The Magazine
September 26, 2016
Goings On
Bar Tab
A Bushwick Dive That Keeps It Clean
The Johnson’s serves two-dollar beers and four-dollar slushies in a room that’s a cross between a retro IHOP and a basement rec room.
Classical Music
The Rise of a Young Lithuanian Maestro
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, an exciting female talent, will make her New York début conducting the Juilliard Orchestra.
Art
A Man-About-Downtown Gets His Due
A retrospective of Walter Robinson’s bright, brushy paintings of pop imagery.
Goings On About Town
“Oh, Hello”: Skeezy-Nebbish Antics on Broadway
The new show stars the alter kakers George St. Geegland and Gil Faizon, who bear a curious resemblance to the comedians John Mulaney and Nick Kroll.
Tables for Two
Rich Refinement at Le Coucou
Many dishes at Daniel Rose’s preternaturally elegant French restaurant are not for the squeamish, or the dainty.
The Talk of the Town
Dept. of Earworms
Did Melania Trump Rickroll America?
Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up” became a viral Internet prank. Now he’s back, with his first U.S. release in twenty-three years.
One Man’s Trash
Making Art with Failed Banks
On the eighth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, Michael Mandiberg opens an exhibition that revolves around the logos of defunct institutions.
Dept. of Higher Education
Twenty-First-Century Alchemists
In the lab with a team of science historians who are attempting to re-create recipes from a sixteenth-century text.
Dept. of Predictions
A Presidential Predictor with a Perfect Record
The Monogram Shop sells cups emblazoned with candidates’ names. Since 2004, whoever’s cup has sold best has won the election.
Comment
Clinton’s Sick Days
As Hillary rested and Trump pulled even in the polls, Democratic Party leaders made cameo appearances on the campaign trail.
Reporting & Essays
Annals of Medicine
Bariatric Surgery: The Solution to Obesity?
Diet and exercise alone rarely help people lose weight and keep it off. Are operations the answer?
Profiles
Hari Nef, Model Citizen
How the transgender alt-glam scenester faces the demands of being a muse and a mouthpiece.
Letter from Washington
President Trump’s First Term
His campaign tells us a lot about what kind of Commander-in-Chief he would be.
A Reporter at Large
A Decade Lived in the Dark
Anna Lyndsey’s memoir of extreme light sensitivity got rave reviews—but doctors have doubts about her story.
Shouts & Murmurs
Shouts & Murmurs
The Book of Simon
Fiction
The Critics
Books
Jane Jacobs’s Street Smarts
What the urbanist and writer got so right about cities—and what she got wrong.
On Television
“Fleabag,” an Original Bad-Girl Comedy
The BBC series is a precision black-humor mechanism, a warped and affecting tale about one single woman’s existence.
Books
Making Sense of Modern Pornography
While the Internet has made porn ubiquitous, it has also thrown the industry into severe decline.
Books
Briefly Noted
The Current Cinema
“Eight Days a Week” and “Bridget Jones’s Baby”
Reviews of Ron Howard’s crowdsourced Beatles history and the latest installment of the franchise that stars Renée Zellweger.
Cartoons
1/15
“If you follow these guidelines, you should be out of your depth in no time.”
Cartoon Caption Contest
The Mail
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