Pilar Olivares/ReutersConvicted killer Joran van der Sloot—who is awaiting extradition to the United States in an extortion case tied to the disappearance of Natalee Holloway—reportedly has been attacked in a Peruvian prison.The Dutchman’s lawyer, Maximo Altez, told ABC News that his client, who may have run afoul of gang rules in the Challapalca Prison, is now in a medical wing.Van der Sloot, 35, is serving a 28-year-sentence for the 2010 murder of Stephany Flores in Lima. That crime came five years after he emerged as the prime suspect, but was never prosecuted, for the presumed death of Holloway.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Andrew Lloyd/Loop Images/Universal Images Group via Getty ImagesHow do you win a race after being knocked unconscious? You could try asking 19-year-old Canadian Delaney Irving, who found out that she’d won Gloucester’s annual cheese rolling competition from a medical tent, but even she might not be able to tell you.“I remember hitting my head,” Irving told Greatest Hits Radio Gloucester on Monday, after she’d unconsciously won the women’s race. “I remember it hurting, and then I remember waking up in the tent.”Grasping her prize in hand—a seven-pound cheese roll—Irving joked, “I can eat this tonight.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesSometime last year my then four-year-old daughter was waking up every single night. I was desperate and very, very sleep deprived. My husband and I tried sticker charts, other kinds of rewards, even going as far as to pay her to stay in bed. (Did I mention we were desperate?)But the only thing that really seemed to capture her imagination and harness her motivation was this bargain: stay in your bed for a month and I’ll take you to Walt Disney World. Since we struck that deal, I can count on one hand the number of times she has gotten out of bed in the last eight months. And that is how I—an amusement park loather who wrote her junior year English thesis on the portrayal of women in Disney movies (spoiler alert: it’s not good, even for the empowered female characters)—ended up at “the happiest place on earth” for three days in February.What does someone like me do in a situation like this—admittedly one of my own making? (My husband, who is still scarred by his own childhood trip to Disney World, told me I’m on my own). Initially my plan was to go into Jane Goodall mode and observe these unusual species—adults who like Disney World—in their natural habitat. Perhaps I’d even find a way to enjoy the theme parks that didn’t offend every sensibility of mine. Namely, hordes of princesses and overpriced food in mediocre restaurants.Read more at The Daily Beast.

KCNA via REUTERSNorth Korea’s latest missile advances mean it is now much harder for the U.S. to prevent Kim Jong Un from launching nuclear weapons.Pentagon insiders and North Korea watchers on Capitol Hill say Kim’s ability to deploy solid-fuel rockets—if proven—would complicate American efforts to launch preemptive strikes and that the Hermit Kingdom has entered a new phase of nuclear power.The North recently claimed that it flight-tested a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time. The new missiles would be a breakthrough in the country’s efforts to build a harder-to-detect weapon that threatens the continental United States.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Henry Nicholls/ReutersBenedict Cumberbatch and his family have reportedly endured “many sleepless nights” after a chef attacked their home, kicking his way through an iron gate and screaming. Cumberbatch, his wife, Sophie Hunter, and their three young children were all home when chef Jack Bissell began his attack, The Times reports. Once on the premises of their London home, the chef spat on the home’s intercom before dislodging it with a fish knife. The date of the attack has not been made public.“I know you’ve moved here,” Bissell, previously a chef at the five-star Beaumont Hotel in London’s Mayfair, reportedly yelled. “I hope it burns down.” Although the chef fled the scene, DNA evidence from the intercom allowed police to make the arrest, The Times reports.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Rocco Spaziani/Archivio Spaziani/Mondadori Portfolio via GettyIt looks like the Hollywood Vampires will need to stay in their coffins—at least for at least a little while. Johnny Depp and his band have postponed their early U.S. tour dates, with Depp recovering from an ankle injury.The band said in a statement posted to Instagram that they won’t be playing their show Tuesday in Manchester, New Hampshire, and will also be putting off a few other shows until July because of Depp’s “painful injury.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Cheatham County Sheriff’s OfficeToni Alcaraz says that she usually speaks with her sister, Nikki Alcaraz, almost every day. For three weeks now, however, Toni hasn’t heard a word from Nikki—who was last seen on a cross-country trip with her boyfriend, Tyler Stratton.Nikki Alcaraz, also known as Nikki Cunningham, is a 33-year-old mother of two, Oklahoma’s News 4 reports. She reportedly Tennessee left for California with Stratton and a dog in her black 2013 Jeep Wrangler, which sports a “Mama Tried” sticker, camo seats, and a “BGL3539” tag.Nashville’s WKRN reports that Stratton—named in fliers shared by the Cheatham County Sheriff’s Office on Facebook as Steven Tyler Stratton—is wanted Tennessee on an unrelated charge for “failure to appear on a probation violation that stems from a theft charge.” Read more at The Daily Beast.

HBOSuccession is over, and so too are the CEO dreams of the Roy siblings, whose quest for power collapsed in a boardroom showdown of almost perfect (by which I mean, wholly inevitable) dysfunction. It was an ideal conclusion for Jesse Armstrong’s seismic HBO hit, which offered glimpses of its protagonists’ pitiable humanity and then stark reminders of their greedy, desperate, me-first ugliness.To the end, it was a series that slyly sought to inspire sympathy for its devils. In doing so, it made its viewers complicit in its characters’ madness, as well as no different, really, than the Roy kids themselves with regards to their (pathetic, needy, misbegotten) love for their rancid paterfamilias, Logan (Brian Cox).In many respects, the Succession finale resembled any other preceding episode, with Kendall (Jeremy Strong) striving to solidify support for his bid to block Waystar RoyCo’s sale to Lukas Matsson’s (Alexander Skarsgård) GoJo, Shiv (Sarah Snook) trying to secure her own spot at the head of the table, Roman (Kieran Culkin) acting like a sniveling, damaged creep, and Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) groveling at the feet of anyone who might throw him a crumb—all as his sycophantic minion Greg (Nicholas Braun) feigned fealty while angling to improve his own spot among this wretched lot.Read more at The Daily Beast.

HBOThe epic series finale of Barry is aptly titled “wow.” Wow. Just wow—all lowercase. This echoes our thoughts while watching the final moments of Barry (Bill Hader) and the group of people he’s screwed up for life, though it’s also a harrowing quote from the episode as well. There is no other word in the English language, in fact, that more perfectly encapsulates the finale of Barry better than this three letter palindrome. Wow.I bring up the idea of a palindrome because, although we’ve seen the linear story of Barry from the first season to this final fourth installment, the HBO series turns itself backwards in this final episode. Barry has always been the murderer carrying out kills in this darkly comedic tale of a man trying to turn his life around with a new creative passion. In this past season, Barry has used every opportunity to run away from the law and his violent past—from living in an isolated desert home to resorting to Christianity as his backbone in life. But in the Barry finale, he can finally stop running. The “wow” has been reversed to throw another character under the bus.Now, Barry’s ex-acting teacher Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) has been accused of killing Janice Moss (Paula Newsome) and Barry’s old acting peer Ryan Madison (Tyler Jacob Moore). With new evidence showing some sort of pay-off between Barry and Cousineau (there’s no evidence, and the money was not for killing), the feds now believe Cousineau used his student to help him kill Janice as blackmail. Cousineau is hiding from the authorities. Barry is freed.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Stephane Cardinale/GettyMartin Scorsese might’ve dropped some big news during his tour through Italy following the Cannes Film Festival in France. After a meeting with Pope Francis, the director now says he has “responded to the pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus.” Scorsese made the comments during a conference at the Vatican, where he reportedly said he’s “about to start making” the film, Variety reports. Scorsese’s manager, Rick Yorn, did not respond to the trade publication’s request for comment. Read more at The Daily Beast.

HBONow that Succession has ended, and we know the final successor, everyone has been waiting for one big answer. It’s the answer that will put a button on this life-changing series. It’s do or die. It’s all anyone can talk about on the internet. Everyone will be hypothesizing about this specific detail throughout the rest of the weekend, if not the rest of the year, if not through TV history, and maybe even the rest of our lives—an ending as jarring as The Sopranos’ final shot. We’re all wondering it.Will Waystar Royco have to change its name?Perhaps there are more pressing topics to discuss than the future of Waystar Royco, especially considering we’ll see none of what lies ahead after tonight’s final CEO selection. We now know who runs the company. (It might not be who you think!) We now know who was screwed over. (It’s not how or why you would think!) And we know who is left sat staring at the sunset. (This might be the only one you can predict!)Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyA slick online media machine has recruited a slew of characters from Russian state-affiliated outlets—and joined a sprawling multinational network of pro-Moscow, pro-Beijing content creators backed by a U.S. businessman reportedly probed in India for ties to the Chinese Communist Party.Since it started posting to Instagram and Youtube in early 2020, nearly all BreakThrough News’ camera-facing personalities have been veterans of Kremlin-backed outfits: former Radio Sputnik host Eugene Puryear; pundit Rania Khalek of video generator ‘In the Now;’ Kei Pritsker, Abby Martin, and Brian Becker of defunct propaganda organ RT America. BreakThrough’s earliest productions lambasted America’s presidential system and persistent racial inequality, and attacked the American and Brazilian responses to the COVID-19 outbreak while praising policies in China.But beginning in January 2022, amid the build-up to Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine, the channel began sharing videos with titles like “Risking World War III with Russia: Why?” and “​​If NATO Goes to War, U.S. & European Soldiers Will Be Called On to Kill & Die.” More recent clips have carried such headlines as “Leaked Pentagon Docs Show US Elites Want Never-Ending Ukraine War” and “G7 Sends F-16 Jets to Ukraine: Flirting with Disaster, Direct War on Russia.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/GettyIn 2016, Bernie Moreno sounded like a lot of Republicans who were aghast at the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president.A wealthy and politically active Ohio businessman, Moreno had immigrated from Colombia to the United States as a child, and was outraged by Trump’s rhetoric on immigration—so much so that he compared the GOP nominee to Adolf Hitler in a Twitter poll.“We can’t throw out the people who came here as children. They don’t know anyone from their home countries,” Moreno said in a 2016 interview, defending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “We need to help them come out of the shadows.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/ShowtimeRight now, the worst person on television isn’t Tom Sandoval or Tom Schwartz from Vanderpump Rules. Or any of the Roy siblings on Succession. It’s Detective Matt Saracusa on Season 2 of Showtime’s Yellowjackets.Played with oily aplomb by 31-year-old actor John Reynolds, when we meet Saracusa, he’s “Jay,” a good-looking hipster-y guy that Callie (Sarah Desjardins), Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey) teen daughter, meets at a bar in Episode 2. Reynolds has mostly been known for playing hapless beta males on Max’s excellent comedy-mystery Search Party or in the film Save Yourselves! At first Jay seems like he could easily be another Reynolds-esque character, until it’s revealed that he’s been brought in to aid Kevyn’s (Alex Wyndham) investigation into the disappearance of Adam Martin (Peter Gadiot), which has been unfolding since Season 1.While the audience knows that Shauna and her Yellowjackets are behind Adam’s “disappearance,” by way of Jeff’s (Warren Kole) blackmail, Kevyn’s timidness around investigating Shauna’s involvement drops Saracusa right into the investigation.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/ID/GettyThe Orphan horror movies, about an adopted Eastern European girl who turns out to be a murderous adult in disguise, are nonsensical claptrap. The Curious Case of Natalia Grace puts forward the theory that may have been realistic.That suggestion is the astonishing hook of ID’s six-part, three-night docuseries event (starting May 29), whose tale concerns an Indiana couple who brought a young child into their home, only to suspect that she was a duplicitous twentysomething sociopath determined to kill them.The Curious Case of Natalia Grace’s introductory montage—a routine docuseries convention in which the juiciest elements of the forthcoming story are teased—sets some sort of record for eye-opening details and quotes, and the ensuing tale doesn’t disappoint when it comes to boggling the mind.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastTaylor Swift, a consummate workhorse who’s in the midst of a record-breaking stadium tour, is also currently on the kind of nightlife tear we haven’t seen from her since the peak of her making-New-York-City-my-personality era.This past week, People reported that the pop star was spotted making out with Matty Healy, her controversial new boyfriend, at Zero Bond, an exclusive, members-only NoHo club frequented by Mayor Eric Adams. The supposedly PDA-packed appearance comes after Swift spent six years largely tucked away from the prying eyes of the public alongside her very private ex-boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn. Indeed, ever since her breakup with Alwyn, which was first reported in April, Swift has been spotted dining out with pals and on the arm of her new beau all around New York City with uninhibited exuberance. Not since the time she frolicked with Tom Hiddleston in the ocean—while he sported that infamous “I ❤️ T.S.” tank top—has Swift appeared so carefree or so public.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Erica LaffertyA decade after my mother, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, was killed trying to protect elementary school students in the Sandy Hook School mass shooting, I am in the middle of yet another crisis brought on by poor policy: crowdfunding to pay for my cancer treatment.In late March, I was diagnosed with Stage II lymphoma, a primary orbital tumor, along with significant sized pre-cancer masses in two of my lymph nodes. Until my diagnosis, I wouldn’t have understood what most of that last sentence meant. Now I know. It means that without aggressive treatment, I may not live to see my 38th birthday.This diagnosis came as a shock to me. I had been aware of a small spot behind my left eye since 2014, but for nine years I’d been going to the eye doctor regularly to have the spot measured. It was always the same. We thought it was scar tissue. That changed last December. Fourteen weeks later, after many tests, I had a cancer diagnosis.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Joan Marcus/ParamountAt home in Buffalo, NY, the actor Stephen McKinley Henderson said he was enjoying watching his grandchildren play. “I tell you, there was no way for me to see when I was 10 years old what I would see when I was 20, 40, 50, 60, or 70,” Henderson said, a Tony Awards nominee for his role as mercurial, mysterious paterfamilias Walter “Pops” Washington in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ also Tony-nominated play, Between Riverside and Crazy.“This is retirement right now, and I may do less,” Henderson said, before laughing heartily during a recent Zoom call. “But I don’t think there will ever be a day that somebody couldn’t get me to do something. I’m going to be very hard about what I do, and I may go away for a very long time. But there’s no way that I can’t be persuaded.” Henderson laughed, imagining receiving a juicy script. “Oh man, I’ve got to read that one! Yeah!”Henderson, 73, won an Obie and Lucille Lortel Award for his performance as Pops when the show ran off-Broadway. Of the Tony nomination, Henderson told The Daily Beast, “I’m very pleased. This has been an incredible season with so many wonderful performances. I’m very glad to be in the number.” Is he competitive? This is his second Tony nomination, after one in 2010 for his role in August Wilson’s Fences. “I think I could tolerate getting the Tony,” Henderson said drily. “I think I might find it in my capacity to tolerate it. But I could also celebrate with any of the guys in my category if they won the award. I’m glad to be in the game.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

NetflixOkay, I’ll admit it. When I first scrolled past MerPeople, Netflix’s new four-part docu-series about professional mermaids, I tuned in mostly for the spectacle. Blinded like a swimmer in brackish water, I assumed “professional mermaiding” was mostly just poolside cosplay—an excuse for wigs, rhinestones, and expensive silicone tails. As a Florida-born pisces, I love all of these things, so naturally, I was on board.MerPeople’s opening scene is designed to shatter that illusion, as a group of mer-performers rises from the water in agony. The pool was over-chlorinated, so now all of their eyes are burning. It’s a mad dash to the sinks, as the distressed merpeople moan and wail. The opposite of a dress-up dream, professional mermaiding looks like an aquatic nightmare. It involves swimming in freezing-cold tanks, sometimes with live rays and “nippy” pufferfish. You could get hypothermia, and assholes will apparently hit on you all the time. Also, everything (absolutely everything) gets sweaty under that tail.Now that we know what mermaiding really is, why would anyone want to do this, exactly? Enter Mermaid Sparkles, the “landlocked mermaid” from Arkansas, whose journey to find her “mermaid family” quickly becomes the emotional anchor for a series that, I’ll admit, wound up making me cry like a little merbaby.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/DisneyThe Little Mermaid changed everything for Disney, launching the so-called Disney Renaissance in 1989. Grossing over $200 million at the box office, it brought Disney back from the brink during a particularly challenging decade for the studio.There’s so much to love about the film, from the gorgeous animation to the memorable characters, along with a great sense of humor merged with a story packed full of emotional heft. But it's the music—from Disney’s then-new wonder duo, composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman—that cements the film as a masterpiece. Menken and Ashman brought in Broadway-style songs, always propelling the narrative forward.This style of music would become a key cog in the Renaissance’s wheel, but “Part of Your World” remains in a league of its own. The song is an example of an “I Want” song, a Broadway staple that’s as it sounds: The protagonist explains through song what they’re after. The use of this type of song would be a defining characteristic of the Disney Renaissance; think Beauty and the Beast’s “Belle,” The Lion King’s “I Just Can’t Wait to be King,” The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s “Out There,” and Hercules’ “Go The Distance”—but Ashman and Menken crafted the most poignant one of them all in The Little Mermaid.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/The Library of Congress/National ArchivesI’ve beaten Ernie Pyle’s lifespan by 10 years. Came 10 feet from losing that race, with a mortar landing on that side of a T-Wall in Iraq, instead of this side. A mundane near-miss during a summer 16 years ago, when I was a reporter embedded with the 82nd Airborne Division. I can listen to the mortar’s incoming rustle on the digital recording I didn’t know was running. I can hear the shotgun blast of the explosion and the shrapnel and my sharp breath. I can hear my first word a few minutes afterwards: “Fuck.”“It’s good, though. You need a close call,” a soldier tells me, his voice recorded for posterity. “Make your stories more interesting.”It’s too strong to say I felt Post-Traumatic Stress, reading David Chrisinger’s The Soldier’s Truth, his biography of World War II war reporter Ernie Pyle, but if you’ve been there, then you’ve been there.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Evgenia Novozhenina/ReutersU.S. Senator Lindsey Graham’s recent comments during his Friday meeting with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in the war-torn country caused outrage and fury in Moscow, with the head of RT Margarita Simonyan calling for his assassination.In a video clip of the meeting, Graham’s comments were spliced in a way that made it seem that the Senator stated that the fact that Russians “are dying” in the invasion is “the best money we’ve ever spent.” In fact, Graham said that the U.S. aid to Ukraine—and not specifically the deaths of the Russians—was a valuable investment in global security for the United States.“Senator [Lindsey] Graham has something to compare with. One of their [US] investments led to World War II and the Holocaust,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed in a statement on Telegram. State TV host Vladimir Solovyov followed Zakharova’s lead on his program, Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, as he angrily exclaimed: “Your dirty American money also fully supported the Nazi regime in Germany! You are a Nazi beast and you’re following in the footsteps of your predecessors. I’ll repeat it once again: you will croak, but the Russian people will live forever!”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Murad Sezer/ReutersTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a roughly 5-percent lead over his presidential run-off opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu on Sunday, according to preliminary returns from Turkish news agencies.Erdogan led with 52.3 percent of the vote compared to Kilicedaroglu’s 47.7 percent, according to the Associated Press. It comes weeks after Erdogan narrowly missed an outright win during the country’s presidential elections on May 14, where he held 49.5 percent of the vote.If Erdogan wins, he will extend his 20-year tenure as Turkey’s leader by an additional five. He previously served as the country’s prime minister before that position was abolished, and he has been the country’s president since 2014.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Michael Moriatis/Paramount+In the first unreleased version of Fatal Attraction, the hit 1987 erotic thriller about a deadly affair, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) kills herself with a knife that has Dan Gallagher’s (Michael Douglas) fingerprints on it, and Dan is arrested for her murder. The ending provided a melancholic, poetic justice of sorts, wherein Alex died but Dan still had to face some of the consequences of his actions. Test audiences, however, reportedly hated it.According to Paramount powerhouse Sherry Lansing’s 2017 biography, audiences wanted to see Alex killed, brutally, and at the hands of Dan’s wife, Beth (Anne Archer). “They want us to terminate the bitch with extreme prejudice,” Lansing recalled another Paramount exec saying.The ending was reshot and Alex met a violent end, wherein she shows up at the Gallagher family home with a knife and attacks Beth. After Dan tries to drown her in a bathtub, Beth gets the chance to shoot and kill the other woman. The film wound up being a smash hit and ultimately reigned at Number 3 at the U.S. box office that year. The new ending was widely lauded, with the exception of Close, who—in an oral history pegged to the film’s 30th anniversary—decried the decision to turn a character she loved “into a murdering psychopath.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

CNNLess than 24 hours after the White House inked a deal with House Republicans to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a default, Republicans are already conceding they won’t be united on it.Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD), one of the deal’s negotiators and a member of some moderate Republican caucuses, conceded to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that some Republicans will not vote for the bill. However, he said, the bill was still a complete and total win for Republicans.Let’s be honest, Bob Good will not vote for this thing,” Johnson said on State of the Union, referring to his GOP colleague from Virginia. “It doesn’t matter if Mother Teresa came back from the dead and called him, he’s not voting for it. He was never going to — this is going to pass.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

REUTERS/Yui Mok/PoolQueen gave ‘express approval’ for booksQueen Elizabeth’s former dresser Angela Kelly is not departing quietly to the grace and favor home in the north of England given to her by King Charles. After last week’s revelation that he had gifted her the residence in exchange for her signing her an NDA—after she was forced to leave her home in Windsor—the Mail on Sunday reports that the late queen wrote a letter to her former dresser “granting express approval” for her to publish three books.Only two books by her have so far been published, and Charles—by reportedly getting Kelly to sign an NDA in exchange for her new digs—might have thought that the possibility of more behind-the-scenes Palace secrets being revealed had been safely extinguished. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastTimes were tough in early-19th century England. The Napoleonic Wars had decimated the country’s economy. To save costs, wealthy textile factory owners replaced skilled artisans with automated machinery to create their goods. The workers fought back—literally—by raiding the factories and destroying the machines in these mills in what became known as the Luddite movement, named after the apocryphal leader of the raids.Today, Luddite is synonymous with people who reject new technology—but we’ve seen the same struggles and frustrations with employers echoed throughout history, from Henry Ford’s assembly line, to mass food production, to self-check out lines at the grocery store. The most recent episode is now playing out in reaction to the AI boom.Since the release of ChatGPT late last year, we’ve already seen it being hailed as a kind of turning point in the tech world, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the advent of social media and the internet itself. And it’s resulted in an infusion of billions of Big Tech dollars into generative AI, and a groundswell of companies embracing the tech quickly—much to the detriment of workers. Labor unions and activists have been caught off guard, and now they’re doing everything they can to fight back before it’s too late.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/ReutersWhen Donald Trump was indicted in Manhattan court last month, all of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination were clearly laboring over how to respond.That is, except for one.Vivek Ramaswamy is not a governor, nor is he a senator, nor even an elected official. Instead, he’s a 37-year old entrepreneur and self-described “anti-woke” activist. And when Trump was indicted, Ramaswamy almost immediately declared his solidarity with Trump.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/GettyWhether we’re talking sparkly thongs or fishnet stockings, few professions exist within the sartorial imagination quite like stripping. Provocation and suggestion have always been the intention, a visual aesthetic that’s meant to play into a sexual fantasy but has been highly stigmatized in the process. But as social norms surrounding sex have continued to evolve, stripper wear has gone mainstream, with dancers taking notice of one particular trend that’s now sparked a big online debate about appropriation versus empowerment.As a former stripper named Jaylen explained, a stripper’s “dance wear is almost like a uniform.” That said, the “stripper heel” is probably “the most defining piece of the stripper aesthetic,” as the Chicago-based exotic dance wear designer added, especially the ones with a clear acrylic heel. The shoe style is so important that it’s actually a requirement at almost every club in the country, according to another dancer in Los Angeles named Hero who recalled times when they “showed up at work and realized, ‘Oh shit, I forgot my shoes. I can’t work.’”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Courtesy of Brennan Nevada JohnsonIn 1995, my family was awarded the distinction, “Family of The Year” by what was then known as the Ocean State Adoption Resource Exchange. We were being honored because of my mother’s decision and journey of being a 31 year-old, single, Black woman who chose to adopt not one, but two Black babies out of Baltimore.When word got out of our unique story, my mother, sister, and I were being interviewed around the clock by local newspapers, radio stations, and on TV discussing the importance of Black adoption. I was only four years old when all of this was happening, too young to understand why it was such a big deal.Sure, adoption wasn't uncommon, and this was an award that was given out annually. But what made our perspective so special was that you almost never saw or heard about situations where Black adults (like my mother) were adopting Black children. Nearly three decades later, it’s still uncommon and somewhat of a rarity to see Black children being adopted and raised by Black parents.Read more at The Daily Beast.