New York Magazine February 24-March 9, 2025

1 New York’s latest cover story explored the world of adults who depend on their parents’ money to make it in the city (“Boomers to the Rescue,” February 10–23). On Instagram, Dominikajaw said she’d been waiting for a story like this: “We have never received financial help … It’s becoming challenging and alienating to have adult friendships with other parents because our lives (financial circumstances, stress levels) are incongruous.” Over on X, volcrushed admitted, “id be lying if i said i didnt feel a bit of envy”; Mcunanda joked, “love this but feels like the call is coming from inside the office lol”; and Gina Fuchs said, “if you are one of the people embarrassed about your trust funds i am offering today to take it off your hands, zero…

INSIDE: Susan Morrison at McNally Jackson / Duck farming in the time of bird flu / A new aesthetic for the Trump era ON FEBRUARY 10, Eric Adams was on his way to meet John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket magnate and friend of Donald Trump’s, at century-old midtown steakhouse Gallagher’s when word came that the Department of Justice was looking to end its corruption case against him. “It looked like a thousand pounds of bricks were off his shoulder,” Catsimatidis said. In the ensuing days, chaos was ignited in City Hall. The DoJ memo stated explicitly that it was seeking to drop the charges so Adams could assist the administration in carrying out its policies, particularly as related to crime and immigration. The prosecutors retained the right to pick up…

TECHNICALLY, THE GROUP of 100 or so was at McNally Jackson Books Seaport on this snowy Thursday to hear Emily Nussbaum interview her New Yorker colleague Susan Morrison about her Lorne Michaels biography. The side chat, though, was all about the email invitation, which had inspired dozens of famous recipients to not just reply but reply-all, causing inbox havoc among the publishing and comedy elite. By that evening, the thread had slowed to “more of a trickle as opposed to the fucking hailstorm it was,” as the comedy writer Bill Scheft put it. Everyone from Graydon Carter (“Honestly, I have my own life. I cannot devote any more time to Lorne”) to Aaron Sorkin (“How did I get involved in this?”) had chimed in, as had a fed-up Tina Fey,…

AT THE BEGINNING of the year, Doug Corwin’s duck farm was thriving. By January 13, one of his barns held 12,000 two-week-old ducklings. It was cold, but they looked healthy. Another flock of 800 birds, six to seven weeks old, was doing well too. “They were absolutely beautiful,” Corwin says, sitting at his desk in Aquebogue, just east of Riverhead. On the walls are a framed photo of duck farmers posing outside John Duck’s Restaurant and a few aerial shots of Crescent Duck Farm, which Corwin’s great-grandfather Henry founded in 1908 on land the family had lived on since the 1640s. On Tuesday, January 14, though, those flocks were hurting: Hundreds of the 12,000 ducklings were dead. Concerned, Corwin called Dr. Gavin Hitchener, the director of Cornell’s Duck Research Laboratory.…

IN DECEMBER, the trend forecaster Sean Monahan—best known for his role in putting the term normcore on the map in 2013 and for predicting the vibe shift of 2022—announced the arrival of a new aesthetic: He called it boom boom. While the vibe shift was a return to the late-aughts looks now called indie sleaze, shaking elder millennials to their core, the new aesthetic, another “fetishization of the past,” he wrote, took up the in-your-face glamour and visible hierarchy of the 1980s and early ’90s. Think flashy cars, power suits à la American Psycho, tanning oil, furs, and the dark wood of uptown restaurants like Le Veau d’Or. Boom boom is looking like you’ve spent money for the sake of looking like you’ve spent money. Once again, Monahan’s proclamation felt…

1. VENGEANCE IS HIS The FBI is bracing for payback under Trump ultraloyalist Kash Patel • BY ANDREW RICE ON JANUARY 30, Kash Patel, the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, went to Capitol Hill to attend to the formality of his Senate confirmation hearing. It’s a measure of how tightly Donald Trump now grips Washington that the author of the book Government Gangsters, which posits the FBI has been controlled by criminals, met with only token resistance. One of the 12 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, Mike Lee, later posted a video of Patel’s entry into the hearing room scored to the badass opening riff of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” The committee’s ten Democrats flailed at him to little effect. Patel dodged and dissembled and occasionally flashed some…