PENSACOLA, Fla. /PRNewswire/ — Today, Hard Rock International announces development plans for REVERB by Hard Rock® Pensacola to break ground in 2026 and open in 2029. REVERB by Hard Rock® is a unique hotel brand designed to be an energetic cultural hub for connection, creation and inspiration among music fans, locals and travelers alike. This will mark the company’s sixth REVERB property joining the portfolio, with Atlanta and Hamburg, and Kalamazoo, Tampa, and Scottsdale also being developed.
REVERB by Hard Rock® Pensacola will feature more than 125 hotel technology-enhanced rooms, a full-service restaurant, rooftop bar, lobby bar and lounge, quick service restaurant and fitness center. An exclusive REVERB City Guide for Pensacola will feature local artist-curated lists of favorite drinks, dining, and entertainment locations throughout the local area. Additionally, the property will host a podcast recording studio for local talent and creators as well as a meeting space for conferences.
The property will be located downtown at Maritime Park along Pensacola Bay with views of the picturesque water that connects to the Gulf of Mexico and with views of Blue Wahoos Stadium. It will provide easy access to nearby hotspots including beautiful beaches, National Naval Aviation Museum and Pensacola Museum of Art. The hotel will be developed on a 100-year ground lease with the city of Pensacola that goes to vote by the City Council on August 8, 2024. The project is expected to create an economic boost to the area and generate 500+ construction and 75+ permanent hospitality employment opportunities with competitive pay.
“Hard Rock is thrilled to keep growing our REVERB hotel portfolio with what will be the second planned property in Florida, this time in the heart of Pensacola Bay. We have full confidence in our partner, the Dawson Company, to deliver a best-in-class hotel based on their four decades of proven experience executing complex and catalytic projects throughout the eastern United States, and their extensive knowledge of the Pensacola market,” said Todd Hricko, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Hotel Development at Hard Rock International.
The Dawson Company, a second generation, Pensacola-based development firm known for its pioneering, landmark mixed-use developments in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Baltimore and Pensacola has assembled one of the most accomplished and world-renown design and engineering teams ever to design the project in Florida’s Panhandle. The design team includes Gensler, the world’s largest preeminent architectural design firm that has created some of the most distinctive, recognizable and celebrated monuments and structures around the world and Kravitz Design, the global conceptual design firm helmed by music and style icon Lenny Kravitz known globally for their groundbreaking, yet approachable and artistic style. With a plan to build in mass timber, Thornton Tomasetti, the foremost thought leader on mass timber design is also on the design team.
“With its roots in music, entertainment and philanthropy, Hard Rock is a wonderful partner for The Dawson Company to continue extending our real estate footprint,” said Tamara Bowens, President & Chief Operating Officer for the Dawson Company. “We are truly excited to bring the REVERB by Hard Rock to the city of Pensacola and we look forward to also working closely with Gensler, Kravitz Design and Thornton Tomasetti to develop what’s to become an incredible mainstay in Pensacola.”
Other partners contributing to the development include Pensacola native, NFL Hall of Famer and real estate entrepreneur, Emmitt Smith, CEO at EJ Smith Enterprises.
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For more information about current and upcoming properties, visit hotel.hardrock.com.
About REVERB by Hard Rock®
REVERB by Hard Rock® is a new select-service hotel designed for the modern music lover; a sanctuary for the eclectic, a place for fans to gather and experience a melting pot of music culture. The hotel features a modern, urban design, user-friendly integrated technology and a program that focuses on local music, food and lifestyle. Hard Rock has been celebrating the spirit of music for nearly five decades; with REVERB, they shine the spotlight directly on the fans. For more information about REVERB by Hard Rock, visit reverb.hardrock.com.
About Hard Rock®
Hard Rock International (HRI) is one of the most globally recognized companies with venues in over 70 countries spanning 309 locations that include owned/licensed or managed Hotels, Casinos, Rock Shops®, Live Performance Venues and Cafes. Its Unity by Hard Rock™ global loyalty program rewards members for doing the things they love across participating properties around the world. HRI also launched a joint venture named Hard Rock Digital in 2020, an online sportsbook, retail sportsbook and internet gaming platform. Beginning with an Eric Clapton guitar, Hard Rock owns the world’s largest and most valuable collection of authentic music memorabilia at more than 88,000 pieces, which are displayed at its locations around the globe. Hard Rock Hotels has been honored by J.D. Power’s North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Study as the number one or two brand in Outstanding Guest Satisfaction for five consecutive years among the top Upper Upscale Hotels. HRI became the first privately-owned gaming company designated a U.S. Best Managed Company by Deloitte Private and The Wall Street Journal in 2021 and has since been honored fourfold. Hard Rock was also honored by Forbes among the World’s Best Employers, as well as Best Employers for Women, Diversity and New Grads and a Top Large Employer in the Travel & Leisure, Gaming and Entertainment Industry. In the 2022 Global Gaming Awards, Hard Rock was named Land-Based Operator of the Year for the second time in four years. Hard Rock International currently holds investment grades from primary investment-grade rating agencies: S&P Global Ratings (BBB-) and Fitch Ratings (BBB). For more information on Hard Rock International, visit www.hardrock.com or shop.hardrock.com.
About the Dawson Company The Dawson Company dba Inspired Communities of Florida is a second-generation managed, Pensacola Florida-based real estate company founded in 1969 in Atlanta, GA by Harold Dawson, Sr. With a history rooted in “doing well by doing good,” The Dawson Company has developed, renovated, and/or managed 5 million square feet of office, 1.5 million square feet of retail, and 15,000+ units of attached and multifamily housing. Drawing on its in-house expertise, The Dawson Company has evolved into a boutique development firm that immerses itself into niche tertiary markets to create impactful, enduring, catalytic mixed-use developments that grow, strengthen and enhance cities, towns and communities. For more information visit: www.thedawsoncompany.com.
SOURCE Hard Rock International
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Influencer Alix Earle, a self-described ‘hot mess,’ has legions of online haters.
Greg Doherty/Getty Images for RevolveJessica Maddox, University of Alabama and Jess Rauchberg, Seton Hall University
Since 2020, content creator Remi Bader had accumulated millions of TikTok followers by offering her opinions on the fits of popular clothing brands as a plus-size woman.
In 2023, however, Bader appeared noticeably thinner. When some fans asked her whether she’d undergone a procedure, she blocked them. Later that year, she announced that she would no longer be posting about her body.
Enter snark subreddits. On Reddit, these forums exist for the sole purpose of calling out internet celebrities, whether they’re devoted to dinging the late-night antics of self-described “hot mess” Alix Earle or venting over Savannah and Cole LaBrant, a family vlogging couple who misleadingly implied that their daughter had cancer.
While the internet is synonymous with fan culture, snark subreddits aren’t for enthusiasts. Instead, snarkers are anti-fans who hone the art of hating.
Remi Bader attends New York Fashion Week on Feb. 10, 2025.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Tory Burch
After Bader’s refusal to talk about her weight loss, the Remi Bader snark subreddit blew up. Posters weren’t upset that Bader had lost weight or had stopped posting about her body size. Instead, they believed Bader the influencer, who’d built her brand on plus-size inclusion in fashion, wasn’t being straight with her fans and needed to be taken to account.
It worked. During a March 2025 appearance on Khloe Kardashian’s podcast, Bader finally revealed that she had, in fact, had weight-loss surgery.
Some critics see snarkers as a big problem and understandably denounce their tendency to harass, body shame and try to cancel influencers.
But completely dismissing snark glosses over the fact that it can serve a purpose. In our work as social media researchers, we’ve written about how snark can actually be thought of as a way to call out bad actors in the largely unregulated world of influencing and content creation.
Grassroots policing
Before there were influencers, there were bloggers. While bloggers covered topics that ranged from entertainment to politics to travel, parenting and fashion bloggers probably have the closest connection to today’s influencers.
After Google introduced AdSense in 2003, bloggers were easily able to run advertising on their websites. Then brands saw an opportunity. Parenting and fashion bloggers had large, loyal followings. Many readers felt an intimate connection to their favorite bloggers, who seemed more like friends than out-of-touch celebrity spokespersons.
Brands realized they could send bloggers their products in exchange for a write-up or a feature. Furthermore, advertisers understood that parenting and fashion bloggers didn’t have to adhere to the same industry regulations or code of ethics as most news media outlets, such as disclosing payments or conflicts of interest.
This changed the dynamic between bloggers and their fans, who wondered whether bloggers could be trusted if they were sometimes being paid to promote certain products.
In response, websites emerged in 2009 to critique bloggers. “Get Off My Internets,” for example, fashioned itself as a “quality control watchdog” to provide constructive criticism and call out deceptive practices. As Instagram and YouTube became more popular, the subreddit “r/Blogsnark” launched in 2015 to critique early influencers, in addition to bloggers.
Few guardrails in place
Today the influencer industry has a valuation of over US$250 billion in the U.S. alone, and it’s on track to be worth over $500 billion by 2027.
Yet there are few regulations in place for influencers. A few laws have emerged to protect child influencers, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has established legal guidelines for sponsored content.
That said, the influencing industry remains rife with exploitation.
It goes both ways: Corporations can exploit influencers. For example, a 2021 study found that Black influencers receive below-market offers compared with white influencers.
Savannah and Cole LaBrant came under fire for implying that their daughter had cancer, in what their critics called a ploy for attention.Danielle Del Valle/Getty Images for Lionsgate
Likewise, influencers can deceive or exploit their followers. They might use unrealistic body filters to appear thinner than they are. They could hide who’s paying them. They may promote health misinformation such as the controversial ParaGuard cleanse, a fake treatment pushed by wellness influencers that claimed to rid its users of parasites.
Or, in the case of Remi Bader, they might gain a huge following by promoting body positivity, only to conceal a weight-loss procedure from their fans.
For disappointed fans or followers who feel burned, snark can seem like the only regulatory guardrail in an industry that has gone largely unchecked. Think of snark as a Better Business Bureau for the untamable world of influencing – a form of accountability that brings attention to the scammers and hustlers.
Keeping it real
Todays’s snark exists at the intersection of gossip and cancel culture.
Though cancel culture certainly has its faults, we approach cancel culture in our writing as a worthy tool that allows audiences to hold the powerful accountable. For example, communities of color have joined forces to call out racists, as they did in 2024 when they exposed lifestyle influencer Brooke Schofield’s anti-Black tweets.
Influencers build trust with their audiences based on being “real” and relatable. But there’s nothing preventing them from breaking that trust, and snarkers can swoop in to point out bad behavior or hypocrisy.
Within the competitive world of family vlogging, snarkers see themselves as doing more than stirring the pot. They’re truth-tellers who bring injustices to light, such as abuse and child labor exploitation. Some of this exposure is paying off, with more and more states introducing and passing family vlogger laws that require children to one day receive a portion of their parents’ earnings or restrict how often children can appear in their parents’ videos.
Yes, snark can veer into cyberbullying. But that shouldn’t discount its value as a tool for transparency. Influencers are ultimately brands. They sell audiences ideas, lifestyles and products.
When people feel as if they’ve been misled, we think they have every right to call it out.
Jessica Maddox, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama and Jess Rauchberg, Assistant Professor of Communication Technologies, Seton Hall University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
‘I were but little happy, if I could say how much’: Shakespeare’s insights on happiness have held up for more than 400 years
The World Happiness Report indicates the U.S. ranks 24th in global happiness, emphasizing that joy arises from societal relationships and care. Shakespeare’s works explore happiness’ duality—both fortune and contentment—highlighting cultural influences that affect individuals’ experiences. Understanding happiness requires recognizing social inequalities, community support, and shared cultural beliefs.
Joanna Vanderham as Desdemona and Hugh Quarshie as the title character in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of ‘Othello.’ Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images
Since 2012, the World Happiness Report has measured and compared data from 167 countries. The United States currently ranks 24th, between the U.K. and Belize – its lowest position since the report was first issued. But the 2025 edition – released on March 20, the United Nations’ annual “International Day of Happiness” – starts off not with numbers, but with Shakespeare.
“In this year’s issue, we focus on the impact of caring and sharing on people’s happiness,” the authors explain. “Like ‘mercy’ in Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice,’ caring is ‘twice-blessed’ – it blesses those who give and those who receive.”
Shakespeare’s plays offer many reflections on happiness itself. They are a record of how people in early modern England experienced and thought about joy and satisfaction, and they offer a complex look at just how happiness, like mercy, lives in relationships and the caring exchanges between people.
Contrary to how we might think about happiness in our everyday lives, it is more than the surge of positive feelings after a great meal, or a workout, or even a great date. The experience of emotions is grounded in both the bodyand the mind, influenced by human physiology and culture in ways that change depending on time and place. What makes a person happy, therefore, depends on who that person is, as well as where and when they belong – or don’t belong.
Happiness has a history. I study emotions and early modern literature, so I spend a lot of my time thinking about what Shakespeare has to say about what makes people happy, in his own time and in our own. And also, of course, what makes people unhappy.
But in modern English usage, “happy” as “fortunate” has been almost entirely replaced by a notion of happiness as “joy,” or the more long-term sense of life satisfaction called “well-being.” The term “well-being,” in fact, was introduced into English from the Italian “benessere” around the time of Shakespeare’s birth.
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The word and the concept of happiness were transforming during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and his use of the word in his plays mingles both senses: “fortunate” and “joyful.” That transitional ambiguity emphasizes happiness’ origins in ideas about luck and fate, and it reminds readers and playgoers that happiness is a contingent, fragile thing – something not just individuals, but societies need to carefully cultivate and support.
For instance, early in “Othello,” the Venetian senator Brabantio describes his daughter Desdemona as “tender, fair, and happy / So opposite to marriage that she shunned / The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation.” Before she elopes with Othello she is “happy” in the sense of “fortunate,” due to her privileged position on the marriage market.
Later in the same play, though, Othello reunites with his new wife in Cyprus and describes his feelings of joy using this same term:
…If it were now to die, ‘Twere now to be most happy, for I fear My soul hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate.
Desdemona responds,
The heavens forbid But that our loves and comforts should increase Even as our days do grow!
They both understand “happy” to mean not just lucky, but “content” and “comfortable,” a more modern understanding. But they also recognize that their comforts depend on “the heavens,” and that happiness is enabled by being fortunate.
“Othello” is a tragedy, so in the end, the couple will not prove “happy” in either sense. The foreign general is tricked into believing his young wife has been unfaithful. He murders her, then takes his own life.
The seeds of jealousy are planted and expertly exploited by Othello’s subordinate, Iago, who catalyzes the racial prejudice and misogyny underlying Venetian values to enact his sinister and cruel revenge.
“Othello” sheds light on happiness’s history – but also on its politics.
While happiness is often upheld as a common good, it is also dependent on cultural forces that make it harder for some individuals to experience. Shared cultural fantasies about happiness tend to create what theorist Sara Ahmed calls “affect aliens”: individuals who, by nature of who they are and how they are treated, experience a disconnect between what their culture conditions them to think should make them happy and their disappointment or exclusion from those positive feelings. Othello, for example, rightly worries that he is somehow foreign to the domestic happiness Desdemona describes, excluded from the joy of Venetian marriage. It turns out he is right.
Because Othello is foreign and Black and Desdemona is Venetian and white, their marriage does not conform to their society’s expectations for happiness, and that makes them vulnerable to Iago’s deceit.
Similarly, “The Merchant of Venice” examines the potential for happiness to include or exclude, to build or break communities. Take the quote about mercy that opens the World Happiness Report.
The phrase appears in a famous courtroom scene, as Portia attempts to persuade a Jewish lender, Shylock, to take pity on Antonio, a Christian man who cannot pay his debts. In their contract, Shylock has stipulated that if Antonio defaults on the loan, the fee will be a “pound of flesh.”
“The quality of mercy is not strained,” Portia lectures him; it is “twice-blessed,” benefiting both giver and receiver.
It’s a powerful attempt to save Antonio’s life. But it is also hypocritical: Those cultural norms of caring and mercy seem to apply only to other Christians in the play, and not the Jewish people living alongside them in Venice. In that same scene, Shylock reminds his audience that Antonio and the other Venetians in the room have spit on him and called him a dog. He famously asks why Jewish Venetians are not treated as equal human beings: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
Actor Henry Irving as Shylock in a late 19th-century performance of ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ Lock & Whitfield/Folger Shakespeare Library via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Shakespeare’s plays repeatedly make the point that the unjust distribution of rights and care among various social groups – Christians and Jews, men and women, citizens and foreigners – challenges the happy effects of benevolence.
Those social factors are sometimes overlooked in cultures like the U.S., where contemporary notions of happiness are marketed by wellness gurus, influencers and cosmetic companies. Shakespeare’s plays reveal both how happiness is built through communities of care and how it can be weaponized to destroy individuals and the fabric of the community.
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There are obvious victims of prejudice and abuse in Shakespeare’s plays, but he does not just emphasize their individual tragedies. Instead, the plays record how certain values that promote inequality poison relationships that could otherwise support happy networks of family and friends.
Systems of support
Pretty much all objective research points to the fact that long-term happiness depends on community, connections and social support: having systems in place to weather what life throws at us.
And according to both the World Happiness Report and Shakespeare, contentment isn’t just about the actual support you receive but your expectations about people’s willingness to help you. Societies with high levels of trust, like Finland and the Netherlands, tend to be happier – and to have more evenly distributed levels of happiness in their populations.
Shakespeare’s plays offer blueprints for trust in happy communities. They also offer warnings about the costs of cultural fantasies about happiness that make it more possible for some, but not for all.
The Bridge is a section of the STM Daily News Blog meant for diversity, offering real news stories about bona fide community efforts to perpetuate a greater good. The purpose of The Bridge is to connect the divides that separate us, fostering understanding and empathy among different groups. By highlighting positive initiatives and inspirational actions, The Bridge aims to create a sense of unity and shared purpose. This section brings to light stories of individuals and organizations working tirelessly to promote inclusivity, equality, and mutual respect. Through these narratives, readers are encouraged to appreciate the richness of diverse perspectives and to participate actively in building stronger, more cohesive communities.
In that first movie, “Episode IV,” Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert.
It might sound impossible, but it’s exactly what experts discussed at the second International Atmospheric Water Harvesting Summit hosted by Arizona State University in March 2025.
Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but it’s distributed very unevenly – including landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely.
Deserts, which cover about one-fifth of the Earth’s land area, are home to about 1 billion people.
Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people.
Researchers can harvest water from air in the desert, in a process powered only by the Sun.
Space debris
When the second Death Star was destroyed in “Return of the Jedi,” it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movie’s mythology helpfully explains a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy.
As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So we’re left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space.
According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked.
Just as on Earth’s roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths.
This accumulation of space debris is creating an increasing problem. With more satellites and spacecraft heading to orbit, and more stuff up there moving around that might hit them, space travel is becoming more like flying the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field every day.
Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies – including a net, a harpoon and a laser – to remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment.
Dodging obstacles in space is no picnic.
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