It seems no less than highly appropriate that when Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London first appeared in 1964 it was purchasable from one of a hundred automatic book-vending machines that had been installed in a selection of inner-London train stations just two years earlier. Sadly, these machines, operated by the British Automatic Company, were short-lived. Persistent vandalism and theft saw them axed during the so-called Summer of Love, by which time, and perhaps thanks to Doctor Who’s then-recent battles with mechanoid Cybermen, the shine had rather come off the idea of unfettered technological progress. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its malevolent supercomputer HAL 9000, after all, lay only a few months away. And so too, did the partial collapse of the Ronan Point high-rise (a space-age monolith of sorts) in Canning Town, East London—an event widely credited with helping to turn the general public against modernist architecture.

As it was, Nairn’s book was published in the middle of a general election campaign that saw the Labour Party’s Harold Wilson become prime minister on the promise of building “a new Britain” forged in the “white heat” of a “scientific revolution.” And Modern Buildings in London is, for the most part, optimistic, or least vaguely hopeful, about what the future might bring—or definitely far more so than much of Nairn’s subsequent output. This is an observation rather than a criticism. In many respects, his growing disillusionment with the quality of new buildings in Britain was not unjustified. Modern Buildings in London finds Nairn at the peak of his powers; it is a book studded with as many pithy observations and startling thoughts as cloves in a ham. Not unlike D. H. Lawrence in his essays and travel books, Nairn’s sentences appear almost to jump-start, as if landing halfway through, punchy opinions falling instantly in quick-fire lines shorn of any unnecessary preamble or padding. Like in Lawrence, there is rage here, much of it directed toward the London County Council and their municipal architects and planners. Of the LCC’s handiwork in the Clive Street neighborhood of Stepney, he bluntly states: “I am too angry to write much about it,” before going on to argue that the old streets by comparison had “ten times more understanding of how people live and behave.”

This week, the Review‘s staff and friends are enjoying a drop in temperatures in New York City and the beginning of the August slowdown. Here’s what we’re looking forward to around town:

“Not Tacos” at Yellow Rose, August (6 and) 7: The downtown restaurant Yellow Rose is known for, primarily, tacos. (And really good frozen drinks.) But friend of the Review and meat purveyor Tim Ring recommends their upcoming collaboration with the Vietnamese food pop-up Ha’s Đặc Biệt that will explicitly not be tacos. Or will it? Their event poster features the words “Esto no es un taco” in Magritte-like font below what might or might not be a taco, depending on your definition.

Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce Theater, August 1–12: August is normally a quiet month for dance in New York City—for professional dance, at least. (We like to imagine that many people are dancing on their own.) But with the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet on hiatus, our engagement editor, Cami Jacobson, recommends seeing the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce. This series will include some of Morris’s lesser-known pieces and be set to live music, in what Jacobson describes as an “unusually small, intimate theater” for seeing dance.  

An overnight trip to the Irish Pub in Atlantic City, anytime: The Review’s Pulitzer Prize–winning contributor, friend, and Atlantic City expert Joshua Cohen writes in: “The Irish Pub, in Atlantic City, is the best bar I’ve ever slept at. But really, you can use their rooms for anything. At fifty dollars a night, the only thing cheaper is the beach, which is down the block.” 

The dessert landscape in New York is generally defined by extremes—by how far flavors can be taken from their origins. ChikaLicious, the East Village dessert bar that opened in 2003 and is run by the chef Chika Tillman, is good for the opposite reason: its success comes from its dishes’ almost extreme subtlety of taste. I ordered a three-course menu centered around the bar’s star dish, the Fromage Blanc Island Cheesecake, a kind of cheesecake mousse that’s served (ascetically) in the form of a mound, on a bed of ice, atop a pile of white dishes. It was preceded by an ice cream appetizer with kiwi syrup, and followed by a plate of small cubes that felt like what eating (delicious) chocolate-flavored air might be like. Unfortunately for the subtlety, every flavor was also mixed with the taste of my own blood, which continually seeped into my mouth due to a post-tooth-extraction wound I’d suffered the day before.

Surprisingly, the best dish wasn’t even a dessert but the Very Soft French Omelet, which had the texture of omu rice without the rice. It came topped with truffle butter, was served with an herb biscuit, and was so good that it made me question why Chika was making desserts at all. Our final dish of the night—which, as with the omelet, we ordered in addition to the three-course cheesecake menu—was a plate of pink peppercorn ice cream that I found disturbing only because of how much it literally tasted like peppercorn.

But the food, bloody or otherwise, didn’t even really matter: the cuteness of the bar ultimately took precedence. The entire space could fit about twenty people comfortably, with most of the seats lining the bar, which doubled as an open kitchen. Chika Tillman, a kind of silent spectacle, prepared every dish herself there, while wearing a signature bonnet that she’d had specially made from the pattern of a baby’s hat, while her bow-tied husband (a former jazz musician) served the food on an assortment of heavily patterned china (he let me come to the storage space in the back to handpick my teacup). During the hours I sat at the bar, multiple regulars came to check in with Chika, among them a former sous-chef from Bar Masa who insisted, graciously, that I take a picture of his dessert (something served in a tiny Crockpot). If it wasn’t for my deep-seated fear of intimacy, I imagined, half-delirious from the wound in my mouth, that I would like to become one of them someday—a regular.

—Patrick McGraw

It was 115 degrees outside when I left my house, around 5 P.M. My steering wheel was hot to the touch. So hot, in fact, that I had to steer with the bottom of my palms; some people store gloves in their car during the summer, but I keep forgetting. This was the second Friday of Las Vegas’s heat wave, our seventh consecutive day over 110 degrees. The National Weather Service had issued an excessive heat warning: “Dangerously hot afternoons with little overnight relief expected.” Emergency room doctors treated heat illness patients. At the airport, several passengers and crew members fainted after a plane sat without air conditioning on the tarmac for hours. A man was found dead on the sidewalk outside a homeless shelter.

I drove a few minutes downtown to a Deuce bus stop near Fremont Street, and when I parked I saw a woman in a one-piece swimsuit and tube socks posing for photos in a square of shade. My bus pulled up, and I climbed to the second level. We cruised south, down Las Vegas Boulevard, past wedding chapels and personal injury attorney billboards. The Deuce is my favorite way of traveling to the Strip.

At the Treasure Island stop, two women, their faces pink and perspiring, slid into the seats behind me. “I couldn’t stand there for much longer,” the first woman said.

As a response to challenges from the public and/or the state, several public libraries across the country have come to compromises with these bodies in terms of access to collection materials for minors. Among the compromises are library cards with age restrictions. In some facilities, all library cards for those under 18 have been made void and every child now needs to reapply for a new card with parental/guardian restriction choices on them. In other facilities, the new cards based on age are being implemented either when old cards expire or when a new card is requested. Age-restriction cards might look like limiting access to materials for those under 8 in one category, those in the 8-12 category, and/or those in the 12-18 category. Every library going this route is doing so a bit differently.

These cards not only go against everything a public library stands for, but they are a tool of censorship. And while it is a means of avoiding problems from the community or the state — so read this knowing most public libraries going this route are not doing so without a lot of thought — these age-restricted cards are opening up the potential for endless lawsuits at public libraries.

Although it is parents/guardians who will determine what card is appropriate for their child, that is where the parental responsibility ends. Now, every decision afterward falls explicitly on the public library. Knowing how litigious right-wingers pushing for such measures are, they, too, are fully aware that their “parental rights” arguments really mean they want to foist the real parental responsibilities off on underpaid, overworked, deeply battered public service workers like librarians (and educators, of course). Demanding a library create separate cards for different age groups and restrict certain materials based on those cards isn’t about parenting. It’s about ensuring you don’t actually have to parent. You get to sign off on a card and let the library handle it from there.

So for the libraries doing this, some questions.

What happens when a circulation worker miscategorizes one of the cards when a young person and their legal guardian signs up for one? This is not out of the realm of possibility in the least, particularly with how cumbersome such changes or modifications can be with an integrated library system (and especially if that system is shared among different libraries who are offering different “levels” of access). One wrong click and suddenly, right-wing mommy’s daughter, who is 16, has checked out Gender Queer, which is a no-no for card holders in the under 18 category. Who gets sued then? Is it the individual who made a mistake? Not likely; they won’t have money. It’ll be the library itself, putting the entire facility and its funding in a chokehold — again, this is precisely what that contingent of folks want to have happen.

Hi, Barbie! What books do you like to read? And what do those books say about who you are? This Barbie book quiz is designed to tell you exactly that. Are you more of a President Barbie or Mermaid Barbie? Maybe even Weird Barbie? We all have the Barbie we’d like to be, but which Barbie are we really?

Whether you loved the movie or just enjoy a good quiz, this Barbie quiz should give you a nice little serotonin boost. After all, Barbie (or at least the Barbie of the Barbie movie) is all about optimism and positivity. No matter which Barbie you get, it’s gonna be good news because all the Barbies are perfect! Well, except Weird Barbie, but we love her all the more for it.

Speaking of imperfect — at the time of writing, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are still fighting for fair wages and protections from the studios who continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith. Sounds like some serious corporate suits, if you ask me. *cue video of Mattel corporate riding the world’s longest tandem bike across the screen* Anyway, we all know which side of things Barbie would be on.

You can support the creatives and entertainers who make movies like Barbie possible through the Entertainment Community Fund.

Over the past couple of years, mental health has become a much more frequent topic of conversation. It’s refreshing to find more people discussing mental health with honesty, vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care. While we still have a ways to go as a society, I’m thankful for how much visibility mental health has now and how the stigma surrounding mental health has lessened. The more people talk about mental health conditions like anxiety, the more the stigma will erode and people will feel less alone in their experiences.

When it comes to anxiety, there are a number of resources available to help teens and young adults, from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s online resource center for anxiety to Teen Line, The Youth Mental Health Project, and more. Another Rioter created this handy guide to workbooks and books about anxiety as well.

Fiction books featuring characters navigating mental health conditions like anxiety can also provide incredibly impactful representation, emotional validation, and healing. These stories can help readers feel seen in their experiences with anxiety. The young adult years are a particularly unique and tender time of life, and helping teens with anxiety find their experiences in books can be life changing. Below, I’ve gathered together a selection of YA books featuring characters with anxiety. I hope these books help you or a teen in your life feel comforted and less alone.

There’s something so romantic about road trips. There’s so much potential romance fodder. Two people alone in a car for hours, beautiful scenery changing outside (perhaps even as the character’s hearts change), tensions inevitably escalating over the course of the trip. Then there’s a disagreement about the playlist or snack choices or which route to take that pushes one person too far and the conflict explodes all over the inside of the windshield and even gets stuck in the cup holders. But there’s nowhere for the characters to go in this middle place. They aren’t home, they’re not at their destination yet, so the only choice is to deal with the messy emotions before the journey ends.

Just like when they have to unexpectedly make an overnight pit stop, the only choice is to share the last remaining bed the motel/inn/bed and breakfast has. It’s just good sense, as Sarah MacLean says. The forced proximity makes tough emotions that have been buried surface in an expedited way that not much else can.

Road trip romances put the main characters in a pressure cooker. There’s a firm end to this arrangement, and if they don’t figure out their feelings by the time they get where they are going, it might be too late.

Have you enjoyed and savored picture books for years now, but you want to wear the big book pants now? Do books and novels without any pictures at all intimidate you a little? Do you want to find middle ground? Chapter books for 2nd graders are here to your rescue!

Chapter books are a great transition between picture books and more advanced reading. They are exciting, friendly, and filled with illustrations. But unlike picture books, they have a lot more words per page. They are also divided into tiny, digestible chapters that can be read in one sitting. A lot of chapter books are released as a part of a bigger series so you can get time to bond with the characters. You tend to feel fond of the characters and get invested in their story. They can be a wonderful way to help navigate home, school, and life by watching someone your age do so on the page.

The books in this list range from everyday events of a child’s life to learning science and even helping magical creatures together. What are you waiting for? Dive into this list of chapter books for 2nd graders to find your next favourite read!

Tarot cards have lingered on the edges of my imagination for several years. I was fascinated by how famous artists like Salvador Dali had made their own decks, drawing on their iconographic vocabularies. But recently, I came across a book that stopped me in my tracks: Claire McMillan’s recently released Alchemy of a Blackbird. Starting during World War II in Vichy France, the book tells the story of the friendship of artists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, who were on the outskirts of the surrealist movement. Tarot is a vital center of the book, starting with Varo’s desire to learn to read the cards, and it is used in the structure of several chapters.

Previously, I had encountered tarot cards in fiction in Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973). In it, a group of travelers meet in a castle and later a tavern, but all have lost the power of speech. They must use tarot cards to tell each other their stories with the corresponding cards in the margins of the book.

Between Calvino and McMillan’s works, I became fascinated by the use of tarot cards as a device in fiction. So I decided to talk with McMillan and explore scholarship about Calvino’s work to find out more.

While the book is mostly told from the point of view of Varo, McMillan ends almost every other chapter from the perspective of a different character in that chapter. Each one is represented with a tarot card. She wrote Varo’s chapter first and then went back to think about what type of card related to the character or energy of the scene. Creating her own definitions for the cards was one of the hardest parts of the book for her.

Most people know the late Harry Belafonte as a singer, but he was so much more than that. Born March 1, 1927, to Jamaican immigrant parents in Harlem, his birth name was Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr. He was raised Catholic (his father was of Sephardic Jewish descent as well as Afro-Jamaican, but Judaism is passed through the maternal line) and grew up in Harlem as well as Jamaica, where he lived with his grandmother for several years and first heard the work songs he would later record. Back in New York, he dropped out of high school to join the Navy and serve in World War II.

After the war, he found work as a janitor and — according to his memoir, My Song — was given tickets to the American Negro Theater. He fell in love with the theater and also met Sidney Poitier, who was nine days older than him. The two became fast friends, training together and pooling their money to go to as many shows as possible; they would take turns using a single ticket to get in, each describing the act they had just watched to the other as they switched places.

In the late 1940s, Belafonte took acting classes with the New School as well as performing with the American Negro Theater. He worked as a nightclub singer to pay for his lessons, backed by the Charlie Parker band. His singing landed him a contract with RCA Records in 1953, and he recorded with them for over 20 years. His debut record, Calypso, was the first album ever to sell 1 million copies and included the song “Day-O,” AKA the Banana Boat Song, which he said is “about men who sweat all day long, and they are underpaid, and they’re begging the tallyman to come and give them an honest count — counting the bananas that I’ve picked, so I can be paid.”

It’s no surprise that Belafonte considered himself an activist first and an artist second. He was extremely political, campaigning for John F. Kennedy and for Lyndon B. Johnson’s reelection after he succeeded Kennedy — and later opposing George W. Bush and supporting Barrack Obama and Bernie Sanders. But he is best known for his work in the Civil Rights movement, alongside his friends Sidney Poitier and Martin Luther King Jr. He financed King’s activism, organized the Freedom March on Washington where King delivered the I Have a Dream speech, and he bailed King out of jail during the 1963 Birmingham campaign, which was when his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was penned. He later organized “We Are the World,” performed at Live Aid, was a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, and campaigned to cure AIDS and raise awareness of prostate cancer, among other actions.

Somehow, he also found time to act, and a few of his films were bookish. His first movie, 1953’s Bright Road, was adapted from “See How They Run” by Mary Elizabeth Vroman and starred Dorothy Dandridge and a mostly Black cast. In 1970 he starred with Zero Mostel and Gloria Foster in The Angel Levine, based on a short story by Bernard Malamud. He appeared in 1992’s The Player, starring Tim Robbins and based on the book The Player by Michael Tolkin. And, in his final screen role, he appeared in BlacKkKlansman in 2018, based on Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth. (He also appeared in nearly everything directed by his friend Sidney Poitier.)

The other night, the performance artist Kembra Pfahler told me some top-drawer East Village Elizabeth Taylor lore: the dame crossed paths with the about-town character Dee Finley outside a needle exchange one afternoon and later paid for Finley to get an entire new set of teeth. A quick Google search when I got home revealed that the story, as reported by Michael Musto for the Village Voice, was not apocryphal: Finley recalls Taylor arriving by limo at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center, circa 1997—“She had just had brain surgery. Her hair was short and blonde. Liz at her dykiest. YUM!” Taylor, who funded a lot of community work related to the AIDS crisis and had donated to the needle exchange, was apparently out and about that Thursday taking a tour to see what her dollars were doing, and also giving away bottles of her best-selling perfume White Diamonds; though Sophia Loren did it first, Taylor’s powdery Diamonds was what really made celebrity fragrances a thing. (Finley says he promptly flipped his freebie for a couple bags of junk.)

The poet and perfumer Marissa Zappas owns a pair of size thirty-eight brown leather kitten heels that once belonged to Taylor, who died in 2011. When I asked her if they smelled, she said, “Not really, vaguely of green peppers at first.” For Zappas, who’s carved out a niche for herself as an independent perfumer designing fragrances for book rollouts and art installations, as well as olfactory homages to historic figures like an eighteenth-century pirate, Taylor has been a lifelong obsession. She even used photos of her idol as visual aids to help her memorize smells when she was training to become a perfumer. Now, after establishing herself through collaborations with pros and internet-famous astrologers, Zappas has returned to Taylor as the inspiration for her latest scent, Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! Typical for Zappas, whose fragrances are more grown and nuanced than her millennial girlie #PerfumeTok fans might let on, Maggie starts off unassuming, with a warm floral musk as paradigmatically perfume-y as Grandma’s after-bath splash (it smells a bit like Jean Nate, to be specific—a summery drugstore staple since 1935). But then it develops into something more feral, a little loamy: like the inside of an empty can of Coke on a hot summer day, or freshly baked bread with a hint of wet limestone, maybe even an overripe peach traced with rot. As I lay around with my laptop in bed in the afternoon, the fragrance mixes with my sweat, its champagne and violets becoming nutty with a note as sharp as paint thinner.

The first ingredient in Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! is anisic aldehyde, a synthetic scent engineered to resemble anise seed. In its chemical structure, anisic aldehyde is somewhere between a compound that smells like vanilla and one approaching the scent of licorice. As Luca Turin explains in The Secret of Scent, modern perfumery was born in labs about a century ago, when synthetics produced to smell like lemons or roses began to replace natural extracts in fragrances. But aldehydes aren’t just one-to-one approximations of organic smells: “To understand what aldehydes do to perfumes, imagine painting a watercolor on Scotchlite, the stuff cyclists wear to be seen in car headlights,” Turin says. “Floral colors turn strikingly transparent on this strange background, at one opaque and luminous.” Aldehydes are incandescent, like Elizabeth Taylor, a delicate flower animated by something stranger, more wild. 

“Complexity is hard to define and easy to recognize,” Turin writes of perfumes. Taylor’s performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is instantly recognizable as that: frustrated and smoldering, yet defiantly vulnerable. The new perfume takes its name from one of her lines— “Maggie the cat is alive! I’m alive!”—spoken while pushing her avoidant husband (played by Paul Newman) to forget his recently deceased best friend and fuck her, God dammit. Maggie is desperate for his touch, Taylor convinces us with her leer, at least as much as she wants a baby to lock down his inheritance. One of the reasons we like the woman is that she’s candid about her maneuvers. She doesn’t feign any kind of moral high ground. And while she’s hardened in her determination, she’s soft enough, through Taylor’s piercing portrayal, not to hide how her husband’s neglect stings. A woman self-possessed but not uncorrupted, surrounded by all the fetid decay of a Mississippi plantation during a heat wave, willing to flirt a bit with her father-in-law, she’s a perfect Southern Gothic figure to be interpreted through perfume. Taylor playing her only makes it more fitting: Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! captures the stewing desire of a sex symbol unsexed. 

Soon it will be August in New York City, a period when everyone is theoretically out of town—they’re always saying this, anyway, in books like August by Judith Rossner. This is mostly a fiction, that everyone’s at their country house and everything is shutting down, but it’s sort of fun to imagine; who doesn’t secretly enjoy having fun while others are away? For the month of August, the Review is trying a little experiment—highlighting some things that are going on during this supposedly quiet month. Every week, we’ll be compiling roundups of cultural events and miscellany that the Review’s staff and friends are excited about around town. (And maybe, occasionally, out of town.) We can promise only that these lists will be uncomprehensive, totally random, and fun.

F. W. Murnau’s Faust, introduced by Mary Gaitskill at Light Industry, August 1: Gaitskill, who was interviewed for the Spring issue of the Review, will be introducing this 1926 silent film, which, like many flops, is now a cult classic. Gaitskill saw a clip of the film online years before she had read Goethe’s novel, though she knew the basic outlines of the story of the scholar who made a pact with the devil. “That was enough for me to understand and to feel, to believe, the reality of the segment: the flailing despair, the futile vanity, the experience of running through a live, tactile murk of demons and uncomprehending humans, moving slo-mo through their own fates, trying to undo something that can’t be undone,” she told Light Industry.

Heji Shin’s “The Big Nudes” at 52 Walker, open all August: “The Big Nudes” is the photographer Heji Shin’s first solo exhibition in New York since the 2020 show “Big Cocks.” The cocks in question, by the way, were a series of roosters photographed in shocking detail. “The Big Nudes,” meanwhile, will include photographs of pigs posed to evoke fashion models. This show comes recommended by our contributing editor Matthew Higgs, who says, “This relatively rare gallery presentation promises to be something of a midsummer event.” It opened recently and will be up through October 7.

“Live Jerry Garcia Band Set Lists” by the Garcia Project at Brooklyn Bowl, August 5: Recommended by friend of the Review and occasional Review softball first baseman Adam Wilson, this will be an attempt to faithfully re-create actual set lists played by the Jerry Garcia Band between 1976 and 1995. If you never had a chance to see Jerry’s soulful side project live, this is probably the closest you will ever come to it, and real Deadheads will tell you—at great length, if you’d like—that JGB is actually, sometimes, even better than the Dead.

He texted me something during staff meeting. I didn’t answer until it was over and I had closed my computer and wasn’t looking at him anymore, and then I told him not to text me, please, for these weeks, like we had said. Then I was upset, and I drove to the other side of the lake, where I parked outside a trailer. It was for work: my job required me to interview people, usually showing up unannounced to where it was possible they lived, or didn’t.

A teenage girl opened the door. She was wearing a hot pink sweatshirt with purple sleeves, and her dog was black or dark gray with white on its face. It didn’t make noise as it went around her legs in the doorframe. I turned around, and it bit into the back of my calf. I yelled for a while, and then I was on the ground. Nothing hurt. I put my finger in its mouth to get it to let go, but it bit it. I screamed louder until I realized there wasn’t a point to screaming, because the girl was already hitting the dog with something, maybe a chair, and there was no one else to alert.

Then I was free, and the door to their trailer was open, and then I was inside, and I had closed the door behind me. Then I was leaning on the arm of their green couch, and then I was sitting on the seat of another, whose color I don’t know, because I was looking at the small lakes of blood on the floor. They were already congealing, and inside the pools were small flecks of white. I realized they were my fat when I saw similar pieces on the thighs of my jeans.

I called him. I told him where I was and that I had been attacked by a dog. He said, “Mm-hmm,” in a light tone, the way he talked to his neighbor when he helped him with his taxes, or to me if I needed help with my computer. There was another girl inside the trailer then, maybe the same girl, and she was looking at me with her hand over her mouth. She asked me what to do, and I told her to call 911. She was upset but she did it.