Café Society
Premiere Issue

FILM & TV
For years, director Joachim Trier has devastated audiences with his quiet Scandinavian sense of time, place, and memory. With back-to-back Oscar nods and a win, plus the box office returns to back it up, Hollywood is finally catching on to this great auteur
Featured
By Jacob Mendel Brown | April 9 2026
By Elsa Lehrer | March 29 2026
Premiere Issue

The word “brave” gets thrown around the art world all the time. But Jewish artist Zoe Buckman has earned that moniker while making the best work of her career
By Jacob Mendel Brown | April 9 2026
It’s a December morning in Miami, and Zoe Buckman is taking me on a brief tour of her temporary kingdom: a hotel room somewhere above the chaos of Art Basel. Moments earlier we'd been discussing Brooklyn brownstones—ours are in the same neighborhood—and she compliments her Zoom view of mine, though I know for a fact hers is prettier. “I fucking love our neighborhood,” she replies.
Over a hundred years ago, French couturier Paul Poiret revolutionized how fashion was made and marketed. And then he went bust. Today, his designs are back in style, as are his antics and broken balance sheets.
By Doris Domoszlai-Lantner | April 6 2026
In 1911, Paul Poiret put on what today would be called a viral stunt: hundreds of people packed his Paris maison for "One Thousand and Two Nights," an extravagant fancy dress ball with exotic animals and decorations, champagne flowing all night, and an exorbitant price tag. It was luxury not just as product, but as...
The founder of a new food delivery startup sees local cooks as the solution to food deserts and our nutritional woes. But can it scale?
By Elsa Lehrer | April 6 2026
For a country that thinks about food constantly, Americans are remarkably bad at actually eating well. We invented the $20 superfood smoothie, fight about which dietary philosophy is the most effective, and have more nutrition information at our fingertips than any generation in history. And yet, with diet-related disease among the leading cause of death in the US and over 19 million people living in food deserts, we are one of the least healthy...
Prestige television is now over twenty years old, but the fine art of the “re-binge” is just coming into its own. Here, one recovering ad-exec shares his binge diary. TL;DR It definitely hits different this time
By Alexander Cavaluzzo | April 2 2026
The second time around, Mad Men shifts. It steps into a new light, more seductive but also more complex, darker but also brighter. It was already a throwback when it aired—nostalgia for the early 1960s, for the gray-flannel confidence of American capitalism, for a time when a man could smoke through a meeting and still be...
For years, director Joachim Trier has devastated audiences with his quiet Scandinavian sense of time, place, and memory. With back-to-back Oscar nods and a win, plus the box office returns to back it up, Hollywood is finally catching on to this great auteur
By Maya Singer | March 31 2026
It seems fitting to start with a memory. Twenty years ago, more or less, sinking for the first time into the world of Joachim Trier watching his debut feature Reprise, stumbling out of the Angelika dazed afterwards, as if surprised to find myself in New York City and not Norway. I think it was the Angelika? I’m almost sure. Or maybe that’s where I saw...
Actress Jessica Henwick has flown star fighters and wielded superpowers; now she’s getting to explore the complexity of the human condition
By Jacob Mendel Brown | March 31 2026
At one point early in her career, Jessica Henwick pulled an all-nighter blowing up balloons. The Surrey-born actress was scraping by in Los Angeles, making ends meet working as a set dresser on film sets. The task? Prepare a wedding scene that required roughly two thousand balloons. When the production’s air tanks ran out, she had to f inish the job by hand—or rather, by mouth.
Whether playing a Gilded Age conwoman or a traitorous, post-apocalyptic secret service agent, actress Nicole Brydon Bloom revels in the unrecognizable.
By Jacob Mendel Brown | March 31 2026
Be it the embroidered certainties of historical drama or the controlled panic of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, we are living through a moment that makes escapism feel especially potent. Of late, Nicole Brydon Bloom has become a compelling presence in both genres. On HBO's The Gilded Age and Hulu's Paradise, she plays women who arrive as polished surfaces that hide ill intentions beneath—duplicitous characters who themselves are playing well-choreographed roles. Offscreen, Bloom comes across as markedly more grounded: a New York actor whose life, even as it has grown more public, seems oriented toward privacy, and the ordinary rituals that keep a person sane.
A Scene from the Historic Café Society Era
By Elsa Lehrer | March 29 2026
On a blustery Vienna night in December 1896, Felix Salten walks into Café Griensteidl. The novelist sees his friend Karl Kraus sitting across the room, walks over, and slaps the man twice across the face. The entire café falls silent. Then, one imagines, someone orders another coffee. Kraus, the Nobel-nominated satirical essayist, was then a sharp-faced, twenty--two-year-old who had spent the better part of the year publicly excoriating everyone in the room.