Category: News

The 2021 WNBA Draft will take place on Thursday night at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN, as dreams will come true for a number of top prospects and everything runs through the Dallas Wings, who currently have three of the top five picks in the draft (and recently traded the 7th pick to the Sparks).

Among the players vying for the top pick is Texas’ Charli Collier, who averaged 13.1 points and 10.5 rebounds per game for the Texas Longhorns this year and, at 6’5, would bring some tremendous size in the paint for whomever is looking to draft her. There are other possibilities at No. 1 — as our Brendon Kleen explored in his mock draft — but Collier is the top center in the draft. Among those who Collier can count on as supporters is fellow Texas alum Kevin Durant, who voiced his support for her being the top pick on Twitter on Thursday, to which she responded she’ll be sending him her jersey as soon as possible.

The two Longhorns also linked up via FaceTime prior to the draft, with Collier — who wore 35 at Texas in honor of KD — and Durant discussing what number she could change to like he did in going to Brooklyn, with KD a big fan of No. 11.

It’s a cool example of the support NBA stars now are giving to the WNBA and the next generation of WNBA stars, and also just a nice distraction for Collier on what is surely a day filled with stress, anxiety, and excitement while awaiting where her community will continue. She likely won’t have to wait long to hear her name called, and whatever uniform that is, the Wings or elsewhere, Durant will be rocking one soon after.

On Thursday, LaMarcus Aldridge announced that he was retiring from basketball due to an irregular heartbeat he dealt with after his last game with the Nets. It is an unfortunate and sudden end to a terrific career, as Aldridge was a 7-time All-Star over his 15-year career with the Trail Blazers and Spurs, and while he was set to be a contributor on a potential title favorite this season, the biggest concern was his long-term health and hopefully Aldridge will be able to take care of that.

A number of players past and present celebrated Aldridge’s career after his retirement announcement, looking back on a tremendous tenure in the league that has gone, if anything, underappreciated. His time in Portland was particularly great, but ended on a sour note as he left for San Antonio in free agency when many felt he would return to the Blazers. Still, hurt feelings have softened over time and in recent years there have been some hopeful he would make a return to Portland for the end of his career.

Damian Lillard started his career as Aldridge’s teammate, and spoke with the media on Thursday about how Aldridge is one of the all-time Blazer greats and how he believes his No. 12 should hang in the rafters at the Moda Center, via NBC Sports Northwest.

“I think everybody was expecting him to return and he ended up leaving and it was kind of like, people felt some kind of what about it,” Lillard added. “But there’s no denying what type of career he had in Portland and what he meant to this city, I think that’s the proper respect, is to retire his jersey because of who he was and what he did for this organization.”

Aldridge was a dominant force offensively at his peak, averaging north of 21 points and eight rebounds for five straight years to end his time in Portland, and was a big factor in bringing the Blazers from one era — the hopeful Oden-Roy era that had so much promise and ended so quickly due to injuries — to the Lillard-McCollum era. That he left as the Blazers seemed back on the rise led to some in Portland being upset but what he did for the franchise, as Lillard notes, was massive and we’ll see if the organization agrees with their star that they should honor Aldridge with a jersey retirement ceremony.

In what’s shaping up to be an example of a little Hollywood quid-pro-quo, Brad Pitt has signed on to a cameo role in Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum’s romantic comedy adventure, Lost City of D. Bullock, who’s also a producer, recently filmed a cameo for Pitt (who has been known to make a great cameo) in the just-wrapped actioner Bullet Train, so when a cameo opened up in the Lost City of D, she hit up Pitt to return the favor, and he gladly said yes. Via The Hollywood Reporter:

Per the studio, the story centers on reclusive romance novelist who is sure nothing could be worse than getting stuck on a book tour with her cover model. That is until a kidnapping attempt sweeps them both into a cutthroat jungle adventure, proving life can be so much stranger, and more romantic, than any of her paperback fictions.

While Pitt’s cameo role is being kept secret, Bullock will play the introverted romance writer while Tatum plays the hunky cover model. And judging by his Instagram, the actor is getting thoroughly jacked for the film, which starts shooting at the beginning of the summer and is being referred to as an “old-fashioned star vehicle.” Over the weekend, Tatum posted a post-workout selfie, and he’s definitely ready to go abs-to-abs with Pitt.

“Little Saturday grind session! Let’s gooooo 2021! Feeelin goodie good!!” Tatum wrote in the caption for the shirtless, pool-side photo of his super-ripped torso.

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Wahl Street (HBO Max series) — Take a peek behind the Wahlcurtain of Mark Wahlberg’s empire — and settle in for some business and life lessons — including a rigorous film schedule, of course, and several successful businesses (a clothing line, a gym studio, Wahlburgers, and his production company). The season was filmed amid the global pandemic and includes appearances of his real-life entourage.

Spy City (AMC+ original series) — Preacher‘s Dominic Cooper stars as an English spy in 1960s Berlin, right before the Berlin Wall goes up. He’s tasked with locating a traitor among the Allies or in the UK embassy, and he’s possibly surrounded by spies and double agents. He’s also dancing around the threat of nuclear war while American, British, and French troops are barely separated from their East German and Soviet counterparts. Good luck?

Younger: Season 7 (Paramount+/Hulu series) — Final season time has arrived for this Darren Star show as it follows up on Liza mulling over whether to marry Charles while Kelsey made strides professionally. Things will be wrapped up soon with Liza struggling in her personal life while struggling not to lose herself, all while Maggie gets canceled, and Kelsey looking for a new creative outlet.

Infinity Train: Book Four (HBO Max series) — This show might be seeing the final season, too, for this Cartoon Network series. Two childhood best friends have a falling out and find themselves aboard the Infinity Train, where a strange concierge helps them on their journey, and the friends must work together or be stuck forever on the train.

Ride Or Die (Netflix film) — Two women take a road trip together. Sound familiar? Well, it’s a pretty Thelma and Louise vibe with one killing for love while the other made her do it, and of course, a chaotic journey follows. No spoilers here, but this story’s a lot deeper than it seems from this brief discussion, and as it turns out, these women have known each other for quite some time, and by the end of the movie, they’ll be even closer.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (NBC, 9:00pm EST) — Olivia (Mariska Hargitay) and Fin (Ice-T) welcomed back Elliot Stabler (Chris Meloni) at the beginning of the season. This week, Garland and Benson are pushing for NYPD change as a high-profile activist worries believes that a hate group kidnapped her sister.

Law & Order: Organized Crime (NBC, 10:00pm EST) — Here’s that full-on Stabler Time, baby. This week, the episode’s actually called, “Say Hello To My Little Friends,” and it features Stabler and Bell following a major lead while Wheatley’s making some strategic moves.

Rebel (ABC, 10:00pm EST) — Sons of Anarchy‘s Katey Sagal stars as an Erin Brockovich-inspired protagonist in this series that’s executive produced both by Brockovich and Grey’s Anatomy showrunner Krista Vernoff. This week, Rebel helps Cruz build a case against Stonemore while enlisting Lana’s help.

Jimmy Kimmel Live! — Emily VanCamp, Zoe Wess

The Late Late Show With James Corden — Forest Whitaker, Kane Brown

Late Night With Seth Meyers — Rob Lowe, Domhnall and Brian Gleeson

When most people think of Compton, California the first thing that comes to mind is the city south of Los Angeles that birthed legendary gangster rap group N.W.A. featuring Dr. Dre, Eazy E., and Ice Cube. So it’s surprising to some that the “Hub City” has a rich history of farming.

The city was settled by Reverend Griffith Dickenson Compton who led around 30 settlers to cultivate the land in the late 1860s. In 1888, Compton donated his land and the area was incorporated by Los Angeles County as the City of Compton. The reverend made the donation with a guarantee from the county that a portion of the city would be zoned for agriculture.

Richland Farms, an agricultural area that still stands in the city, is a testament to the agreement Compton made all those years ago. The area is now home to the Compton Cowboys, a group of urban horse riders dedicated to highlighting the rich legacy of African-Americans in equine and western heritage.

Now, not far from historic Richland Farms, a 21st century vertical farm is sprouting up in Compton.

Plenty, an organic produce company, is currently building a massive, vertical hydroponic farm in a 95,000-square-foot warehouse in the city. When fully operational, the vertical farm will look like an extraterrestrial greenhouse you’d see in sci-fi films.

via Plenty

The warehouse will feature massive vertical farms with rows and rows of crops, futuristic LED lighting, and the food will be harvested by robots. “Just pure food like nature intended,” the company says.

The vertical design uses up a lot less land than a traditional farm.

Plus, farming indoors protects crops from the elements which make it easier to grow without pesticides.

via Plenty

“From day one, it’s perfectly controlled…We don’t use pesticides, there’s no birds flying over our field pooping on the produce, there’s nothing to wash off, it’s usually not touched by human hands ever, and so we have a safe, clean product that is ready to eat right out of the package,” Dr. Nate Storey, the chief science officer and co-founder of the vertical farming company, told ABC.

Plenty also has farms in the Bay Area, Washington, and Wyoming.

Bok choy, fennel, arugula, and kale will be the first crops grown at the farm which looks to produce its first harvest in 2022. Compton mayor Aja Brown believes the farm’s goals are perfectly aligned with those of the city.

“To have a vertical farm that has the ability to produce organic fresh fruits and vegetables with little space and a little bit of water is just incredible, and I believe their mission to combat food insecurities is right in line with our vision that we have for Compton,” Brown said.

Plenty hopes to deliver fresh produce to local restaurants and get more fresh produce to consumers in the area. It already has over 400 Southern California grocery stores signed up to receive deliveries.

So who knows, maybe in the next few years, kale could be just as well known for coming “Straight Outta Compton” as gangster rap.

Aging is a weird thing. We all do it—we truly have no choice in the matter. It’s literally how time and living things work.

But boy, do we make the process all kinds of complicated. The anti-aging market has created a 58.5 billion-dollar industry, with human beings spending their whole lives getting older spending buttloads of money to pretend like it’s not happening.

I’m one of those human beings, by the way, so no judgment here. When I find a product that makes me look as young as I feel inside, I get pretty giddy.

But there’s no doubt that our views on aging—and by extension, our perspectives on our own aging bodies—are influenced by popular culture. As we see celebrities in the spotlight who seem to be ageless, we enviously tag them with the hashtag #aginggoals. The goal is to “age well,” which ultimately means looking like we’re not aging at all. And so we break out the creams and the serums and the microdermabrasion and the injections—even the scalpel, in some cases—to keep the wrinkles, crinkles, bags, and sags at bay.

There’s a big, blurry line between having a healthy skincare routine and demonizing normal signs of aging, and we each decide where our own line gets drawn.

This is where Justine Bateman comes in.

The 55-year-old actress/filmmaker is turning the idea of #aginggoals on its head by simply, boldly embracing her face as it is. No apologies. No avoidance. Just a simple message of “Yeah, this is my face.”

She hasn’t always had such radical self-acceptance. After Googling herself during the writing of her first book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, she saw that the autocomplete after her name read “looks old.” So she looked at the photos people were sharing of her 40-something-year-old face as “evidence.”

“I thought my face looked fine,” she told PEOPLE. “Because of some of the fears I had, unrelated to my face, I decided to make them right and me wrong….I became really ashamed of my face, ridiculously so.”

“I looked the same the day before as I did the day after,” she said, “and yet I felt totally different about my face…The only difference was that I had read the criticism.”

That experience led her to explore how society views women and aging, a topic she explores in her new book Face: One Square Foot of Skin. It also led to her truly embrace her face, just as it is.

Instead of fighting the aging process like many of us do, she decided to fight the fear attached to it.

“I hated the idea that half the population was perhaps spending the entire second half of their lives ashamed and apologetic that their faces had aged naturally,” Bateman writes in her book.

She also shared with PEOPLE how she feels about society painting the physical signs of aging as inherently negative.

“I find it wrong that women absorb the idea that faces need to be fixed,” she said. “That it’s being treated as a matter of fact. I feel that we’ve skipped over the phase where we talk about whether or not we should criticize women’s faces as they get older.”

“I think getting all this plastic surgery is just people pleasing,” she continued. “You don’t want people to criticize you anymore so you appease them. The more you do that, the further away you get away from your true self. It doesn’t work for me. If somebody said to me now we could do some surgery, wouldn’t I be signaling that I’m super insecure? To me, it would.”

In her book, Bateman describes what people are really seeing when they look at her face in its aging glory:

“You’re looking at f***ing determination and truth and creativity. You’re looking at loss and sorrow and the effort for a deeper perspective. You’re looking at satisfaction and happiness. You’re looking at a manifestation of a connection so deep and rooted that it’s more real than I am. You’re looking at my face.”

YES. What a refreshing perspective to add to the conversation surrounding beauty and aging. It’s odd that seeing a woman simply accept the lines in her face is inspiring, but it really is.

Perhaps we should recalibrate #aginggoals to be more about how we feel than how we look. After all, if anyone is “aging well,” it’s the woman who feels—as Bateman told Vanity Fair—”empowered to walk out in the world with an attitude that says, ‘Fuck you, I look great.'”

Right on, Justine Bateman. Thanks for helping us embrace our faces just as they are.

Representative Maxine Waters has a very low threshold for bullsh*t, and Republican Jim Jordan just found that out the hard way.

During a House subcommittee meeting to assess how well the government had responded to the pandemic over the course of the last year — spoiler, not too well — Jordan used his precious minutes at the mic to complain about the loss of basic “liberties” on behalf of his constituents. Jordan ranted about everything from social distancing measures to mask mandates while arguing that our constitutional rights to “go to church” and “have friends over” had been infringed upon. He was making such a big show of things because Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s been in charge of the government’s response to COVID-19 (and who seems to be the far-right’s favorite punching bag) was also at the hearing to share what kind of progress had been made in terms of vaccinations.

Instead, he spent a lot of time arguing with Jordan, who’s really tired of statewide curfews.

While Fauci tried to explain there’s no magic number that, once reached, will let the country open back up again, Jordan kept pressing the good doctor, even after his time had expired. And it’s one thing to waste your own time spewing some performative outrage to rile up your base, but when you start disrespecting your committee chair and interrupting others’ right to talk — well, that’s when Maxine Waters gets fed up.

The representative gave Jordan a good tongue lashing after he kept battling with both Fauci and subcommittee chair Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, yelling at him from across the room to “shut your mouth” after his angry outbursts.

To be honest, we think Waters’ “reclaiming my time” meme might have some new competition.

Man On Man, the new collaborative duo of Joey Holman and Roddy Bottum (best known for his work in Faith No More and Imperial Teen), have been steadily releasing reverb-drenched indie rock singles since last summer. After gaining a sizeable following through their tracks “Daddy,” “Baby, You’re My Everything,” “1983,” and “Stohner,” the duo announce they’re gearing up for their official debut album.

Unveiling details about their self-titled debut LP, Man On Man shared the playful track “It’s So Fun (To Be Gay)” Thursday, which features fuzzy melodies and tongue-in-cheek lyrics. The single arrived alongside a touching video, which tapped several of their queer friends to expresses themselves in self-recorded clips.

Sharing their vision behind their “It’s So Fun (To Be Gay)” video, Man On Man said:

“We wanted “It’s So Fun (To Be Gay)” to feel organic and warm with a strong, universal message. For the video we aimed to focus on our community. Getting through the hardships of the past year we leaned heavily on what we mean to each other in terms of support and understanding. We were in the middle of launching our Chosen Family project and had just finished linking people up for our pen pal program and sourcing art for our quarterly zine. We thought the best way to exhibit the joy in the song would be to have a video full of our chosen family – friends, peers, and heros. So, we asked friends to share their love and lives and these queer testimonials are what make up the bulk of the video. Our togetherness and bond is key to moving forward in these times especially and we aimed to capture that bond and essence, particularly with Gay Pride 2021 on the horizon. It felt fitting to donate the launch-day’s sales to Born Perfect, which is a non-profit whose mission is to end conversion therapy.”

Watch Man On Man’s “It’s So Fun (To Be Gay)” video above and check out their Man On Man cover art below.

Man On Man is out 5/7 via Polyvinyl. Pre-order it here.

Building on the storyline of their recent collaboration, “Set Him Up,” R&B revivalists Ari Lennox and Queen Naija share the vengeful video for the low-key infidelity call-out. Opening with Ari and Naija calling each other on the phone to talk up their respective new relationships, as the men in question are shot with their faces out of the frame, making the revelation that the “men” are the same man even more visually compelling. In the end, the two singers link up to sing the last third of the song on a couch, which their victim tied up and gagged behind them.

“Set Him Up” arrived on the heels of Ari Lennox’s prior duets with Lucky Daye, “Access Denied,” and Jazmine Sullivan, “On It,” showing off a wide range of topics for the D.C.-born singer to address as she prepares a follow-up for her fan-favorite 2019 debut, Shea Butter Baby. Meanwhile, Naija is a few months removed from the release of her own debut album Missunderstood, which helped legitimize the former YouTube star as a proper artist alongside guest stars like Kiana Ledé, Jacquees, and Lil Durk, who appeared on single “Lie To Me.” The two singers are part of a new wave of sultry, unapologetic R&B singers aiming to bring the genre back to the forefront of pop culture that includes Jhene Aiko, Summer Walker, and more.

Watch the “Set Him Up” video above.

Alien director Ridley Scott has been trying to make a movie about the Gucci family since 2006. The film has gone through many stages of development since then, but House of Gucci is finally happening with Adam Driver as Gucci fashion house head Maurizio Gucci, who was gunned down by a hit man hired by his ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani, played by Oscar nominee Lady Gaga. Production has been underway since February and the set photos and production stills have been a source of campy enjoyment for Star Wars fans and Little Monsters alike, but not everyone is tickled by Driver and Gaga as the couple that buys you a drink from the across the bar.

Maurizio Gucci’s second cousin Patrizia Gucci told the Associated Press that she’s “truly disappointed” in House of Gucci. “I speak on behalf of the family,” she said. “They are stealing the identity of a family to make a profit, to increase the income of the Hollywood system… Our family has an identity, privacy. We can talk about everything, but there is a borderline that cannot be crossed”:

Patrizia Gucci said she reached out to Ridley Scott’s wife, Giannina Facio, for clarification on the scope of the film, but has not received any reply… The fact that the production company did not reach out for the new film only heightens the family’s concerns, she said.

Patrizia’s issues with House of Gucci extend to the casting, including Al Pacino as her grandfather, Aldo. “My grandfather was a very handsome man, like all the Guccis, and very tall, blue eyes, and very elegant. He is being played by Al Pacino, who is not very tall already, and this photo shows him as fat, short, with sideburns, really ugly. Shameful, because he doesn’t resemble him at all,” she said. Patrizia also called having Jared Leto play designer Paolo Gucci a “horrible, horrible” choice (he is giving off extreme “car guy from I Think You Should Leave“ vibes…). “I still feel offended,” she added.

“Horrible, horrible” and “I still feel offended” is also my review of Jared Leto’s Joker.

House of Gucci is scheduled to come out on November 21, which is not soon enough.

(Via the AP)