Innehållsförteckning för January 12-25, 2026 från New York Magazine

MOST MOTHERS TEACH their kids to brush their teeth and study hard; my mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany, counseled me on strategies for surviving dictatorships. “Never register with the police if you’re required to,” she advised, and also, “It’s a good idea to have more than one passport.” Oddly enough, my mother, who died in 1977, had no passports. After growing up in Hitler’s Berlin, she had no intention of ever leaving what she considered to be the safety of the United States. For years, I felt the same. I was born in West Harlem in 1944. I had seen plenty of the underside of my country’s ideals—I joined the Freedom Riders in 1963 and worked as trade-union organizer in 1968—but I never considered leaving. Then Donald Trump was…

MARCELLA HYMOWITZ KNEW that she wanted to host a memorable celebration for her husband Gregg’s 60th birthday, but she wasn’t sure what to do for it. Inspiration struck when she was reminiscing about her own prom and Gregg reminded her that he didn’t go to his: “I looked at him and was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s it—we’re going to have a prom! I’m throwing you a prom!’ ” The Hymowitzes are billionaires, so this wasn’t going to take place in a high-school gym. “I wanted to make it the most over-the-top ’80s prom ever,” says Hymowitz, who runs a workout and dance studio for children and adults called the Pearl NYC. “Think Dynasty—elegant, high end—not frizzy hair and neon,” she says. Hymowitz booked ZZ’s Club in Hudson Yards for…

SIX WEEKS AFTER the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, University of Mississippi junior Lesley Lachman was standing in a campus parking lot near her sorority, Pi Beta Phi, scanning the calendar on her phone. She had interviews coming up with PBS, a local radio station, and Fox & Friends, before which she needed to redo her nails. I asked her why, and she looked at me like I was insane. “This is red. I’m doing Funny Bunny,” she said. The red wouldn’t look right on TV. Other members of her team had been getting interviewed too, and she worried they were being banal. “I’m like, ‘This is a brand, guys. Stop saying sentences like ‘We’re a conservative organization on campus.’ Say, ‘We are a true…

Across 1 Volleyball player’s needs5 Mononymous Slovak singer10 Fail to keep a secret14 Fun-loving animal19 Place without problems20 Legitimate21 Bubbe22 Hit off the tee23 Popular N.Y.-N.J. hiking area26 Helpers27 NYC event for swingers28 Mexican mountain range30 Cartoon frame31 Site for cat dads and dog moms32 Expert stock picker33 Listening device?35 Possesses37 Reuters rival40 “Interesting …” 41 What a film villain may make48 “Fiddlesticks!”52 When a plan is put into motion53 Waves crash onto it55 Server of Duff Beer56 Comic Wakim57 It’s 300 miles south of OKC59 RBs score them60 Needing tightening62 ___ bunt (baseball play)63 Bit of comp-sci wisdom64 125 years ago66 Scrubbed clean67 50k runner, say71 Social outcast74 One of the Cabinet depts.75 Garcia or Griffith76 Email addy part, often79 Sheepish admission80 Kid, sometimes82 Exchange of views84 Tomato type85…

IN THE MONTHS before U.S. troops snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from a military complex, President Trump justified his buildup of forces in the Caribbean as an extension of his “America First” domestic agenda. He was ordering deadly missile strikes in the region because boats were smuggling drugs at Maduro’s behest and those drugs were killing Americans, he claimed. Once the troops had deposited Maduro and Flores at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn—from which they were shuttled to a Manhattan federal court in an armored vehicle for arraignment on “narco-terrorism” and other charges—Trump and his top aides pivoted to bald-faced imperialism, bragging about taking Venezuela’s oil and musing about other countries they might soon put under American control. “Cuba is ready to fall,” the…

SANDRA LIOTUS and her partner, David Crampton-Barden, live in a 1925 building on Beekman Place that was designed to resemble a Venetian palace. The architects William Treanor and Maurice Fatio even treated the East River as the Grand Canal, adding a private dock for residents to moor their boats. By the time Liotus, an American lighting designer, and Crampton-Barden, a British lighting engineer, moved into the co-op in 2013, the waterfront features were long gone. But the Italianate courtyard garden remained, and they have direct access to it from their one-bedroom pied-à-terre. “With everything found or displayed, I ask myself, Is this something that Isabella Stewart Gardner would have collected?” Liotus says, referring to the Boston socialite with the Venice fixation. Liotus and Crampton-Barden decorated the living room with tapestries…

TV / NICHOLAS QUAH Savior Complex The medical procedural’s second season is a little too sure of itself. RETURNING TRIUMPHANT, The Pitt confronts a problem reserved for a privileged few: After a first season that exceeded even generous expectations, can the show do it all over again? Television procedurals favor comfort and steady accretion, but The Pitt announced itself by pushing straight to the brink. Its first season’s defining set piece plunged the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s emergency department into the aftermath of a mass shooting, a narrative escalation that felt like the writers’ room emptying its reserves. How do you convert that level of intensity into durability? The second season, set ten months later on a frenetic Fourth of July, responds by easing into itself and sticking to what…

PROFESSOR JUSTIN MCDANIEL, the tenured chair of the religious-studies department at the University of Pennsylvania, has found a way to make his students read again. They don’t write papers or take tests; instead, he asks them to follow a strict set of behavioral constraints. They must give up their cell phones and other worldly distractions, including, in one course, sex. In his popular class Existential Despair, the students gather one evening each week for seven or eight hours to read an entire book in total silence, then discuss it in a darkened classroom. Some had never read a whole novel before. “I’d be lucky if I got through one every four years,” said a recent graduate named Ryan, who has floppy hair parted in the middle and a marketing degree…

RECENTLY, ONE TROPE has been back in full force throughout film and TV: a woman at the end of her rope spontaneously deciding to walk, often fully clothed, into a body of water. In some instances, she just stands there, staring furiously at the horizon; other times, she lets the water subsume her—maybe forever or maybe for just 45 seconds, to freak herself out a little bit. The reasons vary. Sometimes she needs a break. Sometimes she’s seeking a cleansing rebirth. Sometimes it’s about disappearing, self-annihilation. Sometimes she’s merely throwing a dramatic tantrum, as a treat. Even Taylor Swift sang about not drowning herself in “The Fate of Ophelia.” But which body of water is the right one for you to walk into as a trenchant metaphor for your pain…