Three years after Grammy-winning rapper, visionary entrepreneur and hometown hero Nipsey Hussle was gunned down in a stunning public slaying outside his South Los Angeles clothing store, his admitted killer was convicted of first-degree murder on Wednesday. A jury of nine women and three men decided Eric Ronald Holder Jr. …
Read More »How Noah Cyrus Saved Herself
F ar West Farms, a bucolic, family-run riding center perched off a chalky street in Calabasas, California, takes some effort to find. If you’re in a car, you wind your way down Ventura Boulevard and around anonymous office buildings, past the flower-strewn pet cemetery where Humphrey Bogart buried his cocker …
Read More »Was the 4th of July Shooting Politically Motivated?
“The Awake I always knew was politically completely indifferent.” Bennett Brizes refers to Robert E. Crimo III by his rapper name when discussing his longtime online friend. Crimo was arrested on Monday in connection with the Fourth of July parade shooting that killed seven people and injured 30 others in …
Read More »'There's No Crying in Baseball!': 'A League of Their Own' Turns 30
When A League of Their Own hit theaters on July 1, 1992, it was up against a crowded slate of blockbusters, including Batman Returns, Lethal Weapon 3, Patriot Games, and Universal Soldier, that were expected to linger around multiplexes all summer. But when Labor Day rolled around two months later, …
Read More »Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' Law Took Effect. Chaos Ensued
The trouble in Orange County Public Schools began, perhaps unsurprisingly, at a seminar called “Camp Legal.” The meeting’s stated purpose was for the district’s attorneys to walk school administrators through changes to law, a part of their annual training. But Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, better known as the …
Read More »Roe v. Wade Is Officially Dead
Roe v. Wade is dead. The Supreme Court on Friday ruled 6-3 that states can restrict or outright ban abortion at any point during a pregnancy, overturning the landmark 1973 decision that enshrined abortion protections in federal law, along with a subsequent decision that affirmed those protections in 1991. “Roe …
Read More »'The Black Phone': Who Wants a Lazy Serial-Killer Thriller?
What serial killer worth his weight in dismembered corpses would be happy with a moniker as uncreative and flatly descriptive as “the Grabber?” That’s the name either a lazy detective or a reporter on deadline has bestowed upon the 1970s child-murdering villain Ethan Hawke plays in The Black Phone, a …
Read More »Gay Couple Struggles to Stay Together as War in Ukraine Rages On
Russian bombs brought Stepan and Maxim together. Now Russian bombs have driven them apart. The men, now both in their early thirties, were living almost 20 miles apart in the eastern Ukrainian region called the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists went to war in 2014. They likely would not have met …
Read More »A Lotta Love to Give: The Brilliant Voice and Too-Short Life of Nicolette Larson
W hen Nicolette Larson was growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, she’d ask her friends to drive over bumpy roads so she could show off her Neil Young impression. As the truck moved up and down, she’d break out into a shaky vibrato. Just a few years later, the singer …
Read More »Uvalde Cops Could've Ended Shooting in Three Minutes, Says Texas Head of Public Safety
Steve McCraw, the Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, decried law enforcement’s response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, saying police could’ve stopped the gunman within three minutes after he entered the building, but didn’t. “There’s compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the …
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