Innholdsfortegnelse for October 7-20, 2024 i New York Magazine

IT’S A SUNDAY afternoon, and Owen Thiele is buying me a Power Card at Dave & Buster’s. He’s in from Los Angeles and wanted to do something touristy—plus, he says, “I’m a full-on Disney adult. I’m down for any games.” When we start playing Jurassic World: Jungle Jackpot, he gets a text from his mother, who received a message regarding the Dave & Buster’s charge. “My mom’s texting me about a fraud alert,” Thiele says. He explains that he never checks his account, so he has his credit-card alerts sent to his mom. “She’s very involved in my life. Too much. So it’s a disaster but also my favorite thing in the world,” he says. “My friends and other family members would say it’s a disaster.” After years of being…

Early one morning this past May, while the house was still asleep, I tiptoed into the kitchen and was assaulted by a strange smell. I was, by then, inured to most new odors. A month before, our sons’ day care had closed unexpectedly, and, with nowhere else to go, seven children had taken over our two-bedroom rowhouse in Brooklyn, bringing all manner of aromas with them. But this one was different. It was sharper, less ambient than the usual cast of diaper trash and yogurt pouch and chewed-up stuffie. It did not hang in the air so much as cut through it. This was an outdoor smell. I surveyed the kitchen. The counter was clean. The garbage can was closed. The window was cracked open. Then I saw our 20-pound…

PEOPLE THOUGHT WE would move back downtown,” Christine Gachot says, sitting in the living room of the Sutton Place apartment she and her husband, John, share with their two sons, Boris and Jack, and Slim, their springer spaniel. After all, for 18 years, they had lived in a loft on Bond Street, until they outgrew it during the pandemic and did something that probably only two designers (they are co-principals of Gachot Studios) would think to do: “We took this little moment to live in the Paul Rudolph museum,” Christine says about having rented the architect’s disco-modernist triplex penthouse cantilevered atop an 1867 brownstone at 23 Beekman Place. It’s not actually a museum—if you want that, go to the Metropolitan Museum exhibition on the architect through March 16—but it’s a…

IT WAS GRAY AND raining atr Forest Hills Stadium, the outdoor music venue in Queens, but nevertheless the lesbians had assembled. They had come from San Francisco, from Salt Lake City, from Tampa and Bed-Stuy to attend All Things Go, a D.C.-based music festival that launched in New York for the first time in September with a brilliant strategy to stand apart from other fests: Make it for the gay girls. The artists were mostly con-m fessional singer-songwriter pop, mostlys women, mostly queer, and mostly at that strange level of midsize fame that makes fans feel especially close with and protective of their idols. It was a less crunchy Lilith Fair for a flashier, draggier genera-d tion of femmes and themmes. It was, as the band Muna called it in…

INSIDE: Big-tunnel vision / An L. A. hanger-on strikes out on his own / Escape from America AFTER AN EXUBERANT summer, an autumn chill has descended on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The joyous rallies that were all over the news between mid-July, when Harris replaced Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, and the August convention, where she and Tim Walz accepted the party nomination, have quieted into more familiar spectacles. Her once-ascendant polling numbers have stalled and her campaign has become cautious, granting TV interviews mostly to a handful of local news channels in swing states. If the first month of her candidacy was an exhalation after the suffocating defeatism under Biden, the last weeks before Election Day have felt like a collective holding of breath. It’s a stark reversal…

IN SEPTEMBER 2022, Heather and her husband were visiting friends in Portugal when Hurricane Ian began to close in on their hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida. Though the storm ended up making landfall farther south, the close call was a tipping point. Governor Ron DeSantis’s failure to prioritize them had been laid bare—he hadn’t sufficiently addressed the home-insurance crisis, which had been exacerbated by frequent natural disasters. It was the last in a long list of grievances they had against the governor, who had recently made it harder to get an abortion and easier to carry a concealed gun in the state. The couple began to contemplate leaving for good—not merely the state but the country, which they saw going in the same direction. They were able to acquire Portuguese…

EARLY IN THE EVENING of July 13 in an isolated cell block of the D.C. Jail, about two miles east of the Capitol Building, a dozen detainees charged with some of the most violent crimes committed on January 6, 2021, were participating in a thousand-burpee challenge. The group made up roughly half of the inmates held in the block, a special unit sequestered from the jail’s other prisoners and known to its residents as “the Patriot Wing.” The challenge was in honor of a former resident of the unit, a fitness evangelist, who had recently been transferred out to serve a five-year prison sentence for attacking police officers with a floor lamp, a shoe, a nightstick, and a spiked club made from a broken table leg and nails. Around the…

MARK EYDELSHTEYN and I are in a car zooming down a mountain road on the first day of the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. The young actor sits in front, while I’m in the back with two of the film’s publicists. His eyes light up as the driver informs him that his seat has a massager; he can’t believe such a thing exists. A few minutes later, he exclaims, “Guys, it really works! Let’s stop in a few minutes and change seats so you can try it out.” ¶ About half an hour later, as we settle in for our conversation in a restaurant with a dramatic view of the valley below, his buoyant mood has changed somewhat. He looks at me and asks quietly, “In your eyes, who am…

THE DELAWARE AQUEDUCT, 85 miles end to end, is the longest tunnel in the world. It invisibly brings about half of New York City’s water, just over 500 million gallons per day, down from the Catskills to a holding basin in Yonkers. It’s about as old as Joe Biden, and it has not been drained for repairs since he was in high school. The stretch where it crosses under the Hudson (from Newburgh to Wappinger) passes through crumbly limestone, and it has been leaking for decades, now losing up to 35 million gallons of water daily. The best solution has been, as with many aging circulatory systems, bypass surgery. Getting down there required digging a pair of holes, 900 and 700 feet deep, then boring two and a half miles…

In MID-SEPTEMBER, shortly after the New York City police chief resigned amid a federal criminal investigation and Mayor Eric Adams’s chief counsel quit, apparently because her client wasn’t heeding legal advice, and a couple of retired Fire Department officials were arrested on bribery charges, Ingrid Lewis-Martin disappeared from City Hall. Lewis-Martin had long been the most loyal and indispensable of Adams’s advisers—he brings the swagger; she swings the stick—so her sudden absence was noted in the building. “She’s not in this country,” one Adams critic told me. “I hear she is on a beach.” Questions kept bubbling up. Was she fighting with Adams? Was she cutting a deal with the Feds? Was she gone from City Hall for good? In fact, Lewis-Martin was in Japan on what her attorney later…

REMEMBER stranger things? No, seriously—do you actually remember the most recent season of one of Netflix’s biggest shows? Or what happened during the last seasons of HBO’s Euphoria or Severance on Apple TV+? Back when the broadcast networks ruled the world, we would rarely have to go more than four or five months before getting a fix of our favorite shows. But streamers are now in control, and among the many things they’ve disrupted is the notion that hit TV shows should produce new episodes on a timely basis. Delays caused by COVID and last summer’s Hollywood strikes temporarily made things worse, though even without them, the process of making and distributing TV has become so expensive and complicated that two-year waits for fresh episodes are no longer unusual. Yet…

MUSIC / CRAIG JENKINS Too Close to the Sun With 143, Katy Perry joins the cursed ranks of pop flameouts this year. THE ARDUOUS ROLLOUT of Katy Perry’s seventh studio album was a rare gaffe-only product launch. While 143’s lead single, “Woman’s World,” signaled an aggressive pivot to the disco of Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” and Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” Perry’s play at a comeback was derailed by the lyrical simplicity on display, which felt better suited to pharmaceutical ads. The music video’s absurdist gestures so confused its feminist intent that Perry later claimed it was satire. The presence of hitmaker Łukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, whose nearly decadelong legal war with Kesha over sexual-assault allegations was finally settled out of court last year, undermined the theme of women’s empowerment. Neglecting…

THE new york CROSSWORD Syllable Silliness By Matt Gaffney Across 1 Full of get-up-and-go7 Most wise13 “The Grapes of Wrath” lead20 Lacking an owner21 Largest of 5022 Two or three, casually23 Unwilling to walk under a ladder, say (1, 2)25 Entered on tiptoes26 Prior to, in poems27 Petrodollar backing28 “No, thanks”30 It may be set point31 Dug34 One of the senses37 Hebrew words on planes39 Apiece42 Home to nine of the 63 national parks (1, 2)44 Tell a cover story45 Rhea’s role on “Cheers”46 About 2.2 pounds47 Master Mind pieces49 Paint the town red51 Nashville org.53 Lack of strength (1, 2)57 1975 hit for Chicago58 Director Wiseman59 Keep an ___ (observe)60 Unleaded alternative62 Bouncers examine them63 Raindrop stopper64 Flip out66 Maker of mattresses70 Drink made from honey72 Pie-in-the-sky (4, 5)76 Pot77 Simple79…