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Julius Randle will participate in All-Star Saturday night in Salt Lake City. According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, Randle is expected to be named to the Three-Point Contest this year after Portland Trail Blazers youngster Anfernee Simons suffered an injury that will prevent him from competing.

Shortly after Charnia reported the news, the NBA confirmed that Randle is in the event.

As Charania noted, the ankle injury that Simons suffered during Portland’s loss to the Washington Wizards earlier this week will require “further evaluation,” although the extent of the injury is still unclear.

Randle will already be in Salt Lake City for the All-Star festivities, as the New York Knicks standout was named to Sunday’s game for the second time in his career. Both of his appearances have come during Randle’s tenure as a member of the Knicks. Randle is averaging a career-best 24.8 points per game this year and is launching from three more than ever before — his 2.7 made triples and eight attempted threes per game are both the highest marks of his career, while his 33.8 percent clip from behind the arc is right around his career average.

Randle will join Tyrese Haliburton, Tyler Herro, Buddy Hield, Kevin Huerter, Damian Lillard, Lauri Markkanen, and Jayson Tatum as a participant in this year Three-Point Contest.

Bruce Springsteen has more or less perfected musical performance over the last five-plus decades, but that doesn’t mean he’s immune to the occasional mishap. Last May, Springsteen and his famed E Street Band announced their first tour together since 2017. The international trek began stateside this month, and they tacked on 22 US dates for later this year.

On Tuesday, February 14, in Houston, Springsteen busted out “If I Was The Priest” for the first time on stage in 50 years — an early highlight from the tour. But this morning, February 16, a fan-taken video circulating from Springsteen’s February 3 show in Atlanta (as noted by NME) provided a clumsy, semi-funny lowlight.

The Boss nonchalantly tossed his guitar to Kevin Buell, Springsteen’s longtime guitar tech. Buell appeared to trip while trying to catch the airborne guitar, and it hit him in the head as he fell to the ground. Springsteen casually walked over to Buell to make sure he was OK, which he must have been because Springsteen quickly returned to the mic and jokingly yelled some version of “Man down!”

Springsteen and the E Street Band are scheduled to play at the Moody Center in Austin, Texas tonight before hitting Kansas City, Missouri’s T-Mobile Center on Saturday, February 18. This US leg will wrap at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey on April 14, and then the international leg will begin in Barcelona on April 28.

The Royal Ruckus involving the Windsors vs. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle has been an ongoing doozy. People took sides and largely stuck with them, and the mudslinging from both sets of spectators has gotten ugly. And although it’s been incredibly easy to see Meghan and Harry’s side of things when commentators like Piers Morgan are pouring a lot of effort into their vitriol, it’s also been, well, a lot. Perhaps Harry and Meghan really should have taken a breather from public life, but then again, they have to earn a living, and then there’s the sense of fatigue out here.

Although Harry’s memoir did sell an absurd amount of copies, there was a point when overexposure became real. It’s pretty hard to claim an all-encompassing craving for privacy while launching a Netflix docuseries about their lives with Harry also discussing losing one’s virginity in a field and so on. That’s where South Park comes in with their “The Worldwide Privacy Tour” episode, which skewers the contradictions, arguably in an uncouth way that presents no real winners.

A set of characters, clearly Harry and Meghan but never explicitly named, arrive on the set of Good Morning Canada (to promote a memoir entitled, Waugh) while brandishing signs that read, “Stop looking at us!” and “We want our privacy!” From there, the situation devolves further into “Harry” declaring, “How dare you, sir! My Instagram loving b*tch wife has always wanted her privacy.” Below, the gang discusses the Royal duo in the cafeteria, where Kyle declares, “I’m sick of hearing about them! … They’re everywhere, in my f*cking face!” To which Cartman responds, “We don’t care about some dumb prince and his stupid wife.”

When Kyle and Cartman agree on a subject, that’s something. As of now, there’s been no public response from either the Windsors or the Sussexes, but something else can also be said: when you land on South Park, you know you’ve arrived.

Comedy Central’s South Park is streaming on Paramount+.

100 Gecs are about to have a big year. Their new album 10,000 Gecs is arriving soon and they’ll be bringing those new songs on the road on a tour alongside Machine Girl and Fever Ray.

So far, singles “Doritos & Fritos” and “MeMeMe” are out. They released “Hollywood Baby” today and unleashed the full tracklist for the LP. “Hollywood Baby” is a heavy, infectious ripper with metallic riffs and catchy melodies that contrast each other interestingly. The music video is one big fire hazard, but in the best way.

Laura Les, one half of the duo, talked about taking vocal lessons for the record. “As I’ve been exploring my voice more, I’m like, ‘I can do this,’” she said. “And also I’m sick of worrying about it. If I don’t just f*cking do it, then I’m just a scaredy cat. And I don’t want to be a scaredy cat.”

Watch “Hollywood Baby” above. Check out the 10,000 Gecs tracklist below.

1. “Dumbest Girl Alive”
2. “757”
3. “Hollywood Baby”
4. “Frog on the Floor”
5. “Doritos & Fritos”
6. “Billy Knows Jamie”
7. “One Million Dollars”
8. “The Most Wanted Person in the United States”
9. “I Got My Tooth Removed”
10. “MeMeMe”

10,000 Gecs is out 03/17/2023, via Dog Show Records and Atlantic Records. You can pre-order it here.

100 Gecs is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

After six seasons, Ryan Seacrest has announced that he’s leaving Live with Kelly and Ryan. The television mogul had only planned to host the show for three seasons, but ended up sticking around because he was having too much fun with co-host Kelly Ripa. That said, the crazy winters having him missing the west coast, and he’s looking forward to getting back to warmer climates even though leaving the show is bittersweet.

The duo also announced Seacrest’s replacement, and it’s someone who certainly has chemistry with Ripa: Her husband Mark Consuelos. The couple will host the newly rebranded Live with Kelly and Mark when Seacrest leaves in April.

Via The Hollywood Reporter:

“You are a gem. You are one of my best friends,” Ripa said, adding, “The greatest part of this experience has been that you’ve gone from being a friend to a family member. You are family. We love you. We are so proud of you. I know how much of a sacrifice it’s been. I know how exhausting it’s been going back and forth [from New York to L.A.].”

The two hosts, who hugged at the end of their announcement, both seemed emotional, with Seacrest saying he promised Ripa he wouldn’t cry and joking before they went to commercial that they were taking a break so he could cry.

As for working with her husband, Ripa joked it would be “the nation’s weirdest social experiment” before assuring audiences that Consuelos is “the only person who I think is capable of holding [Seacrest’s] torch the way [he] held it.”

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

That Marjorie Taylor Greene has replaced Matt Gaetz with George Santos as her new congressional bosom buddy is a terrifying thought. But the House of Representatives’ most divisive BFFs are now taking their unhinged alliance one step further by appointing themselves the arbiters of good taste and co-sponsoring a bill that would keep “sexually explicit” books out of school libraries.

According to Mediaite, Greene and Santos are co-sponsoring what is known as H.R. 863, a bill that Florida Man and newly appointed GOP congressman Cory Mills filed last week, which caught the attention — and drew ire — from LGBTQ Nation. While the entirety of the proposed bill’s text is not yet public record, Mediaite learned that its official purpose is to “amend title 18, United States Code, to prohibit a publishing house from knowingly furnishing sexually explicit material to a school or an educational agency, to prohibit Federal funds from being provided to a school that obtains or an educational agency that distributes sexually explicit material, and for other purposes.”

Of course, this begs the question: What would be considered “sexually explicit material,” and exactly who (GULP!) would be making that determination? The GOP is currently engaged in an all-out war about “wokeness,” especially in Florida, where — based on the images circulating of empty bookshelves in school libraries — Ron DeSantis, a.k.a. Meatball Ron, seems to want to ban reading altogether. While the Florida governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate has attempted to downplay the state’s book review process and claim it’s the mainstream media who are turning it into a “story” at all, officials in Florida’s Duval County told ABC News that there are currently nearly 2 million titles under review.

“As required by state law, we are in the process of having certified media specialists review all classroom library books,” Tracy Pierce, chief of marketing and public relations at Duval County Public Schools, told ABC News. “There are approximately 1.6 million titles in our classroom and media center libraries that need to be reviewed by a certified media specialist.”

The bill being co-sponsored by Santos and Greene — who doesn’t even seem to know that The Chronicles of Narnia is a book series — would presumably take this war on reading to the national level.

(Via Mediaite)

Joe Mazzulla is no longer the interim head coach of the Boston Celtics. On Thursday morning, the team announced that its first order of business heading into the All-Star break is to remove the interim title and make Mazzulla the full-time head coach, making him the 19th person to hold that title in franchise history.

Beyond the news that Mazzulla is getting the interim tag removed, the team said in a statement that he’ll additionally receive a contract extension, although the terms of the deal were not announced.

Mazzulla has been with the Celtics since 2019, when he was hired as an assistant under Brad Stevens. He remained on staff after Stevens moved to a role in the team’s front office and Ime Udoka was hired to take over, and in the aftermath of Udoka’s year-long suspension in September due to an inappropriate relationship with a staff member, Mazzulla was promoted to interim head coach.

Despite taking over the team under those circumstances, Mazzulla has led Boston to the best record in basketball so far this season, as the team sits atop the Eastern Conference with a 42-17 record. As a result, he was selected to coach Team Giannis this weekend at the 2023 NBA All-Star Game.

RAYE is riding high off the release of 21st Century Blues, her debut album from earlier this month. The 25-year-old British songstress achieved two debuts this week: Her first-ever US television performance and her first-ever New York Fashion Week.

RAYE belted out “Escapism” with 070 Shake on last night’s (February 15) The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. She opened the performance with a perfectly classic, almost nostalgic vibe — delivering her distinctly evocative vocals while sat at the piano and backed with the show’s horn section.

RAYE stepped out from behind the keys for an emphatic second verse: “Been some dark days lately and I’m findin’ it cripplin’ / Excuse my state, I’m as high as your hopes / That you’ll make it to my bed, get me hot and sizzlin’ / If I take a step back to see the glass half-full / At least it’s the Prada two-piece that I’m trippin’ in.”

The set steadily gained momentum and peaked just as 070 Shake sauntered on to the stage to scale it back down to the simmering pace RAYE began with.

“Escapism” became RAYE’s first career No. 1 on the UK charts in January, which she reflected on with Uproxx around 21st Century Blues‘ arrival last week.

“It’s so exciting as an artist to have chart success or mainstream success, but that was never my main goal,” RAYE said. “My main goal is artistic integrity and just loving wholeheartedly what I share with the world and having some time to reassess that and make that the primary. It’s been a really beautiful, ugly, gorgeous, terrible, fun, and liberating process.”

RAYE also shared the inspiration behind the track’s messaging: “I think, as a woman, when you’re processing such things in life, there are not really any healthy outlets for it. I think women do stereotypically face a lot of pressure to seem like they’ve got everything together — to be polite, to be smiley, to be kind, and grateful, and all of this stuff. So I wanted to create a story that was very blunt and honest about that time in my life.”

RAYE enjoyed unabashed expression in a different medium at New York Fashion Week, where she caught up with the likes of Ice Spice and Lil Nas X. Check out RAYE’s snaps from NYFW below, or watch her “Escapism” performance above.

As expanding AI technology becomes a controversial topic, a New York Times reporter claims to have had a particularly disturbing experience with the new Bing chatbot inside Microsoft’s search engine. According to Kevin Roose, he uncovered an alarming version of the search engine that was far different than he and most journalist saw in initial tests. He refers to this version as Sydney, and what he experienced is straight out of a sci-fi movie that’s about to go very wrong.

“The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine,” Roose wrote, and it only got weirder from there. Very, very weird.

Via The New York Times:

As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.

Roose’s experience is reportedly not unique, and on top of dreams of becoming human, Sydney has not responded well to search requests. Not well at all.

“Other early testers have gotten into arguments with Bing’s A.I. chatbot, or been threatened by it for trying to violate its rules,” Roose wrote.

When reached for comment, Microsoft simply said that these encounters are “part of the learning process,” which is exactly the kind of thing a corporation would say before its AI search engine tries to enter a human body and/or offs someone’s spouse. C’mon, people.

(Via The New York Times)

Mid-to-late March is about to deliver heaping helpings of your favorite shows and movies. Ted Lasso may have decided to jump the gun and get in there first, but then the dueling arrivals of Yellowjackets and Succession happen on the same weekend, along with Keanu Reeves in John Wick 4. The last trailer gave us Donnie freaking Yen as one of the franchise’s newest big bads (there are always so many of them, but he’ll be a standout), along with enough rain-soaked battle scenes and swordplay to satisfy existing fans of the franchise. No one could ever accuse these movies (or Keanu) of half-assing things. Imagine how sore he is after shooting every day. Yikes.

The fourth film might find it hard to top the busting-through-glass-boxes glee of the third movie, but I have faith that director Chad Stahelski will not steer us wrong. All of the action will be infused with more mythology, and the franchise has consistently one-upped itself from the sheer adrenaline of the first movie to the amped-up tension of an “Excommunicado” order. Before we new it, there were horses, ninjas, motorcycles, more dogs, and yes, it always comes back to the dogs. Note the final moment of this trailer.

As well, this trailer shows us Keanu going up against the High Table while battling a number of new villains. There’s the articulated notion that he may never be able to find freedom or peace unless, you know, he croaks. John Wick feels differently, although I wonder whether “peace” would ever be truly achievable when you’ve been through the sh*t he has. From the fourth film’s synopsis:

​​John Wick (Keanu Reeves) uncovers a path to defeating the High Table. But before he can earn his freedom, Wick must face off against a new enemy with powerful alliances across the globe and forces that turn old friends into foes.

Also in the works: The Ballerina spinoff with Ana de Armas in action mode, along with The Continental origin story-prequel series coming to Peacock this year.

John Wick 4 arrives in theaters on March 24, 2023.