New York City
Story Stream
Bob Dylan and Me February 18, 2025
Very little of what the film A Complete Unknown portrays is true to history, starting with the opening scenes. It opens with a 19-year-old Bob Dylan arriving by car in New York City and quickly finding his way to Greenwich Village, where a random bea...
One Man's Crusade Against Seed Oils In NYC February 17, 2025
Since it opened in 2013, Carbone in New York City’s Greenwich Village has been a venerated hotspot for celebrities, social climbers, and anyone looking to see and be seen. Pop culture icons like Drake, Justin Bieber, the Kardashians and Adele have al...
Cobra Kai’s Xolo Maridueña Is Taking a Gap Year February 17, 2025
The actor Xolo Maridueña moved to New York City for the same reason so many of us do: to figure himself out. Maridueña has been employed since he was a tween. But suddenly, surprisingly—thankfully?—the 23-year-old Los Angeles native found himself wit...
Chaotic Permanence February 17, 2025
The first time I visited New York, in 2014, I was still on active duty in the U.S. Air Force. I stopped to visit the 9/11 memorial. It was under construction and heavily guarded by NYPD officers to prevent entry, but I wanted to see it. The friend wi...
My Life on the Subway January 29, 2025
I have been taking the New York City subway for twenty-five years. My first train was the 7. It’s considered a national treasure for its diversity, and also very fast if you catch the express from Queensboro Plaza to Sixty-first Street–Woodside. ...
My Dimes Square Think Piece January 20, 2025
Dimes Square (the revival) is introduced as a period piece, both at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research and in the preliminary murmurs I hear about the return of this play. It's an absurd concept at face value. The play was written and first per...
Gay Talese Keeps Notes, Especially on Everyone’s Clothes January 17, 2025
“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” begins the essay that opens “A Town Without Time,” a new collection of Gay Talese’s New York writings. Talese then proceeds to list, with deceptive economy, the things he has noticed: chestnut vendors, pigeon...
Two Dad Memoirs and the End of Fatherhood January 16, 2025
In 2005 I married a man whose detailed thoughts about parenting, childcare and family life I knew very little about. We’d agreed that we wanted children—or, rather, I’d said I wanted a large family and he’d said, “well maybe not too large,” and we’d ...
The Sordid Scene January 14, 2025
A thirty-something indie rocker gallantly holds the hair back for his much younger girlfriend as she rails a line of coke off the coffee table in the opening moments of Matthew Gasda’s gleeful, scathing play Dimes Square. The pair flirt, bicker, talk...
Elizabeth Strout’s Plunge Into Sentimentality January 10, 2025
Early in Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, the retired teacher Olive Kitteridge reads all of the memoirs by Lucy Barton, a New York City writer who arrived in her coastal Maine town during the pandemic. At Olive’s request, an acqua...
The New York City Subway Is a Madhouse. And a Miracle. January 07, 2025
I travel frequently between Los Angeles and New York City, often taking a redeye flight into JFK. The final leg of this journey is nearly always the subway, specifically the A train, which runs the longest subway route in the city, spanning 31 miles ...
Tom Holland's New Superpower January 03, 2025
IT'S ALMOST 80 DEGREES ON an October Monday in New York City, but the New Yorkers drifting in and out of a lounge at the Greenwich Hotel are committed to their fall aesthetics. The hotel, too, is resigned to an autumn gestalt: Thanks to a roaring fir...
I’m Trapped in Downtown Manhattan December 17, 2024
“1234” by Feist was bumping at the 72nd Street Urban Outfitters while the cops handcuffed me and took me to jail. It was 2007; I was 15 years old.My plan had failed. I was going to buy four pairs of socks to secure a receipt and perform an imaginary ...
The Life-Affirming Vitality of Raw Milk December 12, 2024
I've been drinking raw milk for almost 15 years, ever since I made a sudden switch from veganism while visiting my sister in Europe. At the time, she was living in Germany and getting raw milk from a local farmer. I remember mocking her, interrogatin...
The Outer Borough Mind November 18, 2024
The professional class can never fully comprehend Donald Trump; most of the professional class did not grow up in the boroughs surrounding Manhattan. This does not mean there’s any great folk wisdom to be had on Parsons Boulevard or the Grand Concour...
Automotive Asphyxiation November 14, 2024
Back in the early 1990s, anxious about long-term regional decline and hoping to put my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, back on the map, local leaders embarked upon constructing a totally new light rail system that was to provide living proof of our ...
"Didion and Babitz" by Lili Anolik November 11, 2024
Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work "that reads like a propulsive novel" (Oprah Daily) on the mutual attractions—and mutual antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.Co...
Revenge of the Silent Male Voter November 07, 2024
On election day, I caught the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Sitting across from me, an elderly woman wore a T-shirt with the image of Trump pumping his fist in the air with the words “fight, fight.” A small “I Voted” sticker was pressed onto her...
Crushing White Claws With MAGA Hipsters on Election Night November 07, 2024
As I arrived at New York’s biggest cryptocurrency and art-adjacent edgelord election watch party, a young man in a shaggy blonde wig and suit was pulled past a spread of cold McDonalds to deliver a mediocre Trump impersonation before a set of flash-o...
Chronicling 40 Years of NBA Photography November 06, 2024
For forty years, Nathaniel S. Butler—or Nat, as he’s known to his countless friends and colleagues—has navigated the hustle and bustle of New York City to arrive at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street and clock into work with his trus...
Auden’s Island November 06, 2024
When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to se...
The “Girl’s Girls” Have Lost The Plot November 05, 2024
Madison Tayt recently dealt with some online blowback after her post saying Madison Beer had “no charisma” went viral. “Full disclosure, I don’t know much about Madison Beer,” Tayt, an actor in her 20s in New York City, tells me. “She seems very beau...
Adventures With Jean October 04, 2024
I lived in New York City when it was more violent and dangerous than it is now. Needle Park was still a place where people were killed and women were raped, and the Lower East Side was a place where you wanted to be careful. Mobsters shot each other ...
The Death and Life of Progressive Urbanism October 03, 2024
There is an asymmetry between America’s political tribes. Republicans venerate their red states, gushing about the “free state” of Florida and the wonders of Texas—guns anywhere, anytime—and reveling in news of population loss from Democratic-run loc...
The Madness of 'Megalopolis' October 01, 2024
I attended a very special, and very strange, preview screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis a few days ahead of its official release. Before the film ran, the screening audience was treated to what was surely meant to be a great privilege, a...
