New York Magazine May 5-18, 2025

1 For New York’s latest cover story, features writer Jen Wieczner interviewed stock traders and others in finance as they belatedly reacted to the chaos wrought by the Trump administration (“Nightmare on Wall Street,” April 21–May 4). The response was overwhelmingly caustic. On Bluesky, reporter Stephanie Mencimer wrote, “I feel like these Wall Street Masters of the Universe are like the CIA agents who missed the collapse of the Soviet Union … Why should anyone trust these guys with their money?” Paul Ford joked that “to understand what’s really going on in America right now you only need to talk to a group of plain-spoken, hard-working Americans from the south of Canal Street.” Tigersatthezoo agreed: “These are the same guys who read Liar’s Poker as a how-to guide and not…

ON THE LAST DAY of April, a federal judge ordered the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, a senior at Columbia University, from Immigration custody in Vermont. Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident for ten years, had been arrested during a citizenship interview on April 14 and spent more than two weeks in Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans. Born in a refugee camp in the West Bank, Mahdawi participated in protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza last year; as with fellow Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, the government is seeking to deport him on grounds that he poses a national-security threat. Outside the courthouse, Mahdawi, who appeared poised with impeccable hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a keffiyeh, addressed a gathered crowd: “I am saying it clear and loud to President Trump and…

A FEW DECADES AGO, William G. Conway—the late ornithologist who’s largely responsible for reimagining the Bronx Zoo as the conservation-minded institution we know today—had his upper lip bitten halfway off by a king vulture. Apparently, however, it didn’t put anyone there off the vulture business because the zoo has gone to significant lengths to breed a new one. Hatched on February 25, this tiny as-yet-unnamed creature in the fluffy white feather shrug looks fully prepared for the Raptor Met Gala. He or she—nobody’s sure till a DNA test is done—is the offspring of two birds who were fixed up on their first date here in the Bronx. The father is 55 years old and arrived at the zoo in 2018; the mother, who arrived not too long after she was…

NO ONE WOULD ACCUSE Lucien Smith of being original, least of all Smith himself. “I’ve always role-played as a painter, role-played as a fine artist,” he says, swiveling in a chair in his studio. “I don’t know how much of it is genuine and how much of it is an act. Maybe the whole thing.” His earliest public role was wunderkind, which he took on in 2011 when he shot out of art school, Supreme beanie askew, and started selling work that flipped at auction for nearly $400,000. His first big sale was a landscape he copied from Winnie-the-Pooh, and his first big series comprised splatter paintings made by spewing paint from a fire extinguisher. Those brain-dead Pollocks begged critics to slot him into a trend they called Zombie Formalism,…

One afternoon this spring, I went to the West Village to meet a West Village Girl. When I arrived at the whitewashed wine bar she chose, just two blocks from the brownstone stoop Carrie Bradshaw made famous, Miranda McKeon was journaling in her notebook and sipping a cup of green tea. She wore crimson leggings, a stack of candy-colored beaded necklaces, and a black sweatshirt that read SELF-EMPLOYED because she is a full-time influencer—or “creator,” as it is more polite to say in this part of town. Online, the blonde, rosy-cheeked 23-year-old from New Jersey has over a million followers across TikTok and Instagram. She posts a lot, most often about her charmed life in the West Village: sweating it out at Pilates, treating herself to weeknight Froyo, drinking espresso…

WHEN JOHN FETTERMAN was released from Walter Reed hospital in March 2023, Adam Jentleson, then his chief of staff, was proud of his boss for seeking help for what the senator’s office and his doctor had said was a case of clinical depression. His six weeks of inpatient care had been the latest medical setback for the Pennsylvania Democrat, who had had a stroke mere months before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, nearly derailing his campaign against Republican Mehmet Oz. But a year after his release from the hospital, Fetterman’s behavior had so alarmed Jentleson that he resigned his position. In May 2024, he wrote an urgent letter to David Williamson, the medical director of the traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed, who had overseen Fetterman’s…