The daily gossip: May 5, 2020

(Image credit: ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

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1. Elon Musk claims he and Grimes named their son 'X Æ A-12'
2. Kylie Jenner reveals the time her Met Gala dress ripped as she was putting it on
3. Selena Gomez will host a quarantine cooking show on HBO Max
4. Tom Cruise is reportedly exploring shooting a movie in outer space
5. Let Daniel Radcliffe read you the first chapter of Harry Potter

published 5 May 2020

1. Elon Musk claims he and Grimes named their son 'X Æ A-12'

Elon Musk and singer Grimes announced the arrival of their baby boy on Tuesday, and Musk claimed on Twitter that they named him "X Æ A-12." That seems, well, possible, since Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, once said she was changing her name to "c," after the symbol for the speed of light. One theory circulating on Reddit proposes that the baby's name is pronounced "X Ash Archangel," with "X" a placeholder, "Æ" said as "Ash" after the name of the ligature, and "A-12" short for "Archangel," since that was Lockheed Martin's code name for its A-12 airplane model. But because birth certificates in California can't be registered using numbers, it's also entirely possible the baby is just named "Bob" or something, instead.

One time I ate so much Thanksgiving dinner that the belt I was wearing popped off, which is basically the same thing as Kylie Jenner revealing on Instagram this week that her 2018 Met Gala dress was so tight "it ripped as I was squeezing into it." Jenner had trotted out the Alexander Wang gown just three months after giving birth to Stormi, and it was memorable for, well, not really sticking to that year's gala theme of "Heavenly Bodies." (This was the same year that Rihanna legendarily dressed as the Pope). Jenner's dress sported a silver zipper up the side, which she said it "wasn't supposed to have" until it was made necessary by a wardrobe malfunction right at the most inopportune time.

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It seems as if this pandemic is determined to turn the most surprising people into culinary artists, Selena Gomez among them. On Tuesday, HBO Max announced that the 27-year-old singer will be hosting a TV show about "her adventures in the kitchen as she, like many of us, tries to improve her cooking skills during quarantine." Gomez will be joined remotely in each of the 10 episodes on the forthcoming streaming platform by a different chef. "I think I've been asked hundreds of times in interviews if I had another career, what would I do," Gomez said, "and I've answered that it would be fun to be a chef." Meanwhile, Bella Hadid has re-unfollowed Gomez on Instagram, with her groundbreaking follow lasting only a few days.

Tom Cruise is famous for doing his own stunts, but this might be taking things a bit … far. As in, 62-or-more-miles-above-the-surface-of-the-Earth far. The actor and Elon Musk's Space X are reportedly working with NASA to explore potentially shooting what would be the first narrative feature film to be made in outer space. According to Deadline's report, Cruise's extraterrestrial flick would not be a new installment in the Mission Impossible series, but rather a stand-alone project of some sort. It's maybe a little premature to get your hopes up too high —SpaceX's first manned launch is still weeks away — but "this is real, albeit in the early stages of liftoff," writes Mike Fleming Jr.

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much." So begins the 76,944 words of the first Harry Potter book, which you can now have soothingly read to you by … celebrities. Daniel Radcliffe — who of course played the lightning-bolt-scarred protagonist in the movies — was given the first of the 17 chapters in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to read as part of the "Harry Potter at Home" weekly series, developed by J.K. Rowling and her team to help families during the outbreak. Other celebrity narrators will include David Beckham, Dakota Fanning, Eddie Redmayne, and Stephen Fry, with some "very special surprise cameos along the way, too."

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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.