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Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Ayahuasca. Football. God. Sterling K. Brown has a take on just about everything
Sterling K. Brown is telling me about the underground bunker in his Ladera Heights home, a feature common to houses built during the Cold War, when fears of a nuclear holocaust ran rampant and kids were watching 'duck and cover' films at school. Brown and his wife, Ryan Michelle Bathé, sealed the bunker when they moved in, not wanting their two boys to wander in there. But now that Brown has spent the last couple of years immersed in making the Emmy-nominated drama 'Paradise,' set inside a massive domed underground city that some 25,000 people call home after a tsunami floods the planet, I wonder if the show's doomsday vibes have seeped into his consciousness. 'It's definitely seeped into my wife's brain,' Brown says, laughing, adding that now that the boys are older — Andrew is 14 and Amare will be 10 next month — he and his wife are 'actively' looking at opening it up and, per Bathé, stocking it with provisions. He goes on to tell me about friends who have bought land in rural areas to develop and build their own communities, so if push comes to shove they'll survive while everyone else is picking through the rubble. Has he considered joining them? 'It's a different take than Sterling's take,' Brown answers after a beat, noting that he's not passing judgment. 'But there is a level of preparation that I blissfully throw caution to the wind because I'm someone who believes in a Gump-ian existence, that everything will work out the way that it's supposed to.' Gump as in Forrest, Brown clarifies, as if there's any doubt. So even though he's in the middle of shooting the second season of 'Paradise,' much of which finds his Secret Service agent looking for his wife in a world outside the bunker where things have most decidedly not worked out, Brown says he is focusing on 'things that are shiny and beautiful and delightful.' Case in point: a ring he grabs off a table in his office. When Brown and I first met, it was the first Saturday in May and Brown was at The Times taking part in an actors roundtable, which meant he wasn't at Andrew's soccer game or helping coach Amare's flag football team. The soccer game was being recorded, so missing it stung less. But Brown is the defensive coordinator of the football team and, heading into the playoffs, their record was 2-3-1. Nonetheless, he was confident they'd be OK because, again, Brown is a self-professed 'sunny-side-up' kind of guy. 'Not only did we make the playoffs' — here Brown retrieves the enormous ring — 'we won the Super Bowl. We eked in and played our best football at the right time. 'Not to diminish anything else that's going on in my world, because it's a good time to be SKB,' Brown says a couple of days after earning a lead actor Emmy nomination for 'Paradise.' 'But it was a big moment for me. I can't lie.' Was it his finest moment? The word 'moment' has me remembering what Dan Fogelman, Brown's showrunner on 'Paradise' and 'This Is Us,' told a colleague not long ago, talking about a 'Paradise' shower scene that showcased Brown's backside. 'It was his proudest moment on the show,' Fogelman said. 'He's so dumb,' Brown says, not even letting me finish the question. 'I do know what he said, and I won't even lie. I'm not not proud of it because here's the thing: I look at this front part of my body all the time. And I don't always know what it looks like behind. And when I got to see it, I was like, 'You know what?' Not bad. Not bad at all.'' There are many things to parse in this response. Luckily, Fogelman is more than happy to help. For one thing, he explains, it taps into Brown's drive to be the best. Yes, he leads from a light place — you're never going to leave a conversation with Brown feeling heavier than when you began — but the man likes to win. And Fogelman enjoys baiting him, telling Brown that if they played a game of one-on-one basketball, Fogelman would get at least one point. It doesn't matter that he's winking when he says this. Just the notion that an out-of-shape writer would score a point off him drives Brown nuts. Plus, that 'not bad at all' highlights Brown's willingness to speak his inner monologue out loud. He doesn't have many moments where he thinks, 'I wonder if I should tell this story. Maybe it will make me look bad.' 'People are desperate for authenticity and truth,' Fogelman says. 'Actors in Sterling's position usually have a persona that's carefully crafted. Sterling is who he is.' If you want to hear that essence pouring through, there might not be a better place than the podcast Brown does with his wife, Bathé. (Yes, a second season is coming.) It lives up to its title, 'We Don't Always Agree,' featuring the couple's candid exchanges about money, child-rearing, racial identity and religion. No punches are pulled. Says Brown: 'My wife and I are two different people. My wife is a warrior. She's going to fight and she's going to fight hard. I respect her. Me ... I am a peace worker. I'm going to try to find the connective tissue that allows you to recognize that we're not as different as you think.' 'You want to know my favorite episode of 'The West Wing'?' Brown asks. 'It's 'Isaac and Ishmael,' talking about how the two different branches came from Abraham — two different groups but from the same person. But yet our instinct toward nationalism and tribalism keeps us in this constant state of 'us' against 'them.' And as long as we believe in this fallacy of separation, that's going to continue.' Having, like Brown, grown up in the church and then gone in a different direction, believing that there's no monopoly on God, we spend a lot of time talking about the side-eyes family and friends give us when we talk about our spiritual journeys. 'A lot of my faith practice in my youth was performative, so that people saw that I was following the rules and playing the game,' Brown says. 'Now, the connection with the source is the only thing that matters. I've never felt closer to God, the universe, nature, whatever you want to call it.' Brown is reading the Bible to his boys right now, focusing on the Old Testament with his oldest, Andrew, who is having a hard time reconciling the God of love in the New Testament with the vengeful God that turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt when she looked back on the ruined Sodom and Gomorrah. Does God change? Or is it the ways people explain God? 'Fear is a powerful motivator, and today we're seeing how fear can galvanize people into making decisions for their own self-protection,' Brown says. 'What the New Testament is trying to say is that love is as powerful and a pure motivator for the right action. What I want to do is embody love, which is 'love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul' and 'love your neighbor as yourself.'' Brown is adamant in his belief that God wants us to question how the universe works and why there is so much suffering in the world. 'What questions are you asking God these days?' I ask when we reconnect. The first thing that comes to his mind is his mother, Arlene, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2018 and soon lost her ability to speak: Why her? How does this good woman merit a disease that imprisons you in your own body? 'That's what my brothers and sisters struggle with in a very Job-like way,' Brown says. 'And what I've learned is that faith doesn't remove obstacles from your life. Faith allows you to believe there is a purpose for those obstacles. There is a level of grace when I see her. Never am I seeing someone defeated or angry. Arlene Brown is still smiling.' 'Listen, my head is not stuck in the sand,' Brown continues. 'Life can be difficult. But life is also too short not to find something to be grateful for.' And there you have what Fogelman calls the essence of his friend and collaborator — 'a deep thinker but not a heavy man. He radiates warmth and positive energy.' Brown tells me a funny story about how his manager used to get mad at him when he'd miss an audition because he was too busy cleaning his house. For Brown, it was perfectly logical: Cluttered space, cluttered mind. Too much chaos? Brown's brain can't function. That need for control and order runs up against the way Brown likes to picture himself as an easygoing, go-with-the-flow kind of guy. His wife, he says, is happy to disabuse him of that notion. But what really made Brown see himself clearly was the time he and Bathé partook in the psychedelic ayahuasca at a Costa Rica dispensary. (I'm not giving him side-eye. Are you? Brown feels you and heads you off. 'We're crunchy granola Black people,' he explains.) When the shaman gave Brown the 'medicine,' he didn't feel anything at first. Sure, the stars were beautiful. But that couldn't be the extent of the experience. The shaman approached him. Do you need another cup? Maybe. Brown drank the equivalent of half a shot glass and, instantaneously, he felt his body seep into the ground. It was like he disappeared into the earth. Was he dead? No. He could see the sweat bouncing off his body and hovering over him. Maybe the shaman saw something and was concerned because she approached Brown and asked if she could sing to him. 'And she starts singing this song, which sounded very serpentine, like if a snake was able to sing,' Brown says. Like the python in 'The Jungle Book'? 'Yes!' Brown says. 'Now the more I look at things people have created, I'm like, 'They did ayahuasca.'' Nothing about the experience was what he anticipated, which is the lesson he took away: You can't control anything. Just be present to what's happening now — and observe. 'And as I move through life, I experience more peace and comfort just doing precisely that,' Brown says.
Time Magazine
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
What to Know About The Yogurt Shop Murders on HBO
Thirty-three years ago, what was meant to be a sweet trip to a frozen yogurt shop in Austin, Texas, turned into a tragedy when four girls were fatally shot on Dec. 6, 1991. Amy Ayers, Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, and Eliza Thomas, all teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, were killed and stripped of their clothing in a room in the back of the shop, before the place was set on fire. The case, which has remained unsolved for decades, is the subject of a new HBO documentary, The Yogurt Shop Murders, directed by Margaret Brown. In four episodes, premiering Sundays starting Aug. 3, the series explores all of the possible theories about who murdered the girls. It features interviews with investigators—and their interviews with the suspects—the victims' family members, and rare footage of the suspects filmed by a local Austin documentary filmmaker, Claire Huie. Exactly why these four girls were murdered is still unknown. 'I would be at parties, and people would just start talking about the yogurt shop murders,' Brown, an Austin native, says. 'It's part of the mythos of Austin, part of the collective memory, the fabric of the city. Everyone has a theory.' Here's what to know about the first episode of The Yogurt Shop Murders. A key arrest The first episode of The Yogurt Shop Murders opens with Huie's footage of a man named Robert Springsteen going shopping for a suit at a Macy's. He tells the salesperson he's just gotten off death row and is looking for sharp clothes for an interview with CBS's investigative show 48 Hours and various court appearances. The scene teases that viewers will learn how Springsteen became a free man in the next episodes. He was named about a week after the shooting, when police arrested his friend, Maurice Pierce, 16, who was carrying a loaded pistol in the waistband of his jeans in the Northcross Mall Plaza near the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop. It was the same type of gun that police were looking for since they found a bullet in a sink at the yogurt shop. When Pierce was questioned, he did not admit guilt, but he gave up the names of other guys he had been hanging out with the night of the shooting: Michael Scott, Springsteen, and Forrest Welborn. Pierce said Forrest asked to borrow his gun and came back sweaty and smelling of hairspray. The next day, the four boys stole a car and drove to San Antonio to see a girl, and when they returned, Maurice said Forrest asked for the gun again. When Maurice asked why, he said Forrest told him that he wanted to kill more girls like he did the night before. Viewers will hear a police recording of Maurice asking Forrest point blank if he killed the girls, and Forrest claiming he was joking and assuring him, 'I wouldn't lie to you.' Police also never found evidence to prove he killed the girls. The mess at the crime scene is one key reason why this case remains unsolved. Police did not have physical evidence to link these four boys to the crime, though they did make sure they got swabs from the girls for future DNA testing. There was no video footage at the store, and the crime scene was covered in water from extinguishing the fire, making it difficult to find fingerprints and evidence that are not contaminated. And while police could track credit card transactions at the store, they couldn't track people who paid in cash. The leading theory about the yogurt shop murders among law enforcement is that it was a robbery gone wrong. Families still traumatized In the first episode, the families of the victims recall Dec. 6, 1991, like it was yesterday. Eliza Thomas's sister Sonora recalls her teeth chattering uncontrollably when she heard the news and having to put her hand in her mouth to stop her teeth from chattering. She remembers vividly the awkwardness of telling her divorced parents the news of their daughter's death. Sonora remembers nervously cleaning the house while her mother locked herself in her bedroom, refusing to even come out and talk to the police. During her first night sleeping without her sister nearby, Sonora Thomas recalls thinking, 'I've never woken up on a day when my sister wasn't alive.' Shawn Ayers misses his sister Amy every day, saying, 'not one day that I don't think of her.' Pam Ayers thinks of her daughter Amy every time she sees kids and animals, as Amy and the three other girls were part of Future Farmers of America. Barbara Ayres-Wilson, mother of Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, has been speaking publicly about the murders since losing her daughters, hoping it would help law enforcement solve the case sooner. She recalls that Jennifer and Sarah were in such a good mood the day they died, excited to go to the yogurt shop, where Jennifer worked. She saw them off and got a hug from each of the girls and reminded them to be careful. And yet, she still wonders if there is anything she could have done differently, stating, 'You just have all of these regrets of not protecting [them]...How could someone be and then not be?'
Engadget
5 days ago
- Engadget
X has to prove it wasn't negligent when removing CSAM from its site
X isn't off the hook yet when it comes to a significant legal case about child sex abuse content on its platform. On Friday, a circuit judge from the US Court of Appeals ruled that X Corp. has to again face claims that it was negligent in taking down child sex abuse content and didn't have an effective reporting infrastructure for these offenses. This ruling from Judge Danielle Forrest is the latest step in a lawsuit filed in 2021 against Twitter, before it was rebranded to X. The suit lists two underage boys as the plaintiffs and alleges Twitter, now X, "slow-walked its response to reports about, and did not immediately remove from the platform, pornographic content that a trafficker had coerced plaintiffs into producing." A previous decision with a three-judge panel unanimously decided that X was legally immune thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which offers wide-reaching protections to online platforms from the content that's posted by its users. This latest decision from Judge Forrest agrees with parts of the previous ruling, but claims that X was negligent in this case and has to defend itself against the lawsuit's claims that the platform makes it "too difficult to report child pornography that is posted on Twitter." The case revolves around a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old boy who were tricked by online sex traffickers into sending sexually explicit photos, according to the lawsuit. The illegal content was then posted to Twitter, and the 13-year-old filed a report against it through Twitter's content reporting interface, as detailed in the suit. The boy's mother also filed a report, didn't receive anything but an automated response, and had to follow up before receiving a response that Twitter didn't find any policy violations and wouldn't take further action, according to the lawsuit. The suit claimed that Twitter eventually removed the post nine days after the initial report, suspended the poster's account and reported the content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is required by federal law. The lawsuit could set a major precedent in how social media platforms operate, especially if it makes it to the Supreme Court, but X will first have to defend itself against these claims again in district court thanks to this latest decision.
Sydney Morning Herald
24-07-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Trump kills Twiggy Forrest's US green hydrogen dream
Australian billionaire Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest has terminated a major hydrogen project in the United States as Donald Trump slashes tax breaks for clean energy investments and guts programs aimed at tackling climate change. The Forrest-led Fortescue Metals Group on Thursday said it would not proceed with a $US550 million ($830 million) plan to begin producing zero-emissions hydrogen at a new plant in Arizona, blaming the 'shift in priorities away from green energy' under the Trump administration. 'The lack of certainty and step-back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed,' Fortescue head of growth and energy Gus Pichot said. 'As a result, we cannot proceed with our investments as they stand, and will explore future opportunities for our site in Arizona.' Since returning to the White House, Trump has passed laws to end lucrative tax breaks for wind and solar farms, electric cars and other technologies that would help combat global warming, which he falsely calls a 'hoax', while enacting sweeping measures to make it cheaper and easier for companies to extract more fossil fuels. The cancellation of the Arizona project comes as Forrest continues a years-long campaign to diversify Fortescue beyond its lucrative Western Australian iron ore mines and into the production of green hydrogen, a promising clean energy source that burns cleanly and could eventually help displace the use of coal, oil and gas in heavy industry. While Fortescue insists it remains steadfast in its commitment to green hydrogen, it has been forced to hit the brakes on the speed of its ambitions over the past year, blaming the high cost and the vast amount of renewable energy required. Most of the hydrogen produced across the world today is limited to 'grey hydrogen', made from gas through a process that emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The Age
24-07-2025
- Business
- The Age
Trump kills Twiggy Forrest's US green hydrogen dream
Australian billionaire Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest has terminated a major hydrogen project in the United States as Donald Trump slashes tax breaks for clean energy investments and guts programs aimed at tackling climate change. The Forrest-led Fortescue Metals Group on Thursday said it would not proceed with a $US550 million ($830 million) plan to begin producing zero-emissions hydrogen at a new plant in Arizona, blaming the 'shift in priorities away from green energy' under the Trump administration. 'The lack of certainty and step-back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed,' Fortescue head of growth and energy Gus Pichot said. 'As a result, we cannot proceed with our investments as they stand, and will explore future opportunities for our site in Arizona.' Since returning to the White House, Trump has passed laws to end lucrative tax breaks for wind and solar farms, electric cars and other technologies that would help combat global warming, which he falsely calls a 'hoax', while enacting sweeping measures to make it cheaper and easier for companies to extract more fossil fuels. The cancellation of the Arizona project comes as Forrest continues a years-long campaign to diversify Fortescue beyond its lucrative Western Australian iron ore mines and into the production of green hydrogen, a promising clean energy source that burns cleanly and could eventually help displace the use of coal, oil and gas in heavy industry. While Fortescue insists it remains steadfast in its commitment to green hydrogen, it has been forced to hit the brakes on the speed of its ambitions over the past year, blaming the high cost and the vast amount of renewable energy required. Most of the hydrogen produced across the world today is limited to 'grey hydrogen', made from gas through a process that emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
