THEATER: The Summer Play Festival is at full blaze over at the Theater Row complex on 42nd Street. At $10 a ticket it’s your cheapest way to catch new work by playwrights whose heat index is rising. Tonight you have your pick of four plays; insider theater blogger Surplus recommends Cipher, which concerns two clerks stuck in a secret location monitoring the thoughts of suspected terrorists. “When their assignment gets tough, they begin to ask......

Malcolm Gladwell profiles Cesar Millan, the "Dog Whisperer," in the New Yorker this week (the article is not online, but this Q&A Gladwell did with Ben Greenman about Millan is), and Gothamist cannot wait to get our issue from the mailbox. If you don't know who Cesar Millan is (like, you watched the South Park episode and thought he was made up), he's a total phenomenon. He communes with dogs, is able to walk huge......

Come this summer, you may see a new NYPD car - the Dodge Charger, best known as the Dukes of Hazzard car. The NYPD is adding fifteen 4-door Chargers for its Highway Unit - they must really love the Hemi - and ten will be tested this summer. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, "We're always looking for good equipment, including a little muscle in the car department," which almost sounds dirty. Of course, the NYPD's......

Today kicks off the New Yorker Festival and if you haven't snagged your tickets for some of the events yet, here's our list of last minute events we think are more than worthwhile...that still have seats left! Friday (night) Seymour M. Hersh interviewed by David Remnick Hersh has been writing about foreign policy and politics for decades and will be discussing the aftermath of 9/11 and the Bush administrations actions since then. Saturday (day) Literature......

Some of our favorite blogs freak out about the first New Yorker of 2004: Felix Salmon at Memefirst suspects that the "trademarked Eggers High Ironic" he reads in an article about best of lists comes from Ben Greenman. After thinking, "what on earth is the most venerable magazine in the world doing appropriating a prose style which was cool for about ten minutes in 1997," Felix almost goes over the edge when he discovers the......