Justin Timberlake reveals secret health battle and confesses symptoms have been ‘relentlessly debilitating' on tour
Timberlake shared a shocking health issue he's been dealing with amid criticism from fans that he appears "lazy" and "tired" on stage.
The singer commemorated wrapping up the The Forget Tomorrow World Tour on July 30 with a lengthy post on Instagram.
"This has been the most fun, emotional, gratifying, physically demanding, and, at times, grueling experience," the former NSYNC member said of his solo tour.
"I could not have done it without my family, friends, The TN Kids, and all of YOUR support."
Timberlake went on to reveal that he's been struggling with Lyme disease over the past couple of years.
"Among other things, I've been battling some health issues, and was diagnosed with Lyme disease -— which I don't say so you feel bad for me –– but to shed some light on what I've been up against behind the scenes."
Throughout the tour, the singer has been accused of "hardly singing," with many branding his performances "lazy."
In his post, Timberlake addressed his performance and the difficulties he experienced on stage.
"When I first got the diagnosis I was shocked for sure," he wrote.
"But, at least I could understand why I would be onstage and in a massive amount of nerve pain or, just feeling crazy fatigue or sickness."
Timberlake said the diagnosis forced him to decide whether to keep touring or to put a hold on all of his shows.
"I decided the joy that performing brings me far outweighs the fleeting stress my body was feeling. I'm so glad I kept going," he reflected.
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Telegraph
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Keith Richards, Corsican drug dealers and the Rolling Stones' stolen guitar
It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a guitar case. A 1959 Gibson Les Paul guitar that former Rolling Stone guitarist Mick Taylor claims was once his has turned up at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art some 54 years after it may have been stolen from a villa in the South of France. The vintage guitar has a distinctive orange-an-gold 'sunburst' maple face and is often referred to in guitar circles as the 'Keithburst', as it was once also owned by fellow Stone Keith Richards. The instrument forms part of a collection of 500 classic guitars recently gifted to the Manhattan museum by billionaire collector Dirk Ziff, who bought the guitar in 2016. But Taylor, 76, has expressed surprise that the Les Paul has ended up on Fifth Avenue, as he hasn't seen it since it went missing. Taylor has said that he bought the guitar in 1968 from a Rolling Stones road manager prior to joining the band. According to some accounts, the guitar was then one of between eight and 11 instruments half-inched by sticky fingered burglars from Villa Nellcôte on the Côte d'Azur while the Stones were recording their sprawling Exile on Main St album in 1971. 'There are numerous photos of Mick Taylor playing this Les Paul, as it was his main guitar until it disappeared,' his manager, Marlies Damming, told Page Six. However, the Met has refuted that the Les Paul ever belonged to Taylor. 'The guitar has a long and well-documented history of ownership,' a Met spokesperson tells me. The museum's own research claims that Richards bought the guitar some time prior to August 1964 – he played it on The Ed Sullivan Show that year – and owned it until 1971, after which it passed on to owners who were not Taylor. The Met also doubts that the guitar was ever at Nellcôte. Further, the Met says that that far from being 'long lost', the guitar has a long public history. It featured in a US 2019 exhibition called Play It Loud and appeared in a 2013 book about the Rolling Stones' equipment. The twisted tale of the Stones' 'pinched' Gibson is a head-scratcher, indeed. Instruments owned by the famous musicians have often been stolen. In 1972 Paul McCartney had his beloved Höfner bass guitar taken from a van in Notting Hill. And Eric Clapton's Les Paul, nicknamed Beano, went missing from a church hall practice room in 1996. But this affair is far less clear-cut. And it pitches one of the world's most venerable arts institutions against one of rock's finest guitarists. Key to the riddle is the burglary that took place in France in the autumn of 1971. That instruments were stolen from Nellcôte is not in doubt. But what precisely happened is surrounded by conjecture and haziness, which is unsurprising given the volume of narcotics that were floating around the decadent chateau that year. An account of the Nellcôte theft in Guitar Player magazine says the instruments were filched 'in broad daylight while the villa's occupants were watching TV'. Tony Sanchez, who worked for Richards over this period, remembers things differently. 'We had two bad burglaries, and in one of them thieves stole Keith's entire collection of guitars – Gibsons, Mustangs, Les Pauls, Hummingbirds were all carried out the front door while we slept,' Sanchez wrote in his scabrous book Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, adding that Richards 'notified the police and filled in his £22,000 insurance claim the next day'. Some reports have it that bass guitars and a saxophone were also taken. Others say that Corsican drug dealers, angry for not being paid, took them. Richards, for his part, says the theft happened in October 1971. 'We were burgled and my guitars, a great many of them, were stolen,' he wrote in his 2010 autobiography Life. 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There's a picture of him playing the guitar with his pre-Stones band, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Copenhagen in 1968. The guitarist has said that he bought the guitar from Stones road manager Ian Stewart. 'I met Ian Stewart… and I told him I was looking for a Les Paul, because the other one had been stolen. And he said: 'Well, I've got one for sale. Come to the studio and have a look at it.'' A year later, in 1969, Taylor joined the Stones as Brian Jones's replacement. But was the guitar at Nellcôte? I've seen no proof. I own a fantastic signed book of photographs by Dominique Tarlé of the Stones in Nellcôte that summer. In Tarlé's book there are dozens of beautiful guitars pictured as the Stones record Exile in louche surroundings. But there's no picture of this guitar, which was also known as the Bigsby Burst due to its vibrato arm produced by the Bigsby company. Of course, this doesn't mean that the instrument wasn't there. But researchers at the Met agree with me on this; their findings suggest that it 'does not seem plausible' that the guitar was ever at Nellcôte. A goldmine for Stones information is the It's Only Rock 'n' Roll website, or The folk who run the site are Stones sleuths extraordinaire. And according to posts on IORR, a definitive list of guitars stolen in France has never been agreed upon. Some say the Keithburst was one of them, others not. One IORR fan believes the guitar may have actually stolen during the Stones' brief March 1971 tour of England and Scotland, just before they quit Britain and went to France as tax exiles in April 1971. The Met's doubts that the guitar was ever in France are based on an extensive chain of provenance it has unearthed. According to the museum, a guitarist called Cosmo Verrico from British rock band Heavy Metal Kids acquired the guitar in 1971 from a record producer called Adrian Miller, who died in 2006. 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The next owner was a Swedish man called Peter Svensson, in 2006, before Dirk Ziff acquired it in 2016. Ziff then donated it to the museum this year. Hmm. An alarm bell rang for me as soon as I read this. I knew Marsden, who died in 2023, and as well as being one of the nicest men in rock, he was also an utter guitar aficionado. I doubt that he'd have flipped a guitar of that quality for £50 in the same year that he bought it. Marsden played his first professional gig in 1972, with UFO, before joining Wild Turkey and Cozy Powell's Hammer. In other words, his career was taking off just as he'd bought the guitar. Why sell it? I consulted his autobiography, the appropriately-titled Where's My Guitar? Well, well, well. Marsden did indeed buy a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Burst in 1974. He bought it off a geezer in the Marquee club in London, having haggled him down from £600 and offering two of his own guitars in exchange. But Marsden never sold it on. In the book he refers to it as 'my treasured' guitar. It came to be known as 'The Beast' and stayed with Marsden throughout his career. He wrote and recorded Whitesnake's Here I Go Again on it. It's understood that the guitar has remained with his family. Is this, then, the final resting place of Taylor's long-lost guitar rather than the Met? Er, no. Alas, Marsden's Beast isn't the Taylor guitar. Comparing and contrasting photos of The Beast with the Keithburst shows that they are two different instruments (Marsden's doesn't have the Bigsby vibrato arm). Which means that, if the Met is correct, then Marsden bought two 1959 Gibson Les Paul Burst guitars in 1974. This seems highly unlikely. However, according to an online Les Paul forum, it's true. What are the chances? Affinity's Jopp told a guitar expert called Dave Brewis that Marsden only owned the Taylor guitar for about a week in 1974, having bought it from Verrico, before selling it on to him. 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The Independent
an hour ago
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Researchers laid off and science shelved The loss of an estimated $2.6 billion in federal funding at Harvard has meant that some of the world's most prominent researchers are laying off young researchers. They are shelving years or even decades of research, into everything from opioid addiction to cancer. And despite Harvard's lawsuits against the administration, and settlement talks between the warring parties, researchers are confronting the fact that some of their work may never resume. The funding cuts are part of a monthslong battle that the Trump administration has waged against some the country's top universities including Columbia, Brown and Northwestern. The administration has taken a particularly aggressive stance against Harvard, freezing funding after the country's oldest university rejected a series of government demands issued by a federal antisemitism task force. The government had demanded sweeping changes at Harvard related to campus protests, academics and admissions — meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment. Research jeopardized, even if court case prevails Harvard responded by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the Trump administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university. In the lawsuit, it laid out reforms it had taken to address antisemitism but also vowed not to 'surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.' 'Make no mistake: Harvard rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus," the university said in its legal complaint. 'But rather than engage with Harvard regarding those ongoing efforts, the Government announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism.' The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the demands were sent in April. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel federal contracts for policy reasons. The funding cuts have left Harvard's research community in a state of shock, feeling as if they are being unfairly targeted in a fight has nothing to do with them. Some have been forced to shutter labs or scramble to find non-government funding to replace lost money. In May, Harvard announced that it would put up at least $250 million of its own money to continue research efforts, but university President Alan Garber warned of 'difficult decisions and sacrifices' ahead. Ascherio said the university was able to pull together funding to pay his researchers' salaries until next June. But he's still been left without resources needed to fund critical research tasks, like lab work. Even a year's delay can put his research back five years, he said. Knowledge lost in funding freeze 'It's really devastating,' agreed Rita Hamad, the director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research Center at Harvard, who had three multiyear grants totaling $10 million canceled by the Trump administration. The grants funded research into the impact of school segregation on heart health, how pandemic-era policies in over 250 counties affected mental health, and the role of neighborhood factors in dementia. At the School of Public Health, where Hamad is based, 190 grants have been terminated, affecting roughly 130 scientists. 'Just thinking about all the knowledge that's not going to be gained or that is going to be actively lost," Hamad said. She expects significant layoffs on her team if the funding freeze continues for a few more months. "It's all just a mixture of frustration and anger and sadness all the time, every day." John Quackenbush, a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the School of Public Health, has spent the past few months enduring cuts on multiple fronts. In April, a multimillion dollar grant was not renewed, jeopardizing a study into the role sex plays in disease. In May, he lost about $1.2 million in federal funding for in the coming year due to the Harvard freeze. Four departmental grants worth $24 million that funded training of doctoral students also were cancelled as part of the fight with the Trump administration, Quackenbush said. 'I'm in a position where I have to really think about, 'Can I revive this research?'' he said. 'Can I restart these programs even if Harvard and the Trump administration reached some kind of settlement? If they do reach a settlement, how quickly can the funding be turned back on? Can it be turned back on?' The researchers all agreed that the funding cuts have little or nothing to do with the university's fight against antisemitism. Some, however, argue changes at Harvard were long overdue and pressure from the Trump administration was necessary. Bertha Madras, a Harvard psychobiologist who lost funding to create a free, parent-focused training to prevent teen opioid overdose and drug use, said she's happy to see the culling of what she called 'politically motivated social science studies.' White House pressure a good thing? Madras said pressure from the White House has catalyzed much-needed reform at the university, where several programs of study have 'really gone off the wall in terms of being shaped by orthodoxy that is not representative of the country as a whole.' But Madras, who served on the President's Commission on Opioids during Trump's first term, said holding scientists' research funding hostage as a bargaining chip doesn't make sense. 'I don't know if reform would have happened without the president of the United States pointing the bony finger at Harvard," she said. 'But sacrificing science is problematic, and it's very worrisome because it is one of the major pillars of strength of the country.' Quackenbush and other Harvard researchers argue the cuts are part of a larger attack on science by the Trump administration that puts the country's reputation as the global research leader at risk. Support for students and post-doctoral fellows has been slashed, visas for foreign scholars threatened, and new guidelines and funding cuts at the NIH will make it much more difficult to get federal funding in the future, they said. It also will be difficult to replace federal funding with money from the private sector. 'We're all sort of moving toward this future in which this 80-year partnership between the government and the universities is going to be jeopardized,' Quackenbush said. 'We're going to face real challenges in continuing to lead the world in scientific excellence.'
