Ripped from the Headlines: December 2019: This Week In Culture: December 21–27, 2019

Tom Hooper, director of the new Cats movie that opened to catastrophic reviews and cataclysmic earnings, re-released the film with more CGI. He evidently worked on it for three days straight before the release, and didn't quite get it done in time. So if you ever pulled an all nighter to finish a project and the results were... not so good, feel better: at least you didn't spend a hundred million dollars on it.

A bunch of eagerly anticipated films drop in 2020, from the next Wonder Woman chapter to a Bill & Ted sequel that will undoubtedly be... excellent. Mulan, Black Widow, James Bond and other favorites will all be returning in new installments as well. Callow has Germanic origins, from a root meaning "bald." From there it evolved to mean "unfledged," as in baby birds with no feathers, and then to its current sense of "immature."

This list of the top food trends of the 2010s breaks down some of the important changes to the way we eat that have taken place in the last decade, including food trucks, New Southern cooking, pumpkin spice everything, and especially Instagram, which has caused chefs to prioritize the appearance of food in a new way. De facto has a counterpart in Latin, de jure, which means "legally legitimate."

Travis are a Scottish band whose second album, released 20 years ago, was an influential hit. A new radio documentary chronicles the band's history before and since that record. Appropriately, dour entered English through Scotland, where it's commonly used to refer to gloomy or moody things or people. Its origins are French, from Latin; its root is durus, meaning hard, which became dur in French, with the added meaning of stubborn.

It appears that tigers are now extinct in Laos, according to a new study. Scientists blame the widespread use of snares to trap animals for food, fur, and valuable body parts like teeth and claws. They say, however, that if trapping can be brought under control, wild tigers from neighboring countries could repopulate Laos over time. Other species are also threatened, since snares indiscriminately trap whatever steps in them.

Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star in Orion that's 1,400 times larger than the sun, has been dimming for some time. This means that it's nearing the end of its life, and may go supernova soon — though "soon" is relative and could mean anywhere from a day to 10,000 ears from now. Because it's so far away, if we do see it explode, that means it actually went nova hundreds of years ago and the light took that long to reach us.

Taylor Swift is fighting for musicians' rights to own their own masters. After the rights to her first six records were bought by someone else — she says she never had a chance to buy them herself — her new deal includes ownership of her music. Ownership means higher royalties from streaming, which are dismally low.

Chinese food in America is changing. More higher-priced, restaurants are opening, with innovative menus that can be more or less traditional than the home-town places we're all familiar with. Chef Peter Chang owns a number of such spots in the Mid-Atlantic region, and similar places can be found around the country. Partly this is due to the prosperity of many Chinese-Americans, who want fine dining options.

Steph Curry's hand injury put the Warriors out of the running for this season, but fans are hopeful that if he and Klay Thompson can both recover fully that 2021-22 will be a different story. Swagger probably has Scandinavian origins, from the same root as sway, so a swaggering walk is one with exaggerated side-to-side motion.

Six new exoplanets have been discovered using a new method. When a planet is very close to its star, the heat and radiation can cause it to evaporate over time, creating a cloud of gas and dust in the same orbit. This cloud makes it look as if the star is dimmer than it should be, and missing an outer layer: the chromosphere. By focusing on stars with these characteristics, astronomers found planets orbiting the first three they looked at closely. They have 36 still to examine.