GARDNERS — Sam Cooper had just trekked 7 miles through a rain-sodden stretch of the Appalachian Trail when he sat down outside a little country store in Pennsylvania to take on its ice cream challenge.

It was 160 years ago that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they had been freed — after the Civil War’s end and two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

NEW YORK — The Trump family said it is licensing its name to a new mobile phone service, the latest in a string of ventures that have been announced while Donald Trump is in the White House despite ethical concerns that the U.S. president could mold public policy for personal gain.

For the past year or so, I’ve been enthralled by this passage from Nick Davis’ book “Competing with Idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a Dual Portrait”:

Nashville hitmaker Dierks Bentley has delivered “Broken Branches,” his eleventh studio album that leans into some well-tread country rock territory, the kind that invariably involves broken hearts, trucks and a cold beer.

NEW YORK — The sounds of muffled percussion and audience cheers reverberate throughout the grounds. Brand activations, makeshift bars and restaurant pop-ups control traffic as a sea of bodies move from set to set. Sandwiched between is a row of nonprofits across familiar causes: hunger, housing and voter registration.

LOS ANGELES — As she was putting together her seventh and most recent record, Sharon Van Etten came up with a tongue-in-cheek idea for its title. “Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory,” she wanted to call it — a reference to both her interest in psychology and a play on the familial dynamics that often exist within a band.

GREATER WILKES-BARRE

STROUDSBURG — The stage show HYPROV: Improv Under Hypnosis is coming to the Sherman Theater this September, starring master hypnotist Asad Mecci, Colin Mochrie from “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and a handful of lucky volunteers from the audience.

Men shouldn’t have friends. Or should they? That is the tagline from the freshest film coming out of my favorite studio, A24, to hit the cinema so far this year. I don’t know about you, but the conundrum I find trying to make friends as an adult in this day and age is most of our interactions come from our work environments. Well, that and Facebook, but we all know that is an alternate reality.