text: "Come a Little Closer" by Cage the Elephant, from Melophobia, courtesy of RCA Records. Buy It Now 
   
   Published in the November 2013 issue 
   
   THE FIRST HOUR: 
   
   THOUGHTS ON PENMANSHIP, BLOODLESS CAREERISM, AND SLEEPING 
   
   Four-fifty on a Thursday afternoon, deep in a shadowy bar at a hotel called the Nomad, downtown Manhattan, and Scarlett Johansson actually wants to write. I give her a little hotel pad, maybe four-by-six, which she grabs in her small, ringless fingers. She takes my pen eagerly. 
   
   "What do you want me to write?" she says. She will write what I tell her, she says. 
   
   I don't know. "Don't you have a little passage memorized?" I ask. "A little Shakespeare, maybe? 'Oh, for a muse of fire,' something like that?" 
   
   She clicks her tongue. "I think it should be neutral," she says, shaking her head. "Shouldn't involve any acting. I'm afraid I'll emphasize the Oh or something." As she thinks, she purses her lips, looks down, casting a little furtive charm. This one. She came in here  and this place is hung with velvet curtains and underlit by 40-watt bulbs; it's seriously dark  with her sunglasses on, walked six feet in front of me, at her publicist's side, in her gray cotton tracksuit, half pointing at tables that might work for her. All movie star up in here. And I didn't look at her ass. I don't know that she wanted me to. Probably not. Surely not. In any case, I didn't. 
   
   She bites the inside of her cheek when she thinks. There is an extremely large platter of cut vegetables on the table. "Crudités." I say it out loud, a word no one used ten years ago. 
   
   "My God," she says when it arrives. "So many vegetables." 
   
   Her voice is a raspy frequency in the air. Legitimately as pertinent and defining a component of her physical makeup as her lips, her cheekbones, her legs. When you're with her, you feel that voice. This bar is loud with cocktail hour, but the matter of her voice, the fact of it, hangs in the air even so  always a little sandy, somehow broken down, as if she'd been singing all day. Whether she breathes right or projects well I do not know, but her voice cuts the murmuring clatter of forks against small plates, ice spun in highballs. You can hear it no matter what. 
   
   "I wish I could write a parable," she says. "Or maybe just an adage. I could write that one where I never know what the hell it means. Well, I guess if I thought about it  I mean, I have thought about it, of course, and figured it out. But it eludes me the first time I hear it. Every time. It's not logical. At first, I mean." 
   
   "Like 'A stitch in time saves nine?' I never get that one." 
   
   "Exactly," she says. "But it's about birds. 'A bird in the bush.' Or " 
   
   "Oh, yeah." 
   
   
   
   Scarlett Johansson 
   
   So these are the words she writes: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Twice. Once in cursive. Once printed. Then she slides the pad to me and says, "Now you do it." And so I take the pen. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, after all. 
   
   "Come on," she says. 
   
   "Okay," I say. "But you're making me nervous." 
   
   I write it once. "Now print it," she says. And, of course, I screw that up. So my printed line reads A BIRD IN THE HAND IS WORTH TWO IN THE BIRD. 
   
   Scarlett Johansson clucks into the air. "That's gotta be bad for the bird," she says. Me, I want to start it all over again. "No, no, it's fine," she reassures me. "Just give it to them that way." She bites a thin hook of sweet orange pepper. "See what the words tell you." 
   
   We're creating a handwriting sample. Scarlett offers hers for me to take to a graphologist for an analysis of character. You could say she was eager, a movie star all the way, uncowered and free. When she's like this, willing  wanting even  to give in to harebrained plots, you really feel like you're talking to a bombshell, because bombshells are fun. To her, it sounds like fun to have a stranger deconstruct her penmanship in the sidebar of a magazine article. It's part of a search for truth, after all. Not exactly bungee jumping, but Scarlett is brave like that. She's not one of those who pine for the privacy lost to celebrity, nor does she tell teary stories of some paparazzo who stalked her in the doorway of a cupcake shop. Scarlett just plain operates in the world, which can make her seem a little chilly at first, even sour. 
   
   She's only twenty-eight. She's been at it long enough to have done most of it before. Critical success, commercial success, action movie, its sequel and re-sequel. Lost in Translation to Vicky Cristina Barcelona to the various iterations of the Avengers. She's now been the Sexiest Woman Alive twice  well earned, too. But what do they say about impressions? 
   
   The first of her: She seems not to care, to be bored, aloof. But that's as if drawn only from looking at pictures and not reading the text. Truth is, Scarlett is a politically astute, card-playing, magic-loving smart-ass, fairly generous in her time and attentions, a woman who will share her sandwich, a woman who likes horsing around in a bar on a muggy afternoon, a platter of hand-cut vegetables at the ready. 
   
   This year, Scarlett says, has been the busiest of her life. One movie released, two more coming out in the next five months, and two more in production. She finished a full run of a Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in March. In the movie she has out right now, Don Jon, she plays the hot, manipulative girlfriend of a porn addict. She makes a hootchie girl elegant, offering ascendant beauty in every scene. Hers is an unstressed beauty, which may be why her look is so mutable, more slender than buxom and fleshy. Her next movie is Under the Skin, a horror film in which she plays a flesh-tearing supernatural wandering across Scotland. 
   
   In this bar today, she does not look like that horny Catholic in Don Jon for a dozen reasons you already know: She's wiped out from the photo shoot, wearing no makeup, different shoes, different bra, and so on. 
   
   "I'm exhausted and this is my last day in the world," she says, sunglasses off now. "This is the last day, and this is the last piece of work. Then I'm taking a month-long vacation. But I'm not going anywhere, which just makes it more of a staycation. There's luxury in being near home. When you spend a lot of time, like I do, just standing around and waiting, or being moved from place to place, every minute gets consumed by something someone else has set up for you. And it's not like I'm always in a beautiful place wearing something gorgeous. I've stood around bogs wearing half a million dollars' worth of jewelry, up to my knees in the rot, thinking how much more or less the place smelled like a sewer than it did the day before. And that is not what you'd call a problem exactly; it just wears you out. What I want to do right now is sleep late, read the paper. I've come to see that there's something pretty great about having two hours to read." 
   
   Why accept the title Sexiest Woman Alive if everything is so busy just now? 
   
   Here, she shrugs. "I'm the only woman to win it twice, right?" she says. 
   
   She is correct. 
   
   "You know, I gotta hustle. I'm a twenty-eight-year-old woman in the movie business, right?" she says. "Pretty soon the roles you're offered all become mothers. Then they just sort of stop. I have to hedge against that with worktheater, producing, this thing with Esquire." 
   
   Then, as if she hears herself, she looks straight at me and says: "Sounds pretty bloodless, I guess." 
   
   She'll spend her vacation on the beach in the Hamptons, in a house she rents with friends. "It's a contemporary house, with a modern Swedish slant." For whatever reasonmy own prejudices, a tone I mistakenly pick up on in her voice, beach houses I have knownI assume she's saying, the way people do when they rent, that the furniture sucks but it's fine because the water's right outside. 
   
   And here I say, too casually, "Swedish? Like what, like Ikea and that shit?" 
   
   She smiles wryly and speaks softly, unruffled and clear. "No," she says. "Not like Ikea." 
   
   KEEP READING, FOR MORE FROM SCARLETT (AND MORE PHOTOS, TOO) >> ||||| (Click Prev or Next to continue viewing images.) 
   
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   FILE - In this Feb. 28, 2014 file photo, U.S. actress Scarlett Johansson, left, and her partner Romain Dauriac arrive at the 39th French Cesar Awards Ceremony, in Paris. Johansson is a first-time mom.... (Associated Press) 
   
   In this Feb. 28, 2014 file photo, U.S. actress Scarlett Johansson, left, and her partner Romain Dauriac arrive at the 39th French Cesar Awards Ceremony, in Paris. Johansson is a first-time mom. A spokesman... (Associated Press) 
   
   A spokesman for the 29-year-old actress told The Associated Press Thursday that Johansson and her fiance, Romain Dauriac, have welcomed a baby girl, whom they've named Rose. 
   
   Marcel Pariseau says mother and daughter are doing well. 
   
   He added that the couple is seeking privacy and are supporters of the No Kids Policy, the celebrity effort to keep famous folks' children out of the public eye. 
   
   Johansson and Dauriac, a French former journalist, have been engaged since September, 2013. She was previously married to Ryan Reynolds. 
   
   Johansson's recent credits include the films "Lucy," ''Chef," and "Captain America: The Winter Soldier." ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| Kevin Mazur/Getty 
   
   Alyssa Milano has a new little boss in her life: her baby girl! 
   
   The Mistresses star welcomed her second child with husband David Bugliari on Thursday, Sept. 4, her rep confirms to PEOPLE. 
   
   Daughter Elizabella Dylan Bugliari arrived weighing 7 lbs., 7 oz. and measured 19½ inches long. 
   
   “Mommy and baby are doing wonderfully,” her rep says in a statement. 
   
   Milano, 41, announced in March that she and Bugliari were giving their son, 3-year-old Milo Thomas, a sibling — a milestone the former Who’s the Boss star had been looking forward to. 
   
   
   
   Two weeks later, the mom-to-be debuted her baby belly and, in May, revealed the couple were thinking pink. But finding out the sex wasn’t much of a surprise for Milano, who told Fit Pregnancy that she always knew she was expecting a daughter. 
   
   “With Milo, I didn’t have a minute of morning sickness. So I knew it was going to be a girl,” she explained. 
   
   As for bouncing back after giving birth, Milano is putting regaining her pre-baby body on the back burner and is determined to spend the time enjoying motherhood. 
   
   “A female body is not made to look good in a bikini. It’s made to give birth and have a baby and be a cozy companion for it afterward,” she has said. 
   
   My daughter! My daughter! My daughter! Elizabella has made my heart swell and ache with love. Thank you for your sweet messages❣ — Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) September 5, 2014 
   
   — Anya Leon with reporting by Jennifer Garcia 
   
   
   
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   Morning Sickness Helped Alyssa Milano Guess She Was Having A Girl
target: – Esquire's "sexiest woman alive" has given birth to her first child. Scarlett Johansson welcomed baby Rose with fiance Romain Dauriac, reports the AP. The 29-year-old Lucy star, who was previously wed to actor Ryan Reynolds, has been keeping under the radar of late and hopes for the same for her little one: Her spokesman says she and Dauriac are fans of No Kids Policy, a celeb-driven initiative to keep their children away from paparazzi. ScarJo's not the only one making maternity news: Alyssa Milano welcomed her second child, Elizabella Dylan Bugliari, yesterday, reports People. The Mistresses star, 41, and her husband, David Bugliari, also have a 3-year-old boy, Milo. Joan Lunden of Good Morning America fame has her own baby news: She's a first-time grandma. Daughter Lindsey Krauss Weinberg gave birth Aug. 30 to her own girl, Parker Leigh, reports People. Carrie Underwood offered up a Labor Day surprise: On Monday, the singer tweeted that her two dogs, Ace and Penny, had an announcement to make and showed a pic of them wearing sweaters that said "I'm going to be a big brother" and "I'm going to be a big sister," respectively. She added, "Their parents couldn't be happier!" It will be the first child for Underwood and husband Mike Fisher.