Learning a new language just got a lot more fun. A teacher with Levion, an online Vietnamese language platform, has gone viral with a rap song that teaches students how to count to 100 in Vietnamese, and it’s exactly as catchy as it sounds. The same teacher applied the technique to learning colors and days of the week, throwing in some flirty phrases for good measure.
Robert Plant Takes “Ramble On” to Colbert in a Performance Worth Every Second
Robert Plant doesn’t need a stadium to fill a room. The Led Zeppelin legend brought his band Saving Grace to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert Wednesday night, delivering a roots-driven take on “Higher Rock” from their self-titled 2025 album before staying for a bonus performance of the 1969 Zeppelin classic “Ramble On.” The Tolkien-inspired track was a perfect fit for Colbert, a devoted Tolkien devotee who’s currently developing a script for an upcoming Lord of the Rings film.
There’s also a Record Store Day angle worth noting. Saving Grace: All That Glitters… drops April 18, a four-track EP featuring new studio recordings including covers of Bert Jansch’s “Poison” and Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl.” Plant and Saving Grace have a summer and fall tour of Europe and the United States coming as well. The Colbert appearance is a timely reminder that Plant’s creative instincts remain sharp and completely his own.
Nine Inch Noize: Trent Reznor and Boys Noize Drop a Surprise Collaborative Album This Month
Nine Inch Nails and German producer Boys Noize have confirmed what the desert already knew. A billboard spotted on the route into Indio, California this week gave it away before the Instagram posts made it official: a full collaborative album under the name Nine Inch Noize arrives April 17, catalogued as HALO 38 in Trent Reznor’s numbered discography.
The pairing has real history behind it. Boys Noize first connected with Reznor and Atticus Ross in 2024, deconstructing and reimagining their score for Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. He then contributed to the TRON: Ares soundtrack, earning a Grammy for Best Rock Song for “As Alive as You Need Me to Be” at the 2026 ceremony. The collaboration moved to the live stage during NIN’s “Peel It Back” tour, where Boys Noize performed remixes from a second stage mid-show.
This weekend, Nine Inch Noize headline Coachella’s Sahara stage, the ideal preview for what HALO 38 has in store. The album lands April 17, and we might not be ready for this.
Mitski Delivers a Stunning “If I Leave” Performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live
Mitski took the Jimmy Kimmel Live stage Wednesday night to perform “If I Leave,” a track from her eighth studio album ‘Nothing’s About to Happen to Me’, released February 27. The performance is exactly what you’d expect from one of the most compelling live acts working today: controlled, emotionally precise, and completely impossible to look away from.
Jack White Brings a Massive 2026 World Tour to North America and Europe
Jack White doesn’t do anything small. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has just announced a sweeping 2026 world tour, spanning North America and Europe across two massive legs. It’s a run that hits major rooms, festival stages, and iconic venues from coast to coast, wrapping with a closing two-nighter at Atlanta’s Coca-Cola Roxy in November.
The tour launches this weekend with a last-minute Coachella main-stage appearance, the kind of slot that signals exactly where White stands in the rock hierarchy. He’ll then hit North American cities through July, including two nights at Brooklyn Paramount and a Toronto stop at RBC Amphitheatre on July 14, with Quebec sensations Angine de Poitrine providing support.
White’s been moving fast in 2026. He dropped the surprise 7-inch singles “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs” and “Derecho Demonico,” then took the SNL stage alongside host Jack Black, delivering a choir-backed “Seven Nation Army” that brought the house down. The new material lands with the kind of raw urgency that’s defined his best work, proof that White’s creative engine hasn’t slowed for a moment.
After the North American summer run, White heads to Europe for dates in Latvia, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, the UK, and Ireland before returning stateside in the fall. Two nights in London at the Eventim Apollo, two in Dublin at the 3Olympia Theatre, and two more at the Hollywood Palladium round out a tour that leaves very little room to breathe, and that’s exactly the point.
Tickets go on presale through Third Man Records’ Vault on April 13, with the general on-sale following April 17 via Ticketmaster.
2026 Tour Dates:
04/11 Indio, CA – Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival
05/30 Sigulda, Latvia – Sigulda Castle
06/04-06 Aarhus, Denmark – Northside Festival
06/12-14 Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands – Best Kept Secret Festival
06/18 Lyon, France – Les Nuits de Fourvière
06/19 Camaiore, Italy – La Prima Estate
06/21 Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy – Arena Alpe Adria
06/22-24 Zagreb, Croatia – INMusic Festival
07/10 Washington, DC – The Anthem
07/11 Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Paramount
07/12 Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Paramount
07/14 Toronto, ON – RBC Amphitheatre (w/ Angine de Poitrine)
07/15 Essex Junction, VT – Champlain Valley Exposition
07/17 Boston, MA – MGM Music Hall at Fenway
07/21 Indianapolis, IN – Everwise Amphitheater at White River State Park
07/23 Chicago, IL – Radius
07/24 Chicago, IL – The Salt Shed (Outdoors)
07/25 Clarkston, MI – Pine Knob Music Theatre
08/21 Almaty, Kazakhstan – Park Live Almaty
08/22-23 Istanbul, Turkey – Babylon Soundgarden
08/25 London, UK – Eventim Apollo
08/26 London, UK – Eventim Apollo
08/28 Bristol, UK – The Prospect Building
08/29 Newcastle, UK – O2 City Hall
08/31 Belfast, UK – The Telegraph Building
09/01 Dublin, Ireland – 3Olympia Theatre
09/02 Dublin, Ireland – 3Olympia Theatre
09/18 Cincinnati, OH – MegaCorp Pavilion
09/19 East Aurora, NY – Borderland Festival
09/20 Richmond, VA – TBA
09/24 San Francisco, CA – Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
09/25 Pomona, CA – Fox Theater
09/28 Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Palladium
09/29 Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Palladium
09/30 Del Mar, CA – The Sound
10/02 Las Vegas, NV – Fontainebleau Las Vegas
10/03 Phoenix, AZ – Arizona Financial Theatre
10/04 Albuquerque, NM – Revel
10/06 Austin, TX – Moody Amphitheater
10/07 Dallas, TX – The Bomb Factory
10/09 Nashville, TN – The Truth
11/08 Minneapolis, MN – The Armory
11/09 Madison, WI – The Sylvee
11/10 Milwaukee, WI – Landmark Credit Union Live
11/12 Pittsburgh, PA – Citizens Live at The Wylie
11/13 Charlotte, NC – The Fillmore Charlotte
11/14 Charlotte, NC – The Fillmore Charlotte
11/16 Orlando, FL – Hard Rock Live Orlando
11/17 Miami Beach, FL – The Fillmore
11/18 Miami Beach, FL – The Fillmore
11/20 Atlanta, GA – Coca-Cola Roxy
11/21 Atlanta, GA – Coca-Cola Roxy
The Woman Behind the Pen Name: Freida McFadden Is Sara Cohen
For years, one of the publishing world’s worst-kept secrets was hiding in plain sight. The author behind some of the most compulsively readable domestic thrillers of the past decade, a woman known to millions of readers as Freida McFadden, was living a double life. Not the kind that ends in a twist on page 300, but a quieter, more ordinary one: bestselling novelist by night, brain disorder specialist by day, wig by necessity because, as she puts it, she genuinely has no idea how to style her hair.
This week, McFadden ended the mystery. Her real name is Sara Cohen, she is a physician based outside Boston, and she is tired of being a secret.
“I’m at a point in my career when I’m tired of this being a secret,” she told USA Today. “I’m tired of people debating if I’m a real person or if I’m three men. I am a real person and I have a real identity and I don’t have anything to hide.”
The pseudonym was never intended as an elaborate ruse. When Cohen self-published her first novel, The Devil Wears Scrubs, in 2013, a fictionalised account of her life as a medical resident, she simply didn’t want her writing to complicate her work at the hospital. She chose the name Freida as a quiet insider joke, lifting it from FREIDA, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database used by medical trainees. It was the kind of detail that would fit neatly into one of her own books.
For years the system worked. Cohen wrote prolifically, turning out psychological thriller after psychological thriller while maintaining her clinical practice, all while keeping the two identities carefully separate. She worried her patients might feel uncomfortable being treated by someone whose imagination ran to murders, secrets, and women imprisoned in beautiful houses. She worried about professionalism. She worried, as many writers do, about whether she could possibly be as interesting in real life as the version people had constructed in their heads.
What she didn’t count on was becoming one of the bestselling authors in the world.
The Housemaid, published in 2022, changed everything. The novel became an international sensation, spawning sequels and landing on bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2025, it was adapted into a film starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried that grossed nearly 400 million dollars at the box office, making it the highest-grossing film of director Paul Feig’s career. A second film is already in development. In the UK alone, Cohen sold 2.6 million books in 2025 under her pen name, making her the second bestselling author of the year behind only Julia Donaldson, the woman who wrote The Gruffalo.
The bigger the success became, the harder the secret was to keep. Colleagues at the hospital eventually put the pieces together after recognising her from a photo taken at a public appearance. Rather than making things awkward, they rallied around her. They kept quiet on social media, became fans, and she thanked them with a book signing at work. She was, by her own account, completely overwhelmed trying to sustain both lives, and in late 2023 she stepped back from full-time medicine. She now works one or two days a month.
With that distance came the freedom to finally say her own name out loud.
Cohen is clear that the unmasking changes nothing about her relationship with her readers. She is still Freida to them, still the same writer who has published 29 novels, still the same person who has shared, as she puts it, the real me all along. The name is new. The rest, she insists, is exactly the same.
It is, as she cheerfully acknowledges, considerably less dramatic than anything she has ever put in a book. But there is something quietly fitting about it: a writer who built a career on the idea that the most ordinary-looking lives contain the most astonishing secrets, turning out to have been living one herself all along.
Michael Patrick Campbell, the Belfast Actor Who Turned His Terminal Diagnosis Into His Greatest Performance, Dies at 35
Michael Patrick Campbell was many things: a gifted actor, a fearless writer, a devoted husband, and by all accounts, a man who met an impossible situation with grace, humour, and an unshakeable commitment to his craft. He died on April 8, 2026, at the Northern Ireland Hospice in Belfast. He was 35 years old.
Born and raised in Belfast, Campbell trained at the University of Cambridge, where he performed with the celebrated Cambridge Footlights comedy troupe, before going on to study at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London. He built a career that took him from the stages of Belfast to international screens, appearing in the BBC series My Left Nut, which he co-wrote based on his own teenage years, as well as Blue Lights, This Town, Game of Thrones, and numerous other productions.
But it was his final and most personal work that defined his legacy. In January 2025, Campbell received the Judges’ Award at The Stage Awards at London’s Royal Opera House for his adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard III, a production he co-wrote with Oisín Kearney and performed from a wheelchair after his diagnosis with Motor Neurone Disease in February 2023. The production reimagined Richard III as a man receiving a terminal diagnosis at the start of the play, transforming Shakespeare’s text into something searingly contemporary and deeply autobiographical. The Lyric Theatre Belfast, where the production was staged, called it one of the greatest performances ever seen on its stage.
Campbell had been experiencing symptoms while performing at the Dublin Fringe Festival and within a year of his diagnosis was no longer able to stand. In February 2026, he shared publicly that his neurologist had given him approximately one year to live, and that he had chosen to decline further medical intervention in order to spend his remaining time outside of hospital. His final post noted, quietly and without self-pity, that there was still plenty to live for.
His writing partner Kearney remembered him as an actor of rare emotional range, someone who could move an audience from laughter to grief in a single moment. The MAC Theatre in Belfast said that everyone who encountered his work would carry a piece of him with them. His wife Naomi, in her announcement of his death, described him as a titan of a ginger haired man, full of joy, abundance of spirit, and infectious laughter, a man who lived as fully as any human can live.
He closed his final message to the world with a quote from the Irish writer Brendan Behan, one that felt entirely like his own: the most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink, and somebody to love you. Don’t overthink it. Eat. Drink. Love.
Michael Patrick Campbell is survived by his wife Naomi Sheehan, his mother, and his sisters. He was 35 years old and showed every one of them.
Mumford & Sons Finally Play the NPR Tiny Desk 13 Years After Their First Attempt
Mumford and Sons were booked for the NPR Tiny Desk thirteen years ago, during the ‘Babel’ tour, and had to cancel at the last minute. The building they were supposed to play in has since been demolished. The band finally made it, and the wait was justified. Four songs, a string quartet, Matt Menefee on banjo, and Marcus Mumford’s voice in a room that size, backed by Ben Lovett’s harmonies on piano and Ted Dwane on bass, adds up to something that scales the band’s sound down without diminishing it. The set draws from their sixth album ‘Prizefighter’ and reaches back to 2009 debut ‘Sigh No More’ for “White Blank Page.” They closed with “Badlands,” a ‘Prizefighter’ cut they’d never played live for anyone before, followed by first single “Rubber Band Man.” Thirteen years is a long time. This made the case that some things are worth scheduling twice.
A Rejuvenated Kronos Quartet Returns to the NPR Tiny Desk With Urgency and Wit
Kronos Quartet returned to the NPR Tiny Desk twelve years after their first visit, and three of the four members are new faces. Violinists Gabriela Diaz, violist Ayane Kozasa and cellist Paul Wiancko have joined founder and violinist David Harrington, and the result is a quartet that sounds energized and loose, more fun than ever according to the people in that room. The four-song set moves between whimsy and weight with the kind of range that has defined Kronos across more than 50 years and 1,200 commissions. Paul Wiancko’s new arrangement of Neil Young’s “Ohio” hits with jolts of defiance that land as hard today as the song ever has. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” which Harrington calls “the centerpiece of American music,” unfolds through a melodramatic introduction before settling into languid despondency. Canadian composer Nicole Lizée’s “Another Living Soul” brings whirly tubes, groan tubes, bells and vocalizing into the mix, while Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini’s “Hujan” closes the set with a relaxed groove carrying a lament for climate change underneath.
Tiana Major9 Returns to the NPR Tiny Desk In Person With a Grammy-Nominated Song and a Special Guest
Six years after their Tiny Desk home concert, Tiana Major9 returned to NPR’s office in person for a six-song set drawn from ‘November Scorpio,’ and brought the full emotional arc of the record with them. The set moves through the push and pull of love pursued and doubted, from the cautious admission of “desire.” to the yearning and regret of “alone” and “Always,” with Grammy-nominated “Collide,” originally written with EARTHGANG for the ‘Queen & Slim’ soundtrack, sitting at the center as the song Tiana Major9 describes as having changed their life. To close, trumpeter Keyon Harrold, whose own Tiny Desk featured Tiana Major9 as a guest, returned the favor by joining the band for “energy!” It’s a full-circle moment that the performance earns completely.