Ben McGrath

A geologist heads to the hills to study precariously perched boulders, which could provide clues to the frequency of the rare major quakes that shake the region.

Bishop Sycamore, the subject of a new documentary, became a national scandal. But it was part of a larger, and largely unchanged, system.

Newtown Creek, to be clear, is a Superfund site, owing to leaky Greenpoint refineries that have added some thirty million gallons of oil to the untreated sewage that streams in whenever it rains with any force. Black mayonnaise is the connoisseur’s name for its sedimentary ooze. Pity the blue crabs. Beckwith was in the bow. Her friend Amy Gartrell was in the stern. A man who had just met them both sat amidships and pointed at a plastic bottle drifting northwest in the current, headed back to the…

Finkel is now an author in his own right, whose books include “Jocks in Chief,” which ranks the American Presidents in order of athleticism (Gerald Ford first, Andrew Johnson last), and a forthcoming biography of the wrestler Macho Man. He also issues weekly reading recommendations for “sophisticated meatheads,” as he calls them, through his newsletter, “Books & Biceps.” (Robert Kurson is a subscriber.) He lives in Palm Beach County, Florida, with his wife and two kids, and he benches as much as…

“The thing is, the air bags went off,” Daniel Goswick, Sr., a chief with the Piermont Fire Department, said recently, explaining the peculiar buoyancy. “I think it was, like, a knot-and-a-half current. We basically figured out the trajectory of which way it was going and where it would sink.” That was the easy part. After three hours of conducting a grid search on a fire-department boat, using side-scan sonar, they located the vehicle several football fields northeast of the pier and thirty feet…

Paul, who gained renown as a YouTube celebrity and has only ten fights to his professional credit, was born in 1997, the same year that an over-the-hill-seeming Tyson was disqualified from a title bout for chomping on Evander Holyfield’s ears. Who, aghast at that spectacle, could have imagined the bizarro world that would follow? Not long ago, Tyson dined at Mar-a-Lago with his old friend Donald, a ringside fixture turned President and potential felon. “Beautiful,” Tyson recalled, of the experie…

He was still debating it, amid braking on the helix and a barrage of texts from his wife, Carissa, about their elderly mini Yorkie, who had just begun wearing a diaper. (“It’s kind of sad,” Katsov said.) Google Maps showed a solid red bar across the bridge and onto the F.D.R. Drive. The female voice in his phone piped up to reassure him that, in spite of the “eleven-minute slowdown,” he was still on the best route. The West Side Highway would offer no relief. “But, then again, I have to figure o…

Jocks from the majors to the beer-league circuit are raising a fist, cupping an ear, and yelling “Fight!” in homage to Donald Trump’s reaction to his near-assassination.

New York City teens, trapped in the concrete jungle, head out on the Housatonic with two pros, Jessie Stone and Eric Jackson, for some of their first river rides.

In “The Wind and the Rain,” which is staged in the harbor and begins during Hurricane Sandy, Sunny’s Bar, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, is the subject of and the actual location for the final act.