All of this — the bad-faith scrutiny, the obsession with minor discrepancies, the confidence that vast conspiracies can be discovered on Google — is instantly recognizable from previous explosions of internet-enabled misogynistic bullying. The “body language experts” that swarmed around Heard spent years applying the same junk science to Amanda Knox, Meghan Markle, and Carole Baskin. The gremlins who targeted Anita Sarkeesian during Gamergate pretended to be offended by the (extremely minor) technical errors in her videos rather than her presence in their boy’s-only treehouse. The best evidence for the motivations behind the anti-Heard campaign is that while her every slip-up has been dissected ad nauseum, Depp’s far more numerous and consequential discrepancies have been all but ignored. His testimony that he was too high on opioids to attack Heard during the airplane incident, for example, contradicts his own text messages (“angry, aggro injun in a fuckin blackout”) from the day after. His absurd denials of his drug problem belie his own contemporaneous communications and bolster Heard’s account. In the final week of the Virginia trial, he bafflingly claimed that he hadn’t sent text messages from his own phone — I guess someone hacked into it and sent texts that sound exactly like him? […] Heard is not a perfect victim and has never claimed to be. In her own testimony, she admitted to engaging in screaming matches, fighting back, and insulting Depp in the final year of the relationship. The judge in the UK trial said there was probably some truth in Depp’s accusation that Heard was condescending about his drug use, something that triggered his sense of internalized shame and, ultimately, his rage. The psychologist who saw them in 2015 said both partners had poor communication skills and weren’t able to de-escalate fights or have productive conflicts. This is all damning evidence against Heard and I see no reason not to believe it. But remember: The relationship at the heart of this case was one in which the smaller, less powerful partner has evidence of at least 10 serious incidents of violence. Black eyes, bloody lips, trashed homes, chunks of ripped-out hair on the carpet. WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT WHETHER SHE WAS ANNOYING SOMETIMES? […] If you entertain the possibility that Heard has not concocted an elaborate hoax but is in fact an actual domestic abuse victim, having an emotional reaction when her husband shows up and merrily announces that he has broken his promise to her — a broken promise which may put her safety at risk — her actions suddenly make more sense. […] There is almost no evidence that the op-ed had any effect on Depp’s career. Over the previous decade, Depp had released a string of high-profile bombs (The Rum Diary, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Transcendence, The Lone Ranger, Mortdecai, Dark Shadows — I haven’t even heard of most of these) and had been the subject of numerous articles documenting his dimming star power. For years, set leakers reported that he showed up late and drunk and needed an earpiece to remember his lines (Depp says he used it to listen to music). […] In hindsight, the verdict came down the minute the judge allowed the case to be televised. Jurors weren’t sequestered or sheltered from the internet in any way, meaning they were likely exposed to the same bad-faith memes and out-of-context clips as everyone else. Plus, this case has been swirling around the internet for years, making an impartial jury an impossibility in the first place. One man was allowed to stay in the jury pool after revealing a text from his wife that read, “Amber is psychotic.” I have no idea what happens next, but I do know that Depp’s unbelievably cynical strategy to discredit his ex-wife’s abuse claims (Jessica Winter called it “a high-budget, general-admission form of revenge porn”) was a resounding success. Heard is now one of the most hated figures in America. Even if she overturns the decision on appeal, she will likely never be cast in a major Hollywood role again — what studio wants to risk a hostile internet campaign before they even start shooting? Depp’s core claim — women advance their careers by accusing powerful men of abuse — doesn’t even hold up to the evidence of his own abuse accusation. Heard is ruined; Depp is in pre-production for his next role; other alleged abusers are already copying his legal strategy. And outside the courtroom, America’s march backward toward the 1950s continues apace.

Ellen DeGeneres did not “betray” queer people. Such a claim presumes that she owes us, or speaks for us, and that impossible burden — one she has faced since she came out on “Ellen” — is part of what landed her in this mess in the first place. Still, I cannot help but feel exasperation at her defensive crouch when she’s questioned about Bush, or Hart, or her responsibility for the toxic work environment on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” I cannot help but roll my eyes at the self-pitying strain that runs through “Relatable,” her scrupulously unilluminating 2018 Netflix stand-up special, in which she professes, or performs, frustration at the indignities of the celebrity stratosphere. […] As in her interview with Hart, her segment on Bush, her farewell announcements on “Today” and with Oprah, the Dakota Johnson moment inadvertently expressed a central feature of modern American life, and of DeGeneres’ own post-aughts crises: that the very rich and the very famous, the odd Dolly Parton excepted, are in solidarity mostly with themselves. […] For DeGeneres, who built her career on playing versions of “Ellen,” by appearing, as a queer woman in a patriarchal society, not only “normal” but ordinary, this evolution couldn’t help but hold symbolic resonance. Because “progress” is not an achievement but an action, and to let up the fight is already to lose it. From “Don’t Say Gay”-style legislation in the U.S. and the prevalence of transphobia in U.K. media to the deadly threat to queers in Russia and its occupied territories, LGBTQ people are engaged in a tug of war on a tectonic scale, struggling ceaselessly just to keep our footing. It does not seem so outrageous to me, in this context, to expect the most prominent LGBTQ American to pull in the same direction, or at least to accept that the price of holding the vanishing center is becoming a little less beloved. It’s not as if DeGeneres has been driven into hiding. She simply forfeited her position as the queer celebrity everyone — me, my mother, George W. Bush — could agree on, because in a time and place of such terrifying revanchism, it is not enough to be agreeable. For those of us frightened by the change she once represented being so swiftly rolled back, DeGeneres’ fumbling attempt to keep her distance turns out to be the one choice we couldn’t forgive, and will not forget. When we lost Ellen, she lost us.

With a very few exceptions — mostly the “Belt Buckle” episode of Mystery Show — I’ve come to realise that I have a fundamental problem with this subgenre that goes far beyond one Reply All episode. It’s this: who gets to go on an inconsequential quest? Podcasting is already a far from level playing field, and even within that this prestigious little niche of it is closed off to almost everybody. It frustrates me that so many of these shows come from the perspective of well-off white American men, but I understand why that is. The resources required to make a really high quality show of this kind make independent production very difficult. You might have to work for six months on an idea only to find that there isn’t really a satisfying answer, so it’s risky. Most networks or funders are unlikely to take a financial risk on a quest creator unless they have a demonstrable track record, are a celebrity, or are celebrity adjacent in some way. Then unless you can afford to do almost all of the work beforehand — typically unpaid, or expending crucial resources — the pitch for an inconsequential quest series is always going to be “I don’t know the answer yet but just trust me!” And we all know where companies are more likely to bestow that trust: executives tend to be disproportionately white, straight and male, and that’s the kind of talent that too often gets to take risks with big budgets. Celebrity access, by the way, has proved to be somewhat important to the inconsequential quest genre. I think part of why people responded to “The Case of the Missing Hit” like they did was the sheer audacity of PJ Vogt calling up the former Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page and just… asking him if he knew what the mystery song was. See also: Moby’s involvement in the Gregor episode, and Starlee Kine getting Jake Gyllenhaal to confirm his real height. The contrast between all that mundane legwork and the glamour of a real famous person is exciting in a semi-salacious way. When I listen to “The Case of the Missing Hit”, then, or many of the other examples I’ve cited here, I’m constantly reminded of who isn’t getting to make this stuff. Who doesn’t have the chance to throw time and money at a weird little problem and see what sticks. Which is arguably a reaction that could apply to pretty much any audio genre, but because these quests are personal and idiosyncratic and usually rely heavily on the creator’s existing personal relationships, I think I notice it more readily. For me, the best inconsequential quests turn out not to be inconsequential at all. What starts out as an attempt to give a belt buckle back or find some lost CDs turns out to be a process that can teach us something about our flaws, our blind spots and our inner assumptions. But to find those stories, you have to spend a long time looking. And not everybody has that luxury.

But in a world where everyone’s struggling through the quicksand of reality, Fieri is a king among slugs. During the height of #MeToo, he escaped unscathed. There are remarkably few stories about him being a dick in public; in fact, the majority of public opinion is just that he’s the nicest guy. And now, the latest news coming in piping hot from Flavortown, just like one of his recipes, such as I’ve Got the Need, the Need for Fried Cheese! (Jesus Christ, buddy, I’m trying to help you here), is that Fieri is doing a lot more for out-of-work restaurant employees than most people. Since the coronavirus outbreak, he’s raised more than $20 million for a relief fund for restaurant workers. You know who didn’t do that?? Any of your extremely chill, fashionable faves, probably wearing $350 chunky mustard mules, including every single one of the people on Instagram currently trying to convince me to make bread.

Stream on, Waxahatchee and Kevin Morby. Do your thing, James Blake. You all make livestreams suck a little less. What has been really, truly dispiriting is the ceaseless sequence of sanitized at-home performances thrust upon us by the world’s celebrities and major media outlets. These have largely been charitable efforts featuring strikingly similar performance lineups, the likes of Billie Eilish and Elton John working their way across the networks. […] The ordeal suggested that the celebrity class had learned very little from the Gal Gadot “Imagine” debacle. Here again was a parade of celebrities — John Legend and Sam Smith, Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello, multiple iterations of Keith Urban — attempting to supply inspiration from their luxurious outposts, as if the mere sight of famous people was supposed to make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. In place of entertainment value, they had substituted somber, faux-profound schlock. It turns out livestreams suck even worse with high production values and the cheery artificiality of TV talk shows. […] We no longer have to wonder what a coronavirus-era “We Are The World” would be like because here it is, an insufferably smarmy Zoom meeting reeking of expensive vanilla. I like some of these people’s music quite a bit, but none of them came out of this looking anything but thirsty. […] Entertainers can present a united front and raise money for worthwhile causes without resorting to treacle like this. Just look at “House Party,” a quarantine posse cut that brought together the unlikely team of New Kids On The Block, Boyz II Men, Big Freedia, Jordin Sparks, and Naughty By Nature. This was pure goofy fun — an insubstantial lark, maybe, but one far too cute to clown. No one was trying to dredge up some humanitarian statement beyond their depth. It was just a bunch of creative people goofing off, having a blast. Such contagious giddiness feels especially like a blessing right now. On the benevolence front, consider Angel Olsen, who embarked on a smaller-scale, more personal fundraising effort by performing a ticketed online concert to support her road crew. There was nothing ostentatious about it, with none of the icky implications of wealthy people soliciting common people’s money from within their comfortable bubble. Fans paid to watch a performance, and the performer passed on the proceeds to people she cares about: simple, beautiful, unpretentious.

With her first album in eight years, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, singer-songwriter Fiona Apple is breaking free of the chains that have bound her for decades. --- Q: If there is a cohesive statement you’re trying to make with this album, what is it? A: “Fetch the bolt cutters” is probably the theme of it. I know in The New Yorker piece it says something like, “It’s about not being afraid to speak,” but it’s more than that. It’s about breaking out of whatever prison you’ve allowed yourself to live in, whether you built that prison for yourself or whether it was built around you and you just accepted it. For me, it could be many things — including breaking out of this image that the world told me I was and that I actually believed. That’s the sad part.

Billie Eilish has done everything right in her career so far, but that’s not enough for a celebrity industry fixated on sex. --- But being anointed a liberating force in the body-image stakes is its own kind of prison, one that preserves physicality as the ultimate measure of a female star’s worth – and the standard by which they can be undermined. The music industry and the media like to pat themselves on the back for making stars of Eilish and Lizzo, who often joins her in headlines about body positivity, though if these women one day wish to change their physical presentation, they will be accused of betraying fans and squandering their authenticity.

She says 'Miss Anthropocene' is about making "climate change fun"—and she can't stop talking about her hopes for an AI-driven future. But she might just be playing with our perceptions. --- But the Internet is notoriously good at simplifying the messiness of reality into cut-and-dry projections of our deepest hopes and fears—symbols so gripping that they can sometimes cause us to make assumptions that go against our values. To believe that Grimes has made an album designed to spread good faith in Silicon Valley is to undermine her intelligence and agency as an artist, one whose artistic reckoning with the world—and her place within it—has never been anything close to straightforward. The trouble with owning one's perceived badness so completely that you transform yourself into a literal demon, though, is that it's a bit of an out. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to use technology to democratize music-making, or to offset our reliance on fossil fuels—but it's hard to take techno-optimism seriously when its proponents also seem strangely blind to the world that exists right in front of them. In the realm of business, that blindness can take the form of building a fortune partly based on the idea that you're trying to stop climate change while also discouraging your employees from unionizing. In the realm of art, it can mean getting so carried away by the grand design of your vision that you fail to realize that it's motivated by something a bit solipsistic, a mirror of your unique prison of pain. At worst, it can produce art that is less a reflection of shared experience than a vision of the world that was dreamed up in a corporate boardroom, by people who have the luxury of turning existential crises into an entertaining thought-exercise.

Boucher has recently seemed at a loss to regain control over her career, and naive about her role in its dissolution. But Miss Anthropocene reveals an astute understanding – evidently well honed – of humanity’s worst impulses and how to appeal to them. […] Against all odds, Miss Anthropocene is a beautiful and emotionally complex album: Boucher’s continuing personal testament to creativity as resistance against destruction, and an unlikely optimistic gesture that still believes art can be a powerful force for social good. It also finally finds Boucher reconciled to her relationship with the public. On Miss Anthropocene, she is a mirror, inviting us to examine the source of our bad faith.

The internet is built to highlight the dumb stuff famous people say. --- But when no part of our context-collapsing feedback loop is built to accommodate stakes, and considering the speed and vitriol with which Eilish was attacked, I can further understand why artists choose to distance themselves from the press in favor of doing their own. There is almost no upside to being ensnared into a controversy like this, even if it’s manufactured.

Maria interviews Rafael Shimunov, the man who made a video in which scenes of the consequences of the Iraq war are shown behind Ellen Degeneres’ apology for being friends with noted genocidal war criminal George Bush. "So basically I just got really upset… I’d thought her response would be an apology. And then it occurred to me that she was standing in front of her set, in blue, like, a single color. Like a natural green screen, but just blue. So I could put any image behind her, to make the point. "So then I had to go through all of the Iraq War images, and choose, kind of… I still can’t get a lot of those images out of my head, images I’ve never seen before, that I was searching through but didn’t select, because they would just have been flagged as graphic. There was a lot of imagery that I couldn’t use. I had to censor myself, ironically, because if I’d chosen those images, they wouldn’t have been seen: Modern images of the aftereffects, of children being born today, with fatal deformities and things like that, because of the war."

There’s nothing original in this tale and there’s ample evidence, beyond West, that humans were not built to withstand the weight of celebrity. But for black artists who rise to the heights of Jackson and West, the weight is more, because they come from communities in desperate need of champions. Kurt Cobain’s death was a great tragedy for his legions of fans. Tupac’s was a tragedy for an entire people. When brilliant black artists fall down on the stage, they don’t fall down alone. The story of West “drugged out,” as he put it, reduced by the media glare to liposuction, is not merely about how he feels about his body. It was that drugged-out West who appeared in that gaudy lobby, dead-eyed and blonde-haired, and by his very presence endorsed the agenda of Donald Trump. […] There is no separating the laughter from the groans, the drum from the slave ships, the tearing away of clothes, the being borne away, from the cunning need to hide all that made you human. And this is why the gift of black music, of black art, is unlike any other in America, because it is not simply a matter of singular talent, or even of tradition, or lineage, but of something more grand and monstrous. When Jackson sang and danced, when West samples or rhymes, they are tapping into a power formed under all the killing, all the beatings, all the rape and plunder that made America. The gift can never wholly belong to a singular artist, free of expectation and scrutiny, because the gift is no more solely theirs than the suffering that produced it. Michael Jackson did not invent the moonwalk. When West raps, “And I basically know now, we get racially profiled / Cuffed up and hosed down, pimped up and ho’d down,” the we is instructive. […] West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

It doesn’t matter who you are, horniness makes fools of us all. In the right context, the revelation of that vulnerability can be almost sacred in its intimacy. But in a society that unconditionally gratifies powerful men and derides sexual women, it’s easy for that desire to get turned inside out, to become weaponized against its object.

Violent white nationalism has not been so effectively mainstreamed since the 1920s. If Trump wins the nomination and the economy turns down next year, I'd give him a decent chance of victory. Even if he is only a sort of "fascist idiot savant" without much true organizing ability or program, he clearly has a good instinct for the basic psychological impulses underlying previous fascist success. It's time to start taking this seriously.

On tennis and black excellence. … She shows us her joy, her humor and, yes, her rage. She gives us the whole range of what it is to be human, and there are those who can’t bear it, who can’t tolerate the humanity of an ordinary extraordinary person. … As long as the white imagination markets itself by equating whiteness and blondness with aspirational living, stereotypes will remain fixed in place. Even though Serena is the best, even though she wins more Slams than anyone else, she is only superficially allowed to embody that in our culture, at least the marketable one.

Notes on Kim Kardashian and the most important videogame of 2014. Anyway, high/low, camp/class, feminism/exploitation: It’s all breaking down. The digital revolution has made our hierarchies diffuse, and in some cases, defunct. So while Kim may be seen as a sign of end times to those who feel they must protect some temple of good taste, she has become something of a folk hero to a new generation that doesn’t see old-guard institutions as anything but obstacles to disrupt and shatter.

Yes, she’s correct: The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren’t available before. Here’s the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one’s fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties. Its content isn’t like a newsletter mailed discreetly to private homes; it’s like a magazine on a newsstand, asking to be purchased. Telling the world all about your life can look generous to fans and like a barrage of narcissism to everyone else.

Paul is the perfect artist for a time when breathlessly reporting every step of a promotional campaign is prioritised over - or conflated with - actually assessing the art. Sure, most sites technically keep their news and reviews sections separate - but in the grand scheme of promo, this matters not a jot. The Paris Hiltonesque maxim that all that matters is that people are talking about you, not what they're actually saying, holds true across the board: in a crowded musical marketplace, repeated neutral mentions of an artist from a trusted source may not be an explicit recommendation, but they're more valuable than an averagely complimentary three-star review.

Celebrities seeking to provide “a voice for the voiceless” would do well to remember that sex workers aren’t voiceless, just consistently ignored. There may well be women out there who relate to Fantine, but in reducing the experiences of all sex workers to one tale of tragic misery, Hathaway’s comments silence and dehumanize the same women she seeks to ‘help.’

A mediation on the late rock icon's strange journey from being a guy in a band to an idea that keeps cycling through culture via social media and our own minds.

A profile of Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings.

Given 90 minutes of HBO airtime to sell us any story she wants, she paints a rosy, responsible, carefully composed picture of someone who is, at most, making baby steps toward being less of a perfectionist. The parts of Life Is But a Dream that show us a “real” and “vulnerable” ­Beyoncé feel like the parts of job interviews where someone’s asked about their greatest weaknesses.

So the attempt to launch a from-scratch, celebrity-free outlet for longform music journalism has failed. Can a Kickstarter fail “spectacularly”? I don’t know. But reaching 17% of a proposed goal is something, for sure. This isn’t schadenfreude, though; there’s nothing in the Uncool idea to root against, per se. It’s more an opportunity to consider how campaigns like this, when undertaken in good faith, can underachieve. In brief: the idea may be modern, but the underlying realities are rooted in basic political economic realities that date back a very, very, long time.

Ultimately this is a question of what means more right now: The shoulder-shrug of indifference or the clarion announcement. Both have their value, but in the famous person/regular person conversation, we'd argue that the script has been incorrectly flipped. For many (lucky) young people (and older) the case may be that they can just be gay and, whatever, nobody really cares. And good for them. In high schools all across America that is probably the case, that's all that it takes. But for many people that is not the case. And those are the kids (and older) who most need to see examples of gay champions beaming down at them from the hallowed halls of celebrity Valhalla. The brighter the flash from above, the more light might get down to them. There is no right way to come out — you do you, Anderson — but there are ways that are more beneficial, more productive than others. We're happy to hear the news from Mr. Cooper. We just wish he'd said it a little louder. And a lot sooner.

Why doesn't everyone ever point out that Eddie is the most successful comedian ever, by any calculation … and really, it's not even close? That he's one of the best stand-ups ever? That, before Eddie, only white actors were considered sure things at the box office? That Eddie made more money making kids' movies than anyone ever? Doesn't this seem … I don't know … relevant?

Sandler's truth is that his onscreen persona has aged with his fans and experienced the same things at roughly the same time they've experienced it. Over the course of 20 years, Adam Sandler has gone from being a staple of sleepovers to dorm rooms to lousy apartments to the suburbs. And in that time he's remained, essentially, the same guy: He's "That asshole!," the incorrigible dickwad with a heart of gold, the loudmouth buddy who's progressively less fun to hang out with as you get older, the dude your wife forbids from crashing on the couch for "just a few days, I swear."

Now, tasked with little more than delivering a modest number of age-appropriate eyeballs, O’Brien seems both stunted and settled, lavishly rewarded for doing what he loves most for a company that seems to value the end product the least. It’s been well established by now that Conan O’Brien can’t stop. But it seems he’s only transcendent when someone is trying to make him.

Rappers are presented as violent, vulgar sexists and homophobes, and then they're not only expected to have fully-formed opinions on social issues, but progressive ones. This is an ugly update on the always implicit, often explicit demand that hip-hop, if it is to be lauded and celebrated, must espouse a strong, left-leaning political message.

The label's mission is to make a man out of Bieber. The only person who isn't ready to make a man out of Bieber is Bieber. He wants to be 18. He wants to be a swaggy bro—he seems incapable of being anything else—and that's as it should be. Manhood can wait.

His homemade philosophy is such that he can just wander around trying to be honest and respectful of others, and how they react to that effort is entirely their problem, not his. This is why no pockets of ickiness in the audience reaction feel particularly sad.