New York Magazine

There is nothing wrong with a nice Caesar salad. In fact, one might argue that too much about it is *right.* After making its way onto every menu in America, lending its name to any kind of salad imaginable, and fueling a mania for Caesar wraps, Caesar pizza, Caesar pasta and Caesar martinis (of course), there’s nothing left for this Caesar to conquer. It’s still good, but Cae-Sal overload has become predictable for diners and limiting to chefs. Thank God, then, for the kitchens that dare to stray. At the link in our bio, @tammieeverytime combs the city for the restaurants offering up their own takes on other famous salads. Photos: Evan Sung, Eric Medsker, Courtesy of Arthur

The best-selling memoir ‘Strangers’ details the abrupt dissolution of the 21-year-long marriage between its author, Belle Burden, a Vanderbilt and Standard Oil heiress, and her husband, who abruptly leaves her and their three children for his mistress. Compounding the cruelty of his exit is the financial mess. Burden discovers that her husband, whom she long trusted with the family’s finances, kept millions he made in separate accounts. Because of a change to their prenup he proposed days before their wedding, Burden — who emptied some of her trusts to purchase their homes and put her career on the back burner to care for their kids — is entitled to none of it. A recent ‘New Yorker’ investigation that used Burden’s prenups and tax returns to suggest the separation never put her in real financial distress has done nothing to sway readers’ opinions. They are still Team Belle. “As a Black woman who did not come from generational wealth whatsoever, it didn’t change a single thing in my mi

Pop culture and sex work have long been entangled; just look at classic films like ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘Klute.’ But in the digital age, when strippers and escorts often turn to sites like OnlyFans to keep up financially, and young women turn to the apps with the mind-set that they can make a quick buck, more questions around creativity, autonomy, and empowerment have come into play. Modern media has been trying to address this: On ‘Hacks,’ Ava happily dates a sex-worker-slash-magician, and on ‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,’ a New York mom is thrown into a crime after getting twisted up with a cute cam boy. Of course we can’t forget about ‘Euphoria’ — sex work and OnlyFans dominated the discourse about the show’s final season. Whether these recent portrayals of sex work are liberating or demeaning is not up to non-sex workers to decide. So sex workers themselves are entering the conversation to depict their stories without the middlemen. At the link in our bio, six sex workers who work

From Wall Street to West Harlem, New York City turned out in droves this afternoon for one of the most anticipated and historically charged matchups of the World Cup group stages: France v. Senegal. The last time these teams faced off, in the 2002 World Cup, Senegal pulled off a shocking 1-nil upset over the always-favored France. Photographer Jesse @Kornbluth spent the game travelling between French haunts and the uptown streets of Little Senegal. At Le Gratin, Café Boulud, Felix, and Café du Soleil, Les Bleus fans dined on gourmet hot dogs, football-shaped pastries, and nonchalantly sipped rosé. Meanwhile, at SOB’s and uptown on West 120th St, supporters of Les Lions de la Teranga partied like it was ’02. “This time, the French firepower was too much for Senegal to handle. But from watching the city’s West African community come out to support Senegal, you’d hardly be able to tell,” writes Kornbluth. Photo and video: @kornbluth

@emrata told us about her creative relationship with @lenadunham. In her new essay, Ratajkowski reflects on dating as a single mom and how she learned to reclaim her own power and desire. Read it in full at the link in our bio.

Hannah Neeleman doesn’t consider herself to be a tradwife, but she knows many people do. It’s a label the 35-year-old, better known as @ballerinafarm to her 20 million followers across social media, has found difficult to shake. She first began to post about her life on a 300-acre ranch in Kamas, Utah, with her husband, Daniel, and their children in 2018 and soon after became a lightning rod for fascination, speculation, and controversy. Neeleman’s ethereal videos of homemade meals; her large, growing family (she had her ninth baby in March); and bucolic scenes of cows and rolling hills have been called subtle propaganda that encourages a patriarchal ideal of regressive womanhood. More recently, people have speculated that the conniving protagonist in Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel ‘Yesteryear’ is a thinly veiled satire of Neeleman. For several years, Neeleman didn’t respond to her critics. After a viral 2024 ‘Sunday Times’ article, which painted Neeleman as a long-suffering

This year’s midterms are a test of whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s influence can be used to replace even liberal members of Congress with fellow socialists, writes David Freedlander. Representative Nydia Velázquez, a retiring incumbent who has led the city’s political left since the 1990s, met with the mayor-elect after his victory and told him she was going to retire. She wanted to work together on who would replace her. City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán — a Puerto Rican member of the Democratic Socialists of America — was thought to be someone both could agree on. But Cabán had been skeptical of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, and the DSA and Mamdani pushed for Claire Valdez instead. It is a general rule of politics that newly elected leaders have only a limited amount of political capital and must be careful how they spend it, writes Freedlander. “Mamdani is trying to use his to expand the role and power of the DSA in Democratic Party politics, even if it upsets putative allies. It’s a g

Mike Plotkin, who’s been a New York City sanitation worker for 20 years, recently noticed something happening at his garage on Staten Island. In the last 14 months, there have been 15 incidents in which one of his colleagues has gotten stuck by a needle someone tossed in the trash alongside their used tissues and Oreo wrappers. That number felt unprecedented. And he had a theory about the apparent increase in needle sticks: GLP-1s. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans are doing this now. All of them new to needles, most of them with no medical training.” It was a compelling enough theory that @mattsedacca reached out to the Sanitation Department to see if they’d noticed anything similar. It turns out that what Plotkin had noticed at his garage appears to be part of a citywide trend. Per DSNY, in 2019, there were just 25 cases of sanitation workers getting stuck by a needle while on the job. By 2024, there were 36 reported cases. And in 2025, there were 46. As of June 3 of this year, th

Sam Bankman-Fried is incarcerated at a federal prison in Lompoc, California. Once or twice a week, he calls features reporter Simon van Zuylen-Wood, and they talk for the allotted 15 minutes. Even in his wizard-prince heyday running the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried would pliantly chat with journalists about virtually any topic, and he has kept up this agreeable PR strategy in prison. He maintains his innocence, and will comprehensively relitigate his case when prompted, but always defers when I ask what he wants to talk about, saying something like, “Um, I’m flexible!” In the two years since he received a 25-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy, Bankman-Fried has retained many of his pre-prison characteristics. Now as then, he takes meds for clinical depression and ADHD. He is still a vegan on animal-welfare grounds, which means he doesn’t eat at chow hall, instead cobbling together ingredients from the commissary list and finding ways to prepare them by his bunk. Th

The third album from a major commodity in mainstream music is a massive test. A breakthrough debut introduces an artist’s character and pet sounds that, with luck, get refined on a sophomore album. If their next outing doesn’t keep carefully evolving, they can get branded a one-trick pony, but pushing the envelope too far can alienate day-one fans. Olivia Rodrigo has been riding high off the one-two punch of 2021’s ‘Sour’ and 2023’s ‘Guts,’ chart-toppers dually indebted to modern pop and ‘90s grunge. ‘‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,’ the singer’s latest, dodges the third-album conundrum of whether or not to embrace sweeping change,” writes critic @craig_sj. “Rodrigo delicately rearranges the ideas that animated her first two albums.” ‘Sad’ doesn’t ditch the balance of balladry and brusque rockers that yielded hits like the hushed “Drivers License” and the harsh “Brutal.” Instead, it bakes the usual ingredients of a Rodrigo work — fluttering vocals, feelings of abandonment

#ad Attention, class: Polo 101 with professor @tylerjoe is in session, and styling @burberry is on the agenda. Paid Partnership with @burberry

“It can often seem like the Bidens are divorced from reality, exemplified by their ability to claim with a straight face that the former president was not a Washington insider,” writes Washington correspondent Ben Terris. But they believe they can make a case for his legacy — as long as they can somehow disentangle it from Biden’s ruinous decision to run for a second term. “It is undeniable that his hubris cost us,” said one former campaign staffer. “He was an extremely impactful president who was successful in delivering tangible wins for Americans, but all of that is washed away.” Biden’s team is split between outright denial that his age was an issue and asserting that time has a way of working its magic. His presidency may have ended ignominiously, writes Terris, but something like 80 percent of Democrats held him in high regard when he left office. For now, he’s doing things elderly men do: surrounding himself with family and friends, eating ice cream, and burying grievances, wh

“After last night’s cage fights on the White House lawn, roughly timed to the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding but exactly timed to the 80th birthday of President Donald Trump, it’s safe to say that celebrations of the semi-quincentennial are not unfolding in ways that inspire patriotism,” writes Dan Brooks. Leading up to the fights, the UFC announced that the White House lawn would be closed to the general public, who could instead vie for tickets to an official watch party on a less historic lawn, the Ellipse. Seats at the actual event were filled by invited guests of Trump, White, and Ari Emanuel — the CEO of a company that owns the UFC — along with members of the military who were not fat as well as people who purchased VIP UFC packages for more than $1 million apiece. This approach so flagrantly defied the claim that the White House event was part of a national celebration that it seemed almost intentionally aggravating. “I bet if you surveyed the people who paid $1 mi

If you’re a person both old and young enough to have had the same email address for half your life, the same phone number, the same iCloud account, the same password manager, the convenience of transferring it from device to device and backing it up online means a massive ­personal trove is very likely sitting largely unbroken in the digital ether. Realizing your trove exists is terrifying. So is learning that it’s never been more vulnerable. Cybercrime is rising at harrowing rates, in what one expert has described as “the golden age of hacking.” It can also become exposed to the public through explicitly legal means. You don’t need to be the target of litigation yourself to find your private conversations suddenly available to a wider audience. It could be your co-worker, your friend, your family member — why else would texts from Matt Damon’s wife, non-famous person Luciana Damon, become a matter of public record? She can thank Blake Lively for suing Justin Baldoni and dragging her

Every day, we happily and freely export the texture of our lives to the cloud via our chief stenographer, the smartphone. You’re not just writing emails and texting close friends. You’re writing to everyone: loose federations of group chats; your neighbors on WhatsApp and Facebook; acquaintances in Instagram DMs; prospects on ­dating apps; co-workers on Slack. You’re typing into Search, Notes, Venmo. Realizing your trove exists is terrifying. So is learning that it’s never been more vulnerable. Cybercrime is rising at harrowing rates. It can also become exposed to the public through explicitly legal means. You don’t need to be the target of litigation yourself to find your private conversations suddenly available to a wider audience: see the 2025 lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against Sam Altman and OpenAI, which exposed more than a decade of group chats and emails between some of the world’s richest men, squabbling over their personal financial stakes in the fate of humankind. It coul

Shandaken has an empty-house problem. The tiny town in upstate New York, which includes hamlets Pine Hill and Phoenicia, has long been a vacation destination for people looking to visit the Catskills, but the balance of things has fallen off in the last half-decade. Not too long ago, Izaak Schwaiger, a volunteer firefighter in Pine Hill, kicked down the door of a house with its fire-alarm going off only to find no fire and nobody home — just a malfunctioning security system. It happens more than you’d think. Schwaiger rattles off a list of the kinds of emergencies he sees that has followed the post-pandemic influx of weekenders: fires starting in improperly maintained Airbnbs, hikers getting lost, a teen who drove straight into a muddy field and got stuck. Shandaken is also aging. At 50 years old, Schwaiger is the second-youngest person in his department. The average age of his 15-person team and nearby departments is, he guesses, around 60. Many of upstate’s vacation and commuter t

The city is one big party right now. Swipe to see New Yorkers all over reacting to and celebrating the Knicks’ historic win. Go New York go! Videos: @alex.maaaa, @kornbluth, @chloexiang, @shaydcohen, @lucky_xoxo

AFTER 53 YEARS, THE RING HAS BEEN SECURED. LET’S GO KNICKS!!!!!! 🧡💙🧡💙🧡💙 Photo: Getty Images