Sarah Larson

After the death of the Velvet Underground front man, two archivists and his widow, Laurie Anderson, discovered a mysterious sealed package from 1965. Inside was treasure: never-before-heard, folky versions of “Heroin” and other classics.

A collection of articles about 11 from The New Yorker, including news, in-depth reporting, commentary, and analysis.

We’ve been reminded of late night’s value a few times in recent years: first, circa the post-Letterman, post-Leno, post-Conan, post-Jon Stewart “Daily Show” changing of the guard, then during the Trump Administration, the pandemic, and then the strike. In the midst of a crisis, great late-night TV can feel like catharsis, even a kind of lifeline. The W.G.A. and SAG-AFTRA strikes, though not a pandemic-level crisis, have been a public reckoning with inequality and the economics of the digital age…

“We didn’t know we were poor,” Manilow, a youthful-looking eighty, said. He wore a black coat, spoke in a quiet, raspy voice, and took occasional drags from a vape pen. He waved it toward a young Orthodox woman who was opening the front door of a bustling prewar building where his family had lived. “The Mayflower—that’s where I hung out most of the time.” (He released “Here at the Mayflower,” an album imagining the lives of the building’s residents, in 2001.) He lived in an apartment with his gr…

10. “Classy with Jonathan Menjivar” Jonathan Menjivar’s exploration of class—how we perceive it, how we’ve internalized it, whether we try to change ourselves in relation to it—begins with a discussion of teeth. Menjivar, a longtime audio producer and the son of L.A. factory workers, goes to the dentist and is scolded by a hygienist about the “crowding” in his mouth. “It’s true—my teeth are all jacked up in the front,” he says. “But when she said that, all I heard was, ’Your teeth are crooked, b…

“It’s O.K.!” Sale told the room, as the cheering settled down. “I’m not dead, the members of the ‘Death, Sex & Money’ team are not dead, and we don’t even know if the show is dead. However, we know something is ending.” In 2023, there were dramatic layoffs at New York Public Radio and WNYC, Pushkin, NPR, and many other media companies. Last week, Spotify, which had already dismantled much of what remained of the once-great podcast studio Gimlet, which it acquired, in 2019, for two hundred and th…

Nesteroff became a historian inadvertently. “I saw every movie between the age twelve and eighteen—every movie that somebody has heard of. Then all the B movies you hadn’t heard of,” he said. He also collected vintage vinyl in thrift stores, including comedy albums by comics who were considered too dirty for TV and are less known today. “But their records were best-sellers. If you look at the Billboard charts in the sixties, Rusty Warren has three different albums in the Top 100, next to, like,…

The campaign was having trouble keeping warm. For months, DeSantis had languished far behind Donald Trump; now, in a poll from Suffolk University, he was also trailing Nikki Haley, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, whom he’d spent much of his time attacking. In the past week, DeSantis raced through several events in and around Des Moines, including trade conferences, a conservatives’ breakfast, a Fox News town hall, and a CNN debate. At none did he seem to be enjoying himself. He…

“The Greatest Night in Pop,” aside from its mother lode of fascinating footage, is as basic as “We Are the World” itself. Directed by Bao Nguyen (“Be Water”), it tells the story of the project, with some context, including interviews with participants such as Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis, Sheila E., Smokey Robinson, and Lionel Richie. As the movie begins, Richie is thriving, about to go on tour, and rocking his second solo album. In late December, 1984, his manager calls him about a conversation he’…

On First Avenue, know-it-alls were out in full effect, and clusters of strangers were invoking California. “On the top floor it felt like a big truck,” a woman announced. “But as if it could actually move the building?” “I was at my job on Sixteenth Street,” another woman said. “I’m from California. I was taught, especially in brick buildings, to go outside.” The group discussed building structures in the East and West Village. “All the tenement buildings, they’re all, like, done for, in any kin…