Month: April 2021

Isaiah Thomas has waited more than a year to return to the NBA, with his last game coming as a member of the Washington Wizards last February. According to multiple reports, that opportunity will come about with the New Orleans Pelicans, as the veteran guard is slated to join Zion Williamson and co. on a 10-day contract.

According to Charania, Thomas is eligible to suit up for the team starting on Sunday.

As Lopez pointed out, Thomas has played some competitive basketball since he last suited up in the Association. Thomas, along with a handful of former NBA players like Joe Johnson and Brandon Bass, suited up for the United States in FIBA AmeriCup qualifying in February.

With Lonzo Ball missing the last six games due to a hip injury, Thomas would theoretically give New Orleans a steady veteran hand in its backcourt rotation. It remains to be seen how much the 32-year-old has in the tank — he did say during the offseason that he is back to feeling like himself following a number of runs with NBA players in the offseason — and if he can get on the floor for the Pelicans. Thomas appeared in 40 games with the Wizards last season with 37 starts. The former All-NBA guard averaged 12.2 points and 3.7 assists in 23.1 minutes a night while connecting on 41.3 percent of his triples.

Fans know Maynard James Keenan as the leader of Tool, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer. Like anybody, though, Keenan is more than his work. For example, the rocker also owns and takes care of ducks. With Easter coming up this weekend, Keenan shared a story about his ducks and used that as a launching point to discuss the connection between eggs and Easter in a new short film, “An Easter Story.”

Keenan begins the 7-minute video with a story about taking care of his ducks. One day, he noticed that one duck was missing. It was important to find the duck to keep it safe from predators. Fortunately, he did find it, in a bush tending to some eggs. From there, he explains the link between the seemingly random tradition of looking for eggs on Easter.

He also spoke eloquently about the spring season more broadly, saying, “Using the cycle of the moon as a metaphor for the lifetime of a person — and the waxing, thin sliver of light as their awakening consciousness and the formation of self, and the waning light as our elder years — then the full moon represents that fully developed self. The full light of our accomplishments and personality shining for all to see.”

Keenan concludes the video, “But in reality, this is not the person’s or the moon’s light at all. It’s the infinite light from a higher power — the sun. And we are simply reflecting that light. Which, in the instance of spring, is the bringer of life, rebirth, reproduction, resurrection, reconnection of salvation, of infinity, and of hope. Have a happy Easter.”

Watch “An Easter Story” above.

For many men, raising a little girl causes a great awakening when it comes to their understanding of gender. It provides them an eye-opening first-hand experience of the everyday sexism that they probably weren’t privy to before.

A survey from the Oxford Economic Papers found that parenting young girls changes men’s attitudes when it comes to gender norms.

“They experience first-hand all the issues that [exist] in a female world and then that basically moderates their attitudes towards gender norms and they become closer to seeing the full picture from the female perspective,” Dr. Joan Costa-i-Font, co-author of the research from the London School of Economics, told The Guardian.

TikTok user and father of a 14-month-old girl Michael Vaughn provided a great example of this awakening. He gave a passionate, and thoughtful answer to another TikTokker who asked dads when they realized that young women are over-sexualized.

Vaughn finds it insane that we sexualize newborns.

“It was 100% the clothes. And I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know how bad,” he said. “And then we got a onesie for our daughter that says: ‘Sorry, boys, dad says no dating’ — sized for a newborn. I guess I’m wondering who they thought was going to date our zero-month-old daughter. But, all the girls’ clothes are remarkably annoying for so many reasons…”

Vaughn goes on to describe how clothing designed for little girls isn’t just obnoxiously pink, it’s also sized incorrectly and less functional than the clothes you can get for boys.

“Like, I don’t get why boys get normal shorts and my daughter gets shorts with an inseam of negative two,” Vaughn said. “Like, we legit buy boy pants for our daughter because girl pants are sausage casing leggings. I’m not squeezing a baby back into sausage casing every single diaper change. So, it was 100% girl clothes. Girl clothes are the worst?”

Vaughn later expanded on his thoughts about raising daughters to Buzzfeed. After exposing the cultural blindspot in his TikTok video, he shared some steps we can take to help fix the problem.

“The cool thing is you’re the parent, which means you get to be involved in what they’re exposed to, how they’re exposed to it,” he said. “This also means you get to set an early standard about what matters, like their talents and interests. In other words: Positive things that help define them that don’t involve their appearance.”

He gave dads some tips for understanding how young girls are oversexualized. He says to start by analyzing the clothes they see in the store. Even though boys and girls are pretty much the same size when they’re toddlers, the clothes are not.

“I recommend starting with the sayings on T-shirts, then comparing size 3T shorts for girls and boys,” he said.

He also reminds men that the easiest way to learn about sexism is to listen to women.

“This research also includes asking the women in your life if they’d be willing to share their experiences being over-sexualized as children,” he said. “Don’t push if they’re unwilling; many of those experiences are traumatic.”

Vaughn later expanded on his initial comments in a follow-up video.

Apparently, we have an avid—and able—prankster in the White House.

First Lady Jill Biden visited California this week, meeting with farmworkers and support COVID vaccination efforts.

On the flight back to Washington, DC, members of the press and Jill Biden’s staff were treated to Dove ice cream bars during the meal service. A flight attendant who was dressed in black with short black hair and a black mask handed out the bars. Her name tag read “Jasmine.”

Little did passengers know that the hair was a wig, the name was a ruse, and they didn’t recognize the fact that Jill Biden herself had handed them their frozen treats.

A few minutes after handing out the bars, Biden took off the wig, laughed, and said, “April Fool’s!”

The First Lady loves a good prank. Once, during her husband’s first term as Obama’s vice president, she stuffed herself into an overhead before a flight on Air Force Two, surprising the first person to open the bin to stow their luggage.

Biden wrote about that prank in her 2019 memoir, “Where the Light Enters.”

“I had arrived at Joint Base Andrews early, coming straight from teaching my classes, and was the first one there,” she wrote, “As I boarded Air Force Two, I looked around and had an idea. The overhead bins were small, but I knew if I scrunched up enough, I could cram myself into one.”

With the help of a chair, a table, and a Naval aide—as well as some ballet barre classes—she did just that.

“When the first person opened the bin to stow his roller bag, I popped halfway out and screamed, ‘Boo!’ — though it was hard to get it out through my laughter,” Biden wrote.

“Still, my surprise had the intended effect: this poor soul let out a high-pitched shriek and stumbled backward into his seat, a look of utter shock on his face.”

Biden grew up in a family of pranksters who reveled in April Fool’s Day, so she comes by it naturally. Joe Biden himself has remarked on his wife’s traditional celebration of the holiday. In a 2014 interview with Rachel Ray, Biden confessed, “What I worry about when I wake up on April Fool’s Day is: ‘What in the hell is Jill gonna do this time?’ You think I’m joking. I am not joking.”

Now she’s brought some of that lighthearted fun into the White House as First Lady.

She wrote in her memoir that the White House is “a serious place, with serious people, doing serious work,” and that if you aren’t careful, all that seriousness can grind you down.

“I’ve always believed you’ve got to steal the joyful moments when you can,” Biden wrote. “Life is difficult, and if you sit around waiting for fun to show up, you’ll find yourself going without it more often than not.”

Jill Biden seems determined to bring a special touch to various holidays in her new role, which seems quite befitting her identity as a teacher. On Valentine’s Day, her White House lawn decor—oversized conversation hearts with inspiring words like KINDNESS, COURAGE, COMPASSION, and HEALING—and chat with reporters made headlines.

Laughter is healing, and after a year of tragedy and struggle for the nation and the world due to the coronavirus pandemic, we could all use some extra fun and laughter. Thank you, Dr. Biden, for reminding us that serious work doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy simple, silly joys with our friends and colleagues.

Godzilla vs. Kong is the fourth movie in the “Monsterverse,” and at this point all four movies have had different directors and a slew of credited screenwriters. Only one name appears on all four movies and that is screenwriter Max Borenstein.

Ahead, Borenstein takes us through his thought process, and involvement, on the four movies and why, now, he realizes that the main characters are the monsters, not the humans. He also discusses Mechagodzilla, which a lot of people will be excited about, but will leave others asking, wait, what is that thing? Borenstein had wanted to use Mechagodzilla in the previous movie, but when that didn’t happen, well he’s very excited he got to use him in Godzilla vs. Kong.

So you’ve been involved in all four of these. What’s the level of involvement you had with all four? You’re the one constant.

On Godzilla, I was not the first writer in. There had been a couple of drafts prior to being involved, but I was the writer who came in when Gareth Edwards came on and we kind of rebuilt it from the ground up in terms of conceiving the tone and the whole of approach to Godzilla. And then in Skull Island, I wrote the first couple of drafts and worked a little bit with Jordan when he first came in. And then I did a television show and came back before production in the prep world and John Gatins had done a bunch of work. And then on Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I had just written the first draft of that and some basic story elements stayed in place, but I had pretty much no involvement in the film.

And then on this movie, it was sort of somewhere in the middle where I came in, I was the last writer in and once they were sort of in prep. They had a lot of bones and a lot of the basic DNA, some of which we’d been building for a long time. So for instance, Mechagodzilla, the character I had introduced in my draft of Godzilla II and then we didn’t end up using it, so I pulled it back in. They had, I was happy to discover, decided that now was the timing to use that character, so when I came back in, I was like, oh great. We can play with this.

You’re credited with different people each time, but you’re the one constant to the whole thing. Do you think there’s a reason for that?

I don’t know. I would flatter myself to think that I think that I have a great working relationship and a lot of respect for the team at Legendary and at this point I have worked on this thing with them for quite a while in different capacities. And so I think they know that, on some level, I’m part of the team and know generally what to look out for and have learned some of the lessons with them about do’s and don’ts and obviously [inaudible 00:06:50] kind of battle scars you would take over the course of doing a franchise like this.

You said you had the least involvement with King of the Monsters, which was the least well-received. Coming into this one did you look at what didn’t work in the last one?

I certainly didn’t focus on that. I thought that that movie did, I think, what it was trying to do really effectively and had a battle royale, kind of intentionally over the top vibe, which was what it was going for. But I think with this movie, it was already in development at that point and Adam [Wingard] had a vision for the film that was tonally different. And I think somewhere in the middle. And then the human characters. I think, and this is getting into the lesson I learned, they work best when they’re treated as supporting characters. As supporting roles and not trying to carry the movie, but rather lending pathos, lending humor, lending points of view. That, to me, it’s a big lesson that I have learned about how to handle movies with these giant creatures. The more you can let them be the stars of the show and the humans be personalities that are interesting and fun, rather than having to sort of pretend to be the leading man or leading lady, I think that really frees us up.

In King of the Monsters, the humans are still kind of the main thing of the movie, but there are so many characters in that movie and they’re all kind of just doing the same thing, just being on an airplane together and they don’t have different missions. And then when the monsters show up they fight at night and even in a blizzard where you can’t see anything.

No, all valid points. I think, without getting into any critiques of anything else, I think just what I’ve learned, just in this project: when you mentioned characters on different missions I think that’s really valid issue that, from a plot standpoint, you want to give these characters something to do that allows them to be active and not just witnesses. At the same time, from a screenwriting standpoint, the more active the human beings are, the less plausible. In the sense of it forces you to come up with fancy technology, for example, that allows them to interact at that scale. And that has its drawbacks. There are pluses and minuses, because of course it starts to strain credulity and become less bounded the more you invent even Mechagodzilla, right? So it’s all a balancing act.

So how did you come up with the idea of why Kong and Godzilla don’t see eye to eye without making one a complete villain?

Kong is an anthropomorphic character. Kong is a primate. Kong is therefore easy to identify with, even if he fundamentally is always the kind of misunderstood loner, outsider, antihero, he’s also a primate. We can relate. We can identify with him and the character that emotes a more human manner. Godzilla is just this massive monstrous force of nature that’s impossible to ever fully understand or comprehend his motivations. At times in different films over decades, they imbue him with different kinds of personalities, but fundamentally he’s a little impossible. The best versions of Godzilla I think are kind of impossible to fully understand and he has a relationship to human beings that’s something like your relationship to the ants at the picnic table. Like if they don’t get your way, you’re fine with it. If they do, you kill them, but you really don’t think twice about it. It may be every now and then you see one ant lugging a giant crumb and you think, “Oh, that’s a fluffy ant. I won’t kill that one.” That’s pretty much it. Where initially Godzilla is causing destruction and we don’t know why and obviously people are going to misunderstand that. But he certainly isn’t malicious and you have to try to understand what’s going on because Godzilla wouldn’t cause havoc just for no reason.

Mechagodzilla is interesting. Is that a complicated character to introduce? And maybe a movie like Ready Player One helps where he’s featured pretty prominently. But everyone knows Godzilla. Everyone knows Kong. Mechagodzilla is a little … nerdier.

Oh, exactly.

It’s going to be super exciting for a group of people and other people are going to have no idea what this thing is.

Yeah. And I think that’s okay because at the end of the day, the “character” of Mechagodzilla, certainly in this film, is much less important than what Mechagodzilla represents. It really is human ego, right? Writ large. It’s human hubris, the attempt to engage and be active for good or ill at the level of the monsters and then run amok. Obviously kind of a life of its own and whatnot. But, I think that notion that this is people trying to intervene where they rather should stay the hell away, that’s fundamental to something we all kind of can relate to and understanding because that’s what society and civilization does. It causes a lot of problems and some magnificence, but that’s what people do. And so we tried to focus it on that, which I think then, sci-fi aside, it’s relatable and understandable and kind of fits into an existing paradigm.

The first Godzilla and Kong fight happens 45 minutes into the movie? Why did you decide to have a bunch of fights instead of one big fight at the end.

Like I said, a lot of those bones were at least in place in terms of the notion that was something that people wanted to do by the time I came in. But I think it was, to me, that was just the obvious solution because we’ve laid the groundwork now. We’ve introduced Kong. We introduced Godzilla. And they’ve each had their own films where they were, by virtue of being introduced, they weren’t front and center the entire time. But now that you know them, you can’t play coy. This is Godzilla vs. Kong! They’re the stars of the film! It’s almost like a boxing film. Round one goes to one. Round two goes to the other. What’s going to happen in round three? And that felt like the obvious structure.

‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ is now in theaters and streaming via HBO Max. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

If you ever think you’re just wasting your life away while scrolling Twitter at all hours of the day, well, now we have some proof that you probably helped restore global commerce. Well, a little.

The Ever Given was the talk of social media for the better part of a week in late March, as the massive boat got stuck in the Suez Canal in Egypt and blocked the essential waterway from all traffic. The incident crippled trade and forced a lot of boat operators to make a difficult decision: wait for the ship to get unstuck from the side of the wall, or spend thousands of dollars traveling around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa to make it through to the Atlantic Ocean and into Europe.

While companies and captains and engineers tried to solve this problem, a lot of people made memes about the boat. Many of them were funny, and while they may not have actually solved the problem, it was a good way to pass the time. But now we know that those memes may have actually helped move things along after all. In a Washington Post story about the excruciating process to free and re-float the massive ship as long as the Empire State Building is tall, one man working on the process actually said thinking about all the memes that circulated online for days helped fuel their efforts to get it free.

Eslam Negm, 32, watched from the deck of the Baraka 1 tugboat and thought of the all the Internet memes about the marooned ship. The world had been laughing at Egypt. “No one was able to see how much pressure we were under,” he said.

They were exhausted, now accustomed to failure but still determined. And they watched closely as the operation commenced.

Every engine roared, the Alp Guard deeper than any.

And suddenly, they thought they felt movement. Slowly, but yes, the Ever Given’s stern seemed to be creeping toward the deeper water. By 5 a.m., they were sure.

There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, not to mention the help from the moon to lift the tides and get things going to re-float the boat. But if anyone ever says your posting isn’t helping, well, tell them about the time you helped get the big boat unstuck from the Suez Canal.

[via Business Insider]

We live in a time of masks and Zoom happy hours, of elbow bumps and social distancing, of fearing that every coughing stranger could spell our doom. But how will we remember it? And what records will we leave behind to explain this time to others, what films and TV shows will tell future generations how we live now?

In some ways, it’s too soon to ask that question.

We’re still in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic even if vaccines and plummeting infection rates have provided signs for optimism. It’s tough to depict a moment that’s still unfolding. That hasn’t stopped some creators from trying, however, whether dashing off movies and shows set against the backdrop of the coronavirus outbreak or trying to figure how to incorporate the changed world of 2020 into a TV world that already exists. The results have been varied, both in quality and approach. They also provide some of the first clues to how the global pandemic will be remembered — while also suggesting the best and truest depictions remain ahead.

If the only record we left of this time came from TV shows, our descendants wouldn’t know what to make of it. Some shows just carry on. The pandemic cut short The Neighborhood’s season last year, for instance, but on the show, friends still gather to drink wine while Cedric the Entertainer tries to dodge his first colonoscopy. On Mr. Mayor, Ted Danson presides over a Los Angeles blissfully free of the coronavirus after Dolly Parton “bought everyone the vaccine.” And, really, there’s nothing wrong with that. Television’s escapist potential helped make it what it is and maybe viewers don’t want to be constantly reminded about the dire world outside its frame. But the disconnect can be jarring, and even a little dispiriting. Here we are living a life filled with dread while TV characters taunt us by living the sort of life we used to lead.

On the other hand, only half-addressing the pandemic can look strange as well. Black-ish has established itself as a show willing to incorporate the issues of the day into its plots and with “Dre at Home Order,” the second proper episode of the seventh season, members of the Johnson family try in vain to watch a horror movie, distracted by a real-life threat that announces itself in the form of buzzing text alerts informing them that the disease Dre (Anthony Anderson) had previously believed to be confined to cruise ships would be disrupting life in Los Angeles. In the episode that follows, the family deals with remote learning as Dre adjusts to working at home. Junior (Marcus Scribner) laments a budding romantic relationship that’s been pushed to phone calls and video chats. It’s a typically strong episode of the series that addresses the realities of pandemic life. Two episodes later, however, Dre’s back at work and preparing for a family wedding to be held outside, in the only real acknowledgment of the coronavirus. Junior has even begun hanging out with his girlfriend again. It’s real, up to a point.

While it’s easy for a sitcom to offer a light take on Covid-19, or avoid it altogether, series about frontline workers like 9-1-1, Station 19, and Grey’s Anatomy don’t have the same luxury. Most have responded by depicting it but spending ample time in situations in which it can be ignored. The co-workers of Station 19 wear masks when out on the job, but not when alone together, which makes sense given a job that allows them to live together and apart from everyone else. It also sidesteps a problem with depicting our current situation realistically: requiring actors to perform scenes while masked can be distracting and robs them of some of their expressive tools. 9-1-1’s solution, for instance, has been to carve out its characters’ workspace as a mask-free zone. But, given that the season opened with a collapsed reservoir and a city-threatening flood, maybe they just have bigger problems to worry about. (Still, a flood is arguably preferable to the threat over at 9-1-1: Lone Star, where Austin has had to contend with a volcanic eruption.)

Elsewhere, The Good Doctor opened its fourth season with a Covid-19-centric two-parter that depicted several stages of the pandemic outbreak as the characters grew increasingly frustrated, sometimes despairing, at the new normal. With the season’s third episode it moved on. “Newbies” opens with star Freddie Highmore stating it “portrays our hope in the future, a future where no one will have to wear masks” but advising viewers to continue taking steps to protect themselves and others. As odd as this might seem, it also reflects the practical reality of a series like The Good Doctor and other procedurals, which were never designed to build a whole season around breaking news. Covid-19 is a blip it can move past and return to the old normal, a luxury the real world doesn’t have.

On the other hand, maybe it’s better to blip past it than dwell on it when dwelling on it results in a project as half-baked as the Freeform series Love in the Time of Corona, which uses the lockdown as a backdrop for some pretty familiar stories of relationships at a turning point. It’s warmhearted but drab, a project obviously rushed into production in an attempt to do something, anything, during a difficult moment for TV production. Its most notable element: much of its cast was already quarantining together. The real-life couple Leslie Odom Jr. and Nicolette Robinson play husband and wife. Gil Bellows, Rya Kihlstedt, and Ava Bellows play a family of three, which they are.

The best TV depiction of the pandemic has come from a series that has continued to put it front and center. Superstore began off its sixth and final season with “Essential,” an episode checking in with the staff of Cloud 9 Store #1217 at various points in 2020, following the characters as the reality of the disease — and their own danger in working in retail — kicked in and depicting touchstone events like the Black Lives Matter protests (and, to a far lesser extent, the popularity of Tiger King). As the series has long done while dealing with issues of immigration and labor rights, the episode keeps a light touch while acknowledging the graveness of the moment and refusing to wave it away. Subsequent episodes have found the store still unsettled while dealing with Covid-19 and a corporation that seems only vaguely interested in their well-being.

It’s the series that, years from now, will most likely serve as a reminder of how we spent the pandemic, particularly the newfound anxiety of any public space. If there’s a film equivalent it might have been Locked Down, the Stephen Knight-scripted, Doug Liman-directed heist film that premiered on HBO Max in January. Set in the early days of the pandemic, it captures some of the ways being shut off from the outside world can chip away at the psyche, particularly the situation the London-based couple of Linda (Anne Hathaway) and Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor) find themselves in. Their relationship, already in trouble before the pandemic put them constantly in each others’ company, they find they have to confront the issues that have driven them to the brink of breaking up — before bonding over their shared commitment to committing a crime. It’s a good premise but hampered by annoying execution. Even if it gets a lot of the day-to-day details of pandemic life right, they’re overwhelmed by the loud, forced clashes that never carry the dramatic weight they should.

All of which raises a question: What genre best captures the feeling of living under the shadow of Covid-19?

There’s really no right answer. Chances are your experience has felt alternately comic and tragic, filled with moments of hopelessness but also rediscovered pleasures. Turns out many of us really love baking bread, so much so that sourdough references figure into almost all the projects mentioned above. Maybe future depictions of 2020/2021 will use bread references as an easy shorthand to establish period, like bringing in Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s Worth” to alert viewers they’re in the 1960s or bringing in a “Baby on Board” sign to announce the 1980s.

Or maybe it’s horror that best captures the moment, at least right now.

British director Rob Savage’s horror film made its debut on Shudder back in July and its fast turnaround helps it freeze in time the moment when most of us began to realize the disease would be sticking around and wouldn’t clear up in a few weeks. Its characters are still in the let’s-find-new-ways-to-amuse ourselves phase of pandemic life, a desire that leads them to hold an online seance. Predictably, it doesn’t go well, and Savage uses a lot of effective found-footage horror tricks, and some new ones, as well, to turn a Zoom call scary as one participant after another runs into trouble. In ways other sorts of genres can’t, it captures the fear that’s accompanied a disease that’s made so many of us feel alone, even when we’re alone together. It’s a horror movie with documentary qualities, up to a late-film moment when two terrified characters encounter each other in the flesh then, rather than embrace, draw back to bump elbows. Some horrors can supersede even ghosts, demons, and other threats from the great beyond.

But for the most encouraging depiction of pandemic life, and what comes after, it’s best to look again to Superstore, which ended its final season on a more hopeful note than the one on which it began — albeit with the usual cautious optimism that characterized the series. The world the characters have lived in for six seasons comes to an end with Store #1217 redesignated as a fulfillment center as Cloud 9 moves toward a more online-focused model of doing business. It’s a change in retailing hastened by Covid-19 and a change that will never be undone. But the characters move on, into a future where they’ve found new footing and new ways of living while holding onto what really mattered about the old life, including relationships forged under immense pressure. They’ve gotten through to the other side to a different world, one marked by loss and filled with new challenges but also new rewards. And there’s not a mask in sight.

Bellator MMA will make its highly-anticipated debut on Showtime Friday, April 2, with the prelims kicking off at 6 p.m. ET and the main card starting at 9 p.m. ET.

The entire card will be streamed live here at Uproxx for free from the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Connecticut.

The main event features Bellator double-champion Patricio “Pitbull” Freire facing off in a rematch with Emmanuel Sanchez for the 145-pound belt and a spot in the finals of the Featherweight World Grand Prix Tournament against the unbeaten A.J. McKee. Freire was named Bellator’s top pound-for-pound fighter in the organization’s inaugural rankings earlier this week and he’s rattled off six-consecutive wins. He faces off against Sanchez, who presented the champ’s toughest test over the last three years, pushing him to a decision.

The main card also features unbeaten Usman Nurmagomedov, the cousin of UFC’s retired lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, who makes his Bellator debut against Mike Hamel.

Bellator 255 Main Card:

• Featherweight title: Patricio Freire vs. Emmanuel Sanchez in the semifinals of the Featherweight World Grand Prix Tournament
• Neiman Gracie vs. Jason Jackson
• Tyrell Fortune vs. Jack May
• Usman Nurmagomedov vs. Mike Hamel

Bellator 255 Preliminary Card

• Kana Watanabe vs. Alejandra Lara
• Jose Augusto vs. Jonathan Wilson
• Fabio Aguiar vs. Khalid Murtazaliev
• Jordan Newman vs. Branko Busick
• Roman Faraldo vs. Trevor Gudde
• Cee Jay Hamilton vs. Magomed Magomedov
• Mandel Nallo vs. Ricardo Seixas
• Roger Huerta vs. Chris Gonzalez

Bellator 255 kicks off three consecutive weeks of fights, with Bellator 256 scheduled for April 9 and Bellator 257 on April 16.

Taylor Swift loves to hide Easter eggs and other mysteries in her work for finds to find and evaluate. Now, she’s not even hiding them in a song or music video anymore, as Swift took to Twitter today to present her fans with a decoding challenge, which they seem to have already cracked.

Swift shared a video of a golden vault and wrote, “The vault door is about to be as unhinged as you’ll think I am after you watch this video. Level: Expert. Happy decoding!” In the clip, the vault door opens and a seemingly nonsensical series of fake words flies toward the viewer. Swift has been training her fans to look for Easter eggs for years, so it appears they quickly got to the bottom of this.

Fans started sharing their conclusions on Twitter, and a prevailing theory is that the words are jumbled parts of song titles, specifically the titles of the bonus tracks from Fearless (Taylor’s Version). The supposed titles are “You All Over Me” (which is already confirmed as the Maren Morris-featuring song as already been released), “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” “That’s When,” “We Were Happy,” “Bye Bye Baby,” and either “Don’t You” or “You Don’t.” Additionally, it seems one of those songs also features Keith Urban, who became a trending topic on Twitter following the video’s release.

Check out some fan tweets about Swift’s video below.

At the beginning of March, a quartet of Olympic gold medal winners — Alex Morgan, Sue Bird, Chloe Kim, and Simone Manuel — announced a new media endeavor, TOGETHXR. The goal was simple: Create an outlet that will cover women’s sports and tell the stories that are so often not covered by major sports outlets.

To head up content, they brought in Jessica Robertson, the former head of content at the Players Tribune, to be their Chief Content Officer and help them put together a plan for launch and beyond, identifying the stories and series they wanted to promote from the start. Among the first of those was the “More Than A Name” series, which chronicles young athletes who are related to famous male athletes and are both following in their footsteps while also trying to carve out a name for themselves. The debut episode was on UCLA freshman softball star Maya Brady, who is the niece of Tom Brady and Kevin Youkilis, as well as the daughter of Maureen Brady, a softball star at Fresno State in her college days.

Robertson recently spoke with Uproxx about the series and how the inspiration for it started with Kobe and Gianna Bryant, as well as how TOGETHXR is looking do create a new lane for outlets to talk about women’s sports and culture, what they have planned for this year, and how Draymond Green’s recent comments fail to see efforts like TOGETHXR’s to create the interest and break the “vicious cycle” of women’s sports.

Hey Jessica, how are you?

I’m good. I’m not gonna lie, I just saw Draymond Green’s response to, I guess the response to his tweets last night. That’s a fascinating take he has [laughs].

That’s certainly a word for it.

I don’t know. Did you see what he said last night?

Yeah, the thing about how he’s tired of hearing women complain about equal pay.

[sighs] Yeah.

Honestly, I think it’s actually a good place to start because it is kind of the reason y’all started this company. You want to shine a light on women’s sports and tell these stories. How did you come to join this and when y’all were coming together with an early plan of what you wanted to do, what were the conversations like and what were the things y’all were excited to be able to do with TOGETHXR?

I always start with Alex, Alex Morgan. I think this has been an ambition of hers for years now. Obviously existing firsthand in equity in the sports landscape throughout her career and I think she’s had a few sort of pivotal moments where she’s looked around and she’s like, “Wait, we’re, we’re winning or generating revenue, we’re selling out, we’re selling out merch, like we keep doing all the things we say we can’t do or that we need to do to prove our worth. But there’s no real investment coming back in.”

But more importantly, you know, I think she and Sue and Chloe and Simone, the rest of the co-founders, outside of the women they stand next to in their own experiences every single day, they’re thinking about the next generation. I think certainly Alex, becoming a mother and having a daughter, Charlie, she thinks about her future, just to personalize it. But holistically, they’re thinking about what the next generation will experience and how they can impact change across the board.

We talk a lot about this sort of vicious cycle that happens in women’s sports which is, you know the stuff, there’s four percent visibility and media coverage. So what I say is, if there’s no media coverage — if no one’s growing visibility — then it’s really hard to generate viewership, to grow fan bases and communities in women’s sports. And if there aren’t people in the seats, if there aren’t people tuned in, if the fandom isn’t growing, then brands and other people with dollars to invest aren’t going to invest. And if people don’t think that there’s no dollars to be made, then media companies will not cover the sport because they aren’t going to profit off of that coverage.

So for us it’s about disrupting that cycle. You know, we’re entering a big white space, I think. There are some brands that cover women’s sports, but they’re small. It’s not even just about the coverage, it’s the type of coverage, it’s the quality of coverage, the breadth of coverage. There are some brands that have built large communities around women, they tend to be lifestyle and beauty or wellness focused, but there’s a huge white space where I think TOGETHXR enters into to bring sport and culture together for women. And our goal is, like I said, to disrupt that cycle.

Consciously we think about that, but more importantly, we just want to tell really great stories that happen to center women. And, you know over time, while we feel like a first, I think there will be seconds and thirds and fourths, and, you know, maybe Charlie, when she grows up, this is just the norm. It doesn’t feel radical.

And I think the thing that is the most frustrating about comments like Draymond’s is where he says they’re not offering a plan, they’re not offering steps, but there is a plan there. Like, people have been offering these concepts for a while and like you said this is part of the plan. This is part of that plan of here’s how we grow this thing, and it starts with something like this.

Exactly. We’re just gonna do it. Which is very much like a woman, right? I also think Draymond is blaming the wrong people. To your point, there are plans, there’s been a lot of solutions offered. I would say there’s receipts, and he’s actually targeting the wrong group of people. I would trust his intent, but I would say he probably should listen first. I think personally it’s decision-makers at brands, at media companies, and elsewhere — governing bodies — and questions of their level of investment and why decisions haven’t been made to consciously and consistently invest. I think we see it every four years around the World Cup or around the Olympics, but we don’t see it consistently every single day.

I also think that culturally, some of the cultural reckonings and social reckonings we’ve needed to have for a long time around race, sexuality, gender, we’re having them, and I think culture is catching up to the women’s sports landscape a little bit. Because women’s sports is sort of ground zero for a lot of these -isms and conversation. So it’s hard to talk about why there hasn’t been an investment without, one, talking about decision makers, but, two, just sort of talking about massaging in all the other isms that surround this space. But TOGETHXR, actually, embraces that and knows that if we can just tell really incredible, powerful stories consistently, people will show up because of the content that’s there right now.

This “More Than A Name” series that starts with Maya Brady, I thought was a terrific start for that in terms of this particular series. When you were coming up with with early ideas you wanted to do, how did this series come together and shuffle its way into something you want to do early on? And, obviously Maya was a really great first subject for that?

It started actually with Kobe and Gigi. A year ago, well, over a year ago — we’ve been in build mode for a year and a half so you have to forgive me, time is a flat circle — we were thinking about format franchise IP concepts, and I worked with Kobe for quite some time at The Players Tribune. Once he retired, obviously his interest and investment was particularly in women’s basketball, I think, generally because of who he was, but also especially because of his daughter. And I was thinking, Kenyon Martin talks about his own kids and Shaquille O’Neal has a couple of incredible daughters who are playing it at elite level in college and in high school, and I was like, it would be really interesting to sort of do a series on the women who carry big last names and have big shoes to fill, but celebrate them as individuals and their own accomplishments for who they are. So that was the ambition. Obviously, you know, tragic events changed [things] and sort of the original intent, but I think the idea of finding these incredible athletes who happen to be related to famous male athletes so excited us, because we want to celebrate them as individuals.

And Maya Brady was I think the person perfect launch for the series, because obviously the legacy of her uncle. But you know, he even says that she’s the best athlete in the family. I think there’s a lot of layers to her story in particular, outside of being an incredible athlete and having a huge future in front of her. She comes from one incredible athlete and her family with Tom Brady, but Kevin Youkilis and her mom, too, her mom was one of the best pitchers in the country at Fresno State. And I think we wanted to contextualize maybe her athletic ability, but really celebrate her and her identity for who she is.

It’s a story, yes, about family legacy, but it’s also a story about a freshman girl in college who’s doing things her own way and and sort of exploring what identity means to her especially being a biracial woman in this world. I think it was powerful, it was resonant, and she was such a fascinating figure.

Yeah, and when you were mentioning all the -isms that that work within women’s sports I thought about, like you said, the end her at the end of video when she says, “I always knew that we were different from the rest of the family and how we looked, but it didn’t really become a thing until later.” And then going to UCLA where she has more Black teammates and it seems like she’s embracing this identity as somebody who can break down some of those barriers for Black women and bring more Black girls in the softball. And I thought that was a really interesting portion towards the end of that, and like you said, an important way to kind of shift it to, this is what she’s now doing and how she sees herself beyond that family connection.

Yeah and I think it’s also easy to compare women athletes generally to male athletes, especially if they’re related to famous male athletes. So we really wanted to elevate her as an individual, and where she stands and the power that she holds in herself and also her ability as an athlete. Softball in the past, I think it’s been a predominantly white sport, it’s increasingly changing, which is incredible to see. I think the same thing is happening in soccer and for her to lean into that and and celebrate it and own it is really powerful, especially for, I think the rest of the softball to see.

But also, what we want to do is to continue to create these “see it, be it” moments. Telling Maya Brady’s story may radically change a 9-year-old girl’s life. And if we’re not there to tell it and no one’s there to tell it, then think about all the lives that can’t be impacted. So hers is resonant for so many reasons, especially the one that you highlighted.

The entire premise I found really interesting, because I recently did an interview with Lexie Brown about being the face of the retro release of the the Reebok Pumps which her dad had made famous in the ’91 Dunk Contest. And we talked about some of the same things, which is embracing the legacy but also wanting to do your own thing. I think there’s … everybody’s relationship with their name and with their family is different, so I guess the question is, is that something you think is going to make this series unique, because each episodes going to tell a different story and I think you can kind of show how everybody handles that differently?

Yeah, I think it can be a weight, probably. For a lot of people, a burden. It’s also an opportunity, I think sometimes that last name can open doors for you. But when that door’s open, then ultimately, it’s you as an individual that has to step through it and then deliver, right? We’re talking about your legacy, not the legacy of the name that’s on your back every single day. That’s part of your legacy and that’s part of the power that you have, but the question is, like, as an individual who are you? I would imagine, obviously I don’t have that experience, but I would imagine, navigating this world with the weight of a big last name that’s literally on your back sometimes can be complicated. Because people associate you with someone else’s greatness first, and not necessarily your own. So I think it’s probably a life’s mission to establish yourself and your own greatness apart from that name. Even as that name, like I said, it’s sometimes a really big opportunity.

Finally, you mentioned that y’all have been in this build mode for some time. What are the things that folks can be looking forward to and what’s going to be coming from y’all in this first year here, as y’all continue to put out new series and new content that you personally are really excited about?

How much time do you have [laughs]? Some of the things I’m not allowed to say on record yet, but I can sort of talk around them, and we’re gonna have one new big show every single month that drops on YouTube. The next one that we do have premiering in mid-April is called Surf Girls Kaikaina — kaikaina means little sister in Hawaiian. It’s about this cool surf collective in Hawaii. It’s about their friendship, their sisterhood, but also their competitiveness. They compete against one another, but they’re also friends, and, they also embrace the legacy of Hawaiian surf culture and want to see it thrive and carry on beyond themselves. It’s beautiful, it’s cool these girls are really compelling and I can’t wait for the world to see them and meet them.

We’re paying attention to the culture calendar a lot, so we have some really exciting franchises coming up around Pride Month, around the 25th anniversary of the WNBA — that’s gonna be a big tentpole for us. An incredible series, and I can’t wait to share, I would say it’s one of our co founders in the lead-up to Tokyo. So, when I can share more information I’ll be happy to do that.

And then a big priority for us is really leaning in the longform in addition to some of these episodic series that you’re seeing on our channel. We just announced yesterday, we’re doing a narrative long form podcast with Alex and Sue executive producing that revisits and retells the history of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. I say it’s probably one of the most important, if not the most important moment in women’s sports history. It’s also an opportunity to look back and see how far we’ve come, or how far we haven’t come, and kind of look to the future. Especially as they go into these Tokyo Games and this’ll be the 25th anniversary of that. We have a couple of big documentary projects in development.

I would love to share more there, but just know that these will feel like big impactful cultural stories that happen to step through a sport prism, but more to come on those. We’re excited about them.