Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2-15, 2025 i New York Magazine

WHEN NOOR ABDALLA came home from the hospital in April, she put the car seat carrying her newborn on the kitchen floor and burst into tears. “I walked into the house by myself with this beautiful baby, and I think it just kind of hit me,” she says, sitting on a gray sectional in her Morningside Heights apartment. “I have to do this alone.” Her voice cracks, and she reaches for a Kleenex to dab at her eyes. “I think I’m doing so well, until people start to ask me questions.” It’s late May, and her baby, Deen, is napping soundly in the other room. “Sometimes he’ll have the little crying fits where you don’t know what’s wrong,” says Abdalla. “I’ve changed his diaper, I’ve burped him, I’ve fed him—what’s…

ONE RECENT EVENING on the Eastside of Los Angeles, a couple hundred people gathered in a cavernous old soundstage to celebrate the arrival of a new AI studio—one of the nearly 100 now operating in Hollywood. Called Asteria Film Co., it was founded by Bryn Mooser, a serial entrepreneur, and his girlfriend, the actress and writer Natasha Lyonne. Mooser, 45, is tall with a sculpted jaw and salt-and-pepper beard; he fits the role of a rumpled yet elegant pitchman so well that Cartier shot an advertorial of him titled “The Entrepreneur.” He led me through the studio: a 25,000-square-foot collection of soundstages and a workshop built in 1916 by the producer Mack Sennett, who pioneered new uses of scenic backdrops in early film-making. In the lobby, he paused at a…

ON A ONE-BLOCK STRETCH of Broadway between Broome and Spring Streets, dozens of baggy-jeans-wearing, Starface-pimple-patched, matcha-sipping 12-year-old girls wait on line. They’re here for a quintet of stores—Edikted, Brandy Melville, Princess Polly, Garage, and PacSun—that make up a new Tween Row of sorts, where polka-dot ruffled miniskirts and early-aughts-looking baby-doll tank tops sell for prices the equivalent of an hour or two of babysitting. Inside the stores, there are more lines—at the dressing rooms, at the cash registers—but for the teens, it’s worth the wait, even if only for the selfie. “‘Oh my God, it’s so crowded. There’s so many tourists. Ugh, why do you want to go there?’ ” says 13-year-old Ella Wolf, mimicking her parents’ reaction to Brandy Melville (519 Broadway), which is typically her first stop on the…

MOVIES / BILGE EBIRI Bless This Mess The final Mission: Impossible doesn’t hold up to the franchise—but it’s still fun. PERHAPS THE GREATEST sin that Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning commits is buying into its own self-importance. For years, the Mission: Impossible movies stood as a bulwark against the world-building extravagance of Hollywood’s franchise craze. Every installment was a new task, a new heist, a new series of outrageous stunts with minimal crossovers from one picture to the next. This not only let the films stand on their own; it allowed them the grace to be ridiculous. We didn’t take their plots too seriously, which paradoxically involved us even more in what was happening; we could focus on the action without grand ideas or ornate mythology distracting us. And it was…

Across 1 Harder to find 6 Sail holders 11 Took a load off 14 Leaves for a pizzeria 19 “That’s ___ subject” 20 Supreme Being, to Saudis 21 974 years ago 22 Barclays Center, e.g. 23 Exasperated words when watching videos gets boring? 26 Golf great Sam 27 911 responder 28 East Germany, briefly 29 Discussion areas 31 Nashville institution 32 “Glad to hear it!” 34 Mick Jagger’s demand that his bandmates get their own data storage? 39 Doc’s co-worker 41 18+ people 42 Avoid eye contact with her 43 ___ music (score) 44 Saline solutions 45 Get just right 47 Your, once 48 Palindromic billionaire 50 Patrician types 52 Demand that a dispute move from real life to the internet? 60 Putting into storage, as grain 61 Girls, in…

ON AN OTHERWISE forgettable Tuesday in early December, I opened the washing machine and was hit with the overwhelming smell of fish. I pulled out a pair of pajama pants, and the pocket was greasy with two ruptured softgels of cod-liver oil I’d forgotten to remove. The whole load reeked like a cast-iron skillet of seared salmon. I was furious I could be so stupid and careless. I’d taken my lisdexamfetamine dimesylate, the generic version of Vyvanse, that morning, just as I had almost every day since I was diagnosed with ADHD a month earlier at age 35. The first time I swallowed the yellow capsule, I proceeded to paint my home office in two coats of White Dove, the result of a euphoric burst of energy that felt entirely…

WELCOME to the Unsleeping City, a magical New York overrun with the ghosts of crooked cops and members of a fairy mafia. Seven actors had gathered onstage at Madison Square Garden to occupy the fantasy world designed by Brennan Lee Mulligan, the game master for Dimension 20, a streaming show based around Dungeons & Dragons. This was a live one-off episode. Fireballs erupted around the actors as if they were pro wrestlers rather than a group of improv comedians enacting a tabletop role-playing game. The last time they performed in New York, in 2019, it was for 250 people. Tonight, a sold-out audience of nearly 20,000 fans had filled the Garden, to the cast’s surprise. “Everyone I’ve told about Madison Square Garden is like, ‘Oh, is there a smaller room…

AFTER A FLIGHT TO NEW YORK FROM MY HOME IN TOKYO LAST YEAR, I stumbled across a professionally filmed microdrama that played out in bewildering, minute-or-two-long installments on my Instagram feed. Early in Money, Guns, and Merry Christmas, a defense-company CEO is asked by his date how much money he makes. As he says “Fifty or 60,” she interrupts him: “Sixty grand—I cannot believe my daddy set me up with someone so poor.” We know the CEO was about to say “Fifty or 60 million” because he tells us this in a voice-over after his date declares, “Money is the only thing that matters,” and storms out of the restaurant. All of this happens before the end of one short reel, when a woman watching from the bar sets the…

IT WAS AGONY AND ECSTASY outside Madison Square Garden on Thursday night before game five in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Indiana Pacers. The Knicks faced elimination, down three games to one, yet the crowd was daring to hope. In 2022, the team had been so bad for so long that after one first-round win against the Atlanta Hawks, fans acted as if they’d taken home the trophy. This season, the Finals have seemed within reach and the mania especially recalls the 1990s, when the Ewing-and-Starks squads enthralled the city. This time, bigger venues had to be found for watch parties, some of which were held in Central Park. A mildly disgusting TikTok-ready trend had fans slugging shots of honey. Timothée Chalamet has been at every game, keeping up…

NOT LONG AGO, ROB LOWE WAS IN ATLANTA, shooting a small movie he won’t tell me the name of, when he ran into a problem. “Our camera department was having a hard time getting certain shots because the dolly grip wasn’t hitting his marks,” he says. A Marvel project was filming nearby, along with three or four other large-budget movies, and by the time Lowe and his team arrived, the city’s most experienced crew members were booked elsewhere. “It turned out that our dolly grip had never been on a set before,” Lowe says. “He’d applied for the job because he’d worked a dolly at Costco.” For 25 years, Lowe has starred on one hit network-TV show after another, including The West Wing, Brothers & Sisters, Parks and Recreation, Code…

BRIAN FUHRER STARED at the numbers in front of him and was certain somebody had made a mistake. It was the summer of 2017, and the veteran Nielsen data cruncher was in Tampa reviewing the results from the ratings giant’s initial effort to measure how much streaming viewership was taking place on each platform on TV sets. Unsurprisingly, Netflix had finished on top, but YouTube was right behind. “I said, That clearly can’t be, because YouTube isn’t something people use on a TV,” Fuhrer remembers. Eight years later, YouTube’s dominance has only grown. In April, the Googleowned platform accounted for a record 12.4 percent share of all TV viewing, far ahead of Netflix (7.5 percent), which took second place among streamers. And YouTube is not just outpacing other streamers: In…

MADISON BERG and James McGann try not to buy anything new. They drove hours upstate to pick up a living-room couch they found on Craigslist. And on a drive to the Catskills, they found a lamp and a chair on the side of the road and hauled them back to the city. Considering the monumental work McGann has done painting their Jackson Heights apartment, it’s clear the couple, both in their 30s, know how to economize on materials too. “We go to the Home Depot ‘Oops’ paint section and see what they have,” Berg says, referring to the discount corner of the store stocked with incorrectly mixed paints. “That’s how we decide what to color a room.” Over two years, McGann, who studied illustration at the University of Hartford, has…