Indholdsfortegnelse for March 28-April 10, 2022 i New York Magazine

THESE DAYS, PETE BUTTIGIEG is concerned about the future of democracy. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the last time fascism was fashionable in certain corners of this country’s political class, one of the things they said for Mussolini is he made the trains run on time—it was a transportation example,” he tells me in his spacious office overlooking the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. “Which by the way, importantly, was not actually true,” he is quick to add, his eyes suddenly widening. He brings up China and the narrative of “their order versus our chaos,” which the Chinese bolster with enormous infrastructure investments. “Part of what motivates me in this work is that the workaday things that we’re focused on, it’s right back to some really profound issues…

Luke was a teenager, but sometimes he suffered from hot flashes so intense he felt faint. His bones ached. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he twisted repeatedly to relieve the pain in his back, which “feels like it could snap in two.” The discomfort was like having an illness, he says, except he was not sick. Instead, he was suffering from the side effects of puberty blockers—a drug that suppresses the estrogen his body would otherwise naturally produce. Luke was supposed to be on the blockers for a year, part of a mandatory thinking period for minors before they can be prescribed gender-affirming hormones through the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. That deadline, like others before it, had passed. When I first met him, he was 17, and…

For Karaoke in Koreatown GAGOPA KARAOKE, 28 W. 32nd St., third fl.; gagopakaraoke.com GAGOPA IS IN A nondescript building in Koreatown with spare sign-age and a few string lights. Inside: a mirrored, disco-lit, linoleum-floored karaoke fun house. “Life these days is so driven by trends. Gagopa seems more than happy to simply be itself,” says Tae Yoon, the New York editor of Thrillist, who has been going out in Koreatown since the late ’90s. Gagopa (pronounced KA-gopa) offers private rooms for groups of up to 40 people (from $9 an hour per person) and is especially beloved for its BYO-friendly attitude. (For those who don’t plan ahead, Gagopa keeps a fridge stocked with $4 beers and bottles of wine and soju.) The staff provides buckets of ice to keep drinks…

For a Used Bike RECYCLE-A-BICYCLE, 858 Fulton St., Clinton Hill; recycleabicycle.nyc EVERY SINGLE BIKE sold at Recycle-a-Bicycle was donated to the shop before being refurbished by staff. As such, prices remain startlingly low. Shannon Haupt, a law student, bought their first bike—a Diamondback road bike for around $400—at Recycle a couple of years ago: “They tuned it up for me, gave me a rack to put it on, and installed bike lights. It was all included.” After that one was stolen, Haupt went straight back to Recycle (which keeps about 20 bikes on the floor and another 100 or so in a Navy Yard warehouse) and bought a zhuzhed-up Columbia. The Recycle team even built it out to their specifications: “A new gear system; brake lines; fixed up the wheels,…

ON MAY 21, 1988, eight people carried a coffin into Central Park to conduct a “funeral for the ’80s.” Inside it were items meant to represent the culture of the decade: a Rambo doll, tiny figures wearing suits (yuppies), bags of a white substance resembling crack. The participants, most of whom had painted their skin blue, piled the objects into a metal drum along with some flash paper, which they lit on fire. They called themselves the Blue Man Group. ¶ Within months, the group of Blue Men had been winnowed down to three: Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton. Over the next few years, with input from a circle of art-school kids and musicians, they would bring their constantly evolving act to many spots around the city—they played…

LIVE LONG ENOUGH in a pandemic and you will see the entire narrative landscape shift, even flip, sometimes more than once. As recently as a month ago, Americans of a certain cast of mind could have still looked to China—and indeed all of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania—with some plausible pandemic envy. Those early lockdowns in Wuhan were brutal, yes; some of the surveillance testing, contact tracing, and quarantine measures imposed in places like South Korea and Singapore were very restrictive, true; closed borders and reentry policies in Australia and New Zealand went further than those of any country in Europe or the Americas; and while the Sinovac vaccines weren’t as effective as those made by Moderna or Pfizer, the success of true “zero COVID” policies through the region…

WHEN WESTERN GOVERNMENTS imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, seeking to sever Vladimir Putin’s banks and billionaires from global capital, Sam Bankman-Fried knew his company would have to comply. The 30-year-old, who is a billionaire 20 times over, runs FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s incorporated in Antigua, headquartered in the Bahamas, and regulated in the U.S. Crypto itself may be a borderless, supranational abstraction, but the companies that have sprung up around it are domiciled in places with laws, and they don’t get to pick and choose which ones to obey. But after Bankman-Fried responded to the new rules, he went a step further. The American decided to block all Russian banks—even unsanctioned ones—from FTX, the better to ensure that the company’s platforms…

For Unusual Shapes DOWNING FRAMES, 4261 24th St., Long Island City; downingframes.com NO REQUEST IS TOO far-fetched for Downing Frames, which has been building pieces (from $200 to $38,000) for blue-chip artists, galleries, and museums like MoMA and the SculptureCenter for nearly 15 years. For Deana Lawson’s recent show at the Guggenheim, Downing incorporated mirrors, stickers, and holograms into frames for her interactive works. For artist Mariah Robertson’s geometric chromogenic prints, Downing created asymmetrical polygon frames. When multimedia artist Erin Shirreff wanted her pieces built inside the frame (think of a model ship in a bottle), she called the Long Island City framer. “Downing does everything for us,” says Yuta Nakajima, senior director at Hauser & Wirth, adding that the framer can pull off feats with remarkable turnaround. Nakajima recently…

For a Same-Day Appointment UNI K WAX, multiple locations; unikwax.com THERE ARE PLENTY OF fancy places to get a bikini wax in the city—like Haven in Soho, where treatment rooms are decorated with roses floating in bowls of water, or Maris Dusan, which is situated on the ground floor of a Park Avenue townhouse. But none, according to Lili Chemla, founder of clothing company Leset, beat Uni K. No matter which location she visits (the chain has 13 across the city, from Bay Ridge to Lenox Hill to Long Island City), the technicians expertly (and quickly) use hard wax and are “diligent about making sure you’re smooth as a seal,” she says, “not letting a single hair pass their notice.” The no-frills studios are always clean, but the real appeal…

JON BATISTE HAS NO interest in fitting neatly into categories. The lifelong musician instead is engaged in what he calls a broader “humanist” project—to be as multifaceted and expressive a creator as possible, be that as a recording artist, an Oscar-winning film composer, or a bandleader for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Born into a New Orleans musical institution, Batiste began performing in the Batiste Brothers Band at age 8 and later juggled studying jazz at Juilliard and touring with his band, Stay Human. Their 2014 performance on The Colbert Report earned them the gig as the Late Show house band before Batiste had even turned 30. His eighth album, 2021’s We Are, is a document of virtuosity blending R&B, jazz, hip-hop, and rock, sometimes in the same song.…

ROSALÍA ACHIEVED maximum saturation at a shocking speed. In a flash, whispers about a gifted singer-songwriter from Spain reimagining flamenco music blossomed into near-global acclaim as the taste for stark, traditional covers displayed on her 2017 debut album, Los Ángeles, evolved into the spirited genre hybridization and careful pop inroads of its 2018 successor, El Mal Querer. By 2019, Rosalía was guesting on international hits alongside música urbana elites J Balvin, Bad Bunny, and Ozuna, and on English-language records by Travis Scott and James Blake. She has described this evolution in self-mythologizing terms, telling The Fader in 2019 that when she encountered flamenco at age 13, she immediately saw the role it would play in her musical future: “I realized, This is my path.” The quest to fill reggaetón and…

THE KITCHEN at Dhamaka—the Indian establishment at Essex Crossing with a monthlong waiting list—is about the size of a large storage container. At tightly packed stations, cooks work, if not back-to-back, then close enough to pass ingredients without taking a step. To make the pulao, a rice dish, chef de cuisine Eric Valdez uses a portable butane burner, which takes up less space than a stove. “I’ve camped, I’ve cooked with this before,” says Valdez. “But in a professional kitchen? This is my first time.” Dhamaka, which opened in February 2021, is known for its unadulterated representation of regional Indian dishes less familiar to diners abroad: Gujarati stuffed peppers with peanuts and chickpea-flour masala; a pig’s-head salad from the country’s northeast. It’s become a destination to members of the South…

HENRY WILLIAMS was 7 in 2008, and what he remembers about 2008 is that his dad lost his job. Henry’s suburban childhood was comfortable, but even so, it was shadowed by an awareness of precarity. For a time when Henry was growing up, an aunt in her 20s lived with his family while she was between jobs. The aunt had gotten an M.F.A. in film. In the years to come, an M.F.A. in film would seem like a bad plan to Henry. When Henry Williams arrived at college, he was a STEM guy: Computers were what you did to be practical. Eventually, he imagined, he might get a Ph.D. in physics. But his undergraduate career at Columbia was still young when other events intervened. Freshman year, he and a friend…

For Easy Access MANHATTAN MINI STORAGE, storage-mart.com/ manhattan-mini FIVE PEOPLE TOLD US about simple, price-transparent experiences at different branches of Manhattan Mini Storage (from $30 a month), which has 17 locations in the borough. Andrea Whittle, the features director at W magazine who has been using the 110th Street site to store the contents of her one-bedroom, says the sign-up process was “seamless. The website has a useful guide that helped me estimate the size of the unit I would need. They gave me a coupon code for a moving company they work with, which I then quickly booked.” Brand consultant Michael Williams, who now uses Manhattan Mini Storage after a decade of trying other facilities, says the company’s locations typically have “a good loading-dock/parking area, which makes it easy…

ALINE is in theaters April 8. THE FILM ALINE, which premiered last year at Cannes to an audience both baffled and delighted and which was deemed “scary” by The Guardian ahead of its April release, defies simple explanation. It is about a woman who looks and acts and sounds like Céline Dion. This woman’s life includes many of Dion’s own pivotal moments: discovery as a gawky but preternaturally talented young girl by a much older manager who eventually becomes her ponytailed husband; a “makeover” and an ascent to international superstardom; a Titanic performance at the Oscars; a Vegas residency. But here, her name is Aline Dieu and she is played in a César-winning performance by French writer-director-star Valérie Lemercier at every stage of her life—including at age 5, shrunk down…

YEARS AGO, while watching The Forsyte Saga, the 2002 adaptation of John Galsworthy’s gargantuan family drama, I began to wonder what it would be like to watch a television series that continues forever. It could be roughly like that one, I thought, or like the TV version of Roots: the story of how one bloodline registers enormous historical events on an intimate scale, told through each new generation as a barometer for the world in flux. It’s a thought experiment, one that gets to ignore all the logistical reasons a show like that is essentially impossible. Pachinko, the new adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s generational saga about a Korean family, is not a realization of my imagined forever story, but it achieves all the same feats of scope and sharpness.…

TV 1. Watch Moon Knight Llewyn Davis: Marvel star. Disney+, March 30. Yes, this is yet another Marvel series being rolled out by Disney+. But it is another Marvel series, and one that stars both Oscar Isaac, as the titular character who has dissociative identity disorder, and Ethan Hawke, as a cult leader, so at least some attention must be paid. JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 2. Listen to Unlimited Love Ahead of a super-stacked summer stadium tour. Warner Records, April 1. The 12th album from veteran L.A. funk-rockers the Red Hot Chili Peppers reunites the team behind beloved albums like 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik, restoring John Frusciante to guitar duties and tapping Rick Rubin as producer. The musicianship is as tight as the songwriting is affecting—the function of a…