Innholdsfortegnelse for December 19, 2022-January 1, 2023 i New York Magazine

THE COVER OF New York’s 18th “Reasons to Love New York” issue (December 5–18) featured a Pelle Cass image of 72 prominent locals—from artists to politicians to child influencers and more—all crossing a single intersection. On NY1, Pat Kiernan called it “the cover image that has everybody talking. It is a spectacular photograph that’s not quite what it appears to be, but it’s sure a lot of fun. It’s like playing a game of Where’s Waldo? with identifiable New Yorkers.” “I love the creative direction of this cover for so many reasons,” @BRETTAGNE_ wrote. “Every major city should have a ‘reasons to love’ publication.” The issue featured several dozen causes for affection. “I’ve never needed a reason,” designer Kenneth Cole said, “but if you do, here are 39.” The City…

THE LIFE OF THE editor Bob Gottlieb, at a spry 91 years old, is nowadays largely limited to a single room on the second floor of his East 48th Street townhouse—by choice, not necessity. He can bound up Second Avenue just fine to the diner that he considers an extension of his home, where the waitress knows he takes his chocolate milkshakes extra thick. But everything he needs, his library and his pencils, is right here, so why go farther? To receive guests like this one, he didn’t even have to put on shoes or tame the gull’s-wing sweep of his silver hair. Burbling away in a leather club chair in his book-lined office (they are arranged according to a system, he says with a point to his head, that’s…

NOBODY LOVES A NEPO BABY LIKE RYAN MURPHY THE SUPER-PRODUCER behind Glee and Dahmer has a special fondness for the children of Hollywood. In his series American Horror Story (and its Stories spinoff), Murphy can’t help but sprinkle insider youths with recognizable last names into the credits to the chagrin of fans, who’ve complained online about the show being the “revolving door of nepo babies.” Here are his most notable AHS nepo castings, from least to most employed. PARIS JACKSON A musician, a model, and the daughter of Michael, Jackson has acted in Murphy’s AHS spinoff series playing a high-school bully who livestreams herself egging on her friend to share violent sexual fantasies. Murphy has a habit of casting nepo kids as bullies—members of the in crowd playing the villain.…

Ireland Baldwin, the daughter of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, recently announced on TikTok that she and her boyfriend, musician RAC, are opening a “café, wine bar, and a boutique” as well as starting a brand together. Eva Amurri began as an actress playing the younger version of her mother, Susan Sarandon, in Dead Man Walking. Now she runs a lifestyle blog called Happily Eva After. Eminem’s daughter Hailie Jade hosts a podcast called Just a Little Shady. Olivia Jade Giannulli’s mother, Lori Loughlin, committed light fraud to get her into USC and paid for it in prison time; Olivia Jade likely would have preferred to stay a YouTuber. Together, Sistine and Sophia Stallone, daughters of Sylvester Stallone, entertain listeners on their podcast, Unwaxed. (It’s a reference to their eyebrows.)…

BEST OF NEW YORK For Return-to-the-Office Zhuzhing COBBLER EXPRESS AND STANLEY’S SHOE REPAIR, 1 New York Plz., concourse level; 917-691-7955 “MY THEORY of good cobblers is that they are proximal to workplaces where fine shoes are worn,” says Vanity Fair executive editor Claire Howorth, who started going to third-generation cobbler Charlie Colletti when she worked at Time magazine in Brookfield Place. In the eight years since, Colletti has rehabbed everything from Howorth’s “slumping snakeskin knee-highs and scuffed Prada platform penny loafers” to the $80 Ferragamos she found on the RealReal and needed stretched half a size. “I’ve been to a lot of cobblers in the past two decades,” she says, “and none has been as good or fast or reasonably priced” as Colletti, whose prices start at $15 for…

Tammie Teclemariam looks back on a very filling assignment. THIS PAST JANUARY, our newly installed diner-at-large embarked on a quest to visit as many bars and restaurants as humanly possible in 2022. Twelve months and 457 establishments later, here are the freshest, sauciest, crispiest, and cheesiest things she ate. The WORST PART of restaurants in 2022 was not the threat of COVID. It was Resy. Why do I need to give a host my phone number if I’m trying to sit at the bar as a walk-in? BEST WAY TO SPEND $4: A beef patty at Kingston Tropical Bakery in the Bronx. BEST WAY TO SPEND $400: The omakase and a bottle of Matsu no Midori daiginjo sake at Tempura Matsui in Murray Hill. BEST WAY TO END A MEAL:…

1. Dead Eyes: “Tom” (Headgum) When this series started in early 2020, it was tricky to see where things would go: Actor and comedian Connor Ratliff was mounting a quixotic quest to find out why Tom Hanks had fired him from a bit part on Band of Brothers. (Ratliff was told it was because Hanks thought he had “dead eyes.”) It soon became apparent that what Ratliff really wanted was to produce thoughtful, funny interviews with friends and acquaintances about the tenuous nature of life in the entertainment business—ultimately booking an actual, fascinating sit-down with Hanks. The show’s overall effect is sublime. I wonder if there will be anything like it ever again. 2. Normal Gossip (Defector Media) The show, hosted by Kelsey McKinney and produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin,…

Twenty-five things to see, hear, watch, and read. DECEMBER 21–JANUARY 4 TV 1. Watch Fleishman Is in Trouble How will this domestic mystery end? Hulu, December 29. The miniseries version of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel concludes and will need to answer an array of outstanding questions. What happened to Claire Danes’s Rachel, and how sympathetic is her story? Will Lizzy Caplan’s Libby figure out what she wants to do with her life? And does Jesse Eisenberg’s Toby tumble into sex addiction or pull himself back from the encounters he used to deal with the dissolution of his marriage? ROXANA HADADI MOVIES 2. See Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery How did the whodunit get so hip? Netflix, December 23. Rian Johnson’s follow-up to his improbable 2019 hit Knives Out is bigger,…

IN 2007, New York Magazine launched its “Sex Diaries” column, turning readers into a mass of eager voyeurs getting their jollies by peering into random New Yorkers’ bedrooms (or bathrooms, or kitchens, or public restrooms of choice) each week. Over the years, the column has done more than just entertain; it’s become an exhaustive, longitudinal catalogue of the ways people fuck in this city—a compilation of primary-source documents deserving of a place in the National Archives, in my opinion. On December 16, “Sex Diaries” became an HBO docuseries. In anticipation of its TV debut, I took a spin through the archives to see how sex has changed from the days when “Aqueous Transmission,” by Incubus, was considered a suitable fuck track and BlackBerrys—with their filthy little rollerballs—outnumbered iPhones. I read…

HOW A NEPO BABY IS BORN IN 2022, THE INTERNET uncovered a vast conspiracy: Hollywood was run on an invisible network of family ties—and everybody was in on it! Everyone is someone’s kid, but it was as if everybody were somebody’s kid. Euphoria, the buzziest show on television, was created by the son of a major director and co-starred the daughter of another. Actress Maya Hawke was not only born to two famous parents but looked like them, too. Half of Brooklyn’s indie artists had dads with IMDb pages. Even Succession’s Cousin Greg turned out to be the son of one of the guys who designed the Rolling Stones’ lips logo. Aghast, content creators got to work. An unwieldy phrase—“the child of a celebrity”—was reduced to a catchy buzzword: nepo…

NOT SO LONG AGO, the media world contained an entire nepo-baby microclimate. At a time when magazines were still seen as glamorous and culture defining, New York editors and publishers could do a solid for a powerful friend by giving their offspring an internship or assistant job. It’s hard to imagine actual celebrities or socialites wanting to work for a magazine now, but in the ’90s and aughts, three outlets were more notorious than others for hiring their kids. ROLLING STONE The magazine where Mark Ronson “interned” at age 12 was like a summer camp for the children of co-founder Jann Wenner’s rock-star and celebrity friends. Bob Dylan’s granddaughter passed through. So did Chevy Chase’s kid. Boz Scaggs’s son Austin stuck around, becoming a music critic and overseeing the online…

HAILEY BIEBER’S RHODE PEPTIDE GLAZING FLUID, $29 Baldwin brother Stephen’s daughter is a model-slash-influencer known for her glazed-doughnut skin, which she attributes to a “dewy hydration layer” that is part of her skin-care line. The identically named Rhode lifestyle brand has tried to legally bar Bieber from using her own middle name for her company, but as litigation continues, she has not made a change. SARA AND ERIN FOSTER’S FAVORITE DAUGHTER VALENTINA SUPER-HIGH-RISE FLARE, $218 Known for their relatable Instagram content, the two daughters of musicianDavid Foster already did the meta TV show (Barely Famous) and have pivoted to clothing. SAMARIA LEAH WISDOM SMITH’S SAMARIA LEAH SL BABY TEE, $65 The F.I.T. graduate and daughter of LL Cool J launched an eponymous clothing line that sells looks for all sorts…

VALENTINA HARTMANN Investor-relations manager, London What brings you here? I’m representing a company called Bitzero—we do zero-carbon bitcoin mining. One of our investors is Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, and he’s the keynote today. In light of the whole FTX crash, a lot of our investors have come to us and asked, “Are you involved?” And we’re not. Only Kevin himself was. So we also felt it was a good opportunity to show face and clarify that. Why didn’t you guys get involved with FTX? We’ve not yet found a reason to trust any exchanges. We only store our bitcoin in a wallet, which is housed in the offices of our lawyers in Switzerland. Obviously, we feel terrible for the people who took the hit, but again, we’re not associated with…

YEAR IN CULTURE 1. Jerrod Carmichael, Rothaniel (HBO) This special is the epitome of a comedian dismantling his own performance. Carmichael and his director, Bo Burnham, integrate elements of audience response to probe the ways we think about acceptance, reception, and the relationship between performer and spectator. All of it is connected by Carmichael’s announcement that he is gay, and it’s astonishing how he frames that revelation with the theme of seeing things that are hidden in plain sight. 2. Matt Rogers, Have You Heard of Christmas? (Showtime) Rogers uses the holiday as the baseline for a delightfully oddball, intensely gay musical comedy that is ostensibly about how Christmas is a very sexy time of year. A little deeper under the surface, it’s about Rogers’s exploitation of the Christmas capitalism…

10. The Married Swinger at a Weeklong Sex Party in Jamaica (2022) 1 A.M. We catch up with the San Francisco couple, and the four of us make our way to the nude side. The hot tub is always packed at night. S pulls me into the grotto space behind the waterfall between the pool and the hot tub. F and A don’t follow, but A gives me the thumbs-up. 9. The Italian Wife Juggling Work and Sex (2015) 8 A.M. We haven’t had sex in a while, which for two Italians is like torture of the worst kind. But life gets in the way—my husband is having child-support issues with his ex-wife, and I am trying for a big promotion at work since I have my own kids with…

THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY has never been a meritocracy. But this doesn’t mean all nepo babies are created equal. Some were lucky enough to be born with the exact same face as a famously beautiful celebrity; others had to make do with merely inheriting a bevy of connections and a knowledge of how to play the game. Here’s a (nearly) exhaustive accounting of the actors, rock stars, models, directors, producers, influencers, writers, and insiders who just happen to be the children of actors, rock stars, models, directors, producers, influencers, writers, and insiders. Which ones are actually talented? According to their family and friends, all of them.…

NEPOTISM IN SPORTS is defined by more objective markers than in Hollywood: Are you not just good but able to roll with the best in the world? Nowhere is this a more heated topic than in the NBA, which is positively bursting with the sons of former players. This past summer, Shareef O’Neal, the son of Shaquille, failed to make the draft but ended up getting a six-figure deal with the developmental G League anyway. Soon, the NBA nepo phenomenon will reach its apotheosis: Bronny James, LeBron James’s son, is slated to declare for the NBA draft in 2024. But while familial advantages can make entrance to the league easier, staying is a harder proposition. Which NBA sons are making a name for themselves? Here’s how they stack up.…

➸ WHEN IT’S mid-December and you can’t figure out what to buy for the people in your life whose tastes you’re entirely unfamiliar with, it’s time to consider a fail-safe classic—like, say, a bathrobe from Coyuchi, the more-than-three-decade-old California company consistently recommended by interior designers and various experts for its extra-soft bedsheets, towels, and robes. Coyuchi’s shawl-collared Cloud Loom Organic Robe ($178) is admittedly pricey, but according to the many people we spoke to on the subject, it’s worth it. Because it’s made of the same long-staple cotton found in the brand’s bestselling bath towels, it’s exceedingly, unusually fast-drying. “It doesn’t sacrifice weightiness for absorbency or vice versa,” says wellness coach Daphne Javitch. And the Cloud Loom just feels right. According to Reshma Patel, founder of now-closed jewelry store Quiet…

SASHA BIKOFF’S 21-foot-wide house on Commerce Street in Greenwich Village was built in the 1820s in the late Federal style, which doesn’t call undue attention to itself. But step inside and it runneth over with colors, patterns, and references. “My goal for the house was really to create this Notting Hill–French country vibe,” she says. “It started with the Pierre Frey wallpaper.” Oh, and there are a few Venetian notes as well. Bikoff was raised in an apartment with a minimalist look on the Upper East Side, but at age 14, she rebelled. She set off to Janovic for pink wall paint and draped her stainless-steel Conran canopy bed with fabrics found in the Garment District. She’d admired her Persian maternal grandmother’s homes, which involved “a lot of Middle Eastern…

1. Manhunt, by Gretchen Felker-Martin Anger simmers underneath every word in this story of trans people fighting for survival after a plague begins to transform anyone with a certain amount of testosterone into a feral monstrosity. The protagonists take off on an odyssey across New England—The Road with a sense of humor and 110 percent more queer sex. 2. Easy Beauty, by Chloé Cooper Jones In this series of essays, Jones travels in pursuit of meaning. She was born with a rare congenital condition known as sacral agenesis, and the underlying pain it has caused propels the book while providing detours that explore her coming of age, family history, tennis, motherhood, and theories about beauty. 3. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, by Franny Choi The writing…