New York Magazine July 5-18, 2021

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Rachel Lindsay opened up about her experience as The Bachelor franchise’s first Black lead (“Rachel Lindsay Has No Roses Left to Burn,” June 21–July 4). The Washington Post’s Emily Yahr wrote that the program “has always been resistant to change, but if Lindsay’s revelations lead to more stars of the show feeling bold enough to share all, it could be a domino effect that’s hard to stop.” Author Rebekah Weatherspoon tweeted, “This piece is fantastic and I feel like it on a way smaller scale mirrors how it feels [to have] been a Black fan of the franchise.” Writer Brittny Pierre added, “I’m happy Rachel realized ABC/The Bachelor used her as their ‘Black friend.’ They made Rachel their go-to person to discuss all…

GUY VELELLA WAS THE kind of colorful politician who represents a different era in New York City. A Bronx Republican state senator from 1986 to 2004, he led the borough’s Republican Party as it slid into irrelevance, failing to back Rudy Giuliani or Mike Bloomberg in their mayoral runs. The married father of four kept an “Albany wife,” as the saying used to go, had an out-of-wedlock daughter with her, and steered a $24,000 pension payment to his mistress’s mother. After a career marked by ethical lapses, he was sent to Rikers Island in 2004 for accepting bribes but was released a few months later after an obscure panel packed with political appointees recommended he and his cronies be let go, saying they seemed “distraught.” Velella died in 2011, but…

LAST OCTOBER, architecture student Zalmai Levrat approached restaurateur Yudai Kanayama with a proposal. He had been dining regularly at Kanayama’s new Chinatown Hokkaido restaurant, Dr. Clark, and the two had bonded over a love of soccer. Levrat’s idea: If he could get a team together, would Kanayama sponsor a Dr. Clark Football Club? They struck a deal—Levrat would build a roster, and Kanayama would handle team and league fees. Levrat hit the phones, signing up the best soccer players he knew; he had grown up playing on the Lower East Side, and he and his friends (many of whom have been on professional teams in Europe and the U.S.) often played pickup games. His father was brought in as coach. Kanayama had access to an empty apartment and offered it…

I ALWAYS SAY, ‘The first thing you want to hear from the buyer when he opens the door is ‘Wow,’” said the luxury-housing developer Ramtin Ray Nosrati as he stood at the front door of one of his latest projects: a nearly completed 12,000-square-foot six-bedroom, nine-bathroom home in the affluent Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. He gestured across the living room to the retractable glass wall and the balcony, which opens onto the emerald expanse of the Pacific Ocean. “If you hear that word, wow, you know you got them.” A key part of Nosrati’s design philosophy is to have at least one wow factor in every room of a home. I had always thought wow factor was a cliché until I found the word issuing from my lips…

AT ITS MOST PEACEFUL, the United States is an exceptionally murderous nation. In 2014, America recorded the lowest homicide rate in its history—and the highest homicide rate of any comparably prosperous country. That year, Americans were more than three times as likely to die by murder than Western Europeans were. Like most things in the U.S., this aberrantly high risk of homicide was not equally distributed. Residents of Washington, D.C., were murdered at eight times the rate of those in Iowa. Within the district, as in virtually all major U.S. cities, killing was largely quarantined to a select group of politically disempowered, economically dispossessed neighborhoods. Poor Black people did the bulk of the dying. America’s distribution of violent death has changed little over the past seven years, but the sum…

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