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Over 35 seasons of The Simpsons, we’ve learned about Comic Book Guy. His real name is Jeff Albertson; he’s married to Kumiko; and he can’t resist a 100 tacos for 100 dollars deal, especially if there’s a Doctor Who marathon on. We also might have finally learned who the “real” Comic Book Guy is.

In the latest episode of the excellent Talking Simpsons podcast hosted by Bob Mackey and Henry Gilbert, guest Eva Anderson claimed that the character is based on a man named John Brian King.

“I met him a few times and he worked at a book store,” she said. “He has a website and stuff, but he was the one who was eating fried clams when the Simpsons writers came over to the store.” This checks out with previous comments made by Simpsons writer George Meyer, who said back in 2000 that the the character was inspired by an employee at the Amok bookstore in Los Angeles who was “sitting on the high stool, kind of lording over the store with that supercilious attitude and eating behind the counter a big Styrofoam container full of fried clams with a lot of tarter sauce.”

Anderson, a writer for Comedy Bang! Bang!, You’re the Worst, and WeCrashed (and a podcast favorite on Doughboys and Podcast: The Ride), called the “real” Comic Book Guy a “very funny, sarcastic guy. He’s also a title designer. He did the titles for [the Paul Thomas Anderson movie] Punch Drunk Love.” She met him “when I was in my early 20s. I was a receptionist for his wife, who was a famous music supervisor… But we all went to dinner together. When you meet this guy, there’s no question that he’s the entire Comic Book Guy model.”

Hopefully minus the loneliness and cheeseburgers.

You can listen to Talking Simpsons below (the Comic Book Guy talk begins around the 2:02:55 mark, although you should listen to the full thing since the episode they’re covering is the all-timer “Last Exit to Springfield”).

Cardi B is a human being — a multi-diamond-certified human being, but a human being, nonetheless. Cardi B simply wishes BardiGang, her most fervent fans, and the general population at large would remember that when questioning why it has taken six years and counting for the Bronx-bred rapper to deliver her sophomore studio album, the long-awaited follow-up to her record-obliterating debut Invasion Of Privacy.

“Like yesterday, I was scrolling through TikTok and a b*tch made me cry,” Cardi B told Rolling Stone as the cover star for its June 2024 issue. “She was just like, ‘She has got to give it up. She’s better off being an influencer. You was cosplaying being a rapper. Because you don’t take it seriously. That’s why you don’t put out your music.’ And it’s like, I take my music so f*cking seriously that that’s why I don’t put it out. Because if it’s not perfect to my ear, if every f*cking word doesn’t sound like it’s pronounced right, if the beat is overpowering the words or the words is overpowering the beat, I don’t want to put it out.”

She added, “When you give so much and somebody just drags it down, like you’re just playing with your p*ssy all day, just watching Netflix all f*cking day long, it’s very hurtful.”

Elsewhere in the Mankaprr Conteh-written profile, an unnamed Cardi B rep confirmed that “an album in 2024 is still the plan,” and much of the story is dedicated to observing Cardi B hard at work in the studio — tormented over getting it right because she cares so deeply.

The tear-inducing TikTok is referenced again toward the end, when Cardi B showed Conteh an offer to perform a show for $1.5 million.

“If I was doing things for money, I would put out music every month because nothing pays me more than shows,” Cardi said. “I’m turning down these concerts because I don’t got no new music.”

So far in 2024, Cardi B has released “Like What (Freestyle)” and “Enough (Miami).”

The most anticipated sports video game release of the last decade is rapdily approaching, as EA Sports College Football 25 will revive the old NCAA Football franchise after more than 10 years away. After rumblings of a July release for the past few months, EA Sports confirmed a July 19 release date for the franchise and released the covers for the game.

The reason the game is finally back is that EA Sports is now able to pay the players — something they’ve always been willing to do, but were not been able to until recently as the NCAA enacted NIL policies. Because the active players are signed on to a licensing deal, the cover no longer has to be a former college football player. Last week, the PlayStation Store spoiled the cover release for the Deluxe Edition of the game, and while we all knew it was likely to feature active players, it still was somewhat jarring to see a college football game with current college football players on the cover.

On Thursday, EA Sports officially unveiled the two covers for the game, with the Deluxe Edition we already saw and the Standard Edition, which features a trio of current stars: Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers, Michigan running back Donovan Edwards, and Colorado receiver/cornerback Travis Hunter.

The three cover stars provided brief thoughts in a release about their excitement to be on the cover of the game as college football finally returns to the video game landscape.

“EA SPORTS games are legendary and to see myself on the cover of College Football 25 is truly surreal,” said Edwards. “It’s a huge honor to join past Michigan greats as a cover athlete on an EA SPORTS college football game and keep the tradition going.”

“To represent the burnt orange on the real and virtual gridirons is such an honor. EA SPORTS games were the first place I lived out my childhood dream of playing for the Longhorns, so it’s a full-circle moment to now be on the cover of College Football 25,” said Ewers.

“I couldn’t be more pumped to be part of College Football 25 and represent my Buffaloes on the cover of a game with so much excitement behind it,” said Hunter. “I can’t wait to play and see myself, my teammates and my school in the game.”

More details about the game will be coming this week and later this month, but the Standard and Deluxe editions are available for pre-order, while EA Sports will also offer an MVP Bundle, which will get fans the Deluxe editions of College Football 25 and Madden 25, with 3-day early access to both games.

(Obviously, NSFW content will be found below. C’mon, it’s Bridgerton.)

As Bridgerton already proved with Netflix show’s second season, the show can still get it despite the odds (being Duke-less, that is). And much like when the streaming service knew what they were doing with a certain photo of Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, they are at it again on this third-season release day: “Good morning, Bridgertons.”

Yes, the story’s main focus this season is upon Penelope Featherington and Colin Bridgerton and their sex scenes, but the series made sure to bring us up to speed with how the last central courtship is working out, and let’s just say that Anthony Bridgerton and Kate Sharma are still in their honeymoon phase, six months later. They are also rivaling that “moaning” display from a recent The Walking Dead season.

For starters, there are obvious “scratch marks” on display.

Then there’s the moment that might even be able to make Julia Fox reconsider her celibacy stance (only kidding, Julia — please keep doing you):

For sure, Bridgerton is still refusing to shy away from female pleasure, and my goodness, these two actors (Simone Ashley and Jonathan Bailey) have absurd chemistry. Perhaps even too much.

Bridgerton‘s fourth season (the first half of it, anyway) can currently be streamed on Netflix.

Back in 2020, Cardi B interviewed Joe Biden as part of his presidential campaign. Since then, she has soured on the now-President.

Cardi is the subject of a new Rolling Stone feature shared today (May 16). In it, she’s blunt about her feelings towards both Biden and Donald Trump: “I don’t f*ck with both of y’all n****s,” she said as confirmation that she doesn’t plan to vote at all in the upcoming election.

The piece goes on to note, “Before, she had seen Trump as a dire threat, but under Biden, she’s felt ‘layers and layers of disappointment’ from what she sees as domestic and foreign mismanagement. The cost of living is too high, wages are too low, and too little is being done about it, she says.” Cardi added, “I feel like people got betrayed.”

Cardi also said, “It’s just like, damn, y’all not caring about nobody. Then, it really gets me upset that there is solutions to it. There is a solution. I know there’s a solution because you’re spending billions of dollars on any f*cking thing.” She later added, “[America] don’t pay for endless wars for countries that have been going through sh*t for a very long time. There’s countries [where] kids are getting killed every single day, but because the [US] won’t benefit from that country, they won’t help. I don’t like that America has this superhero cape on. We never did things to be superheroes. We did things for our own convenience.”

Check out the full feature here.

BardiGang is starved for Cardi B’s sophomore album, which will be her first LP release since her groundbreaking, Grammy-winning 2018 debut, Invasion Of Privacy. Cardi has teased her highly anticipated follow-up for years, even saying that the album would drop at some point in 2024 on several occasions last fall. Still, it’s difficult to keep up with where Cardi actually is in her album rollout process.

Is Cardi B Releasing A New Album In 2024?

Earlier this week, Cardi B responded to someone on X (formerly Twitter) who suggested that Cardi was “underappreciated” by her fans. Cardi wrote, “Exactly and I tell myself this all the time, and I hate that I fall back and start interacting again and it bites me in the ass…anyway NO album this year..Dropping these features I already committed to and traveling and enjoying my summer.”

Uh oh.

But fear not.

On Thursday morning, May 16, Cardi B was revealed as the latest Rolling Stone cover star. Within the Mankaprr Conteh-written profile, Cardi’s apprehension about dropping a follow-up to Invasion Of Privacy is thoroughly reported, and an update is provided on where the as-yet-titled sophomore studio album stands, as excerpted below.

“In an Instagram video from March 1, Cardi promised to do just that, saying she would release the album this year. By the middle of May, however, she will backpedal in a heated online exchange with her followers. As Cardi and Spotify commemorate those four songs hitting a billion streams each, she’ll spot fans on X posting skeptically about the status of the album, and fire back: ‘This is a big accomplishment for me, and of course here comes Bardigang complaining like Deum I can’t celebrate sh*t,’ she’ll write, adding, ‘Anyway NO album this year I don’t care I’m relaxing.’ Soon after, however, she’ll delete the latter tweet, with her rep confirming to Rolling Stone that an album in 2024 is still the plan.”

Read the full Rolling Stone profile here.

The It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia gang has never been busier.

Glenn Howerton is giving award-worthy performances; Charlie Day has become an in-demand voice actor; Kaitlin Olson is the star of the new sitcom High Potential (she’s also doing great work on HBO’s Hacks); Rob McElhenney is buying soccer teams around the world with Ryan Reynolds; and Danny DeVito is doing his Danny DeVito thing (Jersey Mike’s commercials, mostly).

It must be a challenge to have all their schedules open at the same time, but they found a way: DeVito revealed that It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia season 17 (!) will begin filming in September. “We’re going again in September,” he said at a recent red carpet event for Chris Pine’s Poolman. “Now that we’re with Disney here, we’ve been very tame over the years, so now we can really pull out the stops, you know? Maybe make some noise.”

Maybe win some Emmys, too? Probably not, but a man can dream!

DeVito also recently expressed an interest in voicing Wario in the sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie. “You never know what happens in the world. I’m up for a lot of things… I’m ready to do a lot of things,” he told The Movie Dweeb. “Whatever’s coming, you know, I look at, I see, I evaluate.”

He’s a-Danny Devito, he’s a-gonna win… the role… hopefully.

(Via Deadline)

It appears things have been up and down for Zach Bryan over the past couple months. He performed with Bruce Springsteen in March, but more recently he and girlfriend Brianna LaPaglia apparently got into a serious crash.

LaPaglia, better known as Brianna Chickenfry, shared the story on TikTok, saying in a video:

“I’m just going to rant for a second because I think I’m nearing a mental breakdown and I’ve been living on a bus for the past month, so that doesn’t help the mental. […] Two nights ago, Zach and I got into a traumatizing side-by-side car crash. It flipped a bunch of times, everything shattered, and thank God we had our seat belts on, but there was a lot of blood and we thought we were saying goodbye to each other. After the ambulance came and he got all stitched up, we were like, ‘Oh my God, thank God, it didn’t hit an artery.’ It was just a huge gash, we were OK, we are happy and alive.”

Based on LaPaglia’s phrasing, the crash either involved two vehicles positioned side by side, or it involved a side-by-side, a type of recreational vehicle often used off-road. Either way, Bryan himself has yet to publicly acknowledge the incident.

Check out the video below.

For a long time, Zachary Cole Smith has wanted to make what he calls a “political shoegaze record.” As you might expect, this was not an easy assignment. First, there were the inherent limitations of the genre. Shoegaze music is not associated with political lyrics — or decipherable lyrics of any kind. It’s possible that Cocteau Twins wrote songs about trickle-down economics in the 1980s, but who in the hell would know if they did?

Then there was the matter of Smith’s own history. As the leader of DIIV, Smith has been known for a volatile private life that contrasts with the consistent excellence of his band’s output. If you don’t know his music, you might still remember his highly publicized bust back in 2013 when he and his then-girlfriend Sky Ferreira were pulled over by police and caught with heroin and ecstasy. While Smith was shipped off to rehab, he was saddled with a reputation as an emotionally fragile “Kurt Cobain of his generation”-type, an image that informed DIIV’s pitch-black 2016 double album Is The Is Are as well as the 2019 followup Deceiver.

“There was a lot of baggage to get out of the way first with the other records,” Smith admitted during a Zoom call with his bandmates — guitarist Andrew Bailey, bassist Colin Caulfield and drummer Ben Newman — last month. “It’s like we gazed inwards and then it gave us the privilege to gaze outwards a bit more.”

The result is DIIV’s fourth LP due out May 24, Frog In Boiling Water, which melds the band’s cavernous, widescreen guitar atmospherics with lyrics that ponder a world that appears to be in a permanent state of decline. On the title track — the titular metaphor’s meaning is self-evident — Smith takes on the persona of a fascist leader who extols the virtue of burning books. In “Everyone Out,” he wonders if the idea that the structures that undergird society can actually be changed amounts to false hope. In the luminous single “Brown Paper Bag,” he likens himself to tossed-off detritus “stuck on the ground / down, wasted.”

The topical polemics of Frog In Boiling Water are well-timed given that this is an election year, though Smith brushed off my suggestion that the album coinciding with the impending Biden vs. Trump rematch is significant.

“I think our faith in electoral politics is very low,” he said, “so I would say not.”

The album I have described thus far might seem like the year’s single bleakest and most depressing release yet. But Frog In The Water doesn’t actually sound like that. While the words are frequently downbeat, they are paired with the most flat-out beautiful music of DIIV’s career. (The band is also funnier than they get credit for, as evidenced by the Fred Durst-starring SNL parody in the “Brown Paper Bag” music video.) After the more muscular and aggressive Deceiver, Frog In The Water marks a return to the gauzy tranquility of their droned-out 2012 debut Oshin, which established DIIV as one of the finest bands to be associated with shoegaze in the 2010s. It took them a while to rediscover that path, as work on Frog On The Water dragged on for four years. The process was hampered in part by the pandemic and also by their own exacting perfectionism and impulse to reinvent themselves. At one point they even considered making an electronic record. Only when producer Chris Coady came on board did they begin to move back to the dark-hued guitar rock for which they are known.

“For a lot of people, that is part of what they fell in love with with the first two albums — this rich, dreamy atmosphere that is very feelings-forward,” Caulfield said. “Rather than this song has an amazing bridge and an amazing chorus. A lot of times with the earlier songs, sometimes there wasn’t even a chorus, but it didn’t really matter because the song felt so good to listen to. I feel like the new album has an element of that which makes it feel more comprehensive in our catalog.”

I agree with him — Frog In The Water is a summation of everything DIIV does well, starting with their knack for turning out the sort of mile-wide, so-sad-they-make-you-happy rock songs that made The Cure and The Smashing Pumpkins their respective eras’ kings of pain. While DIIV has not achieved the level of popularity of those bands, Frog In The Water suggests they are on their way to establishing their own considerable artistic legacy.

I love the music video for “Brown Paper Bag” and how you take this institution of mainstream pop culture, Saturday Night Live, and slowly make it seem more and more demented. How did that idea come about?

Zachary Cole Smith: The first thing that we did around the record was the Soul-Net website, which was really fun and cool and we’re really proud of it, but it felt super niche. It was micro-targeting this specific area of the internet that the song deals with. We talked about broadening the scope and then we’re like, what is the bastion of whatever’s popular? So, we went for Saturday Night Live. It was really nice of them to have us on the show.

It’s very accessible as a symbolic target. Was playing SNL ever something you aspired to?

Ben Newman: We were huge fans of their musical guests in the ’90s. We watched tons of SNL performances, but it seems like they’ve transitioned into only the most mainstream, Top 40 artists now. So we weren’t too worried about making them mad. But we did trick a lot of people, unfortunately.

ZCS: Some people early on were like, “It’s going to alienate SNL,” or whatever. And it’s like, there’s no shot of us going on. It doesn’t matter. SNL represents the most banal neoliberal culture, and so it felt like a fair target. And they deal in parody, so it felt like it would’ve been hypocritical if they asked us to take it down.

Any good Fred Durst stories?

Colin Caulfield: He was extremely cool. He drove from where he lives, which I won’t reveal, but he drove a distance to get to us during a really crazy rainstorm where there were a lot of road closures. It really seemed like he wouldn’t be able to come, and he just appeared. That’s a testament to how committed he was to really showing up to be in the video, which is really cool.

ZCS: There were maybe 15 people working on the video. There were camera people and audio people and a lot of our friends who were helping, and he individually went to each person and thanked them before he left. He did the opposite of the Irish Goodbye. I’ve heard it called the Midwest Goodbye, where you individually say goodbye to every person.

The title of the album is taken from Daniel Quinn’s 1996 book The Story Of B, which deals with themes related to environmental disaster and slow societal collapse. And you can see that communicated in the video, which again takes this popular institution and depicts it gradually falling apart. Why were you drawn to that as subject matter for these songs?

ZCS: It’s what we’re interested in. It’s what we talk about and it feels like what we had been wanting to make music about for a while. But there was a lot of baggage to get out of the way first with the other records. It’s like we gazed inwards and then it gave us the privilege to gaze outwards a bit more.

We’re also in an election year. Did that influence you?

ZCS: I think our faith in electoral politics is very low, so I would say not.

Andrew Bailey: It’s not like, “Oh, we got an election coming up, let’s get political so that we can make sure Trump doesn’t become president.” But it is good for us that there is an election just because a lot of the themes that we’re talking about are best exemplified by a U.S. election. We’re talking about how we actually don’t have democracy because there’s only one economic philosophy on the ballot. It’s neoliberalism on both sides. That idea sort of stretches to all the themes that we’re talking about.

CC: Anything that deals with what is happening at all times as opposed to how people interact with politics or larger systems, which is to only hyper-focus on them when an election rolls around. Which I used to be very much like that. I would turn my politics brain off or my socioeconomic brain off, and then when an election came around, I would become an expert. But this stuff that the album deals with, it’s not dependent.

On the title track, there’s a line that stood out to me: “Burn the books, don’t you see, history begins right now with you and me.” To me there are two ways to read that line. One is hopeful — the idea that you can set the past aside and start anew. The other way is sinister — there are clear fascist implications to burning books.

AB: It definitely has hope to it, but I think that that specific example is more trying to paint a picture of a false hope. Because the album also touches on many more types of false hopes, and one of those false hopes is the idea that if we could just crumble everything and start over, then everything would be all right, which is false because it’s impossible.

BN: We had an interview yesterday where he was talking about Covid and post-Covid times and how when you’re living through history, there is this feeling of, “Oh man, maybe we could get it right this time.” It hopeful but also kind of just sad because it doesn’t usually shake out that way.

ZCS: While we were making the record, my wife and I had a baby. There’s this conflict that I think any parent goes through of bringing a kid into a really fucked up world, and ultimately the decision we made was to do that. And I think you have to hold on to some type of hope, whether on a micro scale or a macro scale, and we deal with both of those. But the hope is a lot of times in the musical elements of the songs rather than lyrical. We didn’t want to make a totally scorched earth, black-pilled record because that would be boring, and I think the human experience is more complex. You do all types of mental gymnastics just to exist, and it’s important to have that kind of duality in the music. We always talk about it: happy/sad. That’s the best feeling that music can give you a lot of times.

I read that this album was initially going to break dramatically from your signature sound and be more of a samples-based record.

BN: Sort of. It went through a lot of different phases because it took us a long time to figure it out. We did use some samples, but I think it was more computer-based, like software instruments. It was actually years into the process that it started to become more of a rock record again.

ZCS: I think that was a direct consequence of being isolated in the pandemic. With rock music, you picture a band in a room playing to people, and without that context it stops making sense. So, when we were working on music on the computer, isolated, it was really in that direction. It wasn’t until we brought in Chris Coady where he wanted to lean into our strengths a bit more, and being a live band is one of our strengths.

CC: It’s just hard to distill. It took so long and it involved so many different approaches. Except for when Chris was like, “You guys are going to play the album,” it didn’t feel like there were big forks in the road. One path would bring us back to the same path and vice versa. It’s funny, because I do the same thing with other bands’ albums, but people love to get an understanding of the timeline. But when you’re actually making an album, you’re just throwing stuff at the wall.

Was it always the same set of songs or did you cycle through a lot of material to land here?

AB: These were always in the mix, but we definitely had a big pile of songs that we picked these out of over time. We had a whole rating system and democracy and all that fun stuff. These were the cream that rose to the top — not because they were the best songs, but because they fit and felt like they belong together.

So, there’s another album you could have made out of that big pile of songs?

AB: Oh yeah. There’s, like, 10 records.

BN: We talked about the idea of a double record or a Kid A/Amnesiac-type thing, doing two records in a row. I really wanted to have 15 B-sides or whatever. But when the time came to book studio time, it became clear that we had to narrow it down because of money and time. Ten songs took us four years. I could only imagine if we decided to do 20 songs.

CC: In my opinion, there is not another DIIV record in the stuff we made. I feel like we have such high standards, so there’s good ideas and songs, but the 10 that we wound up with are the DIIV songs, if that makes sense. The other ones didn’t fit. It’s a challenge for us because a lot of bands — and this isn’t a comment on quality of music or whatever — but they don’t have the same criteria that they’re rigorously trying to adhere to. They’re just trying to make songs, and we’re chasing an abstract feeling. Which is both cool and uncool sometimes, when it becomes difficult.

When you’re making a record, do you think about how this thing is going to fit with the other albums you’ve made.

AB: Definitely.

ZCS: I think that’s something that we were always thinking about. On Deceiver, we were referencing a lot of other bands. We were trying to make a genre record, so we were pulling up records and studying records and really being students of other bands. And on this one — it wasn’t really on purpose — but we did not do that ever. It seemed way more self-referential and trying to chase down this thing, what we do. Even picking the album art, I remember taking a screenshot of Apple Music and putting the album art next to the other albums and seeing if it fits. We literally did that.

My initial thought when I heard Frog In Boiling Water is that it distills everything you do well. I have this concept of the “new greatest hits” record, where it’s an album of new songs but they sound like they could be old hits. This album is like that to me.

CC: The thing that Deceiver lacks is the atmosphere that the first two albums have, especially Oshin. You put it on and it’s like a cloud that you step into, and it just surrounds you as you listen to it. And I feel like the new album really has that. For a lot of people, that is part of what they fell in love with with the first two albums — this rich, dreamy atmosphere that is very feelings-forward. Rather than this song has an amazing bridge and an amazing chorus. A lot of times with the earlier songs, sometimes there wasn’t even a chorus, but it didn’t really matter because the song felt so good to listen to. I feel like the new album has an element of that which makes it feel more comprehensive in our catalog.

Frog In The Water also feels like the most overtly shoegaze-sounding album you’ve made. We’re in a moment when a younger audience is rediscovering that music via social media apps like TikTok. What do you think is DIIV’s relationship with that genre, and have you noticed an influx of younger fans?

ZCS: We’re definitely not genre purists and don’t really love talking about genre, but I think this rediscovery of shoegaze also represents a new reinvention of shoegaze, and seeing how the new generation processes it or expands on the genre is really exciting. I think we wanted to make a political shoegaze record or a political record that doesn’t seem like something that’s a part of the genre. We want to expand on it in our own way. And it’s cool that there’s this paradigm where people are — I can’t think of the word — not embellishing but expanding on the genre.

CC: It definitely feels like we have a surge of new fans, but it has yet to feel distilled or specifically part of that kind of shoegaze revival. But it does seem like all of those new bands that are blowing up are fans of us, which is cool. So, it feels like we’re connected to them. But we’re not necessarily reaping the benefits as directly as some of those new kinds of more viral shoegaze bands, which makes sense because like Cole saying, they’re expanding the genre in terms of aesthetic. And it feels like we did that with this album, but in a slightly different way, and a much more lyrically driven way.

AB: It’s always been confusing for me because I had never listened to shoegaze and still haven’t. When we first came out and people were like, “Oh, you’re a shoegaze band” I was like, “All right, cool, whatever you say.” But then we toured with an actual shoegaze band, No Joy, and I was like, “We don’t do any of that.” I guess it was just a vibe that people picked up on. Honestly, I’m still confused by it, but now that I understand what those essential ingredients are and seeing how we did use them on our third album, I guess I see what people are talking about when they think of us as a shoegaze band before any other genre that we could just as easily fit into.

Circling back to the “burn it down” conversation: Zachary, you have been an outspoken critic of Spotify and you co-founded the music industry collective United Musicians and Allied Workers union. How hopeful are you that there is a post-streaming future?

ZCS: I don’t think that listening to music online is bad. The problem is that it’s a tech giant using the library of recorded music as fodder to sell their tech and it devalues music. But I do think that a socialized streaming model or a public free library would be amazing. And it wouldn’t be all our money is going to a tech company.

I think that a streaming model is possible, but it wouldn’t be this one. It wouldn’t be a corporate one.

AB: There’s no reason at all that the main profits generated by streaming music go to the middleman. They’re using the internet, which was built with taxpayer money, to charge people to listen to other people’s music. The fact that there isn’t a nationalized streaming service is just absurd.

Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan has it written into her contract that Netflix must provide a PG-version of the racy show for her family’s viewing. But everyone else gets to see her “f*ck you” nude scene.

Coughlan, who plays Penelope Featherington on the Shondaland show, told Stylist magazine that she requested to be undressed during a love scene in season three with co-star Luke Newton. “I specifically asked for certain lines and moments to be included. There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice,” the actress said. “It just felt like the biggest ‘f*ck you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering. I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought, ‘When I’m 80, I want to look back on this and remember how f*cking hot I looked!’”

Variety has more:

Coughlan has combated online trolls about her weight in the past. She directly called them out in a 2022 Instagram post that read: “If you have an opinion about my body please, please don’t share it with me… It’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day.”

The first half of Bridgerton season 3 is streaming on Netflix now.

(Via Stylist and Variety)