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When speaking at the New York Times ’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy said that while she “didn’t want to technically get into politics,” she recognized “there was a larger conversation that was directly impacting my audience.” Cooper confirmed that both President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris ‘ teams reached out before the election. “We had a Zoom call with Trump’s team,” said the host. “I wasn’t on it. I was like, ‘Let me know how it goes.'” The podcaster explained that the possibility of venturing into politics sparked her interest as she’s a “very competitive person.” “I’m like, how do we keep ramping this up?” she continued. “Joe Rogan has a conversation. He knows his audience. I know my audience, and it’s a bunch of women looking for someone to advocate for them every single day.” Ultimately, Cooper interviewed the Democratic presidential nominee in an episode that aired in October. During their conversation, Harris and Cooper discussed women’s rights, the overturning of Roe v. Wade , and abortion bans. And while Cooper acknowledged the pushback from some of her audience when discussing abortion, the host doubled down on her decision during the summit. “I understand people are like, ‘Oh God, you’re gonna focus the whole time on abortion.’ Yeah, I am. Because it’s not about abortion, it’s about women’s rights to their body.” She added, “I thought, ‘Why not have on someone that could potentially have a huge impact on our country?'” Cooper’s remarks on Wednesday echoed her thoughts prior to her discussion with Harris. In the intro before the Call Her Daddy episode, Cooper said that she “went back and forth” on whether or not to address politics or have politicians on her podcast, but concluded she felt “the conversation I know I’m qualified to have is the one surrounding women’s bodies and how we are treated and valued in this country.” She also made it clear that it wasn’t a “one-sided conversation,” and that if Trump was willing “to have a meaningful, in-depth conversation about women’s rights in this country,” he would be “welcome on Call Her Daddy anytime.”
Micron’s Big Upside. AI Boom Ignites Growth.Canada's top military commander calls out US senator for questioning a woman's role in combatThe game industry is no stranger to boom-and-bust cycles, in which scores of opportunistic developers fall over themselves to release copycat competitors to the latest massive hit, and most, if not all, fail. Perhaps the biggest instance — and certainly the most embarrassing for almost everyone concerned — was the race to release the mythical “ WoW killer” : a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that would unseat Blizzard’s global megahit, World of Warcraft , and earn its makers millions of dollars in monthly subscription revenue until the end of time. It turned out to be an industry-wide epic fail — and I had a ringside seat to this unfortunate spectacle. My career in games journalism began in 2004, just a few months before WoW was released. My obsessive love of the game threatened to tank that career before it had really begun, but instead I turned it to my advantage, specializing in covering a genre of game that was too arcane and time-consuming for most staff writers and editors to get their heads around. I traveled to scores of preview events for MMO hopefuls that public relations reps would optimistically tout as “ World of Warcraft , but for soccer,” or “ World of Warcraft , but for vehicular combat.” In 2008, I was hired by Eurogamer as the editor of its short-lived MMO section — let’s not pretend that we in the press were immune to the same wrongheaded gold-rush thinking — and discovered firsthand exactly why the whole enterprise was doomed to fail. One reason is that World of Warcraft — especially during its 2004-to-2010 heyday — was simply too good to beat. But another is that hit-chasing, not a great strategy at the best of times, is almost impossible to pull off in the world of social, online games. The hits garner intensely loyal, invested audiences who play them month in, month out, and who aren’t really looking for something else to move on to. Those audiences are hermetically sealed within their own fandoms and care much less about shiny graphics or other technical advancements, while the constantly updated games have plenty of room to innovate and evolve the genre within themselves. The time-honored tactic of “just slap a big license (like Star Wars) on it” is less effective in this sphere, too, because the appeal of famous characters and storylines doesn’t necessarily apply — the players are more invested in their communities. Yet the industry continues to make this critical error with online games. Just look at the spectacular crash and burn of Concord earlier this year, itself just the latest of countless attempts to elbow Overwatch off its hero-shooter throne. In the spirit of constructive learning, and only a little bit of schadenfreude , let’s look back at some of the games that failed to put a dent in World of Warcraft ’s hegemony... and the few that did. The failed WoW killers The Lord of the Rings Online (2007): This entry is perhaps a little unfair, since various people had been trying to make a Middle-earth MMO based on Tolkien’s works long before Blizzard had even thought of WoW . The original developer, an MMO specialist called Turbine, probably thought it was just making another niche online game before publisher WB Games got unduly excited about its potential. The game was fine, but clearly a generation behind WoW in terms of its design. People still play it, though! Age of Conan (2008): Oh dear . The first and most instructive case of post- WoW hubris came from Funcom, a Norwegian specialist that got way out of its depth trying to push cutting-edge graphics, gore, sex, and dynamic real-time swordfighting into an MMO based on Robert E. Howard’s lusty fantasy world. Publisher Eidos put all its chips down; I remember attending an absurd press event staged in Oslo’s 1952 Winter Olympic park, which had been transformed into a medieval setting with horse-riding barbarians and fireside feasting. (A PR rep I was with got very drunk and stole a sheepskin rug, roaring incoherently into the Scandinavian night while wearing it around his shoulders.) The game was a mess at launch, and tanked hard. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (2008): EA’s big play made sense on paper; the Warhammer license is probably as close as you can legally get to the Warcraft setting, and developer Mythic’s Dark Age of Camelot was beloved by the MMO hardcore. The game was lavish and expensive but limited in design, too focused on massive player-versus-player combat whereas WoW excelled at embracing almost every possible play style. Warhammer Online was shut down in 2013. APB: All Points Bulletin (2010): A Grand Theft Auto-style massively multiplayer game boasting intense levels of player customization, and masterminded by GTA’s creator himself, David Jones? What could go wrong? Everything! APB was stacked with ambitious features but notably lacked, you know, gameplay. Also, Jones’ company Realtime Worlds, which had previously made the excellent Crackdown for Xbox, was in far too deep. A disastrous launch was followed within a couple of months by the developer going bankrupt and APB getting shut down. Another company bought and relaunched it, but didn’t succeed in putting an actual game in there. Rift (2011): The MMO gold rush wasn’t just about games; entire companies sprang up, drawing huge investment on the promise of some revolutionary technology or other. Trion Worlds was one example that boasted fancy server-side tech that was supposed to take MMOs closer to the fully simulated cloud-gaming dream. Unfortunately, its flagship fantasy MMO Rift was very boring. Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011): Smarting from the failure of Warhammer Online , EA was nevertheless up for another crack at smashing WoW , armed with the Star Wars license, its star in-house developer BioWare, and an apparently limitless budget. The hype was off the charts, but BioWare’s expertise was in single-player games. Everybody bought it, played the story through, and moved on, which is... not the idea. BioWare didn’t give up, though, and steadily built out a proper massively multiplayer game around the story campaigns. After a successful free-to-play relaunch, The Old Republic still has an audience. Guild Wars 2 (2012): Guild Wars 2 is actually a fantastic game, easily the best on this list — I feel bad including it. It has refined combat and employed several genre-defining ideas that were later copied by WoW , Destiny , and others. But the scope of this relatively streamlined game was not equal to the hopes publisher NCSoft loaded on it — and the ever-expanding WoW presented a moving target that could never be caught. WildStar (2014): NCSoft, a big player in Korea, made its most determined attempt to crack the West with WildStar , a game by former Blizzard devs with a very Warcraft-y color palette and art style. It was cute, expensive, action-forward, and had some fun ideas, but it was also very obviously a trend-chasing mishmash with no reason to exist beyond trying to top WoW . NCSoft shut it down and closed developer Carbine in 2018. The game almost did kill WoW Final Fantasy 14 (2013): The prize for perseverance goes to Square Enix, which simply didn’t give up — and which, importantly, had reasons other than competing with Blizzard to be making an MMO. Final Fantasy 11 had been a pre- WoW hit in 2002; the first attempt to follow it up with FF14 in 2010 was a disaster, but Square Enix bravely scrapped it and asked producer Naoki Yoshida for a complete do-over. It was a question of honor, if anything. Yoshida’s reboot ruled, and Square Enix didn’t falter when it didn’t immediately do WoW numbers, but continued to invest. FF14 steadily got bigger and better, and it was ready and waiting when Blizzard stumbled through a succession of PR disasters and lackluster WoW expansions in the late 2010s and early 2020s. WoW streamers and players starting leaving for FF14 in droves, and Square Enix’s game is, at last, the competitor that WoW has always deserved. Analysis Fantasy Gaming PC World of Warcraft World of Warcraft
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Former Missouri congressman Billy Long was tapped on Wednesday evening by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the Internal Revenue Service. Trump called Long — who served six terms representing a southwest Missouri district — a “consummate people person,” adding “taxpayers and the wonderful employees of the IRS will love having Billy at the helm.” Long was one of the first elected officials to jump on the “Trump train,” a phrase he claims to have coined. When most considered Trump’s candidacy a joke or publicity stunt, Long said he was all in, touting Trump to foreign leaders and GOP insiders who snickered at the notion that the real estate mogul and reality TV star would be the next president. “Trump, I saw it early on,” Long told The Independent in 2022, “he has the ‘it’ factor.” After a long career as an auctioneer, and a few years as a conservative talk radio host, Long decided to jump into the 2010 race for the congressional seat being vacated when Roy Blunt decided to run for U.S. Senate. Long said no one took him seriously. “It was an eight-way race,” Long said, “and I was supposed to come in ninth. I was the Donald Trump of the race.” He was pegged as a candidate who was only in the race “for publicity,” Long said, “to help my business and blah, blah, blah, the same things they said about Trump.” His own campaign consultants told him he was “too fat to put on TV,” he said. “And you can put that in the newspaper. They said, ‘You’re too fat. You can’t go on TV. You’ll scare people.’” In the end, Long won the primary by around 7.5 percentage points. He cruised to victory that fall, joining a massive class of freshmen Republicans who swept into office in the Tea Party wave. He says the key to his victory was authenticity. “I may not look the part,” Long said. “But I guaranteed to voters that I would be the part, that I would do the right thing for the right reason every day. And that resonated with people.” In 2022, he gave up his congressional seat to run for U.S. Senate, finishing fourth in the GOP primary behind the eventual winner, Eric Schmitt. According to Trump’s Wednesday announcement, since leaving Congress Long has worked as a business and tax advisor, “helping small businesses navigate the complexities of complying with the IRS Rules and Regulations.” “I have known Billy since 2011,” Trump said. “He is an extremely hard worker, and respected by all, especially by those who know him in Congress... Congratulations Billy!”
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. donors gave $3.6 billion on Tuesday, an increase from the past two years, according to estimates from the nonprofit GivingTuesday. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. donors gave $3.6 billion on Tuesday, an increase from the past two years, according to estimates from the nonprofit GivingTuesday. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. donors gave $3.6 billion on Tuesday, an increase from the past two years, according to estimates from the nonprofit GivingTuesday. The Tuesday after Thanksgiving, now known as GivingTuesday, has become a major day for nonprofits to fundraise and otherwise engage their supporters each year, since the 92nd St Y in New York started it as a hashtag in 2012. GivingTuesday has since become an independent nonprofit that connects a worldwide network of leaders and organizations who promote giving in their communities. “This just really shows the generosity, the willingness of American citizens to show up, particularly collectively,” said Asha Curran, CEO of the nonprofit GivingTuesday. “We are just seeing the power of collective action and particularly collective giving over and over and over again.” This year, about 18.5 million people donated to nonprofits and another 9.2 million people volunteered, according to GivingTuesday’s estimates. Both the number of donors and the number of volunteers increased by 4% from the group’s 2023 estimates. “For us, it’s not just about the number of dollars,” Curran said. “It’s about the number of people who feel like they have agency over the way their communities progress forward into the future.” The nonprofit GivingTuesday estimates the amount of money and goods donated and the number of participants using data from donor management software companies, donation platforms, payment processors and donor-advised funds. Curran said they are purposely conservative in their calculations. Nonprofits in the U.S. raised $3.1 billion in both 2022 and 2023 on GivingTuesday. That mirrored larger giving trends where the overall amount of donations dropped in 2022 and mostly held steady in 2023 after accounting for inflation. It’s never easy to predict current giving trends but Una Osili, associate dean at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, said there were economic forces pushing in both directions. Winnipeg Jets Game Days On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop. “At the very same time, there’s a lot of uncertainty, especially around prices, the cost of living, the supermarket toll that people are expecting continue even though inflation has moderated,” she said. Donating or volunteering with nonprofits aren’t the only ways people participate in their communities. Many give to crowdfunding campaigns, political causes or support people directly in their networks. But tracking charitable donations is one way that researchers use to understand people’s civic engagement. “This country is undeniably in a lot of pain and very divided right now,” Curran said. “And so to have a day that felt as hopeful and as optimistic as yesterday did, I’m sure was not only comforting to me, but to many, many millions of people.” ___ Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy. Advertisement AdvertisementMMA star Conor McGregor assaulted woman in 2018, jury finds
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