On Columbus Day weekend, some ten thousand streetwear enthusiasts, known as “hypebeasts,” descended on the Brooklyn Navy Yard for Hypefest, a two-day convention of waiting in line, staring at phones, and showing off their steeziest outfits. Deep in the Navy Read More …

There are two things to bear in mind when approaching the Academy Awards. The first is that the Oscar for Best Director, in 1974, went not to Ingmar Bergman, for “Cries and Whispers,” but to George Roy Hill, for “The Read More …

“Neo Yokio: Pink Christmas” (Netflix) is an animated bauble with a weird sense of cheer. The hour-long show imagines our hero, a playboy exorcist, tangling with a demonically possessed Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and thereafter unwinding with a cup of Read More …

Kenny Shopsin, the chef-proprietor of Shopsin’s, the defiantly idiosyncratic general-store-cum-restaurant in the West Village and, later, the Lower East Side, was not the sort of person for whom death ever seemed a possibility. Cranky, nonconformist, uninhibited, seemingly driven by an Read More …

A year after graduating from college, and for lack of steadier employment, I worked as a temp, filling in at various publishing houses in New York City. For eight bucks an hour, I wrote bad short stories between answering the Read More …

I was not born a Bendel’s girl. Raised in a middle-class household thirty minutes north of Manhattan, I was weaned on malls—strip malls, outlet malls, underground malls. If I associated upscale department stores with anything, I associated them with food. Read More …

In his youth, Richard Garfield, the mathematician who created Magic: The Gathering, liked to play and invent games. Before his family settled in Oregon, in the mid-seventies, he spent many of his early years in Bangladesh and Nepal, places where Read More …

I may have a permanent crick in my neck from lugging a substantial dog basket home from outside a mansion in Primrose Hill. Does it matter if it’s lightly chewed, that it’s Great-Dane-sized, that its hand-woven construction is so firm Read More …

The year was 1983. The time of year: late fall. Late evening. Leningrad, U.S.S.R. I was sitting at a cluttered table in my one-bedroom apartment, in a sturdy six-floor building put up by German P.O.W.s shortly after the Second World Read More …

“The Bad Seed,” William March’s 1954 novel about an eight-year-old serial killer, was a best-selling thriller that gave rise to a Broadway adaptation and, in 1956, to a drearily stagebound film. A high-toned 1985 TV remake failed to sate the Read More …