A Note from GFY HQ: I wrote this post before the absolutely horrible events in Paris unfolded tonight. At the moment, The Guardian seems to be a good place for news and intel, but the New York Times has also temporarily lifted its paywall, so as to provide news to everyone. France24 also has had excellent (English) coverage.
Fug Nation Paris, I pray that you are safe and well. Please let us know how we can help.
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We are lucky: The Royal We advanced one round, and is now in the semi-finals for the Goodreads Choice Awards — for Best Fiction of 2015 — and we’d love to get your vote to help us move into the finals. You can vote for us, or anyone, here. Thank you!
– As I mentioned in Royals Round-Up, Heather and I saw Hamilton this weekend when we were in New York for a quick business trip. It was awesome, and this is funny (and true), at Bustle: 16 Stages Of Becoming Painfully, Irrevocably Obsessed With ‘Hamilton’ On Broadway
– Speaking of Hamilton, we saw Lin-Manuel Miranda’s alternate Javier Munoz — who does every Sunday matinee, and who’s been working with LMM this way since In The Heights — and Vulture has a great interview with him about the experience of being LMM’s second in a color-blind musical about the Founding Fathers. For what it’s worth, Munoz was fantastic.
– If you haven’t read these comments, wherein Fug Nationals talk about women in their lives who inspire them, you should. Your stories are amazing and touching and heartbreaking and awesome: Each of you knows (or is!) a woman who could be the heroine of an amazing book.
– I enjoyed this interview with Gabourey Sidibe at Buzzfeed. I also didn’t know she has a memoir coming out!
– This Sports Illustrated piece about Michael Phelps — post-rehab — is really interesting, especially if you are (like me), a fan of swimming, the Olympics, and talented men with good abs who are beset by personal demons but fight through them to triumph. (Well, ideally.) It’s also fascinating to me to watch someone like Phelps go from wunderkind to adult athlete. I am a big fan of Phelps — I was ALWAYS Team Phelps when he went up against Lochte, for example — but one of my favorite things about sports is that they are, at their best, a story: There are underdogs, and triumphs, and coming from behind, villains and rivals and allies, heroes and weasels and romances. This gives a fascinating insight to a lot of what we didn’t know was going on behind the scenes, and what might happen in the final chapter of his career.
– At Lainey, the latest on the Gwen/Gavin break-up — it seems that he was allegedly carrying on with the nanny for something like three years. (However, since before that scoop broke, BlindGossip has been running items that COULD POTENTIALLY ALLEGEDLY be decoded to imply that Gavin had been planning to leak a major false story to try and defuse those persistent gay/bisexual rumors. So. The plot thickens?)
– This is great, especially for a native Los Angeleno like myself, at KCET: The 5, the 101, the 405: Why Southern Californians Love Saying ‘the’ Before Freeway Numbers
– At Celebitchy, a run-down of Cate Blanchett’s recent interview with Guardian Weekend.
– From Atlas Obscura: Secret Chambers, Grain Silos and the Long, Long History of Pyramid Conspiracy Theories. I love a good pyramid conspiracy theory!
– Over at The New Potato, The 25 Best Holiday Drinks. Cheers!
– From our friends at Pajiba: 12 Years Later, Mary-Louise Parker Finally Opens Up About That Skeezebag Billy Crudup
– The Atlantic is running a bracket to determine who on TV is THE ACTUAL WORST. (Fitz is clearly in the running to take it all.)
– Shia LaBeouf is…screening all his movies in a row at some theatre in New York and is sitting through this himself, with a webcam on his face or something? PEOPLE ARE WEIRD. Anyway, Vulture sent someone to check it out in person, and it’s quite a good read.
