Lawyers and lawmakers share their experiences. Photo-Illustration: Dakarai Akil; Photos: Getty Shortly after the deaths of two aspiring rappers earlier this year, New York City mayor Eric Adams appeared to take a hard line against drill rap, stressing in a February speech that social-media companies should pull the genre’s displays of gun violence from their apps, comparing the removal to Trump’s Twitter suspension. His words sparked a backlash as they not only seemed to toy with the idea of censorship but also evoked the language of authorities’ long-standing moral panic over music created by Black and brown artists.

He knows his peanut butter. No comedian has ever earned the right to make a joke about peanut allergies quite like Greg Warren. In his new YouTube special, The Salesman, the comedian calls a hypothetical kid with a peanut allergy a “faker” — territory so cliché that even the special’s director and executive producer, Nate Bargatze, has done stand-up mocking it. You’d be forgiven for assuming Warren, a veteran comedian who’s appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers and The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson, takes the obvious route to get to this punch line.

The Middleditch & Schwartz specials suggest a future where the form belongs to performers, not theaters. Photo: Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz Photo: Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. It was the 28th day of quarantine in New York City. Or was it the 16th? Or the 43rd?

The answer is more complicated than “a love story starring Bradley Cooper.” Sort of. “I always knew that I wanted to direct something,” Bradley Cooper explains in a featurette for A Star Is Born. “And I always wanted to tell a love story because it just feels like something that everybody can relate to.” Since then, Cooper has directed a second something, and it is, functionally, the same kind of movie.

Paul Rudd and Paul Rudd in Living With Yourself, one of the shows that Netflix considers an “elevated” comedy. For decades, few things have been more vital to a TV network’s bottom line than its ability to craft a strong comedy brand. ABC dominated the late ’70s ratings in large measure because of Tuesday night sitcoms like Three’s Company and Laverne & Shirley. Similarly, NBC’s Nielsen hegemony through big chunks of the ’80s and ’90s and ’00s can be traced back to the appeal of its “Must-See TV” formula of smart, sophisticated half-hours, ranging from Cheers and Seinfeld to The Office.

Don’t tell mama … Willkommen (to another revival of Cabaret), bienvenue (to another revival of Cabaret), welcome (to another revival of Cabaret). Is there any show that is less of a Fremde, étranger, stranger? The production of Cabaret currently playing on the West End is crossing the pond and will premiere on Broadway in spring 2024, with Gayle Rankin (Kindred) as Sally Bowles and the West End’s Emcee Eddie Redmayne making the journey, according to an October 23 press release.

Less than a minute into the music video for the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket” — one of the first clips ever aired on MTV — we see teddy-boy-coifed bassist Pete Farndon maneuvering a pink whale of an automobile toward the diner where singer Chrissie Hynde is waitressing. All three male Pretenders are riding along, and they’re each British, as is most of the slang in the song (“got bottle,” “skank,” “reet,” plus that title, signifying pocket change).

Reese Witherspoon. Pour a glass of red and fire up Facebook Live, because Reese Witherspoon has a mystery she wants you to solve! For over a year now, the Oscar-winning actress has been dropping hints about an in-demand script she was sent that was so puerile — “maybe the worst script I’ve ever read in my entire life,” she’s said — that it hastened her successful foray into producing her own material.

Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) - Breaking Bad _ Season 5, Episode 11 - Photo Credit: Ursula Coyote/AMC One of Breaking Bad’s most impressive qualities is how well it plays with information disparity: Sometimes the audience knows more than the characters; sometimes the characters know more than the audience. In any given scene, no two people are operating with the same knowledge — not Hank and Marie, not Jesse and Skinny Pete, not Walt and, well, anyone.

One of the biggest moments on Game of Thrones this season came when a necklace was removed. Melisandre’s (Carice van Houten) big reveal came when she took off a choker, which allows its wearer to conceal her true form. According to Michele Clapton, who oversees most of the costume design on the HBO series, the choker’s design was established back when they introduced her character. “I wanted something that was so quickly identifiable with her because she’s out of place,” she says.