On Jan. 1, 2021, a user with the handle @masonoelle uploaded a video to TikTok. In the video, a compilation of short clips blink by, highlighting the climate crisis (polar ice caps melting, deforestation, major flooding), critiques of the United States Army, and the oversaturation of media in the form of TikTokers like Charli D’Amelio. A somber violin piece soundtracks the 20-second video…
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In a time that continues to be marked by uncertainty and devastation, books can provide solace and, perhaps, some answers to the biggest questions that arise when living through crises. The best books of the year so far pick apart what it means to grieve, how to love after loss, and what it takes to survive the unthinkable. In his celebrated new poetry collection, Ocean Vuong picks up the piece…
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Every year, people from around the world pilgrimage to a leafy Harlem brownstone on E. 126th Street in hopes of conjuring history. It was there in 1958 that 57 jazz icons, from Thelonious Monk to Dizzy Gillespie, gathered to take a now-iconic photo for Esquire Magazine. Forty years later, hip-hop royalty including Rakim, Grandmaster Flash, and A Tribe Called Quest crowded on the same steps for …
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After Miley Cyrus won her first Grammy at Sunday night’s awards ceremony, Luke Combs took the stage to perform his cover of “Fast Car” with a very special guest: Tracy Chapman, who wrote and originally performed the song, in 1988. Chapman, whose appearance at the show had been rumored, started out the performance, and the crowd provided hefty applause. Their performance was a full-circle mo…
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The surprise hero in a superhero movie—to themselves, at least, if not the audience—is usually the main character. A radioactive spider bites a teenager and suddenly he’s climbing up walls and saving the day. A soft-spoken scientist is exposed to gamma radiation and transforms into a super strong green giant. In the new DC movie Blue Beetle, out in theaters on Aug. 18, an ancient…
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It’s the Los Angeles Lakers vs. the Boston Celtics in Season 2 of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. When the HBO docudrama inspired by Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 best-seller Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s returns on Aug. 6, it puts the spotlight on one of the greatest rivalries in professional sports.
While…
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Amid the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the fall movie slate has been in a constant state of flux. The inability of striking actors, in particular, to promote their work (with some exceptions) has stoked studios’ concerns around getting audiences out to theaters. Some movies, like Zendaya starrers Dune: Part Two and Challengers, have been pushed into 2024. Others, like t…
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Lalisa Manobal, known mononymously as Lisa, of the globally renowned K-pop girl group Blackpink, is set to make her acting debut in her home country of Thailand for the third season of The White Lotus, Variety reported.
As part of a partnership between HBO and the Tourism Authority of Thailand, filming for the Emmy-winning drama series will begin this month across the Southeast …
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“If you boil the pact down to one rule, it’s do not say you want to go outside, or you will go outside.”
According to Holston (David Oyelowo), the sheriff of the Silo in Apple TV+’s aptly-named new sci-fi series Silo, that’s the secret to staying alive in the mysterious subterranean city where he and his fellow community members exist: never…
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Elvis Presley may be the King, but in Sofia Coppola’s latest film, Priscilla, it’s Priscilla Presley who gets the royal treatment. The biopic, inspired by Priscilla’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, shows what it was like to be married to one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. “We know so much about Elvis,” Coppola say…
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