Culture spent the week doing what it does best: turning decline into programming, branding into mythology, and institutional recognition into a slightly belated apology. A federal agency discovered lowriders after several decades of evidence. Luxury houses staged little pilgrimages inside monasteries and churches. Museums, festivals, and pop stars kept finding new ways to turn archives, lore, and side projects into product without technically calling it that. Even the satire had a cleaner business model than half the real media landscape.

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Ethel Cain built a Coachella junkyard, then hid Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl grass in it

Ethel Cain’s Coachella set was designed as a “graveyard of American industry,” which is a strong escalation from the usual desert-festival LED wallpaper. Stage designer Oli Colman says the environment leaned into rusted car parts, chain-link fencing, swamp grass, Spanish moss, and power lines to match Cain’s Southern Gothic cosmology, with a weathered scythe doubling as a mic stand. The best detail is pure live-production absurdity: some of the grass came from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl set, then got burned and painted yellow to look dry enough for Cain’s world. Even her stage dressing now comes with lore, reuse economics, and a little national decline.

InfoWars got the full satire treatment, and the joke is that the business model barely needed exaggeration

The Onion’s fake welcome letter for new InfoWars owner Bryce P. Tetraeder lands because it understands the real genre: not just conspiracy media, but the larger American content economy where panic, scams, supplements, coaching, ads, and pseudo-truth all merge into one diseased revenue funnel. The piece imagines InfoWars as an “infinite virtual surface teeming with ads” and “free radical misinformation,” which is funny mostly because it reads like a mission statement for half the modern internet. The best line of attack is that the site’s future is not ideological purification. It is corporate optimization. Same poison, better monetized.

Milan Design Week became luxury field-trip season for brands that needed a church, a monastery, or at least a bonsai museum

This year’s Milan Design Week looked less like furniture fair programming and more like prestige brand world-building with a venue budget. Gucci staged Demna’s Gucci Memoria inside the Chiostri di San Simpliciano monastery, Aesop turned Milan’s Chiesa del Carmine into “The Factory of Light,” Miu Miu brought back its three-day Literary Club under the theme “Politics of Desire,” Arket and Laila Gohar installed a fruit-and-vegetable carousel at Giardino delle Arti, and Jaipur Rugs showed Kengo Kuma-designed pieces at the Crespi Bonsai Museum. The obvious takeaway is that design week now rewards atmosphere almost as much as objects. Retail is dead; pilgrimage is in. (Gucci)

The internet got its own sexual counter-history, and it comes as a lecture, a black book, and a redistribution scheme

Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet is less “website” than a whole argument with multiple delivery systems. The project exists as a participatory lecture performance and a 700-plus-page artist book, framing the internet not as neutral infrastructure but as a technology shaped by desire, sexualization, censorship, and the under-credited labor of women. The sharpest wrinkle is the economics: 30 percent of book profits are redistributed to cited contributors through what Seu calls “citational splits,” turning footnotes into an actual payment model. Even the archive comes with reparations logic now. (asexualhistoryoftheinternet.com)

Charli XCX’s indie-film detour is less stunt casting than controlled eruption

Pete Ohs’ Erupcja is being sold, inevitably, through the fact that it stars Charli xcx, but the more interesting part is the filmmaking method around her. Ohs says he built the film with actors in sequence, starting from only half an outline and shaping scenes day by day in Warsaw, turning the production into a live collaborative process instead of a locked script exercise. That matters because it makes Charli less a pop-star cameo than one volatile element inside a movie about signs, desire, and the damage of trying to figure out whether you are on the right path without hurting people on the way. Process became the plot.

TV Star shakes retro dust off Britpop on “Out of My Bag”

“Out of My Bag” is TV Star doing revivalism with enough speed and scruff to keep it alive. The Seattle-Tacoma band pushes jangly Britpop, Madchester swing, and garage-pop mess into something that feels more lived-in than costume-party nostalgic. The hook is immediate, but the better sell is the momentum: loose, bright, and just grimy enough around the edges. It is the kind of track that sounds like it showed up already in motion. The single arrived ahead of the band’s debut album Music For Heads, released through Father/Daughter.

The USPS finally put lowriders on stamps, which is one way to admit the culture won

The U.S. Postal Service released a pane of 15 Lowriders Forever stamps on March 13, using five designs to honor a car culture rooted in Mexican American and Chicano communities across the Southwest. Antonio Alcalá art-directed the set with photos by Philip Gordon and Humberto “Beto” Mendoza, plus pinstriping by Danny Alvarado, and the stamps were made wider than usual to better show off the cars’ obsessive detail. What makes the item worth repeating is the institutional reversal: a style once policed, stigmatized, and treated as lowbrow now gets federal heritage treatment at 78 cents a piece. (USPS)

Media Puzzle’s “New Pet” sounds like a sugar rush with bite marks

“New Pet” is Media Puzzle in their most efficient mode: bratty, hooked-up, and slightly unhinged. The track comes off New Racehorse, the band’s April 16 release, and it has that fast, rubbery indie-punk energy where everything feels one shove away from falling apart, but never does. What makes it stick is the tension between sweetness and agitation. It is catchy in a way that feels a little suspicious, like the song is smiling too hard while shaking the furniture. Very good lane for them. The result is messy, bright, and over before your brain fully catches up.

Throwing hands

How my parents think you get a job in 2026 (X)

I originally pitched PUNCH as “Your pop culture haymaker,” which still feels right; the difference is that this version is leaner, meaner, and less interested in feeding the scroll. Think of it as a compact dispatch on culture, media, status theater, institutional nonsense, and the kind of internet pathology worth dragging into the light.

The Strokes turned Coachella into a protest reel with guitars

The Strokes closed their Coachella set by pushing the festival’s giant screens into open political theater. A video montage reportedly showed leaders allegedly targeted by the CIA alongside footage and references tied to Gaza and Iran, while social posts from the set circulated clips of the final visuals and Julian Casablancas’ onstage crack about the coming military draft. The result was less “rock band says something vague” and more a direct attempt to end on accusation, not uplift. Predictably, the discourse split between people calling it one of the weekend’s few genuinely risky gestures and people acting shocked that Julian Casablancas still enjoys antagonizing authority. (Consequence)

A jury finally called Live Nation what concertgoers already knew it was

A New York jury has found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable for illegally monopolizing major parts of the live-events business. Nice to see the legal system eventually catch up to what everyone who has paid $94 in fees to stand behind a pole already understood in their bones.

This does not instantly fix ticket prices or magically un-inflate the whole racket. The next phase is remedies, which is less exciting than revenge but still useful. Even so, it is one of those rare moments when a giant cultural scam gets described in plain English: live music became a luxury product routed through one giant choke point, and now that arrangement has finally been called what it is.

Frank Ocean updated the webshop and everyone reported to feelings duty

Frank Ocean followed last week’s channel ORANGE and Blonde vinyl restocks with a fresh Blonded merch drop, adding three new T-shirts while the vinyl stayed live on the site. Blonde is listed at $65 with a lyrics foldout and poster, channel ORANGE at $69, both with a 2–6 week fulfillment window; Blonded’s help page also notes that sales are final and mixed orders ship only when everything is in stock. None of this is a song, obviously. But Frank has trained people to treat an online storefront like a seance, so here we are, once again reading cotton and inventory timing as emotional intelligence.

Milan Design Week is back to turning chairs into class warfare

Milan Design Week 2026 runs April 20–26, with Fuorisalone spreading across the city and Salone del Mobile’s 64th edition taking over Rho from April 21–26. Organizers are touting more than 1,900 exhibitors, 36.6% from abroad, over 169,000 square meters of sold-out exhibition space, and well over 1,000 citywide events spread across Brera, Tortona, Isola, Porta Venezia, and the rest of Milan’s annual map of tasteful congestion. Every year this thing manages to present a lamp as a worldview and a chair as a diplomatic weapon. That is the charm and the scam.

Martin Wong gets the rare revival that actually makes the case

Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 has opened Martin Wong: Chinatown USA, a large survey of more than 100 works revisiting his Chinatown imagery, while New York’s P·P·O·W is staging Martin Wong: Popeye, focused on his fixation with comics, tattoos, and lowbrow iconography. That pairing is smarter than the usual retrospective cleanup job. One show leans into inherited fantasy, ethnic theater, and Wong’s outsider relation to Chinatown; the other into brick patterns, cartoons, and subcultural American vernacular. Together they make Wong look less like an art-world cult figure and more like someone building his own symbolic language out of belonging, performance, and urban myth.

Hlynur Pálmason turns a breakup into a haunting domestic weather system

Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains (now on VOD) turns a family breakup into something bruised, intimate, and a little uncanny, using gorgeous 35mm images and a drifting, vignette-based structure to catch the weird sadness of love curdling into shared routine. It finds real feeling in the small domestic details and the quiet humiliations of separation, but its loose, elliptical approach can also feel so withholding that the emotional payoff starts slipping through your fingers.

Edmonia Lewis finally gets the retrospective history kept dodging

The Peabody Essex Museum’s Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone is the first major retrospective devoted to the 19th-century Black and Indigenous sculptor, bringing together her work in a way institutions somehow failed to do for more than a century. Lewis made Forever Free in 1867, widely regarded as the earliest known formal depiction of emancipation by a Black American artist, which means the show lands as more than rediscovery. It is a correction. The basic scandal is that someone this foundational still has to be introduced like a lost figure instead of a pillar.

Japanese women’s wrestling is bringing a title fight to the Hammerstein Ballroom

Sukeban, the Japanese women’s wrestling promotion that looks like sports entertainment after a fashion week concussion, is bringing its World Championship Fight to New York on May 19. The Hammerstein Ballroom event features 22 wrestlers, including reigning champion Ichigo Sayaka, which already sounds more alive than most of the prestige content currently being force-fed to the culture.

It is also unveiling new Cherry Bomb costumes with Nike, because even beautifully unhinged spectacle now arrives with brand architecture. Still, this is the right kind of crossover slop: title-fight stakes, maximalist personas, and a level of visual commitment that makes ordinary live entertainment look like it got dressed in the dark.

Kristen Stewart’s first film bleeds all over the frame, and Imogen Poots keeps it human

The Chronology of Water (now on VOD), Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, is carried by a raw, full-body performance from Imogen Poots that keeps the whole thing from floating off into pure anguish cosplay. It’s visceral, fragmented, and deliberately intimate, turning trauma and rebirth into something felt more than neatly explained, though the film’s nonstop assault of pain and aggressive stylization can, at times, start admiring its own wounds a little too much.

Your imaginary boyfriend is already checking your likes

There is, unfortunately, a whole subreddit for people intentionally creating sentient mind-companions. On r/Tulpas, users treat a tulpa as a mental companion that can develop its own will, emotions, and opinions, which is already a strong sign that the group chat should maybe be muted for a while.

Naturally, this immediately mutates into relationship discourse. One poster complained that a tulpa created days earlier was already acting jealous and possessive over social media likes. Loneliness really said fine, I’ll make my own boyfriend, and then accidentally gave him surveillance instincts.

ADÉLA’s “KGB” stomps in like the night has already been warned

ADÉLA’s new single “KGB” feels engineered for a very specific kind of entrance: dramatic, polished, a little hostile, fully aware of the mirror. The production is glossy and aggressive without collapsing into sludge, and ADÉLA sells the whole thing with that cool, taunting poise pop stars need when they are trying to make attitude sound expensive. The track’s appeal is not subtlety. It is force. High-camp, tightly wound, and built to stalk across a room rather than beg for it.

Pearly Drops and Night Tapes made a comedown song for people with good taste in despair

“Fade to Black” sits in that plush late-night zone where dream pop, electronic haze, and emotional distance all start sharing a coat. Pearly Drops and Night Tapes keep the track light on brute force and heavy on atmosphere, letting it drift with the kind of soft-focus melancholy that feels less like heartbreak than elegant depletion. It is beautifully controlled. Not a meltdown, not a banger, more like the exact song your brain plays when the night is over and you are not.

Headline curation and words by Tag Brum (@tagbrum)

Cola - Skywriter’s Sigh

“Skywriter’s Sigh” feels lean, flickering, and a little worn-in around the edges in a good way. Cola still sound most convincing when they resist overstatement, letting nervous guitars, clipped momentum, and Tim Darcy’s coolly frayed delivery do the work. If this is the album closer, Cost of Living Adjustment looks built less around big release than slow, exact pressure.

Headline curation and words by Tag Brum