There’s always a little bit of a connection between Oklahoma City and me. When the basketball team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, win, 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 cell phones, I guess.

A recent 11-course tasting menu at Eureka, a monthly pop-up restaurant at Los Angeles’ 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.

Juicy J is high as fuck.

We’re seated next to one another inside Irving Plaza, a midsize music venue in lower Manhattan. It’s three in the afternoon, and stagehands can be seen scurrying about hauling various rigging in preparation for Juicy J’s sold-out show later that night. The rapper and I are aglow in red light—fitting, given the similar lighting in the music video for his solo hit “Bandz a Make Her Dance,” which has seemingly supplanted Tyga’s “Rack City” as the de facto strip-club anthem.

Sofia Coppola’s upcoming movie, Bling Ring, is based on a real group of teens and 20-something friends and acquaintances who began robbing the rich and famous in 2008. Over the course of the following year, they stole from Orlando Bloom, Audrina Patridge, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Brian Austin Green, and Megan Fox, and raided Paris Hilton’s house five (!) times (She helpfully left a key under the mat.)

Before they were busted, the group snagged $3 million in loot, including $2 million worth of jewelry from the Hilton fortune heiress, stole Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton luggage from Bloom, and essentially went shopping in Partridge’s designer-laden pad. All members of the crew have since seen their day in court. A few members of the real-life Bling Ring have had a more illustrious postscript than others.

When the long-awaited fourth Daft Punk studio record was streamed last week after months of tantalizing teases and leaks, much of the world collectively yawned. Two French men had spent untold amounts of money and several years in the studio and they came out with…a chilled out disco record?

The world wanted to know: Where is the anthem, that track made for the peak hour on the dance floor that Daft Punk is so good at creating? The closest you’ll get on Random Access Memories is the addictive, funky first single “Get Lucky,” and it’s pretty soft by Daft Punk standards.

Ahead of Steven Soderbergh’s film Behind the Candelabra, which debuts on HBO next week and tells the love story of Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his boy-toy lover Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), a primer on the great entertainer.

Who was he again?