Innholdsfortegnelse for January 16-29, 2023 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Olivia Nuzzi reported on Donald J. Trump’s listless reelection effort (“The Final Campaign,” January 2–15). Politico called it a “rollicking look under the hood of the Trump 2024 campaign” with an “incisive” interview of the candidate. Journalist Eamonn Forde wrote, “This Trump profile … unearths a peculiar bleakness, loneliness and emptiness behind the desperately deflective bluster.” Nuzzi detailed Trump’s obsession with the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, leading the Washington Post’s Karen Heller to interview its sole surviving main cast member, Nancy Olson Livingston, who said she was “surprised he likes it so much. He’s missing something in the movie, while he relates it to stardom. Every character in ‘Sunset Blvd.’ is tragic. Movie stars did not have happy lives.” Trump himself lashed out…

IN A TIKTOK VIDEO she made to promote Liftoff, her beginners’ step-by-step weight-lifting manual, fitness writer Casey Johnston demonstrates the way she used to pick up a 40-pound box of kitty litter and carry it into her apartment. In this “before” scene, she goes through a series of painfully familiar contortions, scuttling, scrambling, and finally pushing the box through the door wheelbarrow style, butt in the air. The “after” video is about two seconds long; Johnston simply reaches down, picks up the box, and carries it inside. The clip is simple but encapsulates what makes Johnston such an effective teacher, one who has convinced her readers that bulking up, not slimming down, is a worthy fitness goal: her willingness to put her imperfections on display to get her message across,…

JUST ABOUT ANY BOOSTER hanging around the Diamond District a few years ago knew Roni Rubinov’s pawnshop, New Liberty Loans. Rubinov wasn’t the only fence who would buy stolen goods and resell them online, but he had a reputation for taking pretty much anything a shoplifter could bring him: Rolexes, baby formula, condoms, boxed chocolate, prom dresses, K-cups, Amazon gift cards. He’d even buy food stamps. Once, a booster offered him a box of pens he’d found in a trash can. Rubinov bought it. Most often, though, boosters sold Rubinov cosmetics pinched from pharmacy chains. On any given day, they would head to Duane Reade or CVS or Rite Aid, sweep an armful of creams—L’Oréal, RoC, No7—into a pillowcase, and leave. In and out in 60 seconds. Occasionally, some poor…

MY WEEK WITH ... An (Artificially) Moth-Eaten Shirt Designed for Runners Satisfy MothTech T-Shirt in Spiral Mojave, $160 ➸ To launch our “My Week With” column, for which a writer spends seven days seeing if a product actually does what it claims, associate editor Louis Cheslaw tested a MothTech cotton shirt (it has strategically placed holes for ventilation) from French running brand Satisfy. “IT’S ON THIS FINAL, seventh-day run that I realize I’m going to keep wearing MothTech for outdoor running even after this week is over. It’s incredibly suited to sweating in 40-to-60-degree weather; it’s warmer than thinner fabrics but, thanks to the holes, absent the discomfort of a sticky chest. And I’ll probably keep wearing the shirts for resistance training because the soft, thick cotton is much more…

ELECTCHESTER TECHNICALLY comprises just 38 buildings—squat brick towers tucked neatly between the Long Island Expressway and NYCHA’s Pomonok Houses. But residents of the co-op complex know it’s really about what winds among the actual apartments: two shopping centers, a bowling alley, a public school, a library. A nearly century-old Jewish club that meets in an imposing office building with its original mid-century phone booths. The “rumpus rooms” in residential basements, where a Cub Scout pack gathers and children’s birthday parties are held. On any given night, a handful of clubs—the Motorcycle Club, the Electrical Welfare Club—might assemble. There’s no real need to ever leave Electchester except to commute into Manhattan for work, the same way it’s always been—a slice of 1950s middle-class utopia smack in the middle of Queens. Electchester…

ON A RECENT RAINY NIGHT in Manhattan, more than a hundred people gathered at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery to celebrate the launch of Parapraxis, a new magazine about the century-old practice and theory of psychoanalysis. The party, co-hosted by the journal n+1, primarily consisted of writers, academics, and analysts, most of them young. You could identify some of the analysts by their clothes (fleeces, button-downs) and their jokes (“How many dollars per hour are they charging for this?”). Alex Colston, the 31-year-old deputy editor of Parapraxis, who is training to become a clinical psychologist, set a stack of glossy magazines on a scarred wooden table near the door. He wore a slip that was screen-printed with an image of Freud’s face—not the classic photograph of the white-haired sage with a cigar…

IT ALL BEGAN with a Florida man and his boat. Back in 2020, a Peruvian-born millionaire who resided in a marina development in Jupiter started fighting with neighbors who objected to a Trump flag he flew on the mast of his 40-foot Invincible. The local feud escalated into a series of nationally publicized pro-Trump boat parades. One of these Trumptillas, as the organizers called them, went from Jupiter to Mar-a-Lago on Labor Day. The night before the event, a Republican donor named Elizabeth Fago threw a campaign fundraiser at her dockside mansion. Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr. were at the party, and so were a pair of local entrepreneurs, Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander, who came bearing items for sale. “You may have a chance to make so much…

For an ‘Excavation-Level Experience’ HIGH VALLEY BOOKS 882 Lorimer St., Greenpoint; 347-889-6346; highvalleybooks.com SINCE 1999, rare-book collector Bill Hall has been running a secondhand bookshop out of his two-story Brooklyn apartment. On the ground floor, Hall keeps a neat, highly curated collection of works including Thornton-edition Brontës and first-edition P. G. Wodehouses. Everything else, thousands of vintage books and magazines (there’s a 1939 Vogue and Flair’s 1950 “All Male Issue”), is in the low-ceilinged, sprawling basement, where Hall will give you a lantern and leave you to explore and read, unbothered. “I always come away with an armful of strange and exciting books I would otherwise never know existed,” says Perrin Drumm, A24’s head of publishing, who most recently left with a complete set of Eros magazines, a booklet for…

THE RITUAL WOULD start with a text: “Drink?” It was around 3 p.m. and the office was gray and I had begun to identify with the carpet stain. This was back before hybrid work, when commuting was part of the daily routine and Café Loup still existed. Even then, the only good argument I could think of for mandatory in-person appearances at the office was the happy hour afterward. The restaurant closed down in 2019 because of unpaid taxes, and my work-life balance hasn’t been the same since. Café Loup was many things to many people, and it was where I discovered that winning combination of martinis and French fries: the New York Happy Meal. The martinis at Loup were beastly things. Served however you liked, often by the silver-haired…

SARAH SHERMAN is in the makeup chair at Saturday Night Live, morphing into a five-eyed, giant-eared beast. Since she joined the show in 2021, SNL’s makeup artist, Louie Zakarian, has transformed her into the Six Flags mascot, covered her in meatballs, and turned her real eyes into googly ones. That was all for sketches; today, though, they’re just experimenting. “Originally, my pitch I was gonna send you for this was, like, pimples that are eyeballs. But my face doesn’t have that much surface area,” Sherman says as Zakarian sticks prosthetic ears with eyes in their lobes to the sides of her head. He adds an extra eye to her forehead, applying thin eyeballs and exploding buttholes since she started performing stand-up in Chicago under the name Sarah Squirm. She finds…

➸AS IF BORDERLINE excessively designed trash cans, dish racks, and compost caddies weren’t enough, Simplehuman’s eight-inch Sensor Mirror Trio ($300), according to writer Kitty Guo, performs like the “Tesla of lighted makeup mirrors.” Double-sided, it offers three magnification levels, including a mini ten-times-enlarged window for focused eyeliner application and brow tweezing. Best of all is the quality of the light, which turns on automatically when you come within a few inches. Per Strategist editor Crystal Martin, its “tru-lux” tech simulates sunlight’s full spectrum so precisely (with daylight and candlelight settings; it can also be dimmed by running a finger along the light’s rim) that it’s “like looking at yourself outside. And everyone knows if you look good in the sunshine, you look good everywhere.” . . . . . .…

SEAN BEDFORD AND NIUNIU Psychotherapist, Downtown Brooklyn How do you know Jin and Newland? We live in the same building. My wife and I invite him and his wife over and we’ll cook dinner, or they invite us over and they’ll cook dinner, and Newland and NiuNiu just do their own thing. There’s one other Sammy in the building and she’s really sweet, but the connection with the owners is just not quite the same. JIN NIU AND NEWLAND Lawyer, Downtown Brooklyn Newland! I named him after Newland Archer from The Age of Innocence. The character represents somebody with a lot of intellectual conflict, and our Newland is like that. If you offer him beef or chicken, you can just see him being torn up about it. How did you…

BARACK OBAMA WAS still the president and Prince Harry hadn’t yet gotten engaged to Meghan Markle when it was revealed that Gjelina—the seminal SoCal destination for high-fashion veggies and produce-topped pizzas—would expand eastward with a Noho branch at 45 Bond Street. Plenty changed in the ensuing years, both in the obvious ways and with the behind-the-scenes team at the restaurant (which had originally been slated to include, among others, the Spotted Pig’s Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield). For a while, the enterprise seemed destined to join the list of appealing projects that nevertheless fizzled out before getting off the ground. Until, with almost no warning at all, Gjelina opened for business on the final day of 2022. Within the dark, narrow, sparsely decorated two-story space, all of the Cali-Italian necessities…

WATCH AN EVENING of New York City Ballet’s seminal works, and it’s easy to see a through-line from the company’s co-founder George Balanchine to Justin Peck, its resident choreographer since 2014. Both use the vocabulary of classical ballet and strip it of fussy flourishes. They’re precise in their attention to the music. And yet a Peck ballet doesn’t look like anything else. He is mathematical like Balanchine, but there’s more of a lightness, an everyday quality that feels playful, even when the steps are technically arduous. He can be surprising and direct; at the same time, his movements make the performers seem like they’re dancing in private, or for each other, barely acknowledging the audience. His work can feel surprising, zigging when you expect a zag, tilting a dancer off…

Twenty-five things to see, hear, watch, and read. JANUARY 18–FEBRUARY 1 TV 1. Watch That ’90s Show Guys: Remember Zima? Netflix, January 19. That ’70s Show makes a comeback of sorts in this sitcom centered on Kitty (Debra Jo Rupp) and Red Forman (Kurtwood Smith) as they welcome their teen granddaughter, Leia, into their home for the summer. Leia spends much of her time in their basement with her friends, much the way her parents, Eric (Topher Grace) and Donna (Laura Prepon), did on That ’70s Show, but this time with references to Deee-Lite and Clerks! JEN CHANEY MOVIES 2. See One Fine Morning A melancholy Parisian romance. In select theaters, January 27. Léa Seydoux is radiant as a widowed single mother in this drama from Mia Hansen-Love, which tracks…