New York Magazine August 11-24, 2025

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Caitlin Moscatello wrote about the prevalence of ARFID, an eating disorder marked by a fear of food, among children (“Too Afraid to Eat,” July 28–August 10). Many readers offered their own stories. Commenter oasisgirl said, “This sounds like what I possibly had as a child. One summer, my sister and I both ate hot dogs at a family reunion. She came down with horrible food poisoning. I did not. After that, I became so afraid of eating food. I would only eat Rice Krispie Treats (not homemade, just the ones in the blue wrappers), plain baked potatoes and oatmeal or Cream of Wheat … My parents took me to child psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. Eventually I seemed to grow out of it and later…

INSIDE: Party time in Chinatown / A eulogy for And Just Like That … / Evidence-based lesbianism ON OCTOBER 25, 2023, just two weeks into Israel’s siege of Gaza, Egyptian-born author Omar El Akkad reposted a video on X of a leveled city block, writing, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” His words, reposted 58,000 times, captured a widespread pre-emptive despair. The hypocrisy of global liberalism, it seemed, would accommodate barbarity until the precise moment that its own survival required a brazen revision. Twenty-one months later, that bitter prophecy, almost claustrophobic in its parsimony, seems more likely all the time: We will not account…

ABOUT 200 PEOPLE were gathered on a rooftop in Chinatown for an art opening inside a former storage shed. To get to the show, visitors walked through the one-bedroom apartment of Adam Zhu, the proprietor of Market Gallery. “Normally, I’m grilling at an opening,” he says. “Newcomers are a bit taken aback, especially when they get to the apartment’s door. They’re like, ‘Wait, am I in the right place?’” Zhu, the artist, skateboarder, and photographer, moved into the apartment in 2015, and he’s been renovating it ever since. Last summer, he enlisted the artist and contractor Andrew Kass to turn a rudimentary plywood structure used as a rehearsal space by his friends in the jazz band Onyx Collective into a 9-by-15-foot exhibition space with concrete walls and folding glass doors.…

IT’S 7:45 ON a Monday morning, and Corinne Low and her wife, Sondra Woodruff, each have big days ahead. It’s Woodruff ’s first day at a new job, and Low is steaming a black denim shirt for her. Low, a Wharton professor who researches household and gender economics, is heading into New York to tape a podcast for her recently published book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, and Woodruff mentions she still needs to pack her makeup bag and breast pump for her. Low helps Woodruff finger-comb her locs while their 3-month-old daughter snoozes in a pink onesie on their bed, where the three of them had spent the night co-sleeping. Every 15 minutes or so, Low calls out…

IN THE MIDDLE OF AN innocent workday, HBO murdered And Just Like That … without warning. The show, only three years old, though also in some ways 27 years old in that it extended the Sex and the City universe, though also ageless in that it will live on forever as a staggering snapshot of whatever happened to the collective consciousness post-2020, remained a fascinating object for every moment of its brief and wonderful life. To judge it on a range of good to bad would be missing the point entirely. And Just Like That … was a state of mind, and that mind was in a coma. It was a place to go for 27-to-44 minutes a week, a windowless white room filled with nitrous oxide. It was a…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, word spread through the text chains of the insular group of men who own and operate high-end Manhattan nightclubs that two new whales had appeared on the scene. For months, William Duplessie and John Woeltz had been showing up nightly at clubs without a reservation. They were suddenly regulars at Jean’s, Paul’s Casablanca, and the Box, a downtown burlesque with a what-happens-here-stays-here reputation, where they often spent six figures in a single evening. Clubs had to scramble to find more expensive bottles to sell them. They tended to bring their own security team—sometimes as many as ten guards, more than A-list celebrities have. Yet none of the nightclub operators knew who they were. Several people who saw them assumed they were tourists. “They looked like hillbillies in…