Innholdsfortegnelse for October 20-November 2, 2025 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Jessica Bennett wrote about the brash onetime queen of daytime TV now being held under guardianship in a luxury senior home. (“Who Speaks for Wendy Williams?” October 6–19). Many readers expressed support for Williams. Notbeforecoffee commented, “It’s shocking to me that one person could have this many sycophantic barnacles attached to her. What an unholy mess. It’s clear WW needs daily attention but I doubt this gets untangled before she is destitute. A NY legend, how sad.” Freddie wrote, “I feel like it’s impossible for the internet to grasp the fact that there are more options than ‘she needs to be in this particular guardianship’ and ‘she needs to be completely free with no supervision whatsoever.’” Others were skeptical. The Capitol Forum’s Paul…

HE’S AN ASSHOLE,” Harvey Fierstein says as he approaches his Gammill long-arm quilting machine, which dominates his Connecticut art studio. The industrial-size device includes a computer interface for creating precise patterns, but he prefers to use it like a pencil and paper, doodling swirls directly onto ice-dyed velveteen. The dye is a recent addition to his process. “You go through these periods when the fabric does the talking or when the design does the talking,” he tells me. Currently, the fabric is yelling. At 73, the Broadway legend has an encyclopedic knowledge of his materials, always remembering which drawer holds which scrap, which spool carries which thread, and which shelf has his custom denim penis fabric. When Fierstein started quilting in 2009, it was a hobby. He’d long been a…

SIERRA ARMOR was bored. It was December 2020, the middle of a Vermont winter, and she was marooned in her dorm room at Bennington College in a white shingled house overlooking a sloping meadow. She wanted to learn how to write stylistically innovative novels like Tao Lin and Marguerite Duras. But many classmates had stayed home that semester, and much of her academic life—including her creative-writing classes—had vanished into Zoom squares. That month, her boyfriend sent her a link to a strange Substack with a tiny following, written by an online presence called Angelicism01, or simply “01.” 01 published manic, labyrinthine, thousands-of-words-long ruminations on nearly every concern of the high-COVID era. They drew parallels between cancel culture and the automated, self-replicating logic of AI models, riffed on the possibility that…

OCTOBER 1, 2:30 P.M. Christian Dior by Jonathan Anderson OUTSIDE AN enormous box-shaped structure in the Tuileries, a line of spectators stretched to the Place de la Concorde, where royals were guillotined during the French Revolution. The debut of Jonathan Anderson’s women’s collection for Christian Dior had drawn by far the largest crowd in recent memory. ¶ Inside, a big inverted pyramid dominated the center of the room. It was a stylish Jumbotron and, once the lights dimmed, the title of a video in a horror-movie font appeared: DO YOU DARE ENTER THE HOUSE OF DIOR? ¶ Anderson had asked the British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis to make a compact history of the house, and his depiction of the brand’s former designers and the overly theatrical fashion world would be…

1. A Guardian and a Thief By Megha Majumdar ➽ After 2020’s A Burning, Majumdar’s second novel—a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award—is set in a version of Kolkata, India, where the city’s food supply is disappearing and crime is spiking. Majumdar thrillingly and gracefully unveils how the fates of two families are intertwined in a cycle of violence and need. 2. The Mind Reels By Fredrik deBoer ➽ DeBoer’s debut novel traces the mental history of Alice, a freshman living in the college dorm where she “would first go insane.” The author, who has written about his own battles with mental health, tells a gripping story. 3. The Uncool By Cameron Crowe ➽ Before writing Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Almost Famous, Crowe was a mostly obedient…

IF YOU’RE AFRAID OF CLOWNS: For nearly 40 years, Pennywise has loomed as a personification of the evil that threatens children. The prequel series It: Welcome to Derry (HBO) digs into his whole deal. IF YOU’RE AFRAID OF TOXIC DADS: Jason Clarke is unrecognizable (paunchy, sweaty, red-faced) in Murdaugh: Death in the Family (Hulu) as the South Carolina lawyer who murdered his wife and son to cover up his financial misdeeds. IF YOU’RE AFRAID OF RICH PEOPLE: Nothing good can come of getting on a yacht with a bunch of billionaires. Does this scenario, or open water generally, freak you out? The Woman in Cabin 10 (Netflix) will leave you deeply unsettled. IF YOU’RE AFRAID OF HOT VAMPIRES: Until the next season of the lusty and bloody Interview With the…

THE OPENING-NIGHT GALA for the Metropolitan Opera’s new season may be the last place you would expect to find yet another sign that Zohran Mamdani is on a glide path to City Hall. The audience is older, more affluent, and, one can safely speculate, less socialist than most audiences for the performing arts in New York. It is the very definition of well-heeled uptown Manhattan’s political and cultural status quo. Yet it turns out that even at the Met—yes, the Met, where Franco Zeffirelli’s warhorse productions of La Bohème and Turandot are both in repertory this season—there are New Yorkers clamoring for change. Such, for me at least, was the takeaway from the scene that unfolded at the September 21 premiere of the new opera inspired by Michael Chabon’s Holocausthaunted…

THE THIRD TIME Iranian director Jafar Panahi was arrested, it was with his wife, his daughter, and 15 of his friends. It was March 2010, and he and Mohammad Rasoulof had been filming a movie that would examine, in Panahi’s typical social-realist style, how the recent disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the wave of protests that followed rippled through multiple generations of one family. The pair knew Iran’s conservative government, which reviews scripts and withholds permits for movies of which it doesn’t approve, would never let them make it. So they began filming at Panahi’s home in secret. They had nearly 30 percent of the movie shot when news of their project got out and his apartment was raided. “It’s not important how they found out,” Panahi tells…

NOAH UCHIDA Fourth-grader, East Village What’s your favorite trick? I can’t decide because everything’s my favorite. But I’m learning how to do a laser heelflip. I haven’t landed it before, but I’m close. Do you practice with your friends from school? No, my friends at school never skate, not one single person. I’m the only one. My classmates only know about Tony Hawk and kickflips. A lot of them play soccer. I like your jacket. Where’s it from? Honestly, I’d have to ask my mom. My mom is a fashionista, and she has some really nice clothes. And yeah, I saw it in her closet. How does this skate scene compare to California’s? People are a lot hungrier and more competitive in Los Angeles because no matter where you’re from…

STELLAN SKARSGÅRD COMES down to the lobby restaurant of the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park a few minutes late on account of his son Gustaf, who called after seeing his father in Joachim Trier’s latest movie, Sentimental Value. “I know exactly what this is about. Do you recognize yourself?” Stellan-as-Gustaf recalls. “Yeah, yeah. I know,” he groused back. In the film, the patriarch of the Skarsgård acting clan (seven of his eight children, including Alexander, Bill, and Gustaf, have gone into the business) plays Gustav Borg, a director in the winter of his life trying to connect with his daughter (Renate Reinsve) by offering her the lead role in his new movie. Sentimental Value could earn him the first Oscar nomination of his six-decade career, which runs from the bleak melodramas…

➸ DON’T PUT ALUMINUM FOIL—or any metal—in the microwave. For many of us, this is a sacred rule of cooking, passed down when our parents left us home alone for the first time. Strategist writer Dominique Pariso had absorbed it so deeply that when she slipped a stainless-steel Black+Blum meal-prep container (from $24) into her microwave, she instinctively ducked for cover, bracing for an explosion. “But after the timer went off, the lunch box and my microwave were all in one piece,” she says. “Not a single spark.” A stack of microwave-safe Black+Blums has since replaced her plastic deli containers. Dan Black, the company’s co-founder and lead designer of the product, explains this minor miracle with a lesson in electromagnetism. He says that sparks fly when microwaves jump from one…

THE PENDULUM swings from cheap to swank and back again. I’ll leave it to the economists to tie the trend to jobs numbers or inflation data, the bread-and-butter equivalent of the hemline index (they’re shorter in booms, longer during busts). All I know is that the rough-and-ready comfort cuisine that dominated the crawl out of the pandemic a few years ago, a banquet-orgy of steaks, shrimp cocktails, and Caesar salads served in shouty canteens and new bistros manicured with the scabs of old ones, has given way to a new age of gloss. Fancy fancy? You’re in luck. Now ascendant: the swankstaurant. Spots such as the minuscule clubhouse 4 Charles Prime Rib and Jon Neidich’s the Nines, with its burgundy velvet and caviar-topped baked potatoes, helped to establish the template…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. THEATER 1. See The Baker’s Wife Song is the staff of life. Classic Stage Company, opens October 23. Stephen Schwartz has been a hitmaker for most of his career: This fall, he’s got both The Queen of Versailles and Wicked: For Good coming out. But you rarely hear about this late-’70s curio that never made it to Broadway and is most famous for producing the great song “Meadowlark.” Here’s your chance to see it with Ariana DeBose in the title role and Scott Bakula as the baker she abandons. JACKSON MCHENRY TV 2. Watch I Love L.A. A voice of a generation, again. HBO, November 2. The long-foretold rise of comedian Rachel Sennott finally brings her to prestige-TV shores. Across the…