Just after twelve o'clock, the first people arrived: a vanload of nine honor-guard soldiers up from Fort Knox, dressed in their green Class-A uniforms, with knotted ties and berets. Collins had seen them practicing and pointing at various spots in the grass when he dug the grave. Now seven of them stacked their M16's in one of those spots. Each gun held three rounds; Sergeant Aaron Huber, a broad-backed thirty-one-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, had taken care to polish his ammunition to a high shine. Six of the soldiers, including Huber, then assembled in two rows between the grave and where they knew the hearse would park. The extra rifleman remained with the weapons, and the noncom in charge, thirty-seven-year-old Sergeant Kenneth Dawson, stood at attention nearby. The ninth man, Specialist Robert Leatherbee, a boy-faced twenty-six-year-old from Massachusetts, took his place about forty feet away. With his buzz cut and iron-crisp uniform, he looked like a soldier, but there seemed something smaller or gentler about him, at least compared with the others. Maybe it was just that he was holding a trumpet instead of a gun, his fingers tender on the brass.
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Star Wars has explored plenty of parental dysfunction over the years, but The Mandalorian and Grogu depicts a family unit that actually … functions. The film, debuting this Friday, leans into the sunnier side of the dad and kid relationship. Star Wars needs this right now. So do parents and their little ones.
Jon Favreau didn’t intend to tell a story about the most intense single father in the universe when he created The Mandalorian TV series almost eight years ago. He just liked the look and vibe of Boba Fett and thought it would be cool to pair an ominous lone wolf with a cute and cuddly ward. That’s how Pedro Pascal’s masked bounty hunter joined up with the little green child we’ve come to know as Baby Yoda. The personal meaning, much of it drawn from Favreau’s own life, just snuck in.
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Every morning, on my pilgrimage to a Japandi coffee shop in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I encounter taste, so much taste, often in the form of copies of the same guy. He wears selvedge denim, thumb rings, and a well-groomed mustache. He is a film bro, with a preference, inevitably, for anything directed by Akira Kurosawa. He likely lives in an intentionally cluttered Greenpoint loft. The clutter includes first-edition copies of Dune. Sightings of people like him are rare in most other American cities, except maybe in the trendiest dive bars of a few other metropolitan areas. Even in Brooklyn, if you travel a mile south or a mile north, he would disappear. For quite a few, this man’s aesthetic is the epitome of taste.
Him and every other Blackbird Spyplane reader, that is.
Fans of the cult-favorite style newsletter—and here in Brooklyn there are many—dress it to perfection. My borough is famously one of the hippest places on earth, so I am ostensibly surrounded by taste. But is this it, this phenomenon I observe every day with my morning coffee? Treating a fashion blog as a manual?
What even is taste?
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It’s baseball-cap season. That’s true in the literal sense; MLB is currently going strong. But it’s also a philosophical declaration. Because even if the idea of hitting a small white orb with a piece of wood and then running around a field were to disappear from the popular consciousness, it’d still be baseball-cap season. Because with Memorial Day rolling in, we’re just about to hit the unofficial start of summer. The sun will shine, the temperatures will soar, and headwear that keeps the glare out of your eyes and the sweat off your brow will become more essential than ever.
Of course, the prevalence of the baseball cap during the warmer months raises some questions. Should I be wearing one? What kind? Where? These are all valid queries, and the short answers, if you’re feeling impatient, are: sure, it depends, and it also depends. But you’re not here for the short version. You’re here to examine the nuances of the baseball cap in 2026 and figure out what works for you and when.
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Christina Alexandra Voros couldn’t believe it. The director was sitting in the crowd at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City for the premiere of The Madison in March when a familiar voice called out her name. “Christina Voros directed every episode of [this] show,” the presenter announced, “I think you'll see that she exceeded even my wildest expectations.”
It was Taylor Sheridan, the prolific TV creator behind Yellowstone, Landman, and countless other successful dramas at Paramount. It’s rare for Sheridan to make an appearance anywhere, let alone in New York City. So, when he showed up to introduce The Madison, he said that it was because he really believed in the series, and of course, in Voros. “I can't stand these things," he joked. “[But] I'm a big believer that when you find a talent that understands your voice, you need to surrender to that talent.”
That’s high praise from Sheridan, who, according to Voros, isn’t much of a “shoulder claps” kind of guy. But “there is a sense that the praise is the job,” she tells me now. “Taylor's very funny. He's incredibly loyal, he's incredibly demanding, and he is very good at identifying talent in people that they might not even recognize in themselves.”
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In the hierarchy of vaguely annoying things about watches, batteries have to be up there near the top. It’s all ticketyboo while the power lasts—you never have to think about it and, of course, it will keep way better time than a mechanical watch. But after a few years, when the battery is shot, that’s when things get dicey.
First you have to identify which teeny battery you need, assuming you have the dexterity to get the back off your watch. Then you have to find said battery. Finally, you have to get the damn thing in there and seal the watch back up without blowing a gasket (in both senses). You could take it to get fixed, but who has time for that? In the scheme of things, you’re more likely to forget about your watch than remember to put a new battery in it. Automatic mechanical watches are a viable—if more costly—solution, but you have to wear them consistently or they’ll lose power after a few days (at most).
A Citizen Eco-Drive watch, on the other hand, will theoretically keep on going forever. You just need light—be it electric or daylight—to keep it ticking.
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