Pluto TV’s Holidays Are Brutal collection offered fans a fresh escape from over-sugared holiday programming with a lineup of beloved blockbusters and action-packed film franchises — from “Charlie’s Angels” and “Rush Hour’ to “The Expendables” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”
On Tuesday night, TAX Magazine took over Music For A While, the subterranean listening bar in Chelsea, to celebrate the release of its sixth issue, Diverge. The crowd was a mix of actors, designers, nightlife icons, and digital creators.
If TAX has a signature, it’s the ability to turn underground energy into something collectible. The Fall/Winter 2025 issue, spanning 370 pages, continues that idea. Designed in Paris, printed in Ghent, published in Los Angeles, and distributed in London, it’s an object that crosses borders but keeps an independent pulse. Diverge explores what happens when instinct takes over instruction and how queer culture, fashion, and intimacy create their own paths and rewrite the rules as they go.
The New York launch came first, followed by an L.A. event the next night. The pace felt right for TAX: fast, global, and slightly chaotic. Inside the warm wood-paneled space, the crowd filled out quickly. Peter Do and Amanda Lepore, both featured in the issue, anchored the night. Lepore arrived in a neon-lime latex dress and yellow gloves that shimmered under flashbulbs while Do kept it understated, moving through conversations with quiet focus, talking about the issue’s evolution and the publication’s widening reach.
The night’s soundtrack came from DJ Evan Kline and DJ P_A_T, who shifted seamlessly between glossy pop and hard electronic cuts. Cocktails flowed courtesy of Gay Water, Superbird Tequila, UME Plum Liqueur (our favorite), and Ten to One Rum, a lineup that matched the magazine’s mood: bright, independent, and a little indulgent.
Across the room, conversations blended fashion, film, TikTok and design. Among the guests were Haley Kalil, Ian Paget, and Peter Demas, alongside editors and reporters from Billboard, WWD, Page Six, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Knockturnal. Photographer Anneliese Horowitz caught the details that mattered: Lepore commanding the room, Kalil in a red sweater mid-laugh, and a sea of phones lighting the space like a low-lit constellation.
TAX’s events always feel less like parties and more like moving editorials. The lighting was cinematic with streaks of red and violet reflecting off glasses and latex, creating pockets of motion that looked staged but weren’t. The energy was fluid, part club, part gallery, part social experiment.
Diverge marks a turning point for TAX. It’s their largest and most visually ambitious issue yet, built with the kind of design precision usually reserved for fashion houses, not independent magazines.
Unwavering faith will help you if you’re ever stranded at sea, according to Zachary Levi and the cast of “Not Without Hope.”
Following the release of her new single “Radio,” rising pop artist Cate Tomlinson spoke with The Knockturnal about embracing authenticity and evolving her sound.
There are people born the year “RuPaul‘s Drag Race” premiered who are now able to vote. People who have had the show their entire existence. What a wonderful world.
Carmela Zumbado, known for her breakout role in “You”as well as appearances in “The Magicians” and “Chicago PD”, has built a career rooted in a lifelong love of performing. Now featured in “Power Book IV: Force”, she reflects on where it all began.
Urban Stages was founded to support playwrights in developing and showcasing new work. They now also work to increase access to the arts. Their mainstage program supports artists and presents acclaimed plays and musicals Off-Broadway.
“When I studied at NYU, when I went to NYU film, the first thing they tell you is the hardest thing in film is animals and children,” director Sarah Goher told the audience at a screening of her debut feature Happy Birthday at the IFC Center.
However, being a mother herself helped her overcome this particular challenge.
“As someone who has two children, I’m very grateful I had those two children before I made this film because it just taught me so much about kids,” she said. “Like, if you really prepare kids and you really earn their trust and you really prepare them for what’s to come, they won’t just give you a hundred percent, they could give you a hundred and fifty percent.”
Happy Birthday, Egypt’s nomination for the 98th Academy Awards in 2026, follows eight-year-old Toha, a child maid for a wealthy Cairo family who forms a special bond with her employer’s daughter, Nelly. Having never celebrated her own birthday, Toha becomes determined to ensure Nelly has a perfect party, secretly hoping to experience the joy she’s never known. As Toha’s relationship with Nelly’s mother, Laila, begins to transcend typical employer-servant boundaries, deep-rooted social hierarchies are threatened, forcing the young girl to confront the realities of class division in modern Egypt.
These realities, however, are communicated in the film through soft whispers.
“At some point, two European sales companies, low-key suggested I add more violence to the film,” Goher explained, “I think they were expecting kind of like Parasite, perhaps I would have something that was much more of a ‘big bang,’ a message about class and about division. And I didn’t for two reasons.”
“I didn’t feel that was true to the reality,” she continued, ”I think there’s a lot more nuance to the reality of these situations. And I feel that at the end of the day, I also want to make a film that I’m not trying to get into a European festival, I’m not trying to sell this to the West.”
“I want a film that when I show this to people in my family, to friends who think that this is okay or who don’t want to acknowledge that there’s something wrong with this kind of situation, the invisibility of certain people in society, that it actually gets to them.”
As it turns out, despite the best efforts of child labor laws, this story resonates with audiences around the world. Happy Birthday is very much a film that pushes back against the notion of giving kids a “better life” via servitude in higher class communities.
“I’ve shown this film to lots of audiences. I get people from India, Honduras, Latin America, Mexico, um, even in Spain, which surprised me. This situation happens,” Goher shared with the audience. “Now, by law, child labor is forbidden in Egypt. But there are kids who exist in this [invisible] limbo under the false pretense of goodwill.”
Still, it was important to Goher that Doha Ramadan (Toha), who the director discovered on the streets of Cairo, didn’t just see her character as a servant.
“The other thing is, when I was directing her, I never told her you’re playing a maid because I didn’t want her to project that,” she explained. “I felt like her prerogative was if I’m this little girl, and this is what I saw with the actual girl who inspired the character, she wants to see herself as a child first.”
“And she would come up with suggestions and be like, ‘Sarah, what if I blah blah blah blah blah,’ or ‘why don’t we blah blah blah blah blah?’ And I would let her do what she felt curious about because I started to find myself like while I was shooting the film, it doesn’t matter what, you know, all the kind of ambitious directing stuff you want to do.”
Since wrapping Happy Birthday, Goher also shared how she stays in touch with Ramadan.
“I didn’t want to be one of those filmmakers who plucks a kid out of obscurity, puts them in front of the camera, and then forgets about them,” Goher shared, “And I’ve seen this happen, and it’s very unfortunate. I’ve been to her school, she does go to a school, it’s not a good school. So I got her a private tutor who, since June of 2024, until now, he teaches her three times a week, and now she can read and write really well.”
“There’s not a lot of outreach for the arts in these communities, so I enrolled her at Cairo Opera House’s Youth Talent Center. So she was doing music, and she hated the singing part, so she’s just doing ballet. So she’s been doing that since June of 2024.”
Happy Birthday, which received several honors at the Tribeca Festival, is Egypt’s submission for the 98th Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film.
Going into Jimmy Donaldson’s “MrBeast Games” Season 2 brings a whole other beast into the competition. Which raises the question: what would you actually do to survive these challenges? Episode 4 pushes that idea even further, asking contestants to navigate not just one game show, but the clash of two survival worlds at once.