Image: Lorne Thomson/Redferns/Prince Williams/Wireimage/mashable composition

If you want to be one of the most streamed artists on the planet, there’s one thing in particular that you apparently need. That thing is a penis. 

Every holiday season, Spotify releases its end-of-year stats, and we get to have a good look at both our own music habits with personalised top tracks-lists, and the lack of gender diversity in the music industry at large. 

Spotify just released the most-streamed artists list and yeah, they’re all dudes. The most streamed artist is Drake, thanks to his Scorpion album, followed by Post Malone, and late rapper XXXTentacion. Number four is Columbian singer J Balvin and last on the top five is last year’s most played artist, Ed Sheeran. 

The exact same thing was the case in 2017, where the top five artists were also all male.

No women are to be found in the most-streamed groups category either. The top five groups are Imagine Dragons, BTS, Maroon 5, Migos, and good old Coldplay, last year’s most streamed group.

In a separate category, most-streamed female artists has Ariana Grande at the top, followed by Dua Lipa, Cardi B, Taylor Swift and Camila Cabello. 

The music industry has grim numbers when it comes to gender equality. An analysis reported on by the New York Times looked at the top 600 songs from 2012 to 2017, and found that of 1,239 performing artists, 22.4 percent were women. The numbers are even lower for songwriters, 12.3 of whom were women in the measured period. 

Similar issues caused a backlash against the Recording Academy at this year’s Grammy Awards, where the social media campaign #GrammysSoMale highlighted the fact that only one woman (Alessia Cara) won a major award, even though the most nominated artist was female (SZA.)

The backlash prompted Recording Academy president Neil Portnow to say that women in the industry just need to “step up.”

*All the eye-rolls*  

 

Even by Marvel Cinematic Universe standards, Captain Marvel has a lot riding on her shoulders.

There are all the usual concerns about starting a franchise and translating a fan-favorite character to screen, of course. Then there’s also the fact that Captain Marvel is the first solo female-led film in the MCU’s 10-year history, arriving at a time when women’s roles on film are more closely scrutinized than ever.

Given all that, you might assume that its star, Brie Larson, is feeling the heat. But when I, along with a small group of other journalists, met her on the set of Captain Marvel in May, she looked perfectly at ease. 

“I don’t feel nervous,” she told us. Partly, this was because she’d made an active effort to avoid social media buzz around the film. She also drew confidence from Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel, herself. 

“I find the character so inspiring that whenever I feel nervous and scared, I feel like I can turn to her and I feel like, No, I got this. And that feels really awesome,” said Larson. “I feel like I have the same awe over her that a lot of her fans do.”

Why Brie Larson took on Captain Marvel

But Larson wasn’t always so comfy with Carol. When she first started talking with Marvel, she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to make the leap. 

“I had a meeting with Marvel and what we discussed was they wanted to make a big feminist movie,” she recalled. “I remember going home and being like, Shit, am I going to do this?” In an interview last year, Larson admitted it took “a really long time” for her to decide. 

What eventually convinced her was the realization that, as she put it, “It’s kind of everything that I’ve wanted.” For Larson, a proud feminist, Captain Marvel presented the opportunity to advance the cause of female representation through a broadly appealing piece of popcorn entertainment.

“As I’ve grown, I’ve noticed that these movies and the Marvel movies in particular have so much meaning in them. They mean so much,” she said. “You can have a great time and just enjoy it for having a great time, but you can also be left with some really deep philosophical questions. That combo is really powerful.”

Larson doesn’t know what impact, if any, Captain Marvel might ultimately have on our cinematic landscape. But she had to try. “The opportunity came and I feel like I’ve got to take the call in the same way [Carol] had to take the call, you know?”

Making Marvel’s “big feminist movie”

Image: Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel Studios

As for what made Marvel’s “big feminist movie” so feminist: As Larson tells it, the studio was adamant that Carol Danvers’ gender wasn’t incidental, but an essential element of the character that they wanted to reflect in the filmmaking.

“That’s a wonderful thing that Marvel understood innately,” said Larson, citing this year’s Black Panther as another example of that approach, “that if you’re gonna tell this story, you’ve got to make that it’s really embedded in everything. It’s not good enough to just make it be me.”

“I realized it changed the way I viewed myself.”

To that end, Captain Marvel staffed up with women behind the camera, including director Anna Boden (with Ryan Fleck), screenwriters Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman, Anna Waterhouse, and Jac Schaeffer, costume designer Sanja Milkovic Hays, and composer Pinar Toprak. 

The difference this made wasn’t always dramatic—Larson offered, as a hypothetical example, a line of dialogue using “woman” instead of “girl”—but they had a cumulative impact on her. “They’re just slight things, and I realized it changed the way I viewed myself,” she said. 

“You don’t realize it, that you’re slowly conditioned in these ways and always viewed[…] through somebody else’s lens,” Larson continued. “The beauty of this is that there’s been so many women involved in the making of it that I don’t feel like I’ve had to fight as much, ’cause I felt understood from the beginning.”

Transforming into Captain Marvel

It was in that cozy context that Larson set about the work of becoming Captain Marvel. In the movie, as in the comics, Carol Danvers is a U.S. Air Force pilot transformed into a warrior for an alien race known as the Kree; the film follows her as she battles another alien race known as the Skrulls, and digs into her own mysterious past on Earth.

To capture Carol’s fighting spirit, Larson met with the closest thing Carol might have to a real-world model: female fighter pilots. These women became one of Larson’s “biggest inspirations” for the role. “The things that I thought were just innately Carol were actually, a huge piece of it, is her background in the Air Force,” she explained. 

Image: Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel STudios

And what, exactly are some of those qualities? 

“They are just the coolest, the coolest,” Larson gushed. “And just this great combination of really confident, super humble, not boastful. You just feel the power being with them, and they’re hyper-intelligent and just badasses.”

But understanding Carol’s mind was one thing. Being able to convey Carol’s physicality onscreen was another. So Larson fell into a physical training regimen that at one point had her working out four and a half hours a day, trying to get strong. “I knew that if I could go through that experience, I would get closer to her,” she said.

While Larson has two “amazing” stunt doubles in Captain Marvel, Renae Moneymaker and Joanna Bennett, she insisted on putting all that new muscle to use by doing “a lot” of her own stunts. “If I was seeing this movie, I think it would mean so much more to me knowing that there was that type of dedication put into it, and that it’s not just CGI.”

Joining the Marvel family

Carol isn’t just a solo heroine, though—like Captain America or Spider-Man, she’s part of the Marvel family. Understandably, Larson remained tight-lipped about how Carol might fit into the MCU, in Avengers 4 and beyond. However, she was happy to talk about the “surreal” experience of showing up for that Marvel Studios 10th anniversary class photo.

“This is a family, and you feel it. I could feel it that day. You can feel the history. You can feel the love. You can feel how much time these people have spent together,” she said. “I was just really grateful that they were so generous and so excited about me joining it, and so open to answering my questions.” 

Why Larson loves Carol (and you will, too)

Of course, all of this—Larson’s training, her research, her intentions, Marvel’s insistence on a strongly female perspective—only matters insofar as Captain Marvel does what it sets out to do, and wins us over. 

Unfortunately, most of us will have to wait ’til March to see how brightly Captain Marvel shines onscreen. In the meantime, though, Larson is eager to spill how much she loves her character, and why.

Image: Chuck ZLotnick / Marvel STudios

“I love that she’s unapologetic. I love that she’s not apologizing for her strength, first as just a human in the Air Force, that she’s never trying to shrink herself because of who she is,” she enthused. “She can’t even be somebody else if she wanted to. She can’t. It’s like she can’t be contained. And I think that is such a beautiful thing.”

That seems like a bittersweet assessment of a character who, as we’ve seen in the trailer, literally seems to have been transformed into someone else—someone who can barely even remember her own history. 

Then again, maybe that just speaks to the force of Carol Danvers’ personality. “The fact that she is just herself, and cannot be contained is pretty awesome. It means that she’s wild,” Larson said. “That’s part of what I love.”

Captain Marvel is in theaters March 8, 2019.

This game was clearly set up with the hope of getting some amusingly awkward info from Margot Robbie — but somehow, all the awkwardness ends up coming from Jimmy Fallon’s side of the table.

The game in the clip above is called “Loaded Questions”. It basically involves Robbie and Fallon taking turns answering questions only they can see. They then choose to either do the shot in front of them, or reveal what the question was.

Robbie gets off lightly, but it’s worth sticking around for Fallon’s gloriously stumbling story about Michael Jordan. And his even more gloriously stumbling story about Kate Hudson.

Image: lili sams/ mashable

Shady developers have found a new way to trick users into spending ridiculous sums of money on worthless services.

The scheme, which was discovered by Redditors and reported by the welivesecurity blog, uses TouchID to trick users into in-app purchases, which can be as high as $99.99. 

The blog uncovered two such examples, both from purported fitness apps. In both cases, the apps instruct users to hold their finger over their iPhone’s home button in order to “scan” their fingerprint for health data. While the “scan” is happening, though, the app triggers an in-app purchase, which is then authenticated via TouchID and completed before the  user even realizes what is happening.

Welivesecurity blog uncovered two examples of this tactic, one called “Calories Tracker app” and one called “Fitness Balance.” Both apps have since been removed by from the App Store by Apple, but you can see it in action in the video below. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shady though they are, it appears that these developers’ tactics were extraordinarily successful. “Calories Tracker app,” pulled in $60,000 in November while “Fitness Balance” made $10,000, according to data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower.

The incident also raises the questions about Apple’s ability to detect scams in the first place.

Though Apple’s App Store has a reputation for being safer than other app stores, this isn’t the first time shady developers have been allowed to get their apps into the store. Last year, a number of barely-functional apps were removed for tricking users into paying for exorbitantly-priced subscriptions. 

One such app, which also took advantage of the App Store’s search ads, was charging $99.99 weekly for a worthless VPN service. The app was pulling in $80,000 a month before it was eventually removed.

Image: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

Being on your phone during a stage production is considered pretty rude, especially if it’s opening night, and even if you’re Kanye West.

The artist was called out on Twitter by one of the stars of Cher-inspired musical The Cher Show, Jarrod Spector, for spending time on his phone during Monday’s opening night performance.

West was attending the show with his wife, Kim Kardashian West, a couple that weren’t ever going to blend in with the crowd — or the cast.

“If you look up from your cell phone you’ll see we’re doing a show up here,” tweeted Spector, who plays Sonny Bono, while the performance was underway.

Fellow Broadway star Patti Murin, who plays Princess Anna in the stage production of Disney’s Frozen, backed up Spector’s gripe.

So, what was Kanye doing on his phone while a Broadway musical was serving up its opening night performance? According to the New York Times, West’s representative said the artist was “taking notes.”

“Kanye was on his phone taking notes. He loved the show and was incredibly impressed by the production,” read a statement published by the news outlet.

West apologised, replying to Spector’s tweet, “Please pardon my lack of etiquette. We have so much appreciation for the energy you guys put into making this master piece.”

The Times also pointed out Kanye wasn’t the only person with their phone on during the performance, with a few forgetful theatregoers reportedly sporting buzzing phones.

And he’s not the only celebrity to be called out for being on their phone during a Broadway performance, with one of the more famous instances involving two-time Tony Award winner Patti Lupone, who snatched an audience member’s phone away mid-performance at Shows for Days.

Madonna was once busted for being on her phone during an Off-Broadway performance of Hamilton, with Lin-Manuel Miranda reportedly unhappy with the pop icon. 

In a now-deleted tweet, the show’s creator wrote: “Tonight was the first time I asked stage management NOT to allow a celebrity (who was texting all through Act 2) backstage. #noselfieforyou.”

Tony Award-nominee and Hamilton cast member Jonathan Groff went even further, saying he had no remorse for Madonna, “because that bitch was on her phone. You couldn’t miss it from the stage. It was a black void of the audience in front of us and her face there perfectly lit by the light of her iPhone through three-quarters of the show.”

Celebrities, your fellow audience members might not be able to see you on your phone during a performance, but the cast sure can. 

Mindlessly watching TV is a pastime enjoyed by many humans, and it seems dolphins are into it too.

Researchers at the Dolphins Plus Marine Mammal Responder in Key Largo, Florida, played videos on a TV screen through underwater windows for a small sample of 11 bottlenose and five rough-toothed dolphins.

As detailed in a subsequent study published in Zoo Biology, the team played scenes from Sir David Attenborough’s Planet Earth featuring other cetaceans, as well as clips from the nature series without any animals, plus some Spongebob Squarepants for good measure.

The researchers monitored the dolphins’ behaviour, noting certain traits like aggression (indicated by head jerks or a jaw clap), or interest (shown by raising their chin, or pressing their melon — basically, their rounded forehead — against the TV), or the blowing of bubbles (which can either be a sign of aggression or interest, although researchers think it’s more the former in this case). 

They found that the dolphins didn’t really mind what was on the TV, but certain dolphins showed more interest in the pictures than others.

“Rough‐toothed dolphins displayed significantly more behaviors, particularly interest and bubble behaviors, than bottlenose dolphins, with no differences observed between the species for the percentage of time spent watching,” researchers noted. 

“Among bottlenose dolphins, males watched the television longer, and responded behaviorally significantly more, displaying a higher rate of bubble and aggressive behaviors than females. Male rough‐toothed dolphins displayed significantly more aggressive behaviors than females, with no other sex differences noted.”

Those aggressive behaviours may be due to the inability for these dolphins to physically interact with or manipulate the TV, the study explains. In future, researchers think TV could be useful as an “enrichment device,” so long their species, sex and individual differences are taken into consideration. 

And we get it dolphins, us humans sometimes don’t care if we watch Spongebob Squarepants or Planet Earth either, as long as something’s on.

Image: lili sams / mashable

YouTube can now add “most popular iPhone app of the year” to its list of accomplishments.

Apple just released its lists for the most downloaded apps of 2018 and YouTube took the number one spot, beating out Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat for the honor. 

YouTube held the #3 spot last year, when Bitmoji and Snapchat came in at #1 and #2 respectively. This year, Snapchat dropped to third place and Bitmoji down to sixth, with Instagram climbing to the #2 slot.

These are the top 20 free apps of the year, according to Apple

1. YouTube

2. Instagram

3. Snapchat

4. Messenger

5. Facebook

6. Bitmoji

7. Netflix

8. Google Maps

9. Gmail

10. Spotify Music

11. Amazon

12. Uber

13. WhatsApp Messenger

14. Pandora 

15. Wish 

16. TikTok 

17. Cash App

18. Google Photos

19. Google Chrome

20. Twitter

While there aren’t many surprises on that list, it’s notable that YouTube has now edged out Instagram and Snapchat. Though not a new app by any means, YouTube is increasingly becoming the app social media companies need to compete with. Earlier this year, a Pew poll found that YouTube is the most-used app among teens. 

Two other notable additions this year include TikTok, the music video app formerly known as Musicall.y, and Cash App, Square’s P2P payments app.

Over on the paid app charts, photography apps once again came out on top. The most popular paid app was (for the second year in a row) Facetune, followed by special effects app kirakira+.

Like last year, Apple also released separate rankings for games where — surprise, surprise — Fortnite took the top spot for free apps. Also making the list was PUBG and HQ Trivia.

The full list of the top 20 most downloaded free games is below:

1. Fortnite

2. Helix Jump

3. Rise Up

4. PUBG MOBILE

5. Hole.io

6. Love Balls

7. Snake VS Block

8. Rules of Survival

9. ROBLOX

10. Dune!

11. Subway Surfers

12. Episode 

13. Word Link 

14. Toon Blast

15. Color Road!

16. HQ Trivia

17. Twisty Road!

18. 8 Ball Pool

19. Kick the Buddy

20. Sniper 3D Assassin: Gun Games

In addition, Apple’s App Store editors also announced their own picks for the best apps of the year. They named sketching app Procreate Pocket as the overall best iPhone app of the year and Donut Country the top game. 

You can check out the full rankings over on iTunes, where you can also view the most popular podcasts, books, movies and television shows.

Quora, the question-and-answer site that bludgeons users into signing up, has been hit with a major data breach.

In a blog post titled “Quora Security Update,” the site revealed that the data of approximately 100 million users may have been compromised as a result of unauthorised access to its systems on Friday.

“We’re still investigating the precise causes and in addition to the work being conducted by our internal security teams, we have retained a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist us. We have also notified law enforcement officials,” Quora co-founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo wrote in the blog post.

The data includes account information, such as name, email address, password, and data imported from linked networks, as well as public content and actions, such as questions, answers, upvotes and comments.

Non-public content could have also been accessed, such as answer requests, downvotes, and direct messages. Quora claims that a low percentage of users have sent or received direct messages.

Quora added that the overwhelming majority of content accessed was already public on its site. Anonymously authored questions and answers were reportedly not affected by the breach, and the company said it doesn’t store information from anonymous users. 

The company will now notify users whose data has been compromised, and will invalidate passwords for users who use one to sign in.

In 2017, Quora served approximately 190 million unique visitors a month, and was valued at $1.8 billion following a funding round that same year. 

It’s not alone in significant data breaches, with Marriott and Dunkin’ Donuts hit over the last week in what feels like an increasingly regular occurrence.

She’s a one-name icon, so it feels right that it would take three people to bring her to life eight times a week.

The Cher Show, which just opened on Broadway, gives Cher the musical treatment — which in theory should be a perfect marriage for the campy, vampy icon.

The show is a pretty standard biopic/jukebox musical, tracing the life, loves, and dresses of Cherilyn Sarkisian. And while it doesn’t hit the highs of all-timers like Jersey Boys or Beautiful — stories that have larger themes than just “here are the songs of the artist you love,” fans of the singer should have a good time reminding themselves throughout this highlights reel why she is the ultimate survivor. 

While not explicitly framed as a variety show, there is a show-within-a-show element from book writer Rick Elice where the three women portraying the superstar (Micaela Diamond as Babe (young Cher), Teal Wicks as the glam Star, and, mainly, a truly great Stephanie J Block as Icon Cher) filter in and out and converse with each other about their unfolding life. 

Fans of the singer should have a good time reminding themselves throughout this highlights reel why she is the ultimate survivor. 

Things kick off with young Diamond, desperate to be a singer, and quickly falling in love with Sonny Bono (an excellent supporting turn by Jarrod Spector). From there it’s off to the races, as we’re quickly treated to a fairly fast-paced version of the highlights of the next section of her life: international success, the Vegas shows, the Sonny and Cher show, a baby. It’s frothy fun and full of great tunes, babe, but you’d be forgiven for hoping there would eventually be a little, well, more to it. It’s CHER, bitches.

A first-act highlight — where Bob Mackie (Michael Berresse) parades out a handful of Cher’s most iconic dresses in a fashion show of sorts during “Dressed to Kill” — had the audience cheering, and showcased the electricity that’s a bit more muted in other parts. Cher the icon is campy and fun with an incredible sense of humor — more of this show should have followed that track.

That it works at all is a credit to Block, who is giving a truly stellar performance. Not only has she perfected the instantly recognizable voice, but she delivers many lines with an archness that belies her amusement with all of what is unfolding. She’s a blast to watch, whether she’s joining some sailors in the iconic “If I Could Turn Back Time” video look or giving emotional romantic advice to her heartbroken younger self. 

The second act struggles to find a thru-line. We’re following Cher’s life, yes, but as we’re quickly bouncing from her doomed relationships with Gregg Allman (Matthew Hydzik) and regular guy Rob Camilletti (Michael Campayno) they aren’t really around enough to make much of an impression. Why’s Cher so upset it’s not working out? 

There’s also the confusing choice to bring back the young Babe Cher when we get to the section about Cher’s acting career. It’s a fulfillment of a childhood dream, sure, but it mostly just feels like an excuse to give Block a break (that Block then pops back in to give the Oscar acceptance speech makes the decision feel like a shrug). The three Cher concept works best when they are weighing in on the life choices of the others: Who hasn’t thought If 16-year-old me could see me now!

Happily, director Jason Moore knows how to end a musical. As we run through the never-ending farewell tours, we get our triumphant moments of joy, with everyone, audience included, ready to groove to “Believe” and more. Jukebox musicals can be hit or miss, but icons who pioneered autotune are forever. 

The rise and fall of Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande‘s whirlwind romance has been a source of fascination during a grim 2018. Some aspects of celebrity gossip are fun — especially when a couple is happy to open up about their love — but it sounds like, months after their engagement ended, some fans are still making things a bit too personal.

In a vulnerable Instagram post on Monday (December 3), Pete opened up about the harassment he’s received both online and in real life over the past several months.

“I’ve kept my mouth shut. Never mentioned any names, never said a word about anyone or anything,” he began the post, which also does not name names or call out any specifics. “I’m trying to understand how when something happens to a guy the whole entire world just trashes him without any facts or frame of reference.”

Of course, both he and Ariana have vaguely and/or indirectly addressed their split, but Pete’s right — the public is largely without knowledge of their relationship’s final days.

Pointing out the irony of a culture that “loves to be offended and upset” yet is quick to judge, the SNL star continued, “I’ve been getting online bullied and in public by people for 9 months.”

This announcement is heartbreaking, especially because Pete has used his platform to amplify his own struggles with mental health, particularly his borderline personality disorder diagnosis and past suicide attempt, as well as his attempts to alleviate his struggles with dialectic behavioral therapy (DBT). Those are all things he says he’s spoken about “only in the hopes that it will help bring awareness and help kids like myself who don’t want to be on this earth.”

Fortunately, despite the loud and negative peanut gallery, Pete isn’t losing sight of himself. “No matter how hard the internet or anyone tries to make me kill myself. I won’t. I’m upset I even have to say this,” he wrote, before ending on a note of gratitude. “To all those holding me down and seeing this for what it is — I see you and I love you.”

Pete may be experiencing problems with trolls, but it seems there is no bad blood between him and his ex. Ari indicated as much with last Friday’s much-hyped “Thank U, Next” music video, which included messages about Pete in her Mean Girls-inspired Burn Book. His page was notably decorated with the sweet phrases “i love u always” and “sry i dipped.” And, proving that she still has a sense of humor when it comes to the controversial comedian, she added “HUUUUUGE” along the bottom of the page — likely yet another reference to Pete’s impressive proportions.

So, if Ari isn’t mad, and if Pete isn’t mad, then it seems like he’s right: It’s time for us all to move on from the unnecessary bullying.