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While flying is usually a pretty hellish proposition (especially during Covid-19) no matter who you are, flying while Black remains an experience unto itself. Last year’s reckoning with racism against Black people in America opened the floodgates for stories about stereotyping and discrimination, and today rapper Meek Mill faced another example of it. Though he says he had just boarded a private jet (!), a flight attendant immediately came up to Meek and his crew and accused them of smoking weed.

After the flight attendant tries to backtrack and claims he “smelled’ the weed, Meek said he wanted to get off the plane anyway because he didn’t feel safe. The flight attendant says he will try to “fix this problem,” which should be relatively easy since he’s the one who created it. “You acting real racist right now, like real crazy, ‘must be smoking weed,’” Meek said to the attendant. It’s unclear if the rapper ended up staying on the flight or looking for a different mode of transportation, but the incident is just another reminder. It’s hard to imagine a flight attendant accusing a group of white passengers of the same thing just 30 seconds after boarding.

Oh and if you have a jet for Meek, please help him out:

One of the first bits of advice you learn when you’re a pop warner football player is to play through the whistle. There are times when that ends poorly — namely when a dude gets a little too overzealous and gives the other team 15 yards as a result — but this is decidedly not one of those times.

During the second quarter of the team’s game against Clemson, Florida State signal caller Jordan Travis dropped back and found his running back, Lawrance Toafili, on a wheel route. Normally this is enough to get college football fans excited — who doesn’t love a good wheel route? — but Toafili had acres of space ahead of him and took off.

It looked like he was going to get taken down deep in Tigers territory and set the Noles up for at least three points on the possession. But somehow, instead of getting tackled, Toafili rolled on the defender without a single body part that would rule him down hitting the ground. A few yards later and he was in the end zone giving Florida State the lead.

This was the first receiving touchdown of Toafili’s career, and it is certainly not a bad way to open his account.

At 42 years old, Glover Teixeira’s Cinderella run isn’t quite over yet. Teixeira (33-7) claimed UFC gold with a second-round submission over Jan Blachowicz (28-9) to win the UFC light heavyweight championship at UFC 267 from Fight Island in Abu Dhabi.

In the first, Teixeira ate a few stiff shots from Blachowicz, but he earned an early takedown and held position through the end of the round. In the second, Blachowicz stuffed two takedown attempts from Teixeira and looked to be gaining momentum. But late in the round, Teixeira hurt Blachowicz with a big hook and then locked in a rear-naked choke after flattening the champion to earn the submission.

Teixeira became the second-oldest champion in UFC history, making it six wins in a row for the veteran. Teixeira’s last three wins have been some of the most notable of his career — over two former title contenders in dominating fashion with a knockout victory over Anthony Smith and a submission over Thiago Santos, and a submission over the champion. Blachowicz himself was coming off a notable five-fight run, one that included wins over Luke Rockhold and Dominick Reyes. He also handed Israel Adesanya his first professional loss.

After the win, Teixeira gave no hints that retirement is in his sights with full anticipation to defend the belt.

Madonna loves to skirt the line between edgy, uncomfortable, and downright disgusting. And some fans think she might’ve crossed over it with a new magazine cover shoot. Working on a shot for the cover of V Magazine, Madonna apparently thought a good conceit for the scene would be recreating the bedroom where Marilyn Monroe was found dead. For those who might be unaware, Monroe tragically died at age 36 of a drug overdose when she took too many sleeping pills.

While the connection between the two has been well-established in Madonna’s art in the past, this gruesome depiction takes it to a whole new level. Sure, the “Material Girl” inspiration from Monroe performing “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” made sense, and there’s an obvious similarity between the two, appearance-wise. It’s a great Halloween costume, as her photos below reveal:

But the emphasis is more on one of the three covers that V ended up choosing:

Photographer Steven Klein defended his artistic choices, saying the shoot was about the relationship between photographer and subject. “We were not interested in recreating the images exactly,” he said in a press release. “But more importantly, we wanted to explore the relationship between photographer and subject. Both the friendship and the artistic process, and how art can imitate life and vice versa. When I sent Madonna the photos, she was really taken by the incandescent fragility of Marilyn at that moment in her life. We decided to find a hotel suite and try to capture the liaison between a star and the camera, the mystery, and magic of this creative collaboration.”

Not sure if the scene of someone’s death by overdose is part of the mystery and magic he’s talking about, but critics seem to have a fair point for this one.

Last week, an accidental gun discharge on the set of the Western Rust resulted in the death of one of its crew members. Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed when star Alec Baldwin unwittingly fired a prop gun he didn’t know was loaded. (Its director, Joel Souza, was also wounded.) Since then, one startling revelation after another about what caused the incident has emerged. Throughout, Baldwin has been cooperative with police and investigators. And now he’s talking to reporters.

As per Deadline, the actor and his wife, Hilaria, agreed to speak to a journalist as they drove through Manchester, Vermont, far from the Santa Fe set of Rust.

“A woman died,” Baldwin said. “She was my friend. She was my friend. The day I arrived in Santa Fe to start shooting, I took her to dinner with Joel, the director. We were a very, very well-oiled crew shooting a film together and then this horrible event happened.”

Baldwin couldn’t go into details, saying he was instructed “not to talk about the investigation.” What he could say was that he was “eagerly awaiting for the sheriff’s department’ to release their findings,” and that he “talks to the cops every day.”

Hilaria repeated had to remind her husband not to go into “details,” and when asked about his meeting with Hutchins’ widower, Matthew Hutchins, he simply said he “wouldn’t know how to characterize” their discussion, but did say he was “overwhelmed with grief.”

What Baldwin did say was that what happened was a “one in a trillion” accident. “How many bullets have been fired in films and tv shows in the last 75 years?” he said. “This is America. Probably billions. And nearly all of them without incident.” He did, however, call for new safety measures on film sets.

The conversation only lasted four minutes, and Baldwin said he did it “out of courtesy.”

Among the revelations about what happened on the set of Rust leading up to the tragic shooting was that there had been an air of “complacency” towards safety issues, as well as questions about certain crew members, including its armorer and assistant director.

On the heels of losing his bantamweight crown due to a controversial disqualification against Aljamain Sterling, Petr Yan is once again holding UFC gold. Yan (16-2) had no problem dispatching Cory Sandhagen (14-4) by unanimous decision to claim the UFC bantamweight interim title at UFC 267 from Fight Island in Abu Dhabi.

Yan had trouble with Sandhagen’s range early on, peppering the former champ with combinations up top. Yan began to eat away with body shots through the first and second, and set up connections up top late in the second round. Yan continued his advantage through the third and fourth, chipping away at Sandhagen with massive shots. Every punch was powerful and by the fifth, Sandhagen

Before his loss to Sterling, Yan handed devastating knockouts to UFC legends Uriah Faber and Jose Aldo in back-to-back tilts. Sandhagen entered his showdown with Yan following a five-round decision loss to T.J. Dillashaw back in July. Before that bout, Sandhagen earned quality wins over Frankie Edgar and Marlon Moraes.

With the win firmly in his rearview, Yan can now turn his attention to Sterling, the reigning bantamweight champion. Sterling, who earned his shot at UFC gold following five consecutive wins, including a submission in June 2020 over Corey Sandhagen, has been clear that he’s ready to unify the belts in 2022 after his return from neck surgery.

All the rumors are true: When it comes to Halloween costumes, few come to play the way Lizzo does. The pop star decided to go as a beloved internet character this year, donning full Baby Yoda aka Grogu garb for a look that has fans of the Disney+ Star Wars television series The Mandalorian absolutely losing their minds. Appearing at a Spotify Halloween party in LA (where was my invite??), as well as several other locations, the rapper posted photos and videos of her costume all over social media with playful captions:

Of course, celebrity Halloween costumes have become an ever popular form of content during the social media era, and a chance for us to see how the most powerful and popular among us can flex their creativity. So many celebrities only do it for the ‘gram though, and don’t take their costumes out into the real world. As you can see above, this is not the case for Lizzo, who remains realer than ever even on the spookiest holiday of the year. Just like she stands up to bullying and always congratulates her peers on their success, Lizzo is the queen of Halloween, too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t have more costumes coming this weekend.

The Jan. 6 committee is still investigating into what caused a legion of Trump supporters to overtake the Capitol building, with little help from Trump himself. Perhaps it was Trump himself? With some help from staffers and die-hards? Just spit-balling here. The former president himself has tried to point the finger elsewhere. And a new report from The Washington Post reveals that one of his more dastardly advisers tried to pin the blame on someone else — a certain person who said supporters wanted to hang.

The Post unearthed an email sent from attorney John C. Eastman to Greg Jacob, the former vice president’s chief counsel, while Pence was hiding from the mob that wanted him dead.

“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote.

The email was featured in a draft opinion article Jacob had written about Trump’s legal team, Eastman among them. Jacob told The Post that, by sending the email at the peak of the Capitol siege, Eastman had “displayed a shocking lack of awareness of how those practical implications were playing out in real time.”

If Eastman’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he’s the author of the infamous “Eastman memo,” which outlined how Pence could overturn the election results and generally create chaos. (He didn’t, thanks in part to Dan Quayle.) The memo was penned in late 2020 but wasn’t made public until this fall. But it’s clear that there’s still plenty more damning evidence about the lead-up to one of the darkest days in history en route.

(Via The Post)

After a long four years, the beloved psych-rock outfit The War On Drugs has released a new album. Though Adam Granduciel teased some clips from the record late last year, it took until summer of 2021 for news about the band’s new project to surface. Back in July, they shared the new track, “Living Proof,” along with news that their next full-length release, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, would be out at the end of October. On Tuesday, the band shared “Change” as the final single before the album itself came out yesterday. Now that fans have had about a day to live with the album, more outpouring of acclaim looks to be on the way, once again.

But since live shows have been a much trickier subject over the last two years than usual, a couple of live performances of songs off the record are a more treasured moment. Today, the band played three of the brand new tunes on CBS This Morning, including the album closer “Occasional Rain,” “Old Skin,” and their latest single, “Change.” Check out clips of those performances above and below, and look out for a career-spanning piece encompassing both the new record and the band’s entire oeuvre dropping on Uproxx very soon.

Back in 2017, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti were as thick as thieves. The two young rappers share a similar style and appeared to be friends in the industry, teasing a joint mixtape and eventually connecting several times in the next year. Though a joint tour was canceled due to Uzi’s need for “focus,” all seemed well between the two upstart, punk rap prodigies… that was, until rumors of beef between the two began to swirl after some online back and forths.

Last spring, Uzi trolled Carti’s new single “@ Meh” as “just meh,” and later continued to to troll Playboi by asking him about his release date, which had been moved a few times. But whatever was going on between these two internet pranksters seems to be all good IRL. At Rolling Loud in New York this past weekend, Carti brought Uzi out as a guest during his set, and the pair performed together. Let’s hope that means their collaborative mixtape is back on track, and maybe even that tour, and we can expect joint new music from both them and Megan Thee Stallion and Bree Runway in the next few weeks and months. Hey, 2021 is far from over and there’s always plenty of room for new rap. Check out some clips of the pair performing together below.