ReportWire

Tag: non-fiction books

  • Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith demonstrate the delicate dance of the celeb memoir | CNN

    Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith demonstrate the delicate dance of the celeb memoir | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Would you want to revisit your life and your past in order to share it all, both the good and the bad?

    I certainly wouldn’t, but I’m not famous nor do I have famous people problems (knock on wood). Being a celebrity is something many people dream about, but while the riches certainly make life more comfortable, what comes a long with it probably isn’t what most of us would want.

    Let’s talk about it.

    Both Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith grasp the concept that drama sells.

    Before their memoirs – Spears’ book is titled “The Woman in Me” and Pinkett Smith’s is “Worthy” – were recently released, there were plenty of tabloid treats from them teased throughout the media landscape.

    The two biggest revelations from the stars’ tomes both happened to involve their celebrity relationships.

    Spears shared that she had an abortion during her time with Justin Timberlake in the early aughts, while Pinkett Smith went public with the news that she and Will Smith have been living separate lives since 2016.

    While both of these revelations sparked conversation, they also showed how there’s a delicate dance when it comes to the art of publishing a celebrity tell-all.

    On the one hand, you have to share enough to get people excited for the book. Yet at the same time you don’t want to reveal too much, because then what is the incentive to purchase said book?

    It should be said, though, that both Spears and Pinkett Smith are most probably used to a lot of attention by now.

    David Beckham and Victoria Beckham in 2004.

    Another instance of a star laying it all out there for public consumption is the “Beckham” docuseries on Netflix.

    I am far from a soccer fan, but I greatly enjoyed visiting the highs – and lows – of David Beckham’s stellar career. The series is really well done and filmmaker Fisher Stevens got both Beckham and his wife, Spice Girls member Victoria Beckham, to open up about difficult times.

    One of those tough times featured in the doc is the decades-old alleged affair between David Beckham and his former personal assistant Rebecca Loos.

    In a recent interview, Loos complained that Beckham was portraying “himself as a victim” in the series. That’s another tricky area when it comes to celebs telling their life stories – it affects others who were also there, and who are portrayed via the star’s lens and recollections.

    Taylor Swift performs during the

    At this point I am aiming to see how many newsletters in a row I can talk about Taylor Swift.

    This time it’s the fact that she’s dropping “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” Swift’s latest rerecording of her old music after losing her masters.

    Yes, much of the recent attention paid to Swift has more to do with her love life than her love of music, but if you know Swift you know that there is a direct correlation between the two.

    I don’t even have to sell it here because it’s Taylor Swift, the star of the moment, and her music. Enough said – except that the new(ish) album debuted Friday.

    Fabrice Morvan attends the

    Reader you know it’s true – Milli Vanilli was the duo to beat back in the day. Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan had hits in the late 1980s/early 1990s and were flying high in the music industry.

    Until they weren’t.

    A new self-titled documentary traces their rise and eventual fall when the world learned they weren’t actually singing on those songs. It’s a more tender look at the pair than one might expect, given the vitriol that was spewed about the controversy at the time which resulted in their best new artist Grammy being revoked.

    The “Milli Vanilli” documentary is streaming on Paramount+.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • An explosive Elon Musk biography is just hitting shelves. But the book’s acclaimed author is already walking back a major claim | CNN Business

    An explosive Elon Musk biography is just hitting shelves. But the book’s acclaimed author is already walking back a major claim | CNN Business

    [ad_1]

    Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.



    CNN
     — 

    Walter Isaacson’s highly anticipated biography on Elon Musk is hitting shelves on Tuesday — and he is already walking back a major claim.

    Isaacson reported in his book that Musk had abruptly turned off Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite internet system last year just as the country was launching an underwater drone attack on a Russian fleet in Crimea, depriving the Eastern European country’s forces of critical communications for the assault and rendering the offensive a failure.

    “He secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast,” fearing the sneak attack would lead to a “mini-Pearl Harbor” scenario and nuclear war, Isaacson wrote in the book, according to an excerpt obtained and first reported by CNN. “As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.”

    That explosive claim, which set off alarms and triggered a tsunami of questions about Musk’s role as a key figure potentially determining the fate of Vladimir Putin’s ruthless war, turned out not to be quite as Isaacson had told it. Musk pushed back last week, writing on X that Starlink was never activated over Crimea and that he had actually received “an emergency request from government authorities” to enable the service, with the “obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor.”

    “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” Musk wrote.

    Perhaps more importantly, Isaacson subsequently walked back the bombshell claim, which had received significant media coverage and was published as an “untold story” book excerpt in The Washington Post.

    “To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not,” Isaacson posted on X, effectively reiterating what Musk had said. “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet.”

    “Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack that night,” Isaacson added in a follow up post. “He now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy.”

    The correction has cast a pall over the biography from Isaacson, a highly respected author who has written acclaimed biographies on historic visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. Isaacson, a professor of history at Tulane University and former head of CNN, has for years enjoyed such a sterling reputation in the media industry that newsrooms have often taken his reporting to be fact.

    Now, Isaacson is having to grapple with an embarrassing problem. A spokesperson for his publisher Simon & Schuster told me on Monday that “future editions of the book will be updated” to no longer include the error.

    Newsrooms, meanwhile, are updating their stories in the wake of the mischaracterization. Over the weekend, The Post updated the excerpt it had published and offered a correction to its readers.

    “After publication of this adaptation, the author learned that his book mischaracterized the attempted attack by Ukrainian drones on the Russian fleet in Crimea,” the correction stated. “Musk had already disabled (‘geofenced’) coverage within 100 km of the Crimean coast before the attack began, and when the Ukrainians discovered this, they asked him to activate the coverage, and he refused. This version reflects that change.”

    CNN also updated its story on Monday, noting Isaacson had backpedaled his initial claims.

    “After this story published, Walter Isaacson clarified his explanation regarding Elon Musk restricting Ukrainian military access to Starlink, a critical satellite internet service,” an editor’s note said. “This story has been updated to reflect that change.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Four takeaways from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk | CNN Business

    Four takeaways from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    “You’ll never be successful,” Errol Musk in 1989 told his 17-year-old son Elon, who was then preparing to fly from South Africa to Canada to find relatives and a college education.

    That’s one of the scenes Walter Isaacson paints in his 670-page biography of Elon Musk, who is now the richest person who ever lived. The biography allows readers new glimpses into the private life of the entrepreneur who popularized electric vehicles for the masses and landed rocket boosters hurtling back to Earth so they could be reused.

    But Musk’s public statements and actions have become increasingly unhinged, filing and threatening lawsuits against nonprofits that fight hate speech and allowing some of the internet’s worst actors to regain their platforms.

    Isaacson portrays Musk as a restless genius with a turbulent upbringing on the cusp of launching a new AI company along with his five other companies.

    Musk allowed Isaacson to shadow him for two years but exercised no control over the biography’s contents, the author said.

    Here are four key takeaways.

    Musk’s upbringing and father haunt him

    Isaacson’s book attributes much of Musk’s drive to his upbringing. He recounts the emotional scars inflicted on Musk by his father, which, Isaacson writes, caused Musk to become “a tough yet vulnerable man-child with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.”

    Musk decided to live with his father from age 10 to 17, enduring what Musk and others describe as occasional but regular verbal taunts and abuse. Musk’s sister, Tosca, said Errol would sometimes lecture his children for hours, “calling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments, not allowing you to leave.”

    Elon Musk became estranged from his father, though he has occasionally supported his father financially. In a 2022 email sent to Elon Musk on Father’s Day, Errol Musk said he was freezing and lacking electricity, asking his son for money.

    In the letter, Errol made racist comments about Black leaders in South Africa. “With no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees,” he wrote.

    Elon Musk has said that he opposes racism and discrimination, but hate speech has flourished on X, formerly known as Twitter, since he purchased it 11 months ago, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Musk threatened to sue the ADL for defamation last week, arguing that the nonprofit’s statements have caused his company to lose significant advertising revenue.

    Isaacson reported that Errol, in other emails, denounced Covid as “a lie” and attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ former top infectious disease expert who played a prominent role in the government’s fight against the pandemic.

    Elon Musk, similarly, has criticized Fauci and raised many questions about public health policy during the pandemic. But he has said he supports vaccination, even if he doesn’t believe the shots should be mandated.

    Musk’s fluid family and obsession with population

    Musk has a fluid mix of girlfriends, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends and significant others, and he has many children with multiple women. Isaacson’s book revealed Musk had a third child (Techno Mechanicus) with the musician Grimes in 2022, and Musk confirmed the revelation Sunday.

    Musk has frequently stated that humans must be a multiplanetary species, warning space exploration will ensure the future of humanity. He similarly has spoken numerous times that people need to have more children.

    “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk said last year.

    Musk has referred to his desire to increase the global population as an explanation for his unique family situation.

    The book reports that Musk encouraged employees such as Shivon Zilis, a top operations officer at his Neuralink company, to have many children. “He feared that declining birthrates were a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness,” Isaacson writes.

    Although the book presents their relationship as a platonic work friendship, Musk volunteered to donate sperm to Zilis. She agreed and had twins in 2021 via in vitro fertilization; she did not tell people who the biological father was.

    Zilis and Grimes were friendly, but Musk did not tell Grimes about the twins, according to the book.

    Musk asked Zilis if her twins might like to take his last name. Isaacson reports that Grimes was upset in 2022 when she learned the news that Musk had fathered children with Zilis.

    “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” Musk tweeted at the time, trying to defuse the tension. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”

    One of Musk’s children, Jenna, often criticized her father’s wealth specifically and capitalism broadly. In 2022, she disowned her father, which Isaacson reports saddened Musk.

    Isaacson reports that Musk’s fractured relationship with Jenna, who is trans, partly led to Musk’s rightward turn toward libertarianism and questioning what he considers the “woke-mind-virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman.”

    Musk has called into question the use of alternate gender pronouns and made numerous statements some critics consider to be anti-trans.

    “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare,” Musk posted in 2020.

    But in December 2020 he also posted a tweet, since deleted, that said “when you put he/him in your bio” alongside a drawing of an 18th century soldier rubbing blood on his face in front of a pile of dead bodies and wearing a cap that read “I love to oppress.”

    Late last year, he tweeted: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

    The purchase of his favorite social media platform, gutting the staff and tinkering with policies and branding have taken time and resources away from Musk’s other companies and projects, Isaacson reports.

    “I’ve got a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew,” Musk told Isaacson at one point.

    After a protracted legal battle over his decision to purchase Twitter, Musk said he regained his enthusiasm for taking over the company when he realized that he wanted to prevent a world where people silo off into their own echo chambers and would prefer a world of civil discourse.

    But Isaacson notes “he would end up undermining that important mission with statements and tweets that ended up chasing off progressives and mainstream media types to other social networks.”

    Musk team members, such as his business manager Jared Birchall, his lawyer Alex Spiro and his brother Kimbal, sometimes try to restrain Musk from sending text messages or tweets that could create legal or economic peril, according to the book. Some friends convinced him to place his phone in a hotel safe overnight on one occasion, before Musk summoned hotel security to open the safe for him.

    During Christmas in 2022 with his brother, Kimbal warned Elon about how fast he was making enemies. “It’s like the days of high school, when you kept getting beaten up,” he said. Kimbal stopped following Elon on Twitter after his brother’s tweets about Fauci and other conspiracies. “Stop falling for weird s—.”

    Are robocars, an AI company and a robot called Optimus on tap?

    Musk continues moving forward on new engineering projects. Since 2021, Musk has been working on a “humanoid” robot called Optimus that walks on two legs instead of like four-legged robots coming from other labs. He unveiled an early version of the Optimus robot in September of 2022. Musk told engineers that humanoid robots will “uncork the economy to quasi-infinite levels,” according to Isaacson, by doing jobs humans find dangerous or repetitive.

    Some of Musk’s top engineers are also working on a “robotaxi,” a driverless vehicle that shows up like an Uber. This past summer, he spent hours each week preparing new factory designs in Texas to produce the next-generation Tesla cars that would look similar to Tesla’s cybertruck.

    Musk is also starting his own AI company called X.AI, which he told Isaacson will compete with Google, Microsoft and other companies surging ahead in the past year with public AI projects. Musk had co-founded OpenAi with Sam Altman in 2015 and contributed $100 million to the non-profit. He became angry when Altman converted the project into a for-profit. Musk also ended a friendship with Larry Page when the two disagreed on AI. According to the book, Musk believes he has a better vision for AI and humanity and thinks the data he owns from Tesla and Twitter will be an asset to his next AI plans.

    “Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged?” Isaacson asks in the last chapter.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Prince Harry says ‘heinous, horrible’ stories have been ‘spoon-fed’ to press from the palace | CNN

    Prince Harry says ‘heinous, horrible’ stories have been ‘spoon-fed’ to press from the palace | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Prince Harry told CBS’ 60 Minutes Sunday he hasn’t spoken with his brother, Prince William, for “a while,” in the second of two major interviews ahead of the publication of his memoir, “Spare” on Monday.

    The Duke of Sussex told Anderson Cooper he doesn’t “currently” speak with the Prince of Wales, “but I look forward to us being able to find peace,” he said. It follows an interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby, ahead of what is likely to be an explosive week for the British royals with the release of Harry’s memoirs.

    The interviews address a wide range of topics from the death of Prince Harry’s mother, the Princess of Wales, his frustration towards the British press, the treatment of his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and the subsequent fallout with his family since his marriage.

    Buckingham Palace has repeatedly declined to comment on the contents of Prince Harry’s forthcoming memoir.

    In the interview and in excerpts from his memoir shared by ITV, the Duke of Sussex addressed how strife in his family has been fueled by the relationship between Buckingham Palace and media outlets.

    “We’re not just talking about family relationships, we’re talking about an antagonist, which is the British press, specifically the tabloids who want to create as much conflict as possible,” Prince Harry told Bradby. “The saddest part of that is certain members of my family and the people that work for them are complicit in that conflict.”

    He also stated that the “leaking” and “planting” of “a royal source” to the press “is not an unknown person, it is the palace specifically briefing the press, but covering their tracks by being unnamed.”

    Prince Harry added that he thinks “that’s pretty shocking to people. Especially when you realize how many palace sources, palace insiders, senior palace officials, how many quotes are being attributed to those people, some of the most heinous, horrible things have been said about me and my wife, completely condoned by the palace because it’s coming from the palace, and those journalists have literally been spoon-fed that narrative without ever coming to us, without ever seeing or questioning the other side.”

    He spoke about how his mother was hunted by paparazzi, recalling the traumatic night his father told him Princess Diana had died from injuries sustained in a car crash.

    “I don’t want history to repeat itself. I do not want to be a single dad. And I certainly don’t want my children to have a life without a mother or a father,” Prince Harry said in the interview.

    The Duke of Sussex also talked about his decision to write the book, saying, “thirty-eight years of having my story told by so many different people, with intentional spin and distortion felt like a good time to tell own my story and be able to tell it for myself. I’m actually really grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to tell my story because it’s my story to tell.”

    Prince Harry pointed out that he has tried over the last six years to resolve his concerns with his family privately.

    “It never needed to get to this point. I have had conversations, I have written letters, I have written emails, and everything is just, ‘No, you, this is not what’s happening. You, you are imagining it,’” he said. “That’s really hard to take. And if it had stopped, by the point that I fled my home country with my wife and my son fearing for our lives, then maybe this would have turned out differently. It’s hard.”

    The duke said he wants “reconciliation but first there needs to be some accountability,” with respect to his family.

    “You can’t just continue to say to me that I’m delusional and paranoid when all the evidence is stacked up, because I was genuinely terrified about what is going to happen to me,” he said.

    “And then we have a 12-month transition period and everyone doubles. My wife shares her experience. And instead of backing off, both the institution and the tabloid media in the UK, both doubled down,” he added.

    Still, the duke said, “forgiveness is 100 percent a possibility,” during the interview.

    “There’s probably a lot of people who, after watching the documentary and reading the book, will go, how could you ever forgive your family for what they have done? People have already said that to me. And I said forgiveness is 100% a possibility because I would like to get my father back. I would like to have my brother back. At the moment, I don’t recognize them, as much as they probably don’t recognize me,” Prince Harry said.

    On Monday, the duke’s interview with “Good Morning America” co-anchor Michael Strahan will air on the ABC show, followed in the evening by a half-hour special on ABC News Live. And to top things off, the duke will make an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” hours after his book is released on Tuesday.

    With that all to come before the public is even able to get their hands on book, one has to wonder if there will be any revelations left to read. For days now, leaks from the upcoming tome have sparked headlines around the world.

    It is now known the duke has made a slew of damaging accusations against the British royal family in “Spare” after several outlets obtained early copies of the book before the weekend. CNN has not seen a copy of the book but has requested an advance copy from the publisher Penguin Random House.

    Perhaps the most incendiary revelation to emerge was Prince Harry’s claim of a scuffle with the Prince of Wales during an argument over his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in 2019, as he described while reading in an excerpt of his memoir on air on Sunday.

    Prince Harry said his brother never tried to dissuade him from marrying Meghan, but expressed some concerns and told him, “‘This is going be really hard for you,’” Prince Harry recalled during his interview.

    “I still to this day don’t truly understand which part of what he was talking about,” Prince Harry continued. “Maybe he predicted what the British press’s reaction was going to be.”

    His relationship with Prince William is just one of a series of incredibly candid accounts of life as the “spare heir” in his memoir. The book’s title of “Spare” – a reference to a nickname the duke lived with while growing up. Prince Harry’s version of events also tackles his final moments with the late Queen Elizabeth II, his attempts to seek closure after his mother’s death, and other deeply personal conversations with members of “The Firm.”

    One part of the book that is seeing some backlash is his reported remarks on killing 25 Taliban fighters during his time in the British Army in Afghanistan. In addition to disclosing the figure, the duke is also quoted as describing the insurgents as “chess pieces” taken off the board rather than people, according to UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

    Prince Harry’s comments have prompted criticism from some British security and military figures – and an angry rebuke from the Taliban.

    Before publicity ramped up around the duke’s book, the Sussexes had previously opened up about the challenges and hardships of royal life in their Netflix docuseries and to Oprah Winfrey.

    In both those royal exposés, the couple outlined their acrimonious split with the House of Windsor and blamed the media for invasive, unrelenting coverage, particularly of Meghan.

    The Sussexes announced in 2020 that they were stepping away from their roles as senior royals and planned to work towards becoming “financially independent.” The following year, the palace confirmed the couple had agreed with Queen Elizabeth II that they were not returning as working members of the royal family.

    In the recent six-part Netflix documentary, Prince Harry didn’t hold back when he blamed the press for placing undue stress on his wife, saying it led to her having a miscarriage and suffering suicidal thoughts.

    Meghan said she wanted to go somewhere for help but claimed she wasn’t allowed to because of the optics on the institution, without specifying who she believed stopped her. She made similar comments in her explosive 2021 interview with Winfrey.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Bono reflects on his 40-year marriage to Ali Hewson | CNN

    Bono reflects on his 40-year marriage to Ali Hewson | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Bono’s new memoir, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” isn’t just about his time and travels with U2. It’s about love.

    “I also wrote the book to explain to my family what I was doing with their life because it was they who permissioned me to be away with U2 or lobbying Congress,” the singer told the Sunday Times Magazine. “Ali gave me the chance and covered for me at home. So I’m not writing a rock’n’roll memoir, [or] an activist’s memoir, I’m not just writing a sojourner’s memoir, I’m trying to write a love letter to my wife.”

    Bono and wife Ali Hewson wed in 1982. He counts her as one of his closest friends.

    That’s actually how the pair met, as childhood school chums. Bono calls the woman he shares four children with “incredible.”

    “She’s not just a mystery to me, by the way. She’s a mystery to her daughters, to her sons,” he said. “I mean, we’re all trying to get to know her. She’s endlessly fascinating. She’s … full of mischief.”

    Not that it’s all been a bed of roses.

    According to Bono, the couple has weathered some tough times.

    “It’s not like our love was absent any dark undercurrents or briny water, [but] we got each other through those bits where it was hard to see where we were,” he said. “Ali calls it ‘the work of love’. I wish she wouldn’t use the word ‘work’ because I have a feeling there’s an adjective, ‘hard’, that’s inferred.”

    “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story” is out Tuesday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Brittney Griner writing memoir on Russian detainment | CNN Politics

    Brittney Griner writing memoir on Russian detainment | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who was freed from Russia late last year after being wrongfully detained, is writing a memoir due out next spring.

    “After an incredibly challenging 10 months in detainment, I am grateful to have been rescued and to be home. Readers will hear my story and understand why I’m so thankful for the outpouring of support from people across the world,” Griner said in a news release Tuesday from publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

    The two-time Olympic gold-medalist spent nearly 300 days in Russian custody after being detained in February 2022 and sentenced to nine years in prison under drug-smuggling charges after authorities in the country found cannabis oil in her luggage. Griner, who the US State Department deemed wrongfully detained, was released last December in a prisoner swap that involved Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

    Griner had for years played on a Russian women’s basketball team during the WNBA off-season and was detained in a Moscow airport as she traveled to rejoin the team.

    “That day was the beginning of an unfathomable period in my life which only now am I ready to share,” she said in the news release. “The primary reason I traveled back to Russia for work that day was because I wanted to make my wife, family, and teammates proud.”

    Her detainment spotlighted the salary caps WNBA players face in the US – which has pushed athletes to go overseas to earn more during their off-seasons.

    She will make her return to the WNBA next season after signing a one-year deal in February with the Phoenix Mercury.

    The book announcement comes after Russian authorities last month detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who the US State Department deemed wrongfully detained on Monday. Detained American Paul Whelan has also been held in Russian custody since 2018.

    “By writing this book, I also hope to raise awareness surrounding other Americans wrongfully detained abroad,” Griner said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link