New York Magazine November 17-30, 2025

1 Each fall, New York dedicates an issue to the question of power. This year, it pondered how the bruised, sidelined Democrats might emerge from the Trump years (“The Out-of-Power Grab,” November 3–16). Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote about two competing visions for the party’s future (“Socialism vs. Abundance”). Commenter repubkooks said, “Abundance can’t really work because it doesn’t recognize the real cause of the problems. It just tries for incremental changes within the existing system which is classic Obama. Democratic socialism admits that decades of worsening inequality has caused most problems and there’s a need for drastic change to level the playing field … Too bad Bernie’s too old but his answers are way closer to the solution.” Sfarmer1789 said the Abundance agenda “has a strong focus on urban issues…

THERE IS NO EQUIVALENT in American history to Zohran Kwame Mamdani becoming, at 34, the next mayor of New York City. An avowed socialist has never led a city so large, nor has a Muslim—nor, in almost any instance, has someone so young and so unlikely to win. Parallels can be invoked, but none quite fits. In the sudden rise of the state assemblyman from Queens there are echoes of Barack Obama, who was derided by many Establishment players as far too inexperienced, or even feckless, to hold great power. And like Bernie Sanders, Mamdani endured a great deal of backlash from Democrats. Obama, though, was a sitting senator when he ran for president. Unlike Sanders, of course, Mamdani actually won. For the first time in the modern age, a…

THE FORMER MTV BOSS Tom Freston had hoped to meet at one of his old haunts, someplace that might evoke the good old days of the music network he co-founded in 1981. But most of those places are gone: the Greek luncheonette he and his colleagues used to frequent, the Mexican joint where the bartender sold cocaine, even the old MTV offices at 1775 Broadway, an entire floor of which went up in flames in 1988 when an employee working overnight tossed a lit cigarette into a garbage can. “I can’t remember any other place that’s still standing,” Freston says while thumbing a sugar packet at the Cosmic Diner in the Theater District, where we meet for breakfast. Now 79, Freston presents me with a manila envelope, inside of which…

YOU SCREW LIKE YOU EAT. I call this the Rule of Nigella Lawson: You can gauge someone’s relationship to pleasure by how they approach a meal. If they turn a night out at a restaurant or cooking at home into a bacchanal, if they see a beautifully seared steak approaching the table and start salivating, if they suck on a saucy Buffalo wing or audibly moan over a perfectly composed bite, it’s clear they respect desire and will probably be outstanding in bed. (If they don’t like to eat, well, I have my doubts.) The connection is biochemical as much as philosophical: The same part of the brain responsible for food cravings is associated with sexual desire. Voracious eaters fuck better. Put it on an apron. I personally love food.…

EXPERTS WERE SURE THAT THE 20TH CENTURY would make us stupid. Never before had culture and technology reshaped daily life so quickly, and every new invention brought with it a panic over the damage it was surely causing to our fragile, defenseless brains. Lightbulbs, radio, comic books, movies, TV, rock and roll, video games, calculators, pornography on demand, dial-up internet, the Joel Schumacher Batmans—all of these things, we were plausibly warned, would turn us into drooling idiots. ¶ The test results told a different story. In the 1930s, in the U.S. and across much of the developed world, IQ scores started creeping upward—and they kept on going, rising on average by roughly three points per decade. These gains accumulated such that even an unexceptional bozo from the turn of the…

Last winter, the federal government released the results of its semi-annual reading and math tests of fourth- and eighth-graders, assessments that are considered the most authoritative measure of the state of learning in American elementary and middle schools. In nearly every category, the scores had plunged to levels unseen for decades—or ever. On reading tests, 40 percent of fourth-graders and one-third of eighth-graders performed below “basic,” the lowest threshold. A separate assessment of 12th-graders conducted this past spring—the first since schools were shuttered by the COVID pandemic—yielded similarly crushing results. Many graduated from high school without the ability to decipher this sentence. How can I assume that? The test asked them to define the word decipher, and 24 percent got it wrong. “You can’t believe how low ‘below basic’ is,”…