The daily gossip: Adele's new album finally has a release date, William Shatner blasts off, and more

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1. Adele confirms the release date for '30'
2. 'Star Trek' actor William Shatner returns from space, muses on 'death'
3. Neil deGrasse Tyson is utterly baffled by Demi Lovato insisting 'aliens' is offensive to aliens
4. Cardi B got a mansion for her birthday
5. Jamie Lee Curtis wore the perfect 'meta' homage to her mother Janet Leigh

published 13 October 2021

1. Adele confirms the release date for '30'

Adele has spoken. After teasing the release of her highly-anticipated next album, 30, on billboards around the world, the singer released a statement on Wednesday confirming that we only have to wait five more weeks to hear the final product. "I was certainly nowhere near where I'd hoped to be when I first started [30] nearly three years ago. Quite the opposite actually," Adele wrote to her fans, adding that "I've painstakingly rebuilt my house and my heart since then and this album narrates it." Previously, Adele told Vogue that the new music was inspired by her divorce from her husband, Simon Konecki, although she's reluctant to call it a "divorce album" since the split was "was amicable — Konecki lives in a house she bought across the street from her own, and they have regular movie nights together with [their son] Angelo, now 9," Vulture reports.

On Wednesday, 90-year-old actor William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on the original hit sci-fi TV show Star Trek, headed to the edge of space courtesy of Jeff Bezos' aerospace company Blue Origin. The 11-minute journey clearly left him moved and musing on mortality: "It was unbelievable … To see the blue cover go whoop by. And now you're staring into blackness," Shatner recounted once he was back on Earth. As he went on: "You look down, there's the blue down there, and the black up there. There is Mother and Earth and comfort and there is … Is there death? I don't know. Was that death? Is that the way death is? Whoop and it's gone. Jesus. It was so moving to me." As The New York Times notes, "The word 'death,' repeatedly mentioned by Mr. Shatner in his post-flight monologue, is rarely thought of as a selling word for space tourism."

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Neil deGrasse Tyson can't wrap his head around Demi Lovato's claim that calling extraterrestrials "aliens" is offensive. "To be worried about offending them by calling them an alien, what [is Lovato] thinking is going on in the head of species of life from another planet?" Tyson ranted to TMZ. "I mean, I know it's very considerate of [Lovato], but really? Really?" Tyson went on to clarify that he uses the term "space aliens" and that when referring to migrants, "undocumented immigrants, that's what the new term is for them, and I'm all in on that." As a result, he insisted, "So what that means is … the only invocation of the word 'alien' is for creatures from outer space that want to kill us all. First, I don't care what they feel. Plus, why should I even believe they know English? So, yeah, I'm not all in on that. I don't get it."

Offset bought Cardi B a Caribbean mansion for her birthday, which is apparently something rich people do when they're not buying themselves tickets to outer space. "For a hot minute now I've been telling Set that I really want to invest in short term home rental properties ... but I felt like he didn't agree with me and would rather put money into other investments," Cardi wrote on Instagram, adding cheerfully: "Well, I was wrong." The property has six bedrooms, seven-and-a-half bathrooms, an infinity pool overlooking the ocean, and a lot of really hideous staging art, according to the birthday reveal video that Cardi B shared to Instagram. Still, for all her excitement, Cardi gave Offset an I.O.U. for properly thanking him: "I can't wait for this hangover to go away," she added, "so I can show you my full appreciation."

Jamie Lee Curtis had the perfect red carpet look for the premiere of Halloween Kills on Tuesday night. The actress wore a belted blue dress with a blond wig, a black purse, and a bloody shower curtain in a picture-perfect homage to her late mother Janet Leigh's character in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. "Honoring my mother in ALL her gory … I meant glory!" joked Curtis on Instagram. She later explained to ET that she was "honoring my beautiful late mama, Janet Leigh, but… it's a little more meta than that. I am actually going as Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh in the [2012] movie Hitchcock. So it's meta because we never knew what color Janet Leigh's dress was because it was a black-and-white movie. But now because of the Hitchcock movie, we know it was pale blue."

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.