Category: News

In January, Celine Dion announced that she was canceling 19 North American dates of her Courage World Tour, citing “severe and persistent muscle spasms which are preventing her from performing.” Then, in April, her “health issues” caused her to reschedule European dates. The “My Heart Will Go On” legend is ending 2022 on a similarly sad note.

Dion, 54, shared an emotional Instagram video this morning (December 8), postponing 23 spring 2023 Courage World Tour dates to 2024 and canceling eight summer 2023 dates. The updated schedule can be seen here, but fans will be more concerned about the five-time Grammy winner’s overall well-being after watching her heartbreaking video. Dion frequently paused to hold back tears as she looked directly into the camera and specified her ongoing health battle.

“Hello, everyone. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to reach out to you. I miss you all so much, and I can’t wait to be on stage talking to you in person. As you know, I’ve always been an open book, and I wasn’t ready to say anything before, but I’m ready now,” Dion began. “I’ve been dealing with problems with my health for a long time, and it’s been really difficult for me to face these challenges and to talk about everything that I’ve been going through. Recently, I’ve been diagnosed with a very rare neurological disorder called stiff-person syndrome, which affects something like one in a million people.”

She continued, “While we’re still learning about this rare condition, we know now this is what’s been causing all of the spasms that I have been having. Unfortunately, these spasms affect every aspect of my daily life — sometimes causing difficulties when I walk and not allowing me to use my vocal cords to sing the way I’m used to. It hurts me to tell you today this means I won’t be ready to restart my tour in Europe in February.”

Dion added that she has “a great team of doctors” helping her “get better” and acknowledged “her precious children […] supporting me and giving me hope.” She has three sons, 21-year-old René-Charles and 11-year-old twins Eddy and Nelson, with René Angélil. Her late husband passed away from throat cancer in January 2016.

“I’m working hard with my sports medicine therapist every day to build back my strength and my ability to perform again, but I have to admit it’s been a struggle,” Dion concluded. “All I know is singing; it’s what I’ve done all my life, and it’s what I love to do the most. I miss you so much. I miss seeing all of you. Being on the stage, performing with you. I always give 100 percent when I do my shows, but my condition is not allowing me to do that right now. For me to reach you again, I have no choice but to concentrate on my health at this moment, and I have hope that I’m on the road to recovery. This is my focus, and I’m doing everything that I can to recuperate.”

According to Cleveland Clinic, stiff-person syndrome (SPS) is “a rare autoimmune movement disorder that affects the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord)” and eventually causes “the development of stiffness and rigidity in the legs and other muscles in the body.” Cleveland Clinic additionally relays that muscle spasms, like Dion noted experiencing, usually “occur randomly or can be triggered by noise, emotional distress and light physical touch.”

If James Cameron get his way (and he usually does), there will be four sequels to 2009’s Avatar, beginning with Avatar: The Way of Water, which finally comes out next week. All that could change, however, depending on “the market,” as he explained to Total Film.

“The market could be telling us we’re done in three months, or we might be semi-done, meaning: ‘OK, let’s complete the story within movie three, and not go on endlessly’, if it’s just not profitable,” he said, adding, “The question is: how many people give a sh*t now?” The people should give a sh*t: if Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: The Seed Bearer (as it’s rumored to be titled) are hits, Cameron will “go nuts” in Avatar 4.

“I can’t tell you the details, but all I can say is that when I turned in the script for 2, the studio gave me three pages of notes. And when I turned in the script for 3, they gave me a page of notes, so I was getting better,” he told Collider. “When I turned in the script for 4, the studio executive, creative executive over the films, wrote me an email that said, ‘Holy fuck.’ And I said, ‘Well, where are the notes?’ And she said, ‘Those are the notes.’ Because it kind of goes nuts in a good way, right?”

This, I imagine, is how Cameron pitched the Avatar sequels:

Avatar: The Way of Water hits theaters on December 16.

(Via Collider)

Taylor Swift’s Grammy-nominated All Too Well: The Short Film was a resounding success, thanks largely to Swift’s vision as director. Now, Swift has offered a behind-the-scenes look at how the Sadie Sink– and Dylan O’Brien-starring video was made.

It’s a pretty unfiltered video, too, a no-frills compilation of clips of Swift on set. Throughout the video, there are points where it’s clear Swift knows what she wants to see from her actors and knows just what to say to make that happen. In one moment, for example, Swift tells Sink, “We should always see a falseness to your smile. It should be contrasted by how real your smile in the last shot was.” Then, Swift watches Sink’s performance as it’s being filmed and she’s clearly impressed.

Beyond the set, Swift was involved in the editing process as well, as there are other clips that show her bouncing ideas off of editors. The video wraps with Swift explaining what’s behind Sink’s character in the video: “We’re watching a person lose an element of innocence and naivete. We’re watching her figure out how to turn it into something beautiful, and she’s… in the older her, there’s a stillness and a stocism and a seriousness, and a… stillness but a sadness. She’s fine, but she’s not who we met. So it’s just sort of one of those things of what’s lost and what’s found and, like, we’re watching a person come of age.”

Watch the behind-the-scenes video above and revisit All Too Well: The Short Film below.

Netflix has debuted the first half of their six-part Harry & Meghan docuseries, and you’d better believe that Piers Morgan fired those episodes up ASAP. The royal fanboy criticizes Meghan Markle at every opportunity, years after he famously stormed off he set of Good Morning Britain following Meghan’s allegations of racism from the Windsors. That anger-bear display followed his admission that Meghan “ghosted” him after a pub date, and he’s never been able (or willing) to let go.

Piers recently pitched a fit over “d*ckhead” Harry’s memoir, and he similarly trounced Meghan’s book. And Piers seems convinced that Harry and Meghan should refrain from ever discussing the circumstances that led them to leave the royal family, so the Fox Nation host has invested a lot of social media time into rage sessions, in which he argues that King Charles “should strip this petulant, selfish, greedy, hypocritical brat of all his remaining royal titles/status ASAP.” So, one should expect that Piers is not a fan of what he’s watching go down on Netflix.

The series’ trailer already set Piers off, and the same goes for the actual show. While he live-tweeted the first three episodes, Piers unoriginally compared the Sussexes to the Kardashians, and even though he didn’t stop watching, he still pointedly declared, “God, they’re so boring! #HarryandMeghanNetflix.”

He’s also very amused that Harry accepted money to help “create a story” while also desiring some semblance of privacy. It’s all black-and-white to Piers, apparently, and the same goes for his rationale that Britain can’t contain pockets of racism because TV stations continued the customary practice of airing high-profile royal weddings. Alright!

He continued his tirade, but he had to cut it short at a certain point. As revealed below, Piers had to break away from tweeting to pen his official “review of this nauseatingly self-serving narcissistic rehashed whine-a-thon.” Oh boy.

Don’t Worry Darling was one of the most drama-plagued movies of 2022, with rumors of on-set drama, alleged feuds, and awkward press conferences. Also, one of the film’s leads spit on his one of his co-stars, unless he didn’t. So it’s no wonder that Don’t Worry Darling won The Drama Movie of 2022 at the 48th People’s Choice Awards. (Other nominees in the the category included Death on the Nile, Halloween Ends, and Luckiest Girl Alive, proving, once and for all, that “the people” have weird taste.)

“We made this movie in 2020 when many people were not confident that audiences would ever return to theaters if they ever reopened,” director Olivia Wilde said in her acceptance speech. “And yet more than 190 brilliant crew members showed up every single day during a pandemic to make something that they hoped that you guys would show up for. And you did show up. And we’re so, so grateful.”

But it’s not Wilde’s speech that has people talking — it’s her “revenge dress.”

The lingerie look was plucked straight from the brand’s 2023 ready-to-wear collection and featured a plunging neckline with a tiered, voluminous skirt and all-over intricate lace detailing. She accessorized with a gold hardware-embellished belt, bold smudged eyeliner from Haus Labs and effortless loose waves. [Wilde] seemed to channel Princess Diana, who invented the revenge dress in 1994 after wearing a sexy LBD when her estranged husband King Charles III admitted to having an affair.

This, not the breakup with Harry Styles, is the ending to the Don’t Worry Darling-era… at least until the inevitable spit jokes at the 2023 Oscars.

(Via E! Online)

Mariah Carey hopped on The Late Show last night (December 7) to take Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Questionert,” a recurring segment in which the host asks his guests the same set of general questions. While introducing the segment, Colbert referred to Carey as the “Queen Of Christmas,” at which point Carey had to get something off her chest.

Cutting Colbert off, Carey said, “First of all, may I say: I never called myself the ‘Queen Of Christmas.’ Can we please be clear on that?” She continued, “Others have said, ‘The self-proclaimed ‘Queen Of Christmas.’ I’m like, ‘Really? I’m gonna do that?’ They can look up every interview I’ve ever done and, not to get super religious, but I was like, ‘I think if anybody would be the ‘Queen Of Christmas,’ that would be Mary.’ And then somebody else uses my quote against me!”

She then explained what has sparked her love for the holiday, saying, “Christmas is for all and I just happen to actually really love Christmas, because I grew up and I had kind of a tough childhood, and I always wanted Christmas to be perfect, and it never was. And so then when I was able to provide myself and my friends, and then later, now my kids who are 11 — hi, ‘Roc and ‘Roe — we have the most festive Christmas ever. […] It’s actually authentic and it came from a place of longing to have some normalcy and some, you know, peace and… just a lovely holiday, and somehow, someone would be throwing mustard at somebody else, or ketchup or whatever. So I went through that, and now, it’s just… I wait for it all year long. So it is actually a real thing.”

She also made sure to note that she and her “All I Want For Christmas Is You” collaborators only make “1/16th of a penny” from streams of the song.

Check out the interview above.

After nearly 300 days of being detained by the Russian government, Brittney Griner is on her way home. In a tweet posted on Thursday morning, President Joe Biden announced that a long-speculated prisoner swap between the United States and Russia has come to fruition and ended Griner’s time in a penal colony.

Griner was detained back in February after allegations that hashish oil was found among her belonging at an airport in Moscow. It did not take long for the United States government to label Griner as wrongfully detained by the Russian government, but despite that, Griner was found guilty on drug charges in August and sentenced to nine years in prison.

The potential of Griner coming home as part of a prisoner swap has been floated for months, with some reports indicating that the United States government wanted to release a Russian arms trafficker named Viktor Bout in exchange for Griner and a U.S. Marine named Paul Whelan, the latter of whom is serving a 16-year sentence in Russia for espionage. According to numerous reports, Whelan will not return to the United States as part of the swap, while Bout, who is known as the “Merchant of Death” and was arrested by the American government in 2008 in Thailand, will return to Russia.

For over two decades now, Deadmau5 (real name Joel Zimmerman) has been a leading figure in electronic music. The core of his visual identity is of course the signature helmet he wears, a simple sphere with a smiling face and two big circular ears on top. Now it turns out that after all these years of sporting the iconic headwear, Zimmerman’s spine has seen better days.

Yesterday (December 12), Zimmerman shared an x-ray of his (presumably) chest, which shows a spine that has a scoliosis-like sideways curve to it. He captioned the Instagram post, “‘Wear a mouse head’ they said. ‘It’ll be fun!’ They said.”

Indeed, Zimmerman has put a heavy load on his head, neck, and shoulders over the years. A 2011 Engadget feature notes that at the time, Zimmerman wore two different helmets during live performances: a neon-lined version and an LED version. The neon one weighed about 11 pounds while the LED model weighed “almost three times as much.” At the 2012 Grammys, though, Zimmerman debuted a carbon fiber head, which, given the material’s relatively light weight, was presumably not as heavy as previous iterations.

Meanwhile, in 2020, Deadmau5 came through with a memorable collaboration, linking up with The Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo) for the single “Pomegranate.”

Putting creative work out into the world to be evaluated and judged is nerve-wracking enough as it is. Having to market your work, especially if you’re not particularly extroverted or sales-minded, is even worse.

So when you’re a newly published author holding a book signing and only two of the dozens of people who RSVP’d show up, it’s disheartening if not devastating. No matter how much you tell yourself “people are just busy,” it feels like a rejection of you and your work.

Debut novelist Chelsea Banning recently experienced this scenario firsthand, and her sharing it led to an amazing deluge of support and solidarity—not only from other aspiring authors, but from some of the top names in the writing business.

Banning shared on Twitter that 37 people had responded as “going” to her book signing at Pretty Good Books in Ashtabula, Ohio, on December 3, but only two showed up.

“Kind of upset, honestly, and a little embarrassed,” she wrote.

u201cOnly 2 people came to my author signing yesterday, so I was pretty bummed about it. Especially as 37 people responded “going” to the event. Kind of upset, honestly, and a little embarrassed.u201d

— Chelsea Banning Author (@Chelsea Banning Author)
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A librarian by trade, Banning spent 15 years crafting the story for her fantasy trilogy about King Arthur’s children. The first book in the series, “Of Crowns and Legends,” was published in August and Banning has been trying to market it ever since.

“For a while I felt like I was throwing my book into the void and getting nothing,” she told NPR. “This felt like last straw.”

Then something amazing happened.

That tweet—which Banning had considered deleting shortly after she posted—started making the rounds. And much to her surprise and delight, Banning got responses from the likes of Margaret Atwood, Jodi Picoult, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King and other famous authors, who shared their own unattended book signing woes.

u201c@chelseabwrites Join the club. I did a signing to which Nobody came, except a guy who wanted to buy some Scotch tape and thought I was the help. :)u201d

— Chelsea Banning Author (@Chelsea Banning Author)
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u201c@chelseabwrites Terry Pratchett and I did a signing in Manhattan for Good Omens that nobody came to at all. So you are two up on us.u201d

— Chelsea Banning Author (@Chelsea Banning Author)
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u201c@chelseabwrites I have sat lonely at a signing table many times only to have someone approachu2026and ask me where the bathroom is.u201d

— Chelsea Banning Author (@Chelsea Banning Author)
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u201c@linwood_barclay @chelseabwrites At my first SALEM’S LOT signing, I had one customer. A fat kid who said, “Hey bud, do you know where there’s some Nazi books?”u201d

— Chelsea Banning Author (@Chelsea Banning Author)
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Even some famous nonauthors unexpectedly swooped in to lift Banning up.

u201c@chelseabwrites YO,,, Here to hype up ya next signing!!!u201d

— Chelsea Banning Author (@Chelsea Banning Author)
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u201cThat is the beginning .. then word gets out and they come !u201d

— Henry Winkler (@Henry Winkler)
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Story after story poured in from dozens upon dozens of household writing names who had experienced two or one or zero people showing up to a book signing event. Anyone who has ever felt like they had failed due to a lack of interest or audience would find the thread inspiring, or at the very least, comforting.

But what was just as heartwarming as the successful writers commiserating with Banning was the fact that she shared her story in the first place. It’s not easy to be vulnerable like that—most of us want to share our wins, not our perceived losses, with the world. But Banning demonstrated how opening up invites others to do the same, which lets everyone know they are not alone in their struggles.

What a beautiful thing all around. And to make it even better, Banning sold out of her signed copies that very same day. Here’s to the power of sharing and caring!

This article originally appeared on 01.22.19

The legality of abortion is one of the most polarized debates in America—but it doesn’t have to be.

People have big feelings about abortion, which is understandable. On one hand, you have people who feel that abortion is a fundamental women’s rights issue, that our bodily autonomy is not something you can legislate, and that those who oppose abortion rights are trying to control women through oppressive legislation. On the other, you have folks who believe that a fetus is a human individual first and foremost, that no one has the right to terminate a human life, and that those who support abortion rights are heartless murderers.

Then there are those of us in the messy middle. Those who believe that life begins at conception, that abortion isn’t something we’d choose—and we’d hope others wouldn’t choose—under most circumstances, yet who choose to vote to keep abortion legal.

It is entirely possible to be morally anti-abortion and politically pro-choice without feeling conflicted about it. Here’s why.

There’s far too much gray area to legislate.

No matter what you believe, when exactly life begins and when “a clump of cells” should be considered an individual, autonomous human being is a debatable question.

I personally believe life begins at conception, but that’s my religious belief about when the soul becomes associated with the body, not a scientific fact. As Arthur Caplan, award-winning professor of bioethics at New York University, told Slate, “Many scientists would say they don’t know when life begins. There are a series of landmark moments. The first is conception, the second is the development of the spine, the third the development of the brain, consciousness, and so on.”

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a human life unquestionably begins at conception. Even with that point of view, there are too many issues that make a black-and-white approach to abortion too problematic to ban it.

Abortion bans hurt some mothers who desperately want their babies to live, and I’m not okay with that.

One reason I don’t support banning abortion is because I’ve seen too many families deeply harmed by restrictive abortion laws.

I’ve heard too many stories of families who desperately wanted a baby, who ended up having to make the rock-and-a-hard-place choice to abort because the alternative would have been a short, pain-filled life for their child.

I’ve heard too many stories of mothers having to endure long, drawn out, potentially dangerous miscarriages and being forced to carry a dead baby inside of them because abortion restrictions gave them no other choice.

I’ve heard too many stories of abortion laws doing real harm to mothers and babies, and too many stories of families who were staunchly anti-abortion until they found themselves in circumstances they never could have imagined, to believe that abortion is always wrong and should be banned at any particular stage.

I am not willing to serve as judge and jury on a woman’s medical decisions, and I don’t think the government should either.

Most people’s anti-abortion views—mine included—are based on their religious beliefs, and I don’t believe that anyone’s religion should be the basis for the laws in our country. (For the record, any Christian who wants biblical teachings to influence U.S. law, yet cries “Shariah is coming!” when they see a Muslim legislator, is a hypocrite.)

I also don’t want politicians sticking their noses into my very personal medical choices. There are just too many circumstances (seriously, please read the stories linked in the previous section) that make abortion a choice I hope I’d never have to make, but wouldn’t want banned. I don’t understand why the same people who decry government overreach think the government should be involved in these extremely personal medical decisions.

And yes, ultimately, abortion is a personal medical decision. Even if I believe that a fetus is a human being at every stage, that human being’s creation is inextricably linked to and dependent upon its mother’s body. And while I don’t think that means women should abort inconvenient pregnancies, I also acknowledge that trying to force a woman to grow and deliver a baby that she may not have chosen to conceive isn’t something the government should be in the business of doing.

As a person of faith, my role is not to judge or vilify, but to love and support women who are facing difficult choices. The rest of it—the hard questions, the unclear rights and wrongs, the spiritual lives of those babies,—I comfortably leave in God’s hands.

Most importantly, if the goal is to prevent abortion, research shows that outlawing it isn’t the way to go.

The biggest reason I vote the way I do is because based on my research pro-choice platforms provide the best chance of reducing abortion rates.

Abortion rates fell by 24% in the past decade and are at their lowest levels in 40 years in America. Abortion has been legal during that time, so clearly, keeping abortion legal and available has not resulted in increased abortion rates. Switzerland has the lowest abortion rate on earth and their rate has been falling since 2002, when abortion became largely unrestricted.

Outlawing abortion doesn’t stop it, it just pushes it underground and makes it more dangerous. And if a woman dies in a botched abortion, so does her baby. Banning abortion is a recipe for more lives being lost, not fewer.

At this point, the only things consistently proven to reduce abortion rates are comprehensive sex education and easy, affordable access to birth control. If we want to reduce abortions, that’s where we should be putting our energy. The problem is, anti-abortion activists also tend to be the same people pushing for abstinence-only education and making birth control harder to obtain. But those goals can’t co-exist in the real world.

Our laws should be based on reality and on the best data we have available. Since comprehensive sex education and easy, affordable access to birth control—the most proven methods of reducing abortion rates—are the domain of the pro-choice crowd, that’s where I place my vote, and why I do so with a clear conscience.