Writing at NYmag, the New York Times, Pitchfork, Harpers, NPR Music, Rolling Stone, Pacific Standard (rip), The Outline, The Fader, VICE/Noisey, Mother Jones, Impose, Gothamist, Study Hall, etc.
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It's easy to imagine an ideal grown-up life in New York City. But how much does it all cost? We asked young New Yorkers about their dream lives. Then we calculated exactly how much each would cost.
The cold months have descended and the holiday season is here, so it's time to seek out hygge - the Danish term for winter refuge and spiritual warmth that enjoyed a moment of international trendiness around 2016. But what if you're a New Yorker and spend two hours a day on the subway?
Although it was the subject of much ridicule at the time, the Zune's ungainliness is sort of charming from our present perch of digital oversaturation.
Music supervisors are the reason why songs on shows like "Stranger Things" go viral. They told VICE how they decide what makes the cut. You probably heard the plea for a deal with God sometime this summer.
Kanye has always been ridiculous and outspoken, overconfident and wildly insecure-both on and off the mic. An overview of his career reads like a strange loop of rhyming controversies: Not letting Taylor Swift finish is a culturally enshrined scandal, but it was practically a callback to his earlier crashing the stage in protest of Justice winning best video at the MTV Europe Music Awards over him.
In the wake of the $32 billion blowup at FTX this month, the ongoing fallout in the crypto industry, and a monthslong decline in prices, plenty of crypto investors who had been flush with coin until recently are suddenly very hard up.
On Friday night, eight people were killed as a giant crowd at Houston's NRG Park surged toward Travis Scott's headlining performance at his 50,000-attendee Astroworld music festival. Concertgoers reported being trampled, crushed, and in some cases unable to move or breathe; videos showed an emergency vehicle coming to a standstill amid a sea of bodies, apparently unable to reach those who needed help.
Maybe your house got a little leaky during the storm at the end of last week. Maybe it was much worse. The next morning, it'd have been the smell that tipped you off: a faint mustiness, initially - just enough to hint at the presence of another life form.
Eric Adams is widely expected to be elected as New York's next mayor, but questions have lingered since June about where he actually lives - in Bed Stuy, like he says, or with his partner in Fort Lee, New Jersey?
Michael Rapaport knew exactly what was going on. "Yo! This fuckin' guy just filled his two bags up with everything in Rite Aid," the actor narrated from his local Upper East Side chain pharmacy as he filmed a man headed out of the store late last month.
"I'm a wonder boy / I can't do nothing," the late avant-pop artist Arthur Russell laments on "Wonder Boy," amid stop-and-go piano and plonky vibraphone. "The poster was nailed to a tree and somebody tore it down / Bits of paper nailed to a tree - that's all I found."
There's a perspective-twisting lyric toward the end of 1930s blues singer Geeshie Wiley's "Last Kind Words Blues" that always knocks me sideways: "The Mississippi River, you know it's deep and wide / I can stand right here, see my face from the other side."
What if the Statue of Liberty disappeared overnight? Or, suddenly, there were no more bodegas, bagel shops, pizzerias? A New York icon, as thoroughly ingrained into city life as any of those, has almost vanished before our eyes this year. The taxi has been Raptured. Two-thirds of our yellow street-hail cabs are gone.
Two-thirds of the way through What's Tonight to Eternity, the stakes are laid plain. In a spoken-word sample of religious testimony, a woman describes finding herself abandoned by Jesus, stuck in a kind of purgatory where she can neither live nor die. Fed up, she resolves to reject Satan, even if that means being cast into the ether.
On Friday morning in Manhattan federal court, Filippo Bernardini pleaded guilty to wire fraud, bringing a resolution to a bizarre saga that roiled the publishing industry for the past six years. Bernardini, a 30-year-old Italian man who worked a series of publishing jobs, most recently with Simon & Schuster U.K.
Turntable.fm predicted the future of the internet, but didn't survive to see it. The nostalgia for it hints at what could be a new normal-or just a passing fad. Since the pandemic forced bars and music venues into indefinite closure in March, scaling physical communities down to household size, the nightlife industry has been scrambling to keep the party going online.
It's moving time again, unfortunately. You'd like to stay in Brooklyn, but mostly the room just needs to be affordable. A curious listing beckons from the Craigslist apartments-for-rent page: $600 per month in Brooklyn Heights? It turns out to be in the prettiest part of the neighborhood, near the intersection of Cranberry and Henry Streets.
The government has accused more than 500 people of committing crimes at the Capitol on January 6. The following allegations are drawn from indictments and affidavits filed in federal court. Additional contextual details are drawn from public databases and reporting. William McCall Calhoun Jr., 58Americus, Georgia A descendant of John C.
In the muggy beginning of last Saturday afternoon, Leonard Shoulders was waiting for the bus on Third Avenue in the Bronx, directly across from St. Barnabas Hospital. He'd just asked a passerby for a light when suddenly the sidewalk beneath his feet ceased to be.
He thought, at first, that they were snakes. Two enormous contractor bags, bursting with serpents, ripped open and spilling onto the path along the southwestern edge of Prospect Park Lake, looking like the Well of Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But they were another nightmare entirely: eels.
endif; ?> The entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery straddles the area where Brooklyn's outer-boroughness begins to self-actualize, where Manhattan commuter transplants become fewer and gas stations more plentiful. Across from a furniture clearance store and an auto body shop, a grass-lined driveway slopes upward to the cemetery's Neo-Gothic gates, which depict scenes of Christ raising Lazarus and the widow's son from death-a reminder to all of the ephemerality of many seemingly final resting places.
Holly Herndon is not interested in creating her own replacement. The composer-musician saw the rise of machine intelligence in music as major labels and tech companies, hungry for cheap production, began pushing AI songwriters. But rather than fight it, Herndon decided to raise a robot bandmate herself. Herndon, who completed her Ph.D.
In 2008, a 24-hour inferno ripped through a Universal Studios backlot, incinerating a massive archive of musical history. As detailed this month in the New York Times Magazine, the fire spread to a warehouse where Universal Music Group-by far the world's largest record company-stored huge portions of its master tapes from nearly a century of recorded music.
A rogue stallion galloped triumphantly through the well-worn path of Billboard's Hot Country Charts last month. As with many an outlaw stopover, if you blinked, you missed it.
"One man's vulgarity is another's lyric," the Supreme Court crooned in 1971, in a decision that declared public, four-letter political criticisms-like "Fuck the Draft"-to be protected speech under the First Amendment. But last week, a very different Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Jamal Knox, a Pittsburgh rapper sentenced to two to six years in prison for his lyrics.
Threading his grey Ford sedan in and out of traffic along the Capital Beltway, Hailu Mergia's hands are finally still. His phone balances on the taxi dashboard below the neon fare meter, its tinny speaker blasting the songs of his shepherd's childhood in rural Ethiopia.
A 48-hour diary of a post-COVID city in miniature - a ten-acre park where cooped-up young people are letting loose, neighbors worry about things slipping back to the '70s, and the reality is something more complicated.
Manhattan's hills tend to get flattened, not forged. And yet one morning, sidewalk mountains of luggage raised the modest slopes of Fort Washington Avenue into a ravine. The building supers there, without clear cause and seemingly all at once, had become possessed of a tidying spirit and finally cleared out the countless long-since-forgotten items from the storage areas of their basements.
Chicago has been hotbed of vanguard jazz ever since the Navy shutdown Storyville in New Orleans, sending its talented bordello musicians and their hot Dixieland sounds north on trains and riverboats. Early on, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton dominated the scene, playing in a style that would later be widely recognizable as swing.
Pianist and producer Jamael Dean is only 21, but his fingers are older. They've already backed Kamasi Washington on tour. They've performed alongside Thundercat. They've backed Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Carlos Niño. And they've danced up and down the keyboard on his excellent and rangey debut album for Stones Throw, Black Space Tapes, which mixes spiritual jazz with ambient and hip-hop production into a classic L.A.-beat scene stew.
Arthur Russell was a polymathic musician and composer in New York's Downtown music scene of the 70's and 80's. He collaborated with seemingly everyone who stepped foot beneath 14th street during those years, including Phillip Glass, Julius Eastman, Allen Ginsberg, David Byrne, Larry Levan-even a young Vin Diesel!-while making music that blurred the lines between avant garde compositional music, disco, singer-songwriter folk, and so much more.
Welcome to State of the Unions Week, where we look at the past, present, and future of organized labor in America. In 2013, Andre Lindal, having finally climbed to the pinnacle of pop songwriter success, surveyed his works and despaired.
Recording music in the Internet age is not exactly a lucrative career pursuit. The practically free nature of streaming services means that most artists and songwriters this side of Drake make very little money directly from their music.
With his cotton candy-colored hair and dozens of face and body tattoos resembling scrawls you might find on a middle-schooler's desk, Brooklyn rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine is not someone you'd expect to easily vanish in a crowd.
A look back at 150 years of cubicles, corner offices, all-nighters, and the holiday party. After a year of staring at each other's heads on Zoom, New York Magazine's "Yesteryear" issue is dedicated to examining the history of the New York office.
This article was featured in One Great Story , New York 's reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. If you live in New York long enough - and it doesn't have to be very long - it gradually becomes unrecognizable.
Sometime during the 2016 campaign, American culture stuck out its tongue and-against all prudent advice-began careening down an enormous hill. The descent has rapidly picked up speed in the years since, sometimes feeling like an unhinged bit that never turns off, sometimes a genuine tragedy, and sometimes the same as ever.
Chris Barrett has made bank on the gray market selling pizza laced with 40 mg of THC per slice. Can the Pizza Pusha survive pot legalization? Legalization will bring its own business risks if others choose to add THC-infused slices to their menus.
The most famous of New York City's 200-plus libraries is almost certainly the flagship Bryant Park branch of NYPL, with the lions standing sentry out front. Arriving after a long subway delay (a risk for library commutes), I eat an early lunch of leftovers in the tourist-drenched park nextdoor.
On January 3, after U.S. military drones assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Donald Trump began fumbling toward war with Iran, Sen. Bernie Sanders posted an anti-war video on Twitter. It shows the Democratic presidential candidate striding down a hallway, admonishing the camera. "I was right about Vietnam.
In the fall of my senior year of high school, as I slogged through the process of begging liberal arts colleges for an invitation, I received a different kind of solicitation. Shining blue and white in its mystery, a Facebook event scheduled for October 22nd, 2017-at the time, seven years in the future-asked for my attendance.
Since his late entry in November, Michael Bloomberg has hired over 1,000 staffers across the country - hundreds more than any other campaign - authorizing 2,000 more hires after the Iowa-caucuses fiasco, according to the New York Times.
Gucci Mane cuts a mercurial figure in the world of hip-hop and pop culture. An absurdly prolific rapper with 80-something full-length releases including the silly, swaggering 2009 hits "Lemonade" and "Wasted," he's been a stalwart of Southern hip-hop since the early aughts.
The story of Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill's latest prison sentence isn't over yet. And its new developments are haunted by the specter of an ugly history. In early November, Meek Mill was sentenced to two to four years of prison for violations of probation.
As we sit in the interstices of March, I wrote up everyone's favorite piano-playing nun, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou for @PacificStand's premium newsletter. Here's a peek!
I'm starting this year of writing with my face turned toward the past. Donald Justice said of Orpheus's riverside hesitation: "With so much to look forward to he looked back." As I look forward to this year's forthcoming Lana Del Rey album, I'm listening back to a gratifyingly itinerant song she released in 2018, Venice Bitch.
Meek Mill really can't get a break in court. On Monday, a Philadelphia judge sentenced the rapper-born Robert Rahmeek Williams-to two to four years of prison for violating probation stemming from a 2008 conviction involving gun and drug possession.
In @PacificStand's subscriber newsletter this weekend, I recommended the warm reality underlying Liz Phair's origin myth: The Girly-Sound Tapes https://t.co/YYmE8QauEm
Also @jackwdenton on Childish Gambino's Summer Pack https://t.co/q1b9OE2Zps
The digital revolution famously upended the music industry and transformed the way songs are consumed. Gone are the days of cassette tape constraints and shelling out $17 for a new album; instead, we are left with an endless sea of listening material-accessible wherever, and practically free.
For nearly two decades, the Tribeca Film Festival has premiered films by new directors, independent releases from established stars, powerhouse documentaries, and buzzy foreign films. But this year it offered attendees an exhibit a little more befitting of Burning Man than Sundance: an ayahuasca trip.
On a quiet shore a few miles north of the Hague's International Criminal Court, a seasoned beachcomber and his son were startled when they spotted something unprecedented in their decades of sand-scouring: an urn of human ashes. Nearby, a fisherman reeled in an inauspicious catch-another urn of cremated remains.
If there is anything that nears consensus in our splintered and specialized digital entertainment media landscape, it is that most music critics love Kendrick Lamar. His most recent album, To Pimp a Butterfly, has a 96 rating on Metacritic, including a perfect score from The Needle Drop and a Best New Music designation from Pitchfork.
A specter is haunting Europe-and the United States, and the rest of the developed world. It lurks beneath our streets, slinking along with oily modesty as it searches out hospitable corners of our cities. When it gains a foothold, it grows rapidly and calcifies to formidable strength, disrupting civic flows and belching furiously.
There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who haven't submitted multiple unsuccessful applications for "ASSMAN" Saskatchewan license plates, and Dave Assman. After the surnominally blessed Canadian's latest attempt was rejected on appeal earlier this month, Assman-whose smirking pride in his family name is unattenuated by its actual pronunciation ("Oss-men")-designed and printed a massive fake "ASSMAN" license plate onto his pick-up truck's tailgate, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix reports.
As New York slouched through the pre-Memorial Day workweek this year, a fissure appeared in the surveillance state. Someone-a " supervillain," " Braking Bad," the " subway saboteur"-was yanking the emergency brakes on subway trains, disrupting many thousands of commutes. And, he'd been doing it continually for months- perhaps even years.
It's the holiday season again, and with it comes the annual traditions: brown-paper packages tied up with string, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, partridges in pear trees-and, of course, bitter clashes over festive decorations between homeowners associations and residents of their subdivisions.
This spring, amid its usual byzantine policy tinkering and chummy energy industry machinations, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) was practicing alchemy-turning natural gas into freedom. In a May press release announcing the approved expansion of a natural gas-processing plant on the Texas coast, two senior-level DOE officials referred to natural gas as "molecules of U.S.
Earlier this month, amid a flurry of restrictive abortion bills passed by emboldened Republican legislatures across the country, one celebrity tweeted out a clarion call: "Our reproductive rights are being erased," wrote Alyssa Milano, an actress perhaps best known for her roles in Charmed and Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later.
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but an insurance policy. American football has been ailing in recent years. Amid increasingly widespread and conclusive knowledge about its relationship to neurodegenerative disorders like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the once dominant sport's popularity has been dropping: Both high school football participation and NFL viewership declined sharply in recent years.
Imagine the Internet shuts down. You turn your router off and on, to no avail. Cellular data too, seems to have disappeared-momentarily a blessing-but slowly it becomes clear that your entire city is disconnected. Soon, rumors begin to trickle in through phone calls and sidewalk chatter: It's the entire state; no, the whole country.