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What’s On Tonight: It’s A Great Time To Catch Up With All The New Netflix Comedy Specials

If nothing below suits your sensibilities, check out our guide to What You Should Watch On Streaming Right Now.

Hannah Gadsby: Douglas (Netflix stand-up special) — The newest Netflix comedy special arrives today with Hannah Gadsby following up on Nanette with a second turn named after one of her dogs. Gadsby’s hope was that Douglas would “inspire comedy disobedience,” according to Netflix, and this LA-filmed special promises to upend all expectations.

Netflix has also dropped several other comedy specials over the past few months, and here are the highlights:

Patton Oswalt: I Love Everything — The Emmy and Grammy winning comedian brings his newest comedy special to the streaming giant. Look forward to anecdotes involving a full-scale Millennium Falcon replica and how home buying gets tied to the term “suicide squad.” Stick around for the post-credits bonus, in which Patton introduces another one-hour comedy special, Bob Rubin: Oddities & Rarities.

Marc Maron: End Times Fun — The long-time standup comic, GLOW star, and prolific podcaster unleashes his latest comedy special. Expect Maron’s thoughts on cell phones, vaccinations, and Tumeric. Oh, and he’s definitely talking about his ongoing beef with Marvel movie fans.

Pete Davidson: Alive From New York — From SNL to a ton of upcoming movies, Pete Davidson’s doing everything, and now, he’s got his very first Netflix original comedy special. Yes, he’s dropping all kinds of unfiltered anecdotes on everything from his SNL-related discomfort to his Louis C.K. beef and Ariana Grande relationship.

Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours To Kill — The legendary Jerry Seinfeld has dropped his second Netflix special. Expect him to keep mining everyday life to unveil comedy in the commonplace. Although the title of this special feels Bond-esque, Seinfeld doesn’t disappoint those expecting his trademarked sharp perceptions about everyday life.

Taylor Tomlinson: Quarter-Life Crisis — Taylor Tomlinson has made a high-spirited appearance on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, and Netflix now presents her first comedy special. Over the course of an hour, Tomlinson will discuss how she’s leaving the mistakes of her early 20s behind her (and tell us why why your twenties are not truly “the best years of your life”).

Tom Segura: Ball Hog — This special promises to not be for the faint of heart, and Segura is leaving no target-stone unturned. He tackles emotionally fragile people, arguments with one’s family, up-ending expectations, and he offers some common sense on following dreams, live from a recent performance in Austin, Texas.

Chris D’Elia: No Pain — The latest outrageous set of bits from Chris D’Elia — who told us about sharing a surprisingly fantastic meal with Tom Arnold — has arrived on the streaming giant. Please enjoy his strange fixations with dolphins, growling at babies, and inappropriate photos.

The late-night shows are enjoying some days off this week, but there are some new TV episodes worth checking out.

Stargirl (CW, 8:00 p.m.) — Courtney’s initial brush with the Injustice Society of America leads to a discussion with Pat about the organization’s history. Meanwhile, Barbara is thrilled to see Courtney get along with Pat, but no one needs to know their secret, at least, not yet.

D.C.’s Legends Of Tomorrow (CW, 9:00 p.m.) — Charlie attempts to protect the legends by scattering them into various television shows, which is not only against Charlie’s nature but does not go as planned.

The Last O.G. (TBS, 10:30 p.m.) — Tray’s suspicions about his mom’s boyfriend lead to a whole lot of digging and trouble while he attempts to prove that the dude is cheating.

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Adam Sandler Almost Got Choked Out For Real In A Brutal ‘Uncut Gems’ Scene

Adam Sandler tries not to take his work home with him, but that was easier said than done while filming his standout role in Uncut Gems.

In a newly released interview with Sandler and the directing duo The Safdie Brothers, the actor reveals that he often went home with bruises from his role as manic jeweler Howard Ratner in the crime thriller. Granted, the film was shot in just under 31 days, that was more than enough time for Sandler to get banged up during takes, and in one particular scene, almost literally get the life choked out of him if an extremely observant stunt coordinator hadn’t been paying attention.

According to Josh Safdie, this was the first movie for the three actors roughing up Sandler, and while he says they were very professional, it was, again, their first time doing an on-camera fight, and things got a little hairy. Via Entertainment Weekly:

JOSH: The stunt driver was actually also the stunt coordinator, so he had eyes on him the whole time, and kudos to him that he was really hawk-eyed about it — because there was one take when Sandler was getting choked and he was trying to tap out, but the actor thought that he was just being Howard so he choked harder, and Adam couldn’t breathe.

You didn’t have a safe word?

JOSH: A safe word? He couldn’t speak! [Laughs] But he never said anything till after we cut and then he was like, “Thank you.”

Thankfully, everyone survived the ordeal, and Uncut Gems went on to be such a breakout hit that The Safdie Brothers and their production company Elara Pictures just signed a two-year first-look television deal with HBO, according to Deadline. Turns out the secret to success is almost killing Adam Sandler. Who knew?

Uncut Gems is currently streaming on Netflix.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

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Why are teen depression rates are rising faster for girls than boys?

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

We’re in the middle of a teen mental health crisis – and girls are at its epicenter.

Since 2010, depression, self-harm and suicide rates have increased among teen boys. But rates of major depression among teen girls in the U.S. increased even more – from 12% in 2011 to 20% in 2017. In 2015, three times as many 10- to 14-year-old girls were admitted to the emergency room after deliberately harming themselves than in 2010. Meanwhile, the suicide rate for adolescent girls has doubled since 2007.

Rates of depression started to tick up just as smartphones became popular, so digital media could be playing a role. The generation of teens born after 1995 – known as iGen or Gen Z – were the first to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. They’re also the first group of teens to experience social media as an indispensable part of social life.


Of course, both boys and girls started using smartphones around the same time. So why are girls experiencing more mental health issues?

Mining three surveys of more than 200,000 teens in the U.S. and U.K., my colleagues and I were able to find some answers.

The screens we use

We found that teen boys and girls spend their digital media time in different ways: Boys spend more time gaming, while girls spend more time on their smartphones, texting and using social media.

Gaming involves different forms of communication. Gamers often interact with each other in real time, talking to each other via their headsets.

In contrast, social media often involves messaging via images or text. Yet even something as simple as a brief pause before receiving a response can elicit anxiety.

Then, of course, there’s the way social media creates a hierarchy, with the number of likes and followers wielding social power. Images are curated, personas cultivated, texts crafted, deleted and rewritten. All of this can be stressful, and one study found that simply comparing yourself with others on social media made you more likely to be depressed.

And, unlike many gaming systems, smartphones are portable. They can interfere with face-to-face social interaction or be brought into bed, two actions that have been found to undermine mental health and sleep.

Are girls more susceptible than boys?

It’s not just that girls and boys spend their digital media time on different activities. It may also be that social media use has a stronger effect on girls than boys.

Previous research revealed that teens who spend more time on digital media are more likely to be depressed and unhappy. In our new paper, we found that this link was stronger for girls than for boys.

Both girls and boys experience an increase in unhappiness the more time they spend on their devices. But for girls, that increase is larger.

Only 15% of girls who spent about 30 minutes a day on social media were unhappy, but 26% of girls who spent six hours a day or more on social media reported being unhappy. For boys, the difference in unhappiness was less noticeable: 11% of those who spent 30 minutes a day on social media said they were unhappy, which ticked up to 18% for those who spent six-plus hours per day doing the same.

Why might girls be more prone to unhappiness when using social media?

Popularity and positive social interactions tend to have a more pronounced effect on teen girls’ happiness than boys’ happiness. Social media can be both a cold arbiter of popularity and a platform for bullying, shaming and disputes.

In addition, girls continue to face more pressure about their appearance, which could be exacerbated by social media. For these reasons and more, social media is a more fraught experience for girls than for boys.

From this data on digital media use and unhappiness, we can’t tell which causes which, although several experiments suggest that digital media use does cause unhappiness.

If so, digital media use – especially social media – might have a more negative effect on girls’ mental health than on boys’.

Looking ahead

What can we do?

First, parents can help children and teens postpone their entry into social media.

It’s actually the law that children can’t have a social media account in their own name until they are 13. This law is rarely enforced, but parents can insist that their children stay off social media until they are 13.

Among older teens, the situation is more complex, because social media use is so pervasive.

Still, groups of friends can talk about these challenges. Many are probably aware, on some level, that social media can make them feel anxious or sad. They might agree to call each other more, take breaks or let others know that they’re not always going to respond instantly – and that this doesn’t mean they are angry or upset.

We’re learning more about the ways social media has been designed to be addictive, with companies making more money the more time users spend on their platforms.

That profit may be at the expense of teen mental health – especially that of girls.

Jean Twenge is Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University

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In men, it’s Parkinson’s. In women, it’s hysteria.

This article originally appeared on ProPublica. You can read it here.

Once it was called “hysterical” movement disorder, or simply “hysteria.” Later it was labeled “psychogenic.” Now it’s a “functional disorder.”

By any name, it’s one of the most puzzling afflictions — and problematic diagnoses — in medicine. It often has the same symptoms, like uncontrollable shaking and difficulty walking, that characterize brain diseases like Parkinson’s.

But the condition is caused by stress or trauma and often treated by psychotherapy. And, in a disparity that is drawing increased scrutiny, most of those deemed to suffer from it — as high as 80% in some studies — are women.

Whether someone has Parkinson’s or a functional disorder can be difficult to determine. But the two labels result not only in different treatments but in different perceptions of the patient. A diagnosis of Parkinson’s is likely to create sympathy, but a functional diagnosis can stigmatize patients and cast doubt on the legitimacy of their illness.


Four in 10 patients do not get better or are actually worse off after receiving such a diagnosis and find themselves in a “therapeutic wasteland,” according to a 2017 review of the literature by academic experts.

“This is the crisis,” said University of Cincinnati neurologist Alberto Espay, the author of guidelines on diagnosing functional movement disorders. “It shouldn’t be stigmatized but it is. No. 1, patients are wondering if it is real. ‘Does my doctor think I am crazy?’ Secondly, doctors can approach it in a way that implies this is a waste of their time.”

A study published last year in a leading neurological journal stoked the growing controversy. Of patients diagnosed with functional symptoms, 68% were women. This finding, the authors wrote, “suggests that female sex may be an independent risk factor for the development” of functional symptoms.

The study prompted a furious letter to the journal’s editor from Dr. Laura Boylan, a New York City neurologist. She argued that the study’s results might demonstrate instead that symptoms thought to be psychogenic were actually the result of Parkinson’s, and that doctors were slow to identify the brain disease in women.

“Disparities in healthcare for women are well established,” she wrote, adding, “Women commonly encounter dismissal in the medical context.”

For Boylan, the issue was more than a professional debate. It was personal. She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s-like symptoms that her doctors, all top caregivers at some of the world’s leading medical institutions, largely believed to be psychogenic or side effects of medication.

via PixaBay

Most of her doctors were men, but two were women. Boylan, herself a brilliant neurologist, disagreed vehemently with them. She attributed her problems to a physiological cause, a tiny cyst in her brain, and grew despondent when other neurologists doubted her theory. She gave up her medical practice, became housebound and contemplated suicide. Even today, her case remains a mystery.

The first sign that something was wrong came in 2008.

At the time, Boylan was busy with a successful career that included work as a teacher, researcher and clinician. She was an assistant professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine; the director of the behavioral neurology clinic for the VA in New York City; and an attending physician at a hospital in Pennsylvania.

She was married to another neurologist, Daniel Labovitz, who is a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and practices at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

It was while driving at night on a Pennsylvania highway that Boylan experienced a vivid hallucination. She saw a cartoonish chipmunk on the steering wheel, smiling and waving at her. Another time, two blue men with red hats appeared on either side of her. She knew the images were not real, but she couldn’t make them go away.

Her doctors at the time blamed the hallucinations on side effects of psychiatric medicine Boylan took for her long-diagnosed bipolar disorder. Her bipolar condition would later add another element of uncertainty to the debate over her Parkinson’s-like symptoms.

Studies show that people with preexisting psychiatric disorders are more likely to develop Parkinson’s — or have a functional disorder with similar symptoms. Boylan said she sees a psychiatrist for the bipolar disorder, but it’s “just not a big deal in my life.”

Over time, her health continued to worsen. In early 2011, during a tai chi class, she had difficulty balancing on her right leg. Later, she also noticed muscle twitching in her feet and legs.

Boylan was worried that some of her symptoms mirrored those found in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a rare and degenerative neurologic disease that affects the ability of muscles to function. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, was ruled out by a specialist, but an imaging scan performed as part of that exam revealed a small cyst on the front right side of her brain.

The location and type of cyst are considered rare. At the time, Boylan and the neurologist she consulted didn’t believe the cyst was causing her movement problems and chalked it up as an “incidental” finding not to be concerned about.

In the fall of 2013, Boylan experienced a three-day bout of double vision that forced her to miss work. The episode was disturbing because it left her, for the first time, unable to perform her duties as a doctor.

About a week later, she went to see Janet Rucker, then a neuro-ophthalmologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Rucker diagnosed convergence insufficiency, a condition in which the eyes are unable to work together to focus on close by objects. Rucker thought it unlikely the brain cyst was causing the vision problem and believed it was more likely related to medication Boylan was taking, according to her notes.

via Bryan Jones

Boylan returned home unconvinced by Rucker’s opinion. Her vision improved enough to allow her to research the condition herself. She said she found instances where levodopa, a medication used to treat Parkinson’s that she had prescribed many times for her own patients, helped alleviate the vision problem.

She decided to take her treatment into her own hands and took levodopa she prescribed for herself. Boylan knew the decision to test her own theory was a direct challenge to Rucker’s competence.

While legal, self-prescribing medication is considered an unsound practice by some in the medical establishment. Physicians who treat themselves risk removing the objectivity usually present in a doctor-patient relationship, which can lead to poor decisions.

Within an hour of taking the levodopa, Boylan’s eyes converged and the vision problem cleared. That wasn’t all. Involuntary tremors and twitches stopped. She later wrote that she “felt years younger” and “moved much better” immediately after taking the drug.

For Boylan, the experience with levodopa confirmed what she had come to suspect; that the cyst in her brain thought to be harmless was in fact causing her Parkinson’s-like symptoms. (In Parkinson’s, nerve cells in the brain that help control body movements break down or die.)

If she had a functional disorder, the drug should have no effect. She excitedly dashed off an email to Rucker reporting her success and attached a video showing her eyes working properly.

“That is a pretty impressive effect,” Rucker replied. She wrote that she rarely recommended the drug for convergence insufficiency, but given Boylan’s improvement, “perhaps I’ll recommend it more often.”

Rucker, however, didn’t appear to think the cyst was responsible for Boylan’s double vision, calling it the “least likely” of options, according to her notes of the case. More likely, she wrote, it was related to other medications Boylan was taking.

Boylan didn’t learn about the contents of the medical notes from her visit until later. Boylan, who believed her recovery proved that the cyst was the origin of her double vision, was insulted.

“That I solved this problem with levodopa, documented it, and returned to work the next day might be taken as evidence of my skill rather than having a screw loose,” she later wrote to Rucker, who declined comment for this story.

Levodopa is a potent drug used to control tremors and stiffness in Parkinson’s patients. The development of the drug, and what it revealed about how the brain works, was an important breakthrough that won one of the researchers involved the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2000. But levodopa can also produce side effects that include involuntary movements, from tics to sudden, jerky body motions, different from those that it had alleviated in Boylan.

Boylan decided to continue taking the drug, but wanted another neurologist to help manage her situation. She chose Elan Louis, a neurologist who had been just ahead of her in the Columbia residency program. Boylan told him she was serving as her own neurologist and that her situation was “getting acutely worse.”

via pixabay

The two doctors saw each other at the occasional reunion, but they were not close. Boylan largely knew of Louis by reputation. He is considered one of the leading experts on movement disorders and is the editor of Merritt’s Textbook of Neurology, a standard clinical guide in the field.

He practiced at Columbia when Boylan first began seeing him in late 2013 but was recruited to Yale University in 2015 to serve as chief of the movement disorders division in the neurology department.

Louis had not treated a specialist in his own field before. The relationship proved challenging. Boylan has a combination of intelligence and passion that attracts devoted friends. Louis described Boylan as “super smart” and someone who was constantly digging into the medical literature to learn as much as she could about her symptoms and the cyst in her brain.

She could also be blunt and confrontational. Boylan was one of several people arrested a decade ago for refusing to leave a U.S. senator’s office as part of a sit-in advocating for single-payer health care.

She was also an early proponent of limiting the perks that pharmaceutical companies give doctors to encourage them to prescribe their drugs, a stance that irked some colleagues but also won her admirers. Boylan was not hesitant to challenge her own doctors’ assessments, as she had done with Rucker. With a mix of pride and contrition, she describes herself as a difficult patient.

In one email exchange in 2015, Boylan appeared miffed that Louis did not believe that a bout of heart palpitations and dizziness was related to her brain cyst. “I wish you’d responded earlier when you found my questions odd/unreasonable,” Boylan chided Louis. “At present I know more about this area than you and yet seem crazier because of it.”

At least 10% of the patients who seek help for movement disorders at the Yale clinic are determined to have a psychogenic, or functional condition, Louis said. At other neurology clinics, the number is as high as 20% and second only to headaches as the reason for seeking help.

To determine if a condition is functional, neurologists identify symptoms that don’t match with physiological movement disorders. In Boylan’s case, the cyst was on the right side of her brain, which meant it should only cause symptoms on the left side of her body. The right leg weakness she experienced at tai chi, for instance, didn’t fit with this.

Then there are a series of tests that can help determine if movements are genuinely involuntary. One group of tests is designed to distract a patient. A patient with a left arm tremor, as was the case with Boylan, might be asked to extend that arm out and then use the hand on the other arm to tap out a sequence of numbers.

As the neurologist calls out for one tap, four taps, two taps and so on, he or she is watching to see if the tremor on the left side stops as the patient focuses on the tapping.

When Louis performed these tests on Boylan, she knew exactly what he was assessing. She administered the same tests to her own patients. To Boylan, the fact Louis was even doing the tests meant he had already concluded some of her symptoms were psychogenic. “I knew I was going to fail,” she said later, adding that the tests are not always a valid indicator.

“I tried so hard to do things properly that it can look extreme.” Louis observed that Boylan’s tremor stopped when she was distracted. “If something is truly involuntary, it should persist whether someone is paying attention or not,” Louis told me. He agreed with Boylan that the tests are not foolproof, but said that they are useful in evaluating a case.

In his initial assessment of Boylan, Louis referenced the brain cyst and possible medication-induced effects as well as the possibility that “something else is going on here.” The difficulty, he noted, was “piecing it all together.”

To help solve this puzzle, with Louis’ encouragement, Boylan consulted two neurosurgeons.

The first, at Columbia Presbyterian, wrote the cyst might be playing a role in her tremors but warned surgery should only be considered as a “last resort.” The second, at Mount Sinai, was skeptical the cyst was playing a role, writing, “It is difficult for me to pin the presence of this cystic lesion on her worsening symptoms.”

After the appointments with the surgeons, Boylan returned to see Louis on Nov. 14, 2013. Louis told her he saw some “psychiatric overlay” in her symptoms and said there may be something “organic beneath a lot of overlay,” according to his notes.

He estimated that perhaps 70% of her symptoms were psychiatric in nature. He doubted the brain cyst was causing her rapidly worsening symptoms. It “doesn’t fit,” he wrote. He noted Boylan “was not happy about this but seems to have accepted it during subsequent emails/phone calls.”

Louis told me that Boylan’s case was “very complicated” because some of her symptoms and the cyst in her brain were rare. “Her syndrome is difficult to neatly put in one box,” he said. “That is why she has defied diagnosis and had a difficult time.”

A psychogenic diagnosis, he said, is hard for patients because “there is a feeling with people that it is not real, it is all in our head and imaginary and undervalues and devalues what they are going through. No one wants that.”

While Parkinson’s is treated with medications such as levodopa, patients determined to have a functional or psychogenic condition are often prescribed psychological regimens such as cognitive behavioral therapy. Louis said he has worked successfully with a Columbia psychiatrist to treat functional patients.

“We have had patients unable to walk who were walking out two weeks later,” he said. Louis said he discussed Boylan’s case with her psychiatrist to share his evaluation of her situation and to coordinate medications. Her psychiatrist referred her to behavior therapy, Boylan said. “I did a round,” she said. “It helped me tolerate problems but did not change them.”

The more Boylan tried to convince others that the cyst was causing her problems, the more she felt she was viewed with suspicion. It became an obsession. Louis once remarked to Boylan that no one in the world knew as much about the square inch of brain where the cyst was located as she did.

Despite their clashes, Boylan respected Louis. When he delivered his diagnosis, it caused her to second-guess her theory about the cyst. She also believed that some of her doctors used her bipolar disorder to cast doubt on her complaints.

Her symptoms worsened and the stress overwhelmed her. On Dec. 9, she was admitted to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital with severely elevated blood pressure and stress-induced cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle disease that makes it harder to pump blood. When a cardiologist inquired if she was under stress, Boylan tearfully told her, “My doctors think I am hysterical.”

As 2014 wore on, Boylan needed increased doses of levodopa to get the relief she first experienced when self-treating her double vision. It was a vicious circle. She needed the medicine to help with her with her lack of balance, which was causing her to fall, as well as her vision and left arm tremor. But the side effects from the medicine were severe.

On a Sunday afternoon in September 2014, Boylan stumbled out of a taxicab onto the sidewalk in front of the emergency room at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. A couple of ambulance workers noticed she was having difficulty and helped her into a wheelchair.

Boylan was gaunt. She had lost more than 30 pounds since the beginning of the year. In the preceding days she slept little. Her body was twisting up in uncomfortable and unusual positions, making it hard to walk.

Her head jerked and her knees pushed together as she bent forward. She was unable to control the movements. In a brief video taken after she was admitted to the hospital, Boylan leaned against a wall with her head slumped awkwardly to the side as she waited to use a bathroom.

To the doctors who attended to Boylan, her condition was disturbing. They knew her as an accomplished neurologist who trained and mentored a new generation of doctors. She was a familiar face at Columbia, having done her medical residency there in the late 1990s. On this day, Boylan appeared paranoid and agitated. She argued with doctors about medication and their assessment of her condition. She complained that her husband thought she was crazy.

Her case defied an easy diagnosis. “She is a quite complicated movement disorders patient,” one of the treating physicians at Columbia noted.The attending neurologist at the hospital that weekend thought Boylan was suffering from “mild psychosis” with contributing factors that included fatigue and the side effects of medication.

The doctors noted Boylan recently received a distressing email about a former patient who was dying; the implication was that this was a possible source of a psychogenic effect. Louisa Gilbert, a friend of Boylan’s, said that when she arrived at the hospital she found doctors treating Boylan as a “psych case.”

Boylan left the hospital after one night. In the following weeks, her condition worsened. She stopped working and was largely homebound. Her diet was poor, consisting primarily of ice cream and grapefruit juice, and she continued to lose weight. She was again having trouble reading and developed severe writer’s cramp that she attributed to the brain cyst.

Boylan grew dependent on others to take care of her, including Gilbert, whom she first met at boarding school. A professor of social work at Columbia University, Gilbert always admired Boylan for her resiliency. Boylan went through her last two years of medical school while a single parent. She never missed work. Now there were days when Gilbert would show up at Boylan’s apartment and find her friend writhing on the floor, unable to get up.

“It was so bewildering,” Gilbert said. “What the hell is going on?”

By December, Boylan was spending hours lying on the floor of her apartment while sipping orange juice to speed up the absorption of the levodopa she was taking to stave off muscle spasms. She was now separated from her husband; they would later divorce. Alone and unable to work, Boylan despaired and made plans for suicide. “I had and am still having emotional meltdown over this loss of profession/vocation/self-definition,” she wrote in an email to her brother, Ross, in California.

Ross and Laura Boylan were the only children of a corporate lawyer and a homemaker. For most of their youth they lived in an apartment near the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Their mother suffered from severe mental illness and was hospitalized a number of times. Their father was an alcoholic. The couple often argued. Laura was happiest when she was out of the apartment, and she often spent summers away from the city.

The Boylan siblings both attended boarding school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, but rarely interacted there. Ross was two years older and each of them moved in their own circles. Laura returned to New York City to attend Barnard College. Ross went on to Harvard University and then moved permanently to the west coast.

In her December 2014 email to her brother, Boylan wrote “bad news” in the subject line. She said the brain cyst was causing “more and more problems.” She shared that she gave up clinical practice because of “fatigue, stamina, vision and other problems.” She said there was a “small possibility of neurosurgery” but she wasn’t sure it was worth the risk, and she doubted any surgeon would take the chance anyway. She said her symptoms were getting progressively worse and there was no cure.

Ross Boylan responded with a short note that ended with a touch of optimism. “The future is not written,” he wrote.

The email from his sister caught Ross Boylan off guard. “I thought she was doing OK,” he said in an interview. “Then she sends me this email, oh by the way every single sphere of my life is collapsing.” The doctors she consulted seemed to be uniform in their view that her brain cyst was irrelevant and that removing it would be pointless and probably dangerous, Ross Boylan said. “It’s impossible to operate, and nothing could be done about it,” he said. Most concerning, it seemed to him that the “fight had gone out” of his sister.

Ross Boylan is a research statistician at the University of California, San Francisco, and his department frequently works with doctors at the medical school there. Among all the specialists at the university, he figured there must be one who could help his sister. He didn’t tell Laura that he was going to try to help. He was afraid she would tell him not to bother, and he didn’t want to get her hopes up in the event his efforts failed.

On a webpage for the university neurology department, Boylan came across a group photo that included his boss. It turned out his boss had done some statistical work for the research team of neurosurgeon Michael Lawton. An introduction was made. Ross Boylan gave Lawton what information he had about his sister’s condition, and within days Laura Boylan was in contact with the surgeon by phone and email.

“My hunch is that operating on the cyst will help and I am ready to proceed,” Lawton wrote her. “You can appreciate that we surgeons like to be certain that our efforts are going to be curative, and in your case I can’t be sure. Nonetheless, I think this operation will be safe and I am ready to move forward whenever you are.”

Boylan decided to go ahead with the surgery and booked a flight to San Francisco.

Lawton told me that the cyst was located in an area of brain circuitry that is disturbed in Parkinson’s patients and could be the cause of her movement disorders and double vision. “It fits,” he said. “It’s right where that kind of lesion would produce those symptoms.” Nonetheless, he said he cautioned Boylan the procedure could be done perfectly with no complications yet have no therapeutic effect.

Louis said he wasn’t certain if the surgery was a good idea. “I deferred to the surgeon,” he said. “There was little margin of error, and that made it a very complex decision.” Others close to Boylan were concerned about the speed in which the decision to operate was made and that Boylan decided to go ahead before even meeting with Lawton in person.

Boylan herself confessed in an email to a colleague days before the operation that she felt “in over my head” in arranging the surgery and was “beginning to think this is not a good idea.”

via PixaBay

On Jan. 9, 2015, Lawton and his team performed a nearly five-hour craniotomy on Boylan in which part of the bone in her skull was removed to expose her brain. The cyst was drained and a piece cut out to prevent it from accumulating fluid in the future.

Boylan was worse off in the weeks after the surgery. The awkward, twisting movements persisted. She couldn’t use her right arm. She didn’t know if she would recuperate to a life worth living.

About a month after the surgery, Boylan saw neurologist Rebecca Gilbert at NYU Langone Medical Center. Boylan arrived for the appointment wearing an eye patch and an arm sling.

Gilbert’s notes of the encounter make it clear she thought Boylan’s symptoms, even after the surgery, might be psychogenic. A right side tremor was “inconsistent” and abnormal movements were “variable and erratic” and only “present during the formal exam.”

In contrast, when “patient is telling her story, there are no abnormal involuntary movements.” Gilbert wrote that she was “very concerned that at least part of this neurologic picture is psychogenic in nature.”

By mid-March, just a month later, Boylan’s condition improved significantly. On March 21, she sent an email to Lawton with the subject line “have turned a corner.” She said her symptoms were improving and she was “back out and about in the world.”

She told him he had “given me my life back.” She also criticized those who questioned the wisdom of her decision to undergo the operation. “I confess that, in accord with my own pre-existing bias, some neurology pals have thought I must have found a cowboy who took a lucky long shot,” Boylan wrote. “I correct them carefully in detail.”

Ten days later, Boylan saw Gilbert for a follow up appointment. Gilbert wrote that Boylan “returns looking very well. She feels well neurologically and psychiatrically. She attributes her improvement to the surgery.” Gilbert declined comment on Boylan’s case.

By June, Boylan was back to work.

On a Sunday morning this spring, Boylan sits at a conference table in the neurology department at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, the country’s oldest public hospital. The room is sparse save for a large, formal portrait of the former head of neurosurgery. The painting does not escape Boylan’s notice. Like many of the leading figures in neurology, the former official is a white male.

Boylan, 57, is dressed casually in black pants and a flower-print blouse. A lanyard with a Bellevue identification tag hangs from her neck. On this morning, she is the attending neurologist, overseeing medical residents. In addition to Bellevue, Boylan does part-time stints at a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, and a VA facility in Albany. She has regained the weight she lost when her illness was at its worst, as well as the mental sharpness that dulled during that time.

Across the table, a resident briefs her about a woman who arrived in the emergency room the day before. The exchange is thick with medical terms, but there is a clear point to the back and forth: They are trying to determine if the woman’s symptoms are functional. The patient complained of a generalized burning sensation.

That’s the type of vague complaint that could point to a psychogenic diagnosis. On the other hand, the resident said the patient reported having problems with her coordination, but not with her strength. People with functional disorders might also indicate they were weak, because they tend to have a wide array of complaints.

When the resident pulls up a scan of the woman’s brain on a screen mounted on the wall, Boylan points to an area that she describes as a “little bent” with a “kink in it.” This is potential evidence, she says, of a cerebral fluid leak. The woman recently underwent an epidural injection and fluid leaks are a known complication of the procedure. Boylan talks to the patient and comes away confident a leak is the problem. The remedy is intense rehydration. The patient improves, and is released the next day.

Afterward, Boylan said her own experience has prompted her to evaluate cases more carefully. She said she also has to guard against failing to recognize cases that may, in fact, be psychogenic. “I have to be careful not to lead the patient,” she said.

After her surgery, Boylan requested copies of her medical records from most of the doctors who treated her over the prior five years. She was angered to find that several of them highlighted her history of bipolar disorder — in some cases it was the first item entered — and discounted the role of the brain cyst in her symptoms.

Boylan believes that many of her doctors discounted the brain cyst because of a predisposition toward diagnosing psychogenic conditions in women, and that her case is symptomatic of gender bias in the field of neurology.

“I don’t believe I would be treated this way if I was a man,” she said. By sharing her experience publicly, Boylan is determined to counter what she views as an ingrained suspicion of symptoms reported by women that dates back to the use of the word “hysterical” to demean them as emotionally and physically weak and prone to exaggeration.

She calls it a “pervasive and potentially lethal bias” in neurology.Gender inequality is rife in neurology. Female neurologists were last in pay and had the biggest salary gap between men and women, in a 2016 survey of salaries by specialty and gender at medical schools.

The American Academy of Neurology has had only one female president in its 71-year history even though women now constitute 40% of the professional society’s membership. Female neurologists are also disproportionately underrepresented in awards handed out by the academy, according to a study last year. In 24 of the 28 years studied, the recipients of the academy’s lifetime achievement awards did not include a single woman.

The more difficult question is whether this inequality spills over to clinical practice. Boylan received care from both male and female specialists, and her medical records are devoid of outright indications of gender bias. Boylan said female neurologists are trained “in a paradigm of thinking generated by men for men” in which the same symptoms are viewed differently in men and women.

Louis said there was no gender bias in his evaluation of Boylan. He said functional disorders are “far more common” in women and “if a person is that gender I am more comfortable with that diagnosis.” Still, gender is “only one of many, many pieces of information” used to make a diagnosis, he said.

Dr. Sarah Lidstone, a specialist in functional movement disorders at Toronto Western Hospital, said it is “impossible to say” that gender bias doesn’t exist in diagnoses of this condition. “That does factor into that.” Still, she said, there appear to be real gender differences. “We don’t know why. It’s complicated.”

Researchers are working to figure out whether women are disproportionately diagnosed with functional disorders.

“We don’t know what is right or the whole truth necessarily,” said Dr. Mark Hallett, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. He said one study underway is looking at whether women suffer more childhood trauma, particularly sexual abuse, than men and if that is a cause of functional disorders.

He said he didn’t believe that gender bias played a significant role in the fact that women receive the diagnosis more often than men, and he said other explanations may include hormonal differences between the sexes or that women may be more likely to seek treatment.

It’s impossible to know for certain how Boylan got better. The workings of the mind are complex and our understanding of diseases of the brain and of psychology is constantly evolving. It may be that, as Louis suspected, a combination of factors was at work that include both a psychogenic component and the brain cyst.

“To me, where she is now is nothing short of a miracle,” said Boylan’s friend, Gilbert.

I asked Lawton if Boylan might have experienced a placebo effect from the surgery. While that can happen, he said, Boylan’s relief and turnaround “was pretty significant to the point that it outlasted the typical duration of most placebo effects which I think run their course.”

Louis said he believes the surgery “did do some good” and at a minimum removed a cyst that was in a dangerous position. But he is not persuaded it is the main reason for Boylan’s turnaround. He suspects many of her symptoms were functional, and sometimes patients with that diagnosis get better over time.

Boylan is convinced her cyst and reactions to medicine to treat the symptoms caused by it were the primary sources of her illness. She views her story as a cautionary tale: She was a woman with means, a degree in medicine and a cyst in her brain. Still, she said, “that did not spare me from being cast as hysterical.”

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Jimmy Fallon Is Under Fire After An Old Sketch He Did In Blackface Resurfaced On Twitter


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Vince McMahon Will Reportedly No Longer Bid On Buying Back The XFL

The XFL filed for bankruptcy not long after the COVID-19 pandemic, causing the league to close the doors on the 2020 season. It was a move that surprised some and, recently, some creditors accused Vince McMahon of shuttering the league so he could secretly buy it back for pennies on the dollar and relaunch it in 2021.

The creditors questioned why McMahon would pay out refunds for all ticket holders if not to keep goodwill with the fan base for a potential return, particularly in non-NFL markets. On Tuesday, McMahon pulled out of the bidding for the bankrupt league, citing those accusations as the chief reason why, per court testimony that was part of filings recovered by Dan Kaplan of The Athletic.

“I don’t know why that’s out there, making me out to be the bad guy, (that) I’m going to buy the XFL back for pennies on the dollar, basically,” McMahon said last week in deposition testimony, part of which he included in a footnote to his legal filing. “That helped me move into the direction of I’m not going to be a bidder, not going to have anything to do with it. I do hope that someone will pay a lot of money for it, and I do hope that it will survive.”

While McMahon is now out of the running, there are apparently 20 potential buyers that have agreed to NDA’s to look through the league’s records and make a determination on whether they want to make bids on the league, with six more teams in process of signing similar agreements. The XFL has apparently made a case that its innovations in television broadcast access makes it uniquely positioned for a swift return in 2021, with or without fans, because of the in-game audio direct from players and coaches.

The expectation seems to be that whoever buys the XFL will look to bring it back for another season. The only thing we know right now is that Vince McMahon will not be the one executing that vision.

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The Best And Worst Of WWE Raw 5/25/20: The Greatest Raw Ever™

Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Raw: Billie Kay smacked Peyton Royce in the face for being part of one of those “disqualified for kicking too much ass” finishes, The Street Profits took on The Viking Raiders in an axe throwing contest with legal ramifications, and Nia Jax ruined a Kairi Sane recorder concert to confirm that she’s just the worst.

Things to do: Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter. BUY THE SHIRT.

One more thing: Hit those share buttons! Spread the word about the column on Facebook, Twitter and whatever else you use. Be sure to leave us a comment in our comment section below as well. I know we always ask this, and that this part is copy and pasted in every week, but we appreciate it every week. We’ve finally started the build for Backlash, featuring The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever™.

And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for May 25, 2020.

Best/Worst: From A Distance

WWE

The good news is that this week’s show actually has something resembling a crowd, as WWE finally realized that if they were going to fill a building with a handful of stars and a shit-load of students and developmental types, they could send out the students and developmental types to cheer while the stars do things. It’s basically what AEW Dynamite’s done since quarantine started, and while the humanly decent thing would be to let everyone just stay home and stop being forced to participate in this essential service by breathing and sweating all over each other, it’s a lot better to hear people react and have some kind of performer-crowd relationship while the wrestling’s happening.

The bad news is that the way they did it might be the most WWE thing of all time. Can you think of a more WWE thing than spending two months performing in front of rows and rows of empty chairs only to take them away when they bring in people? At least toss a couple of unused Money in the Bank floor chairs in there and give them the sit or stand option. They’re out here standing in one spot for three hours, watching Natalya fight Nia Jax from behind some hockey-style plexiglass. Book everyone in a tournament for Wednesday where the winner gets to sit at ringside in the Cole Mine. At least send out The Goon to check somebody into the glass. Masks would probably be a good idea, too, but no promotion seems willing to do that. I think the funniest part is that they point out how the people in the crowd were standing six feet apart to observe proper social distancing, only to have a camera man walking between them to get these intro shots. Does Vince think the cameras are actually as disembodied as they’re presented on TV?

As a side note, as seen in the GIF, this will eventually count as Simone Johnson’s Raw debut. I hope she gets a WrestleMania match next year, and The Rock has to show up and save her from getting beaten down by The Sultan’s daughter.

Best: Apollo Crews Wins The United States Championship

… or …

Worst: Cutting To An Interview In The Middle Of Apollo Crews Winning The United States Championship

Andrade and Apollo Crews are busting their asses with a competitive, show-opening United States Championship match and the tension builds and builds until — uh, we head backstage to listen to Angel Garza explain the birds and the bees to Kayla. What is this, WCW Monday Nitro?

WWE

There’s not even a thematic reason why we needed to interrupt the final stretch of a championship match to hear Garza do Swiss Toni bits from 30 years ago and explain how an orgasm is exactly like a distraction roll-up. Shout out to @tokenbg for helping me place that one.

Anyway, Apollo manages to pull out a victory from seemingly nowhere — Andrade worked the leg the entire match, so of course Crews’ final three moves (a gorilla press, a standing moonsault, and a standing shooting star press) require him to use his legs — and become United States Champion, winning his first title in WWE. Bless Crews for being one of the chosen few to really prosper during the pandemic and the bloodletting of the roster. He’s a talented guy who seems like a good dude, and I’m happy for him. Now if he could just explain to Akira Tozawa how to do what he does on Wednesdays on Mondays.

Best: Defeating Kevin Owens Is Just Like Doing It, Kayla, Let Me Explain

Both Garza and Kevin Owens return for a one-on-one match later in the show, which Garza shockingly wins by jumping Owens during the ring entrances and Wing Clipping him. Wing Clippering him? Wing Clapped? It’s “is it Stone Cold Stunning or Stone Cold Stunnering” all over again. I wouldn’t have guessed this finish in a million years, especially not without a truckload of ridiculous and constant mid-match cheating, and I’ve gotta say, I like when Raw surprises me. I’m not sure this will go anywhere deeper than Owens getting his win back in a more important match on the Backlash pre-show, or whatever, but I dig it. I want to see Garza keep winning and Andrade keep losing* until finally Andrade turns to Zelina and is like, “what’s wrong with me, should I be telling Apollo Crews how getting running knees to the chest in the corner is the cowgirl of sports-entertainment?”

*This is a joke, I don’t ever want to see Andrade lose.

Best: Also Counting This As Malcolm Bivens’ Raw Debut

WWE

Best: Cross Talk

Another great surprise this week is actual mic time for Nikki Cross, who for the first time in a hot minute — or ever, really, if you think about her time in WWE — gets to deliver a real monologue about who she is, why she’s here, and how she feels about things. I liked her pointing out that Alexa Bliss keeps her focused, and that she helps Bliss be a better friend. I also liked the positioning of Bliss and Cross’ surprisingly valid on-screen friendship being played against The IIconics, who were soulmates for years until one slapped the other in the face last week. The IIconics’ friendship is on the rocks, so they want to lash out and say it’s other friendships that are in trouble, not theirs. And it takes Nikki Cross, a woman who has truly been raised up socially and professionally by friendship, to speak up.

It’s hard to tell from her WWE work or even this segment, but I honestly think Nikki Cross is one of the best talkers in the company. They just aren’t ever going to agree, because of the accent. Personally I think the accent is wonderful, and that the more they let her talk on WWE TV, the more we’re going to see how good she is and love her for it. TNA not signing her during British Boot Camp is still such a trip to me. The entire TNA section of her Wikipedia page is the sentence, “[Nikki] Glencross competed in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling’s British Boot Camp 2, which began airing in October 2014, in which she was unsuccessful.”

Anyway, the attack and belt pose from the IIconics was pretty lame, and I’m not sure that inverted Magic Killer they’ve started doing is going to catch on, but a big thumbs up to the two-team women’s tag division at least letting its two teams talk and do things. I don’t want to see Billie lose and get slapped by Peyton either, but I guess it’s better than them sitting at home for another six months.

Worst: You Could’ve Been A Contender

This week’s most important match is probably the number one contender triple threat for a shot at the Raw Women’s Championship, featuring:

  • the NXT Women’s Champion, who is [checks notes] already a champion
  • a woman who got her ass kicked by the champion twice just last week
  • a woman who just lost two matches in a row to Shayna Baszler in humiliating fashion and threw a temper tantrum about it

Like, how bad to you have to be to NOT be getting a Raw Women’s Championship right now? That title’s being given away instead of lost and sits at the top of a division where the top two performers have better things to do — motherhood and NXT — and everyone else is either losing all the time, getting their ass kicked all the time, or in a tag team. It’s like being a men’s tag team and not getting a title shot. Brother, the top two teams are so bored they’re out here flirting with cops and golfing. Win some matches, damn.

Despite having been set up and announced before the show went on the air, Raw has to use The Kevin Owens Show (now just “The KO Show,” which apparently I didn’t pick up on last week) to do that “table of contents” booking thing they love. If a match happens on WWE TV and it’s not prefaced by a promo parade, did it really happen at all?

I liked the structure of the match, at least. The match makes sense. I don’t normally go for triple threats where someone falls asleep on the floor so a normal one-on-one match can happen in the ring and then they switch, but Natalya and Flair have worked together enough to have a decent chemistry, and it keeps Nia from having to do too much or work beyond her means. Plus, Natalya was only in this to take the pin, which she definitely does. If I’m Shayna Baszler, I’m wondering why I dunked on Nattie two weeks in a row only for her to get a shot at a title shot instead of me. It’s not what you do, man, it’s who you know.

Worst: Charlotte’s Moonsault, Again

WWE

Her toes hit the mat before anything else and she lands on her hip, missing Jax completely. These are never good. The twisting press she does to the floor usually looks good, but the moonsaults are almost exclusively cockeyed and bad. Why does she keep doing moonsaults if moonsaults are the one thing she doesn’t do well? Nia’s not a small target, and she’s lying perfectly still. For real, what do you need to start hitting these?

Best: The Eye W.C.

Can we start calling them that?

Early in the night, Seth Rollins cuts a promo on a Rey Mysterio mask a la Latino Heat. I think it’s funny that the mask isn’t even the one Mysterio was wearing when Rollins put his eye out. Rollins just went on Highspots and bought a Rey Mysterio replica mask so he could carry it around and be pissed at it.

Later, Rollins manages the “future” part of his own personal Evolution*, Austin Theory and Buddy Murphy**, to a win over Aleister Black and Humberto Carrillo. Bet you can’t guess which of those two took the pinfall! After the match, the Rollins band feigns like they’re going to put out Carrillo’s eye with the corner of the ring steps, and only don’t because Black’s still lingering around ringside with a chair.

* Nuts to the constant D-X reunions, Triple H’s final in-ring run with the company should be doing the Ric Flair role in a new Evolution
**How long until we just start calling Austin Theory just “Theory?” Would that be the most random one-word noun name since “Test?”

WWE

I was going to write a bit about how Humberto should just call the damn police since one of his co-workers is going so far outside of the rules as to try to cause permanent bodily mutilation, but I remembered that (1) there have been multiple kidnappings in the Full Sail parking lot and nobody’s even concerned about it, so why should they care about THIS, and that (2) this is WWE, where a pay-per-view match once happened because one guy tried to embalm the other alive. “Putting out your eye” is honestly pretty low on the list of WWE Universe sins, from “push a guy in a wheelchair off the stage and try to drag him to literal Christian Hell” to “break a one-legged kid’s one leg in front of his mom and then shove him down a flight of stairs.” Invading a funeral in the Blues Brothers car to drag away your opponent’s father’s casket, stealing your opponent’s dog and cooking and feeding it to him, crucifixions, forced weddings, blood sacrifices, hanging by vampire gang … hell, WWE once had an actual law enforcement officer wrestling for them and he spent most of his time handcuffing people to the ring ropes and beating them with a night stick. He also did the funeral thing and the dog thing. WWE’s basically a cruelty competition.

WWE

Next week’s show will feature a Rey Mysterio Retirement Ceremony, which will almost certainly involve Rey doing one of those convoluted headscissors he uses to launch people into the middle rope to send Rollins into the steps eyeball-first. Maybe at Backlash they’ll have WWE’s FIRST EVER® “Eye for an Eye” match. Bonus points if Mysterio’s wearing a salmon colored mask for the ceremony.

General Best: MVP, A Character With Actual Thoughts, Goals, And Motivations

WWE

Lana, who is almost completely beige all of a sudden, continues to have issues with MVP for luring her husband away from a toxic relationship with promises of professional success. She didn’t (kayfabe) run her delightful-ass husband out of the company just to have somebody swoop in and make her husband start using the Masterlock.

While the segment itself wasn’t especially memorable, I liked MVP’s point of view regarding Drew McIntyre on the VIP Lounge. He wanted to manage Drew ahead of WrestleMania, but Drew turned him down and, after one thing led to another, kicked him in the face. Since then MVP knew that (1) Drew would become champion, and (2) MVP would be personally involved in Drew losing the championship for what he did. That’s cool. Mac boots him in the face again and is DESPERATELY screaming at Lashley to stop being a garbage mid-carder and go full Impact Wrestling with him at the top of the card.

Before we get to the next step in the story, we have to talk about … golf?

Worst: Tiger Wouldn’ts

The “anything you can do we can do better” competition between the Street Profits and the Viking Raiders ends at 2-1 when the Profits reveal they’re better than the Vikings at golf. And mini-golf. It feels like the “standings” in this competition shouldn’t be a big deal considering it was established that the Vikings let the Profits win at basketball and the axe throwing contest ended with Angelo Dawkins revealing he’s actually great at it and was just fucking around, so … man, I don’t know. Remember back in NXT when The Revival and American Alpha revived tag team wrestling in WWE by going to a Dave and Busters and playing Pop-a-Shot for three weeks?

This week’s bit involves them causing Three Stooges-esque mishaps on a real golf course before being demoted to mini-golf. The Profits win, but it’s less important than the final gag: both teams using the final hole of a putt-putt course to store their wallets, their extra red Solo cups, and a full-sized turkey leg. Please enjoy Rick Grimes sharing my disgust at Viking Experience Ivar storing warm meat in the ground (in Florida, in May) with a bunch of grubby golf balls on top of it throughout the day.

WWE

Dawkins shirt is *CORAL*

MVP confronts the Profits about acting like clowns instead of champions. MVP doing the Lord’s work by confronting WWE’s African-American superstars and convincing them to stop being dorks for a goddamn minute and kick some ass for best gimmick 2020.

That sets up the main event of the Profits vs. MVP and Lashley, which the Profits manage to win by disqualification when Lashley gets into the ring illegally and won’t stop fully nelsoning Montez Ford. This draws out Drew McIntyre and finally, miraculously frees Lashley from his internalized cage (or whatever), and the two have a pull-apart brawl around the ring and against the hockey glass. I wanted to give this part a Best, because I think serious Bobby Lashley can be a lot of fun in the ring and love that McIntyre’s more or less shouting at people he works with until good wresting happens, but the editing on the fight is just the dirt worst.

One perfect shot: WWE RAW (2020) Dir. Kevin Dunn.

WWE
Frinkiac

Also On This Episode

WWE

Ric Flair Skyped in to give his opinion on The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever™, and surprise! He picked Randy Orton, the guy he was in a faction with, over Edge. I’ve got to say, though, watching Ric Flair talk about how Randy Orton and Edge are going to have The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever™ is pretty pretty pretty, pretty sad. It’s like having Bob Dylan call in to explain why ‘Memories’ by Maroon 5 is the greatest song ever recorded.

On the topic of interviews like this and debates on which matches were the best, I want to see a pro wrestling edition of Verzuz with like, Ric Flair and Kenta Kobashi trying to see who’s had the most good matches. Flair drops the I Quit match from Clash Of The Champions IX and Kobashi’s like, “KOBASHI AND KIKUCHI VS. FURNAS AND KROFFAT MAY 25 1992 BITCHESSSSSS.” THIS is how the Cena vs. Rock feud should end. I mostly just want an excuse for John Cena to step up and drop Umaga Royal Rumble 2007 on somebody.

Quick side note: A lot of people seem to think this “GREATEST WRESTLING MATCH EVER” stuff is just a setup for Orton to get heel heat by kicking Edge in the balls or whacking him with a steel chair like 10 seconds into the match and getting disqualified. I like that a lot more than the alternative of “Orton tries to have the actual greatest wrestling match ever for 40 minutes,” but Orton didn’t come up with “greatest wrestling match ever.” Charly Caruso did. So if Orton’s leaning into the swerve, he better be in cahoots with Charly.

Liv Morgan is still developing her character, which is currently, “amnesiac Clarissa Darling.” I have no idea what this is or where it’s going, which I’ll make sure to remind you of every week for several months. Fist-bump to WWE creative for coming up with a character whose gimmick is that she’s not sure what her gimmick’s supposed to be, and nobody’s filling her in. Can’t wait until she completes her makeover into Emmalina.

Rob Gronkowski called R-Truth “R-Lies,” and it might’ve been the best moment of the night.

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Night

notJames

Heenan: “Rollins is going after Latino wrestlers’ eyes now, so that they’ll never ‘Sí’ again…”
Gorilla: “Oh will you stop!”

AddMayne

Birdman

I’ve seen Charlotte’s entrance more than my own mother this past month

Harry Longabaugh

To counter Mike Tyson and the TNT championship, on Wednesday night Frank Thomas will present the rebranded NugenXT Championship to Adam Cole.

Jae-Su

I watched a match on Saturday where a guy sold his left arm and his opponent sold his lower back. As the match went on, the “injury” made them mess up basic moves and submission and they had to change their gameplans. Made the match more fun to watch.

Tonight, none of that happened.

troi

this desperately needs LUMIS staring at the hard cam for 3 hours

Bigsexy75

Technically, every show between now and the PPV is Mac-Lash.

MickFoley299

They mention Ric Flair having some of the greatest wrestling matches in WWE and then proceed to show clips of his NWA and WCW matches.

Dave M J

If Seth’s group doesn’t eventually grow to 12, someone did something wrong.

BigD_TVF

Good for Apollo getting a title win in front of the hottest RAW crowd in years

WWE

That does it for another episode of The Best and Worst of Quarantine Raw. Crowd noise and reactions help. Surprises and character consistency help. We just need to confidently move past the show’s safe format and tell some stories and do some shit that hasn’t been done a million times before. Especially if we can do that without having the tag team division revolve around occupational prop comedy.

Anyway, as always you can help us out tremendously right now by sharing the column on social media, as well as dropping down into our comments section to let us know what you thought of the show. I will keep trying to watch these and say something constructive about them, and I can’t wait to celebrate the 7 star match between Edge and Randy Orton at Backlash. It will be a shared, communal, possibly spiritual experience full of chinlocks and slow, slow stomping.

See you next week!

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Director James Mangold Is Confirmed For ‘Indiana Jones 5’ If It Can Escape The Temple Of Delays

So first, the good news for Indiana Jones 5. Not only has director James Mangold been confirmed for the fifth Indy movie, but Steven Spielberg is still very much involved with the project even though he’s stepped aside as director for the first time in the series’ history.

In an interview with Collider, longtime Indiana Jones producer Frank Marshall has confirmed Mangold’s involvement and praised the Ford v Ferrari director as the perfect fit to tackle the whip-cracking archaeologist’s next adventure.

Marshall explained why Mangold was the ideal choice to take over for Spielberg: “His love of the franchise. He’s a wonderful filmmaker. I think he also has a relationship with Harrison. It was all of the right pieces coming together, at the right time.” I must agree with Mr. Marshall — I think Mangold is an expert at twisting old-fashioned genres and tropes with just enough postmodern intrigue to result in comforting yet challenging Hollywood movies. And for those who are still worried about Spielberg’s exit, fear not: “Steven is staying on as a producer, so we’ve got the best of everything.”

And now the bad news. According to Marshall, the writing process for Indy 5 has surprisingly “just started.” This information seems to suggest that Mangold is starting from scratch and jettisoning what has already been a lengthy script process, which has already seen several rewrites and delays. On top of the setback in the writing department, there’s the current state of Hollywood productions that have been scattered to the wind thanks to the pandemic. Even a production as big as Indiana Jones 5 doesn’t know how or when it can restart while protecting the safety of the cast, crew, and surrounding communities where filming would take place.

“It’s a moving target right now,” Marshall tells Collider after admitting that the safety concerns have slowed things down. There’s also the matter of Harrison Ford pushing 80 and developing a penchant for getting into trouble with his plane, which could pose problems if the film is delayed even further. Just putting that out there.

(Via Collider)

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‘Billboard’ Explains Why Nicki Minaj’s Credit Has Been Removed From Doja Cat’s ‘Say So’ On Their Charts

Nicki Minaj recently earned her first-ever No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart thanks to her feature on Doja Cat’s “Say So” remix. There have been rumors in recent days, however, that Billboard has removed her credit from the song on their charts and therefore invalidated that No. 1 distinction. Now Billboard themselves have addressed the situation, and it turns out the rumors were only partially correct.

The publication revealed the top ten songs on the newest Hot 100 chart, and “Say So” sits at No. 2. Interestingly, unlike on last week’s chart, this week’s chart only credits Doja for the song and not Minaj. Billboard explained in a post on their website that this change was made because the original version of “Say So,” not the remix with Minaj, is the primary reason for its chart success this week:

“After two weeks of Minaj showing as a featured artist on ‘Say So’ on the Hot 100 and other charts that utilize the same methodology, only Doja Cat is now listed, as the original version, without Minaj, is now driving the majority of overall activity for the song; the change does not affect any of Minaj’s achievements on those charts the past two weeks, and she continues not to be credited on the song on any airplay charts, as the vast majority of the song’s airplay is still for the original version.”

So, to reiterate, this does not mean that Minaj’s No. 1 song credit is no longer valid: She did have a No. 1 song, but now her version of “Say So” is no longer on the charts.

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A Bronx teen is using social media to tutor a generation of out-of-school students in math

Alexis Loveraz, a 16-year-old high-schooler from The Bronx has earned over 660,000 followers on TikTok by helping fellow students with their algebra, geometry, chemistry and SAT prep during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He’s a math whiz with a 4.0 grade point average at Harlem Prep High School, earning the nickname “TikTok Tutor” for his ability to teach complicated subjects with ease on the social media platform.

“How did you explain it better than my teacher?” one commenter asked. “You explain 1000x better than my math teacher!!!” another exclaimed.


Alexis started making videos before the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily closed schools throughout the country. But during the lockdown, they’ve been a lifeline to students struggling to keep up at a time where education has been turned on its head.

“I was, like, really shocked,” Alexis told CBS2. “Things that they probably forgot like before COVID-19, this is like a refresher of what I’m, like, giving them out. It’s really cool because they understand it even better the way I’m explaining it to them.”

His tutorials have become so popular that they’re now appearing on Google Classrooms, helping kids all over the globe keep up with their math and science skills.

“It reached places like United States, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore,” he said.

@alexis_loveraz Doing SAT Math Problems, will be doing basic to complex problems! Stay tuned for more! ##sat ##college ##1600 ##democracyprep ##algebra1 ##fyp
♬ original sound – alexis_loveraz

@alexis_loveraz Doing SAT Math Problems, will be doing basic to complex problems! Stay tuned for more! ##sat ##college ##1600 ##democracyprep ##algebra ##fyp ##satmath ##ap
♬ original sound – alexis_loveraz

In a world where most teens use TikTok to make dance videos or share makeup tips, Alex’s mother is ecstatic that her son uses it to help educate others.

“I’m excited about this. I know he can do this and more. I’m so proud that he helped a lot of people,” said Likmilian Hiciano.

When asked what motivates him to make the videos, Alexis’s response was simple: “The knowledge I have, like, I want to share it to other people.”

The TikTok Tutor’s popularity shines a light on the grim reality faced by students across the world who have lost at least three months of education due to the pandemic.

According to Education Week, the loss of classroom time will create “longstanding gaps in performance between advantaged and vulnerable students.”

When the school bell finally rings, students will be returning to an educational system that will have been weakened by the economic and political fallout from the pandemic.

“I don’t think we’ve had a shock to educational systems of this magnitude, at least to instructional time,” said Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of economics at Brandeis University. “

“And part of that is the number of weeks and months of school students are going to be missing. But it’s also the fact that a bunch of parents will be unemployed, or that their savings will have vanished, or that someone in their family is sick,” he continued.

Over the next few months, the U.S. educational system will have to stitch itself back together to compensate for lost time and money due to the pandemic. But it’s encouraging to know that students such as Alexis have stepped up to do their best to help fill the gaps during the lockdown.