As I wrote Friday, I was outraged at Stephen Colbert — for whom I’d had a lot of respect for both his comedic and critical thinking skills (Catholicism aside) — for playing nice with Gwyneth Paltrow on his Thursday night “Late Show.”
Over the last few years, he’s made fun of Paltrow and her nonsense-promoting business, Goop, and he’s been pretty direct about it. But this time, he allowed Paltrow a network television platform to promote her Goop pseudoscience (e.g. vagina steaming, magnetic acupuncture, binaural meditation), even going as far as to say, “I love Goop!” Instead he should have said, “I’m consciously uncoupling from even booking her in the first place!”
I don’t have anything against Paltrow as an actress. I’ve liked her ever since I saw her in 1996 in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Hard Eight” (with the great Phillip Baker Hall), as well as “Seven,” “Shakespeare In Love,” “Proof,” “Contagion,” and even her multiple appearances with Robert Downey Jr. in the “Iron Man” movies.
On the big screen, she’s likable enough, but this appearance on the small screen annoyed me so much that I went off on a nearly-fifteen-minute rant about it on my radio show Friday afternoon. Listen to our conversation here.
Previously on Harris Online…
- My conversation with Timothy Caulfield, author of “Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?” (7/25/15).
- My speech entitled “This Is Not Fake News” included a few comments about Paltrow (7/17/17).
- NASA calls out Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website over pseudoscience stickers that “Rebalance Your Energy” (6/26/17).