Innholdsfortegnelse for December 5-18, 2022 i New York Magazine

ANYONE IN MAGAZINES knows what it takes to wrangle a celebrity for a photo shoot. There are weeks of phone calls, issues of timing and availability and vanity. So what happens when you want 72? Therein lay the challenge for this issue’s cover photograph by Pelle Cass, who’s known for multiple-exposure composed images, shot from one spot and then set down, digitally, into one frame. They are intense projects, requiring thousands of identically framed exposures shot over hours and a camera tripod that absolutely. Can. Not. Move. ¶ Jody Quon, New York’s photo director, with her deputy, Liana Blum, and a team of editors, made an enormous list of names, then reached out to a huge swath of staff to start making calls. They and Cass chose a particularly New…

At the end of 2020, when hardly anybody had yet gotten even the first dose of a vaccine and the subways weren’t running overnight and the sidewalks of midtown were so empty you could text and walk safely and there was no place to go dancing or see music or very easily get a martini and burger at midnight, our annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue was written in the past tense: “Reasons We’ve Loved New York.” It was a wake for a traumatized commercial metropolis on pause, bruised and boarded up and unsure of when it would get going again or what would be left of it when it did. We wrote tributes for 500 businesses that had shut down forever during the pandemic: go-to diners, late-night party…

Nancy Davis found herself living what she called “a mother’s worst nightmare.” Around ten weeks into her pregnancy, an ultrasound detected that the fetus had acrania, meaning it was developing without a skull. Davis lives in Louisiana, and acrania doesn’t appear on the list of “medically futile” conditions that allow for an exception to the near-total abortion ban the state implemented after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. “Louisiana doctors, they were scared of prosecution; they were scared of being fined,” Davis says. “So I went somewhere the laws were clear and they were confident they could give me the care that I needed.” On September 1, she ended her pregnancy at the Manhattan Planned Parenthood. “I was emotional the whole entire time, but I was treated with the…

The immersive-kitsch megarestaurants that thrived in Mayor Giuliani’s Times Square have died off faster than video stores and Hale and Hearty. Mars 2112 ended its outer-space operations in 2012. The last remaining Jekyll & Hyde Club closed. Planet Hollywood appears to be trapped in chain-resto purgatory, unalive but still twitching. Blame it on the millennials, if you’d like, who had the hit out on Applebee’s in their pursuit of “authenticity,” or on the rise of lazy, quick-build Instagram-photo-op museums, or on taste. Amid the rubble of this prerecession theme-park–ification, Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Resort Times Square sprouted up at the northwest corner of 40th Street and Seventh Avenue. You come to this first New York City consulate of a small island nation-state presided over by benevolent dictator-king James William Buffett because…

There are three principal sources of commuters into New York City: Long Island, Westchester/ Connecticut, and New Jersey. There are three main destinations: Midtown East, Midtown West, and downtown. There ought to be nine main rail arteries feeding them. For the past century, there have been only four: New Jersey trains and the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station, the PATH train into downtown, and Metro-North into Grand Central. Finally, there will be a fifth. The East Side Access project—bringing LIRR trains to Grand Central Terminal—has been crawling along since 1997. It’s a spectacular cash burner, up to $12.7 billion (as of a few weeks ago; perhaps another billion or two was tossed on the fire when we weren’t looking), just as commutes are on the wane. But even…

It didn’t take long for Citi Bike to buckle under the weight of its ambitions. Even as the program expanded to practically every busy intersection (at least in wealthier neighborhoods), the ubiquitous blue bikes started falling into disrepair. Chains rusted; brakes grew faulty; seats slid down no matter how much you messed with those finicky little latches. No small number of the vehicles became totally unrideable. Even the beloved pedal-assist e-bikes seemed to lose a step. The electric-power boost, which won riders over by providing the sensation of implanting Lance Armstrong’s calves directly into their legs, grew sluggish and herky-jerky. The bikes groaned up inclines and could barely keep pace with non-electrified models, let alone cars. And that’s if a rider could find one that wasn’t out of charge. But…

From 2019 to 2021, more than 4,000 privately owned businesses in New York shuttered, mostly in Manhattan. This was a disaster that made space for something new. How would retail reinvent itself? The answer: Out with the old and in with the older. Many of the most exciting and original new stores to open recently carry vintage and secondhand clothing, and they can largely be found on a strip of the Lower East Side below East Houston. “I mean, what else is there?” says Houman Farahmand, who recently opened Ending Soon on Broome with his partner, Arsène Barski. For him, new clothes are a thing of the past. The neighborhood has always been frip-friendly, and now even more so. Creative types looking for Agnès B. and Yohji Yamamoto will line…

New York has always had its restaurant majordomos, colossi bestriding their narrow host stands, ushering in the elect and the elected, frowning on the disfavored. But theirs has largely been a whispered language unshared with, and indeed inscrutable to, uninitiated ears. But not at Balthazar. Keith McNally, its irascible owner, broadcasts it with a bullhorn. McNally adores his customers, except the ones he loathes, and both have a way of making appearances in the theoretically for-his-eyes-only managers’ reports from the restaurant (and its sibling establishments, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi) that he publishes for mass consumption on Instagram. These reports are full of delicious gossip of the most picayune, and therefore most perfect, variety: table choreography, appetizer agita, who is good (and receives free Champagne) and who is bad (non-tipping…

This was the year the junior bankers had finally had enough. In an internal survey of working conditions at Goldman Sachs that leaked early last year, one junior staff member wrote, “I’ve been through foster care and this is arguably worse.” The indignities continued to pile up over the past 12 months. They were called back from the comforts of their Fidi microbalconies to offices that had killed gratis cold brew. Car stipends were scrapped, forcing them back onto the subway. Bonuses were lousy, and layoff season loomed. David Solomon was still, somehow, an international DJ. The junior bankers were ready to quit, they said, anonymously, on the professional social network Blind (and, anonymously, to the New York Post). Some of them even did. Where would they go? Tired of…

For True Projectionists THE ROXY, 2 Sixth Ave.; roxycinemanewyork.com LOCATED IN THE basement of the Roxy Hotel in Tribeca, this theater is intimate and draped in yards of red velvet, but its true appeal is the quality of its projection work. The Roxy frequently screens classics on 35-mm., like Steven Spielberg’s 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence or David Lynch’s 1997 Lost Highway, and projecting them requires a unique skill set—only 50 or so theater-union technicians regularly work with film. “You have to ride the print and watch and make subtle adjustments with each reel changeover,” says Max Cornillon, a former manager at the Museum of the Moving Image, who says that during a Roxy screening of Michael Mann’s Ali, the projectionist came out periodically to check that the picture was…

Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story, by Joe Coscarelli. This cinematic and sweeping character-driven odyssey throughout hip-hop’s most important city is like candy for rap nerds like me. trans girl suicide museum, by hannah baer. A paradigm-shifting 2019 manifesto-memoir. The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler. The type of speculative thriller (in this case about the mysteries surrounding a community of octopuses that develop human sentience) I go nuts for; in the vein of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. Stay True, by Hua Hsu. A recent, wrenching memoir about friendship and grief. No Lease on Life, by Lynne Tillman. A classic New York novel from 1998.…

1 New York’s latest cover story explored the $32 billion collapse of the crypto empire of Sam Bankman-Fried’s (“The Virtue Was the Con,” November 21–December 4). CoinDesk’s David Z. Morris wrote, “A lot of mainstream media getting shit on for their kid-gloves treatment of SBF, but I want to shout out really good work by @NYMag. Their package title is an accurate representation of their rigor and seriousness.” Journalist and crypto skeptic Jacob Silverman added, “A big improvement over the ‘normie’s guide to becoming a crypto person’ that they published almost exactly a year ago.” Rachel Lin, CEO of the trading platform SynFutures, said it was “the best piece on FTX I’ve read so far from mainstream media, at least trying to deep dive into SBF’s upbringing, social and political…

On a crisp October day, Mayor Eric Adams stood in a three-piece suit in front of the press to publicize an important policy that his administration had been working on. “We’re announcing a once-in-a-generation change,” Adams declared. The big win? “We’ve shifted the time that people can set out black bags and trash from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.” The idea was that trash would be sitting out for less time, which meant less time for rats to get into it. It’s a small step in addressing the city’s garbage problem, but there is an actual solution for getting rid of the rats Adams hates—putting out trash in bins. (In fact, you can still put your trash out earlier if it’s in a bin.) That change, however, would require hefty…

April 12, 2022 was a particularly ludicrous, cinematic day even for a city full of them. The morning began in horror with a shooting on the N train in Brooklyn that injured 29 people but miraculously saw zero fatalities. Things then took a farcical turn: The suspect, Frank James, spent the next 30 hours doing a sort of After Hours–meets-Midwest-mom tour of New York, visiting Dimes Square, Katz’s Deli, and, inexplicably, the cursed East Village McDonald’s. The city put a bounty on his head while he casually bopped around Manhattan evading authorities and baffling locals. Suddenly and without warning, lost among the cold chicken nuggets at his final destination, James called the cops to tip them off to his location. Wandering outside, he was spotted by a few civilians, including…

Yu and Me Books sits on the site of a former funeral-supply store in Chinatown. Its footprint is small and its layout simple: a large counter with bar seating; a tiny reading room with comfy armchairs and dim table lamps; and dark wood shelves that once stocked urns and paper houses for burning but now hold a selection of new and used books, many by immigrants and writers of color. The mood is less “Please buy something” than “Slouch around in this living room.” At a recent reading for Erika Hayasaki’s Somewhere Sisters, the author held court behind the counter while attendees stood around, making the event feel like a house party, albeit a tame one. Yu and Me is part of a wave of new indies with an emphasis…

Conventional wisdom suggests the announcement would come through a @badgalriri Instagram post or during a special-edition pay-per-view Savage X Fenty show—maybe even a candid shoot beside the hedges that line Giorgio Baldi, the Santa Monica restaurant that is the common backdrop for her paparazzi walks. Billionaire Rihanna, mother to some and Johnny Depp apologist to others, bucked convention January 31 when she hard-launched her pregnancy in photographs shot by celebrity paparazzo Miles “Diggzy” Diggs beneath the Riverside Drive Viaduct in Harlem. The image is quintessentially Gotham: Rihanna and baby daddy A$AP Rocky are framed beneath the bridge’s cold, unceremonious steel arches while thin layers of dirty snow or remnants of salting cloud the adjacent thoroughfare. It’s an urban landscape at its purest state (ugly) and a gesture to the kind…

The original New York fancy-croissant innovator was Maury Rubin at his City Bakery near Union Square. The 29-year-old institution (it closed its doors a few months before the pandemic) was the birthplace of the iconic pretzel croissant. Debuting in 1996, it was a revelation, redefining a city staple, the Sabrett’s-cart soft pretzel, with a salty, sesame twist on the French classic. The true age of New York pastry crazes came two decades later with the unveiling of the Cronut by Dominique Ansel in 2013 (his flavor of the month continues to draw crowds to his tiny Spring Street bakery). Since then, there’s been no shortage of croissant experimentation: In 2017, pastry chef Ry Stephen and his partner, Aron Tzimas, founded the Supermoon Bakehouse, which has an ever-changing selection of filled-to-bursting,…

Obviously, their lawyers said it was a bad idea. Or did they? “They didn’t actually say it was a bad idea,” says Hell Gate reporter Nick Pinto. “They said it would be a bad idea to think that we could do this without necessarily paying some price.” The idea: What if they installed a bench in Penn Station’s billion-dollar—and completely bench-free—expansion of Moynihan Train Hall? On a bright-white afternoon in Alphabet City in mid-November, four of the five core members of the independent, journalist-run local news site are gathered around two folding tables in the cluttered front room of a former bank. Most of the time, anti-consumerism performance activist Reverend Billy and his followers use this location, known as Earth Church, as a rehearsal and performance space, but these days…

DAVID BERMAN Investment manager, Upper East Side Who are you here with? My kids. I probably have a record number of kids for the Upper East Side: four boys, two girls. We’re a tennis-freak family—one of my sons was top 15 in the country growing up—but we also love padel and play a lot of it in South Africa, where we live for part of the year. What do you love about the game? I have a hedge fund, Durban Capital, and padel’s a great stress reliever. But it’s also just the most insane sport on the planet—fast, great exercise. It’s taken South Africa by storm; it’s taken Europe and Scandinavia by storm. I find it a bit odd, frankly, that padel is not taking off like pickleball is. THE…

➸ A DECADE AGO, when some of the earliest natural-wine bars—Estela, Contra—arrived in New York, they offered a first taste of Paris’s bistronomie movement, where chefs applied haute cuisine flair to daily-changing menus and locavore ingredient sourcing. Now the progeny of those kitchens are running their own spots around town and paring things down even further: shingles of button mushroom draped over ruby cubes of beef tartare, individual tart shells filled with a mash of fava beans, a puck of lentils in a sauce of herb oil. Their naturalistic and understated touch has resulted in some of the most dialed-back new dishes in the city. Jay Wolman Mimi (185 Sullivan St., nr. Bleecker St.) and Babs (72 Macdougal St., nr. W. Houston St.) Wolman…

“Oh Santa!,” Mariah Carey “Underneath the Tree,” Kelly Clarkson “Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End),” the Darkness “Happy Holiday,” Enuff Z’Nuff “Santa Tell Me,” Ariana Grande “It’s Not Christmas Till Somebody Cries,” Carly Rae Jepsen “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects,” Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings “She’s All I Want for Christmas,” Lloyd “What You Want for Christmas,” Quad City DJ’s, the 69 Boyz, and K-Nock “The Christmas Song,” the Raveonettes “Santa’s Coming for Us,” Sia “’Tis the Damn Season,” Taylor Swift…

Aaron Judge’s home runs announce themselves more loudly and reach the seats more quickly than anyone’s, and no position player so large—he’s a physically dense six-foot-seven—has ever played such a brutal and refined version of baseball at once. When he’s injured, as Judge was for portions of the 2018, 2019, and 2020 seasons, it seems like evidence that a person in a body his size cannot play the way he does. When Judge is right, his full-spectrum brilliance somehow seems even more impossible. So when Judge did what he did this year with the Yankees—break Roger Maris’s single-season American League home-run record with 62 and lead the league in RBIs, runs, walks, and slugging and on-base percentage with a .311 batting average—it was both astonishing on the merits and very…

The playwright Adrienne Kennedy is widely acknowledged as a master of the form, a legend of the avant-garde who has taught at Harvard and Yale and been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and PEN. Yet her spare, experimental dramas—in which Hapsburgian duchesses, Jesus Christ, and Patrice Lumumba are as likely to appear as Suzanne Alexander, her semi-fictionalized alter ego—have been more read and admired than produced and staged. One laurel has always eluded her: Broadway. It’s hard to imagine a white playwright (certainly a white male playwright) of similar renown being similarly overlooked. “The playwrights I admired in the ’40s and ’50s all had plays on Broadway with stars in them—Death of a Salesman, Streetcar, Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” says Kennedy, who spent decades in…

In March 2021, then-Governor Cuomo signed the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act into law. Suddenly, the green rush for dispensary licenses was on. A year later, Governor Hochul announced a unique plan to prioritize granting licenses to business owners who had been adversely impacted by the War on Drugs. “Even for the smell of it, we were harassed by police,” says Hector Guerrero, a cybersecurity analyst who was first arrested for marijuana possession at the age of 17. Nube, Guerrero’s family business, is one of 36 outlets that were approved last month to open brick-and-mortar dispensaries. (The Cannabis Control Board plans to issue a total of 175 licenses in the coming months.) Here, some applicants on their high hopes. Brian Garrido, 34 Lyft driver, videography student My Dispensary: iDeal Cannabis,…

MY FRIEND’S CAT-SITTER–slash–part-time lover has eyebrows to make a grown woman weep. My rabbis are so handsome that my friends now go to shul. My dermatologist is such a babe that I pay serious money to look just like her. My mother’s doorman deserves a Dior campaign. The only person hotter than my literary agent is her wife. New York attracts the world’s most beautiful people—and I’ve got my eye on all of them.…

A certain type of New Yorker will tell you that the city’s only Real Pizza can be found south of Prospect Park and across Staten Island—with just a few quality places sprinkled around Manhattan. The time has come to correct this narrative. The best pizza neighborhood in New York is actually Williamsburg, where excellent pizzerias are as concentrated as a heavily reduced tomato sauce. The Williamsburg Pizza Corridor provides Sicilian-ish pieces topped with barbecue chicken, nuevo New York slices and classic New York slices, grandma pies of the Long Island school, Detroit style with frico crust, and, as if that weren’t enough, Roman squares. It’s not just that there’s so much good pizza so close together but that it spans so many pizza genres. Start at 1. Mo’s General, at…

It was a tiny clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the Upper East Side, the renowned hospital that treats more than 50,000 cancer patients a year, more than half of them New Yorkers. Dr. Andrea Cercek and Dr. Louis Diaz Jr. decided to treat 14 rectal-cancer patients with a single immunotherapy drug and nothing else—no chemo or radiation or invasive surgery. If it didn’t work, the trial would have delayed standard treatment for a disease in which acting fast is imperative. In his previous research, Diaz had found that immunotherapy, which triggers the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells, worked best on patients whose cancer had a specific gene mutation, called a mismatch repair deficiency, that prevents cells from repairing damaged DNA. Between 5 and…

➸ ALTHOUGH LOTS OF DTC BRANDS have launched slick, well-packaged woks in the past few years (Made In and Food52 among them), none are quite as reliable as this over-half-century-old model from Joyce Chen ($39). It was the first patented wok to be made with a flat bottom—before that, they were uniformly round at the base and therefore only worked on specific stoves. Chen’s is also unusually affordable, lightweight, and designed with a long wooden handle that makes tossing that much easier. Its carbon-steel material is what gives stir-fry “the elusive, smoky essence prized by Chinese gourmands,” per cookbook author Grace Young. Sohui Kim, the owner and chef of Insa in Brooklyn, told Strategist writer Emma Wartzman that she has used the same Joyce Chen wok for more than 20…

WHAT DOSAGE would you prefer with your dinner this evening?” asked my host. “We recommend 30 milligrams at most, sir.” As he spoke, he bent slightly from the waist in the practiced way I’d seen sommeliers do in grand restaurants around town a million times before. We weren’t in a grand restaurant, exactly—just a small, tastefully decorated room with half a dozen marble tables. But glasses of Champagne were already being served, and the chef had appeared in his whites to announce the first course of our $365 tasting dinner. Cannabis Fine Dining NYC was the name of this discreet little operation, which—after making a hefty deposit via Zelle and receiving a series of anonymous text-message directions—I’d found behind a door at the end of an apartment hallway in Soho.…

DECISION TO LEAVE is in theaters now. PARK CHAN-WOOK knows he has a reputation for shock. The South Korean filmmaker vaulted into international awareness in 2003 with Oldboy, a lurid, exhilarating revenge drama about a man who’s inexplicably held prisoner by an unknown captor for 15 years, then just as inexplicably set loose. His subsequent work has ranged from a romantic comedy set in a psych ward (I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK), to a perverse family portrait (his first and, so far, only English-language film, Stoker), to the lush erotic thriller The Handmaiden, set in Japanese-occupied Korea. ¶ His latest film, Decision to Leave, is restrained in comparison, a love story tucked inside a murder mystery: It stars Park Hae-il as Hae-joon, a devoted Busan cop, and Tang Wei…

Twenty-five things to see, hear, watch, and read. DECEMBER 7–21 MOVIES 1. See Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio Becoming a real boy gets a little bit too real. In select theaters and on Netflix, December 9. Just how dark is this stop-motion take on the children’s tale? Well, Mussolini makes an appearance, and the wooden boy gets sent to a Fascist youth camp to get trained as a soldier. But this beautifully wrought movie isn’t grim for its own sake. Instead, it uses Pinocchio’s story to examine ideas of obedience and independence. ALISON WILLMORE TV 2. Watch Kindred An Octavia E. Butler novel gets the treatment. Hulu, December 13. Acclaimed playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is behind this haunting adaptation of Butler’s revered 1979 novel. It stars Mallori Johnson as an aspiring writer…