Two, he’s likely the frontrunner for a Best Actor Oscar for playing a deceptively rough and rowdy Montana cowboy in The Power of The Dog. (Read our review before watching!)
Add his portrayal of the talented, eccentric cat aficionado Louis Wain, and you’ve got a one-year acting portfolio that perhaps even Meryl Streep would envy.
The Korean director created Netflix’s runaway hit Squid Game—a show wherein adults compete in children’s games for money. And if they lose, they die.
Hwang intended the show as a critique of Korea’s class disparity when he wrote it back in 2009. Now it’s Netflix’s biggest hit ever, with more than 142 million homes streaming it at some point.
Curiously, and disturbingly, the ultraviolent show attracted a lot of children, too, many of whom replicated the scenarios on their own school playgrounds. (Thankfully without the blood and death.)
The social media whistleblower first spilled her secrets to The Wall Street Journal back in September—detailing Facebook’s controversial inner-workings in what the Journal dubbed “The Facebook Files.”
Backed by internal documents, she said that Facebook stoked controversy for more clicks, and it did nothing when even its own research found that Instagram was harming the mental health of young teens.
I think the story serves as a tragic reminder of the power of celebrity. We see these stars, hear them, read about them. We feel, in some ways, like we know them.
But it’s been six years since Halo 5 came out, so the release of the sixth game in the franchise—Halo Infinite—was greeted with big interest. (81 million copies were sold before it was even released.)
That translates to a $6 billion gross, which makes the much-ballyhooed first weekend take of Spider-Man: No Way Home ($680 million worldwide) look like couch-cushion change by comparison.
And for those who just can’t get enough Master Chief in their lives, Paramount+ announced this year that a Halo TV series is coming, too. (And yes, we’ll definitely be reviewing it.)
This past year alone, he’s had his hand in Vivo (which he wrote, produced, made music for and starred in); In the Heights (a movie version of his first Broadway success);
He’s driving much of the conversation and technology regarding artificial intelligence. He’s pushing for something called the Hyperloop—essentially a combination between a subway and a vacuum tube that would shoot folks around at 700 miles an hour.
And—unusual for a businessman—Musk has become a celebrity in his own right, boasting 48 million followers on Twitter and a Saturday Night Live hosting gig to his credit.
PAL
PAL represents the uneasy relationship many of us have with today’s near-magical technology. We love what our phones can do for us. But let’s be honest: They can kind of creep us out, too.
But a litany of successful singles and the release of her debut album, Sour, catapulted her off the small-screen and forced Time to dub her 2021’s Entertainer of the Year.
Her song “Driver’s License” was the No. 1 track streamed on Spotify this year (and another, “Good 4 U,” was No. 4), and she’s been nominated for seven Grammys.
But while her career’s cleaning up, her songs are none too clean. We’ll be watching her in the years to come, but so far, this former Disney princess is following an all-too-familiar trajectory.
Simpson herself called the photo “unrecognizable.” She writes that “drinking wasn’t the issue. I was. … The real work that needed to be done in my life was to actually accept failure, pain, brokenness, and self-sabotage.”
Simpson, whose father was a Baptist youth minister, has increasingly talked about the influence of faith in her life. Her 2020 memoir Open Book talks transparently, and painfully, about lots of issues, from sexual abuse to struggles with substance abuse.