Slate Arts & Culture Spoken Edition

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

“None of us thought that much into it,” Ed Sheeran says, right before breaking down in great detailed bit by detailed bit just how much thought went into creating this year’s biggest musical hit, “Shape of You.” As they’ve done in the past with other popular songs, the New York Times released a fascinating video in which the artists give a behind-the-scenes tour of their inspirations and creative processes.

In 2009, Chris Brown viciously assaulted then-girlfriend Rihanna. His sentencing as ordered by a judge included five years probation, as well as a five-year restraining order. (In 2011, the restraining order was lifted, conditionally.) In 2015, Brown was accused of forcibly ejecting a woman off of a bus during a video shoot. In 2016, former tour manager Nancy Ghosh alleged that the singer threatened her with violence, and she subsequently cut ties with him.

It’s that time of year again: Love Actually season is upon us. The modern holiday classic is full of egregious flaws, from the not-so-romantic cue card scene to the constant body shaming of a healthy, attractive woman—flaws that fans such as myself have had to come to terms with in order to enjoy the holiday season staple.

When the entire cast belts out “THIS IS THE GREATEST SHOW” a minute into your movie, the film itself had better live up to it. The Greatest Showman—how shall I put this?—doesn’t. Something feels off right from the beginning, as we see Hugh Jackman’s P.T. Barnum making his way through the space behind the circus bleachers in silhouette, pounding his cane to the rhythm of crashing drums.

Dave Grohl, who many lifetimes ago was in a band called Nirvana, stopped by Saturday Night Live with his new band the Foo Fighters, and he brought some Christmas cheer with him! After starting off with “Everlong,” from 1997’s The Colour and the Shape, the Foo Fighters turned in a rocking performance of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” by Darlene Love (off Phil Spector’s 1963 Christmas album) and a guitar arrangement of the Vince Guaraldi classic, “Linus & Lucy,” which first appeared on A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965....

There’s no shame in revisiting a classic, and on this week’s Saturday Night Live, host James Franco riffed on one of the show’s most iconic sketches: Dan Aykroyd’s legendary French Chef bit where, as Julia Child, he sliced a finger and merrily bled to death. Franco’s character, a gift-wrapper at Bloomingdale’s, is motivated by Christmas cheer rather than Bordeaux and chicken livers, but the basic premise is the same: blood, blood, and more blood.

The Hollywood Reporter revealed on Wednesday that the 2018 Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony will be presented by women, women, and more women, as a mark of what womenfolk have been through this year and since the dawn of time. Like many award ceremonies, the SAG Awards usually pairs a man and a women to announce each winner—but this year, only women will have that honor.

On Monday, a 27-year-old man tried to blow up a pipe bomb at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but really he only succeeded in inconveniencing a lot of people, since he was the only one to sustain serious injuries. Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah, both of whom tape their shows in New York, were not impressed with this attempt to bring chaos down on the city’s transit system, which is already pretty chaotic.

Hannibal Buress, the comedian whose 2014 stand-up routine about Bill Cosby was, in many ways, the opening bell for the current wave of sexual harassment scandals in entertainment, was arrested early Sunday morning in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, the Miami Herald reports. According to the police report, Buress approached an officer standing on a street corner and asked him to call him an Uber.

Jimmy Kimmel is taking the week off to spend time with his family after his son’s surgery, but Jimmy Kimmel Live! has continued to air new episodes with a roster of celebrity guest hosts filling in. On Tuesday, Tracee Ellis Ross took the reins and used the opportunity to talk about sexual harassment in the news. “First of all, let’s start with the fact that it isn’t a sex scandal. It isn’t a Hollywood scandal,” she said. “It isn’t even a scandal.

Johnny Hallyday, the singer whose French-language covers of American songs helped bring rock ’n’ roll to France, has died of cancer at the age of 74, Variety reports. He had been ill for several months. Hallyday, whose real name was Jean-Phillipe Smet, was born in Paris. An Elvis movie inspired him to start studying music and performing, and he released his first single, “Laisses les Filles,” in the spring of 1960.

NBC fired Today host Matt Lauer on Wednesday morning following a complaint by a colleague describing “inappropriate sexual behavior,” noting in the statement that “the first complaint about his behavior in the over twenty years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.

What would we do without Slate? No, I don’t mean Slate Magazine. I mean Jenny Slate, actress, comedian, and—today at least—queen of our hearts. In a week of news ranging from the gross to the harrowing, Slate has gifted us with not one but two pieces of objectively good news.