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Pursed lips and vigorous mastication

In recent months, as I scrolled my way through countless recordings of other people’s breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snack breaks on TikTok, I began to notice a recurring thread in many of the food or mukbang videos that I like to waste so much of my time watching. It wasn’t the format of the videos, or the background music, or the voiceovers, or even the kind of food that TikTokers were eating onscreen. It was the way that they were chewing: pursed lips pushed forward, full cheeks, up-and-down mouth movements so vigorous it could have counted as exercise. One could perhaps describe this as an animated pout, or a duckface in motion. Here’s what I mean (NYC Mayor Eric Adams partakes, too).

I had never really thought about the mechanics of chewing before; it is one of those actions, like breathing or swallowing, that you only really notice when it goes wrong. I found this TikTok mode of eating fascinating. Did these creators always eat like this, even when the camera was off? Was it a conscious or learned behavior? How did they make their mouths do that? What if, actually, their mastication was normal and I — with feeble, low-effort teeth gnashing — was the weird one?

I decided to ask some TikTokers directly, pushing aside all feelings of embarrassment about how rude it is to inquire aggressively about strangers’ mouths. As expected, the TikTok users with whom I managed to connect seemed a little baffled by the topic, but also like they kind of got it.

“When I started doing my own videos, I had never really thought about how you have to eat, but you do have to eat differently,” Karissa Dumbacher (a.k.a. @karissaeats) — an American musical theater performer who posts TikToks about everything she eats in China, where she currently lives and works — agreed. When she first started sharing her videos nearly a year ago, she said she routinely received comments telling her to stop chewing with her mouth open — a habit that she’s had since childhood. So she started closing her mouth when filming, and from there, it was “a natural progression” to adjust her on-screen style of consumption to what it is now: lips pursed, with food concentrated in the center of her mouth, and lots of movement and facial expressions.

Feminism means that women can destroy their bodies, too

I finally saw Jackass Forever last night. I loved it! I had so many questions afterward that I stayed up late Googling: Why does Johnny Knoxville have three different hair colors at different points of the movies? (Ultimately it doesn’t matter.) Where was Bam Margera? (Actually, that’s too dark to spend another second on for the purposes of this blog post). But most important, will future women jackasses ever achieve parity if men with penises are designing the most epic stunts?

To catch you up, Johnny Knoxville, Steve O, and the boys added a few new loons to the crew, including an unctuous, steaming hot himbo named Poopies, some guy’s dad (he’s very afraid of spiders), a guy with one tooth and an “I love fat cock” lower back tat, Machine Gun Kelly, some other guy, and a real life GIRL. That’s right, YouTuber Rachel Wolfson joined the crew. Sort of. She licks an electric lollipop in a mime challenge, and later gets underwhelming Botox from a scorpion. But really, it’s more apt to say she got scorpion lip filler — a minor oversight, but one that nonetheless proved to me that women in STEM are not designing the Jackass challenges.

When Wolfson asks for the scorpion to be removed from her chest after the lip filler, Chris Pontius, dressed as a doctor, tells her that she needs to consent before he’s allowed to touch her. “Consent!!!” she screams, scorpion scaling her body back up to her face. “Consent!!” That’s 2021 for you, Pontius says, permission granted for him to touch her clothed boob.

Sounds hard

Idris Elba is a man of many talents. He’s currently one of the cover stars of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue talking about those talents, which include but are not limited to acting in three different movies this year, lending his voice to Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (“I got weak in the knees, literally”), and getting strangers into clubs because they remind him of himself (“I was definitely that guy being turned away just because I’m slightly bigger and I don’t fit the criteria of the club”). But those are all things we would expect from an A-list actor. What makes Elba different is his music career.

“Some may think, Well, it will be the death of your acting if your music’s shit,” Elba said, which is debatable because his career seems to be doing fine despite the fact that he has a song with Macklemore called “Dance Off.” Nevertheless, Elba has bravely continued on in the face of scrutiny. “I’ve dealt with the internal struggle of that over the years. So now I’m at peace and I’ve chosen: This is what I’m doing, and I’m going to do it. Some will love it and some will hate it.”

If I had presented that quote to you without any context, what would you think it was about? Maybe speaking out against injustice or abandoning acting for a career as a ceramicist. In reality, it is about music that sounds like this:

Has anyone seen my homies?

Kristen Stewart has been promoting Spencer for approximately 15 years, since its September premiere at the Venice Film Festival. In that time, we have had the honor of hearing her say a wide variety of things about a film that had not much to say at all. Her performance and subsequent press tour have now miraculously landed her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

Throughout most of Joe Biden’s first year in office,Stewart excelled at answering questions about the late Princess Diana despite knowing as much as any of us do about her sad life. Now, she is doing it yet again, this time in the pages of Vanity Fair.

Many questions remain about the comedian's death

The circumstances surrounding comedian Bob Saget’s death on Jan. 9 are murky, and have only gotten murkier as new information emerged over the past five weeks. Now it seems more details will not be forthcoming any time soon — a Florida judge just blocked the release of any more records related to the Full House actor’s death.

The motion came a day after Saget’s widow, Kelly Rizzo, and his three daughters from a previous marriage, filed a lawsuit against Orange County Sheriff John Mina and the medical examiner’s office to block them from releasing documents or evidence collected during inquiries into the death. In the complaint, the family argued that the records were exempt from Florida’s broad-reaching public records regulation, known as the Sunshine Law, and that releasing them would cause his relatives “irreparable harm in the form of extreme mental pain, anguish, and emotional distress.”

But there are several unanswered questions about how Saget died. A brief primer: in early January, Saget was on tour with a new standup and music set called “I Don’t Do Negative.” The tour kicked off in Orlando on Jan. 7, with a second show Jan 8 in nearby Ponte Vedra Beach. That night, he was staying in the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Great Lakes and scheduled to check out the next day. When he didn’t, Saget’s family contacted the hotel to perform a wellness check; Saget was found unresponsive and declared dead at the scene. (The Orange County Sheriff’s Office did not return Gawker’s request for comment).