Month: January 2021

The last time Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo worked together, they wrote Bridesmaids, a massive hit at the box office (nearly $300 million!) that was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay. It’s been 10 years since the Wonder Woman 1984 star has been ready to partttttttty, but the pair have reunited for Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. The sunny comedy (which was originally scheduled to come out last year but was pushed back due to the pandemic) is about two best friends, Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig), who leave Wisconsin for the first time ever to take a vacation in Florida, where they’re involved in a “villain’s evil plot.” Get ready for midwestern accents. Watch the Stranger Things-inspired trailer above.

Here’s the official plot synopsis:

Take a trip and break out of your shell with Barb and Star. From the gals who brought you Bridesmaids (co-stars and co-writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo) comes Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. Lifelong friends Barb and Star embark on the adventure of a lifetime when they decide to leave their small Midwestern town for the first time… ever. Romance, friendship and a villain’s evil plot… Hold onto your culottes.

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, which also stars Jamie Dornan, Damon Wayans Jr., Wendi McLendon-Covey, Michael Hitchcock, and Vanessa Bayer (so get ready to load your freaking lard carcass into the mud), comes out on February 12.

Grimes has kept busy over the past few months with endeavors like a The Eric Andre Show guest appearance and dropping a new version of Miss Anthropocene earlier this month. Last night, she took some time to flex her poetic muscles, sharing some lines she wrote about the recent GameStop stock market madness.

The brief poem reads, “In the vast ocean / My tear is a drop / My dollar a single photon / Of the light of GameStop.” She also penned a poem about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, which goes:

“It’s not as popular right now
But Bitcoins also a cash cow
And even though she’s fallen some
I still grew my initial sum

I’m told that I’m on the spectrum
I catch crypto like ash ketchum

Crypto king, like Kim dot com
Get me some etherium!”

In response to the latter poem, somebody asked what Grimes has been doing lately, and she responded by indicating that she may have new music on the way soon, or at least that she’s almost done with some. She wrote, “Finishing record and making the visuals , I also broke my arm and got covid and a bunch of other stuff . Hang w x but I guess I should return to the digital realm.”

Aside from the new Miss Anthropocene release, the most recent music from Grimes is her Cyberpunk 2077 song “Delicate Weapon.”

One of the very few universal truths left in the topsy-turvy world in which we find ourselves is that, whenever a huge news story is breaking, that old Dave Chappelle bit becomes more relevant than ever. As seemingly every news and entertainment outlet scrambles to cover the story of the Redditors who semi-broke the stock exchange, one question still remained to be answered: “WHERE’S JA!?”

Fortunately, the Queens rapper heard our cries and has at last weighed in. Unsurprisingly, he’s on the side of the r/WallStreetBets brigade and has some harsh words for the proprietors of Robinhood as they pause trading on the over shorted stocks of AMC and GameStop.

“Yo this is a f*cking CRIME what @RobinhoodApp is doing,” he wrote on Twitter. “DO NOT SELL!!! HOLD THE LINE… WTF.”

There you have it. Ja Rule is one of the thousands of people buying up stock in AMC and GameStop. As the hedge fund managers who bet the house that those companies’ share prices would continue to plummet flex their muscle to save what little face they have left, the “little guys” can rest assured that noted business guru Ja Rule has their backs.

All jokes aside, Ja Rule chiming in on the surreal situation only increases the sensation that we’ve gone way beyond the looking glass. His last notable investment was decidedly… well, not great… and yet, here he is, advising a cadre of Wall Street bettors to hold their shares as they wait for hedge funds’ short-sells to come due so they can try to profit as those hedge funds take a bath. The only way this could get any weirder is if 50 Cent also got in on the side of the hedge funds — which, if you think about it, would totally be in character for him.

If this whole thing still has you baffled about what’s happening, Uproxx has an explainer here.

In a new extended clip released ahead of Friday’s Episode 4 of WandaVision, Marvel promises that “everything is about to change” as several mysteries behind the show come into focus. Taking place in the aftermath of Teyonah Parris‘ Geraldine being removed from Westview after causing Wanda to be reminded of her brother’s death during The Avengers’ battle with Ultron, the clip confirms that Geraldine is Captain Monica Rambeau who was last seen as a young girl in Captain Marvel. In the comic books, Monica is also known as the superhero Spectrum who at one point was Captain Marvel, so it’ll be interesting to see how the MCU will handle her character.

Working with Geraldine/Monica is Randall Park who makes his MCU return as Agent Jimmy Woo from Ant-Man and the Wasp. The new clip reveals that Park’s Woo is the radio voice that’s been attempting to contact Wanda inside the energy bubble that’s encasing Westview, which is shown to be a small town in New Jersey. Woo seems to be concerned with who is “doing this” to Wanda, which seems to hint that a villainous force at work.

Finally, the clip brings Kat Dennings into the fold. Reprising her role of Darcy Lewis from the Thor films, she appears to be working with SWORD — short for Sentient Weapon Observation and Response Department — but its not known whether that’s in an official capacity like Monica and Jimmy, or as a consultant. Darcy seems to be the mysterious figure from Episode 1 who’s observing the sitcom events unfolding in Westview from a monitor. More importantly, a quick glimpse of the wall of her office offers another hint that there’s something going on with Kathryn Hahn’s Agnes. The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment shows that all of the Westview residents are real people with names and IDs except for Agnes, who is noticeably unidentified.

Before WandaVision even aired, fans have theorized that Agnes is actually the Marvel sorceress Agatha Harkness, who has a deep history with Wanda in the comics. This latest clue seems to be pointing in that direction, but Marvel is also not adverse to using red herrings to keep fans on their toes.

This year’s rookie class in the NBA spent much of 2020 in limbo, working out after the college basketball season was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic for a draft date that, for much of the year, was a moving target. From March to November, the prospective 2020 Draft class was working individually and waiting to find out where they would be playing organized basketball next.

Following the longest draft process the league has ever seen came the shortest transition period, as rookies were selected, hurried to their new home city, and began training camp within mere weeks, with no preseason and a season that tipped off barely a month after they heard their names called virtually by Adam Silver and Mark Tatum.

This required the rookies to be flexible and adaptive, both in plying their craft on their own for months and then to finding ways to fit in with their new teams and learn a new system and new teammates in just a month before the season started.

“Yeah, so you know right after draft night it was like all about getting to the city and hitting the ground running because it’s such a short turnaround,” Sixers rookie Isaiah Joe told Dime last month. “But it’s been a rollercoaster that’s like, it’s teaching me how to be able to adapt to different situations, so now I have to adapt to the long draft process, I have to adapt to coming into the season real early.”

It was a rapid adjustment period and one the NBA had to work through as well in order to provide those rookies with the same information and guidance other classes get from the Rookie Transition Program.

For Jamila Wideman, the NBA’s VP of Player Development, there was never a question of whether they would host the transition program, but what it would look like and how the league would try to meet the demands of this year.

“In some ways, this year, the circumstances almost amplified the importance of having the Rookie Transition Program as much as any other year because of the particular kinds of challenges that, just the circumstances of the world, have sort of additionally imposed as challenges that rookies are facing as they make this transition into their professional lives,” Wideman said. “I think we, and together with the Players Association, realized that although it was a challenge it was also an incredible opportunity. So, we really just thought about what the most impactful way was gonna be to reach the rookies and we landed on having a virtual platform to connect with them.”

It started with virtual sessions over Zoom, where the rookies would discuss various topics like finances and investing, sleep and nutrition, mental health, social justice, professional development, and more, hosted by a variety of speakers, including a number of current and former players. Among those that spoke with the rookies were Karl-Anthony Towns, Dwyane Wade, Danilo Gallinari, Pat Connaughton, and Tobias Harris, sharing their experiences and perspective on how to build a successful on-court career, but more importantly how to navigate life as an NBA player off of it.

Harris sees it as his responsibility as a veteran in the league to impart knowledge to the next generation that he’s gained both through experience and that passed down from vets he learned from as a young player. On the RTP call, his focus was less on the work they’ll do on the court, as they’ll get ample guidance from their coaches and teammates on what they should be doing there, and more on how to take care of their newfound financial well-being.

“Just doing your homework and your research, because you’re coming into a brand new space,” Harris said. “It’s the first time for a lot of guys, probably for all of the guys, to get this type of money. So my biggest message is, just do your research on everything you’re looking into, getting into, because you technically hit the lottery. And you want to be one to, years from now, look back and say you did the right thing with the type of compensation and the funds you’re getting to be in the league. So, just in terms of investments and things like that, to know what you’re getting into before you make a quick decision, because a lot of people are going to come at you any type of way and you’ve got to be able to know who to trust. And trust is going to come from you being smart enough to do your homework on the backend. So that’s my message to all the rookies, especially on the RTP call, is to really [emphasize] you gotta do your homework. With everything you’re getting there’s a responsibility.”

Along with the importance of taking care of your finances and being knowledgable about what’s happening with your money, something that stood out to Wideman on the call was the discussion of how to embrace your platform as an NBA player to impact change on the community — something we saw happen around the league in 2020 as players became leading voices in the fight for racial justice.

“What was interesting about the guys that came in this year, is each of them had a way of engaging in their communities in a really different way,” Wideman said. “So, I think one of the themes that came out of the conversation was to encourage the younger players to be really intentional and thoughtful about what they’re authentically passionate about in terms of how they want to invest in their communities. And I think also encouraging guys to be open and to embrace all the different way that that can look. And for some guys that might be advocacy around voting, for some guys that might mean investing in a business to build affordable housing, for other guys that might mean being really, really connected to the high school that they went to and making sure that kids there have access to the educational resources they might need. But, you know, the list is as long as the guys who attended. So, I think that would be the one theme I would pull out was just encouraging guys to grow into themselves and be open to all kinds of ways in which they might think about turning back to invest [in their communities].”

Understanding that each of the rookies is their own person who is in a unique place is something that the league has tried to keep in mind with the program, knowing that they need to bring in a variety of voices who have been in different positions in the league. For the top picks, Wade and Towns can speak to the unique pressures that come with that status, while first round picks outside the lottery can relate more to Harris’ journey from being the 19th pick and entering the league as a role player to becoming a starter and star in the league. For second round picks like Isaiah Joe, Connaughton was a guy that has carved out a key rotation role on a top contender from being the 41st overall pick and can speak to the work required to make that happen.

This year, the league will provide continued calls and opportunities for rookies to gather advice and have conversations and continued education, because as Wideman noted, you don’t make the transition to being an NBA player in just a day or two, it’s a constant journey and the league wants to be cognizant of that — particularly this year when everyone is learning how to navigate a new normal.

Joe is just trying to be a sponge, learning from teammates like Harris and a veteran coach in Doc Rivers, embracing the culture they’re trying to build in Philadelphia. The biggest lesson to this point has been how to make sure he’s doing the necessary work to be a professional outside of the team structure, noting that the free time afforded as a professional is a significant departure from his time at Arkansas.

“I think one of the biggest things is being able to be productive during your time,” Joe said. “Coming from school where we’re booked with classes and practices and study halls and things like that, now it’s just basketball for the most part. And so, during my off time, what am I doing? Am I being productive working on my body? Am I looking into my finances making sure everything is all right? Just things like that, finding extra time to get into the gym. It’s definitely, I think, watching some of the older guys and learning from them, learning their schedule. It’s very helpful.”

Harris, now a decade into his career, can still see himself in the rookies coming in, remembering what it’s like to be a fresh-faced kid trying to make it as an NBA player. His rookie season was a lockout year, so he can even relate some to the mad dash to start the season these rookies have had to go through. He also hasn’t forgotten all of the help he received as his journey began, and believes it’s his responsibility to show the young players the ropes on and off the court to provide them with the guidance he received.

“I had great vets. I came in, Drew Gooden was a great vet for myself. Ben Gordon when I got to Orlando, Jameer Nelson, I always learned from the guys that were before me and have been in the league for a longer period of time,” Harris said. “When I first came in in Milwaukee, I had some great vets there, Joel Pryzbilla, guys that just wanted to make sure I was good in whichever way. Just checking in on me, cause I’m coming in a young player, like 19 years old, rookie, they looked at me as a little brother, and I take that same responsibility with a lot of the young cats and rooks we have on the team now. Cause it’s a great opportunity, but you have to really be grounded and really know what you want and you have to have good people of influence around you to get there.”

This year’s rookie class had a journey like no other, and as a group their performance this season has been impressive given the challenges faced by an interminable draft prep period followed by a whirlwind month between the draft and the season. Each one has a unique path they’ll take, but the league and veterans like Harris will try to ensure they have the guidance to make the most of the opportunity in front of them.

Ahead their live stream event “The Show,” K-pop vanguards Blackpink are back with a scintillating performance of their The Album single “Pretty Savage” for The Late Late Show With James Corden. The quartet executes their elaborate choreography with razor efficiency as they collectively flip off their haters with the song’s defiant, dismissive lyrics.

The late-night appearance was their return to US television after appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Good Morning America in October. The group also spent some time palling around with host James Corden, giving him a digital tour of their set and sharing some of their pre-performance rituals.

Originally, “The Show” was set to premiere at the end of December, but it was pushed back to January 31 due to South Korean COVID safety precautions. It’s billed as a “first of its kind” live stream experience to play in multiple territories simultaneously via YouTube, and is expected to feature the debut live performances of a number of songs from The Album, which was released during the pandemic and therefore didn’t see an accompanying tour.

Since then, group member Jennie launched her own YouTube channel to share her daily life with fans.

Watch Blackpink’s high-energy performance of “Pretty Savage” on The Late Late Show With James Corden above.

Breaking Bad‘s “Ozymandias” was previously the only television episode with a perfect 10.0 user rating on IMDb (with good reason: it’s the best episode of Breaking Bad and, therefore, one of the best episodes of any show ever), but no more.

“Ozymandias” still retains its pristine score, but it’s joined by two episodes of another series: anime mega-hit Attack on Titan. Both season four’s “Assault,” which has already aired in Japan and will debut in the U.S. on Adult Swim’s Toonami block soon (it is available via Crunchyroll, however), and season three’s “Hero” have 10.0 ratings.

IMDb user ratings should be looked at with the same amount of skepticism as Netflix viewership numbers, but it’s still interesting to find an example of something that tens of thousands of internet strangers think is “perfect.” How often does that happen? For instance, “Ozymandias” was directed by Rian Johnson, who also directed The Last Jedi, which has a 90% rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes but only a 42% audience score (the critics are correct). But on IMDb, he’s 10 out of 10 would recommend. Speaking of Star Wars: three episodes of The Clone Wars, “Victory and Death, “Shattered,” and “The Phantom Apprentice,” have 9.9 ratings. The rest of the 9.9s include multiple episodes of Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and Attack on Titan, as well as individual episodes of Person of Interest (?), Chernobyl, and Mr. Robot.

The “Finding Frances” episode of Nathan for You is nowhere in the top-50, invalidating the entire list. But if you’re still interested, here it is.

If you aren’t exactly sure what’s happening with the Redditor-fueled GameStop (and AMC) mayhem, you’re not alone (that’s where The Daily Show‘s alternative to Margot Robbie might come in handy). The chaos has been sparking Wall Street anxiety for at least a week, and it all began when the flagging stock of GameStop (a brick and mortar operation that sells physical copies of games, which can more conveniently be streamed) began skyrocketing. The WallStreetBets Subreddit had led the charge and also sent AMC stock soaring in a move that might just save movie theaters.

Well, none of this sat too well with the Wall Street big boys, especially when the GameStop stock frenzy crashed a hedge fund that made a ton of money when Cyberpunk 2077 flopped. Days later, and GameStop was still soaring and even briefly topped $500 a share during early Thursday trading after another massive rally on Wednesday. Well, someone must have pressed hard for an end to the madness, or brokerages are growing nervous about retaliation or… some other financially punitive repercussion (by the more typically powerful traders or even the government).

This led to TD Americatrade temporarily restricting trading on both GameStop and AMC on Wednesday before thinking better of the move and reversing course with an apology (after a backlash). Well, this didn’t stop Robinhood Interactive Brokers from deciding to restrict GameStop trading on Thursday, which is an ironic move because it’s apparent that any claims of “market manipulation” (by Redditors) aren’t acknowledging how hedge funders (like those on Showtime’s Billions) already do this on the regular.

In any event, Robinhood boasts “Democratizing finance for all” as one of its slogans. The company holds itself out as a free-stock trading pioneer, and this 2016 tweet (“Let the people trade”) is now attracting a lot of attention.

All of this has led to justifiable responses (on Twitter) about the free market putting on the brakes because the wealthy are losing money due to this Subreddit/GameStop rally. People are angry as heck because, yes, the market is being manipulated again under the guise of halting market manipulation. It’s very circular, given that the GameStop rally began as a means to illustrate (and maybe even punish) those who profit big time from manipulating the market.

Even Fyre Fest co-founder Ja Rule has weighed in.

The Biden Administration has yet to step into this mess but is said to be “monitoring” the situation. As if Joe Biden didn’t already have enough to deal with this month, right? This isn’t over yet.

It’s easy to hazard a guess for why people don’t follow news about Wall Street: It makes us feel powerless in a million different ways all at once. When endlessly confusing financial instruments get filtered through infinite layers of elite cronyism and poured into a big old vat of government corruption, it’s no surprise that the general public is left disengaged. A feeling which, as Ryan Gosling says in The Big Short, Wall Street thrives on — making us think that “only they can do what they do; or, even better, for you to just leave them the fuck alone.”

Who can blame us for tuning out? It’s what literally everyone seems to want. Plus, it’s too painful to look.

We watched the government bailout banks while leaving homeowners to rot in ’08. In 2020, we saw friends, businesses, and entire communities decimated by a pandemic that has been (both inexplicably and quite predictably) good for the stock market and bad for the wealth gap (even worse for the racial wealth gap). So sure, we know on some deep level that Wall Street is screwing us, but we’d really rather not hear the bawdy details.

The chance to briefly fight off this antipathy to knowing what’s happening on Wall Street is part of what makes the Reddit-GameStop stock price saga so fun to follow. It’s full of chaotic energy, archetypical themes, and (while there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye) it seems like a plot we can track without too much effort (thanks to Trevor Noah in the bath). On paper, it’s Robin Hood vs. the greedy ruling class in both the literal and metaphorical senses (Robinhood is the name of a trading platform where much of the story has gone down and which has now turned heel by restricting trades on certain stocks).

It’s like a real-time episode of Billions where Bobby Axelrod gets the absolute screws put to him by a bunch of lone investors making memes on message boards. Pretty fun, while it lasts.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, who co-created Billions, is covering it for the Times. Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale in The Big Short, is the voice that helped spark original optimism in GameStop. At this rate, Adam McKay will own the rights to the r/WallStreetBets subreddit by the end of the week and Ben Mezrich will have a draft of a book turned in by February.

For those not yet following along, here are some Cliff’s Notes on the whole Reddit-GameStop story:

• In October, Redditors noticed that GameStop (GME) stock was being heavily shorted (people were betting on it to fail), with Melvin Capital, run by Gabriel Plotkin, holding a large short position. (Hedge Funds don’t have to share their short positions, though they can often be deduced and Plotkin had disclosed some of his.)
• Perhaps because Plotkin’s short positions seem to heavily feature nostalgic brands for internet natives (Bed, Bath, & Beyond and Express are also on his list), because shorting brick and mortar retail in a pandemic feels almost absurdly exploitive, or simply because they wanted to make money on undervalued prospects, Redditors on the popular forum r/WallStreetBets targeted those same companies (and others) as stocks to buy. (There was a solid case to be made, at that time, that the stocks being shorted were undervalued.)
• By buying call options and using platforms like Robinhood to purchase fractional shares, Redditors created a “short squeeze.” Shorts pay off when the price of a stock falls — if it goes up, the shorts incur negative value and anyone holding shorts has to pay daily interest on them and make sure they have the money to cover their positions.
• The price of GameStop stock trended upwards for a few months and spiked astronomically on Monday, as more and more Redditors got in on the action of artificially inflating a stock to stick it to the hedge funds that bought the original shorts.
• The short squeeze turned into a “gamma squeeze” on the hedge funds. (There is no upper limit of what you can lose with a short — if a stock you betted on going down keeps going up, you have to exit your position with a loss or find the money to hold it.) This forced Melvin Capital and other hedge funds to either dump their positions and take a bath or pay enormous fees in order to maintain their positions while getting squeezed.
• The internet rejoiced and Redditors urged one another to hold their positions as Melvin Capital got bailed out by other Wall Street goliaths. Melvin Capital publicly claimed to have exited their position — though Redditors aren’t buying it.
• Right now, GME stock is incredibly volatile but up around $400 per share. It was near $19 per share on NYE 2020.
• The SEC announced that they’re closely tracking how GameStop has been traded over the past week. Yesterday, hedge fund managers called for regulation — something they’re not in the habit of doing — very publicly. (The way Gamestop has been traded more closely resembles a momentum stock amplified by media coverage and an engaged populace than actual collusion.)
• Robinhood announced that they’re restricting trading on GameStop and other volatile stocks.

That’s… the gist. There’s a lot more to it. (This has all been a boon to the explainer economy, too.)

Just like any good episode of Billions, the subplots are still hazy and will take a while to become clear. There are probably a few “heists behind the heist” going on — whether that’s hedge funds making side bets or frontrunning by paying for information from Robinhood to buy stocks and resell them at a profit in a matter of nanoseconds, Melvin Capital allegedly planting an MSNBC story about dumping their position, or hedge funds who bought into the rise early allegedly seeding commenters on Redditor to keep the pump going.

The whole mess isn’t getting untangled anytime soon, that’s for sure. There have already been a few wild plot twists — like people gradually realizing that Robinhood was more villain (or profiteer) than hero in all this.

Even if determined Redditors holding GME stock ride this thing ’til the wheels fall off out of spite (“to the moon!” is their slogan), the stock price won’t be sustained over the long term (because GameStop is cooler than hedge funds think, but it’s not Google) and someone is going to pocket the cash when the bottom drops out. Hopefully, it’s some Redditors, but on some level, it’s also inevitably going to be Wall Street. We know that already, we’ve seen how every movie and TV show about corporate greed ends.

Brace yourself for a few title cards at the end of the eventual movie or series about the actual collusion that was going on between the big firms and Robinhood and a melancholy postscript that essentially says, “and they’re still doing it, right now.“

Nevertheless, a few billionaires are having a rough week and one that’s likely to get rougher if Redditors hold on and keep pushing, which they’re vowing to do. As Billions noted in its short squeeze plot arc, interest and fees are accumulated on short positions daily and can balloon quickly. So while victory might not be clear cut, it seems likely that some hedge fund investors will lose significant portions of their funny money and substantial credibility with corporate investors over this fiasco.

Maybe that wasn’t the point in the beginning, but a quick look at the current threads on r/WallStreetBets will tell you it’s sorta the point now. Certainly, the media is eager to celebrate these few glimmering days of feeling like David triumphed over Goliath. Plus some laughs at the expense of billionaires getting foiled by Redditors with names like /FartHammer6969.

By the time the dust truly settles this whole story will have returned to the realm of “Wall Street tales of greed that most of us don’t have the disposable time or interest to follow.” When the big reveal comes (financial reporter Alexis Goldstein lays out the biggest probable winners here), most folks will have tuned out already. Some celebrity will have said something dumb and the cultural conversation will move on.

Why? Partially because it’s so maddening to follow the financial world, but also because most Americans don’t own even a fraction of the shares traded on Wall Street. Sure, folks might hold some shares of a company via a mutual fund that’s part of a retirement package they can’t touch (where roughly 30% of US-owned stock shares are held), but with 40% of US corporate equity owned by foreign investors in 2019 and rich Americans gobbling up the lion’s share of what’s left, the amount of directly held stock by the bottom 95% of families is, according to data published Tuesday by the New York Times, in the 5% range.

Meaning 95% of the country isn’t really invested in the world of investing. But when it leads to wage stagnation or jobs slashed in favor of shareholder dividends or stock buybacks, they’re the ones who feel it the most. This is, again, what makes a Reddit revolt feels so cool (even when the story behind the story inevitably doesn’t end up being quite so tidy).

The best we can say for now is that it’s exciting as shit to see a small fraction of Wall Street’s underbelly exposed this week. The fact that the stock market is just rampant gambling in every sense (with American workers typically picking up the tab) is, gradually, becoming common knowledge. Moments of wild speculation and frenzy like this remind us: that’s pretty much all Wall Street does. This knowledge can potentially create a sea change around investing, in which rampant greed is checked.

At the very least, there are a lot of hedge fund managers who will have to also hedge their lust for money out of fear of being the next viral target.

Yesterday, Chamath Palihapitiya — a tech investor who often takes vocal positions against Wall Street’s excess, has lots of fans on r/WallStreetBets, and has now both made and donated money thanks to a GameStop position — said on MSNBC: “Just because you’re wrong doesn’t mean you get to change the rules.” It’s a great pull quote for this real-time Billions episode, if not 100% correct — in the past Hedge Funds and other big investors have been allowed to change the rules when proven wrong. Because while Hedge Funds absolutely treat investing like gamblers, they’re also — when conglomerated together — “the house.”

And one way or another, the house always wins. Robinhood restricting trading seems to be a harbinger of that.

Still, it’s hard not to be at least a little charmed by the Reddit-based investors who seem to know all of this and are nevertheless committed to seeing their line of action through. Whether they did it for the nostalgia, for the laughs, to troll big investors, or simply to get rich off a market opportunity just like everyone else who invests, for a few days they made everyone pay attention to just how broken the system is. And they absolutely infuriated everyone who has a stake in “business as usual” on Wall Street.

That, in itself, makes their made-for-TV/movie efforts a success.

About three years ago, I made a wish for more artists to livestream their concerts.

I was writing about the run of 13 shows performed in 2017 by the band Phish at Madison Square Garden, which were made available to watch live online. “Whenever I’m in the midst of following Phish on a ‘couch tour,’ I often find myself wishing that I could replicate this experience with other bands,” I said. In a sense this wish has come true, though strictly in a cursed, Monkey’s Paw kind of way. I was hoping for a future in which more bands made it possible for fans to engage with their live performances from the comfort of home, and to enhance this engagement by approaching their setlists in more creative and innovative ways. Certainly, I did not anticipate that a worldwide pandemic would completely level the concert industry and make livestreaming, for now, the only game in town.

Nevertheless, this is where we currently find ourselves. And, in spite of what some in the industry might want to believe, I don’t think this is a temporary stopgap. Even if concerts come back in some form later on this year — hardly an automatic proposition given the slow rollout of Covid vaccines — I suspect that livestreaming will continue to play a significant role in how fans experience “live” music, as it already has for years in the jam scene. Artists and platforms are just starting to figure out what works and doesn’t work in this sphere, both in terms of the technology as well as larger philosophical questions about how to replicate the sensation of an ineffable, in-person experience via a screen. Ultimately, livestream concerts exist in an unsettled DMZ between a concert and a more cinematic experience. The question is how to strike the right balance between presenting something that’s visually and musically exciting, and giving viewers the feeling of togetherness that no television show or movie can provide as well as actually rubbing shoulders with strangers in a club or theater.

Judging by my experience over the weekend with the new Bandsintown Plus livestream platform, this question will be especially tricky to navigate. Launched earlier this month, Bandsintown Plus — an offshoot of the site previously known mainly for concert listings, sort of like Pollstar for indie bands — is a subscription service in which more than 25 concerts per month by a range of acts are made available for $9.99. While the majority of the artists are up-and-comers with minimal name recognition, the site has booked a handful of indie-folk luminaries for exclusive shows, including Phoebe Bridgers, Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, and Soccer Mommy.

Bridgers, Lenker, and Tweedy performed last week on consecutive nights, no doubt drawing some of the largest audiences to Bandsintown Plus in the platform’s young life. Immediately, many of the distinguishing features of Bandsintown Plus, both good and bad, were apparent. On the plus side, the concerts looked and sounded quite good, with practically no technical glitches in any of the concerts I watched. (As anyone who was viewed a lot of livestream concerts will tell you, this is no small feat.) The artists also presented something that went beyond a normal club or theater experience.

Bridgers played in a rehearsal room with frequent collaborator Ethan Gruska, reworking her songs to suit Gruska’s beautiful piano playing. Lenker performed at a house in the Minneapolis area, softly strumming stunning tunes from her recent solo record, Songs, as her grandmother painted a mural behind her. Tweedy was the only one to play with a full band, but his show also felt more intimate than usual, with both of his sons joining him. (The Tweedy progeny will be familiar to viewers of the family’s IG program The Tweedy Show, one of the more delightful examples of livestream music in the Covid era.)

I count myself as a fan of Bridgers, Lenker, and Tweedy. And yet during these performances I couldn’t help feeling, frankly, a little bored. It didn’t have anything to do with the music — I’ve seen all of these artists play live in person, in some cases multiple times. So, what was the problem? Why was this music I normally enjoy not translating?

For starters, some of the shows I saw on Bandsintown Plus were not actually live. No matter how good these not-live performances were, they didn’t have the nervous energy that is apparent during actual live performances, even when you’re watching at home. These canned gigs seemed doubly egregious given that Bandsintown Plus doesn’t archive performances — if you don’t show up at the scheduled start time, there is no going back and catching up with what you missed. If artists don’t have to be there on time, it seems fair to allow subscribers a window of at least 24 hours to view the shows they’ve paid for.

Another problem is that the performers themselves, in some cases, couldn’t help but point out how strange it is to perform under such circumstances. Much of the patter between songs reiterated this time and again, and as a viewer it was just deflating after a while. Yes, playing music in a mostly empty room to an unseen internet audience is definitely weird. But so is watching “live” music by yourself on a couch. Is it possible to at least briefly suspend our collective disbelief over reality not being generally crappy at the moment? We’re all trying to make do here.

But the biggest hurdle with livestream concerts in fact has nothing to do with the artists. When I think back to the livestream concerts I’ve enjoyed the most in recent months — The Hold Steady’s performances from the Brooklyn Bowl in December, Trey Anastasio’s autumn run of concerts at The Beacon Theatre — their shared attribute is the discernible presence of a virtual audience.

At The Hold Steady’s gigs, video screens were visible around the stage showing fans at home pounding beers and singing along to songs from all over the world. For the Trey Anastasio concerts, the Phish frontman frequently engaged with commenters watching at home on Twitch, addressing their comments as they scrolled on a nearby screen. Anastasio also had the benefit of a large and enthusiastic audience that live-tweeted all of his Beacon shows, which added to the feeling that this was an actual event and not a secondhand representation of an event.

People go to concerts because they love music, but they also are seeking community. You bond with those around you who love this thing as much as you do. This makes us all feel less alone in the world. For Bandsintown Plus and other platforms like it, this community-building aspect is crucial. And it requires more than just having a chat room scroll endlessly during the performance. (Chat rooms are magnets for some of the obnoxious people online, no matter the context. Most of us avoid them like a sketchy nightclub bathroom.) Of course, I have no doubt that the people involved in these services already know this, and I recognize that this is always easier said than done. The acts I’ve responded to most positively in the streaming realm benefit from fan communities that are already well established. Generating similar excitement for artists who are just starting to build fanbases is infinitely harder.

But it remains a necessity regardless. Now more than ever, we all need to feel connected to something. And so many livestream concerts, unfortunately, only enhance the feeling of isolation, reminding us that this is not what live music is supposed to be like. But we’re not alone, we just haven’t figured out the best ways to connect at these concerts yet.

Merely seeing other people Zooming into those Hold Steady shows had an unexpected affect on me; it made me forget myself for a while. I felt part of a group again, cracking open my own beer and joining in on the sing-along. That’s the power of live music, and it’s an ideal that all livestream concerts ought to pursue.