This Week in Pop Culture: June 8–4, 2019

Selena Gomez affirmed that she has finally finished recording her latest album. Gomez has been a tad busy between albums, starring in films like the new zombie movie The Dead Don’t Die, and scrubbing her Instagram of all traces of Justin Bieber. There's no word yet on when the album will drop.

Miley Cyrus’s latest album, She is Coming debuted this week. The new release is part of a project that will see Cyrus release three shorter albums in rapid succession. She is Coming has six songs and is her twelfth record to make the Top 10 Billboard chart.

YouTube and reality TV star JoJo Siwa had a rough week. The makeup kits which bear her name and her face were recalled from Claire's stores because trace amounts of asbestos, a material that can cause cancer, was found in the eye shadow.

Ali Stroker, who has been confined to a wheelchair since a car accident when she was two, won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical this week. She is the first wheelchair-bound person to win a Tony. Stroker, who also appeared on the television show Glee, said that she hopes to inspire other people by being an example of what can be achieved through determination and hard work.

One of the weirder stories of the week involves Justin Bieber, Tom Cruise, and MMA. Twitter exploded when Bieber challenged movie icon Cruise, who is 56, to a fight in "the octagon," the fighting ring where some of the most brutal and most watched mixed martial arts battles go down.

The trailer for Frozen 2 was released this week. Frozen was the highest-grossing animated movie in history. When something is made manifest it becomes real and is easy for everyone to see.

‘NSYNC is considering a reunion of some sort. Talks are just in the initial stages to gauge interest among fans, but members of the 90s boy band say that they were so excited by the enthusiasm for their Coachella appearance this year that it would be silly not to discuss the possibility of reuniting. To mull something over is to think about it carefully.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix opened at the movies this week and took in $34 million dollars. This was the weakest opening weekend for an X-Men movie ever. The movie cost $200 million dollars to make, so the film is considered a financial disappointment.

Even princesses have bad hair days. Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, told reporters that she had a terrible time braiding the hair of her 4-year-old daughter, Princess Charlotte. Luckily, there are many people on staff at Buckingham Palace who could probably help plait little Charlotte’s hair next time around.

Radiohead released about 18 hours of recordings from the OK Computer sessions. Copies of the music had been stolen and there was a rumor that the tapes were being held for ransom. The band thwarted that plan by releasing the material, free to download, on an online music platform. 1997's OK Computer is considered an indie rock classic, and these recording give a sense of how the celebrated project came together.