Adam Iscoe

The first-time Hollywood actor, who co-stars with Colman Domingo, visits his old stomping grounds in Mount Vernon.

“We’re having a little issue with the batteries this morning,” Beatrice Cordiano, an Italian scientist aboard the craft, said on the day of departure. Energy Observer was to travel up the East River, through Long Island Sound toward Massachusetts, and across the Atlantic, in the direction of the French coast; her more than sixty-two-thousand-mile journey would return to where it began, in 2017, in Saint-Malo. “It’s a problem that we usually do not have,” Cordiano said of the batteries. Just abou…

Matt Meeker, a serial entrepreneur (in 2002, he co-founded Meetup, the network of offline hobbyists), saw a problem in need of a solution. Earlier this year he started up Bark Air, which markets itself as “a 100% totally real airline for dogs.” The Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, several four-legged passengers checked in at a Signature Aviation terminal at Westchester County Airport, for Bark Air’s inaugural flight—a six-hour trip to Los Angeles, aboard a chartered Gulfstream V (a “G-five,…

In New York, the neighborhood restaurant doesn’t have much room for neighbors anymore. At Sailor, April Bloomfield and Gabriel Stulman’s new spot in Fort Greene, reservations are scooped up fourteen days in advance by residents of SoHo, Aspen, and East Hampton, who likely saw the place on some list, or while doomscrolling TikTok or Eater. The majority of diners log on to a restaurant’s Web site at 10:59 A.M., two weeks before they want to eat out, then wait, click, and pray. Pete Wells, who gave…

In fact, the Rebbe did expand—but mostly aboveground. In a move that has tickled architectural historians, he encouraged the construction of numerous replicas of 770 Eastern Parkway around the world, in Los Angeles, Aspen, Cleveland, Tacoma, Jerusalem, São Paulo, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Milan, Montreal, Melbourne, and Dharamkot, India, where it sits not too far from the Dalai Lama’s temple. The distinctive façades have become a worldwide symbol of Hasidic Judaism. They also look as if Henry VIII…

“Like, an excavator-size thing?” Glass asked. “Are you impressed that I pulled out that technical term? I have nephews.” “It’s not quite an excavator—it’s a telescoping material handler.” Marsden and his crew were transforming the fifty-two-acre garden into a light show called Lightscape—Dancing Water Colors (the fountains), Singing Trees (spruces and larches wrapped in lights), a Sea of Light (a grove of cherry-blossom and oak trees transformed into a lit-up symphony), all powered by not quite…

Last week, some protesters gathered at a community space in midtown to prepare for a vigil to honor the thousands of civilians killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip. The first arrivals: a fifth grader named Ryan Suseno and his parents. “I’ve been thinking about how this is different than the Black Lives Matter demonstrations,” Ryan’s mom said. “In my place of work, bringing up this topic feels like—on either side, it doesn’t even matter!—it feels inappropriate, somehow.” She munched on a carrot fro…

“We’re adding a simulation to the simulation,” a colleague named Idris Brewster said. Brewster is a co-founder of the Kinfolk Foundation, an organization attempting to remake the city’s streetscape with an app. In 2017, Brewster was working at Google, and he was among the many local activists who tried and failed to persuade lawmakers to remove the towering statue of Christopher Columbus on Fifty-ninth Street. “We were, like, ‘All right, we lost that one,’ ” Brewster recalled. “So we started cre…

Flash back to the springtime, when Prefer, who is nonbinary and wore double-kneed work pants and mud-caked trail runners, brandished a pair of pruning shears at a plum tree. They said, “What if everyone had an apple tree in front of their house instead of having to go buy apples at the store?” Prefer snipped a low branch, then used black electrical tape to graft a gnarly twig of rosy-gage scionwood in its place. (Scionwood is a twig cutting used to propagate trees.) It had been cut from a fruit…

Airborne, Deborah, who runs a hair salon back home, reviewed equipment: aviation- and marine-band radios (“So we can talk to ships”), eighty litres of drinking water, several electronic altimeters, a sleeping bag and two Arctic-expedition parkas (“It gets nippy up there”), dehydrated “macaroni gunge,” a life raft, tea, coffee, multiple aircraft-collision warning systems, a polystyrene bench to lie on, and a polystyrene box to sit on, “so one can sit while the other sleeps,” she explained. The ba…

Azalea vs. spicebush vs. sunflower: Horticulture nuts in all five boroughs vie to make their flower the city’s official bloom.

The train cost a nickel in 1904. The M.T.A. held a three-day town hall to let citizens sound off about the latest increase, to two dollars and ninety cents.

Between sets, fans of Kim Petras, Ice Spice, and Joey Bada$$ could get a demo on how to reverse an opioid overdose.

The drummer Sean Carey, who schedules his tours around fly-fishing stops, tries out some urban angling in Central Park with his bandmates Zach Hanson and Ben Lester.

What a subway killing reveals about New York City’s revolving-door approach to mental illness and homelessness.

For his next book, Reginald Dwayne Betts cooks up a batch of handmade paper, formed using T-shirts and undergarments donated by incarcerated people.

The city’s unofficial waterfront czar hits the not so high seas (the final resting place of tugboats, houseboats, and one warship) for some salvage work.

While serving time for selling cocaine, Joel Valle MacGyvered a flexible razor blade; now he and the owner of the storied Village barbershop are patenting it.

The private-aviation market is down, so a wannabe oligarch tries out the Guardian Jet Vault 4.0 to look for some deals.

7-Eleven stores have taken to blasting opera music to keep homeless people from loitering. Why did they select the genre? And does it work?