Between Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings—and the media’s sloppy coverage of them—the U.S. Senate blocking the Manchin-Toomey bill calling for stricter background checks on firearms mere months after the second-deadliest mass shooting in this country’s history, and the massive explosion at a fertilizer plant near Waco, Texas, it’s been a brutal week, to say the least.

The Vice documentary Lil Bub & Friendz, premiering at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, provides a welcome respite from the barrage of bad news. Directed by Vice’s Andy Capper and Juliette Eisner, the film tells the tale of the world’s cutest cat, Lil Bub, and examines our obsession with other Internet-famous cats, including Grumpy Cat, Colonel Meow, (the late) keyboard cat, and many more.

Ryan Lochte is one of the world’s fastest swimmers. He’s an 11-time Olympic medalist, and holds four world records for his aquatic abilities. Recently, he’s been in the public eye for headlines surrounding his personal life: comments made by his mother about possible one-night stands, public hook-ups with celebrities, his occasionally stumbling interviews (“The reason why I love swimming is because racing”). But what do we know about the Olympian’s personal life outside of the tabloids? In his latest endeavor, What Would Ryan Lochte Do?, an eight-episode reality TV show premiering April 21 at 10 p.m. on E!, we might just find out.

The show’s first episode showcases Lochte both in and out of the pool, but the results are anything but gold. We see Lochte’s budding bromance with Gene, his assistant and friend, as the two get drunk together on the golf course, talk about women, and engage in debauchery. “Is that bad if your pee is neon?” he asks Gene while relieving himself on the golf course. (According to this chart, if your urine is “neon,” you may be severely dehydrated.) Lochte also takes a trip to D.C.; upon arriving in Washington, Lochte exclaims, “We’re going to meet Abe Lincoln!” He also has his first encounter with Washington women, who quickly intimidate him with a plethora of political queries. The rest of the season appears to follow suit, as Lochte goes on dates, shows off words from his fictional vocabulary, and goofs around with friends and family.

Between 1939 and 1945, The New York Times published more than 23,000 front-page stories. Of those, 11,500 were about World War II. Twenty-six were about the Holocaust.

So why did “the paper of record,” which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is said to have combed through every morning, decide to bury the bulk of its Holocaust coverage deep inside the paper, nestled between advertisements?

She may play the goody-two-shoes wife of two-timing ad man Pete Campbell on AMC’s hit series Mad Men, but Alison Brie is far from conservative off-camera. The curvy 30-year-old starlet decided to strip down for a sexy photo spread in this month’s Esquire magazine.

In the photos, Brie—who also stars as the quirky Annie Edison on NBC’s Community—shows off her bodacious bod in a pair of revealing swimsuits by a pool.

Two movies, made four decades ago, have overwhelmed the oeuvre of Hollywood director William Friedkin: The French Connection, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, came out in 1971; The Exorcist, one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, was released in 1973.

As the eminent auteur acknowledges in his new memoir, The Friedkin Connection, none of his other movies—21 so far—have matched the acclaim and commercial success of those two career-making blockbusters.

Sundance Channel, the indie-centric network that is closely aligned with corporate sibling AMC, is quickly ascending to a place of prominence in an increasingly fragmented television landscape. For the longest time, the network was identifiable as the home of independent films, repeats of Lisa Kudrow’s short-lived HBO mockumentary The Comeback, and some forgettable reality fare. It lacked a cohesive programming identity and existed within the same hazy hinterlands as IFC.

But in the last year, Sundance Channel has found itself in the white-hot spotlight normally reserved for AMC—home of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead—thanks to a slew of high-profile and critically acclaimed shows, like the gripping paraplegic unscripted series Push Girls, Jane Campion’s haunting mystery drama Top of the Lake, and now Rectify, a six-episode drama that begins Monday.

Back in 2006, the California-based band Cold War Kids exploded into the indie-rock consciousness. Their debut album, Robbers and Cowards, sold close to 200,000 copies, blockbuster numbers by indie standards, and they graduated from playing house parties for their friends’ 21st birthdays just years prior to amphitheaters across the world.

“I realized that something great was happening when we went to Australia at the end of a 2-and-a-half month world tour,” says bassist Matt Maust. “We were playing 2,200-capacity venues in Australia. I remember stepping out and being like, ‘Wow.’”