New York Magazine June 16-29, 2025

1 New York’s most recent issue focused on Hollywood at a turning point. Starting on a positive note, Zak Cheney-Rice’s cover-story profile of Michael B. Jordan featured the actor fresh off his blockbuster, Sinners, which well exceeded its earnings expectations (“An Original Vampire Movie Led by Michael B. Jordan Revived the Box Office,” June 2–15). Commenter Boswelox said, “People are very happy to go to original movies. They just have to be good, well-made original movies—which Sinners very much is.” Susila concurred: “I could write a thesis about that movie.” On Bluesky, Cory Barker said it was “pretty disingenuous to write about the weird coverage of Sinners box office performance as if your publication didn’t produce some of that coverage.” Many readers were taken with Jordan’s cover look, styled by…

SINCE THE 2010S, social media has been identified with protesters. In the early years, this was intuitive. Protest movements wanted attention, but mainstream media outlets were often slow or reluctant to give it to them, unless, of course, things got out of hand, at which point they would get plenty. Social media, by contrast, was an effective tool for activists to communicate with one another and directly with the public, providing counternarratives to the ones laid out in the Establishment press. An opportunistic embrace of progressive causes by social-media executives cemented the perception: Twitter was with the activists. This created a powerful dynamic: Social-media platforms that were used to organize protests were then used to circulate encouraging imagery of those protests, helping movements like Black Lives Matter spread across the…

THINGS CAN MOVE quickly at 26 Federal Plaza. People arrive for check-ins at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s offices, then disappear inside the building. In the drab hallways by the courtrooms on the 12th and 14th floors, federal agents, in plainclothes with faces concealed, arrest people as they exit their hearings, pinning some with violent force. Then it’s down to the holding cells on the tenth floor, where, according to those detained, dozens are confined in tight quarters. Many have reportedly been held for days without a shower or clean clothes. Some say they saw people sleeping on bathroom floors. “It feels like they’re turning 26 Federal Plaza into a de facto short-term detention center,” says Daniel Coates, director of public affairs at Make the Road New York. Margaret Cargioli, an…

PABLO TORRE WAS sitting at a table decorated with white roses at the Peabody Awards this month when he snuck a look at his phone and saw he was getting trash-talked by Bill Simmons, the sports commentator who pioneered the omnivorous approach Torre shares. He went to the bathroom and listened to the clip: Simmons had said Torre was “pretending to be a journalist” and that he was dining out on one of his biggest stories yet, a series of scoops revealing some unusual dynamics between former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, 73, and his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson. Torre was in Beverly Hills for the event because he had been nominated for a journalism award for an episode of his podcast, but the jab from Simmons stung anyway.…

THE VAST MAJORITY of humans alive now aren’t old enough to feel the shell shock from the musical paradigm shifts of the 1960s. We were born in a world that always had the music of the Beatles and Nina Simone and Jimi Hendrix. Yet the deaths of Sly Stone and Brian Wilson at 82 feel especially cataclysmic. The parallels between the two artists are in some ways uncanny; hailed as songwriting giants well before they turned 30, Stone and Wilson broke musical boundaries with Stand!, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Pet Sounds, and Smile and faced initial critical resistance when they released their most innovative work. They both struggled to balance their aspirations and fans’ expectations, falling out of favor the further inward their critical lenses peered. But it’s in…

On April 4, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha posted a video of an obliterated urban landscape. Suddenly, there are bombs: Smoke erupts from the base of the buildings, and two large objects are ejected from the rooftops into the sky. Arms and legs seem to undulate in the air—they appear to be human bodies—before they crash down onto the pyre. “This is scary more than ever,” Abu Toha wrote on Instagram. “In the air strikes, two people flew even above the clouds of death.” In the background, the girl videotaping is crying as she holds the phone. She knows that those two people, perhaps briefly alive in the sky, have died, that Israel is bombing an already annihilated place, and that eventually those bombs may come for them all.…