August 24, 2023 Happenings August 27–September 4: What the Review’s Staff Is Doing Next Week By The Paris Review Rare blue supermoon. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 3.0. August is coming to its end—a blessing or a curse, depending who you ask. Here’s what the Review’s staff and friends are doing these days, before we all go (metaphorically) back to school. Summer Streets, August 26: It is the last weekend of New York’s Summer Streets, so take advantage now, runners, bikers, and amblers. Huge stretches of the city will be shut down between 7 A.M. and 1 P.M. this Saturday in Brooklyn and the Bronx; vendors will be hawking wares like coconut water, ice cream, and Coca-Cola. Our web editor, Sophie Haigney, will be jogging merrily along the car-free expanse of Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. New York Liberty vs. Las Vegas Aces at Barclays Center, August 28: Our assistant editor Oriana Ullman encourages everyone to turn out for the tail end of the WNBA season, one of summer’s great sporting pleasures. “This is the last matchup of the year between the league’s two superteams,” Oriana tells us. “The Liberty just beat the Aces in the Commissioner’s Cup, but go to get another preview of what the Finals showdown will probably be.” (The playoffs begin September 13.) The U.S. Open at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, August 28–September 10: Our managing editor, Kelley Deane McKinney, recommends going on opening day, when there will be matches happening on twenty-two courts. A day pass will get you access to twenty-one of them. She advises anyone attending to skip the main court, Arthur Ashe: “The stadium is too big for tennis and the good seats are all corporate boxes full of people who don’t know or care about the games and chat loudly the whole time,” she says. “Real heads know that Louis Armstrong is the better show court, only seating fourteen thousand.” A tip: sections one and two get the most shade during the day, but every seat has a great view! You can skip the signature cocktail, the Honey Deuce, which features tennis ball–shaped honeydew pieces floating in spiked raspberry lemonade “for, like, twenty-two dollars. This year I bet it’s twenty-five.” Read More
August 17, 2023 Happenings What the Review’s Staff Is Doing This Week: August 21–27 By The Paris Review Flushing Meadows Fairgrounds. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC0 4.0. Artists & Writers Annual Charity Softball Game in East Hampton, August 19: Should you be lucky enough to find yourself in East Hampton at a loose end this coming Sunday, it is the annual artists vs. writers softball game. In fact, it is the seventy-fifth anniversary of said game, which began as a picnic in 1948 and has seen the likes of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell at bat. Anyone can spectate. (The Review’s softball team, meanwhile, is coming off three straight rainouts.) U.S. Open qualifiers at Flushing Meadows, August 22–25: Next week, 128 men’s players and 128 women’s players will be vying for the final 32 spots in the tournament. The beauty of this particular week is that it’s 100 percent free and open to the public. Our intern Izzy Ampil plans to be in attendance, and friend of the Review and Club Leftist Tennis cohead Charlie Dulik says it’s a “great way to scout up-and-coming guys in the tennis world.” Read More
August 10, 2023 Happenings August 14–20: What the Review’s Staff Is Doing Next Week By The Paris Review Matt Berninger of the National. Photograph by Andy Witchger, licensed under CCO 2.0. Tonight, the sun will begin to set before 8 P.M. once again, a milestone that always fills us with some low-level dread. This is all the more reason to participate in summer fun of all varieties. Here’s what the Review’s staff and friends are looking forward to next week: Wine & Water Lilies at the New York Botanical Garden, August 17: Between 3 and 6 P.M. next Thursday, come to the New York Botanical Garden for a drink with a side of plants! This recommendation comes from our new intern Izzy Ampil; you can have a water lily–themed cocktail, a glass of wine, or a brownie with marshmallows while wandering among the lotuses. There will also be music. The National at Madison Square Garden, August 18: Are you feeling vague malaise for no particular reason, which seems to sort of seep into everything, but is also not entirely unpleasant and in fact maybe kind of nice? If you’re not, and you want to be, you should join our web editor, Sophie Haigney, and go see The National, the prolific, excellent, low-grade-sad band whose new album includes a song that goes: “And there you are, sitting as usual / with your golden notebook …” Annie Baker’s Infinite Life at the Atlantic Theater Company, opening August 18: This new play, an excerpt of which first appeared in the Review’s pages, features five women in chaise longues at a fasting clinic discussing life, sex, and chronic illness. Their exchanges are unforgettable: “You had great sex with him but you left him because he was a screamer,” one woman says. “No he left me,” her friend responds. “He left me. And I was a wreck.” Their conversations probe the connection between physical pain and sexual desire, and much else; they show, in a sense, where conversation can lead. In partnership with the Review, the Atlantic is offering tickets to shows between August 25 and September 10 at a 30 percent discount if you use the code PARIS online at checkout. Read More
August 4, 2023 Happenings August 7–13: What the Review’s Staff is Doing Next Week By The Paris Review Perseid Meteor Shower. Licensed under CCO 2.0. 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.” Read More
July 27, 2023 Happenings August 1–7: What We’re Doing Next Week By The Paris Review Charlie Saikley Six-Man Volleyball Tournament. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 3.0. 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. Read More