I decided to go to Coachella for the first time this year.
While I loved the musical performances and felt that the event was well-organized, I probably won't be attending again as it is too much hassle to arrange all the logistics — and too much money to attend the festival.
Living in New York, I never thought it made much sense to ship out to Indio, California, for one of Coachella's two weekends of music and fun.
That's without getting into what Coachella is supposedly about, which, according to varying reports, is both a glittering entertainment-industry party and a bunch of Orange County teenagers skipping school to drink. The weekend has become such an event for social media influencers, models, and celebrities that some have dubbed it the "influencer Olympics."
When Business Insider asked me to coverthe festival, I was determined to go in with as little preconceived notions as possible. And, with this year's Coachella lineup featuring Childish Gambino, Anderson .Paak, Janelle Monae, and Tame Impala, some of my favorite artists, it was hard to not get amped up.
By the end of the weekend, I had seen some incredible performances, discovered amazing new artists, found my way into an ultra-exclusive afterparty, danced the night away at a hidden stage, and was convinced I probably wouldn't ever come back.
An all-star animated environmental music video featuring the voices of Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande has gone viral on social media.
The song Earth, by comedian and rapper Lil Dicky, also has cameos from Katy Perry, Snoop Dogg and Miley Cyrus.
Speaking to Time, Dicky - aka David Burd - said: "What started as a silly joke of an idea along the way became the most important thing I'll ever do."
A share of proceeds will go to the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.
DiCaprio, who campaigns on environmental issues, also makes an animated appearance towards the end of the seven-minute long video.
In Earth has had more than 2.5 million views on YouTube since going live early on Friday.
Burd and his celebrity friends including Halsey, Snoop Dogg and Rita Ora urge people to fight against climate change.
Hey, I'm a zebra / No one knows what I do, but I look pretty cool / Am I white or black? sings Ariana while Ed Sheeran, voicing an animated marsupial, adds: I'm a koala and I sleep all the time / So what? It's cute / How did you wrangle all of these superstars to be on the song?
"It was me, my manager Scooter Braun [who also represents Bieber and Grande] and Benny Blanco, who is a true producer in every sense of the world," said Burd. "We're all such competitive people that we all kept tabs on who got who.
"We all had our own relationships, and together, in a three-pronged attack, we got 30 artists.
Burd admits he did have an issue trying to land one famous voice, belonging to mercurial rapper and producer Kanye West.
"I'm friendly with Kanye - I used to play basketball with him," he said.
"But I left myself like three days to get Kanye on the phone and couldn't get in touch with him. He was pretty unreachable; he changed his email and his cell phone.
"So I reached out to Kevin Hart and asked, "Would you play Kanye?" and he said 'yes'."
Divorce is never easy. Throw in children, intermingled business relationships, and high personal net worth, and it gets exponentially harder. Add on infidelity and there is the potential for a very messy divorce.
Williams is focused on moving forward and creating the best life possible for her and her son, but her pending divorce puts a lot at stake.
Williams and Hunter did not have a prenup
At the time of their marriage in 1997, Williams was just eight years into her radio hosting position. She was still over a decade away from The Wendy Williams Show. Despite this, Williams revealed to VladTV in 2013 that at the time she discovered that Hunter was cheating on her the first time (when her son was just one month old) she had already created great personal wealth for herself.
She had money and vacation homes, enough to be able to support herself.
When asked by Howard Stern in 2013 whether she had a prenup, Williams told him no. She even acknowledged her husband’s previous cheating during the discussion and confirmed that she would split everything 50-50. But Hunter had a different take. He told Stern, “I might give her everything, start fresh.”
Williams and Hunter have one child together, Kevin Hunter Jr. Hunter was born three years after the couple was married in 2000. Since their child is over the age of 18, child support and custody will not be an issue that the couple has to worry about.
Their businesses interests overlapped significantly
It may be Williams’ name on the wall, but Hunter has been involved in every facet of the show from the very beginning. Hunter was named executive producer for The Wendy Williams Show in 2011. In 2013, the two formed the production company, Wendy Williams Productions, the production company that runs The Wendy Williams Show.
Hunter has also been Williams’ manager for several years. The business relationship between the two has become so intertwined that it will be difficult to separate. Experts say that the couple may have to sell the production company and assets and split the proceeds.
Show staff say the end is near or already here for Hunter
Hunter has continued to work at The Wendy Williams Show since it was revealed that the couple was getting divorced, despite rumors that he is controlling and that his presence is toxic to the show.
But according to sources closes to the show, it is only a matter of time until Hunter is shown the exit.
A source told Us Weekly, “…staffers have expressed concern about their safety and Wendy’s safety and do not want to work with him,” adding, “employment at the show no longer makes sense.”
The Wendy Williams Show executive producer recently released a statement, saying in part:
“No matter what the outcome is or what the future holds, we are still The Hunter Family and I will continue to work with and fully support my wife in this business and through any and all obstacles she may face living her new life of sobriety, while I also work on mine.”
Should he wish to stay at the show, as his statement seems to imply, it is uncertain whether he could be forcibly removed.
Williams filed for a no-fault divorce
Williams and Hunter currently live in New Jersey. Unlike many states, New Jersey is a fault state, meaning fault can be assigned during a divorce. This means that if the court finds evidence that one partner was the cause of the divorce, they could grant a judgment that is more favorable to the wronged party.
Surprisingly, Williams has reportedly filed for a no-fault divorce. This means that Hunter’s alleged affair and child will have no bearing on the case, should it go to trial. Williams’ decision to file for a no-fault divorce could mean that the talk show host hopes to settle the divorce out of court, or she may wish to handle the divorce as amicably as possible and does not want to throw mud.
There is also the issue of alimony. Since Williams is the higher earner, she could be ordered to pay alimony to Hunter. Her decision to file for a no-fault divorce could be an olive branch to prevent Hunter from asking for alimony.
Between Avengers: Infinity Warand the upcoming Endgame, it feels like practically every named good guy from the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies has come back.
But there's one character who appeared in the first two Avengersfilms who didn't pop up in last year's blockbuster, and that's Dr Erik Selvig.
You'd think as one of the go-to science guys, he'd pop up to spout some jargon but nope, he wasn't in Infinity War, and now it has been revealed that he won't be in Endgame either.
Disney
Actor Stellan Skarsgård spoke to Metroand said: "No, I'm not (in Endgame). I've done four (MCU movies) and they have contracted for five, and they haven't called me yet."
"They usually call me when they need some weird plot to be explained in a quasi-scientific way.
"I thought it was a one-time thing, but the contract said if they wanted me they could use me for five films, but I didn’t think they’d use me for four so it was a surprise. It was a pleasant surprise because I’ve had a lot of fun on those shoots."
It was reported just this week that Marvel is considering a fourth solo film for Thor, and although Taika Waititi (who didn't use Selvig or his science crew in Ragnarok) is tipped to return, he may decide to give the doctor one more outing.
We kind of wanted to see him throw Stan Lee's shoe at Thanos, though.
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Avengers: Endgame will be released on Thursday, April 25 in the UK and on Friday, April 26 in the US.
I can’t tell you how Game of Thrones ends, but I’m pretty sure I can tell you how it doesn’t. From the beginning, the series has depicted a world in which attempting to appeal to others’ sense of a higher purpose is the quickest way to get yourself killed. (Just ask Ned Stark’s severed head.) Viewers have known from the beginning that humanity is facing an existential threat from the army of undead known as the White Walkers, but the show’s characters have discovered the looming crisis only gradually, and they’ve been slow to reckon with the little they do know. Now, with the Night King’s masses marching south from the sundered Wall, there’s no doubt that the threat is real. And yet, with only five episodes of Game of Thrones remaining, the human race is resolutely failing to rise to the occasion. Jon Snow’s attempt to form an alliance with Daenerys Targaryen has created dissension instead of unity, with some northern houses deserting the cause and others, like poor little Lord Umber’s, left unprepared and undersupplied. Despite having pledged her troops, Cersei is merely lying in wait, hoping that the rival armies weaken each other enough for her to conquer whatever remains.
There is only one plausible conclusion to this saga, and it’s that humanity does not survive. Westeros’ various factions either never get it together at all, or they realize, too late, that even the divisions between them that have lasted for centuries pale next to the gulf between the living and the dead. In the first season, Cersei explained the struggle for power to Ned Stark—who, at that point, still had his head—as one in which “you win or you die,” and the years that followed have uncovered little evidence of a third option. No one’s negotiating peace with the Night King.
The facts on the ground in Westeros are different than those in our world, but human nature is constant across universes, and what we’ve seen of Game of Thrones’ take on it is unsparingly pessimistic—and entirely warranted. The series’ utility as an allegory of climate change can be overplayed, but to the extent that it reflects our ability to band together in the face of looming catastrophe, it’s all too accurate. Last year, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that irreversible changes could set in as early as 2030 and that preventing them would require a massive and unprecedented transformation of the global economy. Faced with a clear deadline and overwhelming scientific consensus, we’ve done … “nothing” seems not too strong a word. There’s nothing remotely approaching the kind of unshakable public resolve that would move politicians and industry to prompt, decisive action. Some of us are pretty upset about the whole thing, but others are either too flush with fossil-fuel cash or too busy drinking from Liberal Tears mugs to admit the problem exists. (As I am currently writing about a popular television program rather than chaining myself to the doors of the Environmental Protection Agency, on a global level I’m not accomplishing much more.)
What little we know about Game of Thrones’ final season suggests the series will at least flirt with the possibility of mass extinction. The episode-length Battle of Winterfell will likely fall in the season’s third episode, directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who’s directed the series’ previous blowouts. (Given that the troops are already assembled, it seems unlikely the show would wait until the fifth episode, also directed by Sapochnik, to play that card.) That means the human armies will make a do-or-die stand at Winterfell, and unless the series plans to spend three full episodes on the comparatively unimportant question of who ascends to the Iron Throne after the Night King’s defeat, my guess is that humanity will lose that battle. And since every human killed is not just a loss for one side but an undead addition to the other, that ought to be the ballgame. As a viewer, I’m rooting for Jon Snow and co. But if I were an Essos gambler laying a bet, I know whom I’d put my money on.
There’s just one problem. The show that became famous for its willingness to kill off seemingly essential figures has grown less and less likely to do so. Even before Jon Snow came back from the dead, viewers had begun to develop a sense of which characters were essential to the series’ endgame, and thus impossible to kill off. You didn’t need Ramsay Bolton or even Littlefinger to tie up the story’s loose ends, but it’s impossible to imagine Dany or Jon getting axed for shock value. There was no chance the High Sparrow would dethrone Cersei for good or that Arya would fail the Faceless Men’s tests. The show’s core characters had acquired what fans call “plot armor,” which meant that any time the odds seemed truly hopeless, when they were backed against a wall and there seemed to be no way out, we knew the question wasn’t if they’d escape but only how.
Now that the series is almost over, individual characters are finally losing their invulnerability. (For all we know, any of those essential figures could buy it in Episode 2.) But there’s still one suit of plot armor left, and it’s the biggest and clankiest of all. I don’t know which humans will survive till the end of Game of Thrones, but I feel certain humanity will—that the series will end in a Westeros in which the Night King has at least been beaten back, if not wholly defeated. The logical endgame to the precepts Game of Thrones has espoused is the Night King grinning on the Iron Throne, surrounded by his army of the dead, but HBO hasn’t invested close to a billion dollars to tell a story whose moral is that humanity is screwed. Victory will come at a cost, but that cost will be paid; life, of one sort or another, will go on. There are, unfortunately, no such guarantees in our world. We might lose our battle, and there will be no one left to appreciate the plot twist.
Watch Game of Thrones on Sunday nights. Then listen to recaps with June Thomas, Sam Adams, Dan Kois, and other Slatesters every Monday.
As the world awaits the arrival of Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 2, HBO is now offering eager fans a sneak peek at the follow up to “Winterfell.”
Currently, the title of Episode 2 hasn’t been released but it has been assumed that the upcoming installment of the final season will set up the arrival of the Night King and the White Walkers. With Episode 3 set for a one hour and 22 minutes run time, many are expected the beginning of the biggest battle of the series to begin at the end of Episode 2. Additionally, we receive two images of Bran Stark, which may hint to an emerging story element related to the character.
Take a sneak peek at Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 2 above.
Black, whose real name is Bill K. Kapri, 21, was arrested on gun and drug charges Wednesday near Niagara Falls, New York, while trying to enter the US from Canada, New York State Police said.
Kapri and three others were detained by US Border and Customs Protection before being arrested by police.
Kapri faces allegations of criminal possession of a weapon second degree and unlawful possession of marijuana.
Officer James O'Callaghan, a public information officer for Troop A of the New York State Police, told CNN a Glock 9mm pistol was undeclared in their Cadillac Escalade at the Lewiston-Queenston International Bridge.
CNN has reached out to Black's representative for comment.
Kapri was arraigned at a court in the town of Lewiston and remanded to Niagara County Jail on $20,000/$40,000 cash bond.
He posted bail on Thursday, CNN affiliate WKBW reported. A video showed him walking to a parking lot, apparently shielding his face with a fan of cash.
The singer has a court date set for next month.
He was expected to perform in Boston at The House of Blues on Wednesday.
Kapri was raised in Pompano Beach, Florida. His breakout hit "Tunnel Vision" became his first top 10 hit on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.
It was my first — and probably last — time at Coachella.Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider
