Category: Worldwide

Last fall, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin was fired by the New Yorker for an incident in which he was caught masturbating during a Zoom call with his co-workers. He was also kept off the news network during the 2020 presidential election cycle and up until today, when he was interview by CNN Newsroom co-host Alisyn Camerota.

“In October, you were on a Zoom call with your colleagues from the New Yorker magazine,” she began. “Everyone took a break for several minutes, during which time you were caught masturbating on camera. You were subsequently fired from that job, after 27 years of working there. And you, since then, have been on leave from CNN. Do I have all that right?” After Toobin confirmed that Camerota had it all right, she asked, “To quote Jay Leno, what the hell were you thinking?” (This is a reference to The Tonight Show host’s opening question to Hugh Grant after the actor was arrested for “lewd conduct” with a sex worker.) Toobin awkwardly answered, “Well, obviously I wasn’t thinking very well or very much, and it was something that was inexplicable to me. I think one point — I wouldn’t exactly say in my defense, because nothing is really in my defense — I didn’t think I was on the call. I didn’t think other people could see me.”

Toobin thought he had turned off the camera, which he called “deeply moronic and indefensible. But that is part of the story. I have spent the seven subsequent months, miserable months in my life, I can certainly confess, trying to be a better person.”

Camerota asked Toobin if he’s thought about what it must have been like for the other people on the call who witnessed his actions. “They were shocked and appalled,” he answered. “I think they realized that this was not intended for them. I think they realized that this was something that I would immediately regret, as I certainly did, and it was then — it was that day that I began apologizing. And that is something that I have tried to continue to do both publicly and privately.” Toobin said it was “good to be back [on CNN], and I hope to be a better person off camera as well as on camera.”

This guy caught the entire thing:

You can watch the interview below.

Fast & Furious and Rocket League are two franchises that were made for each other. Both have cars going at incredibly fast speeds and doing stunts that should not be performed by any car in a realistic environment ever. Of course, while the Fast & Furious crew is saving the world from terrorists, or committing heists, Rocket League has cars with rockets strapped to the back playing soccer. Yes, they’re just as absurd as they sound and they’re perfect for each other.

With the new Fast & Furious movie coming out later this month, it’s the perfect opportunity for a crossover. Rocket League and Fast & Furious have crossed over before, with some of the cars being available in Rocket League, and now players will have even more to choose from.

The trailer is a reference to one of the more absurd scenes from the new Fast & Furious movie trailer where the crew has their cars drop from a plane for what we can only assume is a quick entry landing. Of course, in the game, they’ll be landing in an arena to play soccer.

An important question that has to be asked. Which member of the Fast family would be the best at car soccer? The obvious answer is Dominic Toretto, but if Luke Hobbs is participating then there’s a chance the match is never going to end as the two battle it out to be the most powerful soccer car player in the family. The only way this can be solved? Get Hobbs and Dom’s car in the game and battle ’em out. Let’s settle this debate for ourselves.

Following the breakout success of her 2019 global hit “Dance Monkey,” Australian artist Tones And I has continued sharing her sunny music. Now with one EP to her name, Tones And I is officially gearing up for the release of her debut album, Welcome To The Madhouse.

The singer returned Thursday to release the optimistic tune “Cloudy Day.” The single starts off slow as a languid piano offers moody instrumentals. But at the chorus, a group of soulful backup singers join Tones And I to sing about the importance of remaining positive through difficult moments, turning the gloomy song into a snappy and carefree message of hope.

In a statement about her inspiration for “Cloudy Day,” Tones And I said she wrote the track after receiving some much-needed advice from a friend. “After my friend T passed away I was struggling to write any songs that were happy or that I even liked,” the singer said. “I met up with a friend who told me this saying from his late mum – ‘on a cloudy day, look up into the sky and find the sun.’ I knew I wanted to use that as a lyric and the next time I went into the studio I wrote ‘Cloudy Day.’”

About her Welcome To The Madhouse album as a whole, Tones And I detailed some of the themes her music touches on:

“This album for me is very up and down and reflects the forever changing emotions in me. There are songs on the album that were written before ‘Dance Monkey,’ about not knowing if busking was right for me. There are songs about my good friend T passing away and not wanting to deal with those emotions. The ups and downs of life in lock down and the mental challenges / struggles. Some songs make me laugh and some make me cry but there is no running theme or vibe to the album – the songs are unique to how I was feeling the day I wrote them.”

Watch the “Cloudy Day” video above and see the Welcome To The Madhouse cover art and tracklist below.

1. “Welcome To The Madhouse”
2. “Lonely”
3. “Won’t Sleep”
4. “Westside Lobby”
5. “Fly Away”
6. “Sad Songs”
7. “Just A Mess”
8. “Child’s Play”
9. “Not Going Home”
10. “Dark Waters”
11. “Cloudy Day”
12. “You Don’t Know My Name”
13. “Fall Apart”
14. “Bars (RIP T)”

Welcome To The Madhouse is out 6/16 via Elektra. Pre-order it here.

Tones And I is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Kehlani’s run of duets over the past couple of years is bordering on legendary. She’s given the Bay Area a new wedding anthem with Rexx Life Raj, shared the tender “At My Worst” with Pink Sweats, and done heart-tugging joints with Russ and Bryson Tiller. She elevates practically everything she touches, and that includes her latest collaboration with T-Pain, the lush “I Like Dat.” The pair appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to perform their new hit, giving a swaggering rendition complete with cowboy hats and baggy chaps.

As enjoyable as the collaboration has been, it was nearly consigned to an extensive list of partnerships that never happened thanks to T-Pain’s unawareness of Instagram’s UI. The “Bartender” crooner posted a TikTok video toward the end of April, apologizing to all the celebrities and potential collaborators who reached out to him via Instagram’s DMs as he explained that he didn’t realize that verified accounts’ DMs also get filtered into the “requests” folder. Among those he’d overlooked were Diplo, Fergie, and more. But it turned out to be beneficial, as he later held a town hall with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about potential improvements for the feature. T-Pain also premiered “I Like Dat” during the stream, promising plenty more to come now that he’s realized people have been trying to get in touch with him.

Watch T-Pain and Kehlani perform “I Like Dat” on Jimmy Kimmel Live! above.

With the trailer for Netflix’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation out in the wild, He-Man fans have been going nuts for the nostalgia-fueled preview of the limited series spearheaded by Kevin Smith. Pitched as a direct continuation of the original Masters of the Universe cartoon from the ’80s, fans are loving the updated look for the classic series, but that enthusiasm only grew after finally getting to hear one of the more genius casting decisions. Namely, Mark Hamill as Skeletor.

While Hamill is best known for playing Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy, he also has a hardcore following from his voice work as the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series. With Skeletor, Hamill is now voicing another classic villain, and He-Man fans are absolutely losing their minds about it on social media:

Interestingly, Smith revealed to Entertainment Weekly back in May that Hamill almost walked away from voice acting before being offered the Masters of the Universe role. “[Hamill] had talked about wanting to step out of animation, but he was like, ‘When you came at me with Skeletor, how could I say no?’” Judging by the outpouring of love from fans, Hamill made the right call.

Here’s the official synopsis:

After a cataclysmic battle between He-Man and Skeletor, Eternia is fractured and the Guardians of Grayskull are scattered. And after decades of secrets tore them apart, it’s up to Teela to reunite the broken band of heroes, and solve the mystery of the missing Sword of Power in a race against time to restore Eternia and prevent the end of the universe.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation starts streaming July 23 on Netflix.

The 2020-21 NBA season was unlike any other, with a 72-game season in a condensed timeframe, starting in late December and ending in May. There were plenty of rightful complaints about the condensed season, with the league pushing to avoid spilling over into the Olympics at the behest of broadcast partners, and there have been reasonable questions asked about whether the hurried season was a cause for the spike in soft tissue injuries we saw this year.

On top of the Olympics time crunch, the chief reason for hurrying through this season so soon after the Bubble was that the NBA wanted to get back to a normal season timeframe as soon as possible, and it appears they succeeded in doing so just one year after the Bubble. On Thursday, The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported that the league sent all 30 teams a memo with key dates for the 2021-22 season, which will see training camps begin in late September, the regular season start in mid-October, and the Finals end in late June followed by the Draft per usual.

There was some legitimate wonder if the league would shift permanently to a new schedule that avoided more of the NFL and college football season during the Bubble last year, but it’s clear that wasn’t something the league really wanted to do and players voiced their displeasure with the idea of losing the summer as their offseason. The 2020-21 season was seemingly the means to the end in terms of getting back to normal, and it seems the league has succeeded in getting back to where they wanted to be.

After a quiet 2020, Ed Sheeran has been more publicly visible this year. That’s especially true of the past few weeks, which have seen Sheeran palling around with Courteney Cox and making hilarious radio appearances. He has also teased a new album, which seems like it will have a more full-band sound than Sheeran’s previous material. Now, it looks like we have an approximate timeline for when the new era will begin.

Yesterday, Sheeran shared a photo of himself making a pained and nervous face and wrote on Instagram, “The moment you realise your first solo single in 4 years is coming out in a few weeks.”

Some fans in the comments noted that Sheeran’s solo song “Afterglow,” which he released in December 2020, could be considered a solo single, thus invalidating Sheeran’s caption. When Sheeran shared the track, though, he wrote, “It’s not the first single from the next album, it’s just a song I love, and hope you love too.”

Meanwhile, Sheeran returned to Instagram today with what may be an advance look at his upcoming era (but also maybe not). In the photo, Sheeran is dressed up as a Twilight-like vampire, complete with fangs, black fingernails, and styled hair. Sheeran wrote, “The nails were a nightmare to try and take a piss with. Wouldn’t recommend.” The photographer behind the image, Zakary Walters, also recently shared a photo of Sheeran drinking wine and spilling it all over himself.

Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Of the first three Marvel Cinematic Universe shows to premiere on Disney+, Loki was the most anticipated. That’s not a knock on WandaVision or The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — it’s just that people really like star Tom Hiddleston, a certified gender-fluid Internet Boyfriend. The data backs it up too: Loki was watched by 890,000 households in the United States on the day it premiered, according to Samba TV, compared to 759,000 for The Falcon and the Winter Solider and 655,000 for WandaVision.

Loki‘s viewership also bests the 4-day premiere weekend of Cruella on Disney+, however, that pic was available to subscribers at $29.99… SambaTV previously clocked 1.7 million households who tuned into The Falcon and the Winter Soldier‘s first weekend and 1.6M for WandaVision over its first three-day frame.

Loki should shatter those figures once people who don’t enjoy waking up at 2 a.m. to watch television (me) get around to checking it out over the weekend.

Every MCU show has been bigger than the last, but it will be interesting if the trend continues. Next up is Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye, neither of which are as well known as Loki (or in the case of Hawkeye, as well liked), followed by Moon Knight. The combined forces of Ethan Hawke and Oscar Isaac might be enough to usurp that space trickster.

(Via Deadline)

If you’ve been on TikTok at any point in the last two months, the odds are extremely high you’ve heard Bia’s “Whole Lotta Money” at least once — I’d ballpark it at around 96%. The ruthlessly catchy wealth anthem has been a staple of all kinds of content, but today, you get to see the face and the razor-sharp performance behind the jewelry jam on UPROXX Sessions.

Hailing from Medford, Massachusetts, Bia is one of a growing number of rising stars to get her start on a reality show. In her case, it was Oxygen network’s Sisterhood Of Hip Hop, where she spent two seasons after signing to RCA Records. However, when the deal stalled out, she secured her release in 2019 — and started her ascent to stardom in earnest. Her song “Best On Earth” with Russ was highlighted by a Rihanna co-sign and gave Bia her first platinum plaque. Over the course of the next year, a string of releases included “Same Hands” with Lil Durk, a new EP, For Certain, on Epic Records, and yes, the TikTok-favorite single with which she’s taken over viral launching pad TikTok. Keep an eye and an ear out; Bia is built for this and finally getting her due.

Watch Bia’s UPROXX Sessions performance of “Whole Lotta Money” above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.

There are few brands in the world as big as FaZe Clan is right now. This is a company with beginnings as a place everyone went to for trick shot Call of Duty videos, but as time has gone on, they’ve become a powerhouse in gaming and beyond.

Go to their website right now and you’ll find a shop full of merchandise, gaming chairs, and some of the biggest names on the internet promoting it. FaZe Clan may be known for their gaming videos on YouTube, and army of Twitch streamers, but their influence is going even further. Athletes like JuJu Smith Schuster, Ben Simmons, and Bronny James are all members of FaZe and represent them when they’re streaming.

As gaming continues to grow, it’s becoming clear that it is making an impact in a number of different avenues. FaZe is one of the groups leading that charge, and it’s why Call of Duty League co-owner of the Atlanta Faze, Paul Hamilton, believes that FaZe will one day be the biggest lifestyle brand in the world.

Via Sports Illustrated:

“I believe that in the next five years they’ll be the biggest lifestyle brand in the world,” says Paul Hamilton, who co-owns the Call of Duty League’s Atlanta FaZe team with his own company, Atlanta Esports Ventures. “The way content is being consumed is different. My kids will never go to the TV, turn it on and see if there’s cartoons on. They go to their iPad and go watch their favorite streamer. FaZe Clan has been in that area for so long. They have a better idea of what their fans want to consume and how it evolves.”

There’s a lot of truth to what Hamilton is saying here. As children grow up, they aren’t watching the same stuff that all of us did as kids — they watch streamers and gaming videos on YouTube instead of flipping around on TV. They’re growing up embracing gaming and those brands as a result. So companies like FaZe have a head start on everyone else, which they hope will pay off down the road.