New York Magazine December 1-14, 2025

1 New York’s “Stupid Issue” (November 17–30) explored the rise of American inanity. Lane Brown contended that our current benighted state is owed to increasingly unfettered access to one another (“A Theory of Dumb”), an argument The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper called “pretty convincing.” On Bluesky, Jamillah Knowles agreed that the phenomenon is real: “I feel I get dumber each day.” Many readers took issue with Brown’s premise and sources. Commenter matthughes2 said, “ ‘Intelligence’ changes with what life and society demand … We may be in an era of people being weird and annoying but I don’t think that means objectively stupidity.” Reliable Indicator said, “I would love to point out the irony of an article about people getting dumber that uses a halfassed research design to prove it.…

“WOMEN ARE HUMAN BEINGS,” intones one of the characters in Liberation, Bess Wohl’s new play about Second Wave feminism. “If you don’t believe that, at this point, I don’t know how I can help you.” The audience, gathered for a matinee on Broadway in mid-November, laughed dully in response. The grim joke was that the women onstage were already weary of ceaseless misogyny in 1970. And yet my phone had just been vibrating with texts and news alerts from 2025: about an infamous child-sex trafficker and his chummy emails with the most powerful men in America; about pregnant women dying thanks to a regressive Supreme Court decision; about the president telling a female reporter, “Quiet, piggy!” While I was supposed to marvel at the notion that people were over still…

ON NOVEMBER 18, Sotheby’s rolled out the blue carpet, hung the velvet ropes, and poured Champagne for attendees on the inaugural night of auctions at the Breuer Building, its new headquarters on Madison Avenue. The collection of the late cosmetics billionaire Leonard A. Lauder was on the block, and the house desperately needed a strong showing. The global art market has endured a grim two years of sliding sales and gallery closures, but Sotheby’s has been in a more precarious position than most. The Breuer, which Sotheby’s bought from the Whitney for an estimated $100 million in 2023, was a splurge, considering the company’s consolidated global sales fell 23 percent in 2024. Adding to the pressure are the debt issues of owner Patrick Drahi, whose company Altice has faced multiple…

BENEATH THE Bayonne Bridge, on the banks of the Kill Van Kull in New Jersey, a dashing French financier intends to build one of the largest film studios in the Northeast. “It will be like a little city,” Arpad “Arki” Busson says one chilly morning as he picks at a croissant in an underheated construction trailer. “That was one of the things that seduced me the most.” On the wall hangs a blowup of his site plan, which calls for 23 state-of-the-art soundstages, around a half-million square feet of office and workshop space, a ferry dock, and a helipad. A water tower will bear the name of the development: 1888 Studios. Busson picked it to commemorate the year that Thomas Edison filed for a patent for the movie camera invented…

MY MOTHER IS a loud woman. She loves to tell jokes and wears the kind of statement jewelry you can spot from a block away. But during the 25 tumultuous years she was married to my father, she often kept her mouth shut—literally. “I didn’t speak to him for an entire year when you were kids,” she told me once. “One day, he finally asked me, ‘Is there a problem?’ ” Clearly, there were a lot. “I didn’t have options like women do today,” my mother says now. “At the time, it felt like that was all I could do.” That was 40 years ago, back in the ’80s, when the divorce rate in the U.S. was actually at a historic annual high of around 20 divorces for every 1,000…

It was February when measles killed 6-year-old Kayley Fehr and it was April when measles killed 8-year old Daisy Hildebrand and it was May when measles brought the man from the Agency to the health-food store in Seminole, Texas. The man was a 53-year-old highly credentialed, chatty bald former Brooklynite physician given to posting photos of his bare abs; he had once appeared on the cover of a magazine in a pin-striped suit and a shirt unbuttoned to reveal a leather harness over his chest. The cover line read THE GOOD DOCTOR. He did not spend much time in Texas, but he did have a tattoo of Jesus on his stomach, and he did find many of the people he met in Texas awesome. He was one of a handful…