Category: News

The number of podcasts out there has mushroomed exponentially since I started writing this list annually a few years back. Every year I struggle a bit with how to brand it. Is it a list of “true crime” podcasts? Not really. I still love a good murder mystery or wrongly convicted story, but podcasts in general seem to have expanded the scope of the kinds of stories they tell, and my appetite for different kinds of stories has expanded along with it.

Of course, not all developments have been positive. While the number and length of podcasts seems to have grown exponentially, the actual content they cover seems to have remained fairly static. Now that there’s an established market for podcasts, there are inevitably a lot more padded, half-assed, over-edited and overwrought podcasts. For the love of God, no more podcasts where one host reads a Wikipedia entry to another who feigns surprise. I have a strict “no fake banter” policy. Also, maybe we don’t need a sound effect for every story development. One of the podcasts on this list actually used a police siren sound effect at one point. How does a person not realize that siren sounds in a medium usually listened to in the car or while walking through a city is a bad idea? It’s okay to just have people talking.

This list is also, of course, limited in scope. It excludes many of the pods that I listen to regularly, including two of my own and the others that have had me on as a guest. Those are all great pods and I’m not biased at all in saying that you should subscribe to them immediately. Of course, those are probably driven more by how much you enjoy the hosts as substitute friends than by the quality of story and storytelling, which is fine, just not really the focus of this list of the finest in audio non-fiction storytelling.

These pods are all single-story-per-season podcasts. Miniserieses, essentially. And all non-fiction. Fiction podcasts are expanding, and it seems like every few months there’s an article about how fiction podcasts will be the next big thing. I’m sure there are some great ones out there but I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to one yet. Maybe someday. Right now it feels like far too many are just proofs-of-concept hoping to one day be made into TV.

Okay, that’s probably enough prefacing. Just get to the list! Fine, fine, stop shouting.

10. Harsh Reality: The Story Of Miriam Rivera

Wondery podcasts can tend towards overwrought and padded, and this one definitely begins that way, with an extended, confusing Helen of Troy metaphor. But Harsh Reality is also exactly the kind of obscure, forgotten saga perfect for a podcast series. It tells the story of There’s Something About Miriam, a 2003 British reality show whose producers thought it would be a really good idea to do a Bachelorette-style dating show where the final reveal was telling the contestants that the woman they had all been competing for was transgender. You can imagine that didn’t work out too well.

Like all podcasts, I could nitpick episodes that should’ve been shorter and others that should’ve been longer, avenues that were more or less interesting than others, and metaphors that did or didn’t work. But when it comes down to it, this was a weird, interesting story that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

9. The Grand Scheme: Snatching Sinatra

If you’re like me, you probably vaguely remember that Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped and held for ransom at some point. Wondery’s The Grand Scheme, hosted by John Stamos, who turns out to be weirdly good at this podcast hosting thing, is sort of about the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. What makes it really sing is the detailed picture it paints of California in the sixties. You think white privilege gets you places now? Try being a rich white kid in Southern California in the sixties. You could literally kidnap Frank Sinatra’s son.

Barry Keenan, the mastermind of the kidnapping and the son of a securities trader, went to University High School in Los Angeles, where his classmates included James Brolin, Nancy Sinatra, and Ryan O’Neal. He also heard voices in his head and eventually got addicted to booze and pills, which in the 1960s still didn’t stop him from becoming a fabulously rich trader by his early 20s. Eventually he got in some trouble and decided kidnapping Frank Sinatra’s son was the best way out, and even roped in some buddies from his high school cool kids’ club, known for drinking lots and pulling pranks, like lighting palm trees on fire. When I started listening, I was thinking this would be the lurid tale of a bad idea going poorly. But it’s actually more of a fascinating look at what young white kids got up to in a world seemingly without consequences. Boomers, man.

8. American ISIS

Remember Caliphate? The 2018 New York Times podcast about an ISIS fighter from Canada? It was a riveting tale, but it later turned out that the Times and Caliphate‘s host, Rukmini Callimachi, “got took,” in The Wire parlance. The subject turned out to be a fabulist. American ISIS, from The Intercept, is basically the non-faked version of Caliphate. Trevor Aaronson, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about FBI overreach in the War On Terror, spent three years working on American ISIS, focusing on Russell Dennison, a red-headed suburban pot dealer-turned ISIS fighter, who sent Aaronson more than 30 hours of recordings about his life and journey to ISIS before he was killed by an airstrike in eastern Syria.

It’s a fascinating listen, partly about the FBI doing as much harm as good, and also oddly reminiscent of Into The Wild, another tale about an idealistic stoner trying to find himself and looking in all the wrong places. Did I mention Russell Dennison also raps? It’s a strange, unforgettable, bittersweet, Heart of Darkness kind of listen.

7. The Plot Thickens: The Devil’s Candy

Since starting in Summer 2020, TCM has already released three seasons of their podcast, The Plot Thickens. All of them are pretty listenable, but for my money the best one is season two, The Devil’s Candy, about the ultimately disastrous, soon-to-be-infamous 1990 production of Bonfire of the Vanities. Lots of big movies have flopped, and there are always a few stories about why, but Bonfire was unique in that entertainment reporter Julie Salamon was there on set and during pre-production every day, recording audio (having been invited to tag along by director Brian DePalma).

Salamon wrote a book about the experience (entitled, get this, The Devil’s Candy), and yes, you could probably skip the middle man here and just buy the audiobook of that. But then you wouldn’t get to hear all the original recordings from the set and the modern day contextualizing by present day Salamon (who has a truly unique voice). I might be the perfect audience for this show, as there are few things I enjoy so much as the grandiose musings of film producers who are secretly morons, or the diva antics of movie stars in the heyday of the movie star.

6. Haileywood

The story of how Bruce Willis moved to a small town in Idaho in the late 90s and tried to turn it into his personal playground is exactly the kind of story I want to hear. Between this and The Devil’s Candy, maybe I just can’t get enough stories about Bruce Willis being kind of an asshole. Incidentally, this was the podcast on the list that actually used a siren sound effect, so don’t take Haileywood‘s inclusion as my sanction of IHeartRadio’s production style. Luckily the reporting on Bruce Willis’s attempt to “celebriform” Hailey, Idaho (from host Dana Schwartz) and the interviews with the locals and with Team Bruce are engaging enough to transcend the occasional structural hiccups.

5. The Line

Eddie Gallagher’s story is one that feels perfect for the podcast format. The Navy SEAL chief was turned in by his own crew for war crimes, and then his story became an unlikely front in the culture war, thanks to a marketing genius wife who knew just how to turn Gallagher’s story into red meat for Fox News viewers. Host Dan Taberski explores two main stories here. One about the Forever War, and how the inability for larger society to acknowledge that it’s still going on forced soldiers on the ground to have to square this cognitive circle; and another about how a fairly straightforward story about Gallagher’s soldiers risking their careers to do the right thing somehow turned into a national flashpoint over “lazy millennials.” Yes, culture wars and the aftermath of the aughts are going to become a theme in this list. I’m a sucker for “how did we get here?”

4. 9/12

It took me all the way until the end of the year before I finally gave this podcast a chance, maybe because it shares a name with Glenn Beck’s unhinged bloody shirt austerity project in the late aughts (an event helpfully covered in episode two of this podcast), and maybe because I wasn’t in a hurry to hear more of the usual 9/11 stories. Like everyone of my generation, I feel like I’ve heard a lifetime’s worth of those.

Turns out I should’ve started sooner, because 9/12 is exactly not the kind of “what so-and-so was doing when the first plane hit the tower” reporting you might expect. 9/12 finds people whose lives were upended by 9/11, but not in the traditional sense. The crew of an 18th century replica ship recreating Captain Cook’s voyage for a reality show tries to make sense of the event thousands of miles away, with no access to phones or internet. The staff of The Onion tries to figure out what kinds of jokes they can do now. A Pakistani business owner is forced to pivot when he loses his entire market base. Oh, and hey, an episode with the director of Loose Change. Remember that? It’s fascinating to harken back to a more innocent time in conspiracy theories.

Dan Taberski (Chasing Richard Simmons, Running From Cops, Surviving Y2K) has had some ups and downs in his podcast output, but 9/12 definitely feels like his best yet, with clever, humane storytelling and one of the first accurate depictions of the cultural mindset in the aftermath of 9/11 that doesn’t fall into the same old clichés.

3. Believe Her

Believe Her is probably the closest thing on this list to a traditional “true crime” podcast, which begins with a murder and works backwards from there. But as host Justine van der Leun takes pains to point out, the driving idea behind it is to question our ideas of traditional true crime and what it means to be a “perfect victim.”

Believe Her tells the story of Nikki Addimando, who killed her husband in 2017 in what she says was self defense after suffering years of horrific abuse. Occasionally you’ll hear people dismiss certain reporting because the reporter has “an axe to grind” or some such. Which to me is a little idiotic because the best stories are almost always told by someone who’s telling it like their life depends on it. Van der Leun clearly has a fire under her ass to share this tale, and with it question the entire structure of the way the system treats abuse victims. What do we do when the abuse victim isn’t a corpse?

As you might expect from the previous paragraphs, Believe Her isn’t exactly what you’d call “light listening.” “Harrowing” is probably a better description. But give it a chance, it even has sort of a happy ending.

2. Things Fell Apart

If Jon Ronson makes a podcast, it’s always a safe bet that it’s going to end up on my year-end list. The first time I heard him I thought he had the strangest voice I’d ever heard. Little by little I found that I couldn’t stop listening and now I sort of wish he’d follow me around narrating my life. This year, the bespectacled Welshman teamed up with BBC 4 for Things Fell Apart, a podcast in which he attempts to plumb the history of the culture wars — exploring the family who kickstarted the anti-abortion movement, the first guy to spark a censorship controversy on the internet, a town that got caught up in the debate over “critical race theory,” and more.

Most of our current media apparatus is invested in whipping up these conflicts to stoke engagement and make money, making us all hate each other in the process. It’s refreshing to hear someone simply back up and try to take a broader view. Asking “how can we understand this?” rather than “which people are furious about this?” seems like a good starting point for all journalism going forward (I know it won’t happen, but indulge my dreams for a second).

Things Fell Apart is humane and engaging in all the ways Jon Ronson stories generally are, and the BBC feels like they have a head start in creating high quality audio content. They’re fine with just letting podcasts be radio, rather than trying to create some fancy new style of soundscape like American podcasts sometimes can. That being said, why do they make it so hard to get BBC content outside of the UK? Isn’t the whole point of the thing to promote British culture to the outside world? The British, man.

1. The Meltdown

David Sirota seems to have become one of the main characters of Twitter this past month, thanks to overly-bitchy critiques of Don’t Look Up (my review) followed by overly-petulant responses to it from Sirota (who has story credit) and director Adam McKay. All that aside, I’m happy to report that the podcast Sirota hosted this year is much closer to an unqualified great.

The Meltdown, co-produced by the Hardest Working Man In Documentary, Alex Gibney, tells the story of the 2008 financial meltdown and the limp government response to it that followed. It’s a story that you’ve maybe heard before, but it’s usually been told in the kind of top-down, the smart-people-in-the-room-trying-to-do-their-best style that dull centrist liberals love, as seen in the HBO adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s (no relation) book, Too Big To Fail.

The Meltdown covers what so many of those stories tended to elide: the way the financial crisis affected the average American and the way the government response to it betrayed them — paving the way for Trump in classic authoritarian style. Sirota is former political aide and political reporter, so his metaphors and pop culture references can tend towards corny, but The Meltdown does a fairly brilliant job combining granular reporting — on how government programs meant to help homeowners ended up getting weaponized by banks and “foreclosure mills,” and the like — with the bigger picture portrait of how inadequate government response to crises traditionally leads to a loss of faith in democracy. It explains how we got to where we are today and will probably make you very pissed off, hopefully in a constructive way.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Antonio Brown’s time as a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers has officially come to an end. In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s decision to remove his pads and leave the Bucs mid-game during Tampa Bay’s win over the New York Jets, Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians announced that he was no longer a member of the team.

That didn’t exactly happen, as the Buccaneers did not immediately release Brown. The wide receiver was on the roster for a few days following the incident, but on Thursday, the team announced that they had finally done it, with a statement that rebukes some of Brown’s claims about being forced to play through an injury.

Brown, through his attorney, released a statement on Wednesday in which he claimed that he was dealing with an ankle injury that will now require surgery. He also claimed that the injury — which, per a report, was confirmed to have been serious via an MRI Brown’s since received — required a painkiller. On Thursday, Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians responded to this, saying that Brown never said anything about his ankle bothering him and that his gripes were with the amount of targets he received during the game.

Following his leaving the game, Brown caught a ride to New York City while the Bucs continued to play.

What we have on our hands here is a classic Good News, Bad News situation. We’ll start with the good news first, in four parts, because it’s always better to lead from a place of solid vibes.

GOOD NEWS, PART I

The Righteous Gemstones is back, finally, after over two full years away. If you were smart, you cushioned this situation with a periodic rewatch or two of the first season, in part because it’s smart to stay fresh with these things and in part because the first season was so damn good. I’ve rewatched it at least three times, usually in frantic 48-hour blasts, which is something you can still do too if you start, like, now, and power through before Sunday night’s two-part premiere. There are much less productive uses of your time. It’s January. It’s not like the lawn needs to be mowed on Saturday.

Everything about it was so good, too, starting with the cast. Danny McBride, creator and star, as the pompous dipshit eldest son of a powerful televangelist played by, as is only right, John Goodman. Workaholics star Adam Devine as the weirdo baby of the family who lives with a one-time Satan worshipper he converted. Edi Patterson as the oft-overlooked middle child who is married to a vanilla cookie of a man named BJ, both of whom steal scenes from their more famous counterparts with enough regularity to call it a crime spree. And Walton Goggins is in there, too, in old man makeup, as a singing and dancing preacher named Baby Billy Freeman who is equal parts petty and devious. We’ll discuss him more later.

If this all sounds, on paper, like HBO’s other notable show about a powerful family consisting of a domineering father and his imbecile children, well, there’s a good reason for that: It does look a lot like Succession… on paper. You can even line up the characters if you want, in a way that works weirdly well. (Eli is Logan, Jesse is Kendall, Kelvin is Roman, Judy and BJ are Shiv and Tom, etc.) There are important differences here, though. The first is the biggie: Succession is, primarily, a drama, one that uses its gravitas to blindside the viewer with furious fits of comedy; Gemstones is a comedy, primarily, one that uses unbridled silliness to occasionally blindside the viewer with feeling. Very occasionally. The show prides itself on being a ridiculous endeavor that a few people — John Goodman, mostly — play arrow-straight, which actually adds to the comedy. This is science, really.

The episodes are shorter, too, typically in the 30-40 minute window, which is nice. The shows are less copies of each other than they are flip sides of the same dysfunction, self-destructive coin. Forty percent of all shows could use this framework and I wouldn’t care if they pulled it off this well.

What I’m saying here is that all of this is basically the opposite of a complaint.

GOOD NEWS, PART II

Walton Goggins is back. I don’t think words can do justice to how much fun he is on this show. Baby Billy Freeman is the brother of Eli Gemstone’s now-deceased wife, a man who is livid at the world for the hand he was dealt even though he’s still holding what amounts to a flush draw at all times. He rants and raves and schemes through his geriatric makeup and white wig and gets to do just the most bonkers stuff you can imagine, all of which he eats up like church lunch. Look at that screencap up there. It’s perfect. And useful.

More importantly, look at this.

You’ve seen this before. Everyone has seen it. It’s probably been stuck in your head on and off for the full two years since the show ended. That’s fine. There are worse things to have stuck in your head, provided it doesn’t interfere with, like, your job, which I say as someone who once derailed an interview with poor Walton Goggins for a few minutes with questions about running through the house with a pickle in your mouth. It’s fine. I’m fine. Let’s move on.

And we should, because it gets better. As revealed in this preview piece from the great Alan Siegel at The Ringer, Goggins is at it again.

But once again the season’s wildest moments belong to Baby Billy Freeman, the singing, scheming chaos agent played by Goggins. “Walton is so good at bringing him out,” McBride says. “Sometimes the more ridiculous material you hand him, the more interesting it is to see him land it, because he really can make anything land. … He’s involved in probably one of the most ridiculous things we’ve ever written before, he completely lands it in such a way that it almost makes it heavenly.”

We are all truly very blessed.

GOOD NEWS, PART III

As if the cast wasn’t already just a Murderer’s Row of comedic skill, they went ahead and added the following people, among others:

• Eric Roberts as a former professional wrestling kingpin from Memphis who shows up early on to pull Eli toward the dark side through a series of flashbacks and thumb disfigurements
• Eric Andre as an up and coming televangelist from Texas who attempts to woo members of the family with fame and riches and independence in a way that creates a delightful little rift
• Jason Schwartzman as an investigative reporter named, I swear to the Heavenly Father himself, Thaniel, who is digging around in the Gemstone family’s past and altogether just being a pain in their neck, which is a perfect use of Jason Schwartzman

Again, no complaints.

GOOD NEWS, PART IV

Look at the episode descriptions for the episodes in the two-part series premiere. Number one…

As Jesse eyes a business opportunity with an Evangelical couple on the rise, the media cracks down on a fellow preacher; Eli reconnects with a figure from his mysterious past.

… and number two:

After doubling-down on their efforts to invest in Zion’s Landing, Jesse and Amber scramble for the cash; Eli’s attempts to dodge a big-city reporter spell doom for the Gemstones.

We already have intra-family squabbles and cash scrambles and dalliances with crime. There are also a surprisingly large number of motorcycles and super buff Jesus-stans, and, at one point, at church lunch, BJ drinks milk out of a wine glass. I suppose that last thing could be considered a spoiler, in the loosest sense of the term, even though HBO released it as a promotional image last month. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I saw the screener a while ago and have kept it to myself until now. I’m only so strong.

Unfortunately, this marks the end of the good news and brings us to…

BAD NEWS

I fell in love with the idea of a Good News, Bad News format for this sucker a few days ago, thinking, like a dummy, that I could figure something out to slot here. Turns out I can’t. There is no bad news. It’s a wonderful and chaotic show and I’m so happy it’s back. My editor is probably sighing and rolling his eyes right now. Sorry, buddy. I get excited.

Season 2 of The Righteous Gemstones debuts with a two-part premiere on Sunday, January 9

This article originally appeared on 04.22.15

Gordon Ramsay is not exactly known for being nice.

Or patient.

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Or nurturing.

On his competition show “Hell’s Kitchen,” he belittles cooks who can’t keep up. If people come to him with their problems, he berates them. If someone is struggling to get something right in the kitchen, he curses them out.

His whole TV persona is based on being the world’s worst boss.

Earlier this week, Ramsay went on Reddit and allowed users to ask him any question they wanted.

So when a fellow cook asked him a sincere, deeply personal question about what to do when you’ve hit a roadblock in your career, you could probably guess what was coming.

(Click on text to zoom.)

Indeed, I thought the guy was making a terrible mistake pouring his heart out to a chef as notoriously tough as Ramsay:

“My hopes and dreams are nowhere to be found as I scale and portion salmon after salmon, shelling pods after pods of broad beans.
…
Sometimes I look out the tiny window and I can see people walking around the streets, enjoying the sunlight, while I’m here, questioning my dedication to this art as I rotate stock in the cool room, getting frost bitten, but the fear of the chef stops me from stepping outside to warm up.
…
The closest thing to feeling any kind of joy I get is those rare moments when I walk through the dining room near the end of service to get some coffee for everyone, and there will be a few diners left, idly sampling those little petite fours that we’ve painstakingly ensured are all perfectly round, identical, and just plain delicious. Then, one of them will stop the conversation they’re having with their company, look up from their food and say, ‘Thank you, chef. This is delicious,’ and making the previous 14-hours of sweat and tears kind of worthwhile.

My question is, how did you deal with it? How the fuck did you deal with all the bullshit, Gordon?”

But the way Ramsay responded? Totally amazing. And completely unexpected.

(Once again, click the text to zoom.)

Turns out, real-life Gordon Ramsay? He actually can be a really kind, big-hearted dude.

He’s sympathetic to the guy. Not just because he’s a good person. But because he’s been there.

Working in restaurants is a tough, tough business. As of 2012, the average salary for cooks was less than $23,000/year. And those who are just starting out often have to work unglamorous, tedious jobs that no one else wants to do. Ramsay didn’t have fancy culinary school training. He rose up through the ranks putting in long hours for low pay in kitchens all over the world. That’s why he gets it.

Which brings up another point.

When we go out to eat, we, as a culture, tend to behave … how should I put this?

Let’s go with “not like perfect angels.”

Of course, no one likes getting the wrong order. Or waiting a really long time for a meal. Or eating something that doesn’t taste the way you expect it to.

But it’s important to remember that the people behind the food, like Ramsay’s anonymous letter-writer, might be working 14-hour days. Or might be a recent immigrant who speaks limited English, trying to support a family thousands of miles away. And possibly making very little money. And sure, they screw up sometimes. But we all screw up at our jobs sometimes.

Because they, like the rest of us, are human beings.

Which is why saying…

“Thank you, chef. This is delicious.”

Could mean everything to someone.

This article originally appeared on 08.17.16

A group of 105 homeless people gathered at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Each of them was given a disposable camera and told to take pictures that represent “my London.”

Photo by Richard Fletcher/MyLondon Photography Contest. All photos used with permission.

The photos were entered in an annual contest run by London-based nonprofit Cafe Art, which gives homeless artists the chance to have their work displayed around the city and, for some of the photographers who participate in the yearly challenge, in a print calendar.

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“Some people have had experience, and others have never picked up a camera before,” said Paul Ryan, co-director of Cafe Art.

The program, Ryan explained, includes mentorship and training from professional volunteers at the Royal Photographic Society, including winners of the contest from previous years, many of whom are ultimately inducted into the society.

The goal of the challenge is to help participants gain the confidence to get back on the job market, search for housing, re-engage with their social circles, or even activate dormant skills.

“I really enjoyed it. And I started to get involved in my art again, which I’d left for years,” a 2015 participant said in a video for the organization’s Kickstarter campaign.

These are 11 of the top vote-getters from this year’s contest:

1. Ella Sullivan — “Heart Bike Rack”

2. Alana Del Valle — “London Bus with Sculpture”

3. Beatrice — “Out of the Blue”

4. Laz Ozerden — “What Now?”

5. Leo Shaul — “The Coffee Roaster”

6. Christopher McTavish — “St. Paul’s in Reflection”

7. Hugh Gary — “London Calling”

8. Keith Norris — “Watching Mannequin”

9. Siliana — “After the Rain”

10. Saffron Saidi — “Graffiti Area”

11. Jackie Cook — “Underground Exit”

Ryan, who has been developing the program for seven years, said that while there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for individuals who are homeless, for some who are too used to being “knocked back,” the experience of seeing their work on display or in print — and of success — can be invaluable.

“Everyone is helped in a different way, to get up to the next step in whatever way they need to.”

As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6th insurrection on Capitol Hill, new anecdotes from high-level Trump aides are shedding light on the former president’s reaction to the attempted coup he instigated.

One such person is Stephanie Grisham, former press secretary and the First Lady’s Chief of Staff. Grisham recently wrote a tell-all in which she recounted Melania Trump’s mishandling of the insurrection, sharing how the former First Lady refused to condemn the attacks until days after the uprising had been squashed. Now, in an interview with CNN, Grisham is revealing how Trump took in the deadly scene on Capitol Hill.

“He was in the dining room, gleefully watching on his TV as he often did, [saying] ‘Look at all the people fighting for me,’ hitting rewind, watching it again, that’s all that I know,” Grisham shared.

Grisham also blasted Trump for abandoning his MAGA supporters once the insurrection failed.

“He cares about no one but himself,” she continued. “The people who have been rightfully punished for their role in the insurrection … you know, where is he? All I know is he’s sitting at Mar-A-Lago, apparently getting his legal bills paid by the RNC. This man is a master manipulator. He gets people to do his bidding.”

The one-time Trump supporter then revealed that as many as 15 former aides and top advisors to the ex-president plan to meet next week to discuss ways to stop Trump from running for office again and prevent him from attempting to “manipulate people and divide our country” with his Big Lie.

“There were a few of us who have been sitting back, watching him continue to manipulate and harm our country,” Grisham explained. “He continues to divide our country because he has a fragile ego. We’re going to talk about how we can formally do some things to stop him.”

Watch the full interview below:

(Via The Daily Beast)

First-week sales of a new album is a metric that most major artists place a lot of value on; Having a big debut is good for a project’s chart prospects and moving a lot of copies of an album early gives some major bragging rights. That doesn’t matter to The Weeknd, though, as he declared in a reply to a Twitter thread suggesting that the first-week sales of Dawn FM will be negatively impacted because no physical editions of the album will be available upon its release. (The Weeknd’s online store notes that CD editions of Dawn FM are set to ship on January 28, while vinyl and cassette versions will ship on April 29.)

The thread in question reads, “No physical copies (vinyls, CDs, cassettes) for @theweeknd’s ‘Dawn FM’ will be available in store during release week. Furthermore, no physical copies will be shipped the first week. This will obviously impact first week figures. The reason is likely that The Weeknd pushed the release up. Therefore, physicals aren’t ready for distribution.”

It then points to The Weeknd’s New Year’s Day Instagram post to back up its claim about the supposedly advanced release date. In that post, The Weeknd wrote, “Music can heal and that feels more important than another album rollout. Let’s just drop the whole thing and enjoy it with the people.”

The Weeknd caught wind of this thread and noted in response, “this doesn’t matter to me. what matters is getting to experience the album together with the fans during these times.”

All of that said, Dawn FM shouldn’t have a problem being the biggest new album of the week, as its primary competition for that title may be Gunna’s Drip Season 4.

Dawn FM is out 1/7 via Republic. Pre-order it here.

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

Of all the faces and fashions seen smashing their way through the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the image of Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman, is undoubtedly the most memorable. With his David Puddy-like face paint, horned fur hat, and spear in hand, the 34-year-old Arizonian seemed to go out of his way to take center stage in every damning video and photo taken during the January 6th attacks, but now he’s blaming the media for making him the poster boy for the MAGA coup (just as his lawyer blamed Americans in general for making Chansley the way he is).

But on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the events of January 6, Chansley is blaming everyone and everything that isn’t his satanic Davy Crockett hat for turning him into “the face” of the Capitol insurrection. Speaking from an Oklahoma federal prison, where he’s currently serving a 41-month sentence for the part he played in the attacks, Chansley got on the horn with Inside Edition’s Lisa Guerrero, with help from his mom, who had him on speakerphone (awwww).

When asked whether he had any regrets about his actions on that infamous day, Chansley claimed that he actually tried to calm down the crowd on more than one occasion:

“In retrospect, one thing I can say that I regret is not working to ensure that there was far more peace on that day. Had I known what was going to happen, I would have stepped in before any barricades were breached. I actually tried to, on more than one occasion, calm the crowd. But it just didn’t work.”

Since the bulk of the footage we have seen of Chansley involves him howling, and we know that he left a threatening message to Mike Pence on the Senate dais, the idea of him actually trying to quell the storm of sedition doesn’t quite fit. Even Guerrero challenged him on this, noting: “You’re a grown man. You chose to go to the Capitol that day. Many people look at you as the face of Jan. 6 and are appalled. What is your response to those people?”

Yet again, Chansley wasn’t ready to take the blame, telling Guerrero: “As far as being ‘the face,’ that’s something that the media made me. I didn’t make myself anything.” He did, however, choose to dress like a feral animal and illegally thrash through the halls of one of our most government’s most sacred institutions.

But what does Chansley’s mom think? She claims that then-president Donald Trump invited everyone to the Capitol, and feels “really passionate about how wrong I think it is that he is even doing any time at all.”

While more than 700 people have been arrested for their actions on January 6th, the FBI claims there are still approximately 350 additional suspects they are trying to find to face prosecution. None, however, is likely to look as familiar as Chansley.

(Via Inside Edition)

After President Joe Biden addressed the nation on the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack, Donald Trump didn’t waste any time firing back at the speech that clearly put the blame for the attempted coup on his shoulders for refusing to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. In fact, Trump proved Biden’s point by once again trotting out “The Big Lie” that the election was stolen from him, which is a heck of a thing to do on the anniversary of an insurrectionist attack based entirely on that false premise.

In Biden’s speech, he ripped Trump for calling his supporters true patriots. “Is that what you thought when you looked at the mob ransacking the Capitol, destroying property, literally defecating in the hallways?” Biden said in the fiery address, in which he also called Trump “a defeated former president.”

Considering Trump canceled his Jan. 6 press conference and is still banned from Twitter, the former president was forced to respond to Biden via an email to his MAGA enthusiasts. Via Mediaite:

This political theater is all just a distraction for the fact Biden has completely and totally failed. Our Country no longer has Borders, has totally and completely lost control of Covid (record numbers!), is no longer Energy Independent, Inflation is rampant, our Military is in chaos, and our exit, or surrender, from Afghanistan was perhaps the most embarrassing day in the long and distinguished history of the United States—and so much more. Why is it that the Unselect Committee of totally partisan political hacks, whose judgment has long ago been made, not discussing the rigged Presidential Election of 2020? It’s because they don’t have the answers or justifications for what happened. They got away with something, and it is leading to our Country’s destruction.

Trump ended his rant by saying the Democrats now “own” January 6. “I say, let them have it because America sees through theirs lies and polarizations.” Again, another weird thing to say concerning the riot literally happened during Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally after he told the crowd to “fight like hell.” There wouldn’t even be a January 6 without him, but sure, the Democrats own it now.

You can see excerpts of Biden calling out Trump below:

(Via Mediaite & The Recount)

Richard Grenell served in the Trump administration as acting Director of National Intelligence and the United States Ambassador to Germany. He still has his former-boss’ back, even though he no longer has to study the complete discography of Rammstein, or whatever the United States Ambassador to Germany does.

Grenell appeared on Newsmax on Thursday to discuss the events of January 6, 2020 (you can watch the video here). “These democrats and their media allies see something. They’re dramatizing this whole January 6th, because they want to seize elections forever,” he said to three other stern-faced men before grumbling about mail-in ballots.

Later, Grenell returned to the attack on the Capitol Building one year ago today, but rather than call it what it was (a failed coup, an insurrection, a day dark in American history, etc.), he complained about Trump getting booted off Twitter. “Let me finish with this, January 6th was a terrible day because it’s the day Big Tech and the media kicked President Trump off Twitter and silenced his voice,” he said to approving nods. “That was the day that was an attack on our democracy.”

Grenell conveniently left out the part where Trump wasn’t “silenced” on the 6th. He didn’t get locked out of his Twitter account until the next day, followed by a permanent suspension on the 8th “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

At least Grenell didn’t get tricked into thanking a war criminal… again.

(Via Mediaite)