Category: News

A primary use of Britney Spears’ Instagram account has become sharing nude photos of herself, which Kevin Federline, Spears’ ex-husband and former backup dancer, brought up in a recent interview. He noted Spears’ sons, Jayden and Preston, have chosen to distance themselves from her and said of the risqué pics, “I try to explain to them, ‘Look, maybe that’s just another way she tries to express herself.’ But that doesn’t take away from the fact of what it does to them. It’s tough. I can’t imagine how it feels to be a teenager having to go to high school.”

Both Spears and husband Sam Asghari offered responses to this and now Asghari has shared another comment.

In an Instagram Story posted Monday (August 8) that is no longer viewable, Asghari defended Spears’ skin-bearing posts, writing, “Even if there was truth to her kids being ashamed of their mothers choices and positive body image they wouldn’t be the 1st teenagers [embarrassed] of their parents. Most kids are embarrassed of their parents at one point. The mere presence of a parent can humiliate a teenager. It’s so common it has been a storyline used over and over on TV and in Films for decades. Eventually if not already they will realize their mothers choices are harmless and an expression of newly found freedom. There is nothing to be [embarrassed] about just lots of things to be proud of.”

In Asghari’s initial post, he wrote, “To clarify my wife has never posted a nude selfie except of her butt [which] is quite modest these days. All other posts were implied nudity [which] can be seen in any ad for lotion or soap. There is no validity to his statement regarding the kids distancing themselves and it is irresponsible to make that statement publicly. The boys are very smart and will be 18 soon to make their own decisions and may eventually realize the ‘tough’ part was having a father who hasn’t worked much in over 15 years as a role model.”

Memes, trends, and challenges are in the making when it comes to Beyoncé’s Renaissance. First “Plastic Off The Sofa” inspired a vocal challenge for ambitious TikTok users. Now the idiosyncratic “Alien Superstar” is the center of attention.

The song is a particularly clubby anthem, bursting with sensual lyrics, chaotic rhythms, and an otherwordly texture. Check out some of the memes and videos below.

Keke Palmer has even joined in to praise the track. “If you woke up this morning, and you wasn’t sure what was going on with you, wasn’t sure if you felt good, you looked in the mirror and said, ‘Ugh,’ you know, you just didn’t feel like you were it, then turn up your radio and understand this,” she said with the song playing in the background, Bey’s vocals beginning just as Palmer finished speaking.

Before sharing Renaissance, Bey shared a statement about her intentions with the album. “Creating this album allowed me a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world,” she wrote. “It allowed me to feel free and adventurous in a time when little else was moving.” It’s proving to serve as an escape and a source of freedom for her fans as well.

There are wild trials and then there’s the with Alex Jones. The InfoWars honcho was successfully sued by parents of one of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, to whom he now owes nearly $50 million in damages. It’s easy to single out the most shocking part: when a lawyer representing said parents informed Jones that his attorneys had accidentally sent him the entire contents of his phone. That intel is now in the hands of the Jan. 6 committee, but it’s not just Jones and Donald Trump who have to worry.

A source told The Daily Beast that Tucker Carlson — a longtime Jones texting buddy — is “s*itting his pants” over the possibility that his correspondences with the noted conspiracy theorist could wind up in the public eye. It’s not yet clear what they text about, but the source claims that they’re “highly embarrassing.”

Though Jones is one of the nation’s most notorious conspiracy theorists, Carlson isn’t far behind him. He regularly floats dodgy claims on his highly-rated Fox News program, even ones shared by white supremacists. Carlson has made several InfoWars appearances and has gushed about Jones on multiple occasions. He’s said Jones is “more talented than I am,” and he’s written a blurb for one of his books, in which he said Jones might be “onto something,” and that people should “[r]ead this book and decide for yourself who’s crazy.”

Then again, surely Jones and Carlson’s texts aren’t as out-there as the ones between Jones and longtime Republican fixer Roger Stone, which have been “intimate messages.” Stone has gone so far as to advise Jones to sue his lawyer for the blunder.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Taylor Swift‘s copyright infringement lawsuit over her 2014 hit “Shake It Off” has been going on since 2017. It was dismissed in 2018, when that decision was overturned. Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler continue to demand a percentage of profits from the song because of the similarities to their song “Playas Gon’ Play,” which they wrote for 3LW, the early ’00s girl group composed of Naturi Naughton and Cheetah Girls stars Adrienne Bailon and Kiely Williams.

Billboard has reported that the “All Too Well” singer has provided a lengthy response in a motion filed today. “The lyrics to ‘Shake It Off’ were written entirely by me,” she claimed. She continued:

In writing the lyrics, I drew partly on experiences in my life and, in particular, unrelenting public scrutiny of my personal life, “clickbait” reporting, public manipulation, and other forms of negative personal criticism which I learned I just needed to shake off and focus on my music.

I recall hearing phrases about players play and haters hate stated together by other children while attending school in Wyomissing Hills, and in high school in Hendersonville. These phrases were akin to other commonly used sayings like “don’t hate the playa, hate the game,” “take a chill pill,” and “say it, don’t spray it.”

Most people don’t look at their work calendar on any given day and say, “Yay! I have a meeting!” Most of us just understand and accept that meetings are a part of work life in most industries.

Some people, however, are far more negatively impacted by scheduled meetings than others. For people involved in creating or producing, meetings are actively disruptive to work in a way that isn’t often the case for managers.

A viral post with an explanation from Paul Graham breaks down why.

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Graham is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. In 2009, he described on his website the differences between the way managers and makers utilize work time and how meetings affect their workflow. It’s a brilliant observation that rings true for people in various fields, and understanding this difference can help bridge the gap that often exists between those who work in creation or production and those who manage them.

Graham’s explanation was shared by Reese Jones on Facebook with a graphic that shows the difference in how time is seen between managers (people who manage others—the bosses) and makers (writers, artists, programmers—the creators). The manager’s time during the day is split into small blocks, whereas the maker’s is split into two large chunks.

“One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people,” Graham wrote. “Meetings cost them more.”

Graham explained that managers and makers work on two different types of schedule. The manager’s schedule looks more like an appointment book, with the day broken into one-hour intervals.

“You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default, you change what you’re doing every hour,” he explained. “When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.”

Generally, the folks in power are on this kind of schedule. But those who make things don’t think in hours. Writers, artists, programmers and others who create for a living work in half-day units at least.

“You can’t write or program well in units of an hour,” wrote Graham. “That’s barely enough time to get started.”

Then he got to the heart of the problem with managers making meetings for makers:

“When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

“For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.”

Bingo. As a “maker” myself, I can attest to this description being spot on for me personally. If I have to attend a meeting, it’s best for it to be right at the beginning or end of those two blocks of time. Tossing one into the middle of the morning or middle of the afternoon is far more disruptive than someone who isn’t a maker might understand.

Many people in the comments complained about meetings being a waste of time, but I don’t think that’s the case all or even most of the time. I see the value in many kinds of meetings and as someone who largely works alone, I actually do sometimes look at the calendar and say “Yay! A meeting!” The issue isn’t so much meetings themselves as their timing.

Graham explained that a meeting can sometimes blow half a day for a maker, not that the meeting itself takes half a day but purely due to the interruption of the workflow.

​”Each type of schedule works fine by itself,” he wrote. “Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager’s schedule, they’re in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.”

Graham’s post can be read in its entirety here. It’s worth perusing whether you’re a manager or a maker. The more we understand the different ways different people operate, the more we can learn to respect and honor one another’s needs, which ultimately makes us all more successful.

Two-and-a-half years after the COVID-19 pandemic came to America, things are slowly returning to normal. Although people are still catching the virus, the seven-day average of deaths is around 15% of where we were at the pandemic’s peak. Lockdowns and mask mandates are over, kids are all back at school and there’s a definite feeling that the worst is behind us.

The last 30 months have been a time of anxiety, loneliness, fear, sickness, death, misinformation, and political and economic upheaval. Over that time, most of us were forced to change how we worked, socialized and learned. Even as the pandemic winds down, we live in a world that will never return to what it was like before the virus.

Now’s the time to try to make sense of what we’ve all been through so that if there’s a next time, we know how to do things better.

A Reddit user by the name Affectionate-Ad1060 asked the online forum, “What is the most important lesson learnt from Covid-19?” and they received more than 19,000 responses.

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Some thought that the pandemic taught them the importance of being around people. Others realized that maintaining one’s mental health isn’t just about resilience.

A lot of people were discouraged by how incredibly selfish some acted during the pandemic. Many were surprised by the number of people who put their political beliefs ahead of the health of themselves and others.

A lot of our norms and assumptions about society have been significantly challenged over the past two and a half years. The only way that we can create a feeling of hope that things will be better the next time is to examine the lessons learned from COVID-19 so we can be better.

Here are 21 of the most important lessons that people learned from COVID-19.

1. 

“No matter how strong and resilient you think you are, your mental health can be penetrated without you realizing it.” — Lentewiet

2. 

“You should take the time to spend with those you love.” — idontworktomorrow

3. 

“That it wouldn’t take much for civilized people to turn on each other.” — hindmaja

Strength-in-the-Loins added:

“A wise man once said something like ‘Humanity is perpetually 9 meals away from utter barbarism.”

JimmyHammer12 really put the nail on the head with their response:

“It could also be said based on the way people went FOMO for all that toilet paper that ‘Humanity is perpetually 9 rolls away from utter barbarism.'”

4.

“People’s mental health ain’t no joke… people need people.” — vg4030

5. 

“Pandemic was just the proverbial group project in school all over again. A couple of intelligent and hard-working people trying to keep everything from falling apart while the rest sit on their ass or choose to straight up sabotage everything. Yet somehow everyone gets the exact same grade.” — NaughtyProwler

6. 

“Bold of you to assume we’ve learned anything.” — Airsoft07

7. 

“Healthcare needs a overhaul.” — Toxic_Politician

8. 

“The extent to which politicians will sell out public health for their political advantage is much higher than I thought. Usually, life or death situations are good for all politicians, just be a voice of stability and hope and you’re good. We all pull together and get through it. This time, dividing us intentionally to cause chaos? I still can’t believe real people did that.” — Griswald

9. 

“Most schools weren’t as ready to switch to digital methods as they bragged about.” — SenpaisReisShop

10. 

“Most grown adults are nasty and have to be reminded to wash their hands.” — shantyirish13

11. 

“The ‘supply chain’ is far leaner and vulnerable to the vagaries of pandemic conditions than most had thought.” — Back2Bach

12. 

“You can have all the free time in the world and still manage to do nothing with it.” — hogaway

13. 

“We need to teach statistics and critical thinking better.” — hardsoft

14. 

“I work in childcare. We learned that children really need socialization. You would think with time off parents would work on things. Kids came back to daycare, not potty trained, still using a pacifier, speech behind, and refusing to share. It’s better now but it was really interesting seeing a child pre-Covid who you potty trained…. Come back months later acting pretty helpless. don’t know if it’s parents, the lack of social pressure, or just some other thing. But it was an interesting experience.” — Paceim

15. 

“People are willing to die over politics.” — morinthos

16.

“That 50% of jobs can be done from home while the other 50% deserve more than they’re being paid.” — Kayin_Angel

17. 

“That being tied to the office, working insane hours, super long commutes are not necessary.” — squashedfrog

18. 

“People make irrational decisions when afraid.” — AaaON_

19. 

“During covid, I was laid off for months and spent that whole time keeping up to date on everything going on in the world. I mean everything I possibly could, every single day. I reached the point of obsession and the massive amount of negative crushed me. There was so much bad going on so much suffering that eventually, one day I just set it all down and said I’ll check in in a month. Best decision I made that year, the only thing that kept my sanity. Just taking time away and not bathing in it every day.” — Primerallen

20. 

“People will listen to politicians over their doctors.” — GhostalMedia

21. 

“A decent amount of people I work with surprised me a lot during the pandemic. People I used to have some respect for revealed themselves as complete idiots. It was really sobering.” — RiW-Kirby

Megan Thee Stallion has been teasing her new album for a long time now, with songs like “Plan B” and “Pressurelicious” helping build up anticipation to unimaginable heights. Today, she raised it even higher by sharing a freestyle she did on Power 106 Los Angeles on Twitter.

“GRIND MODE IT’S ALBUM TIME HOTTIES GO CHECK OUT MY LA LEAKERS FREESTYLE,” she wrote while sharing the video, which quickly went viral. At a little over a minute and a half, the song is full of great quips that have fans flipping out in the replies. It’s performed to the instrumental from Warren G’s “Regulate” feat. Nate Dogg, which samples Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’.” Megan’s rap touches on a lot of topics, including her ongoing feud with her record label 1501 Certified Entertainment: “How you want to be me, at the same time want to shake me / I be makin’ money on the motherf*kin’ daily / Got my label mad but them n****s gotta pay me.”

In an Instagram story late last month, the rapper announced that her next LP is done. “So happy abt my album,” she wrote. “It’s finished. It’s for the hotties. It’s honest. It’s me. It’s real.”

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

While the WNBA has seen tremendous growth in recent years, the league still lags behind in a number of areas compared to the major men’s sports leagues, particularly when it comes to the amenities afforded to players. While the last collective bargaining agreement upped player pay, the league still restricts travel options for teams, making players fly commercial from game to game and refusing to allow owners to charter flights for the team even if they wanted to pay for it.

This has been an issue for a number of teams in the past, but on Sunday night, the L.A. Sparks got stranded in Washington D.C. following their win over the Mystics and, because there weren’t enough hotel rooms for all of them, some of them, including WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike, spent the night in the airport before their rebooked 9 a.m. flight home.

As Ogwumike notes, while she’s seen some travel disasters in her time as a WNBA player, having to spend a night in the airport is a new one. On Monday, she penned a statement that the WNBPA sent out officially calling on the league to alter their rules amid the current climate of air travel in the U.S. — which anyone who has flown recently knows is a bit of a disaster with delays and cancellations — and allow teams to charter flights, starting with the playoffs.

If it seems like a simple solution, that’s because it is, and the league’s stance that it’s a “competitive advantage” for a team to fly a charter when not every ownership group can afford it (or, more accurately, isn’t willing to pay for it), is an outdated one. As Ogwumike notes, there are owners wanting to do this and more money and interest in the league than ever before, so it wouldn’t be all that difficult to find 12 ownership groups willing to pay for charters.

The charter flight issue is one that isn’t just a fight between players and the league, but one happening within the Board of Governors, as Joe Tsai, who owns the New York Liberty (and the Brooklyn Nets), was fined $500,000 for secretly chartering flights for the team last season after someone from another team complained to the league about it. There is a clear divide between new owners like Tsai, Mark Davis in Vegas, and Marc Lore in Minnesota, who come from those major men’s sports and want to spend the money to treat the players like the elite athletes they are, and longtime owners who don’t necessarily have that level of expendable funds. That issue might get resolved whenever expansion comes, as two new owners will almost assuredly fall into the new money camp willing to spend, but in the immediate we still have situations like this that only serve to make the league look awful.

It seems unlikely that the league agrees to this change before the playoffs, but hopefully they’ll reconsider their stance this offseason because it’s past time for teams to at least have the opportunity to fly charter and avoid these kinds of travel disasters and be expected to play their best afterwards.

On Monday, FBI agents used a search warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago, the resort where former president Donald Trump now resides. Sources told The New York Times the investigation pertained to the 15 boxes of classified material he took with him after his lone term came to an end. Trump himself whined about it on his rinky dink Twitter clone, where he also accused Hillary Clinton of stealing “antique furniture” from the White House. Fox News also covered it, and if you ever wondered what having a mental break was like, watch this.

Host Jesse Watters and former Breitbart reporter Dana Loesch were there to weigh in on the breaking news. Like most, at the time they weren’t sure why the feds had knocked on Trump’s door. But they had some theories. Lots and lots of theories. Any theory they could think of made it to air in a series of stream-of-consciousnesss splutterings.

“We were told that the FBI wasn’t going to get involved in any politically-charged search warrants, investigations, announcements, indictments before an elections. We were told that!” Watters said, visibly and audibly grasping at straws. He then brought up whatever he popped into his head. He turned the page back to the fall of 2020, when the feds, he said, refused to look into Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. “They’re going to send agents into Mar-a-Lago before the midterm election? This was not what we were told the FBI was going to do.”

Watters then moved onto Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul. Then he moved onto her son. He talked about Asia. Then he moved back to Hunter. Then “suspicious wire transfers.” Watters seemed to be arguing that the FBI should be investigating…whatever all that was. “Did they get the address wrong?” he asked.

Loesch herself weighed in, claiming there was “more evidence to implicate, I think, the Bidens than ever has been.” She added “green energy stuff” to the quickly towering pile, as well as China and cobalt mines and — why not! — the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We should be talking about these issues instead of trying to settle the score of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats,” referring to someone who hasn’t had a job in the White House since 2013.

In the span of less than two-and-a-half minutes, Watters and Loesch both managed to throw out so many ideas it was like watching James Austin Johnson’s Trump impersonations, where his broken brain moves from one unrelated subject to another with dizzying speed. It was like watching a pitch meeting for Fox News conspiracy theories. Or it was a sign that they knew an era in which they both played a major part might finally be coming to an end.

For more than 40 years, ESPN and the Big Ten have been synonymous when it comes to the broadcasting of college football and college basketball. Though FOX has emerged as a prominent partner for the Big Ten, both in showcasing top-tier games and actually owning a majority stake in the Big Ten Network, ESPN is often associated with the conference due to a longstanding relationship that provides the network with a great deal of programming. However, a report from John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal indicates that could be changing in the near future.

Ourand notes that, while “there remains the possibility ESPN could wind up with a package,” it would take a “last-minute change of direction” for the worldwide leader to keep a piece of the Big Ten’s media rights on its next deal. FOX already secured the most prominent part of the Big Ten’s next package, but Ourand reports that CBS and NBC are now “clear front runners” to split the rest of the conference’s offerings.

In addition to FOX’s branding of “Big Noon Saturday” built heavily around the Big Ten in the early window, their agreement also includes Big Ten Network and FS1 rights for both football and basketball. In the arrangement that could be coming together in the near future, CBS would replace its vacated SEC rights in the 3:30 pm ET time slot (after ESPN swiped those away), with NBC reportedly projected to carry Big Ten games in prime time.

The loss of the Big Ten would be quite jarring for ESPN, though Ourand’s piece does hint at a potential run at the Pac-12 and/or Big 12 to replace some of the tonnage. Still, that doesn’t quite carry the same luster, particularly with the recent agreement for UCLA and USC to join the Big Ten and the Big 12’s loss of Oklahoma and Texas. Elsewhere, NBC adding the Big Ten alongside its current agreement with Notre Dame would be quite intriguing, and CBS avoids the large-scale absence of college football after the well-publicized shift away from the fabled SEC on CBS broadcast.

ESPN certainly can’t be ruled out until the ink is dry on a signed agreement, but this would be a big loss for the network. It would also set up a situation in which Big Ten fans could be treated to national windows from noon and into prime time with the conference’s programs on display across the board.