New York Magazine January 13-26, 2025

1 For New York’s latest cover story, E. Alex Jung profiled Adrien Brody following his powerful performance in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (“Adrien Brody Found the Part,” December 30, 2024–January 12, 2025). Commenter ladywriter lauded Jung as “clearly a listener who gave Brody the respect and space to be his articulate self.” Film critic Ankit Jhunjhunwala also praised the results of the sensitive reportage: “Adrien Brody is extraordinarily candid and self-aware. He wouldn’t dispute that give or take a few Wes Andersons, there’s a 22 year wasteland between The Pianist and The Brutalist … Hollywood never knew quite what to do with him.” Dozens of outlets picked up on Brody’s revelation that he had struggled with PTSD following his Method performance—which entailed near starvation—in The Pianist. Health writer Vivek Kumar…

INSIDE: Congestion pricing begins / More Realtor reality TV / Biden’s legacy I AM NOT A WORRIER, not given to hear the call of catastrophe. In the middle of the night on Monday, amid the squeal of the wind, my husband got up to take down some chimes ringing through the dark. I laughed: What a ridiculous time to have wind chimes. The wind moaned, whimpered; doors shook. It made no sense that we lived here. We could barely afford this house, which was, in any case, a two-bedroom too small for a family of four. We had been entranced by the view of Silver Lake, and Atwater Village, and the mountains beyond them. When the sun rose on Tuesday, we could see, from our balcony, palms bend in the…

NEVER MIND THAT it was more than a decade in the making, studied to death. Since January 5, every New Yorker has abruptly become a policy expert when it comes to congestion pricing. The new toll on cars entering the portion of Manhattan below 60th Street is the end of civil liberties, or a cash grab, or the death of the working class, or the salvation of the MTA, or a corrective to decades of car-centric policy, or—just maybe—a straightforward way to ease traffic and clear the air a little. Some drivers soon discovered that a parking garage that went through from West 61st Street to West 60th could be a secret back-of-the-wardrobe passageway into the fare zone, at least until it was gated off. Vickie Paladino, the most reliably…

NOHO IS RAINY and gray, but Eleonora Srugo’s tan is a deep ocher. We’re standing in the entrance to 40 Bleecker, a brick-and-glass luxury building, waiting to visit one of her clients in his multimillion-dollar condo. At 38, she is a top agent at Douglas Elliman and the star of Netflix’s most recent “occudrama” real-estate show, Selling the City, a soapy chronicle of her all-female team’s deal-making and infighting. Srugo, a tiny five-foot-three with giant brown eyes and perfectly arched brows, starts pitching me from the moment we enter the minimalist white lobby (the work, apparently, of Kanye West’s interior designer). “It’s very rare to find a ground-up condo with a doorman in Noho,” she says. “People really want to be in this building.” On the fifth floor, we’re greeted…

IT IS THE FATE OF most presidents to watch the inauguration of their replacements with rueful thoughts: in the words of King Lear, “They told me I was everything. ’Tis a lie.” As Joe Biden prepares to pass the torch to Donald Trump, I find myself reflecting on Biden’s own hand in this humbling ordeal. In those whirlwind weeks of blame and recrimination after his disastrous June debate, Biden was often compared to Lear: an aged sovereign with no clear successor, not entirely sound in mind, undone by a crisis born of vanity, vengeance, and fickle nature. Like Lear, Biden had been insulated from criticism, preferring loyalty to blunt counsel, collusion to collaboration. Like all tragic heroes, he suffered from certainty, monomania, an unwillingness to yield. Shakespeare’s tragedies, write Adam…

SCARLETT PAVLOVICH WAS A 22-year-old drama student when she met the performer Amanda Palmer by chance on the streets of Auckland. It was a gray, drizzly afternoon in June 2020, and Palmer, then 44, was walking down the street with the actress Lucy Lawless, one of the most famous people in New Zealand owing to her six-season stint portraying Xena the warrior princess. But Pavlovich noticed only Palmer. She’d watched her TED Talk, “The Art of Asking,” and was fascinated by the cult-famous feminist writer and musician—by her unabashed self-assurance. On the surface, Pavlovich appeared to be self-assured as well. A local girl, she had dropped out of high school at 15 to travel to Europe, Morocco, and the Middle East on the cheap, pausing in Scotland—where Tilda Swinton gave…