Anyone can cook!

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Nearly 4,000 people watched the fatal police-involved shooting of the victim who friends and family identified as 21-year-old Sean Reed.

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Yaron Oren-Pines, who never delivered a single ventilator to New York, took to Nextdoor in his bid to sell at least 18 million masks to California.

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The ACLU said Wednesday that the immigrant “died because ICE refused to release him when he still had a chance to survive this deadly virus.”

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Fans of the Assassin’s Creed series have been eagerly anticipating the next installment in the franchise since 2018, when Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was released to widespread praise. It’s been 13 years since the original AC game came out, and a rabid fanbase has followed it every step of the way.

Last week, fans finally got a glimpse into the next game when Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was unveiled. This iteration is one that fans have been asking for since the early days of the franchise — you will finally get to play as Vikings, and it looks just as cool as everyone wanted it to be.

While cinematic trailers are cool, what everyone really wanted to see was the gameplay. And on Thursday, fans were given a brief glimpse into what that may look like come launch, which is currently slated for Q4 of 2020. A gameplay trailer was shown during the Xbox Series X event, and while it was merely 90 seconds, we were again brought into the world in which Valhalla will occur.

The game unsurprisingly looks gorgeous — which you would expect from what should be a next gen release — but it doesn’t give enough of a glimpse into what gameplay will actually look like. It does look like you may have access to boats again, a feature that fans of the series have been in love with since Black Flag and the popular “Eagle vision” where you take over a literal Eagle to explore the world through an aerial view appears to be returning as well, but we do not know for sure.

The entirety of the trailer uses quick shots of what looks like gameplay as it smash cuts away to other potential features. It all looks excellent, but it’s unfortunate we can’t get a little more time to see what it will inevitably look like. That said, I don’t doubt that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will be another fantastic addition to the series. Odyssey and Origins were both huge hits among fans and seen as a much-needed breath of fresh air into the franchise. Valhalla should take what those two did well and master it.

Another week with a stacked offering of the best new hip-hop albums. As the COVID-19 quarantine continues, artists have been busier than ever, with fewer distractions to keep them from getting in the studio. Of course, with the music industry more connected than ever thanks to social media and streaming, the unforeseen circumstances that would have crippled the supply chain before are only minor speed bumps on the way to dropping albums, EPs, and mixtapes. While some big-name artists hold off in the hopes of utilizing national tours to maximize their profits, up-and-coming and indie artists art using the opportunity to drop their latest work and snap up some market share while potential fans have free time between marquee material. Case in point, the best new hip-hop albums dropping this week include projects from established underground vets Bishop Nehru, Lil Durk, Little Simz, and Nav, while up-and-coming artists Jean Deaux, Lil Tjay, and Ric Wilson share some profile-boosting releases of their own.

Here are all the best new hip-hop albums coming out this week.

Bishop Nehru — My Disregarded Thoughts

At just 23 years old, this New Yorker is already a mainstay on the city’s independent rap scene, with a collaborative project with MF Doom under his belt. My Disregarded Thoughts is Bishop’s first full-length project since 2018’s Elevators. Split into two acts, Nehru calls this is most eccentric project yet.

Jean Deaux — Watch This!

Chicago rapper Jean Deaux has bounced about from R&B to straight-up rap and her latest EP finds her firmly in the latter mode for six tracks of swaggering rhymes and uptempo beats. It also has two features that perfectly highlight Jean’s style: Yung Baby Tate and Saba, who reflect her slick lyricism and her unapologetic femininity.

Lil Durk — Just ‘Cause Y’all Waited 2

Lil Durk has been one of most consistent rappers from the Windy City, releasing at least one project in each of the last nine years, with the most recent one,
Love Songs 4 The Streets 2 dropping in 2019. The latest, which features Gunna, Lil Baby, Polo G, and G Herbo, is another display of Durk’s mashup of melodic sensibilities and drill-style authenticity — that is, if his latest track, “3 Headed GOAT,” is any indication.

Lil Tjay — State Of Emergency

After celebrating his 19th birthday — and causing controversy with his antics all the way — New York’s Lil Tjay follows up his breakout debut album, True 2 Myself, with the versatile State Of Emergency mixtape. Although I criticized his debut for being too one-note last year, his new one splits the difference between the singsong style pioneered by fellow Uptown native A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, and Brooklyn’s drill adherents like Fivio Foreign, Pop Smoke, and Sheff G — all of whom appear on this tape.

Little Simz — Drop 6

A surprise drop from the London native, Drop 6 features five songs written and recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s the sixth EP of Simz’s Age 101: DROP series, following her 2019 release of the full-length Grey Area.

Nav — Good Intentions

The Torontonian producer and rapper picks up where he left off with last year’s Bad Habits. After launching the promotion for this album in earnest with his hit song “Turks” featuring Travis Scott and Gunna, fans have plenty to look forward to. Featuring appearances from Future, Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, Pop Smoke, Don Toliver, and Lil Durk, Good Intentions is a star-studded affair to showcase Nav’s extensive contact list and polished production sensibilities.

Ric Wilson and Terrace Martin — They Call Me Disco

A collaborative effort between emerging Chicago rapper Ric Wilson and veteran Los Angeles jazz revivalist Terrace Martin, They Call Me Disco is a breath of fresh air for anyone looking for a departure from the trap-focused beats and the boom bap-styled alternatives that dominate hip-hop’s modern landscape.

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

Andy Serkis is able and willing to get a little bit (actually, a lot) “precious” to raise money for pandemic relief. On Friday, May 8, he’s going to settle in for an epic, 12-hour armchair reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit from cover-to-cover, and the entire event will be livestreamed. As all Middle-earth fans (and even casual nerds) are aware, Serkis’ most famous role to date would be the voicing of Gollum in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring trilogies. The motion-capture master hopes to channel that (unsettling) appeal for the greater good, no matter how long-winded the effort.

The live-reading will benefit NHS Charities Together (a gathering of 200+ charitable organizations) and Best Beginnings (a childrens’ charity). As Yahoo reports, Serkis has set a goal of raising £100,000, or roughly $125,000, over the course of what he’s referring to as “The Hobbitathon” in his Twitter announcement.

The live-stream will begin at 10:00am GMT/5:00 am EST/2:00am PST on Friday morning, all geared toward funneling money toward the The Hobbitathon’s GoFundme page. In a video announcement, Serkis explained why he’s taking this journey:

“So many of us are struggling in isolation during the lockdown. While times are tough, I want to take you on one of the greatest fantasy adventures ever written, a 12-hour armchair marathon across Middle-earth, while raising money for two amazing charities which are doing extraordinary work right now to help those most in need.”

You can find more information about this event at the link provided (from Serkis) below.

(Via Andy Serkis & Yahoo)

T.I. and Killer Mike have committed to helping out their Atlanta community in any way they can during the pandemic. Tip and Mike recently sported gloves and masks to post up outside their restaurant to hand out over 500 meals to families affected by the coronavirus.

TIp and Mike partnered with the community organization PAWkids and have committed to donating 1,000 meals each week to families in the area. They kicked off the partnership Wednesday and handed out meals in brown paper bags alongside volunteers, all while snapping photos with fans.

In an interview Tip posted to social media, the rapper said he has a “sincere passion” to give back to his community. “To participate in business in this community and not give back is a travesty,” he said. “So, we’ve always had genuine and sincere passion to feel together. This is just one of the many ways we intend to do so.”

Mike echoed Tip’s message, saying that they aim to support organizations like PAWkids: “This is really what it’s about. It’s about us supporting the organizations that make sure this can happen even when celebrities don’t show up. Every single day the neighbors are taking care of one another.”

The rappers went into business together to purchase the Bankhead Seafood Market restaurant back in 2018 after it closed. Mike told GPB News that he had grown up eating there and had many fond memories of the place. He didn’t want to see it permanently shut down, so he and T.I. bought the place and opened up operations. “T.I. and I went in and bought a business and wanted to keep it going. And in the middle of that, a pandemic happened,” he said. “So, whether money is being made the priority is human beings and people. People need to eat.”

A long-known aspect of Michael Jordan lore that has been reinforced time and time again during The Last Dance is that he wasn’t exactly the best teammate. While the Chicago Bulls won a whole lot of games and championships, Jordan had no issue challenging his teammates. This, of course, has plenty of downsides, including one bizarre story that surfaced this week.

Sam Smith, the longtime journalist who wrote The Jordan Rules and makes a number of cameos in The Last Dance, appeared on KNBR’s Tolbert, Krueger, and Brooks podcast. As Smith tells it, Jordan’s teammates had a story about Horace Grant that revolved around MJ’s response when Grant would have an off night.

“Players would come to me over the years and said, ‘You know what he did? He took Horace’s food away on the plane because Horace had a bad game,’” Smith said, per KNBR. “[Michael] told the stewardesses ‘Don’t feed him, he doesn’t deserve to eat.’”

This is an extremely weird way to get a point across. It’s also an anecdote that probably isn’t that surprising following this past Sunday’s episodes, which included Jordan accusing Grant of being the main source for Smith’s book that infamously painted Jordan in an unflattering light as a hyper-demanding teammate. Others in the doc more or less said Grant couldn’t have been the main source, and during his podcast cameo, Smith mentioned that the fear of Jordan was something that existed throughout the franchise.

“They would tell me stuff like that and they they’d say ‘Why don’t you write this?’” Smith said during his podcast appearance. “And I would say ‘Well I can’t write it unless you say it.’ I don’t do ‘league sources.’ You can’t do that kind of stuff on these kind of things. ‘If you want to be quoted I’ve got no problem with that.’ ‘No, no, no we can’t say that about Michael Jordan.’”

In 1991, in the Arizona desert, eight human beings entered a sealed off ecosystem for two years in an effort to study if a self-sustained existence was possible for future colonization of other planets. Called Biosphere 2, back then, this was a pretty big story – that eventually faded into zeitgeist obscurity. Today, Pauly Shore’s 1996 movie Bio-Dome somehow has a larger cultural footprint. What’s fascinating about Matt Wolf’s Spaceship Earth (which will be available on-demand this weekend) is that not only does it get into the technical aspects of what made this mission remarkable, the documentary also explains why this event lost its place in history.

Mainly, the mission was fraught with controversy. From the makeup of the crew members – who might be better described as theater kids and/or commune residents than actual researchers – to some bending and/or breaking of the rules. (At one point a crew member leaves to have finger surgery and returns with new supplies. Another time, when carbon dioxide levels were getting too high, a scrubber was installed.) As Wolf explains, it wasn’t so much that these events happened, but more not being upfront with the media about these incidents cost them their credibility. And, in the process, their place in history.

And then, after people stopped paying attention, a villain showed up to sabotage all the research. And who the villain turned out to be is pretty nuts.

I have to admit, the idea of sequestering oneself for a substantial amount of time doesn’t seem that crazy anymore.

Oh, yeah. I’m sure there is a certain claustrophobia to it, but I think just having the option to go into nature. I live in New York City, too, and I go to a park where there’s five million drivers swarming around me. But I think if you were having a hard day, and you took me through the biosphere, you could climb up the trellis of the structure and go hang out in a tree or you could go diving and hang out with the coral reef. There was just a lot of room for private space beyond the living quarters.

I somewhat remember when this happened. But it kind of got lost to history.

And that’s precisely why I was interested in telling this story. I’m really drawn towards these kind of forgotten histories: where something was a huge story with huge global implications, but it’s kind of faded from collective memory. And I think it’s really the media depiction of the project that resulted in that. Which, at the end of the day, kind of rebuked as this failure or fraud. And, in fact, there were a lot of really innovative and meaningful things that were gleaned from the project. And it has a kind of enhanced relevance today with accelerating climate change and, of course now, the pandemic. But I think the media had the final verdict and the verdict was that it was a failure or a fraud. And that really diminished the legacy of the project. And for many decades it’s languished.

You’re right. But when you look at it on the surface, the people in charge of Biosphere did a pretty poor job of presenting it as something that wasn’t fraudulent? These were more theater kids than scientists. I almost can’t blame the media for being skeptical of what they were doing.

Yeah. But Biosphere 2 was in a laboratory. In an academic sense it was this closed system with a different kind of science that was based on observation and collecting data. So, the people who were stewards of that world had a variety of practical skills that shouldn’t only encompass academic science credentials. They had to be good farmers and gardeners and ecologists. But also the whole aspect of the project of being enclosed for two years through glass that people could look through. I mean, you have to be an adventurer, too. And I think the project was so outside the realm of anything that had been done and so futurist in it’s ambition and conceit. To me, it was not surprising that artists pursue it. I think what the problem was is that the presentation and representation of the project shied away from the reality of their background. And when the press caught on that these Biospherians didn’t have traditional scientific credentials, that lack of transparency bit them in the butt. But, at the same time, a lot of astronauts don’t have PhDs. They are on a mission. And that’s true of these guys too.

Well, yes, some astronauts are pilots.

Yeah, exactly. And I would say that a lot of them had practical skills, but that there wasn’t a defined skill set to pursue a project of this nature. To me, the issue wasn’t their academic credentials, it was a definition of what an experiment is. So, I can understand why that would raise eyebrows to a more traditional scientist. But, also, I think both kinds of inquiries are interesting and worthwhile and that just even creating the spectacle of Biosphere 2 is meaningful in terms of people thinking about the planet as one closed system itself and how people might be stewards of it.

Right. And I understand what their theory was and everything you just said, it’s I tend to think they would have gotten better press if they had maybe one scientist…

And, to that point, Dr. Roy Walford, the medical doctor was an established scientist, but he was also kind of an idiosyncratic performance artist, too. He had authored a book on the 120 Year Diet and did all this real academic research on aging and nutrition. He was also a wacky guy.

Right. He didn’t make it to 120. Though, he made it to 80. That’s a good run.

Yeah, he lived a good life. No, I’m not defensive of the project but I think part of the problem with the management of the project is how they set it up in the public eye. In a certain way they set the ground rules, whether intentionally or not…

Do you think if they laid all their cards at the beginning and said, “Here’s what we are, here’s what we’re doing,” they would have gotten less strife back?

Or, as a journalist, if you express skepticism and people withhold information, it’s only going to make you want to dig deeper and to substantiate those questions and to see what’s really going on. And so controversy was brewing because they weren’t being transparent and that’s a fatal flaw if you’re dealing with something on the world stage.

[Spoilers below about who the mysterious villain turns out to be. If you plan to watch Spaceship Earth and want to be shocked, stop reading. If you are on the fence, this bit of information below might make you want to watch.]

So the crazy thing, this movie has one of the best twists. When I first heard Steve Bannon’s name I did a double-take. “Wait, that Steve Bannon?”

I asked all the writers, “Please don’t give it away.” Because when it is a surprise for people, it makes the movie so much more exciting. And I think when the film premiered at Sundance, the audience audibly gasped. I could hear like a “What?” coming from the audience. And it’s one of those stories that just has so many twists and turns. It’s like Byzantine in its plot, but it’s kind of like the mission’s over so I guess the movie’s over. And then … bam, there’s another twist. And that twist really brings the consequences of the project into the present. Because this kind of contemporary political villain takes over Biosphere 2 and in a lot of sense, the political players that are in power right now, they’re taking over Biosphere I: our planet. And doing all sorts of things to pillage our natural world. So, it’s a kind of preshrank metaphor, you know? But of, course, now the fact that we’re quarantined maybe makes it a little more timely than that.

After the events of your movie end, I was reading more about hat happened. Apparently, they sue Bannon? And, in court, Bannon refers to one of the Biospherians as a “bimbo.”

Yeah. And it’s kind of like, we could go really soap opera-y with the film, or we could try to find bigger ideas in the intentions of the project, but also a cautionary tale in the downfall. So, in some ways, we kind of didn’t indulge in the tabloid-y stuff of Biosphere 2, even though there are tons of twists and turns. And I think the story, the word I would use is, it’s just bizarre. It’s a bizarre story. And the other thing is, as a filmmaker, how often do you come across a story that’s so unparalleled in that everything was filmed. So the fact that we had access to all this footage also just was wild. And so, embrace that stuff, but also then wanted to go into the gray areas and the nuance, and to try to unpack who these people were and what they aspire to. So, for us, that was the focus more so than the tabloid-y stuff. But yeah, there’s so much stuff, we had to find our focus on it.

Yeah, I get what you’re saying about tabloid-y but it still happened. There’s also a story about when they tried another mission in 1994, two of the people in the original project went and vandalized the biosphere and broke windows and opened doors to try to sabotage it. That’s pretty remarkable.

Yeah, there’s a lot of drama. It was real saga. Kind of an epic saga and soap opera to a certain extent.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.