Nominated for a National Magazine Award, our second print issue features Hilton Als on Prince's Eyes, How Adderall Changed America, Sex with Neanderthals, New Fiction by Isle McElroy, Ordering Elements, and more.

Before entering Felix Rodriguez’s exhibition 

“Legendary Looks: My Ballroom Story,”

“From the moment I stepped into my first ball, I felt an energy so powerful it was as if my soul had found its rhythm…” 

I teared up—not from sentiment, but recognition. That ache of finally finding home after an adolescence spent in fear and camouflage. For the gay, the queer, the gender-nonconforming, ballroom isn’t just a subculture—it’s shelter. A stage. Survival as spectacle. In the ballroom world, the very traits that once marked outcasts as targets—flamboyance, femininity, audacity—become currency. Affirmation. A self-made spotlight for kids who were once left in the dark.

Rodriguez has spent the past three decades documenting the ballroom scene as a member of the House of Milan. Known for its high energy and hyper-stylized culture and terminology, the scene is composed of “houses”—groups of chosen-family—that compete in drag tournaments, or balls, by “walking” in different categories. Rodriguez began filming balls in 1992, after watching 

 in a theater full of people who didn’t understand what they were seeing. The laughter was wrong. He could feel it. So he picked up a camera.

His archive is unlike any other—not just for its longevity, but for what it listens to. Rodriguez follows the commentators—the MCs, the ones who carry the floor. He gives equal weight to the spectacle and the sound. The language that lifts or cuts. In ballroom, commentary isn’t background—it’s structure. A dazzling, ruthless, exacting public education. Junior LaBeija. Melissa Extravaganza. David Ian Xtravaganza. Kenny Ebony. Jack and Selvin Mizrahi. Precious Basquiat. Snooki West. Undercelebrated talents that created iconic terms and concepts such as “vogue,” “werk,” and “you better werk.”

Rodriguez has tracked the evolution of the mic with near-obsessive clarity—tracing shifts in tone, rhythm, and how authority is performed across generations.

This exhibition opens just a fraction of the archive. The three works form a living lineage—past and present in dialogue—offering an insider’s view of a world made visible through identity play and radical self-invention. In this interview, Rodriguez reflects on what ballroom gave him: a voice, a purpose, a world apart from his daylight life—where the hidden parts of him could thrive.

Michael Bullock

How old were you when you first stepped into the ballroom community? How did you find that scene?

Felix Rodriguez

The first man I kissed was from the ballroom scene. His name is Angel, and he was a Magnifique, years before he joined the House of Milan. This was in October 1990, I was 23 years old and had just come out as gay. Voguing was popular because of Madonna's “Vogue” video. It was also the same year as her Blonde Ambition tour. So I knew that there was this thing called voguing, but I didn't know where it came from. I didn't come out until grad school, but when I did, the majority of the people I met were a part of that scene. So before even attending a ball, I had heard so much about it—spoken with such passion—that I felt like I already knew what I was getting myself into.

. On the following Sunday I went to my first ball: the Xtravaganza Milan War Ball at Sound Factory. It was music, it was dance, it was theater, it was competition. It was call and repeat. It had all the things I loved in one place. It was the epitome of New York in the ‘90s, and it was mainly people of color: Black and Latino. Looking back at my videos of balls from 30 years ago, I’ve noticed that I liked to feature Latinos. Being the Puerto Rican Black man that I am, I felt like it was my duty to make sure they got credit in a mainly African American scene. So for this exhibition at Pioneer Works, “Legendary Looks,” I made sure to feature two Latino ballroom commentators that people rarely mention today: David Ian Xtravaganza and Melissa Xtravaganza. They were one of the first to emcee to the beat. They were celebrities in that community. But unlike Madonna or a Kardashian, you could actually touch them. It was attainable. I could become legendary, if I wanted to. I never competed though.

Never. I didn’t have the guts. I’m glad I didn't because I wanted to record the ballroom from a neutral point of view. By competing and being more involved, I would've been looked at differently. So while I never competed, the excitement of a ball would turn me on immediately. Even today, at 58, I still feel that energy.

And so you immediately joined a House, or how were you inducted?

I was always hanging out with either the Milans or the Xtravaganzas. They were considered sister Houses at the time, so they planned balls and partied together. I hung out equally with both of them. In ‘93, right after a ball that I recorded, I went to an afterparty. This was on my birthday. I was hanging out with the father of the House of Milan, Roger, and I jokingly say to him, "The Milans asked me if I'm an Xtravaganza, and the Xtravaganzas asked me if I'm a Milan because I'm hanging out with both of y'all, and nobody knows the connection." And he's like, "Well, do you want to be a Milan?" And I said yes. He's like, "Happy birthday, Felix. You're a Milan."

It's usually a person who competes and has a reputation in a certain category.

But there's also other reasons why people would join or bring you into a House. Roger was very strategic. He had all the resources. He had DJs, club promoters, realtors. We were living in a time when none of us had easy access to apartments. So he had all kinds of people to service the House—and also himself on a personal level. He had one or two white girls; he’d say one of them was his wife in order to get an apartment. He had drug dealers, he had prostitutes, he had pimps. All of them were a part of his House because it was part of that underground world. So, why not throw me in, the camera person?

He even was honest when he brought me in, saying, "The good thing about having you in the House is I don't have to go to a ball because you're going to record it. You're going to capture every nook and cranny.”

Back in those days, you prepared. Now you don't have to prepare all that much, because they have balls all the time. But back then, they were every three or four months. You’d prepare for the next one based on what people did in the previous ball. So they would look at my tapes and study them. So again, he was strategic.

Like a football team, rewatching the plays.

They take it very seriously. Voguing too. They see the steps, and they try to either top them or come up with something completely different that's going to impress the judges. But there was also the fact that I was a master’s student in dramatic writing at NYU, which was something they desired. Unfortunately, a lot of House members hadn’t even graduated high school. So I was also respected.

I'll also add that when I came out, I was so new and impressionable that I wanted to vogue and wear scandals to the club.

Scandals is the term they use when a person wears a g-string or pumps or sequins, or mesh. They'll say, "Tonight, I'm going to go in a scandal."

So I tried wearing a scandal a couple of times, but all the queens said I was butch, and had to be banjee. "Don't be cunt, be banjee." And I was like, "Okay." It did help me get laid. Which was a priority at 23, as you can imagine.

So you were studying dramatic writing, but then got into film?

They actually had a course on writing for film, and one of its requisites was to use a camera—even if you didn't have any filming or editing experience. When you're writing for film, you actually have to imagine the first shot, the second shot. How are you going to cut that? So, I grabbed the camera and never let it go. I fell in love with recording and the process of editing. I've always loved music. The first video I ever edited was 

 (1992), the one you see before you go into the gallery. It was funny because the Milans would ask me to sit at their table, which I would for like five minutes. But after a while, I’d get really antsy and want to record. I'm grateful that that’s what I wanted to do, because now you have a generation that’s gone. This was in the early 1990s, when I was working for FX. I've always tried to keep some kind of stable job while I was recording these balls. The company launched in New York in 1994, and by 1995 I’d say 90 percent of the people that I met had died, including my first boyfriend. It was devastating. I didn't think that I was going to make it to 30.

I remember one day I was talking to the company’s HR, and they’re giving me this spiel about 401(k)s, saying, “When you retire, you'll get this money back." And I replied, "When I retire?” “You know, when you're 62, 67, whenever you decide to retire." And I thought to myself that I was never going to get there, even though I was practicing safe sex—which a lot of people were doing and still getting sick. It was just a matter of time. We think we know how long we’re going to live, but we really have no idea. I’m blessed that I’ve made it this far, and I’m blessed that I recorded those balls and kept all that material to show the world. But I was recording because I knew that we were all going to die—including me. And I just wanted to make sure that that stuff was out there. If it weren't for these tapes, most people would never know who the founders of these Houses were, because there was no documentation. Watching 

 inspired me to continue recording these events.

The press materials for your exhibition mention that you saw people laughing at inappropriate times during the film.

It was music, it was dance, it was theater, it was competition. It was call and repeat. It was the epitome of New York in the ‘90s, and it was mainly people of color: Black and Latino.

The screening was at Film Forum. And the audience was pretty much all white. I remember distinctly when Freddie Pendavis is speaking, and says something like, "I'm his protege. If I weren’t there then he’d be wrinkled." People were laughing at him, and I thought that that wasn't funny.

They're laughing at the cultural differences, instead of at jokes?

It felt very voyeuristic. Like an outsider looking in. So I wanted to offer a view from the inside.

How do you feel about that film, and all that it’s accomplished?

It changed my life—literally. I was studying dramatic writing; I wanted to be a filmmaker; I wanted to tell stories. And even though it wasn't done by a person of color, 

was about people of color that I knew. It was talking about music and a culture that we don't usually see in a documentary. It was like a celebration of that world, even though it was very, very dark.

What was the scale of that world like in the ‘90s? Were there thousands of people at a ball?

No, no. You'd be lucky if you had 300 people.

It's actually so small relative to how much of a phenomenon it became. But it’s not so dissimilar to the history of performance art, which was mostly just these very small moments. If you were to take a broader look, what do you think the ballroom scene gave you as a young person, in terms of your later development and growth?

Coming out in New York in 1990, I felt like there was no other place where I could ever witness what I was witnessing. I literally went to Sound Factory and Madonna was dancing right next to me. And at that point Madonna was the biggest star in the world. So to come out in New York, experiencing this whole world, felt like it was only happening there, at that time. I'm sure everybody that comes out in a big city feels the same way, regardless of the era, right?

I don't know about that. That's pretty special.

New York at the time was very club-oriented. Now you don't hear about them as much. Ballroom also changed. It became more popular, but then a lot of people in the Houses weren't going to balls. They were going to clubs instead. So then the scene became divided, between Houses that went to clubs and Houses that went to balls. Even within Houses, some would go to clubs and some would compete in balls. So we would make fun of the Houses that didn't compete. It would be like a baseball team that didn’t play baseball. How can you call yourself a House if you're not walking at balls or going to them, right? So we used to have an issue with that. But then people would have an issue with me, because they'd be like, “How can you consider yourself a Milan when you've never walked?” There became a politics of what it meant to really 

 ballroom. I would get so wrapped up in it, but then people would look at me and be like, well, can you vogue? So then I would shut up.

They're very protective of their world, which has also made it difficult for a lot of people in the mainstream to join in, because, again, this was like a private party. Ballroom started uptown, in Harlem, in the ‘60s, when it was illegal to be in drag. They would do them incognito in bars that closed at three o’clock in the morning. The ball would start at five am, because that was the only time that they could perform these events. Gays were considered the lowest of the low. Imagine being in Harlem at 11 o’clock in the morning after a ball had ended, and seeing so many queens parading out of the club wearing all these outfits and boas. It was a different time.

So how did this Pioneer Works exhibition “Legendary Looks” start?

So, it's three different organizations doing exhibitions around ballroom culture, as part of this whole “Legendary Looks” project. There’s ArtsWestchester, which is just costumes. Pioneer Works, which features my videos specifically about commentators, and then City Lore, which includes videos, but also flyers. Michael Roberson, the exhibitions’ organizer who’s very involved in ballroom, suggested my videos for Pioneer Works. For a theme, I wanted to focus on the commentators, because I've seen how that role has changed over the last 30 years. If you don't have a good commentator, you might as well not have a ball.

When you took me to the Latex Ball, what I remember most were the commentators’ catchphrases, which have stayed with me for the past 10 years or so. "Gim-me, gim-me, gim-me, my life back." Another emcee used the word "Trace." He would shout out a category, such as Butch Realness, and then shout "trace, trace, trace, trace. I loved the concept of tracing an identity. It was immediately clear to me that emcees are crucial. They are masters at keeping the energy high. In the exhibition, you’re able to go through this audio archive and listen to them side-by-side, which is something I’ve never seen before. It's an amazing resource. What are some other structural differences?

In the early days, people were voguing to music. Now they vogue to the commentator. The commentators are telling them what to do and the walkers are literally moving to their sounds and riffs. The commentator is not only hyping up the audience, they're also hyping up the competitors. A testament to how much balls have grown now is people get thousands of dollars in prizes. Back then they only had one cash prize, and it was given to the House with a production. At the end, there was always the Grand Prize. You were lucky if you got $150. Now you walk one category and you get $3,000 or more.

You have sponsors now—cosmetic companies, Fortune 500 institutions—that are pouring money into these balls because that's the thing to do. Pride was sponsored by Citibank and Chase. So people in the ballroom scene took advantage of that and are making money.

Yeah. The few people that are still around from the ‘90s are upset because they feel that ballroom’s history has been forgotten. People make too much money. There are no longer Houses. People don't get together anymore because everyone's on social media. The older generation doesn't like how the world has changed, particularly in the ballroom scene. Especially outside of the United States, you have Houses now that were created in dance studios. They've never had a mother or father in the way that we experienced them when we were younger. These Houses are basically just a club that competes at balls that they learned about in a dance studio, whereas in our generation you learned how to vogue on Christopher Street, on the piers. You learned it at the club. You went home and studied that tape. Now you go to a class.

 (2025)—which projects footage from a ball in the 1990s alongside footage from one in 2025—what’s it like seeing the passage of so many decades, side-by-side? I could definitely see 

’s influence in the 2025 footage. The looks are more fantastical, and not rooted in reality. But what's your take?

That’s the pain and the beauty of it: wanting to be part of a world that doesn’t want you, and still wanting to own that space and claim it and be it. 


When I look at the ‘90s it's really nostalgic. Because again, the majority of those people are gone. But I respond to it more because that's my generation.

The ‘90s looks are amazing. They’re hot and beautiful. And while the energy between the two eras is the same—the spontaneity, the bravado—the style is markedly different.

One of the things that they were trying to do in the '90s was assimilate into heterosexuality. Trans women wanted to look like women. They didn't want to look like drag queens. They wanted to be able to get on the subway and pass. So the fashion was street fashion. It was like, no, I'm not going to look like a 

 competitor. I want to look like Marisa from the bodega.

Michael Bullock is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of 

I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear

 (2023). Bullock serves as associate publisher of 

art-roberta

My Ballroom Story

Garth Greenwell Is Too Much

Picture This: Adinkras

In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

July

On this and all later Tuesdays in July, the Amateur Astronomers Association will have night/twilight observing for the public from 7:00 to 9:30 from the High Line. Meet at the crossroads of Little West 12th and Washington Street. Watch the weather; rain or heavy clouds will likely mean a cancellation. Also, check the AAA and HighLine websites (both .org).

Earth at aphelion. Today the Earth is 1.017 AU (95 million miles) from the Sun—as distant as it ever gets. Yet it's the hottest time of year for us borealites. The reason is that the Sun's local heating of the Earth depends not on distance, but on the 

 of the noontime sun (now nearly overhead for us) and on the length of sunlight (now 15 hours).

Mercury at “easternmost elongation (26 degrees).” There’s no compelling reason to add “seeing Mercury” to your bucket list—except, perhaps, that it’s really difficult! Allegedly, even 

 never actually saw it. He was a “theoretician,” as we call them today, and must have relied upon the observations of others—especially 10–13 Arab astronomers, who did a very good job with it (and had much better skies). So, to one-up Copernicus, find a spot with an absolutely clear western horizon and look for three stars very low down, about 1 hour after sunset. The brightest and leftmost is Mercury; the other two are the Gemini twins Castor and Pollux.

Fortunately for us northerners, Mercury whips around very fast, and better opportunities will exist when the Sun is well to the south (mid-December of 2025 is good, when a nearby crescent Moon will point the way).

July 4 is also the traditional date for the appearance of the most famous supernova in history. What we know for sure is that in the early summer of the year 1054, a very bright “guest star” (the Chinese word) appeared suddenly, and was closely observed by Far Eastern astronomers (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). It was described as “visible in daylight” for 23 days, and in the night sky for over a year. It must have been amazing to stargazers everywhere—but strangely enough, no definite record exists for its visibility in Europe or the Americas.

Today, the remnant of that explosion is still visible as the Crab Nebula, a small elliptical cloud of gas and dust. Virginia Trimble, an American astronomer famous for her quick wit and insightful astrophysics, found that the nebula is rapidly expanding, such that it must have originated from a single point around the year 1100 (and for once, she wasn't kidding). This proved that the 

 originated in the explosion of a tiny, faint star at its center, or perhaps the ancestor of that star. A few years later, it was found that this star is a 

—a solid star, made entirely of neutrons and spinning at a rate of 30 times a second.

This star is 6500 light years away—and if you do the math, you'll find that in the summer of 1054, this object was about as luminous as an entire galaxy. Holy mackerel! This was basically the beginning of modern stellar astrophysics. Two years later, the first black hole was discovered—and we were off and running.

But what's this “July 4” business? That's mainly a U.S. obsession. The ancient Chinese were exacting at dates, but not that exacting! (Or at least our 

 of their dates is not that precise.) We do know three things that underlie the modern myth: (1) On the morning of July 5, 1054, as viewed from the western U.S., the waning crescent Moon was just northwest of the Crab Nebula's position; (2) several cave paintings and carvings from that region and era seem to show a round object (the supernova?) next to a crescent-shaped object of equal size (the Moon?); and (3) the Pueblo Indians of that era commonly made early-morning observations of the sky, perhaps to mark the seasons.

Despite this ultra-thin reed of evidence, few U.S. astronomy teachers can resist the retelling of the patriotic supernova story. I certainly can't.

Birthday of John Archibald Wheeler in 1911. Wheeler was probably the most important American physicist of the twentieth century. (OK, Richard Feynman fans; you'll have your say later.) Wheeler became a teacher and mentor to nearly all American scientists working on general relativity, or Einstein's theory of gravity. He invented the terms “

” And he came up with a single, short sentence that perfectly expresses the basic idea of Einstein's theory, and which 

 Newton's theory: “Space-time tells matter how to move, and matter tells space-time how to curve.”

From 1–4 pm, we’ll be hosting solar observing for the public at Pioneer Works and the same will be possible at Pier I (at the same time!)—the fishing pier west of Riverside Park, at 70th Street.

” in 1945—as it was called in Lansing Lamont’s famous book, to signify the first full test of a plutonium-implosion bomb. The test was designed by Kenneth Bainbridge (Oppenheimer for the overall leadership, Bainbridge for the test) who, after the blast, was reported to have said to Oppenheimer “we’re all bastards now.” There had been much debate among the scientists about the ethics of the bomb. Bainbridge ran a seminar for Harvard freshmen in the 1960s; I applied… and always wondered if I would have gotten in, had I shown my knowledge of the “actual” Trinity, acquired during prep school at a Benedictine monastery. (Nah, I decided that wouldn’t help… and didn’t get in.)

A second plutonium bomb was later dropped on Nagasaki. Planners were sure that the alternative “enriched uranium” (U-238) design would work—so they earmarked that, without ever testing it, for the first and most famous use of atomic weapons in warfare (Hiroshima, August 6).

In my opinion, the best of many books on these matters is Richard Rhodes’ 

On this famous day in 1969, two astronauts landed and walked on the Moon. The story has been told a thousand times. Less well known is exactly what happened right after the quite dangerous landing. The original schedule called for the astronauts to catch some sleep before attempting the famous walk. But after all the excitement of the trip and peril of the landing, sleep was the last thing on their minds. Even though they had landed on… ahem... the Sea of Tranquility.

So NASA changed the plan and said “Okay, do the walk.” Then it was most-watched live event in television history: “One small step for a man...” Until, of course, the 2006 FIFA World Cup final between Italy and France, ending in a shoot-out. Now 

Interesting side note: Of the six American flags planted by the six Apollo missions to the Moon, all are still standing (photographed by Lunar Orbiters) 

 the first, which was immediately and ingloriously blown down by the exhaust from the take-off rockets. (The take-off rockets were quickly re-designed to correct this egregious violation of flag etiquette.)

Look west for “the old Moon in the New Moon’s arms” on these evenings. Mars can’t resist paying a close visit on the evening of the 28th. Any of these nights in late July are great for 11 pm–2 am viewing of the brightest regions of the Milky Way—the Scorpius-Sagittarius star cloud, and the Summer Triangle (Vega-Deneb-Altair).

This is the oldest and most famous annual gathering of amateur astronomers in the nation. Beautiful night skies if clouds stay away. Events are spread over four days, so google “Stellafane” and take your pick. It's in the tiny town of Springfield, Vermont… which can present challenges in housing and dining. The deeply committed (there are plenty) camp out on Stellafane's hill.

August

First quarter Moon—directly south at sunset. Really good time for telescopic viewing of the Moon’s most cratered regions.

The Moon passes very close to the bright red-supergiant star Antares tonight.

On any clear morning in early August, look for Orion rising low in the east about an hour before dawn. “Ghost of the shimmering summer dawn / King of the winter nights!” It’s my personal favorite season-defining sight in the sky.

Jupiter and Venus, king and queen of planets, stage a little dance low in the eastern morning sky this week. From August 7–10, Venus is just above Jupiter. But Venus, brighter and moving faster, passes Jupiter on August 11. The waning crescent Moon, moving still faster of course, passes the pair on August 19.

Today, the Sun enters the constellation Leo. But it entered the 

 sign of Leo 20 days ago, on July 22. What's up with that? Part of this shift arises from minor tinkering of constellation boundaries by humans… but most of it is courtesy of the Earth's wobbling axis. In addition to its better-known motions (spin, orbit), the Earth has a third and very subtle motion—the slow precession of its axis, like a wobbling top. The axis now points towards Ursa Minor—in fact, almost exactly towards the medium-bright star Polaris, which we therefore call The North Star. But the axis slowly wobbles around the sky, and this causes the 

. Our calendar, however, pays attention to seasons, not constellations. So most people who think they're “Leos” are actually “Cancers.” I don't know what the implications are… but it doesn't sound good.

All night, the Earth's journey takes it through a diffuse stream of cosmic dust particles which were once shed by Comet Tempel-Tuttle (named after that comet's discoverers). When a comet sheds matter (dust particles), it doesn't really go anywhere—it just wanders off ever so slightly, continuing roughly in the same orbit for thousands of years. Those little dust particles are like the odor particles emitted by humans and detected by bloodhounds. Except that the Earth, unlike bloodhounds, must follow the law of gravity—and only encounters that stream when its orbit intersects the stream's orbit, in early August.

The Earth encounters the dense part of that stream every August 12, and many of the dust particles fall to Earth with a streak of light—a 

. The meteors appear all over the sky… but if you trace back the streaks of light, they all appear to be coming from the constellation Perseus. Hence the name: the Perseid meteor shower. It’s the most reliable of the annual showers, and many stargazers plan summer outings to watch the Perseids. Unfortunately for us in 2025, it nearly coincides with the Full Moon, whose brilliant light will wash out all but the brightest of meteors.

On this day in 1868, one of the most historically important solar eclipses was observed in Thailand. During totality, several teams of astronomers—mainly British—took spectra and photographs of the Sun’s lower and upper atmosphere (the “corona”). They found a yellow emission line which occurred at a wavelength never seen before on Earth—so they named it “helium,” after the Greek name for the Sun. That was the beginning of helium’s glorious history. Today we recognize it as comprising approximately 25% of the Universe. Essentially all the Earth’s atmospheric helium has escaped—because helium is so light that Earth’s feeble gravity can’t hang onto it. Mendeleev’s periodic table, for example, has no element of atomic number two. Nor does helium combine with any other element—it’s a “noble gas,” to use the lingo. Our only source of helium is through the radioactive decay of heavy elements mined from Earth’s interior (e.g., uranium). That’s why we have 

(for balloons, cryogenic experiments, etc.).

On these mornings, the waning crescent Moon charges past the Venus–Jupiter conjunction in the eastern sky.

This morning will feature a very good apparition of the International Space Station (ISS) for NYC observers. It will suddenly appear nearly overhead (emerging from the Earth’s unseen shadow) at exactly 4:26 am and move rapidly eastward, disappearing (re-entering the unseen shadow) low in the east two minutes later. It’ll be very bright—brighter than any star. Worth an effort to see, especially with the Venus-Jupiter conjunction costarring near the eastern horizon.

. The moon's shadow swept from the Oregon coast, across the Rockies and the Midwest, before finally heading out to sea near Charleston, South Carolina. Nearly all observers enjoyed beautiful weather and got to witness this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.

If you spend your life rooted to one spot on Earth, you'll have to wait about 400 years between total solar eclipses—and that's assuming no cloudy days! But NYC is in the midst of a streak: four between 1925 and 2020. For the 1925 event (totality occurred above 96th Street in Manhattan), 

 scolded the Columbia University astronomers in headlines for getting the time wrong by four seconds. Maybe the 

was miffed because totality didn’t include 

If you’re inclined to think about future total solars, here are the ones to consider:

2026 August 12: Greenland, Iceland, Spain, or some ship in the North Atlantic

2027 August 2*: Spain, most of North Africa, Saudi Arabia

2030 November 25: South Africa, Australia

On this day in 1835, the first installment of the most successful moon hoax of all time was published in 

revealing the amazing discoveries of John Herschel with “an immense telescope” newly installed at the Cape of Good Hope. The author, Richard Locke, reported that Herschel had found the Moon with rivers, abundant wildlife, and humanoids with wings. There were no photographs to prove it (hey, photography was still a decade away), but there were some great, great drawings.

Locke was no stranger to hoaxes, and hoaxes were not rare in the nineteenth-century literary world. They were great for selling newspapers. Most newspapers at the time were sold on the street, with barkers excitedly announcing the juiciest story. This series (there were five more issues) really energized the popularity of 

. Unfortunately for science, fate intervened. The final issue reported that the telescope was so immense, humans couldn't handle it. Someone trained it on the Sun a week later, in search of yet more amazing discoveries—and wouldn't you know it, that burned down the whole observatory. No more discoveries to report. Not even a trace of the telescope for party-pooping investigative reporters to examine.

Edgar Allan Poe was plenty jealous about this. He had earlier published a very similar story, featuring a traveler 

 to the Moon in a balloon and finding similar goings-on. But as a story, with obvious satire and no pretense of accuracy, it just didn't have the impact of a real astronomical discovery.

On this day in 1883, the greatest volcanic explosion in history occurred: Krakatoa! The blast was heard by humans 3,000 miles away, and the pressure wave travelled around the Earth three times before finally becoming undetectable by barographs. The explosion was 10,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Volcanic dust was blasted into the upper atmosphere, where it lingered for many months—lowering the Earth's average temperature by about one degree. Krakatoa is part of the “Ring of Fire,” the huge region where the Pacific Plate crashes into plates to its west (Japan, Southeast Asia) and east (California, the Andes, etc.). Mount Saint Helens (1980) and Pinatubo (1991) are other members.


The exact 50th anniversary of Nova Cygni 1975, one of the most famous “classical novae” in history. I received a phone call on that night in 1975, directing me to go out and look up… and behold, I saw an “extra star” in the famous Summer Triangle. (Sometimes it pays to know your constellations.) It erupted from a blank spot in prior sky photographs, leading to speculation that it was the long-awaited supernova (none had been seen in our galaxy since 1604). And it was my 

 of graduate school at the University of Texas. A few weeks later, I received telescope time at Texas’s McDonald Observatory and found a little 3.3 hour wiggle in the light curve. I wrote a research paper about it, followed by several others during my years there. That wiggle turned out to be closer to an “ordinary” nova (an exploding white dwarf), but with the twist that the white dwarf was strongly 

Nova Cyg was first seen by observers in Japan, then Korea, China, Russia, and others as sunset occurred progressively later at those longitudes. By sunset in Texas, at least 2,000 independent discoveries must have been made (phone calls don’t count, of course!). Sitting there as an intruder in the Summer Triangle, it was hard to miss.

Birthday of Sir Ernest Rutherford in 1871. By firing alpha-rays (helium nuclei) at gold atoms, Rutherford became famous for revealing 

the tiny size of the nucleus of all atoms

… and for his terrible singing, as he roamed the famed Cavendish Laboratory trying to inspire students with “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

September 

Today, the equation of time is zero. Nowadays, probably 90 percent of astronomy PhD's would have no idea what this even means. But for most of the last thousand years, it would have been elementary to all astronomers, clockmakers, ship captains, navigators, and many ordinary citizens. Why? Because, historically, the only really practical and accurate clock in the natural world (larger than atoms/molecules!) is the Sun. Shadows—and more precisely sundials—were the way you could measure time.

Here's how it goes (in the Northern Hemisphere). Roughly speaking, the Sun is directly south, and casts a shadow directly north, at local noon every day. But there are two reasons why this is not exactly true. (1) The Sun moves in an elliptical orbit—fastest when it's near the Earth (in January), slowest when it's most distant (in July). (2) It moves in a plane different from the Earth's equator (by 23 degrees). Sundial-makers, ancient and modern, usually capture these two small corrections (up to 20 minutes) by etching a little wavy curve called the 

. But on this day, the corrections are zero, and the Sun is precisely south at noon!

noon. But in 1883, the U.S. legislated “Standard Time,” which meant that everybody within approximately 500 miles east or west of a standard longitude (which for us is 75 degrees east of Greenwich, England—roughly Philadelphia) must be on that time. NYC is slightly east of Philadelphia, so the Sun is directly south (“crosses our meridian,” to use the lingo) slightly sooner—at 11:56 am. Check out your shadow today—that's when it points exactly north. (But remember, there's another purely legislated correction—Daylight Saving Time—to which the Sun and its shadows are indifferent. So, it’s 12:56 pm EDT.)

Many things labeled as sundials are simply vertical or inclined sticks with a horizontal scale for the shadow. Many are sold as small works of art for your garden. These lack all precision, but after looking at the selections online, they're number one on my birthday wish list. I'd love to hear about large sundials still up and unmolested in the NYC area.

And on this date in 1859, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson independently observed a huge solar flare—probably the hugest in history. If such a thing happened today, it would probably ground all airplanes for several days (because the cosmic-rays at altitude would be very dangerous… and forget about communications). On the positive side, there would be great auroras—seen in 1859 as far south as the Caribbean. It’s now known as “the Carrington event,” because it was manifest in so many ways.

Prof. Joe Patterson is a professor of Astronomy at Columbia University, an observational astronomer, and a baseball enthusiast. (He was also our editor-in-chief’s first astronomy professor.)

sci-ameliapro

Big Apple Sky Calendar: July, August, September 2025

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Liz Pelly, my identical twin sister, is seven minutes older than me. We've both been writing about music since we were teenagers, so I've had a front row seat to her emergence as a paradigm-shifting critic of the streaming economy. I’ve watched her make principled decisions around music and her work with remarkable consistency, from our very first jointly authored cut-and-paste zine when we were in elementary school, to our investigative music reporting for our high school newspaper, and then onto our careers as journalists.

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

, with its unflinching inquiry into the origins and consequences of the streaming industry, is no exception. Drawing on over 100 interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, 

 pulls back the curtain on today’s highly consolidated record business and its impacts on artists and listeners.

At the time of this conversation, in March, Liz had done 90 interviews about

Jenn Pelly

At your book launch back in January, Max Alper asked you about your roots as a person for whom music has always had incredible social value, in addition to artistic value. I felt like you dodged his question so I want to re-ask it. Can you talk a little about your experience as a participant in music, rather than a critic?

Liz Pelly

Thanks. I really dislike talking about myself, but have agreed to make an exception for you, which will be interesting.

I think I'm a testament to how one conversation with one person can change the trajectory of your life. I have a memory from seventh grade, where at the lunch table our friend Lauren said, "Oh, you like music? Do you have Napster on your computer? You should go home and download music by The Ataris and Bright Eyes." And I went home and did that. Lauren ended up bringing us to a show in someone's garage not long after, which, as a 12-year-old, completely terrified me.

That moment definitely sticks out in my memory as an early introduction to local and underground shows. It launched a few years of our lives that revolved around pop-punk, emo, and hardcore scenes, meeting people on MySpace and LiveJournal who were interested in music. I didn’t choose for music to embed itself into my life and become the social fabric of how I knew all of my friends. It was just more interesting.

I do think there's something specific to understanding yourself as a participant in music, rather than someone who is listening and observing from the outside. When you're a participant, you have a seat at the table, you have a sense of agency. You also meet a lot of musicians. It doesn't surprise me that someone with such a rigorous critique of Spotify has also been participating in music since they were 13 years old.

I like telling that story as my key into a whole larger world of music, but it wasn't really until getting involved in college radio and booking house shows that I really started to get a sense of what punk is, and what DIY culture is.

I think participation in DIY and independent music gives you a certain sense of power analysis about the culture industry, and it really pushed me to invest in this mode of thinking about collective culture. But the book is also journalistic, and I drew on academic works around the political economy of digital music media, too.

There's this sentence in the introduction where you state very lucidly: "I've long been confounded by the expectation that we simply accept the dealings of the powerful as unexplainable." That sentence always stands out to me because I hear you so strongly in it—the totality of experience of a person who, from the time she was a kid, wholeheartedly believed that, and continues to live by her values.

I didn’t choose for music to embed itself into my life and become the social fabric of how I knew all of my friends. It was just more interesting.

I think it’s worth carrying it as far as you can in life. When you’re a kid and you start to see how big the world is, it’s exciting and also infuriating. When we were teenagers, Liz instigated a crusade against Walmart at our high school. When Walmart arrived at the mall in our town on Long Island, Liz organized a protest where we distributed pamphlets encouraging people to boycott, with information about sweatshop labor. This was in 2006. And to be clear, there were maybe five of us participating in this protest, but it’s still such a powerful memory for me.

, you write about these charged anti-globalization protests happening in Gothenburg in 2001, and how they anticipated pro-piracy groups taking root in Sweden. Activist groups that 

 piracy were asking questions about free music, and whether culture should be a public good. You write about how the normalization of piracy in Sweden paved the way for a company like Spotify to take root, because the music industry had basically given up on the idea that it could make money there. Is there a connection for you between your teenage crusade against Walmart and your criticisms of Spotify?

Definitely the seeds of hating corporations are all right there. As a teenager, I came across this book called 

 that had been put out by Verso, and it made a really big impact on me. It’s interesting to think about how a teenager in suburbia would be learning about this anti-corporate perspective, as a ripple effect of the anti-globalization protests in the late ’90s, early 2000s.

In the first chapter of my book, I talk about a group in Sweden in the mid-2000s called Piratbyrån, which consisted of organizers, hackers, ravers, and punks, some of whom had been involved in the anti-globalization protests in Stockholm at the beginning of the 2000s. At that point, the whole battle over Napster had already played out. Piratbyrån was created as a response to a Hollywood-aligned lobbying group in Stockholm called Anti-Piratbyrån, the Anti-Pirate Bureau.

It was a moment of questioning the corporate capture and consolidation of cultural industries, and people were challenging the effectiveness of copyright. At the time there were really some interesting arguments being made about music as a public good, but there weren’t strong enough labor protections for musicians to carry out the logic of that thinking. It allowed for piracy culture to be co-opted—Olof Dreijer talks about the rise of streaming as a gentrification of file-sharing—and maybe it speaks to the philosophy’s weaknesses that Spotify was able to emerge.

When we were teenagers, we had this very simple and intuitive sense of right and wrong, and Walmart fit directly into the “bad” bucket. Obviously you can't really make a clean metaphor, but Spotify is similarly profit-minded in how it exploits musicians, brings low-cost stock music to the platform, and mitigates the experience of listening for people.

In some of my early interviews around the book, I caught myself saying things like, "Obviously it's great that people have access to music. I'm not against free music, but when things are made free, there can be high costs that come with them." And I remembered that, funnily enough, that's literally the subtitle of a book about Walmart form 2005: 

, published by Harper’s in December, was a chapter on ghost artists. They’re popularly known as fake artists, but you make a distinction in the book where you refer to them as ghost artists instead.

People started using the phrase “fake artists” around 2016, 2017. But in the years I spent writing the book, a bigger conversation about generative AI music started to take hold. I needed to clarify that these tracks are not, for the most part, made using generative AI. They are musicians hired to make these tracks under unfavorable conditions, and that phenomenon was setting the stage for AI to take over in a concerning way.

When that excerpt came out, the music critic Ted Gioia made a post in his newsletter talking about how impressed he was by your reporting, particularly because as a journalist himself, he’d had his own pitches rejected by mainstream media outlets who didn't see the value in investigative journalism on streaming. He pointed out that it took an independent journalist such as yourself, to bring this story to light. Why do you think mainstream music media has tended to disregard streaming?

I don't know if it's been disregarded entirely. Certainly there's been no shortage of important coverage on streaming in music business trade publications and stuff. But what sorts of stories are being told? What Ted Gioia wrote in his newsletter resonated with me. 

I thought this would be an important story, but I knew that if I tried to pitch it to a mainstream publication, I wouldn’t be able to tell it in the way that I wanted to. The space typically afforded to these topics tends to be a hot take, or a 1200 word piece. There needs to be some clear news hook.

I was just at a talk at Brooklyn Public Library where the labor journalist, Hamilton Nolan, was talking about the difference between business stories and labor stories. He articulated labor journalism as business reporting told from the perspective of workers.

The music business should talk to musicians more often. I guess in some ways that's advocating for a more pro-labor perspective on 

music business journalism. In this book, there's as many musicians interviewed as people who work in the music business. I wanted to talk to the people who actually do the work that makes the whole scheme possible.

To some extent, I think the mainstream music business and media has shied away from this conversation over the years because it would require them to interrogate themselves and engage a political perspective about corporate consolidation. Maybe there's some reluctance to do that kind of grappling or self-reflection.

From my perspective as a music journalist, it's so hard to get a feature assigned anywhere if it’s not about a famous musician, because publications are so concerned with traffic.

Well, journalism is in crisis. This book exists because there wasn’t another way for me to conduct a seriously sourced cultural investigation into the state of music media and music technology. In some ways, my preference would be to just have a staff job at an alternative newsroom or something, but where are those?

 was in January 2024. We went upstate on a writing and editing retreat, and while we were there, the news broke that Pitchfork had been gutted by Condé Nast. I had worked for and with Pitchfork for the previous 14 years, and about a dozen of my colleagues and friends in the Pitchfork Union were fired.

It felt depressing and also really telling. I’m curious if you have any other thoughts about the relationship between streaming and the crisis of music journalism?

The decimation of journalism over the past two decades, maybe longer at this point, has had so much to do with changes in the advertising business. For better or for worse, journalistic outlets, including music magazines and music publications, largely used to exist because of advertising. And the way that digital advertising has moved in the past 20 years is directly related to the rise of the platform economy. Spotify started as an advertising platform, which I think is really important to remember when thinking about the history of this company and the rise of this model.

The original Spotify business model was about creating a library of content, and I hate the word “content,” but it’s the one they use. At first they weren't even sure if it was going to be for music. According to early employees, they'd considered video, audiobooks, and other products. They were looking for a traffic source for advertising, and music was what they landed on for a multitude of reasons. This company was started by people with backgrounds in ad tech.

So in some ways, both the rise of streaming and the decimation of journalism have been completely tied to the shifts of the digital advertising market. In seeing how journalists are trying to respond, improvise, and create new alternatives, it's obvious that they were always in a vulnerable position. Advertising never made sense as the primary source of funding for music or media.

It's horrible that there are so many people out of work, but [it feels important] that media companies are considering cooperative alternatives, nonprofit newsrooms, and membership models, and asking these big questions about the role of public subsidy in the future of journalism. It's like yeah, you wouldn't solve the problems created by a VC-funded ad tech platform by creating a new VC-funded ad tech platform that's slightly less horrible. It requires really looking at the roots of the problems and the ways we relate to culture, and advocating for and supporting people who are having these more robust conversations about ownership.

Do you think that the mechanisms of streaming are intentionally obfuscated in order to keep artists in the dark?

Yeah, definitely. Actually, I have a really vivid memory of talking about that with you, and you playing me the Laurie Anderson song

“Only an Expert.” That song captures a large part of why these companies invest in complicated systems, so that artists will have to defer to "experts" to understand them. Part of the process of demystification is putting forth this idea that it's not too complicated. We can have a greater sense of media literacy when it comes to audio culture, and actually try to wrap our heads around these things.

I also think it’s important to not underestimate readers—as Taja Cheek of L’Rain shares in the book, the music business tends to treat listeners like they're dumb. I think that applies to books too. I actually think people want to read about these tools that have become a normalized part of everyday life.

Yes totally. When you were trying to sell this book, it was rejected by one publisher who said it was too depressing, and on the same day it was rejected by a publisher who said it was too hopeful. And it's like, why can't it be both? Why can't it be dark and also hopeful at the same time? That's reality.

 came out in the beginning of January, I've gotten to watch you read in New York, Baltimore, DC and now Barcelona, Lisbon, and London. Some of these events have really felt utopian to me. At the end of the book, you suggest that a solution to beginning to confront streaming is to foster conversations within your communities about how to revalue music collectively. A lot of the events I've been to have enacted that, and I think that's really powerful. I’ve looked around in those rooms and felt hopeful to see people converging who actually care about the intersection of art and politics.

The people who wanted the book to tell them which button to press in order to be ethical consumers found it to be depressing. But those who know that imagining healthier cultural ecosystems comes from active participation were the ones who found it to be hopeful, which is interesting.

Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned since the book came out?

That's been the best part of it. As one person, you can do all the interviews in the world, but you're never going to be able to fully have the answers for people. There have been some unsatisfying moments when people want a neat answer for, "Well, what's the solution?" But the cool thing about events has been that they open up this space for more people to chime in with ideas.

Something I try to really drive home in the book is that we don't need technical solutions to these problems. We need to rethink the social and political alternatives to these systems. There are so many risks to Spotify being our archive, but what does it look like to be a responsible steward of music?

 a question that originated in a piece you wrote for the 

. When I was 18 and I first moved to New York City, I went to Fordham for a year and lived next door to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and took out CDs all the time. Some think the idea of a library streaming service is too idealistic, but people have been getting music from libraries for decades. A library-based service might not fully “solve” the streaming dilemma, but I think it would help foster intentional listening, which is part of the puzzle.

 in 2021, and it's something I remain really excited about. After that 

piece came out, I heard so many stories from other people in music about how important going to get a stack of CDs at the public library was to them as a teenager. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to end the book with the public library as a possible alternative or “solution” for digital music access.

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