“I would not be friends with someone who didn’t feel comfortable sending me offensive things,” wrote a Democratic political staffer, 23, who asked not to be named. In the next email he begged to strike that from the record because it sounded “abrasive,” even though he was being quoted anonymously: “I would be simply embarrassed to see that in there.” (He then insisted that his location within the city remain undisclosed; we will refer to him as the Staten Islander, because it’s remotely possible he is one.)

It’s a familiar dilemma to New York’s ambitious worthies: Perfect manners are suspect in private, but it’s embarrassing to be linked with jokes and ribaldry in public.

Javier Peres slept on the flight from Berlin last Wednesday night and hit the tarmac running. He dropped by the Tribeca Grand hotel to check in, splashed some water on his bearded face, then grabbed a cab to Terence Koh’s art opening at a private residence uptown. Sometime around sunrise, he crashed. He woke up the following evening around 8 p.m. and went to the Phillips de Pury auction, where he attempted to buy back a piece of Mr. Koh’s work—a wall installation of 12 bronze hands and forearms covered in black patina, wax and oil. A bidding war ensued between Mr.

Smell yams in the air? We smell a big fat Tofurkeyand three days of watching the Kirsten Dunst classic Bring It On in the suburbs, scratching our head at the thought of the U.S. automakers who refused to make fuel-efficient, cool cars, and thus were the architects of their own demise, now expecting a government handout—hello? Is this the Soviet Union circa 1973? Meanwhile, three glam geezers—Liz Smith, Gay Talese and Pete Hamill—conjure a pleasant palliative of nostalgia as they tell stories about Olde New Yorke at the 92nd Street Y, moderated by New York 1’s Budd Mishkin. Or gussy yourself up as

Milk
Running time 128 minutes
Written by Dustin Lance Black
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, Diego Luna, Victor Garber, Denis O’Hare

In real life, Harvey Milk was an unexceptional Jewish boy, as plain as a matzo, but with extraordinary courage, as challenging to homophobic society as a pierced nipple. Without much public egotism or personal glory, he was a late bloomer who, at 48, made history, first when he became the first gay-rights advocate elected to public office on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, and the next year, when he was assassinated for it.

Lake City
Running time 92 minutes
Written and directed by Hunter Hill and Perry Moore
Starring Sissy Spacek, Troy Garity, Colin Ford, Rebecca Romijn

Hunter Hill and Perry Moore’s Lake City, from their own screenplay, was designed from the outset as a vehicle for veteran Oscar-winning actress Sissy Spacek. It was also consciously and even self-consciously modeled after such “Southern” movies as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Sling Blade (1996), One False Move (1992), Tender Mercies (1983) and The Last Picture Show (1971). In their joint Director’s Q&A, Mr. Hill and Mr. Moore discuss the genesis of the film: “Lake City burned a hole through us: it was a story we had to tell.

Forty years ago, on a chilly afternoon in November, the Harvard and Yale football teams met at Harvard Stadium to play their final game of the season. For the first time since 1909 both schools were undefeated, and when the game was all over it was an instant classic, a thing of collegiate and sports lore. Sitting up in the stands that day in 1968 was undergraduate Kevin Rafferty, who would grow up to become a filmmaker (Blood in the Face, The Atomic Café) and now has made a documentary about the historic game, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (the title was a Harvard Crimson headline).

Billy Elliot is the best thing to happen to Broadway for a long while. The hit West End show about a working-class boy in a doomed North of England coal mining town who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer pulls off a remarkable trick: It’s the first musical I’ve seen to successfully combine a huge dollop of sentiment with social fury.

The groundbreaking Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change (2004) had the fury, but—too bad for its chances of Broadway success—was too emotionally refined. Billy Elliot takes no prisoners. It’s an unabashed tearjerker and a fairy tale, an unusual hybrid of stardust and coal dust.

The American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is best known for his mobiles—hanging sculptures fashioned from impeccably poised lengths of wire and thin metal plates, usually colored black and red. Taking direct inspiration from Miró, Calder distilled the Catalan master’s biomorphic vocabulary to the point at which Surrealist portent became happy caprice. The mobiles don’t need wind currents to set them into motion; they’re already lighter than air.

You’ll see Calder invent the mobile at roughly the midpoint of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years; 1926-1933,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was a transformative moment prompted by a move to Paris.

ABT’s relationship to Antony Tudor is somewhat schizophrenic. He’s too important to its history to be ditched, and of course several of his ballets are dramatic masterpieces that dancers love to dance. But he’s not a big draw, and—worst of all—he didn’t create any of those full-evening star vehicles that the company’s big spring season at the Met apparently requires. What to do?

In recent years, we’ve had a Lilac Garden here, a Pillar of Fire there, an occasional Dark Elegies. Scattered appearances of Orpheus in the Underworld, The Judgment of Paris and a few others. And all too frequent performances of The Leaves Are Fading, a work that Tudor made for Gelsey Kirkland back in 1975 that’s all lyrical nostalgia—looking back at the joys of spring and the careless rapture of young love.

When Drew Nieporent opened Montrachet on these premises in 1985, he turned New Yorkers’ idea of a fancy French restaurant on its head. The setting was a stark industrial space, with tin ceilings and overhanging pipes, in a desolate neighborhood of cast-iron buildings and scruffy warehouses. Instead of elderly French waiters in black tie, there was a young staff dressed entirely in black; the menu was in English, not French, and the wine list gave American vintages equal billing. The chef was an unknown named David Bouley.

Montrachet established a cool downtown style that has been widely imitated ever since.

Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown, 309 pages, $27.99

Of all the writers in the world—the number continues to multiply in terror-inducing increments—Malcolm Gladwell may be the only one who doesn’t need the extra credit from God you get for being published in The New Yorker.

His status there as star staffer certainly wins him no extra love from the management-consultant types who stuff his best-selling books into their briefcases before striding purposefully through airports, en route to their next carpeted conference suite. Mr. Gladwell has other, far more relatable gigs: Eponymous Web site maintainer; curiously youthful-seeming Romeo (like public-radio heartthrob Ira Glass, he’s well into his 40s); orator who fills theaters the size of the Colosseum with his plummy-voiced presentations, his hands flitting in front of him like birds as the capacity crowd murmurs its approval.