New York City

Wednesday

Rachel Johnson

Penetrating Trumpland is a breeze

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 centre on arrival at Dulles when we relocated to Washington, D.C. Oliver, aged six months, was travelling separately from us with a British nanny who’d over-stayed on a visa a decade before, and we didn’t know where he was for 24 hours.

Monday

Roger Kimball

Beware Mamdani’s ‘warmth of collectivism’

From our US edition

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 send a shiver down your spine.

Mamdani

Wednesday

Diane Cole

In defense of Renoir’s pretty pictures

From our US edition

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 popularity represented the triumph of the cliché.

renoir
Josie Cox

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

From our US edition

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 have really picked up since.

rockettes
Michael Wolff

Why I corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein

From our US edition

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.

Gage Klipper

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

From our US edition

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 place in Italy.

Friday

Cockburn

‘Dear libs, don’t boycott the Kennedy Center,’ top orchestras beg

From our US edition

Cockburn is a cultured character with a longstanding fondness of the high arts. He was therefore amused to read an open letter, titled “The Kennedy Center Boycott and Its Impact on Artists” from the Orchestra Committee of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera Orchestra, in a recent issue of International Musician. The letter effectively amounts to classical musicians pleading with liberal patrons to attend Kennedy Center shows – despite President Trump’s overhauling of the institution. “While we respect every patron’s right to personal expression, withdrawing from beloved music as an act of protest is a shortsighted response that hurts the very artists who make that art possible,” the committee writes.

Tuesday

Jane Stannus

How to make an unforgettable Christmas dinner

From our US edition

In the early 1970s, celebrity chef Jacques Pépin and his wife bought a dilapidated house in the Catskills so they could go skiing on the weekends. It was a real fixer-upper. Groups of friends would come up from New York City and pitch in on the renovation effort, and Pépin would serve dinner at the end of the day. These weekends were so much fun Pépin decided to memorialize them by hand-lettering and painting special menus. How Pépin convinced his friends to let him sit in the kitchen sketching petits poissons and heads of broccoli while they slaved away at framing and drywalling his winter getaway is, admittedly, mysterious.

Christmas

Friday

Neal Pollack

When Donald met Zohran

From our US edition

“I’ll tell you,” the President was saying. “The press has eaten this thing up. I had a lot of meetings with world leaders, and the press didn’t care. The biggest people in the world come over and nobody cares. This one, they care about.”   President Trump sat at the Resolute Desk, wearing a red tie. Standing next to him was the Boy Wonder, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani of New York City, wearing a blue tie. Their hour-long meeting at the White House had just concluded. In recent weeks, Mamdani had called Trump a fascist. Trump had called Mamdani a communist and a “lunatic.”  Anyone expecting acrimony or fireworks, though, would have been disappointed by this joint press appearance. Cats and dogs, living together.

zohran mamdani

Tuesday

Curtis Sliwa

Andrew Cuomo was the spoiler, not me

From our US edition

In the final weeks of the New York City mayoral campaign, there was heavy involvement from billionaires and masters of the universe. Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined the chorus of the Democratic Establishment. And the message was clear: a vote for me was a vote for Mamdani. There was a 72-hour barrage from super PACs running this message on conservative radio and news shows in an attempt to convince Republicans and conservatives to abandon their beliefs and principles and effectively join the Democratic party. No longer was the focus on what each candidate stood for. The point was to rewrite history and distance fact from reality. We had Andrew Cuomo – a failed governor who left office in disgrace – being presented to the public as NYC’s only savior.

Curtis Sliwa
trader joe's
Josie Cox

How Trader Joe’s became a way of life

From our US edition

A young woman recently approached me as I stood outside Trader Joe’s on the corner of 93rd Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m visiting from the UK and I’m just wondering if there’s anything worth seeing around here.” This is not an unusual occurrence. It’s always tourist season in New York. People come for the cherry blossoms in Central Park, for the magic of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and for the vague hope of running into Timothée Chalamet at a downtown brunch place. They even come in the sweltering heat of summer when I, personally, would rather be anywhere else – ideally somewhere without the pungent smell of hot garbage and misplaced ambition.

Friday

Gage Klipper

Mamdani will hand New York’s restaurants to the rich

There’s no shortage of catastrophic predictions for New York under Zohran Mamdani’s leadership. While the city probably won’t see breadlines, the wildly expensive, exhaustingly derivative restaurants that dominate its 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 programme, 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.

Wednesday

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.

zohran mamdani

Tuesday

Josie Cox

New York City belongs to the rats

From our US edition

Before I moved to New York City five and a half years ago, the warnings were never about astronomical rent prices, apocalyptic winters or days-long subway delays. They were about rats. Former Manhattanites authoritatively spoke of them with the kind of hushed dread usually reserved to conjure biblical plagues. These weren’t mere animals, I was told, but tiny demons in fur coats – miniature Tony Sopranos with tails – who were quick to scuttle from the shadows at the merest whiff of a discarded bagel, bold enough to set up camp in your kitchen and perfectly willing to maul a callow pug or nibble on an unsuspecting baby. One friend cautioned me to keep the toilet lid shut at all times.

rats

Wednesday

Neal Pollack

Zohran Mamdani pledges free everything on Fox News

From our US edition

Ahead of tomorrow night’s debate with Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, Democratic socialist and future mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani appeared on Fox News this afternoon for the first time.   Anyone expecting a clash of cultures, or 15 minutes of pure ideological arguing, would have been disappointed. Fox anchor Martha MacCallum asked tough, pointed questions, but it was a respectful exchange between two New Yorkers who clearly don’t summer in the same ZIP code.   That doesn’t mean the interview lacked news value. The most shocking part came before the commercial break, when Mamdani said it was “too early” to give President Trump credit for the Middle East peace deal.

Zohran Mamdani (Fox News screenshot)

Saturday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

The Rockefeller Wing reopens

From our US edition

Of the 1,800 objects on display at the newly reopened Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the funerary poles of the Asmat people stick out.  At 15 feet tall, they tower above the swarm of visitors and nearly touch the newly rendered, gorgeously curved ceilings. The poles, decorated with carvings of haunted-looking faces and bodies, were traditionally made to mark a violent death. Once that death was avenged, the poles were removed to the woods, where they were left to decay.  These particular poles have further meaning, though, beyond their eerie beauty and the symbolism they confer of the cycle of life. They were collected by Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Michael, on a trip to spend time with the Asmat in New Guinea in 1961.

Monday

Gage Klipper

Zohran’s embarrassing scavenger hunt

From our US edition

I still look back fondly on my 10th birthday party – a cute little scavenger hunt through the landmarks of Central Park. But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to waste a peaceful Sunday afternoon reliving those glory days 20-odd years later.  Zohran Mamdani is cut from a different cloth, it seems. New York’s socialist soon-to-be mayor hosted his very own campaign-themed “Zcavenger Hunt” on Sunday, and thousands of over-worked (or unemployed?) New Yorkers seemingly had nothing better to do than embrace their inner whimsy.  Mamdani announced the event on Saturday in typical fashion – a highly produced video clip poking fun at his opponents.

Thursday

Santiago Vidal Calvo and Vilda Westh Blanc

Zohran Mamdani’s politics of entitlement

From our US edition

Zohran Mamdani’s presumptive victory will make history: if elected in November, he will become New York’s first Muslim and first Indian-American mayor. Powering his win in the Democratic primaries was a massive surge of young, urban, progressive voters changing the city’s political future. But beneath the energy and hope lies something more troubling: a generational embrace of a politics of entitlement, poised to undermine not only the city’s finances but also the values that have historically bound together American civic life. The city’s youth voting base turned out in force: voters aged 18–29 gave Mamdani the win.

Zohran Mamdani (Getty)
Eric Adams
Cockburn

Cash in a bag? We’ll miss you, Eric Adams

From our US edition

If Eric Adams were a normal incumbent New York City Mayor, he’d have a decent chance of winning re-election against slick TikTok-mastering bourgeois communist Zohran Mamdani and the decaying boomer persona of Andrew Cuomo. But Adams and his cronies can’t manage that. His New York is so corrupt it makes Coleman Young’s Detroit look like deacons passing a church collection plate. Even in the height of election season, Adams Inc. can’t help itself.

wesley lepatner ceo
Max Horder

Wesley LePatner and the sinister rise of ‘Luigism’

From our US edition

Shane Tamura walked into a lobby on 345 Park Avenue on July 28 and opened fire on the crowd leaving work. He was mentally unwell, angry about football giving him head injuries, and wanted to target the NFL Headquarters to enact his revenge. But he got off at the wrong floor, and ended up spraying bullets into a group of office workers unaffiliated with the sports organization. Then it became clear that one of these victims, Wesley LePatner, was CEO at a large investment company. And when the followers of the prophet Luigi Mangione heard the news, they had a different take: an accident is just what they want you to believe. Before she died, the 43-year-old LePatner was the CEO of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust in New York.