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Trae Young appeared on “Gil’s Arena,” the podcast hosted by former NBA player and current media personality Gilbert Arenas, and discussed his desire to represent USA Basketball some day. While he’s one of the top players in the NBA, Young has never gotten the opportunity to play for the national team, and as he laid out on the show, he would love to get the chance to join the team at the Olympics next year.

A pretty nice clip! Young would be a fun player in the international game — as he said, his passing, in particular, would be an asset — but we’ll have to wait and see if he makes it. But once he finished talking, the always outspoken Arenas excoriated the current United States squad that is about to participate in the FIBA World Cup a little later this month, calling them a “sorry ass group” and suggesting that Nike plays an outsized role in keeping guys affiliated with other apparel companies off of the team.

“I’m happy for the people who make it,” Arenas said. “It’s cool, it’s cool for some of the guys who got there that I don’t know, some of them probably don’t even start on their team. I don’t know, I don’t wanna look at it, cause it’s embarrassing sometimes where you have star players who’s really stars that do wanna participate, and you just automatically just say, yeah, he’s not gonna fit our style.”

While the World Cup featuring a slightly weaker USA team isn’t anything new — the team came in seventh place in the tournament back in 2019 — this is an especially young team, as only four players have earned All-Star nods and none of them have made it more than once.

How was your weekend? Did you eat something nice or spend time with friends or family? Did you add to Barbie’s insane grosses, or catch its more serious movie twin Oppenheimer? Or did you spend it railing against your many enemies on a social media service, sometimes in ways that could land you in jail? If it’s the latter, you have something in common with Donald Trump.

On Friday, the former president dropped a threatening Truth Social post widely interpreted as concerning his third indictment. The judge overseeing that case didn’t take it lightly and is demanding answers by Monday. In the meantime, Trump decided to go after someone else: Nancy Pelosi, who had said he looked like a “scared puppy” en route to his third arraignment. Not so, according to the big guy himself.

“I purposely didn’t comment on Nancy Pelosi’s very weird story concerning her husband,” he said, referring to the intruder who viciously attacked her spouse last year, prompting wacko conspiracy theories. He added, “but now I can because she said something about me, with glee, that was really quite vicious.” He denied Pelosi’s claim, writing, “I wasn’t ‘scared.’ Nevertheless, how mean a thing to say! She is a Wicked Witch whose husband’s journey from hell starts and finishes with her. She is a sick & demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!”

Pretty weird stuff! The guy should probably go sit by the sea and eat some oysters or something. After all, those are two things he won’t be able to do should his antics finally laid him in the clink.

(Via Mediaite)

In July, Eminem surprised fans when he joined boxer Terence Crawford during his ring walkout for his fight against Errol Spence Jr. On Saturday, August 5, Lil Durk accompanied Jake Paul in Dallas at the American Airlines Center for his stroll before he faced Nate Diaz. The pair used Durk’s latest single, “All My Life,” featuring J. Cole, as the soundtrack to their strut.

As Durk’s song played over the speakers, the rapper used the camera time to his benefit, updating fans on the deluxe version of his latest album, Almost Healed. The shirt he bore words, written in large red capitalized letters similar to the album’s featured font, that confirmed the album would be released sometime this month.

In the fan-captured video of the entrance, Durk emerged wearing his t-shirt before Paul appeared from behind the curtains.

For weeks Durk has told fans that the extended version of the album will eclipse the work he did on the original recording. On July 13, he took to X (formerly Twitter) to write, “Almost Healed Deluxe should of been the main album painnnnnnnnn.”

After Durk canceled multiple dates of his Sorry For The Drought Tour due to a health scare, former ticketholders hoped the new edition would compensate for the nixed live shows.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. must have known what would happen if he ran for president. For one thing, his wacko views would get greater exposure. When he floated a bizarre, arguably anti-Semitic theory about how COVID-19 was a bioweapon designed to exclude Jewish and Chinese people, even his own family members called him out. In the past RFK JR. has claimed that he’s cool with them doing that. Privately it’s another matter.

The New York Times has a new profile on the Democratic candidate, and buried within (as teased out by The Daily Beast) is a note on how he’s reacted when siblings and other close relatives have criticized his crackpot conspiracy theories, or the very fact that he’s running. (Some openly don’t support his campaign.) According to the report, Kennedy has “reached out” to some of them to complain about their public comments.” He’s also “engaged in tense discussions about his campaign and platform.”

Some of these correspondences have gone both ways. As per NYT, “Some family members recall pressing him on why he was running and warning him that he was putting his life up for scrutiny in a way that might be personally devastating.”

Has Kennedy’s controversial campaign been worth it? Is he fine with the extra scrutiny paid upon his wife, Cheryl Hines, whose most frequent coworker is no fan of her husband’s candidacy? Or is it part of some bigger scheme to peel off potential Biden voters, therefore making it easier for Donald Trump to amass more votes? The latter may be a conspiracy theory, but it’s a lot sounder than any of the ones Kennedy has ever floated.

(Via NYT and The Daily Beast)

Early in his career, Post Malone would brag about his rockstar lifestyle. However, those drunken nights nearly derailed his marital plans after his fiancée rejected his proposal. During his appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast on Wednesday, August 3, Post told host Alex Cooper about the night two years ago he decided to pop the question to his then-girlfriend.

“I had lost a significant amount of money at the table, and we go upstairs, and I’m, like, off my rocker hammered,” Post said. “I was like, ‘Hey, you wanna marry me? I got a ring and all this stuff. And then she said no.”

To others, getting a rejection might have been devastating. Pot, though, took it as a learning lesson. “She’s like, ‘Ask me tomorrow,’” said Post. “And then I did. And I was sober, and it was nice.”

Post took to social media in April to open up about his journey to sobriety. He shut down drug use rumors, writing, “I wanted to say that I’m not doing drugs. I’ve had a lot of people ask me about my weight loss and, I’d suppose, performance on stage. I’m having a lot of fun performing and have never felt healthier.”

Listen to the full episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast below.

Whether it’s soccer, basketball, or football, the worlds of professional sports, and rap music often bleed over into each other. Last year, Drake launched his recreational basketball league. J. Cole briefly played in the Canadian Elite Basketball League. Meanwhile, Jack Harlow showed off his basketball skills in the White Men Can’t Jump reboot. Although Harlow was embraced for his amateur abilities on the court, he has different standards for aspiring rappers.

During an interview with No Jumper, former NFL player-turned-rapper Le’Veon Bell revealed that Harlow declined his request for a guest feature a few times. As Bell discussed his budding music career, he confessed that he’s taken some hard hits to his ego.

“Bro, I sent Jack Harlow two songs, and he turned them both down,” said Bell.

He went on to provide more details regarding the interactions. “The first one, he’s like, ‘Nah bro, this one ain’t it.’ The second one, he was like, ‘Hey, you close on this one, but it still ain’t it,’” laughed Bell.

As such, a Jack Harlow and Le’Veon Bell song isn’t going to happen anytime soon. But Bell is hopeful that it will go down in the future.

Watch the full interview above.

Jack Harlow is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The Golden State Warriors pulled off one of the more interesting trades of the NBA’s offseason when they turned Jordan Poole into Chris Paul. In a big picture sense, trading Poole for Paul indicated that Golden State is all-in on trying to win around its core of Steph Curry, Draymond Green, and Klay Thompson, with any hope of a two-timeline approach that sacrificed a little bit now with an eye on being able to compete on a longer timetable going out the window.

But for just next year, there’s a question about how Paul will fit into everything, in part because he made clear he would like to stay in the starting lineup. Regardless, in an interview with Robin Lundberg of Sports Illustrated, Steve Kerr made clear the team found it “hugely important” to bring Paul on board in an effort to make the team less one-dimensional.

“Chris is such an incredible competitor,” Kerr said. “He’s one of the all-time great competitors in my mind. He’s so smart, he controls games, he’s thinking three steps ahead all the time, he gets any shot he wants in the midrange. Our team last year needed another way to attack, and we became a little too one-dimensional with Steph and high ball screens. We needed another playmaker to give us a different look. And Chris is, as we know, one of the all-time great pick-and-roll players, and he’ll know how to control the tempo. It’s hugely important, especially in playoff games, to have guys like that and they’re hard to find.”

A major issue for the Warriors over the years has been keeping their offense afloat when Curry rests, and at the bare minimum, Paul should help with that. If there is a way for him and Curry together — and it’s not 100 percent clear that there is, as that would be a backcourt that has some serious defensive limitations — Paul could theoretically be a major on-ball option to unlock Curry’s ability to frustrate teams with his ability to get open off of the ball. At the very least, Kerr seems excited to explore any and all options with his new guard.

The Eras Tour is well on its way to crossing the one billion dollar threshold. However, money isn’t the only motivating factor behind Taylor Swift’s robust international show. During her concert at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on Thursday, August 3, Swift confessed that performing live is a coping mechanism she uses to “process life” and a method to bond with fans.

After the COVID-19 pandemic halted touring, Swift has said they put all her attention on recording. According to Variety journalist Chris Willman, she told concertgoers she decided to drop “As many albums as humanly possible” to replace the loss of direct contact with her fans that she’d temporarily lost.

“The reason we didn’t tour for five years — that was not a normal or scheduled thing. We had a global pandemic; we had much more important things that we had to worry about,” said Swift.

She continued, “But I’ve been playing shows sort of as a coping mechanism my whole life since I was about 12 years old. I go through this process where I feel things, write a song about that thing, show it to you, and go, ‘Do you like it? Did you ever feel this way too?’ And so when you guys are at a show if you even nod your head or make eye contact with me or sing the words to a song during a show, that validates that emotion and makes me feel like I wasn’t alone in feeling it. It’s sort of my coping process in life — so all of a sudden, that was gone. And so I decided in order to keep that connection going, if I couldn’t play live shows with you, I was going to make and release as many albums as humanly possible.”

The Eras Tour is slated to return for a second North American run in 2024 after its Latin American wing concludes.

Elon Musk has been a busy guy. Two weeks ago he up and rebranded Twitter, which is now supposed to be called simply X. The move has brought changes to the company’s San Francisco headquarters, including giving conference names new, weird names and irritating neighbors. Does he even have time to get into some semblance of shape for his proposed Mark Zuckerberg cage match? Probably not, but when/if the tussle happens, it won’t play on primetime TV. It’ll play elsewhere.

“Zuck v Musk fight will be live-streamed on 𝕏,” Musk tweeted on Sunday, adding, “All proceeds will go to charity for veterans.”

Did Musk clear this with Zuckerberg, who also owns a pretty big social media company? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s not unlikely that Musk whimsically made the call before consulting with anyone, including the owner of Facebook/Meta with whom he’s supposed to duke it out. After all, he has a habit of making rash decisions without making sure he’s dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s.

Musk first floated the idea of a cage match with Zuckerberg back in late June. Zuckerberg was into the idea, not the least because he’s been kicking ass at Jiu-Jitsu matches. Unlike Musk, he’s super-ripped, on top of being a rival whose social media service he’s trying to tank.

Perhaps Zuckerberg will cut a deal in which viewers can also watch the fight on Facebook, and then they’ll gamble on how many people watch the fight where. But maybe some will find it more pleasurable to watch Musk get his butt handed to him on the platform he’s been making worse.

(Via Yahoo!)

Everyone has a bad day now and then, but unfortunately for Lizzo, hers has snowballed into a rocky week. On Tuesday, August 1, news broke that the singer was named in a lawsuit accusing her of sexual assault and alleging that she fostered a hostile work environment. Since then, Lizzo has released a statement on Instagram refuting the claims outlined in the lawsuit three of her former dancers filed.

As people online continue to weigh in on the allegations, Grimes took to her Twitter/X page to support her longtime friend. In a lengthy post screenshotted by Pop Crave, Grimes spoke about her positive interactions with Lizzo over the years.

“I love Lizzo. Not saying I don’t believe people when bad things happen, but I had dancers mistreated on my watch in ways I didn’t find out about until way later,” Grimes wrote. “Mebe sh*t is bad. But loyalty matters to me. Lizzo was kind to me and others for a decade before she was ‘cool,’ and she checked in on me when no one cared. I’ve only ever seen exemplary behavior from her, especially when everyone was hating on me, and she was on top of the world.”

She continued, “There was no reason for her to check in besides to be a good person. Just my two cents. I recall when she first blew up being so happy because I’d never known such an admirable person to find fame in the music industry. I struggle to believe she would have so radically changed. Tired of a culture that seeks to destroy its greatest virtues. Lizzo is amazing.”

Grimes doubled down when users began to push back against her rationale. One person asked her, “Chris Brown was nice to me, so he never hit Rihanna?” Grimes replied, “Rihanna has supported Chris Brown in the aftermath because Rihanna seems to be about restorative justice. *Assuming* Lizzo is guilty, it’s funny to me the same people who fight for restorative justice seem against it for someone who has been a figurehead for change and suffered greatly to fight for acceptance.”

https://twitter.com/PopCrave/status/1688177076208009218/photo/2

This case is still developing.

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