Innholdsfortegnelse for December 15-28, 2025 i New York Magazine

1 New York’s latest issue spotlighted the Culturati 50, a selection of those who most shaped the culture in 2025, and their own favorite entertainments from the past year. Though their lists created a global splash, the most heated comments we received addressed the issue’s three features. First, Kerry Howley reported on the CDC under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (“ ‘No One Is Coming to Help Us,’ ” December 1–14). Kat Tenbarge of Spitfire News noted, “I don’t think people comprehend the scale of destruction wrought by this administration already, not even close.” Hofstra University law professor Ian Marcus Amelkin concurred that what is happening at the CDC is “chilling, awful, unnecessary, and like so much of this administration, needlessly cruel.” University of Washington political-science professor Scott Lemieux said, “As…

HANNAH LA FOLLETTE RYAN, the Brooklyn-based photographer known by @SubwayHands, one of her Instagram handles, has been documenting the intimate ways in which we clench, grip, clasp, and rest our hands while on public transit since 2014. She’s attuned to the slightest shifts in behavior; post-pandemic, she noticed more people reverting to wired headphones and, more recently, young couples (most of whom are under 21, she says) sharing them, each with a bud in one ear. “It’s like the couple have the car to themselves, absorbed in their own world,” she says, “and the wires bring their bodies into this tender contact.” After La Follette Ryan takes each photo, she approaches the subjects and asks what they’re listening to. “I’ve been struck that most of it is not from the…

MARC KAGAN was 43 when he decided to become a teacher. He’d been an MTA worker for 20 years, establishing himself as a prominent union organizer and helping to oust what he believed was corrupt union leadership. By 2004, he wanted a change. His first class at the Bronx High School of Science was ninth-grade social studies—“They didn’t trust me yet with the tenth-graders.” In it was an outspoken, curious boy named Zohran Mamdani. “He was completely engaged,” Kagan says. “My approach was always, ‘I want to hear your view on this. I want to actually hear what you have to say.’ And I think a student like Zohran, that’s right up his alley.” If Kagan was inexperienced, it apparently didn’t show. Mamdani has since (repeatedly) called him one of…

WHEN SHAQUITA GARCIA’S kitchen became unexpectedly unusable because of a six-month renovation delay, the 38-year-old designer and mother on the Lower East Side was at a loss. She deeply values cooking for her husband and children—Zoey, age 6, and Nelson, 8—nearly every night. So after a brief and unsustainable stint ordering out, she prepped pork chops and baked beans and then walked her clan the ten-to-15 minutes to East River Park to grill. “It was so special because you have the lights of the city and you’re on the water, and it feels very luxurious,” she says. A Friday-night ritual began: Garcia cooked hot dogs for the kids and rotated between proteins like steak and salmon, plus vegetables, for the adults. On muggy evenings, her children wore their bathing suits…

A LIT TLE MORE than a year ago, Tom Aulenback, a 30-year-old consultant, started the Greenpoint Trash Club by asking on the neighborhood sub-Reddit if anyone wanted to meet to pick up trash together. “Ten people came to the first one, which was ten more people than I was expecting,” Aulenback says. Since then, a tradition has developed: Every Wednesday, Aulenback hands out grabbers with flashlights attached to them—an upgrade he’s excited about—and, at the head of a group of about 40 people, rolls a granny cart lined with a trash bag as they snap up coffee cups and chip bags. Afterward, they all go to a bar. Dean Foster, a first-time attendee, tells me he just moved to New York from Tennessee, taking a “leap of faith.”…

WHILE THE Smithsonian is busy memory-holing DEI, five New York museums gave Black artists major, career-defining retrospectives. At MoMA, “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” made technique—dragging acrylics and tessellating time—the vehicle to alchemize anger into beauty. At the Guggenheim, “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” turned the rotunda into a commons with mosaics of mirror, ceramic, glass, oyster shell, and black soap—fracture arranged toward repair. At the Whitney, “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” restored the portrait to its rightful place in the public forum with grisaille flesh against saturated grounds. At the Met, “Lorna Simpson: Source Notes” treated painting and photography as an ecology, cool fronts moving through archives to widen the frame of history. And uptown, the Bronx Museum anointed a kitchen-table visionary with “Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald”: Her vernacular…

A FEW YEARS AGO, two boxes filled with Maude vibrators showed up at my door. (I am The Cut’s “Sex Diaries” columnist, and things like this happen to me.) They sat on the floor of my closet until one morning I decided they had to go. So I whipped up a post in my local Buy Nothing group on Facebook: Anyone interested could meet me in my apartment building that day. I had no idea if my neighbors would be delighted or revolted. Then the responses poured in. A cheerful, high-energy woman who reminded me of Allison Janney DM’d, “A lot of my friends turning 60 this year! This would be a great gift to keep the juices flowing.” When she showed up at my door, I was on a…

WHEN NEWS SPREAD that the filmmaker John Wilson was swinging a hammer in Ridgewood this past spring to build a movie theater, it seemed possible that it was a bit for HBO’s How To With John Wilson. But Wilson had been living in the neighborhood for more than a decade and knew there was a hunger for non-lame, noncorporate spaces. “I could just sense that,” he says. Wilson partnered with friends Davis Fowlkes, a film-business veteran, and Cosmo Bjorkenheim, a critic. Low Cinema opened in May with two Hugh Grant films; a 4K restoration of Billy Madison played over the summer. The space is equally unpretentious: Carpet printed with swirling film reels fronts a concession stand that sells Sno-Caps and $5 popcorn. Look past the candy on sale, and there’s…

IN THE DAYS LEADING UP to her first show at the David Zwirner gallery, the artist Sasha Gordon was painting 17 hours at a clip, starting late in the afternoon and continuing until 11 the next morning. When she’d finish one section of a painting, she’d take a quick nap to clean her mind, then go at it again. “When I am painting,” Gordon said, “I usually get fast toward the end. I’m excited, but I’m also really nervous and stressed. This time, I was really hard on myself. I had gotten better at painting, but I had higher standards.” Her ascendancy in the art world had been swift. This show was highly anticipated. “And then it sucked because I was running out of time. So, usually, I can sacrifice…

WHEN BILLY JONES, co-owner of the Williamsburg venue Baby’s All Right, died at 45 in June, the nightlife scene lost a kind of godfather. For more than ten years, Baby’s has defined an era of indie music and hosted early shows by the likes of Billie Eilish, SZA, and Dua Lipa. Tom Moore, Jones’s friend and business partner, says Jones possessed a prodigious curatorial skill for creating rooms that people wanted to hang out in—a “genius that was difficult for people to understand.” Today, there’s nowhere Jones’s legacy is more strongly felt than in his final creation, Night Club 101, a 150-capacity concert hall in the East Village, which he opened in January with Moore. Running in the former Pyramid Club space (imagine a small sweaty party in the 1980s…

BAYLIN BENGATHODY First-grader, Chatham, New Jersey Who’s on the other end of your walkie-talkie? My friend. We’re using it to say where we are so we don’t get lost or anything. I like the cheetahs on your pajamas. They’re jaguars. Do you learn a lot about animals in school? Not that much, but I already know a lot. Just ask me some specific questions and I’ll answer. Do you know what the biggest cat is? A tiger! I heard it’s cold in Vermont right now. There’s some snow. I like playing in it. But winter is not my favorite season; I like all of them. Tell me about this stuffie you’re holding. It’s a jaguar, and it helps me sleep. Are you looking forward to seeing anything in particular? I’m…

RHEA SEEHORN HAS a thing for libraries. As she arrives for our interview at the Philosophical Research Society, a New Agey outfit in a Mayan Revival building in Los Feliz, she tells me she’s excited to discover a new library right here in Los Angeles, where she lives. Seehorn, 53—Rhea is her middle name, pronounced “Ray”—has dusty-blonde hair and an athletic, forceful presence. Having just come from the Wrap’s Power Women Summit, she arrives in a businesslike blazer and a full face of makeup, which sharpens her features. She apologizes for her extravagant appearance, then returns to nerdy enthusiasm for her surroundings, suggesting I follow the Instagram account @1000libraries, which features venues like this. We get a tour from an attendant, learning that the place was built around a collection…

IN 2021, the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer was on a bike trip in South America with some friends, including media mogul Barry Diller, former Allen & Company president Herbert Allen Jr., and former Activision chief Bobby Kotick. A registered Democrat at the time, Grazer was expressing his frustration with the woke fever gripping the country and was considering holding a salon at his Santa Barbara home to discuss the issue. Allen suggested Grazer get in touch with his son Herb Allen III, who now runs the family’s boutique investment bank, which is known for its billionaire-heavy media-tech confab, held each year in Sun Valley, Idaho. When Grazer spoke to the younger Allen, he said, “You should talk to Bari Weiss.” Weiss had recently arrived in Los Angeles from New York,…

WHEN HE DECIDED to make a scale model of 30 Rockefeller Plaza back in 2004, Joe Macken, a truck and limo-bus driver from Middle Village, didn’t mean to let it get this far. “I wasn’t even thinking about building the whole city,” he says. “I just wanted to build a building. And then I built another one and then another one. I just kept going out and out and out. There were a lot of times when I would fall asleep at my table at three o’clock in the morning.” Now, 21 years later, he has a balsa-wood replica of nearly every last building in New York’s five boroughs. “It is close to a 2,500 scale, but it’s my own scale,” he tells me. “Every inch is 160 feet.” It’s…

All right, it’s not the Apollo missions to the moon. But as recently as a few years ago, getting a lift-and-dump containerization system onto our streets seemed about as likely as a new lunar landing. Since late 2024, we have been either using or testing big bins for big buildings, smaller wheeled bins for smaller buildings, and even smaller bins for compostable waste. (Those last ones help curb the rat population by choking off its food supply.) The chunky collective bins are the most polarizing because they require the sacrifice of a parking spot or two. Happily, the bin-haters are losing out to the rat-haters.…

FOR THE PAST 21 years, at least four times a week, Youman Wilder could be found on a field in Harlem coaching up to a dozen boys in the art of good baseball. Wilder, along with his nonprofit, the Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy, has trained multiple future Major League players, including one World Series champion, but his proudest accomplishment? Making sure all of those boys, and a couple hundred more, went to college. “I want to make great baseball players, but I really want to make great students,” he says. The academy doesn’t hold tryouts and has no minimum fee; the only requirement is that players maintain a 3.0 GPA. Like many of the kids he coaches, Wilder grew up in New York with a mom living paycheck to paycheck.…

A SUNSET PARK bodega worker complained to Lorenzo Tijerina that his boss couldn’t open a new bagel store across the street because the gas wasn’t working, even though he’d been paying rent on the space for nearly three years. “Oh, that’s a great story!” Tijerina recalls thinking; he immediately got a reporter on the case. Tijerina is the publisher (and editor, photographer, web manager, ad salesperson, graphic designer, and main delivery guy) of The Sunset Post, the Spanish-, English-, and Chinese-language community newspaper he runs from the one-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife and young son. The 50-year-old, a tax preparer and web developer, once worked for regional papers and TV stations. The Post, which published its first edition in September, began as a venture to reconnect with journalism.…

THE FRICK’S AXEL RÜGER ON THE STUDIO MUSEUM “The higher you go up, the better view you get. Thelma built a roof terrace, which feels like it’s the size of half a football field. It’s enormous up there. And then the roof tower is to die for. You can just imagine on warm summer nights spending time up there surrounded by lower buildings and impressive views.” “It’s cute. All these little chairs. Their education space is different from ours, more geared toward making and messing with materials. There’s a nice parallel between having that space for kids as well as space for the professional artists in residence.” “The steps are a reference to the stoops in Harlem. It’s a flexible space for people to sit and, in modern parlance, ‘hang…

IN 2016, AFTER nearly 30 years teaching high-school English in Queens, Robert Gold retired and set three goals for his new life. “I wanted to go to the gym more often and work in an animal shelter, but those things never happened,” he says. “And then I wanted to do background work.” As a child, he’d dreamed of being an actor but never pursued it. This time around, he registered with Central Casting and Grant Wilfley Casting, the two main clearinghouses for movie and TV extras in New York, and crossed his fingers. He picked a good time to launch a second act in show business. The streaming boom was in full swing, fueling a surge in TV shoots across the city and the demand for background extras. Many are…

FOR A LONG TIME, the role of maître d’ has existed only in fussy uptown restaurants, where regulars expect certain corner tables and their Sancerre ice cold. But at the current impossible-to-get-into spots, the maître d’s are there to bring a human touch to this app-driven experience, to curate the crowd and the mood—and maybe, if you follow their advice below, to get you a table. RESTAURANT: BRIDGES “I’ve realized that I’m pretty good at recognizing faces. And so if people come in a second, third time, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, nice to see you again. Weren’t you here the other day?’ I feel like people are always surprised by that.” Make the reservation IRL: “All of our tables are for reservations, but we try to keep the entire 12-seat…

FOR A SOLID STRETCH between summer and early fall, two experimental, grimy-gay shows directed by Sam Pinkleton—Josh Sharp’s ta-da! and Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank?—played to packed houses downtown. “We yanked the Village back from these white girls,” says Sharp. “You would walk past bars and be like, That one’s for the Lululemon set, and this is for us.” The double bill became the queer Barbenheimer with fans of one buying tickets to both. “I could feel our audiences getting to know one another,” says Bassichis. Playing an extended run at the Greenwich House Theater, ta-da! was a lewd PowerPoint presentation about Sharp’s relationship with his dead mother. Can I Be Frank?, at Soho Playhouse, was a manic testimonial about creative ambition and political activism filtered through the stand-up…

➸ COUNTLESS BRUSHES had failed to tame Strategist contributor Iva Dixit’s thick, coarse hair. But then hairstylist Lizzy Weinberg introduced her to the Y.S. Park Luster Wood Styler Paddle Brush ($59), something of a secret among hair professionals. “The boar bristles were straight and stiff, and they cut through my strands like a tractor implement,” Dixit recalls. “Here I am, four years later, with a head of hair so embarrassingly shiny, all courtesy of the same brush.” As Weinberg likes to say, “Everyone needs one—or three.”…

WHEN STANLEY KUBRICK’S Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999, the world shrugged. Critics didn’t know what to do with it, treating it less like the final statement of a master filmmaker and more like a bootlegged work print—understandable, given that Kubrick, who typically fussed over his movies until the last possible second, had died that March, just days after delivering a semi-finished cut to Warner Bros. The studio and his estate made the remaining tweaks. Meanwhile, audiences had been primed by the marketing to expect an explicit, boundary-pushing erotic thriller featuring an extended orgy sequence that almost triggered an NC-17 rating. What they got instead was much tamer: a slow-motion marital drama about a Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise), rattled by his wife’s (Nicole Kidman) confession of…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. MOVIES 1. See Metropolitan Dawn in the big city. Metrograph, December 19. Whit Stillman’s 1990 directorial debut is stealthily a terrific holiday film, taking place in a chilly Manhattan over debutante season, where its baby socialite dramas unfold in classic sixes decked out with Christmas trees. ALISON WILLMORE OPERA 2. See I Puritani Epic romance during the English Civil War. Metropolitan Opera, opens New Year’s Eve. Puritanism never sounded so opulent as in Bellini’s melodrama of love and gunsmoke. Cavorting melodies, villains skulking, high notes bursting in air—all the elements of bel canto converge in an opera that hasn’t gotten a new production at the Met in nearly 50 years. JUSTIN DAVIDSON MUSIC 3. See Clipse Pope approved. Brooklyn Paramount, December…

MY GRANDFATHER Sidney Lipsyte, the son of immigrants who became a New York City public-school teacher and administrator, lived from 1904 to 2005, a good run I don’t expect to match. He witnessed, and sometimes experienced, a century of mayhem and invention: human flight, human spaceflight, pandemics, vaccines, economic devastation, Nazi conquest, atomic murder, peace treaties, civil rights, pacemakers, penicillin, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. I’ll stop before this becomes a Billy Joel song, which is no knock on Long Island’s favorite son, though I do worry we started the fire or, at least, enthusiastically tended it. When my grandfather was 8, he and his brothers listened to distress calls from the Titanic on their homemade crystal-radio set. Sidney was 14 when his father died from the…

A SELF-DESCRIBED “train-obsessed child,” John McGill has been constructing models of the trucks in and around Newtown Creek storage lots—“the main characters of this strange backwater”—since the pandemic. Using 3-D-printed plastic and metal detail parts from model-railroad kits, he built about 30 trucks and finally got a chance to debut them this year at his company art show. But “almost immediately,” he says, “I started thinking about what to make next.”…

Since the fall, teenagers (and some adults) around the city have been filming themselves dangling from crossing signals while singing along to the 2008 Kid Cudi song “Maui Wowie” for no reason other than, really, why not?…

Instead of sitting around and just … waiting, Hannah Solow (Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary!), Dee Roscioli (Madeline Ashton in Death Becomes Her), and Daniel May and Steven Huynh (Maybe Happy Ending) used their hours of downtime to make content for TikTok and Instagram. Solow even got a full two-week run with her name above the marquee, and fans wearing “Oh, Hannah!” shirts lined up at the stage door asking her to repeat her catchphrases.…

SOME OF THE best movies of the year were also the best New York movies of the year. Just look at Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, which re-created a 1950s Lower East Side that pulses with the irrepressible self-belief of hustlers, schemers, and strivers. No surprise that Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest took off once Denzel Washington left his Dumbo penthouse and went down to the streets, where the people are. Celine Song’s Materialists got mileage out of soft-luxury voyeurism: There really are moneyed bachelors who live like this. And then there are the projects that haven’t yet been released: Jean Smart dodging traffic in the Flatiron District for Hacks, Dakota Johnson covered in (presumably fake) blood for the Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity, Anne Hathaway twirling outside the Long Island Bar…

ON THE FOURTH story of a building in the East Village, there’s a school that teaches traditional Ukrainian dance. Olya Melnyk, 16, found her way there after her family was displaced in 2022 from Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine. There, school had been constantly interrupted; every day felt fractured. “People weren’t living life normally,” Olya says. “They were always afraid.” The air-raid sirens could last for 15 minutes, two hours, or six hours, and they went off almost daily. Her family found stability in New York, but she felt out of place. The Plast program she had joined, a Scouts-type Ukrainian organization, was mostly for kids who grew up in the city and featured grammar lessons she didn’t need. Olya had never danced before, and the classes became a way for…

IN A YEAR of electric (if ultimately disappointing) New York basketball, one squad had an undefeated season: the Deaf Community Basketball Team, led by David Perez and Heriberto Almonte, which went 5-0 in the police department’s first citywide summer tournament, beating teams of cops representing each borough. Detective Angel Familia, the department’s disability liaison, had been trying to build ways of connecting the NYPD with Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, so last year, he reached out to Perez and Almonte, both former interns at the NYPD. The two played basketball at Lexington School for the Deaf and were tasked with coaching and putting together a team to face off against the department. They succeeded, but no one expected them to win. The tournament “was very competitive,” says Assistant Commissioner Alden Foster.…

NETWORK TV HAS LONG provided the income streams that not so secretly float New York actors. Everyone on Broadway has Law & Order somewhere in their Playbill bios and, with the ascendancy of The Gilded Age, maybe a prestige HBO credit, too. But recently no show has done more for this cohort than Elsbeth. A spinoff of The Good Wife, it follows Carrie Preston’s daffy lawyer to various local subcultures as she solves each week’s mystery, often with a delightfully on-the-nose guest star. Amy Sedaris was a resentful comedy writer, Stephen Colbert a vain talk-show host, Julia Fox an influencer mourning a husband who wasn’t actually dead (until she murdered him), William Jackson Harper killed to save his poetry journal, Nathan Lane committed a crime for the love of opera,…

WHEN RUBY MCCOLLISTER, Arabella Aldrich, and Leah Hennessey first painted the walls of their new Flatiron store, Surrender Dorothy, emerald green, set up a TV playing videos of tornadoes, and filled a room with dollhouses that look like miniatures of Auntie Em’s house, it wasn’t just that they were referencing The Wizard of Oz. “We were vaguely inspired by Princess Ozma from the Wizard of Oz books—she spies on Dorothy before she comes to Oz—and her boudoir,” says McCollister. Surrender Dorothy does feel like a bizarre boudoir, a freaky, chic-y one where copies of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire and Mark Booth’s Camp are strewn on the floor and the owners offer you tea when you arrive. It’s undoubtedly the only place on lower Fifth where you can buy…

I LEFT CUBA in 1967, when I was 5, and the show reminded me how vibrant street life was in those days. There was live music everywhere. Everyone dressed up. I had an aunt who was a loan shark, and her clients worked at fancy department stores and wore Dior and Balenciaga. The afternoons in Old Havana were a glorious thing because all these shopgirls would leave the store for a snack or lunch and everyone would come out to watch them go by. It was a fashion parade. I had the sense as a kid that everyone was a performer, everyone was a singer, everyone had this double life. There was a lady in our neighborhood who was a singer at Tropicana, which was bigger than the Buena Vista.…

IT’S DINNERTIME. What’s a local to do? We’re lucky in this town to have multiple options on every block. We’re glutted, too, on ways to navigate them: the endless lists and listicles, Michelin guides, Instagram influencers and anti-influencers, anonymous Substack truth-tellers. Now here I am, adding to it all. I revisited old favorites and stuffed myself at new ones to put together the first edition of my personal guide to the best restaurants in New York. Why? Because for all the star-giving and mapmaking of the other lists, most of them leave me pretty cold. The best restaurants in New York are not the places that cater to foodie tourists and billionaire gastronomes—not necessarily and certainly not exclusively. They’re the ones that balance quality, utility, and ambience in a way…