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Vinyl Me, Please, a lovely company that offers exclusive versions of new and old albums, really ticked off a lot of pop fans today (through no fault of their own). This morning, they teased a “big new album” they were releasing soon. Grande and Adele fans both assumed VMP was talking about one of those two, but it turned out Vinyl Me, Please was referring to Julien Baker’s Little Oblivions, which she announced today. That’s certainly a “big new album” in the indie community, but pop fans were furious when their wishes didn’t come true, and Baker herself understands.

Baker responded to an Uproxx tweet sharing our original post on the situation from earlier today, writing, “little do you know I’ve prepared my whole life to be the okayest alternative for a better thing.” Baker then showed a strong sense of empathy by putting herself in Grande and Adele stans’ shoes and realizing how she’d feel if she was one of them. She added in a follow-up tweet, “if I was expecting either I’d be a lil pissed too.”

Through all the backlash, Vinyl Me, Please put on a brave and happy front. They summarized the whole ordeal by tweeting, “Yeah, this thread has gotten pretty f*cking wild pretty f*cking quick, lol.” Responding to a frustrated Twitter user wondering who Baker even is, VMP wrote, “Great that you ask, she makes incredibly raw, self-confessional music. So jealous of you that you get to discover her now!” They also endorsed a tweet that wondered why Vinyl Me, Please would be the ones to reveal a new Adele or Grande project: “Plus why tf would a vinyl company be the ones to announce an artist of Adele’s size instead of Adele herself it just doesn’t make sense.”

All in all, cheers to Baker and Vinyl Me, Please for handling the situation well, and here’s to the disappointed Grande and Adele fans who decide to give Baker a listen today and discover that she’s great.

After launching just a little over six months ago, Quibi is reportedly facing a shut down after failing to find a buyer for the struggling startup. The app often made headlines for reeling in top stars for its “bite-size content” offerings, but even with a pandemic ramping up consumers’ demand for more streaming entertainment, Quibi notably failed to connect with audiences. As for the subscribers that it did manage to attract, 90% of them left once their free trial was up. The situation grew more dire as talks of a “strategic sale” emerged, and now, the fledgling streaming service is looking at having its own cord cut.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Quibi hired a restructuring firm to navigate its financial troubles, and one of the options presented was to cut its losses and power down the app, which appears to be the only option left. The proposal arrived after founder Jeffrey Katzenberg was unable to secure a buyer for Quibi, and not without a lack of trying. Katzenberg reportedly shopped the app to Apple, WarnerMedia, Facebook, and NBCUniversal who all passed on the offer and were “put off by the fact that Quibi doesn’t own many of the shows it puts on its platform.”

The shutdown news arrives after Quibi landed a surprising amount of Emmy nominations that seemed to boost the platform’s prospects for the future, if only for the moment. Despite the Emmy recognition, the platform continued to face scrutiny for handing out large paydays to celebrities for literally minutes of work while continuing to layoff employees. It was not a good look on top of Quibi’s documented struggle to entice and retain a scalable user base.

(Via Wall Street Journal, Variety)

Travis Scott’s massive Fortnite performance broke the record for most concurrently playing gamers — 12.3 million to be exact — and now the game’s developers Epic Games are inviting another superstar to their virtual stage. Fortnite announced that J Balvin will be joining the game for his own concert on Halloween night.

The special performance will happen in Party Royale, meaning you can put on your favorite skin and dance along to Balvin’s music with other players. In celebration of the show, Fortnite will be making Balvin’s exclusive Party Trooper outfit available for players who want to arrive in style. But the outfit won’t be the only special edition of the night. According to Complex, the singer will also debut a new single during the set titled “La Luz.”

In a statement about the event, Balvin said: “I am always looking for innovative ways to connect with fans that have been so incredibly supportive of my career and music, as well as gain exposure to future fans. Partnering with Fortnite is an out of this world way to perform a concert in 2020.”

Echoing the singer’s statement, Epic Games’ Nate Nanzer said: “This show is going to be incredibly special, and nothing like our players have seen so far. J Balvin was the perfect partner to work with to create an unforgettable show as his music appeal is boundless. We are honored to work with him and bring his music to fans worldwide.”

J Balvin’s Fortnite performance kicks of 10/31 at 9 p.m. EDT.

The English language is constantly evolving, and the faster the world changes, the faster our vocabulary changes. Some of us grew up in an age when a “wireless router” would have been assumed to be a power tool, not a way to get your laptop (which wasn’t a thing when I was a kid) connected to the internet (which also wasn’t a thing when I was a kid, at least not in people’s homes).

It’s interesting to step back and look at how much has changed just in our own lifetimes, which is why Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler tool is so fun to play with. All you do is choose a year, and it tells you what words first appeared in print that year.

For my birth year, the words “adult-onset diabetes,” “playdate,” and “ATM” showed up in print for the first time, and yes, that makes me feel ridiculously old.

It’s also fun to plug in the years of different people’s births to see how their generational differences might impact their perspectives. For example, let’s take the birth years of the oldest and youngest members of Congress:

Senator Dianne Feinstein was born in 1933, the year in which “antihistamine,” “jet engine,” and “goose bumps” first appeared in print.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in 1989, the year that saw “cybersecurity,” “eco-friendly,” and “intersectionality” printed for the first time.

It’s almost like a time capsule, isn’t it? So indicative of how much changes just in one lifetime.

Like any dive into the dictionary, Time Traveler can also help you expand your vocabulary. I found some words I’ve never seen before that have apparently been around for more than four decades when I searched my birth year. Some seem like they might come in handy, like “phallocratic,” which means “relating to, resulting from, or advocating masculine power and dominance.” (Could be a useful alternative to “patriarchal.”) Others I’ll likely never use, such as “becquerel,” which is “a unit of radioactivity of a given sample of material equal to one atomic decay per second.” Cool, but pretty useless in my non-scientific life as a writer.

It was even fun to see what words came about during my kids’ short lives. My youngest is 11, and words that came into print in his birth year include “crowdfund,” “mansplain,” and “photobomb.” Seriously, it really is like a time capsule that offers a snapshot of life and culture in any given year.

Merriam-Webster gives this note about what it means for words to be used in print for the first time (which doesn’t meant the first time they were ever used):

“The date most often does not mark the very first time that the word was used in English. Many words were in spoken use for decades or even longer before they passed into the written language. The date is for the earliest written or printed use that the editors have been able to discover.

The date is subject to change. Many of the dates provided will undoubtedly be updated as evidence of still earlier use emerges.”

Language is a fascinating thing, ever-changing and ever-evolving. Thanks, Merriam-Webster, for providing a simple way to see that truth play out over time.

You can try out the Merriam-Webster Time Traveler here.

The former mayor of New York City and current personal attorney to President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, is the latest in a line of politicians and other public figures to be foiled by a Sacha Baron Cohen character. In this case, it’s his most famous creation, Borat, in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the sequel to 2006’s Borat, which — yes, spoilers ahead, so feel free to stop here for that reason, among others — features a climactic scene in which Maria Bakalova, the actress playing Borat’s daughter in the film, poses as a journalist while asking Giuliani questions about Trump’s COVID-19 response.

After the interview, however, Giuliani moves into a hotel bedroom for a drink, where he asks for the journalist’s phone number and eventually lies back in the bed and places a hand inside of his trousers, as described by The Guardian.

Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.

After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

The actress playing the journalist, Maria Bakalova, is not 15 years old, and there is no indication in the film that Giuliani believes her to be underage. However, the footage contained in the film stands in stark contrast to the way that Giuliani’s described the incident in July, when he called the police after the incident, remarking at the time, “I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.”

Meanwhile, tweets from Giuliani’s communications director in July describing the incident do not reflect the reality of the situation, either.

Giuliani has not yet commented on the scene in the film. Ironically, however, his last retweet — delivered before this story broke — referred to alleged photos of underage girls contained in a hard drive Giuliani purports belongs to Hunter Biden.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video this Friday, October 23rd. The film also features scenes from a Three Percenter rally, captured on video, that went viral back in August.

Let’s start with what we know:

• The Fast & Furious franchise will end after the 11th film, leaving only the delayed ninth movie and a two-part mega-finale directed by the mastermind of the operation, Justin Lin
• The franchise is totally nuts on many levels, from the action (submarines, tanks, super-powered sports cars soaring through the air like birds), to the soap opera plot developments (amnesia, characters returning from the dead, heroes becoming villains and vice versa), to the pretzeled chronology of it all (the third movie, Tokyo Drift, slots in between the sixth and seventh, and Vin Diesel self-produced a short film that explains how we got from two to four)
• It is, allegedly, finally, headed to space in the ninth movie, whenever it comes out
• There is no hard limit on what is possible in these movies, and you are a fool if you believe for one second that there is
• I am not ready for the franchise to end

This last one is admittedly odd, mostly because 11 films over 20-25 years is an absurdly long run for any franchise that is still trotting out the majority of its original but ever-growing cast. This should be enough. It should be more than enough. I suspect it is for many of you. But it is not for me. This sucker could go for 100 years and continue on with the characters’ children and grandchildren and outlive us all and I would be perfectly happy. It’s so big and dumb and fun and getting more of each of those with each new film. I am genuinely excited to see how far they can push the limits of credulity.

And so, with that in mind, I have ranked 10 potential endings for the franchise. The rankings aren’t really organized in any particular order beyond “how much Brian would like to see them happen,” but still, I stand by all of them. Crank up “See You Again” and read this through your tears. Let’s get weird.

10. Some sweet ending about Family that doesn’t involve space or necromancy or a complete disregard for the generally accepted laws of physics

This is the most likely actual ending, like at the very end of the final movie in the franchise proper, if only because it is how most of the other movies end. Everyone sitting around for a barbecue with bottles of Corona strewn about like discarded canisters of NoS, Tyrese saying a pre-meal prayer, former adversaries showing up with potato salad three weeks after trying to blow up a casino and being welcomed with open arms like a long lost sibling, the whole deal. I know this is how it’s going to end. You know this is how it’s going to end. But it’s ranked last anyway because we can have way more fun playing make-believe with it all. So let’s do that.

9. Everyone stays in space and fights aliens

If, as has been teased multiple times and remains inevitable given the trajectory of this delightful bozo circus of a film franchise, the ninth movie takes one or more of the crew to outer space, even briefly, then that opens the door to Space Stuff as an ongoing development. There’s no reason the next movie can’t open with the government recruiting the Family, again, because someone is trying to blow up the moon. And while they’re on the moon — space buggy races for pink slips, etc. — they discover aliens. And then the whole last movie is them in the damn cosmos shooting lasers out of spaceships they know how to fly for some reason, except for Tyrese, who shouts “Oh HELL no” and just rides with Ludacris and complains the whole time.

Be honest. You can see this crystal clear in your head right now. Do not lie to me on Vin Diesel’s internet.

8. Shot-for-shot remake of Infinity War and Endgame

Look, if we’re going to end the franchise with a massive two-part final chapter, and we’ve already more or less turned the movie’s characters into science-defying comic book heroes, and I just convinced myself that aliens can be looped into this without it being a completely unreasonable reach, then I don’t see why we can’t just go ahead and be hilarious about it. Put Vin Diesel in a full-on Iron Man suit. Let Ludacris be Spider-Man. Let The Rock be Hulk. Let Statham play Captain America even though he has a British accent thicker than The Rock’s thighs. I could keep going.

And I will. Jordana Brewster is Black Widow. Michelle Rodriguez is Captain Marvel. Sung Kang is Star-Lord. Tyrese is Black Panther. Charlize Theron is Thanos. Groot is there but is voiced by Ja Rule as his character from the first movie, to avoid confusion. Just mash it all up into a ball and heave it into my big stupid face. That’s all I ask.

7. Gisele comes back too and she and Han get married

If this franchise can bring back Han after killing him off in the third movie and fudging the chronology to bring him back for films 4-6 and then revealing he was murdered by Jason Statham and then making Statham a good guy by the eighth movie, there is absolutely no reason they can’t also bring back Gisele, played by Gal Gadot, who died in the sixth movie, and end the franchise with a huge ceremony where she and Han get married. I’m picturing everything in these next bullet points:

• Ceremony officiated by Ludacris because if he can go from Miami mechanic and jet-ski race referee to world’s greatest computer hacker in a span of about four films, he can certainly get ordained, too
• Gal Gadot drives a supercharged neon Honda down the aisle to the altar
• She is given away by Vin Diesel who drives a huge muscle car next to her and sheds a single tear of joy
• Instead of the traditional wedding march, they walk — er, drive — no, DRIFT — down the aisle to “See You Again,” performed live by Wiz Khalifa even though it folds the movie’s universe on top of itself
• Car cake
• Etc.

I will 100 percent cry if this happens. I feel okay about it.

6. Voltron ending

In order to defeat their most powerful enemy yet (let’s say, oh, I don’t know, a Tyrannosaurus rex controlled by Tilda Swinton), the Family is outfitted with a fleet of cars that can link together to form a 50-foot robot with arms and legs and a head and that throws NoS-powered haymakers at the dinosaur in the middle of Paris and then climbs the Eiffel Tower and leaps off of it to deliver a crushing elbow to the throat to finish the battle. I barely think about this at all. Only like an hour every night. That’s less than five percent of the day. Like I said, barely at all.

5. Dominic Toretto is elected President

See, on paper, a convicted felon who escaped a prison transport bus and was hunted to Brazil by a powerful government agency and who used to make his living stealing DVD players from moving 18-wheelers in coordinated highway heists would be, like, a pretty bad candidate, but please consider these two things: One, picture Dominic Toretto grunting and growling his way through a debate; two, what if he wins the election without campaigning at all, just through a coordinated national write-in movement, possibly after the incumbent president reveals himself to be an evil mastermind who kills his opponent in a plot to become King of America and is defeated by Dom and Company in an adrenaline-thumping final battle that involves Mia Toretto driving a hovercraft down the Potomac?

Not so far-fetched now, is it? I mean, for this franchise.

4. Jason Statham and The Rock break bad and we have an inter-Family battle to the death

The Fast & Furious franchise has a long history of characters flipping from good to bad. Letty became a villain for a minute when she had amnesia after almost dying. Dom was a villain for a chunk of the eighth movie when he was blackmailed. Statham’s character straight-up murdered Han and tried to blow Dom out of the Abu Dhabi sky with a bazooka, and now he’s a lovable goof with a spin-off. It takes no death-defying leap of logic to get from any of that to “Hobbs and Shaw break bad or maybe break good and try to take down the heroic/felonious family once and for all.”

I really want to see this. I know they all have that alleged clause in their contracts about how they can’t lose fights but that almost makes it better. Close this sucker out with an hour-long battle in the streets and cut to the credits as it’s raging on, with no resolution beyond the implication that the ruckus rages on in perpetuity. Everyone driving high-performance cars that have been outfitted with hood-mounted cannons, laying waste to an entire city without harming each other at all, speeding around and through rubble until the end of time in a cloud of dust and anarchy. It’s kind of perfect.

3. Dom drives to Hell and fights the Devil

I don’t have much to add here. Someone suggested it to me on Twitter and I laughed out loud for like five full seconds. I’m glad I was in an otherwise empty room when it happened. I do not think I would have had fun trying to answer the question, “What’s so funny?” But I did have a lot of fun picturing it. That’s what matters here.

2. Jacob’s Ladder situation

Do you listen to How Did This Get Made? I hope so. It’s a good podcast. One of their running bits features Jason Mantzoukas suggesting that a movie — any movie, no matter how BBC silly or dumb — could end with “a Jacob’s Ladder-type situation,” a reference to the 1990 movie with the twist ending that — spoilers, I guess? — the whole thing was a hallucination.

My working theory for how this plays out in the Fast & Furious universe is that Dom actually slipped into a coma after the crash at the end of the first movie…

… and everything that has happened since is just his brain going wild while he is hooked up to machines in the hospital. The crazy thing is that this is somehow both completely insane and kind of the most logical way to explain how a franchise that started with a small-time criminal who runs a lunch counter evolved into a globe-trotting adventure involving multiple death ruses and amnesia and submarines and secretive government organizations and maybe a trip to outer space. I almost want it to happen now. I would do such a weird groan/laugh/shout combination that people in the theater might think I’m dying.

1. Everyone travels back in time to before the events of the first movie, with the knowledge of everything that has happened since, and lives happily ever after in a world where they get to wink at each other and smile knowingly

I swear to God, if Ludacris doesn’t build a time machine before this franchise ends, I will eat one of my shoes. Please keep in mind here that I called the submarine in the eighth movie and have been banging the drum for outer space for years now. I am not a crackpot.

I mean, I am a crackpot, sure, but in a way that lines up well with the madness of these movies. I will miss them so much.

Paul McCartney is only two years removed from the release of his latest solo album, 2018’s Egypt Station. Now he has another one on the way, and it’s a continuation of a classic series: McCartney III (which follows 1970’s McCartney and 1980’s McCartney II) will be released on December 11.

McCartney said the album came from a fun stretch with no real end goal in mind:

“I was living lockdown life on my farm with my family and I would go to my studio every day. I had to do a little bit of work on some film music and that turned into the opening track, and then when it was don,e I thought, ‘What will I do next?’ I had some stuff I’d worked on over the years, but sometimes time would run out and it would be left half-finished, so I started thinking about what I had. Each day I’d start recording with the instrument I wrote the song on and then gradually layer it all up, it was a lot of fun. It was about making music for yourself rather than making music that has to do a job. So, I just did stuff I fancied doing. I had no idea this would end up as an album.”

Press materials describe the album as an “eclectic collection of spontaneous songs” and “a stripped back, self-produced and, quite literally, solo work marking the opening of a new decade, in the tradition of 1970’s McCartney and 1980’s McCartney II.” Most of the songs have McCartney on vocals and piano or guitar as a foundation, with overdubs of bass, drumming, and other instruments to flesh things out.

Check out the album art below.

McCartney III is out 12/11 via Capitol Records. Pre-order it here.

Korean-American producer Yaeji first made a name for herself when her 2017 song “Drink I’m Sippin On” was widely shared via 88rising’s YouTube channel, a renowned collective for Asian-American and Asian musicians. Since then, the artist continued to cement herself as a promising producer through a handful of singles and EPs. After touring the world and working with big artists like Charli XCX and Robyn, Yaeji shared to her debut LP What We Drew last April.

Now returning with a bonus track, Yaeji debuted the song “When In Summer, I Forget About The Winter” Wednesday. The song calls back to the chilled-out nature of the producer’s early catalog, boasting a slow, thumping beat under her fuzzy layered lyrical delivery.

Speaking about the bonus track in a statement, Yaeji said: “‘When In Summer, I Forget About The Winter’ was a track I wrote maybe close to 3 years ago. I was probably a different person back then, but the song still resonates with me now. It was included as a bonus track in the Korean and Japanese CDs of What We Drew 우리가 그려왔던, but we’re finally sharing it with everyone.”

Listen to “When In Summer, I Forget About The Winter” above.

What We Drew is out now via XL. Get it here.

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

Tua Tagovailoa is the new quarterback in Miami despite the team playing solid, .500 football so far this season, and it appears they did not level with Ryan Fitzpatrick prior to his benching.

Speaking with reporters on Wednesday afternoon, Fitzpatrick described the frustration of being “basically fired” even though he was “fully committed and invested” in the success of the Dolphins this season.

Through six games in 2020, Fitzpatrick has completed 70 percent of his passes with the third-highest net yards per attempt of his career and a sterling 82.5 QBR. While Fitzpatrick has also thrown seven interceptions, his mistakes haven’t been too costly for Miami, as the team’s passing offense is the 13th-most efficient in the NFL, according to Football Outsiders.

Amid a career year, it’s no surprise that Fitzpatrick would be disappointed to lose the starting job.

“We’ve talked about how I’m the placeholder and this eventually was going to happen, it was just a matter of when and not if,” Fitzpatrick told reporters. “It still just broke my heart.”

When a rebuilding team like the Dolphins drafts a player like Tagovailoa whose upside is so considerable, the clock starts on when that quarterback will eventually take the reins of the offense. The change came quickly here, and while Fitzpatrick has given no impression that he will handle the change poorly, it’s clear that at least from Fitzpatrick’s perspective, Miami pulling the trigger now with Tagovailoa came as a shock.

The current COVID-19 “strategy” from the White House appears to be to push for theoretical “herd immunity” by letting the virus spread among the young and healthy population while protecting the elderly and immunocompromised until a certain (genuinely unknown) threshold is reached. Despite many infectious disease experts and some of the world’s largest medical institutions decrying the idea as “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence,” and “practically impossible and highly unethical,” the radiologist Trump added to his pandemic team is trying to convince people it’s a grand plan.

Aside from the fact that we don’t know enough about the natural immunity of this virus and the fact that “herd immunity” is a term used in vaccine science—not as a strategy of purposefully infecting people in order to get through an infectious disease outbreak —the idea of “infect the young, protect the vulnerable” is simply a unworkable strategy.

Look no further than the outbreak among the college student population in Pullman, Washington to see why.

Pullman, the largest town in rural Whitman County, is home to Washington State University, with the 20,000+ student population making up nearly half the county’s population.

Pullman and Whitman County kept the pandemic under control for a long time. The pandemic shutdown in March hit right around spring break at the university, and most students just stayed at their respective homes for the remaining two months of the school year in the spring. The county saw its first COVID-19 case on March 22, and over the next five months, there would be a tiny trickle of cases, with no hospitalizations and no deaths. Whitman County even had a three-week period with no new cases over the summer and was able to move to a new phase of reopening early.

As of August 20, there had been 138 cases total in Whitman County. No hospitalizations, no deaths. Washington’s pandemic response plan was working. Things were under control.

Then the students started returning to Pullman.

Even though WSU was holding all classes online, an estimated 12,000+ students came back to town anyway at the end of August. Some couldn’t get out of leases they’d signed. Some had no other place else to live. Some just wanted to come and have the college party experience, despite the governor’s ban on gatherings of more than 10.

And party they did. Reports of parties on Greek Row and in housing near the campus, with no masks and no distancing, poured in. In two weeks, cases in the county quadrupled, then kept climbing. Pullman was ranked by the New York Times’ coronavirus tracker as the #1 hotspot in the nation in mid-September.

By October 5, the county had 1614 cases—a more than 1000% increase in 7 weeks.

But because nearly all of the cases were college-aged, there were only a couple of hospitalizations and no deaths. More than six months after its first case, Whitman County still hadn’t seen a COVID death, even with this outbreak among the students. These statistics would have been a perfect argument for “let it spread through the young and healthy” idea—right up until it wasn’t.

A few weeks ago, the ages of the new cases started shifting and Pullman saw a sudden influx of hospitalizations. The first death came on October 6. There have been eight more since then.

Let me repeat that. Whitman County went from zero COVID deaths in nearly seven months to nine COVID deaths in two weeks.

That may not seem like a huge number to those in large cities, but it’s a stunning increase in a small, rural county that had had the virus under control. And yes, these deaths were all in the over-60 age group—because you can’t keep widespread infection among the young and healthy from infecting the vulnerable. You just can’t.

The virus is now in Whitman County’s long-term care facilities. Cases are also showing up in the hospital staff. It’s not like those populations weren’t already being protected—this is just how outbreaks work. An large increase in cases just among one age group leads to more opportunities for more people to become infected, which leads to an even greater increase in cases among the whole community, etc. The virus is indiscriminate in who it infects, and it’s virtually impossible to create perfect bubbles of groups that don’t overlap with one another.

Pullman’s current situation started with carefree college students acting like things were “back to normal,” partying with no masks and no social distancing. And now it has spread into the community that had done such a good job of keeping it at bay—exactly what residents worried would happen if and when the students returned.

Yes, this is anecdotal, but it’s reality. Protecting the vulnerable requires protecting the whole community as much as possible. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have to lock everything down for years—it means we need to choose what stays and what goes wisely and do things as safely as possible, with distancing and masks and handwashing and not holding group activities.

It means not buying into magical thinking that we can somehow push the virus through the less vulnerable population without killing people unnecessarily. We are seeing how that thinking plays out in real time in Whitman County.