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BIDEN
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(midterms)

In the
midst of our
mind-boggling
“polycrisis,”
one economic
historian has
become every
lefty know-itall’s favorite
know-it-all.

By Molly
Fischer

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march 28–april 10, 2022

features

Galaxy Brain

The cult of
Adam Tooze.
By Molly Fischer
30

Blocked

A U.K. teen caught up
in the battle over
trans health care.
By Caitlin Moscatello
36

The Future of
Trumpism
Could Ron DeSantis
be the right’s new
standard-bearer?
By Jonathan Chait
42

P H OTO G R A P H : M AG N U M P H OTO S

Luke, 18, is one of
thousands of young
trans people in
the U.K. whose care
has been delayed.

Photograph by Olivia Arthur

9

march 28–april 10, 2022

the culture pages

intelligencer
16

22

60

68

What excess mortality
reveals about the pandemic
By David Wallace-Wells

The buoyant
Pete Buttigieg
By Ross Barkan

20

26

An oral history of
one of Off Broadway’s most
improbable success stories
By Molly Langmuir

Valérie Lemercier’s
surrealist spin
on Céline Dion.
By Rachel Handler

Inside Dhamaka’s
storage-containersize kitchen
By Chris Crowley

Crypto’s head
honchos confront
the war in Ukraine
By Jen Wieczner

Tomorrow

The Group Portrait

37 Minutes With …

The Money Game

strategist
49

BEST OF NEW YORK

Seasoned New Yorkers tell us their favorite
karaoke bars, framers, bike shops, and more. plus: Even
more expert recommendations on Curbed.com.

10 n e w y o r k | nymag.com

How Blue Man Blew Up

66

Jon Batiste on a Lifetime
Making Musical Alchemy

How the New Orleans
native fuses hip-hop,
jazz, rock, and humanism
By Justin Curto

Inspired by a True Diva

80

To Do

Twenty-five picks
for the next two weeks

72

Critics

movies by Alison
Willmore Ben Affleck and
Ana de Armas torment each
other, sexily, in Deep Water

pop by Craig Jenkins
Rosalía’s evolution
in Motomami
tv by Kathryn
VanArendonk Pachinko
is an epic family drama on
an intimate scale

12 Comments
98 Games: New York
Crossword,
by Matt Gaffney; the
Vulture 10x10s
100 The Approval Matrix

on the cover: Adam Tooze. Photograph by Brian Finke for New York Magazine.
The chart above Tooze is adapted from a recent edition of his newsletter.
this page: Pete Buttigieg at the Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C.
Photograph by Victor Llorente for New York Magazine.
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March 14 27 2022

®

THE FIRST GENERATION
BORN AFTER UKRAINE WON
INDEPENDENCE DOCUMENTS
THE BEGINNING OF
THE RUSSIAN INVASION.

SIXTEEN DAYS IN UKRAINE
BY

Anastasiia Mokhina, Aleksey, Viktoriia Khutorna, Petro Chekal, and Nasta and
Victor Dobrovolskyi, Anastasia Kovalchuk, Julia Berdiyarova, and Victoria Vlasenko.
Masha Varnas, L ana Muradian, Vova Prylutskyi,
Matsiiovskyi, and Yasia Myroshnychenko.

Leonid.
Daria Holovatenko, Danyil Zadorozhnyi, Mariia Shuvalova, Inna Zadorozhnaya,
Anastasiia Viekua, Katya Vasiukova, Vika Zavhorodnia, Lisa Bukreyeva, Alexander, Roman Vydro, Markiian
Yehor Shata lo, Polina Polikarpova, Lesyk Yakymchuk, Svyatoslav Fursin, and Sana Shahmuradova.

20 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 1 4 2 7 2 0 2 2

New York’s latest issue told the story
of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
through the eyes of 30 young people
living through the war (“Sixteen Days in
Ukraine,” March 14–27). Author Edwin
Hayward called the oral history “an incredible read. A vivid reminder that the
people caught up in the invasion of
Ukraine had lives that were just like
everyone else’s—and then they didn’t.”
This American Life’s Ben Calhoun found
the package “devastating and illuminat1

ing, and unique within the coverage of
the war. My thoughts are with those
who shared their stories here, and my
admiration to those who elevated their
voices with this.” Sbunker co-founder

Agon Maliqi had “been reading this
stream of captivating testimonials for
almost an hour and … damn! You’ll be
hard pressed to find any other genre of
writing that can so powerfully portray the
ways in which war upends lives.” Morgan
Pomaika’i Lee of Christianity Today
tweeted, “The specificity of this pain will
wreck you,” and Proofpoint’s Sherrod
DeGrippo wrote, “Moving. Infuriating.
Horrible. Inspiring. Delicate. Tender.
Funny. Sad. Hopeful. Sweet. Young.
Absolutely incredible piece.” On his
MSNBC broadcast, Chris Hayes praised
the story, noting: “I got a vision of what
this has meant in a daily way almost
u
d.”
ng to

T
av
, the
deputy editor-in-chief of The Village
Ukraine who contributed reporting to
the project, said, “Here in Ukraine we

are prepared for this Ukrainian war
fatigue that eventually comes when
global media are covering wars and
conflicts. The hope is you guys will con-

tinue to cover these stories, because it’s
really important in the face of Russia’s
aggression and the ongoing struggle
here.”

In “Still Yawning at the Apocalypse”
(March 14–27), David Wallace-Wells
wrote about the pervasive blend of complacency and fatalism that has met the
U.N.’s latest climate report. Biologist
Colin J. Carlson said the column “nails
part of the problem with the new #ipcc
report: people have heard the real-time
impact assessments before as projections,
and don’t necessarily know when/which
things moved from one compartment into
the next,” while Washington State University’s Steve Austin tweeted, “This is indeed
what is happening. Amazingly, most in the
US have gone rapidly from ‘it’s not real’ to
‘ok, we’ll deal with it.’ Can we?” Mark
Brownstein of the Environmental Defense
Fund’s energy program wrote, “The
climate crisis is no less serious or
immediate than the geopolitical crisis
facing us today.” And Variety’s Michael
Schneider said, “All the stuff we talk about.
All the stuff we fight about. Nothing will
matter if we can’t live on this planet anymor
is on fire.” Don’t Look Up
coSirota added, “It’s as if an
2

asteroid is headed toward Earth but
there’s a media and political system
designed to make us not care.”

12 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

march 14 27 2022 | new york

21

Bilge Ebiri profiled the former child
star Ke Huy Quan on the cusp of his
return to the screen in Everything Everywhere All at Once (“Another Life,” March
14–27). Film critic Scott Weinberg found
it “so cool to see the acting resurrection of
Ke Huy Quan, whom everyone remembers from Temple of Doom and The
Goonies!!,” and @MindaMZ “was already
excited to see Michelle Yeoh in this, a
movie about a middle aged woman
kicking ass (more please), but Ke Hey
Quan, too? Take. My. Money.” Howard Ho
wrote, “When I was a kid, only one actor
3

in the movies looked like me. I used to
recite his dialogue into the mirror, imagining myself as Short Round from Indy2.
Seeing him make his big screen return is
like a piece of me being restored.” Direc-

tor Justin Decloux noted, “This article …
is great, but it does skip over the fact that
he starred in a Taiwanese action film
called Red Pirate (1997) directed by Jackie
Chan’s mentor.” Many readers seemed
delighted to learn that Jeff Cohen, who
played Chunk in The Goonies, is still close
with Quan. @katychristy said, “I was a
massive Goonies fan as a kid (and still
could probably recite it line for line) and it
just makes me so happy that 1. the actor
that played Data is returning to his acting
career and 2. his lawyer is the actor who
played Chunk.” Writer Danielle Sepulveres added, “Finding out that Data and
Chunk are still friends made my heart
grow three sizes. I love this profile.”

Send correspondence to comments@nymag.com.
Or go to nymag.com to respond to individual stories.

li

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Diving Into
the Unknown
L
Artist Lo Harris faces fears and reignites her creative fuel in Cancun

o Harris never expected to be a full-time artist. With a background in vi
journalism and the desire to work in a newsroom, the Brooklyn-based
creative’s love for visual arts was sidelined as a hobby — something to le
on outside of her nine-to-five job. She created an Instagram account fo
her art, designs highlighting social and racial justice, self-love, and her
inspirations. During the summer of 2020, shortly after the death of George Floyd, h
Instagram received an influx of followers, her work was being commissioned, and
began her path as a full-time artist in January 2021.
That October, feeling burnt out and in need of a vacation, Harris took a trip to
Cancun, Mexico with her best friend. While there, she found herself inspired,
invigorated, and rethinking her relationships with her art and herself. A trip
intended for rest and relaxation provided a resurgence of self-love, acceptance,
and creative fuel.
It’s not uncommon to be inspired by travel, but what exactly happens to our brains
and bodies while immersed in these new experiences? Along with boosts in menta
and physical health, studies have also linked travel to possible increases in creativit
an enhanced brain function, and overall well-being. Read her story to experience
Cancun with Lo, a place where she reconnected with herself. Notice how the
vivid colors of the Yucatan show up in her work (and closet) and bookmark her
recommendations for must-visit places during your own visit.

Pop out to
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travel stories!
Scan the QR code to read about Lo’s trip and
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inside: The hottest kitchen in town / Mayor Pete flourishes in Washington / Crypto confronts the war

Tomorrow:
David Wallace-Wells
COVID’s Arithmetic
A single metric
might change much
of what we know
about the pandemic.
16 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

live long enough in a pandemic and you will see the entire
narrative landscape shift, even flip, sometimes more than once.
As recently as a month ago, Americans of a certain cast of
mind could have still looked to China—and indeed all of East
Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania—with some plausible pandemic envy. Those early lockdowns in Wuhan were brutal, yes;
some of the surveillance testing, contact tracing, and quarantine
measures imposed in places like South Korea and Singapore
were very restrictive, true; closed borders and reentry policies in Australia and New Zealand went further than those of
any country in Europe or the Americas; and while the Sinovac
vaccines weren’t as effective as those made by Moderna or Pfizer,
the success of true “zero covid” policies through the region
meant that in many places, shots got into arms without anything like a major covid surge ever having taken place.
All of that seemed like an unimaginable triumph. Now, after

P H OTO G R A P H : N E W S H A TAVA KO L I A N / M AG N U M P H OTO S

A grave in Tehran in March 2020.

a brutal Omicron wave punishing its
largely unvaccinated elderly, Hong Kong
has a cumulative death toll approaching
Canada’s. (In February, it was 25 times
lower.) Omicron spikes elsewhere in the
region—in South Korea, in Singapore—
have proved less threatening, given higher
rates of vaccination among the elderly. But
panicked lockdowns imposed again in
China suggest that the country’s leadership,
at least, believes an enormous amount of
pandemic vulnerability remains—enough
to justify a total shutdown of Shenzhen, a
city of almost 20 million and such a critical economic and manufacturing hub that
American observers immediately started
raising their expectations for inflation.
Narrative turnabouts are not new with
Omicron. Some are familiar: The disease wasn’t spread through the air, then
it was; masks weren’t worth it, early on,
then became not just essential but badges
of personal vigilance, then only useful if
they were KN95s. Some narrative shifts
were more obscure: Omicron was said to
be “mild,” though it is roughly as severe
as the original strain in immunologically
naïve populations. Others have been somewhat memory-holed, as when much of the
public-health Establishment spent the fall
of 2020 suggesting that herd immunity
would be reached when 60 or 70 percent
of the country was infected or vaccinated, a
threshold we have now long since surpassed
with nothing like herd immunity in sight; or
when it spent the summer of 2021 insisting
that breakthrough cases were exceedingly
rare and breakthrough deaths essentially
nonexistent, when in fact probably a quarter
of all American deaths since Delta have been
among the vaccinated. Some reversals were
technical, as when rapid tests were first considered imprecise, became indispensable
during Omicron, then had their efficacy in
preventing transmission called into question. Some had to do with policy: School
closures were once part of a first-response
wave of restrictions, but a growing understanding of the relatively low risk to kids and
real costs of keeping them home has meant
schools are now broadly viewed as among
the most important places to remain open.
And some had to do with personal behavior, as when many of the same people
who spent 2020 yelling at Thanksgiving
travelers and arguing that responsibility
to protect others should dominate one’s
personal behavior spent 2021 reasoning
that vaccines had absolved us all of that
responsibility. Many of those who once
reacted in horror to “Let it rip” proponents
began wondering if anything at all could
have stopped the early spread in its tracks.
Our experience of the pandemic has

The unsteady
narratives of
COVID-19 are
reminders that
the stories we told
ourselves were
often incomplete.
been littered with bad-faith argumentation and instigation, but most of these
narrative reversals are not that, or even
signs of what Harvard’s William Hanage has called the “motivated reasoning”
of the pandemic. One narrative replacing
another is one description of the scientific
method, and among the many astonishing
features of this pandemic is how quickly
science was able to process and respond—
perhaps without adequate speed, but
at least fast enough for vaccines to be
designed within two days, manufactured
within two months, and rolled out to the
vast majority of the world within two years.
But the unsteady narratives of covid-19 are
reminders that, as sure as we might have
been about how to interpret our experience
of it, the stories we told ourselves about
what we were dealing with and what we
should be doing to protect ourselves were
often incomplete, clouded by much more
uncertainty and ignorance, wishful thinking and reflexive panic, than we were ever
comfortable acknowledging.
There is one data point that might serve
as an exceptional interpretative tool, one
that blinks bright through all that narrative fog: excess mortality. The idea is simple: You look at the recent past to find an
average for how many people die in a given
country in a typical year, count the number
of people who died during the pandemic
years, and subtract one from the other. The
basic math yields some striking results, as
shown by a recent paper in The Lancet
finding that 18.2 million people may have
died globally from covid, three times
the official total. As skeptical epidemiologists were quick to point out, the paper
employed some strange methodology—
modeling excess deaths even for countries
that offered actual excess-death data and
often distorting what we knew to be true
as a result. A remarkable excess-mortality
database maintained by The Economist
does not have this problem, and, like the
Lancet paper, the Economist database esti-

mates global excess mortality; it puts the
figure above 20 million.
As a measure of pandemic brutality,
excess mortality has its limitations—but
probably fewer than the conventional data
we’ve used for the last two years. That’s
because it isn’t biased by testing levels—
in places like the U.S. and the U.K., a
much higher percentage of covid deaths
were identified as such than in places like
Belarus or Djibouti, making our pandemics
appear considerably worse by comparison.
By measuring against a baseline of expected
death, excess mortality helps account for
huge differences in the age structures of different countries, some of which may have
many times more mortality risk than others
because their populations are much older.
And to the extent that the ultimate impact
of the pandemic isn’t just a story about
covid-19 but also one about our responses
to it—lockdowns and unemployment,
suspended medical care and higher rates
of alcoholism and automobile accidents—
excess mortality accounts for all that, too. In
some places, like the U.S., excess-mortality
figures are close to the official covid data—
among other things, a tribute to our medical surveillance systems. In other places, the
numbers are so different that accounting
for them entirely changes the picture of not
just the experience of individual nations but
the whole world, scrambling everything we
think we know about who did best and who
did worst, which countries were hit hardest
and which managed to evade catastrophe.
If you had to pick a single metric by which
to measure the ultimate impact of the pandemic, excess mortality is as good as we’re
probably going to get.
so what does it say? A year ago, it
seemed easy enough to divide pandemic
outcomes into three groups—with Europe
and the Americas performing far worse
than East Asia, which appeared to have
outmaneuvered the virus through publichealth measures, and much of the Global
South, especially sub-Saharan Africa,
which looked to have been spared mostly
by its relatively young population. Today, a
crude count of official deaths, not excess
mortality, suggests the same grouping:
North America and Europe have almost
identical death counts with official per
capita totals eight times as high as Asia,
as a whole, and 12 times as high as Africa.
South America’s death toll is higher still—
ten times as high as Asia and 15 times as
high as Africa.
The excess-mortality data tells a different story. There is still a clear continentby-continent pattern, but the gaps between
them are much smaller, making the experi-

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

17

intelligencer

ences of different parts of the world much
less distinct and telling a more universal
story about the devastation wrought by this
once-in-a-century contagion. According to
The Economist, Europe, Latin America, and
North America have all registered excess
deaths ranging from 270 to 370 per 100,000
inhabitants; excess mortality in Asia is
estimated between 130 to 330; in Africa,
the range is 79 to 220. These numbers are
not identical, but, all things considered, they
are remarkably close together. The highest
of the low-end estimates is barely three
times the lowest; the highest of the highend estimates is not even twice as high as
the lowest.
If you adjust for age, as the Economist
database does separately, the differences
among continents grow more dramatic—
suggesting a reversal of outcomes, rather
than a convergence. Outside of Oceania,
Europe and North America were the best
in the world at preventing deaths among
the old, and they were several times better
at protecting their elderly, of whom they had
many more, than Africa and South Asia.
East Asia performed better, but only slightly:
Canada is in line with China, Germany just
marginally worse than South Korea, Iceland
in the range of Japan. By almost any metric,
Oceania remains an outlier: The Economist
estimates zero excess deaths among the
elderly in New Zealand, for instance, and
gives the whole region an excess-mortality
range of negative 31 to positive 37 per
100,000 residents, meaning it’s possible
fewer people died there than would’ve had
we never even heard of sars-CoV-2.
In the country-by-country data, the divergences grow even bigger. Perhaps most
striking, given both self-flagellating American narratives about the pandemic and
current events elsewhere on the globe, is
that the worst-hit large country in the world
was not the U.S., which registered the most
official deaths of any country but ranks 47th
in per capita excess mortality, or Britain,
which ranks 85th, or even India, which
ranks 36th. It is Russia, which has lost, The
Economist estimates, between 1.2 million
and 1.3 million citizens over the course of
the pandemic, a mortality rate more than
twice as high as the American one.
Russia is not an outlier. While we have
heard again and again in the U.S. about
the experience of the pandemic in western Europe—sometimes in admiration,
sometimes to mock—it has been eastern
Europe that, of any region in the world,
has the ugliest excess-mortality data. This,
then, is where the pandemic hit hardest—
in the countries of the old Warsaw Pact
and formerly of the Soviet bloc. In fact, of
the ten worst-performing countries, only

one is outside eastern Europe. The world’s
worst pandemic, according to the data, has
been in Bulgaria, followed by Serbia, North
Macedonia, and Russia, then Lithuania,
Bosnia, Belarus, Georgia, Romania, and
Sudan. (Have you read much about pandemic policy in any of these countries?)
Peru, which had what is often described
as the most brutal pandemic in the world,
ranks 11th—with the smallest gap, among
those countries with the most devastating
pandemics, between the official covid data
and the estimated excess mortality. (You
probably haven’t read much about Peru,
either, but its lockdowns were severe—for
months, only one member of each household was allowed out once a week. At one
point, an exemption was extended allowing
for children under the age of 14 to leave
their homes for 30 minutes of exercise per
day, so long as it was conducted less than
500 meters away.)
Because The Economist allows you to
explore how excess mortality evolved over
time, country by country, the data also
clearly showcases the pandemic as a tale
of two years—a mitigation year, 2020,
and a vaccination year, 2021. Early in
the vaccine-distribution phase, with the
U.K. and U.S. moving most quickly, it was
striking how so few of the countries that
had done well in preventing spread in
2020 were doing well in providing vaccines
quickly. Over the course of 2021, many of
those gaps disappeared, with countries
across East Asia and Oceania eventually
accelerating their vaccine distribution and
parts of Europe that were slow at the outset
starting to catch up too. But the U.S. took
the opposite course. In 2020, the U.S. had
done a bit worse than average among its
OECD peers. In 2021, when pandemic
outcomes were often determined by the
relative uptake of American-made vaccines, the U.S. did much, much worse than
that. In country after country in Europe,
the pandemic killed a fraction as many last
year as it had the year before. In the U.S.,
it killed more. A year ago, it was possible

It has been eastern
Europe that,
of any region in
the world, has
the ug t excessmortality data.

18 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

to defend the American record as merely
below average—worse than it should have
been but not, judging globally, cataclysmically bad. Today, it is cataclysmically bad,
which is both outrageous and ironic, given
that it is largely American vaccine innovation that has changed the pandemic landscape for the rest of the world—the rest of
the rich world, at least.
On February 1, 2021, just after the
inauguration of Joe Biden, the U.S. had
registered, according to The Economist,
178 excess deaths per 100,000 inhabitants,
quite close to Britain’s 166, Belgium’s 162,
and Portugal’s 201. Fast-forward a year and
those gaps have exploded. The U.S. has now
registered 330 excess deaths per 100,000—
meaning our total has roughly doubled.
In Britain, the excess mortality grew only
30 percent; in Portugal, it was 17 percent.
The gaps between deaths in the U.S.
and countries that had done better in the
first year of the pandemic, like Germany or
Iceland, have gotten even bigger. If the U.S.
had the same cumulative excess mortality
of Germany, it would have had 600,000
fewer deaths. If it had the excess mortality of Iceland, it would have had a million
fewer deaths—and would have only lost
about 100,000 Americans in total.
How did this happen? The answer is
screamingly obvious, if also, in its way, confusing: The U.S. drove an unprecedented
vaccine-innovation campaign in 2020,
which empowered much of the world to
turn the page on the pandemic’s deadliest
phases, then, in 2021, utterly failed to take
advantage of its power itself. But what is
perhaps even more striking is that American vaccination coverage isn’t just bad,
by the standards of its peers, but getting
worse. About two-thirds of Americans have
received two shots of vaccine, a level that is
in line with Israel and not far off from the
U.K., though below many other wealthy
countries. (And even in the U.K., vaccination was more effectively directed toward
the old.) But over the last six months, the
country has had an opportunity to make
up that gap with boosters and has simply
not taken it. Only 29 percent of Americans
have had a booster shot of vaccine, which
puts us behind Slovenia, Slovakia, and
Poland and means that less than half of
those people happy to be vaccinated a year
ago have chosen to get a third shot through
Delta and Omicron. Booster campaigns
seem like an obvious opportunity for easy
public-health gains, yet remarkably few
Americans seem to think it’s worth the
trouble. Why? For everything we think we
know about the pandemic and how people
have responded to it, that one remains a
■
maddening mystery.

intelligencer

The Group
Portrait:
Dhamaka’s Tiny
Factory of Flavors
The miniature kitchen
drawing enormous crowds.
By Chris Crowley

the kitchen at Dhamaka—the Indian establishment at Essex Crossing with a monthlong
waiting list—is about the size of a large storage container. At tightly packed stations, cooks
work, if not back-to-back, then close enough to
pass ingredients without taking a step. To make
the pulao, a rice dish, chef de cuisine Eric Valdez
uses a portable butane burner, which takes up
less space than a stove. “I’ve camped, I’ve cooked
with this before,” says Valdez. “But in a professional kitchen? This is my first time.”
Dhamaka, which opened in February 2021,
is known for its unadulterated representation
of regional Indian dishes less familiar to diners
abroad: Gujarati stuffed peppers with peanuts
and chickpea-flour masala; a pig’s-head salad
from the country’s northeast. It’s become a destination to members of the South Asian diaspora
seeking the house paneer, food geeks who love to
complain that New York’s Indian offerings can’t
compare to London’s, and finance bros eager to
boast about getting one of the most coveted reservations in town. Even at Omicron’s peak, Dhamaka was booked out for weeks. “We don’t really
get cancellations,” says chef Chintan Pandya.
Pulao is one of the most popular menu items,
and at first the restaurant tried to limit orders:
“Every time we got busy, it was chaos,” Valdez
says. Each pulao takes about eight minutes to
cook, and only two can be made at a time. But
he got used to it: “It’s about timing. You need
to smell the steam coming out—that’s when
you know it’s cooked enough.” Valdez simultaneously works the pass and the pulao station;
there’s no room for anyone else.
In such cramped surroundings, it helps that
some of the staffers, including Valdez and line
cook Abubacarr Gikineh, have worked together
before (Valdez and Gikineh did stints at Junoon
and then Rahi, Pandya’s first restaurant with his
business partner, Roni Mazumdar). One year
in, everybody in the kitchen still seems a bit surprised by the fanfare. “People ask, ‘How are you
guys always busy?’ I’m like, ‘I’m just cooking the
food, bro. I don’t know why they like it,’” Gikineh says. “Everything that I do I learn from
Chintan and Eric. I do it how they taught me,
■
and if we can do better, that’s good.”
20 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

from top left: Roni Mazumdar, Eric Valdez, Tsepak Dolker,
Chintan Pandya, Saul Anastacio, Rafael Zaragoza,
Shawon Deb, Cristian Gonzalez, Lila Weitzner,
Juan Gonzalez, Abel Aviles, and Bubacarr Kabba.

Photograph by Evan Angelastro

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

21

intelligencer

37 min u tes w ith …

Thanks to billions of dollars in allocation money,
the Transportation secretary is living his best life.
by ross barkan
hese days, pete buttigieg
is concerned about the future of
democracy. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the last time fascism was
fashionable in certain corners of this
country’s political class, one of the things they
said for Mussolini is he made the trains run
on time—it was a transportation example,” he
tells me in his spacious office overlooking the
Anacostia River in Washington, D.C.
“Which by the way, importantly, was not
actually true,” he is quick to add, his eyes suddenly widening. He brings up China and the
narrative of “their order versus our chaos,”
which the Chinese bolster with enormous
infrastructure investments. “Part of what
motivates me in this work is that the work22 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

aday things that we’re focused on, it’s right
back to some really profound issues we’re
dealing with in terms of what kind of country
we’re going to be,” Buttigieg says. “It’s about
whether democracy can deliver.”
Buttigieg, in his light-blue necktie and crisp
white shirt, hasn’t had many acquaintances,
let alone journalists, in his D.C. office since
becoming Joe Biden’s secretary of Transportation in 2021. covid locked people behind
Zoom screens, and Buttigieg, perhaps the
administration’s most adept political animal,
had been left to evangelize for transportation
and infrastructure virtually.
That has begun to change for the newly
minted 40-year-old and father of twins, who
is not only hobnobbing more in Washington
Photograph by Victor Llorente

EXPERIENCE IT TODAY

GET TICKETS AT LIONKING.COM

intelligencer

but recently visited South by Southwest and
packs a busy schedule of out-of-town events.
His office, in the chic D.C. Navy Yard neighborhood, has few personal touches. A Notre
Dame coaster, sitting next to a newsletter
provided by a longshoreman union, is a
small reminder of where he came from.
In a year of woe and confusion for
Biden—the war in Ukraine seems to be
boosting a president who has been bogged
down with Donald Trump–like approval
ratings for many months—it has been Buttigieg who is out front and unruffled, the
public face of a trillion-dollar infrastructure package that might be the president’s
defining domestic-legacy item. At a time
when other members of the Cabinet are
struggling to escape the administration’s
travails, Buttigieg has proved himself to
be both a dogged defender of the president
and an irrepressibly buoyant figure with
a following all his own, as likely to appear
in People magazine with his husband,
Chasten, and the twins as on Meet the Press.
Right time, right place for Buttigieg, who
will always be known, to a certain crowd,
as Mayor Pete. The former mayor of South
Bend, Indiana, has been marked for stardom
since his Harvard days, shooting to national
fame with a surprisingly viable presidential
campaign in 2020. In New Hampshire,
Biden cut a blistering ad mocking Buttigieg’s small-town roots—comparing the
former veep’s revitalization of the U.S. auto
industry with Buttigieg’s revitalization of
South Bend’s sidewalks—but Buttigieg still
managed to strategically endorse Biden not
long after, helping consolidate votes against
a surging Bernie Sanders.
If the Biden campaign seemed, at times,
to subsist on whatever terror and rage
Democratic voters could marshal against
Trump, Buttigieg’s bid was a small taste of
what Biden’s old boss had once offered curious Iowans. An openly gay military veteran
making his own soaring case for aspirational liberalism, Buttigieg could captivate
a packed gymnasium like Barack Obama
and soon became a favorite of White House
alums like David Axelrod.
Now on everyone’s shortlist of possible
presidential contenders, Buttigieg is reflective, if circumspect, about his future. “I don’t
know if I’ll run for office ever again,” he says,
pausing carefully before answering yet
another question about what comes next.
“It’s there,” he acknowledges of the political
chatter, particularly talk of a future clash
with Vice-President Kamala Harris, who
has recently been the subject of stories of
palace intrigue in the press. (According to
a new book by New York Times reporters
Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns,
Biden’s staffers have been rolling their eyes

at the “First World problems” that seem to
preoccupy the vice-president, including an
unflattering cover shoot for Vogue.) “The
main thing is just not to be distracted by
it,” Buttigieg says. “There’s literally no time.”
However, he admits he offers communication advice when requested to a White
House that has struggled to convey its
accomplishments to voters.
What he has missed about the campaign
trail, he says, is “being in the room, watching
faces rise and fall as I learn what really resonates.” But he is sure to diplomatically add,
“It’s rewarding to be campaigning not for
yourself but for an idea.”
That idea is infrastructure, a bipartisan
staple of Washington that, in its nuts-andbolts nerdiness, seems ideally suited to a
politician who has always embodied the
straight-A student hungry to answer the
next question. Transportation policy genuinely excites Buttigieg, who gained a small
degree of fame among wonks for his successful pedestrianization of South Bend. He
has rolled out an ambitious plan to drastically slash traffic fatalities nationwide. He
is outspoken about the environmental and
sociological degradation that certain highway systems have brought to communities
of color. Technocrats have great sway with
him: Polly Trottenberg, his deputy, was the
long-serving New York City DOT commissioner and has been given broad latitude to
pitch and implement policy.
Most important, Buttigieg commands
money. A Reuters analysis of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed
by Congress late last year, estimates that
around $126 billion of the $660 billion
allotted to the DOT for the next five years
will be for new spending. Competitive grant
programs will allow him to choose where
the cash flows. “Building infrastructure is
like building cathedrals,” he says. “It’s very
rare the person who lays the cornerstone
gets to be the person who cuts the ribbon.”
Democratic politicians still bristling
from the Trump years, when the pennypinching Elaine Chao ran the department,

In a year of woe
and confusion
for Biden, it has
been Buttigieg
who is out front
and unruffled.

24 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

sing hosannas for Secretary Pete. “My God,
it’s night and day,” says New Jersey governor
Phil Murphy. “He’s a guy who understands
what it’s like being chief executive. If you’re
a governor, you’re automatically on a similar wavelength with him. He’s lived in my
shoes, and to some extent I’ve lived in his.”
Infrastructure money will endear Buttigieg not only to powerful Democrats across
the country but to voters. For example, it
will go a long way toward building a new
rail tunnel between New York and New
Jersey, a project Chris Christie scuttled and
Trump failed to revive. For Senator Tammy
Duckworth of Illinois, Buttigieg was a revelation because he was willing to listen to
her pleas to incorporate funding for disability access to mass-transit systems. “He
was as good as his word,” she says. “That’s
really critical. A lot of folks, a lot of principals, they want to take the picture and don’t
follow through.”
Transit experts are pleased with Buttigieg
but still waiting for a greater vision of what
transportation should look like in the U.S.
There are hard rules around how federal
money is spent; much of it must go toward
car-friendly highway-expansion projects.
“What the administration has been
focused on has been funding, not policy,”
says Beth Osborne, the director of Transportation for America and a former highranking official in the Obama DOT.
The pandemic-induced supply-chain
crisis and inflation have presented steep
challenges for Buttigieg, but he is calmly
defensive of the administration’s performance thus far. “We’re doing a lot,” he says.
“It’s worth noting that if you had looked at
some of the coverage in October, you would
have thought that the holidays were basically canceled, but we got through them.”
More complications loom. Spirit and
Frontier, two low-cost airlines, are seeking
to merge, which would create another
enormous carrier in an already consolidated industry that pretty much everyone
hates. Buttigieg has the power, along with
the Department of Justice, to derail the
merger. For now, he’s noncommittal. “It has
my attention, obviously,” he insists.
Buttigieg claims he’s content in D.C. managing a massive federal bureaucracy and not
campaigning for a promotion. Gazing out
the window at the cranes cutting across the
sky and the traffic flowing quietly over the
Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, he
considers this new pace of life. “I remember
rejoicing any time, when I was running, that
I got to be in the same hotel room for two
nights in a row because that meant at least
I didn’t have to pack my toothbrush.”
“Now, one, two trips a week, maximum.
■
It’s more civilized.”

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GENER AL MANAGER

JEANET TE LERMAN-NEUBAUER MUSIC DIRECTOR

The Money Game:
Jen Wieczner
Crypto’s Moral Ledger
For the big trading
platfor s, the
war in Ukraine has
turned borderlessness
into a liability.
26 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

when western governments imposed sanctions on
Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, seeking to sever Vladimir
Putin’s banks and billionaires from global capital, Sam
Bankman-Fried knew his company would have to comply. The
30-year-old, who is a billionaire 20 times over, runs FTX, one
of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s incorporated in Antigua, headquartered in the Bahamas, and regulated in the U.S. Crypto itself may be a borderless, supranational abstraction, but the companies that have sprung up
around it are domiciled in places with laws, and they don’t get
to pick and choose which ones to obey.
But after Bankman-Fried responded to the new rules, he went
a step further. The American decided to block all Russian banks—
even unsanctioned ones—from FTX, the better to ensure that
the company’s platforms couldn’t be used to funnel assets to the
pariah regime. Russian credit cards stopped working on FTX,
and the platform stopped accepting Russian deposits. Then
Bankman-Fried shut out banks in Kremlin-aligned Belarus as
Illustration by Ben Kothe

S O U R C E P H OTO G R A P H S : S T R I N G E R / A N A D O LU AG E N C Y V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ( U K R A I N E ) ; S T E P H A N S C H U L Z / P I C T U R E A L L I A N C E V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ( F LO W E R S )

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well. For him, the decision was easy, even
obvious. “I don’t trust ourselves to be able
to distinguish between the sketchiness of
each individual institution,” he told me
recently from Nassau. “I don’t want to be
in a position of guessing, ‘Is this Russian
bank, which is not sanctioned, acting as
a conduit for that one?’” he said. “That’s a
really messy situation, and you don’t want
to fuck that up.”
His fellow crypto CEOs, however,
seem perfectly comfortable fucking
that up. The heads of most of the other
exchanges have begrudgingly promised
to abide by the sanctions and do what
the law requires—and nothing more.
“Frankly, I think the communication of
the industry has been quite bad,” Bankman-Fried said. “It has sounded somewhat pro–sanctions evasion.”
Well before Russia’s war of aggression, there were worries that rogue states
could use cryptocurrency to evade blacklists and move funds around the world
in secret. On February 27, with Russian
forces pressing toward Kyiv, Ukraine’s
vice-prime minister issued a call for
“all major crypto exchanges to block
addresses of Russian users. It’s crucial
to freeze not only the addresses linked to
Russian and Belarusian politicians, but
also to sabotage ordinary users.” Jesse
Powell, the CEO of Kraken, rejected the
idea out of hand, writing on Twitter that
his company’s mission “is to bridge individual humans out of the legacy financial
system and bring them into the world of
crypto, where arbitrary lines on maps
no longer matter, where they don’t have
to worry about being caught in broad,
indiscriminate wealth confiscation.”
(“Besides,” he added, a little snottily, “if we
were going to voluntarily freeze financial
accounts of residents of countries unjustly
attacking and provoking violence around
the world, step one would be to freeze all
U.S. accounts.”) Coinbase, another big
platform, has taken the same position, as
has Binance, the largest exchange by volume, which still allows trading in rubles.
Given all the libertarians in the cryptosphere (some anti-Establishment anarchists, more utopian ideologues), one
might think the Russian state’s killing
of Ukrainian civilians would provoke
a stronger response. But aside from
Bankman-Fried, most western leaders
in the crypto community are responding
to the war remarkably coolly. For Illia
Polosukhin, the Ukrainian co-founder
of a blockchain platform called Near, the
issue is not so abstract. In recent weeks,
his social-media feeds have bifurcated into
posts about bombings near his hometown

of Kharkiv and those discussing the price
of bitcoin. “It’s surreal,” he said. “It was two
direct opposites.” He left Kyiv for Lisbon
in late January, before the invasion, but he
still has family inside Ukraine. He’s not in
favor of banning all Russians from crypto
trading—that would be too indiscriminate—but he thinks it would make sense
to block those still residing in Russia. In
his view, anyone who remains there is
complicit, and so are those who transact
with them. “I do see operating in Russia as
actively contributing dollars to the government, which is waging war,” he said.
even though the crypto markets
have long since been flooded by apolitical
speculators whose only motivation is
profit, the CEOs of the big exchanges are
still inf luenced by (and often count
themselves among) a cohort of true
believers: early adopters who think that
letting governments dictate who can
trade digital coins compromises the very
ethos of the technology.
Bitcoin, after all, was created in direct
response to a global crisis: the mortgage
meltdown of 2008 and the flood of
stimulus by fiat that followed. It was both
a financial innovation and a statement
of principles; it had, bound up in its
code, ideas about trust, transparency,
autonomy, and the role of the state—
or lack thereof. In the years since, as
bitcoin and other digital tokens have
proliferated, adherents have touted their
borderless utility across a host of international problems and crises. Crypto is an
elegant tool for immigrant laborers and
refugees sending remittances to their
home countries; it’s a banking alternative
for Afghans fleeing the Taliban; it’s even
a store of value for Venezuelans facing
hyperinflation of the bolivar. But the

Lagarde accused
crypto outfits
of being
“accomplices”
to those evading
sanctions,
who were using
the technology
“as we speak.”

28 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

Ukraine war dwarfs these concerns. And
arriving at a moment when the global
market cap for digital coins is approaching $2 trillion, it has helped turn borderlessness into a moral liability.
Crypto itself may be an unbeatable
way to zap funds directly to Ukrainians
defending their countr y, but the
operators of these billion-dollar trading
platforms are coming off as blasé, at
best, about the possibility that their
companies could be helping the Russian
regime. When I asked Coinbase CEO
Brian Armstrong last week whether he
has a responsibility to take a stance on
the war, a spokesperson immediately
demurred on his behalf and directed me
to a Twitter thread in which he had said,
in part, “We don’t think there’s a high
risk of Russian oligarchs using crypto
to avoid sanctions.” Just a few days later,
Christine Lagarde, the president of the
European Central Bank, told a high-level
gathering of industry experts that such
techniques were “certainly being used, as
we speak,” and accused crypto outfits of
serving as “accomplices.”
It’s not the first time Armstrong has
tried to stay out of a conflict. In 2020,
after the murder of George Floyd, he said
he didn’t think it was his place to weigh in
on racial injustice and Black Lives Matter, asserting that Coinbase had an “apolitical culture.” His employees staged a
walkout, and 60 of them resigned. Much
has been made of the notion that we are
living in an era of “woke capitalism,” with
corporations being pushed by investors
and their own workers to act in more
socially responsible ways. The Ukraine
war has only accelerated this reshuffling
of the corporate moral order. As the Yale
business scholar Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has
pointed out, oil companies—oil!—led the
exodus from Russia after Putin’s invasion,
forfeiting billions in potential profit. Wall
Street’s old guard followed suit. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon did get
blowback for questioning whether it was
the finance industry’s function to ostracize Russia, telling Time, “That’s not our
job.” But he had already set in motion the
firm’s exit, the first by a big bank. And
he quickly put out a new statement: “We
firmly believe it is our responsibility at
Goldman Sachs to lead the way in supporting the U.S. and international community’s efforts to punish Putin and his
regime.” The alarming implication is that
aside from the likes of Bankman-Fried,
the crypto industry—the ascendant force
in finance, the recipient of so much talent
and investment—has scruples far weaker
■
than the vampire squid.

Back on Broadway April 14!

“The

lovable,
big-heart
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Broadway needs
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HOW THE IMPECCABLY
CREDENTIALED,

IMPROBABLY CHARMING

ECONOMIC
HISTORIAN

ADAM

TOOZE
SUPPLANTED THE

DIRTBAG LEFT.

GALAXY

AIN

by molly fischer
Photographs by Brian Finke
30 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

ENRY WILLIAMS was 7 in
2008, and what he remembers
about 2008 is that his dad lost his
job. Henry’s suburban childhood
was comfortable, but even so, it
was shadowed by an awareness of
precarity. For a time when Henry
was growing up, an aunt in her 20s
lived with his family while she was
between jobs. The aunt had gotten
an M.F.A. in film. In the years to
come, an M.F.A. in film would seem
like a bad plan to Henry.
When Henry Williams arrived
at college, he was a stem guy:
Computers were what you did to be
practical. Eventually, he imagined,
he might get a Ph.D. in physics.
But his undergraduate career at
Columbia was still young when
other events intervened. Freshman year, he and a friend started a
not-quite-kidding presidential campaign for former Alaska senator Mike Gravel. (They had heard about the senator on the socialist comedy podcast Chapo Trap House.) The campaign consisted
primarily of a vigorous presence on dirtbag-left Twitter, where the
so-called Gravel Teens gave their 89-year-old candidate’s account an
unlikely fluency. The campaign did not achieve its goal of sending
Gravel to the Democratic-primary debates, though it did attract
mystified attention and national press. Williams’s allegiance passed
in due course to Bernie Sanders, whose campaign suffered irretrievable defeat just before covid shut down Williams’s campus. Dissatisfied with remote school and disillusioned with college in general, he decided to take a year off—from class, but not from learning.
What he wanted, he told me, was to find someone who could
explain “what the hell was going on in the world.” From Sanders’s loss, to the emergence of a global pandemic, to the economic
fallout, “it’s this incredibly fast-moving maelstrom of events, and
particularly if you talk about the economics of it, it’s almost impossible to get a grip on.” This was when Williams discovered the work
of economic historian Adam Tooze.
In the corner of Twitter where Williams dwelled, Tooze had
emerged as the explainer of first resort. He was the guy other guys
recommended; he was also, from what Williams recalls, tweeting
“a hell of a lot.” Williams heard Tooze on the Bloomberg Odd Lots
podcast explaining how the current crisis was and wasn’t like
2008. He read Tooze in the London Review of Books explaining
the pandemic’s effects across China, the U.S., and the eurozone.
Starting with The Deluge, Tooze’s 2014 account of World War I and
its aftermath, Williams proceeded to read all of his books—The
Wages of Destruction (about the Nazi economy), Crashed (about
the 2008 financial crisis), and Statistics and the German State,
1900–1945 (self-explanatory). His year off from college became,
in effect, an independent study in Tooze.
In seminar rooms and on Twitter, Tooze has won a following:
They are primarily young men, known sometimes as “Tooze Bros”
or “Tooze Boys,” if boys can encompass a male population in its
early 20s to late 30s. Like Williams, these fans tend toward the
left and have occupations that enable them to spend hours on
Twitter forming opinions. They concern themselves with American economic and foreign policy, with special attention to the
fraught places where these two intersect—for example, in confronting climate change. Perhaps some would once have cast their
critique in the shitpost mode of the Chapo heyday, but lately, in
place of provocation, they prefer an avalanche of facts. The Gravel
32 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

campaign, Williams reflected, “feels like forever ago. I feel a lot
older than I was then.”
What Tooze gives a reader like Williams is not a piercing, singular insight but a sense of rigorous mastery. In March, drawing
on work by scientists, work by economists, and context in German
politics, he assessed the feasibility of a Russian-energy boycott by
Germany. (Conclusion: certainly difficult but perhaps not impossible.) Tooze’s great intellectual power is a gift for synthesis. “He
just digests staggering amounts of information,” said Ted Fertik,
one of his former Ph.D. students and now a policy strategist. Tooze
roves across vast fields of data—historical data, technical data,
data about Russian currency reserves, data about the Nazi steeltube industry—and returns with a reasonably accessible brief in
hand. His omnivorously quantitative approach combines with
his economic expertise to reveal familiar subjects in new ways.
In Crashed, the book that was many readers’ introduction to his
work, the financial crisis of 2008 becomes something even more
complex and catastrophic than it might initially have appeared: an
American housing bubble, yes, but also an international decadelong disaster brewed by the global dollar system.
As a historian, Tooze once observed that work drawing on
quantitative sources had become “a minority interest” in the field,
one greeted at times with “an attitude of hostility and incomprehension.” As a public intellectual, he has found a more receptive
readership. Let the historians wring their hands about Foucault
and power; off campus, numbers make you sound like you know
what you’re talking about.

“He validates the little-boy inter
‘Risk’ while also
21ST-CENTURY POLITICS
In the years since the financial crisis, a growing audience has
sought answers regarding capitalism’s failures. Tooze, with his
close study of what technocratic elites and free-market ideology
have wrought, offered ammunition for leftist critique. As with the
economist Thomas Piketty a few years prior, this has made him an
unlikely celebrity. Crashed depicted the sheer scale of government
intervention required to prop up global finance, and all the ways
that falling short—doing too little or doing it too late—had led to
needless suffering. To challenge decades of economic orthodoxy
urging government thrift and free markets, it helps to have someone with the data to back up John Maynard Keynes’s assertion that
“anything we can actually do, we can afford.” A figure like Sanders
could make the case that things had to change, but a figure like
Tooze could provide the proof.
Tooze’s ongoing study of past global disasters has arrived at a
present rife with global disasters to explain. The events of spring
2020 vaulted him to prominence: As much of the world shut down,
his schedule filled. On one occasion, when booked back-to-back, he
left a Zoom panel with Emmanuel Macron while the French president was mid-sentence—just closed the window on Macron. In an
email, Tooze recalled, “I was kinda in shock for days afterward ;).”
TOOZE’S OFFICE AT Columbia is approximately the height
of two offices vertically stacked. Bookshelves run floor to ceiling
along three of the walls, and on the fourth, beside a window open
to the traffic noise of Morningside Heights, hang two oil paintings
of airplanes. These were the first oil paintings Tooze bought, back

when he was in graduate school. Originally commissioned for
Shell’s London corporate headquarters, they capture technological optimism at a 20th-century peak—“Supersonic longdistance passenger travel as it was imagined in the early ’60s,”
Tooze said, “with a little bit of a sci-fi turn thrown in.”
Although Tooze’s family is British, he spent much of his childhood in Germany, where his father worked as a molecular biologist. Growing up in the southwestern part of the country was, in
Tooze’s telling, akin to growing up in a combination of Silicon
Valley and Detroit—Mercedes and Porsche were both nearby. An
early ambition of his was to become an engine and chassis designer
for race cars. “I was quite serious about it,” he told me when we
spoke in his office on a February afternoon. “I was doing, for that
age”—early teens—“quite sophisticated calculations shaping the
exhaust pulse as it exits the combustion chamber so as to minimize
‘back pressure’ and maximize scavenging and all that.” This was
one of two great intellectual infatuations Tooze nurtured in his
youth; the other was military history. “I’ve sort of sublimated those
into more mature interests,” he said.
His fascination with the inner workings of complicated
machines now attaches to such subjects as the global bond market.
Not unlike a Porsche engine, it is a product of material constraints
and countless decisions made by highly trained experts. And these
experts—the people drawing up plans and issuing orders—stand
at the center of his work. Just as traditional military history offers
a top-down perspective, so too does the Tooze view depict a world
of high-level strategy: A move like Mario Draghi’s 2012 declara-

class, and it proved “the first time I kind of got a sense of what
liberated, intellectually creative teaching could be like at grad
school,” he said. “And then that’s what I did at Yale.”
Arriving in New Haven in 2009, he found himself part of a
new academic economy. Within the artisanal guild system of
Cambridge, “if you’re the salami-maker, that’s what you do.” At
Yale, by contrast, “you’re being hired as a senior partner to a small
academic consultancy and teaching business with a very large
capital base. And so what they’re interested in doing is maximizing
your human resource.” Tooze spoke fluent German, so he could
teach alongside the Germanists; he knew his military history, so
he could join John Lewis Gaddis’s Grand Strategy program and
“do the whole Kissinger thing.” He’d found a polymath’s paradise
and, in his view, the style that would make his career. The interdisciplinary approach Yale encouraged is “why I’ve ended up with
you interviewing me,” he said.
At Yale, he became interested in the financial crisis of 2008 as
history—how its story was told even as events progressed. He soon
saw that in order to understand the crisis as history, he would have to
understand the crisis itself. “I realized it was a transatlantic story, like
the story I told in Deluge and in Wages of Destruction,” Tooze said.
“You had to relate European and American history, in this case, by
way of their banks. The other thing I realized was that we were living
through—as a result of globalization and financialization—a quite
fundamental challenge to the framework of macroeconomics as we
understood it.” Conventional macroeconomic models had failed to
predict the crash, “and not by accident. The reason they had failed

est in BIG MACHINES and great men playing
EMBRACING ALL THE LEFT-WING, ANTI-IMPERIAL,
we’re supposed to have.”
tion that the European Central Bank, of which he was then president, would do “whatever it takes” to save the euro is equivalent
to a decisive cavalry charge.
Tooze’s parents had met at Cambridge, where his father was
a scholarship student and his mother, he says, a child of the
“Brahmanical upper-middle class.” Tooze, upon applying, was torn
between studying economics and history. Because British undergraduate education involves a single focus, this choice appeared
absolute. In economics, Tooze was by his own account “kind of
on fire”—he’d been permitted as a teenager to teach a class on
Keynesian models at his secondary school. His prospects in history appeared less auspicious; he enrolled in economics. With its
entrenched traditions and exacting, unquestionable standards,
the Cambridge approach to pedagogy makes intellectual life a
kind of specialized craftsmanship. Tooze compares it to “being an
Italian artisan in a very demanding trade like sausage-making or
Parmesan-making or violin-making.” He chafed at the curriculum.
After getting his history Ph.D. at the London School of
Economics and returning to Cambridge as an assistant professor, “I found it very confining. It made me depressed,” he
said. His “lifeboat” in those years took the form of a course he
devised on the end of history. Reading the venerable Marxist
Perry Anderson on Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and
the Last Man had been a “life-changing” experience for Tooze—
where many on the left saw a celebration of liberal capitalism’s
triumph, Anderson saw a historical analysis worth serious
scrutiny. Tooze took Anderson’s approach as inspiration for the

to predict it was the way they were built.” The lecture course that
Tooze first taught in 2013 drew on economics, politics, and history.
It also drew on Tooze’s particular charisma as a lecturer—his ability
to convey a gobsmacked awe at the facts as well as the facts themselves. Attracting a mix of econ majors interested in being bankers
and lefties interested in bankers’ failures, it became the kind of class
where students showed up early to get a good seat. Crashed, essentially a book-length expansion of the course, was published in 2018.
Yale was also where Tooze began offering a graduate course on
the philosophy of history. Fertik remembered Tooze’s role in the
class as a “convener” more than an instructor: someone who was
“surely in the top half of the group in terms of the depth of his
existing knowledge of the texts,” but who acknowledged that some
of the students had expertise surpassing his own. He came to the
material with a sense of discovery. In 2011, when Fertik took the
class, it unfolded alongside Occupy. While he and his classmates
wrestled with ideas about the end of history, a few hours away, history seemed to be taking place. “I reacted to Occupy as indicating
the possibility of an ‘end to the end of history,’” Fertik wrote in
an email. “This only intensified the feeling that the texts we were
reading had visceral stakes.” Recalled Tooze, “A bunch of my more
radical students were doing Occupy part time and this course.
A whole bunch of them were actually off their heads on pills,
and I was off my head from just not sleeping.” He was struggling
with writing The Deluge at the time. “And it created this intense—
I mean, it was amazing. An incredible classroom dynamic.” The
group sometimes gathers for reunions. “You can die happy after
march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

33

having that teaching experience once in your life,” he said.
The students who collected around the class and the reading
group it spawned came from many disciplines: philosophy, history,
political science. They were also predominantly male. Regarding
the gender dynamic of the scene, “I worry about it,” Tooze said,
“because there’s a way of interpreting it as exclusive. And that’s very
delicate terrain. It makes me very thoughtful, really, because it isn’t
true statistically that I don’t have any female students and haven’t
worked closely with women.” Within the Tooze Boy milieu, “it’s a
homosocial environment, and that’s easy. We know it’s easy. It’s
also true for women,” he said. “It creates a kind of bond, there’s no
question.” He is relieved that his current Columbia reading group
has a roughly 50-50 gender split. Nevertheless, “there is this Tooze
Boy thing, and they are boys,” he said.
WHEN HENRY WILLIAMS returned to school last fall, he
saw that Tooze, who had moved from Yale to Columbia in 2015,
was teaching a seminar called “Capitalism and Democracy.” The
class was a graduate offering—technically, Williams was not qualified. When he showed up on the first day, “I selectively omitted the
truth,” he said. Tooze’s eventual verdict was that as long as he kept
up, he could stay. The next semester, Williams joined a Tooze-led
reading group on the political economy of climate change. “The
hope of this group is to be sort of generative,” Williams told me.
“Breaking new ground, reaching new terrain.”
In February, on the night I sat in, the group was discussing
the book Bolivia in the Age of Gas. “I’m finding this stuff very
challenging,” Tooze told the group. “I’m finding it very unfamiliar and outside my comfort zone.” The discussion that followed
alighted on thinkers from Max Weber to Andreas Malm. When
listening very closely, Tooze bowed his head and shut his eyes.
Williams ventured that the book undersold Evo Morales as a polit-

track at Georgetown, Columbia, and Cornell), there are a legion
of podcasters, reporters, tweet threaders, and think-tankers with
similar pedigrees and fewer prospects.
This demographic may not have institutional power, but it sometimes has the ear of people who do. In corporate settings, in government settings, at economic ministries, “all the analysis is done
by people in their 30s,” said Tim Sahay, a senior policy manager at
the Green New Deal Network and one of Tooze’s friends. “Those
are the people who have been paying attention to Adam.” In the
offices of Senators Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, Sahay
told me, there are staffers for whom Tooze’s work serves as “a kind of
secret handshake.” (He saw shades of Tooze in the Build Back Better
climate legislation, which combined economic and CO2 modeling.)
During the pandemic, the ranks of the Tooze Bros grew.
Matthew Zeitlin, a reporter whose Tooze enthusiasm was perhaps
the first I registered, remembered that in spring 2020, Tooze “was
on a podcast every other day.” In Zeitlin’s most vivid memory of
the early pandemic, he is simmering dried beans, he is listening
to Tooze talk about the Treasury market on a podcast, and he is
thinking, I’ve done this so many times.
Tooze’s wife, Dana Conley, runs a boutique tour company, and
during the pandemic, her work disappeared. Tooze was busier
than ever, meanwhile. He set aside the book he had been writing
about the economics of the climate crisis and began to think and
write about the covid crisis instead; that book, Shutdown, was
published last year. In 2020 and 2021, he started first a Substack
called Chartbook, then a podcast called Ones and Tooze. Both allow
him a wide-ranging mandate to explain numbers in the news.
Tooze told me that a model that guides him is the BBC in its publicspirited educational heyday. A flautist in his youth, he fondly recalls
an hour-long radio program dedicated to “discussing different
recordings of late Beethoven string quartets, comparing passages.”

“Every dude on here’s dream blunt rotation is
MIKE DAVIS, ADAM TOOZE, AND FIDEL CASTRO.”
ical figure. “All that is brilliant and right,” Tooze told him. Williams
suggested that the extractive masculinist order in Bolivia resembled that of West Virginia. Tooze nodded forcefully—or Britain or
Poland, he added. Later, Williams brought up meeting a person
with a venture-capital-funded space-mining program, and there
was laughter all around. Before Williams introduced himself
to me after class, I had indicated him in my notes as “loud boy.”
Within the academy, Tooze embodied a certain graduate
student’s fantasy: a scholar defying recent trends toward social and
domestic history, focusing instead on the elites who dominated
economic and political battlefields. When Yakov Feygin, now an
economic-policy researcher at the Berggruen Institute, was getting
his history Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, “I would joke
that I want to be Adam Tooze when I grow up,” he told me. (He’s
now at work on a book he describes as something like “Wages of
Destruction for the postwar Soviet economy.”) Between Tooze
and his students, the influence ran both ways. Those with whom
Tooze worked most closely would read his publications in progress, inform his thinking, push him not to equivocate. The world
as it appears in his work—as a place where global power brokers
act with huge and often dire consequences—resonated with their
experience. These were elite students who had graduated into the
economic mess he described in Crashed. And if his own students
have fared remarkably well (Tooze Boys can be found on the tenure
34 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

In January, he devoted an installment of Chartbook to mapping
“the polycrisis we are in.” This polycrisis encompassed Omicron, U.S.
inflation, European inflation, the need for net-zero climate policy,
and the potential for war with Russia in Ukraine. “It comes from
all sides and it just doesn’t stop,” Tooze wrote. “In German there
is a compound noun: Krisenbilder—Crisis Pictures. I am going to
draw some Krisenbilder.” What followed—the Krisenbilder—were
thickets of color-coded arrows, increasingly dense, connecting such
entities as “oil prices,” “ECB,” and “Biden admin (midterms).” Among
them, further graphs charted the state of Ukrainian government
debt, American oil prices, and E.U. gas imports.
“The German philosopher-historian Reinhart Koselleck spoke
of the gap in modernity between the space of experience and the
‘horizon of expectation,’ ” Tooze concluded. “Given our present
mood, talk of a horizon of expectation feels like a rather pastoral
image. What these Krisenbilder sketch is more like a mind map of
our fears. But, with Koselleck, let us hope that these fears do remain
on the horizon.”
Another model Tooze said he looks to in his role as public intellectual is that of his maternal grandparents. “Leading synthesizers
of global data on childhood nutrition,” Peggy and Arthur Wynn
published research on poverty and family policy and together
wrote a pseudonymous book attacking Tory business connections called England’s Money Lords. (Arthur was also, for a time, a

Soviet-spy recruiter at Oxford.) They continued
their work into their 90s. Arthur died over his
word processor one night after Peggy had gone
to bed; he was making a list of things to do.
IT WAS IN 2020 that Rachel Millman, a
social-media editor, noticed something afoot
among her male friends. It began with a man
she described as “aesthetically, a Long Island bro
to the core—the accent, the flat cap, the polo, all
of it” but “also a dedicated DSA member.” One
day, the pair was hanging out when an alarm
on her friend’s phone whipped him into action.
“He was all, ‘Oh, there’s a Tooze talk I have to
watch right now,’ ” Millman said. As another
friend, then another, professed their devotion to
Tooze, a phenomenon took shape in Millman’s
mind. “Guys only want one thing and it’s fucking
disgusting,” she tweeted above a screenshot of
Tooze’s Twitter profile. Now, when a noteworthy
piece of Tooze content “drops,” the tweet recirculates. (“I accidentally created the Bat-Signal,”
she told me.) Because Tooze, like his fans, is constantly on Twitter, he too came across the tweet.
He was alarmed at the possibility that it might
imply something untoward; when he DM’d her,
Millman reassured him otherwise. In her mentions, she watches as Tooze fans find a community she calls “the Beyhive of nerds.”
“Every dude on here’s dream blunt rotation
is Mike Davis, Adam Tooze, and Fidel Castro,”
tweeted journalist Aaron Freedman recently. “And there’s nothin
wrong with that.”
Last year, the journalist Alex Yablon sent out a newsletter
diagnosing the emerging Tooze phenomenon. (Under the heading
“Tooze Clues,” it included Tooze’s bespectacled, beard-flocked face
Photoshopped next to cartoon dog Blue.) Yablon, a self-described
“dilletantish liberal-arts type,” wrote that he had undergone a
pandemic-inspired conversion to caring about the economy. He
and his wife had been counting on universal pre-K to make New
York affordable, and now the program’s future seemed in doubt.
“I became obsessed with the debates over federal, state, and local
fiscal policy in spring 2020 out of naked, immediate self-interest,”
he wrote. “Once I finally tuned in, I found that the economic-policy
consensus felt more up for grabs than at any point in my lifetime.”
Back when he was graduating from college, circa 2008, he and his
friends had talked over beers about topics like fiction and indie
rock; now they talked about the E.U.’s carbon border-adjustment
tax scheme. “We joke about becoming ‘Tooze pilled,’” he wrote. A
large part of Tooze’s appeal is that he “suggests that this stuff is comprehensible,” Yablon told me. “In 2008, I didn’t feel like that.”
“Is there a word for members of the Adam Tooze fandom,” wondered journalist Brendan O’Connor on Twitter last fall. What to call
them? Tooze Boys, Tooze Bros, Tooze Hounds, Tooze Heads, Tooze
Dudes, Toozers. (“Tooze Bro,” in my experience, seems to come up
most often in relation to online fans, “Tooze Boy” in relation to students. I have heard, secondhand, of a complaint that everyone says
“Tooze Bros” and no one says “History Boys.”) The name is contentious, the appeal inarguable. “For the Tooze Bros, what Adam does
is he validates the little-boy interest in big machines and great men
playing Risk while also embracing all the left-wing, anti-imperial,
21st-century politics we’re supposed to have,” said Ethan Winter, an
analyst at the think tank Data for Progress. “That’s very fun.”
The media contingent of Tooze’s fan base are readers who relish

a chance to “feel marginally superior to Matt Yglesias,” as journalist
Alex Pareene put it. Tooze conveys substance—a sense of undeniable expertise—in a way few of his fellow explainers can match.
“It’s remarkable the breadth of things he covers,” Pareene said.
“It puts the rest of us to shame. You check his newsletter and it’ll
be like, ‘Here’s the economic implications of what’s happening in
the Ukraine. Here’s a complex discussion of cryptocurrency,
which I don’t even like talking about yet I can talk about at length.’
And then everyone else is like, ‘Here’s a woke college student who
complained in a meeting.’ So many other public commentators—it
illuminates how parochial their concerns are.”
Tooze joined Twitter in 2015, at the suggestion of his teenage
daughter (now a Columbia junior), and took to the medium energetically. “Every day, I can see him basically live-tweet-reading the
Financial Times,” Pareene said of Tooze—partly under his inspiration, Pareene recently subscribed. The Tooze Bros look upon
his productivity in wonderment. “It is mind-boggling. Beyond
mind-boggling. I mean, I’ll see him tweeting at 4 a.m. sometimes,”
Williams said. “I do that sometimes, but that’s really a mistake.
That’s a problem for me.”
In the seven years that he has been tweeting “intensively,” Tooze
believes he has managed to avoid significantly offending anyone.
For him, the app has provided a cordial and sustaining intellectual
community. “Those are my peeps,” he said. Twitter has “become
far more important for me than academic seminars.” Lately, he
said, the writing he enjoys most is “the short tempos”—the articles,
newsletters, and other commentary. He suspects the climate book
he is working on now will be the last he writes for some time. Since
the beginning of 2022, Tooze has published eight articles in The
New Statesman, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian; 40 editions of
Chartbook (not including link roundups); and 1,500 tweets.
“The man’s output is insane,” said Winter. “He just crushes con(Continued on page 97)
tent. I have no idea how it’s possible.”
march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

35

t

Luke came ut
tr s w n
w 11, hoping to
start r n
r
as a teenager.
Instead, he was
held st
n
tc
m c
t
that’s far from over.

C TLI N
MOSCATELLO
h

h

l

a thu

3

His bones ached. Sitting on the edge of his
bed, he twisted repeatedly to relieve the
pain in his back, which “feels like it could
snap in two.” The discomfort was like
having an illness, he says, except he was
not sick. Instead, he was suffering from
the side effects of puberty blockers—a drug
that suppresses the estrogen his body would
otherwise naturally produce. Luke was supposed to be on the blockers for a year, part
of a mandatory thinking period for minors
before they can be prescribed genderaffirming hormones through the United
Kingdom’s National Health Service. That
deadline, like others before it, had passed.
When I first met him, he was 17, and he had
been waiting six years for care.
Luke is one of thousands of young
people in the U.K. living in limbo, casualties of a battle being waged in the media
and the court system over the Gender
Identity Development Service, a division
of the NHS that performs psychological
assessments for gender-diverse youth. The
fight has divided British mental-health
professionals: On one side are clinicians
who believe if a child says they’re trans,
they’re trans—and they have the right to
puberty blockers and hormones.
A small group, however, has sued to
force gids to adopt a more conservative
approach and withhold medical interventions. Their aim, they say, is to prevent
young people from making decisions they
might regret. The case they brought, Bell
v. Tavistock, continues to play out in the
British courts, but the repercussions are
already being felt. For almost a year, gids
was brought to a near standstill. After an
early court decision, no gids patients were

referred for gender-affirming hormones,
and today, roughly 5,300 young people are
on the waiting list for a first appointment,
with an expected wait time of 23 months.
“I was in an absolutely terrible place
because I couldn’t cope with waking up
and things being the same every single
day,” Luke says. He socially transitioned at
age 12, the same year he was diagnosed with
gender dysphoria. He has been binding his
chest for so long that he barely thinks about
it anymore. To boost his five-foot-four
frame, he often walks in black lace-up boots
with a chunky heel. (They also look cool.)
He is now in his final months of
secondary school. When the academic year
started, his hope was that he could go on
testosterone before university. “To see the
treatment there and be running toward it,
and it moves at the same pace as you away
from you—coming to terms with that is the
hardest thing,” he says.
In places with a more progressive
approach, such as the Netherlands or some
parts of the U.S., Luke could have gone on
blockers as early as age 12, preventing breast
growth and menstruation. If he had continued on to hormones, he would have experienced a male puberty alongside his peers.
But in the U.K., that path was closed to him.
There are signs that the debate in the
British courts has found an audience in
the U.S. Last month, Texas governor Greg
Abbott ordered state agencies to investigate parents of children who medically
transition for child abuse. In his written
opinion supporting the order, Texas’s attorney general cited arguments from Bell v.
Tavistock. Nationwide, right-leaning lawmakers proposed 43 bills last year aimed

38 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

until he turned 10, Luke (who asked
to be identified by first name only) never
thought much about his gender. He was,
by his own telling, “a very, very girlie girl.”
His mother, a caretaker in a residentialcare home, and his father, an engineer,
never suspected that he might be grappling
with his gender identity—and for the first
decade of his life, he wasn’t. “I had quite a
balanced upbringing,” says Luke, who now
lives about two hours outside London with
his mother and 14-year-old brother. (His
parents separated when he was 7.)
With the onset of puberty, however,
Luke began to feel disoriented in his body.
He was particularly bothered by his hips.
When he looked in the mirror, it was
almost like staring at someone who’d had
botched plastic surgery, he says. Instead of
seeing minor curves, the reflection was like
looking at “a badly done caricature, like
Betty Boop.” Luke discovered that dressing
in masculine clothes made him feel a little
bit better, so he started wearing tracksuits.
At age 11, he discovered videos about
gender dysphoria on YouTube, made by
people whose experiences matched his own.
After watching videos by Jamie Raines, a
British man assigned female at birth who
documented his medical transition online,
“I eventually settled on what I was,” says
Luke. He had his long brown hair cut off
and told his mother that he was, in fact, a
boy. A few weeks later, he told his father, too.
He eventually decided he wanted to be
called Luke and use male pronouns. His
father covered up a tattoo on his hand of
the name they’d given Luke at birth, which
Luke saw as an act of love. “He’s not superemotional, but that was his physical action,
like, showing a lot of acceptance,” he says.
Luke’s mother took him to see a general
practitioner to discuss starting a medical
transition; that doctor referred Luke to a
specialist who, over the course of several
appointments, diagnosed him with gender
dysphoria, which meant he was feeling dis-

P H OTO G R A P H S : M AG N U M P H OTO S

Luke was a
teenager, but
sometimes
he suffered
from hot flashes
so intense
he felt faint.

at preventing minors from accessing
gender-affirming care.
As the lawyers and legislators fight,
countless gender-diverse young people
are caught in the middle. Without access
to blockers, some of them are forced to go
forward with a puberty that doesn’t align
with their gender, producing irreversible
changes that can only be corrected with
painful and expensive surgeries later on.
In the meantime, governments and health
authorities seem further than ever from
reaching a consensus on the best kind of
care for trans kids. So Luke and his peers
wait, month after anguishing month.

tress over his gender identity and body not
aligning. (To be transgender is not necessarily to have gender dysphoria: the latter is a
medical diagnosis; the former is not.)
In the early aughts, a protocol
developed at the Amsterdam Center of
Expertise on Gender Dysphoria to help
dysphoric children began to gain traction.
Researchers found that they could alleviate their depression by halting puberty at
a relatively early stage (often around age
12, but earlier in some kids) using drugs
that had, for decades, been prescribed to
children with precocious puberty (when
puberty starts too early, sometimes as
soon as age 8). These puberty blockers
prevented sex changes driven by adolescent hormones: Transfeminine kids could
avoid developing an Adam’s apple and a
deep voice, for instance; transmasculine
kids could stunt breast growth. At age 16
(though sometimes younger), according to
the protocol, those patients could choose
to start on estrogen or testosterone. At 18,
they could consider surgery.
Shortly after his appointment with
the specialist, Luke learned that in order
to access blockers and perhaps eventually hormones, he would still need to be
separately evaluated by gids clinicians.
In September 2016, two months before
his 13th birthday, Luke received his referral. He was told it would be roughly ten
months until his first appointment. Then
the letters began arriving. “I’d probably
get a letter every four months telling me
that the waiting list has been extended.
Basically, you move forward a month and
then you move back a month,” he says.
During this time, “there were no checkups, nothing like that” to help Luke with
his gender dysphoria.
To cope, Luke tried to alter his body on
his own. He began binding his chest, first
using “really rubbish” binders he’d ordered
on Amazon before finding one that didn’t
hurt quite as bad. He Googled ways to
deepen his voice, none of which worked,
and lifted weights in the hopes of broadening his shoulders. He began menstruating,
and his depression worsened. “I was getting really desperate,” he says.
As his male peers began to physically
mature around him, Luke felt stuck in
place. “I was basically paused sounding like
a teen girl,” he says. “Mentally, it created a
conflict because my personality got forced
to develop in order to cope with the circumstance, but I still had to inhabit a body
that made me feel really immature and disconne
tho
once l
eu
when his classmates’ voices changed and his

didn’t; he stopped doing gymnastics when
he became hyperaware of the differences
between his body and those around him.
Luke considered using GenderGP, a
telehealth service registered in Hong
Kong that could potentially prescribe him
blockers and hormones. The service has
become popular with transgender people
in the U.K. frustrated with the slow pace of
the NHS. “It’s what everyone goes on,” says
Luke. But the fees were expensive, and his
family couldn’t afford it.
Meanwhile, his first appointment with
gids kept getting pushed back. The initial ten-month period became 18 months,
then 22 months. Finally, he received a letter
with a firm date. By then, he was almost 16
years old—the age at which young people
in the U.K. are eligible for gender-affirming
hormones. “I thought, Okay, I’ll go and get
interviewed. They’ll see that I’ve been living
as male for about four years, and they will
put me on hormones because I’ve wanted
it for a long time,” says Luke. At first, the
letter felt like a winning lottery ticket.

WHILE LUKE
WAITED
YEARS
to be seen by
gids, a rift was developing within the orga-

nization. In 2014, the service’s leadership
adopted the protocol developed in Amsterdam, but some clinicians objected that
gids was pushing patients toward blockers
and hormones too quickly. They began
voicing their concerns internally, arguing
for a greater commitment to therapy for
patients with gender dysphoria.
They were calling, in a sense, for a
return to the organization’s roots. gids
was founded in 1989 by Domenico
Di Ceglie, a psychiatrist at St. George’s
Hospital in London who wanted to create
a place for young patients to explore their
gender identities. It was one of the first
clinics in the world dedicated to helping
children with gender dysphoria. In 1994,
gids was moved under the umbrella of
the Tavistock, the talk-therapy arm of the
NHS. It had “three or four staff in a tiny
office” and saw as few as 50 patients a year,
says Bernadette Wren, a retired consultant
clinical psychologist and family therapist
who started at gids around that time.
Almost 20 years later, gids was still
seeing only 300 or so patients a year. But
then, in 2016, the organization made
it e
for
rs to refer patients
to
an
018—the year Luke
received notice of his first appointment—

that number had jumped to 2,500. (Most
patients are seen at the Tavistock clinic in
London, although gids operates a smaller
clinic in Leeds and has outreach sites in
Bristol and Birmingham.)
As the numbers grew, patients and their
parents began arriving at gids already
aware of blockers and hormone therapy,
says Wren. gids director Polly Carmichael
and some of the senior members of her
team supported the gender-affirming
model, but other clinicians were startled
by the number of patients demanding
medical interventions right away. They
had trained as psychoanalysts and family
therapists and came to the service expecting to do long-term therapeutic work.
(gids’ most recent data shows that patients
averaged ten appointments before moving
on to hormone therapy. Carmichael did not
respond to interview requests.)
Anastassis Spiliadis, a psychotherapist
and psychoanalyst who worked at gids
from 2015 to 2019, says that at times, he
felt like “the only thing that the service was
offering was a medical approach.” Spiliadis
was alarmed when, he says, Carmichael told
clinicians not to bring their concerns to the
service’s child-safeguarding lead. (A spokesperson for gids denied this, but evidence
presented before a tribunal investigating the
matter backs up Spiliadis’s account.)
When the gids clinicians in favor of a
less medicine-focused approach felt their
objections weren’t addressed by management, ten of them (from a staff of around
70) shared their worries with David Bell,
a high-ranking psychiatrist and former
president of the British Psychoanalytic
Society who had been at the Tavistock
for more than 25 years. Bell worked with
adults and was not affiliated with gids, but
he was a staff representative on the Tavistock Council of Governors, which meant
he was elected by employees to make sure
they have a voice in how things are run.
He was also not a neutral sounding
board. He says that gids always made
him “uncomfortable,” and that while he
supports an adult’s right to medically
transition, in his view, minors “can’t make
that kind of decision.” He was skeptical of
the idea that someone could be born trans.
“Over time, you develop a gender identity,
which is probably quite early on in life, but
it’s not assigned at birth,” he says. “There
isn’t a gendered soul.”
Bell, who is 71, suspects clinicians came
to him because “I had a reputation, I think,
of being the kind of person who wasn’t
scared to say what he thought.” In his
conversations with clinicians, “the most
important thing was that they felt, or they

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

39

“Seeing girls my age starting to look very curvy
on the same
believed, that the children referred to the
service were not adequately cared for and
were in danger of being motored on an
inappropriate pathway, which would have
irreversible consequences, without sufficient thought,” he says.
In the summer of 2018, Bell wrote a
report on the clinicians’ concerns and
submitted it to the Tavistock Council of
Governors. “Dr. Bell kind of ran away with
it and wrote a report that was full of his
own criticisms,” says Wren. He used “very,
very extreme language, implying senior
staff were harming children.”
The 55-page report, which includes
lengthy, anonymous testimonies from
gids clinicians, was damning for gids
management, going so far as to assert that
the service is “not fit for purpose” and that
“children’s needs are being met in a woeful inadequate manner.” Bell pointed to
unmanageable caseloads, “an excessively
affirmative attitude” that he attributed to
external political pressures, ethical questions around consent, systemic homophobia among staff and parents (one clinician said some parents would rather their
child be trans than gay), and inexperienced
clinicians tasked with complex cases.
Bell called for an overhaul of gids. If
the concerns he raised weren’t acted upon,
he warned, there could be long-term,
damaging consequences for the service’s
patients, and the reputation of the Tavistock
would be “very seriously at risk.”

IN THE FALL
, just a few months after
OF
2018
Bell submitted his report, Luke got ready for
his first gids appointment. It had been four
years since he socially transitioned. He had
partially gone through puberty by then: His
hips and breasts were developing, his body
taking a shape that made him uncomfortable
in his own skin. But he was no longer
menstruating, after his general practitioner
put him on what he believes were birthcontrol pills. Luke says that intervention, at
least, had been helpful; it ended what had
become a monthly crisis. “I’d just have a
nagging feeling in my head, like, You’re
actually an idiot. Look, you’re clearly a

woman. You’re clearly going through this.
You’re not what you think you are,” he says.
“It’s a very oppressive feeling because it’s
your own body against you.”
Still, the pills “didn’t make everything
okay,” he says. Luke got upset looking at
photos of himself before puberty, when his
body was “genderless,” what he describes as
a blank canvas—when “it could have gone
another way, but it didn’t.” He stopped going
to gym class. He avoided parties. As his
classmates started to look more like adults,
Luke oscillated between two states of panic.
Sometimes, it was like he was on a train he
couldn’t jump off, barreling toward womanhood while knowing he was male. (“Seeing
girls my age starting to look very curvy and
like women, and knowing I was technically
on the same playing field as them, that was
really frightening,” he says.) Other times,
he felt trapped, unable to move forward
without the testosterone he needed.
His experience stands in contrast to that
of transgender minors with easier access to
hormones. In December, I sat down with
Jason (who asked that his name be changed
to protect his privacy), a 16-year-old in the
U.S. who came out as transgender in the
eighth grade. He started on testosterone
shortly before his 14th birthday, and at 15,
he underwent transmasculine top surgery.
He’s now having the high-school experience he imagined. He plays on the boys’
lacrosse team and doesn’t have to worry
about taking off his shirt in the locker
room; in fact, most of his teammates don’t
know he is transgender. Sometimes, “I’ll be
at a party talking to a girl, and I’m like,
Oh, this is so normal,” he says.
For Luke, the moments of normality
arrived rarely, but he did his best to find
his comfort zone. Over time, he grew his
hair into a proper male shag and replaced
the tracksuits with thrift-store finds, silk
scarves, and patterned shirts (very ’70s
Mick Jagger, though Luke was particularly inspired by Queen). He tried to focus
on the positives of his body—that he was
lean and not particularly curvy and didn’t
have a high voice. It was much harder
for transfeminine people stuck in the
same waiting process, he suspected. His
friend, who was assigned male at birth,
couldn’t access blockers or hormones
either. Over the span of several months,
her voice broke, she shot up to five-foot-

40 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

ten, and her shoulders broadened. “That
is, like, a real dire thing because those few
months determine the rest of your life if
you are male to female,” says Luke. When
he looked at himself, he simply saw a boy
who was a late bloomer.
For his gids appointment, Luke drove
with his mother to the service’s satellite
office in Birmingham. It didn’t look like
much, just some chairs in an otherwise
empty waiting room, but Luke was elated
that he was about to see the specialists
who could change his life. “We were really
excited to be moving forward and talked a
lot about how far we had come,” says Luke.
When two gids clinicians came in to talk
with Luke and his mother, he expected that
they’d quickly go through his history and
start discussing medical options. Instead,
“it was a very kind of vague check,” says
Luke. “They were just like, ‘How old are
you? How do you feel? When do you feel
it?’” Most of the questions focused on the
past year—if he’d felt more like a girl or a
boy, if people treated him like a girl or a boy,
if he felt his life would be better as a boy.
They ended the meeting by handing him
forms to fill out and said he’d need to come
in for a total of four to six appointments.
Luke soon found himself back in the car,
somewhat bewildered, thinking, That’s it?
Unlike the fast-paced care outlined in the
Bell report, Luke’s experience with gids was
maddeningly slow. He wasn’t yet caught up
in the consequences of the court fight to
come—the delays came instead from an
overburdened service and the very thing the
Bell report wanted more of: a staff invested
in talk therapy, with no rush to prescribe
blockers or hormones.
Luke tried to stay positive, telling himself it was a start. Now, there was a clinician
on his case and he was moving forward, at
least incrementally. “First appointments
are often introductory,” he figured. “I’ll
come back next week, and we’ll start talking about my treatment.”
It was a couple of months until he was
seen again. During the next appointment,
Luke and his mother kept saying the same
things over and over—that he’d been living
as a boy for years and that he’d been interested in gender-affirming hormones for
years as well. He already had a genderdysphoria diagnosis and had been seen by
a general practitioner and a mental-health

and like women, and knowing I was technically
playing field as them, that was really frightening.”
professional. Luke had assumed that
because gids clinicians were gender
specialists, they would read his file, get
consent from both Luke and his parents,
and move him on to an endocrinologist
who could administer the hormones.
By the third appointment, emotions
were running high. One of the forms he
was told to fill out asked if Luke thought
of himself as a hermaphrodite, which he
found offensive and outdated. He was
similarly upset when a clinician challenged him on why he had never had a
romantic relationship. Luke explained
that he was too uncomfortable in his
body to connect with another person
on that level. “I can barely hug my family because it makes me so hyperaware
of my body—that’s why I’m here,” Luke,
who is bisexual, told her. He says that
the clinician pushed back, stating that
plenty of transgender teens are in relationships. In the same conversation, the
clinician mentioned that Luke had said
he sometimes wore eyeliner, and wasn’t
that kind of experimental for someone
who wanted to be perceived as male?
Luke’s frustration grew. “It’s a bit of eyeliner. It’s not that deep.”
“She really had a complete lack
of understanding that transgender
people are different, not everyone’s the
same,” Luke says. “I was saying to her,
‘For me, it’s a very biological thing. For
me personally, I could dress in feminine clothes and I would be fine as
long as my chest was flat and my hips
were narrow.’ And she was like, ‘What?
What? You can’t do that.’”
The appointment became a turning
point for Luke and his mother. Until
then, they’d been confident that they
were on the path to starting his medical transition. But time was slipping
away—by then, Luke had turned 16,
the age he’d hoped to start his male
puberty. A student in the grade above
him at school, who had come out as
transgender years after Luke, had
paid for private care and was already
on hormones. Luke’s younger brother
was starting to go through puberty as
well. It was as though everyone was
passing him.
The real bombshell came in a later
appointment, when (Continued on page 87)
march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

41

I

T H E F U T URE OF

TRUMP

The greatest threat to Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican
Party comes from his Florida neighbor, GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS , who
may be more MAGA than the MAGA king himself. BY JONATHAN CHAIT
42 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

Photo-illustration by Eddie Guy

as daily
deaths from covid-19 tallied in the thousands across the country, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced his latest
effort to dismantle his state’s response to
the coronavirus pandemic. Private businesses, he insisted, should stop requiring
their employees to wear masks at work.
Here was a perfectly selected message to
build the brand he has established: Ron
DeSantis, scourge of public-health bureaucrats, enemy of woke corporations, and
friend of the little guy.
Both the form and content of the message
reflected careful planning. As DeSantis
spoke, he looked like a man who had been
mimicking Donald Trump’s speeches in
front of the mirror. He performed a series of
hand thrusts, in which he drew his thumbs
together until they were almost touching,
then jerked them apart in quick horizontal
motions, as if he were playing an invisible
accordion. After five such accordion pulls, he
swung his right hand, thumb pointing up, in
a semi-circular motion back inward to the
center. DeSantis tweeted out the clip, and
any maga fan watching, even without the
sound on, would have grasped the gist just
through the eerie physical impersonation.
Republicans have collectively recognized
that however much Trump may exasperate
them, their president-in-exile will not be
purged, nor will the changes he brought to
their party be rolled back. He might, however, be co-opted. And if this is to happen,
they have settled with remarkable unanimity on DeSantis as the person to do it.
People who do not ingest large amounts
of conservative media may have difficulty
comprehending the extent of the adulation both the Trumpist and the Trumpskeptical wings of the party have lavished
on DeSantis. On a daily basis, the rightwing press churns out stories with headlines like “The Promise of Ron DeSantis,”
“Could Gov. Ron DeSantis Be the Favorite
GOP Front-runner for 2024?,” “A Ron
DeSantis Master Class in Rope-a-Dope,”
“Media Keep Trying—and Failing—to
Take Down Florida’s Ron DeSantis,” “Karol
Markowicz on What Gov. Ron DeSantis Is
Really Like: ‘So Real and Down to Earth,’”
and on and on.
The Florida governor has reportedly provoked Trump by refusing to preemptively
endorse his likely candidacy for a second
term, and DeSantis is putting himself in a
position to challenge the former president
for the 2024 nomination. An annoyed
has
d as
that
h
wor
eS
ause
he “has no personal charisma and has a
dull personality,” according to Axios. But
Trump has cause for concern: DeSantis
has blitzed the national Republican donor

circuit and turned most of the conservative
media into his personal messaging apparatus. “You should be my governor,” cooed
Sean Hannity in one interview. “We see him
as the future of the party,” a Fox News producer wrote to DeSantis’s office in an email
obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. This
work has already yielded fruit: DeSantis’s
polling has crept up steadily, while every
other Republican who had once been
whispered about as a potential nominee—
Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Josh
Hawley—has barely registered.
There are other, more troubling signs for
Trump that his stranglehold over the party
may be loosening. In December, during an
interview in Dallas with disgraced former
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Trump was
booed by members of the crowd when he
confirmed that he had received a covid
booster shot. Since he left office, the Republican Party has by and large turned against
the measures designed to ameliorate the
impact of the pandemic, giving upstarts
like DeSantis a chance to outflank him on
what has become the central battleground
of the culture wars. “What we’ve done is
historic,” a confused Trump told his skeptical supporters in Dallas, claiming credit
for the production of lifesaving vaccines.
“Don’t let them take it away. Don’t take it
away from ourselves.”
Trump is right that DeSantis can’t
compete as a performer with him or even
with past Republicans who have built
national brands. DeSantis has the anti-tax
zealotry of Paul Ryan without the winsome
affect and sculpted torso. He has the social
conservatism of George W. Bush with none
of the folksiness. He has the partisan fire of
Newt Gingrich without the mesmerizing
hair. He speaks in a nasal tone nobody has
described as pleasant on the ears and has yet
to utter an eloquent or memorable turn of
phrase. Reporters have noted his puzzling
lack of interest in human relationships outside his family, which has resulted in heavy
staff churn. “You will be in the car with Ron
DeSantis and he’ll say nothing to you for an
hour,” one associate told Politico. “He would
prefer it that way.” But in some respects,
DeSantis’s distant middle-management
energy is the point, especially when
compared to Trump’s garish star power.
It is crucial to understand that the
critique of Trump that prevails among
Republican officials is far narrower than
the one proffered by Democrats or Never
Trumpers. They don’t object to Trump’s
on, lying, or contempt for
s, except to the extent that
these qualities hurt the party’s brand. What
irritates, instead, is Trump’s constant disregard for basic political self-preservation.
DeSantis offers them the prospect of a party

44 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

leader who can harness all the right-wing
populist energy generated by Trump without the latter’s childlike inability to focus on
what his advisers tell him. One DeSantis ally,
confiding to the New York Times, summed
up his appeal as “competent Trumpism.”
His proto-candidacy reflects a handful of
working assumptions. First, that any former
Republican voter who opposed Trump on
moral rather than aesthetic grounds is gone
and not worth trying to bring back. Second,
that the right-wing groups Trump brought
into the Republican fold or whose creation
he inspired are either political assets or
simply too important to be culled. And
third, that Trump’s attempt to secure an
unelected second term was a failure of tactics, not a disqualifying ambition that merited rebuke and ostracism. The DeSantis
pitch is to wrest the maga movement from
the grifters who built it and place it in the
hands of a trusted professional politician.
This project raises two questions: Can
it succeed in prying the nomination from
Trump’s grip? And what would it mean if it
did? Just imagine what a Trumpified party
no longer led by an erratic, deeply unpopular cable-news binge-watcher would
be capable of.
ONE OF THE REASON S P O L I T I C A L
analysts dismissed the possibility Trump
could win the Republican nomination
when he first ran is that such an outcome
violated what was taken as virtually a
scientific truth. A 2008 book written by
a quartet of political scientists, The Party
Decides, argued that presidential nominations only appeared to be controlled
by the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire,
and so on but were actually determined
by party insiders. The elites, coordinating with one another, made their preferences known through the media, and the
primary voters would absorb those messages and act accordingly.
This thesis perfectly described the next
contested primary that happened. The
2012 Republican nominating contest
featured a succession of flamboyant rightwing populists—Rick Santorum, Herman
Cain, Gingrich—who would enthrall the
base and shoot up in the polls only to
collapse as if pulled down by some gravitational force detectable solely by political
science. But Trump’s 2016 nomination,
in the face of near-total opposition from
the Republican elite, obviously shows the
party does not always decide. The voters
might pick a nominee their party’s elites
oppose if that candidate offers them
something unique.
Many Republicans have tried to discern
the source of Trump’s appeal and replicate
it. As early as 2016, Ted Cruz was tacking

P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : J O E R A E D L E / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( D E S A N T I S )

in late february,

to Trump’s right on abortion and guns, and
Marco Rubio briefly tried to match Trump’s
schoolyard insults, at one point making fun
of the size of his hands. But Trump’s secret
sauce with the base turned out to be his
unwavering pugilism. Having spent more
time than perhaps any other Republican
candidate consuming conservative media,
Trump had absorbed its message that
conservative America is under assault by
sinister liberal elites. He built a political
style designed for the world depicted on
Fox News, in which the Republican Party
is always losing because its leaders are too
weak to fight back.
Conservatives sum up his appeal with
the phrase “But he fights.” As the “but”
implies, they often acknowledge Trump’s
f laws before praising his overriding
instinct to attack their enemies. Even his
errors can turn to his benefit. The more
Trump draws howls of outrage from liberals and the media, the more he proves his
tribal bona fides.
DeSantis has undertaken an almost clinical effort to manufacture and bottle this
aspect of Trump’s style. He has repeated
the Trumpian narrative that the party’s
leaders have failed to take the fight to the
enemy. “We cannot, we will not, go back to
the days of the failed Republican Establishment of yesteryear,” he promised in 2021.
DeSantis’s brand is, like Trump’s, a Republican who never compromises, never apologizes, and always fights—whether the issue
is education, the pandemic, or even Trump’s
misconduct. At the cpac conference in his
home state in February, he claimed that
Democrats “want us to be second-class
citizens” and assailed the “corrupt and
dishonest legacy media.”
The Republican elites rallying to
DeSantis are calculating that his synthetic version of Trumpism will serve as an
adequate substitute. The party is trying to
regain its control of the process by offering
the voters a more attractive product than,
say, Jeb Bush. If you loved Trump, you will
like DeSantis. And if you liked Trump, or
maybe just tolerated him through gritted
teeth, you will love DeSantis.
One irony of DeSantis’s attempt to
become the new Trump is that his trajectory was almost precisely the opposite of
the latter’s. Trump grew up wealthy but
was an indifferent student who allegedly
cheated his way into college and retained
a working-class affect when he inherited
his father’s real-estate empire. DeSantis
grew up mi
(his mothe
installed Nielsen boxes on televisions),
before attending Yale and then Harvard
Law School. At Harvard, he joined the
Navy as a jag officer, later putting his

legal skills to use during stints in Iraq
and at Guantánamo Bay.
After active duty in the Navy, DeSantis
ran for a House seat in 2012 in the Sixth
Congressional District in the middle of a
two-decade stretch when the state was
trending from purple to red. DeSantis
prevailed in a crowded primary in part
by winning endorsements from national
tea-party groups. The way Republicans
established their right-wing credentials
at the time was by adopting radical libertarian stances on fiscal policy, and DeSantis duly proposed to abolish the graduated
income tax and phase in cuts to “entitlement programs”—i.e., Medicare and
Social Security. In Congress, he helped
found the Freedom Caucus, a right-wing
faction, though he didn’t participate in
the destructive displays of rebelliousness,
such as forcing government shutdowns
to stage impossible demands, that made
other caucus members intolerable to the
party leadership.
After Trump’s election, DeSantis could
see that the energy on the right was flowing
through different channels. When he ran
for governor in 2018, he overcame a betterknown Republican rival by positioning
himself as Trump’s staunchest defender.
In Congress, he proposed to defund the
Mueller investigation. He attacked his primary opponent for having failed to attend
a Trump rally in 2016 and cut a cheeky ad
showing himself reading Trump’s The Art
of the Deal to his young son and instructing
his daughter to “build the wall” with her
toy blocks. He made frequent appearances
on Fox News, where he caught Trump’s
attention and won his blessing. “Ron is
strong on Borders, tough on Crime & big
on Cutting Taxes—Loves our Military & our
Vets,” Trump tweeted. “He will be a Great
Governor & has my full Endorsement!”
A COMMON ASSUMPTION OF
mainstream-media analysis of DeSantis is
that he is merely pandering to Trump and
his supporters and, as a graduate of Yale
and Harvard, is too smart to actually believe
what he is saying. This is a failure of imagination. DeSantis developed reactionary
suspicions of democracy before Trump ever
came along, which positioned him perfectly
to straddle the elite-base divide within his
party. In fact, DeSantis once wrote a book
warning of the dangers of a megalomaniacal
president who threatened to destroy the
foundations of the republic. That president’s
na
ama.
d Dreams From Our
Founding Fathers in 2011, when he was
running for Congress. It is out of print and
has received barely any attention in the
media. DeSantis joked recently that the

book “was read by about a dozen people.”
But it provides deep insight into the worldview that has propelled him to this point.
Published at the height of the tea-party
movement, Dreams From Our Founding
Fathers made the case that Obama and his
agenda were inimical to the Constitution
and this country’s founding ideals. It is
sprinkled with passages DeSantis would
never have written after Trump took office.
He notes accurately that the Founders
“worried about the emergence of popular
leaders who utilized demagoguery to obtain
public support in service of their personal
ambitions.” He flays Obama for alienating
traditional allies, meeting with foreign dictators, and impugning American innocence
with statements like “We sometimes make
mistakes,” a far more measured assessment
than Trump’s “There are a lot of killers. You
got a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?” He devotes an entire
chapter to the importance of the president being personally humble, depicting
Obama’s alleged excessive self-confidence
as a disqualifying trait.
DeSantis’s obsession with media bias,
which has since become a motif of his political style, clearly developed before he ran for
office. He laces the book with bitter complaints that the media failed to vet Obama
or expose his allegedly radical influences,
while extensively citing criticisms of Obama
that appeared in the mainstream press,
oblivious to the contradiction. DeSantis
is an exceedingly unreliable narrator,
wrenching heavily abridged quotations
out of context to distort their meaning.
For example, he plucks the phrase “At a
certain point you’ve made enough money”
to characterize Obama as a radical socialist
who wants to confiscate all income above
some level, neglecting to note that Obama’s
follow-up was: “But, you know, part of the
American way is that you can just keep on
making it if you’re providing a good product
or you’re providing a good service.”
Still, Dreams From Our Founding
Fathers is much more interesting than
a typical partisan screed. Its author,
who majored in history and spent a year
teaching the subject at a tony boarding
school, has clearly given a great deal of
thought to the book’s thesis: that Obama’s
agenda of raising taxes on the rich and
spending more money on the non-rich is
an attack on the Constitution.
“As legend has it, Benjamin Franklin once
said that ‘when the people find they can vote
themselves money, that will herald the end
of the republic,’” he writes. While acknowledging that the quote is apocryphal—it was
probably concocted by reactionaries many
decades later and attributed to various
Founding-era statesmen—he proceeds to

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

45

try to prove this was the real view of the
Founders and the Constitution.
The Constitution, he argues, was
designed to “prevent the redistribution of
wealth through the political process.” The
danger is that, as his fake Franklin quote
suggests, people will support programs
funded by taxing the rich that benefit themselves. “Popular pressure to redistribute
wealth or otherwise undermine the rights
of property,” he laments, “will ever be present.” The Constitution’s role, as DeSantis
sees it, is to prevent popular majorities from
enacting the economic policies they want.
DeSantis does not believe the Constitution merely establishes a set of ground
rules for how policy should be written.
He thinks the Constitution requires that
conservative Republican policy prevail forever. This is not an original belief. It was
the dominant right-wing position from
the late-19th century through the middle
of the New Deal, and conservative courts
routinely struck down all sorts of progressive legislation on the grounds that the
Constitution prohibits active government
intervention in the economy.
DeSantis treats any further expansion
of government as a mortal threat to the
Constitution. Sentences like “Obamanomics represents a dramatic departure
from the nation’s founding principles”
and “Obama’s quest to ‘fundamentally
transform the United States of America’
represents the type of political program
that the Constitution was designed to
prevent” are found in nearly every chapter.
The word redistribution and its variants
appear more than 150 times.
DeSantis’s core conviction is that an outcome in which Democrats win majorities
through free and fair elections and vote to
expand social spending by taxing the rich is
fundamentally illegitimate. He is far from
the only Republican to hold this view. The
American right has never fully accepted the
legitimacy of democratically elected majorities setting economic policy.
This principle helps explain why even
most Republicans who get queasy over
Trump’s authoritarianism ultimately support him anyway. The prospect of Democrats winning elections poses a graver
threat to the Constitution than Republicans
stealing them. For those Republicans who
always considered Trump no worse than
the lesser evil, who feared more that he was
squandering his power than that he was
abusing it, DeSantis is not just an acceptable vehicle. He is one of them.
WHAT HAS BROUGHT DESANTIS NEAR
the pinnacle of Republican politics barely
a decade into his career is not only his
deep commitment to the principles of

the conservative movement but also a
keen understanding of the power centers
within the party. As those centers have
changed throughout his career, DeSantis
has adjusted nimbly from tea-partyer to
Trumpista. The identity he recognized in
the spring of 2020, and embraced with
deepening militancy, is founded on opposition to social-distancing policies during
the coronavirus pandemic.
DeSantis’s skepticism of public-health
authorities paid economic and political dividends, at least for a while. During
the 2020–21 academic year, when most
states stuck with remote learning, Florida
opened its schools, a position even Democrats belatedly recognized as correct. He
has used covid as a stage to pick successful
fights with the media, which has sometimes
overreached in its criticism of his pandemic
policy. Last year, a 60 Minutes segment
accused him of corruption for steering
vaccine distribution to the Publix chain of
pharmacies, which had donated to his pac,
though many acknowledged the popular
outlet was a logical partner for the program.
DeSantis deftly used the episode to thrill
conservatives with sharp counterpunches
against the media. “The whole thing is a big
lie,” he fumed, using a PowerPoint presentation to make his case.
But DeSantis’s aggressive covid politics have also seen him take increasingly
extreme positions. Over the past year,
DeSantis’s defense of what he calls “freedom over Faucism”—which, in addition
to keeping schools open, has involved
blocking towns from mandating masks
and businesses from requiring vaccines
and at one point scolding high-school students for wearing masks at a photo op—has
drawn him into the arms of the anti-vaccine
movement. He has appeared at a press
conference with an anti-vaxxer, suspended
a state health official for encouraging his
staff to increase their vaccine uptake, and
appointed vaccine skeptic Joseph Ladapo
to serve as the state’s top health official.
(People are “being forced to put something
in their bodies that we don’t know all there
is to know about yet,” Ladapo claimed.
“No matter what people on TV tell you, it’s
not true. We’re going to learn more about
the safety of these vaccines.”) After confirming he received his first shot last year
off-camera, DeSantis has refused to say
whether he got a booster.
One result of DeSantis’s support for
the anti-vaccine movement is that, as of
uar
te ranked 46th nationally
s sh
lderly citizens who have
received a booster shot. During the covid
wave last winter, Florida’s death rate significantly outstripped California’s. At his
February 2021 cpac speech, DeSantis

46 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

boasted that his state had a (slightly)
below-average covid death rate. His
covid riff at this year’s cpac made no
mention of mortality statistics.
DeSantis’s oppositional approach to
politics borrows heavily from Trump’s style
but with noticeable adjustments. Compared with the original, DeSantis’s version
of Trumpism is much more methodical,
which robs it of its organic spontaneity
yet also eliminates the frequent blowback.
He has followed Trump’s practice of using
Twitter to launch unhinged attacks on
the media and liberals, with the important revision of outsourcing the job to his
spokespeople, most notably press secretary
Christina Pushaw. This allows DeSantis to
get much of the benefit of Trump’s fire hose
of abuse, exciting conservative activists and
flustering reporters with wild accusations,
all while his underlings absorb the reputational damage.
Trump’s genuine ignorance and limited vocabulary allowed him to effortlessly
channel the Republican base’s contempt for
the educated elite. DeSantis has to work at
it. Last fall, he mockingly cited a Wall Street
Journal article on the declining number of
men attending college. “I guess there was a
decline in the number of men, the percentage of men going to college or whatever,”
he told his audience. “And they acted like
this was a bad thing. And honestly, like, you
know, to me, I think that is probably a good
sign.” This is not, of course, advice that the
double-Ivy DeSantis took himself.
DeSantis’s culture-war appeals usually
steer clear of Trump’s overt racism. (The one
exception was during the 2018 general election, when he warned voters not to “monkey
this up” by electing his Black Democratic
opponent, a phrase that might have been a
deliberate racist appeal but could also have
been an unfortunate slip of the tongue.) He
often attempts to formulate positions that
could drive a wedge between the left and
the center. Most important, while Trump’s
culture-war gestures often produced nothing but ephemeral content for conservative
media, DeSantis has placed real state power
behind the right-wing social agenda.
DeSantis has signaled his support for a
bill that would restrict classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender
identity, preventing teachers from explaining things like why some children have two
fathers or two mothers. (Democrats offered
an amendment to ensure the bill would be
limited to discussions of sex. Republicans
voted it down.) The bill’s deepest potential
for harm lies in its details. It bans such discussions either before the fourth grade or
“in a manner that is not age-appropriate
or developmentally appropriate.” Not only
is the standard of “appropriateness” inher-

P H OTO G R A P H S : DAV I D A . G R O G A N / C N B C / N B C U P H OTO B A N K / N B C U N I V E R S A L V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ; J O E R A E D L E / G E T T Y I M AG E S ; F R E D E R I C J. B R O W N / A F P V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ;
J O E R A E D L E / G E T T Y I M AG E S ; C N N / YO U T U B E ; S TO R M S M E D I A F O R D E L R AY B E AC H M A R K E T / M E D I A P U N C H / S H U T T E R S TO C K

DESANTIS HAS
UNDERTAKEN AN ALMOST
CLINICAL EFFORT TO
MANUFACTURE AND
BOTTLE TRUMP’S STYLE.
ently subjective, but its enforcement mechanism enables parents who don’t like the
instruction their child gets on gender to sue.
You don’t need to be a social liberal to see
the potential for havoc. The bill will open
“a lawsuit factory for culture war organizations to go after schools,” the libertarian
magazine Reason notes, forcing schools
“to shell out money to defend themselves”
and giving “the most conservative parents
the ability to veto school discussions that

other parents are perfectly fine with.”
DeSantis has appeared undaunted,
tearing into a reporter who quoted Democrats who have called it the “Don’t Say Gay”
bill. This allowed him to highlight, once
aga
ma
at the hands of the
me
hou
g to address the more
serious objections to the bill. Pushaw went
on Twitter to reframe the law as an “AntiGrooming Bill,” writing, “If you’re against
the anti-Grooming bill, you are probably

a groomer or at least you don’t denounce
the grooming of 4- to 8-year-old children.”
It was a perfectly orchestrated DeSantis
culture-war set piece.
DeSantis is also preparing to sign what
he calls the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” a measure
preventing uncomfortable racial discussions at any public school or college in the
state that is so broad it would ban teachers
or professors from defending affirmative
action. The Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education, a free-speech group
that has frequently denounced left-wing
indoctrination and censorship on campus,
describes the bill as “flatly unconstitutional.”
This spring, DeSantis staked out a
position to the right of his own party
by promising to veto a congressional
map designed by Republicans. DeSantis
insisted instead on a more aggressive map
that would eliminate two of the state’s five
Black-held seats. DeSantis believes this
maneuver can both increase his party’s
strength in Congress and provoke a legal
fight that would lead to the Supreme
Court’s striking down the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act that protect minority representation in legislative
redistricting. “In meetings, he would just
demand, ‘Pass my maps! My maps! My
maps!’ He’s just bizarrely obsessed with
this,” a Republican told NBC.
A measure that received less attention
than either, but has enormous significance,
is one DeSantis signed with little fanfare.
In 2018, nearly two-thirds of Florida voters
approved a ballot initiative to allow former
felons to vote. Felon disenfranchisement
is a relic of the post-Reconstruction era,
when white southern states used it, in
combination with laws heavily targeting
Black men, as a tool to limit voting. The referendum granted eligibility to more than a
million Floridians.
DeSantis, who was elected governor at
the same time the initiative passed, acted
quickly to nullify it once in office. Republicans pushed through a law requiring former
felons to pay off any outstanding fines or
court debt before they could vote. At least
three-quarters of eligible voters owe court
debt, and of those, the vast majority can’t
pay it back.
The point of the bill was not to compel
payments. Indeed, because the state has
no central database listing all fines, many
voters who had the money, and an intense
enough desire to vote, to pay for the privilege could not do so. The bill’s purpose was
to disenfranchise those voters. Republicans
have been implementing voting-rights
restrictions across the country since about
2011, but no state has enacted a measure
as sweeping and draconian as Florida’s.
DeSantis is the only (Continued on page 86)

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

47

A BLISS-INDUCING, GLEAMING,
FEEL-GOOD
MUSICAL
COMEDY!
HUGH JACKMAN GIVES THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS CAREER,
AND SUTTON FOSTER IS INCANDESCENT.

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

VOGUE

MUSICMANONBROADWAY.COM

of an entirely reimagined “Best of New York,”
€
where you’ll find dozens of standout services, shops, and spots across only a handful of categories—
WELCOME TO THE SECOND YEAR

because the best framer for someone looking to conserve a 27-foot-long Richard Serra quintych
is quite different from the one for the person just looking to put a photograph in something simple
and oak. To source our recommendations, we polled hundreds of savvy and stylish New Yorkers,
among them architects, curatorial directors, art advisers, and authors. On Curbed.com, you will
find updates to our best housepainters, upholsterers, playgrounds, woodworkers, toy stores,
home-goods stores, exterminators, colorists, caterers, fitness instructors, and florists as well as the
new entries found on the following pages. These include the laser-hair-removal studio frequented
by several beauty editors (and a threader who is a master of the feathery, ’90s-esque brow), bicycle
shops for used wheels or Tour de France–caliber bikes, and karaoke bars for all types—ranging
from one with piano accompaniment to another where you can scream-sing Evanescence.

Typography by Zipeng Zhu

F E AT U R I N G

karaoke bars ...................................... 50
framers .................................................. 52
storage units ..................................... 53
bike shops ............................................. 54
hair-removal services ................ 56

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

49

BEST of NEW YORK 2022

as The Avengers and ’70s
soft-core porn. The soundproofing is especially stellar, meaning even rowdy
parties won’t hear one
another—a bonus for
Winters, who has gone to
RPM with other Broadway
singers to take a break
from musical theater.
“Sometimes you want to
try new material without
an audience,” she says.
“You just want to let loose.
It’s like therapy.” And for
those who don’t mind
singing to a bigger crowd,
RPM’s larger rooms connect and can hold parties
of over 200 people.

For an Extensive
’90s Hip-Hop
Catalogue
ROSA’S AT PARK, 2568 Park

Ave., the Bronx;
rosaatpark.com

For Karaoke in
Koreatown
GAGOPA KARAOKE, 28 W.

32nd St., third fl.;
gagopakaraoke.com

€gagopa is in a
nondescript building in
Koreatown with spare signage and a few string lights.
Inside: a mirrored, disco-lit,
linoleum-floored karaoke
fun house. “Life these days
is so driven by trends. Gagopa seems more than happy
to simply be itself,” says Tae
Yoon, the New York editor
of Thrillist, who has been
going out in Koreatown
since the late ’90s. Gagopa
(pronounced KA-gopa)
offers private rooms for
groups of up to 40 people
(from $9 an hour per person) and is especially
beloved for its BYO-friendly
attitude. (For those who
don’t plan ahead, Gagopa
keeps a fridge stocked with
$4 beers and bottles of wine
and soju.) The staff provides
buckets of ice to keep drinks
cold and will bring takeout
orders directly to your

room, or you can bring your
own spread. Alyse Whitney,
a food editor who has been a
Gagopa regular since 2012,
says her friends have
brought everything from
homemade crab rangoon to
Murray’s cheese boards to—
once—three slow cookers
full of hot dip. “The staff was
like, What is she doing?”
Whitney says. “But they
allowed it.”

For

KARAOKE
IN

CHINATOWN
DR. CLARK
104 Bayard St.;
drclarkhouse.com

50 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

For Spotting
Broadway Singers
RPM UNDERGROUND,

246 W. 54th St.;
rpmunderground.us

€rpm underground
opened in 2019 after Raj
Banik and his business
partners noticed a lack of
large-scale karaoke-party
venues. They decked out

the space with contents of
one owner’s collection of
records, Pop Art, and
Beatlemania ephemera,
making it “one giant time
capsule of why people love
music,” says Broadway
actor (and regular) Syndee
Winters. RPM’s 18 private
rooms (from $50 an hour)
fit between five and 40
people and are decorated
according to themes such

€rosa’s at park is a
Latin-fusion restaurant
inside the Bronx’s Wingate,
a new Wyndham hotel half
a block from Grand
Concourse. Every other
Thursday at Rosa’s, After
Work Karaoke takes over.
Starting at 7:30 p.m.—
with happy hour and
dinner service still in full
swing—the Bronx-based
music and comedy duo the
Range Brothers start
taking names and songs.
After Work Karaoke

when japanese restaurant Dr. Clark opened in 2020, it took over
a space on Bayard Street formerly occupied by Winnie’s, the karaoke dive
that closed in 2015 after a 28-year run. (It reopened in 2019 on East Broadway.) “We started getting these OG Winnie’s customers, Chinese people
from the neighborhood, gallery people,” says Yudai Kanayama, a co-owner
of Dr. Clark. “For us, it was very important to keep the legacy of Winnie’s
alive.” So the owners started hosting outdoor karaoke during the summer
of 2020 (“It got almost too crazy—we started packing the whole street,”
says Kanayama”), eventually moving the whole thing inside when indoor
dining returned. Now, on Mondays at 11 p.m., a server turns on the screen
(tucked between hanging dried plants from Green River Project, which
did the interiors) and people sing in English, Japanese, and Mandarin
between shochu highballs and Sapporos. “It’s a chill vibe and then it’s just,
like, party time,” says actor and philosophy grad student (and regular) Billie
Alexopoulos. “Everybody joins in, and it’s rowdy, it’s crazy, it’s a transformation.” (“I saw Lorde there once,” says Vanity Fair art columnist Nate Freeman. “I think she was a little surprised when karaoke started going down.”)

Illustrations by Pete Gamlen

KARAOKE BARS

started only in January but
already has regulars like
City Councilmember
Althea Stevens, who says
the crowd is young, largely
from the Bronx, and there
to sing hip-hop and R&B;
oft-requested songs are by
Busta Rhymes, Biggie, and
Blackstreet and from JayZ’s ’90s catalogue. For the
typically microphone-shy,
it helps that Rosa’s extends
the happy-hour menu of
$7 mojitos and $5 shots
until the singing stops at
10:30 p.m. and that the
hosts sometimes hop on an
additional microphone,
hyping up members of the
crowd to make sure they
sing along with the chorus.

For ScreamSinging
Evanescence
ALLIGATOR LOUNGE,

600 Metropolitan Ave.,
Williamsburg;
alligatorloungebrooklyn.com

€on thursdays,
Fridays, and Saturdays, a
messy, strictly after-midnight karaoke scene takes
over the back room at Alligator Lounge. “It’s when
the creatures come out,”
says longtime visitor Emily
Vanderpool. Fueled by $7
Booty Shakers (Tecate and
a tequila shot) and the free
personal pizza that comes
with every drink, patrons
take to the stage to screamsing emo and pop-punk
from the late 1990s and
early aughts, like Green
Day, Evanescence, and My
Chemical Romance. The
clientele often leans more
college age and band-teesand-beanies than, say, the
crowd at Bushwick’s Cobra
Club, which rivals Alligator
Lounge in intensity but
skews more toward true
DIY punk. For sheer emo
nerve, Vanderpool says
Alligator Lounge is hard to
beat: On two separate
nights, after particularly
passionate performances of
Fall Out Boy and Blink182, she has seen the singer
crowd-surf the room.

For

OLD-TIMERS

SINGING
GEORGE
MICHAEL
MONTERO
73 Atlantic Ave.,
Brooklyn Heights

“I don’t know if any other
places really bring that ‘I’m
gonna pick this dude up
and carry him around’
vibe,” she says. “The
bouncer did not love it. But
nobody got kicked out.”

For Piano
Accompaniment
SID GOLD’S REQUEST ROOM,

165 W. 26th St.;
sidgolds.com/new-york

€in 2015, paul devitt
of Beauty Bar and pianist
Joe McGinty of the Loser’s
Lounge (as well as the
Psychedelic Furs) opened
Sid Gold’s Request Room,

montero, with its flickering
neon sign and glass-brick façade,
opened on Atlantic Avenue near
the waterfront as a longshoreman’s
bar in 1938. It’s still well known
for its maritime ambience (model
ships, lifesavers, and framed
photos of sloops abound), but
since 2007, the place has become
equally popular for its rather
rowdy karaoke nights, run by
host Amethyst Valentino. On
Thursdays through Saturdays,
get a paper slip at the bar when
you buy a drink, fill it out, and
give it to Valentino, who will
which forgoes a karaoke
machine in favor of a live
pianist. Every night
(except Sundays and Tuesdays) in the back room,
behind a thick velvet curtain, a piano player takes
requests for everything
from Sinatra and Frankie
Valli to ABBA and Britney
Spears. Guests watch from
rounded velvet booths,
under a pressed-tin ceiling, and scan QR codes to
pull up the song list. The
regulars, per Sara, who has
frequented Sid’s for six
years and had her engagement party in the piano
room, are often genuine
talents. “It’s just a hidden

gladly suggest other songs if
yours is taken. Expect to hear the
Eagles, Céline Dion, Billy Joel,
Queen, and Sinatra. (Cristina
Martin, a regular for almost a
decade, recalls one especially
notable rendition of “The Lord’s
Prayer.”) Montero gets its share
of young professionals and
students, but Martin says the oldtimers are the heart and soul
of the place, including “Bob.
Whenever I see him,” Martin
says, “I know he’s going to sing
‘Careless Whisper’ and bring the
house down.”

gem,” she says. “All of a
sudden, it’s like Broadway
level.” There’s no cover or
song charge, but Sid’s does
have a two-drink minimum. (The menu includes
something called an After
the Gold Rush—a gin
drink with lemon, lime,
honey, and gold glitter.)

For “Robyn
Roulette”
BRANDED SALOON, 603
Vanderbilt Ave., Prospect
Heights; brandedsaloon.com

€the weekly “jared
Michael Gniewek Karaoke
Warzone” night at the

karaoke nights at Fajitas Sunrise,
a pink-and-orange-walled Mexican
F r
restaurant in Ridgewood, start off lowkey: A man the staff calls “the mariachi
guy” sets up his equipment in the corner and sings an old bolero or two
a
before passing the microphone off to
dinner guests. Eventually, says Litzy
Confesor, a server at the restaurant,
people forget about their plates and
start dancing between the tables. Latin
songs from the past 50 years or so are
the focus: Think mariachi, bachata,
F
S
and everything from Mexican pop
from the 1980s to reggaeton from the
2010s. “It’s the songs we grew up with,”
says Mariano Morán Ventura, a data
analyst for the city who is originally
from Veracruz, Mexico. Karaoke at Fajitas—which starts around 7 p.m. on weekends—
is like being transported to a wedding back home, Morán Ventura says: “It’s a place
where you can sing and get emotional to songs that may not even have a deep lyrical
meaning, but you just end up singing along because you share the same culture.”

JUAN G BRIEL

A UST

L R

honky-tonk-ish gay bar
Branded Saloon has a
group of unusually
devoted regulars: Prepandemic, the event was
so important to videographer Don Calva that
he would rearrange his
work schedule to accommodate it. “And I’m not
the only one who did
that,” they say. “I met
everybody I live with
through karaoke night
here.” Gniewek, the DJ,
says regulars send him
their song choices days
in advance so they can
practice at home, and he
sends weekly emails with
updates on new songs
added to the catalogue;
the night of, guests
submit paper slips and
sometimes wait two
hours to sing. Song
choices range from ’90s
pop-punk nostalgia to
Weird Al to Limp Bizkit
to Rent. (“Basically the
entire crowd is queer,”
says regular Kat Rejsek.
“The song choices reflect
that.”) Throughout the
night, Gniewek keeps
one slip from everyone
who sings, and at 11 p.m.
whoever happens to
be on the mic picks a slip
from the pile for “Robyn
Roulette.” Whoever’s
name gets pulled
sings “Dancing on My
Own,” “whether they
know the words or not,”
Gniewek says.

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

51

BEST of NEW YORK 2022

For Annabelle
Selldorf’s Framer
HANDMADE FRAMES, 1013

Grand St., Williamsburg;
handmadeframes.us

For Unusual
Shapes
DOWNING FRAMES, 4261
24th St., Long Island
City; downingframes.com

€no request is too
far-fetched for Downing
Frames, which has been
building pieces (from
$200 to $38,000) for
blue-chip artists, galleries,
and museums like MoMA
and the SculptureCenter
for nearly 15 years. For
Deana Lawson’s recent
show at the Guggenheim,
Downing incorporated
mirrors, stickers, and
holograms into frames for
her interactive works. For
artist Mariah Robertson’s
geometric chromogenic
prints, Downing created
asymmetrical polygon
frames. When multimedia
artist Erin Shirreff wanted
her pieces built inside the
frame (think of a model
ship in a bottle), she called
the Long Island City
framer. “Downing does
everything for us,” says
Yuta Nakajima, senior
director at Hauser &

Wirth, adding that the
framer can pull off feats
with remarkable turnaround. Nakajima recently
needed eight large, delicate Philip Guston works
in frames with gold leaf
applied by hand; it would
ordinarily be a six-week
job, but Downing had
them ready in a month.

For Frames That
Would Cost Double
in Manhattan

charge double what Adam
Collignon charges, and the
quality will be sometimes
worse,” says Eckstein,
recalling a 30-by-20-inch
piece that came in at a
$300-to-$400 framing
estimate at Greenpoint
Frames and $1,000 in
Manhattan. Collignon has
owned the business since
2018, when he took it over
from his mentors. He has

GREENPOINT FRAMES, 937
Manhattan Ave.,
Greenpoint;
greenpointframes.com

€the somerset house
founder Alan Eckstein has
gone to Greenpoint
Frames for five years. Eckstein has since moved out
of the neighborhood, but
the vintage-furniture and
art dealer still heads back
to Greenpoint for framing
(for both his store and
home) because of the
shop’s excellent price-toquality ratio. “Frame shops
in the city are going to

52 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

F RA

S H

P

F

since made some updates,
like adding new materials
to the inventory and hiring
his own staff (who Eckstein says did an “incredible job” with an uneven
painted metal sign by a
Jamaican artist that he
recently brought in). “It
feels like a little artist community in there,” Eckstein
says. “They’re always
playing cool music.”

€architect annabelle
Selldorf has been taking
her personal art collection
to Handmade Frames
since 1990. She has
referred her clients to Paul
Baumann and Marilyn
Gold, who own the shop,
for just as long, sending
them everything “from
contemporary works
to old masters,” she says.
“They are meticulous in
their approach to every
project, whether it is for a
museum or an individual.”
One standout feature in
Handmade Frames’ work:
Baumann and Gold take
into account the realities
of living in a city like New
York and find inventive
ways to frame pieces (from
$200) beautifully but flexibly. For a 27-foot-long
Richard Serra quintych,
they built a lacquered
maple frame designed to
break into two pieces during transportation; a delicate Hao Liang painted
silk scroll was mounted
with three glass panels to
protect the work from
light and airborne dirt. For
Selldorf, though, it’s simple: “They know how to
show the piece at its best.”

stylist beverly nguyen has a very specific preference for frames: “I have most of my
artwork in a 1.5-inch oak frame with floating
glass,” she says, explaining that, to her eye, “it
allows the piece to stand out and not distract
you.” Nguyen, whose eponymous homewares
shop stocks a lot of similarly warm and pareddown bowls, spoons, and brooms, initially had
a hard time finding a framer that would build
something to her specs: “Believe it or not, ten
other framers fought me on this very simple
design I requested.” Nguyen went by Soho Picture Framing after reading its Google reviews
and found the perfect shade of oak (ask for
“natural”) at the right price (from $250). And
the owner, Michael Ingbar, immediately
agreed to her dimensions. “He met me with no
resistance,” says Nguyen, who has since gotten
ten pieces framed with him.

FRAMERS

For an Art
Historian’s Eye
BARK FRAMEWORKS, 21-24
44th Ave., Long Island
City; barkframeworks.com

€when elizabeth
“Buffy” Easton first started
working with Bark Frameworks, she was the chair of
the European-paintings
department at the Brooklyn
Museum and had undertaken the sensitive task of
reframing some of the
museum’s Impressionist
and Post-Impressionist
paintings. Easton and
Jed Bark spent ten years
studying the collection
before replacing the
generic Louis XIV– and
Louis XV–style frames
with hand-carved ones
made to honor the artists’
brushstrokes and composition. “I had never before
considered the importance
a frame plays in how one
looks at a work of art,” she
says, noting that one of
Bark’s new frames for a
Monet changed the viewing experience entirely by
revealing an additional 45
square inches of the canvas. Easton continues to
send pieces (both professional and personal) to
Bark, both for his critical
eye and the shop’s manufacturing capabilities: “I
don’t know of any other
framer that has both gilders in-house as well as a
metal shop,” she says.
“They can make a metal
frame with no seams
because they fabricate it
directly for the work.”
(Prices start at $350.)

For New Collectors
ULFIG PROJECTS, 544 Park

Ave., Bedford-Stuyvesant;
ulfigprojects.com

€interior designer
Adam Charlap Hyman is a
genuine frame obsessive
(“People make fun of me
because I go to museums
and take photos of the
frames,” he says) and trusts
Weston Ulfig with his own
pieces. Charlap Hyman says

that Ulfig typically makes
“very quiet structural decisions” that add life to contemporary, modern
pieces—at a slightly belowmarket rate for high-end
framing (from $220 to
$4,000), as he crafts most
orders in-house instead of
sending them out. For a
series of Charlap Hyman’s
own cutouts, Ulfig suggested mounting the works
onto a textured mat, which,
he said, would allow the
viewer to pick up the
shadow and dimension of
the piece. “Ulfig performs
this magic trick of putting
pieces in a frame that gives
them the right amount of
space and air, with the right
color around them, to make
someone stop and look
twice,” says Charlap Hyman.

For Jenna Lyons’s
Framer
SKYFRAME, CHELSEA, 141 W.
28th St.; skyframe.com

€three people gave
us resounding recommendations for Skyframe,
including Jenna Lyons, who
has gotten countless pieces
framed there. Lyons initially
went there because the
company is bonded and
insured for high-end art,
but she returned because
Skyframe always said yes to
her ultraspecific requests
and never rushed a decision. On one occasion,
when Lyons wanted a Cy
Twombly done up in a custom silver-leaf frame (to
compliment the drawing’s
blue undertone) and a black
border, Skyframe mounted
the piece on a mat board so
it would, at Lyons’s request,
float within the frame without revealing a shadow. “It’s
like finding a good tailor,”
Lyons says. “I come to the
table with knowledge and
want to use the knowledge
they have, too. They know
what they’re talking about.”
(Prices range widely—small
matte-black jobs can start
at $55; a hand-carved
and gilded piece will be
closer to $8,000.)

For Easy Access
MANHATTAN MINI STORAGE,

storage-mart.com/
manhattan-mini

€five people told us
about simple, pricetransparent experiences at
different branches of
Manhattan Mini Storage
(from $30 a month),
which has 17 locations in
the borough. Andrea
Whittle, the features director at W magazine who
has been using the 110th
Street site to store the
contents of her onebedroom, says the sign-up
process was “seamless. The
website has a useful guide
that helped me estimate
the size of the unit I would
need. They gave me a
coupon code for a moving
company they work with,
which I then quickly
booked.” Brand consultant
Michael Williams, who
now uses Manhattan Mini
Storage after a decade of
trying other facilities, says
the company’s locations
typically have “a good
loading-dock/parking

area, which makes it easy
whether you’re driving in or
taking an Uber.” (He does,
however, recommend the
Chelsea location over the
Spring Street one to avoid
Holland Tunnel traffic.)
J. Mueser creative director
Matthew Woodruff appreciates that the key card gets
you 24/7 access, meaning
he can use the space in an
emergency: “I recently
stopped by to change into a
pink suit—obviously
exactly the thing you’d keep
in a storage unit—for a
friend’s pink-themed birthday party.”

For All-in-One
Service

he shares with his girlfriend, he needed a company that could handle
both moving and storage.
Bombas founder Randy
Goldberg, a friend of
Coggins’s, recommended
Liberty for its reasonable
prices (from $70 a month),
speed, and professionalism.
“They did a meticulous—
even rigorous—analysis
over a video chat, where I
showed them all my possessions, and I got a
specific quote down to the
square foot,” Coggins says.
The move took slightly less
time than Liberty had estimated; the company finished carting off his carefully wrapped books and
furniture and lowered the
quote accordingly.

LIBERTY MOVING & STORAGE,

libertymoving.com

€author david coggins
recently moved out of his
West Village apartment of
12 years, which he’d filled to
the brim with “objets, or
what some people like to
call clutter.” Not able to take
all of his possessions with
him to the new apartment

For Million-Dollar
Artworks
CROZIER,

crozierfinearts.com

€art adviser todd
Levin, who has helped
clients find everything
from Rembrandts to

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

53

BEST of NEW YORK 2022

Basquiats for 35 years, says
that for storing high-value
art, he (and almost everyone
else in the industry) goes to
Crozier. The storage company (from $100 a month)
has serviced collectors for
more than 40 years and is
“the standard go-to used by
the main auction houses,”
says Levin, referring to Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s. “Everything is temperature controlled, humidity
controlled, and the alarm
systems connect to both the
fire department and the
police, which is crucial when
it comes to keeping insurance costs down.” (Crozier
tells us its units are kept at
“museum standard,” meaning a climate of 50 percent
humidity, 70 degrees for
paintings, and 35 percent
humidity, 55 degrees for
photography.) While the city
has other storage facilities
with similar conditions, like
Trimaxion in Long Island
City, Levin says that is
“more of a General Motors
than Crozier’s Bentley
experience,” in part because
of Crozier’s menu of
services: Besides storage, it
provides international
handling and on-site gallery
rooms for showing works to
potential buyers.

For Château Latour
DOMAINE,

domainestorage.com

€jamie wolff, a partner
of Chambers Street Wines,
says that once you’ve
accrued more than a few
cases of wine, proper wine
storage becomes necessary:
“Keeping them under the
bed and running the airconditioning is not appropriate.” Many of his customers, Wolff says, use Domaine
($285 per year for every ten
cases) for its proper storage
conditions (55 degrees yearround, kept horizontal, for
red and white) and in-house
wine expertise: If you buy
wine from another collector
or vineyard and ship
directly to Domaine, the
staff will inspect the bottles
before adding to your
reserves. And last year,
Domaine helped customize
a software, so its website can
track your collection and its
current value and will even
notify you when it’s time
to uncork certain bottles.

For Inherited
Minks
POLOGEORGIS, 143 W. 29th

St.; pologeorgis.com

€fur coats don’t fare
particularly well in heat or

F r

f r

H
LI

S

R

STORAGE UNITS

K

sunlight—both can cause
rotting and discoloration.
Longtime Upper West
Sider Lisa Zaretsky owns
an “embarrassing” collection of “20-odd” coats
and keeps hers with Pologeorgis, a coat showroom
with a dedicated floor
for storage downstairs
kept at 56 degrees with
controlled humidity.
Pologeorgis staff “come
to your apartment, pack
everything up neatly, and
off they go,” says Zaretsky.
They’ll inspect coats
while the company is
storing them and make
repairs (optionally, for a
fee); when customers
want one back, “they’ll
drop them off within two
days,” Zaretsky says, adding that other places take
a week or two. Plus, the
prices are reasonable.
Pologeorgis charges $95
per garment, for storage
from April to October,
plus pickup and delivery.
And those prices have
hardly gone up, according to retired publishing
executive Connie Anne
Harris, who previously
worked for Vogue,
Glamour, and InStyle
and has gone to Pologeorgis for decades, calling owner Nick Pologeorgis “a genius.”

when furniture and lighting designer
Ben Kicic was looking for a storage unit in
Crown Heights, the cheapest rate he could find
for an “appealing” space was $340 a month.
By expanding his search area a little further to
East New York, he found an “amazing, fully
staffed, superclean and secure” unit with Life
Storage, a nationwide storage chain that has
12 locations in Brooklyn. After booking online
(which Kicic recommends; that’s how he got a
discount rate), he was able to schedule his
move-in for the same day. Upon arrival, it took
only 20 minutes to sign forms and get a key to
his new unit. “I’ve been renting a 15-by-15-foot
unit for over a year for $200 a month that I
could fit 20 mattresses into if I wanted,” he
says. “I have a sofa and ten chairs in there, and
it’s still only half-full.” Plus, he says, Life
Storage’s office sells packing supplies like tape,
foam peanuts, plastic wrap, boxes, and locks,
sparing you additional errands.

54 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

For a Used Bike
RECYCLE-A-BICYCLE, 858

Fulton St., Clinton Hill;
recycleabicycle.nyc

€every single bike
sold at Recycle-a-Bicycle
was donated to the shop
before being refurbished by
staff. As such, prices remain
startlingly low. Shannon
Haupt, a law student,
bought their first bike—a
Diamondback road bike for
around $400—at Recycle a
couple of years ago: “They
tuned it up for me, gave me
a rack to put it on, and
installed bike lights. It was
all included.” After that one
was stolen, Haupt went
straight back to Recycle
(which keeps about 20 bikes
on the floor and another
100 or so in a Navy Yard
warehouse) and bought a
zhuzhed-up Columbia. The
Recycle team even built it
out to their specifications:
“A new gear system; brake
lines; fixed up the wheels,
tires, and tubes—and the
whole thing was only about
$350,” Haupt says. The shop
also has a selection of

refurbished kids’ bikes, such
as a bright-yellow 20-inch
Hunt for $150, a Schwinn
for $75, and a Yuba Balance
for $35. All proceeds go
toward the shop’s education
program—the staff teaches
free riding classes for kids
and adults.

For No Extra
Charges
DIXON’S BICYCLE SHOP,

792 Union St., Park Slope

harold dixon, a
Jamaican immigrant and
an expert mechanic, opened
Dixon’s in 1967; more
than 50 years later, his sons,
Chris and David, run the
business. Its legions of
fans—including many who
swing by after shopping
at the Park Slope Food
Coop next door—say the
feeling at Dixon’s is one
of overwhelming goodnaturedness. “My front tire
went flat four or five times
in a matter of months,” says
writer Kayla Levy, “and
every single time I walk in
for a fix, they remember me.

BIKE SHOPS

For

A QUICK

FLAT FIX
NYC VELO
66 Second Ave.;
nycvelo.com

And they only charged me
the first time I came in, just
in case it was their fault
the tire was still leaking.”
(It wasn’t, she says: The staff
eventually informed her the
tire was dead and replaced it
“for an exceedingly fair
price.”) Government worker
Jess Powers says that when
her brake popped off unexpectedly when she was
riding downhill from Prospect Park, Dixon’s replaced
it, then greased her chain for
free. “They said it needed
doing,” she says. “Some
places want to charge you
for every little thing. They’re
just not like that.”

For an
Approachable
E-Bike
PROPEL, 134 Flushing

Ave., Clinton Hill;
propelbikes.com

in his three decades working as a bike messenger, Kevin “Squid”
Bolger has gone through more than ten bikes. “Eventually the
frame will crack somewhere if you’re using it all the time,” he says.
But when it comes to fixable, day-to-day issues—punctures,
snapped chains, rust—he has stuck with NYC Velo for over ten
years. Bolger says that at specialty bike shops, “if you came in with
a flat, they might be like, ‘You have to leave it or we can’t help you
with that’ ”—which doesn’t help when you’re already running late
to get some blueprints up to a midtown office. Owner Andrew
Crooks, on the other hand, is good for a flat fix (for $25) for messengers like Bolger, who both co-owns and runs the courier service
Cyclehawk. He recently added a couple cargo bikes to his fleet for
wine deliveries (a big part of his business these days) and will get
their cumbersome hydraulic brakes serviced only at NYC Velo.

for hauling groceries or children, from around $3,000),
and adventure (pedal-assists
that can traverse forest
trails, from around $4,700).
Stern quickly deduced that
he wanted the fastest possible ride, so Chris set him up
with a Stromer (from
$3,100), which can go 28
mph. He then adjusted the
seat height for Stern, taught
him how to use the digital
controls, and let him go on a
test drive around the neighborhood. He bought the
bike. Now, Stern says,
“whenever there’s an issue
with the bike, I just drop it
off, then get text updates.
‘Looks like a brake issue,’
one week. ‘Motor issue,’ two
weeks. They’re communicative, which I appreciate.”

specializes in custom bikes
for cyclists of all sizes and
styles, from gravel-road
riders to crit racers, and
tune-ups (starting at $175)
for riders who have invested
in top-of-the-line equipment like a carbon frame, a
Dura-Ace groupset, or
carbon wheels made at
Randall’s other shop, Honey
Wheel Co., in Gowanus.
Calilap says Randall’s deep
knowledge is key: When he
had a persistent brake issue,
for instance, Randall dug in
until he learned it was actually a manufacturer error in
the bike’s front fork. “Every
project Tijon has worked on
with me is finished to perfection,” Calilap says, “down
to the placement of the
handlebar tape.”

For Top-of-the-Line
Tune-ups

For Tricking Out
a BMX

TUNED,

furniture-maker
Ephraim Stern walked into
Propel, an electric-bike shop
in the Brooklyn Navy Yard,
on a whim. “I’d never even
seen an e-bike before I went
in there,” Stern says. “But
Chris, the owner, simplified
it.” The shop breaks its
inventory into four categories: comfort and cruising
(e-bikes for running
errands, from $2,600),
commuters (zippier options
that can handle cobblestones, from around
$2,600), kids and cargo
(ones with powerful motors

291 Nevins St., Gowanus;
tunedby.square.site

“i need to know that my
bike mechanic knows the
ins and outs of race
machines,” says Angelo
Calilap, a creative director
who races in Prospect Park
and Central Park and in
national events like Gravel
Worlds in Lincoln,
Nebraska. So Calilap takes
his bikes to Tuned, the
newest shop run by Tijon
Randall, a bike mechanic
who has been building and
fixing bikes in New York for
over 20 years. Tuned

BIKEFIX NYC, 334 E. 6th
St.; bikefixnyc.com

between the wheelies
and standing up on their
seats, street riders put an
unusual amount of wear
and tear on their bikes.
Professional street rider
Julius “Obloxkz” Barnes
rides a Throne 27.5-inch
Goon XL (just imagine a
big BMX bike) and for
years has relied on BikeFix
NYC to maintain it.
Barnes started going to
Will Hough, the shop’s
owner, because he lived
nearby; these days, he regularly travels to the East

Village from his home in
the Bronx for tune-ups
(starting at $75) and new
gear at BikeFix. The shop
caters to all kinds of riders,
but Hough makes a point
of stocking goods for the
bike-life crowd, so you can
pick up Maxxis mountainbike tires (from $55) or
spoke skins for your wheels
in a rainbow of colors or get
a busted chain on your bike
rethreaded after too many
tricks. But a big part of the
draw is the vibe: Outside
the shop, you’ll almost
always find some of the
city’s best riders hanging
out, smoking weed, and
popping wheelies down
6th Street.

For Vintage
Colnago Frames
and Shimano
Derailleurs
NEW YORK BIKE JUMBLE,

Fifth Ave. and 4th St., Park
Slope; nybikejumble.com

for rare, discontinued,
or esoteric bikes and
parts—like a vintage
Shimano derailleur for a
1980s Japanese road bike
or a giant yellow tricycle—
Evan Friss, author of
On Bicycles: A 200-Year
History of Cycling in New
York City, recommends
Bike Jumble, the bike flea
market held outside the
Old Stone House in Park
Slope’s Washington Park.
Since 2009, the Jumble

has hosted dozens of vendors (mostly hobbyists
and collectors) selling
restored classics, hard-tofind components, and
cycling ephemera like
jerseys and caps. “It’s a
museum of sorts, a
selection of bikes and
parts from the last 60 or
so years,” Friss says.
Another longtime
attendee says that “for
collectors of classic steel
road frames and Campagnolo parts, the Jumble
can’t be beat,” adding
that he found his silver
Colnago there for $500—
around $1,500 less than
what the Italian bikes
usually cost (even when
used). This year’s Jumbles
are scheduled for May 7
and September 10 in
Park Slope.

For a Peloton
Instructor–
Approved
Bike Fitting
REDBEARD BIKES,

69 Jay St., Dumbo;
redbeardbikes.com

from torso length
to back flexibility to wingspan, riders have unique
proportions that affect
how they ride, and a custom fit takes your geometry into account. So when
Peloton instructor and
Masters Track World
Champion racer Christine
D’Ercole hears of anyone
who needs a seat adjustment or a new handlebar
angle, she sends them to
Redbeard. “The owner,
Ilya Nikhamin, is an especially excellent bike-fitter,”
she says. (Basic consults at
Redbeard start at $150;
more detailed, three-tofour-hour fittings go up to
$450.) “A proper fit will
help you ride more
efficiently, more powerfully, and will help avoid
injury from misaligned
joints,” she says. “While it
might not seem relevant to
the everyday rider, it is.”

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

55

STORAGE UNITS

For Patient
Explainers
on Gear Ratios
CITY BICYCLES, 307 W. 38th

St.; citybicyclesnyc.com

€when mo hussain
fell down the rabbit hole
into the world of hobbyist
cycling—replete with
custom bikes, drop-bar
bikes, and Lycra—he had a
lot of questions about the
right bike to build. “I’d go to
shops and annoy mechanics
with questions, peppering
them for hours,” says
Hussain, who works as an
IT director and organizes
Cycling Fanatics New York,
a club for riders in the boroughs and New Jersey. Not

every mechanic was receptive to Hussain’s inquisitive
approach, but he ultimately
found a patient teacher at
City Bicycles. While building himself a $1,700 custom
track bike for racing in
events—a project that
required sourcing parts and
learning about mechanics
like gear ratios—Hussain
worked closely with shop
owner Jhonatan Moloon.
“He explained to me
the gearing, what he likes
to ride, what a good setup
for me would be like, going
through each option,”
Hussain says. “Those should
have been billable hours,
but he was just giving away
the sauce. And he’s never
burdened or irritated.”

For

AN ACTUALLY
WORTH IT

$13,500

BIKE
STRICTLY CYCLING COLLECTIVE
525 W. 30th St.;
strictlycyclingcollective.com

long before eric min bought his first Pinarello
Dogma, he knew he’d buy it from Strictly Cycling
Collective. Dogmas are obscenely fast, responsive,
and light Italian racing bikes—five of the six last Tour
de France winners have ridden them—and the Collective is one of the very few places that sells them in
the city. “I heard of it before I could feasibly shop
there, but once I could, I never looked back,” says
Min, the CEO of Zwift, a virtual-world cycling platform. The Collective, which originally opened in New
Jersey in 1994, sells four brands of high-end bikes:
Pinarellos, Specialized, Assos, and its own brand,
Strictly. Besides the Dogma, it sells models like the
13-pound S-Works Aethos road bike ($13,500) and
the Turbo Creo e-bike made for mountain cycling
($9,750.) Min heads to the Hudson Yards shop
(which has a café and a Retül Bike Fit rig for a hightech fitting) anytime a new Dogma model comes out
so that its “highly knowledgeable mechanics” can
keep his bike in shape in between upgrades.

56 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

For a Same-Day
Appointment
UNI K WAX, multiple
locations; unikwax.com

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

services listing several variations on bikini waxes, ranging from “top only” ($13),
for just the horizontal strip
of hair above the pubic area,
to a “Boy Short” ($87),
which includes hips and
inner thighs. Nora DeLigter,
writer-director who has
been going to Uni K for
bikini waxes for eight years,
says over all that time, she
has “never not gotten a
same-day appointment.”

For a BoyZillian
MPM, 239 W. 26th St.;

mpm.studio

€when it comes to
cleaning up his nether
regions, “most woman
waxers act kind of afraid of
me,” says one avid male
client who’d prefer to
remain anonymous. “They
generally aren’t willing or
able to get me into the right
positions to really get it
done.” Not so at MPM, an
exclusively for-men spot in
Chelsea that sugars (a hairremoval process that uses a

lemon-water-and-paste
mixture instead of wax)
away hair in the perineum,
on the balls, around the
shaft, and basically anywhere else the customer
pleases (prices start at $30
for “the crack only”). Oskar,
one of the technicians, is
particularly good at “contorting my body into whatever shape it takes to really
get into the crevices of my
butt. He’s not shy around or
afraid of the male body.”
The “BoyZillian” ($60)
removes hair from the full
pubic area in 30 minutes or
less, and while it’s admittedly “extremely painful,”
Oskar is “gentle and makes
it more tolerable than it
should be.”

For Taraji P.
Henson’s Go-to
TENOVERTEN, 121 Fulton
St.; tenoverten.com

€in her ten years at
Tenoverten, Miranda
Doxani has gained a highprofile following for her sur-

HAIR-REMOVAL SERVICES

BEST of NEW YORK 2022

prisingly painless waxing
services. Her client list
includes Demi Moore,
Taraji P. Henson, Maggie
Gyllenhaal, and Naomi
Watts as well as Jimena
Garcia, Chanel’s in-house
brow artist, who has been
seeing Doxani for bikini
waxes (from $35) for 15
years, since before Doxani
moved to Tenoverten.
Doxani uses nontoxic products (Satiness beeswax,
natural resin-based wax,
azulene oil), but Garcia
says Doxani’s finesse comes
down to experience: “She
knows how to adjust the
temperature, the pace, the
way she holds her hands
specifically. You can learn
technique in school, but
you have to actually do it
over and over to be able to
really see hair-growth
patterns and hair types the
way she does.”

For a ’90s-esque
Arch
ZUBI’S THREADING CORNER,

157 Allen St.; zubisthreading-corner
.business.site

€“zubi always has a
point of view about eyebrow shape and the relationship between how your
hair grows and the shape of
your face,” says stylist
Mellany Sanchez of Zubi
Kothiya, owner of Zubi’s
Threading Corner. (She got
Kothiya’s name in the first
place from her friend
Seymore Fleck, a beauty
specialist who has been
seeing Kothiya since 2008.)
Take, for instance, the time
Sanchez showed Kothiya
her saved photos of ’90s
supermodels and Puerto
Rican women with their
ultra-arched, razor-thin
brows. (“I live for it,” she
says.) Kothiya steered her
away, suggesting instead
that a better arch would be
achieved by growing her
brows in and shaping them
so they gently taper past
the outer corners of her
eyes. Now Sanchez has a
feathery, ’90s-esque arch
with none of the no-going-

in 2016, contributing editor at Vogue Jenna Rennert
went to Romeo & Juliette Laser Hair Removal on the
F r
recommendation of a friend and has been a regular ever
since, dipping in frequently ahead of events. She has
referred industry friends, like Instagram’s head of beauty
programs, Kristie Dash, who has since become a regular.
Romeo & Juliette has 14 available lasers, including Nd:yag
lasers, which yield the best results on darker skin tones and
are not available at many med spas. Rennert’s bikiniline treatments (from $235) are generally done with the
Synchro REPLA:Y, which has nuanced settings to allow for
more targeted treatments based on hair type and thickness
and skin tone and sensitivity. Dash remembers being
pleasantly surprised at her first appointment when multiple
R M
J
settings were used on a single body part. “It’s such a
L
H
R
thorough process,” she says. “Other salons pop you into a
room and just start zapping.” Blake Newby, an editor at
Essence, has been getting her Brazilian area done at Romeo
& Juliette for three years. “The area has stayed hairless as long as I’ve been diligent with
touch-ups,” she says. “And I’ve never experienced so much as an ounce of discoloration. I’ve
referred friends with deeper skin tones than me to R&J, and they said the same.”

-

back overplucking. (From
$10 to $200 for a wide
range of services.)

For No Ingrowns
SHEN BEAUTY, 138 Court

St., Cobble Hill; shenbeauty.com

€beauty writer
Saleam Singleton gets chest
and stomach waxes and
says his priority is to find “a
service that is as gentle as
possible” because his coarse
hair typically leads to
ingrown hairs and irritation. He’s been a regular for
a year at Shen Beauty,
where he sees Annie
Otaigbe, who does waxing,
facials, and body treatments
(from $16 to $145). Otaigbe
is “very interested in and
passionate about skin care,”
says Singleton, pointing to
her biomedical-informatics
training from the Aveda
Arts & Sciences Institute
New York as well as the
product regimen she has
put him on. Besides using
micellar water, Amber After
Wax Quench, and Fur Oil (a
product that softens pubic
hairs and clears pores) during treatments (and recommending them for at-home
care), Otaigbe has given

58 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

Singleton crucial advice on
preventing ingrowns in
between waxes. From
sharing the best exfoliators
(Nécessaire’s The Body
Exfoliator) to which acids
will gently treat hyperpigmentation (glycolic, kojic,
and mandelic), “it’s
more than just waxing,”
Singleton says. “I’ve gone to
waxers in the past who
don’t share any tips, but
Annie is a gem.”

For a DominatrixApproved Bikini
Treatment
LUNA LE VAG, 1096
Broadway, Bushwick;
lunalevag.com

€mistress marley is a
financial dominatrix who,
until last year, got regular
bikini waxes that would
often leave her sore and
with uneven hair regrowth.
She immediately converted
to sugaring after going to
Jordan Cozens, co-owner
of Luna Le Vag in Bushwick. “It’s less painful,” she
says. “I’m in and out in ten
minutes, and I can go a
whole month and the hair
doesn’t grow back.” Plus, as
Marley discovered, Luna
Le Vag offers a menu of

services tailored to skin
care for women of color:
To gently lighten the
hyperpigmentation on her
bikini line, Marley stocks
up on Luna Le Vag’s Clear
Skies brightening solution,
made with witch hazel,
kojic acid, and glycolic
acid. Every three to four
months, she’ll add on one
of Luna Le Vag’s facial-foryour-bikini treatments,
called a Vajacial (from
$60)—the clay mask and
hydrating post-sugaring
treatment are meant to
help exfoliate dead skin
and coax out any ingrowns.
“It’s a very relaxing experience” as well as a thorough
one, Marley says. “She’s
super-informative. To go to
someone who understands
your hair and after-care is
so important.”

For Ancestral
Brows

“I threaded my eyebrows
mercilessly as soon as
I was allowed to,” says the
communications strategist,
and from the age of 17
up until the pandemic, she
kept her brows in distinct,
separate arches. But postlockdown, with her childhood brow fully rewilded
after having no access to a
salon, she decided to leave
“colonial standards of
beauty” behind. On a recommendation from hairstylist Dhiran Mistry, she
went to see Azi Sacks,
whose “eyes lit up in a way
I hadn’t seen before,”
Rahim says. “Her concern
was, ‘How do we keep
these as full and ancestral
as possible?’” For Rahim,
Sacks carefully tweezes to
preserve her brows’ natural
shape ($120 for shaping)—
somehow taming the
cowlick that stumped
previous eyebrow artists—
and adds a tint ($40) for
further definition.

AZI SACKS, THE BROW
STUDIO, 205 W. 20th St.;

azibrow.com

€as a child, zara
Rahim’s unibrow was
openly praised at home by
her Bangladeshi family but
mocked by her classmates
at her Florida school.

REPORTING BY:

Alice Markham-Cantor,
Mackenzie Wagoner,
James Lynch,
Willy Blackmore,
and Louis Cheslaw

THE UNFORGETTABLE STORY
IS NOW THE UNFORGETTABLE BROADWAY SHOW

BASED ON THE BEST-SELLING BOOK
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The CULTURE PA

How Blue Man

60 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

Illustration by André Carrilho

lew Up

The wild success of a show starring
strange bald men painted in
Yves Klein blue. B y M O L L Y L A N G M U I R
march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

61

—

Ca. 1990:

Flyer for
an early
show.

1988:

1993:

The first BMG
appearance,
on MTV.

Playing a
“drumbone.”

i
- -

-

- -

-

–

- -

-

-

-

i

i

–
l

-

1990:

On top of the
Clocktower
Gallery.

Mid-’90S:
1991:

Astor Place
Theatre
playbill.

—

-

Mirinda
soda ad
campaign.

2015:

Performing
in Las Vegas.

2001:

With
Jill Scott
and Moby.

2018:

At New York
Fashion
Week.

l
-

–

-

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

SUPERL ATI V E S

Jon Batiste on a Lifetime
of Musical Alchemy
By

justin curto

jon batiste has no interest in fitting neatly into categories. The lifelong
musician instead is engaged in what he calls a broader “humanist” project—
to be as multifaceted and expressive a creator as possible, be that as a
recording artist, an Oscar-winning film composer, or a bandleader for The Late
Show With Stephen Colbert. Born into a New Orleans musical institution, Batiste
began performing in the Batiste Brothers Band at age 8 and later juggled studying
jazz at Juilliard and touring with his band, Stay Human. Their 2014 performance
on The Colbert Report earned them the gig as the Late Show house band before
Batiste had even turned 30. His eighth album, 2021’s We Are, is a document of
virtuosity blending R&B, jazz, hip-hop, and rock, sometimes in the same song.
The risk paid off: He is nominated for 11 Grammys, a near record. A more personal
win is his history-making number of nominations across fields in a single year,
appearing in the R&B, American Roots, Classical, Music Video, and general
categories for We Are, along with Jazz and Visual Media for his soundtrack to
Pixar’s Soul. He welcomes the hard-won attention while keeping his focus on craft,
just as he would if the accolades had never arrived.

Quickest song to
make on We Are

Song that sounds
like New Orleans

made in the length of time
that it took for me to
play it. The first take on
the song feels like you’re
communicating something
beyond comprehension.
Composers such as
Beethoven, Chopin, Bach—
three of my favorites—
there’s so many stories
of them improvising
movements or impromptus
or fantasies, where they
would create something
on the spot and then go
back and refine it by putting
it onto a score. That’s
what I did with this piece:
I channeled the feeling
of the moment in streams
of consciousness that
come on the piano.

upbringing in detail. Its
collaborators, Trombone
Shorty and PJ Morton, were
there in New Orleans with
me. PJ’s verse talks about his
experience growing up there,
as does mine; Troy plays
his solo and you hear what
his experience was being
3, 4 years old, marching in
parades and second lines.
Even the production and the
beat—we borrowed from the
sounds of New Orleans hiphop and all that stuff that we
grew up listening to, whether
it was the Hot Boys and Cash
Money or No Limit with
Master P and the crew. Troy
and PJ didn’t need to be in
the room with me to get it.
We lived it.

➽ “Movement 11’ ” was

➽ “Boy Hood” speaks to my

66 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

Album that
foretold his
artistic vision

➽ 2013’s Social Music (with

Stay Human) is an amazing
thing to have captured
for me as an artist at that time
because it’s really
We Are 1.0. It speaks to all of
the same themes that have
since only become more and
more political and divisive but
are really rooted in
humanism. This ability to
blend all of the genres acts
as an allegory for how
human beings can
coexist on this
planet. Social
Music predates
We Are almost
by ten years, but
it was the
beginning of
refining that vision.

Most
political song

➽ “Tell the Truth” is so, so

powerful in the sense
of it being a mandate from
my parents—my dad in
particular—when I left New
Orleans for New York. “Tell
the truth” is the mandate that
I would give to everybody in
a position of power. The things
that we march about, we just
want transparency. Everybody
wants to know what’s what
and not be manipulated.
There’s a very, very political
message in “Cry” as well.
It’s even political, as a Black
artist, to be nominated
in American Roots for
this song. At the end,
the lyric says,
“For the struggle of
the immigrants/
For the wrongful
imprisonment /
For the loss
of our innocence.”

Inspired by
a True Diva

How do you write, direct, and star in a
Céline Dion biopic without losing your nerve?
First step: Change her name.
By R A C H E L H A N D L E R
aline is in theaters April 8.

the film aline, which premiered last year at
Cannes to an audience both baffled and delighted
and which was deemed “scary” by The Guardian
ahead of its April release, defies simple explanation. It is about a woman who looks and acts and sounds like
Céline Dion. This woman’s life includes many of Dion’s own
pivotal moments: discovery as a gawky but preternaturally
talented young girl by a much older manager who eventually
becomes her ponytailed husband; a “makeover” and an
ascent to international superstardom; a Titanic performance
at the Oscars; a Vegas residency. But here, her name is Aline
Dieu and she is played in a César-winning performance by
French writer-director-star Valérie Lemercier at every stage
of her life—including at age 5, shrunk down and warbling at
a family wedding. If Lemercier had gotten her way, she would
also have played Aline as an infant.
A Dion obsessive who co-wrote the film with her frequent collaborator Brigitte Buc, Lemercier says Aline was
“freely inspired” by the singer’s life, though she takes some
strange creative liberties: scenes in which Aline gets lost
inside her own mansion or reveals a long-awaited pregnancy by carving the letters BB into a bowl of her husband’s
carrot purée with her hands. Lemercier pitches her performance somewhere between earnest homage and camp

P H OTO G R A P H S : J E A N - M A R I E L E R OY © R E C TA N G L E P R O D U C T I O N S / G A U M O N T / T F 1 F I L M S P R O D U C T I O N , D E L’ H U I L E / P R O D U C T I O N S C A R A M E L F I L M I N C . / P C F A L I N E L E F I L M I N C . / B E LG A P R O D U C T I O N S

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

imitation, mimicking Dion’s spontaneous, limb-flinging dance moves and
wide-eyed energy. But she insists she is
not making fun of Aline or Céline—
instead, she sees Aline as a tribute to a
fellow artist grappling with the highs and
lows of stardom.
Although Lemercier’s work is unfamiliar to many Americans, she’s well known in
France as a film actor, director, and stage
performer. (She’s also no stranger to celebrity impressions; she made a satirical film
inspired by Princess Diana and Prince
Charles in 2005 called Palais Royal!)
“I wanted to speak about the artist’s life,
which is also mine,” says Lemercier. “You’re
alone onstage. You’re alone afterward.
You’re alone when you go out. The
changing rooms in the theaters are awful.
There are no windows. It’s not very glamorous. I wanted to speak about all of that.”

You take some artistic liberties
with Céline Dion’s life, starting with
her name. Why didn’t you want to do a
straight biopic?

I changed the name first. My co-writer
said to me, “Change the name. It will all be
easier.” And, in fact, it was. Céline’s younger
than me. She’s alive. Of course, she’s much
more famous than me—I couldn’t have a
poster with my head and the words Céline
Dion. I changed her name to be more free.
And I preferred to make small digressions.
To make a movie, you need strong images
and symbols. For example, her father gives
her a coin at the beginning of the movie
that she carries with her all over the
place—it’s not totally a fact. It’s between
something true and something untrue.
When did you first become a fan?

Céline has been famous in France since
she was about 14 years old, but I heard
about her late. I was doing a play in 1995,
and there was a girl working at the theater
who always sang Céline’s album D’eux
while she was giving out tickets and
seating people. I didn’t know anything
about Céline’s life or her love story, just
the beautiful songs. I didn’t even know
her English repertoire. But then I was
very touched by the first images of her
walking alone after her husband René
Angélil’s funeral in 2016. I saw Céline
onstage for the first time while I was
writing the script. I was really struck by
the performance, by the voice.

It sounds like you were less drawn to
her talent and celebrity and more to the
story behind it, the people around her.

It’s a movie for her and for René. There
are books this thick on René and her
mother—bigger than the ones about Céline.
There was so much material: the love story,
the family story, the success story.

I was very touched by that big family of
Céline’s—that they’re so close. The love
story with her mother is really important.
Céline wasn’t supposed to be on Earth—
she was born when her mother was in her
40s. Everything is a plus, everything is a
gift, because she wasn’t supposed to live. So
her mother did twice as much for her last
little girl as for her 13 other children. She
wanted to repair something. And when
Céline arrived in René’s life, he had no
artists, no job. I think the movie is a story
about repair.

Have you met Céline before or since
the movie?

No. I’d like to. The first thing I did when
I finished the script was to give it to her
French manager, who read it on a plane.
She liked it and said, “I see how much you
love her.” But Céline didn’t want to read it.
She doesn’t want to see the pictures of our
actors or be part of it. I understand why
she prefers not to see the movie. I hope she
will see it one day because, of course, I did
it for her.

“I was singing for
real in a stadium
with nobody in front
of me. I was alone.
And I was crying.”
If her manager had said, “I don’t like
this,” would you still have made the
movie? Did you feel like you needed
that permission?

It would have been difficult. In Québec,
there are a lot of comedians who love to
make fun of the age difference between her
and René. People were waiting for me to be
sarcastic in the movie, maybe even more
than in the five movies I’ve made before.
But that was not the story I wanted to tell.
I wrote it as an homage.

Dieu means “god” in French. Was that
name a bit of a wink, a joke about her
elevated status?

No. It was not a joke. It’s just close to
Dion. Some people really are named Dieu.

What were some other details you
invented? For example, did René actually
propose to Céline by putting a ring inside
an ice-cream cone?

No. In the film, she meets him just after
she goes ice-skating, wearing her mother’s
gigantic shoes. Céline was not ice-skating
right before she met him. I think she had
normal shoes on in real life. But I wanted

to explain why she has 10,000 pairs of
shoes. I thought, Maybe if during the first
important meeting of her life, she has bad
shoes, maybe afterward she has too many
shoes. It’s small things to understand her
better. And it’s also a comedy, so I wanted
funny things that were not bad for her.

What made you decide, I’m not only
going to write this, but I’m going to direct
it and star in it and even play her at age 5?

When Aline doesn’t know how to be a
woman, how to dance, when she has the
wrong teeth—when she’s in the dentist’s
chair with an open mouth—I didn’t want
to make a small girl do that. It’s fine to
laugh about my own maladroit. I think it’s
not funny to do that to a poor little girl.

So you decided instead, Okay, I’m
gonna shrink myself.

It’s not my own face on a child’s body;
it’s all me. When I’m at school, they put me
at a big desk with papers bigger than normal ones and a big pen. When I’m signing
records, we used big records. And we took
off my wrinkles. Onstage, I’ve played a lot
of kids and teenagers. It’s one of the things
I love to do. Of course, it could be strange
for Americans because you don’t know
me. But in France, they know I’ve played
that kind of character. So maybe it’s more
funny for us.
I will tell you: At first I also wanted to
play her at 6 months old, as a baby with
one tooth, sleeping in a drawer. My producer asked me to take that out. One time
I will show it to you because it was so
funny. For me, it’s a big regret that it’s not
in the movie.
You really embody Céline’s natural
wackiness. She is a kooky person, and the
tone of the film feels like it’s on the same
wavelength as her sense of humor.

She’s a clown.

Can you talk to me about finding that
tone? Because it’s a fine line—you’re not
making fun of her.

I think we did that in editing. The
script was funnier, more of a comedy. But
I wanted to mix funny and sensitive. We
know all along that Aline’s husband, GuyClaude, is going to die. The day we edited
the death, I came back very sad. It felt like
it happened to me. It was difficult.

A lot of her hits, like “The Power of
Love” and “All Coming Back to Me Now,”
are missing from the film. But you do
have a lot of her bigger covers, like “River
Deep, Mountain High” and “Nature Boy.”
Were you unable to get the rights to some
of those other songs?

All the songs I chose speak about her
love. Each is a step of her love story. And
at the end, she’s alone, and there is only
one song she sings from the beginning to

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

69

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

We had 50 singers to choose from. It
was like The Voice with no names
attached. She was letter B, and she was
really the best. They told me, “She works
a lot. She will be easy to direct,” and that
was the case. Of course, she was obliged
to sound like Céline, but I wanted to hear
her heart. I wanted her to be in the song.
I think she had the most difficult job,
making 16 songs. They’re not complete in
the movie, but we did it for the record.
What was the process of matching up
your performance to her vocals? Did you
lip-sync to her?

She was singing to match me. She has
the lyrics, she has my face, she must breathe
like me, she must move like me. All of that.
In certain songs, you can hear my voice
mixed with her voice for a few moments.
So when you filmed those concert
scenes, were you singing in front of an
audience or lip-syncing to another track?

I was singing for real in a stadium with
nobody in front of me. I was alone in
22-centimeter heels. And I was crying.
I was really in the songs. I was totally,
100 percent in the songs.
I heard two of Céline’s siblings thought
the film was disrespectful because it
painted her as growing up in squalor.
What’s your reaction to that?

It’s difficult to say. We proposed to the
Québec distributor that the family see the
movie—all of her brothers and sisters—
and they didn’t want to. Then one journalist let them enter a press screening under
another name, and they left before the
movie ended. Of course, they didn’t recognize Céline in the film. I think it’s very difficult when you’re so close. Aline’s house is
not exactly the same as Céline’s. I know she
didn’t leave her house through a window
wearing her wedding dress.
I never wanted to be unkind. I spent all
my energy to make her onscreen family a
good family with love. I did get some
advice while I was making the film from
one of Céline’s other siblings, but he didn’t
speak publicly so I can’t say his name.
René’s family loves the movie.
What would you say if you could meet
Céline now?

First, I’d say, “You have nice shoes.” And
■
afterward, we’ll see.
70 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

Why Is Everyone Suddenly Reading
Cassandra at the Wedding?
By n o r a d e l i g t e r

there’s no easy explanation for why Cassandra at the Wedding—a 1962 novella
about a pair of twins reuniting at their family ranch in the Sierra Nevadas—
should be circulating rapidly right now. The book, by Dorothy Baker, wasn’t a best
seller when it first appeared. Its most recent reissue, from New York Review Books,
came out a decade ago. So why is seemingly every screenwriter, editor, and
Ph.D. candidate from New York to L.A. picking it up? We set out to find Cassandra’s
patient zero by talking to every person we know who has read it lately.

the stein strain
➽ In October, the author Lynn Steger Strong

t
“Favorite novels about siblings??” Cornelia Channing, now an editorial
assistant at the New York Times, responded with Cassandra—which
h
i from the writer
she’d heard about from her boyfriend,
and editor Sadie Stein, who came across it at a used-book shop in Paris in
2002. S
t
l
of a class she is teaching at
Columbia on unhinged narrators.

the ward strain
➽ It seemed as though Stein was behind the spread—until we heard about
Taylor Ward, the wine and service director at Cervo’s, Hart’s, and the Fly.
H
while combing the publisher’s website in 2016. “I love

Cassandra—she’s so narcissistic that she actually is incapable of
reading the room,” he says. He recommended it to Kassandra Thatcher,
a ceramicist; Kate Abernathy, a film editor; Lily Soule, the Fly’s manager;
t Emma Wooley, a brand strategist,
and Emily Dinowitz, a producer (
and Eliza Dumais, an editor).
the sestanovich strain
➽ Last year, Emily Rappaport, a book-to-film scout,
C
from author and editor Clare Sestanovich. She recommended it
to Sacha
to Zander Allport, a Ph.D. candidate, w r
Macabee, an English teacher, who recommended it to Soren Hope,
a painter. Rappaport also
f
c
the production
company Seaview. Strangely, Neon, another production company,
reached out to Seaview as well: An actor had brought a book to Neon’s
attention, and the company was hoping to approach the estate.

B O O K ) ; L E V R A D I N / A L A M Y ( E A R LY )

Victoria Sio provides Aline’s singing
voice. How did you work together to get
her to sound so similar to Céline?

CULTURE CONTAGION

the early strain
➽ The actor was John Early. He says he found Cassandra afte

to “become a Deborah Eisenberg completist.” Once he’d read
short stories, he moved on to her favorite books—and, as it
Eisenberg w
NY
for Cassandra. Soon, he was talking
about the book to anyone who would listen, including the comedian Kate
Berlant and the playwright Sarah DeLappe, who began discussing adapting
the book into a film. DeLappe, along with Early, Neon, and Seaview,
approached the Dorothy Baker estate, meeting with Baker’s grandchildren
over Zoom. The estate signed off on Seaview, Neon, and Early as
producers.
i
f

P H OTO G R A P H S : J G P H

the end, that last song: “Ordinaire.” That
really speaks to who she is. The only song
I couldn’t get was “The Power of Love.”
We have “I’m Alive,” we have “My Heart
Will Go On,” and there are some important French songs, like “Pour Que Tu
M’aimes Encore.”

@khaby.lame

A S M O OT H E R W AY TO S O DA

p o p

/

t v

/

m o v i e s

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

CRITICS

P O P / CRAIG JENKINS

Impostor Syndrome
When the metamorphosis is constant,
how do we ever know the true form?
rosalía achieved maximum saturation at a shocking speed. In a flash,
whispers about a gifted singer-songwriter from Spain reimagining flamenco
music blossomed into near-global acclaim as the taste for stark, traditional covers displayed
on her 2017 debut album, Los Ángeles, evolved into the spirited genre hybridization and
careful pop inroads of its 2018 successor, El Mal Querer. By 2019, Rosalía was guesting on
international hits alongside música urbana elites J Balvin, Bad Bunny, and Ozuna, and on
English-language records by Travis Scott and James Blake. She has described this evolution
in self-mythologizing terms, telling The Fader in 2019 that when she encountered flamenco
at age 13, she immediately saw the role it would play in her musical future: “I realized,
This is my path.” The quest to fill reggaetón and Latin trap songs with
the melodrama and vocal theatrics of flamenco singing has earned the
vocalist an embarrassment of praise. El Mal Querer received awards
MOTOMAMI
at the Latin Grammys in 2018 and 2019 and was named Best Latin COLUMBIA
RECORDS.
Rock, Urban, or Alternative Album at the 2020 Grammys; the Billie
Eilish duet “Lo Vas a Olvidar” was crowned Best Latin at the 2021
MTV VMAs. But Rosalía’s critics, and even some of her admirers,
72 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

see a problem: a white European woman
swiping accolades that should be reserved
for artists of color from across the Atlantic.
To a cynic, Rosalía may seem like a ringer.
Born in Catalonia, the affluent territory in
northeastern Spain that has been actively
trying to secede from the country for the
past few years, she received training from
a vocal coach as a teen, landing at Taller de
Músics—the Barcelona school with a stated
interest in “the dissemination of jazz, flamenco, and modern popular music”—at 16.
From there, she enrolled in the Catalonia
College of Music, participating in its flamenco program, which accepts only one
student a year. It’s not the common experience. Dabbling in reggaetón and adjacent
styles tied Rosalía to external worldviews
and gave her a feeling of cross-cultural solidarity. When performing in Mexico and
Panama, she explained in a 2019 Billboard
video series called Growing Up Latino,
“I feel Latina.” There are people for whom
this music is a matter of life and death, and
there are people for whom this music is an

P H OTO G R A P H : R E P U B L I C R E CO R D S

Craig Jenkins on Motomami … Kathryn VanArendonk on Pachinko …
Alison Willmore on Deep Water.

BROADWAY’S MOST
THRILLING AND
ROMANTIC SCORE

Photo by Matthew Murphy

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avenue of personal expression. Rosalía is a
terrifyingly good study, a singer at ease with
any sound she surveys, who bends genre,
culture, and music history to her will. As she
excels in scenes linked ineffably to specific
cultural identities, questions about what is
gained and lost when she takes up space in
these communities persist. Some flamenco
purists perceive the Catalan star’s success in
a historically Andalusian form as an insult.
Rosalía responded in 2018, stating that flamenco doesn’t belong to their community
or anyone else’s. As she circles reggaetón,
dembow, and bachata now, her every move
seems to annoy someone.
Motomami, Rosalía’s third album, shows
off three years of gains and lays out its goals
in the first song, “Saoko,” borrowing the
chorus from Puerto Rican reggaetónero
Wisin’s 2004 hit “Saoco.” She raps about
embracing change and finding peace in
her inconsistencies: “Me contradigo, yo
me transformo/Soy todas las cosas, yo me
transformo.” If water is always changing
states, chilling to become ice or warming
to steam, why are we expected to stick with
a fixed persona? Motomami revels in dualities: It’s an album about trying to square
the pangs of desire with the freedom of
being single, about wanting to look fantastic but knowing that beauty eventually
fades, about juggling the love of self and
family and men and God, about combining
sounds from the past and the present,
from the avant-garde and the mainstream.
“Saoko” recalls aughts reggaetón but plays
with your expectations for that instrumentation, shifting on a dime from rockadjacent distortion to jazz, warning listeners to torch whatever preexisting ideas
they had about this album.
This music is restless, a puckish expression of exquisite taste. No style sticks for
two songs in a row. After “Saoko,” “Candy”
serves flashy synths and Burial samples.
“Diablo” interrupts its feathery reggaetón
with stately James Blake vocals—this after
the title track’s loopy Pharrell production.
“La Fama” one-ups the old bachata remixes
of the Weeknd’s hits, getting Abel Tesfaye to
sing an original, then “Bulerías” recenters
flamenco. The latter offers a close look at
the spiderweb of influences Rosalía pulls
from as it invokes the names of some of
her heroes in prayer: “Que Dios bendiga a
Pastori y Mercé/A la Lil’ Kim, a Tego, y a
M.I.A.” (“Bulerías” also offers rare insight
into how the singer copes with backlash
as she pledges to meet negativity in kind—
“De cada puñalaíta saco mi rabia”—and
compares herself to the suffering woman
from 1940s and ’50s flamenco star Manolo
Caracol’s “La Niña de Fuego.”) Triangulating Rosalía’s interests through references, samples, collaborators, and covers

is exhilarating. “Delirio de Grandeza”
reimagines Cuban singer Justo Betancourt’s
1968 Fania Records weeper, adding some
of the short-lived rap duo Vistoso Bosses’
2009 Atlanta bass track “Delirious.”
“CUUUUuuuuuute” gets Argentine DJ
and producer Tayhana to loop up vocals
from Vietnamese social-media star Soytiet
for a clattering dance track that suddenly
collapses into a quiet piano break. It’s here
that Motomami starts to feel a bit too coolly
curated, though, like an attempt to get the
listener lost in its vastness. It’s a jolt when
the breathy, carnal exaltations of “Hentai”
give way to sped-up raps in “Bizcochito,”
where smirking rebuffs invert dembow
tradition, suggesting straight men aren’t the
players they’re allowed to believe they are:
“¿Tú eres el que pimpeas o te pimpean a ti?”
“G3 N15” recasts our theme as lust, not love:
“Esto no es El Mal Querer, es el mal desear.”
A message of self-sufficiency and
empowerment steadies Motomami
through roiling creative twists, those owed
to its twin interests in complicating our
grasp on Rosalía’s abilities as a vocalist and
tying international movements in modern
Spanish-language music to their 19th- and
20th-century antecedents. El Mal Querer
dealt in stories about escaping toxic relationships, a quality inherited from the
source material it was based on, the tale of
a woman locked in a tower by her jealous
husband. Motomami keeps suitors at arm’s
length. These songs luxuriate in designer
threads and spurned advances; they also
warn of tethering self-worth to desirability
and material wealth.
In the years spent fine-tuning the
sound and scope of this album, Rosalía
has spoken candidly about her interest in
effecting change in a music business that

74 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

overlooks women. As eager as Rosalía is to
shake things up, though, her career path is
familiar: The story of the godsend whose
raw skill justifies the space they occupy in
communities of color is also the story of
Eminem, who has won the Best Rap Album
Grammy six times, more than any other
living rapper. Whiteness, or proximity to it,
often buys artists greater visibility, even in
non-white spaces. White artists get commended for trying to “transcend culture,”
while performers of color get pilloried for
the same behavior. Rosalía has admitted
that privilege is in part what affords her the
freedom to change drastically with each
album and to enjoy acclaim that was never
showered on the innovators of the genres
she delves into. Motomami offers a chance
to fix that.
Only you’d really have to lurk the album
credits and be eagle-eyed with the music
videos to catch the contributions of
Caribbean and Latin American musicians
to Motomami. The real revolution would
have been bringing everyone to the table
to share the spotlight this concerted push
for crossover success is bound to generate.
It’s not Rosalía’s fault the music industry
uses Latin interchangeably with Spanishspeaking while ignoring the deeper distinctions the former carefully delineates.
She is not to blame for narrower opportunities for artists who don’t sing in English
or for the long history of talent shielding
white artists from criticism. Look, Rosalía
can make whatever music she wants. She’s
brilliant. Motomami is great. But if her
vision for this music of San Juan, Santo
Domingo, Medellín, Miami, and the Bronx
fails to honor the richness of those origins,
if the story is just the richness of her gift,
■
this isn’t the change she prophesied.

T V / KATHRYN VANARENDONK

A Tale Only As Old As Time
One self-contained multigenerational
epic that refutes all mythmaking.
years ago, while watching The Forsyte Saga, the 2002 adaptation of John Galsworthy’s gargantuan family drama, I began
to wonder what it would be like to watch a television series that continues
forever. It could be roughly like that one, I thought, or like the TV version of Roots: the story of how one bloodline registers enormous historical events on an intimate scale, told through each new generation as a
barometer for the world in flux. It’s a thought experiment, one that gets to
ignore all the logistical reasons a show like that is essentially impossible.
Pachinko, the new adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s generational saga about
a Korean family, is not a realization of my imagined forever story, but

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76 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

M O V I E S / ALISON WILLMORE

In the Shallow
All play and no work
kills the mood of the
erotic thriller.
a dr i a n ly n e is a moralizer
at heart. This may seem like a
counterproductive quality for a filmmaker
best known for his contributions to the
erotic-thriller boom of the ’80s and ’90s,
but for Lyne, the shame is inextricable
from the sizzle. In 1987’s Fatal Attraction,
Michael Douglas nails Glenn Close against
a kitchen counter—being, as she puts it, “a
naughty boy”—while his wife and child
are out of town, and then he gets punished when Close’s character turns out to
be an obsessive stalker; in 1993’s Indecent
Proposal, Demi Moore sleeps with a
wealthy Robert Redford in exchange for
money that she and Woody Harrelson
desperately need, a mutually agreed-on
dalliance that nevertheless almost breaks

P H OTO G R A P H : A P P L E T V +

it achieves all the same feats of scope and
It all makes Pachinko a family epic that
sharpness. The series slides among several satisfies the minute, glorious, devastating
decades at once: The protagonist, Sunja, human drama—marriages, deaths, pregis born in early-20th-century Korea, and nancies, affairs, gossip, betrayal, and
Pachinko spends time with her in her early romance. Throughout, the series is transchildhood (when she’s played by Yuna), in formed by the performances of each Sunja.
her young adulthood (played by Minha Youn is excellent as the elder iteration, and
Kim), and when she is a grandmother Kim is absolutely astounding as Sunja in
(Yuh-jung Youn). Sunja’s life encompasses her youth. There is a clarity to Kim’s permultiple titanic changes in both the history formance that becomes the foundation
of the world and of her family. As a child, on which the whole series rests: Every
Sunja lives in Japanese-occupied Korea eventual transformative twist and turn
and grows up with the omnipresence of in the family history seems to stem from
colonial rule. As a young adult,
a specific flash of emotion across
she moves to Japan. By the time
her face, the code that translates
she’s elderly, her family has put
Pachinko’s immense historical
PACHINKO
down roots in both Japan and the
weight into palpable human
APPLE TV+.
U.S. while maintaining a bedrock
reality. She is also a boulder in a
of Korean culture and identity.
river, resisting the rush of overAlthough Pachinko moves
whelming events and preventfreely in and out of periods in Sunja’s life ing her family from getting swept away.
(chiefly her young adulthood in the 1920s So many of the other performances are
and her grandson’s early adulthood in the fantastic—especially that of Lee Minho
1980s), it does so in a way that resists fran- as Koh Hansu, a figure who becomes the
tic flashback-style finger-pointing. Its pace specter of an alternate history for Sunja—
is urgent but measured. Gaps in Sunja’s life but they all exist as reflections of and
allow for surprise and discovery, but the responses to Kim’s Sunja.
series avoids clean, overly ordered logic.
If the drama did not work on a tiny,
When new pieces of Sunja’s history slot individual level, there’d be no grounding it.
into place, they tend to arrive only after The most straightforward version sees the
you’ve roughly sussed out what they must family as a microcosm of a particular hislook like, giving Pachinko’s revelations torical thread: Sunja’s family as a window
the weight of poignant inevitability. That into all the pain and horror of occupaPachinko entirely dodges plodding obvious- tion. Pachinko, though, is too deft and
ness, though, feels almost like magic: It’s not much, much too careful to spin another
quite genealogy as puzzle box, and it’s not uncomplicated progress narrative. It is not
lineage as personality test, either. Each era a series about glorifying a simpler, more
in Sunja’s life has its own rhythm and inter- authentic past, and it is not a celebration
nal momentum. When parallels occur, or of a more comfortable, more technologiwhen one story’s events answer some ques- cally complex modernity. If anything, it’s
tion that arose elsewhere, those moments an admirable portrait of Sunja’s resilience.
come quietly.
Even then, Pachinko avoids slipping into

wholehearted boosterism for its protagonist. She is remarkable, and she is ordinary, and Pachinko does not see those as
conflicting truths.
I have longed for an infinite family drama that can strikingly refute so
many myths. Those set against a volatile
timeline put the lie to shortsighted “arc
of history bends toward justice” stories.
They are also reminders that our current
experience of a nightmarish too-muchness is not special or unprecedented.
We cannot get distance from our now,
but we can see a family story play out
for nearly a century and feel shaken
out of the unbearable intensity of being
blinded by current events.
Pachinko’s opening credits are an
almost uncannily precise distillation of
the series: After a montage of images
evoking the dark past, it shifts to a brightly
lit pachinko parlor—the titular game of
chance—where cast members from each
era dance with ecstatic abandon to the
Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live for Today.” It flattens the Pachinko timeline. Here they
all are at once, while the lyrics “Live for
today/And don’t worry ’bout tomorrow”
play over them. Pachinko is an incredible
expression of that idea and a rebuke to my
desire for a perpetual TV show that I won’t
■
soon forget.

“

FRESH
AND
HILARIOUS!
The laugh-out-loud sad comedy we’ve been needing.

Bryna Turner reshapes the wedding genre for our time.
Directed with wit by Jenna Worsham, this sprightly,
70-minute LCT3 production offers Mary Wiseman
a brilliant showcase for her comic genius.”
–Jesse Green,

BRUTALLY
HILARIOUS!”
“

–Zachary Stewart,

★★★★ !

“

”

Photo by Marc J. Franklin

–Adam Feldman,

AT THE WEDDING is sponsored by The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation’s Theatre Visions Fund.
Major support is provided by The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.

78 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

Vic as he drives. When things get worse,
right around the time Vic does kill one of
Melinda’s lovers, they don’t even share
a frame.
So, really, we’re left with an erotica
lacking in thrill because the film’s stakes
are never clear. Melinda isn’t worried that
Vic will kill her, even when she comes to
believe he has killed on her behalf. And
Vic isn’t especially careful to hide his body
count. The ending, which strays from the
book, feels almost like a joke about Lyne’s
social conservatism, except it’s played
straight. For all its sloppiness, though, Deep
Water offers the rare experience of watching a movie that’s decidedly grown-up. It
may be set in a subtropical city, but there’s
a coolness to its look, to the slightly greentinged cinematography and the unwilted
crispness of its characters’ appearances,
that adds a sense of distance. When Vic
and Melinda get ready to go to that first
party, she allows him to pick the shoes she’s
going to wear and to kneel and put them on
her feet. Then they disappear into the night
in a flurry of perfume and promises to the
babysitter, off to the unfathomable land
of adults, a place so vividly realized that
the film’s messy writing almost passes for
■
psychological complexity.

P H OTO G R A P H : H U LU

apart the couple’s previously passionate guably interesting together. Affleck, cast
marriage; and in 2002’s Unfaithful—once in a part that feels written for someone
thought to be Lyne’s last film—Diane Lane reedier and nerdier, summons his deadenlivens her suburban existence by having eyed Gone Girl affect to play the stolid Vic
an affair with a dreamy Olivier Martinez, as someone who isn’t really seen by anyonly for her doting husband, played by one in his life except his wife. De Armas,
Richard Gere, to find out and kill the guy with her calculating eyes and bright smile,
in a burst of rage. The sanctity of the home is incandescent, even when the characin Lyne’s work is constantly assailed by the ter she’s playing seems to reinvent herself
allure of sordid, frantic, awesomeevery other scene based on what
looking extramarital sex.
will throw Vic most off balance.
Deep Water, a half-sultry, halfSometimes Melinda appears
DEEP WATER
stultifying adaptation of the 1957
to really want out of her marriage
HULU.
Patricia Highsmith novel and
and out of motherhood, two comLyne’s first movie in two decades,
mitments that, she suggests, were
initially looks like another variaVic’s idea. Other times, she and
tion on this theme. Its marrieds, Vic (Ben Vic appear to have settled into a routine
Affleck) and Melinda (Ana de Armas), that, however poisonous, seems to work for
reside in an elegant New Orleans house them. “If you were married to anyone else,
with their daughter, Trixie (Grace Jenkins), you’d be so fucking bored you’d kill yourand appear to lead lives of moneyed leisure. self,” Melinda taunts after coming home
Their circle includes couples played by late and drunk, and it’s possible she’s right,
Lil Rel Howery, Devyn Tyler, Dash Mihok, though neither apparently has any interest
Jade Fernandez, Tracy Letts, and Kristen in talking out the dynamics of their power
Connolly, and they all own equally fabu- games or making them consensual. Their
lous places and throw shindigs with live status as a couple is instead measured out
music and bartenders. For fun, Vic raises in the scenes of their car rides home. When
snails and rides his mountain bike out of things are good, Melinda, in a gesture of
the city. Melinda’s hobbies, on the other practiced intimacy, retrieves a half-eaten
hand, are being the life of the party and apple from Trixie’s lunch and shares it with
having affairs with men whom she insists
on bringing to the events she and Vic are
always going to. Her latest conquest, when
the movie opens, is a blissful idiot named
Joel (Brendan C. Miller), who makes the
mistake of assuming that Melinda and Vic
have an understanding.
We’re tempted to believe the same thing
given Melinda’s openness about what she’s
doing and the way she meets Vic’s gaze
through a window as he watches her kiss
her lover. But when Joel and Vic have a
moment alone, Vic lobs an idle threat his
way, implying that he murdered the last
man with whom Melinda had a fling. He
didn’t, or at least he probably didn’t, but it’s
obvious that he is not as content with the
situation as he claims to be to concerned
friends. What’s less evident about Vic and
Melinda’s relationship is how much he is
turned on by the public cuckolding. The
story we’re shown, which was written by
Zach Helm (of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder
Emporium) and Euphoria creator Sam
Levinson, never creates any sense of
internal coherence in its toxic main pair.
Deep Water, whose planned theatrical
release presumably became a casualty of
covid and the Disney-Fox merger, is now
an artifact of the very public and since concluded real-life romance between its leads,
who share a spark onscreen in the warmthfree way two rocks struck together might.
Neither is served especially well by the
roles assigned to them, but they’re inar-

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4.
15.

1.

For more culture
coverage and
streaming
recommendations,
see vulture.com.

20.

10.

TV

7. Watch The

Grammy Awards

Music’s biggest, delayed night.

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

To

CBS, April 3.

The Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for a
January 31 ceremony, will finally be handed out
during proceedings broadcast from Las Vegas
and hosted, like last year, by The Daily Show’s
Trevor Noah. BTS, Billie Eilish, and Olivia
Rodrigo are slated to perform, so yes, your kids
might actually be interested in watching an
awards show.
j.c.

8. See The Patsy

One man to rule them all.

Abrons Arts Center, March 30 to April 30.

Twenty-five
things to see,
hear, watch,
and read.
MARCH 30–APRIL 13
TV

TV

1. Watch Moon Knight

4. Watch A Black Lady

Llewyn Davis: Marvel star.
Disney+, March 30.

Yes, this is yet another Marvel series being rolled
out by Disney+. But it is another Marvel series,
and one that stars both Oscar Isaac, as the titular
character who has dissociative identity disorder,
and Ethan Hawke, as a cult leader, so at least
some attention must be paid.
jen chaney
POP MUSIC

2. Listen to

Unlimited Love

Ahead of a super-stacked summer stadium
tour.
Warner Records, April 1.

The 12th album from veteran L.A. funk-rockers
the Red Hot Chili Peppers reunites the team
behind beloved albums like 1991’s Blood Sugar
Sex Magik, restoring John Frusciante to guitar
duties and tapping Rick Rubin as producer. The
musicianship is as tight as the songwriting is
affecting—the function of a unit that grasps its
strengths, then plays to them. craig jenkins
BOOKS

3. Read Sea of

Sketch Show

Emmy nominated.
HBO, April 8.

This under-the-radar sketch series rarely gets the
attention it deserves, but the cast is stellar and the
ideas razor sharp. This season, Skye Townsend
steps in for departing regular Laci Mosley; guests
include Wanda Sykes, Ava DuVernay, and Lance
Reddick.
kathryn vanarendonk
MOVIES

5. See Sidney Poitier &

His Trailblazing
Contemporaries
A 48-film fest.

Film Forum, April 1 to 28.

Programmed by film historian Donald Bogle, this
series showcases the work of the first major male
Black movie star—and films with actors he paved
the way for, like Ivan Dixon (Nothing But a Man),
James Edwards (Home of the Brave), Juano Hernandez (Intruder in the Dust), and Canada Lee
(Cry, the Beloved Country). alison willmore
OPERA

Tranquility

6. See Elektra

Knopf, April 5.

Metropolitan Opera, opens April 1.

In 1912 Eng
a;
300 years l
a
book tour. Their stories (and others over the centuries) reduplicate in subtle and sci-fi ways. Emily
St. John Mandel also riffs on today, as a pandemic
rattles the novel’s universe.
emma alpern

e of soprano firend Lise Davidsen
as her sister Chrysothemis. Those voices, in this
score, are the operatic equivalent of a monster-truck
rally: It’s hard to believe they can get so big, so
daring, so exciting.
justin davidson

The Station Eleven author’s new novel.

A Patrice Chéreau production.

80 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

After decades of winning Obies and mounting his
own spectacular plays, David Greenspan began
turning complex, multi-role classics into oneman shows. For the Transport Group, he returns
to the show that started it all—his 2011 adaptation of Barry Conners’s little-known 1925 comedy
The Patsy. It’s an 80-minute whirlwind, a hilarious visit to pre-Depression theater, and to play all
its many parts, Greenspan makes himself into a
buoyant bit of dandelion fluff, soaring on the
play’s funny, 100-year-old breeze. helen shaw
MOVIES

9. See Babi Yar. Context
Kyiv, Ukraine, September 1941.
Film Forum, opens April 1.

This is Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s most
brutal, traumatizing documentary yet—an onthe-ground look at the Nazi invasion of Ukraine
during WWII and the mass murder of Jews at the
titular ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv.
bilge ebiri
TV

10. Watch Slow Horses
Based on the first of Mick Herron’s Slough
House novels.
Apple TV+, April 8.

What’s better than a British spy drama? What
about a British spy drama about a team of washedup spies starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott
Thomas, and Jonathan Pryce, created by one of
the writers of Veep and produced by Graham Yost
of Justified fame? You’re going to watch it, but
most important, your dad is going to watch it and
he’s going to text you about it.
k.v.a.
POP MUSIC

11. Listen to Ivory

Ft. Daniel Caesar and Kali Uchis.
Warner Records, April 8.

On his debut, Mexican American singer-songwriter Omar Apollo stretches out into his many
prodigious talents, pulling ideas from indie rock,
hip-hop, and Mexican ranchera music to make
his own brew, kicking impressive raps in English
and Spanish on the trap jam “Tamagotchi” and
pouring his heart out over rockers like “Talk,”
folk ballads like “Personally,” and R&B jams like
“No Good Reason” and “Killing Me.”
c.j.

F R O M L E F T: M A R V E L S T U D I O S ( M O O N K N I G H T ) ; A P P L E T V + ( S LO W H O R S E S ) ; I F C F I L M S ( N I T R A M ) ; T I N A T H O R P E / H B O ( A B L AC K L A DY S K E TC H S H O W ) ; A 24 ( E V E RY T H I N G E V E RY W H E R E A L L AT O N C E )

THEATER

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S

I

E R
N O D T O

V L O G
E

E O

R M O R

I

Historians Kellie Carter Jackson and Leah
Wright Rigueur scour the decadeslong archive of
The Oprah Winfrey Show to extract a deeper
sense of Oprah’s legacy.
nicholas quah

N L

E T

Y

TV

13. Watch Tokyo Vice
HBO Max, April 7.

This loose adaptation of Jake Adelstein’s book
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police
Beat in Japan stars Ken Watanabe, Rinko Kikuchi, and Ansel Elgort. Michael Mann directs the
premiere, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get some beautiful shots of men middle-gazing into the distance,
pondering their choices.
roxana hadadi

C R A P

A W S

L A U R A

U R E
A R E A

T H E B A T M A N
E Y E
H

H

T S

A T T

I

N S O N

R

P O P
D A M S

S

I

T A

I

T E R

L

I M E

The Steamy Puzzle
N O S

P O L

H U S H

I

A L

L

E

R

I

I

V E R B O A T S

D G E R T O N

E Q U A L
A R

U E

A R E

D R U G

L Y

N E

D E

N

I

E E T S

E T

E O N S

I

E N S

Find new puzzles daily at

nymag.com/games.

The Last of Sheila, April 30 and May 1
Psycho star Anthony Perkins and Sondheim
actually co-wrote the screenplay for this 1973
murder mystery, which filmmaker Rian Johnson
has called an inspiration for Knives Out.

of St. Luke’s

E
E

alison willmore

Performing J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
Carnegie Hall, April 7.

The Orchestra of St. Luke’s teams up with three
different choruses for a performance of Bach’s
vaulting, consoling cathedral of a piece. Bernard
Labadie, who is a passionate Passion specialist,
conducts.
j.d.
MOVIES

15. See Nitram

Caleb Landry Jones, one of cinema’s most compelling weirdos, plays a lonely, agitated man who
would go on to perpetrate the 1996 Port Arthur
massacre, the worst single-shooter mass killing in
Australian history.
b.e.
TV

P S A

A T T

Stavisky, April 15 and 16
Sondheim composed the score for this Alain
Resnais–directed biopic, which stars Jean-Paul
Belmondo as the disgraced financier Alexandre
Stavisky.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

IFC, opens March 30.

The Gotham Puzzle

R

Original Cast Album: Company, April 9, 17,
and 23
D. A. Pennebaker’s electric doc about the
marathon session resulting in a beloved recording
(parodied perfectly by Documentary Now!) offers
a glimpse of Stephen Sondheim at work.

A crime drama.

With the Best Actor at Cannes.

T P

West Side Story, April 1 and 3 (2021), April 2
and 3 (1961)
The original Robert Wise adaptation may be a
classic, but last year’s Steven Spielberg–directed
update is downright astonishing.

14. Hear Orchestra

The Scam Puzzle
O M O

Highlights from the Museum of the Moving
Image’s salute to the big-screen work of the
musical-theater legend.

Studying the icon.

P U F F S U P
N E R A T E

S U N D A E

I

S C R
A S

I

U R N
N E O

SEE IT BIG: SONDHEIM

Oprahdemics

Unfinished Business
A S P
E
U

The Shortlist

12. Listen to

16. Watch

The Invisible Pilot

A double life.
HBO, April 4.

Adam McKay produces this three-part doc about
Gary Betzner, the family man and pilot who
jumped off a bridge in 1977. Each episode considers another angle, connecting what happened to
covert schemes involving guns and drugs. r.h.
DANCE

17. See Soledad Barrio &

Noche Flamenca

CLASSICAL MUSIC

18. Hear Missa Solemnis
Beethoven’s Solemn Mass.
Carnegie Hall, April 8.

April is choral-monolith month at Carnegie Hall,
it seems; on the day after Bach’s St. Matthew
Passion, the Philadelphia Orchestra rolls in for
Beethoven’s mega-Mass in a performance led by
Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
j.d.
TV

19. Watch 61st Street

If you weren’t into the new Law & Order.
AMC, April 10.

The legal drama follows a Black high-school track
star caught up in a drug bust during which a
police officer dies. Once a public defender (played
by Courtney B. Vance) takes his case, the two
must face down the corruption of Chicago’s
criminal-justice system. The series already has a
two-season order, and the cast includes scene
stealers Aunjanue Ellis and Holt McCallany.
r.h.
MOVIES

20. See Everything

Everywhere All at Once
Ke Huy Quan stars.

Get on the floor.

In theaters.

The Joyce Theater, April 5 to 10.

There is no way to briefly do justice to the Daniels’
bizarre, expansive, heartwarming, profane, harrowing, exhausting, universe-hopping, multipletimeline action-comedy-sci-fi-fantasy-adventurefamily-drama extravaganza. But you’re definitely
gonna want to see it more than once, so start now,
while it’s in theaters.
b.e.

Soledad Barrio and her group, Noche Flamenca,
under the artistic direction of her husband, Martín Santangelo, dances in a much-anticipated
ussion and physical virtube the thing to stamp out
those post-lockdown blues.
h.s.

82 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

POP MUSIC

21. Listen to

THE ORCHID SHOW:
JEFF LEATHAM’S KALEIDOSCOPE
Now–May 1
nybg.org

Fear of the Dawn

The first of two new Jack White albums.
Third Man Records, April 8.

Fear of the Dawn sees former White Stripes frontman and sometime Raconteur Jack White leaning into the pummeling rock that made him
famous on songs like “Taking Me Back” and the
title track, but the theatricality of “Hi-De-Ho,” a
Q-Tip collaboration with an unexpected flamenco breakdown, shows that his music remains
unpredictable.
c.j.
TV

22. Watch Julia

What to watch while eating coq au vin.
HBO Max, March 31.

British actress Sarah Lancashire (Coronation
Street, Happy Valley) brings an infectious joie de
vivre to her portrayal of Julia Child in this series
about the cookbook author’s rise to fame as a PBS
star of her own show. Lancashire is joined by
David Hyde Pierce as Child’s husband, Paul, and
Bebe Neuwirth as her close friend Avis, which
makes this kinda sorta a Frasier reunion.
j.c.
CLASSICAL MUSIC

23. Hear New York

Festival of Song
The season finale.

Merkin Hall, April 13.

REBEL, JESTER, MYSTIC, PO ET
CONTEMPORARY PERSIANS The Mohammed Afkhami Collection
“A rare treat” —Hyperallergic

Is there a genre more eternal, more intimate, or
more varied than the song? The resilient group
NYFOS, which has spent three decades exploring
the simple, infinite terrain of voice + words +
piano, closes out its comeback season with a program devoted to Black composers, with music by
H. Leslie Adams, Margaret Bonds, Harry Burleigh, Adolphus C. Hailstork, Robert Owens, Hale
Smith, and William Grant Still.
j.d.
BOOKS

Asia Society Museum
725 Park Avenue, New York City
AsiaSociety.org/ContemporaryPersians
On View Through May 8, 2022

24. Read Post-Traumatic
Chantal V. Johnson’s thoughtful, caustic debut.
Little, Brown and Company, April 5.

On the verge of distancing herself from her unstable family, Vivian, a Black Latinx attorney at a
New York City psychiatric hospital, descends into
an era of self-destruction. Through it all, she
assesses herself in a tart inner monologue, even as
she draws on wells of tenderness with her clients.
e.a.
TV

25. Watch Our Great
Shirin Aliabadi. Miss Hybrid 3, 2008.
Chromogenic print. Mohammed Afkhami
Foundation. Photograph courtesy
of Mohammed Afkhami Foundation

National Parks

A stunner.

Netflix, April 13.

Let this five-part docuseries about the National
Parks system, narrated by Barack Obama, step
into that void you once filled by getting high and
watching Planet Earth. Sure, there are problems
in the world. But have you seen the Grand
Canyon? Yeah. Yeah.
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The Future of Trumpism
CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 4 7

governor since the Jim Crow era to institute
a literal poll tax.
After signing the law, DeSantis proclaimed on his official Twitter account,
“Voting is a privilege that should not be
taken lightly.” He conveyed his beliefs with
chilling accuracy: Voting is a privilege, not,
as many Americans believe, a right.
trump and desantis have been circling
each other since the 2020 election, and their
budding rivalry has so far been shaped by
the GOP’s two great preoccupations of the
immediate post-Trump era: the pandemic
and Trump’s attempts to steal the election.
The incipient contest broke into public
view in December. It began when DeSantis
appeared on Fox News with Maria
Bartiromo, who asked if he had gotten a
booster shot. DeSantis evaded the question
and changed the subject to his fight against
vaccine requirements. A couple of weeks
later, Pushaw announced that DeSantis was
refusing to disclose his status as a matter of
“medical privacy.”
The next week, Trump appeared on One
America News and, without naming him,
ridiculed DeSantis for being afraid to come
clean. “I watched a couple of politicians be
interviewed and one of the questions was
‘Did you get the booster?’ ” Trump said.
“Because they had the vaccine, and they’re
answering like—in other words, the answer
is ‘Yes,’ but they don’t want to say it because
they’re gutless. You gotta say it, whether you
had it or not. Say it.”
Quickly afterward, DeSantis hit back.
The lobbyist Josh Holmes, an ally of Mitch
McConnell’s, asked DeSantis on his podcast
if he had any regrets about his term in
office. DeSantis replied that he wished he
had spoken out more forcefully against
Trump’s early, intermittent endorsements
of social distancing when the coronavirus
pandemic began, which he described as
“locking down the country.” In other words,
DeSantis considers his biggest mistake in
office failing to push back against something
Donald Trump did.
The most revealing aspect of the episode
was how the conservative media covered it.
If you listened to the Trump-critical outlets
on the right—the ones aligned with the

GOP Establishment’s belief that Trump’s
personality is a liability for the party—the
first shots had been fired in DeSantis’s
uprising. National Review, which has
become the premier intellectual organ of the
anti-anti-Trump right while pining for his
replacement, ran columns with headlines
like “Could DeSantis Beat Trump?” and
“The DeSantis-Trump Tensions Will Lead
to a Test of Strength.”
Meanwhile, the most loyal Trumpist corners of the conservative media denied the
entire premise that DeSantis and Trump
were in conflict. American Greatness, an
online magazine invented in response to
the Trump campaign and premised on
turning his slogans into a political program,
insisted that “the New York Times story
on the Trump-DeSantis feud is kayfabe”
(a staged conflict). In a column headlined
“Why the Media’s Attempt to Split DeSantis
and Trump Isn’t Working,” the Federalist’s
Mollie Hemingway argued that the “corporate media” is trying to pit Trump and
DeSantis “against each other” because
“they’re a threat to the Establishment.”
If you’re a Republican who wants
Trump gone, DeSantis is the man with the
guts to take him on. If you’re a Republican who adores Trump, DeSantis remains
his loyal ally. Both wings of the party
are jostling for DeSantis’s approval and
broadcasting DeSantis-friendly messages
to their audiences.
The same dynamic can be seen in
DeSantis’s courtship of the anti-vaccine
movement. Pro-vaccine conservatives
maintain the pretense that DeSantis only
opposes vaccine mandates, calling him “a
vocal proponent of the covid vaccines”
and insisting that the claim he is encouraging doubt about the safety or efficacy of the
vaccines is a “lie.” Meanwhile, anti-vaccine
activists have hailed DeSantis as their
champion. Vaccine skeptic Robert Malone,
appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast,
gushed, “Ron DeSantis and surgeon general Joe Ladapo … are giving hope to the
rest of the world. They are listening to the
key messages we are putting forth.”
If you completely dismiss the possibility that DeSantis could pry the Republican
base away from a president to whom it has
formed a cultlike attachment, you may not
be considering the potential effect of two
more years of DeSantis being given the sort
of coverage in the right-wing media that
Pravda devoted to Joseph Stalin.
What a DeSantis-led Republican Party
is perhaps best captured
o the claims that the 2020
election was stolen. DeSantis began by
playing the familiar role of Trump defender,
complaining the day after the election about
Fox News’ decision to call Arizona for Joe

86 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

Biden. (The network, he speculated, had
“some type of motive, whether it was ratings,
whether it was something else.”) He went on
Hannity’s show to warn of “vote dumps,” a
Republican term designed to cast suspicion
on the results coming out of Democratic
counties: “I tell you, what I’m seeing in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is troubling, Sean.”
Later that day, DeSantis went on Fox
News again and floated the possibility
that Republican-controlled legislatures in
battleground states won by Biden could
override the election results and appoint
Trump electors.
On the day of the insurrection, DeSantis
issued a perfunctory rebuke (“Violence or
rioting of any kind is unacceptable”) before
pivoting back to his comfortable posture
of offense. In the past year, he has assailed
Liz Cheney for cooperating with the investigation of the attack (“We want people
that are going to fight the left”), refused to
say whether Biden legitimately won the
election, and similarly declined to clarify
whether Pence was correct to certify the
Electoral College results.
By the time the anniversary of the insurrection arrived, DeSantis was floating the
right-wing rumor that the violence on
January 6 had actually been ginned up
by undercover FBI agents. But mostly he
resented the media for covering the issue
at all. “This is their Christmas: January 6,”
he complained. “They are going to take this
and milk this for anything they could to be
able to smear anyone who ever supported
Donald Trump.”
DeSantis also marked the anniversary by
wooing right-wing social-media personalities with an invitation to his office, dinner at
the governor’s mansion, and rooftop drinks.
One of the less visible aspects of DeSantis’s
political operation has been its appeals to
conservative activists who have gained clout
and influence during the Trump era and
who have legitimized vaccine skepticism,
support for Vladimir Putin, and dismissing
or even participating in the January
6 insurrection. Pushaw attended an event
to promote the anti-gay education bill held
by Brandon Straka, who was recorded at
the Capitol on January 6 urging the crowd
to seize a police officer’s shield and yelling
“Go, go, go!” Esther Byrd, whom DeSantis
appointed to the state’s board of education,
has reportedly defended the January
6 rioters, QAnon, and the Proud Boys.
DeSantis’s unembarrassed courtship of
right-wing extremists has broadened his
array of media advocates. Perhaps most
important, his no-enemies-to-the-right
strategy has sent a message about his brand:
Unlike the weak Republican Establishment,
DeSantis will stand with conservatives.
In January, a small band of white

supremacists converged in Orlando, where
they chanted “White power!” and roughed
up a Jewish student. Pushaw suggested on
Twitter that the white supremacists were
actually Democrats pretending to be Nazis
to make DeSantis look bad, a charge that
was quickly debunked.
When DeSantis was asked about the episode at a press conference, he could have
confined himself to a rote denunciation of
the racist hoodlums, as several of his fellow Florida Republicans did. Instead, he
launched an extended diatribe against
“Democrats who are trying to use this as
some type of political issue to try to smear
me.” He then wound his way through such
talking points as Ilhan Omar, the BDS
movement, Louis Farrakhan, inflation, illegal immigration, crime, and the supposed
failures of the Biden administration—which
the press was allegedly trying to obscure
by bringing up the Orlando attack. Rubio,
standing behind DeSantis, shuffled his feet
uncomfortably as DeSantis’s rant went on.
“We’re not playing their game,” he insisted,
falling back on his occasional habit of narrating his own political strategy. Their game,
in this case, meant accepting the terms of
debate as defined by what he has called the
“corrupt” media.
In a high-profile editorial denouncing
Trump six years ago—a cover story with
the glittering tagline “Against Trump”—
National Review asked, “If Trump were to
become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong
conservative support, what would that
say about conservatives?” More recently,
National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, made
the case for DeSantis on the grounds that
he is the closest possible thing to Trump.
“The challenge to Trump,” he reasoned, “will
have to come from the Trump wing—at this
point, more like the Trump fuselage, wing
and landing gear—of the party.”
The paradigmatic DeSantis constituent within the Republican elite would
be William Barr. The former attorney
general, who released a memoir in March
describing his clashes with Trump over the
2020 election, has called Trump delusional
and says he wants to nominate “young candidates who will fight for principle but don’t
have the sort of obnoxious personal characteristics that alienate a lot of voters.” But
Barr eagerly supported many of Trump’s
efforts to weaponize the Justice Department and has conceded that he will vote
for Trump again should he be nominated.
It’s worth noting that the one major difference between Barr and DeSantis is that the
former drew the line at Trump’s attempt
to overturn the results of the last election.
With DeSantis, there’s no telling where that
■
line might be.

Blocked

CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 4 7

Luke learned about the mandatory oneyear thinking period, during which he’d
be on blockers alone. “I was in shock. I
was in disbelief. I told them, ‘That’s a
whole year of my life that I’m not going to
be able to feel. You don’t understand what
it’s like,’ ” says Luke. “It was emotional
overload.” Eventually, he calmed down. It
was 12 more months. He could do this.
bell’s report found two strong supporters in Susan Evans, who had a short
tenure at gids in the mid-aughts, and her
husband, Marcus, a member of the Tavistock Council of Governors who resigned
because he didn’t think the organization
was taking Bell’s recommendations seriously. They soon mounted a public campaign
to sound alarms about gids. In their view,
there was not enough evidence to support
putting young people on blockers. Doing
so, they argued, could push minors toward
a medical pathway when they might have
otherwise outgrown their dysphoria.
Susan Evans was eventually contacted
by the mother of a 15-year-old with autism
who was assigned female at birth and was,
according to the mother, “desperate to run
away from all that made her female.” The
mother feared that if seen by gids clinicians, her child would be put on puberty
blockers. Evans and the mother decided to
file a lawsuit against the Tavistock. A decision in their favor had the potential to end
gender-affirming medical treatment for
minors in the U.K.
As they set out to find expert witnesses
for the case, a woman named Keira Bell
(no relation to David Bell) came forward.
She was a 23-year-old former gids patient,
assigned female at birth, who had transitioned to male after being assessed at gids,
then gone back to identifying as female.
Soon, Evans and her team asked Keira to
become the main claimant named in the
lawsuit. (She is the Bell in Bell v. Tavistock.)
Keira’s childhood had been difficult—
her parents divorced when she was 5,
and her mother, forced to go on welfare,
“descended into alcoholism and mental
illness,” according to an essay Keira published on the Substack Persuasion. She
describes herself as a tomboy, not think-

ing much about gender until the onset of
puberty, when “everything changed for the
worse.” She no longer fit in with the boys
who were her closest friends but didn’t feel
she belonged with the girls, either. “By the
time I was 14, I was severely depressed and
had given up: I stopped going to school;
I stopped going outside,” she wrote. Keira
also realized she was attracted to girls.
Keira had her first appointment with
gids when she was 15, and she says that by
the time she got there, she was “adamant
that I needed to transition.” After what she
describes as “a series of superficial conversations with social workers,” she was put
on puberty blockers at age 16 and received
her first testosterone shot a year later. Her
voice deepened, she grew facial hair, and
she changed her name to Quincy. At 20,
she had her breasts removed.
Rather than feeling more comfortable
with her body, Keira became uneasy, eventually realizing that she was not a man and
the gender dysphoria she’d experienced was
“a symptom of my overall misery, not its
cause.” She blamed gids for not more thoroughly evaluating her and for putting her on
a path to hormone treatments.
In court, Keira’s lawyer, Jeremy Hyam,
argued that people under the age of 18
were incapable of informed consent: They
lack the ability to decide if puberty blockers are right for them, and even if they
could, gids failed to provide adequate
information on the drugs and their possible effects. (Hyam did not respond to
interview requests on Keira’s behalf.)
On December 1, 2020, three judges
ruled in favor of Keira’s claim, agreeing
that young people under 16 couldn’t consent to puberty blockers and also that the
treatment was “experimental” in nature.
After the ruling, the NHS updated its
guidelines: Anyone 16 and under in the
U.K. could not go on blockers without getting a judge’s approval first.
In their decision, the judges wrote that
it was “highly unlikely” a child 13 or under
could give informed consent to pubertyblocking treatment and that they were
“very doubtful” children 14 or 15 could do
so either. The judges seemed particularly
skeptical that a child under 16 could understand the way puberty blockers might affect
their fertility and sexual functioning.
The medical evidence for the conclusions
in the decision, however, is thin. Joshua
Safer, an endocrinologist and the director
of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender
Medicine and Surgery, says that blockers
are not known to affect fertility. If a kid
decides to stop, “you’re going to have the
same puberty you would have had anyway,
just a little later.” Juanita Hodax, a pediatric endocrinologist and co-director of the

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

87

Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic, points out
that blockers have been used for 40 years
for precocious puberty with no effect on fertility and “there’s no reason to think it would
be any different in gender-diverse kids.”
The question of sexual functioning is
more complicated. Marci Bowers, the
incoming president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health
and a well-known gender-affirming surgeon who is herself transgender, says she’s
“squarely on the side of blockers,” particularly for transmasculine kids, because if
they use them early in puberty, they can
halt breast growth and avoid top surgery
later. However, she does have concerns
when it comes to transfeminine kids and
is of the view that they should “allow a
little bit of puberty to happen, if they can
possibly stand it.” For starters, if a transfeminine child goes on blockers very early
in puberty, it can limit the growth of the
scrotum and other genital tissue, which can
make vaginoplasty more complicated in
the future—although certainly not impossible. Also, if those same young people go
straight onto estrogen, they may experience
challenges having an orgasm later in life.
Bowers’s argument for a more nuanced
approach, however, squares poorly with
the blanket ban imposed by the court.
Susie Green, the CEO of Mermaids, a nonprofit that supports gender-diverse young
people and their families, says her phone
started ringing almost immediately after
the decision was announced. “There was
so much confusion, such a lack of clarity
around what would happen next,” she says.
Green heard from young people who had
gotten their first gids appointment and
thought they could finally go on puberty
blockers. “They were just told, ‘That’s
not happening now.’ ” Green felt that she
had very little hope to offer them. “A lot
of parents were talking around, ‘How am
I going to keep my kid alive?’”

B

ecause luke had just turned
17, he wasn’t initially affected by
the court’s decision: He had been
on blockers for more than three
months by the time Bell v. Tavistock was
announced. He was relieved that he would
be able to continue them, but he knew people who were still waiting. Most of them
would likely pay for private health care,
he believed.
Luke was surprised that Keira Bell’s story
had had such an impact; Bell was 16, after
all, when she went on blockers—old enough
to give consent, according to the court.
Had she been going through gids now, she
would have been eligible for blockers and
could have had the same outcome.
Luke had also never felt pushed to tran-

sition by anyone at gids. If anything, he
thought, they were holding him back. “If
that was actually happening, I would be
as disgusted with it as Keira was,” he says.
“You should not be encouraging children
to go on hormones when they don’t need
them. That’s terrible, because they are
going to end up with dysphoria. That’s not
what’s happening.”
In August 2021, Luke finally experienced the direct effects of Bell v. Tavistock. That month, his one-year “thinking
period” should have ended. But after the
court decision, gids stopped referring its
patients for hormone treatments regardless of age. Luke’s options were limited: He
could stay on puberty blockers beyond the
one-year mark and continue living with the
side effects, or he could go off the blockers,
which would cause his body to resume a
female puberty.
In the end, he stayed on blockers—less a
choice than a necessity. To help with the side
effects, his endocrinologist suggested they
try reducing the interval between doses.
“I’ve been on them for so long I’ve been getting really, really bad pain in my bones, in
my muscles, and getting a lot of skin pain,”
says Luke. “It’s affecting my sleep.”
In September, an appeals court reversed
the initial judgment, ultimately ruling that
the court had no place in medical decisions
made by patients, their families, and their
doctors. A spokesperson for gids said that
referrals to endocrinology resumed that
same month, but patients and activists say
in practice the door to medical interventions remained largely shut for months.
In that time, says Green, the service was
“completely stagnating as far as we can see,
and NHS England seem really reluctant to
do anything about all of those thousands
of young people who are on that waiting
list.” Only now, more than a half-year later,
are patient groups beginning to see more
young people move on to hormone treatments again.
Trans-rights advocates recently sued the
NHS for gids’ yearslong waiting period,
which is well beyond the 18-week maximum that is supposed to be allowed. Jolyon
Maugham, a lawyer and the founder of
Good Law Project, says he hopes that the
litigation will give ammunition to those
in the NHS who “do not subscribe to this
view that we must pathologize gender dysphoria.” He envisions a system where many
transgender young people could get puberty
blockers from their GPs and only complex
cases would require seeing a specialist.
Hilary Cass, a former president of the
Royal College of Paediatrics and Child
Health, who is leading an independent
review of gids commissioned by NHS,
embraced a similar solution in an interim

88 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

report published in March. Cass called for
a new clinical model that doesn’t rely on
gids alone, instead allowing young people
to seek care through a network of regional
hubs. The Cass report also criticized the
slow pace of the treatment received by
patients like Luke, but it has yet to come
down on either side of the debate about
blockers and hormones.
In the fall, Luke’s gids clinician told him
that, with his 18th birthday approaching, his
best chance for accessing hormones would
be to switch to the adult service and be put
on the waiting list there. In January, two
months after his birthday, he and his mother
drove to London for what they thought was
going to be another consultation. Instead,
Luke learned that he would begin a low dose
of testosterone that day. It took a moment
for the news to settle in. “You know, when
something really good happens, you just
feel a bit out of it?” he asks. “That’s kind of
how I felt—like I had to have a lie-down. It
felt conclusive in a really relaxed, safe, nice,
‘It’s over’ kind of way.’” Once home, they
celebrated with Champagne.
The physical changes are, so far, subtle;
Luke will eventually go on a higher dose
of testosterone, which will help him grow
facial hair, increase his muscle mass, and
deepen his voice. The testosterone has
also relieved many of the side effects of
the puberty blockers, which he’s still on to
suppress his estrogen levels. He has more
energy and fewer aches. He’s happier, too.
“I think 99 percent of my moods, feeling
better, is knowing that I don’t have to go
through more of this stuff,” he says.
There is relief in knowing that he will
start art school in London this fall with his
medical transition under way. He hopes to
get top surgery in the next few years and has
already started saving for the £8,000 outof-pocket fee by selling thrift-store finds
online. There’s a scenario he has imagined
in which he and his new university friends
go swimming and someone notices the scars
on his chest and asks about them. “I will be
like, ‘Oh, I had top surgery, I was born a
girl,’” he says. “I feel like it needs to be that
simple because I don’t want to hide it and
I don’t want to make it a big aspect of me.”
Now that he’s on testosterone, it’s surreal
to him—even infuriating—that he could
have felt this way years ago. He worries
about the kids who still don’t have access,
the ones stuck on the waiting list for what
could be years. On the rare occasion that he
gets a hot flash these days, and the familiar
feeling of discomfort seeps in before the
testosterone recalibrates his body, he thinks
of them. “There are people who don’t get
through those times of it being uncomfortable,” he says. “There are people who literally
■
don’t survive it.”

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Galaxy
Brain

CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 3 5

Never before have I written a story with
which my male peers were so eager to help.
They sent tweets, they sent podcasts, they
proposed merch. “I really want to make
one of those ’90s pop-star shirts for tooze,”
one enterprising friend texted, along
with a Backstreet Boys Etsy link. Maybe
this is what Tooze feels like all the time,
I thought—carried along by great gusts of
boyish enthusiasm, lavished with informative chats. It felt good.
The texts arrived in a flurry when, in
February, Elon Musk tweeted about Tooze.
The Tesla co-founder had jumped into an
exchange about the Canadian truck blockade to recommend The Wages of Destruction. “Well thank you @elonmusk much
appreciated!” Tooze responded. Musk had
cited the book in the course of comparing
Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler. This came
to Tooze’s attention only later. At the time,
Tooze had been distracted: He was flying
to the Bahamas, where he and his wife are
rebuilding their house, which was destroyed
by Hurricane Dorian. “I wish I had been
more on top if it,” he told me. “But my initial
impulse when somebody says something
nice about my work is to simply say thanks.”

I

n the acknowledgments to
Shutdown, Tooze thanks two therapists by name; in Crashed, he thanks
an anonymous psychoanalyst. For a
time, he was doing three psychoanalysis sessions per week, though lately he has cut back
to two. “It helps me sort through the psychointellectual dramas of high-stakes intellectual life,” he said, such as interviewing
Timothy Geithner. (“He lays a trip on you,”
said Tooze of the former Treasury secretary.
“He is a little Napoleonic figure. He’s very
charismatic. He’s playing with your mind;
he’s playing with your emotions.”) On a more
quotidian level, “it helps me manage the
fears around writing.” Despite his graphomaniacal recent output, Tooze has grappled
with insecurity and writer’s block over the
years. “I was an economist as an undergraduate. I wasn’t in a writey-writey di
he said. “I didn’t think of myself as
”
Sometimes the dramas of intellectual life
take the form of reviews. “A lot of my graduate students had to talk me down after the

Anderson piece,” Tooze said. In 2019, he
was waiting to board a transatlantic flight in
Paris when he received an email from Susan
Watkins, editor of New Left Review. Tooze
had contributed to NLR in the past, and
Watkins was writing to share an essay on his
work it would publish in a few hours. Tooze
remembers struggling to download the text
on his phone as he boarded the plane—“a
horrific situation,” he said. The piece, when
it arrived, was a long and scathing critique
by Perry Anderson. Coming after Crashed
had amassed a year of acclaim, its publication was “like watching gods fight,” one
Tooze fan told me. Anderson cast Tooze
as insufficiently critical of power, a thinker
whose posture amounted to “running with
the hare and hunting with the hounds.”
It is true that Tooze’s work deals almost
exclusively with the doings of a tiny, powerful elite. This is his method and the basis of
what fans on the left see as his critique. As
Tooze put it to me, “If you want to do critical
analysis of contemporary capitalism, stick
with the trouble, stay inside the machine.
Follow the people who are operating the
machine and you’ll be amazed what they’ll
tell you. Absolutely staggering what they will
say out loud.” He sees his work as offering,
in “quite explicit” terms, a class politics for
his educated, white-collar readers—the
professional-managerial class, or PMC. “It’s
a matter of holding ourselves as the PMC
responsible for our catastrophic fuckups,”
he said. “In argument with Perry Anderson
and people like that, I’ve become more and
more conscious of this. It’s a kind of class
politics. It’s a PMC class politics.” (He also
said, “I mean, look at me, for crying out loud.
I cannot be the bearer of a populist politics.”)
Reading Anderson’s account of his work
left him “vaguely sick” and “dizzy”; he felt
“travestied” and “misunderstood.” But
Tooze, who describes his politics as “leftliberal,” was accustomed to political scrutiny.
“My lefty friends in the United States were
so disappointed in me for using the word
‘liberal’ about myself,” he said. He didn’t
quite understand why it bothered them
until witnessing the “full-on self-celebration
of New York Times liberalism” in the wake
of Biden’s election. “Nevertheless, you don’t
need to witness that to know that liberalism
has blind spots. It must have. All ideologies
do. But it really has lots, and to my mind,
reading Marxism has always been the most
powerful corrective to that.” Tooze is a figure with unimpeachable Establishment
credentials who takes the left seriously. The
combination has made him, in the words
of one Tooze Bro, “the only person who can
make credible, respected appearances at the
Verso loft or at Davos.”
Recently, an invitation to deliver a particularly prestigious lecture “unleashed a com-

plete crisis,” Tooze told me. The honor was
an occasion for “incomprehension and panic
and almost shame—impostor complex.”
The solution he and his analyst devised was
to focus on what he might usefully say. Just
be useful: This directive has of late become
his “principal stabilizing device.”
“I’m no longer, I would say, principally
driven by a striving for distinctiveness or
radical originality or those things,” he said.
(“Though obviously—and it does happen
to me—when you come up with an original
idea, it’s great.”) Shutdown, for example:
“The purpose of that book is to be useful,”
he said. “People need to understand what
happened in the bond market last year, and
most people don’t. So let’s really explain it
and link it up to all the other things that
happened and provide a map. And write
that book, and write it quickly, and get it out,
and like—it’s useful.”
Russia’s war on Ukraine, it soon developed, was yet another disaster that put
Tooze’s services in demand. It was a crisis
that entangled military strategy, diplomatic power, and international finance; it
concerned both European history and the
economic machinery that churned within
global politics. It was textbook Tooze
terrain. One night in early March, a week
into the invasion, I received an email from
him. “No doubt there are more important
things to write and think about right now,”
he wrote. “But this is a chronicle of a week
in the life of Tooze.”
Below was a schedule listing some
21 items, which included giving interviews,
filing articles, and attending a National
Security Council advisory session on IndoPacific strategy. Tooze reported that he
had just finished a 14-hour day that began
with talking to Der Spiegel and ended with
talking to Chris Hayes. Still outstanding
were requests from 13 established organizations and outlets as well as six or so
from “podcasts, etc.” whose names he
did not recognize. He had taken to using
two computers at once to ease toggling
between events. “Plus,” he wrote, “many of
the interviews and panels I’ve been doing
are in German. So I get confused, at times,
about what language I am in.”
On Ones and Tooze, he explained the
fine print on energy sanctions; in The New
Statesman, he explained Prussian military
theorist Carl von Clausewitz. “Who do you
think has gotten less sleep the last two
weeks,” a friend later texted me, “Putin
or Tooze?” The need for explanation was
evolving so swiftly that Ezra Klein had interviewed Tooze twice in the space of four days.
“In a moment like this,” Tooze wrote in an
email to me at 10:56 p.m., “if folks feel I can
help make sense of things, I am all in. I will
■
work around the clock.”

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

97

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By Matt Gaffney

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19
20
21
22
25
26
27
28
30
31
32
34
37
44
46
47
48
49
50
52

Across

9
96
0

99

10

05
2

Thick carpet
Pour water on
Nonclerical
Capital on a peninsula
Have ___-track mind (be
obsessed)
Piece with a thesis
Ma plays it
Rotten to the core
Pet bug of a game-show icon?
Truck brand
Withdrawal schedule
Swimmers said to be slippery
Scully and Mulder’s cases
Green arm of govt.
Part under a car
Honors
Ming thing
Songwriting method that
produced hits like “Straight
Up” and “Forever Your Girl”?
Dental-floss brand
Native to
Intended for, as a letter
Madrid metal
Soldier’s bed
Ear, for one
Type of advocacy grp.

06

3

92
9

0

107

10

10

0

5

1

1
5
10
14
18

5

95

9
2

74

1

1

122

1

53 Like some situations
55 18 holes designed by a “Parks
and Recreation” star?
61 “Where It’s At” singer
62 Makers of mochas
63 “Jude the Obscure” novelist
64 Home to Mavericks
66 So much
67 “A.I.,” e.g.
68 Soup with tofu cubes, often
69 “The Tempest” king
72 “Sexy ___” (“White Album”
song)
73 Temporarily replace, as a talkshow host
77 First two words of the
“Friends” theme song
78 People who avoid the singer
of “Smile”?
81 Wave part
83 Habit wearer
84 Salma Hayek’s “mother”
85 Thespian Tyler
86 Commentator Kasparian
87 2017 World Series winners*
90 Part of GSA
91 Journalistic success
93 Baker’s dozen of 1970s
blaxploitation movies?

98 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

97 Wilson and Jillian, e.g.
98 In an honorable way
99 Wedding-day promises
100 Bird with excellent vision
102 Words after checking your
watch
105 State for the record
106 Mechanic’s tool of yore
111 Below average
112 Rival drink of Tom Hanks
Orange Soda and Denzel
Washington Ginger Ale?
116 “Uncut Gems” gem
117 “The bombs bursting ___ …”
118 Yoga position
119 Ready for business
120 Fail to obey
121 Ultimate goals
122 Neither sober nor drunk
123 Sonic the Hedgehog’s
creator
1
2
3
4

Down

Put on a flash drive
Elaborate con
Latin for “years”
Like “Downton Abbey”
characters, mostly
5 Fold of skin on a dog’s neck

The solutions to last week’s puzzles appear on page 82.

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Initial Misunderstanding

6 Its second letter stands for
“Safety”
7 “Don’t keep ___ suspense!”
8 Wouldn’t stand for it?
9 Letter-reading activity
10 Actors Majors and Pace
11 Key used with other keys
12 ___ will (spite)
13 Learn to live with one another
14 Negligent
15 Shape without corners
16 Cat avoiders
17 Order with lodges
20 People in “People”
23 Phone purchase
24 Lugosi of “Dracula”
29 Use, as an airplane
31 Solo
32 Ready to eat
33 Some choir members
34 Words to learn
35 Bakery inhalation
36 Half-man, half-goat
38 Crocheted shawl
39 Range dividing Europe and
Asia
40 Make bare
41 Beach-bag item
42 Literary Jong
43 The Dalai Lama et al.
45 Increases
51 Go back to the drawing board
54 Shaped like a vanity mirror
56 Some play themselves
57 1970s role for Valerie Harper
58 Nitpick
59 Bay window
60 Frequent letter recipient
65 Digressions
67 Lacks permission to
68 Interior
69 Org. for songwriters
70 First name on cookies
71 Time after you “fall back” in fall
72 Gross-sounding semi-liquid
73 Capture
74 No petty thief
75 Stars that form a hunter
76 Party host’s stack
79 Spy’s stock-in-trade
80 Radiates
82 The Fool’s deck
88 Much of Asia
89 December tremble
90 Warn off, as a guard dog might
92 Three-color cats
94 Supercool, to surfers
95 Lionel Richie’s show, for short
96 Medal-count champs at the
2022 Winter Olympics
101 Tiny
102 Small player
103 Be bitter about it
104 Bakery unit
105 Without any adjustments
106 Leave no escape for
107 Physicist’s particles
108 “Clue” weapon
109 Couturier Cassini
110 Bubbe
113 Mono114 “The Evil Dead” creator Raimi
115 Show set in Vegas

March 28–April 10, 2022. VOL. 55, NO. 7. New York Magazine (ISSN 0028-7369) is published biweekly by Vox Media, LLC, 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

GA

M

the new york crossword

the vulture 10x10
Across

1 Sebastian in “The
Little Mermaid,”
for one
5 Benedict
Cumberbatch or
Florence Pugh
9 The Killers song
that asks, “Are we
dancer?”
11 Tip-top
12 Peacock show set
at Whitlock H.S.
13 Boring way to
learn
14 Titular portrait
subject in “The
Duke”
16 Take in, as a movie
17 “It’s Always Sunny
in Philadelphia”
role
18 Ask for a treat, in a
way
19 “Speed” vehicle

22 Jim who plays
Kempton Bunton
in “The Duke”
25 Haim, for one
26 “Hyperbole and a
Half ” blogger
Brosh
27 Extremity the
Beatles want to
hold
28 Site of a major
conference in 1945
29 Hardly
mainstream
30 Pay attention to

Across

1 2019 movie with a
mythical “butthole
cut”
5 Lamb’s mother
8 Getting nearer
10 Pirate portrayed
by Taika Waititi in
“Our Flag Means
Death”
11 Character
described as a
“human female
Jedi master” on
Wookieepedia
12 “The
of
March” (Ryan
Gosling political
drama)
13 CD-___
14 Savory flavor
enhancement
16 “Living With
Yourself ” facility
that creates secret

y

1

3

4

6

9
12

3

14

1

1
1

1

23
6

27

2

29

25
26

29
30
31
32

Hiroto Katagiri on
14-Across
With every little
detail, onscreen
Mag known for sex
tips (an infamous
one involves a
doughnut)
Fly high in the sky
Loose basis of the
2004 film “Troy”
Pointy part of a
fork
2019 documentary
about psychedelic
therapy

30

THE SEEDY PUZZLE
By Stella Zawistowski

2

3

4

9

1
16
17

1

1

20

21

22

4

2

2

2

30

3

32

27

2

THE JOLLY ROGER PUZZLE

clones of patrons
17 Area of expertise
for Chidi on “The
Good Place”
21 Make amends
23 Piece of land
24 Instruction in a
recipe
25 Chicken, in
Spanish
27 “No ___!”
28 Group organized
by baristas at more
than 100
Starbucks
locations (and
counting!)
29 Little Monsters,
e.g.
30 Kaley Cuoco role
for 12 years

Find new puzzles daily at nymag.com/games.

0

2

25

By Malaika Handa

1

4

12
4
17
1

19

2

2
2

2

30

2

Down

mademoiselle”
20 Come together for
a cause
21 Stand in good ___
22 Co-star of George
and Frances in
“Burn After
Reading”
23 Neil Lane item on
“The Bachelor”
24 “Ugh, boring”
25 “Batman” preceder

Down

featuring Lena
Headey as Sikes
City where
Anthony Bourdain
ate bun cha with
Barack Obama
Denzel’s co-star in
“Training Day”
Small group of
specialists
Drug dropped in
season five of
“Mad Men”
Stringy tie favored
by Vincent Vega
Whitman of “The
Perks of Being a
Wallflower”
“The Fairly ___
Parents”
(Nickelodeon
show)

1 Mouthfuls of
tobacco
2 “The Legend of
Zelda” currency
3 Walk without
haste
4 Ditch a party
5 Floating palace in
“Cleopatra”
6 Place for a hairdye touch-up
7 Totally digging
8 Charli D’Amelio,
for one
10 “Beats me”
15 “The old has gone
away” Danny
Gokey song
18 Mad-Eye ___
(Hogwarts
professor)
19 Disney princess
who’s “a most
peculiar

By Stella Zawistowski

22

Across

1 Move really slowly,
as a plot
5 Italian violinmaking family of
note
10 Delevingne of
“Suicide Squad”
11 Source material
for fanfiction
12 “Baywatch: Panic
at Malibu ___”
13 Costumes seen in
“The Big Leap”
14 New HBO Max
drama shot on
location in Japan
16 Role for Jennifer
in “Respect”
17 Where to watch
“Naomi” and
“Riverdale”
21 Fashion
boundary?
22 Ken who plays

THE GOYA PUZZLE

2

1 Doc who’s your
go-to
2 Café additive
3 Apt name for a
Boston terrier
4 German-language
Netflix show with
time-travel tangles
5 Word inscribed on
two Oscar
statuettes a year
6 Color similar to
lilac
7 Absolute opposite
8 “You have me
there”
9 Measurement on a
pair of 501s
15 Can’t keep the
boredom off your
face
17 2021 Charles
Dickens
adaptation

18

19
20
23
24
27
28

Down

1 “Wallace &
Gromit” technique
2 NYC rep. who
plays “League of
Legends”
3 “For shame!”
4 Sis or bro
5 Old-fashioned
shout of surprise
6 Jewelry-making
material
7 Finales
8 Queen with iconic
eyeliner
9 Sound in a “Young
Frankenstein” bit
10 Sounds made
while shivering
14 “It’s Raining ___”
(Weather Girls
song)
15 Dance movie with
four sequels
18 “You Be
”

19
20
22
24
26

(Run-D.M.C.
song)
:
Stoic
Celestial spheres
Letters on a
sunscreen bottle
Number of seasons
of “Firefly”

march 28–april 10, 2022 | new york

99

compiled by melvin backman, dominique pariso, and chris stanton

highbrow
“Mariupol is
no more.”

“The team that has been
investigating Mr. Trump
harbors no doubt about
whether he committed
crimes—he did.” But
DA Alvin Bragg punted

Nasty,
tendentious
Republican
senators try to
p…
trip

… But Ketanji
Brown Jackson
keeps her
cool.

BA.2 runs wild,
and the Biden
administration will
no longer reimburse
hospitals for COVID
care of uninsured
patients.

Half of the latest round of
architecture firms designing
the city’s next generation of
public projects are certified
“Minority- and Women-Owned
Business Enterprises.”

The New York
Times’ preening
gamified cancelculture editorial.

Governor Hochul
keeps delaying the
implementation of
nursing-home-staffin
rules meant to ensure
they have enough
nursing staff.

Jonah Peretti scurried
away without taking
questions from
BuzzFeed News after
he told his newsroom
he was gutting
BuzzFeed News.

Return to the
office? That sad
desk salad is
way more
expensive than
it was in 2019.
Travis Scott and
Kylie Jenner
change their
1-month-old son’s
rad name, Wolf.
You can do that?

Maury Povich to
retire, which
means we may
never find who’s
our daddy.

So Netflix is canceling
The Baby-Sitters Club,
raising its prices, and
trying to crack down
on
pas wo d sh
sharin
sharing
ng
o password
g?

Debate: Baldwin vs.
Buckley at the South
Oxford Space reminds
us how inarticulate our
debates are.
Who said his name
three times?
Beetlejuice returns to
Broadway (again).

Disney workers
across the country
stage walkout over
company’s stance
on Florida’s “Don’t
Say Gay” bill.

Spring is finally here,
but so is “I think its
just allergies, not
COVID” season.

Daddy Yankee is
gifting us one
last album,
Legendaddy,
before he retires
from music.

Barry Jenkins
and Issa López
are teaming up
for True
Detective
season four.

After DJ-ing a
Chainsmokers
concert during the
pandemic’s peak,
Goldman Sachs CEO
David Solomon has a
gig at Lollapalooza.
Just what the kids
want!

Simon Rex didn’t
get to keep his
Red Rocket
prosthetic
penis …

… But Minx finally
allows for phallic
diversity in
televised male
nudity.

Do we really need twice
as many shows about
the Real Housewives of
New York?

l owbrow
100 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 8 – a p r i l 1 0 , 2 0 2 2

Jersey City’s own teenytiny Saint Peter’s
University took down
No. 2–seed Kentucky in
the NCAA men’sbasketball tournament.

And Just Like
That … is
renewed.
Long may
Che Diaz
reign!

Freed
Amanda
Bynes!

Hark that
jingle-jangle!
It’s the start of
Mister Softee
season.

Pusha T releases
Arby’s-sponsored diss track
about McDonald’s, fails to
reveal Ronald McDonald’s
secret love child.
Ye seems like he
would rather
terrorize Kim
Kardashian than
perform at the
Grammys.

Elaine Hsieh Chou’s
Disorientation
skewers academia.

Thomas
Woodruff’s
pandemic dino
paintings at
Vito Schnabel’s
gallery.

brill iant

despicable

We couldn’t really
afford to buy an
apartment even
before interest rates
went up (and they
will likely go up
again) …

Albany is all in on
expanding childcare subsidies.

Stare-off! Marina
Abramovic brings back
The Artist Is Present to
benefit Ukraine.

The new Compact
magazine’s baldfaced attempt at
subversion.

… And there are 2,500 New
Yorkers living on the streets
and in the subway, while
2,500 apartments
designated for them sit
empty.

Ukraine
persists.

Nayland Blake
reproduces the
façade of
the defunct
Mineshaft
sex club on the
side of the Whitney.

Ben Affleck was
“exceptionally good” at
h
handling his gastropod
co-stars on the set of
Deep Water.

RPDR queen
cast as the
Sanderson sisters
in Hocus Pocus .

P H OTO G R A P H S : C H A D N AG L E / F L I C K R ( M A R I U P O L ) ; N I A I D (CO V I D) ; N E W YO R K T I M E S ; M I C H A E L N E W M A N / F L I C K R ( A PA R T M E N T ) ; CO M PAC T; V I N TAG E ( L A U R E N H O U G H ) ; B R I A N AC H / T E C H C R U N C H ( P E R E T T I ) ; L E AT H E R P E D I A ( M I N E S H A F T ) ; A P P L E ( F L AG ) ; M O M A ( A B R A M O V I C ) ; P E N G U I N ( D I S O R I E N TAT I O N ) ; A P P L E (C H I L D C A R E ) ; V I TO
S C H N A B E L / T H O M A S W O O D R U F F ; C H R I S TO P H E R M C E L R O E N ( B A L D W I N ) ; WA R N E R B R O S. ( B E E T L E J U I C E ) ; PAT R I C K B O U Q U E T ( W O L F ) ; L I S A / F L I C K R ( S A L A D) ; S TO C KC ATA LO G / F L I C K R ( P O L L E N ) ; N E T F L I X ( B A B Y-S I T T E R S C LU B ) ; A 24 ( S I M O N R E X ) ; T H E M A U RY S H O W ( M A U RY ) ; R O D R I G O F E R R A R I ( K A N Y E ) ; T H E CO M E U P / F L I C K R ( P U S H A T ) ; C H A R L E S
S Y K E S / B R AVO ( R E A L H O U S E W I V E S ) ; LO R E N J AV I E R ( D I S N E Y ) ; A B C / T Y L E R G O L D E N ( B A R RY J E N K I N S ) ; S E B A S T I A N R / F L I C K R ( DA D DY YA N K E E ) ; H B O ( A N D J U S T L I K E T H AT ) ; H E A R T T R U T H / F L I C K R ( B Y N E S ) ; S A I N T P E T E R ’ S U N I V. ; N E W WAV E G U R LY / F L I C K R ( S O F T E E ) ; K AT R I N A M A R C I N O W S K I / H B O ( M I N X ) ; H U LU ( A F F L E C K ) ; V H 1 ( H O C U S P O C U S )

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