New York Magazine October 20-November 2, 2025

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…

ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY, clueless fathers are asking their tweens and teens the same question: “What is ‘Six Seven’?” This question is being met with gales of laughter and an identical response: “It doesn’t mean anything, Dad”—the emphasis on that title, which not so long ago was wreathed with the sweet breath of filial affection, serving to punctuate their scorn. “No, really,” the especially dense father might persist. “It has to mean something!” More delighted laughter, more eye-rolling at this supreme display of parental idiocy. “It’s just ‘Six Seven,’ ” they say, moving their hands like they’re juggling an invisible ball. Since at least the spring, “Six Seven” has been the bane of middle-school classrooms, a social-media-fueled wildfire that has burned without abating. One teacher in Texas told The Wall…

“IT’S BEEN ABSOLUTELY CHAOTIC,” Oshri Reuven is saying. He’s an owner of Global Gold & Silver, which trades in precious metals on 45th Street. In mid-October, those commodities reached record prices, topping $4,300 per troy ounce for gold and $54 for silver. (In January, they were about $2,600 and $30.) “People are definitely searching in their valuables and bringing in everything,” he says. That has been true all over: On a recent Friday at Manhattan Gold & Silver, over on 47th, the sellers’ line snaked up a stairwell and onto the second floor. A lot of his customers, Reuven says, “are in their late 60s or 70s and have jewelry that the kids or grandkids don’t want.” He says business is running about 30 percent above normal. For those who…

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…

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…

It is happening right now, right on Broadway , every weekday. Undocumented immigrants line up to enter 26 Federal Plaza. They walk to the elevators, pass the death-stare portrait of President Donald Trump, and hit the button for the federal immigration courtrooms located on the 12th and 14th floors. When the doors open, they enter harshly lit hallways where ICE agents mill around in black balaclavas waiting to take people away. The agents have a list. No one knows how you end up on it. Around the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are carrying out Trump’s promised roundups, staging armed raids designed to create muscular social-media spectacles and rattle cities like New York, where nearly 40 percent of the population is foreign born. Since late spring, though, the strategy in New York has shifted to easier pickings. ICE agents are focusing…