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By H. Alan Scott
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Summer's almost done, so let's see what it left behind. A festival that forgot what made it singular. A novelist and a showrunner who fully deserve each other. A pop star who decided the conversation about her body was not one she had to attend. A group that turned down a trophy built to keep them in their lane. And a lot of men finally admitting they need somewhere to put their stuff. Five stories, all circling the same question: What do we do with the people we watch? Labor Day is fast approaching. Consider this the end of summer receipt.
Festivals: Lollapalooza's Problem Isn't the Lineup
Since 2005, Lollapalooza has been a Chicago institution: four days of music in Grant Park every summer. Before that, it was a traveling roadshow. Since its 1991 debut, the festival has hosted a genuinely wild spread of acts, from Jane's Addiction to Ice-T, Billie Eilish to Ice Cube, the Beastie Boys to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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Lately, though, it has been losing the culture war to other festivals, chiefly Coachella. Coachella makes moments. Artists show up and go viral by lunch. Lollapalooza just sort of happens. The problem isn't the talent; the lineups are still stacked. The problem might be that the one thing Lollapalooza gave up, the touring, is the exact thing that could set it apart again.
Picture a festival that moves: the same stacked lineup, a new city every week, a fresh batch of viral moments at every stop. That isn't just catnip for social media, that's a pop culture defining type of agenda. Imagine this year's roster, Charli XCX, The Smashing Pumpkins and Olivia Dean, all on the same bus. Now that would be wonderfully insane, in the best possible way.
Television: Ryan Murphy Found His Perfect Match
If there's one author whose work was practically engineered for Ryan Murphy's particular blend of sex and horror, it's Bret Easton Ellis. So, of course Murphy is adapting Ellis' novel The Shards for FX.
Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, the semi-autobiographical teen horror thriller follows a group of prep school seniors and the serial killer that detonates their final months before graduation. It is a nearly perfect handoff. Ellis builds the world, all privilege and looming dread, and Murphy gets to luxuriate in it: the excess, the fashion, the paranoia, the drama. This also adds to an already crowded shelf of Ellis adaptations, following American Psycho, Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction.
The cast is young and very hot: Igby Rigney, Homer Gere, Kaia Gerber and Hayes Warner in key roles. Expect suspense. Expect sex. Expect murder.
Celebrity: Ariana Grande Exits the Stage
This was supposed to be Ariana Grande's moment. A new album dropping mid-Eternal Sunshine tour, the music finally the main event. Instead, the conversation went somewhere else entirely: her body.
After the video for "Petal" arrived, the Academy Award nominee and Grammy winner watched her appearance become the story, with fans and social media users flooding the comments with what they framed as concern for her weight. Grande then announced through a representative that starting in September she would be "taking a step back from visibility." The statement to People described the pause as a "much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances," attributing it in part to "endless, ongoing public scrutiny." The break includes her exit from the forthcoming West End production of Sunday in the Park with George.
Onstage in Chicago, she pushed back on the idea that she was fleeing. The decision "was not a reactive or impulsive thing," she told the crowd. “It is something that I had decided to plan that I had quietly made a long time ago, and it's a decision that was made from a thoughtful and empowered place.”
Hollywood has always done this to women, and it has never once been the interesting part of the story. An artist released an album. We talked about her appearance instead. That's not concern, that's a habit, and Grande is doing the only sane thing available to her: exiting stage left.
Music: BTS Won't Be Labeled
BTS does not want a category built just for them. The South Korean group withdrew from Grammy consideration after the Recording Academy announced a newly created award for Best Asian Pop Music Performance.
"We decided not to submit our work for the upcoming Grammy Awards," the group wrote on Instagram. "We hope that music can be appreciated and loved for what it is, without being divided by region or language."
The announcement landed at a pointed moment. BTS released Arirang this year, their first album after a multiyear absence while members completed South Korean military service, which means the Academy invented a lane for them just as they returned to compete in the main ones.
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. responded in a statement: "I am saddened to hear that BTS has chosen not to participate in the Grammy Awards process this year, but as a music creator, I understand and respect their decision."
This will not settle the long-running argument over region-based categories, the same one that has trailed categories like Latin Grammys for years. But it is a real position, taken by the biggest group in the world, at the exact moment they had the most to lose by taking it. That’s big.
Trends: The Man Bag Won
Men have spent decades inventing new names for a purse rather than carry one. Satchel. Messenger. Utility sling. Anything but the word itself. This summer, the workaround is collapsing, and the stars of Heated Rivalry are helping break it down.
Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams were photographed around Toronto while shooting the show's second season, bags slung across their chests like it was the least remarkable thing in the world. Which, increasingly, it is. The bag has quietly graduated from accessory to necessity for men, the thing you grab because your pockets were never going to hold all that. (And nobody needs cargo shorts. Nobody. Retire them immediately.)
They have company. Harry Styles, Jacob Elordi and David Beckham have all been snapped carrying recently, too. Norwegian soccer start Erling Haaland turned up with a Birkin, which is both rare and roughly the price of a car.
But will the man bag reach the rest of us? It already has. Count the bags at your end-of-summer party.
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