“Tired but Full of Joy”: Greenpoint’s New Comedy Club is a Testament to Independent Artists
Opened by longtime NYC comedian Jeremy Pinsly, Greenpoint Comedy Club was founded on the belief that comedy works best when it feels communal. The new Brooklyn venue combines standout lineups with an atmosphere designed as much for hanging out as the performances themselves.
Mystic Caviar and the Art of Actually Talking to Strangers
Mystic Caviar blended champagne, tarot, contemporary art, and actual conversation into the kind of New York night people swear no longer exists. Inside Tara Downs Gallery, strangers debated art, pulled cards, and remembered what community can feel like in the city.
Inside the Dystopian Fever Dream of Chalk Outline Portal
Created by immersive theater veterans Ingrid Kapteyn and Tony Bordonaro, Chalk Outline Portal turns Theaterlab into a sensory-heavy dystopian game room where dance, gaming, intimacy, and audience participation blur together in chaotic and thrilling ways.
Dysfunctional Politicians and Dysfunctional Train Riders (Us)
The MTA is filthy, delayed, underfunded, and somehow deeply beloved. New Yorkers spend hours trapped underground complaining about the subway while simultaneously defending it with religious fervor. This is a city that learned to romanticize infrastructural collapse.
REVIEW: Lake Effect By Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
Set against the gray heaviness of Rochester winters, Lake Effect explores adultery, family fallout, and emotional stagnation with sharp observations about suburban life. Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney captures Upstate New York beautifully, even if the novel’s emotional complexity doesn’t always hit as hard as it wants to.
The Tank Throws the Gala New York Actually Needs
The Tank’s Off-Off-Runway Gala was more than a fundraiser. It was a reminder that New York’s arts scene survives because people are still willing to fight for rehearsal rooms, weird ideas, and emerging artists in a city increasingly hostile to all three.
Well, I’ll Let You Go does not, in fact, let go. Not for a moment.
Bubba Weiler’s Well, I’ll Let You Go is the kind of play that makes your chin tremble before you even realize you’re about to cry. Refusing clean structure and easy catharsis, the Studio Seaview production unfolds like overheard grief: messy, anxious, strange, and painfully human.
The Messy Lesbian, the Saturn Return, and the Search for Chosen Family
At a warm queer gathering in Brooklyn Heights, conversations about astrology, messy lesbians, and coming-of-age relationships revealed something deeper beneath the tarot cards and cosmic language: the difficult work of building chosen family.
Lagom, Aquavit, and the Herring Queen: Scandinavia House Throws the Perfect Party
Scandinavia House’s Craft Your Own Aquavit event was the rare cultural program that actually felt alive. Guests blended their own aquavit, sang Scandinavian drinking songs, ate incredible food from Björk Café & Bistro’s Ulrika Bengtsson, and turned a museum event into a genuine party.
The Best Party in Brooklyn Is Also Theater
Canciones is less like attending immersive theater and more like accidentally being folded into someone’s loud, loving, emotionally complicated family party. With soulful live mariachi music, fresh tamales, porch chisme, and performances so intimate they feel overheard rather than staged, it’s one of the most restorative and memorable theater experiences I’ve had in years.
At New York Historical, Indigenous Art Reclaims the American Story
At New York Historical, “House Made of Dawn: Art by Native Americans 1880 to Now” explores Indigenous history and identity through more than a century of paintings, photography, sculpture, and mixed media. The exhibit feels less like a traditional retrospective and more like a reclaiming of perspective.
Review: Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez
Xochitl Gonzalez’s Last Night in Brooklyn captures an early-2000s Brooklyn that felt communal, ambitious, and alive. Moving between artists, finance types, parties, and Fort Greene apartments, the novel remembers a version of New York that increasingly feels difficult to hold onto.
Beauty Freak Review: A Bold Play About a Filmmaker Entangled with Nazi Power
A visually striking, tightly directed production, Beauty Freak examines the rise of a filmmaker whose success is inseparable from Nazi power. It is a smart, unsettling play about ambition, denial, and the cost of looking away.
A Life Lived Mostly in Letters - a Review of The Correspondent
A quiet, slow-burning novel about a woman who feels like an outsider in her own life. Nothing neatly resolves—and that’s exactly why it lingers.
David Szalay on Flesh, the Booker Prize, and Writing at the 92nd Street Y
Winning the Booker Prize sounds glamorous. According to David Szalay, it’s mostly unbearable. In a packed room at the 92nd Street Y, he spoke with Sam Lipsyte about Flesh, the tension between desire and disgust, and why he refuses to let his protagonist explain himself.
An Interview With LuLu Braunstein and Lisa Anne Morrison of The Menopause Monologues
Menopause Monologues takes on a subject long ignored, blending humor, frustration, and real experience to expose just how much women are still not told about their own bodies.
Three Very Different Shows, One Very Fringe Experience
A dramedy about friendship and longing, a scrappy cultural sketch show, and a heartfelt solo musical. Three Fringe picks, three completely different outcomes, and a reminder that the risk is the point.
Schmigadoon! Finds Its Sweet Spot on Broadway
What plays like a repetitive gag on screen comes alive onstage. Schmigadoon! trades small-screen irony for full-scale theatrical joy, landing as a sharp, affectionate parody that actually works better live.
REVIEW of Becco: A Little Tight, A Lot of Pasta
At Becco, the pasta keeps coming, the tables keep closing in, and somehow it all works. A pre-theater staple where unlimited pasta meets a dining room full of strangers who may or may not become part of your night.
SUbway Take
A subway card gets a full-blown funeral, complete with eulogies, processions, and “swipe swipe” chants, but beneath the spectacle is something real: the slow death of a New York icon. From its chaotic 90s debut to its final days in a contactless world, the MetroCard wasn’t just a way to get around, it was a personality, a ritual, a piece of the city’s pulse.