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Desiree Tuttle, the pastry sous chef at Reynard in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has a tattoo of a croissant under her left ear. “Croissants are my jam, I love croissants,” she explained the other morning as she sliced one in half. “Most people don’t do this, they just bite right into the side or something. But you can see all these laminations—each one is a layer we put in there by hand.” Indeed, there’s an incredible geometry to it, like the rings on a sequoia. “It’s actually really hard to do, because we use this organic butter that’ll shingle if it doesn’t laminate properly. Then you won’t get those distinct croissant qualities, like the flaky layers.” 

Matt Pandamiglio is notgoing to get married until he’s sure that nothing else goodcan happen to him. So goes the film adaptation of Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show, Sleepwalk With Me, co-starring Lauren Ambrose as Abby, the girlfriend to whom he won’t get married. Like most stories by and about stand-up comedians, Birbiglia’s first-person narrative flitters between his self-pitying isolationism and the genuine fact that the world shits on him constantly.

At one time or another, Bruce Nauman, now 70, has been described by Peter Schjeldahl as “the best American artist of the last quarter century” and by Artforum as “adolescent and contemptible.” Either way, it’s not much of a stretch to call Nauman the foremost living practitioner of conceptual art, and his 2005 installation One Hundred Fish Fountain, on display at the Gagosian Gallery through August 31, is an amalgam of materials and motifs from nearly a half-century of work.

'Daily Show' writer Kevin Bleyer takes on the daunting task of rewriting our Constitution. (Why not?)

Joel Stein wrote a book about becoming a man. Or rather, Joel Stein is a man who wrote a book about his quest for machismo.

I emailed a friend yesterday afternoon, looking for company to see (and wait in line for) Christian Marclay’s much acclaimed video installation The Clock up at Lincoln Center. His response: “Oh yeah, there's a similar film playing on my cell phone every single second of every day.” As facetious as that is, Daniel Zalewski’s profile of Marclay does mention a copy of the film having sold to hedge fund manager Steven Cohen, who “started showing the work on a monitor in his office, as if it were a fancy screen saver.”

As an American, I’ve seen my share of people rock a fuckin’ basement, but few have rocked one harder than Valley Lodge did last night at Union Hall. For one, their frontman Dave Hill, also known for putting funny things on the internet and on paper (Tasteful Nudes), was wearing a floral brooch. Nobody wears a floral brooch on stage when they’re insecure about their rocking abilities. The other two axmen were sporting colorful jeans (white and yellow). Good enough.

The Loopy Doopy Rooftop Bar at the Conrad New York hotel might fit neatly into the general conglomerate of Manhattan rooftop bars, but for one fun fact: the building is owned by Goldman Sachs. As part of what’s been dubbed “Goldman Alley,” Loopy Doopy—named for the Sol DeWitt piece in the hotel’s lobby—goes along with the Shake Shack, Vintry Wine & Whiskey, and Salvatore Anzalone’s barbershop to form Battery Park City’s new all-inclusive comfort zone for the 8,000 Goldman employees that come and go about the company’s main tower.

In preparation for a Jersey Shore comedown, MTV is filling out its slate with scripted programming—not Laguna Beach “scripted,” but writers’ room scripted. And leading these shows, at least in critical praise from reputable folks, is Awkward,a comedy (now in its second season) about a teenage girl at a Los Angeles high school.

Woody Allen's new film is a reminder why it’s just so boring to watch characters you don’t care about recite over-written conversations.