Staff Picks: Obama, Netflix, and Escorts

I never expected to like Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World, but it needed only a few minutes of my attention to have me laughing out loud. Though the description might be off-putting—“Bored with killing animals, seventeen-year-old James is busy plotting his first real murder when brash new girl Alyssa catches him off guard at school”—the show is witty and barefaced in the way that a Wes Anderson film could be if Anderson’s films weren’t so masculine. Alyssa and James have a push-pull relationship that left me refreshed at the end of the show’s eight twenty-minute episodes, wondering where the two and a half hours had gone. —Eleanor Pritchett

If you live in the New York City area or are visiting soon, please carve ten minutes out of your day for  and then, if you have ten more minutes, . These are two strange little rooms, both created by the artist Walter De Maria, both maintained by , both completely free to enter. I won’t (oh god, a pun, why not) the surprise of either piece, but I will say that when I visited these two exhibits in quick succession last Sunday, I saw the city open up—almost unfold before my eyes—in ways that it hadn’t for me ever before. What other rooms could be lurking among the tapas restaurants and purveyors of high-end socks? I wondered. What other mysteries does the city hold? —