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The Last Sportswriters of New York March 11, 2025
On a warm, misty January morning, Phil Mushnick is sitting in his Boca Raton townhouse where he now winters. He points out the herons in the lagoon near his back porch as well as an adjacent golf course, a thousand miles from his central Jersey home ...
The Author of ‘The Help’ Wrote a Second Novel March 10, 2025
Fifteen years after her blockbuster novel “The Help” sparked conversation and criticism for its portrayal of the lives of Black maids in the South, Kathryn Stockett is publishing a new novel.Set in 1933 in Oxford, Miss., “The Calamity Club” centers o...
Curtis Sittenfeld Has a Question March 10, 2025
There really was a woman who photocopied her butt at a workplace in the 1980s.Curtis Sittenfeld, 49, heard about the incident when she was a girl and filed it away. Four decades later, the Great Butt Xeroxing makes an appearance in her new short stor...
The Gender Vibe Shift and Its Discontents March 06, 2025
Twenty-six-year-old Miles Yardley — formerly known in downtown New York City as a musician, influencer, and model named Salomé — publicly renounced his trans identity this year, sold his women’s clothing online, and began posting grim details to his ...
What Did #MeToo Accomplish? March 05, 2025
On Sunday, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo formally announced his long-anticipated bid to become the next mayor of the Big Apple. Speaking at a carpenters’-union event, the 67-year-old touted his record managing the pandemic while flanked by his da...
I Coulda Been A Contender... March 05, 2025
Nothing soothes a broken heart like watching two men beat the hell out of each other. It may not cure it, but the tender mercies can be assuaged watching sweat and blood pounded off a man’s body with the physicality of venom and singular, rabid deter...
Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now? March 05, 2025
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theat...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
The New Woke Right Wants Its Own Safe Space March 04, 2025
In the 2010s, a certain kind of social justice activist took a hard turn against the mainstream media. The rancor was of a different flavor than the Chomskyian critiques of corporate media and the consent it allegedly manufactured. It wasn’t so much ...
Toward Good Art, and Art Itself March 03, 2025
Last year, the New York Times published a list of what its critics deemed the best books of the 21st century. (So far.) Offices and book clubs across the country chattered about which books made it and which got snubbed, which were ranked higher and ...
2 Books for Jazz Age Enthusiasts March 03, 2025
Dear readers,The Museum of the City of New York recently unveiled the refurbished Stettheimer Dollhouse, the decades-long creation of Carrie Stettheimer — who, with her sisters Florine (a painter) and Ettie (a writer), hosted notable salons for the 1...
Why Not the New York Mets? October 14, 2024
Of all the little quirks and enormous moments that have defined the past few months for the New York Mets—the comeback at-bats and the lucky pumpkin; the McDonaldland mascots on the 7 train and that oddball, end-of-September doubleheader—one of the m...
Will We Finally Get Another Subway Series? October 14, 2024
New York is a baseball town. The NFL has been subsumed. Stroll around the five boroughs and witness the blue-and-orange, once donned sheepishly or with dour fatalism, become Hope personified. Consider Grimace, OMG, Hawk Tuah, Polar Bear’s playoff pum...
Woke Is Here To Stay October 11, 2024
There’s an idea out there that “peak woke” has passed. Earlier this year, The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg penned her obituary for “wokeism,” claiming that it was on its deathbed. “Diversity, equity and inclusion departments, briefly prized, are...
The Greatest Knicks Team That Never Was October 11, 2024
For a few months this summer, it seemed as if the New York Knicks had done something remarkable. By bringing together Villanova University teammates Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, Donte DiVincenzo, and Mikal Bridges in the professional ranks, the team was...
Can the Jets Salvage This Season? October 10, 2024
After dozens of reports, press conferences, and carefully crafted statements, we still don’t know exactly why (or even how) the Jets abruptly fired head coach Robert Saleh on Tuesday morning. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there, which s...
A Giant of a Man October 10, 2024
The timing was uncanny, a bit charmed even, but then again—during a Hall of Fame career that spanned nearly a quarter of a century, and that led him from the Jim Crow South to New York to San Francisco and then back east—Willie Mays had nothing if no...
The End of the Public Intellectual October 09, 2024
In August, the celebrated writer Ta-Nehisi Coates published a new column in Vanity Fair. It was his first piece for the magazine in four years, and his first anywhere in a very long time. In every sense, it marked his return: his fourth nonfiction bo...
France’s Most Controversial Novelist October 09, 2024
Michel Houellebecq — arguably the most important French writer of the past quarter-century — was perched on the seat of his chair like a bird. We were sitting in his dim Paris apartment in August, a spectacularly beautiful day visible through his cur...
Author & Aviator October 08, 2024
In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for People...
The Empty Promise of 'Megalopolis' October 08, 2024
Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis frets about the future. The star-studded sci-fi drama pits the ambitious and superpowered architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) against the corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). At stake in this moder...
Al Pacino Is Still Going Big October 07, 2024
Al Pacino has been one of the world’s greatest, most influential actors for more than 50 years. He’s audacious. He’s outrageous. He’s Al Pacino, and I’m pretty sure you know what that entails....
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...
A Book Critic Goes to Dublin October 03, 2024
This summer, my wife, Cree, and I went to Dublin to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. We chose it over more exotic destinations because it made sense to us: I’m a book critic and she’s a writer. How could we not go to Dublin, perhaps the most l...
