Category: News

One of the WNBA’s most promising and successful franchises has new ownership. Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis announced on Thursday that he has agreed in principle to purchase the team from MGM Resorts International, and the deal is pending approval from the WNBA Board of Governors.

“I am excited to announce that I have entered into an agreement to purchase the Las Vegas franchise in the WNBA from MGM Resorts International,” Davis said in a statement released by the team. “I will have more to say once I receive official approval from the WNBA Board of Governors and have had a chance to speak with the players, coaches and administrators of the team.”

As MGM continues to sell off many of its physical, non-gaming properties, including the Bellagio and MGM Grand Resort on the Las Vegas Strip, they also seem to have been pursuing a sale of the WNBA franchise they purchased just over three years ago. In doing so, MGM gave a lifeline to a crumbling San Antonio franchise and gave Las Vegas its second professional sports team alongside the NHL’s Golden Knights.

Now, with Davis having moved the Raiders to the desert starting with the 2020 season, he gives himself a chance to dominate pro sports in Las Vegas.

“We will continue our enthusiastic support of the WNBA, NBA and basketball in Las Vegas,” said George Kliavkoff, president of sports and entertainment at MGM.

Having sold the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino where the Aces play their home games and where the 2019 WNBA All-Star game was held, and moving to a business model focused solely on casinos and sportsbooks, this sale was seemingly in the making for months.

Still, that Davis, valued at $500 million, would sign on to own a WNBA team is an interesting wrinkle here, as he becomes immediately among the wealthiest and most well-known team governors in the league.

It’s not easy to have a song reach a billion plays on Spotify, but now a new artist has been welcomed into the club of performers who have pulled it off: Today, Harry Styles’ hit single “Watermelon Sugar” has apparently topped a billion plays. As of this post, the Spotify play count for the song is at 999,056,008 on my desktop Spotify app, so either my count isn’t updated or the song will very soon eclipse a billion. Regardless, Styles fans are celebrating the feat, as both “PROUD OF HARRY” and #1BWatermelonSugar were trending topics on Twitter today.

Meanwhile, “Adore You” has surpassed 700 million plays today to become his third most-played song, just after “Sign Of The Times,” which has over 750 million plays.

Introducing the song before playing it during his Tiny Desk concert back in March 2020, Styles described how it came to be, saying, “[I wrote ‘Watermelon Sugar’] in 2017, while I was on tour for the first album. I was in Nashville on my day off, and we went into the studio just to kind of play around a little bit. We started some ideas and then I was with the guys that I made the first album with and we had this idea, this chorus melody, it was pretty repetitive […] This song became ‘Watermelon Sugar.’ It’s probably the longest it’s ever taken me to finish a song.”

Now that the James Harden trade is official as of Thursday morning, Rockets players are free to move forward and think about the future of this team post-Harden, and in a shootaround call with reporters on Thursday, it was Eric Gordon, the longest-tenured player on the team, who clarified the mood in the locker room.

According to Gordon, the deal gives the Rockets a chance to move forward with a “real direction.” After spending so much time winning at a high level alongside Harden, Gordon was willing to give the superstar the benefit of the doubt, but made it clear that Harden had made up his mind to leave Houston and it wasn’t going to work any longer.

With a core of Christian Wood, John Wall, and the newly-acquired Victor Oladipo in addition to veteran role players like Gordon, DeMarcus Cousins, Danuel House Jr. and others, the Rockets are in good shape to remain competitive in 2021. They likely will trade P.J. Tucker who seems to still be unhappy and should have a nice trade market according to Kelly Iko of The Athletic.

When Gordon was asked about the identity of the team going forward, he hyped up the opportunity for Houston to be “aggressive,” playing the type of fast-paced and overwhelming style that new head coach Stephen Silas has tried to install since being hired.

Through nine games, Houston is 12th in pace and they have had some stellar offensive nights when Harden or Wall had it going. Wood is scoring 23 per game. All the shooting accumulated over the years is still here, and Wall is a capable offensive conductor even if he’s not an MVP-level player like Harden.

A change of scenery could be good for Oladipo, who looks physically like himself again, has started hot from deep, and is a nice partner as a defender and scorer alongside Wall. The Rockets will have the chance to re-sign him this summer.

It’s hard to say that the Rockets will be chasing home-court advantage again as they have for nearly every season with Harden, but Houston will surely be able to stay afloat. Sometimes addition by subtraction can be what’s needed for a group to come together, as we’ve seen countless times in sports.

Of course removing an MVP candidate from the equation will make this team worse overall, but the difference between this deal and other superstar trades is that by nabbing Oladipo and keeping Wall and Wood, the bottom will not fall out. And judging from how harshly Cousins and Wall responded to Harden’s tirade this week, the Rockets were clearly tired of the cloud looming over them.

Olivia Rodrigo has herself the first surprise hit of the year with “Drivers License,” which has drawn the attention of Taylor Swift and broken the Spotify record for most daily streams of a non-holiday song. Her success has been unprecedented, especially for somebody who wasn’t already a music megastar (the teenager is mostly known as an actress), and Spotify agrees.

Spotify’s Global Hits lead Becky Bass spoke about Rodrigo and “Drivers License” with Billboard, saying that she and her team have “never seen anything like this”:

“There’s truly no direct comparison here. You do have songs like BTS and ‘Dynamite’ or Ariana Grande and ‘7 Rings’ that come out with just massive first-day numbers. And then you have newer artists like Tones And I with ‘Dance Monkey’ or Lil Nas X and ‘Old Town Road,’ which took a little bit longer to grow into chart-toppers. But in my experience — and as a team, we were just discussing this earlier — we’ve never seen anything like this, where you do have a newer artist that just comes out of the gate in such a dominant way, and just continues to grow. I mean, we were like, ‘Whoa, these first day numbers are huge!’ And then they were bigger the second day, bigger the third day… so it really feels unprecedented, and likely is unprecedented.”

Rodrigo previously said of the song, “When I came up with ‘Drivers License,’ I was going through a heartbreak that was so confusing to me, so multifaceted. Putting all those feelings into a song made everything seem so much simpler and clearer — and at the end of the day, I think that’s really the whole purpose of songwriting. There’s nothing like sitting at the piano in my bedroom and writing a really sad song. It’s truly my favorite thing in the world.”

Read more of Bass’ Billboard interview here.

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

Marvel fans are understandably freaking out after a Deadline report that Chris Evans is in talks to return as Captain America. While little is known about how Evans’ return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe would play out following the events of Avengers: Endgame where Steve Rogers ends the film as an elderly who lived a full, rich-life after restoring the MCU timeline (or not…), sources say that Evans won’t be starring in a solo movie. The actor would reportedly take a similar approach to Robert Downey Jr.’s appearances in Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Evans’ return is especially notable because the actor has been clear about being done with the MCU and pleased with the way Cap’s story ended. However, he’s reportedly been receptive to talks with Marvel who weren’t ready to let him go just yet. Via Deadline:

Things had changed in recent months as the idea was floated of Evans returning to the MCU as Rogers to see if there was any interest and as the weeks went by, Evans became more game to the idea with the two sides coming to agreement at the top of the year.

As for what all of this means for the MCU going forward, fans are already furiously floating theories on social media. At this stage, the possibilities are endless thanks to the introduction of the Multiverse, and the announcement of the Secret Invasion series for Disney+, which will feature Nick Fury trying to figure out which Marvel heroes are real and which ones are shape-shifting Skrulls.

As for how this will affect Anthony Mackie taking on the mantle of Captain America in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Marvel has clearly left themselves plenty of storytelling opportunities that won’t conflict with its future plans for a new Avengers team. It also wouldn’t be without precedent. Both the Falcon version of Captain America and Steve Rogers peacefully co-existed in the comics at the same time.

(Via Deadline)

Ivanka Trump, officially, has remained very quiet following the failed MAGA coup, in which a mob of Trump followers stormed the U.S. Capitol, which left five people (including two police officers) dead. Well, Ivanka did tweet-and-delete a description of these people as “American Patriots,” and there are reports that she fancies herself as a future president, but other than that, we’re hearing a lot from other people. That includes warring sources quoted by the Washington Post in a report about the many toilets of Jared and Ivanka… and their apparent steadfast refusal to allow their Secret Service detail to use any of them.

This seems a tad extreme, right? Jared and Ivanka’s D.C. home (which they will, uh, soon vacate) features six-and-a-half bathrooms, and if this report is to be believed, they didn’t even want to designate a powder room for the people who protected them from harm’s way. This led to the U.S. government eventually being forced to rent a $3,000 per month basement bathroom elsewhere that has totaled up to $100,000 over the past your years. Yikes. This absurdity arrived after Jared and Ivanka wanted the agents to use a porta-potty, which the neighbors hated, and after the agents used a garage bathroom nearby at Barack and Michelle Obama’s house. That got (literally) messy:

The porta-potty was the agency’s initial solution to the protective detail’s dilemma, but it was removed in the face of the neighborhood’s protests. After that, according to the law enforcement officials, the agents began using a bathroom in a garage at the Obamas’ house, which the former president’s protective detail had turned into a command post.

The Obamas did not use the garage, so the extra traffic to and from the command post caused no problem. Yet this solution, too, was short-lived after a Secret Service supervisor from the Trump/Kushner detail left an unpleasant mess in the Obama bathroom at some point before the fall of 2017, according to a person briefed on the event. That prompted the leaders of the Obama detail to ban the agents up the street from ever returning.

The Post quotes a law enforcement source that declared, “It’s the first time I ever heard of a Secret Service detail having to go to these extremes to find a bathroom.” Meanwhile, the official White House word is that the Secret Service didn’t want to use Jared and Ivanka’s bathrooms, but yeah, law enforcement pushed back on that one. So, is it January 20th yet?

(Via Washington Post)

Cooking a steak to (your personal idea of) perfection takes time to master. Because there are a lot of ways to cook a steak, which means there are a lot of ways to mess it up. We’re not talking about selection, cuts, or even methods today. Instead, we’re zeroing in on getting the meat done right in a general sense, whether on a grill or in a cast-iron skillet.

This is about teaching you to have a “knack” for cooking steak. So that you never cut into a $40 piece of filet mignon and find it blue when you wanted it medium ever again.

Our goal here is to help you learn the three main ways to check your temperature as you’re cooking and resting your meat. Using a thermometer is (surprise!) the most accurate. But beyond that, you’re really going off of feel more than anything else. And that’s something you master over time.

Obviously, there are a lot of variables at play here, too. Cooking a skirt steak isn’t the same thing as cooking a bone-in ribeye. Likewise, a filet is going to take a little more finesse than a strip. We’ll explore the differences in the process as it relates to the specific cut as we go along.

PART I — Know Your Temperatures

• 110F — Blue (seared, red, and just warmed through)
• 120F — Rare (dark pink and fully warmed through)
• 130F — Medium Rare (light pink throughout)
• 140F — Medium (losing most of the pink)
• 150F — Medium Well (brown with a hint of pink in the very middle)
• 160F — Well Done (no pink at all)

140F is generally the spot you want to hit if you’re worried about bad bacterias on or in your food. Side note: Buy food you trust from local sources and this becomes much less of a concern.

If you’re nervous about your meat, always cook it to at least 140F. However, a steak is a solid piece of meat and harmful bacteria (if there is any) will be on the surface, which reaches temperatures well beyond 140F while cooking. Onely when the surface area is ground and mixed into the whole (hamburger), do you really have to start worrying about harmful bacterias in your meat.

All of that being said, know what you like and are comfortable with. Then cook your steak accordingly. Sure, well done meat is worse for you, but who are we to judge?

Lastly, these are end-point temperatures. That means we’re talking about a steak’s internal temp once it has rested. In general, the internal temperature will raise anywhere from five to ten (sometimes more) degrees while it rests, depending on which cut we’re talking about (more on that later). So don’t make the common Thanksgiving mistake of not taking your protein off the heating element until it’s reached the desired temp.

PART II — Start With Room Temperature Meat

Give yourself a head start! Cooking meat fresh out of the fridge will screw up the final product. You want to take the steak out at least an hour — preferably two hours — before you cook it. This will bring the internal temp of the meat to room temp. That should mean a difference of starting your cook at 75F instead of 35F. The actual muscle and fats will be softer when the meat is room temp, allowing the heat you apply on a stove or grill more space to do its work.

You also want to salt pretty early. Our tip is to take your steak out of the fridge about two hours before you want to cook. Then liberally salt all sides and let it rest on the kitchen counter. This will help season beyond the surface while also desiccating the surface, allowing a better crust to form down the road.

(There is some debate on when to salt the steak, but with a lot of reps under my belt, I like this method.)

PART III — Rest Between The Sear And Finish/Baste

Whether on a grill or in a skillet, you want to go fast and hot for the first step of cooking. You really don’t need to worry about internal temp at this point. Heat some neutral oil in a skillet or turn your heat up to 11 on the grill and get a solid sear on your meat.

Once you have a sear on both sides, take that steak off the heat and let it rest for a second. If you’re going for rare or medium-rare, this will stop the outer layer of the steak from losing all its pink color and going brown.

Generally, let the steak sit for three to five minutes just to take the edge of that high heat off. If we’re talking about a flank or skirt steak, you really don’t need to do this because they’re thin enough just to sear and be done with it. If we’re talking something with a bone, this is crucial.

Then you want to finish the steak on closer to medium or medium-high heat. This is where you add in your aromatics — thyme, rosemary, garlic, whatever — and butter if you’re basting.

This is also where you start testing for temperature. Which leads us to…

PART IV — The Touch Method

The most talked-about way to test your steak’s doneness is called the “touch method,” where you use your hand’s meatiness as a gauge.

It goes something like this: Look at your palm. Start poking it where your thumb meets the palm, leading to the index finger. That little bit of soft fleshy bit is basically the same feel as a rare steak. Now, move your poking finger about a half-inch towards the inner palm. It’s a little stiffer, right? That’s medium-rare. Another half-inch towards the palm is medium. The next half-inch should have your poking finger fully in the palm and a fairly stiff point which is medium-well leading to well done.

This little explainer is actually produced by the American Heart Association.

Chef Gordon Ramsay has a different riff on the touch test here. He drops a few other gems, too.

This is not a science. A skirt steak will cook much faster than, say, a rib eye. So you’ll have to keep a closer eye on it and take it off pretty fast. Then there’s a filet (or tenderloin) which, depending on thickness, will still hold a bit of giggle to it even as it cooks through. So you’ll have to practice this and find the sweet spots.

PART V — The Metal Spear Method

This might sound a little crazy to the uninitiated, but most professional chefs use a very small metal meat pick or spear to test their meat’s doneness. Basically, what you’ll see trained chefs do is insert this thin little metal stick into the meat and then place that stick on their wrist (or more weirdly their chin) to test the warmth of the internal meat. How warm that metal stick is will tell the chef where the meat is internally.

While this is a cool looking trick, it takes forever to master. You really have to get used to how a temperature feels which you really can’t do unless you’re cooking 50 steaks a night in culinary school. Still, if you master this at home, good on you! It’s a fun way to prove your prowess at cooking meat precisely… if you can dial it in.

PART VI — The “Just Use A Thermometer Already!” Method

This is really where everyone should start, especially if you’re dealing with thick cuts of meat. You can use something like a Meater thermometer to know exactly where your steak is at all times. We’re calling out that thermometer specifically because you leave it in the meat while you cook. You do not want to be poking your steak a dozen times to check the temperature — it’ll create holes through which all the juices you want to preserve will escape. The thermometer in the image above sort of gets sealed into the meat as it cooks, so you don’t lose the precious fluids.

If you do want to use a standard thermometer, our advice is to use the “touch method” and then put a thermometer in to see how close you are to the targeted temp just once. Please don’t keep poking the steak with a thermometer. The best thing you can do is practice and feel it out over trial and error until you have it just right.

PART VII — Always Rest After The Cook

This is the final step of cooking any steak and crucial to the final doneness of the meat.

If you’re cooking something thin like a skirt or even something small like a four-ounce filet, you’ll need around five minutes for the rest. In that time, you can see anywhere from five to seven or eight degrees change in temperature.

If you’re talking about a big ol’ rib-eye or porterhouse, you’ll need at least ten minutes and expect a ten-degree increase in internal temp.

So, if you’re aiming for medium-rare with a rib eye, take it off the heat at 120F to 125F. Rest for ten minutes. Then check the temp with a thermometer. It should be between 130F and 135F. This process also allows the steak to calm down and for fluids to redistribute. The juices will settle back into the muscle, creating a more succulent final experience.

This resting time also gives you just the right amount of time to make a quick pan sauce. But that’s an article for another day.

After being behind-the-scenes as a producer for recognizable names in electropop, Danny L Harle is ready to step onto center stage with his debut LP. The producer officially announced his collection of club-ready songs Harlecore with a soaring new single.

Harle debuted the fluttering track “On A Mountain” Thursday, which boasts euphoric vocals and trance-like synths over a racing beat. The song officially previews Harlecore, which aims to offer a home for ravers who are missing the experience of live music. Throughout 13 tracks, Harle offers his vision of a futuristic club, which each room holding one of four residents with a distinct style of music: DJ Danny, MC Boing, DJ Mayhem, and DJ Ocean.

Ahead of announcing his debut album, Harle has earned a respected name for himself after working on projects with some contemporary pop stars. Most recently, the producer lent a prominent hand in music for the likes of Charli XCX, Rina Sawayama, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Clairo. He also worked as the executive producer for Caroline Polachek’s critically acclaimed debut album Pang.

Listen to Harle’s “On A Mountain” above and find the Harlecore album art and tracklist below.

1. DJ Danny — “Where Are You Now”
2. MC Boing — “Boing Beat”
3. DJ Mayhem — “Interlocked”
4. DJ Ocean — “Ocean’s Theme”
5. DJ Danny — “On A Mountain”
6. MC Boing — “Piano Song”
7. DJ Danny — “Do You Remember”
8. DJ Mayhem — “All Night”
9. DJ Danny — “Take My Heart Away”
10. DJ Ocean — “For So Long”
11. DJ Mayhem — “Shining Stars”
12. MC Boing — “Car Song”
13. DJ Danny — “Ti Amo”

Harlecore is out 2/26 via Mad Decent. Pre-order it here.

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

If you’re curious as to how a Donald Trump rally quickly turned from political protest to outright insurrection as a throng of the president’s supporters violently stormed the Capitol building, The Daily Show just dropped a new video that should leave little doubt about who’s to blame. Titled “Heroes of the Insurrection,” the damning collection of clips features everyone from Fox News talking heads, members of Congress, the official White House press secretary, and Trump’s own children as they steadily ratchet up the rhetoric from just a few days after the presidential election to the moments before the Capitol attack on January 6.

While nobody escapes the brutal Daily Show segment without a sizable amount of blame on their shoulders, there were clearly some standouts. Freshly elected congressman Madison Cawthorn is seen on video specifically telling an audience in December to threaten lawmakers. “You can lightly threaten them and say, you know what, if you don’t start supporting election integrity, I’m coming after you, Madison Cawthorn is coming after you, everybody’s coming after you.”

Rudy Giuliani also doesn’t look great by demanding “trial by combat,” but things really take a turn for the worse when Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. take the stage on the day of the attack. Eric tells the crowd that, “We need to march on the Capitol today,” while Don Jr. really steps in it by threatening those who refuse to overturn the election results. “If you’re gonna be the zero and not the hero, we’re coming for you,” Don Jr. said. “And we’re gonna have a good time doing it.” Republican Congressman Mo Brooks certainly didn’t help to calm things when he takes the podium and says, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!”

But of course, nothing can compare to Donald Trump directly addressing his supporters and instructing them that “we’re going to the Capitol” and to “fight like hell.” Five people were killed in the attack.

It looks like “WAP” rapper Cardi B is truly serious about becoming a movie star. Variety reports the Bronx rap superstar has snagged her first-ever lead role in an upcoming comedy produced by Paramount, Assisted Living. Cardi will play a petty crook who dons a disguise to hide from her former crew and the police after a heist gone wrong. That disguise? An elderly woman at her grandmother’s nursing home. Considering Cardi’s sharp comedic instincts, EW expects Assisted Living to be a star vehicle like Sister Act.

Cardi got her first acting role in 2019’s Hustlers alongside fellow Bronx native Jennifer Lopez. Like Lopez, it appears Cardi is now pursuing a double-threat career as both an actor and a musician. In a recent interview, Chris Rock said before Cardi blew up with the release of 2017’s “Bodak Yellow,” he tried to pitch her as the star of a comedy television show, calling her “one of the funniest people” he knows. Now, Paramount is hoping Chris was right, but that may depend on the film’s other personnel; no director is attached in the report, but the writer is Kay Oyegun of This Is Us.

Cardi also has a role in the upcoming Fast & Furious film, F9. You can see more of her funny insights on her Facebook Watch show, Cardi Tries.