title: Joyner Lucas

text: Gary Maurice "Joyner" Lucas Jr. (born August 17, 1988) is an American rapper, singer and songwriter. Lucas first received widespread exposure and critical acclaim after the release of his single "Ross Capicchioni" in 2015. In June 2017, he released his fourth mixtape, "508-507-2209", which was his first on a major label. In November 2017, Lucas released his single "I'm Not Racist", which quickly went viral, gaining him further mainstream attention. The video was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Music Video at the 61st Grammy Awards. Lucas is signed to Griselda Records, Which is a label he's been signed to since 2019. Since 2016, Lucas has also become known for remixing popular hip hop songs like "Gucci Gang" by Lil Pump, "Bank Account" by 21 Savage, "DNA" by Kendrick Lamar and many others. In October 2018, he announced his debut studio album "ADHD", which was released in 2020.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: Outside of music, Lucas co-founded the music technology platform, Tully in 2015, with manager Dhruv Joshi.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: Gary Maurice Lucas Jr. was born on August 17, 1988, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He began rapping at the age of 10 and attended South High Community School in Worcester.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: Joyner Lucas first started rapping under the name G-Storm, but by 2007 had changed his stage name to Future Joyner and started working with his cousin Cyrus tha Great, forming a group called Film Skool Rejekts. That year they released "Workprint: The Greatest Mixtape of All Time". Lucas released his first solo mixtape, titled "Listen to Me", in 2011. After rapper Future came to prominence, Lucas dropped the "Future" from his name and continued as Joyner Lucas. He released his first mixtape under this new moniker in 2013, titled "LFO's (Low Frequency Oscillators)". His next mixtape, "Along Came Joyner", was released on April 5, 2015. This mixtape contained his critically acclaimed "Ross Capicchioni". Following the success of the song, Lucas was featured in the 2015 BET Hip-Hop Awards Cypher. Originally intended to appear in the online-only cypher, he was later promoted to rap as part of the live broadcast cyphers based on the strength of his initial performance.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: Lucas signed to Atlantic Records on September 21, 2016. Lucas went on to release a project titled "508-507-2209" on June 16, 2017, with Atlantic Records. The mixtape charted at #7 on the Heatseekers Albums chart on "Billboard" and contained the singles "I'm Sorry", "Ultrasound", "Just Like You" and "Winter Blues". Ever since 2016, Lucas has also become known for remixing popular hip hop songs.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: On November 28, 2017, Lucas released the single "I'm Not Racist" via his YouTube channel. The music video quickly went viral and gained critical acclaim. The controversial song is about race and society, and race relations from the perspectives of a white man and a black man. The video was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Music Video at the 61st Grammy Awards, but lost to Childish Gambino's "This Is America". Lucas and Chris Brown announced a collaborative project titled "Angels & Demons" on February 25, 2018, with the project's first single "Stranger Things" releasing the following day. On April 1, 2018, Lucas released the single "Frozen", a song focused on different forms of reckless driving. The second single from the "Angels and Demons" collaborative mixtape, "I Don't Die", was released on May 2.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: On July 31, 2018, Lucas announced that he was forced to cancel appearances in the Australian and European legs of his I'm Kind of a Big Deal tour due to hoarseness and laryngitis. A month later, Lucas was featured on "Lucky You" from Eminem's tenth album, "Kamikaze". The song debuted at number 6 on the "Billboard" Hot 100, marking Lucas' first top 10 entry on the chart. On October 12, 2018, Lucas announced that he would be releasing his debut studio album entitled "ADHD". He also announced a single from the album that would be released the following Wednesday. The song, entitled "I Love", was released as the lead single from "ADHD", which was released on March 27, 2020. It was preceded by nine singles from October 2018 to March 2020, the time before release.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: On August 17, 2020, Lucas announced the release date of his debut EP, "Evolution". It was released on October 23, 2020. It was preceded by two singles, "Fall Slowly" featuring Ashanti and "Snitch".


title: Joyner Lucas

text: On April 30, 2021, Lucas released the single "Ramen & OJ" with Lil Baby as the lead single from his upcoming second studio album. It was accompanied by a music video. Lucas contributed a song titled "Shoot My Shot" to the "" soundtrack.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: Lucas has cited several artists as influences in his music, but he cites Eminem as his biggest musical influence. Eminem himself actually considers Lucas to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. He also revealed he was influenced by Will Smith in his song "Will", which he would release a remix of featuring Will Smith himself on May 15, 2020. He cites Jay-Z as one of his influences too.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: Joyner Lucas shares a son named Joyner Messiah Lucas (born February 20, 2016) with Carmen Julissa Ayala, with whom he had an off and on romantic relationship. Lucas tells the story of his son's conception in his song "Forever" on his mixtape "508-507-2209". Joyner Messiah Lucas is loved and adored by his father and referenced in many of his songs. He has also made cameos in his father's music videos. Most recently he played Will Smith's son Jaden Smith in the video of "Will".


title: Joyner Lucas

text: Lucas has revealed that the title of his album "ADHD" comes from the fact that he was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. He explained that people surrounding him, including his own parents, made him feel like he was not normal and treated him differently as a result. Eventually, he would act out, bullying other classmates, failing classes, and get sent to an alternative school after expulsion.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: According to Lucas, when he was on Tech N9ne's tour bus, he heard some records from Tech's album "The Storm". Lucas expressed interest on collaborating with Logic on the song "Sriracha" and felt that he could add to the display of fast-flow rapping, and Tech acquiesced. Logic was originally slated to be the only feature on "Sriracha", but when he spent over six months to deliver his verse, Lucas hopped on the track to offer his own. Joyner stated that when they got the record back, he could tell that Logic was not "too happy" about him being on the track once he heard it. On his remix of Future's "Mask Off", Joyner, unhappy by the work Logic turned in after taking nearly half a year to edit his verse, directly addressed the disappointing display. Both he and Tech N9ne were upset with Logic for not emulating the style of quick flow on the song.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: After Logic's hit song "1-800-273-8255" peaked at number three on the "Billboard Hot 100", Joyner Lucas immediately took offense and argued that the track was named in order to bring direct competition to his song, "I'm Sorry" from his album "508-507-2209". In a later interview, he called Logic "corny" and in another incident, he said that he thinks that Logic "can rap" but feels like "he tries to prove that he's black too much for me." With both Logic's single and Lucas' mixtape dealing with the issue of mental health representation and resource allocation, Lucas was careful to not slam the track too hard.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: When Logic dropped his song "Yuck" from his mixtape "Bobby Tarantino II" in March 2018, the veiled diss inside the song was quickly spotted by Lucas and his fans, despite Logic saying that there was no diss in the song. Seemingly nonplussed by the insult, Lucas dared Logic to call him out directly on Twitter. That same month, Joyner took aim at Logic's song "44 More" and his album "Everybody" on his remix of BlocBoy JB's "Look Alive".


title: Joyner Lucas

text: In 2019, the two rappers ended their feud, which was revealed when Logic made a guest appearance on Joyner Lucas' song "ISIS", the third single from "ADHD". Lucas kept the name of the collaborator a secret until he released the song.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: In September 2018, when a fan asked rapper Hopsin on Twitter who would win in a rap battle between him and Joyner Lucas, Hopsin replied, "That's a dumb question that I'm sure you already know the answer to." Not long after, Lucas commented, "Hold up. @Hopsin wtf is that supposed to mean???" In his response, Hopsin stated that he would "b[r]eak his soul" and also dissed Logic in the comment. This dispute would prove to be short-lived, when in less than two days Hopsin shared a screenshot of a FaceTime call with Lucas, indicating that they finally made peace, but still wanted people to consider who would beat the other in a rap battle.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: On November 19, 2018, Lanez claimed that he was a better rapper than Joyner Lucas on an Instagram Live session. Incredulous, Lucas immediately responded by inviting Lanez to a battle rapping challenge and telling him to let the public decide who is better. The next day, Lanez dropped a freestyle over Eminem's "Lucky You", of which Lucas made a guest appearance on. In less than 24 hours, Joyner responded with his freestyle over "Litty" by Meek Mill featuring Tory Lanez, also targeting rapper Trippie Redd, who joined Tory's Instagram Live and slandered Joyner's name as well. Shortly after, Lanez retaliated with his own freestyle of "Litty", titled "Litty Again", taking shots at Joyner's collaboration with Eminem. Lucas' answer song was a freestyle of Kodak Black's "Zeze". On the track, he mentions Tory's being accused of plagiarism in 2016, when listeners noticed that the ending of Lanez's song "4am Flex" was similar to Kendrick Lamar's "The Art of Peer Pressure". Joyner also accuses him of copying rapper Don Q's flow on his 2017 Funkmaster Flex freestyle. On November 23, Tory posted on Instagram a video of him declaring victory in the feud and celebrating. Displeased, Lucas reposted the video with his own comment, with a reference to Lanez as a singer.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: The end of this rivalry was made public on August 8, 2019, when Joyner Lucas and Tory Lanez collaborated on their remix of "Suge" by DaBaby.


title: Joyner Lucas

text: The Grammy Awards are held annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Joyner has two Grammy nominations altogether.


title: Vortex (2021 film)

text: Vortex is a 2021 independent psychological drama film written and directed by Gaspar Noé. The film premiered in the Cannes Premiere section at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. It stars Dario Argento as a father and author, Lui, his first leading role, alongside Françoise Lebrun as his wife, Elle, and Alex Lutz as his son, Stéphane.


title: Vortex (2021 film)

text: The film received acclaim from critics and audiences, with particular praise for Noe's direction and writing, performances, emotional power, scope, ambition and execution.


title: Vortex (2021 film)

text: The film is set in northeast Paris, near the Stalingrad Station, and revolves around an elderly couple as they struggle with declining mental and physical health with the help of their adult son, who is also dealing with significant personal problems.


title: Vortex (2021 film)

text: "Vortex" was conceived after some of the inspiration for the film came from his experiences dealing with his mother’s dementia, as well as Noe being diagnosed with a brain hemorrhage that almost killed him in early 2020. In his first leading role, Argento, who lives in Italy, learned to speak in fluent but heavily accented French, sometimes pausing and fumbling to find the right word.


title: Vortex (2021 film)

text: In August 2021, the film sold to Utopia for US distribution. It was released at the IFC Center on 29 April 2022, followed by an expansion to the rest of the US on 6 May 2022.


title: Vortex (2021 film)

text: The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes calculated a 93% approval rating from 86 reviews, with an average rating of 8.0/10, making it Noé's first film to earn a "Certified Fresh" rating for Rotten Tomatoes. The website's consensus reads, ""Vortex" is Gaspar Noé at his most unflinchingly pitiless -- but viewers who can make it through will be rewarded with a haunting contemplation of death." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 82 out of 100 from 29 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". It holds the highest-rated critic scores for Gaspar Noé's films on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.


title: Vortex (2021 film)

text: Justin Chang, a top critic of the "Los Angeles Times", praised the film and noted: "It’s a bone-deep sensory immersion that never feels merely sensationalist, anchored by two performances of astonishing commitment and emotional power." Glenn Kenny of "RogerEbert.com" gave a perfect four out of four stars and noted: "One leaves "Vortex" feeling cleansed by fire."


title: Roger Scruton

text: Sir Roger Vernon Scruton (; 27 February 194412 January 2020) was an English philosopher and writer who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Editor from 1982 to 2001 of "The Salisbury Review", a conservative political journal, Scruton wrote over 50 books on philosophy, art, music, politics, literature, culture, sexuality, and religion; he also wrote novels and two operas. His most notable publications include "The Meaning of Conservatism" (1980), "Sexual Desire" (1986), "The Aesthetics of Music" (1997), and "How to Be a Conservative" (2014). He was a regular contributor to the popular media, including "The Times", "The Spectator", and the "New Statesman".


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he held several part-time academic positions, including in the United States. In the 1980s he helped to establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel in 1998. Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".


title: Roger Scruton

text: Roger Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire, to John "Jack" Scruton, a teacher from Manchester, and his wife, Beryl Claris Scruton (née Haynes), and was raised with his two sisters in High Wycombe and Marlow. The Scruton surname had been acquired relatively recently. Jack's father's birth certificate showed him as Matthew Lowe, after Matthew's mother, Margaret Lowe (Scruton's great grandmother); the document made no mention of a father. However, Margaret Lowe had decided, for reasons unknown, to raise her son as Matthew Scruton instead. Scruton wondered whether she had been employed at the former Scruton Hall in Scruton, Yorkshire, and whether that was where her child had been conceived.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Jack was raised in a back-to-back on Upper Cyrus Street, Ancoats, an inner-city area of Manchester, and won a scholarship to Manchester High School, a grammar school. Scruton told "The Guardian" that Jack hated the upper classes and loved the countryside, while Beryl entertained "blue-rinsed friends" and was fond of romantic fiction. He described his mother as "cherishing an ideal of gentlemanly conduct and social distinction that ... [his] father set out with considerable relish to destroy".


title: Roger Scruton

text: The Scrutons lived in a pebbledashed semi-detached house in Hammersley Lane, High Wycombe. Although his parents had been brought up as Christians, they regarded themselves as humanists, so home was a "religion-free zone". Scruton's, indeed the whole family's, relationship with his father was difficult. He wrote in "Gentle Regrets" (2005): "Friends come and go, hobbies and holidays dapple the soulscape like fleeting sunlight in a summer wind, and the hunger for affection is cut off at every point by the fear of judgement."


title: Roger Scruton

text: After passing his 11-plus, he attended the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe from 1954 to 1962, leaving with three A-levels, in pure and applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, which he passed with distinction. The results won him an open scholarship in natural sciences to Jesus College, Cambridge, as well as a state scholarship. When he told his family he had won a place at Cambridge, his father stopped speaking to him. Scruton writes that he was expelled from the school shortly afterwards, when during one of Scruton's plays the headmaster found the school stage on fire and a half-naked girl putting out the flames.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Having intended to study natural sciences at Cambridge, where he felt "although socially estranged (like virtually every grammar-school boy), spiritually at home", Scruton switched on the first day to moral sciences (philosophy); his supervisor was A. C. Ewing. He graduated with a double first in 1965, then spent time overseas, some of it teaching at the University of Pau and Pays de l'Adour in Pau, France, where he met his first wife, Danielle Laffitte. He also lived in Rome. His mother died around this time; she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone a mastectomy just before he went to Cambridge.


title: Roger Scruton

text: In 1967 he began studying for his PhD at Jesus College and then became a research fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge (1969–1971), where he lived with Laffitte when she was not in France. It was while visiting her during the May 1968 student protests in France that Scruton first embraced conservatism. He was in the Latin Quarter in Paris, watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones, and for the first time in his life "felt a surge of political anger":


title: Roger Scruton

text: Cambridge awarded Scruton his PhD in January 1973 for a thesis titled "Art and imagination, a study in the philosophy of mind", supervised by Michael Tanner and Elizabeth Anscombe. The thesis was the basis of his first book, "Art and Imagination" (1974). From 1971 he taught philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, which specializes in adult education and holds its classes in the evening. Meanwhile, Laffitte taught French at Putney High School, and the couple lived together in a Harley Street apartment previously occupied by Delia Smith. They married in September 1973 at the Brompton Oratory, a Catholic church in Knightsbridge, and divorced in 1979. Scruton's second book, "The Aesthetics of Architecture", was published that year.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton said he was the only conservative at Birkbeck, except for the woman who served meals in the Senior Common Room. Working there left Scruton's days free, so he used the time to study law at the Inns of Court School of Law (1974–1976) and was called to the Bar in 1978; he never practised because he was unable to take a year off work to complete a pupillage.


title: Roger Scruton

text: In 1974, along with Hugh Fraser, Jonathan Aitken and John Casey, he became a founding member of the Conservative Philosophy Group dining club, which aimed to develop an intellectual basis for conservatism. The historian Hugh Thomas and the philosopher Anthony Quinton attended meetings, as did Margaret Thatcher before she became prime minister. She reportedly said during one meeting in 1975: "The other side have got an ideology they can test their policies against. We must have one as well."


title: Roger Scruton

text: According to Scruton, his academic career at Birkbeck was blighted by his conservatism, particularly by his third book, "The Meaning of Conservatism" (1980), and later by his editorship of the conservative "Salisbury Review". He told "The Guardian" that his colleagues at Birkbeck vilified him over the book. The Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen of University College London reportedly refused to teach a seminar with Scruton, although they later became friends. He continued teaching at Birkbeck until 1992, first as a lecturer, by 1980 as reader, then as professor of aesthetics.


title: Roger Scruton

text: In 1982 Scruton became founding editor of "The Salisbury Review", a journal championing traditional conservatism in opposition to Thatcherism, which he edited until 2001. The "Review" was set up by a group of Tories known as the Salisbury Group — founded in 1978 by Diana Spearman and Robert Gascoyne-Cecil — with the involvement of the Peterhouse Right. The latter were conservatives associated with the Cambridge college, including Maurice Cowling, David Watkin and the mathematician Adrian Mathias. As of 1983 it had a circulation of under 1,000; according to Martin Walker, the circulation understated the journal's influence.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton wrote that editing "The Salisbury Review" effectively ended his academic career in the United Kingdom. The magazine sought to provide an intellectual basis for conservatism, and was highly critical of key issues of the period, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, egalitarianism, feminism, foreign aid, multiculturalism and modernism. In the first edition, he wrote: "It is necessary to establish a conservative dominance in intellectual life, not because this is the quickest or most certain way to political influence, but because in the long run, it is the only way to create a climate of opinion favourable to the conservative cause." To begin with, Scruton had to write most of the articles himself, using pseudonyms: "I had to make it look as though there was something there in order that "there should be something there!"" He believes that the "Review" "helped a new generation of conservative intellectuals to emerge. At last it was possible to be a conservative and also to the "left" of something, to say 'Of course, the "Salisbury Review" is beyond the pale; but ...'"


title: Roger Scruton

text: In 1984 the "Review" published a controversial article by Ray Honeyford, a headmaster in Bradford, questioning the benefits of multicultural education. Honeyford was forced to retire because of the article and had to live for a time under police protection. The British Association for the Advancement of Science accused the "Review" of scientific racism, and the University of Glasgow philosophy department boycotted a talk Scruton had been invited to deliver to its philosophy society. Scruton believed that the incidents made his position as a university professor untenable, although he also maintained that "it was worth sacrificing your chances of becoming a fellow of the British Academy, a vice-chancellor or an emeritus professor for the sheer relief of uttering the truth." (Scruton was in fact elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2008.) In 2002 he described the effect of the editorship on his life:


title: Roger Scruton

text: The 1980s established Scruton as a prolific writer. Thirteen of his non-fiction works appeared between 1980 and 1989, as did his first novel, "Fortnight's Anger" (1981). The most contentious publication was "Thinkers of the New Left" (1985), a collection of his essays from "The Salisbury Review", which criticized 14 prominent intellectuals, including E. P. Thompson, Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre. According to "The Guardian", the book was remaindered after being greeted with "derision and outrage". Scruton said he became very depressed by the criticism. In 1987 he founded his own publisher, The Claridge Press, which he sold to the Continuum International Publishing Group in 2002.


title: Roger Scruton

text: From 1983 to 1986 he wrote a weekly column for "The Times". Topics included music, wine and motorbike repair, but others were contentious. The features editor, Peter Stothard, said that there was no one he had ever commissioned "whose articles had provoked more rage". Scruton made fun of anti-racism and the peace movement, and his support for Margaret Thatcher while she was prime minister was regarded, he wrote, as an "act of betrayal for a university teacher". His first column, "Why politicians are all against real education", argued that universities were destroying education "by making it relevant": "Replace pure by applied mathematics, logic by computer programming, architecture by engineering, history by sociology. The result will be a new generation of well-informed philistines, whose charmlessness will undo every advantage which their learning might otherwise have conferred."


title: Roger Scruton

text: From 1979 to 1989, Scruton was an active supporter of dissidents in Czechoslovakia under Communist Party rule, forging links between the country's dissident academics and their counterparts in Western universities. As part of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, he and other academics visited Prague and Brno, now in the Czech Republic, in support of an underground education network started by the Czech dissident Julius Tomin, smuggling in books, organizing lectures, and eventually arranging for students to study for a Cambridge external degree in theology (the only faculty that responded to the request for help). There were structured courses and "samizdat" translations, books were printed, and people sat exams in a cellar with papers smuggled out through the diplomatic bag.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton was detained in 1985 in Brno before being expelled from the country. The Czech dissident watched him walk across the border with Austria: "There was this broad empty space between the two border posts, absolutely empty, not a single human being in sight except for one soldier, and across that broad empty space trudged an English philosopher, Roger Scruton, with his little bag into Austria." On 17 June that year, he was placed on the Index of Undesirable Persons. He wrote that he had also been followed during visits to Poland and Hungary.


title: Roger Scruton

text: For his work in supporting dissidents, Scruton was awarded the First of June Prize in 1993 by the Czech city of Plzeň, and in 1998 he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel. In 2019 the Polish government awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. Scruton was strongly critical of figures in the West — in particular Eric Hobsbawm — who "chose to exonerate" the crimes and atrocities of former communist regimes. His experience of dissident intellectual life in 1980s Communist Prague is recorded in fictional form in his novel "Notes from Underground" (2014). He wrote in 2019 that "despite the appeal of the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and many more, it is the shy, cynical Czechs to whom I lost my heart and from whom I have never retrieved it".


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton took a year's sabbatical from Birkbeck in 1990 and spent it working in Brno in the Czech Republic. That year he registered Central European Consulting, established to offer business advice in post-communist Central Europe. He sold his apartment in Notting Hill Gate, and when he returned to England, he rented a cottage in Stanton Fitzwarren, Swindon, from the Moonies, and an apartment in the Albany building on Piccadilly, London, from the Conservative MP Alan Clark (it had been Clark's servants' quarters).


title: Roger Scruton

text: From 1992 to 1995, he lived in Boston, Massachusetts, teaching an elementary philosophy course and a graduate course on the philosophy of music for one semester a year, as professor of philosophy at Boston University. Two of his books grew out of these courses: "Modern Philosophy: A Survey" (1994) and "The Aesthetics of Music" (1997). In 1993 he bought Sunday Hill Farm in Brinkworth, Wiltshire—35 acres later increased to 100, and a 250-year-old farmhouse — where he lived after returning from the United States. He called it "Scrutopia".


title: Roger Scruton

text: While in Boston, Scruton had flown back to England every weekend to indulge his passion for fox hunting, and it was during a meet of the Beaufort Hunt that he met Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian. They announced their engagement in "The Times" in September 1996 (Jeffreys was described as "the youngest daughter of the late Lord Jeffreys and of Annie-Lou Lady Jeffreys"), married later that year and set up home on Sunday Hill Farm. Their two children were born in 1998 and 2000. In 1999 they created Horsell's Farm Enterprises, a PR firm that included Japan Tobacco International and Somerfield Stores as clients. Scruton and his publisher were successfully sued for libel that year by the Pet Shop Boys for suggesting, in his book "An Intelligent Person's Guide To Modern Culture" (1998), that their songs were in large part the work of sound engineers; the group settled for undisclosed damages.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton was criticized in 2002 for having written articles about smoking without disclosing that he was receiving a regular fee from Japan Tobacco International (JTI, formerly R. J. Reynolds). In 1999 he and his wife — as part of their consultancy work for Horsell's Farm Enterprises — began producing a quarterly briefing paper, "The Risk of Freedom Briefing" (1999–2007), about the state's control of risk. Distributed to journalists, the paper included discussions about drugs, alcohol and tobacco, and was sponsored by JTI. Scruton wrote several articles in defence of smoking around this time, including one in 1998 for "The Times", three for the "Wall Street Journal" (two in 1998 and one in 2000), one for "City Journal" in 2001, and a 65-page pamphlet for the Institute of Economic Affairs, "WHO, What, and Why: Trans-national Government, Legitimacy and the World Health Organisation" (2000). The latter criticized the World Health Organization's campaign against smoking, arguing that transnational bodies should not seek to influence domestic legislation because they are not answerable to the electorate.


title: Roger Scruton

text: "The Guardian" reported in 2002 that Scruton had been writing about these issues while failing to disclose that he was receiving £54,000 a year from JTI. The payments came to light when a September 2001 email from the Scrutons to JTI was leaked to "The Guardian". Signed by Scruton's wife, the email asked the company to increase their £4,500 monthly fee to £5,500, in exchange for which Scruton would "aim to place an article every two months" in the "Wall Street Journal", "Times", "Telegraph", "Spectator", "Financial Times", "Economist", "Independent", or "New Statesman". Scruton, who said the email had been stolen, replied that he had never concealed his connection with JTI. In response to "The Guardian" article, the "Financial Times" ended his contract as a columnist, The "Wall Street Journal" suspended his contributions, and the Institute for Economic Affairs said it would introduce an author-declaration policy. Chatto & Windus withdrew from negotiations for a book, and Birkbeck removed his visiting-professor privileges.


title: Roger Scruton

text: The tobacco controversy damaged Scruton's consultancy business in England. In part because of that, and because the Hunting Act 2004 had banned fox hunting in England and Wales, the Scrutons considered moving to the United States permanently, and in 2004 they purchased Montpelier, an 18th-century plantation house near Sperryville, Virginia. Scruton set up a company, Montpelier Strategy LLC, to promote the house as a venue for weddings and similar events. The couple lived there while retaining Sunday Hill Farm in England, but decided in 2009 against a permanent move to the United States and sold the house. Scruton held two part-time academic positions during this period. From 2005 to 2009 he was research professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia, a graduate school of Divine Mercy University; and in 2009 he worked at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he wrote his book "Green Philosophy" (2011).


title: Roger Scruton

text: From 2001 to 2009 Scruton wrote a wine column for the "New Statesman", and contributed to "The World of Fine Wine" and "Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine" (2007), with his essay "The Philosophy of Wine". His book "I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine" (2009) in part comprises material from his "New Statesman" column.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton, who was largely self-taught as a composer, composed two operas setting his own libretti. The first is a one-act chamber piece, "The Minister" (1994), and the second a two-act opera, "Violet" (2005). The latter, based on the life of the British harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, was performed twice at the Guildhall School of Music in London in 2005.


title: Roger Scruton

text: The Scrutons returned from the United States to live at Sunday Hill Farm in Wiltshire, and Scruton took an unpaid research professorship at the University of Buckingham. In January 2010 he began an unpaid three-year visiting professorship at the University of Oxford to teach graduate classes on aesthetics, and was made a senior research fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. In 2010 he delivered the Scottish Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews on "The Face of God", and from 2011 until 2014 he held a quarter-time professorial fellowship at St Andrews in moral philosophy.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Two novels appeared during this period: "Notes from Underground" (2014) is based on his experiences in Czechoslovakia, and "The Disappeared" (2015) deals with child trafficking in a Yorkshire town. Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education". He sat on the editorial board of the "British Journal of Aesthetics" and on the board of visitors of Ralston College, a new college proposed in Savannah, Georgia, and was a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.


title: Roger Scruton

text: In November 2018, Communities Secretary James Brokenshire appointed Scruton as unpaid chair of the British government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, established to promote better home design. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs objected because of remarks Scruton had made years earlier: he had described "Islamophobia" as a "propaganda word", homosexuality as "not normal", lesbianism as an attempt to find "committed love that [a woman] can't get from men any more", and date rape as not a distinct crime. He had also made allegedly conspiratorial remarks about the Jewish businessman George Soros.


title: Roger Scruton

text: In April 2019, an interview of Scruton by George Eaton appeared in the "New Statesman". To publicise it, Eaton posted edited extracts from the interview on Twitter, of Scruton talking about Soros, Chinese people and Islam, among other topics, and referred to them as "a series of outrageous remarks". Immediately after the interview and Eaton's posts went online, Scruton began to be criticised by various politicians and journalists; hours later, Brokenshire dismissed Scruton from the Commission. When Scruton's dismissal was announced, Eaton posted a photograph of himself on Instagram drinking from a bottle of champagne, captioned "The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser". The next day, Scruton wrote in "The Spectator", "We in Britain are entering a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict – or merely seem to conflict – with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes." On 12 April, Eaton apologised for his tweets and the Instagram post but otherwise stood by the interview, but would not release a full recording.


title: Roger Scruton

text: On 25 April, Scruton's colleague Douglas Murray, who had obtained a full recording of the interview, published details of it in "The Spectator", and wrote that Eaton had conducted a "hit job". The audio suggested that both the tweets and Eaton's article had omitted relevant context. For example, Scruton had said: "Anybody who doesn't think that there's a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts", but the article omitted: "it's not necessarily an empire of Jews; that's such nonsense." Of the Chinese, Eaton tweeted that Scruton had said: "Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing." Eaton's article included more words: "They're creating robots out of their own people ... each Chinese person is a kind of replica ..." The transcript showed the full sentence: "In a sense they're creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done," which suggested the topic was the Chinese Communist Party. In response, the "New Statesman" published the full transcript.


title: Roger Scruton

text: On 2 May, the "New Statesman" readers' editor, Peter Wilby, wrote that Eaton's online comments suggested that he had "approached the interview as a political activist, not as a journalist". Two months later, the "New Statesman" officially apologised. Several days later, Brokenshire also apologised to Scruton. Scruton was re-appointed a week later as co-chair of the commission.


title: Roger Scruton

text: According to Paul Guyer, in "A History of Modern Aesthetics: The Twentieth Century", "After Wollheim, the most significant British aesthetician has been Roger Scruton." Scruton was trained in analytic philosophy, although he was drawn to other traditions. "I remain struck by the thin and withered countenance that philosophy quickly assumes," he wrote in 2012, "when it wanders away from art and literature, and I cannot open a journal like "Mind" or "The Philosophical Review" without experiencing an immediate sinking of the heart, like opening a door into a morgue." He specialised in aesthetics throughout his career. From 1971 to 1992 he taught aesthetics at Birkbeck College. His PhD thesis formed the basis of his first book, "Art and Imagination" (1974), in which he argued that "what demarcates aesthetic interest from other sorts is that it involves the appreciation of something for its own sake". He subsequently published "The Aesthetics of Architecture" (1979), "The Aesthetic Understanding" (1983), "The Aesthetics of Music" (1997), and "Beauty" (2010). In 2008 a two-day conference was held at Durham University to assess his impact in the field, and in 2012 a collection of essays, "Scruton's Aesthetics", edited by Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, was published by Palgrave Macmillan.


title: Roger Scruton

text: In an Intelligence Squared debate in March 2009, Scruton (seconding historian David Starkey) proposed the motion: "Britain has become indifferent to beauty", and held an image of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" next to one of the supermodel Kate Moss. Later that year he wrote and presented a BBC Two documentary, "Why Beauty Matters", in which he argued that beauty should be restored to its traditional position in art, architecture and music. He wrote that he had received "more than 500 e-mails from viewers, all but one saying, 'Thank Heavens someone is saying what needs to be said.'" In 2018 he argued that a belief in God makes for more beautiful architecture: "Who can doubt, on visiting Venice, that this abundant flower of aesthetic endeavor was rooted in faith and watered by penitential tears? Surely, if we want to build settlements today we should heed the lesson of Venice. We should begin always with an act of consecration, since we thereby put down the real roots of a community."


title: Roger Scruton

text: Best known for his writing in support of conservatism, Scruton's intellectual heroes were Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Ruskin, and T. S. Eliot. His third book, "The Meaning of Conservatism" (1980) — which he called "a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers" — was responsible, he said, for blighting his academic career. He supported Margaret Thatcher, while remaining sceptical of her view of the market as a solution to everything, but after the Falklands War, he realized that she "recognised that the self-identity of the country was at stake, and that its revival was a political task".


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton wrote in "Gentle Regrets" (2005) that he found several of Burke's arguments in "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790) persuasive. Although Burke was writing about revolution, not socialism, Scruton was persuaded that, as he put it, the utopian promises of socialism are accompanied by an abstract vision of the mind that bears little relation to the way most people think. Burke also convinced him that there is no direction to history, no moral or spiritual progress; that people think collectively toward a common goal only during crises such as war, and that trying to organize society this way requires a real or imagined enemy; hence, Scruton wrote, the strident tone of socialist literature.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton further argued, following Burke, that society is held together by authority and the rule of law, in the sense of the right to obedience, not by the imagined rights of citizens. Obedience, he wrote, is "the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition that makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into 'the dust and powder of individuality'". Real freedom does not stand in conflict with obedience, but is its other side. He was also persuaded by Burke's arguments about the social contract, including that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. To forget this, he wrote — to throw away customs and institutions — is to "place the present members of society in a dictatorial dominance over those who went before, and those who came after them".


title: Roger Scruton

text: Beliefs that appear to be examples of prejudice may be useful and important, he wrote: "our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable, from our own perspective, and the attempt to justify them will merely lead to their loss." A prejudice in favour of modesty in women and chivalry in men, for example, may aid the stability of sexual relationships and the raising of children, although these are not offered as reasons in support of the prejudice. It may therefore be easy to show the prejudice as irrational, but there will be a loss nonetheless if it is discarded. Scruton was critical of the contemporary feminist movement, while reserving praise for suffragists such as Mary Wollstonecraft. However, he praised Germaine Greer in 2016, saying that she had "cast an awful lot of light on our literary tradition" by showing the male as the dominant figure, and defended her against criticism for having used the word "sex" to describe the difference between men and women, rather than "gender", which Scruton called "politically correct".


title: Roger Scruton

text: In "Arguments for Conservatism" (2006), Scruton marked out the areas in which philosophical thinking is required if conservatism is to be intellectually persuasive. He argued that human beings are creatures of limited and local affections. Territorial loyalty is at the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme; every expansion of jurisdiction beyond the frontiers of the nation state leads to a decline in accountability.


title: Roger Scruton

text: He opposed elevating the "nation" above its people, which would threaten rather than facilitate citizenship and peace. "Conservatism and conservation" are two aspects of a single policy, that of husbanding resources, including the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions, and the material capital contained in the environment. He argued further that the law should not be used as a weapon to advance special interests. People impatient for reform — for example in the areas of euthanasia or abortion — are reluctant to accept what may be "glaringly obvious to others — that the law exists precisely to impede their ambitions".


title: Roger Scruton

text: The book defines post-modernism as the claim that there are no grounds for truth, objectivity, and meaning, and that conflicts between views are therefore nothing more than contests of power. Scruton argued that, while the West is required to judge other cultures in their own terms, Western culture is adversely judged as ethnocentric and racist. He wrote: "The very reasoning which sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding, and cultural relativism as objectively true."


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton was a supporter of constitutional monarchy arguing it is "the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere." In a 1991 column for the "Los Angeles Times", he argued that monarchy helped create peace in Central Europe and "the loss of it that precipitated 70 years of conflict on the Continent."


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton was an Anglican. His book "Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England" (2013) defended the relevance of the Church of England. He contends, following Immanuel Kant, that human beings have a transcendental dimension, a sacred core exhibited in their capacity for self-reflection. He argues that we are in an era of secularization without precedent in the history of the world; writers and artists such as Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Edward Hopper and Arnold Schoenberg "devoted much energy to recuperating the experience of the sacred — but as a private rather than a public form of consciousness." Because these thinkers directed their art at the few, he writes, it has never appealed to the many.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton considered that religion plays a basic function in "endarkening" human minds. "Endarkenment" is Scruton's way of describing the process of socialization through which certain behaviours and choices are closed off and forbidden to the subject, which he considers necessary to curb socially damaging impulses and behaviour. On the matter of evidence of God's existence, Scruton said: "Rational argument can get us just so far… It can help us to understand the real difference between a faith that commands us to forgive our enemies, and one that commands us to slaughter them. But the leap of faith itself — this placing of your life at God's service — is a leap over reason's edge. This does not make it irrational, any more than falling in love is irrational." However, despite claiming that belief alone is sufficiently rational, he advocated a form of the argument from beauty: he said that when we take the beauty in the natural world around us as a gift, we are able to openly understand God. The beauty speaks to us, he claims, and from it we can understand God's presence around us.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton defined totalitarianism as the absence of any constraint on central authority, with every aspect of life the concern of government. Advocates of totalitarianism feed on resentment, Scruton argues, and having seized power they proceed to abolish institutions — such as the law, property, and religion — that create authorities: "To the resentful it is these institutions that are the cause of inequality, and therefore the cause of their humiliations and failures." He argues that revolutions are not conducted from below by the people, but from above, in the name of the people, by an aspiring elite. The importance of Newspeak in totalitarian societies, he writes, is that the power of language to describe reality is replaced by language whose purpose is to avoid encounters with realities. He agrees with Alain Besançon that the totalitarian society envisaged by George Orwell in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949) can be only understood in theological terms, as a society founded on a transcendental negation. In accordance with T. S. Eliot, Scruton believes that true originality is only possible within a tradition, and that it is precisely in modern conditions — conditions of fragmentation, heresy, and unbelief — that the conservative project acquires its sense.


title: Roger Scruton

text: The philosopher of religion Christopher Hamilton described Scruton's "Sexual Desire" (1986) as "the most interesting and insightful philosophical account of sexual desire" produced within analytic philosophy. The book influenced subsequent discussions of sexual ethics. Martha Nussbaum credited Scruton in 1997 with having provided "the most interesting philosophical attempt as yet to work through the moral issues involved in our treatment of persons as sex partners".


title: Roger Scruton

text: According to Jonathan Dollimore, Scruton based a conservative sexual ethic on the Hegelian proposition that "the final end of every rational being is the building of the self", which involves recognizing the other as an end in itself. Scruton argues that the major feature of perversion is "sexual release that avoids or abolishes the "other"", which he sees as narcissistic and solipsistic. Nussbaum countered that Scruton did not apply his principle of otherness equally — for example, to sexual relationships between adults and children or between Protestants and Catholics. In an essay, "Sexual morality and the liberal consensus" (1990), Scruton wrote that homosexuality leads to the "de-sanctifying of the human body" because the body of the homosexual's lover belongs to the same category as his own. He further argued that gay people have no children and consequently no interest in creating a socially stable future. He therefore considered it justified to "instil in our children feelings of revulsion" towards homosexuality, and in 2007 he challenged the idea that gay people should have the right to adopt. Scruton told "The Guardian" in 2010 that he would no longer defend the view that revulsion against homosexuality can be justified.


title: Roger Scruton

text: In an imaginary conversation, 'Anguilla. Gespräch in Lyon', Andreas Dorschel sets up a debate between Scruton and actress Jeanne Moreau (1928–2017) about the question whether the joy of sex and the pleasures of the gourmet are of the same kind. Moreau affirms, Scruton contests. Towards the end of their conversation the inventiveness of their French cook, Mathieu Viannay, seems to tilt the balance in favour of Moreau's position.


title: Roger Scruton

text: 2014, Scruton stated that he supported English independence because he believed that it would uphold friendship between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and because the English would have a say in all matters. In 2019, when asked if he believed in English independence, he told the "New Statesman":


title: Roger Scruton

text: No, I don't think I've ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing ... I don't think the Welsh want independence, the Northern Irish certainly don't. The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still ... enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom. I can see there are Scottish nationalists who envision something more than that, but if that becomes a real political force then yeah, we should try for independence too. As it is, as you know, the Scots have two votes: they can vote for their own parliament and vote to put their people into our parliament, who come to our parliament with no interest in Scotland but an interest in bullying us.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton strongly supported Brexit, because he believed that the European Union is a threat to the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and that Brexit will help retain national identity, which he saw as being under threat as a result of mass immigration, and because he opposed the Common Agricultural Policy.


title: Roger Scruton

text: For his work with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in communist Czechoslovakia, Scruton was awarded the First of June Prize in 1993 by the Czech city of Plzeň. In 1998 Václav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, presented him with the Medal of Merit (First Class). In the UK, he was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education". His family accompanied him to the ceremony, which was performed by Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace.


title: Roger Scruton

text: Polish President Andrzej Duda presented Scruton with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in June 2019 "for supporting the democratic transformation in Poland". In November that year, the Senate of the Czech Parliament awarded him a Silver Medal for his work in support of Czech dissidents. The following month, during a ceremony in London, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán presented him with the Hungarian Order of Merit, Commander's Cross with Star.


title: Roger Scruton

text: After learning in July 2019 that he had cancer, Scruton underwent treatment, including chemotherapy. He died on 12 January 2020 at the age of 75. The following day, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson tweeted: "We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker – who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully." The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, referred to Scruton's work behind the Iron Curtain: "From his support for freedom fighters in Eastern Europe to his immense intellectual contribution to conservatism in the West, he made a unique contribution to public life."


title: Roger Scruton

text: Mario Vargas Llosa, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote: "[Scruton] was one of the most educated people I have ever met. He could speak of music, literature, archeology, wine, philosophy, Greece, Rome, the Bible and a thousand subjects more than an expert, although he was not an expert on anything, because, in fact, he was a humanist in the classical style ... Scruton's departure leaves a dreadful void around us."


title: Roger Scruton

text: Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan called Scruton "the greatest conservative of our age", adding: "The country has lost a towering intellect. I have lost a wonderful friend." Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that Scruton's work on "building more beautifully, submitted recently to my department, will proceed and stand part of his unusually rich legacy". The scholar and former politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali described him as a "dear and generous friend, who gave freely to those who sought advice and wisdom, and he expected little in return". Another friend and colleague, Douglas Murray, paid tribute to Scruton's personal kindness, calling him "one of the kindest, most encouraging, thoughtful, and generous people you could ever have known". Others who paid tribute to Scruton included education reformer Katharine Birbalsingh and cabinet minister Michael Gove who called Scruton "an intellectual giant, a brilliantly clear and compelling writer".


title: Roger Scruton

text: In an essay critical of Scruton's philosophy of aesthetics, "The Art of Madness and Mystery", published in "Church Life" (a journal of the University of Notre Dame's McGrath Institute) shortly after Scruton's death, Michael Shindler wrote that "like the Roman guard who would not abandon his post during the cataclysm of Pompeii, the late Roger Scruton stands in lonesome majesty as the artistic tradition's greatest defender athwart modernity’s aesthetic upheaval."


title: Roger Scruton

text: Scruton's funeral was celebrated on 24 January 2020 at Malmesbury Abbey, at the presence, among others, of several peers, Conservative politicians and the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán. Following the funeral ceremony, which was presided by the Revd Oliver Stross, Scruton's remains were buried in the Abbey's churchyard.


title: Bisphenol A

text: Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical compound primarily used in the manufacturing of various plastics. It is a colourless solid which is soluble in most common organic solvents, but has very poor solubility in water. BPA is produced on an industrial scale by the condensation of phenol and acetone, and has a global production scale which is expected to reach 10 million tonnes in 2022.


title: Bisphenol A

text: BPA's largest single application is as a co-monomer in the production of polycarbonates, which accounts for 65–70% of all BPA production. The manufacturing of epoxy resins and vinyl ester resins account for 25–30% of BPA use. The remaining 5% is used as a major component of several high-performance plastics, and as a minor additive in PVC, polyurethane, thermal paper, and several other materials. It is not a plasticizer, although it is often wrongly labelled as such.


title: Bisphenol A

text: The health effects of BPA have been the subject of prolonged public and scientific debate. BPA is a xenoestrogen, exhibiting hormone-like properties that mimic the effects of estrogen in the body. Although the effect is very weak, the pervasiveness of BPA-containing materials raises concerns, as exposure is effectively lifelong. Many BPA-containing materials are non-obvious but commonly encountered, and include coatings for the inside of food cans, clothing designs, shop receipts, and dental fillings. BPA has been investigated by public health agencies in many countries, as well as by the World Health Organization. While normal exposure is below the level currently associated with risk, several jurisdictions have taken steps to reduce exposure on a precautionary basis, in particular by banning BPA from baby bottles. There is some evidence that BPA exposure in infants has decreased as a result of this. BPA-free plastics have also been introduced, which are manufactured using alternative bisphenols such as bisphenol S and bisphenol F, but there is also controversy around whether these are actually safer.


title: Bisphenol A

text: In 1934, workers at I.G. Farbenindustrie reported the coupling of BPA and epichlorohydrin. Over the following decade, coatings and resins derived from similar materials were described by workers at the companies of DeTrey Freres in Switzerland and DeVoe and Raynolds in the US. This early work underpinned the development of epoxy resins, which in turn motivated production of BPA. The utilization of BPA further expanded with discoveries at Bayer and General Electric on polycarbonate plastics. These plastics first appeared in 1958, being produced by Mobay, General Electric, and Bayer.


title: Bisphenol A

text: In terms of the endocrine disruption controversy, the British biochemist Edward Charles Dodds tested BPA as an artificial estrogen in the early 1930s. Subsequent work found that it bound to estrogen receptors tens of thousands of times more weakly than estradiol, the major natural female sex hormone. Dodds eventually developed a structurally similar compound, diethylstilbestrol (DES), which was used as a synthetic estrogen drug in women and animals until it was banned due to its risk of causing cancer; the ban on use of DES in humans came in 1971 and in animals, in 1979. BPA was never used as a drug.


title: Bisphenol A

text: The synthesis of BPA still follows Dianin's general method, with the fundamentals changing little in 130 years. The condensation of acetone (hence the suffix 'A' in the name) with two equivalents of phenol is catalyzed by a strong acid, such as concentrated hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, or a solid acid resin such as the sulfonic acid form of polystyrene sulfonate. An excess of phenol is used to ensure full condensation and to limit the formation of by‑products, such as Dianin's compound. BPA is fairly cheap to produce, as the synthesis benefits from a high atom economy and large amounts of both starting materials are available from the cumene process. As the only by-product is water, it may be considered an industrial example of green chemistry. Global production in 2022 is expected to reach 10 million tonnes.


title: Bisphenol A

text: Usually, the addition of acetone takes place at the para position on both phenols, however minor amounts of the ortho-para (up to 3%) and ortho-ortho isomers are also produced, along with several other minor by‑products. These are not always removed and are known impurities in commercial samples of BPA.


title: Bisphenol A

text: BPA has a fairly high melting point but can be easily dissolved in a broad range of organic solvents including toluene, ethanol and ethyl acetate. It may be purified by recrystallisation from acetic acid with water. Crystals form in the monoclinic space group P 2/n (where n indicates the glide plane); within this individual molecules of BPA are arraigned with a 91.5° torsion angle between the phenol rings. Spectroscopic data is available from AIST.


title: Bisphenol A

text: About 65–70% of all bisphenol A is used to make polycarbonate plastics, which can consists of nearly 90% BPA by mass. Polymerisation is achieved by a reaction with phosgene, conducted under biphasic conditions; the hydrochloric acid is scavenged with aqueous base. This process converts the individual molecules of BPA into large polymer chains, effectively trapping them.


title: Bisphenol A

text: About 25–30% of all BPA is used in the manufacture of epoxy resins and vinyl ester resins. For epoxy resin, it is first converted to its diglycide ether (usually abbreviated BADGE or DGEBA). This is achieved by a reaction with epichlorohydrin under basic conditions.


title: Bisphenol A

text: Some of this is further reacted with methacrylic acid to form bis-GMA, which is used to make vinyl ester resins. Alternatively, and to a much lesser extent, BPA may be ethoxylated and then converted to its diacrylate and dimethacrylate derivatives (bis-EMA, or EBPADMA). These may be incorporated at low levels in vinyl ester resins to change their physical properties and see common use in dental composites and sealants.


title: Bisphenol A

text: The remaining 5% of BPA is used in a wide range of applications, many of which involve plastic. BPA is a major component of several high-performance plastics, the production of these is low compared to other plastics but still equals several thousand tons a year. Comparatively minor amounts of BPA are also used as additives or modifiers in some commodity plastics. These materials are much more common but their BPA content will be low.


title: Bisphenol A

text: Concerns about the health effects of BPA have led some manufacturers replacing it with other bisphenols, such as bisphenol S and bisphenol F. These are produced in a similar manner to BPA, by replacing acetone with other ketones, which undergo analogous condensation reactions. Thus, in bisphenol F, the F signifies formaldehyde.


title: Bisphenol A

text: As a result of the presence of BPA in plastics and other commonplace materials, most people are frequently exposed to trace levels of BPA. The primary source of human exposure is via food, as epoxy and PVC are used to line the inside of food cans to prevent corrosion of the metal by acidic foodstuffs. Polycarbonate drinks containers are also a source of exposure, although most disposable drinks bottles are actually made of PET, which contains no BPA. Among the non-food sources, exposures routes include through dust, thermal paper, clothing, dental materials, and medical devices. Although BPA exposure is common it does not accumulate within the body, with toxicokinetic studies showing the biological half-life of BPA in adult humans to be around two hours. The body first converts it into more water-soluble compounds via glucuronidation or sulfation, which are then removed from the body through the urine. This allows exposure to be easily determined by urine testing, facilitating convenient biomonitoring of populations.


title: Bisphenol A

text: The health effects of BPA have been the subject of prolonged public and scientific debate, with PubMed listing more than 16,000 scientific papers as of 2022. Concern is mostly related to its estrogen-like activity, although it can interact with other receptor systems as an endocrine-disrupting chemical. These interactions are all very weak, but exposure to BPA is effectively lifelong, leading to concern over possible cumulative effects. Studying this sort of long‑term, low‑dose interaction is difficult, and although there have been numerous studies, there are considerable discrepancies in their conclusions regarding the nature of the effects observed as well as the levels at which they occur. A common criticism is that industry-sponsored trials tend to show BPA as being safer than studies performed by academic or government laboratories, although this has also been explained in terms of industry studies being better designed.


title: Bisphenol A

text: Public health agencies in the EU, US, Canada, Australia and Japan as well as the WHO have all reviewed the health risks of BPA, and found normal exposure to be below the level currently associated with risk. Regardless, due to the scientific uncertainty, many jurisdictions have taken steps to reduce exposure on a precautionary basis. In particular, infants are considered to be at greater risk, leading to bans on the use of BPA in baby bottles and related products by the US, Canada, and EU amongst others. Bottle producers have largely switched from polycarbonate to polypropylene and there is some evidence that BPA exposure in infants has decreased as a result of this. The European Chemicals Agency has added BPA to the Candidate List of substances of very high concern (SVHC), which would make it easier to restrict or ban its use in future.


title: Bisphenol A

text: BPA exhibits very low acute toxicity as indicated by its LD of 4 g/kg (mouse). Reports indicate that it is a minor skin irritant as well, although less so than phenol.


title: Bisphenol A

text: BPA has been found to interact with a diverse range of hormone receptors, in both humans and animals. It binds to both of the nuclear estrogen receptors (ERs), ERα and ERβ. BPA can both mimic the action of estrogen and antagonise estrogen, indicating that it is a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM) or partial agonist of the ER. Although it is 1000- to 2000-fold less potent than estradiol, the major female sex hormone in humans. At high concentrations, BPA also binds to and acts as an antagonist of the androgen receptor (AR). In addition to receptor binding, the compound has been found to affect Leydig cell steroidogenesis, including affecting 17α-hydroxylase/17,20 lyase and aromatase expression and interfering with LH receptor-ligand binding.


title: Bisphenol A

text: Bisphenol A's interacts with the estrogen-related receptor γ (ERR-γ). This orphan receptor (endogenous ligand unknown) behaves as a constitutive activator of transcription. BPA seems to bind strongly to ERR-γ (dissociation constant = 5.5 nM), but only weakly to the ER. BPA binding to ERR-γ preserves its basal constitutive activity. It can also protect it from deactivation from the SERM 4-hydroxytamoxifen (afimoxifene). This may be the mechanism by which BPA acts as a xenoestrogen. Different expression of ERR-γ in different parts of the body may account for variations in bisphenol A effects. BPA has also been found to act as an agonist of the GPER (GPR30).


title: Bisphenol A

text: BPA has been detectable in the natural environment since the 1990s and is now widely distributed. It is primarily a river pollutant, but has also been observed in the marine environment, in soils, and lower levels can also been detected in air. The solubility of BPA in water is low (~300 g/ton of water) but this is still sufficient to make it a significant means of distribution into the environment. Many of the largest sources of BPA pollution are water-based, particularly wastewater from industrial facilities using BPA.


title: Bisphenol A

text: Paper recycling can be a major source of release when this includes thermal paper, leaching from PVC items may also be a significant source, as can landfill leachate.


title: Bisphenol A

text: In all cases, wastewater treatment can be highly effective at removing BPA, giving reductions of 91–98%. Regardless, the remaining 2–9% of BPA will continue through to the environment, with low levels of BPA commonly observed in surface water and sediment in the U.S. and Europe.


title: Bisphenol A

text: Once in the environment BPA is aerobically biodegraded by a wide a variety of organisms. Its half life in water has been estimated at between 4.5 and 15 days, degradation in the air is faster than this, while soil samples degrade more slowly. BPA in sediment degrades most slowly of all, particularly where this is anaerobic. Abiotic degradation has been reported, but is generally slower than biodegradation. Pathways include photo-oxidation, or reactions with minerals such as goethite which may be present in soils and sediments.


title: Bisphenol A

text: BPA is an environmental contaminant of emerging concern. Despite its short half-life and non-bioaccumulating character, the continuous release of BPA into the environment causes continuous exposure to both plant and animal life. Although many studies have been performed, these often focus on a limited range of model organisms and can use BPA concentrations well beyond environmental levels. As such, the precise effects of BPA on the growth, reproduction, and development of aquatic organism is not fully understood. Regardless, the existing data shows the effects of BPA on wildlife to be generally negative. BPA appears able to effect development and reproduction in a wide range of wildlife, with certain species being particularly sensitive, such as invertebrates and amphibians.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Jason McCabe Calacanis (born November 28, 1970) is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York. His second venture, Weblogs, Inc., a publishing company that he co-founded together with Brian Alvey, capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL. Calacanis is also an angel investor in various technology startups, and co-host of the "All-In Podcast" & "This Week in Startups Podcast".


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis was born in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York, to parents of Greek and Irish origin, and has two brothers.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: He graduated from Xaverian High School in 1988. He then attended Fordham University, where he received a B.A. in psychology.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis was founder and CEO of Rising Tide Studios, a media company that published print and online publications. During the dot-com boom, Calacanis was active in New York's Silicon Alley community, and in 1996 began producing the "Silicon Alley Reporter". Originally a 16-page photocopied newsletter, it eventually expanded into a 300-page magazine, with a sister publication called the "Digital Coast Reporter" for the West Coast. Calacanis' socializing earned him a nickname as the "yearbook editor" of the Silicon Alley community. The company also organized conferences in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco focused on the Internet, web, and New Media.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis co-founded the blog network Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey on September 24, 2003, and the startup was supported by an angel investment from Mark Cuban.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Two years after inception, the Weblogs, Inc. blogs business was generating $1,000 a day just from AdSense. Time Warner's America Online agreed to buy Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005 for $25–30 million.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: On November 16, 2006, TechCrunch reported that Calacanis had resigned from his position as CEO of Weblogs, Inc. and general manager of Netscape. Calacanis later confirmed this on his blog and the Gillmor Gang podcast.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis joined Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm, as an EIA (entrepreneur in action) in December, 2006, a position which he held until May, 2007. Through this program, Calacanis invested $25K in Travis Kalanick's company, Uber. The deal is now worth about $100 million.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: In 2007, Calacanis started an internet trend he called "fatblogging" after being fed up with being overweight. Fatblogging is when a person loses weight by exercising and then posting their weight afterwards onto their blog for encouragement and support from commenters and other fatbloggers.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: He launched the web directory Mahalo ("thank you" in Hawaiian), which raised $20 million in venture capital from investors including Sequoia Capital, News Corp, CBS, Mark Cuban, and Elon Musk. The company hit a peak of 15 million unique visitors a month and achieved profitability in 2011, but suffered a sharp decline in traffic that year from the Google Panda search algorithm update and shut down in 2014.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis founded ThisWeekIn.com, which shut down in 2012 but is live again and available as a weekly podcast.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: "This Week in Startups" (also called "TWiSt") is a show hosted by Calacanis and co-hosted by Molly Wood.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: He also founded a startup Inside.com which focuses on delivering thematic newsletters. The company raised $2.6 million.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: In June 2019, Calacanis partnered with the NSW Government to create the Sydney Launch Festival for startups to give their pitches to global audiences.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: In 2009, Calacanis founded the Open Angel Forum, an event that connects early-stage startups with angel investors. The forum was the culmination of a series of public comments by Calacanis questioning the ethics of pay-to-pitch angel forums. Calacanis believes startups shouldn't have to pay to pitch angel investors, calling out fees that can range from $1,000 to $8,000 for a single 10- or 15-minute presentation. Calacanis is an angel investor in Robinhood, Wealthfront, Uber, Desktop Metal, Datastax, Thumbtack, Superhuman and Trello.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis raised a $10 million fund for his own venture investment firm to invest in startups that emerged from the Launch conference. Limited partners in the fund include David Sacks.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Following the success of the Launch conference, Calacanis declared his intent to get closer and more involved in the new ventures that emerged from that conference. The level of investment was around $25,000 to $100,000 in five to 10 startups per year.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis publicly announced in 2018 that he had sold all of his Facebook stock, expressing sharp criticism of company CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on the Too Embarrassed to Ask podcast. He called Zuckerberg "completely immoral" in how he runs the business and said, "No founder should ever sell a company to him."


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis authored a book titled ""Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000"" on angel investing published by HarperCollins in 2017.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: This Week in Startups is a weekly podcast created and hosted by American internet entrepreneur and angel investor Jason Calacanis. "The Wall Street Journal" contributor Cecilie Rohwedder described the podcast as "an influential Web series filmed in the U.S."


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Plans for the podcast were announced on March 16, 2009, through a blog post. The 60-minute program premiered on May 1, 2009, featuring Brian Alvey, CEO and founder of the content management and hosting system Crowd Fusion, as its first guest. The show is one of the longest running podcasts on the topic of startups and angel investing.


title: Jason Calacanis

text: "This Week in Startups" was listed in an article at Fortune.com titled "The Ultimate Guide to the Best Business Podcasts".


title: Jason Calacanis

text: As of 2022, Calacanis is co-host of the "All-In Podcast", alongside Chamath Palihapitiya, David O. Sacks, and David Friedberg. In May 2022, the "All-In Podcast" team hosted their first "All-In Summit" in Miami, where leaders in business and tech attended to discuss the central theme of "What problem do you want to solve right now?"


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis married Jade Li sometime between 2006 and 2009. Calacanis' name was found in Jeffrey Epstein's little black book on page 9. On 5 August 2020, he addressed this discovery by stating that he met Epstein at a Ted Talk, when Epstein wanted to invest in Calacanis' magazine. Calacanis also added that he has "played ping pong with Ghislaine Maxwell once".


title: Jason Calacanis

text: Calacanis was an early supporter and funder for the effort behind the successful recall election of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: The Late Show with David Letterman is an American late-night talk show hosted by David Letterman on CBS, the first iteration of the "Late Show" franchise. The show debuted on August 30, 1993, and was produced by Letterman's production company, Worldwide Pants Incorporated, and CBS Television Studios. The show's music director and leader of the house band, the CBS Orchestra, was Paul Shaffer. The head writer was Matt Roberts and the announcer was originally Bill Wendell, then Alan Kalter. In most U.S. markets the show aired from 11:35 p.m. to 12:35 a.m. Eastern and Pacific Time, and recorded Monday to Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m., and Thursdays at 3:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The second Thursday episode usually aired on Friday of that week.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In 2002, "Late Show with David Letterman" was ranked No. 7 on "TV Guide"s 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. As host of both "Late Night" and "Late Show" for more than 30 years, Letterman surpassed Johnny Carson as the longest running late-night talk show host in 2013. That same year, "Late Night" and "Late Show" were ranked at No. 41 on "TV Guide"s 60 Best Series of All Time. The show was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Series 16 times, winning 6. It was also nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series 15 times, and was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series 16 times during its run.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In 2014, Letterman announced his retirement and the final episode of "Late Show" aired on May 20, 2015. After Letterman's final "Late Show", instead of airing reruns of the show or having guest host episodes of "Late Show", CBS opted to air reruns of scripted dramas in the 11:35 pm time slot over the summer with the branding "CBS Summer Showcase". The show was then succeeded by "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert", hosted by Stephen Colbert, which premiered on September 8, 2015.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: CBS had previously attempted late-night talk shows with "The Merv Griffin Show" (1969–1972) and "The Pat Sajak Show" (1989–1990), but Griffin clashed with network censors and moved to syndication while Sajak was unable to compete with NBC's "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and was canceled due to poor ratings. For most of the 20 years preceding "Late Show", CBS's late night fare consisted of movies, reruns and specialty programming packaged under the name


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: "CBS Late Night" and broadcast to middling ratings. When David Letterman became available following a conflict with NBC, CBS was eager to lure him and offered him a three-year, $14 million per year contract, doubling his "Late Night" salary. According to their agreement, the show would spend a month in Hollywood at least once a year.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: CBS purchased the Ed Sullivan Theater for $4 million, spending "several million" to renovate it. The renovation was supervised by architect James Polshek. CBS' total cost for acquiring the show including renovations, negotiation rights paid to NBC, signing Letterman, announcer Bill Wendell, Shaffer, the writers and the band was over $140 million.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: A significant issue regarding Letterman's move to CBS was the ownership of long-running comedy bits used on "Late Night," as well as the name of the CBS show itself. NBC claimed that much of what he did on "Late Night" was intellectual property of the network. Letterman and his attorneys countered that some segments ("Stupid Pet Tricks", for example) pre-dated "Late Night" and had first aired on "The David Letterman Show", which was owned by Letterman's production company rather than NBC, and others, such as the Top Ten List and Viewer Mail, were common property and not owned by either Letterman or NBC. Ultimately a compromise was reached in key areas: the "Viewer Mail" segment would be called the "CBS Mailbag"; the actor portraying Larry "Bud" Melman on "Late Night" would use his real name, Calvert DeForest, on the CBS show; and Paul Shaffer's "World's Most Dangerous Band" would become the "CBS Orchestra".


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: NBC gave Letterman the choice of at least two options to name his new show, "Late Show with David Letterman" or "Nightly with David Letterman". On this matter CBS executives stepped in, rejecting "Nightly" in part because of potential confusion with "Nightline" on ABC, along with the "NBC Nightly News". Thus, "Late Show with David Letterman" quickly became the official name.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: After Letterman was introduced on "Late Show"s very first episode, "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw accompanied him on stage and wished him "reasonably well". As part of a pre-arranged act, Brokaw then proceeded to retrieve a pair of cue cards while stating that "These last two jokes are the intellectual property of NBC!" After he carried them off stage, Letterman responded, "Who would have thought you would ever hear the words 'intellectual property' and 'NBC' in the same sentence?" In his opening monologue, Letterman said "Legally, I can continue to call myself Dave" but joked that he woke up that morning and next to him in bed was the head of a peacock (while the orchestra played the theme from "The Godfather").


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In ratings, Letterman's "Late Show" dominated Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" for its first two years. Leno pulled ahead on July 10, 1995, starting with a Hugh Grant interview, after Grant's much-publicized arrest for picking up a Los Angeles prostitute. Leno also benefited from the lead-in provided by NBC's popular "Must See TV" prime time programs of the mid-to-late 1990s. Likewise, the CBS network was hindered by a weak prime time lineup, along with several large- and major-market network affiliation switches in late 1994 relating to Fox's acquisition of CBS's National Football League rights, stunting the "Late Show" just as it was beginning to gain traction.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: At times "Late Show" even came in third in its time slot (behind "Nightline", most recently in November 2008), once prompting Letterman to arrange for a Manhattan billboard proudly declaring himself and his show to be No. 3 in Late Night, aping an older, nearby billboard which promoted Leno and "The Tonight Show" as No. 1. Letterman attempted to respond by making his show more political, aping the approach taken by "The Daily Show" under Jon Stewart.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: On June 1, 2009, Conan O'Brien (who had succeeded Letterman as host of "Late Night" in 1993) took over as host of "The Tonight Show"—an event Letterman referenced in his own show's Top Ten List on that night—and Letterman's "feud" with Leno temporarily ceased. In 2008 Letterman told "Rolling Stone" that he would welcome Leno on his show once Leno's tenure ended. Letterman said on competing with O'Brien, "I still find it hard to believe that Jay won't be there." The interview was held prior to Leno announcing his return to NBC for "The Jay Leno Show". In the second week after Letterman and O'Brien began their opposing broadcasts, viewer ratings for "Tonight" began to slip and "Late Show" was poised to beat "Tonight" for the first time in over ten years, a fact pointed out by Letterman's guests on air (Howard Stern and Julia Roberts). Letterman quickly tried to change the subject in the interviews and tried to avert a new rivalry. In fact, the June 9, 2009 episode of "Late Show" featuring Roberts rated better than "Tonight" with a 3.4 household rating nationally to O'Brien's 2.9. The Letterman/Leno feud was revived in the wake of the 2010 "Tonight Show" conflict, which saw Letterman side with O'Brien. Despite the rivalry, Leno appeared in a "Late Show" promo with Letterman and Oprah Winfrey which aired on CBS during Super Bowl XLIV; it was Leno and Letterman's first joint appearance since Leno took over the "Tonight Show" in 1992. The feud between the hosts ended for good on February 6, 2014, with Leno's second and final retirement and "Late Night" host Jimmy Fallon, who succeeded Conan O'Brien in 2009, becoming the current host of the "Tonight Show" on February 17, with its subsequent return to New York for the first time since 1972.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: On April 3, 2012, CBS reached an agreement with Worldwide Pants and CBS Television Studios to continue the show through 2014. The parties reached another agreement in October 2013 to extend the show an additional year, continuing the series into 2015. Including his 11 years on NBC, Letterman is the longest tenured late-night talk show host, having surpassed Johnny Carson.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: On April 10, 2014, one week after Letterman announced that he would retire as host of "Late Show" in 2015, CBS announced that his successor as the host of the program would be Stephen Colbert, then host of competing late-night series "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Announcer Bill Wendell retired and left the show on August 18, 1995. He was replaced by Alan Kalter on the show's next episode, September 5, 1995, which came after a two-week hiatus.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In 1996, long-time producer Robert Morton left and head writer Rob Burnett was promoted to executive producer.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In 1997, Justin Stangel and Eric Stangel were hired as writers; by March 2000, the Stangel brothers became the show's head writers, taking over the job held by Rodney Rothman.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Director Hal Gurnee and producer Peter Lassally left the show soon after to pursue other interests. Gurnee was replaced by Jerry Foley. Burnett was absent from the day-to-day operations from 2000 to 2004, and was replaced by Barbara Gaines and Maria Pope, both of whom served as executive producers, with Gaines acting as on-air producer. In 2003, producer Jude Brennan was added to the team of executive producers.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Lassally, who had served as an executive producer for Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show", was invited back to "Late Show" in January 2005 as a guest to discuss the recent death of Carson. Lassally served as executive producer for Worldwide Pants' "The Late Late Show" from late 1994 to February 2015, encompassing the tenures of hosts Tom Snyder, Craig Kilborn and Craig Ferguson. Lassally also served as Executive Producer of the "Tony Mendez Show", an online webcast featuring "Late Show"s "cue card boy", Tony Mendez (c.1945–July 29, 2021). Mendez served in that capacity until 2014, when after a long-running dispute with writer Bill Scheft over Scheft micromanaging Mendez's job, he attacked Scheft and was fired.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Matt Roberts, a long-time writer and producer for the show, became the show's head writer in January 2013, replacing brothers and co-head writers Justin Stangel and Eric Stangel.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Sheila Rogers, the producer responsible for booking guests on the show, worked for Letterman since his "Late Night" days.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Biff Henderson served as the show's stage manager, carrying over from "Late Night". Henderson had a prominent on-camera role with the show.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: The show was taped at the Ed Sullivan Theater at the corner of Broadway and 53rd Street in midtown Manhattan during its entire run. Formerly called CBS Studio 50, it had been home to several TV programs over the years, most notably "The Ed Sullivan Show". Letterman made use of the immediate neighborhood surrounding the theater for his show on occasion, closing off the portion of 53rd Street that goes past his studio for various stunts. Nearby merchants gained fame after making frequent appearances on the program, including Rupert Jee, owner of the Hello Deli at 213 W. 53rd St., and Mujibur and Sirajul, Bengali immigrants who worked at a souvenir shop close to the studio.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: The stage layout followed the same basic structure Letterman employed on "Late Night": the house band appeared on the far left, followed by the performance area and then the interview set.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In May 2015, days before Letterman retired, Seth Stevenson described what it was like to attend a taping of "Late Show":


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: When Letterman was not on vacation (which he took roughly ten weeks per year), he and his crew worked four days per week, taping Friday's show earlier in the week. From October 2001 until May 2004, Friday's show was taped on Thursdays. From 2004 to 2010, Friday's show was taped on Mondays. During this time, the Friday's show's monologue topics, sketches, and other segments were chosen for their lack of topicality, with few if any references to current events or any subject which would run the risk of seeming dated. However, in late 2011 "Late Show" reverted to the practice of taping the Friday show on Thursdays, helping the Friday shows become more topical and relevant.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: The show's opening credits featured a series of shots of New York City as the CBS Orchestra performed the "Late Show" theme (a livelier variation of the more jazzy "Late Night" theme). The announcer presented the names of that night's guests, as well as Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra, then introduced Letterman. On rare episodes, the show began with a cold open as Letterman, dressed casually, briefly interacted with a celebrity or performed a short sketch backstage before the traditional opening sequence began.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In the last few years, Alan Kalter included himself in the introduction. In addition, Letterman took to dashing across the stage either just before, while, or just after Kalter introduced him. In years prior, Letterman would be greeted by two female models, sometimes in costume. For an extended stretch of episodes, one of the models would be performing with several hula hoops, while the other would be wearing a metal suit and operating a grinding machine against her abdomen, a carry-over from their first appearance on the sketch, "Is This Anything?"


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Letterman would then walk out on the show stage to perform his stand-up monologue, which occasionally began with a reference to something an audience member said to him during the pre-show question-and-answer session. The jokes were based on pop culture, current events, and politics. He then introduced one or two video jokes such as a running gag or fake commercial/public service announcement. The monologue was followed by Letterman's introduction of Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra. Beginning in 2009, a commercial break replaced Letterman's trademark 'crossing to the desk', which he had done since the early years. Letterman then chatted with the audience and Shaffer, sometimes relating an anecdote from his personal life, sometimes discussing his anticipation of a particular guest; a running gag may have been featured.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In 2005, after the death of Johnny Carson, it was revealed that Carson had made a habit of sometimes sending jokes to Letterman which Letterman would then incorporate into his monologues. The January 31, 2005, episode of the "Late Show", which featured a tribute to Carson, began with a monologue made up entirely of jokes written by Carson since his retirement.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Letterman read the Top Ten List at this point before turning to guest interviews with a celebrity, politician, or other public figure. On most episodes, the first guest stayed on through the commercial break and continued the interview.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Following the first guest was a short segment to bridge two commercial breaks sequentially. In earlier episodes, Letterman would return to his running gag during this break, or retry a failed stunt from earlier in the show. Later episodes included a brief comedy announcement from announcer Alan Kalter while showing the audience cheering.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: The final segment consisted of a live musical performance, a comedian performing a stand-up routine, or another guest interview. Musical guests included artists from David Bowie, U2, Neil Young, Coldplay to indie bands like Grizzly Bear, Gorillaz, MENEW, and Animal Collective. The CBS Orchestra frequently accompanied musical guests in performing their songs. Episodes occasionally concluded with Letterman recommending viewers stay tuned for "Tom Snyder, "Craig Kilborn, "Craig Ferguson" ("James Corden" in 2015), but usually he simply waved to the camera, saying, "Good night everybody!" In the latter part of the run, the admonishment to watch Craig Ferguson and James Corden was delivered by Alan Kalter, via voiceover.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: "Late Show" had various repeated absurdist segments, including those involving cast members' and audience participation. The show will also take a camera crew into the Hello Deli to show games such as "What's on the iPod?" and "Beat the Clock", or onto 53rd Street or the roof to record various stunts there.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: The show began broadcasting in high-definition television (HDTV) on August 29, 2005. About two weeks later, Tim Kennedy, the show's Technical Director, commented on the transition in the show's official newsletter:


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Kennedy and his crew won an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Technical Direction, Camerawork, Video for a Series" during the nearly four-month-long transition to HDTV.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: The guests with the most appearances were Regis Philbin (150 appearances), Marv Albert (126 appearances, 73 from "Late Night"), and Jack Hanna (102).


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: The person who appeared the most on the "Late Show" was media personality Regis Philbin, with 150 total appearances over the show's 22-season run. Jack Hanna was in second place with 103 appearances, followed by Tony Randall with 70, Marv Albert with 52, and Tom Brokaw with 49.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Darlene Love appeared with a musical number 21 times, most notably for a 19-year-long annual tradition of her performing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" (18 live plus one video clip) on the show's last episode before Christmas. This continued a tradition that started in 1986 on Letterman's NBC show "Late Night with David Letterman", performing the song as Letterman's Christmas finale 28 times across his "Late Show" and "Late Night" run. Love's final Christmas appearance was on December 19, 2014, nine days after the announcement that the show's finale would be in May 2015. Letterman has stated that the annual performance is his favorite part of Christmas. Due to the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, Love was unable to perform on the Letterman show in 2007; instead, a repeat of her 2006 performance was shown. Love was also the musical guest on May 7, 2007, performing "River Deep-Mountain High", while also appearing as a background choral singer on October 15, 2008. Love had a 22nd appearance, appearing as an interview guest on June 12, 2013, to talk about the documentary "20 Feet from Stardom".


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In 2000, after Letterman had quintuple bypass surgery, the "Late Show Backstage" was aired. This featured many celebrities reminiscing about their experiences as guests on his show. Charles Grodin (February 7), Regis Philbin (February 8 and 10), Bandleader Paul Shaffer (February 9 and 11), Drew Barrymore (February 14), David Brenner (February 15), Tom Snyder (February 16 and 17) (Snyder hosted "The Late Late Show" from 1995 to 1999), and Tom Arnold (February 18) were among those who hosted. These interviews were interspersed with past footage. Previously, only reruns without any special introductions had been aired since Letterman's temporary leave from the show began on January 15.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: Letterman returned on a limited basis on February 18, in a show which premiered three days later. To ease his transition back to air, temporary guest hosts carried the show. Bill Cosby (February 22), Kathie Lee Gifford (February 24), David Brenner (February 29), Nathan Lane (March 2), Janeane Garofalo (March 7). filled in on the first week.


title: Late Show with David Letterman

text: In February and March 2003, Letterman missed 14 shows due to shingles. Letterman had various guest hosts during his illness-inflicted absence: Bruce Willis (February 26), John McEnroe (February 27), Regis Philbin (February 28), Whoopi Goldberg (March 10), Vince Vaughn (March 11), Elvis Costello (March 12), Will Ferrell (March 13), Megan Mullally (March 14), Brad Garrett (March 17), Tom Dreesen (March 18), Bonnie Hunt (March 19), Paul Shaffer (March 24), Bill Cosby (March 25), and Luke Wilson (March 26).