For guests who dare to appear on the comedian’s Instagram Live show, the question is not if you are racist, but how
By E. Alex Jung
“I get wild DMs,” Ziwe Fumudoh tells me as she scrolls through her phone. There are suggestions for guests on her Instagram Live show, where she asks subjects discomfiting questions about race: Candace Owens (“I could see it working in studio”), Rachel Dolezal (“The time to talk to her was 2015!”), …
There needs to be a reckoning over his toxic relationship with the vox populi
By Craig Jenkins
It’s a special kind of hell we live in right now when a celebrity who has admittedly never voted can claim to be running for president four months before the general election and catapult the internet into many days of trenchant debate about his motives for entering a race that he has yet to file any paperwork to join. That’s the rarefied air occupied by Kanye West, one of the most famous people on the planet and one of the least predictable figures in a sphere of American celebrities who move with careful intention, defined by the garrulousness of ever-present Twitch streamers and YouTube influencers, the pointed insouciance of political commentators, and the strategic poise of megawatt stars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. Kanye, by contrast, moves like summer rain: He sneaks up, empties out everything that’s been brewing upstairs, and moves on while we splash around the puddles he leaves behind. After dividing his fandom by showing loud support for Donald Trump over the last five years, West walked it all back during a peculiar Forbes interview last week, in which he insisted his MAGA years were an act of protest “to the segregation of votes in the Black community,” inspired in part by his admiration for the décor inside the Trump hotels. …
The streaming platform raised $1.75 billion and secured a roster of A-list talent, but it can’t get audiences to notice
By Benjamin Wallace
Last year, Scott Gairdner, a comedy writer and director who had worked on Conan and created the animated series Moonbeam City, went to the Hollywood offices of the new streaming platform Quibi for a pitch meeting. He is also the co-creator of a viral Adult Swim video called Live at the Necropolis: Lords of Synth, which Quibi was considering adapting. Gairdner was provisionally excited. In a business where new players pop up only to evaporate, he was used to deals never quite materializing. But a new, deep-pocketed buyer was cause for optimism.
Quibi, the brainchild of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney studio head and DreamWorks co-founder, had promised to reinvent television by streaming high-quality content in ten-minute-or-less chunks to “the TV in your pocket.” (Quibi, which rhymes with Libby, is short for “quick bites.”) Katzenberg believed enough mobile-phone users would want to spend their spare minutes of downtime — while waiting in line for coffee, riding the bus or subway — digesting small plates of premium, Hollywood-quality video, at a monthly cost of $4.99 (with ads) or $7.99 (without ads), when not surfing the amateur stuff on TikTok and -YouTube, scrolling Twitter, or playing Animal Crossing for free. And he was spending lavishly on his hunch. …
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