People Magazine has announced that they’re introducing a new quarterly magazine “focused exclusively on the royals.” People Mag already covers the British royals extensively and with a truck full of sugar, so I’m not sure what the quarterly magazine will cover really? Don’t get me wrong, the royals are good business, for print media and blogs alike. The Sussexes alone could keep a lot of publications in business. So is this just People Magazine milking one of their most popular subjects, royalty? Perhaps. Here’s what we can expect:

In addition to this week’s cover story on Queen Elizabeth’s private life, PEOPLE has several other royals-focused projects in the works, including a new quarterly publication and two TV specials. PEOPLE Royals will showcase glamorous new photos and inside stories fans haven’t seen or read elsewhere – from lavish celebrations and cocktails fit for a Queen to the luxurious lifestyles of the world’s real-life princes, princesses, kings, and queens.

“PEOPLE has reported on the royals since its debut in 1974,” says Dan Wakeford, Editor-in-Chief, PEOPLE. “We felt it was only natural to launch a stand-alone beautifully crafted quarterly magazine that will inspire and entertain with deep stories and lush photography.”

Each cover story will focus on a different member of the royal family and will offer a rich look into his or her untold story. The 100-page premium issue also includes a first-person essay, written by Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson and an exclusive interview with Prince Albert of Monaco, who talks about his life in quarantine during the pandemic.

PEOPLE’s vast audience has had an insatiable appetite for the royals over the years. In fact, Princess Diana appeared on the cover of PEOPLE more than any other subject in the brand’s history. William and Kate’s wedding in 2011 and Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018 remain among the best-selling issues. One of PEOPLE’s most popular digital verticals is dedicated to the royals at people.com/royals, which satisfies readers’ interest in up-to-the-minute, 24/7 content.

This week’s issue of PEOPLE featuring the Queen also highlights a letter from Wakeford about the new quarterly publication: “Kate and William and Meghan and Harry bring glamor and excitement to many around the world,” he writes. “The family has had its ups and downs, but the Queen’s strength of character and calm leadership have helped steady the monarch, and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren have ensured that the royals will captivate us for years to come.”

[From People]

See, if it’s just Katie Nicholl-esque hagiography on the Windsors, I’m going to have to pass. And I wonder how much Fergie is getting paid to write and consult? Good lord. This feels like it could be especially messy. Think of the Windsors going to People Mag and making them do all of the heavy lifting of fluffing up the Keens’ images, not to mention the petty-ass Queen. I wonder if People Mag will even bother to call out the Keens for their shenanigans now that they need even more access for their stupid quarterly magazine?

People has also announced that they’ve got two more royal specials coming out on the CW. Harry & Meghan’s American Dream will air on Tuesday, March 30 at 9pm ET/PT, and PEOPLE Presents: William & Kate’s Royal Anniversary will air on Thursday, April 29, at 8pm ET/PT. Lordt.

Anyway, any excuse to reuse these photos of Kate at the 2019 Royal Ascot. She was especially lively because the Windsors forced Meghan and Harry to stay away from Royal Ascot that year. Kate had center stage all to herself, so she celebrated by wearing a Victorian doily.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, WENN.

Benedict Cumberbatch has the kind of look which works well for period films. It’s kind of a wonder that he ever gets work to play modern roles, because he’s so completely suited to play World War II or post-war characters. After trying and failing to play American characters, Benedict returned to what he does best: a posh British accent and period costume. In The Courier, and Benedict plays a “normal guy,” a salesman who is recruited by British intelligence to work as an asset and spy, flying into Russia under the “businessman” guise during the height of the Cold War in 1960. Here’s the trailer:

What’s kind of crazy to realize is that Britain has so many of these stories which have never been told because of the Official Secrets Act, a catch-all for all kinds of huge secrets during World War II and the Cold War. MI6 did a lot of good and bad work during that time period, and I have no problem believing that they thought it would be super-clever to send an untrained businessman into Russia to work as a spy. As for Cumberbatch… I’m an old-school Cumberbitch and I love him in these kinds of roles, clearly. It looks like a great vehicle for everything he does well as an actor, plus it just looks like an interesting story.

GALLERY UPDATE: Five new stills featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne in ‘The Courier’ https://t.co/FRaL0xZBKv pic.twitter.com/qVyYnpo7qU

— Benedict Cumberbatch Central (@cumberbatchcom) January 27, 2021

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.

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I’m old enough to remember what kind of “internet age” we were promised. We were promised mass information, mass communication, and the rise of a socialist-lite egalitarian community. What we got was “too big to fail” banks wrecking the economy and the rise of Nazis, fascism and dumbf–k conspiracies like QAnon. But this story has made me hopeful that at least some people are trying to bring chaotic good to the stock market. The backstory: hedge funds wield their $100 billion-plus portfolios around, making massive bets that this stock will fail or that stock will rise. Some of the biggest hedge funds in the world decided to short GameStop’s stock, betting that the stock would continue to decline and that they would reap a huge profit. Then a wide variety of small investors, mostly self-organizing on Reddit, decided to mass invest in GameStop and a handful of other declining stocks. Reddit’s small investors pushed the price of GameStop’s stock so high, and now they’re cashing out, making a huge profit on their small investment. Wall Street is FREAKING OUT.

A real estate salesman in Valparaiso, Ind. A former line cook from the Bronx. An evangelical pastor and his wife in Huntington Beach, Calif. A high school student in the Milwaukee suburbs. They are among the millions of amateur traders collectively taking on some of Wall Street’s most sophisticated investors — and, for the moment at least, winning. Propelled by a mix of greed and boredom, gleefully determined to teach Wall Street a lesson, and turbocharged by an endless flow of get-rich-quick hype and ideas delivered via social media, these investors have piled into trades around several companies, pushing their stock prices to stratospheric levels.

Some of the names are from an earlier business era. BlackBerry’s shares are up nearly 280 percent this year. Stock in AMC, the movie theater chain, has surged nearly 840 percent. But the trade that captures the David-versus-Goliath nature of the moment involves GameStop, the troubled video game retailer that was once a fixture in suburban malls.

On Wall Street, individual investors are often derided as “dumb money,” destined to lose against the highly compensated analysts and traders who buy and sell stocks for a living. But in recent days, individual investors — many of them followers of a popular, juvenile, foul-mouthed Reddit page called Wall Street Bets — have upended that narrative by banding together to put the squeeze on at least two hedge funds that had bet that GameStop’s shares would fall.

While the hedge funds and other professional money managers had been shorting GameStop’s shares, betting that its stock was doomed to further decline, the retail investors — online traders, mom-and-pop investors, small brokers and others — have been pushing the other way, buying shares and stock options. That caused GameStop’s market value to increase to over $24 billion from $2 billion in a matter of days. Its shares have risen over 1,700 percent since December. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, the market value rose over $10 billion.

The tribal framing online, as a kind of team sport pitting plucky upstarts against well-heeled Wall Streeters, has been especially helpful in motivating more investors to participate. This week, Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, fueled the trading by posting about the Reddit page on Twitter. And speculation is growing that other investors are seeing fresh opportunities to push the stock even higher.

No one knows how this ends. Some analysts say the intense activity could eventually prompt a wider sell-off in the market by forcing hedge funds on the losing side of these trades to sell parts of their portfolios to raise cash to cover their losses. While this speculative frenzy played out on the market’s sidelines, the S&P 500 fell more than 2.5 percent on Wednesday, its worst day since late October, as the Federal Reserve gave a glum assessment of the economy and before a number of big tech companies announced their earnings.

[From The NY Times]

There’s no hedge fund which will ever be designated “too big to fail” – meaning, there is no bailout on the horizon. Instead, you have the so-called professional class of Wall Street commentators completely flummoxed by what is happening, and some of the richest hedge funds in America losing billions in a matter of days. It honestly is like an episode of Billions (a show I love). I saw one Wall Street analyst try to explain what was happening as “it’s a combination of boredom and people investing their stimulus checks.” Which is funny, because that’s the way these douchebags think – “we gave the peasants a few dollars and now look what happened!” Anyway, I’m proud of these small investors. I saw some screencaps from Reddit where the small investors were talking about donating portions of their profits to charity and helping family members pay for medical care. These are real people… screwing over faceless hedge-funds and feeding the poor.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about this mess too, lol.

Psaki on Biden’s thoughts about GameStop stonks: “It is a good reminder that the stock market is not the only measure of the health of our economy and it does not reflect how working and middle-class families are doing.” pic.twitter.com/xAopMdOcWU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 27, 2021

BREAKING: Elon Musk loses “richest man in the world” title to TigBitties420_x

— manny (@mannyfidel) January 27, 2021

Regardless of what I understand about the stock market, it’s just nice to know that right now in Greenwich, Connecticut there are broke hedge fund managers weeping in their parked Range Rovers while their mistresses are sending them to voicemail.

— Bess Kalb (@bessbell) January 28, 2021

The Internet showing up to repossess a hedge fund manager’s house pic.twitter.com/cfgtiHTi5S

— Zack Bornstein (@ZackBornstein) January 28, 2021

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Photos courtesy of Getty.

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Paris Hilton and boyfriend Carter Reum are going strong over a year after we found out they were together. So strong, the couple is looking to take the next step in the relationship. But not the one we were expecting. According to Paris, the couple is currently undergoing in-vitro fertilization to have a baby. Paris, who has been taking advice from renewed gal-pal Kim Kardashian, froze her eggs and is ready to fulfill her dream of becoming a mom. Because to Paris, having kids is “the meaning of life.”

Taking a huge step! Paris Hilton confirmed that she is undergoing in vitro fertilization with boyfriend Carter Reum — and they have Kim Kardashian to thank.

“We talk about [planning a wedding] all the time and planning our baby’s names and all of that,” the businesswoman, 39, said on “The Trend Reporter with Mara” podcast on Tuesday, January 26. “So, I’m really excited to just move on for the next step of my life and finally just have, like, a real life. I really do believe that having a family and having children is the meaning of life. I haven’t got to experience that yet because I don’t feel that anyone really deserved that love from me and now I’ve finally found the person who does, so I cannot wait for that next step.”

The Simple Life alum added, “We have been doing the IVF, so I can pick twins if I like. Kim is actually the one who told me about that. I didn’t even know anything about it.”

In January 2020, Us Weekly confirmed that Hilton was dating the 39-year-old M13 Ventures founder. At the time, a source told Us that the duo were “extremely serious” and that an engagement “could happen very quickly.”

A source told Us exclusively in August 2020 that Hilton was “definitely trying” to get pregnant and is ready to “start a family,” and the heiress said in an interview that same month that Kardashian “inspired” her to freeze her eggs.

“I think every woman should do it because you can really control it and not have that ‘Oh, my God, I need to get married’ [mindset],” the “Stars Are Blind” singer told Britain’s Sunday Times. “I’m obsessed with dressing them up. I want … twins, because then you get [a girl and a boy] at once.”

During a “Lady Gang” podcast appearance the following month, Hilton teased what she wants to name her future children. “I have baby London, which is the girl, and I’m trying to figure out a name for the boy,” she explained at the time, noting that she doesn’t “want a theme of cities” for her babies’ monikers.

[From Us]

To be fair to Paris, she has been talking about wanting kids for a very long time. However, if her true reasoning for wanting a baby is because she believes, “that having a family and having children is the meaning of life,” that’s a bit concerning. Attaching that much importance to anything is red flag for anybody. Especially if, in her next breath, she gives the reasons of wanting kids to dress them up and because she’s picked out names. I remember when Paris appeared in the documentary The American Meme and talked about giving her phone number out to her fans whom she called her “Little Hiltons.” She spoke of them as if they were her children, watching them “grow up” and how they “just genuinely love me.” She claimed to speak to these fans every single day because of the validation they gave her.

Paris is 39. She’s wanted kids forever and Carter seems like a decent enough guy. The scenario makes sense. I hope things work out for her the way she has them planned. But that’s just it, babies rarely follow the plans we make for them.

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Immediately after the January 6th insurrection, various Democratic congresspeople expressed their very real concerns that they were afraid of certain Republican members of Congress. Like, those Democrats were genuinely afraid that some GOP representatives and senators had aided and abetted the Capitol terrorists, and that those Republicans were still planning to harm Democrats. The shortlist of potentially murderous Republicans was pretty obvious to most, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was on top. She’s a QAnon conspiracist with a history of “liking” social media posts which threatened violence against Democrats.

As that story took hold this week, another story about Rep. Greene came out – she was one of the wingnuts filming herself stalking and harassing survivors of the Parkland shooting. She’s one of those reprehensible “false flag” conspiracists who believe that “the government did Parkland and Sandy Hook so they could take away our guns.” Those dumbf–ks also believe that the children who died in those shootings didn’t really exist, and that the traumatized parents are just “actors.” I sh-t you not. There is still a “cottage industry” of gun nuts who stalk and harass Parkland and Sandy Hook survivors and the parents of murdered children. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of those gun nuts.

Video of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg before she was elected to Congress went viral Wednesday amid an uproar over newly reported comments she made in 2018 and 2019. In the video from March 2019, Greene follows Hogg as he walks toward the US Capitol. She can be heard making false and baseless claims as she asks him a series of questions related to gun rights and how he was able to meet with senators. Hogg continues to walk without addressing Greene.

“He’s a coward,” Greene says at the end of the video as Hogg walks away, claiming his activism was funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is often the subject of far-right conspiracy theories, and other liberals. “He can’t say one word because he can’t defend his stance.” Greene — who has previously called Hogg “#littleHitler” — said in a written statement to CNN that the video was taken while she was in Washington, “going from office to office in the Senate to oppose the radical gun control agenda that David Hogg was pushing.”

[From CNN]

What’s f–king bonkers about the Greene video is that SHE MADE IT HERSELF and she posted it online. And somehow it never cropped up during her congressional campaign? Jesus. After one of the Parkland parents posted the video IDing Greene, David Hogg tweeted his statement, and he’ll be doing interviews today. There’s also a movement to flat-out expel Greene from Congress. Republicans are fighting it.

.@mtgreenee, is this you harassing @davidhogg111 weeks after the Parkland shooting, that my daughter was killed in & he was in? Calling him a coward for ignoring your insanity. I will answer all of your questions in person. Get ready to record again.pic.twitter.com/aQjL74x7kh

— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) January 27, 2021

1/2 As we fight for peace we also face massive amounts of death threats and armed intimidation simply for not wanting our friends to die anymore.

This is not the country we should be and it’s not the country we have to be.

— David Hogg (He / Him) (@davidhogg111) January 28, 2021

I didn’t realize there was also video of @mtgreenee following us 10 min before the outside interaction too pic.twitter.com/tRzH9VraqR

— David Hogg (He / Him) (@davidhogg111) January 28, 2021

BTW part of the reason we were so calm with @mtgreenee harassing us was because we have been through similar stuff so many times before it’s just this time it was on video- and they’re in Congress now.

What you see in that video is about 0.1% of what we go through in a year.

— David Hogg (He / Him) (@davidhogg111) January 28, 2021

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Photos courtesy of Getty.

Whenever a royal figure appears on the cover of People Magazine, seemingly out of nowhere, I wonder what’s going on behind-the-scenes and why that royal needed a hit of sugary People Mag PR. It happens all the time with the Duchess of Cambridge, who in recent years has gone to People Mag to take a “mulligan” on whatever negative story is out there at the time. So it’s very strange to see Queen Elizabeth doing the same. QEII had a horrendous 2020 – she went into lockdown too late, then she refused to say much in the way of public support during the pandemic. She wandered around maskless, she made people give her a birthday parade and she also forced her 99-year-old husband to travel to Scotland and change his living situation several times for no good reason. It was a mess and it was all so bloody unnecessary. So, it’s time for a soft-focus piece on how the Queen loves to… laugh?

Queen Elizabeth is known for her stoic nature, but there is an unexpected side to the monarch. The Queen “is much livelier in private than what the public sees,” royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith, author of Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch, tells PEOPLE in one of this week’s cover stories.

The author quotes a source at the Queen’s country estate in Norfolk, Sandringham, once saying, “‘You can hear her laugh throughout that big house.’ She has a big laugh!”

The Queen, 94, can also be surprisingly self-deprecating. Not long after Prince Charles’ 1981 wedding to Princess Diana, a rerun of the ceremony was playing on TV during a party in London that the monarch was attending. Spotting herself on the screen, “The Queen said, ‘Oh, there’s my Miss Piggy face,’?” Bedell Smith recalls. “She has the ability to laugh at herself.”

And while Queen Elizabeth’s portraits are often serious and unemotional, she knows how to have some fun too. During a shoot celebrating her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the Queen told photographer Barry Jeffrey to “just keep the camera rolling!” as she broke from the norm. The Queen proceeded to strike a “series of poses, slipping her hands in and out of her pockets and placing them onto her hips, mimicking the stances of a professional model,” recalled her dress maker and close confidante Angela Kelly.

They stood “in disbelief. The Queen was a natural,” Kelly marveled. “Barry and I felt we were experiencing something really special: a moment never to be repeated.”

When the Queen wants to relax, she turns to her beloved animals: her last living dorgi (a crossbred corgi and dachshund), Candy, and her stable of Fell ponies, a distinct English breed.

“She goes into a peaceful mode when she is with horses,” says her close friend and equine adviser Monty Roberts.

[From People]

Interesting that Angela Kelly is quoted. Kelly ran around last year, claiming that Meghan and Harry had cursed her out after she pulled some tiara shenanigans. She was the central source for the entire “Meghan’s tiara drama” story. Then, to get the final word, Angela ran to Richard Kay at the Mail, pushed stories about how close she is with QEII and basically made them sound like late-in-life lovers, like she’s the sole gatekeeper to the Queen. It was unhinged. As for this People cover and the effort to make the Queen sound like a normal person… please. This is the same petty, grumpy a–hole who denied a veteran of war the opportunity to have a wreath laid at the Cenotaph. Liz of House Petty is reprehensible.

Oh, and in another cover story excerpt, “sources” claim that the pandemic is “the only slight rest she’s ever had in her whole life.” Are you f–king kidding me? The woman goes to Balmoral EVERY YEAR for two (sometimes three) months so she can “have a vacation.” She did that in 2020 again, and forced all of her workers to quarantine for weeks away from their families, just so she could have a few months sitting on her royal arse at a different palatial estate.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.

Dakota Johnson is doing promotional rounds for her film, Our Friend. It also stars Jason Segel and Casey Affleck and is about a dying wife being cared for by her husband and their best friend. I’m not quite sold on it yet. But I do like Dakota, primarily because she is unflinchingly honest in interviews. This trait is even more entertaining because Dakota makes a habit of lying in her everyday life and then confessing to those lies in her interviews. We’ve only just recovered from learning that her love of limes is a blatant untruth, made up on the spot simply to be entertaining. And now there’s this: Dakota impersonates other famous people to get restaurant reservations. She did, at least, before her own name got her a table. While on The Drew Barrymore Show, Drew asked Dakota about pretending to be George Clooney to get tables. And I guess he heard about it – and didn’t care.

Did you or did you not used to make reservations at restaurants under the name George Clooney as to get the best table?

No, it wasn’t even to get the best table. It was just to get a reservation. But I did that.

But you met him, and he was (okay with it)

Yeah, weirdly. I had not met him yet, obviously, and he was like, “I’ve heard about what you’ve done.” I was like, “Oh my god.“ But he was cool with it.

[From YouTube via DListed]

I asked the same thing Allison at DListed asked: was being the legacy of Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffin and Don Johnson really not enough to get a table in LA? Sheesh, tough crowd. It probably takes that kind of pedigree to have the guts to impersonate George Clooney’s party, though, so it counted for something. When Jimmy Fallon asked Dakota about this on The Tonight Show in 2019, he wanted to know what happened once she showed up at the joint sans George. She said she’d tell them George was on his way or meeting them later and they’d buy it every time. I can tell you from first-hand experience this is a blatant double standard. Most fancy pants places that require you to pretend to be Clooney to get a reservation won’t seat you until your whole party is present, and they will cancel your @ss if the others aren’t there within 15 minutes of the reserved time. But I guess if the outstanding person has an impressive IMDb page attached to their name, it’s a different set of rules.

How did George find out it was Dakota using his name? It must be a legacy hotline thing, information just gets around. I love that he was fine with it. This is just a great story all around.

I’ve included the Fun Facts with Dakota Johnson segment below because it’s cute. Drew asks her about learning how to be a cowgirl in Colorado from her dad. They also speak about the curated lists her production company, TeaTime, posts. Jimmy Fallon also asked her about those when she was on his show. I’ve only just now learned about them, they’re really good. They post them for music, films, books – you can check them out on their Instagram page.

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Photo credit: YouTube, Getty and Avalon

Our good brother Tyler Perry is making headlines again but this time it is not for feeding thousands of Atlantans during a pandemic. Instead, Tyler looks to educate the Black community about the Coronavirus vaccine in hopes to dispel suspicion. Due to a history of horrible and unethical government-backed medical experiments (read: Henrietta Lacks, Tuskegee Experiment and Dr. J. Marion Sims), many Black people have a healthy suspicion of the medical industry and the government. At the moment Black people are falling behind white people in getting vaccinated against covid which is a cause for concern since Black people are disproportionately affected.

Tyler appeared on CBS’s This Morning to promote COVID-19 Vaccine and the Black Community: A Tyler Perry Special in collaboration with BET. Tyler received the vaccine live while talking to doctors. Below are more details via People:

With a new informative BET project titled COVID-19 Vaccine and the Black Community: A Tyler Perry Special, the filmmaker, 51, receives the coronavirus vaccine on-camera and ask doctors questions in order to help de-stigmatize vaccinations amid the ongoing pandemic. Perry admitted during a recent CBS This Morning appearance that he was skeptical at first and that he understands the skepticism in the Black community.

“If you look at our history in this country, with the Tuskegee experiment, Henrietta Lacks and things like that, it raises flags for us as African American people. So I understand why there’s a healthy skepticism about the vaccine,” he said.

Perry said prior to learning more about the technology that produced the vaccines so quickly, he “didn’t really feel like he could trust it.” But he explained, “Once I got all the information, found out the research, I was very, very happy.”

Opting for the Pfizer vaccine, Perry said he had no reactions to the first dose earlier this month, and after the follow-up second round he had on Monday, Perry said he “woke up with some aches and pains, but I took some Advil about an hour ago and I feel fine now.”

Despite slight aches and pains, Perry assured that he has no regrets in taking the vaccines, given the alternative.

“Here’s what you don’t understand: the problem with this COVID-19 virus is you never know how it’s going to affect you,” he said. “I’ve had people die that I know, people who have had long-term health issues that I know. So you’re making the choice of getting the vaccine … and reducing your chances of ending up in the ICU by 100 percent.”

“I think it’s important for people to know that if you take your chances with COVID, you never know how it’s going to affect you, and it could affect your long-term health,” said Perry.

[From People]

Like I have said before, I personally do not like Tyler’s movies but I love him, specifically his philanthropy. Ironically, Tyler has proven to leads by example and be a voice of reason in the Black community. I applaud Tyler for going after some Black churches and leaders for helping spread disinformation as it was the Black church (chitlin’ circuit) that supported his first movie efforts. I have spoken to many Black people who said their pastor claimed the vaccine is unsafe. I believe that Tyler has the clout to address these issues. With being so high profile, many Black people would listen to and take Tyler seriously and I like that he is using this to educate folks. Many of my friends and I wanted to wait until the vaccine went through more cycles of research before getting vaccinated. However, when I found out from Kizzmekia Corbett, a Black scientist who helped develop the vaccine, that the vaccine had been in research for over a decade, I decided that it was safe. I am now on a waiting list in my county. My other friends are as well and one has gotten her first dose.

I do hope that Perry’s project with BET is effective at getting Black people motivated to get vaccinated. The tide has to turn at some point. I want to see my family, friends, and community (who overwhelmingly work on the frontlines), healthy and sticking around longer. I personally want to start traveling again. Anyhow, if you haven’t gotten vaccinated I encourage you to research your options and get on a list if you can. I hope that the majority of the U.S. and the world are vaccinated by the end of the summer so that we can get back to a normal-ish life and our death toll began to level out. Nothing will go back to the way it was. We are different and we have all suffered lost this last year, so many people have died unnecessarily because of poor governing. I also feel we must grieve our former lives. After we grieve, we must embrace our new normal.

COVID-19 Vaccine and the Black Community airs tonight at 9pm ET/PT on BET.

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With the COVID vaccines here, optimism grows. With new vaccines in the works and the distribution getting fast-tracked, projections of when we might be able to start hanging out again are being cautiously moved forward. Now, the Center for Disease Control says they have enough data to suggest that our kids can go back to in-person classrooms. According to new evidence, the CDC said students going back in the classroom has done little to spread the disease, as long as they maintain all the COVID precautions such as washing hands, social distancing and wearing masks.

Evidence shows that K-12 schools can safely resume in-person instruction in the U.S., as long as steps are taken to continue reducing the spread of COVID-19, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

As students returned to school across the nation — and the globe — for the fall semester “there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission,” of COVID-19, researchers for the CDC wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

According to the report, a study of COVID-19 transmission among people ages 0 to 18 in Mississippi found that attending gatherings and social functions outside one’s home, as well as having visitors inside the home, was associated with increased risk of infection.

However, in-person school attendance was not.

“Accumulating data now suggest a path forward to maintain or return primarily or fully to in-person instructional delivery,” the researchers said.

That path would include taking steps to reduce transmission of COVID-19 in schools, including wearing masks and maintaining social distancing, as well as limiting activities such as indoor sports and other extracurricular activities.

[From People]

I want to be excited about this. However, reading the article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, their US samples are from rural Wisconsin, 11 school districts in North Carolina with 90,000 students and staff and one unspecified part of Mississippi. There are over 730,000 students alone in the single Los Angeles school district. Over 1M in New York’s, so the samples used in the evidence are a concern to me. Plus, the article relies heavily on the communities in which the school reside adhering to strict COVID precautions. Meaning everyone should be wearing masks and social distancing. No one should be gathering in homes or in large numbers unnecessarily. All outside interaction should remain limited. I wish I could rely on my community to do that, but they have yet to prove they can. Our school district, which is right outside LA unified, reopened to a hybrid in-person learning for K-2 for two months, I think, before all students were pulled back home. We just received another email they were going to try that again after Gov Newsom inexplicably reopened the state. Yes, we have seen a small dip in cases, but still have no hospital beds and are rationing resources. EMTs and ICU triage cases based on chances of survival. So all of this sounds like too much of a gamble to me.

The focus of the People article and the JAMA article seems to be the mental health of the students. It’s a valid concern. In CA, we haven’t gotten to Tier 1b on the vaccine process yet, which means out teachers haven’t been vaccinated. I absolutely agree that the current at-home school conditions and resources has put a giant mental strain on students. But based on these articles, there’s too much assumption to feel confident that sending them back to the classrooms will alleviate stress and not just create new ones. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep working towards getting kids back in school. And communities that have shown no growth in new cases and proper guideline adherence should allow kids in classrooms. But I think even if I asked my socially starved children their preference right now, they’d be freaked out given the horror show we’ve been witness to over the last six months.

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Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema from Unsplash and Getty Images

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Halsey has grown up a lot after her confessional early interviews. It happened gradually in recent years. She talked about her endo struggles. She mourned a miscarriage. She spoke in detail about her own mental health struggles, and told people to stop making jokes about Kanye West’s manic episode. She stopped self-medicating with booze and everything else. She wasn’t so confessional about her love life. The drama absolutely went down to a manageable level. And now Halsey is expecting her first child. Congrats!

Halsey announced her pregnancy – where else – on social media. She posted some lovely photos on Instagram with the comment “surprise!” The father is Alev Aydin, a Turkish 37-year-old screenwriter who is LA-based, just like Halsey. According to People’s source, Alev and Halsey “have been dating for several months. Halsey has been low-key about their relationship. They were spending a lot of time at her house in the fall though, and it was obvious that she was happy.” Hm… did she get pregnant really quickly when they first started dating? But Halsey’s fans also figured out that she and Alev were dating as far back as last June. So it does seem like this was a real relationship before she got knocked up. I guess! Alev was commenting on Halsey’s social media too, writing “Heart so full, I love you, sweetness.”

Anyway, congrats to the two of them, soon to be three of them. I have my fingers crossed for them!

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Photos courtesy of Instagram.