In eighteenth-century England, a portrait wasn’t decoration—it was proof. Silk, jewels, posture, and pose all signaled rank. But when Thomas Gainsborough hung a courtesan beside a duchess, critics panicked. Because if status is just silk and posture… who exactly gets to look important?
Critics say this year’s Whitney Biennial is too sentimental, too loose, too eager to please. Maybe. But what it actually does is something rarer. It pulls the everyday realities of American life into the same frame and asks us to recognize ourselves in it.
I’ve been to Broadway shows, rooftop parties, and ball-adjacent spectacles that promised magic and delivered… content. The Burns Night Reeling Ball in NYC actually delivered—kilts, whiskey, live music, strangers spinning into friends, and the kind of joy New York rarely allows itself.
Neil’s dubbing the biannual event “Manhattanhenge” was an homage to Hawkins, but also a reference to the fact that future civilizations might think the phenomenon was deliberate. What will our descendants think when they dig up this meticulously-numbered grid, designed to glow on the most random of spring nights?
The SoHo Playhouse’s Fringe Encore series brings standout acts from international festivals to New York for a limited Off-Broadway run. Among them is a wave of Australian comedians, including Elouise Eftos, whose provocative show Australia’s First Attractive Comedian challenges the expectations placed on women in comedy.
A rising band, a dead sister, and the strange theater of the music industry collide in The Future Saints. The novel offers cinematic scenes and California glamour, even if its emotional depth sometimes feels imagined rather than lived.
In Windfall, Tarell Alvin McCraney asks a devastating question: what happens when a city budgets for your child’s death? Set in a near-future America that feels uncomfortably present, the play follows a father offered a government settlement after state violence takes his child. The money could save his home—but at what moral cost? In this preview, we explore how Windfall turns policy into heartbreak and forces audiences to confront the true price of “blood money.”
Let's hear it for Le Dive who decided not to have a menu full of 45 different obscure wines that no one gives a shit about! Five categories...one to three choices in each. Boom. We're more than grateful.
In eighteenth-century England, a portrait wasn’t decoration—it was proof. Silk, jewels, posture, and pose all signaled rank. But when Thomas Gainsborough hung a courtesan beside a duchess, critics panicked. Because if status is just silk and posture… who exactly gets to look important?