Never Try To Rob and Former MMA Fighter
Don’t Drink When You’re Drunk – That’s Important
FRIGHT KREWE Renewed
‘Fright Krewe’: Animated Horror Series Renewed for Season 2 at Hulu, Peacock
By Joe Otterson
The animated horror series “Fright Krewe” has been renewed for Season 2 at Hulu and Peacock, Variety has learned exclusively.
The 10-episode first season was released on Oct. 2. The second season is expected to launch in 2024, though an exact premiere date has not been set.
The series hails from creators Eli Roth and James Frey and DreamWorks Animation. According to the official logline, “An ancient prophecy and a Voodoo Queen put misfit teens in charge of saving New Orleans from the biggest demonic threat it’s faced in almost two centuries. But, honestly? Saving the world might be easier than becoming friends.”
The main voice cast of “Fright Krewe” consists of Sydney Mikayla as Soleil, Tim Johnson Jr. as Maybe, Grace Lu as Missy, Chester Rushing as Stanley, Terrence Little Gardenhigh as Pat, and Jacques Colimon as Belial. The recurring cast in Season 1 included: Vanessa Hudgens, Josh Richards, X Mayo, Rob Paulsen, JoNell Kennedy, Melanie Laurent, Chris Jai Alex, Reggie Watkins, Cherise Boothe, Keston John, Grey Delisle and Krizia Bajos.
For When The Bad Guys Are Chasing You
Aliens Inside
Anomalies Deep Inside Earth Are Wreckage of Crashed Alien World, Scientists Propose
The long-lost remnants of the planet Theia are far beneath our feet.
Scientists have proposed that the wreckage of a long-lost alien world is buried about 1,800 miles under our feet, reports a new study. This mind-boggling hypothesis suggests that strange anomalies in Earth’s interior may be relics of a world that smashed into our planet some 4.5 billion years ago, and that similar ancient remnants may lurk inside other celestial bodies.
The infant solar system was much wilder and more tumultuous than it is today, with lots of crashes between small embryonic worlds called protoplanets. Scientists have long suspected that an ancient protoplanet known as Theia, which could have been as large as Mars, hurtled into Earth in this period. This catastrophic collision ejected debris from Theia and Earth into space, where it eventually coalesced into the Moon, so the theory goes.
Boom Bust
A Forgotten Bust Found Propping Up a Storage Shed Could Net $3 Million for a Tiny Scottish Town
The auction record for a Bouchardon bust was set in 2012 by the Louvre.
A 18th-century bust created by artist Edmé Bouchardon, who served sculptor to French King Louis XV, and was later bought by a Scottish local government for just a few pounds may soon be sold for millions to benefit public programs—but not before the public has had its say.
Scotland’s Highland Council will allow members of the local community to voice their opinion on the fate of the multimillion-dollar bust, currently held by the Invergordon Common Good Fund. The port town in eastern Scotland has a population of fewer than 4,000.
In 1930, Invergordon Town Council spent £5, roughly $500 today, on a marble sculpture of Sir John Gordon, an 18th-century Scottish landowner and political figure, by the French artist Bouchardon.
Sotheby’s, which is acting on behalf of the Council, recently received an offer of more than $3 million for the bust, an amount the auction house believes represents close to peak value. The record for a Bouchardon bust is €3 million (about $3.2 million), which the Louvre paid at French auctioneer Aguttes for the bust Marquis de Gouvernet in 2012. As part of any deal, the council is requiring that the buyer provide a museum-quality replica.
Fun With Cars and Cliffs
Big Books
How Has Big Publishing Changed American Fiction?
A new book argues that corporate publishing has transformed what it means to be an author.
By Kevin Lozano
n 1989, Gerald Howard had been a book editor for about ten years, and his future filled him with dread. His primary fear, he wrote in a widely read essay for The American Scholar, was “a faster, huger, rougher, dumber publishing world.” He had entered the industry during a time of profound change. In the course of a few decades, American publishing had transformed from a parochial cultural industry, mostly centered on the East Coast, into an international, corporate affair. Starting in the nineteen-sixties, outfits like Random House and Penguin were seen as ripe targets for acquisition by multinational conglomerates like RCA and Pearson, which wanted to diversify their revenue streams, whether through oil, textbooks, calculators, or literary fiction. These parent companies changed the business of books, inciting an arms race that encouraged publishers to grow larger and larger, consolidating and concentrating the industry into a few giant players. Howard’s career had overlapped with this period of flux, and he saw before him a brutal, profit- and growth-obsessed landscape, inimical to his work. Corporate publishers like Penguin moved and grooved “to the tune of big-time finance,” he wrote. This dance was no “fox-trot; it’s a bruising slam dance,” he observed. “From down here on the shop floor, the results often look ludicrous and disastrous.”
Last year, shortly before the antitrust trial that successfully blocked a planned merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, Howard, who had recently retired, wrote for Publishers Weekly looking back on how the industry had changed in the course of his career. The slam dance had continued, its pace only more harried. The corporate houses had grown exponentially since the eighties, and swallowed up their competitors. Trade publishing was dominated by an even smaller group of companies that exerted an immense influence on the reading habits of Americans. When Penguin merged with Random House, in 2013, Howard took to calling the resulting behemoth Cosmodemonic Publishing. The scale of the company, the thousands of employees and hundreds of imprints, were, he says, “simply too large and abstract for a mere editor to get his head around.”
Devil 12/P Pons-Brooks
Rock on: ‘Devil comet’ will bring its horns swooping by Earth this summer
Comet 12/P Pons-Brooks does not pose a threat to the planet, but there’s a chance it will be visible to the naked eye this June.
By Denise Chow
Comet chasers: Give the devil his due.
A comet with two distinct “horns” of gas and ice, earning it the nickname “devil comet” is speeding through the inner solar system and may be visible to the naked eye in the spring when it reaches its closest point to Earth.
The celestial object, formally known as Comet 12/P Pons-Brooks, does not pose a threat to the planet. Instead, the cosmic interloper provides an opportunity for skywatchers to try to spot the comet as it nears Earth on its 71-year orbit around the sun.
Comet 12/P Pons-Brooks will reach perihelion, or the point in its orbit closest to the sun, on April 21, 2024. Shortly after that, on June 2, the comet will pass closest to Earth. During that time, if conditions are clear and skies are dark enough, astronomers have said that the comet may be bright enough to see with the naked eye.
‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Fright Krewe’
In coming-of-age horror shows ‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Fright Krewe,’ the scares are rooted in everyday life
BY TRACY BROWN
Many coming-of-age stories are reminders that being a teenager is a terrifying time.
Is your crush going to notice you today? (Do you even want them to?) How long until your classmates forget about the time you accidentally called your math teacher “mom”? Is your future really going to be decided by how you score on one test? Do people talk about how your hobbies are weird or — even worse — boring?
Adolescence can be a fraught time when these everyday dilemmas feel like the end of the world, which makes it a gold mine for stories that blend these metaphorical monsters with supernatural ones. Just look at shows from “Stranger Things” to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Timed to America’s favorite spooky season, two new teen-led horror shows launched earlier this month: DreamWorks’ New Orleans-set animated series “Fright Krewe,” first season available now on Hulu and Peacock, and Sony Pictures Television’s “Goosebumps,” a new adaptation of R.L. Stine’s popular book series, streaming on Hulu and Disney+. New “Goosebumps” episodes land Fridays.
Downtowns Near Dead
America’s Downtowns Are Empty. Fixing Them Will Be Expensive.
Lonely sidewalks and closed storefronts inspire proposals to recast office districts into neighborhoods where people live, work and raise families
MINNEAPOLIS—Downtown streets were so crowded in the 1960s that developers conjured up a maze of elevated walkways between buildings, providing winter-proof avenues for office workers who filled the central city Monday through Friday.
Stores, fast-food spots, bakeries and barber shops lined the covered, temperature-controlled walkways, which linked new glass skyscrapers sprouting one after the next. Workers racing to cubicles in the morning kept to the right to avoid crashing into each other, recalled convenience store clerk Monica Bray.
Bray sees only a trickle of passersby these days and lots of empty storefronts. Downtown streets also are quiet, leaving plenty of room for homeless people, police and the occasional tourist. “It’s spooky,” she said.
For decades, downtown office districts across the U.S. powered local economies, generating commerce, tax revenue and an aggregation of ambition, talent and disposable income. Many cities riddled with half-empty office buildings hope to survive the new remote-work era without bulldozing swaths of downtown and starting from scratch.
Mothman, Wampus Cat, and Raven Mocker
Haunted Appalachia? These ancient mountains witnessed the birth of man and monster
The supernatural creatures said to roam these forests are intimately tied to the landscape, which is older than most of life on Earth.
BY OLIVIA CAMPBELL
From the Mothman, Wampus Cat, and Raven Mocker to the Grafton and Flatwoods Monsters, the Appalachians are teeming with supernatural creatures. TikTok is flooded with stories of #hauntedappalachia. And many people believe the high rate of mysterious phenomena in the Appalachian Mountains, a 2,000-mile range that spans Newfoundland to northern Alabama, is due to their geological age.
How old, you ask? Older than Saturn’s rings. Older than the ozone layer. Older than sexually reproducing organisms. Old enough to remember when days on Earth were shorter than 24 hours. The rocks at the core of the Appalachians formed nearly 1.2 billion years ago when all the continents were still one.
“About 750 million years ago, the supercontinent began to thin and pull apart like warm taffy because of expansion of the continental crust,” Sandra H.B. Clark, U.S. Geological Survey research geologist eloquently explained in the story of the birth of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. When the continents eventually broke off, a deep basin from the Carolinas to Georgia filled with seawater. (The rest of the mountain range shoved off to become the Scottish Highlands.)
I Will Survive
Good.
Teens Want Parents to Track Their Phones and Monitor Their Every Move
An upbringing filled with anxiety has Gen Z sharing their location via apps
Teenagers have long balked at telling parents where they are. Now, they’re asking their parents to track them.
Every generation experiences its set of traumas, but social media and real-time news—with vivid images about the pandemic, war and other disasters—have heightened these anxieties among young people. And lots of them are closer to their parents than previous generations have been.
Members of Gen Z, ages 11 to 26, say they use family location-sharing apps to bolster a sense of security. Downloads of Life360 doubled in the U.S. since 2021. The app now has more than 33 million monthly active users in the U.S. and another 20 million internationally. Even more teens share their location using Apple’s Find My, Google’s Family Link,
Snapchat’s Snap Map and GPS-equipped smartwatches.
Gen Z respondents to a recent survey from Life360 said they share their location when they drive, when they go on dates and when they attend concerts and other large gatherings. Many keep location sharing on at all times.
Chief Broom and Flower Moon
The Long, Strange, Beautiful Road to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
My father-in-law and my late husband, both accomplished actors, wished for a time when Hollywood would make movies about real Native Americans. Now my daughter is living it.
It’s 1985, and I am 24—a few years removed from smoking cigarettes in front of the Baskin-Robbins in Brooklyn Heights.
I’m in Georgetown, South Carolina, and I jump off the back of the production van and directly into the path of two men wearing Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots. I recognize the older one, his silver hair braided with red ribbon, as the actor Will Sampson, who played Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He is with his son Tim, with whom I will fall in love.
We are filming a PBS miniseries, Roanoak, and Will again plays the role of chief. At six feet, seven inches, he is a commanding presence.
Before becoming an actor, Will, a full-blood Muscogee, or Creek, had been a rodeo rider, a lineman, and an artist. The Cuckoo’s Nest producers had heard about a “big Indian” and tracked him down. After a few days on set of hurry-up-and-wait, Will had gotten back in his pickup and driven away—fuck this noise. But he’d been cajoled back and made history. (The movie remains one of only three to have won the Big Five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay.)
Death Valley Alive
from The Los Angeles Times via MSN
‘I’ve never seen anything like this’: Death Valley gleams with water, wildflowers and color
Story by Christopher Reynolds
Death Valley is still wet. And only a fortunate few seem to be getting the best of it.
Two months after a storm that dropped a year’s rainfall in a single day, flooding roads, destroying trails and closing down the park, the national park’s Oct. 15 reopening revealed a strange place made stranger.
The famously flat and dry Badwater Basin now is home to a sprawling but temporary lake, visible from water’s edge and 5,575 feet above at Dante’s View.
Between sand dunes at Mesquite Flat, you might stumble on a puddle or a pond. In Mosaic and Golden canyons, where floodwaters surged in August, scattered boulders and silt have reshaped the narrow passages, hinting at violence just concluded. Across the plains and slopes, you see more green than usual and sometimes yellow and orange wildflowers, apparently blooming out of seasonal confusion.
The Art Thief
Inside the Hunt for the World’s Most Prolific Art Thief
Stephane Breitwieser is believed to have stolen hundreds of artifacts, worth a total of $2 billion
BY RALPH JONES
Get lost in the suspense of “The Art Thief.”
From the moment he read about him, Michael Finkel knew he wanted to tell Stephane Breitwieser’s story. He remembers looking at newspapers and small websites, wishing to learn French at the time, discovering the Frenchman’s story and becoming hooked. Breitwieser, currently serving a seven-year prison sentence, is the most prolific art thief in the history of the world.
Three things about Breitwieser intrigued Finkel: the insane quantity of his conquests, the fact that the thief never hurt anyone during his crimes and that he professed to steal art not for money but for love. “Whose heart doesn’t melt a little bit right there?” Finkel says over Zoom.
It’s impossible, a French journalist friend warned him. Breitwieser doesn’t talk to the press. This simply solidified Finkel’s resolve. “Game on,” he said to himself. Breitwieser became the author’s inspiration to learn French as quickly as possible. He wrote letters to the thief, beginning in 2012, and moved to France. It was years before Breitwieser returned Finkel’s letters, but when he did, the pair spoke at such length that Finkel was able to write a book about the man. Breitwieser’s story is so extraordinary that, Finkel tells me, he has sold the movie rights and is fantasizing about Timothee Chalamet playing the lead.
The Roast Is Done
The age of the comedy roast is over
Satirical annihilation has become a sanitised ritual
The spotlight beams down on the stage, illuminating the faces of the evening’s celebrities, who are seated in a semicircle like ancient oracles of comedy. At the centre of it all is the roastee — the guest of honour — who will soon be subjected to a brutal barrage of jokes. “James Franco…” started Natasha Leggero’s demolition job 10 years ago. “Acting, teaching, directing, writing, producing, photography, soundtracks, editing — is there anything you can do?” Then there was Gilbert Gottfried’s audacious pivot at the Hugh Hefner Roast, held just two weeks after 9/11, which descended into the “filthiest joke ever told”.
But as much as these moments underscore the art form’s past audacity, they also highlight the pallor that has settled over it. Once a platform for such biting wits as Don Rickles and Joan Rivers, the comedy roast has become a sanitised ritual, a showcase of quips that hardly go beyond the skin. Perhaps the last time we heard a roast joke that truly shocked was in 2019, when Blake Griffin took the mic to thank Caitlyn Jenner “on behalf of black men everywhere” for giving her daughters “daddy issues”. Since then, roasts have transitioned into an assembly line of safe, formulaic jokes that don’t even scratch the surface.
Yet looking at the roast’s decline, perhaps it’s understandable that nowhere in the entertainment world is the existential crisis over the rise of AI more palpable than in comedy. After all, there is no field of creative endeavour that’s become more dependent on cliches, groupthink and repetition. But while the malaise is widespread, the roast, in particular, looks set to be an early casualty.
Vesuvius Scroll Decoded
A 21-Year-Old Just Solved a 2000-Year-Old Mystery In ‘World-Historical’ Breakthrough
21-year-old Luke Farritor became the first person in millennia to read the text on an ancient scroll using machine learning.
A 21-year-old computer scientist named Luke Farritor just became the first person in nearly 2,000 years to read words from a papyrus scroll that was buried under more than 60 feet of volcanic ash after the disastrous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
Farritor used a machine learning program to pinpoint the Greek word for “purple” in one of the hundreds of carbonized scrolls that were unearthed in Herculaneum, a town that was obliterated by the eruption along with its more famous neighbor, Pompeii.
The scrolls were found in 1752 during excavations of an ancient villa in Herculaneum that may have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Excavators at that time quickly realized that the singed and fragile works disintegrated when they were unrolled, and so left most of them bound in their original form.
Rube Goldberg Wild
Suzanne Somers Gone
Suzanne Somers, Three’s Company and Step by Step Actress, Dead at 76
The actress passed away “peacefully at home” surrounded by loved ones, PEOPLE confirms
By Bailey Richards and Andrea Mandell
Suzanne Somers, best known for her roles on Three’s Company and Step by Step, has died.
Somers died on Sunday morning, PEOPLE confirms. She would have been 77 on Monday.
“Suzanne Somers passed away peacefully at home in the early morning hours of October 15th. She survived an aggressive form of breast cancer for over 23 years,” Somers’ longtime publicist R. Couri Hay wrote in a statement shared on behalf of the actress’ family.
“Suzanne was surrounded by her loving husband Alan, her son Bruce, and her immediate family,” the statement continued. “Her family was gathered to celebrate her 77th birthday on October 16th. Instead, they will celebrate her extraordinary life, and want to thank her millions of fans and followers who loved her dearly.”
Annular Fire
A rare ‘ring of fire’ eclipse is coming. Here’s how to see it.
This celestial phenomenon won’t occur in the continental U.S. again until 2039. Here’s what it is and where you can experience it for yourself.
BY ALLIE YANG
PHOTOGRAPH BY HAMAD I MOHAMMED, REUTERS/REDUX
On October 14, a “ring of fire” solar eclipse will appear across a swath of the western United States, as well as in parts of Central and South America. The sun will be blocked by the moon, which will appear slightly smaller, producing the glowing ring in the sky. This phenomenon, known as an annular solar eclipse, was last seen in the U.S. in 2012 and won’t be visible again in the continental U.S. until 2039.
If you are in the path of the eclipse, with the right eye protection, you’ll be able to safely see this rare celestial display—and you might hear and feel the eclipse, too.
All lower 48 U.S. states will get a partial eclipse, but only certain areas in Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas will get the full “ring of fire” effect. This phase of the eclipse begins at 9:16 a.m. Pacific time in Oregon and sweeps across the country, passing over San Antonio, Texas, at 11:52 a.m. Central time.
Parts of some Central and South American countries, including Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil, will also see the annular eclipse. Maps created by NASA show the path where the ring of fire will be visible and the times for best viewing.
Ms. Pelé
Banksy?
New ‘Banksy’ appears in the middle of London – but fans are baffled over its meaning
Ellie Henman | Morgan Johnson
A NEW suspected Banksy has appeared in the middle of London – but fans are baffled over its meaning.
The artwork, which is believed to be the latest hit by world-famous Banksy, popped up overnight in Edgware Road, near to Paddington Train Station.
The graffiti-style piece says “Another world is possible”.
The writing appears to be spray-painted by a factory machine which is being ripped away by three people – all of whom look to be different ages.
While many are speculating that it is Banksy, it has not been confirmed.
Banksy normally uploads pictures of his latest work – wherever that may be – to his Instagram account claiming it.
But he hasn’t done that with this piece.
AI Tackling Alzheimer’s
Is the Eye the Window to Alzheimer’s?
New AI tools could diagnose the disease with visual scans
By Vipal Monga
Getting tested for Alzheimer’s disease could one day be as easy as checking your eyesight.
RetiSpec has developed an artificial-intelligence algorithm that it says can analyze results from an eye scanner and detect signs of Alzheimer’s 20 years before symptoms develop. The tool is part of broader work by startups and researchers to harness AI to unlock the mysteries of a disease that afflicts more than seven million Americans.
For years, people have studied individual hallmarks of Alzheimer’s, including brain inflammation and neurodegeneration, but the exact causes of the disease remain elusive. AI, researchers say, could open a new era in the diagnosis of a neurological disease that remains difficult to identify, let alone treat.
The Age of Madonna
The Meaning of Madonna
For forty years, her quest for freedom through reinvention has resembled our own.
t was a more physical world, though we thought it quite advanced. There seemed nothing “terrestrial” about twisting a radio knob to some eccentric decimal point, dialling static into song. In the summer of 1985, we all knew someone, usually an older sibling, who owned a portable, cassette-playing stereo. The rest of us remained stuck catching Top Forty countdowns on AM radio, or playing, on our parents’ imperial turntables, the one or two LPs in our possession. Increasingly, we listened to music by watching it on TV, our dance parties often overseen by a strutting, tattered sprite who wore bangles like opera gloves and held the camera’s gaze with her entire being, as though locked in a dare she was not going to lose.
I liked her best in motion: the jut of her chin as she spun to a stop, the drag of her foot through a grapevine step. Something important seemed bound up in this vision, beaconlike but elusive, forever disappearing around a corner up ahead. I prized the “Like a Virgin” LP I received for my birthday, the adults involved having apparently thought little of giving the record to a Catholic girl who was, if anything, overfamiliar with talk of virgins and of being like at least one of them. In regular living-room sessions, I twirled and stretched before the hi-fi altar, arching toward God knew what, flashing on how doing my best Madonna might resemble discovering a radical style of my own, the curious fission of moving in time.
Spooky Tree
14,300-Year-Old Tree Reveals Apocalyptic Warning for Today’s Humans
BY JESS THOMSON
Evidence of the most powerful solar storm in history has been uncovered in an unlikely place: within the rings of a tree.
This immensely powerful solar storm is thought to have been at least 10 times as powerful as the Carrington Event of 1859, which caused chaos in the rudimentary telegraph system of the time.
New research has now found that a radiocarbon spike found within ancient tree rings in the French Alps reveals the full extent of the sun’s power and the potential danger it poses to us if a storm of this scale occurs today, according to a study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences.
Howloween In New Canaan
‘Howloween’ Dog Parade To Take Place In New Canaan
The inaugural “Howloween Dog Parade” is set to take place during New Canaan’s Halloween Block Party in October.
by RJ Scofield
NEW CANAAN, CT — The inaugural “Howloween Dog Parade” is set to take place during New Canaan’s Halloween Block Party next month.
New for 2023, the dog parade offers an opportunity for residents’ furry friends to get involved. Set to take place between 1:30 p.m. and 1:50 p.m., pet pantry prizes will be offered for costumed dogs.
Guest judges include Kristen Schilo, the “Dog Whisperer” from New Canaan Dogs, Michael Konstantaras, owner of Bark Busters and renowned author James Frey. “Spooktators” are also highly encouraged.
FRIGHT KREWE and Scooby-Doo
Scooby-Doo & Goosebumps Were Major Influences For Eli Roth’s New Horror Show: “There Was Nothing Scary For Our Kids”
As he expands his horror work to more family-friendly territory with Fright Krewe, Eli Roth explains how Scooby-Doo and Goosebumps inspired the show. Co-created by the genre vet and I Am Number Four author James Frey, the animated show centers on a group of New Orleans teens who inadvertently awaken an ancient demon and must use the special abilities granted to them by the mystical Loa to stop him. Produced by DreamWorks Animation, Fright Krewe marks a rare dual release across Hulu and Peacock in time for the Halloween season.
In anticipation of the show’s premiere, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with Roth to discuss Fright Krewe. When asked about the initial concept for the show, the co-creator explained how he and Frey looked back on their love of watching Scooby-Doo as kids and felt there was “nothing scary for our kids” currently on the air, thus wanting to create a gateway into the genre for older viewers and their kids.
Habibi Funk
How Arab Funk Is Going Global
BY ARMANI SYED
In London’s Jazz Cafe, the sound of Egyptian legend Umm Kulthum’s song Alf Leila Wleila is reverberating around an atmosphere of anticipation. Fragments of light are reflecting off the Camden venue’s rotating disco ball—lighting up the faces of an intimate crowd who are waiting, drinks in hand, for Berlin record label Habibi Funk’s first live music show to start.
It’s late August and this diverse group of music lovers doesn’t seem entirely sure what they’re in for. But when Lebanese musician Charif Megarbane and his band takes the stage, the crowd loosens up. Tall and floppy-haired, Megarbane delights audience members with multi-instrumental songs from his new album Marzipan, which was released in July by Habibi Funk. “Hopefully you appreciate it all and thank you again for coming,” Megarbane says, to cheers, as he warms up the crowd.
In recent years, global interest in Arabic music has surged. TikTok and Instagram have helped a new wave of Arab talent such as Saint Levant, Issam Alnajjar, and Wegz reach tens of millions of people. Parties such as Beirut Groove Collective, Laylit, and DJ Nooriyah’s Middle of Nowhere frequently sell out in London, New York, and other Western metropolises. All of this has even prompted the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the global body for recorded music, to launch in November the first ever regional MENA music chart.