The family of Brian Wilson, the co-founder of the Beach Boys, announced on June 11 that he passed away at the age of 82. Wilson shaped the Beach Boys’ timeless sound as the band’s songwriter and co-lead vocalist, from the easygoing surf songs of their early days to the more experimental and still influential 1966 album Pet Sounds.

Wilson’s struggles with mental health issues played a role in the followup to Pet Sounds—the unfinished album Smile, which the Beach Boys began recording in 1966. Wilson was convinced it would be his masterpiece, but Smile wouldn’t be released until nearly forty years later.

Here’s the complicated backstory behind Smile—and how it cemented Wilson’s legacy. 

Smile’s not-so-good vibrations

In describing the followup to Pet Sounds, Wilson billed Smile as a “teenage symphony to God.” He was experimenting with songs like “Brian Falls Into a Microphone,” “Love To Say Dada,” and “Do You Like Worms.”

As part of the brainstorming process, Wilson became reclusive, ordering eight truckloads of beach dumped around his piano at home so that he could wiggle his toes in it and get in the zone to compose, according to the New York Times. A lot of mystery came to surround the project, and it only grew when Wilson cancelled the album release in 1967. The Times wrote that it “turned into the most famous unheard album in pop history.”

Later in 1967, the Beach Boys released a stripped down version of Smile, titled Smiley Smile. The band came “nearly undone” by that album, wrote TIME’s Jay Cocks in 1993, and marked the beginning of a decline in their commercial success.

Reaction to Smile

But the Smile sessions weren’t totally for nothing. Over the years, some of the work that Wilson did for Smile ended up in Beach Boy hits like “Good Vibrations,” “Heroes and Villains,” “Surf’s Up,” “Cabin Essence” and “Wind Chimes.” Pieces of the unfinished work drew acclaim. Writing about a Good Vibrations box set that included some of Wilson’s recordings for Smile, Cocks described the works as “unfinished, incomplete and glorious. The music is mystic, mad, wild and gentle, quite unlike anything anyone, including Wilson, had ever tried in pop before.”

“The lyrics were as fleeting as a waking dream; the musical tracks were layered as if Wilson were a kid in his room stacking 45-r.p.m. records on top of one another,” he wrote. “The songs that resulted seem random at first, off-beam and crazy, but they haunt.”

TIME’s Bruce Handy also wrote about the joys of discovering a CD of unfinished Smile tracks: “I love this CD. I love its raw beauty, but even more, I love its wasted promise. (This is a boy example; girls can substitute Sylvia Plath‘s burned journals.) I also love the illicit access to Wilson’s half-finished thoughts, to Wilson himself.”

Wilson finished Smile in 2004, and it was “rapturously received,” as TIME noted in a 2008 list naming it one of the 10 best comeback albums. 

“It was finally ready to be finished, ready to be accepted,” he told the New York Times that year. Wilson argued that the mid-1960s wasn’t the right time to release it, explaining, “We think people are now ready to understand where it was coming from. Back then, no one was ready for it.” 

On Wednesday, the long-simmering dispute between Hollywood and the AI industry escalated dramatically when Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, one of the most prominent AI image generators, for copyright infringement. The two Hollywood heavyweight studios argue that Midjourney allows its users to “blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters,” such as Shrek and Spider-Man. “Piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing,” Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal officer, said in a general statement.

The lawsuit challenges one of the AI industry’s fundamental assumptions: that it should be allowed to train upon copyrighted materials under the principle of fair use. How the case gets resolved could have major implications for both AI and Hollywood going forward. 

“I really think the only thing that can stop AI companies doing what they’re doing is the law,” says Ed Newton-Rex, the CEO of nonprofit organization Fairly Trained, which provides certifications for AI models trained on licensed data. “If these lawsuits are successful, that is what will hopefully stop AI companies from exploiting people’s life’s work.” 

A growing backlash against AI training norms

AI companies train their models upon vast amounts of data scoured from across the web. While most of these companies have resisted admitting that they scrape copyrighted material, there are already dozens of AI copyright-related lawsuits in the U.S. alone alleging otherwise. Midjourney, which allows its millions of registered users to generate images from prompts, faces a class-action suit led by artists including Kelly McKernan, who found that users were inputting the artist’s name as a keyword in Midjourney to spit out eerily similar artworks. “These companies are profiting wildly off our unpaid labor,” they told TIME in 2023.

For the last few years, Hollywood has refrained from entering the fray, while sending mixed messages about AI. During contract negotiations in 2023, AI was a major source of contention between unions like SAG-AFTRA and producers, who advanced a “groundbreaking AI proposal” involving the use of “digital replicas” to fill out the backgrounds of film scenes. 

Read More: Even AI Filmmakers Think Hollywood’s AI Proposal Is Dangerous

But while some in Hollywood hope AI will make filmmaking more efficient and less expensive, many more have grown concerned about the AI industry’s usage of copyrighted material. This concern has come to a head with the Disney-Universal lawsuit, which is the first major lawsuit brought by Hollywood studios against an AI company. The lawsuit seeks damages and an injunction that would immediately stop Midjourney’s operations—and casts generative AI theft as a problem that “threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law.”

Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We are bringing this action today to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content,” said Kim Harris, executive vice president and general counsel of NBCU. 

Newton-Rex believes that this lawsuit is particularly significant because of the size, influence and resources of Disney and Universal. “The more that these mainstays of the American economy weigh into this fight, the harder it is to ignore the simple truth here,” he says. 

In February, a Delaware judge dealt a blow to the AI industry’s “fair use” argument, ruling that a legal research firm was not allowed to copy the content of Thomson Reuters to build a competing AI-based legal platform. 

If the Disney-Universal lawsuit is similarly successful, that would have major implications for both AI and Hollywood, says Naeem Talukdar, the CEO of the AI video startup Moonvalley. Many AI companies might have to retrain their visual models from the ground up with licensed content. And Hollywood, if given legal clarity, might actually accelerate its usage of AI models built upon licensed content, like ones built by Moonvalley and Natasha Lyonne’s and Bryn Mooser’s Asteria Film Co.

“Nobody wants to touch these models with a 10-foot pole, because there’s a sense that you’ll just get sued on the outputs later,” Talukdar says. “I would expect that if this judgment falls a certain way, you’ll see a lull, and then you’ll have a new class of models emerge that pays the creators. And then you’ll see this avalanche of studios that can now actually start using these models much more freely.” 

A governmental loophole? 

Unsurprisingly, AI companies are fighting back in court. They’re also working on another path forward to retain their ability to train their models as they see fit: through governmental policy. In January, OpenAI sent a memo to the White House arguing their ability to train on copyrighted material should be “preserved.” They then relaxed several rules around copyright in the name of “creative freedom,” which triggered a flood of Studio Ghibli-style images on social media. 

In the U.K., the government announced plans to give AI companies access to any copyrighted work that rights holders hadn’t explicitly opted out of, which drew a huge backlash from stars like Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa. Last week, the House of Lords rejected the legislation for a fourth time. 

Newton-Rex says that this dispute over AI and copyright will not be resolved any time soon. “Billion-dollar AI companies have staked their entire businesses on the idea that they are allowed to take people’s life’s work and build on it to compete with them. I don’t think they’re easily going to give that up because of one lawsuit,” he says. Nevertheless, he says that the announcement of this lawsuit is “really good for creators everywhere.”

One of the most-watched K-dramas of 2025 so far, Netflix’s Tastefully Yours stars Squid Game’s Kang Ha-neul as Han Beom-woo, a ruthless manager at his mother’s soulless food conglomerate, Hansang, whose entire life philosophy is challenged when he meets Mo Yeon-joo (The Frog’s Go Min-si), a brilliant but stubborn fine dining chef who runs a one-table restaurant in remote Jeonju.

When we meet Beom-woo, he is obsessed with building a restaurant that will get Hansang a coveted three-star rating in the fictional Diamant system. His mother, Han Yeo-ul (When Life Gives You Tangerines’ Oh Min-ae), has built Hansang by herself, prioritizing the company over her children. Now, she pits brothers Beom-woo and Han Seon-woo (Weak Hero Class 2’s Bae Na-ra) against one another in a race for the Diamant rating. Hoping to finally earn the love and approval she has withheld throughout their lives, they compete for the accomplishment.

Beom-woo’s aspirational path to three-star success is paved not by hard, honest work, but rather by deceit. His conman playbook involves buying independent restaurants, stealing their recipes to use for his flagship establishment Motto, and shutting them down. However, when he goes to Jeonju and meets Yeon-joo, something changes for him. Over the course of 10 episodes, Beom-woo and Yeon-joo fall in love and build a found family in Yeon-joo’s Jeonju restaurant with locals Jin Myeong-sook (Hellbound’s Kim Shin-rok) and Shin Chun-seung (Crash Landing on You’s Yoo Su-bin) as their co-workers. In the process, Beom-woo becomes a much better person, though the changes come with their fair share of drama.

Beom-woo’s downfall

When Beom-woo’s past as a Hansang executive who steals other restaurant’s recipes comes out at the end of Episode 8, the idyllic life he’s built starts to falls apart. Yeon-joo, Myeong-sook, and Chun-seung understandably feel betrayed, especially when it’s revealed that one of Yeon-joo’s recipes is being served at Motto as Chef Jang Young-hye’s (Buried Hearts’ Hong Hwa-yeon) original creation. When Diamant judges eat the dish, they are impressed, putting Motto on track to become the first-ever Korean restaurant to earn three stars.

However, Yeon-joo’s recipe was not stolen by Beom-woo. The thief is Young-hye and Beom-woo’s former right-hand man Lee Yu-jin (Taxi Driver’s Bae Yoo-ram), but our male lead frustratingly doesn’t take the time to explain that to Yeon-joo. To be fair, he taught Young-hye and Yu-jin those underhanded tactics. Beom-woo also never stood up to his mother, when she ordered him to shut down Jeongjae; if it exists, it poses a threat to Motto’s success.

Yeon-joo retreats to the monastery where she grew up, and Beom-woo heads to Seoul, where he cleans out his office at Motto and spends a lot of the penultimate episode sulking and drinking alone at bars. The news that finally jolts him out of his self-pity comes in the form of an unexpected announcement from the French-based Diamant Guide: both Motto and Jeongjae have earned three stars.  

Jeongjae’s three stars

Chef Yeon-joo has never cared much about industry recognition. Though she was trained at CIA and cooked in one of the best fine dining restaurants in Japan before opening Jeongjae, she defines success in ways other than reaching for rating stars. If the people who come to her restaurant enjoy the food she makes for them, then she has done her job well. Still, her sincere, creative, and meticulous work could not help but find recognition.

Earlier in the season, Beom-woo took a tricky job for Jeongjae: a multinational engaged couple wanted a restaurant for their parents’ meeting. Her parents would be coming from France, and his father would be joining from Korea. They needed to find food that would complement both of their palates, and set the scene for the joining of their two families across cultural boundaries. Yeon-joo manages to strike the perfect balance, and they all leave happy. 

Unbeknownst to the Jeongjae staff, the French father was actually the Editor-in-Chief of the Diamant Guide. When it comes time for this year’s ruling, he puts a special word in for Jeongjae, a restaurant outside of Seoul of which few “important” people have ever heard. Notably, this moment never would have come without Beom-woo’s arrival at Jeongjae. While Beom-woo had been taught to care only about profit and industry success, Yeon-joo arguably cared too much about the sanctity of the recipe, not taking into account any business considerations or the preferences of the people she cooks for. Together, they balance one another out.

The announcement of Jeongjae’s three stars angers Han Yeo-ul, who has spent her life working for a goal that seemingly comes to Yeon-joo and Jeongjae easily. In Episode 9, she orchestrates a TV competition showdown between the two restaurants, and plans to shut Jeongjae down, no matter what the outcome.

The TV competition winner 

One of the least successful elements of Tastefully Yours’ ending comes in the execution of the TV cooking competition between Motto and Jeongjae. Though not a terrible story idea for a climactic event around which to build the series’ climax, the set-up is rushed and doesn’t include Yeon-joo, who is at her monastery home for much of the competition. As our female lead and someone whose sincerity and skill we’re told throughout the series is integral to Jeongjae’s success, it’s a jarring and unearned conclusion. Though it is powerful to see Myeong-sook succeed as a chef from a non-traditional background, the episode and series as a whole does not lean into this theme. 

In the end, the competition’s stakes are further invalidated when Yeo-ul lies and says that Motto and Jeongjae tied when really Jeongjae got more votes from the food influencers and judges. The competition falls apart, with the Diamant judge leaving in protest, but there seem to be no actual consequences to this twist. When Yeon-joo shows up and challenges Yeo-ul to her own competition—Yeon-joo will cook for the Yeo-ul, and will abandon Jeongjae if the CEO doesn’t like it— PD Kim, the character directing the entire production under Yeo-ul’s orders, pivots to a new ending. At this point, it’s unclear what shape this TV special will even take, given that it was mostly shot as a cooking competition program. Tastefully Yours does not care to explain it, either.

While the cooking competition ends up feeling like wasted time, Yeon-joo’s challenge does not. She uses the framing of a challenge to get Yeo-ul to sit down with her two sons and enjoy a home cooked meal in a way she never did when they were children. The meal is inspired by Beom-woo’s memories of his grandmother’s cabbage kimchi and by the shrimp jeon Yeo-ul claimed on a TV show she cooked for her sons when they were children. Though Yeo-ul walks out after the cameras cut, she is obviously affected by the moment. She tells Yeon-joo and Beom-woo they can keep their restaurant.

How Tastefully Yours ends

Tastefully Yours got where it was going in 10 episodes (which is notably less time than this K-drama genre usually gets to tell a story) but not always in the most efficient or effective manner. A mid-season subplot involving Yeon-joo’s culinary and romantic past in Sapporo wasted precious narrative time that could have been given to the Jeonju setting and characters. (Though it’s always nice to see actor Yoo Yeon-seok (When the Phone Rings, Hospital Playlist), who plays Yeon-joo’s ex here). 

Beom-woo’s growth from a bad person to a good guy happens, but feels somewhat unearned. The finale’s reveal that he eventually helps one of his previous victims get their family restaurant back is vital, but it comes after Yeon-joo—and the audience—is meant to forgive him. 

Beom-woo’s growth, and the confirmation of his romantic relationship with Yeon-joo, is hurt by the absence of a scene that has Beom-woo telling Yeon-joo the whole story and putting his actions and growth in context to prove his understanding. Instead, that work is done by other characters. We see Yeon-joo’s monk mother, Yu-jin, and Sun-woo all telling Yeon-joo that Beom-woo is sincere, but are robbed of the opportunity to see Beom-woo prove that he has changed through a big risk or a moment of true vulnerability—the stuff that can move a K-drama from enjoyable to iconic.

Still, Tastefully Yours is buoyed by its commitment to the rich theme of sincerely cooked food as a potentially life-changing force, with warm visual direction to back it up. You can’t help but root for the Jeongjae crew. They all end up together, committed to the family and home they have found in one another. The series ends with Yeon-joo and Beom-woo happily in a relationship, kissing in the garden behind Jeongjae where they first met.

The Park Ji-hoon cameo

K-dramas have a glorious tradition of random actor cameos shoehorned into the main plot in creative ways. For Tastefully Yours, this came in the form of Park Ji-hoon, the star of action teen drama Weak Hero. We see snippets of Park in the fictional TV series Myeong-sook is watching throughout the series. Called Lovely Jogger, it is obviously a reference to last year’s K-drama phenomenon Lovely Runner. Park stars as Eun-jae, seemingly a play off of the Lovely Runner main character’s name, Sun-jae.

In the Tastefully Yours finale, Eun-jae shows up at Chun-seung’s family gukbap restaurant, where he and Myeong-sook are hosting a cooking class together. Myeong-sook freaks out about the arrival of the star, but it’s Chun-seung who shares a particularly intense moment with Eun-jae. While serving Eun-jae water, Chun-seung pauses to get a better look at his face, and asks “If you don’t me asking, which high school do you go to?” The smile drops off Eun-jae’s face as the music builds.

This is all a reference to Weak Hero Class 2, in which Park stars as Si-eun, an introverted high school student who takes on the school bullies. Yoo co-stars as Choi Hyo-man, a bully who targets Si-eun upon his arrival at Eunjang High School. Tastefully Yours and Weak Hero share much of the same production team in creator Han Jun-hee and director Park Dan-hee (Weak Hero Class 1, only). The series share another actor in Bae Na-ra, who plays Beom-woo’s older brother, Sun-woo, in Tastefully Yours, and antagonist Na Baek-jin in Weak Hero Class 2.

The judge in Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes retrial declared a mistrial on the final charge the disgraced movie mogul faced, a day after the jury delivered a split verdict on two other charges.

The mistrial declaration on Thursday came after the jury foreperson, who alleged he had been threatened by another juror, refused to return to deliberate. On Wednesday, the jury convicted Weinstein of one charge, acquitted him of another, and failed to reach a consensus on the third.

Weinstein has been accused by numerous women of sexual harassment, assault, and misconduct over the span of about three decades.

The accusations levied against him sparked the landmark #MeToo movement, and his convictions in New York on rape and sexual assault charges in 2020 and on sexual offenses in Los Angeles in 2022 were seen as victories for the movement.

Read more: Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood’s Ugly Casting Couch History

But last year, the case against him in New York was thrown into limbo when the state’s top court overturned his conviction and sent the case back to the Manhattan courthouse.

Here’s what to know about the case, the jury’s verdict, and why the judge declared a mistrial.

Why was Weinstein being retried?

Weinstein was initially convicted in 2020 of sexual assault and rape in the third degree, and acquitted of predatory sexual assault and of first-degree rape.

Read more: Harvey Weinstein’s Mixed Verdict Shows the Challenge of Prosecuting Sexual Assault

But in 2024, the New York Court of Appeals overturned his conviction, saying that the appointed judge had prejudiced Weinstein’s case by permitting prosecutors to bring women who were not directly tied to the charges to the stand.

Three women—Lauren Young, Dawn Dunning, and Tarale Wulff—testified in 2020 about their interactions with Weinstein. The testimony was permitted under a New York state law that allows testimony on “prior bad acts” to show behavioral trends.

But New York’s top court said that the three women’s testimonies “served no material non-propensity purpose.”

With Weinstein’s conviction overturned, the case went to a retrial.

What did the jury decide?

Jurors on Wednesday convicted the former movie mogul of forcibly subjecting a person to a criminal sex act, related to an incident in 2006. But they acquitted him of another criminal sex act charge stemming from a 2006 incident. 

They were unable to reach a verdict on a charge that Weinstein raped a woman in 2013.

Weinstein, who has repeatedly denied sexually assaulting or raping anyone, had pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Why did the judge declare a mistrial?

The judge declared a mistrial on Thursday on the final charge of third-degree rape.

The jury foreperson said that day that he was unwilling to return to deliberations after telling the judge before the jury delivered its partial verdict on Wednesday that another juror told him “You know me; you going to see me outside,” according to NBC News.

The foreperson told the judge he felt “afraid inside there” and could not return, the outlet reported, citing a transcript from the state court.

The judge said jury deliberations “sometimes become heated” and that he understood “this particular deliberation was more heated than some others,” according to the New York Times, though he noted other jurors had not described “anything that rose to the level of threats.”

A private plane loaded with 26 suitcases of cocaine, weighing more than 1500 pounds. Sounds like a plot point in a Hollywood heist movie, but it really happened in 2013.

When the stash was discovered in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, on a plane bound for France, the pilots Pascal Fauret and Bruno Odos were taken into custody. Then, in another plot twist straight out of a movie, they escaped to their native France via boat in 2015. The two pilots were convicted in a 2019 trial and sentenced to six years in prison, but they appealed the verdict, and were ultimately acquitted in 2021. 

Now the pilots appear in a new Netflix docu-series Cocaine Air, out June 11. The main question in the legal proceedings was whether they were supposed to check the contents of the 26 suitcases. In the series, Fauret and Odos defend themselves, saying that they couldn’t possibly have known about the contents of the suitcases, while Christine Saunier Ruellan, who spearheaded the investigation of the case in France, explains what she sees as suspicious activity in the walk-up to the 2013 flight.

Here’s how Cocaine Air presents both sides of the case. 

Pilots seen as heroes

Both pilots described the shock of being detained in the Dominican Republic. Odos describes the rollercoaster of emotions he was feeling in the moment: “When you’re innocent, you almost turn yourself in. It’s like a way to say—okay, please help me.”

In France, both pilots were seen as national heroes because they served in the French army, transporting nuclear weapons before moving into commercial aviation. They garnered a lot of support from people who couldn’t imagine that French army veterans would be capable of participating in drug trafficking, and they are seen throughout the series holding up messages of support outside the buildings where legal proceedings took place.

Cocaine Air co-director Jérôme Pierrat explains that the pilots’ defense lawyers successfully compared pilots to taxi drivers, arguing, “Just as taxi drivers do not have to check your suitcase as it goes in the trunk, it’s the same for them [the pilots].” 

The pilot’s lawyers made the case that the contents of suitcases is the responsibility of border control offices and that pilots are not supposed to be asking passengers what is in their suitcases. 

As Fauret put it himself in the doc, “they tell me the date, and I fly. I never know the purpose of the trip.”

The series also features the owner of the plane, eyeglasses magnate Alain Afflelou. Afflelou leased the plane to another agency when he wasn’t using it, so he was never linked directly to the infamous flight.

An investigator sees red flags

As the series shows, the investigation by Christine Saunier-Ruellan focused on why three flights were flown with the same pilots and the same passenger. On the March 2013 flight that resulted in the pilots’ arrest, the manager and stewardess were told that the client did not need her services—

Through intercepting the pilots’ devices, she found what she thought were suspicious messages sent by the pilots, from “nature of cargo confirmed” and “we did what we had to do.” Saunier-Ruellan also discovered Internet searches on Fauret’s personal computer that were about the drug trafficking situation in Ecuador and the penalties. 

She questioned if these were all signs that the pilots knew that cocaine was in the 26 suitcases, but no definitive link could be made between the messages and behaviors and the luggage. “The appeals court considered these arguments solid enough to overturn the conviction,” says Olivier Bouchara, Cocaine Air co-director. 

At one point, she even went so far as to bug former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s phone because he had flown that airline in the past. But he had nothing to do with the plane full of cocaine and appears in Cocaine Air to set the record straight on any misconceptions.

“In the case of the two pilots, she didn’t have direct proof,” Bouchara says. “What she had were indications, or circumstantial evidence.” 

Yet even after spending months immersing themselves in the details of this case, the filmmakers are also not convinced that they know everything about the pilots’ role in the scandal. As Bouchara put it, “Jerome and I were wondering during all of the shooting, are they responsible? And I have to say that we don’t have the final answer.” 

Bouchara stresses that he and Pierrat were not jurors, or judges, but journalists: “Sometimes, we’d be shooting a scene and we’d look at each other and think, ‘Wait, maybe they knew. Maybe they were in on it.’ Other times, we’d come across a detail that made us doubt everything again. And that’s part of what we wanted to share: not a verdict, but a conversation.”

On June 18, 2023, a submersible imploded while trying to visit the remains of the R.M.S. Titanic, killing the five passengers onboard. The victims included Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, which designed the submersible, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, explorer Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had completed three dozen dives to the Titanic.

Two years since the implosion of the submersible, which was named Titan, OceanGate has suspended all commercial and exploration operations, and the U.S. Coast Guard has yet to publish the findings of its investigation into the disaster. In the meantime, a Netflix documentary out June 11 offers its own take on why the submersible imploded, featuring interviews with former OceanGate employees who said the disaster came as no surprise and that the submersible’s design was flawed from the beginning.

TIME talked to director Mark Monroe about uncovering red flags in the walk-up to the OceanGate submersible disaster. 

Flawed materials

The documentary shows that the materials used to build the submersible were flawed from the get-go. Tests had shown that the carbon fiber used in the submersible could not hold up on a dive as deep as the one to reach the Titanic. In tests, the fiber repeatedly came apart under pressure, making a loud pop and snapping sound as the threads broke.

“Everyone says the sound happened when the submersible was actually very close to the surface,” Monroe says. “You would think that would have been a clear warning that something was wrong.”

Given the submersible was still facing issues on its 80th test dive, a successful dive was likely never possible, former employees tell the filmmakers. “Maybe no test would have ever shown that it was safe to do it,” Monroe says. “There’s not enough positive testing that shows that it’s something that you should be doing with paying customers.”

It would have taken millions of dollars and years of more testing in order to prove that carbon fiber was safe to use in the hull, Monroe says. And it’s not clear where OceanGate was getting its money. “What is clear from my research and from talking to people is that they were not making money,” says Monroe. “There’s zero chance that OceanGate was actually turning a profit.”

Rush had a fixation on making the carbon fiber work, which had deadly consequences. As Monroe says, “Had he followed the industry standard, sure, he might not have been able to make a carbon fiber submersible and take it to the Titanic, but maybe those people would still be alive.”

Cutting corners

Engineers interviewed in the documentary describe Rush as reckless, often rushing through tests and not concerned enough about the safety of the passengers. The key red flag is Rush’s decision not have a third-party inspection to examine the submersible, going against industry standards. Monroe says that Rush also skirted around regulations requiring the submersible be registered as a vehicle, and never registered it.

At one point during the project, the hull cracked and a new one had to be built. A miniature version of it was put through the same kinds of pressure tests that the first one had to go through.

Despite not having a single successful test, OceanGate decided to go ahead with manufacturing the submersible. At that point, Emily Hammermeister, assistant to the lead engineer at OceanGate, quit. At one point in the documentary, she says she felt “uncomfortable bolting people into the sub.”

She wasn’t the only employee who was unsatisfied. Monroe describes their viewpoint: “I think a lot of people didn’t understand, why are we going forward if we can’t get the model to not implode?” 

Viewers will hear surprising audio of David Lochridge, a submersible and former operations director, being verbally attacked by Rush after Lochridge wrote up a memo about all the safety issues that concerned him. The recording became available when the U.S. Coast Guard pursued its investigation. 

“Every expedition we’ve had, we’ve had issues,” as Lochridge can be heard saying in the audio. Rush accused Lochridge of not understanding his vision, which he described as “doing weird sh-t” that’s “definitely out of the mold.” Rush, the documentary shows, took any criticism of his project as a personal attack. 

Lessons from the disaster

Monroe hopes that the Titan tragedy will make viewers skeptical about whether such expeditions are necessary in the future, arguing, “We’ve seen a billionaire travel craze, and the desire for those with means to do something in this world that others can’t do. This experience feeds into that desire.”

Monroe also hopes the documentary will encourage viewers to be skeptical of Silicon Valley founders who brag that they are doing things differently and have found a way to work around rules and regulations, saying, “While that may be the case in some industries, when you’re taking money from people, and their lives are at risk, I think it’s very dangerous.”

History does not record if Sally Ride rolled her eyes when she got a look at the plans for the first toiletry kit NASA put together for its female astronauts—but she’d have been within her rights to do so. The space agency certainly knew how to pack for men, providing them more or less the basics—deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, razor. The women would get the essentials too, but there would be more: lipstick, blush, eyeliner, and, critically, up to 100 tampons—because who-all knew just how many the average woman would need during the average week in space?

That first toiletry kit was planned before June 18, 1983, when Ride went aloft on the shuttle Challenger, becoming the first American woman in space, breaking the gender barrier the Soviets had broken with cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, just over 20 years to the day earlier. The tampon nonsense was not the only indignity NASA’s female astronauts in general and Ride in particular had to endure. Her story is chronicled in the evocative new documentary Sally, a 2025 winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Alfred P. Sloan feature film prize.

Among the memorable moments Ride experienced was the pre-flight press conference during which a TIME magazine correspondent raised his hand and asked, “Dr. Ride, a couple of fast questions, sir…ma’am.” There was, too, the reporter who pointedly asked Ride “Do you weep?” when confronted with a particularly knotty problem during training. There was the bouquet of flowers Ride was handed after the shuttle landed, intended as a gift to America’s first space heroine—a gift Ride politely refused to accept, sparking all manner of criticism in the mainstream press.

More important than all of that, though, was the private—exceedingly private—side to Ride, most notably her 27-year relationship with her life partner Tam O’Shaughnessy, a marriage-in-all-but-name that wasn’t revealed until Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012 at age 61, and O’Shaughnessy told the world in the obituary she wrote to mark her mate’s passing. Not long before Ride died, O’Shaughnessy gently broached how—and whether—she should reveal their more-than quarter century secret.

“I asked Sally about that. I said, you know, ‘I’m kind of worried. I don’t know what I’m going to write, you know, how I’m going to navigate this,’” O’Shaughnessy recalled in a recent conversation with TIME, ahead of the release of the film. “And she said, ‘You decide. Whatever you decide will be the right thing to do.’”

The film, written, produced, and directed by Cristina Costantini, premiers on the National Geographic channel on June 16, and becomes available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on June 17. As it reveals, Sally and Tam made a lot of right—and tough—choices in the time they had together, and Ride did much the same when it came to the professional trajectory that took her to space. There is no minimizing just how alien the notion of female astronauts was at the start, at least in the U.S. The film includes a clip of Gordon Cooper, one of NASA’s original seven astronauts, being interviewed in the early 1960s. “Is there any room in the space program for a woman?” the reporter asked. “Well,” Cooper answered without a trace of a smile, “we could have used a woman and flown her instead of the chimpanzee.”

It wasn’t until 1976, a decade and a half after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, that NASA opened up its astronaut selection process to women and people of color. More than 8,000 hopefuls applied; in 1978, NASA selected 35 of them to become astronauts, including three Black people, one Asian American, and six women. Ride was among them, as was Judith Resnik, who would lose her life when the shuttle Challenger exploded at the start of its tenth mission in January 1986. There was a great deal of  handicapping inside and outside of NASA as to which woman would fly first—much the way there was among the men in the run-up to Shepard’s flight in 1961—and Ride and Resnik were considered the leading candidates. Ultimately, as Sally recounts, Ride was chosen because she struck NASA mission planners as slightly less distracted by the celebrity attending being number one, focusing more on the mission and less on the history she would make. 

“She loved physics and she loved space exploration,” says O’Shaughnessy, “and with those things she could be intense, driven.”

Ride loved O’Shaughnessy too—though it was a devotion that was a long time in the making. The two met when Ride was 13 and O’Shaughnessy was 12 and they were standing in line to check in to play in a tennis tournament in Southern California, where they both grew up. Ride repeatedly rose restlessly to her tiptoes, and O’Shaughnessy said, “‘You’re walking on your toes like a ballet dancer,’” she recalls in the film. “That kind of started our friendship. Sally was kind of quiet, but she would talk for eight minutes straight on different players and how to beat ‘em, how to whup ‘em.”

The two grew quickly close, but went in different directions, with Ride studying physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania for three semesters beginning in 1968 and later at UCLA for the summer semester before transferring to Stanford as a junior, and O’Shaughnessy becoming a professional tennis player from 1971 to 1974, ultimately playing in both the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. O’Shaughnessy accepted her sexuality early, openly, and enthusiastically.

“I was on the tennis circuit and there were a few queer women,” she told TIME. “But it was also just the atmosphere, even the straight women. No one really cared who you slept with…I was going to the gay bars in San Francisco and dancing with my friends.”

For Ride, things were different. When she was at Stanford she fell in love with her female roommate and the two were together for four years. But Ride insisted on keeping the relationship largely under wraps and that secrecy was a no-go for her partner. “She couldn’t stand being so closeted and decided to move on with her life,” says O’Shaughnessy.

Ride would later choose an opposite sex partner, marrying fellow astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982, a move that was more than just an accommodating pose for a public figure in a country not ready for same-sex marriage, but less than a true union of the heart. “They were really good friends,” O’Shaughnessy says. “They had a lot in common. He was an astronomer, Sally was a physicist. They had stuff to talk about. They were both so thrilled to be selected to be astronauts and they both liked sports, so I think they had a solid friendship.”

It wasn’t enough. The two divorced in 1987, but even before they did, Ride and O’Shaughnessy began drifting together as more than just friends. At the time, O’Shaughnessy was living in Atlanta, after retiring from the tennis circuit; Ride, who was living in Houston, would visit her frequently.

“I never thought we would become romantic,” O’Shaughnessy says, “but it just turned that way one afternoon in the spring of 1985. When she would come to town, we would typically go for runs and long walks and just spend time together. Back at my place one day, we were just talking. I had an old cocker spaniel named Annie, I leaned over to pet her, and the next thing I knew, Sally’s hand was on my lower back. And it felt unusual. I turned to look at her and I could tell she was in love with me.”

As O’Shaughnessy recalls in the film, she said, “Oh boy, we’re in trouble.” Ride responded, “We don’t have to be. We don’t have to do this.” Then they kissed. 

Ride would ultimately fly twice in space, going aloft the second time in 1984, once again aboard the shuttle Challenger. After that snake-bit ship came to tragic ruin, exploding 73 seconds into its last flight and claiming the lives of all seven crewmembers, Ride and Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11 and the first man on the moon, served on the commission that investigated the causes of the accident. Ride left NASA in 1987, accepting a fellowship at Stanford and later became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. In 1989, O’Shaughnessy moved out west to live with her. It would not be until 2013, a year after Ride’s death, that California would permanently legalize gay marriage, and it would not be until 2015 that the Supreme Court would do the same nationwide. That was alright with Ride, who, as with her relationship with her college roommate, continued to believe that her love for O’Shaughnessy should remain a quiet and relatively private thing. But all that began to change in 2011.

It was early that year that Ride first showed signs of illness—poor appetite and yellowing cheeks. Her doctor diagnosed pancreatic cancer. “The doctor never said what stage. He never said the worst stage. We thought she was going to get better, and we were trying everything,” O’Shaughnessy recalls. “She was doing acupuncture, we were meditating, we became vegans. And then one day, we’re at the oncologist, and he said, ‘It’s time for hospice.’ And Sally and I were, like, shocked.”

Not long before Ride died, the couple grew concerned that O’Shaughnessy would not be allowed to visit her in the hospital, help make critical care decisions, or share property because they were not married—and could not be in California. So they went for the next best thing, registering as certified domestic partners, which afforded them the necessary rights.

“It’s the worst phrase,” says O’Shaughnessy. “We used to call each other certified domestic hens, because it’s such a bad term.”

Whatever name they went by, they would not get to enjoy their newly legalized status for long. Ride passed on July 23, 2012, just 17 months after she was diagnosed. At first NASA planned no formal memorial or celebration of Ride’s life. Then, the next month, Armstrong died and a memorial was held at the Washington National Cathedral, with 1,500 people in attendance.

“I got mad,” O’Shaughnessy says. She called then-Senator Barbara Mikulski (D, Md.) who chaired the Senate Committee on Appropriations and oversaw NASA’s budget. Mikulski called then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, who at first offered up a relatively intimate affair for 300 people at the National Air and Space Museum. O’Shaughnessy pressed, and ultimately won approval for a far more prepossessing event at the Kennedy Center in 2013.

Today, Ride’s legacy lives on in Sally Ride Science, a nonprofit founded by Ride and O’Shaughnessy in 2001 to inspire girls to become scientifically literate and to draw girls and women into the STEM fields. It lives on too in astronaut Peggy Whitson, who now holds the U.S. record for most time spent in space, at 675 days over four missions. It lives on in Christina Koch, who will become the first woman to travel to the moon, when she flies aboard Artemis II on its circumlunar journey in 2026. It lives on in NASA’s current 46-person astronaut corps, of whom 19 are women. Ride flew high, Ride flew fast, and Ride flew first—doing service to both science and human equity in the process. Sally powerfully tells her tale.

In the breakout third episode of Call Her Daddy, the podcast’s co-hosts, Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn, encouraged a male listener to track his crush’s movements via Snapchat, advised a woman that there was no need to tell her boyfriend about her sugar daddy, and plotted to sell dirty Coachella shoes to foot fetishists. But the bit that really made “Gluck Gluck 9000,” posted on Oct. 3, 2018, a classic was Cooper’s lively and detailed description of the eponymous, supposedly game-changing oral sex technique. Six years and three days later, Cooper hosted an episode of the same podcast in which she posed to Kamala Harris, then the Vice President of the United States and Democratic candidate for President, questions about mental health, reproductive rights post-Roe, and the economic challenges facing young people.

How did the Call Her Daddy that launched, not so long ago, as a chronicle of two 20-something Lower East Side roommates’ X-rated exploits evolve into the ultra-mainstream Call Her Daddy of today? The short answer is that Cooper and Franklyn’s cheerfully raunchy banter quickly attracted an audience of millions and just kept getting more popular, fueled by successive deals with the fratty platform Barstool Sports, then Spotify, and now a three-year Sirius XM contract reportedly worth $125 million. A more illuminating explanation for the show’s expansion into a media empire would require an understanding of who Cooper—a solo act since Franklyn’s departure in 2020—really is. The Hulu doc Call Her Alex presumably exists to offer such insight. But in just two scattered episodes (whose release as a series rather than a feature probably comes down to marketing), it’s less a portrait of the podcaster than an infomercial for her brand.

Directed by Ry Russo-Young (Nuclear Family, And Just Like That) and, crucially, produced by Cooper’s company Unwell, Call Her Alex takes a form so typical of the authorized 21st century celebrity documentary, it’s become a cliché. Behind-the-scenes footage of Cooper preparing for her first tour, which she’s determined to make more exciting than the live tapings that comprise so many podcasters’ events, is paired with a roughly chronological origin story. In the present, tension builds around troubled rehearsals of a program that includes musical numbers where Cooper is flanked by male dancers. The pressure to give her beloved listeners, known as the Daddy Gang, an unforgettable night seems insurmountable. An anxious Cooper seeks comfort from her unflappable husband and business partner, Matt Kaplan (a figure so adored by the Daddy Gang, some audience members carry giant cutouts of his face). Of course, as the trope dictates, last-minute disasters give way to an unequivocally triumphant opening night.

The biographical portions can feel evasive—weirdly so, considering that messiness and candor are central to Cooper’s brand—often swerving away from uncomfortable topics. She recalls escaping the pain of boys’ bullying, as a skinny redhead, by bonding with other girls on the soccer field and making videos with friends. Then, suddenly, the awkward childhood photos are replaced by images of the perfectly proportioned and coiffed blonde she’d become by the time she matriculated at Boston University. There’s no talk of how this glow-up might’ve affected her personal life or career, or the messages it might send to skinny redheads who worship Father Cooper, as she calls herself. The defining contradiction of Call Her Daddy, like Cosmo and the “female chauvinist pigs” of Y2K pop culture, is its frequent implication that female empowerment requires catering to male desires. But Russo-Young never really interrogates Cooper’s gluck-gluck feminism.

Also conspicuously downplayed is the Cooper-Franklyn split, a perennial hot topic for the Daddy Gang. Talking heads who lived through it allude to a breakdown of the women’s personal relationship as well as their professional partnership, as they renegotiated their initially meager Barstool contract—old news. Cooper doesn’t have much to say about this. And while Barstool’s controversial founder, Dave Portnoy, who also became a character in the contract drama, offers a few anodyne words of praise for Cooper in the doc, Franklyn is only glimpsed in archival footage. Anyone hoping to learn more about the end of the friendship, which isn’t necessarily unreasonable for fans of a show premised on the intimacy of girl talk, will be disappointed. 

Still, Cooper is too savvy to put out a product entirely devoid of revelations. The morsel of news that started circulating in the days leading up to the series’ release concerns the accusations of sexual harassment she levels in Call Her Alex against a since-retired BU soccer coach. Framed by Cooper’s return to Boston for her tour, her story of a female coach who she says pried into her sex life and touched her inappropriately and used the students’ scholarships to manipulate them—and of the university’s alleged refusal to act on her scrupulously documented complaint—is infuriating. (Boston University has yet to comment on these allegations.) It also complicates Cooper’s memories of soccer as a safe space and her choice to build a career around what is often euphemized as locker-room talk, though those aspects of the ordeal are barely explored. Instead, it’s framed as yet another chance for Cooper to demonstrate her strength and tenacity. “I was so determined,” she says in a voiceover that accompanies her stroll across an empty BU soccer field, “to find a way where no one could ever silence me again.”

Cooper is indeed a force—shrewd, ambitious, dynamic, hard-working. She knows her worth and fights for it. But that much has been obvious for years, to anyone with a casual awareness of her ascent to media-mogul status, as she’s built an empire that now includes a media company (Trending), a podcast platform (Unwell Network), and an electrolyte drink (Unwell Hydration). The Daddy Gang certainly gets it. Which raises the question of who the audience for this documentary is supposed to be. Potential business partners, maybe? Watching Call Her Alex, at times, I felt as though I was being pitched a product: an empowered woman whose brand is female empowerment.

All this marketing detracts from an element of Cooper’s personality that is far more fascinating and rare and, I think, critical to her appeal than the stuff Russo-Young focuses on: she’s great with people. The glimpses we do see of her interactions with fans are among the doc’s highlights. When an audience member at one of her tour dates tearfully recounts how Call Her Daddy helped her cope with her father’s death from cancer, Cooper calls her up to the stage, gets her a chair, sits at the young woman’s feet, holds her hand, listens and reacts to every sentence of her story.

Any performer could go through these same motions, but Cooper’s care and curiosity—whether she’s talking to a fan or a disgruntled employee or the most powerful woman in U.S. history—always come across as genuine. When she tells someone “I f-cking love you,” which she often does, it sounds like she means it. This is probably why so many of her Gen Z listeners have likened her to a big sister. Yet she’s something more complicated, too, a comforting but also aspirational figure, whose ugly-duckling-to-sex-goddess-swan transformation has left her with an unusual combination of empathy for the everygirl and the charisma to make that Daddy Gang diehard feel special. In a world that plays mean girls against mere mortals, she plays the part of the people’s Regina George, her burn book replaced by an endless supply of sincere compliments.

Fifty-five summers ago, a riot broke out in Chicago’s Grant Park, where Sly and the Family Stone was booked to play a concert. Sly was on en route, but the crowd, fearing that the erratic rock star wouldn’t appear, started throwing bottles and rocks onstage. This, in turn, provoked police to wade into the crowd, beating people with nightsticks. As the incensed crowd spilled out across the park, windows were smashed, and cars were overturned. Three people were shot, although it wasn’t clear by whom, and 160 more were injured.

The dystopian scene was a far cry from a Sly concert the year before: Woodstock in ‘69, where the band, operating at the peak of its powers, had implored its 400,000 rapt attendees to take it higher into the wee hours of the morning. But the Summer of Love and the ensuing years had given way to disillusionment and rage, and Sly felt this shift acutely. “I had sensed a shadow was falling over America,” he wrote in his 2023 memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). “The possibility of possibility was leaking out and leaving the country drained.” 

Sly, who died on June 9 at the age of 82, wrung greatness out of this abyss. He channeled the Grant Park riot and larger national anxieties into the 1971 album There’s A Riot Goin’ On, now considered one of the best albums of all time. A swampy morass of funk grooves and murmured mantras, the album captured a sociopolitical undercurrent that America had long resisted acknowledging: a brew of exhaustion, trauma, resilience, and determined joy bubbling from the country’s dispossessed margins. And as America confronts a new era of unrest, there are few albums made today that capture an unyielding spirit that still courses through the country: of dogged individualism and collective civil disobedience.

Future Utopias

Stone was once the avatar of a more peaceful, unified future. In the mid-’60s, when anti-miscegenation laws were still being upheld in many states, he formed Sly and the Family Stone, one of the country’s first mainstream racially integrated bands. “There were race riots going on at the time,” Greg Errico, the band’s white drummer, told Rolling Stone in 2015. “Putting a musical group together with male and female and Black and white, to us, it felt really natural and cool and comfortable, but it made a statement that was definitely threatening to some people.”

The band’s diversity wasn’t just skin-deep, but also musical, as they fused funk, rock, soul, and psychedelia into up-tempo anthems with pure, motivational messages: Stand. Dance to the music. Everybody is a star. Their vision of America was a place where all sorts of outdated boundaries could be broken down; they embodied the long arc of the universe bending toward justice.  

But in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, as was Bobby Kennedy. One day, while the band was on tour and riots were unfolding across the nation, the band was accosted by guardsmen while stopping for gas in a Michigan town under curfew. One of the guardsmen called a white woman in their group a  “[N-word] lover,” and tried to provoke them into resisting, Sly writes in his memoir. “We got out of there without too much trouble, other than all the trouble,” he recounts dryly. 

As the Vietnam War dragged on and violence inside the country mounted, Sly grew increasingly disillusioned with the nation’s trajectory. “You couldn’t take turns with freedom. You couldn’t have one moment where freedom went with the majority and one where it went with the money and one where it went with one skin color or another,” he later recounted. His fame was also taking a toll: plagued by expectations, hangers-on, and feeling used by the industry, he soon turned heavily to drugs and drinking.

The riot begins

Stone channeled all of these discontents into There’s a Riot Goin’ On. It was a far cry from its predecessor Stand!, which commanded alertness and action. There’s a Riot, conversely, was not militaristic, but mutant. It did not press to impress, but forced the listener to adjust to its oozing pace, its fuzziness, its Blackness. Sly’s constant overdubbing and reworking of the tape caused it to disintegrate, giving its sound a gritty veil. On the record, he gasped and murmured, holding too long to opaque phrases, his words seemingly spilling out of a collective unconscious of unrest—“made by no one and everyone, made under the influence of substances and of itself,” he later wrote.

The album’s provocative title was a reference to several touchpoints: the 1954 song “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” by the Robins, which jubilantly depicts a prison uprising; Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released earlier in 1971, which lamented war and moral decay; and the Grant Park riot from a year earlier. It also represented, he wrote in his memoir, “the riot that was going on inside each person.” On its cover was a modified version of the American flag, suggesting that small and big riots alike had always been part of America’s legacy—and that the nation’s fabric was changing in fundamental ways.

The album, which confused some reviewers at the time, is now revered as an American classic. The record’s bass and drums influenced later funk icons like Parliament Funkadelic, as well as groundbreaking jazz-funk explorations from Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Its stripped drum machine sounds created a blueprint for many hip-hop artists. “Listen close, because there’s no way in hell a major label will ever again let out this much horrible truth,” wrote Pitchfork’s Andy Beta while naming it the fourth best album of the ‘70s. 

“Yes, it’s the very first funk album,” Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson told NPR this year, while promoting his new documentary Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden Of Black Genius). “But for me, it’s probably 41 of the most painful documented minutes in a creator’s life…I hear someone crying for help, but because the music is so awesome and so mind-blowing, you know, we wind up fetishizing his art, and you don’t see the pain of it or the fact that Black pain is so beautiful.”

Read More: Questlove on Summer of Soul and the Oscars

After making the album, Stone slipped even further into addiction, depression, and paranoia, sometimes going for years at a time without public appearances. But while he may not have been a role model, he was a “real model,” he liked to say. And there will never be another album like There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which is the sound of a genius straining against the edges of convention; of a teeming mass fighting for freedom; of love being found in a hopeless place. 

In 2023, TIME conducted a written interview with Sly, who was struggling with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) and near deafness. TIME asked him how the summer of 2020 compared with other summers of protest that he had lived through. “I still watch the news and still think about what could make things better in America,” he wrote. “There are days when it feels like things are going in the wrong direction, that every good thing has two bad things behind it. Black and white, rich and poor, we have to find some way to live together without hurting each other. It’s not simple but it’s important.”

Read More: Sly Stone Reflects on the Past and His New Memoir in a Rare Interview

In November 2021, the third Astroworld music festival commenced in Houston, Tex., the hometown of rap superstar Travis Scott. Scott had a personal affinity for the Six Flags AstroWorld theme park in Houston that had closed its doors in 2005, naming his six-time platinum certified 2018 album after it and holding the inaugural festival near the site of the demolished amusement park. After canceling the 2020 edition because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Astroworld 2021 promised to be bigger than the two editions before, expanding the festival from one day to two, while uniting tens of thousands of young fans who had missed out on valuable concert-going experiences since the pandemic began.

“It’s a carefree world” is how concertgoer Kaia Redus describes the festival in Netflix’s Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy, which details how the Houston celebration turned into a death trap with 10 fatalities, with the youngest victim only nine years old, as well as hundreds of injuries. 

“It was a concert you didn’t want to miss, and you knew it was going to be fun,” explains Sophia Santana, another survivor, with enthusiasm and certainty. The feature-length documentary, releasing June 10, is the first in a weekly series that digs into big event meltdowns that made headlines, created corporate scandals, and often cost lives. Directed by Yemi Bamiro, the film includes interviews with survivors and experts and uses footage shot on concertgoers’ phones to explain how such a massive crowd crush happened during Travis Scott’s headlining performance and what happened in the aftermath.

What led to the deaths at Astroworld?

Astroworld was organized by LiveNation, the biggest live event promoter in the U.S. bar none, and the company was eager to capitalize on Scott’s “rager” brand when Astroworld returned. As The Astroworld Tragedy shows, footage of fans breaking down fences to get into the 2019 Astroworld was used to promote the festival’s return. Kirby Gladstein, a returning festival photographer, recalls her team was instructed to lean into the chaos of Scott’s performances. Gladstein seemed anxious to share her perspective on the temperature of the festival and how the organizers lost control, as she believes the blame lies at LiveNation’s feet. “They hold so much of this industry in the palm of their hand,” says Gladstein. “By talking about what happened at Astroworld, I know that I’m jeopardizing my career, ultimately.” (No representative of LiveNation is interviewed in the documentary, though their responses are included in text at the end of the film, and include pointing to the roles of SMG Global and the Houston Fire Department in setting sellable capacity for the venue, and stating all relevant parties were aware of event plans and safety codes. The company released their only statement on the tragedy the day after it occurred, in 2021.)

The Astroworld Tragedy interviews crowd safety expert Scott Davidson, onsite paramedic Jose Villegas, and security guards Jackson and Samuel Bush (who were only hired hours before the festival began) to paint a picture of the poor planning that contributed to the festival’s death tally. The mainstage was unoccupied all day, meaning that fans could camp out for Scott for hours in the hot Houston sun. It also meant that thousands of fans traveled to the headline set from the same direction at the exact same time, creating the perfect conditions for crowd crushing. On the left-hand side of the stage, fans funnelled directly into a pen that added more pressure to fans against barriers with no route of escape.

Beginning at 9 p.m., Scott appeared on stage and the crushing quickly worsened; the most upsetting footage of The Astroworld Tragedy is taken from cell phone videos shot inside the pen, showing fans being asphyxiated and crushed in real time while Scott’s performance blares unaffected behind them – while Scott would later say he was aware of some fainting and disturbance, he claimed to not realise the gravity of the situation.

How did Astroworld organizers respond to the crisis?

“Stop the show! Stop the show! Stop the show!” shout fans as Scott introduces a guest onstage.

Despite concertgoers screaming for help en masse, climbing up to restricted areas to demand help from officials, and calling the police, the concert didn’t end until an hour after Scott began performing onstage. Davidson concluded (and the documentary team consulted an additional crowd safety expert to verify his findings) that a major fault with the festival was that only two individuals had been delegated authority to stop the concert when it became dangerous, but as Davidson explains, “any key decision-maker […] should have been able to very quickly initiate a show stop process, what should have been as simple as a figurative or literal button being pushed.”

Meanwhile, crush victims were struggling to breathe and stand up straight. “I just remember thinking, ‘Don’t fall down because you won’t make it back up,’” recalls Santana.

The countdown to 10 p.m. was hectic and lethal, and Davidson quotes the transcript of a LiveNation manager speaking to the audio engineer, one of the only people who could speak directly to Scott onstage: “We have four active CPRs going on. Two are most likely dead. It is very, very bad. There are more crush victims than I’ve ever seen in my 25-year career.”

Mark Lentini, a former commander for the Houston Police, places the responsibility for the Astroworld tragedy on the festival organizers rather than the police response. He points out how completely predictable the chaos of unauthorized entry and jumping fences would have been to a properly organized festival team. But others see it differently; as Davidson explains, as the crisis was worsening, the Houston Police and LiveNation agreed to continue the concert for Drake to appear onstage to avoid “trigger crowd panic”.

“The idea of a performance continuing while even one CPR in progress is underway is insane, unprecedented, not to mention multiple,” stresses Davidson.

What was the aftermath?

Travis Scott’s statements on the tragedy were received as insincere by many survivors and victims’ loved ones, who tearfully recount the moments at hospitals and reunification centers when they were informed of deaths. Since Astroworld, Scott has made only a few comments on the tragedy, but the song “My Eyes” on his 2023 album Utopia references his perspective of the event, with one lyric that goes, “If they just knew what Scotty would do to jump off the stage and save him a child.” In addition to Utopia, Scott has released a companion film Circus Maximus, and is currently nearing the end of a global tour—but Astroworld has not been held since 2021. A grand jury decided not to hold any individual criminally responsible for the tragedy, and the families of victims received out of court settlements for lawsuits brought against Scott and LiveNation.

Since Astroworld, LiveNation has faced a host of other legal issues, including a lawsuit from the Department of Justice for monopolization of the music industry, another from the families of an artist who was murdered backstage at a festival, and criticism of their hostile arbitration rules. Netflix’s documentary gets to the heart of how something as traumatic and confounding as the Astroworld crowd crush happened, but the questions it ends on—Why didn’t someone stop it? Will it happen again?—are left terrifyingly unanswered.