Kanye West: Don’t Start a Cult

Kanye West attends the Manus x Machina Fashion in an Age of Technology Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Photo by: By Ovidiu Hrubaru / Unsplash

Kanye, you’ve never been the kind of person who does things the easy way. You could have stuck with being a musical genius, but you decided to be a fashion icon too, and you created the Yeezy. When they gave a Grammy to Taylor Swift instead of Beyonce, you didn’t tweet something passive aggressive—you got up on stage and did something about it. When you were in debt, you didn’t talk to your bank, you asked Mark Zuckerberg for $50 million. And more than a decade after you said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” when it seemed like the whole world was finally ready to stand up and condemn a Republican president’s bigotry, you declared that Donald Trump was your brother because you’re both “dragon energy.”

So now that you’ve started your Sunday Services, released an album of spirituals, and produced a Christian Opera—Oratorio?—you are fully set up to devote the rest of your life to developing and running the cult of Yeezus. But is that really how the greatest artist of all time should be focusing his energy? Sure you could convert your fans into an insular flock of devout followers who would die for you. But at this point, that would honestly be too easy. It’s time to shake things up. It’s probably not too late to decide to be the most influential sculptor of our generation, or the greatest therapy patient of all time. Even if you decide to focus your energy on your 2024 presidential run, that’s cool, as long as you avoid taking the easy path: Don’t start a cult. Also, please don’t tell T.I. that investigating his daughter’s hymen is “god approved…”

Kim Kardashian West: Fix the American Justice System

Kim Kardashian attends the CFDA Fashion Awards at Cipriani South Street, in New York

Photo by: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/Shutterstock

Kim, you’ve honestly been doing some amazing stuff in the past couple years, and we all kind of feel like we were underestimating you. For too long we thought of you as just a reality show star and a fashion model—an artifact of America’s vapid celebrity obsession. But you are so much more than that. Since 2017 you have helped free dozens of prisoners who were falsely convicted or hit with overly punitive sentences. In 2020, we’re going to start setting our expectations higher to really help you reach your full potential. Starting January 1st, you have twelve months to fully fix the problems with the American justice system. If you finish early, maybe try to solve climate change too. And maybe check on your husband—seems like he’s trying to start a cult.

Tom Hooper: Don’t Make Any More Musicals

Tom, after you directed The King’s Speech, you won the Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director in 2010, and you clearly felt empowered to pursue your true passion—making star-studded movie versions of classic musicals. Les Miserables was a hit at the box office, and it even won some awards, but the reviews were mixed. You could have asked yourself why you cast Russel Crowe in a movie that required him to sing, or you could have taken that as a sign that your passion for musicals may not be aligned with your particular talents as a filmmaker, but you were undeterred, and we admire your perseverance. That said, with the selection of your second musical adaptation, you revealed something important about yourself: You have terrible taste in musicals.

Cats has always been a bad musical, and there was probably no way you could have made it into a good movie. You may have misunderstood the appeal that allowed the show to run for 18 years on Broadway—people liked the wild costumes, and the way the performers moved through the audience. The music itself was only ever decent at best, and your ambitious plan to put Idris Elba, Ian McKellen, and Dame Judi Dench in motion capture suits, and digitally convert them into cat creatures would have been misguided even if the result hadn’t turned out so deeply unsettling. So, while you’ve scrambled to recover something watchable from the ashes of this disastrous movie (please don’t—it’s better as a disaster), we want to make sure you go into 2020 with this important lesson: never again.

Jeremy Renner: Make a “Cats” Movie

Jeremy, no one appreciates your genius. People spent much of 2019 mocking your musical ambitions and using your personal app to embarrass you. It’s time for you to show the world that you have nothing to be embarrassed of. Take your incredible singing voice and your untamed energy to a project that truly deserves you: Cats.

We know it’s not what people expect, but you’re unpredictable, we gotta tell you. And sure, they tried to make a Cats movie this year, but they forgot the secret ingredient—that certain, special Rennergy. You could play every role! And also, all the characters names could be changed to Jeremy Renner, and instead of CGI, you could just be buck naked, covered in body paint. All us Renner heads would go crazy for it. It’s a good idea, and it’s how you should spend 2020.

Eddie Murphy: Don’t Leave Us Again

Eddie, you were gone too long, and your comeback has been too good. Don’t be a Mickey Rourke. Be a Michael Keaton—come back for good. Dolemite Is My Name is an amazing movie, and your recent appearance on SNL destroyed their usual ratings. So don’t just tease us that you might get back into stand-up or you’re thinking about another movie. Make 2020 your year. That is all.

Bill Maher: Lose a Lot of Weight

Bill, you made headlines in September by advocating for fat shaming saying that “it needs to make a comeback” and, “Shame is the first step to reform,” and you couched it in terms that made it sound like you were helping people get healthy. You seemed to be implying that people who struggle with obesity don’t even realize there’s an issue, and they need your bullying in order to see themselves clearly. We were shocked, not because you were ignoring the fact that a shame spiral of yo-yo dieting is actually more detrimental to cardiovascular health than obesity itself, but because you delivered your proclamation with such the smug sense of superiority. It meant that you were absolutely right—that you can’t even see what a disgusting pig you are.

Bill, you may think that you are as slim and svelte as ever, but the jowls beginning to form on your cheeks tell a different story. We have to wonder what you even see when you look in the mirror, because for must of us it’s hard to even stomach looking at you. To put it bluntly, if you don’t have the decency to be ashamed of yourself, we’ll have to shame you into dropping some of the excess weight you’re lugging around. An adult male skeleton typically weighs around 25 pounds, so our best estimate suggests that you should aim to lose about 135 pounds in 2020. That might sound like overkill, but trust us, no one will miss it when it’s gone.

Elon Musk: Get Off the Internet

Elon Musk at the Rihanna’s First Annual Diamond Ball at the The Vineyard on December 11, 2014 in Beverly Hills, CA

Photo by: Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock

Elon, remember last summer in the aftermath of the Thai soccer team cave rescue, when people were criticizing your ill-conceived submarine plan, so you called that rescue worker “pedo guy?” And remember how now he’s suing you? Or what about the people who have taken issue with your “mass transit” plan that involves drilling a new, single-lane car-tunnel every time traffic gets backed up? Remember how you called your critics “subway stalinists,” and dismissed the recognized phenomenon of induced demand as “irrational?” And that’s not even getting into all the abuse you took over the botched Cybertruck demo. That must have been hard for you, but not as hard as it was for the rest of the world when you tweeted that image of Tesla stock reaching 420.69…

The point is, you just don’t seem to be mature enough to handle the internet. You are not alone, a lot of billionaires—and even “billionaires”—seem to have trouble controlling themselves on Twitter. The good news is, you can still have an active, vibrant life. By all means, keep developing new battery tech and launching free-internet satellites for the world to use. Just don’t use the Internet yourself. Make 2020 the year of Elon unplugged. You’ll be much happier without being confronted by all the people trying to poke holes in your genius, and we can maybe go back to thinking you’re kind of cool.

Grimes: Leave Elon Musk

You’re way too cool for him, and you know it.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders: Please Save Us

Just in case Kim can’t fix all our problems alone, could you two please team up and save the world from the people who are so afraid of you? Kthanksbye.