Category: News

After starring in HBO’s The Idol, Troye Sivan has been back in the musical spotlight with his forthcoming album Something To Give Each Other. Recent singles “Rush” and “Got Me Started” are building up the hype, and he’s also stopped by the BBC Live Lounge for a new performance.

Along with performing a mellow rendition of “Rush,” Sivan covered Billie Eilish’s sprawling “What Was I Made For” from the Barbie movie soundtrack, which also had artists like Ice Spice, Dua Lipa, and more. Sivan’s vocals are beautiful and evocative as he sings the vulnerable ballad against soft, ethereal piano. He does the song justice; Billie would certainly definitely approve.

About “Rush,” Sivan previously said in a statement, “‘Rush’ is the feeling of kissing a sweaty stranger on a dancefloor, a 2-hour date that turned into a weekend, a crush, a winter, a summer. Party after party after party after after party. All of my experiences from a chapter where I feel confident, free and liberated. Independent, yet somehow the most connected to the music and community around me.”

Listen to his cover of “What Was I Made For” above.

Something To Give Each Other is out 10/13 via Capitol. Find more information here.

When the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the accused crypto fraud man, exploded late last year, there was one upside to the unpleasant affair: Michael Lewis, financial journalist extraordinaire, was already hard at work on a book about him. Surely the author of The Big Short could smell a big, painfully obvious rat who’d bilked investors of millions? Somehow no. His new book is out and the first reviews can’t believe that Lewis fell hook, line, and sinker for a possibly jailbound alleged grifter.

The book is called Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, and it arrives on shelves at an almost suspiciously convenient time. In his pan for The Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik says it “amounts to a defense brief for Bankman-Fried for his fraud trial in New York federal court, which opens Tuesday — coinciding, as it happens, with the publication date of Lewis’ book.”

Hiltzik does not hold back in condemning Lewis for not condemning his subject, even after his empire crumbled:

Journalism schools will be able to use “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” Michael Lewis’ new book about the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the fall of its boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, as a textbook on the imperative need to approach a subject with a healthy helping of skepticism.

To make a long story short, in this book Lewis doesn’t exercise any.

Hiltzik almost takes sympathy on the once-acclaimed author. “Lewis quite plainly started this book project thinking he could write the definitive foundation story of cryptocurrency as ‘the new new thing,’ to quote the title of one of his earlier books,” he writes. “When the thing collapsed, he was unable to shed his initial enchantment.”

But learning the thesis of one’s book is bunk mid-writing has happened before. Other writers have saved face by writing instead about how they came to see their subject in a new, damning light. Not Lewis, who Hiltzik says “treats Bankman-Fried as sort of an endearing scamp who got in over his head, essentially by an adorable habit of inattention.”

The New York Times wasn’t any kinder. “Lewis, who traveled back and forth from the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried was based, had, in the months leading up to the disaster, a front-row seat — from which he could apparently see nothing,” writes Jennifer Szalai.

Szalai contends that Lewis may have convinced himself that he wasn’t writing the definitive book on Bankman-Fried:

But this isn’t a book of investigative journalism; this is Lewis’s account of being a fly on the wall — a perspective that’s all well and good when your subject isn’t a billionaire savant who is charged with defrauding people who trusted him. Lewis seems so attached to the protagonist of his narrative that he takes an awful lot in stride.

Both Hiltzik and Szalai instead recommend another, more skeptical tome on the same subject: Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, by Zeke Faux. Unlike Lewis, Faux didn’t enter the crypto world thinking it was lefit.
“From the beginning,” Faux writes, “I thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined.”

The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times weren’t Lewis’ only critics.

There is one downside to Bankman-Fried facing his likely comeuppance: Had he not been busted he might have rid America of Donald Trump for good.

(Via LA Times and NYT)

TikTokker Mario Mirante is going viral for his video that brings up two significant issues: smartphone addiction and whether people without children have the right to criticize parents.

It all started when Mirante saw a young boy playing alone in the park.

“The kid is just playing quietly, not being annoying. I don’t hear a peep from him; he’s just doing his thing on the playground,” Mirante said in a video that has nearly 6000,000 views. “The mom the entire time is on her phone, staring right down at her screen. Doesn’t look up one time.”

The boy climbed up to the top of the slide and called down to his mother, who didn’t even look up from her phone. “I hear, ‘Hey mom, watch. Watch, Mom,’” Mirante recalled. “And at the top of her lungs, shrieking like a Velociraptor, this mother screams, ‘One second!”

The mother’s shriek was so intense that it shocked Mirante and the boy.

@mariomirante

Please watch the whole video before you comment. Thanks

“He wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Mirante said. “Mom never looks up from the screen as the kid goes down (the slide).” After witnessing the parent with her face in her phone, ignoring her child, Mirante decided to call out parents who make their children feel as if they are less important than their parents’ phones.

“Are you guys that attached to your phones?” Mirantes demanded. “All that I was simply trying to say was that I see that happen all too often. And then I see parents complaining about how exhausting it is and how society and social media is ruining their children. Meanwhile, they can’t look up from their phones. Can’t give ‘em the time of day.”

Many people thought Mirante didn’t have the right to criticize the mother because he doesn’t have children. “I thought the same way as you. And then I became a parent. Until you become a parent, you do not understand the struggle,” Sophia wrote.

While others thought that his criticisms of the mother were warranted.

“I am a single mom, I 100% agree with you. Kids remember who is actually PRESENT with them, not glued to their phone, the TV etc etc,” i.am.kristen wrote. “Sometimes it takes two seconds to make a child feel seen and heard, I could’ve used that in my childhood. love this,” Dez addded.

Mirante pushed back against those who said he doesn’t have the right to judge by noting that he’s been a child. “I am an adult that went through a childhood,” he said. “If you want to justify screaming at your kid for no reason when they’re not doing anything wrong and how your phone is more important than the attention from your child, go right ahead. I’m all ears.”

There’s no hard-set rule on whether people without children have the right to criticize parents, but Mirante was right to point out a big problem in today’s world: parents who spend too much time on their smartphones.

​Even if a parent isn’t a full-blown social media addict, spending too much time on our phones can hurt a child’s development. “Often, the effect of looking down at a screen can eliminate the opportunity and space kids need to say what’s on their mind,” warns Jeanne Williams, a child psychologist and play therapist, told Today’s Parent. “When a kid is distressed, and you completely ignore them, their distress is going to grow. They won’t build neural pathways that teach them how to soothe themselves.”

We’ll never know the entire situation that happened that day at the park and whether the mother normally pays attention to her son. But Mirante’s video brings up a much-needed conversation about the amount of time we spend staring at our phones when we could be engaging with those we love.

If you’re looking for some aging inspiration, look no further, because Dorothy Hoffner is about to blow your mind.

At 104, Hoffner just became the oldest person to parachute out of an airplane in a tandem skydive. That’s right, skydive. At 104 years old—or to be exact, 104 years and 289 days old—beating the previous world record set by a 103-year-old in Sweden in May of 2022.

But it’s actually even more impressive than that. It’s not like Hoffner is someone who’s been skydiving since she was young and just happened to keep on doing it as she got older. She actually didn’t go on her first skydiving adventure until her 100th birthday.

On Oct 1, 2023, she joined the team at Skydive Chicago in Ottawa, Illinois, for the world-breaking tandem skydive. Though she uses a walker to get around, she manages the physical toll of plummeting through the air at 10,000+ feet before parachuting to a skidding stop strapped to a certified U.S. Parachute Association (USPA) tandem instructor with impressive ease.

“Let’s go, let’s go, Geronimo!” Hoffner said after she boarded the plane, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Watch her do what many of us would be too terrified to attempt:

See on Instagram

The way she rolls right out of that plane cool as a cucumber! Hoffner told the Tribune that on her first skydive, at age 100, she had to be pushed out of the plane. But this time, knowing what she was in for, she took charge with calm confidence.

“Skydiving is a wonderful experience, and it’s nothing to be afraid of,” Hoffner shares. “Just do it!”

That’s some seriously sage advice from someone who knows firsthand that age really is just a number. Learn more about skydiving with Skydive Chicago here.

There remains some mystery around what life was like in the 1800s, especially for teens. Most people alive today were not around in the Victorian era when the technologies now deemed old-fashioned were a novelty. In this rediscovered 1970s clip from the BBC, two elderly women reminisce about what it was like being teenagers during a time when the horse and buggy was still the fastest way to get around.

While cars were just around the corner from being the common mode of transportation toward the end of the 19th century, it’s pretty wild to imagine what these women experienced. Frances “Effy” Jones explained how, at age 17, she was encouraged by her brother to check out this new machine in a storefront window. Turns out that machine was a typewriter and, after being trained on how to use it, Jones would sit in the store window typing while people outside gathered to watch. Before long, classes began popping up for women to learn how to use a typewriter, starting a new movement for women of that era.

The second woman, Berta Ruck, told the BBC that she would get into a bit of trouble at boarding school for drawing instead of completing school work. This talent took Ruck to art school in London where she rode buses around town, attempting to avoid mud getting on her long skirt. But the woman explained that it never worked and she would spend hours brushing the mud from her skirt before wearing it out again. I’m sure you’re thinking, buses? They weren’t the buses we would see nowadays. These were double-decker horse-pulled carriages.

I know, that’s hard to imagine. That’s why you should check out the video below:

This article originally appeared on 08.29.22

There are very few things that would make people nostalgic for the 1950s. Sure, they had cool cars and pearl necklaces were a staple, but that time frame had its fair share of problems, even if “Grease” made it look dreamy. Whether you believe your life would’ve been way more interesting if you were Danny Zuko or not, most would agree their technology was…lacking.

All eras are “advanced” for their time, but imagine being dropped off in the 50s as someone from the year 2023. A recent post by Historic Vids on Twitter of a 1956 commercial advertising a refrigerator, however, has some people thinking that when it came to fridges, maybe they were living in the year 2056. I don’t typically swoon over appliances, yet this one has me wondering where I can purchase a refrigerator like this.

Of course, there’s no fancy touch screen that tells you the weather and asks how you’d like your ice cubed. It’s got more important features that are actually practical.

Like a fruit drawer that not only pulls down so you can quickly check your inventory, but also pulls completely out.

“A big picture window hydrator for fruits and vegetables,” the actress says while demonstrating. “It tilts down to show you your supply at a glance, and it also lifts out, so you can take it over to the sink when there’s a fresh supply to be washed and put away.”

Yeah, that could be helpful and reduce the clutter in your fridge from all those clear storage bins companies designed to essentially do the same thing but maybe in a more cumbersome way. But the cool factor of the vintage refrigerator didn’t stop there. You know how sometimes it’s like playing Jenga removing leftovers? Well, this fridge has shelves that slide out nearly completely. Oh, the amount of reduced stress that would give folks sneaking a late snack after a holiday meal.

Watch the fascinating video below:

u201cThis refrigerator from 1956 has more features than modern day fridgesu201d

— Historic Vids (@Historic Vids)
1682958373

​One commenter said, “Can we vote to bring this back?” and I have to agree. Take my money.

For a little extra fun, check out the full commercial below and marvel not only at the refrigerator but at how our attention spans for advertisements have diminished over the decades.

This story originally appeared on 5.3.23

There’s an emerging trend among American Gen Zers and Millennials where they are moving away from responding with “You’re welcome” after receiving thanks. While older generations might interpret this shift as a sign of a decay in manners, many young people view responses like “OK” or “Mm-hmm” as more courteous than the traditional “You’re welcome.”

The change may signal that the younger generations are actually kinder than the older ones. Simply put, the difference suggests that older people think help is a gift you give, while younger people think help is an expectation required of them.

This change in manners has caused a debate in the States, and the cultural shift has also led to some discussions abroad. Recently, there has been a considerable debate on TikTok, where non-Americans, especially those in Europe, see the change as rude.

​Earlier this year, Australian YouTuber and content creator Georgia McCudden shared a clip (which has since been removed) depicting an experience with a server during her visit to the U.S.

In the video, McCudden recounts that she thanked a restaurant employee who handed her ketchup, to which the server replied, “Mmhmm.” She was baffled by the response, saying, “I was like, ‘I beg your f**king pardon,’” she said in the clip. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that was a big ask.”

An American responded to McCudden’s original post, reassuring her that the server wasn’t being rude at all. The exchange was just a cultural misunderstanding.

@clockforaheart

#stitch with @Georgia also this is a good verison of nonamericans teasing americans besides the usual stuff they say

A TikTokker named Arjuna hopped into the discussion with a post that described the “You’re welcome” phenomenon in America, and he must have done an excellent job because it’s received nearly a million views.

He captioned the clip: “I promise you Americans are actually very polite!!!”

“Someone went viral earlier this week for saying that Americans don’t say ‘you’re welcome’ in customer service situations,” Arjuna said. “I’m not here to sh*t on them, but I do want to explain for non-Americans why we don’t really say ‘you’re welcome’ and why ‘you’re welcome’ feels a little outdated to a lot of Americans.”

@superdesidrinks

i promise you americans are actually very polite !!! #usa #american #thankyou #yourewelcome #english

Then, he laid out the “American” logic for the change.

“Let’s say I’m a cashier at a fast-food restaurant, and they hand someone their food, and they say ‘thank you,’ to a lot of Americans, for us to say ‘you’re welcome’ has the mindset of like ‘Oh, yeah, we just did something big for you.’ Like, it has this implication of ‘I know, you should be thanking me,’” Arjuna said.

He adds that saying “you’re welcome” after completing a small task that’s part of their job “seems way too intense for that.” That’s why he says younger Americans prefer to respond with an “uh-huh,” ‘no problem,” or “don’t worry about it.”

Arjuna did add one caveat where “you’re welcome” would be an appropriate response to a “thank you.”

“But if I donated a kidney to someone, and then they came up to me and were like ‘thank you’ then I’d be like ‘yeah, you’re welcome,'” he said.

Last week the WGA strike officially came to an end. Given the different issues that have popped up around musicians — from Bandcamp being bought by Songtradr to a large discussion of the harm of merch cuts — music fans are wondering if there are unions for songwriters.

There is a union for musicians, called the United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) is the union for musicians. However, the inclusion of songwriters is tricky, and even in some cases illegal. “It’s something we need to work toward,” said musician Joey La Neve DeFrancesco. According to LA Times, a National Labor Relations Board-recognized union would need to exist to bargain for songwriters, otherwise they are treated as independent contractors licensing their work. DeFrancesco continued, “But unlike the WGA, musicians for a variety of reasons are simply not in the same level of organization right now. That’s the fundamental barrier.”

In response to the merch cut discussion, Live Nation ended fees for selling merchandise at their club-sized venues, as well as “investing in developing artists by providing $1,500 in gas and travel cash per show to all headliners and support acts, on top of nightly performance compensation.” As the company explained in a statement, “By helping with these core expenses, we aim to make it easier for artists on the road so they can keep performing to their fans in more cities across the country.”

Bullying is an issue that we all know well. We talk about the importance of instilling kindness in children and teaching them to speak up when they see someone being bullied. It’s proven time and time again that bullying can be damaging – in some cases, deadly. This prompts all sorts of PSAs and anti-bullying campaigns but there’s one type of bullying these efforts often miss.

Monica Lewinsky is no stranger to bullying but through all of her battles and multi-hyphenate titles she’s achieved, there’s still one bully she fights daily – herself. Well, Lewinsky didn’t let her internal battle slow her down. While talking to her about her new project, a PSA on self bullying, she revealed where the idea came from.

“About ten years ago had to write down the negative things we said to ourselves and had to read them to other people,” she explains before pondering why we’re this cruel to ourselves if we wouldn’t speak this way to others.

Self bullying isn’t new and Lewinsky is sure to reiterate that she did not coin the term. This negative self talk is just something that seems to happen as we age, especially with the rise of social media where it’s easy to compare your lived reality with the curated snapshots others share. Lewinsky contributes social media to more teens speaking to themselves negatively as well as more struggles with mental health.

“95% of teens use social media and more than a third of them report using social media constantly,” she says quoting a recent Surgeon General’s Advisory.

The producer also explains that there’s a high correlation with poor self image, body issues and online harassment and the use of social media. Being armed with this knowledge, it made it important for Lewinsky to include a couple of young teen sisters in the PSA.

In the PSA, the exercise Lewinsky had to do a decade ago is used to make a statement on a larger scale. Having each person read the negative thoughts they have about themselves to someone else really brought home how harmful self bullying can be. But Lewinsky revealed an even deeper connection to bullying, self bullying and this mental health PSA.

“It’s an interesting intersection, my undergraduate degree, my major was in psychology so then to have the experiences I have. Literally the life altering year of 98 gave me more of an understanding, having the world reflect back to me these negative things I thought about myself,” the social activist divulges.

Lewinsky expresses excitement for her dream of helping to pioneer “emotional trauma urgent care centers.” These centers would be a place where people who may have just experienced an upsetting event can walk into one for immediate help.

“We give such immediate attention to physical injuries, why not emotional,” Lewinsky asks.

Emotional injuries are sometimes much harder to recover from and understandably can sometimes result in self bullying. But when it comes to self bullying, Lewinsky believes people are less easily able to identify it, which is why she felt making this PSA was important.

“It’s not a concept that’s really out there but when we reframe an issue or reframe a behavior it helps,” she tells Upworthy.

For those who are struggling with negative self talk, Lewinsky has a message for you.

“Be gentle with yourself, even around the process of starting to realize that negative self talk is bullying. I’ve been working on it for decades.”

On Sunday, then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy seemed awfully confident. He’d just teamed up with House Democrats to avert a disastrous shutdown of the federal government. That had enraged fellow House Republicans, most notably Matt Gaetz, who vowed to bring a vote to remove him from the gig he just barely nabbed in early January. In response McCarthy tweeted this:

Jump less than 48 hours and McCarthy was successfully ousted from his Speaker job. What happens next is up in the air, but the immediate reaction was one of merriment. The jokes flew all over social media. The Daily Show got in one of the best ones. So did the star of the film McCarthy seemed to be referencing when he told Gaetz and crew to, as he put it, “Bring it on.”

That film was, of course, Bring It On, the dueling cheerleader squad comedy from the year 2000, that starred Kirsten Dunst and Gabrielle Union. The latter didn’t miss McCarthy’s apparent reference. And after McCarthy lost his gig, she offered him some side-eye.

McCarthy getting dissed by one of the stars of a movie he referenced isn’t as bad as what happened to fellow Republican Ted Cruz. McCarthy was simply spouting a phrase that inspired the title of a popular franchise. Cruz actually got into a fight with Cary Elwes, the star of his favorite movie, The Princess Bride. That must suck knowing that one of the stars of your favorite movie hates your guts. But most of us will likely never know that indignity.

(Via Mediaite)