The daily gossip: May 26, 2020

(Image credit: Rich Fury/Getty Images)

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1. We've all been saying Steve Buscemi's name wrong
2. J.K. Rowling's new children's book is being released for free online
3. Tom Holland befriends an interloping pigeon
4. Halsey broke her ankle by tripping on the dishwasher door
5. Elon Musk and Grimes have already changed their baby's name — sort of

published 26 May 2020

1. We've all been saying Steve Buscemi's name wrong

Everything you've ever known is a lie, because apparently everyone has been pronouncing Steve Buscemi's name wrong for years. In a profile published Monday in GQ, the endearingly humble actor (who, by the way, has survived getting hit by a bus, car, and stabbed by a stranger in a bar!) discusses topics like how he hopes to one day win the New Yorker caption contest and how he'd prefer to be murdered less in movies. But the real revelation comes in a parenthetical by the article's author, Gabriella Paiella: "He says it boo-sem-ee, not boo-shem-ee." If ever in doubt, though, you can always avoid the whole "potato, po-ta-to" headache and stick with plain old "Mr. Pink." Read the full profile here.

For the millions of Harry Potter fans growing increasingly restless in coronavirus quarantine, J.K. Rowling has dug into her attic and found something that might help. The author announced that starting Tuesday, she'll be publishing her new non-Potter-related children's book, The Ickabog, for free, releasing new chapters online every weekday. Rowling explained that she wrote most of her first draft of this fairy tale in between working on Harry Potter installments and intended to release it after Deathly Hallows in 2007, but it "went up into the attic" after she decided to take a break from children's books. New chapters are to be published through July 10, and you can check out the first chapters here.

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Anyone who's reached the point of having lengthy debates about the notion of free will with their cats in quarantine will likely sympathize with a stir-crazy Tom Holland, who befriended a trespassing pigeon on Monday. "Okay then," Holland said in an Instagram video that captured the moment the pigeon wandered into his living room. The actor jokingly identified the bird as "Will Smith," a reference to Spies in Disguise, in which Holland's character accidentally turns Smith's into a pigeon, then began to painstakingly coax it back outside, praising his feathered friend's progress the whole way. "This is great work," Holland encouraged. "This is good form. Smashing it." Watch the surprisingly great video here, and remember to, uh, get some air.

It's no gardening mishap, but Halsey recently broke her ankle in a rather unglamorous accident, she told the British radio show Capital Breakfast on Tuesday. "I was loading the dishwasher and I pulled the door down to load the dishwasher," she said. "And the kitchen floor was wet and I tripped over the dishwasher door." The singer didn't miss the irony, either: "After, you know, 2,000 live shows, where I'm jumping around for two hours, I finally fractured my ankle. In the kitchen. At my house." But Halsey isn't letting the unfashionable injury get in the way of her selfie game, posting a bikini pic to Instagram — sans her "itchy" new ankle brace.

"X Æ A-12" was always going to be a puzzling name, to say the least, but now it's officially an invalid one. Grimes confirmed on Instagram that she and her partner, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, changed the name of their son to "X Æ A-Xii" on his birth certificate, swapping the "12" out for the corresponding Roman numeral in order to satisfy California laws that prohibit anything other than "the 26" English-language letters. Of course, that still leaves a big question mark around "Æ," which Grimes has previously explained is her "elven spelling of Ai," and which is not one of the 26 more prosaic letters required by California. Baby X may very well have yet another name change in his near future.

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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.