Arts

Society & Culture

Spaghetti Underground

The MTA’s new redesign of the New York City subway map is the latest of many attempts to capture the sprawling network on paper.

April 18, 2025

Christopher Benfey

Anecdote of the Teapot

A teapot made in South Carolina during the 1760s by an enigmatic English émigré potter named John Bartlam provides an allegory for porcelain’s journey from the East.

June 12, 2025 issue

Jenny Uglow

Orchid Frenzy

The discovery of a Brazilian orchid with huge red-and-purple flowers in the early nineteenth century set off a mania for the exotic plants in Victorian England.

June 12, 2025 issue

Jarrett Earnest

Art to Sit On

For the past forty years people have enjoyed chairs, tables, and benches in public places across North America without realizing they are part of Scott Burton’s radical artistic vision.

May 15, 2025 issue

Martin Filler

The Frick Reinvigorated

In an ambitious and long-overdue renovation, the architect Annabelle Selldorf attempted to harmonize with the Frick’s Classical aesthetic while asserting her Modernist credentials.

May 15, 2025 issue

Heather O’Donnell

Ambition, Discipline, Nerve

The qualities that enabled Belle da Costa Greene to cross the color line were the same ones that made her a formidable negotiator and collector for J. P. Morgan’s library, which she led for over twenty years.

May 15, 2025 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

I, Coppola

Megalopolis, the director’s first film in thirteen years, is a useful reminder of how inimical extreme wealth is to democratic thinking—and to clear thinking in general.

November 3, 2024

Will Simpson

Sovereign Wager Fascinator

Photographs from the 2025 Kentucky Derby

May 28, 2025

On Old New York

Susannah Jacob, photographs by Radcliffe Roye

What Happened to the West Village?

The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures.

October 9, 2019

A postcard showing the St. Denis Hotel at Broadway and 11th Street, New York City, circa 1908

Jeremiah Moss

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

As affordable rents disappear, the mental health of New Yorkers increasingly becomes yet another tale of two cities. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?

March 7, 2018

Jason Epstein

New York: The Prophet

“The war over the monstrous Lower Manhattan Expressway, a projected ten-lane elevated link…connecting the Holland Tunnel to the East River bridges, would be long and painful. Jacobs and the neighborhood coalition prevailed. But the nine-year struggle…convinced Jacobs that if she wanted to write other books she must leave New York.”

August 13, 2009 issue

Lucy Sante

My Lost City

“Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.”

November 6, 2003 issue

The Latest

Poorna Swami

Our Nusrat

The Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan earned fans the world over. For decades they have debated just what he stood for.

June 16, 2025

Zoe Hu

Break the Aspiration Meter!

Far from providing a nostalgic refuge from the contemporary Internet, The Sims taps into some of its most foundational assumptions.

June 8, 2025

John-Baptiste Oduor

An Obstinate Commitment to Defeat

The conceptual artist Mike Kelley considered the creative expression of ordinary people to be beautiful, pathetic, and fascinatingly bizarre.

June 4, 2025

Lauren Kane

One Cubit at a Time

Medieval theologians produced ornate architectural drawings in their efforts to comprehend divine instructions. A recent book recovers their contributions to the form.

May 24, 2025