One week until our Issue Fifteen launch party!
Plus some extremely abbreviated reviews
One week from today, on July 16 at 7 p.m., we’ll be celebrating the release of Issue Fifteen at Night Club 101 in the East Village. At 7:30, issue contributors Jamie Hood, Mariah Kreutter, Benjamin Krusling, Owen Park, Gaby Del Valle, and Stephanie Wambugu will read from their pieces. Admission is free for subscribers; not-yet subscribers can get in by paying $20 at the door for a copy of the issue.
In the meantime, we have a selection of Mentions from Issue Fifteen for your perusal. Read on for horned-up OnlyFans zombies, human and bovine athletes, Paul von Hindenburg, cow colostrum, and “severe nausea.”
The Riverfront Times
MEDIA
Many beloved alt-weeklies have suffered from declining ad revenue and fallen into the hands of dimwitted financiers — think The Village Voice, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Boston Phoenix. Others, like St. Louis’s Riverfront Times, live on as horned-up OnlyFans zombies. The RFT once published exposés on topics like police corruption and the death of FBI-surveilled Ferguson protester Darren Seals. Now, the paper primarily runs A.I.-written sponcon with titles like “Lily Phillips Says She Used To Enjoy Extreme Sex Events For Fun Before OnlyFans” (since deleted) and “Man Starts Leaking Cholesterol Through His Pores: High Fat Diet Goes Very Wrong.” It’s a good thing no real news is happening.
Devin Thomas O’Shea
“Buck Off” at the Garden
SPORTS
Like Fleet Week for buckle bunnies, the Professional Bull Riders’ three-day event, sponsored by Monster Energy and the U.S. Border Patrol, brought 45 of the world’s best bull riders and their fans to Manhattan. The sold-out 2025 “Buck Off” at Madison Square Garden drew a distinctive crowd: out-of-towners in Farming Simulator merch alongside downtown types looking for a place to wear a cowboy hat with a little less irony than usual. The audience watched as human and bovine athletes (as the bulls are called) endured 135 dizzying rides — few lasting the qualifying eight seconds — before Lucas Divino, a seasoned rider from Nova Crixas, Brazil, claimed the nearly $46,000 purse. While the uninitiated may find professional bull-riding less overtly sexy than pop culture’s mechanical bull fantasy led them to imagine, there is something titillating about watching these small, durable men go bareback. Imagine the rider — often, a barely 150-pound twentysomething — as a jerky appendage, joined to the bull thanks only to the strength of his inner thighs and five firm fingers. Yeehaw.
Sydney Allen-Ash
Social Democracy: An Alternate History
ROLE-PLAY
Thrilling stuff for history-buff dads who game: players in this addictive web simulation are politicians in the Weimar Republic trying, and usually failing, to fend off the Nazis. We begin in 1928, with Germany’s vibrant democracy in full swing. As it unravels, we’re presented with several options: patch things up with the revolutionary communists? Pander to the bourgeoisie? Unfortunately, it seems the key to foiling fascism is preventing the doddering octogenarian president (in this case the mustachioed Paul von Hindenburg) from running for another term. Ah.
Bryn Stole
“Pod Save America” ads
PODCASTING
Presenter-read advertisements, the last vestige of amateur podcasting, offer a glimpse into a show’s imagined audience. What can the selection of products hawked by former Obama aides teach us about the average liberal American male? That he wants to restore his gut lining by swilling cow colostrum in sungold apricot flavor, burn fat while lounging on his direct-to-consumer mattress in bamboo delicates, avoid hangovers that could impede productivity, eat chicory root inulin and tapioca starch cereal for dinner, and consume vegetables in powder form.
Juliana Adelman
Sancta
THEATER
The work of Austrian theatermaker Florentina Holzinger, master of the crowd-pleasing abject and the so-called “Tarantino of Dance,” has previously featured cobalt blue vomit (Kein Applaus für Scheisse or “No Applause for Shit”), a spectator-splashing orgasm (A Divine Comedy), and a key extracted from a vagina (Ophelia’s Got Talent). Holzinger’s latest offers a churchly ritual wherein a chunk of one performer’s flesh is griddled and fed to another — a scene that, in Stuttgart, caused eighteen audience members to seek medical treatment for “severe nausea.” Undaunted, Berlin’s prestigious Theatertreffen festival named the play one of German-speaking theater’s ten “most remarkable productions” of the year. The U.S. might not be graced by Sancta anytime soon, but in February, Tanz — a grisly piece of dance theater that critiques ballet’s sexual fixation on women’s bodies by literally skewering dancers with meat hooks and dangling them from above — sold out its New York City run. Before Holzinger’s unholy power to transubstantiate metaphor into the scandalously corporeal, all heathens turn into believers.
Sanders Isaac Bernstein
You all ever actually accept out of slush or naw? Genuinely asking.