All posts tagged: voting

‘Ozempic’s biggest night’: Nikki Glaser kicks off Golden Globes with jokes on sex scandal and voting

‘Ozempic’s biggest night’: Nikki Glaser kicks off Golden Globes with jokes on sex scandal and voting

Published by skeptic

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Nikki Glaser pulled no punches as she kicked off the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, telling the A-List audience that the award show was “Ozempic’s biggest night.” The 33-year-old comedian, who is known for her dark and often offensive brand of humour, opened the 82nd annual awards show in Los Angeles by using her opening monologue to take aim at voting. Glaser previously told The Independent that anticipation for the show had made her feel “42 weeks pregnant, and she was excited to deliver her jokes “in front of the crowd they were meant for.” Glaser entered the spotlight for her cutting, dark, and often offensive jokes during U.S. comedy roasts, including those of Rob Lowe, Bruce Willis, and Alec Baldwin. She was also one of the standout performers at the roast of Tom Brady – broadcast on Netflix back in May. She has also received …

Voting Opens for the 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards

Voting Opens for the 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards

Published by skeptic

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Voting Opens for the 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards Voting is now open for the bookish internet’s annual popularity contest: the Goodreads choice awards. I have never done this, but you could probably win your theoretical office Fall Madness pool (this does not exist) by just looking at which of the nominees have the most rating in each category and picking those. (Maybe I will do that this year?). Because when you ask the internet to vote for things you will get one of two outcomes: regression to the mean or Boaty McBoatface. And since there is really no way to McBoatface this things, mean regression it is. Notably, Goodreads is the only major award to split out historical fiction, which makes it somewhat less predictable in the general fiction categories, as historical fiction comprises so much of the commercial upmarket literary space that tends to win things like this. Also, Romantasy & Horror have their …

Azealia Banks Says She’s Voting for Kamala Harris Because Elon Musk Is an “Overrated Ketamine Addict”

Azealia Banks Says She’s Voting for Kamala Harris Because Elon Musk Is an “Overrated Ketamine Addict”

Published by José

“Very f*cking dangerous.” Hater’s Ball Despite her prior endorsement of Donald Trump, rapper and reactionary shock jock Azealia Banks now says she’s voting for Kamala Harris — if only to avoid giving her mortal enemy Elon Musk any more power. During a lengthy screed that references Musk’s toxic on-off relationship with her one-time collaborator Claire “Grimes” Boucher, Banks tweeted that she “will be Voting For Kamala Harris tomorrow because Elon Musk (a fucking overrated Ketamine addict) belongs [nowhere] near American Politics.” The “212” rapper has a long history of beef with the wealthy Trump campaign surrogate, and has taken potshots about his oft-admitted drug use before. Back in 2018, Banks live-tweeted what she said was a bizarre stay at Musk’s Los Angeles house after Boucher purportedly invited her over to work on music together. According to long-expired Instagram stories, the New York-born rapper was left there alone “for days” while Grimes “coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on twitter on acid” — a seeming reference to Musk’s fateful tweet …

Voting as Self-Healing | Psychology Today

Voting as Self-Healing | Psychology Today

Published by skeptic

Reclaim your voice: Voting isn’t just civic duty—it’s a powerful step toward healing and shaping a hopeful future. Source: Wasabi Publicity/Adobe/Abood, used with permission Experiencing trauma—whether it’s a natural disaster, betrayal, or assault—can shake your world, leaving you feeling lost, vulnerable, and disconnected. I know; it did for me. After surviving Hurricane Helene, being betrayed by a close friend, and bringing the pedophile who hurt me as a child to justice, I grasped for ways to regain control and feel like I still had a voice. Surprisingly, one of the most powerful healing steps I have found is participating in local or national elections. Voting is more than a civic duty; it can be a therapeutic step toward reclaiming your power, grounding yourself in your community, and reinforcing resilience. Here’s how participating in elections can support self-healing, along with steps for making voting part of your recovery journey. Vote as a Form of Self-Expression Trauma often leaves people feeling silenced. Voting lets you safely make your voice heard. By casting your vote, you’re not only …

Revenge Voting Over Gaza Is a Mistake

Revenge Voting Over Gaza Is a Mistake

Published by José

The Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was a zealous defender of all human rights, but there was one he spoke about as a first among equals: the right to emigrate. This was, he wrote, “an essential condition of spiritual freedom.” The power to vote with your feet, to exit if you so choose, gave the individual a veto over the state. So many other rights are important for an open society—expressing your political views, worshiping freely, assembling without constraint—but all have much less meaning if (as in the Soviet Union) you can’t even decide where to live. I find myself, in these nail-biting days before the election, prioritizing in much the same way. What rights matter most? What conditions are necessary for a democratic society to exist and persist? What material makes up the floor on which we all stand? The freedom to dissent ranks near the top for me—and reading the recently published memoirs of Alexei Navalny, an intellectual descendant of Sakharov, only made it seem more precious; you can pay with your life under …

Expanding Voting Rights After the Civil War

Expanding Voting Rights After the Civil War

Published by skeptic

  The American Civil War ended in the late spring of 1865 with a decisive Union military victory. Despite being defeated militarily, the former Confederacy made no effort to change its treatment of Black people. Slavery was formally eliminated with the Thirteenth Amendment, which all former Confederate states were made to ratify, but Southern states quickly implemented “Black Codes” to try to subjugate formerly enslaved people.   Setting the Stage: Slavery in the South An 1867 wood engraving of slaves laboring in a cotton field in the American South before the Civil War. Source: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)   For the first eighty years of the American republic, slavery was a controversial institution. Primarily, slave states were in the South and provided agricultural labor. By the 1840s, the agrarian economy of the South relied heavily on slave labor. Tensions over slavery began to increase during this decade, influenced by the Second Great Awakening religious movement that opened many Americans’ eyes to the evils of forced bondage. This greatly expanded the abolition movement to …

Nikki Haley campaigners endorse Harris as she backs Trump

Nikki Haley campaigners endorse Harris as she backs Trump

Published by Sam

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley announced that she would vote for former President Donald Trump during an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 2024. Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images Several former state campaign committee members on Nikki Haley’s failed presidential bid have endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, publicly breaking with Haley, who is backing GOP nominee Donald Trump. “This year the election may well be decided by independents and former Haley supporters,” wrote Tom Evslin, who co-chaired Haley’s Vermont state leadership team, in an op-ed Wednesday for the Vermont Daily Chronicle. Evslin, who voted against then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 and against Trump in 2020, wrote that he “will be happy to vote FOR Harris if she consistently articulates a strong foreign policy.” The same day, two former members of Haley’s Michigan state leadership team also urged Republicans to support the Democratic ticket of Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “As Republicans, we believe character and integrity matter,” business consultant Jimmy Greene and communications expert Bill Nowling wrote in …

Voting for Their Jobs | Tim Judah

Voting for Their Jobs | Tim Judah

Published by skeptic

As we sped down Georgia’s main highway, the spine of the country linking east and west, Vato Bzhalava, who had helped set up this trip, showed me a video. He had made it as plainclothes policemen bundled him into a van during last spring’s anti-government demonstrations in the capital, Tbilisi. By chance, journalists who were livestreaming the protest also filmed the moment, and his friends saw the footage. This was lucky. Georgia is a small place; one way or another everyone knows everyone. Messages got through to the police: “Don’t beat up Vato!” They did not. Others were not so lucky. Vato is a moustachioed thirty-four-year-old researcher at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies (GFSIS). We were on our way to Akhaltsikhe, a small town eleven miles from the Turkish border. Signs giving the distances to Tehran and Ankara flashed by. Close to the turnoff for Stalin’s birthplace at Gori, we passed within a third of a mile of the southernmost tip of South Ossetia, the de facto Russian-controlled territory that broke away …