Molly Ringwald—Still Pretty

When legendary Brat Pack filmmaker John Hughes passed away last year, his original teen muse Molly Ringwald had a resurgence of press and media attention, resulting in a heartfelt tribute at the Oscars. Of course, Ringwald has slowly been relaunching herself for a few years now, as the mother to a pregnant teen in the hit ABC Family show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager. But Ringwald cements her comeback this week, with the publication of her memoir, Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family, and Finding the Perfect Lipstick. With gorgeous illustrations from fashion designer Ruben Toledo, the book is an aging woman’s dream bible: It is about finding inner beauty when you are no longer 16 (and for Ringwald, being a teenager seemed to last forever). She argues that beauty is “the part of you that knows what you really want, that takes risks,” rather than anything external—but the book has more depth and scope than most celebrity tomes. Ringwald truly wants women to feel admired and confident at any age, and her passion comes across as clearly (and quirkily) as it did in her teen movie years.

The Singing Caribou

When it comes to music, the Canadian prowess for haunting and memorable indie rock is well-known, and one of the country’s most brilliant exporters is 32-year-old electronic musician Daniel Snaith, who performs under the name Caribou. The musician’s new album, Swim, is a gorgeous landscape of blips, melodies, scratches, and sweeping orchestral moments, and is being met to almost universal acclaim among critics. The notoriously stingy British music blog Drowned in Sound had nothing but praise for Snaith: “His music really is art for the ears, with hues, colors, textures and aural brush strokes dripping with vibrancy and imagination,” while Pitchfork awarded him with high compliments: “Swim is a reminder that even at his most challenging, the man's compositional capabilities can dazzle.” Snaith is touring the U.S. now and if his past live shows are any indication, Caribou will win a lot of new fans from down South.

Allen Ginsberg's Beat Photographs

When the Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl, starring James Franco, hits box offices later this year, a new generation of viewers will get to know the Beat poet and his contemporaries, but no fiction can compare to the lives and work of those who actually created the movement and defined a cultural moment. To that end, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. is focusing on the real thing: A new exhibition, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, will display 80 of the poet’s own photographs, of himself and his best friends. Here, you’ll see Kerouac and Burroughs before they were famous, playfully joking with Ginsberg, along with the poet’s original captions of events. The exhibition covers Ginsberg’s entire life, with photos taken up until his death in 1997, showing that whether through film or on paper, Ginsberg could not stop observing and processing the world, trying to make sense of his community and urban life.