In the lead-up to New York fashion week, Vogue released a late summer surprise: a special canine package featuring sixteen celebrity dogs. On one of its twelve digital covers, Sydney Sweeney’s rescue pitbull mix, Tank, floats on some pillows in a Los Angeles pool. On others, Glen Powell’s Brisket mugs in his movie premiere attire, and Mariah Carey’s Mutley poses by a grand piano in his “home in Connecticut.” Interviews with proud pet owners dig into profound questions like, “What is the most dog thing your dog does?” and “Who would voice your dog in a movie?” (“A.I. Tupac,” apparently, for ASAP Ferg’s Australian Shepherd named KrasH.) Ultimately, Dogue fails to bridge the gap between celebrity culture and the quotidian, reaffirming that stars are not just like us, and neither are their dogs.

“You don’t get the sentences you don’t make / back,” a line from Graham Foust’s latest collection, is as good a sales pitch for the act of writing poetry as anything cooked up by the MFA industry. To read a poet like Foust (master of the double negative, of playful doubling-back) is to confront the sly devices of the English sentence. There is pleasure in Foust’s constructions, but also in the labor of delayed gratification. “Sun through / a wound // in some plastic / wrap caught // on wire around / a field I’m not in, // and then that / image caved in, // carved out, raved / up into cultural glue,” Foust writes. At a moment when literary forms have come under pressure to offer something like justification for their own existence, Foust withholds anything of the kind. Indeed, Terminations testifies that poetry today is still as useless as ever. Foust: “As to knowing what / to do, I have nothing / to say.”

If you’re going out of town and your friends are unwilling to babysit your car on short notice, and the same car is saddled with a string of delinquent parking tickets, you could do worse than to use the long-term parking service at TWA Hotel, “the only on-airport hotel at New York’s JFK International Airport.” Designed by Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen and constructed in 1962, when JFK was still called Idlewild, the curvaceous “head house” of the defunct Trans World Airlines is nowadays a try-hard nostalgia trap posing as a vacation destination. Across the penny-tiled foyer, enjoy the famous Sunken Lounge, done up in red and filled with white-backed tulip chairs in which you may swivel at your leisure so as to better peer through the grandiose faux-cockpit window at what is now Terminal 5 (JetBlue). But the real draw, I’m told, is the rooftop deck, where visitors can take in the timeless scent of jet exhaust while floating in an infinity pool beneath the permanent crosshatch of contrails overhead. All this, plus — I have it on good authority — the on-site garage is infrequently visited by tow trucks.

In Kelly Reichardt’s debut feature, now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, new acquaintances Cozy and Lee embark on a crime spree across a patch of no-man’s-land between Broward and Dade Counties. Cozy, an ennui-ridden housewife and the Bonnie to Lee’s Clyde, narrates the duo’s escapades, which include stealing unattended shirts from a laundromat and a half-eaten rotisserie chicken from Lee’s family home. She romanticizes her days on the extremely small-time lam with a self-mythologizing desperation: “I could feel the butterflies in my stomach as I tumbled deeper into a life of crime.” Much like the film, she quickly moves on from her husband and kids at home as she tries to discover “where all those highways headin.’” Cozy finally manages to reach terminal velocity by committing an actual felony, then finds herself thrust into the first thrill of her new life: bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-95.

In September, the noted designer label-wearer and Zero Bond enthusiast Eric Adams joined a storied lineage of New York City mayors when he was indicted on charges of bribery, wire fraud, and conspiracy, in part related to $123,000 worth of luxury travel benefits. In 1932, Jimmy Walker, known for his flamboyant suits, his patronage of speakeasies, and his penchant for “chorus girls,” was forced out by FDR for, among other charges, personally accepting one million dollars in bribes. In 1872, A. Oakey Hall, or “Elegant Oakey,” infamous for his dapper style and partying with Walt Whitman’s bohemian milieu, faced criminal charges related to Boss Tweed’s corruption racket. Plenty of NYC mayors have skirted consequences for open grift on their watch: take, for instance, Ed Koch and the Parking Violations Bureau scandal, or Bill de Blasio and donor kickbacks at City Hall. Given that those incidents went unpunished, one has to wonder if these three clotheshorses’ real crime was not corruption, but revelry, panache, and swagger.

The Power Broker turns fifty this year, and so do the animating ideas behind the $120 million movie Francis Ford Coppola refinanced his winery in order to fund. This impassioned defense of Robert Moses-style slum clearance features Adam Driver as a Nobel-winning scientist-architect who can stop time but chooses not to do so in potentially useful moments — like when pieces of a Soviet satellite are falling onto Manhattan, or when a child holds a gun to his face, or when a mob attacks him because his evil billionaire cousin has inexplicably projected a deepfake of him having sex with a “virgin” pop star on a huge screen in Madison Square Garden. The film is set in a mash-up of New York and ancient Rome; the classicist Mary Beard served as an adviser. So did “architectural consultant” Neri Oxman, the famed ex-MIT academic, Bill Ackman spouse, and alleged Wikipedia plagiarist (who even makes a brief cameo as a surgeon performing a face graft on Driver after the aforementioned child-shooting incident). In the end, when Driver proclaims that the city of the future will be a utopia — and utopia just means a space for free and open debate — the mobs forgive him for demolishing their homes and kill the demagogue who’s been riling them up. Coppola has been trying to make this movie since the late seventies, so eager was he to get out his message. The message in question? Makes The Fountainhead look ideologically coherent.

In the American Ballet Theatre’s heavy-handed adaptation of Laura Esquivel’s best-selling 1989 novel, fist-pounding illustrates frustration, ribbon-tying symbolizes marriage, and flat characters dance next to instead of with each other. At its best, ballet consists of revelatory movements constrained by the absence of speech; here, choreographer Christopher Wheeldon opts for an overly literal gestural language instead. The ballet’s few moments of strong physicality stem from gestures already described in the book — as when a wedding cake causes guests to vomit from sadness.

This slime-themed play space, founded in 2019, is Willy Wonka’s factory for children raised in the epoch of micro trends: picture colorful vats of “hand crafted, artisanal slime,” a slime lake, and pipes that shower aquarium-blue slime from the ceiling onto participants for an added fee. “Parents are looking at how to get their children off screens,” says Nicole Shanahan, who helped Sloomoo raise $5.8 million in Series A funding before joining RFK Jr.’s ill-fated presidential ticket. (The Drift’s fact-checkers could neither confirm nor refute that Sloomoo’s proprietary formula includes “whale juice.”) Come for an afternoon of fun, stay for the chance to be named in a class action lawsuit for chemical poisoning.

With a plot inspired by The Silence of the Lambs and a marketing rollout reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, Oz Perkins’s latest horror flick follows FBI agent Lee Harker as she hunts a birthday-obsessed, cipher-writing, gender bending serial killer. But the director’s references and pastiche do not save the story from feeling as monotonous as the protagonist’s voice and as hollow as the dolls that prove key to the killings. Perhaps Longlegs should have borrowed more from its inspirations — with, say, a character study of its titular villain à la Hannibal Lecter. Instead, we spend most of our solo time with Longlegs watching him pick up earplugs and threaten no one in particular at a hardware store.

An aughts Welsh indie group still striving for Midwest emo stardom, Los Campesinos! should be extremely annoying. Their vocals are nasal and their titles adolescent enough — “Adult Acne Stigmata,” “kms,” “To Hell in a Handjob” — that they could pass for local in any St. Louis basement. Instead, their first studio album since the Trump administration proves one of the most affecting of the year. The melodies are crystalline, and the lyrics pass right through solipsism into wan sincerity, inflected with unsubtle anglicisms (there’s an entire song about praying to soccer league rankings). It’s an effective road map for a British invasion narrowly focused on playlists belonging to the saddest teenagers in suburban Illinois.

Initially, I imagined the energetic breadth of Kim Gordon’s latest concert series — which spanned some three dozen cities in six months — might have been a rejoinder to her ex-Sonic Youth and ex-matrimonial partner Thurston Moore’s cliched decampment for an associate two decades his junior. But the project is about more than scoring points. At Basilica Hudson, her throaty monotone was backed by percussion so thunderous it felt like standing underneath a Sikorsky helicopter continuously taking off for an hour. “BYE BYE,” a distorted trap-rock recitation of her packing list, sounds like her escape, or a send-off. In a way it was: it both opened and closed the show.

Avant-garde filmmaker Jerome Hiler embellishes cinema’s long-standing devotional tendencies in his new visual lecture, screened this summer at the Museum of Modern Art. Hiler’s case that medieval stained glass in the churches of England and northern France was proto-cinematic mass media is mostly an excuse to feature these unsigned masterpieces — starry pools that confound the eye with their delicacy and scale — up close. What’s left unsaid is right there on the surface: the material, celluloid cinema of Hiler’s era could soon, like the Chartres glaziers’ tempered-color technique, be lost to time.

A book about doing psychedelics, going to raves, Berghain, a bad heterosexual relationship, and moving to Bushwick: a murderers’ row of potentially annoying subjects. But Witt transforms them through virtuosic observation in heroically restrained prose — like Joan Didion posting on Erowid. The narrator is a hypnotic avatar of female abjection in the vein of Jean Rhys and Anna Kavan. In a just world, this memoir would serve as a death knell for the dominant humble bragging style of millennial life writing. Many readers I know inhaled the compulsively shareable PDF galley overnight, or in a day — though I do wonder if others also skimmed the sections on protests and U.S. politics, which suggest that even a writer as gifted as Witt can’t make Donald Trump’s America that interesting. But I’d read her on just about anything else.

Mati Diop’s latest feature trails 26 royal artifacts on their journey from France to Benin, interweaving glossy unboxing shots of bronze and wooden statues with footage of a debate among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi about the politics of restitution. While some herald the return of these objects as a cultural cure-all, others eye them suspiciously as nationalist props in a Fanonian pantomime. Triumph of justice or liberal coup de grâce? Diop resolves the matter by endowing one of the artifacts with an auto-tuned voice, whose hackneyed monologue implies that all these objects ever wanted was to come home. “I am the face of metamorphosis,” it says. “I’ll no longer mull over my incarceration in the caverns of the civilized world.”

Conveniently located in eleven states, as well as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Spain, the U.K., and Japan, this folksy favorite is owned and operated by the Twelve Tribes, a Christian fundamentalist sect whose track record of alleged child abuse, labor exploitation, and racism has led some (like the Southern Poverty Law Center) to call it a cult. Vibe-wise, imagine if the Grateful Dead took a trip to Middle Earth: the Boulder, Colorado outpost features a groovy wall mural depicting Tribe members flying in a winged rainbow van, as well as rough-hewn wooden furniture and medieval folk instrumentals playing in the background. The platonic ideal of a deli: piping hot breakfast sandwiches, homemade cream cheese pie, and a chance to find, per the FAQ page, “new friends, a new job, a new hairstyle, a new address, and most importantly, a new Master, who will direct every aspect of your life.”

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled eleven million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, killing at least 250,000 aquatic animals and destroying billions of fish eggs. Today, the nearby city of Whittier is the embarkation point for multiple cruise lines, including Phillips Cruises and Tours, which launched in 1958 with a boat previously owned by the actor John Barrymore. From there, you can sail luxuriously into the Sound, sipping this locally sourced fourteen-dollar beverage — chilled with glacier ice the crew hauled in with its own net — as a park ranger narrates a sanitized version of Alaskan history. Order your drink on the rocks, while they last — two-thirds of the world’s glaciers may melt by the turn of the century.

In n+1 writer Richard Beck’s new book, no resource has been spared to preserve the feeling of scabbed-over mania that marked the aftermath of 9/11: the miniature American flags, the “freedom fries.” But for all the quirky dysfunction of those years, Beck reminds us that they also soft-launched a number of insidious contemporary crises. Sprawling and delightfully deadpan, Beck’s book links the War on Terror to just about everything, high and low, from the rise of superhero slop and the baffling popularity of the Hummer to the erosion of government accountability, the creation of the surveillance state, and the disarming of international law. “History is something that you have to try to understand even as you live through it,” Beck writes in the introduction. His book offers a weighty substitute for anyone who didn’t.

An ex-vicar, an archaeologist, and an aristocrat walk into a podcast studio. Each episode, the cheerful trio dives into esoteric trivia (think: the bones of Saint Peter, an exploding whale, ancient dental plaque, memories of Eton, the Finnish practice of giving PhD graduates ceremonial swords). The former vicar is Richard Coles, who before taking the cloth played in the ’80s pop group The Communards. The archaeologist, Cat Jarman, specializes in the radiocarbon dating of Viking-era human remains. The aristocrat? Earl Charles Spencer, brother of Princess Diana.

Garth Greenwell’s latest follows an unnamed gay poet who is plunged into a health crisis, prompting a reappraisal of his relationships and recent history. Greenwell posits the sick body as a submissive losing control both of its physical autonomy and the capacity to separate art from life. The book is at its best when it is brutal and erotic: in one scene, the narrator sucks on his partner’s tongue and gets dizzy; in another, the pair rekindle their romance amid the chaos of an ICU after a detailed examination of stool. But for all the excrement involved, the narrative itself proves relatively tidy. Maybe the reigning king of gay autofiction needs love to win.

An aging fitness instructor (Demi Moore) in health-obsessed L.A. takes a drug that spawns a younger, better version of herself (Margaret Qualley), and the two begin to battle for supremacy. From the awkward title cards and jump cuts to the montages of slick bodies and chickens, the film isn’t scary so much as grotesque. It’s been touted as a feminist parable, but Moore’s insistence on destroying her younger, better self makes it seem more like an excuse to watch two hot women fight. After 130 minutes, I found myself hoping a better, shorter version might take over the movie too.

The Harlem Globetrotters meet Rocky Horror for guys with mullets in a Republican way. This baseball-team-cum-circus-troupe is sweeping the nation; as of this writing, it has more TikTok followers than any MLB team. Fans put their names into a lottery months in advance, hoping to experience what the team insists is “the greatest show in sports.” And it might be true: there’s a player on stilts, and another who sings pop music; a squad of “dad bod” cheerleaders; and an emcee in a blinding, disco-silver blazer who calls himself “The Young Professor.” The fat is trimmed and the volume is dialed up. Pitches come whip-fast, as everything from Bruno Mars to the Burger King jingle blares in schizophrenic ten-second clips from stadium speakers. The whole first inning lasts less than ten minutes, while the pregame show runs over two hours. Sport, it seems, yearns for theater.

For its twentieth anniversary, Mamoru Oshii’s 2004 follow-up to his 1995 feature Ghost in the Shell was redistributed across North America last June. The standalone sequel follows a stoic cyborg counterterrorist as he investigates a line of artificially intelligent sex dolls that turn homicidal. The sumptuously animated feature was tailed by a sixteen-minute documentary on its production and loss at Cannes, where the first film’s reputation led the second to be the only anime ever to compete for the Palme D’Or. Innocence lacks a bibliography for its dialogue’s many, many unattributed aphorisms and allusions. (Wikipedia attempts a partial one: “Buddha, Confucius, Descartes, the Old Testament, Meiji-era critic Saitō Ryokuu, Richard Dawkins, Max Weber, Jacob Grimm, Plato, John Milton, 14th-century playwright Zeami Motokiyo, the Tridentine Mass, and Julien Offray de La Mettrie.”) The result is a snapshot of a future in which our personal A.I. bots stage spectacular shoot-outs and metaphysical denouements instead of just drafting our LinkedIn posts.

The narrator of Flann O’Brien’s 1939 classic At Swim-Two-Birds proposes that “the entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required” and that “the modern novel should be largely a work of reference.” Swap out literature for cinema, and you’ll find this absurdist-modernist creed realized in Despicable Me 4, which eschews plot for a series of barely related episodes that functions mainly to reference previous films. Not only the venerable Despicable Me Minions cinematic universe — which already boasts six titles — but also franchises as diverse as Terminator, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, and James Bond. Where we’re headed, it seems, is a “cinema-cinematic Universe,” in which movies are only ever about one thing: other movies. The good news is you probably won’t need to see them.

Depending on who you ask, Ron Spencer is either a shady ex-trucker or a wonder-working messiah. His nom de guru is Buddha Maitreya the Yogi Christ, and he is regarded by acolytes as the reincarnation of Jesus, Krishna, the prophet Enoch, and a pantheon of other holy men swirled together. He has a modest following in the U.S., including a core group that lives in shimmering white domes at a gated ashram atop a crumbling hill in the California mountains. Spencer rarely plays in-person gigs, but he has produced hours of spacey, multi-layered soundscapes he calls Soul Therapy, in which he pounds drums, rings bells, chants warbling om’s, and performs sermonic riffs, in effect channeling the spiritual leaders of whom he is meant to be the avatar. The music is worth a close listen, preferably in one of the domes, lying beneath a crystal-studded pyramid. At once cringe, camp, and eerily transcendent: cult classics.

Cher was on the cutting edge of celebrity entrepreneurship in the mid-nineties with this short-lived mail-order catalog. The self-financed “coffee-table book you can order from,” as she described it, ultimately folded due to “mismanagement and order-fulfillment problems.” While it lasted, the collection boasted a global Ren Faire aesthetic, lots of wrought iron and fleurs-de-lis, and the kinds of furnishings with which Anne Rice might appoint her boudoir. Put on 1974’s “Dark Lady,” flip through the glossy pages, and contemplate the Sanctuary Chainmail Helmet Candlestand ($179.95), the Sheriff of Nottingham Tax Box ($49.95), and maybe even the Wrought Iron Candelabrum ($239). You can practically smell the Sanctuary tuberose incense — a Cher favorite, according to the product blurb. The rare physical copy can be found on Etsy, but if you dial the 1-800 number to order a Scroll Heart necklace ($24.95) from the Fall/Holiday 1995 issue, you’ll be offered a medical alert device with a monitoring service instead.