Lifestyle

Don’t Eat the Burger. It’s a Stool.

Published

1 year ago

January 17, 2025

Jonny Carmack was perusing the aisles of a store in his hometown, Danbury, Conn., when he first saw it: a giant strawberry sitting on a shelf.

Mr. Carmack, 32, a content creator, was awe-struck. “I was just like, oh my gosh, it’s so cute,” he said. “It’s so whimsical.”

But this strawberry didn’t come from the vine. In fact, it was a ceramic table with the cartoonish likeness of a strawberry. He purchased the table for $59.99 for his office and redecorated the room with the faux fruit in mind, adding panels of moss to a door and turf to the floor to resemble a garden.

Mr. Carmack is one of many passionate people across the United States who scour the aisles of discount retailers like HomeGoods, T.J. Maxx and Marshalls in search of culinary-inspired stools. Food as furniture has gone viral on social media, with collectors sharing photos of their finds and trading buying tips.

“It’s a huge community,” said Mr. Carmack, who owns about 30 food stools, including a stack of doughnuts, a peppermint and a pink gummy bear. “I was feral for that,” he said of his ceramic ursine figure.

Birdie Wood, too, developed a love of food stools by accident. She was shopping online one day in early 2021 when a stool with the likeness of a hamburger caught her eye. “I started decorating with weird and food-shaped things in 2009, so when I saw that this existed, I was like, this is huge,” she said. The burger was out of stock, but she snagged one on eBay a few weeks later.

She eventually furnished her three-bedroom, one-bathroom home on the South Shore of Long Island, N.Y., where she had recently moved, with the burger as inspiration. Throughout her home are other colorful, oversize objects, including a table shaped like a giant spool of thread, a large multicolored wristwatch and 10 other food stools, including a wedge of cheese. “I sort of based my entire life and personality around this silly burger stool,” she said.

Ms. Wood, 33, a woodworker, recently began building her own food-inspired furniture, with the goal of making objects she can’t find in stores. Her creations include a table with the likeness of a wrapped stick of butter and another resembling a can of Spam.

Ms. Wood said that for collectors like her, much of the appeal of quirky food stools is generational. “I think a lot of millennials specifically or older Gen Zs grew up with the ‘beige’ décor,” she said. “Once we hit the scene, we made it OK to decorate fun and silly.”

“I think that design just became so neutral, so minimalist, so boring for so long,” said Megan Hopp, 37, an interior designer and founder of Megan Hopp Design. She said these stools are millennials’ way of rejecting minimalist aesthetics — including the “billions of cans of gray paint everyone was using forever” — and embracing kitsch.

But not all food stools are created equal. There are hundreds of different designs, and the resale market for stools that are no longer available in stores can be competitive. (One reseller on eBay listed a strawberry stool for $169, more than twice its price at HomeGoods.)

Finding coveted stools often requires careful strategizing, and some dedicated collectors have it down to a science.

Robbie Hornik, 28, who owns about 87 food stools, said HomeGoods stores debut new stools seasonally and usually on the West Coast first. By studying the shopping habits of other food stool collectors on social media, “I’ve kind of calculated how long it takes for them to get here,” said Mr. Hornik, who lives in Syosset, N.Y.

Of course, it also helps to know the right people. “I’ve actually made friends with a couple of the managers and they kind of tell me when they have shipments,” he said.

To cut out the middleman, Mr. Hornik has even tried to source stools directly from vendors and manufacturers, though he has been unsuccessful so far. “There were so many different stools that I wanted and I needed to try and find a faster way to find them,” he said. (In an email to The New York Times, a spokesperson for TJX, the parent company of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods, said the company could not comment on any vendors or products in stores.)

But the thrill of the hunt is also part of the fun for many collectors, including Mr. Carmack, who has built a large following on social media by posting videos about his stool collection and secondhand furniture finds. He has become something of a celebrity to the staff at his local HomeGoods in Danbury — for better or worse.

“The employees, they come right up to me,” he said. “I’m like, oh my gosh, I cannot come here every day. They’re going to have me arrested.”

Click to comment

Lifestyle

Sunday Puzzle: Vowel Renewals

Published

4 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

Sunday Puzzle

NPR

hide caption

toggle caption

NPR

On air challenge

I’m going to give you some seven-letter words. For each one, change one consonant to a vowel to spell a new word.
Ex. CONCEPT –> CONCEIT

1. REVENGE

2. TRACTOR

3. PLASTIC

4. CAPTION

5. SCUFFLE

6. POMPOMS

7. MOBSTER

8. LINKAGE

9. TEMPERS

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge came from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Name an animal. The first five letters of its name spell a place where you may find it. The last four letters of this animal will name another animal — but one that would ordinarily not be found in this place. What animals are these?

Challenge answer

Stallion —> Stall, Lion

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Peter Gordon, of Great Neck, N.Y. Name some tools used by shoemakers. After this word place part of a shoe. The result will be the subject of a famous painting. What is it?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.

Lifestyle

L.A. summons the spirit of glam-surrealist artist Steven Arnold

Published

5 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

L.A. summons the spirit of glam-surrealist artist Steven Arnold

The sun, played by Love Bailey, and the moon, played by Logan Wolfe.

He has been described as a magician and “being of light.” As Salvador Dalí’s kindred spirit and protégé. As the Andy Warhol of the West Coast. The artist Steven Arnold ought to be a household name. The exhibition “Cocktails in Heaven” at Del Vaz Projects in Santa Monica, which opened this week with a party co-hosted by Karen Hillenburg and Christine Messineo of Frieze, is a hopeful step in this direction.

On Monday night, the gallery transformed into a replica of Arnold’s legendary home and studio in Los Angeles, known as Zanzabar, which has been compared to Warhol’s Factory for the luminaries it attracted (Timothy Leary, Debbie Harry, Ellen Burstyn) and the creative synergy it inspired. Throughout the ’80s and into the early ’90s, Zanzabar was host to queer gatherings and parties, as well as surrealist photoshoots with exquisite paper-cut set designs that Arnold entirely made from hand. “My house is a temple for me. It’s a religious space, it’s where the creativity happens,” he says in the 2019 documentary made on him, “Heavenly Bodies.” Arnold died at the age of 51 in 1994, from AIDS-related complications, and left behind a mind-bending body of work that is now housed by ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

Steven Arnold "Cocktails in Heaven" exhibition at Del Vaz Projects.

At Del Vaz, characters from Arnold’s ethereal photographs and films came to life in performances directed by artist Tyler Matthew Oyer: At the door, two French waiters, dressed in Mozart wigs and original coats hand-painted by Arnold, checked off guest names from an 8-foot scroll. Inside, performers dressed as the sun and moon — their mostly nude bodies spray-painted gold and silver — languorously laid over a banquet table abundant with crudités, conjuring a scene from Arnold’s most famous film, “Luminous Procuress,” which was projected on the wall. In the courtyard, a bodybuilder posed as a live version of Michelangelo’s “David” sculpture. It was an ode to the joyous, maximalist world that Arnold meticulously and affectionately built in both life and art — because for him there was no distinction, art was life.

Steven Arnold, "Angel of Night," 1982, featuring model Juan Fernandez.

Steven Arnold, "Intersection of Dreams," 1985

Every detail of the party came from something found in Arnold’s archive. The artistic director of the exhibition, Orrin Whalen, planted a few of Arnold’s actual belongings in the warm room where his photographs and drawings hung: his ornate metal bracelet rested on a seashell, and replicas of his red leopard print business cards fanned open on the front table. “Cocktails in Heaven” is also the title of Arnold’s unpublished memoir and became the source material for the party’s chef, Gerardo Gonzalez, who scanned for passages where the artist mentioned his favorite foods — mainly hors d’oeuvres and copious glasses of Vermouth.

Guests on Monday included fashion and art world luminaries, including artists Ron Athey and Joey Terrill, designer Zana Bayne, former Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin, and jewelry designer Sophie Buhai, who mingled under the dangling grapevines and in a tent where upside-down paper umbrellas suspended from the ceiling. The dress code was “Complete Fantasy Conglomerata Divina Magnificata,” and the crowd did their part wearing feathered hats, leopard-print tops, golden sequinned dresses and polka-dotted face paint. It was only fitting to pay homage to Arnold this way, a fashion icon in his own right who was once voted the best dressed man of Los Angeles by L.A. Weekly.

The evening signaled that this is not the type of show that will deaden an artist behind glass vitrines. “We can summon artists’ spirits through gatherings,” says Jay Ezra Nayssan, founding director and chief curator of Del Vaz Projects, which is also Nayssan’s home. “This opening is an aspect of a project that should be equally important as the exhibition itself … Queer culture is carried not only through scholarship but through laughter, perfume, embrace and touch, through dinners and concerts — and whatever forms are waiting to be invented.”

Waseem Salahi, left, and Elisa Wouk Almino, Editor in chief of Image Magazine.

Actor Charlie Besso, left, and director Luke Gilford.

Lifestyle

‘The Comeback’ is back. That’s something to Cherish

Published

16 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

‘The Comeback’ is back. That’s something to Cherish

Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish in The Comeback.

Erin Simkin/HBO

hide caption

toggle caption

Erin Simkin/HBO

Consider Valerie Cherish, the perennially desperate-to-be-seen, desperate-to-be-loved Hollywood C-lister played by Lisa Kudrow. Valerie, bless her, reenters our collective lives once every decade, like the census.

And like the census, her return always assumes the form of an appraisal, a ruthless and clear-eyed taking of stock. In The Comeback‘s original 2005 season, Valerie donned a cupcake costume and pratfalled her way through the rise of reality television, starring in both a corny sitcom and its making-of documentary. In 2014, a second season found Valerie headlining a prestige HBO series about that sitcom, auguring the fusillade of high-end, self-satisfied streaming dramedies that were about to pummel an unsuspecting populace into submission.

In this third season, she’s still out here hustling. Sure, she’s got an Emmy under her belt, and she’s been booked and busy, but there are signs of trouble — she and her husband (Damian Young) have downsized from their Brentwood mansion to a West Hollywood apartment. Her publicist-turned-manager (Dan Bucatinsky) seems even more checked out than baseline. She’s hired a social media consultant (Ella Stiller) and has even started (ominous chord, shudder) … a podcast.

As we meet her, she’s older, wiser but still essentially Valerie: Blithely optimistic, hungrily opportunistic. She’s still desperate for attention — but the precise nature of the attention she’s craving these days has subtly but significantly shifted. It’s no longer enough for Valerie to be seen; now, she wants — expects, demands, even — to be heard.

She remains ridiculous, thank God. And Kudrow once again imbues her with the physicality that has come to define Valerie’s essential self: She’s still going through life nodding like a bobblehead, still punctuating just about every sentence with a “right?” or a “yeah?” or a “y’know?,” because it’s a learned response. If the world refuses to affirm her in any way — and somehow it continues to find endlessly novel ways to do just that — then she’ll just affirm her own darn self, yeah? Right?

But something happens in the first episode of the new season that efficiently signals how much has changed for Valerie. The setup is classic The Comeback: She’s agreed to star as Roxie in Chicago on Broadway (after receiving assurances that her choreo will be the “dumbed down, Real Housewives version”). Rehearsal isn’t going great — her director and fellow dancers are mean, catty and dismissive (apart from one gay guy, whose words of praise Valerie seeks out like a homing missile — which checks out).

What happens next is quietly remarkable, given the Valerie Cherish we’ve come to love/cringe-in-sympathy-with over The Comeback‘s previous seasons. She doesn’t chirpily ignore their insults and blithely soldier on. She doesn’t try to excuse and minimize their bad behavior so she can take advantage of the opportunity they’re affording her. No, she calls them out, and she quits. (More accurately: She finds a ready, contractually viable excuse to quit — same difference, I’d argue.)

This isn’t the Valerie we used to know. When an opportunity to star in an AI-written sitcom arises, she doesn’t knock over furniture to lunge at the chance, as she would have before. She refuses (at first), she seeks assurances that actual writers will be involved (they will, sort of), and she steps up as the show’s executive producer as soon as it becomes clear she’s the only one involved who cares about the cast, the crew and the quality of the show itself.

There remain plenty of opportunities for Kudrow to make us laugh at Valerie, but as the season progresses, we find ourselves rooting for her more than ever. That’s because Kudrow has altered Valerie’s fuel mixture a bit. She’s always been acutely self-aware, she’s always known when she’s being disrespected, but the Valerie of seasons one and two was perfectly content to swallow other people’s low opinions of her if it meant she got some time in the spotlight.

Now, that self-awareness is matched to something besides her default, pathologically sunny perseverance; it’s married to defiance, and to action.

She stands her ground against a costume designer (Benito Skinner) who sees her as camp and nothing more (yet another of The Comeback‘s knowing digs at its rabid gay fanbase). She agrees to play nice with a network executive (Andrew Scott) until she, very publicly, doesn’t. And when her dour husband starts flailing on his own reality show, Valerie draws on her vast reserves of experience on both sides of the camera to show him how it’s done.

But a self-actualized Valerie affects the show’s comedic chemistry, and there are times when the season can’t quite manage to sustain its satiric bite. On two occasions, the show’s pitched disdain for Hollywood phoniness and hollow ambition falters, and something akin to sincerity peeks out from behind the mask. In one, a beloved real-life Hollywood comedy legend delivers a short monologue to Valerie about why AI can never replace real comedy writers, because comedy needs broken people. In another, a cast member from The Comeback‘s first season returns simply to assure Valerie that she is a good person, a wonderful person, and that she is in no way in the wrong.

On both occasions, seasoned viewers will be patiently but eagerly awaiting the turn, the rug-pull, the reveal that such abject, wet-eyed earnestness will of course get swatted down, because this is The Comeback. But the turn never comes, the rug remains firmly in place and we are left to grapple with the knowledge that we’ve just been exposed to the creators’ true intent, delivered with a gravid plainness, without anything even resembling the gimlet-eyed take we’ve come to, well … cherish.

But you know what? Fine. Who knows if Valerie will return in ten years’ time to once again Cassandra us all about the state of the entertainment industry? Who knows, in point of fact, if there’ll be an entertainment industry for her to return to? I forgave those moments of uncharacteristic ingenuousness because I managed to convince myself they felt valedictory, triumphant — a few discordant bars within Valerie Cherish’s swan song.

Which, as viewers of The Comeback’s definitive, beloved, iconic Season 1 finale will remember, is “I Will Survive.” Because it could never be anything else. Y’know?

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.