New York Magazine June 30-July 13, 2025

1 For the cover story of New York’s June 16–29 issue, Suzy Hansen wrote about the war in Gaza from a legal perspective (“The War Crimes in Plain Sight”). On Piers Morgan Uncensored, the host characterized the article as “very damning,” “extremely thorough and detailed and well researched.” He asked Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, about Hansen’s assertions of war crimes in Gaza. Danon replied, “I have to disagree with this language. I deal with this at the U.N. every day, when people spread lies so easily, blood libels, … and then we have to deal with the consequences, the incitement,” adding that “we are doing our best, even now when we are in the middle of a war with Iran,” to get Palestinians access to humanitarian…

THE SHEER MAGNITUDE of Zohran Mamdani’s victory as the Democratic nominee for mayor was still sinking in for him a day and a half later. “We won College Point, Brighton Beach, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach,” he told me on the phone, ticking through neighborhoods known to be among the most right-leaning in the city. Power brokers across the party who had lined up behind Andrew Cuomo—the labor unions, county bosses, church leaders, and ward heelers—were now calling him, while business and real-estate executives burned up their own phone lines to figure out how to stop him in November. Most of the party and the city’s elite had backed Cuomo, if reluctantly given his personality. The former governor had universal name recognition and a strategy to run a campaign much as campaigns…

ON ELECTION NIGHT, as the polls for New York’s Democratic primary closed, Melissa Lozada-Oliva was crammed into a watch party at a bar in Gowanus, staring at news updates on a projector screen alongside a blue-and-gold crowd of white-knuckled locals desperate for Zohran Mamdani to win. Lozada-Oliva, a 32-year-old novelist and poet, had never canvassed for anyone before, but she spent the past few months door-knocking for Mamdani in her neighborhood of Crown Heights, moved by his message about a city everyone can afford. She had no idea what to expect. The bar was too loud to hear the news announcer. Numbers flashed on the screen. “And then those big letters of ANDREW CUOMO IS CONCEDING came and it was just—it was a zoo,” she said. “People were crying. Hugging…

WITHIN 24 HOURS of Zohran Mamdani’s Democraticprimary win, New York City’s ruling class was engaged in a collective freak-out. “The sky is falling, feels like the vibe,” an adviser to one billionaire told me on June 25, as the city awoke to the likely prospect of a 33-year-old socialist mayor. By lunch that day, the Partnership for New York City, a group made up of CEOs, big landlords, and other people who think they own the city, was throwing together an emergency Zoom meeting. With rare uniformity, these interests had coalesced in the primary to support and fund Andrew Cuomo’s muscle-car campaign. Now their chosen vehicle was wrecked, and they were desperately looking for another ride. It was not so much Mamdani’s specific proposals that seemed so objectionable: A stabilized…

ON NOVEMBER 15, 2024, Zohran Mamdani released a video of himself interviewing people on the street in Queens and the Bronx who had voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election the previous week. It was one of the first of the viral posts that propelled him into the spotlight and ultimately helped him all but capture the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York. Then polling close to zero percent, Mamdani seemed more like a local news anchor than a candidate, gamely thrusting a microphone into the faces of voters and letting them take the stage. The answers to why they voted for Trump— “Food prices are going up,” “Rent is expensive”—informed Mamdani’s campaign as it homed in on the issue of affordability. But the other answer that came…

”THIS IS PAINFUL”, Maggie James told me as we took a stroll through Gion, the famous geisha district in Kyoto. It was a warm April night, and James, a high-end local fixer for jet-setters visiting the city, was giving me a tour of the neighborhood, which had become emblematic of the plague afflicting Kyoto and, increasingly, much of the world: too many tourists. Gion’s quiet streets lined with lanterns and low-slung wooden machiya townhouses were now filled with foreigners preening in polyester kimonos they had paid $20 to rent for the day. “None of them are Japanese,” James said, pointing to a group of men in elaborate getups. “These guys are wearing full-on shogun shit.” We walked past a spice shop that James and her friends used to frequent until…