Tuesday, 28 February 2017
“Feud” Season 2 Will Focus On Princess Diana And Prince Charles
Fox Photos / Getty Images
FX just announced that Ryan Murphy's newest anthology series, Feud, has not only been renewed for a second season, but that Season 2 will focus on Prince Charles and Princess Diana!
Murphy will write the 10-episode Feud: Charles and Diana with Jon Robin Baitz (The Slap, Brothers & Sisters).
At this time, no additional details are known about Feud Season 2, other than that it will premiere in 2018.
That said, Murphy has a penchant for luring A-list talent to television for his various FX anthologies: Annette Bening and Matthew Broderick will star in the Hurricane Katrina-centric second season of American Crime Story, while Susan Sarandon and Catherine Zeta-Jones join Murphy mainstay Jessica Lange in the first season of Feud, about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, which premieres March 5. So, the iconic roles in Feud: Charles and Diana are sure to be highly coveted gigs.
via BuzzFeed/Travel
People Turned The Official Best Picture Oscar Card Into A Hilarious Meme
“Best Picture: Paul Blart: Mall Cop.”
Last night, the Academy Awards ended in one of the least conventional ways in its history.
Kevin Winter / Getty Images
After La La Land was initially announced as the Best Picture winner, it was noted there was a mistake and Moonlight was the actual winner of the night.
Christopher Polk / Getty Images
La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz held up the card, correctly showing there had been a mistake and Moonlight was the actual winner.
AMPAS / ABC
via BuzzFeed/Travel
15 Very Good Service Animals Guaranteed To Make Your Heart Feel Full
Service animals, and the humans they help, come in many shapes and sizes.
This very good pony, who helps their human with a nerve disorder:
Moxie the Hockey Puppy, who helps her veteran pal kick butt at hockey:
This peach princess, who makes little ones in the hospital smile:
In addition to many other skills, this sassy bean will make you laugh!
via Buzzfeed/Animals
The 3 Biggest Mistakes I Made Starting My Online Business
Setting out by yourself to start a business can be an exciting and also scary time. Whatever your reason for needing to go solo and make it on your own, what follows is usually a messy experiment of failures and successes than eventually (hopefully) becomes a business you can be proud of, or the makings of an entrepreneur who’s not afraid to give anything a go.
It can be even scarier when most of what you do is online for everyone to see (or not, as is the case with my third business mistake below). The sheer volume of opportunities we have to access clients, suppliers, collaborators and solutions online is unprecedented, to the extent that even a stay at home mum can start a business in her pyjamas and eventually offer her husband a job.
However, despite eventually succeeding in my ventures, most of my mistakes had nothing to do with the online realm at all. It can be easy to think online business is easier, but it still needs you to focus on all the hallmarks required of any traditional business. Here’s where I fell down, so you can hopefully avoid the same pitfalls.
1. Not Keeping My Finances in Check
My ‘business’ started out fairly slowly with revenue trickling in from here and there. I did have the foresight to set up as a Sole Trader (a simple Australian business structure), but I didn’t set up a separate bank account because as a sole trader I would be taxed at the same rate as an individual. So all my revenue earned went into my personal account and was spent as personal income.
My big mistake was not considering the implication of no longer having income tax withheld from my earnings. When you’re employed, your employer does that for you and passes the tax onto the government. When you’re a sole trader, you need to do that yourself, preferably on a regular basis ie each quarter. I learned the hard way, getting landed with an $11,000 tax bill at the end of my first financial year.
To make things even more difficult, I wasn’t really keeping effective financial records, so submitting my tax return was painful and eventually resulted in many tears and a visit to an accountant. My accountant set me on the right track, helped me get set up with an accounting system, a business bank account, and the correct business structure. They also empowered me to learn how to manage and understand my own accounts and tax obligations. You may want to delegate these to a bookkeeper and/or your accountant, but I thoroughly recommend learning to understand how your finances work in your own business first.
2. Working with the Wrong People
I think this is a pretty common mistake. When we first start out we eagerly take business that comes our way, usually for the wrong reasons – they’re a friend, they were referred by a friend, we need the money, we tell ourselves we need the experience – even if they’re not quite the right fit.
I’ve taken on clients and then realised I should have done more homework. I would have recognised that I couldn’t actually help them. I’ve worked with clients who have said they want one thing and then after it was delivered, moved the goalposts – like to another playing field!
It’s the same with people who you contract or sub-contract to – your judgement can be easily clouded, but when it really matters, the mismatch in expectations or skill will become painfully clear.
The best ways to avoid these mistakes is to:
- have a very clear expectation of what you want in a client and/or contractor
- do your homework and make sure they actually fit the brief. Ask for examples of work from a potential contractor, or at least do a trial run.
- ensure expectations are clearly understood – do they understand what you’ll be doing for them and what they’ll be doing for you?
- be super vigilant with the above if considering working with friends or family
3. Lacking Self Confidence
Deciding to jump the fence from being an influencer to working with influencers was a big step for me. There was some definite imposter syndrome going on, and as such I ended up spending too much time worrying about branding and business cards (which is important to help you stand out) and not enough time creating content and promoting myself. I felt like I had to hide behind some pretty fancy business cards that cost me $900 (wow, that hurts to admit that!) and remembered crying when my toddler destroyed $30 worth of business cards in the blink of an eye!
I have always identified as the experimenter, not the expert. I’m a terrible self-promoter and I worry about what people would think if I ever wrote an opinion piece, hence why finding blog posts authored by yours truly is like searching for hens teeth. Not the best strategy if you want to be found online!
Last week Darren introduced you to Robert Gerrish of Flying Solo in a podcast interview about how to overcome the challenges of being a solo entrepreneur. I’ve been going through his Soloism course and came across this very frank observation:
Being a soloist demands that you are prepared to stand up, stand out and get noticed. It also demands that you stand for something, have opinions and can talk powerfully and passionately about what you do, who for, why and how. This is stepping into the expert’s space – standing under the spotlight.
Are you ready to stand under that spotlight? I wish I had realised that positioning yourself as an expert is not about he or she who shouts loudest. Any confidence (even the quiet kind) can help you create content and opportunities that will allow the right people to find you and work with you. It’s something I’m still learning to do so that I can continue to grow into the entrepreneur who’s not afraid to give anything a go.
Soloism ‘Work Your Way’
Solosim would have helped me to avoid most of my business mistakes, except maybe the tax one – there’s no specific advice on that, and is best pursued with your relevant local authorities. When you go it alone you don’t have to be truly alone – there are great communities like ours and Flying Solo to draw from, and the Solosim ‘Work your way course’ can help you at whatever stage you’re in with your solo business.
With over 80 videos and supported by exercises, worksheets and online discussion, Work your way is the most comprehensive course of its kind anywhere. The modules help you to attract more dream clients. Fire clients. Find a mentor. Coach yourself. Work faster. Work slower. Work healthily. Charge more. Smile more. Expand. Contract. Enter new markets. Design your office. Design your week. Design your exit.
I’m looking forward to the next stage of my own entrepreneurial venture, as it is ever changing and exciting. I’ll see you on the other side of this module on ‘Rejuvenating and Refreshing’!
ProBlogger is an affiliate partner of Soloism who is offering a 20% discount off the Work your way course. We earn a small commission if you purchase Soloism but we offer our genuine recommendation for it and the Robert’s teaching.
The post The 3 Biggest Mistakes I Made Starting My Online Business appeared first on ProBlogger.
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Monday, 27 February 2017
A Beautiful Reason Why An Iranian Director Chose Two Scientists To Accept His Oscar
Ansari and Naderi
Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Images
Two Iranian-American scientists came to the 2017 Academy Awards in the place of nominee Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director of The Salesman. They might have seemed out of place — a pair of accomplished professionals in hard sciences sitting not so far from little statues of gold nude men who were meant to denote artistic excellence.
Asghar’s film won Best Foreign Language Film on Sunday; prior to that, on Jan. 29, he’d announced he was boycotting the ceremony in light of President Donald Trump’s travel ban affecting seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. The director did not even personally know his representatives at the awards: Anousheh Ansari, an engineer and astronaut, and Firouz Naderi, the former director of solar system exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and former manager of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.
When Asghar’s film won, Ansari read a statement from the director: “My absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of other six nations whom have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the US. Dividing the world into the ‘us’ and ‘our enemies’ categories creates fear — a deceitful justification for aggression and war. These wars prevent democracy and human rights in countries which have themselves been victims of aggression. Filmmakers can turn their cameras to capture shared human qualities and break stereotypes of various nationalities and religions. They create empathy between us and others, an empathy which we need today more than ever.”
The day after the Oscars, Naderi told BuzzFeed News he could at least conjure a guess as to why Asghar, whom he’d never met, asked them to take his place.
Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images
“This being cinema, he could have chosen Iranian-American actresses and actors to represent him. … As I said last night, once you go away from the Earth and look back at the Earth, you see no borders, no lines separating countries. It is one, whole, beautiful unit,” Naderi explained on the phone. “I think given that he wanted to be talking about the global nature of our world today, and argue against a travel ban, he selected two people who are not in arts, but who work in space.”
(Asghar did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.)
Naderi himself is an immigrant — he came to the US initially on a student visa in 1964, and he came back to the US for good after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. “I thought I would have come back anyway, because I already had my green card, and my intent was to make America my home, it just rushed it,” he said with a chuckle. “When the revolution came to Iran, they were anti-intellectual — I’m sorry to say that I’m seeing bit of that now in the US.”
Naderi also spoke against Trump’s executive order, saying that he was most troubled by how it negatively affected students. “This travel ban would not withstand even a modest logical scrutiny,” said the esteemed scientist. “Banning students to come here and go to universities, or a grandmother to come and visit the family? How does that change the equation in the Middle East? And how does it enhance the security of the US? … To alienate those people because you disagree with their government — the very government that oppresses them — how does that make sense?”
via BuzzFeed/Travel
Why Your Blog Needs SEO
In the second part of our three-part series on the What, How and Why of SEO and how it relates to your blog, we’ll be exploring why your blog needs SEO (you can find the first post SEO For Bloggers: A Basic Explanation here).
The reasons for writing a blog are varied, from sharing your knowledge to earning income, but they all depend on attracting, maintaining and growing an audience. You can have a blog filled with great writing and information, but if no one reads it, all you have is a diary.
The Importance of SEO
Now for some sobering facts. At any given time there are approximately 164 million blogs in circulation, yet 80% of those stagnate with readership numbers of less than a thousand, and many with, as the industry maxim goes, readerships of one.
A common process with bloggers, especially when starting out, is to pump out content, a “build it and they will come” approach. This is pointless and an approach that will only dishearten your efforts in building a loyal readership. If you weren’t attracting readers with five blog posts, what makes you think writing ten more will change anything?
So how do you increase your readership base? Well, promotion is the key, along with the ability of your blog to be found. That’s where SEO comes in.
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process used to write and structure your blog in such a way as to raise your search engine rankings. When done correctly it means more people finding and reading your blog. Here’s why:
SEO Is Cost-Effective Marketing
In the search for more readers, many blog owners resort to advertising on social media or paying for ads on other blogs. This approach will usually cost you money. Typically, not what a blogger wants. Utilise the power of SEO to:
- Accurately pinpoint your audience – achieving better results than ads
- Save money by researching and writing your own campaign
- Customise your SEO campaigns to target exactly the type of reader you want visiting your blog
- Increase Return-On-Investment with custom marketing using SEO techniques and keyword analysis
Be Searched. Be Found.
Readers looking for blogs like yours have a great way to find them, and that is using search engines. Google and the like are this generation’s phone books, handy ways to look up any business or entity to find out where to contact them. Google does its part by sending out its robot (Googlebot) to crawl your site, searching for relevant information. It then uses this information to catalogue the individual pages. The closer your blog posts come to answering reader’s questions, the more likely they are to rank high.
Search engine optimisation is just that: optimising your page to get the best possible rankings for a given search phrase. By following simple SEO principles, traffic from Google and other search engines can grow quickly. Even tweaking small details, such as making filenames descriptive instead of image009.jpg can help posts rank higher.
A Better Reader Experience
Structuring your blog posts with SEO in mind makes for a much better reader experience. Informative, entertaining, and succinct posts will keep readers returning and help build a loyal following. Other points to follow that create a superior reader experience are:
- Focus each post on a single key phrase group, to avoid posts wandering off topic
- Make your site uniform across all pages to appear more professional
- Compress your images to ensure faster load times
- Match all page and image titles to relate to the page content
- Links on your pages should only lead to legitimate, relevant posts and sites
Roll With The Changes
SEO is in a constant state of flux. Every time you think it is perfect, a Google update can upset the balance. The regular updates that Google conducts means your SEO must be a dynamic process to maintain high rankings. Keep abreast of Google and its various updates and tweak your site accordingly. Evolving your SEO will ensure you continue to deliver quality posts to your readers.
Leading The Competition
If you have competition in your niche that you’re eager to overtake, SEO is one of the simplest ways to do it. This works especially well if your competitor has poor quality search engine optimisation. They may have a greater budget or more time to work on their site, but if their pages aren’t optimised as well as yours, you will hold the SEO advantage. That means a greater opportunity for your site to rise in the rankings with a potential drop for the competition.
A simple, successful search can lead a vast amount of readership to your blog. To be searched and found entails you spending some time understanding and implementing an SEO strategy that makes your blog easier to discover. You want your blog to stand out from your competition, increasing your readership base and offering you the chance to monetise your blog. SEO is a powerful tool that can leverage your efforts for great returns.
Jim Stewart, CEO of StewArt Media, is a recognised digital marketing expert. Jim is ProBlogger’s SEO expert and will share his vast SEO knowledge to equip you with the systems and skills to optimise and monetise your blog using tried and tested techniques. What Jim doesn’t know about SEO and blogging isn’t worth knowing.
The post Why Your Blog Needs SEO appeared first on ProBlogger.
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7 Ways To Eat Healthier This Week
From snacks to swaps.
Learn how to easily extend the fridge life of your favorite greens — and get more healthy bang for your buck.
Storing leafy greens with paper towels can help them stay drier, longer. That's because the paper towels act by absorbing excess moisture over time. This trick also works with things like berries, and can help you cut down on wilted-too-soon produce you might otherwise throw away.
More: We Tested Pinterest Cooking Hacks & Here’s Which Ones Worked
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
If you're vegan — or if you're just looking to try new things in the kitchen — start using aquafaba.
Aquafaba — or the liquid inside a can of chickpeas — is a ~magic juice~ of sorts, and can actually be used in place of eggs in recipes for breakfasts, desserts, drinks, and more. Learn more about how you can incorporate it into your kitchen routine here.
More: 23 Amazing Foods You Can Make With Aquafaba
Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
via BuzzFeed/Food
It Turns Out That Taxing Soda Makes People Drink Less Soda
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
It's too soon to tell whether a so-called "soda tax" can improve public health. But early data shows it certainly seems to lead to people drinking less soda.
Consumption of sugary drinks has declined in three places that recently started taxing soda: two cities (Berkeley, CA and Philadelphia, PA) and a country (Mexico.)
Grocers and beverage distributors in Philadelphia, which implemented a 1.5-cents-per-ounce tax on soda on this year, recently told Bloomberg that in the first few weeks their sales have slid by as much as 50%. Results in Philadelphia, the country's fifth most populous city, could provide feedback on what impact these taxes would have on soda consumption in a major urban market.
In Berkeley, the first US city to adopt a soda tax, a 2016 survey by UC Berkeley found consumption of soda and other sugary beverages in low-income neighborhoods fell 21% after a 1-cent-per-ounce tax was rolled out in 2015.
In Mexico, where a soda tax went into effect in 2014, purchases of taxed sugar-sweetened beverages beverages decreased by 5.5% in 2014 and 9.7% in 2015, according to a new study in Health Affairs that used Nielsen survey data.
More soda taxes are planned: three more Californian cities, San Francisco, Oakland and Albany; Boulder, Colorado; and Cook County, Illinois, home to more than 5 million people including residents of Chicago, the country's third-largest city.
A penny or so per ounce may not sound like a lot, but it adds up. Philadelphia raised $5.7 million in January from the tax. In Chicago, the price of a $10 pack of soda is estimated to rise to $15.76 when the tax kicks in this summer.
This Philly restaurant paid a sugary beverage tax of $58.95 on a $321 purchase, increasing its cost by 18%.
Health groups, like the American Heart Association, support the tax as a way to reduce sugar intake, but there's a catch: the soda tax in both Berkeley and Philadelphia is imposed on distributors, not as a sales tax to consumers. People begin drinking less soda once the tax is passed on in the form of higher prices in stores and on menus — but theres a risk that grocery stores and restaurants may choose to increase prices on other products instead.
California City Passes First-In-The-Nation Tax On Soda
Soda Taxes Pass In Four Cities, Dealing Blow To Big Soda
via BuzzFeed/Food
Everything You Need To Know About "When We Rise"
From left: Rachel Griffiths, Mary-Louise Parker, Guy Pearce, Michael Kenneth Williams.
Phil Bray / ABC
Four years ago, Dustin Lance Black heard that ABC — as in the American Broadcasting Company — was looking for LGBT-themed properties. The filmmaker and producer, who had won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for 2008's radical biopic Milk, found it to be "unbelievable" that a traditional broadcast network would embark on such a project, especially after having endured the risks and frustrations of trying to secure funding for Milk. "I had Gus Van Sant, I had Sean Penn, I had James Franco,” Black told BuzzFeed News, “and I couldn't get anybody interested." (That is, until Focus Features, which had found success in Brokeback Mountain, came along.)
The fact that that ABC — “the network I was allowed to watch when I was, like, 8 years old and in a Texas, military, Mormon home” — was soliciting LGBT pitches was “mind-blowing," Black said over coffee and a scone recently in West Hollywood.
Dustin Lance Black
ABC
Black moved quickly on the opportunity: His agent set up a meeting with the network, and the result is When We Rise, a four-part, eight-hour scripted miniseries that begins airing Monday, Feb. 27 at 9 p.m. and concludes Friday (it will skip a night for ABC to air Donald Trump's address to Congress on Tuesday). A dramatic retelling of the story of the LGBT civil rights movement in the United States, it’s massive in scope, but focuses on a few key players who walk viewers through history. It stars Guy Pearce, Mary-Louise Parker, Rachel Griffiths, Michael Kenneth Williams, T.R. Knight, Debbie Allen, and Whoopi Goldberg, among others (including blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos, like Debra Winger as Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan).
It was Black who originally pitched the project as a miniseries. "I never thought it was a series. And it was not a movie," he said. "Movies are, like, a poem. Movies — you can express a feeling or an idea. If you want to tell a story that feels more like a novel or a book, I think miniseries are the home for that."
And he wanted ABC to fund an "extensive research period" during which he could find his own source material (rather than adapt other people's work). They agreed; he took a full year to do it.
Black called these years in his professional life "not fruitful, financially." He could have gone to a premium cable channel such as HBO or Showtime, and he probably would have earned "more time, and more money." But, he said: "I would have had this nagging feeling the entire time that I was wasting all our energy because it would be preaching to the choir in the end. I guess I exchanged my financial well-being for ABC's audience. Because their audience is my family, their audience is who I grew up with."
Why When We Rise's story doesn't begin with Stonewall
Cleve (Austin P. McKenzie), left, and others run from tear gas at a San Francisco protest.
ABC
Though the Stonewall Riots of 1969 are generally understood to be the start of the LGBT civil rights movement, Black intentionally didn’t kick off When We Rise there.
There was a time when he considered trying to depict what happened during those rebellious nights and days of demonstrations, but the recollections from protesters were so hazy and implausible that "none of the stories matched up."
Black asked one source about his experiences at the Stonewall Inn. He said the source responded, "Lance, you are completely missing the point. … These are all fabulous stories, aren't they?"; yes, they were, he agreed. "He's like, 'The day before Stonewall, we didn't think we deserved a fabulous story. The day after Stonewall, we knew we did. Everyone kind of made up their own version of it because we fuckin' thought we deserved a story for the first time in our lives. That's Stonewall.'"
"It gave me the chills," he said.
And so Black decided that Stonewall should be the inspiration but not the root of When We Rise.
Life magazine / Via oldlifemagazines.com
Instead, the series opens in the year 2006, with activist Cleve Jones (Guy Pearce) speaking to an unnamed young man (Douglas Smith) who's recording the interview. "When did you know you had to rise up and fight back?" the kid asks Jones. "Oh, pay attention," Jones snaps. "It wasn't just me who heard the call. It was all of us."
Then it flashes back to 1972, and a high-school-aged Cleve (played by Austin P. McKenzie) is handing out anti-war leaflets at a peace rally in Phoenix. Later, he spies — and surreptitiously takes — a copy of Life magazine's "Year in Pictures" issue for 1971 that says "Gay Liberation" in block letters on its cover, counting the nascent movement among the big stories of the year. The magazine itself becomes the device that connects the series' main characters. Ken Jones (Jonathan Majors) sees it on the battleship he's on in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War; Roma Guy (Emily Skeggs) reads it on a plane as she leaves her Peace Corps stint in Africa.
"The first thing I found that seemed universal in the interviews I did is that almost every single person of a certain age could point to the moment they saw Life magazine's year in review hit their coffee table or their mailbox, no matter where they lived, because everybody got that," Black said. "You flipped it open, and for the first time, it wasn't just filled with horrible things about monstrous gay people. It actually talked about gay and God, it talked about rising up in New York, and they showed these pictures of San Francisco that made it look gay mecca.
"I thought, That's the beginning for this."
How Black discovered the sources who then became the central characters in When We Rise
Emily Skeggs as Roma Guy, with McKenzie as Cleve Jones.
ABC
Black already knew Cleve Jones: In 2006, he went to Palm Springs to interview Jones about Harvey Milk, for whom he had worked, for Milk research. "He not only told me the stories of how he did what he did, and who Harvey Milk was," Black said of Jones, "but he also then looked at me and said, 'What is it like to be a part of the first generation in this country with no purpose? And what are you going to do about it?'"
That call to action is in When We Rise, and the unnamed character played by Douglas Smith is a stand-in for Black. (Black knows Smith from HBO's Big Love; Black was a writer for the show, and Smith played the character Ben Henrickson, a rebellious son of polygamous Mormons. "Doug Smith has been playing versions of me for a generation now," Black said.)
Black had a list of criteria for the characters in When We Rise. He wanted them to be people who had worked across social justice coalitions — particularly the anti-war movement, women's equality, and the black civil rights movement — and hadn't focused solely on LGBT issues. He also wanted them to be "lifetime activists," which cut the list of possibilities way down, "because it's such a difficult job," Black said.
And he wanted his main characters to be still be alive — survivors — in real life, defying the usual fates of LGBT characters in film and television history. "You can graduate to a serious dramatic role as long as you die in the end," Black scoffed. Citing Milk, he continued: "I made that movie. I didn't want to make that again."
Roma Guy's and Ken Jones' names kept coming up in his research, and then he discovered their connections to Cleve Jones: He and Roma were friends from San Francisco politics, and he and Ken had worked together many times. "And it became apparent how unique Cleve's story was," Black said. Regarding Jones' ubiquitous presence at key moments in LGBT history, Black said with a laugh that his mom calls Jones "Forrest Gump," whereas Black calls him "Zelig," after the 1983 Woody Allen movie. When We Rise is based in part on Jones' memoir of the same name.
Black wanted to tell a local political story in the series through Roma, a member of the then-homophobic National Organization of Women, who went from being closeted and afraid to an out lesbian raising a child with her partner (and later wife) Diane. She was one of the founders of the San Francisco Women's Building, a locus for feminist programs, and a member of the city's health commission who helped get universal health care for San Francisco.
Michael Kenneth Williams as Ken Jones; Ivory Aquino as Cecilia Chung.
There was also Cecilia Chung — a Los Angeles–based HIV/AIDS and transgender activist — with whom Ken Jones was close. "I had known Cecilia Chung and her story forever," Black said. "Some of the trans folks who I know really look up to her. "
He had to find Ken Jones, but no one had heard from him in a while. "I found him living across the Bay," Black said. "He was very much still alive.” And to Black’s surprise, Jones also happened to work in a highly progressive, inclusive Christian church. That meant that Jones' leg of the When We Rise story could include a variety of tensions: of being gay and black, and an activist in both communities; his military background; HIV/AIDS (Jones is HIV-positive); and religion.
"It was a lot of homework. It was a nationwide search that became San Francisco–centric. And it ended up on this core group," Black said. "I think a movement is not fueled by and doesn't survive on the personality of one — it's about all the people doing this really hard, often unrewarding work in the middle of it all. And that's what all these guys do."
Casting the series
Mary-Louise Parker as Roma Guy, with Rachel Griffiths as Diane.
ABC
When it came to casting, Black knew he wanted eventually to make a time jump from the early ’80s to 1992. Which meant, as he put it, "I'm going to take a cue and a little bravery from a little miniseries called Roots and I'm going to switch casts."
Jonathan Majors as the younger Ken Jones.
Eike Schroter / ABC
For the younger versions of the characters, the casting directors focused on auditioning theater actors. McKenzie (young Cleve) came out of the Deaf West production of Spring Awakening (he played Melchior in Los Angeles and on Broadway); Skeggs was nominated for a Tony Award for her portrayal of Medium Alison in Fun Home. For young Ken, Black said, the casting directors discovered Majors at Yale's School of Drama. "We watched the tape, and we were like, ‘Holy crap’ — he's already shot two more feature films," Black said. "He's going to be a giant star."
When it came to casting the older actors, Black wrote with specific people in mind, something he doesn't normally do. Roma was always going to be Mary-Louise Parker. "There's something about how frank she is, and still funny," he said. "So when she said yes, I flipped."
He thought of Guy Pearce for Cleve for his "brooding sensitivity." They made him the offer, but didn’t immediately hear back. When Rachel Griffiths met with them for the role of Roma's partner Diane, she said of her fellow Australian actor, "Have you thought about Guy to play Cleve?" Black recalled. "We were meeting to see whether she wanted the role or not, but we sort of forgot to have that conversation." Griffiths called Pearce, and — though he doesn't know whether the move directly influenced Pearce’s decision— the actor did agree to play Cleve.
Michael Kenneth Williams cold-called Black himself. "In very emotional, frank terms, he told me about the people — his friends — growing up in New York who were artists he had lost," Black said. "Again, sort of like Rachel, I was not given a choice whether to cast him or not. He told me what I was going to do and how necessary it was. And I was like, 'Yeah, that's right.'"
Aquino as Chung.
ABC
For the four trans roles in When We Rise, Black told the casting directors that they needed to hire trans actors. They recommended Ivory Aquino for Cecilia Chung, a main character, and sent her tape along to Black. "I got a little angry with them," Black said. "I said, 'I want to cast trans — go work harder, go find a trans actress.' They said, 'Ivory's going to be calling you.' She came out to me on the phone as trans." Casting trans performers in trans roles has been a seemingly impossible task for Hollywood, from The Danish Girl to Transparent to Dallas Buyers Club. But that was not the case for When We Rise, Black said. "The big surprise was: It's easy."
"They bring an authenticity to the performance and a lot of great information to the role that a cisgender actor or actress just wouldn't," Black said. "They've lived the experience. They still have to act; they're not playing themselves."
Structuring a story out of 45 years of history
T.R. Knight as Chad Griffin; Guy Pearce as Cleve Jones.
ABC
Black first wanted When We Rise to have a 10-hour runtime. "Eight is what I was given, and that's generous, let's be real," he said. Through the characters — this "makeshift family," Black called them — "we'll learn about a movement." So he had to whittle down to the essentials: "What were the critical, pivotal moments in the movement, and the critical, pivotal ideas?"
He settled on the early ’70s migration to San Francisco and the beginning of LGBT political power; the beginning of the AIDS epidemic; the eventual life-saving drugs that stopped HIV from being a death sentence; ’90s complacency; and the fight for marriage equality.
When We Rise unsparingly tackles AIDS, with all the terrifying uncertainties about who was getting it and how it was transmitted rendered in wrenching detail: Several characters become HIV-positive, and some die.
"Political power-building taught us that gays and lesbians could be powerful if we stopped fighting with each other and ignoring each other and started working together. HIV/AIDS made us a family," Black said. "It really bonded us, in a way. Women stepped up. Didn't have to."
Majors as Ken Jones.
Eike Schroter / ABC
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37 Backstage Photos From The 2017 Academy Awards
A lot happened last night and there’s a lot we didn’t see.
Jimmy Kimmel before stepping on stage as the host of the 2017 Oscars.
Christopher Polk / Getty Images
Mahershala Ali and Ryan Gosling looking dapper AF.
Christopher Polk / Getty Images
Trevante Rhodes and Andre Holland, the adult Chiron and Kevin in Moonlight respectively, also looking dapper AF.
Christopher Polk / Getty Images
The reunion of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
Christopher Polk / Getty Images
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This Guy Made His Pet Corgi A Super Sweet Snow Maze
Run, Wally, run!
This little pupperino is Wally, a corgi who lives in Dieppe, New Brunswick, and he is having more fun than all of us.
Denis Jalbert
That's because his parents, Denis and Christine Jalbert, built something amazing in their backyard.
Denis Jalbert
Wally's very own snow maze!
It all started after a large snowfall two years ago. Denis had originally dug trenches around his backyard to stop Wally from jumping over the fence, but it also gave Wally and his short legs a way to exercise.
"With his little legs, if he went in the snowbank he couldn’t move, he’s stuck," said Denis.
"I decided, okay, let’s try to do something to entertain him."
Denis Jalbert
That first maze took up only half the backyard. But this year, Denis went all out and spent six hours carving out a winding maze full of dead ends that takes up the whole yard.
Denis Jalbert
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We Need To Talk About How Fucking Gross Seafood Is
It is NOT better down where it’s wetter.
Hi there, we have a pressing issue to discuss today, regarding the topic of eating fish, aka seafood, aka YUCK.
You see that? That’s seafood and some people actually enjoy consuming it. So, let’s just talk about the repulsiveness that is this gunk for a few minutes.
Let’s start with what is single-handedly the WORST of the worst: oysters. This is NOT food. This is NOT meant for human intake. They are "shucking" terrible.
This includes lobsters.
Seriously, what the actual fuck?
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The Oscars Were Not Actually A Battle Against Trump's America
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins at the 89th Annual Academy Awards.
Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
The wildest thing that has ever happened at the Oscars — yup, even wilder than that time in 1974 when a guy streaked naked across the stage — took place Sunday night at the end of what had, up until that point, felt like an Oscars ceremony short on shocks: While presenting Best Picture, Warren Beatty opened the envelope and then, for reasons unclear at the time, hesitated, leaving his fellow presenter, Bonnie and Clyde co-star Faye Dunaway, to announce the predicted La La Land as the winner. Cue the applause and acceptance speeches unfolding in front of increased turmoil as the ceremony's producers ran on stage. Soon, La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz made his way to the mic and revealed , astonishingly, that a mistake had been made.
For a second, it looked like Horowitz was pulling an Adele at the Grammys, another white person sheepishly using their winner’s platform to acknowledge the more deserving, yet passed-over, piece of black art. But Horowitz wasn’t making a gesture, he was literally trying to correct a huge error. “This is not a joke — Moonlight has won Best Picture,” he said. For maximum drama, he grabbed the correct card out of Beatty’s hands and held it up for the camera to zoom in and confirm his words, a moment that Twitter would meme the hell out of minutes later. It was a twist ending M. Night Shyamalan (who played along on Twitter) couldn't even dream up, an immense fuckup destined to be parsed and studied like the Zapruder film. And, for many of us, it was the first time since Nov. 8 in which the world made any goddamn sense.
Ever since the presidential election, the temptation to, jokingly or otherwise, cast other collective cultural events as a re-staging of that fateful evening has been irresistible. It’s also been like the revisiting of trauma, since each one until now has played out the same way. After La La Land swept the Golden Globes, there was the Super Bowl, in which the Atlanta Falcons consistently throttled the New England Patriots — led by Trump pal Tom Brady — only for the crown to slip from their hands in a way that felt uncomfortably familiar. Then there was the Grammys, during which the aforementioned Adele incident took place. The British singer won Album, Record, and Song of the Year over Beyoncé's Lemonade, despite even Adele herself admitting Lemonade was 2016’s defining work.
It’s not like any of these were exact Trump parallels (Adele seems very nice!), but they all felt like nationally broadcast instances of whiteness reasserting its grip on a country that has been fighting its way, ever so slowly, toward a future in which whiteness does not mean a guaranteed win. And by that measure, the nail-biting last-minute Best Picture reversal wasn’t just a case of the finest film winning — it was a gratifyingly redemptive triumph.
Barry Jenkins’ compassionate, gorgeously wrought story about how a black, queer, and poor boy comes of age in Miami beat out the heavily favored La La Land, a movie whose blithe racial assumptions and fetishism for nostalgia have unfortunate connotations in the wake of an election campaign in which each had been explicitly and effectively weaponized. Moonlight, a testament to cinema’s ability to create empathy and understanding for marginalized lives, bested La La Land, a testament to its ability to serve as an escape from reality. It didn’t just feel justified — it felt necessary.
But no matter how satisfying Moonlight’s success was — and no matter how many fiery late-breaking takes on the alleged destructive force La La Land there were — Moonlight’s mangled victory isn’t actually a triumph of good over evil. Or even of the left’s triumph over the right, because let’s be real: The true conservative candidate among the Best Picture contenders would be Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge (and wouldn’t that have been an upset, in every sense of the word).
Barry Jenkins accepts Best Picture for Moonlight.
Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Images
The way that Moonlight and La La Land were placed in grand opposition over the course of awards season created a compelling narrative that burdened both movies with roles that were, in different ways, unfair to them. Being presented as the important, political urgent one has meant that Moonlight’s incredible aesthetics have frequently been overlooked or treated as secondary in the conversation. And La La Land — which out of awards context plays like a slight, winsome ode to a semiretired genre — got crushed under the burdens of being the overpraised representative of white supremacy.
La La Land was not the active villain of the Oscars, but it sure seemed poised, until that incredible final inning defeat, to benefit from an unjust and racist status quo. And while art doesn’t have an obligation to put real-world relevance front and center, that doesn’t mean that the melancholy dreaminess of Damien Chazelle’s musical is neutral. It felt like a “no comment” in a year that has really, really demanded a comment. Whereas Moonlight’s every choice is a statement — not just in the story it tells, but in the ways in which it envelops you in its experiences, the pain and the firework-bright moments of joy felt by its young protagonist. Its success is a milestone for representation at the Oscars, but it’s also a commemoration of remarkable artistry and depth. It’s a development destined to give a boost to a movie that could use it, that’s still only been seen by a small fraction of the country when it should be enjoyed by the widest possible audience.
What Moonlight isn’t is a sure sign of greater shifts in the industry or at awards shows: The Oscars have made steps forward in terms of diversity and recognizing artistic daring before, and followed them with steps back. The Academy Awards remain a window into how Hollywood sees itself and how it’d like to be seen, two things that are sometimes directly at odds. Because, no matter how many easy digs Jimmy Kimmel managed to slip in (or tweet) at the current administration last night, the self-assured progressivism that so much of the film industry takes for granted has been very slow to manifest in the choices that industry has made about whose stories get told and who gets to tell them. Studies from University of Southern California, Annenberg’s Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative have not only laid bare damning statistics about who’s directing and appearing on screen in the biggest movies; they’ve also showcased how little those stats have been improving.
Mahershala Ali accepts the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Moonlight.
Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Images
The trouble with attaching meaning to the Oscars is that they are, in the end, only a highly selective, imperfect, subjective reflection of what’s actually happened in a cinematic year. Moonlight was always going to be one of 2016’s most significant films — getting the big award doesn’t change that, but just confirms what everyone already knew.
What will actually be significant is what comes next, for the cast and crew of Moonlight and for so many other actors and filmmakers, in terms of what’s funded and who’s put on screen. The Academy Awards aren’t a re-legislation of the larger battle for America’s soul — they’re another temperature check, an evening in which Mahershala Ali could have a historic moment as the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar, give a beautiful, heartfelt speech, and still have to smile through Kimmel making multiple dumb cracks about his name. Not matter how good the movies may be, it’s still Trump’s America we’re living in.
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