title: Nadine Coyle

text: Coyle joined Cheryl Tweedy, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts, and Kimberley Walsh to comprise the new girl group Girls Aloud, formed through the show by a public vote on 30 November 2002. The group's debut single "Sound of the Underground" peaked at number one on the UK Singles Chart, becoming the 2002 Christmas number one. Girls Aloud hold the record for the shortest time between formation and reaching number one. The group released their debut album "Sound of the Underground" in May 2003, which entered the charts at number two and was certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) later the same year. Their singles "I'll Stand by You", "Walk This Way", and "The Promise" have charted at number one. Two of their albums have reached the top of the UK Albums Chart: their greatest hits album "The Sound of Girls Aloud" and 2008's "Out of Control", both of which entered the chart at number one, with over one million copies of the former being sold.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: They also achieved seven certified albums and have been nominated for five Brit Awards, winning the 2009 Best Single for "The Promise".


title: Nadine Coyle

text: The group's musical style is pop, but throughout their career they had experimented with electropop and dance-pop. Girls Aloud's collaborations with Brian Higgins and his songwriting and production team Xenomania earned the group critical acclaim, due to an innovative approach to mainstream pop music. The group became one of the few UK reality television acts to achieve continued success, amassing a fortune of £30 million by May 2010. "Guinness World Records" lists them as "Most Successful Reality TV Group" in the 2007 edition. They also hold the record for "Most Consecutive Top Ten Entries in the UK by a Female Group" in the 2008 edition, and are credited again for "Most Successful Reality TV Group" in the 2011 edition. The group was also named the United Kingdom's biggest selling girl group of the 21st century, with over 4.3 million singles sales and 4 million albums sold in the UK alone.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In 2009, Girls Aloud decided they would partake in a hiatus to pursue solo projects. That same year, Coyle collaborated with Boyz II Men for their album "Love", recording a cover of the Take That song "Back for Good", although the song was cut from the final track listing. Coyle also worked with Jay Sean, although the duet was later scrapped.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: Coyle announced plans to release a solo album during Girls Aloud's hiatus. She enlisted Barbara Charone, who has worked with Madonna and Christina Aguilera, as a publicist and Bruce Garfield as her manager. Early reports indicated three major record labels interested in Coyle, In April 2010, it was reported she had signed to Geffen Records. The deal later fell through. In August 2010, Coyle officially signed a deal with grocery store chain Tesco's new record label, releasing the album through her own Black Pen Records imprint.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: She worked with a number of famous songwriters and producers during recording sessions, such as Desmond Child, Guy Chambers, Mike Elizondo, Steve Booker, Toby Gad, Tony Kanal and newcomer Ricci Riccardi. According to an interview with Booker, Coyle had worked on song ideas using GarageBand which she then presented to Booker in England to work on together further. The producer said, "She was singing her songs to loops, and then I took the loops out and rewrote the music from scratch to her ideas." He described her songs as "very pop". Booker also worked on songs to show off Coyle's vocals: "Because she’s got such a belting voice, I tried a couple of things where she could really belt," he said.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: The album was preceded by the release of her debut single, the title track "Insatiable". Co-written with Guy Chambers and produced by Ricci Riccardi, the song has an "80s feel" and "a harder, guitar-led sound." The single peaked at number twenty-six in the UK Singles Chart.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In November 2012, Coyle reunited with the rest of Girls Aloud to celebrate their tenth anniversary. On 18 November 2012, the band released their new single "Something New" which was also the official charity single for Children in Need. The group released their second greatest hits compilation "Ten" on 26 November 2012. Coyle and the group embarked on the in February. After the tour's conclusion in March 2013, the group announced that they were disbanding.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In late June, Coyle appeared on ITV's "Michael Flatley: A Night to Remember", as part of "ITV Music Specials". On the programme she sang a cover of "Dangerous Games", shortly thereafter she announced she would star alongside Flatley on his 2014 tour on select dates. Coyle, in August, also revealed she has been in the studio recording new songs for a forthcoming second studio album.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: On 16 September 2014, Coyle announced that she began working with longtime collaborator Brian Higgins. In March 2015, Coyle spoke about the details concerning her second album, stating that she intended on signing with a major label and that the sound is "similar" to that of London Grammar. Later that year, Nadine recorded a duet with Shane Filan from the band Westlife for his album "Right Here". They performed the single, titled "I Could Be" together on that year's annual "Children in Need" telethon.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In July 2017, it was announced that Coyle had signed a recording deal with Virgin EMI Records. She released her new single, "Go to Work", on 8 September 2017. In February 2018, it was announced that Coyle will release a four-track EP "Nadine" in April 2018. "Girls on Fire" was the first track to be released from the EP, on 8 February 2018.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: Coyle announced a seven-date tour, touring the UK and Ireland in May 2018. The tour was cancelled without reschedule in April 2018, a month before commencing, with Coyle stating it was becoming "impossible to achieve" what they had wanted to do, and that the cancellation was "definitely a lesson" for her. In 2019, Coyle returned to the music scene with her summer anthem "Fool for Love", produced by Brian Higgins of Xenomania. In December of that year, Coyle announced another track called "All That I Know" which was released in 2020.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In October 2022, Nadine sang a cover of The Cranberries classic Zombie, as it was voted the number 1 Irish song of all time by RTE2FM listeners. Her performance gathered great reviews.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: As a member of Girls Aloud, Coyle has also appeared in the fly on the wall documentary "", the E4 documentary series "", and a one-off variety show entitled "The Girls Aloud Party". Coyle made a cameo appearance in Natasha Bedingfield's video for "I Wanna Have Your Babies".


title: Nadine Coyle

text: Coyle contributed to the book "Dreams that Glitter - Our Story", an autobiography with her Girls Aloud bandmates, in October 2008. The book was written with a ghostwriter and published by the Transworld imprint Bantam Press. The book featured unseen photographs and included insights into the members' personal lives, their success together, style tips, and "everything we've learned about life, love and music."


title: Nadine Coyle

text: As a member of Girls Aloud, Coyle has also endorsed Barbie, KitKat, Nintendo DS, Samsung, Sunsilk and Pandora.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In December 2009, Coyle visited her hometown of Derry to successfully break the record of the most trees planted in one site in an hour by 100 volunteers. Coyle has also dedicated some of her time to charities, including the Northern Ireland children's hospice.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: Coyle published her new record label Black Pen Records, which additionally released her debut album "Insatiable" and her further singles. In 2012, Coyle served as a guest judge for an episode of the series "America's Next Top Model".


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In March 2018, Coyle appeared in Fabulous Magazine with a cover photo shoot and feature interview where she discussed life after Girls Aloud.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In 2019, Coyle participated in the nineteenth series of "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!" and finished in fifth place.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In 2006, Coyle moved from Northern Ireland to Los Angeles, California. This led to her constantly commuting back and forth between the US and the UK for her projects with Girls Aloud and as a solo artist. Whilst living in Los Angeles, Coyle opened an Irish pub restaurant in Sunset Beach, California named Nadine's Irish Mist in 2008 as a family business, which would allow family members to live near her and help her run the business. In 2013, her estimated wealth was £6 million according to that year's "Sunday Times" Rich List.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: On 15 August 2013, Coyle announced on her Instagram account that she was expecting a child. She further confirmed her reunion with ex-fiancé Jason Bell, who is the father of her daughter. Their daughter, Anaíya Bell, was born on 10 February 2014.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: In 2015, after nine years in Los Angeles, Coyle closed down Nadine's Irish Mist and moved back to Northern Ireland to raise her daughter Anaíya. She stated that she decided to close the restaurant as the business gradually took a toll on her overworked family members, and that she was tired of being approached by film and television producers who wanted to use the restaurant for their projects. She also stated that she was becoming homesick for Northern Ireland whilst living in Los Angeles.


title: Nadine Coyle

text: Coyle and Bell split in 2019 "due to their increasingly distanced lives", as Bell remained in the United States when Coyle returned to Northern Ireland. However, by 2021 the two were living together in Northern Ireland to allow Bell to co-parent Anaíya during the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: BattleBots

text: BattleBots (logo: Bꓭ) is an American robot combat television series. The show was an adaptation of the British show "Robot Wars", in which competitors design and operate remote-controlled armed and armored machines designed to fight in an arena combat elimination tournament. For five seasons, "BattleBots" aired on the American Comedy Central and was hosted by Bil Dwyer, Sean Salisbury, and Tim Green. Comedy Central's first season premiered on August 23, 2000, and its fifth and last season ended on December 21, 2002. The show was in hiatus until it was revived on ABC in 2015.


title: BattleBots

text: A six-episode revival series premiered on ABC on June 21, 2015, to generally favorable reviews and ratings. Additionally, ABC renewed "BattleBots" for a seventh season, which premiered on June 23, 2016.


title: BattleBots

text: In February 2018, Discovery Channel and Science picked up the show for an eighth season, which premiered on May 11, 2018. A ninth season of "BattleBots" premiered on Discovery Channel on June 7, 2019, the tenth season premiered on December 3, 2020. and the eleventh season on January 6, 2022.


title: BattleBots

text: On December 3, 2020, it was announced that a spin-off titled "" would be produced. That spinoff premiered on January 4, 2021 on Discovery+.


title: BattleBots

text: A second spin-off premiered in August 5, 2022 under the name "BattleBots: Champions" where bots fight to gain a slot in an eight-robot competition that combines former and current Battlebots champions with the winners of BattleBots: Champions episodes.


title: BattleBots

text: "BattleBots" is an offshoot of the original version "Robot Wars", the brainchild of Marc Thorpe. Robot Wars had financial backing from Sm:)e communications, a New York record company. The Thorpe partnership broke up in 1997, starting many years of legal wrangling between Thorpe and Profile Records (the former Sm:)e Communications). Profile licensed "Robot Wars" to a UK production company and "Robot Wars" ran for seven years as a popular television program in the UK, before being revived for 2016.


title: BattleBots

text: The robot builders left behind in San Francisco formed BattleBots, Inc. and began a series of competitions. The first was held in Long Beach, California in August 1999 and streamed online, attracting 40,000 streams. Lenny Stucker, a television producer known for his work on telecasts of professional boxing, was in attendance and showed interest in being involved with "BattleBots"—believing the concept of robot combat was "hip" and have shown an interest in technology. Stucker made changes to the competition's format and presentation to make it more suitable for television, including elements reminiscent of boxing (such as a red and blue corner) and shifting to a single-elimination format. The creators tried selling the competition as a television series to networks such as CBS, NBC, HBO, and Showtime—but they failed to understand the concept of the program or take it seriously. A second event was held as a pay-per-view in Las Vegas in 1999, the PPV was in turn, used as a pilot to pitch the show again, with a higher rate of success.


title: BattleBots

text: Among the networks interested was Comedy Central, who ultimately picked up the program. Debbie Liebling, the network's Senior Vice President of original programming and development, felt that the concept would appeal to the network's young adult demographic, explaining that "it was really funny and really nerdy. The Internet was not a big thing yet, so the nerd culture wasn't so celebrated. It was sports for the nerdy person, I guess." Co-creator Greg Munson viewed the deal as a double-edged sword; it gave "BattleBots" an outlet and a larger budget, but the network insisted on the addition of comedic aspects to "BattleBots" as a program, such as sketches involving contestants. However, the competition itself was not affected by this mandate; Liebling described the final product as being "a parody of a sports show without being a parody". Munson lamented that the network had also ignored his suggestion for the co-host role to be filled by "attractive geek girls" with sufficient knowledge to speak with builders, having elected to "[keep] throwing bigger and better hot babes at it", such as Carmen Electra.


title: BattleBots

text: Despite this, viewership and awareness of "BattleBots" grew progressively over time; contestants Christian Carlberg and Lisa Winter were invited to appear on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno", "BattleBots" beat "South Park" as Comedy Central's highest-rated program for a period during Season 3, competitor interest grew and licensing deals also emerged. The success of "BattleBots", however, resulted in competition from other broadcasters; TLC introduced a competing program, "Robotica", while other channels imported episodes of the British "Robot Wars" series. By 2002, the program had begun to face further difficulties; Munson felt that the bouts had become "homogenized" because the participants had "perfected" the sport of robot fighting, leading to a lack of innovation in robot designs and strategies. Furthermore, "BattleBots" had sued Anheuser-Busch and its advertising agency for producing and airing a commercial during Super Bowl XXXVII that parodied the program and featured a robot greatly resembling one from "BattleBots" (this lawsuit, however, was dismissed in 2004, after a judge ruled that the ad was a parody protected by fair use). In September 2002, Comedy Central cancelled "BattleBots" after its fifth season, "BattleBots 5.0". Viacom acquired full control of the network in April 2003; Stucker believed that Comedy Central had become "tired" of the program, and Roski stated that Viacom had wanted to shift Comedy Central back towards traditional comedy programming.


title: BattleBots

text: Between the 21st and 26 August 2009 a BattleBots event was held and filmed in California. Three competitions were held The High School Championship, Collegiate Championship and Pro Championship. Competitors included a mix of Comedy Cental and Reboot stars. CBS sport originally agreed to air the Collegiate Championship before dropping out due to lack of commercial interest. A deal with Fox was later signed before also falling apart for unknown reasons. The pilot episode of the Collegiate Championship was released onto the official BattleBots Youtube Channel on the 17th of September 2010.


title: BattleBots

text: In December 2015, ABC announced that it had picked up a six-episode revival of "BattleBots", produced by Whalerock Industries, to premiere in June 2015. Roski and Munson served as executive producers, joined by Lloyd Braun. The revival drew an average viewership of 5.4 million in its Sunday-night timeslot, with a 1.9 share in the 18-49 demographic. In November 2015, ABC announced that it had renewed the "BattleBots" revival for a second season, which expanded the competition to a 56-team field.


title: BattleBots

text: After ABC declined to renew the revival for a third season, the series was picked up by Discovery Channel and sister network Science. On April 18, 2018, Discovery and Science Channel announced that a new season would begin on Friday, May 11, 2018, at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on Discovery Channel and Wednesday, May 16, 2018, at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on Science Channel. The announcement reported that amongst the returning bots would be favorites Tombstone, Minotaur, Chomp, Witch Doctor, Bronco, Bombshell, Bite Force, and Yeti. Chris Rose and Kenny Florian return to call the action, provide background information about the bots and teams, and offer commentary. Jessica Chobot served again as the sideline reporter. Faruq Tauheed returned as the ring announcer.


title: BattleBots

text: BattleBots was then brought back for another season on June 5, 2019, on Discovery and Science Channel. Chris Rose and Kenny Florian returned as hosts with a new sideline reporter, Jenny Taft, interviewing all of the BattleBots competitors in the workshop. A tenth season was set to premiere on Discovery on May 15, 2020; however, due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it was pushed to December 3, 2020. Filming began on October 10 and ended on October 21.


title: BattleBots

text: For the first five seasons, "BattleBots" was hosted by Bil Dwyer, Sean Salisbury, and Tim Green. Correspondents included former "Baywatch" actresses Donna D'Errico, Carmen Electra, and Traci Bingham, former Playboy Playmate Heidi Mark, comedian Arj Barker and identical twins Randy and Jason Sklar. Bill Nye was the show's "technical expert". The show's match announcer was longtime boxing ring announcer Mark Beiro.


title: BattleBots

text: The 2015 edition was hosted by Molly McGrath, with Chris Rose and former UFC fighting legend Kenny Florian as commentators. The battle arena announcer was Faruq Tauheed, and Alison Haislip conducted interviews on the sidelines and behind the scenes. The judges were engineer and NASA astronaut Leland Melvin, "Nerdist News" anchor Jessica Chobot and visual effects artist, and former competitor, Fon Davis.


title: BattleBots

text: For the 2016 season, Samantha Ponder was added as host, replacing Molly McGrath. The returning judges were Fon Davis, Jessica Chobot, and Leland Melvin, as well as celebrity guest judges actor Clark Gregg, "MythBusters" host and former Battlebots builder Adam Savage, NFL tightend Vernon Davis, and YouTube star Michael Stevens a.k.a. Vsauce.


title: BattleBots

text: For the 2018 season, Rose, Florian, and Tauheed all returned in their roles, with Rose and Florian taking over as the primary hosts of the show. Chobot and Haislip switched their roles, with Chobot becoming the new sideline reporter and Haislip one of the rotating judges. Other judges include former "Battlebots" competitors Lisa Winter, Derek Young, Grant Imahara and Mark Setrakian.


title: BattleBots

text: For the 2019 season, Chobot was replaced with Jenny Taft as a sideline reporter, and the judging panel was fixed to Winter, Young, and former competitor Jason Bardis instead of rotating as it had done in previous seasons.


title: BattleBots

text: For the 2020 season, former builder Peter Abrahamson was added as a ringside "bot whisperer" who provided technical details and in-depth analysis of matchups, robots, and damage.


title: BattleBots

text: Robots at BattleBots tournaments were separated into four weight classes in seasons 1–5. The weight limits increased slightly over time. At the final tournaments the classes were:


title: BattleBots

text: Starting in season 6, there were no longer separate weight classes while the weight limit for heavyweights was increased from 220 to 250 pounds.


title: BattleBots

text: "Walking" robots (stompbots) propelled by means other than wheels were initially given a 50% weight bonus. The rules changed following the victory of a heavyweight stompbot (Son of Whyachi) at BattleBots 3.0. For BattleBots 4.0 and beyond only a 20% weight bonus was given to walkers and the technical rules specified that walking mechanisms do not use cam operated walking mechanisms as they were functionally too similar to wheel operation. Since the rules change, walking robots have entered the competition, but none has achieved any success beyond preliminary rounds. As of 2020, true walkers are given a 100% weight bonus, allowing the only competing walker, Chomp, to weigh 500 pounds.


title: BattleBots

text: Matches are three minutes long. During a match, two robots do their best to destroy or disable each other using whatever means available. The match begins with a series of lights that flash from yellow to green. The original Comedy Central version used a standard Christmas tree as seen in the sport of drag racing; the ABC revival uses just one box of lights that flash yellow three times, and then flash green.


title: BattleBots

text: There are only two events that cause the match to be paused resulting in people entering the BattleBox. One is the event that the robots are stuck together and cannot separate or that both have simultaneously become immobilized. The other scenario is that one or both 'bots have caught on fire. In that case, the people entering the BattleBox are equipped with fire extinguishers.


title: BattleBots

text: If a robot grabs an opposing robot by any means, the grabber robot can hold the defender for 30 seconds before the grabber needs to release the defender.


title: BattleBots

text: If a robot is unable to move for ten seconds, because it is too badly damaged or it is stuck in some manner (e.g. ensnared in an arena-trap), it is declared knocked out. In the Comedy Central version, the driver could also call a "tap-out" to forfeit the match if his or her robot is about to be destroyed. This ends the match ten seconds later; the opposing driver is "asked" (but not instructed) not to attack during the ten-second count.


title: BattleBots

text: If both robots survive the three minutes, three judges distribute a total of 45 points (15 points a judge, 5 points per judge per category) over three categories. The robot with the higher score wins. The judging categories are Aggression, Strategy, and Damage. In Season 6 (June/July 2015), the judging categories were Aggression, Damage, Strategy, and Control. A robot who hangs back safely from its opponent will not get many Aggression points; one in there fighting the whole time, however, will. The Strategy category is about how well a robot exploits its opponent's weaknesses, protects its own, and handles the hazards. A robot driving over the kill saws will lose points here unless it had good reason to do so, while a robot that is able to attack its opponent's weak areas will gain points. The Damage category is for how much damage the bot can deal to its opponent while remaining intact itself.


title: BattleBots

text: At the end of the tournament, a series of 'rumbles' or 'melee rounds' is typically held in each weight class, allowing robots that survived the main tournament to fight in a 'free for all' in a 5-minute match. Occasionally there are too many robots for one rumble, and multiple rumbles are held with the top surviving bots competing in a final event.


title: BattleBots

text: During the Season 5 Heavyweight rumble (the first rumble of that competition), a sheared-off robot part went through the Lexan arena roof and fell (harmlessly) into the audience. Because of this, the rest of the rumbles were canceled due to safety concerns.


title: BattleBots

text: The BattleBox is a 48' x 48' square arena designed to protect the drivers, officials, and audience from flying debris and charging bots. It was originally designed by Pete Lampertson. As of the 2015 season, Pete was still overseeing the box with the help of Matt Neubauer. It has a steel floor and steel-framed walls and roof paneled with thick, bulletproof polycarbonate plastic. The teams bring their robots in through doorways, which are sealed after all humans have exited. The drivers control their machines from outside the sealed arena.


title: BattleBots

text: Arena booby-traps are intended to make fights more interesting and unpredictable and to reward drivers who can avoid the traps while pushing or carrying their opponent into them. Traps from the first five seasons include (and where noted, omitted for the later ABC/Discovery/Science Channel-shown seasons):


title: BattleBots

text: Beside the Giant Nut trophy awarded to the winning team of the championship tournament, there are cash prizes for all Robots that compete in combat at the Tournament. In the second season of the ABC revival series, the winner of the championship tournament finals was awarded a cash prize of US$ During Season 10, the prize was US$


title: BattleBots

text: Additionally, the Giant Bolt trophies are awarded to teams based on their robot’s design and operation, regardless of their performance in the tournament. The awarded categories are: Most Destructive Robot, Best Designer, and Founder’s Award. Following the death of longtime competitor Grant Imahara in 2020, the Best Designer award was renamed to the Grant Imahara Award for Best Design in his honor.


title: BattleBots

text: On December 3, 2020, it was announced that a spin-off titled "BattleBots: Bounty Hunters" was released. The streaming series premiered on January 4, 2021 on Discovery+.


title: BattleBots

text: "BattleBots: Bounty Hunters" features veteran bots who have dominated all past challengers. For the first time ever, the series places a "bounty" on some of the heads of the 'most lethal, most destructive, and the most ruthless bots'. A group of the best builders step forward to defend their title. With six elite tournaments and US$ on the line, the newcomers only have one shot to take down a legendary bot.


title: BattleBots

text: On July 19, 2022, it was announced that a spin-off titled "BattleBots: Champions" was released. The streaming series premiered on August 4, 2022 on Discovery+.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that most sanctions of criminal punishment for consensual, adult non-procreative sexual activity (commonly referred to as sodomy laws) are unconstitutional. The Court reaffirmed the concept of a "right to privacy" that earlier cases, had found the U.S. Constitution provides, even though it is not explicitly enumerated. It based its ruling on the notions of personal autonomy to define one's own relationships and of American traditions of non-interference with private sexual decisions between consenting adults.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: In 1998, John Geddes Lawrence Jr., an older white man, was arrested along with Tyron Garner, a younger black man, at Lawrence's apartment in Harris County, Texas. Garner's former boyfriend had called the police, claiming that there was a man with a weapon in the apartment. Sheriff's deputies said they found the men engaging in sexual intercourse. Lawrence and Garner were charged with a misdemeanor under Texas' anti-sodomy law; both pleaded no contest and received a fine. Assisted by the American civil rights organization Lambda Legal, Lawrence and Garner appealed their sentences to the Texas Courts of Appeals, which ruled in 2000 that the sodomy law was unconstitutional. Texas appealed to have the court rehear the case "en banc", and in 2001 it overturned its prior judgment and upheld the law. Lawrence appealed this decision to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which denied his request for appeal. Lawrence then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: The Supreme Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas in a 6–3 decision, and by extension invalidated sodomy laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory. The Court, with a five-justice majority, overturned its previous ruling on the same issue in the 1986 case "Bowers v. Hardwick", where it upheld a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy. It explicitly overruled "Bowers", holding that it had viewed the liberty interest too narrowly. The Court held that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. "Lawrence" invalidated similar laws throughout the United States that criminalized sodomy between consenting adults acting in private, whatever the sex of the participants.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: The case attracted much public attention, and 33 "amici curiae" ("friends of the court") briefs were filed. Its outcome was celebrated by gay rights advocates, and set the stage for further reconsideration of standing law, including the landmark case of "Obergefell v. Hodges" (2015), which recognized same-sex marriage as a fundamental right under the United States Constitution, and "United States v. Windsor", which invalidated Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Legal punishments for sodomy often included heavy fines, prison sentences, or both, with some states, beginning with Illinois in 1827, denying other rights, such as suffrage, to anyone convicted of the crime of sodomy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several states imposed various eugenics laws against anyone deemed to be a "sexual pervert". As late as 1970, Connecticut denied a driver's license to a man for being an "admitted homosexual".


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: As of 1960, every state had an anti-sodomy law. In 1961, the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code advocated the repeal of sodomy laws as they applied to private, adult, consensual behavior. Two years later the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took its first major case in opposition to these laws.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: In "Griswold v. Connecticut" (1965), the Supreme Court struck down a law barring the use of contraceptives by married couples. In "Griswold," the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that couples, at least married couples, had a right to privacy, drawing on the Fourth Amendment's protection of private homes from searches and seizures without a warrant based on probable cause, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law in the states, and the Ninth Amendment's assurance that rights not specified in the Constitution are "retained by the people". "Eisenstadt v. Baird" (1972) expanded the scope of sexual privacy rights to unmarried persons. In 1973, in "Roe v. Wade" the US Supreme court extended that supposed right to privacy to protect a woman's right to have an abortion, although the extent to which that might be regulated by the government varied, with almost absolute protection in the first trimester, and allowing for increating regulation as the pregnancy progressed.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: In "Bowers v. Hardwick" (1986), the Supreme Court heard a constitutional challenge to sodomy laws brought by a man who had been arrested, but was not prosecuted, for engaging in oral sex with another man in his home. The Court rejected this challenge in a 5 to 4 decision. Justice Byron White's majority opinion emphasized that "Eisenstadt" and "Roe" had only recognized a right to engage in procreative sexual activity, and that long-standing moral antipathy toward homosexual sodomy was enough to argue against the notion of a right to sodomy. Justice Blackmun, writing in dissent, argued that "Eisenstadt" held that the Constitution protects people as individuals, not as family units. He then reasoned that because state intrusions are equally burdensome on an individual's personal life regardless of his marital status or sexual orientation, there is no reason to treat the rights of citizens in same-sex couples any differently.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: By the time of the "Lawrence" decision, ten states—Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Michigan, Utah, and Virginia—still banned consensual sodomy without respect to the sex of those involved, and four—Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri (partially)—prohibited same-sex couples from engaging in anal and oral sex.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: On September 17, 1998, John Geddes Lawrence Jr., a gay 55-year-old medical technologist, was hosting two gay acquaintances, Tyron Garner, age 31, and Robert Eubanks, 40, at his apartment in northeast Harris County, Texas, east of the Houston city limits. Lawrence and Eubanks had been friends for more than 20 years. Garner and Eubanks had a tempestuous on-again off-again romantic relationship since 1990. Lacking transportation home, the couple were preparing to spend the night. Eubanks, who had been drinking heavily, left to purchase a soda from a nearby vending machine. Apparently outraged that Lawrence had been flirting with Garner, he called police and reported "a black male going crazy with a gun" at Lawrence's apartment.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Four Harris County sheriff's deputies responded within minutes and Eubanks pointed them to the apartment. They entered the unlocked apartment toward 11 p.m. with their weapons drawn. In accordance with police procedures, the first to arrive, Joseph Quinn, took the lead both in approaching the scene and later in determining what charges to bring. He later reported seeing Lawrence and Garner having anal sex in the bedroom. A second officer reported seeing them engaged in oral sex, and two others did not report seeing the pair having sex. Lawrence repeatedly challenged the police for entering his home. Quinn had discretionary authority to charge them for a variety of offenses and to determine whether to arrest them. When Quinn considered charging them with having sex in violation of state law, he had to get an Assistant District Attorney to check the statutes to be certain they covered sexual activity inside a residence. He was told that Texas' anti-sodomy statute, the "Homosexual Conduct" law, made it a Class C misdemeanor if someone "engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex". The statute, Chapter 21, Sec. 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code, had been adopted in 1973 when the state revised its criminal code to end its proscription on heterosexual anal and oral intercourse.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Quinn decided to arrest Lawrence and Garner and charge them with having "deviate sex". In the separate arrest reports he filed for each, he wrote that he had seen the arrestee "engaged in deviate sexual conduct namely, anal sex, with another man". Lawrence and Garner were held in jail overnight. At a hearing the next day, they pleaded not guilty to a charge of "homosexual conduct". They were released toward midnight. Eubanks pleaded no contest to charges of filing a false police report. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail but was released early.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: The gay rights advocates from Lambda Legal litigating the case convinced Lawrence and Garner not to contest the charges and to plead no contest instead. On November 20, Lawrence and Garner pleaded no contest to the charges and waived their right to a trial. Justice of the Peace Mike Parrott found them guilty and imposed a $100 fine and court costs of $41.25 on each defendant. When the defense attorneys realized that the fine was below the minimum required to permit them to appeal the convictions, they asked the judge to impose a higher penalty. Parrott, well aware that the attorneys intended to use the case to raise a constitutional challenge, increased it to $125 with the agreement of the prosecutor.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: To appeal, Lawrence and Garner needed to have their cases tried in Harris County Criminal Court. Their attorneys asked the court to dismiss the charges against them on Fourteenth Amendment equal protection grounds, claiming that the law was unconstitutional since it prohibited sodomy between same-sex couples, but not between heterosexual couples. They also asserted a right to privacy and that the Supreme Court's decision in "Bowers v. Hardwick" that found no privacy protection for consensual sex between homosexuals was "wrongly decided". On December 22, Judge Sherman Ross denied the defense motions to dismiss. The defendants again pleaded "no contest". Ross fined them $200 each, the amount agreed upon in advance by both sides.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: A three-judge panel of the Texas Fourteenth Court of Appeals heard the case on November 3, 1999. Their 2–1 decision issued on June 8, 2000, ruled the Texas law was unconstitutional. Justice John S. Anderson and Chief Justice Paul Murphy found that the law violated the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment to the Texas Constitution, which bars discrimination based on sex, race, color, creed, or national origin. J. Harvey Hudson dissented. The Court of Appeals decided to review the case "en banc". On March 15, 2001, without hearing oral arguments, it reversed the three-judge panel's decision and upheld the law's constitutionality 7–2, denying both the substantive due process and equal protection arguments. Attorneys for Lawrence and Garner asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest appellate court in Texas for criminal matters, to review the case. After a year's delay, on April 17, 2002, that request was denied. Lambda Legal's Harlow called that decision "a major abdication of judicial responsibility". Bill Delmore, the Harris County prosecutor who argued the case, called the judges "big chickens" and said: "They have a history of avoiding the hot potato cases if they can."


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: In a petition for "certiorari" filed in the U.S. Supreme Court on July 16, 2002, Lambda Legal attorneys asked the Court to consider:


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: On December 2, 2002, the Court agreed to hear the case. Lambda Legal coordinated the submission of sixteen "amicus curiae" briefs to complement their own brief. Submitting organizations included the American Bar Association, the American Psychological Society, the American Public Health Association, the Cato Institute, the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of history professors, and a group of religious denominations. An op-ed in support by former Senator Alan Simpson appeared in "The Wall Street Journal" on the morning scheduled for oral argument. The attorneys for Texas did not control the "amicus" briefs submitted in support of their position by representatives of religious and social conservatism, including Jay Alan Sekulow and Robert P. George. Several, including that of Liberty Counsel, depicted homosexuals as self-destructive, disease-prone, and promiscuous. The states of Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah advised the Court that unlike heterosexual sodomy, homosexual sodomy had "severe physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences".


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: At oral argument on March 26, 2003, Paul M. Smith, an experienced litigator who had argued eight cases before the Supreme Court, spoke on behalf of the plaintiffs. Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, refused to have his office argue the case. Charles A. Rosenthal, District Attorney of Harris County, represented the state. His performance was later described as "the worst oral argument in years", but some believe his lack of preparation reflected his lack of enthusiasm for the statute he was defending.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: On June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 decision in favor of Lawrence that struck down Texas's statute. Five justices held it violated the Due Process Clause, while a sixth, Sandra Day O'Connor, held it violated the Equal Protection Clause.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Five justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. The Court ruled that Texas's law prohibiting private homosexual activity between consenting adults violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court did not speak of private sexual activity as a fundamental right that might require the highest "strict scrutiny" standard of judicial review. Instead, it focused on why the Court's decision in "Bowers v. Hardwick" was wrong.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: First, the Court stated that its decision in "Bowers" went against its statements in cases involving child-rearing ("Pierce v. Society of Sisters" and "Meyer v. Nebraska"), contraception ("Griswold v. Connecticut" and "Eisenstadt v. Baird", and abortion ("Roe v. Wade") that the Constitution protects a right to privacy and personal autonomy. Next, Kennedy wrote that in "Bowers" the Court had misread the historical record regarding laws criminalizing homosexual relations. He stated that, after further research, the Court had found that historical American anti-sodomy laws had been directed at "nonprocreative sexual activity more generally," rather than specifically at homosexual acts, contrary to the Court's conclusions in "Bowers". Combined with the fact that these laws were often unenforced, the Court saw this as constituting a tradition of avoiding interference with private sexual activity between consenting adults.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Lastly, Kennedy noted that "Bowers" jurisprudential foundation had been weakened by two subsequent cases involving sexuality ("Planned Parenthood v. Casey" and "Romer v. Evans"), and that the reasoning of "Bowers" had been criticized in the United States and rejected by most other developed Western countries. For this reason, Kennedy stated that there was a jurisprudential basis to think that it should be "an integral part of human freedom" for consenting adults to choose to privately engage in sexual activity.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Kennedy wrote: "The petitioners [Lawrence and Garner] are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime." Kennedy reviewed the assumption the court made in "Bowers", using the words of Chief Justice Burger's concurring opinion in that case, that "Condemnation of [homosexual practices] is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards." He reviewed the history of legislation that criminalized certain sexual practices, but without regard for the gender of those involved. He cited the Model Penal Code's recommendations since 1955, the Wolfenden Report of 1957, and a 1981 decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Case 7525/76 "Dudgeon v United Kingdom".


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor only concurred in the judgment and wrote a concurring opinion in which she offered a different rationale for invalidating the Texas sodomy statute. She disagreed with the overturning of "Bowers"—she had been in the "Bowers" majority—and disputed the court's invocation of due process guarantees of liberty in this context. Rather than including sexuality within protected liberty, she would strike down the law as violating the equal protection clause because it criminalized male–male but not male–female sodomy. O'Connor maintained that a sodomy law that was neutral both in effect and application might be constitutional, but that there was little to fear because "democratic society" would not tolerate it for long. O'Connor noted that a law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples would pass rational scrutiny as long as it was designed to "preserv[e] the traditional institution of marriage" and not simply based on the state's dislike of homosexual persons.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissent, which Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas joined. Scalia objected to the Court's decision to revisit "Bowers", pointing out many decisions from lower courts that relied on "Bowers" that might now need to be reconsidered. He noted that the same rationale used to overturn "Bowers" could have been used to overturn "Roe v. Wade", which some of the Justices in the majority in "Lawrence" had upheld in "Planned Parenthood v. Casey" (1992). Scalia also criticized the majority opinion for failing to give the same respect to "stare decisis" that three of those in the majority had insisted on in "Casey". O'Connor's concurrence noted that Scalia's dissent conceded that if cases such as "Romer v. Evans" "have "stare decisis" effect, Texas' sodomy law would not pass scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause, regardless of the type of rational basis review" applied.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Scalia wrote that if the court was not prepared to validate laws based on moral choices as it had done in "Bowers", state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity would not prove sustainable.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: He cited the majority opinion's concern that the criminalization of sodomy could be the basis for discrimination against homosexuals as evidence that the majority ignored the views of most Americans:


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: He continued: "Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means." The majority's "invention of a brand-new 'constitutional right'", he wrote, showed it was "impatient of democratic change".


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Justice Thomas wrote in a separate, two-paragraph dissent that the law the Court struck down was "uncommonly silly", a phrase from Justice Potter Stewart's dissent in "Griswold v. Connecticut", but he voted to uphold it as he could find "no general right of privacy" or relevant liberty in the Constitution. He added that if he were a member of the Texas legislature he would vote to repeal the law. Finally, Thomas concluded that:


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: President George W. Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer refused to comment on the decision, noting only that the administration had not filed a brief in the case. As governor, Bush had opposed the repeal of the Texas sodomy provision, which he called a "symbolic gesture of traditional values". After quoting Fleischer calling it "a state matter", Linda Greenhouse, writing in "The New York Times", commented: "In fact, the decision today ... took what had been a state-by-state matter and pronounced a binding national constitutional principle."


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: The Lambda Legal's lead attorney in the case, Ruth Harlow, stated in an interview after the ruling that "the court admitted its mistake in 1986, admitted it had been wrong then ... and emphasized today that gay Americans, like all Americans, are entitled to full respect and equal claim to [all] constitutional rights."


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Professor Laurence Tribe has written that "Lawrence" "may well be remembered as the "Brown v. Board of Education" of gay and lesbian America". Jay Alan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice has referred to the decision as having "changed the status of homosexual acts and changed a previous ruling of the Supreme Court ... this was a drastic rewrite".


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: The end result of "Lawrence v. Texas" was "like the "Roe v. Wade" of the homosexual issue", according to Peter LaBarbera of the Culture and Family Institute and Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, an organization recognized as a anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: "Lawrence" invalidated age of consent laws that differed based on the relative sexes of the partners. The day after the "Lawrence" decision, the Supreme Court ordered the State of Kansas to review its 1999 "Romeo and Juliet" law that reduces the punishment for a teenager under 18 years of age who has consensual sexual relations with a minor no more than four years their junior but explicitly excludes same-sex conduct from the sentence reduction. In 2004, the Kansas Appeals Court upheld the law as is, but the Kansas Supreme Court unanimously reversed the lower court's ruling on October 21, 2005, in "State v. Limon".


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: In "Muth v. Frank" (2005), following "Lawrence" a man convicted of criminal behavior by having an incestuous relationship in Wisconsin appealed his ruling in an attempt to apply the logic of sexual privacy in "Lawrence". The Seventh Circuit declined to extend the right of privacy stated in "Lawrence" to cases of consensual adult incest. The case was distinguished because parties were not similarly situated since there is in the latter case an enhanced possibility of genetic mutation of a possible offspring as suggested by geneticists who were witnesses at the trial.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: In "Martin v. Ziherl", the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled the state's fornication law unconstitutional relying on "Lawrence" and the right to privacy.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: The Connecticut Supreme Court rejected an argument based on "Lawrence" that a high school teacher had a constitutional right to engage in sexual activity with his consent-aged students. The court rejected the teacher's privacy and liberty arguments in the context of an "inherently coercive relationship wherein consent might not easily be refused".


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Upon rehearing "Williams v. Pryor" after "Lawrence", the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Alabama's ban on the sale of sex toys. Facing comparable facts, the Fifth Circuit struck down Texas's sex toy ban holding that "morality is an insufficient justification for a statute" and "interests in 'public morality' cannot constitutionally sustain the statute after "Lawrence"".


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Lawrence v. Texas should pose no serious obstacle to bestiality prosecutions because such laws “plainly can be upheld on a ‘cruelty to animals’ justification.” Leighann Lassiter, animal cruelty policy director for the Humane Society of the United States, notes, however, the "Lawrence" ruling may create complications in several states that include human sexual conduct and bestiality in the same "anti-sodomy" statute. As of 2018, 45 states have direct prohibitions on bestiality, while others may prohibit it under broader animal cruelty laws, according to the Animal Legal and Historical Center (Michigan State University College of Law).


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: A few months later, on November 18, 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples have a right to marry. Although deciding the case on the basis of the state constitution, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall quoted "Lawrence" in its second paragraph: "Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code."


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Aside from Massachusetts, other state case law had been quite explicit in limiting the scope of "Lawrence" and upholding state bans on same-sex marriage regulations. (See "Standhardt v. Superior Court ex rel County of Maricopa", 77 P.3d 451 (Ariz. App. 2003); "Morrison v. Sadler", 821 N.E.2d 15 (Ind. App. 2005); "Hernandez v Robles" (7 NY3d 338 2005).)


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: In the first successful federal court challenge to a state same-sex marriage ban, Judge Vaughn Walker cited Scalia's dissent in his decision in "Perry v. Schwarzenegger" that found California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage unconstitutional.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: In the majority decision, Justice Kennedy wrote: “The present case does not involve minors. It does not involve persons who might be injured or coerced or who are situated in relationships where consent might not easily be refused." The "obvious" meaning, as Nancy D. Polikoff wrote, was to point out that "Lawrence" could not be used to legalize "sex with children". Nonetheless, in 2004, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals quoted this sentence when saying that "Lawrence" had not established a right for gay parents to adopt. In an adoption case, the 11th Circuit said, "the involved actors are not only consenting adults, but minors as well...Hence, we conclude that the "Lawrence" decision cannot be extrapolated to create a right to adopt for homosexual persons."


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: The United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, the last court of appeals for courts-martial before the Supreme Court, ruled that "Lawrence" applies to Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the article banning sodomy. It also twice upheld prosecutions under Article 125 when applied as necessary to preserve good order and discipline in the armed forces.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned "Roe v. Wade" (1973) in "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization" and removed the federal protection of the right to abortion, on the grounds that the "right to privacy" does not extend to that of abortion on the criteria from "Washington v. Glucksberg" that a right must be "deeply rooted in the Nation's history", and abortion was considered a crime, a view that some historians argued is incomplete. In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito responded to the dissent opinion's concerns, saying that the ruling would not affect other substantive due process cases. In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, "In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including "Griswold", "Lawrence", and "Obergefell". Because any substantive due process decision is 'demonstrably erroneous' ... we have a duty to 'correct the error' established in those precedents." The three cases Thomas mentioned concerned contraception ("Griswold"), sodomy ("Lawrence"), and same-sex marriage ("Obergefell"). respectively. The dissenting opinion, which criticized the majority for rejecting "stare decisis" and overruling precedents dating back to "Griswold", responded, "Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other."


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Justice Scalia and others have noted that the majority did not appear to apply the strict scrutiny standard of review that would be appropriate if the "Lawrence" majority had recognized a full-fledged "fundamental right". He wrote the majority instead applied "an unheard-of form of rational basis review that will have far-reaching implications beyond this case".


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Nan D. Hunter has argued that "Lawrence" used a new method of substantive due process analysis, and that the Court intended to abandon its old method of categorizing due process rights as either "fundamental" or "not fundamental" as too restrictive. Justice Souter, for example, argued in "Washington v. Glucksberg" that the role of the Court in all cases, including unenumerated rights cases, is to ensure that the government's action has not been arbitrary. Justice Stevens had repeatedly criticized tiered scrutiny and preferred a more active judicial balancing test based on reasonability.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: Lower courts have read "Lawrence" differently on the question of scrutiny. In "Lofton v. Secretary of the Department of Children and Family Services", the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld a state law barring adoption of children by homosexuals, holding explicitly that "Lawrence" did not apply strict scrutiny. In "Witt v. Department of the Air Force", the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that "Lawrence" applied intermediate scrutiny.


title: Lawrence v. Texas

text: John Lawrence died of complications from a heart ailment in 2011, aged 68. Tyron Garner died of meningitis in 2006, aged 39, and Robert Eubanks was beaten to death in 2000, in a case that was never solved.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Psycho is a 1998 American psychological horror film produced and directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy, and Anne Heche. It is a modern remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film of the same name, in which an embezzler arrives at an old motel run by a mysterious man named Norman Bates; both films are adapted from Robert Bloch's 1959 novel.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Though filmed in color and set in 1998, the film is closer to a shot-for-shot retelling than most remakes, often copying Hitchcock's camera movements and editing, including the original script by Joseph Stefano (and uncredited writer Alma Reville) mostly being carried over. Bernard Herrmann's musical score is reused as well, though with a new arrangement by Danny Elfman and Steve Bartek, recorded in stereo. Some changes are introduced to account for advances in technology since the original film and to make the content more explicit. The film's murder sequences are also intercut with surreal images.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: "Psycho" was a commercial failure and earned mixed reviews from critics who criticized the similarities to the original film, though Heche's acting received some praise. It won the Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Remake and Worst Director, and was nominated for Worst Actress (Heche). However, it earned two Saturn Award nominations for Best Actress (Heche) and Best Writing.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: During a Friday afternoon tryst in a Phoenix hotel, real-estate secretary Marion Crane and her boyfriend Sam Loomis discuss their inability to get married because of his debts and alimony demands from his previous marriage to his ex-wife. Returning to work, she decides to steal a cash payment of $400,000 entrusted to her for deposit at the bank and drive to Sam's home in Fairvale, California, where he owns a hardware store. En route, she hurriedly trades her car, making both the car dealer and a California Highway Patrol trooper suspicious.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Running into bad weather, Marion stops for the night at the Bates Motel, located off the main highway. Proprietor Norman Bates descends from a large house atop a hill overlooking the motel, registers Marion under an assumed name she uses, and invites her to dine with him. After he returns to his house, Marion overhears him arguing with his mother Norma about her presence. Upon returning with a light meal and apologizing for his mother's outbursts, Norman discusses his taxidermy hobby, his mother's "illness" and how people have their own "private trap" that they wish to escape from. Returning to her room, Marion, remorseful of her crime, decides to drive back to Phoenix in the morning and return the stolen money hidden in a newspaper, unaware that the aroused Norman is watching her through a hole in the wall. As Marion showers, a shadowy figure appears, brutally stabs her to death and leaves. Anguished and horrified upon finding Marion's corpse, Norman cleans up the murder scene, wraps the body in the shower curtain and places it along with her belongings and the hidden cash in her car, and sinks the car in a swamp near the motel.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Marion's sister Lila arrives in Fairvale a week later, tells Sam about the theft, and probes her whereabouts, but he denies her disappearance. Private investigator Milton Arbogast approaches them, saying that he has been hired to retrieve the money. Learning that Marion spent a night at the Bates Motel, he questions Norman, whose nervousness and inconsistency arouse Arbogast's suspicion. When Norman implies Marion had spoken to his mother, Arbogast asks to speak to her, but Norman refuses. Arbogast, not yet suspecting the worst, updates Sam and Lila about his findings, and promises to phone again later. When he enters the Bates home looking for Norman's mother, a figure resembling an elderly woman emerges from the bedroom and fatally stabs him.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Hearing no word from Arbogast, Sam and Lila grow curious about the Bates Motel, Arbogast's last stop. The pair later visit Al Chambers, the local sheriff, who tells them that Norman's mother died in a murder-suicide ten years earlier, concluding that Arbogast lied to Sam and Lila so he could pursue Marion and the money. Convinced that something happened to Arbogast, Lila and Sam drive to the motel, check in while posing as a married couple, and infiltrate Marion's room, finding a missing shower curtain and a scrap of paper indicating that Marion subtracted an amount from her cash payment. Sam distracts Norman in the office, while Lila sneaks into the house. Suspicious, Norman becomes agitated and knocks Sam unconscious. As he runs to the house, Lila hides in the fruit cellar, where she discovers the mother's mummified body. She screams, and Norman, wearing his mother's clothes and a wig, enters the cellar and tries to stab her. Sam appears and subdues him, rescuing Lila.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: At the police station, psychiatrist Dr. Simon Richmond explains that Norman jealously murdered Norma and her lover by poisoning them with strychnine ten years earlier. He mummified her corpse and began treating it as if she were still alive, even going so far as to recreate her in his mind as an alternate personality, as jealous and possessive as she was while alive. When Norman is attracted to a woman, "Mother" takes over: he had murdered two other young women before Marion, and Arbogast was killed to hide "his mother's" crime. Dr. Richmond concludes "Mother" has now completely taken over Norman's personality. Sitting in a jail cell, Norman hears his mother saying that the murders were all his doing, as Marion's car is retrieved from the swamp.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Director Gus Van Sant was a longtime admirer of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960), and, while a film student, shot a parody commercial for a fictional "Psycho Shampoo" brand, which featured a recreation of the 1960 film's shower murder sequence. After the release of Van Sant's financially successful "Good Will Hunting" (1997), Universal Pictures agreed to option his proposed remake of the film. Van Sant's pitch was to remake the film shot-for-shot, which Casey Silver, then-head of production at Universal Pictures, felt was "a very strange idea. The idea of remaking a classic like Psycho just seemed like a dangerous business to get into". When asked why he wanted to remake the film in this manner, Van Sant responded: "Why not? It's a marketing scheme. Why does a studio ever remake a film? Because they have this little thing they've forgotten about that they could put in the marketplace and make money from".


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Marion Crane was initially slated to be played by Nicole Kidman, but she was forced to leave the role due to scheduling problems. Drew Barrymore was also considered for the role before Anne Heche was ultimately cast.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Julianne Moore, who was cast as Lila Crane, intentionally chose to portray the character as a more aggressive personality in contrast to Vera Miles's interpretation.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: William H. Macy chose to stay true to the portrayal of his character in the 1960 film, while Vince Vaughn and Julianne Moore interpreted the dialogue and scenes from the original film differently.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Filming of "Psycho" took place largely on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot in Los Angeles, with additional exterior filming taking place in Phoenix, including at the Hotel Westward Ho.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Van Sant began with the vision of remaking the film entirely shot-for-shot, stating that he and his crew started out being fanatical about doing it exactly the same, but early into the filming process, realized that doing so was unfeasible: "There were a couple of scenes we just couldn't get it right. We just couldn't see how Hitchcock did the blocking, where people were supposed to be standing in relation to the camera. So all we could do was loosely base them on the original".


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Because the film was shot in color, fake blood was used during the film's infamous shower murder scene, instead of chocolate syrup as had been done in the original film. Rick Baker designed the Mrs. Bates dummy. The new film heightened the violence to the levels of depictions of violence in films made circa 1998 by portraying two knife wounds in her back and blood on the wall in the shower scene. It also shows the buttocks of the Marion character when she dies, an aspect cut from the original film.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: The costume designer, Beatrix Aruna Pasztor, originally thought that the film was going to be a period piece, so she acquired period clothing for the cast, which was used in the film.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Though almost entirely a shot-for-shot remake of the original, the film does feature slight differences in terms of visuals, minor plot details, as well as the actors' portrayals of the characters. Van Sant updated several elements in the screenplay, including setting the film in contemporary 1998, and adjusting the references to money that would be anachronistic in a modern-day setting. Due to inflation, the amount of money stolen as stipulated in the original film was adjusted from $40,000 () to $400,000.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Where the 1960 film features little visual bloodletting in its murder sequences, Van Sant's film features more explicit violence, particularly during Marion Crane's murder sequence in the shower: in Van Sant's film, blood is shown streaming down the shower wall tiles, as well as visible stab wounds to Crane's back as she collapses in the bathtub.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: During the scene where Norman Bates spies on Marion through a peephole as she undresses, it is made explicit that Bates is masturbating through the use of sound effects as well as Vaughn's performance, which suggests Bates's voyeuristic encounter ends in him having an orgasm; in the 1960 film, the sequence consists merely of Bates observing, with no suggestion that he is masturbating.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Van Sant also employed several surreal subliminal images that were edited into the film's murder sequences, likened by horror writer Charles Derry as "surreal memory fragments" that "flash" before the characters' eyes as they die.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: "Psycho" was released theatrically in the United States on December 4, 1998 in 2,477 theaters, ranking at number two at the domestic box office with a weekend gross of $10,031,850. It went on to earn a total of $37,141,130 in the worldwide box office, $21,456,130 domestically. The film's production budget was an estimated $60 million; while promoting his 2002 film "Gerry", Van Sant said he thought the producers "broke even" financially.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, "Psycho" holds an approval rating of 40% based on 78 reviews, with an average rating of 5.30/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Van Sant's pointless remake neither improves nor illuminates Hitchcock's original". At Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 47 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Literary critic Camille Paglia commented that the only reason to watch it was "to see Anne Heche being assassinated" and that "it should have been a much more important work and event than it was". At the 1998 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, the film was cited as one of 37 dishonourable mentions for Worst Picture. Universal Pictures received the Founders Award "for even thinking the moviegoing public would line up and pay to see a shot-for-shot remake of "Psycho"".


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Film critic Roger Ebert, who gave the film one-and-a-half stars, noted that the addition of a masturbation scene was "appropriate, because this new "Psycho" evokes the real thing in an attempt to re-create remembered passion". He thought Vaughn was miscast, unable to capture the "secret pool of madness" in the Norman Bates as a character, and Heche was guilty of overacting. Ebert wrote that the film "is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema, because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted".


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Janet Maslin remarks that it is an "artful, good-looking remake (a modest term, but it beats plagiarism) that shrewdly revitalizes the aspects of the real "Psycho" (1960) that it follows most faithfully but seldom diverges seriously or successfully from one of the cinema's most brilliant blueprints"; she noted that the "absence of anything like Anthony Perkins's sensational performance with that vitally birdlike presence and sneaky way with a double-entendre ('A boy's best friend is his mother') is the new film's greatest weakness".


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Eugene Novikov for "Film Blather" admired the film, saying that he enjoyed the remake more than the original film. Jonathan Romney of "The Guardian" also championed the film, writing: "Somehow, Van Sant has managed to spin a big-budget studio project into a piece of conceptual art, a provocative inquiry into the nature of cinematic originality. It's not the full-on 'queer "Psycho"' that Van Sant fans predicted, but it is an extraordinary drag act".


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Leonard Maltin's "Movie Guide" classified the film as a "bomb", compared to the four-out-of-four stars he gave the original. He describes it as a "slow, stilted, completely pointless scene-for-scene remake of the Hitchcock classic (with a few awkward new touches to taint its claim as an exact replica)". He ultimately calls it "an insult, rather than a tribute, to a landmark film...What promised to be "Drugstore Cowboy"s answer to Hitchcock' is more like Hitchcock's answer to "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues"".


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: The film was awarded two Golden Raspberry Awards, for Worst Remake or Sequel and Worst Director for Gus Van Sant, while Anne Heche was nominated for Worst Actress, where she lost the trophy to the Spice Girls for "Spice World".


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment released "Psycho" on VHS and in a collector's edition DVD on June 8, 1999. In June 2017, Scream Factory released the film on Blu-ray for the first time, which featured a new critical audio commentary, as well as the bonus materials included on Universal's 1999 DVD release.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who wrote the original script that was carried over to the remake, thought that although she spoke the same lines, Anne Heche portrays Marion Crane as an entirely different character.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Even Van Sant later admitted that it was an experiment that proved that no one can really copy a film exactly the same way as the original. One favorable take on the film came from an "LA Weekly" retrospective article published in 2013, in which writer Vern stated that the film was misunderstood as a commercially motivated film when it was in fact an "experiment" and this was the reason for the poor reception. Vern concluded that "experiments don't always have to work to be worth doing".


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: Although the film's overall reception was less-than-favorable, it did receive a blessing from Hitchcock's daughter Pat, who stated that her father would have been flattered by the remake of his original work.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: On February 24, 2014, a mashup of Alfred Hitchcock and Van Sant's versions of "Psycho" appeared on Steven Soderbergh's Extension 765 website. Retitled "Psychos" and featuring no explanatory text, the recut appears to be a fan edit of the two films by Soderbergh. The opening credits intermingle names from both the 1960 and 1998 versions, and all color has been removed from Van Sant's scenes with the exception of the infamous shower scene.


title: Psycho (1998 film)

text: The film's soundtrack, "Psycho: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture", included Danny Elfman's re-recordings of some of Bernard Herrmann's score for the original film, along with a collection of songs in genres from country to drum and bass, connected mainly by titles containing "psycho" or other death or insanity-related words. Many of the songs were recorded specifically for the soundtrack, and included a sampling of Bernard Herrmann's score composed by Danny Elfman. The soundtrack also includes the track "Living Dead Girl" by Rob Zombie, which can be heard during the film when Marion trades in her old car for a new one.


title: Beard (companion)

text: Beard is an American slang term describing a person who is used, knowingly or unknowingly, as a date, romantic partner (boyfriend or girlfriend), or spouse either to conceal infidelity or to conceal one's sexual orientation. The term also refers, in some areas, to anyone who acted on behalf of another, in any transaction, to conceal a person's true identity. The term can be used in heterosexual and non-heterosexual contexts but is especially used within LGBTQ+ culture. References to beards are seen in mainstream television and films, and other entertainment.


title: Beard (companion)

text: The usage of the term "beard", also known as "lavender dating" or "front dating", dates to the 20th century, prior to the gay rights movements. This was at a time when homosexual relationships had not yet gained public acceptance in the Western world. Often, in the early to mid-20th century, a beard companion was used by homosexual individuals to conceal one’s sexual orientation through the disguise of a heterosexual relationship. This relationship typically was between a lesbian and a gay man in an attempt to dispel rumors of homo-orientation. In some situations, such as that of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, the pair in the beard relationship may have children together despite a lack of sexual attraction. Today, the term beard or lavender dating is used less as a result of greater acceptance of homosexuality in both the United States and Western Europe, but is still occasionally used today used by young individuals from traditional communities or conservative countries.


title: Beard (companion)

text: In early usage of the term, a beard scenario involved concealing infidelity in a monogamous relationship. In a typical scenario, X and Y are in a supposedly exclusive relationship, but X is actually cheating with Z. However, to prevent Y from learning about X's infidelity, W, the "beard", pretends to be paired with Z. Such a scenario is a central premise of Woody Allen's 1984 film "Broadway Danny Rose". The titular talent agent is the beard, pretending to date Tina, a single woman who is actually having an affair with married singer Lou Canova, Danny's client. By posing as Tina's date, Danny can bring her to Lou's performance without drawing attention from Lou's suspicious wife. The term "beard" is a running gag, used four times ("e.g.", "I'm only the beard") when Tina's ex assumes Danny is Tina's previously mysterious lover.


title: Beard (companion)

text: Recognized usage of "beard" applies to a person who serves to camouflage another's sexual orientation. An example is the woman that a gay man pretends to date in an effort to conceal his sexuality. Though "beard" entered wider use in the 1960s, many of the reported lavender marriages of the 1920s in Hollywood, and the similar reported romantic marriage of Rock Hudson (mid-1950s) employed the same usage. In Hudson's case, Phyllis Gates acted as his beard to avert the damage that the disclosure of Hudson's homosexuality might have caused to his career. In a 2011 interview, Betty White stated that she often served as a beard to Liberace to counter rumors of his homosexuality. Such relationships can cause legal and emotional issues for both parties, particularly when they end.


title: Miso soup

text: Along with "suimono" (clear soup seasoned with a small amount of soy sauce and salt in a dashi stock), miso soup is considered to be one of the two basic soup types of Japanese cuisine.


title: Miso soup

text: The type of "miso" paste chosen for the soup defines a great deal of its character and flavor. "Miso" pastes (a traditional Japanese seasoning produced by fermenting soybeans with salt and the fungus "Aspergillus oryzae", known in Japanese as "" (麹菌), and sometimes rice, barley, or other ingredients) can be categorized into red ("akamiso"), white ("shiromiso"), or mixed ("awase"). There are many variations within these themes, including regional variations, such as Shinshū miso or .


title: Miso soup

text: The amount of time taken also affects its flavor: a miso paste that has been fermented for a shorter period of time, such as a white miso, provides a lighter, sweeter flavor, while one which has been fermented for a longer period, such as a red miso, gives the miso soup a stronger, deeper one.


title: Miso soup

text: More than 80% of Japan's annual production of miso is used in miso soup, and 75% of all Japanese people consume miso soup at least once a day.


title: Miso soup

text: The most common "dashi" soup stocks for miso soup are made of niboshi (dried baby sardines), kombu (dried kelp), katsuobushi (thin shavings of dried and smoked bonito (similar to skipjack tuna)), or hoshi-shiitake (dried shiitake). The kombu can also be used in combination with katsuobushi or hoshi-shiitake. The kelp and/or shiitake "dashi" serve as a vegetarian soup stock.


title: Miso soup

text: When the ingredients involve shellfish such as Asari clam ("Venerupis philippinarum"), Shijimi ("Corbicula japonica"), or Hamaguri ("Meretrix lusoria") they will impart flavorings that serve the role of "dashi" and thus it is not necessary to prepare any stock in advance.


title: Miso soup

text: Outside Japan, American or European style miso soup is sometimes made by dissolving miso in a Western vegetable stock. The stock might include ingredients such as "negi", carrot, potato and "daikon" radish. In some versions of the dish, chicken stock, Western-style fish stock, and other non-"dashi" bases can even be used, but there is some debate over whether or not miso soups made using these non-traditional bases count as true miso soup.


title: Miso soup

text: According to Japanese custom, ingredients are chosen to reflect the seasons and to provide contrasts of color, texture, and flavor. Thus negi and tofu, a strongly flavored ingredient mixed with a mildly flavored ingredient, are often combined. Ingredients that float, such as wakame seaweed, and ingredients that sink, such as potatoes, are also combined. Ingredients may include mushrooms (nameko or shiitake), potato, taro, seaweed, green laver, onion, nira, common bean, mitsuba, shrimp, fish, clams, and sliced daikon. Nearly any Japanese ingredient is added to some type of miso soup. However, typical miso soup recipes contain a small number of additional ingredients beyond "dashi" stock and miso.


title: Miso soup

text: If pork is added to miso soup, it is called "tonjiru", meaning "pork soup". Tonjiru is a soup served for dinner and lunch, and is not usually eaten as breakfast soup.


title: Miso soup

text: Hearty and robust cold weather variations may include daikon, deep-fried tofu called "abura-age", potatoes, onions and dark miso varieties. Lighter variations are better suited for spring or summer months and made with ingredients like cabbage, seri, myoga, eggplant.


title: Miso soup

text: Miso soup can be prepared in several ways, depending on the chef and the style of soup. Japanese recipes usually call for most vegetables to be cooked in the simmering "dashi", particularly mushrooms, daikon, carrots, potatoes, tofu, and fish. The miso is suspended separately in some "dashi" stock removed from the simmering mix, to keep the miso paste from cooking, which alters the flavour, kills beneficial bacteria, and reduces the health benefits of biologically active miso paste. When the vegetables are cooked, the stock is removed from heat, the miso suspension is added and mixed into the soup, any uncooked ingredients are added, and the dish is served.


title: Miso soup

text: In Japan, miso soup and white rice make up the central dishes of the traditional Japanese breakfast. The soup has been a favorite of commoners and royalty alike for many centuries, but there are also many other dishes involving breakfast. They are all quite small, some include egg, fish, and nattō which is a fermented soy bean. The soup is usually served in lacquer bowls with lids and drunk directly from the bowl, though the solid ingredients are eaten with chopsticks. The bowl sometimes has a lid to keep heat and aroma in as well as to improve the presentation.


title: Miso soup

text: Instant miso soup is available in single-serving packets. It is usually sold in dehydrated powder and paste forms, though it sometimes also sold freeze dried. It generally contains dried toppings such as wakame and tofu with soy beans that reconstitute rapidly on the addition of hot water. These are popular in the Japanese workplace, where miso soup can be made with lunch as easily as green tea and using the same water. Instant miso soup is available in many grocery stores outside Japan. It has a shelf life of 3 to 12 months.


title: Miso soup

text: is a miso-soup-based dish unique to Awashima island off the coast of Niigata, Japan. A cedar flask ("" is filled with miso soup, fish and vegetables and it is heated by dropping in hot rocks, which quickly bring it to a simmer. Hot rocks retain their heat for hours after being taken from the fire, so a hot meal can be prepared without the use of fire.


title: Miso soup

text: In 2003, researchers at Japan's National Cancer Centre suggested that eating three or more bowls of "miso" soup every day could lower women's breast cancer risk.


title: Miso soup

text: Studies in 2020 have shown that habitual consumption of miso soup has the effect of lowering blood pressure and heart rate, or it has the effect of causing proliferation of good bacteria in the intestines and helping prevent constipation.


title: Clayne Crawford

text: Joseph Crawford (born April 20, 1978), known professionally as Clayne Crawford, is an American actor. He is known for portraying the role of Martin Riggs on the Fox action comedy-drama television series "Lethal Weapon" (2016–2018). He also portrayed Teddy Talbot on the critically acclaimed Sundance drama "Rectify" (2013–2016) for which he was nominated for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.


title: Clayne Crawford

text: Crawford had supporting roles in the films "A Walk to Remember" (2002), "Swimfan" (2002), "A Love Song for Bobby Long" (2004), "The Great Raid" (2005), and "" (2006). He also played in some small independent films that were not widely distributed.


title: Clayne Crawford

text: Born in Clay, Alabama, Crawford is the son of Brian, a design engineer, and Lennie Crawford. By high school, he was on the football and wrestling teams, and graduated from Hewitt-Trussville High School.


title: Clayne Crawford

text: In 1996, he drove to Los Angeles to seek work as an actor. He often worked in construction to support himself while appearing in small theaters. In 2000, he changed his name professionally from Joey to Clayne, a combination to honor an ancestor ("Clan") and his hometown (Clay, Alabama).


title: Clayne Crawford

text: He had a recurring role in the first season of "Jericho" as Mitchell "Mitch" Cafferty. In 2008, he appeared on "Life" in the episode "Evil ... and His Brother Ziggy". Crawford was the protagonist in the 2010 straight-to-DVD prequel to "Smokin' Aces", "".


title: Clayne Crawford

text: In 2010, he had a recurring role in the eighth season of "24" as Kevin Wade, a young, mysterious man. He also appeared in the first and second season of the A&E series "The Glades".


title: Clayne Crawford

text: Crawford played the role of Ted "Teddy" Talbot Jr. in the first SundanceTV original series, "Rectify", which was aired for four seasons from 2013 to 2016. The series, exploring a man who is released from prison after 19 years on death row after DNA evidence appears to support his innocence, also looks at the effects on his family and town. It received critical praise and won a Peabody Award in 2014, also receiving notice for its treatment of issues in criminal justice.


title: Clayne Crawford

text: Crawford played the role of Cade LaSalle, older brother to Christopher LaSalle on "NCIS: New Orleans".


title: Clayne Crawford

text: Beginning in 2016, Crawford portrayed Martin Riggs in the Fox television reboot "Lethal Weapon". In May 2018, amidst reports of bad behavior and incidents of hostility between cast and crew on the show's set, Crawford was fired from the show after two seasons and replaced by new character of third season Seann William Scott. His costar, Damon Wayans, quit the series shortly afterwards.


title: Liz Phair

text: Elizabeth Clark Phair (born April 17, 1967) is an American singer-songwriter. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Phair was raised primarily in the Chicago area. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1990, she attempted to start a musical career in San Francisco, California, but returned to her home in Chicago, where she began self-releasing audio cassettes under the name Girly-Sound. The tapes led to a recording contract with the independent record label Matador Records.


title: Liz Phair

text: Phair's 1993 debut studio album, "Exile in Guyville", was released to acclaim; it has been ranked by "Rolling Stone" as one of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Phair followed this with her second album, "Whip-Smart" (1994), which earned her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and "Whitechocolatespaceegg" (1998). Ten years after the release of her debut, Phair's fourth album, "Liz Phair" (2003), released on Capitol Records, moved towards pop rock, earning her a mainstream audience but alienating critics; the single "Why Can't I?" peaked at number 32 on the "Billboard" Hot 100.


title: Liz Phair

text: After the release of her fifth album, "Somebody's Miracle" (2005), Phair left Capitol and released her sixth album "Funstyle" independently in 2010. In 2018, it was announced that Matador Records would be releasing a retrospective set for Phair's debut album "Exile in Guyville" which includes remastered recordings from her original Girly Sound demo tapes. Phair released her seventh studio album, "Soberish", in 2021. As of 2011, Phair had sold over three million records worldwide.


title: Liz Phair

text: Phair was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on April 17, 1967. She was adopted at birth by Nancy, a historian and museologist, and John Phair, later an AIDS researcher and head of infectious diseases at Northwestern Memorial Hospital; her mother later worked as a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has one older brother, also adopted. On being adopted, Phair has said: "My parents were very responsible ... They were perfect about it ... I've never tried to find [my biological] parents. My friend who was adopted from the same home requested information and got back a four-page letter about her mother's life. She said it was jaw-dropping." Phair was raised as a Christian.


title: Liz Phair

text: Phair spent her early life in Cincinnati until age nine, when her family relocated to the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois. She graduated from New Trier High School in 1985. During high school, Phair was involved in student government, yearbook, and the cross country team, and took AP Studio Art her senior year, among many other advanced-level classes. She attended Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, where she graduated in 1990 with a B.A. in art history.


title: Liz Phair

text: Phair's entry into the music industry began when she met guitarist Chris Brokaw, a member of the band Come. Brokaw was dating one of Phair's friends, and stayed at their loft in SoMa one weekend. After living in San Francisco for a year, Phair went broke and returned to Chicago, moving back in to her family's home. There, she began writing lyrics and playing guitar, recording songs on a four-track tape recorder in her bedroom. She used the name Girly Sound on these recordings. She became part of the alternative music scene in Chicago and became friends with Material Issue and Urge Overkill, two of Chicago's upstart bands to go national in the early 1990s, as well as Brad Wood and John Henderson, head of Feel Good All Over, an independent label in Chicago.


title: Liz Phair

text: After asking Wood who the "coolest" indie label was, Phair called up Gerard Cosloy, co-president of Matador Records, in 1992 and she asked him if he would put out her record. Coincidentally, Cosloy had just read a review of Girly Sound in "Chemical Imbalance" that very day and told Phair to send him a tape. Phair sent him a tape of six Girly Sound songs. Cosloy recalls: "The songs were amazing. It was a fairly primitive recording, especially compared to the resulting album. The songs were really smart, really funny, and really harrowing, sometimes all at the same time. ... I liked it a lot and played it for everybody else. We usually don't sign people we haven't met, or heard other records by, or seen as performers. But I had a hunch, and I called her back and said O.K."


title: Liz Phair

text: Cosloy offered a $3,000 advance, and Phair began working on a single, which turned into the 18 songs of "Exile in Guyville".


title: Liz Phair

text: "Exile in Guyville" was produced by Phair and Brad Wood, and released in 1993. The album received uniformly excellent reviews. The album received significant critical acclaim for its blunt, honest lyrics and for the music itself, a hybrid of indie rock and lo-fi, and established Phair's penchant for exploring sexually explicit lyrics. By contrast, her trademark low, vibrato-less monotone voice gave many of her songs a slightly detached, almost deadpan character.


title: Liz Phair

text: The release of Phair's second album received substantial media attention and an advertising blitz. "Whip-Smart" debuted at #27 in 1994 and "Supernova," the first single, became a Top 10 modern rock hit, and the video was frequently featured on MTV. Phair also landed the cover of "Rolling Stone" with the headline "A Rock Star Is Born." The album received positive reviews, but not as acclaimed as the debut, but was certified Gold (shipments of at least 500,000 units). It ultimately did not sell as well as expected, as it was hoped the album would introduce Phair to a wider, more mainstream audience. Following "Whip-Smart", Phair released "Juvenilia", a collection of some early Girly Sound tracks and several B-sides, including her cover of the 1980 song by The Vapors, "Turning Japanese."


title: Liz Phair

text: In 1994, Phair made several live television and radio appearances in an effort to promote "Exile in Guyville" and "Whip-Smart"; she appeared on "Late Night With David Letterman" performing "Never Said" and "Supernova", and on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" performing an acoustic version of "Whip-Smart". She also performed "Alice Springs" live on "Good Morning America".


title: Liz Phair

text: She also appeared on the MTV alternative rock show "120 Minutes" performing "Never Said", "6'1", "Cinco de Mayo" and "Supernova" live at various times during 1994 and early 1995.


title: Liz Phair

text: In 1995, Phair married film editor Jim Staskauskas, who had worked on her videos. They had a son, James Nicholas Staskauskas, on December 21, 1996. Phair and Staskauskas divorced in 2001.


title: Liz Phair

text: Phair's third album, "Whitechocolatespaceegg", was released in 1998 after some delays, which included a disagreement about content; at one point, Matador rejected the album as submitted, and asked Phair to write a few additional radio-friendly songs for the set. The album displayed a more mature Phair, and reflected some of the ways marriage and motherhood affected her. While the single "Polyester Bride" received some airplay, and the album received many positive reviews, it was no more successful commercially than her previous records. To promote the record, Phair joined Lilith Fair. Phair performed on the main stage along with acts like Sarah McLachlan, Emmylou Harris, Sheryl Crow and Missy Elliott. She also opened for Alanis Morissette on her 1999 Junkie Tour.


title: Liz Phair

text: Phair provided backing vocals on the 2003 Sheryl Crow single "Soak Up the Sun". In 2003, Phair released her self-titled fourth album on her new label, Capitol Records. It departed from Phair's earlier lo-fi sound for more polished pop production and songwriting. Phair said she wanted to earn more money from her work, and hired the Matrix, who had produced songs by pop acts including Avril Lavigne, to create some songs, including the singles "Extraordinary" and "Why Can't I?" "Liz Phair" debuted at #27 on the "Billboard" 200. "Why Can't I?" entered the Adult Top 40 and Hot Adult Contemporary charts, and its music video placed Phair in heavy rotation on VH1 for the first time. It received mixed reviews, including negative reviews from the "New York Times" and "Pitchfork", who accused Phair of selling out and mimicking younger artists. In 2019, the "Pitchfork" critic Matt LeMay apologized for his review, saying he had failed to appreciate Phair's willingness to "try on different masks".


title: Liz Phair

text: "Somebody's Miracle", Phair's fifth album and final with Capitol Records, was released in 2005. It returned to a rock sound. The album received mixed reviews, with Amy Phillips of "Pitchfork" writing: "Now this is a terrible Liz Phair record. "Somebody's Miracle" is mostly generic pap that any number of next-big-has-beens could have cranked out, a useless piece of plastic poking a pointy heel in the eye of the carcass of the artist Liz once was." Phillips also suggested it was worse than her largely critically derided previous album. A review published by MSNBC found the album "less blatantly commercial [than her previous], but still smooth, reflecting her increasing shift toward a clearer sound".


title: Liz Phair

text: Phair signed with Dave Matthews' label ATO Records in early 2008 and re-released "Exile in Guyville" on June 24, 2008, on CD, vinyl, and in digital format, featuring three songs from the original recording sessions, "Ant in Alaska," "Say You," and an untitled instrumental, and also a documentary DVD, "Guyville Redux." "


title: Liz Phair

text: In May 2009, Phair released a new song, "Faith and Tenderness," sold exclusively at Banana Republic on a compilation disc featuring other artists. Also in 2009, Phair began working as a television composer, following an invitation by her childhood friend Mike Kelley to score the show he was creating for CBS, "Swingtown", given it was based on the life in their hometown. For the task, Phair decided to bring in Doc Dauer, producer of a children's album about bodily functions, "The Body Rocks", where Phair performed after being brought in by Pete Yorn, and Dauer's creative partner Evan Frankfort. She followed it by creating the theme song for NBC's "The Weber Show", and working for the CW's "The 100", the USA Network show "In Plain Sight" and the CW reboot of "90210", for which she won the 2009 ASCAP award for Top Television Composer.


title: Liz Phair

text: On July 3, 2010, Phair's official website announced a surprise link to download her new album "Funstyle", which she released independently after parting ways with Capitol Records and ATO. The song "Bollywood" was available to stream from the site for a limited time, before Phair took it down.


title: Liz Phair

text: A note from Phair to her fans posted on her official website explained why the songs were problematic:


title: Liz Phair

text: Phair revealed in an interview with the "Wall Street Journal" that the falling out with her record label, ATO, occurred after a change in management. She explained, "The people who were still there didn't like, or didn't know what to do with, the music I was making, so we just stalled out and I asked to leave."


title: Liz Phair

text: Phair went on tour to promote the album, playing many songs from "Guyville" and "Whip-Smart", along with songs from the rest of her repertoire. The Funstyle Tour ran from October 2010 to March 2011. The tour's last show took place at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.


title: Liz Phair

text: In 2012, she co-wrote and performed the song "Dotted Line" with A. R. Rahman for the film "People Like Us". "The song 'Dotted Line' I wrote with A. R. Rahman for Alex Kurtzman's film 'Welcome To People'," she said in an interview. "Both amazing. 'Welcome To People' is a truly powerful film. Very proud of being part of it."


title: Liz Phair

text: The dystopian holiday song "Ho Ho Ho" was released by Phair in late 2014. In 2014, Capitol released a greatest hits compilation of Phair's work entitled "Icon".


title: Liz Phair

text: In spring of 2016, Phair supported The Smashing Pumpkins on their "In Plainsong" tour, performing as the opening act.