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In the first half of the 2022 Major League Baseball season, the New York Yankees were the toast of the sport. The Yankees, led by an historic season from Aaron Judge, posted a blistering 64-28 record before the All-Star break, leading the entire American League field by 4.5 games and enjoying the best record in baseball during the mid-summer classic. However, things have spiraled for the Yankees in late July and August, headlined by 11 losses in the last 13 games.

On Tuesday, New York lost again to the Tampa Bay Rays at home and, during the eighth inning, the television broadcast captured a haircut being given… in the Yankee Stadium bleachers.

This could simply be an exercise in weird things happening during the relatively slow pace of a baseball game on a Tuesday evening. However, the synergy is undeniable with the Yankees tailspin, as New York is now 8-17 since the All-Star break. The Yankees still maintain a very comfortable division lead in the AL East, but the Houston Astros are now the frontrunners for the No. 1 seed in the AL and, more importantly, New York seems to have lost the plot.

It certainly helps that Aaron Judge has 46 home runs on the evening of August 16, but he is only one man. The Yankees are scuffling so badly that at least some fans would rather focus on haircuts than baseball.

The Indie group Martha‘s last album was the warm and witty 2019 LP Love Keeps Kicking. The inviting pop-punk songs strengthened their cult following, and fans have been waiting for new material ever since. Today is their lucky day, as the band have announced Please Don’t Take Me Back, arriving on 10/28.

The announcement comes with the release of the song “Baby, Does Your Heart Sink,” which right off the bat proves that they haven’t lost any of their charm. It starts with colorful, urgent guitar work and a bouncy rhythm. Speaking about the song, the band said, “‘Baby, Does Your Heart Sink’ is just your classic break-up song, but one designed to be played at the disco at the end of the world. If there are multiple timelines, worlds, and universes out there, you’ve really got to wonder how things are going in the others, don’t you?”

It arrives with a video shot at Sunderland’s Pop Recs, paying homage to the venue’s co-founder Dave Harper, who tragically passed away last year. “This was the first time we’d all been together as a band for a while, and it was a really fun day,” said drummer Nathan Stephens-Griffin about the video. “Pop Recs is a brilliant thing, and we want to support as much as possible – everyone should visit when they get a chance. We’ll be doing our Northeast album launch on that very same stage in early December and we can’t wait. Hopefully the people watching are more into it on the night though! It was also extremely cool to get to direct a video featuring a Futurehead and a Heartstring!”

Listen to “Baby, Does Your Heart Sink” above. Check out the album artwork and tracklist below.

1. “Beat, Perpetual”
2. “Every Day the Hope Gets Harder”
3. “Please Don’t Take Me Back”
4. “Irreversible Motion”
5. “Baby, Does Your Heart Sink?”
6. “F L A G // B U R N E R”
7. “Neon Lung”
8. “Take Me Back To The Old Days (Reprise)”
9. “Total Cancellation Of The Future”
10. “I Didn’t Come Here To Surrender”
11. “You Can’t Have a Good Time All Of The Time”

Please Don’t Take Me Back arrives 10/28 via Specialist Subject Records.

There are not many high school basketball recruits who have generated as much attention as Bronny James. It’s something that comes with the territory — being named “LeBron Raymone James Jr.” is assuredly going to turn heads when you step on the basketball court — but despite that, Bronny’s recruitment has been rather unique because, well, there just haven’t been a whole lot of reports about scholarship offers, visits, or anything else that normally comes in recruiting. Really the only major update on what his future holds that we’ve gotten is that Bronny’s dad wants to play with him in the NBA somewhere down the line.

On Tuesday, we received a rare update by way of Jamie Shaw of On3, who reported that Oregon are the frontrunners to land Bronny. Per Shaw, the Ducks boast “a lead” and as of now, “James is looking like he will end up in Eugene.” It caught on like wildfire on the heels of the 4-star guard’s monster poster dunk earlier this week, but on Tuesday night, LeBron decided to address the report directly.

LeBron took to Twitter and posted a legitimate update on where things stand with Bronny, saying that it’s been nothing more than a few calls at this point. While he did not say which schools are working to acquire his services, LeBron did say that Bronny will be the one to announce where he’s headed.

Bronny is about to enter his senior year of high school. On3’s consensus ranking has him as the number 44 prospect in his class.

Donald Trump has spent his entire life avoiding comeuppance, but that streak may be coming to an end. He’s hopping mad that the FBI searched the resort he now lives in, throwing around one dodgy excuse after another — and helping inspire death threats against government agents the Republican party has long held up as heroes. But an FBI search is no joke, especially if it involves a former president. Trump seems to secretly know this and is reportedly on the hunt for rock star legal representation. Problem is, no decent lawyer appears to want to work with him.

“Everyone is saying no,” a prominent Republican lawyer told The Washington Post. That’s a shame because, as an attorney who once worked on the Watergate prosecution team, who also turned down Trump, what he needs is a “first-rate, highly experienced federal criminal practitioner.”

That attorney said his excuse was that he simply didn’t have time. Others, though, are scared off by his divisiveness, his prickly personality, and his habit of stiffing vendors:

One lawyer told a story from early in Trump’s presidency of his legal team urging him against tweeting about the Mueller probe, only to find he’d tweeted about it before they got to the end of the West Wing driveway. Several people said Trump was nearly impossible to represent and that it would be unclear if they would ever get paid.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer, who even went to jail for Trump, had no good to say about him. He described him to the Post as a “very difficult client in that he’s always pushing the envelope, he rarely listens to sound legal advice, and he wants you to do things that are not appropriate, ethically or legally.”

In other words, a lifetime of being, well, Trump is coming back to bite him in the ass.

It’s not that Trump doesn’t already have a legal team. But longtime confidants, the Post reports, are worried that they’re not experienced enough or up to snuff to deal with something as outsized as a federal investigation that may include potential violation of the Espionage Act.

“You get these guys who just live to be around him, and mistakes get made,” one lawyer told the Post. “These guys just want to make him happy.”

Meanwhile, his legal team is busy trying to get the name of the alleged mole who ratted Trump out. So you can see where their priorities lay.

(Via The Post)

In January, Bad Bunny announced The World’s Hottest Tour, which is aptly titled considering his album Un Verano Sin Ti was one of the biggest LPs this year, if not the biggest after reaching No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and earning 1.606 million equivalent album units in the US.

The tour just kicked off a few days ago in Orlando, Florida at Camping World Stadium, and the audience has been lucky not only to see Bad Bunny but also great openers. This includes DJs Diplo and Alesso, who will definitely do a good job of hyping up the crowds before Bad Bunny goes on. Diplo is most known for his hit “Where Are Ü Now” with Jack Ü and Skrillex as well “Heartless” and “Genius” with LSD, Sia, and Labrinth. Alesso is most known for “Let Me Go” with Hailee Steinfeld, along with “When I’m Gone” with Katy Perry.

The shows will definitely be packed to the brim with stoked fans. On the day of the Un Verano Sin Ti release, Spotify announced that he broke two records, with the LP becoming the most-streamed album in 2022 and Bad Bunny becoming the most-streamed artist globally in one day. It wasn’t too surprising, considering that last year the Puerto Rican star received the most streams on Spotify out of any other artist around the world.

The Kevin Durant saga continues to dominate NBA chatter in August, with everything from retirement pseudo-rumors to a bombshell on what Durant would need to stick in Brooklyn and endless speculation on which teams might remain interested in his services. One such team is the up-and-coming New Orleans Pelicans, with Christian Clark of NOLA.com weighing in with an interesting report on Tuesday. In short, Clark noted that the Pelicans could be a part of the Durant bidding, but any pursuit “would likely require” the inclusion of highly touted wing Brandon Ingram. However, Clark, citing league sources, reports that “the Pelicans are unwilling to do so.”

Ingram is one of a handful of players across the league regularly mentioned as hypothetical centerpieces in Durant packages, and it makes sense on some level. After all, the Nets are thought to be seeking high-level NBA talent in addition to draft compensation for Durant, and the 24-year-old Ingram has an All-Star selection and three-year averages of 23.4 points, 5.6 rebounds, and 4.8 assists per game since joining the Pelicans.

With that said, Clark notes plainly that Ingram is nearly a decade younger than Durant, perhaps fitting more snugly with the timeline associated with Zion Williamson and other young players in New Orleans. Ingram is also quite a bit cheaper when it comes to contract cost, and that could be a real factor for a small-market team such as the Pelicans moving forward into the future.

It would be difficult to find a credible trade package that the Pelicans could offer without Ingram or Williamson, so the unwillingness to include either player likely crosses off New Orleans before even considering that Durant may not prefer the Pelicans as a destination. At the same time, it is interesting that the Pelicans may not even be willing to think about Ingram, and the future is undoubtedly bright in New Orleans if Williamson can stay healthy next to Ingram, CJ McCollum, and an intriguing young roster.

Will Mark Zuckerberg ever complete his metaverse? Will anyone want to use it? The answers to those questions remain to be seen. But so far his vision of a future where everyone hangs in a virtual realm, sometimes as animal avatars, doesn’t seem to be gripping the public. Jokes have flown ever since he changed his company’s name from Facebook to Meta. The backlash has been such that people even agreed with something Bill Maher said. Now the latest image from this magical realm isn’t exactly inspiring confidence.

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg dropped a Facebook post announcing that Horizon Worlds — the free virtual reality game that launched in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. last year — was expanding to France and Spain. To celebrate, he shared a friendly image of his avatar inside the game, standing in front of cartoon version of the Eiffel Tower and a Spanish Basilica.

Zuckerberg avatar was…something. Childlike and soulless, it in no way betrayed the billions that have gone into its creator’s massive pet project that no one seems to be excited to see. Once it made it to the other big social media service, Twitter, the reviews were not good, with more than one person comparing to the Miis in Wii, Nintendo’s game system from 2006, when Facebook was only two years old.

Others argued that it was actually an accurate likeness, if not in a flattering way.

And it came so soon after people noticed a baby Jesus sculpture at LACMA looks like Zuckerberg.

Rick Ross and Wingstop have become synonymous. The rapper owns at least 25 Wingstop franchises and even bought his son a Wingstop franchise for 16th birthday last year. But in a new report published by XXL, it looks like the federal government’s Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division has fined Rick Ross and his family members for multiple violations found in some of their Mississippi Wingstop locations.

According to the report, the feds have collected $114,427 thus far from Ross along with his sister, Tawanda Roberts and mother, Tammie Roberts, who are also listed as owners of some of the franchises. And these seem to be some pretty serious infractions: “Forcing employees to illegally pay for safety training, uniforms, background checks and cash register shortages. In some instances, this caused some employees’ average hourly rates to fall below the $7.25 federal minimum wage.”

Another part of the report says that Boss Wings Enterprises, Ross’s corporation, let a 15-year-old employee work past 10pm multiple times this year. The law states that 14 and 15-year-old workers cannot work past 7pm. This is not a good look for Rozay and certainly not the image of “The Boss” that he wants to convey. For the workers though, 244 of them will recoup the funds that were illegally taken from them.

Yesterday, Drake topped another significant record by The Beatles. When the track “Staying Alive” by DJ Khaled with Drake and Lil Baby checked into the Billboard Hot 100 at the number five spot, it marked Drake’s 30th Top 5 single on the chart, thus breaking the tie at the top he previously held with The Beatles at 29. So what did Drake do to celebrate the accomplishment? He went on a high-stakes gambling roulette run, of course!

Drake is a noted gambler who won big money betting on the Golden State Warriors this past NBA playoffs, scored over $1 million in Super Bowl bets, and then won — and lost — over $25 million playing video roulette with French Montana. His roulette bets have all been on the online cryptocurrency betting platform Stake, whom he partnered with this past March. So immediately following the news of his record-breaking hit, Drake posted a headline and the a video on Instagram of himself winning $5,130,000 million on a roulette play. His betting was livestreamed on Twitch, which is something he often does when he’s betting big money, presumably to raise the profile of the Stake platform. “Ok I broke my records for the month now me and Stake need you to do your thing Bitcoin,” he commented on an Instagram.

Since the $5,130,000 is paid out in Bitcoin, Drake would stand to make even more if the price of the cryptocurrency shoots up. Hence him asking for Bitcoin to “do your thing.” He better hope that French Montana isn’t around though…

Olivia Rodrigo is back in the studio with her producer Dan Nigro. On Tuesday evening, August 16, an Instagram story was posted on his account that’s a selfie taken by none other than the Sour star. She looks both silly and excited — excited to be working on stuff and excited to leak this information to her fans who she know will freak out.

It’s likely, though, that new material from the “Brutal” performer won’t arrive for a while considering last year was absolutely massive for her, and she continues to rise in status by bringing her hits on big tours.

The one-year anniversary of Sour was in May; the singer celebrated her colossal debut with a heartfelt Instagram post: “my first album SOUR came out a year ago today,” she wrote. “it is impossible for me to sum up in words how much this album means to me and how grateful I am to have gotten the privilege to make it and watch it exist in the world. thank u @dan_nigro for making it with me and believing in me more than anyone. and thank u to everyone who has embraced my 17 year old lamentations and forever changed my life in the process. [purple heart emojis].”