Eminence Front followed by Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing is a solid double header as bar music
My double review of Clare Barron’s You Got Older and Wallace Shawn’s What We Did Before Our Moth Days, two wildly contrasting Dad plays, each of them chewy, moving & excellent: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
The piece also reminded me of how South Park— itself a big part of the edgy-nihilism, feminism-scorning wave!— managed to nail this particular phenomenon. (This is from my 2017 piece How Jokes Won the Election www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...:
Someone in NYC should do interviews with middle-school kids who take the subway to and from school every day, to see if they have any advice for Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy who can't seem to go a single day without pissing himself in fear over them.
That’s the thing! There’s a wild, colorful tradition of this brand of “edgy.” Ariana Huffington first came on the scene when she published a splashy anti-feminist book when she was still in college… there are so many variations on this story! Back to popular female anti-suffragists
This is a good & infuriating piece about a putrid phenomenon — one intensified by all the punditry of the last decade that rolled its eyes at feminist analysis. There’s ALWAYS been a living available to women who vibed as “not like other girls,” in every decade, especially in the media
oh fuck off
Mindblowing & brainfeeding article about how AI has changed coding by the fabulous @clivethompson.bsky.social, who worked his ass off interviewing more than 70 people in the industry. Contains the word “panjandrums”:
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/m...
"Questions are flying, ever since the start of Sepharax the Cruel’s Thousand-Year Blood Reign. Whether it’s the Pit of Souls or the Child Reapers, there’s a lot to be worried about. But most of all? The price at the pump."
I think it had some of the same origin: the people ON the show were always talking about how smart they were, therefore the show itself had to be exceptionally smart
This is not the same kind of interaction but the amount of otherwise lovely people I’ve met on college campuses who have tried to bond with me by assuming that I’d agree that The Newsroom was one of the best shows ever on television and that Americans were just too dumb to understand it is HIGH
Guys, this is Senator @chrismurphyct.bsky.social. You need to read it all. He's CONFIRMING what many of us already suspected about this war.
I can tell you Trump is 100% lying trying to make out like the US is wrapping it up.
as someone who monitors right wing media, its under discussed right now but i can tell you conservatives are absolutely terrified of the way talarico is using religious messaging against them
GOD BLESS YOU, social media for the win
Right? My eyes nearly popped out of my head
Haha, yes. According to Ross, he wrote a bunch of songs, including "Empty Town," "Something Up My Sleeve," "Save It, Pretty Poppa, Save It For Me"... & a song about Ross called "Thank You For Being The Girl You Are," which he copyrighted under the pseudonym David Hope. SOMEONE PLEASE FIND IT
so when he knew her, she was writing proto-Goldberg bits based on hotel gossip. He was into show tunes and wanted to be a songwriter! She married an older British chemist who had visited the hotel, but now I'm imagining an alternate history in which Shawn & Berg stayed together & wrote Bway musicals
The story makes sense— the hotel Berg's Dad ran had a clientele of people just like Shawn's family, middle-class Jews from Chicago. But it's so funny to imagine the two of them hanging out... In her teens, she was running the theater program at the hotel, doing skits for guests
(For the children who do not know, Berg was the OG TV showrunner—she created the very first family sitcom, The Goldbergs: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...)
Sooo, I read Lillian Ross' memoir Here But Not Here this week and stumbled upon a detail that felt designed *specifically* for me: when TNY editor-in-chief William Shawn was in his teens, his family visited the Catskills and he had a summer romance with GERTRUDE BERG
The Amazing Race took off 25 years ago this week, and I have some amazing behind-the-scenes stories for you! #AmazingRace #RealityTV
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I wavered between the two, but my recent piece about the TV blacklist knocked me back to the 40s
Let's expand this please
I already lived through young people being wrongly nostalgic about NY in the 80s, must I live through them being wrongly nostalgic (or at least, nostalgic about the wrong things) about NY in the 90s! Go back in time to being correctly nostalgic about NY in the 1970s and 1940s, like me!
Today, the Academy announced its final lineup of presenters alongside one truly earth-shattering revelation: Comedian, actor, musician, and vocal maestro Matt Berry will be this year’s announcer.
Another tough day for team “there’s no point in complaining about AI, just accept it.”
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That’s beautiful!