Month: February 2024

“Teflon Don” is what they call Donald Trump, and for good reason: He’s never had to face any real comeuppance, and he’s usually rewarded for doing bad. Those around him aren’t so lucky. Take Rudy Giuliani. Formerly “America’s Mayor,” now he’s a broke joke who torched his career, his reputation, and his livelihood in a failed attempt to help him overturn an election. Last year he even filed for bankruptcy, then was seen hitting up an ATM. Speaking of, that checking account which he was presumably accessing? It’s way in the red.

Per Raw Story, new bankruptcy filings from Giuliani show that on top of owing $148 million to election workers he defamed, he also owes CitiBank a pile of money in overdrafts. How much overdraft money? Only $9,530,21.

Of course, that’s chump change compared to what Giuliani owes Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, who he baselessly accused of easily debunked voter fraud — and who he kept defaming even after he was ordered to pay almost twice what his good buddy Trump has to pay E. Jean Carroll over her second defamation suit (and counting).

So is a guy who used to throw mobsters in jail and once lorded over America’s greatest city basically only paying for his extravagant lifestyle by overdrafting from his checking account? Even for all that has befallen him — and mind you he’s also facing 10 undecided lawsuits — this one almost makes him worthy of pathos. Almost.

(Via Raw Story)

There’s an arms race happening at your local wing joint. According to QSR, it’s because Americans have strayed from eating traditional fare and are embracing spicier ethnic foods such as Mexican and Asian cuisine.

A 2013 Consumer Flavor Trend Report found that a majority of Americans (54 percent) prefer hot or spicy foods, including sauces, condiments, and dips, compared with 48 percent in 2011 and 46 percent in 2009. Now, a new report out of China shows that this new trend in American eating habits could prolong our life spans.

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Researchers discovered the connection between spicy food and longevity after studying the results of a survey of 500,000 Chinese people taken from 2004 to 2008. The survey asked people about their dietary habits, including the amount of chili they consumed on a weekly basis. When researchers checked back in with respondents seven years later, those who consumed spicy foods once a week had a 10 percent lesser chance of death. And those who ate spicy foods three to seven times a week had a 14 percent lesser chance of death.

“We know something about the beneficial effects of spicy foods basically from animal studies and very small-sized human studies,” Lu Qi, associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, told Time. Studies have shown that capsaicin, the active ingredient in spicy foods, is linked to a lower risk of cancer as well as heart and respiratory diseases. It also has a positive effect on metabolism, weight, and gut bacteria.

“It appears that increasing your intake moderately, just to one to two or three to five times a week, shows a very similar protective effect,” Qi said. “Just increase moderately. That’s maybe enough.” So, if you want an extra dab of Tabasco on your tacos, go for it. But you might not want to eat a dozen fried, greasy buffalo wings every night—that will probably cancel out the positive effects of the chili.

This article originally appeared on 09.19.17

I first saw a psychiatrist for my anxiety and depression as a junior in high school.

During her evaluation, she asked about my coursework. I told her that I had a 4.0 GPA and had filled my schedule with pre-AP and AP classes. A puzzled look crossed her face. She asked about my involvement in extracurricular activities. As I rattled off the long list of groups and organizations I was a part of, her frown creased further.

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Finally, she set down her pen and looked at me, saying something along the lines of “You seem to be pretty high-functioning, but your anxiety and depression seem pretty severe. Actually, it’s teens like you who scare me a lot.”

Now I was confused. What was scary about my condition? From the outside, I was functioning like a perfectly “normal” teenager. In fact, I was somewhat of an overachiever.

I was working through my mental illnesses and I was succeeding, so what was the problem?

I left that appointment with a prescription for Lexapro and a question that I would continue to think about for years. The answer didn’t hit me all at once.

Instead, it came to me every time I heard a suicide story on the news saying, “By all accounts, they were living the perfect life.”

It came to me as I crumbled under pressure over and over again, doing the bare minimum I could to still meet my definition of success.

It came to me as I began to share my story and my illness with others, and I was met with reactions of “I had no idea” and “I never would have known.” It’s easy to put depression into a box of symptoms.

Even though we’re often told that mental illness comes in all shapes and sizes, I think we’re still stuck with certain “stock images” of mental health in our heads.

When we see depression and anxiety in adolescents, we see teens struggling to get by in their day-to-day lives. We see grades dropping, and we see involvement replaced by isolation. But it doesn’t always look like this.

And when we limit our idea of mental illness, at-risk people slip through the cracks.

We don’t see the student with the 4.0 GPA or the student who’s active in choir and theater or a member of the National Honor Society or the ambitious teen who takes on leadership roles in a religious youth group.

No matter how many times we are reminded that mental illness doesn’t discriminate, we revert back to a narrow idea of how it should manifest, and that is dangerous.

Recognizing this danger is what helped me find the answer to my question.

Watching person after person — myself included — slip under the radar of the “depression detector” made me realize where that fear comes from. My psychiatrist knew the list of symptoms, and she knew I didn’t necessarily fit them. She understood it was the reason that, though my struggles with mental illness began at age 12, I didn’t come to see her until I was 16.

If we keep allowing our perception of what mental illness looks like to dictate how we go about recognizing and treating it, we will continue to overlook people who don’t fit the mold.

We cannot keep forgetting that there are people out there who, though they may not be able to check off every symptom on the list, are heavily and negatively affected by their mental illness. If we forget, we allow their struggle to continue unnoticed, and that is pretty scary.

This article was written by Amanda Leventhal and originally appeared on 06.03.16

When you’re a kid, or in high school or college, you usually don’t work too hard on your friend situations. Friends just kind of happen.

For a bunch of years, you’re in a certain life your parents chose for you, and so are other people, and none of you have that much on your plates, so friendships inevitably form. Then in college, you’re in the perfect friend-making environment, one that hits all three ingredients sociologists consider necessary for close friendships to develop: “proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.” More friendships happen.

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Maybe they’re the right friends, maybe they’re not really. But you don’t put that much thought into any of it — you’re still more of a passive observer.

But once student life ends, the people in your life start to shake themselves into more distinct tiers.

It looks something like this mountain:

At the top of your life mountain, in the green zone, you have your Tier 1 friends — the people who feel like brothers and sisters.

These are the people closest to you, the ones you call first when something important happens, the ones you love even when they suck, who make speeches at your wedding, whose best and worst sides you know through and through, and whose relationship with you is eternal; even if you go months or years without hanging out, nothing has changed when you find yourself together again.

Unfortunately, depending on how things went down in your youth, Tier 1 can also contain your worst enemies, the people who can ruin your day with one subtle jab that only they could word so brilliantly hurtfully, the people you feel a burning resentment for, or jealousy of, or competition with. Tier 1 is high stakes.

Below, in the yellow zone, are your Tier 2 friends: your Pretty Good friends.

Pretty Good friends are a much calmer situation than your brothers and sisters on Tier 1. You might be invited to their wedding, but you won’t have any responsibilities once you’re there. If you live in the same city, you might see them every month or two for dinner and have a great time when you do, but if one of you moves, you might not speak for the next year or two. And if something huge happens in their life, there’s a good chance you’ll hear it first from someone else.

Toward the bottom of the mountain in the orange zone, you have your Tier 3 friends: your Not Really friends.

You might grab a one-on-one drink with one of them when you move to their city, but then it surprises neither of you when five years pass and drink #2 is still yet to happen. Your relationship tends to exist mostly as part of a bigger group or through the occasional Facebook Like, and it doesn’t even really stress you out when you hear that one of them made $5 million last year. You may also try to sleep with one of these people at any given time.

The lowest part of Tier 3 begins to blend indistinguishably into your large group of acquaintances (the pink zone): those people you’d stop and talk to if you saw them on the street or would maybe email for professional purposes but whom you’d never hang out with one-on-one. When you hear that something bad happens to one of these people, you pretend to be sad but you don’t actually care.

Finally, acquaintances gradually blend into the endless world of strangers.

And depending on who you are and how things shook out in those first 25 years, the way your particular mountain looks will vary.

For example, there’s Walled-Off Wally:

And Phony Phoebe, who tries to be everyone’s best friend and ends up with a lot of people mad at her:

Even Unabomber Ulysses has a mountain:

Whatever your particular mountain looks like, eventually the blur of your youth is behind you, the dust has settled, and there you are living your life.

Then one day, usually around your mid- or late 20s, it hits you: It’s not that easy to make friends anymore.

Sure, you’ll make new friends in the future — at work, through your spouse, through your kids — but you won’t get to that Tier 1 brothers level, or even to Tier 2, with very many of them because people who meet as adults don’t tend to get through the 100+ long, lazy hangouts needed to reach a bond of that strength. As time goes on, you start to realize that the 20-year frenzy of not-especially-thought-through haphazard friend-making you just did was the critical process of you making most of your lifelong friends.

And since you matched up with most of them A) by circumstance, and B) before you really knew yourself yet, the result is that your Tier 1 and Tier 2 friends — those closest to you — fall in a very scattered way on what I’ll call the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph:

So, who are all those close friends in the three non-ideal quadrants?

As time goes on, most of us tend to have fewer friends in Quadrants 2 through 4 because A) people mature, and B) people have more self-respect and higher standards for what they’ll deal with as they get older. But the fact is, friendships made in the formative years often stick, whether they’re ideal or not, leaving most of us with a portion of our Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships that just don’t make that much sense. We’ll get to the great, Quadrant 1 friendships later in the post, but in order to treat those relationships properly, we need to take a thorough look at the odd ones first.

Here are 10 common ones:

1. The non-question-asking friend

You’ll be having a good day. You’ll be having a bad day. You’ll be happy at work. You’ll quit your job. You’ll fall in love. You’ll catch your new love cheating on you and murder them both in an act of incredible passion. And it doesn’t matter, because none of it will be discussed with The Non-Question-Asking Friend, who never, ever, ever asks you anything about your life. This friend can be explained in one of three ways:

1. He’s extremely self-absorbed and only wants to talk about himself.
2. He avoids getting close to people and doesn’t want to talk about either you or himself or anything personal, just third-party topics.
3. He thinks you’re insufferably self-absorbed and knows if he asks you about your life, you’ll talk his ear off about it.

In almost every group of friends, there’s one pair who can’t ever be alone together. It’s not that they dislike each other — they might get along great — it’s just that they have no individual friendship with each other whatsoever. This leaves both of them petrified of the lumbering elephant that appears in the room anytime they’re alone together. They’re way too on top of shit to ever end up in the car alone together if a group is going somewhere in multiple cars, but there are smaller dangers afoot — like being the first two to arrive at a restaurant or being in a group of three when the third member goes to the bathroom.

The thing is, sometimes it’s not even that these people couldn’t have an individual friendship — it’s just that they don’t, and neither one has the guts to try to make that leap when things have gone on for so long as is.

3. The non-character-breaking friend you have to be “on” with

This is a friend who’s terrified of having an earnest interaction, and as such, your friendship with him is always in some kind of skit — you always have to be on when you’re interacting.

Sometimes the skit is that you both burst out laughing at everything constantly. He can only exist with you in “This is so fucking hilarious, it’s too much!” mode, so you have to be in some kind of joke-telling or sarcastic mode yourself at all times or he’ll become socially horrified.

Another version of this is the “always and only ironic” friend, who you really bum out if you ever break that social shell and say something earnest. This type of person hates earnest people because someone being earnest dares him to come out from under his ironic safety blanket and let the sun touch his face, and no fucking thanks.

A third example is the “You’re great, I’m great, ugh why is everyone else so terrible and not great like us” friend. Of course, she doesn’t really think you’re perfectly great at all — if she were with someone else, you’d be one of the voodoo dolls on the table to be dissected and scoffed at. The key here is that the two of you must be on a team at all times while interacting. The only comfortable mode for this person is bonding with you by building a little pedestal for you both to stand on while you criticize everyone else. You can either play along and everything will go smoothly, even though you’ll both despise yourselves and each other the whole time, or you can commit the ultimate sin and have the integrity to disagree with the friend or defend a non-present party the friend criticizes. Doing this will shatter the fragile team vibe and make the friend recoil and say something quietly like, “Hm … yeah … I guess.” The friend now respects you for the first time and will also criticize you extra hard next time she’s playing her pedestal game with a different friend.

What these all have in common is the friend has tall walls up, at least toward you, and so she builds a little skit for you two to hang out in to make sure any authentic connection can be avoided. Sometimes that person only does this out of her own social anxiety and can become a great, authentic friend if you can just stomp through the ice. Other times, the person is just hopelessly scared and closed off and there’s no hope and you have to get out.

In any case, I can’t stand these interactions and am in a full panic the entire time they’re happening.

4. The double-obligated friendship

Think of a friend you get together with from time to time, which usually happens after a long and lackluster email or text exchange during which you just can’t find a time that works for both of you — and you’re never really happy when these plans are being made and not really psyched when you wake up and it’s finally on your schedule for that day.

Maybe you’re aware that you don’t want to be friends with that person, or maybe you’re delusional about it — but what you’re most likely not aware of is that they probably don’t want to see you either.

There are lopsided situations where one person is far more interested in hanging out than the other (we’ll get to those later), but in the case we’re talking about here, both parties often think it’s a lopsided situation without realizing that the other person actually feels the same way — that’s why it takes so long to schedule a time. When someone’s excited about something, they figure out how to get it into their schedule; when they’re not, they figure out ways to push it farther into the future.

Sometimes you don’t think hard enough about it to even realize you don’t like being friends with the person, and other times you really like the idea or the aesthetic of being friends with that particular person — being friends with them is part of your Story. But even in cases where you’re perfectly lucid about your feelings, since neither of you knows the other feels the same way and neither has the guts to just cut things off or move it down a tier, this friendship usually just continues along for eternity.

5. The half-marriage

Somewhere in your life, you’re probably part of a friendship that would be a marriage if only the other person weren’t very, very, extremely not interested in that happening. 1 for 2 on yes votes — just one vote away — so close.

You might be on either side of this — and either way, it’s one of the least healthy parts of your life. Fun!

If you’re on the if only side of things, probably the right move is to get your fucking shit together? Ya know? This friendship is one long, continuous rejection of you as a human being, and you’re just wallowing there in your yearning like a sobbing little seal. Plus, duh, if you gather your self-respect and move on with your life, it’ll raise their perception of your value and they might actually become interested in you.

If you’re on the Oh yeah, definitely not side of the situation, here’s what’s happening: There’s this suffering human in the world, and you know they’re suffering, and you fucking love it, because it gives your little ego a succulent sponge bath every time you hang out with them. You enjoy it so much you probably even lead them on intentionally, don’t you — you make sure to keep just enough ambiguity in the situation that their bleeding heart continues to lather your ego from head to toe at your whim.

Both of you — go do something else.

6. The historical friend

A Historical Friend is someone you became friends with in the first place because you met when you were little and stayed friends through the years, even though you’re a very weird match. Most old friends fall somewhat into this category, but a true Historical Friend is someone you absolutely would not be friends with if you met them today.

You’re not especially pleased with who they are, and they feel the same way about you. You’re not each other’s type one bit. Unfortunately, you’re also extremely close friends from when you were four, and you’re both just a part of each other’s situation forever, sorry.

7. The non-parallel life paths friendship

Throughout childhood and much of young adulthood, most people your age are in the same life stage as you are. But when it comes to advancing into full adulthood, people do so at widely varying paces, which leads to certain friends suddenly having totally different existences from one another.

Anyone within three years of 30 has a bunch of these going on. It’s just a weird time for everyone. Some people have become Future 52-year-olds, while others are super into being Previous 21-year-olds. At some point, things will start to meld together again, but being 30-ish is the friendship equivalent of a kid going through an awkward pubescent stage.

There are darker, more permanent Non-Parallel Life Path situations. Like when Person A starts to become a person who rejects material wealth, partially because she genuinely feels that pursuing an artistic path matters more and partially because she needs a defense mechanism against feeling envious of richer people, and Person B’s path makes her scoff at people who pursue creative paths, partially because she genuinely thinks expressing yourself is an inherently narcissistic venture and partially because she needs a defense mechanism against feeling regretful that she never pursued her creative dreams — these two will have problems.

They may still like each other, but they can’t be as close as they used to be — each of their lives is a bit of a middle finger at the other’s choices, and that’s jst awkward for everyone. It’s not always that bad — but to survive an Off-Line Life Situation, friends need to be really different people who don’t at all want the same things out of life.

8. The frenemy

The Frenemy roots very hard against you. And I’m not talking about the friends that will feel a little twinge of pleasure when they hear your big break didn’t pan out after all or that your relationship is in bad shape. I’m not even talking about someone who secretly roots against you when they’re not doing so well at some area of life and it hurts them to see you do better. Those are bad emotions, but they can exist in people who are still good friends.

I’m talking about a real Frenemy — someone who really wants bad things for you. Because you’re you.

You and the Frenemy usually go way back, have a very deep friendship, and the trouble probably started a long time ago. There’s a lot of complex psychology going on in these situations that I don’t fully understand, but my hunch is that a Frenemy’s resentment is rooted in his own pain, or his own shortcomings, or his own regret — and for some reason, your existence stings them in these places hard.

A little less dark but no less harmful is a bully situation where a friend sees some weakness or vulnerability in you and she enjoys prodding you there either for sadistic reasons or to prop herself up.

A Frenemy knows how to hurt you better than anyone because you’re deeply similar in some way and she knows how you’re wired. She’ll do whatever she can to bring you down any chance she gets, often in such a subtle way it’s hard to see that it’s happening.

Whatever the reason, if you have a Frenemy in your life, kick her toxic ass off your mountain, or at least kick her down the mountain — just get her off of Tier 1. A Frenemy has about a 10th of the power to hurt you from Tier 2 as she does from Tier 1.

9. The Facebook celebrity friend

This person isn’t a celebrity to anyone other than you, you creep. You know exactly who I’m talking about — there are a small handful of people whose Facebook page you’re uncomfortably well-acquainted with, and those people have no idea that this is happening. On the plus side, there are people out there you haven’t spoken to in seven years who know all about the new thing you’re trying with your hair, since it goes both ways.

This is a rare Tier 3 friend, or even an acquaintance, who qualifies as an odd friendship because you found a way to make it unhealthy even though you’re not actually friends. Well done.

10. The lopsided friendship

There are a lot of ways a friendship can be lopsided: Someone can be higher on their friend’s mountain than vice versa. Someone can want to spend more time with a friend than vice versa. One member can consistently do 90% of the listening and only 10% of the talking, and in situations where most of the talking is about life problems, what’s happening is a one-sided therapy situation, with a badly off-balance give-and-take ratio, and that’s not much of a friendship — it’s someone using someone else.

And then there’s the lopsided power friendship. Of course, this is a hideous quality in many not-great couples, but it’s also a prominent feature of plenty of friendships.

A near 50/50 friendship is ideal, but anything out to 65/35 is fine and can often be attributed to two different styles of personality. It’s when the number gap gets even wider that something less healthy is going on — something that doesn’t reflect very well on either party.

There are some obvious ways to assess the nature of a friendship’s power dynamic: Does one person cut in and interrupt the other person while they’re talking far more than the other way around? Is one person’s opinion or preference just kind of understood to carry more weight than the other’s? Is one person allowed to be more of a dick to the other than vice versa?

Another interesting litmus test is what I call the “mood determiner test.” This comes into play when two friends get together but they’re in very different moods — the idea is, whose mood “wins” and determines the mood of the hangout. If Person A is in a bad mood, Person B is in a good mood, and Person B reacts by being timid and respectful of Person A’s mood, leaving the vibe down there until Person A snaps out of it on her own — but when the moods are reversed, Person B quickly disregards her own bad mood and acts more cheerful to match Person A’s happy mood — and this is how it always goes — then Person A is in a serious power position.

But hey, not all friendships are grim.

In the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph above, the friendships we just discussed are all in Quandrants 2, 3, or 4 — i.e., they’re all a bit unenjoyable, unhealthy, or both. That’s why this has been depressing. On the bright side, there’s also Quadrant 1 — all the friendships that do make sense.

No friendship is perfect, but those in Quadrant 1 are doing what friendships are supposed to do: They’re making the lives of both parties better. And when a friendship is both in Quadrant 1 of the graph and on Tier 1 of your mountain, that friendship is a rock in your life.

Rock friendships don’t just make us happy — they’re the thing (along with rock family and romantic relationships) that makes us happy.

Investing serious time and energy into those is a no-brainer long-term life strategy. But in the case of most people over 25 — at least in New York — I think A) not enough time is carved out as dedicated friend time, and B) the time that is carved out is spread too thin, and too evenly, among the Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships in all four quadrants. I’m definitely guilty of this myself.

There’s something I call the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap. When you haven’t seen a good friend in a long time, the first order of business is a big catch-up — you want to know what’s going on in their career, with their girlfriend, with their family, etc., and they want to catch up on your life. In theory, once this happens, you can go back to just hanging out, shooting the shit, and actually being in the friendship. The problem is, when you don’t make enough time for good friends, seeing them only for a meal and not that often — you end up spending each get-together catching up, and you never actually get to just enjoy the friendship or get far past the surface. That’s the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap, and I find myself falling into it with way too many of the rocks in my life.

There are two orders of business right now:

First, think about your friendships, figure out which ones aren’t in Quadrant 1, and demote them down the mountain. I’m not suggesting you stop being friends with those people — you still love them and feel loyal to them, and old friends are critical to hold onto — but if the friendships aren’t that healthy or enjoyable, they don’t really deserve to be in your Tier 1, and you probably shouldn’t be in theirs. Most importantly, doing this clears up time to…

Second, dedicate even more time to the Quadrant 1, Tier 1 rocks in your life. If you’re in your mid-20s or older, your current rocks are probably the only ones you’ll ever have. Your rock friendships don’t warrant two times the time you give to your other friends — they warrant five or 10 times!

Your rocks deserve serious, dedicated time so you can stay close. So go make plans with them.

This article was written by Tim Urban and originally published on Wait But Why. It originally appeared here on 03.11.16

Remember how there was a whopping 13-year gap between the first and second Avatars? Don’t think James Cameron won’t be able to crank out a bunch more. He already has principal photography for the third one in the can, though it’s still not dropping until next December (unless it gets pushed again). But what of Avatar 4, or Avatar 5? Those probably aren’t seeing the light of day for a good while. But at least if one of its stars can be trusted, it will all be worth the wait.

“It’s going to be amazing. ‘Avatar 3,’ it’s going to be amazing, and ‘Avatar 4’ and ‘5’, it just gets crazy,” Zoe Saldana, who plays Na’vi Neytiri, recently told Collider. She continued:

“It’s true. It really does. [James Cameron has] blown our mind. This is his legacy project. We all thought it was ‘Titanic’ and it turned out that ‘Avatar’ is his legacy. And for us to be a part of something so groundbreaking and trailblazing, it’s like it’s a legacy for us, too. So I’m excited to go back. We go back to work next week, so I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone.”

But why should the Avatars stop with 4 or 5? Cameron, who’s pushing 70, has plans for even more.

“We’re fully written through movie five, and I’ve got ideas for six and seven, although I’ll probably be handing the baton on at that point,” Cameron told People. “Mortality catches up. But I mean, we’re enjoying what we’re doing. We’re loving it. We get to work with great people.”

So perhaps Avatar may continue even without Cameron in the director’s chair. The filmmaker discussed another big issue with the franchise: longtime fans who are a little nonplussed that the guy who helmed two Terminators, one Alien (i.e., Aliens), The Abyss, True Lies, and, of course, Titanic is now living exclusively on Pandora:

“People are always asking us, ‘So why did you just keep working in the same…’ Why did [George] Lucas keep working in the same thing? Why did [Gene] Roddenberry keep working in the same thing? Because when you connect with people, why would you squander that? Why would you start over with something else that might not connect?”

Let’s imagine that Avatar 3 still comes out in 2025, three years after Avatar 2. If Cameron and team stay at that click, 4 won’t come out until 2028, 5 in 2031, 6 in 2034, and 7 in 2037. Cosmic stuff! And Saldana herself is already appalled at how old she’ll be when 5 arrives. And perhaps one of them can be called The Seed Bearer.

(Via Collider and People)

Grammys Week is always a chaotic time in Los Angeles. In addition to preparations for the “Biggest Night In Music,” it’s a time when all the producers, managers, writers, publicists, assistants, and A&Rs finally come together in one place to catch up and plot the year ahead at a host of gatherings, from exclusive listening events to rooftop brunches — like The Labels Brunch, hosted by Uproxx and Velcro Records at the Remington in Beverly Hills and produced by Powerhouse Agency.

Taking over the stately penthouse, the Labels Brunch brought together a collection of some of music’s hottest up-and-coming acts for drinks, food, music, casino games, and the premiere of the music video for “To The Grave,” a new single from Polo G with G Herbo and Velcro Records artist HotBlock Jmoe. Also in attendance were rising stars like Backwood Brat, Domani, Fresco Trey, Kalan.FrFr, Journey Montana, MAF Teeski, Smiley, Tyla Yaweh, and YK Osiris, as well as rap pioneers like Too Short and Erick Sermon.

The brunch continued until well after sunset, as guests enjoyed some of LA’s finest catering courtesy of the Goldwing Group and DJ sets provided by Red Cup Nation. Special thanks go to Last Wave Entertainment, August Shore, Happy Dad, Fire, and Don Londres. Check out photos and videos from the Labels Brunch below.

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

Everybody makes a big deal about Olive Garden’s breadsticks — which I don’t understand because the best table bread side of any big chain restaurant is the famous biscuit at Lucille’s Smokehouse BBQ. Part of what makes Lucille’s biscuits so addicting is the sweet cinnamon-y apple butter that they’re served with. If you haven’t had Lucille’s apple butter just imagine creamy whipped butter infused with extra floral sweetness and the slightest hint of spiced apple.

You think butter can’t get any better, and then someone invents apple butter. It’s amazing.

If you’re familiar with this wonderful culinary creation, you’ve no doubt wanted to bring that buttery goodness home with you. Unfortunately, Lucille’s doesn’t sell a retail version of the apple butter (they don’t realize they’d essentially be printing money), and unlike Olive Garden’s alfredo sauce, an official recipe doesn’t exist online.

Luckily, TikTok’s got our back! A TikTok user by the name of Moribyan with 4.9 followers and an eCookbook, seems to have cracked the recipe. The video, which has been viewed over 200k times, doesn’t claim to be a copycat recipe but rather inspired by Lucille’s apple butter. That said, we’ve never seen a recipe online that captures the look of the real thing so accurately, so we’re willing to bet this is just as good if not better.

Moribyan’s recipe is as follows:

• 1 cup unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 tbsp of honey
• 1/4 cup of powdered dry apple
• 2 tsp granulated white sugar
• 1 tsp of cinnamon
• and a pinch of salt to taste.

The result looks so good you can almost taste it through the screen! Think of all the things you can put this butter on that aren’t biscuits — baked potatoes, pancakes, a bagel, cornbread, or hell, get weird with it and use it as a potato chip dip. The possibilities are endless.

The last time Nancy Mace made headlines, she was demonstrating to the nation that she completely missed the point of The Scarlet Letter. Since then, the South Carolina congresswoman has reportedly turned over her entire D.C. staff amid allegations that Mace is “delusional” and runs a “toxic” workplace.

According to a new report, all but one of Mace’s staffers quit the congresswoman’s office. The lone staffer who didn’t quit, Dan Hanlon, was fired on December 1. He’s now running against Mace in her own district.

Via The Daily Beast:

More broadly, these staffers described Mace’s office as grueling and thankless. She created a “demoralizing environment for staff,” as one of her other former senior employees put it.

Multiple former employees specifically complained about Mace’s propensity to ensure everyone was working all the time. Even on Good Friday, when some staff just wanted to take an hour off to go to Mass in the late afternoon, Mace wouldn’t have it, two former senior staffers said. (The House was adjourned at the time.)

“For Mace it was all about control,” one of the previously mentioned former staffers said. “She didn’t see the staff as people but as property.”

Many of the former staff members also left after they witnessed Mace’s new chief of staff, Lori Khatod, calling the Capitol Police on Hanlon, who had came to the office to return his keys a few days after being fired. Khatod had allegedly tried to clear the employees out by telling them to leave early, but when they stayed, they witnessed her trying to have Khatod arrested.

“At that moment, I felt the most unsafe I ever had on the Hill, when I realized she was using the Capitol Police to intimidate staff,” a former staffer told The Daily Beast.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Recently we named In-N-Out the best fast food restaurant in America, and there are several reasons for that (you can read more about why here). A testament to the quality and popularity of In-N-Out is that once a restaurant location has opened, it doesn’t close… with the exception of two restaurants — a restaurant that will be closing in a month in Oakland for safety concerns, and the original In-N-Out location.

Yes, it’s heartbreaking, but the OG In-N-Out doesn’t exist anymore, and if you stood in the place the restaurant once was, you’d likely have to dodge oncoming traffic because that original location was demolished in the late ‘50s to make way for California Interstate 10, one of the most congested freeways in all of Los Angeles (If you know, you know).

Luckily, a replica restaurant was erected near the original location of Francisquito and Garvey in Baldwin Park, California, now known as the In-N-Out Museum. The museum is a charming little replica of the original restaurant, and by restaurant, we mean 100 square-foot shack. It’s not an operable In-N-Out but a cute photo opportunity for your socials and a time capsule of its era.

If pretending you’re at In-N-Out makes you hungry, don’t worry, there is a full-size In-N-Out down the street which is also home to the In-N-Out University — a campus that In-N-Out sends its managers to for additional training. And while that sounds like the nerdiest sh*t on the planet, it must be working because In-N-Out consistently has some of the best service of any fast food restaurant on earth.

Maybe every fast food restaurant needs a university?

If you want to visit the In-N-Out Museum, head to 13752 Francisquito Ave, Baldwin Park, CA 91706, but please note that the operating hours are incredibly tight. Be sure to arrive Thursday-Sunday between 11 AM and 2 PM, unless you want to look at the In-N-Out Museum through a fence.

Check out some photos from the In-N-Out Museum below.

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There’s a sequence in Action Jackson – the 1988 movie giving Carl Weathers the opportunity to lead his own franchise in the making that never happened – in which the title character, Action Jackson, played by Weathers, is trying to chase down a cab that had just tried to kill Action Jackson and Patrice Dellaplane, played by Sharon Stone. At this point in the movie, Action Jackson had not shown any particular superhero skills or supernatural powers, but now here he is, running just as fast, or faster, than a speeding cab. Action Jackson finally jumps onto the cab’s roof and punches out the windshield, causing the would-be assassin to hit the brakes, sending Action Jackson flying off ahead onto the pavement. Now at this point, the assassin has a gun and can just shoot Action Jackson, but Action Jackson calls him a chicken, resulting in the cab careening at Action Jackson at full speed. Oh, but, Action Jackson jumps over the cab and does a flip in mid-air that so stuns the assassin that he crashes his cab into a building. Action Jackson will live to see another day.

Up until that scene, we heard a lot of stories about Jericho “Action” Jackson’s prominence for, well, “action.” But, you see, Action Jackson had been demoted and benched for tearing a criminal’s arm off. When Action Jackson’s captain (Bill Duke, being awesome) brings this up, Action Jackson replies, “He had a spare.” But this isn’t just any criminal, Action Jackson tore the arm off of local prominent Detroit auto manufacturer Peter Dellaplane’s (Craig T. Nelson) son. And for reasons that make absolutely no sense, Action Jackson is designated to be the police department’s representative at the hilariously titled “Businessman’s Man of the Year Award,” where Dellaplane is receiving the highest award. When the two have words, it’s obvious Action Jackson does not like Dellaplane because he’s a crook. Dellaplane does not like Action Jackson because Action Jackson tore his son’s arm off. This movie is hilarious.

Considering the outpouring of love toward Weathers after the announcement of his passing on Friday, it’s unusual his biggest movie as the outright star of the film doesn’t have much of a footprint today, if any. When I posted on Twitter/X on Friday that we were watching it, it seemed evident most people had never seen it. I finally posted a clip of the scene I described in the opening paragraph, which actually convinced a few people to give it a shot. And to be fair, I am also a person who kind of forgot about this movie. I hadn’t seen it since theaters and I remember it being a fraught experience. Action Jackson is now one of those hilariously over-the-top violent movies that feels endearing in a, “They sure don’t make ’em like that anymore,” way that wasn’t as endearing back then. It was one of those situations where my parents were on an outing with their couple friends, John and Carol, in a city called Osage Beach, Missouri, near Lake of the Ozark. (You know, the show made famous by the Netflix series, Ozark.) So they could sneak away and get cocktails (at least I assume), they left me and John and Carol’s two daughters at the local theater at the only movie that was playing was Action Jackson. The way I remember it, I was 13 and having a great time, but the younger daughter who was maybe eight years old certainly was not. “Hey, let’s just dump these three kids off at the movies at the extremely R-rated movie.” The ’80s, what a time! (On Friday night I texted the older daughter, who I still somehow know a little bit, and asked if she remembered this. Not surprisingly, she had no idea what I was talking about. Apparently, seeing Action Jackson was not as important to her as it was for me.

Anyway … the plot of Action Jackson centers on Peter Dellaplane having auto union reps murdered and Action Jackson tries to stop him with the help of Dellaplane’s mistress, Sydney Ash (Vanity). I’ll be honest, I was a little worried about rewatching this movie after so long. Weathers’ death is so heartbreaking (gosh he’s been so good in Star Wars) that I didn’t want to watch something that wasn’t a fun time. Of course, Action Jackson got terrible reviews at the time, but most of the movies like this got terrible reviews at the time.

Actually, the only downbeat to the whole thing was there are not, somehow, five Action Jackson movies. It made money! You can’t tell me they couldn’t have, at the very least, made a few direct-to-video sequels? Nope. This is it. I swear, if there were ten Action Jackson movies I’d watch them all this week. But there’s only one, and if you like cool, hilarious, violent action movies starring Carl Weathers, you should watch it. (Of course, being from 1988 there are always a couple moments that wouldn’t fly today.)

So there’s almost a sequel. There’s a 1990 movie called Dangerous Passion with Weathers and Billy Dee Williams that, in parts of Europe, was marketed as Action Jackson 2, even though it has nothing to do with Action Jackson. While reading about Dangerous Passion, it says Weathers plays “a security expert” named Kyle Western. Enough said, I immediately bought a used DVD off Amazon.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.