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After a three-week hiatus, HBO’s Last Week Tonight returned with… nothing to talk about. Everything’s hunky dory as is. If only. Actually, last night’s episode was centered around coronavirus conspiracy theories, “particularly why they’re so appealing, how to spot them, and what you might be able to do about it,” host John Oliver explained.

After acknowledging that conspiracy theories are popular because “they help explain a chaotic, uncertain world and appeal to the human impulse to what’s called proportionality bias,” Oliver noted that when confronted with someone genuinely believes that, say, chemicals are making frogs gay, you shouldn’t try to make fun of them for believing something so incredibly stupid, as tempting as it is. Rather, he said, “What experts say is that the most effective way to approach someone is not by shaming them for believing something, or overwhelming them with counter-evidence, but to try and be empathetic, meet them where they are, and nudge them to think a bit more critically.”

Or, y’know, get famous people to educate your conspiracy theorist family members. For your wrestling-loving aunt, there’s John Cena. For your game show-obsessed uncle, there’s Alex Trebek. For your fashion-obsessed cousin, there’s Billy Porter. And for everyone, there’s Catherine O’Hara and Paul Rudd. If those two can’t get through to these people, no one can. To find the clips, which “gently [urge] anyone who watches it to be careful with what they encounter and share online,” head to The True True Truth.

Here are links to the individual videos, in case that site crashes: Alex Trebek, John Cena, Billy Porter, Paul Rudd, and Catherine O’Hara.

Chance The Rapper guested on an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast on Friday (July 17), and during the chat, he revealed that now-presidential candidate Kanye West once considered running for mayor of Chicago.

Chance was asked about his support of Chicago mayoral candidate Amara Enyia, and he responded, “The story of how I ended up working with Amara Enyia is so layered and crazy. I don’t think I ever told anybody this, but I found out about Amara Enyia through Kanye West. He called me right before he was about to move back to Chicago, and he told me that he was thinking about running for mayor of Chicago.”

He was then asked if he would have supported Kanye’s mayoral bid, and he responded, “I don’t think so, honestly, because, at the time, I think our views were a little bit…” The host chimed in, “Divergent,” to which Chance responded, “Yeah. But I think both of us have changed in a lot of ways since then. I think that we do agree a lot more on things now.”

Chance then explained why Kanye didn’t end up running for mayor, saying, “He called me back the next day and said he could not run for mayor, because you have to live in the [city of Chicago] for a certain amount of time. And, basically, he was, like, ‘I’m looking into other people: Have you ever heard of Amara Enyia?’ Amara was not a well-known candidate, and she had some extremely progressive, almost radical ideas about governing Chicago. That included defunding police and co-op grocery stores and gas stations. It was like a bunch of stuff that I had never heard before. She didn’t have campaign dollars or any big donors or anything. I met with her, and I just fell in love with her ideas. I completely and totally put everything I could into backing her campaign. And that sh*t didn’t work out. She ended up having to drop out.”

Listen to the full episode below.

Jim Carrey has been making the Zoom rounds on talk shows this week to promote his new novel, Memoirs and Misinformation, which he describes thusly: “None of this is real and all of it is true.” The actor, who recently reached box-office heights again with Sonic the Hedgehog, has shared more than a few great stories, including one about being in Hawaii during the false missile warning.

Meanwhile, over on WTF with Marc Maron, Jim Carrey — who is very New Age these days — spent some time talking about coming up in the comedy scene with the late Sam Kinison, which is a bizarre pairing considering their different career paths.

As for Jim Carrey’s career path, he got his big break when he moved from stand-up into In Living Color, the ’90s sketch show from Keenen Ivory Wayans and his brother, Damon Wayans, with whom Jim Carrey acted with in Earth Girls Are Easy. It’s the same sketch show where others, like Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez, started their careers.

For those less familiar with Carrey’s early career, he played a character he created with Adam Small and Steve Oedekerk called Fire Marshall Bill, who can best be described as the After Picture of a MacGruber sketch. He is a fire marshall with no lips owing to the fact that he’s been involved in a number of fires. He was absolutely hysterical, and probably the most popular recurring character on the sketch show series.

That character, Carrey admits himself, is basically responsible for the success of Carrey’s first comedy hit, Ace Ventura, which he co-wrote with Oedekerk during downtime in In Living Color. Fans turned out for Ace Ventura to see what Fire Marshall Bill would do in a movie. However, as dark as Fire Marshall Bill already is, the original conception of that character was even darker, as he tells Marc Maron.

“Fire Marshall Bill was born out of a sketch … called The Death Wish Foundation. It was a sketch about kids who were passing away, and their posthumous wish is what we were concentrating on. My posthumous wish as this sick kid was to go to an amusement park after I died. So, it would be me, on the rides, flopping around in the seats on the roller coaster like Weekend at Bernies. That didn’t get on, but the character stuck. The character became Fire Marshall Bill.”

“Oh my god,” Maron exclaimed. “That is a dark backstory!”

Indeed, it is. Fortunately, this was also several years before his method acting made Tommy Lee Jones hate him.

Source: WTF with Marc Maron

Netflix is infamous for not releasing data about how many people watch what on their service unless the numbers are huge. Even then, there’s no way to verify if the data is correct, and no other numbers to compare it to. As such you have to take it with a quarry of salt when they claim, for instance, that The Old Guard — their new action/sorta-sci-fi extravaganza, starring Charlize Theron as an immortal-ish semi-savior of humankind — had ridiculous numbers, as they did over the weekend.

The streaming giant has it that The Old Guard — which of course is based on a comic and which naturally ends with a set-up for a sequel — “is currently on track to reach 72M households in its first 4 weeks!” Big, if true! No, seriously, all we can do is take their word for it that 72 million households is definitely the number that will have pressed play on it. And is that worldwide?

And by the way, how does that compare to other Netflix original movies? Last year, they claimed Murder Mystery, starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, was watched by 30 million households in its first three days alone. How did that one do over its first four weeks? Is Charlize more powerful than Sandler? Oh, and what about the other films mentioned on the list of Top 10 hits in the streamer’s history, which is also filled with data that can’t be cross-checked?

We may never know, because Netflix is holding all the cards here and expecting media sites to simply repeat the data it feeds them, no questions asked. But if these soaring numbers are true, good for it and good for Theron, who has blossomed into one of our most nimble action stars, and someone who’s cool with never having been in a Marvel movie.

(Via The AV Club)

Back in June, Kanye West proclaimed the last Friday of the month as the West Day Ever, on which the rapper shared a plethora of new announcements from both his fashion and musical endeavors. In the following weeks, more announcements followed, the latest coming Saturday night with the announcement of his upcoming album, Donda. Now he’s turned back to his presidential campaign, having submitted the required documents and officially launching it with a rally in South Carolina.

Taking the stage at Exquis Event Center in North Charleston, West spoke to attendees while wearing a security vest and rocking a “2020” haircut style for the first rally of his campaign. It didn’t take long for him to spark a bit of controversy. At one point during the speech, he looked to make a clarification on the work of Harriet Tubman saying, “Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves, she just had them work for other white people.” His statement didn’t seem to go over well with the crowd. A bit later, West had an emotional moment when speaking about his mother, father, and current family with wife Kim Kardashian. West also addressed his past comments on Planned Parenthood.

West’s rally arrives less than 24 hours after the rapper revealed the tracklist and release date for Donda. It arrives next week July 24, not long after he previewed the album’s title track on Twitter.

For the second straight week, a posthumous album has topped the Billboard albums chart. Last week, it was Pop Smoke’s No. 1 with Shoot For The Moon Aim For The Stars. This week, Juice WRLD has now earned his second No. 1 album with Legends Never Die. It marks the first time in Billboard history that the No. 1 spot on the albums chart has been occupied by posthumous albums for consecutive weeks.

Legends Never Die sold 497,000 equivalent album units in its first week, meaning it now holds the record for the biggest first-week number in 2020, passing The Weeknd’s number of 444,000 with After Hours. On top of that, Legends Never Die now holds the record for the fourth-biggest streaming week ever, having tallied 422.63 million on-demand streams in the week ending on July 16 in the US. Juice WRLD also logged the biggest week for a hip-hop album or a male artist since Travis Scott’s 2018 album Astroworld.

As for the rest of the top half of the chart, Pop Smoke clocks in at No. 2 with Shoot For The Moon Aim For The Stars, with 110,000 equivalent album units. Coming in at No. 3 we find the original Broadway cast recording ofHamilton: An American Musical backed by 95,000 equivalent album units. Rounding out the top five is Lil Baby’s My Turn at No. 4 and Post Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding at No. 5.

As for the bottom half of the top 10, DaBaby’s Blame It On Baby comes in at No. 6, Harry Styles’ Fine Line holds it down at No. 7, Summer Walker’s newly-released Life On Earth EP debuts at No. 8, The Weeknd’s After Hours is at No. 9, and Polo G’s The Goat comes in at No. 10.

Read our review of Juice WRLD’s Legends Never Die here.

(via Billboard)

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

When the NBA gets back on the court later this month for its restart in the Disney bubble in Orlando, a number of players will be wearing uniforms with various social justice messages on the back in place of their names.

The NBA offered players a list of messages through collaboration with the players association, but many were left underwhelmed by the options and not particularly pleased that they were constrained to the list. It’s for that reason that some like LeBron James and Jimmy Butler won’t put a message on their uniform, with LeBron simply wearing his regular jersey while Butler will remove any name or message and play with just a number on the back.

On Sunday, word emerged from Shams Charania of The Athletic that the NBPA is partnering with Russell Westbrook’s clothing line to create warmup t-shirts for players that will feature more messages that were not on the approved list, including things like “Am I Next?” and “Police Reform.”

Westbrook’s Honor The Gift will create the shirts and apparently supply them to the players in the bubble — Westbrook himself hopes to join the Rockets in Orlando relatively soon after testing positive for the coronavirus earlier this month.

It will be interesting to see how players respond to these shirts and whether they feel they offer a better array of messages to choose from. As players like Jrue Holiday and others pledge to donate their bubble salaries to social justice causes and Black-owned businesses, they will continue to seek out ways to use the platform that will be available to them to amplify the message and keep the issues at the forefront of people’s minds, even as basketball begins.

A remarkable rescue was captured on video in Newark Penn Station on Tuesday.

Footage from a NJ Transit Police body camera shows officers Alberto Nunes and Bryan Richards encountering a woman in a bathroom stall in the train station holding a newborn baby. At first you can hear one of the officers saying, “It’s not a baby,” but it’s followed by surprise when they realize that not only was it a baby that the woman appeared to have just given birth to, it was a lifeless shade of gray and was not breathing.

“Working here, you see a lot of things, but expecting a baby in a mother’s arms that’s a newborn, that’s nothing that we would expect,” Officer Bryan Richards told WNBC-TV, “I took possession of the baby to do the assessment on it. We didn’t know how long the baby was in this world.”

New Jersey Transit Police perform CPR to save a lifeless baby

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Officer Richards, a 10 year EMT, quickly brought the child to the sink and began performing CPR using his fingers to deliver the compressions. It did not take long for him to come to the conclusion that the situation was extremely dire and that they could not wait for the paramedics.

The two officers can be seen running to a police car with the infant wrapped in a blanket. As officer Nunes rushed to the hospital, Richards continued the compressions. And then about a minute before they arrived, the child started to show signs of life. Richards can be heard encouraging the baby saying “good girl.”

“We just knew what we had to do: Get the baby and (Richards) to the hospital, and that’s what we did,” Nunes said. “I was so happy, so excited that I heard the baby crying, because that meant the baby was breathing.”

Richards added, “It’s already high stress, high adrenaline, but once I had the baby crying, it was a big sigh of relief. A happy moment that the baby was crying, and everything we were doing was helping.”

The child is currently under evaluation with her mother at University Hospital in Newark, NJ, and is expected to survive.

Alex Trebek is “doing well.” The long time host of the iconic game show Jeopardy! was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer back in 2019. “I’ve been continuing my treatment and it is paying off though it does fatigue me a great deal. My numbers are good. I’m feeling great,” Trebek said in a video posted on the official twitter account of “Jeopardy!”

As CNN reported, this latest video is an uplifting one for Trebek fans, as only 18% of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer survive the first year. While the update was a positive one, the hallowed gameshow host mentioned that he would be lying if he said the journey has been the easiest to deal with. “There were some good days but a lot of not-so-good days,” he said. He revealed that he would kid with those close to him that “the cancer won’t kill me, the chemo treatments will.”

Trebek has been recording opening segments in his home that will precede some classic episodes of Jeopardy! scheduled to air in late July. It appears that his love for his work has played a part in his healing process. As he told The New York Times, “Oddly enough, when we started taping I suddenly started to regain my strength,” he said, after noting that he could hardly get out of bed in the morning. “It’s the strangest thing. It is some kind of an elixir.”

Summer Update From Alex Trebek | JEOPARDY!

www.youtube.com

In an interview with People in May of 2019, Trebek said his first round of chemotherapy had shrunk some of his tumors by as much as 50%. After the numbers rose again later on that summer, he committed to another round of chemo. The gameshow icon told media that he would likely stop the treatment should the current round not show enough progress. No matter the results, Trebek has no plans to stop hosting the game show.”It’s a quality program, and I think I do a good job hosting it,” he said. “When I start slipping, I’ll stop hosting.”

Trebek revealed even more good news for the Jeopardy! faithful. Not only is he releasing his book The Answer Is …Reflections on My Life on July 21st that he wrote while going trough his treatment, but he announced the re-airing some of the best episodes from the archives of the epic quiz show.”For the first time ever, we are going to open the Jeopardy! vaults and take another look at some of our favorite episodes, including the very first Jeopardy! show I ever hosted, mustache and all,” he said. Trebek hopes to be back in the studio taping new shows as soon as the restrictions due to COVID-19 are lifted. We will know the world is starting to heal when we can once again give answers in the form of a question.

You can help the fight against cancer whether it is making a donation or volunteering by visiting the American Cancer Society.

Almost three years went by following 2017’s Trip before Jhene Aiko delivered her third album Chilombo. The album has lived up to expectations from her fans and currently stands as one of the best R&B releases from the year. Using the deluxe album trend to give fans even more music, Aiko announced back in May that she would premiere the album’s deluxe version in the following weeks. Clearing a few obstacles that delayed the deluxe album a few months, Aiko shared it this past weekend. In addition to the updated album, she also delivered a new video for one of its new tracks, “Summer 2020.”

The track serves as an extension of the interlude that appears on the original version of Chilombo. In the video, Aiko reflects on the rollercoaster year 2020 has been while thanking and showing appreciation toward her significant other who has made it easier to push through difficult times. Making the best of the turbulent year, Jhene blows bubbles and cools off in a small inflatable pool and the serenity of nature surrounds her, bringing a warm vibe to the visual.

Aiko’s “Summer 2020” video serves as the latest visual effort from Chilombo she previously released a video for “Happiness Over Everything” with Miguel and Future as well as an animated visual for “B.S.” with H.E.R.