If you watch The City as closely as we and our friends at the Cut do, you may find yourself wishing, just a little, that you lived in the glorious New York that you see onscreen, instead of the slightly less colorful and shiny one that exists in real life. You would never step in vomit on the sidewalk, your hair would always cascade delicately away from your face, and when you walked into a restaurant, your name would appear in white writing below you, to the left.

Newsweek, a magazine that we heretofore did not know was allowed to be humorous, made a video experimenting with this theory. Except their City knockoff takes place in Washington, D.C., and (instead of you) stars Barack Obama as the ingénue. There are a lot of subtle elements that make this work surprisingly well. Behold, The District.

The District [Newsweek]