“I’m not seeing any Bonghitters. Very disappointed.” I was in Central Park with Andrew Fedorov, reporter for The Fine Print, to see a game of softball between the Bonghitters, fielded by The High Times, and The Wall Street Journal. (It wasn’t just the stoners: A call to the league’s commissioner revealed the game had been rained out.) He’s been covering the games for years, and working at TFP since 2021, as party reporter, features writer, industry correspondent, and interviewer. His pieces run weekly, and sometimes more often: By any estimate he’s one of the most hard-working and versatile writers in New York.

It’s from his scene reporting that I first met him, and it is this that accounts for his own newsworthiness. Writers’ social skills are often desultory, and they are given to backbiting and cruelty. They mock. I’ve heard some unpleasant things said about him, albeit generally using the mononym, that most reliable index of influence: A typical party report includes dozens of names. Writers and editors are more reluctant to admit they have looked for their own names in his pieces than to confess Googling themselves, filing late, or various types of infidelity.

Fedorov on his method: “If I go to a thing, I will go up to the host and be like, ‘Hey, will you play proper nouns [with me]?’ And they will just point out all the people, and they’re like, ‘You should talk to this person. They have something fun going on.’ And then I go to people, and I’m like, ‘Hey, what’s your name? How do you spell it?’ It’s totally random.” He took a break from the social column, “Vital Moments,” over the summer, because he had started feeling “a little paranoid,” like he “was going everywhere having an evil eye.”

People sometimes wouldn’t talk to him at parties. A briefly-notorious saloniste claimed he “didn’t realize” Fedorov was “recording the whole time,” because he regretted what he’d said.

TFP operates from a sense of public interest, unlike Gawker (middling) or Bookforum’s Paper Trail (Publishers Lunch-y). Significant stories from Fedorov include Erin Overby’s difficulties after she shared diversity statistics at The New Yorker, her employer; a rocky period at The Baffler; and what Julian Barnes (Times reporter) thinks about having the same name as Julian Barnes (award-bespangled novelist). TFP is intended for people who work in media, and it does affect how accountable they feel for what they publish and how they treat their workers, colleagues, and readers. A few days later, a friend asked what the name for Fedorov fans would be, and I proposed “the Fedoyeen.” I count myself among them.

I went about my own duties with Fedorov’s warnings and pointers in mind. But summer is lazy. Some columnists are lazy. Friend and editor at The Baffler Matthew Shen-Goodman took me to see my first professional fight, making up for the rained-out softball game. It was also my first time at Madison Square Garden. I discovered Muhammad Ali’s grandson, Biaggio Ali Walsh, has a tattoo on his chest that says “Arabic” in Arabic. Flava Flav was there. Midway through the card someone a couple rows back vomited so fantastically he cleared our entire section, which would have been a great time for the city to demolish the place.

I heard Dissent was throwing a party at their Wall Street office. After, a fellow attendee remarked, “That was the worst thing I’ve ever been to,” and he would know. They do have a terrace overlooking the East River, which made me feel like a passenger on an Air America flight: Lovely view, distressing atmosphere. Christian Lorentzen’s arrival, soon after his return from Albania, was applauded, and he obligingly doled out duty-free cigarettes and made a pass at a friend of mine. I overheard some unpleasant things about conditions at Harper’s from a fellow attendee, but this source was optimistic about the incoming editor, Chris Carroll. Here I’m inclined to apply The Paris Review rule: Replacing the current editor with someone who shares their first name guarantees improvement.

Speaking of, TPR throws the best parties in the city. I got a ride home with a couple editors from the New Yorker, but found myself unable to grill them thoroughly since what makes TPR parties great are free and recklessly strong drinks. They also have Dan Piepenbring, whose recent accession to the book column at Harper’s has already made it the finest going. Danielle Carr had a party later that week, possibly celebrating her return to Los Angeles, but also plausibly for the publication of her excellent piece on Bessel Van der Kolk in New York. An editor of a prominent little magazine autopsied the worst pieces in their forthcoming issue, because I asked, but I’ll spare them this time. Semper vigilans.

I increasingly suspect that Triple Canopy is the best magazine in New York, if only because it’s the one that, to borrow a friend’s phrase, feels the least like “an adult lemonade stand.” They hosted a panel to discussed the artist Darren Bader’s attempt to sell his artistic practice. A short film from Pacho Velez, with title cards from Becca Abbe, the legal contract Bader had drawn up, and an essay are on the TC website. Rachel Ossip introduced the panel, including art historian Rachel Hunter Himes, Harvard professor David Levine, filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins, TC founder Alexander Provan, and artist Dena Yago. One million dollars—the price set for Bader’s practice—doesn’t entitle the buyer to rights over his work to date (like a French horn filled with guacamole), but it would allow them to produce nearly anything they wanted as Bader. Levine remarked that he found the gambit unpersuasive until he considered it as a sincere business proposition: So long as it isn’t an artwork, “it’s a masterpiece.” Maybe opting out will be cool again.

In About Ed by Robert Glück (NYRB, November), one of his many lovers tells him something that would feel unearned in a book by any other writer: “[Y]ou possess a sophisticated creativity and gratitude for your life that is unusual.” Here, you’re delighted to agree. About Ed is the record of Glück’s life with another lover, Ed Aulerich-Sugai, and their friendship until his death from AIDS in 1994. It is an oneiric, lyrical book, suitable for a writer who describes himself as “a novelist working outside the genre.” Glück’s sense of humor is intact, albeit subdued: There are the rare, smaller jokes, familiar from his criticism and poetry, but the big laugh is how foolish we all are when we’re young, and how helpless throughout. The memoir is partly a dual künstlerroman (Aulerich-Sugai was becoming a painter, and Glück a writer), and much of the book is about how Glück’s vocation fails him in grief:

Glück’s genius is in the fineness of his perception, and every sentence in About Ed is laden with disarming acuity. It ends with Ed’s dreams, dozens of them, each keen and whole: “Before that we rushed downstairs—a cyclone! Cylindrical, not apexed.”

A friend once suggested: If you’re unhappy, and particularly if you’re unhappy about your work, go to Coney Island and ride the Cyclone. There’s a story about the Cyclone in 1948’s New York Times: “For five-and-a-half years Emilio Franco, a 35-year-old machinist and coal miner from Fairmont, W. Va., has been speechless. After one frightening ride on the Cyclone at Coney Island he can speak again. He said so himself yesterday.” His first words? “I feel sick.”

The day after the Hamas offensive began, Palestinian Youth Movement and the Party for Socialism and Liberation organized a demonstration in Times Square. Before we even reached the rally a counterportestor asked my friend if she felt “like a feminist” for supporting Palestine. We were driven into a pen when the march arrived at the Israeli consulate, and I found myself beside a group of young men talking in Arabic and English. My friend, to her delight, noted that they were cursing the counterprotesters in robust Hebrew. The tone of the march was tentative—another attendee called it “generic”—but support for the resistance was firm. Our group retreated to Margaritaville, next to the Statue of Liberty with “NO PASSPORT REQUIRED” on her tablet, and talked about just war theory and what it’s been like to watch another Iraq.

This was before the extent of the retaliatory airstrikes and raids in Gaza were known, and before the threat of a ground invasion loomed as it does now. Over ten thousand Palestinians, nearly half of them children, were alive then who aren’t today. Gaza hadn’t been bombed into dust. We had just seen the videos of the bulldozers crashing through the fence at the border. We were talking about a “paradigm shift”—a new generation, thirty years after Oslo!—and how it explained the muteness of our left and the confusion and bitterness of our opponents, not yet knowing about the more than a million people who would be displaced and bombed as they fled.

The following Friday, the PYM and Within Our Lifetime unity march, also from Times Square to the consulate, was larger and more resolute. Attempts by the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group to box the demonstration out of the square in front of the consulate were frustrated, and we continued nearly to the U.N., but grief or fear stopped us short of a sense of achievement.

On Wednesday, someone I had never met loaned me her car so I could drive down to D.C. for the Jewish Voice for Peace march. Things had changed: We had a demand. We wanted a ceasefire because Israel had turned the water and electricity off, food and medicine were running out, there was a blockade on the aid convoys and airstrikes at the Rafah crossing, and entire families were dying in their homes. I didn’t know if a ceasefire with an apartheid state was possible: Wasn’t it already war, with the embargo and the assassinations and the settlements? But Biden had sent two carrier groups to the Mediterranean, and wanted $106 billion for Ukraine and Israel and for a wall on the southern border, and it had to stop. Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush cried as they spoke to us. I saw a dozen people from my neighborhood, who’d also left at dawn and would get home past midnight. I missed the chants in Arabic, because I wondered if people in Jenin or Gaza or Shatila would understand what we were saying if they saw a video. The march terminated at a congressional building where, inside, three hundred people including two dozen rabbis were being arrested for demanding a ceasefire. Marjorie Taylor Greene mocked us from a balcony.

On Friday, NYC-DSA, IfNotNow, Adalah Justice Project, Crown Heights Tenant Union, DRUM and JVP organized a march from Bryant Park to Senator Gillibrand’s office. The night before, I learned several members of a friend’s family were killed in the bombing of the St. Porphyrius Church in Gaza, including a six-month-old baby. One hundred and thirty-nine people, including Rep. Jabari Brisport, were arrested demanding a ceasefire. This earned half a sentence in the Times two days later. My arresting officer googled “disorderly conduct” on his phone as he walked me to the bus.

The next day, at the action in Bay Ridge organized by WOL, PYM, Al-Awda, Samidoun, and others, I saw dozens of people from the night before already back in the streets. There were thousands more, blocks and blocks worth. Balady grocery store had arranged vegetables in the shape of a Palestinian flag, and it was wonderful. A friend gave me za’atar-flavored cheese puffs and remarked on the “genius of the Arab people.” We marched for hours, and there were fireworks on rooftops and teens climbing streetlights and buses. When the police split the march, I didn’t notice, because there were still hundreds of people around me. I was feet away when the police rushed the first ranks of the protest and arrested twenty-two people, mostly Black and Palestinian, some of them children. I watched from the sidewalk as a cop punched someone in the face.