You’re good here, ok?

Connor Storrie knew Rachel Reid's "Unrivaled" was happening before it was announced! The "Heated Rivalry" actor shares with TODAY.com his appreciation for the author and why he thinks this book-to-screen adaptation was successful. “Unrivaled” will tell the next phase of Shane and Ilya’s story, which began with 2019’s “Heated Rivalry” and continued in 2022’s “The Long Game.”

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor's Wife (1864)

HUDSON WILLIAMS

Arrives at the Giorgio Armani fashion show during the Milan Fashion Week - Menswear Fall/Winter 2026-2027 on January 19, 2026 in Milan, Italy.

heated rivalry + original series soundtrack

This is all one take?? And they have MULTIPLE people as Robin Hood so that they can "cut" between them by spinning the camera??? Wow. That's so complicated but super clever

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on injustice at home even when the bigger battles are farther away

This morning, I was blessed to attend an MLK Day gathering in the town where my church is located, and doubly blessed that our pastor gave a hell of an address that fired up the room and filled up the collection baskets for a local youth scholarship program.

I was also blessed in that the program contained the text of a speech by Dr. King that I had not read before, from his visit to Cornell College in Iowa from 1962. Many of the themes we hear in Dr. King's other speeches and sermons appear in this one-- and rightly so, because what's true and important bears repeating until the message doesn't just stick but inspires action. But there was a particular passage in this speech that really spoke to the doomerism and defeatism and both-sidesism I keep seeing social media by people who are quick to Wholeheartedly Condemn! wide swaths of people and claim that it's useless to act because That Group makes it Impossible, Actually, to succeed, so you Somewhere Else can stay at home and aren't required to act because Those Other Hopeless People have prevented us all from realizing our freedoms.

I was familiar with the "injustice anywhere" quote but not the paragraph preceding it (bolded emphasis mine):

There is also need for leadership from the people of goodwill in the white South. I would not have you believe for one minute tonight that there are not white persons of goodwill in the South. I am absolutely convinced that there are hundreds and thousands, nay millions of white people of goodwill in the South, but most of them are silent today because of fear—fear of political, social and economic reprisal. God grant that the people of goodwill will rise up with courage, take over the leadership, and open channels of communication between races, for I think that one of the tragedies of our whole struggle is that the South is still trying to live in monologue, rather than dialogue, and I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don't know each other and they don't know each other because they don't communicate with each other, and they don't communicate with each other because they are separated from each other. And God grant that something will happen to open channels of communication, that something will happen because men of goodwill will rise to the level of leadership. There is also need for leadership and concern on the part of white people of goodwill in the North, if this problem is to be solved. Genuine liberalism on the question of race. And what we too often find in the North is a sort of quasi-liberalism based on the principle of looking objectively at all sides, and it is a liberalism that gets so involved in looking at all sides, that it doesn't get committed to either side. It is a liberalism that is so objectively analytical that it fails to get subjectively committed. It is a liberalism that is neither hot nor cold but lukewarm. And we must come to see that this problem in the United States is not a sectional problem, but a national problem. No section of our country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. It is one thing for a white person of goodwill in the North to rise up with righteous indignation when a bus is burned in Anniston, Alabama ... but that same person of goodwill must rise up with the same righteous indignation when a Negro in his state or in his city cannot live in a particular neighborhood because of the color of his skin, or cannot join a particular academic society or fraternal order or sorority because of the color of his or her skin, or cannot get a particular job in a particular firm because he happens to be a Negro. In other words, genuine liberalism will see that the problem can exist even in one's front and back yard, and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

It doesn't matter if you live in a blue state and your vote "doesn't matter," because it in fact matters to people whose votes don't count in red states to know that there are parts of the country where their humanity matters. It doesn't matter if you can't travel to a red state to protest or organize. It does matter that you fight the injustices where you find them. That might not mean blockading ICE-- but it might mean filling the community fridge or volunteering at a shelter where folks with discomfiting mental illness still need your help.

These aren't performative things that get you in the spotlight or earn you an award for Moral Correctness, and yet they're all as necessary as the big marches or the landslide votes or any other act to challenge injustice. And it requires you to pick a side and act and connect, as if it could actually matter-- because that's the only way it ever will. Stop being lukewarm, kids, and get heated up.

*whispers* holy shit. he’s done it again.

*yells* THIS IS THAT TIME HE DID IT WITH POTTERY AND IT FUCKING RULED.

Ilya really said the rumors are true. I am a whore and a slut. but ☝️ I love your boring son.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m more than a casual fan of heated rivalry. I’m having a ball in here and loving it etc but I think having been insane about media since the age of 10 has inoculated me somewhat to the life altering effects it’s having on normal people. They don’t have the tools to navigate this. For them this is the first piece of media they’ve consumed where it feels like someone secretly put drugs in it. But me I live here baby. This is my home

this feels the same as being rick-rolled