Innholdsfortegnelse for July 15-28, 2024 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Reeves Wiedeman investigated the spread of nondisclosure agreements from the boardroom to the bedroom (“Hush-Hush Affair,” July 1–14). “As an attorney who reviews NDAs nearly every day, I never imagined NY Mag would make a cover story about them,” wrote girl.who.is.going.to.be.ok. “I feel seen!” The litigator Daniel A. Horwitz called it “a great piece on the comical metastasization of NDAs … We don’t talk enough about NDAs’ constitutionally dubious enforcement mechanisms (like requiring courts to issue prior restraints) or the fact that they often violate the rights of non-parties.” Susan MacRae, whose unsuccessful attempt to invalidate an NDA relating to her father’s sexual abuse was mentioned in the article, offered thanks for “shedding light on the pervasiveness of Nondisclosure Agreements for all types…

SUPPOSE, IN THE immediate aftermath of January 6, 2021, you predicted the following events: Disgraced coup plotter Donald Trump would evade impeachment and then prison. He would not only regain control of the Republican Party but deepen his mastery over it, driving his skeptics within the party into retirement or terrified silence. He would win renomination without the slightest drama. The Supreme Court would rule that he is entitled to commit crimes in office. And then he would win a second term virtually unopposed. Only the most addled QAnon cultist would have envisioned such a triumphal rise from ignominy to redemption. But now all but the last item on this list has come to pass, and that, too, is on course to transpire—with severe and possibly long-lasting repercussions for the…

One morning at the end of April 2023, Marcela Maus, a cancer researcher at Mass General in Boston, got a call from her colleague Bryan Choi. “He called me, and he’s like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!’ And I’m like, ‘What is going on?’” Maus said. Choi, a neurosurgeon with the languid demeanor of a surfer, was not given to outbursts. Maus hung up the phone and hurried over to his office. The day before, Choi and Maus had treated their first patient in a clinical trial for an aggressive brain cancer called glioblastoma, infusing genetically modified white blood cells directly into the fluid surrounding the brain. They had been up all night worrying, especially after the patient, a 74-year-old man, developed a fever. Choi had…

CELEBRITY SHOPPING Sacred Rituel Sacred Serum, $98 “Without being shiny, this serum smooths out my skin and gives it a bit of a glow. While we were filming Janet Planet, it was basically the only thing I wore on my face besides moisturizer because the director, Annie Baker, likes showing ‘warts and all.’ ” Canaan Za’atar, $10 “It goes without saying that every Arab household has to have za’atar. There’s sumac berry in this blend, which gives it sour notes, and sesame seeds, which are toasted and add a little bit of nuttiness. Like my mom, I always have it blended with olive oil as a spread.” Barney Bed in XXL, $519 “Our Irish wolfhound is 180 pounds. He’s a big boy, and he requires a very large bed. This…

I’ve long been a fan of Commando underwear, but Jockey’s Elance String Bikini has uncrowned them as my top pick for the best women’s underwear. Made from 100 percent cotton, they’re comfortable and breathable. They’re called bikini, but the cut is closer to a brief with full coverage in back and a fairly adjustable rise. They stay put, too. They go up only to a size 14, but still, for the price, it’s hard to do much better: It’s just $24 for a three-pack at full price, and you can almost always find them on sale.…

Deodorant feels like a natural place to start. What is everyone using these days? DOMINIQUE PARISO: People need to wear deodorant with aluminum in the summer. I understand how people feel about anti-perspirant, but when you’re on the subway and people are not wearing aluminum deodorant, there’s a smell situation that happens. Natural deodorant just doesn’t work as well for absorbing moisture or preventing sweat in the first place. TEMBE DENTON-HURST: I personally cannot wear aluminum because I have hidradenitis suppurativa and aluminum clogs my pores and creates lesions, so I do wear Native deodorant, which is natural. I think because it has a powdery texture, it helps with drying ever so slightly. The scents are also good. Cotton and Lily ($15) is pretty neutral. AMELIA JERDEN: I also wear…

WHEN DERRY GIRLS, the Channel 4 sitcom turned Netflix comedy juggernaut, ended in 2022 after a rapturously received three-season run, actress Saoirse-Monica Jackson found it hard to fully separate from her character. Jackson was 23 when she was cast as Erin Quinn, the ambitious, face-pulling, somewhat arrogant ringleader of a posse of teenagers in Northern Ireland at the tail end of the Troubles. ¶ “I was growing as a young woman in my early 20s, leading this massive, successful show, and my own personal growth was so woven in and running parallel to the story lines,” Jackson tells me during a late pasta lunch in early June in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood. Her real life then wasn’t quite as chaotic and ridiculous as Erin’s, but they were learning similar lessons, like…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. MUSIC 1. Listen to Y2K! A debut, but you already know her. 10K Projects/Capitol Records, July 26. Bronx rapper Ice Spice captured the nation’s hearts in just under two years, following the viral hit “Munch (Feelin’ U)” with a string of brisk and insouciant drill-rap anthems such as “In Ha Mood” or “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2.” Now her debut album touts “Gimmie a Light,” a sample-drill take on Sean Paul’s dancehall classic; “Think U the Shit (Fart),” a worthy addition to Spice’s growing repertoire of toilet gags; and “Phat Butt,” a barrage of bass-y boasts. CRAIG JENKINS THEATER 2. See Pre-Existing Condition Reclaiming her time. Connelly Theater Upstairs, through August 3. A quintet of stars, starting with Tatiana Maslany, rotates…

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN walked before a row of flags and took his place at a lectern stamped with the presidential seal. A few feet in front of him, thin panes of teleprompter glass, programmed with prewritten remarks, were positioned to meet his stare. His White House press secretary looked on. So did several senior White House officials. Anxiety clung to the humid summer air. What the president was about to say might determine the future of his presidency and perhaps the Republic itself. Yet he was not onstage in a stadium or auditorium or perched on a platform in a gilded hotel ballroom. He was not speaking to a crowd of thousands or even hundreds. There would be no video of his statement carried live to the world. There would…

This Old Man BACK IN THE SPRING, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her team at Simon & Schuster chose July 9 to publish True Gretch, her new memoir-slash–inspirational guidebook. “I wanted to put it out early enough in this election cycle that it gave me something positive to talk about,” Whitmer, dressed in a cupcake-pink dress in the lobby of the midtown Hilton, told me brightly the day after its release. “And give people a laugh, or some hope, in this hard and heavy election year.” It would be a distraction for politicos in advance of Donald Trump’s scary party convention in Milwaukee and far enough ahead of the Democrats’ own August convention that it would not seem as though she were trying to bigfoot her heat-seeking peers. However, Whitmer…

THERE’S A MOMENT that inevitably comes after your insurance company has denied a claim. You’ve read your member handbook and pored over your policy, bills, and explanations of benefits. You’ve asked your primary-care doctor to send a letter to your insurance company. You’ve meticulously tracked and stuck to your appeal deadlines, sent out rafts of documents to various P.O. boxes, and dialed the 800 number on the back of your insurance card half a dozen times. And then you check the mail. Where you find yet another denial. Ah, you think, I’m going to lose my mind. Tens of millions of health-insurance claims are denied in the U.S. each year for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes patients get services during the course of an appointment that aren’t covered on their…

IN 2017, 23andMe began offering tests for the genetic risk of developing certain health conditions like celiac disease, Parkinson’s, and late-onset Alzheimer’s. The Alzheimer’s test will tell you if you have the gene variant APOE4, which means you have an increased likelihood of developing the disease. One in four people carry a single copy of the gene, but 2 to 3 percent of the population have two copies—one from each parent—and have a much higher probability. As with all of 23andMe’s upcharged “Health Predisposition Reports,” the sell on it was self-empowerment: Once you know, you can plan, allowing you to take charge of your well-being. Except most experts don’t recommend that you test for APOE4 status. There’s no cure for Alzheimer’s disease and no surefire way to prevent it. Many…

BEFORE AXOLOTLS WERE everywhere, the “It” stuffed animal was a sloth, and before that it was a llama. Now, there’s a new kid in town: the capybara. The South American rodents are furry, stout, and cartoonishly oversize and have cute personalities in real life. They are smart, social herbivores that like to swim and are often kept as pets, like an irresistible mix of a corgi, hippo, and pony. And they’ve been rising in popularity. Encanto featured a scene-stealing capybara back in 2021; there is a viral capybara song and countless memes and GIFs. Toymakers are taking notice: Jellycat recently released Clyde Capybara. And Pusheen’s capybara was so popular it sold out in two days. Alexis Bobbitt, owner of toy store Little Green, told me that when kids come into…

WHEN WRITER Sara Gaynes Levy had her first child, she, like most new parents, registered for a lot of things neither she or her baby ended up liking very much. Of all the gadgets and gear she has cycled through, this mini-sanitizer is the thing she wishes she would’ve had with her eldest. “This doodad has become my go-to baby gift: I loved mine more than anything else I got for my third child. The small countertop device dries and sterilizes pump parts, bottles, and pacifiers using UV lighting, getting you bone-dry sterilized baby gear in as little as 30 minutes. This is a low-maintenance device (unlike the steam sterilizers I had tried), which was crucial because with my third, I exclusively pumped and had a lot of stuff to…

How was the opening? I ran into so many dealers and artists and collectors and critics—you know, the art world. It was like the art world went to the country for the day. What do you curate? The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection. She is a very prominent collector, one of the biggest in the world. We have a space in Palm Beach called the Bunker—it’s major. Everybody knows her, and everybody knows the Bunker. And you’re an artist yourself? Yes. It’s all language-based text art. I’m a visual poet, constantly whittling and jotting down words and doing cut-and-paste stuff. I just made a piece regarding what happened, that SCOTUS turned our country into a monarchy and made former president Trump a king. It says, “50 Stars and 13 Stripes Will…

THIS PAST OCTOBER, 40 new hires were in an underground space that was previously most famous for being the theme restaurant Mars 2112. A new tenant, the first East Coast branch of the Taiwanese chain Din Tai Fung (1633 Broadway, nr. W. 50th St.; dintaifungusa.com), had moved in, and the employees were beginning a 12-week program focused on perfecting just one item: xiao long bao. At all of the chain’s 181 locations—whether in Tokyo, London, Bangkok, or Sydney—the dumplings are the same. Exactly 18 little folds on top. The skin is thin but holds its shape when lifted from a bamboo steamer basket. They are agreeably small, just 21 grams apiece, and hold rich broth with pork or crab. They are best eaten by biting a small hole in the side,…

BY MOST METRICS, the author Lev Grossman’s life appeared to change irrevocably in 2009. After publishing two books in relative obscurity, he released The Magicians, a novel about troubled kids who get invited to a magic school and fall backward into another universe. It became a best seller, and the reviews were giddy. Two more successful books in the series followed; Hollywood adapted the trilogy into a hit TV show on Syfy. Grossman asserted his place as an important stakeholder in genre fiction, helping move it from the margins of publishing to where it is now—the financial center of the book world. By 2016, he was happily married with three children and had at last quit his magazine job to write full time. Grossman also announced he was feeling confident…

This Old Man IN 1965, WHEN JOE BIDEN was 22, still seven years away from being elected the youngest senator in the country, Bob Dylan wrote, “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” Now, nearly threescore later, the prophecy appeared to be fulfilling as Biden stood onstage in Atlanta, as white as a sheet, as frozen as an oil painting, rummaging through frayed neural pathways for the words, any words, to escape the linguistic corner into which he’d stumbled. Words! Where were the words? Detoured in the transition, stuck to the tip of his tongue under a gob of Poligrip? How long did it last, two seconds, three? It might have been forever: Scranton Joe, the workingman’s friend, in stop motion on one-half of…

➸ HONESTLY, if it’s small enough, any lamp can be a bedside lamp. But when the Strategist’s home-décor writer Erin Schwartz consulted 17 design experts, Hay’s Matin Table Lamp ($265; available in eight colors) was far and away the most recommended option. The Matin got the nod from interior designers as well as our style columnist Chris Black and SNL’s Chloe Fineman, who owns two. Fineman said it “creates a beautiful glow.” (She has a purple one for her place in New York and a yellow one in L.A.) Schwartz, who tested the lamp, found it was easy to toggle among the three brightness levels and liked how it filtered light for nighttime reading. Evan Dent, the manager of Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper East Side, whose girlfriend gave…

Uniqlo AIRism Cotton-Pique Polo Shirt “I can wear this on a hike or tucked into a suit and get compliments,” says Jason Stewart, a DJ and co-host of How Long Gone. His big tip for any polo, though, is lots of washing to break it in. A collar that’s a little worn, a slight fray to the hem—these are the details that make the potentially stuffy style feel lived-in. Zanone Slim-Fit Polo Shirt in Certified Cotton Crêpe Years of wearing a uniform as a kid have turned James Hirschfeld, co-founder and CEO of Paperless Post, into a polo connoisseur. “The material needs to be a fine cotton piqué or wool-cashmere knit to avoid the back-to-school-uniform feeling,” he says. This one from Zanone is well cut for his slender arms and…

SURVEYING THE POP landscape right now is like flipping through swatches in a paint store—nearly every release has its own bespoke color palette. The trend has been percolating for a few years, thanks to canny efforts by Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, but it exploded this summer as Charli xcx claimed a shade of lime green for brat. For some artists, the palette comes naturally, like Ice Spice intentionally selecting her calling-card orange hair or Sexyy Red and girl in red, well, leaning into red. Others work with designers and creative directors to pick shades and build campaigns around them. Regardless, the goal is to “own a color,” like Supreme’s white on red, says Brent David Freaney, the art director behind the brat rollout: “If you’re able to create a…