NEW YORK

August 24–September 6, 2026

Private leagues have made youth sports more expensive, hypercompetitive, and all-consuming for families.

But at least investors are making a killing.

By CAITLIN MOSCATELLO

The Pay-to-Play Childhood

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INTELLIGENCER

6 Social Studies How the U.S. Open became a clubhouse for jet-setters By Ben Ryder Howe

8 Neighborhood News The summer of storms By Matthew Schneier

10 81 Minutes With... The macher standing athwart the pied-à-terre tax, Randy Mastro By Chris Smith

12 Power Mitch McConnell no longer needs to be present—or even conscious—to control the Senate By Nate Weisberg

STRATEGIST

37 Best Bets A slimmed-down version of the classic Boat and Tote

38 The One-Page Guide To Making a move as painless as possible By Cassie Hurwitz

39 The Look Book Sits with the soigné guests at an Indochine staff party

42 Design Hunting The 18th-century Springs cottage with a long literary history By Wendy Goodman

48 Food Buenos Aires import Graciela might be the best new steakhouse in town: Matthew Schneier reviews

4 Comments 66 New York Crossword, by Matt Gaffney 68 The Approval Matrix

NEW YORK

AUGUST 24–SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

FEATURES

Are We Still Having Fun?

When high-pressure travel leagues replace local rec teams, private equity wins.

By Caitlin Moscatello

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The Candidate Creator

Rebecca Katz has an uncanny gift for finding charismatic progressives. Why do so many of them implode?

By David Freedlander

22

The Inconvenient Non-Indian

Thomas King spent his life writing about the Native experience—then he learned he isn't Indigenous at all.

By Tommy Orange

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THE CULTURE PAGES

51 He'll Break Your Heart No one channels a himbo with a soft side better than Charles Melton By Molly Lambert

54 Our Last Movie Star An ode to the enduring power of Miss Piggy By Angelica Jade Bastien

58 TV's Horny Chaos Agent In Amita Rao, Gen Z's answer to Friends has a wide-eyed breakout star By Emily Gould

60 Critics MUSIC by Craig Jenkins Phoebe Bridgers tells the story of her 2020s from a distance on Lost Weekend BOOKS by Emma Alpern Life of M is an unwitting spectacle of Rachel Cusk's rudeness MOVIES by Alison Willmore In The End of Oak Street, Anne Hathaway fires a rifle at a velociraptor

64 To Do A Seoul-set Chekhov production at the Park Avenue Armory, Isabella Rossellini hosts a midtown screening of White Nights, Lizzie Borden gets the Ryan Murphy treatment, and more picks for the next month

ON THE COVER: Photograph by Victor Llorente for New York Magazine. THIS PAGE: Amita Rao. Photograph by Wade Schaul for New York Magazine.

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Comments

1 THE MAGAZINE'S most recent issue was devoted to a series of articles exploring the rise of the city's SWANA—Southwest Asia and North Africa—scene ("Habibi City," August 10–23). The feature prompted a strong reaction, from celebration to condemnation, across social media, newsletters, and local and international news outlets. Copies of the issue sold out online, and multiple city newsstands placed reorders; at the same time, some longtime readers canceled their subscriptions in protest of material they found antisemitic.

The Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid called Zaina Arafat's introductory essay "a wonderful piece on how NYC met its Muslim moment," and the Lebanon-based L'Orient-Le Jour wrote that the issue "symbolizes the emergence of a new era" and argued that the "most striking symbol of this media breakthrough is the cover, entrusted for the first time to a Palestinian artist and photographer, Dean Majd." One commenter, a Palestinian American raised on the Upper East Side, wrote, "honestly never thought I'd see the day NYMag put the word 'Palestine' on its cover without a giant, de-humanizing asterisk underneath it" and thanked the magazine for making the "American diaspora population feel a little more seen." Reem Farhat of the News Movement praised the issue as "historic" but wrote that "the question now is whether ... this 'soft power' in the form of cultural clout will mean less bombs dropping overseas." "The answer

is obviously: NO," the journalist Dalia Al-Dujaili responded. "Most people can agree that having more SWANA businesses is an enjoyable development ... To force this connection in the narrative of this issue is unfounded."

The series reported from within a community that explicitly defines itself as pro-Palestinian, and the magazine's decision not to include other perspectives struck some readers as unbalanced, antagonistic, or an act of Jewish erasure. On Substack, Matthew Nouriel wrote that the series' "diversity is curated inside an ideological framework: Israelis can appear, as long as the ones we are shown have denounced Zionism. I can't think of anything more pitiful or pathetic than Jews or Israelis being granted acceptance by repudiating the actual decolonial national liberation movement of their own people." "Every Jew is described as anti-Zionist, an Arab Jew, or as someone's non-Zionist partner," wrote Eli Kowaz in his newsletter, The Middle Ground. "To be a Jew in Habibi City, you have to answer the Israel question the 'right way.'" Mark Horowitz, a former editor at the magazine, said he was saddened that the feature "couldn't find a way to celebrate one part of the city without also denigrating and erasing another."

Arafat, a Palestinian American writer and professor, wrote in her essay ("Soft Power") that members of the SWANA community "still face xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism—along with the repercussions of speaking out against them"; many readers critiqued the choice to include the

term Zionism in this sentence. In a letter to the magazine, Kenyon College political philosopher Fred Baumann asked, "How is the presence of Jews (and non-Jews) who want to see the Jews of Israel survive and the Jews of the diaspora have a place to go to, when as Jew-hate revives yet again, a threat? What is so scary about that, that it has to be 'faced?'" Others were upset that while October 7, 2023, was referenced multiple times in the series, the authors never directly addressed the massacre that occurred in Israel that day.

The controversy around the issue was covered widely in other publications. The New York Post ran multiple articles about it, headlining one "New York Magazine's evil 'Habibi City' cover sends a message: Jews aren't welcome in Mamdani's NYC." The online magazine Tablet called the issue "absurd," while National Review accused the magazine of turning "its back on the city's Jews." For The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz wrote, "If all you care about is your native culture, if you wish to fill every moment of your day with swell SWANA sensations, why not, ya know, go back to SWANA?" and argued that "everyone else should fight like hell to make sure New York never becomes Habibi City."

The reaction was, to some readers, itself Islamophobic. The media-watchdog group FAIR argued, "These nonsensical responses to a straightforward piece of cultural reporting are a testament to what Arabs, Persians and other groups are up against in the press." "It's sad to see certain pro-Israel voices treat culture as zero-sum.

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It seems that their opposition is to the very idea of a Muslim or Arab public presence in NYC,” Hamid, the Washington Post columnist, wrote. He added, “Of course Muslim spaces are going to be critical of Zionism. Why wouldn’t they be?” Jasmine El-Gamal argued that “the meltdown” over the “series is very telling, and underscores just how much some people want us, as SW Asian/Middle Eastern/North African communities who make up the beautiful melting pot that is America, to exist quietly, invisibly, obediently ... We’re proud of our cultures, and we’re proud to be American, and both of those statements can be true at the same time, habibi.”

Some objected to the magazine’s use of the term genocide to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. Close readers will recognize that this was not a decision specific to this series. This past fall, after an extensive review of genocide scholarship and interviews with multiple experts in the field of genocide studies, the magazine’s editors decided the term was an accurate description of the atrocities in Gaza, that accusations of antisemitic intent were in fact obfuscating an overwhelming scholarly consensus, and that its use would be allowed in our pages.

2 AS PART OF THE SERIES, Madeline Leung Coleman wrote about the SWANA restaurant scene—and the fissures that exist within it (“When Eating Out Is Political”). Journalist Peter Sterne called the report a “really fascinating story about the cultural and political implications of NYC’s ‘Middle Eastern’ dining scene” and praised it for “presenting Arab, especially Palestinian, New Yorkers as protagonists in their own story.” But numerous critics took issue with its embedded argument that Israeli restaurants were appropriating other cultures’ cuisines. In a Substack essay, “New York Magazine Erased My Family From the Middle East,” Hen Mazzig wrote, “To pretend that a people don’t have food is a way to dehumanize them. No nation lacks cuisine. Deprive Jews and Israelis of a culture, and you deprive us of our humanity.” Helen Rosner of The New Yorker, though, called it “an incredibly insightful, intelligent piece” and encouraged critics to read it more closely: “Not only is this article genuinely one of the most rigorous, elegant pieces of gastronomical culture writing I’ve ever read ... it gives deep consideration to Jewish & Israeli culinary culture.”

In writing about the restaurant Ayat, Leung Coleman described its menu as

“a cheerful tourist-style map in which the land mass currently called Israel is titled ‘Discover Palestine.’” While she calls Ayat’s stance “combative,” many readers were offended by this line, which to them suggested the magazine itself was adopting the restaurant’s perspective. On Instagram, the Jewish comic Eitan Levine wrote, “The whole thing made it seem like Palestinian culture cannot exist unless Israeli and Jewish culture are wiped off the map.” Writing for the Forward, Rob Eshman argued that articles like it are part of the reason “Israeli restaurants are increasingly labeling themselves as Middle Eastern or Levantine”: “Israeli restaurants aren’t Med-washing their names because they’re reckoning or apologetic. They’re hiding because the violence against them is getting worse.” In its reporting on the controversy, Haaretz noted that “Israeli chefs in New York voiced concern about the article, but preferred to keep a low profile and not inflame the debate further. The feeling among them is that the piece could hurt restaurants identified as Israeli—yet alongside the worry there is also hope that the uproar will actually draw Israel’s supporters to them, and there are still plenty of those in New York.”

3 ELSEWHERE IN the issue, Emi Nietfeld reported on the custody fight between a Chinese man and the Florida woman who carried his triplets (“Who Gets to Raise These Babies?”). For many, the article raised concerns about the lack of regulation around surrogacy in the United States. The feminist writer Jill Filipovic said, “I don’t think surrogacy should be illegal but it should be very very very tightly regulated and stuff like this should not happen.” Attorney Dilan Esper added, “I am not sure transnational surrogacy should necessarily be legal at all in the US. The argument for surrogacy is that American couples desperately want children of their own. But selling American kids to foreign (authoritarian!) countries isn’t good!” Overwhelmingly, readers asked us to keep covering the story: “I came here to say one thing,” commenter joyous wrote. “Please, please, please continue writing about this. We want to know how this story progresses and the fate of these precious babies.”

CORRECTION: FeelBeit is an Israeli-Palestinian, pro-dialogue artistic partnership. It was incorrectly described as an anti-Zionist organization in “Soft Power.”

ISRAEL with Nilay Patel

Understand the biggest problems in tech and business

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Intelligencer

INSIDE: Summer of downpours / Mandani's nemesis / Mitch McConnell in limbo

Social Studies: Ben Ryder Howe

The Shmancification of the U.S. Open Is the new Arthur Ashe just another members' club for the elite?

WHEN P. J. SIMMONS heard about the $800 million renovation of Arthur Ashe Stadium and the addition of 2,000 premium courtside seats, he was optimistic. "I thought maybe that would depress ticket prices slightly," he says.

An environmental consultant by trade, Simmons might be the most knowledgeable person about Ashe who has never worked there. For up to eight hours on a given day, he monitors fluctuations on Ticketmaster and StubHub and dispenses advice on his website, the Road to 4.5 Tennis, on the best way to score cheap Open seats. This has become especially helpful as tickets for the tournament have spiked, largely due to the resale market, which the Open can't regulate like other Grand Slams. A single courtside seat for the men's finals was going for $29,000 in August. "The other day, I was like, Oh man, there are front-row tickets for this night, and that would be so fun to treat somebody to. Ten minutes later, they were gone. And then

6 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

Photo-illustration by Danielle Del Plato

PHOTOGRAPHS: COREY SIPKIN/UP/UNITEDSTOCK (TUCS), GETTY IMAGES (REMAINING)

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ten minutes after that, they were fucking on resale," Simmons says.

It's July, less than a month before Fan Week, the official start of the Open, and normie fanatics like Simmons are stewing because they aren't finding the deals they expected at the updated Ashe. "It has almost been the reverse," he says. In fact, by the time the three-year renovation is completed next summer, the world's largest tennis stadium will have no added capacity and less than half of the logo, the more affordable section above the courtside and suite sections.

Kirsten Corio, the chief commercial officer of the U.S. Tennis Association, says the renovation will merely "take a few thousand seats from upstairs and move them downstairs," but it would be more accurate to say the stadium is shifting as much capacity as it can closer to the court, where seats are more expensive.

In remaking Ashe, the USTA is following the hospitality industry in catering to those for whom money is no object. At the Open, there has been a dramatic expansion of bundles with expensive hospitality options. This year's pricest offerings, which run as high as $85,000, include locker-room access, a gifting suite, and private hitting clinics with tennis royalty. Next year, a subterranean, London-social-club-style complex of lounges called the Bunker Suites is expected to take over a catacomb once used by players for warm-ups, and access has been floated at $120,000 per person.

If there is a preview of where the Open is headed, it can be found in Southern California. That's where Larry Ellison bought the Indian Wells Tennis Garden in 2009 and installed high-end amenities including outposts of Nobu and Spago. Fans who can afford "Tennis Paradise" now expect similar perks elsewhere. The difference is that Indian Wells doesn't just operate like a private club during the tournament. For most of the year, it is a privately owned club.

The Open finds itself competing with other elite sporting events for the patronage of jet-set rubberneckers. "They're not tennis-playing fanatics or there for business. They're there for 'I want to go to the Super Bowl. I want to go to a World Cup final. I want to go to the U.S. Open and get as close as I can,'" says Corio. They're people like the clients of Renee Falack, an adviser at the travel and destination-events agency Embark Beyond. "They're more into the scene and wanting to be there," she says. And they don't want to sit in the logo. "They want to be near the players, they want to be on TV, especially in New York," Falack adds. "It's not just about getting into the U.S. Open. They want to be courtside."

"If you take a selfie at a Yankees game, you're a fan. If you take one at the Open, it says, 'Look at me, I'm rich.'"

UNTIL 1978, the U.S. Open was hosted at the private West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, which epitomized the image of tennis as exclusive, white, and stuffy. Players and spectators tended to wear all white. Advertising was minimal and displays of enthusiasm politely discouraged.

The story goes that William "Slew" Hester, a freewheeling Mississippi oilman who had just become USTA president, was on a flight into La Guardia when he looked out the window and saw the future of tennis in a rusting, weed-filled stadium called the Singer Bowl. Hester envisioned a massive sports complex with capacity for larger crowds and modern facilities for players. It would have tennis courts available to the public at modest hourly rates, a condition of the deal with the city to build the complex on parkland. Later, fears grew that the Open would leave the city, and in 1993 the Dinkins administration agreed to a new 99-year lease requiring the USTA to share revenue with the city and pay for its own infrastructure.

The democratization of tennis shifted in the aughts, when it became obligatory for banks, law firms, and luxury brands such as Mercedes and Rolex "to get a well-placed box at the highest tier," says Richard Farley, an attorney who is often invited by the law firms he works with. "You want to provide concierge service to your clients. If they're local, you get them car service to and from. And if they're out of town, you fly them in and put them up at a nice hotel. And you'll do this over the course of two weeks, if you're lucky, with a different client every night."

During the pandemic, the Open was played in empty stadiums, and in 2021 it fell short of capacity because of reduced international travel. Not long after that, the renovation now underway was conceived. The USTA, uncertain if there would ever be a normal tournament again, seems to have looked to the success of Indian Wells and decided the future lay in VIP suites. Hotels, airlines, and cruise ships also bet

big on the rich—not just because there was money in it but because their backs were against the wall.

After lockdown, the demand for live events surged, and the tournament began blowing up previous attendance numbers. By 2024, it reached a million guests, many of them influencers who discovered that posing for selfies at Ashe made for great content. "Social media changed everything," says Chris Widmaier, the former head of communications for the USTA. "If you take a selfie at a Yankees game, great, you're a fan. If you take one at the Open, you're making a statement and it says, 'Look at me, I'm rich.'"

In light of the tournament's growth, David Dinkins's progressive deal may appear lopsided when measured purely by the gap between organizer profits and direct payments to the city. But the tournament's annual economic contribution to New York exceeds $1.25 billion, says USTA chief operating officer Danny Zausner.

"We can all be angry about how the world's changed and how the rich get richer, but it's a bit of fake news about the U.S. Open," says Claude Okin, the founder and CEO of Sportime, which operates private tennis clubs in New York. "The USTA is really concerned about underserved markets. It's Robin Hood. Even though they have this huge business, that money is spent on low- and no-cost tennis programs."

Among those is Fan Week, created a decade ago in part to offer an affordable path to the tournament during the quiet period when lower-ranked players compete for the final 16 spots in men's and women's singles. The renovation too has been billed as a gift to the fans. The stadium, everyone agrees, shortchanges upper-deck viewers with terrible sight lines. The new configuration won't help with that. A few weeks ago, Simmons was looking at Ticketmaster when suddenly there was a drop of what are known as Blue Dot or standard seats, which are verified not to have been resold. They are highly coveted and tend to get purchased instantly.

Then he saw the lowest price for a courtside seat: $9,100. "Every single one of those tickets was a hospitality ticket" bundled with perks such as "chef-attended food stations." "Die-hard fans don't care about getting fed amazing food and showing off. We just want to watch tennis," Simmons says.

Just about the only cohort not complaining about the new Ashe is those sitting courtside or in the VIP suites, which have all sold out, according to the USTA. Farley told me he's already booked for several nights in Flushing. "And I'm taking clients," he says. Of course, none of them are paying. ■

AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 | NEW YORK 7

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INTELLIGENCER

Neighborhood News: Rain, Rain (Please) Go Away

A summer of seemingly endless typhoons might dip into October.

By Matthew Schneier

ODYSSEUS ISN'T THE ONLY one braving storms this year. New York's summer weather has been a trial and a tribulation, intense heat—temperatures reached over 100 degrees in Central Park on the hottest day in July—alternating with gales and floods. "We're on track to double our average precipitation for August," says Alex Gallagher, a meteorologist at NYC Emergency Management. "Four out of the five most intense flooding events in the last five years happened this year."

That won't come as a great surprise to anyone who's had to wring themselves out over a storm drain in the past couple of months. Stomp-and-holler virtuoso Noah Kahan had to cancel his July appearance at Citi Field when storm clouds threatened. Public World Cup watch parties at Brooklyn Bridge Park and the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens were canceled. The Yankees have been rained out of four games so far, and an outdoor concert for 5,000 in Bryant Park, a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, was scuppered. Cindy Adams, the weather vane of the New York Post, took to her column to carp, "NYC's summer weather has been just like how we all feel—lousy." Over the Fourth of July weekend, a series of storms skimmed the south of the city, pummeling Coney Island and the Rockaways with sand and sending beach umbrellas spinning like tops. Two tornadoes, a metro-area rarity, upped the ante in August, whipping through parts of Queens and Long Island.

It's an aggravation; it's a money pit. Mayor Mamdani just announced he'd be increasing the budget of the Orwellian-sounding Bureau of Coastal Resilience to more than $43 million to shore up floodgates. And it's not over yet. Summer temperatures are expected to last into October, and El Niño is currently gathering strength in the Pacific. No rest, it seems, for the storm sentries. "Believe me," Gallagher says, ringing off. "I wish autumn would get here, too." ■

8 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

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A thunderstorm lands on Fourth of July weekend.

Photograph by Stephen Wilkes

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INTELLIGENCER

81 MINUTES WITH ...

Randy Mastro

If anyone's going to stop Zohran Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax, it's probably Rudy Giuliani's former deputy.

BY CHRIS SMITH

IT IS A MONDAY AFTERNOON in August, and midtown is as empty as it gets all year. But Randy Mastro, the lawyer who has made himself a sharp thorn in Mayor Zohran Mamdani's side, is in his 27th-floor office near Bryant Park. His wife and dog are on vacation, but Mastro couldn't be busier, and he couldn't be happier. "The only place I'm going this month," he says with an enthusiastic growl, "is the courthouse on Staten Island."

The source of his good mood and overflowing schedule is the spate of lawsuits Mastro has filed against the City of New York and the mayor. The

most recent, and the most prominent, is Mastro's attempt to halt the rollout of a new pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth $5 million or more and co-ops and condos valued above $1 million of which the owner isn't the primary resident. Mastro won the first legal round when a Staten Island judge issued a temporary restraining order earlier this month, stopping the notices about the possible surcharge. Perhaps more important for Mastro, he appears to have gotten under Mamdani's skin. "There are few things more certain in New York City than death, taxes, and Randy Mastro filing a lawsuit against this administration," the mayor quipped in a press

10 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

Photograph by Alexander Coggin

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conference in what seemed to be an attempt to belittle Mastro as a gadfly.

Mastro, however, is no mere annoyance. His fluffy head of white hair and matching beard may give him the appearance of a cuddly uncle, but on his desk is a bottle opener shaped like a hammer and engraved YOU'RE RANDY FUCKIN' MASTRO, a parting gift from a colleague at a former firm. During his time as a top aide under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Mastro's muscular wrangling over everything from city budgets to taxi regulations provoked the Daily News to call him, in 1998, "the only trigger man in town who can make Giuliani look like Mr. Nice Guy."

Mastro has been working in and around the highest levels of city government for four decades, and he knows which legal and political buttons to push, when to turn on the charm, and when to throw punches to get what he wants. In 1985, hired by then-U.S. Attorney Giuliani as a prosecutor in the Southern District, Mastro spearheaded the federal government's racketeering case against the Teamsters union. He then followed Giuliani to City Hall, first as chief of staff, then as deputy mayor of operations; one of his proudest achievements was implementing the strategy that pushed organized crime out of the Fulton Fish Market. Then came a long stretch as a corporate litigator, combined with almost ten years as board chairman of Citizens Union, the good-government group based in New York.

In 2024, Mayor Eric Adams tried to appoint Mastro as the city's top lawyer, a post Mastro called his "dream job" at the time, but the nomination was withdrawn after a bitter, 11-hour City Council hearing that to many political insiders felt like long-delayed payback for the sins of the Giuliani administration. Seven months later, though, with Adams enmeshed in corruption scandals, he installed Mastro as deputy mayor. "I encouraged Randy to go in because I felt otherwise the city was in real jeopardy," says Kathryn Wylde, the former longtime head of the Partnership for New York City, a powerful business-lobbying group. Wylde both teamed up and tangled with Mastro over the years. "He's not somebody you mess with," she says. "Randy is very smart, very capable."

Pointing to his work on a wide range of causes, Mastro maintains he has no political motivations. He's a registered Democrat, and the bookcase next to his desk displays a framed photo of him with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and another of him alongside Bill de Blasio and former comptroller Bill Thompson, both of whom Mastro represented in the failed 2008 effort to stop Mayor Michael Bloomberg from tearing up term limits. "I'm nondenominational when it comes to bringing lawsuits

"I'm nondenominational when it comes to bringing lawsuits against the city."

against the city or the state or the federal government," Mastro says.

But Mastro, who endorsed Andrew Cuomo for mayor while invoking Adams's warning that electing Mamdani would be "an existential crisis" for the city, has managed to breed particularly bad blood with the current administration. Shortly after leaving office, Mastro advised a charter-revision commission—created on Adams's last day in office—to put nonpartisan primaries on this fall's ballot, a move that could have weakened Democrats' advantages in local elections. Mastro also got Adams to reverse his stand in favor of building subsidized housing on the site of Nolita's Elizabeth Street Garden—a contentious campaign issue on which Mamdani was also in favor of development.

As mayor, Mamdani has beaten back the nonpartisan-primary referendum, dismantling the Adams commission and creating one of his own. But he has recently, begrudgingly, had to concede defeat on Elizabeth Street, largely because Mastro maneuvered to officially dedicate the site as parkland—making development nearly impossible. Mastro maintains that the deal he hammered out with the city will eventually result in more below-market apartments in the neighborhood while preserving open space.

With that battle won, Mastro spent his Monday morning writing the reply papers, due in 48 hours, for his suit, on behalf of a coalition of landlords, to overturn the recent Rent Guidelines Board decision to freeze rents on roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments—one of Mamdani's top campaign priorities. Mastro had barely caught his breath from a court-appearance doubleheader four days earlier, in which he argued a Freedom of Information Law case against the city, through which he is seeking records related to the mayor's actions on antisemitism, just a few hours after he'd argued the pied-à-terre case in front of an appellate-court judge. "He's done a really good job of generating a lot of negative coverage," a Mamdani administration official says. "I think he just really doesn't like the mayor."

EVEN IF IT IS TRUE that all his other cases against the administration are purely

business, the pied-à-terre case is maybe, possibly, slightly personal. In July, Mastro was one of 17,000 city homeowners to receive a letter notifying them they might be subject to a new levy, depending on the value of their home and whether it is one of several properties, and demanding they prove their status as New York residents.

"A threatening letter!" Mastro cries indignantly. And one that to thousands of homeowners appears to have been a mistake. Several days after the notices went out, Mastro appeared on a radio show with Staten Island GOP city councilman Frank Morano, whose wife, Rachel O'Brien, has a primary residence in New York but appeared on a city-published list of 900,000 homeowners who might be dunned. Soon, Mastro had enlisted her along with Morano's father and, cannily, a Mamdani supporter who lives in Chelsea as plaintiffs. Their homes all appear to be ineligible for Mamdani's fee.

"It could have been negligence, it could have been laziness, it could have intentionality to try and ensnare a lot of New Yorkers into paying the surcharge," Mastro says. A state court has, for now, allowed the rollout of notices to continue, but Mastro isn't done fighting—he'll be back in court in late August.

Meanwhile, the mayor he is bedeviling is riding high in polls, and the wealthy Establishment resistance has struggled to coalesce. "Eric Adams in his first six months had approval ratings in the 60s too!" Mastro points out. "We'll see. I root for the city to succeed." Is he carrying water for the mayor's plutocratic adversaries, perhaps Bill Ackman or Ken Griffin? Mastro says he doesn't know either man and that the FOIL and pied-à-terre cases are pro bono.

One city political insider tells me that Mastro doesn't have an agenda other than self-promotion; there is clearly an element of showmanship to what he describes as simply upholding the law. Another photo prominently displayed on Mastro's shelves is of him with the singer Tony Bennett. "That he performed at such a high level into his 90s was incredible," Mastro says. "He's a role model in that way." Mastro would be turning 70 several days after we spoke. He was looking forward to his next court appearance more than to any birthday party. ■

AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 | NEW YORK 11

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INTELLIGENCER

The office of Senator Mitch McConnell on July 31.

Power: Nate Weisberg

The Ghost of Mitch McConnell How he wields influence despite his mysterious disappearance.

ON THE FIRST Saturday in May, at a Derby Week party in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Ward ran into Senator Mitch McConnell. They hadn't met in years, though they had been circling each other for nearly half a century, mostly as adversaries. Ward, a former Democratic representative, first tangled with McConnell in 1977, when Ward chaired the Kentucky chapter of the election-watchdog group Common Cause and McConnell was running for Jefferson County judge-executive. What Ward knew of him lately he knew the way everyone did: from stories and clips of the falls and the two episodes in which the senator froze mid-sentence on-camera and had to be led away. So it was a surprise when the 84-year-old McConnell, who had stepped down as Senate Republican leader in 2025 after a record 18 years in the job and 40 years in office, spotted him across the room, walked over, greeted him by name, and put out his hand.

12 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

PHOTOGRAPH: FRANCIS CHUNG/POLITICO

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"Well, wow, you're doing well," Ward said. "That's a good firm handshake."

"What'd you expect?" McConnell replied. A little more than a month later, on June 14, McConnell fell at his Washington, D.C., home, briefly lost consciousness, and developed pneumonia, according to his office. He spent a month in the hospital and most of another in rehabilitation; in August, he returned home to continue recovering. In the meantime, the public has gotten a few written statements, secondhand assurances from Republican colleagues and friends, and two photographs—one showing McConnell upright in a hospital bed beside his wife, Elaine Chao, holding that day's Washington Post, not unlike a hostage proof of life.

Online sleuths promptly began examining the image for signs of AI amid rampant speculation that McConnell was hiding the severity of his poor health or perhaps had even expired. The rumors were supercharged by revelations that Chao had initially declined to rush to his bedside while on a tour of China, which was indeed pretty weird. And Andy Beshear, Kentucky's Democratic governor and a potential presidential candidate, loudly suggested that McConnell has not been forthcoming with voters: "Provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign."

"He could be barely able to communicate, or he could be just as articulate as ever. We got no way of knowing," Ward told me. "Mitch doesn't give a shit about letting the people know how he's looking or feeling." Keith Runyon has known McConnell just as long as Ward and from closer range: He spent 25 years running the Louisville Courier-Journal's editorial page, McConnell attended his wedding, and Runyon's wife served as McConnell's first press secretary. "They say he's going home for more rehab," Runyon told me. "I've lost the ability to believe entirely in what his office says."

For many, McConnell is the latest exhibit in a familiar pattern: An elderly legislator becomes hopelessly debilitated, and his staff conceals how much power has quietly passed into their hands. His longtime chief of staff, Terry Carmack, reportedly earns an annual salary of $226,850, making him one of five senior staffers in McConnell's office earning more than the senator himself. Samuel Moyn, the Yale Law School professor and author of Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It, told me a politician "can be completely incapacitated" while the people around him have "every interest in hiding the medical reality of the situation."

There is a more prosaic possibility, given that McConnell is not seeking reelection and is already on his way out. "Here's an old guy who's having the worst health crisis of his life," Al Cross, a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Kentucky and longtime dean of the state's political press corps, told me. Cross sees nothing sinister, just a sick man concentrating on his recovery and enjoying a luxury he rarely had in four decades of elective politics: that nobody can force him to explain himself. "He's no longer answerable to the voters," Cross said, "and it's just his way of having it his way."

In MAGA-world, the suspicion is that McConnell—who is curiously a figure of scorn for many on the right despite all he has done to advance their interests—remains powerful. "It's not the physical Mitch McConnell," Steve Bannon told me. "It's the specter of Mitch McConnell. The specter of Mitch McConnell controls the Senate." Bannon was talking about McConnell's influence over his successor, Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, and the rest of the Senate leadership McConnell cultivated and now leaves behind as well as his huge network of former staffers and allies in government. "It's run by McConnell's rules with McConnell's people," Bannon said.

Those two theories—McConnell as wooden figurehead and McConnell as hidden wizard—sound like opposites. But both describe a political machine that no longer requires McConnell to be present—or even, well, conscious.

McConnell rigged the system to protect his party's power years ago. When Beshear won Kentucky's governorship in 2019, state law would have let him fill a Senate vacancy with anyone he chose. Two years later, with McConnell turning 79, Kentucky Republicans changed the law, requiring the governor to pick a replacement from three names supplied by the departing senator's own party. Beshear vetoed it; the Republican supermajority overrode him.

Charles Booker, now the Democratic nominee for McConnell's seat and a former

The senator rigged the system to protect his party's power years ago.

Kentucky state representative, told me there was little mystery in Frankfort, the capital, about whom the changes were meant to protect: "The legislative changes were specifically for Mitch McConnell."

In 2023, McConnell suffered a fall that left him with a concussion, followed by the televised freezes. The next year, Kentucky Republicans went further, removing the governor from the process of filling a vacancy in favor of a special election. If McConnell is incapable of voting or carrying out his duties in office, there's little Beshear can do beyond demanding answers. If McConnell were to die, Beshear would still be powerless. And should Beshear try to challenge the constitutionality of the laws that prevent him from filling vacancies, the fight would move immediately to the courts and likely ultimately the Supreme Court—whose conservative majority McConnell did so much to create.

Then there's the Senate. The most prominent Trump priority stalled in the Senate, the SAVE America Act, is hardly unfinished McConnell business. Before his fall in June, he was one of four Republicans who joined Democrats in blocking an effort to advance the voting-restriction bill. Its supporters still lack the votes to overcome the filibuster, a rule McConnell has spent years defending, to the fury of Bannon, Trump, and the MAGA faithful.

McConnell's legacy lives on in the control leadership still exerts over restive Republicans. "Thune adjourned the Senate for summer recess without bringing the SAVE Act to a vote, despite public threats from MAGA senators to block the recess unless he did," a Senate staffer told me. "When the moment came, none objected."

The Republican nominee and presumed favorite for McConnell's seat, Representative Andy Barr, is the senator's former intern. Thune and Wyoming senator John Barrasso, now the Senate Republican whip, both spent years on McConnell's leadership team. When McConnell disappeared, they were among the Republicans vouching that they were still speaking with him. Even Thune's general approach to dealing with Trump seems to be learned from McConnell: Don't always do what he wants, especially on Senate prerogatives like the filibuster, but never argue with him.

There's one way the public might still get a glimpse of the fading giant between now and mid-January. If there's a roll call that is important enough and close enough, McConnell might be wheeled back onto the Senate floor to vote one last and crucial time. It would be the most McConnell ending available: months of silence followed by one decisive exercise of power. ■

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NEW YORK

The ascent of PRIVATE TRAVEL LEAGUES turned youth sports into an expensive, PROFESSIONALIZED NIGHTMARE for families.

PARENTS CAN'T STOP signing up anyway.

ARE WE

STILL HAVING FUN?

By Caitlin Moscatello

14

Photographs by Victor Llorente

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HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE HAD SIMPLE

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LOOK, THE KID IS FINE AT SOCCER.

At 11, he's competitive, and he loves the game. But if his mother, Elizabeth, had it her way, he would still be on one of the town's low-cost teams, where he started at age 6, rather than the $5,000-a-year club program that now dominates their schedule. She looks back on those earlier years fondly: carpooling to games with other families from their suburban public school, cheering on the neighborhood kids from the sidelines. That version of youth soccer resembled her own days on the field in the '90s, when it was the norm for children—even the most athletically inclined—to play on community-based teams through eighth grade. She had wanted that for her son too. Saturday mornings at the park with friends. Orange slices from the cooler during half-time. Parents clapping for everyone, win or lose, because really, what's the difference?

Those simpler days were short-lived. By the time her son was 9, at least a third of the children enrolled in his town rec league had left for a travel league, including the pricey clubs offering a mini-version of professional sports—crisp uniforms, hired coaches, games in different states. With fewer players, the town teams became less competitive and gave the remaining boys the impression they were in a second-rate program. Before his 10th birthday, Elizabeth's son asked if he could try out for one of the clubs, too. "I want to be a social-justice warrior. I didn't want to flex my privilege muscle," she said. But her son was getting bored.

In the switch to club, she found herself surrounded by parents with both means and flexibility. Her son did improve, but in her view, it wasn't because of the coaching or so-called premium facilities; the boys on the club team were simply playing more—four days of practices and games a week, almost year-round. Still, other things troubled her. The time investment made the stakes feel artificially high. There was an enormous focus on winning; at games, she witnessed parents yelling at players, sometimes not even their own, and berating the referees. The coach was red-carded after losing his temper over what he perceived to be a bad call. "Every single time after a loss,

the parents blamed the ref," said Elizabeth. "What does that teach the kids?"

The financial obligations also piled up: There was a tournament 15 minutes from her brother's house, but everyone on the team was required to book rooms at a designated hotel. Parents were told to buy pink jerseys in addition to the other uniforms; the players wore them only a few times. Elizabeth was shocked when the coach made a surprise announcement that the team was going to compete in scrimmages in Europe that cost $3,500 per player. "They kept saying, 'Oh, don't worry. It will only be $3,500 a person because we are going to fundraise for it,'" she said. "And to me, it's like, Okay, so then I'm going to ask my friends and family to help support my son going to play soccer in Europe?" To her, the trip didn't make any sense—this wasn't an elite team made up of the most competitive kids in the country. "I was thinking, There are plenty of teams we are losing to right here in our state. Why do we need to go lose to teams abroad?"

The final straw was when the league director lost his temper with a group of boys at a winter clinic. Multiple children came home and told their parents what had happened, and those parents discussed it on the team app, messages she says an administrator then deleted. Next season, a number of the kids aren't returning, "but that's not the No. 1 reason," she said. "The parents are frustrated about the coaching style; they don't think he's good enough. They don't think the practice-field situation was okay because there were too many kids on half a field. It wasn't that the director of the program was screaming curse words at our children."

Travel sports, a term that has come to encompass all sorts of private teams, leagues, and clubs, used to be for the truly exceptional young athlete. Now, they're for anyone willing to pay—an expensive, exhausting commitment that has become popular not necessarily because millions of parents want them for their children but because it can feel like there's no other choice. Rec programs are underfunded

and struggle to compete with for-profit leagues for prime field, rink, and court times. As more children leave rec, so do their parents, creating a void of volunteers. And the level of play is diluted, often very early, as travel teams are incentivized to enroll children at young ages. Some hold tryouts as early as kindergarten.

Parents like Elizabeth are familiar with the stats. They know only around 2 percent of young athletes will compete in Division I college sports and roughly 0.05 percent will play professionally. The vast majority of kids quit organized sports entirely by the time they turn 13. And plenty of parents by now have had it drilled into their minds that the hyper-competitive, highly specialized environment travel sports pushes isn't developmentally appropriate for young children. For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics has warned that intensely playing one sport from a young age can lead to stress, burnout, and overuse injuries caused by performing a repetitive motion. Experts have long advised that children are best served by playing multiple sports without pressure until they're in their early teens or even later. But travel teams often lock children into packed practice and game schedules that stretch well beyond a typical season, leaving little opportunity to try other sports. Numerous books on the matter, published across three decades, mostly boil down to: Keep sports fun. Make them child centered. Focus on development, not results.

Still, it can be difficult for parents to resist the travel craze. Children aren't different from adults in that they look around, see what their friends are doing, and want to be a part of it too. The mother of a first-grader in Manhattan was appalled when, upon her telling him travel baseball would leave no time to play on his school team with his classmates, he said, "I don't want to be a part of a team that anybody can join. I want to be a part of a team that you have to try out to make."

Ironically, though, talent and skill no longer act as a barrier to entry. "When I competed, travel was more like you

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had to be really good. It was intimidating, and most people did not make it," said Amanda Pennel, a mother of four in Georgia who played travel basketball as a teenager. "Now, it doesn't matter if you're the worst basketball player anyone's ever met; there's a travel team for you." Her oldest son started travel basketball in the seventh grade, which she came to learn is considered late nowadays. After her next oldest also joined a travel team, family life torqued around the schedule: Pennel drove an hour to Atlanta multiple days a week for practices, getting home as late as 11 p.m., while weekends were devoted to games and tournaments. Monday was often their only night together as a family. "I was like, What are we supposed to do on Monday? Laundry?" Worst of all, her children would get back in the car after practices depleted. "They looked like they were wilting," she said. Her son once missed an annual fishing trip with his father and siblings for a basketball tournament. When the team lost, the coaches yelled and cursed at the players. She looked at her son, shoulders slumped on the bench, and thought, My kid could be on a trout stream right now.

Around 5 million children in the U.S. now compete on travel teams. Parents find themselves trapped. They know the benefits of sports—better health outcomes, higher self-esteem—and want that for their children, yet giving it to them often means buying into a sports ecosystem that's inherently flawed. As the pay-to-play model increasingly takes hold, so does the idea kids should start competing at younger and younger ages, risking their sense of self along with their shoulders and ACLs. "I think the word isn't specialize; you are professionalizing your kid early. You are exposing them to everything professionals have to deal with—I'm talking injury, time, schedule, everything," said John Van Benschoten, a former MLB player who has coached travel baseball in Nashville. It makes one ask: All this for what? And for whom?

THE MODERN-DAY HYDRA of youth sports can partly be traced to the pandemic. Parks-and-recreation departments, a major provider of rec sports, rely on local tax dollars, but budgets were slashed during COVID, and social-distancing requirements and park closures put many programs on pause. Privately owned sports leagues temporarily stalled during lockdown, but many had the capital to get back up and running soon after; parents who could afford the fees were more than willing to pay if it meant returning their children to

some semblance of normalcy. In many ways, it resembled what was happening in education: After public schools shut down, private schools experienced a bump in enrollment.

Investors saw an opportunity and had a model. In 2014, a pair of private-equity firms acquired Varsity Brands, a team-sports-apparel and competitive-cheer company, for $1.5 billion. The deal gave Varsity Brands ubiquity in the youth-sports ecosystem at the national level, from the competitions themselves to the uniforms and training camps. Just four years later, it was bought by another private-equity firm, Bain Capital, for a reported $2.5 billion. In 2024, it sold again to KKR for around $4.5 billion. Travel sports had been growing in popularity since the early aughts, but investments tended to be small and fragmented—a team here, a rink there. The new mentality was bigger and more straightforward: Own it all.

Private investment firms began buying up teams, facilities, software, camps, apparel, and media streaming in a roll-up strategy that allows them to profit from almost every aspect of a family's participation. "It's a stay-to-play mentality where you go to a tournament that is owned by the same company that owns the team, that then says you have to book a hotel block that's owned by the team through a platform also owned by the team. They have rules about taking your own video because they want to sell you their media package,

and you have to pay to park because they own that too," said a former club-lacrosse coach in New Jersey who has three children on travel teams. "Before you know it, you're paying a lot of money for the privilege of your kid playing a team from one town over, several states away from where you all live." Private equity didn't create all these practices, but in some cases it accelerated them, said Tom Farrey, founder and director of the Aspen Institute's Sports & Society Program.

Since the initial Varsity Brands sale, multiple deals have anointed different sports with their own financial overlords. 3Step Sports, backed by private-equity firm Juggernaut Capital Partners, rules club lacrosse; Black Bear Sports Group, owned by a set of private investors, including a minority investment from Blackstreet Capital Holdings, a company founded by Black Bear's ex-CEO Murry Gunty, is a dominant force in youth ice hockey.

A common investment tactic is to purchase smaller teams and leagues, put them under one national umbrella, and give them a corporate sheen to resemble the pros. Some of this is aesthetic: Children receive high-quality uniforms and play in state-of-the-art venues. Other parts seem devised to ratchet up the pressure. Apps feed parents and young athletes live stats and standings. There are contracts with terms that make it difficult for players to switch teams. Some leagues make "exploding offers," giving families a short window, often 24-to-48 hours, to accept or decline a spot before it goes to someone else. Competitive programs with brand appeal add B and C squads, charging those parents the same amount of money for a more junior program with less-experienced coaches. Words like elite and select are thrown into team and league titles as bait. Leagues tell parents, subtly or not, that their child is special: This summer, a private-equity-backed youth baseball program in New York City with children as young as 7 sent parents an email that read, in part, "Players on our Travel Teams represent the top 5% of all players in our program" and reminded them that "travel baseball here isn't something that players and families choose to do" but something that requires a high level of desire, commitment, and competitiveness."

Parents so far have shown a willingness to pay. Overall, families spent 46 percent more on a primary youth sport in 2024 than they did just five years prior, according to Project Play, an initiative of the Aspen Institute. It estimated that youth sports generate up to $40 billion in annual revenue—nearly twice as much as the NFL. It isn't just the ultrarich doing

"YOU ARE EXPOSING YOUR KID TO EVERYTHING PROFESSIONALS HAVE TO DEAL WITH—I'M TALKING INJURY, TIME, SCHEDULE, EVERYTHING."

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the spending, either. An AP-Ipsos survey published this month found that less affluent parents spent about the same on their children's sports as ones whose household income was at least $100,000. The children most left out of organized sports are from homes with incomes under $25,000, according to the Aspen Institute, and that gap is widening. Meanwhile, profits for investors in youth-sports companies are growing significantly.

Firms are now in a race for less-tapped markets, including who gets to own flag football, a former backyard game that private capital has helped mold into a competitive sport booming among young athletes. Participation in tackle football is down amid fears about the dangers of concussions, and flag football is also more accessible to girls. It's only in the past five years that flag has truly taken off. This year, the girls' high-school flag-football championship aired to an audience averaging more than a million viewers. In 2028, the sport will make its Olympic debut at the Summer Games in L.A., and NFL-affiliated professional leagues are scheduled to launch next year.

The investment playbook is similar to those of other sports: Hook families while their kids are very young. Brand Velocity Group, a private equity firm where Eli Manning is a partner, recently acquired the operating partner for the NFL's youth flag-football program, which starts at age 4. Unrivaled Sports, also backed by private capital, acquired a majority stake in Under the Lights, a national flag-football program that begins before kindergarten. It could be a strategic choice for parents, too. The women's game is emerging as a D-I sport and is far less saturated than sports like soccer, offering a fresh pipeline to playing in college and beyond. In interviews, parents tend to say they're not delusional about their children's athletic futures, but in an anonymous survey, 11 percent said they believe their child could one day go pro. In another poll, 44 percent said the potential for NIL (name, image, and likeness) money played a role in their decision to sign up their child for sports. Never mind that highly lucrative NIL deals are rare, even among the minute percentage of athletes who go on to play in college.

Flag football has already eclipsed lacrosse and could very well come to rival youth soccer, said Scott Lancaster, a youth-sports adviser and program architect who has consulted for investors interested in the sports sector. He developed the NFL's initial youth flag-football program in the '90s,

which was mostly created as a marketing tool. Lancaster predicts investors will buy up field houses that leagues and clubs can rent for tournaments, then develop local and regional youth leagues as they have in other sports. "Private equity loves investing in facilities where they can be the anchor tenant of the sport they also invest in. Then they go back and buy others and bring them into a conglomerate," he said. "They want to take every angle and monetize it."

ONE REASON PARENTS accept these conditions is they are anxious about what will happen if they don't. In a time of justified concern for children's mental health and unease about the future, parents have latched on to sports as a lifeline—a kid throwing a ball around is a kid not scrolling YouTube. No parent wants their child to feel left out, and more and more, parents may worry that a travel league is the only way to set their child up to play beyond grade school. Some school districts across the country have cut freshman and junior-varsity teams from their budget, increasing competition for fewer spots, said Farrey of the Aspen Institute. He experienced it himself as a parent. "You look at the high-school team, and all those kids played club starting from a fairly early age, and just to preserve the opportunity that my kid could play in high school, I'm like, Well, I might as well go with it," he said. "And the next thing you know, it's Mother's Day and you're in Poughkeepsie at some Drury Inn."

This fear—that if they don't get their child in on the ground floor of travel teams, the elevator will go up without them—can lead families to commit to one sport and one sport alone. Eric Marvin, a former D-I and minor-league hockey player in Michigan, has four children who play on travel hockey teams, which collectively cost around $35,000 a year. He wishes they had time to try other activities. Children who are highly specialized in one sport report more fatigue and mood issues than those who play multiple sports. But there's a sense that if they skip a hockey camp or aren't playing year-round to accumulate ice time, they won't advance. These days, if they don't start young enough, it's possible for a child to get left out of the pipeline by third grade; Marvin said the coaches of the most competitive teams for children ages 10 and under often want athletes from the most competitive teams for children ages 8 and under.

"I used to think, I'll never be that mom," said Liz Marmer, a parent of two

on Long Island. She signed her son up for ice-skating lessons when he was 4 after a family trip to Boston, where he'd had a blast puttering around a pond. Three years later, her son, now 7, plays on a competitive travel ice-hockey team; in the spring, he plays on two. The sport has become a central part of their family life, and some weeks, she finds herself spending as much as ten hours chauffeuring him to and from the rink. Each year, the team holds tryouts in which even current players must fight to keep their positions. "Now that he's on a better team, he has a lot more to risk," she said.

It's not really about hockey. "Being a kid these days is not what it was when we were kids. The expectations come so much earlier in life that it's almost like they have to figure out what they want to do at such a

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young age,” Marmer said. “I was willing to let my kids get into travel sports at such a young age because they need to figure out now if that’s what they love.” As a mother of three soccer players in North Carolina told me, “I never want my kids to look back and say I didn’t do everything I could to help them live their dreams.” She’s hired professional photographers to take action shots for her 12- and 13-year-olds’ Instagram accounts—the social-media platform has become a recruiting tool—and they’ve both asked her to pay for personal trainers to work with them.

In their pursuit of a competitive edge for their children, parents can inadvertently take the positive effects of sports and turn them inside out. Perhaps nobody knows this better than Travis Snider, a child baseball prodigy turned first-round

MLB draft pick who ultimately struggled in his professional career until he retired in 2022. Snider remembers what it was like to be the child on the field; his sense of self-worth was so closely linked to how well he played—every inning felt like his life depended on it.

Now a father of three, he’s the co-founder of 3A Athletics, a company that educates adults on a healthier way to interact with young athletes. He’s trying to reach parents and coaches of children ages 6 to 18 who are what he calls the “80 percent middle.” “You have 10 percent of parents who are just insane—they’re the ones who are screaming at their kids, they’re yelling at umpires and getting kicked out of games. Then there’s the 10 percent of enlightened, yoga, tea-sipping parents who are just like, ‘Hey, we’re here to have fun! This is great!’ And then you have

the 80 percent of us in the middle who are kind of mildly crazy,” he said. “There’s a lot of damage that’s done by this 80 percent unknowingly without the intention of ever wanting to create these traps for our kids.”

If an 8-year-old starts talking about how much she wants to compete in college, he urges parents to recognize it could be because a dream is taking root but also because she’s seeing if saying that gets her more love and attention. “Kids are taking the cue from us: How serious is this?” he said. Even the best-intentioned parents could feel resentful after spending thousands of dollars and countless hours in the car for their child to compete on a travel team, only for their child to tell them one day that they don’t want to play anymore. Many do want some form of return on their investment, he said, even if they can’t

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articulate that, and the more they put in, the more they expect. In the best-case scenario, that return is their child having a positive experience. Too often, though, it comes down to results.

"Despite their awareness that kids should be learning and winning doesn't matter at younger ages, that gets thrown out the window because parents want to win," said the lacrosse coach, who admits he can sometimes be that parent himself. "They want to be a part of a program that's going to take their kid to the promised land." Coaches and parents both know there's always another team for families to jump to; on the field, coaches are in charge, but that doesn't change the reality that it's the parents who are the paying customers.

As travel sports get more commercial, parents are mimicking trends and behaviors they see in college and professional sports. In baseball, it's become popular for parents to play walk-up music when each child goes to bat, just like in the pros, which extends an already slow game. (One of the most popular songs is DJ Khaled's "All I Do Is Win.") Social media is awash with parents' images of staged contract signings for children as young as 5, complete with balloons and hats in their team colors, their small hands holding pens. Some tournaments require them to buy tickets to see their kids play—perhaps why there's a subset of adults who show up with an expectation of being entertained; parents shared stories of seeing other parents mixing screwdrivers from a cooler or sipping wine from Yeti tumblers at 8 a.m., which can lead to bad sideline behavior. At a lacrosse tournament in Rhode Island for second- and third-graders in July, a sign staked into the ground addressed adult attendees: PLEASE REMEMBER, THIS IS A GAME, THESE ARE KIDS, REPS ARE HUMAN.

THE COACHES, THEY have to win. In the travel-ball world, that's how it is," said Van Benschoten, the former MLB player and travel-baseball coach. One practice that has become commonplace is recruiting "guest players," athletes not on the team who act as hired guns for games. "Coaches are constantly working the phones; they are constantly asking people to play with them," he said.

It was two years ago, when his son was 11, that Van Benschoten first saw parents letting their children guest-play for other teams. He became concerned when he learned that one boy on his team, a pitcher, had thrown in a game for a different team on Thursday when he was scheduled to pitch for their team that Saturday. The

"THE COACHES, THEY HAVE TO WIN. IN THE TRAVEL-BALL WORLD, THAT'S HOW IT IS."

boy's father assured Van Benschoten he'd thrown only 25 pitches, but a parent at the Thursday game told him that number was closer to 60. Another game would have been too much for the boy's shoulder. "The parent was actively lying about this, and if we just took his word for it, we could have put the kid in danger," he said. "A lot of coaches don't care, and they love the fact that they can use this kid as a chess piece and win with him." Pennel, the basketball mother in Georgia, says it happens frequently; the unintended message is that children are, at best, valuable only if they can perform to expectations and, at worst, dispensable. "Imagine being a kid and you're like, Oh, I've been to all the practices and now I'm sitting because they called this other boy just to help the team win."

By the time she was 13, London, a 16-year-old soccer player from Kentucky, was guest-playing for three additional travel teams. The extra playing time helped strengthen her skills, and she liked competing with different people. But London was already playing soccer seven days a week all year. The extra playing time put additional stress on her still-developing body. Yet it was difficult to turn down opportunities. "I know a lot of people who don't get asked to guest-play," she said.

London had started on the local rec team when she was 6 but joined a travel team at age 9, when she and her father decided it was time to get serious about soccer. "I was waking up real early in the morning, going to the gym, practicing before school," she said. "Every day, it was soccer, soccer, soccer." There was more pressure to per-

form well in the travel league, and anxiety attacks became a regular occurrence—not every game or tournament but often enough that London began "having anxiety about having anxiety." She worried about what her coaches were going to think, what her father was going to think. "It could be so bad that I would start playing soccer and then start hyperventilating and have to sit down. I was so scared that I wasn't doing good," she said. The coach's daughter was also a striker, and they competed for playing time. London felt there was no room for error. Sometimes, as she sat crying, the coach would give her a pat on the back and then walk away.

Initially, London's anxiety didn't seem so out of the ordinary to her mother, Rachel West. It was a competitive team, and expectations were high. There was yelling. Children cried. "I feel like when these kids are doing club and travel sports during puberty, there's a lot of emotion," West said.

London was guest-playing for another travel team in November 2024 when she heard a pop and fell to the field, pain radiating up and down her left leg. It was a full ACL tear and would require surgery; the recovery could take up to 12 months. West reassured her that she had plenty of time. It was only her freshman year. College coaches couldn't contact her until she was a junior. London would get the surgery, do physical therapy, and find herself back on the field when it really mattered. Still, another player would need to temporarily replace her. She thought, What if they take my place? What if I don't get to play that position anymore? She started to second-guess if she had played well enough that season and worry about what it meant to be stuck on the sidelines. West took her to a surgeon one state over who performed fertilized ACL surgery, in which bone-marrow stem cells are mixed into the bone graft during reconstruction, and told them she could return to playing in six months.

London returned to the soccer field in June 2025, just as her doctor had promised. Her first season back, she was constantly worried about reinjuring her leg. But she soon regained her physical strength, and with that, her fears of getting hurt again began to dissipate. It was ten minutes into a game this May when she felt something snap in what had been her healthy leg. She was again guest-playing in a tournament, this time for a rival team—they're selective; it was flattering to be asked. Immediately, London knew it was her ACL. Days later, an MRI confirmed it.

At Boston Children's Hospital, young athletes being treated for an injury

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are sometimes referred to its sports-behavioral-health clinic for help with the psychological toll. The average age of patients at this clinic is 16, and currently, the youngest is 8. ACL injuries are common. So are chronic pain, bone-stress injuries, and post-concussion headaches. After an injury, “there’s a lot of anxiety about this happening again, fear of not being able to get back to where they were, fear of falling behind,” said Taryn Brandt, a psychologist at the clinic. “There’s anxiety about losing opportunities. I think certainly there are times when it’s I don’t want to disappoint family or coaches.” Recently, I spoke with a 14-year-old lacrosse player in Maryland named Carrington who not long ago underwent her second ACL surgery on the same leg. She had her first operation in the seventh grade, when her growth plates—areas of cartilage near the ends of long bones in children—may not have closed yet. Carrington and her parents opted for a more limited surgery, one that would repair the area using hamstring tendons but not bone plugs; the latter are more stabilizing but can lead to irregular bone growth in children who are still developing. Even as she recovers from her second surgery, Carrington’s priority is getting to play again.

Matthew Sacco, a sport-and-performance and health psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, placed a minimum age of 12 on his practice because otherwise he found himself dealing more with parents than patients. “I’m getting many, many, many, many more asks for younger kids than I’ve ever had,” he said. Sometimes parents bring a child in, sharing with him some version of “I just want to make sure that we’re doing everything we can do to support them. We want to give them every resource.” Other times, they view their child as broken and are hoping for a straightforward solution. Sacco is wary of those parents. “At a certain age, it’s quite an indictment to bring somebody to see the psychologist because I need to fix something to make them a better athlete,” he said. Most often, parents are concerned that their child is more irritable than usual and is suddenly complaining about going to practice. Sessions with young patients always start with the parents in the room; when Sacco speaks with the child alone for the first time, that’s when they tell him that they’re not having fun anymore, that their body is constantly sore, that it’s been injury after injury. On rare occasions, he closes the door and they say outright, “I’m over this. I’m done. I don’t want to play anymore.”

Sacco blames the year-round schedule

ule many travel programs encourage for much of the burnout he sees in young patients. “The travel or elite sports programs, they’re built around a competitive calendar. It’s not a developmental one,” he said. “A 9-year-old’s brain is not built for these tactical, high-stakes, decision-making competitions.” There’s no magic number, but experts generally recommend waiting to focus on one sport until at least the early teen years. When a patient is experiencing burnout, he typically first suggests stepping back, rather than stepping away from the sport entirely. “But a lot of people aren’t okay with that. It’s like if they step back, then they’re not going to be progressing. They’re missing these opportunities, and the window is so small,” he said.

There’s an identity loss for athletes who are unable to compete for a period of time, who quit their sport, or who want to keep playing but don’t advance to the next level. The latter can be particularly painful, but Brandt equates all of these experiences with grieving. Young athletes grapple with regret, focusing on where they could have made a different decision or taken another opportunity.

Hali Campbell’s son, Hudson, is in many ways a success story: He started playing hockey at 6, and nearly a decade later, he’s a defenseman for a team that’s at the highest level for his age. The family spends $25,000 a year for Hudson to play hockey. At this point, the skates are $1,200, and “he has a hockey bag that is the cost of a trip to Disney,” she said. Combined, Campbell and her ex-husband make $150,000 a year. She’s a marketing director for a small skin-care company and pet-sits on the side for extra income. Most weeks, she spends about 30 hours at the rink or driving to and from it.

For a long time, the sacrifice seemed like it would pay off; Hudson had all the makings of an athlete who had a real shot at playing for a D-I college one day. Campbell saw herself as a parent committed to her child’s dreams and allowed academics to take a back seat. Late nights at practice followed by 90-minute drives home leave little time for studying.

She’s starting to worry, though, that they’ve put too much on one side of the scale. As Hudson approaches the end of high school, he finds himself competing against athletes whose families can afford private coaches or who attend the prep schools that serve as feeders to the big D-I programs. College recruiters also pull talent from junior leagues and from Canada, where almost a third of NCAA hockey players hail from. Hudson isn’t

interested in playing college hockey if he can’t get a scholarship, but Campbell believes without hockey, he might not get in at all. “I feel like it’s all about the money,” Campbell said. She sees hockey players her son’s age burning out physically and mentally trying to keep pace with a system that increasingly favors those who can afford more. Even travel hockey, expensive and time-consuming as it is, may not be enough anymore; another level is seemingly always being built above young players’ heads.

T DOESN’T HAVE TO be this way. In Minnesota, a network of 250 public rinks serves as the foundation for a nonprofit youth ice-hockey program with more than 60,000 athletes across the state. The entry cost for Minnesota Hockey is low: Most families pay $200 to $400 per season, and in some parts of the state, there’s no fee at all for a player’s first one and equipment is provided for free. The idea is to keep ice hockey accessible and community based; the organization is broken out into 13 districts, and athletes play where they live. Jeremy Reed, the executive director, says organizing the program geographically is crucial: “The majority of the players in Minnesota grow up playing for that name on the front of their jersey. That’s their community.”

Starting at age 13, athletes can try out for Minnesota Hockey’s Tier I team, which competes with the private clubs at nationals, but nobody is cut from the program altogether. Instead, athletes are grouped by ability, which keeps the game competitive for the more skilled athletes and fun for everyone else. The price increases at the highest level—top players pay up to $1,400 for one season, including equipment—but that’s trivial compared to the $25,000 some families pay elsewhere.

Reed says they’re able to keep down costs by relying on volunteer coaches, who are required to complete a training course with USA Hockey, the sport’s governing body, to ensure quality. Much of the funding comes from charitable gambling machines called pull tabs, or what some Minnesotans refer to as “cardboard crack,” found in bars across the state. Families who can’t afford the registration fees can also pay with their time; in Roseau, Minnesota, players and their parents receive a discount if they volunteer at the local fair. It’s a setup that separates Minnesota from the rest of the country and that Reed seeks to preserve. He’s seen other hockey powerhouses with which they used to go head-to-head, including Michigan and Massachusetts, (Continued on page 67)

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THE CANDIDATE CREATOR

The outcome of the midterms could ride on political consultant Rebecca Katz and her risky formula for winning elections.

BY DAVID FREEDLANDER

IT'S A FEW HOURS before polls close in Michigan, and Rebecca Katz is alone in front of the stage at the Majestic Theatre in Midtown Detroit, pacing. Her candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, is scheduled to have his Election Night party here, and over the last week of the race, his campaign has expressed extreme outward confidence. Polls show him likely to win in a blowout against Representative Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat. The expectation is a short night and a victory speech early in the evening.

But Katz looks miserable, hunched over her phone, twitching, texting reporters and campaign staff, trying to keep an even keel as press file into the auditorium. Michigan is one of the last contested primaries of the year, one of the final places for the left wing of the Democratic Party to stake its claim. Control of the Senate next year, as well as greater checks on Donald Trump's powers, could hang in the balance. And El-Sayed's numbers are not looking great. Katz knows if things hold and he does not win easily, with a broad coalition, the party's trust in his ability to win the November general election will be shaken.

The child of Egyptian immigrants, El-Sayed has campaigned for the Senate on his support for Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending military aid to Israel. If elected in November, he has suggested he would not support Senator Chuck Schumer's bid for Democratic leader of the body. The idea that El-Sayed could win the nomination would have been laughable a few years ago—when he ran for governor in 2018, he lost in the Democratic primary by 22 points.

Schumer and most of the rest of the Democratic Establishment lined up against him, as they have against Katz's clients throughout her career: Graham Platner, the upstart progressive from Maine who chased a governor out of the Senate race; Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx principal who defeated a 16-term incumbent congressman; Senator John Fetterman, the Hells Angels look-alike whom elected Democrats disregarded; and even Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who did not receive the endorsement of party leaders until well after he had secured the Democratic nomination.

In all of those cases, Katz's candidates won, and she provided crucial strategic advice. However, while there have been a lot of victories, there have also been a number of high-profile disasters. Fetterman has become the Democrats' No. 1 troll, a Fox News regular who has distanced himself from the party. Bowman lost his reelection bid after a series of blunders, which

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Photograph by Jack Califano

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included pulling a fire alarm during a vote in the House of Representatives. Accusations of sexual assault against Platner, which he denies, have put the Democrats' hopes of taking the Senate in jeopardy.

El-Sayed is running in Michigan, a traditional home of the working-class, lunch-bucket Democrat and a state President Trump has won twice. It is close to mandatory for Democrats to succeed here. In the Majestic Theatre, no one—especially not Katz—needs to be reminded that there is a lot riding on her unorthodox ideas about who can win a big election in a purple Rust Belt state.

Ever since the Platner implosion, Katz has laid out to me her theory of politics, why it is not crazy to bet on El-Sayed—in fact, why it would be wrong to do the opposite and assume an Establishment

has orchestrated the campaigns of underdog and outsider candidates who have won key Democratic Party primaries. Fight's victories have left the Establishment in a funny position. Despite many of them inveighing against her candidates for months, Democrats now need Katz's theory of the electorate to work to win back Congress.

Some in the Establishment worry it is a foolish bet on novices aligned with an insurgency from the Democratic Socialists of America. Fight's roster represents the left edge of the possible in American politics. The candidates chosen are in many cases making their first run for political office. Before the campaign, Platner was an oysterman who had served in the military; El-Sayed was a county public-health official; Dan Osborn,

too woke, too left, too radical. Candidates who make people feel they can safely vote for a Democrat and it won't mean prisons will be abolished, borders eliminated, or the internal-combustion engine outlawed.

Fight's operating theory is sometimes described as the belief that the true path to victory lies in left-wing populism. But the fact that these candidates are all on the left is, Katz tells me, not her focus. She is far from a wild-eyed socialist or a fire-breathing revolutionary, despite having spent almost a decade and a half pulling the party in a more progressive direction. Katz says her choices are instead based on a belief that Democrats keep getting in their own way by nominating milquetoast candidates who play in the familiar battle lines of partisan politics.

"It's harder to get candidates who are

THE ROSTER

2013	2016	2018	2020	2022
Bill de Blasio WON Election for mayor of New York City in a landslide running as an unabashed progressive	John Fetterman LOST Democratic Pennsylvania Senate primary while branding himself as a burly Bernie Sanders supporter	Cynthia Nixon LOST Democratic New York gubernatorial primary but sort of scared Andrew Cuomo	Jamaal Bowman WON House race as an unorthodox leftist fighting for the Green New Deal and police defunding	John Fetterman (again) WON Senate race, proving the upside of anti-Establishment candidates—and, eventually, the potential downside

candidate could win. She has done it over the course of weeks in near-daily phone calls and texts. Between arguments about why her formula would help Democrats win, she would also make a case for why I shouldn't write an article about her. When we meet in her office in a tower in Downtown Brooklyn overlooking the Manhattan skyline, the pattern continues. I take out my phone and laptop; she says, "I am not sure I am agreeing to this." And then Katz proceeds to talk for the next three hours. Often, she interrupts herself to ask who else I was talking to and what they were saying; she asks what the story would really be about. "How about the tension in my own soul?" she suggests, half in jest.

But the reason I am talking to Katz is obvious. Fight Agency, the political-consulting firm she co-founded a little over a year and a half ago with veteran ad makers Tommy McDonald and Julian Mulvey—later bringing in, among others, the 27-year-old wunderkind of left-wing politics, Morris Katz (no relation)—seems to have unlocked a secret for unlikely victories in American politics. For the midterms, the agency

another Fight client mounting a second independent candidacy for a Senate seat in Nebraska, was a mechanic. Bob Brooks, a Fight client hoping to flip a congressional seat in Pennsylvania, was head of a firefighters union. In her work, Katz is explicitly looking for normal people who come from normal backgrounds, not carefully groomed career politicians. "The era of the perfect candidate is over," she says, repeating a line she often uses when pitching her work. "You're not looking for a candidate with perfect hair and a perfect life."

The idea is a direct challenge to strategic orthodoxy in American politics. The way running a campaign is usually understood is that you need to convince some portion of the people who voted for the other party last time to vote for you this time. It's why Democratic leaders have been optimistic heading into the midterms; as the president's approval rating says, Democrats just need some regretful Trump voters to flip. So party leadership has tried to recruit candidates who reassure persuadable Republicans—candidates who aren't

more in touch with their communities out of primaries," Katz told Campaigns & Elections, a magazine that covers the political-consulting industry. But "those candidates are out there. They might just not have people who take a serious look at them." Katz's unique skill is finding and presenting these candidates to the public. "This is Rebecca's superpower," says one rival political operative. "Her ability to brand candidates and create a story around them and a protective marketing bubble and myth and mythology is unmatched."

Katz's critics view this "superpower" differently. They say Fight is undermining the work of national Democrats and local parties. "I am not saying these people aren't smart, but they are playing this political game backward. It is the candidate's job to find the consultant and not the consultant's job to find the candidate," says Jim Kessler, the executive vice-president of policy at Third Way, which supports moderates in the Democratic Party. "You take someone like Platner, and here is this person who looks like he is lifted from central casting, who is handsome and charismatic

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and articulate, who seems unafraid and who farms oysters, and to the consultants who pluck him out, he is perfect. But it's just a con."

Katz thinks such D.C.-brained complaints miss what is actually happening out in the electorate. "The leaders of our party don't recognize their own toxicity and that there are many different stories to be told and many different kinds of candidates," she says in her office. "I bet you that Chuck Schumer thinks that Zohran Mamdani is more toxic to the Democratic brand than he is. That is the problem."

THE STEREOTYPE OF A TOP political operative is a hard-drinking, fast-living man with mercenary instincts and expensive habits. Katz is the opposite. She is a ball of New York neurosis and chaotic

that could push back on Republicans' attacks. The person he originally hired, Katz says, abruptly quit just before his start date. Katz—broke and directionless after Kerry's loss—got the job instead.

Reid was a mentor and surprisingly understanding as a boss. Katz is dyslexic and suffers from an undiagnosed attention deficit disorder. One day, she was sitting by Reid with a list of phone numbers from Nevada radio stations he was supposed to call for a series of brief interviews. Katz kept telling him the wrong phone numbers until Reid finally asked, "Do you have a learning disability?" She nodded "yes," afraid she would be fired. Instead, Reid responded, barely above a whisper, "Well, you must have had to work twice as hard to get where you are."

"I loved him forever after that," Katz says. While her disabilities made working

the political-consulting business to claim hypocrisy; Katz told me Steyer convinced her he was the most progressive candidate in the race. After Eric Swalwell dropped out, Steyer briefly looked like the front-runner. But Katz saw the eventual Democratic nominee, Xavier Becerra, gaining steam online before polls and conventional wisdom caught up. She got the campaign to focus on him, an operative who worked on the race tells me. Steyer still lost.

The operative says Katz's advice helped but there were limits to her formula. "Everyone out here thought Steyer was going to win," another operative tells me. "But you can't just show up in California and run a Mamdani-style campaign and call yourself a Bernie Sanders kind of billionaire and expect to win. It was style over substance, and people didn't buy it." Katz will soon

2024	2025	Fight's Candidates This Year
Ruben Gallego WON Arizona Senate race as an anti-woke, but progressive, candidate in a purple state	Zohran Mamdani WON New York City mayoral race, defeating Cuomo, the living embodiment of Establishment Democrats	Tom Steyer Billionaire loser of the California gubernatorial primary	Graham Platner Disgraced former Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine	Dan Osborn Independent running against a Republican for Senate in Nebraska	Abdul El-Sayed Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan

energy whose self-appointed task is saving the Democratic Party from itself. With her, there is no sipping of bourbon or talking about shadowy deals. She is a Brooklyn parent, and when we talk, it is easy to pick up the sounds of her making dinner or shuffling her two teenage boys out the door.

Katz's first major job on the Hill was with Harry Reid Jr., the pugnacious but soft-spoken majority leader of the Senate. She had grown up in Philadelphia, the child of a social worker and a professor, one of the few white kids in her kindergarten class, and graduated from Central High School, among the city's elite public high schools. Before her time with Reid, she had worked a job with John Edwards's presidential campaign, then ran communications in the Pennsylvania operation for an outside spending effort trying to elect John Kerry president.

After the Republicans' success in Swift-boating Kerry, Reid was determined to find a way for Democrats to go on offense. He acted on Hillary Clinton's suggestion to create a "war room," a centralized hub

through a call sheet harder, an inability to focus on any one thing for very long has served Katz well as a campaign consultant. She doesn't read The New Yorker. The Sunday Times arrives with a thump to her doorstep but goes untouched. Books on politics, even ones where she is mentioned, are unopened, and podcasts are too long and boring. Instead, Katz gets her news the way she thinks most voters do, scanning X and TikTok all day, figuring anything worth seeing will show up in her feed.

"She has an acute sense of where the news cycle is at any given moment," says Lauren Hitt, a former spokesperson for Kamala Harris's presidential campaign who has worked on several races alongside Katz. "It is very much driven by an idea that it is a waste of time to walk into the day with the same plan you had yesterday. She is comfortable in chaos."

The close attention to vibes online helps Katz figure out the trajectory of campaigns quickly. In the most recent California gubernatorial primary, she was working for Tom Steyer, the billionaire former hedge-funder, a client who led some of Katz's detractors in

have another shot in California: Fight has been hired to help DSA member Nithya Raman in her upstart campaign for mayor of Los Angeles.

A FTER A COUPLE of years working for Reid, Katz began to tire of life among Democratic senators. It was a job that consisted mostly of men jostling for attention. She made her way to New York and moved in with her fiancé (now husband), James Katz, whom she'd met on the Edwards campaign. Soon after, she started working with Bill de Blasio, who eventually put together a run for City Hall.

The de Blasio approach set the template for future Katz campaigns: He announced weeks before everyone and ran as an unapologetic progressive. Katz candidates are now known for entering before others, catching the supposed front-runners by surprise, and moving with aggression. The seminal moment of that campaign, Katz says, is when de Blasio spoke at the Association for a Better New York breakfast and told attendees, including some of the

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city's elite, that he would raise taxes on the wealthy to help pay for universal pre-K.

But Katz quickly grew disillusioned with de Blasio's imperiousness, serving only 15 months in his administration. In 2015, she traveled to Braddock, Pennsylvania. A struggling town trying to refashion itself as a haven for artists priced out of New York, Braddock had a six-foot-eight, 300-pound, heavily tattooed mayor who supported Bernie Sanders for president and was contemplating a run for the U.S. Senate. The party was lined up behind Katie McGinty, a former environmental regulator turned lobbyist, to face off against Republican incumbent Pat Toomey in the 2016 general election. But Fetterman seemed to be able to generate real enthusiasm. There were standing-room crowds and hundreds of thousands in small-dollar donations. Katz took him on.

It was hard to convince others to see Fetterman's potential. Katz accompanied him to Washington, D.C., where officials from the Democratic-campaign Establishment made clear how little they thought of the mayor. "We hear you want to legalize heroin," they said, and he said, "No, you know, I just think that we have a drug crisis in America. I see it in my community, and I think we have to rethink drug policy." Katz recalls.

As the race went on, the Democratic Party rallied behind McGinty, including the sitting governor. Former president Barack Obama cut a radio ad for her. Even Sanders didn't support Fetterman. But Katz, who had a growing rolodex of national political reporters, made her candidate into a brand by steering the media to Braddock to get a look at Fetterman. She framed him as an outsider antidote to the problems of politics.

Fetterman was a graduate of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the son of a successful businessman, and supported by his family well into adulthood. But few of those facts made it into the stories beyond a passing mention. Fetterman was instantly recognizable as something more in line with the needs of the media: a man of forgotten America with a lefty's heart of gold.

In the 2016 Senate primary, Fetterman would come in a distant third place, but he had established himself in the national consciousness. Six months later, McGinty would lose the general election to Toomey, helping the GOP keep a narrow majority in the Senate.

After Fetterman fizzled out, Katz found herself back in New York, adrift. Trump was president, and, as she saw it, Democrats were too quickly moving on from what happened in 2016, too ready to believe Trump was a fluke. "Democrats lost their way when

they stopped being curious about what voters were saying," she tells me. "They asked no questions about why Hillary Clinton lost. There was no audit, nobody questioning if that playbook was the correct playbook. And if we had just taken a beat to look at the war within the party, to look at why people were excited by Bernie in the first place, and figure out where those Bernie voters went in '20 and '24, I think we'd all be better off."

Young voters, radicalized by Trump's presidency, were joining the Democratic Socialists of America and forming groups like Justice Democrats, Run for Something, and Sunrise Movement, all of which tried to pull the Democratic Party to the left. Katz was more than a decade older than the senior leadership of these groups but became a mentor to young political operatives, showing them how to deal with the press and how to drive narratives.

"It was like, 'Oh, you just call these people and paint a story and make it easier for them to write?'" recalls one person who worked with her then. "None of us had any rolodex or relationships, and she came in with this sense that you needed conflict to drive a story further."

In 2018, Katz became a primary strategist behind the actor Cynthia Nixon's quixotic run for governor against Andrew Cuomo. The campaign is mostly remembered for how Katz turned something that would typically be hashed in closed-door negotiations—the room temperature for their debate—into a national story that spawned think pieces.

more distant from the Establishment and could not hide her frustration. In 2019, the national Democratic Party's congressional-campaign arm announced that any consulting firm that worked with someone challenging an incumbent would be blacklisted. "I just wanted them to be curious about what works in politics and where all this energy was coming from," she says of party leaders. "And they just wanted to end my career."

IN 2022, FETTERMAN AGAIN ran for the Senate, and the party Establishment, believing him to be a weak general-election candidate, again supported a rival. This time it was Representative Conor Lamb, who, with his square jaw, earnest mien, and military background, looked like the perfect fit to defeat the Republican candidate, the TV personality Mehmet Oz.

But something had shifted between 2016 and 2022. Maybe the party Establishment didn't have the power it once did. Or maybe Democratic-primary voters had caught up to what Katz had been pushing the previous six years. Fetterman won by more than 20 points.

"My model for that race was really the Obama campaign," Katz says. "Everybody keeps learning the lessons of Bill Clinton over and over again, but they think it's about triangulation when it's really two things: 'It's the economy, stupid' and 'I feel your pain.' It was Obama who really showed us how

"HER ABILITY TO BRAND CANDIDATES AND CREATE A STORY AROUND THEM IS UNMATCHED."

("Can a Room Temperature Be Sexist?" read one headline.) "Ninety percent of the reason I ran was that nobody else would run because everybody was so scared of Cuomo," Nixon tells me. "And it was very hard to get people, particularly people of her caliber, to work on the campaign because everybody was running scared—and she wasn't even scared a little bit."

Katz did worry about her business prospects after taking on the notoriously vindictive Cuomo. But she was also growing

to run a populist campaign, criticizing Mitt Romney for how many houses he has. It's the kind of thing that's sticky."

Fetterman won by five points, despite running in a general election that was supposed to be a difficult environment for Democrats and, more importantly, despite the fact that he had a stroke right before the primary and struggled to speak for much of the race.

Katz was thrilled. She and Fetterman had been friends for nearly a decade, and this

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was proof her way of doing politics could succeed in a swing state—that Democrats could run nontraditional, pathbreaking candidates who popped on social media and connected with voters in ways the stuffy mainstream could not. Fetterman's candidacy didn't doom Democrats, Katz believed; it saved them from almost certain defeat. After the win, Katz bought her own ticket to a fundraiser for Bob Casey, the other Pennsylvania Democratic senator, who was gearing up for his own challenging reelection campaign. There, she buttonholed him on the work she and some of her colleagues had done for Fetterman and tried to pitch him on the same approach.

"I said, 'This is going to be a hard race, and I think you need to punch him in the fucking face,' Katz recalls. The genteel Casey, the scion of a Pennsylvania Democratic dynasty, demurred. 'And he was like, 'Oh, that's so kind of you.' He was so polite. And I said we could put together, like, a team and we could go hard. Like, 'I think you have to go hard against the Republicans.'" Casey declined. He went on to lose.

Instead of another job in Pennsylvania, Katz went to work for Ruben Gallego, a progressive Arizona congressman who was raised by a single mom before deploying to Iraq and eventually making his way to Harvard University. Gallego talked like a regular person, encouraging Democrats to stop using terms like "economic stability" and instead recognize that most voters, especially men, just wanted a job, a place of their own, and "a big-ass truck." Gallego followed the Katz playbook: He announced early, blitzed the state, and chased the recently independent sitting senator, Kyrsten Sinema, out of the race. He won in 2024 and outperformed Kamala Harris in the state.

Afterward, Katz and some veterans of the Fetterman campaign decided to start their own agency. ARE YOU A FIGHT CANDIDATE? read a rubric the group created when it was first forming. "Can you have a conversation that doesn't sound like talking points?," one prompt read. "Can you tell me why you are running for office in one sentence? Do you have a connection to the working class?" If you answered "yes," then you were ready for Fight. If you answered "yes" to the question "Were you voted most likely to be president in your high-school yearbook?," Fight would hustle you out the door.

"The idea was to go on offense. We wanted people who weren't scared of their own shadow all the time," says Kipp Hebert, a longtime associate of Katz's. "One thing we always say is that Democrats should stop apologizing for being Democrats. The Republicans are confident in who they

are, and their party leaders don't spend all their time talking about how some of their candidates are liabilities."

As much as Fight has been painted as the political-consulting firm of the rising left, that is not quite right. Fight is not associated with the DSA, and the agency did not help every candidate associated with the organization this cycle. Katz's firm, for instance, did not work with Francesca Hong, the legislator and chef who lost a gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin.

Fight's idea is not to support so-called regular people—regular people don't run for office; it is to support real people, those who have personality and are confident in who they are. Conventional wisdom in Washington has maintained that the key to Trump's rise was his willingness to moderate and break from Republican orthodoxy on issues like Medicare and Social Security; Katz and the team at Fight don't buy it. Trump wins because, as Hebert puts it, "he talks about the elite that you hate while Democrats talk about how we are going to make your life incrementally better in a way that you won't even notice. Trump is saying 'Let's tear the system down,' and Democrats are saying 'Let's make the system better with 100 small ideas' but not paint a picture of a better future."

THE PRIMARIES haven't always borne out the idea that the Democrats are simply too cautious. In Michigan, the result was far closer than the polls had it. The race was not called, as expected, that night. It took until early the following morning, long after the Majestic had emptied for the evening. El-Sayed eked out a victory by a single percentage point. If those moderate Democrats who voted against El-Sayed in the primary prove unwilling to support him in the general against the relatively centrist Republican Mike Rogers, the race will be hard to win.

And for all the talk of working-class politics, El-Sayed actually did far worse among those voters than Stevens. Likewise, Platner was performing poorly among working-class voters in Maine when he dropped out. "Fight folks have this idea that poor people are closet leftists, and they are just not," says a former top Democratic official. "The people who come out for them are college-educated people who like the videos they see on social media."

When Fight began in early 2025, it seemed to have a growing track record in statewide races. It had already helped elect two straight-talking lawmakers from swing states in Fetterman and Gallego. But Bowman had imploded and Fetterman

had broken ties with the progressive wing, and in a few months' time, Morris Katz was traveling to Maine to recruit Platner for his doomed run. It began to look like a pattern: Fight could pick people to win elections in the Trump era—the problem was what happens next.

Rebecca Katz, ever the comms pro, doesn't much want to talk about what has gone wrong with some of her candidates. She thinks October 7 had something to do with it in two cases—it pushed Fetterman right and Bowman further left while also making the latter less responsive to the concerns of his constituents. "I do think there's something about the way that campaigns are today," Katz says. "They are all-encompassing and suffocating, and it comes at you from every angle. And they don't just go after you; they go after the people you love. And I think it does alter the brain chemistry a little bit."

The Fetterman case is clearly a wound. She considered him a friend, enjoyed his company, and spent a decade trying to get him to the U.S. Senate. Then he got there and became a different person. In her view, the darkness he had kept at bay seemed to have overtaken him. It nags at her. What if Fetterman switches parties after Democrats take the chamber? Worse, what if he does only after El-Sayed wins just as a way to get back at Katz?

Platner is different. He went through multiple tours in Iraq, and she believes it left a mark. "Fetterman's life was hard from inside," she told me. "I think Graham's life was hard from the outside." Katz and her team at Fight still stand behind the idea of Platner—at the beginning, he was a good candidate and forced a sitting governor from the race. But, as Katz says, "if he committed sexual assault, he should not be a U.S. senator. It's as simple as that."

It's a dilemma, then, for both Katz and for the Democratic Party. She keeps finding candidates who are exciting to voters. But that formula can lead to blowups and reversals that endanger the broader prospects of the party.

"Our whole theory of the case has been that basically people don't care if their candidates are broken because they are a little bit broken too," Katz says as the sun is setting outside her office window. "They don't care if their candidates are flawed because everyone is flawed, right? You are looking for someone who has been through what you've been through and they understand you and they see you. That is the theory."

"I don't think I should be responsible for all of my candidates' worst decisions," she adds. "I am hired to win races."

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Thomas King inspired a generation of Native writers, including myself.

Then we discovered he wasn't Native at all.

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The Inconvenient Non-Indian

By Tommy Orange

A self-portrait from 2025.

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1

HE WRITER Thomas King and I first met over Zoom in early February to talk about how he found out he is not a member of the Cherokee Nation in any way, shape, or form. He's not an Indigenous person or a mixed-blood Native either, according to a genealogist from the organization Tribal Alliance Against Frauds (also known as TAAF, pronounced like the word gaffe, as in a blunder). TAAF's revelation, which it planned to publicize, prompted King to write an op-ed this past November in The Globe and Mail, where he recounted learning that a story his mother had told about his absentee father being part Cherokee is not true. 'I feel as though I've been ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story,' he wrote. 'Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all.'

He's since taken three DNA tests, two of which show no Indigenous ancestry whatsoever. (The third was lost in customs, he said.) A genealogist King personally hired, whose last name—incredibly—is Hoax, also concluded King has no Native heritage.

King is 83 years old, which can mean a lot of different things, physically and cognitively, and through Zoom it can be hard to tell sometimes what's going on with the person on the other side of the screen. In the Native world, if you make it to 83, you've more than defied the odds. The average life expectancy of a Native man in the U.S. is lower than that of men in any other racial group. A Native man is disproportionately more likely to experience health problems like heart disease, addiction, and countless other things people who have been put through it inherit from people who have been put through it before them. But King is not actually a Native man.

Still, he would be considered an elder among any group. That isn't to say he seems elderly. There is a playfulness about him in the eyes and at the corners of his mouth. I got the sense right away that he is present, and fully himself, but every now and then he looked at the screen, and me on it, with some level of distrust, or perhaps he was merely trying to get a deeper read of me.

He had agreed to these interviews because he believed I'd be fair and thorough, provide nuance and compassion—give the whole picture.

I was in Oakland, in the room I write in, with my dogs. He was at home in Guelph, Ontario, where he has lived for decades. The byline on his books is Thomas, but he goes by Tom. He has been considered a leader in the world of Indigenous thought in Canada more so than in the U.S., though he grew up in California. He had a popular radio show called 'The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour' that ran from 1997 until 2000, and he wrote books Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike have revered. I was one of them. I felt changed as a writer and a Native person when I first encountered his 2012 nonfiction book, The Inconvenient Indian. For an entire generation of Native writers, it was a master class in

narrative subversion. King managed to take the suffocating history of the Indian—the treaties, the massacres, the Hollywood caricatures—and turn it into something conversational, even funny. He highlighted how the 'dead Indian' trope was a white invention and the present-tense Indian is viewed as an invisible inconvenience. It was a book that allowed us to laugh at the absurdity of our own erasure, even as it was still happening.

I first met King in 2020, just before the pandemic, at a literary conference in Mexico. It was the 15th anniversary of the gathering. One of the many white attendees calling themselves expats decided she would celebrate its quinceañera by dressing up in a Mexican ball gown. We had dinner on a rooftop at a restaurant overlooking San Miguel. King was there with his wife. I was with my family. We had a very nice evening together. The sunset was purple and pink and green. And yet the evening takes on a different tone when I recall the eager way he told my wife his father's oldest sister had affirmed to him that his dad was Cherokee.

Regardless of how I remember his books, or our time together, no matter that I like him, I have been changed by this new information. Am I saying I'm not a fan of his writing anymore? Of him? It's much too complicated for the binary of like-or-dislike. I don't want to go after him. But there has been a paradigm shift in the Thomas King—dom.

'I didn't want to be the story,' he told me during the first of four conversations over the course of a couple months. 'Once the rumors started, once people began digging, I realized the story I had was no longer mine to tell. It's a strange feeling, being told you aren't who you've been for eight decades. It's like someone coming into your house and telling you the walls aren't really there.'

AFTER HIS PUBLIC ADMISSION, assuming his publisher at Harper-Collins Canada might not want the ninth book in his 'Dreadful-Water' mystery series, which features a Native man named Thumps DreadfulWater, King paid back his advance and published the book himself, sharing it with friends and family and eventually a few bookstores. The distribution for a film adaptation of The Inconvenient Indian was scuttled in 2020 because the director, Michelle Latimer, ironically, had her Indigenous ancestry called into question after claiming for years to have ties to the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, an Algonquin First Nation near Maniwaki, Quebec. (Latimer now claims to be 'a non-status Algonquin of mixed blood, Métis, French Canadian heritage.')

I grew up with a Native father. He was an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, and his first language was Cheyenne. Throughout my childhood, he brought the family back to where he grew up in Oklahoma. He spoke Cheyenne at home and told us about what it means to be Cheyenne, what it meant for him growing up there. I was raised to be proud of our Cheyenne heritage, even while being sort of assimilated into American culture through TV and video games and being one of the only Native children in any of the classrooms I moved through. But my mother is white. And just knowing I grew up in Oakland and was only half-Native gave me a good deal of doubt when I introduced myself to people and even more so when I started trying to write about Native people.

King wrote in his 2003 book, The Truth About Stories, based on his series of public lectures from the same year, 'The truth about stories is that that's all we are.' I can remember feeling the impact of this sentence as a young writer. As a Native person first thinking about how to tell Native stories, I felt like I was being given permission, like I belonged to storytelling itself.

Something else he said in that same book: 'Once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.' So now I'm thinking, If the story we're talking about is one his mother told

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TOP: Thomas King, at left, around age 5, with his brother (second from left), his maternal grandmother, and three of his cousins; at 14. ABOVE: As he was entering high school.

him that happens to be untrue, but he built his life and identity and career on it, what is it then? Might there be writers who are actually Indigenous who could have told their stories in place of his, stories that would have meant more to their respective communities and to the wider community? His not being Native makes non-Native people question our authenticity, which is already an issue: outsiders deciding for us who the real Natives are, on a governmental, institutional level as well as on a basic social level. Non-Natives always seem overconfident of their qualifications for asking questions about our authenticity. Which ones are the real ones? everyone seems to be wondering in the back of their mind when the subject of Native people comes up. And it's been happening since the myth of our vanishing—as if on our own or by natural, mysterious forces—took the place of the history of the genocide committed against us by the U.S. government as well as by its civilians. The American obsession with playing Indian has been a histori-

cal constant. In the early 17th century, some colonists and escaped indentured servants joined tribes to make land deals or otherwise benefit. And at the end of the 19th century, there were "five-dollar Indians": white settlers who would claim a drop of Indigenous blood—an inversion of the one-drop rule for Black people—and often bribe an Indian agent with $5 to get them on the federal rolls, historical records created by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to document members of Indigenous tribes. Doing so might entitle them to land or oil rights.

The spread of their celebrity through books and film, and eventually through social media, has allowed self-proclaimed Native people to become public figures who were later exposed as "Pretendians." If you went all the way back through American history and included in this category anyone dressing up as Native, as well as all the models and celebrities who have claimed Native heritage, the list would surely be at least as long as the number of federally recognized tribes (currently, there are 575).

In the 1930s, there was Archibald Belaney, an Englishman who transformed himself into Grey Owl, a half-Apache born in Mexico to a Scottish father and an Apache mother. As Grey Owl, he had two internationally popular books, Pilgrims of the Wild, published as a supposedly autobiographical novel, and The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People, a children's adventure novel. He then went on the lecture circuit in Britain.

In 1976, a man named Forrest Carter published a memoir called The Education of Little Tree. "Forrest Carter" was a pen name for Earl Asa Carter, a former Klansman and speechwriter for George Wallace who'd written the line "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He tried to distance himself from his segregationist origins by writing under a pen name and claiming to have Cherokee ancestry. In 2006, a PEN Beyond Margins Award-winning writer named Nasdijj, who claimed to be Navajo, was revealed to be a white man born Timothy Patrick Barrus in Lansing, Michigan. In 2016, a report accused the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning Canadian fiction writer Joseph Boyden—who had claimed ancestry from Canadian First Nations groups—of lacking Indigenous heritage. ("A small part of me is Indigenous, but it's a big part of who I am," he said in his defense.) More recently, in February 2024, The New Yorker profiled an American academic, Elizabeth Hoover, who had claimed Mohawk and Mi'kmaq descent and apologized for it under duress but continues to teach. As with many of the academic cases, there are often no permanent consequences for Pretendians; they are either allowed to continue teaching or granted a graceful retirement. In June 2024, a Toronto woman named Karima Manji was sent to prison for three years in what is reportedly the first sentence for being a Pretendian in Canada: She had gotten her twins thousands of Canadian dollars in scholarships on the pretense they were Inuit. Patricia Marroquin Norby, who claimed to be the first-ever Native American curator of the Met from 2020 through 2025, left the museum in December, citing health reasons—though her departure came amid a report from TAAF alleging that she has no Native ancestry. "Every time one of these cases comes to light," said the writer Tanya Talaga, who is an enrolled member of the Fort William First Nation, "it hurts the people who are actually doing the work. It makes the public skeptical of all of us. It turns our identity into a crime scene."

I believe Thomas King when he says that he believed his mother. And it should be noted here that his willingness to talk to me, to talk to TAAF, and to publish his op-ed outing himself as not being Native is remarkable. A lot of the time, Pretendians who have been found out double down on their claim and disappear. And yet listening to King move through this new information about his background, I can't help but feel he's still seeing the walls of the house, even though, as he'd said, he's been told they aren't really there.

PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF THE SUBJECT

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“Every time one of these cases comes to light, it hurts the people who are actually doing the work. It makes the public skeptical of all of us.”

“Even now,” King told me, “when I look in the mirror, I see a Native person. I don’t see anything else.”

KING’S STORY BEGINS IN ROSEVILLE, California, in the 1940s and ’50s. Roseville was then a rail town just outside the state capital. Thomas was born there in 1943 to Katheryn King and Robert Elvin King, who had served in World War II. When Thomas was 3 years old, his father left their family. “We all stood there in the park, in the sunshine, and my father told my mother that he was leaving,” King writes in his op-ed. “Which he did. And we never saw him again.”

King said he grew up with a lot of curiosity about his father, but his mother didn’t like to talk about him. “I had to pull information out of her. ‘What was he like? Who was he? Where did he come from?’” he told me. His curiosity was compounded by the fact that he and his brother looked different from their cousins and aunts. “The racial makeup of Roseville, California, was very different than it is today,” King told me. “And white was the default. My brother and I were darker than the rest of the kids. It was no big deal when we were 8 or 9. By the time I got to be 11, people were looking at me, and some of the kids thought I was Asian. I took that to my mother, and she said, ‘No, your father’s part Cherokee; that’s what they’re seeing.’” In the aftermath of World War II, looking Asian was considered a liability in their predominantly white town. “So I thought, Okay. Perception is a very strong thing. You’ve got your family, you’ve got the family stories, you’ve got the way people see you. By the time I was 18, I knew I was a mixed blood.”

After high school, he moved to San Francisco and started driving an ambulance to make money. He once picked up a bank manager who was having a heart attack, which led to a brief stint as a bank teller, during which he met a woman who told him about working on a steamboat headed for Australia. Instead of Australia, he ended up on a ship to New Zealand, where he worked in a photography studio, among a few odd jobs.

After that, he made his way to Australia. There, working for a magazine called Everybody’s, King said he was subjected to fierce racism and labeled by colleagues as their “resident Abo,” short for Aboriginal. He told me he never backed away from his Indian identity then. He started writing articles for the magazine. In his telling, they kept making fun of him for being Native and even drew a racist caricature of him as “Chief Screeching Eagle.” The extremity of his experience there fortified him. By the time he returned to the States in 1967, the social premium on Indigeneity had shifted. Soon, he was getting his B.A. in English: “I was at Chico State when I teamed up with a Mohawk guy, Richard Glazer Danay, and we started a little nascent Indian club on campus.” He found a job in Native Affairs at the University of Utah in 1972, serving as a counselor for Indian students, thanks in part to a tip from Danay. “I’m sure that I got the job at Utah because I was mixed blood and had a B.A.,” King told me. At a time when Native people with degrees were rare, King was an asset who could navigate housing, financial aid, and federal protocols. He also started teaching Native studies classes and began a Ph.D. there. In 1980, before even finishing his dissertation, he was invited to teach in the Native-studies department at the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta, jump-starting a long career in academia.

He had been writing “dreadful short fiction” since he was in

New Zealand, he said, but he didn’t publish his first book until 1990, after Margaret Atwood wrote about two short stories he’d published and King connected with a literary agent. “When we were founding small presses in the 1960s, we looked and looked for Indigenous writers, and there just weren’t any,” Atwood told me. “We found plenty of people writing about Indigenous people. But then came along Jeannette Armstrong, Tomson Highway, and Thomas King. Tom brought a wit to it. He was funny.” As far as she’s concerned, he did nothing wrong. “If I moved to France and was brought up French, would I be allowed to write about France?” she asked me. “I think Tom King should be adopted by a First Nation and thanked for all the work he did.” Atwood herself is an honorary member of Wolf Lake First Nation and was given an official status card that she carried around with her for a time. It once got her out of a bind when she lost her passport.

What gets me about Thomas King is his lack of curiosity as the years went on and he started taking jobs in Native American-studies departments, started writing Native stories. As I asked him many different times during our talks, “But didn’t you wonder or feel like you had to confirm something about being Cherokee at different points along the way?” And every time, he answered as if such a thing had never occurred to him. “I talked to a guy, probably in his late 20s, who was chewing on me pretty hard,” King told me. “And he said, ‘Why the hell didn’t you go on the internet and look up this shit?’ I was born in the early ’40s; I didn’t have an internet. I didn’t have a computer until the 1970s. And what I realized is that a lot of the complaints about what I did or didn’t do really don’t take into consideration the world of the 1940s and the 1950s—a very different world than today’s.”

He did try to find out more about his father’s side of the family, including traveling to Oklahoma in the 1970s, where he said he met with a recent retiree from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But he said he kept hitting dead ends and gave up. About two decades ago, some of his estranged father’s children from other relationships tracked him down, but he doesn’t seem to have used the new connections to seriously restart his research. According to his op-ed, he made at least one other trip to find relatives, including members of the Hunt family. His mother had told him a man named Elvin Hunt might have been King’s biological grandfather instead of the person listed as King’s grandfather of record. Still, there were so many years before he connected with TAAF when the internet did exist. Why hadn’t he tried to verify anything then? The Cherokees are one of the best-documented Native tribes, so why hadn’t he hired a genealogist before he got wind that he might not be Native after all?

HOMAS KING’S FIRST platform as a voice for First Nations people in Canada started with “The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour.” He invited his listeners to laugh at the very things that killed and were still killing Native people. It was satire as survival strategy, a broadcast from a fictional café taken from King’s second novel, Green Grass, Running Water, on which he played himself and brought on mostly First Nations guests who made fun of white people or white people’s perceptions of Native people. By the time The Inconvenient Indian arrived in 2012, King was an established voice in Canadian broadcasting. “I thought the book was brilliant. I didn’t read a lot of books like

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A Pretendian Primer

A very incomplete list of white people who claimed to be Native.

Archibald Stansfeld Belaney

In the 1930s, the Englishman claimed to be born to a Scottish father and Apache mother. He published two popular books under the name Grey Owl.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

For decades, the folk singer said she had Indigenous ancestry and wrote songs about Native experiences. A 2023 investigation by the CBC revealed she was of Italian and English descent, though she continued to claim to be “a proud member of the Native community.”

Earl Asa Carter

A speechwriter for George Wallace and former Klan member who wrote a well-received novel from the perspective of a Cherokee orphan while pretending to be a Cherokee writer named Forrest.

Joseph Boyden

The writer was appointed as a member of the Order of Canada for his work focusing on First Nations. Several Indigenous researchers have disputed his ancestral claims, though Boyden continues to identify as part Indigenous.

that,” said Talaga, who was one of the first people to publicly criticize King in a scathing Globe and Mail op-ed titled “Thomas King’s Storytelling Now Feels Like a Betrayal.” She adds, “I had heard the rumors, but I didn’t want to believe it.” She brought up the 2023 CBC investigation that revealed the singer Buffy Sainte-Marie had no Indigenous ancestry. (Sainte-Marie, responding to the accusations, claimed to be “a proud member of the Native community with deep roots in Canada.”)

I can’t stress enough how big of a deal it was inside the lives and hearts of Native people who loved her that Buffy Sainte-Marie is not actually Native. At all. It was like finding out Elvis was an alien. “I think for a lot of First Nations women in Canada, she presented as this beautiful First Nations woman. Remember those long leather boots and the black hair?” said Talaga. “And there she was in the ’60s, and there she was at Woodstock. It was wild. And the one thing about our people is we’re so proud and we are so happy to see that.”

There’s something else that happens when artists, specifically, turn out to not be who you thought they were. A kind of corruption of memory. When a vulnerable part of you has opened up to some piece of beauty or connection in a work of art by someone who turns out to not be who they said they were, that part of you will close back up. And worse, it will be less likely to open again. “Now, I listen to Buffy and I hear screeching,” Talaga told me. She feels similarly about King. “You’ve written this beautiful book, The Inconvenient Indian, a hard-hitting book on the history of Turtle Island. How could you not turn the lens on yourself and do that? That’s the part I found very tough.”

IF THE TEAM OF JOURNALISTS at the CBC was the downfall of Sainte-Marie, for King it was TAAF. The Tribal Alliance Against Frauds was started in 2023 by a group of volunteer American Indians. “We had been informally working with some Facebook groups who do genealogy and in particular the Cherokee one,” Lianna Costantino, a co-founder of TAAF, told me in early June. She and the other co-founders realized that they needed a dedicated organization to go after Pretendians. “In the beginning, it always starts with an innocent grandmother story, but eventually, in a lot of cases, it becomes a downright lie because they discover they’re in fact not Indian but continue with the grift,” she said. The way TAAF typically decides to pursue a case is “somebody comes to us and says, ‘I think this guy’s a fraud, and I think he’s making money doing it,’” Costantino explained. “One of the first things we do is approach that person and say, ‘Hey, this is TAAF, this is what we do. Somebody reported you as a potential fraud. Would you mind sharing what it is you base your claim of being an American Indian person on and thus having an American Indian perspective on anything or a right to center yourself in American Indian things?’ Usually, they’re very defensive: ‘I don’t have to prove anything to you. Who the fuck are you?’ And they get very angry. And no Indian would ever do that. I’ve only ever had one legitimately Indian person get offended that I was asking,” TAAF’s lead genealogist, who goes by the name Athena, detailed her process in an email: “When investigating a claimed American Indian ancestor, I specifically attempt to establish an unbroken documentary chain connecting the living subject to the alleged ancestor. The research therefore proceeds generation by generation: subject → parent → grandparent → great-grandparent → earlier generation → claimed American Indian ancestor. Each relationship is independently evaluated. If the documentary evidence establishes a person’s parents but the next generation cannot be reliably established, I stop the ancestral chain at that point rather than filling the gap with an assumption. This is one of the most important safeguards against accidentally transforming a possibility into a genealogical fact.” She had much more to

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PHOTOGRAPHS: ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES, DELACORTE PRESS, ULF ANDERSON/GETTY IMAGES

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say about the organization's research process, but she emphasized that tribal nations are sovereign governments and they ultimately determine who belongs in their nation. "Genealogical research can establish whether a claimed ancestral relationship is supported by historical documentation, but a genealogist should not substitute a genealogical conclusion for a Tribal Nation's own determination of citizenship or belonging. Accordingly, our research focuses on what the historical and genealogical record can demonstrate while respecting the authority of Indigenous communities over their own citizenship and identity."

In some ways, TAAF came into existence because of a growing concern about too many Pretendians getting away with it specifically in academic institutions and the arts. In early 2021, a list of rumored Pretendians started circulating privately in Indian social-media circles. Jacqueline Keeler, enrolled in the Navajo Nation and of Yankton descent, originally created it. I had to wonder if I was on it: Even though my Cheyenne father was in my life, and I had no doubts about my official tribal enrollment, I wondered if people thought I wasn't a real Native, if I were being perceived as a Pretendian. Not long after I met King in Mexico, I heard that he was on the list.

TAAF eventually learned that some Indigenous people had doubted King's background for years, perhaps even before the list emerged. King said he heard the group was investigating him and got in touch. Costantino claimed TAAF reached out first. Either way, they connected in October 2025. "We had a Zoom meeting with him where he got to speak to our genealogist and ask questions. And she explained everything to him and nauseam, and that was very exhausting," Costantino said. "We explained that we would like to release a statement together so that we can show a united front. We'd like to vouch for you going forward as an ally, but that requires you doing the right thing there too. We would like to see an apology, a legitimate sincere apology, not just that you got caught but that you understand." Instead, Costantino said, King went radio silent and published the op-ed on his own. "We were all pissed because it clearly was him getting ahead of it. And he cut off all communication with us too at that point, so he wouldn't talk to me or anybody else. It was like, 'Here you are trying to get out in front of the story so that you can control the narrative and play the sad old white man who's done so much for us Indians and get our sympathy and our empathy.'"

King described TAAF as a group that gave him no "courtesy," putting him on its "naughty list" before ever contacting him, referring to the private list the organization keeps of people it's currently investigating for having false claims of Native ancestry. He likened his interaction with TAAF's leadership to being "ambushed," a process he found "nasty" and reductive. Costantino denied this. "He seemed to think we were being nasty because we referred to him as a white man, but we were trying to explain to him, 'You need to understand that you are a white man and a European descendant and there's nothing wrong with that,'" Costantino said.

The term Pretendian hunter has proliferated online in reference to groups like TAAF. I find the term racist, conjuring an image of a savage holding a club. Pretendian hunters tend to be painted as aggressive or angry, which ultimately serves to undermine their claims. So-called Pretendian hunters have coined a term of their own, Defendians, to describe the people who defend the Pretendians. It's a sensitive topic. People fight online, families fight among themselves, and many people don't want to talk about the subject at all.

Who gets to decide who belongs? Native people might say your community claims you. But when the subject of blood comes into it, things get messy. I would still be one-64th short of actually being half-Cheyenne if my dad fixed the problem of not having

"He seemed to but we were trying to

his Cheyenne father—who was one-16th German—on his birth certificate. But since this problem didn't get fixed, I'm one-quarter Cheyenne on the CDIB (certificate degree of Indian blood), which meant until my tribe changed its blood-quantum qualification amount to one-eighth from one-quarter, I couldn't enroll my sons in my tribe.

The legal status of Native people, the required blood quantum of federally recognized tribes, is a policy white people invented to gatekeep what being Native means—one of many methods to get rid of Native people altogether that is sometimes referred to as "bureaucratic genocide."

David Cornsilk is a retired Cherokee genealogist who has also now concluded King isn't Native. He said he reached out to King back in 2012 with questions about his ancestry, though King said he never heard from him. To Cornsilk, calling out Pretendians isn't about being "mean"; it's about prioritizing tribal sovereignty. "The tribe has the right to determine its own citizenship," Cornsilk told me. To Cornsilk, the distinction between Native DNA and Native culture is a false binary often used by those who have neither. He pointed to Elizabeth Warren, whose DNA test showed less than 2 percent Native heritage and who was never an enrolled member of Cherokee Nation. Warren at least sufficiently understood the political reality of claiming membership in a group she hadn't grown up in to apologize for saying she had Cherokee ancestry in the lead-up to her 2020 presidential campaign, though Cornsilk found it to be a very weak apology. King, conversely, told me he feels that to apologize is to admit guilt, and he maintained he didn't cheat anyone because he believed his mother's story.

As the forensic pressure mounted in 2025, King's defense became technical, even labyrinthine. He described the search for his genealogy as a "plate of wet spaghetti"—a series of dead ends and cul-de-sacs. He told me about the samples he sent to CRI Genetics and Ancestry.com, which were apparently sent back by U.S. Customs or lost in a security loop with an Apple account he didn't have. "It drives me nuts," he said, "because it makes me look as though I'm dragging my feet or I'm just trying to hide something, and I'm not."

When the paper trail failed, King leaned into physiognomy—the way he looks and the way people perceive him. He spoke about being at a coffee shop where a young person assumed he was Native just by looking at him. To King, this perception is a reality that cannot be dismantled. "Ms. Costantino told me that appearance has nothing to do with ethnicity. No offence, but she's wrong. Appearance is what people see, the visual upon which they form a first opinion as to who you are. And how people see you and how they reflect that back—good and bad—helps to form and maintain an identity," he wrote in his op-ed. "Don't believe me? Talk to Black folks in North America. To Muslims. To Sikhs. To any person with brown skin. But Ms. Costantino is also right. Appearance can have little to do with ancestry."

Cornsilk agreed on that last point. Identity is not a costume or a feeling but rather a legal and political status. "Colonization didn't end with the theft of our land," Cornsilk said. "They're now colonizing our identity."

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think we were being nasty because we referred to him as a white man, explain to him, 'You need to understand that you are a white man and a European descendant and there's nothing wrong with that.'

The second time I spoke with King, he wore a Cleveland Indians baseball cap with the old Chief Wahoo logo. I was a little shocked at what felt like the tone-deafness of it. He called it a joke to lighten the mood, referencing a photo shoot he'd done years ago featuring cultural representations of Indians alongside Native artists in Lone Ranger masks. It felt defensive—a way of saying that none of this stuff really matters. It's what happens when identity is a choice rather than a responsibility. But it does matter. King told me, 'Mostly I hear silence, the sound of silence from the Native community.'

When it comes to his writing process, King's 'one hard and fast rule is nobody sees the book until I think it's done and ready for publication and then I send it to a publisher.' (The only exception is his life partner.) The way that I've always written requires that I let others in to qualify the experience I am writing about. For my debut novel, There There, the first public reading I did was for Native youths I worked with at a nonprofit based in Oakland. Reading to them helped me understand if what I was writing felt real and was relatable for the kinds of people I was writing about, because it was them I was writing for. I read my novel to other Native writers, too. King's private process felt strange to me. Protective. For reasons I didn't understand.

The lingering question, the one that sits in the throat of every reader who ever found themselves in his pages, is 'Can a story be true if the storyteller's identity is not?' If a story heals you, does it matter that the hand that wrote it wasn't the hand you thought it was? King often referred to himself as a 'bad Indian,' one who didn't speak the language and wasn't from the reserve. I'd asked in one of our conversations about his sons, if he'd raised them to know their Cherokee heritage and if they now identify as Cherokee men. 'One of the boys had a rough time. He doesn't look Native at all,' King said. 'The white kids who found out he was part Native gave him a tough time. The Native kids who he wasn't Native enough for gave him a tough time. So he got caught in the middle, and it was not a nice place to be, and it was something I couldn't protect him

from. And so I think he just turned off and said, 'I don't need this.' He said his other son had more exposure to Indian culture growing up: 'We had a big drum here in town that we sang on for five or six years, and he was one of the singers on that drum.'

CAN'T SAY that I myself am the best kind of Indian. I don't live in and am not in meaningful touch with my tribal community in Oklahoma. I do not know how to speak the language of my Cheyenne ancestors. I do have an intertribal Oakland community that I'm a part of and that claims me. And I have family stories that are true and, as with any family, family stories that are lies. In many ways, the family I was born into is broken. And in many ways, this comes from historical trauma, from things my dad went through that he passed on to his kids, that I myself have continued. There is a wound some of us write through related to what it feels like to be a Native person. There is an earned quality to writing about this experience, and there is a cost to knowing things about what it feels like to come from this wound.

I got this email from King several months after we started talking:

I just got the DNA back from 23½Me and they are no better than the results from Ancestry. No indigenous markers. It's hard for me to believe and the two tests have left me devastated. On the bright side, the 23½Me results have me as a 2% Neanderthal with Viking chieftain markers... Hot damn. So, there it is. I still see a mixed blood when I look in the mirror. Going to have to find a new mirror. Can't tell you the pain I'm in over this. But hey, it is what it is. Just wanted to follow through on my promise to share the results.

Eighty-three years is a long time to live inside a story. He told me he will keep writing, but he won't be writing from a 'Native perspective' anymore because that 'palette' is gone.

If the pictures of Native life he painted resembled the stories of real Native people, it's because he did spend a lot of time around Native people. He did 'put in the work,' as he said many times over the course of our calls. I don't believe Thomas King lacks the talent to write stories with heart and humor and depth. But the fact is he rose to prominence at a time when there was a lack of Native stories. He—if unknowingly—used Native stories that were not his to tell to further his career. This is how he will be remembered now. I asked him what he thinks the best outcome from all of this could possibly be; in an ideal world, what would he want to happen? 'I've got no answer,' King said, and I can hear that he wants to know if he can still survive this as a writer, if he will still be read somehow. 'I guess you just take it for what it is. The story is out there now. You can't call it back. Once the words are spoken, they belong to the listener.'

Only he's still on the search. During fact-checking for this story, he shared that he is continuing to look into whether his paternal grandfather may have had Lumbee heritage, after someone wrote to him suggesting that the name Elvin Hunt sounded Lumbee—a tribe that North Carolina temporarily reclassified as Cherokee from 1913 to 1954. 'I'm not making any claims about being part Lumbee,' he said. 'It's an unanswered question, and it came out of the initial brouhaha. I'm not going to leave that stone unturned. I'm just trying to fill in the blank as best I can.'

I wanted to give King credit for facing a very difficult thing, a cracked mirror or the disappearance of familiar walls of a place that housed his very belonging. But there is something unsettling about his continued search for that belonging, even after two DNA tests showed no Indigenous markers and two genealogists told him there was nothing tying him to a lineage of Native people whatsoever. He seems unable to stop looking for a shred of evidence that will justify his whole life. But his time would be better spent thinking about how to make things right with the people he was representing all along. Working with our tones and our pain and joys should be considered an honor. Maybe he should find a way to say, if not 'sorry,' then at least 'thanks.'

AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 | NEW YORK 35

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THE BEST WNBA INSIGHT CAN ONLY COME FROM THE BEST.

VOXMEDIA × TOGETHER

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THE ONE-PAGE GUIDE TO:

Moving Apartments

YOU INCESSANTLY SCROLLED through StreetEasy, dodged ghosting brokers, and finally found a place to live.

Congrats! Now it's time to move your stuff. Writer Cassie Hurwitz tracked down the best moving companies, professional packers, and tips for loading everything into your new home.

► Book your move early—and move off-peak and mid-month. Many movers take reservations at least two weeks out during popular times, says Rick Carruthers, the owner of Sven Moving, and deposits are often refundable. Moving on the first or last of the month will be expensive and busy; scheduling for a random day is cheaper and calmer. "The 26th to the 2nd is what we call 'hell week,'" says Lou DeFabrizio of Lou Moves You. ► Before you hire a well-known moving company, try negotiating. Use quotes from multiple companies to attempt to secure a cheaper price from your top pick. Just note: The quality of service by big-name companies can be inconsistent because their businesses rely on seasonal subcontractors. ► If you have to move yourself,

a U-Haul and Taskrabbit combo is the cheapest option. You can rent a nine-foot U-Haul cargo van (from $20 per day) or a 20-foot truck (from $40), which is better for moving a two- or three-bedroom. Adding someone from Taskrabbit will cost anywhere from $40 to $80 an hour.

► Deal with a gap between moving out and in by renting a storage space—Manhattan Mini Storage is the most affordable. A medium-size, climate-controlled unit in its Chelsea location starts at $99 a month. If you need to store your stuff for only one night, look for a mover like Liberty Moving & Storage or Sven Moving that charges by the weight and length of time stored and won't commingle your stuff with other people's. ► There isn't really a budget option for packing and unpacking services, but it can make a big difference for larger moves. Joanna Muenz, a photo director in Queens, paid Oz Moving $3,000 to pack up her family of four. "What would've taken me weeks took them a few hours," she says. If you're packing for yourself or live in a studio or one-bedroom, again, Taskers are your best bet.

► Keep your clothes on hangers by using wardrobe boxes, which saves you a ton of energy during the packing process, says Olivia Hyde, an account director who has moved almost every year of her life, including four times within New York City. ► If your couch doesn't fit, call a "couch doctor." While the original New York Couch Doctor (516-779-1720) is famed for disassembling bulky furniture in emergency situations 24/7, the charge is anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars. Similar services like Couch Doctor NYC (from $450; 347-509-5003), Dr. Sofa (from $250; 888-837-7632), and Jose Nunez (from $250; 347-446-8879) can take apart sectionals and large pieces such as kitchen tables. ► Tip your movers 20 percent. This is especially

appropriate for a $1,000-plus move, but don't be a miser if it's a smaller job. It's customary to hand over cash to the foreman; they'll distribute it evenly to each mover, according to Matt Graber, the co-owner of Cool Hand Movers. But Venmo or Zelle is often ideal ("The last thing you want is that tip falling out of your pocket when moving up and down stairs," says DeFabrizio). ► Wizard of Homes will do a specialized "move-out" deep clean of your empty apartment from $200. In addition to vacuuming and mopping, Wizard will clean the insides of windows, closets, and cabinets. Si Se Puede Women's Cooperative (from $145) is another favorite, and Butch4Hire, a do-it-all company marketed to queer folks, does apartment cleaning starting at $100. ■

38 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

Illustrations by Zach Hackman

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THE LOOK BOOK GOES TO

An Indochine Staff Reunion

The Noho institution celebrated its 42nd year with current and former servers, hosts, and staffers; birthday cake; and a vogue ball.

INTERVIEWS BY JEREMY RELLOSA

BAIZY KEFLAY

Restaurateur, Lower East Side

What did you do at Indochine?

I was a server, starting in 2005, for like seven years. I was known as the girl with the head wrap. That was my signature look.

Has much changed about this place since you left?

The staff now is just younger and hotter. Every generation has a different vibe. I would like to say that when I was working here, we had the most fun. We were wild girls. We were not just pretty. We were all characters.

It seems like people love working here.

I've worked in many restaurants, but Indochine was a place that allowed me to be myself. It never leaves you, wherever you go. I opened a restaurant in the Theater District recently. A customer walked in, and he was like, "Oh my God, aren't you the Indochine girl?"

Photographs by Tessa Belle Dillman

39

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THE LOOK BOOK: INDOCHINE STAFFERS

HAILEY ROSE Server and model, Noho

VIRGINIA W. ALLEYNE Server, Upper East Side

GALE SCOTT DJ and student, Chelsea

SAMUEL ALFILER General manager and actor, Los Angeles, California

TASHA HENRY Actor, Astoria

DIANA LANNES Photographer, Los Angeles, California

MAMY FALL Model, Seaport

HUY CHI LE Restaurateur, Kensington

RAHEL GHEBREMICHAEL Model, Lower East Side

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SAKAE ISHIKAWA Video editor, East Village

RICHARD SERPICA Handyman, Bay Ridge

► Any good stories from working here?

Every time anyone meets me, they say, "Oh, Iman, like David Bowie's wife." She's a regular here. One time, we're in the bathroom together. She's washing her hands, and I'm like, "Hi, Iman. I'm Iman. Every single time I meet someone, they mention you." She looks at me and says, "Okay. Yeah, whatever you say, lady in the bathroom!"

IMAN JAZMIN BROWN Model, actor, and maître d', Los Angeles, California

ELIGHA OJOK WEISS Model and EMT, Bedford

→ Did you have a favorite night on the job? One Sunday, my friend and I were working a double shift. This lovely gentleman came in with his son and asked for a mezcal-rinsed vodka martini. Then he promptly tipped us a thousand dollars.

EMILY WALLACE Beverage director, Noho

DYLAN THOMPSON Maître d', Bushwick

ANGÉLIQUE REHARDE Multidisciplinary artist, Bedford-Stuyvesant

TAVIANA DANSBY Freelance architect and server, Bedford-Stuyvesant

← What's it like meeting former staff? We treat them almost better than celebrities because you see celebrities here and it doesn't really surprise you. But when someone who hasn't been here in a decade or two comes in, that's when we freak out.

BLAIRE SPICER Event director, Bushwick

AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 | NEW YORK 41

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DESIGN HUNTING

This Old, Very Old, Hamptons House

The restoration of an 18th-century cottage in the Springs proves worthy of its bohemian past.

BY WENDY GOODMAN

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago, the artist and custom framer Pamela Morgan got a call from a friend alerting her to the sale of a worn cottage house in the Springs believed to date back to the late 1700s. Its last owner was the literary muse Patsy Southgate.

Morgan, a granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, had been renting a former chicken coop in Bridgehampton for many years with her daughter Rachael, and she had not been looking to buy. “But I listened to my friend and I came out on a horrible winter day in February. I hit the driveway, and it was too much driveway,” she recalls.

The zigzagging dirt path led to grounds so overgrown with scrub oaks and tangled vines she had no idea where the property lines began or ended. The living-room windows were shrouded by wild lilacs. “I went, Oh, it’s perfect,” Morgan says. She knew how she would fix it up and that it would take a long time. “I visualized all the possibilities and got to work.”

Morgan cleared the land, planted a vegetable garden, and

The Living Room

The wicker-backed chair belonged to Pamela Morgan’s grandmother Marie Norton Harriman and her second husband, W. Averell Harriman. The bust of Marie is by Jo Davidson. The watercolor is by Morgan. The framed photograph is by Nicholas Vreeland. The etching over the sofa is by Caio Fonseca. The rug is from Carpet Culture.

42 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

Photographs by Annie Schlechter

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The Garden

The original brick path was rediscovered by Morgan when she dug to clear the vegetable garden around 2003. The grape arbor and vines were in place when Morgan bought the property.

turned an open shed into a playhouse and guest bedroom for her grandsons. She also converted a part of the house built in the 1980s into her bedroom and studio, where today she paints still-life and landscape watercolors.

The newer addition was the work of Southgate, a writer and translator who had relocated to the Springs with her husband, the novelist Peter Matthiessen, after several years at the center of the American-expat scene in mid-century Paris. Their social circle on Long Island included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Frank O'Hara, who makes reference to visiting Southgate out East in his famous poem "The Day Lady Died."

O'Hara and Southgate were such close friends that his lover Joe LeSueur lived with her for decades. LeSueur died in 2001, and a year later Morgan bought the house from Southgate's daughter. Southgate "had been dead a few years, but part of her arrangement was that Joe could continue living here," Morgan says. A friend gave her a bush of climbing roses,

The Main Bedroom

"The bed frame came from a tag sale and cost $50," Morgan says. The chair belonged to her grandmother Marie and was reupholstered by Morgan's sister Alida, an artist and landscape designer. Morgan opened up the room, which was closed off, and installed doors that had belonged to her friend David Zinsser.

The Kitchen

The open shelves hold Morgan's decades-old bowls from Pottery Barn as well as the Calyx Ware Lowestoft china that is a family heirloom. The table came from Morgan's former rental home in Bridgehampton. The light fixture is from the since-closed Grand Brass Lamp Parts.

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DESIGN HUNTING

↓ The Staircase

The stair “runner” leading to a former bedroom was painted blue when Morgan got the house. She decided to keep it that way. “It’s one of the reasons I loved the house so much,” she says.

→The Porch

“I did not plant it, but I trained it,” says Morgan of the ivy covering the wood posts of the screened-in dining area, where she serves meals in summer. The table is made of salvaged parts, including a piece of wood found on the street in Manhattan in the 1980s. The hanging lantern was found at a yard sale.

which now covers LeSueur’s former living quarters. “Suddenly, you don’t see it’s an addition at all.”

For the most part, Morgan has filled the interiors with heirloom furnishings, including the battered Louis Vuitton steamer trunk her grandparents Cornelius and Marie took on their honeymoon in the 1920s (Marie would later marry New York governor W. Averell Harriman). The hard-edge suitcase is now a coffee table that sits in the living room between the wood-burning fireplace and a sofa that’s the only significant piece of contemporary furniture. Morgan prefers to keep her home free of modern trappings. “Don’t forget,” she says. “This is one of the first houses around.” ■

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AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 | NEW YORK 47

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FOOD

RESTAURANT REVIEW

A Win for Argentina

Graciela is an offshoot of Buenos Aires's most famous parrilla. It's this city's most charming new steakhouse.

BY MATTHEW SCHNEIER

IT WAS A HOT Argentina summer up here in the northern hemisphere when La Albiceleste surprised the world, meeting Spain to play for what might have been its second consecutive World Cup title. Then things took a turn. Argentina succumbed to La Roja, and the tide of public opinion receded sharply. Accusations of dirty play and racist behavior (by players and fans) led to choral condemnations online; the boys sealed their fate with a Cup-capping brawl.

Into this fraught moment comes a balm in beef fat, Graciela, which took over the large two-chambered space vacated by L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele. It's the first U.S. restaurant from Pablo Rivero, the Argentine restaurateur whose Buenos Aires parrilla, Don Julio (a kind of grill-forward steakhouse—a parrilla is a type of grill), is a gastro-tourist pilgrimage site, like a South American Luger's, albeit one that favors a warmer style of service.

Graciela 81 Greenwich Ave., at Bank St. gracielange.com

"How many people work here?" my dinner guest whispered as we were ushered past a gauntlet of greeters in custom pañuelos and coffee-colored chore jackets, all chirping "hello," eight or ten in total. On any given night, they were saluting the Argentines waving to Rivero and West Village Girls photographing their entrées; during one meal, I spotted Elle and Dakota Fanning sharing a table. Swelled to abundance for the opening, at least, the floor staff display a thoroughgoing commitment to charm. The employee-to-diner ratio allows for very regular check-ins by a rotating cast, who are admirably well versed in the finer points of Argentine cuisine, whether they are New Yorkers slipping between English and Spanish ("Entonces, the French fries?") or one of five porteños who shipped in to join the restaurant and share their local knowledge, identifiable by the lisping sh of their gentle Argentine accents.

Don Julio is famous for its steaks, and I enjoyed the Argentine rib eye I sam-

48 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

Photographs by Hugo Yu

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pled, tender even with a minimum of fat, served sectioned, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, into three non-slice chunks on a wood-and-steel platter. It had a clean, pure-animal flavor, though I was even more taken with a cord of inch-thick short-rib slices, which had a more pungent funk. In place of the usual French sauces, Graciela offers two different chimichurris, a greener fresh one and a spicier, better, red variety. The sides list is limited and spinach free, and the best choice I found was the French fries, thick, twice-fried honkers with creamy interiors that already rank among the city's best.

Those willing to deviate from the

standard-edition steakhouse playbook will fare even better. By the late 1800s, Italians made up a majority of European immigrants to Argentina, and many of the dishes at Graciela nod to their influences: the deep-fried Milanese, here done with New York strip, or the fiery, fennel-scented Calabresa salami among the charcuterie. Osso buco empanadas, a staple at Don Julio, are unmissable, braid-edged half-moons filled with steaming braised beef shank, ready to be dripped with chile-and-tomato yassua after you bite off a sealing corner. (The yassua must be spooned into, not over, the empanada, Rivero stopped by my table to apprise us.) I wouldn't skip any

of that charcuterie, either, made from Rivero's recipes by the butchers at Ends Meat in Brooklyn, be it the flat wreaths of chacarero or Calabresa, or the long fatty squiggles of cecina, a kind of cured picaña beef, gilded with olive oil. I loved a new-to-me chickpea tart called fainá, like a bouncy, paprika-dusted marriage of a socca and a flan, and while I personally found the truth-in-advertising simplicity of "Un Tomate," a $23 tomato appetizer that is, quite literally, a single heirloom tomato dressed with more yassua, a little silly, the trays of them waiting visibly in kitchen racks suggested I might be the only one.

It wasn't any individual of these dishes that endeared me to Graciela but the long oily drowse of an evening there. "I thought New York was hard," Rivero said, fresh off a flight from Buenos Aires. "But the people are very nice." I suspect the truth is on the other side. It was almost with reluctance that our porteña waitress dropped off the check. "Come back anytime," she said. "This is your house."

SCRATCHPAD

IMPORT SPECIALISTS

Rivero's partners in Graciela are the Saper brothers, native New Yorkers who first helped bring Eataly to America's shores.

WINES TO MATCH

Rivero, a sommelier by training, offers a wine list of top Argentine producers like Zuccardi, El Montañista, and Matías Riccitelli.

SIMPLE AND SWEET

If you're not a flan person, Graciela's homemade ice cream is a good way to go. The kitchen offers a number of flavors. The best I sampled was almond.

AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 | NEW YORK 49

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MISS PIGGY / AMITA KAGY

CRITICS / TO DO

The CULTURE OF PAGES

He'll Break Your Heart

Charles Melton

is leading

a new generation

of strong,

sensitive types

in Hollywood.

By Molly Lambert

Photograph by Victoria Stevens

51

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The CULTURE PAGES

CHARLES MELTON SCANS the menu at Cindy's diner in Eagle Rock, looking every bit the L.A. hipster: sweatshirt, oversize pants, wraparound sunglasses, a stud in each ear. He's warm and relaxed, teasing the waitress over the lack of Coke (it's a Pepsi place), but when I ask about his daughter, born earlier this year, he loses all pretense of coolness, breaking into a wide grin and pulling up his camera roll. As he scrolls through iPhone photos of the most adorable baby I've ever seen, he emits the kind of infectious excitement the internet tends to describe as "golden-retriever energy." He practically squeals when he pauses on a picture of his daughter squeezed into a tomato-red dress: "Isn't she so cute?" Becoming a father is "the best thing" in his life.

In the near decade since he took over the role of Reggie Mantle in season two of Riverdale, Melton has made a meal of physically strong, emotionally sensitive types. He stole scenes from Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore as the latter's much younger husband in Todd Haynes's darkly comic melodrama May December, a role that gained him unfulfilled Oscar buzz, then played a calmly authoritative officer named Jake in Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza's Warfare. His performance this year as a himbo with a heart of gold in Lee Sung Jin's Beef earned him his first Emmy nomination for acting. (Doubling as an EP on the show, Melton is also nominated for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series.) On this Wednesday morning in early August, he's juggling the release of his newest film (Nicolas Winding Refn's sci-fi thriller Her Private Hell, which he describes as "physically the hardest thing I've ever had to do"), X-Men casting rumors (he's been coy about playing Beast and wasn't at the D23 cast announcement), and filming the Daniels' next movie, a top-secret project following the Best Picture-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once. The 35-year-old Melton is helping build a new kind of masculine archetype, the anti-red-pill guy who's much more complicated than he appears. Right now, though, he just misses his kid.

"I think, for any parent, it's hard when you're away, even if you don't see them for a few hours," Melton says, smiling as he gazes at his daughter's picture. "But the silver lining is to be grateful that you can miss somebody this much. It only exists because of how much you love them." As if on cue, his partner, French Australian director-photographer Camille Summers-Valli, calls from Europe, where she's directing a film. Melton ducks outside to catch up with her during this brief time-zone overlap.

In Beef's second season, Melton plays Austin Davis, a personal trainer whose hulking physique belies a deep well of empathy. His fiancée, Ashley (Caihee Spaeny), knows her ambition is the key to supporting a family, while Austin is an eager, if naïve, romantic. Fifteen minutes into the first episode, he pauses mid-push-up to rehydrate a flailing bee he spots on the floor. His face falls, defeated, as the insect buzzes its last. "A bee died in the house," he types, stone-faced, to Ashley. "I cried." When Ashley urges Austin to pose as a licensed physical therapist at the tony country club where they work to impress the wealthy new Korean owner (Youn Yuh-jung), he balks at the subterfuge. "He's coming to terms with not wanting to disappear," Melton says, ripping through his fries. "He used to be a very successful collegiate football player, and now he's trying to rediscover his life. He's probably questioned, What is my place in this world?" He probably wants to be a provider but then his fiancée ends up becoming the provider. What does that do to his psychology?"

When Austin develops a crush on his co-worker Eunice (Seoyeon Jang), it cracks open his own Korean identity, which he's been suppressing to fit in among white people. It's a life-changing moment for Austin, who says to his white fiancée, "I've never been around this many Koreans before, okay?" When the new owner's scheming takes them to Seoul, both Austin and Ashley are forced to choose: expose the corruption underpinning her business or keep their jobs, with all the safety and security they entail, and live with the guilt? Later, Austin is prepared to leave Ashley for Eunice, only to realize in the back of a taxicab that he'd be throwing away his life for a woman who doesn't love him back. The agony of heartbreak plays across his face. It's the

kind of performance that can and should launch Melton to the top of the call sheet.

He was astonished to learn how directly the role of Austin was tailored for him. Lee approached him at an event with a simple pitch: "He said, 'This picture is in our writers' room,' and it was a picture of me. I was like, 'Oh, does a character look like me?'" Melton remembers. "He's like, 'No, we're going to write for you. We're going to write to you.' That was very profound for me."

As a half-Korean, half-white kid growing up near Army bases in Germany and Korea before hopping around the American heartland with his parents and sisters, Melton learned how to code switch and fit in just about anywhere. "I mean, look—if I had a job interview or if I was meeting the studio head or a banker, whatever the social construct of the circumstance is, I can adapt to communicating a certain way. But one thing that I'm desensitized to is social awkwardness. People tell me I'm a big dork ... I'm like, Oh really?" If he's performing self-awareness right now, it's flawless, though he's right about the dorkiness. His delight as the conversation turns to all things filmmaking is so effusive it seems to bubble out of him.

We pay the bill and drive a few blocks to Vidiots, the legendary Los Angeles video store that in recent years moved into a former movie theater in the neighborhood. He rattles off a list of directors he'd love to work with, including Park Chan-wook, Thomas Vinterberg, Pablo Larraín, Paolo Sorrentino, and the Coen brothers. When he learned Refn wanted to meet with him, "I already knew I was going to do whatever project he had because it was Nic." Right after finishing Beef, he flew to Copenhagen to film Her Private Hell. He plays an American GI known as Private K, a vigilante figure searching for his daughter and plowing down any barrier in his way. "It was a rich area to explore—very animalistic and shadow-self-driven," he says. Melton did all his own stunts, fighting off a wall of yakuza and plucking out a sumo wrestler's eye with a knife. "I would train relentlessly," he says. "I remember getting physio during lunch to strengthen my hamstrings and my joints, and I was on my stomach eating cherry tomatoes and chicken breasts. My body was falling apart."

Sports were Melton's first language—"I thought I was going to be a football player for the rest of my life"—but on his way to practice at Kansas State University, he heard a radio ad for a talent showcase. "It was kind of a scam, but it gave me a lot of encouragement to drop out of school and move to L.A. with $500 in my pocket and a bunch of cans of tuna and Shin

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In Beef.

Ramyun,” he says. His dad, whom Melton describes as “a big dreamer, an artist,” drove him from Kansas to California. “We ended up getting two large Domino’s pizzas and sitting at Hermosa Beach, watching the sunset,” he says. “This sounds like a Hallmark movie or something, but I saw dolphins and porpoises swimming in the waves, and I remember thinking, Man, I’m exactly where I need to be.”

Riverdale was like a professional football team for burgeoning young talent. It was working with showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who cast him on Riverdale after Melton’s first screen credit, Glee (Melton played a male model named Gavin), that showed him how collaborative acting could be. “I remember texting Roberto random ideas about Reggie Mantle at midnight and one o’clock in the morning,” he says. “I was sharing personal things that gave him freedom to explore if he wanted to.” Back then, Melton auditioned for everything—“I was trying to fit into every character, into every role, and it was great schooling for me because I would fail thousands of times”—but he takes a more judicious approach to scripts now. “I know when I can serve something or not,” he explains.

Inside Vidiots, he bounds to the horror section (a genre he really wants to do), then sci-fi. (On Armageddon: “Do you know why I love this movie so much? People

“One thing that I’m desensitized to is social awkwardness. People tell me I’m a big dork ... I’m like, Oh really?”

from all walks of life come together to save the planet. And it’s the people that are least expected to save the planet.”) He asks what Agnès Varda movie he should rent as his introduction to her work and takes out Vagabond on my recommendation. He and Haynes have a future appointment to watch Vertigo, which Melton hasn’t seen yet. He talks about the magic of moviemaking with both wonder and pragmatism, equally interested in the glittering images as he is the brass tacks of funding and promotion. He and his sister Tammie started a produc-

tion company where he hopes to shepherd into existence the kinds of projects that still light up his synapses. Melton’s a great listener; he leans in to hear suggestions and disarms everyone around him into getting comfortable because he’s so comfortable with himself. At the counter, he asks the staff if the shop has May December with a big cartoony wink.

Next year, he’ll appear in the romantic drama Saturn Return on Netflix, and soon he’ll start filming on Elijah Bynum’s My Darling California alongside Jessica Chastain, Mikey Madison, and Chris Pine. He hopes to work on Lee’s first feature film whenever that happens. For actors, Melton says, there’s always “leakage” between the work and real life, but he’s careful about maintaining a balance and tries to get as far away from the entertainment industry as possible during his breaks. His daughter doesn’t get screen time, and he relished a recent camping trip when he was fully off the grid. “If I don’t have a life outside of the work, how do I expect to bring life into the work?” he asks. “If I’m doing Postmates every single meal and getting driven everywhere and flying private—not that I’m on private jets, because I’m not—and then I’m playing a blue-collar character, what life have I lived to help inform that?” He pauses, laughing. “But again, it’s make-believe. Julianne Moore always says, ‘Honey, it’s pretend!’” ■

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Our Last Movie Star

Like Mae West and other classic Hollywood icons, Miss Piggy plays with femininity in delightful, contradictory ways. By Angelica Jade Bastién

I AM A BLONDE because of three women: my mother, Lil' Kim, and Miss Piggy. The last in particular has shaped my understanding of womanhood and its possibilities since I was a child in the '90s; every holiday season, I admired her aggressive and assured demeanor as our home wore out the VHS tape of The Muppet Christmas Carol. I am not alone in my estimation of Miss Piggy. ¶ "For me, growing up, there was a woman who I just related to. She just felt very strong. She had a really specific POV. She asked for what she wanted. She always had good jokes. And that woman was Miss Piggy," Amy Poehler said last spring on an episode of Las Culturistas. Her comment was met with shrieks from Bowen Yang and praise from Matt Rogers. On Poehler's own podcast this year, the actress Da'Vine Joy Randolph said, "That lady, I am who I am today because of her. At a young age, that being instilled in you: You don't take shit from men. You do your thing. Be fabulous." She added, "That's my girrill." During Sabrina Carpenter's Short n' Sweet tour, Miss Piggy made a cameo as the celebrity who got "arrested" during the singer's last show. The crowd's response was uproarious. Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone are spearheading a new Miss Piggy-focused movie, set to be written by Cole Escola. When asked by W magazine earlier this year if she would be playing the diva, Stone scoffed in disbelief: "First of all, that is the biggest insult to Miss Piggy I have ever heard, and I will not have her name dragged through the mud, I'm sorry. Why would I play a literal star?" She continued, "Of course I'm not playing Miss Piggy ... Miss Piggy is playing Miss Piggy." Who else could?

To say Miss Piggy is having a moment would be inaccurate. Since the mid-1970s, she's been a cultural icon, bridging the gap between comedy and the world of fashion. She's been dressed by Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Vivienne Westwood, and Zac Posen, among others. She has reported from New Year's Eve ceremonies and written a best-selling book. She's appeared on the covers of Elle, Life, and even New York in 2011. But Miss Piggy is the last woman movie star. She is part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, carefully curated

personas bolstered both by their market value at the box office and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that end up on the silver screen. These are women like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West. During their reign in Hollywood's Golden Age, their lives and cinematic work played out ideals about femininity and its expectations in American culture writ large. It's a legacy Miss Piggy carries on.

Miss Piggy has spent the past five decades building an image of delightful contradic-

tions: She's glamorous and insecure, bold and vulnerable, domineering and high femme. Whether sparring with Joan Rivers on Fashion Police in 2012 while wearing Louboutins ("Please, Joan, have some dignity. Or did it get sucked out the last time you had lipo?"); yearning for romance with her on-again, off-again beau, Kermit the Frog; or asking Carpenter if she's wearing her wig in The Muppet Show 2026 special, Miss Piggy has made these contradictions into high comedic art.

Her presence is an argument: A woman can make herself into her greatest artistic work. Being full of yourself isn't detrimental but necessary for survival. Humor is a means of self-definition. Within the oeuvre of the Muppets' cinematic and televisual work, Miss Piggy hasn't ever wholly been a punch line—her image is too dexterous for that. But aspects of her persona have been. Consider the 1982 song "Snackcercise," featured on Miss Piggy's Aerobique Exercise Workout Album. In the video, dressed in the workout gear du jour, Miss Piggy lounges while dancers flank her. "I maintain my dynamite figure with a daily aérobique workout," she explains. "Now you go to your refrigerator and get your exercise equipment and get ready to snackcercise." Workout moves like "banana splits" advise one to "lift the dish, grab the spoon, take a bite and chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow." Her weight and notable appetite are integral to the musical number. But something has shifted within this decade. The Miss Piggy attributes that were once gags are now the very aspects of her character that millennials (and, to a lesser extent, younger Gen-Xers) deify her for.

ONE OF THE EARLIEST incarnations of Miss Piggy was an unnamed, blonde, beady-eyed puppet in 1975's The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence who spoke in a nasally whine during a film parody, "Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs." By the time The Muppet Show premiered the next year, Miss Piggy was reborn. She was given a distinctive look by designer Bonnie Erickson: a flowing gown, satin opera gloves, and large light-blue eyes framed by thick eyelashes. She is one of the few Muppets with irises, which go a long way toward making her seem human. And thanks to her puppeteer Frank Oz, who performed the character from early in her history until the beginning of the aughts, her highly romantic and vivacious personality came to life. What's fascinating about Miss Piggy's journey from chorus girl in 1976 to Muppets star is how quickly her persona coalesced once Jim Henson & Co. saw her potential.

In the 1979 New York Times article "The

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Muppets in Movieland," pegged to the then-upcoming fourth season of The Muppet Show, Oz shares her origin story: Miss Piggy "grew up in a small town; her father died when she was young; her mother wasn't that nice to her. She had to enter beauty contests to survive. She has a lot of aggressiveness, but she needs a lot to survive—as many single women do. She has a lot of vulnerability, which she has to hide, because of her need to be a superstar." All her fabulousness comes with a current of complication and sorrow: "Although Miss Piggy's essentially humorous, to me she's had a sad, difficult, painful life," Oz says. On a class level, Miss Piggy is a striver, a self-made woman who acts as an argument for the power of self-determination.

In the 1981 film The Great Muppet Caper, we see this self-determination in action. Haughty fashion designer Lady Holiday (Diana Rigg) is talking about the failure of recent designs: "We have to make drastic changes in the new line before the show tomorrow. All my girls are going around looking like barnyard animals." Off-camera, someone clears their throat.

"Good heavens, who are you?" asks Lady Holiday. That someone is Miss Piggy. Blonde hair flowing. Pearls gleaming. She casts a saucy gaze from beneath a white hat with pink florals. Her dress is white, magenta, and burgundy, matching her hat. She poses, leaning against the door. "My name is Miss Piggy, and I would like to be a high-fashion model."

"Doesn't surprise me. Seems to be the way we're heading," Lady Holiday volleys, but Miss Piggy is undeterred.

"I've always dreamed of being a Holiday model," she says. "May I come in?"

"Absolutely not."

Miss Piggy comes in anyway. She practically hops around the desk.

"May I show you my portfolio?"

"No."

Miss Piggy plops her black-cover portfolio

folio on the desk: "Good. Here." Noticing Lady Holiday's trepidation, Miss Piggy says, "You may open it." Lady Holiday listlessly turns the pages, barely glancing at Miss Piggy in various outfits.

"This is me reeking grandeur. Being aloof. Being demure," Miss Piggy narrates. "Ah!"—her voice drops a few octaves from its typical prissy, preening softness—"Daring." While the clothes change, her pose and expression remain the same.

"Interesting range of emotions," Lady Holiday says sarcastically.

Miss Piggy is as confident as ever: "Modeling is my life. It is my destiny. I shall accept nothing less." She gets a job as a receptionist and screams with pleasure at the prospect. One step closer to her goal of stardom.

Oz once said his way of understanding Miss Piggy was she's a "truck driver wanting to be a woman." These rough-hewn aspects of Miss Piggy's femininity feel incongruous only if you believe a woman's natural state is to be coy and demure, that things happen to you but you never drive the action. It's the way Miss Piggy renders her femininity as an arch spectacle, twisting expectations by incorporating notes culturally associated with the masculine, that makes her a star. A movie star isn't merely a title bestowed upon those whose box-office numbers back it up. A star affects the reading of a film as much as the cinematography, direction, and costume design. And a true one turns their contradictions into a cohesive art form.

Miss Piggy's greatest ancestor in this regard is Mae West. With a career spanning seven decades, starting in vaudeville before turning toward pre-Hays Code Hollywood, West established her stardom her own damn self as an actress, comedian, screenwriter, and playwright. Her first lead role on Broadway was in the 1926 play Sex, which she also wrote. Her work was so incendiary she was arrested for it. She battled censorship onstage and onscreen to explore sexuality and femininity in all its colorful, bawdy

permutations. She liked her necklines low and gowns tight on her Rubeneseque frame. F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have deemed her the "only Hollywood actress with both an ironic edge and a comic spark." I'm partial to how West herself put it: "It isn't what I do but how I do it. It isn't what I say but how I say it. And how I look when I do it and say it."

It would be easy to stop at the superficial similarities between these outsize characters: blonde, petite in height but full-figured, defined by their appetites. But Miss Piggy and Mae West share an interesting tension: West was inspired by female impersonators, including Bert Savoy, who was a figure in The Greenwich Village Follies, a musical revue from 1919 through the 1920s. She plucked inspiration from his campy excess for her signature strut. In the 1930s, West was simultaneously deemed the "Siren of Sex and Sensation" and, by a writer in Vanity Fair, "the greatest female impersonator of all time." It's femininity through the looking glass. Miss Piggy, too, is the product of female impersonators. There is a friction between the earnestness of the character, her cutting humor, her radical femininity, and the fact that only men have performed her: first Oz and then, after he mostly stepped away from his work with the Muppets in 2001, Eric Jacobson, who has performed her ever since.

Jacobson is a 55-year-old with a gentle countenance who has been with his wife since they met when she was a production assistant on Sesame Street. He wasn't initially a Miss Piggy acolyte. "I did not grow up with Miss Piggy as my favorite character from the Muppets," he tells me. "I was more of a Kermit guy. More of a Fozzie Bear guy. As a child, I was drawn to characters that I thought I could be friends with or that I wanted to be like. And Miss Piggy, she was just a little too much for me." It was only over the years, as he matured as a human being and performer, that he became enamored:

One of her first appearances in 1975.

In The Great Muppet Caper from 1981.

With Joan Rivers on Fashion Police in 2012.

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PHOTOGRAPHS: YOUTUBE, HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES, BROOKLYN MUSEUM

"I saw all the fascinating complexities to the character and became a huge fan of hers."

Jacobson does a lot of improv as Miss Piggy—and he's especially able to cut loose on live television and in other less-scripted appearances. (Leigh Slaughter, vice-president of the Muppets Studio, noted that for the performers, scripts are sometimes more suggestions than rule of law.) It is during Jacobson's tenure that Miss Piggy's image has become an emblem of empowerment and prowess for her women and queer audiences, although prior viewers were starting to glean the nuances of the character. In her 1995 book, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes, "In Miss Piggy's Guide to Life, a mock self-help and etiquette book, Miss Piggy borrows Cosmopolitan magazine's style of using imperatives and checklists ('do this, check that') to tell women how to improve themselves. On the surface, she seems to accept the norms of femininity. But when she tells women how they can 'snack' their way to 'slimness,' she abandons Cosmo's line on deferred gratification in favor of the pleasure principle, mocking the bourgeois Protestant ethic of work and investment that pervades women's magazines and that helps support the identity of self-sacrifice and masochism with femininity."

In 2015, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum presented Miss Piggy with a Sackler Center First Award. The ceremony can be found on YouTube and includes Gloria Steinem lavishing the character with praise. Jacobson was initially resistant to the award: "I thought, Surely there must be any number of actual women out there who would be more deserving of a feminist award than a fictional character—and, on top of that, one who's performed by a man." But Jacobson came around. He says women came up to him to tell him how deeply Miss Piggy inspired them. "And that's when I realized,

Wow, this character is so much more than just a character—and just how important symbols can be to a society."

The public perception of Miss Piggy has continued changing; she's become a signifier of confidence rather than female delusion. The artisans and producers at the Muppets Studio are well aware of this fact. "Miss Piggy's delusions of grandeur have been somewhat accepted and even reinforced by the media and by different people. It's become more of a challenge to play her as delusional, which is a really important

"There's that Coco Chanel saying of 'Get dressed and then take one accessory off.' Miss Piggy is the opposite, and she would put three more on."

aspect to her character. So many people now have bought into her delusions: that she's a big star and a true talent," Jacobson says. It has led to a challenge for him and the bevy of people who bring her to life. "We have to find new ways to make her even more over the top," he says. "It's fun because it just pushes us to be more absurdist. And that's part of the DNA of the Muppets." It also comes through in what she wears and how she carries herself. "We like to say 'Those pearls are not real,'" Dani Iglesias, the Muppets Studio creative director, tells me. "She would never let anyone know that. But

it's that sense of showmanship, of wanting to project the idea of what it is to be a diva and a successful actress and fashionista that drives a lot of the decisions we make for her wardrobe. There's that Coco Chanel saying of 'Get dressed and then take one accessory off.' Miss Piggy is the opposite, and she would put three more on."

Miss Piggy's influence thrives in the present through characters like Cole Escola's Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary! There's a glint of Miss Piggy's quick wit in the comedic edge and blonde ambitions of Jennifer Coolidge. I also see Miss Piggy in Jennifer Tilly. Whether stunting on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or embodying the homicidal sex symbol Tiffany Valentine in the Chucky franchise, Tilly is a distinctively voiced, exceedingly attractive representation of what confidence can get a woman who strives to move beyond her fraught beginnings. But unlike these flesh-and-blood examples, Miss Piggy doesn't experience the discrimination of aging. She's seasoned, yes. (I've always felt she's in her mid-to-late 40s.) But she's also ageless. If a woman star lives long enough, she may get lucky, like Barbra Streisand and Cher, in that the aspects of themselves deemed too much in the middle of their careers become worthwhile and beloved in their 40s and 50s. Miss Piggy will never receive retaliation from her audience for not existing in life as the unchanging fantasy they hold in their minds. She won't have a partner whose mistreatment tarnishes her goddesslike image. That's the bittersweet undercurrent of her fame: She can reach a level of consistent public adoration and respect that no living woman would ever be able to embody. After all, flesh has its complications. But Miss Piggy is a star nodding to an era in which women were much more than they're allowed to be now: vivid, dynamic, larger than life. Shirking relatability for something mythic. She is one of our last. And the rest of the world is finally realizing it. ■

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TV's Horny Chaos Agent

Breakout Amita Rao amps up the absurdity and drama in the Gen-Z sitcom Adults. By Emily Gould

ADULTS season two premieres August 27 on FXX and Hulu.

THE TRICKY THING about hanging out with Amita Rao, who plays Issa, the roommate with main-character energy on the FX sitcom Adults, is remembering she is not Issa. Except when she totally is. Issa would bring a picnic and sketchbooks and miniature watercolor palettes to meet up with a stranger, for instance. But Issa probably wouldn't casually mention the Jungian concept of "creative depression" or cop to the fact that her sense of humor is a "trauma response from social alienation." She would, however, describe an ex as a "thembo."

We're perched atop the hilly Sunset Park at Rao's favorite picnic spot in the city, sitting on a blanket that emerged from her giant tote along with wraps (chickpea for her, chicken for me) and art supplies. She whips out a Sharpie. "This exercise will be familiar to you from 'doodling in class,'" she says, then starts a curvy line I continue into some loops, and soon we've drawn the outline of a face that we go on to fill in with watercolors in fantastical shades. "I think he's a general. What do you think his name is?" she asks. I am most assuredly in the presence of someone who has a background in improv and has dabbled in clown. I feel like I could sit here and draw with Rao forever except it's 90 degrees and humid and eventually we're going to have to pee.

Feeling entertained and engaged with only the slightest tinge of discomfort is not unlike the experience of watching Adults. Originally conceived by then-20-somethings Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold as a Friends for Gen Z, the show is making a bid for a wider audience in its second season. Four college friends who live together

in New York City—smirky perfectionist Anton (Owen Thiele), innocent Samir (Malik Elassal), hapless striver Billie (Lucy Freyer), and quirked-up sexpot Issa—adopt a sexually fluid Canadian named Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), who becomes Issa's boyfriend. Now the adults are growing up a little bit, and that adds depth to the show but doesn't sacrifice jokes.

The pilot turned off so many viewers that the show creators developed a "prequel episode," which is now listed as the first in the series—essentially a do-over. FX executives could measurably tell viewers had dipped out at various points during the pilot, including when Issa starts aggressively masturbating at a perv on the subway, a perfect encapsulation of her character. Rao, 27, plays Issa as someone who rides the fine line between fearless and clinically disinhibited but whose intentions are always pure; why shouldn't that perv get a taste of his own medicine? "She has such a good heart, and she loves so hard. I totally identify with Issa in that way," Rao says.

I came to Adults fandom late, coerced into watching by a younger colleague who was mildly disappointed in me for gulping down the first season of Mindy Kaling's recent frothy roommate show Not Suitable for Work. He told me that, unlike NSFW, in which the characters are 20-somethings by default, Adults is as accurate a portrayal of his generation as he has come across on TV. The roommates don't easily slot into sitcom archetypes. Each of them is at times the hot one, the funny one, and the chaos agent, and Issa is all of those things at once as well as the glue. Her improv energy keeps the roommates "yes, and"-ing, perpetuating the ridiculous situations they inevitably find themselves in. The Adults roommates also do drugs, have tattoos, and aren't defined by their jobs, which they either don't have or don't take too seriously. It's a calming fantasy of young adulthood in which the stakes are never too high—they live in Samir's parents' house, so no one pays rent—and the borough of Queens (played by Toronto) they inhabit welcomes their presence as long as they don't try too hard to take over the homeowners association.

In season two, the roommates' bonds are tested. In "Raccoon," Issa is tasked with ridding the house of not one but two invading animals and dealing with the unignorable sexual tension between Paul Baker and Anton, who, for plot and green-card reasons, got married at the end of season one. "Amita has to keep the character emotionally grounded. All these wild decisions are these dominoes that are falling, and it's on her to make you believe it makes sense," says Oz Rodriguez, who directed the episode. Rao found it easy to relate to Issa's relationship drama, which comes to a head right after the roommates all eat acid tabs. An opossum enters the mix at a maximally inopportune moment that I'm not permitted to spoil. The show's range—heartbreaking, horny, and gut-punchingly hilarious—is on display in a ten-second clip, most of which tracks the expression in Rao's eyes.

As we draw portraits of each other ("It's okay if you give me body dysmorphia," she tells me), our conversation covers astrology, AI data centers, and birth order before I interrupt her lavish praise of my (bad) drawing to turn the conversation back to her career. She shot her first movie this summer, a Maya Hawke rom-com with lots of comedian cameos, and she says in the future, she wants to do horror and action movies because she loves "throwing my body around." Her drawing of me comes out pretty solid (if much too flattering). "I fucked up your eyes, but I think there's something there," she says, handing me the sketchbook as a keepsake. ■

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CRITICS

Craig Jenkins on Phoebe Bridgers's Lost Weekend ... Emma Alpern on Rachel Cusk's Life of M ... Alison Willmore on The End of Oak Street.

MUSIC / CRAIG JENKINS

Phoebe Bridgers Keeps It Real

Her third album is as lacerating as her breakthrough.

THE LOST WEEKEND, a 1944 novel by Charles R. Jackson, chronicles a writer's rapid decline in the shadow of alcoholism. The term has come to refer to any period of recklessness a person may not be able to, or want to, remember, like John Lennon's bender with Harry Nilsson during a year-and-a-half separation from Yoko Ono in the '70s. Phoebe Bridgers borrows the title for her third album, a candid assessment of her failures, an intriguing batch of images and allegories, and an expansion of her musical wheelhouse, making for a follow-up that is as painstakingly potent as her breakthrough, 2020's Punisher. That album perfectly matched the spirit of a tumultuous year, as she sang about feeling trapped in her depression, fear, and insecurities. Amid growing renown for her diaristic songwriting and fixation on her relationships (she was engaged to actor Paul Mescal and is now dating comedian Bo Burnham), Bridgers formed the indie

supergroup Boygenius with kindred spirits Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. A season as a supporting character fed (a little) less of her life to gossip authorities, but tons of people who've never met her still believe they are experts on her life and motivations. Lost Weekend suggests it took time and distance to tell the story of her early 2020s right. It's a highlight of 2026.

The album evokes the experience of watching someone once close to you move on while you find yourself taking a different trajectory in life than you intended. It's caught between regrets for a situation that disintegrated and excitement for what took its place. Songs about catastrophic endings rub elbows with odes to giddy cohabitation. Opener "The Outside" circles the striking idea of feeling like a detached observer to your own ascent. Bridgers wants to be more present but on her terms. Prior to Lost Weekend's release, she avoided the media

LOST WEEKEND PHOEBE BRIDGERS DEAD OCEANS

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PHOTOGRAPH: PHOEBE BRIDGERS VIA YOUTUBE

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saturation of the Boygenius promotional cycle. She previewed music for fans with a spate of live performances but locked attendees' phones, keeping any drama from spilling out until publications could report on lyrics. You can feel the eventful six-year interim between solo albums in the way she writes from a place of being a known entity with an audience and an imitated style.

Career windfalls and pitfalls, the 2023 death of her once-estranged father, and relationship upheaval inform the album. She kicks off the gutted fourth track, "The Governor's Waltz," by embodying the terror of Shelley Duvall in The Shining but doesn't come across as the victim in its narrative ("You deserved better, you wanted me"). She then follows it with the ecstatic "Bobby" before listeners get the idea she's too hung up on her ex. "Waltz" closes with a scathing verse that seems to be about Gracie Abrams, a longtime Bridgers fan who is now dating Mescal. A couple lines from the song ("She can pretend to be me / Since she took my place in my bed on that stage") got to fans ahead of the album, and the track was quickly framed as a diss. That reading is corroborated by another song, "I Can't Wait," on which Bridgers tells a departing mate to "go dancing with my understudy." But both "Waltz" and "I Can't Wait" exemplify the appeal of Bridgers as a songwriter (which also happens to make her a fount of celebrity gossip). She's not a perfect narrator forever fixated on someone else's shortcomings, the kind of pop sensation who writes from a place of never knowing why awful things happen to them. She's fumbling into the future like anyone else, accepting responsibility for her role in her own bad times. "Waltz" and "I Can't Wait" are about realizing you are as much of a problem as anyone else you could take umbrage with. The latter song uses another horror analogy to grapple with frustrations about working against your own best interests in what sounds like an uncredited duet with Geese front man Cameron Winter: "All my life / Side by side / Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde."

The album's references to monsters and murder mysteries aren't just par for the course for an artist who wrote "Halloween" and briefly repopularized skeleton hoodies. Bridgers dramatizes the stakes for the beautiful romantic bond percolating in "Bobby" and "Liberty Tree." She doesn't want to fuck it up or watch someone else die. "Still Standing," which feels like an update to "Kyoto," Punisher's withering song about her father, is a series of snapshots of unresolved emotions left in a person's wake. There was once a scary home environment, "and now there is nothing." "Standing" juxtaposes

childhood trauma and parental loss as an adult to explore how bereavement can get displaced by spite: "Sometimes I want you back / But not today." Nothing and no one comes or goes easily in Lost Weekend, but the album doesn't want to crawl back into the past that badly (except in moments of desperation like "Wait"). Both her contentment in the bursting, relieved "Never Going Back!," which ends in cheering, and the depth of connection to Burnham documented in "Liberty Tree"—"Don't die, Bobby / Before I die"—imply Bridgers is aching to live in the now.

One consequence of Bridgers's growing fame is her expanded supporting cast. Expected characters like Dacus and Burnham show up as backing vocalists and co-writers, but the album is brimming with legendary pulls from around the sphere: The folk-rock jam "Bobby" features American Football's Mike Kinsella and Jesu and Godflesh's Justin K. Broadrick on guitar; "Haunted," a country song about putting yourself back together no matter what's thrown your way, corals the bluegrass trio Nickel Creek. Swift whisperer Jack Antonoff co-produces here, and Alex G, an opener for Bridgers's fall arena tour, provides synth accents throughout. Longtime drummer Marshall Vore is also a fixture, this after producer Chris Nelson accused him of "dating and/or pursuing teenage girls" in a 2021 defamation suit against Bridgers, which claimed she falsely accused Nelson of grooming. Nelson's suit was dismissed in 2022 under California anti-SLAPP legislation, and a spokesperson for Bridgers said

it was "not grounded in law, or facts." But some fans pine for a more direct statement from her on the allegations about Vore, who does not appear to have publicly responded, years after Bridgers accused Ryan Adams of emotionally abusing her in her early 20s, which he denied. A side effect (or a perk) of a rollout that leaves most of the talking to the music is it puts the artist less in contact with the key conversations about themselves, their circle, and their work. This eases their experience of fame but doesn't do anything about the infamy.

The album fares best in moments of unnerving quiet, like the shattered single-note verses of "Other Plans" ("You were shaking like a final girl / I got what I deserved"), and in unexpected psychedelic bustle, like the noisy, seemingly Winter-assisted coda of "Kill Me." Bridgers's Bon Iverian robot voice on the first song carries a whiff of event-album bombast. But it's not until the blipper synths and staccato guitar notes of "Wait" appear late in the album that Lost Weekend starts to feel like someone who played a few Eras dates called the producer behind many of those hits to streamline for chart traction (you can also feel it in the slickness of lead single "Lost Boys"). This album otherwise scans as a natural survey of its players' unusually intersecting skill sets. It survives the leap into the world of parasocial pining and celebrity beef with its dignity intact. Just as the previous album held a mirror to a year of introspection, Lost Weekend discomfitingly nestles within the mid-'20s theme of being back out on the road, still feeling bad, and clawing comfort from encroaching doom. ■

BOOKS / EMMA ALPERN

Is This Just Fantasy?

Rachel Cusk's novel allegedly inspired by Natalie Portman only occasionally succeeds.

IN JULY, an unusually early review on the right-leaning British website UnHerd pointed out that Rachel Cusk's next novel, Life of M, seemed to be all about Natalie Portman. The actress was said to be a friend of Cusk's, or at least an acquaintance, and her double in the book, who's just called M, is unmistakable. M starred as an uncomfortably precocious young girl in her first movie—same as the real Portman, who acted in Luc Besson's Léon: The Professional as a tween. M made a Black Swan—esque film about ballet. She lives in an unnamed city that's likely Paris. She's literate and tasteful, in one scene co-presenting at a literary salon for a fashion brand.

As though anticipating the tabloid stories to follow, Cusk starts the novel with a caveat: "A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She

LIFE OF M BY RACHEL CUSK FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX.

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liked the idea. She's a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said. No answer is recorded, but we can guess the author takes the deal. Then we are shot inside M's mind, which has been scrambled by fame-induced dissociation since she was a child. Decades later, her condition has only gotten worse. "Everyone else believed in reality," the narrator says. "It was as if they, not she, were in a film, a film she was watching." M has been neatly removed from the world.

Like most of Cusk's recent work, Life of M is mainly plotless; unlike her Outline trilogy, though, which consists mainly of a series of long conversations, it's light on dialogue, and there's a mesmerizing, out-of-time quality to the whole scenario. M moves through a series of rooms, many of them white with taupe accents, sealed behind double-glazed windowpanes and with carafes of cold water on their tables. Everything is taken care of, and doors open to admit her. Alone with her thoughts, drifting among time zones, she reflects on the mutations of fame and the mingled envy and revulsion she feels when she observes normal people's normal lives. Usually, she's not close enough to see them.

This is the zone of Cusk's acid celebrity story, whose central character experiences her fame more as restraint than excess. ("She wishes sometimes for more exhilaration," the narrator says as M sits on "a large wooden schooner of great beauty.") She is polite and generous but may be faking her kindness, and she sometimes seems intensely lonely: She has friends and family, but for the most part, she's not the kind of person others understand or even dare talk to. The writing is about ten times more embellished than a People magazine article's, full of dramatic statements about public life. "From where she stands she sees only the summit, directly above her," the narrator says at one point, "brutal peaks of concentrated power, of evil and influence, of ambiguous victory."

Between M's scenes are sections told from the point of view of a "we," who appears to be someone like the author from the first chapter but sometimes seems to be a stand-in for any upper-middle-class urbanite. This person lives in the city; they do things like go to the countryside and get EMDR therapy (or at least what seems like EMDR therapy; Cusk's ongoing war on proper nouns doesn't allow her to call it that). Like M, they don't really notice the seasons passing, and they too feel removed from some experience of reality—a favorite Cusk word, gesturing toward an arbitrary consensus about the world. They seem designed as one of Cusk's experiments in stripping character from her fiction, but her insistence on vagueness can be tedious.

Meeting up with their friends, this person says, "we talk about what we see there, what we feel, the events that have occurred and what they might mean. Each friend is different and we don't always remember that until it is too late." At other times, the studied estrangement from common sense turns into something unintentionally comic. About a flock of pigeons, Cusk writes, "They are the reminder of how far removed we are from our animal nature." These prim observations threaten to swallow the "we" sections, and they creep into the rest of the book, too: M muses that a pie she is served at a dinner party is "like an emblem of democracy itself."

Both M and the narrator identify violence in their past, like the violence of the premature end of M's childhood and the "violence of insignificance" the author feels. Occasionally, Cusk, as she often does in her work, wedges in some people experiencing

acute physical violence: "mad people, angry people, people who shout and rail in the streets." When it rains, she writes, "the misery of the people who have nothing is, we know, intensified." Maybe the idea is that these less fortunate figures are able to experience their lives in a direct way without floating above things the way Cusk's artist protagonists do. "Only the cleaners, always pushing their trolleys laden with equipment up and down one or another of the hotel's carpeted corridors, seem to be real," Cusk explains. If they're there to signify that she is aware of how little her primary characters' problems matter, the gesture ends up seeming bashful and, at moments, compulsively cruel. "Wouldn't it be a relief to not see them?" M thinks at one point.

Intentional or not, Life of M works best as a spectacle of Cusk's rudeness. The novel is not exactly tabloid material, but there's gossip here—the Cusk version of it, at least.

M has a meal with a cruel person who seems to be her former romantic partner, and she worries about her family's resentment of her. She does not allow herself to eat pastries or pie. By the end, M and the author finally meet up again, this time in the actress's elegant drawing room. Before she relates their conversation, a tense exchange that closes the book (and includes one of the oddest final sentences I've ever read), the author describes the room exactly: its herringbone parquet, moldings and cornice, painting of an egg, and long burgundy velvet curtains, undrawn. You can imagine her whipping out a notebook and scribbling down everything she can see when M steps out to get a carage of water.

"This is what Rachel Cusk does—she torches people and moves on," one anonymous critic who supposedly knows the novelist told the Times of London in July. "Her fiction is deeply unkind to people." A judge for an "important literary award," according to the same article, reported that some people on the committee once refused to read a book by her because "they felt Cusk was too cruel." It's not the first time her work has seemed almost made to rile a specific person or two: The first edition of her 2009 memoir, The Last Supper, was pulped in England when a group of tourists she had vacationed with saw themselves in the book and threatened to sue. This is also not the first time Portman has been the subject of a writer's attention. She and Jonathan Safran Foer exchanged emails for over a decade, and there were rumors that he later left his wife in the hope that Portman would be with him. She didn't reciprocate the gesture.

It's hard not to think the wool is being pulled over our eyes in some way. Did Portman, like M, really take offense at what Cusk had written? (One source told the Telegraph she is "more concerned with the state of the world"—an impassive response that would be in keeping with M's highly controlled persona.) Did Cusk, like the author, really inhabit a public figure as a way to "go and live in someone else"? (In an interview with the New York Times, she said whether M is based on a real person "is not really the point.") Would the book be as compelling without all this external drama, and does that matter?

It's ironic that the most interesting part of Life of M is a deviation from Cusk's often labored project, beginning with the Outline trilogy, to move away from narrative and character. Her previous two books were too much in service of her artful ideas about what makes a modern novel. That final argument between the author and the Hollywood star, the pressure in the room once M gets a whiff of betrayal—for a minute, Cusk lets some heat come in. ■

62 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

PHOTOGRAPH: FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

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MOVIES / ALISON WILLMORE

Close Encounters of the T. rex Kind

Studios need to make more films like this.

WE NEVER LEARN the precise location of the neighborhood in The End of Oak Street, a tangle of quiet streets and circular cul-de-sacs lined with two-story homes and lawns whose borders are only sometimes demarcated by fences and gates. The license plates on the boxy cars indicate we're somewhere in Michigan, but the place might as well be labeled "Amblin, USA" for how much it's grounded in the movies as it is any actual memory of the era. It's 1982, and the world of the Platt family—mother Denise (Anne Hathaway), father Greg (Ewan McGregor), teenager Audrey (Maisy Stella), younger brother Brian (Christian Convery), and their dog, Starbuck—is meant to evoke a pang of nostalgia, even if the closest you've ever gotten to experiencing anything like it is watching E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. At the block party in the opening scene, neighbors grill and gossip between breaks for limbo competitions and sack races, their kids freed to roam the streets in packs. When dinosaurs start tearing through this idyllic landscape not long after, chasing screaming suburbanites down the sidewalk and ripping the aluminum siding off houses to get at residents hiding within like so many McNuggets, it's as satisfying as shoving a hand right into the center of a carefully iced cake.

I can't fathom how The End of Oak Street actually exists, even if it is an ideal example of what the big studios should be doing right now—making original spectacles, ideally ones in which Anne Hathaway fires a rifle at a velociraptor. After getting small-scale attention for his lyrical debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover, in 2010, then making an indie-horror landmark with It Follows in 2014, filmmaker David Robert Mitchell directed the terrific, tragically unloved shaggy conspiracy comedy Under the Silver Lake in 2018 and ended up in movie jail for a few years. That he'd emerge with a Spielberg pas-

tiche that's both better than the one his producer J.J. Abrams made back in 2011 and more compelling than the actual Spielberg motion picture that preceded it this summer is a twist I didn't see coming. The End of Oak Street slams Jurassic Park into Close Encounters of the Third Kind and, in doing so, manages to be an audacious good time that pokes at what this VHS-box version of

Americana represents and how it relates to the consecration of the nuclear family.

Because all is not perfect for the Platts, despite the context in which they're introduced. Greg hides booze around the house and has

been spending his spare hours delivering pizzas for a local restaurant, a side gig he unconvincingly insists is just a way to pick up extra cash. Denise has also been keeping secrets, chiefly about the manuscript of a novel she's been banging out on a typewriter in the basement, one that happens to concern a woman who fantasizes about leaving her family behind for a life in New York. Brian recently broke another kid's arm, only half by accident, while Audrey appears to be struggling with some unarticulated feelings for her oblivious bestie. Then, after a series of eerie harbingers, the Platts discover the power and water in the house have shut off in the aftermath of an intense storm and the atmosphere outside has become unsettling and oddly tropical. Oak Street and its environs have, it turns out, been transported back to a prehistoric era, the whole neighborhood lifted from the present as though with a giant ice-cream scoop and sent back in time to a period filled with massive predators that immediately start terrorizing the unprepared residents.

The way that Mitchell rolls out this reveal, which the audience is aware of long before any of the characters, is a real scream. Each of the Platts on their own knows that something's off but is unaware that the swaddled safeness of their lives is no more and that they're now easy prey. The most terrifying shots in It Follows weren't jump scares but of the monster inexorably stalking characters who hadn't seen it yet. You wouldn't think a movie could pull off the same trick with lumbering beasties, but The End of Oak Street does, more than once, including an incredible sequence with some snake or legless salamander ancestor, the face of which remains winningly impassive as it slides silently along in its attempts to eat people. Mitchell seems genuinely thrilled by the possibilities of space in the frame—he uses split-diopter shots like someone who's only just encountered the tech—but the apparent glee he takes in the carnage he inflicts on this stretch of suburbia is infectious. The movie, with Denise and her quiet frustrations at its gravitational center, is aware of the fundamental absurdities of putting domestic dramas on the same level as dinosaur attacks, even as it clears space for its two adults to have a long-delayed fight about all the things they don't talk about as the world crumbles around them. In the havoc it wreaks on one of our most hackneyed shorthands for the American Dream, Mitchell's film suggests that it takes a freak accident of time travel to save its characters from the prison of patriarchal expectations and that occasionally you have to blow the whole block up to figure out if you want to stay together—primeval invaders and all.

THE END OF OAK STREET DIRECTED BY DAVID ROBERT MITCHELL, WARNER BROS. PG.13.

PHOTOGRAPH: WARNER BROS.

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For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com.

The CULTURE PAGES

To

Twenty-five things to see, hear, watch, and read.

AUGUST 26-SEPTEMBER 23

TV

1. Watch Adults Season Two

For when you don't want to feel like a grown-up.

FXX and Hulu, August 27.

Each era has its "wacky 20-somethings getting up to shenanigans in the city" series: Friends, Broad City, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Of the recent tide of Gen-Z offerings, this is the best of the bunch with its mix of absurdist humor and heartfelt sentiment. ROXANA HADADI

MOVIES

2. See Kwaidan

A restored director's cut.

Film Forum, September 11 through 17.

The horror anthology film against which all others are measured, Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 collection of ghost stories features some of the most stunning spooky imagery you'll ever see, especially in the third tale, about a blind musician who's painted with a sutra in hopes it will protect him from the spirits who want to take him to the realm of the dead. ALISON WILLMORE

ART

3. See Another Wonderland

Abram Champanier's Alice Mural, restored.

Museum of the City of New York, through September 27.

WPA artist Champanier transformed the children's ward at Gouverneur Hospital in the 1930s into a fantastical Wonderland where Alice drifted from the Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island. Miraculously rescued, painstakingly restored, and reunited for the first time in nearly 50 years, these luminous

works remind us art can heal, delight, and belong to everyone—not just museumgoers. JERRY SALTZ

MUSIC

4. Listen to I Must Be Dreaming

First new album in 11 years.

Island Records, August 28.

Alabama Shakes make up for lost time both in their revisitation of the crunchy, soulful grooves of the band's 2010s heyday and in singer-guitarist Brittany Howard's fearless dive into the weedy realities of the 2020s. She can "Feel Hope Coming," and so should we. CRAIG JENKINS

CLASSICAL

5. Hear Carlo Vistoli and Giulio Zappa

Benvenuto, Carlo.

Park Avenue Armory, September 10 and 12.

Vistoli, a countertenor who sings with delicacy and power, generally sticks to a circuit of opera houses within striking distance of his Northern Italy home. He finally makes his North American debut in a recital of arias by Purcell, Händel, Donizetti, Bellini, and others. JUSTIN DAVIDSON

MOVIES

6. See Colony

A Korean zombie thriller.

In theaters August 28.

A decade after he directed zombie classic Train to Busan, Yeon Sang-ho is back to give a bio-horror twist on the genre with Colony, set inside a Seoul high-rise whose bottom floors are home to a mall. There, a disgruntled biochem employee unleashes a virus that causes victims to mindlessly attack anyone they see—then things get really gnarly. A.W.

TV

7. Watch Uncle Stav

Familial humor.

Netflix, September 8.

The Baltimore-born comedian Stavros Halkias, who came to fame through the dirtbag-left comedy pod Cum Town (and now hosts Stavvy's World), returns with his second special taped at his hometown club, the Lyric, and directed by Tony's Matt Johnson. NICHOLAS QUAH

MOVIES

8. See Filipinana

What's under the green.

In theaters August 28.

Rafael Manuel's beautifully minimalist drama follows one blisteringly hot day at a golf course outside Manila where a young "tee girl" discovers the depths of exploitation that make this genteel, elegant world possible. BILGE EBIRI

THEATER

9. See

The Invention of Love

I'm assuming you know A. E. Housman.

Theaterlab, September 17 through October 3.

It's worth seeing whatever downtown treasure David Greenspan is up to. Here, the draw is most intriguing: a revival of the lovely, literary, underproduced queer academic drama by the late Tom Stoppard. Come for Greenspan and Latin puns; stay for the longing. JACKSON MCHENRY

MOVIES

10. See Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

Take three.

In theaters September 18.

I will never get over the way the little teeth in Aardman's stop-motion work look. Each individual grin, including the sideways one given on occasion by our ovine hero, is a testament to the studio's commitment to handcrafted animation and intensely adorable character design. A.W.

GAMES

11. Play Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy

Rats!

Focus Entertainment, August 27.

The first two Plague Tale games were cinematic sneak-around adventures set in medieval France that happened to have an awful lot of rats. This prequel moves the action to Greece, leans harder into combat, and, judging by the footage, features far fewer rats. Fatal mistake? We'll find out. N.Q.

CLASSICAL

12. Hear Remembrance: 9/11

A lullaby.

Trinity Church, September 11.

After September 11, when rescue and cleanup crews needed a place to rest, eat, sob, or pray, they

PHOTOGRAPHS: JIM BENNETT/GETTY IMAGES (TORO Y MOI), FOCUS ENTERTAINMENT (RESONANCE), ALDARA ZABRAO/A/WIREIMAGE (BRITTANY HOWARD), CHRISTOPHER RAPHAEL/NETFLIX (GENTLEMEN), MICHAEL GIBSON/FX (ADULTS)

64 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

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headed for St. Paul's Chapel of Trinity Church. A quarter-century later, the church's musical forces mark the day with a performance of Fauré's luminous Requiem. J.D.

MOVIES

13. See Eternity One

Swept away.

Arverne Cinema Outside, September 2.

The city's most enticingly beachy cinematic event, the Rockaway Film Festival, opens with Marnie Ellen Hertzler's doc about a 12-year-old girl growing up on Tangier Island in a Chesapeake Bay fishing community facing displacement owing to climate change. Arrive early for some live music from TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone. A.W.

TV

14. Watch Chad Powers Season Two

Put the wig back on.

Hulu, September 3.

Season one, which spun an Eli Manning gimmick video into a sports comedy with Glen Powell as a disgraced college-football star, started to veer in a fascinating, somewhat depraved direction. As the show returns, will it follow through? N.Q.

THEATER

15. See Pre-Existing Condition

Make an appointment with ...

Greenwich House Theater, September 1 through October 24.

Marin Ireland's play about a woman recovering from a physically abusive relationship returns for an extended engagement, directed by Maria Dizzia. An impressive rotation of actresses will share its lead role, starting with Lupita Nyong'o. J.M.

CLASSICAL

16. Hear Tarot!

The Magician, the High Priestess, and the Fool.

The Morgan Library & Museum, September 23. Magic, mysticism, mythology, fate, revelation—these ingredients have always seduced opera and classical-music composers. The exhibition provides an apt hook for a chamber concert that starts with Carmen's fortune-telling scene and ends with Victoria Bond's Instruments of Revelation, based on three tarot characters. J.D.

TV

17. Watch Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story

A win for feminism, supposedly.

Netflix, September 17.

Women can be monsters too! The first installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's franchise to focus on a female killer this season brings together a group of recurring Murphy players to adapt the story of the Massachusetts woman who was tried and acquitted of hacking her parents to death in 1892. Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie, Rebecca Hall plays her stepmother, and Monster: The Ed Gein Story star Charlie Hunnam plays her father. R.H.

BOOKS

18. Read Ten Perfect Guests

"Bad People. The best game ever!"

Sourcebooks Landmark, September 8.

Be glad you're not among the bickering, savage retinue of art-world-affiliated landsharks (you know the types) invited to "Celebrate the Life & Art" of (or lose an inheritance from) late genius painter Victor D'Arcangelo on a remote island. Better to let artist-author Jonathan Santofor (The Lost Van Gogh), who knows whereof he speaks, spill their tea—and blood—in this absorbing, almost cozy coup de torchon. CARL ROSEN

MOVIES

19. See White Nights

"I'm not a hero. I'm just a dancer."

Paris Theater, September 15.

Mikhail Baryshnikov plays a ballet dancer who defected from the USSR and Gregory Hines is a tap dancer who defected to it in this weird, mesmerizing 1985 drama, which screens in 70-mm. for the first time here in over four decades. As a bonus, Isabella Rossellini, who plays Hines's wife in the film, will be in person for a Q&A. A.W.

MUSIC

20. Listen to Buddy Miller

The country-music trinkedour.

New West Records, September 11.

Fourteen-time Americana Music Association Awards winner Buddy Miller is a busy player in his later years, from acclaimed team-ups with his wife, Julie, to folk-music cruise appearances. Nevertheless, this self-titled set is his first solo album in 15 years. The stirring "Don't Look Back" says it's never too late to get back in the game. C.J.

TV

21. Watch The Gentlemen Season Two

Illegal activities in British manor homes.

Netflix, September 3.

In this major improvement on the fairly racist Guy Ritchie film that inspired it, Eddie Horniman (Theo James), a former Army captain and duke, aligns with a drug syndicate to keep his estate afloat; his sexual chemistry with the syndicate's de facto leader, Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario), complicates things. As does the fact Eddie and Susie now wonder if they should break off ties to Susie's imprisoned dad, Bobby (Ray Winstone). The supporting stars, including A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms breakout Daniel Ings, make this series. R.H.

ART

22. See The Modern Window

On your way in.

The Museum of Modern Art, through September 30. As seen in the largest street-facing 53rd Street window of MoMA, Julien Ceccaldi paints contemporary life through collisions of manga, fashion illustration, advertising, and modernist

painting. Unsettling humor, flirty loneliness, and performance blur into one another. Proof some of the museum's most interesting exhibitions aren't always inside the galleries. J.S.

MUSIC

23. Listen to Yours Sincerely

Ahead of a Radio City show with Toro Y Moi.

Sony Japan/Ghostly International, September 11. The 23rd album from the Japanese composer Haruomi Hosono, who co-founded Yellow Magic Orchestra, is his first for the Brooklyn indie label, and it bubbly opener "Note of Mothership" is any indication, it'll be poking around the ambient corner of his catalogue. C.J.

THEATER

24. See The Cherry Orchard

Chekhov heads to Seoul.

Park Avenue Armory, September 16 through 26. Director Simon Stone—you may have seen his Yerma at the Park Avenue Armory—has a fondness for placing classics in new contexts, as with this revision of Chekhov that brings late Imperial Russia to present-day South Korea. Previously developed and performed there, Stone's production makes its North American debut with a cast that includes Park Hae-soo (Squid Game). J.M.

MOVIES

25. See Musclefest

A lost canon.

Roxy Cinema, September 3 through 6. Upstart distributor Muscle, a place for "scrappy, misty films," celebrates restorations and underground work with a series that includes the New York premieres of Louise Weard's audacious ongoing trans saga, Castration Movie Chapter iii; Henry Hanson's doc Puppygirl; and Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank's hangout movie, Drinking and Driving. A.W.

Solution to Last Issue's Puzzle: Replacement Parts

Find Vulture 10x10s, Cinematrix, and our puzzle archive at nymag.com/games

AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 | NEW YORK 65

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THE NEW YORK CROSSWORD

Start at the Beginning

By Matt Gaffney

Across

• 1 Crime of the past
• 6 Like whiskey and wine
• 10 Haile Selassie studier, often
• 15 She-bears, in Bolivia
• 19 Cranky "Cheers" server
• 20 Eve Hewson's dad
• 21 "Bake me ___ as fast ..."
• 22 Org. for Arsenal
• 23 Press-baiting high jinks a late novelist partook in?
• 26 Bakery purchase
• 27 Some are medium
• 28 Hankerings
• 29 Sunglasses brand
• 31 Part of a coll.
• 33 Device that works on songs from the "Shrek" soundtrack?
• 37 What goes around, coming back around
• 39 Toward the left, far from shore
• 40 Painting options
• 41 What slot machines have, famously
• 43 In a sea of
• 44 Tampa Bay QB, say
• 45 Diplomacy

• 49 Two fives for ___

• 50 Lower edge of a roof

• 52 Wide receiver ___-Ra St. Brown
• 54 "But I'm completely innocent!"
• 55 The latest insider gossip on the singer of "Smile"?
• 62 Sneak attack
• 63 Paul who sings "Lonely Boy"
• 64 Toast in Tipperary
• 65 Stone in "Casino"
• 69 Or more
• 72 Civil War general Henry L. ___
• 73 1950s-60s series set in Wyoming
• 75 Locks you can cut
• 76 Regular growth (abbr.)
• 78 100 percent auto-generated sequel to "The Revenant"?
• 85 London's ___ Gardens
• 86 Notes with a dollar amount
• 87 Catch word of
• 88 Bronxville university
• 89 Pair you're using now
• 91 Triumphant letters
• 92 Young lady
• 94 94-___ (this entry)
• 96 European "later"

• 98 "Is this mic working?"

• 100 Play-starting actions

• 101 Quick text alerting friends to a movie star on the subway?
• 108 Devoured
• 109 Outer part of the brain
• 110 Rockies resort
• 111 Warn off, as a lion might
• 113 Casual pace
• 114 What "Wheel" contestants used to shout when they won?
• 120 India. ___
• 121 Slippery as ___
• 122 Camouflage
• 123 1991's Best Actor winner
• 124 Give but want back
• 125 They perform functions (abbr.)
• 126 Categories
• 127 Hair hassle

Down

• 1 Reversible drug
• 2 Old-school cheer
• 3 Dublin dance
• 4 Spanish for "pot"
• 5 Traveler on tracks
• 6 The A. of James A. Garfield
• 7 "Your ___ is cooked"

• 8 Suffix with respond

• 9 Forehead-slapping utterance

• 10 Like "Oppenheimer" and "Anora"
• 11 It hums in summer
• 12 Ned Stark's eldest daughter
• 13 Admission to a movie (abbr.)
• 14 Like stories with morals
• 15 "Ms. Jackson" duo, 2000
• 16 Maker of mattresses
• 17 Get ___ pass
• 18 Mythical wine lover
• 24 Show interrupter, briefly
• 25 Meeting of bishops
• 30 Word in table-tennis scores
• 31 Danish word before drinking
• 32 "You sure about that?"
• 34 Soup super with Sapporo
• 35 Nail-lacquer brand
• 36 "Oh my!"
• 38 More than expected
• 42 Natural pigment
• 43 Estée Lauder acquisition, 1997
• 44 Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er"
• 46 Make ___ (do very well)
• 47 Raccoon-family animal
• 48 Mahjong pieces
• 51 Arabic for "noble"
• 52 "My hands are tied by ___" ("Midnight Express" line)
• 53 Degs. for some painters
• 56 Coffee-makers exude one
• 57 ___-to-Dover ferry
• 58 ___ a million (rare)
• 59 Greek revenge getter
• 60 Pacific-island nation
• 61 "Agreed," poshly
• 65 Satisfy, as thirst
• 66 "Roots" writer
• 67 "You sure about that?"
• 68 Gandhi fought it
• 70 A handy times ten
• 71 Old, as a joke
• 74 Recipient of many letters
• 77 Long or Peeples
• 79 Theater-ticket info
• 80 Charging animal
• 81 "___ will it rain today?"
• 82 "I'm so impressed!"
• 83 Beginning
• 84 Chic no more
• 90 Sang improvised syllables
• 91 Calling your partner by your ex's name, e.g.
• 92 "Super Freaky Girl" singer
• 93 Totally acceptable
• 95 Herb also called French parsley
• 97 "What's Love Got to Do With It" role
• 98 Ready to roll
• 99 Some are precious
• 101 Computing numeral system
• 102 Peter in "The Maltese Falcon"
• 103 Sensitive area
• 104 One Finger Lakes county
• 105 Speedy, as a walk
• 106 Egg parts
• 107 Man on much money
• 112 Prefix with nautical
• 115 Whatever number of
• 116 "They say that about me?"
• 117 Penn who played Kumar
• 118 Carry-___ (some baggage)
• 119 Function

August 24-September 6, 2026. VOL. 59, NO. 18. New York Magazine (ISSN 0028-7969) is published biweekly, plus one additional issue each in February and June and two issues in September by the Media Group, LLC. 85 Broad Street, New York, N.Y. 10004. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Editorial and business offices: 212-508-0700. Postmaster: Send address changes to New York Magazine, P.O. Box 17155, Boston, MA 02107. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product: Canadian Distribution Sales Agreement No. 4061-0008. Canada returns to be sent to The Media Group, P.O. Box 35542, London, ON M5 6BU. Subscription rates in the United States and possessions. 1980 to 1990. For subscription assistance, write to New York Magazine, 1200 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Copyright © 2026 by The Media Group, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. Chief executive officer, Jim Barker, New York Magazine is not responsible for the return or loss of unsolicited manuscripts. Any submission of a manuscript must be accompanied by an SASE.

66 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

The solution to last issue's puzzle appears on page 65.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21

lose their public leagues and rinks to the private sector. Minnesota Hockey's model works because nobody is trying to profit from selling families ice time. In most of the country, however, rinks are commercial enterprises trying to make as much money as possible. "When you own the rink, it gets more into the business side of things," said Reed, watching his words with a midwestern politeness. "You need that rink to be filled."

The results speak for themselves: Minnesota produces more D-I men's and women's ice-hockey players than any other state, and it's not a stand-alone case. In Norway, a country that medaled more than any other at the recent Winter Olympics and made it to the quarterfinals of the FIFA World Cup this summer, youth teams are subsidized by the government so that every child can play regardless of their family's income, and they're not allowed to publish scores or rankings until age 11 or compete for national championships until age 12. For comparison, the U.S. was knocked out of the World Cup in the Round of 16 despite the massive amounts of money spent on youth sports. Critics blame a landscape that has become less about merit than it is about money. In other countries, the best athletes are plucked from the largest possible pool of subsidized youth teams and then developed under the sponsorship of professional leagues. Here, children whose parents can't afford for them to play may never get the chance. And even if they do, prioritizing winning over skill development may make them weaker team players later on. Last season, roughly a quarter of NBA players were from outside the U.S., many of them from Europe, where there's a strong focus on team play and fundamentals.

The fight to remove private capital from youth sports has made its way to Congress, where the Let Kids Play Act, a Democrat-led bill that seeks to curb what it calls "vulture practices" in the sector, was introduced this spring. The bill calls out private-equity firms specifically but, if passed, would require any investors in youth-sport companies

with below-board tactics—junk fees and binding contracts, for instance—to divest over a two-year period. "We basically say, 'If you were engaged in these practices, then we are essentially deeming you an illegitimate owner of a youth-sports organization,'" said Senator Chris Murphy, a lead sponsor of the bill and the father of a hockey player. He argues that elementary and middle-school sports should be covered by nonprofits as well as local and state governments, akin to the way high-school sports have been funded for decades, with some support from the federal government, too.

In a subcommittee hearing this summer, Black Bear Sports Group, the privately owned hockey company that's been buying rinks across the Midwest and Northeast, was specifically named following a USA Today report accusing the company of driving out nonprofit teams to prioritize private ones, among other practices. (The company declined to be interviewed for this story but denied the report's allegation in an emailed response.) Black Bear argues that it is purchasing rinks that would likely shut down otherwise. New compressors alone, which are necessary to cool the ice, can cost $2 million, and energy prices are rising. Evan Nierman, a company spokesperson, points out that the repairs on just one of its 47 ice rinks, the Jersey Shore Arena in Wall Township, New Jersey, cost almost $3 million. "We feel strongly that private ownership is not the real threat to youth sports, and youth hockey specifically," Nierman wrote in an email.

Murphy calls that argument persuasive only because we've gotten used to private ownership in youth sports. He's arguing for more public investment in an ecosystem that millions of children and families want to participate in. Private capital "wants you to think that their investment is free. It's not. You're paying for it. Plus, you know, a vig for their investors," said Murphy. "So it's a question of, How do you want to pay for youth sports?" The bill is unlikely to move forward before the mid-terms and faces an uncertain future after, but Republicans recently joined Democrats to pass legislation limiting private-equity investment in single-family homes, giving Murphy some hope for momentum.

REAL CHANGE WOULD also require a cultural shift. Lancaster, the youth-sports adviser, is a co-founder of Whole Child Sports, an organization that aims to improve children's experiences in athletics. He's currently testing a flag-football program modeled on free-play games

like pickup basketball to keep the sport fun and accessible. The idea is young athletes will register as individuals and play with different kids on multiple teams throughout the course of one day, each accumulating points, and at the end there's no winning team. It may not appeal to parents seeking a more competitive atmosphere for their children, Lancaster said, but he hopes it could provide an alternative to club mania. With flag football, he sees a rare opportunity to build a better sports ecosystem from the ground up before families once again find themselves giving in to onerous scheduling and financial demands. "I'm concerned because money can change everything," he said.

A return to the sports paradigm of the '90s is likely out of reach. But there are companies experimenting with a sort of hybrid future. RCX Sports, one of the companies backed by Brand Velocity Group, creates plug-and-play sports packages for low-cost town teams, providing uniforms, equipment, and operational support. Most of its programs cost as little as $25 to $40 per child, keeping it accessible for families, although its mission isn't entirely altruistic. RCX is an official licensing partner for professional leagues' youth programs, including the NFLs, and research shows children who play a sport are significantly more likely to become a fan. "They want consumers for life of their media, merchandise, and other products," said Farrey of the Aspen Institute. It's too early to know if RCX is a success story, "but at the very least, it's an opening to bring back local rec leagues with some level of quality."

For some families, it's too late. This year, despite her reservations, Elizabeth's son will play for a different soccer club; it doesn't feel like a real option to return to the town team, not when she knows there are so few kids left, much less ones who play at his level. She doesn't see soccer as a path to college for him—"The end goal is not a scholarship," she said—but she does want him to continue to love the game.

Elizabeth recognizes her family is complicit in a broken system. When her son first joined a club, he left behind one of his closest friends on the town team. That boy was just as athletic; the only difference was his parents couldn't afford the costs of a private league. Since Elizabeth's son left, that child's mother has told her he's lost interest in soccer. His family loves the game, but he doesn't want to play anymore. "There are enough kids in our town that if they all played rec, my son would have had a great experience," Elizabeth said. His friend could have, too. "It's a collective-action problem." ■

AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 | NEW YORK 67

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THE APPROVAL MATRIX

Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.

COMPILED BY DOMINIQUE PARISO AND CHRIS STANTON

LOWBROW

68 NEW YORK | AUGUST 24-SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

PHOTOGRAPHS: SETTY HANLEY (SUGGEST LEAVITT HANLEY, TREE STAMP WORLD LIBERTY, GLOBE, WISCONSIN, IDA GILBERTS, DOMINION, PURE, DENVER, DENVER, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE

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REACH FOR THE CROWN

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制度与权力批判深度研判：New York Magazine (2026-08-24)

▌ 本日全报思想与文化深思雷达 (Intellectual & Cultural Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在制度结构、权力技术与法理合法性层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 法律程序的“否决权”化与城市空间操纵 [F11_21, F12_23, F13_25]（版面：社区新闻）

   • 事件简述：律师 Randy Mastro 通过频繁提起诉讼，将特定区域（如伊丽莎白街花园）划定为公园绿地，从而在制度层面阻碍了补贴住房的开发。
   • 制度批判切入点：剖析法律程序如何被转化为一种“否决权力” (Veto Power)，分析个体如何利用司法程序的冗长与复杂性，将私人利益包装为“维护法律”的公益行为，从而对抗公共政策。

2. 媒体叙事中的“意识形态筛选”与身份抹除 [F3_5, F4_8, F5_10]（版面：主报深度版面）

   • 事件简述：杂志在报道西南亚和北非（SWANA）社区时，被批评仅纳入谴责犹太复国主义的视角，且在餐饮报道中隐含以色列餐厅挪用文化的观点，导致部分读者认为其在抹除犹太/以色列人的存在。
   • 制度批判切入点：探讨媒体在构建“多样性”叙事时如何通过意识形态框架进行筛选，分析当“包容性”报道演变为一种排他性的政治立场时，如何产生新的权力压制与身份抹除。

3. 体育空间的“奢靡化”与阶级准入机制 [F7_14, F8_15, F9_18]（版面：专业栏目）

   • 事件简述：美国网球公开赛通过推出高昂的“款待票”（如 $9,100 的场边席）及捆绑特权服务，将体育赛事从大众竞技转化为一种财富身份的展示场。
   • 制度批判切入点：分析公共体育景观如何通过“服务升级”实现结构性阶级分层，探讨资本如何通过重新定义“球迷体验”来建立一种基于经济能力的排他性准入制度。

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▌ 精选核心专题深度思想论证 (In-Depth Dialectical Monograph)

专题一：法律工具化与公共利益的悖论：以 Randy Mastro 为样本的权力剖析

本期报道中关于律师 Randy Mastro 的叙事 [F11_21, F12_23] 提供了一个极佳的权力技术样本：法律如何从一种“解决争端”的工具转化为一种“制造障碍”的武器。Mastro 坚称自己没有任何政治动机，并以注册民主党人及与多位政要（如索托马约尔、德布拉西奥）的合影来构建其“公益”与“非党派”的合法性外壳 [F12_23, F13_25]。然而，其行为实质是通过司法程序的反复启动，在制度层面冻结了城市空间的开发可能性。

从权力机制来看，这是一种典型的“程序性权力”对“实质性政策”的截击。在现代城市治理中，公共政策（如开发补贴住房）需要经过复杂的行政审批，而司法救济（诉讼）则提供了一个相对低成本且能迅速产生“暂停效应”的机制。当 Mastro 将法律程序转化为一种“否决权力”时，他实际上是在利用制度的冗长性来对抗公共利益的紧迫性。

这种现象揭示了法理学上的一个深层矛盾：当法律被绝对化为一种程序正义时，它可能被个体利用来阻碍整体的社会正义。在这种结构下，法律不再是社会契约的执行工具，而变成了个体操纵城市空间、对抗政府规划的杠杆。这种“法律工具化”导致了公共空间的碎片化，使得城市发展的方向在很大程度上取决于谁能更高效地操纵司法程序的漏洞。

专题二：叙事霸权与身份认定的政治：媒体在 SWANA 报道中的认知偏差

关于《纽约杂志》在报道西南亚和北非（SWANA）社区时引发的争议 [F3_5, F4_8]，揭示了当代媒体在处理复杂地缘政治身份时的认知困境。批评者指出，该系列报道的“多样性是在一个意识形态框架内被筛选的” [F3_5 🔍]，即只有谴责犹太复国主义的以色列人才能获得发声机会。这种筛选机制将复杂的民族认同简化为一种“政治忠诚度测试”。

从认识论角度看，这是一种“叙事霸权”的体现。当媒体试图通过呈现“受压迫者”的视角来追求正义时，如果缺乏对对立视角的制度性包容，这种报道本身就变成了一种新的排斥机制。例如，在关于餐饮业的报道中，隐含的“文化挪用”观点被批评为将以色列家庭从中东叙事中抹除 [F4_8 🔍]。这种做法将文化流动性简化为权力压迫，从而在认知层面将特定群体（以色列犹太人）从其原有的文化地理坐标中剥离。

此外，杂志对 FeelBeit 组织的错误描述（将其误认为反犹太复国主义组织）[F5_10 🔍] 进一步证明了这种意识形态预设如何导致事实层面的失真。当编辑部预设了一个“压迫者 vs 被压迫者”的二元框架时，任何试图通过对话（Dialogue）打破此框架的组织都会被强行纳入预设的标签之中。这标志着一种危险的趋势：媒体不再是事实的记录者，而成为了身份认定的裁决者，通过定义谁是“真实的”或“合格的”社区成员，来实现一种隐形的制度性审查。

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▌ 面向学者的制度研究开放性追问 (Open Research Horizons)

1. 【关于司法程序作为“否决权力”的机制研究】：在城市规划与公共住房危机背景下，个体如何通过法律程序的“战术性启动”来抵消政府的行政权力？这种现象如何影响城市空间的公平分配？
2. 【关于媒体叙事中“筛选多样性”的伦理研究】：当媒体在追求社会正义的叙事中采取特定的意识形态筛选机制时，如何界定“必要的立场”与“不公正的抹除”之间的边界？
3. 【关于体育消费的阶级分层研究】：体育赛事的“款待票”模式如何通过将物理空间（场边席）与特权服务（主厨美食）捆绑，将体育竞技的公共属性转化为一种阶级认同的排他性符号？

理性与情感辩证深度研判：New York Magazine (2026-08-24)

▌ 本日全报生活世界痛感与情感政治深思雷达 (Lifeworld & Affective Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在个体生命体验、情感撕裂与生活世界崩解层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【代孕监护权之争：法律理性与伦理痛感的撕裂】 [F5_9 🔍]（生活领域：健康与家庭）

   • 事件简述：一名中国男子与一名佛罗里达州代孕女性就三胞胎的监护权展开法律争夺，引发公众对美国代孕监管缺失的担忧。
   • 情感政治切入点：分析代孕合同的“契约理性”如何试图量化生命的所有权，而这种理性在面对母亲的肉身联结与父亲的渴望之情时，暴露出其在处理人类最深层伦理痛感时的冷漠与无能。

2. 【巴勒斯坦-以色列叙事的认同撕裂：意识形态筛选与抹除】 [F3_5, F3_6, F4_8, F5_10]（生活领域：文化与政治）

   • 事件简述：杂志关于西南亚和北非（SWANA）社区的报道引发剧烈争议。批评者认为其多样性在特定意识形态框架内被筛选，导致部分犹太/以色列视角被抹除，且在餐饮文化报道中隐含了关于文化挪用的政治观点。
   • 情感政治切入点：探讨“政治正确”的编辑理性如何与个体的“归属感”产生冲突。当一个人的民族身份或文化实践被定义为“殖民主义”或被从叙事中抹除时，个体产生的被剥夺感如何转化为对抗性的情感政治。

3. 【美国网球公开赛的“奢靡化”：阶级区隔的符号化】 [F8_15, F8_16, F9_18]（生活领域：体育与社会阶层）

   • 事件简述：美国网球公开赛从早期的排外白人主导形象转向现代的极致商业化，高昂的“款待票”将体育观赛转化为一种财富地位的炫耀。
   • 情感政治切入点：分析“消费理性”如何将纯粹的体育热爱异化为阶级符号的交换。死忠球迷对“只想看网球”的朴素诉求与系统性地推行“特权捆绑”之间的矛盾，揭示了生活世界被资本逻辑全面殖民后的情感异化。

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▌ 精选核心专题理性与情感辩证论证 (The Dialectic of Logos and Pathos Monograph)

专题一：【契约理性与肉身伦理的对抗：代孕监护权争端中的生命量化危机】

在 Emi Nietfeld 报道的中国男子与佛罗里达州代孕女性的监护权之争中 [F5_9 🔍]，我们观察到一种极端的法律契约理性（Legal Logos）与具身伦理痛感（Embodied Pathos）之间的剧烈冲突。代孕在法律层面被构建为一种服务合同，试图通过条款将婴儿的“所有权”在生物学父母与代孕母亲之间进行清晰的界定。这种理性追求的是确定性与可执行性，将生命诞生过程简化为一种权利的转移。

然而，这种理性在面对肉身联结的不可量化性时显得极其脆弱。女权主义作家 Jill Filipovic 指出的“严格监管”需求 [F5_9 🔍]，本质上是对契约理性过度扩张的警惕。代孕母亲在孕育过程中的生理与情感投入，以及父亲对孩子的渴望，并非可以通过合同条款完全覆盖的“成本”或“权利”。当法律试图通过判定监护权来解决争端时，它实际上是在用一种二元对立的逻辑（谁拥有权利）来掩盖一个复杂的伦理悲剧：即生命在进入世界之初就被卷入了资本与法律的博弈。

这里存在着深刻的辩证摩擦：法律理性认为监管的缺失导致了混乱，因此主张通过更严密的法律框架来规范；但伦理痛感则提示我们，某些人类体验（如母子联结、血缘渴望）本身就是反量化的。这种冲突揭示了当代生物伦理的困境——当人类最深层的情感纽带被纳入市场交易逻辑时，无论法律如何完善，都无法消除那种关于“生命被商品化”的深层不安。

专题二：【叙事理性与认同真实：媒体框架下的文化抹除与情感反弹】

在《纽约杂志》关于 SWANA 社区的系列报道及其引发的争议中 [F3_5, F3_6, F4_8]，我们看到了编辑叙事理性（Editorial Logos）与个体认同真实（Identity Pathos）之间的对抗。杂志编辑部基于对“种族灭绝”学术共识的审查 [F4_7 🔍]，构建了一套支持巴勒斯坦、批判犹太复国主义的叙事框架。这种理性试图通过筛选特定视角（如谴责犹太复国主义的以色列人 [F3_5 🔍]）来达成某种政治上的“公正”或“进步”。

然而，这种自上而下的叙事理性在个体的生活世界中引发了强烈的排斥反应。马修·努里尔（Matthew Nouriel）和伊莱·科瓦兹（Eli Kowaz）等读者的批评 [F3_5 🔍]，揭示了当个体的民族认同被定义为“威胁”或被要求通过“否认自己”才能获得接纳时，所产生的深层绝望感。尤其是关于餐饮业报道中隐含的“文化挪用”观点 [F4_8 🔍]，将日常的饮食实践政治化，导致部分读者感受到自己的家庭历史被“抹除”。

这种辩证摩擦体现为：媒体试图通过一个统一的意识形态框架来简化复杂的地缘政治冲突，以实现叙事上的连贯性；但认同的真实性恰恰存在于那些“不连贯”的、矛盾的、无法被简单分类的个体体验之中。即使杂志随后对 FeelBeit 的描述进行了更正 [F5_10 🔍]，也无法弥补叙事框架在初始构建时对复杂认同的粗暴简化。这揭示了当代公共讨论的一种危机：当理性被简化为“阵营筛选”，而情感被工具化为“政治立场”时，真正的对话空间被压缩，取而代之的是一种基于“抹除”与“反抹除”的对抗性情感政治。

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▌ 面向学者的伦理与社会心理开放性追问 (Open Research Horizons)

1. 【关于契约与生命的伦理边界】：在跨国代孕等生物技术商业化领域，法律理性应如何构建一套能够兼容“肉身联结”与“契约精神”的动态伦理框架，以避免将生命权完全简化为所有权？
2. 【关于叙事权力与认同抹除的机制研究】：在高度极化的媒体环境下，编辑权力如何通过“多样性筛选”实现另一种形式的排他性？我们应如何构建一种能够容纳“矛盾认同”而非“筛选认同”的公共叙事模型？