The Bench
In Georgia Judge, Has Trump Finally Met His Audience-Thrilling Match?
by Charles Bethea
Scott McAfee, the cello-playing, What-A-Man-pageant-winning judge presiding over the only televised Trump trial, wants to avoid becoming “the next Judge Ito.”
In the Water
Tits Out Under the Verrazzano
by Daniel Shailer
Leslie Hamilton, an accountant, battled sea lice and rusting garbage barges as she became the first person on record to swim a lap around Staten Island since 1979.
Sendoff Dept.
A Parting Glass for the Ritz-Carlton’s Norman Bukofzer
by Zach Helfand
One of the late, great barman’s best customers, Liam Neeson, presided from a “fecking” sickbed upstairs as drinkers toasted the guy who’d served Jodie Foster, Ralph Fiennes, Bono, Joe Torre, and Bette Davis.
Endangered Species Dept.
Reports of the Pay Phone’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
by Zach Helfand
Days after the city bid farewell to its “last pay phone” with much hoopla, one sleuth reported on several remaining phone booths—by making calls from said phone booths.
Feed the World
José Andrés Feeds Ron Howard, Then Feeds Him Some More
by Patrick Radden Keefe
The two friends discuss their new documentary, “We Feed People,” and how the chef’s World Central Kitchen has served twenty million hot meals to displaced Ukrainians since February.
Explorers Club
A Secret Voyage Across the Seven Seas of Central Park
by Ben McGrath
Two urban Shackletons braved the elements for a clandestine, moonlit canoe excursion down each of the Park’s waterways, from the Harlem Meer in the north to the Pond in the south, dodging the police and “Star Wars” reënactors along the way.
A Sense of Where He’s Been
by Thomas Beller
Bill Bradley, a staid member of the rarefied (the Rhodes Scholarship), the very rarefied (the U.S. Senate), and the super-rarefied (the Knicks’ two championship teams), premières his autobiographical one-man Broadway show, “Rolling Along.â€
David Byrne Does Broadway on the Fly
by Rich Benjamin
When COVID sidelined cast and crew of “American Utopia,†Byrne offered ticket holders a refund or the option to attend a reimagined performance with whatever cast members could cook up in a few days.
When the Man in Black Met the Guys in Tie-Dye
by Nick Paumgarten
Owsley Stanley, the legendary Grateful Dead soundman and LSD chemist, left behind thirteen hundred reels of live recordings from his sonic laboratory, including a newly released recording of the night Johnny Cash came to town.
On Air with the Greatest Radio Station in the World
by David Owen
WPKN-FM—on which you can hear a Stevie Wonder song performed by an all-women jazz septet or twenty minutes of Tuvan throat singing—moves to a new location in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut.