New York City

Saturday

Josie Cox

Roaches: the spirit animal of New York City

Over the past few years, I’ve written regularly for this magazine about my devotion to New York City. I love the cultish exercise classes that test your psychological mettle and the cryptic linguistic idiosyncrasies of the people you meet here. I love the know-it-all doormen – the actual kings of Gotham – and that any day, a celebrity might move in next door. I love that this is home to the world’s most audacious rats and, yes, I love Staten Island – proof that my affection extends beyond accepted social norms. Only here would someone say ‘I named a roach after you’ and consider it a heartfelt gesture of affection

roaches

Thursday

Gage Klipper

Loser’s: the campy and ironic bakery making made-to-order cakes

Going downtown in New York used to be cool. Before Soho became a glorified shopping mall, it was a haven for starving artists. Before Chelsea became family-friendly, Michael Alig was throwing Blood Feast parties at the Limelight. The rebel heart of downtown, which attracted generations of avant-garde creatives, is much harder to find today. All of Manhattan has seemingly “gone uptown.”  But Loser’s Eating House, a made-to-order bakery operating out of a tiny Soho ghost kitchen, is still serving up a little slice of downtown realness. Loser’s style is campy and ironic. The cakes rely on exaggeratedly large piping, done in a purposefully messy style Loser’s was launched in 2021

Friday

Josie Cox

The subway deserves some respect

A few weeks before the end of the year, I was invited to a house party at which I had the misfortune of becoming embroiled in a conversation with a man I’ll call Joe, because his name was Joe and I don’t feel inclined to offer him the dignity of a pseudonym. There’s a theory I’ve corroborated since moving to New York in 2020. Every conversation at a party in this city eventually gravitates toward one of five subjects: traffic, the weather, real estate, sex or the mayor. The ultra-rich are among the subway’s most devoted riders Joe told me he works in finance (which he pronounced “fin-ants”) and it

Wednesday

Mickey Down

New York, I love you, but I need to get home

I reached New York for the premiere of the fourth series of Industry in a mild state of delirium. I was traveling from Lamu, and it had taken four flights and 20 hours in the air to reach the US. Lamu is so beautiful that it briefly makes you consider whether to bother with western civilization at all. On the rickety flight to the island from mainland Kenya, I had sat next to a German count I vaguely knew. ‘You looking to get a little fucked up?’ he asked. I mumbled something about ‘family time’. He nodded and wished me luck. On New Year’s Day I ran into him again,

new york
Rachel Johnson

An Englishwoman in New York

For this trip, I’ve had to divulge my social-media handles, blood group, shoe size etc, and have therefore assumed the brace position for being “processed” into the US, not least because I was once, under Joe Biden, incarcerated in a side room at JFK for having an apple in my hand luggage. The border protection officers show not the slightest interest in my sarky tweet about neocon Liz Truss Though, I might add, it was even worse under Bill Clinton. My baby boy was placed in a detention center on arrival at Dulles when we relocated to Washington, .C. Oliver, aged six months, was traveling separately from us with a

Monday

Roger Kimball

Beware Mamdani’s ‘warmth of collectivism’

One of the things I admire about Zohran Mamdani is his candor. You know where you stand with him. Mamdani, who was sworn in a few days ago by Senator Bernie Sanders as New York’s first Muslim mayor and also its first avowedly socialist mayor, makes no bones about his ambitions. He was elected as a “democratic socialist,” he said, and he intends to govern as one. “We will,” he said in the most commented upon phrase from his inauguration speech, “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” “The warmth of collectivism.” If you are not a political simpleton or a conniving totalitarian (or, as often happens, both), that phrase should

Mamdani

Wednesday

Diane Cole

In defense of Renoir’s pretty pictures

Those who think it’s chic to dismiss Renoir have a rethink coming, courtesy of the absorbing, highly informative exhibit Renoir Drawings, now on view in New York. Not so long ago, the idea of ousting Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) from the canon of western art sparked a movement of sorts. “RENOIR SUCKS AT PAINTING,” proclaimed a protester’s sign at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2015. The performance artist Max Geller had organized the demonstration to condemn Renoir as a purveyor of “treacle.” His female nudes objectified women, it charged; even when clothed, they smiled and blushed too prettily. Indeed, Renoir’s work held value only for the unsophisticated and its

renoir
Josie Cox

Hold on to your peppermint mochaccinos – the Rockettes are not from New York City

In some ways, it feels like I stepped off the plane at JFK from London mere days ago – wide-eyed, naive and still convinced that “winter” would be charming and cozy rather than a six-month endurance test in avoiding frostbite. Yet here I am, somehow entering my sixth year of participating in the annual pageant that is the New York holiday season: that weeks-long spectacle beginning with the first delicate whiff of PSL-something and ending in the far-too-slowly receding hangover on an insultingly arctic New Year’s Day. The first year, Covid-tinted and therefore emotionally reminiscent of a half-deflated Macy’s parade balloon, was not what one might call festive. But things

rockettes
Michael Wolff

Why I corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein

Olivia Nuzzi, the young and talented Trump reporter, committed the apparently cardinal sin of becoming romantically entangled with a subject. And, worse than that, the subject was widely reviled, particularly among journalists: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-Kennedy. And then it turned out –her jilted fiancé, another journalist, was telling all – that there were other politicians she’d been involved with, too. This scandal, which has consumed the journalism world, was good for me because it forced the heaps of opprobrium I was getting from other journalists for my emails with the reviled Jeffrey Epstein off the front page. I had interacted with Nuzzi a few times shortly after my

Gage Klipper

A chef’s twist on the Feast of the Seven Fishes

My Italian-American family gathers every Christmas Eve to cook a Feast of the Seven Fishes. And every year, it’s always just a little disappointing. Sorry, Mom. While the Feast must include seven distinct seafood dishes, there’s no correct way to prepare it. It’s entirely open to personal preference or family tradition and typically relies on whatever fish is readily available in the American northeast. Still, a touch of gourmet precision can help refine some of Nonna’s age-old recipes. The Feast is a quintessentially Italian-American tradition – one rooted ostensibly in Old World Catholicism and the abstention from meat until Christmas Day. Yet there’s very little record of it ever taking

Friday

Tuesday

Friday

Tuesday

Friday

Gage Klipper

Zohran Mamdani’s policies will make restaurants bland and expensive

There’s no shortage of catastrophic predictions for New York City under Zohran Mamdani’s leadership. While we probably won’t see breadlines, the wildly expensive, exhaustingly derivative restaurants that dominate the New York food scene are likely to become more dominant. Mamdani’s big pledge on food is to “make halal eight bucks again.” But it’s a “false promise” of street-food affordability according to Heritage Foundation economist Nicole Huyer. She says Mamdani’s economic program, which includes higher taxes, steeper leasing regulations and a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, will effectively make restaurants even more expensive. “All of these great socialist policies that [Zohran’s] planning to implement

zohran mamdani

Tuesday

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