Innholdsfortegnelse for January 18-31, 2021 i New York Magazine

1 In “Gain of Function” (January 4–17), Nicholson Baker explored the possibility that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. The Washington Post’s Adam Taylor wrote, “This is a well-told summary of the whole ‘lab leak’ theory but I still end up with the same conclusions of nine months ago 1) the science is too complicated for a layman to have a firm opinion 2) we will probably never know for sure.” Alina Chan, a molecular biologist whose research was highlighted in the essay, called it a “fearless analysis … of whether COVID may have originated from a lab, how the U.S. research system could be implicated, and the nearly decade-long debate over gain-of-function research.” Many vocal scientists and science journalists challenged not only Baker’s conclusions but also his…

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S SECOND impeachment, like the other repudiations he has suffered, feels provisional. He is never quite banished. He is impeached, but Senate Republicans refuse to convict or even allow evidence into his trial. He loses the election, but won’t concede, and may just run again. He is impeached again, but his trial is delayed until after his departure date. It feels as if we have spent four years watching the wheels come off, yet the vehicle somehow still keeps rolling forward. But now, finally, the end is at hand. Trump is suffering a series of wounds that, in combination, are likely to be fatal after Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20. Trump is obviously going to surrender his office. Beyond that looming defeat, he is undergoing a…

EARLY ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, January 6, Joe Biden and the people closest to him allowed themselves some genuine optimism. For weeks, the president-elect and his team had been mapping out what they could accomplish in a divided Washington, but now—fresh off a pair of surprise wins in Georgia’s runoffs, which handed Democrats the Senate and therefore unified control of the government—a new world of possibility was in view. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi seemed to agree that a fresh round of stimulus checks would be on the way. Biden’s budgeteers saw a clearer-than-ever chance to expand his recovery legislation into multiple trillions of dollars’ worth of investments. The incoming president’s preexisting day-one promises—rejoining the Paris climate accord, unwinding a range of Donald Trump’s more draconian executive orders—now looked…

➸ AS THE WEATHER worsens and the city sinks back into lockdown, the board-game boom is proceeding apace (Hasbro, for instance, which makes Game Night standards Jenga and Clue, reported a 20 percent jump in the third quarter of 2020 compared to the previous year). And people aren’t just buying Monopoly. Patchwork, in which players win points for creating the “most aesthetic” quilt, has for years been a favorite on the popular review site BoardGameGeek (the IMDb of board games, where some 2 million registered users have long debated in forums about the sturdiest meeples—playing pieces, for the uninitiated). Now, it’s a mainstream hit that has sold out several times over. Parents looking to pry their kids from screens are behind the surge in sales of Morels (in which gamers…

You’re from Tennessee? Yes, we’re here visiting my husband’s family. It’s very different here, COVID-wise. At home, there are Walmarts you can go into where not one single person is wearing a mask. Where are you coming from? Connecticut. My friend and I are going thrifting on the Lower East Side. We’re obsessed with fashion. I’ve been coming into the city alone since I was 13. That first time was with a friend, too. We went to get bubble tea and buy K-pop posters. Nice outfit. I was raised in the 1950s, and this is how professionals dressed. I’m a lawyer for religious institutions. Through work, I’ve made friends who have political views a world apart from my own. One of my dear friends, who thinks Trump ought to have…

Iran and Turkey. She even ran a gym café in Tehran where, instead of smoothies, she whipped up Persian dishes like koofteh (meatballs), prompting gymgoers to joke that she was sabotaging their efforts. After arriving Stateside, the divorced mother of three eventually found work through refugee-focused organizations like the Eat Offbeat catering kitchen and Tanabel dinner series. But her personal dream is to open a Persian teahouse—a place designed to “show something not found here,” like the glories of Iranian slow cooking and Turkish breakfast—and also “to have fun, to dance.” Considering present circumstances, the dancing might have to wait. But Rejali has been busy building her brand, populating an online store with pickled dates, carrot and eggplant jams, and the Middle Eastern pastries that have become her calling card.…

THE GUITAR SOUNDED a bit out of tune, but she liked it. Jazmine Sullivan was flipping through tracks on her computer, finding material to put words to for her new album. “It was so heart-wrenching,” she remembers. “It just hit me.” She jotted down lyrics for a plea: “Just don’t have too much fun without me/Don’t have too much, don’t have too much fun/Please don’t forget about me/Try not to love no one.” Her request is selfish, but it feels real. It became the first single, “Lost One,” from her new album, Heaux Tales. “I just tried to think of the saddest thing I could think of,” she says. “The thing that came to mind was losing somebody you loved.” Among today’s crop of R&B artists, Sullivan is a voice—a…

➸ Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey didn’t kick Trump off Facebook and Twitter, respectively; Stacey Abrams did. Within 72 hours of Democrats taking control of the Senate, Dorsey and Zuckerberg found their better angels and suspended Trump’s account. You think it’s because they finally came to the realization that this was bad for America? Or that Trump had crossed a new red line? No, it was because they recognized that Democrats were going to be the heads of the Senate committees regulating them. Zuckerberg and Dorsey got tough on Trump 1,447 days into his 1,461-day tenure. ➸ Twitter and Facebook built businesses in which shareholder value was directly correlated with the president’s rage and disinformation. Twitter stock, which I bought for the first time in 2019, was in the teens…

Antony Blinken SECRETARY OF STATE ABidenaideforyears,herose throughtheranksduring theObamaera;alsoplaysin abandcalledAblinken. Janet Yellen SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY FederalReservechairuntil2018, whenTrumprefused torenominateher,sayingshewas “tooshort”forthejob. Lloyd J. Austin III SECRETARY OF DEFENSE LedtroopsintheIraqWarand willhavetobeexemptedfromthe federalbanonrecentlyretired militaryofficersleadingtheDOD. Merrick Garland ATTORNEY GENERAL AfterMitchMcConnellrefusedtoeven considerhisSupremeCourt nominationin2016,hereturnedto theU.S.CourtofAppeals. Deb Haaland SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR AmemberoftheLagunaPueblo tribe,HaalandwillbethefirstNative AmericanCabinetsecretary. Tom Vilsack SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE Theex-Iowagovernorwillresume thisjob,whichheheldforbothtermsof theObamaadministration. Gina Raimondo SECRETARY OF COMMERCE Theonlycurrentgovernor (orsenator)inBiden’smix, theex-investorrunsRhodeIsland. Martin J. Walsh SECRETARY OF LABOR Bostonmayorandtheformer presidentofSouthBoston’s LaborersLocal223. Xavier Becerra SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES 26-yearL.A.congressmanwho becameCalifornia’sattorneygeneral; longtimedefenderoftheACA. Marcia L. Fudge SECRETARY OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT Clevelandcongresswomanand closeBidenallywhooriginally wantedtheAgriculturejob. Pete Buttigieg SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION Oversawa$25milliontraffic reorganizationasmayorofSouthBend (ithasonlybuses,nolocaltrains). Jennifer M. Granholm SECRETARY OF ENERGY FormerMichigangovernorand auto-industry-bailoutveteran; secretlyplayedSarahPalinduring Biden’sdebateprepin2008. Miguel A. Cardona SECRETARY OF EDUCATION TaughtfourthgradeinaConnecticut publicschoolbeforebecoming thestate’seducationcommissioner in2019. Denis McDonough SECRETARY OF VETERANS AFFAIRS Obama’slastchiefofstaff;…

IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST, birds fell dead from the sky by the tens of thousands, succumbing mid-flight to starvation, emaciated by climate change. ¶ ACROSS THE HORN OF AFRICA swarmed 200 billion locusts, 25 for every human on earth, darkening the sky in clouds as big as whole cities, descending on cropland and chewing through as much food as tens of millions of people eat in a day, eventually dying in such agglomerating mounds they stopped trains in their tracks—all told, 8,000 times as many locusts as could be expected in the absence of warming. ¶ THE FIRES, YOU KNOW. Or do you? In California in 2020, twice as much land burned as had ever burned before in any year in the modern history of the state—five of the six…

1 Quick to Learn and Quick to Play Will Sorrell, a British board-game designer, tells friends to think of the enormously popular, Catan-like Ticket to Ride, where players connect North American cities by building train routes, as “an analog version of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” (Ticket to Ride, $43 at amazon.com)2 Dice Rolling In this dice game, players become commodores of their own spaceship fleets and compete to gain influence and be promoted to the title of admiral. Space Base “offers a great blend of luck and strategy,” says Ian Ross, who runs the Instagram account Board Games As Art. (Space Base, $32 at amazon.com)3 Drawing For fans of Pictionary, Quintin Smith, a game-review-site editor, recommends Pictomania, which he calls “more deep, exciting, and competitive” than the old standard.…

JOHN WILSON’S NEW HBO SHOW, How To With John Wilson, captures the specific strangeness of street life in the city—the snippets of documentary film range from a woman tucking a pigeon into a Duane Reade bag to two men dragging a disjointed mannequin around Brooklyn. The 34-year-old Wilson was born in Astoria and has lived a couple of miles south in Ridgewood (which shares a border with Bushwick) for the past eight years. “On an industrial street with five other people for six, and in my own place for two,” he says. “At first, it was just price that kept me here, but everything is just the right height. The buildings aren’t too tall.” When he’s filming, Wilson says, he “darts around as chaotically as possible to mimic the route…

I’VE ENJOYED MANY fried-chicken dinners during the course of this plague year, from Popeyes to Cote steakhouse and the Beatrice Inn, so when word of Eric Huang’s quirky delivery operation out in Fresh Meadows, called Pecking House, reached my little corner of lower Manhattan, I quickly signed up for a taste. Like many new comfort-food impresarios around town, Huang is a highly credentialed chef (he used to be the sous-chef at Eleven Madison Park). He developed his concept on the fly in the deserted kitchen of his uncle’s Queens restaurant, Peking House, after it closed this summer. Thirty-five dollars will buy you three pieces of his Chinese-accented version of Nashville hot chicken—which is a lot to pay for chicken—but, as word of its deliciousness has spread far and wide, the…

THE MOST ANTICIPATED event of a Bachelor season isn’t the conclusion but the start. From first-impression roses to first kisses, the show’s premieres* are windows into its tried-and-true formula—and provide easy opportunities for drinking games. Watch enough of them and patterns begin to emerge.…

“We saw this violence before the election, often done by radicalized white supremacists. And that is a problem that doesn’t go away. You can’t vote that problem away. The people who are dangerous today will continue to be dangerous the day after the election.” “I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive.” “They can’t even win with the deck stacked in their favor. And so what they are willing to do is set a match and light our entire democracy on fire.” “I want to be clear to Senator Ted Cruz: You do not belong in the United States Senate. I want to be clear to Senator Josh Hawley: You do not belong in the United States Senate.” “I don’t…

CALLS FOR VIOLENT public execution began mere hours into the New Year, as they often do these days, via Twitter. Conservative lawyer Lin Wood proclaimed that Mike Pence would be killed by firing squad for treason. Five days later, Donald Trump’s tornado of zealots blew through the Capitol, erecting gallows and holding posters that read MAKE GUILLOTINES GREAT AGAIN. I wasn’t surprised by the violent effigies, but I was, frankly, perplexed to see the Trumpists invoke the guillotine. Their sham-billionaire leader seems like exactly the kind of despot the machine was intended for, but most recently, guillotines, as an anti-capitalist symbol, have belonged to the radical left. If you follow anybody interested in income inequality, you may have encountered one or two of them on social media—mostly as a shorthand…

Ben Hart: The Biden administration has a hugely ambitious $1.9 trillion bill that will include new stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, a higher minimum wage, and a raft of other measures. What are the prospects of it passing quickly? Ed Kilgore: It would take ten Republican votes in the Senate to pass quickly. So it will depend on Mitch McConnell & Co.’s strategy for the next two years. I’m guessing it won’t happen. That means (absent the filibuster reform) it will have to be rolled into a budget-reconciliation bill, which only requires 50-plus-1 votes. But not all elements of the proposal can be passed that way; notably, a minimum-wage increase or an eviction moratorium will be problematic. Gabriel Debenedetti: The truth is, no one—not Joe Biden, not his top aides…

WILSON LISBOA Student and cruise-ship employee, New Haven, Connecticut What are you up to today? Me and some friends came into the city from New Haven to take pictures. We’re going to the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, Grand Central, and Central Park. Friend time. Usually, I’d be on a ship, but most of them are docked right now. So you work on cruise lines? Yes, in the gift shops or in the restaurants, usually. For the past few years, I’ve been at sea eight months at a time. Before this, I never thought of cruises as unsafe. I mean, I saw some things. Sometimes a person would pay for the best room, then just jump overboard when we were in the middle of the sea. And sometimes it’s not possible…

NOTHING WRONG WITH GOOD old takeout and delivery, but if restaurants are as much about the experience as the food, can you package the experience and let it loose inside the customer’s home? That, in part, is the goal of the restaurant subscription service, a burgeoning new business model designed to spice up the state of relations between eater and restaurant through regularly scheduled helpings of hospitality. The ultimate purpose of the two subscription services below, however, is to help keep restaurant doors open while so many are closing. Sure, you might liken them to fruit-of-the-month clubs. But instead of a crate of kiwis, you get wine or cocktails or three-course meals prepared by some of the brightest lights in the restaurant industry in what is still the greatest restaurant…

JIM CARREY’S FINAL SCENE as Saturday Night Live’s Joe Biden impressionist was the most telling moment of his entire short tenure. He stands next to Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris, declaring himself the victor in the presidential election. Carrey pulls his jaw taut against his face, curling his lower lip over his teeth in an exaggerated old man’s grimace. “There are many situations in life, and this is one of them, where there must be a winner and …” He pauses briefly. His voice rises, his grin turns wicked. “A looooooser,” he finishes in a growl. He and Rudolph put their fingers to their foreheads in big L’s. “Lo-hooo-ser!” Carrey crows in falsetto. It’s not Biden, it’s Carrey. Pointing out the overuse of celebrity cameos on SNL has become something…

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE soldiers arrived, while you were sleeping, I reached down and touched your hair, your back, your forehead. You stirred in your sleep. Across the room, your mother was stripping corn. Your beautiful mother, her hair hanging down her body, facing away from me. I moved silently so I could see her face. Back then we grew corn and squash, sunflowers and pumpkins, and we dressed deerskins together. We walked at night together to be alone. Then I began to silently weep. I lay down beside you and wept, for you, for your mother, and for our people, who would soon have to hide in the mountains. I wept for the people who would be beaten. I wept for the people in wagons and the ones who…