The third album from a major commodity in mainstream music is a massive test. A breakthrough debut introduces an artist’s character and pet sounds that, with luck, get refined on a sophomore album. If their next outing doesn’t keep carefully evolving, they can get branded a one-trick pony, but pushing the envelope too far can alienate day-one fans. Celebrity Skin (1998), Hole’s third studio album, neatened up Courtney Love’s sound and image after her Golden Globe nom for The People vs. Larry Flynt, exchanging the guttural shrieks and tattered garb of her early-’90s oeuvre for sleeker pop-rock hooks and chic threads. Fans and critics met her pivot with begrudging respect, thanks to the strength of the album’s melodies. Olivia Rodrigo is a student of Love and her ilk who has been riding high off the one-two punch of 2021’s Sour and 2023’s Guts, chart-toppers dually indebted to modern pop and ’90s grunge. You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the 23-year-old singer’s latest, dodges the third-album conundrum of whether to embrace sweeping change. Rodrigo delicately rearranges the ideas that animated her first two albums.
Sad doesn’t ditch the balladry and brusque rockers that yielded hits like the hushed “Drivers License” and the harsh “Brutal.” Instead, it bakes the usual ingredients of a Rodrigo work — fluttering vocals, feelings of abandonment, occasional fuzz tones — down into a more cohesive confection of bittersweet, maximalist pop-rock that largely borrows from the ’80s. It’s an autobiographical concept album about the thrills and chills of life with a partner who turned out to be a mismatch. Less reliant on abrasive rock tones, her sound loses some urgency, but she fights to make up for the album’s more restrained approach with laser-guided storytelling. Sad may not reach the heights of her previous projects, but it is a ferocious showcase of her strengths.
Rodrigo admitted in a recent interview that she wasn’t excited by rock in a “traditional” sense this cycle, after sparking controversy for wearing baby-doll dresses at one of her concerts and on Sad’s album cover. Accused of courting Loli creeps, the singer stressed she was paying homage to forebears like Love. Grunge and riot grrrl vets were merchants of social commentary, steeped in a typically ’90s disdain for subtlety, on having to grow up too quickly to navigate a world of predatory men. That Rodrigo’s tribute to these pioneers went over as an act of titillating horny anonymous men shows how male agency takes priority over other perspectives even when people think they’re behaving in a woman’s best interest. It also shows how, as effusively as Rodrigo advertises her admiration for the likes of Hole and Weezer, she is still understood as a pop property and Taylor Swift successor. Sad’s sonic points of reference notably aren’t “kinderwhore” staples like Hole or Babes in Toyland, so any critique and defenses of Rodrigo’s right to (or obligation not to) engage in sporadic Courtney Love cosplay now look funny in the light of Sad’s softer scope. And Rodrigo’s poise comes off like a coping mechanism for the think-piece storms set off by her every movement; this third album is an evolution too delicate to ruffle many feathers but nevertheless caused a stir.
Sad balances piano-pop pomp, extravagant alt-rock, and cinematic serenading. With a craggier vocal, the boisterous lead single “Drop Dead!” could pass for Arcade Fire. The Montreal unit’s polyphonic overload is useful to Rodrigo lyrics about being overwhelmed by attraction, to the head rush of a kiss and the swirl of possibilities it could lead to. Elsewhere, the tender “Honeybee” lays a precious, Lorde-like delivery on too thick to re-create starry-eyed pillow talk — “Shooting stars, racing cars / Everything I own just feels like ours” — and the elegant breakup ballad “Less” takes after Disney Princess songs, using regal, ascending notes to wish the dream guy didn’t fall for her. Sad’s louder, leaner songs land as grating in their company: “My Way” and “Expectations” crank up the angst and distortion, but both tracks seem perfunctory and inessential to the main story, as though her heart really isn’t in shredding right now but she still had to satiate “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” fans. The most exciting thing “Expectations” has going for it is a chunky bass tone that recalls the ’70s masterworks of New Wave titans Ric Ocasek and Gary Numan.
Sad’s narrative, seemingly inspired by Rodrigo’s two-year romance with English actor Louis Partridge, is alluring. It plays with our image of the singer as the jilted flame and plaintiff of “Drivers License,” “Traitor,” and “Vampire,” a person awful things continue to happen to despite noble intentions. Here, Rodrigo accepts some responsibility for a broken bond by setting up impossibly giddy and borderline irrational paeans to stalking a crush and obsessing about him through the day. She slowly lives to regret such behavior, coming to terms with the reality that her beau is not the prince who was promised. Songs in which love is fizzling challenge the wisdom of songs about the chase. “The Cure” reckons with problems a boyfriend can’t fix — “But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore / It will never be the cure” — before the closer “Cigarette Smoke” suggests their failure to live up to storybook ideals. The latter song’s chorus — “I thought that we played the perfect couple / ’Til you didn’t want the part” — can be read as a fuck-you or as a wounded reappraisal of the scatterbrained glee of earlier cuts like “Maggots for Brains,” an upbeat take on the Cure’s “A Forest” that can’t wait to paraphrase Sex and the City’s Miranda Hobbes: “And everything that’s funny, I wish I could tell to him.” Rodrigo is so spellbound in the bustling “U + Me = <3” that you almost sense her smirking at herself and listeners, like, Bad idea, right? Do we really want what Miranda and Steve had?
Cuts like “Maggots for Brains” and “U+ Me = <3” highlight Rodrigo’s adjustments to her approach to rock and roll. The guitars are ever present but not necessarily the focus; at the chorus, “Maggots” surrounds Rodrigo with a hail of synth-and-string bells and whistles, then “<3” does the same with stacks of electric and acoustic guitars. The two tracks salute the maudlin pop instincts of the Cure but tiptoe too closely to the source material. “<3” is the “In Between Days” to “Maggots”’s “A Forest.” The happy Cure-type beats are cozier fits for Sad’s traditional pop-star fare (like the shouty, wordy, Swifty third single, “Stupid Song”) than Guts’s disorienting mix of snarling slacker-rock excellence and sorrowful cooing. Rodrigo gets that the Cure’s catalogue is home to countless formidable pop songs, but “Maggots” and “<3” are undermined by a distracting reverence to what they’re trying to re-create. You don’t have to craft Head on the Door simulacra to honor goth romantic Robert Smith; his other admirers include Chino Moreno of Deftones and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, who don’t much sound like Smith or each other. Circling Smith’s ’80s work keeps Sad on trend with 2020s pop’s forever fixation on Reagan-era musical real estate. Sad is an across-the-pond rejoinder to Plastic Hearts, Miley Cyrus’s 2020 ode to Joan Jett and Stevie Nicks, or a London-in-the-’80s alternative to the Paris-in-the-’80s pining on Doja Cat’s 2025 full length, Vie. Sad is better than both those albums, but by hook or by crook, we find our way back to 1980-something.
Deep in Sad’s volley of pure-pop reverie and New Wave period pieces, “What’s Wrong With Me” delivers a shining exercise in the reflexivity that has endeared Rodrigo to young fans and rock elders. The actual Robert Smith guests on the song after mutual words of admiration and surprise collaborations at Glastonbury 2025 and Primavera Sound 2026. “Wrong” is a cartoonishly forlorn, disconcertingly peppy duet that tracks the disintegration of a relationship in tinny programmed drums and synth notes. The vocalists check off a list of possible sources of a malaise until they land on her significant other, serving desolation in the aesthetics of wedding-singer routines. You could totally slip “Wrong” onto a Cure album in the era that produced the strutting “Let’s Go to Bed,” but it doesn’t want to be “Let’s Go to Bed.” The song is a study in subtlety and irony, a coming-of-age story with an old soul’s flair for decades-old sounds. It contains wholesome ’60s girl-group lyrics — “Went to the doctor and she said I was fine / But every movie that I see makes me cry” — rendered in kitschy ’80s production behind ’90s-themed album art. Pairing time-displaced tastes and dour earnestness is distinctly Rodrigo.

President Donald Trump’s administration has made it a mission to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government, and those efforts have had a trickle-down effect across corporate America. So much so that it’s cost Laverne Cox approximately 90 percent of her income over the last few years.
Cox, a high-profile transgender star who rose to fame thanks to an Emmy-nominated turn on Orange Is the New Black, made the reveal in a new interview with The Guardian while promoting her first book, a memoir titled Transcendent.
“This regime has threatened to defund any colleges and universities that promote gender ideology, DEI,” she said, adding that she’s even lost teaching opportunities. “Even though I’d be teaching a graduate acting class, it could be perceived as promoting trans ideology. These are the realities. I’m not complaining — I’m very blessed. The important thing to note is that if Laverne Cox’s income has gone down significantly, what about all the other trans people who are not as privileged and as blessed as I am? There are material consequences for this kind of discrimination and scapegoating.”
The interview echoes earlier statements she made to Attitude. “I’ve lost so much money because of this administration, the past year,” Cox told the publication. “I managed to stay busy with acting and branding work, as well as speaking engagements. But I never thought college speaking gigs would dry up.”
Because of the impact on her bank account, Cox said she’s been forced to dip into reserves to stay afloat. “The past year or two, I’ve had to dip into savings and my retirement fund. So, the blessing is that I finally have the privilege to have a retirement fund to dip into, but you don’t really want to do that. If it’s affecting me, then it’s definitely affecting other people.”
And not just financially.
“If we don’t wake up and don’t understand, trans people will be exterminated,” she also told The Guardian. “People’s rights are being taken away, people are losing their jobs, people are losing healthcare, people are being de-transitioned in prison, gender-affirming care is being attacked, not just for children but also for adults. It’s never been about protecting women — it’s always been about creating a permission structure to scapegoat trans people, to dehumanise trans people, to take away our rights and to eliminate us from public life.”

Following the debacle that was Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, bipartisan group America250 has announced a July 4th concert co-headlined by Smashing Pumpkins and Chris Stapleton.
Taking place at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the “America’s Block Party” event will be hosted by rap legend Queen Latifah and promote America250’s Giving 4th initiative.
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Tickets for the concert will cost $17.76 and go on sale Tuesday, June 16th at America250’s official website. All proceeds after fees will go to Feeding America.
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A total of 5,000 tickets will be donated to first responders, veterans, and active-duty service members, who can also claim tickets directly through VetTix.
“As we celebrate our 250th anniversary, we have an opportunity to bring Americans together around the values that continue to unite us,” said America250 chair Rosie Rios, who was a top Treasury official in the Obama administration.
America250 was established in 2016 by the nonpartisan US Semiquincentennial Commission specifically to oversee official planning for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Trump’s competing Freedom 250 was not created until January 2025.
In late May, Freedom 250 announced a dismal slate of performers for Trump’s Great American State Fair, featuring one half of Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, Bret Michaels, Flo Rida, Morris Day & The Time, C+C Music Factory, Martina McBride, and The Commodores.
Within a few days, Morris Day and The Time, Young MC, The Commodores, Martina McBride, and Bret Michaels all bailed on the event. They all offered similar explanations, saying they were unaware of its partisan nature at the time of booking. In particular, Young MC referred to it as a “bait-and-switch.”
Meanwhile, Milli Vanilli’s Fab Morvan vowed to perform instead of the group’s actual vocalists, and there appeared to be an internal dispute within C+C Music Factory.

West Wilson won’t be returning for “Summer House” Season 11 when the Bravo show begins filming in the Hamptons in early July, a source has confirmed. His contract has not been renewed.
After delivering its most-watched season ever — propelled by an intra-cast scandal that put the Bravo show in the headlines for months — the next season of “Summer House” will have some major cast changes, born out of necessity. The first one on the docket is the ouster of Wilson, who was — alongside Amanda Batula — at the center of the Season 10 conflagration.
Wilson dug his own grave with “Summer House.” Rumors began in March that he and Batula were dating — or something — which many fans refused to believe, thinking Batula would never do that to her close friend Ciara Miller, who’d been in a tortured romantic dynamic with Wilson since Season 8. But in fact, Batula would do that to Miller — and did! And Wilson and Batula would both do that to Kyle Cooke, Batula’s estranged husband, and, along with Lindsay Hubbard, a founding member of the “Summer House” cast.
On March 31, Wilson and Batula announced their coupledom (or something!) in a joint Instagram post. The post, and the idea of them as a couple, did not please the Bravo faithful. And matters only got worse as the three reunion episodes rolled out, in which they appeared to be deceitful, unapologetic and drugged.
In public, Wilson has appeared to be increasingly hostile to the show. A sports journalist for Complex, Wilson said on his own podcast, “Show Me Something,” that he hoped the New York Knicks would lose to the San Antonio Spurs on Saturday night, forcing a Game 6 in the NBA finals. That way, Wilson reasoned, no one would watch “Summer House: The Aftermath,” the bonus episode of the show that’s airing on Bravo on June 16 (because it would be up against Game 6). That statement activated “Summer House” star Hubbard, who wrote in one of a series of diatribes on Threads, “West Wilson: you are trash. Trying to get people to not watch OUR show that iiiii brought YOU on, you should move immediately.”
“Summer House: The Aftermath,” despite Wilson’s wishes, will air without having to conflict with the champion Knicks. The bonus episode is three conversations that were filmed in May, after the reunion had been taped. The episode is a conversation between Hubbard and Batula, Cooke and Wilson and Miller and Meija Moreno, who’d thought she was in an exclusive relationship with Wilson until he dumped her for Batula.

It’s been six months since the tragic deaths of filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, producer Michele Reiner. The couple was found stabbed to death in their home on Dec. 14, 2025, and their youngest son, Nick Reiner, has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
Nick has pleaded not guilty and faces either life in prison without parole or the death penalty if convicted.
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As the legal battle unfolds, Nick is seeking access to a $1.5 million trust fund set up by his late parents. According to court documents obtained by People, Nick intends to use the money to rehire prominent defense attorney Alan Jackson.
The move has sparked speculation about family tensions, with many expecting Nick’s siblings, Jake and Romy Reiner, to block his access to the money. However, reports indicate that the opposite is true.
Related: The Reason Nick Reiner Could Still Inherit His Parents’ $196M Fortune Even if He’s Found Guilty of Their Murders
Hollywood insider Rob Shuter claims that, despite the severity of the accusations, Jake and Romy haven’t “abandoned” their brother. They were reportedly involved in early discussions about financing Nik’s legal defense and even supported his right to quality representation.
“What’s remarkable is that Jake and Romy still don’t appear to oppose Nick using family money to defend himself,” a source close to the case told Shuter. “Whatever they may think about the allegations, they believe he deserves a fair fight in court.”
The main obstacle, insiders say, is the trustee overseeing the estate. “The trustee and the siblings are not on the same page,” one legal source explained. “Jake and Romy seem willing to see trust funds used for legal fees. The trustee has taken a much harder line.”
This disagreement has become a major issue in Nick’s case, but Alan Jackson has indicated that he would consider returning to the case if the funding is secured. As a separate source puts it, Nick “wants access to the money so he can hire the lawyer of his choice. And based on the filings, his brother and sister don’t appear to be standing in the way.”
With the family seemingly united on this front, all eyes now turn to whether the court will allow Nick to use the trust.
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