I have some jarring news.

Someone who was born on the day Jewel’s Pieces of You, the album that sold 12 million copies and launched the career of the folk-turned-pop-turned-country singer-songwriter-actress, would now be 18. Feeling old? Implausibly—again, this is a singer who burst onto the music scene crooning hit folk songs in the '90s—Jewel’s career has also made it to adulthood. On Monday, she stars as June Carter Cash in the Lifetime biopic Ring of Fire, and is a sight for sore eyes for fans who, as they have so many times when she’s returned to the spotlight after long hiatuses, are offering a heartfelt chorus of “Welcome back, but where have you been?”

In February Smash kicked off its second-season premiere with a bold, infectious new anthem called “Broadway, Here I Come!” At the time, the song—the centerpiece of what would become the show’s second fictional musical, Hit List—seemed a confident declaration of the heavily retooled NBC drama’s having righted itself after an increasingly preposterous debut season, confidently welcoming disillusioned viewers back into the fold.

It turns out that the song was actually a warning: take cover, Broadway, because this is going to get ugly.

Heather Graham has turned out to be quite the prolific actress.

The stunning blonde first burst onto the scene as the junkie Nadine in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy. Several juicy roles followed, including a six-episode arc on David Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks—and the spinoff film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, as well as parts in Six Degrees of Separation and Swingers. Her big break came in 1997, when she portrayed the porn star Rollergirl in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights.

One of the most hotly anticipated films at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, running from May 15-26 in the south of France, is Only God Forgives. The crime-thriller reteams Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn with his star, Ryan Gosling, and is Gosling’s last film before his self-imposed hiatus from acting.

Gosling plays Julian, an American running a Muy Thai boxing club in Bankok, Thailand, that’s a front for a drug-smuggling operation. When his brother, Billy (Tom Burke), is killed in an act of revenge after murdering an underage prostitute, the two boys’ mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), comes to town. Crystal is a deliciously evil crime lord, and demands that Julian seek vengeance on the man who killed her favorite son.

There’s always a little bit of a connection between Oklahoma City and me. When the basketball team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, wins, I get, like, 50 texts.

I’m currently in Brighton, England, but on Monday, I was at a hotel right in the middle of London on Camden Street. We were playing a show here and I had the flu, so I had been sleeping all day Monday. My phone was lying there on the bed and I started getting hundreds of texts. After I woke up from whatever cold medicine I was on, it was around 10 p.m. in London, so 4 p.m. in Oklahoma City. I turned on the news and watched. As the night went on, you don’t know if you’re going to hear from someone who says, “Oh my god” this-and-that, and you do your best to check in on people as quickly as you can. That’s the marvel of cellphones, I guess.

A recent 11-course tasting menu at Eureka, a monthly pop-up restaurant at Los Angeles’s BierBeisl, included a dish of fresh and dried English peas concealing a hidden parmesan and whey pudding, a live scallop under a cucumber foam, gnocchi made from ash, and an unctuous sous-vide egg yolk encircled by hedgehog mushrooms, pork skin snow, and a sauce made from preserved lemons and radish greens.

On an evening in early May, this was a meal that showed the precision, vision, and creativity of its gifted chef, one that soared on a deliberate rhythm and flow: plates arrived at just the right moment with an explanation of the dish’s ingredients, each showcasing the season to perfection. The chef, Flynn McGarry, moved in the kitchen with grace, charring ramps for a dish of sturgeon and tapioca with a charred onion sauce before spinning around to sauce a plate—on which quivered a single slice of blood-red dehydrated beet—with just the right amount of raspberry-black pepper vinaigrette.

IT’S A summer tradition. Each year, moviegoers giddily count down the days until the release of the newest film in their favorite franchise ... and then leave cinemas soured when it doesn’t live up to the original outing. But just as audiences have started to resign themselves to coughing up precious dollars for lackluster sequels, the recent releases of stellar third films in hit trilogies are upending that trend. New installments in two franchises—studies in polar opposites—are continuing the upswing. One is about three men who get really, really drunk; the other about an introspective couple with a penchant for staging monumental evolutions in their relationship in various European cities every nine years. Both, however, are the unlikeliest of franchise success stories.

The Hangover and Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight series both release their third installments this week. That each of these franchises has made it this far is an accomplishment that would have seemed impossible years ago—for reasons the least of which include not being based on a comic book, adapted from a wildly popular young-adult novel series, or produced by Pixar.

On stage at the Bowery Ballroom, Lizzy Plapinger, the enchanting frontwoman of the New York–based pop band MS MR (pronounced “Miss Mister”), has the crowd eating up her every hip shake, stomp, and soulful wail. Lit by a collection of flickering candelabras, Plapinger is dressed in a white tank and magenta spandex pants and is accompanied by Max Hershenow, a blond-haired bundle of kinetic energy who, every so often, abandons his keyboard in favor of dancing with Plapinger.

Plapinger’s look, those magenta pants and a head of fiery orange curls that change to purple and blue at the edges, is decidedly glam rock. But her smoky croon sounds somewhere between the soaring ebullience of Florence Welch and the melancholic purring of Lana Del Rey.