Whoopsie Goldberg 😳
Mōrena lil shits!!
Yesterday was a good one!! I recorded a wonderful episode of The Shit Show with Brother Nick/Squish (PS I love how many of you email me about the podcast and call him ‘Squish’ - I send them ALL to him) where we explain the stock market to you, along with wild pigs taking over American cities and… more partying by Boris Johnson. That’s out on Friday so make sure you’re subscribed!
After recording the pod Liv and I went and played some tennis and then I’m trying to get into “To Paradise” but at the mo it’s moving pretttttty slowly so I’m hoping things pick up. ALSO, Rubes read ‘The House in the Cerulean Sea’ (my best book of 2021 and my Christmas gift to her) in the weekend in literally TWO DAYS and she loved it!! So if you’re not on that buzz yet, get on that buzz.
Also, after I wrote about Euphoria’s soundtrack, Kendall (not Jenner, avid newsletter reader Kendall)nemailed me (and I have since fact-checked this) saying that the music supervisor for Euphoria also did Yellowjackets!! You’re all full of fun facts!!
Help pay my rent?? 🥺 — www.getrevue.co
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In today’s newsletter:
It's time we stopped treating fangirls as pop culture's favourite punchline
How the snowflakes win
Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended from The View for two weeks after holocaust comments
All the Astroworld Lawsuits Are Getting Rolled Into One Case
Do you eat the sticker off the apple?
It's time we stopped treating fangirls as pop culture's favourite punchline
Over the summer I was interviewed for a piece (along with a bunch of other smart people) for Vogue India, and then I forgot clean about it! That was until I stumbled upon it yesterday & got the shock of my life!! If you’re interested in reading it (I mean, you probs already know most of my thoughts about why the days of shitting on stans are over) then you can do so here! Not sure when I became the person people turn to as an “expert” on standing up for fangirls, but I’ll take it!!
How the snowflakes win
Yesterday I read this amazing piece about all the eras of Tumblr (I only realised at the end that it was written by Kaitlin Tiffany, because of course it was!!!) There’s something about the nostalgia of the ‘old’ internet that I’ll never get tired of reading about. And Tumblr fascinates me because it was started by David Karp as almost… the opposite of Facebook? It wasn’t about making friends, posting publicly on others’ walls, or even being that social. It was like the underground version of that, where pseudonyms were encouraged, where you almost… kept your blog a secret (espesh if it was a One Direction blog) and it reflected what you thought (or wanted people to think) was your “truest self” (for me it was probs the self that I thought made me look the coolest.)
Tumblr is also fascinating because there was a time where it was everything to people (and sold for more than $1BILLION - it's now worth $3mil) but they just never figured out how to keep it lucrative (banning the NSFW stuff was the nail in the coffin really.) Ads didn’t really take off, people didn’t want to pay to use the service, and users also felt extremely protective over the product, so change never really came.
Tumblr was also a place where you stumbled into discourse (however half baked it may have been) about things you otherwise possibly wouldn’t have:
“So the site raised artists and writers and activists and fangirls who came to it for pictures of actors and pop stars and GIFs of kissing but then stumbled across the language of intersectional feminism, anti-racism, gender identity, and passions of all sorts.”
It really gave me my start (along with Rookie Mag) when it came to considering the Big Life Questions, but it also served up a whole lot of super triggering mental illness content which did not go hand in hand very well. I often talk/think about the flattening of content/context on social media, and I know that scrolling past posts about history, feminism, racism, someone romanticising some mental illness and a One Direction gifset, and then giving them all the same energy/ consideration/ thinking they were all as important as one another, definitely fucked me up in a big way. But that’s not really Tumblr’s fault, that’s kinda social media by design.
Wow, I seem to have started rambling without much of a point, except for that you should defs go and read some smarter ramblings about Tumblr, here!!
NEW EPISODE OF CULTURE VULTURE
Sydney Sweeney, Jay-Z, & Spotify's Podcast Politics — open.spotify.com
This week before we even get into the episode Liv spills a HUGE secret (one you won't want to miss.) Then we talk about Sydney Sweeney, a potential Fyre Festival 2.0, someone crashing into Taylor Swift's house and why rap lyrics shouldn't be used as evidence in court.
AND THEN THE MAIN EVENT - JOE ROGAN VS SPOTIFY and the idea that when you pay someone to be on your platform you have more of a responsibility to keep other people safe than if they were just uploading podcasts themselves.
Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended from The View for two weeks after holocaust comments
On Monday’s episode of The View, during a roundtable discussion of a Tennessee curriculum ban on the graphic novel Maus (a Pulitzer-winning novel written as a dialogue between a son and his father, an Auschwitz survivor) Whoopi Goldberg said some things. She said, “let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” saying that it was instead about “man’s inhumanity to man.”
This was in fact, not correct, nor was it a good thing to say.
Whoopi apologised soon after, saying that it was in fact about both race and inhumanity and that she stands corrected:
She also apologised on Tuesday morning’s episode of The View, saying:
“Yesterday on our show, I misspoke. I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention. I understand why now, and for that, I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful, and it helped me understand some different things.”
But where things get a little confusing is that after she tweeted her apology and before she apologised on air, she also went on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and said “didn’t want to fake apologize” but said she wasn’t trying to offend. Colbert explained why her comments were still offensive and not accurate until Goldberg ended the segment by saying, “I’ll take your word for it and never bring it up again.”
Since then, Whoopi has been suspended from The View for two weeks, with Kim Godwin, ABC News president, saying: “effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for two weeks for her wrong and hurtful comments.”
It goes without saying that reductive, harmful, and antisemitic comments like this need to be taken hella seriously, and The View definitely made the right decision, but again, another interesting element of this story is the speed that the PR machine moved to try and amend this (and how it kinda backfired when they tried to do too much.)
All the Astroworld Lawsuits Are Getting Rolled Into One Case
I’ve been keeping you updated on the Astroworld situation (much to the dismay of Kris Jenner I’m sure) and the latest is that all the lawsuits (of which there are many) are being rolled into one big case.
Paper magazine reports that:
“A Texas court panel has agreed to grant a request to hear all 387 individually filed lawsuits — representing over 2,800 alleged victims — as one all-encompassing case in the interest of expediency, given the similarities between claims.”
“The lawsuit looks to hold Travis Scott and promoter Live Nation accountable for negligence related to the planning and construction of Astroworld, namely the lack of crowd control, emergency response measures and the failure to provide adequate care, with the plaintiffs seeking billions of dollars in damages.”
In December, Travis Scott requested to have some of the Astroworld cases dismissed, pushing back against them with a "general denial," so… there’s that.
Do you eat the sticker off the apple?
No. You don’t. Well, actually, 2% of you do, but I’m hoping they were just slip-of-the-thumbs.
Megan Thee Stallion is Manifesting an Adele Collab (Vulture)
JFK's Very Revealing Harvard Application Essay (The Atlantic)
The longest lightning bolt ever recorded (The Times)
Kids draw the darndest things (Bored Panda)
Why Simple Is Smart (The Atlantic)
India says it will launch digital rupee as soon as this year (BBC)
Sydney Sweeney, Jay-Z, & Spotify's Podcast Politics (Culture Vulture)
Sexy M&M's, BoJo's partying and a whole lot of world updates! (The Shit Show)
GET A 14 DAY FREE TRIAL TO WATCH EUPHORIA OR YELLOWJACKETS! (Neon)
You can listen to us talk about all things pop culture on Culture Vulture, about THE WORLD on The Shit Show or watch us explain the internet on Extremely Online.
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LOVE YOU THE MOST, LUCE XX
