I’ve always felt that the greatest revenge you can get on your haters is to succeed in spite of them. Haters never have anything good to contribute, so you’ve got to just ignore them and keep going on your path.
While plenty of celebrities have had that experience growing up, Lady Gaga has completely lived that truth.
You see, back when she was a college student at NYU, playing dive bars and open mics for anyone who’d listen, a crew of her classmates created a Facebook group specifically meant to bully her. They used the forum to tease her mercilessly, making fun of her appearance, her music, and her dream of becoming a famous singer.
The group, which uses her real name, is titled “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous,” and accused her of things like being an “attention whore”. It also repeatedly stated that she’d never, ever be successful at her chosen calling.
The group was first exposed back in 2016, when Lauren Bohn, a former classmate of Gaga’s made a Facebook post about it:
Lauren wrote how Gaga’s story is a perfect example of what happens when you don’t let your haters get in your head.
When I was a freshman at NYU and Facebook was only a year old and people created/joined groups like “I have dimples, f*** me” and “Fake ID, please!,” I remember coming across a Facebook group that broke my heart. It’s name: “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous.
The page housed pictures of a pretty Norah Jones-esque young 18-year-old NYU student who sang and played piano at local bars. The group was peppered with comments, sharp as porcupine needles, vilifying the aspiring musician for being an “attention-whore.” Scores asked: “Who does she think she is?” I also remember one dude posting a flyer for one of her upcoming gigs at a local village bar. He had clearly stomped on the flyer, an outline of his muddy sole [soul] struggling to eclipse her name.
I couldn’t shake the raw feeling of filth while scrolling down that Facebook page, but I pretty much — and quickly — forgot about that group and that girl with the intense raven eyes.
Until about five years later. I was on an Amtrak train from NYC to Philly, reading a Vanessa Grigoriadis New York Magazine profile on Lady Gaga. I floated somewhat mindlessly through the piece until I got to the first sentence of the second graf:
“Before the meeting, I assumed that someone with a stage name like “Lady” (her given name is Stefani Joanne Germanotta) was going to be a bit standoffish…”
“HOLY SHIT,” I screamed to an empty car (Those who hang with me will know that I actually shrieked). “LADY GAGA IS STEFANI GERMANOTTA? STEFANI IS LADY GAGA?”
I was overcome with a dizzying emotional cocktail of stage-mom-at-a-beauty-pageant and nerd-revenge triumph. But also shame. Shame that I never wrote on that group, shame that I never defended the girl with the intense raven eyes — the girl whose brave flyers were stomped on, probably somewhere near my dorm.
But again, I soon forgot about that revelation and that feeling. Feelings. They’re so fleeting. Even more so, revelations. We need to constantly re-discover them every damn day. Like last week, when I woke up to this meme. I saw the muddy sole eclipsing her name. The eye-rolls. The cowardly virtual-giggles. The “Who does she think she is?”
I’ve got a lot of feelings, but the easiest one to articulate: gratitude. Stefani, thank you. Thank you for always thinking you’re a superstar, for using your cracks to let the light come out more brightly. Humans, let’s follow suit. #LadyGaga #ThatsWho
Well, Gaga is clearly getting the last laugh today. She’s a household name who recently broke barriers by becoming the first woman to win a Grammy, Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA in the same year for her incredible performance in “A Star is Born.”
Others also noted that this just shows how people will always try to hate on each other, but that haters should never be the reason you give up on your dreams.
As winter keeps dragging on, there’s a good chance you already have a request for some time off sitting on your manager’s desk. Maybe you’ve even started browsing Airbnb for that perfect spot to stay at. If so, check out these 9 reviews of places that range from downright weird to absolutely incredible.
So, tally up your paid time off and get ready for adventure. Because booking your vacation with a phone app means not exactly knowing what you’re in for.
Hopefully now you understand even a fraction of the power of Snapchat. Because, as I said earlier, if you don’t appreciate the snaps… YOU DON’T DESERVE THE SNAPS.
Do you believe in coincidences? I think we all do to an extent… and yet, there are some coincidences that are so bizarre that you start looking around and thinking “Wtf, am I in some kind of parallel universe or something?
1. But the worst day of all was when someone had to create SandwichBoy SquareBob…
While the main gang featured in that film was called The Dead Rabbits (which is an awesome name), they were hardly the only ones running the streets at the time. As a matter of fact, there were plenty of 19th-century gangs with colorful names, many of whom operated in New York’s notorious Five Points neighborhood.
Here are 10 that roamed the streets many years ago.
1. Crazy Butch Gang
A gang of teen pickpockets.
2. Molasses Gang
These boys used to bet a shopkeeper he wouldn’t fill up a hat with molasses. When the poor fool did, they’d slap the hat on his head and take all his money.
This gang of thieves consisted of teenagers who formerly worked as newsboys or shoe shiners. They also ran a theater where they performed. You could say they were multi-talented.
If you live in a city in the U.S., your opinion of squirrels probably amounts to “rats with bushy tails.” That might sound kinda mean, but honestly, it’s not that far off from the truth. However, squirrels as an animal are actually pretty cute, especially these rare tiny squirrels that live only on one island in Japan.
Animal lovers, meet the Ezo momonga, aka the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel. A few quick facts: They are extremely small, with very big eyes. They can fly-ish (!!!). And they only live on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido because of course they do.
It’s unlikely that you’ll ever see a Japanese dwarf flying squirrel for yourself, unless you happen to live in Hokkaido. Luckily, though, there are a ton of squeal-worthy pictures online.
These creatures are small enough to curl up into the palm of your hand, and they “fly” basically by gliding from tree to tree. They munch on tree bark, seeds, and nuts, and they often hang upside down while doing so.
Unlike many other rare animals, Japanese dwarf flying squirrels are not endangered in the slightest. They are doing very well – thriving, even. Seeing as there are apparently plenty to go around… Maybe we can just trade some of our terrible American squirrels for these freaking adorable ones?
Back in 1878, archaeologists came across a Viking burial chamber in an important trade center known as Birka. Judging by the way the body had bee placed into the grave, they assessed that it must have belonged to a prominent Viking warrior.
The body was found buried with their weapons, fancy clothes, and two horses. The assumption at the time was that the remains must have been those of a man,but a DNA study concluded that the remains were biologically female.
Critics of the findings argued that the weapons could have belonged to her husband or that there could have been two skeletons in the grave and the analysis was done on the wrong one. They argued that thinking that women were Viking warriors is wishful thinking and that we don’t have enough historical evidence to support the claim.
Researchers, though, are defending their findings in the journal Antiquity, saying the remains buried in the chamber are “unassailably female.” They confirm that there was only one skeleton in the grave, so they couldn’t have mixed up the remains, and asserted that all documentation was correct.
“Grave Bj.581 had only one human occupant,” confirms Professor Neil Price to IFLScience. “An extra thigh-bone in the Bj.581 museum storage box – much hyped by our online critics – is clearly labeled as coming from another grave and had just been misplaced in the wrong box (the possibility of which is why bones are labeled to begin with!).”
He also continues to make an even finer point:
“To those who do take issue, we suggest that it is not supportable to react only now, when the individual has been shown to be female, without explaining why neither the warrior interpretations nor any supposed source-critical factors were a problem when the person in Bj.581 was believed to be male.”
Ideas about gender, of course, are not set in stone and vary between cultures, so it’s fair to say the skeleton could belong to a person who was both a female and a warrior, and also to accept the fact that being a woman might not have meant the same thing in that culture as it does in ours today.
“The body’s XX chromosomes revealed in the genomic study provide an unambiguously female sex determination, but the gender of the Bj.581 individual is a different matter. There is, of course, a broad spectrum of possibilities, many of them involving contested contemporary terminologies that can also be problematic to apply to people of the past.”
The archaeologists on the study expect that, in the future, we’ll probably find more and more Viking Age female warriors, whether they’re new finds or reassessments of remains already catalogued.
The future – and the past – is female, it would seem.
I’ve always believed that it’s so important to have good parents who help you understand the difference between right and wrong, and who have your back when things get rough.
That’s what happened when this Redditor was called into her daughter’s school after an incident. While she was ready to defend her baby tooth and nail, it turns out the young lady had already handled her problem in a rather admirable way.
