Innholdsfortegnelse for January 27-February 9, 2025 i New York Magazine

WHEN PETER JACKSON’S Beatles documentary, Get Back, debuted in 2021, the fact that Jackson had used artificial intelligence to clean up previously unusable audio was greeted with enthusiasm from tech geeks and crickets from most everyone else. But a lot has changed over the past few years, and when the story broke in mid-January that Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist had used AI behind the scenes, reactions on social media ranged from “I’m afraid The Brutalist can kiss my arse” and “Get fucked” to simply “Evil.” The controversy sprang from an interview the film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, gave to an outlet called RedShark News in which he spoke of using an AI voice-cloning tool, Respeecher, to tweak Adrien Brody’s and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian dialogue. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world…

THE TRASH CANS BLEW OVER ON West Mariposa Street. It was Tuesday morning, January 7, and the Santa Ana winds had picked up. A 69-year-old woman named Jerri Flowers was outside her house on a corner lot in Altadena. She had bought it for $100,000 decades earlier, but it was now worth ten times that, with a roof topped with solar panels and an unruly Chinese elm tree in the yard. Flowers is one of the many residents of Los Angeles I spoke to over the past few weeks, people with markedly different lives in a sprawling city. But in the days following the fires that started on January 7, they shared an understanding of what it was to fear losing everything. Flowers and the others walked me through what they…

AT THE PEAK of its sprawl, Momofuku’s empire comprised 13 restaurants across six cities on two continents. There were fast-casual satellites—Milk Bar, Fuku, Bang Bar—and a companion magazine. Tying it all together was David Chang’s bro-chef sensibility, a talent for blending East Asian techniques and American comfort food that has now been distilled into a grocery line of instant ramen and condiments, Chang’s Ringer podcast, and his Netflix cooking show. Meanwhile, the number of full-service Momofuku restaurants dwindled to four. But the most recent to close—Ko—is turning into the company’s first entirely new restaurant since 2019: Kabawa (8 Extra Pl., instagram.com/kabawa) is a reimagining of what a Momofuku restaurant can be—I didn’t see one peach illustration as I walked through—with chef Paul Carmichael stepping in to lead. Carmichael has actually spent…

THE ENTHUSIASTIC RESPONSE to Kendrick Lamar’s music over the past 12 years has been driven in part by the perception that he’s a political vessel. He’s not just the most lyrically gifted MC of his generation but the griot of the Obama era and its discontents, whose songs have galvanized street protests against police brutality as seamlessly as they have filled concert arenas and inspired academic books. But what exactly are his politics? 2012 Young Leader ➽ The year Kendrick released his debut album marked his first real brush with political controversy. In an interview with conspiracy website Truth Is Scary, the Compton native, then 25, proclaimed, “I don’t do no voting,” signaling his intention to sit out the upcoming election. The backlash was immediate. “He isn’t the only young…

INSIDE: Confessions of a prominent internet addict / Will AI upend the Oscars race? DONALD TRUMP’S JANUARY 6 pardon spree is, without question, a captivating shiny object. Love what he’s done or hate it (and even some Republicans acknowledge the lunacy), it’s impossible not to gawk: clemency for, essentially, everyone—from seditious conspirators to 170-plus defendants who attacked cops with weapons to nonviolent insurrection-curious Capitol meanderers. Over 1,000 convictions were wiped off the books, all pending prosecutions were dismissed, and about 400 offenders were ordered to be released from prison. Despite prior insinuations from Trump and others about moderation, almost no lines were drawn. They all skated. But the pardon bonanza, for all its shock value and undeniable historical import, obscured a series of momentous policy changes initiated through an avalanche…

IT’S MONDAY, JANUARY 20, the first night of Donald Trump’s second presidency, and just a couple blocks from the Capitol Building that his now-pardoned MAGA army swarmed four years and 14 days ago, there is, as there has been for the past several nights in restaurants, hotel ballrooms, and lobbying offices, a party for people who have never been happier about the direction in which this country is heading. They are drinking, smoking, flirting, networking, but mostly congratulating one another on their big win. This party is at Butterworth’s, a new dimly lit bistro that has become a hot spot for the right in part because one of its investors is Raheem Kassam, once the editor-in-chief of the U.K. edition of Breitbart. On the menu are themed cocktails with names…

CHARLES FITZGERALD landed on St. Marks by chance in 1959. After being kicked out of an apartment he had fixed up on Minetta Lane, someone told him to call a guy who could help move his furniture and, it turned out, would also rent him a room at 11 St. Marks Place for $5 a month. A teacher back then, FitzGerald says he was used to picking up discarded furniture from the street, “as you do when you’re not making a lot of money.” In the early ’60s, much of St. Marks was boarded up, he recalls, but it was “a seedbed where you could rent a store for $25 a month.” And so he did. Several of them. “I went crazy being entrepreneurial,” he tells me, and opened a…

A LITTLE OVER A YEAR AGO, Jack realized he didn’t like his face anymore. The 23-year-old from Chicago had just started working as a broadcast journalist at a local station, and being on television meant watching himself on television. “I didn’t find myself totally attractive, and, man, I wished there was something I could do to make myself attractive,” Jack, who preferred to speak pseudonymously, tells me. The more he scrutinized his face, the more he came to believe the problem was with his chin. Or, really, his lack thereof. “When I realized that my chin was the thing that was hindering my looks, I did some research,” Jack says. “I wasn’t planning to get plastic surgery.” Online, he stumbled across Dr. Benjamin Caughlin, who has made his Chicago-based practice…

CHRIS HAYES CUTS a peculiar figure in the media landscape. He is omnivorously inquisitive, his owlish frames imparting the sense that he is always on the lookout for new information to hunt down and digest. He is an archetypal social-media know-it-all, equally confident dispensing his thoughts on sports, culture, and politics. And he is the rare pundit to have truly important insights into the workings of the world, predicting our anti-Establishment era in his 2012 book, Twilight of the Elites. Yet somehow he has ended up in cable news, as the host of MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes, making him an object of curiosity for those journalists who turn their noses up at the talking-head roundtable, the election countdown clock, and the sensationalist chyron. Is he one of us…

NOT LONG AFTER ARRIVING in New York, Sarah McNally, a devoted vegetarian, tried oysters for the first time with the family of a boyfriend. She loved them—25 years later and still vegetarian, she still makes an exception for them—but she equally loved their craggy, opalescent shells, which she gathered up afterward and, to the polite horror of her hosts, stuffed into her purse. At 49, McNally has a soft, fluty voice (with a trace of rounded Canadian oars: “Soary,” she would apologize) and a wide-eyed manner. She’s too direct to be a classic bullshitter, but the oyster story painted a portrait almost too fanciful to believe. It felt like something out of a 19th-century novel: The provincial innocent from the North making her way in the sophisticated city, the magpie…

MUSIC / CRAIG JENKINS Dance-Floor Euphoria FKA Twigs celebrates pleasure and freedom. FKA TWIGS—the singer-songwriter, producer, actor, director, and model born Tahliah Barnett in Gloucestershire, England—spent much of 2024 promoting her remake of the cult classic The Crow and awaiting an upcoming sexual-battery trial against Shia LaBeouf. In interviews, Twigs touched on parallels between her character, Shelly, who is murdered and revived at great cost, and herself, calling the film a vital step in her healing journey. While The Crow bombed after a heartwarming buildup, opening at $4.6 million against a budget of at least $50 million, LaBeouf has appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and shot a film with David Mamet, signaling a post–Me Too comeback. Now Twigs rolls out Eusexua, an album steeped in the dance music she…

Across 1 Take all the air out of8 “Uh-oh, better get ___” (ad line)13 Humans and birds, e.g.19 Hit the gym20 Acela terminus21 Milano is there22 “Gilmore Girls” actress who knows how to get what she wants?24 Got smaller25 Go to waste, as crops26 Find work for27 Scrappy-___ (cartoon nephew)29 Tome with Rome and Nome30 “That doesn’t ring ___”32 Elie Wiesel’s father35 Passive game entities, briefly37 Poker great Ungar38 “Inferno” poet40 French resort region42 Nix and Jackson, for two45 Jason’s ship47 Music producer who always wears a crop top?49 Former “SNL” player Dunn50 89 percent on a test, say52 “Why are ___ blind to see” (Coolio lyric)53 Get to share one’s opinion55 Waits for the next plane57 Goodyear 400 org.61 Office helpers (abbr.)62 Makes sharper63 “Suits” actor McDonough64 Decide not…