Working alongside NY’s hottest chefs took its toll on Laurie Woolever, but in a new memoir she opens up about her battles with drinking, drugs – and losing her friend

Laurie Woolever is an expert on indulgence. The first time we met was in a dimly lit omakase restaurant in downtown Tokyo, in the summer of 2017. We were both in Japan on respective work trips. Woolever was researching a travel book she was writing with her boss, the chef Anthony Bourdain, and I was filming a CNN digital spin-off series from his Parts Unknown show. We were introduced through mutual friends in New York, where I had been living that year, and where her reputation preceded her. She was known to be private, tough, with a wickedly dry sense of humour. I was a little intimidated.

As she expertly navigated a seven-course tasting menu of wagyu beef with her chopsticks, she casually mentioned that she’d recently stopped drinking, alluding to the fact it had become out of control. I self-consciously sipped my own cold beer, picked up sweet strips of marbled meat and couldn’t help thinking how tricky giving up drinking must have been, both because of her job as the then long-term assistant to Bourdain – one of the most rock’n’roll food personalities of our time – but also being immersed in a fast-paced New York food scene where drinking to excess was the norm. What I didn’t realise until reading her new memoir, Care and Feeding , was that while Woolever wasn’t drinking, she was still seeking hits of illicit pleasure. A few days after our dinner, she hired a Japanese male sex worker to join her for an “erotic massage” at her hotel. A clinical act to numb the discomfort she felt, trapped in an unhappy marriage without alcohol to smooth over the cracks.

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Snow White has sparked outrage across the board, but why is no one worried about its messaging on beauty?

Last week I took my daughter to see the new Snow White film and on the train she told me how all the girls had been called into a special assembly. It was to tell them that makeup was strictly forbidden – some girls (she discreetly told me their names, vaguely scandalised) had started wearing mascara to school. And as she spoke I was immediately propelled to 1991, my friend’s kitchen, the violet smell of other people’s laundry, her mother explaining that we shouldn’t wear makeup until we were, “At least 40,” because it was just, “for covering wrinkles and the shadows of age.” That conversation has rattled around in my head for decades (“the shadows of age”) and it lodged there as I settled in with my popcorn.

The new Snow White has been plagued by so much controversy some might assume the marketing team had bitten a cursed apple. It took nine years to make it into cinemas, after, OK: Rachel Zegler’s casting sparked a racist backlash; actors with dwarfism debated the ethics of portraying (in Disney’s words) the “ seven characters ’,”; and critics (including the son of a director who worked on the 1937 film, to the Telegraph ) complained that Disney is “making up new woke things”. Then, in August, a member of a pro-Palestine campaign called for a boycott of the film , citing Gal Gadot’s (who plays the evil queen) support of Israel’s military actions. Rightwing press were next to call for a boycott, after Zegler spoke out first in support of Palestine and then against Trump, leading Disney ( allegedly ) to scale back the eventual premiere. And then it was here, and the reviews were… grumpy. The New Yorker headlined its review with: “Disney’s remake whistles but doesn’t work.”

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Murderous unicorns run amok in Alex Scharfman’s gory American horror that gleefully embraces a lo-fi aesthetic but lacks sufficient bite

What if unicorns were badass? What if, rather than the twee, sparkly fairy creatures that distribute magic and glittery microplastic at kids’ themed birthday parties, unicorns were fearsome beasts with deranged amber eyes, huge tombstone teeth that could sever a man’s arm, and horns covered in the entrails of their victims like flesh pennants? It’s an appetising central premise. And this Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega-starring horror comedy, produced by the achingly hip boutique studio A24, certainly delivers on the grisly, torso-skewering gore. Maybe the jokes could have been sharper, but at least the unicorns’ horns make their point.

Killer unicorns are not an entirely novel concept. The ultraviolent 2022 cult feature animation Unicorn Wars – described by its director as “ Bambi meets Apocalypse Now meets the Bible” – pitted unicorns against teddy bears in a savage battle for supremacy. But it’s a sufficiently distinctive selling point for this pulpy feature debut from producer turned director Alex Scharfman. What’s less original is the messaging that underpins the blood-sodden mess: that the real monsters are not the unicorns, but the evil representatives of big pharma – in this case, company boss Odell, played by Richard E Grant , his trophy wife, Belinda, played by Téa Leoni, and their idiot son, Shepard, a role that allows Will Poulter to hog the lion’s share of the best jokes – plus most of the recreational drugs.

In UK and Irish cinemas

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The actor talks about getting excited at the cinema, being lured to kids’ parties and buying amazing breakfast samosas from the farmers’ market

Sunday highlights? Spending time with Eric Cantona, my dog. He’s a nine-year-old grey French bulldog. I meet my friends for a chatty run on the heath, then my husband, Matt, will meet me and we’ll walk Eric. The dog hates walking around our park because he finds it boring.

What do you chat about? Gossip. DIY. My friend Becca is renovating her kitchen. We’re trying to move, so there’s quite a lot of very dull chat about conveyancing.

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All her life Jean Hannah Edelstein had tried to feel comfortable with her breasts, battling unwelcome attention and breastfeeding woes. But then came cancer and a double mastectomy – and she realised she was losing something she loved

Let me tell you about my breasts, of blessed memory. That’s not something I would have said while I still had them. I was quite prim, you see, and maybe I still am, but a double mastectomy gives you license to say “‘breast” over and over again, without the usual consequences. My breasts were real, and they were spectacular.

That’s a Seinfeld reference, if you’re not familiar. Seinfeld was one of the shows that I watched often in my adolescent years when my breasts first asserted themselves. It was among our key texts. We were in late-20th-century America, my breasts and I. It was a time and place that taught me that women’s bodies – breasts, specifically – were objects of desire, and jokes, and danger. Friends , Baywatch , Melrose Place . Clueless , Scream . Britney, Beyoncé. Monica Lewinsky.

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The American photographer​ captured life​ behind the wheel ​across the US and elsewhere over three decades, using a vehicle’s angles to frame the world outside

It’s 3.35pm in Beijing and everything is happening. The wide street, bathed in slanted afternoon sun, is filled with traffic. We are in the back seat of a taxi, paused at the mercy of the traffic controller atop his tiered stand, like a figurine on a wedding cake. The edges of the road are clogged with cyclists rushing towards and away from us, but mostly what we see is cars, cars and more cars, including the interior of our own.

The four-wheeled automobile is the subject and the vehicle , so to speak, of American photographer Clark Winter’s Here to There: Photographs from the Road Ahead , which chronicles three decades of road life across the US and beyond. As a youth, Winter was offered a rare place to study at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design under American photography luminaries such as Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. Realising he wanted to know more about the world before fixing it with his lens, he instead took an entry-level job at JP Morgan, who funded a year of education in finance and then sent him across the world to learn about global markets. He took his Leica with him.

Here to There. Photographs from the Road Ahead is published by Damiani (€50)

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Adrien Brody, Paapa Essiedu and Romola Garai are some of the big stars of the night. Plus: Bruce Parry watches a teeth-removal ritual. Here’s what to watch this evening

10.15pm, ITV1

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Writer and director behind Taxi Driver and American Gigolo accused by former employee in lawsuit

Paul Schrader , the writer of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo, has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting his former personal assistant, firing her when she wouldn’t acquiesce to advances and reneging on a settlement that was meant to keep the allegations confidential.

The former assistant, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, sued the filmmaker and his production company on Thursday. She is seeking a judge’s order to enforce the agreement after Schrader said he couldn’t go through with it. The terms, including a monetary payment, were not disclosed.

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