Innholdsfortegnelse for January 7-20, 2019 i New York Magazine

On the outskirts of McAllen, Texas, a few miles north of the Rio Grande, a dun-colored warehouse squats on the corner of West Ursula Avenue and South Ware Road . Formally known as the Central Processing Center, it is surrounded by a chain-link fence and numerous signs prohibiting photography. A few years ago, it was occupied by an injection-molding company. Since then, it has been retrofitted by the federal government to lock up as many as 1,000 individuals at one time. The Central Processing Center is a monument to “deterrence,” the idea that undocumented immigrants will stop showing up at the border if the punishments inflicted upon them there are severe enough. Deterrence dates back to Bill Clinton’s presidency, but it reached an unprecedented level of harshness in 2018 inside the…

IN JEN MCGOWAN’S Rust Creek, Hermione Corfield plays Sawyer, a college senior en route to an important job interview in D.C. whose GPS sends her straight into the path of a pair of scuzzy, meth-pushing gits in the backwoods of Kentucky. Smarmy Hollister (Micah Hauptman) and big, beefy Buck (Daniel R. Hill) don’t take her refusal to come and party with them gracefully, and soon she’s scrabbling through the denuded late-November landscape with a deep knife wound in her thigh as the chill deepens and darkness closes in. If you’ve seen enough modern woman-in-peril thrillers, you know to brace yourself for the worst-case scenario. But Rust Creek lets you exhale just a bit. It’s tight without being punishing, and its humor takes you happily by surprise. In this sort of…

THIS MONTH, we are all tentatively dipping our toes into the New Year, wondering what horrors and highlights might await us in 2019—the year that served as a setting, you may remember, for Blade Runner, Akira, and Running Man, three of the most iconic future-casting movies ever made and now divergent choose-your-own-dystopia visions of the years ahead (perhaps some more plausible than others). They are also reminders that, though Americans today may have a hard time imagining a future all that different from the present—we dream less about flying cars and space travel than about somewhat improved health care and slightly more immersive video games—it was not all that long ago that we believed (sort of) that very wild futures were possible just a decade or two down the road.…

It was the same for my father, and for his father, and for his father, and for the men in my family going back as far as we have records. We’ve all carried the same hereditary genetic mutation. On chromosome 2 in the DNA of all human beings, there’s a gene called the luteinizing hormone/choriogonadotropin receptor (LHCGR). In women of reproductive age, the LHCGR triggers ovulation; in men, it triggers testosterone production. But somewhere back in the lost recesses of my family’s genetic history, an unfortunate ancestor of mine was born with a mutant LHCGR gene. Having a mutant LHCGR gene leads to what doctors now call familial male-limited precocious puberty, an extremely rare disease that affects only men because you have to have testicles, which is why it’s also…

THE GREAT SUSHI omakase craze has been spreading like wildfire through the upper realms of the city’s high-roller dining scene for decades now, but lately the situation seems to have taken an even more elaborate turn. Travel the circuit of discreet new tasting joints around town (with a sizable wad of cash in your pocket, of course) and you’ll find uni-topped slivers of A5 Miyazaki beef (Sushi Ginza Onodera), and nori hand rolls stuffed with caviar (Uchu Kaiseki Counter). You’ll find monied young restaurateurs recruiting talent not from Los Angeles, like in the old days, but from decorated establishments in Japan (Amane, Noda), and you’ll see such a rainbow of different styles (box-pressed, locally caught, Kansai-influenced, L.A.-style, edomae, vegan) that the aficionados and fat cats who keep track of such…

I SUSPECT THAT plenty of New Yorkers who can easily pick out Mogadishu or Vladivostok on a map couldn’t find their way to Sunnyside Yard. It’s a grayed-out zone in the heart of western Queens, a walled-off, whale-shaped expanse with its tail in Long Island City and its snout nuzzling Woodside, 180 acres in all. This is a busy place—Amtrak, LIRR, and New Jersey Transit come here to maneuver, switch directions, and submit to repairs—and it could be much, much busier. Hudson Yards too was once a big blank nothing that nobody knew, and look at it now: a bristle of fresh new towers packed with elevators that glide frictionlessly up into the clouds. But that monster project is puny by comparison; Sunnyside Yard is seven times bigger. On a…

IN 2039... DAHLIA LITHWICK: The Supreme Court Will Die Off IN 2039, the Supreme Court will consist of two people: Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, because no one else will ever be confirmable again, and gradually the other justices will retire or die off. ¶ Democrats are all saying that they want the filibuster reestablished really soon. I think everybody has come to realize that confirming people by 50-48 margins is not good for anyone. But we’re also moving quickly away from anything that looks like a consensus nominee. And the paradox is, we will put up people who are 40. Clarence Thomas famously responded to the idea that he might move left over time, the way Souter and Stevens did, by telling his clerks, “I ain’t evolving.” Now nobody’s…

THERE ARE MAYBE one or two factories in China that can still do it at this level,” designer Marc Newson says of cloisonné, the ancient technique of inlaying enamel into dainty patterns on metal. Though the style, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean more than 3,000 years ago and spread to China around the 14th century, is traditionally seen on vases, plates, jewelry, and figurines, New-son has borrowed the age-old craft for large-scale updated pieces: the furniture in his new show, opening January 17 at Gagosian’s West 21st Street gallery. After factory scouting in China for the better part of three years, Newson decided that none of the manufacturers he visited would do the trick, so, on Gagosian’s tab, he oversaw the construction of a massive new kiln in a…

PEN15 comes to Hulu February 8. “ARE YOU GOING to get your ears pierced?” “You should get your ears pierced.” “Maybe I will.” Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine, who are both 31, have been in the Claire’s accessories store at the Galleria mall in Glendale, California, for approximately five minutes, and they already sound like teenagers. Of course, they’ve had plenty of practice. As the stars and creators of PEN15, a weird and wonderful new show on Hulu, they play Anna Kone and Maya Ishii-Peters, characters based on their seventh-grade selves. Set in the year 2000, the ten-episode series, named after a common schoolyard prank, begins with the two best friends preparing for their first day of middle school: “Seventh grade is gonna be amazing,” Maya enthuses. The joke, as…

MOVIES 1. See Glass Hell of a group-therapy session. In theaters January 18. Say what you will about M. Night Shyamalan’s pretensions, he knows how to conjure a metaphysical sense of evil. In Glass, the Shyamster returns (see p.49) with would-be supervillain Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) and would-be superhero David Dunn (Bruce Willis). Sarah Paulson is the shrink at the asylum where they land. DAVID EDELSTEIN ART 2. See Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel A punch as strong as Duchamp. The New Museum, 235 Bowery, through January 20. If you haven’t taken a good long gander at the in-your-face feminism and material intelligence of sculptor par excellence Sarah Lucas, you still have a few more days to do so in this singularly brave, rowdy three-floor retrospective. Some think this much…