"$450,000," called the auctioneer, pointing to a bidder in the crowd at Christie's.

He wheeled around to another: "$500!"

Then back to the first: "$550!"

Star Trek (noun) Science-fiction franchise launched on television in 1966. Not Star Wars.

The series was not, in fact, created by Jean-Luc Picard, but Gene Roddenberry. The television shows were prolific: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. There are 12 installments on film: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (yes, this was the movie with the humpback whales), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, Star Trek: Nemesis, Star Trek, and Star Trek Into Darkness. The new film franchise, which launched in 2009, is mostly inspired by the original television series.

 “We’ve been together a long time,” Barbara Walters said Monday morning on The View, officially announcing—as it was leaked she would over the weekend—that she will be retiring from television entirely in the summer of 2014. That statement, like much of how she handled the fanfare with which she was feted during the opening segments of the episode, was, to say the least, exceptionally humble.

As Bill Carter wrote in the New York Times piece that broke the news—after over a month of speculation—the retirement was announced “on the program she invented, on the network where she worked for the past 37 years, on the medium where she broke barriers and rules for more than 50 years.” The words “icon,” “trailblazer,” “innovator,” “legend,” and “pioneer” have been used to describe Walters in the day since her retirement became official. And on Monday morning while talking about it on air for the first time on The View, it was Barbara whose turn it was, after all these years, to cry.

The most powerful woman in the world is about to get the Hollywood treatment.

Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state—who is maybe running for president in 2016—is the subject of a new feature film about her youth. Rodham focuses on 1974, when the 26-year-old was a determined—and relatively humorless—lawyer working as a member of the House impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C. When she wasn’t helping impeach Nixon, Rodham was struggling to maintain a long-distance relationship with a suave Arkansas law professor by the name of Bill Clinton, who was himself busy running for the House of Representatives in his home state.

When I found out about playing the role of Scotty for the Star Trek reboot, it felt like a bomb had gone off near my head. I got asked in such an insalubrious way from J.J. Abrams. In an email that came out of nowhere, J.J. literally wrote, “Do you want to play Scotty?” It didn’t even say, “Dear Simon” or “Love, J.J.” I emailed him back and said, “What the fuck, man? You can’t just do that to me. That’s crazy! You’ve got to take me out to dinner or something or offer me something to read.” It was huge!

I said, “I don’t know,” but J.J. let me think about it. He told me, “The worst thing that could happen is that every couple of years we get together and have fun.” Of course, I said yes. The role was given to me because Scotty is a slightly lighter-hearted character in the sense that he’s kind of the Everyman, so he reacts to situations like we would really. I felt elated and impressed, and slightly like I was having a dream.

Jere Burns’s wife couldn’t take it anymore.

Last Monday, she confronted him after watching her husband’s second episode of Bates Motel, where he is currently playing Jake Abernathy, a sinister motel guest who has done the impossible: terrified the woman who gave birth to Norman Bates. “My wife walked into the kitchen, where I was getting something to eat,” said Burns, “and she said, ‘Honey, you’re really scary. Would you stop it, please?’ I said, ‘Well, my job is done!’”

On Sunday, NBC unveiled the sweeping changes hitting its 2013-14 primetime schedule, which includes several night and time changes to pre-existing shows: Parenthood will move to Thursdays at 10 p.m., following the network's traditional two-hour block of comedies (though there was no word on when Community would be returning to the lineup), Chicago Fire will get relocated to Tuesdays, and freshman hit Revolution will be moving to a new Wednesday programming block with an emphasis on dramas, including Law & Order: SVU and the new Ironside reboot.

Amitabh Bachchan is a tall Indian film legend. In Baz Luhrmann’s bloated The Great Gatsby he plays Meyer Wolfshiem, a “small flat-nosed Jew.” In the words of Daisy Buchanan, “Bachchan? What Bachchan?”

Bachchan (pronounced “Bach-an”) isn’t fooling anyone. In his roughly seven minutes on screen (which begin with a bombastic “My boy!”), the Bollywood star looks like an Indian man, and his accent slithers out when pronouncing things like “discov-ahd.”

There’s something delightfully bizarre when searching for a song a particular musician recorded in tribute to his mother and finding the warning “(Explicit)” next to its title.

Yet that’s exactly what happens when you track down Snoop Dogg’s “I Love My Momma” on YouTube. And if a hip-hop star inextricably linked to drugs and girls and partying and raunchy content and explicit language offering up a well-meaning love letter to his mother seems odd, well, the truth is, it’s rather common. Kanye West, 2Pac, and Jay-Z are among the host of rappers who have done the same, trading lyrics about fast cars and popping bottles for tokens of appreciation for a mother’s hard work.