Zach Helfand

In an election season dominated by dead dogs, childless cat ladies, pets for dinner, and dumped bear cubs, the ferret lobby has some advice.

Fandom is an exercise in imagination. What happens when you know too much?

Julie Benko, who hit it big after going on in place of Beanie Feldstein in “Funny Girl,” has a lot of advice for the Vice-President, now that she’s done with waiting in the wings.

Trump is fortunate in one respect: if you’re going to be shot, the ear is not the worst place. (“It felt like the world’s largest mosquito,” he told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) If offered a choice, few people would sacrifice a kneecap or a finger. A missing nose is too gruesome. A bloody toe is unimpressive. It’s true that ears can be messy. “They bleed more than any other part of the body, for whatever reason—the doctors told me that,” Trump said in his R.N.C. speech. “So we learned something.” But…

ElAttrache sees patients in a multi-story office building near LAX. After business hours, by phone, a stream of athletes and the otherwise famous or wealthy seek ElAttrache’s advice for free. He treats shoulders, elbows, knees, Achilles tendons, and the big muscles. Most surgeons are known for one specialty operation; ElAttrache’s fellow-surgeons consider him among the best in the world at many. “There’s very few of the upper-level-athlete injuries that we’re not going to be somehow involved in,…

The eminent editor’s wife and daughter sift through a lifetime’s worth of collectibles: quirky plastic purses, a porcelain Miss Piggy, and many, many books.

The courthouse had two active falsifying cases the other day, before Judges Gregory Carro and Juan Merchan. Carro presided over courtroom 1300, part 32, on the thirteenth floor, off a corridor that looked as if the Penn Station basement had decided it was too bright. A window was open in the back, through which resounded loud hammering from construction next door. The court was called to order, and defendants began coming forward for pretrial hearings. One looked dazed. One was missing a leg. So…

Life, so far, in the tennis: player (top five), author (“Winning Ugly”), commentator (ESPN), actor (“ ‘Red Oaks’ on Amazon. I was Dr. Feinberg—the club champion!”), real coach to real players (Agassi, Roddick, Murray, Coco Gauff), and, recently, real coach to fake players (Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, for “Challengers”). “I did Z before I started coaching Coco,” he said. Zendaya rooted for Coco from afar as she won last year’s U.S. Open, but they’ve yet to meet. “Coco said she sent he…

In Alec Sutherland’s short film, upstate New York’s demolition derbies are a loud, brutal, deeply physical antidote to the isolation of digital life.

The production is designed to involve, and to implicate, the audience. Last Thursday, at the start of a contentious town-hall scene for which the house lights remain on, Imperioli, as the mayor, asked the assembly if there were any objections. “I object to the silencing of scientists!” a man called out from the top of the theatre. Two companions soon stood up and began shouting about the perils of a warming planet. The audience looked stunned, and a little confused. The ushers were evidently cau…

Their conjoined apartment—specifically the art they continued collecting in it—is the subject of a new book by Hattis, “Masterpieces: The William Rubin Collection—Dialogue of the Tribal and the Modern.” The book presents the works via a tour of the apartment: Picasso above the piano, Matisse by the tool drawer, tribal masks on the windowsill. (There are also personal notes from Frank Stella and Richard Serra.) The other day, Hattis offered a real-life trip through the penthouse. “So, we had a li…

Nowhere has sheer made as much of a splash as in the summer collection of what might be called the House of Major League Baseball. Baseball fashion has been stale. What was once avant-garde (the pantaloon, the stirrup, the male stocking, the chubby old manager inexplicably kitting up in full uniform) has become passé. Boldness was needed. The league delivered, when spring training opened, with new uniforms designed by Nike and manufactured by the apparel company Fanatics. “2024 MLB season brings…

But how should they describe it? It’s not quite a musical, a ballet, or a play, but it’s close. It’s a collaboration between three big-deal artists—a supergroup, basically, like boygenius, but for theatre. Stevens, of course, provided the music, and Peck the dance; at thirty-six, he’s been the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet for a decade. (He recently choreographed “Maestro” and Spielberg’s “West Side Story.”) For the narrative, they enlisted the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury,…

Recently, I spoke with Michael Reed, a butcher at Bob’s Quality Meats, a shop in Seattle. “It’s a field where it’s not customary to tip,” he told me, on his day off. Reed has worked in what he calls “retail meat” for twenty years. It’s more occupation than passion, but he’s proud of the personal touches in his butchery. Immigrants describe, and receive, home-country cuts that don’t have English names. Reed knows which customers have bad teeth, and he slices their steaks thin. In 2021, Bob’s inst…

Instead: success. Everyone felt rejuvenated, at least spiritually. Still, necks hurt, throats tickled, even well-calloused fingers had blisters. (“A lot of sixteenth notes,” Dart said.) Monday, the band members who hadn’t dispersed slept. Tuesday, they schvitzed. Dart, the enthusiastic one, was waiting at the Russian and Turkish Baths, on East Tenth Street—the place with the feuding co-owners. (It was Boris’s day.) Dart sat with his bass in a travel case. Cory Wong, the peppy one, showed up next…

It’s not a knock against Sanders’s (prodigious) football knowledge to point out that he got his first college job by sheer force of personality. He had no coaching experience beyond high school when he was hired, three years ago, by Jackson State University, a historically Black school in Mississippi. He framed the hiring in Messianic terms. “God called me collect,” he said. “And I had to accept the charges.” His mission was to elevate not just Jackson State but Black college football as a whole…

A New Comb-over for an Old Woolly Mammoth

Page often plays villains and antiheroes—Lear, Richard III, Claudius, Brutus, Green Goblin, Grinch, Scar, Scrooge—roles that go to men of a certain vocal register; Page is a bass. Onstage, at least, people rarely want their bogeymen to sound like Ron DeSantis. It’s a specialized market. “There’s the same five guys up for every role,” Page said. “We all like each other!” The roles also require a certain allure. “Ted Bundy had trouble getting girls—until he was a serial killer,” Page said, near so…

Assessing the forty-fifth President’s Georgia photo op in the context of Da Vinci, Warhol, and a rogues’ gallery of accused criminals.

Monster-truck tires are at least sixty-six inches high—the height of the average American. When the trucks leap fifty feet in the air, a crowd’s reaction is almost religious.