New York Magazine November 22-December 5, 2021

1 For New York’s latest cover story, David Wallace-Wells wrote about the moral imperative the world’s rich have to remove the carbon—their carbon—that threatens the global South (“Climate Reparations,” November 8–21). The AP’s Nick Riccardi said Wallace-Wells “re-frames the issue as to whether the 1st world is going to try to clean up the mess it’s made in the developing one.” Breakthrough Institute analyst Seaver Wang called the essay, which was published as world leaders gathered in Glasgow for a U.N. climate-change summit, “required reading” for anyone who has “ever thought about climate justice, historical culpability for current + future climate impacts, and CO2 removal.” Daniel Ketyer wrote, “In business and academia we debate the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of CO2 removal. @dwallacewells unpacks the moral case for ‘why.’ ” And…

IN AUGUST 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse brought an AR-15-style rifle to downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the name of law and order. As protests and riots raged in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, the 17-year-old Blue Lives Matter enthusiast felt called to serve as an amateur armed guard for a Kenosha car dealership. He ended up shooting two unarmed protesters dead and blowing off another’s right biceps—without committing a crime. Or so a Wisconsin jury decreed on Friday. After three and half days of deliberation, the jurors found that Rittenhouse was not guilty of reckless homicide, intentional homicide, or recklessly endangering public safety. This verdict was legally defensible. Yet it exposed the anarchy latent in America’s peculiar combination of lax gun regulations, expansive self-defense rights, and mass gun…

NO ONE COULD STOP HUGGING in the greenroom before Vulture Festival’s 3rd Rock From the Sun reunion panel. The show’s leads—John Lithgow, Kristen Johnston, French Stewart, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt—had been close during its six-season run, but the four had not been in a room together since the day they wrapped 20 years ago. Lithgow in particular was in a state of effusive delight. “I’ve been waiting for this for so long,” he exclaimed as the members of the quartet cried and embraced one another. “This is so surreal!” said Gordon-Levitt. A weird, surprisingly subversive sitcom about a group of aliens sent to Earth to study humanity, 3rd Rock won eight Emmys for performance, choreography, and design. Yet perhaps because of its odd, mannered bluntness, the series has not attained the…

DASHA NEKRASOVA is hungry, and she’s not interested in patiently waiting her turn. It’s after 3 p.m. on a Sunday, but the West Village restaurant Bar Pitti, where she has asked to meet me—it’s not so far from her apartment—is still swarmed by brunchers. So she suggests Fanelli Cafe, the Soho see-and-be-seen stalwart, on the other side of NYU territory. As we walk, like a bored tour guide with a map to the stars in her head, she points out all of the New York notables who live along our route. Hilton Als over there. Mark Ronson and Chloë Sevigny over there. And that way, J. Smith Cameron, currently her co-star on HBO’s Succession. Between that show and her upcoming horror film inspired by Jeffrey Epstein’s death, The Scary of…

THE METAVERSE IS BEST described as a consensual hallucination between Mark Zuckerberg and the media—a fantasy that we’ll trade pleasurable activities in the physical world, like cooking and dating, for nausea-inducing hours in a virtual realm full of legless avatars. To most ordinary people, the Facebook CEO’s aspiration to be the god of a universe we can enter only by affixing a prophylactic to our heads seems megalomaniacal. They’re correct. However, every time you hear Zuckerberg say metaverse, swap in super-app and the plan sounds less stupid. A super-app is a single mobile app that offers basic services including chat and payments, along with a suite of “mini-apps” from third parties, ranging from stores and restaurants to government agencies. Westerners aren’t familiar with them, but across much of Asia, super-apps…

THE FIRST FEMALE GOVERNOR of New York was sitting in the back of the Apollo Family Restaurant in Buffalo one recent Wednesday afternoon when an older man in a VFW baseball hat approached. The governor, wearing a light-brown suit and a gold nameplate necklace that read VAXED, looked up from her rice pudding. “I hate to interrupt, but I need to ask a burning question. Did you ever go out with a guy named Jim Wilson?” Kathleen Courtney Hochul, age 63, married for 37 years, thought for a beat. Then she asked, “Jim Wilson who played football with my brother?” “Yeah.” “I did not go out with him.” “Aww, that lying son of a—” “Is he saying I went out with him? “Yeah, he said he dated you.” “Nah, tell…