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The average episode of Jeopardy! is watched by million of viewers. That’s a lot of public exposure for, say, a beekeeper from Albany, New York, or a librarian living in Council Bluffs, Iowa. A recent contestant got more attention than she expected, to the point where she was asked to start an OnlyFans.

Anji Nyquist, a social media coordinator from Minneapolis, Minnesota (and major Minnesota Timberwolves fan), won the July 5th episode of Jeopardy! with a one-day total of $8,800. She told the Sun that the experience was “amazing” and that she was “as shocked as I looked. I had a good game, but I had just turned to [fellow contestant] Aubrey [Gillerman] and said, ‘I’m not gonna win this one,’ and he said something so kind, like, ‘You never know!’ And all of a sudden, Final Jeopardy happens, and I did win; it was crazy.”

Nyquist, who was bounced from the game show after the next episode, hosted a Q&A on her Instagram about what it was like.

“I did an ‘ask me anything,’ and there were a lot of people who asked, ‘Would you do an OnlyFans? It would be really popular.’ I mean, that’s not my style, but it was flattering,” she said. “You’re gonna get some nice people, and you’re gonna get some creeps. I have been getting DMs from random men. Most of it’s just nice, ‘you’re so beautiful, you’re the hottest contestant ever,’ which is so dumb.” Nyquist added, “It was not what I was expecting, that’s for sure.”

Maybe these dudes thought they were messaging Ken Jennings?

(Via the Sun)

Jason Aldean finds himself in hot water at the moment as his new video for “Try That In A Small Town” has brought new attention to the two-month-old song. The country star’s lyrics on the track have been widely derided as pro-gun or pro-violence, and people are speaking out about it. That includes Sheryl Crow, who addressed Aldean directly.

She wrote on Twitter last night (July 18), “.@Jason_Aldean I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence.There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting. This is not American or small town-like. It’s just lame.”

(When Crow mentioned the mass shooting, she was referring to Aldean being on stage during the shooting at the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas.)

She also retweeted a post from activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham that reads, “Uvalde? Small town. VA Tech? Small college town. Newtown? Small New England town. Parkland? Small town that had just been voted Florida’s *safest* town. Most mass shootings occur in *small towns* @Jason_Aldean. Your listeners are dying.”

Aldean offered a statement of his own, writing in part, “There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it- and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage -and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music- this one goes too far.”

In May, country star Jason Aldean released a song called “Try That In A Small Town.” The track flew relatively under the radar until a few days ago, when the song started receiving attention for its controversial pro-gun lyrics. The new video, which features footage of robberies and protests, also ruffled some feathers. Now, Aldean has offered a response to the controversy.

He wrote in a social media post shared yesterday (July 18) afternoon:

“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it- and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage -and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music- this one goes too far.

As so many pointed out, I was present at Route 91-where so many lost their lives- and our community recently suffered another heartbreaking tragedy. NO ONE, including me, wants to continue to see senseless headlines or families ripped apart.

Try That In A Small Town, for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief. Because they were our neighbors, and that was above any differences. My political views have never been something I’ve hidden from, and I know that a lot of us in this Country don’t agree on how we get back to a sense of normalcy where we go at least a day without a headline that keeps us up at night. But the desire for it to- that’s what this song is about.”

Before the backlash started pouring in, he also wrote of the video, “When u grow up in a small town, it’s that unspoken rule of ‘we all have each other’s backs and we look out for each other.’ It feels like somewhere along the way, that sense of community and respect has gotten lost. Deep down we are all ready to get back to that. I hope my new music video helps y’all know that u are not alone in feeling that way. Go check it out!”

As African music styles grow in popularity here in the US, it’s only natural that artists with the strongest ties to their African roots hop on the wave. Bas, whose parents are Sudanese, taps into this rich musical heritage with his newest single, “Passport Bros” featuring his Dreamville compatriot, J. Cole. Over a beat filled with the now familiar sounds of the continent, Bas and Cole detail their globe-hopping ways, encouraging listeners to join them in collecting a few more stamps in their passports.

Bas teased the single on Twitter last month, writing, “I gave my bro DJ Moma an exclusive summer heater me and J. Cole cooked up this week. Pull up on my Everyday People fam in a city near you to hear it. The song not out nowhere don’t look.”

The song is the second single from Bas’ upcoming fourth studio album, We Only Talk About Real Sh*t When We’re F*cked Up. In January, he shared the first, “Diamonds,” before announcing the album, which has yet to receive a release date.

Meanwhile, J. Cole, who frequently collaborates with Bas, recently teased a collaboration with a less frequent rhyme partner in Drake. Appearing during Drake’s ongoing It’s All A Blur Tour stop in Montreal, he agreed that the two rappers — who more or less started their musical careers at the same time — should once again join forces.

Listen to “Passport Bros” above. We Only Talk About Real Sh*t When We’re F*cked Up is coming soon via Dreamville.

Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa are undoubtedly having a ball on their High School Reunion Tour. The pair — whose friendship has only solidified since their iconic 2011 collaboration “Young, Wild & Free” — kicked off the run earlier this month, and it’s stopping by many cities alongside Berner, Too Short, and Warren G, with special guest DJ Drama.

The setlists for both rappers are packed with hits as well as covers of artists like Dr. Dre, Wale, Tupac, Ty Dolla $ign, The Notorious B.I.G., and even Maroon 5.

Check out Snoop Dogg’s setlist below, and find Wiz Khalifa’s underneath it, according to setlist.fm.

1. “The Next Episode” (Dr. Dre cover)
2. “Boyz-n-the-Hood (Remix)” (Eazy-E cover)
3. “Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang” (Dr. Dre cover)
4. “Tha Shiznit”
5. “G Funk Intro”
6. “Hypnotize” (The Notorious B.I.G. cover)
7. “Ain’t No Fun (If the Homies Can’t Have None)”
8. “Lodi Dodi”
9. “Murder Was the Case (DeathAfterVisualizingEternity)”
10. “I Wanna Love You” (Akon cover)
11. “Beautiful
12. “(Smile) Living My Best Life” (Wale feat. Lil’ Duval cover)
13. “Sexual Eruption”
14. “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” (2Pac cover)
15. “Gin and Juice”
16. “Dolomite Intro”
17. “We Dem Boyz” (Wiz Khalifa cover)
18. “You and Your Friends” (Wiz Khalifa cover)
19. “Who Am I? (What’s My Name?)”
20. “Young, Wild & Free”

1. “Black and Yellow”
2. “Roll Up”
3. “23” (Mike WiLL Made-It cover)
4. “Or Nah” (Ty Dolla $ign cover)
5. “Swole Life”
6. “The Thrill”
7. “Bad Ass Bitches”
8. “Iced Out Necklace”
9. “No Sleep”
10. “Peace and Love”
11. “You”
12. “Bake Sale”
13. “Payphone” (Maroon 5 cover)
14. “Taylor Gang”
15.”So High”
16. “On My Level”

Last month Rudy Giuliani seemed to be finally doing something he should have done a long time ago: turn on Donald Trump. Last month, the former “America’s Mayor” “voluntarily” met with Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating two separate Trump cases, including the one involving his alleged mishandling of government documents. Alas, at least according to his team, Giuliani has no plans on ratting on the guy who left him high and dry with a mountain of legal bills.

“Any speculation that Mayor Rudy Giuliani ‘flipped’ against President Donald Trump is as false as previous lies that America’s Mayor was somehow a Russian Agent,” Giuliani adviser Ted Goodman told The Daily Beast. “In order to ‘flip’ on President Trump—as so many in the anti-Trump media are fantasizing over—Mayor Giuliani would’ve had to commit perjury because all the information he has regarding this case points to President Trump’s innocence.”

That may be true, but perhaps such sentiments don’t apply to other fellow Trump cronies. The New York Times reported that during the sit-down, Giuliani discussed John Eastman, another lawyer who infamously laid out a devious — and illegal — plan to keep Trump in power. He also talked about yet another attorney, Sidney Powell, who fed one cuckoo conspiracy theory after another into Trump’s ear. But maybe he had nice things to say about them, too.

Besides, Giuliani has bigger fish to fry, like coaxing Joe Biden into letting him use “lie detector analysts” to catch whoever’s responsible for the White House cocaine.

(Via The Daily Beast)

In October, Sorry dropped Anywhere But Here, an album whose penultimate track was “Screaming In The Rain,” a haunting ballad with a sly bassline and disoriented lyrics, like, “I feel too alien / Nothing’s making sense.”

Now the London-based band want to take another jab at the song. They’ve rereleased it, titling it, “Screaming In The Rain Again.”

“We wanted to make a version that was harder, stronger, faster,” they explained in a statement. “We felt we could show a different side to the version that is on the album, one with more passion.”

This new version had a stronger punch and more momentum. It leans into the sense of disarray and delirium, with sporadic sounds sputtering while they sing. It successfully brings the song to the next level, making it an unforgettable experience.

About having their 2020 debut album 925 overshadowed by the pandemic, Sorry singer, songwriter, and guitarist Asha Lorenz told Uproxx in a 2022 interview, “It was frustrating, but I feel like it was just such a mad time in the world,” she said. “I didn’t really process it that much because it was just kind of so horrible for everyone.”

You can listen to “Screaming In The Rain Again” above.

Fall Out Boy recently shared So Much (For) Stardust, their first album since 2018’s Mania. The band is bringing those songs to stages on their tour with Bring Me The Horizon, Alkaline Trio, New Found Glory, and more, which kicked off in June.

Considering Fall Out Boy has a whopping eight albums, their setlist is a big deal. Lucky for fans, they’ve been playing songs from all over their large discography, from 2013’s Save Rock And Roll and 2015’s American Beauty/American Psycho to 2007’s Infinity On High and even their 2003 debut Take This to Your Grave.

Check out their setlist from their concert in Indiana, according to setlist.fm.

1. “Love From the Other Side”
2. “The Phoenix”
3. “Sugar, We’re Goin Down”
4. “Uma Thurman”
5. “A Little Less Sixteen Candles, a Little More ‘Touch Me’”
6. “Homesick at Space Camp”
7. “Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy”
8. “Calm Before the Storm”
9. “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race”
10. “Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes”
11. “Heaven, Iowa”
12. “Bang the Doldrums”
13. “Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet”
14. “Fake Out”
15. “What a Time to Be Alive” (Piano)
16. “Golden” (Piano)
17. “Don’t Stop Believin’” (Journey cover) (Piano)
18. “The Last of the Real Ones”
19. “Save Rock and Roll”
20. “Baby Annihilation”
21. “Crazy Train” (Ozzy Osbourne cover)
22. “Dance, Dance”
23. “Hold Me Like a Grudge”
24. “Where Did the Party Go”
25. “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em Up)”
26. “Thnks fr th Mmrs”
27. “Centuries”
28. “Saturday”

This weekend, a ton of people are embarking on a most curious double bill: They’ll be seeing, many on the same day, a feminist movie about a longtime (not always feminist) doll, and an epic about the inventor of the most dangerous weapon in human history (thus far). Those films, of course, are Barbie and Oppenheimer, and the latter’s length is well-known: It runs a full 180 minutes. But how long is Barbie — i.e., how long will brave audiences doing both in succession have to spend in movie theaters?

The answer is: five hours total, as Barbie runs a short but not too short 114 minutes.

Barbie could have been a lean, 90-minute, play-it-safe adaptation. It could have been strictly for kids. But for whatever reason, Mattel decided to aim for an older audience. They enlisted not some hack but Greta Gerwig, the writer-director whose previous film was the fourth big Hollywood adaptation of Little Women. (Before that, of course, was Lady Bird.)

With her fellow filmmaker partner Noah Baumbach (whose most recent directing credit was a take on Don DeLillo’s famously hard-to-film White Noise), the two decided to go ambitious — while still being fun. Will the combo of smarts and vibes work? Critics seem to think so. The rest will have to wait for July 21.

For fantasy fans, it truly is the best of times, and the worst of times. On the bright side—there’s more magic wielding, dragon riding, caped crusading content than ever before. Yay to that.

On the other hand, have you noticed that with all these shows, something feels … off?

No, that’s not just adulthood stripping you of childlike wonder. There is a subtle, yet undeniable decline in how these shows are being made, and your eyes are picking up on it. Nolan Yost, a freelance wigmaker living in New York City, explains the shift in his now viral Facebook post.

The post, which has been shared nearly 3,500 times, attributes shows being “mid,” (aka mediocre, or my favorite—meh) mostly to the new streaming-based studio system, which quite literally prioritizes quantity over quality, pumping out new content as fast as possible to snag a huge fan base.

The result? A “Shein era of mass media,” Yost says, adding that “the toll it takes on costuming and hair/makeup has made almost every new release from Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu have a B-movie visual quality.”

He even had some pictures to prove it.

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Yost first addressed the Amazon Prime Series “The Rings of Power.” One of the many, many things that makes Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy so iconic is the costumes. But that legacy was the direct result of dedication to detail.

“The production spent years hand-making every single piece of armor with real metal, hand-dyeing all-natural fiber fabrics, and designing distinct embroidery and hairstyles specific to each race in Middle Earth that had continuity through the story,” Yost wrote.

He added, “the natural dyes and dedicated layers of fabrics for elves, for hobbits, wool/dyes, and for men had a much more muted/medieval look, yet ethereal because of the slight detail you don’t really notice, but the depth draws your eye to every inch of the costume regardless.” This, he says, is why those three movies stand the test of time.

Compare this to the two images from “The Rings of Power,” below. In one photo “they barely scrapped together an unnaturally gilded scale mail breastplate and just screen printed a stretched long sleeve shirt to match underneath, all over a skirt in a single layer of a warped poly skirt.”

The other image shows “they just saved money on an Elven wig altogether for a 2022 pompadour, with a velvet pleated priest smock (with crushed parts not even steamed out), and a neckline that isn’t tailored to fit like we’ve seen previously with Elrond or Celeborn.”

Yost then moved onto HBO’s “House of the Dragon.” Arguably even those who have never seen a single episode of its predecessor, “Game of Thrones,” would still recognize Daenerys Targaryen for her platinum white hair—an attribute that Yost notes was quite expensive.

He explained that for the show’s final season alone, Daenerys’ wigs most likely cost tens of thousands, requiring human hair to be custom made into multiple wigs.

Luckily, there was only one character with that signature look in the show. For “House of the Dragon,” however, with a cast almost entirely made up of silver-haired brooding powerhouses, Yost surmises that due to budget constraints, the creators opted for synthetic wigs.

You can see below the problem this cost-cutting decision makes in terms of authenticity.

“Synthetic hair reflects light throughout the whole hair shaft and it tangles extremely easily,” Yost writes. “With any shot where a character isn’t actively moving or is performing dialogue and the hair isn’t being actively smoothed down every couple of seconds between shots, each flyaway is going to show up on camera if there’s any indirect lighting and look messy. Not only that, synthetic hair is also twice as thick per strand than human hair, so regardless of that the wigs are going to look bulky in an uncanny valley sort of way.”

This affects not just sci-fi and fantasy, but other genres meant to transport viewers into other worlds, like period pieces, which Yost points out with a picture from “Bridgerton” by Shonda Rhimes.

“It’s obviously not meant to be historically accurate, which is totally fine,” he writes, but without important details or embellishments or even proper undergarments to make the clothes fit well, everything looks like a slightly more expensive Halloween costume.

Yost’s insightful post really shines a light on what audiences are having to trade off for the sake of constant output. The phrase “done is better than perfect” takes on a new meaning altogether as studios race to meet a deadline with whatever is easiest to mass produce. But if viewers are so easily taken out of these stories because of noticeable corner cutting, then perhaps it’s a sign that what we really want and need are stories worth waiting for, ones that truly pull us in and leave us captivated. This is no easy ask, for studio execs or customers alike (I too am a voracious binge-watcher), but as we can see in these examples, the most valuable experiences rarely, if ever, come from rushing.

This article originally appeared on 9.10.22