13 Reasons People Think the Number 13 is Unlucky

Donald Glover’s show about fame and friendship heads into its third season after burning down every screen in sight by subverting expectations for what a TV series can be.

“Genius” gets tossed around a lot, but Glover has crafted a show that’s trippy and grounded, yet silly and brutal. It’s a show that defies a singular label and demands a seat at the VIP table. One of the best of the best.

Eat or be eaten, here are 10 facts about the Emmy-nominated series.

1. DONALD GLOVER TRICKED FX INTO ORDERING THE SHOW.

FX Networks

The concept of Trojan Horse-ing your way onto TV is something a few creators (including Jenji Kohan of Orange is the New Black) have talked about. Either selling the studio or your audience one familiar thing while introducing them to the real, innovative story hiding inside it. According to Glover, Atlanta followed in that grand tradition by telling FX the series would be more of a traditional hang-out show than it is. “I just Trojan Horsed it,” Glover told Vulture. “I told FX the show was something it wasn’t until we got there and then hoped it would be enjoyable.”

2. THEY MADE A CHICKEN WING ORDER SO POPULAR, A CHAIN ADDED IT TO THEIR MENU.

If you don’t know Atlanta, this can get a little confusing: J.R. Crickets is a real restaurant depicted in the show, but the Lemon Pepper Wet chicken wing order that Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) and Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) get wasn’t on its menu in real life until the show’s depiction of it made a bunch of people order it and J.R. Cricket’s decided to place it on the menu. Which kinda kills the joke. Glover based it on an item on American Deli’s menu, finding it funny that someone could treat Paper Boi to something at J.R. Cricket’s that wasn’t actually on the menu. This is what happens when you inject real restaurants into your fictional show.

3. IT’S CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM FOR RAPPERS.

FX Networks

Along with surrealism, the show trades in wry humor that would make Larry David proud. Glover describes Atlanta as “Curb Your Enthusiasm for rappers." "Being a rapper is super awkward,” Glover told Stephen Colbert earlier this year. "You’re in a video and you got, like, champagne and butts close to your face ... and then you have go to Whole Foods and the person is like, 'Hey, you’re that dude!' and you’re like, ‘Please I really want to buy this ice cream.'" Cue the theme music and the deadpan stare.

4. SINCE HE'S A RAPPER IN REAL LIFE, GLOVER DIDN’T WANT TO PLAY ONE ON TV.

There are plenty of TV stars who echo their real careers in the fictional world. Jerry Seinfeld playing an increasingly successful comedian, Lena Dunham playing an increasingly successful aspiring writer, and Adrian Grenier playing an increasingly successful Hollywood actor. Glover didn’t want to go that route. “That would have been wack to me,” Glover said. “I don’t think people want to see a show of someone actually making it.”

5. THE GLOVERS COMPARE THE SEASONS TO KANYE WEST ALBUMS.

"We’ve kind of been comparing the season to a sophomore record from a new artist," director Hiro Murai told Rolling Stone when Atlanta: Robbin’ Season came out. "Internally, we’ve drawn Kanye parallels: if the first season is College Dropout, this one is Late Registration.” It’s a sentiment from Donald and his brother, Stephen Glover, who is a writer and executive producer on the show. So it’s no surprise that they view the upcoming third season like Kanye’s Graduation. What does that mean, exactly? “This is probably our most accessible but also the realest—an honest version of it—and I feel like the most enjoyable,” Donald Glover explained.

6. BRIAN TYREE HENRY DIDN’T WANT TO STUDY OTHER RAPPERS TO CREATE HIS CHARACTER.

FX Networks

Donald and Stephen Glover write Paper Boi’s raps, and Stephen performs them, but Brian Tyree Henry embodies Alfred and his rap persona "Paper Boi." Yet in crafting the character, Henry didn’t go the conventional route. “I wanted to be so far removed from [studying other rappers] because I think that every rapper, even their names are ways that they want you to know them,” Henry told NPR. “Rappers make personas or names. I felt like it was a way of protection, you know what I mean? So, I didn’t really want to study any rappers per se because I wanted to get to know who [Alfred] really was and where he came from before I could even go to where he was going. Like, Paper Boi is where he’s going.”

7. THEY NEEDED A “WHITE TRANSLATOR” TO USE THE N-WORD ON THE SHOW.

FX initially told Glover not to use the N-word in the pilot, which would have been a dilution of natural speech. “I’m black, making a very black show, and they’re telling me I can’t use the N-word," Glover told The New Yorker. "Only in a world run by white people would that happen." To solve the problem, the creative team brought in white executive producer Paul Simms (known as the “White Translator” to several black showrunners) to make the case for why FX should allow the show to use the word. If you watch the show, you know who won that argument.

8. ZAZIE BEETZ IS CAUTIOUS ABOUT HOW HER CHARACTER IS VIEWED.

As an actress, Zazie Beetz is in a precarious position playing Van, a version of black womanhood not usually seen on TV. Van is representative, but, of course, not wholly so. “I think it is important to see intelligent black women who are also struggling with their partners. You know what I mean?” Beetz told GQ. “That’s all part of this larger narrative of what’s going on in the media and in film and television in generally. But her story isn’t everybody’s story. I don’t want executives in studios to be like, ‘Oh, we have to do more exactly like Van.’”

9. THERE’S A NOD TO CHILDISH GAMBINO IN THE “JUNETEENTH” EPISODE.

Donald's album was in Atlanta and we didn't even know pic.twitter.com/ywZBTDdwx5

— Sam (@SamRea14) November 10, 2016

When Glover’s (a.k.a. Childish Gambino) third studio album, “Awaken, My Love!”, dropped on December 2, 2016, sharp-eyed internet denizens realized he’d already hidden its album art in an October 25, 2016 episode of Atlanta where Glover's Earn and Beetz's Van go to a Juneteenth party. That’s next level Easter egging.

10. MARIJUANA INSPIRES THE SHOW'S CHAOTIC STRUCTURE.

It’s hardly surprising that marijuana is the muse for much of a show marked by disorientation and disconnection. “We do everything high,” Glover told The New Yorker. “The effortless chaos of Atlanta—the moments of enlightenment followed by an abrupt return to reality—is definitely shaped by weed. When sh*t is actually going on, no one knows what the f*** is happening.”

Today would have been the 98th birthday of English chemist Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant and dedicated scientist best known for the honor denied her: the 1962 Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. Here are 15 facts about her.

1. SHE KNEW HER CALLING EARLY, BUT HER FATHER RESISTED EDUCATING A DAUGHTER.

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London in 1920. She was one of five children born into a wealthy Jewish family. She decided she wanted to become a scientist at 15, and passed the admissions exam for Cambridge University. However, her father, Ellis, a merchant banker, objected to women going to college and refused to pay her tuition. Her aunt and mother finally managed to change his mind, and she enrolled at Cambridge's all-female Newnham College in 1938.

2. SHE ATTENDED COLLEGE WITH ANOTHER WOMAN WHO DIDN'T GET FULL CREDIT FOR HER WORK.

Bletchley Park cryptanalyst Joan Clarke was a few years older than Franklin, but they were both at Newnham in the late 1930s. Clarke would go on to be recruited for the war effort, cracking the German Enigma codes. The full scope of Clarke's work is still unknown, due to government secrecy.

3. HER SCHOLASTIC ACHIEVEMENTS WERE DENIED BY HER UNIVERSITY FOR YEARS.

Azeira, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

Despite Newnham College having been at Cambridge since 1871, the university refused to accept women as full members until 1948, seven years after Franklin earned the title of a degree in chemistry. Oxford University started granting women's degrees in 1920.

4. HER RESEARCH ON COAL HELPED THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY.

After graduation, Franklin got a job at the British Coal Utilization Research Association (BCURA), where she researched coal and charcoal, and how it could be used for more than fuel. Her research formed the basis for her 1945 doctoral dissertation; it and several of her later papers on the micro-structures of carbon fibers played a role in the eventual use of carbon composites in air- and spacecraft construction.

5. HER MALE COLLEAGUES WERE HOSTILE AND UNDERMINED HER RESEARCH.

Franklin had a direct nature and was unwilling to be traditionally feminine. One reason she left Cambridge to work on coal was that her doctoral supervisor did not like her and believed women would always be less than men. When she was hired in 1951 at King's College, London, to work on DNA, she clashed with researcher Maurice Wilkins, who had thought she was his assistant, not his equal. Meanwhile, Franklin was under the impression that she'd be completely independent. Their relationship got worse and worse the longer they worked together. Wilkins went so far as to share Franklin's research without telling her with James Watson and Francis Crick—even though they were technically his competitors, funded by Cambridge University. Watson was particularly nasty about Franklin in his 1968 book, The Double Helix, criticizing her appearance and saying she had to be “put in her place.”

6. HOW EVENTS UNFOLDED IN THE DISCOVERY OF DNA'S STRUCTURE IS STILL DEBATED TODAY.

Altayb, iStock

Many books have been written hashing over events, either criticizing Watson and Crick, saying they stole Franklin's research, or defending the duo, saying her research helped them but that Franklin would not ultimately have reached their conclusions on her own. Though Franklin and Watson never became friendly, Crick and his wife welcomed Franklin into their home while she was being treated for ovarian cancer.

7. HER WORK MAY HAVE LED TO HER UNTIMELY DEATH.

Franklin died of cancer in 1958. She was 37. Though genetics likely played a part in her illness, her work with crystal x-ray diffraction, which involved constant exposure to radiation, did not help. She is not the first woman in science to risk her health for her research. Marie Curie died from aplastic anemia, which has been tied to radiation exposure. Many of Curie's personal belongings, including her cookbooks, are too radioactive to handle even today.

8. HAD SHE LIVED LONGER, SHE MAY HAVE QUALIFIED FOR MORE THAN ONE NOBEL PRIZE.

Maurice Wilkins (on left), Francis Crick (third from left), and James Watson (fifth from left) accept their Nobel Prize in 1962.

Keystone, Getty Images

The first, of course, would have been awarded with Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, had they been made to share credit with her. (Pierre Curie had to ask the Nobel Committee to add his wife to the nomination in 1903.) As for the second, chemist Aaron Klug won the prize in 1982, carrying on work he and Franklin had started on viruses in 1953, after she left King's College. Because of the rules at the time of her death about awarding prizes posthumously (and in 1974 all posthumous awards were eliminated, the sole exception being in 2011), Franklin has none.

9. DESPITE BEING DENIED HER PRIZE, SHE'S BEEN HONORED BY MANY ACADEMICS.

In 2004, the Chicago Medical School renamed itself the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. She has also had a number of academic programs, auditoriums, and labs named for her. In 2013, Newnham College principal Dame Carol Black helped install a plaque commemorating Franklin at the Eagle Pub in Cambridge. Crick and Watson, who already had a plaque in the pub, drank there often while working on the DNA project, and allegedly boasted about discovering “the secret of life” to other patrons.

10. SHE IS THE SUBJECT OF SEVERAL BIOGRAPHIES.

The first, 1975's Rosalind Franklin and DNA, was written by her friend Anne Sayre, largely as a reaction to Watson's The Double Helix. In 2002, Brenda Maddox published Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA.

11. AN OBJECT IN SPACE IS NAMED AFTER HER.

In 1997, amateur Australian astronomer John Broughton discovered an asteroid, which he named 9241 Rosfranklin.

12. AT LEAST ONE HISTORY RAP BATTLE IS ABOUT HER.

It was produced by seventh graders in Oakland, California (with some help from teacher Tom McFadden). And it is delightful.

13. SHE HAS BEEN IMMORTALIZED ON THE SMALL SCREEN AND THE BIG STAGE.

In 1987, BBC's Horizon series aired The Race for the Double Helix, starring Juliet Stevenson as Franklin. Jeff Goldblum played Watson. In 2011, playwright Anna Ziegler premiered a one-act about Franklin called Photograph 51. It opened on the West End in 2015, starring Nicole Kidman as Franklin.

14. THE 2015 RUN OF PHOTOGRAPH 51 RE-IGNITED THE OLD CONTROVERSY.

While Kidman got much praise from critics for her turn as Franklin in Photograph 51, Maurice Wilkins' friends and former colleagues have taken exception to a scene where Wilkins takes a photograph—the titular Photo 51, which showed evidence of DNA's structure—from Franklin's desk when she isn't there, saying he would never have done something so dishonorable.

15. THE PLAY MAY COME TO THE BIG SCREEN IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS.

In 2016, the West End production's director, Michael Grandage, told The Hollywood Reporter that he hopes to turn the play into a film—with Kidman reprising the role.