zuzanna Szadkowski, who played Blair's housekeeper (a fan-favorite character), said she remembers "a guy coming up to me who had a suit and a briefcase, this total Wall Street Guy, and he was all like, 'Oh my god, Dorota!'

He told me, and a couple of other guys have told me this, too, that they used to watch the show because it was a great way in with the ladies."

While the tabloids may have desperately hoped for some Lively-Meester on-set friction, this, by all first-hand accounts from those involved with the show, was not the case—though, god knows, that did not stop the tabloids from conjuring such tales.

"It's funny," Trachtenberg said, "Because when we were filming, there was, 'Leighton hates Blake, Blake hates Leighton, everyone hates Blake, everyone hates Leighton, everyone hates Chace,' and blah, blah, blah.

Makeup artist Amy Tagliamonti explained, "I have to say there was too much work to do for things to be that dramatic behind the scenes.

It's not like [the actors] were trying to get followers for Instagram; nobody was trying to do all the things that I feel like people do now, like, 'Let's get attention.'

Safran—who was Savage and Schwartz's second-in-command and who wrote nearly every premiere and finale of the series—had this to say about the two leading ladies: "Blake is very much in the moment.

She knows this movie's coming out, this band is happening.

You talk to Blake on a very contemporary level, and she would be like, 'I'm doing this thing tonight.

Leighton was very removed and very quiet, and, after her scenes were done, she would wander the stage.

I had this image of her just in these gorgeous dresses with a book in her hand, sort of a little bit out of focus out in the corners."

But even though they may have had different demeanors, the two got along just fine on set: "Blake and Leighton were not friends.

They were friendly, but they were not friends like Serena and Blair.

Yet the second they'd be on set together, it's as if they were."

Lively's life ended up mirroring and then eclipsing that of Serena, the character she was playing.

"It was funny," Schwartz said, "When we first started talking to Blake, it was like, in order for this show to work and for you to be the ultimate New Yorker, you're going to have to host Saturday Night Live and be in a Woody Allen movie."

"And be on the cover of Rolling Stone," Savage added.

(Lively has by now checked all three of these achievements off her list.)

When Lively first appeared on the cover of Vogue, Schwartz remembers thinking, "Oh my god, this is . . . Blair's nightmare.

It really felt like life imitating art."

Costume designer Daman noted, recalling Lively "running around on Christian Louboutin's moped" when they filmed a few episodes of the series in Paris: "I feel like Serena and Blake definitely had a symbiotic relationship: in their lives and in the show."

From left: by James Devaney/WireImage, by Justin Campbell/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic, by Jeffrey Ufberg/WireImage, by Justin Campbell/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic.

For the first few seasons of the show, Lively was dating Badgley—their characters dated on the show, as well—but the two were careful to keep the relationship largely hidden from the public eye.

"The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before," Safran said.

"They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now.

They kept it from everybody which is a testament to how good they are as actors.

Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show."

Lively said she now sees that those in power likely were thrilled about the fact that her personal life was receiving as much attention as it was.

"Stepping back from it, I can see it," she said.

"But I remember there was one point where we were just afraid of how our personal lives overlapping our work life could be perceived by our bosses.

[But then] we were like, 'Oh no, that's exactly what they want.'

They wanted us all to wear the same clothes that we're wearing on the show.

They wanted that, because then it fed their whole narrative.

I asked Lively if it was ever surreal or strange to have her own life seemingly bleed into Serena's and vice versa.

She responded emphatically that, in fact, playing Serena only clarified for the actress how much her real life was not like her character's.

"At the time," Lively says, "I was wearing the same clothes and doing fashion shoots, and dating the same person that my character was dating—or sometimes that person [Dan] was my brother, you never know with Serena—and because of that, what people were projecting onto me was that I was Serena . . .

We look the same, and we acted the same as far as they could tell, because I wasn't doing anything but that show.

If [Badgley and I] were photographed walking down the street, they didn't know if it was a paparazzi shot or if it was a shot from the show. . . .

At the time, what was heightened was, wow, it all looks similar from the outside, but it's so different on the inside."

Badgley—who declined to be interviewed for this piece—has spoken publicly, since the show ended, about his displeasure with aspects of the series.

"Penn didn't like being on Gossip Girl, but . . . he was Dan.

He may not have liked it, but [his character] was the closest to who he was," Safran said, in reference to Badgley's sardonic, outsider, Brooklyn-dwelling character.

Towards the close of the show's run, as might be expected for any television show producing 20 or more episodes almost every year and featuring a slew of gorgeous young stars with an increasing number of career options, the cast became restless.

Meester was pursuing a pop music career on the side.

Taylor Momsen—who played rebellious Jenny Humphrey—left the show to record and tour with her rock band, the Pretty Reckless.

(Kelly Rutherford, who played Serena's mom, remembered: "You'd walk by the dressing rooms and everyone would be doing their music.")

"Some of the actors were not entirely happy to be there after a certain point," Safran explained.

"And no matter what we did, they were never going be happy. . . . They were kids.

Billy Baldwin, who played Serena's father, recounted Lively getting a call from set one day informing her she'd been offered a movie role opposite Billy's brother Alec.

"She goes, 'Yeah, he's gonna play my husband.'

And I said, 'So in what universe is it just or right or fair that he plays your husband and I play your father?'

And she started laughing and said, 'That makes you Alec's father-in-law.'

And I was like, 'Say that again and I'm gonna stab you with a pen or something. Or, like, break your kneecap.'"

Lively asked for the show to shift production to Los Angeles while she filmed the 2012 movie Savages, directed by Oliver Stone.

She began dating Leonardo DiCaprio, which also—inadvertently, thanks to her innovative means of communication with the actor—came to influence the content of the show itself.

"We learned a lot from Blake," Safran said.

"When I think about shooting the L.A. episodes, Blake was dating [DiCaprio] at the time, and she had this thing where she had a doll that she took photos of that she sent to Leo.

She was documenting her life in photographs in a way that people were not yet doing."

Lively herself said that she doesn't think of her work on the show so much like acting as she does being part of a machine.

"It didn't really feel like acting as much . . .

It felt like we were in the center of a marketing machine, a cultural pop phenomenon.

We were creating three episodes at once sometimes, we were given our lines at the very last minute, we didn't know where our characters were going; there was no planning or arc. . . .

We were basically sort of reading off of cue cards.

There were people taking pictures the whole time and paparazzi jumping in front of the cameras—it felt like we were part of a cultural experiment."

She concluded, with a very Lively graceful landing, "There was something neat about that."

"It didn't really feel like acting as much . . . It felt like we were

in the center of a marketing machine, a cultural pop phenomenon."

While the interest in the show from the actors may have been waning by the show's end, there was still enough for Russian hackers—again, Gossip Girl very ahead of the curve!—to attempt to infiltrate the show's database in the fourth season.

"All season, our scripts were ending up online, and we couldn't figure out how," one of the producers on the series explained.

We didn't understand what was happening, because everything was getting leaked, every detail. . . .

A teenager, I think either [from] Russia or Bulgaria, had hacked one of the writer's e-mails, and was selling scripts on eBay.

But they were underage, so they couldn't be prosecuted.

We would have to print on red paper. . . .

It was like there was a 'Gossip Girl' in our system."

As it turned out—spoiler alert, if you're one of those people working your way through the series for the first time now on Netflix—"Gossip Girl," on the show, was revealed in the series finale to be Badgley's character, Dan Humphrey, a decision that was seen as somewhat controversial, given it was tough to work out logistically how Dan would have been able to maintain the blog.

(Both Nate and Eric van der Woodsen, Serena's brother, had been considered as potential "Gossip Girls" by the writers earlier in the show's run.)

Someone should let Ed Westwick know about the Dan reveal, though.

The actor e-mailed me, in response to a question about favorite plotlines or memories from filming: "I still am not sure who GG was lol."

The last episode of Gossip Girl aired in 2012, but the show's continued relevance means that there is talk about revisiting the franchise.

Many of the cast members seem quite excited by the notion.

Wallace Shawn—who played Blair's stepfather, Cyrus Rose—practically shouted, "Oh, I would jump at it."

Rutherford said, "I would be completely on board.

I'm open to anything that's good, that's interesting, and that sort of feels necessary. . . .

I can't speak for everyone else, but we all owe so much to this show, and I think that it would be silly not to acknowledge that."

(Aside from Lively, the other young cast members have had trouble finding traction with film roles since the show's end.)

When I asked Meester if she would ever want to revisit the character of Blair now, given rumors of a reboot or reunion, she responded, deadpan, "Yeah, I don't really hear [talk of] that . . .

I guess I hear that in fits and starts here and there, but it's hard to say.

If everyone was into it and if the timing was right, you know?" She trailed off, "I don't want to say, 'No, never . . .'"

Schwartz and Savage told me they think they "could be persuaded [to revisit the world of Gossip Girl] if there were new stories to tell."

New Line briefly flirted with producing a "new version" of the franchise as a film, though it has not moved forward.

Von Ziegesar, who wrote the Gossip Girl books, told me that she would love to see a take of Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer, a horror adaptation she published in 2002 based on her original installment (in this version, "Serena comes back from boarding school to kill everyone").

At one point during my conversation with Safran—which took place in the very thematically appropriate King Cole Bar at the St. Regis hotel—he said that "the saddest thing that has happened is that network television has decided that it is not important to tell aspirational stories."

He assessed, "Every show on any television network right now has a murder in it, or is dour.

We were working [on Gossip Girl] feeling like, 'O.K., this is the beginning of something,' and when I look back on it, it was almost like the end of something, actually."

Full ScreenPhotos:1/12Blake Lively Had a Truly Excellent 2016

The year began for Lively with the release of the movie her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had fought to make for years, Deadpool.

The film would go on to be nominated for two Golden Globes in December and become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.

Photo: By Dave Alloca/StarPix/Rex/Shutterstock.

We came to Lively's defense earlier this year, when it was reported that she had—quite unjustly—been asked to uncross her legs at a fashion show.

We will reiterate here: if Blake Lively wants to come to your fashion show, you should just emanate thankfulness, bow your head in the direction of the Serena van der Woodsen poster in your office, and then let her sit however she damn pleases.

Photo: By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.

Lively and Reynolds attended a state dinner in March where they met the Canadian prime minster, Justin Trudeau.

Photo: By Andrew Harnik/A.P. Images/Rex/Shutterstock.

Few provide the Met Ball red carpet with as much "Look. At. Me" glamour—usually with a touch of Old Hollywood—these days as Lively does.

If you have never seen this photo before, well, we don't know what to say to you.

This is Lively (pregnant at the time), and, yes, the squad led by Taylor Swift, in the ocean off Rhode Island over July Fourth.

Lively joked on air with Jimmy Fallon that her daughter James believed that Fallon was her dad, due to some confusion related to a Fallon cardboard cutout in their home.

Lively and Reynolds brought out two-year-old daughter James, and their younger daughter Ines, born this fall, for Reynolds's Walk of Fame ceremony and their first public appearances.

Photo: By Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images.

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Career.:2007–2012: "Gossip Girl" and music ventures.

In 2007, Meester was cast in The CW's teen drama series "Gossip Girl" as Blair Waldorf, based on the book series of the same name by Cecily von Ziegesar. She first auditioned for the role of Serena van der Woodsen, but told the producers that she could better play Blair.


Meester dyed her hair brown for the role.

(meta data) TITLE: Gossip Girl 10 Years Later: Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, and More Reflect on the Zeitgeist They Created | Vanity Fair

(meta data) COPYRIGHT: Copyright (c) Condé Nast 2017

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: August 30, 2017 7:00 AM

Organization: Internet Archive Global Events

This is a collection of websites, news articles, advisories, social media feeds, and other online materials related to Hurricane, later Tropical Storm, Harvey in 2017.

To add to this collection, please use the following contribution form: https://goo.gl/forms/PKvXnR3Zc59QzBU12 / / Esta es una colección de sitios web, artículos de prensa, avisos oficiales, feeds de las redes sociales y otros materiales en línea relacionados con el huracán, y luego clasificado como tormenta tropical, Harvey en 2017.

Para agregar a esta colección, utilice el siguiente formulario de contribución: https://goo.gl/forms/VrD0Y0Ixsr2pwQks1 / / Translations by Ana D. Rodriguez and Natalie Baur.

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20170830235955/https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/08/gossip-girl-ten-year-anniversary

You Know You Love MeWhen Gossip Girl Ruled the WorldA decade ago this fall, just as social media was fracturing pop culture into a million pieces, a pair of sophomore show-runners, a start-up network, and a cast of barely of-age millennials aligned to capture one last old-fashioned teenage zeitgeist.

On the tenth anniversary of the CW's flagship series, Gossip Girl 's actors, producers, and crew members reflect on the frenzy, contemplate the series's lasting impact, and, yes, dish on its on-set dramas.

XOXO . . .by Josh DuboffGossip Girl cast members Jessica Szohr, Penn Badgley, Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Leighton Meester, and Taylor Momsen, photographed by Mark Seliger in Coney Island for V.F.'s August 2008 issue.

The blonde Tarzana, California, native—who, one imagines, leaves a trail of sunflower emojis and the scent of cupcake icing in her wake wherever she goes—had had enough.

Eighteen years old at the time, she had just appeared in a small independent film and come to a crushing conclusion:

"I realized that [acting] was a business as much as a craft," she told me more than a decade after the fact, while on the West Coast, where her husband, Ryan Reynolds, was about to start shooting Deadpool 2.

"People will go see your movie based on your standing and all of that, and it didn't make sense to me because I was 18 and being an artist."

She decided, having deferred from college a year earlier, that she would jump off the Hollywood carousel and enroll in school.

It was at about this time, in 2007, that The O.C., a prime-time soap opera about beautiful, articulate, sun-kissed teenagers living in Orange County, was wrapping up its four-year run.

The show had arrived on the scene with a tidal wave of buzz, its actors almost immediately splashed on magazine covers and pushed out onto red carpets; but after burning through plot at a rapid pace (its leading lady, Mischa Barton, saw her character get killed off somewhat unceremoniously in the third season), the show sputtered to a close, ending with a truncated final season.

But The O.C.'s creators and show-runners, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, already had the beaches of Newport in their rearview mirror, with their sights on a next project.

They had been sent Cecily von Ziegesar's popular Gossip Girl book series, centered on a group of affluent, conniving New York private-school students.

As soon as they finished reading the first book, the duo knew this was it.

"We learned a lot of lessons [on The O.C.] and its kind of crazy four-year run that we wanted to take and apply to something moving forward, and we were really excited about doing something in New York," Schwartz said over lunch in Los Angeles this past winter.

Meanwhile, a new television network, the CW, was simultaneously in the midst of a delicate birthing process.

Formed by the union of the WB and UPN, the new network—led by then President of Entertainment Dawn Ostroff—was searching for an identity.

"We knew we needed the defining show," Ostroff (currently president of Condé Nast Entertainment) said.

"You have to sort of catch the wind at your back.

You have to really hit something that's in the zeitgeist, or really going to matter to people in a way that becomes an emotional connection.

And it was even more difficult for us, because we were going after a younger, more finicky audience."

It was a perfect storm: a buzzy property, a hot creative team, and a new network.

The official green light was a mere formality: Schwartz and Savage were off to the races.

Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Blake Lively, and Penn Badgley, at a gala at Cipriani Wall Street in October 2008.

Photograph by BILLY FARRELL/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images.

There were two core figures at the center of the books—Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen—and casting them was at the top of Schwartz and Savage's agenda.

Waldorf is a brunette queen bee—controlling, poised, meticulous.

Van der Woodsen, by contrast, is the blonde, effortlessly cool free spirit.

Blair, the Veronica, inspires fear; Serena, the Betty, inspires envy.

When they started to cast the show, Savage and Schwartz looked at online message boards, where fans of the book series had already decided that Lively—known at this point primarily for her role in 2005's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—would be the perfect Serena.

"We didn't see a lot of other girls for Serena," Schwartz said.

"She has to be somebody that you believe would be sitting in the front row at Fashion Week eventually."

Then they said, 'O.K., you can go to Columbia [University] one day a week.

After the first year [of the show], it'll quiet down.

Your life will go back to normal and you can start going to school.

We can't put it in writing, but we promise you can go.'

So that's why I said, 'O.K. You know what?

When I asked Lively if that arrangement ended up working out (even though I already knew the answer), she responded, laughing: "This is advice to anyone: when they say, 'We promise, but we can't put it in writing,' there's a reason they can't put it in writing."

She added, "But no, the show didn't slow down.

If every generation has its one or two shows that prove defining, that essentially everyone seemed to watch as if there were no other choice in the matter, Gossip Girl—which is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its premiere this September—would be that show for anyone who was a teenager or twentysomething (or, in many cases, older than that!) when it first aired.

The show premiered before Instagram or Snapchat had launched, and before Facebook and Twitter had become the juggernaut forces they are today.

But the premise of the series—an anonymous blogger, who goes by "Gossip Girl," monitors the goings-on of a small group of glamorous Upper East Side high-schoolers—predicted, to an almost eerie extent, what was to come for our culture.

The notion of a group of people being callously gossiped about online by an anonymous troll certainly has resonance in our current climate, in which celebrities (as well as politicians and public figures) are often blogged about with a blithe and biting disregard.

As Kristen Bell, who voiced "Gossip Girl" for the show, said to me, "[Schwartz and Savage] were spearheading: 'What if the Internet is just a place to judge people? What if that's what it turns into?'

(On a meta level, the actors on the show were among the last wave of young television stars who were not broadcasting their every move on social media—which perhaps helped to create a certain air of mystery and intrigue about them, one that doesn't exist in the same way for young television stars now.)

The show also debuted at the very end of the period during which people regularly watched shows live when they aired (as opposed to on their DVRs or laptops or phones).

As Ostroff put it, "It holds such a place in pop culture and in society where people just really say, 'I remember everything around that show.

I remember where I was [when watching it] and what I was doing in my life.'"

Viewers wanted to dress like the characters; they wanted their haircuts and jewelry and ringtones; they wanted to talk like them and listen to the music they listened to.

At some New York City private schools, the show—which featured its lead characters partaking in all sorts of illicit antics—was in fact "banned," which of course only served, in all likelihood, to make the students want to watch it more.

New York magazine featured the (scantily clad) cast of the show on its cover toward the end of the first season, proclaiming in its cover headline (only semi-tongue in cheek), "BEST. SHOW. EVER."

At its core, though, while the fashion and music and Lively-ness of it all no doubt drew a large swath of viewers, the central, relatable dilemmas faced by the main characters—Blair and Serena, as well as Brooklyn "lonely boy" and eventual Serena boyfriend Dan Humphrey, ostentatious bad boy and Blair soul-mate Chuck Bass, and pinup prepster Nate Archibald—were what kept people tuning in.

"Phones get updated, but the inner life of teenagers, and the things that they struggle with, are pretty timeless, regardless of what device they're on," Schwartz said.

At many New York City private schools, the show—which featured its

lead characters partaking in all sorts of illicit antics—was in fact

There was no shortage of high-profile guest stars throughout the run, either, as luminaries from the world of fashion, publishing, music, and art appeared on the series.

Lady Gaga performed "Bad Romance" on the show, right as she was approaching the height of her fame; David O. Russell filmed a multi-episode arc, as, yes, a director.

And, that's right, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner made an appearance, in a club scene filmed at the Boom Boom Room.

("They did it for the money," Schwartz said, with a laugh.)

Trump said in an interview at the time that she never missed an episode of Gossip Girl.

"I think I'm a cross between Blair Waldorf and Lily van der Woodsen when it comes to the style," she told InStyle.

While the show was as zeitgeist-y as zeitgeist-y gets, Gossip Girl never did particularly well in the ratings.

But it has enjoyed a continuing popularity, even 10 years later.

It's currently available on Netflix, where a new generation is discovering the show for the first time.

(Chace Crawford, who played Nate, noted, "It's so weird how the same demographic has been frozen in time.

Fourteen- to 20-year-olds still come up to me freaking out and it's because they binge [the show] on Netflix.")

And in other countries, the show has come to represent the allure and glamour of New York.

Nearly every cast member I spoke with—from Crawford to Wallace Shawn—reported that they, to this day, are regularly stopped by foreigners who recognize them from the show.

Ostroff recalled that, about seven or eight years ago, she had a meeting with Chinese executives, who told her that the most illegally streamed show in China was not C.S.I. or Lost, but Gossip Girl.

During the filming of the pilot in 2007—the cast now assembled in New York—Schwartz and Savage felt confident they had magic on their hands.

In addition to Lively as Serena, they had cast relative unknowns Leighton Meester, Crawford, Penn Badgley, and Ed Westwick as Blair, Nate, Dan, and Chuck, respectively.

Savage remembered an early cast outing as the moment it hit her that things were clicking: "We all went to see Blades of Glory and [we were] walking with them [and thinking], 'I don't know what the rest of the world is going to think, [but] when I see these kids together, I feel excited.'"

The actors felt they were a part of something that could be quite special, as well.

Crawford said he remembers meeting Meester at his audition and thinking, at first, "I just don't see her as Blair Waldorf.

But then she turned around "slyly in her chair," with Blair's soon-to-be-trademark headband on, and she snapped into character.

"I just remember thinking, 'That girl can act.

Schwartz recalled Meester's audition, and her determination to get the part, vividly: "She came in and she was really funny, and really smart and played vulnerable.

But there was one problem: she was blonde.

And Blake was blonde, obviously; Serena had to be blonde.

So, [Leighton] went to the sink and dyed her hair.

Lively said, frankly, she was scared about the attention that was to come.

"I'm actually a very shy person and the idea of losing my anonymity was one that was scary to me," she said.

"I remember saying when I read this script, 'Whoever does this will not be able to walk out of their house ever again and be the same as before they started this.'

You could tell it was a cultural phenomenon.

That was both exciting and thrilling, but also very scary."

(Meester, who actually auditioned first for Serena before telling the producers she felt she was a better fit for Blair, was a bit more blasé in reflecting on the project's beginnings: "I think it was just the normal, typical pilot season audition for me.

I auditioned and then I tested once and then we did a screen test with everybody.

On the precipice of what promised to be great fame, Texas native Crawford and Westwick, a young Brit in America on a work visa, decided to move into a two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea together.

(Schwartz and Savage said they were adamant about casting Westwick, who had initially auditioned to play Nate; when the network asked them to prep a backup in case his visa situation did not work out, the duo refused.)

Before the show had even aired, but after casting had been announced, Westwick and Crawford were already getting swarmed when they ventured out in the wild.

Crawford recalled attending an Arctic Monkeys show with Westwick, where they got a sense of what their future might hold.

"We had these girls coming up to us, and they were kind of freaking out about it: 'Oh, we love the books.'

[Ed and I] kept looking at each other like, shit, man."

The CW moved ahead with the series after seeing the pilot, and Ostroff now says the show was essentially to the CW what House of Cards is seen as for Netflix—the singular series that came to represent an entire network.

While Schwartz and Savage were able to develop an audience over the fall, it was the spring of 2008 that the show really hit its stride, in part thanks to the timing of the writer's strike.

"The CW, because they couldn't just run repeats or game shows, [Gossip Girl is] all they had," Schwartz said.

"They kept re-running the show during the strike so more and more people were watching."

The show's return was preceded by a controversial "OMFG" marketing campaign, featuring stills of the cast in states of undress, with pull quotes saucily warning that the show was, "Every parent's nightmare" and "Mind-blowingly inappropriate."

(Again, what better way to make sure teenagers did whatever it took to watch?)

When the writers returned to craft the new batch of episodes post-strike, "people knew what the show was," executive producer Joshua Safran said.

It was not long before packs of paparazzi were stalking the set, not dissimilar from the way in which "Gossip Girl" and "her" sources snapped Serena and Blair on the show itself—and it was impossible for the cast to so much as walk to set without getting swarmed.

Hairstylist Jennifer Johnson said, "I had a little S.U.V. at the time and I had it parked out front of our location at the school.

There were just so many fans everywhere, and when we wrapped at the end of the day, there were handprints all over my car.

Sam Robards, who played Nate's father, laughed as he remembered what it was like to shoot scenes with Crawford: "It was a Friday night around midnight, and we were up on Fifth Avenue and 95th Street, and I looked across the street and there were, like, 200 kids with cell phones, and I said to Chace, 'Hey buddy, there are 200 kids on a Friday night in the city [here] . . . and they ain't taking my picture.'"

Michelle Trachtenberg, who played impeccably dressed menace Georgina Sparks, said she remembers fans trying to "pet [her] hair" as she made her way through the set: "I opened up my trailer door to see, literally, on my first day, I think 40 paparazzi.

That's when I was like, 'O.K., I need my own bodyguard.'"

Crawford said while he didn't necessarily mind the frenzy at the time, he reflects on it now somewhat differently.

"I think I used to feel like I was fine with it, but looking back on it from a different perspective now, I never really got used to it. . . .

I'm a private person and I don't like being the center of attention."

Meester was somewhat flippant about the initial fan attention: "I think they were mostly there for the guys."

While Sex and the City had blazed the trail for a New York-based show that enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the worlds of fashion and commerce, Gossip Girl set trends for the coveted 18 to 34 demographic in a particularly emphatic way.

"It was very clear from the beginning that we wanted to editorialize television and give it this high-fashion, international flair," costume designer Eric Daman explained.

Savage said, "We talked about how the show, on the one hand, is telling this fictional story about these characters, but it's also kind of working as a lifestyle magazine."

Johnson, who remains close friends with Lively, said she was amazed to see how much interest there was in how Lively's hair was styled, comparing it to Jennifer Aniston's iconic haircut on Friends:

"A lot of magazines would call and want to do interviews on how you get the 'Serena look.' . . .

A 2008 New York Times story noted, "Merchants, designers, and trend consultants say that Gossip Girl . . . is one of the biggest influences on how young women spend," with a Bloomingdale's fashion director explaining that the show had had a "profound influence on retail."

Daman said, "When we came back with Season 2, so many designers were lining up and wanting to be a part of it—they wanted their stuff on either Blake or Leighton."

Daman said the bold looks Westwick's Chuck Bass, ostensibly the show's romantic male lead, wore on the show—which involved purple suits, patterned handkerchiefs, and bowler hats—had a profound impact on the marketplace, as well.

"I think because he was a Brit and had a different understanding of clothing and what it means, he was game day one," Daman said.

"He had a very big influence on menswear and how men dress today, and on what getting dressed up means.

Menswear, at that point, was still very Jersey Shore.

I'm very proud we got to break through to the men and be like, 'No, it's O.K. to dress up.

You're not gonna look like some big pansy because you're in a fucking suit, dude.

While men may have taken fashion cues from the show, they perhaps gleaned other recreational benefits from it as well.

Zuzanna Szadkowski, who played Blair's housekeeper (a fan-favorite character), said she remembers "a guy coming up to me who had a suit and a briefcase, this total Wall Street Guy, and he was all like, 'Oh my god, Dorota!'

He told me, and a couple of other guys have told me this, too, that they used to watch the show because it was a great way in with the ladies."

While the tabloids may have desperately hoped for some Lively-Meester on-set friction, this, by all first-hand accounts from those involved with the show, was not the case—though, god knows, that did not stop the tabloids from conjuring such tales.

"It's funny," Trachtenberg said, "Because when we were filming, there was, 'Leighton hates Blake, Blake hates Leighton, everyone hates Blake, everyone hates Leighton, everyone hates Chace,' and blah, blah, blah.

Makeup artist Amy Tagliamonti explained, "I have to say there was too much work to do for things to be that dramatic behind the scenes.

It's not like [the actors] were trying to get followers for Instagram; nobody was trying to do all the things that I feel like people do now, like, 'Let's get attention.'

Safran—who was Savage and Schwartz's second-in-command and who wrote nearly every premiere and finale of the series—had this to say about the two leading ladies: "Blake is very much in the moment.

She knows this movie's coming out, this band is happening.

You talk to Blake on a very contemporary level, and she would be like, 'I'm doing this thing tonight.

Leighton was very removed and very quiet, and, after her scenes were done, she would wander the stage.

I had this image of her just in these gorgeous dresses with a book in her hand, sort of a little bit out of focus out in the corners."

But even though they may have had different demeanors, the two got along just fine on set: "Blake and Leighton were not friends.

They were friendly, but they were not friends like Serena and Blair.

Yet the second they'd be on set together, it's as if they were."

Lively's life ended up mirroring and then eclipsing that of Serena, the character she was playing.

"It was funny," Schwartz said, "When we first started talking to Blake, it was like, in order for this show to work and for you to be the ultimate New Yorker, you're going to have to host Saturday Night Live and be in a Woody Allen movie."

"And be on the cover of Rolling Stone," Savage added.

(Lively has by now checked all three of these achievements off her list.)

When Lively first appeared on the cover of Vogue, Schwartz remembers thinking, "Oh my god, this is . . . Blair's nightmare.

It really felt like life imitating art."

Costume designer Daman noted, recalling Lively "running around on Christian Louboutin's moped" when they filmed a few episodes of the series in Paris: "I feel like Serena and Blake definitely had a symbiotic relationship: in their lives and in the show."

From left: by James Devaney/WireImage, by Justin Campbell/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic, by Jeffrey Ufberg/WireImage, by Justin Campbell/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic.

For the first few seasons of the show, Lively was dating Badgley—their characters dated on the show, as well—but the two were careful to keep the relationship largely hidden from the public eye.

"The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before," Safran said.

"They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now.

They kept it from everybody which is a testament to how good they are as actors.

Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show."

Lively said she now sees that those in power likely were thrilled about the fact that her personal life was receiving as much attention as it was.

"Stepping back from it, I can see it," she said.

"But I remember there was one point where we were just afraid of how our personal lives overlapping our work life could be perceived by our bosses.

[But then] we were like, 'Oh no, that's exactly what they want.'

They wanted us all to wear the same clothes that we're wearing on the show.

They wanted that, because then it fed their whole narrative.

I asked Lively if it was ever surreal or strange to have her own life seemingly bleed into Serena's and vice versa.

She responded emphatically that, in fact, playing Serena only clarified for the actress how much her real life was not like her character's.

"At the time," Lively says, "I was wearing the same clothes and doing fashion shoots, and dating the same person that my character was dating—or sometimes that person [Dan] was my brother, you never know with Serena—and because of that, what people were projecting onto me was that I was Serena . . .

We look the same, and we acted the same as far as they could tell, because I wasn't doing anything but that show.

If [Badgley and I] were photographed walking down the street, they didn't know if it was a paparazzi shot or if it was a shot from the show. . . .

At the time, what was heightened was, wow, it all looks similar from the outside, but it's so different on the inside."

Badgley—who declined to be interviewed for this piece—has spoken publicly, since the show ended, about his displeasure with aspects of the series.

"Penn didn't like being on Gossip Girl, but . . . he was Dan.

He may not have liked it, but [his character] was the closest to who he was," Safran said, in reference to Badgley's sardonic, outsider, Brooklyn-dwelling character.

Towards the close of the show's run, as might be expected for any television show producing 20 or more episodes almost every year and featuring a slew of gorgeous young stars with an increasing number of career options, the cast became restless.

Meester was pursuing a pop music career on the side.

Taylor Momsen—who played rebellious Jenny Humphrey—left the show to record and tour with her rock band, the Pretty Reckless.

(Kelly Rutherford, who played Serena's mom, remembered: "You'd walk by the dressing rooms and everyone would be doing their music.")

"Some of the actors were not entirely happy to be there after a certain point," Safran explained.

"And no matter what we did, they were never going be happy. . . . They were kids.

Billy Baldwin, who played Serena's father, recounted Lively getting a call from set one day informing her she'd been offered a movie role opposite Billy's brother Alec.

"She goes, 'Yeah, he's gonna play my husband.'

And I said, 'So in what universe is it just or right or fair that he plays your husband and I play your father?'

And she started laughing and said, 'That makes you Alec's father-in-law.'

And I was like, 'Say that again and I'm gonna stab you with a pen or something. Or, like, break your kneecap.'"

Lively asked for the show to shift production to Los Angeles while she filmed the 2012 movie Savages, directed by Oliver Stone.

She began dating Leonardo DiCaprio, which also—inadvertently, thanks to her innovative means of communication with the actor—came to influence the content of the show itself.

"We learned a lot from Blake," Safran said.

"When I think about shooting the L.A. episodes, Blake was dating [DiCaprio] at the time, and she had this thing where she had a doll that she took photos of that she sent to Leo.

She was documenting her life in photographs in a way that people were not yet doing."

Lively herself said that she doesn't think of her work on the show so much like acting as she does being part of a machine.

"It didn't really feel like acting as much . . .

It felt like we were in the center of a marketing machine, a cultural pop phenomenon.

We were creating three episodes at once sometimes, we were given our lines at the very last minute, we didn't know where our characters were going; there was no planning or arc. . . .

We were basically sort of reading off of cue cards.

There were people taking pictures the whole time and paparazzi jumping in front of the cameras—it felt like we were part of a cultural experiment."

She concluded, with a very Lively graceful landing, "There was something neat about that."

"It didn't really feel like acting as much . . . It felt like we were

in the center of a marketing machine, a cultural pop phenomenon."

While the interest in the show from the actors may have been waning by the show's end, there was still enough for Russian hackers—again, Gossip Girl very ahead of the curve!—to attempt to infiltrate the show's database in the fourth season.

"All season, our scripts were ending up online, and we couldn't figure out how," one of the producers on the series explained.

We didn't understand what was happening, because everything was getting leaked, every detail. . . .

A teenager, I think either [from] Russia or Bulgaria, had hacked one of the writer's e-mails, and was selling scripts on eBay.

But they were underage, so they couldn't be prosecuted.

We would have to print on red paper. . . .

It was like there was a 'Gossip Girl' in our system."

As it turned out—spoiler alert, if you're one of those people working your way through the series for the first time now on Netflix—"Gossip Girl," on the show, was revealed in the series finale to be Badgley's character, Dan Humphrey, a decision that was seen as somewhat controversial, given it was tough to work out logistically how Dan would have been able to maintain the blog.

(Both Nate and Eric van der Woodsen, Serena's brother, had been considered as potential "Gossip Girls" by the writers earlier in the show's run.)

Someone should let Ed Westwick know about the Dan reveal, though.

The actor e-mailed me, in response to a question about favorite plotlines or memories from filming: "I still am not sure who GG was lol."

The last episode of Gossip Girl aired in 2012, but the show's continued relevance means that there is talk about revisiting the franchise.

Many of the cast members seem quite excited by the notion.

Wallace Shawn—who played Blair's stepfather, Cyrus Rose—practically shouted, "Oh, I would jump at it."

Rutherford said, "I would be completely on board.

I'm open to anything that's good, that's interesting, and that sort of feels necessary. . . .

I can't speak for everyone else, but we all owe so much to this show, and I think that it would be silly not to acknowledge that."

(Aside from Lively, the other young cast members have had trouble finding traction with film roles since the show's end.)

When I asked Meester if she would ever want to revisit the character of Blair now, given rumors of a reboot or reunion, she responded, deadpan, "Yeah, I don't really hear [talk of] that . . .

I guess I hear that in fits and starts here and there, but it's hard to say.

If everyone was into it and if the timing was right, you know?" She trailed off, "I don't want to say, 'No, never . . .'"

Schwartz and Savage told me they think they "could be persuaded [to revisit the world of Gossip Girl] if there were new stories to tell."

New Line briefly flirted with producing a "new version" of the franchise as a film, though it has not moved forward.

Von Ziegesar, who wrote the Gossip Girl books, told me that she would love to see a take of Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer, a horror adaptation she published in 2002 based on her original installment (in this version, "Serena comes back from boarding school to kill everyone").

At one point during my conversation with Safran—which took place in the very thematically appropriate King Cole Bar at the St. Regis hotel—he said that "the saddest thing that has happened is that network television has decided that it is not important to tell aspirational stories."

He assessed, "Every show on any television network right now has a murder in it, or is dour.

We were working [on Gossip Girl] feeling like, 'O.K., this is the beginning of something,' and when I look back on it, it was almost like the end of something, actually."

Full ScreenPhotos:1/12Blake Lively Had a Truly Excellent 2016

The year began for Lively with the release of the movie her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had fought to make for years, Deadpool.

The film would go on to be nominated for two Golden Globes in December and become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.

Photo: By Dave Alloca/StarPix/Rex/Shutterstock.

We came to Lively's defense earlier this year, when it was reported that she had—quite unjustly—been asked to uncross her legs at a fashion show.

We will reiterate here: if Blake Lively wants to come to your fashion show, you should just emanate thankfulness, bow your head in the direction of the Serena van der Woodsen poster in your office, and then let her sit however she damn pleases.

Photo: By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.

Lively and Reynolds attended a state dinner in March where they met the Canadian prime minster, Justin Trudeau.

Photo: By Andrew Harnik/A.P. Images/Rex/Shutterstock.

Few provide the Met Ball red carpet with as much "Look. At. Me" glamour—usually with a touch of Old Hollywood—these days as Lively does.

If you have never seen this photo before, well, we don't know what to say to you.

This is Lively (pregnant at the time), and, yes, the squad led by Taylor Swift, in the ocean off Rhode Island over July Fourth.

Lively joked on air with Jimmy Fallon that her daughter James believed that Fallon was her dad, due to some confusion related to a Fallon cardboard cutout in their home.

Lively and Reynolds brought out two-year-old daughter James, and their younger daughter Ines, born this fall, for Reynolds's Walk of Fame ceremony and their first public appearances.

Photo: By Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images.

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In 2007, Meester was cast in The CW's teen drama series "Gossip Girl" as Blair Waldorf, based on the book series of the same name by Cecily von Ziegesar. She first auditioned for the role of Serena van der Woodsen, but told the producers that she could better play Blair. It was important that Serena was blonde and Blair was brunette.


On 15 January 2019, Martin O'Neill was appointed as the new manager.

(meta data) TITLE: Martin O'Neill confirmed as new manager of Nottingham Forest | Football | The Guardian

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.facebook.com/PAMediaGroupUK/

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2019-01-15T06:09:56-0500

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# Martin O'Neill confirmed as new manager of Nottingham Forest

• Former Forest player replaces Aitor Karanka in job• First game likely to be against Bristol City on Saturday

Last modified on Tue 15 Jan 2019 12.32 EST

Martin O'Neill becomes Nottingham Forest's 11th full-time manager since 2011.

Nottingham Forest have named Martin O'Neill as their new manager.

The 66-year-old, a former Forest player who won two European Cups at the City Ground, replaces Aitor Karanka in the job after the Spaniard's departure last week.

## Martin O'Neill set to be appointed Nottingham Forest manager

O'Neill becomes the club's 11th full-time boss since 2011 and his first game in charge is likely to be at home against fellow Championship play-off hopefuls Bristol City on Saturday.

There is no news yet on whether Roy Keane, the former Forest midfielder who assisted O'Neill during his five years as Republic of Ireland manager, will also be returning to the club.

O'Neill was a midfielder for Brian Clough's continental conquering Forest team which won the 1977-78 English title and then back-to-back European Cups in 1979 and 1980.

Clough managed Forest from 1975 to 1993.

Irishman O'Neill enjoyed success with Wycombe, Leicester and Celtic as a manager, before less fruitful spells with Aston Villa and Sunderland.

He left his role as Ireland boss in November.

Forest are ninth in the Championship table, four points behind local rivals Derby, who occupy the final play-off spot, and lost 2-0 at Reading on Saturday.

Simon Ireland was in caretaker charge for the game at the Madejski Stadium.

The Fiver: sign up and get our daily football email.

In January 2008, Ireland was appointed as assistant director, with responsibility for the U9-U12 age groups at Blackburn Rovers. From 2010 to 2013, he worked as the U18 assistant academy manager. In August 2013, he then became the U21 manager of Brighton & Hove Albion. After 18 months, Ireland left to join Queens Park Rangers as the academy’s new head of coaching and coach education on 14 February 2015. After almost three years, he left on 18 January and a few days later, he joined the staff of Aitor Karanka at Nottingham Forest as a first team coach. On 11 January 2019, Aitor Karanka was released and Ireland was appointed as the caretaker. Ireland faced his first game as manager the following day against Reading which he lost 0-2.