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Bono shared a beautiful animatic honoring his 40-year marriage

A poetic tribute to his wife and "soulmate," Ali.

Photo by ESPRIT U2.COM is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Bono and Ali Hewson have been married since 1982.

For any couple to successfully make it through four decades of marriage is impressive, but for someone famous, it's downright historic. According to the U.K.-based organization Marriage Foundation, as of 2012, celebrities had twice the divorce rate as the average U.K. citizen. Though divorce rates have fallen and new marriages are now predicted to last longer than they were in the past, 40 years of marriage at this point is certainly worth celebrating.

That's one reason Bono's 40-year marriage to his wife, Ali, is giving people feelings.

Another reason is that the U2 frontman has shared a beautiful animatic honoring his and Ali's wedding day for their 40th wedding anniversary.

Bono narrates the four-minute video as moving sketches illustrate the story. He starts by describing the final morning he lived in his parents' house before he married Ali on August 31, 1982, painting a picture of his strained relationship with his father before sharing the feelings he had on his wedding day.

The text comes from Bono's upcoming memoir, "Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story," and if the video is any indication, the book will be a poetic telling of a fascinating life in the spotlight. Bono has spent most of his 62 years—and all of his marriage to Ali—as a rock star, with U2's first album, "Boy," being released in 1980 and their first No. 1 album, "War" being released in 1983.

But every global superstar is just a human being in a marital relationship, subject to the same gifts and challenges of intimacy as anyone else. If anything, fame makes relationships harder, but Bono and Ali appear to have made it work through four decades of world tours, flashing cameras and diehard fandom.

This animatic offers a small glimpse of what lies at the heart of their success as a couple.

Ali truly has been there since the beginning. The couple were high school sweethearts who started dating in 1976, the same year U2 formed.

Ali has served as the inspiration for many U2 songs, perhaps most notably "The Sweetest Thing." Originally written in 1988 as an apology for being in the studio on her birthday, the song was remade in 2000 and became a hit. Bono dedicated all of the proceeds from the single to Ali's favorite charity, Chernobyl Children’s Project International. She is featured at the beginning of the music video for the song, with the rest of the video looking through her eyes.

Congratulations on 40 years of marriage, Bono and Ali. May we all be so fortunate to find that kind of love.

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Andy Grammer and his 4-year-old daughter Louisiana want your help writing lyrics for a new song

Andy Grammer/Instagram

Since his first hit single "Keep Your Head Up" in 2011, award-winning multi-platinum recording artist Andy Grammer has made a name for himself as the king of the feel-good anthem. From "Good to Be Alive (Hallelujah)" to "Honey, I'm Good" to "Back Home" and more, his positive, upbeat songs have blared on beaches and at backyard barbecues every summer.

So what does a singer who loves to perform in front of live audiences and is known for uplifting music do during an unexpectedly challenging year of global pandemic lockdown?

He goes inward.

Grammer told Upworthy that losing the ability to perform during the pandemic forced him to look at where his self-worth came from. "I thought I would have scored better, to be honest," he says. "Like, 'Oh, I get it from all the important, right places!' And then it's taken all away in one moment, and you're like, 'Oh, nope, I was getting a lot from that.'

"It's kind of cool to break all the way down and then hopefully put myself back together in a way that's a little more solid," he says.

And no worries—we're still going to get at least one anthem out of him for the summer. His new single, "Lease on Life," which will be released on June 28, is part of his new album that speaks to a lot of what we collectively experienced over the past year.

You can get a taste of the song here:


Grammer acknowledges that it was difficult to find positives in the pandemic, even for him. "Happy for happy's sake is not super authentic," he says. "The word 'positive' inherently is a little cheesy, I think. But if it is rebellious against negativity, it starts to gain some legs for me."

He points out that most of the "feel-good" songs he's famous for are actually grounded in a lot of pain, which is what makes them truly connect with a broad audience.

"If you hear a song like 'Keep Your Head Up,' it's not just like, 'Be happy!'" he says. "I wrote that song after my mom died. So like, I'm crushed, and in the face of that, choosing and finding a way to stay up. I think that's the grounding piece to optimism that makes it something that people believe in and that is true and sincere."

He says the key is always trying to write something that's true. "Because if you get it to be true, then it has this extra resonance to it. The quick analogy I use is that Isaac Newton wrote out what gravity was. He wrote it out for the first time, and everyone else was like, 'Gravity! I have gravity all the time! Oh my God, you super nailed it.' And I think every great song has something of that in it."

The other thing Grammer did during pandemic downtime was spend a lot of time with his two daughters, 4-year-old Louisiana and 1-year-old Izzy.

"Overall, that's been the huge win," he says. "It's just been an intense, awesome amount of time for someone like me who does travel quite a bit, to have this whole year. I haven't gotten on a plane once. And to just be, every single night, having the routine with these little girls, it's really, really special."

He and Louisiana are even working on their first collaborative musical project together. In partnership with Quaker Chewy and the American Camp Association, Grammer is crowdsourcing lyrics for a summer camp anthem that he and his preschooler are going to write together.

"It's been really hard for kids throughout the pandemic to not be able to play with other kids," Grammer says. "And so with summer coming and some things are opening up and kids can actually go to camp, we want to send as many kids as we possibly can to go to go play with each other."

Summer camp song lyrics can be submitted at chewycamptrack.com before June 30, 2021. For every lyric sent in, Quaker Chewy will donate $1, up to $200,000, to the American Camp Association's Send a Child to Camp Fund. Grammer will pick lyrics from those submitted, and the Chewy donations will be used to send up to 500 children to summer camp next year.

Grammer says having Louisiana help choose the lyrics will be a blast. "She sings a lot, and I think it's going to be really fun," he says. "It's one of the first songs I'm really going to do with her. Really fun."

After being in a "songwriting hibernation zone" during the pandemic, Grammer is excited to be back out. And we're excited for his new album to come out to see what kind of awesome, life-affirming music he shares with us next.

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The new Britney Spears documentary is making people completely re-think the pop star's life

Film Updates/Twitter, FX Networks/YouTube

I never thought I'd voluntarily watch a documentary about Britney Spears, much less recommend one. While her music is fine, celebrity culture does nothing for me and the news surrounding her always felt too tabloidy for my taste. Over the years, I've brushed off Spears' personal saga as clickbaity fame drama not worth my time and energy—a dismissal I now regret.

After seeing multiple people I admire and respect share how the New York Times' Britney Spears documentary impacted them, I decided to check it out. And all I can say is—holy crap. There's so much to her story that we should all be aware of, because so much of it involves all of us.

This post will contain spoilers, so if you'd rather just watch the documentary yourself, search for "The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears" on Hulu. (You can sign up for a 7-day free trial if you don't have a subscription.)

The focus of "Framing Britney Spears" is the growing #FreeBritney movement—the push from Spears' fans to let her have control over her life. For the past 12 years, Spears' has had a court-appointed conservator of her person and her estate, meaning that she doesn't have agency over decisions about her life or her money. For nearly all of that time, her father Jamie has served that conservator—a fact that is strange in and of itself, since he hadn't played an active role in her life prior to her public breakdown.

Every documentary has a purpose, and this one clearly leads us in the direction of the #FreeBritney message. We're shown how capable she had been even when she was young and how she had always held the reins of her own career. We see how she's continued to be able to perform and work at a high level, despite the fact that she supposedly doesn't have the mental capacity to handle her own affairs.

There are plenty of revelations that point to people in her life manipulating the situation for their own gain. You have to wade through some kind of cringey connect-the-dots conspiracy thinking from obsessed fans in the documentary, but there are legitimate questions about why the conservatorship remains in place for someone who appears to have her wits about her. We don't have access to her medical records, but there are millions of people who live with mental health issues—even severe ones—and don't have the right to make decisions about their life taken away from them like this.

That's one element that should concern us all.

Another huge piece of the Britney story that I wasn't aware of was how absolutely relentless the paparazzi was with her from the get-go. Celebrities get followed and photographed all the time, of course, but with Britneys Spears it was literally all the time, up in her face, surrounding her car, swarming her every step she took.

And she was so young when this all started. While she clearly had the ambition to become a singer, she was a sweet, approachable young woman who didn't seem equipped to tell these grown men surrounding her with cameras and questions to back the eff off. At first, she seemed to enjoy the attention, but that luster only lasts so long. And these grown men with their cameras were so predatory, even while they talked nicey to her. Super icky.

Watching the constant flashing of cameras and bombardment of questions she endured nearly gave me a panic attack, and I'm a middle-aged adult. But because of society's insatiable appetite for the "sexy schoogirl," paparazzi could make up to $1 million per photo. So they hounded and hounded her, and the more drama in her life began to unfold, the worse it got.

Combine the paparazzi with the way the media treated her and, like I said, holy crap. The questions journalists and show hosts thought they could ask this young woman, the details of her private life they thought they were entitled to, and the cruelty they purposefully subjected her to is shocking. So many of the questions she was expected to answer wouldn't even be asked today, much less answered. (Can you imagine someone in today's media straight-up asking a teen girl if she was still a virgin? Or asking about her breast size?)

One of the things pointed out in the documentary is that there's a misogynistic infrastructure and apparatus ready and waiting to come for a woman if that's what our vulturous society decides to do. The media clearly plays a huge role in that, and they came for Britney in full force.

When Spears and Justin Timberlake broke up, Timberlake ended up controlling the media narrative, which basically made her seem like a slut. He even made a revenge music video with a look-alike of her—yuck.

Diane Sawyer said in a segment that Britney had disappointed mothers all over the country and pointed out that the wife of the governor of Maryland said she would shoot Britney Spears if she had the opportunity. She asked Britney what she thought about that, indicating that she had legitimate concerns as a mother.

Seriously? Saying she wanted to shoot her is just an expression of motherly concern?

After Britney married Kevin Federline and had her first baby, she was almost immediately painted as an unfit mother. And the paparazzi still wouldn't let up.

Matt Lauer asked her what she could do about the paparazzi, and she said, "I don't know. I don't know." Then she broke down crying. He asked her if getting them to stop hounding her was her biggest wish, and she said it was. At that point, she was 23 or 24 and had been dealing with this stuff for years.

By the time the documentary gets to Britney's infamous head-shaving (Britney asked a hairdresser to shave her head, and when they refused, she took the shears and did it herself) and her beating the side of a paparazzi's truck with an umbrella, those behaviors seemed less like a cry for help and more like a justified "eff y'all."

Of course, there are details about her mental health history that we are not privy to. She has had issues with substance abuse according to court documents, and there have been numerous reports of truly erratic behavior from various reputable outlets. It seems quite clear that she's in need of some kind of mental health treatment, but does that justify someone taking total control over her life and finances?

From this documentary, it appears many in Britney's life may not have her best interest at heart, or whose "best interest" shifted with the tens of millions of dollars she rakes in as a working pop star. And so many questions remain. Why does the conservatorship remain if she's as functional as she appears to be? Is she on board with the idea of a conservatorship in general, or did she just not want her dad to serve in that capacity?

Jamie no longer has total control—his own health issues in 2019 caused him to step down from being conservator of her person, and a court case in November made a bank representative co-conservator of her estate along with Jamie. But is all of that really still necessary?

And what about the media's complicity in all of this? Glamour Magazine has issued an apology to Britney Spears, writing on Instagram, "We are all to blame for what happened to Britney Spears—we may not have caused her downfall, but we funded it. And we can try to make up for that."

Spears' boyfriend of four years, Sam Asghari, doesn't appear in the documentary, but he made a rare statement criticizing Britney's father on Instagram after it came out, saying he has "zero respect" for Jamie and calling him "a dick." But this documentary also leaves one with a feeling of distrust for pretty much everyone close to Britney. There's just so much money at stake, too many people who have taken advantage, and too many unknowns to feel 100% good about anyone in her life at this point.

I walked away from this documentary with concerns about civil rights for people with mental illness, concerns about misogyny in the media, concerns about how our obsession with fame can literally destroy lives, and concerns about this individual woman's well-being.

It's worth watching, even if you're not a celebrity documentary watcher. Underneath the over-the-top fandom is an important story that needs to be told.

The New York Times Presents | Framing Britney Spears - Season 1 Ep. 6 Highlight | FXwww.youtube.com

And according to Page Six, we may be getting more of Britney's story from her own perspective, as she's reportedly working on a documentary about her life. That's one we'll all be on the lookout for.

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Ariana Grande shares a personal story about objectification that's all too relatable.

"We are not objects or prizes. We are QUEENS."

On Tuesday night, singer Ariana Grande shared a powerful message about sexism and objectification with her 43 million Twitter followers.

The "Side to Side" singer and badass feminist frequently uses Twitter to talk about things that are happening in her personal life, but on Tuesday night, she shared a message that should resonate with us all about treating each other as human beings and not objects.

‌Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

The story — following an encounter she and her boyfriend, Mac Miller, had with a fan — is something far too relatable for many young women. She wrote:

"Went to pick up food with my boyfriend tonight and a young boy followed us to the car to tell Mac that he's a big fan. He was loud and excited and by the time M was seated in the driver's seat he was literally almost in the car with us. I thought all of this was cute and exciting until he said, 'Ariana is sexy as hell man I see you, I see you hitting that!!!!'

*Pause*

Hitting that? The fuck??"



Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images.

"This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but I felt sick and objectified. I was also sitting right there when he said it. (?) I've felt really quiet and hurt since that moment. Things like that happen all the time and are the kinds of moments that contribute to women's sense of fear and inadequacy. I am not a piece of meat that a man gets to utilize for his pleasure. I'm an adult human being in a relationship with a man who treats me with love and respect."

Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Clear Channel.

"It hurts my heart that so many young people are so comfortable enough using these phrases and objectifying women with such ease. I felt like speaking out about this one experience tonight because I know very well that most women know the sensation of being spoken about in an uncomfortable way publicly or taken advantage of publicly by a man. We need to talk about these moments openly because they are harmful and they live on inside of us as shame. We need to share and be vocal when something makes us feel uncomfortable because if we don't, it will just continue. We are not objects or prizes. We are QUEENS."

Some fans were quick to note that Grande often uses sexually-charged imagery in her music videos. She had a pretty great response to that too.

It's easy to write Grande off as just a pop star, but it's worth noting just how far her influence reaches.

With more than 43 million followers on Twitter, the 23-year-old has a larger social entourage than Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama — combined. It matters that she's out here spreading important messages about respect and consent to people in the world. And not only sharing her personal story, but encouraging all of us to partake in the conversation and take a meaningful stand on objectification.

Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

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