Innholdsfortegnelse for October 23-November 5, 2023 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Olivia Nuzzi spent 13 weeks on the campaign trail with the presidential candidates who say they’re vying for the Republican nomination (“Do Any of These People Stand a Chance Against Trump?” October 9–22). Many readers praised the cover illustration by Joe Darrow. Levi Teitel said, “Magazine covers are still alive,” and @vagrantcow wrote, “Is this not the best political magazine cover ever?” On Instagram, @stephenjosephs added, “The Scotch tape is brilliant!” Sami K. Martin, however, asked, “Could you please stop putting Trump on the cover?” @mothernlaw wrote, “I wish the candidates could express their stance on important subjects without being obscured by the shadow of Trump and his baggage.” On Instagram, Barry Misenheimer noted, “Aside from Christie, all the other candidates are trying…

PROBABLY NO ONE is more responsible for the coming ruination of Airbnb in New York than Peter Ward. Until 2020, Ward was the president of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, the union representing about 40,000 hospitality workers across New York and northern New Jersey. Over two decades, Ward transformed the organization into a political dynamo, winning large pay increases for bellhops and housekeepers while forging close relationships with every politician of note. Airbnb was a direct threat to HTC’s membership, and Ward catalyzed its downfall, pushing top hotel executives to unite against the marketplace and channel their donations to politicians who promised to implement tough rules limiting Airbnb’s operations. Ward even endorsed Bill de Blasio’s desultory run for president, surely knowing it would go a long way toward securing…

THE 12 TOWERS comprised by NYCHA’s Alfred E. Smith Houses occupy prime real estate overlooking the East River between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. A decade ago, the Bloomberg administration took note, unveiling a high-profile plan to lease land at the complex to market-rate developers. In theory, the gambit was meant to raise funds for the cash-strapped public-housing authority. But Aixa Torres—the Smith Houses’ uncompromising, well-connected tenants-association leader—saw the specter of luxury towers as an unacceptable lurch toward privatization and, from there, the eventual dislodging of her tenants. She led a legal counteroffensive that resulted in the complete abandonment of the plan. As the top staffer to one local politician says, speaking for many, “We try not to piss off Aixa.” The most famous recent “Aixa battle” involves the Smith…

WHEN REESE Witherspoon started Reese’s Book Club in 2017, modeled on Oprah’s, she needed someone to ferret out the books that she would recommend. Among those her team hired was a book scout named Jon Baker. Scouts are professional gossips and tastemakers who look for interesting manuscripts and books from one market and recommend them to publishers in others. Baker scouts from Jersey City for Bloomsbury U.K., Albin Michel in France, and other clients. But what distinguishes him is that “he decides which book reaches Reese’s beach house,” as one book exec puts it. Baker and his team read everything with an eye for Witherspoon’s tastes—she seems to have a fondness for women-in-peril reads—then present her with a shortlist. Baker’s suggestions—such as Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees and…

HERE’S A PARADOX: In any given New York election, it should be impossible for more than one campaign to have a functioning staff. Because nearly every political operative I know says they won’t work for a candidate unless Jonathan Davis is on their side, and they definitely won’t sign on if he is working for a rival. Davis is an opposition researcher—someone a candidate hires to dig up damaging information on competitors and whisper it to the press. Many oppo workers are actively trying to stop working oppo (they hope to one day get a more respectable role), but Davis seems content, in part because he’s so effective. “It’s really simple. Jonathan quickly finds the things no one else can and then knows how to inject them into the Zeitgeist,”…

THE MOST infamous—or maybe just the most theatrical—power move in Wall Street history may have come in 2012 when Elliott Management forced the seizure of the Libertad, an Argentine naval vessel, as collateral for the sovereign debt that Elliott had purchased and that Argentina had defaulted on, insisting it could not pay. Argentina eventually yielded, paying the hedge fund $2.4 billion, and the balance of power between governments and foreign financiers was forever altered. Elliott is run by the billionaire Paul Singer, but the architect of the Argentina trade was Jay Newman. Now 71, Newman has been out of the finance headlines for a while; he recently wrote a fun novel, Undermoney, about sex and finance and espionage, and at least one review noted that he had retired. But Newman…

A.C. HUDGINS, who made his fortune in finance, has been collecting art since the 1970s, championing Black artists like Henry Taylor and Senga Nengudi when they were still being ignored by most white gallerists. Take, for example, his early interest in the artist David Hammons, whose work shocked viewers by using materials like gnawed ribs, barbershop hair clippings, and grease-stained paper bags. Now a piece by Hammons goes for millions. As a result of these bets, Hudgins “has one of the most formidable collections of Black art of any American collector,” one gallerist told me, and his predilections continue to carry a strong signal for the rest of the art world. “Somebody like A.C. is probably one of the most important in the ecosystem,” says one dealer I spoke with,…

VENTURE CAPITALISTS are often mimics playacting as contrarians. Lately, one of the ways they’re copying one another is by piling into New York, complicating the city’s reputation as a minor league for start-up funding. Grind-from-anywhere exiles who fled dismal San Francisco for Austin and Miami during the pandemic are bouncing out of their new cities but not back home, finding their way to New York instead. “Everybody has moved here,” says Matt Turck, a partner at FirstMark. The oldest and biggest California firms have ventured, herdlike, into Manhattan office spaces: a16z, Lightspeed, Sequoia, Index. One reason they’re coming east is to keep an eye on what their competitors are up to, and there’s no one they’re more curious about (and determined to imitate) than Lee Fixel. Fixel, 43, is a…

FASHION DESIGNERS GO TO Piergiorgio Del Moro when they want the models no one else can book—semi-retired supermodels (Liya Kebede walked several of his shows this season) or major earners who have graduated from the grind of the runway and will do only a few shows a season. “He is really able to make or break a show,” says a New York designer. After “an insane rise,” Del Moro and the agency he co-founded, DM Casting, swept past many of their more established competitors and now have relationships with some of the industry’s biggest brands (Versace, Saint Laurent, Jacquemus, Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors) and publications (Italian Vogue, W, i-D). “He controls a huge amount of business,” a modeling agent says. “You really don’t want to be on his…

A FEW YEARS AGO, fashion designer Raul Lopez met with some hospitality executives in New York about potentially being involved with a new hotel in the Cayman Islands called Palm Heights. He was introduced to the “HBIC: the Head Bitch in Charge,” he says, otherwise known as Gabriella Khalil, the hotel’s reported owner, creative director, and face. “It was like a movie,” Lopez recalls. “She comes out of the elevator with this long ponytail, wearing this chic white Jacquemus suit. I was like, Okay, whoa. So this is actually the boss.” Palm Heights first opened in 2019 but was closed to foreign visitors from March 2020 to late 2021. As soon as New Yorkers could get out of their apartments and down to the Cayman Islands, they began to flock…

THE BUSINESS MODEL of NGK Global, Nathalie Gerschel Kaplan’s boutique consultancy, is simple: Get luxury brands to partner with galas that benefit good causes. For example, Cartier might sponsor a dinner before a Robin Hood fundraiser, and wouldn’t the co-chairs of the gala’s host committee like to try on some earrings after dessert? “The charities are interested in meeting these luxury jewelry clients, and these luxury jewelry brands are interested in meeting the charities’ donors, so it works for both sides,” says one person who has attended several Kaplan events. Her clients have included causes like Save Venice, the Society of Memorial Sloan Kettering, the Bass Museum of Art, and brands such as Tiffany & Co., Loro Piana, Christie’s, and dozens more. While the corporate sponsors are not hiring Kaplan…

MISTRESS IRIS IS NOT just for the stereotypical rich guy who spends his weekends in a rent-by-the-hour dungeon with his pants down getting spanked (though in her ten years as a professional domme, she has done some of that). There’s a reason a religious leader, an Oscar-winning actor, an athlete, a military general, a senator, a top-dog Hollywood drug dealer, and a sampling of CEOs, tech execs, judges, attorneys, and finance scions beg to enter her world. She’s exclusive—her client list is a very particular subset of the much wider variety of people who want to be dominated—she’s expensive, and she’s gorgeous. And she approaches domming with precision, surgically excising her clients’ very deepest fears, desires, insecurities, and hang-ups, learning their minds inside and out, understanding how they wield power…

THE LOOK BOOK GOES TO JENNY PAULSON Philanthropist, Upper East Side How did you get involved with the conservancy? I’ve been involved with the park for many, many, many years. I attend several of their events, including the May luncheon, which is the “hat luncheon.” Which many, many, many people come to. Martha Stewart loves to attend the hat luncheon. Mayor Bloomberg is there almost every year as well, honoring us with his presence. How do people get invited? One person gets the table, and you just invite your friends, whoever you want to invite. Everyone at my table is one of my girlfriends. What is the cost of getting a table? Maybe we don’t get into that. THE LOOK BOOK: LADIES WHO LUNCH So it was just the luncheon…

THE GOLDEN BACHELOR is on ABC. THE GOLDEN BACHELOR shows me his dink. The pickleball shot—in which you lift your paddle in a compact underhand stroke so the ball drops right over the net—is deceptively challenging for one’s opponent to return, rewarding finesse over brute strength. I don’t have the slightest idea how to play pickleball. Lucky for me, Gerry Turner is a great teacher. But unlike with most instructors, he appeared to me the night before, while I was watching a video explaining the game, in an ad for his new prime-time TV show, one that has been sold as the latest (partial) rebranding of traditional dating-show dictates. In theory, The Bachelor franchise is a factory for fairy tales with each season’s star meant to pluck his future spouse…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. TV 1. Watch The Buccaneers American debutantes take London. Apple TV+, November 8. The initial impression of this Edith Wharton costume drama is more Bridgerton than you might expect. Its skin is slick and modern, bordering on cool. But its essence is pure Masterpiece Theater— romance, betrayal, sincerity, secrets, and a deep fascination with nationality and class. It’s a loose adaptation, but Wharton never finished this novel anyhow. KATHRYN VANARENDONK PODCASTS 2. Listen to The Big Dig It’s always Infrastructure Week. GBH. Ian Coss, who made the lovely ode to marriage and divorce Forever Is a Long Time, leads up this nine-part series about a wild disconnect between a successful large-scale highway build in Boston and a damning public narrative that…

A FEW YEARS AGO, the owner of Freedom Cruises, Pjeter Vulaj, received a letter informing him he had 24 hours to vacate his berth at Pier 36, just north of the Manhattan Bridge. Quickly, he came to the conclusion that Hornblower Group, another cruise operator, was after his spot and had enlisted the mayor’s office to get it. “They sicced the fire department on me, the health department on me; they went after my liquor license,” says Vulaj. “Hornblower has enough muscle that they can do whatever they like.” (Vulaj filed a lawsuit against the city, which he later dropped; Hornblower declined to comment.) Hornblower is based in San Francisco, but Tim O’Brien, an M.B.A.-toting former sailing instructor, is the company’s VP in New York overseeing ferries and transportation, which…

THE INTERESTS THAT have historically called the shots in Sunset Park’s Industry City are right there in the name. But recently, industry—as represented by the billion-dollar developer Jamestown—lost a seven-year effort to transform the waterfront district into an even bigger retail destination. Led by Elizabeth Yeampierre, an environmental-justice activist and the head of the Sunset Park community-advocacy organization Uprose, a local coalition managed to kill the project over concern that the rezoning would push out thousands of residents from the working-class community of color: Greenpoint or Williamsburg all over again. The coalition also wanted to preserve the waterfront in hopes of creating green jobs. “Elizabeth was the driving force,” says Representative Nydia Velázquez, whom Yeampierre recruited to the effort. In 2021, Yeampierre helped notch another win for Sunset Park when…

THERE’S A certain type of book that’s becoming known as Jackson Howard’s genre: queer, experimental, and generally difficult to get past the fusty old guard of publishing. The 29-year-old editor’s power is that he manages to get them past. His greatest career success so far may have been with the writer Brontez Purnell, who won a Whiting Award for his second book, Since I Laid My Burden Down. Purnell’s follow-up: the scandalously vivid, extremely well-reviewed 100 Boyfriends. “Without even knowing me, Jackson was like, ‘Come to New York and crash on my couch,’ ” the author says. “I was basically told that FSG had never put out a book like 100 Boyfriends, and he went to bat for me. My babies—as I like to refer to my books—finally had a…

“I THINK EDDY’S at the zenith of Latino political consultancy,” says Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney. “I’m not sure there’s a Latino leader in New York City who has not at some point sat across the table from him and his partners to talk about their run, their concerns, their issues.” Eddy, or Eduardo Castell, is the managing partner at both the Hamilton Campaign Network and MirRam, the prominent campaign-management and political-consulting firms, founded by Luis Miranda and Roberto Ramirez. He’s been the under-the-radar power broker behind many victories: Gonzalez’s in 2017, when he became the first Latino DA in city history, and Letitia James’s run for public advocate in 2013 and for state attorney general in 2018. What Castell offers, his clients say, is an intimate knowledge of…

AS MUCH as hedge-fund managers might want you to believe that they are a self-made and rational breed, making trades on little more than their powers of research and assessment, the truth is that their success is contingent on social connections and salesmanship. Every year, the hedgie crowd gets together for the Sohn Investment Conference—a day for fund managers to present their bets to an audience of fellow financiers in hopes of creating momentum that will make a stock soar or tank. More managers want to speak than there are slots, and the lineup is selected by a group led by Graham Duncan. As chair of the conference, and chairman emeritus of the $2 billion fund East Rock Capital, Duncan edits for a mix of younger investors with (they hope)…

EVERY ERA has its defining chefs and restaurateurs: Daniel Boulud, David Chang, Gabrielle Hamilton. These days, it’s Kihyun Lee, and even if you don’t know his name, you’ve likely eaten at his restaurants, which have all raised the profile of Korean cuisine and almost completely upended the fine-dining hierarchy. When Lee’s company, Hand Hospitality, opened Her Name Is Han in 2015, he firmly established the house sensibility: Korean home cooking for the 21st century with design cues straight out of Seongsu-dong. The next year, Lee entered his first partnership with the couple JungHyun and JeongEun Park. Together, the group opened Atoboy and Atomix—the latter of which went on to rank among the city’s most acclaimed tasting counters. In the meantime, Lee kept expanding: Lysée, Jua, Moono, LittleMäd, and the shared-plate…

REMEMBER THAT offensively short, low-rise Miu Miu miniskirt that became the most ubiquitous clothing item of 2022? Its journey to Walmart (where you could at one point find a $22 dupe) was jump-started by an i-D magazine cover. Paloma Elsesser, one of the world’s most famous plus-size models, was wearing it. And the person who chose the skirt for her was stylist Carlos Nazario. What distinguishes Nazario from other stylists, people say, is his ability to be “the ultimate connector” between the old guard and the new; he has worked with small brands (Willy Chavarria), heritage houses (Burberry), and everything in between (Nike). He’s both the global fashion director at the indie i-D and a contributing editor at Vogue. It doesn’t hurt that Nazario is friends with, and has styled,…

GREGG LEMKAU’S DECISION to leave Goldman Sachs at the end of 2020 left all of Wall Street confused. The deal-maker was considered a front-runner to one day become CEO; why would he abandon that to run a relatively puny outgrowth of the family office of Michael Dell? The answer soon became clear when Lemkau merged Dell’s firm with one run by his former colleague Byron Trott. The move created a new Wall Street power player out of what had been two niche businesses, and Lemkau went from mostly investing money on behalf of one billionaire to deploying the fortunes of hundreds of them—a significant chunk of all the wealth on the planet. Going by the ungainly name BDT & MSD Partners, Lemkau’s venture is a new kind of investment bank.…

THE LOOK BOOK GOES TO A LADIES’ LUNCHEON THE BEST BRAIDERS A NEW CLAM COCKTAIL . . .BEST BETS ➸ WHEN WRITER Elissa Suh asked professional chefs, food writers, and recipe developers about the best can openers, many people mentioned the obvious choice here, the always-reliable OXO. (A couple of electric options that made the list proved to be no more effective than a manual device and a lot more expensive.) But a sleeper manual hit emerged, apparently a longtime chef’s favorite: the Korin Ganji Kankiri ($9). Jeremy King, chef and owner of Little King, has found over the years that his kitchen staff love this no-nonsense can opener, which more closely resembles an objet d’art. It has an incredibly sharp blade and gets the job done much faster than…

THERE ARE CLAMS on the half-shell, and at Ilis (150 Green St., Greenpoint; ilisnyc.com), there are clams in the whole shell. Chef Mads Refslund’s surf-clam appetizer arrives in the full housing, sealed with beeswax and tied with twine like a roast that’s ready for the oven. Instead, it’s a flask of sorts, sitting upright on a bed of ice and filled with clam juice, clarified tomato juice, and smoked dashi. On top, there’s a hole dusted with sumac-seasoned salt. “You drink it almost like a Bloody Mary,” Refslund says. If it sounds like something from Noma, that’s because Refslund was at Denmark’s most famous restaurant in the very beginning. He left less than a year after it opened, ran a restaurant in Copenhagen, and came to New York in 2012,…

FOR MANY YEARS in its early history, this magazine took it upon itself to identify New York’s most powerful inhabitants, delineate their influence, and in doing so expose how the city actually operates. Earlier this year, when we set out to chronicle power post-COVID, we came to an unexpected conclusion. New York’s major power brokers—the moguls and the billionaires, the sort of people who bend the city to their will—are, as a group, remarkably staid and listless. Across government and media, Wall Street and the arts, the big machers are more likely than ever to shirk the spotlight, enjoy just minding the shop, or, in a lot of cases, simply be absent. Power vacuums abound. At City Hall, a shallow mayor presides over a distinctly unambitious administration. On Broadway and…

AT JUST ABOUT every Democratic campaign’s first organizational meeting, a staffer is assigned “Mara duty”—a full surveillance of the social-media feeds of the New York Times editorial board’s youngest member, Mara Gay. The paper’s pronouncements still matter quite a lot—mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia jumped 15 points in the polls after the Times endorsed her—and Gay is emblematic of its shifting interests. For politicians desperate for the Times’ nod, her concerns are theirs. Gay, whose remit includes city politics and government, brought the vantage of a Black millennial woman living in a rented apartment in Brooklyn to the board when she was hired in 2018. She helped housing affordability become the major issue in Albany this past session with Kathy Hochul unveiling the most expansive agenda of any governor in generations.…

WHEN KATHERINE HEDDEN, a pickleball organizer, wanted courts painted onto precious Manhattan playground space, she knew she had to go through the Parks Department’s Steve Simon. Hedden pushed for two courts in Hell’s Kitchen; Simon said they could have one. The court got painted over an access panel; she called him again. During the negotiations, Hedden assumed that Simon was the Manhattan commissioner. Understandable mistake. He is technically the chief of staff to the commissioner—a man named Anthony Perez—but in reality he is the man standing between Manhattanites and the resolution of their grievances. “For all practical purposes,” says former council-member Ben Kallos, “Steve Simon runs the Parks Department for Manhattan.” Simon has held his role for nearly 20 years. He is a savant of Parks minutiae and a budget…

STANLEY SCHLEIN has been called a kingmaker, a consigliere, and the dark prince of Bronx politics. As an election lawyer, lobbyist, and counsel to many Bronx Democrats, he sees the machinery of politics from every angle. For decades, nothing’s happened north of Manhattan without him knowing about it. According to one fellow operative who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisal, “County leaders change. Elected officials change. Priorities change. But Stanley is always there.” Schlein lives on City Island and carries a brick of index cards in his coat pocket in lieu of his phone’s address book. At 75, he’s perhaps as powerful as ever, thanks to his close relationship with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (whom he once helped make chair of the Bronx Democratic Party). As an…

WHEN A submission comes in from her, you stop what you’re doing,” says Doubleday senior editor Yaniv Soha of Alia Hanna Habib. The 45-year-old agent possesses the rare ability to start a bidding war just by sending over a manuscript. The world of literary agents can be confusing for authors and editors both. There are powerful reps who can offer connections to film and television but who might be less interested in the literary potential of the text. There are boutique agencies that offer their clients more focused attention and passion but might lack the oomph to get their authors big deals. Habib is at a midsize agency (the Gernert Company), which means she has leverage in negotiations as well as an elite list of mostly nonfiction authors. This she…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Keith Wright, the chairman of the New York County Democratic Party, made a surprise power move by recruiting Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Exonerated Five, to move from Georgia and run for a City Council seat. With Wright’s son, Jordan, serving as campaign manager, Salaam pulled off a stunning upset against three Harlem incumbents. At 68, Wright has a foot in the past and an eye on Harlem’s future—and the patience to outwork and outlast his opponents. He still lives in the apartment he grew up in, in Harlem’s Riverton complex, a cradle of middle-class Black talent where Wright’s neighbors included future mayor David Dinkins. His father was a State Supreme Court judge who earned the sobriquet “Turn ’Em Loose Bruce” for not demanding sky-high…

LEE ZELDIN, a proud Donald Trump supporter, seemed like the last candidate who could make a dent in New York’s deep-blue electorate. But he did. This past November, with crime among voters’ priorities, he fell just six points shy of becoming the first Republican to win a governor’s race in 20 years. Zeldin ran remarkably well against Kathy Hochul in the Asian community, winning large swaths of Flushing and Bensonhurst. This was no surprise to Yiatin Chu, president of the Asian Wave Alliance, a citywide political club that endorses Republicans and Democrats alike. Asian voters are drifting to the right, and Chu is forcing progressives to stop taking their vote for granted. “We can’t look at just one party,” she says. “A lot of grief we’ve experienced is because we…

THE VETERAN art dealer Jeffrey Deitch is always on the lookout for young gallerists. “I heard about this woman in this tiny storefront and that she lived in the back of the gallery, and I was intrigued,” he says. So a few years ago he visited Ellie Rines at her 450-square-foot gallery, 56 Henry. “I walked over and I saw this phenomenal show of Anna Weyant,” who had just graduated from RISD. “I said, ‘This is terrific. Can I buy one?’ But everything was sold. Unlike other galleries, which ignore you or play games, shortly after that opening, she called me and said, ‘I have a painting for you.’ It was marvelous, and I acquired it for something like $6,000. And through that we made a rapport.” The 35-year-old owner…

A FEDERAL CRIMINAL prosecution is usually an unstoppable force. Nine in ten defendants plead guilty, and a minuscule number, less than half of one percent, manage to get acquitted at trial. So when a defense attorney develops a reputation as someone who can beat the Department of Justice, as Randall Jackson has, it’s a rare and exceedingly lucrative thing. Last year, Jackson successfully represented Tom Barrack—a close ally of Donald Trump’s—in an upset victory in Brooklyn against prosecutors who had accused him of working at the direction of the United Arab Emirates to influence U.S. policy. It was an exceptionally high-profile case, and it came on the heels of Jackson’s securing an acquittal for Jean Boustani, a Lebanese businessman who had been accused of paying hundreds of millions in bribes…

OF COURSE, it was the deliveristas who, in WhatsApp messages and crowded intersections, organized to call attention to their industry’s low, unpredictable pay. But the person who was able to translate their experiences in negotiations with city officials and secure a mandatory minimum-wage law ($18 an hour, required to go up to $20 by 2025) was Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of Worker’s Justice Project, the advocacy organization backing Los Deliveristas Unidos. In the first few months of organizing, Guallpa, the daughter of a day laborer, spearheaded a survey of delivery workers to determine the issues that mattered most—collecting damning data on their pay and working conditions. And as the primary intermediary between the workers and elected officials, Guallpa positioned herself as a trustworthy conduit. “I don’t mean this pejoratively,…

ALEX LEVY, 37, describes himself blandly as an “adviser to people in public life.” New York Review of Books editor Emily Greenhouse calls him “the secret macher whisperer beneath Gotham.” His ex-boss, Senator Chuck Schumer, attests, “He always gives great advice.” What that means is Levy is on hand to help various eminences sound eminently reasonable. His clients, who hire him on long-term retainer, have included Robert Rubin, Steve Ballmer, Ronald Lauder, Shari Redstone, and Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick—not to mention the top brass of the New York Times (including various Sulzbergers who work at the family biz). He’ll help craft a sensitive companywide email (see Kotick announcing the Microsoft deal) or an op-ed in a newspaper (Lauder on antisemitism in the New York Post in 2023) or a…

For Any Kind of Cornrow BRITTNEY J HAIR, 607A Vanderbilt Ave., Prospect Heights; 240-659-8723 TUCKED BETWEEN a honkytonk bar and an Italian café is Nicko’s Unisex Salon, a barbershop–slash–hair salon that offers crisp lineups, well-blended fades, and exceptionally neat braids. The braider on staff is cosmetologist Brittney JoLette, who can do any kind of cornrow—straight back, swirly parts, and stitch braids (from $50). Cornrows are among the most basic braiding styles but aren’t the easiest to pull off. Clean parts and neatness are key, which wardrobe stylist Alexander-Julian Gibbson says JoLette has mastered. He visits her every three to four weeks and switches between cornrows, plaits, and twists. “She takes care of everything,” he says, including “washing, blow-drying, and attaching braiding hair, if you need it, without charging extra.” The…

FOOD RESTAURANT REVIEW WHATEVER ITS STATED neighborhood ambitions, it was inevitable that Sailor would become a beacon for restaurant tourists and Resy card-punchers; the lure of a returning champion is simply too irresistible. Here, she is April Bloomfield, whose name is synonymous with the rich, snouty eating of the 2010s. (Her specialty at the Breslin was a whole trotter, still novel.) Or at least it was until it became synonymous with the blind eye turned toward male misconduct in the pre–Me Too era. Her reckoning is by now well known. After a couple years cooking quietly out of the city, Bloomfield is back, not as the lodestar of a constellation of restaurants but as the clogs on the ground of one would-be local joint in Fort Greene, where her partner…