Innholdsfortegnelse for February 28-March 13, 2022 i New York Magazine

1 In an excerpt from New York’s new book, Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC, Lisa Miller chronicled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s meteoric rise from bartender to face of the resurgent left (“Adrift, Broke, and Disillusioned,” February 14–27). Miriam Bensman of the Queens DSA wrote, “terrific excerpt from what must be a terrific bio, traces AOC’s path before her run for office,” while Adam Fetcher said it was “a totally incredible story. Thank you @AOC for reminding us what public service looks like, and for leaving the door open behind you for others who might also say ‘People like me don’t run for office.’” Some readers thought the magazine had overstated Ocasio-Cortez’s impact: “I love AOC, but reshape? Kind of a stretch. I don’t feel like I’ve seen any real legislative accomplishments,”…

THE ACTOR Ben McKenzie is sitting in the den of his Brooklyn Heights townhouse, summarizing a 24-part MIT lecture series about the blockchain by SEC chair Gary Gensler. “Gensler talks about finance being the intermediation of risk and capital,” he explains before whipping me through the reliability of state-held currencies, the dangers of speculation, and the history of encryption from the Merkle tree (an early method of computer encryption) to ethereum (the biggest cryptocurrency after bitcoin). Once he gets through the three sides of the fraud triangle and the definition of securities, he takes a sip of tea. “It’s really good that you’re here talking to me,” McKenzie says. “Now my wife can say, ‘Thank God, for one day, I don’t have to listen to this shit.’” It’s a February…

BRANDON STANTON WAS seated on a metal folding chair in the cavernous basement of an East Harlem café. He leaned forward and jabbed at the air with long, pale fingers. “I love the idea of juice! Juice, juice, juice!” he said. “I’m excited!” It was a December afternoon, and across the small table sat the Diallo brothers, Rahim and Mohammed, their own excitement tempered with apprehension. The Diallos, who emigrated from Guinea to the U.S. as teenagers and put themselves through college while working in restaurants and driving cabs, are the owners of the Ginjan Café, a cozy spot across from the 125th Street Metro-North station that has struggled since the commuter hordes began mostly staying home. Stanton is the creator of Humans of New York, the popular publication that…

➸ TOWEL CHOICE IS intensely subjective—for every full-throated waffle obsessive, there are plenty willing to argue the merits of a flat-weave Turkish set. Still, there are a few characteristics that are vital across the board: No matter the style, a towel needs to dry quickly and stay soft after a couple hundred runs in the wash. To find the ones that are as good-looking as they are durable, we spoke to 24 designers, hoteliers, and shop owners, unearthing the checkered style by textile company Baina preferred by multidisciplinary design-studio founders and decorators (seen here, $110), a mildewproof option that dries so fast it can be used twice a day, and one that has held up through years of “emergency potty-training accidents.” Visit thestrategist.com for an even deeper dive into the…

GLORYA GRAH Student, Flatbush What do you do aside from school? I’m a stylist. I’ve been calling myself that since October. Basically, last summer was my toxic-party-girl phase. I made this rapper friend, and we were just sitting at her house, and she was fretting because she had nothing to wear to her performance. And I was like, “You literally have white fur Demonias in your closet. What are you talking about?” I put an outfit together for her, and she tagged me on her Instagram Story. I put “stylist” in my bio and said my fee was $65. Then I got a message from someone asking if I could style them for the Governors Ball. And then another person messaged me. I’m like, Okay, bet! Where’d you get ready…

RECOMMENDED DISHES: For the two courses that offer options on the tasting menu, we like the roast duck and the “ice-cream sandwich.” NOTE: Vegan and vegetarian menus are available on request. Boozehounds should make time for a visit to Overstory, the Art Deco–style ten-seat bar that is separate from the restaurant but accessible via the elevator or a flight of stairs. Yes, there is a balcony, and no, there probably isn’t a better martini-sipping view in town. OPEN: Dinner Tuesday through Saturday. PRICE: $245 per person.…

2011: One of the first HONY posts to draw attention is of Elizabeth Sweetheart, who becomes known on the internet as the Green Lady of Brooklyn. This post helps Stanton settle on his format of writing the caption in the subject’s own words. “I have felt God the most when He’s sent people into my life at the times I’ve needed Him most. Why not try to be that for other people?” 2015: Stanton features a Brownsville middle-schooler, Vidal, who names his principal, Nadia Lopez, as the biggest influence in his life. (Stanton later features Lopez on HONY.) The post garners more than 1 million likes on Facebook. 2015: After Stanton publishes their stories, Vidal and Lopez are both guests on Good Morning America and invited to meet President Obama.…

Absorbency The most important quality of a towel is its ability to absorb water from your body while staying plush, not getting soggy. Absorbency is measured by GSM, or grams of fabric per square meter. The higher the GSM, the thicker, softer, and more absorbent the towel is going to be. Absorbency Rating (low to high) Material and Feel Egyptian cotton has longer fibers, making it soft, plush, and particularly thirsty. Turkish-cotton fibers are shorter, which means they’re lighter and faster drying than Egyptian-cotton towels (if not quite as absorbent). Then there’s American-grown Supima cotton, which has extra-long fibers but doesn’t feel quite as plush. Style Over the past few years, brands like Marimekko and Dusen Dusen Home have made swirly, striped, dotted, and otherwise over-the-top printed towels popular. But,…

EVERY PIECE OF millwork and fireplace, every detail, was left intact,” recalls Rodney Lawrence of the Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone that he and his husband, Terry Sonterre, bought in 2005 and have been slowly renovating ever since. The couple had been living in a cramped rental in the West Village and looking for a house, and they were ready to give up on finding anything that hadn’t been denuded of character by a bad renovation when they walked into this place. The sellers had 25 offers, but they prevailed: “We were the first people here, and we were the last people here,” Lawrence says. The move, and the incremental restoration of the place, coincided with Lawrence’s own reinvention as an interior designer. His family had decamped to Montclair, New Jersey, from Trinidad…

OVER THE COURSE OF ITS LONG LIFE, Hurley’s, the 1892 saloon located in a Victorian townhouse on the corner of Sixth Avenue at 49th Street, was many things to many people: a neighborhood bar, a Prohibition-era speakeasy fronted by a flower shop, a pain in the ass for John D. Rockefeller (he wanted to tear down the building for Rockefeller Center, but the bar’s Irish American owners wouldn’t budge). Later, it became a refuge for the folks who worked in radio and television at 30 Rock, including Johnny Carson, who treated the place like a home away from home. Since then, it has housed a kitschy Hurley’s clone, Citarella’s seafood restaurant, and office space. Magnolia Bakery has occupied the ground floor since 2008. First there was binge drinking and barroom…

WHEN HAILEY WHITTERS thinks of Shueyville, the small Iowa town south of Cedar Rapids that raised her, she thinks of her Aunt Cindy and Uncle Phil’s farm. The country singer-songwriter didn’t grow up around animals the way others in the Whitters family did, but depending on the year, Cindy would have cows, pigs, chickens, goats, turkeys, or even ducks. “She was homesteading before homesteading was cool,” Whitters jokes, pulling onto the farm’s gravel driveway in a pickup truck borrowed from her mother. In the wood-furnished kitchen of the farmhouse, fragranced by strawberry rolls rising on the counter, Cindy tells us stories about butchering chickens and giving her children milk from their goats rather than from the store. One day, as her kids were helping make homemade sauerkraut, one of them…

TWELVE YEARS AGO, the writer Sheila Heti published a short list of her favorite “secret self-help” books, offering as criteria only that each book had “actually helped me—they’re both precious and practical.” There was Audition (1978), a manual for aspiring actors by the casting director Michael Shurtleff, who claimed to have “discovered” Barbra Streisand singing in a Greenwich Village dive bar. Another was Diane von Furstenberg’s Book of Beauty (1976), a memoir that doubles as a lifestyle guide containing tips on skin care and diet. “Furstenberg’s conviction,” wrote Heti, “that the desire to look great is not a patriarchal illness, but a natural and fine longing, allows me to, guiltlessly, fuss with my hair.” Among her most reassuring suggestions was The Patient Who Cured His Therapist (1992), co-authored by a…

IN AUGUST 2019, New York State attorney general Letitia James was on a boat, fishing, with Andrew Cuomo. The then-governor had asked her to take a tourism-boosting trip to Lake Ontario. It was almost a year into her first term, which she had won in part thanks to his decision to throw his political weight behind her 2018 primary bid. It wasn’t well known at the time, but Cuomo and James had recently experienced a bumpy patch. In June, James had overridden Cuomo’s wishes by issuing a statement supporting the Green Light bill, which granted undocumented New York residents the ability to legally apply for driver’s licenses. Cuomo publicly favored the measure but, according to James and members of her staff, privately wanted her office to rule it unconstitutional. At…

Pick the right sportsbook. FanDuel is a good book for beginners, mostly because it’s the easiest to use. Little team logos next to each bet make it “easy to decipher who’s playing,” says longtime bettor Daniel Ortega. Red and green arrows next to the bets show how the odds are trending in real time, and, once a game begins, virtual bet tickets update to reflect how many points you are away from winning. If you’re primarily betting on basketball, pick FanDuel or DraftKings. “Both update fast enough to bet during basketball, where the score changes by the minute,” says Jonathan Cooper, a multi-decade sports bettor who—like everyone we spoke to—said these two books are the best for live betting, especially since you can enter bets and cash out mid-game, which…

ON MARCH 9, 2020, Danny Abrams and Cindy Smith opened the Mermaid Inn in Chelsea—the fourth branch of an urban-fish-shack chainlet comprising three Mermaid Inns and one Mermaid Oyster Bar, all known for happy-hour deals, neighborly service, consistent cooking, and free chocolate pudding. The location held special significance for Abrams; it was where, 21 years earlier, he and the chef Jimmy Bradley had opened the Red Cat, the pioneering restaurant that helped make West Chelsea a dining destination and effectively launched his culinary career. Less than a week later, the homecoming was cut short when COVID ended indoor dining and Abrams and Smith temporarily shut everything down, including their uptown pizzeria, Sirenetta, and the Greenwich Village outpost of J.G. Melon that Abrams and his brother, Steve, had co-owned since 2015.…

THERE IS CITY AND there is spirit and the two coincide. Yes, this is about the texture of the bridge, the smell in the air, the thick noise everywhere, the inimitable attitude. But there is who the city is at the core: a glow-in-the-dark something, a luminant orb at night, a maelstrom, quicksand spinning. (Not a place, an idea. Not a place, an energy.) There’s the spirit named in its mother tongue; ruthless, faceless whirlwind dancing between land and sky. Nobody comes close. Ruled by a treacherous trinity: Èkó, the senior trickster, the melting pot in the sun, the overseer of all, the one who watches the underside of night; Lagos, the plain-mad, plain-fun, plain-loved; and LasGidi, the one with arrogance in its gait, who glimmers under strobe lights, who…