Names and faces
■ Move over, Instagram and Snapchat — the Met Gala was the place to announce a pregnancy Monday night, at least if you’re Serena Williams or Karlie Kloss. The tennis legend and the supermodel revealed their pregnancies in interviews on the Met Gala’s not-so-red carpet. Williams’ announcement had particular poignance given that she stepped away from tennis last year, saying she had to in order to have a second child. “Believe me,” the 23-time Grand Slam champion wrote in an August essay for Vogue magazine, “I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family.” Williams shared the news that she was expecting alongside her husband, Alexis Ohanian, in an interview with Vogue livestream host La La Anthony. The first time around, Williams publicly posted a picture in profile on Snapchat, captioned “20 weeks” — which she said was an accident. Williams, 41, also said in her Vogue essay that she wanted to focus more on her business interests. Their daughter, Olympia, is now 5. Kloss, 30, sporting black hair, shared her pregnancy earlier in the night in an interview with another Vogue livestream host, Emma Chamberlain, prompting squeals of delight and an offer to babysit from the influencer. Kloss and her husband, Josh Kushner, also have a son, Levi, who was born in March 2021.
■ The long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, “The Covenant of Water,” is Oprah Winfrey’s latest book club pick. “The Covenant of Water,” published Tuesday, is Verghese’s first work of fiction since his million-selling “Cutting for Stone” came out in 2009. Verghese’s current book is a multigenerational saga set in India from 1900-1977. “This is one of the top five books I’ve read in my lifetime. And I’ve been reading since I was 3,” Winfrey said. “It’s epic. It’s transportive. Many moments during the read I had to stop and remember to breathe. I couldn’t put the book down until the very last page — it was unputdownable!” Verghese said that receiving the call from Winfrey, the dream of countless authors, felt like a miracle. “My thoughts were racing back through the decade-plus of writing ‘The Covenant of Water,’ during which time my mother died, and covid had descended on us,” he said. “After we hung up I realized that I’d reflexively risen to my feet and stayed that way throughout our long chat.” Verghese, 67, is an Ethiopian-born physician who has also written two memoirs. He received a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015, and was praised during the White House ceremony for a “range of proficiency” that extends from “his efforts to emphasize empathy in medicine, to his imaginative renderings of the human drama.”