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Selena Gomez has been one of the most successful pop stars of the past decade: All three of her albums have topped the charts and she has eight top-10 singles to her name, including “Lose You To Love Me,” which was a No. 1 single in 2019. That said, Gomez seems to think she’s not getting the credit or respect she deserves, which has left her seriously considering leaving music.

In a new Vogue cover story, Gomez says:

“It’s hard to keep doing music when people don’t necessarily take you seriously. I’ve had moments where I’ve been like, ‘What’s the point? Why do I keep doing this?’ ‘Lose You to Love Me’ I felt was the best song I’ve ever released, and for some people it still wasn’t enough. I think there are a lot of people who enjoy my music, and for that I’m so thankful, for that I keep going, but I think the next time I do an album it’ll be different. I want to give it one last try before I maybe retire music.”

When asked about that again, Gomez replied, “I need to be careful,” and clarified that she’d like to spend more time producing and giving herself “a real shot at acting.”

Following publication of the story, “WE LOVE YOU SELENA” became a trending topic on Twitter as fans showed their support for the artist.

Gomez certainly has plenty of coals on the fire outside of music. She has her HBO Max series Selena + Chef, her status as one of the most-followed people on Instagram, her Rare Beauty cosmetics company, and many other endeavors. So, while it would be unfortunate to see a talent like Gomez leave music, she would likely fare just fine if she did.

Read the full Vogue feature here.

It started like many things did in 2020: over Zoom. Fred VanVleet sat for post-practice media availability seven weeks into the NBA’s Orlando Bubble, and by now, the routine had grown rhythmic — a second to get himself settled, a welcome from one of the team’s remote PR people running the call, then the familiar order of beat writers called on for their questions. Only that day was different. Jacob Blake had been shot by police in Kenosha, Wisc. on August 23 and footage of the event quickly spread across social media.

Social unrest ran parallel with the league since its return to play. It was a prerequisite from players that the league show visible support for the Black Lives Matter movement during broadcasts and throughout the Bubble so that the protests and social action many players had been involved in after the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd not lose momentum. But the shooting of Blake seemed to suddenly put things in stark perspective: Nothing had changed in the world that existed outside of their Bubble.

What unfolded can be unpacked a few ways. Sports media, traditionally, has not been the most adept at sensing when to shift the familiar line of questioning in the face of what could be taken as aberration, whether from an event or its emotional fallout. There is a weird propensity to press on as usual even when the situation is anything but. Then factor in that most media members weren’t in the same room with a player, who wore a mask, and more social cues that might’ve been picked up via proximity were lost.

Still, within the seconds it took for VanVleet to be asked his first question that morning — whether he was excited about Toronto’s upcoming series against the Celtics — some palpable signs of discomfort were there. His shoulders square, his blinking gets more rapid, his chin tenses in the way that happens when pressing your lips together.

“I was pretty excited,” VanVleet says, crossing one of his arms against his chest, tucking his hand under his elbow, “and then we all had to watch Jacob Blake get shot yesterday.

“Coming down here, making the choice to play, was supposed to not be in vain,” he added. “It’s just starting to feel that everything we’re doing is going through the motions and that nothing’s really changing.”

It was an honest, painful disclosure. The gravity of what VanVleet just said made the follow up question feel perfunctory: Where was he when he saw the video, and how did he try to make sense of it?

“I don’t know,” VanVleet says calmly, the only thing betraying his steadiness are his hands just out of frame, running up and down his legs. “I would like to ask you, what do you think about it? How do you make sense of it?”

The reporter, TSN’s Michael Grange, is clearly caught off guard. His response, in the moment, academically abstract. When he’s finished, VanVleet just nods.

“We’re the ones with the microphones always in our face,” he says. “We’re the ones always who have to make a stand. But like, we’re the oppressed ones and the responsibility falls on us to make a change to stop being oppressed. That’s my point in asking you the question. At what point do we not have to speak about it anymore? Are we going to hold everybody accountable? Or we’re just going to put the spotlight on Black people, or Black athletes.”

“I’d say what was probably missing the most was off the top, I regret not reading the room better right off the start,” Grange recalls. “Because clearly I think I was a little bit out of tune when I was looking to ask about the playoff series when that wasn’t what was top of mind. I think sometimes when you’re in your own little bubble, your own environment, and you don’t sometimes sense the weight of that moment as they’re experiencing it, as Fred was, clearly that was the wrong opening question.

“I respect him for doing it,” Grange adds. “He was asking a pretty sincere question. I was doing my best to give a full answer on a massive topic, and I wish I’d done a little better.”

The fourth wall VanVleet pressed up against by turning the question back around on media had been one perceptibly closing in, at times uncomfortably, awkwardly, or outright strangely, by the day. When play resumed at Disney following a league-wide stoppage in response to Blake’s shooting, media did along with it, and Zoom calls became a daily routine for team beat writers.

Initially, there was a friendly sense of reunion, calls featured two-way video and the novelty of seeing faces after months of hiatus lent an affable tone, at least in one area, to the resumption of play in arguably the most performative place in the world. There was added levity in on-the-fly troubleshooting, media figuring out how to ask questions, and team communications staff adopting and adjusting best practices both on the ground at Disney and remotely.

“I honestly had never heard of Zoom before March,” Phoenix Suns communications manager Cole Mickelson says, laughing at the disbelief of a pre-Zoom world. “And so it [was] kind of a whole new world in terms of navigating that. The NBA were the ones who set up everything as far as all the infrastructure, these giant TV monitors that had cameras attached to them that each of the practice gyms and the game gyms had. Setting up in front of those was definitely an adjustment. The first time having each player, when they did the Zoom, having to give them a brief beforehand just saying, this is something you haven’t seen before but this is how it’s going to be in the Bubble.”

While acknowledging the NBA did an incredible job creating everything from scratch, Mickelson says “constant little corrections” were necessary, like making sure microphones and monitors were ideal for each press availability. He recalls the first Zoom presser for Suns coach Monty Williams, who prefers to be seated when meeting with the media. The issue: He had nowhere to sit.

“So I got him a chair at the last minute but because of that, just the way the camera was set up, the quality of the shot was really terrible,” Mickelson gives a little groaning laugh, recalling the mistake. “For that first one, you could only see the top of his head.”

Mickelson made sure to get the same kind of chair for every call after that and eventually noticed, as other teams followed suit, a readily available ocean of high seats. Teams began to emulate other blanket best practices, too, notably switching mid-Bubble from two-way Zooms to a one-way model.

With about 90 percent of the media accessing Orlando remotely, there was a noticeable uptick of attendance in every team’s availability. Access, for the first time, wasn’t bound by physical location — media could now “attend” any team scrum so long as they made the request through that team’s PR channels. With double the attendees, it made sense to shift away from two-way video, as calls could get cacophonous. Mickelson claims two-way calls weren’t as popular, saying “it was almost as though the player was talking to themselves in the mirror.”

But it was in that zeroing in, however necessary, that some crucial elements began to get lost. Remote video communication platforms, as much as we’ve grown familiar with them since last spring, have made us painfully aware of the things we miss from traditional face-to-face communication. Subtle facial expressions don’t do well with video delay, and the subtle and second-nature elements of human interaction that stem from social cues, are lost in something as scheduled and expedited as a remote scrum.

While Grange didn’t want to paint Zoom as the villain in his exchange, he noted that in person, “you’d have a sense of the room, the energy of the room, and maybe you’d be a little bit more … you’d just sense things better.”

In person, there are ways to potentially soften what might be a difficult or pointed question. A reporter can talk about the game that just happened, or talk about something completely unrelated to the game, signaling their intention and giving a player time to absorb their meaning. With scrums turning one-way, it became evident, even without the traumatic events that prompted VanVleet’s earnest exchange, that questions from media were growing bolder by virtue of their remove.

“I would think the very first and most significant loss is simply setting the tone for a friendly interaction,” Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and New York Times bestselling author of a dozen books on discourse analysis and interpersonal communication, says. “Things like a smile, a facial expression of goodwill, a friendly remark, some comment. It’s easy to make fun of human interaction because people so often are not talking about anything substantively important, talking about the weather, but all that is very important because it’s what establishes the human relationship. That is the basis for whatever information is now going to be exchanged.”

Tannen says not seeing one another and establishing those initial markers of connection can, in effect, skip ahead to the activity “before you’ve established the relationship.”

“Things are coming at you but you don’t really see where they’re coming from,” she says of the one-way Zoom set up in the Bubble. “I would think that would make you feel bombarded, cornered.”

Another byproduct of this acceleration in communication was that interviews began to feel transactional. In even the most hectic of scrums there’s a necessary attentiveness required when asking questions, even if it’s to gauge when it’s time to ask one. In a Zoom scrum, attendees just need to press a button to raise their hands and wait to be called on. Preparedness, in some cases, felt secondary to the urgency to just get in the queue.

“What you’re describing, in the way it was before, the athlete knew they were speaking to someone with whom they shared a lot of basic information: what happened in the game, the person was there, they know that you’ve waited to see him. So you have made an investment, too. And so, I would guess, they would feel motivated to make more of an investment in answering you,” Tannen says, when asked how speed and ease of access may have changed media’s approach to conversations. “But now it’s a situation where you might’ve just popped in, you certainly didn’t attend the game because nobody could, and so the answer may be abrupt for a lot of reasons. One could be they don’t know how much you’ve invested, so why should they invest more than necessary?”

While what was happening in the Bubble was in some ways a microcosm of what was going on in the wider world, the shift in personal investment brought on by wider access and the lack of opportunity or desire for preamble had another adverse effect: a loss of empathy.

Jamie Aten, a disaster psychologist, told Dime that we’re in a kind of paradox with the pandemic in that we have less physical access to one another but more means of remote access to conversation than we’ve ever had before. Like Tannen, Aten agrees we’re missing out on non-verbal communication even over video, and that to some degree, our brains have grown rustier to once familiar social cues. He went as far as to compare “an informal walk up and small talk,” once a constant in everyday life, to “that scene from Mission Impossible where you’ve got Tom Cruise’s character hanging down and there’s the lasers on the ground.”

“If you were to ask something that was more of a bold question, you probably wouldn’t do that in a large town hall situation, it would probably be in a situation where you had the ear of that player,” Aten says. “You know that certain questions should be asked in certain circumstances where you’re more likely to get an authentic response based on when, where and how you ask it. What I’m starting to notice is now, we’re treating every interaction with the people being interviewed in the same way. And that’s probably one of the reasons the players are starting to pull away to some degree.”

This overarching slackening of attention and empathy via video conferencing, while not unique to the Bubble, did combine with the ongoing social and power dynamics to create a very specific set of circumstances. Players were being asked again and again to not only emote, but to explain deep feelings of grief, anger, and incredulity by a disassociated voice coming out of a computer. If they didn’t get it quite right, there could be a follow-up, then a completely different question about, say, their shooting percentage, then another cursory prompt to explain their reaction to racialized violence by someone who’d just entered the scrum because they clicked on a link instead of walking into a room and being able to read it. It was an exhausting, bizarre, and wholly disconnected loop.

“The power imbalance between journalists and the people they’re writing about, it’s a very interesting thing. Access, of course, is to some extent in the power of the people being interviewed or being covered,” Tannen says. “But the power of how they’re going to present you and the power to make you look good or bad, the power to put you on the spot in the way that they’re not on the spot, from that perspective the journalists have the power.”

What made the disruption of play in the Bubble so powerful, aside from the players’ palpable frustration and quick and actionable demands for change, was how abrupt it was. In an environment controlled down to the minute, that could only really exist under the continual renewal of the players to opt-in to that state of control — and those watching, in silent contract to the belief that control was possible when the rest of the world was spiraling out of it — they, for a few days, opted out. VanVleet’s turning around of a question that in some ways was meant to maintain the same rhythm was the same. They were real, reactionary moments. They were also adept at pointing out how embarrassing it was that it needed to take all of that for players to be better understood as not needing to appear sanguine in the face of staggering emotions, or to always answer the questions asked of them, to be authoritative to the league or those involved in it.

“Maybe it is an offshoot of what we’ve been talking about that the players are more, freer, to turn that around,” Tannen says, speculating on a potential upside of the hot seat players have been put in. “And say, you’re not the only one who gets to ask questions here. Why can’t I ask questions? You should have some skin in the game, too. You should have to answer to what’s going on as well.”

The remote approach to scrums first utilized in the Bubble has remained in place in all markets, even where some media have returned to games. It varies from team to team, but two-way video is now largely the best practice, with the choice to have a camera on or off left up to the individual. This falls in with the suggestions from experts like Tannen and Aten on improving a sense of connectivity, to have video for both participants on in an interview setting, or at the very least a photo, as well as with what Mickelson felt would be an improvement to give players a better sense of mentally placing reporters.

But remote media still presents its challenges and biases — journalists being called on in a fixed order, limited player availability, technical constraints, and the reality of life in anxious times inevitably entering into conversations a screen-length away, with both parties physically distant and not as emotionally equipped to handle them. It’s possible to attend more than one team scrum simultaneously but impossible to have a sense of investment in either, our mental capacity static or, in some ways due to Zoom and pandemic fatigue, much worse.

The hope is that we will all bounce back from this period as equipped as we were before for the in-person interaction we’re currently so bereft of, but the larger, psychological fallout from going through the motions and this kind of generalized “flattening” of human contact remains. There should never need to be an occasion where a player, like VanVleet, is put on the spot by tragedy, but the reality is that at some point they will be. Our concern has to be that in this interim of being unable to look someone in the eye, we’re able to retain the crucial, connective sense of what that leveling can feel like.

Dua Lipa is used to performing her upbeat music in settings like sold-out arenas and late-night talk show stages. But its rare that the singer gets to showcase her powerful vocals by themselves. Lipa changed that Tuesday after appearing in a commercial for the bottled water company Evian.

The brief advertisement, a part of company’s Drink True campaign, depicts the singer gearing up for a show at a regal opera house. Soundchecking the set, Lipa busts out a stripped-down rendition of the opening lines of her Future Nostalgia song “Levitating.”

About the project, Dua Lipa said she doesn’t get the chance to sing her music a capella too often. “Stripping everything back to a beautiful and calm flow felt refreshingly different. It’s not often I get the chance to pause and sing my music a cappella, so I hope the fans enjoy it,” she said. “I have always found that being true to myself is extremely empowering, and I love that it is important to Evian as well.” Lipa went on to note that the campaign is meant to honor “authenticity, transparency and honesty,” and she notes, “Being part of this campaign means a lot to me; I have always found that being true to myself is extremely empowering. And I love that it is important to Evian as well.”

Watch Lipa’s Evian commercial above.

Dua Lipa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The Daily Show has been a late-night staple since 1996 (or maybe 1999, when Jon Stewart took it over). But for the first time, the comedy show will air during the daytime. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Presents: Remotely Educational will feature Noah and his correspondents and contributors, including Ronny Chieng, Michael Kosta, Desi Lydic, Dulcé Sloan, Roy Wood Jr., Jordan Klepper, and Lewis Black, teaching “the lessons that students will actually need in life.” The special premieres on March 10 at 8:30 a.m. EST and will re-air that night during The Daily Show‘s normal time slot.

Topics covered include commerce, “the parts of the government you’ll meet in real life” like the TSA (“Here’s a tip, kids: Always drink your booze before you get on the flight”), sex education, mice poop, geography, and math. Students will also get a reading lesson from K-pop mega-stars NCT 127. “In order to better understand and communicate with us, NCT 127, it’s very important to know how to read,” the group says. “Yes, it’s very important, so make sure you read a lot and keep studying. And if you do so, you’ll be able to better understand us through these subtitles.”

Watch the trailer for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Presents: Remotely Educational above.

With her new EP dropping this week, Chika stopped by Spotify Sessions to offer up a soulful performance of her song “U Should,” along with a poetic cover of Billie Eilish‘s “My Future.” In a funny twist, Chika is up for the Grammy Award Eilish won at last year’s ceremony, Best New Artist. She noted as much in a statement accompanying the performance, saying:

I picked “My Future” by Billie Eilish as my [Best New Artist] cover for Spotify because the song is beautiful and presents an interesting opportunity to talk about where I am as an artist, especially on the heels of this nomination. My present is moving so fast that each passing moment is practically the future already. And I’m in love with the ride I’m on.

Chika’s ride started in an unconventional way, with a viral freestyle she called an “open letter to Kanye West” that wound up being shared by such hip-hop luminaries as Sean “Diddy” Combs. That exposure led to a Calvin Klein ad, a Warner Records deal, an electrifying television debut, a role in a film, a XXL Freshman placement, and her debut EP Industry Games — all before her debut album was even announced. With a new EP dropping just days before she could possibly win a Grammy Award, Chika will be a winner either way this weekend, earning that Best New Artist moniker through sheer force of will even without a trophy.

Listen to Chika’s cover of Billie’s “My Future” above.

Chika is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

We’ve got a “scandal” brewing at the White House. According to reports, President Joe Biden’s German Shepherds, Champ and Major, have been moved back to the Biden family home in Delaware following a “biting incident” involving Major and a member of the White House security team. This news arrives with word that Major has reportedly been having some issues adapting to his new home due, a few years after the Bidens adopted him from a rescue shelter in late 2018. Via CNN:

Major, who is 3 years old, is the younger of the two Biden dogs, and has been known to display agitated behavior on multiple occasions, including jumping, barking, and “charging” at staff and security, according to the people CNN spoke with about the dog’s demeanor at the White House. The older of Biden’s German Shepherds, Champ, is approximately 13 and has slowed down physically due to his advanced age.

While most reports seem to confirm the biting incident, there appears to be conflicting information on the dogs’ current living arrangements. While CNN didn’t receive a comment on how long the dogs would remain in Delaware, NBC News White House Correspondent Kelly O’Donnell reports that Champ and Major will be returning shortly and were not sent to the Biden’s residence. According to O’Donnell, the dogs were simply staying with family friends while the Bidens are traveling.

The dog “scandal” proved to be a big enough bone for conservative commentators to bite on as the Biden Administration has been noticeably drama free so far, particularly in comparison to its predecessor. With not much else to go on, Republican politicians and pundits latched on to the dog incident in a move that echoed Newsmax’s previous coverage on how Champ sometimes looks “rough.”

Clearly, this is bigger than Watergate.

(Via CNN, Kelly O’Donnell on Twitter)

We all know the limits of our collective pop-culture attention span. But sometimes things are so weird and epic that they stick with you. Perhaps to an obsessive degree. This is the story of one of those things for me: a 20-foot recreation of Eddie Murphy’s head that sparked broad interest when it went on a cross country road trip in 2008 to Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and Times Square in New York as a rolling publicity stunt to promote the film Meet Dave.

Why am I writing about this thing that most people have no recollection of? For one, it’s a product of a time when social media was less ubiquitous, meaning studios had to try a little harder and think a little bigger to go “viral.” Meaning there was an art to it that should be celebrated. Especially in this case. Also, this coming out when Murphy is back in the news with the success of Coming 2 America, his first big comedic swing since… well, the release of Meet Dave, is not accidental. But really, I just want to tell you about this amazing thing and all the wild things that happened (and could have happened) to it. First, though, let’s talk about the film that sparked all of this.

Meet Dave is a mostly forgettable attempt at a sci-fi comedy with Murphy leading a crew of miniature aliens through mid-aughts New York in an Eddie Murphy sized space ship. It’s like Honey I Shrunk The Kids and Men In Black combined, only not. To me, it’s simply fine. Not laugh-loud-hilarious and not unwatchable dreck. But critics hated it (the film sits at 20% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), it made a loud thud during its opening weekend, and Murphy even took a shot at it in a recent New York Times interview when discussing his pre-pandemic plans to return to stand-up.

The plan was for all of us to be doing standup. When I got up off the couch and did this little patch of work, it was, let’s do “Dolemite.” Let’s do “Saturday Night Live.” Let’s do “Coming 2 America.” Because I want to go do standup again, but I don’t want to just pop up out there when people hadn’t seen me be really funny in a while. I didn’t want to do standup after the last movie you’ve seen me do is “Meet Dave.” [Laughter] Let me remind them that I’m funny.

Yikes. Before Meet Dave‘s failure was assured, though, the studio behind it, 20th Century Fox, made a concerted effort to see if they could spark big interest in the film. Which is why they turned to Ultra Productions and its CEO, Maximillian, a single-monikered former child actor who had come up working with Madonna’s Maverick Records promoting events for acts like Nine Inch Nails and U2 before creating several noteworthy spectacles tied to TV and film. Ultra’s portfolio includes a pop-up White Castle in Hollywood for Harold And Kumar (before such things were commonplace), a stunt tied to The Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer where skydivers jumped out of a plane to form a giant “4,” and a meticulous recreation of The Black Pearl from Pirates Of The Caribean. There have also been stunts tied to Lord Of The Rings, Heroes, and several other projects with San Diego Comic-Con often serving as the backdrop.

When I reached out, almost a year ago, to Maximillian (who is presently working to build on the success of two 2019 art shows to create a similar fan experience with movie props and set pieces called “I Like Scary Movies”), I had one main question in mind: is this pop-culture relic still out there and could I actually get a look at it? And while I found out that, no, the Eddie Murphy head got destroyed long ago for insurance reasons, multiple conversations with Maximillian have revealed that the head’s end is far less interesting than its journey (and its near second life), which was born from a want to do something big and cool and unlike anything that had been done before. So, here’s the life story of a traveling head made from 3,000 pounds worth of steel, 100 gallons of Polyurea, 5 gallons of glue, a bunch of foam, and a little bit of vision and luck.

How did this all come to be?

So, Fox came to me because I come up with outlandish, crazy things to do to get new attention for movies, and I wanted to sort of sink my teeth into something cool. I was in a meeting with them one day and they just kind of plopped this Eddie Murphy Meet Dave film on me and put me on the spot. [They] told me a little bit about what the movie was about and I immediately was like, “Well, why don’t we create a giant version of Eddie Murphy’s head and just tour it around the country and have people be able to get into it and interact inside Eddie’s head?” And the executive at Fox’s eyes just got massive and they got all excited immediately. He was like, “Can we do that?” I was like, “Why not? Let’s figure it out.”

It stood fully about 20 feet tall. We hydraulic-ed him up into place and put a little staircase out the back of his head with a whole deck system and everything so that people could literally climb up inside of Eddie Murphy’s head. It was so much fun because the movie’s poster was literally Eddie Murphy popping out of his own ear. So we recreated that and literally did it in real life so people could pop out of Eddie Murphy’s head and take a great shot. The thing that was incredible about this tour was it was long before social media existed [in its current state]. Yet, somehow it blew up and we were getting news crews and people that were taking photos of their own and putting them on the internet

I’m very interested in the road trip aspect of this.

One of the things that I was really adamant about that I wanted to figure out was… everybody that I went to try to fabricate the Eddie head all wanted to disassemble him and put him together on-site. And I was really adamant about the fact that the draw is… If I was just a normal dude, driving down the street and I saw a massive version of Eddie Murphy’s head going down the 101, I would freak out. I wanted people to see Eddie Murphy going down the freeway. I wanted that reaction. And so we figured it out. We figured out a way to have it clear bridges and that kind of stuff.

Going back, I wish to God we would’ve shot this, because there are so many things that happened during the course of the tour. This one time, the guys who were driving it had the bright idea of stopping for lunch at Hooters. One of the guys actually snapped a picture of Eddie Murphy parked in the parking lot with the Hooters sign behind him, and they thought it was funny. And it was. It was hilarious, but I was like, “Guys, we can’t have Eddie Murphy’s head in a Hooter’s parking lot. Can we please move?” So it was weird stuff like that. They stopped to get gas at one point and they didn’t look at the clearance and they smashed his forehead into a low overhang at a gas station. So I got a phone call at that point that Eddie had a nice dent in his forehead. So we had to find a local fabrication shop to kind of give him a little bit of first aid.

These stories are amazing. Anything else come to mind that happened during the tour?

I wasn’t witness to this, but God, I wish I had seen it. Fox did not get Eddie’s permission to have me do this. Apparently, they have something in his contract where they don’t have to necessarily go to him, even when it comes to likeness. Cut to his junket and Eddie Murphy is doing interviews and the press are coming in and asking all of these different questions about the giant head. So he thought they were referring to the giant head in the film. But in fact, they were talking about this giant head going across the country. Well, the way they kept phrasing it made him realize that something else was going on. So he turned to his publicist after a handful of interviews and he said, “Why do they keep asking me about a giant head, my giant head?” Because he was just playing it off like he knew what was going on, but he didn’t know. So finally the PR person said, “Well, Fox went ahead and greenlit a promotional tour of you as a giant version of your head going across the country.” And he was immediately somewhat annoyed that he didn’t know about it, but then his annoyance turned into intrigue and he immediately was like, “What? I’ve got to see what this is.” So they showed him some pictures and he loved it. It was really funny.

My favorite part of this story is what almost happened after the tour.

At the end of the tour, there was some talk about actually getting Eddie’s head delivered to his house because his kids wanted it as part of their pool in the backyard. His family was really taken by the visuals of the giant head. They wanted to be able to jump off of dad’s head into the pool and have it as a permanent fixture there. But it was going to have to be craned in and everything else. It just became like such a big thing. So we weren’t able to do it after all. But the idea that it would be a permanent fixture at Eddie Murphy’s household in his family’s backyard, I thought was such a great visual.

We sort of just kept it in storage for a while at the end of the tour because they wanted to maybe do something again for the home entertainment release, and we had all kinds of different, crazy things to do with the Eddie head because it got so much attention. One of the main things I came up with, that I would love to have seen, would have been Eddie Murphy going down Niagara Falls. I thought that would’ve just been such a great visual to see Eddie Murphy going down Niagara Falls in a barrel. So that didn’t happen. I thought it might have a little bit of a negative connotation or something like we’re trashing it, but it did get some traction for a little bit and that would have been so much fun to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEEAeBdaPnQ

Piers Morgan never shies away from holding strong and controversial opinions, but his ride-or-die attitude toward the British monarchy has led to more backlash against the Good Morning Britain co-host than usual. Following Piers’ attack on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry (over their Oprah interview), he got thrashed by a Black Good Morning Britain colleague for defending the Royal Family despite some racist remarks (about the color of Archie’s skin) by unidentified members. Piers also stormed off set when a co-host came for him over the seemingly personal beef he feels for Meghan, and all of this chaos is reminding people of the time that someone smugly referred to him as a “honey-glazed gammon” on live morning TV.

To recap a bit, Piers started jousting with Parliament member Ross Greer in early 2019 over the MP’s characterization of Winston Churchill as “a white supremacist mass murderer.” To that notion, the morning show host tweeted, “And you’re a thick ginger turd who’d be spewing this filth in German if it wasn’t for Churchill.”

Greer responded, “Honey-glazed gammon speaks.”

And that led Piers to push back: “I’d like to apologise to any other gingers, thick people or turds offended by association with @Ross_Greer.”

Naturally, Piers decided to speak with Ross Greer on air, where the former declared offense at the latter’s use of clapping emoji. And the subject matter that they discussed is obviously not cut and dry. On one hand, Churchill has been accused by many of being a white supremacist, but on the other hand, Churchill declared war in 1939 against, you know, Adolf Hitler. So, the joy people are feeling about this video really isn’t as much about the substance of the discussion as Greer acknowledging, out loud, “You look like honey-glazed gammon.”

Greer persisted in explaining why his description of Piers was not a racist remark before going on to declare, “It wasn’t Churchill who won the war, it was the soldiers, sailors and airmen, and they voted him out when they came home.” It’s definitely worth nothing that, within one day, the tweet reminding people of this clip has amassed over 10,000 retweets and over 55,000 likes.

Piers kept on digging his hole, by the way (in the below clip), with his vigorous defense of Churchill, who he said “almost single-handedly dragged this country from the abyss in World War 2.” As for Greer, he declared, “We’re unable to talk about this without folk like yourself Piers having a tantrum. That’s very snowflake of you.”

Watch the full segment below.

Over the past few years, “Thumbs” has become a fan-favorite Lucy Dacus song. She started playing it live in 2018 and fans quickly latched on to the then-unreleased track, so much so that a Twitter account devoted to the song popped up. Recently, Dacus started mailing fans VHS tapes featuring the song, and now, finally, “Thumbs” has officially been released.

Dacus says the smoldering, emotional, and understated song was written during a 15-minute car ride to dinner in Nashville and further explains:

“Like most songs I write, I wasn’t expecting it and it made me feel weird, almost sick. It tells the story of a day I had with a friend during our freshman year of college, a significant day, but not one that I had thought of for years. I started playing it live a month or so later during the Boygenius tour after Phoebe [Bridgers] and Julien [Baker] encouraged me to. I knew I wanted a long time to get used to playing it since it made me feel shaky, so I ended sets with it for about half the shows I played in 2019. Before I played it, I would ask the audience to please not record it, a request that seems to have been respected, which I’m grateful for.”

Listen to “Thumbs” above.

The Brooklyn Nets picked up the biggest name that is likely to hit the buyout market this season in Blake Griffin after he agreed to part ways with the Detroit Pistons. Griffin went through three seasons in Detroit that saw him play the best basketball of his career briefly before persistent injuries derailed his and the Pistons’ trajectories.

Griffin’s presence on the loaded Nets caused plenty of gawking as they add yet another former All-Star to the roster, but the question remains exactly how much Griffin can provide in his current state. In 2018-19, Griffin was one of the best players in the NBA, averaging 24.5 points, 7.5 rebounds, and 5.4 assists per game on strong efficiency, transforming his game and embracing a lead creator role. That season he also played through knee issues to drag the Pistons to the 8-seed, where they were unceremoniously ousted by the Bucks in the first round. For his efforts, Griffin needed multiple knee procedures and has played just 38 games since.

In those 38 games, he hasn’t been the same scoring force he was in that ’18-19 campaign, lacking the same burst to create separation and losing some lift on his jumper that has seen his three-point shooting dip significantly. Even so, at a vet minimum contract on the buyout market, he was more than worthy of a flyer from the Nets, even if he doesn’t fit their exact needs. The biggest critique of the Nets is that they simply don’t have the defensive personnel to be even an average defensive team — they currently sit 26th in defensive rating at 113.6. Griffin won’t address that issue in a significant way, particularly given how injuries have limited his mobility some, which was his best attribute as a defender.

But the truth is, there isn’t an easy answer for the Nets that will fix their defense. This is a team whose best lineups will feature Kyrie Irving, James Harden, Kevin Durant, one of Joe Harris or Bruce Brown (depending on if they want a little more defense or the best shooter in the NBA), and someone at center. That someone at center doesn’t exist at their price point to suddenly make them a good defense, so why not steer into the skid and say, “we are going to be better than you on offense for 48 minutes”? That is evidently the plan with the Griffin signing, a player who wasn’t able to carry an offense anymore, but who can fit snugly into what the Nets want to do and will almost always be sharing the floor with a premiere ball-handler, even with the second unit.

In Detroit, Griffin was asked to create the vast majority of his shot attempts, as just 28.6 percent of his two-point field goals in 20 games this season were assisted. That is a stark contrast to the player he was in Los Angeles, where Chris Paul controlled the offense and Griffin always had 60-plus percent of his two-pointers come via assist. In Brooklyn, that presumably will be the case once again, as Griffin moves back off the ball and can attack the basket as a cutter and roll man, rather than having to do so off the dribble. With all of the attention defenses have to pay to the Nets’ stars, Griffin should benefit from better looks and opportunities to create space for himself off the ball while defenders try to provide help on Brooklyn’s trio of elite ball-handlers and shot-creators.

Griffin isn’t the generational high-flyer he once was (he didn’t have a single dunk this season and had just five last season), but DeAndre Jordan isn’t as explosive as his Clipper days, either, and he enjoys a number of open lob finishes each night because of the attention Harden and Irving attract and their willingness to make that pass when help leaves someone else open near the basket. Griffin may not be putting people on posters anymore, but for someone that is still a quality finisher at the rim (65.6 percent inside three feet this season). He hasn’t been getting nearly the volume of looks there because he has had to create for himself (just 14.4 percent of attempts inside three feet), and playing with the Nets figures to be a tremendous boost for his interior scoring.

On top of what should be a better role for him on offense as a finisher, his improvement as a facilitator and passer will fit well with the Nets. While he may not be as explosive in creating his own looks, his feel as a passer has always been an underrated aspect of his game and he really built on that skill while in Detroit.

The biggest swing skill for Griffin is going to be his shooting. Prior to the injury, Griffin had established himself as a solid three-point shooter, with a career-best 36.2 three-point percentage during the ’18-19 season. In the 38 games since, he’s shot just 28.1 percent from deep (66-for-235), but showed some meager improvement (31.5 percent) this season. If he can be a spot-up and pick-and-pop threat as well as a roller and cutter, his value to the Nets increases significantly. In any case, being asked to do less and play less should allow him to play better, and the Nets have a coaching staff that is exceptionally good at tasking role players with things they can excel at. As odd as it sounds to say about Brooklyn’s historically great offense, if they’re to go all-in on this offense first/defense maybe model, they needed more punch in the frontcourt for the second unit. Griffin, if nothing else, should provide that for them.

There’s a reason the Griffin signing barely caused a ripple in the NBA title odds in Vegas, as the player he was in Detroit isn’t a needle-mover at that level. However, it’s very possible that the version of Griffin the Nets get is better than the one we saw with the Pistons over the past two seasons. It’d be stunning if he returns to pre-injury form, but simply by being placed in lineups as, at most, a secondary creator is going to allow him to find the things he does well and focus on those, rather than trying to carry an offense. Defensively, he’s not going to change much, but for a Nets team that needs more frontcourt depth they’re comfortable playing in the postseason, Griffin is a low-risk pickup that could bring a higher reward than many expect.