New York
As the Right Lionizes Daniel Penny, His Prosecutor Faces a Familiar Fury
Daniel Penny broke into a smile at midmorning Monday, hugging both of his lawyers in a Manhattan courtroom and getting a kiss on the cheek from one. Moments before, a jury forewoman had said Mr. Penny was not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of a homeless subway passenger he had restrained in a chokehold last year.
As the celebration moved to a nearby bar, criticism of the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, exploded online. It came from Republicans like Vice President-elect JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr. and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who praised the jurors and scorned Mr. Bragg for charging Mr. Penny, a former Marine.
On Friday, Mr. Vance said he had invited Mr. Penny to attend the Army-Navy football game on Saturday with him and called Mr. Bragg “New York’s mob district attorney.”
And so, as Mr. Penny’s star ascends on the right, Mr. Bragg, who faces re-election next year, finds himself in a familiar position: saying he had followed the law and his duty no matter the outcome as an internet storm raged around him.
Mr. Bragg, a Harlem native who is Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, has been a target for such fury since the first days of his term, when he promised a progressive approach to crime. It built to a fever when he charged President-elect Donald J. Trump with 34 felonies — and won a conviction on each charge.
After the Penny trial, Mr. Bragg said in a statement that “as with every case, we followed the facts and the evidence from beginning to end.” But he added that “prosecutors and their family members were besieged with hate and threats — on social media, by phone and over email.”
“Simply put,” he said, “this is unacceptable, and everyone, no matter your opinion on this case, should condemn it.”
Tumult comes with the job, said Cyrus Vance Jr., his predecessor, who is not related to the vice president-elect. But in recent years the 24-hour news cycle and the never-sleeping internet have made routine cases “more fraught more frequently,” he said.
“The office has always has been involved with tough cases and tough decisions,” Mr. Vance said. He added, “My guess is, the change in reporting has intensified the reactions to cases brought and not brought.”
It was cases possibly not brought that first made Mr. Bragg a focus of public ire. In his first week in office in 2022, Mr. Bragg told his staff to ask for jail time only for the most serious offenses — including murder, sexual assault and crimes involving major sums of money — unless the law required otherwise. The city was struggling to control a pandemic spike in crime, and the move created confusion and consternation in law enforcement circles.
But the most vociferous opposition came from conservative politicians after his office charged Mr. Trump. The former president portrayed him as part of a vast and sinister Democratic conspiracy as Mr. Bragg won his conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star. Mr. Trump has demanded the prosecution of people he blames for criminal and civil cases against him, including Mr. Bragg.
This summer, Mr. Bragg signaled that he would testify before Congress as Republican representatives sought to discredit the case. Since winning election this year for a second term, Mr. Trump has asked the court to dismiss his conviction. In a letter to the judge overseeing the case, Mr. Bragg’s office countered by showing a willingness to freeze sentencing while Mr. Trump holds office.
The district attorney’s office, with about 1,700 staff members, including approximately 600 prosecutors, has brought 36,000 cases this year, according to its data. In November, the office concluded 13 trials.
Mr. Bragg’s supporters have said that the politically charged cases have overshadowed good work, like mental health initiatives and the creation of a special victims division. Erin E. Murphy, a New York University law professor and Mr. Bragg’s close friend, said it is “frustrating.”
However, Mr. Bragg’s experience as a career prosecutor — working in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and as a deputy New York attorney general — prepared him to take the condemnation in stride and ignore the political maelstrom, she said.
“The work he’s done has gone up against some of the most powerful political, economic, financial actors in our system,” she said. “He’s just well poised to just know what that feels like and what it entails.”
Mr. Bragg’s case against Mr. Penny stemmed from his encounter with another subway rider, Jordan Neely, on May 1, 2023. Mr. Penny, an architecture student, was on his way to the gym when he boarded an uptown F train. Mr. Neely, 30, who had struggled with his mental health for years, entered the car and began yelling about his hunger, wanting to return to jail and not caring about living or dying, according to witnesses, several of whom described his behavior as frightening.
As Mr. Neely strode through the car, Mr. Penny approached from behind and put him in a chokehold, taking him to the floor.
In the days after, as video of the two men struggling on the floor rocketed around the internet, protesters crowded onto the platform at the Broadway-Lafayette station, where the train had stopped, demanding charges against Mr. Penny.
Others quickly came to his defense, saying that he had acted to protect fellow passengers.
Vickie Paladino, a Republican city councilwoman from Queens, this week called for Mr. Trump’s incoming administration to launch a federal civil rights investigation of the prosecutor’s office. Mr. Bragg “has made this racial,” Ms. Paladino told “Fox & Friends First,” adding that the trials of Mr. Trump and Mr. Penny, who are both white, show the prosecutor’s office has a “vendetta.”
Maud Maron, a right-wing activist who has said she plans to run as a Republican for district attorney, said she would not have filed charges against Mr. Penny because he had acted in defense of others.
Mr. Neely would not have died had he been jailed for previous crimes, she said. Although incarceration is not “ideal or sometimes even a great way to deliver mental health services for drug treatment services, sometimes it’s the only way,” she said.
Mr. Penny’s case became a flashpoint in the debate over how New York handles crime and justice, homelessness and mental illness.
Some said the episode was representative of a string of high-profile crimes on the subways, many involving homeless and mentally ill people, and showed the city’s inability to protect residents. Others saw Mr. Neely as a symbol of a broken system that lets vulnerable people slip through the cracks.
That politicians seized on Mr. Penny’s case was unsurprising, said Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney and former candidate for mayor. “In this era, political actors are deeply invested in what prosecutors are or are not doing,” she said.
Ms. Wiley, who said she met Mr. Bragg during their respective campaigns in 2021, called him a “straight shooter.”
Mr. Bragg had an “obligation to Neely and to the public” to look at the evidence and prosecute the case, particularly following a medical examiner’s findings that Mr. Neely died because of the chokehold, Ms. Wiley said. “Anything short of that would have been to fail to do the job appropriately,” she said.
But as Mr. Bragg’s office finishes one charged case, another is close on its heels.
At almost the same time as Mr. Penny was rejoicing on Monday, police officers in Pennsylvania arrested a suspect in the killing of a health insurance executive on a Manhattan street. The suspect, Luigi Mangione, has been charged with murder by New York prosecutors and they seek his extradition.
Already, the killing has garnered an impassioned response from Americans frustrated with the health insurance industry, with some making the defendant into a folk hero — and returning a polarized nation’s attention to the prosecutor’s office in Lower Manhattan.
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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