Innholdsfortegnelse for August 1-14-2022 i New York Magazine

IT’S NOON IN AUSTIN, fully 100 degrees out, and the documentarian Alex Lee Moyer is sitting in a downtown hotel a few hours before the premiere of her new film. Alex’s War is an access-driven portrait of the muscle-bound conspiracist Alex Jones, and yesterday Moyer traded places with her subject, appearing on his Infowars show to plug it. “Every time there was a commercial break, they were really trying to push his boner pills,” she says. “He’s like, ‘The globalists are trying to ruin the American family. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have children.’ ” Having spent months recording Jones, Moyer mimics his hoarse, manic drawl with affection. Moyer’s own expression is generally deadpan, and at times it’s hard to tell if she’s masking worry or ennui.…

ONE OF THE FIRST instances of ghosting I can recall took place in the early 2010s. A friend had gone on a few great dates with a boy she met on Tinder, after which they exchanged a steady stream of communication. Soon, her messages were met with long silences, “yep,” or “lol.” We speculated on the reason: a lost phone, shadowy personal problems, perhaps even a hospitalization. We didn’t use the term ghosting; back then, it wasn’t obvious to us that this was an ending. These days, we seem to have resigned ourselves to an epidemic of unsatisfactory conclusions and unexplained rejections. Friends and friends of friends have shared endless stories of carefully made plans canceled and beloved clothing items and books lost forever in a ghost’s home. Someone told…

IMAGINE THAT A GROUP of people you’ve met on dating apps over the years were to gather in one room, make idle chitchat, then talk to a reporter about you. What would they say? What patterns might be revealed? Jeremy Jacobowitz, a 35-year-old TV producer turned food influencer who runs an Instagram account called Brunch Boys, decided he’d be willing to find out. By his estimate, he has met around 50 women from the apps over the past ten years. Of those women, five agreed to meet him again in New York, while five others opted to weigh in from afar. Most of these app dates followed a similar arc. “My rule is always ‘Let’s just get drinks,’ ” Jacobowitz said. “If it’s terrible, you just get out of there.”…

FOOD OPENINGS ➸ IT HAS BEEN 28 months since anyone could stop in to Txikito—the small Chelsea restaurant run by chefs Eder Montero and Alex Raij—for whole trout with serrano ham, tripe with bizkaína sauce, or salt cod with pil-pil. Pandemic or otherwise, a closure of more than two years would be the end of the road for most businesses. Not so for Txikito, which reopens this month. Montero and Raij still operate their Brooklyn restaurants, mere feet from each other in Cobble Hill. La Vara is focused on the Moorish and Jewish crosscurrents in southern-Spanish cooking, while Saint Julivert culls coastal cuisines from around the world for its wide-ranging seafood menu. And with Txikito, the couple now want to dive even further into the Basque traditions that have informed…

MARIA BAKALOVA IS NOT CONCERNED about getting hurt. There’s even a kind of twisted pleasure, she says, in knowing you can endure it. Grinning into her computer camera, the 26-year-old shows me her bruises, remnants of a movie she just shot in her home country of Bulgaria: bluish-green welts covering both elbows, a few scratches still red and inflamed on the back of her hand. She is more concerned about hurting someone else, as when she was shooting the A24 horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies. In one scene from the film, which is out this week, a group of longtime friends and their new partners sit cross-legged on the floor to enact an icebreaking, boundary-crossing ritual: One by one, they turn to their right and slap the shit out of…

USHER RAYMOND’S viral NPR Tiny Desk settled what needed no debate. The Atlanta R&B veteran with the golden falsetto and stellar dance moves hasn’t lost luster as a performer in the quarter-century since he spelled his name in 1997’s “Nice and Slow.” His catalogue is timeless and Teflon: nine No. 1 songs, platinum-selling hits in three different decades, a diamond-certified classic in 2004’s Confessions. And yet Usher’s meteoric career has often confounded audiences—first as a 14-year-old singing about mature themes, then when he married hip-hop production, and later EDM, with raw emotion. As he begins a new Las Vegas residency, one that venerates every stage of his trendsetting, Usher is garrulous and also unafraid to say he revolutionized some shit. Most enduring memory of recording 1994’s Usher with Diddy ➽…

That Comes With Soup Across 1 Sandwich with pork4 Unfair personal attack9 “Pardon me …”13 1972 No. 1 hit for the Chi-Lites19 “I’m impressed!”20 Holmes or Couric21 Sport with belts22 2014 dance craze23 Gas-station device with an innovative design?26 “Hello Darlin’ ” singer Conway27 Southwest features28 Latin for “where”29 Coach Parseghian31 Horn’s sound32 Zero, to soccer fans33 Tex-Mex dish ladled over a1990s gadget?39 New York and Nairobi, e.g.41 ___ harp (instrument played by the wind)42 Possesses44 Doing the dishes, e.g.45 Life force46 Bit of flirty behavior50 Redo the furniture of every house in your part of the state?55 More than mad56 “How’ve you ___?”57 Ivory rival58 L.A.’s region60 Back talk61 Neighbor of Libya65 Be boastful67 Calms down69 Fatalistic sentiment about a beauty chain’s products? [Note: double order of soup]72 Beneath…

INSIDE: New York’s shark patrol / Alex Jones parties with the post-left / Decoding Elon Musk POLITICAL NEWS RARELY gets much grimmer than it did for Joe Biden on July 26, when he was greeted by a surprise poll showing that, were he to run again in a contested primary in New Hampshire, he might command less than one-fifth of the vote. It was a far-fetched hypothetical—the likes of Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren won’t challenge him if he runs for reelection—but the dearth of support for a sitting president was still galling. And yet, improbably, the news was even worse for his presumptive heir: Kamala Harris was all the way down in the single digits. The vice-presidency is, by definition, a nearly impossible job. There’s the prestige and the…

IN JANUARY 2018, Tesla announced details of a new contract with its CEO, Elon Musk, that sounded less like an executive-compensation package and more like the premise of a game show. Under the deal, Musk would take no salary but could earn large bundles of stock options each time he raised the company’s value by $50 billion. If it went up by a mere $49,999,999,999, he would leave empty-handed. The contract’s top prize could be unlocked only if the company’s market cap hit $650 billion by 2028, a 13-fold increase. Tesla was bleeding so much money—it was among the most shorted stocks on Wall Street—that growing its value that significantly in a decade, or ever, seemed hopeless. The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin described the feat as “laughably impossible.”…

JORDAN PEELE’S new horror comedy, Nope, stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as Otis Jr. and Emerald, the sibling proprietors of Haywood’s Hollywood Horses. As they attempt to capture video evidence of a mysterious being attacking their ranch from the clouds, Nope stretches out like a camera’s bellows to the wide-open landscapes and cyclone-filled sky in a way that recalls The Wizard of Oz. OJ and Em team up with a cinematographer named Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) to nab footage of the alien using a hand-cranked Imax camera the Nope crew referred to as “Dorothy.” During filming, Wincott shadowed the film’s own cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, to study up on his role. “Photography—or how we photograph things, and the chemistry of photography—is a very big theme in the film,” says…

CRITICS Kathryn VanArendonk on The Last Movie Stars … Alison Willmore on Nope … Craig Jenkins on Special. THE SWEATIEST, most homeworklike moment of any documentary is the job of setting the stakes, that necessary introduction that typically relies on sweeping generalizations about time and human nature. A six-part series on the lives of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, directed by and prominently featuring Ethan Hawke, could have slipped into plaintive nostalgia for a bygone era or underexamined hero worship for the two icons’ towering legacies. Its title alone, The Last Movie Stars, feels a bit like a joke when articulated by a man with a lengthy section of accolades on his own Wikipedia. But the docu-series runs on Hawke’s enthusiastic curiosity about his subjects. He showcases Newman’s and Woodward’s…

IN THE THREE YEARS since “Truth Hurts” blew up on TikTok and “Good As Hell” crept into raunchy ensemble comedies, RuPaul’s Drag Race lip syncs, and commercials for Grubhub and Garnier, the Grammy-winning Minneapolis performer Lizzo has had a tumultuous ride in the public consciousness, garnering respect for nuclear-grade feelgood anthems like “Juice” while contending with people’s nebulous standards for what she should sing, how she should dress, and even how much she should weigh. She’s also been accused of pandering to white audiences with motivational pop songs and scolded for wearing revealing outfits. Occasionally, the backlash has been deserved, like when she went after critics following the release of her 2019 breakthrough album, Cuz I Love You—a perplexing play, since the reviews were mostly glowing—or publicly shamed a Postmates…

FOR MOST LOCAL beachgoers, the return of apex predators is hair-raising news. The first nibble came in June when a man swimming at Jones Beach suffered a “possible shark bite” to the leg; this incident was quickly followed by five more reports of shark bites happening off Long Island in a three-week span. (Mercifully, none of the recent bites has resulted in serious injury.) But for Greg Metzger, the chief field coordinator of the SOFO Shark Research and Education Program, evidence of a thriving New York shark population has been found here for a while. “We’ve been seeing more sharks for nearly ten years now,” says Metzger, a high-school science teacher who spends his summers captaining boatloads of shark researchers. “As sad as it is that these individuals had a…

IF YOU READ THE PAPERS, then you know that Papaya King, the colorful little counter that created the template for the city’s other Papayas, is facing demolition after an impressive run of more than 70 years on the same corner of 86th Street and Third Avenue. This original branch was opened in the late 1940s by a juice-loving entrepreneur named Gus Poulos, who at first sold only his tropical potions but added hot dogs—along with his trademark sweet onions—to the menu a few years later in deference to the legions of sausage-loving Germans in Yorkville. The slim, snappy dog has its charms, but what has long separated the place from your average street cart is the tangy papaya drink that, to me, has always tasted like the magic of the…

DESIGN HUNTING THE HOUSE IS TALLER than it is wide. The living room is around 30 feet high,” says Todd Oldham of the “very strange” home that he and his partner (in business and in life), Tony Longoria, purchased in the Poconos in 1997. “We got the house just after it was finished.” It was “a blank slate,” Oldham adds, “so I went to town.” The house is among his long-term projects, one of the many overlapping creative endeavors he has engaged in over the 40-plus years he has spent making the world a more interesting place to live. Oldham had his own clothing line through the 1990s (and hosted MTV’s House of Style), yet the wasteful whims of fashion always weighed on him. While he was putting the finishing…

THERE’S A SPEECH that Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) would give during safety meetings on the film sets where he worked as a provider and handler of trained horses. You can tell by the way his son, Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), mutters some of it on a soundstage at the start of Nope, just six months after his father’s bizarre and disturbing death, that these words have been a familiar, perhaps daunting refrain in his life. OJ may be dedicated to maintaining his father’s legacy, but he’s no talker. When his little sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), makes her late arrival, he immediately cedes the floor to her, and she picks up easily where her brother trailed off. The spiel has to do with a series of photos of a galloping…