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Weimar Vibes: Taking in “Cabaret” and the Neue Galerie in the time of Trump

Rebecca Saltzman

Several months into Donald Trump’s second term, a friend dragged me to Cabaret. The Broadway revival had begun during the Biden administration, when it felt like, perhaps, the center still might hold. Now the rough beast had returned, like the horror movie villain you think you’ve defeated: ominous music, tiny orange hand catching the door right before you can slam it shut. I was less than eager to spend several hours at a musical about

Yas, King: El Daña, Mo B. Dick, and Buck Wylde Talk Three Generations of Drag

Tinamarie Ivey

Left to right: Mo B. DIck, El Daña, and Buck Wylde at the King of Drag premier, 2025. I attended my first drag king show in 2018. Two friends invited me to join them at Spectrum, a queer nightclub in Eugene, Oregon. I’d seen quite a few drag queen shows by then—audiences packed with bachelorette parties and tourists seeking exotic experiences—but the atmosphere at Spectrum was intimate and insurgent. The room pulsed with a collective

Live from Red Dora’s Bearded Lady

Cindy Crabb

On The Way To Folsom St. Fair, 1994. Photo by Chloe Sherman. The Bearded Lady opened in San Francisco on Fourteenth and Guerrero in 1992, born out of the need for a lesbian-centered meeting and performance space. “Our only idea was we were going to have a coffee machine and a wrestling mat,” recalls cofounder Harry Dodge. Cindy Crabb’s manuscript for The Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe: An Oral History of the San Francisco Dyke Scene,

The Virgin

Katie Cappiello

Scene: Between 4–6 BC. The home of MARY, JOACHIM, and ANNE. Minimalist (obviously). MARY, 13, is on her knees scrubbing robes in a large tub. In the midst of her work, MARY tugs a bucket toward her and vomits. She smiles with relief until the nausea overtakes her again. She vomits. ANNE, 54, enters carrying more laundry. She waves at the air. It reeks. ANNE. Too much wine for you, Mary. I’ve told . .

Mercedes Matter at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, NY, September 5–October 4, 2025

Charis Caputo

Mercedes Matter, Untitled (Main Landscape), c. 1957, oil on board, 16 × 20 in., Estate of Mercedes Matter, courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery, New York. “A young person studying art today steps into a particularly confusing situation,” wrote Mercedes Matter in 1963. “The extraordinary kaleidoscope of events of the twentieth century, of movements following so closely one upon another, of extremes absurd and great, of ideas canceling each other out and recurrent Dada and anti-art,

“Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us,” a two-part retrospective of thirty films

Mindy Aloff

Presented by the Japan Society and Metrograph, New York City, 2025 Mikio Naruse. Photo © Toho. In the United States, the term “women’s picture” generally refers to a film, released between the 1930s and the end of the century, with a melodramatic story concerning women’s emotions, presented from a woman’s point of view. The melodramas are often exaggerated in their details of relationships, and the most important relationships tend to be between women. They rarely

“New York Love Stories” on the Criterion Channel

Charis Caputo

Courtesy of the Criterion Channel. Joan Micklin Silver’s romantic comedy Crossing Delancey (1988) opens in a dimly lit bookstore on the Upper East Side. “They want to pull us down and make something clean and tall and obscenely profitable arise out of our ashes,” the bookstore’s owner tells a group of literary luminaries assembled for a fundraiser. “But we are here! . . . New York’s last real bookstore will be around for a good

On the Sixtieth Anniversary of Agnès Varda’s “Le bonheur”

Meg Whiteford

A still from Le bonheur (1965). In the summer in New York City, every bodega you pass sells flowers, and every bodega selling flowers sells sunflowers, which do look a lot like the sun as a child might draw the sun: with distinct triangular rays and a smiling brown face in the center. Sixty years ago, Agnès Varda opened her film Le bonheur with an image of a sunflower, a florist’s symbol of loyalty. Did

How Liz Wallace’s “The Rule” Became Alison’s “Bechdel Test”

Mary-Kate Wilson

The Bechdel Test has become shorthand, a feminist seal of approval for movie goers who care about broadening roles for broads. Alison Bechdel’s papers at Smith College’s women’s history collection offer a fascinating glimpse into her creative process making Dykes to Watch Out For, including an installment in 1986 titled “The Rule” that spawned her most far-reaching contribution to culture. Bechdel’s first drafts tended to be notes scrawled on a storyboard, no images yet, with

Sandwiches

Pat Lipsky

Many times, on studio visits to friends, when I didn’t entirely love the work,I would exclaim, “Beautiful loft.” After, when we had left the neighborhood forever and life had become quiet and difficult, I thought about the parties. Every day in SoHo was the same: you worked, drank, stayed up late. Weekends didn’t matter. So parties came on Tuesday or Thursday, after openings. The whole pregame ritual of it—pulling on jeans and a sweater, doing

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