Category: Worldwide

This article originally appeared on 01.11.19

Disney princesses are a magical thing, sometimes most of all for the princesses themselves.

Amber Shaddock Roberts used to visit Disneyland every year as a child. And from ages 2 to 15, she stopped to say hello and take pictures with the woman who was dressed as Snow White.

Amber Shaddock Roberts/Facebook

Amber Shaddock Roberts/Facebook

Roberts says the park employee remembered her by name each year, something that made her annual visits even more magical.

Fast forward several years and Roberts heard that the woman who portrayed Snow White was still working at Disneyland, only now portraying the Fairy Godmother. Roberts was able to track her down and brought her photo album of their shared memories in tow. What ensued was pure, magical bliss. As Roberts wrote in her Facebook post:

When I was 2 years old, I met Snow White. Every single time I saw her until I was 15, she recognized me and knew me by name. She made my Disney childhood so incredibly magical. I haven’t seen her in person since, but I knew she was now the Fairy Godmother. Today I tracked her down & got to hug her neck. Best day ever!!(And yes I cried!)

Amber Shaddock Roberts/Facebook

Amber Shaddock Roberts/Facebook

Amber Shaddock Roberts/Facebook

We hear you, Amber. We hear you. Is that fairy dust in our eyes?

And so does the world. The post has barely been up on Facebook for 24 hours and has already been shared more than 80,000 times with no sign of slowing down.

This article originally appeared on 02.07.19

Anyone who owns a dog can attest to the amazing comfort they provide during times of stress or discomfort. Research shows that dogs have a biological effect on us that elevates our levels of oxytocin, which is known as the “love hormone.”

Unfortunately, most of the time, dogs aren’t allowed in the place where people need comfort the most: hospitals. Even though evidence suggests that that visiting with a pet while hospitalized improves a patient’s mood while reducing their anxiety.

A story shared by Reddit user Mellifluous_Username on the online forum is going viral because of the lengths he and his dog went to to visit his sick wife.

For brevity’s sake, we’ll refer to Mellifluous_Username as “Mel.”

“My wife was in the hospital after a very invasive surgery, which after a few days, looked like it did not produce ideal results,” Mel wrote. “The prognosis was not good. She was able to speak, but was not eating or drinking, and relied completely on her IV and hard pain pills. In one rare instance of cogent speech, she convinced me to sneak our dog into her private room, so she could see her ‘one more time.'”

Mel decided he could sneak their 50-pound Austrian Shepherd into her hospital room by hiding it in a suitcase.

“I packed her in, with the lid unzipped, and placed her in the car until we arrived at the hospital,” Mel wrote. “When we arrived, I ‘explained’ to her that I would open the zipper in a few minutes and that she could see her Mommy.”

As they slipped their way through the s hospital wings, the dog was quiet as a cat burglar. When asked about the suitcase, Mel told the nurses that he was bringing “items to make my wife more comfortable.”

“When we entered the room, my wife was asleep,” Mel wrote. “I unzipped the suitcase, and the dog immediately jumped on the bed, and gingerly laid across her chest, somehow avoiding the wires and IV. She positioned herself to where she could look directly into my wife’s eyes, and laid completely still, until about twenty minutes later, when my wife woke up, and started moaning in pain.”

“The dog immediately started licking her, and quietly moaned, as if knowing that barking would definitely blow our cover,” Mel wrote.

“My wife hugged her for almost an hour, smiling the whole time,” he continued. “We were busted by one nurse who was so touched that she promised not to tell. When my wife finally went back to sleep, I loaded the dog back in the suitcase, and she somewhat sheepishly obliged.”

Mel’s wife passed away a few days later, but his dog has yet to learn the sad truth. “Now, whenever I grab the suitcase, the dog thinks we are doing to see her again,” he wrote.

This article originally appeared on 08.15.18.

Have you ever wondered why people don’t seem to say “you’re welcome” anymore?

Back in 2015, author and professor Tom Nichols tweeted out an angry response after receiving what he thought was poor customer service:

“Dear Every Cashier in America: the proper response to ‘thank you’ is ‘you’re welcome,’ not ‘no problem.’ And *you’re* supposed to thank *me*”

Dear Every Cashier in America: the proper response to “thank you” is “you’re welcome,” not “no problem.” And *you’re* supposed to thank *me*

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom)
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The angry tweet elicited a number of mocking responses from people on social media.

But eventually one person chimed in with a detailed and thoughtful response that just might give you pause the next time you or someone you know says, “no problem.”

It’s not about being polite. Our views on gratitude are evolving.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

In a response that is going viral on Reddit, on person writing under the name “lucasnoahs” laid it all out:

Actually the “you’re welcome/no problem” issue is simply a linguistics misunderstanding. Older ppl tend to say “you’re welcome,” younger ppl tend to say “no problem.” This is because for older people the act of helping or assisting someone is seen as a task that is not expected of them, but is them doing extra, so it’s them saying, “I accept your thanks because I know I deserve it.”

“No problem,” however, is used because younger people feel not only that helping or assisting someone is a given and expected but also that it should be stressed that you’re need for help was no burden to them (even if it was).

Basically, older people think help is a gift you give, younger people think help is an expectation required of them.

Nichols took a lot of flack for his comment. But the insightful response reveals something important about gratitude.

The thoughtful response from “lucasnoahs” doesn’t apply to everyone. After all, there are certainly a lot of people of any age group for whom acts of kindness and gestures of gratitude are “no problem.”

Still, his message conveys an important idea that doing well for others does not have to be a grand gesture. It can be a simple act — and the additional act of letting someone know that it’s really no problem helps relieve any potential sense of debt or guilt the person receiving the gesture might otherwise take on.

Most of the time, doing the right thing is indeed no problem. In fact, it might be the solution to a lot of the daily problems we grapple with.

This article originally appeared on 04.26.16

On April 26, 1986, the world experienced the worst ever nuclear disaster.

It occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in Ukraine. Immediately after the meltdown, dozens died. 30 years later, the number of lives lost to the plant’s radiation lies somewhere in the tens of thousands.

If not for the work of three brave men, we may have lost millions of lives instead.

The plant, severely damaged, four days after the disaster. Photo by AFP/Getty Images.

10 days after the Chernobyl meltdown, engineers learned of a new threat: nuclear steam explosions.

The plant’s water-cooling system had failed, and a pool had formed directly under the highly radioactive reactor. With no cooling, it was just going to be a matter of time before a lava-like substance melted through the remaining barriers, dropping the reactor’s core into the pool. If this would have happened, it might have set off steam explosions, firing radiation high and wide into the sky, spreading across parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

“Our experts studied the possibility and concluded that the explosion would have had a force of three to five megatons,” said Soviet physicist Vassili Nesterenko. “Minsk, which is 320 kilometers from Chernobyl, would have been razed and Europe rendered uninhabitable.”

Soviet engineers test waters for radiation within the 30-kilometer “forbidden zone.” Photo by AFP/Getty Images.

Three brave men volunteered to dive under the plant and release a critical pressure valve.

Just one available man knew the location of the release valve. His name was Alexei Ananenko, and he was one of the plant’s engineers. He along with fellow engineer Valeri Bezpalov and shift supervisor Boris Baranov were asked to take on what amounted to a suicide mission.

The men were told they could refuse the assignment, but Ananenko later said, “How could I do that when I was the only person on the shift who knew where the valves were located?”

Decades after the disaster, a visitor photographs a memorial built for the first responders of Chernobyl. Photo by Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images.

The men released the valve in time and, in doing so, saved the world from a disaster that would have been exponentially worse than the initial explosion.

Over the following days, more than 5 million gallons of water were released from below the plant. A report later confirmed that without the work of Ananeko, Bezpalov, and Baranov, a nuclear explosion would have taken place, turning hundreds of square miles into an inhabitable radioactive wasteland.

A nuclear hazard warning is seen in Kopachi, one of the many villages close to the Chernobyl plant buried after the disaster to reduce the spread of radiation. Photo by Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images.

By the time the men surfaced from under the reactor, all three were showing signs of severe radiation poisoning. Tragically, none of them survived for more than a few weeks.

Like other victims of the Chernobyl disaster, the three men were buried in lead coffins.

What makes their actions unique in comparison to those of the disaster’s first responders is that these men were warned outright of the danger radiation posed — firefighters weren’t given any background on radiation poisoning before running to put out the flames. They’re all heroes, but these three men knew they’d die; they did it anyway, saving the lives of hundreds of thousands.

Their story has been mostly lost to time, with references only popping up in books about catastrophe, danger, and disaster. But the names of these three men shouldn’t be forgotten.

A monument is dedicated to the lives of all those lost in the Chernobyl disaster. Photo by Boris Cambreleng/AFP/Getty Images.

Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov didn’t prevent the Chernobyl disaster; they prevented something much, much worse.

Their story really makes you think about the label “hero.” For some, like the three Chernobyl divers, heroics come quietly as the result of a quashed threat. For others, like the first responders at Chernobyl or Fukushima, during 9/11, or in response to other terrorist attacks, heroics are the result of running toward danger so that others may run away from it.

The truth is that heroes are all around us. Teachers, health care workers, and just everyday people are and have the capacity to be heroes in their own right. No capes needed, just a little faith in the human spirit.

This article originally appeared on 01.20.16

Privilege can be a hard thing to talk about.

Oftentimes, when it’s implied or stated that someone is “privileged,” they can feel defensive or upset. They may have worked very hard for what they have accomplished and they may have overcome many obstacles to accomplish it. And the word “privilege” can make a person feel as though that work is being diminished.

The key point about privilege, though, is that it doesn’t mean that a person was raised by wealthy parents, had everything handed to them, and didn’t have to do much other than show up.

Privilege means that some of us have advantages over others for any number of reasons we don’t control — like who we are, where we come from, the color of our skin, or certain things that have happened in our lives.

Even when things haven’t come easy for some people, they can still have privileges that others don’t have.

Illustrator Toby Morris did some thinking about the concept of inequality and privilege, and he found one major problem.

He did a lot of research to learn about it, but as he started to really understand privilege, he found that a lot of the information about privilege felt very academic and technical. He felt it was important to “talk about this heavy stuff in a really simple and clear way,” Morris explained to me in an email interview.

That’s what led him to create and illustrate this incredible comic on privilege for the The Wireless.

He did an amazing job. Check it out:

This comic is property of The Wireless, where it originally appeared. It’s shared here with permission.

This is a great way to explain privilege to someone who’s having a hard time understanding — or someone who doesn’t want to recognize it.

“Comics are very human and accessible — they’re non-threatening and quite inviting to a reader,” Morris said. “It’s a lot less daunting than picking up a giant book or trying to decipher a really long or really dense article.”

True story.

Make no mistake: Morris isn’t taking away from hard work in his comic.

“I’m not trying to say I’m against that idea that if we work hard, we succeed,” he said. “I would like to think that is true, for the most part, but I just think people often forget or don’t realise that our starting points, or our paths to success, aren’t all even. Some people have to overcome more obstacles in the path to succeeding than others.“

He was also quick to point out that this isn’t about anyone needing to feel bad or guilty for the privileges that they have, but rather it’s about honesty and understanding — because maybe that’s what could lead us to a better place.

“Acknowledging the issue is one step towards addressing it hopefully,” he said.

Ultimately, success — or lack thereof — can be about hard work and other factors, some of which are beyond our control.

A lot of people have been able to relate to this comic — both sides of it — and have reached out to Morris to share.

“Personally, I’ve grown up somewhere in the middle,” he said. Because his dad was in the army, Morris moved around a lot as a kid. “I experienced a lot of different neighbourhoods and schools and friendship groups — some well off, some not so much — and that experience lead me to this belief that ultimately people are all pretty similar wherever you go, we just don’t all have the same chances in life.”

Kanye West fans were excited this week by sparse footage emerging from a recent listening event for his new album during which he revealed some of the guests for the album. According to attendees and one clip that surfaced on Twitter and Instagram, the features include usual Kanye collaborators like Travis Scott and Ty Dolla Sign and newcomers like Baby Keem in addition to the previously rumored Tyler The Creator.

However, one name fans won’t find on that list is Lil Durk, who was apparently invited to the recording sessions but was unable to attend — at least, that’s the inference from Durk’s comment on a post about the listening sessions on Instagram. Replying to a post featuring a screenshot of comedian Justin LaBoy’s recap tweet of the event, Durk expressed his regretful reason for not being on the album: “I missed the jet.” However, he also expressed hope for the future, writing, “Well next album.”

Durk, who looked up to Kanye as a fellow Chicagoan, paid homage to the hometown hero in the video for “Kanye Krazy” from his recent album The Voice, recreating some of Kanye’s own videos like “I Love It” and “Bound 2.” Meanwhile, fans who missed out on the Las Vegas listening event will get another chance at it, provided they can get to Atlanta by Thursday. He’s holding another event there at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, but he has yet to announce a new release date after pushing it back multiple times.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have appeared in the same movie multiple times, most recently 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, but Good Will Hunting was the only screenplay they wrote together, Oscar-winning or otherwise, until The Last Duel.

Based on author Eric Jager’s novel The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France and directed by Ridley Scott, the historical drama stars Damon as Jean de Carrouges, a knight whose wife Marguerite (Killing Eve great Jodie Comer) has accused squire Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) of rape. Affleck has a supporting role as Count Pierre d’Alençon. The Last Duel is Scott’s most Gladiator-looking film since, well, Gladiator. That worked out pretty well for him, and the combined efforts of Affleck and Damon writing the screenplay with Academy Award nominee Nicole Holofcener (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) could lead to more Oscar glory.

Here’s more on the book that the movie is based on:

Based on extensive research in Normandy and Paris, The Last Duel brings to life a colorful, turbulent age and three unforgettable characters caught in a fatal triangle of crime, scandal, and revenge. The Last Duel is at once a moving human drama, a captivating true crime story, and an engrossing work of historical intrigue with themes that echo powerfully centuries later.

The Last Duel opens on October 15.

Clairo recently declared that she won’t tour unless she’s able to have additional security at her shows to keep her audience safe. Well, she got that security, because Clairo announced a 2022 North American tour today that will stretch from February to April.

Press materials note of the tour, “Clairo has partnered with SafeTour and Calling All Crows to provide a safe and harassment-free concert experience. Clairo is integrating a dedicated representative from Calling All Crows into her touring team who will respond to requests for support through a text helpline and proactive canvassing of each concert, and provide messaging and educational support so that attendees can take part in making these shows and their own communities safer. Together, SafeTour and Calling All Crows will provide sexual harassment prevention and response training to the full band, crew, and interested venue staff to create safe and inclusive environment on the road.”

Clairo also said, “Now that shows are starting to come back into our everyday lives, it’s important to prioritize everyone’s experience to the fullest. Everyone deserves a resource and everyone deserves to enjoy the show in peace. I want the audience to know that there is someone who will listen and believe them at every show”

Check out the full list of tour dates below. All dates are with Arlo Parks and Widowspeak except for the final three, which will only feature Widowspeak.

02/16/2022 — Charlotte, NC @ The Fillmore
02/17/2022 — Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium
02/19/2022 — Washington, D.C @ The Fillmore Silver Spring
02/22/2022 — Richmond, VA @ The National
02/24/2022 — New York, NY @ Radio City Music Hall
02/26/2022 — Philadelphia, PA @ The Fillmore
02/27/2022 — Boston, MA @ House Of Blues
03/02/2022 — Montreal, QC @ Mtelus
03/04/2022 — Toronto, ON @ History
03/07/2022 — Cleveland, OH @ Agora Ballroom
03/08/2022 — Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore
03/10/2022 — Chicago, IL @ Riviera Theatre
03/18/2022 — Minneapolis, MN @ The Fillmore
03/20/2022 — Denver, CO @ The Fillmore
03/23/2022 — Seattle, WA @ Paramount Theatre
03/25/2022 — Portland, OR @ Arlene Schnitzer Hall
03/28/2022 — Vancouver, BC @ The Orpheum
03/30/2022 — San Francisco, CA @
03/31/2022 — Oakland, CA @ Fox Theater
04/02/2022 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Greek Theatre
04/03/2022 — Anaheim, CA @ House Of Blues
04/05/2022 — Tempe, AZ @ Marquee Theatre
04/07/2022 — Dallas, TX @ South Side Ballroom
04/09/2022 — Austin, TX @ ACL @ Moody Theater
04/10/2022 — Houston, TX @ Bayou Music Center (fka Revention)
04/13/2022 — Miami, FL @ The Fillmore Miami Beach
04/14/2022 — Orlando, FL @ Hard Rock Live
04/16/2022 — Atlanta, GA @ Tabernacle

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

The scrutiny that young women — hell, all women – face within the music industry is well-documented. With “Blouse,” the sole single released from her sophomore album, Sling, Clairo adds her own grievances to that lengthy petition. Movements like #MeToo and an increased emphasis on diversity and equality have reflected a more public longing for a cultural shift, but not much has budged. Perhaps it’s young women who are the most shocked by how little the status quo of sexism and misogyny seems to change, despite lip service to the contrary. Older generations have grown weary, or wiser, in the fight. Or, simply absconded away from the unsafe offices of leering executives, opting to pursue a different kind of life. On Sling, Clairo is both weary and absconding — both suit her incredibly well.

At 22, Claire Cottrill is still young, two years younger than her frequently-cited peer and now collaborator, Lorde, though the two women share the unsettling-but-coveted experience of teenage stardom. “What this industry does a lot is drain young women of everything until they’re not youthful any more,” Cottrill remarked to The Guardian in one of her few interviews in support of her second album as Clairo. She prefaces that thought with the implied premise: “‘There’s a lot more that we can squeeze out of her before she’s done.’” Within that context, it’s not surprising that a famous teen — crowned the next big indie star, then immediately torn down for her father’s corporate connections — would eventually fantasize about a life of rural domesticity. Committing to care for herself and others is a way of reclaiming a connection to the joy of youth, a respite from the calculating prurience of record labels. Isn’t the mother the dichotomous opposite of the whore?

For Sling, the would-be pop star has turned to the piano palette of Randy Newman, Jackson Browne, and Carole King, as a late 2020 King/Browne cover hinted, employing honeyed ‘70s melancholia to chronicle her own shift from glum dorm-room phenom to the splendid isolation of a listless twenty-something. Except Clairo found meaningful companionship in the meantime, not just in best friends and sometimes bandmates of Claud and Josh Mehling, but in caring for an adopted rescue dog, Joanie. Even the album artwork centers this caretaker relationship, with Claire gazing down, a latent paw indicating Joanie’s presence. Over what could be a Billy Joel piano riff, Cottrill harmonizes with herself on her dog’s namesake tune, foregoing lyrics for the sake of the melody’s own storytelling. It’s a playful, off-the-wall kind of track, and an indication of just how different this record is from her stark, shimmering 2019 debut, Immunity. (Rostam wouldn’t have let this fly, but Antonoff loves a scribble — the emotional resonance the song shares with Chemtrails is striking.)

After a year spent in lockdown with her family, Cottrill understandably made changes to the architecture of her personal life, committing to care for Joanie, and opting to split time between a Brooklyn apartment and renovating her newly-purchased house on a five-acre plot in a tiny Massachusetts town. That house, along with the remote mountaintop location of Allaire Studios in upstate New York where the album was recorded under Antonoff’s wing, seems to animate the atmosphere of Sling as much as any lived experiences. In interviews, Clairo talks of encountering her mother’s memories of life prior to the roles of wife and mom, an experience that thrust this era of her own life into stark relief: Is pre-motherhood Claire simply a chapter her own daughter will forget to imagine for a few decades? The gentle, Lorde-featuring “Reaper” gets into this thought pattern with even more depth: “I keep forgetting that I’ll have a family,” and “I’m born to be somebody, then somebody comes from me.” This, too, is armor against the youth-draining objectification her time spent on stage hammered home.

Even the album’s name isn’t taken from the more familiar slingshot, but the cloth wrap that a parent uses to nestle a newborn, a subtle shift that recasts the tone of the songwriting. “I could wake up with a baby in a sling,” she sings on the uneven “Zinnias,” painting the picture further: “Just a couple doors down from Abigail / My sister, man and her ring.” It’s not a far-off dream, but one that resonates because of its simplicity, and the perceived distance from rooms where stories like the one told on “Blouse” take place. In that way, Sling is a document of the distance between what Clairo’s life has been, and what she’d like it to be. Sans any features, aside from backing vocals from Lorde on two songs, the record is a singular document in our current collaborative environment. If there’s one area where Clairo doesn’t need any help, it’s in knowing what to say. Her strength has been and continues to be translating the ennuis of her generation into songs that make sense to people of all ages. These songs are piano ballads, but they’re also quietly ambitious, a memento of her life as it is now — more than enough, until another chapter unfolds.

Sling is out now via Fader Label/Republic Records. Get it here.

A few weeks back, HER announced another edition of her personally curated Lights On Festival in Concord, California, happening over two consecutive days in September. (The first Lights On went down in 2019, if you’ll recall.) Now, Lights On is making its way to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center the following month.

Also curated by the Grammy-winning performer, the East Coast iteration of Lights On also goes down on two consecutive days — October 21 and 22 — and features performances from HER (and friends), plus R&B favorites Maxwell, 6lack, Bryson Tiller, Ari Lennox, SWV, Queen Naija, Lucky Daye, Chloe Bailey (of Chloe x Halle), Blxst, Victoria Monet, Skip Marley, Joyce Wrice, and Tone Stilth, with more to be announced.

As previously reported, Lights On Festival is making its way to the Concord Pavilion in Concord, California on September 18 and 19 with performances from HER, Erykah Badu, Tiller, Ari Lennox, Ty Dolla Sign, Keyshia Cole, Masego, Lucky Daye, Kiana Ledé, Fousheé, and lots more. According to today’s announcement, tickets for the Barclays show in Brooklyn are set to go on sale this Friday, July 23, at 10 a.m. ET, though fans can get pre-sale tickets today, July 20, at 12 p.m. ET. Get tickets here.

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