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Allen Iverson is an NBA legend, not just because of his spectacular skills on the court, but because of his cultural impact off of it, too. Iverson was himself at all times, and his willingness to be comfortable in his own skin is what has allowed a lot of current NBA stars to feel the same way about themselves.

Iverson’s legacy includes one off-court moment that gets brought up all the time: the practice rant. His infamous media remarks about practice became a sports moment that is still replayed to this day on every morning talk or debate show. While Iverson has embraced this famous moment in his life, it’s understandable that he can sometimes be a little annoyed about it, usually in interactions with fans.

On a recent episode of the All The Smoke podcast, Iverson recounted how fans will come up to him and start talking about his practice rant rather than bringing up the many incredible moments from his playing career, which he believes is a little odd considering he was a Hall of Fame player.

It’s definitely an iconic moment, but he has a point Iverson was the guy who, despite his size, managed to fight his way into the paint and tough out points. He was for years the owner of the deadliest crossover in the league, won MVP in 2001 as the leading scorer for the Philadelphia 76ers, and was credited for dragging an overmatched team to the NBA Finals. At the very least, let’s use this as an excuse to watch a bunch of Iverson highlights.

Though it’s been less than two years since Veep’s series finale aired on HBO, it feels like much longer—though not quite in the same way that spending 20 minutes with Catherine Meyer feels like a lifetime. Julia Louis-Dreyfus feels your pain. Though the award-winning star has kept herself plenty busy since the biting political satire bid farewell—what with having to be smuggled onto the set of Falcon and The Winter and Soldier and all—Louis-Dreyfus says she misses playing Selina Meyer.

In a wide-ranging interview with Variety, the 60-year-old actress was asked about any past roles she’d be interested in revisiting. While some would have expected her to answer Elaine Benes, given how long it’s been since we’ve checked in on the members of the Seinfeld gang, she was quick to admit that “I miss playing Selina Meyer.” While the opportunity to drop some of the most brilliantly sweary dialogue and insults ever written since The Thick of It (another Armando Iannucci joint) is enough of a reason to miss the role, Louis-Dreyfus says it goes beyond that.

In addition to missing the show’s equally brilliant cast and crew, Louis-Dreyfus—who broke an Emmy record when she won six consecutive Best Actress awards for her part in Veep—says that is was just really “exciting” to be Selina: “Playing that character, who was so out of her f*cking mind, and so undeveloped; it was just freeing! Everything was about her ego, with not a care in the world for another human being.”

Though the show’s finale did that Six Feet Under thing to see into the future, there’s certainly plenty of time to bring Veep back. And Louis-Dreyfus would love to see it happen. “It would give me enormous joy to do more Veep,’” she said. “And who knows, maybe we will one day.”

If any politician lacked the self-awareness to run for president yet again and think they had a chance of winning, it’s Selina Meyer (fictional politicians, that is; there are real ones who are much more deluded).

(Via Variety)

“Woman,” the second single from British rapper Little Simz’s upcoming album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, finds Simz celebrating femininity in sort of an audio Miss International pageant. Naming locations all over the world from African nations to Brooklyn, New York, she describes the beautiful qualities of each woman in both physical and deeper terms, praising them for having both beauty and brains.

The video follows the theme, with Simz signing seven-figure checks at a banquet attended by beauties in business suits and dancing in silk slips at an elegant mansion pajama party. Simz also bartends at a classy lounge, singing along to Cleo Sol’s dreamy chorus as the women around her boogie to the beat.

Simz first announced the impending release of Sometimes I Might Be Introvert two weeks ago with the release of the video for its lead single “Introvert.” The album will be her first full-length release since 2019’s critically acclaimed Grey Area, a ten-track effort that featured appearances from Jamaican reggae artist Chronixx and Swedish electronic band Little Dragon. In 2020, Simz also released the Drop 6 EP, recording its five songs to help herself shake off the quarantine blues from the coronavirus pandemic.

Watch Little Simz’s “Woman” video above.

While attempting to prop herself up as a potential replacement for California Governor Gavin Newsom, Caitlyn Jenner held a town hall with Sean Hannity earlier in the week where she she made a ridiculously out-of-touch comment about the homeless. While talking to Hannity, Jenner recounted a conversation she had with a friend in the next private plane hangar over, which was already a bad start, and the anecdote continued to go downhill from there.

“My friends are leaving California,” Jenner said. “My hangar, the guy right across, he was packing up his hangar and I said, where are you going? And he says, ‘I’m moving to Sedona, Arizona, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t walk down the streets and see the homeless.’”

Jenner got blasted on social media for the classist remarks, and on Thursday night, Jimmy Kimmel got in on the action. While teeing up the Hannity clip, Kimmel quipped, “This is how well Caitlyn Jenner understands the plight of everyday Californians here in L.A.” After Jenner’s hangar anecdote played for the audience, Kimmel joked, “Ah, homeless people: can’t walk around them, can’t fly over them.” But he was just getting warmed up. Via THR:

“Is it transphobic to call a trans person an ignorant a-hole?” Kimmel asked. “Or does calling that trans person an ignorant a-hole — even though she happens to be a trans person — show that we don’t discriminate against ignorant a-holes, no matter their gender orientation? It’s a tough one. I don’t know, I guess we’ll let the Internet decide tomorrow.”

Unlike Jenner, Kimmel’s “a-hole” remarks have not caused an internet backlash as of this this writing, so we’re guessing he’s good.

Kelly Clarkson had an interesting introduction for Megan Fox during Thursday’s episode of her eponymous talk show. “She’s brought some of our favorite childhood cartoons to life on the big screen with her roles in Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” she said before welcoming her guest out. Nothing that Clarkson said was wrong, exactly, but it leaves out Fox’s two best performances, Jennifer’s Body and New Girl.

“Wondering why Kelly Clarkson didn’t mention Megan Fox’s 15-episode arc on a Fox sitcom” is not why I’m posting about her appearance, however. It’s because of her Britney Spears impression. The pop star helped Fox conquer her fear of flying. “There was a point where I was working in New York and I also lived in L.A., so every four days I was flying,” which is where the fear came from, she said. “It’s like, yeah, if you fly twice a year you’re good but not if you’re flying like twice a week. So what I did, and what I do recommend to people if you hit turbulence and you’re like, ‘I don’t like how this feels,’ I would throw on certain music that I just knew I wasn’t going to die to, which, for me, that was Britney Spears.” Not just any Britney, but Oops!… I Did It Again-era Britney.

Fox then sung a snippet of “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” (which appeared on the Oops followup, Britney, but they were only a year apart). “That’s not the soundtrack to my death. So, that always made me feel better,” she said. Hearing Fox mimick Spears’ vocals made me feel better, too. You might even say it made me… stronger.

Hear the Britney chat around the 5:00 mark in the video above.

Coldplay just released their new single, “Higher Power.” While that seems to indicate the band has a new album on the way, they haven’t officially announced one yet… although Chris Martin has done everything he can to let fans know that one is more than likely on the way.

Chris Martin and Jonny Buckland spoke to Capital Breakfast With Roman Kemp this morning (as NME notes), and when asked about the possibility of a new album, Martin chose his words carefully. That said, he did everything but directly say the band has a record coming, saying, “We’re not supposed to say, but there won’t not be one.” Buckland added, “We’ve recorded more than one song.”

Elsewhere, Martin spoke with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, and while he didn’t talk about the album that doesn’t officially exist, he did speak about his willingness to experiment musically, saying, “I think that every artist is completely intertwined with what’s happening culturally and what’s happening technologically around them, you know? So when the delay pedal came through, whoever invented that, then you had all these amazing delay pedal records. So we’ve existed in the band concurrently with the barriers between types of music coming down… which for us is the biggest blessing in the world. When we started, it was like, ‘You’re a white indie band and this is urban radio and this is alternative radio and basically old fashioned racist statements.’ Of course we fit in a box at the beginning, and then right now in 2021, everyone’s doing everything. You can like Olivia Rodrigo as much as you like AC/DC and no one thinks that’s weird, and that’s musical utopia for me. […] It’s miraculous. So why would you want to stay in one box?”

Coldplay is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

After spending Wednesday evening reporting his “most f*cking evil lie yet” about the COVID vaccine, which put him in the crosshairs of a significantly large backlash on social media — even for him — Tucker Carlson attempted to blame his own shoddy reporting on Joe Biden. Naturally. In a nutshell, Carlson had reported figures from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is an open-source system where literally anyone can submit a report claiming an adverse reaction. Here’s the important part: these claims are in no way verified as accurate because, again, it’s open source. For example, Raw Story reports that in 2004, one doctor submitted a claim that a flu shot had turned him into the Incredible Hulk.

As many people noted after Carlson’s Wednesday report, he either missed this important piece of information about VAERS in his haste to stoke fear about the COVID vaccine, or worse, he intentionally omitted it. However, when Carlson returned to the air on Thursday, he was downright furious over the backlash he received, and instead of owning up to his mistake, he blamed the Biden Administration for the VAERS numbers, even though the system has been around since 1990s. VAERS is not part of the official statistics on vaccine efficacy because, again, anyone can submit the claim, and you can only guess how that is going in these partisan times.

As The Daily Beast notes, there are several warnings directly on the VAERS page:

“Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information,” one disclaimer reads, while another warns: “The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted or used to reach conclusions about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines.”

Maybe Tucker should try reading next time.

(Via The Daily Beast & Raw Story)