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WrestleMania 36 wasn’t quite the same as a normal WrestleMania, thanks to the lack of a big venue and accompanying live crowd due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but that doesn’t mean the WWE Superstars didn’t give it their all. They put their bodies on the line for our entertainment like they always do, whether it was Jimmy Uso in a ladder match against John Morrison and Kofi Kingston, or Kevin Owens executing the biggest spot of the weekend in his match with Seth Rollins. Since then, reports have come out that Uso and Owens are both injured, although there’s a big difference in severity and how long they’re expected to be out of action.

Kevin Owens tweaked his ankle in his match with Seth Rollins, but according to Dave Meltzer at the Wrestling Observer, he’s only expected to be out for a couple more weeks. Hopefully on his return he’ll be able to keep building on the babyface momentum he’s been building these past few months.

Jimmy Uso, on the other hand, suffered a pretty serious knee injury in that aforementioned ladder match, and he’s expected to be out of action for six to nine months. Meltzer also says that the Usos being unable to work has altered the booking of the Smackdown tag team division, with the Forgotten Sons getting called up to fill a hole in the multi-team match being planned for the Money in the Bank PPV. It’s a shame he’s going to be out so long, because the tag division just isn’t the same without him and Jey.

Ken Jennings is sorry about how things have gone since he officially became the greatest Jeopardy! player in history, and he’s hoping a board game can make it at least a little better. Jennings was crowned the Jeopardy! GOAT in the Greatest of All Time tournament in January, and though it was filmed in late 2019 it still stands as one of the rare positive things about life in 2020.

“It was fantastic winning the Jeopardy! tournament,” Jennings said by phone in March. “I didn’t know that was going to be the last good thing that happened in 2020, though. I feel bad if that’s the highlight of the year.”

He’s joking, of course, but with both of us locked down — Jennings in Seattle and myself in Boston — it was inevitable that life in quarantine came up. And Jennings does have something he thinks may help with the doldrums of social distancing and avoiding contact with others: a board game designed to make even the most trivia-averse players feel smart. Enter Half Truth, a game designed by Jennings and legendary Magic The Gathering creator Richard Garfield that aims to address many of the problems that often come with traditional trivia board games.

“The core reason I love trivia is because it makes me feel smart. For something in your head to pay off in a game,” Jennings said. “But that’s the exact same reason why people dislike trivia. It makes them feel dumb or anxious. And what I really loved about Richard’s pitch for this game is that you feel smart the whole time. You’re always playing, you always have a guess or an intuition. You’re never waiting for somebody to bang their head on a table and remember an answer.”

Rather than taking turns, Half Truth is a game where everyone (2-6 players) answers every card, which features a question and six possible answers. Three are right, three are wrong, and it’s your job to pick the right answer with a press-your-luck twist — if you know more than one correct answer, or even all three, you can get bonus victory points in addition to moving spaces on the round marker.

It’s a mechanic that both designers played a part in, even if Jennings wasn’t aware of it at the time. The two teamed up after Garfield read the Jeopardy! champion’s book, Brainiac, and reexamined a genre of board games he largely dismissed in his lengthy career.

“Usually with games I try to learn what makes people like them, and that usually makes me like them. It certainly makes me understand the game better, and I realized I had not done that with trivia,” Garfield said, recalling the lessons he learned from Brainiac that made him call Jennings and pitch what became Half Truth. “What I in particular responded to is the idea that trivia doesn’t have to be super specialized. It can be really egalitarian. Everybody can participate because everybody has these wonderful bits of knowledge that other people don’t, and getting a chance to show those off is fun.”

Garfield recalled playing trivia games with his grandmother growing up, and though she may not have always won there were certain questions that — due to her age or expertise — only she could answer. It also helped inspire a quirk of Half Truth that it loosely borrows from Jeopardy!: good questions often have clues in them that make finding the answer more like solving a puzzle than merely recalling information.

“The other thing he showed me is that trivia wasn’t just black and white, it was’t whether you knew the answer or not,” Garfield said. “A good question often involved some intuition, detective work, meta gaming. And that was really what made questions great.”

In Half Truth, for example, a question about poisonous mushrooms may have three incorrect answers that are all something else entirely, like Pokemon or carnivorous plants. Jennings equated it to the wordplay categories on Jeopardy!, which he happens to excel at, and said it offers another layer of gameplay to some astute gamers: if you know what the wrong answers are, you can work out which ones are actually correct.

It works just as well in practice as it does in theory, too. I played with both trivia fans and those not very into board games, and it wasn’t just the ones missing bar trivia nights these days that did well. There were a wide enough range of topics that everyone found a card on which they did very well, and the strategy of when to reach for extra answers and points kept games interesting right down to the end. The game was also written to be as future-proofed as possible, a difficult feat with trivia games that often have an inherent shelf life and tap into a knowledge pool that can change over time.

“Most trivia is pretty evergreen,” Jennings said. “The memory fades slowly enough that most things don’t become wrong overnight. It’s just gradually. You play Trivial Pursuit from 20 years ago and go ‘why is there all this boomer stuff about Howdy Doody?’”

Jennings said in writing the cards — he wrote about half and edited the rest of them — he tried to capture the “good feeling of knowing an answer” while not pitting others against their friends as much as the cards themselves.

“Every card in that deck is lying to you three times,” he said. “So what you’re really trying to do is outsmart that card. Figure out what’s really going on with it and stay a step ahead. And I think that’s a lot of fun and I think it’s a lot of fun in a communal setting where you can see how you stack up against others as well.”

Jennings raved about Garfield’s design expertise, which combined with Jennings’ writing is an attempt at something fairly unique in trivia games. Half Truth adds to a genre where titles like Trivial Pursuit immediately come to mind, which in recent years has adapted and morphed into a game that’s actually more like Half Truth in some ways. Newer, quicker versions have you bet coins on whether someone gets a question right or wrong, and you can use that currency to buy wedges you’re missing. But in Half Truth you’re only betting on yourself, which is a far less vindictive mechanic that creates a much more satisfying result.

“Making a game more broadly competitive, that is to say more people feel like they have a chance at it, is a matter of making it so that you reward the right things in the game,” Garfield said, noting that the luck of a die roll in Half Truth regulates the value of getting an answer right. “My goal for using luck in a game is that it should make it so everybody has a chance — at least to have small victories — but it doesn’t overwhelm the game so the best players will still more often win.”

The game originally launched on Kickstarter in 2019, where it was quickly funded and made a reality. Later this week it officially hits stores, entering the market at a fascinating and harrowing time. Jennings and Garfield both know their name recognition give them an advantage in a crowded field full of diverse options, but they hope the design and potential of the title speaks for itself.

“In some respects I feel bad about it,” Jennings said. “Because I don’t think the best thing about the game is that you might have heard of the names on the box. But I like that gaming has got to a point where there are auteurs of gaming. People have designers they like and designers they don’t like and people consider it like an art form.”

Jennings spoke of growing up in a time where board games were more product than art, and Garfield raved about the “marvelous” diversity of gaming concepts and genres emerging in recent years that helped him get interested in trivia games. Seeing the father of Magic and King of Tokyo take to trivia may be a change of pace, but the result is certainly something worth giving a chance.

“I hope that people trust Richard on games if they’re fans of his. And I hope people trust me on trivia, and obviously that makes it easier for us to sell the game,” Jennings said. “I kind of wish that everybody had that opportunity, but I don’t think we’re going to lead you astray. I don’t think you’ll be lied to if you got the game because our names were on the box.

Half Truth does lie to you. Three times every card, in fact. But once you play a few rounds, you start to see exactly what Jennings really means.

On Mondays, Billboard reveals what songs occupy the top ten spots of the upcoming Hot 100 chart, and today’s dispatch was full of fascinating bits of trivia. They mostly relate to Travis Scott and Kid Cudi’s collaboration “The Scotts” debuting in the No. 1 spot, but this week also put a new trophy on Megan Thee Stallion’s shelf: Thanks to the new Beyonce remix of “Savage,” the single has become Megan’s first top-10 song.

“Savage” jumped ten spots on the chart dated May 9, up from No. 14 all the way to No. 4 (so yes, “Savage” is also Megan’s first top-5 song). Megan offered a simple reaction of “OMGGGGGG” on Twitter, but elaborated more in an Instagram post, writing, “I really want to cry right now like oh my god !!!! This is my first top 10 b*tch my first top 5 !!!! Likeeeeee hottiessss we really doing this sh*t ! We aint never give up we doing everything they said we wouldn’t!!!! I said jwhite give me a beat I can go off on and he did. Thank you @beyonce ! I’m just happy to be here man THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU !!!!”

Megan was beyond pumped when she first heard Beyonce’s contributions to her song, saying in a recent Instagram Live session, “I know that they say manifest it, but b*tch: that’s a real thing! That is a real thing. Manifestation is a real word. I ain’t know that! […] I just really can’t believe it. I heard it for the first time and I called my grandma, and I was like in f*cking shambles. I was really crying, I was like, ‘I really got a f*cking song with Beyonce.’”

Kid Cudi’s decade-plus career has earned the rapper a number of accolades, including a prominent role in this season’s Westworld. Even with his awards, Kid Cudi has never had a song reach No. 1 on the charts… until Monday. The rapper recently joined forces with Travis Scott for the hard-hitting track “The Scotts,” and the single earned him his first No. 1 ever.

“The Scotts” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated May 9. Along with marking Cudi’s career first No. 1, the single became Scott’s third time achieving the feat. It’s only the 37th song ever to debut on top of the chart. Upon its debut, the single garnered over 42.2 million streams in the US alone and was purchased for download 67,000 times, according to Billboard. The single’s impressive number of downloads makes it No. 3 in digital sales so far in 2020, following BTS’ “On” and Justin Bieber’s “Yummy.”

Kid Cudi shared his unabridged excitement to social media upon hearing the news. Cudi thanked both his fans and Travis Scott for the achievement: “THIS MEANS SO MUCH TO ME!!! IVE BEEN IN THIS GAME FOR 12 YEARS AND I FINALLY DID THIS W MY MUTHAF*CKIN BROTHER!”

Along with the single earning Cudi his first No. 1, this weeks’ charts also give Megan Thee Stallion a career first. Megan’s “Savage (Remix)” with Beyonce jumped to No. 4 this week, making it the rapper’s first Top-10 single.

Americas’ national parks are slowly starting to reopen, after being forced to shut down back in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Zion, one of the most heavily trafficked parks in the country, is allowing guests to return on May 13th. Nearby Bryce Canyon is opening certain trails this week. It may feel small, but for lovers of the outdoors this news is certainly a long-awaited ray of hope, especially as summer approaches.

The thing is, parks won’t just be flinging open the gates so that everyone can flood back in. There are likely to be some serious rules in place for social distancing. Meanwhile, all services — restrooms, campgrounds, concessions, lodges — are still shuttered for the foreseeable future. Some of the parks, like Denali in Alaska, are only opening up small stretches of their roads in order to limit access.

In short, you can’t just show up and hope for everything to be as it was before the shutdown. The most important advice is to go to nps.gov, find out if the park you want to go to is even open, and check on what’s accessible. If the park is open, you’ll need to know the National Park Service rules, created in conjunction with the Center for Disease Control. They’re in place to make sure you don’t spread or contract COVID-19 when traveling to or visiting a park, so follow them.

The guidelines for visiting national parks in the wake of COVID are listed below. A quick note, these are for the National Park System — not local or state parks. Policies vary wildly state to state and sometimes county to county and are often subject to rapid change. It falls on you to be aware of and comply with the precautions in place.

Only Visit Parks Close To Your Home

There’s a good reason for this. According to the CDC, “traveling long distances to visit a park may contribute to the spread of COVID-19.” If you’re spending a day on the road, you’re going to need to stop for gas, bathroom breaks, and probably food. That means contact with people and surfaces you wouldn’t normally be in contact with. You could, theoretically, be spreading the disease or pick it up somewhere and take it with you.

Instead, find a national park near you. There probably is one, even if it’s not on your radar. You can travel straight there (and preferably back) without stopping too often and widening the number of people you come into contact with.

Prepare Before You Visit

Part of this is simply going online to figure out if the park near you is even open. Another big part is recognizing that even if the national park you want to see is open, pretty much all the services in the park will be suspended, including toilet facilities. That also typically covers food options, lodging, and visitor’s centers. Campgrounds are also gated as well.

All of this means that if you do plan to go to a park, it should be a day trip and you’re going to need to bring everything you need with you. So ask yourself: Is it even worth it, knowing you won’t be able to use the bathroom or stay the night? It may seem trivial, but simple things like toilets being closed might be a deal-breaker for some.

Always Adhere To 6-foot Social Distancing

This seems pretty obvious, but news reports from beaches from California and Florida show that it’s just not. A statement from the National Park Service indicated that rangers will be on hand to “ensure those [reopening] operations comply with current public health guidance.” And public health guidance includes six-foot social distancing at all times.

It’d be a shame if these parks had to re-close because people refused to maintain social distancing practices. We understand that this can be a bit hard, given that people tend to crowd in areas close to striking vistas or other photo-ops. But the fact is, that really has to stop for now. Our guess is that if, say, a thousand people gathered on the south ridge of the Grand Canyon for a sunset next weekend, they’ll shut it back down. As they should.

Do Not Use Pools, Spas, Hot Springs, Water Parks, Playgrounds

This one is a little murkier. Individual parks will be deciding where you can swim or not in regards to natural water areas. But overall, the CDC recommends you just don’t for now. The CDC notes that water park areas, swimming holes, and pools “are often crowded,” and they “can be challenging to keep surfaces clean and disinfected,” and that the “virus can spread when people touch surfaces and then touch their unwashed hands to their eyes, nose, or mouth.”

Basically, the main facilities at hot springs or spas will probably be closed anyway. As for beaches, lakes, springs, and rivers, please look up and follow the rules prescribed by the NPS and CDC.

Do Not Visit A Park If You’re Sick Or Have Had Contact With Someone With COVID-19

This, again, sounds obvious. But given that a lot of people are asymptomatic, it’s hard to know where to draw a line in the sand if we ever want to open the world back up.

Our advice would be to play it safe. Even if there’s a minor reopening in a park, maybe give it a little more time before you jump in the car and head out. Testing is the only way for us to really know where we stand. And that’s nowhere near universal yet. So… going back to the earlier question, do you really need to go to a national park right now? Why exactly? What about researching less-crowded BLM land? Or hiking a local trail?

Meanwhile, visit most parks online from your couch (we know it’s not the same, but still!). While you wait for the coast to be clear, Find Your “Virtual” Park is a great outlet for experiencing national parks from coast-to-coast.

Drake may miss out on the top spot of Billboard‘s album chart for the first time in a decade thanks to a surprising competitor for the No. 1 spot. While Drake’s albums generally outsell the competition by a large margin — especially after Billboard changed its rules in order to count streams — his latest release, the surprise mixtape Dark Lane Demo Tapes, is reportedly locked into a neck-and-neck race for No. 1 with country legend Kenny Chesney’s Here And Now, according to Hits Daily Double.

The insider trade magazine reports that Drake’s tape is ahead on streaming, enough to amount to 230-255k equivalent units, while Chesney’s ticket bundle has him close enough to touch Drake’s totals at 220-235k units. Drake’s first-place finish would likely be contingent on fans continuing to stream his project at rates consistent with his last few projects. While Dark Lane‘s numbers are impressive for an album that released with no real promotion, Drake’s become accustomed to living at the top of the charts.

If Dark Lane Demo Tapes misses out on No. 1, it would be the first of his full-length projects to miss ever; his highly anticipated debut album Thank Me Later debuted at No. 1 in 2010, followed by a string of No. 1 debuts that continued all the way up to his most recent drop, 2019’s Care Package, which was also a collection of B-Sides and previously released singles that arrived with little-to-know promotion.

It remains to be seen whether Drake will ask fans for a last-minute push the way his countryman Justin Bieber did during the competition between his “Yummy” and Roddy Ricch’s “The Box,” but Drake may have little to worry about anyway. Within hours of releasing Dark Lane Demo Tapes, Drake had already begun teasing another full-length release — this time a proper album — for later this year.

Dark Lane Demo Tapes is out now on OVO Sound/RCA Records.

In its gripping new trailer for the true crime documentary, I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, HBO pulls viewers into Michelle McNamara‘s relentless investigation into hunting down the Golden State Killer.

Based on her bestselling book of the same name, McNamara was a dogged writer whose obsession with unsolved cases led her down the path of attempting to unravel the identity of the serial killer who had plagued California during the ’70s and ’80s. Tragically, McNamara died in 2016 before her book could be finished, but her husband, actor/comedian Patton Oswalt, dedicated himself to completing her book and enlisted the help of his late wife’s colleagues Paul Haynes and Billy Jensen to wrap up her investigation.

I’ll Be Gone In The Dark hit bookshelves in 2018, and less than two months later, the Golden State Killer was finally arrested by the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, bringing a bittersweet ending to McNamara’s passion project. Now, under the direction of Emmy winning director, Liz Garbus, McNamara’s investigation will unfold in a six-part documentary. From HBO’s synopsis:

I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK is a detective story told in McNamara’s own words, through exclusive original recordings and excerpts from her book read by actor Amy Ryan. The series draws from extensive archival footage and police files as well as exclusive new interviews with detectives, survivors and family members of the killer to weave together a picture of a complex and flawed investigation. It is a frightening document of an era when victims were often too ashamed to speak out and sexual crime was minimized in the press and the courtroom. Echoing McNamara’s writing, the series gives voice to the victims, and their experiences speak to the far-reaching, human cost of the decades-old case.

I’ll Be Gone In The Dark will debut on HBO on June 28.

There probably isn’t anyone painted in a more poor light by The Last Dance than Jerry Krause, the Chicago Bulls former general manager who had a contentious relationship with the team’s superstar, Michael Jordan, throughout Jordan’s tenure in Chicago.

Krause was the butt of many jokes, typically about his height and weight, as Jordan and Scottie Pippen never missed a chance to verbally dunk on the team’s top executive. They also made sure to try and make him look bad at every possible moment on the court, attacking anyone they knew to be a personal favorite of Krause’s on the opposing team. This is what led to Toni Kukoc’s baptism by fire in the 1992 Olympics and Jordan said he went after Dan Majerle in the 1993 Finals for the same reason.

Krause died in 2017 and as such is not able to defend himself in the documentary, as it must lean on past interviews for his side of stories, but Krause was working on a memoir when he died that explores a lot of these issues. K.C. Johnson of NBC Sports Chicago was given excerpts of Krause’s memoir by the Krause family, and on Monday he published one that details Krause’s fraught relationship with Jordan — one that was driven by both men’s intense desire to win at all costs.

It goes into Jordan’s foot injury his sophomore year and the minutes restriction he was placed on — which was the start of the tension between the two. Krause explains his side of certain decisions and how he was always looking to do what’s best for the team, but in one section he notes that Jordan did the same at the end of his career.

After the 1998 season, prior to officially announcing his retirement, Jordan severed a tendon in his shooting hand with a cigar cutter — the most Jordan injury possible — and required surgery. As Krause recalls in the memoir, Jordan very easily could’ve decided to force the Bulls into giving him a contract and gone on the disabled list with the injury to collect millions, but instead retired.

To his everlasting credit, at the end of his time with the Bulls he could have really screwed the franchise big time and he didn’t. In the summer after winning the last championship he’d cut his index finger of his shooting hand very badly with a cigar cutter. It was seriously questionable if he could regain enough movement in the finger to be himself again as a shooter. He could have easily put us in an extremely tough situation by saying he wanted to play and force us to sign him to the biggest contract in team sports history. It would then have been easy to go on the disabled list with the finger injury and spend the rest of that strike-shortened season picking up checks every two weeks and not playing at all. But Michael being Michael, once he signed a contract, he gave you a thousand percent effort and would not think of stiffing you.

The entire excerpt Johnson published is an interesting look into how Krause viewed Jordan and their relationship that was fraught with issues. Throughout, there’s a level of respect for what Jordan did, but an acknowledgment that while they both had the same goal, their methods and thoughts on how to get to those goals was different.

While the coronavirus pandemic is undeniably a devastating global crisis, it’s also an unprecedented opportunity. A chance for humanity to take a pause. A chance for us to step back and examine the world we’ve built. A chance to decide if what we have to look back on is really the “normal” we want to return to.

This idea of reimagining normal is explored through a child’s bedtime story in the now viral video called “The Great Realisation.” Released on YouTube on April 29 by a new channel called Probably Tomfoolery, the video goes through four minutes of rhyming poetry that outlines where we were before the pandemic and where we end up in the future.

The Great Realisation

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The story is profound, beautiful, and most importantly, hopeful. It gives fulfilment to the desire so any of us have to not return to the normal that was, but to build a new normal that befits humanity true potential. And it does so in a way that doesn’t preach or point fingers, but rather pushes us to think about what we want the world to look like on the other side of this pandemic.

Definitely worth four minutes of your time.