Innholdsfortegnelse for October 25-November 7, 2021 i New York Magazine

BODIETL SAYS ON THE PHONE to come by the South Street Seaport at six, where he’ll be hosting a fund-raiser for Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee and all but assured next mayor of New York City. Dietl favors shiny suits and gold watches the size of a baby’s arm, and he was, like Adams, a New York City police officer for two decades. Unlike Adams, Dietl went into the security-and-private-investigation business. Then he made a name for himself as a loud and gruff commentator on Fox News and Don Imus’s radio show, where he once said Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, wanted to build a privacy fence around Gracie Mansion so they could “doobie-doobie-doo,” by which he meant, apparently, smoke marijuana. A longtime acquaintance of Donald…

ON THE SECOND DAY of business at their New Mexican spot, Santa Fe BK in Williamsburg, Melissa Klein and John Watterberg take a seat in the dining room to discuss one of the guiding principles of their new restaurant. The married couple describe a recurring experience from their 20-some years in the city’s hospitality industry. At the end of a typically chaotic night of dinner service somewhere, Klein, who has worked as a server and hostess, and Watterberg, a bartender, would each prepare to head out, count their stacks of tips with glee, then wave good-bye to the cooks and dishwashers with a slightly guilty “Thank you!” “While they’re mopping, going, ‘Uh-huh. Yeah, great. Let me mop for my $15’”—or their $12 or $8—“ ‘an hour,’ ” says Klein. “It’s…

IN THE SHADOW of the San Gabriel Mountains just outside Pasadena, there’s a cemetery called Mountain View. It is not the showiest boneyard in greater Los Angeles. While Hollywood Forever and Forest Lawn are the famous final resting places of Walt Disney, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, and Dorothy Dandridge, hosting everything from movie screenings to haunted tours, Mountain View skews toward local Civil War ghosts and the ashes of original TV Superman George Reeves. Forest Lawn has Jean Harlow’s marble crypt; Hollywood Forever, the (perfect) statue of Johnny Ramone. Mountain View has a dutifully kept blog. But that’s not all it has. Smack between two plots containing actual human remains is this Altadena cemetery’s most unusual secondary revenue stream: in the words of Mountain View’s office and operations manager, Luis…

WES ANDERSON ALREADY had two features under his belt when The Royal Tenenbaums was released in 2001. There was his debut, Bottle Rocket, a lo-fi comedy about inept would-be criminals played by Luke and Owen Wilson that looks downright naturalistic compared with what would come after. Then there was Rushmore, about the friendship between a teenage oddball played by Jason Schwartzman and a wealthy depressive played by Bill Murray, the Anderson film that even the Anderson averse admit to tolerating. But it was Tenenbaums—a star-laden dramedy about a dysfunctional family of former child prodigies living in a fanciful Manhattan that stretches up to 375th Street—that would separate the fans from the haters. In this film, the intricate, airless visual style and tone of wistful melancholy for which Anderson has become…

DURING THE PAST year of COVID-induced market mania, cryptocurrencies have gone up so much—bitcoin is up about sixfold, while many other crypto projects are up far, far more—that even reluctant Wall Street institutions have started tiptoeing into the arena. A blazing rally that began this month has seen bitcoin shoot up 50 percent in a few weeks. But doubters remain, and their ranks just happen to include many of the same prominent investors who saw the financial crisis of 2008 coming. Hedge-fund mogul John Paulson, who was behind “the greatest trade ever”—he made $4 billion on his short of subprime mortgages—thinks cryptocurrencies will prove to be “worthless.” Michael Burry, the quirky hedge-fund manager made famous in The Big Short movie, complains that no one is paying attention to crypto’s leverage.…

SEVEN YEARS AGO, when I started talking incessantly about the climate crisis, my parents thought I was having a mental breakdown. It was 2014, and the drought in California that summer was particularly bad—the driest year in nearly a century before that record was surpassed this past summer. My dread stretched beyond what I saw in my suburban Los Angeles surroundings, in the crunchy grass and smoggy skies. After staying up into the night reading about melting ice sheets, I began having nightmares about tsunami waves swallowing my family’s house. My parents sent me to my therapist, Ken, who gently suggested my condition was related to post-traumatic-stress disorder from a sudden loss a few years earlier, and that made a comforting kind of sense. In September, I asked Ken if,…

THESE ARE TRYING times for stout, beefeating non-vegans like me. Expressions like “plant-based” have been on the lips of breathlessly trendy restaurant folk for years, of course. Lately, however, and especially in the strange new COVID era, the advances in this ever-expanding genre—a refuge, in ancient beefeating lore, for sprout-munching, lactose-intolerant commune dwellers and assorted other kooks—have been downright alarming. Novel techniques (for faux milk, faux cheeses, faux meat of every variety) are being developed with the kind of avid ingenuity usually reserved for rocket programs. Talented young cooks are stampeding into the space, grand old masters are struggling to keep up, and, as my Underground Gourmet colleagues have reported, first-class vegan restaurants are beginning to pop up around town the way upscale burger joints used to do not so…

“WE’D LIKE THE snails, the oxtail, the venison, and the goat intestines” is not an order that gets tossed off frequently—or ever—at New York’s southern-Indian restaurants. But these are some of the dishes chef Vijay Kumar, late of the Bay Area’s Rasa, remembers eating while growing up on the family farm outside Madurai in the state of Tamil Nadu. Now he’s cooking them at the West Village restaurant run by Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya that was previously known as Rahi but was renamed Semma upon Kumar’s arrival in mid-October. Other notable new dishes include a snappy chaat of sprouted mung beans, braised lamb with black cardamom, and a whole Dungeness-crab masala for two (pictured). About the name: It means “great,” “superb,” “wonderful,” or “awesome” in Tamil. That may sound…

1 Nirvana’s third and final studio album was released on September 13, 1993. It has been described as one of the greatest albums of all time. It also drew controversy for songs like “Rape Me,” which Cobain stated was anti-rape. 2 Around that 1993–94 period, Cobain had two overdoses where it wasn’t clear if he would make it. After one incident, Courtney Love found him passed out in the bathroom turning blue, according to journalist Michael Azerrad’s recent piece in The New Yorker. “Terrified,” he writes, “she sent word out to the band’s crew: Pack up the equipment—there will be no show tomorrow, because Kurt is dead.” 3 Guitarist Pat Smear left Foo Fighters in 1997 before rejoining as a touring guitarist in 2005. (He has been a full-time member…

MATT BERRY PLAYS MEN WHO DO NOT fit in this world, who are either too dumb to know that or too self-involved to care. He’s the cruel, fatuous hangman—also named Matt Berry—in Snuff Box and the witless, talentless actor Steven Toast in Toast of London. In FX’s What We Do in the Shadows, he’s a sex-obsessed, murderous Victorian vampire who is absolutely serious at all times, especially when he’s being very stupid. “Escapism is so important,” Berry tells me at a plush hotel bar in Manhattan, where he’s attending Comic Con to promote the third season of Shadows. “I’m more than happy to be part of something that is utterly pointless and stupid. With no sort of social hammer whatsoever. Nothing at all.” It’s true—much of Berry’s work is superficially…

THE BRONX SCIENCE Speech & Debate Team, one of the winningest teams in the U.S. and currently ranked No. 1 in the country, operates on a policy of no tryouts and no cuts: Just come to a meeting. Getting a leadership position, however, is harder. “It’s a full-on application process with an interview, résumé, merit check, grades check,” says senior Ellington Fagan. “It was like submitting my tax returns, if I even do those.” Ellington is one of 12 team captains of the sprawling squad, which has about 300 members this season, roughly 10 percent of the school’s student body. His specialty is Congressional Debate, in which students mimic a legislative body. According to him, that category tends to attract jacks-of-all-trades who have other interests too (he happens to be…

IN THE WEEKS before the publication of her memoir, Going There, Katie Couric and I would play a dark little game called Funny or Fucked Up? Over coffee, lunch, and Zoom calls, I would bring up an anecdote from the book—like, say, the first sentence, which is about the time she ate so many carrots in the summer after college that her skin turned orange—and ask her what, exactly, her reader was supposed to make of it. The carrots were on account of the Scarsdale Diet, the deprivational fad to which the 22-year-old Couric had committed because her plan “was to look as good as possible for my wet hot American summer” before “finding a job—maybe even a career—in TV news.” That career would wind up being a blockbuster. At…

AS FAR AS MODERN culinary concepts go, there may be no greater clichés than the all-day café, the natural-wine bar, and the upscale bodega. St. Jardim, newly opened in the West Village corner nook vacated by Bar Sardine, identifies as all of them but does so with enough flavor and personality to make it stand out from a very crowded pack. Credit for this goes to the good taste of partners Andrew Dete and Christa Alexander, neighborhood residents and first-time restaurateurs, and the talents of consulting chef Tony Nassif, a Montreal native whose résumé includes Black Seed Bagels and the Spotted Pig. With its oversize windows flung open to the street and lavish seasonal-vegetable compositions that look engineered to tempt Instagram addicts, the 28-seat spot evokes California, Australia, and especially…

I’D NEVER EVEN HEARD of a strigil before my visit to the ceramicist Thomas Lollar’s apartment. But there I was, standing in his living room—an orderly jumble of all manner of curiosities, including Roman keys; a traveling sundial; silver Italian Futurist objects; a Georgian English Paul Storr tureen; and a pair of silver entrée dishes belonging to the Duke of Cumberland, brother of King George III—holding a 2,000-year-old bronze grooming device that looks like an archaic shoehorn. Lollar explained that strigils were used in ancient Greece and Rome to scrape off dirt, sweat, and the oil that was applied before bathing. “Some scholars think that perhaps physicians would pick up the dead skin cells and use them to repair wounds,” he tells me as I examine the curved blade he’d…

ABOUT A DECADE AGO, the then-20-year-old sometime Atlanta rap iconoclast Young Thug began releasing mixtapes in a series he called I Came From Nothing. They filtered sharp melodic sensibilities and a natural gift for rhyming through a playful, warbling tone, coolly undercutting his formidable talents with an air of levity. Songs like “I Know Ya,” off I Came From Nothing 3, sounded like mutant descendants of the booming, triumphant beats of the aughts Jeezy tapes and the gymnastic lyrical flights of the music Lil Wayne was releasing at the same time. Hip-hop appreciates change—up to a point. A subset of hip-hop heads wrote this all off as “mumble rap,” a catchall term demeaning (mostly southern) rappers for their diction. But Thug persisted, evolving his sound and inching a little closer…

MOVIES 1. See Spencer A devastating portrait. In theaters November 5. The most pedigreed of the latest incarnations of Princess Diana onscreen—including Jeanna de Waal in the misbegotten Diana: The Musical and Emma Corrin and, soon, Elizabeth Debicki on The Crown—is Kristen Stewart in the new film from Pablo Larraín, which focuses on Diana during the 1991 holidays. The real marvel is the way the film works as a bookend to Larraín’s 2016 Jackie, another portrait of a woman caught up in the image-making required to create, or maintain, the idea of royalty. ALISON WILLMORE TV 2. Watch Love Life Good-bye for now, Darby. HBO Max, October 28. The second season of this rom-com anthology series shifts from Anna Kendrick’s Darby to a distant member of her social circle, Marcus…