New York Magazine December 20, 2021-January 2, 2022

Earns the kind of applause you too rarely hear at And this thundering response testifies not only musicals these days: the kind that doesn’t merely to the excellence of the production, but to the end a song, but expresses genuine, heartfelt joy. enduring brilliance and insight of Sondheim’s score.” “ DEEPLY FUNNY.” Peter Marks, “ BLOWS THE ROOF OFF THE THEATER!” Tim Teeman, “ SUBLIME.” Naveen Kumar, MUSIC & LYRICS BY STEPHEN SONDHEIM BOOK BY GEORGE FURTH DIRECTED BY MARIANNE ELLIOTT “ THE CAST IS OUTSTANDING.” Matt Windman, “ DAMN, IT’S GOOD.” David Rooney, “SUPERB.” Greg Evans, Official Sponsor of COMPANY “ KATRINA LENK IS A KNOCKOUT!” David Cote, “ PATTI LUPONE IS A GENUINE GOLDEN AGE STAR.” Maureen Dowd, “ GLORIOUSLY TRANSFORMATIVE. A GODSEND. The leading character of the musical COMPANY has been born again and she’s singing with her heart in her throat, with the power to make grown men (well, this one,…

1 For the 17th annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue (December 6–19), the magazine chronicled the city’s long love affair with the movies. Author Jill Kargman tweeted, “Always love this issue so much, makes me verklempt,” and director-writer Ellen Houlihan wrote, “Very excited to read this issue. Movies in NY have been my lifeline (always but even more so) since life started opening up again.” Although @shereeny asked, “How lovable can a place be if you have to constantly (annually!) remind people of reasons to love it?” Leading off, Bilge Ebiri wrote about how “New York Makes the Movies, and the Movies Make New York.” @juliebabyar found the essay “reaffirming yet fresh,” and screenwriter Valerie Kalfrin said it “captures what’s to love about the city & movies.” Inside the…

HE SHOULD HAVE been a contender. As backbenchers and prattling senators piled into the 2020 race for president, Bill de Blasio entered as the manager of the nation’s largest city, overseeing a police force the size of a small army, a school system that had more children in it than the entire population of seven different states, and the successful response to not one but two infectious-disease outbreaks. He had created early-childhood-education programs that served more than 100,000 children under the age of 5 each year, given paid family leave and higher wages to city workers, added or preserved 165,000 units of affordable housing, granted greater access to health care for the poor, imposed fair-scheduling requirements for fast-food workers, and kept the annual increases on rent-regulated apartments to a minimum. De Blasio…

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT to Bing Bong Nation, the most exciting local basketball squad right now is the men’s team at Yeshiva University, which won its 50th-straight game recently and is currently the top-ranked Division III team in the country. Yeshiva—hardly a traditional basketball powerhouse—isn’t just winning games; it’s dominating them. The Maccabees’ average margin of victory through 14 games this season is more than 29 points, and only twice have they won by fewer than ten. Much of their success can be attributed to Ryan Turell, a senior from Los Angeles who leads all Division III players in points. Turell had offers to play for Division I schools—which would have meant more exposure to scouts and a more conventional pipeline to a pro career—and briefly committed to Army. “I realized…

WOOOOOO, we’re on drugs! We’re gonna make it happen! It’s gonna be really cool! And I have more drugs that we can doooooooooo!” I’m sprinting carelessly across Eighth Avenue on an early-December Saturday night with a 40-something woman I barely know, and she is singing this to me or to herself. We’re heading to one of the (pre–Omicron surge) after-parties for Horizons, New York’s annual psychedelics conference, at a sports pub near Penn Station, and we are, needless to say, completely out of our minds and would get only more so. Let me backtrack on how we got here. Back in the fall, sitting outside a neighborhood dive bar drinking irresponsibly late on a Sunday night, I met Gloria—which is not her name, but she’s a mother and doesn’t need any…

THE 20TH CENTURY BROUGHT with it a deluge of paper. As American businesses expanded in both number and scale in the wake of the Civil War, so did their printed material; there were graphs, memos, charts, forms, and more correspondence than ever. This “paperization” eventually spilled into the home, where a rise in personal documentation meant that houses were filling up with bills, letters, tax forms, receipts, birth certificates, recipes clipped from magazines. As these archives ballooned, a new technology rose in popularity: the filing cabinet, whose history the scholar Craig Robertson documents in The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information. One 1918 advertisement described the filing cabinet as “oracle-like” with a “great gigantic memory”: “It is only a bit o’ steel, yet no brain was ever made /…