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Matt Gaetz, the Republican congressman who is under investigation by the FBI for alleged sex trafficking, got married in California over the weekend.

“Gaetz and Ginger Luckey eloped Saturday, with the politician sharing a series of tweets and photos celebrating the occasion,” the New York Daily News reports, including one that reads, “On one of my amazing Wife’s final days as a fiancé, she was right there with me campaigning in Iowa. It is pure joy to walk through life with ⁦@LuckeyGinger.”

In another, Gaetz wrote, [extremely Borat voice] “I love my wife!”

If the name “Ginger Luckey” sounds familiar, that’s probably because you know her sister, Roxanne Luckey, who called Gaetz “weird and creepy” and “a literal pedophile” on TikTok. “I saw the character and type of person he is, and when everything came out about him, I honestly, unfortunately, was not surprised,” the former-White House intern said, adding, “As someone who has personally experienced a ton of creepy old politician men hitting on me when I was underage, and experiencing sexual assault at that age by people of power, it’s very disheartening and I have zero tolerance of people like [Gaetz].”

About 40 people attended the ceremony (Roxanne was likely not one of them), which had an official hashtag of #GaetzGetsLuckey. Twitter users had a better suggestion.

There was a competing hashtag, too:

(Via the New York Daily News)

Lizzo recently kicked off a new era of music with “Rumors,” her single with Cardi B. The single dropped alongside a regal video, which included several callbacks to Disney’s 1997 film Hercules. While the new track topped the iTunes chart, it also subjected Lizzo to a number of bodyshaming trolls. The comments led Lizzo to go on an emotional Instagram Live session, and now many celebrities are jumping to her defense.

Along with Cardi B and Offset sharing their support, T.I. is the latest celebrity to tell the haters to leave Lizzo alone. The rapper shared an encouraging message to the singer in a video shared to social media, reminding Lizzo that negative comments are just a projection of haters’ own insecurities:

“My message to Lizzo. I don’t know Lizzo personally. Listen, sweetheart, you are beautiful, you are talented, you are good enough for all the great things the world has to offer, don’t wait on nobody out there in the public to validate that. Don’t do that because their perception of you has more to do with them than it does with you. All these people who out here who have negative sh*t to say it’s because they feel negatively about themselves. Them speaking negatively about you or me or anybody else has more to do with them than it does with you. Please don’t wait on them to give you the okay to be happy. Please don’t wait on them to give you the okay for you to be satisfied with yourself, your accomplishments, your achievements.”

T.I. then ended his message by repeating some choice words. “F*ck them people,” he said. “F*ck what people say. You hear me? F*ck ’em.”

Watch T.I.’s full message above.

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

After exiting The View at the beginning of August, Meghan McCain has resorted to tweeting aggressively partisan attacks that, just like her arguments on The View, have routinely blown up in her face. This time around, McCain took a shot at Vice President Kamala Harris by retweeting a right-wing video accusing Harris of “laughing” about the situation in Afghanistan. The former talk show host even went so far to accuse the vice president of having a disorder similar to Joaquin Phoenix’s version of the Joker. It was pure class all around.

“This may be some kind of real issue (like Joaquin phoenix in the joker),” McCain tweeted. “[B]ut she’s the Vice President and she’s hand ample time and resources to media train herself out of reacting to every SINGLE crisis situation like she’s walking onto a late night show. She comes off so craven.”

Despite firing off her tweet early Monday morning, it didn’t take long for people to flood McCain’s replies and point out that Harris is clearly not laughing about the situation in Afghanistan, but at the throng of reporters crowding her and yelling at her over the sound of a helicopter. When she is asked about Americans still trapped in the country, the vice president’s demeanor noticeably changes to match the seriousness of the topic.

There were also plenty of quips about McCain’s time on The View, and how she probably isn’t the best person to lecture others about professionalism while on camera considering her penchant for on-screen shouting matches and routinely mentioning that she’s John McCain’s daughter.

You can see some of the reactions to McCain’s tweet below:

(Via Meghan McCain on Twitter)

An album can be utterly disappointing, and still be excellent. This is the paradoxical feat that Solar Power, Lorde’s third, hotly-anticipated album has executed. And part of the problem lies within that hot anticipation, more than it does in what the artist herself has delivered. Disappointing early singles like the peppy, toothless title track and Lana Del Rey-cosplay “Stoned At The Nail Salon” alerted fans to an obvious sea change, and a third single, “Mood Ring,” which tried and seemingly failed to parody nü-wellness culture initially landed on my ears as the biggest bummer of all. Within the context of the album as a whole, though, all three have gained at least a sense of place.

Though this New Zealand “teen millionaire” has assuredly divorced herself from the pop star sound and accoutrement that used to fit like a glove, the weight of who she was hangs over the record like a cloud. “If you’re looking for a savior, that’s not me,” she sings on “The Path,” a direct juxtaposition to her clunky title track assertion, “I’m kind of like a prettier Jesus.” Solar Power isn’t a record about coming back to reality after several years spent hiding out in the bush — it’s a record about how hiding out in the bush is Lorde’s reality now, and the celebrity stuff is what she’s closing the book on. In that sense, it doesn’t deliver what fans thought it would, but it also offers a more intimate portrait of Lorde than any set of bangers could’ve. A Laurel Canyon-inspired portrait of life in New Zealand isn’t going to qualify as gospel for most American listeners, but after some getting used to, it’s an unexpectedly beautiful left turn.

From the woozy album opener “The Path” all the way through the lush “Fallen Fruit” and trippy, barely-minute-plus “Leader Of A New Regime,” Lorde traces a tongue-in-cheek argument for remove from society, justifying her decision to look for meaning elsewhere in real life disappointments. It’s the logical decision of someone who is rich enough to be fully offline for years at a time, but certainly not a concept album that’s one that’s going to resonate with her extremely-online, college-loan-debt-laden fans. At least these three, and the other standout, “California,” offer enough atmosphere to anchor “Mood Ring” in the breezy, sardonic climate it needed to feel funny.

We always knew she was going to go full Kate Bush — if early covers of “Running Up That Hill” didn’t alert you, her split with Max Martin over “Green Light” phrasing should’ve — we just didn’t know it would be so soon. Goodbye to all that, and hello Lorde’s 24-going-on-25 epiphany: Being famous isn’t worth the hassle. This seems like the healthiest conclusion a pop star has come to in years, but again, it isn’t necessarily relatable en masse. The sense of resignation that permeates the album is perhaps unexpected for a songwriter as young as Lorde, but considering how much life she lived in the first two decades of her life — again, typified in “California” — it feels earned. Since that song essentially takes “Royals” and applies the same dismissal to the very worst of LA celebrity culture, it might be hard for the entire rest of the state to stomach the rather stereotypical generalization, except for when remembering Lorde’s respect for hip-hop. I’ll take it as a subtle nod to Tupac and Dre et al. and not the lowkey insult it can sound like upon a less generous listen — especially since the entire sound of the album is inspired by and owed to the state this song sorta maligns.

When it hits, the record hits, sun on skin. But when the songwriting stumbles, which is almost solely on a lyrical level, the missteps are egregious, and too jarring to ignore. “Stoned At The Nail Salon,” a deeply beautiful song, feels lifted wholecloth from Lana’s entire shtick, and the fan-discovered melodic overlap with “Wild At Heart” off Chemtrails doesn’t help the cause. On the other end of the spectrum “Secrets From A Girl (Who’s Seen It All)” could’ve almost passed as a fine ’90s throwback tune, except for the spoken word outro from Robyn that is truly awful. Fashionable representatives from Lorde’s old Rookie set might be tempted to archly quote Jenny Holzer’s “abuse of power comes as no surprise” over this misuse of the Swedish icon, but it’s also indicative of what can happen when an artist has no one around them willing to be brutally honest.

Contrary to what the baseless pontifications from Antonoff armchair critics assert, Jack doesn’t seem to wield that kind of editing pen or veto power in his collaborative pop star relationships. Quite the opposite, he doesn’t seem to offer constructive criticism when maybe he should. So just as I won’t credit Antonoff for the sparkling pathos of the actually brilliant “Big Star,” I can’t blame him for the album missteps, either. “The Man With The Axe” and “Dominoes” prove that Paul Simon’s influence is harder to escape on a lighthearted-yet-heavy songwriters album than it appears to be, and the latter’s strangely Swiftian lyric reference (“Out Of The Woods”) feels more like an oversight than an allusion. But whether reference or homage, similarity to Taylor and Lana feels inevitable for Lorde, whose past approach to the world of pop seemed to rest gently between the two.

If Lorde failed to live up to the standards this pair set on this latest album, it’s because they’ve only been setting the lyrical bar higher all throughout her hiatus, and again, that’s the primary area where Solar Power lags. Whatever is lacking in lyrics is almost made up for in her newly-realized vocal control, which is so much more intricate here, improved by leaps and bounds. “I can make anything real,” she boasts on the Fleet Foxes-indebted “Oceanic Feeling” (“Grown Ocean,” “Sunblind”) a blazing six-minute epic that feels like it could’ve been the album opener for a completely different version of Solar Power. On this song most off all, the daylight is worth chasing, and ironically, most indicative of the state I know and love.

Solar Power is out now via. Get it here.

Boosie Badazz has made no secret of his feelings about Lil Nas X’s popularity. Despite the backlash over his previous comments in which he called Nas several slurs in defense of DaBaby, Boosie doubled down in a recent interview with New York’s The Breakfast Club. The show, which can be a controversy magnet at the best of times — sometimes even courting it on purpose, as it seemingly did with this booking — brought him on to address his criticisms and the reaction they prompted on social media.

When host Angela Yee asks whether he thought his words went “too far” — which, come on, man — Boosie argued that they did not. “I’ve gotta speak up because, as far as straight people in the world, you don’t have an opinion no more,” he said.

“Everything is harm,” he complained, providing a supremely questionable example. “If you say anything [like], ‘I like women,’ it’s vulgar.” To the hosts’ credit, they did push back on that assertion, Boosie was undeterred, insisting that the entertainment industry is “ran by” queer people (objectively not true; also, so what if it was? You can have an opinion — you aren’t entitled to sharing that opinion, especially if it’s peppered with derogatory slurs and the same rhetoric that gets used to justify oppression and violence against minority groups).

Boosie seems to be completely missing the point of the backlash against him and The Breakfast Club‘s hosts seem ill-equipped to convey it to him. The whole exercise feels a little … pointless. Meanwhile, Lil Nas X is getting huge opportunities like a creative role at Taco Bell even as hateful rhetoric like Boosie’s forced him to hire security. It looks like that the effect of all this will continue to be lost on some folks, which is a shame because there can’t be that much money in hating.

The Ted Lasso Power Rankings are a weekly analysis of who and/or what had the strongest performance in each episode. Most of the list will feature individual characters, although the committee does reserve the right to honor anything from animals to inanimate objects to laws of nature to general concepts. There are very few rules here.

Season 2, Episode 5 — “Rainbow”

HONORABLE MENTION: Isaac (good lad); Jamie Tartt (nothing to do this week but I assume he’s still on the right path); Nate’s cranky dad (he’s not a dog, Nate); Jade Anniversary (good fake name); Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds (need a Mythic Quest / Ted Lasso crossover ASAP); Wario (I need to hear Roy pronounce the names of all the characters in the Nintendo universe, starting with Yoshi); The Rolling Stones (I assume they all bought new boats with the checks they got for the use of a huge chunk of “She’s Like a Rainbow”); Hugh Grant, Matthew McConaughey, Drew Barrymore, various Kates, etc. (do anything in your life as well as they’ve done rom-coms and you’ll be just fine)

10. Higgins (Last week: Unranked)

I had been getting a great deal of pleasure from plopping Higgins in the Honorable Mentions section every week, regardless of what he did, in part because it felt right given his role on the show and in part because I am a child who cannot do a simple weekly rankings post without creating bits to entertain myself. But I had no choice here. I had to slide him into the listings proper. Between the line in the screenshot above and the thing where the entire climax of the episode — I cried, again — was a reference to the ringtone he uses for his wife, which is itself a reference to their first big date… yes, Higgins has entered the top ten.

9. The surprisingly helpful kebab shop owner (Last week: Unranked)

Pretty nice of him to give a seemingly unrelated speech about doing what you love just as Ted was trying to convince Roy to come back and help coach the team. Almost like it was written into the script that way for a reason. Hmm. But as a guy who has a law degree and now spends most weekdays writing nonsense rankings and taking screenshots of friendly fictional kebab chefs, I suppose I really can’t run around poking holes in any of this. It checks out. And now I want to eat a kebab. Vicious cycle, really.

8. Ted Lasso (Last week: 9)

Another week, another player helped through Ted’s brand of folksy therapy, this time Isaac, who learned to be less cranky and have more fun with a nudge from Roy Kent, who also succumbed to Ted’s little Benevolent Jedi routine. And he got to sneak out that “wigwam inside a teepee = two tents / two tense” line, which has to be pretty thrilling for him. I bet he’d been sitting on it all week just waiting for his chance to slide it into the conversation. Good for him.

That said, it does remain my position — and I haven’t watched the screeners ahead of this episode because I am not a cheater — that there is still a big sit-down with Dr. Sharon coming, one that is going to wreck Ted and me equally. I am looking forward to it and dreading it all at once. And there’s also the phone thing, which we’ll get to in the section on Rebecca. We really need to talk about that.

7. This kid (Last week: Unranked)

Love this guy. Look at his little face. Adorable.

6. Keeley (Last week: 5)

Three things here, regarding Keeley:

• I love the relationship she and Rebecca have, kind of equals as friends, kind of employer-employee, kind of mentor-life coach, kind of, in a way, mother-daughter, even though Hannah Waddingham and Juno Temple are only 14 years apart in age
• The “let’s invade France” line was terrific and perfectly delivered
• It still cracks me up that everyone on this show has an open door policy and spends entire workdays role-playing as restaurant hostesses to help other team employees

I want her and Roy to have a baby, mostly so I see can what kind of person they’d create. Make a spin-off about this hypothetical child and set it 30 years in the future. I am serious.

5. My sweet prince Dani Rojas (Last week: 8)

I need to see Dani Rojas absolutely flying on cold brew and sugar. I had not even considered this as a thing I might want until this week. I had kind of assumed he already was flying on caffeine and sugar all the time, like a kid who got into the Mountain Dew at a sleepover. But now that I know this is him in his natural state… I must see it. Give him a Red Bull. Give him a Four Loko. This is science now. I’m doing science. I will document my findings and everything. Someone get me a lab coat and a clipboard and enough sugar-y energy drinks to launch a horse into orbit. Dani Rojas and I have work to do. I bet he’d be able to bench press the team bus.

4. Rebecca (Last week: 2)

Plenty of ways we could go with the Rebecca chat this week, whether it’s her strategy of making herself big before scary social situations or her turning to her own employees for advice on her love life. But I think we need to focus on the Bantr of it all. How she’s been chatting with some charming mystery man. How she’s giggling and blushing like a teen at their little conversations. How the episode cut from the image in the screencap above, where she sent the mystery man another personal note, straight to this…

This is happening. I think this is happening. I do not know if I want it to happen. But something is coming here. Ted and Rebecca are both recently divorced middle-aged people who spend a lot of time together and enjoy each other’s company. In a way, it was bound to happen at some point. I kind of can’t wait to see their faces when they realize that what I think is happening here is, in fact, happening. It would be a whole thing.

3. Nate (Last week: Unranked)

It was nice to see Nate get a win this week, with the whole table business. He’s had a weird run so far this season, stuck in limbo between having authority as a coach now (and tormenting the new kit man with this new power) and still being the low man on a new totem pole (lowest ranking coach). He’s a sweet man, sometimes too sweet, so I got a legitimate belly laugh out of the thing where he spit at the mirror after saying the line in this screencap. I hope this becomes a thing. I hope, for the rest of the season, just at random, the action cuts briefly to Nate sitting in a restaurant by himself at the best table at the house, just confidently cutting and eating a steak and making eye contact with the server and other staff.

What I’m saying is that it would be funny if this show slowly, over the course of many seasons, turns Nate into James Bond.

2. Roy Kent (Last week: 3)

This episode, as you probably realized early into the proceedings, was chockablock with references to various romantic comedies. There was plenty of When Harry Met Sally in there, some Bridget Jones, some Notting Hill and Pretty Woman, and a slew of others. Then there was this one right at the end, the “you had me at coach” twist on the famous Jerry Maguire line. I wasn’t joking earlier: I did straight-up start crying when Roy walked onto the field to raucous cheers from the crowd. This is because I’m a crier, just generally, but also because the episode followed the classic rom-com structure that has conditioned humans to start crying at pivotal moments. It’s almost diabolical, really.

Two thoughts, in closing:

• I will, once again, for what feels like the fifth week in a row, restate my pitch that Roy Kent should host a daytime talk show where he gives blunt but helpful life tips, like he did to the guy who helped him get to the stadium by dropping the “You’ve got to date your wife” line he stole (with credit) from Nikki Sixx
• I will miss him as a pundit very much, both because he was hilarious in that role and because he did this little eyebrow-raise before he’d start talking and I found it to be maybe the funniest thing on the show

But him becoming a coach feels right, even if Nate seems a little uncomfortable about it all. We’ll have to monitor this situation over the next few episodes. And while we’re doing that, in the interim between this episode and the next, I would recommend doing a little “right-click / save as” move on the following screencap…

… just because I feel like we could all get some use out of it going forward. Roy Kent is a good man, much to his chagrin.

1. Coach Beard (Last week: 1)

Sometimes when I’m watching an episode take a long ride with a particular character — Nate at the restaurant, Roy at the restaurant, really any time anyone is at a restaurant — my mind will drift off and start wondering what Coach Beard is up to in that exact moment. It could be anything. Nothing would surprise me. He could be skydiving or exchanging gold bars for marble sculptures or cooking a perfect soufflé. He fascinates me.

But, and this is important, and I’ve said it before, I absolutely do not want to ever actually find out. To paraphrase another good show about personal growth amidst odd circumstances, let’s just let this mystery be.

Fox News continues to be very upset over President Joe Biden’s handling of the evacuation in Afghanistan, but their faux outrage’s latest political target is a surprising one.

During a segment on Sunday, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy seemed to place much of the blame for the chaos in the Middle East squarely on First Lady Dr. Jill Biden’s shoulders. Despite Dr. Biden having held no cabinet position or really being involved in the decision-making process when it comes to America’s military presence overseas, Duffy was adamant that the buck should stop with the First Lady, suggesting that it was her job to curb her husband’s bad decision-making.

“You wonder who are the people responsible for putting someone this incompetent and frankly this, you know, mentally frail in this position?” Campos-Duffy said (via Raw Story). “I’m sorry, as a political spouse, I can’t help but look at Jill Biden.”

Oddly enough, Duffy never blamed former First Lady Melania Trump for some of Donald Trump’s most humiliating failures while in office. “Where was Melania when Trump was chatting it up with the Taliban?” is a question we would’ve never heard a year ago. Still, Duffy appeared absurdly upset over that Dr. Biden hasn’t diagnosed her husband with a mental condition — she’s a Doctor of Education, not medicine — and her refusal to step in when it became clear the president had bungled the situation in Afghanistan.

“No one knew better his state of mind than Jill Biden, Doctor Jill Biden,” Duffy emphasized. “If you ask me, the most patriotic thing Jill Biden could’ve done was tell her husband … to love her husband and not let him run in this mental state that he’s in. I think she failed the country as well.”

(Via Raw Story)

Much of Jake Tapper’s recent CNN airtime has been devoted to coverage of the Afghanistan debacle, but on Sunday, the anchor took time to air a dying wish from former Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-MI), who passed away about a week ago following a battle against cancer.

Mitchell, who spoke with Tapper from a hospice bed, expressed his desire to only have this interview aired following his death. The interview was an emotional one on both ends with the frequently (and necessarily) stoic Tapper expressing sadness over Mitchell’s terminal condition, and Mitchell (who retired in December 2020) making a plea for bipartisanship to finally happen, even as Democrats and Republicans find themselves increasingly at odds. It’s a phenomenon that isn’t new, although it’s clear that the pandemic has only exacerbated existing fissures with Mitchell noting (on the subject of vaccines), “It’s ‘I won’t talk to you.’ It’s breaking up families.”

“There’s value in people you don’t agree with. It’s easy to find people you agree with. There’s value in people that you may disagree with on something strongly, but it doesn’t inherently make them a bad person,” Mitchell further declared to Tapper. “Learn to understand people and judge less and love more and let’s have less hatred. It’s destroying our society.”

Sage words that will hopefully be heeded. Watch the video below.

It’s been a few years since Kacey Musgraves secured several Grammys for her hit 2018 album Golden Hour. Since then, the singer has gone through several transitions in her life, including a divorce, but she’s now preparing for the release of her upcoming album, Star-Crossed.

Musgraves officially announced Star-Crossed Monday, saying it will arrive in early September alongside a film on Paramount+. She also recently sat down with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe to discuss her LP. While writing music for the album, Musgraves was at first worried that she didn’t yet have a concept and that it was just “going to be a bunch of sad songs.” But then, she started learning about the structure of old Greek theater and realized her Star-Crossed album is a “modern tragedy in three acts.” Because of this, Musgraves is giving her own modern-day definition of “star-crossed”:

“It’s to be f*cked by love or luck. You’re ill-fated, it’s just not written in the stars. It is not for you. And everyone puts out their highlight reel, nobody’s putting out their f*ck ups. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s daunting. But I’m excited to share ‘star-crossed’ just because people know me to be a songwriter that writes about what I’m going through. And I think it would have been extremely awkward if I just acted this last chapter didn’t happen for me. So I think you saw my highlight reel with Golden Hour and this is the other side of that. And I mean there are beautiful parts of that too.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Musgraves said there are some parts of the record that sound more country than Golden Hour, but her album is also meant to be theatrical. “I always love when something classic or something traditional, something futuristic kind of meet,” she said. “I just, I’m always intrigued by that. Whether it’s in fashion, etc. I think that there are certain aspects of this record that sound a little bit more country, I guess than Golden Hour. I don’t know. But at the same time, I feel like I’m tapping into more influences on this, widespread influences on this album.”

Watch Musgraves’ full interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe and Star-Crossed film trailer above. See her Star-Crossed album artwork and tracklist below.

1. “Star-Crossed”
2. “Good Wife”
3. “Cherry Blossom”
4. “Simple Times”
5. “If This Was A Movie..”
6. “Justified”
7. “Angel”
8. “Breadwinner”
9. “Camera Roll”
10. “Easier Said”
11. “Hookup Scene”
12. “Keep Lookin’ Up”
13. “What Doesn’t Kill Me”
14. “There Is A Light”
15. “Gracias A La Vida”

Star-Crossed is out 9/10 via Interscope Records/UMG Nashville. Pre-order it here.

Last summer, Yesenia Aguilar was walking on a sidewalk five minutes from home in Anaheim, California when a drunk driver jumped the curb with her Jeep and struck her. The vehicle narrowly missed her husband, James Alvarez, who was walking beside her. Aguilar was 35 weeks pregnant at the time.

Tragically, Aguilar died at the hospital, but the couple’s baby, Adalyn Rose, was delivered via cesarean section and survived. For the past year, Alvarez has poured himself into being a good dad to Adalyn while processing the grief and trauma of witnessing his wife be killed right in front of him.

The story was widely covered in the news and many people have followed Alvarez as he shares his life with Adalyn on social media. It’s now been a year since the accident, and the birthday photos Alvarez has shared of Adalyn’s first birthday are touching people deeply.

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With the help of X & V Photography, Alvarez has recreated a photoshoot he and Aguilar did not long before the accident. Aguilar was dressed in a pink gown, with her baby bump featuring prominently in the photos. In the new shoot, Alvarez dressed Adalyn in a pink dress as well and posed her in the places her mother was in the previous one.

The effect is sadly touching and achingly beautiful—a reminder of the gift of life.

It’s hard to imagine what range of emotions this shoot brought up for Alvarez.

It’s also hard to imagine how Adalyn will process the whole story when she’s old enough to understand.

But what a beautiful tribute to the woman who gave her life before hers was taken.

“Adalyn, I know if your mommy was here, she would have been the happiest person alive,” Alvarez wrote in an Instagram share of the photo shoot. “She would be so excited to celebrate your birthday. That’s why, I’m making sure I fulfill her wishes and wish the happiest birthday ever baby. Your mommy and daddy loves you.”

It’s the hardest thing to make beauty out of tragedy, but these photos prove it’s possible. Happy birthday, little Adalyn.