8 pieces of can’t-miss pop culture to catch up on this weekend

Between movies, books, music, comics, podcasts, and the ever-growing glut of TV, there’s a ton of pop culture out there.

It can be a lot to keep up with. So we here at Vox Culture — where we’re currently into all-caps rap, thoughtful celebrity profiles, and baby animals — have a few suggestions for how to make the best use of your pop culture–consuming time.

Here are some items to consider adding to your culture diet this week.

The Coachella live stream lets you watch acts from Kendrick Lamar to Hans Zimmer (really) from your own couch

Coachella consistently has one of the strongest music festival lineups, but if you’re not someone who feels like shelling out hundreds of dollars to stand in the dust of the Californian desert, fear not! Coachella has seriously upped its live stream game this year, so you can watch any of the events on the three main stages — from Kendrick to Lorde to, yes, legendary composer Hans Zimmer — as they happen in real time. Watch the sets from the first weekend, or tune in this weekend for the second round. —Caroline Framke

Emma Cline’s The Girls, last year’s hottest book of the summer, is now out in paperback

Random House

Everywhere you looked last summer, there was The Girls and its psychedelic cover. It was the hottest book of the season, and a debut novel too. It’s about cults, and teen girl friendships, and how the one can come to feel achingly like the other; it’s also about the shattered utopian dreams of the 1970s. Cline’s prose is assured and stylish, and she evokes a sweaty, grimy summer on a commune with unromantic precision. And now the book is out in paperback, so you can find out exactly what all the fuss was all about without shelling out for hardcover prices. —Constance Grady

Every profile of Lorde reads like Lorde fanfic, thank god

Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Coachella

Lorde has been keeping a low profile for the past few years, but she’s starting the publicity mill again to promote her new album, Melodrama. And the new profile of her in the New York Times Magazine is everything you might hope for: She shows up looking like a witch, as is her wont; she tells the reporter she’s going to take him on an adventure, pulls a mysterious key out of her pocket and inserts it into the wall, and tells him she’ll take him out through a secret way; then she starts nerding out about songwriting theory and melodic math. Bless that beautiful no-longer-teenage witch. —CG

Kendrick Lamar returns with DAMN., an album that’s all lament

Kendrick Lamar’s blistering To Pimp a Butterfly set the world on fire two years ago, and last Thursday he returned with DAMN. (It spawned speculation that a companion album would drop Sunday, which didn’t happen.) Every track title is in all caps and punctuated with a period, and the songs feel that way when you listen to them: an emphatic, crunchingly elegant indictment of weary apathy and where we find ourselves in a messy, frightening 2017. Reviewing the album for Vulture, Craig Jenkins compared it to the biblical Book of Job, and that seems exactly right. Give this one a few openhearted listens before you decide what to think about it. —Alissa Wilkinson

Prince Harry does a podcast, misses his mom, is a real boy

Photo by Chris Jackson - WPA Pool/Getty Images

In the premiere episode of Mad World, the Telegraph’s new podcast exploring mental illness, Prince Harry appeared to promote the royal family’s mental wellness campaign. In the process, he opened up about his own struggles with depression and grief two decades after the death of his mother.

The episode is a surprise for several reasons. His royal highness has rarely been so verbose, frank, and excited all at once, and the interview is a stark reminder that the British royals are human beings who care about one another beneath all those staged public appearances. The death of Princess Diana lingers over the conversation; when Harry hopes for a society that will one day allow us all to “offload all of your week’s grief,” it’s with an earnestness that reminds us social change often begins with the deeply personal. —Aja Romano

The live birth of a giraffe ground YouTube to a halt

Scott M. Denderson / April the Giraffe

Over the past two months, millions of viewers around the globe fell in love with a New York giraffe named April and her newborn calf. The Animal Adventure Park channel gained 260 million views over 8 billion live-streamed minutes in the lead-up to the calf’s live birth on April 14. The love fest is still going on, with followers churning out fan art and even poetry dedicated to April and son. —AR

The Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight finished its first season untangling legal knots and timely politics

You might be looking at this and wondering how you missed the fact that there’s a Good Wife spinoff (starring Christine Baranski as a reluctantly un-retired Diane Lockhart, no less). Don’t worry, you’re not crazy; CBS just decided to air this one entirely on CBS All Access, its new bid at an exclusive streaming service that will later host the network’s upcoming Star Trek reboot. But The Good Fight’s first season was a lot of fun and, thanks to a hairpin turn after Trump’s election, purposefully relevant on issues ranging from “fake news” to the systemic nightmare greeting police brutality cases. All 10 episodes are available to stream now on CBS All Access. —CF

The Wicked + The Divine gets a chaotic, fitting end to its devilishly fantastic fifth chapter

Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen’s The Wicked + The Divine has a place in the pantheon of great comics. Since its creation in 2014, WicDiv has been an effortless song of celebrity worship, mythology, and religion. At its best, McKelvie and Gillen’s creation takes swings at the relationship between celebrity, art, and consumerism, with some panels that are so brilliantly magical and suddenly beautiful it’s startling. The comic’s original premise was that of ancient gods incarnated for two years at a time. In these last five issues, ending with No. 28, we see what happens when gods aren’t bound by those rules, what happens when there’s a great unexplained evil that haunts them, and the bloody mess these deities get into when they think no one’s watching. —Alex Abad-Santos

Correction: This article previously misstated the title of Lorde’s new album as Melancholia instead of Melodrama.

Will you join us?

Our biggest supporters are our readers — and we’re so grateful to everyone who has made a contribution during our September campaign. We’re less than 1,000 contributions away from reaching our goal for the month, which in turn will allow us to say yes more often when our incredible journalists come to us with questions they want to answer and projects they want to pursue. Will you make a contribution before the month ends and support our policy coverage through 2024 and beyond?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via