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Blinks, rejoice! We finally have a release date for Blackpink‘s sophomore album, Born Pink. The ladies announced today via social media that Born Pink will arrive September 16.

Ahead of their album, the group will drop their single, “Pink Venom” this Friday.

As of now, not much is known about the album. However, songwriter and OneRepublic lead vocalist Ryan Tedder revealed that he wrote a few tracks that may end up on the album in a recent interview with Good Morning America.

In a May interview with Rolling Stone, Blackpink member Lisa says the band has no plans to slow down any time soon.

“I mean, won’t Blackpink last at least 10 more years? We’ll be nearly 40 by then,” Lisa said. “Someday we’ll get married and things like that. But then I see the Spice Girls, how they got together for a reunion concert. Can we do that too someday? Will I be able to dance then, like I do now?”

In addition to their new album, Blackpink will embark on an international tour, the largest ever for a K-pop girl group.

Check out the tour dates below. Venues and ticket information will be available at a later date.

10/15 — Seoul
10/16 — Seoul
10/25 — Dallas, TX
10/29 — Houston, TX
11/02 — Atlanta, GA
11/06 — Hamilton, OH
11/07 — Hamilton, OH
11/10 — Chicago, IL
11/11 — Chicago, IL
11/14 — Newark, NJ
11/15 — Newark, NJ
11/19 — Los Angeles, CA
11/30 — London
12/01 — London
12/05 — Barcelona
12/08 — Cologne
12/11 — Paris
12/12 — Paris
12/18 — Berlin
12/22 — Amsterdam
01/07 — Bangkok
01/08 — Bangkok
01/13 — Hong Kong
01/14 — Hong Kong
01/20 — Riyadh
01/28 — Abu Dhabi
03/04 — Kuala Lumpur
03/11 — Jakarta
03/18 — Kaohsiung
03/25 — Manila
05/13 — Singapore
06/10 — Melbourne
06/11 — Melbourne
06/16 — Sydney
06/17 — Sydney
06/21 — Auckland

Born Pink is out 9/16 via YG Entertainment and Interscope.

It’s been a year and a half since disturbing allegations against actor Armie Hammer surfaced, and it seems like more is about to be revealed in a shocking docuseries from Discovery+.

Last month, reports surfaced that the disgraced actor was laying low and selling timeshares in the Cayman Islands after being booted from nearly every project he had in the works. Hammer was one of Hollywood’s most promising leading men until several women spoke out against his alleged violent tendencies and even alluded to cannibalism. Now, Discovery+ has released a trailer for their long-awaited doc about not only Hammer but his family legacy.

House Of Hammer is a three-part series that features interviews, texts, voice memos, and other evidence from Hammer’s alleged victims. There are shocking messages that are seemingly from Hammer describing his various violent fantasies. The doc even has commentary from Hammer’s own aunt, Casey Hammer, who promises to reveal “the dark, twisted secrets of the Hammer family.”

Jason Sarlanis, Discovery’s President of Crime and Investigative Content, Linear and Streaming, explained that the doc will dive even deeper into the world of the Hammer family and their longstanding legacy. “The accusations of rape and abuse brought against Armie Hammer in the last few years are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Hammer family. With HOUSE OF HAMMER, we witness truly disturbing details and sinister secrets that money and power couldn’t hide forever,” Sarlanis explained in a press release.

He added, “This documentary provides an important platform for the incredibly courageous women who came forward to share their stories, and we hope their courage inspires others to continue meaningful conversations around abuse in our society.”

House Of Hammer premieres on September 2nd on Discovery+. Check out the trailer above.

Avocados — once the poster child of overpriced food, lambasted as the reason spendthrift millennials can’t afford houses — aren’t as expensive (at least in a lot of places). Australia is actually currently in the midst of an avocado glut. Closer to home, the Mexican state of Jalisco has reportedly been approved to export the creamy fruit to the good old US of A.

While I don’t purport to be an expert on the global supply chain, I can tell you that I bought my most recent avocadoes for 97 cents and a buck a piece (they tend to range from $1.50 to $3 each normally). Whether that’s due to some larger economic force (or organized crime) or just what happens when they’re in season, I’m not sure of the why of it all. Point is, avocados are cheaper than peaches now, and as my grandpappy once told me “don’t look a gift fruit in the mouth” (he was senile).

Long story short, now’s a perfect time to enjoy some avocado toast and I’ve got the perfect recipe for you. What do I know about avocados? Well, I’m glad you asked. I’ve been finding ways to “just throw some avocado on stuff” (the logic underpinning avocado toast) since I was just a teen. My best friend growing up had big avocado tree in his back yard, and there was many a night that we came home famished from a long night of drinking next to canals and tried to slake our hunger with any avocado preparation that could be accomplished using 60% or less of brain cells. Sometimes that was just salt and a spoon, which is still pretty good, honestly.

I’ve come a long way since then (sort of), but the same basic rules hold true: avocados need very few accoutrements to be delicious. And frankly, a lot of the additions I see at restaurants and in recipes online detract more than they enhance. Side note, stop cooking your damned avocados. 99.99% of the time they taste better raw.

Anyway, the following recipe is the result of synthesizing some techniques I learned cooking other things, plus my years of avocado toast trial and error, put in service of the simplest but best avocado toast recipe possible. To put it in slightly different terms, I think you could use fewer ingredients than this and have reasonably good avocado toast, and you could use more ingredients than this and it would also be pretty good, but neither would be quite as good this avocado toast. That, to me, is what we mean when we say “refined.” Everything here is here for good reason.

Avocado Toast

Ingredients:

• 1 slice of bread
• About 1/2 a medium-sized, ripe-but-not-too-ripe avocado
• 1 garlic clove
• A wedge of lime
• Parmigiano Reggiano (preferably aged longer than a year)
• Extra virgin olive oil (not pictured) for grilling
• Salt and black pepper (not pictured)

I think any bread will do here, but I prefer the “artisan” type loaves from my local supermarket bakery — something a touch bigger and denser than a baguette, so that it can stand up to the spread, and ideally will get a crunchy on the outside while staying slightly gooey on the inside when grilled, which is what we’re going to do here. Sourdough works great too.

As for the avocado itself, hopefully you know what a ripe avocado feels like by now, but my preference is one that has some give when you squeeze it but not too many softer spots. When you cut it into cubes, the cubes should melt in your mouth but they shouldn’t completely mush down flat when you spread them — that’s the ideal texture, to me. Doesn’t have to be perfect though, slightly sub-perfect will still be delicious.

Tools:

• Bread knife
• Spreader knife
• Microplane grater
• Cast iron pan (not pictured) — or any other pan, really.

Do you need a special spreader knife like I have? Could you get by with a spoon and a butter knife instead? Sure, but when you make as much avocado toast as I do, these spreader knife thingies are pretty nice to have. You can do your cutting and scooping with a single utensil. You don’t need a microplane either, but they also simplify the process.

Directions:

Heat up that pan on medium heat and get a few glugs of oil in there, enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Having done this a few times, my preference is olive oil, both because it tastes pretty good with the other ingredients and because it gives a nice consistent fry. I’ve also used butter (spread on the bread), which tastes good but doesn’t fry quite as crisp, and avocado oil, which is flavor-consistent but for some reason the bread sucks up more of it than with olive oil so you end up having to add more halfway through. I don’t know the science behind that but I’ve seen it happen.

Your pan/oil should be hot enough that the bread sizzles when it hits it. If the oil is smoking, it’s too hot. You can usually tell when the bread is toasted enough by smell. This is gonna sound dumb but it’s true: the toast is done when it starts to smell like toast.

Once your toast is done, slice a little piece off your garlic clove so that it’s flat on one end.

Now, take your garlic and rub that flat side all over the bread just like you’re grating some cheese. You might not think this would add much garlic flavor, but trust me, it does.

See how much garlic came off that clove? Also you might notice the bread getting a noticeable sheen from the oils in the garlic. Good times. I rub my bread on *both* sides because I’m a Big Time Garlic Daddy but you can only do one side if you want. (I also grew this particular garlic myself, are you impressed yet?).

Now for the avocado.

I realize there are different ways to do this. For instance, I’ve seen people scoop out the avocado with a spoon and then cut thin vertical slices almost to the end of the avo and then fan it out on the toast, which does look pretty. That’s fine, this is my standard technique, which is easy, functional, and guarantees the maximum avocado-per-square-millimeter of toast. I tend to think that’s a little more important than aesthetics alone, plus you don’t have to be as fussy with it.

So you take your spreader knife (or butter knife, as the case may be) and make a little cross hatch on the avocado, being careful not to pierce the rind. Then you scoop that out and just spread it on the toast. Granted, this method doesn’t work as well for the smooth-skinned avocado varieties (which also taste delicious) that you have to peel with a fruit peeler. But that’s a digression for another day.

I call this “pretty enough.”

Now take your lime wedge and squirt a little lime on there. Doesn’t have to be a ton, four or five drops works just fine, just enough to brighten it up. If you don’t have limes, lemon works fine too.

Salt after lime. How much salt? This part is more art than science, but I would say the ideal amount of salt for avocado toast is more than you’d put on an egg, but less than you’d put on a steak.

Now cracked black pepper on top of the lime and salt. I feel like there are a lot of dishes where people add black pepper more out of habit than for any noticeable flavor benefit, but I swear by black pepper on avocado toast. Black pepper and avocado are a great combination. (I have not tried this with white pepper, please respect my privacy at this time).

And now for the coup de grace, motherf*ckin 24-month aged Parmigiano Reggiano. If you want to shave it on there instead of microplaning? Go nuts. That would probably look baller as hell, but for me personally I couldn’t make my shaved cheese look as good as my microplaned cheese.

Cheese is probably my most controversial addition here, but like I said up top, I truly don’t believe avocado toast with any fewer or more ingredients than this will be better than this. Aged parmesan has that slightly nutty, umami quality that pairs beautifully with slightly nutty, citrus-brightened avocado with just a hint of peppery heat from the black pepper. I make this for guests all the time and I’ve never not had one say, “Holy shit, this is good!”

I’m not staunchly against adding more ingredients when they’re in season and makes sense. Thinly sliced hot peppers, like jalapeño or serrano? Sure, why not. Thinly sliced, pickled radish and/or onion? Hey, that could be good. I still have some super ripe tomatoes and tiny serranos from my garden lying around, and I’ll throw those in there from time to time, just for a little something different, like so:

That’s a fun variation, but at its heart it’s a change up. Throwing a change-up only works when you surround it with fastballs. Grilled toast-garlic-lime-salt-pepper-parmesan is my avocado toast fastball. I dare you to try it and disagree.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter.

As long as he’s been in the rap business, Russ has been about sharing the secrets of his success with fans and other aspiring artists. While that sometimes takes the form of preachy-sounding lectures on social media or interviews that can rub his intended audience the right way, he’s been getting better at softening his delivery, making sure that the message isn’t getting lost in the tone. In addition to starting his own, artist-friendly label, he seems to have found his niche thanks to TikTok, where he can speak directly to his fans, answering their questions in videos that offer more context.

A great example recently found its way to Twitter. In the video, Russ responds to a fan’s comment in a previous video asking how and why he spent $1 million on his new single, “Are You Entertained” with Ed Sheeran. In typical Russ fashion, he goes into detail, but this time, he’s sure he’s giving the right information to the right people, sounding confident instead of condescending. Offering a disclaimer, he made sure to note that “I’ve had songs go multi-platinum that I’ve spent zero dollars on and I’ve had songs do nothing that I’ve spent hundreds of thousands on. It’s not as simple as, ‘Oh, if you just spend money, the song does well.’ If that was the case, then there would be no flops.”

But on to the nitty-gritty: “Basically, I spent about $300K on the music video,” he recalls. “We shot it in London, [so] it was a whole big production. Then, I spent a little over $700K on marketing, which is like: I did Spotify marquee campaigns, radio, social media ads, [and] billboards overseas.” So, there you have it, an explanation of how much it costs to promote a new song, and a warning: It takes a lot more than money. Russ knows this, but luckily for his fans, he wants them to know it too. Check out the video below.

In the modern age of television, it’s very common (and sometimes required) for sets to have intimacy coordinators to help map out sex scenes in a way where everyone is comfortable and on the same page. This is something that has been more common in the post-#MeToo era, and has since been a pretty regular thing on sets (and SNL parodies). But, obviously, this is a relatively new thing that not everyone has experience with, including actress Amanda Seyfried.

Seyfried has been in the business since she was a teenager when intimacy coordinators were practically non-existent. In a new interview with Net-A-Porter, she explains how things were a lot different 20 years ago, and she wishes she was able to have the same on-set advocate that is available now.

“Being 19, walking around without my underwear on – like, are you kidding me? How did I let that happen?” the actress said. “Oh, I know why: I was 19 and I didn’t want to upset anybody, and I wanted to keep my job. That’s why.”

The Dropout star, who played some of the most iconic teenagers in the early 2000s movies (Mean Girls and Jennifer’s Body, just to name a few) said she was still put in some uncomfortable positions when she was just starting out. Though she does say that she came out of the pre-#MeToo era “pretty unscathed.”

According to the SAG-AFTRA protocol guide, an intimacy coordinator’s job is to “Ensure continued consent throughout the filming of scene (both consent to what their likeness is seen performing, and how the action is achieved) while minimizing interference in production flow.”

While it’s a pretty important on-set job, some actors like Sean Bean think the addition is a bit strange. Bean recently made headlines for saying that intimacy coordinators “ruin” the scenes for him. Perhaps he should consider the fact that he’s an established guy and not a young actress just starting out in a room full of strangers!

(Via Net-A-Porter)

Atlanta news station WSB-TV reports Young Thug, who is currently incarcerated in Fulton County Jail awaiting trial on racketeering charges, has been assessed a litany of new charges including drug, firearm possession, and robbery charges. According to a statement given to XXL by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, “Charges were added for defendants via re-indictment based on evidence found at arrests. When Mr. Williams was arrested on May 9, evidence was recovered that resulted in the additional charges, including a charge of possession of a machine gun.”

Back in May, Thug, Gunna, Yak Gotti, and other members of a purported street gang going by Young Slime Life, or YSL, were indicted on 56 counts of murder, armed robbery, and conspiring to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act (aka racketeering). Young Thug was initially indicted on the latter thanks to repeated mentions of YSL — also the acronym for his label, Young Stoner Life — in his lyrics. However, he was charged with seven additional felonies after police raided his home, including possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and possession of a dangerous weapon or silencer (which covers sawed-off-shotguns, sawed-off rifles, or machine guns). Many of the re-indictment charges are based on these.

Thug, Gotti, and Gunna have all pled “not guilty” and maintained their innocence, although they were also denied bail. Their trial was set for January 9, 2023.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Donald Trump is getting raked over the coals for pleading the fifth in the ongoing New York civil investigation into his business. The former president arrived at Attorney General Letitia James office on Wednesday morning where he reportedly “declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution.”

“I once asked, ‘If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?’ Now I know the answer to that question,” Trump said in a statement via the Associated Press. “When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors and the Fake News Media, you have no choice.”

To be clear, like all American citizens, Trump has the constitutional right to not incriminate himself in a court of law, and that is almost definitely the best legal advice his attorneys can give him. However, as Trump himself notes in his own statement (which demonstrates that the less he talks, the better) he has made several grand statements in the past about how only guilty people plead the fifth.

“The mob pleads the fifth,” is a phrase Trump loved to say, and now, it’s coming back to bite him in the orange butt. Following the announcement that he refused to answer questions in the New York investigation, Twitter went wild dunking on Trump for pleading the fifth after years of dogging others for doing the same.

You can see some of the reactions below:

(Via Associated Press)

The old adage “you can’t predict baseball” got taken to a new level on Tuesday night when the Pittsburgh Pirates traveled to Arizona to take on the Diamondbacks. Pirates infielder Rodolfo Castro tried going from first to third on a single by Oneil Cruz, and thanks to a head-first slide, he safely found himself 90 feet away from scoring.

The issue is that Castro’s slide meant something fell out of his back pocket. That something? Well, it was a cell phone.

It was extremely bizarre, and in the aftermath, everyone had exactly one question: How the heck can this happen? Castro was asked about this after the game and explained that it was totally unintentional.

“I don’t think there’s any professional ballplayer that would ever go out there with any intentions of taking a cell phone,” Castro said, per ESPN. “It’s horrible it happened to me. Obviously, it was very unintentional.”

Castro went on to stress that it was both an “accident” and a “mistake,” while Pirates manager Derek Shelton told the press that “You stay around the game and you see things you haven’t seen before. This was just a kid who made a mistake. It’s just one of those things we move forward from and tell him, ‘You can’t do that.”’

As for the game itself, the Diamondbacks went on to win, 6-4.

Steven Seagal’s got a bit of a love affair going on with autocrats and doing strange things on camera during mutual butt-kissing sessions. John Oliver recently revisited the time that the Under Siege star ate carrots with “the last and only dictator in Europe.” And the worst SNL host of all time has been enamored with Russian President Vladimir Putin for quite some time. As seen above, the pair aired their bromance to the press (in 2013) during the opening of a Moscow martial-arts school that helps to train KGB agents.

Here’s where it gets stranger. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, Seagal was said to have pulled out of his “special envoy” role (tied to humanitarian causes since 2018) that he enjoyed with Russia. All of that talk must have gone nowhere, though, and it’s worth noting that Joe Rogan recently passed on a fake story about Seagal fighting alongside Putin’s troops against Ukraine.

As it turns out, the spirit of that story that might be spot on because Seagal apparently popped onto the site of a destroyed prison in war-torn Ukraine. In July, the facility (Donetsk’s Olenivka prison) was bombed, killing 50 of Russia’s prisoners of war, and the Military Times reports on footage aired by Russian websites, which detail the propaganda spread by Seagal while attempting to convince everyone that Ukrainians did the bombing here. There’s some heavy tin-foil hat flavor going on:

Seagal added a conspiracy angle by suggesting that HIMARS was used by Ukrainian troops because the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wanted to silence a “Nazi” being held at the prison.

“The interesting thing is that one of the killed Nazis is a Nazi who just started talking a lot about Zelensky,” Seagal added, “and that Zelensky is responsible for the orders about torture and other atrocities that violate not only the Geneva War Convention, but are also crimes against humanity.”

Business Insider notes that the footage (which has been popping up on YouTube) hasn’t yet been authenticated, but it’s been aired by Russian state media and contains Putin-endorsed talking points. Seagal’s aiming to convince everyone that it’s really Ukraine who committed this war-crime atrocity, and a Russian TV host, Vladimir Solovyov, has attempted to put it on public record that Seagal has “personally examined” rocket fragments during the (convenient) course of making a documentary.

Even though Seagal purportedly has access, though, the New York Times reports that the International Red Cross Committee still hasn’t been permitted to visit the site since the fatal July attack. [Big sigh]

(Via Military Times, Business Insider, Newsweek, & New York Times)