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I went to a walkthrough of the recently-opened Hyatt Union Square on Fourth Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets last night, to see what the first new hotel in the neighborhood in more than a decade looks like. As it happens, in many ways it looks like every other Hyatt I've visited. I mean that in a good way. The hotel boasts tastefully-furnished guest rooms, a friendly, helpful staff, and clean, airy public spaces: the kind of place that takes some of the pain out of business travel and adds a premium of pleasure to leisurely jaunts. This being franchise-averse Manhattan, though, it has a few cool downtown twists to help it fit into the Union Square area, which I've always considered the real heart of New York for people who actually live here (sorry, Times Square). Exhibit A: a cool sculpture by Brinton Jaecks called "Hypnagogia" (above) in the hotel's independently-operated restaurant, The Fourth, featuring a series of discarded beds connected by hand-carved wooden chains. I looked at the sculpture, hanging as the massive, slightly twisted centerpiece to the two-level, three-meal restaurant, and wondered to myself: is Hyatt letting its freak flag fly? Maybe a little.

The incarnation of Seinfeld creator Larry David with which audiences are probably most familiar is his Curb Your Enthusiasm self: clean-shaven, mostly bald and always in the midst of an uncomfortable situation. This perception is so ingrained in our collective cultural memory that most people probably won’t even recognize Mr. David in his latest role, the upcoming HBO film Clear History. In the new trailer for the movie, David appears as a grizzled old man with a yacht-rock-meets-hippie vibe, driving a convertible and belting out Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4.” Cool.

First off, we already know that right-wing nutjob Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has smoked crack cocaine. Secondly, that’s Canada’s problem—as far as I recall, the U.S. reelects crazy drug addicts without much fuss. Third of all, do you care about Gawker getting an exclusive video of this ruddy, racist, drugged-out mess, or the people who shot it getting a bunch of money for being there when he smoked crack cocaine? Man, for $200,000 I’ll win public office and smoke crack cocaine right in front of you. Deal. 

There are four times this summer when several very peculiar things are happening in the Hamptons. Things like "having your chilled Dom Perignon rosé parachute-delivered 13,500ft by a skydiver," or "eating French toast bites alongside Angus beef sliders and lobster rolls." Sounds familiar? Then perhaps you've been to Day & Night in NY – the Koch brothers' sparkler and DJ-filled brunch party – and perhaps you'll be very happy to hear: it's taking over Montauk for the third year in a row. 

Ben Wheatley's romantically murderous road movie Sightseers premiered but two weeks ago in the states, and yet, today we're already graced with a trailer for the director's next feature A Field in England. When we spoke with Wheatley back in April, he told us that the film was:

Much hay has been made of the news that Internet dinosaur Yahoo! Inc. will buy the blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, allowing the company’s decrepit 26-year-old founder and CEO, David Karp, to finally retire to his private island made of American Apparel models. (Just kidding, David. Please don’t delete me.) But while Tumblr users and others have expressed outrage and threatened self-exile, as if we’d just reelected George W. Bush, we didn’t know what a Yahoo!-fried Tumblr will look like. Until now. Here are some highly confidential plans we intercepted. 

With the political upheaval of the time and the world in a state of disarray. the late 1960's spawned some of the most iconic and memorable works of cinema from people trying to make sense of the vastly changing world around them. With a need to not only tell what the hell was going on, but how it felt, director's were making films that provided a "cinematic snapshot of the era," and one of those filmmakers was acclaimed cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

When I saw this on model-turned-Twitter sensation Chrissy Teigan's Instagram yesterday, I thought it was a joke. I mean, John Legend's babely fiance regularly releases crazy, 140-character claims for the sake of comedy, so it wasn't a far-fetched idea. A fast food chain like Taco Bell wouldn't actually design rings for their most loyal and famous fans to wear, right?