NASCAR is in the midst of a change, as Bubba Wallace, the series’ lone Black driver, speaks out on the Black Lives Matter movement and successfully pushed NASCAR to ban Confederate flags from events.

The backlash to Wallace from a certain subset of NASCAR’s fan base, the ones that would like the sport to remain a safe space for racism, has been swift, but so has the support from new fans that want to watch races and cheer on Bubba. My Twitter timeline, which is typically fairly quiet during races given that I mostly follow folks interested in basketball, was more active than I’ve ever seen it in the last stage of Sunday’s race at Talladega.

As Wallace charged to the lead briefly and then battled in the top 10 for much of the final stage before being forced to pit on a late caution as he was running out of fuel, fans were enthralled by the action on the track — which, I must say is particularly unique to superspeedway racing at Talladega and Daytona — but also had plenty of questions.

I hope folks tuning in recently to support Wallace stick with NASCAR, a sport I’ve enjoyed watching for years but could desperately use an infusion of a younger, more diverse audience. As such, I’d like to try and answer some of those questions fans may have about terminology they hear on the race broadcast — I will say NASCAR broadcasts do a better job defining terms than most any other sports broadcasts — as well as some of the things that will happen during the race that may not be familiar to someone new to the sport.

Loose vs. Tight

You will hear announcers and drivers talking about their car being “loose” or “tight” throughout a race, sometimes with regards to one driver fighting both issues at the same time. That, unsurprisingly, is very bad. A loose race car means the rear tires lose traction first and make the back end of the car step out. The telltale sign of a loose race car is the back end sliding out in the corners, which can lead to spinning and wrecking. Sometimes, you’ll hear that one car forced another to “get loose,” which is the act of disrupting the air flow to the back bumper of the car, forcing the back end car start sliding up the track, which can lead to a spin or, at the least, forcing the other driver to really work the wheel to save it.

A tight race car means it doesn’t turn as much as the driver wants it to because the front tires lose traction before the rear tires, and this means they have a hard time sticking with the bottom line on the track. A driver with a tight race car will have to step out of the throttle to get the car to the bottom of the track or getting out of turns, losing speed in the process. Sometimes, a car can be both things, loose getting into turns and tight getting out. Again, that’s extra bad.

How do you fix these issues? That gets us to our next terms.

Trackbar, Wedge, Air Pressure Adjustments

Once a car is on the track there are three main ways for drivers and the crews to make adjustments to help the car’s handling. One is the track bar, which crews can adjust with a wrench that goes in the back windshield and drivers sometimes will adjust with a rod in the car (although some feel they only screw things up more when handling it themselves). The track bar runs underneath the rear of the car and can be raised or lowered to shift weight distribution from one side of the car to the other, and can change how it handles to either tighten or loosen up the car.

A wedge adjustment can only happen on a pit stop and requires a crew member to adjust the tension in the rear spring of the car. Sometimes you’ll hear about them calling to add wedge or taking out wedge during a pit stop. Adding wedge (increasing the spring tension) raises the car and makes it tighter, while taking out wedge (lowering the tension) lowers the car and loosens it up. Wedge adjustments are done in “rounds,” which is the amount the crew member will turn the ratchet. Sometimes it can be a quarter or half round, and sometimes it’ll be more than a full turn.

Finally, crews will toy with the air pressure in the tires to get the car to handle better. Lower air pressure will make a car tighter, while adding more air pressure will make the car looser. Most adjustments in air pressure are made to the right sides, particularly the right rear, because of how much force is put on the right sides on the banked corners.

Four Tires vs. Two Tires

For that same reason, that the right sides take more wear on the banked corners of NASCAR tracks, sometimes on key pit stops some drivers will take just two new tires (you might hear an announcer call them “stickers” because they’re new and came with the sticker on them still) on the right side rather than a full four to shorten their time on pit road and pick up some positions on the field. While that can be a good strategy for track position, if it’s done with too many laps left in a race, the worn left side tires will cause them to lose a bit of speed and the cars that take four tires will be at an advantage. Sometimes guys will take no tires and just get a splash of fuel to ensure they can make it to the end (we saw this some at Talladega on Monday).

Green-White-Checker

This is the “overtime” format NASCAR introduced years back to keep races from ending under caution, which is the most anti-climactic finish and fans hated it. The fix was to ensure a race always gets at least one full lap under green before being officially called. The Green-White-Checker designation refers to the flag order, with the first lap starting with the green, the white flag indicating the last lap. Once the leader takes the white flag (crosses the start/finish line for the final lap) the next flag ends the race. Sometimes this can mean a yellow and a checker, but typically if there’s a wreck on the final lap that’s not towards the front of the field well before the finish line, they’ll keep the race green for the leaders to battle it out (as we saw this Monday at Talladega).

Stages

NASCAR recently introduced stages to each race, breaking them up into three segments in an effort to make things more competitive. The first two stages each award points to the drivers in the top 10, making them valuable to the race for the playoffs, and reward drivers for running up front, even if they have issues or wreck later on in the race. The stages also work to prevent as many runaway winners, as there were times when, over a 500 mile race, you’d end up with the majority of the field getting lapped by the eventual winner. Since a caution flag is thrown after each stage, it ensures fewer green flag pit stops, closer fields, more restarts (where action tends to happen) and incentivizes the early and middle portions of the race.

Drafting

One of the first things folks notice when watching NASCAR is how close the cars get to one another and to the wall. That’s all part of the plan to reduce drag and increase speed. At Talladega and Daytona, the 2.5 mile superspeedways on the circuit, the use of “tapered spacers” to reduce horsepower by limiting air flow to the engine, bunch up the field and you get the type of racing we saw Sunday, where they’re nose to tail 5-10 deep and three-wide all the way around the track. Most tracks aren’t quite like that, but drafting is key at all of them, both in pushing someone to the front and also drafting to gain on them and, potentially, “slingshot” by them by using the speed you pick up drafting off of them to pass.

“Bump-drafting” is an aggressive form of drafting where the car behind will literally bump into the car in front at nearly 200 miles per hour. Some tracks, like the superspeedways, this is encouraged because the cars stay “wide open” (full throttle) the entire way around the track. At other tracks, where you let off the throttle in the corners or have to even use the brakes, bump-drafting at the wrong time in the corners can send someone into wall.

Drafting is also done by “side-drafting,” which is when cars get real close to each other when running side-by-side, this is done to manipulate the air flow on the side of a car and push more air onto the other car’s spoiler, slowing it down. When a car breaks a side draft, the resulting pocket of air that gets quickly filled can disrupt the other car, getting them loose or slowing them down as well.

In “Moving On,” the 16th episode of the final season of The Office, Pam interviews for a new job in Philadelphia, only to discover that her would-be boss, played by Bob Odenkirk, is essentially a bizarro Michael Scott. She declines the job because she realizes that she cannot work for another Michael Scott again.

In one way, that episode of The Office comes full circle for Better Call Saul‘s Bob Odenkirk, with him playing a version of the character for which he was very nearly hired back in 2005. The hiring of Michael Scott on The Office, in fact, was probably the most difficult casting decision that had to be made on the show for legendary casting director Allison Jones.

Casting Michael Scott was “the longest part of the [casting] process,” The Office producer Ben Silverman said in Andy Green’s book, The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s. “We were circling Bob Odenkirk. He was available. He had a great reputation in the comedy world, and he hadn’t yet become famous. He wasn’t really well known.”

However, Odenkirk wasn’t the only actor on their radar. In fact, over 35 actors were at least under consideration for the role of Michael Scott, including Robert Townsend, David Arquette, Jason Lee, Dave Foley, Dan Castellaneta, Thomas Lennon, Mark McKinney, Horatio Sanz, Ben Falcone, Owen Wilson, David Koechner, Hank Azaria, Rick Moranis, Kevin Nealon, Dan Aykroyd, Jon Favreau, Eugene Levy, Christopher Guest, Jason Segal, Andy Richter, Jeff Garlin, Cedric the Entertainer, Richard Kind, Matthew Broderick, William H. Macy, Paul F. Tompkins, Stanley Tucci, Steve Buscemi, Gary Cole, Stephen Colbert and John C. Reilly. Most of those actors obviously did not make it past the “consideration stage.” However, Paul Giamatti and Phillip Seymour Hoffman were offered the role, but both declined, Louis C.K. came in and read, but he was barred from starring on The Office because of a holding deal with CBS.

Ultimately, the field was narrowed down to two names: Steve Carell and Bob Odenkirk. They wanted someone with a sort of “generic Americana” feeling, along the lines of Jerry Seinfeld or Tim Allen. They liked The Daily Show alum Steve Carell because of his work on Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty. However, Carell was on another NBC show at the time called Come to Papa as the fourth lead, and NBC — which also owned Papa — would not let The Office connect with Carell until the show was officially canceled.

Meanwhile, Bob Odenkirk “really wanted the part,” and “had a great take on the character.” The problem with Odenkirk — which is also what eventually made him so perfect for the role of Saul Goodman — is that “he had an edge to him. His take was as funny as Steve’s, but it was darker,” according to Allison Jones.

He wasn’t “soft” or “likable enough,” according to Silverman. “He was a little tougher and meaner.” Still, as Jones noted, “how often do you have two people as good as Bob Odenkirk and Steve Carell testing for the same role?”

The decision to go with Carell, however, came down to the fact that he was more of a “jerk and a douche,” while Odenkirk was closer to an “asshole.” Carell wasn’t very threatening, which they felt would work better with an American audience.

“The worst thing I have ever had to do ever,” Allison Jones remarked in Andy Greene book, “is to tell Bob Odenkirk’s agent that he didn’t get The Office … Believe me, it was a bummer to make that call and I do suspect the show would have worked with Bob Odenkirk.”

Of course, while Odenkirk did not land that role, he’s doing just fine for himself, approaching the final season of Better Call Saul after several successful seasons on Breaking Bad. Meanwhile, Carell and Odenkirk have 10 Emmy nominations between them, and both can boast about starring in some of the most popular and critically acclaimed television shows of the 2000s. Not bad for two actors who were not very well known in 2004.

Source: The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s

Doja Cat is riding high right now: “Say So” became her first No. 1 song last month, and the hit single is still in the top 10 on the latest Hot 100 (which Tekashi 69 leads). Now she has given fans something else to enjoy, by sharing a late-night (or early-morning, depending on your perspective) upload of “Unisex Freestyle.” The track appears to be exclusive to SoundCloud, as it is not currently available on streaming platforms.

The song is driven by hard-hitting hip-hop beat contrasted by light synths sounds laid on top. On the song, Doja brags about her multi-gender appeal, rapping, “All the girls like me, and they mans / Unisex, unisex / I’m for all the ladies and gentlemen / I’m unisex, unisex.”

Doja got scatological with her descriptions of the track. Sharing it on twitter, she wrote, “I made some more horny sh*t check it out.” In the SoundCloud description, she called the song “just a pile of a poo poo honey,” and she tagged the track #peepeebaby.

There seems to be even more in the tank from Doja as well. Ariana Grande hinted at a collaboration recently, and an unreleased song from Doja made the rounds on TikTok a month ago.

Listen to “Unisex” above.

During Jon Stewart’s tenure as host of The Daily Show, from 1999 to 2015, his head writers were six white dudes. Many of his top correspondents, including Steve Carell, Ed Helms, John Oliver, and Stephen Colbert, were also white males. Stewart originally dismissed the show’s “women problem,” as Jezebel called it, but during an appearance on The Breakfast Club, he remembers “going back into the writer’s room and being like, ‘Do you believe this sh*t? Kevin? Steve? Mike? Bob? Donald?’ Oh… Uh oh. Uh oh.”

The Daily Show had a policy that kept the names and races of job applicants a secret, so as “to not be sexist and racist,” but Stewart eventually realized “the river that we were getting the material from, the tributary was also polluted by the same inertia. And you had to say to them, send me women, send me black people. And all of a sudden, women got funny… but they’d been funny all along. We just hadn’t actively done enough to mine that.” He also discussed the time he told Wyatt Cenac, the only Black person on staff at the time, to “f*ck off” over an impression of Black presidential candidate Herman Cain:

“It took me a long time to realize that the real issue was that we hired a person who is black… [and] they felt like they’re carrying the weight of representation. So they suddenly feel like, ‘I’ve got to be the speaker of the race.’ So we think we’re doing the right thing, but we’re not doing it in the right way. Those were hard lessons for me, and they were humbling lessons. And I was defensive about them and still didn’t do it all right.”

Stewart (whose new movie, Irresistible, comes out later this week) shared advice for a white man in a position of authority: don’t be complacent. “What’s hard about that for people is you get defensive. Nobody likes to be called on their sh*t, especially when they feel like it’s not really their sh*t,” he said. “But what you realize is, just stopping active persecution isn’t enough to dismantle. It has to be actively dismantled.”

Watch the interview below.

(Via Rolling Stone)

I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, the 2018 true-crime masterpiece by the late Michelle McNamara, will land on a TV near you this weekend with a few additional layers. The book, of course, helped nab the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California in the 1970s and 80s, leaving a trail of 50 rapes and 12 murders in his wake. Michelle, who passed away in 2016, didn’t live to see the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, although there’s no question that her dogged pursuit of the truth, as well as the public awareness that she generated for the cold case, led to renewed law enforcement action that finally brought results. That process, along with much of the book, is detailed in a six-part HBO docuseries that takes its title from the McNamara-penned source material.

The HBO project is epic in its scope, not only following much of the book’s content but also including interviews from survivors, investigators, and McNamara’s husband, Patton Oswalt. True crime fans will find themselves unable to stop watching, and Michelle’s own obsession with unsolved cases — and her non-sensationalized, empathetic treatment of the subject matter — is clear to anyone who’s read the book. The series not only dives into Michelle’s soul but also layers in archival footage and police files, along with anecdotes about her life. Director Liz Garbus (Love, Marilyn, What Happened, Miss Simone?) was nice enough to speak with us about how this docuseries came together.

Even the opening credits of this docuseries are gripping. I can’t think of a better mood-setter than a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche.” How did you decide upon that song?

The cover is performed by Aimee Mann, who was a friend of Michelle and Patton. And if you know the song, you know it’s rather apt for the kind of ghost that haunts the series, but we felt that kind-of flipping the switch and having it in a female voice was appropriate and haunting for our show.

There are so many Cohen covers out there, but this one really hits the mark and sets a mood for what’s to come.

Oh good. We were really thrilled that she did it and with the performance.

You started work on this docuseries before Michelle’s book was published, yes?

You are right. HBO sent me a manuscript of the book before it was published, and I didn’t know much about the case at all. It was probably somewhere deep in my brain, but I hadn’t followed it closely. I think people were less aware of it, or people like myself anyway, and I was just really drawn in by Michelle: by her voice, by her ability to inhabit the world of her survivors. And my hair would stand up while I was reading it, but at the same time, I could feel her tremendous empathy. And also, at the heart of this story was this woman, the artist, who I felt that I identified with. And I just felt like really excited it on, not really as a crime story but really as a portrait of a woman, and a portrait of an artist, and that’s what really lured me in.

This is not only a crime story but a celebration of Michelle’s work, and also a cautionary tale on prescription drug addiction, so how did you strike a balance?

I think that was the challenge: balancing Michelle as an artist, who’s maturing and becoming a wife and a mother with a career, and managing all of those stretches with pills, and then, of course, she succumbs to them, and that kind of narrative. And interweaving it with the narrative of the survivors, not only the trauma of the crimes but also the trajectory of what happens in years after, with their relationships, how they were able to talk about or not talk about this. Then there’s law enforcement and their hunt for the perpetrator, and these threads are interwoven throughout, and that was really the challenge and the joy of it.

Michelle’s blog was wildly popular, and the book took off. So many people have theories on why true crime is so fascinating. Why do think our culture is so obsessed with it?

I definitely think a lot about it, and I know that Michelle thought a lot about it. I think it’s interesting to note that women are particularly part of this audience, and I guess I wonder if women being vulnerable in this world or often victims of domestic violence or other types of sexual violence, if it’s almost like a safety valve, where you can explore your greatest fears in a way that’s controllable? You can turn it off when you close the book. But I also think that storytellers and readers and audiences have always been interested with the most extreme, transgressive types of human behavior. It helps to kind-of understand the outer limits of humanity, and it’s inherently interesting. And it’s interested writers and poets since the beginning. Perhaps in this moment in our society, it’s taken on a bigger spotlight.

The book and the series both touch on how, in the 1970s, rape was not a felony. It was treated like a simple assault, and women were outright blamed in messaging for becoming victims. We’ve made progress, but do you feel that it’s enough?

Yes and no. Things have evolved. It was seen as a misdemeanor, a simple assault, and one of our subjects talks about being processed by male officers and her body being treated like a crime scene. Of course, that still happens in some cases, and in some cases, it doesn’t. And obviously, rape is now a felony, but a lot of rapes go unreported with women fearing not being believed, so there’s a lot of work to do. What I found great is that the survivors in this series, many of whom have been quiet for so long because of shame or stigma, or just social norms from when they were kids, that they decided to come forth and talk about it, and share with their family members. Because holding these kind of things back in private is too much on a person, and you need other people, you need your loved ones to be able to be there for you, so that was a wonderful thing, seeing those folks persevere in that journey.

It was striking, too, how when DeAngelo was arrested, the reaction from some of the survivors was like, “Really… him?”

Right, and Michelle predicted that. She said that it’s [a predator’s] actions that make them so powerful, and then you see that they’re Bob, or Bill, or in this case, Joe. Just some pasty old guy who’s barely worth your thoughts, you know?

And with that “Letter To The Old Man” that Michelle wrote in her book, how did you decide exactly where to put it in the series?

I think that the letter is such a prescient, powerful piece of writing, and she predicts so many things about what would happen in that letter, so we put it in a very special part of the series. It shows Michelle’s power and prowess, so it was very important for us to include it and dramatize it, very specifically.

You had cameras rolling when the team (including Patton) found out about the arrest. That timing.

It was crazy, that night — the first night of shooting — we went to Chicago. It was really early days of the project, and we thought we were just going to get to know [each other]. Patton was doing a book reading in Chicago, and we were all going to meet Michelle’s relatives, and then we filmed the reading, and then went to sleep. We woke up in the morning to text messages blowing up the phone about a suspect arrested. My camera crew had already boarded a flight to another city, and we shot Patton with an iPhone, and we were all booked on different flights back to New York, and then Patton was booked on Seth Meyers, and we were able to regroup with a different photographer and shoot them watching the press conference and their first reactions, so it was really a wild 24 hours.

Patton’s mentioned in the book, and he was obviously a huge supporter of Michelle’s work, so how did you decide how much of him to include?

Patton was always clear in that “this is not about me.” We agreed, and I think he was able to shed incredible light onto Michelle’s character, onto their initial romance, which made some great stories, and into struggle with writing, being a mom, and all those things. So, he was really there in service of Michelle’s story, and he never wanted anything more than that, so it really wasn’t that hard.

To wrap up here, DeAngelo is expected to plead guilty on June 29th.

Yes. The day after the premiere. His journey through the justice system is what really bookended our production. I hope that he does plead guilty, and that happens, for the survivors who were not named in the current suit. It’s really important for them and their closure, so I do hope that it goes through.

HBO’s ‘I’ll Be Gone In The Dark’ premieres on Sunday, June 28 at 10:00pm EST.

IDK has a new album on the way, but recently, he has been teasing another project he plans to share before then. He dropped his IDK And Friends mixtape in 2018, and now he is following it up with IDK And Friends 2. This week, he gave some vague teasers about the release, which is set to drop this Friday. Now he has dropped another breadcrumb by sharing the list of guests who will appear on the album.

The list is divided into an “Artists” column and a “Producers” column. The former includes ASAP Ferg, Wale, Juicy J, Denzel Curry, Maxo Kream, PnB Rock, Xanman, Rico Nasty, Big Flock, Yung Manny, Big Jam, Weensey (BYB), Alex Vaughn, and Ronny J. The latter features Jersonmade, Michael Uzi, Ronny J, Juicy J, FNZ, Acyde, Teo Halm, Jeff Klienman, Nils, Wonda, Blue Rondo, DJ Money, Vontae Thomas, “and more.”

This all comes after IDK previously indicated that his first IDK And Friends project would not be repeated, as he tweeted in 2019, “IDK AND FRIENDS was a sacrifice I had to make inorder to fund #ISHEREAL without a label. My album was basically done before I did my partnership. I will never put out a project like IDK&FRIENDS again. So if you like my simple sh*t, enjoy that. It will be the last.”

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

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