Innholdsfortegnelse for January 3-16, 2022 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Gabriel Mac wrote about how phalloplasty saved his life (“My Penis, Myself,” December 20, 2021–January 2, 2022). Documentary-video editor Miles Hill thanked Mac for his “vulnerability and for putting this all on the page! Very helpful to me in my own process,” and Elizabeth C. McLaughlin called it “one of the most beautiful and moving things I’ve ever read. It gives me such hope, how the capacity to self-define can break throughevery barrier and transform us into something glorious.” Gimlet’s Reyhan Harmanci wrote, “Congrats … on the new dick, and to us, for such a visceral reminder that we are flesh and bone and still something else.” Some readers challenged the ethics of publishing Mac’s essay. The popular Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson tweeted,…

PETER SARSGAARD is sitting across from me, spoiling the ending of Lolita. It’s early December, and we’re at Rucola, an Italian spot in Boerum Hill that he frequents, and the conversation has turned to Vladimir Nabokov, whose work I’ve somehow never read. But that possibility doesn’t seem to cross Sarsgaard’s mind when he starts to describe one of the novel’s final scenes, in which the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, corners Clare Quilty, who, like Humbert, is obsessed with 12-year-old Lolita. “He shoots him and he shoots him. Then he goes up the stairs, and he shoots and shoots and shoots,” Sarsgaard says as I nod along. “The amount of anger that Humbert has for a guy doing the same thing that he does, it’s like he’s killing himself. It’s almost comedic.…

DR. OZ FOR SENATE is headquartered in a patch of strip mall next to a Mexican restaurant in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where the candidate’s father-in-law, Dr. Gerald Lemole, maintains a medical office down the road from the Lemole family farm, three acres overlooking the Philmont Country Club that the candidate, who seems to live in New Jersey, has claimed as his official place of residence. Five days into the race, there was no discernible election-related activity of any kind. No staff. No yard signs. No signs of life at all. Except for John Palma. “Are you looking for Mehmet?” he asked. I said that I was. The owner of John Sebastian Painting and Renovating (slogan: YOUR WORLD IN COLOR, WHEN QUALITY AND NEATNESS COUNT), Palma is a tattooed 47-year-old Italian…

BACK DURING the dim, distant pre-COVID days when year-end dining wrap-ups like this one were concocted, the idea was to give our readers a sense of the latest breathlessly trendy dishes and dining fashions in a city that viewed itself as the restaurant capital of the world but also, in a strange, jaded way, took that culture for granted. Now, as one ominous virus wave replaces another and the COVID plague continues to hover like a persistent fog over the city, the opposite is true: That invisible web of community and spirit and identity of the great network of chophouses, haughty gourmet destinations, ramen parlors, red-sauce joints, frozen-dumpling depots, and Peking-duck houses has never felt stronger or more central to the sense of health and well-being of the city. When…

WHAT READERLY EXPERIENCE matches the pleasure of a well-executed, well-deserved takedown? When the critic is sharp enough, the subject praise-glutted enough, the results are exquisite—succulent, tart, worth any mess. ¶ Forty-two years ago, Joan Didion—who died on December 23 at 87—delivered one such delectable specimen. “Letter From ‘Manhattan’ ” was the restrained headline that appeared above her 1979 New York Review of Books essay on Woody Allen’s late-’70s oeuvre. And, if only in a certain sense, the essay that followed was restrained as well. Didion was not unleashing a tirade; tirades were not her style. Rather, she was describing—with exasperated precision—a body of work whose popularity she found “interesting, and rather astonishing.” Allen’s characters possess “the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class,” Didion wrote: These…

ON A SUNNY WEDNESDAY in November, Keisha Lance Bottoms went to the Atlanta City Detention Center, a water-stained hulk of concrete with slits for windows glaring out over Peachtree Street. She was there on a kind of valedictory tour, showcasing her accomplishments as she gets ready to leave the mayor’s office. “I thought this one was dead in the water,” she would tell me later of the deal that is turning part of this facility into a “diversion center”—a place where cops can bring people with behavioral problems that is not jail or the hospital. The floor inside was a ratty mix of linoleum and pilling brown carpet, and a podium had been set up for the event. That’s where Bottoms started to cry. “I’ve been crying a lot lately,”…

Gage& Tollner 372 Fulton St., nr. Smith St., Downtown Brooklyn; 347-689-3677 There are probably more stylish new restaurants around the city and places serving more elaborate desserts or impressive cuts of beefsteak. But none of them embodies the spirit of perseverance, community, and revival during this grim chapter in the city’s history quite like St. John Frizell, Ben Schneider, and Sohui Kim’s reimagining of this venerable New York dining landmark, which began life back in 1879 among the oyster stands and beer halls along Fulton Street. With its rows of giant antique hat hooks and vintage gaslight chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, the room, which took over a year to restore and was crowdfunded by legions of local friends and neighbors, is one of the wonders of this strange restaurant…

TELEVISION A return to Game of Thrones (and a million shows like it). Monarch (Fox, Jan. 30) Is this Empire but with country music? Succession with a twang? Its premise—about the power dynamics within a country-music family that includes singing patriarch Albie Roman (country star Trace Adkins) and matriarch Dottie Cantrell Roman (Susan Sarandon)—contains echoes of both of those series. Pam & Tommy (Hulu, Feb. 2) The story behind the famous Pamela Anderson–Tommy Lee sex tape is part revenge heist, part ’90s Boogie Nights, and part love story. Seth Rogen plays the frustrated electrician who stumbles upon the legendary Hi8 cassette, Lily James is the Baywatch star, and Sebastian Stan portrays the Mötley Crüe drummer. Inventing Anna (Netflix, Feb. 11) Not that we’re proud…

THE ’90S WAS a transitional decade, squarely between two technological eras. The internet was just becoming widespread enough to conjure the excitement of having the world at our fingertips. We were mere moments away from the total ease of access to basically anything—especially, frankly, pornography. There are some among us who can’t imagine life before texting; the same is true of life before Pornhub. But in the ’90s, there was still room for something more analog, namely, the rise of phone-sex hotlines. You can find phone-sex hotlines today if you look hard enough, not unlike how you can still find the last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon. They have mostly been rendered relics. For a while, though, you could turn phone sex into an empire. Back when business was booming, one…

JOHNNIE WALKER ON ICE! A double shot! shout our swaggering fathers and uncles, red-faced, brimming. Bursting. How we love them. We must try hard not to bust out laughing when they belt out national anthems to countries that aren’t the U.S. of A. Our fathers and uncles, who are as familiar as they are mysterious to us, mix Absolut and orange juice, crush Budweiser cans, pour homemade wine into chipped mugs, concocted from recipes hailing from lands we’ve never been to or can only dimly recall. We sneak into backyards with flimsy fences where our fathers and uncles toast Jameson and smoke cigarettes, hookah, and ganja on a night when winter is beginning to loosen its grip and let spring bloom. (Random House, January 4)…

2021 began with Rikers Island in a miserable state, with every indication that conditions would soon get much worse. COVID was spiking. The staff was depleted, and the jail was getting more crowded. In January, its population rose above 5,000—an increase of more than 25 percent from the spring of 2020. After nearly two years without a suicide at the facility, a man hanged himself before the month was out. A gruesome incident followed in early March, then another suicide, then an overdose. The people incarcerated at Rikers continued to die at such a steady rate that the agency charged with investigating deaths in custody couldn’t keep up. Rikers is a complex of jails, not a prison. A small number of people are serving short sentences for misdemeanors or parole…

BETWEEN THE LAST time Adam Platt distilled a year’s worth of dining out into a mouthwatering guide to the city’s restaurant scene and now, much—if not everything—has changed. Still, even in an era of unparalleled challenges, the industry continues not only to rebound but somehow, against all imaginable odds, to surprise and delight. In the following pages, our critic shares his experiences being a professional eater in the age of pivots, pop-ups, and streeteries and celebrates his 12 favorite new restaurants of the year (including the Bronx’s Hudson Smokehouse, pictured here with its Saturday-only beef rib).…

SEAN THOR CONROE is outlining what he calls the “four pillars” of fuckboy-hood—the different ways you can be a self-aggrandizing, duplicitous, and otherwise distasteful man. First, there’s what he calls the classic spineless, “bitch-ass dude,” whom other men look down on because they’re not living up to the “masculine standard of toughness and integrity.” There’s the “untrustworthy male in the romantic context.” There’s the “hypebeast fuckboy” decked out in Balenciaga. And finally, there’s the guy who uses sex with more powerful men for protection. ¶ I ask Conroe—the author of Fuccboi, a novel about a fuckboy who shares his name and some of his biography—whether he identifies as a fuckboy. He looks incredulous. “No, hell no,” he says. It’s Black Friday, and we’re sitting over plates of potatoes and smoked…