jon stewart is cute

The Comedy Central companion shows are two of the 45 teams from the media scene competing in the annual NYFEST industry soccer tournament on Saturday.

The staffs of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight will be among the teams slated to face off at a celebrity soccer tournament this weekend as part of NYFEST.

Looking dapper in a beige suit, Stephen Colbert was spotted filming a bit on the streets of New Orleans with the newly announced ‘The Late Show’ band leader Jon Batiste

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“Yeah,” he mumbles, because no one can expect him to be articulate at a 3:40am in the morning, damn it.

There’s no answer for the longest time. He’d have thought Tony had hung up on him, if not for the harsh sound of laboured breaths. Something is wrong, clearly, he thinks. Forcefully pushes aside the sluggish sleepiness.

“Tony?” he asks again, firmer. “Tones, what’s wrong?” 

“Rhodey?” Tony whispers, like he’s surprised to hear his voice. He’s slurring, drunk, but that makes no sense. Tony hasn’t been drunk since he and Pepper broke up.

“Rhodey,” he says again, slowly, like he’s trying the name out for a fit. 

He sounds–sad. There’s a hitch in his breath, something not quite a sob, a sound so painfully familiar Rhodey flinches. It brings back memories from a thin, sixteen year old boy who spoke too much and didn’t smile enough. Of too many nights spent pretending Rhodey couldn’t hear him crying himself to sleep, of all those times he’s watched Tony’s face fall, the times when he closed himself off until not even Rhodey could reach him.

“How- How do you make people like you?” Tony asks, soft and helpless and so young. 

Police brutality is an organic offshoot of the dehumanization of those power structures. There are always going to be consequences of authority. When you give someone a badge and a gun, that’s going to create its own issues, and there’s no question that those issues can be addressed with greater accountability. It can be true that you can value and admire the contribution and sacrifice that it takes to be a law-enforcement officer or an emergency medical worker in this country and yet still feel that there should be standards and accountability. Both can be true. But I still believe that the root of this problem is the society that we’ve created that contains this schism, and we don’t deal with it, because we’ve outsourced our accountability to the police.

"Look, every advancement toward equality has come with the spilling of blood. Then, when that’s over, a defensiveness from the group that had been doing the oppressing. There’s always this begrudging sense that black people are being granted something, when it’s white people’s lack of being able to live up to the defining words of the birth of the country that is the problem. There’s a lack of recognition of the difference in our system. Chris Rock used to do a great bit: ‘‘No white person wants to change places with a black person. They don’t even want to exchange places with me, and I’m rich.’’ It’s true. There’s not a white person out there who would want to be treated like even a successful black person in this country. And if we don’t address the why of that treatment, the how is just window dressing. You know, we’re in a bizarre time of quarantine. White people lasted six weeks and then stormed a state building with rifles, shouting: ‘‘Give me liberty! This is causing economic distress! I’m not going to wear a mask, because that’s tyranny!’’ That’s six weeks versus 400 years of quarantining a race of people. The policing is an issue, but it’s the least of it. We use the police as surrogates to quarantine these racial and economic inequalities so that we don’t have to deal with them."

" I’m old enough to have heard a lot of speeches and old enough to be dubious about our ability to overcome our defensiveness about racism. That doesn’t mean that we can’t be the generation to dismantle structural racism for good, but it takes effort. Imagine the anguish of living in a country that profited off the forced labor of your ancestors, and is still having this conversation: ‘‘Hey, do you think we should fly the flag of the people that fought to enslave your ancestors? What do you guys think of that? Good idea or bad idea?’’ And then you hear, ‘‘It’s history.’’ It’s not history! It’s hagiography. If you go down there and read the plaques on the Confederate monuments, they aren’t, ‘‘This [expletive] thought he could enslave people based on the color of their skin.’’ That’s not what the plaque says. The plaque honors them! Enraging doesn’t begin to describe it."

Stephen Colbert pens hilarious and important feminist op-ed

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From GQ’s 2015 profile of Stephen Colbert.

Every once in a while I come back to this. It’s really so breathtaking.