Haley's 'the comet,' says the N.Y. Times

South Carolina's Gov. Nikki Haley has been catching the attention of the national media lately.

Last week she was featured on ABC's "This Week." And today Haley, South Carolina's Republican governor for one month and a GOP rising star, is the interview subject in today's New York Times Magazine, which calls her "The Comet."

The newspaper's wide-ranging interview touched on her backstory and some of the rumors that threatened her candidacy:

On why her parents, from India, settled in Bamberg.

They were touring the United States and were about to leave when someone said you can't leave the "best country." They didn't have jobs, but Haley's mother was offered a job teaching sixth-grade social studies, and her father was offered one as a professor. The jobs were in Bamberg.

On her much-self-touted story on being disqualified from the Little Miss Bamberg pageant because the judges couldn't determine whether to enter her in the community's then-segregated contest as white or black.

After she performed, the judges said if they put Haley in the white contest, the white parents would be upset, and if they put her in the black contest, the black parents would be upset. So, the judges gave her a beach ball and disqualified her. "I know that to people outside the state, it sounds like something that's really terrible," Haley tells the Times. "But what I want people to understand is that Bamberg is the same small town that stopped segregating the princesses after that. ... I wanted the takeaway ... to be what the town did after the pageant."

On her parents' reaction to her conversion to Christianity after she married.

"We don't talk much about it, but they have been very respectful."

On campaign allegations that she engaged in sexual affairs.

The rumors only started after she took a double-digit lead in the GOP primary.

On whether she plans on reading the memoir that Will Folks, one of the two men who said he had an affair with Haley, says he is writing.

"I don't plan on reading it. I don't have time to read fiction."

On why so many GOP lawmakers said they planned to vote for her Democratic opponent for governor.

Legislators don't like her because they "know that I call them out whenever they do something wrong."

The Times asks Haley about how she reacts to losing.

The governor talks about beating her children in basketball, Wii and putt-putt golf. Of her reaction to losing, she says, "I don't lose, so I don't have to worry about that."