Innholdsfortegnelse for August 15-28, 2022 i New York Magazine

ON A MUGGY AFTERNOON at the ragged end of July, Nestor Cortés Jr., the mustachioed, heavily tattooed left-hander for the New York Yankees, was pouncing off the mound to field ground balls and fire them to first base. The night before, the Yankees had won on a walk-off home run from Aaron Judge, their six-foot-seven, 282-pound juggernaut and the front-runner for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. Not since Derek Jeter have the Yankees enjoyed such a captivating superstar. But the 27-year-old Cortés, built at the human scale of five-foot-11, has emerged as a star in his own right, quietly capturing the hearts of the Yankee faithful as the team tries to win its first World Series title in 13 years. For most professional athletes, there’s a time, usually…

IVANA TRUMP’S HOUSE at 10 East 64th Street, which she purchased for $2.5 million in 1992 after her divorce from Donald Trump, is modest compared with the former mansions of Gianni Versace and David Geffen on the same block. Twenty feet wide with a 1920s limestone-column-and-pediment façade, it could pass for a small nation’s consulate or a mausoleum. Inside, it was all Ivana: red carpeting, gilded paneling, and animal prints. She was especially proud of the grand curving staircase with a mural, she once told People magazine, “painted on so it looks like it’s a balcony, looking into French-Roman gardens”—the backdrop for countless regal publicity moments with her posing in ball gowns, peddling a relentlessly queenly idea of herself almost to the very end, even as her realm had shrunk.…

bullet train feels like someone crossbred Kill Bill with a Final Destination movie. And at times, David Leitch’s film is almost as glorious as that description makes it sound—elaborate and ridiculous but dedicated to making the elaborate and the ridiculous seem, well, not plausible, exactly, but certainly compelling and fun. Not to mention the film’s conviction that there is no level of baroque narrative digression a modern audience will not tolerate. I took something like 50 pages of notes, and I still feel like I caught about half of what happened. To describe the plot in any detail would send one down more than a dozen wormholes, but here’s a general outline: The action takes place on a train speeding from Tokyo to Morioka on which a number of criminals…

It’ll Cost You By Matt Gaffney Across 1 Barbecue side dish5 Massive9 Rami with an Oscar14 Word with single or soccer18 Mount Olympus queen19 Gulf Coast city20 Cinéaste Kurosawa21 “Gotcha, boss!”22 Purina competitor23 Unfamiliar24 Underwater explorer25 Mediterranean mountain26 Uncommon knowledge28 Prop for Mr. Peanut29 Lousy tennis shot31 Prepare 126-Across, one way32 City next to Chapel Hill34 Thespian Rickman36 Big bird37 Paper purchase39 Campfire creation40 Highly unfriendly41 Snitch42 Be down in the dumps45 Craft beer, often46 Gardening or golfing, e.g.48 Chopper with a head49 Do it wrong50 More kind52 How Tom Hanks looked in “Cast Away”53 Nut used in sodas55 No longer worth discussing57 Prefix with sphere59 Highway stop60 Object61 ___ nitrate62 Suffix with Kazakh63 Day after viernes67 Latvia’s capital68 Seesaw or wheelbarrow, e.g.70 “Wait ___ Dark”72 Oklahoma city73 Danger near…

A MONTH AGO, Joe Biden’s presidency was on the brink of failure. His legislative agenda was moribund, the economy was teetering on the precipice of recession, and Democrats were speculating in the press about who else they could nominate for president in 2024. Biden, like Jimmy Carter, seemed destined to be remembered as a president overwhelmed by economic crosscurrents and a Democratic Congress he could not productively lead. The situation has changed with astonishing speed. Biden has salvaged his domestic-policy agenda, his party’s base has snapped out of its torpor, and the economy is showing signs it just might pull through. And while not all these developments are his own doing, nor do they completely extinguish the political danger he faces, they all redound to his benefit. In the span…

WHEN WE THINK about the economy, there’s a tendency to rush headfirst into the swirl of numbers moving up or down each month, plot them on angular charts, and spin out a story of what it all means. Inflation, unemployment, pay raises, gas prices—together, these indicators are supposed to jell into a coherent narrative and tell us where we’re going. The problem with the current economy is that the numbers don’t make any sense. Less than a month ago, some commentators were claiming we were already in a recession, thanks to two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Then the July jobs report hit, showing that the economy had added a staggering 528,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate hit a 53-year low. Prices are high, everything is expensive, and…

I WASN’T LOOKING FOR anything specific—or anything,” says artist Austin Lee of this 1899 house he bought three years ago in Greenpoint after a brief stint living in a rather boring new condo, and he has been tinkering with it ever since. “I think that is the kind of vibe of the house: making things work.” Lee is a native of Las Vegas and spent his 20s in Philadelphia. He got his M.F.A. at Yale in 2013 and started working with gallerist Jeffrey Deitch five years later. He spent a decade renting a house in Long Island City similar to this one, along with a separate studio. But after a six-month stint in Berlin, he gave up that place. And condo life wasn’t for him. When you walk into the…

LAST SUMMER, an Austin-based graphic designer named Lauren Robinson threw herself a 24th-birthday party. She and her friends from the University of Texas love a theme, and since they had spent the early part of the pandemic marathoning art-house movies, they latched onto the idea of ringing in 24 with an A24 party—held, appropriately, near the city’s Lady Bird Lake. A couple friends showed up dressed as the skaters from Mid90s, another as The Last Black Man in San Francisco; two different people came as the ghost from A Ghost Story. Robinson dressed up as Florence Pugh’s May Queen from Midsommar, a costume she created out of headbands, an old shirt, and $20 worth of fake flowers from the dollar store. On TikTok, where Robinson had documented the party, someone…

CRITICS Craig Jenkins on Beyoncé … Justin Davidson on the semi-imaginary New York of Westworld … Bilge Ebiri on Bullet Train. NILE RODGERS got a million-dollar inkling in 1979 when he stepped into the bathroom at the Gilded Grape, the legendary mob-owned drag bar on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, home to a colorful cast of regulars including Andy Warhol. The place, Rodgers would later recall in his 2011 autobiography, Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny, was packed with Diana Ross impersonators. “Suddenly it dawned on me that Diana was an iconic figure in the gay community,” wrote Rodgers, who had just agreed to write and produce Ross’s next album. He met with his Chic bandmate Bernard Edwards and hatched a plan “to have Diana talk…

THE LEADING Democratic candidates in New York’s newly created Tenth Congressional District are getting a little sick of one another. At a televised debate in August, City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera told ex-prosecutor Dan Goldman, who is the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, “You’re a walking campaign-finance loophole,” referring to Goldman’s decision to give his campaign $1 million from his personal coffers. “I believe in the Constitution,” former representative Elizabeth Holtzman sniped at Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, as the two jousted over whether there should be term limits on Supreme Court justices. “Maybe you haven’t studied it sufficiently.” (Simon favors the limits and criticized Holtzman for not backing them.) The winner of this contest will walk away with a high-profile prize: a district that includes Wall Street, Greenwich Village, the…

THE BOAT WAS A beauty of a thing: some 500 tons across 171 feet of glass and steel as white as Santorini. All rounded edges, the five decks—one with a glass-bottom pool—were made for July on the Mediterranean, sunset dinners among the islands near Sicily, cocktails in the turquoise shallows off the coast of Ibiza. Her would-be captains showed off pictures of the $50 million vessel at parties, bragging that it would be “bigger than all of the richest billionaires’ yachts in Singapore” and describing plans to adorn the staterooms with projector screens, creating a waterborne gallery for their growing collection of digital art in the form of NFTs. No matter that they had originally told friends they were shopping for a $150 million vessel; the superyacht was still the…

THIRTY-FIVE HOURS before he was murdered, 18-year-old Jayquan McKenley was sitting on a yellow beanbag chair in a teacher’s office at the Children’s Village, a residential facility for at-risk youth, including juvenile offenders, tucked away in the woods of Westchester County. The campus includes a school, ball fields, and dormitories with beds for 137 students. On Fridays at 3 p.m., McKenley attended a voluntary after-school mentorship program called Bravehearts run by Robert Ramaseur, a 26-year-old from East Harlem who had lived at Children’s Village as a teen. Ramaseur would lead the Bravehearts through exercises like “Monster in the Basement,” in which students would try to identify suppressed traumas, such as “death, substance abuse, seeing things that you shouldn’t have seen when you were younger.” A dry-erase board featured a little…

IT’S BEEN JUST about two months since chef Ignacio Mattos’s Corner Bar opened on the first floor of the new Nine Orchard hotel (9 Orchard St.), and already in this restaurant’s short life, it has become clear that morning is the time to go. Corner Bar’s oeuf à la coque is a photo-ready soft-boiled beauty that requires two hands to eat: one to steady the egg in its porcelain cradle and another to dunk batons of fried bread into the smooth yolk. (Shiny demitasse spoons are given to guests so they may scoop the soft-set white away from the shell.) Pastries are baked in-house, and they are all worth ordering; there’s a kouign-amann that deserves special attention for its crackly crust and tender interior. “We’re technically a French restaurant, but…

LIKE SO MANY dreamers before them, Westworld’s synthetic-flesh-and-circuit creations have finally made it to Manhattan. Perhaps it was inevitable that even the AI-powered soul-mining androids that broke out of their desert-fantasy resort in season one would be drawn to this maddeningly irrational city—to fix it, to own it, to remake it in their image. The algorithmic creature-in-chief, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), becomes a goddess in season four because moving here puts an entire populace within earshot of a single giant transmission tower that deafens everyone into total obedience. If you can make people do anything there, you can make people do anything everywhere. There are 8 million stories in the Westworld city, and I have given up following them. I have lost track of who’s human and who’s synthetic, or…