Category: Worldwide

Today is a special occasion for Christina Aguilera — it’s her 40th birthday! The pop star definitely had a lot on her mind for this momentous occasion, and in a tweet simply captioned “Arriving at 40,” Aguilera went on to share her thoughts on turning the milestone age.

“Dear 40,” she began. “What a beautiful concept… to not only be “turning” 40, but to be ARRIVING at 40! This ever-present social stigma exists around getting older, but I have ALWAYS embraced it! I am forever an old soul and I appreciate the wisdom, grace and beauty that comes with each new year of life. I treasure the growth that comes with age and I welcome the knowledge from the greats that came before me; I get lost in each of their uniquely fascinating stories and experiences… all of which have contributed to my own personal journey.

After a whirlwind of a year, in which we all have experienced so much change, I find that our personal choices matter more than ever. We have to be brave; we have to stand in the discomfort and push ourselves to new heights where we can find our greater purposes.

I have always faced my life challenges head on, and what I have learned from doing that for 40 years is that I always come out on the other side as a stronger and wiser person.

It’s hard to express the magnitude of this birthday and what it means to me. Our world has been flipped upside down yet I have so much faith in the future. I’m deeply humbled and blessed by the fullness of my life that I’ve built over the last 40 years, and I’m truly excited to see what adventures lie ahead for man I continue following my heart and my dreams.

I’ve heard it said that some of your best life is lived in your 40’s. You stop giving a fuck about all the bullshit… clarity comes over you, and a new intention sets in with every move you make. I truly believe the best is yet to come and I am READY for it.

Now as a grown woman who has endured, overcome, created and powered through so much… I am not just turning 40, but ARRIVING at 40! So many stories yet to be told and revealed. I am at a place in my life where I own who I have been. I embrace the new woman I am today, and I look forward to the new chapters that will shape who I become.

To the rare and beautiful souls who have stood by me for over 20 years and counting, I am eternally grateful for you. I am blessed to have the most solid friended around me, a team I believe in that makes me feel supported and heard and of course, my family; my baby boy and girl, the most incredible children one could ever imagine! My heart is full. So, 40, let’s fucking do this. You have no idea what I have planned for you, I hope you’re ready.

X”

Check out here full post here:

University of Louisville alumni Donovan Mitchell and Angel McCoughtry have teamed up to support Black college students through Mitchell’s latest basketball shoe, the Adidas D.O.N. Issue #2. Mitchell, who is entering his fourth season in the NBA, and the WNBA star teamed up with their alma mater to support current and future students at the school by donating all proceeds from the sale of the shoe to several academic initiatives and scholarships.

Following two unique basketball seasons in which players from both the NBA and WNBA organized and advocated for racial justice, Mitchell and McCoughtry are now looking to address racial inequality in the U.S. college education system. The U.S. student debt crisis has affected millions of graduates across the country, but Black students have been the most disproportionately impacted.

In June, Business Insider reported that Black students are not only more likely to need to take on debt for school, but Black college graduates are also nearly five times as likely to default on their loans than their white peers. According to the Brookings Institution, Black students with bachelor’s degrees owe $7,400 more student debt on average upon graduation than white grads.

“We know it’s important for [Black] kids to get the education they need,” McCoughtry told Uproxx. “We know the system is kind of tough — you have kids with $100,000 in debt coming out of college before getting a job that pays $30,000 a year. We want to change all of that.”

After working with the University of Louisville Office of Diversity and Equity, Mitchell and Adidas decided that proceeds from the sale of the D.O.N. Issue #2 will go to several academic scholarships including the Woodford R. Porter Scholarship Program, the Muhammad Ali Scholar Program, the Health and Social Justice Scholars Program and an expanded emergency fund to help increase retention rates of the impacted students, allowing them to focus on their studies and work toward graduation.

Mitchell attended Louisville from 2015 to 2017 before making the jump to the NBA, going No. 13 overall in the 2017 NBA Draft. In her four years at Louisville from 2005 to 2009, McCoughtry starred for the Cardinals before being drafted No. 1 overall by the Atlanta Dream in the 2009 WNBA Draft.

Both Mitchell and McCoughtry, who initially met years ago through their connection to Louisville and have remained close friends since, plan to wear the shoe in their upcoming seasons to raise awareness for the issue.

“With my mom being a teacher and based on the values she taught me from a young age, I have always understood the importance of education, which is why adidas and I worked with my alma mater, the University of Louisville, to ensure proceeds from the Louisville colorway of D.O.N. Issue #2 would fund scholarships to support Black students,” the Utah Jazz guard said in the release.

During the 2020 WNBA season, the players’ association was highly influential and worked to develop several initiatives to fight for social justice, including the addition of Breonna Taylor’s name to the backs of players’ jerseys, the organized refusal to play as a protest against the police killing of Jacob Blake and the creation of a social justice council to continue the conversation beyond the season.

When asked how the players plan to continue the push for social justice, McCoughtry invoked the memory of former Congressman John Lewis and emphasized the importance of never giving up.

“The fight never ends, the fight always is with you,” McCoughtry said. “You take it with you wherever you go.”

Alex Trebek’s final games hosting Jeopardy! set up an emotional holiday season for game show fans, as the show’s final episodes taped before his death will air right up until Christmas Day. To celebrate the late Trebek’s legacy, Jeopardy! has put together a number of tributes.

Jeopardy! announced the tribute on Thursday, with two full weeks of Trebek’s favorite episodes where he traveled around the globe to deliver clues from iconic locations. The collection begins on December 21 and runs until New Year’s Day and features episodes from the last two decades where Trebek covers a wide range of topics.

Here’s the full list of episodes and their air date:

Week 1: Dec. 21-25

Monday, Dec. 21 Hockey (Original Airdate: 10/14/04)
Tuesday, Dec. 22 Sesame Street (Original Airdate: 04/04/06)
Wednesday, Dec. 23 The U.S. Air Force: USO Tour to Japan (Original Airdate: 09/27/07)
Thursday, Dec. 24 Machu Picchu (Original Airdate: 11/06/07)
Friday, Dec. 25 Niagara Falls (Original Airdate: 01/15/09)

Week 2: Dec. 28 – Jan. 1
Monday, Dec. 28 Journey Through Israel (Original Airdate: 11/23/09)
Tuesday, Dec. 29 Galápagos Wildlife (Original Airdate: 12/09/09)
Wednesday, Dec. 30 Operatic Costumes: The Met (Original Airdate: 11/09/11)
Thursday, Dec. 31 Petra (Original Airdate: 11/14/11)
Friday, Jan. 1 National Museum of African American History and Culture (Original Airdate: 2/06/17)

As a Niagara Falls native, I’ll be particularly interested in that Christmas Day episode, but there are lots of really interesting locations the show has explored with these segments, including some much harder to get to than the American Falls, such as, say, Machu Picchu.

Anyway, to get you ready for the “Around the World” tribute, here’s a supercut of Alex Trebek speaking French, if you need it.

C’est un danger, indeed.

Ty Dolla Sign and Post Malone teamed up this year for the second time following their 2018 collaboration “Psycho.” Their joint track “Spicy” appeared on Ty’s recently released LP Featuring Ty Dolla Sign and the song’s visual featured cowboy hats, futuristic weapons, and a voice-over cameo by Snoop Dogg. Now, Ty offers an inside look at the visual’s making in a behind-the-scenes clip.

The original video slates Ty as a cowboy out for revenge. Teaming up with fellow outlaw Posty, the two gun down an entire tavern of bandits in an epic bar fight. The behind-the-scenes clips depict the creation of the bar fight, showing the director giving the musicians pointers on how to smash bottles over their victims’ heads.

Judging by their on-screen energy, it’s clear that the two musicians click. Apparently, their musical chemistry was so natural that they’re talking about making a collaborative album together. Ty recently teased the news in an interview, saying the joint album is definitely a possibility. “Posty and Ty Dolla Sign album coming soon,” he quipped.

Watch the behind-the-scenes from Ty and Posty’s “Spicy” video above.

Featuring Ty Dolla Sign is out now via Atlantic. Get it here.

Ty Dolla Sign is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Mike Pence had a busy Friday, starting with taking the first steps to immunize himself against coronavirus. And then he made himself the topic of a second round of viral reaction by announcing a name for what we should call Space Force troops.

Pence announced on Friday, after flexing his way through a publicly-televised COVID-19 vaccine, and said that members of Space Force will be called “guardians.” The news was echoed on Twitter by the branch’s official account.

“A name by space professionals, for space professionals,” the slogan read. The tweets celebrating the name also used the hashtag #SemperSupra, the branch’s official slogan which is latin for “always above.” Which, you know, kind of works.

The name “guardians” is essentially akin to members of the Army being called soldiers, and such, but given that the group deals with space there were some obvious jokes to be made. What are the Guardians, well, guarding? Earth? Or perhaps something more… universal? And so jokes were made, as there were some pretty obvious connections to Guardians of the Galaxy to poke fun at.

It will certainly be interesting to see if the Netflix show named after this new branch of the armed forces will adopt the real-life name for its troops. It if, like the show itself, it will go a different direction in Season 2.

Today is the 57th birthday of silver screen icon Brad Pitt, long considered to be the scion of male beauty in America culture. So much so that in her intrepid hit “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” released in 1997, which was almost 25 years ago, namechecks him as the kind of guy to not be impressed by.

Her point in the verse singling out Brad is that simply being really, really ridiculously good looking wasn’t enough to impress her, and that there are other things more important than looks in making a relationship work. But, it is kind of harsh to single someone out by name in a song about not being impressed with men, so in honor of Brad’s birthday, Shania logged onto to Twitter dot com to make a little joke celebrating Brad: “Happy Birthday to Brad Pitt, I’ll make an exception for today,” she wrote.

While Brad is yet to respond, plenty of fans got the joke and helped the tweet go viral, so odds are he’ll see it eventually. And for those of you who have yet to discover — or rediscover — the lovable misandry of this late-90s hit, I’m including it below. Shania might be enteriing her golden years now, but we’ll always have that leopard look.

There are two things that make up great fighters. One is, obviously, the ability to fight at a level that transcends even the best of the sport. If you cannot box, or you cannot grapple, or you cannot make guys tap out better than everybody else, you will never be able to make it in combat sports.

But in order to go from that to another stratosphere, you need to have a sense of showmanship about you. Think of all the great fighters that we have ever seen, all of them have an otherworldly sense of the moment and how to keep fans enthralled, when they are both in the ring and outside of it.

I say all that to say this: check out this damn introduction.

This is Reshat Mati, a 22-year-old Albanian boxer from Staten Island who took on Dennis Okoth on Friday night. He decided that the best way to go about this was to go to the ring in a Batman costume while the Backstreet Boys classic “I Want It That Way” played. The only rule is it has to work, of course, and by god, it did. Mati needed all six rounds to get the job done, but he managed to move to 9-0-0 on his career via a final round TKO.

Here is a better look at the cape, which is extremely good.

This was Mati’s seventh win via knockout. Gonna end with some Backstreet Boys puns here, if you don’t mind: He must have told the ref “don’t wanna hear you say … that I lost.” He made sure the judges didn’t have to make “The Call.” He decided to “quit playin’ games” with his opponent and just ended things. His introduction was “Larger Than Life.” Alright I’m done, thank you, have a good weekend, folks.

The United States is dealing with two conflicting emotions right now. On one hand, the first COVID-19 vaccines are being administered across the country this week, mostly to frontline medical personnel.

However, on the other hand, the number of infections in the country continues to grow to a record high with over 238,000 new cases reported on Thursday. And it’s going to be more than a few months until we see a significant decline in infections caused by widespread vaccinations.

This week, thousands of frontline workers in hospitals breathed a sigh of relief when they received the vaccine. It has had to be traumatizing to go into work every day knowing you were always at risk of becoming infected with COVID-19.

A study out of the U.S. and the UK found that “frontline health care workers had a nearly 12-times higher risk of testing positive for COVID-19 compared with individuals in the general community.”

Frontline workers at Boston Medical Center celebrated the vaccine by dancing in the streets to Lizzo’s “Good as Hell.”

And do your hair toss

Check my nails

Baby how you feelin’?

Feeling good as hell

The BMC staff strutted their stuff on the sidewalk while still wearing their masks face shields and gowns. A clip of the video was shared on social media by BMC president Kate Walsh.

“Why I love my job!” Walsh wrote. “Teams of people working to safely and equitably distribute vaccines to their front line colleagues getting cheered on by their friends celebrating the arrival of the vaccines! A great day, a great place.”

According to Boston.com, the hospital received 1,950 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine Monday and began giving its employees jabs on Wednesday.

On Monday, New York City critical care nurse Sandra Lindsay became the first American to get Pfizer’s vaccine outside of a clinical trial. After getting the shot, she wanted to let everyone know that there’s nothing to fear. “I want to instill public confidence that the vaccine is safe,” she said.

Although healthcare works seem like they’d be the least likely to be hesitant about getting a vaccine, there are still some who are skeptical of the shot. A recent survey of physicians in the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City found that 60% of doctors in the network and about half of the nonphysicians were enthusiastic about the vaccine.

“It’s going to be a marathon,” Susan Mashni, head of the vaccine distribution task force at Mount Sinai, said according to Buzzfeed. “If folks don’t feel comfortable right now, hopefully, they’ll come back and feel comfortable with some time.”

To make healthcare providers everywhere feel safer about getting the shot, frontline workers have been posting photos of them getting vaccinated on social media under #IGotTheShot. Hopefully, this will encourage those on the frontlines to get the shot as well as countless Americans who are on the fence about rolling up their sleeves.

When Paramore’s Hayley Williams announced she would be releasing her debut solo album last December, she didn’t envision that she’d be stuck at home for its entire rollout. In order to cope with lockdown, the singer began sharing acoustic covers of some of her favorite songs. Now, she’s sharing even more music. Williams released the acoustic EP Petals For Armor: Self-Serenades Friday, and it also arrived with a brand-new song.

The three-track project boasts stripped-down covers of her songs “Simmer” and “Why We Ever,” but it also features the previously-unreleased track “Find Me Here.” The tender song arrives as a heartwarming love ballad, expressing her trust and devotion in another.

Speaking about the song’s inspiration in a statement alongside its release, Williams said she hasn’t spent this much time alone with a guitar since she was a teenager:

“I spent this year at home like everyone. I hadn’t spent that much time at home alone with my guitar since I was a teen, before Paramore hit the road. Once I realized I’d likely not be performing any of my new songs live for a while I guess it just felt right to play them for myself and re-imagine them, just a little bit lonelier. It wasn’t long before I started writing new songs again and one of the demos I made seemed fitting for this little EP. ‘Find Me Here’ is the feeling of surrendering your loved ones to their own, personal struggles; Letting them take their time and come to their own rescue. It’s a hard version of love to learn but it is an important lesson in loving someone well.”

Listen to “Find Me Here” above.

Petals For Armor: Self-Serenades is out now via Atlantic. Get it here.

Hayley Williams is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”

That line is sung by the cast of Hamilton in the musical’s emotional final number — and it’s an important question to ask ourselves in our daily lives. Whose lens are we seeing history through? Who wrote the article we just shared on Twitter? Who’s telling the story?

“Young adults live in a world that bombards them with other people’s opinions and ideas,” Sasha Rolon Pereira, Director of the Hamilton Education Program, says. “This isn’t actually new, the technology has just advanced and made it overwhelming in a new way.”

The Hamilton Education Project, or EduHam for short — founded by Lin-Manuel Miranda in conjunction with The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History — is keenly interested in who’s interpreting the history that students are learning. Does it reflect the neighborhoods and cultures they’re from or is it being told by someone with their own agenda? That’s why the program connects students to primary sources for research, because even textbooks are written through a distinct lens and are often inaccurate.

In short, EduHam encourages students to do just what Miranda did when he researched and wrote Hamilton — take back the narrative and then tell the story in their own style and voice.

“The truest way to find out what happened is to go directly to the voices –the letters people actually wrote to each other, the diaries they kept, the art and songs and speeches they made,” Rolon Pereira says. “Letting students interpret for themselves what all these primary sources mean lets them actively engage in history instead of being passive receivers of someone else’s version of it.”

Started in 2015 to create education outreach to pair with the mega-hit musical, EduHam has connected thousands of students to history, whether participating online or in their classrooms, in a unique way — through their own experiences.

“This is a story about America then, told by America now, and we want to eliminate any distance — our story should look the way our country looks,” Lin-Manuel Miranda once told the New York Times.

Often in interviews, the actor, musician, and playwright has noted that when he began researching Hamilton he saw endless parallels to people today.

“I was like, ‘I know this guy,’” he told the Times. “Just the hustle and ambition it took to get him off the island — this is a guy who wrote his way out of his circumstances from the get-go. That is part and parcel with the hip-hop narrative: writing your way out of your circumstances, writing the future you want to see for yourself. This is a guy who wrote at 14, ‘I wish there was a war.’ It doesn’t get more hip-hop than that.”

Though it seemed radical to mirror and juxtapose the experience of people of color in America with those of the founding fathers, Hamilton‘s breakaway success proves that the idea worked. The musical speaks on both metaphorical and literal levels to the diversity of this nation while playing with how history is told. Similarly, EduHam urges students to mine the past for connection points to the present day.

“We encourage students to discover the diversity of experience during the founding era and connect it to current events,” Rolon Pereira says. “From Phillis Wheatley’s depiction of George Washington to Abigail Adams’s famous letter urging her husband to “remember the ladies,” students are drawn into the country’s contradictions as Americans aspired toward liberty.”

EduHam features a wealth of materials on their website for students to access — with information on more than 45 Founding Era figures, 14 events, and 24 key documents, as well as 175 supporting documents, video clips from Hamilton, and more. Then they connect these materials to key moments in the musical and students are able to create their own original performances, inspired by the historical documents that most sparked their imaginations. These performances might be a rap or a song, but they also might be poems or scenes.

When the theater was still running, selected students were able to come together to perform these pieces. Giving many young adults the opportunity to see the show and interact with the cast.

“It has given hundreds of thousands of students access to a professional theater experience they might not otherwise have had, as both performers and audience members,” Rolon Pereira says. “Students are encouraged throughout the program to connect past people, ideas, movements to what they are seeing today. Especially regarding individual action, strength in diversity, and speaking up for civil rights.”

After theaters closed, EduHam created an extensive program at home — something that was already in the works, but was accelerated by COVID-19. Now, students all over the country have access to the custom-designed education program that connects early U.S. history with hip-hop and other performing arts. And they can upload their performances into a National competition and lottery that will pick winners to come to NYC to see Hamilton in person when theaters are back up and running.

It’s all about empowering students to tell their country’s stories themselves, very much in the spirit of Miranda’s creative vision.

“Lin-Manuel Miranda wanted Hamilton to open the gates of theater as well as the American founding era to people of color,” Rolon Pereira says. “With a cast that is predominantly non-white, even in telling the stories of historical people who were white, the musical and the program celebrate the universality of American aspirations.”

For more information on these programs, please visit gilderlehrman.org. To register for EduHam Online go to hamilton.gilderlehrman.org.