The Los Angeles Clippers took a gigantic swing in the trade market earlier this week when they completed their long-standing pursuit of James Harden. The Clippers were able to bring Harden and P.J. Tucker on board from the Philadelphia 76ers for a package of picks and players, giving them a third All-Star to put alongside Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.
With how things have gone since Leonard and George joined the team in 2019, taking a swing on a player like Harden makes a ton of sense. And of course, any time someone makes a trade like this, they immediately become one of the most fascinating and exciting teams in the league. All eyes are going to be on the Clippers going forward, and in the aftermath of Wednesday night’s game against the Los Angeles Lakers, Leonard reacted to his new running mate in an extremely Kawhi Leonard way.
“I guess excited,” Leonard said, according to Melissa Rohlin of Fox Sports. “I know he’s one of the best players that has stepped on an NBA floor.”
It’s unclear when Harden will be able to make his full debut for the Clippers. While Tucker was able to suit up and play against the Lakers, Harden is in the process of ramping up after a limited preseason and training camp in Philadelphia.
Spiced rum is the kind of spirit that always seems to be readily available and frequently finds a spot on your home bar cart but … you rarely know exactly what to do with it. When it comes to the rum world, spiced rum often seems to be left out of the overall discussion. Bartenders and home mixologists enjoy mixing with white rum and sipping dark rum. The spiced variety is just sort of left around for rum and Cokes.
First off, what is spiced rum? Well, it’s typically gold or dark rum that’s been spiced with vanilla, cardamon, cloves, cinnamon, or other spices to enhance the barrel flavors. It’s sweet, spicy, and, we think, deserves way more credit than it gets. If you have a well-made, nuanced spiced rum, you can drink it neat or on the rocks like you would a long-aged dark rum or whiskey. You can also use it as a mixer in myriad cocktails from hot buttered rum to spiced mojitos to those classic rum and Cokes.
To find the best spiced rums in the game, we went to the professionals for help. We asked a few of our favorite bartenders to tell us their favorite “double duty” spiced rums to sip and mix with all year long.
Cotton & Reed Dry Spiced Rum
Cotton & Reed
Vlad Novikov, general manager at Silver Lyanin Washington, DC
Cotton & Reed Dry Spiced Rum is great. The big reason: it doesn’t have a ton of added sugar and artificial flavors like most spiced rums. You won’t find that typical vanilla, sugary lead. They’re also local to DC. As a side note, their white rum won double gold in 2022 and 2023 at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.
Tasting Notes:
It begins with aromas of citrus peels and spices. The palate is filled with notes of caramel apples, vanilla, and island spices. All with a dry, warming finish.
Bumbu Spiced Rum
Bumbu
Adrienne Balk, bartender at Parasol in St. Petersburg, Florida
Bumbu Rum is a great spiced rum. It’s a blend of sugarcane-based rums from various countries in the West Indies and South America. We use the rum to make a twist on a Pina Colada, which is a great fall sip.
Tasting Notes:
It has notes of banana bread, caramel, vanilla, and gentle spices. It’s sweet, fruity, and perfectly spiced.
Bacardi Spiced Rum is always on top of my list. Blended with natural flavors and spices, each sip offers a bold, yet smooth taste. It’s great for mixing or as a value sipper.
Tasting Notes:
It has a caramel-like vanilla flavor with subtle notes of almond and dried, dark fruits rounded out by cinnamon, nutmeg, and a touch of honey, creating a balanced rum with a hint of smokiness.
Striped Pig Spiced Rum is my preference and admittedly a biased one as it is local to me. It’s distilled in Charleston, South Carolina. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a flavorful, well-made spiced rum though.
Tasting Notes:
Vanilla, brown sugar, cinnamon, and butterscotch notes make this a great mixer or sipper. It’s the perfect match for a brown butter wash. Add a few dashes of black walnut bitters and a little maple syrup and you get a delightful rum old fashioned that’s now featured on our fall menu.
The Kraken Black Spiced Rum
The Kraken
Clay Crocker, beverage director at Branja in Miami
In such a massively diverse category, it would be easy to go with some niche expensive artisanal name, but to be perfectly honest, I’m reaching for a bottle of Kraken more often than not. This 94-proof spiced rum delivers a bit more of a kick than a lot of its colleagues, and it’s exactly what I want when I am shaking up something with a ton of citrus in it. It might not have all the nuances of something from a smaller distillery, but it makes up for that in the sheer boldness of the flavors it delivers.
Tasting Notes:
When you’re making a tropical drink that has a ton of other ingredients clamoring for your tastebud’s attention, the ginger and vanilla from Kraken do not get lost in the mix.
The Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum is tough to beat. It is blended with the finest rums from the Caribbean. It’s readily available and a great base for your favorite rum-based cocktail.
Tasting Notes:
It offers a burn but ends on a nice, sweet note. It will go well with sparkling apple juice and can be used as for spritz cocktails.
Chairman’s Reserve Spiced Rum is the only spiced rum I will touch. I have seen the production process firsthand where rum is soaked in large vats with individual dried and fresh ingredients and then blended together without any artificial flavors or essential oils. I generally don’t endorse any other spiced rums as most are made from unaged distillate with synthetic flavorings.
Tasting Notes:
Aromas of candied orange peels, cinnamon, and spices work their way into a palate of raisins, vanilla, toffee, oak, and spices.
Doctor Bird Jamaican Spiced Rum
Doctor Bird
Vincent Bolognini, head bartender at Due West in New York City
Dr. Bird is a classic Jamaican Spiced Rum. The first pot distilled in Jamaica, it blended and aged in former muscatel wine barrels at the distillery in Detroit.
Tasting Notes:
Its palate is loaded with ripe tropical fruits and a slightly funky and oaky finish from the muscatel barrels. I usually drink it over ice with tonic and a squeeze of lime.
Plantation Stiggins’ Fancy
Plantation
Corey Hayes, general manager and beverage director at Gala & Muse Bar in Miami
It’s not technically a spiced rum, but Plantation 5 Year is the absolute best, price point you can’t beat for this Barbadian rum. The dried fruit notes mixed with banana fosters flavor making it an absolute killer for a classic daquiri or tiki-forward cocktails such as a Mai Tai. But, on the other hand, Plantation Stiggins’ Fancy Pineapple is as close to a spiced rum as the brand makes. Pineapple, spices, what’s not to love?
Tasting Notes:
Infused with pineapple, this dark rum carries notes of vanilla, honey, ripe tropical fruit, and cloves. It’s just as great as a sipper as it is a mixer.
Cruzan Island Spiced Rum
Cruzan
Alex Barbatsis, bar director at The Whistler in Chicago
When it comes to spiced rum, I’ll usually reach for Sailor Jerry. It has warm vanilla notes and cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger flavors. But there are other great value spiced rums on the market and one of the best is Cruzan Island Spiced Rum.
Tasting Notes:
Flavored with cinnamon, vanilla, and star anise, this spiced rum is well-suited as a mixer for your favorite rum-based cocktails.
British pop star PinkPantheress has come a long way in a relatively short time. Her 2021 mixtape To Hell With It not only somewhat predicted but also boosted the resurgence of Black dance music styles like garage and 2-step, then her hit “Boy’s A Liar” skyrocketed her to the top ten of the Hot 100 (bringing Ice Spice along for the ride). Now, she’s a little over a week away from the release of her debut album, Heaven Knows, and well, heaven only knows how much higher she can fly.
Here’s everything to know about PinkPantheress’ new album, Heaven Knows.
Release Date
Heaven Knows is out 11/10 via Warner Records UK. Find more information here.
Tracklist
1. “Another Life” Feat. Rema
2. “True Romance”
3. “Mosquito”
4. “The Aisle”
5. “Nice To Meet You” Feat. Central Cee
6. “Bury Me” Feat. Kelela
7. “Internet Baby”
8. “Ophelia”
9. “Feel Complete”
10. “Blue”
11. “Feelings” (Demo)
12. “Capable Of Love”
13. “Boy’s A Liar Pt. 2” Feat. Ice Spice (Bonus Track)
PinkPantheress will open on Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts tour beginning in July 2024. You can see the dates below.
07/19/2024 — Philadelphia, PA @ Wells Fargo Center ^
07/20/2024 — Washington, D.C. @ Capital One Arena ^
07/23/2024 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena ^
07/24/2024 — Lexington, KY @ Rupp Arena ^
07/26/2024 — Kansas City, MO @ T-Mobile Center ^
07/27/2024 — Oklahoma City, OK @ Paycom Center ^
07/30/2024 — Denver, CO @ Ball Arena ^
07/31/2024 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Delta Center ^
08/02/2024 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center ^
08/03/2024 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center ^
08/06/2024 — Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena ^
08/07/2024 — Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena ^
08/09/2024 — Vancouver, British Columbia @ Rogers Arena ^
08/10/2024 — Portland, OR @ Moda Center ^
^ with PinkPantheress
PinkPantheress is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
After officially announcing the series back in 2021, FX is finally ready to unleash Shõgun, an epic drama set in feudal Japan. Based on the best-selling James Clavell novel of the same, Shõgun will take viewers through a stirring journey in this limited series about an isolated, legendary samurai who’s struggling to hold onto power as he’s surrounded by enemies on all sides.
Here’s everything we know about the FX series.
Plot
From the official synopsis for Shõgun:
When a mysterious European ship is found marooned in a nearby fishing village, its English pilot, John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), comes bearing secrets that could help Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) tip the scales of power and devastate the formidable influence of Blackthorne’s own enemies — the Jesuit priests and Portuguese merchants. Toranaga’s and Blackthorne’s fates become inextricably tied to their translator, Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), a mysterious Christian noblewoman and the last of a disgraced line. While serving her lord amidst this fraught political landscape, Mariko must reconcile her newfound companionship with Blackthorne, her commitment to the faith that saved her and her duty to her late father.
Cast
Shõgun will center on three main characters as it unfolds its epic tale. Anna Sawai stars as Lady Mariko, the “revered daughter of an infamous samurai traitor, whom Toranaga enlists to avenge her father’s death.” Hiroyuki Sanada takes on the role of Yoshii Toranaga, a “living legend” and “powerful daimyo from a feared lineage, isolated and outnumbered by his enemies in Osaka Castle.”
Rounding out the leads is Cosmo Jarvis as John Blackthorne, “a restless English pilot major in search of a destiny far from the world he was born into.”
Release Date
While no precise release date has been set, FX has announced that Shõgun will premiere some time in February 2024 and run for 10 episodes.
Even though Halloween is over, there is always room on Netflix for some haunting true crime shows you can watch in one sitting, as long as your doors are locked and you don’t have any active enemies looking for you.
Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering Vs. Haysom is an eight-part docuseries that chronicles the killings of Derek and Nancy Haysom. Through footage, reports, and new interviews, the series tells the story from the perspectives of the law enforcement who were there and the man convicted of the murder over 30 years ago, Jens Soering.
In April 1985, the Haysoms were found murdered in their home, and the police began questioning their daughter Elizabeth, who claimed to be with her boyfriend Jens in Washington D.C. The Haysoms reportedly did not approve of Jens and Elizabeth’s relationship, and the police began investigating the couple after they discovered the mileage on Elizabeth’s car did not add up. After the couple fled to England, the duo was caught and sent back to the U.S., where they were wanted on suspicion of murder. At least they got a nice vacation out of it, though.
After the couple began to turn on each other, it quickly turned into a chaotic trial, and now Jens wants to tell his side of the story. Here’s the official Netflix description: “Did Jens Soering murder his girlfriend’s parents in 1985 — or was she the killer? This docuseries digs into questions that still swirl around the case.”
Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering Vs. Haysom is now streaming on Netflix.
The ongoing BTS hiatus has been both a curse and a blessing for fans. One on hand, the most obvious implication is that the K-pop group isn’t currently active. A side effect of that, though, is that band members have been better able to pursue solo projects outside of the group. The latest to do so in Jung Kook, who has his first solo album, Golden coming out tomorrow, November 3.
In terms of what specific time you’ll actually be able to listen to the project, here’s what to know.
As is true for most major music releases these days, Golden is set to hit streaming services at midnight ET on November 3. So, if you’re, for example, on the West Coast of the United States, you can hear Golden at 9 p.m. PT. If you’re somewhere else in the world, time zone conversion websites are your friend. Here’s one with the base time already set to midnight ET on the 3rd, so just add your city or time zone and that’ll tell you when you’ll be able to listen to Golden.
If you want to see the tracklist or other information about the album, we’ve put together a guide that you can check out here.
Golden is out 11/3 via Big Hit. Find more information here.
“If [Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins] has something to say, then she’ll write a book about it,” producer Nina Jacobson told Yahoo! Entertainment. “Honestly, as much as I love Katniss, I think her story is complete. And I think that Suzanne feels that her story is complete. But if that changes, and Suzanne has something she wants to say, and it involves Katniss, then I would be thrilled. But really any chance to be back in this world, and lead with [director Francis Lawrence] and Suzanne, I would take regardless of who it was about.”
Lawrence added, “I think that if for whatever reason [Collins] had some thematic idea that made sense to tell another Katniss story, I’d be in, and then I’m sure Jen would be in.” Maybe it will happen eventually, but for now, Lawrence probably needs more time away from franchise films.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes comes out on November 17th.
In September, Uproxx’s Phil Cosores wrote on the sustainability of Coldplay, reviewing the band’s performance at San Diego’s Snapdragon Stadium. At the time, the band’s most recent album was 2021’s Music Of The Spheres. That’s soon to change, though, as they recently announced their next album, Moon Music — and this time, they’re offering their fans the opportunity to participate.
Revealing that the album is “nearly finished,” Coldplay teased a song called “One World,” to which they’d add fans’ voices. “All you have to do,” they wrote, “is record yourself singing ‘Ahhhhh’ for a few seconds at oneworld.coldplay.com.”
– Record your “Ahhhhh” by pressing the microphone icon
– You can listen to your vocal and re-record if necessary
– Click on the tickbox if you’d like to be credited in the track’s digital booklet
And that’s it. They do require that fans be older than the age of majority in your jurisdiction (generally speaking, 18 years old) and not sing words or phrases.
There’s also a leaderboard showing which regions the most entries are coming from (as of this writing, the US and Britain are in the lead, naturally, followed by Italy, Brazil, and Mexico).
You can check out the website for more information.
Coldplay is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Each week our staff of film and TV experts surveys the entertainment landscape to select the ten best new/newish shows available for you to stream at home. We put a lot of thought into our selections, and our debates on what to include and what not to include can sometimes get a little heated and feelings may get hurt, but so be it, this is an important service for you, our readers. With that said, here are our selections for this week.
What we have on our hands here is a Bachelor spinoff about an older gentleman looking for love from a group of similarly aged ladies. Which is… honestly kind of adorable. Good for them. And good for us, too, especially if one of the episodes features a date where they eat dinner at a diner at 4:45 and then go watch an episode of Columbo in matching recliners. This was written as a joke but honestly sounds kind of wonderful. That’s true love right there, people.
Welcome to the third season of Upload, a fun little science fiction-y comedy from the creator of The Office, Greg Daniels, that is set in 2033 in a world where humans can — you guessed it — upload themselves into a virtual afterlife when they die. The show follows Nathan, a guy who dies young under potentially mysterious circumstances and tries to sort things through from a very fancy new virtual community. It sounds strange. We promise it’s pretty fun.
Sly gives us pretty much exactly what you would expect from a documentary named Sly about the life and career of Sylvester Stallone. Which is, to be clear, not a complaint at all. Stallone has had a wild run if you stop and think about it, from Oscar glory with Rocky to ending the Cold War with Rocky IV to… look, you’ve seen the Expendables movies. There’s something to be said for building a career in Hollywood that spans six decades and it’s probably good to let the man go ahead and say it.
Robert Kirkman’s other most beloved comic book series proved that Amazon really is doing superheroes and supervillains better than anyone else right now. When this round of episodes begins, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) will need to fully reckon with the implications of that climactic fight in the sky with his dad, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons). Additionally, his love life will receive new wrinkles, and Walton Goggins will be back, meaning that the man who would be Boyd Crowder again is achieving TV supremacy with every passing year. New characters shall be portrayed by Ben Schwartz and Tatiana Maslany.
This 2023 movie goes back to the 1973 short story by Stephen King as the perfect streaming lead-in to nightmares about Halloween season. This is not a true tale, but perhaps thinking of it that way can increase the terror. The story explores the enduring Boogeyman/Bogeyman folklore that has persisted around the globe for centuries. We’ve got a distracted father not paying enough attention to a pair of sisters, who begin to experience horrors that could trigger any lingering fears you’ve ever had about monsters lurking in your bedroom closet. The cast includes Sophie Thatcher, David Dastmalchian, and Chris Messina.
Brie Larson has never shied away from speaking out for feminist causes, and in this series, she stars in the adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’ bestselling novel, Lessons In Chemistry. Garmus became an overnight “a literary rock star” at age 66 for this impressive debut novel that is all the rage in book clubs everywhere. That will give the show a built-in audience as Larson portrays a brilliant chemist who is fired for a sexist double standard. This leads to an unexpected career change as a cooking show host. This high-profile new platform allows her to sandwich in other nuggets of wisdom for housewives as well as demonstrating how to bake yummy cookies.
Kristen Stewart’s gay ghost hunting show has everything: slayances, spook-kikis, haunted strip clubs, and comedian Roz Hernandez snacking on donuts while she yells at homophobic poltergeists. The group – a hodgepodge of paranormal experts that includes a psychic, a witch, and a tarot card reader – road trips across the country in this docuseries produced by the Queer Eye creators, chatting it up with demonic entities and benevolent spooks to get to the root of some very real, very human problems. If there’s a better way to spend your weekend than watching a group of well-dressed Queer spiritualists commune with the dead while cracking jokes and busting stereotypes, we don’t want to know about it.
This is kind of like if Planet Earth had been executive producer by Steven Spielberg, who does executive produce this
The official description is as follows: “The story of life’s epic, 4 billion-year journey on Earth, told through its ruling dynasties, its underdogs and the cataclysmic events that reshaped it”
This sucker is narrated by Morgan Freeman
Settle deeeeep into your couch and turn off the lights and enjoy.
Come for the dong jokes, and stay for the dong jokes. Much like The Boys, this spinoff does not skim on the raunch, and it also gives us a whole new roster of Supes who might feel differently about Vought International’s motives. This series seemingly pulls off the impossible by managing to be as appealing as the flagship series without the presence of its most shining and degraded beacon, Homelander. This franchise shows no sign of wearing out or fatiguing its audience as both the MCU and DCU have managed to do, which might be the most heroic feat of all in the present entertainment realm.
A rom-com in space? Sure, why not? There’s likely no better way to kill some time on a doomed ship that will never make its way back to Earth than to, you know, consider the “if you were the last person…” scenario that comes to life. Actually, damn, this is dark stuff! It’s a good thing that Anthony Mackie is over there making flirty eyes at Zoe Chao. Very distracting.
— This movie stars Sandra Oh and Awkwafina and Will Ferrell, which is a good start
— This is the official summary: “Anne and her estranged train-wreck of a sister, Jenny, must work together to help cover their mother’s gambling debts. When Anne’s beloved dog is kidnapped, they set out on a wild cross-country trek to get the cash.”
When we last left Loki, the title character (Tom Hiddleston) had traveled to an alternate version of the Time Variance Authority where no one remembers him and there are statues of Kang (Jonathan Majors) everywhere. This second season picks up where we left off, only Loki soon discovers he’s being thrust back and forth not to an alternate timeline, but the past and present of his current timeline. Seeking the help of the present-day Mobius (Owen Wilson, the past’s version doesn’t know Loki) the two seek out Ke Huy Quan’ Ouroboros (or OB for short), a fellow who has been around a long time and seems to know how to do everything, to stop Loki from doing these involuntary jumps back and forth through time.
Also, Loki and Mobius are charged with finding one of Kang’s variants, for reasons that are too complicated to explain here. So the pair travel to 19th-century Chicago to find an inventor and con man named Victor Timely. The problem is other people with the ability to jump through time are also after Timely and his fate has repercussions on multiple timelines.
This show is a lot, which is by design, but it’s still a lot. The first season played as good fun, and this second season is also fun, though maybe just a little less so (at least through four episodes), but while watching it’s hard to forget the real world where one of the main cast members is on trial for assault.
Rick and Morty used to take notoriously long breaks between seasons, but not this time. Season seven of the animated sci-fi comedy series returns less than a year after the season six finale. There have been big changes behind the scenes, however: co-creator Justin Roiland, who also voiced the title characters, was fired from the show. Tricky line to straddle going forward, but the show has rarely let us down before.
Emily Blunt portrays a down-on-her-luck single mom who launches a new career alongside Chris Evans’ pharmaceutical sales rep. Not a great idea, ultimately, given that she becomes involved in a racketeering scheme. And of course, she begins to realize that this company’s success is coming at a ghastly price for humanity. This is a dramatized version of the rise and fall of Insys Therapeutics, which no longer exists, and yeah, you will definitely find out why.
Apple TV+’s Fingernails turns love into an equation that can only be solved by, you guessed it, AI. Jessie Buckley plays Anna, a woman in a long term, algorithmically-sound relationship with Ryan (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) that’s been verified and sterilized by something called The Love Test – a machine that demands a couple’s fingernails in order to qualify their relationship’s percentage of success. When Anna meets her new co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed), numbers give way to actual chemistry, causing her to doubt everything she thought she knew about love. It’s probably the most interesting soft-fi romance drama you’ll see this year.
Taylor Sheridan currently has 6666 in the works on the Yellowstone side, but first, he’s taking viewers back to the real Old West. David Oyelowo portrays the legendary Black U.S. Deputy Marshal. This series will harken back to the Post-Reconstruction era, in which Bass Reeves became a notorious frontier hero by capturing thousands of the most frightening criminals in the land. Oyelowo will be accompanied by Dennis Quaid, Garrett Hedlund, and Donald Sutherland.
The seventh season of Big Mouth ties Orange is the New Black and Grace and Frankie as Netflix’s longest-running scripted series (it will break the record in its eighth and final season). Not bad for an animated show about horny teenagers and hormone monsters. Guest stars this season include Megan Thee Stallion, Lupita Nyong’o, and Pulitzer Prize winner Lin-Manuel Miranda as a pubic hair. Good show.
No Hard Feelings is more than just the scene of Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence beating up teenagers while naked. I mean, it’s that, but it’s also a breezy R-rated comedy with some genuine moments of heart. Lawrence and co-star Andrew Barth Feldman have strong chemistry, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Natalie Morales, and Kyle Mooney show up in funny supporting roles. If every movie is going to be based on an existing property, forget comic books — make more Craigslist ad comedies.*
Mike Flanagan fans, get ready. The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass showrunner is back along with Carla Gugino, who will spook your soul right out of your bod and deliver a “consequential” evening to “a collection of stunted hearts” that is the Usher family. Yikes. Do not expect a literal adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe short story. The story focuses here on the hell created by ruthless siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher, who built Fortunato Pharmaceuticals into an empire of wealth, privilege, and power. Horrible secrets shall surface when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying at the hands of a mysterious woman, portrayed with glee by Gugino.
Have you ever been convinced that the animatronics at Chuck E. Cheese are freaking evil? Welcome to Five Nights At Freddy’s. In this adaptation of the wildly popular video game, Josh Hutcherson stars as Mike Schmidt, a security guard who’s about to seriously regret his new job. Tasked with keeping an eye on Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza joint, Mike quickly learns that the night shift is a terrifying hell ride as the pizzeria’s animatronic creatures come to life with a task of their own: Kill. Like the game, Mike will have to do everything in his power to survive the night and elude the dead-eyed mechanical monsters hunting him down.
I’m pretty positive that Edgar Allan Poe had (has?) the power to travel through time. Hear me out on this one.
It’s not just the well-known circumstances of his life — orphaned at a young age, father of the mystery novel, master of cryptology, maestro of the macabre. Nor am I referring to the head-scratching details of the days leading up to his death: how he was found on the street near a voting poll wearing someone else’s clothes, and during his subsequent hospitalization, he was alleged to babble incoherently about an unidentified person named “Reynolds.”
And I won’t even get into the confounding reports of a nameless figure who, for seven decades, would show up to Poe’s gravesite in the early hours of his birthday with a glass of cognac and three roses.
Tragic and curious, yes, but hardly evidence that the acclaimed horror writer could transcend the limits of space and time. No, my time travel theory concerns the author’s creative output, which you’ll soon see is so flukishly prophetic as to make my outlandish claim seem plausible — nay, probable!
The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is a loosely linked map of flesh-eating floaters, crunched skull survivors, and primordial particles. OK, here we go…
Exhibit A: “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”
Published in 1838, Poe’s only completed novel details a mutiny on a whaling ship lost at sea. Out of supplies, the men revert to cannibalism, drawing straws to elect a sacrifice. A boy named Richard Parker draws the shortest straw and is subsequently eaten.
Now here’s where it gets weird(er): In 1884, 46 years after the novel’s publication, four men would be set adrift following the sinking of their yacht. Shipwrecked and without food, they too would go the survival cannibalism route, electing to kill and eat a 17-year-old cabin boy. The boy’s name: Richard Parker.
The extraordinary parallel went unnoticed for nearly a century, until a widely-circulated letter from a descendant of the real Parker outlined the similarities between the novel’s scene and the actual event. The letter was selected for publication in The Sunday Times after journalist Arthur Koestler put out a call for tales of “striking coincidence.” Striking indeed.
Exhibit B: “The Businessman”
In 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage suffered a traumatic brain injury after taking an iron spike through the skull. Somehow he survived, though his personality would change drastically. These behavioral changes were closely studied, allowing the medical community to develop the first understanding of the role played by the frontal lobe on social cognition.
Except for Poe, who’d inexplicably understood the profound personality changes caused by frontal lobe syndrome nearly a decade earlier. In 1840, he penned a characteristically gruesome story called “The Businessman” about an unnamed narrator who suffers a traumatic head injury as a young boy, leading to a life of obsessive regularity and violent, sociopathic outbursts.
Poe’s grasp of frontal lobe syndrome is so precise that neurologist Eric Altshuler wrote, “There’s a dozen symptoms and he knows every single one… There’s everything in that story, we’ve hardly learned anything more.” Altshuler, who, to reiterate, is a medically-licensed neurologist and not at all a crackpot, went on to say, “It’s so exact that it’s just weird, it’s like he had a time machine.”
Exhibit C: “Eureka”
Still unconvinced? What if I told you that Poe predicted the origins of the universe 80 years before modern science would begin to formulate the Big Bang theory? Surely, an amateur stargazer with no formal training in cosmology could not accurately describe the machinery of the universe, rejecting widely-held inaccuracies while solving a theoretical paradox that had bewildered astronomers since Kepler. Except that’s exactly what happened.
The prophetic vision came in the form of “Eureka,” a 150-page prose poem critically panned for its complexity and regarded by many as the work of a madman. Written in the final year of Poe’s life, “Eureka” describes an expanding universe that began in “one instantaneous flash” derived from a single “primordial particle.”
Poe goes on to put forth the first legitimate solution to Olbers’ paradox — the question of why, given the vast number of stars in the universe, the night sky is dark — by explaining that light from the expanding universe had not yet reached our solar system. When Edward Robert Harrison published “Darkness at Night” in 1987, he credited “Eureka” as having anticipated his findings.
In an interview with Nautilus, Italian astronomer Alberto Cappi speaks of Poe’s prescience, admitting, “It’s surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically evolving universe because there was no observational or theoretical evidence suggesting such a possibility. No astronomer in Poe’s day could imagine a non-static universe.”
But what if Poe wasn’t of a day at all, but of all the days?
What if his written prophecies — on the cannibalistic demise of Richard Parker, the symptoms of frontal lobe syndrome, and the Big Bang theory — were merely reportage from his journey through the extratemporal continuum?
Surely I sound like a tinfoil-capped loon, but maybe, maybe, there are many more prophecies scattered throughout the author’s work, a possibility made all the more likely by the fact that, as The New York Times notes, “Poe was so undervalued for so long, there is not a lot of Poe-related material around.”
I’ll leave you with this quote, taken from a letter that Poe wrote to James Russell Lowell in 1844, in which he apologizes for his absence and slothfulness:
“I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass… You speak of “an estimate of my life” — and, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things, to give any continuous effort to anything — to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim — impulse — passion — a longing for solitude — a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future.”
This story was originally published on HistoryBuff and first appeared on 8.16.16
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