Ralph breaks the internet

Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah has been in the news off late for all the wrong reasons. Shailesh Lodha who played Taarak Mehta recently quit the show. It is also being rumoured that Raj Anadkat aka Tapu may also be on the outs very soon. There have been multiple media reports of actors being forbidden from working on other projects besides the sitcom. Amidst all the speculation, producer Asit Kumarr Modi has now spoken out about the matter and said how he wants to keep everyone in the team together. In his video message, he added that if someone decides to explore other opportunities, the show will not stop if they quit. Asit said in Hindi, “See I have said this before also that I want to keep everyone and everything together. But there are a few people who do not want to come back, they don't have the hunger, they don't want to limit themselves to TMKOC. They don't want to understand this. I want them to think again because without them the show … [Read more...] about Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah: Asit Modi Breaks His Silence About Actors Leaving The Show; WATCH

There was a time when one could often find Mandela Barnes on MSNBC. His hits peaked in late summer 2020, when Wisconsin ’s 33-year-old lieutenant governor took to the liberal airwaves to register his outrage over a police shooting in Kenosha. Those appearances left a strong impression, as Barnes — young, Black, equal measures charismatic and unapologetic — condemned law enforcement’s accounts of how one of their own shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man. ”We’re being told not to believe our eyes,” he said on the network. “If we have the accountability we deserve … we wouldn’t be in the place that we are with this racial reckoning.” It was an era when Democratic Senate candidates were fixtures on MSNBC, preaching soundbites to the liberal choir and hoovering up millions of dollars’ worth of donations, a reward for taking on a reviled Trump toady. Fast-forward two years, and Barnes is now a Democratic Senate candidate himself. But he’s appeared on the liberal cable network … [Read more...] about The Hot New Strategy for Unseating Trump Republicans: Don’t Make It About Trump

T he black Cadillac pulls into the diner’s parking lot in Queens. Built in the 1950s, the building looks like it only exists on a rainy day, the rock-lined exterior out of another time. I step out of the Uber and look up at the restaurant where, in 1983, my father was arrested after escaping federal prison. He had spent two years on the lam, and was brought down by the U.S. Marshals after eating breakfast with his longtime mistress. He had just come from organizing a new shipment from Colombia. I imagine the day was also rainy. Almost 40 years later, I am there to meet with the Drug Enforcement Agency officer who tracked him for nearly a decade, trying to bring down one of the biggest mari juana kingpins of the 1970s, the man I once called “Daddy,” and one of the architects of the modern drug trade: Dan McGuiness. When the Cadillac arrived at my hotel, I had to laugh. The last time I saw my father, he, too, was driving a black Cadillac. He had just arrived in Los Angeles … [Read more...] about Learjets, Mistresses, and Bales of Weed: My Dad’s Life as a Drug Kingpin

It was the first hour of November 3rd, 1980, as the Learjet left behind Miami’s city lights and headed west over the dark of the Everglades. Aboard were two principals, each flanked by their respective henchmen . Until this hour, they had never met. The one who had leased the plane was a thirty-six-year-old drug-smuggling kingpin named Dan McGuiness. He had a penchant for ordering up Learjets on short notice. Once, after striking up a conversa­tion with a young woman in a Boston bar, he went, on impulse, ​​ over to a pay phone and called up a Learjet from Miami to take the two of them to Jamaica for the weekend. McGuiness had pulled off enough successful smuggling deals to be able to afford little luxuries like that. The other man, forty-two-years old, was well known in smuggling circles as Theo Poulos, a specialist in providing highly specialized off-loading services to “mother ships” coming up from Co l ombia laden with marijuana . The aircraft was now headed for a … [Read more...] about Inside Operation Grouper: the DEA’s War on Marijuana Smuggling

It ends the only way it can end, with two of the toughest men in Los Angeles holding hands as one of them bleeds out on the periphery of LAX’s tarmac. For the greater part of two and a half hours, we’ve watched Neil McCauley — mastermind of heists and bank robberies — and Vincent Hanna — lieutenant in the LAPD’s Major Crimes Unit — circle one another, chase each other, and calmly converse over a cup of coffee. Now, however, these apex predators of the urban jungle have reached their endgame, and this cop and this criminal share one final moment together before McCauley shuffles off this mortal coil. The fact that they are played by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino only sweetens the deal. This is where we leave the twin anti-heroes of Heat , Michael Mann ’s epic 1995 crime thriller, right before the final credits roll. It’s the perfect fade-out of a film devoted to the sort of game-recognizes-game professionalism and Zen machismo that the writer-director traffics in, taken from a true … [Read more...] about ‘Heat 2’: Why Michael Mann’s Sequel to His Classic Crime-Movie Had to Be a Novel

In February 2020, Sarah Thankam Mathews was struggling to write a novel; freelancing wasn’t going so great, either. So, she took a writing break, looked at the burgeoning threat of Covid-19, and immersed herself in the needs she predicted were on the horizon as the pandemic altered everyone’s reality. “What grew out of that anxiety-spiral-meets-moment-of-clarity was I built this online Slack network that was sort of a neighborhood-based mutual-aid network,” she says. It started with a few flyers — which called on her Bed-Stuy neighbors to “stay together and keep each other safe and be connected as a community,” and also included a join link to her Bed-Stuy Strong Slack — and snowballed into an organic form of mutual-aid organizing, where people worked together to provide for one another within Bed-Stuy. By the end of 2020, she says, “We had supported 23,000 people during those first seven months with a week’s worth of groceries. And by the end of our Covid-specific … [Read more...] about How the Pandemic Allowed One Author to Affect Change in Her Community and Reinvent Her Debut Novel