If the Golden Globes airs on a weeknight and no one watches it, does it still matter? That was the question posed when the Oscars’ boozy cousin returned to television on Tuesday evening after a one-year absence. The awards show, a cash cow for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — …
Read More »
Among the many compliments I can give HBO’s The Last of Us is that it eventually made me forget that it’s based on a video game. This isn’t a knock on video games, but on the very different, conflicting natures of gaming versus watching film or television. One is interactive, …
Read More »
On his YouTube channel Channel 5 and in his recent HBO Max documentary This Place Rules, 25-year-old Andrew Callaghan has amassed millions of fans as a goofy, deadpan interlocutor, highlighting the absurdities of modern culture. His straight-faced interviews with fringe members of contemporary society — prepubescent MAGA heads, QAnon influencers, …
Read More »
This month marks the twentieth year of the longest-running police reform effort in the United States. The Oakland Police Department was placed under federal court oversight in 2003 following revelations that a squad of officers had spent the summer of 2000 running rampant in a predominantly Black part of the …
Read More »
Y OU NEVER FORGET your first murderer, they say — though few cops recall the killers they caught as charitably as Vargas does. At the wheel of his seven-seat Escalade — a car that drives like an opium dream and is fancied equally by narco bosses and the retired federal …
Read More »
Kevin McCarthy’s as-yet fruitless bid to become the GOP Speaker of the House is a once-in-a-century shitshow. The last time the House failed to select a Speaker on a single ballot was back in 1923. McCarthy’s humiliation is historic, but it’s not out of keeping with a Republican party whose …
Read More »
The Stud was packed wall-to-wall with shirtless men, but JP and their friends were in their own dimension. The traveling party Horse Meat Disco had commandeered the San Francisco bar, filling it with pounding dance music and the carnal stench of amyl nitrate poppers, but for three and a half …
Read More »
W hen Andrew Breshears arrived at the Agapé Boarding School in 2018, he was a sandy-haired 12-year-old who weighed less than 100 pounds. He enjoyed watching movies, listening to Elvis, and playing soccer with his friends. “I was sheltered,” Breshears says. But he struggled at home. When he was told …
Read More »
Nearly two decades after a judge abruptly cleared pop diva Gloria Trevi of charges she lured minors into a secret sex ring in Mexico, the singer is facing a new civil lawsuit in Los Angeles that revives claims she procured underage girls for her ex-producer Sergio Andrade. The new complaint, …
Read More »
Nothing good starts in a Facebook group. The Ward, a reading group founded by Tennessee-based author Susan Meachen, largely went dormant after a September 2020 post — supposedly written by her daughter — was shared from her page announcing that she had died by suicide following bullying and harassment from …
Read More »