Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an international fellowship requiring no membership dues or fees dedicated to helping alcoholics peer to peer in sobriety through its spiritually inclined Twelve Steps program. Non-professional, non-denominational, self-supporting and apolitical, an avowed desire to stop drinking is its sole requirement for membership. Despite not endorsing the disease model of alcoholism, to which its program is nonetheless sympathetic, its wider acceptance is partly due to many AA members independently promulgating it. As of 2020, having spread to diverse cultures, including geopolitical areas normally resistant to grassroots movements, AA has had an estimated worldwide membership of over two million with 75% of those in the U.S. and Canada.
Celebrity is a condition of fame and broad public recognition of an individual or group as a result of the attention given to them by mass media. A person may attain a celebrity status from having great wealth, their participation in sports or the entertainment industry, their position as a political figure, or even from their connection to another celebrity. 'Celebrity' usually implies a favorable public image, as opposed to the neutrals 'famous' or 'notable', or the negatives 'infamous' and 'notorious'.
Since at least the 18th century, grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks. In art, performance, and literature, however, grotesque may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity.
Entertainment Weekly is an American monthly entertainment magazine based in New York City, published by Meredith Corporation, that covers film, television, music, Broadway theatre, books, and popular culture. The magazine debuted on February 16, 1990, in New York City.
Us Weekly is a weekly celebrity and entertainment magazine based in New York City. Us Weekly was founded in 1977 by The New York Times Company, who sold it in 1980. It was acquired by Wenner Media in 1986, and sold to American Media Inc. in 2017. Shortly afterward, former editor James Heidenry stepped down, and was replaced by Jennifer Peros. The chief content officer of American Media, Dylan Howard, oversees the publication.
Hello! is a royalist weekly magazine specializing in celebrity news and human-interest stories, published in the United Kingdom since 1988. It is the United Kingdom local edition of ¡Hola!, the Spanish weekly magazine.
Homer William Smith was an American physiologist and science writer known for his experiments on the kidney and philosophical writings on natural history and the theory of evolution.
A benefit concert or charity concert is a type of musical benefit performance featuring musicians, comedians, or other performers that is held for a charitable purpose, often directed at a specific and immediate humanitarian crisis.
Cintra Wilson is an American writer, performer and cultural critic. Dubbed "the Dorothy Parker of the cyber age", she is best known for her commentary on popular culture which is often humorous and irreverent in tone. She contributed to the New York Times for its "Critical Shopper" series and is considered one of the 50 "most influential people working in New York fashion". Wilson is also a regular contributor to the Hartford Advocate for her political column "The C Word". Her books include Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease, Colors Insulting to Nature, and Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny. She wrote a bi-weekly column called The Dregulator, which critiqued the tabloid culture and was syndicated in a number of alternative weeklies. She was a frequent contributor to Salon.com from 1994–2007.
Phill Wilson is an American activist who founded the Black AIDS Institute in 1999, and served as its CEO, and is a prominent African-American HIV/AIDS activist.
Famous for being famous is a pejorative term for someone who attains celebrity status for no clearly identifiable reason and appears to generate their own fame, or someone who achieves fame through a family or relationship association with an existing celebrity.
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is a collection of previously published short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1840.
The Ugly Duchess is a satirical portrait painted by the Flemish artist Quentin Matsys around 1513.
Michael Herschel Greger is an American physician, author, and professional speaker on public health issues, best known for his advocacy of a whole-food, plant-based diet, and his opposition to animal-derived food products.
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is a 1987 book by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts. The book chronicles the discovery and spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) with a special emphasis on government indifference and political infighting—specifically in the United States—to what was then perceived as a specifically gay disease. Shilts's premise is that AIDS was allowed to happen: while the disease is caused by a biological agent, incompetence and apathy toward those initially affected allowed its spread to become much worse.
The Ice Bucket Challenge, sometimes called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, is an activity involving the pouring of a bucket of ice water over a person's head, either by another person or self-administered, to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and encourage donations to research. The challenge was co-founded by Pat Quinn and Pete Frates; it went viral on social media during July–August 2014. In the United States, many people participated for the ALS Association, and in the United Kingdom, many people participated for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, although some individuals opted to donate their money from the Ice Bucket Challenge to other organizations.
Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again is a non-fiction book by businessman Donald Trump, first published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster in 2015. A revised edition was subsequently republished eight months later in trade paperback format under the title Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America. Like his previous work Time to Get Tough (2011) did for the U.S. presidential election in 2012, Crippled America outlined Trump's political agenda as he ran in the 2016 election on a conservative platform.
Body horror or biological horror is a subgenre of horror that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body. These violations may manifest through aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body. Body horror was a description originally applied to an emerging subgenre of North American horror films, but has roots in early Gothic literature and has expanded to include other media.
During a time of social distance and limited contact with others, social media became an important place to interact. Social media platforms are meant to connect people and helped the world remain connected, largely increasing usage during the pandemic. Since many people are asked to remain home, they have turned to social media to maintain their relationships and to access entertainment to pass the time.
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, people can sometimes be labelled, stereotyped, discriminated against, treated separately, or experience loss of status because of real or perceived links with the disease. As a result of such treatment, those who have or are perceived to have the disease, as well as their caregivers, family, friends, and communities, may be subjected to social stigma.
