Christopher Bonanos

1 week ago | curbed.com | Christopher Bonanos

A few decades ago, William G. Conway — the late ornithologist who’s largely responsible for reimagining the Bronx Zoo as the conservation-minded institution we know today — had his upper lip bitten halfway off by a king vulture. Apparently, however, it didn’t put anyone there off the vulture business because the zoo has gone to significant lengths to breed a new one.

2 weeks ago | curbed.com | Christopher Bonanos

Name that tunnel. This morning, Lorde dropped “What Was That,” her first major release since 2021 and the one she teased on April 22 with an unannounced appearance in Washington Square Park. It was supposed to be a full-on performance, but she hadn’t gotten a permit so the police put a stop to that. Lorde briefly danced to one of her recordings instead.

4 weeks ago | curbed.com | Christopher Bonanos

“By the way, I have a favorite statistic,” Juliette Michaelson tells me midway through our conversation. She’s a deputy chief of the MTA, working on policy and especially on the rollout of the congestion-pricing toll program. “The city’s 311 collects information about how many people call about what is called ‘excessive car-honking,’” she says. “And the number of complaints about excessive car-honking in January and February was 70 percent lower than last January and February.

1 month ago | vulture.com | Christopher Bonanos

A Polaroid photograph of Didion in the art department at Vogue, circa 1958. Joan Didion, unsurprisingly, took a lot of notes. The author and journalist, who died at 87 in 2021, also kept those notes, and her datebooks, and more generally the paper trail of her literary legacy. All of it, after her death, went to the New York Public Library, knitted together with that of her writer husband, John Gregory Dunne.

2 months ago | curbed.com | Christopher Bonanos

The atrium at Bell Works, in Holmdel, New Jersey (without the Lumon set-dressing). “Come with us to get severed at lumon,” reads the caption on one enthusiastic TikTok video. “I’m soooo obsessed #severance #lumon #bellworks.” The poster, Sophia Stern, had just filmed at an office park with an illustrious past: Bell Works, the former Bell Laboratories research center in Holmdel, New Jersey, designed by the midcentury master architect Eero Saarinen.