Everyone who has ever suffered from addiction and beaten it has almost always had a profound wake-up call. There’s a moment in our lives where we don’t want to struggle with the things that slowly kill us. For Travis Barker, that moment happened after he nearly died in a fatal plane crash in 2008. The incident caused four people to pass away, while the iconic drummer and Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein survived with intense burns.
Admittedly, the plane crash kept him horrified from flying again for 13 years. But his near-death experience did help him realize he “never wanted to touch a drug again.” In an interview with the Associated Press, Travis Barker recalled his intense nerves about flying. Consequently, he found drugs were the only efficient way to calm him down. Additionally, he admitted that being away from his kids also screwed with his nervous system.
“I have no clue where that even comes from except for flying when I was a kid and I was with my mom and I saw her terrified,” Barker told the publication. “I don’t know if that really had an effect on me or what it was. But my drug use started from first being able to get on planes because they scared me so much. Then to not only being afraid of flying, but I had to leave my children for long periods of time to go on tour.”
Travis Barker Candidly Opens up About His Drug Addiction and Fear of Flying
Then, the drug habit became a full-blown addiction. It wasn’t until he had to endure dozens of surgeries and was placed on morphine that he realized he never wanted to be so low again.
“Instead of ever going to rehab or quitting, I got into a plane accident where I nearly lost everything and I was in a burn center for six months on morphine and I had 30 surgeries,” Travis Barker added. “70 percent of my body was burnt and I never wanted to touch a drug again in my life. So, I don’t know if that didn’t happen to me if I would still be using drugs in some way, shape, or form. But that was my wake-up call. That was my rehab.”
The aftermath was particularly difficult for Travis Barker. DJ AM was the only one he felt like he could confide in for a long time. However, once he died from a drug overdose, he vowed to never fly again. It wasn’t until his wife, Kourtney Kardashian, finally convinced the Blink-182 legend to try again. Nowadays, flights and turbulence don’t bother him anymore.
Students returning to a Kentucky middle school this year learned something surprising on their first day of class: They don’t live in Kentucky.
Apparently, they live in “Venecky.”
The bizarre geography lesson appeared in student agendas distributed at Farnsley Middle School, part of Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville. A U.S. map in the planner transformed Kentucky into “Venecky,” Louisiana into “Lookoong,” Alabama into “Alotome,” Illinois into “Vitoiis” and South Carolina into “Sorth Cuanto.”
The mistakes didn’t stop at state lines. The agendas also contained a distorted periodic table, unreadable phases of the moon and other garbled educational material that parents suspect may have been created using artificial intelligence.
JCPS has not confirmed whether AI was used or identified who produced the agendas.
It took a student just one day to notice.
“Mom, did you know that we live in Venecky?” Stacey Morris recalled her son joking after school, according to Louisville’s WDRB.
Morris contacted the school about the errors. Administrators later warned teachers there were a “LOT of mistakes” on pages 19 through 36 and instructed students to tear the pages out of their planners before taking them home.
For parents, however, the problem goes beyond bad geography. Families pay a $10 annual instructional fee for the agendas.
“Someone did not look at what they were handing out to the students,” Morris told WDRB.
The mishap also comes at an awkward moment for Kentucky’s largest school district.
A nearly 500-page special examination released by Kentucky State Auditor Allison Ball in June raised broader concerns about JCPS’s management and finances. The audit found the district lacked a cohesive strategic plan, had begun spending more than it brought in despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in federal COVID relief and suffered from a workplace culture in which employees reported fear of retaliation.
The report also identified gaps in financial and budgeting knowledge among district leaders and school board members.
New Superintendent Brian Yearwood, who took over JCPS last year, has said the district is taking the findings seriously and called the audit an opportunity to strengthen the system.
Against problems of that scale, a $10 student planner is a tiny expense. But for families already questioning how their school district is managed, an educational resource riddled with errors obvious enough for a middle schooler to catch on his first day has become another highly visible example of failed oversight.
Whether artificial intelligence created the mangled pages remains unanswered.
The students, at least, appear to have learned one useful lesson from them: Always check the source — even when the adults hand it to you.
A lot of people don’t realize that tensions between Drake and Kendrick Lamar had been brewing for over a decade. Dating at least back to 2013, the pair have thrown shots at each other. The only reason things didn’t absolutely explode sooner was that Drake made an abundance of other enemies that took priority in the years since. Moreover, Lamar had different aspirations and grander ideas to exercise than bickering with the Toronto MC.
To properly document the years of beef simmering between the two hip-hop giants, we’ve collected four verses where the Compton legend threw shots at his biggest rival.
4 Kendrick Lamar Verses That Proved His Beef With Drake Long Before ‘Not Like Us’
“Control”
The funny thing about Kendrick Lamar’s infamous “Control” verse is that the “diss” in question was extremely tame. All he did was list his many contemporaries, including Drake, and challenge them to be the best rapper in the game. “I got love for you all but I’m tryna murder you n***as/Tryna make sure your core fans never heard of you n***as/They don’t wanna hear not one more noun or verb from you n***as,” Kendrick Lamar spit.
Still, it was enough to get Drake in his feelings and start a long cold war for the next decade.
“All The Stars”
Who knew that you could throw subliminal disses at your enemies in a song for a Disney soundtrack? Kendrick Lamar’s verse on “All The Stars” for the Black Panther soundtrack is largely subliminal in the shots fired. You might even think it’s too broad to apply to any specific person.
But knowing that Kendrick Lamar had constantly questioned Drake’s moral integrity in 2024, the shoe fits on “All The Stars”. He scoffed at ego and entitlement, wanting nothing to do with fake people. “I hate people that feel entitled/Look at me crazy ’cause I didn’t invite you/Oh, you important? You the moral to the story? You endorsin’?/Mothaf***a, I don’t even like you,” he rapped.
2013 BET Hip-Hop Awards Cypher With TDE
In the immediate aftermath of the “Control” verse, Drake threw some scattered shots and complained a little bit during interviews. Lamar largely scoffed at his reactions during the 2013 Hip-Hop Awards, dropping a sly reference to Drake and telling him to toughen up.
“Yeah, and nothing been the same since they dropped ‘Control’/And tucked a sensitive rapper back in his pajama clothes,” Kendrick quipped.
“King Kunta”
Ever since he battled ghostwriting allegations from Meek Mill in 2015, Drake’s legitimacy as a rapper started to come into question. Skeptics turned to full-blown haters, and pre-existing haters only had more fuel to argue Drake wasn’t that great.
Kendrick Lamar also indulged on “King Kunta”, wondering what happened to hip-hop for ghostwriting to be acceptable. Moreover, he even teased that he quietly knew about the allegations long before we did. “I swore I wouldn’t tell, but most of y’all sharing bars/Like you got the bottom bunk in a two-man cell,” Lamar rapped.
(Photo by Michael Buckner/Billboard via Getty Images)
Legendary Four Seasons singer Frankie Valli is retiring, or so we thought. Earlier this week, Frankie’s brother Bobby posted what appeared to be a retirement announcement on Facebook. “He has millions of fans who love him dearly. He is now 92 years old. In his illustrious career, he has sold over 100 million records, R&R Hall of Fame. He will now retire. We will always have special memories of Frankie Valli. He has reached a place in his life where his family is there to love, cherish, and be there for him.”
Frankie Valli followed up with his own post on Instagram. “In spite of what you might have heard, I am not retired. – Frankie.” The iconic singer was quick to shut down any sort of retirement announcement.
Due to this, Frankie’s brother Bobby amended his original message. He replaced “he will not retire” with “In my humble opinion, there is a possibility he will stop touring.” Again, Bobby updated the message once more, replacing that line with “We are all hoping for a speedy recovery and that he can continue to tour and perform.”
In May, Frankie Valli Canceled His Remaining 2026 Performances
On August 14, Bobby Valli posted an apology. “I apologize; I was misinformed. I was under the impression my brother Frankie was retiring.” The next day, Bobby added, “If I misled or offended anyone, once again I apologize.”
In May, Frankie Valli announced he would be cancelling the remainder of his 2026 concerts. His representative confirmed, “He realized he needed to take a break and get his health in order.” Ultimately, she emphasized that the singer is expecting to perform in 2027.
Frankie’s brother continues to wish the “Sherry” singer a speedy recovery. As Valli’s health issues haven’t been publicly disclosed, it is still unclear what this entails. He has noticeably struggled to perform for years, leading many fans to be concerned for his well-being. I have to admit, his relentlessness is admirable, to say the least.
Valli’s 75-year career dates back to the early 1960s. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons penned 29 top-40 hits, with six No. 1 hits. As a solo artist, Valli earned two No. 1 hits in the 1970s, “My Eyes Adored You” and “Grease”. Additionally, his origin story with the Four Seasons has been adapted into a Broadway musical titled Jersey Boys. This resulted in a 2014 film of the same name, directed by Clint Eastwood.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has enough on his plate managing American foreign policy. Apparently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s sauerkraut won’t be joining it.
Rubio and his wife, Jeanette, offered a surprisingly candid glimpse into life inside the Trump administration during an appearance on “The Katie Miller Podcast,” covering everything from Cabinet members’ diets and pets to Pop-Tarts, UFOs and Rubio’s disastrous attempt at going keto.
Katie Miller is the wife of Deputy Chief of Staff and long-time Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller. Her podcast has become a behind-the-scenes look into Trump’s Cabinet members.
Asked whether he had embraced Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, Rubio said he supported it.
His wife immediately disagreed.
“He’s completely not,” Jeanette Rubio said, revealing her husband’s fondness for Pop-Tarts.
“The Pop-Tart is one of the great American innovations in history,” Rubio responded.
Rubio also singled out Kennedy’s commitment to a meat-and-sauerkraut-heavy diet, saying the health secretary travels with his own food.
“I’m not gonna travel the world with a cooler full of sauerkraut,” Rubio said.
Rubio has tried changing his eating habits. It apparently didn’t go well. He described attempting the keto diet as a “near-psychotic event” brought on by sugar withdrawal, joking that giving someone in his position that much irritability could have geopolitical consequences.
Then there is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth‘s cat.
The Hegseths and Rubios are neighbors, Rubio revealed, and Hegseth’s cat routinely visits the secretary of state’s porch. Rubio, who prefers dogs, described the animal as “arrogant.”
The cross-Cabinet pet diplomacy apparently goes both ways: The Rubios’ goldendoodle has wandered into the Hegseth home.
Rubio’s unusually loose interview ranged well beyond his colleagues. He professed a fondness for Tupac Shakur and electronic dance music, discussed UFO sightings around U.S. military installations and admitted his ideal fall Saturday involves spending hours watching college football.
He also recalled spending roughly 90 minutes aboard Air Force One worried that another passenger sleeping on a couch might actually be dead. Rather than wake the person, Rubio said he kept watching for signs of breathing until the passenger finally stirred.
The interview offered an unusually personal look at an official better known for managing an increasingly complicated portfolio of international crises and national security issues.
It also established at least one clear boundary in American diplomacy: Rubio may travel the world on behalf of the president, but he won’t be doing it with a cooler full of fermented cabbage.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on August 18, 2026
Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.
He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days. Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.
Last month, Nathan Cofnas—a former Cambridge researcher who may politely be described as a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ, and who may impolitely be described as a professional racist—published in his newsletter what appeared to be significant evidence of Arday’s plagiarism. This month, as it became apparent that much of the Arday legend was most likely just that, the academic became an object of international obsession, especially in British media and on X. He resigned from Cambridge last week, though this did not stem the flood of attention.
The online hive mind, in particular, was brutal until the moment of Arday’s death, at which point the collective swarm did an about-face. The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness. I find the whole pageantry grotesque.
What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.
Here is the truth about Jason Arday: A preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist who successfully conned a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo. (Arday denied intentional misconduct and suggested that his apparent plagiarism was a result of his autism, which he said meant that he tended to learn through imitation.) As evidence of those seeming lies mounted, the powerful institutions that had made him continued to back him, doubling down and raising the stakes. Simon & Schuster stood by its author—or perhaps more accurately, stood by its product. Even as the evidence of fraud became all but undeniable, the publisher did not merely declare that it would press forward with Arday’s book; it had the audacity to tout “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”
Then those on the racist right—frothing with glee that they took no trouble to conceal—pressed their advantage, punch-drunk on the double intoxicant of incandescent liberal hypocrisy and a Black man’s failure. The mob swelled, online and in the media. Some people joined out of perfectly legitimate indignation at the apparent obliteration of academic standards that the ordeal attested to. Some joined out of ghoulish pleasure at seeing a beneficiary of DEI, as they cast him, cut down to size.
Everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress. Amusement because of the undeniable comic absurdity to the revelation that the best and brightest minds at Cambridge had been so easily deceived by a man who claimed to have run nine marathons in about as many days on a fractured fibula, and who maintained that his future had been predicted by a Brazilian shaman. Distress because I could relate to some of the things that Arday might have experienced.
I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further. I have always found such encounters stomach-churning. But I can also imagine—if you came up hard and are unaccustomed to kindness—how good it might feel, and how tempting it might be, to do and say things that make people give you that look again and again, whether or not the things you’re saying are strictly true.
Two images have rattled around in my head since the news of Arday’s death. The first is from a 2023 BBC clip celebrating his hiring at Cambridge. Cremin, Arday’s Cambridge colleague, clasps both of his hands in the manner of a cherished loved one as they stare into each other’s eyes. The camera zooms in on their white and Black hands interlocked and lingers there. The second image was posted on X last night: a screenshot of a list of article headlines about the Arday scandal, stretching to several pages, published by one British outlet alone. It represents but a few watts of the international spotlight that had been trained on the academic.
I have been dwelling on these two images—the theatrical interracial handclasp; the pages and pages of monomaniacal media coverage of what was ultimately a niche academic scandal—because together they speak to a terrible reality. Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.
The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.
To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.
Around the same time yesterday afternoon that I learned of Arday’s fate, I came across another piece of news: an announcement that Ross Barkan, a white novelist and journalist, had just been dropped by New York magazine after the publication—having investigated allegations regarding dozens of instances of plagiarism in Barkan’s writing—concluded that his work “did not live up to our editorial standards.” Swiftly afterward, Barkan announced that he would now focus on writing a new column at The Nation, another venerable outlet. (After the publication of this article, The Nation told me that Barkan had been “in conversations with his editor about a possible column but nothing had been formalized” and that he was “not under contract” with them.)
It is impossible to know what is in someone’s head or heart in their final moments. I have to imagine, though, that Arday understood well enough the world he had entered and how its rules tend to work: When you are Black, some people will open the door for you far wider than they should. And when that door abruptly comes swinging shut, you will be offered no second chances.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on August 18, 2026
Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.
He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days. Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.
Last month, Nathan Cofnas—a former Cambridge researcher who may politely be described as a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ, and who may impolitely be described as a professional racist—published in his newsletter what appeared to be significant evidence of Arday’s plagiarism. This month, as it became apparent that much of the Arday legend was most likely just that, the academic became an object of international obsession, especially in British media and on X. He resigned from Cambridge last week, though this did not stem the flood of attention.
The online hive mind, in particular, was brutal until the moment of Arday’s death, at which point the collective swarm did an about-face. The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness. I find the whole pageantry grotesque.
What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.
Here is the truth about Jason Arday: A preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist who successfully conned a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo. (Arday denied intentional misconduct and suggested that his apparent plagiarism was a result of his autism, which he said meant that he tended to learn through imitation.) As evidence of those seeming lies mounted, the powerful institutions that had made him continued to back him, doubling down and raising the stakes. Simon & Schuster stood by its author—or perhaps more accurately, stood by its product. Even as the evidence of fraud became all but undeniable, the publisher did not merely declare that it would press forward with Arday’s book; it had the audacity to tout “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”
Then those on the racist right—frothing with glee that they took no trouble to conceal—pressed their advantage, punch-drunk on the double intoxicant of incandescent liberal hypocrisy and a Black man’s failure. The mob swelled, online and in the media. Some people joined out of perfectly legitimate indignation at the apparent obliteration of academic standards that the ordeal attested to. Some joined out of ghoulish pleasure at seeing a beneficiary of DEI, as they cast him, cut down to size.
Everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress. Amusement because of the undeniable comic absurdity to the revelation that the best and brightest minds at Cambridge had been so easily deceived by a man who claimed to have run nine marathons in about as many days on a fractured fibula, and who maintained that his future had been predicted by a Brazilian shaman. Distress because I could relate to some of the things that Arday might have experienced.
I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further. I have always found such encounters stomach-churning. But I can also imagine—if you came up hard and are unaccustomed to kindness—how good it might feel, and how tempting it might be, to do and say things that make people give you that look again and again, whether or not the things you’re saying are strictly true.
Two images have rattled around in my head since the news of Arday’s death. The first is from a 2023 BBC clip celebrating his hiring at Cambridge. Cremin, Arday’s Cambridge colleague, clasps both of his hands in the manner of a cherished loved one as they stare into each other’s eyes. The camera zooms in on their white and Black hands interlocked and lingers there. The second image was posted on X last night: a screenshot of a list of article headlines about the Arday scandal, stretching to several pages, published by one British outlet alone. It represents but a few watts of the international spotlight that had been trained on the academic.
I have been dwelling on these two images—the theatrical interracial handclasp; the pages and pages of monomaniacal media coverage of what was ultimately a niche academic scandal—because together they speak to a terrible reality. Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.
The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.
To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.
Around the same time yesterday afternoon that I learned of Arday’s fate, I came across another piece of news: an announcement that Ross Barkan, a white novelist and journalist, had just been dropped by New York magazine after the publication—having investigated allegations regarding dozens of instances of plagiarism in Barkan’s writing—concluded that his work “did not live up to our editorial standards.” Swiftly afterward, Barkan announced that he would now focus on writing a new column at The Nation, another venerable outlet. (After the publication of this article, The Nation told me that Barkan had been “in conversations with his editor about a possible column but nothing had been formalized” and that he was “not under contract” with them.)
It is impossible to know what is in someone’s head or heart in their final moments. I have to imagine, though, that Arday understood well enough the world he had entered and how its rules tend to work: When you are Black, some people will open the door for you far wider than they should. And when that door abruptly comes swinging shut, you will be offered no second chances.
They’re far more powerful and fun than their bargain price suggests. | Photo: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge
When I'm asked what to buy if you want to get into making electronic music, I often recommend Elektron's budget-minded Model:Samples and Model:Cycles grooveboxes. They don't grab headlines the way Teenage Engineering's gear or the Telepathic Instruments Orchid do, and even compared to the company's higher-end and more niche musical offerings like the Digitakt, Octatrack, or Tonverk, they're often overlooked. But as my collection has grown to include fancier and far more expensive instruments, I still find myself coming back to the Model series.
Those looking to get their first groovebox are often drawn to more familiar brand names like Korg …
This probably won’t get the attention or, frankly, outrage that it deserves because it’s kind of technical. But it’s stunning and a ‘Caligula making his horse a senator’ kind of craziness, as revealed in a new report from The Washington Post.
The US is in the process of transitioning from the Nimitz class to Ford class aircraft carriers. The USS Ford is already in service. I think one other Ford class ship is in the testing phase. (For clarity, the class of ship takes its name from the first shape in production. So there’s a USS Ford and then a Ford ‘class’ of ships which follow the same design.) The tower on the Ford class ships is swept toward the back of the ship. That has some safety advantages but it also creates a much longer launch and storage area. President Trump has decided that he prefers the look of the World War II era battleships where the tower is in the middle of the ship. And he is pushing the Navy (and considering ordering the Navy) to move the tower forward on the Ford class ships. This comes after Trump just a few days ago ordered the Navy to go back to steam-powered catapults (the thing that hurls the planes forward off the ship for takeoff) from the new electromagnetic catapults. He apparently wants to do this because he once talked to a catapult operator who told him the old kind was better.
TL;DR: Elevate your AI prompts to pro level, no complicated engineering required, with a lifetime subscription to Prompting Systems for $29.99, a 91% price cut from the $360 regular price.
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Will Saletan gives his take on how Republicans accused of serious misconduct have learned to survive scandal. All they have do is follow Donald Trump’s example: never resign, deny everything, attack the accusers, call the investigation “political,” and invoke Trump’s own history as proof that they can stay in the fight. From Duncan Hunter and Matt Gaetz to George Santos, Cory Mills and Max Miller, Will walks through how Trump has become the model for Republican politicians facing allegations, investigations and convictions — with endorsements, pardons and political support often waiting on the other side.
In my previous post, I discussed target curves and gave examples of curves you might want to consider when implementing DSP correction in your sound room.While the use of full-range target curves is not uncommon, as discussed, there are those who advocate against doing so and would insist that only partial corrections in the bass frequencies up to the Modal+Transition Zones should be applied
Artists only respond to critics when there is immense backlash to whatever they made. Mainstream acts, especially, never respond to a particularly thoughtful, favorable review. Instead, they’re merely in the business of amplifying the haters and making it look like it’s them against the world. In the case of Tyga, he released a record that the large majority of people are hating on. Even Doja Cat called him a “penis” for using AI on $TARFACE.
Naturally, Tyga’s first instinct was to deflect from all criticism. Talking to TMZ, he shrugged that he’s never even heard of the popular publication Pitchfork to care about their review. “I don’t know what Pitchfork is. All I know is the devil uses a pitchfork. Unfortunately, Gen Z can’t read,” he said.
Then, Tyga doubled down on how exactly he utilized AI in the making of $TARFACE, emphasizing its use as a tool. “I used AI-assisted things in the production. All the vocals are me. I wrote all the songs. When it comes to the 80s synths and the guitar solos, yes, I used AI for that. But I didn’t make a full AI album. I was in the studio for 3 months working on this,” he explained.
Tyga Claps Back at All The Hate Over His AI-Aided Album
In regard to Doja Cat, the Compton-bred rapper chuckled and pointed the finger back at her. “Listen, I love Doja, but she made a demonic album. But I still love her,” he laughed.
Pitchfork was especially cold towards $TARFACE, zeroing in on how, regardless of AI, Tyga is creatively bankrupt on the album. They rated it a devastating 0.0 out of 10, their first 0.0 in almost 20 years.
“But influence is a form of personal expression,” journalist Drew Millard wrote. “And it often elicits a feeling of connection in the listener, whether the reference is identifiable or subliminal. Not so with $TARFACE, an album that confuses loving music with prompt engineering.”
Tyga isn’t the only West Coast rapper intent on tinkering with AI. Fenix Flexin finally opened up about using Treblo for his song “RUBBERZ” after months of denying it. “Never said I didn’t use AI, I said it had nun to do with the recording process,” he replied to a fan on Instagram. “I didn’t even know what da app was till we mixed it and erybody started commenting. Ain’t nothing wrong with using new technology as a tool, keep up with the times or get left behind.”
The South has ruled hip-hop with an iron fist over the last 20+ years. When considering the genre and how it’s risen in pop culture, places like Atlanta were instrumental in the process. Starting with Geto Boys and 2 Live Crew, then Outkast, UGK, and others, the region carved out a space of its own amidst the infamous East Coast vs. West Coast beef. In a way, there was a harmony among Southern rappers that almost acted as an example for how hip-hop could be without all the turmoil.
Naturally, even with the South’s prominence, there’s still an abundance of underrated greats over the years. Consequently, in the spirit of celebrating the region’s contributions to hip-hop, we’ve selected five southern rappers who are criminally slept on.
5 Southern Rappers You Should Be Showing a Lot More Love
Young Dro
Young Dro should get a lot more credit for how innovative he was as a rapper. Few artists in any region were as imaginative with how he would describe colors or alter typical punchlines. Take “Rubberband Banks”, where he raps, “Mathematically with a pistol, I do trigonometry“.
Or on the same song, he’ll say his diamonds are the color of passionfruit, while his Chevy Suburban is the complexion of a Snapple. Instead of saying he has alligator-skinned shoes, he calls his feet “amphibian.” Young Dro is quietly one of hip-hop’s most skilled writers because of his knack for distinct details.
Trick Daddy
You can’t tell the story of hip-hop in Florida without Trick Daddy. Artists like Kodak Black take after his unabashedly country twang, distinct lingo, and trademark sense of humor.
“I’m A Thug” distills his entire essence, confronting bigots who judge him on the gold slugs shining out of his mouth or the baggy jeans that make him stand out. Then, in the second verse, he mischievously grins that his name alone could break up happy, healthy relationships. Although 2 Live Crew opened the doors for Florida to enter hip-hop, Trick Daddy was the image young rappers could look to emulate.
Phonte
Phonte is an all-time great everyman in hip-hop. He identifies with the common man and their social plight all while hilariously satirizing the state of art and culture in the same breath. This applies to his solo rapping and his Little Brother work as much as it does for his work in Foreign Exchange. There, he croons about relationships and sleeping on the couch after an argument with his woman.
Long before Drake became the all-encompassing superstar we know him as today, he was just trying to emulate Phonte first. Compare and contrast Drake’s first mixtapes next to Little Brother and Phonte’s singing, and you hear virtually the same artist.
Slim Thug
If you’ve heard a Houston rapper, you’ve heard almost all of them. They really capture the essence of hip-hop, staying true to the art of freestyling all while musing about riding slabs and sipping lean. But Slim Thug threw a slight curveball into the tried-and-true formula early in his career by taking his titanic voice and dominating a vast array of different beats.
For instance, Pharrell and Chad Hugo laced him with these booming beats that would devour any other rapper. But in Slim Thug’s hands, he would steamroll over them, flashing his diamond-encrusted grill in the process.
Curren$y
Few rappers are as effortlessly cool as Curren$y. But he’s not the kind of artist with preposterous boasts either. Instead, he lounges in his luxury, rolling up spliffs and making runs to the corner store in his vintage rides. Spitta Andretti has a million and one ways to describe driving his insane car collection.
For instance, on “Showroom”, he gives us a play-by-play breakdown of how the spoiler gets deployed from the trunk once he drives 70 MPH. The only reason we know this is that he bragged about studiously reading the handbook in his console. Hearing other people talk about it might sound a little sweaty and nerdy. But Curren$y’s chill demeanor makes it extremely addicting.
In the dog days of summer, there’s no better place to escape the heat than inside the air-conditioned paradise of a movie theater. Perhaps you’ll even find yourself there with a romantic companion, their uncovered leg grazing against yours as you both tuck your feet in to make room for the annoying person who came in late and is now trying to find their seat in the dark. Your skin touches theirs, trading the dewy moisture of perspiration. How electric; erotic, even. For just a second, the spark between you two is so powerful that it melts away every care outside of that place and time.
And then, your film — a romantic comedy or dramedy that seems like the perfect date movie — begins, and you’re quickly reminded that no amount of desire can remove you from the context of the world you exist in. The fantasy comes crashing down. Even the fluffy rom-coms are steeped in real life’s anxieties about the social and political, the wars and the wages. But the passion was there; it was real. Maybe the moment was even more charged by the knowledge, somewhere in the back of your head, that these unexpected, carnal joys arrive far less often when so much of our time is spent just trying to make it from one day to the next. Sex, even just the lingering thought of it, can feel like an extravagance. I’d wager that’s a big part of why this summer’s theatrical slate has been so overtly horny: Everyone is trying to figure out how sex fits into this strange modern life.
(Nicole Rivelli /Universal Pictures) Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in “One Night Only”
“One Night Only” encourages a compelling and multilayered dialogue about the role of sex and intimacy amid terrifying political fury. How can we find the joy in all of this? Is, say, one hour of fleeting sexual pleasure enough to combat the 14-some others that we spend in waking dread? The solutions won’t, ahem, come easily.
No film makes that more clear than Will Gluck’s new romantic comedy, “One Night Only,” where, brace yourself here, premarital sex has been outlawed except for one outrageous annual holiday. Think “The Purge,” but for sex — “The Urge” was right there, but whatever — and just as dystopian, though with quite a bit more charm and fewer dead bodies. In the movie, unlucky-in-love strangers Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (Monica Barbaro) find their paths repeatedly crossing during the 12-hour sex purge window, as both of them seek partners to get it on with. We know the pair will inevitably end up together. But it’s their journey and all the bizarre autocratic municipal rules they have to dance around that make “One Night Only” a clever, peculiar and head-scratching standout from the rom-com crowd.
“One Night Only” also happens to be the discourse darling du jour, with some suggesting that its unusual fusion of genre tropes and political overtones is an insidious embrace of our backslide toward fascism. Indeed, Owen and Allie quibble less about living under a punitive abstinence edict than one might expect, and the film doesn’t have nearly as much fun with, or fury for, the civic regime as it should.
But like this summer’s “The Invite” and “I Want Your Sex,” Gluck’s film encourages a compelling and multilayered dialogue about the role of sex and intimacy amid terrifying political fury. How can we find the joy in all of this? Is, say, one hour of fleeting sexual pleasure enough to combat the 14-some others that we spend in waking dread? The solutions won’t, ahem, come easily, but there’s really no more appropriate time to ask these questions and search for their answers than summer, when the heat makes us alternate between f*cking furiously and f*cking furious.
Curiously, “One Night Only” is more of the former than the latter. As the film’s title card tells viewers, the movie takes place three years into “the mandate,” as the characters refer to it. “It’s been . . . a lot,” the card continues. Opaque and jokey as it is, this is the only bit of tangible backstory the film provides about the average American’s response to the forbiddance of fornication. Though a few ideological asides do provide some additional color as the night goes on. Owen’s mother (Molly Ringwald) and her partner (LeVar Burton) get into a spat about the mandate’s legislation — “That’s what happens with single-issue voters!”; “No one voted for it, it was passed by Congress!” — that soon turns hot and heavy.
It’s a silly but reasonably shrewd way to depict how many of us have landed at some level of complacency in a political atmosphere where, most of the time, we have little direct control and negligible impact over the laws that dictate our lives, no matter how oppressive. We bicker about them, but the majority of Americans aren’t in the streets protesting. As neo-fascist as the country’s become, we still live under capitalism, and the ability to regularly protest is somewhat a luxury. But, then again, so is living in America at all (at least to some extent), even when it’s awful.
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I realize I’m probably giving Gluck and screenwriter Travis Braun too much credit when I say these are the kinds of questions they wanted viewers to ask. But I find “One Night Only” to be a far more interesting film because it doesn’t answer everything up front or take the blanket optimist’s route. These characters know that the mandate is awful, but they’ve found screwed-up ways to live with it. Anyone who says that doesn’t reflect the modern American way has their head in the sand. And frankly, a film as pleasant but ephemeral as this isn’t going to push democracy any further into the dark.
What “One Night Only” makes so apparent is that our personal pleasure is at stake in this environment. Constant federal surveillance and deeply rooted institutional corruption are simply not sexy, even if being cognizant and fearful of them absolutely is. (Caring is still hot!) And I’ve always said that there is no better place to work out thorny, complex ideas — the kind that are sometimes difficult to devote time and energy to amid the stress of our day-to-day lives — than at the movies.
Gluck’s film arrives on the heels of a pair of sweltering summer peers that already laid quite a bit of thematic groundwork in the sex space for audiences to traverse. The stickiest of them all, Olivia Wilde’s terrific chamber dramedy, “The Invite,” just landed on VOD after steadily working its way up from limited to wide theatrical engagements — sort of like cinematic release-schedule foreplay. The film navigates ideas large and small, moving between the casual intimacies, or lack thereof, that make up long-term relationships, and the baseline human carnality that points us toward sex even when those relationships aren’t working.
(A24) Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton in “The Invite”
That’s the glorious thing about going to the cinema: You’re bound to leave any movie with both questions and answers. Occasionally, one such question might be, “Does this movie covertly support fascism by making totalitarian sex mandates cute and manageable?”
Put simply: It’s more difficult to maintain the true intimacy than it’s ever been. The prevalence of dating apps and our ability to follow someone else’s every move on social media have zapped the honeymoon period’s lifespan. Throw in demanding jobs, expensive rugs, rapidly changing social mores, the desire to start or maintain a healthy relationship with your neighbors, and the nagging feeling that everyone in the world is having sex but you, and life gets overwhelming fast. Sex shuffles to the back burner. But though the flame might be small, it remains lit. And “The Invite” attests that it’s never too late to dial up the heat, so long as we’re honest about what we want and what we need from our partners.
“The Invite” is all about communication and open conversation. And that’s a critical strength in both relationships and in the ways we watch and digest art. That this summer has been replete with dialogues not only about our sexual neuroses and compulsions, but real, steadfast love in all its forms, is a sure sign that love and sex are on our minds more than they have been in a few decades. Much like the influx of grief-laden horror movies that followed the 2016 election, one can trace our preoccupation with intimacy back to political rot. Our government directs so much of our lives that it’s impossible to remove its influence completely. Now, we’ve moved past grieving the lost hope and have the chance to create our own using the spark of romance and physical connection.
(Magnolia Pictures) Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman in “I Want Your Sex”
As Gregg Araki’s playful comedy “I Want Your Sex” asserts, crafting the transient delights of the flesh into something stable and meaningful will take some trial and error, perhaps even some sacrifice. We’re living in a moment where people can easily choose to void sex from their lives or pursue it as a ritualistic part of their existence, and the space in the middle is murky and treacherous. If you have questions about sex and where it fits into your life, Araki’s ardent message is to explore them. The answers may come with regret or heartbreak, but they may also come with glorious satisfaction and unbelievable revelations. More often, the resulting discoveries will sit somewhere in between those two emotional polarities. We can’t live our lives to the extreme all the time, but we can do ourselves a favor and become better acquainted with exactly what we want and how to get it.
That’s the glorious thing about going to the cinema: You’re bound to leave any movie with both questions and answers. Occasionally, one such question might be, “Does this movie covertly support fascism by making totalitarian sex mandates cute and manageable?” And those are queries that must be addressed because, whether we like it or not, even dystopian rom-coms might point us in the right — or even new — direction. The federal government certainly isn’t trying to orient us toward a brighter, more consistently pleasurable future. Why not take matters into our own hands? Or better yet, put those hands on someone we love and care for, even if only for a night.
The Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4 key art has reportedly been leaked online. Although many players initially believed the artwork was fake, prominent dataminer HYPEX now says it is likely legitimate. If accurate, the leak reveals every major Fortnite Override collab, including KingdomHearts, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Sonic, and more.
Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4 Collabs Reportedly Leaked
Screenshot: Epic Games, Square Enix
A leaked image of the Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4 key art recently surfaced on social media and reportedly reveals all upcoming Fortnite Override collabs. The artwork features numerous gaming legends, including Crash Bandicoot, Pac-Man, Spyro the Dragon and Megaman.
While the leaked key art initially had many players divided over whether it was real, prominent dataminer HYPEX says it is likely legitimate after an official Fortnite Sonic comic book also surfaced early online. The character’s design in the comics appears to match his appearance in the leaked Override image.
Here is the full list of Fortnite Override collabs coming to Chapter 7 Season 4 according to the leaked key art:
All Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4 Collabs
Sonic, Shadow, Eggman, and Tails
Kingdom Hearts (Sora and a Keyblade)
Mega Man
Pac-Man
Persona 5 (Joker)
Beyond Good & Evil (Jade)
Spyro the Dragon
Crash Bandicoot
99 Nights in the Forest (Roblox)
Tetris
Screamer (Hiroshi Jackson)
Street Fighte
The Witcher
Tomb Raider
Halo
Honkai: Star Rail
Leaked Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4 Key Art Is Reportedly Unfinished
Screenshot: Epic Games
One reason some players initially believed the leaked Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4 key art was fake is that parts of the artwork appeared unfinished. For example, Pac-Man was missing his eyes. However, it now appears that the image is a WIP, or work-in-progress, version of the season’s key art. It is still unclear how an unfinished image like this could have leaked online in the first place.
Even so, the artwork being incomplete is a bit strange, given that Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4 launches in just five days on August 20. Epic Games is also releasing the first official Fortnite Override trailer on August 16, which will likely feature the completed season key art and confirm the upcoming gaming legends crossovers.
Regardless, HYPEX believes the leaked Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4 key art is likely real due to the newly discovered Sonic comicbook. Still, players should take the full collab lineup with a major grain of salt until Epic Games officially confirms which characters are coming to the new Fortnite Override season launching later this week.
Leaving behind a bandmate after 30 years is much harder than it seems. After countless rumors and an announcement, Slipknot is sending mixed messages on whether Sid Wilson is staying in the fold. The band briefly announced on social media that they were officially parting ways with Wilson. But before you could even read them wishing him the best in his future endeavors, the post was gone.
Then, an hour later, the same announcement resurfaces on Slipknot’s music festival Knotfest account. But why share the announcement there and not on their main social media account as they did before? Currently, there’s no word on why they deleted it in the first place, if the departure still holds true, or if this is just some odd publicity stunt.
This comes on the heels of bandmate Jim Root teasing that we shouldn’t believe all the rumors on the internet. Instead, he suggested that we should wait for Slipknot to formally address all the buzz around Sid Wilson. I wonder what he’ll say after the confusing social media debacle.
“Don’t believe everything you read. Stop. Think. Take a breath. Sit with it for awhile. Maybe. Just maybe even wait until there’s more information,” Root stressed to fans.
Slipknot Officially Breaks up With Sid Wilson After 30 Years… Or Not?
Allegedly, bad behavior is what caused the band to finally break things off with one of their original members. Reports suggest that Wilson was notorious for mistreating other bandmates and that the decision to fire him had been in the making for quite some time. Moreover, the band hadn’t planned on making the decision public so soon. However, once the information leaked and the rumors really started swirling, Slipknot had no choice anymore.
Perhaps what makes this most confusing of all is that Sid Wilson is yet to formally address the big split. In fact, he is still going around introducing himself as a part of the band. Making an appearance at the inaugural World Scratch Invitational, he was still identifying as “no. 0” from the band.
Wilson was one of Slipknot’s earliest members, serving as their DJ since 1998. He joined the group three years after percussionist Shawn Crahan, bassist Paul Gray, and original vocalist Anders Colsefni founded the group. Now, Crahan is the only one left from the first iteration of Slipknot, as countless band members have cycled in and out of the group over the years.
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