New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Zoë Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath chronicled the chaos at Twitter (“Elon’s Birdcage,” January 16–29). Journalist Sam Sachdeva called it a “great deep dive into Elon Musk’s (swiftly crumbling) Twitter empire,” and Recode Media host Peter Kafka said, “Even if you have been obsessively following the shitshow (and since you are still here, good chance that’s the case) you will find new jaw-dropping stuff.” Chip Riggs added, “I’ve heard folks on podcasts discussing Musk’s Twitter takeover in dry, business terms, but none of that captures the human misery he’s created in the company (and on the app) like this story does.” Reporter Nick Statt wrote, “Damn every paragraph of this excellent feature … just gets bleaker and bleaker as you read. Enough…

THERE’S A MOMENT in the video that Los Angeles police officials released of the January 3 encounter with Keenan Anderson in which a bystander can be heard telling him, “We’re all watching. You’re okay.” Anderson, a 31-year-old Black man visiting from Washington, D.C., where he taught English at a charter school, was involved in a car collision less than two miles from the Venice Beach boardwalk. Body-camera footage picks up with an officer riding his motorcycle and coming across Anderson, who is in an agitated state, trotting across the busy intersection and asking for help. The cop asks him to sit cross-legged on the sidewalk, where Anderson explains in paranoid-sounding sentence fragments that people are trying to kill him and plant contraband in his BMW. “Have a seat against the wall,”…

AT GREENPOINT’S Post BK athletic club, no one is using the basketball court to shoot hoops. Ten players, many of them retirees, line up on opposite sides of a portable net and serve. “It feels like a discothèque!” shouts Carlos Gautier from East Harlem as plastic spheres are thwacked wildly across the court. Often described as a cross between badminton, tennis, and Ping-Pong, pickleball was created in 1965 by three Washington dads to entertain their bored children in the summertime. Today, it’s America’s fastest-growing sport, attracting boomers recovering from heart surgery and curious 20-year-olds alike. “With COVID and parks closing, pickleball took off in Manhattan,” says Katherine Hedden, a USA Pickleball co-ambassador for the borough since 2018 and the driving organizational force behind its burgeoning network of picklers. She advocates for…

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE with the sound of schmoozing. It’s a rainy weeknight at the Upper East Side’s Mark hotel, where the bar is full of networking menswear acolytes and well-heeled couples enjoying cocktails. On a zebra-print divan, Myles von Trapp Derbyshire, great-grandson of the only famous naval officer Austria has ever produced, is pitching me on the TV drama he’s developing about his family history. It’s called Baroness, a title his mother is still addressed by in the Old Country, even though technically the Austrian nobility hasn’t existed since 1919. Today there are around 100 living von Trapps, descendants of the ten singing siblings whose childhoods were dramatized in The Sound of Music. Thirty-eight-year-old Myles, clad tonight in an oatmeal Fair Isle sweater with a popped collar underneath, is not…

FOR A MINUTE THERE, things looked grim for New York City landlords. The pandemic caused an exodus of such proportions that owners were forced to cut rents to their lowest levels since the bad old days of 2011. But then a miracle happened. (Or at least one seemed to!) New York’s expats didn’t just return. They came—in a phrase uttered in eerily identical fashion by the real-estate industry and the credulous reporters who cover it— “flooding back.” “What started as a trickle earlier last year has become like a geyser of demand,” one broker told CNBC in early 2022. Suddenly, there were lines around the block for open houses and bidding wars over unrenovated walk-ups. The vacancy rate in Manhattan fell below 2 percent, and median rent passed $4,000 for the…

A FEW DAYS A WEEK, Wang Juntao, a primary organizer of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and one of the world’s most renowned Chinese dissidents, travels from his home in New Jersey to his office in Flushing. He drives to the train station with the cheapest parking, then takes the PATH to the LIRR to Main Street, emerging to the whiff of fish and cigarettes and the roar of planes making their final approach to La Guardia. Skirting a stretch of street vendors and Falun Gong practitioners, Juntao cuts up 41st Avenue toward the weather-beaten headquarters of the Democratic Party of China, the organization he has led for more than a decade, dedicated to the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party. New York has the greatest number of exiled Chinese activists…