Your life is in reruns: ABBA returns for the first time in 35 years, The NYT reflects on its LGBT coverage, and your childhood comic book collection rules the box office!

ABBA Dabba Do

Hold onto your Pet Rocks, and polish up your mood rings: the original members of ABBA — Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — are back together and will soon have a pair of new tracks on the market.

The group, responsible for “Dancing Queen,” “Waterloo” and “Take A Chance On Me” will soon be adding to their hit-laden canon. The quartet took to Instagram yesterday to announce “the decision to go ahead with the exciting ABBA Avatar tour project had an exciting consequence. We four felt that, after some 35 years, it would be fun to join forces again and go inside the recording studio. So we did.”

The results of their reunion have yet to be heard, but the band is clearly as excited as their loyal fan base. As their post gushes, “it was like time had stood still and we had only been away on a short holiday. An extremely joyful experience!”

The last time they worked together, not only was digital music not a thing; CDs had yet to catch on. But ABBA being ABBA, they don’t do things in a small way, and their “getting the band back together” could well make high-tech history. They will be returning to the screen in the same way that the dinosaurs of “Jurassic World” are seen gobbling up tourists — courtesy of CGI.

Their statement goes on to say that their studio time “resulted in two new songs and one of them, ‘I Still Have Faith In You,’ will be performed by our digital selves in a TV special produced by NBC and the BBC aimed for broadcasting in December.”

Until the new tracks materialize, please feed your ABBAdiction with this video just added by a Cher fan. The former Ms. Bono has added the group’s “Fernando” to her live act in anticipation of the Mama Mia sequel headed to cinemas this summer.

Corrections

“The Old Gray Lady,” as she is often called, doesn’t like to get things wrong. But The New York Times has cast scrutiny upon its own coverage of LGBT issues and the AIDS epidemic in particular.

Six Times reporters, who are also members of the LGBT community — Natalie Kitroeff, Adam Nagourney, John Koblin, Wesley Morris, Jeremy W. Peters, and Denny Lee — were asked to reconsider to the paper’s coverage of those tumultuous years, and what might be gleaned from their perspective in future coverage.

It’s a rough ride, but reading the piece is highly recommended: Six Times Journalists on the Paper’s History of Covering AIDS and Gay Issues

Avengers Assembled

Wait: You haven’t seen all 19 movies that led up to today’s debut of Avengers: Infinity War?

Well, we’re here to provide you (thanks, Fandango!) with a spoiler-free and blissfully short visual Cliff’s Notes about the who, what, where, when and how of it all.

Although there still isn’t a good explanation why Captain America bears such an uncanny resemblance to the Human Torch of a dozen years back.

Check out “Mama Mia!” Here We Go Again — With Cher Along for the Ride



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Last modified: July 20, 2018