The New Yorker's full of surprises this week. First, there's their cover - "To a New Beginning" by Owen Smith - which features two women locking lips. And what's more: they're black. Now, we've been reading The New Yorker for a long time now and we don't remember ever seeing lesbians on the cover, let alone black lesbians. We find it pretty thrilling.

Another interesting bit comes courtesy music critic Sasha Frere-Jones. Reviewing Clipse and Young Jeezy's respective albums, Frere-Jones narrows in on the ubiquitous references to cocaine. Sure, coke's presence in popular music's nothing new, he says, but this new brand of rapper brags about their success as dealers, not takers. But that's not the part that intrigues us most - we're impressed by his Frere-Jones' familiarity with cocaine colloquialisms.

Trying to help with what he calls "inscrutable wordplay," Frere offers a handy translator:

Many listeners will grasp the meaning of “snow.” (Young Jeezy’s nickname is the Snowman. When his logo, three stacked spheres, began appearing on high schoolers’ T-shirts last year, anti-drug groups complained and school districts banned the shirts.) But what about “keys” (kilos of cocaine); “trap house” (a place where cocaine is cooked into crack); “fishscale” (uncut cocaine); “triple beam” (a scale used to weigh the drug); “work,” “weight,” and “birds” (terms for parcels of cocaine)?

Speaking of impressed, movie critic David Dendy practically cums all over Dreamgirls:

The sigh you will hear across the country in the next few weeks is the sound of a gratified audience: a great movie musical has been made at last... “Dreamgirls” fulfills the ecstatic promise inherent in all musicals—that life can be dissolved into song and dance—but it does so without relinquishing the toughest estimate of how money and power work in the real world that song and dance leave behind.