Manhattan
Story Stream
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 Killer Inside You December 16, 2024
Mirror mirror on the wall. It’s been a week since a masked gunman assassinated the CEO of UnitedHealthcare outside a Manhattan hotel in broad daylight, shocking the nation to rapt attention that only grew more pronounced as the first bizarre details ...
Luigi Mangione Has to Mean Something December 13, 2024
For more than a week now, a 26-year-old software engineer has been America’s main character. Luigi Mangione has been charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. The killing was caught on video, leadi...
Luigi Mangione: American Revenge Fantasy December 12, 2024
When a hooded gunman shot dead the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in Manhattan last week, the story already had the makings of folklore to many disenfranchised Americans raised on revenge narratives. The unsympathetic target. ...
The Antipsychiatry Movement’s Long Shadow December 12, 2024
It was the sort of grisly serendipity book publicists may only take covert satisfaction in. Jordan Neely’s death in a Manhattan subway car last year occurred just two weeks after the release of a book with considerable relevance to the controversy it...
A Feminist Director Takes On the Erotic Thriller December 10, 2024
The final day of shooting for “Babygirl,” a new erotic thriller, was devoted to a sequence that the film’s writer and director, Halina Reijn, had deliberately saved for last. In the movie, which will be released on Christmas, Nicole Kidman plays Romy...
A Manhattan Original June 26, 2023
Black bricks are relatively common building materials, but they crop up usually as architectural pinstripes, rarely as a whole suit, so to speak. One glorious exception stands on an especially prominent site in Manhattan: Raymond Hood's American Radi...
Demystifying AI June 22, 2023
ChatGPT might be causing a speculative stir in the startup market and among Twitter meme poets, but did you know it’s also an unknowable eldritch abomination? “There is a long-held pursuit of the unexplainable,” intones a BBC article, “[and] the myst...
Sarah Jessica Parker Keeps Playing Carrie Bradshaw June 20, 2023
On a recent Thursday afternoon at SJP Collection, a tiny, pink, candle-scented shoe boutique in Manhattan’s West Village, the store’s owner, the fifty-eight-year-old actress Sarah Jessica Parker, was working the floor. “Stuff the toes with this,” she...
Robert Gottlieb, Eminent Editor, Dies at 92 June 15, 2023
Robert Gottlieb, an illustrious editor at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker whose deft touch shaped a bibliophile’s library of novels, nonfiction books and magazine articles by a pantheon of acclaimed writers from the middle to the...
How Richard Hell Found His Vocation June 08, 2023
In 1974, when he was in his early twenties and living in downtown Manhattan, Richard Hell, born Richard Meyers, founded the band Television with his high-school friend Tom Verlaine. After an acrimonious split with Verlaine, Hell left the group and cr...
‘Vision of Spain’ Shouts Viva España! June 05, 2023
When the Hispanic Society Museum and Library on Audubon Terrace in upper Manhattan reopened its doors last week, its first visitors in six years were greeted by the masterwork of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, “Vision of Spain,” a monumental homage to hi...
Nouriel Roubini Predicts NYC Destroyed by Nukes October 25, 2022
Nouriel Roubini is seriously reconsidering whether he wants to continue living in New York. Mostly because, well, he wants to survive....
New York's Hipster Wars May 27, 2022
In American cultural and intellectual life, New York City sets the tone. As the main hub for the country’s media and frequent originator of trends that percolate through US society, what’s “in” with the New York scene today is often central to Americ...
From Grit to Greatness January 28, 2022
If you think today’s Manhattan has little in common with the tight little island of two centuries or so ago, you may have to think again.In the early to mid-1800s Manhattan emerged as the financial and mercantile hub of America. The top 1% controlled...
How the Other Half Builds January 24, 2022
In 1890, a Danish-born New York newspaper reporter captured the nation’s attention. In gripping prose, Jacob Riis offered a cascade of horrible descriptions, supported by his own striking photographs, illustrating conditions in the dense and squalid ...
Which Algorithm Watches the Watchmen? November 27, 2017
Cameras, connected to facial recognition software, watch every corner in lower Manhattan......
Misreading New York, and Cities September 14, 2017
The whiz kid of urban studies doesn't understand the first thing about housing and development......
Inside New York City's Housing Crisis August 02, 2017
New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency, a term defined by the......
