Shocked by Ebola's death toll, Bob Geldof corralled together a bunch of celebrities to do a Band Aid 30 rendition of Do They Know It's Christmas? to raise money for Ebola sufferers and their treatment. Everyone from Rita Ora and Sinead O'Conner to vloggers Zoella and Alfie Deyes turned up to record a bit of music for charidee. The biggest talking topic, though, was the fact Fuse ODG, who is Ghanaian, refused to be on the track because of its 'negative images' of Africa as a suffering entity, rather than varied, prosperous and attractive.
Controversy hit One Direction again as Zayn Malik was absent from a promo trip to New York. The boys (or self-appointed dad/spokesman Liam Payne) said he had a dodgy tummy, but one newscaster wondered if it was anything to do with drugs. Zayn denied this, then ditched the curtains he’d been rocking.
Thousands of Mexicans took to the streets to protest the disappearance and presumed murder of 43 college students. Under pressure from the public, police – thought to be involved in gangs – were arrested and the president announced that plans to address corruption. Meanwhile, those protests in Hong Kong intensified, with the police using tear gas on and arresting those left against an un-budgeable government.
Normally we wouldn’t give many darn-tootin’ hoots about Thanksgiving, but our supermarkets decided to borrow an American tradition this year. Not pre-made pumpkin pie, but Black Friday, where the day after Thanksgiving is treated as an opportunity to flog cheap electricals to people without providing much security assistance. Photos of people scrambling for TVs went viral, and arrests were made.
It was a bad time for online superstar pick-up artists in November, after mounting pressure to remove men who’d either appeared to assault women in their skits (Julien Blanc humped strangers’ faces in one YouTube video) or just barked rape jokes in response to feminist criticism (Dapper Laughs explained to a crowd of people, as a lol, how to rape a woman after being accused of creating a ‘rapists’ almanac’). Daniel O’Reilly, the face, grin, hair, beard, mouth, brain and entire person behind Dapper Laughs, killed the Vine star off after his TV show was dropped, and Julien Blanc was successfully banned from entering the country.
Banger(s) of the month: Azealia Banks actually released an album. Yep. Broke With Expensive Taste was actually pretty good, too!
We were watching: Aside from Christopher Nolan's bonkers giant space mess Interstellar (of COURSE it was morse code through the watch), November was all about the very spectacular return of The Lawrence in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I.
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Illustration by Sophia Den Breems
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.