Unsolved Mysteries launched on NBC in 1987 (with initial host Raymond Burr) and ran for 14 seasons while dancing around to CBS, Lifetime, and Spike TV. That lengthy run isn’t quite a record but does prove that cold cases (with some chilling installments that can only be explained as dabbling in the paranormal) consistently captivate a TV audience, and that’s a phenomenon that endures to this day. Now, Netflix is reviving the series that will drop in the near future (July 1), and the streamer previews upcoming episodes with a trailer that doesn’t stray too far from the original series.
Such an approach seems more than alright, given that the public’s appetite for the show should only be aided by a hefty dose of nostalgia. Stranger Things production company 21 Laps Entertainment is here for the update, which appears to promise that the spooky feel won’t diminish, and the original creators from Cosgrove/Meurer Productions are back as well. From the official synopsis:
The iconic series UNSOLVED MYSTERIES is back! Fusing signature elements from the original series with contemporary immersive, character-driven storytelling, the 12 new episodes are rooted in the experiences of ordinary people who have lived the unthinkable — from the trauma of a loved one’s unexplained disappearance or horrific death, to the shock of a bizarre paranormal encounter. Alongside detectives and journalists, family members offer clues, present theories, and identify suspects, hoping one viewer holds the key to solving the mystery.
Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries reboot will drop a half-season (six episodes) on July 1, and here’s the key art for the season.
Miley Cyrus has lived in the spotlight since her preteen years. For young celebrities, undergoing formative years in the limelight have proven immensely challenging. Cyrus has had her fair share of controversial moments, like when she infamously sparked a joint on stage during an acceptance speech at the 2013 MTV EMAs. But Cyrus has grown a lot since then. In a recent interview, the singer revealed she’s now celebrating six months of being sober.
Cyrus recently sat down with Variety for an in-depth interview about her last year. The singer spoke about her recent role in Black Mirror, and the conversation eventually turned to her vocal surgery. Back in November, Cyrus announced she would be putting all recording and touring plans on hold as she underwent vocal chord surgery. The singer said the surgery necessitated her sobriety and she decided to stick with it:
“I’ve been sober sober for the past six months. At the beginning, it was just about this vocal surgery. … But I had been thinking a lot about my mother. My mom was adopted, and I inherited some of the feelings she had, the abandonment feelings and wanting to prove that you’re wanted and valuable. My dad’s parents divorced when he was 3, so my dad raised himself. I did a lot of family history, which has a lot of addiction and mental health challenges. So just going through that and asking, ‘Why am I the way that I am?’ By understanding the past, we understand the present and the future much more clearly. I think therapy is great.”
Cyrus ended the interview by saying she’s been able to find clarity through sobriety: “The thing that I love about it is waking up 100%, 100% of the time. I don’t want to wake up feeling groggy. I want to wake up feeling ready.”
Charlize Theron was in Mad Max: Fury Road, therefore she’s allowed to talk sh*t about anyone. But she’s especially allowed to talk sh*t about Steven Seagal.
The Oscar winner recently dropped by The Howard Stern Show to discuss her new Netflix movie, The Old Guard, where she plays an immortal, butt-kicking mercenary “with a mysterious inability to die.” While discussing her preparation for action movies like The Old Guard and Atomic Blonde with Stern, Theron said, “At night I’ll go online to watch fighters or watch people fight and you always come across that odd Seagal video of him ‘fighting’ in Japan, but he really isn’t. He’s just incredibly overweight and pushing people.” If that seems unnecessarily harsh, well, Theron has a reason for coming after the face of poorly choreographed, direct-to-video fight films:
“I have no problem talking sh*t about him because he’s not very nice to women so ‘f*ck you’!”
Seagal has been accused of sexual assault and harassment by numerous women over the years. The “Allegations and Lawsuits” section of his Wikipedia page is organized by “Early 1990s,” “1995 lawsuit,” “2010 lawsuit,” “2011 lawsuit” (to be fair, that one was over bringing a tank to a suspected cockfight), “2017 allegations,” and “2018 allegations and investigation.” There’s also a bitcoin scandal thrown in there, as a treat.
Theron also said that the star of such cinematic classics as Gutshot Straight, The Asian Connection, and Born to Raise Hell “can barely fight… He’s shoving people by the face, it’s a whole setup.” Women in action movies “don’t want to f*cking fight like men,” she added. “We want to fight like we would fight and figure out what this looks like. We want to fight smarter, we want to fight in a way that makes sense and we want to do it in a way where we’re still part of emotional storytelling.” I’m tempted to say I want to see Theron fight Seagal (it could be on a bill with the Perlman v. Cruz wrestling match), but that wouldn’t be fair. She would finish him in about three seconds.
(Via The Howard Stern Show & NY Daily News)
After the success of their crossover concert with Travis Scott, Epic Games, the developer behind the popular multiplayer game Fortnite, has announced another in-game concert, this time with even more big-name stars. Fortnite: Party Royale will be headlined by Diplo, with supporting acts Young Thug and Noah Cyrus. The game’s official social channels announced the event, which takes place Thursday, June 25 at 9pm EST/6pm PST by sharing a flyer featuring all three artists and inviting players to “take your llama down to Party Royale and dance ’til you can’t no more.”
Fortnite‘s previous in-game concert with Travis Scott was a massive success by all counts for both parties, so it makes sense they’d expand on the concept. The concert brought in enough viewers to break Fortnite’s previous record — which, incidentally, also happened on Twitch when another rapper, Drake, participated in a livestream of the game with popular gamer Ninja — while Travis received a big enough boost in music streams to see his 2018 album Astroworld re-enter the Billboard top 10 albums. Hip-hop and Fortnite have always been tied together, but these concerts show just how beneficial it can be for Epic Games to actually compensate artists for using their likenesses in-game.
Watch Diplo, Young Thug, and Noah Cyrus perform in-game on Thursday, 6/25 at 9pm EST/6pm PST.
The coronavirus pandemic has led to the cancellation of every major festival this summer. In late March, New York City festival Governors Ball announced they would, too, be canceling their 2020 iteration. While fans won’t be able to see their favorite artists live in person this year, Governors Ball has cooked up a clever way to suffice. The festival will be airing popular past performances in their series From The Vault.
This year’s Governors Ball lineup was supposed to see performances from big-name artists like Tame Impala, Missy Elliot, and Vampire Weekend. Rather than move to at-home livestream performances, as late-night television has, Governors Ball has opted to spotlight some of their most popular past sets. Over the weekend of June 25-26, Governors Ball will be streaming handpicked sets from Travis Scott, The Black Keys, Post Malone, and Major Lazer.
Along with streaming performances, the festival is committing a portion of funds to charity. Governors Ball released a line of exclusive From The Vault merch with all proceeds going directly towards organizations Equal Justice Initiative, Crew Nation, and Food Bank for New York City. The festival is also selling professional photographs taken by its photo team over the years which will also benefit its charity partners.
Governors Ball’s From The Vault series kicks off 6/25 at 8 p.m. EDT. Watch it here.
Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The Cleveland Cavaliers are one of eight teams whose offseason has officially begun, as they will not be among the 22 teams participating in the NBA’s restart in Orlando.
The biggest question facing the Cavs this summer is what happens with Andre Drummond, who they traded for at the deadline and has a lucrative player option worth $28.75 million. It was possible pre-hiatus to think Drummond’s best bet would be to hit the open market and seek a long-term deal as one of the few top-level free agents in this year’s class. The Cavs would’ve had a good chance of retaining him, but there would’ve been a few teams that might’ve sniffed around at a big time deal for the league’s rebounding king.
However, with uncertainty about what kind of hit the league will take financially and what the salary cap may look like next season, Drummond opting out of nearly $29 million for a deal that would likely pay him far less annually seemed highly unlikely. Drummond effectively confirmed that on the latest episode of STUpodity, telling ESPN’s Stugotz that it would “be hard” to pass up that money and that he will be in Cleveland next year.
“Yeah, it’s going to be hard to give up, so you can count on me being in Cleveland still,” Drummond said when pressed on whether he plans to exercise his option.
“I definitely will be in Cleveland.”
It’s not a major surprise, but it gives some confirmation to the Cavs months in advance of the deadline for Drummond to pick up his option. That will allow them to head into the offseason mainly focused on the draft and trying to add another piece to their growing young group, now anchored by a pair of frontcourt veterans.
In a generation or two, kids in history class will be reading about this time period we’re living through now. They’ll learn about a global uprisings for racial justice in the middle of a pandemic, they’ll hear about the specific incidents that sent that spark into a flame, and they’ll analyze the significance of the movement to remove statues and monuments that celebrate white supremacy or honor problematic individuals.
Some people claim that removing statues erases history, but the truth is the exact opposite. The entire reason for their removal is that people are finally becoming aware of history that had been erased, through whitewashed history books and glaring omissions in the heroic stories we tell. As a result, people are making history by taking down monuments that symbolize historic erasure.
The history of a nation is essentially the story of its people, and the removal of statues by the people is as much a part of the American story as the individuals and events they were created to honor. It’s hard to see in the moment, but this kind of thing is exactly how history is created. In the same way that we middle-aged folks learned about the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, history students will learn about the history being made now with this movement.
In addition, the idea that removing statues erases history is nonsensical on its face. The fact is we don’t learn or study history through statues or monuments. We study history through books, primary documents, first-hand accounts and other documentation. There are no statues of Hitler in Germany, and no one claims that not having them erases the history of the Holocaust. And there are plenty of historical figures we’ve all learned about who don’t have statues erected of them.
A statue is not a history lesson; it’s a way of honoring someone. The same goes with naming schools or roads or places after someone. It seems to be long past time to seriously question how and why we venerate historical individuals in general, especially since statues beyond the more clear-cut confederacy figures have begun coming down as well.
In recent weeks, people have toppled statues of genocidal explorer, Christopher Columbus, and founding father and former president Thomas Jefferson, who not only wrote the Declaration of Independence but also raped an enslaved Black woman and didn’t free the children he fathered with her until he died. This week, a statue of Teddy Roosevelt in front of a New York museum is being taken down by the museum itself—not so much due to issues with Roosevelt himself, but because the statue has him atop a horse with a Native American man and a Black man flanking him on the ground behind him on either side. (Roosevelt’s great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV agreed with the museum’s decision, for what it’s worth.)
Of course, there’s a lot of gray area here. “Where does it end?” and “How far do we go with this?” are questions we all have to grapple with.
In addition to the already established purpose of confederate monuments erected to reinforce white supremacy, we need to examine why we put up statues of people in general. The assumed purpose of a statue of someone displayed in public is veneration and honor. But what impact does that have?
Protesters in Portland, Oregon recently toppled a Jefferson statue in front of Jefferson High School. Rather than ask whether the statue should stay, let’s ask why it’s there in the first place. Does it even makes sense to honor Jefferson by naming a school in Oregon after him, when Oregon didn’t even become a state until 30 years after Jefferson died? What’s the purpose there, and what’s the impact, especially on students Jefferson would have been cool with enslaving if they’d lived at the same time? Does honoring a figure like Thomas Jefferson by naming a school after him prompt us to gloss over the horrific aspects of who he was?
And what’s the impact of removing the name? Would students at Jefferson High School never learn the history of Jefferson if it weren’t for their school being named after him? Of course not. Was my history education lacking because I went to a high school called North Central and not the name of a historical figure? Of course not. Is there a better way of naming schools, buildings, roads etc. than pseudo-idol-worshiping historical figures? Undoubtedly.
I would argue that very few historical individuals are unproblematic enough to have statues of them displayed in public—especially in a nation whose history is steeped in white supremacy. Removing public figures from prominent places of honor and reverence allows us to sit with the full truth of who people were and are, to see them in their full history. With Jefferson, for example, it is possible to hold two truths at once—that he was a brilliant thinker whose powerful words pushed humanity forward in some important respects, and that he was also a rapist who kept his own children enslaved during his lifetime. But it’s hard to balance those truths when we see his face everywhere in places of honor—statues, portraits, namesakes, and even our currency. We can’t reconcile those two equally important truths when we constantly see him being honored and celebrated.
If we truly want to not erase history, we need to rethink statues and namesakes altogether. The over-honoring of historical individuals doesn’t actually help us learn more about their history; it prompts us to elevate their positive contributions and brush aside their problematic characteristics. While focusing more on people’s positives than negatives sounds nice in theory, that doesn’t work in a country where the positives of people in power have always directly benefited an entire race of people while their negatives hurt entire races of people.
That’s the nature of the history of our nation, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. And I hope our kids learn that truth more fully when they learn why people in our generation chose to topple statues.
Living in Arizona, it’s become increasingly clear that safely going out and about won’t be happening anytime in the near future as the swift shedding of precautions and care from the general public and state government has led to a massive spike in COVID-19 cases and hospitals once again near capacity.
Now a good three months into some form of quarantine life, many of us have found ourselves creating and settling into a new routine for this new normal, both with regards to work and free time. It’s also meant finding new escapes from that routine in an effort to shake free from stagnation that seems so easy to slip into right now. For my fiancee and I, that’s meant exploring a bit deeper into the Nintendo Switch catalog to find some games that can bridge the divide of our otherwise very different video game preferences.
I almost exclusively play sports games and always have. I’ve never been interested in — and have always been terrible at — first-person shooters, and have never had the attention span for games that require you to log long hours to complete. My fiancee, while an avid sports fan, never really played sports games growing up and has little interest in them, instead preferring games like Spyro and other quest-type adventures. Finding games we can both play can be a bit of a challenge, but we were able to bridge that gap — and test our communication skills and patience — with the equal parts frustrating and hilarious 2016 title Overcooked, which also has a sequel from 2018.
The premise of Overcooked is pretty simple, you run a kitchen to put together plates in the right order while battling various obstacles of increasing difficulty in different locations before time runs out. It is part puzzle, part quest, and part competition, which gave us a rare game that crossed over into both of our gaming interests — also while only taking about 12 hours to get through, but with imminent replayability.
As you go through the worlds, you encounter different obstacles that require you to crack the code for how to most efficiently get food chopped, cooked, on the plate, and out the window. Sometimes that means you’re on a boat, where the counters slide as the boat rocks, changing who has to be in charge of what. Sometimes you’re in space and have to cooperate on opening doors for the other person so they can get to ingredients. Sometimes your kitchen is split in half, separated by a river that you have to cross ice flows to reach the other side. All of them will test your relationship with your partner (or roommate or whomever else you’re playing with), and whether you can effectively communicate what you need and where you need help.
There were moments where I wanted to snap my Joy-con in half after being unable to figure out how the hell we could get enough points for three stars after a 10th attempt at a level. Other times, we had to pause the game because we couldn’t stop laughing because my wheelchair-bound raccoon chef slid off an iceberg, resulting in a kitchen fire because something didn’t get pulled from a deep fryer soon enough, erupting into flames while I helplessly waited to re-spawn. Throughout it all, we had to collaborate on a plan, communicate when things went array, and cover for the other when one of us inevitably screwed up.
On its face, it’s a silly game about cooking burgers and soups and fish and chips under disastrous and absurd circumstances, but there’s a depth to the game that I absolutely wasn’t expecting when we downloaded it because it was on sale for $7 on the Switch store and sounded kinda fun. A couple hours a night melted off the clock as we laughed and cursed at this increasingly and infuriatingly tricky game, and in the process helped force us to articulate frustrations and thoughts because it was the only way to achieve success.
Overcooked is an absurd, yet perfect test of your relationship’s communication skills, cloaked in the facade of lakes of lava, haunted kitchens, and a literal spaghetti monster threatening the apocalypse if you don’t feed it fast enough.