ELLE January 2013

Sunday, January 6, 9 P.M. EST WELL MANORED In the third-season premiere of PBS Masterpiece's period melodrama Downton Abbey , the Crawleys stand at the brink of financial ruin, Mr. Bates languishes in prison, and Shirley MacLaine and Maggie Smith face off to deliver the season's best one-liners. "The family has always told stories about how difficult I was as a baby, and what a terror as a toddler. They say I learned to walk at seven months and to run the very same day, ever after the hot pepper—Aji!—a menace to myself and everyone else." —Sonia Sotomayor Tuesday, January 15 AMERICAN IDOL Justice Sonia Sotomayor ends her memoir, My Beloved World (Knopf), 20 years before her Supreme Court appointment, but the personal stories she tells—from her…

GUEST BLOGGER: HEATHER CLAWSON While assisting celebrity interior-designer Tony Ingrao, Heather Clawson saw the potential for a forum showcasing spaces and designers—a playful, personalized take on the rarefied pages of upscale home-design magazines. So inspired, she created Habitually Chic, giving an insider's view of the interior-design world. Since launching in 2007, the site has been celebrated for featuring emerging talent and trends alongside the homes of, say, Gwyneth Paltrow and Aerin Lauder. Recently, Clawson channeled the blog's style into Creativity at Work, a book that explores the work spaces of artistic minds such as Peter Som and J.Crew's Jenna Lyons. This month, Clawson gives ELLE.com a look into her office—her New York City apartment—and shares her shortlist of clever ways to refresh your home and office for the new year.—Catherine…

We write a lot around here about female ambition, about the ways women consciously and subconsciously bury their own while championing its necessity, as well as about how, according to some literature on it, the female-dominated workplace is more collaborative and supportive, more sane. We've interviewed the authors of a spate of new books in recent months that tell us to stop cloaking our ambition under piles of denial that we even have any, and to use our feminine, um, advantages when the situation merits it. And then we've got Lani Hay. I read her CV before I ever met her, and she was so accomplished that I assumed she was in her fifties. But no, she's in her thirties, as she told me while dressed in a low-cut ball…

BRIGHT LIKE DIAMONDS Who better among Tinseltown's elite to represent the amazing achievements of women in film than the luminous honorees for the nineteenth-annual ELLE Women in Hollywood list [November 2012]: Sarah Jessica Parker, Cate Blanchett, Octavia Spencer, Uma Thurman, Emma Watson, Susan Sarandon, Kristen Wiig, Elle Fanning, and Shirley MacLaine. We know why we love them—beauty, brains, talent—and here's what our readers had to say: "I'm so happy to see Sarah Jessica Parker on the cover of ELLE! I haven't even started reading the issue because I just had to tell you SJP and ELLE have aced it. She oozes joy and style." —TJF, via e-mail "Wow, it's great to be a Fanning girl. Dakota is friends with Steven Spielberg, while her sister is friends with Coppola! These girls…

NAME: Ali Wentworth PROVENANCE: Washington, DC NOW: New York City PROFESSION: Writer and actor THIS MONTH: "Eyes Wide Open" (page 88). "People would say, 'You look great—did you get your hair cut?' I don't know why that was the first thing they thought of. I told them I got my eyes done. Everyone was taken aback by my honesty. That's a good plastic surgeon, I guess." BONA FIDES: BA, drama, Bard College; author of Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales; host of Yahoo!'s Daily Shot With Ali Wentworth FIRST GIG: Cast member on In Living Color. "It was my first big job. I love sketch comedy and doing big, broad characters. I loved working with Jamie Foxx and David Alan Grier. We…

You think we're inspiring? Armed with racks of fashion-forward pieces from H&M, Creative Director Joe Zee proves the feeling is mutual by elevating four ELLE readers' looks to editorial heights There are many types of comfort zones. Some are private and ritualistic. Breakfast, for instance: I have a friend who has eaten Cheerios and whole milk every single morning for the past 14 years! More universal—and visible for all the world to see—is our style comfort zone. Because style is so closely tied to our identity, venturing outside the tried-and-true can really throw you for a loop. Trust me; I know. The limits of my comfort zone have long been defined by one word: color. I've spent most of my life in black, white, gray, and navy blue. For eons,…