New York Magazine May 19-June 1, 2025

1 In New York’s latest cover story, features writer Brock Colyar documented the rise of the West Village Girl (“Her Town,” May 5–18). The Spread newsletter wrote, “Colyar crystallizes the latest crop of young women to treat New York’s most young-woman-idolized neighborhood like they’re on their semester abroad.” Michael J. Miraflor called the feature “a pantheon read that people will refer to far into the future to explain how TikTok molded a whole generation, or in this case, a neighborhood.” Heidi N. Moore said, “This specific type of transplant is load-bearing for this city. This is what Carrie Bradshaw was.” The comedian Steven Phillips-Horst countered, “The West Village Girl is not the modern day Carrie Bradshaw … She would never dream of posting an affiliate link.” Predictably, the cover generated…

THE ORIGINAL EDITION of Emily Post’s Etiquette, published in 1922, had little to say about workplaces. Post advised women, who mostly filled secretarial roles at the time, to leave their personal lives at home (“Mood, temper, jealousy … are the chief flaws of the woman in business”) and to not waste much of an employer’s time freshening up. But in a single incisive line, Post distilled the central difficulty of office life: “It takes no small amount of will and self-control,” she wrote, “to get on with any constant companion under the daily friction of an enforced relationship that is unrelieved day after day, week after week.” Basically: Hell is other people. A century and countless cultural and technological shifts later, American workers generally agree. During the switch to remote…

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IT’S HARD TO SAY that I learned a lesson,” Aidan Maese-Czeropski tells me recently over FaceTime, staring somewhere off-camera and scratching an eyebrow. He’s calling from a hostel in Australia, where he’s sitting poolside under palm trees. It’s 10 a.m. and already 80 degrees on the island continent, but as far as I can tell through the screen, he doesn’t break a sweat, even while recounting the salacious chain of events that led him 10,000 miles away from Washington, D.C., where, not that long ago, the 25-year-old worked on Capitol Hill. In 2021, Maese-Czeropski was hired by the office of then–Maryland senator Ben Cardin. He worked for Cardin until December 2023, when a sex tape Maese-Czeropski recorded at work and shared with friends leaked, causing a ruckus in D.C. It…

IN THE DAYS LEADING up to the conclave that would name the 267th pope, Catholic muckety-mucks from the U.S. descended on Rome for a week of networking, schmoozing, and fundraising. “America Week,” as it’s called, had been planned long before the death of Pope Francis, but the timing couldn’t have been better. For the past 12 years, the archconservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church had found itself out of power, frustrated by a pontiff who had restricted use of the Latin Mass and allowed priests to bless same-sex couples. Now, the wealthiest among them would be on hand to socialize and gossip and, just maybe, if they prayed their rosaries right, tilt the College of Cardinals toward their choice as the next leader of the world’s 1.4 billion members…

On the morning of April 1, Katrina Armstrong entered a crowded conference room in Washington, D.C., sat down at a long table, and prepared to be deposed by the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, a panel President Trump had formed to investigate and punish America’s universities. Armstrong had just resigned under pressure as the acting president of Columbia University—the administration’s No. 1 target and the first to yield to its demands. Those in the room understood she was in Washington to take a beating, but what transpired was still painful to behold. As the deposition got underway, Armstrong seemed unable to answer the government’s increasingly hostile questions, as if the experience of running Columbia had shattered her. “The last weeks, if not the last months, or a year—it’s just incredibly…