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August 16–29, 2021

GET WEEKLY NEWS & INS HT NG Y INDUSTRY. A NEWSLETTER FROM VULTURE’S

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august 16–29, 2021

The National Interest

They Call Him Loop Daddy

As the virus evolves, so does the denialism By Jonathan Chait

The half-naked, fully improvised musical stylings of Marc Rebillet By Nichole Perkins

The Group Portrait

Gawker, resurrected By Choire Sicha

A Return to ‘Company’

Tabloid legend Cindy Adams By Olivia Nuzzi

Stephen Sondheim and Jonathan Tunick look back at the legendary cast album By Frank Rich

90 Minutes With …

Daryl Hall on the Best and Worst of Hall & Oates

Higher Education

What’s a master’s degree really worth? ByWilliamDeresiewicz

Plus the pair’s most underrated albums By Craig Jenkins

strategist

TV’s White Guys Are in Crisis

Best Bets

Sweat solutions for your entire body

What to do with the protagonist Old Guard By Kathryn VanArendonk

The One-Page Guide

To getting a passport in 2021

Critics

The Look Book

Joins a cricket match

Design Hunting

Movable walls transform a Flower District loft into a gallery By Wendy Goodman

Wyn, creator of dissociative identity disorder YouTube channel the Entropy System.

features

Food

CO V E R S O U R C E I M AG E : D R E W A N G E R E R / G E T T Y I M AG E S

the culture pages

Platt on ethereal barbecue in the Bronx; Paris Hilton, celebrity chef?

New York Touch

The bully resigns. By Andrew Rice and Laura Nahmias 14

The Spine Collector

pop by Craig Jenkins Billie Eilish’s sophomore album is a surprising tour de force theater by Helen Shaw In Merry Wives, the Real Housewives of Windsor take charge movies by Bilge Ebiri A little of The Suicide Squad is more than enough 76

To Do

Twenty-five picks for the next two weeks

There’s a thief wreaking havoc on the publishing industry. By Reeves Wiedeman with Lila Shapiro 20

As Seen on Riis Beach

on the cover: Ill by . this page: Photograph by Maegan Gindi for New York Magazine. For customer service, call 800-678-0900.

Documenting the city’s queerest seaside destination. Portfolio by Wayne Lawrence 26

Meet My Multiple Mes

Inside YouTube’s dissociative identity disorder community. By Lizzie Feidelson 36

2 Comments 86 New York Crossword, by Matt Gaffney 88 The Approval Matrix n e w y o r k | nymag.com

Comments

Broadway’s Back

By Jackson McHenry p 55

/ Where’s Scott Rudin?

By Ben amin Wallace p 22

/ Plus Kathryn Garcia’s Wide-Open Future

By Clare Malone

August 2 15 2021

ANTHONY VEASNA SO KNEW HE WAS A STAR When the author died at 28, he was on the cusp of literary fame. Who was he? By E. ALEX JUNG

S tt R t W By Benjamin Wallace

Illustration by Zohar Lazar

22 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 2 1 5 2 0 2 1

For New York’s latest cover story, E. Alex Jung profiled Anthony Veasna So upon the release of his posthumous story collection, Afterparties (“Infinite Self,” August 2–15). The New York Times’ Ashley Wong wrote, “How do you profile 1

the life of someone who’s already passed? [Jung] untangles the tricky, shifting perspectives about the life of a complicated artist just getting started with such sensitivity.” Actor Michael Cyril Creigh-

ton called the story an “incredibly written profile that hit me in the gut and made me want to know more and more,” adding, “I can’t wait to read Afterparties.” Writer Alexander Chee complimented how the “brilliant constellation structure to [Jung]’s profile of So allows for so many stories about him and from him to coexist.” And author Anne Elizabeth Moore wrote, “There are a lot of kinds of heartbreak in this profile of Anthony Veasna So … This thing of layered, generational trauma is so difficult, all-encompassing, and indescribable.” In “Scott Rudin in the Wings,” Benjamin Wallace reported on the notorious producer’s downfall—and whether his career is really over (August 2–15). The Washington Post’s Dan Zak said of the report, “Thorough, dishy, fair, damning. Have been waiting for one like this.” Theater critic Rob Weinert-Kendt tweeted: “This is a 360-degree portrait of a 2

deep com

d s.

My 2 cents: It’s time to give great producers who aren’t psychopaths a run.” The Undefeated’s Soraya Nadia McDonald 2 new york | august 16–29, 2021

wrote, “There are plenty of artists who

know how to collaborate, in part because they could never get away with behaving like Scott Rudin. Being an asshole is not a prerequisite for being great.” Playwright

Jesse Jae Hoon called for more institutional change: “Most deeply saddening to me … was reading about playwrights and actors who are worried that no producer will pay them as well. This, in my mind, doesn’t mean we need another ruling class mega-producer—it means we need a playwrights’ union.” And David Graham-Caso, who has publicly accused Rudin of inflicting the emotional abuse on his twin brother that precipitated his suicide, wrote, “Scott Rudin continues to lie, gaslight & sociopathically avoid any responsibility for the horrific and lasting abuse he inflicted on people. My twin brother is dead, in part

because of this monster. Don’t forget Kevin. Don’t let this bully off the hook.”

Daniel Duane reported on how many residents of one of America’s most liberal cities are ready to cast out its progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin (“Everyone in San Francisco Has Something to Say About Chesa,” August 2–15). S.F. police commissioner and criminal defense attorney John Hamasaki tweeted, 3

“It’s nice to read an actually insightful article about criminal justice politics in San Francisco from our friends on the East Coast. Think it is pretty balanced in a omplexities, with all si say.” @GryphKnight

agreed it was “particularly refreshing to read a piece that doesn’t try to make heroes of anyone; it shows the flaws in persons

and systems both.” However, Bay Area journalist Susan Dyer Reynolds thought the story was far too generous: “This is an embarrassing PR article for a DA 3,000 miles away. Or is it about surfing? Hard to tell since [Duane] is interviewing [Boudin] about the stabbing of a 94-yearold woman while catching waves.” Commenter LanceMH asked, “Crime is on the rise everywhere. Why? Certainly, rising economic inequality has nothing to do with it. Nor a global pandemic, resulting in people at the bottom losing their jobs … If you want to lower crime, focus on the causes … not the effects.”

P. E. Moskowitz reflected on how tweeting a photo of their parallelparking job unleashed a torrent of online vitriol (“Space Invaders,” August 2–15). Writer Alicia Kennedy said the column was “less about parking and more about how Twitter is fucking deranged, and it’s excellent.” But many readers were quick to relitigate Moskowitz’s parking job. @eliahhh_ asked, “Did the other cars have enough room to get out? You never really responded in the article to people calling you selfish/inconsiderate. Should people not be upset at you exploiting the inaccessibility of the city?” Writing for the A.V. Club, Reid McCarter pointed out, “Because their parallel parking might appear to have inconvenienced others, Moskowitz became the sin eater for issues including city infrastructure shortcomings and anger over other aspects of the respondents’ personal lives.” 4

L Send correspondence to comments@nymag.com.

Or go to nymag.com to respond to individual stories.

“I believed a clinical trial could save me. Thankfully, so did Perlmutter Cancer Center.”

Two years after difficult chemotherapy and surgery for breast cancer, Karen Peterson learned that her tumors had returned. “I knew my only real hope was a clinical trial,” Karen said. She called everyone and searched everywhere. Finally she found an immunotherapy clinical trial at Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health. Karen became the first triple-negative breast cancer patient in the trial. After just eight weeks, a scan revealed that Karen’s lesions were shrinking. A couple of months later, they were gone. In the past year, Perlmutter Cancer Center has opened more than 100 additional clinical trials for many types of cancers. “I know there are more patients out there like me,” said Karen. “They should know there’s hope and help at Perlmutter Cancer Center.” To learn more about Perlmutter Cancer Center’s clinical trials, visit nyulangone.org/pcc. Or call 833-NYUL-PCC.

inside: Gawker, back from the grave / Manhattan’s empress of gossip / The master’s grift

The National Interest: Jonathan Chait The Republicans’ Pathogenic Party Line A new variant of covid denialism has emerged. 4 new york | august 16–29, 2021

in the middle of august, as the Delta variant began driving coronavirus caseloads back to levels Americans believed they would never see again, Missouri senator Josh Hawley introduced an amendment to the Senate budget resolution addressing what he sensed to be one of his party’s most urgent priorities. Hawley called for restricting federal funding to K–12 schools that mandate covid-19 vaccines for students, mandate students wear masks, or do not resume in-person instruction. As school districts around the country scramble to figure out how to reopen, Hawley’s plan for public education is to demand in-person schooling while banning any efforts to make it safe. (Hopefully, nobody will tell Hawley about ventilation lest he ban that too.) Hawley is merely following a partywide stampede into a new form of covid denialism, and Republican officeholders are jostling with one another to stake out the wildest stance. Seven Republican-led states have banned schools from

P H OTO G R A P H : M . S COT T B R A U E R / R E D U X

Anti-vaxxers in Swampscott, Massachusetts.

requiring masks in the classroom. Ted Cruz and fellow Republican senator Kevin Cramer have two new bills banning mask and vaccine mandates. Texas governor Greg Abbott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis have banned mask and vaccine mandates, and DeSantis even tried to prevent cruise lines from requiring passengers to be vaccinated. It’s worth recalling that in the early days of the pandemic, Republican covid denialism began as a largely reflexive partisan instinct. President Trump was too upset by the emergence of a pandemic, at a moment when he believed he had seized a decisive campaign advantage, to admit that he was facing a serious crisis that required action. And so he began insisting the virus would disappear quickly, or that it could easily be cured by hydroxychloroquine, or that people should simply tough it out and not let it dominate their lives. The Republicans’ original premise for these beliefs was that Democrats were hyping up the pandemic as a pretext to shut down the economy and thereby to harm his chances of reelection. If Joe Biden won the election, Cruz sagely predicted a year ago, “I guarantee you the week after the election, suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors, will say, ‘Everything’s magically better. Go back to work. Go back to school. Suddenly the problems are solved.’ ” And since covid was an exaggerated threat concocted to advance a nefarious Democratic agenda, it followed that the measures publichealth authorities were recommending against it, including masks and vaccines, were also unnecessary. That entire conspiracy theory has collapsed. And yet the beliefs it spawned— that masks and vaccines were unnecessary— have remained in place. As the Delta variant spreads, in no small part owing to rightwing resistance to vaccination, Republican covid denialism has mutated into an altered form. It is now organized around sanctifying and protecting the absurd and false mythology that Republicans spread under Trump. Until covid came along, not even doctrinaire libertarians opposed government vaccine mandates. For decades, institutions like the military and schools have routinely required a long list of vaccines. HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn cites the works of libertarian writers such as Jessica Flanigan (“A Defense of Compulsory Vaccination,” 2013), Jason Brennan (“A Libertarian Case for Mandatory Vaccination,” 2018), and Ilya Somin, all of whom supported vaccine mandates before covid existed.

Until COVID came along, not even doctrinaire libertarians opposed government vaccine mandates. But even if you were such a libertarian extremist that you opposed vaccine requirements, there’s no conceivable justification for banning private business from requiring vaccinations. When Cruz insists, “No one should force anyone to take the vaccine—including the federal government or an employer,” he is trampling on property rights and freedom of association, principles a small-government conservative like Cruz usually defends fanatically. Suppose, for instance, you want to enjoy a cruise with the peace of mind that everybody onboard has gotten a vaccine, and a cruise line wants to sell you that experience. A traditional conservative or libertarian would describe that as a capitalist act between consenting adults. DeSantis believes the heavy hand of government should step in and make that contract illegal. Let’s not pretend Republicans would care about rights for anti-vaxxers if their ranks didn’t include disproportionate numbers of Republicans. Only the identitypolitics aspect of the anti-vaxx, anti-mask crusade has driven Republicans to turn against their customary reverence for freedom of contract. DeSantis hinted at the logic in unusually revealing terms two weeks ago. “I’m sick of the judgmental stuff. Nobody’s trying to get ill here,” he lectured reporters. “Let’s not indulge that somehow it’s their fault for not [getting vaccinated].” Of course nobody wants to get sick. Nobody wants to die in a car crash or go to prison, either, but some people drive drunk or commit felonies anyway, and generally people like DeSantis judge their behavior. The idea DeSantis is expressing in his plea for withholding judgment is that the feelings of people who believed Trump’s lies deserve special protection. Since Trump left office, so much of the Republican energy has been organized around protecting his followers from any social, political, or legal consequences. What principle grants somebody the extraordinary right to walk onto another person’s property and spread a deadly virus? The principle that they should pay no price for having followed their president. DeSantis’s Florida represents a test case of the Republican political theory. By

flouting precautionary measures, DeSantis has successfully branded the state as an outpost of mask-free, very vaccineoptional living. He has benefited as well from being the object of factually shaky attacks—a 60 Minutes segment depicted his decision to distribute vaccines through the Publix drugstore as corrupt, state employee Rebekah Jones accused him of falsifying covid deaths, and when neither charge panned out, Republicans flocked to him as another victim of the liberalmedia conspiracy. National Review published two articles demanding the national media apologize to DeSantis, whose martyrdom thrust him to the top of the list of potential nominees if Trump decides not to run. But Florida has become the kind of national petri dish of disease DeSantis’s critics have long feared. By mid-August, according to some estimates, the state’s covid hospitalization rate soared to levels higher than New York had at the peak of its outbreak. DeSantis and his fellow Republicans are not telling people not to get vaccinated or wear a mask indoors. Instead, they quietly urge people to get the vaccine while loudly demanding freedom for those who refuse, treating the choice to opt out of vaccines and go anywhere you wish while potentially carrying a deadly transmissible disease as a fundamental right. DeSantis has simultaneously said “These vaccines are saving lives” while selling merchandise plastered with the slogan don’t fauci my florida. It is tempting to assume this reflects a devious strategy. But 70 percent of adults in the U.S. have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and, according to one survey, more than 60 percent of parents of schoolage kids think unvaccinated students and staff should have to wear masks. There is no clever plan here—just politicians so desperate to cater to the pathologies of their base that they chase one another to adopt the most politically toxic and socially hazardous position available. Donald Trump’s heirs have tested the political marketplace and arrived at a morbid conclusion: His supporters would rather die than admit ■ they were wrong. august 16–29, 2021 | new york

intelligencer

The Group Portrait: Gawker Returns for Unknown Length of Time

It begins again: the messy bargain between Gawker and Gawker writer. By Choire Sicha gawker’s back, riding a very bloggy moment in media—down with editors, up with newsletters, the world’s a mess, and no topic is too small. Founded in 2002, murdered by a well-funded lawsuit in 2016, the site returns under Bustle Digital Group and the furious and hilarious editor-in-chief Leah Finnegan. This new bratty pack has lots in common with those of us who wrote for Gawker previously. They want to have a laugh— and they don’t believe in a long future. “I consulted a few different people to ask if this was a terrible mistake. I ultimately came to the conclusion that it was too rare of an opportunity to pass up,” says staff writer Jenny G. Zhang. “I figured, worst case, at least I’ll have had an interesting experience.” “It’s very refreshing that after a year of learning too much about everybody else’s toxic workplaces, I get to start somewhere without any calcified ill feelings between people,” says contributor Tammie Teclemariam, the wine-and-food writer whose coverage of racism spurred a series of high-profile media resignations last year. “How long do we think this is even going to last? There’s no ads even on the site yet,” she adds. “It’s like a snow globe right now.” “This could be the last journalism job I ever get,” says Tarpley Hitt, an investigative reporter and blogger and the real killer of the gang. Anything else you’d like the folks at home to know? “I would love people to send me secrets at tarpley@gawker.com, especially if they have documents that ■ come with it,” Hitt says. 6 new york | august 16–29, 2021

top row (from left): Kelly Conaboy, Jenny G. Zhang, Brandy Jensen, Tammie Teclemariam, Jocelyn Silver, Tarpley Hitt. middle: Darcie Wilder, Claire Carusillo, Allie Jones, Sarah Hagi. bottom: Olivia Craighead, Leah Finnegan, George Civeris.

Photograph by Victor Llorente

august 16–29, 2021 | new york

intelligencer

Cindy Adams at home with her housekeeper, Nazalene Persaud.

90 min u tes w ith …

Cindy Adams

The stalwart of “Page Six” gets ready to tell all

kind of.

by olivia nuzzi he penthouse that gossip built looms above Park Avenue guarded by a oneand-a-half-year-old Yorkie, Jellybean, who was sososososososoexcited to have a guest, and a 91-year-old New York Post columnist, Cindy Adams, who was not. “What is it you’re looking for?” she asked me. “What do you want?!” The occasion for my visit was Gossip, 8 new york | august 16–29, 2021

the four-part Showtime documentary series, out August 22, in which director Jenny Carchman tells the story of the New York Post and the Murdochization of American media through the newspaper’s most enduring star, who has for almost 40 years devoted five hours a day, six days a week, to crafting her column. “I would never leave the Post,” Adams told me, “because I’m very loyal and because the New York Post is the flavor Photograph by Gillian Laub

of New York. If you go to the Hamptons— I sold my house there, I don’t want to go to the Hamptons—they say that you can’t go to dinner unless you first go to the newsstand and pick up the Post. I don’t know about Colorado. I don’t care about Arkansas; I don’t even know where they are—but if you’re in New York, it’s the New York Post.” On the page, Adams is a few hundred words of zigzagging chitchat concerned mostly with celebrities and socialites and personal friends or allies. To grab from a stack of Posts at random is to shake a Magic 8-Ball of Adams’s fortunes for the fortunate: One recent column included an update on Reese Witherspoon’s ascent to Hollywood moguldom amid news of her funding deal with Blackstone and, pegged to no news at all, a brief introduction to John Catsimatidis’s wife, Margo. The union of Mr. and Mrs. Catsimatidis is more than 30 years old, but Adams and Catsimatidis have a new partnership; as a side hustle, she’s hosting a talk-radio show on his station, WABC. (She left that part out.) Another recent column was devoted almost entirely to a casual accusation that movies create gun violence, which she backed up not with argument but by listing a random assortment of celebrities—Brad Pitt, Ice-T—who have owned firearms. This is reporting of the kitten heel rather than the shoe leather—proudly transactional, rarely transparent, tailored not for the public interest but for private grievance or professional maneuvering or petty warfare. Adams has a term for the distinct manner in which she communicates: “I write smartmouth,” she said. “I write like a city person. My English is perfect, but I don’t write that way. I write the way a New Yorker sounds.” New York’s city editor, Christopher Bonanos, assessed the Adams style this way: “She’s the last known survivor of the art she practices, and the last person on the island who speaks the language of a lost population—that rat-a-tat thing of Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons—and she’s got to write it down to pass it on.” It’s all very simple to Adams, who views the world as divided between “somebodies” and “nobodies.” And, as she explained it to me, “I’m not gonna write about nobody!” I guess I wanted to understand why. We were seated in a corner of her 4,200-square-foot palace, late-afternoon light streaming in from the terrace and reflecting off the metallic spikes on the collar of her Prada blouse. She is pretty in a way that I probably would have described as girlish had I not seen her face squished next to Jellybean’s; it’s

more accurate to say that Adams is Yorkie-ish. Unlike Jellybean, she eyed me with disdain. “What’s the question?! I don’t understand the question!” she said, leaning back in her chair and rolling her eyes. “Your questions are about gossip. I. Don’t. Think. About. Gossip.” By this, Adams did not mean that she doesn’t devote much of her life to the sport of acquiring and disseminating shards of information about the people she thinks matter most but that she does not care to analyze gossip in any sort of philosophical way. Why would anyone spend time talking about gossip when they could be busy doing something useful, like spreading it? “It means nothing!” she said, exasperated. “Gossip doesn’t mean anything!” the way the studios forged starlets from plain Janes, Adams says she was forged for a life in New York society. Her family had no money, but her mother, Jessica Sugar Heller, got Cindy a nose job

and his wife Dewi. In 1965, she published her first book, Sukarno: An Autobiography, As Told to Cindy Adams. She got her break in the news business in 1979, when she was summoned to visit the Shah on his deathbed and the invitation conflicted with her dinner plans with then–Post editor-in-chief Roger Wood. Adams skipped the dinner, met the Shah, and wrote up what she saw for Wood, who slapped the exclusive on the cover. Adams officially became a Post columnist in 1981, just in time for the tabloid rise of her close friend Donald Trump (whom she met through her other close friend Roy Cohn). Adams is a registered Republican with what she calls her own “values,” but her decisions over the decades have been largely in service to one cause: the advancement of Cindy Adams. In Gossip, Carchman details how Adams maneuvered through the paper, making herself useful to her bosses; in one scene, Adams recounts working with Governor Mario Cuomo to get Rupert Murdoch the legal rights to run the Post

“I am not evil. I am not vicious. I am amusing.” (illegally) when she was 15, plus a procedure to push back her hairline. She sent her to etiquette classes and banished any trace of a class-betraying New York lilt with broadcast-English lessons. Adams says her mother “improved” her, and when I asked if it fucked her up at all, she responded like I was from outer space. “My mother was wonderful to me,” she said. “She. Created. Me.” The project was a success, and by 17, Cindy was a local pageant queen going steady with Joey Adams, a vaudeville comic who seemed to have the keys to the city. “I went from one to the other: a mother who took care of me no matter how ill I was, how unpretty I was. And then I married a man exactly the same age as my mother who took care of me.” Adams likes to say that her husband was “a No. 2 with a No. 1 lifestyle.” Joey’s connectedness—in show business, in media, in politics—primed Cindy to become something beyond an access journalist and more like a spokeswoman for the stars. When Joey went to Asia on tour with a variety show, Cindy made friends with other powerful couples: the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife Farah, and Indonesian president Sukarno

and his television network, Fox News, at the same time. What was good for the Post was good for Adams, and she remains proud of her ability to use her pen to secure these intertwined fates. “What struck me was how politically savvy she was in terms of how to handle people like Col Allan,” one tabloid vet told me, referring to the onetime Post editorin-chief and Murdoch confidant. “Cindy noticed that Col was this alien from Australia who didn’t know what was going on and felt lonely and isolated, and she took him under her wing, squired him around Manhattan, made sure he was invited to things, and thus secured her role there.” The less generous view was that Adams was a “political opportunist,” in the words of one media executive, who said her coziness with Murdoch meant that her column was essentially corrupt, since readers could never know when she was carrying out her boss’s bidding. “Cindy was a good girl,” the executive said, “She did what Daddy wanted.” Adams sometimes rationalizes her role as a mouthpiece for monstrous people by framing it in careerist terms, arguing that, when everyone else is savaging a public figure, the only way to be original is to august 16–29, 2021 | new york

intelligencer

sidle up and make the defense’s case instead. Other times, she’ll rationalize these relationships in terms of personal allegiance. When asked about her conspicuous lack of coverage of the Trump presidency, Adams said, “I take care of my friends, and I continue to love my friends. I didn’t write about any of the difficulties of Donald Trump, nor am I going to.” (She claims, for instance, to have known all about his affair with Marla Maples long before it became a matter of public record but didn’t report it. “Donald’s my friend,” she said, “so I wouldn’t have printed it.”) When I asked her about moral conflict, she glared again. “What does that mean?” she said. “I don’t have that problem because I do not do anything that starts in here.” She turned her hand toward her heart and moved it up and down. “If it starts to upset me in here, if I feel it’s making me uncomfortable, I will not write it.” This from the woman who once said in a TV interview, “Lying, to me, goes with the turf. Of course you lie. You do anything. And I’ve done almost everything … Hell, you’ve gotta get the story.” To me, she denied this was her view. “I don’t think lying is part of the job,” she said. “I think doing what you have to do is part of the job.” biography such as this, about a public figure of a certain age, invites media coverage that resembles obituary, and in fact, one of the first things people do when you call them to talk about Adams is ask if she’s dead, which she’s not, or dying, which she’s also not, any more than we all are, or if she’s still writing, which a daily thumb through the Post confirms she very much is. Even today, so far into the era of the democratization of the gossip industry that its most popular practitioner is an anonymous social-media user named Deuxmoi, Adams commands a devoted readership. My Aunt Dianne gets the Post delivered to her doorstep in Queens and reads it on her patio with her iced coffee each morning. When she’s finished, she folds the paper up, slips it back into its plastic, and throws it over the fence for her neighbor. I didn’t expect the ritual had anything to do with attachment to a particular writer—and anyway, I could tell Aunt Dianne that I interviewed Jesus Christ and she would probably say something along the lines of “That’s nice, Liv! Was he handsome?”—but when I mentioned that I’d met Cindy Adams, she yelped. “Oh my God! I LOVE Cindy Adams! I can’t get through a day without reading Cindy Adams,” she said. “I get such a kick out of her. She’s old-school!” Even readers less enthused than Aunt 10 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

Dianne remain loyal. One frequent target of the tabloids put it this way: “Do you matter in New York City if Cindy Adams doesn’t shit on you? It’s a rite of passage.” Daily News columnist Harry Siegel said he finds value in her “crazy, garbled Winchell shorthand” because she reflects the thinking of her social circle, “a bunch of guys like Trump and Catsimatidis” who exist mostly in analog. “This is where their information is flowing through. She is still, at 91, a conduit for that,” Siegel said. “It’s all through her narrator voice. None of the sentences have all that much meaning. Everything’s soup—but it’s very useful soup. It’s this general mushyminded understanding of older people, and all of them are talking but I’m not privy to those conversations.” The tabloid target agreed. “People are more likely to see you quoted there than in The Atlantic.” The people of the press are bitchy by nature, but after getting their licks in, almost everyone offers up admiration for Adams’s longevity; old age has the effect of buffing the edge off everyone’s claws. One tabloid vet offered this criticism: “Cindy’s one of those people who views everybody through the prism of how they treat her. So if Adolf Hitler had been nice to her, well …” And then, in the next breath, added, “She’s still showing up to things and unfurling her notebook and getting quotes from B-list actors—I mean, God bless!” And the media executive, who hates almost everyone, said, “Look, you’ve gotta give her credit. She was clever at the end of the day, and she stays in the game because she plays it safe.” Life is hell and the media is a snake pit, so I am awed by Adams the way I am awed by anything with that much fight in it. But who wants to play a game with rules like this? If you ever stop, you lose, but if you play forever, you still can never win. This is something to admire only if you believe ambition is a virtue and, more practically, if you believe a person like Adams does not owe history a truthful account of all the dirt she has spent a lifetime not reporting. “Normally, someone writes the memoir when they don’t care anymore,” Bonanos said, “and she’s never gonna do it. So the question is, What’s the point of the secrets?” These days, Cindy Adams is—still— what people used to call a tough broad. Some of that feels like a protective shtick: You don’t survive a near half-century in the media if you don’t learn to assemble a version of you that exists for consumption so that you may emerge without a scab no matter how much you’ve been picked at. And hers is a good shtick, of the variety you’d expect from the wife of the Borscht

Belt icon credited with the line “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” But the performance cracks when it comes to the subject of her friend the former president, who is under investigation by New York prosecutors. There’s a story in Gossip in which Trump flies Adams in his helicopter to sprinkle her late husband’s ashes over Central Park after he died in 1999. I realized later that, a few months before Joey’s death, Trump had been angry with Adams for not attending his own father’s funeral. So this was a tale of Donald Trump showing a capacity for forgiveness and generosity—not to mention defying his germaphobe reputation by volunteering to be within inhalation distance of human remains? It struck me as fishy. “He doesn’t give a shit about the rituals of death,” Mary Trump, his niece, told me. She thought it was unbelievable too. “Unless they aimed over a crowd of people—maybe he would’ve been into that.” A look of panic came over Adams’s face when I brought up the anecdote. “You know, I’m not sure you should really write that because that’s illegal,” she said. I was confused—whether or not I wrote about it wouldn’t matter since it’s about to be on Showtime. “You shouldn’t do that,” she said. Huh? “To go up in the air and sprinkle the ashes, it’s against the law. So he did it, but I’d appreciate you not saying it.” I wasn’t trying to narc on the guy for littering, I tried to explain, but she cut me off, looking at her watch: “This is an hour! How much longer do we need?” Later on, when she showed me her office— wallpapered, even on the ceiling, with her New York Post covers—I asked about Trump again. “Make sure you say that I love him and I’ll always be there for him,” she said. Is she afraid for him? “Yes, I am. So I say nothing about him. I don’t want anything to be taken—right, wrong—” She stopped herself. “Yes, I am worried.” She opened her eyes wide and nodded. Adams would prefer not to get that deep. “Gossip has become pernicious. I don’t appreciate pernicious gossip. I don’t indulge in saying evil kinds of things about people,” she said. “I’m not mean—I’m fun!” By way of example, Adams told me a joke she’d recently written for her column. “I’ve said that Jennifer Lopez should have a tollbooth installed inside her,” she said. “That’s pretty brutal!” I said. “It’s not brutal! It’s funny!” she said. “I am not evil. I am not vicious. I am amusing. I am tweaking little things. I’m not harming anybody. I am not outing anybody. I am not breaking up any marriage. I am not talking about your sex life. I’m skirting all of that. Because I’m ■ doing it with humor.”

Higher Education: William Deresiewicz The Master’s Trap The desperate economics behind the pursuit of another degree. 12 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

an investigation by The Wall Street Journal in July sent a shiver through the millennial and zoomer class. The story, “‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off,” dug through Department of Education data to highlight master’s programs at prestigious private universities whose alumni were struggling under mountains of debt. Columbia turns out to be the worst offender, with 14 of 32 programs in which median student debt exceeded median income two years after graduation. One student reported taking a car ride with three friends from the film program, during which “they calculated they collectively owed $1.5 million in loans to the federal government.” Despite the scope of the Journal’s investigation, its focus on Columbia’s film program—a stupendous outlier with median debt some six times higher than median income—represents a tiny corner of the master’s boom. Between bachelor’s degrees and doctorates, master’s programs are, for the media, the neglected

P H OTO G R A P H : M O P I C / S H U T T E R S TO C K ( S T I C K ) , I S TO C K / G E T T Y I M AG E S P LU S (G R A D U AT I O N C A P )

intelligencer

middle child of the higher-ed triumvirate. This despite the fact that they account for over a quarter of all degrees awarded and have witnessed the most remarkable growth in recent decades: From 1991 to 2019, the number of master’s degrees awarded rose by 143 percent. That’s 70 percent faster than bachelor’s degrees and 84 percent faster than doctorates. And it is the master’s that may have the most interesting story to tell us—about not only the universities that peddle the degree but also an increasingly bureaucratized economy that leads young, educated people to look to it for salvation. Some reasons for the popularity of master’s degrees are familiar. For educational institutions, master’s programs are cash cows since their students get far less financial aid than undergraduates. For students, the master’s program responds to a specific need: American workers are competing more and more with those around the world, and the more college graduates there are, the more you need to find a way to distinguish yourself from the mass. That is all the more true given the halfassed things people major in these days. I don’t mean the liberal arts; I mean the opposite. Humanities majors, whose numbers have been falling for decades, account for less than 6 percent of new graduates; social-science majors a little more than 14 percent. Meanwhile, vocational fields account for fully half: things like communications, law enforcement, leisure and fitness, and, above all, business, which alone accounts for nearly 20 percent. Such programs aren’t, to put it mildly, highly rigorous. The undergrad business major, one professor told me, is for students who aren’t up for doing college-level work. And since very few elite institutions even offer vocational majors, the majority of those graduates are getting their degrees from undistinguished schools—which won’t give them a lot of push in the job market. Hence the need for a master’s. Globalization has not just introduced more competition for the average American worker; along with its sibling, financialization, it has led to more bureaucratization. In The Utopia of Rules, the late great social thinker David Graeber describes how the mind-set and procedures of corporate bureaucracy, under the aegis of financialization, have spread across the economy. Not only is the master’s degree the quintessential example of a bureaucratic credential—drably functional and frequently deeply pointless— but much of its growth has been in fields that are themselves explicitly bureaucratic: business (of course), public administration, and social services.

The financial premium for doing a master’s is a lot like the degree itself— kind of, you know, meh. This trend has a direct impact on the kinds of jobs that college graduates these days often find themselves doing five or ten years out of the gate, mired somewhere in the lower levels of a corporate, nonprofit, or public bureaucracy (“bullshit jobs,” to quote the title of one of Graeber’s other books). That is, boring and futile jobs which offer little security or prospect of advancement, and don’t pay all that well to boot. Going back to school to get a master’s is one of the ways people try to hoist themselves out of that predicament. In other words, it’s about investing in yourself with all the cost and risk that any investment entails. And because of financialization, not to mention the ever-climbing cost of higher ed, that investment is increasingly literal. Thanks to the Grad PLUS loan program, which Congress created in 2005 and which has no fixed borrowing limits, graduate debt has exploded. From 1999 to 2016, the average debt assumed for master’s study, among the nearly half of students who borrowed, increased by 57 percent, to $66,000. Is it worth it? In terms of return on investment—at least in the strict financial sense—the large-scale data are equivocal. Master’s recipients earn, on average, $18,000 more per year than those with a bachelor’s only. That isn’t nothing, but it’s considerably smaller than the gap between people who finish college and those who finish only high school ($29,000), let alone between master’s recipients and those who earn a professional degree ($51,000). Over the course of their lives, 61 percent of master’s holders earn more than the median lifetime income of college-only graduates—which means that nearly two in five earn less. The financial premium for doing a master’s is, in other words, a lot like the degree itself—kind of, you know, meh. But it depends on the field. Of the ten job categories that show the biggest wage advantages for master’s holders, six are in management (i.e., bureaucrats) and two are in finance. Of the three with the smallest, two are in the arts. Which brings us to the master in fine arts, or M.F.A., the degree under scrutiny in the Journal story. The M.F.A.’s numbers too have soared in the past three decades. Programs have multiplied apace, both at individual institutions and across the country. As recently as the

mid-1990s, for example, the School of Visual Arts in New York offered four graduate programs; now it offers 12 M.F.A.’s alone (visual narrative, social documentary film, illustration as visual essay), along with eight other master’s. In 1984, there were around 150 programs offering graduate writing degrees of all kinds (including M.A.’s, M.F.A.’s, and Ph.D.’s); today, there are more than 220 M.F.A. programs alone. Both the financial rewards of an M.F.A. and the motives for getting one can be extremely murky. The degree is not like a master’s in physical therapy, say, something that feeds you directly into a well-defined employment field with proven and stable demand. It is more like a prayer or a lottery ticket. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, artists rank even with waiters and servers in median income, slightly under janitors and maids. In Why Are Artists Poor? Hans Abbing, a Dutch economist and visual artist, boils down the answer to his titular question to this: Artists are poor because there are too many of them, and there are too many of them because so many of them are delusional. Under those conditions, shelling out as much as a couple of hundred thousand dollars to do an M.F.A. is a mighty iffy proposition. And that’s if you have talent, along with the freakish drive and will you’ll need to give yourself a fighting chance. But a lot of people go to art school lacking those qualities. They may go to delay decisions about the future or because they’re hopelessly naïve or because the economy they enter as young adults is so dispiriting, so full of bullshit jobs, that they grasp at any hope they can. And the institutions let them in. With the financial crash of 2008, the rise in the number of people aspiring to go to art school came to a sudden end. But in many cases the infrastructure had been built, or overbuilt, and the schools had to keep finding asses for all of those seats. Admissions standards plummeted. Beyond the top few programs, acceptance rates are now typically well over 50 percent. “They take anyone,” a veteran art-school teacher told me, “and it is ugly.” Going to art school is fine if you can manage it without financial ruin. But borrowing $300,000 to do a film degree? Bad idea. And allowing your stu■ dents to do it? Inexcusable. august 16–29, 2021 | new york

august 16–29, 2021

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n 2001, a s he set ou t on his first, disastrous campaign for public office, Andrew Cuomo invited a columnist for this magazine to join him for a car ride through New York City. Bill Clinton had just departed office, leaving Washington in Republican hands after being impeached over his sexual relationship with an intern who worked for him, and Cuomo, the youngest member of his Cabinet, was impatiently angling to run for governor against George Pataki, the man who had defeated his father, the liberal giant Mario Cuomo. The story’s dynastic elements were irresistible, but the younger Cuomo sought to downplay them, portraying Clinton as his true model, emphasizing what he had learned from watching the master tactician. In the back seat of his car, Cuomo deconstructed Clinton’s use of physical contact, clasping the (male) columnist’s shoulder, holding his hand, stroking his knee. “He knew every nuance of what he was doing,” Cuomo explained. “The effect of touching you there, or touching you here.” You can say this for Andrew Cuomo: He always knew what he was doing—he was able to dissect, with a clinician’s eye, the many ways in which a man in power could control, dominate, and humiliate those he touched. “You can’t build something …” he started to say, 20 years later, on the phone on the Friday morning after his shocking resignation. He paused and searched for the right metaphor for his heavy-handed philosophy of governance. “You can’t talk a nail into going into a board. You can’t charm the nail into a board. It has to be hit with a hammer.” It was three days after he’d admitted defeat in a characteristically strange, selfjustifying, un-self-aware speech, and yet he was on the phone still fighting, spinning, waxing philosophical, relitigating, questioning the motivations of the people who benefited from his removal. He sounded calm and self-assured, even upbeat. He spoke in his usual musical lilt, drawing out vowels, asking himself rhetorical questions and providing the answers, a Socratic habit he picked up from his father. He went on like this for 80 minutes. He said he thought 16 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

he would have won an impeachment trial but was leaving to spare the state further convulsion. He claimed, however implausibly, one more time, that he had no idea how his words and gestures would be interpreted by the women who gave damning testimony against him. For those who watched Cuomo closely as he guided New York through the pandemic—commandeering ventilators, raising field hospitals, reassuring the public that a strong hand was in control—it had been disorienting to see him lose his grip so swiftly. Almost as disorienting as it had been to see him become, for a surreal, transitory moment last year, a beloved figure, unrecognizable to the political class he was known to terrorize. “I literally am not any tougher than I need to be to get the job done, because I understand there’s a price of being tough,” he said. “There is no longterm path to be a strong executive without being strong. “And people resent the strength.” The end came in the form of a report, produced by State Attorney General Letitia James and released to the public on August 3. Cuomo knew it would be embarrassing, but he’d preplanned a defense: his own 85-page rebuttal and a 14-minute video with an awkward photomontage of him innocently kissing and hugging all sorts of people. But it was far worse than he had imagined, with more women—11 in all—

and more devastating details of harassment than he was prepared to counter. Worst of all, in the view of the governor’s dwindling number of defenders, were the allegations of a young female state trooper on his personal detail, who testified to investigators the governor alluded to her sex life and ran his hands over her body. Even friends who doubted the credibility or seriousness of the other accusations were aghast. “That trooper story, there’s just no explanation for that,” one person close to the governor said. He quickly lost the support of his oncepliant allies in the State Legislature, labor, the Democratic Party apparatus, and the New York business interests that had propelled him. “As cuckoo bananas as he is, his approach to governing is a pretty stable one, and he keeps a sort of political and ideological equilibrium,” a real-estate executive said shortly after James released the report. “What has happened in the last 72 hours is his existence has become destabilizing.” After a spell of denial, Cuomo realized he had just one lever left to pull. Almost no one was sorry to see him go. The day afterward, one of the grand old men of New York State politics, former MTA chairman and onetime lieutenant governor Dick Ravitch, was asked to share his thoughts on the governor’s stunning fall. “Let me begin by saying I’ve known him a long time,” said Ravitch, who has a rich history of antagonism with the governor. “I think he’s a son of a bitch.” he resignation rumors had been flying for days—especially after his loyal adviser Melissa DeRosa quit over the weekend—but it was still hard to believe that he would really give up. For ten minutes, sitting in a cold conference room in his office on Third Avenue, staring into a camera, he made his case. He was sorry. He didn’t mean what the women thought. His enemies were out to get him, as usual. “Rashness has replaced reasonableness,” he said. “Loudness has replaced soundness.” It wasn’t a valediction; it was justification. Karen Hinton—a former Cuomo aide who wrote a column in the Daily News in May describing his alleged harassment, bullying, and practice of “penis politics”— was watching on her laptop in the living room of her home in New Orleans. “I thought, Well, shit—you know, this is more of the same,” she said. “Now, you know me,” Cuomo was saying. “I’m a New Yorker, born and bred. I am a fighter, and my instinct is to fight through this controversy because I truly believe it is politically motivated. I believe it is unfair

and it is untruthful, and I believe that it demonizes behavior that is unsustainable for society.” “I was thinking, Okay, I hear the ‘but’ coming,” Hinton said. “If I could communicate the facts through the frenzy, New Yorkers would understand.” There it was: If. With that syllable, Governor Cuomo’s political existence became conditional. In fact, New Yorkers understood him all too well for entirely too long. He was almost Trumpishly incapable of ever conceding an inch of ground and appeared to be willing to do anything, however brutish, to survive. He didn’t seem to care a whit that Joe Biden and every Democratic official of any importance in the state had called for his resignation. Most worryingly to many in Albany, he seemed almost certain to win reelection next year, damn it all. But in that moment, the consummate maneuverer conceded he was out of moves. “Government really needs to function today. Government needs to perform,” he said in his speech, sounding at least to himself magnanimous. It’s already difficult to imagine how it went on this long. Everyone knew what he was. Just open up the thick, dog-eared file of his press clippings. “The antipathy toward him,” Adam Nagourney of the New York Times wrote of Cuomo in 2002, “is visceral, driven by a vague impression

that he is pushy, ambitious and too urgent in pursuing his career.” Eight years later, his colleague Jonathan Mahler wrote, “That Cuomo has become New York’s dominant Democrat figure is something of a political miracle.” Five years later, here’s Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker: “He is the uncommon elected official with a streak of misanthropy.” Many people in New York politics seemed to be of the view that, gross and demeaning as Cuomo’s behavior with the women who worked for him was, it was only a symptom of a weird and disturbing power pathology. The 165-page report was accompanied by hundreds more pages of evidence in three appendices, offering damning documentation of the steps that Cuomo’s inner circle took to discredit the women—leaking personnel files of Lindsey Boylan, his first accuser, and manipulating a young woman into recorded phone conversations—and ripping open for the first time the culture of absolute fear and paranoia that pervaded his office. Of course, it was only the revelation of it that was stunning. “The abuse detailed in the report was just one manifestation of the fact he has been governing by extortion and threats for his entire tenure,” said a former high-level state official and Cuomo antagonist who called as he was enjoying a celebratory beer. (Many of those interviewed for this article requested anonymity because, even

“YOU CAN’T TALK A NAIL INTO GOING INTO A BOARD. YOU CAN’T CHA T NAIL INTO A BOARD. IT HAS TO BE HIT WITH A HAMMER.”

after his disgrace and resignation, it was still impossible for them to believe that Cuomo was really, truly finished in politics or incapable of someday seeking revenge.) “The arc of his entire career,” he said, “is one of thuggery.” In his youth, Cuomo made his reputation—and an enduring nickname, “The Prince of Darkness”—as the right hand of his father, whom he always addressed as “Mario.” Cuomo the elder was on the verge of political oblivion after multiple losses when he turned, for lack of other options, to his eldest son to manage his long-shot 1982 campaign for governor. Andrew was a student at Albany Law School and had a weekend job in Queens driving a tow truck. But under the 24-yearold’s management, the campaign won a huge upset over then-Mayor Ed Koch. Andrew took a dollar-a-year salary and an impressive office on the second floor of the State Capitol Building. He was a trusted adviser and, people in politics whispered, the old man’s goon. The rap carried more than a tinge of ethnic stereotyping—Mario was the first Italian American to be elected governor of New York—but it stuck, in part because Andrew was happy to play the tough guy. He was an operative and an operator. He enjoyed the company of reporters, who shared his interest in the inside game. In 1988, he roared around with a writer from this magazine in his light-blue Corvette Stingray, chainsmoking Parliaments and telling indiscreet stories. “I’m talking to a reporter once,” Andrew said. “He says, ‘Well your father is very liberal.’ I say, ‘Liberal! Liberal!’ I say, ‘This is an Italian guy, grew up in South Jamaica, Queens. I’m 18 years old, I’m still waiting for my talk on sex!’ Boom! That was the lead! So the next thing you know, this book arrives in the mail.” The hardbound volume was titled A Compendium of Advice to My Son Andrew on Matters of Sex, by Mario Cuomo. Inside, all the pages were blank. As a pair, the Cuomos defied the immigrant-assimilation cliché. Mario was thoughtful, urbane, smooth around the edges. Andrew somehow felt more firstgeneration: “A man of unseemly hunger,” in the words of a political writer who encountered him early in his rise. The origins of that hunger were not hard to guess. For all his beautiful oratory and public rumination— the “Hamlet on the Hudson” routine— Mario was a blank page when it came to his son: distant, unappreciative, imperious. Andrew wanted him to run for president in 1992, at a time the Democratic Party looked to be theirs for the taking, but Mario fritaugust 16–29, 2021 | new york

tered away the opportunity. Andrew wanted Mario to accept a nomination to the Supreme Court the following year, when Bill Clinton broached it, but Mario took a pass. In 1994, he lost the governor’s office to Pataki, a nonentity propped up by another family enemy, then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato. “Maybe the people just didn’t like Mario Cuomo,” the defeated governor moped to a reporter. Andrew had little to do with that race. By then, he was well in the midst of his metamorphosis into his father’s heir apparent. He was hardly the first hotheaded son to follow his father into politics, but the younger Cuomo’s route was characteristically overcrafty. It was as if he had set out to remake his life to attract regular coverage in the New York Post. He became an urban problem-solver, founding a nonprofit to take on the crisis of homelessness, which had reached dire levels in New York City. He courted an idealistic young woman, Kerry Kennedy, daughter of RFK, taking her out on his motorcycle to a housing project on their first date. “How do you think it will play?” he asked his reporter friends before he asked her to marry him, according to Michael Shnayerson’s biography of Andrew, The Contender. The engagement party was held at McFadden’s, a newsroom watering hole on Second Avenue. His sometimes pal Donald Trump, who had given Mario campaign donations and later raged at him when he wouldn’t get Andrew to do him a favor at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, sent a videotaped testimonial. “Whatever you do,” advised the developer, then in the midst of his Ivana divorce, “don’t ever, ever fool around.” After Clinton hired Andrew for an undersecretary position at HUD in 1993, he and Kerry had moved down to Washington, where they lived at Hickory Hill and her late father’s suburban estate in Virginia. When the HUD secretary resigned amid a criminal investigation involving payments to a mistress, Cuomo was promoted to the top job. He quickly became known as one of the administration’s most politically savvy Cabinet members, and he surrounded himself with a loyal crew, including an ambitious up-and-comer named Bill de Blasio. Andrew was gunning to run for something. In 2001, he declared his candidacy for governor at a shoe store owned by his brotherin-law, Kenneth Cole. That first campaign was the sort of experience that would have forever leveled a less-formidable ego. Andrew never managed to articulate a rationale for running. The plan seemed to be to use his family name, his Kennedy connections, and his 18 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

force of will to win the nomination over Carl McCall, the state comptroller who was vying to make history as New York’s first Black governor. Cuomo fumbled the obligatory stuff. He couldn’t line up the unions behind him. And he couldn’t make himself likable. He made dismissive remarks about Pataki’s performance after September 11: “Rudy Giuliani was the hero of 9/11. He held the leader’s coat,” Andrew said, which made him look like a twerp. Facing certain defeat in the primary, Andrew dropped out. Soon afterward, Kerry demanded a divorce. Andrew’s lawyer put out a statement saying she had “betrayed” him, and soon word of an affair leaked to the tabloids. Meanwhile, Pataki defeated McCall and went on to tie Mario Cuomo with three terms in office. Andrew later called this his life’s low point, and during his career’s next act, he portrayed the humbling as a formative experience, giving birth to a new man (“Andrew 2.0,” some in Albany called him). In practice, what that meant was that he stripped his political identity down to its ruthless core and rebuilt himself from there. After a few years working for a real-estate investor who was also his chief fund-raiser, Andrew entered a crowded race to succeed Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who was running for governor. He allied himself with Jennifer Cunningham, the political

director of a powerhouse health-care union that had endorsed Pataki (helping him to beat McCall). Cunningham helped him to reintroduce himself to the big institutional players he had previously alienated in his youthful arrogance. Gone were the freewheeling jaunts with reporters; the new Andrew model was tightly controlled and seldom spoke on the record. Andrew won the primary and easily defeated Republican Jeanine Pirro, whose campaign foundered when it emerged that she was under federal investigation for allegedly proposing to bug a boat owned by her husband, whom she suspected of cheating. (She was never charged with a crime.) Then Governor Spitzer resigned when it was revealed he’d been a client of a prostitution ring. Then Spitzer’s successor, David Paterson, dropped his election bid after a series of scandals, including one over his attempts to quash a domestic-violence complaint against a top adviser. The road to the Governor’s Mansion was clear. With rivals like these, who needed friends? “just think about what we did,” Cuomo said on Tuesday, speaking—for the first time—about his tenure in the past tense. “We passed marriage equality, creating a new civil right—legalized love for the LGBTQ community—and we generated a force for change that swept the nation. We passed the safe Act years ago, the smartest

“I DON’T THINK HE WAS A BAD GOVERNOR. HE’S DEFINITELY NOT A NICE HUMAN BEING, THOUGH.”

P H OTO : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E O F F I C E O F G O V. C U O M O

gun-safety law in the United States of America, and it banned the madness of assault weapons.” The governor went on, reviewing a decade of balanced budgets, collegetuition benefits, and new infrastructure. Cuomo styled himself as a man who got things done, a master builder in the tradition of Robert Moses. He knocked down the rickety Tappan Zee Bridge and replaced it with a new, $4 billion span he named after his father. “It’s on time and on budget,” Cuomo boasted, although neither thing was completely true. He opened it by driving across in FDR’s Packard. Later, a whistleblower would claim that Cuomo’s administration had covered up structural deficiencies, one area that legislators were exploring in their now-suspended impeachment hearings. He constructed roads, subway lines, airport terminals. He was a gearhead. Even as governor, he liked to get under the hood with his cars. “Mechanical work,” Cuomo told Politico in a profile published on March 13, 2020. “It’s linear and it’s numerical and there are no emotions and there are no personalities and there’s no foibles. It’s predictable.” Then, within a few days of that story’s publication, an unpredictable catastrophe threw the whole world into chaos. If history is kind, it will remember him for the One Big Thing he got at least superficially right, the covid crisis, in which he played the role of the calm, rational national leader, a counterweight to the maniac in the White House, winning an Emmy for his press conferences. In retrospect, the pandemic was, tragically, his finest moment. Fans declared themselves to be “Cuomosexuals.” (A clothing company that sold sweaters embroidered with the term is now offering to restitch them with a slogan of the buyer’s choice.) Cuomo, a natural scowler, soaked up the glow. Last summer, he unveiled an old-timey-looking poster, a map of the covid “mountain” filled with illustrations representing the most colorful bits from his press conferences. (He was depicted in his Pontiac GTO running his daughter’s boyfriend—the butt of his dad jokes—off a cliff.) Crown gave him a ridiculous $5 million advance for a memoir, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the covid-19 Pandemic, which unfortunately came out as a second wave of covid was starting to swell. It soon was overshadowed by the scandal that did him in. (It has sold fewer than 50,000 copies.) In his resignation speech, Cuom what he had got done over the past but not how. He practiced a style of politics distilled by a then-senior aide: “We operate

Cuomo revealing “The New York Tough” poster on July 13, 2020. at two speeds here: Get along and kill.” Cuomo won legislative battles by outsmarting and outworking his opposition and, when the first two tactics didn’t work, by bullying them. In 2011, he threatened to not legalize taxis in New York City’s outer-boroughs if the Bloomberg administration didn’t agree to a deal that would potentially cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars in health-care expenses for public employees. “He was just a miserable fucker on the taxi thing,” Bloomberg’s former chief Albany negotiator Micah Lasher recalled. “It was just a straight-up shakedown.” Lasher felt especially free to opine on the episode in part because “Saddam has been toppled. These don’t need to be state secrets.” Managing the press was as critical to Cuomo’s government as managing the government. He read all his own print news coverage (it took him a while to move to the internet) and, early in the morning after a critical story was published, he would dispatch his aides, or sometimes just call himself from an unlisted number, to scream at reporters and their editors about the tone of the coverage or the headline. After de Blasio was elected mayor of New York City, Cuomo promptly turned on his onetime ally and started working him like a heavy bag, screwing with him on policy matters and pummeling him in thinly veiled quotes to the newspapers. (Once, Cuomo accidentally outed himself as the anonymous “adminis-

tration official” who called the mayor “bumbling and incompetent” in The Wall Street Journal and lampooned him in the Daily News.) Aides would threaten to go over an editor’s head to the publisher, or to pressure advertisers to pull their dollars from news websites. Cuomo and his people felt no compunction about weaponizing details of critics’ and journalists’ lives, going so far as to compile a dossier on a reporter’s “snarky” journalism. Rumors swept the rooms of the Capitol where the press corps worked that Cuomo’s aides were going to extreme lengths to monitor reporters. One prominent journalist talked about raising funds to hire surveillance experts to sweep the press room for bugging devices. uomo saw no distinction between his personal life and his work, and he expected the same of his closest aides. He was possessive of staffers’ time and controlling about their careers. He routinely pressed people who’d left the administration back into service, whether to help construct PowerPoint slideshows for his annual State of the State speech or to run crisis comms when he got in trouble. Ex-aides had to solicit and receive Cuomo’s blessing when they sought new employment. Otherwise, they risked losing the job offers. “The odd part about these workplace stories,” Cuomo’s former chief (Continued on page 82)

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new york | august 16–29, 2021

The

Spine COLLECTOR for the past five years, a mysterious figure has been stealing books before their release. is it espionage? revenge? a trap? or a complete waste of time? By

REEVES WIEDEMAN with

LILA SHAPIRO i l l u s t r a t i o n s by

M a d i s o n Ke tch a m

n the morning of March 1, 2017, Catherine Mörk and Linda Altrov Berg were in the offices of Norstedts, a book publisher in Sweden, when they received an unusual email. A colleague in Venice was asking for a topsecret document: the unpublished manuscript of the forth coming fifth book in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” series. The books, which fol low hacker detective Lisbeth Salander, have sold more than 100 million copies. David Lagercrantz, another Swedish writ er, had taken over the series after Larsson’s death, and his latest—The Man Who Chased His Shadow—was expected to be one of the publishing events of the year. Norstedts was guarding the series closely. Lagercrantz wrote his first “Millennium” book on a computer with no connection to the internet and delivered the manuscript on paper, at which point Norstedts mailed a single copy to each of the book’s inter national publishers. With the new title, Norstedts wanted to streamline the process—Lisbeth Salander’s publisher, they figured, should be able to protect itself from hackers and thieves. Mörk and Altrov Berg, who handle foreign rights at Norstedts, con sulted with other publishers of blockbuster books. The translators working on one of Dan Brown’s followups to The Da Vinci Code, for instance, were required to work in a basement with security guards clocking trips to the bathroom. Norstedts decided to try sharing the new “Millennium” book via Hushmail, an encryptedemail service, with passwords delivered separately by phone. Everyone would have to sign an NDA. The unusual email came from Francesca Varotto, the book’s Italianedition editor, and arrived shortly after Norstedts sent out the manuscript: Dear Linda and Catherine, I hope you are well. Could you please resend me the link to the manuscript of The Man Who Chased His Shadow? Thank you! Best, Francesca

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Minutes later, and a few blocks away m Norstedts headquarters in Stock lm, Magdalena Hedlund, the agent rep enting the book, received a similar ail from Varotto. It was strange that rotto had lost something so valuable, t she and Hedlund were old friends, and e email struck a familiar tone. Plus eryone was scrambling: The book was set for release in 27 countries simultane ously, and the translators had to get started. Hedlund sent her friend the link to the manuscript. Varotto replied instantly. “I’m sorry M,” she wrote. Varotto said that her password was “disabled/expired.” Could Hedlund send a new one? Back at Norstedts, Mörk also received an email from Varotto. “Sorry Catherine,” the message read. “Could you please give me the Hushmail code?” Altrov Berg dashed off a separate message to Varotto, asking if everything was okay. Suddenly, her phone rang. “Why are you sending me this?” Varotto asked. Altrov Berg explained what was happening. Varotto was confused. She hadn’t sent any emails to Norstedts all day. With Varotto on the phone, the two Norstedts employees scrolled through the messages. The emails looked like ones Varotto would send: The text used the same font, and the signature at the end was styled just like hers. Then, with Varotto still on the line, Mörk got yet another email asking for the password. They scanned the messages again. Only now did Varotto notice that the signature listed her old job title; she had been pro moted two months earlier. The subject line also misspelled the name of her company. Finally, they realized the email address wasn’t hers at all: The domain had been changed from @marsilioeditori.it to @marsilioeditori.com. Everyone deleted the emails. What other malicious tricks were lurking inside? The IT department at Marsilio Editori began investigating and found that the fraudulent domain had been created the day before through GoDaddy. It was regis tered to an address in Amsterdam and a Dutch phone number. When an employee tried calling, it went straight to a record ing: “Thank you for calling IBM.” The “Millennium” team was in a panic. The thief didn’t yet have the password, as far as they knew, but was clearly deter mined to get it. Publishers around the world depend on a best seller like this, and an online leak of the manuscript could derail its release.

But the book’s publication came and went without a hitch. The manuscript never reappeared. What was Fake Fran cesca Varotto after? Much more than Lisbeth Salander’s bestselling exploits, it turned out. On the same day as the “Millennium” emails, Fake Francesca asked someone else in publishing for an early look at Lot, Bryan Washington’s story collection, as well as a debut novel about an accountant who becomes a fortune teller. Even stranger, the thief had other identities. Later that day, a fake Swedish editor went to the Wylie Agency in London to request a copy of Louise Erdrich’s just announced novel, and someone pretend ing to be Peter van der Zwaag, a Dutch editor, asked a colleague in New York for the same fortuneteller book. Fake Peter then introduced his new assistant to request that she be added to a private mail ing list filled with confidential publishing information. The assistant followed up with a friendly note: “It’s so busy and over whelming now with the London Book Fair, isn’t it?” The assistant didn’t exist. this was a setup Stieg Larsson would have admired: a clever thief adopting mul tiple aliases, targeting victims around the world, and acting with no clear motive. The manuscripts weren’t being pirated, as far as anyone could tell. Fake Francesca wasn’t demanding a ransom. “We assumed it was the Russians,” Mörk said. “But we are the book industry. It’s not like we’re digging gold or researching vaccines.” Per haps someone in publishing, or a Hollywood producer, was desperate for early access to books they might buy. Was the thief simply an impatient reader? A strungout writer in need of ideas? “In the hacker culture that Stieg Larsson de picted, they do a lot of things not for finan cial benefit,” Mörk pointed out this spring, “but just to show that they can do it.” When I first heard about the scheme in February, four years after the attempted “Millennium” heist, the thief was still on the loose, exhibiting behavior that was even bolder and more bizarre as they chased after everything from Sally Rooney’s latest to novels by obscure writ ers never published in English before. This sounded like a fun challenge, a digital mys tery to obsess over at a time when the real world was shut down. I texted a friend in publishing to find out more. She quickly replied, “The culprit has been identified.” This was unexpected. The New York Times had two reporters on the case last year, and the FBI had been called in to investigate,

but no charges or accusations had been leveled publicly. One of my colleagues, Lila Shapiro, looked into the scam in 2019 but dropped the story after concluding the case might be too baffling to crack. Many in publishing were too paranoid to discuss it. One literary agent, who had become obsessed with solving the mystery, had declined to talk because she feared Lila herself might be the thief. And yet my contact was certain—or “like 85 percent sure”—that the thief was a par ticular person, a man who had worked in New York publishing for a decade. He was an outsider in the industry with a reputa tion for becoming pushy when he didn’t get what he wanted. He seemed to conduct his business almost entirely over email. Even more intriguing: Someone, I was told, had proof. on the spectrum of cyberattacks, this one wasn’t very complex. There was no ma licious software or actual hacking involved. Some of the earliest victims used Gmail ac counts for work, which were easy and free to spoof. Registering an alternate domain and setting up an email server was only slightly more involved, and the possibilities were endless: t’s became f’s (@wwnorfon. com), q’s replaced g’s (@wylieaqency.com), r’s and n’s cornbined to make m’s (@penguinrandornhouse.com). The do mains suggested someone who liked to play with words as much as code. Books became bocks, unless the company was Dutch, in which case boek was Anglicized to book. What did seem sophisticated was the thief’s knowledge of the business. The cul prit wrote like someone in publishing, abbreviating to “MS” for manuscript and “WEL” for world Englishlanguage rights, while exchanging insider chatter, telling one victim that a publisher was pitching a book as a comp to Pachinko and expressing surprise to another that a novel had recently sold for a shocking amount. The thief sent messages in the wake of announcements on Publishers Marketplace, a subscription website that tracks deals, but they also asked about books that the thief ’s marks didn’t even know existed. The mimicry wasn’t always perfect—an assistant at the talent agency WME realized her boss was being impersonated because she would never say “please” or “thank you”—but the impression was good enough. What’s more, the thief seemed to have a strong grasp of the rarefied world of inter national publishing. The first email fall of 2016, traveled almost exc among the small group of people who

handle the flow of manuscripts between countries, including a foreignrights man ager in Greece, an editor in Spain, and an agent selling international writers in the Chinese market. In the attempted “Millen nium” heist, only a few dozen people in the world knew the book was being shared with foreign publishers and that Mörk and Altrov Berg controlled access to it. Suspicion quickly fell on literary scouts, whose work involves getting early access to books in order to advise foreign publishers and Hollywood studios whether to buy the rights. “We’re the ghost in the publishing machine,” Jon Baker, who works as a scout, said. “If anybody is going to be randomly asking you about something that’s coming out, it’s a scout.” The job requires finding books that match a client’s taste—a German publisher that wants historical fiction, a streaming service looking for strong female protagonists with a drinking problem—but scouts mostly try to get everything. Because agents often want to control who sees a book and when, a scout’s ultimate coup is a “slip,” or a manu script obtained surreptitiously from a friendly source, cultivated over cocktails and coffees, giving the scout’s client a few extra days, or hours, to consider a book before the competition gets ahold of it. The most common shorthand is to say that scouts are the book world’s spies. If the thief were a scout using digital espionage to get books that couldn’t other wise be acquired, then that narrowed the list of suspects. “I always joke that scouting is like 40 people on earth,” said Kelly Farber, a New York–based scout. “It’s prob ably more like 60, but it’s not in the triple digits.” People eyed lessestablished play ers with suspicion. “I just thought it was a very bad scout who couldn’t get manu scripts,” Lucy Abrahams, a scout who lives in Tel Aviv, told me. The person I’d been urged to look into was also a scout. The charges against him were vague—bad email manners, unusu ally aloof among his peers—but a source told me they had heard that a literary agency in New York had “hired an investi gator” to look into the case and found something damning. My source was light on details, but the suspect had apparently been sloppy, attaching his real name and email to one of the fake domains registered early on in the scheme. Intrigued, my col league Lila agreed to take up the case again with me. If the evidence was good, the mystery could be solved. Actual proof was harder to come by. No one I spoke to at the literary agency

seemed to know anything about it. Other domains were being registered with enough security to protect the thief ’s iden tity, and when people reached out to GoDaddy about shutting them down, the company often did so, but declined to share any information, citing its privacy policy. It did seem curious that some of the domains appeared to be registered in the Netherlands and that the thief wrote to one person in passable Dutch. Several scouts noticed that a former colleague had recently started an ebook company that would presumably need content. He hap pened to be from Holland. But the registrations appeared to be a red herring. Domains popped up with no clear pattern, registered to the address for a gay men’s health clinic in London, an H&M in Copenhagen, a housing develop ment in Harlem, a bookstore in Mel bourne. The scouting theory also had con siderable holes. Many of the books were ones that any scout could get without much trouble. While agents and publish ers tightly guard big titles like the “Millen nium” series, which prop up the entire business, the challenge with most books is getting anyone to read them. One of the thief ’s early targets—“a modestly selling author’s fifth novel,” as the book’s agent put it—sold fewer than 2,000 copies. The scheme seemed like a lot of work for little reward. And it came with great risk.

hile riding the TGV from Paris to Germany in October 2018, a scout I’ll call Natasha—she request ed a pseudonym in order to more freely discuss industry spywork—sent an excited email to her clients. A few days earlier, she had received a message from a scout named Jane Southern offering a trade. Southern had Ian McEwan’s new novel, Machines Like Me, and said she would slip it to Natasha, perhaps in exchange for another big release. Scouts don’t often swap manuscripts, which amounts to giving intelligence to the enemy, but this was an unusual case. The foreign rights to a title by a bigname writer like McEwan are spoken for well in advance, which made the book less valu able to Southern’s clients around the world. Natasha, however, was among a growing number of scouts who work exclusively on behalf of Hollywood producers and stu dios, and the film rights to a new McEwan could be snatched up fresh each time. The book would be a trophy for Natasha to show her clients as she arrived at the Frank

august 16–29, 2021 | new york

furt Book Fair, international publishing’s Davos, and she was especially grateful to Southern for the offer because they had never met in person. Natasha saw South ern at a dinner and thanked her for the slip. Southern had no idea what she was talk ing about. After a quiet summer, the thief was back with a new tactic. They didn’t just want the McEwan. The McEwan was bait. And if the thief were trading in books that were of great interest to Hollywood, the money involved might change the riskreward cal culus for a scout. Studios and production companies depend on their film scouts for early access to books in order to start woo ing a director and identifying starworthy roles that would make for an enticing pack age. Maria Campbell, the scouting world’s biggest player, made her name in part by

her look through her inbox, that for seven months she had been sending manuscripts to the thief, rather than a scout she thought was simply dying to read her books. Several people decided it was time to ask for outside help. A scout broke the news to The Bookseller, a British trade publication, and Publishers Weekly spoke to Ziv Lewis, who works for an Israeli publisher and said that he had threatened the thief with “Mossadstyle cyberwarfare.” Erin Edmison, a scout in New York, even approached someone at the state attorney general’s office, only to be told that the potential for criminal rather than civil charges, not to mention the jurisdictional quagmire—how do you prosecute someone impersonating a Romanian asking a Swede for an American novel?—meant she might be better off trying the FBI. To many in the industry, the case felt like one that book peo ple, having sold no shortage of spy novels, could solve on their own. “There’s a bunch of us ama teur Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys who have made our ver sions of the Claire Danes Homeland wall,” said Baker, the scout. In the spring of 2019, Baker con ducted a sting. After the thief emailed a European client asking for Of Women and Salt, one of the season’s hottest novels, Baker mocked up a PDF with the book’s cover page— followed by the text of Pride and Prejudice. Baker told his client to slip the Austen mashup to the thief and then alerted oth ers to their plan. If the thief was a scout, Baker hoped, they would unwittingly send the fake book to their clients. But the PDF never turned up. Others tried similar gam bits to no avail. Three years into the crime spree, an industry based on trust and relationships faced a growing paranoia. Agencies started passwordprotecting minor books. (“I got a 70page Dutch novella with an NDA,” one scout said. “An NDA for a 70page Dutch novella!”) A scout and an agent developed a code word they included in emails to authenticate their conversations. People were suddenly distrustful of colleagues they had worked with for years. The attacks felt personal. It was violating to men and women of letters to have their words appropriated—especially once authors themselves became targets. Many writers were vulnerable to the ruse, eager to please someone they thought was their agent or editor. Others experienced it as yet another letdown. The thief reached out to

“ TAKE MY ADVICE: DROP THIS STUPID ARTICLE AND STOP WITH IT IMMEDIATELY!!! ” getting Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in front of Steven Spielberg; today, she scouts for Netflix. The thief ’s earliest emails hit just as the streaming wars began and the hunger for content with a builtin audience ramped up. A producer landing early access from the thief would still need to buy the rights through proper channels, but a head start would make them ready to pounce when the time came. The thief did possess a tenacity more common in Hollywood than the book world. If a target didn’t respond, the thief would often follow up with an identical request several hours later. One person received nine emails from the thief in a single day. Some insiders speculated the thief was servicing multiple Hollywood clients—scouts, producers, studios—none of whom knew, or wanted to know, where the material was coming from. “Maybe it’s another level down,” one literary agent whispered. “A subcontracted service.” By the fall of 2018, the thief had made off with dozens of books, although no one knew how many times people had fallen for the scam, so the total haul was likely much higher. A literary agent in New York didn’t realize until this summer, when I helped

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an Icelandic author, expressing interest in representing that person’s work abroad, only to disappear with their manuscript. In 2019, the thief found out that Eka Kurniawan, an Indonesian novelist who was nominated for the Man Booker Inter national Prize, had a deadline looming and decided to impersonate his agent. “You told me the manuscript would be ready before the 18th of July and it’s now the 14th,” the thief wrote, applying pressure on Kurni awan to hand over the draft. Kurniawan is now two years late, and his agent, Maria Cardona, said the stress was partly respon sible. “He’s been quite stuck,” she said. Multiple people told me they were con vinced the thief was someone they knew pursuing a personal vendetta. But the breadth of the scheme suggested a grudge against the entire industry—perhaps an underling whose career hadn’t panned out was spoiling a party they weren’t invited to. A few months after his foiled sting, Baker sent a snarky reply to the thief in which he concocted another fake book. “There’s a new submission over here that’s the talk of the town,” Baker wrote. The book, he said, was called Anatomy of a Fraud. Baker told the thief it was “epistolary, a series of email exchanges.” The thief’s response suggested they were either oblivious to the innuendo or taking a sly delight in the chaos they were creating. They asked, “Can you share the MS pls?”

ur investigation was mov ing slowly. More leads were coming in, each less helpful than the last. A new suspect would surface, only for the evidence to fall apart under minimal scrutiny. The smok ing gun I’d been promised remained elu sive. The closest I could get was a former assistant at the literary agency in question who recalled the damning domain regis tration, but only in part. The domain had been registered to an address in Manhat tan, somewhere above Central Park. I turned to the emails themselves. Tex tual analysis came naturally to the indus try’s sleuths, some of whom claimed to detect a Germanic cadence in the thief ’s writing or an idiomatic French syntax. But each victim had only a tiny glimpse of the thief ’s body of work. I started collect ing dozens and eventually hundreds of emails, from all over the world, hopeful that patterns would emerge. It was difficult to find anything mean ingful. The thief largely emailed on week days, during New York working hours, but there were exceptions. They asked for

“favours” and spread “rumours,” but also wished American victims a Happy Fourth of July. They wrote poorly in many languages: Hebrew, Icelandic, Korean, Swedish. (A Brazilian caught on when the thief wrote to him in European Portu guese.) The thief ’s English, meanwhile, could be crisp and formal; clumsy and stilted; playful and clever; sometimes unreadable. They mostly wanted to get their hands on adult fiction, with occa sional forays into YA and just enough non fiction to make their taste in books inscru table. Their favorite emoticon was ;). With no pattern emerging, we looked to one of the thief’s biggest attacks for clues: an attempt in 2019 to steal The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Over several months, emails were sent almost every day to pretty much anyone associated with the book: Atwood’s agent, her publishers, their assistants, even judges for the Booker Prize—along with many others who had no connection to the book at all. “If it is a scout, then they’re often getting it spectacularly wrong,” Karolina Sutton, Atwood’s agent, said of the spray andpray approach. “It’s almost like they’ve hired someone else to do it.” The attack presented new wrinkles. The thief began employing a devious deception that involved creating a fictional exchange between two people—an editor and an agent, say, talking about changes to a manuscript—then including the imagi nary backandforth at the bottom of their email as if the thief were forwarding a con versation. The attacks concerned Atwood’s agency so much that it decided not to share the final version of the book wit publishers until after its domestic disrupting the book’s global unveiling.

Atwood’s representatives assumed that piracy was the goal. Her foreign publishing rights were spoken for, and Hulu was airing The Handmaid’s Tale, meaning the streamer was likely first in line for the film andTV option. An IT consultant for Atwood’s agency developed a related theory, positing that snippets of the manuscript were being used as bait to trick readers to turn over their creditcard information. But, yet again, no pirated manuscript appeared online. (The only leak came from the industry’s other disruptor: Amazon accidentally shipped 800 copies early.) Some in publishing were beginning to question whether manuscripts were even the end goal. How else to explain why the thief would want sample pages of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite storyboards and a ten page book proposal for Michael J. Fox’s memoir? After a rights manager in Ger many got hit, she speculated that a security company was stresstesting publishers in the hopes of later selling them protective software. Several friends I spoke to who consider themselves the good kind of hackers said this sounded like a cyber gang’s training program: The stakes were low, the targets weren’t especially tech savvy, and there was a deliverable target— the MS—that a new recruit could bring home before moving on to stealing login credentials from employees at a nuclear reactor. In the wake of North Korea’s alleged leaking of emails from Sony Pictures, could this be another attempt to destabilize western culture? Dramatic, perhaps—but then again, I had found nearly 200 companies in more than 30 countries that the thief had impersonated, and none of them was Russian. If the thief were really multiple thieves

working from a dark warren somewhere, how did they know so much about book publishing? In early 2020, an explanation presented itself. Virginia Ascione, an Ital ian editor, sent an email to Mira Trenchard, her scout in the U.K. Minutes later, another scout Ascione works with received an identical email—only this one was sent by the thief impersonating Ascione. Some how, the thief had instantly recreated a private message between two real people. Several months later, Trenchard was emailing with an editor friend when she realized her friend was being imperson ated. Trenchard sent a separate email ask ing if she knew about the scam. “I didn’t!” the friend wrote back. “How sinister.” The thief then replied to the message Trenchard had sent to her friend with a gonzo version of the same response. “NO, I didn’t!!!” the thief wrote. “How sinister!!” The thief, it seemed, was somehow read ing Trenchard’s emails. (Trenchard has changed her password and hasn’t had any such incidents of late.) Several people told me about similar experiences with other publishing companies. Perhaps the thief had seemed at home in the publishing world not because they were a part of it but because they had been lurking inside people’s inboxes all along. This suggested an operator that textual analysis wasn’t going to unmask. We had no choice: Bring in the hackers. We consulted several cybersecurity experts, who found that the thief had upgraded their security starting in 2019, albeit only slightly. They had registered more than 300 fake domains—13 for the Wylie Agency alone— using digital security certificates for an additional layer of privacy. This was enough to prevent our hackers from iden tifying the thief, but it didn’t suggest a sophisticated operation. For one thing, the certificates confirmed that the domains were controlled by a single entity, if not a single person. Many of my fellow sleuths asked me if there was creditcard informa tion to find, not to mention how much the thief was spending on all this. But GoDaddy confirmed it had repossessed a number of the domains, many of them likely owing to payment fraud—the thief seemed to be using stolen credit cards. Others decided it was time to bring in the big guns. Last summer, several people approached the FBI, sharing the thief ’s emails with the bureau. But if this were a crime of which the primary consequence was annoyance, it wasn’t clear how high the case would rank on the FBI’s priority list. (The bureau (Continued on page 84)

august 16–29, 2021 | new york

AS SEEN ON

DANCING, SMOKING, AND PLAYING ALL SUMMER LONG AT NEW YORK’S

from left: Emilio Vides-Curnen, Gobi-Kla Vonan, Jonathan Chay, Brandon Leo Beasley, Rob Dozier, Jay-Michael Wilson, and

RIIS BEACH

QUEEREST SEASHORE. ➽ PORTFOLIO BY WAYNE LAWRENCE jay-michael wilson: My partner is a Cancer and loves the ocean.

Preparation for a beach trip is taken seriously by us. We’re kind of like an old married couple. We prepare for anything but always end up forgetting something. We love to discuss our outfits days before the trip. It’s a cute thing we do.

Justin Duckworth, Brooklyn

august 16–29, 2021 | new york

I’D L ST MY PH E.

To be more specific, I drank too much tequila, went to a party I didn’t like, drank more tequila, and, somewhere between an Uber and the front steps of my apartment, lost my new iPhone. The next morning, hung-over and depressed, I make my way to Jacob Riis beach with one of my first queer friends in New York, a bag of White Claws in hand, hoping it would somehow make everything better. Riis is the city’s most democratically queer beach, named in 1914 after the muckraking journalist (then recently deceased) who campaigned (using language that admittedly can seem a bit questionable today) to improve the lives of the city’s immigrant communities. It’s not as easy to get to by subway as, say, Coney Island or even the beaches at the other end of the Rockaways. Instead, you need to take a bus or the ferry, or ride your bicycle, or splurge on a Lyft, or track down that one friend of yours whose partner has a car. The journey is made more tolerable by good company. The vibe is like nightlife but with sunblock, or a block party with bodysurfing. Vendors sell weed and rum punch (“Ice cold! Ice cold!”), and before I can find a vacant spot to lie down, I notice several people I know from going out and hooking up: a boy I want to sleep with, a boy I almost slept with, and another boy I definitely slept with a few too many times. The last one is popping about from group to group in a tiny blue Speedo. Later, I remember his Grindr bio is “As seen on Riis Beach.” On the towel beside us are three topless gorgeous Black women—a couple with their favorite third—surrounded by the remnants of their fun: empty bottles, burnt roaches, and a halfeaten burrito. When I ask why they come here, they all giggle before one of them tells me, “The gays.” They’re all New Yorkers and have been coming here since high school. It’s where they learned to be comfortable topless and where they brought their first-ever girlfriends to make out by the water. “Queers always exist at the margins,” one of them says wryly; the gay part of the beach technically lies at the eastern edge of Riis Park, in front of the ruins of a tuberculosis sanatorium. Probably someone would say that every summer is the summer of Riis, but for those of us without the wherewithal to pay for a share on Fire Island, or much desire to consort with the kind of people who can, or who have been working from home (if we’re working at all) in a locked-down city, it’s been more of a lifeline than ever these past couple of years—probably busier, more diverse, and sexier than at any time in its history. It’s become the center of its own world. “It feels like a gem in the sense that I don’t particularly think the beach is the prettiest, but I think the people are,” says Abi Benitez, cofounder of Gayletter and a frequent visitor. “Every time I go, I bump into at least 20 to 30 people I know: close friends, former colleagues, and old flings that I try to avoid,” says Kile Atwater, an artist who lives in Brooklyn and is among the people we met when we took this portfolio one weekend this summer. They add, “At Jacob Riis, I feel an overwhelming sense of self-love for being Black, queer, and free.” And there aren’t enough places like that. We can credit the seeds of this to, of all people, the racist Robert 28 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

Moses, who in the first half of the 20th century brutally demolished what he saw as “slums” and isolated a lot of Black and brown neighborhoods with highways but also had a thing for swimming. In 1932, the city built Riis Park’s first bathing pavilion by the ocean, but as Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker, the “beach at Jacob Riis Park in the Rockaways was used only sparsely, but there was reason: there was no way for a family without a car to reach it.” Moses later added a mile-long boardwalk and parking. A bridge came in 1937. And who came traipsing across? The queers. According to the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, it soon became a cruising spot. By 1963, the New York Times was recognizing Riis as a place “the New York homosexual” could find friends of “his kind,” and a local guidebook was calling it “one of the best Gay Rivieras in the world … so crowded, nudes go unnoticed.” Before the Stonewall riots set off an explosion of queer organizing across the country, the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian-rights group, was hosting meetups at Riis. One flyer from 1968, with an illustration of two skinny swimsuit-clad women with bobbed hair, gives a directive for an upcoming ladies’ beach day: “La Femmes and others are to bring box lunches and all sorts of goodies [to auction off] … The highest bidder gets to share the lunch with the femme who brought it.” After Stonewall, Riis became a site of political participation where gay activists could hold voter-registration drives on the sand. The thing about Riis is everybody is there to look cute, but the definition of cute is not strictly enforced. Surgery scars are as nonchalantly on display as tattoos. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bar in the city at which the diverse set of queer people of all body types and gender presentations would party together. It’s a horny place, but as Benitez puts it, “it’s more powerful than sexual.” Over the years, there have been periodic police crackdowns on public sex and nudity. Friends who go often tell me the police presence had quieted down during quarantine, but I arrived to find several cops zigzagging furiously through the little islands of people. At the back of the beach, there’s a tall chain-link fence where people go to pee with their backs to the water. Though I watch dozens of men use the fence, the officers suddenly hound a built Black guy in a black Speedo and fine him for urinating in public. Seemingly every group on the beach has brought along some booze, but the same offi“I don’t cers target a blonde with a particularly shaved head and a rattail, booty think the shorts that read stalin, and a doe-eyed Chihuahua and force beach is the her to pour out her beers and prettiest,” says take the dog off the beach. Feet one regular. away sit several more dogs. “But I think Before she heads back to Bushthe people are.” wick, the Chihuahua owner tells me she heard about a weed dealer getting arrested on the beach the day before. When an NYPD chopper flies over, a cop leans out and waves. Half the beach gives him the bird. And then back to the party. Balding gay guys with matching potbellies eat guacamole under a circle of Life Is Good umbrellas; others throw back tall boys under a shady tent. There are dance parties playing Latin music and other dance parties playing backto-back Cher and Gaga. On our towel, my friend and I light up a spliff. I giggle at older men who seem like they could be my dad, if he had lived a different life, and really laugh when I watch a boy we were ogling smoke his joint like he’s smoking a flute. I guffaw at a flag that is half–Pride flag, half–Old Glory and then, when I lean back, on this cloudy, rainless day, I see a damned rainbow in the sky. brock colyar

Ca and Zena Schul

urole, chef,

roduct manager, Bushwick

We live in Bushwick and are getting married this month. Riis was a huge escape for us during summer 2020. It felt like a massive sigh of relief to run onto the beach mask off, like we could finally breathe again. We both have different Riis tattoos; we named one of our disabled cats Riis.

Pa phot

Plush” Arias er, Hamilton Beach

Before I head over, I roll at least four spliffs, pack my pink Telfar, make myself a hearty breakfast, and text my friends to wake up so we can get a good spot on the beach. It’s the essential venue for everyone in NYC’s queer nightlife scene. It’s inspiring. If the dance floor and stage is the altar where we worship, Riis is our after-church picnic.

na Tea drag

Bedford-Stuyvesant

I try to go at least three times a month. I make a bomb playlist and blast it on my speaker while I bike. There was one day when literally all of my friends were there. I remember lying back, just taking it all in, and I looked out into the water to see all my friends swinging their undies in a circle and screaming with laughter. It caught the attention of the whole beach, and I realized then that I have a pretty special group of queers in my life. august 16–29, 2021 | new york

Kile Atwater, artist, Clinton Hill, and Jason Ford, actor, Washington Heights

Luis Corrales, Bushwick

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M.B.: Things have been heavy lately, so I’m trying to be out every hot weekend. I feel like a fish out of water most of the time, so getting to the water is a priority.

Juaynita Mikele Philadelphia

This summer was my first at Riis. I found myself out at the far point of the jetty, with my headphones in, letting the music take me.

Ralph Hopkins, retired chef, Clinton Hill I am 73 years old, and people are so surprised when I tell them my age. I’ve always loved the beach, especially Riis. I’ve been coming here since the late ’60s. I saw it when it was nude in the ’70s. I threw beach parties with fashion shows in the ’90s. At that time, I think I was the only one to give a fashion show with DJs and food. That’s why I know so many people on the beach. They call me the Mayor of Riis Beach. I love the sun and the people. I go as much as I can—at least three times a week.

Stone Tsao, poet, Bedford-Stuyvesant I have been going for 11 years—I started going before I even knew “trans” was possible—and I have been so many different selves here. A year before the pandemic, I started biking to Riis, and that experience has been life-changing. I would bike here and confront my feelings of insecurity and anxiety. Then when the pandemic hit, Riis became a sanctuary. I would bike here with my mask on at least two or three times a week in March, April, and May just to stare at the ocean. By June, I would go early in the day, camp out, and float in the water.

34 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

Nichelle Cox, artist, Pelham Parkway Since I live in the North Bronx and have for most of my adult life, it’s hard to get out to Riis. But I have a ton of Brooklyn and Queens friends and got introduced over a decade ago to the vibe. Now I’m hooked. My brother put it perfectly: “Just folks in their bodies having a good-ass time.” The standouts for the day have been seeing an old boss and resisting the urge to cuss him out since he was with his young child (and I already paid for parking). I had only planned to be in the water ankle to knee at most, because I don’t swim and #blackhair, but the sea had other plans. interviews by andrew nguyen

Decades after Hollywood sensationalized the diagnosis, some people with dissociative identity disorder are presenting their selves on YouTube to rapturous fans. By Lizzie Feidelson

soon after she joined the Army in 2011 at the age of 20. While in basic training, she had bouts of amnesia, during which she forgot having met people she knew. Other times, she found herself suddenly acting outgoing or flirtatious for reasons she couldn’t explain. She had experienced trauma in her childhood—something she still prefers not to talk about— and struggled with symptoms of PTSD throughout her life, including depression and anxiety. But this felt different.

W Y N FELT HER R E A LIT Y BEGIN TO SHIFT

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“I was falling apart,” she told me. Sometimes she felt “like someone else.” She would look in the mirror and feel “disconnected” from the face she saw there, she said. One day, a sergeant found Wyn sobbing in her car in a parking lot, preparing to attempt suicide. After a short hospital stay, Wyn received a medical discharge and, determined to get better, moved back home to the midwestern state where she had grown up. She married a nurse named Andrew whom she had met in the Army. She Photograph by Maegan Gindi

Wyn at home this month.

went to therapy and tried medication and EMDR (a form of psychotherapy that aims to desensitize patients to traumatic memories), but her symptoms didn’t improve. Six years later, despite being on “ungodly amounts of Xanax,” Wyn said, she still woke up some mornings unable to speak or leave her bed. In 2017, Wyn began seeing a therapist she had met through group therapy for childhood trauma. The therapist suggested she undergo a psychological exam called the MID, one of three guides developed in recent decades to aid in the clinical diagnosis of dissociative disorders. Dissociation is a psychological phenomenon that all people experience—when you space out while driving home from work, you are to some degree dissociated from reality. But in extreme situations, typically in the aftermath of traumatic events, dissociation can become pathological. Soon after Wyn took the exam, her therapist diagnosed her with dissociative identity disorder, formerly called multiple personality disorder, the most serious and controversial disorder on the dissociative spectrum. By this point, Wyn had started to admit to herself that she’d long had “thoughts and emotions” that felt like they were coming from someone else. As a kid, her panic attacks had sometimes felt like “bumps” of feeling from another person’s mind. In her late teens, she sometimes dressed as a man and introduced herself at drag shows as Daniel. But as Daniel, Wyn didn’t feel more like the person she was meant to be. Wyn felt like Daniel “was someone else entirely.” Wyn is articulate, earnest, and upbeat, with pale skin and reddish-brown hair (she changes hairstyles frequently). She is the kind of person who cracks self-deprecating jokes about how much she loves anime. She knew how it sounded when she described being out of her own body, inhabited by others. She also knew she wasn’t faking how she felt. Once, she was in her car on the way to class when she had a distinct sensation that there was an older female presence inside her who had taken control of the wheel and was using Wyn’s hands to drive. Wyn found the experience so terrifying that she texted a friend for help. The day after she took the MID, Wyn went to see M. Night Shyamalan’s 2017 film Split, a thriller about a murderer with multiple personalities, on its opening night. Wyn watched the movie horrified, as though it were telling her, “You’re a monster. You’ll never have a family.” Later that week, “desperate for reassurance,” she went on YouTube and searched “multiple personality disorder.” She found channels run by young people with DID, including one called MultiplicityAndMe 38 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

featuring a bubbly 25-year-old named Jess, who was from Wales and had blonde bangs, a supportive husband, and a stable job in the health-care industry. Since 2012, Jess had been posting educational videos that doubled as windows into daily life with the disorder. Instead of repressing her “alters,” Jess treated them as just another part of her, and her followers seemed to love her for it. She now has more than 200,000 subscribers. Wyn found more DID channels. Many vloggers proudly referred to themselves as “systems” of personalities and to their birth name as that of the system “host,” challenging the notion that any of their alters was more real than any other. Jess had four alters, all male, named Jake, Jamie, Ed, and Ollie. Together they managed which of them “fronted” at any given time, sharing airtime on her channel and answering their own Q&As. The systems in these videos pushed back on the idea that having DID made them bad parents or violent or that they were faking it altogether. Instead of seeing their alters as fuzzy, scary presences, the hosts said, they had gotten to know them, and hosts and alters could communicate with one another easily. Many vloggers used they/them pronouns—in a plural sense. When I first saw the channels, the videos seemed at once astonishing and mundane, then still more astonishing for being so mundane. One vlogger filmed herself organizing a hotel room for easy access to her boarding pass if she were dissociating when it was time to head to the airport. When Wyn first saw them, the channels gave her hope.

f course, did is catnip for YouTube. Vloggers have long found an audience by leaning into niche identities—imagine encountering someone who says they have 15. “If you’re not used to it, DID can be very striking when you see it,” even for clinicians, said David Spiegel, a Stanford research professor who is a leader in studying dissociation. The channels appeal to people like Wyn who have been diagnosed and are looking for validation and support, but plenty of viewers come simply because they are fascinated. Ever since the film The Three Faces of Eve was released in 1957, an exaggerated and often inaccurate depiction of dissociative identity disorder has been the norm in Hollywood. From 2009’s United States of Tara and 2015’s Mr. Robot to an upcoming Marvel series, it is usually figured as alternately freakish and alluring, with the stereotypical patient (think Sally Field as Sybil) being a bright, attractive white woman with unpredictable urges that imply sexual vulnerability and a dark past. Most people

think of DID as a plot twist, not as a medical condition that affects real people. DID is not a debunked condition, nor is it widely contested by the medical Establishment, like chronic Lyme disease. Some studies suggest that between 0.01 and one percent of the population may have some form of DID; of those, only a fraction have a dramatic presentation of their systems. (In the 1980s, DID researcher Richard Kluft estimated that roughly 5 percent of people with DID displayed their symptoms with dramatic “switching” between personalities.) The disorder is thought to form in childhood as a response to repeated trauma, commonly sexual abuse but also war, medical procedures, and natural disaster. Getting the right kind of treatment is both difficult and crucial. Some symptoms of DID—like hearing voices or displaying rapid shifts in mood and affect—are often misinterpreted as symptoms of schizophrenia or psychosis, especially in nonwhite people. It can take years of failed treatments to get a correct diagnosis. Studies have found that people with DID are likely to experience abusive relationships, eating disorders, self-harm, and substance abuse. According to one study, 70percent of people with DID had attempted suicide. Someone who has yet to be diagnosed may not recognize their internal landscape as being composed of a cast of alternate identities; instead, the person will describe “a persistent quality of feeling like ‘not me,’” said Amy Dierberger, a psychologist who treats people with DID. Patients may say they feel as if they have different “parts, parts inside, aspects, facets, ways of being, voices, multiples, selves, ages of me,” according to one common treatment guideline. Sometimes these parts or voices argue, converse, comfort, or urge a person to commit suicide. Another frequent symptom is “losing time”: Patients realize they have made purchases or gone places they don’t remember. Clinicians now understand that all of a DID patient’s parts put together constitute a single personality. “There are different senses of self with different attributes, but there aren’t lots of people in one body,” explained Richard J. Loewenstein, another expert in dissociation. “You’re all aspects of a single human being and a single mind.” The condition is both “incredible” and requires treatment that is “very nonexciting,” Dierberger said. Talk therapy with a professional trained in dissociation is considered the gold standard. While a person’s dissociative tendencies may never fully resolve, over time, therapists believe, if a patient tries to deliberately connect with other parts of the self in therapy and works

through traumatic memories with each one, the sense of being made up of separate people may start to fade. Eventually, some or all parts may begin to “fuse” into a cohesive sense of self. “Everything we do,” said Loewenstein, “is unification.” Underlying the treatment is a fundamental medical understanding that experiencing multiple personalities in a single body is a symptom of mental illness.

he period after Wyn’s diagnosis was rocky. Although her husband was supportive, Wyn said, the situation was sobering for them both. She continued weekly therapy, feeling that she and her therapist now “had a direction.” “I was like, All right, what’s up, we’re going to fuse everybody!” she recalled. Her therapist cautioned that this would likely take a while. In the meantime, Wyn decided she would start her own video channel. By this time, Wyn was beginning to learn more about the dissociated parts that made up her personality. Patients in treatment for DID often work to increase communication with their alters by writing to them in a diary or speaking to them out loud or in her head. If patients have been denying their dissociation, this can be a profoundly disturbing experience. One young woman with DID told me that when she started communicating with her alters, she wondered “if it was ghosts, or I was going crazy, or if it was a parallel universe I had somehow tapped into.” Wyn told me her therapist was impressed by her ability to connect with her parts almost immediately—some patients struggle for years to communicate—but expressed hesitation about Wyn sharing her experiences with the public. Her therapist seemed concerned primarily about how others might respond to her disorder, Wyn said; her therapist encouraged her to “keep [my diagnosis] low-key.” Therapists often worry that these patients, many of whom have histories of severe childhood abuse, will remain vulnerable to exploitation as adults. But Wyn, who had recently gone back to college to study geology, decided she did not want to hide herself because of how other people might feel about her. She said being upfront online felt like saying to

society, “I’m not going to shut up.” Wyn’s brother is autistic, and she saw DID YouTube as analogous to channels for the deaf or autistic communities. “I’ve been watching the autistic community go from ‘Please just understand us’ to ‘We’re cool; we just have different ways of communicating,’” she said. In class, one of her professors had recently defined entropy as “something that randomizes and separates.” Wyn decided to call her channel the Entropy System. In her first video, four of Wyn’s alters— whose names she now knew to be Daniel, Mistletoe, Kit, and Mi—front in succession. She had learned how to allow them out at will by doing something she called “falling back in the headspace.” As each alter surfaced and Wyn retreated, she felt as if she were “letting someone else drive.” It was a little bit like what she had felt when the older woman’s presence took over her body in the car, but now she had some control over it. The alters filmed themselves talking about their ages, interests, and how they felt about being part of a system. Wyn edited the results and posted them in late 2017. The video is called Living Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder. When she first watched a video recorded by one of her alters, Wyn thought, Nobody’s going to believe this. But instead of mocking her, viewers crowded in like fans of a superhero universe. They commented on each alter’s traits, tabulating their likes and dislikes and asking questions of specific alters by name. “You guys are all so amazing,” a typical commenter wrote. “I couldn’t stop smiling!” When she wasn’t in class, Wyn started spending nearly all her time online. She met other systems with video channels. Social and medical stigma, especially in the psychiatric community, was a constant topic. Wyn added “Ending Stigma Against DID” to all her intro titles. “There are still a lot of psychiatrists and therapists today that don’t believe the disorder is even real,” she cautions in one of her early videos. In the first two months, her channel gained 1,000 subscribers. Most of her videos had hundreds of comments expressing recognition and relief. “I’ll be 36 in a few weeks,” wrote one commenter. “I just got the official diagnosis on Tuesday. I’m burning through your videos like wild.” Another wrote,

When she first watched a video recorded by one of her alters, Wyn thought, “Nobody’s going to believe this.”

“Every time I hear you speak it’s like you voice everything I think.”

“ i fou n d i t i m po s si bl e t o watch those videos,” said Loewenstein, who founded the Trauma Disorders Program at Sheppard Pratt psychiatric hospital in Baltimore, of DID YouTube. He has a strident, almost gruff way of talking about DID, as though years of public misperception have worn him down. He has treated people with DID for 40 years. Part of it, he said, is the way DID vloggers represent their alters. He thinks the format—“this ‘all these people in one body’ stuff”—is inevitably sensationalistic, but his main concern, in addition to privacy issues, is that being public on the internet about DID could make dissociation worse. If the therapist’s job is to carefully help integrate the pieces of a fractured sense of self, then intentionally cultivating the differences between the parts for an online audience and “interacting with these different states,” Loewenstein said, only encourages them to become more differentiated. “It’s completely anti-therapeutic.” Bethany Brand, another leading DID researcher and therapist, was more qualified in her criticism. “There’s many positives to it,” she said of YouTube. “People feel understood and like they’re not as alone.” But she too is concerned about the way displaying the disorder for public consumption might worsen dissociative symptoms. It isn’t exactly selfharm, yet it certainly isn’t self-care. “If their parts become more elaborated online, I certainly wonder if that will keep them from moving forward to integration.” People with DID, as Brand and other clinicians I spoke with pointed out, often resist the idea of letting go of dissociation. Although it is a resilient and adaptive coping mechanism, dissociation also shields sufferers from painful realities. “It is really common for clients to be scared to death not to dissociate so much,” Brand told me. She wants to see her patients rely less on dissociation as a way of coping and for their involvement in their inner world to dim. “When people get sick of talking about dissociation, that’s something you want to see.” i started talking to wyn over Zoom

around Thanksgiving 2020. If another alter was out at the start of our call, they would introduce themselves in the way someone else might share a fairly inconsequential but ever-so-slightly embarrassing piece of contextual information—almost how one friend might warn another that they’d had a few drinks before getting on the phone. “Oh and, uh, by the way, this is august 16–29, 2021 | new york

Kim Kim,” Kim Kim might say, head tilted, a few seconds in. Wyn’s parts were on the same page about their internal experiences and life story. The differences between them were subtle, although not hard to recognize. Daniel spoke a little more deeply. Kim Kim frequently swore. But speaking to Kim Kim or Daniel still felt like speaking to part of the same being. All three, for example, often used the word phenomenal. (I’ve attributed most quotes in this piece to Wyn for clarity.) Kim Kim, who is one of Wyn’s main alters, was out twice when I called. Most of Wyn’s system switches were planned. (“I’ve been out front for most of the day,” she explained, “doing my own hobbies and doing chores.”) Kim Kim had a wryness that Wyn didn’t, and when she was out, she expressed an especially powerful yearning to be seen as an individual. Online, she told me, she enthusiastically engaged with commenters and was delighted when they told her she reminded them of people they knew. Yet she had to spell it out to someone like me when she was on the call speaking through Wyn’s face, and sometimes I thought her bluntness disguised worry, as when she explained to me, with a touch of exasperation, that she could in fact remember everything from my past conversations with Wyn; the two “share a lot of memory.” YouTube was good for explaining what it was like to live with DID in part because of its longform nature; it captures the texture of someone’s mannerisms and way of speaking more luxuriously than the tightly manicured squares of Instagram or the quick-hit videos of TikTok. Wyn’s YouTube videos went into detail about how she helped facilitate communication between her alters (they wrote notes to each other in a green dollar-store notebook) and managed having a job (at the game store where she worked, she came out to her boss and co-workers without incident). All her alters worked collectively on this goal. “My rule was to be as honest and straightforward as possible,” Wyn told me. On her channel, Wyn tried to strike a balance between encouraging people to take pride in their uniqueness and giving the misimpression that the disorder was some-

how fun. In one video, she says, “I’ve been receiving comments lately of people saying, ‘Oh, I wish I had DID! I’d never be lonely!’” Her voice rises. “Honestly, that’s like going up to someone who was trafficked and being like, ‘Oh, I wish someone would pay me to travel!’” But she also did things that were fun, like sorting her alters into Hogwarts houses using an online Harry Potter– themed quiz or doing a spice-tolerance challenge that showed her alters having different reactions to a spicy pepper gummy. For his footage, Daniel usually donned a flannel; Kit used dark eyeliner. This was a degree of visible difference that some psychiatrists might regard as playing-up symptoms. Wyn told me she felt the separateness she portrayed was primarily for viewer clarity—a helpful visualization, not an exaggeration—mirroring what she felt inside but would usually choose to conceal. Loewenstein told me he questioned whether some vloggers even fit the diagnostic criteria for DID. “In an inpatient unit, when someone walks in and says, ‘I’m DID, look at my switching,’ my nursing staff says, ‘No DID person says that,’ ” he said. “They hide it. They don’t want it recognized.” Clinicians expect their DID patients to be profoundly embarrassed about how they feel. Brand, however, said some of those expressing pride on YouTube may just not have the same shame about the disorder that previous sufferers held on to—and they live differently because of it. Jaime Pollack, a childhood educator in Florida and the founder of the Infinite Mind, an organization for people with DID, meets hundreds of people with DID each year and told me that younger people tend to be “into full acceptance and full embracing. They have their YouTube channels, their parts on their name tags,” she said. “They are very open about it.” Wyn had been involved with the DID community online for just a few months when a blog appeared accusing her of making up her disorder. “This individual is disgustingly fake and attempting to turn Dissociative Identity Disorder into a joke,” one post read. When Wyn learned it had been written by online friends, she “broke down in heaving sobs.”

“I might have pressured my system into fusing against their will if I hadn’t been online.” 40 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

Other people in the community defended her, and eventually Wyn was able to laugh it off. YouTube was still one of the only places where you could see a person with DID living in a way that did not seem dangerous or unstable, and Wyn wanted to keep it that way. The trolls “didn’t get to know how completely they crushed me,” she said. Wyn had started working at the game store in 2018, after she graduated from college. Twice, fans recognized her at work and asked for pictures. Online, Wyn often fielded questions from viewers on how to start their own DID channels. (She advised them to be animated, with their eyebrows up and “energy in their voice.”) She started her own Patreon and set up a post-office box that overflowed with gifts of pillows, stickers, candy, and letters. Most were from people who said they had DID, too: One postcard read, “I have started to feel hopeful again for the first time in a long time.” Some of her subscribers started their own Discord server. She coined a name for her followers: “entropical fish.” By 2019, the community’s top users had become something of an influencer friend group. MultiplicityAndMe, the Welsh YouTuber Wyn had first seen when she researched the condition, held a “DID Sleepover” at her house. Other vloggers filmed the visit and cross-posted videos on their channels. Wyn became close friends with two other systems with DID channels: Team Piñata, a nonbinary Californian with a nose piercing, then 28, and DissociaDID, a then-21-year-old from the U.K. named Chloe who had animated intro titles for all her videos and filmed with a ring light. DissociaDID was quickly becoming the most visible online, with well over a million followers by 2020. She and Team Piñata, whose videos felt more raw and who spoke about bouts of homelessness and not having a therapist, started dating long distance. Wyn found it “really impressive” that Team Piñata was working on healing themselves without the aid of psychotherapy. Running an educational channel about a mental-health topic without any mentalhealth training could be tricky, and Wyn knew that some of her viewers saw her as more of an authority than she was. Wyn, DissociaDID, and others didn’t claim to be professionals, but several of Wyn’s viewers commented that they were clinicians looking to learn more about treating DID. Kelly Caniglia, a therapist I spoke with in North Carolina who specializes in the disorder, said she had received little formal training in treating or identifying DID while getting her master’s degree and relied on the expertise of other practitioners and her own patients to fill in the gaps. When we spoke about her approach

the s tem in he y utu e ch nnel w ’s lters t ke tu ns w th the c mer

Wyn

Kim Kim

Little Bronwyn

Lito

Daniel

to treating it, she said, “Pretty much everything I’ve talked about today I learned from the DID community.” While Wyn wanted to present accurate information to her audience, she was afraid of being too open about her own mental health and giving ammunition to the trolls. Sometimes she announced short mental-health breaks from her channel without going into detail. Taking a break wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course—it indicated in part that she knew when to step away. And to a large extent, Wyn was doing quite well. She had graduated from college. She’d gotten a job. She lived a happy, secure life with a happy marriage. She had friends. Still, she said, “Mental health is unpredictable.”

body is gone,” he said of self-states beginning to cohere. “It’s that everybody is more here than ever.” Yet over time, Wyn found herself questioning the idea that the only way to be healthy was to have one cohesive self. Some of her alters passionately opposed becoming part of one whole. Wyn had by this point watched every video by every DID vlogger she could find, and the content seemed like proof that people with DID did not always lead catastrophically dysfunctional lives. Jess of MultiplicityAndMe still reported suffering from symptoms of PTSD, but she’d also just had a baby and seemed to Wyn like any other young mom. By October 2018, less than a year after she started her channel, Wyn decided that fusion didn’t fit her personal desires anymore. “What if I was in that position?” she wondered, speaking of how her alters might feel. “If someone told me I had to fuse, I’d be devastated.” The psychiatrist and psychiatric anthropologist Laurence Kirmayer argues that the conclusions psychiatry draws about dissociation and its optimal treatment are insep-

Kit

n her channel, Wyn encouraged others with DID not to be nervous about the prospect of fusing their dissociated parts. In one video, she likened “final fusion” to blending different shades of paint into a beautiful new color. Loewenstein echoed this metaphor. “It’s not that every-

arable from the values of western societies, particularly the emphasis on “autonomous and coherent personhood” and “on facing, owning, and integrating traumatic memory.” In other cultures, particularly in parts of Latin America and India where spirit possession is practiced, people are not necessarily expected to recover from dissociative episodes by “facing” or “owning” traumatic memories verbally. But here, someone who does not—or who cannot or who does not wish to—integrate her dissociative experiences into a coherent narrative, especially in talk therapy, is unlikely to be considered mentally well. Instead of fusion, some people in the DID community, even those who said they were in treatment, said they preferred a term like healthy multiplicity or functional multiplicity to describe their treatment goals. The language expressed a desire to remain in a divided, dissociated state without the internal conflict that dissociation implies. Most vloggers who espoused this idea framed it in a way that would be familiar to disability-justice advocates, who have argued since the (Continued on page 87) august 16–29, 2021 | new york

S rn S u i N w r Ci G t v xm i v nts.c m nth v r

r 22n –23r , 2 2 f rm r .

A Nose-to-Tail Guide to Sweat Defense

➸ perspiration is a full-body affair. With sweat glands on nearly every centimeter of our skin—from our scalps to the soles of ou at aily swipe of deodorant. To find the products that will keep everything (and, really, w e e of sources, including dermatologists, podiatrists, endurance athletes, and hair and makeup artists tasked with making their clients shine-free under stage lights. The following are expert picks for dry shampoos that revive limp hair, powders that soak up foot sweat, and salves for soothing sweat-chafed skin in, shall we say, delicate areas.

best bets

Photographs by Rob Frogoso

best bets: sweat minizes lashes, and isn’t impossible to remove like some other waterproof mascaras. TATCHA ABURATORIGAMI JAPANESE BLOTTING PAPERS, $12

Hair It’s not really possible to prevent scalp sweat—unless you’re willing to shell out for Botox injections. So your best option is to spray dry shampoo on your roots to absorb any excess oil, sweat, and odor. Dry shampoos use ingredients like starch and silica that absorb moisture and keep hair from feeling weighed down. KLORANE DRY SHAMPOO WITH NETTLE FOR OIL CONTROL, $20

celebrity hair stylist Aviva Perea says this is her go-to dry shampoo for “a particularly sweaty workout and during the hot summer months.” It contains rice starch to absorb excess oil, and Perea says it leaves her feeling “refreshed and new.” MOROCCANOIL DRY SHAMPOO DARK TONES, $26

the drying agents in dry shampoos that are so effective at absorbing sweat can leave a white residue that’s visible in darker hair. This one, recommended by Benjamin Talbott, is specifically designed to not leave your hair looking chalky. “It’s infused with argan oil and UV filters, which help moisturize and prevent sun damage,” he says.

Face If you wear makeup, you’re likely familiar with the feeling of your foundation or mascara melting down yo pri the plus water stand up to t enough, we n for a personal blast of cool air.

when applied under your foundation, makeup and visual artist Clara Rae Natkin says, this tonerlike liquid “actually physically stops sweating.” It’s a favorite among opera performers and SNL stars, who need to look good under stage lights. With aluminum chlorohydrate, an antiperspirant that blocks pores from releasing sweat, it’s an essential for when you really need to be shine free. BECCA EVER-MATTE PORELESS PRIMING PERFECTOR, $39

if you don’ t need something quite so powerful, a mattifying primer designed for keeping oily skin in check provides a slip-free base for the rest of your makeup. Celebrity makeup artist Amy ZdunowskiRoeder says this Becca primer “tightens your skin and keeps your makeup looking fabulous during the steamiest of days.” COVER FX POWER PLAY FOUNDATION, $44

choose matte over luminous foundation to reduce the shininess of your sweat. Cover FX’s Power Play foundation contains rice-hull powder that absorbs oil. “I have used this foundation for clients in the unforgiving summer heat of New Orleans in July with no worry at all,” says makeup artist Tara Lauren. L’OREAL VOLUMINOUS X FIBER WATERPROOF MASCARA, $12

beauty editor Ruby Budyer s whe w rugst eets he on through heat and sweat, volu-

44 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

ZEASORB EXCESS MOISTURE

“sometimes sweat is inevitable, which is why I always keep a pack of these blotting sheets in my bag,” says Buddemeyer. A light pat with one of these papers, which contain absorbent abaca leaf, removes excess oil without taking off your makeup.

this powder is a favorite among dermatologists for absorbing underboob sweat and keeping your skin dry. “It absorbs three times more moisture than regular baby powder,” according to dermatologist Debra Jaliman.

VERSIONTECH

CARPE NO-SWEAT BREAST, $20

MINI HANDHELD FAN, $15

ALCONE COMPANY STOP THE SWEAT, $14

reason to worry: “Despite rumors that abound, antiperspirant ingredients like aluminum chlorohydrate are safe and not carcinogenic.”

according to Strategist writer Dominique Pariso, this mini-fan is “the closest you can get to sticking your head in the freezer on a steamy train platform.” Small enough to stash in her fanny pack, it charges via USB and runs for hours. “It stops the river of face sweat in its tracks before it even has a chance to get into my eyes,” says Pariso. “And if sweat has already started dripping, it efficiently moves along the evaporation process for me—no desperate wipe-awayand-rub-on-pant-leg necessary.”

Boobs Underboob sweat is its own beast. It’s not that this area necessarily sweats more than the rest of the body—rather, the moisture gets trapped where your breasts meet your torso. “The skin hangs and folds on itself, leaving less air to evaporate the sweat,” says dermatologist Rachel Nazarian. Wedge a bra band in between those folds of skin and it’s not uncommon to wind up with chafing and irritation from the wet fabric rubbing up against you. It’s a problem that requires a multiprong approach: antiperspirants to stop the sweat, powders to absorb it, and creams and balms to ease friction. DOVE ADVANCED CARE SENSITIVE 48-HOUR ANTIPERSPIRANT & DEODORANT STICK, $5

“topical antiperspirants are fair game to use in this area,” says Nazarian. “Just make sure you’re using one that’s unlikely to irritate delicate skin.” Both she and dermatologist Heidi Waldorf recommend alcohol-free antiperspirants from Dove that feature moisturizing ingredients that won’t irritate skin. If you’re hesitant about using antiperspirants near your breasts, Waldorf says you have no

2.5 OZ (PACK OF 2), $14

if powders are too messy for you, there are lotions and creams that serve a similar function. Jaliman likes this one from Carpe that contains a slew of sweat-absorbing ingredients such as cornstarch, ricebran extract, and silica microspheres, plus witch hazel for soothing the skin. SQUIRREL’S NUT BUTTER ALL NATURAL ANTI-CHAFE SALVE, $13

while its name suggests it’s better suited for a different body part (and it can certainly be used there, too), elite marathon runner Tina Muir says Squirrel’s Nut Butter salve is the best product she’s found for preventing chafing along the sports-bra line. “It doesn’t ruin clothes or leave grease marks like Vaseline,” she says. Designed for athletes, it uses moisturizing ingredients like coconut oil, cocoa butter, and beeswax to form a protective barrier on the skin to stop chafing. BELLY BANDIT DON’T SWEAT-IT BRA LINERS, $20

made from moisturewicking bamboo, this discreet bra liner recommended by dermatologist Morgan Rabach sits in between your chest and your bra band to both absorb sweat and protect the skin.

Thighs Thigh chafing, often known as “chub rub,” is caused by sweat and the friction of thighs rubbing together when you walk or run. For some, it might cause mild discomfort, but for others it can sting or even turn into a full-on wound. Because it’s such a common issue, there are now a variety of ways to deal with it, including soothing anti-chafe balms and gels as well as clothing and accessories that create a lightweight protective barrier around your thighs.

M O D E L S : D I A N E B E R N A R D O A N D G A B B Y R O S A R I O ; P H OTO G R A P H S B Y R O B F R O G O S O F O R N E W YO R K M AG A Z I N E . P R O D U C T P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E V E N D O R S

Hyperspecific Sweat Solutions

By Karen Iorio Adelson

best bets: sweat MEGABABE THIGH RESCUE, $14

this moisturizing stick looks like especially pretty deodorant and comes recommended by six women with extensive thigh-chafing experience. Key ingredients like aloe, pomegranate-seed extract, and grape-seed oil create a friction-free skin barrier that reduces inflammation and prevents future chafing. According to Curvily founder Sarah Chiwaya, it goes on smooth and lasts for hours. VASELINE BODY BALM STICK ANTI-FRICTION, $6

aside from being uncomfortable, Dr. Noelani Gonzalez, the director of cosmetic dermatology at Mount Sinai West, tells us, chafing “can lead to other things, such as infections, or even hyperpigmentation or darkening of that area.” Her solution: petroleum-jelly-based products like Vaseline balm stick, which she says is less sticky and easier to apply than a standard tub of Vaseline ointment (which will also work in a pinch). MONISTAT CARE CHAFING RELIEF POWDER GEL, $8

stylist ansley morgan says that this gel from Monistat “saved her thighs.” She has been using it since high school, and though it’s not as cute as Megababe, she says, it lasts a long time and has stood up to long walks at

Disney World and rushing a sorority in college. The lotion-to-powder formula is non-greasy and works to both prevent chafing and relieve any irritation you may already have. KNIX THIGH SAVER 6-INCH SHORTS, $36

a aside from body products, there are plenty of accessories yyou can wear under yyour clothes to wick away sweat and create a physical barrier to protect against chafing. These seamless, silky-feeling shorts are made expressly to protect against innerthigh chafing. They are a reliable favorite of Strategist senior writer Karen Iorio Adelson, who wears them under dresses. “They’re really lightweight and breathable, so you don’t get sweaty,” she says. UNISEX THIGH BANDS BY BANDELETTES, $18

when wearing short dresses or skirts, Liz Black, a writer and the creator of the blog P.S. It’s Fashion, swears by Bandelettes. “They’re little bands that look like the top of a thigh-high stocking,” Black says. Chiwaya also relies on Bandelettes on days when she knows she’ll be more active than usual. “I took a few pairs with me on a trip to Europe and had them under every dress: Despite walking even more than I do at home, I didn’t chafe once,” she says.

Balls Like breasts, balls spend most of their time wrapped in fabric collecting sweat, which can lead to uncomfortable itching and rashes. Since the groin is a very delicate area, dermatologists recommend taking a cue from products used to treat diaper rash, as those ingredients can help manage moisture and prevent chafing. BURT’S BEES BABY DUSTING POWDER, $9

this paraben-talc-andphthalates-free powder is a favorite of Dr. Nazarian’s because it uses natural ingreb dients like cornstarch, baking soda, and bentonite clay to absorb moisture, keeping your groin cool, comfortable, and dry. DESITIN DAILY DEFENSE BABY DIAPER RASH CREAM, $13

if you’re trying to heal irritation from ball chafing, dermatologist Samer Jaber recommends a slathering of this diaper-rash cream in the evenings to soothe and reduce redness on contact. It uses zinc oxide to protect skin from wetness and aloe to soothe. ANTHONY NO SWEAT BODY DEFENSE DEODORANT, $22

this cream-to-powder formula can technically be used all over the body, but dermatologist Michele Green likes it best as a mess-free

way to combat testicle sweat. It features macadamia-nut oil, aloe, and tapioca starch to provide protection against sweat while nourishing and soothing the skin. SUPER FRESH BALL DEODORANT FOR MEN BY SWEATBLOCK, $12

if you’d like something that’s specifically formulated for keeping testicles sweat free, Jaliman recommends this aluminum-talcand-paraben-free antiperspirant that goes on like a lotion and turns into a powder. It’s made with aloe, starch, witch hazel, and colloidal oatmeal for a cool soothing feel.

Feet According to nurse Angela Ballard, the feet have the highest concentration of sweat glands (roughly 125,000 on the sole of each foot) of any body part. Ballard says that your feet can produce around a half-pint of perspiration daily. Just like with your underarms, you can use antiperspirants with aluminum chloride that will block the sweat glands on your feet. Since sweaty feet are a breeding ground for fungus, try powders with the antifungal ingredient miconazole to both absorb sweat and prevent infection. The type of socks you choose matters, too—moisturewicking ones made from wool or polyester blends will do the best job of keeping your feet dry.

Underarms Options for underarm deodorant have exploded over the years. Whether you are a heavy sweater or a light one, are looking for a prescription-strength antiperspirant or for an all-natural version, or want to experiment with a new form (perhaps a paste or cream), there’s something for you. Follow our flowchart below to find one perfectly suited to your needs.

SWEATBLOCK ANTIPERSPIRANT WIPES, $19

as an alternative to a roll-on antiperspirant, dermatologist Amy Wechsler likes these antiperspirant wipes, which contain aluminum chloride and are easy to use on your feet. “they’re marketed for underarms, but they can be used anywhere on the body,” she says. “You apply it at night before you go to bed and then it helps the next day.”

START HERE

F h ws r y

Very sweaty.

Not all that sweaty.

? Do you like fragrance?

Cover it up.

Do you want to stop your sweat before it starts or just cover up the odor?

ZEASORB ANTIFUNGAL POWDER TREATMENT FOR ATHLETE’S FOOT, $10

A LOT

Agent Nateur Holi(man) No 5 Deodorant ($21): A mix of essential oils like vetiver, sandalwood, and rose that could double as cologne.

Ursa Major Hoppin’ Fresh Deodorant ($18): This aluminum-free deodorant uses odor-fighting enzymes to soak up sweat and neutralize odor-causing bacteria.

Stop the sweat.

Are you opposed to chemicals?

How much sweat are we talking about?

WORSE THAN BAD

YES NOT REALLY

Lovefresh Super Strength Deodorant ($24): Natural formulas lack aluminum, which blocks sweat; this one has baking soda to absorb it.

Do you have sensitive skin?

SweatBlock Antiperspirant Wipes ($19): One swipe of these SweatBlock wipes can IT’S BAD stop you from sweating Certain Dri Prescription for up to seven days. Strength Clinical Antiperspirant Roll-On ($6): Strength antiperspirant that physically clogs your sweat glands with aluminum. This one works best when applied at night.

YES

Are you Violets Are Blue opposed to Magnesium Deodorant chemicals? ($25): Baking soda can be irritating, though, so consider a deodorant like this one, which NO YES uses magnesium.

ROLL-ON

Ban Roll-on Antiperspirant Deodorant, Unscented ($6): A thin layer of clear liquid stops sweat and odor without leaving any white residue on your clothes.

STICK

Native Natural Deodorant ($12): Arrowroot powder and magnesium hydroxide work together to neutralize scent and absorb moisture.

ROLL-ON

thanks v

ss ,” ing

Dove Men+Care ($5): Keeps you dry and smelling good while moisturizing your armpits. CREAM SPRAY Type: A Deodorant— Dove Dry Spray Go The Visionary ($10): Fresh Antiperspirant This rub-on cream that’s ($6): Deodorant sprays act e dry quickly and don’t a cause any mess. This one crunch hea

m the e.

LIPTON TEA BAGS, 100-COUNT, $4

podiatrists Isaac Tabari and Jackie Sutera both recommend soaking your feet in black tea to reduce sweating. Sutera explains that the tannic acid found in tea has astringent properties that draw out moisture and dry out your feet. She suggests brewing two tea bags in a quart of water and soaking your feet for ten minutes nightly for a week. Afterward, repeat the process once a week to keep reaping the benefits. UNDER ARMOUR UNISEX UA ARMOUR DRY RUN NO SHOW TAB SOCKS, $12

STICK

Real Purity Roll-On Natural Deodorant ($13): Real Purity keeps the armpits of several

powder is frequently recommended to cut down on foot sweat, but it’s important to choose the right kind. Some powders, like talc, can combine with sweat to form a kind of “gunk” or “mud” that isn’t very comfortable to walk around in. Instead, podiatrist Alex Kor and Wechsler suggest the antifungal powder Zeasorb to actually reduce moisture and treat any fungus that may be present. “Yeast and fungus love to grow in a warm, moist environment,” says Wechsler, “so the powder absorbs the sweat and then there’s antifungal medicine in it to prevent athlete’s foot.”

is formulated to soothe irritated armpits too.

the right socks can make a big difference when it comes to keeping feet dry. Avoid cotton, which Ballard says can get “very soggy” as it soaks up perspiration. Unsurprisingly, the same materials found in athletic socks—moisture-wicking polyester blends and wool—are a good choice for daily wear if you have sweaty feet. Tabari likes sports socks from Under Armour, which are designed to wick away moisture.

august 16–29, 2021 | new york

the one-page

guide to:

The Specific Torture That Is Procuring a Passport Right Now

currently, there is only one way to get a new passport in fewer than 12 weeks: ➽ Secure an elusive appointment at an official passport office that can print new passports the same day. You can schedule one by talking to a human being at the National Passport Information Center over the phone (877-487-2778). This is the only way private expediting companies—some of which charge well over $500—can make appointments, so save your money. The phone line is open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and more than ten people we spoke to cited the average hold time as two hours. The soonest available appointments are typically two weeks away—note that to manage the backlog, you’ll be given an appointment date no more than three days before your flight—and you will be asked to bring proof of a flight or of a family emergency (in the form of a statement from a hospital or a mortuary) to your appointment. If you’re anxious about your appointment being so close to your flight, there is a way around this: ➽ Tell the agent your flight is sooner than the one you really want. Then, the morning you go into the office, buy any refundable international ticket for the date you said you were flying on. That’s what fashion designer Andrew Livingston did to secure an appointment in early August for a mid-August trip. ➽ Be prepared to travel—far—for your slot. If you do get an appointment, it is unlikely to be near your home. The New York City office is particularly booked—Livingston ended up having to fly across the country to San Diego for his renewal appointment. Student Justin Previllion flew from New Jersey to Dallas to make his, while designer Eric Lawrence, who says the security guards “basically laughed at me” when he asked for a walk-in appointment in New York, drove from Manhattan to New Hampshire for his. ➽ If you still haven’t managed to get one, try your representative. Three people we spoke to were able to speed things up with the help of their congressperson’s office, where aides used their leverage at the State Department to advocate on their behalf. Suzanne McElwreath, a New Jersey–based attorney, estimates she spent 40 hours on the phone trying to get an appointment but was unsuccessful. Ten days before her family’s flight, she contacted Representative Mikie Sherrill’s office. The congresswoman was ultimately able to secure McElwreath an appointment in Boston. ➽ But make sure to be nice. When video-game developer Sam Lucyk’s mailed-in application was sitting in limbo in early July, he called Representative Nydia Velázquez’s office about a flight two weeks away. Over the next few days, an aide to his congresswoman was able to expedite his application so he could make his July 17 trip to Turkey to meet his girlfriend’s family. He credits his luck to calling early in the process and being empathetic. “At first, [the aide] said, ‘We can’t do anything, there are too many requests.’ I clarified that my flight was in a couple weeks, and she said, ‘There might be something we can do … There have just been so many people trying to travel, and people have been yelling at me.’ She thanked me for being kind and patient and said she would do what she could.” If you get an appointment, take the day off from work. Your slot at any passport office will be scheduled for a specified time, but be prepared to hang around for a lengthy period to actually get your passport, since you’re not allowed out of the center while you wait for it to be processed and printed. DJ Brendan Fallis and his wife, Hannah Bronfman, and their newborn spent six hours at the New York office. “I was looking at my baby’s formula because I was so hungry,” he says. ➽ If that doesn’t work, try Reddit and Facebook. Unsurprisingly, these forums have become hotbeds of activity around this topic with good and bad actors trading appointments and offering up advice. (One Facebook group, “Passport Appointment,” has about 11,000 members, and Reddit megathread “US Passport Renewal // 2021” is just as active.) One person we spoke to ended up getting a same-day passport by typing “Passport Appointment” into the Reddit search bar and contacting the most frequent posters; ultimately, he found someone with an appointment that day who was willing to give it up for free. That said, be wary about taking an appointment from a stranger. Hoffman notes that his office has often turned away people who got appointments through these sources and arrived only to discover the reservation number had already been used. ➽ And if all else fails, consider Guam. Per Travel + Leisure editor Paul Brady, “You can go there without a passport, through Hawaii, on United. Stay at Dusit Thani, where they can set you up with snorkeling and hiking trips. Get a morning espresso at Coffee Slut, and later have beers and brats at Carabao Brewing.” 48 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

I L LU S T R AT I O N : TO N Y M I L L I O N A I R E

The pandemic has thrown the process of renewing or getting a passport into disarray. The Strategist’s Louis Cheslaw and Daniel Varghese spoke with more than 30 New Yorkers who have gone through the hassle.

the look book goes to

A Cricket Match in Van Cortlandt Park Where players from India, Australia, Jamaica, and elsewhere faced off. interviews by louis cheslaw and daniel varghese

ELVIS GRANT

Bus driver, Wakefield When did you start playing?

When I was 10 in Jamaica. I moved here in ’82 and didn’t know they played cricket in America. I was standing at a bus stop one morning, and I saw a guy walking on the street with a cricket bat in his hand. So I walked over to him and I said, “They play cricket here?” And he said yes. He invited me to become a member of his club right away. Now I’m part of the Primrose Cricket Club, which was founded by a group of Jamaicans in the Bronx in 1913. You play just on weekends?

Yes. Driving in the city is a tough job. It takes a lot of concentration and a lot of energy. So at home, I do farming in the backyard. I plant a les: tomatoe , peppers, string beans. I also raise mourning doves. They’re so cute. They sit on my head and my shoulders.

Photographs by DeSean McClinton-Holland

the look book: van cortlandt park cricket fields

How was today’s match? We lost.

We had a pretty strong team, but we just collapsed. Cricket’s a mental game, period. Lately, there’s been one guy who’s been scoring runs but nobody else. He’s like, “I can’t be scoring runs every week for this team!” But he’s the captain, so it’s his job.

HARSHAN RAMAKRISHNA

SONNY KHURANA

Mechanical engineer, East Village

SCOTT CROSS

CEO, Syosset

Squash coach, Washington Heights

Do you watch cricket on TV?

A lot. There is this app called Willow TV—it’s like Netflix for cricket. It’s like $9 per month. Everyone I know has a subscription.

SUMIT GROVER

GAURAV VYAS

M&A director, Upper West Side

Product manager, Cliffside Park, New Jersey

MOHAMED HAMEETH

Auto detailer, New Rochelle

What brings you to the park?

My boyfriend, Harshan, is playing for the Wanderers. We met on Hinge last summer. I wouldn’t be the best judge of this— this is only the second game I’ve ever seen—but it seems like he played quite well.

MATTHEW BADEN

Tech recruiter, West Village

50 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

KATELYN GLASSMAN

Software engineer, Lower East Side

SUJIT BHOOLA

Auditor, Upper East Side

I assume you’re not playing today?

No, I injured my sesamoid bone during a game in June, so I’m out for the season. I actually founded the club with six other members in 2018. It’s quite diverse. Our vice-captain is Sri Lankan. I’m the treasurer, and I’m Indian. Our president is Australian. We’re all so close that when our captain got married in South Africa, five of us were there to see it.

SEETHARAMAN TN

Consultant, Jersey City, New Jersey

TRACEY ALLEN

Accountant, Stamford, Connecticut

AARON WEINMAN

Journalist, Battery Park City

KRUNAL CHAMPANERI

Data engineer, Austin, Texas

NISCHINT SUNDAR

Project director, Upper East Side

SELWYN CHEONG

Bus mechanic, Queens Village

Where’d you learn how to play?

From the other kids in my neighborhood in New Delhi. As I got better, I started playing in youth tournaments in Andhra Pradesh. At that point, I had to either pursue cricket or my studies. My coach insisted that I was good enough. He talked to my parents, but my dad was strict about studies. It’s been the regret of my life.

SAKET GUR

VP of technology, Secaucus, New Jersey

SAGAR WAGHMARE

Research engineer, Inwood

GANESH ANBAZHAGAN

Software engineer, Lower East Side

august 16–29, 2021 | new york

design hunting

She Lost a View Bu Construction of a hotel next door to Han Feng’s loft covered her east-

Photographs by Seth Caplan

In the Living Room

Han Feng in her loft under her portrait painted in 2016 by Francesco Clemente. “We met when he was having a show in Shanghai, and I cooked for him at my apartment,” she says. She’s since cooked for him and his wife, Alba, in New York, and the three remain friends.

ut Gained a Gallery facing windows, so she came up with a plan. by wendy goodman

august 16–29, 2021 | new york

The Chinese Bed

She bought it from an antiques dealer. The interior lamps are from Shanghai Tang.

I An Obscured Kitchen Window

This became a gallery for her still-life photographs. The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown will be showing Han Feng’s work from August 13 to September 1.

The Kitchen

Han Feng loves to entertain; her guests congregate here before sitting down to eat. The ceramics on the kitchen island are by Maria Robledo.

first visited Han Feng’s Flower District loft for one of her spectacular multicourse dinner parties, where she would always have a mix of fashion, theater, and art people from her circle. Back then, it was drenched with light from a series of windows looking east. She grew up in Nanjing and Hangzhou during the Cultural Revolution in China—“I was thinking I should get a factory job,” she says— and studied graphic design at the China Academy of Art. She came to New York in 1985. In 1993 she launched a ready-to-wear line, and in 1997 she rented this sunny loft, which she would later buy. Along the way, she designed the costumes for Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly, which debuted in London with the English National Opera in 2005 and was later performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and became an expert in Chinese contemporary art, which she collects and advises other people on collecting. In 2015, the shorter building next door was demolished for the construction of a hulking hotel, which would obscure three windows and her view east. “Oh my God, I’ll have to move!” Han Feng recalls thinking. “What am I going to do without the windows?” It was only after a friend observed that the loft had previously gotten too much sun to be a good place to display art that she changed her thinking. She contacted her friends the architect Richard Gluckman and his partner, Dana Tang, to reimagine it as a gallery space with new movable walls. It’s now the perfect place to show the work of the artists she collects—some

Southern Exposure

Her south-facing windows remain open, keeping her cacti alive. A Venetian chandelier hangs in front of shelves that include Frances Palmer ceramics and glass Venus sculptures by Claire Anderson. The New Hotel When it went up,

it blocked her view east.

of whom she also represents—including the large ink paintings of Gu Wenda, digital drawings by Shao Wenhuan, and the ceramics of Robin Whiteman and Maria Robledo. Before the pandemic, she would split her time between New York and China. She still has her made-to-measure custom-clothing business and represents artists. In 2017, the developer of the Amanyangyun resort in Shanghai invited her to open a gallery space, and in 2019, she moved her design studio into an apartment there. Back in New York during the lockdown, she turned part of her apartment here into a photo studio and started taking still lifes, which are displayed in the area of one of her former windows. Han Feng still remembers what one of her art teachers told her: “You have a big beautiful life. You shouldn’t be a frog inside a well; you have to get out of the well and look at the world.” ■ “That” she says, “changed my life.”

The Gallery

After she lost three windows, architects Richard Gluckman and Dana Tang took advantage of the lack of light to create a gallery with sliding wall panels. This is also where she entertains.

food

Hudson Smokehouse

Barbecue Bliss in the Bronx

Hudson Smokehouse is worth a trip from any borough. by adam platt

e could eat here for days,” my standing in line, a gentleman from Nanuet, friend the barbecue loon said with in Rockland County, just across the Hudtremors of joy in his voice as we son River. He said he makes regular pilgrimstood in line not long ago at the ages on Saturdays, which is the day when Hudson Smokehouse in the South Bronx the pitmaster, Kenneth McPartlan, smokes and contemplated the bounty up on the weekly specials like pastrami, which our great blackboard menu. There were slabs friend considered to be the second-best of brisket and smoked turkey breast sold by pastrami in all the city (“It is not quite as the half-pound, full and half-racks of pork good as Katz’s”), and a giant Texas-style ribs, and supersize helpings of freshly sizzled bone-in beef rib that is served up on pork cracklings seasoned with chile pepper butcher paper and a metal tray, just the for $6 apiece. There was a house way it’s done in the Hill Country Hudson smash burger, and there were around Austin. Others in the line Smokehouse eight kinds of sandwiches—one espoused their own favorites: Two 37 Bruckner Blvd., at Alexander Ave., the daunting “Hat Trick” made elegant ladies dressed in their Mott Haven 718-872-7742 with three kinds of pork, including weekend best were here for the hudsonsmokethe aforementioned cracklings. chicken; two cops on their lunch housebx.com I think I counted seven varieties break recommended the brisket. of chicken wing, which are smoked and “It’s a heavy sandwich for lunch, but it’s a then finished in the fryer (Buffalo, jerk, good sandwich,” one of them said before and barbecue, to name a few), along with his radio crackled and they drove off with a blizzard of sides, including roasted their carryout in a cruiser. Brussels sprouts, two coleslaws (vinegar McPartlan is a bar owner by trade (his and creamy), and a deadly sounding cre- family has been running the same tavern on ation called “cheesy potatoes.” East 149th Street since the ’30s). A couple “This is a full-service operation,” said of years ago, he and a partner bought a one of the beef connoisseurs we met while secondhand smoker “from some guy in

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Jersey,” as he puts it, with the idea of bringing to the Bronx the kind of barbecue revolution that has been unfolding for years now in Brooklyn. They renovated a former bar space in a western-saloon motif (sturdy oak tabletops, lampshades shaped like wooden barrels) and opened days before the city shut down in March 2020. The restaurant survived on PPP money and a nowthriving delivery business, and McPartlan used the time to hone his self-taught pitmaster skills and techniques, which he says are influenced by the great dry-rub schools of the Midwest (“We’re a combo of Kansas City and St. Louis”) and the smoke artists from the Carolinas and Texas. When we sampled them, the house pork ribs had a nice bark on their exterior but were loose and tender inside, and the combination of spice and smoke didn’t overwhelm the essential porkiness of the meat. The same was true of the excellent rib tips, which are stacked in little paper boats, and also the soft, candied pork-belly burnt ends, tossed in a classically sticky barbecue sauce. The brisket, we generally agreed, was a good, honest example of the genre, although Photograph by DeSean McClinton-Holland

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th e u nde rgrou nd g ou r me t qu i ck bi t e it needed a little more deckle-cut heft to challenge the reigning champs at Katz’s. The chicken was on the dry side when we ordered it, although the smoked wings, in all of their multi-flavored splendor (try the jerk and the vinegary, mayo-based “Alabama White”), are worth a special trip. The thing that separates this neighborly barbecue shack from others around the city is the sides, many of which taste as though they’ve been beamed into this little corner of the Bronx from some ethereal country kitchen in the sky. McPartlan assures us this isn’t true—the sides are the work of a talented cook named Bilal Muhammad—but he learned from the bar business that variety is the secret spice of a good, buzzy hospitality operation. Thus those two coleslaws, one sauced with vinegar, the other a classic “creamy” variety made with strips of red bell pepper for an extra vegetable-garden crunch. I identified at least three kinds of bean in the house baked beans, which are folded with chunks of apple and remind you of something you’d find at a Thanksgiving dinner. Ditto the green beans and bacon and the dense slabs of cornbread, which taste of real corn, the way the best masa cakes do, and are spread with sugar and honey on top. Timing is everything in the quirky realm of real smoked barbecue, and the best time to visit, as mentioned, is on Saturdays, when the meat is fresh from the smoker, salsa bands set up on the street in clement weather, and there’s plenty of time after lunch to digest your leisurely afternoon meal. The pastrami isn’t quite as good as Katz’s, it’s true, but I don’t think I’ve encountered anything like the deeply smoky beef rib outside of the barbecue temples around Austin; it is crusted with garlic crystals, along with the usual clouds of salt and pepper, and cooked overnight for 16 hours. I don’t recommend consuming any of the deep-fried dessert options afterward (there are six, including deep-fried Oreos, Twinkies, and Snickers bars), but the cool, soothing banana pudding is the perfect antidote to a pleasant case of barbecue daze on a hot summer afternoon. bites RECOMMENDED DISHES: Pork ribs, rib tips, beef rib (Saturdays only), jerk and Buffalo wings, creamy coleslaw, baked beans, cornbread, banana puddin : The barbecue can sell out quick pays to arrive early—especially on busy weekends. OPEN: Lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday. PRICES: Side dishes and appetizers, $3 to $6; mains, $10 to $38.

A GF Pastry That Takes the Cake

Knead Love’s Cinny Buns are dark, dense, gluten free, vegan, and totally delicious. what does a 21st-century cinnamon bun owe its public? Are goo and glaze enough? For Brooklyn baker Sarah Magid, who launched Knead Love Bakery from her Greenpoint apartment in 2019, the pastry should also be whole grain, nutrientdense, naturally fermented for four to eight hours, and incorporate enough local ingredients to support the regional economy and merit a new stand at the Union Square Greenmarket. Magid’s Cinny Bun is all these things. And, like the rest of her repertoire, it is gluten free, which has made the baker a bit of a cult hero for those who follow that diet. But that shouldn’t deter anyone else. In fact, two non-vegan gluten-eating cinnamon-bun aficionados tried the thing the other day and were pretty much blown away. You should know that comparing a Cinny Bun to a traditional cinnamon bun may be misleading. Both contain cinnamon and both are buns, but that is where the similarities end. A Cinny Bun seems to us more like a cross between an oat-bran muffin and sticky toffee pudding, if that’s possible. Or maybe it’s like a maple-cinnamon scuffin. Whatever it is, it’s fantastic—petite in stature but surprisingly hearty, with a pleasingly dense and grainy texture. Rather than default to a generic GF-flour blend, Magid sources her raw materials from Maine Grains, combining a Japanese variety of buckwheat with cracked oats she toasts and hand-mills. She makes “Seymour,” her sourdough starter, from organic brown rice. And the secret to her fluffy frosting is maple cream from the Greenmarket’s Roxbury Mountain Maple. For maximum enjoyment, Magid offers this (non-vegan) hack that we highly recommend: Rather than warm your bun in a toaster oven or microwave, heat it from the bottom up in a skillet with butter or ghee to “activate” the cinnamon-coconut-sugar ribbons while preserving the delicate integrity of the frosting. ($8 per bun at Union Square and McCarren Park Greenmarkets; kneadlovebakery.com.) robin raisfeld and rob patronite

streaming

Cooking With Paris Is Anti-Aspirational Food Television

Paris Hilton rattles the very foundations of cooking shows. by rachel sugar ever since julia child first braised boeuf bourguignonne for public-TV audiences in 1963, American cooking shows have rooted their instruction in an illusion of ease. Of course you can cook. Anyone can cook! All you do is follow the steps. The hosts—famous chefs, chefs who might be famous, famous non-chefs like Selena Gomez—prepare aspirational meals with aspirationally little effort using an aspirational number of clean bowls. The promise of food television is that you can become like them. We’re all in this together, cooking shows promise. We’re all just one tutorial away from living in a crisp East Hampton villa with our doting husband, Jeffrey. But now, there is Cooking With Paris. The show, which premiered on Netflix this month, is about cooking with Paris Hilton. On the surface, it looks like standard-issue Netflix food filler from the service that has already brought us Salt Fat Acid Heat, The Chef Show, and Cooked. But it is so much stranger. Cooking With Paris rattles the very foundations of cooking television. This development is not apparent in the premise, which is about what you’d expect. “I love cooking, but I’m not a trained chef,” muses Hilton at the start of each episode, explaining that she has found some new recipes to expand her culinary repertoire and is inviting friends over to test them out. In the premiere, Hilton vaguely suggests that this project has to do with how she is getting married and wants to be a mom soon, which I found exciting. It could be like an updated version of that 1908 classic The Bride’s Cook Book but on Netflix and starring Paris Hilton! Alas, it is not that. Instead, the plot of the first episode is that Hilton’s ex-employee Kim Kardashian West comes over, and the two make French toast with glitter on it. “No one has partied as hard as you and looks the way you do,” Kardashian 58 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

West tells Hilton, who smiles. “I’m an alien,” she replies. As the series wears on, it’s never clear what Hilton knows or doesn’t know about cooking. She has no trouble caramelizing the tops of marshmallows with a tiny butane torch, but moments later she seems alarmed by the mechanics of toast. (“Why does this keep turning brown?”) When, in the third episode, comedian Nikki Glaser drops by to make vegan burgers and fries, Hilton is unable to identify a whisk but seems remarkably comfortable with a deep fryer. What is this show? I kept thinking, as I marched through the available episodes, increasingly agitated for reasons I could not explain. And why? The most cynical reading is that Hilton, who is clearly sensitive to branding opportunities, posted a semi-satirical video of herself making her “famous lasagna” in January 2020, 5 million people watched it, and Netflix bought it. This may be the correct reading, but it’s not very satisfying; they could have made something else, and instead they made this. To understand what Cooking With Paris is, it helps to start with what it is not: It is not informative. It is neither practical nor culinarily interesting. There are no useful tips or tricks or fun cultural facts, the kind of trivia you might pull out, years later, if you were ever at a party and someone asked, “So what’s the deal with Himalayan salt?” It is not funny, although the twist is that it is also not serious. It feels as though it should be satire, except it doesn’t satirize anything specific. The joke is that Paris Hilton is Paris Hilton—classic—only now she is cooking, sort of, in a giant kitchen she appears to have never entered previously, surrounded by assistants and wearing cocktail dresses and fingerless gloves. It is definitely self-aware. It is maybe sometimes amusing? It feels like a spiritual successor to The Simple Life, in

which Hilton landed in Middle America and did normal Middle American things like grocery shopping and working at a drivethrough. But while Hilton allowed herself to be the butt of the joke on that series—it’s still funny to watch an overconfident socialite ask “What is Walmart?”—there’s no punch line here when Hilton simply can’t achieve the effortless charade of a typical cooking show, largely because she’s not trying. Hilton enjoys cooking. We know because she tells us at the top of every episode. Yet she approaches the task with antiseptic reserve. She rarely tastes what she is making and often protects herself with rubber gloves. “I can’t even deal,” Hilton says with a sigh after she and Demi Lovato mess up the dough for their homemade ravioli, but whatever. She has other, “normal” ravioli waiting in the fridge. You can buy more. “Is the problem with extreme wealth that there are no stakes?” I asked a friend, who agreed that, yes, that may be one of them. Hilton is so confident, she claims, about her own abilities, regularly announcing that she is “killing it”—or sometimes “sliving,” her trademarked portmanteau of living your best life and slaying—unencumbered by knowledge or details. And the thing is, her food mostly comes out okay! Perhaps the aspirational part is how not stressed out she is about the whole thing. Like how she’s not worried about making mistakes? And when she does, it’s kind of … fine? The show works best not as entertainment but as a deconstruction of the genre, tearing down the illusions of dump-andstir TV. “It’s all fake!,” Cooking With Paris whispers in its sexy baby voice. Of course, your life will never look like this; the whole thing’s a mirage. Are you famous? Do you have an army of production assistants? Give it up, the deck is stacked. And still, it is so effortful. No task is easy in Hilton’s kitchen, despite the assistants and the double dishwasher. You watch this show and you do not want to be Paris Hilton, or befriend her, or eat her glitter-topped cannoli, or pet her tiny dogs. Hilton is not a better, shinier version of you. Hilton’s whole thing is that she’s not like you at all. Her life looks nothing like yours, and she doesn’t want it to. And neither do you. The show is strangely lonely and slightly sad—a small woman in a large kitchen making stilted small talk with people she’s supposed to know. “Do you live in L.A. now?” she asks the rapper Saweetie as they make shrimp tacos. She does. “I love L.A.,” Hilton replies. Sometimes Hilton laughs, but is she ■ really laughing? It’s hard to tell.

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food

Less conspiracy. More consideration.

They Call Him Loop Daddy Marc Rebillet livestreams improvised music to millions of fans, often in just his boxer briefs.

By Nichole Perkins 61

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arc rebillet is standing in a mostly empty living room with a huge grin on his face. Wearing nothing but a bronze-colored silk robe and a pair of black-and-white boxer briefs, he holds a microphone in his left hand. Headphones are clamped to his ears, and his right hand hovers over a keyboard. The caller on the line wants a song about “getting it on with a big-booty Black girl.” Rebillet pauses, never losing his smirk. “I could get blasted for this,” he says, laughing. For the next 12 minutes and five seconds, Rebillet, his keyboard, and a loop machine (he’s known around the internet as Loop Daddy) oblige the caller with a bedroom groove featuring a bass line straight from an ’80s R&B quiet-storm playlist. The chat box lights up. Everyone wants to “work that ass for Daddy.” Since 2016, Rebillet (pronounced RUB-EE-yay) has been livestreaming completely improvised musical performances on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and sometimes Twitch to millions of viewers. His first taste of virality came in 2007. Rebillet, then an energetic 18-yearold, was the first person in line at an AT&T store in Dallas to buy an iPhone, and he hammed it up for the camera when a woman bought his spot for $800. The video racked up 4 million views. He quit college the following year to start a music career. Rebillet was a classically trained pianist, and he would eventually work with private teachers to learn about sound engineering, mixing, and jazz theory. But he had no plan for how to bring his music to larger audiences. “I’ve never been good at strategy, you know? It was all just shots in the dark,” Rebillet, now 32, says, shrugging in the living room of his chic Manhattan apartment. When he started building a fandom a decade later, it wasn’t just through a screen. People pay to see Rebillet live and in person. In the pandemic year alone, after national restrictions eased, he performed a sold-out drive-in tour. Now, he is returning to live shows across the U.S. with another tour, called “Third Dose,” and at festivals like Lollapalooza and 62 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

Bonnaroo. During his sets, he often displays a phone number onscreen and takes suggestions from his audience, but he never knows what kind of music he’ll create that day. The results range from EDM to ’70s funk to mournful piano solos. Along with the essential equipment— keyboard, loop machine, laptop, the occasional handheld percussion instrument, and plenty of beverages by his side— Rebillet pairs smooth vocals with a porn star–meets–stand-up comedian vibe. Most of his lyrics come from whatever’s in his head that day. Viewers request songs about just about anything: sobriety, quarantine hookups, long-distance friendships. His fans range from bros who want him to make up songs about breasts and weed to women who need encouragement about finding a new job to celebrities like Ice-T and Erykah Badu, who joined him onstage during one of his drive-in-tour stops in Fort Worth, Texas. Rebillet grew up in Dallas, and for most of his 20s he worked with local rappers, making beats and earning no money. He originally wanted to become a producer, so he created a SoundCloud under the name leae (pronounced lay). “It was just this nonsense word I came up with because there were no other results for that word on Google. So it was like if you

type that in, then I would be the only thing that came up, you know?” Rebillet explains. “It was a half-assed attempt at producing where I wasn’t trying to make connections in a serious way.” (He eventually quit trying to produce more formally because he found it “boring.”) He was similarly aimless when he moved to New York—where he worked as an executive assistant and a server to make ends meet— for the first time in 2011. “I made up a solo EP under that name and had a little release party for it on my roof. Just fun, but [it] didn’t really do anything,” he says. In 2014, Rebillet returned to Dallas to look after his father, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. (He died in late 2018.) While there, he ordered a loop machine to mess around with. He was inspired by the way musician Reggie Watts used the device in his sets, looping layers of music on top of one another. Growing up playing piano, Rebillet had never liked practicing, so making songs on the fly appealed to him. The looper eventually changed the trajectory of his career, but it took him a couple years to take learning it seriously (because he was “a lazy shit,” in his own words). In 2016, Rebillet began posting “idealogues,” videos of him improvising music, online. The following year, he set up a phone line so viewers could chat with him about topics of their choosing. Callers would present him with a subject like “pooping your pants.” He describes his decision to start streaming as “farting around,” but when people began leaving him tips on his livestreams, he realized there could be a bit of money in what he was doing. He started doing sets at BrainDead Brewing in Dallas, the first place to pay him to perform. Soon, he was playing at other local restaurants, including Twilite Lounge and the Common Table; his online presence grew as he continued to stream videos of his performances. After about two years of moving between livestreams and bar gigs, Rebillet returned to New York. His YouTube following had grown from 5,000 to 40,000 subscribers, and he knew he needed to take advantage of whatever was happening. “I had been helping my mom and taking care of my dad for three or four years at that point,” he says. “We had decided that if it had gotten to a point where my dad no longer derived anything valuable from my presence there, and if there was a reason for me to make a move, that maybe that would be the time to do it.” By the end of 2018, Rebillet was booking shows at the Bowery Electric, the Kingsland, (Le) Poisson Rouge, and the

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Rebillet at Lollapalooza on July 31.

Abbey. Within two months of his return to the city, “something happened online,” he says. “All the videos I’d been uploading to Facebook started getting shared around like crazy [with] a million and a half views, 2 million views, 3 million views. I started getting a bunch of DMs about playing in Germany, France, the U.K. And I really didn’t know how to answer these people.” A booking agent in Brooklyn contacted him, offering representation. “I signed with them, and they took over my Facebook and DMs and put together for me a North American tour that was grueling,” says Rebillet, shaking his head at the memory. He did over 30 dates in the span of a month and a half. “It was really poorly routed, but they were shows, and they were ticketed shows. They were like 200-, 250-cap venues, and they sold out within a week and a half.” Rebillet’s shows continue to sell out rapidly. During his most recent live performances, he says, the vibes have been unmatched. “You can feel it in the air— the relief, the joy, the unbridled sense of togetherness,” he says. “I’ve never been happier to play. Let’s fucking go.” In the quiet of his apartment, Rebillet is mellow, but on his livestreams, he has to be quick; there’s little room for dead air. Part of his appeal is his unreserved passion when performing. It can be sensual to watch him, even when he’s not throwing a coquettish wink to the camera or sliding a finger into his bellybutton. His fans leave comments saying they just had sex to his livestream; his DMs are filled with testimonials from people who have lost their virginity to his music (along with declarations he remains more dis-

creet about). Men hold up signs at his shows that say their girlfriends want to have sex with him. People of all gender expressions post videos of themselves dancing to his songs, shaking ass in their underwear. “I’m just very comfortable with the way I look,” Rebillet says of his confidence, leaning back on his plush red Togo sectional. “It’s good enough for me.” Part of Rebillet’s sense of humor onstage is about embodying characters. Sometimes that involves generically channeling a woman—as with “Two Girls,

“I’m just very comfortable with the way I look. It’s good enough for me.”

One Quarantine,” a bedroom anthem sung from the points of view of two women—or putting on a Blaccent, as in “Work That Ass for Daddy.” When I first spoke to Rebillet last year, I asked him how he thinks about appropriation in his work. He pointed to his appreciation of the genres he’s working within, but on some level, he can’t explain how he thinks about it intellectually. When he’s improvising, he goes to a place where he’s not overthinking every decision he makes. “There’s lots of ways in which you can

fuck that up and be extremely insensitive,” he said. “But when I’m doing it, there’s not much thought. I am just trying to do something dope and deliver that in an honest way. Even if I’m saying stupid shit about butts and pussies, the music is hopefully pretty good—there needs to be that foundation there in order for the humor to work. I hope I’m not fucking it up. That’s all I can say, you know?” Rebillet still does everything on the creative side himself. He edits his videos and overlays text as he layers sounds— things like “It’s not funk until some bass hits that sweet ass,” followed by “Time to ruin it with my stupid voice.” He fields all calls, answering them live without screening, which can make for some awkwardness when the caller is starstruck or doesn’t want to engage. (One time, he hung up on a caller for not bringing the energy he wanted.) He claims to spend nine-to-12 hours a day managing his social-media accounts. “I think that is part of the appeal,” he explains. “I don’t want to hand that off to anyone.” Rebillet admits his aversion to structure is holding him back from achieving certain goals. He knows he’ll need help if he wants to create music that lasts. “I have this deep desire to create a full, realized, composed piece of work, but it’s hard for me to find the will and the patience to carry that out,” he says. “I’m reaching this point where I think I need a collaborator to give me that juice to carry through a more traditional production process and make something real.” Before the second wave of covid-19 shut down Los Angeles last fall, he spent October in the city meeting with Snoop Dogg, Flying Lotus, and Watts, whom he cites as his main influence. “Reggie is the dream collaborator for me because there is a fondness and a comfort in commonality,” he says. When he is ready to pursue an album, Rebillet hopes it will be a collaboration with his idol. “That excites me: the prospect of having someone else who wants to achieve this thing with me,” he says. “These one-off, one-take things, they’re fun, but they’re not super-deep, you know? I’d like to make something deeper.” In fact, he knows exactly what he wants: “A stone-cold piece of funk that is not a buttoned-up Vulfpeck shit. And it’s not pop heavy, like Anderson .Paak shit. It’s more Sly & the Family Stone raw-heroinlaced shit.” Rebillet grows more intense as he talks about it. He leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “It would be, at most, ten songs, and this would be something you could put on to fuck to. Nothing but a ■ vibe for 30 to 40 minutes.” august 16–29, 2021 | new york

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A Return to Company

Stephen Sondheim and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick revisit the making of the iconic cast album—and Elaine Stritch’s beautiful meltdown. By Frank Rich original cast album: company is available August 17 on the Criterion Collection.

ollywood has a long history of making beloved movies about the backstage machinations of Broadway. A short list would include films as various as Warner Bros.’ Depression-era fable 42nd Street, Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon, Mel Brooks’s The Producers, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, and, at the head of the class, Joseph Mankiewicz’s acid-tinged valentine to Broadway’s postwar golden age, All About Eve. They were mostly made in Los Angeles. But some of the best films about the Broadway theater are documentaries made in New York and not nearly as well known as they should be, in part because they have been only sporadically available (if at all) on commercial video. They were the work of D.A. Pennebaker, the groundbreaking filmmaker who died at 94 in 2019 and whose eclectic subjects spanned from Bob Dylan in the late ’60s (Don’t Look Back) to the first Bill Clinton presidential campaign (The War Room).

Two of his exemplary Broadway films, Jane (1962) and Moon Over Broadway (1997, co-directed with Chris Hegedus), chronicle productions from their hopeful geneses to their disillusioning opening nights. They have been overshadowed by Original Cast Album: Company (1970), Pennebaker’s fly-on-the-wall account of the marathon making of the Columbia recording of the musical that rebooted Stephen Sondheim’s career six years after his previous Broadway musical as composer-lyricist, Anyone Can Whistle, had flamed out in a week. Despite often falling out-of-print over the past half-century, this 53-minute film has survived as a semi-underground classic and as recently as 2019 inspired a Documentary Now! parody, spearheaded by John Mulaney. This month, at long last, our indispensable curator of classic cinema, the Criterion Collection, is reissuing the Pennebaker original in a sumptuous restoration. For so compact a film, it is full of finely etched portraits of the characters at hand, 64 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

especially the young Sondheim and the original ensemble cast, led by Dean Jones as Bobby, a Manhattan bachelor whose many married friends alternately press him to join their ranks of the semi-happily wed and offer graphic examples of why he had better look hard before he leaps. The most sardonic of those friends, of course, is played by Elaine Stritch, whose travails while recording her big number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” are the dramatic highlight of the documentary and a big part of why the film and Stritch herself have endured as objects of cult devotion. At the time Stritch opened in Company, her career had been flagging; her two star turns in Broadway musicals, both in flops, were a decade behind her, and her alcoholism was no secret. She left the show a year into its 20-month Broadway run, and it would be more or less a quarter-century before the late-in-life renaissance that led to her steady employment in the theater, film, television, and cabaret. It’s the long

august 16–29, 2021 | new york

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Elaine Stritch in scenes from the Company documentary.

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afterlife of Pennebaker’s enduring portrayal of her breakdown on-camera in the wee hours that kept the memory of her vital spark alive during her many dark years. (After her comeback, he would co-direct a film adaptation of her one-woman stage show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, in 2002.) I interviewed Sondheim and Jonathan Tunick, the brilliant orchestrator who collaborated on Company and most of the Sondheim classics to follow it, for a video that accompanies the rerelease of the documentary. Three Sondheim shows in New York were among those shuttered by covid: the recently opened Ivo van Hove revival of West Side Story; the CSC revival of Assassins then in preproduction; and the new revival of Company, just starting previews on Broadway, in which, as conceived by the British director Marianne Elliott, Bobby is repurposed as a female Bobbie. (Unlike Bobby, she also has a biological clock to contend with as she weighs the joys and perils of marriage on her 35th birthday.) Company and Assassins are now on the verge of reopening, the virus willing.

“Elaine was a performer with great stage fright, and she would always get a nip offstage to get her courage up.” My own personal history with Sondheim began roughly when Company did. As a drama critic for my college newspaper, I had seen its first public performance, in its pre-Broadway tryout at the Shubert Theatre in Boston, in the spring of 1970. The show’s epic final number, “Being Alive,” so powerfully delivered by Jones, had yet to be written. Even now, having seen countless revivals since, including the gender-reversed version in its London debut nearly three years ago, I still remember the high I experienced at that first viewing in Boston: the jangling pulse and infinite variety of the score and lyrics; the daring refusal of Furth’s book to offer any narrative that might be called a plot; the aggressive pitch of producerdirector Hal Prince and the choreographer Michael Bennett’s staging; the stark 66 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

Mies van der Rohe architecture of Boris Aronson’s set. Despite being confined to a windowless recording studio, Pennebaker’s film is remarkably evocative of the whole enterprise. I met Sondheim a year after I initially saw Company, when I reviewed his next show, Follies, in its Boston tryout. A year later, when I was living in London during a postgraduation gap year, he invited me to watch a rehearsal and then the opening of the West End production of Company at Her Majesty’s Theatre. It was a duplicate of the Broadway original with a mixture of imported New York cast members and Brits. The premiere was a triumph for Steve and Stritch, who celebrated by getting plastered at the opening-night party at the Inigo Jones restaurant in Covent Garden and barking savagely at anyone who crossed her path. When I revisited Company’s early days with Steve and Tunick, it was the December Sunday after Thanksgiving weekend, just as I was starting to venture beyond the immediate neighborhood of my apartment uptown. I decided to do my end of the Zoom at Criterion’s empty office in Union Square, where a crew of two had organized a covid-protected environment. Like most people I know, I have few jubilant memories from the long hibernation, but seeing Steve, even if on a monitor, is one of them. Fresh, feisty, and funny in his 90th year, he was as charged up about Company, both the musical and the documentary, as if he had written the show yesterday. Though I have talked with him about Company ad infinitum over the course of our friendship, including in public conversations, here he was, still adding juicy new details to the historical record. The interview went on well past an hour, and, at my selfish insistence, drifted irrelevantly into Follies as well. But that’s another story. When I left the Criterion office, it was chilly and starting to get dark. I decided to walk uptown toward home. The Manhattan that Steve writes about in Company—the “city of strangers” where people “find each other in the crowded streets and the guarded parks / By the rusty fountains and the dusty trees with the battered barks”—was still locked down. But for now, my usual pandemic despair had lifted, so elated was I by having spent the afternoon in intense virtual contact with Sondheim’s teeming New York, as lyrical and poignant today as it ever was. How lucky we are that D. A. Pennebaker caught the lightning of its creation at the very moment when it was being bottled.

Jonathan, Steve has called you the greatest orchestrator for the theater. You’ve worked with so many people. You’ve done movies. You’ve done television. What’s distinctive about working with Steve?

jonathan tunick: The easy answer is his intentions are clear. When he presents a new number to me, I’ll ask a few questions, often perfunctory. I tend to get it. stephen sondheim: One of the reasons he’s the best orchestrator for the theater is he has a sense of drama, of what’s going on on the stage. He isn’t just interested in the sounds. He is interested in enhancing the play, and that’s relevant to what he’s saying—my theatrical and dramatic intention is clear, which is something I was taught by Oscar Hammerstein and Arthur Laurents to do. j.t.: There are some entities that describe my job as “music orchestrated by,” and that always annoys me. I feel I orchestrate more than the music—certainly the lyrics, and maybe other things as well. I’ve been known to consult with the lighting designer. I remember being stuck on an ending once, but I went to the lighting designer and said, “How are you going to light the ending?” And whatever his answer was, it helped me decide what I was going to do with that ending. I’ve described orchestration as lighting for the ears. It’s more than just music.

Many people don’t know how the collaboration between the composer and the orchestrator works. Could you talk about that a bit?

s.s.: I suspect every combination is different, but with Jonathan and me, I write for the piano. It’s my only instrument. I know nothing about orchestrations. I play it for Jonathan in person, and he orchestrates from the feeling of the way I’m playing the piano. I don’t choose any instruments. He does all of that. I suspect it’s very hard to orchestrate because the figures and textures are so pianistic. My favorite example is “Another Hundred People,” which is written as a toccata. It’s a strict approach to piano writing. j.t.: Alternation of notes is very easy to do on the piano. The hand can rock back and forth. This can be done on orchestra instruments, but it isn’t comfortable, especially when it’s very fast. If you take the string instruments, they create sound with a back-and-forth motion with the bow on the strings. So it’s much easier for them to repeat notes, which is kind of awkward to do on the piano. So if I see the rocking rhythm on the piano and I’m writing it for strings, I’ll probably change it to repeated notes.

As we know, recordings are often sweetened from the theatrical version, in that instruments are added and adjustments are made for the recording.

s.s.: Jonathan made a decision on what he wanted to do in terms of enlarging the orchestra. j.t.: It was common practice to double the size of the string section for the recording—every cast album did that. Typically, a Broadway show had six violins, two cellos, and maybe two violas, and you would record with double that number. And we did it on Company as well. s.s.: Another thing—this was in the days of LPs, meaning there was a limited amount of time you could put on one side of a record. So you have to say, “Sorry, take a minute out.” If possible, you don’t want to throw out an entire song. Although that happens, as it did on the Follies record. j.t.: You might want to trim out 16 bars of underscoring that make a lot of sense on the stage but are rather redundant on a recording. It has to be like surgery, so you don’t see the scar. s.s.: [Record producer] Tom Shepard is a composer and musician. If he and I were looking to cut 30 bars, together we could figure out how to get from bar one to bar 16 to bar 37. I love to work on the end of a song. I always like to know what the end is going to be, lyrically, musically, whatever. j.t.: It’s fascinating you say that, Steve. We’ve never talked about this. I like to work backwards from an ending, too, in an orchestration. I was taught at Tamiment by the great Milton Greene, and he gave me sage advice. One was to write the ending first because that way, if you don’t get to finish the orchestration, at least we’ll have an ending for applause. I found it a good way to work, because a good ending will show me what a good beginning should be. s.s.: Absolutely. Also you’ve got to learn to save your resources. You don’t want to give everything away in the 16th bar when you want to use it at the end.

Even when you listen to subsequent recordings of Company, of which there have been several, it seems to me this is the definitive recording. Take Dean Jones, who played the lead, but left the show fairly early on in New York. So few people saw him do it.

s.s.: The best “Being Alive” he ever did is on this recording. That’s the best because he was trying so hard, and he didn’t have confidence in his voice. And you can watch it. There’s a close-up of him, and he’s practically sweating the notes out.

We have to move on to the inevitability of Elaine Stritch, who plays one of Bobby’s friends, Joanne. Stritch had been in

unsuccessful musicals like Noël Coward’s Sail Away. This was a comeback for her. Steve, when you asked the playwright, George Furth, who the character Stritch was playing was, he said, “It’s Stritch.”

s.s.: I started to write a song for the character, Joanne, because like Stritch, she was brought up very upper class, as opposed to what we know about Stritch when you talk to her. That was important to George because he based the character on her. I wrote a song. I wrote a draft of a lyric called “Crinoline,” which was about how she is really old-fashioned although she is this hip, cuss lady. So I thought, Okay, what’s the action of the scene? She’s getting drunk, so I wrote something called “Drinking Song,” which is in fact “The Ladies Who Lunch.” We changed the title later. Elaine liked to drink. As a matter of fact, she was a bartender in between jobs. George liked to drink too, and they would go out. They were out one morning, and it was approximately 4 a.m., so the bars were closing. They got to a bar, and she looked through glass doors and, indeed, the chairs were on the tables. And she knocked and knocked and knocked on the glass door until finally the bartender had to let her in. He said, “I’m sorry, we’re closed.” And she said, “Just give me a bottle of vodka and a floor plan.”

Why was “The Ladies Who Lunch” done so late in the session?

s.s.: It was supposed to be done early; the last song to be recorded was to be “Being Alive.” Dean Jones was something of a diva, as it turned out. He said, “I’m having trouble with my throat and I want to take a break. We’ll do another take later.” That kind of behavior. At the lunch break, we were in a diner nearby. Dean was complaining that his voice wouldn’t be usable at ten in the evening. Elaine said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll sing at the end of the day. And you sing in the morning when your voice is fresh.” He said, “Really?” She said, “Yes.” He said, “Okay.” She gave him her spot. So she sang at ten in the evening. And that’s when the dam fell.

From there, we witness her breakdown onscreen. I want to hear both of you talk about what happened in all these takes that might not be visible to someone seeing the condensed version in the documentary.

s.s.: The major thing to look for is what happens to a singer’s voice if they drink. Elaine was a performer with great stage fright, and she would always get a nip offstage to get her courage up. And if she had too many entrances, too many nips, the voice started to go. Which is what happened. She had a bottle of brandy in her dressing

room at the recording studio, and during the day she’d take a little nip every now and then. So by 10:30 in the evening, her voice was in rocky shape. In a number like that, it’s not production of the note—it’s the attitude towards the note, and that requires having a completely usable voice and courage. The more she tries, as you see, the less she was able to do it, as often happens. j.t.: Another issue with Elaine, I think, was the fact that she was very mercurial and the slightest thing would set her off. I did most of her arrangements, and I found that in a rehearsal, if someone made a noise in the audience, if the lighting was a little different, it would throw her off. She’d lose the beat. She’d forget the words. s.s.: Confidence was not her middle name.

When she was having her problems, was everyone involved with the recording aware that she was drinking?

s.s.: No. Look, what happened was she started recording the number and Pennebaker started to pack up because he was running out of film. As he got halfway to the exit door, he suddenly saw what was happening: that Elaine Stritch was having a breakdown. He turned right around and started to photograph. That’s what happened. We sent her home. She came back two mornings later, ten in the morning, bright as a button, and did it in virtually one take.

I noticed too when she came back, she’s in full makeup, like she’s ready to land it— and for the camera, not that that was her motive. But looking at the film again, one thing I’m conscious of is that Elaine is quite aware of the camera. She always had her eye on it.

s.s.: Oh, that’s her motive. Sure it is. Why not? I’ll add one anecdote about Elaine. When we were in Boston, she couldn’t get a handle on “The Ladies Who Lunch.” That number is designed to really excite an audience, and she sang it okay. I was in the hotel room writing “Being Alive” when Hal called me after a matinee. He said, “She got it. She got it. I wish you’d been there. It was thrilling, and the audience was wild. You got to see it.” I said, “I’ll come in tonight.” So I went in the evening, and sure enough, she did it great. I went backstage afterwards and I said, “Elaine, that’s the way it should be done. Thank you so much. It was just wonderful.” The next day I’m back at the hotel and Hal calls me at 11 in the evening after that night’s performance. He said, “Ugh, she lost it. It was so terrible tonight.” I said, “God, I don’t know. I told her how wonderful it was.” He said, “You what?” I said, “I went backstage.” “You told ■ her she was wonderful? You idiot.” august 16–29, 2021 | new york

T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

SUPERL ATI V E S

Daryl Hall on the Best and Worst of Hall & Oates by cr aig jenkins

CO R B I S / VCG V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S

rock and roll and soul music are brothers from another mother, and few performers have dedicated their careers to accentuating the closeness of the genres as much as Daryl Hall. He cut his teeth on the Philadelphia soul scene in the 1960s before meeting John Oates, a fellow Temple University student who sang and played guitar. The two became fast friends, roommates, and eventually bandmates who flourished in the ’70s. By the ’80s, Hall & Oates were accomplished hitmakers with a pliable sound, capable of balancing bubbly love songs with angular New Wave jams. This month, the duo embarks on a tour that was originally meant to start last year, alongside English rockers Squeeze (“Tempted,” “Cool for Cats,” “Black Coffee in Bed,” “Another Nail in My Heart”) and Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall (“Suddenly I See”). I spoke to Hall about the best, worst, and most underrated of Hall & Oates.

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Photograph by Lynn Goldsmith

Best album you ever made

➽ There are parts of many of them that I think are the best parts, but I don’t think there is one best Hall & Oates album. Truthfully, the most impactful albums to me are my solo albums. They’re the ones that matter the most to me because I liked the people I worked with. My favorite albums I’ve ever done are Three

Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine with Dave Stewart and the Sacred Songs album with Robert Fripp. I find no fault with either of those albums. With Hall & Oates, there are a lot of songs I would redo.

Hall & Oates song you most want to rerecord

➽ I would redo “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do).” I’d redo “You Make My Dreams.” I’d redo “Maneater.” The only one I wouldn’t redo maybe is “Sara Smile.” I’d leave that one alone because it’s close to perfection.

Best Hall & Oates single

➽ “She’s Gone.” Because we wrote that song together. All the other songs, I wrote. Also, there was Arif Mardin, who was a genius producer and arranger. John and I, we were new to that world.

We’d just started with the Atlantic Records group of people. “She’s Gone” represents a true Daryl and John collaboration.

Most underrated album

Best use of a Hall & Oates song in a film

Least favorite album review

➽ 500 Days of Summer. They basically just did a video of “You Make My Dreams,” and they used almost the whole song. It’s very unusual for a movie to do that. The impact that it had … People told me—this was when people were still going to movie theaters—that they would get up and start dancing around when that scene came on.

’80s pop single you wish you had thought of

➽ Anything by Prince. “Little Red Corvette,” I pick that one.

Best hip-hop song that samples Hall & Oates

➽ I’m aware of all of them because I approve them. I did a song with B-Legit [in 1996]. That was really cool. It was called “Ghetto Smile.” He sampled me, and I actually sang on it. That’s a good one.

➽ Most of them.

➽ Robert bloody fucking Christgau gave Abandoned Luncheonette a C. [Ed.’s note: It was a B-minus.] One of the great albums of the ’70s. So there you go. What an asshole.

Singers who made you want to sing

➽ I can’t really say one person. But, I mean, I started off singing street-corner music and things like that. Early, early rock and roll and R&B. Somebody who really influenced me, apart from the Temptations, was the lead singer of the Spinners, Philippé Wynne. I loved his singing style. I loved what he brought to the table in the world of soul. I mean, it was gospel music all the way. He moved me like just about nobody else ever has. That was definitely a mental influence on me.

Favorite younger artists

➽ I like Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars. I like that thing they’re doing together, Silk Sonic. I put some feelers out [to work with them]. I dig those guys. I like the new soul singers. I relate to them.

T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

TV’s White Guys Are in Crisis They’re no longer the main characters, but they’re still around. So what happens to them? By Kathryn VanArendonk

this summer, television became preoccupied with a question: What should happen to men? Not all men—TV has not been inundated with stories about Black men, migrant men, trans men, men who struggle to make ends meet by holding down three gig-economy micro-jobs. One conundrum has kept cropping up in various genres and iterations: The white guys who used to be default protagonists on TV and in American life, all of the beleaguered dads, bad bosses, authoritative leaders, and wild-card mavericks, are no longer the main characters. So what happens to that guy now? Should he be erased? Can he be rehabilitated, his entitlement washed away? Where is he supposed to go? Series from this summer have found various answers to that question. Perhaps the white guy has a meltdown, or he leans into his right to take up space; maybe the best course of action is to plot his demise. In every case, it’s less a clear answer and more a thought experiment for an awkward cultural snarl—with a vague gesture about how to loosen it slightly. Although many of these shows include people of color on the directing staff or in the writers’ room, they are all created or co-created by white producers, and it’s tempting to see their own plaintive self-concern at work in them. After all, none of the shows simply jettison the white guy. They hold him close. They observe him, mock him, jab at him mercilessly. Even as he becomes a story’s central problem rather than its central character, there he still is in the middle of the narrative. 70 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

The first 2021 show to poke at this question was the friendly Peacock comedy Rutherford Falls. Ed Helms plays Nathan Rutherford, a white man with good intentions and a passion for family and local history; his best friend, Reagan Wells (Jana Schmieding), belongs to the local (fictional) Minishonka Nation. Nathan runs a beautiful history museum and has plenty of money to maintain the relics of his family’s past: They were the white people who founded the town, and he idolizes their legacy. Reagan has one small Minishonka heritage room in the local casino, even though she has a degree in museum studies and a more nuanced understanding of the centuries of oppression and injustice that led to their small town’s current politics. In another era of TV, Rutherford Falls would have surely been mostly centered on Nathan, his quixotic attempts to get people to care

about history, and the shenanigans of his quirky friends. Instead, it is about his hubris—the show’s title is the name of the town, and it’s also a joke about Nathan. But while Reagan is the obvious protagonist (all the storytelling energy is behind her), there’s Nathan, standing next to her. Rutherford Falls is about an American Indian deciding to take back what should belong to her tribe, but it can’t stop wondering what should happen to the guy whose family stole it in the first place. In June came Kevin Can F**k Himself, an AMC series about a depressed wife, Allison (Annie Murphy), that is notable for how it plays with TV’s genre conventions. Allison lives in a dark, drug-filled prestige drama while her husband, Kevin (Eric Petersen), gets to yuk it up in the chipper, well-lit sanctuary of a multi-cam sitcom. The series excavates the buried assumptions of network sitcoms like The King of Queens, Kevin Can Wait, and According to Jim. What does the more responsible wife have to put up with while the zhlubby husband gets into scrapes and faces no consequences? The show is similar in its setup to Rutherford Falls. The animating energy is with Allison, a woman who has been underestimated and forgotten in the world of this show and in every other sitcom in which a hot wife tut-tuts over her useless husband. And yet Kevin Can F**k Himself is saddled with Kevin, TV’s king doofus. Allison, as the archetypal sitcom wife, has been freed from second-on-the-call-sheet prison and given her own show, her own motives and desires and frustrations. Even then, all she can think to ask is “What the fuck should I do about Kevin?” The White Lotus, an HBO drama about wealthy white families vacationing at a Hawaiian resort, gets at the problem with a more lacerating edge. The show is a critique of whiteness, not just white men. But it offers the most pointed soliloquies to its male characters—in particular, Mark (Steve Zahn), a classic TV-dad figure who feels emasculated by his wife’s professional success and frustrated by his daughter’s political animus toward her family’s privilege. “How are we going to make it right?” Mark asks when his daughter, Olivia, raises the issue of white oppression of Indigenous Hawaiians. “Should we give away all our money? Would you like that, Liv? Maybe we should just feel shitty about ourselves all the time for the crimes of the past, wear a hair shirt, and not go on vacation.” Mark is exasperated; he is ridiculous. Somewhere not far under the surface, though, The White Lotus is sincerely asking: Should he just shut up? Fade away? In the show’s most positive vision of a possible outcome, white

P H OTO : CO U R T E S Y O F H B O

Steve Zahn in The White Lotus.

men run away from their lives entirely. The latest series to take up this question is Netflix’s The Chair, an academic dramedy about English professor Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh), who ascends to the position of department chair—the first woman or person of color to hold the role—full of plans to make it vital again. As she deals with the morass of institutional red tape and protests from older faculty members, Ji-Yoon realizes she is harnessed to a problem she didn’t even see coming: her close friend, the department’s popular modernism professor. Bill (Jay Duplass) is no Nathan or Kevin, and he’s not a Mark, either. He is thoughtful about his privilege—he’s an ally! And then he’s caught out in a mistake: Students film him performing a “Sieg heil!” salute while teaching a class on Fascism. The act is taken out of context, but things escalate as Bill doubles down. He is not a monster, but he behaves like the wronged party in an Aaron Sorkin script. As Bill digs himself into an ever-deeper hole, he becomes the main source of conflict for JiYoon, who is forced to sacrifice her career ambition so she can salvage her vision of the department’s future. The Guy, the Main Guy—the guy whose problems we care about, the guy who used to be a show’s dominant point of view— becomes an obstacle to overcome. He’s not quite an antagonist because he’s too clueless. Nathan and Kevin lack the agency to cause problems on purpose. They are objects of disdain, of lingering, almost nos-

talgic fondness. We used to love The Guy so much! He was our Beaver Cleaver, our Tim Allen in everything Tim Allen has ever played, our Alex P. Keaton, our Don Draper, our Michael Scott. We can’t just throw him out or relegate him to the status of recurring minor guest star. But he no longer fits. His privilege feels outsize. As a protagonist, he doesn’t spark the same joy he used to. The comedy Ted Lasso, on Apple TV+, is a glaring exception, a counterpoint so stark it’s as though someone unfurled a banner that reads yes, you can still have a beloved white male tv protagonist— ask me how! Now in its second season, the show’s eponymous Ted (Jason Sudeikis) is an American football coach brought on to coach an English soccer team. He represents the model of an ideal, considerate, unpretentious white man. Why worry about the specter of the Former Main Guy lurking around the joint when you can swap him out for his preternaturally positive twin, Nu Main Guy, who approaches all his peers with unfailing empathy and respect? It is TV comedy as modern-parenting technique, rewarding good behavior and ignoring the bad stuff—the viewers are the children who require wholesome, appropriate models, their wounded psyches longing to be soothed. What is Ted Lasso if not Father Knows Best with contemporary, reformed ideas of what “best” means? (Father knows so much, in fact, that he even knows he is not perfect and is operating in an unfair patriarchal system!)

Shows like The Chair and Kevin Can F**k Himself are messier, and at times didactic, but they capture a friction that feels truer than Ted Lasso’s clean alternative. Ted has skipped ahead. It has ignored the difficulties of how to transform entitlement into humility and instead presented a Fixed Version of the American Man as a fait accompli. The fantasy of emotionally intelligent, empathetic American masculinity arrives fully formed. It’s an easier show to watch. It begins with answers instead of thorny, intractable muddles. It’s odd because, within the world of TV, there is a simple answer to the puzzle these shows pose. They could just forget the Main Guy altogether, at least for a while (and it’s worth noting that most recent shows led by creators of color do not frame white masculinity as the fundamental obstacle for their characters). It could be a relief to let him rest, to allow Reagan to flourish and make her own mistakes, to let Allison just divorce Kevin and move on with her life, to let Ji-Yoon tell Bill he’s being an idiot instead of standing by and sadly shaking her head. It would be so much more pleasant to erase his history, to eliminate his assumed protagonicity and make him like everyone else, a guy whose moment comes and goes, a team player. Still, there is an honesty in the choice to keep the dethroned Main Guy around as a fictional device. He doesn’t disappear in real life; he is still there, tied to the lives of ■ everyone around him. august 16–29, 2021 | new york

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T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S

CRITICS

P O P / CRAIG JENKINS

The Loud Part Quiet On her new set, Billie Eilish matches her growing independence with a vastly expanded palette. billie eilish’s meteoric ascent has seen much turbulence, both avoidable and unavoidable. By the time she entered the final year of her teens, in December 2020, she had already gone platinum, swept the major categories at the Grammys, topped both the “Billboard 200” and “Hot 100” charts, sang the theme song for a (still yet to be released) Bond film, starred in a documentary about her life, and struck up a friendship with her childhood idol, Justin Bieber. Parallel to all this, unfair criticism of her body and legitimate pushback for her feistier music takes seemed to throw the young star into a defensive position. She fell back for a sec, then began to renegotiate her relationship with the public. She ditched the jet-black mop with HAPPIER THAN slime-green roots that had become a signature look throughout the EVER BILLIE EILISH. rollout of her 2019 debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do DARKROOM/ INTERSCOPE We Go?, and its tour, and she bid farewell to the long, flowing suits RECORDS. some onlookers crassly compared to ’90s rapper clothes, restoring her blonde locks and unveiling a new wardrobe that challenged the 72 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

presumption that she was leery of people’s prying eyes. Eilish returned to a public that was a bit harsher, a bit less forgiving than before. The training wheels are now off. It’s easier to draw smoke. Past gaffes come back. Her videos earn more scrutiny. She has been accused of queerbaiting. She has had to apologize for mouthing a slur in an old video. The exposure has made Eilish by turns more protective of herself and clearer in her diction. The music she released this year opened new avenues in her singing and writing, pushing past the claustrophobic synth pop of her hit “Bad Guy” and, at times seemingly out of necessity, mirroring moments of resolute honesty in The World’s a Little Blurry. Where do you go after your first effort rakes in attention many artists never see in a lifetime? Happier Than Ever, Eilish’s sophomore album, spells out the differences in the singer’s life in greater detail than the bread crumbs in her Instagram posts and interviews. In many ways, it’s your textbook

P H OTO : K E L I A A N N E M ACC LU S K E Y / DA R K R O O M / I N T E R S CO P E R E CO R D S

Craig Jenkins on Happier Than Ever … Helen Shaw on Merry Wives … Bilge Ebiri on The Suicide Squad.

follow-up project: It is, in part, a reaction to the jarring experience of rapidly becoming a public figure behind a hit album and the extraordinary life changes this entails—the love, the scrutiny, the lack of boundaries, and the heightened parasocial expectations. Eilish seems to handle it in stride in a batch of songs that run more overtly personal than ever. Early on, in “I Didn’t Change My Number,” the singer litigates who gets to have access to her behind the scenes. “NDA” is a look at the nagging pitfalls of celebrity: “Got a stalker walking up and down the street/Says he’s Satan and he’d like to meet/I bought a secret house when I was 17/Haven’t had a party since I got the keys.” The interlude “Not My Responsibility,” originally a video piece from the When We All Fall Asleep tour, is a stern rejoinder to anyone who gossiped about her body: “I feel you watching, always / And nothing I do goes unseen/So while I feel your stares, your disapproval, or your sigh of relief/If I lived by them, I’d never be able to move.” Where on the first album Eilish sometimes seems like a spectral narrator wandering amid scenes of disarray, pondering the afterlife and tiptoeing through salacious drug parties, here she owns her body and the lust and rage and pain and the rational and irrational pangs that come with it. While Eilish coolly rebukes stalkers, gossips, abusers, and predatory men, she takes time to let listeners know she isn’t unhappy, only taking out the trash in her life and demanding the respect she deserves. Her growing independence is matched by a vastly expanded musical palette. Working closely again with her older brother, Finneas, Eilish branches out into a wider world of sounds but preserves her debut’s disarming quiet. “Billie Bossa Nova” is a sparse salute to Brazilian music; the snarling “I Didn’t Change My Number” and the kiss-off “Lost Cause” both feel indebted to ’90s hip-hop soul. “Goldwing” is a saintly choral number that hangs a sharp left into the kind of warped vocals and electronics you’d sooner expect from Björk. The disparate threads of the advance singles—see the subtle nu-jazz accents in “My Future,” the gutting folk of “Your Power,” and the sinister electropop of “Therefore I Am,” one of the few callbacks to the sounds of When We All Fall Asleep—are tied together into an album that, like its predecessor, sets itself apart from the sonics most contemporary pop stars favor. It carries the rustic minimalism of the songs Jack Antonoff produced for Taylor Swift a step further; opener “Getting Older” manages to feel both plush and delicate and barely there. Eilish’s first album made mutant pop with unconventional instrumentation, but Happier Than Ever is at once the more conventional-sounding

body of work and the less predictable of the pair. There are no EDM tunes or bright ’80s-rock choruses, no crossover-happy trap beats or surprising pop-punk jams. The only qualities tying Happier Than Ever to this year, or even this decade, are lyrics like the line in “Billie Bossa Nova” in which she tells a love interest to lock their phone when they’re together. Eilish’s deceptively muted vocals and unflinching, commanding presence make a tantalizing combo, and the unexpected twists that Finneas’s production takes underfoot carry this album to places the first one wasn’t prepared to visit. The strides both siblings have made toward improving their craft are never more apparent than on the title track, the longest song in the young singer’s catalogue. When it creaks in

like an old country breakup tune, you think it’s going to mirror the wispy, exceedingly dark trilogy of songs that close out the last album. It’s a ruse. Midway through, Eilish’s whisper explodes into a chorus of harmonizing screams as she fires darts at her exboyfriend, explaining in no uncertain terms how and why he blew it and imploring him (and maybe us as well) to “just fuckin’ leave me alone” in a squall of thick fuzz and feedback. It’s a shock not unlike the swelling high note at the climax of the Bond theme “No Time to Die,” another wild card she had stashed up her sleeve all along. You wonder what else she’s capable of as the closer, “Male Fantasy,” lands us gently with talk of recovery and therapy. Maybe we’ll know in 2023. You move at a different pace when your ■ major competition is yourself.

T H E AT E R / HELEN SHAW

The Real Housewives of Windsor In Merry Wives in Central Park, Falstaff falls back as the women step up. shakespeare in the park is back! And let me lay aside the critical monocle for a minute and say the experience of going to Merry Wives is entirely glorious. Even the heaviest summer sky is beautiful over the Delacorte as a much-missed civic ritual slots back into its seasonal groove. The sense of collective celebration in the theater is positively medieval: Afterward, had they asked us, we could have raised a barn. It’s not just release, though. The production has been chosen to feel like a leap upward: Merry Wives is Jocelyn Bioh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s farce The Merry Wives of Windsor, which she and director Saheem Ali have deftly shifted to a Ghanaian and Nigerian community in Harlem. It’s not the first all-Black cast in Shakespeare in the Park—that would be Kenny Leon’s exquisite Much Ado About Nothing in 2019. But it is the first time (apart from musical adaptations) that the festival has invited a Black playwright to make the piece her own. Beowulf Boritt’s clever set is a forced-perspective street corner: Citi Bike look-alikes are parked stage right near a clinic, a laundromat with an apartment above, and a hair-braiding salon. As in many a park production, the show shifts into a kind of van Gogh rapture as the twilight fades into night, and the designers (Boritt and lighting designer Jiyoun Chang) focus our attention on the trees towering behind the stage. But for most of the play, the stretch of 116th Street is enough: a boulevard where local slacker Falstaff (Jacob Ming-Trent) can try to gull the neighborhood’s well-to-do African immigrants, who turn the tables on him in increasingly absurd ways. After they receive identical love letters from Falstaff, it takes maybe 30 seconds for the married ladies Madam Ford (Susan Kelechi Watson) and Madam Page (Pascale Armand) to take offense and—as their husbands fumble with their own plans—dream up a series of Falstaff-foiling plots. As these older folks try to stay out of one another’s arms, young Anne Page (Abena) and her suitors Slender (Joshua Echebiri), Doctor Caius (David Ryan Smith), and Fenton (MaYaa Boateng) do-si-do their way into the appropriate romantic formations. Connecting these narrative levels are the many foolish messengers, including Mama Quickly (Shola Adewusi) and Pastor Evans (Phillip James Brannon), who misdeliver letters, pick august 16–29, 2021 | new york

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M O V I E S / BILGE EBIRI

Irreverent Irrelevance Fun yet exhausting, The Suicide Squad upholds even as it subverts superhero conventions. director james gunn’s The Suicide Squad—equal parts sequel to and reboot of 2016’s widely reviled but ultimately profitable Suicide Squad—offers so much rapid-fire irreverence that it’s sometimes hard to figure out if it’s even supposed to be a movie. With its incessant profanity, ridiculous body count, and trollish sense of humor, Gunn’s film often seems content to exist in a constant state of rug-pulling. Lots of fun but little forward momentum. It kills off supposedly major characters with abandon, and it upends noble superhero virtues

P H OTO : J OA N M A R C U S / T H E P U B L I C T H E AT E R

fights, hide in cupboards, and prevent the Ford’s Laundromat, where Watson and easy unspooling of each story line. Every Armand crackle with invention and impatangle combs out in the end. tience, ready to get Falstaff’s libido sorted To get the evening down to an intermis- out so they can go on to fix the world. sionless hour and 50 minutes, Bioh has When the merry wives enter, they’re chucked one of Shakespeare’s subplots and greeted with a theme song—they strut, a bushel of jokes about Welsh pronuncia- pose, vamp. Falstaff gets Michael Thurber tion, heraldry, and Latin grammar. Her cuts, entrance music too, but Ali doesn’t follow though, do not change the deeper structure, through on the concept of the play as a sitand in terms of the language, her additions com. (Merry Wives would be great as a sitalways chime with elements already in the com, to be clear. Add commercial breaks! source. Invitations to dinner involve roast Freeze-frame as the credits roll!) But Ali goat; mentions of “sack” now refer to rum or picks up a gimmick only to abandon it, palm wine. She tends to round off an original which is true of much of his underbaked diphrase with a modern line, so the Nigerian rection here. And then there’s Ming-Trent’s “Auntie” Mama Quickly says, “Never a Falstaff, who can seem too fragile to stand woman knows more of Anne’s mind than I under the deliberately collapsing comic edido, nor can do more than I do with her, I fice. The character is among Shakespeare’s thank Heaven,” only to turn to the audience best: According to theater lore, Queen to roll her eyes about “these people.” Mama Elizabeth herself, upon seeing Henry IV, Quickly then checks her blood pressure be- demanded that he get a spinoff. Ming-Trent cause “they stress me too much, o!” certainly has the right chops for MERRY WIVES Bioh’s adaptation contains a lot of that kind of Falstaff. We know this BY JOCELYN BIOH, Elizabethan text, but now it pulses from The Forty-Year-Old Version ADAPTING WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. differently: This one time in his life, and countless stage productions; DELACORTE THEATER, CENTRAL Shakespeare wrote a whole play in we also know it from a scene in PARK. THROUGH SEPTEMBER 18. prose, but Bioh’s interpolated West which he’s allowed to unleash his African ohs and ehns bring in the remarkable singing voice, a mohopscotch rhythms of verse. ment he lights up with briefly glimpsed, Bioh’s breakthrough was the hilarious titanic charisma. In Bioh and Ali’s modernSchool Girls; or, The African Mean Girls ization, though, he is no longer a knight, no Play, in which she displayed both a whip- longer a rolling stone. He’s just the poorest, crack wit and an ability to write a gaggle of loneliest guy in the neighborhood, a handsy girls simultaneously negotiating status, de- loser, the butt of a bunch of mean fat jokes. livering gossip, and casting shade. Thus in (Speaking of which, Ali has actors grab Merry Wives, when she multiplies women their genitals for sex jokes and the belly for (as she does by resexing Fenton or adding fat jokes. This is never the right thing to do.) a distracted hair-braider), she brings us The problems and the promise of this into her wheelhouse. There are guys in this production’s Falstaff are exemplified by show, but you can feel them being bustled his bedroom. When a wall of Boritt’s street away from your attention. We’re in this to spins around to reveal a tiny apartment, we hear the Real Housewives of Windsor in- see it has pink-and-black zebra wallpaper vent more elaborate insults, to wait while and the accoutrements of a man who esthey exit to change into fabulous outfits capes into fantasy a lot—a VR headset, a by Dede Ayite, then to howl with laughter lightsaber. Over the bed is a blown-up print when they come back on to finish the she- of what might have been an album cover: nanigans. Bioh’s ear and the women’s skill is four Falstaffs, each in a Notorious B.I.G.– such that we would be happy never to leave style crown, the ’90s vibes rolling off it.

falstaff, the poster says, and discretion/ valor. It delivers a fantastically detailed idea of who this guy is, with Nietzsche on his bedside and Poetic Justice on his T-shirt. The plot mechanics, though, need Falstaff to be always on the make, a grifter who looks forward, not back. The quieter Ming-Trent becomes, the more his gravity slows the scenes around him. Every Shakespeare modernization comes at a cost. There will be a dozen ways in which changing the frame enriches the play and a handful of ways it wrenches it out of true. Here, only the wives are made more merry. Happily, though, Elizabethans knew what Mamma Mia! also does: You can fix any show by doing a dance at the end. The plot dissolves into lunacy (in both senses of the word), as the whole company comes out to caper in the moonlight—ostensibly to frighten Falstaff, but really just for the joy of taking over a public space. The show doesn’t end so much as it evanesces. Our spirits rise and rise and rise. There’s really only one thing that rings false at the end: the way Armand and Watson bow before Ming-Trent, who is in star position. Shakespeare might have done it that way, but here we are certainly left thinking of them, their wit, their fire. Falstaff has been stealing scenes for hundreds of years. In Merry Wives, you meet ■ the women who steal them back.

P H OTO : H B O M A X

with such indulgent glee that it can feel repetitive at times. But sometimes the lowhanging fruit is also the sweetest. It’s hard to hate a movie in which Sylvester Stallone voices a giant talking shark who pretends to read a book so people will think he’s smart. “Book read,” he rumbles, adorably, holding the book upside down. “So smart, me. Enjoy book so much.” Of course, the Suicide Squad concept was always meant to upend the noble superhero virtues. This is a crack team of killers assembled from a variety of supervillains serving time in prison. They are allowed out for special covert missions at the behest of ruthless government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), and they don’t fight because they’re trying to save the world; they fight because they’re bribed and coerced and because they have bombs implanted in their necks that Waller will detonate if they get out of line. Sometimes they fight because they get to kill. Sometimes they switch sides because they are, after all, bad guys at heart. That’s what made the Suicide Squad comics among the more interesting titles in the superhero firmament: They were often so delightfully unpredictable. It’s a fun idea for a movie, too, since the best iterations of the genre tend to live or die by the strength of their villains, and this concept is villains all the way down. It actually felt well timed back in 2016, when Marvel’s colorful jokiness had taken a turn for the self-important and DC’s gritty earnestness had been supercharged by films like Batman v Superman. Most critics despised the first crack at a movie about the Suicide Squad, directed by David Ayer (Fury, End of Watch). It had its moments of refreshing nastiness but had clearly been hacked to pieces in postproduction. Reportedly, a company that made trailers was brought in to recut it, which is maybe why so much of the picture felt like a random assemblage from a far more interesting effort. Ayer has since all but disowned the film. It’s easy to see, in retrospect, how his street-level toughguy sensibility might not have provided the R-rated but still juvenile geekery DC and Warner Bros. were gunning for. Gunn, who delivered one of Marvel’s more entertainingly trippy and colorful hits with the first Guardians of the Galaxy and who spent the early part of his career working in the Troma exploitation-flick salt mines, is clearly a better fit for this stuff than Ayer ever was. Still, despite its tonal departures, The Suicide Squad does bring back some of the characters from the previous film, including Davis’s Waller, ostensible team leader Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), Aussie psychopath Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), and, most important, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), who has since had her

own solo cinematic outing in the wellreceived Birds of Prey. They’re joined this time around by, primarily, Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and Peacemaker (John Cena)—both of them expert marksmen and assassins— as well as the Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) and Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), two of the goofier superhumans out there. The Polka-Dot Man throws deadly polka dots; Ratcatcher 2 controls armies of rats. There is also a variety of lesser baddies such as Blackguard (Pete Davidson), T.D.K. (Nathan Fillion), and Savant (Gunn regular Michael Rooker, whose bewilderment in the movie’s early scenes makes him a nice audience surrogate). The plot is too generic to warrant more than a quick mention: Our heroes must sneak into the fictional island nation of Corto Maltese, which has just suffered a violent coup, and enter an old fortress to destroy a secret alien experiment nicknamed Project Starfish.

play. He’s a slick filmmaker, to be sure. He shoots action cleanly and has a flair for visual punch lines that make his more grotesque indulgences acceptable. One throwaway example: A character who callously kills a bird early in the film later gets his head blown off, and Gunn makes sure to include a shot of the same type of bird landing on the man’s bloody neck and picking off a piece of shredded flesh. (And this had been someone we liked.) A later massacre, when Bloodsport and Peacemaker quietly compete for the most kills, is filled with gratuitous gags (dudes exploding, getting hacked to pieces, being electrocuted, etc.), and one marvels at how well Gunn pairs his penchant for gross humor with a supremely confident sense of style—like Steven Spielberg making a dick joke. But a little of this stuff goes a long way, and it’s possible The Suicide Squad is too much of a good thing and not enough of

Of course, the story is not really the point a better thing. The movie offers lots of here, and you can feel the movie deflating memorable scenes and lines, but it’s hard whenever it has to handle any sort of nar- to feel like any of it amounts to anything. rative business. Gunn, who also wrote the The lack of narrative momentum or comscript, doesn’t seem particularly interested pelling character arcs starts to wear on in grounding these characters in anything you. The jokes get old, too. The movie’s resembling the real world. Maybe because best line comes from the Polka-Dot Man, he struggles whenever a scene calls for sin- whom Dastmalchian plays with tense, softcerity: An early prison conversation spoken eeriness: “I don’t like to between Bloodsport and his teenkill people, but if I pretend they’re age daughter is presumably sup- THE SUICIDE SQUAD my mom, it’s easy,” he says early DIRECTED BY posed to set some emotional stakes on, and it’s a chilling, hilarious JAMES GUNN. WARNER BROS. R. for the character, but when parent bit, perfectly tossed off. But Gunn and child start hurling “Fuck you”s doesn’t leave it there. The charat each other, it’s hard not to feel acter then explains why he hates Gunn the screenwriter throwing his hands his mom so much. Then we see through up. The various revelations and betrayals of his eyes and realize that everybody around the film’s final act, meanwhile, are so pre- him has his mother’s face. The first time this dictable that you’re liable to forget them happens, it’s pretty funny. By the third time even as they’re happening. it happens, it feels like a gag being driven The Suicide Squad works best when into the ground. The movie has humor and Gunn the director can go to town with style to burn and not much else. For some, ■ the dirty jokes and the over-the-top gun- that will be more than enough. august 16–29, 2021 | new york

4. 9.

7. Watch Work in

12.

Progress

Abby, still under construction.

T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S

Showtime, August 22.

Abby McEnany co-created and stars in this underappreciated gem about a queer woman (also named Abby) with mental-health issues. In its second season, Abby goes on the hunt for a new therapist amid the challenges of a pandemic. j.c. BOOKS

8. Read Real Estate

Beyond Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. Bloomsbury Publishing, August 24.

Twenty-five things to see, hear, watch, and read. AUGUST 18–SEPTEMBER 1 TV

1. Watch The Chair

4. Watch Only Murders

Netflix, August 20.

True crime meets two of the Three Amigos.

With showrunner Amanda Peet.

Sandra Oh stars in this dramedy as the new chair of the English department at a university where enrollments are down, systems are antiquated, the professors have problems, and she’s been tasked with fixing it all ASAP. Which should be simple enough, since institutions averse to change are always incredibly easy to reshape. jen chaney POP MUSIC

2. Listen to Solar Power “A weed album.”

Universal, August 20.

The 24-year-old singer-songwriter Lorde, in a new set produced by Jack Antonoff, balances sprightly tunes like the lead single/title track with the dark reflections of the follow-up single, “Stoned at the Nail Salon.” craig jenkins THEATER

3. See

Feinstein’s/54 Below

Life is a cabaret.

in the Building Hulu, August 31.

So Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez walk into a streaming series … no, really, they do in this enjoyable comedy about three residents of an Upper East Side building who come together to investigate what appears to be a suicide (but might be a murder) and make a podcast about it. j.c. PODCASTS

5. Listen to Blank Check On a horror auteur. AudioBoom.

This filmography-spelunking podcast by David Sims and Griffin Newman is basing an entire run on the works of the celebrated cult genre filmmaker John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing, They Live). Guest stars include directors Nia DaCosta and Alex Ross Perry. nicholas quah MOVIES

6. See Ma Belle,

Feinstein’s/54 Below, 254 West 54th Street.

My Beauty

The cozy supper club’s in-person programming has been spectacular, full of artists who clearly missed the red velvet curtains and clinking silverware and intimate seating. August sends off the season with, among others, four performances from the divinely funny powerhouse Bonnie (August 18, 19, 24, 30); Broadway darling Leo Butz singing “torch songs for a pandemic” (August 19 to 21); and composer-lyricist Michael R. Jackson performing his Covers and Uncovers (August 31), a night of old songs and new. helen shaw

Sexy, melancholy, and the next best thing to a trip to the south of France, Marion Hill’s film stars Idella Johnson and Lucien Guignard as married jazz musicians who reunite with the woman (Hannah Pepper) with whom they once formed a polyamorous relationship. The gorgeous setting contrasts with the dissatisfactions of the characters, who are trying to mesh their desires with what they can actually have. alison willmore

76 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

A Sundance winner.

In theaters August 20.

Deborah Levy has already written two of what she calls “living autobiographies”—meaning ones written in midlife. Both Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013) and The Cost of Living (2018) were intimate and essayistic. The last in the trilogy, Real Estate, chronicles her late-in-life adventures in Paris and India, London and New York, and questions how writers settle in or wander about in search of the right space and a feeling of belonging. hillary kelly MOVIES

9. See The Night House Expect jump-scares.

In theaters August 20.

In David Bruckner’s moody horror film, Rebecca Hall is left rattling around her waterfront home after the death of her husband. The prize for most enviable haunted house might just go to the gorgeous lakeside abode. Her character may be beset by grief and plagued by dark dreams, but those windows, that view, are worth weathering marital secrets and possible demonic forces for. a.w. ART

10. See Mark Laver

Online exhibitions are still going strong. riccomaresca.com, through September 30.

In the past 40 years plus, few galleries anywhere have done as much for the cause of “self-taught” and “outsider art” as the Ricco/Maresca Gallery; now, in its electric online viewing room, see the work of Canadian Mark Laver, who channels Charles Burchfield’s mystical landscapes, but infused with a juicy painter’s touch. jerry saltz MOVIES

11. See Val

Narrated by Kilmer’s son Jack. Prime Video.

Val Kilmer was never quite the leading man Hollywood tried to sell us, but he was always fascinating. Assembled from home footage dating since childhood, Kilmer’s intimate doc doesn’t flinch from showing him as he is now that throat cancer has robbed him of his voice. bilge ebiri TV

12. Watch The Other Two Return of the fame seekers. HBO Max, August 26.

In its second season, striving talent manager

PHOTOGRAPHS: JON PACK/COMEDY CENTRAL ( THE OTHER TWO); NETFLIX ( THE CHAIR); DANIELLE LEVITT/COMEDY CENTRAL (AWKWAFINA); HULU (ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING); SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES ( THE NIGHTHOUSE)

For more cultur coverage and streaming recommendati see vulture.co

21.

Publicly traded under LUVU

Brooke (Heléne Yorke) and struggling actor Cary (Drew Tarver) are now living in the shadow of their mom, the Ellen-esque talk-show host Pat Dubek (Molly Shannon), and their younger brother, Chase (Case Walker). What has not changed: This showbiz satire remains LOL-funny. j.c. TV

13. Watch AHS:

Double Feature

Ryan Murphy’s perennial fearfest. FX, August 25.

One part of American Horror Story’s tenth season takes place by the sand and the other by the sea; we know aliens are somehow involved; we know the cast features a ton of AHS regulars (Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Lily Rabe, Frances Conroy, and Finn Witrock among them) as well as a notable newbie to the franchise: Macaulay Culkin. j.c.

Mak Your source for intimacy enhancers.

POP MUSIC

14. Listen to How Long

Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?

From founding members of Bon Iver and the National. Jagjaguwar/37d03d, August 27.

Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner have reformed their Big Red Machine outfit with its mix of rustic folk and light electronics. Guests include Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Sharon Van Etten, Anaïs Mitchell, Naeem, and Taylor Swift. c.j. PODCASTS

15. Listen to Love Is

a Crime

With Jon Hamm and Zooey Deschanel. Vanity Fair and Cadence 13, August 17.

Vanity Fair’s first limited narrative podcast series takes up a bloody scandal of Old Hollywood: the shooting of an agent suspected by Walter Wanger, a powerful film producer, of having an affair with his wife, the femme fatale Joan Bennett. Love Is a Crime comes from Karina Longworth and Vanessa Hope, Wanger and Bennett’s granddaughter. n.q.

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Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street; japansociety.org August 20 to September 2.

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New Japanese film fest.

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This essential showcase of recent cinema from Japan is online as well as in person this year, with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Wife of a Spy, a thriller set at the cusp of World War II, as the centerpiece. Other highlights include It’s a Summer Film!, in which Marika Ito plays a high-schooler determined to make her own samurai movie, and The Great Yokai War: Guardians, Takashi Miike’s sequel to his 2005 fantasy film drawing from folklore. a.w.

A week-in-review newsletter From the people who make New York

17. Watch Evil Scary and brilliant.

Paramount+, August 29.

One of the best, creepiest, and quirkiest dramas returns from its summer hiatus with more investi-

v r sn

august 16–29, 2021 | new york

gations into paranormal phenomena and, presumably, more of Michael Emerson absolutely acting his freaking face off. j.c. POP MUSIC

18. Listen to Glow On Turnstile’s on tour.

Roadrunner, August 27.

Baltimore hardcore quintet Turnstile comes roaring back into action with the first full length since the 2018 sophomore album Time & Space. On Glow On, the band is still pushing the boundaries of what is possible in punk rock, with fast songs and lush ballads, crunchy rock songs and guest vocals from R&B maestro Blood Orange. c.j. MOVIES

Start Playing Test your pop-culture knowledge and everyday wit with the New York Crossword, now online. Solve new and past puzzles with our digital crossword game.

nymag.com/crossword

19. See The Meaning

of Hitler

Martin Amis gives a compelling interview. In theaters and VOD.

Do we need more movies about Hitler? If they’re this insightful and disturbing, yes. Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s documentary is less about the Nazi era and more about how history has tried to deal with that murderous legacy—and how it has failed to, given the recent resurgence of fascism across the world. b.e. THEATER

20. See

What Happened? The Michaels Abroad End of an era.

Loewe Theatre at Hunter College, from August 28 to October 8.

Richard Nelson’s multiplay saga about a Rhinebeck family has seemed similar to his other multiplay sagas about Rhinebeck families (The Apple Family Plays, The Gabriels). In the in-person culmination to a series that had to go online for several iterations, we finally get to see the whole team. This last play in the Michaels era is also, Nelson says, the farewell to his “Rhinebeck Panorama,” which began in 2010. Come say good-bye. h.s. TV

21. Watch Awkwafina Is

Nora From Queens

The corniest of family sitcoms.

from Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, and Christopher Plummer. It was nominated for a bunch of Oscars and didn’t win any of them; it probably should have won most of them. b.e. ART

23. See Roy Lichtenstein Pop Art near the Hamptons.

Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, through October 24.

Located in a pretty new building on Long Island, just east of super-tony Southampton, the Parrish Art Museum is home to a gaggle of usually good shows. Here is the story of the artist “before the dot,” finding his own idiom and voice. As all artists must. j.s. BOOKS

24. Read A Slow Fire

Burning

Revenge served hot. Riverhead Books, August 31.

After a man is murdered on a houseboat in London, we meet three suspects, all women with axes to grind and something to hide. Their stories begin to bleed into one another as Paula Hawkins navigates their private motivations and public aggressions with her signature heightened suspense and (fun twist) some killer side-eye at the publishing industry. tara abell MOVIES

25. Go to Paris Theater A new legacy.

Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street.

As part of its grand reopening, the legendary, nowrun-by-Netflix Paris Theater is featuring a phenomenal series called “The Paris Is for Lovers,” a 31-film retrospective of great movies, many of them masterpieces, that premiered at the Paris— everything from Carol and A Room With a View to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (in 35-mm.!) and Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry. b.e.

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Broadway reopened with Pass Over (through 10/10). American Utopia (9/17) and Little Shop of Horrors (9/21) will return to the stage soon. Here, theater critic Helen Shaw lists the season’s other can’t-miss shows.

Comedy Central, August 18.

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WHERE/WHEN

Letters of Suresh

Second Stage Theater/ Tony Kiser Theater; previews start September 14.

Six

Brooks Atkinson Theatre; previews start September 17.

Is This a Room

Lyceum Theatre; previews start September 24.

What to Send Up When It Goes Down

Playwrights Horizons/ Mainstage Theater; previews start September 24.

The Lehman Trilogy

Nederlander Theatre; previews start September 25.

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How Andrew Cuomo Lost the Governorship CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 9

of staff Josh Vlasto texted to a friend as the sexual-harassment scandal was breaking, according to investigators, “It’s not even close to what it was really like to work there day to day. It was so much worse.” It was no accident that Melissa DeRosa, who would eventually rise through the ranks to serve as Cuomo’s secretary, the highest-ranking unelected office in the state, was first hired in 2013 as his communications director. She embraced his reputation as an intimidator and her persona as one of his “Mean Girls.” The irony was that, even as covid put him at the peak of his might—in March 2020, the State Legislature granted him temporary emergency powers that gave him dictatorial authority to enact new laws by decree—he was already starting to lose control. In 2018, the Democrats had won the State Senate, which perversely was bad for Cuomo, since he held more sway over a divided legislature than a united, progressive one. Most of the powerful aides who served him in the early years were gone, whether because they were burned out, discarded, or banished for some real or perceived act of betrayal. He had broken up with his longtime companion, TV chef Sandra Lee. His cheating was “an open secret,” the Post reported last April, citing unnamed sources, in an article that claimed Lee had grown tired of what she saw as inappropriate relationships with other women, including staff members. (“It’s not true, and the New York Post’s reporting standards are subterranean,” said Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi.) This left him, by his own admission, lonely, even before covid. Cuomo’s downfall began with his threatening someone who dared fight back. One evening in February, Assemblyman Ron Kim, one of those pesky newly empowered progressives, received a call from the governor as he was putting his kids in the bath. Kim, who believed his uncle had died of covid in a nursing home, was pushing to investigate the administration’s alleged cover-up of the scope of the death toll in such facilities. Cuomo gave him the usual treatment, but to the shock of Albany, Kim struck back, going on CNN and claiming the governor said “he can destroy me.” 82 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

“The bullying is nothing new,” chimed in de Blasio. “There are many more of us, but most are too afraid to speak up,” declared Lindsey Boylan, a former state official who was running for borough president in Manhattan, in a post on Medium, expanding on what she had previously described in a Twitter thread as a pattern of persistent sexual harassment by the governor. She claimed he had asked her to play “strip poker” during a flight on a taxpayer-funded jet and, later, gave her an unwanted kiss in his Manhattan office. Her earlier allegations, though vague, had mostly fallen into a void—in part because, behind the scenes, Cuomo’s top aides had mobilized to discredit her with reporters. DeRosa, the chair of the New York State Council on Women and Girls, who’d championed the state’s paid-family-leave law and legislation ensuring insurance covered fertility treatments, and who’d appeared just months earlier on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar under the heading “Voices of Hope,” spearheaded the campaign to damage Boylan. She got ahold of her confidential personnel files, which leaked to reporters. A spokesperson described this effort as “correcting the record.” According to the report, a female former staff member testified that “at the insistence of Ms. DeRosa,” she called up a woman who had worked for Cuomo and secretly taped their conversation in an effort to find out who Boylan was talking to and whether any other women might accuse the governor. Then came another crisis: In January, Attorney General James released a report finding the administration had, in fact, undercounted covid deaths of nursinghome residents, and in February, audio leaked of DeRosa telling legislators that she’d delayed giving them an honest tally of how many thousands of elderly and sick people had died. Later that month, a 25-year-old former aide named Charlotte Bennett came forward to say Cuomo had made overtures to her about having a sexual relationship. Other allegations emerged, and Cuomo was soon facing calls for his resignation. Cuomo sought to slow the process by commissioning an investigation headed by a handpicked private attorney. When that blatant gambit failed, he turned the matter over to James, who hired a real team of investigators, including Joon Kim, a veteran of the corruption investigations conducted by former U.S. Attorney and Cuomo bête noire Preet Bharara. DeRosa requested the state’s vaccine czar, a former Cuomo aide, to ask county executives to stay quiet until the investigation concluded. “I ask the people of this state to wait for the facts from the attorney general’s report before forming

an opinion,” Cuomo said in March. State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and some of the Democrats in his conference “pumped the brakes” on their own plans for an impeachment investigation, an assemblymember said. As winter turned to spring and then summer, Cuomo seemed to be prepared to ride out the siege, and turned his sights toward a fourth term. Meanwhile, to Cuomo’s dismay, James was conducting a serious investigation. Current and former aides were subpoenaed for personal emails and messages. They sat for lengthy depositions. Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s current communications director, recalled Kim asking him during his own deposition whether the governor, in a fit of rage, had ever thrown fruit at Azzopardi— specifically, dried apricots. It didn’t happen, Azzopardi said, but he recalled investigators threatening to lock him up if he talked to anyone about the substance of his testimony before the report was published. (A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office declined to comment.) In otherwise mundane conversations with reporters, senior aides began making unsolicited, nervous jokes about going to jail. Cuomo sat with investigators for 11 hours in mid-July. Soon after, his surrogates openly attacked James and the investigation as having a “transparent political motivation” and suggested she was using it to destroy Cuomo and clear her own path to run for governor. The report was expected to land around Labor Day, and they were hard at work undermining it. Instead it arrived with no advance warning to Cuomo’s team at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, August 3. The report hit the Capitol like novichok. Cuomo started working the phones, trying to find support, but allies poured forth to condemn him over the report’s findings. There was no more talk of a fourth term. “The question was survivability, not electability,” one ally said. “Electability was not even on the table past lunchtime on Tuesday.” The day of the report, Cuomo talked on the phone with Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the Democratic State Committee and a friend. Jacobs encouraged Cuomo to hold a press conference to defend himself. It was set for 11 a.m. the next day, Wednesday, August 4. “I said that there’s no way this tidal wave that is coming is going to be survivable unless you’ve got something compelling to say that’s going to change its course,” Jacobs said. “The governor was, I wouldn’t say arguing, but he was pretty clear that he felt he could change its course, that the investigation wasn’t legitimate on either the process or the merits.” But Wednesday morning came and Cuomo never showed. It seemed to Jacobs that Cuomo and his aides “were just trying

to run the clock at that point, to play for time.” Jacobs told Cuomo he was planning to call for his resignation, and shortly after 3 p.m. he did. So did Heastie, who said there were enough Democratic votes in the assembly to impeach the governor. Cuomo, holed up in Albany in the gloomy and ornate redbrick gingerbread mansion on Eagle Street, worked the phones each day, seeking affirmation for his plan to keep fighting from a small, shrinking circle of advisers, including longtime friend Bill Mulrow; powerhouse political consultant and lobbyist Charlie King; his brother, Chris; his sister, Maria; and his daughters. Friends who spoke to him compared the process of counseling him toward resignation to palliative care for a patient who refused, in spite of all reason, to accept his terminal prognosis. Heading into the weekend, Cuomo was still telling allies he intended to fight, sending out three of his attorneys to hold a jawdropping virtual press conference attacking both Cuomo’s accusers and the investigators’ methods. One of them, his personal attorney Rita Glavin, reiterated the counterattack in lengthy appearances on television. But the accusations couldn’t be shouted down. The executive assistant who accused him of groping her in his office filed a criminal complaint and went on television to tell her story. On Sunday, DeRosa, under an avalanche of bad press, saw that Maureen Dowd of the Times had written a devastatingly sharp piece accusing her of enabling Cuomo’s predatory behavior. DeRosa announced her resignation in a statement that night. In a last-ditch effort, Cuomo dispatched intermediaries to try to talk to people close to Heastie and several other assemblymembers to find out if they would be willing to cut a deal, perhaps promising not to run for a fourth term if the Assembly would not impeach him. But Cuomo didn’t take no for an answer until Monday afternoon, when Heastie unequivocally dismissed the idea of a deal during a press conference. “If he saw any possible way out, any possible deal that could have been worked out with the legislature for him to leave more gracefully, he would have kept fighting,” one person close to Cuomo said. “But there was just no path, and for once in his life, there was no one around him to even tell him there was a path.” “how are you?” “Philosophical, philosophical,” Cuomo said on the phone on Friday. “What does that mean?” “You know, I consider myself a student of history, and I see everything through that lens.”

He wanted to talk about his legacy, to solicit a reporter’s opinions. How would his accomplishments compare to those of past governors? How would he be remembered? Implicitly, he was asking whether what he was accused of would overshadow the things that got done. “I feel like I did the right thing. I did the right thing for the state,” he said of his resignation. “I’m not gonna drag the state through the mud, through a three-month, four-month impeachment, and then win, and have made the State Legislature and the state government look like a ship of fools, when everything I’ve done all my life was for the exact opposite. I’m not doing that. I feel good. I’m not a martyr. It’s just, I saw the options, option A, option B.” Or might there be an option C? Among the political cognoscenti, the preoccupying question last week was whether he could still spring through some secret trapdoor. Was it really possible, after 3,875 days as governor and decades of omnipresence in New York political life, that Andrew Cuomo would just leave with so little drama or ceremony, like he was clicking the red button on his Zoom? The cynics seized on the 14-day transition period he laid out in his speech. Bharara issued a statement saying he hoped “there’s nothing nefarious about the 14 days” and calling Cuomo a “person of mischief.” Beyond that, Cuomo still had more than $18 million in his campaign account, and there is another election coming in 2022. He is still only 63—15 years younger than the president of the United States. “Unless he’s actually convicted in a court of law of committing crimes,” one Cuomo adviser said, “who’s to say he can’t come back?” For now, though, it is hard to see an angle. He has no obvious political heirs. Some of the big things he wanted to get done—redeveloping Penn Station and the area around it, the train to La Guardia airport—probably won’t happen. Other infrastructure projects, like the new $11 billion train terminal and tunnel beneath Grand Central or the Second Avenue subway extension, long predate his involvement and won’t require his presence at the ribbon cutting. The moderate, pro-business, Clintonian brand of politics that he practiced was in retreat long before Cuomo was overtaken by his personal failings. “He was an extremely effective governor for the first eight years, and he kept things balanced,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, the business lobbying group. “For the last three years, he was on the defe When Cuom n his state helicopter at the 34th Street heliport and flew back to Albany on Tuesday, he left behind a city that

is still reeling from the effects of a pandemic that has emptied its office buildings, shaken its tax base, and left its schools and subways in a disordered state. Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, who is positioned to take over as the state’s first female governor, is an unknown quantity, facing a legislature that has grown emboldened in pushing an agenda of tax increases, rent regulation, and other measures that many in the business community consider antithetical to the city’s recovery. “The governor is a worldclass asshole,” one New York real-estate developer said—but, he added, “the guy was an incredibly centrist hedge against what I perceive to be a runaway legislature. He was very good at manipulating the power of his office, and I think from a policy standpoint the business community has to be afraid of the State Legislature becoming fairly unhinged and flying too far to the left.” But big business can always find another protector. Eric Adams is making reasonable noises. Maybe Hochul, a moderate, will offer the same ideology without the agita. “I don’t think he was a bad governor,” said Dick Ravitch. “He’s definitely not a nice human being, though.” And that mattered more than what he was able to deliver. “He has no friends. There was nobody willing to stand up for him and say, ‘This is bullshit.’” Jay Jacobs, who talked to the governor again the day he resigned, said that Cuomo was planning to use his final two weeks in office to wrap up his work. “There’s a lot of i’s to dot and t’s to cross, and I believe he’s rushing through that,” Jacobs said. He also has practical preparations to make. By New York standards, he is not an exorbitantly wealthy man, although that book advance and the $50,000-a-year pension he is eligible for should help to tide him over. “He also has to figure out what his living will be when he moves out of the mansion,” Jacobs said. “He’s got a lot of packing to do.” “Uh, I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” Cuomo said when asked about his immediate plans, like where he was going to live. “I’m not disappearing. I have a voice, I have a perspective, and that’s not gonna change. And the details aren’t really that important to me, to tell you the truth. You know? I’m a New Yorker, I’ve lived here, I’ve lived in Queens, I’ve lived in the city, I’ve lived upstate, I’ve lived everywhere, I came to Washington, so that’s … I don’t really care about that. I’ll figure that out. And I think I did the right thing.” After his breakup with Sandra Lee, she sold the home they shared in the Westchester suburb Mt. Kisco. Since then, his only residence has been the mansion in Albany that has been occupied by members of his family for 21 of the last 38 years. Without it, ■ Andrew Cuomo is homeless. august 16–29, 2021 | new york

The Spine Collector CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 2 5

declined to comment.) The names of the two Gmen publishing people spoke to— Clay Chase and Boris Klyuchnikov— highlighted the absurdity of it all, as if we were living out a cheap le Carré imitation in which none of the clues added up.

he pandemic disrupted the book business just like everything else. The only constant was email, and the thief took advantage. Af ter learning that a British agent had con tracted the virus, the thief emailed the agent’s assistant—“[He] told me he has caught covid, jeez, that’s awful!”—to ask if the assistant might have Joshua Ferris’s new novel. The thief began sending intra office messages between colleagues who could no longer see each other faceto face and buttered up targets by asking the difficult questions facing publishing’s elite: “Are you staying in the city now or have you gone upstate?” In another mes sage, the thief explained that speaking on the phone was out of the question because they were only working European morn ings before taking over childcare duty in the afternoon. To their victims around the world, the thief expressed empathy: “I hope the situation is getting better in Norway!” “Are you in Italy now? I heard things are now opening up there which is great!!” “How’s working from home for you? For me it’s getting a bit stressful …” For most of the pandemic, the thief ’s scheme looked like a game, a way to pass the time. During the height of lockdown restrictions in London, the thief imperson ated a U.K. scout to ask for Kevin Kwan’s forthcoming sequel to Crazy Rich Asians. “I’d like to take a look at it over the week end,” the thief wrote. “Getting bored here.” I was getting bored, too, and had to admit the investigation had become a welcome distraction from the state of the world. Every day brought a new domain to investigate, and I now had my own ver sion of the Homeland wall: a spreadsheet filled with 400 of the thief ’s emails and counting, organized into dozens of cate

84 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

gories I hoped would reveal something before the scheme swallowed me whole. I did find one unusual sequence of events. During the third week of last August, the thief seemed to snap. It was six months into the pandemic, and for the first time I could see, they were angry. On mul tiple occasions that week, they emailed literary agents threatening to leak unpub lished manuscripts they claimed to already have unless the agents handed over another book the thief was after. In several cases, they pasted text from the manu scripts they had in order to make the threat real. They signed one such email “xxx.” The most menacing message came on August 17. Linda Altrov Berg, who had dealt with the “Millennium” attack back in 2017, received an email impersonating an editor in Spain, asking for a book that Altrov Berg instantly knew that particular editor would never want. The thief, it seemed, didn’t actually know her world all that well. Altrov Berg sent a defiant reply: “Keep on dreaming!” In the past, the thief had retreated from confrontations, skulking back into the digital shadows once the jig was up. This time, however, they shot back a reply: “Hoppas att du dör av coronaviruset.” In English, the message translated to: “Hope you die of the coronavirus.”

ovid was bringing out a more vicious side of the thief. They con vinced several translators to write reports on manuscripts in various languages, promising to pay $150 per book, then ghosting the translators once the work was done, an attack on some of the field’s lowestpaid people. There was no telling who they might go after next. In late April of this year, a scout named Liz Gately, whom I had recently inter viewed, received an email from the thief impersonating another scout named Bettina Schrewe: Dear Liz, Someone named Reeves Wiedeman contacted me to talk about the publishing scammer and he said you gave him my name. Who is he? Do you know him? Is he someone legit? Best, Bettina The email wasn’t accurate. Gately hadn’t given me Schrewe’s name. How did the thief know I was on the case? I had spoken to more than 50 people in publishing, some of whom were suspects themselves. And earlier that week, I had emailed with Mira Trenchard, the scout whose inbox had seemingly been compro

mised. However they knew, the thief was aware of my efforts and reached out directly a day later: Hi Reeves, We might know who the phisher is! Apparently a few days ago he sent an email asking for a manuscript but he forgot to sign with the agent/victim’s name and put his own … Best, Bettina Even in my heightened state of alertness, I had to scrutinize the phony email address several times to see that the “r” and “h” in Schrewe had been swapped. I called Lila to workshop a response. Should we let the thief know we were onto them? Or play along? We chose the latter. “It definitely makes me feel anxious,” Fake Bettina wrote back when I asked about the effect of the ongoing scheme. (She said that she had recently heard that “the phisher got hold of an early draft of Taffy BrodesserAkner’s new novel from the production department at PRH here in NY.”) Fake Bettina declined to say anything over email about the name in question, other than to note that it was a common one. She wanted to print the damning email and send it via FedEx; when I suggested our company mailroom, she said the material was too sensitive for that. Could we provide a home address? “I’ll pay the postage of course,” the thief wrote. After a brief silence—when I followed up several days later, my email bounced back— the thief returned wearing a new costume. Now impersonating a Dutch editor, they sent four different emails: one each to my personal and work accounts and to Lila’s. Each was a warped but nearly identical ver sion of the others. Three of the four cut off midsentence; one ended in the middle of a word, reading in full: Dear Reeves, I heard you’re working on an article on the publishing scammer and I w What on earth was going on? I continued to play dumb, still hoping to glean some thing revelatory. But the thief quickly dis missed all of this as pointless. “It’s stupid and ridiculous,” the thief wrote. “Only a waste of time.” Was the thief referring to our investiga tion, I asked, or the caper itself? “The third option,” they wrote. I asked what they meant. “It’s only a publicity stunt set up by the Publishers and Editors Asso ciation,” the thief said, citing an organiza tion that doesn’t exist. “They’re fooling you.” As the conversation stretched over sev eral days, other strange things occurred.

The thief impersonated my book agent for the first time. Anonymous accounts tried to connect with me on LinkedIn. One morn ing, I woke up to an overnight alert on my phone that someone was trying to log in to an online dating profile that had not been active for years. Lila, meanwhile, had begun her own exchange with the thief. Our approaches diverged. While I was happy to methodi cally collect emails, hoping the next exchange would provide a casebreaking clue, Lila was eight months pregnant, and every time she returned from a doctor’s appointment, she grew more exasperated at my increasingly chaotic Homeland wall. She wanted to be more direct. “Would you be up for a phone call?” she wrote to the thief. The thief suggested an inperson meeting instead. When Lila said she lived in Brooklyn, the thief said they did, too. Lila then suggested meeting in Cobble Hill, at which point the conversation turned. “How about Fuck You Hill?” the thief wrote back. “Or can I meet you at Silly Cunt Square?” The message went on. “take my advice,” the thief wrote. “drop this stupid article and stop with it immediately!!!”

he thief wasn’t the only one who wanted me to stop. Two of this magazine’s editors sat me down and said that I couldn’t spend all year investigating a crime with no real victims. The world was sick and on fire with actual cyberattacks knocking hospitals and pipelines offline. It was time to write the ending. In the course of reporting this story, more than a dozen people in publishing told us they believed a single suspect was behind the whole thing: the person I’d been told about at the outset. Most people couldn’t tell me much about him, but the details they shared fit the thief ’s profile. He was from another country, and his English wasn’t great. His manner, in person and in writing, could be brusque. His client list was small, and his scouting business was sometimes a struggle: One former client told us that after parting ways with the scout, he sent her so many texts she had to block his number. He wasn’t on the literary social scene, which made people presume he was resentful. Then again, one scout admitted to me, “Do we all just think it’s him because he’s weird?” The smoking gun—the mistaken domain registration teased by my friend— was meant to provide more substantial proof. After a seemingly endless game of tag, we finally got to the source. In the summer of 2017, Laila Lalami, the award winning novelist, had been approached

by the thief, who was impersonating someone at her literary agency. Lalami figured out something was wrong, and her husband, an IT engineer, looked into the domain and found that it was regis tered to a particular Gmail address. When Lalami shared the address with her agency, they saw the email seemed to belong to a scout—our original suspect. But upon closer inspection, I found the proof was a mirage. The address wasn’t the suspect’s. It was yet another fake email, missing a single letter, the same one the thief had used to impersonate the suspect himself all the way back in 2016. Lila and I scrambled for an explana tion. Wasn’t it suspicious, at least, that the thief had used this particular address? Maybe our suspect was being framed? What a twist! But when I showed the evi dence to Chad Anderson, a senior security researcher at DomainTools, he scanned some of the thief ’s other domain registra tions from the time and found that almost all of them were registered with fake Gmail accounts loosely connected to peo ple and companies in publishing. Our smoking gun had misfired. I had come too far not to close the loop. In early August, I spoke to the suspect on Zoom. He was sitting in the garden of his home wearing a blue polo shirt with the sun setting behind him, causing the screen to flare around him. He was shocked to hear that his colleagues in the industry suspected him and denied the accusation. Over the next 24 hours, he sent me 64 emails frantically laying out his case: mes sages that showed he could get books legit imately from agents all over the world, an email exchange from when he was imper sonated and considered paying $2,000 to an anonymous hackerforhire for help, and several notes he had sent to the thief at the time: “I hope the new year brings you the end of your career and a big law suit. In other words, all you deserve.” The suspect said he had a simple expla nation for why people thought there was something odd about him. He was, by his own admission, kind of an odd guy. He was shy and had never fully assimilated into the New York scene he was supposed to become a part of. He rarely got invited to parties and wasn’t the type to crash them. His clients couldn’t spend big money, which meant sometimes agents ignored him, and he admitted that his position in the industry was sometimes frustrating. He had chosen a profession he thought was for bookish people like him, only to realize that in publishing, as in everything else, the extroverts still ruled. “Even if I’m an introvert,” he said, “I’m not a hacker.”

his felt like the final chapter. The suspect’s manner had been strange, but he had also presented more evidence in his defense than anyone had mustered in his prosecution. I felt less like Lisbeth Salander than one of M. C. Escher’s monks, wandering end lessly in circles. Maybe the thief was right. This was pointless. Or … was the pointlessness the point? The one thing that seemed to tie all these tiny acts of deception together was a sense that the thief was in it for the pleasure of the act itself. Whoever they were—a dis gruntled scout, a basement full of hackers laughing to themselves—they cared enough to keep at it for years, devoting countless hours to sending endless emails—all seemingly for nothing. I imag ined that some in publishing could feel a certain empathy for a person engaged in an effortful obsession that produced little profit; after months of fruitless investigat ing, I certainly did. “If you try to find finan cial and economic gain, it’s of course hard to see,” said Daniel Sandstrom, the literary director of a Swedish publisher hit many times by the thief. “But if the game is psy chological, a kind of mastery or feeling of superiority, it’s easier to visualize. This is a business full of resentment as well, and in that sense, it becomes a good story.” Last week, in one final attempt at cracking the case, Lila and I sent an email to 89 different addresses the thief has used. Did they care to comment? The thief hasn’t written back. But just a few minutes after the message went out, I got an unusual text from someone hop ing to talk off the record—a person in publishing equally obsessed with solving the case. “It’s me!” they said, jokingly admitting guilt, after I asked whether they had just received my email. “Wouldn’t that be the best twist of all?” I wasn’t kidding. I had walked so deep into the dark labyrinth of this mystery that rounding every bend seemed to reveal another uncertainty. Just last month, the thief expanded their scheme yet again: For the first time I knew of, they were impersonating someone in Hollywood rather than a book person. And now, here was this source, beckon ing me to join them even deeper in the maze. They were calling to tell me a story they hadn’t told anyone else. For two years, they had harbored a suspicion about a widely respected figure in the industry. The suspicion was based on one curious moment that could only make sense, they thought, if this new suspect were the thief. It could mean everything, my fellow obsessive said. Or it might ■ mean nothing at all. august 16–29, 2021 | new york

Solve This Online! visit

nymag.com/crossword Sunday nights for new and vintage puzzles.

Remakes They’ll Never Make New York Crossword by Matt Gaffney

9 24

4 5

3 65

7 1

4 9

1 1 5

106

111

26 27 28 29 30 34 35 36 41 42 43 44 45 48 49

Across

Napkin material Slowpoke in a shell Hayride seat Simone Biles lands on them Yankees manager since 2018 Pasta often ridged (“rigate”) Bitcoin fan Musk 50-plus org. Reality-court-show remake with cases like Scarecrow v. Lollipop Guild? Language spoken in Manitoba Studies “Another idea would be … ” Look more deeply into Marked down Twizzlers and Twix, e.g. Called up Hit AMC drama, but with the title character an activist instead of a lawyer? Paperless exams “Just ___ suspected!” Slinky’s shape ___ Mode (“The Incredibles” character) Prepares for a night on the town More, in Mexico Serious wound

115

118 122

1 6 11 15 19 20 21 22 23

53 1991 comedy remake about a reggae legend and his psychologist? 58 ___ up (increase) 61 Couturier Cassini 62 Cross inscription 63 “Thank U, Next” singer Grande 64 Vivien who played Blanche DuBois 66 Mathematical approximations 70 Laudatory poet 71 Neptune neighbor 73 Unit on a walking app 74 Greek P’s 76 Batting-cage cover 77 2000s sitcom redone with a chief justice in the title role? 82 Insert coin here 83 John of England 84 Sunken treasure’s place 85 Since 89 Friendly 92 Piglet’s mama 93 Really, really want 94 1988 heist comedy starring a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actress in the remake? 101 Cheese-maker’s ingredient 102 Whisper lovingly to 103 Tony and Bonnie, for two 104 Great Plains shelter

86 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

105 107 109 110 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Combination pastry Part of the brain Unproductive 1950s sitcom, redone with a “Xena: Warrior Princess” vibe? Red-carpet walker Showed up Without dissenting voices Hawkeye Items in a chest or closet Head pair Chats with the deaf Just fine and dandy

Down

Prez from Texas Debtor’s note Head movement Lang. of Leicester Pine-tree pokers Framed favorably Beatty and Flanders, for two “___ news?” Playing a certain soccer position Finds out about Bankrupt “Such a shame!” Single Finale

15 Eminent Emmanuel 16 Rodgers and Neville, for two 17 People had so many questions for him 18 Like many medalists in Tokyo 24 Taunting remark 25 ___ a beet 29 Collins or Ivey 30 Orchestra-pit item 31 Aficionado 32 Comics legend Lee 33 Attorney-___ 34 Scale 35 TV type 37 Oldest living U.S. president 38 Cheese used in bagels 39 Very Vegas vehicle 40 Part of UAE 45 Chum 46 Starting spot 47 Tears apart, poetically 49 Crossword-puzzle part 50 French acting great ___ Delon 51 Get the feeling 52 Radisson rival 54 Uninteresting 55 Increase by 200 percent 56 Recycling container 57 Came up 58 Univ. donors, usually 59 Name on “Mamma Mia!” posters 60 Living-room piece 65 Flying insect 67 Find a job for 68 “Hold tight!” 69 Calculating 72 Pick 75 Chicago-airport code 78 New Rochelle college 79 Earth 80 Attended 81 With ___ care in the world 86 Pen name for H. H. Munro 87 Finished 88 “___ up!” (“Admit it!”) 89 Clarified butter 90 Nooks 91 Sierra ___ (neighbor of Liberia) 93 “The Chronicles of Narnia” author 94 Sculptor, say 95 Give for dinner 96 Up for grabs 97 Dismissive looks 98 Delivery people, often 99 With “the,” 1960s dance popularized by Chubby Checker 100 Swedish “S.O.S.” singers 105 French Open surface 106 The Spanish Steps’ setting 107 Loretta with 300,000 Twitter followers 108 Encouraging shouts 110 Slippery surface 111 Feel like a ___ in the machine 112 Underhanded 113 Mate for a ram 114 Online-educator Khan 115 Bowen Yang’s show, briefly

The solution to last week’s puzzle appears on page 77.

August 16–29, 2021. VOL. 54, NO. 17. New York Magazine (ISSN 0028-7369) is published biweekly by Vox Media, 250 Vesey Street, New York, N.Y., 10281. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. Editorial and business offices: 212-508-0700. Postmaster: Send address changes to New York, P.O. Box 420306, Palm Coast, FL, 32142-0306. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40612608. Canada returns to be sent to The Mail Group, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON, N6C 6B2. Subscription rates in the United States and possessions: 26 issues, $59.97. For subscription assistance, write to New York Magazine Subscription Department, P.O. Box 420306, Palm Coast, FL, 32142-0306, or call 800-678-0900. Printed in the U.S.A. Copyright © 2021 by Vox Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. Founding chairman, Bruce Wasserstein; chief executive officer, Jim Bankoff. New York Magazine is not responsible for the return or loss of unsolicited manuscripts. Any submission of a manuscript must be accompanied by an SASE.

crossword

Meet My Multiple Mes

CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 4 1

1970s that society’s barriers to access are what impair a disabled person, not their physical or mental differences. A lack of ramps, not an inability to walk, keeps a person who uses a wheelchair from accessing certain buildings. One YouTuber and activist in their 20s who calls themselves the Rings System told me they thought the question of whether or not they would fuse was beside the point. “What I need is not to become the perfect epitome of health,” they said. “It’s for society to be accessible to me even if I’m not.” In October 2018, 20 months after being diagnosed, Wyn decided she was ready to leave therapy. The decision didn’t have to do with her therapist not supporting the idea of “healthy multiplicity,” she said. Wyn just felt better, and she said her therapist encouraged her, agreeing that she seemed more “able to untie her own knots.” Wyn explained the decision in a video, What Did Therapy Look Like for Us?, wearing a cream-color turtleneck and black eyeliner. “For the first time ever, I feel like a selfsufficient, confident human being,” she said. That same week, Wyn proposed a holiday called “System Pride Day” in a video announcement on her channel. A part of the DID internet community subscribes to the discredited idea that satanic cults caused some people’s DID and, unbeknownst to Wyn, that dates in October have traumatic significance for people who have been abused as a part of cultic practices. The announcement triggered a severe negative reaction from that corner of DID YouTube. Wyn received multiple death threats. Soon after, she was working at the game store, texting with her DID-vlogger friends. Suddenly, she started feeling like “a confused blob.” “We started being like, Wow, I don’t know who is fronting right now,” she said. Everything got blurry. “Then all of a sudden, we felt energetic and personable.” A new, fully formed alter had emerged as part of her consciousness. “He was like, ‘I don’t want to talk to customers.’” Using a hard, bright voice, she imitated how the new alter sounded: “I’ll clean things because I don’t have to talk to stupid people.” Usually, experts say, the emergence of an

additional alter occurs when a person with DID is under extreme stress. And there wasn’t just one new alter; a second had also emerged. Wyn insisted that she didn’t mind. Even though one of the new alters “did not care,” “would not be emotionally invested in other people,” and had “no empathy whatsoever,” both new parts seemed to help her block hateful commenters—something Wyn couldn’t bear to do on her own. She welcomed her new alters publicly on her channel without acknowledging that internet hate had caused them. “I wanted all my content to be positive,” she said.

n the spring of 2020, right after lockdown, the divisive internet personality Trisha Paytas, who has about 5 million followers, made a viral video about DID, alternately lampooning the disorder and claiming to have it. Soon after, Kiwi Farms, a hateful, misogynistic forum where “lolcows” (or “crazies”) are “milked for laughs” and whose discussions frequently turn into organized trolling and doxxing, began to focus its attention on vloggers with DID. Kiwi Farms users delighted in dredging the internet for information about their personal lives, and the trolls were tireless—the main discussion thread about DID YouTubers currently clocks in at 344 pages. Much of it was unilluminating, but Kiwi Farms posters dug up some offensive pornographic drawings that Wyn’s friend Team Piñata appeared to have drawn and posted on an old forum. The drama escalated quickly, pulling in other YouTubers, and Wyn found herself opening her Twitter to 50 notifications, each one nastier than the next. “There were people talking about ways I should die and that I should get shot on sight,” she said. She added that it felt like “watching everything burn.” Even after the messages subsided, Wyn started having panic attacks when she sat down to record a new video. Lockdown was in full swing, and she had nowhere else to direct her thoughts. She said she would “just sit at home and cry and be afraid.” Last summer, Wyn decided to stop posting videos, which, she admitted, her husband, Andrew, had been encouraging her to do for a while. The emotional vicissitudes were too much to handle, and the community didn’t feel safe anymore. “I don’t want to go into more detail at this time,” she wrote on her YouTube community page. “We just need to protect our mental health.” At first, when Wyn stopped updating her channel, she felt ashamed to be “just a retail worker.” “I was changing the world,” she said, “and then all of a sudden I had none of that.” She went live on Instagram from the

game store one day, soon after in-store shopping had resumed in her state. “I miss my channel so fucking much,” she said. She was sitting in the back room of the shop, waiting for customers. She looked tired. “Even thinking about it, I broke down crying.” Although Wyn had started a Patreon, she never made much money. What vlogging had given her was much deeper and more totalizing—she’d met someone with DID only once or twice in real life. “It hurt from all angles at once,” she said recently. “When I lost my channel, I lost my purpose.” Gradually, Wyn has started to feel better. She draws more now. For about six months, after being “fantastically depressed,” she went to a life coach. She also called her old therapist, but the therapist no longer had room for her in her schedule. Wyn now thinks that “being on YouTube was massively detrimental to our mental health,” but her feelings about her videos themselves and the ideas expressed in them haven’t changed. Her channel remains live, a parade of pink-tinted thumbnails that continues to gather views. Wyn expects to remain multiple for the rest of her life. She wouldn’t have entered this frame of mind without the influence of other DID-content creators, she told me. Her therapist had advocated fusion; it was all her husband knew to recommend as well. “I might have pressured my system into fusing against their will if I hadn’t been online,” she told me. In our interviews, Wyn said she felt good. She also missed the beginning of two of our Zoom conversations, once because she had spaced out while doing an art project, she said, and the other time because she had spent the night tormented by “trauma nightmares” and gotten a terrible night’s sleep, although she said this now happened rarely. Things with Andrew were going well. Starting a family was still “up in the air,” she told me. “It has nothing to do with my disorder, though. It’s more that the state of the world right now doesn’t seem like the best environment for a child.” She made one last video this spring to protest The Crowded Room, a new Apple TV+ show about DID. The first season will feature the actor Tom Holland playing Billy Milligan, the first person to successfully use DID to claim an insanity defense after committing several rapes in the 1970s. “If they want to humanize DID, focusing on the story of a serial rapist is not the way to do it,” Wyn says in the video. She looks angry and confident. Below it, she links to a Change. org petition to shut down the series. “There are tons of people who live happy, functional lives with DID who do not cause harm,” she ■ says. “I’m one of those people.” august 16–29, 2021 | new york

THE APPROVAL MATRIX

Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on ourr ttaste t hi hierarchies. hi

U.N. climate report makes it clear that all we can do now is try to make things somewhat less cataclysmic.

Ron DeSantis’s war on the war on COVID.

Relatedly, Greece is on fire.

Cori Bush gets results on the eviction New York’s first moratorium. woman governor. Wish it didn’t happen quite like this, though. Leila Slimani’s historical novel of interracial wartime romance, In the Country of Others.

He didn’t really seem … sorry.

despicable

Funny Beanie Feldstein to star in Funny Girl on Broadway.

The Green Knight is weirder than any of the hobbit movies in a good way.

Does anybody really want to “co-work” in a shuttered Saks store?

It’s not a new album, but Frank Ocean’s jewelry sure looks pretty.

FX’s Reservation Dogs is unhurried by u eces a y things unnecessary t ngs.

AMC says you’ll be able to buy tickets with bitcoin. Thanks, we’re saving for a Tesla. “Hard” Mountain Dew. But doesn’t it already contain meth?

Who is … Mike Richards. No, seriously— who is he?

Karina Longworth’s sordid, star-studded d new Hollywood podcast, Love Is a Crime. Rachel Comey x Target.

Still with the QRcode menus?

Barry the barred ow owl x x gets mysteriously sy offed in Central Par Park. Park

Team USA paintballer Jessica Maiolo says COVID-infected teen “n needs a fucking treadmill.”

There is no season like New Jersey corn season. Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett reopen Radio City with a bang.

Of course, the Mets weren’t going to make this easy. Why can’t we get The White Lotus theme song out of our heads?

Wet Hot Summer drags on. Pervert hermit crabs are reportedly getting off on chemicals in plastic pollution.

Chet Hanks goes on anti-vaxx rant. Please stick to the horribly embarrassing rapping.

lowb row 88 n e w y o r k | a u g u s t 1 6 – 2 9 , 2 0 2 1

Holy no surprise, Batman! Robin comes out as bi. John Waters, new Baltimore Museum of Art board member, A demands a bathroom de be named after him posthumously.

brill ian nt

Leon Black, investo art collector, friend Jeffrey Epstein with a private plane.

KAWS x Rockefeller Center.

Sundance darling CODA casts deaf actors to play deaf characters.

Is the Delta variant going to cancel fall everything season?

Apple will scan your phone for child porn. What could go wrong?

Ballet Hispánico, Alvin Ailey, ABT, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem BAAND Together at Lincoln Center.

Eric Adams saves Brooklyn Botanic Garden from the shadows of two proposed high-rises.

Schadenfreud d is not muc off a gubernatorial or all campaign pl tform tfo m

The right’s Hungar g y g mes.

At least you won’t be able to see Elon Musk’s space billboards from Earth.

Spencer Ackerman takes us from 9/11 to Trump in Reign of Terror.

P H OTO G R A P H S : R E N E T T S TO W E / W I K I M E D I A CO M M O N S (G LO B A L WA R M I N G ) ; C A R L O S B O U R N / W I K I M E D I A (G R E E C E ) ; M A R C N OZ E L L / F L I C K R ( D E B L A S O) ; C A P T P L A N E T R O C K S M Y S O C K S / N I C H O L A S J O N E S ( M U S K ) ; P U B L I C D O M A I N ( D E S A N T I S ) ; W I K I M E D I A CO M M O N S (C U O M O) ; KO N R A D F Ö R S T N E R ( S O R RY ) ; S C R I B B L E R . CO M / F L I C K R ( A P P L E ) ; D O W J O N E S E V E N T S / F L I C K R ( L E O N B L AC K ) ; B A R B A R A F R I E D M A N / F L I C K R ( B OTA N I C A L G A R D E N S ) ; S A R A H TAT E / U. S. A R M Y / F L C K R ( R E G N O F T E R R O R ) ; A B T ( A B T ) ; P E N G U I N R A N D O M H O U S E ( I N T H E CO U N T RY O F OT H E R S ) ; A P P L E T V + (CO DA ) ; K AW S ( K AW S ) ; A 24 (G R E E N K N I G H T ) DA N N Y B P H OTO S / W I K I M E D I A ; M I K E M OZ A R T ( A M C ) ; E VG E N Y TC H E B OTA R E V / W I K I M E D I A ( S A K S ) ; T H E B O S TO N B E E R CO M PA N Y ( M O U N TA I N D E W ) ; J E O PA R DY / S O N Y P I C T U R E S E N T E R TA I N M E N T ( J E O PA R DY ! ) ; M A R CO V E R C H (Q R CO D E ) ; F Y N K Y N D / F L I C K R (O W L ) ; S LG C KG C / F L I C K R ( M E T S ) ; J U S T I N C A P O LO N G O ( PA I N T B A L L ) ; C H E T H A N K S / YO U T U B E (C H E T H A N K S ) ; H O M E R ( H O M E R ) ; F X ( R E S E R VAT I O N D O G S ) ; TA R G E T ( R AC H E L CO M E Y ) ; T H O M A S H AW K / F L I C K R (CO R N ) ; H B O M A X ( W H I T E LOT U S ) ; D C CO M I C S ( R O B I N ) ; K R I S T I A N G O L D I N G ( H E R M I T C R A B ) ; P E N A M E R I C A N C E N T E R ( WAT E R S )

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