Category: News

Over the past year, Bad Bunny has been absolutely stacking his resume. He’s set to act with Brad Pitt, he recently made chart history, and he’s a WWE champion. On top of all that, he has the distinct honor of being the musical guest on this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live. Traditionally, the musical guest usually joins the week’s host and a cast member to film some promotional clips for the show. So now, Bad Bunny’s promo has emerged and it’s focused on his name.

Bridgerton‘s Regé-Jean Page introduces the clip before Melissa Villaseñor references Bad Bunny’s name by saying, “I think I’m gonna go by ‘Bad Melissa’ now.” Page makes a similar declaration, declaring his new nickname to be Regé-Jean Bunny. He then asks Bunny if he wants a new nickname, but he sticks to his guns, replying, “‘Bad Bunny’ is already cool, so I’m gonna keep it,” a conclusion with which both Page and Villaseñor agree.

All of this comes after Bunny had a COVID-19 scare. He tested positive in November, but in a December appearance on The Late Late Show, he told James Corden, “I feel great, thank God. I already tested negative, so I’m so happy. I feel great. I feel perfect.”

Check out the SNL promo above.

As the COVID vaccine continues to roll out, the country moves ever so closer to something resembling normalcy. But, to be certain, it’s a slow and deliberate process, and it could be significant time before we can go back to attending gatherings of multiple people safely.

Despite the continued precaution required, the NBA has remained adamant about holding its annual All-Star Game in Atlanta next month. Multiple star players have publicly expressed concerns over health and safety, especially considering the number of games that have already been postponed this season, combine with time lost from players who have been held out because of contact tracing.

As the league has pressed forward, commissioner Adam Silver has stuck to his belief that the sort of mini-bubble that would be created in Atlanta for the game would actually be safer than players using their time off during the mid-season break to travel to different locales across the country. On Thursday, he took that sentiment a step further during an appearance on The Jump:

“There were obviously those who thought we shouldn’t play without fans, thought we shouldn’t play in the bubble, thought we shouldn’t be playing in a very serious way because of the social justice issues roiling this country,” Silver said. “So I certainly hear the other side of this issue here.

“And I’ll lastly say it seems like no decisions during this pandemic come without uncertainty and come without risk. This is yet another one of them, and yet it’s my job to balance all those interests, and ultimately, it feels like the right thing to do to go forward.”

Silver has faced significant criticism for his stance, and that’s not likely to go away between now and then. The league has certainly been in a difficult position since the pandemic started, and continuing play has come with many challenges. Though the All-Star Game seems very low on the list of priorities, it’s also a huge revenue stream, a reality that obviously has factored into this decision.

Until the world finally gets back to normal, the league will continue to face tough decisions about how to move forward while trying to balance the safety of its players.

Zoe Dupree is not like any other celebrity stylist. He styles with intention and thrives on innovative fashion aesthetics that get the people talking. Perhaps that’s what Young Thug’s fiancee Jerrika Karlae felt when they first met at New York Fashion Week. The connection eventually led to Dupree becoming the man behind Young Thug‘s most iconic fashion look — the cover of his 2016 mixtape Jeffery.

Donned in a flowy lavender dress contained by ruffles, the look Thug so confidently wore created quite some commotion and viral memes. A man in a dress delivering some of the best music of 2016 gave the internet a lot to talk about. The discourse reached students sitting in lectures at top-notch colleges such as NYU where the discussion of femininity and masculinity in hip-hop was led by Dupree himself.

Make people talk. That was always the plan, Dupree expressed to Uproxx on his styling career. Helping rising acts such as Lil Keed, Asian Da Brat, and Renni Rucci get in the position to make fashion headlines by paying it forward to up-and-coming Black fashion designers also seems to be part of his plan. There are not that many Black people in the fashion industry as it is, and Zoe Dupree is doing his part to help adjust that.

How did you end up linking up with YSL?

Jerrika Karlae, Thug’s fiancee who is now a rapper, she’s also a designer. Me and her cousin were cool and he was like, “Oh my God, you have to work for my cousin. You have to do her PR.” I do PR on the side as well. He was like, “You’ve got to connect with them. They want to be in New York for fashion week, set some things up for her. I’ll make sure she’s there.” I set up an interview for Jerrika at Fader and that was my first time meeting her but we would see each other out during fashion week. That whole week I saw her at Rihanna’s show, her and Thug, her mom and so it was like, “You’ve got to come to Atlanta. We’ll get some stuff going.” Three weeks later I went to Atlanta to work and she was like, “You know what? You need to just move here.” I remember just packing a suitcase and her and Thug lived in this beautiful townhouse downtown. She was like, “We got extra bedrooms.” They gave me a room on the third floor of the townhouse. I lived with them and then I wound up moving with them to their mansion in Buckhead.

I worked for Thug and Karlae for about maybe three and a half years. About a year and a half ago, I just started focusing on just one artist and I started working with Lil Keed when he got signed. I started doing his styling and just helping him move around day to day.

That’s dope. I always hear about Thug and how he always wants to help out others.

Thug will give you the shirt off his back. He’s a good person. He wants everybody to get whatever you can get out of the situation and make it great for you. I learned a lot of things by just working with him because Thug is a fashionable guy, so for him to even let me come in and just create looks… I got a lot of iconic moments under Thug.

Tell me about those iconic looks.

The thing that I’m most known for is the album cover Jeffery, the dress. I did all the tours. I got to travel on tour with Drake and Thug when we did the London tour. I’ve done festivals, I’ve done music videos, Adidas commercials. I’ve done Vibe, Source, and just different things with Thug. I’m just grateful for the opportunity to be able to have those moments and then be able to help create new moments for the new artists.

What was the name of the designer for that dress?

Alessandro Trincone. I met him at New York fashion week. He’s always showing me his new collections.

How did you end up getting that dress for the cover?

I was setting up some PR stuff for Jerrika and Thug just happened to be with her. He was doing an interview so we were all there and we wind up seeing this dress, just randomly out. Thug had already shot the Jeffrey cover. It was just a simple cover but he was like, “Oh my God, got to redo it.”

They wind up sending the dress out and sending it back overseas to Atlanta. I remember this big box coming to the house and he’s like, “All right y’all, we are shooting the cover today.” I remember like it was yesterday. That was a cool moment and it was controversial, too. I was nervous when it came out because I got a lot of hate mail and then I got a lot of like, “Oh my God, this is amazing. This is breaking barriers.” Off that alone, I remember getting a lot of speaking engagements at colleges because some of the professors would do courses around this album cover where they talked about masculinity versus femininity in music. NYU had a big course, Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University. Everybody had small little lecture groups surrounding this album cover.

What colleges did you speak at?

I talked at Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta.

Now you’re dressing Keed and you’ve created some known looks for him, too. You put him in a jacket from Lady Gaga’s Fame Tour in the “Here” video. What did he say when you guys told him that this was the Lady Gaga jacket?

He was excited. He was like, “What the f*ck?” I just remember him walking and he had this arrogance. He was like, “Man, this jacket is like… Man.” I remember him walking back on set and just giving it his all.

What’s been your experience as a Black stylist?

My overall experience as a Black stylist, it’s been… it’s a lot of fun. Just coming from Philadelphia — growing up there, it’s kind of like a black cloud. I’m able to meet people. I’m able to network, I’m able to make money. I’m able to make people look good. It’s just a really, really good feeling being a Black stylist.

How are you using fashion to get the artists that you’re working with messaging and personality across?

One thing I always do working with a new client is study them and look at past pictures versus stuff that I do with them now. I’m a big researcher. I love the mainstream brands and I use them in and out with my styling. The thing that separates me is that I use up-and-coming Black designers. It could be a mom-and-pop shop, it could be just something fresh off Instagram. I’m always giving different Black designers opportunities. So I always like to take those small brands and mix it in with my artists to for one, to give them a look that nobody has done or, having involved in pieces that no one’s used before. It makes them trend and it helps the brand as well.

Can you give me an example of a time you’ve done that and the artist was very interested in the designers look?

My friend, Jeff Spicoli, has a brand called Dare To Be Different and he has these flannel pants. He had this like crisscross cage on them and they were double-sided. I remember him contacting me on Instagram about working together. He had these pants and I remember getting them on Thug. Thug put the outfit on and the next day, it was on Vogue. Also with those pants, I was on a tour with Thug and Jaden Smith. I actually gave Jaden a pair of pants on behalf of Thug. The next thing you know, I walk out to watch the show, and I see Jaden with the pants on.

I’m pretty sure that was life-changing for your friend, Jeff.

It really was.

How does that make you feel to be able to help out your friends in that way?

Naturally, I just like to help. I feel like my gift is to help people look good, help people connect the dots and help people get what they need.

How do you use styling to help a new artist breakthrough?

I’m always edging the clients to just go big, go hard, and kind of step out the box. I’m always telling them “Oh let’s do this, some crazy sh*t that doesn’t make sense. Let’s just put some of those crazy looks together that you might not see day-to-day and let’s just go viral with it.” I feel like those kinds of moments right there get people talking because everybody’s not going to like what you put together. But as long as people are talking, it’s going to do what it needs to do. It’s not going to be a horrible look, but it’s going to be just some hard, out of this world kind of pieces. Crazy things that I have in my mind where I’m able to get through to the artists.

When’s a time that you convinced an artist to step out of the box and they just went crazy?

One time, Keed was going to the BET awards and he wanted to wear a suit. I remember getting this bright-ass lime green suit and it was kind of oversize with a jacket and very bell bottom-ish pants. He had red hair at the time and I remember his hair started bleeding on the blazer and it messed it up. So we took a piece of his date’s dress and cut it, put it over the spots and it was kind of like a handkerchief kind of thing. I remember we went outside and he took a picture, and everybody was talking about the outfit. It was good stuff and bad. It went viral and that was a crazy moment. That night, everybody was wearing lime green. I remember Ella Mai wore green and a bunch of different artists popped out with lime green suits that night.

2019 was definitely the year of lime green.

Everybody wanted to be slime and all that.

Who are some of your favorite Black designers and why?

I love LaQuan Smith. We’re actually cool friends. I met him through a colleague of mine. The first time meeting him, I had used this stuff on Thug. I went to a couple of his shows and his showroom and I was able to see his pieces. It’s just so good to see an African-American male dominating this industry. People think of fashion as a white-dominated industry. It’s always good to see Black people rising to the occasion. I’m really proud of him. I like him as a designer. I like Pyer Moss, he’s another designer. I actually got to work with him when Keed walked in their New York fashion week show. I got to see the pieces and how eclectic his style was. Everything was androgynous. They’re maybe two of my favorite Black designers.

What advice or encouragement would you have for aspiring Black creatives?

Be yourself. There’s nothing like just being authentic. Pray every night, keep God all in your business because he’ll basically help you to get where you need to be. Ask questions, educate yourself, read books, search the internet. Be around like-minded people. Everybody can’t go where you’re going in life. You probably can’t take your best friend. You probably can’t take your brother and your sister. Everybody’s not meant to be on your front row. You got to sometimes give people some balcony seats or maybe some seats outside the stadium on the lawn. You’ll learn it along the journey.

What’s next for you?

I do a virtual style school. It’s basically online. Whoever’s an aspiring stylist, they can come join the class. It’s a two- to three-hour course where I give them free game, like how I got started. Also, telling them the ins and outs. I’m going to do that once a month. Zoechella is my annual birthday party where all my celebrity clients come and perform. That’s going to be July 4th weekend. We’re also doing a versus fashion show. I’m battling another stylist. We’re using Black designers and it’s going to be a party on a boat ride.

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

South Park‘s first pandemic special aired in October 2020 to high ratings, so Trey Parker and Matt Stone are here to make that magic happen again with a second installment that’s got a very telling title — “South ParQ The Vaccination Special” — so one can imagine that we’re not only going to see pandemic-related events again (and the show already tackled anti-vaxxers in 2019) but also some much-needed roasting of the QAnon conspiracy crowd.

Hopefully, we’ll hear some news soon on the return with a full season of half-hour episodes, but for now, it’s good enough news that we’re getting an hour-long special. There’s no telling whether this event will tackle the U.S. Capitol insurrection (it’s easy to imagine the show including the throngs of MAGA-flag waving crowds packing the complex’s outside staircases), but I do hope that we get to see South Park‘s version of the QAnon Shaman with all of his organic food whining torched for all to see.

The special’s description reads as follows: “The citizens of South ParQ are clamoring for the COVID-19 vaccine. A hilarious new militant group tries to stop the boys from getting their teacher vaccinated.” Expect to see the episode available not only on Comedy Central but also MTV2. “South ParQ The Vaccination Special” will air on March 10.

February has been a tremendous month for Australia. Their COVID response has dropped the number of new cases per day to somewhere between one and five. They passed a new law that required sites like Google and Facebook to pay for news and Facebook responded by essentially up and leaving the continent completely. And, in what many — just me — consider the biggest story of all, the Land Down Under now has its own version of America’s finest television program, Holey Moley.

I have discussed Holey Moley many times on this website. There’s a simple reason for this: Holey Moley is perfect. It is, in theory, a mini-golf competition show. People putt the ball and keep putting it until it goes in a hole and the person who gets their ball into the hole in the fewest putts wins. Where it becomes special, though, is its addition of Jackass-level physical challenges that toe the line between unnecessary in every way and more necessary to my survival than water. People go flying everywhere. It’s a good show. You should watch it.

The Australian version makes a few small changes:

• Aussie legend Greg Norman has been replaced American legend Steph Curry as the show’s resident golf expert
• Joe Tessitore has been replaced by Australian television personality and former Olympic sprinter Matt Shirvington
• Rob Riggle is still the co-host, which is admittedly not a change but worth including because it is funny to me
• There is now a hole where a man dressed as an angry muscular chicken torments the golfers

We can work with this. The show premiered on February 1st and has aired two or three episodes a week and will already air its finale on the 22nd. This is so powerful. It’s one of the reasons I respect Australia very much. No other country would look at this bozo circus of a television show and say “let’s go ahead and air the full season in three weeks.” I’m so proud of them.

But why am I still typing? You don’t want to read words. You want to see people wiping out on aggressively dangerous obstacles. Buddy, do I and the Australian Holey Moley have you covered. Here’s the first hole of the first episode. It’s the same windmill fiasco as the American version but now, for reasons as unclear as they are delightful, the contestants wear little hats. The hats do not help.

Does this show also feature Hole Number Two, the one where contestants try to race past a row of portable toilets before people dressed in Halloween costumes fling the doors open into their sprinting bodies and send them flailing into a pool?

I am pleased to report that it does.

The hole where contestants cling to a rocket-powered zip line and then try to grasp a large pole they are speeding toward, never succeeding, and then spiraling to a splashdown finish?

Yup. That’s here, too.

But the best part of all of this is that most of the contestants are, like, extremely Australian. Just an incredible cross-section of humanity selected to compete on this show. And this is where I get the pleasure of introducing you to this guy, who appears in the second episode and — spoilers, whatever — wins. This is important. Look at this bearded king.

It gets better. At multiple times throughout the episode, he gets catapulted into a swimming pool after wiping out. And when he emerges from the pool, he does… well, this.

It’s majestic. It’s beautiful. It’s is the only logical conclusion to a blog post about Holey Moley coming to Australia and so it is where I will end. Just a marvelous job by everyone involved. I’m so happy.

Thank you to Paul for this wonderful tip

Just a few months removed from her debut mixtape, Wolf Pussy, her highest-profile feature song feature on Rico Nasty’s “Smack A Bitch” remix, and a fiery back-and-forth battle with Chicago rapper Cupcakke, Florida’s rising star Sukihana lends her raunchy raps and a revealing outfit to R&B singer Muni Long’s sensual “Thot Thoughts” video. Suki, who got her first taste of stardom as a Love & Hip-Hop cast member and later received a co-sign from Cardi B who gave her a cameo in the racy “WAP” video, unabashedly bares… a lot in the video, while rapping about her “ho tendencies” and twirling around a stripper pole.

Muni Long, who previously co-wrote such hits as Fifth Harmony’s “Worth It,” Pitbull and Kesha’s “Timber,” Rihanna’s “California King Bed,” and Selena Gomez’s “Who Says” (all credited under her real name, Priscilla Renea), released her debut EP under her new moniker in 2020. Titled Black Like This, the seven-song offering sees Muni dabbling in sensuous pop-R&B and scintillating hip-hop while collaborating with singer Jacob Lattimore and Atlanta rapper YFN Lucci. She told Vogue in October that she plans to release more music as Muni Long on her own label, Supergiant Records, viewing the EP as her “reintroduction” after over a decade in the music industry writing hits for others.

Watch Muni Long’s “Thot Thoughts” video featuring Sukihana above.

HBO’s The Undoing was a fun limited series. It wasn’t great, but it was passably intriguing and one of those series that found its main selling point in damn fine performances from the upper crust of talent, including a villainous turn by Hugh Grant, a nuanced portrayal from Nicole Kidman, and a nefarious twirl from Donald Sutherland’s mustache. Then there was an unassuming-yet-commanding performance by Lily Rabe. She portrayed Sylvia, the best friend of Kidman’s Grace, and let’s just say that Sylvia was a surprise ace-in-the-hole for nearly every character who wasn’t a murderer. Rabe did an excellent job of keeping the audience guessing about her character’s motives, and she pulls off a similar trick in Amazon Prime’s new crime thriller series.

Tell Me Your Secrets has more in common with The Undoing that is immediately evident. And whereas latter was exquisitely shot, casting a seductive sheen over any plot holes that persisted. Whereas the former show kind-of revels in letting those holes all hang out. It’s a seriously messy series — so chaotic and unyielding that one almost admires all of the excessive effort — yet it doesn’t have the A-list selling power of the former series. Both shows swan dive into soap operative excess, but whereas The Undoing was forgiven for most of its sins, Tell Me Your Secrets won’t receive the same deference. And that’s a shame because this show would likely be embraced if its leading trio — played almost too well by Rabe, Hamish Linklater, and Amy Brenneman — could also distract from its (abundant) flaws by, you know, zooming in on Nicole Kidman’s scene-stealing eyeballs to communicate shock and fear in a Hitchcockian way.

Look, I probably shouldn’t be fixating upon The Undoing while reviewing another show, but it’s a recent show that gathered a lot of social media attention, and our current situation has led to fewer TV shows being churned out, so I suspect that a lot of people could use a similar trash-thriller fix. And a lot of people who applauded Lily Rabe as Sylvia will want to watch her in another show. So, relevant comparisons will be made to with this series, which undoubtedly arrives with a lesser pedigree (no David E. Kelley in the producer’s seat, and no source material on bookstore shelves to add additional contest). Also, it’s stunning how both shows lean into their shortcomings in different ways, and only one was destined to emerge with critical acclaim.

Essentially, we’ve got three characters with murky and troubling past lives. Rabe stars as Emma, who’s cast from the same mold as the antihero ladies of Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places and Sharp Edges. Emma’s in the witness protection program due to her status as the ex-girlfriend of a serial killer, and trouble follows her everywhere. A lot of that trouble sources from Brenneman’s Mary, the mother of one of the killer’s victims, and she wants to track down Emma, so she hires Linklater’s character, John, who’s a former serial predator who’s gone cold turkey from his old ways and appears to want redemption. Or does he? Essentially, these are three very f*cked up people, and while one is very easy to judge (John being a serial rapist does not bode well, and fortunately, the show does not attempt to frame him in an empathetic light), and the story’s somewhat predictable, the show’s still a decent watch for the performances of all involved.

To put it bluntly, Tell Me Your Secrets is a binge that won’t waste your time if you love trashy psychological thrillers, even if it’s fighting an uphill battle without the same degree of stellar production values and names that sound impressive. There are no multi-million dollar Manhattan flats to make us appreciate how much the lead characters have to lose as a result of a grisly crime that’s ultimately shot in an arty way. Instead, the newer show embraces the down-and-dirty reality of witness-protection life, which appears to be a discombobulating space in this show. Emma’s isolated from anyone she previously knew, and she’s dependent upon a shifty shrink (Enrique Murciano), who was key to springing her from prison. Trusting anyone appears to be a bad idea, and every main player starts to look like a suspect at some point.

The less said about how the principal cast maneuvers through their respective environments the better. I will say that the show’s setup is intriguing, and man, the atmosphere is an ominous one. At one point, Emma is literally wading through a swamp while attempting to evade what’s sure looking like a serial killer. Also, the show certainly doesn’t pretend to be high art, and it’s almost campy in moments, like when choosing to put the worst wig ever on Lily Rabe to separate her current and former lives.

The wig is bad, yes. It’s still easy enough to hang with this series to watch the mystery unfold. Is this a great story that will be remembered? Not even close, but Tell Me Your Secrets is a more than passable bingewatching candidate.

Amazon Prime’s ‘Tell Me Your Secrets’ streams on February 19.

Donald Trump is very particular when it comes to food. The former president’s diet is far more defined in the eyes of the American public than his overall policy ideas. Trump likes steaks well done (with ketchup), loves Diet Coke to appear at the press of a button and he thinks fast food is a luxury that college football players have never experienced.

We’re still very much in the fallout zone of Trump’s presidency, even though he’s been in exile in Florida for weeks while the Biden administration gets underway. But we’re also starting to hear some extremely colorful stories from Trumpworld as people no longer tethered to him for employment or healthcare give new details about what it was like during the Trump presidency.

On Friday, The Washingtonian published a fascinating story about Trump’s Old Post Office hotel and its central role in Washington, D.C. over the last four years. All the major players you’ve known from Trump’s orbit are there, including Rudy Giuliani literally making the hotel’s restaurant his office:

Perhaps the most notorious VIP was Rudy Giuliani, who had a regular table in the restaurant’s downstairs dining area. “It was pretty much his office. He was doing more paperwork there than eating,” Williamson, the chef, says. “Some days, he’d be there all day.” At one point, someone made it official and created a black-and-gold plaque that read RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI PRIVATE OFFICE. The restaurant would keep it behind the host stand and place it at his table before he arrived.

“The biggest pain in my butt was Giuliani,” says the former manager who dealt with an annoyed Hicks and a sauce-covered Schwartz (and who asked for anonymity to avoid blowback from future employers). “He was constantly in the restaurant. And I complained about it. The guy would come in, expect a table for ten at a moment’s notice at, like, 2 pm, when we’re not fully functioning. We don’t have the staff. But he’s the President’s lawyer, and what am I supposed to do?”

The article includes a visual of the nameplate they had made for Giuliani, which is an incredible touch. There are many small moments that hold weight when you know the players, like Rand Paul denying one employee’s claim that he used Scotch tape to affix his mask to his glasses “leaving it flapping over his mouth and nose.” But the biggest details are about the extensive guidelines for employees when Trump was at his private table. That included a seven-step method for presenting him his beloved Diet Coke:

As soon as Trump was seated, the server had to “discreetly present” a mini bottle of Purell hand sanitizer. (This applied long before Covid, mind you.) Next, cue dialogue: “Good (time of day) Mr. President. Would you like your Diet Coke with or without ice?” the server was instructed to recite. A polished tray with chilled bottles and highball glasses was already prepared for either response. Directions for pouring the soda were detailed in a process no fewer than seven steps long—and illustrated with four photo exhibits. The beverage had to be opened in front of the germophobe commander in chief, “never beforehand.” The server was to hold a longneck-bottle opener by the lower third of the handle in one hand and the Diet Coke, also by the lower third, in the other. Once poured, the drink had to be placed at the President’s right-hand side. “Repeat until POTUS departs.”

There’s a similar anecdote about Trump’s favored steak condiment: ketchup. He’d ceremonially get a fresh bottle each time he showed up, with employees told to make sure he heard the “pop” of the glass bottle to know it’s fresh. It’s a lot, and the amount of information people working at the restaurant needed to know about its customers is really impressive. But perhaps the funniest story in the piece detailed what happened when Trump thought someone he ate with got a bigger steak than he did:

“It was the same steak. Both well done. Maybe it was a half ounce bigger or something, I don’t know,” says Williamson, who had previously run the kitchens of DC staples Birch & Barley and the Riggsby. The chef had always prepared a bone-in rib eye or filet mignon for Trump. After Steakgate, he switched to a 40-ounce tomahawk. Trump would never again gripe that he didn’t have the greatest, hugest, most beautiful steak.

There are a lot of little things you learn about Trump’s family: Melania hates garnishes and sent a garnished plate back once. The kids were not nearly as much trouble as you might think. And Trump had a hilarious rider-like list of junk food he wanted on hand at an extremely fancy restaurant:

One more thing. Don’t forget the snacks. A tray of junk food needed to be available for every Trump visit: Lay’s potato chips (specifically, sour cream and onion), Milky Way, Snickers, Nature Valley Granola Bars, Tic Tacs, gummy bears, Chips Ahoy, Oreos, Nutter Butters, Tootsie Rolls, chocolate-covered raisins, and Pop-Secret.

It’s not all bad for the employees there: they said they made a lot of tips from people who thought bribing workers Mafia-style would get them a spot at Trump’s exclusive table (it did not). But there are a lot of little things about working for Trump that were clearly bizarre. There were stories of scowls on the subway and wondering whether it will be OK to put a Trump hotel on their resume in the wake of the MAGA coup that happened weeks before Trump’s tenure ended.

The whole piece is a fascinating look into a world that already no longer exists, where well-done steaks and gummy bears were the key to power in Washington D.C.

[via Washington Post]

As sci-fi fans, we’ve become accustomed to being shortchanged by reality. The hoverboards and self-lacing shoes promised to us by some of our favorite 80s and early 90s films have yet to hit the market. We’re still eons away from developing teleportation abilities. No one’s talked seriously about laser gun manufacturing in years. And that’s fine. Really, we can tie our own sneakers and it doesn’t feel like now is the moment to test whether robots would betray us if given the chance anyway. But every so often we’re reminded of a fictional technological advancement so imaginative, so avant-garde, so deliciously weird, we can’t help but be a little salty at how cruelly some of those old-school sci-fi movies teased us over the years.

Because it’s 2021, and Keanu Reeves practically swore that cybernetic dolphins with heroin addictions would exist and we. don’t. see. them. anywhere!

We can suffer through a pandemic and inter-generational wars that hinge on whether skinny jeans and side parts are still cool. We can even survive the notion that a segment of the population is campaigning for David Ayer’s Suicide Squad cut because they actually want to see more of Jared Leto’s Joker. We can.

But asking us to live with the knowledge that humans had the chance to communicate with dolphins using VR headsets and we didn’t take advantage of it because … I don’t know, umbrella drones and toilets that monitor your bowel movements seemed more important? It’s too much.

If you’re lost (and, if you want to get philosophical for a second, aren’t we all?) let me explain. The early 90s saw an influx of futuristic-minded action films. Some were good and some were called Johnny Mnemonic.

Now, Johnny Mnemonic has somewhat of a cult following thanks to its cyberpunk dystopian setting and the fact that it featured a young Keanu Reeves doing what amounts to a feature-length audition tape for his eventual Matrix gig. Reeves plays the titular character, a mnemonic courier who’s had a chip implanted in his brain so that he can store and transport sensitive information across a kind of VR-inspired idea of the internet, called simply, the Net. The downside to Johnny’s job is that the more gigabytes he downloads, the less space there is for childhood memories. That makes Johnny sad, so he agrees to do one last transport to earn enough money for a surgery that would remove the chip and restore his memories.

Unfortunately for Johnny, this “last job” ends up being a doozy. The world is in the middle of a pandemic brought on by humanity’s overreliance on technology — basically, we’ve all spent too much time on social media and now we’re having seizures all the time. The data Johnny ends up agreeing to store in his brain contains the cure for this disease, and that’s lucrative information for nefarious Big Pharma companies and Yakuza gang leaders hoping to profit from the world basically going to sh*t.

There are some wild visuals this movie asks us to process: Dolph Lundgren as a crazed, cybernetically enhanced street preacher who looks like a Skid Row Jesus, Ice-T wearing ski-goggles and face-paint while leading an underground resistance called the LoTeks, a future in which Newark, New Jersey is one of the world’s most developed cities. But the craziest thing this film gives us is dolphins. Specifically, one dolphin named Jones.

Jones is a Navy vet, trained by the military to decrypt data. He’s the co-leader of this sewer-dwelling grassroots group and he pops up just in time to help Johnny hack his own brain, discover the code to unlock the data in his mind, and cure the Wi-Fi-enabled disease ravaging the planet.

And sure, it sounds weird. A porpoise sporting a metal brain cap chatting it up with Keanu Reeves and hacking the Matrix to give us all access to better healthcare? It’s the kind of fever dream you wake up from after a night of Goop-inspired psychedelics research and a Dolphin Tale marathon. But here’s the thing, plenty of other bizarre tech Johnny Mnemonic predicted has been ushered into our shared reality. Maybe not the pocket-sized fax machines or electric whips that slice men in two, but government monitoring of massive amounts of private information, virtual reality headsets and gaming gloves, video-call capabilities, electronic passports, full-body scans … those are all actual inventions that have been forced on us. Even Johnny’s brain implant, one that lets you download ridiculous amounts of information, kind of resembles a recent Elon Musk brainchild.

And if we’re to believe we might one day be able to upgrade our cranium software the same way we do our iPhone storage plan, then sci-fi can deliver on its forgotten promise of AOL chatting with a marine mammal.

We want that future, the one Johnny Mnemonic sold to us, almost as badly as Keanu Reeves wants room service.

Make it happen, 2021.

Mark Jackson’s tenure as head coach of the Golden State Warriors has been chewed over publicly for years now, in large part because the Warriors became a dynasty once he left and because Jackson himself continues to be in the public eye as a broadcaster for ESPN and a well-known candidate for coaching jobs around the NBA.

But Jackson spoke on the topic once again in an interview with Rich Kleiman this week, and he went deep on his tenure, his regrets, and what went wrong that led to his firing in 2014. Kleiman asked Jackson specifically whether “the narrative” around Jackson and the culture he built while coaching the Warriors plays a role in his inability to get another head coaching job in the league now.

“It plays a role,” Jackson responded, before going out of his way to bring up how his religion may play a part in how fans and decision-makers view him. “You could make the statement that I forced folks to go to church, but what sense does that make?”

Jackson is referring to details from Marcus Thompson’s Steph Curry biography, in which Thompson tells the story of Jackson bringing his star player to a religious service and, along with his wife, rubbing oil on Curry’s sprained ankle and getting the entire congregation involved in an effort to heal the ankle. Thompson does not ever state in that passage that Jackson forced Curry to attend the service, which is what Jackson seemed to deny on Kleiman’s podcast.

Of course there were other factors that led to Jackson’s undoing, including the chaos surrounding his coaching staff and the way he used Curry. Team governor Joe Lacob has said in the past that Jackson’s relationships throughout the organization played a major part in the decision to move on from Jackson as well and ultimately hire Steve Kerr.