Month: October 2022

When headlines and social media seem to be dominated by the negative, we all need reminders that the world is full of wonderfulness. Joy connects and inspires us and can be found everywhere—if we keep our eyes open and look for it. One of our goals at Upworthy is to make that search a little easier by telling stories that highlight the best of humanity and sharing the delights, large and small, that unite us.

Each week, we collect 10 things that made us smile and offer them to you to enjoy and share with others. We hope this week’s list tickles your heart and brings a smile (or 10) to your face as well.

1. Tico the parrot is a master vocalist. Not even an exaggeration.

@ticoandtheman

On a dark desert hwy, cool wind in my hair…

We’ve shared some delightful parrots in these roundups before, and each one somehow seems to out-entertain the last. I did not see Tico’s vocal skills coming, though. The intonation! The vibrato! Even my music major daughter was blown away by this singing bird.

You can see more of Tico singing with guitarist Frank Maglio on YouTube and TikTok.

2. Mom navigates adorable toddler questions about her pregnancy.

@kadynsmithsmith

😂🥰🤍 #pregnant #momtok #momsoftiktok #toddlertok #toddlersoftiktok #baby

Three-year-old Blakely is going to be a big sister for the second time, but this time she has questions. Every parent felt that weighty pause when she asked how the baby got into Mommy. (You just never know when that question is coming, so it’s hard to be prepared with the right answer for the age and maturity of the kid asking.) Little Blakely sure is a doll, though. Read the full story—and get some expert tips for how to field kids’ questions in an age-appropriate way—here.

3. People are sharing simple ways to practice kindness daily.

A Reddit user asked for ideas of kind acts people can do every day, and people shared their thoughts. Some of the ideas were profoundly simple, and not necessarily things we might think of, like being aware of how we’re impacting those around us or leaving a place a little better than we found it. See the whole collection of acts of kindness here.

4. Woman finds out her best friend named her baby after her and it’s a roller coaster of emotion.

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Meeting a brand new human being is always a special moment, and when it’s a loved one’s baby it’s even more special. But Mireya meeting her best friend Morgan’s baby pushed special into a whole other stratosphere when she found out she’d become a namesake. That second when it sunk in and then the disbelief. “What? No, you did not.” Oh yes, she did. So much love here.

5. Little chimpanzee kiddo is greeted with hugs from his new family.

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Oh, the hugs for Beckley! This is almost too much sweetness for one video.

It was shared by Liberia Chimp Rescue & Protection, a sanctuary and conservation center in Liberia that rescues baby chimps from the illegal bushmeat and pet trades. While most of the chimpanzees the workers rescue and rehabilitate aren’t able to be returned to the wild, they do get to live their life in a protected forest with other chimps. You can read more about their work here.

6. The Onion filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court and it’s seriously hilarious.

It’s a real brief with a real argument for a real First Amendment case, but it’s unlike any other court filing you’ll ever read. The satirical news site is petitioning the Supreme Court to review a case of a man who was arrested and prosecuted for creating a Facebook page parodying the Parma, Ohio, police department. After the man was acquitted by a jury, he sued the police for violating his constitutional rights, but his case was thrown out because the police were granted “qualified immunity.” In defense of the man’s—and everyone’s—First Amendment right to parody, The Onion filed a 23-page brief utilizing the very parody it’s defending, and it’s a brilliant and hilarious read. I mean, who else could call the federal judiciary “total Latin dorks” while making a solid argument? Read the full story here.

7. Kids casually chatting with scientists is the cutest thing everrrr.

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Kids are naturally curious, which makes them the perfect people to ask questions about science. Upworthy and Pfizer have been inviting kids to chat with scientists and there’s just no way to predict where their conversations will go. Precious Marcelo here with his “I’ve got like 27 more years” to think about a career while chatting with virologist Vidia Roopchand was just so delightfully real. You can find more of these kid chats on our Instagram channel.

8. Four-year-old sings The Isley Brothers with his whole soul.

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Goodness. “Driftin’ on a nemberee…all we need is candlewight…” He’s putting his entire self into singing that song. Beautiful voice from her, too.

9. The Rock’s daughter pranks him with a water balloon as he’s waking up.

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“Good Morrrnniiiiing!” HA. She knows how to get her dad good.

Not gonna lie. I would not have the good-natured patience of The Rock if my child broke a water balloon over my face in bed. But this isn’t the first time he’s played the “Daddy, close your eyes!” game, so he knew something was coming. See more of Jazzy’s pranks on her pops here.

10. Let’s welcome the weekend with the exuberance of this ball-fetching doggo.

u201cDog does happy dance for his self-fetch toy…ud83dudc36ud83dudc3eud83cudfbeud83dude0dud83dude05u201d

— ud835udd50ou0334gu0334 (@ud835udd50ou0334gu0334)
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Even without the bouncing in anticipation, the tail wag says it all. Pure joy. Bring it.

That’s it for this week! Come back next week for another round of joy on us. And if you’d like more stories like this in your inbox, subscribe to our free newsletter, The Upworthiest, here.

Tonight (October 7), Jack Harlow performs at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. Ahead of that, though, he had something else to take care of while he was in the area: co-hosting The Tonight Show alongside Jimmy Fallon yesterday.

Harlow assisted on a “Hashtags” segment, with the theme being #AddAWordRuinAHorrorMovie. As they read tweets and made quips about them, Harlow radiated his signature calm confidence as he played off of Fallon and came up with some amusing banter.

Elsewhere, NBA legend Dwayne Wade was the episode’s guest and Harlow mostly took a backseat during the interview. He had his moments, though, like when Wade was talking about how hard it can be for him to watch basketball games as a former pro. Wade then noted that Harlow (who participated in the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game earlier this year) plays ball and asked if he thinks about what he would do if he watches the NBA. Harlow answered, “Well, I think, ‘Wow, I’d like to do that.’” Then, the NBA fan in Harlow shone through when he quickly asked Wade of the Utah Jazz (which Wade co-owns), “Are y’all rebuilding?” Wade clarified, “We’re reshaping.”

Harlow, Fallon, and Wade also played a round of “Random Object Shootout” during the episode. Fallon interviewed Harlow, too, so check out clips from the show above and below.

Jack Harlow is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Last night, Taylor Swift uploaded all of the track reveals for the remaining songs on her upcoming album Midnights. Between using her bingo roller to unearth her famous track five (“You’re On Your Own, Kid”) and announcing a collab with Lana Del Rey (“Snow On The Beach”), Swift also shared a separate video to explain the meaning behind the album’s opening song — “Lavender Haze.” The initial inspiration for the title came from a surprise TV show.

“I happened upon the phrase ‘Lavender Haze’ when I was watching Mad Men and I looked it up because I thought it sounded cool, and it turns out that it was a common phrase that was used in the ’50s where they would just describe being in love,” Swift said. “Like, If you were in the ‘Lavender Haze,’ that meant you were in that all-encompassing love glow, and I thought that was really beautiful.”

She continued to explain how this moment, even though the show was set in the ’60s, connects to both the modern era and her longtime relationship.

“I guess theoretically when you’re in the ‘Lavender Haze,’ you’ll do anything to stay there and not let people bring you down off of that cloud,” she added. “And I think a lot of people have to deal with this now — not just, like, quote-unquote public figures — because we live in the era of social media and if the world finds out that you’re in love with somebody, they’re gonna weigh in on it.”

The Mad Men scene itself happens during season 2 episode 12, when a minor character tells Don Draper that he’s in “the lavender haze.” Draper, who at the time was feeling that way about Betty (which Swift also has a song called) according to Reddit, reacts with a shy smile. So, by association, Taylor Swift is in her Don Draper era. The good one.

Watch Swift’s full video about “Lavender Haze” above.

Midnights is out 10/21 via Republic. Pre-order it here.

With the release of the massive album Special, Lizzo is having a great year, made even better by playing a crystal flute owned by President James Madison and taking her songs to life on an extensive tour and bringing them to excited audiences.

So playing a show in her hometown of Detroit, Michigan was a big full-circle moment for the “About Damn Time” singer that evoked many feelings in her, especially gratitude. Before launching into the track “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready),” she said (as Billboard notes), “Tonight is a very special night ’cause we are home, b*tch! My whole family is in this motherf*cker!”

“The feeling that I have,” she added, before being interrupted by a cheering crowd, “is indescribable.” She gave shoutouts to her family, saying, “My mom’s over here somewhere.” She continued, “It’s emotional being in the place where you were born. It’s emotional being back where your roots began… thinking about the people you wish were here.” She began to tear up. “I think about my father every time I come here. He would’ve been so proud…”

Before finally getting into the song, she said to the audience, “I love you. You are beautiful. You can do anything.”

Lizzo is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Lindsay Lohan‘s last leading role in a movie was all the way back in 2013, with Paul Schrader’s messy The Canyons. But the Mean Girls and Freaky Friday star is coming back with a pair of Netflix movies, including the holiday rom-com Falling for Christmas where she falls off a cliff during a marriage proposal and can’t remember her name.

Hallmark really biffed it by not making this movie first.

The Falling for Christmas trailer has everything you want in a holiday rom-com: attractive people in sweaters, attractive people in flannel, and… that’s it, honestly. “The doctors did say that if I did normal things, my memory might come back,” Lohan’s Sierra, who was a spoiled hotel heiress before the accident, tells a small-town lodge owner played by Glee‘s Chord Overstreet. It sure would be a shame if those two fell in love and drank hot chocolate by the fire and lived happily ever after. Probably won’t happen, though.

Here’s the official plot synopsis:

A newly engaged, spoiled hotel heiress (Lindsay Lohan) gets into a skiing accident, suffers from total amnesia and finds herself in the care of a handsome, blue-collar lodge owner (Chord Overstreet) and his precocious daughter in the days leading up to Christmas.

Falling for Christmas comes out on November 10 on Netflix.

For the fifth year in a row, the World Happiness Report named Finland the world’s happiest country. The evaluation was based on a “healthy life expectancy, GDP per capita, social support in times of trouble, low corruption and high social trust, generosity in a community where people look after each other, and freedom to make key life decisions.” It also helps that Finland has a cool as hell prime minister.

Unlike most politicians, Sanna Marin has a healthy work-life balance. She works… and she has a life where she likes to party (and invite topless influencers to her residence) “I have danced, sung, celebrated, done legal things,” Marin explained after a bunch of buzzkills got mad at her for having fun. “I have a family life, I have a work life, and I have free time to spend with my friends. Pretty much the same as many people my age.”

Marin also has a smart solution for how to end the conflict in Ukraine.

When asked by a reporter for her thoughts on Joe Biden saying that he’s trying to figure out what is Vladimir Putin’s “off-ramp” before he uses nuclear weapons against Ukraine, Marin asked for clarification about the term “off-ramp.” The reporter explained that it’s “a way out of the conflict,” to which she replied, “The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine. That’s the way out of the conflict.” Marin then laughed and walked away in a mic drop moment. The Finns don’t mince words, now do they?

(Via the Daily Beast)

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

In 2019, Charlie Puth couldn’t wait to get his heart broken for the first time. At 30 years old, Puth is the pop poster boy for late bloomers, and he described himself that way to Hunter Harris and Vulture back then — yearning for the kind of teenage puppy love he watched in Clueless and worrying that his love songs came across as formulaic. In January 2020, that insecurity caused him to scrap his followup to his acclaimed 2018 sophomore album Voicenotes. He provided an update 18 months later, revealing the pressure he’d felt to pump out the next radio-friendly hit while operating from a relatively empty internal well. Charlie, his long-awaited third solo album out today (October 7), leaves that problem firmly in the past.

This is Puth at his most vulnerable, down to a teary-eyed TikTok admission about how traumatizing “That’s Hilarious,” the album opener, was for him. That unabashed transparency is the backbone of Charlie — rooted in authentic pain, brave exploration, and subsequent self-discovery. The album was produced entirely by Puth and assembled on TikTok, to extinguish his self-doubt by receiving real-time feedback from his fans that he’d missed during the pandemic.

Puth hadn’t needed to draw from experience to churn out platinum-certified pop earworms like the ubiquitous “See You Again” with Wiz Khalifa, “Marvin Gaye” featuring Meghan Trainor, “Attention,” “One Call Away,” or “We Don’t Talk Anymore” featuring Selena Gomez. With Charlie, recorded in the aftermath of a draining breakup — be careful what you wish for? — he balances his reputable music theory expertise, pristine pitch, and innovative production with his newfound introspection.

It began with “Light Switch,” the gold-certified catchy lead single with nearly 300 million Spotify streams and 15 weeks on the Hot 100 to its name. Born by accident on TikTok, Puth had an epiphany after recording himself flipping a light switch. The melodic, uninhibited album closer, “No More Drama” was similarly hinged on a creaking door. The Jung Kook-assisted bop “Left And Right” cleverly pans from one headphone (or AirPod, probably) to the other in the chorus. Each track seamlessly segues into the next sonically, but the duality in the ordering is more intriguing — mirroring the emotional whiplash of falling in and out of love. The lasting revelation, though, is the cohesive lyrical arc Puth paints. The broken man in “That’s Hilarious” is stronger for it in “No More Drama.”

In “That’s Hilarious,” Puth laments that his ex “took away a year of my f*ckin’ life” in the pre-chorus before the chorus reveals his scars, underscored by synthesized laughter: “You didn’t love when you had me / But now you need me so badly / You can’t be serious / That’s hilarious.” The next track, “Charlie Be Quiet,” hits on Puth’s pension to keep his messy (and potentially risky) feelings to himself.

Early album standouts “Light Switch” and “There’s A First Time For Everything” capture the hypnotizing and intoxicating nature of developing a crush. Puth’s buoyancy is immediately deflated with the synth-based “Smells Like Me,” which simultaneously sounds like it’s plucked from an ’80s rom-com and delivers a bitter yet earnest message — “I hope your jacket smells like me” — that could be found in any Instagram caption.

“Left And Right” indulges all-consuming infatuation. “Loser” is soaked in self-loathing and blame for someone leaving, followed by the gut-punch piano ballad “When You’re Sad I’m Sad,” where Puth can’t help but empathize and take her back when he knows he shouldn’t. By the time we arrive at “I Don’t Think That I Like Her,” punctuated by Travis Barker on the drums, and “No More Drama,” Puth has the clarity to choose himself.

“I’ve got no more drama in my life, and it’s been amazing,” he sings in “No More Drama,” utilizing his signature high register. “I’m so glad I finally realize I’m better without you / It took a year before I recognized / That our love already died / Baby, I was down bad, I was down bad / Now I’m healing.”

It was a hard-earned realization, one he credits his fans for guiding him toward. “This album was born on the internet, and I’ve had so much fun making it in front of all of you this past year,” Puth wrote on Instagram when confirming Charlie‘s release date. “2019 me used to think that in order to be an artist, you had to hide away and talk to nobody to make your art. Turns out you make MUCH better art when you involve millions of people in the process. (For me at least.) I hope you scream cry every word when I sing these songs on tour because they wouldn’t be here without you.”

As with any piece of art, the subject matter doesn’t matter as much as the perspective. Charlie is a breakup album, a staple in music since forever. But the unique TikTok crafting of Charlie normalized crowdsourced healing. The typical artist trope is to relinquish ownership of an album to their fans upon release, but Puth welcomed joint custody of Charlie from the beginning — out of therapeutic necessity rather than vanity. He’s thrilled to finally have a full body of work that not only he can stand behind but that people want to claim. (He summarized his career-long frustration to Entertainment Weekly by saying he wished he “had a time machine” to make Charlie his debut offering.)

Since “See You Again,” Puth has tried so hard, by his own admission, to package himself as the perfectly consumable pop star. He was born with the skill to make chart-topping bangers in his sleep, and he did, but the sleepwalking ends with Charlie.

“I can’t think of a melody that makes you come back to me,” Puth poignantly sings in the thumping, bass-laced track “Tears On My Piano.” It feels like a reckoning that music can’t solve everything. The missing ingredient couldn’t be manufactured or serendipitously found by flipping a light switch. Puth just needed to live more life, experience heartbreak, and throw perfectionism to the wind (literally). As a result, he became what he, and his truest fans, always wanted him to be: a more complete human being and relatable pop star.

Charlie is out now via Atlantic. Stream it here.

Charlie Puth is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Every now and then, a new Drake beef pops up or an old one gets revived. Now, there’s apparently a new situation that came seemingly out of nowhere, with actor Zach Woods. Woods was a guest on The Late Late Show yesterday (October 6) and while there, he took a minute to clear the air about his (very much a joke, unless there’s something we don’t know) feud with Drake.

Woods started by offering some context, saying:

“I just want to squash a beef that’s starting to get out of hand. Drake and I… this beef is getting out of control, and I just think it needs to stop. Because Drake is out there like, ‘Oh, I’m the most famous person in the world. I’m more famous than Zach Woods, who was on The Good Wife, a recurring on The Good Wife, and in late seasons of The Office.’ And it’s like, no one knows… neither one of us are scientists, we don’t know who is more famous.

And also, if you think about it… and this is the thing that started the beef… I mean, you guys know, so I’m just telling you. Everyone knew I was ‘Champagne Papi.’ Everyone knew it, and then Drake rolls in and says, ‘I’m Champagne Papi,’ and it’s like, well, are you from the Champagne region of France? Because if not, you’re Sparkling Wine Papi, b*tch. My friend Vanessa pointed that out to me.”

Woods, who IMDb lists as 6’4″, continued, “I want to squash the beef, I don’t want to perpetuate the beef, but I will say: Drake is a musician, but I can play any movie theme on trumpet and Drake can’t even play trumpet. You see what I’m saying? So that’s it. I just need to squash it because I’ll be the bigger man, spiritually, also physically because Drake’s a mini, and that’s between him and his nutritionist. But I just, it ends here tonight, Drake. You can stop.”

He then wrapped it up, concluding, “The thing that he’s done that is really inexcusable is… in a beef, what you don’t do is you don’t be passive-aggressive. And Drake has acted as though he doesn’t even know who I am or that we’re in a beef, which is a low blow, so shame on you, and that’s coming from your Champagne Papi.”

Check out the interview clip above.

Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries returned this week to deliver more O.G. true-crime vibes for the streaming audience. The series will grow more supernatural with the second episode, but the first one takes a grounded approach to dealing with a real-life crime and considers whether an 18-year-old volleyball star, Tiffany Valiante of New Jersey, took her own life. Of course, Netflix recently scored a major hit with Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer dramatization starring Evan Peters, and that show upset victims’ families by arguably capitalizing upon tragedy. With this newest Unsolved Mysteries episode, however, the family is fully onboard in the interest of uncovering the truth of what happened to a beloved daughter who died in a puzzling, nonsensical way in 2015.

Officially, the medical examiner and investigators declared Valiante’s death to be a suicide, a determination that her family cannot stomach as the truth. That’s because Valiante was not only apparently an outwardly happy and well-adjusted teen, but she was nearly about to begin college on a volleyball scholarship. Her stature (she was 6’2″) made her stand out in a crowd, but no one saw what happened to Valiante after she left a party to walk a few blocks to her family’s home. She did show up on footage from a neighbor’s deer camera (as shown below), but investigators determined that she supposedly ditched her shoes and walked three miles, barefoot and on rough terrain, to the point where a moving train (which was on the route between Atlantic City and Philadelphia) hit her after she allegedly threw herself on the tracks.

The episode’s a spooky one, and — as the episode details — the conductor who was helming the train gave conflicting stories about what he saw or didn’t see on the tracks that night. Tiffany was also not fully clothed when (what was left of) her body was found. In addition, a previous Daily Beast investigative report detailed a hearsay story from a Wawa manager, who claimed that he overheard some teenage boys discussing how Tiffany was allegedly kidnapped after she had left the party. Whether or not that story was true, or whether Tiffany was chased onto the tracks by anyone else, no one knows for sure, and the manager didn’t want to be identified by the Daily Beast.

In addition, there are differing accounts of whether Tiffany had argued with her mother and/or ditched her cell phone in her parents’ driveway. Reportedly, cell records showed that Tiffany used the phone an hour after some people say that she tossed the device. Her mother also indicated that Tiffany always kept her cell phone with her and went to great measures to protect it with a durable, waterproof device. Further questions involve whether Tiffany could have been distraught over an ended relationship, but she had recently entered into a different coupling.

In the end, this episode doesn’t provide the answers, which adds to the obligatory “Unsolved” nature of the tragedy in question. The Netflix series, as with the original, asks viewers to provide any tips (here) if they think they can help solve a crime. Hopefully, Tiffany’s family can gain some closure if anyone out there can help determine what actually happened leading up to those train tracks.

Netflix’s ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ is currently streaming the return of Volume 3.

In recent times, Taylor Swift has been gradually rolling out the tracklist for her upcoming album Midnights, by revealing one song at a time in her “Midnights Mayhem With Me” series of videos. As of last night, there were five song titles yet to be unveiled, and Swift went ahead and revealed them all in one go, sharing a new video hourly between midnight and 4 a.m. ET last night/this morning.

Swift saved the most intriguing reveal for last, as she captioned the video, “The season finale of Midnights Mayhem with Me, with QUITE the twist of an ending…” As for the song, it was the fourth track, called “Snow On The Beach.” The song includes the album’s only credited feature: Lana Del Rey.

The Del Rey collaboration shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to Swifties, as the link-up has been rumored for weeks now. The main piece of evidence here was a sweater: Fans caught a glimpse of a distinctive pattern of a sweater Swift wore in a Midnights teaser video, identifying the article of clothing as the same one she wore in a photo with Del Rey and Midnights collaborator Jack Antonoff in April.

Find the full Midnights tracklist below.

1. “Lavender Haze”
2. “Maroon”
3. “Anti-Hero”
4. “Snow On The Beach” Feat. Lana Del Rey
5. “You’re On Your Own, Kid”
6. “Midnight Rain”
7. “Question…?”
8. “Vigilante Sh*t”
9. “Bejeweled”
10. “Labyrinth”
11. “Karma”
12. “Sweet Nothing”
13. “Mastermind”

Midnights is out 10/21 via Republic. Pre-order it here.