New York Magazine April 21-May 4, 2025

1 New York marked its 57th anniversary in the annual “Yesteryear” issue, celebrating 29 theater superstars with a set of covers and a portfolio of portraits by photographer Mark Seliger (“Legends of Broadway,” April 7–20). Noting its appearance while “Broadway enjoys a hot streak fueled by A-listers,” CNN’s Brian Stelter called the story a “must-read” in his Reliable Sources newsletter; Whoopi Goldberg shouted out her photograph on The View; and the collection captured widespread attention on social media and Substack. Seliger and Jody Quon, the magazine’s director of photography, discussed their creative process on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Near-centenarian Dick Van Dyke was their best first “get,” according to Quon, who said he “just changed the vocabulary of the whole project.” Seliger agreed: “He just performed, and that’s exactly what we…

YEARS AGO, one of the many storms that flood Riverside Park cracked open a playground’s paving. The sinkhole has gone unrepaired, and it’s come to look like an establishing shot for a film about an abandoned metropolis, seen through the rusting frame of a tire swing surrounded by crowd-control barriers. It’s grown deep and wide enough that a bear might choose to hibernate in it. As the toddlers who might have played there grow into tweens, it sits like a wrecked mini-microcosm of a place with no time for the future. The public realm, the 40 percent of the city that we all collectively own, is a Swiss cheese of neglect and procrastination, pocked with stalled projects and discarded plans. The city feels stuck and sluggish, prey to an uncertainty…

THE TOURIST helicopter that crashed into the Hudson River on April 10, killing the pilot and five passengers, appears to have fallen victim to a hazard known as “mast bumping.” It’s a phenomenon unique to helicopters with semi-rigid rotors like this one, a Bell 206L-4 LongRanger, and it’s particular to their structure. The blades are attached to a hub that in turn is connected to a mast that projects upward from the transmission. As Robert E. Joslin, a professor at Florida’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, explains, “Think of a drinking cup upside down on the top of a broom handle. If you just move it back and forth a little bit, it won’t touch. But if you go real hard, the rim will hit the handle.” That could bend or break…

IT’S A RAINY, gray March afternoon, not the optimal time to see a midtown apartment 17 floors above the Times Square M&M’s store. “It normally gets great light,” Nicole Flender says to the potential buyers, an Italian couple looking for a Manhattan pied-à-terre. They peer out the unit’s windows, a giant neon Krispy Kreme sign shining through the fog. Flender cheerfully explains the building’s friendly rental policy and that the price, $949,000, is good for the market. “This would be a great investment,” she says to the Italians, who seem to have no idea that this petite UGGs-wearing real-estate agent is Timothée Chalamet’s mother. Flender has been selling real estate with Corcoran for nearly a decade, ever since her husband, Marc Chalamet, a French journalist who now works for the…

IT WAS LUNCHTIME AT the New York Stock Exchange, and Peter Tuchman was standing on a balcony surveying the scene, one side of his unruly white hair flaring up jaggedly like a market chart. It was Wednesday, April 9, a week after President Donald Trump announced a series of astronomical tariffs on nearly every country in the world, including tiny Antarctic islands inhabited only by penguins, seals, and other wildlife. The S&P 500 was eerily flat for the day, but the so-called Fear Index—or VIX, a measure of the market’s volatility—was disturbingly high, as if what Tuchman was observing were an ocean whose glassy surface belied the currents swirling dangerously below. Tuchman has worked on the floor of the NYSE for 40 years—through 1987’s Black Monday, the dot-com bust, the…

Katie Asher, buzzing with exhaustion, collapsed on her couch. She was 40, smart, a bootstrapper with a southern drawl and long auburn curls. She also had an abusive ex-husband, three jobs, and five children, including a then-17-year-old named Houston, who had autism and couldn’t speak. Caring for Houston was torture. He smeared feces. He bit his hands so hard that she could hear him grinding the bone. He grunted and tantrumed all night long—no one in the family could sleep. He ran everywhere, fast: around the house, away from Katie. At age 3, he ran into the street and was hit by a pickup truck. Katie installed locks on the inside of all the doors; he was hers to protect. But after puberty, Houston was suddenly, terrifyingly huge: six feet…