Tony Night is Broadway’s one evening to impress a mainstream audience. And like any entertainment-awards competition, popularity and personality play a big part in what gets nominated and who wins.

This season, American theater critics and audiences didn’t always see eye to eye. For example, Alec Baldwin wowed audiences with his strong and nuanced performance in Orphans, but he didn’t get a nod. “He does those Capital One commercials,” sniffed one Broadway producer and Tony voter. “How could we admit that he’s also a real actor?”

If a baby was born the day Sex and the City premiered, she would be just old enough now to rock her first pair of Manolos. That’s because June 6 marks the 15th anniversary of the premiere of Sex and the City. As the series transitions to its teenage years, it’s as culturally relevant as ever, with episodes rerunning almost constantly on cable, speculation about a third film always circulating, and fans quoting Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda daily—that is, when they’re not debating which of the four friends they are most like.

(Or maybe you’re like Shoshanna on Girls, perhaps the most blatant example of Sex and the City’s lasting influence: “I think I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes … sometimes Samantha kinds of comes out. And then, when I’m at school, I definitely try to put on my Miranda hat.”)

But as Sofia Coppola’s new film, The Bling Ring (out June 14), points out, Hilton’s rhinestoned, glossy-lipped veneer was at one point integral to Hollywood. Simply put, she defined an era: those early, prelapsarian aughties. So much so that her taste for vaudevillian femininity prompted a group of Los Angeles teenagers to break into her home and loot her closet.

For any girl under the age of, oh, I don’t know, 50, it’s pretty unbelievable that there’s never been a big-screen adaptation of a Judy Blume book. The phrase Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret has been in the lexicon since 1970, and since the book’s publication, being a young woman in America has never been the same.

Just two days ago Michael Jackson’s only daughter, Paris, did something any average teenage girl would do. She posted a lengthy video of herself applying makeup for all to see. Forty-eight hours later, the 15-year-old was being rushed from her family’s home to a nearby hospital after a possible suicide attempt.

Sources close to the Jacksons confirm that the 15-year-old was taken by stretcher from the home she shares with her grandmother and two brothers, after family members found her passed out in her room. The 911 call from inside the Jackson residence indicated that it may have been a drug overdose, while sources at the hospital say the young girl had multiple cuts on her wrists. The cuts didn’t appear to be fresh.

For television addicts, specifically those who pride themselves on having taste more Homeland than Honey Boo Boo, summer is no longer a season of mourning. For decades, nail-biting cliffhangers, teased with big promotional campaigns, have been the seasonal signoff each May, indicating a months-long summer absence of quality TV that leaves viewers with little more than repeats, low-budget reality shows, and series deemed not good enough for the fall. In other words, says TV historian and former Lifetime and USA Network executive Tim Brooks, they hang a sign letting viewers know that they’ve “gone fishing.”

Now the networks seem to be rescheduling those trips. Jumping on a trend that cable channels like USA, Showtime, and TNT have been capitalizing on for years, broadcast networks are abandoning the idea that it’s OK to take a summer vacation from quality programming. CBS is launching one of its most ambitious summer slates yet, led by the heavily promoted series adaptation of the Stephen King sci-fi novel Under the Dome, premiering June 24, and the resurrection of once-canceled procedural Unforgettable, returning July 28. NBC is debuting the crime drama Crossing Lines on June 23, and also plans to roll out the dramedy Camp on July 10. ABC, meanwhile, is throwing its muscle behind the debut of the primetime soap Mistresses, while cop drama Rookie Blue is already airing its fourth season. Add those network series to the stable of hit cable shows returning this summer—Showtime’s Dexter, HBO’s True Blood, AMC’s Breaking Bad, USA’s Burn Notice—and it’s clear that summer no longer signals a drought of quality television. We may, in fact, be in the golden age of summer TV.

It was sloppy and lasted under a minute, but it sowed the seeds of discontent for future generations.

On February 21, 2012, five members of the Russian feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot staged a guerrilla performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, an Orthodox church in Moscow. Masked by their trademark multicolored balaclavas, the women mock-prayed, verbally swiped at Putin, and shouted epithets. The protest was cut short when security guards dragged the women offstage. A video of the performance, currently with more than 2.5 million views, was uploaded to YouTube with the title “Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!”

“We were protesting the vertical power and the authoritarian tendencies that exist within the Moscow patriarchy,” Yekaterina “Katya” Samutsevich tells Newsweek in a recent Skype interview from Russia. “The Moscow patriarchy was instrumental in the passing of laws that were anti-women, as well as promoting laws against the LGBT community and minorities.”

On a recent Thursday, a gaggle of teenagers wielding cameras and pens are huddled in front of the Trump SoHo hotel in downtown Manhattan. The target of their affection isn’t some movie star, but a genial, follicly challenged 48-year-old wearing sneakers and baggy jeans.

After years as a cult-TV nerd-god, creating shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, Joss Whedon has become one of the most successful film directors in Hollywood, thanks to having helmed Marvel’s The Avengers, a superhero extravaganza that took in $1.5 billion worldwide, making it the third-highest-grossing film of all time.

His latest film is a passion project. Much Ado About Nothing is a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s classic play. The black-and-white movie was shot in just 12 days at Whedon’s home in Santa Monica, California, with a cast of his best friends from past shows, including Angel’s Amy Acker as Beatrice, Buffy’s Alexis Denisof as Benedick, and Firefly’s Nathan Fillion as Dogberry.

Jeremy Scahill is a proud member of what the late neoconservative icon Jeane Kirkpatrick dubbed “the blame-America-first crowd.” He’s a writer, after all, for The Nation magazine and has a mutual-admiration thing going with MIT professor Noam Chomsky, who is better known for his revolutionary hatred of American power and influence than for his revolutionary advances in linguistics.

Scahill is also—to give him his due—an adventurous war correspondent who has spent much of the last decade courting danger in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. While his documentary Dirty Wars, based on his recently published book of the same name, is predictably scornful of U.S. motives and actions in the so-called war on terror, it is emotionally involving, a skillful piece of polemical moviemaking. It opens June 7.

The first public words Paris Jackson ever uttered were at the end of her father’s funeral.

“I just wanted to say…”