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    Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen: The Latest Podcast Duo

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The State of PodcastingA Booming IndustryThe Medium for QuarantineThe Voices of ‘Resistance’Growing Up on MicAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarack Obama and Bruce Springsteen: The Latest Podcast DuoTheir new show, “Renegades: Born in the USA,” features the 44th president and the musician speaking intimately and expansively on topics like race, fatherhood and the country’s painful divisions.The new podcast hosted by Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama is drawn from a series of one-on-one conversations at Springsteen’s home studio last year.Credit…Rob DeMartinPublished More

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    How a TV Critic Turned to Podcasts During a Pandemic

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookHow a TV Critic Turned to Podcasts During a PandemicTV meant to be responsive to the moment seemed distant. But podcasts, with the intimate production values, felt more immediate and relevant than ever before.Credit…Hudson ChristieFeb. 25, 2021, 5:02 a.m. ETIn a year otherwise defined by loss, one area of our lives has remained untouched; abundant, even. Movie theaters closed and blockbusters were delayed. Music and theater venues shuttered. But TV marched on. The number of original scripted shows dipped slightly, but international series and older shows arriving on the streaming platforms more than filled the void of shows canceled or delayed.And yet, as the pandemic months piled up, TV’s seeming imperviousness to the halt of all other cultural activities started seeming less like a virtue and more like a vice, like denial, like a dispatch from a faker world. Much in the way I grew to prefer an old-fashioned phone call to a video chat, podcasts, not television, became my go-to medium in quarantine. With their shorter lead times and intimate production values, they felt more immediate and more relevant than ever before.As a TV critic, I had a policy to stay on top of it all, which was, “if I’m home, I’m watching something.” Then I was home for a year, and that policy, like everything else, changed.Also, I was alone. Alone as I have ever been. I went weeks without making eye contact with anyone. Zero hugs between March 11 and July 4. And all my shows just kept making it worse — everyone was always touching, those lucky bastards. A crowd scene would make my heart race, a character’s cough made me feel as if my skin was shrinking.Even TV meant to be responsive to the moment felt distant and curdled. Late-night hosts did their monologues from home, but the format and rhythms of the material stayed the same, and their jokes hung in empty air, sentences with no punctuation. Scripted shows about the pandemic, like “Love In the Time of Corona,” were brittle at best, and even when dramas like “Grey’s Anatomy” addressed the disease directly, mass death was less dramatic than a surprise cameo. Goofy shows, like “Floor Is Lava,” designed to be an escape, instead felt degrading. People are dying! Society has collapsed! I don’t want to watch dumdums fall down.I’ve spent years happily watching 70 hours of television a week, even listening to shows in the shower. But suddenly TV was no longer cutting it. I could no longer focus, and now I’m not even sure I remember what focusing is.At least with podcasts, you’re supposed to half-do something else, even if that something else had previously been “ride the subway,” and now it is “do the dishes for the 9,000th time.”You’re also supposed to listen to podcasts alone, but maybe I wasn’t quite all by myself, because I was listening to other people commiserate about kitchen woes on the podcast “Home Cooking.” This pandemic-oriented food and cooking advice show from Hrishikesh Hirway and Samin Nosrat was easily the podcast highlight of the year, bright but not phony, filled with suggestions and compassion and jokes.There were plenty of good TV shows that came out this past year, and even a few great ones, beautiful and surprising and fascinating — “I May Destroy You,” “Ted Lasso,” “Teenage Bounty Hunters,” “How To With John Wilson.” But oftentimes I wanted more direct reflections of the world around me, the kind of contact that was, that is, impossible when you’re effectively housebound. I wanted something more like validation, where everyone was miserable too.I listened to Esther Perel counsel couples in various lockdowns on “Where Should We Begin.” When self-recrimination spirals took over for generalized malaise, I listened to “Dead Eyes,” a podcast where the actor and comedian Connor Ratliff investigates in tremendous detail the time he was fired from “Band of Brothers” — a real making-lemonade-from-deep-emotional-wound lemons.I never miss an episode of “Stop Podcasting Yourself,” a genial Canadian comedy chitchat podcast hosted by Dave Shumka and Graham Clark whose overheard (and “overseen”) segment is now even more of a treasure to me, given how little in-person overhearing we do these days. This is the longest I’ve gone in my life without singing in a group, and an entire wing of my spirit has atrophied, so I listen to the pop music theory show “Strong Songs.”Turns out the prudes are right, and too much screen time will fry you from the inside. Characters appeared in my dreams, or I’d catch myself thinking, “who was I just talking to about this?” when the answer was “that conversation happened on a TV show.” But then quarantine hardened me I guess, and now it feels as if everything is behind glass, and TV shows barely register unless I’m concentrating extra hard on them for work. To keep it together this year, though, required a state of emotional hibernation alongside the physical one, and podcasts are just small enough to get into my small little loser bear cave. There’s less emotional buy-in than with a scripted drama, but they possess a legitimacy and honesty largely absent in reality and unscripted television.In the coming months, when, please, oh please, aspects of our old lives re-emerge, and we all slither out of the anti-chrysalis that turned us back into caterpillars, maybe I will go to a ballgame, or the theater, or to the movies, or, oh God, even a party. And on my way there, I will be listening to a podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Podcasting Is Booming. Will Hollywood Help or Hurt Its Future?

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPodcasting Is Booming. Will Hollywood Help or Hurt Its Future?A frothy adaptation market is just one sign of the rapid evolution of the industry. But some worry that big money will stifle the D.I.Y. spirit that has driven much of its success.Once seen as a marginal forum for comedy, tech talk and public radio programming, podcasting is one of the hottest corners in media, with Hollywood hungry for TV and film adaptations.Credit…Hudson ChristieFeb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETIn November, production began in Los Angeles on a new series with the trappings of a potential hit.“Unwanted” is a buddy action comedy told with a wink, part “Beverly Hills Cop” homage and part Seth Rogen-esque genre sendup. It stars Lamorne Morris (“Woke” and “New Girl”) and Billy Magnussen (“Game Night”) as slackers who stumble on criminal intrigue in between bong hits, and its script is stocked with gross-out humor. (Sample line: “When I told you I dropped my phone in the toilet, that wasn’t the whole story.”)But “Unwanted” is not the latest Netflix comedy; it’s a podcast — or at least is starting out that way. The show’s first two episodes were released this week by QCode Media, a two-year-old company whose podcasts, with big names and high production values, are all but audio pitches for film and television. In July, for example, QCode introduced “Dirty Diana,” an erotic drama starring Demi Moore; by September, Amazon made a deal to turn it into a TV series.A frothy adaptation market in Hollywood is just one sign of the rapid evolution of podcasting. Though the format dates to the early 2000s — it is named after the iPod — podcasting has had an expansive growth spurt the last few years. Since 2018, the number of available shows has more than tripled, to around two million. Spotify, Amazon, SiriusXM, iHeartMedia and other major streaming and traditional media companies have poured about $2 billion into the industry, both chasing and fueling its growth. Celebrities, even former presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, are piling in, looking at on-demand audio as a key brand-building channel.Once seen as a marginal forum for comedy, tech talk and public radio programming, podcasting is one of the hottest corners in media. Yet its formats and business practices are still developing, leading producers, executives and talent to view the medium as akin to television circa 1949: lucrative and uncharted territory with plenty of room for experimentation and flag-planting.“It’s a new frontier, and we love it,” said Morris, who is also a creator and executive producer of “Unwanted.”But along with the optimism come worries that big money may stifle the D.I.Y. spirit vital to podcasting’s identity. Indie podcasters, used to an open and decentralized distribution system, fear being marginalized if the tech giants push through pay walls and exclusive deals. And as podcasting becomes big business, there is unease that the diversity of voices in our earbuds — never a strong suit of the industry — could be put at risk too.Nick Quah, who writes the Hot Pod newsletter, said that corporate interests tend to run contrary to what has always made podcasting interesting: the idea that anyone, anywhere, can bubble up and find an audience.“As we move forward and more of these platforms assume a stronger gatekeeping position,” Quah said, “there’s a strong possibility for new voices to get pushed out of the space. That’s a real concern.”Lamorne Morris, left, and Kyle Shevrin, are the creators of the buddy action comedy podcast “Unwanted.”Credit…Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesCracking the Code of the Podcast AdaptationFor the average listener, the most noticeable change in podcasting’s immediate future may simply be higher-quality shows.The influx of money — from tech platforms, advertisers and Hollywood — has attracted talent and driven spending on production resources. Podcasting executives say they are now flooded with pitches for new shows, often from A-list writers, directors and performers.“What you’re seeing now is this incredible flowering of creativity,” said Lydia Polgreen, a former HuffPost and New York Times editor who is now managing director of Gimlet Media, a Spotify-owned studio.For Hollywood, the podcasting space has become a farm team for intellectual property — where story lines can be tested out and promising material scooped up relatively cheaply. And with the movie business dominated by remakes, superhero franchises and other tent-pole mega-productions, the freedom podcasting provides is also refreshing, said Rob Herting, a former agent at the Creative Artists Agency who founded QCode.“I had gotten tired of the repurposing of old intellectual property,” Herting said. “I kind of yearn for original stories. This felt like such a great outlet for those, a place where you can go to be bold, experiment and move quickly.”QCode launched in early 2019 with “Blackout,” starring Rami Malek as a radio D.J. in a small New England town when the national power grid mysteriously goes dark. The company now has a portfolio of 11 series, including “Hank the Cow Dog,” a children’s show with Matthew McConaughey, and “Carrier,” a thriller starring Cynthia Erivo that showcases another feature of many of the best podcasts: intense, consuming sound design. QCode plans 15 new podcasts in 2021.Modest budgets and quick turnaround time enable more risk-taking. Most of QCode’s shows cost in the low to mid six figures to make, Herting said — orders of magnitude less than a film or TV project — and an eight-episode podcast can be taped in just a week or two. A comparable TV season, Morris said, could take two months to shoot.“Unwanted” is the studio’s first comedy, and Morris, who had a part in “Carrier,” said he was unsure whether it would work. For one thing, taping during the pandemic meant working remotely; using audio gear shipped to them at home, actors communicated via Zoom.But Morris said that his worries evaporated the first day on the virtual set. His character, Ben, is introduced pleading for an extension on his student loan, before he is revealed to be calling from a strip club. In the background, the comedian Ron Funches announces the dancers like a lascivious carnival barker: “Put your hands together for the beautiful … Desssstiny!”“I heard the raw playback and I was dying laughing,” Morris recalled. “You forget how immersive audio can be until you sit down and just plug in,” he added. “It really takes you there.”A successful adaptation into film or television can generate $1 million or more for podcast creators, far exceeding what most shows can collect from advertising. (The entire ad market for podcasts was estimated to be less than $1 billion last year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.)But as the audience for podcasts grows — at last 104 million Americans listen each month, according to a survey last year by Edison Research and Triton Digital — TV and film properties are increasingly being adapted into audio shows as well.“It really is a two-way street,” said Josh Lindgren, a podcast agent at C.A.A. “It’s not just that Hollywood is coming to gobble up all the podcast I.P. and turn it into TV shows.”Warner Bros. is creating podcasts for Spotify based on DC Comics characters; Marvel is bringing a slate of podcasts, including a scripted series, “Marvel’s Wastelanders,” to SiriusXM. And Ben Silverman, the TV producer behind the American version of “The Office,” whose company Propagate Content made an oral history of that show for Spotify, has struck a new deal with SiriusXM that will establish a new franchise of entertainment oral history podcasts.“There are no rules anymore,” Silverman said. “If you are a creative person, you can go anywhere.”Walled Gardens and the Future of IndiesEmily Cross channeled her inner Seinfeld with “What I’m Looking At,” a podcast where she spends 20 to 30 minutes just talking about what she’s looking at.Credit…Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesHollywood deals have taken podcasting far from its shoestring origins. But the growth story has been building for years.The first mainstream hit arrived in 2014 with “Serial,” an investigative look at the murder of a teenage girl that was made by veteran public-radio journalists. The show — and the media attention it received — demonstrated the format’s storytelling and marketing potential.New stars were minted. Leon Neyfakh was a Slate staff writer in 2017 when he hosted the first season of “Slow Burn,” a meticulous examination of the Watergate scandal.As a writer, Neyfakh said, he was dispirited to find that long feature stories, which had taken months of work, would yield just a few minutes of “average engaged time” from readers. But “Slow Burn” fans would spend hours with the show, listening through to the end of episodes that lasted 30, 40 minutes or more.“People are just willing to give you more of their attention in podcasting than they are in print,” Neyfakh said.Epix turned the Watergate season of “Slow Burn” into a TV documentary and an anthology series starring Julia Roberts and Sean Penn is heading to Starz.Along with high-minded journalism came a flood of comedian-led talk shows, pop-culture gabfests, sex and self-help shows, and every niche dive imaginable. In 2017, Emily Cross, an indie-rock musician, was joking with a friend about the glut of podcasts when she hit on a “Seinfeld”-inspired idea.“What if I just did a podcast about nothing? A podcast about just what I’m looking at,” Cross recalled. “I was like: Actually, I really like that idea. So I just started doing it.”For 20 to 30 minutes each week, “What I’m Looking At” features Cross calmly describing random objects — her shoes, an apple, a box of toothpicks — in soothing detail, like a combination Zen relaxation ritual and conceptual art project. She earns no money from it directly (she has supporters on Patreon), but has built a small community of followers who email her comments after every episode.Shows like “Slow Burn” and “What I’m Looking At” exemplify the power and charm of podcasting — an intimate, technologically simple medium that can help forge a connection with an audience over any topic, weighty or whimsical.That power, and the lure of greater advertising dollars, has begun to draw big investment. In 2018, iHeartMedia, the broadcast radio giant, paid $55 million for Stuff Media, the studio behind hits like “Stuff You Should Know.” Last year, SiriusXM acquired Stitcher, a popular app and distributor, for at least $265 million. And in late December, Amazon agreed to buy Wondery (“Dr. Death,” “Dirty John”) at a price estimated at more than $300 million.Over the last two years, Spotify has paid more than $800 million for a series of podcasting companies, like Gimlet, the Ringer and Anchor. Spotify has also struck content deals with the Obamas, Kim Kardashian West, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the comedian Joe Rogan, whose no-holds-barred talk — including with guests like Alex Jones — has made him podcasting’s closest thing to Howard Stern.Spending has amped up competition among platforms, many of which have begun to protect their investments by keeping content inside so-called walled gardens, accessible only to subscribers. Spotify, which keeps some shows within its walls, has made it clear that it views podcasts as a way to attract new customers to its service. This month, Spotify said that a quarter of its 345 million customers listen to podcasts.“There is no question that podcasting is helping drive more people to Spotify than ever before,” said Dawn Ostroff, the company’s chief content and advertising business officer. “That’s really our goal at this point.”Consumers have grown accustomed to content arms races among streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. But in podcasting, it has led to fears of corporate Balkanization of what has long been a platform-neutral medium, in which anything but the most high-profile shows could effectively be suppressed.For now, there are signs of experimentation in the distribution model — or at least a hesitancy by platforms to wall off too much of their content. When “The Michelle Obama Podcast” came out in July, for example, it was only on Spotify, but within two months it was widely available, including on Spotify’s archrival, Apple.SiriusXM, which owns Pandora and Stitcher, has developed a hybrid approach to take advantage of the offerings on each of those three brands. The company circulates free podcast versions of some of its subscriber-only radio shows, like Kevin Hart’s “Comedy Gold Minds,” to Pandora and Stitcher, in part as marketing for SiriusXM’s paid service.“We love our three-barrel attack,” said Scott Greenstein, SiriusXM’s president and chief content officer.A Diversity Downside?Lory Martinez, whose Studio Ochenta makes “Mija,” said starting her own company may have been the only way to get her shows — and her multilingual, multicultural approach — to market.Credit…Carolina Arantes for The New York TimesLory Martinez, a Colombian-American podcaster, keeps her grandfather’s press card at her desk in Paris.He was a newspaper reporter in Colombia who covered the country’s Indigenous communities, and saw his role as bringing those people’s stories and perspectives to the entire nation. His approach inspired the mission of Martinez’s company, Studio Ochenta: “Raising voices across cultures.”Ochenta began a year and a half ago with “Mija,” a short-form podcast about the life of an immigrant daughter from Queens — modeled after Martinez herself — that was released in English, Spanish and French. It reached No. 1 on iTunes’s fiction podcast charts in 13 countries, and its third season, about an Egyptian Muslim character in Britain and the United States, will be released in April in English, Spanish and Arabic.“There is now more of a space for voices than you would traditionally hear, and they are appearing in podcasting,” Martinez said. “They’re not only making podcasts, they are starting companies. That’s what’s so exciting about this time.”But Martinez said that starting her own company may have been the only way to get her shows — and her multilingual, multicultural approach — to market.“I don’t think ‘Mija’ would have been made if I pitched it elsewhere,” Martinez said.Increasing corporatization, and the incentive for platforms to favor the shows they own, has intensified concerns that podcasts from underrepresented groups could enjoy less promotion, find fewer listeners and collect less advertising revenue — a vicious cycle that would repeat many of the failings of the old media model.For all the rah-rah talk of podcasts as a democratized medium, building diversity has been a slow undertaking. In 2008, for example, 73 percent of monthly listeners in the United States were white. In those days, “the average podcast you listened to was two white dudes talking about internet routers, and the audience reflected that,” said Tom Webster of Edison Research.Last year, Edison and Triton found that white listeners’ slice of the pie had narrowed to 63 percent, nearly mirroring the 60 percent of Americans who identify as white in census data. But the representation behind the microphone still lags.Juleyka Lantigua-Williams, a former journalist at NPR and The Atlantic who founded a production company focused on work by people of color, said that media and tech companies should look at diversity as a business imperative, given the country’s shifting demographics and the devoted audiences that companies like Studio Ochenta are building.“In the rush to secure the players that look like sure bets,” Lantigua-Williams said, “they are overlooking the creators who are really growing audiences that are going to stay with them five, 10 years down the line.”Yet some podcasters have found success navigating the corporate world from within. Spotify’s “Dope Labs” features two young Black women, Titi Shodiya and Zakiya Whatley — both working scientists with Ph.D.s — who came to podcasting via a Spotify-sponsored accelerator program, Sound Up, that aims to bring talent from underrepresented groups into the medium.“Dope Labs” mingles hard-nosed science and pop culture, with episodes on coronavirus vaccinations, racism in science and the history of Afrofuturism. The show has more than 100,000 followers — a midlevel hit.“People have this stereotypical box of what a scientist looks like, what they sound like and what they care about,” Shodiya said. “And we say, no. We don’t only care about these things. We’re really into fashion. We’re really into music. We’re really into food. We like to break the mold.”Sound Up awarded Shodiya and Whatley $10,000 and offered them training in basics like interviewing and using recording equipment. They were free to take their show anywhere, and Shodiya said they pitched it to other companies, which asked for changes the women did not want to make. They stuck with Spotify.“Spotify seemed to get it,” Shodiya said. “They really appreciate our voices and what we bring to the platform.”Opportunities for CreativityFor a star like Morris, the question of access to media is less of an issue. But even for him, podcasts offer a rare opportunity — to test a new idea, quickly and cheaply.“When you’re a creative person, you need an outlet,” Morris said. “You can’t always say, ‘Let’s go and make a $50 million movie.’ But you can sit down, record, say your idea out loud.”For now, many podcasters say, the money spent by platforms, media companies and advertisers has helped enable experimentation in the format and a sharpening of storytelling techniques.Early fiction hits like Gimlet’s “Homecoming,” from 2016, about a therapist working with returning soldiers, demonstrated some of the potential for innovation, with crosscut scenes and varying audio treatment of voices to indicate different environments — a high-tech take on techniques first heard in 1930s radio dramas. (“Homecoming” became a TV series on Amazon starring Roberts and then Janelle Monáe.)More recently, shows like Audible’s “When You Finish Saving the World,” a five-hour drama by Jesse Eisenberg, have tinkered further with narration and storytelling in long-form audio.“Unwanted,” Morris said, could very well be a film or television project. (A spokeswoman for QCode said no negotiations to adapt it have taken place yet.) The story, he said, was just one of “millions” of ideas that he and Kyle Shevrin, his co-creator and writing partner, have bandied about, and podcasting allowed it to become a reality.“It’s a proof of concept,” Morris said, “to say to the industry: This works, this is fun, this is something that can be done.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Paris Hilton Has a Podcast, With a Twist

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyParis Hilton Has a Podcast, With a TwistThe aughts fixture and proto-influencer’s new show with iHeartMedia aims to stake out a middle ground between podcasting and social media.Paris Hilton, photographed at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif., is getting into the podcast business with a new company, her own show and an unusual spin on a format that seeks to create an audio equivalent to social media.Credit…Rosie Marks for The New York TimesFeb. 4, 2021Updated 3:17 p.m. ETPodcasting holds a strong allure for would-be media disrupters and visionaries. In the still-developing medium, they see wet clay, capable of being molded into an ideal vessel for long-form narrative journalism or fiction or game shows or musicals or memoir.Add Paris Hilton to their ranks. Hilton, master of an earlier mass-communications era in the tabloid-fueled early aughts, is getting into the podcast business with a new company, her own show and an unusual spin on a form that will seek to create an audio equivalent to social media.“This Is Paris” will debut on Feb. 22 in partnership with iHeartMedia, the radio giant that has become one of the largest distributors of podcasts, with more than 750 shows collecting more than 250 million downloads per month. Aimed at Hilton’s over 40 million followers across social media platforms, the new show will offer a mix of personal content and conversations with her family, friends and other celebrities. It will be the flagship of a planned slate of seven shows to be produced by Hilton’s company, London Audio, and the iHeartPodcast Network. The other programs, featuring different hosts, will be released over the next three years.“I’ve always been an innovator and first mover when it comes to reality TV, social, D.J.ing, and now I really believe that voice and audio is the next frontier,” she said in an interview.A key feature of her podcast will be its use of a format that Hilton is calling “Podposts”: short (between one and three minutes), stripped-down dispatches meant to mimic the cadence and tone of posts on social media. The “This Is Paris” podcast feed will host longer (around 45 minutes), more traditionally produced episodes weekly, with intermittent Podposts filling in the gap several times per week.Since the end of the Fox show “The Simple Life” (with Nicole Richie) in 2007, Hilton has branched into other industries like fashion through her company, Paris Hilton Entertainment.Credit…Michael Yarish/Fox“I really believe that it is like another form of social media,” Hilton explained. “I do so many things — being a D.J., a businesswoman, a designer and an author — so there will be a lot for me to talk about.”Preplanned categories of Podposts will be inspired by Hilton’s famous catchphrases, including “That’s Hot” for product recommendations, “Loves It” for culture recommendations and “This Is my Hotline,” in which Hilton will respond to voice mail messages sent in by listeners. Conal Byrne, president of the iHeartPodcast Network, said the company is currently looking to partner with brands for sponsorship at different levels.“Her power to recommend products to her fans that she believes in is just about unrivaled,” Byrne said.Since the end of “The Simple Life,” her reality television series with Nicole Richie, in 2007, Hilton, who will turn 40 this month, has branched into a wide range of industries through her company, Paris Hilton Entertainment. Its assets include 45 retail stores and 19 product lines across categories like fragrance, fashion and accessories. Before the coronavirus pandemic, Hilton was a sought-after D.J. around the world, for which she has been paid a reported $1 million per gig.In this new deal, iHeartMedia will fully fund the slate of shows produced in partnership with London Audio at a budget of multiple millions of dollars. The two companies will be joint partners in each show and split all revenue streams. After “This Is Paris,” the rest of the slate is expected to be geared toward subjects including beauty, wellness, dating, philanthropy and technology, with Hilton and Bruce Gersh, the president of London Audio, serving as executive producers.“This is a medium that has so many dimensions and really allows you to connect to an audience in a unique way,” Gersh said. “Paris wanted to jump in wholeheartedly.”In addition to the flagship podcast “This Is Paris,” Hilton’s deal with iHeartMedia calls for the creation of six other shows over the next three years.Credit…Rosie Marks for The New York TimesHilton, who named “Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions” and Kate and Oliver Hudson’s “Sibling Revelry” as among her favorite shows, immersed herself in the medium while grounded at home in Los Angeles during the pandemic.“Usually, I’m traveling 250 days a year and working constantly,” she said. “During this whole year in quarantine, I’ve had more free time than I’ve ever had in my career. So I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and getting really interested. When I’m cooking or working or doing my art, I always have them on in the background.”Podcasts have become a favored outlet for celebrities seeking to engage with fans in more depth than is possible in a typical post on Instagram or Twitter, while avoiding the scrutiny and vulnerability that comes with speaking to the press. Name recognition is a powerful advantage on the platform — shows by celebrity podcasters like Dax Shepard, Jason Bateman, Anna Faris and Bill Burr appear regularly in the top 50 of the Apple Podcasts charts. (In addition to the Hilton deal, iHeartMedia has struck joint partnerships with Will Ferrell and Shonda Rhimes for slates of shows.) And podcast audiences tend to be a relatively friendly bunch: There are no comments sections to elevate unpleasant behavior, and podcasts by their nature require a level of active engagement that discourages drive-by detractors.“I think once people understand that this is a platform where they can directly interact with their fans without any kind of middleperson, it becomes a very attractive proposition,” said Tom Webster, senior vice president of Edison Research, a media research firm.Webster added that Hilton’s Podposts concept reminded him of the proto-podcast field of audio blogging, in which writers for websites like The Quiet American and The Greasy Skillet posted short audio diaries. “It allows them to stretch out into their personal interests in a way they don’t get to in their day job,” he said.In last year’s YouTube documentary “This Is Paris,” Hilton said she was abused by administrators at a private boarding school she attended as a teenager, an experience by which she remains traumatized.Credit…YouTube“This Is Paris” shares a name with Hilton’s YouTube documentary, released last fall. In that film, which has nearly 20 million views, she distances herself from the blithe, ditsy persona with which she has been identified since emerging in the glare of paparazzi bulbs two decades ago. Hilton also says that she was abused by administrators at a private boarding school she attended as a teenager, an experience by which she remains traumatized.The podcast is meant to follow in the same candid vein. Hilton is recording it at a home studio (built for her music projects) and using her much-discussed natural voice (which, to my ear, is deeper than her most girlish trill but not a dramatic departure).“She talks in a way that’s very relaxed and accessible, as opposed to someone who is putting on a performance,” Byrne said. “Right away she was a natural at making it feel like a one-on-one phone call and not a one-to-many media asset.”For Hilton, recording the pilot for the show did feel uncomfortable at first — unlike on social media, there were no glamorous photos or videos to hide behind. “It’s only about the knowledge you’re bringing and what you’re saying with your voice,” she said.But soon she fell into a groove. After a lifetime of being the subject of interviews, she’s been enjoying “turning the tables” as the one asking questions. Compared with her old jobs, the commute isn’t bad either.“I love being a homebody,” she said, reflecting on her new chapter. “I’ve worked so incredibly hard to build my empire — now I get to finally enjoy it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    ‘Anything for Selena’ Examines a Singer’s Legacy and Latino Identity

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Anything for Selena’ Examines a Singer’s Legacy and Latino IdentityWhile the podcast is a biography of the Tejano star, it also weaves in the personal story of the host and examines why the singer has had a lasting effect on culture.Maria Garcia, the host and creator of “Anything for Selena,” in El Paso, Texas, where she was raised.Credit…Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021Maria Garcia has a distinct memory of when her connection to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez began. It was the early 1990s and she was 7, watching the Tejano star perform on television.“She had this cascade of black hair, red lips, brown skin,” Garcia says in the first episode of the new podcast “Anything for Selena.” “She sang like she felt every single word of her songs, like the music was emanating from her body.”It was a pivotal moment for Garcia, the podcast’s host. Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and raised in El Paso, Texas, she struggled to figure out who she was and where she belonged, describing in the podcast how she felt “a rejection, a stigma, in both countries.” Yet, here was someone who looked like her, uncompromising in her biculturalism and appearance. Selena was Mexican as much as she was American. Her first hits, like “Como La Flor,” were in Spanish, but “Dreaming of You,” her posthumous English-language album, was a mainstream success and the 1997 biopic starring Jennifer Lopez further cemented her legacy.While the show, a 10-episode podcast co-produced by Boston’s NPR affiliate WBUR and Futuro Media, serves as a biography of Selena, it also weaves in Garcia’s personal story. And she makes the case for how the singer’s life and death (Selena was fatally shot by the president of her fan club in 1995) were profound flash points for Latinos like herself that had lasting effects on the cultural landscape. The episodes drop each Wednesday and are paired with Spanish-language versions.Selena was Mexican as much as she was American, uncompromising in her biculturalism and appearance.Credit…Arlene Richie/Media Sources/The LIFE Images Collection via, Getty ImagesI also grew up in Texas, 100 miles north of Corpus Christi, where Selena was from, and like Garcia, I am a first-generation Mexican-American. Whether it was at a quinceañera or blaring from the kitchen radio, Selena’s music was part of the soundtrack to life. Tejano music, which fuses Mexican, European and American influences, was an expression of what it means to be from Texas. She embodied all those influences.Garcia is currently staying in El Paso, where she spoke on the phone about the series and how much it hinged on a meeting with Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla, who is known to be very protective of her legacy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was the inspiration for “Anything for Selena”?The podcast has been my own search to figure out where I belong in the world and how I belong in the world. Everybody who knows me knows that I have always been a huge Selena devotee from the time I was a little girl to my adolescence and to my early adulthood.The last home video I have with my father before he died, it’s of us dancing to Selena music. I realized there were all these moments in my life where Selena was there, and I really wanted to unpack why she felt so profound to me even in my 30s. I knew the answer was more than just she was this Mexican-American performer in the ’90s — a time when that really incentivized assimilation. I wanted to go even deeper and try to connect the dots through the decades and really try to do her legacy justice in music and in culture.The other thing about this series is that it’s partly a memoir about your upbringing and life on the border and struggling to fit in. It made me think of this saying in Spanish, “ni de aquí, ni de allá,” neither from here nor there. Why did you want to open up about that?I wasn’t thinking of it as a memoir when I started writing it. For me, I was telling this story because when I was 7 years old and I have the first memory of Selena, I didn’t have the language to articulate what she meant to me.There was this tension between these two parts of me, and to see somebody who embodied both of those parts fully in the States and in Mexico, who traversed the two countries without code switching, who was the same person on both sides of the border — I’d never seen anything like that. It struck me at a young age and it stayed with me all of my life.Garcia was filled with trepidation in meeting Selena’s father, known for tightly controlling the singer’s legacy.Credit…Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesThe most recent episode has topics that listeners may find intriguing.We explore race pretty deeply in these next episodes. I have this theory that there is a direct historical lineage from Selena to today’s mainstreaming of big butts. Black women have always been at the forefront of celebrating curvaceous bodies, but there is this moment in the mid-90s, after Selena’s death, and particularly at the time of her biopic, when Latinas made it a feature that became desirable in the mainstream.To me, that story is about Latino identity’s fraught relationship with Blackness and the way Latinidad (the concept of U.S. Latino identity) has dehumanized and erased Black people while capitalizing on and obsessing over Black features. And the way that Latino identity has served to make these features palatable for white audiences.In the second episode, you talk about going to meet Abraham Quintanilla, Selena’s father. What was that experience like and did you have concerns about what might happen?Oh absolutely. I was terrified. I flew to Corpus Christi without any guarantee that he would even see me. We had been trying to acquire the music rights for Selena’s catalog. We had heard from the record label and they told us that not only the family rejected it, but that they were not supportive of the project.But I knew Abraham was one of the foundational keys to understanding Selena. It’s amazing how often and how devotedly she talked about her father. They had a creative bond over their craft, over music.He’s this really imposing character, especially in Spanish media. There’s been so much salacious coverage about him, and I wanted to get to know him as a person, without an agenda. I think he realized that after he spent some time with us and opened up.It felt like he let his guard down with you.And I with him. It was reciprocal.He is genuinely a complicated person. He admits that he was an incredibly demanding father. But he told me he has moments where he wonders if he had not pushed Selena to be a star, would she still be here? That’s a very real tension he has lived with for the last quarter century.Young mourners outside Selena’s home the day after she was killed in 1995.Credit…David J. Phillip/Associated PressThe series also discusses how after Selena’s death, Howard Stern became a flash point on how Latinos were portrayed in the media. It was startling to hear the rhetoric now (in a clip, he makes fun of her and the Latinos grieving her death; he later apologized). Do you think much has changed since then?A lot of people listen to that archive tape and feel distressed. I say this in the episode — this is his thing. But I really wanted to focus an episode on that because that is the moment in the Selena journey that it became clear to me how political [her death] was. To make fun of the people who mourned her was to dismiss the life of Latinos.When I heard this tape, all I could think about were the women in Juarez who have been murdered over generations and nobody cared. And it feels like to this day, nobody cares. So many of them looked like Selena. These are women who were poor and brown like Selena had been. But Selena was afforded a different path because she was born on this side of the border.Even if she did everything right, even if she played by all the rules, still to Howard Stern, her life didn’t matter. That’s the moment where her symbolism took off, the weekend after her death. After her death, her symbol then transformed even more. She became this vessel to look at the polemics, tensions and narratives around Latino life and its worth.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Keegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a Laugh

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKeegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a LaughHis new 10-part podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” is a surprising and earnest defense of a relatively unsung art form.Keegan-Michael Key in 2018. His new podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” involved a lot of research. “I loved school,” he said, so delving into a subject “kind of lights my fire.”Credit…Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021Updated 4:33 p.m. ETThere are people who enjoy comedy, people who are nerdy about comedy and then there is Keegan-Michael Key, an actor and producer whose deep and affectionate connoisseurship of jokes puts him closer to the realm of a jurist or sommelier.On Key’s new Audible-exclusive podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” he plays resident historian, taking listeners on a laugh-laden and discursive journey — from ancient Sumer to 16th-century Rome to Abbott and Costello — in a lighthearted but earnest attempt to demonstrate the enduring power and understated complexity of the art form.For Key, who has spent the half-decade since the end of his award-winning TV show “Key & Peele” zigzagging between interesting projects onscreen and off, the podcast was a labor of love. It was directed by and co-written with his wife, Elle Key, last year. On a recent phone call, he discussed the impetus for the show, performing without a true audience and the role his adoption played in his love of comedy.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When you hear about a celebrity starting a podcast, you generally think of something personality driven, or an interview show with other famous people. You don’t think of an in-depth, 10-part history lesson. What made you want to do this project as a podcast?KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY Well, one of the things that brought me and my wife, Elle, together is our love of humor and of comedy, even the science of it: What makes a good turn? What makes the joke work? I’m an academically minded person — I loved school. So being able to do research and delve into a subject and turn that around and share with other people is something that kind of lights my fire. For years, Elle has been suggesting that with all of the combined knowledge and passion for this art form that we have, we should figure out a way to share it with others. And when the pandemic started, we used all of our time in quarantine to put it together. Her pitch to Audible was: “If Keegan-Michael Key was a guest lecturer at N.Y.U. doing a 10-week course called ‘The History of Sketch Comedy,’ it would be a very popular class.”Have you always been a student of the history of sketch comedy?KEY That’s something that started in my 20s probably, when I was an undergrad fine arts and acting major [at the University of Detroit Mercy]. I never gave much thought to the history of comedy until I started studying commedia dell’arte. I was like, “Wait a second, you mean there are archetypes? Warner Brothers didn’t just invent the phenomenon of Bugs Bunny? The primary characteristics [of Bugs] have existed for hundreds of years?” When my professor said that, my mind got peeled back. I wrote a paper [in graduate school, at Pennsylvania State University] making a comparison between vaudevillian poster advertisements from the late 19th century and the images that you would see on Greek and Roman friezes from the comedies of Plautus and Terence and Aristophanes, just because that kind of stuff fascinated me.Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key, who directed the podcast, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party last year.Credit…Danny Moloshok/ReutersHad you done much comedy of your own at that point?KEY Yeah, I think comedy afforded me social currency. You don’t have to be particularly athletic, you don’t have to be super strong and you don’t have to be on the dean’s list to be able to execute a pratfall or tell a funny joke or do a dead-on impression. That was the route that I went as a painfully shy, very skinny kid. That was the only power I knew how to wield. I remember once, when I was a kid, seeing my father, who was this very large, stoic, soft-spoken guy, guffawing at this impression. It was revelatory to me that a person could have that kind of power over somebody who was a thousand miles away, or 10,000 miles away.Did you try and make him laugh yourself?KEY I would try to impress him. If I had gone to see a movie, I would go home to my mom and my dad and act out the movie. Or, if they hadn’t seen a trailer for a movie, I would act out the trailer. Sometimes I would also use that as a kind of pre-Power Point presentation, trying to convince them to let me go see the movie if it was rated R. They were thoroughly entertained, but alas, it did not work.That’s really funny given what you ended up doing for a living, especially all the movie-inspired sketches of the “Key & Peele” show.KEY Exactly. It’s not a surprise at all. Also, I’m adopted; so to say that I spent a lot of time trying to get my parents’ approval is kind of an understatement. I’ve been acting since I was born, you know what I mean? I’ve been putting my tap shoes on for people’s approval for a long time.You chose an interesting starting point for the show, going all the way back to a Sumerian fart joke from 1900 B.C., which I couldn’t believe was real. How did you decide how far back to go?KEY It started with the joke from the film “Airplane.” Lloyd Bridges storms in and he goes: “All right, everybody. I need this piece of information. I need that to happen over there, this to happen over here, and we have to start at the beginning.” And then the guy says to him: “OK. Well, first, there was dinosaurs, and then …” So we actually decided to use that joke as the basis for the beginning. Like, “What would it look like if we start at the beginning? Let’s talk about hieroglyphics.” And then the hieroglyphics brought us to the Sumerians. I think, at our most basic level, the way we captivate each other as human beings is through explaining the journey or the ordeal that one goes through. Literature, cinema, theater — they’re all basically the same at the core, but we express them in a different way.The series begs the question of just what is a sketch. I’m curious how you define it.KEY I think one of the biggest components of sketch is brevity. The modern definition is: premise plus escalation equals sketch, or premise plus escalation equals comedy, which means that a sketch is just kind of an elongated joke that builds on itself. So I was trying to affix that measuring stick to these other pieces of art throughout history. There are lots of scenes in movies and plays where you could move it surgically out of the larger piece, and it could stand as its own piece of comedy. To me, that’s sketch.How did you approach doing all the research for the show? Did you have to brush up on your William Dunlap or your Mathurine de Vallois?KEY Well, a lot of what Elle did is that, as we were putting the structure together, we started to go through history and just say, “What do we know about comedy and where there were comedic performers in history?” Then we just started putting them on the timeline. I discovered through our research about female jesters — was not aware that they existed. There are a lot of wonderful things that I discovered, like the “rural purge” and Beyond the Fringe.Putting all that on a timeline and then being able to kind of zoom out, did it make you see comedy in a different way? Or affirm things you already knew?KEY I think that it probably affirmed things. One of those affirmations was the basics: that people figured out tens of thousands of years ago that it was satisfying to watch someone overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. That is somehow inherent in our programming, to excite us and bring us meaning.Yours is the only voice we hear in the series, and you act out a lot of the sketches you discuss. Was it strange to perform without an audience?KEY Technically speaking, I wasn’t alone: I had Elle in the booth, the engineer and a production assistant. I’d be in the booth looking at them [while performing], and I’d see them start to smile. To me, if I start improvising and I see people start to grin, that’s chum in the water and I’m a great white shark. I’m going to go right the [expletive] off script and do everything in my power to make them burst out in laughter. In certain episodes, you actually hear me talking to Cameron [Perry], the engineer. I go, “Right, Cameron? I mean, it’s a pretty filthy joke, but you’re laughing. Everybody, Cameron’s laughing.”What have you liked most about working in audio?KEY One thing I like is the fact that sometimes it allows you to go bigger. It allows you to be broader, more energetic, because you have to convey something through a microphone. Especially when you’re doing animation work — the figure of what you’re performing with your voice is often so exaggerated that it gives you license to be peculiar or over the top. You can say to the director, “What if I just was like [yodels loudly and cartoonishly]?” And the director will go: “That might work.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    On Keegan-Michael Key’s Podcast, a Provocative Case for Sketch Comedy

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn ComedyOn Keegan-Michael Key’s Podcast, a Provocative Case for Sketch ComedyThe 10-part series mixes history, memoir, analysis and performance to show how classic scenes can be revived just as classic theater is.Keegan-Michael Key as a substitute teacher in a sketch from “Key & Peele.”Credit…Comedy CentralJan. 27, 2021Updated 5:18 p.m. ETWhat if the most impressive post-sketch show career belongs to Key, not Peele?Sure, it’s a hot take, but hear me out. Jordan Peele followed the Comedy Central hit “Key & Peele” by merely becoming one of the greatest film auteurs of his generation, whereas his partner, Keegan-Michael Key, took a more varied route, stealing scenes in “Hamlet” at the Public Theater and improvising bits on Broadway, singing in a movie musical, starring in a comedy series, doing prolific voice work in blockbuster movies, hosting a game show and being an absolutely stellar talk-show guest (his conversations with Conan O’Brien are hilarious). Measured by diversity of work and bounty of laughs, Key stacks up well, particularly after his new project, the Audible podcast series “The History of Sketch Comedy,” is released on Thursday.The title doesn’t do it justice. Directed and co-written with his wife, Elle Key, “The History of Sketch Comedy” is far more eccentric, funny and personal than an Intro to Comedy class, although it is that, too. His 10 half-hour or so episodes cover thousands of years from the ancient Sumerians (who kicked comedy off with a fart joke) right up to Tim Robinson’s Netflix show “I Think You Should Leave.”But this comedy nerd history is filtered through memoir, with Key relating stories of his budding fandom, training and rise from improv comic to television sketch artist. He follows talk about comedy from Aristophanes by saying he grew up “a chariot” ride from Greektown in Detroit.Along the way, he pauses to offer the kind of practical tips you might find in MasterClass videos. “If you are an actor in a comedy, you should be trying to make the crew laugh,” he instructs in the ninth episode. Key explains concepts taught in comedy schools like “heightening” or “the game of a scene,” and also breaks down the four main comedy-character archetypes, dating to the commedia dell’arte. Demystifying the art, he provides if not a formula, then a road map.Yet the most ambitious role he plays is not as a comedy mentor or amateur historian, but as a performer. The heart of this series, an odd genre hybrid that reminds me of Al Pacino’s documentary “Looking for Richard,” is in the sketches. Instead of relying on tape from “Saturday Night Live,” “In Living Color” or any other beloved shows, Key performs them all himself, setting them up, playing all the parts.It’s a feat to pivot from analysis to performance, let alone between Abbott and Costello and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. It’s also a risk. Can jokes from “Chappelle’s Show” still work if you take out Dave Chappelle? And considering the reputation that comedy doesn’t age well, will old sketches still make audiences laugh?They certainly crack up Keegan-Michael Key, who pairs a fan’s gushing enthusiasm with the skilled craftsmanship of a seasoned pro who knows that laughter can be contagious. Obviously, there’s no way a podcast is going to prove that Sid Caesar’s physical comedy is unmatched, as Key argues, but it can make a strong case for Bob and Ray’s “Slow Talkers of America” routine. Key’s version of this classic, built on the frustration of a conversation with a man who takes extremely long pauses, is absolutely hilarious.Key is generally a faithful interpreter, but his goofy, ingratiating sensibility inevitably offers a new take, warming up, for instance, the chilly absurdism of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” In his final episode, Key is particularly persuasive championing what he considers the pinnacle of the art form: The audition segment in “Mr. Show,” the great, innovative sketch series by David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, that hinges on an elegantly simple premise about the misunderstanding of when a scene begins. What makes Key such a superb interpreter is how alert he is to the subtle choices, the minor variations, that build pace and spin a setup into something dizzyingly funny.Key delights in witty, formally inventive comedy, which shows up in his very fine discussion of British humor in the sixth episode. Along with the obvious examples — Python, “Beyond the Fringe” — he lavishes attention on an early 1970s TV show less well known in America called “The Two Ronnies,” which builds a whole sketch on misunderstanding names. He then explains how a famous sketch he did on “Key and Peele” about a substitute teacher shares the same tactic. It isn’t the only time he uses his own experience to illuminate older work.Eddie Murphy, right, doing a Stevie Wonder impression alongside the music star on “Saturday Night Live.”Credit…Anthony Barboza/Getty ImagesThere’s a poignancy to him remembering the first time he heard his stoic father laugh. Seeing him break up at Eddie Murphy doing a Stevie Wonder impression with Wonder at his side on “Saturday Night Live” made such an impression that Key described it as “the beginning of my sketch-comedy path.” His enthusiasm can veer into cloying dad humor, but his delight in forgotten artists is infectious.It’s questionable whether Timmie Rogers belongs in this podcast (he’s more of a stand-up), but it’s still exhilarating to hear Key doing the mid-20th-century act of this trailblazer, the first comic to headline the Apollo and star in an all-Black variety show on network television, “Uptown Jubilee.” Rejecting vaudeville stereotypes and racist conventions like blackface, Rogers transitioned from a musical double act into a politically wry solo performer, making him a founding father of stand-up. Compared with fellow comic revolutionaries like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, Rogers tends to get short shrift in accounts of that era. But in performing his old catch phrase (“Oh, yeah!”), Key doesn’t just pay tribute. He offers a reintroduction.“The History of Sketch Comedy” keeps an eye on comprehensiveness, including quick histories of burlesque and vaudeville as well as the Broadway revue (“a vaudeville show dressed in a tuxedo”). The podcast goes out of its way to name-check a dizzying number of television shows. So it feels churlish to single out an omission, but the absence of Tim and Eric stands out because their aesthetic is so influential, including on shows “History” examines, like “Portlandia.”And yet, one comes away from this series not just entertained and informed, but also convinced. It has an argument, even if it doesn’t overtly state it. Sketch is a rich, deceptively intricate art, even if part of its power is in its simplicity. Fart jokes endure for a reason. In creating a de facto canon, Key proves that the best examples of sketch comedy can be triumphantly revived like classic works of theater. To put it succinctly, a necessity for the form: If Rodgers and Hammerstein, why not Nichols and May?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    My Ears Have Been Opened by the Audio Play Explosion

    @media (pointer: coarse) { .at-home-nav__outerContainer { overflow-x: scroll; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; } } .at-home-nav__outerContainer { position: relative; display: flex; align-items: center; /* Fixes IE */ overflow-x: auto; box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15); padding: 10px 1.25em 10px; transition: all 250ms; margin-bottom: 20px; -ms-overflow-style: none; /* IE 10+ */ […] More