After delivering a gripping teaser in early May, HBO is back with an official trailer for its upcoming docu-series I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, which is based on the Michelle McNamara book of the same name.
As fans of true crime and comedian Patton Oswalt know, McNamara died tragically in her sleep in 2016 before finishing her book that focused on solving the infamous cold case of the Golden State Killer. In honor of his late wife’s dedication to the case, Oswalt worked with a team of investigators to finish I’ll Be Gone In The Dark. Two months after it hit shelves, the killer was arrested after decades of eluding law enforcement.
In the upcoming docu-series, not only will McNamara’s extensive research into the Golden State Killer be front and center, but also the crime writer’s intense dedication to telling the victims stories. With interviews from Oswalt, friends, and co-investigators, I’ll Be Gone In The Dark will go beyond the book and also tell the story of McNamara’s fierce determination that led to the capture of a killer.
Here’s the official synopsis from HBO:
I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK is a detective story told in McNamara’s own words, through exclusive original recordings and excerpts from her book read by actor Amy Ryan. The series draws from extensive archival footage and police files as well as exclusive new interviews with detectives, survivors and family members of the killer to weave together a picture of a complex and flawed investigation. It is a frightening document of an era when victims were often too ashamed to speak out and sexual crime was minimized in the press and the courtroom. Echoing McNamara’s writing, the series gives voice to the victims, and their experiences speak to the far-reaching, human cost of the decades-old case.
I’ll Be Gone In The Dark will debut on HBO on June 28.
With industries still adapting to the coronavirus, many TV shows have halted production. Thankfully, fans of Jeopardy! are still able to see some fresh content as the show has been pulling from a catalog of previously filmed episodes. While the backlog is slowly dwindling, music lovers were in for a treat with Monday night’s episode. St. Vincent, the moniker of musician Annie Clark, was a question in one of the categories.
St. Vincent’s question fell under the category “Island People,” a play on words as her stage name is also an island in the Caribbean. Reading out the answer, host Alex Trebek said: “Annie Clark is the original name of this Grammy-winning singer.” Contestant Lindsay Madejski was quick to respond with, “Who is Annie Clark?” and earned an impressive $1,600.
Sharing the clip to social media, Clark expressed her excitement with an excess of punctuation, writing: “Brief pause in MFBL posts for this — ?!!?!!!???!!!?!!!??!”
This is far from the first time Jeopardy! used a popular musician as an answer on its show. Lil Wayne was recently a response to an answer about his ColleGrove collaboration with 2 Chainz. In the same episode, Alex Trebek gave a hilarious impersonation of Lil Jon’s catchphrase “yeeeeeeeahh.” More recently, Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born track “Shallow” stumped contestants on a round of Final Jeopardy. The clue read: “In October 2019 this song, a duet, was still in the top 10 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary Chart after spending a year on the chart.” But only one contestant was able to give the correct question.
Last night’s episode of WWE Backstage was an Evolution watch-along, with the women of WWE weighing in on the historic 2018 pay-per-view in a group video call. Towards the end of the program, the commentators said that they would love to see a second Evolution, and talked about their dream matches for the event.
Paige, while praising the new faces in NXT, said she “would love to see Nattie do more” and that she doesn’t know why Tamina isn’t being used right now. The possibility of Renee Young having a match was brought up, with Maria Menounos telling the Backstage host, “There might be nothing more fun ever in your life to do, Renee, trust me. It’s literally the highlight of my entire life.” Everyone also reacted positively to the idea of Stephanie McMahon getting back in the ring.
Ruby Riott, Bianca Belair, and Nikki Cross discussed who their own dream opponents for an Evolution event would be. Riott started with the new NXT Women’s Champion, saying, “I’m a huge Io Shirai fan, so I want so bad to work with her.” She also mentioned “a lot of the women from NXT who I haven’t gotten a chance to [work with] or who I’ve mixed it up with on the indies that I would love to do on a bigger scale,” naming Candice LeRae, Dakota Kai, Tegan Nox, and Shayna Baszler.
Belair said she thought “a good matchup, storytelling-wise” for her would be “either Charlotte or Shayna just because I have history with them.” From a purely in-ring perspective Belair brought up, “Raquel [Gonzalez] or Nia Jax or Beth Phoenix because it would be strength vs. strength, so I think we could create some magic in the ring with that lineup too.” Paige added that she would like to see Belair in the ring against Naomi, and Young suggested a match with Asuka.
Nikki Cross would want to wrestle a tag match on a second Evolution show, and she’d want to partner with Alexa Bliss, who she said has helped her with the “psychology and storytelling” or wrestling. Her “two dreams” for them would be a match against the Bellas or against Lita and Trish Stratus.
You can watch all the WWE Backstage Evolution commentary on YouTube here.
When 21-year-old Jacksonville singer YK Osiris challenged Drake to a boxing match, the older rapper laughed him off in his Instagram DMs after Osiris realized he’d likely be outmatched against the taller, heavier, stronger opponent. Osiris has been passing the time in quarantine challenging his contemporaries to friendly bouts. He previously matched up with New York rapper and peer Lil Tjay in a fight the two streamed live to their fans. However, he may have jumped weight classes a bit reaching out to Drake, but was good-natured enough to share the DM exchange with fans on Instagram.
“I’m trynna box u now,” he joked in the DM, before rescinding the challenge later. “I’m jp u gonna beat df out of me.” Drake’s reply was magnanimous, giving Osiris credit for realizing his mistake. “Least u know your limits,” he laughed. However, while Osiris likely won’t get to trade blows with Drake anytime soon, he does have some possibilities lined up. After his fight with Lil Tjay, he threatened Tekashi 69 for trolling in the comments of an Instagram post about it, saying “I’ll knock u out.” Unfortunately, he may need to find himself another opponent, as Tekashi is still on lockdown, completing his shortened sentence for racketeering on house arrest, and Osiris’ planned bout with Trippie Redd was canceled due to external interference, according to Trippie. YK is still looking for a fight, though.
Never has there been a clearer metaphor for this movement than statues with bloody, painful histories being graffitied and torn from their plinths. Usually, these removals happen after years, sometimes decades of debate by city councils. No more. The people are taking power into their own hands. Chopping off Columbus’s head and casting slave traders into the sea. Rapidly unlearning their long-held reverence for the people who helped create our institutionally racist system.
Is this dramatic, direct action going to solve everything? No. But it sure sends a strong message. And it just may signal a larger sea change. Symbolism matters, after all. If it didn’t, the statues being torn down would have never been erected in the first place.
I’ve called for the removal of statues of racist colonizers in the past. I’ll call for it as long as they’re still standing. For me, it’s very simple. Revering people who we know were monsters is objectively awful. We have the gift of hindsight, so let’s use it. Our history is real, has real consequences, and hurts entire communities to this very day. And yes, most cultures have darkness in their history but most have the sense not to celebrate those people. Just try to find an enshrined statue celebrating the Nazi era in Germany. There aren’t any. You don’t have the Fox News-style contrarians saying, “But they built good roads!” The Germans built memorials to that era’s victims instead.
Let’s be clear: Saying Christopher Columbus was a great navigator isn’t enough anymore. We know he was a genocidal despot and one outweighs the fact that he was good at sailing. Not only did Columbus set in motion the greatest mass death and destruction of cultures in known world history with the colonization of the Americas and Caribbean, but he also helped bring about the Transatlantic African slave trade, which led to millions more deaths and the destruction of entire African cultures. That’s three continents worth of mayhem and generations of pain just so that churches in Rome or Madrid could have statues of Jesus made of gold. (I’m not even going to get into the brutality the man carried out himself.)
As the Bostoners who beheaded a Columbus statue in North End Park knew, there’s no valid reason left to celebrate a man who discovered the “new world” by irrevocably damaging the old one. Off with his head! Taking down a statue is the perfect symbolic start to the reformation our society needs to go through. They represent the proverbial tip of the miseducation iceberg that we’ve all been living atop for centuries. But for these dramatic actions to have a lasting effect will require us to go deeper.
Reeducating societies about their racist or even genocidal pasts isn’t anything new. Germans (and a lot of other Europeans) had to go through Denazification after World War II. South Africa has a program of Decolonization. This is something that’s recognized as a way to move forward in the spirit of reconciliation. It’s a way to deal with the painful pieces of the past that fester in the present. What we’re seeing now in the U.K. with the removal of statues of slave traders like Edward Colston is the foundation of that Decolonization education. Colston was responsible for over 80,000 slaves being shipped to the Americas and the deaths of nearly 20,000 at sea. And the wealth he created through the slave trade was pumped back into British society, which benefitted immeasurably. Meaning that as seaweed grows on the drowned statue, we also need to begin a fundamental shift in how we teach history, practice laws, and run the economy from top to bottom.
If you’re one of the people who thinks throwing a statue of Edward Colston into the sea is bad, wait until you find out about the 19,000 slaves who died whilst his company transported them to the Caribbean. pic.twitter.com/xahaC16G7E
It’ll be interesting to see how far the British people are willing to dive into self-reflection about their horrifically brutal colonial past in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Will it include the crimes against humanity they inflicted upon the Irish for centuries? Outside of the UK, will the message of decolonization translate to societies like Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, and Belgium — who all have deeply rooted and horrific colonial histories of their own? Are the Lakota, Incas, Congolese, Hawaiians, and hundreds of other Indigenous nations going to get back the gold and silver that was stolen from them? How about long-overdue payments to Indigenous communities for the ore, timber, minerals, oil, fruits, land, and people that built European empires?
You want kids to learn history? Good. Me too. This is the ultimate teachable moment. They’re living through history. The new history books will write about this as a revolution of philosophy — when the old fables of European heroism were rewritten completely. The toppling of Columbus and his cohorts should be part of curriculae worldwide.
What does this process look like in the U.S.? Once the statues are gone and the streets have been renamed, we have to do the work to decolonize the American mindset. That’s harder than sawing the head off a statue. The myth of “America” is what protects systemic racism. The cops, politicians, and racists opposing this movement learned those behaviors — in no small part because of the education they received in the “greatest country in the world” taught them that they were the heroes over and over and over again for centuries.
Is it still their fault? Of course. But standard American history education and the entirety of pop culture sold them a lie about who we are as a nation. How far this movement can extend depends on how far the American public is ready to decolonize their mindsets. Would you be willing to give Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe (colonially known as Mount Rushmore) back to the Lakota? Can you look in the mirror at your history and recognize that “yes, some of the people I’ve been taught to revere were, in the end, the bad guys?” Because, spoiler alert, every face on the mountain was a bad guy, even in their own time. Moreover, that sacred mountain was stolen from the Lakotabecause it was sacred and therefore used to bolster American supremacy over Indigenous people (and built by an actual white supremacist).
If you can applaud the Belgians taking down King Leopold or Bostonians taking down Columbus but not see how Rushmore needs to come down too, then we’re not there yet. But if we can truly empathize with the pain that mountain causes people, there may be a chance to move forward together.
BREAKING: The Christopher Columbus statue at Byrd Park was taken down by protesters. This follows a call for its removal by demonstrators earlier today. The story is developing, we’ll have more details as they come. pic.twitter.com/FLsEafHr58
At a press conference in 2017, Donald Trump was asked about the removal of statues. He turned the question back on the reporters in the room. “What about Thomas Jefferson … What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? Do you like him?” To which an off-screen reporter answered, “I do love Thomas Jefferson.” Trump replied, “Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue … because he was a major slave owner? Now, are we gonna take down his statue?”
If the people of this nation are taught their history, the answer will become a resounding “Yes!” because not only was Jefferson a slave owner who openly raped his slaves, but he’s also responsible for the “Extermination” policy against the Indigenous Nations the United States employed during their western expansion. He was a racist in action and philosophy. Weirdly enough, Trump actually made a ham-fisted point at that presser: Where are you, woke allies, willing to draw the line?
Will that be hard? For some. Will it meet resistance? Absolutely. Progress isn’t easy. But it’s not impossible either. And that “long arc toward justice” we hear so much about? Perhaps this recontextualizing of history will prove to be another sign that it’s finally starting to curve.
You can reach Zach Johnston on Twitter or Instagram. You can also follow his work on Indigenous issues on Uproxx here.
Since as far back as December, there have been rumors that Iggy Azalea is pregnant. She never announced a pregnancy, but she has confirmed now that the rumors were true: Today, she revealed that she has given birth to a baby boy.
She wrote in an Instagram Story this afternoon, “I have a son. I kept waiting for the right time to say something but it feels like the more time passes the more I realize I’m always going to feel anxious to share news that giant with the world. I want to keep his life private but wanted to make it clear he is not a secret & I love him beyond words.”
Azalea, who has been romantically linked to Playboi Carti over the past year or so, was reportedly six months pregnant in December. In late April, it was reported that she gave birth to her son, although that news remained unconfirmed by Azalea until now. It’s possibly also worth noting that Azalea stopped posting on Instagram in December (when the pregnancy rumors began) and resumed in early May (after she reportedly had the baby).
Meanwhile, Azalea appears to have some new music in the works: When asked by a fan on Twitter in May if she was in Los Angeles and working on her third album, she responded, “Yes & Yes.”
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