New york

Tuesday

Christopher Shrimpton

The art of betrayal: Exhibition, by Alex Hyde, reviewed

From our UK edition

Exhibition, Alex Hyde’s second novel, recounts the intimate, messy, ambiguous and ultimately ill-fated relationship between two fictionalised Young British Artists in the early 1990s. Rosie ‘Rabble’ Stone, the narrator, is a gifted but grounded Mancunian photographer, newly arrived in London to begin her studies at a prestigious art school. There she meets, and soon moves in with, a beautiful and accomplished (and throughout nameless) figurative artist destined for greatness. They are inspired by, though very different from, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas and the works they produced in this period. The story begins in Brixton, at an ‘upside-down’ house to which Rabble has been directed to find lodgings.

Monday

Alexander Larman

The vulgarity of the Swift-Kelce wedding

When Taylor Swift, the billionaire pop star, announced her engagement to Travis Kelce, the rather less wealthy (although still multi-millionaire) NFL player, she chose to mark the occasion by declaring, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” It was rather a nice way for Swift to refer to herself and her forthcoming nuptials. Those who, like me, have always been fans of both her and her music had hopes that her wedding to Kelce would not become the usual hideous exercise in celebrity tackiness. Boy, was I wrong.

Taylor Swift

Friday

Roger Kimball

Why socialism will fail

The philosopher David Hume warned us not to mistake “constant conjunction” for causation. It’s good advice, though it is not the sort of universal disturbance in the force that some philosophers, eager to jettison old certitudes, believe it to be. Hume himself eventually rejected that “pretended skepticism” as a juvenile affectation. Like the rest of us, he recognized that reasoning from induction, from observed realities, introduces us to that great guide in the cognitive adventure of life – probability. Don’t let the appearance of a black swan down under disturb you: good mental hygiene and faith in the soundness of inductive reasoning go together. I indulge in this preliminary expectoration (apologies to Søren Kierkegaard) because I arrived in London on June 22.

Wednesday

Anastasia Brown

Why Jack Schlossberg lost

Jack Schlossberg was, until yesterday, a high-profile candidate in New York’s 12th congressional district who seemingly had everything you might need for a modern political career: a winning smile, a Kennedy connection, an engaging social media presence. The only thing he was missing? Actual policies on which to predicate his campaign. He came third in yesterday's primary, after securing just over 10 percent of the vote. “Jack didn’t have a message other than, ‘It’s time to shake up politics,’” Democratic consultant Chris Coffey told the New York Times.

jack schlossberg

Tuesday

Ani Chkhikvadze

Will Janeese Lewis George be the Zohran Mamdani of DC?

Eight months after New York handed City Hall to a democratic socialist, Washington, DC appears ready to follow suit. Janeese Lewis George, a former prosecutor, leads the field, preaching the same message of affordability that carried Zohran Mamdani to power. DC residents head to the polls today to vote in the mayoral primary after Muriel Bowser decided not to stand for reelection. In the deepest of blue areas, the winner of the Democratic primary race is almost certain to be its next mayor. The primary has become an ideological tug-of-war between the Democratic party's socialist wing and its business-aligned establishment. Lewis George runs as the candidate of the progressive coalition.

Janeese lewis george

Wednesday

Cockburn

Trump or Hochul: who knows ball?

The New York Knicks clinched an NBA championship spot Monday – and President Trump shared his excitement over his home team’s progress and his hopes to attend an NBA Finals game during today's cabinet meeting “Boy, what a team. They win all their games," Trump said. "They really, they have some great players. I think I will be going to one of their games.” He also congratulated Knicks owner Jim Dolan, who he counts as a longtime friend. https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/2059684404973236616 Trump has been a Knicks fan for years, with recently surfaced photos showing him sitting courtside back in 1991. If his plans work out, he will be the first sitting US president to attend an NBA Finals game.

hochul ball

Wednesday

Lynn Barber

Was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious ‘Fountain’ even his own work?

This slim volume has only one fault. It has no illustrations. So you’ll have to do some Googling or visit the current Duchamp exhibition at MoMA (until 22 August) if you want to know what ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’ looks like. Otherwise it’s perfect – wittily written and packed with many fascinating characters besides the ever intriguing Marcel Duchamp. He didn’t actually arrive in New York until 1915, but when he did he found himself already famous. His ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2’ had been included in the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, alongside works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Braque, and completely stole the show. Duchamp didn’t even know the painting was being exhibited.

Friday

Josie Cox

Down with the children’s birthday-industrial complex

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about birthdays. For one thing, I’m writing this on the very day I turn 37. For another, you might’ve heard that America’s got a big one coming up later this year: 250. Old enough to stop squabbling and act its age. But right now, the only birthday that matters in our household is my daughter’s, and it’s coming up in two weeks. New York City children’s birthday parties – at least many of the ones I’ve witnessed – are unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Not so much parties as highly coordinated tests of moral conscience. They’re diplomatic summits involving balloons, sugar and, yes, perhaps a touch of low-level psychological warfare.

Anne Margaret Daniel

Meeting Jay McInerney, Manhattan’s sassiest social novelist

Since his debut novel Bright Lights, Big City appeared in 1984, Jay McInerney has been one of the best-known writers whose work is mostly grounded on the long, skinny, granite-bedrocked river isle the Lenape called Manahatta, “island of hills.” He has lived in town for most of the past four decades too, and currently divides his time between a Village penthouse apartment and Water Mill in the Hamptons. McInerney walks into the lobby of the Marlton Hotel on West 8th Street, just paces from Washington Square, and heads turn. Young lovelies on their laptops with Mission Control Center-sized cans over their ears and chic hairstyles look up and blink, appealingly. Waiters slide swiftly to his side.

Friday

Toby Young

The American dream is dying. Good

The American dream is dying, according to the Times of London. To mark the US’s 250th anniversary, the paper commissioned YouGov to explore whether the country’s citizens still believe that if you “work hard and play by the rules” you will eventually be successful. Turns out, only 38 percent of the respondents think this applies to all Americans, while 59 percent think the American dream is now less attainable than it was when they were growing up. In addition, 38 percent rated today’s quality of life as “excellent” or “good,” compared with 60 percent who said the same about 1976, the bicentennial year.

dream

Wednesday

Peter Wood

Mamdani vs monarchy

Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York has faced what others might consider awkward moments in office, as when two Islamists, inspired by ISIS, tried to immolate anti-Muslim protesters outside Gracie Mansion. He passed it off with aplomb by saying the two bomb-carrying individuals were “suspected of coming here to commit an act of terrorism.” In a later statement he acknowledged that the two men had proclaimed “their allegiance to ISIS.”  That counts for boldness on Mamdani’s part. He is considerably more comfortable denouncing Israel, defending the “globalize the intifada” slogan and lamenting anti-Muslim bigotry, than he is in acknowledging New York’s history of terror attacks by Islamists.

zohran mamdani

Tuesday

Olivia Cole

Farewell to the Calloways: See You on the Other Side, by Jay McInerney, reviewed

From our UK edition

Many of Jay McInerney’s characters had their glory days in the 1980s and 1990s of his vivid early novels, with all of the excesses and freedoms that he captured, most famously in his 1984 debut Bright Lights, Big City. As familiar as New York’s landmarks and favourite haunts remain, the city of 2020 can seem a bewildering landscape for his creations, even before the darkened lights of the pandemic. The Calloways are the literary ‘It couple’ about whom McInerney first wrote in the elegiac Brightness Falls (1992). Now, in See You on the Other Side, friends and acquaintances get hit by #MeToo with the kind of randomness reserved for corked wine or a careless investment.

Friday

Josie Cox

Adieu, Dinosaur the pigeon

On one of the first warm Saturdays of this year, hundreds of New Yorkers flocked to the popular High Line, the railway-turned-public park that extends over 22 blocks of Manhattan, to bid farewell to a T-Rex-sized pigeon. The pigeon, cast out of aluminum and named “Dinosaur,” had been a resident of its elevated perch since 2024. As so many New Yorkers will tell you, though, part of what’s magical about living in this city is that the experience is often transient. In the words of Baz Luhrmann, you should “leave before it makes you hard.” There’s nothing worse than a hard pigeon and so it was that on that glorious day last month, I joined throngs of people eager to get one last look at the monstrous, departing bird.

Tuesday

Ariane Bankes

Defiantly creative to the end: the transgressive Dorothea Tanning

From our UK edition

I received this book for review on the same day that Dorothea Tanning was making headlines in the auction world, breaking records with the sale at Christie’s of a tiny but key early work for more than £4 million. Her prices have risen an astonishing sevenfold in the past year, as collectors cotton on to her significance as a Surrealist; and while she may still be trailing on Leonora Carrington’s coat-tails, she looks to be steadily catching up.   Born in America to Swedish parents, Tanning was the very model of a fiercely independent artist, and her works are singular and disquieting like few others. She was largely self-taught as a painter and developed a virtuoso technique.

Thursday

Josie Cox

My search for the perfect New York therapist ended badly

Before moving to New York City, I had a particular vision of what my life as a writer in this fabled land of opportunity would look like. I’d wear sleek, black turtlenecks and skinny jeans. I’d go to diners and eat bagels. I’d defy the caloric calculus and stay svelte. I’d write at my window like Carrie Bradshaw, getting paid at least $2.50 per word. I’d go to book parties and stroll through the West Village, occasionally bumping into a semi-famous friend. We’d spontaneously drink wine. Perhaps most importantly, I’d have an excellent therapist – someone who had many leather-bound books, a calm and reassuring presence that could effortlessly calibrate my mental state. He’d look a bit like Wallace Shawn or maybe Barbra Streisand.

Thursday

Josie Cox

February in New York: where dreams come to die

I probably sound naive, but February always struck me as a month that should be full of hope – brimming with the type of optimism that comes from new beginnings. At least here in New York, though, it was grim. Everything feels more expensive. Everyone’s temper seems as short as the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them daylight hours. And then there’s the weather. The streets are flanked like an Arctic military checkpoint by car-sized mounds of calcified brown snow. The kind of snow that has visible layers, like a geological cross-section of urban neglect. The kind that has already gobbled up who knows how many small dogs. The wind is so ferocious, it makes that chemical skin peel you’ve been targeted for on Instagram look pleasant. New York does sleep. And thank goodness it does.

Friday

Cockburn

Why does Trump love Zohran so much?

Mayor Zohran Mamdani met Trump in the Oval Office yesterday to pitch a huge New York City housing initiative – and secure the release of a Columbia University student from ICE custody. Mamdani’s communications director said that Trump was “very enthusiastic” about the plan to build 12,000 new affordable homes in Sunnyside, Queens, by using over $21 billion in federal grants. What’s more, the student, who happens to be a photogenic young woman, was freed. Results all around. Zohran and his team gave Trump a prop newspaper with the headline “TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD,” a play on the 1975 New York Daily News cover – “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” The headlines made a clear case for how much the people would love Trump if he went ahead with Mamdani’s plans.

zohran trump

Thursday

Diane Cole

The auteur Eugène Atget

Few connoisseurs of the image are unfamiliar with the great French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). But his name is, unfortunately, unfamiliar to the lay person. This is a shame: his gloriously detailed, sharply focused black-and-white images of late 19th- and early 20th-century Paris evocatively conjure the shadows and lights of the boulevards, parks and alleyways of the Belle Époque. His astonishing close-ups of finely crafted architectural details are as striking as his sometimes surreal views of storefront windows and food-stall displays. Whether training his bulky large-format view camera on scenes interior or exterior, he reveals an aesthetic sensibility exquisitely sensitive to the world around him.

Tuesday

Brian Martin

No good deed goes unpunished: A Better Life, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

From our UK edition

Lionel Shriver is a first-rate storyteller. And yet… A Better Life is a satire on the immigration problem that particularly faces the US. All the clichéd arguments on both sides of the debate are laid bare. In fact, the whole novel is a cliché. Yet clichés come into existence because their substance is what everyone is talking about. Shriver’s problem is that her plot and her characters can seem like ciphers for her polemical views; they dominate the novel’s form. Gloria Bonaventura, a 62-year-old divorcée, lives with Nico, her 26-year-old, Fordham educated, unemployed layabout son, in a Queen Anne mansion in a fashionable part of New York.

Friday

Maud Maron

Who’s the victim in Zohran Mamdani’s New York?

Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a hospital visit to comfort the victim of a knife attack on a police officer, who was forced to fire his weapon to defend himself. Of course, the bed Mamdani visited was that of the schizophrenic man, Jabez Chakraborty, who charged at police and was shot as a result. It almost goes without saying that New York’s new mayor did not check in on the officer.Face and voice full of strained emotion, Mamdani said after the visit: “No family should have to endure this kind of pain,” referring to the family of the knife-wielder. He made no remarks about the strains on families of police officers whose incredibly difficult, and increasingly thankless job, puts them face-to-face with knife wielding assailants for a starting salary of $60,000.

Mamdani