“Anything from thongs to vibrators. That’s the least of it: fellatio, how to control the taste of a man’s semen. … I’m at a fish counter and this guy comes up to me and says, ‘You know, I just have to thank you. Thank you so much. There’s no way I could have really broached the subject about sex with my daughter without your help. Thank you.’ I’m at the fish counter with the father of a 13-year-old girl.

The man in the Marvel suit confronts his body. Photo: David Alekhuogie for New York Magazine Photo: David Alekhuogie for New York Magazine Kumail Nanjiani would like to remind everyone about his brain, but I’ve brought him to the gym to talk about his muscles. He gets that this is all people — especially men — have wanted to talk about since the photos. You’ve seen them. He strikes a superhero pose, his shirtless torso slicked with baby oil, displaying branching veins that crisscross his arms like a complex irrigation system.

The Transformers series has kept Shia LaBeouf busy — the only movie he’s put out in the last three years sans clanging robots was the sequel to Wall Street — but now that LaBeouf has parted ways with Michael Bay, it’s time for him to figure out who he’ll really be as an actor. Exhibit A: The Prohibition-era crime drama Lawless, which boasts an auteur director (John Hillcoat, who made The Proposition and The Road) and casts LaBeouf as the youngest of the Bondurant brothers, real-life moonshine bootleggers who attempt to fend off the special agent investigating them.

Frida Kahlo, with cacti. “We, like many people, knew Frida Kahlo as one of the most important artists of the 20th century — and, dare I say it, as a cultural icon,” Todd Forrest, vice-president for horticulture and living collections at the New York Botanical Garden, quipped at the press opening May 16 for “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life.” Heck, the Times “Styles” section had just the week before declared that the artist was “having a moment.

William Jackson Harper in Primary Trust, at the Laura Pels. Theater seems to have loneliness on the mind. In recent works like King James and Summer, 1976, I’ve seen intimate explorations of friendship, and in plays like The Trees, a consideration of the dynamics of community—all tinged by a few pandemic years spent with little human interaction. A stage is a good space to conjure togetherness, and so is an audience.

Last year when Louis C.K. released his 1998 feature film debut Tomorrow Night, it seemed like a move that didn’t quite add up. Here’s this guy, A-list comedian, has his own cable TV show – suddenly he’s putting out this black and white art film. Why? His show now isn’t necessarily laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s certainly a different kind of thing than Tomorrow Night. That’s like Lars von Trier showing us all a HBO half hour from 20 years ago.

LOUIE: Louis C.K. stars in LOUIE, a new comedy airing on FX. Woody Allen has announced the remainder of the cast for his next film, and the director has added Louis C.K. (presaged by Vulture!) and Andrew Dice Clay (well!) to a movie already populated by Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, and Michael Emerson. Also, that Bradley Cooper rumor never panned out, as he’s not in the film; you will get Peter Sarsgaard, though.

Utopia understands the giddy fervor of plunging down the rabbit hole. Fiction is often measured on its relevance to the current moment, even though sometimes “relevance” is mistaken for being topical. Utopia, the new Amazon Prime adaptation of a U.K. show, spearheaded by Gillian Flynn, is weirdly, upsettingly topical. It’s a show about a band of misfits trying to stop a devastating virus from causing the end of the world.

500 Days of Summer, oh la la. Two months ago, we looked out on the upcoming slate of film releases and boldly declared that 2009 would be the Year of the Werewolf, with hairy-faced Lycans finally putting an end to the box-office hegemony of vampires — but that was way before Paul Blart: Mall Cop made $39 million over four days this weekend. Even though the coming weeks and months will bring wolf-starring movies like Underworld 3, The Wolf Man, and First Howl, we’ll also see April’s Observe and Report, in which Seth Rogen plays a racist mall security guard, and the new, just-announced-today Fox sitcomWalorsky, which follows “the exploits of an ex-cop who now patrols a shopping mall in Buffalo, NY” (Fox claims to have picked up the show prior to Blart’s baffling MLK Day success).

Thanks to their pulverizing sound, an endorsement from Metallica, and their dinosaur-elephant name, Atlanta metal band Mastodon are one of the genre’s biggest recent crossover successes. Their new album, Crack the Skye, is a tribute to drummer Brian Dailor’s sister, who committed suicide when he was a teenager. Dailor spoke with Vulture about Skye, doing the music for the upcoming Jonah Hex movie, and what fans can expect at their show tonight at the Hammerstein Ballroom.