THEATER

Lea Michele Was Snubbed by the Tonys!

Unfortunately, there is no special prize for “singing the loudest.”

As someone who has seen two plays this year, I have strong feelings about the Tonys but no expertise. Jackson McHenry has seen all the plays and he has expertise. Together, we’re unstoppable. Herewith, a conversation about what to expect on June 6, when P!nk will host the awards.

My Chess group chat was abuzz this morning about how Nicholas Christopher, Hannah Cruz, and even Bryce Pinkham got nominations but the musical itself didn’t get nominated for Best Revival. And Lea Michele once again was not nominated, which means she has now been nominated for zero Tony awards.

Lea has a spotty reputation in some ways that I think the nominating committee may have struggled with. She claims to have atoned, but that lingers. Also Best Actress was surprisingly competitive. People really like Stephanie Hsu. We care about the New Musical emissaries Sara Chase and Christiani Pitts. Lea is gonna have to do more than stand center stage and belt like she’s at regionals.

Not even nationals! There are three SNL heavyweight alumni on Broadway right now, two of whom are pitted against each other in Featured Actress in a Musical. Who is the most interesting to you: Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, or Maya Rudolph?

Whatever happens, Lorne Michaels wins. He’s the lead producer of Schmigadoon!, so he’s happy today. Maya Rudolph — I haven’t seen her in Oh, Mary!, but she’s so interesting, she’s so fun, she has already broken ticket records for the show. And Rachel Dratch getting that award would be almost like a Purple Heart because she has to deal with so much audience participation. Also it’s interesting because for women of their age in Hollywood, it turns out theater has places for them.

What were some other notable snubs?

It’s interesting that they were so enthusiastic about the Rocky Horror performances but didn’t like Sam Pinkleton’s direction enough to nominate it. Instead, the guy from Two Strangers got that slot. The most surprising thing for me is that I have been forced into the corner of rooting for The Lost Boys. Because, well, it has a set. Plus we like vampires, we like hot boys, we like west-of-the-Rockies–sounding Benson Boone nonsense music.

We don’t like all of that, but sure. I get the sense you thought Cats: Jellicle Ball should have gotten more actress/actor nominations.

I loved Jellicle Ball so much. And there’s so much opportunity in the Featured Actor categories to be, like, we want to celebrate, like, Skimbleshanks, the railway cat, or we want to celebrate Grisabella, who is so moving. But they only went for André De Shields, which is the most boring choice of the cats. He’s a theater legend, but come on.

He was great on Elsbeth.

What a moment for Elsbeth. Congratulations to Elsbeth’s gay son, Ben Levi Ross, who is very likely to win a Tony.

I’m sure Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer have also been in the Elsbeth/The Good Wife cinematic universe at some point.*

They should have the vampire boy kill someone on Elspeth.

FASHION

The Heated Rivalry Boys Went All Out Last Night

We were disappointed. Yet, inevitably, erotically compelled.

Meanwhile, my Heated Rivalry group chat was abuzz from 5 p.m. onward about Connor Storrie’s and Hudson Williams’s debuts at fashion prom and the secondary outfits they wore til they came home at dawn. This morning, I checked in with Jen Ortiz, who as deputy editor of The Cut is qualified to speak about fashion. Also she cares about these actors in the same way that I do (unhealthily).

What were your thoughts when you first saw Connor’s look? How did you feel about his hair?

Oh, I liked it. There isn’t actually anything I think he could do to his hair that I would not like, I gotta say.

WHAT????? Oh, well, obviously these people could run me over with a car and I’d be like, Go off, king.

I’d be like, Thank you so much. It all looks good on top of that head. As far as the outfit goes, for a while, all we were getting were silk blouses tucked into high-waisted pants, and that was too much of one look. I get that it’s YSL and that it is a collection, but it just felt like he could be having more fun. It’s stylish. It looks good. It’s just a little snoozy.

And last night’s high-necked sleeveless blouse with trailing scarf-train, black-pants, skinny-belt ensemble?

It was like every story in an early-aughts women’s magazine on “How to take your outfit from office to evening.” He went from office to evening. It wasn’t that exciting, but it was exciting to see his arms, so we had that. I like a man holding a little clutch purse. I did like his after-party look, just a suit with chest out. I love a slutty blazer.

Okay, moving on to Hudson. I don’t know where to begin. I’ve literally read conspiracy theories on Tumblr about what happened. It really seems like the makeup and hair were doing one thing and the outfit was doing another.

He made our worst-dressed list, and I’m scared of the Loons coming for me on Threads now. Okay, let’s start with the positives: I love a little slutty strip of lower tummy. I liked that it was color, that we got a train, and that it wasn’t boring. However, it was incoherent. “Doing too much” feels like the wrong phrase because this is the night when you should be doing too much, but it was disappointing in a different way than Connor’s. Connor’s was really quiet, and this was too chaotic. Hudson is chaotic and that’s why we love him, but the chaos of the outfit didn’t match the chaos of the man. When I saw the after-party look, I was like, That’s what he should have worn.

I loved it, loved it, loved it. The boxing shorts, the knee-high socks, the GRILLS.

We knew he got a grill, didn’t see the grill on the red carpet, and we had to wait till the after-party. That was chaos in the right way.

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LITERATURE

Which Book Should You Attempt to Read This Month?

Eight books stand before me, but only one will go on to become America’s Next Top Novel.

Emma Alpern and Jasmine Vojdani read books so you don’t have to, but you still should. This month, it depends on what you’re in the mood for: A history of the mid-20th century told through one Haitian football star’s wild life? A swank New York thriller? A funny-sad memoir by one of the creators of PEN15? A “textured and affecting” story about a closeted gay man reconciling with his Calvinist father? A dark debut set at a girls’ boarding school? A gothic novel set in a crumbling international university? An encyclopedic history of queer music? Or maybe you should be first to the party of a book we predict will win awards: Harriet Clark’s The Hill. “Every week, Suzanna visits her mother at a hilltop women’s prison staffed by nuns. It’s a strange place, but maybe only because childhood itself is strange,” Emma writes, “and Suzanna’s mother, who was part of a revolutionary group that killed a guard at a bank, went under lock and key when Suzanna was very young, leaving her to live with a grandmother who’s simmering with anger.” Emma calls it “a stunner.”

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• Get to know the real Nene Leakes.

• Congratulations to the graduating class of 2026! You are uniquely cursed.

• Can the New York Liberty’s new head coach lead our team to victory?

• Met Gala guests were treated to a Stevie Nicks performance, fueling speculation that she’ll be on Beyoncé’s next album.

• If you have a mother figure in your life, it’s time to get her a present.

• “At 43, I nearly ended a friendship over a hard candy.”

• Laurie Woolever and Gabrielle Hamilton are spilling tea tonight at Quick Eternity.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

*Gasteyer played Judge Patrice Lessner on The Good Wife. Dratch played a court stenographer on The Good Fight.

MEDIA

Everyone Who Played Themselves in TDWP2

Tonight’s the Met Gala, but that one scene was the meta gala.

Which “real people” exist in the universe of The Devil Wears Prada 2? What interests me isn’t so much the designers (Marc, Donatella, Dolce, and Gabbana) or models (Naomi, Heidi), nor even the pop stars (Ciara, Gaga). No, predictably, I am fixated on the (real) media personalities who gathered at (fictional) Miranda Priestly’s Hamptons house for a high-toned clambake. What was it like to shoot a scene with luminaries like Amelia Dimoldenberg, Molly Jong-Fast, and Kara Swisher? As always, we’re very lucky that Tina Brown’s Substack is here to enlighten us. The hot summer day started out bright and energetic at 9 a.m., but Tina et al. were about to learn how hard movie stars work for their big salaries.

By 2 p.m., however, we cameo-istas were in a somewhat mutinous mood. The lobster and baby potatoes were looking ominously old. Between setups, we congregated downstairs in a room adjacent to the​ kitchen. There was no air conditioning in this period mansion, nor enough food for starving media mavens. The ever fearless Swisher led us in a call to order out, even though it was verboten by the house owners. A few wilting cameos gathered in the refrigerated wine cellar, as if hiding from an active shooter. Jenna Bush Hager shared that whenever Trump’s name comes up at dinner with her father, former president George W. Bush, he says, “Why spoil a good meal?” As if underlining the media world of the movie and the real media world today, Molly Jong-Fast kept checking her phone for the names of the three West Coast writers, plus her editor, who had just been fired by the new Vanity Fair editor, Mark Guiducci.

Brown also attended the film’s premiere, which allowed her to end this excellent post with a subtle dig at her New Yorker successor: “An actress reflecting the sentiments of her fictional character may not be as uplifting as David Remnick orating at the next PEN Gala about the importance of journalism, but it was welcome, worthy, and a big win on Instagram.” Orating!

CINEMA

The Deadpool & Wolverine Subtext You Missed

A fun little Easter egg for fans of Hollywood pettiness.

Reeves Wiedeman sifted through mountains of subpoenaed texts and emails to try to get to the bottom of what happened on the set of It Ends With Us, the Colleen Hoover book adaptation that ended with star Blake Lively suing writer-director Justin Baldoni for $300 million. By all appearances, avowed male feminist (red flag!) Baldoni was wildly inappropriate with Lively; at one point during the shoot, co-star Jenny Slate stepped in after Baldoni gestured to Lively’s low-cut costume and called it “pretty hot”: “We’re just not doing this anymore,” Slate told the director. Another of Lively’s defenders: her husband, Ryan Reynolds. He and Lively seem to have worked out some of their beef with Baldoni in X-Men:

The plot of Deadpool & Wolverine follows Reynolds’s sarcastic anti-hero into an alternate reality where he encounters various gonzo versions of himself: Dogpool, Kidpool, and, most prominently, Nicepool. Reynolds plays Nicepool with his hair in a man-bun, a sunny disposition, and a persistent wokeness that blinds him to his faults. At one point, Nicepool declines to join a fight because he has “low bone density.” When Nicepool mentions Ladypool, he says, “She just had a baby too — you can’t even tell,” before insisting it’s okay for him to say that because “I identify as a feminist.” Eventually, Ladypool, voiced by Lively, pulls out a pair of Uzis and unloads a barrage of bullets into Nicepool, who is standing in front of a flower shop. When Deadpool & Wolverine came out the following summer, just two weeks before It Ends With Us, Lively encouraged women to see the movie in part because it offered a commentary “about Nice men who use feminism as a tool.”

Things got progressively wilder from there on out, culminating in a pitched battle taking place via warring agents, social-media managers, publicists, media proxies, Taylor Swift (who doubtless wishes that her texts and emails could be excluded from this narrative), psychics, Rainn Wilson, and every other possible Hollywood type you can imagine. Regardless of who wins in court, the reputational damage to everyone involved is considerable. Slate alone comes out of this story looking good.

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TELEVISION

Andy Cohen Is ‘Not Doing Molly at Horse Meat Disco Anymore’

Asking prying questions of the man who asks the prying questions.

A lot of people don’t realize that Andy Cohen is no longer a Bravo executive; he’s fully a talk-show host and Housewives producer now. He sat down with Jason P. Frank to talk about his current perch at the epicenter of a specific kind of culture and how his life has changed since becoming a father.

I have a dialogue with people who watch me that is meant to be very transparent. If I’m the guy asking all of these super-personal questions, then there should be a level of transparency about my life. Conversely, there was a moment at a RHONY reunion years ago when Ramona was very offended that I was asking about her relationship with Mario, and she was like, “Who are you dating? Tell me about your sex life.” I said, well, “When I go on a reality show about my life, I will tell you everything.” The reality show about my life that I’m on is of my own making. I’m in charge of the edit, and so I go as far as I want.

That edit recently included telling Alex Cooper, “I don’t want to be with some slurpy twink,” which seems like an example of healthy boundaries.

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• The race to represent NYC’s 12th Congressional District is full of big personalities.

• Gen Zalpha still shops at the mall, and here’s what they’re buying.

• We’re giving subscribers treats! This month, we’ve got free coffee and pastries at La Cabra.

• A whiplash-inducing but useful playlist of the New York Times’ 30 best American songwriters.

• Yikes. To be on the safe side, don’t go hiking at all.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

My timeline, which I realize is a reflection of my tarnished soul, is so feral about what the HR boys are wearing to the Met Gala, and it’s been cracking me up all day.

SEQUELS

The Key to My Psyche

Yes, it is TDWP.

If you read this newsletter, you’re probably overfamiliar with my lore, but to quickly recap: I started my first job out of college in 2004, working as the assistant to the editor-in-chief of a publishing house. By 2006, when The Devil Wears Prada came out, I was working at Gawker, an experience I won’t bore you by summarizing here; you can Google it. The combination of these two jobs made me so primed to sympathize with the heroine of TDWP that when I saw it in the theater, I sobbed. Multiple times. Normal thing to happen when watching a fluffy rom-com! But you have to understand that the story of an idealistic young striver who gets Henry Higginsed by a charismatic job/boss situation and leaves her ideals in the dust because it’s just so intoxicating to be told, intermittently, that She Is Good — we all relate to that, right? RIGHT?? Add in a sprinkle of “you live with your college boyfriend and you’ve both outgrown the relationship but you still love each other, even though he routinely tells you that your job is sucking out your soul” and then dollop on a soupçon of “and then you cheat on him with a Blond Man who is obviously terrible but knows exactly what to say to get you to let down your guard,” and you have the recipe for a movie that is essentially the key to my psyche. Thank you, Aline Brosh McKenna, for making me feel seen! I hope both sides of your pillow are always cool and you can always find a parking spot.

So yeah, I’m seeing the sequel later today. I’m sure it will be disappointing in some ways, but I am also sure I’ll love it regardless.

BTW: Chantal Fernandez wrote what may be the most essential thing anyone’s yet written about TDWP(1): a post about how much the movie’s signature shoes, handbags, lattes, and steak lunches that get thrown in a sink cost now versus in 2006. I spent my first-ever tax refund on a Marc by Marc (RIP) purse, and all the older editors in my office told me I was insane for doing so. It cost half my rent. Now lost to the sands of time, it was very similar to the one Andy gives Lily, which Chantal informs us is now only $150 on resale sites. Tempting, but sometimes it’s better to leave the past in the past.

DEBATES

Who Is the Real Villain of The Devil Wears Prada 2?

I’m going with “Nate, still, somehow, even though he’s not in it.”

As people of a certain age (over 30?) know, arguing about which character is the “real villain” of The Devil Wears Prada is less “original parlor game” and more “tired meme.” Real heads know the only possible correct answer is “Andy’s boyfriend Nate,” unless the alternative correct answer is “capitalism.” Louis Peitzman examines the possibility that the sequel has a different villain. Is it the titular devil, Miranda Priestly? Or someone else entirely?

Folks on social media love to lambaste Andy’s friends from the first Devil Wears Prada, whose biggest crimes, as far as I can tell, are stealing her phone when Miranda calls and generally being judgy about her commitment to fashion and letting Miranda treat her like garbage. Tracie Thoms’s Lily is the only friend to return for the sequel, now joined by Mack (Larry Mitchell), a laid-off former co-worker Andy hires to write for Runway, and Tessa (Rachel Bloom), a book editor urging Andy to write the Miranda exposé. Perhaps responding to feedback about the prior movie, McKenna has turned Lily into an exceptionally supportive friend, both in Andy’s career and her love life. Mack, meanwhile, is just a writer who wants to keep getting paid to do journalism — I feel you, brother — and Tessa is pushy with good reason. A friend who can help you secure a $350,000 book deal is a friend for life. No villains here.

My only minor quibble with this is that Lily is so morally superior and disapproving in the first movie when she catches Andy getting a chaste(ish) kiss on the cheek from Christian Thompson at the art gallery, as though it would be the worst thing in the world to cheat on a drip like Nate. With friends like those, we don’t need enemies! It’s heartening to hear that Lily has grown as a person since 2006, and props to Thoms also for coming back for the sequel and getting her (Marc Jacobs) bag.

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TWITTER

It Was the Best of Timelines …

… It was the worst of timelines.

Please be assured that all these tweets curated by Becca Schuh are about the things that really matter: jokes, nonsense, memes, and comical photos of authors and celebrities. Who could ask for anything more?

Honestly, this is a worthwhile debate: Dickens-name son or Pynchon-name daughter?

Jack Quaid turned 24, but the question arose: Is he Angela Lansbury?

Cancel me if you must, but a niche Friends reference is enough to sustain me through two workdays.

I love it when people discover Young Franzen.

Hemingway was the first to use the “X are X who have never X’ed before” construction, kind of.

Another one!

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• A very cute, very New York City wedding.

• What Strategist staffers actually purchased last month, including the nicest pregnancy pillow I’ve ever seen.

• A moving essay about mourning a relationship with your mom that you never had.

• Meet the wine importer who scored a minor victory against Trump’s tariffs.

• Brooklyn as a big office-space market isn’t ever going to happen, and developers should stop trying to make it happen, imo.

• Sam Irby’s filthy romance-novel recommendations.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

That’s all.

TELEVISION

When MrBeast Went on Survivor

An insane amount of drama to digest.

Last night’s episode of Survivor 50 was honestly so good; our recapper called it “riveting, exciting, truly revolutionary.” My son Raffi stayed home sick from school today, so we watched it together. I had forgotten that the famous candy-bar, soft-drink, and YouTube mogul MrBeast would be on the show, so you can imagine the pandemonium that broke out when he appeared onscreen. During the tribal council, after everyone had already whispered about who they were conspiring to vote out, MrBeast gave Rick Devens an opportunity to flip a gold coin. If the flip went in his favor, he would win immunity plus an extra million dollars added to the prize pot; if it didn’t, he’d be out. It went in his favor! They voted out Stephanie, who had lied unconvincingly and generally behaved like a shady little snake. Then we got on the phone with Carrie, who helped us tease out the deeper meaning of what we’d witnessed.

Carrie: Raffi, as a first-time Survivor watcher, what were your thoughts?

Raffi: It was like the hallways of my school, or like recess. There was so much drama.

Carrie: And so many shifting alliances. What were some of the peak moments?

Raffi: When Aubrey ate the grubs. When Jonathan ate the sea slug.

Carrie: I felt a little sick watching that. That stuff used to be on Survivor all the time, but this is the first time they’ve done it in years and years. Raffi, did you already know who MrBeast was before you watched this?

Raffi: MrBeast was, like, my childhood. I feel about MrBeast the way you guys probably feel about Happy Days.

How old do you think we are? Carrie, this is what your kids will do to you when they’re 10. They will just roast you constantly.

Carrie: My daughter already roasts me. She’s like, Mama, take off those shoes. Mama, take off those pants. Okay, so, you know MrBeast. I was not looking forward to him, but ultimately I felt he was a net positive for this episode. The stakes of the game got much higher. $2 million is real money.

For $2 million, I would eat a grub.

Carrie: I would eat it for much less than that. I would eat a grub for $1,000.

Okay, honestly, so would I. Would you want to be on Survivor?

Carrie: If I could get on the show, I’d absolutely be up for it.

Raffi: You’d miss 30 precious days with your daughter.

Carrie: I would desperately miss my daughter, but I would go and I would win her a million dollars and I would buy her so much stuff with that money. I would miss my phone. I have to imagine that’s a huge part of the survival element, acclimating to life without access to any media.

Raffi: It’s called sleepaway camp, except at the end of it you might win a million dollars.

What did you guys think of the scheming that happened before tribal, when Jonathan and Stephanie were initially trying to get Ozzy out, but then it backfired on them spectacularly?

Raffi: Cerie saw right through what was happening. She explained everything Stephanie did that showed that she was lying about stuff. That was what caused the ricocheting ping-pong from person to person to person of different lies over and over again.

By the moment when everyone was saying “I don’t know what’s happening,” I also didn’t know what was happening.

Carrie: You have to be really tricky, and you also just have to be really good at reading people and talking to people and remembering who you’ve lied to and who you haven’t lied to. Raffi, I’m glad that you immediately clocked the most important thing about Survivor, which is that Cerie’s so good at this game.

But you can’t be too good, because then you might get voted out. Who’s in trouble next week?

Carrie: I think the target’s gonna be on Aubrey, Devens, Ozzy, and Cerie.

Raffi: [Coughs, fakely.]

PARENTING

How to Deal With Your Cheapskate Mom’s Meddling Ways

It’s called “setting a soft boundary.”

Today our financial columnist, Charlotte Cowles, wades into the stormy waters of mothers, daughters, and money. This particular daughter is also a mother to be, which is making her mom’s long-standing cheapness a new source of concern. And no wonder!

My main issue is that now I’m pregnant with a baby of my own, and my mom wants to be very involved. She lives close by and says she’ll help out a lot (partly because she wants to, but also because she’s horrified by the price of child care, of course). I want her to be part of our child’s life, but I don’t want her judging our spending or weighing in on our household expenses. It stresses me out when she asks how much something costs, which she does all the time. This recently surfaced when my friends hosted a baby shower for me and my mom said she would pitch in, but then she mailed them a check for $20. I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, but it was embarrassing when I found out how little she’d sent! How do I speak to my mom about her irritating habits and keep her from bringing them into our home now that she’ll be here a lot more often? My partner and I have our own financial stressors, like most people, but we’ve worked hard to feel secure with what we have, and I don’t want her second-guessing us all the time.

Charlotte counsels this person about exactly what to say to her mom and when to say it (ASAP). It’s all quite reasonable. I commend anyone who is actually able to put it into action without losing their entire mind.

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PANTIES

Can All-Cotton Everyday Underpants Also Be Sexy?

If anyone can crack the code, it’s our team of picky testers.

Let’s be so real for a second: Unless you’re in the opening montage of The Devil Wears Prada (1) or in the early stages of a blossoming relationship, you’re wearing all-cotton underpants that cost less than ten bucks a pop. Right? Life is too short to spend time hand-washing delicates. With that or something similar in mind, the team at the Strategist set out to find non-granny (but still high-waisted) underpants that are, at least, not unsightly. And while for resident underwear expert Ambar Pardilla the category killer is still the Gap’s classic Organic Stretch Cotton Hipsters, there are also a few new options in this roundup worth adding to your drawer, chief among them the Subset Organic High-Rise Brief, which she says is “as invisible as I’ve found for mostly cotton underwear, in all my years of underwear testing.” She also isn’t shy about saying her butt looks good in them, which is also important. Our hard-earned butts deserve to be showcased appropriately.

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• Think twice before you shell out $50,000 for Silicon Valley’s latest trend: bespoke prenatal genetic testing.

• Think twice before you take financial advice from Real Housewife Amanda Frances.

• Can Graham Platner defeat Susan Collins? He is hot, that much is certain.

• The regulatory roadblocks that could still scuttle the Paramount-WBD merger.

• Lauren Mechling found a Spotify playlist that’s all songs about horses.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

Tomorrow I’m going to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 with a gaggle of preteens, and I will be wearing this shirt.

BROWSER HISTORY

What Are Your Load-Bearing Blog Posts?

Open the schools. Specifically, Internet University.

We often refer to “load-bearing” tweets, Tumblr posts, etc. — the ones that you still think about years later, that live rent-free in your mind palace, that helped form your worldview, or that will always make you literally laugh out loud. Today, I thought I would share mine, in the hopes that you, in turn, will send me yours at dinnerparty@nymag.com. Some of these are personal essays and some are reported journalism, while others combine elements of both genres, as blog posts are wont to do. Many are from a long time ago, but you shouldn’t hold that against them.

“Negroni Season,” Evelyn Everlady (Sara Vilkomerson), The Awl, 2010
Some people read A Christmas Carol every year in December. I reread this post every spring, when negroni season (still not a real thing) comes around again. The author has gone on to greater and greater things, but this essay remains one of her many major contributions to society. It should also be noted that negronis have increased in popularity by about 1,000 percent since this was published, which cannot be a coincidence, even though it makes you never want to drink one ever again.

“Ten Days in the Life of a Tampon,” Maureen “Moe” Tkacik, Jezebel, 2010
It is what it says on the can. TW: body horror. The byline says Anna Holmes, which is probably horrifying to Anna Holmes.

“A Birth Story,” Meaghan O’Connell, Longreads (originally Tinyletter), 2014
By turns harrowing and hilarious, this is the fullest and most honest accounting of a birth I have ever read, and I’ve read Spiritual Midwifery as well as a metric ton of internet on this topic. Maybe don’t read this if you’re pregnant with your first child. Or do, and then hire a reputable doula.

“On Pandering,” by Claire Vaye Watkins, Tin House, 2015
This essay has been removed from the internet for legal reasons, which is maximally ironic and incidentally unfortunate because that means we can’t read it. For an expansion of its themes (basically, a woman admits to herself that she has been in the habit of envisioning all her writing being judged by an imagined white male reader, explores why that is, and experiments with not doing it), read Watkins’s novel I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness.

“Interview With a Woman Who Recently Had an Abortion at 32 Weeks,” Jia Tolentino, 2016
Both interviewer and subject approach this conversation with maximum candor and maximum compassion. If you can read this and not be convinced that abortion should be safe and legal under any and all circumstances, I don’t want to know you.

I’m sure I can think of more — this is just off the top of my brain, which by all appearances stopped cathecting on to specific blog posts circa 2016. (I wonder why!) What are your load-bearing blog posts? Sound off in my inbox.

DO LESS

By Trying to Fix Your Hair, You Are Ruining Your Hair

Too much protein is bad in every context.

Have you noticed that protein is now in everything? Not just candy and soda and popcorn but shampoo, conditioner, and hair masks. A little bit of protein is a good thing for your strands, but too much can actually make them snap right in half.

The reparative action hair gets from protein isn’t from the inside out. It’s surface level and temporary — and the protein can build up on the hair shaft over time. That’s when you might notice some negative effects. “Overproteinated hair loses its flexibility and just snaps instead of bending,” explains dermatologist Dr. Joyce Park, who specializes in hair health. The tricky part is that it doesn’t usually start there. At first, hair may just feel drier than usual, stiffer, harder to manage, and progressively more prone to breakage.

Help is on the way in the form of detox shampoos and protein-free masks and conditioners. You can also wash your hair with castile soap like a real Park Slope Food Coop hippie.

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SHOPPING

Warm-Weather Shoes That Look Cute and Won’t Ruin Your Life

Flats? For summer? I think the word you’re looking for is evergreen.

It has come to my attention that I should wear shoes that aren’t beat-up Converse or Tevas, because I work in an office and not an organic farm in Vermont. Ugh, okay. Enter: flats. Versatile, cute, and supposedly comfortable. From cheaper options like standbys from Madewell and Everlane and Camper (the Campers look more expensive than they are, in my opinion) to a $350 Loeffler Randall pair that promises to make the wearer feel “like a Jordan almond,” there are, all told, 28 pairs of shoes in this roundup, all of them recommended by an actual human being who walks around a lot. While I personally have never found flats walkable, I am ready to be proved wrong, especially if someone who works at Margaux wants to send over a pair of Pascals in size 9, bone or black. Or, really, whatever you have lying around is fine.

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• A moving and complex essay by Mahmoud Khalil.

• Should we all start smoking cigarettes again? You already know my answer.

• Rachel Zegler in Evita is coming to NYC, balcony not included.

• Can you, a man, pull off huaraches? One way to find out.

• Some books are simply “a way for a delusionally persistent person to scrawl ‘I WAS HERE’ on the surface of life.”

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

You know what I’m doing tonight … watching Survivor, baby, and praying for Jonathan to finally get his torch snuffed.

RIOT WOMEN

Get Ready to Go See Liz Phair and Sleater-Kinney

All the details about their upcoming tour plus a playlist to get you excited.

Exciting news for my niche but proud demographic: Liz Phair and Sleater-Kinney are touring together this fall. As Devon Ivie reports, it’s strange but true that they’ve never shared a stage before. Strange because they have so much in common, artistically as well as in terms of their fan bases. If you are a little baby (SK reference), you may know very little about these historically significant women, so sit back and relax as I drop 1/1,000th of my 1981-minted brain’s knowledge on you.

Liz is the blueprint for a great number of our present-day pop girlies, both sonically and lyrically. Without ca. 1993 lyrical avowals like “I want to fuck you like a dog / I’ll take you home and make you like it” as well as “I want all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas,” Sabrina Carpenter would not be out here singing “Come right on me, I mean camaraderie / Said you’re not in my time zone but you wanna be / Where art thou? Why not upon-eth me?” Ariana, Taylor, Olivia, Chappell Roan maybe most of all: These are her daughters.

I also love Sleater-Kinney, but I don’t have a similar unified theory of why they’re important; you can just listen to the playlist that Devon and I made and connect the dots. A lot of people are out here making music about what it’s like to be in your 20s, and that’s great. But, as Carrie Brownstein says, it’s rarer to hear songs written from the perspective of women in their 50s. “It’s harder than you think over the years as you continue with your art. All these bands come up after you and you’re like, This is the next big thing. And then they go away,” she says. “The longer you last, the more people come and go, and that’s fine. I love that we are two entities that are going on tour who still make records. It’s not easy to present and put forth something from your current self.”

DYSPHORIA

What It’s Like to Be a Gen-Z Person Watching Euphoria

The first season felt like being seen. Season three feels like a humiliation ritual.

As a teenager in 2019, Etta Washburn experienced some of the same drama that the characters on Euphoria did.

My attraction to the show went beyond the aesthetic. For the first time, I saw my own experiences reflected back to me with unflinching specificity. I watched Rue relapse and struggle to keep it a secret and remembered the guilt I felt the night I learned my friend was sent back to rehab, that she had been dosing for months in secret and I hadn’t noticed. I saw Jules’s assault by an older man in denial of her real age and thought of my classmates, 16-year-old girls with baby faces and fake ages on their Tinder profiles. I watched Kat slip precariously into sex work and remembered a friend from freshman year of high school who disappeared halfway through the semester after her parents found out she was being lured into a sex-trafficking ring.

Now, though, Etta and her friends are adults, but the characters in the show haven’t kept up. “Euphoria seems to actively enjoy degrading its female characters and wants viewers to enjoy it, too,” she writes. It’s a disappointment to most viewers, but to the people who grew up defending seasons one and two, like Etta, it feels more like a betrayal.

FILM

How Desert Warrior Became a Flop of Historic Proportions

An explicit instruction manual on exactly how not to make a blockbuster.

Shot entirely and expensively on location in Saudi Arabia, the historic epic Desert Warrior cost, by some estimates, $170 million. It trickled onscreen this past weekend and has grossed $472,000. That’s not even enough to buy a studio apartment in Clinton Hill. What went wrong? Well, for starters, everything, as Chris Lee writes.

In a final you-can’t-make-this-shit-up development, Desert Warrior — in which Arab heroes rise up against villains from the Persian empire — reached North American movie theaters at a time when audiences want to see anything but more desert warfare. (With the U.S. at war with Iran after two and a half years of the Israel-Hamas war, many have had their fill.) “Man makes his plans and the gods laugh,” says Ali Jaafar, MBC’s head of film and global series. “Destiny has decreed that this film comes out in the geopolitical circumstances that it does. It’s a delicious twist of irony.”

It’s a shame that Ben Kingsley had to be involved in this mess for some reason.

Click Your Way Out

• The switch to smart LED bulbs has caused our windows to glow orange.

• Can a silicone replacement for our beloved plastic deli containers stack up to the original?

• King Charles did make an American Revolution joke at the White House but did not quote Hamilton.

• A deep dive into unusual objects lost and found on the subway.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

  ---

Don’t wanna go see Liz Phair and Sleater-Kinney with me on September 19? You’re no rock n’ roll fun!

WEENIES

Some People Are Trying to Regrow Their Foreskins

In this economy?!

Meet the intactivist movement: men with circumcised penises who are determined to reinstate the flap of skin that they were deprived of in early infancy. Their concerns may be valid, but their methods and the depths of their fixation can be … extreme.

The online restorer community is populated by dick connoisseurs who parse the anatomy and aesthetics of the male sexual organ with the exactitude of Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show judges. They have developed a scorecard to measure their progress, called the Coverage Index, which ranges from CI-1 (no loose skin on the shaft) to CI-10 (skin that droops over the glans like loose pantyhose — affectionately referred to by some as a “wizard’s sleeve”). Skeptical of a medical Establishment that took away what they now hope to regrow, these men — who post under monikers like “Going Hooded” and “MrAnteater” — have long relied on peer-to-peer advice to achieve their goals, sharing work-in-progress photos of their penises and exchanging tips on using cut-off baby-bottle nipples to regain their lost sleeve of skin. There are few limits on how far restorers will go. “If I could grow a foreskin that hung down to my knees, I’d totally do it,” wrote one restorer on his blog.

There is hope! Fresh medical expertise — honed thanks to the popularity of gender-affirming surgeries — can now make it possible for these individuals to live their dreams without turning to a single Reddit forum.

THEATER

There’s One Hot Vamp in The Lost Boys, at Least

Ali Louis Bourzgui hive, rise up!

Should we go see The Lost Boys? If you’re anything like me, this question occupies some of your brain space. On the one hand, it’s a movie adapted into a musical with a huge budget and an ultralong run time. The music is purported to be bad. And the vampires are not even gay. On the other hand, as Sara Holdren writes:

Two years ago, I had a minor freak-out watching Bourzgui’s Broadway debut in the Tommy revival. Now he’s wearing a Billy Idol mullet and soaring through the air, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it. He’s absurdly charismatic, mostly by virtue of being so entirely himself. He doesn’t sound like any other young musical star, speaking or singing — there’s gravitas and mischief there, Oberon and Puck rolled into one. Though the Lost Boys takes its own glam aesthetic in a punk-and-hair-metal direction, Bourzgui’s got more than a little Lady Stardust in him. As an irresistible rock-and-roll vampire named David, he certainly sings a song full of darkness and disgrace.

Okay, I might have a spare two hours and 40 minutes.

FREE ADVICE

My Literal Dinner Party Go-Tos

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!

The title of this newsletter comes from the idea that if you’re a guest at a dinner party, you’ll want to have some fun conversational tidbits under your belt. “Did you know some men are going to great lengths (no pun intended!) to restore their foreskins?” That sort of thing. But today, I wanted to take a moment to address the reality of the dinner party — not the kind thrown by women who are actually entertaining professionals, as much as they pretend to be regular gals. I’m talking about the kind of dinner parties thrown by the people who buy their cookbooks, such as myself.

A previous incarnation of yours truly was much more interested in food and cooking. The last relic of her existence can be found in this time capsule: my own Grub Street Diet, which was recorded the week of March 26–30, 2020. Ahahaha. “Maybe don’t go through a case of wine in three and a half weeks.” Ya think? Anyway, here we are in 2026, and I don’t cook for fun anymore. It is what it is.

On Saturday I had friends over for dinner. The morning of the dinner, it’s very important to respond correctly to “What should we bring?” The answer is “Wine and ice cream.” Then it’s time for someone in the family, not you, to pick the scattered child socks off the floor, make sure the flotsam is contained in the designated flotsam containers, and vacuum the cat hair off the couch.The next step: What to serve? Typically, there is a lot going on the day of the dinner and not much time to cook. The solution is to make a recipe from an Ottolenghi cookbook that starts with marinating chicken in a bunch of other stuff. Grocery shop while your child is at gymnastics, then throw the chicken into the stuff in the 15-minute window between gymnastics pickup and going to a playdate. If you have more executive functioning than I do, you can even do these steps a day or two ahead of time.

When you get home from the playdate, you’ll want to dump the chicken and all its stuff into a roasting pan and stick it in the oven. Now it’s time to lie down in bed and read* until the guests text you that they’ll be a polite amount of late! When you finally force yourself upright, assemble cheese and crackers and grapes (or whatever). Make a salad and a dressing that is whatever vinaigrette you know how to make by heart; if you don’t know any, the Nora Ephron Heartburn one is solid. A thinly sliced fennel bulb will always give the impression that your salad is fancy. When the guests arrive, take the chicken out of the oven and put in frozen chicken nuggets for the children. When the nuggets are done, it’s time to serve dinner! The key to making dinner feel like a party is to serve everything on big attractive platters, which can be easily and cheaply acquired from any church thrift shop or tag sale in New England, and to light candles (or Strat). For dessert, allow guests to scoop their own ice cream.

Now that I’ve revealed my secrets, I can no longer deploy them, so if you have an alternative method, please let me know at dinnerparty@nymag.com.

Click Your Way Out

• Jeff Koons eats exactly 24 pistachios a day.

• An excerpt from PEN15 genius Anna Konkle’s new memoir.

• Are we getting too numb to react to the news? (Did something happen this weekend?)

• The pied-à-terre tax seems destined to pass, and brokers aren’t happy. Boo-fucking-hoo.

• A chewy, nuanced Laurie Metcalf profile that gets into the Scott Rudin of it all.

• Coping with a brother’s death with food, but not in the bad way (via Jessica Stanley).

• Ought one have relations on the wedding night?

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

*HR fan fiction, obviously.

TWITTER

Run Us Over With a Truck, College-Age Jon Hamm

Becca Schuh continues to engage with Twitter so we don’t have to.

How to train your algorithm: Refuse to engage in vagueposting and rage-baiting, minor lit-world scuffles, and major geopolitical developments. Instead, curate your timeline to be purely niche internet history and absurdist takes.

A picture of Jon Hamm in college is circulating. Some people recall the hazing; others cannot help but admit that they would have let him run them over with a truck. Look, some people just yearn to be lit on fire by a young Don Draper.

“Please, come to Brazil” can now legally vote and smoke cigs. According to Wikipedia, during that time, it has “engendered public and scholarly commentary.” Which is more than I can say for most 18-year-olds.

A new Shen Yun poster has hit the towers. Or that’s what I thought when I saw this poster. But it’s actually a parody drag show at a Franklin Avenue gay bar. It took me over two days to realize this was not a new iteration of the actual Shen Yun. And that’s on branding.

I do not enjoy the idea of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg running for president. However, I enjoy this image as meme fodder and the callback to an excellent television relic of my youth.

THEATER

Titaníque’s Constantine Rousouli Is a ‘Meat-and-Fruit Gay’

The Broadway star avoids seed oils but not “night eggs.”

As you’d expect from the co-creator of a show that’s a retelling of the 1997 blockbuster Titanic from the perspective of Céline Dion, Constantine Rousouli is a cutup. His diet is also funny, but like funny absurd, not funny hilarious. He eats two cups of ground beef with four eggs every morning, which, wow, okay. I have some worries, but also, look, whatever works. One time, he had a “parasite” and ate nothing but red meat for two weeks, which restored him to factory settings, he tells Zach Schiffman:

I went to Brazil three years ago for New Year’s with friends and I ended up getting a parasite that lasted in my body for nine months. I was like, Cool, cool, cool, tight, tight, tight. Rounds and rounds of antibiotics did not work. My stomach extended out like ten inches, I couldn’t put pants on, no food was being digested, my joints were hurting for nine months, like I was pregnant. My sister’s an acupuncturist, and she was like, “Go to this Chinese-medicine doctor in Chinatown.” I love holistic shit. I go to this guy, he gives me this protocol, we kill the parasites. But he also said, “You have to change your diet.” So I was a carnivore for two months. Breakfast, lunch, dinner: red meat, nothing else. No vegetables, no fruits, no starches, no sugars, no whatever. The parasite was gone within two weeks. I’ve never looked better in my life. The mental clarity was unbelievable, the clearest I’ve ever been. My skin, all these weird little pimple bumps I had on my shoulders from lifting, completely gone. I looked like I was 12. I was like, Should I just be a carnivore? But that’s crazy. I need vegetables. So after a while, I started adding more stuff back in.

At this point, I know you’re worrying that this man is MAHA, but we can relax: “I’m sure people are going to be like, You’re crazy and you’re QAnon. But I’m not. Still gay, still a liberal!”

THEATER

Rostam Batmanglij Has Very Specific Thoughts About Socks

He has a new single out today and a clear aesthetic vision for his feet.

The song and video for “Back of a Truck,” out today, are perfect for springtime — both evoke the bittersweet, yearning feeling of first love. Rostam Batmanglij relies on some staples to keep his singing voice and creativity flowing — low-acid toothpaste, Throat Coat tea — but what he’s really picky about are socks. At $72 for a four-pack, Smartwool ankle socks aren’t cheap, but you might consider them for yourself after reading Batmanglij’s thoughts about cotton socks, which he says have “components of the moisture that always stay in there.” As for the low cut, well, he knows people will have some thoughts.

I like ankle socks. I know they’ve become controversial. Someone described it as an “ankle socks epidemic.” I do think it’s context based. For example, you will never see me in khaki shorts and loafers. I don’t own khaki shorts and I don’t own loafers. And I think that is why I can wear ankle socks. Now, if I did own khaki shorts and loafers, and I wore khaki shorts and loafers, then you would never see me in ankle socks. So I think that people who have an aversion to ankle socks, it is because they want to wear loafers and khaki shorts. But I wouldn’t look good in loafers and khaki shorts. I know this about myself.

This is the kind of self-knowledge that comes with turning 42, which Batmanglij does today (!). Happy birthday, Rostam, and thank you for the tunes.

Click Your Way Out

• Is everyone getting Botox without me?

• I missed Tammie Teclemariam’s thorough evaluation of Goop Kitchen yesterday, and now I want that GF pizza. Sorry, not sorry.

• Jimmy Fallon apologized to Christian Hubicki for getting him voted off Survivor.

• Who is behind the Summer House reunion-tape leak?

• Where would veteran planners situate Taylor Swift’s NYC wedding?

• “The sleepover that never was is the gift that keeps giving.”

• Plan to work from home on June 22 and 30 if you can, because of soccer.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

  ---

We made it through another week, and it’s time to celebrate by touching some grass — do it today, because tomorrow the grass will be all wet.

TELEVISION

Survivor 50 Is Cirie’s Game to Lose

Speculating and prognosticating about America’s most important show.

I have gone from Survivor illiterate to fully Survivor-pilled, an outcome that probably isn’t a surprise to anyone who recalls my Love Island conversion experience. I’m very lucky that I have Survivor scholar (and contributing writer) Carrie Battan in my contacts. Today, she walked me through the fan reactions and background lore surrounding this week’s episode, in which Jeff Probst participated in a challenge and toxic nerd Christian met his downfall courtesy of, of all people, Jimmy Fallon.

This week, because my Survivor-head friend Bennett demanded it, I went back and watched some of Cirie’s first season. Now I get it. She’s a master of the game.

The thing about Cirie is her game never changes. Her game is not even really that definable. She simply radiates warmth and charisma and intelligence. It’s so crazy that her name has yet to really be brought up as a potential vote out.

Why do you think that is?

People just want to be in her presence, and they realize they would be sad without her there. She’s been kind of a guiding light to players who aren’t as good as she is. She’s made herself a really critical component of a lot of players’ games. She’s like, I got you. Oh, you thought this person was telling the truth, like, they’re actually lying to you. She’s being a really good emotional and strategic resource for everyone else in the game, and so they feel like they need her. That’s why people are keeping her around. Fans are saying that season 52 is going to be the return of an old concept they used to great success called “Blood Versus Water,” where people come on in pairs — like, a returning player with their brother or son or whatever. My husband was like, “What if you and Emily Gould did ‘Blood Versus Water’?”

You would have to sell me out in a heartbeat in order to survive because I would be useless at any kind of challenge. If I had to do the thing where they were pulling on the buckets, I would be like, “I’m out.”

Speaking of the bucket challenge, one thing I don’t think we’ve talked about yet — I’m curious to know your impressions of Jeff Probst, because I feel like we’re getting a much looser Jeff Probst than we usually get. What do you think of him?

My sense of him is just that he’s a consummate professional who is, at every moment, doing whatever is best for the show.

His nickname on set is “One-Take Jeff” because he is so good at nailing every one of his spiels with one take. Do you find him attractive?

Not really my thing. I don’t have a daddy thing at all. And as our recapper Brian Moylan pointed out, correctly, he’s been “wearing the same shirt since the Bush administration.” Did the fans like this episode? I finally understood what was going on, and I fell in love with Cirie.

This episode was unpopular with a lot of the fans, who are really mad at the ridiculousness of the twist of Christian going on the journey and then having to vote himself out. People are just like, Stop messing with the game, stop creating these scenarios for them where their hands are totally tied and they’re sitting ducks. But there was a classic kind of throwback Survivor scene where Cirie and Emily got into it about how to cook the rice. That’s what’s sort of cool about old-school Survivor. People used to be like, Oh, that person’s pissing me off because they’re disagreeing with me about how to cook rice or how to start a fire or they snore. You’re getting voted out because you ate too much rice today.

The element of personal pettiness mixed with the element of people trying to play four-dimensional chess is the secret sauce, and the producers have to get that balance right. I understand that people don’t think they’re getting that balance right this season, but I’m really glad that Christian is gone because he’s so annoying. If you’re a self-described smart person and you lost based on a challenge that was engineered by Jimmy Fallon? Come on. Okay: What’s gonna happen next week? And what’s your dream top three?

Next week, unfortunately, we’ll have to contend with MrBeast. My dream top three is Ozzy, Cirie, and Riz. Though Tiff is a really understated threat right now, and she’s playing a really good low-key game.

Well, that cuts both ways, though, because the theme of the season is the fans control everything, so you have to cultivate a persona, and if you’re failing to do that, it makes you a target.

True, and that’s true in real life as well. Not to get too dark.

MEDIA

TMZ D.C. Is Shaking Things Up in Boringtown, USA

Is reporting on Congress like it’s Hollywood a good thing?

The newly opened branch of Harvey Levin’s online tabloid has already gotten some good scoops, even as its staffers struggle to find bathrooms and restaurants. Charlotte Klein took on the hardship of going to America’s cursed capital (I’m from the D.C. area, so I dislike it in a different, more nuanced way than you do) to ask what locals think of the new blood.

Some reporters said the more the merrier, noting that TMZ will ask questions that more traditional reporters would not, including whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. really cut off the penis of a dead raccoon and what’s behind his fascination with roadkill. (Kennedy did not respond.) Such questions have value for a different audience from the one reading Axios or Punchbowl every morning. “It’s good for these institutions to have fresh eyes on them. Maybe a decade ago I would have been like, That’s ridiculous. TMZ is a celebrity thing,” said one political reporter. “But politics is ridiculous right now. Sure, they’re not going to ask serious policy questions, but Capitol Hill is not doing serious policy right now.”

TMZ D.C. has one serious handicap, though, Charlotte reports, which is that it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch. “It remains to be seen how much freedom it will have to embarrass Trump’s cronies or even the president himself,” she writes.

THEATER

Beaches Sounds Absolutely Dreadful

A Sara Holdren pan? Don’t mind if I do; yum yum!

One of the many problems Sara Holdren has with the new musical Beaches is that the movie Beaches has Bette Midler in it, and this musical, despite its attempts to channel that diva’s energy, simply does not.

Cee Cee and Bette have long since been fused into a single cultural entity. An actor coming along today isn’t merely rustling up the redheaded showgirl chutzpah of the character Iris Rainer Dart wrote; she’s also navigating her way around the Divine Miss M.

The fact that Jessica Vosk is singing her butt off as Cee Cee up on the Majestic stage, and really doing her best underneath an endless succession of red wigs, is therefore both good and, well, not bad but somehow sad. It’s nice to hear great singers sing. It’s sad to hear them pour themselves out in service of something so fundamentally trite — and something that, in Vosk’s case, won’t ever emerge from a shadow no matter how well she lands the punch lines and rattles the rafters. It won’t because it’s not meant to: Bette is supposed to be in the room with us, along with the tissues stuffed in our pockets for “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

In the end, though, will it matter? A lot of people are still going to buy tickets to see this with their best friends and moms. Before you click buy, though, consider that your mom might have more fun at Rocky Horror.

Click Your Way Out

• Artist George Nelson Preston’s home is partially a museum.

• Actual British people teach us how to properly buy a vintage or new Barbour waxed jacket. (Watch out for the ones that smell intractably bad.)

• Can Congress prevent our jobs from being taken by the robots?

• Watching Michael feels like “being frog-marched through a wax museum.”

• Parker Posey has a new gig, hosting Hulu’s answer to Traitors.

• People are fighting with their partners who order way too much DoorDash.

• Why you shouldn’t write passive-aggressive notes to strangers.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

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Thank you to everyone who wrote to me asking how to speak to ghosts! Please stay in touch and let me know how it goes!

READ ESTATE

Go Ahead and Sleep With Your Landlord

Sure, the potential downside is total life implosion. But think of the upside!

Clio Chang immediately threw cold water on the woman who wrote to “Apartment Department” asking if maybe, just maybe, she could have sex with her landlord just a little bit.

I want to have sex with my landlord. I’m a woman who lives in an owner-occupied building (there are six apartments), and the owner who lives there happens to be newly divorced and hot in an older-guy way. We flirt a lot, which started innocently when I first moved in but seems to have ramped up a bit. If I take things further — with a fling, or who knows, even by dating the guy — am I ruining my life? Or am I unlocking a possible pathway to domestic bliss and possible free rent if things get more serious? (I honestly really like him.)

The reasonable answer, which Clio reasonably gives, is: No. Absolutely not. Are you crazy? If you catch feelings, you could wind up jealous of the other women he has over, or he could get mad and vindictively raise your rent, or you could unromantically get annoyed at him for not fixing your leaky toilet, yadda yadda yadda.

But since I’m a sucker for any kind of “no, no, we mustn’t!” romantic scenario, I think you’d be silly to ignore the chemistry. Sure, it could be a disaster. Or you could wind up Mrs. Landlord! Possibly the best-case scenario is one where he stops charging you rent for the duration of your romantic relationship, you save up enough money to buy your own apartment, and you parlay that investment into owning some rental property. Then we cut to ten years later: He’s fallen on hard times and is looking for a place, and now, suddenly, in a third-act twist no one anticipated, you’re his landlord.

For a shot of ice-cold reality, though, Clio let professional matchmaker Janis Spindel have the last word: “Big deal, he owns a six-unit building.” That don’t impress Janis much.

CULT BEVERAGES

Drinking the “Upscale Kool-Aid” at Starbucks

How teenagers made the Strawberry Açai Refresher the Labubu of beverages.

If you are of tween or teen experience, you know that kids these days love nothing more than to clutch a large icy cup filled with a brightly colored beverage. They photograph well on social media, they’re just expensive enough to feel fancy but not prohibitive, and they — the Refreshers especially — are a $2 billion “platform” for Starbucks. Elizabeth G. Dunn hung out with NYC teens to observe the fervor in action.

Ask tweens and teens what they love about these drinks and the answers tend to be — shocker — not terribly introspective. It’s a lot of “I like the taste” and “They’re refreshing.” The most obvious explanation I found for Starbucks’ sway with this age group is that its stores are just good places to hang out. Over and over, I watched kids huddled around phones with Refreshers, performing the ancient adolescent ritual of Doing Nothing Together. A $7 beverage was the price of admission. “It’s really the only food place we can sit down near here,” a high-school student named Ines told me while waiting for her own Refresher. “In the winter, this place is a lot warmer than the libraries.”

Like those totemic Labubus, a Starbucks drink also functions as a small affordable token of belonging. This helps explain the universal appeal of the Strawberry Açai Refresher; it is, according to all the Starbucks employees I spoke with, the most popular drink among teens despite tasting mostly like upscale Kool-Aid. “They flood in at 3:10 and order ten Strawberry Açai Lemonades in a row, all with different customizations,” a barista named Layla at an Upper East Side Starbucks tells me. “Light ice or no ice, no strawberries, and then if there’s one piece of strawberry, they get mad.”

Dunn also reports that Cool Sips, the Utah-based chain that popularized the vile concoctions known as “dirty soda,” may soon make inroads in NYC, at which point we will all become nostalgic for a more innocent time.

SPIRITS

Ann Dowd Had a Life-Changing Encounter With a Psychic

Magic is real, and Dowd has proof.

Take your skepticism elsewhere; legendary character actress Ann Dowd believes in the beyond.

I was having some trouble with stage fright, and a castmate said, “Oh, I know exactly who to go to.” I had one of my children with me, and the other was home in New York with my husband. When I walked in the door, the psychic just said right away, “Where’s your other child? And he’s challenged, isn’t he?” She just knew all the facts of my life. She said, “I talk to your angels and guides. That’s what I do.” I wish I could show you what she did. She would talk to them, have conversations, and then she would say, “Can you put it in a simpler way, please? Oh, I see. Okay. Yep. Got it.” Then she would tell me what they said. I was falling off my chair. I couldn’t believe it.

Dowd doesn’t recommend any specific practitioner, but if you’re in need of guidance from ghosts, email me at dinnerparty@nymag.com for tips. (I’m serious.)

Click Your Way Out

• Keith Haring’s to-do lists are beautiful.

• Hey, Siri, show me an example of “nostalgie de la boue.”

• How to deal with in-laws who are insensitive about money.

• Some very nice chairs.

• Who will buy this giant apple?

• The Hell’s Kitchen Bareburger that’s also a gay sex club.

• Mark your calendar: Gen-X karaoke night is June 10.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

  ---

I saw The Rocky Horror Show last night and I am definitely going to see it again; you should, too, if that sounds like a fun time to you.

NOSTALGIA

‘A Period of Twisted Originality and Complete Freedom’

The art world of the ’90s was magical, and Jerry Saltz captured it all.

There’s an old saying that New York was always better right before you got there, but for me — I moved here in May of 2001 — it’s objectively true. For proof, look no further than the photos Jerry Saltz took of the 1990s art world. Here’s Tracey Emin lying in bed under one of her signature quilts, Fran Lebowitz dropping cig ash perilously near Brice Marden’s birthday cake, and fully nude Matthew Barney shoving an ice screw up his butt. And that’s just for starters! I got Jerry on the horn to discuss this bygone era, which he wrote about for New York’s latest cover story, and how it compares to the art scene today.

How did this come together?

During the pandemic, I was rummaging through some stuff that we store in a house that we rent in Connecticut. I came across all of these huge boxes and brought them upstairs and started to unpack them. Then I took a short video and sent it to my editors, saying, “This is an incredible find. There are like 40,000 slides here that I used to use for lectures.” I took those slides on a regular basis for about 15 years, from about 1988 to whenever the iPhone started.

They were just overwhelming. I could not possibly deal with them. And recently, Erik Maza kind of stuck a cattle prod in me so I sorted through about 20,000 slides, one at a time. I realized there was a possible narrative here that I could tell of the rise and the ultimate fall of this incredible, fecund, reinventing era, and that’s where the project originated. It took six months of almost constant work.

You were in the right place at the right time, and you had a camera. I wonder how it felt to you at the time as you experienced it. Did you have the sense that you were witnessing a pivotal moment in art history?

The reason I think I was chosen by fate is that I was kind of a loser. I had just started writing after driving a truck till I was almost 40. I had just started calling myself an art critic, having never written a word in my life. I had to assign myself something to do, so I invented three categories — people, places, and things — and I started taking pictures of everything that I saw. That explains why the quality of my photographs is not particularly good. They give you a passionate bystander’s approach of beholding this incredible thing that was unfolding. I’m sociopathically shy and bashful, although I know I don’t come off that way, but I forced myself to go out and try to witness and be very, very open to this world that was at the beginning rather of a prolonged recession. But that was my big break. My break was the lack of money.

What happened when the money came back?

You know, money started having sex with art in public and everybody was watching everybody else.

Production values started increasing, the birth of the mega gallery was in the air. Museum expansion was being discussed. It was about to take place on a grand scale with Bilbao, Thomas Krenz bankrupting the Guggenheim by franchising the museum, and MoMA spending a billion dollars to rebuild its building but failing to build enough space for the permanent collection of modern art, then installing roughly only 4 percent of that collection of art by women. And this persisted for some time.

You mention that Matthew Barney is a particular favorite. He’s a favorite of mine too. I remember going to the Guggenheim to see The Cremaster Cycle. It was so much fun, and my friends and I would take Vaseline off the railing and smear it on ourselves.

He just represents a lot to me. He was taken over, I felt, by brainy curators who wrote long, impenetrable texts on him and showed him in all museums. I felt that Barney, in a way, was lifted up, above, and out of the art world. And I love that in the past ten years or so, he has come back to be just an artist.

We talked a little about how few people of color are in these photographs.

The period is also the last flickering of what I call the era of white aesthetics. We’d only been doing that for 5,000 years, and this was the last hours of it.

Right now, again, is a period when art history is being rewritten and art history is being made. There’s some idiotic Jerry Saltz out there right now, taking pictures, staying up late, showing up, and hopefully witnessing this art world as it’s being reinvented again only with people of color.

In this picture of you at the cocaine buffet, are you really snorting the cocaine?

Everybody else was doing it, but I had to do it because I was being witnessed. And later that night, a woman I admired very much said, “Jerry, there’s a giant white ball of snot on your nose.” I had been somewhat skeptical of Rob Pruitt, the artist, and like I wrote in the piece, he brought me to my knees. That’s a very powerful thing to do as an artist.

REAL ESTATE

Apartments All Have Giant Windows Now, and It Sucks!

Shelling out for custom screens makes sense for owners, but renters are screwed.

Don’t be seduced by the walls of sunlight in a real-estate listing: Those huge, irregular-size windows rarely have screens, which means that, in open-windows season, your sleek interior may become a terrarium for visiting bugs. Clio Chang reports:

So how are the people moving into these buildings keeping, say, giant black flies out of their apartment on a spring afternoon? You can’t just buy something at Home Depot and pop it in, so trying to get fresh air means letting everything else inside, too. People have gone mad, at least on Reddit, trying to solve the issue. “My building is a newer luxury building and it has those windows that open on a hinge inward,” one person wrote. “But I’m in dire need of a screen outside so I stop getting mosquitos. Does anyone have any solutions??” Multiple people respond saying they have the same problem. The issue, in part, is that the energy-efficient seal on these kinds of windows don’t leave much room to throw in a screen insert. One four-year-old thread is still active with people trying to figure out a solution, which includes Gorilla Tape–ing screen mesh directly to their window frames. (“That didn’t work.”)

One way that renters can be savvy: Bet owners to agree to put in screens during lease negotiations. Failing that, the commenters on this post have some creative ideas.

MUSIC

Who Won Coachella?

Time to familiarize yourself with model/actriz Oklou, flowerovlove, Bini, and Slayyyter.

Remember Chappell Roan’s breakout 2024 Coachella performance? One of this year’s festival acts is going to rise from semi-obscure to inescapable, too, Craig Jenkins and Jason P. Frank write. Jason has his eye on Slayyyter:

Looking a bit like Kesha if she were born in Missouri instead of Los Angeles (that’s a compliment), Slayyyter came to Coachella to make the stage her bitch. The pop singer has been bubbling up in recent years, but her new album WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is her best yet. With the wind on her back, she arrived at Coachella with something to prove, and she did it. She wore a fashion-ratty shirt and a pair of jean shorts with a pack of cigarettes poking out of the back pocket, and trashy never looked so good. “Crank,” her standout track, was a bracing moment of messy, dirty pop perfection. When she got her audience to chant, “She pick up, then we fuck, I get so gay off that tequila / I need some dick for Tuesday, lеt me go put out some feelers,” it was a bit like seeing the divine. Most of all, the overwhelming sense for those watching from home was intense FOMO. Slayyyter is a movement, and her performance makes you want to get off the couch and join the scream.

Seeing the divine, indeed!

Click Your Way Out

• Here’s everything you need to know about getting married at City Hall.

• The last word on Helen DeWitt versus Twitter.

• Geek star Felicia Day recommends the best kids’ podcast, Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest.

• Jack Harlow is giving out free books.

• Gallerist Andrew Crispo dealt art by day while moonlighting as a murderer.

• Whither Apple in the post Tim Cook era?

• “It has been the defining problem of human civilization, what to do with our shit.”

• How to combine herbs like a pro.

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

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I used Vaseline from The Cremaster Cycle as lip balm in 2004 and I’m still alive.

WORK

Don’t You Wish Your Office Were a Bar?

Employees of OR Books and Lux Magazine are living that particular dream.

For small publishing businesses, finding a cheap enough office space that can still accommodate shelves full of books and back issues can be a huge hassle. Enter the Francis Kite Club, a bar and music venue on Avenue C that has provided an unorthodox solution for the small press OR Books and the feminist magazine Lux. They use its greenroom as an office during weekday hours, then sometimes host readings and events at the bar in the evening. It all adds up to the kind of harmony you’re more likely to see in the animal kingdom, like when a species of snail evolves to live happily on the back of a moving whale. Adriane Quinlan breaks down the details:

For $1,700 per month, OR Books rents the Francis Kite Club’s greenroom from Monday through Wednesday, from about 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. On Thursdays, OR hands it over to Lux, a feminist magazine, which pays $250 for the day. Bartenders arrive at 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, creating a built-in happy hour for the assembled workers. The bar-office also hosts events like the Search Work launch along with fundraisers and parties — a perk that makes use of a sound system brought in by Kyp Malone, who’s part of the collective of artsy friends who co-own the bar. Chelsea Manning has DJ’d a party for Lux. Slavoj Žižek and Norman Finkelstein have appeared for OR Books. The relationship is “symbiotic,” per Joey Daniel, who handles audiobooks for OR. “I’ve signed off on beer deliveries,” says Lux founder and editor-in-chief Sarah Leonard. “And sometimes we get books delivered on a Saturday, and they’re here to receive it for us,” adds editor Olivia Heffernan. Editors dump out half-drunk cocktails and tidy up so they can spread out over the banquettes in front with their laptops and manuscripts. Bartenders borrow books. “It’s like a sitcom back here, and always delightful,” says Leonard.

Notably, no one has ever stolen an OR book from the shelves in the greenroom, though bands that play the space do tend to leave things behind — clothes, mostly, including, on one occasion, pantyhose. Sometimes they even leave books behind, which is the last thing the overstuffed space needs.

FIRST PERSON

When Your Friend Betrays You by Going on Wegovy

If you’ve lived your adult life in ED recovery, it’s a big deal.

Sophia Ortega thought her close friend would understand that she wouldn’t approve of her friend’s choice to use a GLP-1 drug, since Ortega had battled anorexia and bulimia for years. She thought incorrectly! And she understands that many won’t understand why she felt she had to end a friendship over this.

From mutual friends, I’ve gleaned that we both feel similarly — something like, “It’s a gigantic bummer but I get it.” In many ways, I’m being a baby. But eating-disorder recovery is a process of relearning how to feed yourself — tuning back into the body’s most basic needs, which is the stuff of babies. If I could keep the friendship and compartmentalize the fact that she is orienting her life toward thinness, I would. But my brain doesn’t work like that. In the same way a recovering alcoholic is ineligible for a glass of wine to decompress before bed, I am ineligible for regulation regarding my body: no counting, weighing, or food rules. Left on autopilot, I fiend for control, veering toward the self-objectification that drained my life of delight for so long. The allure of looking “perfect” is a siren call that will always turn my head. I’d love to reach a point where the tune disinterests me. In the meantime, I do what I can to plug my ears.

We all gotta make the choices that are right for us, ultimately!

POP GIRLIES

What ‘Drop Dead’ Portends for Olivia Rodrigo’s Third Album

Our reviewer reads the Livvy tea leaves.

“Drop Dead” is a little bit of a departure for Olivia Rodrigo, but it also keeps just enough of what fans have come to expect from her. Craig Jenkins writes:

Rodrigo escapes the country for a spell but doesn’t shake the pop sheen and self-loathing of her debut album, Sour, or Guts’s rock-and-roll cameo-filled tour. “Dead” is a strutting synth-pop single interrupted by a fuzzy rock bridge pointing to the zestier single this could have been (or a deeper future rock dive). The punchier and dancier aspects that gently elbow into Guts and The Rise of a Midwest Princess producer Dan Nigro’s pure pop seem gleaned from touring her hits alongside a cohort of pop stars and alt-rock vets like the Breeders. Happiness is the theme, but the mortal anguish of earlier songs like the wounded “Traitor” and “The Grudge” remains in the picture. She could die if she doesn’t get a kiss.

We’re hoping for more of a Breeders vibe on the rest of the album.

Click Your Way Out

• Snip, snip! Meet New York’s most popular mohel.

• “Men who kill their wives and children are not just bad apples who needed a free month of BetterHelp.”

• Ottessa Moshfegh is separated from Luke Goebel.

• Barry Keoghan has never read a novel.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

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Celebrate 4/20 by rewatching the original High Maintenance web series.

POP GIRLIES

Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Drop Dead’ Has Killed Us

In a good way!

Zach Schiffman has been getting us hyped for this moment for a while, and last night at midnight Olivia’s new single finally dropped, accompanied by a video directed by Sofia Coppola. When I say “video directed by Sofia Coppola,” you’re probably thinking, Oh, is the whole thing shots of Olivia running gaily through Versailles in Chloé bloomers? Well, yes, you guessed correctly. More important, the song itself is … so good?!?! I loved it instantly, and how often does that happen? The lyric “One night I was bored in bed and stalked you on the internet” is timeless, deathless memebait poetry. Zach says people will complain Livvie is reheating Taylor’s nachos — the lyric “went home and tried to stalk you on the internet” is from “Paper Rings,” specifically — but to them we say, “Whatever!” The experience of stalking a crush on the internet is eternal and universal.

The other intriguing lyric in “drop dead” is “Pisces and a Gemini / But I think we might go really nice together.” Oh, Olivia. Well, clearly she and Louis Partridge could not overcome their astrological incompatibility, which is considerable. I’d recommend that she date a grounding Taurus or a no-nonsense Capricorn. However, she seems to be spending time with Cameron Winter, a fellow Pisces. That’s a lot of weepy, dreamy, creative, addiction-prone energy for one relationship, but I’m hoping those two kids will make it work, or at least get some good songs out of it.

TELEVISION

Doing Karaoke With The Pitt’s Isa Briones

Her song choice is flawless, as is her portrayal of Trinity Santos.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Jackson McHenry, and you’re at Sing Sing with TV and Broadway star Isa Briones, who famously sang “You Oughta Know” in last night’s finale of The Pitt. You’re up first at the mic, and you know that the skill and intensity of your own performance is going to determine whether Briones herself will fully commit. Your song choice? “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia. Jackson, you are truly one of God’s strongest soldiers. I really wish I could have been there for this, but Jackson’s description of what Briones did next will have to suffice:

The party trick is that she’s taught herself to sing “The Winner Takes It All” with all the same mannerisms as Meryl Streep in the film version of Mamma Mia! “I can do the whole performance, beat by beat,” she says. We cue up the song. The synthesizer riff starts to clink. “Imagine Pierce Brosnan is following me,” Briones says, before shifting into Streep’s liquid vowels and aquiline posture. It’s a studied impersonation, down to the way she keeps fiddling with an imaginary scarf — in an instrumental section, she pretends to run along a Greek coastline with it. “That’s the performance of a generation,” Briones says afterward. “Every time she goes, ‘I don’t wanna to talk,’ that shit is amazing.”

What song would you have tried to impress Briones? I would have either done “Who Will Save Your Soul” or “Because the Night.”

TWITTER

‘The Pope Is Soft on Crime’

Becca Schuh on what you missed this week if you are, wisely, not on Twitter.

Remember Monday? I barely do. Way back then was when we first learned about a new meme format that is frankly rude (as a person of 1991 birth).

Feud season three: Trump vs. the pope.

I have no qualms with this direction for Nicole Kidman. I think it’s interesting and fun. Okay, fun might not be the right word.

TBH, I’ll try the Upper West Side Goop, who cares.

Incredible news for insufferable people (myself included).

A Joe Biden gaffe, harkening back to simpler times.

Click Your Way Out

• Multi-hyphenate star Julio Torres opened his sketchbooks.

• Too good for this world: Hampshire College is no more.

• The food that powers Ci Siamo chef Hillary Sterling through her busy days.

• Natalie Portman is living my personal nightmare of being pregnant with her third child at 44 (good for her, though).

• Audrey Gelman spent four hours trapped in the fever dream that is the House on the Rock.

• Tracie Morrissey is blogging again, praise the dark Lord.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

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If you’re a fan of I Who Have Never Known Men, or misandry in general, don’t miss tomorrow’s NYPL event.

TELEVISION

Which Survivor 50 Contestants Are MAGA?

And which one is a leftist sex-work advocate?

For reasons best known to her alone, Carrie Battan has a Ph.D. in Survivor. I don’t know anything about the show, but I’m watching regardless. Each week, she schools me on the subtext I’m missing. Here’s our full recap.

While to me, an ignorant person, this seemed like a boring episode, I suspect I’m missing a lot. Fill me in!

Okay, so historically Survivor is about bringing together all walks of life, from all over America, different types of people. Obviously that means that they bring people on who have political differences. And yet it’s the elephant in the room because if anybody talks about politics at camp, that doesn’t make it into the episode because that could alienate viewers. So Survivor is presented as this completely apolitical thing even though there are all these rumors swirling around that, before the season started, a MAGA alliance among the cast formed on Zoom. It’s Stephanie, the super-athletic late-40s woman; Chrissy, a registered Republican voter who lives in the villages in Florida; Coach, who got voted off last night; Jonathan, the big guy; and Colby. Then you have these brown and Black players and these young Ivy League types. The battle lines are being drawn, but nobody can say explicitly, “Okay, you guys stand for everything Trump supports and we don’t.” The show has to pretend that people are voting purely on the basis of strategy and gameplay. But there’s all of this bubbling beneath the surface.

Are any of the contestants leftists? It’s hard to imagine a leftist Survivor contestant; the game seems inherently conservative.

Ozzy Lusth was protesting the Iraq War when he was 20; he’s pro-Palestine. He had an OnlyFans during the pandemic. He’s one of the most woke players who’s ever been on Survivor.

Wow, that’s amazing! Oh, he’s open to MMF threesomes. Good to know. I thought Cirie was the hero of last night’s episode. The moment she had on the beach, crying because she couldn’t find the coconut, was very genuine and relatable to me.

It’s a good thing she found that coconut, because she was then able to orchestrate the ouster of Coach and Chrissy. She was all but saying, “If we don’t get this pair out, they have a very clear path to the end.” Cirie was doing damage control for CBS — and for the broader Survivor fan community — by being like, “Let’s not have a MAGA winner.”

HEALTH

The Agony and Ecstasy of a 6-Year Running Streak

Hannah Pittard knows she’s being nuts, but she’s still running every day.

Peek into the brain of someone who has gone for a run every day since 2020, through flu, COVID, grief, and even, once, a tornado. There are a lot of reasons, both good and bad, why Pittard can’t give up her habit.

I don’t know how this ends. I suspect it won’t be dramatic, but it will be sad. It won’t be a banner day or a triumphant declaration. It will likely be ordinary: a day that gets away from me, minute by minute, just as in my dreams. My family has pointed this out, as though I should be relieved: “At least you won’t have to decide.” They mean it kindly. What they’re really saying is “We’re waiting for something to rescue you from yourself.” When I try to imagine that day — the actual day — I feel the particular grief of something being taken rather than released. And I can’t decide if the fact that I can’t choose to stop means I’m still sick, or just human, or both.

I love this woman’s commitment to doing the most, and if that’s wrong I don’t want to be right!

AUGHTS POP

The Lyric ‘Drops of Jupiter’ Came to Pat Monahan in a Dream

And now it’s going to be stuck in your head.

If the Train song “Drops of Jupiter” was a person, it now would legally be able to rent a car. Still, I challenge you not to come hear it in the wild sometime in the next few days, playing in a CVS or an Uber. What makes this somewhat weird and even cringe song also a bit timeless and compelling?

At the time we had recorded an album that was called Something More, and the president at the time was like, “You don’t have a first single,” something that had to be a hit and get you excited. We didn’t have any of those, and my mother had passed away and so I was not in a good place to write the thing that they were looking for. I worked for three months and one night I fell asleep and woke up with this dream, “Now that she’s back in the atmosphere.” And it was my mother basically saying, “You don’t have to worry about me. Like, go do your thing. I can swim through the planets and come back here with drops of Jupiter in my hair if I want.” And then I turned that into a love story and it took 15 minutes.

Treat yourself to a listen today and be whisked away to a simpler time, when the idea of “the best soy latte that you’ve ever had” could captivate the world.

Click Your Way Out

• The 259 things New Yorkers should know, from Tina Brown’s dry cleaner to Gabrielle Hamilton’s exterminator.

• Dan Levy on how he creates memorable TV mothers.

• Just say “no” to the Gen-Z shoe of the summer: Rainbow flip-flops.

• The new trash cans are already breaking.

• How to have a spring break with kids that’s not an expensive bad time.

• Why Anna Dorn is still obsessed with Lana Del Rey.

• Crossword.

• Telematrix.

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

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Yes, “Drops of Jupiter” has been performed on Glee.

POP GIRLIES

Olivia Rodrigo Probably Isn’t Secretly Gay

Zach Schiffman’s got the latest on Livvy, Sabrina, and, possibly, Taylor.

The moment adults clinging to their adolescence have been waiting for is almost here: Olivia Rodrigo’s first single since 2024, “drop dead,” drops this Friday. On Instagram and TikTok, the sound, which her team surely is praying will trend far and wide, has been dubbed “drop unalive 🤪” (emoji included). Gen-Z pop stars, they’re not just like us! The song seems to be about her recent ex-boyfriend, British actor Louis Partridge. Her first tease of the synth-rock-sounding song includes the lyric “I hope you never finish that beer” set to footage of a couple of pints of Guinness, likely a nod to the Netflix series that absolutely no one watched starring Partridge, House of Guinness.

Fans have quickly moved on, though, guessing that Olivia Rodrigo is the next secretly gay pop star (Gaylivia rumors have been around for a while, admittedly) and is currently dating Tony nominee (and should-be winner, IMO) Sadie Sink. Olivia’s recent Instagram dump starts a post of her holding a bouquet of flowers in the Los Angeles hills, and fans have theorized that it twas taken outside of Sink’s home. But I have firsthand knowledge that Sink currently lives in Park Slope. (I see her walking around there constantly, and she has even been spotted — by me — in the Flatbush Avenue Crunch Fitness.) That gay rumor is, unfortunately, unalive for now. Plus Olivia was spotted getting dinner last night with Cameron Winter.

Meanwhile, in main-pop-girl land, Sabrina Carpenter’s lavish Coachella-headlining set was briefly overshadowed by her misunderstanding of the zaghrouta, an Arabic call, as a yodel. False controversy! Moving on! People online tried to accuse her of being MAGA, like fellow busty blonde Sydney Sweeney, but why would she have comrade Susan Sarandon play Sabrina’s older self for seven minutes during the set if she were secretly a Republican? Get some media literacy, pop people! Seemingly, the Susanalogue will stay this coming weekend, but there’s another surprise coming to Carpenter’s performance, as the official Coachella schedule has added ten minutes to the headline act. Perhaps it’s ten minutes for a fellow blonde to perform her own ten-minute-long song? Rumors that Carpenter was sound-checking the title track “The Life of a Showgirl” were never verified, but I wouldn’t count out a drop-in from someone witty and pretty named Kitty. Legitly.

ACTORS

Riz Ahmed’s Favorite Music, Clothes, and Scene From Hamlet

He’s a hypebeast, a dad, and an Oscar winner — the complete package.

There’s something for everyone in Riz Ahmed’s “Taste Test” interview: recommendations for the places he likes to buy Japanese vintage and Scandinavian army jackets, his favorite “crunchy, sultry” R&B, the book his novelist wife is always trying to get him to read (Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead: hard to argue with that). But there’s also the actor stuff – he’s starring in a new production of Hamlet, a play that’s so hot right now. His favorite scene is a really juicy one.

The scene that I performed back at drama school that I think is a really interesting scene … the “Get thee to a nunnery” scene with Ophelia, where he is basically telling her to leave him alone and break up with him, but also kind of being really horrible and mean and saying ugly things. There’s a lot of different possibilities as to what’s going on. Is he actually being overtly just mean and toxic, or is he publicly staging a breakup to try to create distance between them because he knows that they’re being spied on? Is he almost protecting her? It has that mix of rage and vulnerability — it’s performative, but also there’s something very personal spilling out in an uncomfortable way.

I’ve always liked the “publicly staging a breakup to protect her” interpretation because I’m a bit of a romantic.

FASHION

Shop Susan Alexandra Founder Susan Korn’s Closet!

All the beading and fruit and whimsy you’d expect, for low prices.

I am loving the Strategist “Classifieds,” especially these closet drops, but sometimes the prices are a little on the high side. Susan Korn is being more realistic, and you should take advantage. A custom-made dog outfit for a mere $18? $25 pointy white slingbacks? A portrait of a woman that Susan painted, then realized looks too much like her therapist, and is now selling for $35? What’s stopping you? Especially if you wear shoe size 8.5 to 9.5, there’s lots to admire here.

Click Your Way Out

• Aww, the people working on The Pitt brought their pets to work.

• Supriya Ganesh’s gender journey.

• An internet hero known to us only as @buzzkillary is vindicated.

• “My mediocre employee thinks she’s not getting promoted bc Sexism.”

• A steep discount on a modern, minimalist (kind of hideous) townhouse.

• I’m sorry but if I had to know about this, you do too. (I’m not sorry.)

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

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Julia Wertz! Me! Books Are Magic! Tonight!

POP

Niall Horan’s New Album Is Also Called Dinner Party!

Why not chat with him about it?

Because One Direction was younger millennials’ Heated Rivalry, I know plenty of people to whom Niall Horan is very, very important. So when the opportunity arose to interview him about his catchy new single, “Dinner Party,” off the forthcoming album of the same name, who was I to say “no”? The song itself is a laid-back, California-feeling up-tempo ballad about meeting a new love at, you guessed it, a dinner party. On a recent Zoom, Niall ran his hands through his hair adorably while telling me what it’s like to dine at his house.

Let’s imagine you’re hosting a dinner party. I hear you love eating and drinking. What are you serving?

When I was growing up, it was a very meat-and-potatoes upbringing, like literally every day. Spaghetti Bolognese was like, Wow, we’re being adventurous tonight. You know, pasta sauce from a jar. I moved to London when I was 16, and I was trying all these different cuisines and then obviously traveling the world broadened my palate for the better. I love, love, love Japanese food.

And to drink?

If I’m doing a barbecue at home, it’d be a cocktail. I love gin-and-tonics. I love an Aperol spritz. We obviously have the Wimbledon tennis tournament, and in the summer, Pimm’s is a big thing.

Ew, a Pimm’s cup is gross, too much like a salad.

I’m not a huge Pimm’s fan, but for those few weeks when Wimbledon is on, every bar is selling it in these big jugs, and you just do it because it’s happening around you. You jump on the bandwagon for those few weeks and then never drink Pimm’s for the rest of the year.

What do you find are some fail-safe dinner-party conversation topics?

It depends on the group around the table. Friends of mine are doing very different jobs, so you can lean into that and ask what they’ve got going on in their lives. I don’t really hang out with people in my industry. For the most part, everyone I hang out with has got completely nine-to-five jobs. I moved into a new house, so the house is always a talking point as well; people want to have a look around. Politics always creeps in, especially in this day and age, but I usually try to keep it light around the music we’re playing.

Would you play “Dinner Party” at a dinner party?

When I think of songs like “Dinner Party,” I think of the countryside in England, beautiful rolling hills, and sunsets in the evening in the middle of June.

FILM

The Best Part of The Drama Is Its Soundtrack

All credit to the film’s music supervisor.

Cat Zhang got obsessed with the Robert Pattinson–Zendaya A24 movie with the twist that’s creeping some people out, but not for the reason you’d think: She was immediately smitten with the film’s music. Per Cat, it’s “a treasure chest of deep cuts — Scottish funk-pop, Norwegian trip-hop, German underground folk.” If that sounds like something you’d like (and honestly, who doesn’t love Scottish funk-pop?), Cat and Jack Denton made a Spotify playlist of songs from The Drama and songs like the songs from The Drama. Listening to it, I find this is a perfect playlist to throw on when you’re having friends over for a … dinner party. “You have such brilliant taste! I’ve never heard this song before, but I feel like I’ve known it all my life,” your appreciative guests will say, though perhaps not Niall Horan. You could also play this album in your tiny chic independent boutique that smells like palo santo. You could even play it in bed, maybe, if that’s the vibe. Though not everyone wants to get it on to Judee Sill.

BROADWAY

The Best Part of Dog Day Afternoon Is Its Soundtrack

The new stage adaptation of the 1975 heist movie has killer tunes.

“We started to build a palette months ahead of being in the theater to keep that gritty ’70s New York feel,” Dog Day sound designer Cody Spencer told Devon Ivie. “I paid attention to what was being played on the mainstream and college radio at the time. What were people hearing in Brooklyn in 1975?” The answer: David Bowie, Marvin Gaye. The play itself is getting mixed reviews, but one thing everyone agrees on is that the music is great.

One of the things I love about reading Devon is that she’ll casually drop this kind of tidbit: “The Edge,” one of the most sampled songs in hip-hop that was composed by the man who played Ducky on NCIS.” (In case you don’t immediately know what she’s talking about, it’s the instrumental part that precedes “dadadada … it’s the muthafuckin’ D.O.G.” in “The Next Episode,” for one.) Don’t you love knowing stuff like that? I do.

Click Your Way Out

• Famesick, by Lena Dunham, is out today. Here’s a review and a rundown of some gossip about the book’s boldface names.

• The definitive guide to preventing and treating head lice.

• Nicole Kidman and Chloé Zhao are training to be death doulas.

• Great news! Taxwise, it has never been a better time to own a private jet.

• A cautionary tale about existing online from our inimitable Tammie Teclemariam.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Horoscopes.

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Tomorrow’s high is 82, so I hope today at work you planted the seeds of the fake illness you’re “coming down with.”

FIRST PERSON

Why Rainbow Rowell Hasn’t Gone on GLP-1’s … Yet

Not experiencing hunger is destabilizing and strange.

Novelist Rainbow Rowell specializes in yearning. “My characters tend to want something so badly it makes their stomachs hurt, and I’m good at sustaining that stomachache-y feeling for 200 pages,” she writes. It’s that feeling, and that part of her identity, that she worries she would lose if she went on the now-ubiquitous weight-loss drugs.

Every night I go to bed looking forward to breakfast — genuinely excited about breakfast. “If I go to sleep now, it’ll be here immediately.” After breakfast, I’ll have an iced coffee. I love an iced coffee — nothing’s better than an iced coffee. Then I get to have lunch. Love lunch. Then my family will come home, and we’ll have dinner. Maybe we’ll go out. Dinner’s a party, I love dinner, and I get to have it every day. What a world, what a life. I am excited to eat all day, every day. I love being hungry.

I think I would have started a GLP-1 by now if I thought it would affect only my body. What I’m worried about is my brain. It’s the yearning I want to hold onto. The desire and delight.

I feel compelled to say here that none of my friends or family have experienced anhedonia as a result of weight-loss drugs. I also feel compelled to say that before these drugs came along, I didn’t know that the word anhedonia existed.

I’m worried that if I take the drugs, I’ll change, and I won’t even realize it. I’m also worried that I’ll take the drugs and change, and I will realize it, but I’ll love being skinny so much that I won’t care.

I’m merely a “small fat” (remember the terminology of body positivity? I barely do), but I felt exactly the same way as Rowell does about the quest to be thin at the cost of not really experiencing hunger or desire in the same way during my abortive three-month Mounjaro journey, which I touched on here. I also experienced side effects that I can only liken to … so you know how sometimes if you smoke weed you experience “dry mouth”? Now imagine that happening to, like, your entire lower intestine. TMI?

SKIN DEEP

Beauty and Wellness, Taken to a Dystopian Extreme!

What is really going on with the people obsessed with peptides and lasers?

If you read Lily Sperry’s Substack, Health Gossip, where people share their baroque and idiosyncratic beauty/wellness routines, or if you had a reaction to the Substack post where Laura Reilly shared her pricey and seemingly endless litany of personal upkeep routines and products, have I got an article for you! Novelist Zoe Dubno explores how we got here and why it is that so many people are stacking peptides and injecting themselves with whatnot in order to look, in her words, “marginally better.”

Sperry told me that the morning we spoke, she “stood on her vibration plate, which activates lymphatic drainage, with her red light on and some Gregorian chants playing.” When I asked her why she engages with these practices, she said, “I think it stems from a desire for control. And, you know, in our current global climate, it’s just very chaotic. So to return to the body and to ourselves as a site of control is comforting for some people.”

This was a common theme among the women I spoke to. “We all have our little rituals of control that make us feel better,” a 31-year-old woman working on a doctorate in clinical psychology told me about the Botox she’s been getting since she was 25 and worked as a case manager in Brooklyn. “For a year in my early 20s, I was also spending literally all of my money on a psycho 100-step skin-care process. Looking back, I didn’t have the executive functioning to be successfully anorexic, which is what I also wanted. But I did have the discipline to enjoy this complicated multistep ritual of the skin care. I found it satisfying.”

I don’t have the executive function, time, or money for any of this shit, but that’s not to say that I’m low maintenance (at all. I’m a Libra) and I feel compelled to share with you that getting a lash-lift and tint every three months is the best investment in my looks I’ve ever made, because you always look like you’re wearing perfectly applied subtle mascara and it only costs $100. The only downside is that you have to keep your eyes closed for an hour and it feels extremely claustrophobic. But as we have learned time and again — and as I tell my 7-year-old child as they squirm in the pedicure chair — beauty is pain.

MOVIES

Prepare for the Film Forum Terry Zwigoff Festival!

Adriane Quinlan interviews the revered director of Ghost World and Bad Santa.

Terry Zwigoff is obsessed with the kind of material that Hollywood hates: rare, old blues records; sexually explicit adult comics. Improbably, these interests pulled him to make documentaries (Crumb, Louie Bluie). What’s even weirder is how he somehow pivoted to adapting Daniel Clowes comics into films, then making Bad Santa. Film Forum is showing his oeuvre from April 17–23.

Ghost World (2001) shows America as the hellscape we now know and love. Tell me about cranking up the absurdity, like with fake ads for an oil company and cheesy restaurants.

In preproduction, I spent a day taking the cinematographer, producer, production designer, wardrobe, and other department heads to a nearby shopping mall. I pointed out things I found absurd or ridiculous or “off” in some way — like glum, obese people walking around in colorful jogging outfits, holding giant-size cups of soda, mindlessly pushing carts full of plastic junk through the piped-in Muzak. Everything was so colorful and cheery on the surface but had a more nightmarish underside. That probably came out of some instinct that started to seep into my consciousness from being an avid reader of the early Harvey Kurtzman Mad magazines in the early ’50s, and wanting to help the audience connect to my own way of seeing the world, while layering the film with details so it holds up on subsequent viewings.

I could watch the art-school scenes dozens of times. They’re perfect. What was the thinking behind Mirror, Father, Mirror?

There was a guy I knew from years ago who used to always show his short 16-mm. films around San Francisco in the ’70s. I’d suffered through dozens of them over the years. He knew a lot of the same underground-comics crowd I knew and would always show his latest effrort at parties. I couldn’t find him, but I wanted to. I thought it would be better to get an actual amateur experimental filmmaker to do it. A cinematographer I knew had a young gal as an apprentice, so I asked her to do it. I told her to not try and be funny. We gave her a camera, and this is pretty much what she did. I think it was silent, and we added the sound or some of the sound.

Robert Crumb also came out of your 1970s San Francisco scene. You were friends first. When was the last time you guys talked and about what?

I talked to him last week, just checking in to see how he’s doing. He said, “Good,” said his little, beautiful French village is still rather untouched by the hell going on around the rest of the world. I asked him to clarify some memories I had of his brother Maxon. In the early ’70s when I first met him, he lived three blocks away from me and I remembered him as much more well adjusted and “normal.” He had a job as a car mechanic at a garage downtown. After work one day, I remembered visiting him and he had an attractive girlfriend cooking him a spaghetti dinner while he watched TV and had a beer. I wasn’t sure if that was a dream I had or not. He said it was not a dream, told me Maxon took LSD for the first time shortly after that and it didn’t interact well with his epilepsy. He was never quite the same. It had the strange effect of “tightening” up his artwork for the better, though.

Click Your Way Out

• What made photographer Peter Hujar a “genius about sex”? (Having sex with 15,000-plus people was only the beginning.)

• Rachel Zegler, you are a goddess and you are forgiven for Snow White, possibly the worst movie I have ever sat through in a theater.

• Sara Holdren loved Titaníque.

• Where to buy Lena Dunham’s $3,600 custom sobriety-chip necklace.

• This is the order in which to read Laurie Colwin’s novels.

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

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Come see Julia Wertz and me this Wednesday at Books Are Magic!

POLITICS

Another Eric Adams Main Character Is in Trouble

Are we about to witness the fall of a Zero Bond buddy?

Eric Adams’s post-mayoral life began with a boom, then a bust. In early January, he launched a meme coin to combat antisemitism and promote New York City, which was immediately hit by a rug pull (apparently not by him), causing most of the people who “invested” in the useless asset to lose their “investment.” Since then, he’s been quiet. Oh, and then there was the surprise announcement today that he was granted Albanian citizenship. Mirëseardhje, Mr. Adams.

But if you thought the allegations of financial impropriety in Adams’s orbit were over, then you don’t know these guys. I’d like to note an Adams-adjacent indictment from earlier this month that went a little under the radar. On April 1, federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Zhan “Johnny” Petrosyants with conspiracy to commit health-care fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and aggravated identity theft, among other things. FBI agents arrested him after he landed at JFK from a trip to Milan.

Do you remember this guy? Petrosyants and his twin brother, Robert, hung with Adams at his preferred members-only club, Zero Bond; Adams was seen often at Osteria La Baia, the Theater District Italian joint the brothers run. Adams reportedly slept at Johnny Petrosyants’s condo in Trump Tower sometimes, though Gracie Mansion was a quick car ride away.

The alleged scheme was a classic, one that has been pulled off before him by the likes of Tony Soprano in season one, a bunch of former NBA players in 2021, and a massive health-care company run by Florida senator Rick Scott back when he was in the private sector. Beginning in 2018, the Feds say that Petrosyants submitted tens of millions of dollars of claims to auto-insurance companies for nonexistent medical procedures, then laundered the cash through a jewelry business in the Diamond District.

Petrosyants has pleaded not guilty, but this is not the first time he has been charged with a crime related to auto-insurance fraud. In 2014, Johnny and Robert pled guilty in a similar scheme involving auto-insurance fraud and billing medical providers. When Adams was pressed on the matter, he said his friends from Turkmenistan deserved a second chance. And with that grace, Petrosyants engaged in the same crime, allegedly.

INTERNET THINGS

How to Text After a Bad Date

If you follow Twitter’s advice.

This week in Discoveries From Becca’s Timeline: Lena Dunham returns to Twitter, another person claiming to be an empath proves they are the opposite of that, Charlie from Girls is going to be a father, and more from the internet of the absurd.

Lena Dunham is back tweetin’ in advance of her book release.

Incidentally, Bald Ann Dowd met Real Ann Dowd.

I don’t totally understand this joke format, but, hey, I giggled.

A new horrific text response has entered the discourse, and people are riffing on it as the gods intended.

Also: Aubrey Plaza is pregnant with Charlie from Girls’s baby! Some people are being weird about it, but let’s just ignore that, shall we.

Click Your Way Out

• The newly renovated New Museum is held together by tape.

• Dads would rather take ’shrooms than go to therapy.

• Patrick Radden Keefe really likes yogurt.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

• Crossword.

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It’s the weekend and I am layering up and going to the beach, although I worry that my friends are going to regret that decision as soon as we get there. I am reading Down Time, by Andrew Martin. I am drinking full-strength soda and rewatching Better Call Saul, but only the crime stuff.

RACKETS

You Can Now Rent a ‘Celeb’ by the Hour

No, not like that.

What’s the opposite of a recession indicator? Maybe it’s the new business from Flipping Out star Jeff Lewis called Fan Social, in which regular folks — fine, super upper-middle-class people with serious expendable income — pay to hang out or get dinner with niche celebrities. It’s similar to Cameo, except in real life, and obviously you’re picking up the check for lunch with Tom Arnold or the course fee for golf with former “Showtime” L.A. Laker Byron Scott. To understand more, I spoke with Rebecca Jennings, who wrote about Fan Social and this new way of parting people from their money in our latest issue.

Is this thing an app or like a social experiment let loose upon the world?

Technically, it’s an app. But, yes, spiritually more of an experiment.

So what’s the logical endgame of paying for the time of “celebrities” by the hour — that you could get one of the kids from Mrs. Doubtfire to babysit your kids? Can we invent celebrity Taskrabbit? This is a weird world we’re entering.

One of the founders described it as Uber for celebrities, this thing where they can make money in the pockets of time when they have nothing else going on and where all they really have to do is talk about themselves. On Fan Social’s menu, you can go golfing with a former Laker, you can have lunch with Chris Hansen, you can have one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey officiate your wedding. You can imagine a future where one of the kids from Mrs. Doubtfire could babysit for you.

The Bravoverse is kind of perfect for this, on both the supply and demand sides. Do you think that this can or will expand beyond that tier of celeb?

The Bravoverse is sort of ground zero for parasocial relationships, and so it naturally works well. I know that they want to expand, especially to athletes in smaller markets. A lot of people that pay for this, they don’t live in New York or L.A. where most of these celebrities live. So they see a lot of opportunity among stars that are based in places that are not New York or L.A. and have some kind of local appeal there, which makes a lot of sense.

I was thinking that the local retired pro athlete is perfect for this. Like a middle manager in Salt Lake City would pay a bag to get lunch with one of the ’90s Jazz players.

People have always been able to do this, but normally you had to know someone who knew someone or who could, you know, reach out to their agent. But now, this has just standardized things.

We have democratized lunch.

DWEEBS

Unfortunately, You Do Need to Pay Attention to Musk

Start with this new book.

I’ll admit it: For a while there, I tuned out Elon Musk. After the DOGE incursion, I did not want to hear about his immature jokes and the enormous government contracts handed to the world’s richest man. But in their new book, Muskism, authors Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian argue that it is important to stay tapped in. If the model of Fordism helped build the 20th century, Musk’s business model — in which he makes the federal government dependent on his many companies — is defining the 21st. I spoke with the authors for our “Just Asking Questions” series. The good news is that if you pay attention to the top-line stuff, like how NASA and the Pentagon rely on this erratic oligarch to a scary degree, you can ignore the jokes on X.

OOPS

We Are Getting Some Awesome Corrections

The FT and NYT are giving me something to live for.

In magazine world, you’re supposed to wait until there are three of something to declare it a trend and prematurely overexpose it. But this is a newsletter, and I want to talk about some wonderful corrections coming from the newspapers.

Let’s begin with the New York Times, which printed a few hundred thousand copies last week with an op-ed on President Trump’s NATO ambivalence. The headline read, “A North American Treaty Organization Without North America?” Well, no. It’s North Atlantic, and that’s tough. You gotta eat that one.

This morning, editor Daniel Sugarman found another fun one, posting on X:

Hopefully, Brown, who writes about shame and vulnerability, can find some humor in this; perhaps it is a test to see if she is really in her “fuck it” era. Either way, I am thankful to our copy department for saving me from writing stuff like how “Mark Carney is solidly in his North American Treaty Organization era.”

Click Your Way Out

• The marriage of traveling pants.

• Melania Trump gets her own jet.

• Speaking of rackets: An astrologer is making bank day-trading.

• Is the last season of Hacks any good?

• Crush Week continues.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

• Crossword.

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I will be back tomorrow after watching the Knicks-Celtics functional ECF preview while shivering in my apartment tonight.

PETS

Good Pups, Bad Owners

The real crisis rocking the city.

My stepmom is always threatening to send me a surprise animal. I grew up with tons of dogs — at one point in my childhood, there was a Chihuahua, a bulldog, a golden retriever, and a Great Dane living with us — but living in a fifth-floor walk-up in New York City and having an unreliable schedule do not lend themselves to having a “fur baby” of my own anymore. And while in theory I’d love a dog, aren’t there enough of them in the city already? Nobody knows for sure, as Rachel Sugar reports:

There were about 100,000 licensed dogs as of 2024, but that accounts for only a small fraction of the canine population, which is mostly composed of scofflaws. (An annual dog license costs $8.50 for dogs that have been spayed or neutered.) The latest New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, from 2023, found about 15 percent of households had at least one dog, a fraction of the national average, which, according to 2025’s American Veterinary Medicine Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook, was 42.6 percent. Still, the number that gets tossed around is about 600,000 — a lot of dogs.

The problem is not so much that we seem to be outnumbered by dogs but that some owners no longer observe basic rules of pet decorum. Kip Gleize, a restaurateur whose current projects include the Brooklyn spots Margot and Montague Diner, tells Rachel she stopped someone from bringing in their dog, then watched as they left, studied their phone, and then marched back in. “They’re like, ‘Actually, it’s a service dog, and you’re not allowed to ask us for proof.’” Huh!Maybe we need to invent a new name for dog owners like this. My suggestion: Kibble Karens.

THEATER

Cats Are Back Where They Belong

Slaying the house down boots on Broadway.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball opened last night at the Broadhurst Theatre. I saw the original Off Broadway production at the Perelman Performing Arts Center back in 2024 and had the same reaction as everyone else: “Wait, Cats can be this good?????” Turns out setting this musical in the ballroom scene is one way to save it from being the punch line it always has been. Jackson McHenry writes:

What powers The Jellicle Ball, in either instance, is the intuition that cultural products of opposite edges of 1980s New York City — the megamusical and the drag ball — can speak to each other. On Broadway, the show occupies the home turf of one form (though it really is too bad the Winter Garden is taken), so that dynamic is supercharged.

While it’s sad this production has lost the full runway it had downtown, I will be the first to say that venue gave me neck pain for days. I was seated on the side, and craning my head horizontally throughout to catch all the fabulous action was not ideal. There’s a reason the Arthur Ashe Stadium is a square and not a rectangle. Plus I found the Perelman subpar acoustically. I am beyond excited to re-attend The Jellicle Ball with a more comfortable neck and ears.

DINING

What’s in a Burger?

A classic beef patty is hard to beat.

Our restaurant critic, Matthew Schneier, tasted the chicken burgers at Ramblin’ Chick, the new Carroll Gardens venture from the Ample Hills couple.

The thing I couldn’t shake with either is that there’s a reason people don’t generally make burgers with ground chicken. Even thigh meat is leaner than ground beef, and the wetness of the sauces and toppings wasn’t enough to lend the burger itself the satisfying drip of a great patty. Taken alone, the patty has a rubbly chewiness.

I attended an early preview of Ramblin’ Chick and found the burgers flavorful but definitely in need of a fork and knife, basically immediately. Nothing wrong with that! My mom always says, “You know a burger is good when you feel like you need a bath afterwards.” Ramblin’ Chick should install a shower!

Click Your Way Out

• Even as someone who wrote his final college essay on Anne Hathaway’s career, I don’t know if I can emotionally handle the Mother Mary discourse.

• I have never had a crush on a co-worker, and for that I am extremely grateful.

• Shocker: Jill Singer is selling some great lamps.

• Incidentally, I need this massive steam mop ASAP.

• I am always excited to hear the opinions of our very own Brock Colyar.

• And I am just as excited to listen to America, Actually from our sisters at Vox.com!

• Crossword.

• Cinematrix.

• Telematrix.

• Horoscopes.

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Good-bye for now! You will probably hear from me again when Olivia Rodrigo’s single “Drop Dead” drops on April 17. Our girl went full Angie Jordan “My Single Is Dropping” on that one.