Zach Bryan is getting candid about his relationship with alcohol, revealing that he once drank as many as 15 beers a day and was intoxicated when he wrote nearly every hit song of his career.

The country star, 30, opened up about his sobriety during a conversation with Matthew McConaughey that was released alongside his latest EP, "Young Manhood and Other Donatable Organs."

Bryan detailed how his drinking eventually led to severe panic attacks that left him fearing he was going to die.

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"When I got in the throes of drinking f---ing 15 beers in a day and I kept going with that cycle, I started getting these really, really severe panic attacks where my whole body went numb, and I thought I was going to have a stroke and die," he told McConaughey.

"I’d curl up for days at a time, and I went to a doctor. And, like I said, I still didn’t believe it. I told the doctor, ‘Man, I’m just hungover. I’m fine.’ And the doctor was like, ‘No, man. You have a really severe thing going on here.’"

Bryan said his doctor diagnosed him with panic disorder and suggested that quitting alcohol could help.

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"[My doctor] said, ‘I think you have a pretty bad panic disorder. And if you quit drinking, that might help you a little bit.’ So I tried it, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’"

Before giving up alcohol, Bryan said he relied on drinking to manage his stage fright.

"So I used to get on stage. Here’s my routine. I used to think this was the perfect routine. No show could ever go bad if I did this: work out, shower, play my guitar, listen to Bon Iver, drink four beers," he recalled.

"It eased my pain. All the stage fright I had was gone after I drank three or four beers, and I’m like, ‘I can do it.’ Then I would drink after the show, too."

Bryan said he would wake up the next day facing another performance and repeat the same cycle.

"I’d wake up the next day with another show, and I’d think, ‘Well, to get rid of this panic in me, to get rid of this stage fright, there’s one choice. Let’s do what we’ve always done,’" he said. "I’d drink two or three more beers. And I thought I was never going to get out of that. I thought that cycle was forever."

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The singer-songwriter said his managers had questioned whether he had tried performing without alcohol, but he viewed drinking as part of his routine.

"They would always be like, ‘Hey, have you tried not drinking before a show?’ Like, I can’t. It’s my routine. It’s my lucky socks," Bryan said.

"For a long time, I danced with that. Years, I danced with that. And it worked, you know. I was playing a good show. I was paying my bills. I was doing everything. I employed 100 or 200 people. I was like, ‘This is fine.’"

Bryan said performing sober is more intimidating at first, but ultimately more rewarding.

"I will say now that I’ve quit drinking, stages are more scary," he admitted. "But once I get on stage, it’s a lot more enjoyable. So much better. It feels like flying. It’s more fun. It’s the best feeling in the world."

Bryan said the realization that he was responsible for his own struggles came after years of denial.

"I used to be so terrified of that," he said of performing sober. "And that denial is what got me there. That denial is what brought me to those panic attacks. I was the issue the whole time."

The Grammy winner also said he had convinced himself that alcohol was essential to his songwriting process.

"Every hit I ever had, I was pretty much drunk when I made it," Bryan said. "And so I had the issue of thinking I was never going to have a good song again if I wasn’t under the influence."

He described the belief as a "real curse" that made him feel as though he had to repeat the same rituals in order to create music.

"This is the first project I’ve ever done, this ‘Young Manhood’ thing, that I didn’t drink a lick," he said. "I wrote every word sober and I sang every word sober. And I’ll say it took that to prove to me that I could do it."

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Bryan admitted that he once dismissed sobriety and didn't recognize that his own drinking had become a problem.

"I always thought sobriety was a joke because it’s people who couldn’t control themselves celebrating not being able to control themselves," Bryan said. "When I was drinking a lot, I always thought, ‘Why can’t you control yourself?’ I never realized I had a problem."

The singer said his perspective changed during a solo 30-day motorcycle trip across the country.

Bryan said he spent much of the trip stopping at bars and drinking himself to sleep. When he reached a Pilot truck stop outside Seattle, he bought a 40-ounce Budweiser and sat on a curb beside his motorcycle.

"I’ll never forget this as long as I live," he said. "I went into this Pilot and I grabbed a 40 [ounce bottle of] Budweiser, and I’m sitting on the curb with my motorcycle in front of me, and I’m drinking it. And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell was all that worth? Why did I do any of that? I feel emptier than when I left.’"

Bryan said he realized he had spent the previous 30 days chasing a "big romantic movie moment," only to find himself alone in a parking lot.

"I’ve got nowhere to go home to, no one to call," he recalled thinking. "That’s when I said, ‘Man, why am I drinking right now? What am I celebrating?’"

"It changed me a lot, that parking lot," he said. "That was the moment I realized, when I went and got that 40, I was like, ‘Man, it’s f---ing 3. You’ve got an issue. Why do you want to drink a 40 right now in the Seattle Pilot parking lot?’"

Bryan previously announced in November 2025 that he had been sober for two months, writing that he had used alcohol to cope with a "perpetual discontent" and a "consistent black hole" inside him.

During his conversation with McConaughey, Bryan said sobriety has helped him feel more creative, energized and content.

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"I feel great. I feel content. I feel whole," he said. "There’s nothing I need to get me by anymore."

Amy Schumer shared a glimpse of her recent family vacation in Turks and Caicos, where she posed in a floral one-piece swimsuit before heading out on a scuba-diving excursion.

The 45-year-old comedian posted photos from her time at the beach resort, including several shots aboard a boat and footage of her exploring the ocean underwater.

In one photo, Schumer stood sideways on a boat, holding onto a metal railing as she looked over her shoulder toward the camera. Her swimsuit featured pink roses and green leaves against a cream-colored background, with lace-up detailing along the back.

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She completed the look with oversized tinted sunglasses, while her blonde hair was pulled into a casual ponytail.

Another image showed the "Trainwreck" star facing the camera in the same swimsuit, adjusting her sunglasses while holding a large orange buoy attached to a yellow rope.

Schumer also gave followers a glimpse of her underwater adventure, sharing footage of herself scuba diving in tropical waters.

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"Our family had the time of our lives at @beachesresorts in Turks and Caicos," Schumer captioned the Instagram post.

"2 best decisions of my life are becoming a mom and getting certified to dive by PADI," she continued. "If you're like me and have always wanted to dive, don't wait!"

The actress, who shares 7-year-old son Gene with ex-husband Chris Fischer, also thanked the resort staff and credited TA3 for her swimsuit.

Schumer's vacation photos drew encouragement from several famous friends.

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"Legs McGee. 🔥," actor Cheyenne Jackson commented.

Actress Leslie Mann chimed in with "Babe," while Lindsay Lohan and Krysten Ritter left heart emojis.

The tropical getaway also included some unexpected entertainment.

In an exclusive interview with People published Wednesday, Schumer recalled attending an impromptu wedding celebration after discovering a ceremony taking place on the beach near her family's accommodations.

The comedian said she and Gene watched the vows from nearby lounge chairs before she joined the festivities and photobombed the newlyweds.

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Schumer also described scuba diving as a highlight of the vacation, explaining that she had the opportunity to explore reefs and see a variety of fish.

Her son, meanwhile, enjoyed the resort's water park, where the family spent time together during their stay.

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The vacation comes as Schumer continues to share glimpses of her life following her weight-loss journey.

In December 2025, the comedian clarified that she had lost 50 pounds while addressing speculation about her changing appearance.

"I didn't lose 30lbs, I lost 50," Schumer wrote on Instagram at the time, which has since been deleted.

"Not to look hot which does feel fun and temporary. I did it to survive," she continued.

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Schumer, who previously revealed she had been diagnosed with Cushing syndrome, explained that her health had been a major factor in her physical transformation.

She also acknowledged using Mounjaro, a medication she had previously praised after experiencing severe side effects with another weight-loss drug.

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In a since deleted March 2025 Instagram video, Schumer said she had tried Wegovy several years earlier but struggled with nausea.

"Mounjaro's been great," she said, adding that she was having a positive experience with the medication.

Schumer has since emphasized that improving her health, rather than meeting outside expectations about her appearance, has been her priority.

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Christina Applegate is back at "square one" after doctors told her she does not have multiple sclerosis.

The 54-year-old actress, who was diagnosed with MS in 2021, addressed the surprising development Tuesday on her "MeSsy" podcast with Jamie-Lynn Sigler.

"This may come as great news, but to me, I’m back at square one," Applegate said while fighting back tears. "It’s hard to say that [my doctor] came into my room, and she said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS.’"

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"What does that moment feel like?" Sigler asked.

"I was, like, not happy at all," Applegate admitted. "Everybody else was so happy … You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I’m better."

"I haven’t gotten better, Jamie!" she continued. "If anything, I’ve gotten worse in some ways. So I’m back at square one that I don’t know what’s going on with me."

Applegate said her doctors are now working to determine what has caused her ongoing health problems and why she was diagnosed with MS in the first place.

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"There’s a pretty damn high number of misdiagnoses with MS," she said. "So this is not a rare occurrence. It’s clear now that they’re finding something different. Something else is going on."

The actress also admitted that the news left her feeling confused and as if she had "let everybody down."

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"It’s this weird feeling of like … I became this — you and I, the poster children for MS," Applegate told Sigler. "And all that I did, everything I was doing. I had a reason. I had a f---ing reason as to why my day sucked every day."

"And now I don’t have a reason, and it’s very unnerving, and it’s really confusing for me," she added.

Applegate also opened up about the toll her chronic pain and mobility issues have taken on her mental health and career.

"I’ve gone through a great depression because of it," she said through tears. "But you know, I lost everything. I lost my job. I lost — sorry. What do you say to someone who’s been living with this for six years? God, I’m so sorry, I get really emotional because it stopped my life."

Applegate clarified that the change in her diagnosis has not changed her physical condition.

"I still have to use wheelchairs when I go to the doctor’s office," she said. "I can’t walk from the car to the room. I’m still in this. Nothing magical happened when she said, ‘You don’t have MS.’ Nothing magical happened."

Applegate first revealed her MS diagnosis on X in 2021.

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"Hi friends. A few months ago I was diagnosed with MS," she wrote at the time. "It’s been a strange journey. But I have been so supported by people that I know who also have this condition."

"It’s been a tough road," she continued. "But as we all know, the road keeps going. Unless some a--hole blocks it."

The actress has been candid about how her health struggles have affected her life, including her ability to parent her 15-year-old daughter, Sadie, whom she shares with husband Martyn LeNoble.

"I want to take her [to school and activities]; it’s my favorite thing to do," Applegate previously told People. "It’s the only time we have together by ourselves. I tell myself, ‘Just get her there safely and get home so you can get back into bed.’ And that’s what I do."

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Applegate said her physical limitations have also made her more determined to be honest about her life.

"My life isn’t wrapped up with a bow," she said. "People’s lives, sorry for lack of a better term, f---ing suck sometimes. So I’m being as honest and raw as I possibly can."

During a previous episode of her "MeSsy" podcast, Applegate discussed how her health struggles have affected Sadie.

"She didn’t know this. It was like losing the mom she had to this f---ing thing," Applegate said. "And the more she’s gotten older now, I think the more it’s hurting her."

"Mommy can’t do all the things that she used to be able to do, and I see it in her eyes," she added. "I see it."

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Mark Johnson | The Atavist Magazine | September 2026 | 2,048 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 180, “The Family Plan.”

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At first she told no one. Not her twin sister. Not her mother. Not even her father the scientist.

Six-year-old Jenna Smith knew better than to pee when she was in the bath. But on that night in 1992, in her family’s home in Iowa City, the water felt so comfortable against her skin that she didn’t want to get out of the tub. It seemed like such a small thing. Who would know?

Seconds later the water around her waist turned reddish pink. Blood? It had to be. Jenna wondered if she’d hurt herself. “I was six years old sitting in a bathtub, watching a few seconds of my world stop making sense,” she would recall years later.

She kept the blood a secret because she didn’t want to admit that she’d peed in the bath. But when it was still in her urine the next time she used the toilet, she went to her mother. Concerned, her mom called her dad, Richard Smith, and he took Jenna to the emergency room.

Richard was an ear, nose, and throat doctor in the University of Iowa’s school of medicine, a researcher who would become one of the world’s authorities on the genetics of hearing loss. His wife, Lynne Lanning, had worked as both a lawyer and a nurse. They had four young children: twins Jenna and Jessica, who were identical, and two boys, Luke and Rion.

At the ER, doctors ran tests on Jenna, but they couldn’t identify the cause of the blood. In the days that followed the bleeding intensified. At her parents’ urging, Jenna collected samples of her urine in Dixie cups for further testing. The doctors remained stumped, however, and after a while Jenna found the whole thing more annoying than worrisome.

The uncertainty was much harder on her parents. It wasn’t that doctors were misdiagnosing their daughter; they were unable to diagnose her at all. “It was horrible,” Richard said. “Imagine seeing your child and you know something is wrong, and you know the doctors treating her have no clue what to do.” Richard called a pediatric nephrologist he knew in Houston, where the family had lived previously. The nephrologist listed several conditions that could be causing the bleeding and said that, to determine which was to blame, Jenna’s parents should take her to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

In July 1992, Richard, Lynne, and Jenna drove nearly 500 miles to get answers. Doctors in Cincinnati diagnosed Jenna with dense deposit disease, a condition in which proteins clog and damage the kidneys, leading to renal failure in many patients. There was no cure.

The hospital couldn’t tell the family much else—no one could. The disease was exceedingly rare, afflicting between one and three people in a million. Back home, Richard and Lynne spent hours inside the University of Iowa’s quiet medical library, poring over papers in search of information about their daughter’s illness. They could find no evidence that anyone was actively studying the condition.

Although many Americans—roughly one in ten—suffer from a rare disease, the experience can be lonely. Friends and relatives don’t understand the unique miseries such illnesses impose on daily life. Few doctors are likely to have encountered them before. And because there aren’t many patients, drug companies usually don’t invest in research for treatments.

Richard and Lynne feared that their daughter’s life might be tragically brief. Sometimes the mention of weddings would sink Lynne into melancholy; she couldn’t bring herself to watch the movie Father of the Bride. Richard agonized over what to do. His training compelled him to seek answers, but he wanted to be Jenna’s father, not the scientist charged with curing her. He kept his research focused on hearing loss. At first, anyway.

Stories of scientific discovery almost always celebrate individual researchers, consigning the contributions of loved ones, communities, and colleagues to footnotes. There are exceptions―the teams that built the first atomic bomb and deciphered the human genome, for instance. Science also has its share of famous families. Marie and Pierre Curie, along with their daughter Irène and her husband, Frédéric, won five Nobel Prizes between them for discoveries related to radioactivity. For the most part, however, the history of scientific progress has been mythologized as a succession of brilliant, driven individuals—often men—who chose the lab over the dinner table and competition over collaboration.

Some scientists have embraced the role of maverick. “You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing,” the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman is said to have told a colleague. The decades-long pursuit of a treatment for Jenna’s disease followed a very different path. There was no single hero, no lone scientist seeking glory. The biomedical quest required the efforts of a family and their neighbors in Iowa City, and the work of scientists around the globe. Together they changed an obscure area of medicine.

Richard and Lynne met in 1977, when both were working at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston—she as a nurse, he as a medical intern. He noticed a run in her nylons and was smitten by her smile. She liked his down-to-earth manner and intelligence, his humor and kindness. They were working in the hospital’s burn unit when he asked her out.

The couple married in 1981, and except for two years in England, they remained in Houston until 1990. That December they moved to Iowa City, where Richard had a job waiting for him leading the pediatric otolaryngology division and running a research lab at the University of Iowa’s medical school. They had been there only a year when Jenna got sick.

Richard and Lynne learned that their daughter’s disease was caused by a malfunction in her complement system. Believed to have evolved long before other parts of our immune infrastructure, the complement system sends proteins to battle foreign invaders. Unlike antibodies, these proteins are not tailored to fight a specific virus or bacteria, but they kick into gear faster when a threat is detected. In people with Jenna’s condition, the complement system is like a runaway train: Proteins become overstimulated and then accumulate in the glomeruli, tiny filters the kidneys use to clear waste from blood.

Blood in the urine is one symptom of the disease. Others include swelling, high blood pressure, inflammation, and fatigue. When Jenna was in the first grade, her body struggled to make growth hormones. Her production of red blood cells slowed, and she grew increasingly tired. During rehearsals for The Nutcracker ballet around Christmas 1993, she’d finish her part and then lie down backstage, completely spent.

Doctors put her on a heavy dose of the steroid prednisone and on blood-pressure medication. The prednisone caused her body to retain water. She woke up each morning with her eyes swollen shut, then waited in bed until the swelling receded. She couldn’t fit into her clothes or shoes. She wore flip-flops and roomy jumpers Lynne sewed for her.

As twins, Jenna and Jessica had always been close. They played together, made up songs and dance moves, explored the woods near their home, and enjoyed pranking friends and family members. “She made a lot of things feel not so heavy,” Jenna said of her sister. Still, she sometimes thought that Jessica “got off scot-free” by not having dense deposit disease. Neither girl liked feeling different from the other. (Years later, Jessica would be diagnosed with type-1 diabetes; Jenna would not.)

The changes to Jenna’s appearance meant the girls were no longer identical. Once, according to Lynne, when a boy at school said that Jenna couldn’t be a twin anymore because of how she looked, Jessica slugged him. Lynne recalled sitting in the principal’s office, politely listening to a lecture—this is not the way we resolve things!—but understanding why Jessica had lashed out. Nothing was so frightening to her daughters as the idea that they’d stop being twins.

About half of those afflicted with Jenna’s disease progressed to kidney failure within a decade of diagnosis; it took her less than a year. She made it through the last day of first grade. Then, as other children departed for summer camp, she went to a clinic. While her classmates practiced archery and did arts and crafts, she learned about the catheter doctors would surgically insert in her body. Through that tube, a machine would pump fluid into her abdomen, where her peritoneum—her abdominal lining—would take over the filtering function kidneys usually perform.

She would take the peritoneal dialysis machine home with her and use it every day for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of her life. When a nurse tried to take Lynne aside to show her how to operate it, Jenna stopped her. “I’m the patient,” the seven-year-old insisted. “I’m learning how to run the machine.”

In such moments, Lynne was surprised at the strength she drew from her daughter. She needed it. Her grief could leave her feeling drained. One day she found herself crying into the soil as she gardened.

But Lynne and Richard were determined that sadness would not define their lives. For a long time, they didn’t have a TV in their house—they wanted the family to talk when they were together, and for the children to build forts, learn to sew, be creative. They had painting nights, creating portraits of one another. There were cooking contests, too. Richard and Lynne made sure to spend one-on-one time with each kid. Richard traveled with Luke to Japan, with Rion to the Grand Canyon, with Jessica to Italy, and with Jenna to England. Lynne took trips with the children to Brazil, England, and Guatemala. There were themed birthday celebrations: a James Bond party for Richard, where everyone was armed with Nerf guns, and one for Lynne where Richard dressed as the artist Bob Ross and the guests painted “happy little clouds.” Richard coached the kids’ hockey and soccer teams. He built harps and lyres from scratch, and Lynne played them.

Every day, Richard left for work at 5 a.m., while the children were still in bed. He returned around six at night. The family joked that they could hear him coming from half a mile away in his rust-bucket Isuzu Trooper with the bad muffler and a hole in the passenger footwell. When he wasn’t seeing patients or in surgery, Richard was in the lab. On Saturdays, Luke would go there with him. Sometimes the other kids joined. They liked to refill the communal candy jars and visit the mice used in experiments.

It seemed a wonder to the lab’s staff that Richard squeezed so much into a day. When they began using email to communicate, they received messages from him time-stamped three or four in the morning. “Why don’t you sleep sometime?” a colleague replied once. Indeed, Richard slept little. At night his mind kept running through the mysteries of his daughter’s disease.

Richard had read that it took 10,000 hours—the equivalent of working full-time for about five years—to achieve expertise in a subject. He believed it. In 1995, he began flying to conferences about kidney disease, where he talked to the few doctors who cared for patients like Jenna. Medicine was getting no closer to finding a treatment.

That year the owner of a ranch where Richard and Lynne’s children took riding lessons offered to host a fundraiser for kidney disease research. The family organized Dressage in the Heartland, which featured riding events, fiddle music, and bowls of chili. After raising upwards of $10,000 for the National Kidney Foundation, they held the event again the following year. There are hundreds of kidney ailments, however, and the foundation didn’t allow the money the family raised to be earmarked for the research of dense deposit disease. (The foundation said it now allows monetary gifts to be dedicated to specific conditions.)

Richard and Lynne ran into more disappointment during a visit to the University of Minnesota in early 1997. A specialist they consulted was blunt. “Nobody is looking at this disease,” he told them. “And barring something unforeseen, nothing will be done in the next twenty years.”

It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive back to Iowa City. In the car, Lynne brought up what the doctor had said. Maybe they would have to be that unforeseen something.