Miley Cyrus, one of the biggest music stories of 2013, may have been strangely absent from this year’s Grammy Awards, but the “Wrecking Ball” singer regains the spotlight tonight when she stars in her very own Unplugged special on MTV. Haters are poised to mock, but Miley has given hints that she’ll acquit herself nicely under the long-running acoustic concert program’s flaw-revealing format. Through its stripped-down nature, Unplugged rigorously tests the true musicality of those who perform on the show, but those who make it through the acoustic gauntlet gain some respect and an easy excuse to release a live album.

Today, it was announced that Dan Brown will publish a new book about genius symbologist Robert Langdon. It’s called Origin and it will delve into “the dangerous intersection of humankind’s two most enduring questions, and the earth-shaking discovery that will answer them.” The novel will, of course, incorporate “symbology, science, religion, history, art, and architecture,” which is a nice way of saying that it’ll involve some bonkers plot to save the world that revolves around [insert famous novel/work of art/statue/museum you went to once on a field trip].

With great fame comes great responsibility. Your new Spider-Man, Tom Holland, is a 19-year-old Gemini hailing from Kingston Upon Thames in southwest London who enjoys slow-motion flips and Taylor Swift. Most recently, he’s appeared as Thomas Cromwell’s son in Wolf Hall, but his first taste of fame came when he made his West End debut in Billy Elliot the Musical, which eventually led to a role in The Impossible opposite Naomi Watts.

ENTOURAGE, (from left): Kevin Dillon, Adrian Grenier, Kevin Connolly, Jerry Ferrara, ‘Out With A Bang’, (Season 8, ep. 802, aired July 31, 2011), 2004-11. photo: Claudette Barius / © HBO / Last weekend, comedian/former writer for Happy Endings and Brooklyn Nine-Nine Gil Ozeri watched every single episode of Entourage in a row without sleeping. This is his story. Shhh!! Do you hear that? That’s the sound of me crossing another incredibly stupid item off my bucket list.

Old Hollywood owes a lot to the circus. The Big Top was where talent like Tod Browning, the director of Freaks and Dracula, and Burt Lancaster, the leading man in From Here to Eternity, got their starts. But it was also home to publicity masters like Harry Reichenbach, the legendary film promoter who supposedly ran off with the circus at the age of 13. Reichenbach worked with traveling acts and a magician called either “The Great Raymond” or “The Great Griffith” (accounts vary, so clearly he wasn’t that great) before coming to New York and seeking work on Broadway.

Well this is strange. Terrence Howard is not unlike his Empire character Lucious Lyon: Both have troubled pasts, exhibit extreme behavior, and make for a great interview. That last one is especially apparent from a new Rolling Stone profile that treats the actor like a ticking time bomb (“You never know what you’re going to get with a guy like Howard,” Erik Hedegaard writes) whom no one can believe still has a job in Hollywood, let alone a starring role on a runaway Fox hit.

She’s still giving us charming saccharine-laced pop, but she’s not the teen who sang about the best day of the week. If the name Rebecca Black doesn’t ring a bell, the words “It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday” surely will. At 13 years old, Black inducted herself into the internet and meme hall of fame when she released the viral video for her debut single “Friday,” on February 10, 2011.

Andrew Garfield in 99 Homes. 99 Homes is the fifth and most sensational feature by Ramin Bahrani’s, a slam-bang morality play in the Wall Street mode set closer to home. Here, the embodiment of rapacious, conscienceless, deregulated capitalism is now a Florida realtor, Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), who evicts people who’ve been foreclosed on (sometimes under criminally false pretenses), using cops to pull crying, pleading, raging families out of the houses.

Diego Luna in Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico. Narco traffickers are having a cultural moment. In addition to the trial of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán now underway in Manhattan, there’s the coincidentally timed premiere of Narcos: Mexico. The new season of the Netflix series follows the ascent of cocaine kingpin Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, with whom El Chapo got his start in the 1980s. Of course, the Mexican outlaw oeuvre known as narco cinema has been training a lens on drug dealers for decades.

The 1995 Ghost in the Shell anime. The Scarlett Johansson version of Ghost in the Shell is being released this Friday, whether we want it or not. It’s been notoriously tricky for Hollywood to successfully adapt anime and manga titles, even if they later get a critical reappraisal (see: Speed Racer, Edge of Tomorrow). But in the case of a classic franchise like Ghost in the Shell, which most American viewers know from the 1995 Mamoru Oshii film, there’s more of a known quantity to live up to — this is one of the most influential franchises in anime history.