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New York City Forever!

Since 1971, Travel + Leisure editors have followed one mission: to inform, inspire, and guide travelers to have deeper, more meaningful experiences. T+L's editors have traveled to countries all over the world, having flown, sailed, road tripped, and taken the train countless miles. They've visited small towns and big cities, hidden gems and popular destinations, beaches and mountains, and everything in between. With a breadth of knowledge about destinations around the globe, air travel, cruises, hotels, food and drinks, outdoor adventure, and more, they are able to take their real-world experience and provide readers with tried-and-tested trip ideas, in-depth intel, and inspiration at every point of a journey.

What's there to say about New York City ? Everything and nothing, really. The city speaks for itself, rising triumphantly out of the ground and into the sky. But while its landmarks — the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge — tell part of the story, it's the whispers and yelling and stomping and rushing and laughter and tears of eight million individual souls across five sweeping boroughs that tell the other. Not to mention the eight million who came before and the eight million before them.

This year, 2020, New York had a new word attached to its story: epicenter. One day in March people took the subway to work and then took the subway home — not realizing that it would be the last time for a very long time. While desks gathered dust in Midtown towers, ambulances whirled and buzzed across the city, the world watched in shock and awe as a Navy hospital ship cruised down the Hudson, and rooftops and windows became a 7 p.m. social club of sorts, where previously unknown neighbors smiled and waved each night from a distance while clanging pots and pans for frontline workers.

Eventually, though, the sirens began to fade, the Navy ship returned to sea, and New York City opened its heavy, heavy eyes again. The fallout of the situation is real: we've lost our favorite restaurants, stores that always had just the right thing, and the curtains remain closed on Broadway. But New York City is a resilient one, home to resilient people.

New York City is not dead — and it will never be dead. At Travel + Leisure , we say New York City forever! Here, our love letter to the City That Never Sleeps in the form of a beautiful essay from a born and raised New Yorker , guides to experiencing the city virtually and safely in person , rebuttals from locals challenging the idea that New York is "over," and more. We love you, New York, thanks for being our home.

Renita E, guest-favorite host at Empire State Building

"The invincible spirit of New Yorkers will always make a city rise."

Monique Fletcher, MTA New York City Transit Bus Operator/Brooklyn

 As long as we keep growing as a global society, NYC will never die because people are always willing to come to live in or visit the greatest city in the world. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

Anelle Miller, Executive Director of the Society of Illustrators and the Museum of American Illustration

"As a native New Yorker, I have experienced so many challenges that this city has been faced with and have seen our community rise up to meet every one of them. The people of New York are the most resilient, and determined, with an innate ability to bounce back. Within my East Midtown community, we support one another and work together to build back our businesses."

New York City

Eight million residents and a five-borough spread make New York one of the most kaleidoscopic cities in America. The culinary culture is as vibrant as you’d expect: a mix of multiethnic street food, Michelin-starred restaurants, diners, craft cocktail joints, and infamous dive bars. You can kayak in the East River or bicycle through verdant city parks. A dynamic arts community, anchored by Broadway and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, provides ample entertainment, while shopping ranges from top-end boutiques to handcrafted goods sold at neighborhood flea markets. Take a bite of the Big Apple for an electric, unforgettable experience.

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Photo by Dolly Faibyshev

When’s the best time to go to New York City?

In summer, New York seems to have more tourists than residents—perhaps because New Yorkers flock to the Hamptons, Montauk, and other seaside havens. Winter holidays in the city are celebrated on a scale not found elsewhere. Spring and fall, however, are the seasons in which the city truly shines. Outdoor cafés are not yet crowded, hotels are more affordable, and the temperate weather brings extra pleasure to activities like walking in Central Park or biking around Governors Island.

How to get around New York City

There are two international airports within the city limits: JFK and LaGuardia Airport. Newark Liberty International Airport, just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, is a convenient cab from Manhattan or Brooklyn. (Though it’ll cost anywhere from $60-$80 one-way these days.) Major highways connect the city to the rest of the continental United States, and trains—commuter lines and Amtrak—make it easy to access New York from neighboring cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Moynihan Train Hall opened in 2021 across the street from Penn Station, making for a lovely new transit center between Midtown and Long Island and various Amtrak stops.

The New York subway is the most convenient mode of transportation within the city, with 472 stations and more than 840 miles of track. Ride-sharing companies like Lyft and Uber are available along with plenty of iconic yellow taxis. When in New York, however, it’s always worthwhile to do as the locals do: walk. In Manhattan, city streets are largely organized in a simple grid. Don’t be afraid of a lack of options in the outer boroughs; green taxis do street pickups without complaint. The city’s bike-share program, managed by Citi Bike, is the most environmentally friendly option aside from walking.

Can’t miss things to do in New York City

• Drink your choice of light or dark beer at the oldest Irish tavern in the city, McSorley’s Old Ale House.
• Spend an afternoon walking the High Line up to Little Island , where live music, cold drinks, and views of the Hudson await.
• Whatever’s on stage at the Public Theater , St. Ann’s Warehouse , or BAM is worth seeing.
• Visit the New York Botanical Garden in any season. There might be a Kusama display, an orchid show, or a Christmastime train show depending on the month.

Food and drink to try in New York City

Cuisine from nearly every culture on earth can be found somewhere within the five boroughs, and the city is home to the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia. More than 60 Michelin-starred restaurants fill Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, and some 4,000 food carts bolster the city’s reputation for great casual food. The latest additions are upscale and locally sourced food halls like Time Out Market in DUMBO, and coming in 2022, a Singaporean-style hawker center will open within blocks of Times Square with 18 street-food vendors representing. Meanwhile, an active, influential brewing culture makes it likely that the average bar will provide a good mix of imported, local, and domestic beer options. Sixpoint is a favorite.

Local travel tips for New York City

• Ride the NYC Ferry : not for the commute, but for a fabulous—and inexpensive—way to take in neighborhoods across boroughs and the downtown Manhattan skyline.
• Don’t be afraid to solicit help. City residents have gained a reputation for being rude because they are caught up in the hustle and bustle—but if you’re lost, they will happily oblige with directions. Just ask!
• Plan to be here for what will surely be a buoyant NYC Pride March on June 26—it’s one of the most joyous parties of the year.
• New York public libraries are the best places to pause and rest, check your email, even read (!) during a big day of sightseeing.
• The city is at its most beautiful in twilight. Or in the light of dawn. Or maybe in the middle of the night, when the bridges and buildings become glittering beacons. There is, too, a strange beauty to watching—preferably from above or from a distance—the city dwellers navigate the crowded sidewalks and Grand Central Station’s main hall. Never is it more clear that the city is a living, breathing organism.

Guide Editor

John Newton is a freelance editor, writer, and AFAR Ambassador. In addition to AFAR, he has written for Condé Nast Traveler , GQ , Men’s Journal , Newsday , the New York Post , Travel+Leisure and many other magazines and newspapers. Raised in California, he has lived in New York City for almost 25 years (currently in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) and is always ready to explore the city he calls home. With additional reporting by Laura Dannen Redman, Ann Shields, and Lyndsey Matthews. This guide was last updated in May 2022.

NYU Travel Magazine

Life is short and the world is wide.

Let our publication be the canvas for your travel experiences – where your story comes to life.

editor’s note

Welcome to Baedeker, New York University’s travel magazine!

Named after the famous travel books created by Karl Baedeker, our bi-annual magazine strives to connect the NYU community to the world by showcasing our school’s travel experiences, with the hope of encouraging more students, alumni, and faculty to travel. Through writing and photography from wonderfully talented NYU travelers, Baedeker endeavors to examine what it means to discover the world around you with open eyes, and become a more worldly person while you do it.

After deactivating in 2019 due to COVID, Baedeker has returned in 2023 and continues to evolve: we’re expanding our global network with writers abroad in the thick of things, a dedicated Magazine Design & Layout team, planned events and workshops, upcoming collaborations with NYU clubs and associations, and preparations for new types of travel content. On this site and in our magazine, you’ll find stories of adventures from Uganda to Bhutan and everywhere in between. We hope you’ll find the inspiration to not only embark on your own adventures, but  document  them too; we sure did.

Jonny Rothberg, Editor-in-Chief

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. John Muir

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HARD ROCK HOTEL NEW YORK

Rockin’ & rollin’ in the heart of new york.

Nature At Its Best

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Luxury in hudson valley.

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Basking in the equatorial sun.

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Yachts, culture & plenty of history.

New York City

New York City Skyline Sunset (Photo: Mike Lee via Flickr)

Writer Tom Wolfe declared: “One belongs to New York instantly; one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” And that is the beauty of visiting New York, where a tourist can blend into the crowd and become part of the energy of the city in one magical moment. An island only 13 and a half miles long and just over two miles wide at its broadest point, Manhattan packs more famous icons and attractions into one compact area than any other place on earth. With limitless activities and events, time is your only constraint, so plan accordingly! The diversity of its inhabitants is matched only by the to the variety of things to do, from Central Park, the Empire State Building, Ellis Island, the world-renowned museums, Times Square and Broadway, to the local flavor of each distinctive neighborhood and the hidden treasures they have to offer. And don’t forget the other four bustling boroughs: walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, eat ethnic food in Astoria, Queens, visit the Bronx Zoo, and take the Staten Island ferry for a glorious (and free!) view of Lady Liberty. Discover your own version of New York City by wandering its streets and taking it all in, becoming fully immersed in the NYC experience.

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The Case Against Travel

By Agnes Callard

What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.

The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa , whose wonderful “ Book of Disquiet ” crackles with outrage:

I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson , a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?

Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.

To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.” Socrates went abroad when he was called to fight in the Peloponnesian War; even so, he was no traveller. Emerson is explicit about steering his critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or “duties” demand it. He has no objection to traversing great distances “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it. Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting—and, if Emerson and company are right, misses.

“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “ Hosts and Guests ,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation from the concluding chapter of the same book: “Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community.” We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others.

For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.)

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position. I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. “I went to France.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the way down.

The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. This is how it came to pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa” and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion. I walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a giant asterisk. In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking. When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? You might as well be in a room full of falcons.

Let’s delve a bit deeper into how, exactly, the tourist’s project is self-undermining. I’ll illustrate with two examples from “The Loss of the Creature,” an essay by the writer Walker Percy.

First, a sightseer arriving at the Grand Canyon. Before his trip, an idea of the canyon—a “symbolic complex”—had formed in his mind. He is delighted if the canyon resembles the pictures and postcards he has seen; he might even describe it as “every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” But, if the lighting is different, the colors and shadows not those which he expects, he feels cheated: he has arrived on a bad day. Unable to gaze directly at the canyon, forced to judge merely whether it matches an image, the sightseer “may simply be bored; or he may be conscious of the difficulty: that the great thing yawning at his feet somehow eludes him.”

Second, a couple from Iowa driving around Mexico. They are enjoying the trip, but are a bit dissatisfied by the usual sights. They get lost, drive for hours on a rocky mountain road, and eventually, “in a tiny valley not even marked on the map,” stumble upon a village celebrating a religious festival. Watching the villagers dance, the tourists finally have “an authentic sight, a sight which is charming, quaint, picturesque, unspoiled.” Yet they still feel some dissatisfaction. Back home in Iowa, they gush about the experience to an ethnologist friend: You should have been there! You must come back with us! When the ethnologist does, in fact, return with them, “the couple do not watch the goings-on; instead they watch the ethnologist! Their highest hope is that their friend should find the dance interesting.” They need him to “certify their experience as genuine.”

The tourist is a deferential character. He outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. This deference, this “openness to experience,” is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience. Emerson confessed, “I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.” He speaks for every tourist who has stood before a monument, or a painting, or a falcon, and demanded herself to feel something. Emerson and Percy help us understand why this demand is unreasonable: to be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one’s own feelings that count. Whether an experience is authentically X is precisely what you, as a non-X, cannot judge.

A similar argument applies to the tourist’s impulse to honor the grand sea of humanity. Whereas Percy and Emerson focus on the aesthetic, showing us how hard it is for travellers to have the sensory experiences that they seek, Pessoa and Chesterton are interested in the ethical. They study why travellers can’t truly connect to other human beings. During my Paris wanderings, I would stare at people, intently inspecting their clothing, their demeanor, their interactions. I was trying to see the Frenchness in the French people around me. This is not a way to make friends.

Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung destinations. The boy could recount sailing routes around the world, but he had never left Lisbon. Chesterton also approved of such stationary travellers. He wrote that there was “something touching and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”

The problem was not with other places, or with the man wanting to see them, but with travel’s dehumanizing effect, which thrust him among people to whom he was forced to relate as a spectator. Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection. When the man in Hampstead thought of foreigners “in the abstract . . . as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them.” “The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion,” Chesterton wrote. “It is rather an inner reality.” Travel prevents us from feeling the presence of those we have travelled such great distances to be near.

The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. Pessoa, Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travellers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion. So cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?

Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this , and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.

Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel. ♦

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Conan O’Brien Must Go Takes One Giant Step for Travel-Show Idiocy

When Conan O’Brien appeared on Hot Ones last week, he did the opposite of what most guests do on that show. Instead of dabbing his chicken wings in conservative dollops of hot sauce, he submerged them to the point of drowning. He sucked every piece of meat off of every bone, at one point dramatically licking a wing covered in Da’Bomb Beyond Insanity, a condiment almost single-handedly responsible for Idris Elba’s murder on the series in 2019 . Rather than wipe away tears or snot, O’Brien let everything fly so that, by the end of the episode, milk, mucus, and other unidentifiable fluids were streaming down his face while he screamed out a promo for his new travel series, Conan O’Brien Must Go .

The internet naturally went wild over all this , turning the moment into an opportunity to share classic Conan clips and celebrate the former late-night host’s eagerness to go for the most broken version of broke in any scenario. But his Hot Ones appearance is also a reminder of what has always been the secret to O’Brien’s success: his ability to enter well-established media formats — the family sitcom via his time as a Simpsons writer, the late-night talk show, the celebrity-interview podcast — and blow them up with his postmodern version of vaudevillian absurdity.

That’s what he does for the docuseries form in Conan O’Brien Must Go, a new Max series inspired by Conan O’Brien Needs a Fan , a podcast spinoff of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend in which O’Brien has in-depth conversations with admirers from all over the globe. In the Max show, whose four episodes drop simultaneously this Thursday, O’Brien actually goes to visit some of those fans — the host swears that none of them know in advance that the world’s most recognizable redhead and his film crew are about to show up — while also visiting various cities to theoretically learn more about each country’s culture. O’Brien did something similar in Conan Without Borders , a series of specials that ran on TBS when O’Brien also hosted Conan on the network. Perhaps because Conan O’Brien Must Go is a series rather than spread-out one-offs, or maybe because it seems to have a more robust budget, this version is much more blatant about its interest in riffing on and subverting the tropes of the travel format.

Each of the episodes — set in Norway, Argentina, Thailand, and Ireland — begins with majestic cinematography and a deeply serious voiceover narration from distinguished filmmaker Werner Herzog as he describes the beauty of our planet. Then Herzog, in his thick German accent, utters what is basically the mission statement of the show: “To truly appreciate the astounding grandeur of this planet, sometimes you must defile it. Behold,” he adds, “the defiler.” Cut to clips from the series of O’Brien making an ass of himself on multiple continents.

The first theoretical rule of being a travel-show host is to keep the focus on the places and people you’re visiting rather than yourself. O’Brien takes the paper that rule is written on and sets it on fire. In classic Conan fashion, he makes everything about himself. Crucially, he’s always the butt of the joke and the obvious jester, never a mocker of other people’s traditions. In Bergen, Norway, he “helps” one of his fans, a hip-hop musician, by insisting on singing on one of his songs in a very high falsetto. In Buenos Aires, he commissions another fan, an artist, to paint a mural of O’Brien with his arms around the pope and soccer star Lionel Messi, underneath a banner that says “Hijos sagrados de Argentina,” or “Sacred sons of Argentina.” (In case this wasn’t abundantly clear: Conan O’Brien is an Irish American who grew up in Massachusetts and has zero connection to Argentina.) In an especially clever and very Conan bit, when the host first arrives in Ireland, he says, “As soon as I landed, I knew that I was with my people,” at which point the camera captures several different Irish men and women, all of whom are just O’Brien in costume.

Conan O’Brien Must Go even highlights the mechanics of making a travel show and Conan-izes them for the sake of comedy. O’Brien points out that he can afford drones for this series, which he uses for the least inspired reasons he can conjure. In the Norway episode, he waxes poetic about how stunning the northern lights look, then the camera pans to a wide shot and reveals that he’s actually sitting in his hotel, staring at a picture of the northern lights on his laptop. This show is relentless in its silliness. This is meant as the highest compliment.

Most travel-show hosts try to make their interview subjects comfortable, but that is not O’Brien’s goal. After getting a Norwegian to admit his people do not like having their space invaded, he slowly licks the entirety of the man’s left cheek. After being fitted for a formal suit in Bangkok, O’Brien pontificates about nonsense in English at great length, while the owner of the shop assumes an expression similar to the one Chris Pine made while trying to beam himself onto some other celestial plane during the Don’t Worry Darling press tour.

O’Brien even calls attention to specific subgenres that fall underneath the travel-show umbrella. While visiting Merrion Square Park in Dublin, a place that U2 front man Bono is allegedly known to frequent, the series briefly turns into a nature program called Finding Bono in which O’Brien tries to track the elusive rock star. (He almost “catches him” by using a fake global humanitarian award as bait.) Before trying some of the black pudding that Ireland is famous for, O’Brien nods to Stanley Tucci’s foodie-focused CNN travel series by noting that Tucci always looks like he’s having “six orgasms” after he tries a bite of any dish. Not to be outdone, after a couple tastes of black pudding, O’Brien engages in a deranged form of modern dance that leads to him writhing on the floor while the owner of the shop he’s visiting looks on, stupefied.

This is what O’Brien was born to do: gyrate on the floor in public, in his land of origin, in the hope that someone, somewhere on this planet filled with astounding grandeur, will laugh. He truly is the defiler. At 61 years old — his birthday falls on the same day as Conan O’Brien Must Go ’s release date — he is also, still, a comedy king .

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This Handheld Gaming Console Made Me Love Games Again

For the better part of a decade, most of my gaming time has been relegated to long commutes and idle time in offices and waiting for friends to arrive — not exactly environments ripe for heavy gameplay. As a result, I’ve missed the largest milestones in the last several years of gaming — the joy of completing a Dark Souls game after hours of crushing defeat, the collective experience of playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons in the early days of COVID — in favor of mobile card games. That FOMO hasn’t been enough to kick my mobile-only gaming habit, but Lenovo’s newest handheld gaming console, the Legion Go, may have done the trick.

The Legion Go is one of several newer portable gaming consoles that run or can run Windows; the other models are the Asus ROG Ally, which also came out in 2023, and the Steam Deck, which was released in 2022. But in design, the Go has a lot more in common with the Nintendo Switch. Like the Switch, it has a kickstand on the back — something no other Windows-powered handheld console has — that you can use for propping it up on a surface. I can drop the Go in my bag, head to a bar or coffee shop, plop the console down at my table, and dive back into my latest Stardew Valley farm. Unlike the ROG Ally or the Steam Deck, the Legion Go has Switch-like removable controllers, which you can use when the device is in kickstand mode or connected to a TV. The Go is slightly larger than the Switch, but its display has a higher resolution and it’s about two inches bigger, so it looks better than the Switch’s display does.

Since it runs full-blown Windows, I’ve even paired a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with it, and have used it to type out a few quick emails when I’ve been at my parent’s house without my laptop. Running Windows also means it has access to multiple game libraries like Steam and Epic Games (as well as cloud gaming and emulators ), which is more than you can get on the Switch . I’d never played Battletoads & Double Dragon before, but now that I can play it right from my couch on the Go, I’m hooked on it (and its unbelievably catchy soundtrack ). I never have to worry about running out of storage, either, as the Legion Go has a built-in microSD card slot that I can swap out for another once one gets filled up. It also has two USB-C ports (one on the top and one on the bottom), which you can use for charging or connecting an external GPU, which allows the Legion Go to perform on higher graphics settings and feel more like a traditional gaming PC setup .

My phone used to be my go-to console because its convenience simply couldn’t be beat: no matter where I went, my latest gaming fixation remained within arm’s reach. That worked great for keeping myself entertained, but it limited me to whatever games my phone is capable of running (emulators are now allowed but my iPhone still can’t play Baldur’s Gate 3 ). The Legion Go is the first console I’ve tried that’s given me nearly the same portability while providing more power than any phone could, plus access to way more games.

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New York’s Hottest Club Is a Literary Event

These days, readings in the city can require tickets and be just as hard to get into as a trendy restaurant.

By Kate Dwyer

When the writer and professor Amitava Kumar invited the book scout Erin Edmison to his reading at McNally Jackson Books’ Seaport location in February, Ms. Edmison penciled it into her calendar and “didn’t think twice about it,” she said, “because I am old, and that’s the way things used to work.”

On the night of the reading, she arrived at the bookstore to discover that she needed a $5 ticket to the event, which was sold out. “It didn’t even occur to me,” Ms. Edmison, 48, said.

She got in eventually. After a brief wait near the cash register with the other walk-ins, Ms. Edmison was able to stand in the back of the room. “It wasn’t a big deal,” she said. She was happy to see that Mr. Kumar , who is a friend, had a packed house.

In the New York of the recent past, readings were events one could wander into, perhaps as a recent college graduate aspiring to be a published writer or simply looking for something to do. But these days, McNally Jackson and a handful of other independent bookstores across the city have begun requiring people to buy tickets or R.S.V.P. to attend readings. Tickets can cost anywhere from a few bucks to some $30, depending on whether you buy the book, too, sometimes rolled into the price.

New Yorkers may have gotten used to the idea that nothing in the city is ever really free and that everything is hard to get into. Nonetheless, some have begun to wonder: What changed?

“Recently, attendance has been extremely up,” said Mikaela Dery, the director of programming at McNally Jackson, which has multiple locations around the city. “At least half of our events sell out. Often, we have weeks where every single event is sold out. And we have three or four events a week.”

The bookstore started its reservation system when it reopened as pandemic lockdowns eased — as the staff was careful not to overcrowd the room. But McNally Jackson, as well as other bookstores including Books Are Magic and the newer P&T Knitwear, adopted it as a long-term policy as a way to prevent no-shows.

Crowded rooms, though, are still a consideration. Readings — and not just at bookstores, but at bars, galleries and parties, too — seem to be more popular than ever.

On a Tuesday night in late March, the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib drew 350 people for a 10 p.m. reading and Q. and A. at the Bell House, a performance venue in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, to promote his new book “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension.” (The late-night event was added after an earlier 350-person reading with the critic Wesley Morris sold out in a matter of hours.)

But you don’t need to be a big name to fill a room. Over the years, less established writers have found large audiences at readings hosted by upstart magazines like The Drift and Cake Zine , which typically ask a few of their contributors to read in the earlier hours of their raucous parties.

Some of these readings cost money, too: Drift parties are free for subscribers, but otherwise tickets are $20 at the door and include the latest print issue. Cake Zine’s events were free until recently; at its issue party last summer, at Public Records, the space quickly reached its 500-person capacity, and people lined up down the block, said Aliza Abarbanel, a founding editor at the magazine. For the launch of the magazine’s winter issue, she and her co-editor, Tanya Bush, charged $15 for tickets.

Readings became a way “for people to ease back into social life” as Covid began to recede, said Whitney Mallett, the founder of The Whitney Review of New Writing, a biannual print magazine with shortform criticism and essays. And for a younger generation especially they can play a large role in social life.

“I’m sure kids still go to shows at Baby’s All Right and places like that,” Ms. Mallett said, though that Williamsburg concert hall has also hosted a few literary magazine parties recently. “Maybe readings have replaced that to some degree — it seems more contemporary. To go see someone’s indie rock band play doesn’t feel as of this era.”

It used to be that readings were a source of some grumbling, not because people couldn’t get in, but because they didn’t want to go. “You dread going to readings — they can be so boring,” the memoirist Priscilla Gilman, a child of literary New York , said. Lately, she noted, events have been more inventive, with things like food and cocktail pairings.

Bars like Pete’s Candy Store, Franklin Park and KGB have hosted readings for years. But chefs and restaurateurs have brought the events to new, upscale spaces, too. Tables of Contents, a reading series founded by the chef Evan Hanczor more than a decade ago, has become a mainstay on the literary event circuit and takes place each month at rotating venues such as the Ace Hotel in Brooklyn. The series’s upcoming 60-seat event — with dishes inspired by each reading — sold out within an hour of being announced, Mr. Hanczor said.

The fashion world has taken notice, too. Rachel Comey hosted a reading with The New York Review of Books last year. And in February, Ms. Mallett hosted a Whitney Review reading at the Comme des Garçons store in Chelsea.

Mr. Abdurraqib said he wanted to treat his book launch more like an “album release show or a concert,” and for it to feel for the audience “as though you’re settling into the end of a night hanging at your friend’s house, when a party kind of winds down and people aren’t leaving.” And in fact no one wanted to: The author signed books past midnight.

When literary events become trendy scenes, there are usually at least a few people who bemoan the loss of a seemingly bygone serious reading culture. (Some writers reading their work aloud are “not necessarily in it to publish books,” Ms. Mallett said, “or books are just another part of selling a persona — there’s a lot of social media stars.”)

But the landscape of readings in New York has always been varied, encapsulating both underground, D.I.Y.-ish performances and more professionalized gatherings.

The writer Lucy Sante remembered participating in poetry readings inside church basements and coffee houses as a high school student in the early 1970s. “When I was writing my first book, ‘Low Life,’ I tried out bits reading them at Mona’s bar on Avenue B,” Ms. Sante said.

Downtown bars like Sophie’s, Chumley’s and Phebe’s had reading series, as did CBGB, around the same time (on Sunday nights). There were also readings in art galleries, and “readings given under the auspices of downtown magazines like Between C&D,” Ms. Sante said, noting that Between C&D, which was on the Lower East Side, was “like two people operating out of their apartment,” similar to today’s indie publications run by twenty-somethings.

In a more cash-flush era of book publishing, in the 1980s and ’90s, releasing a book often involved parties uptown where authors would be feted at editors’ and agents’ apartments, Ms. Gilman, the memoirist, said. (Those gatherings did not usually include a reading.)

Today, most readings are not so ritzy, and what draws people to them is not the promise of a fancy cocktail or an hors d’oeuvre.

For many writers, they’re “an outlet to share this thing that might otherwise be seen as nerdy or a solitary pursuit,” said Leah Abrams, 25, who with a fellow writer, Heather Akumiah, 29, runs a series called Limousine Readings.

At a night of readings on Thursday in celebration of Cake Zine’s second anniversary, Ms. Abarbanel said a few people approached her to say they were inspired to go home and write immediately after the event.

“That’s probably the best feedback I could hear,” she said.

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