February 13–26, 2023

What Was Kyrie Irving Thinking?

One of the greatest

talents of his
generation,
defiantly un-vaxxed
and broadcasting
conspiracy theories,
has left the
Nets in shambles.
By Simon van Zuylen-Wood
FINAL WEEKS AT THE WHITNEY
THROUGH MAR 5
Whitney Museum Become a member
of American Art Provide critical support for
99 Gansevoort Street the Museum, all while enjoying
unlimited free admission,
whitney.org exhibition previews, special
@whitneymuseum viewing access, guest privileges,
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Above: Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927. Des Moines
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Edward Hopper’s New York is sponsored by
Art Foundation, Inc. © 2023 Heirs of Josephine N.
Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS),
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P L E A S E E N J O Y R E S P O N S I B LY
 february 13–26, 2023

features

Head Games
What Kyrie Irving
wrought in Brooklyn.
By Simon van Zuylen-Wood
20

Get Me Risa Heller!

There’s no one who’ll
spin it better.
By Shawn McCreesh
28

Crime of the Centuries

Michael Steinhardt’s
exile from the world
of plundered antiquities.
By Greg Donahue
34

Risa Heller
on West
Broadway in
February.

Photograph by Jason Nocito february 13–26, 2023 | new york 3

intelligencer the culture pages

9 56
The National Interest Caroline Polachek
Joe Biden’s Loves Mess
modest achievements A trip to the zoo with
By Jonathan Chait the singer and self-
described “horse girl”
february 13–26, 2023
12 By Rachel Handler
Neighborhood News
The mystery of the dead 60
Rockaways whale Lorraine Hansberry
By Laura Thompson Saw It Coming
The Raisin in the Sun
14 playwright’s
135 Minutes With … lesser-known
Creed III’s softhearted work gets a
star, Jonathan Majors long-awaited
By Tahirah Hairston revival
By Jackson
16 McHenry
Cityscape
Why is the Oculus 64
crumbling Can Prestige TV
beneath our feet? Be a Video Game?
By Christopher Bonanos How HBO’s
adaptation of
strategist The Last of Us
misinterprets
control
41 By Andrea
Best Bets Long Chu
The kitchen scale
every home cook needs. 67
Plus: international Good One:
toothpastes, Kristin Marc Maron
Chenoweth’s Joking
favorite throat lozenges, through grief
and a non-frumpy By Jesse
airport outfit. David Fox

44 68
Best of New York Critics
Pet stores with food music by
for geckos, cashmere Craig Jenkins
for dogs, and Kelela sounds
everything a shrimp freer than ever
owner might need on Raven
theater by
45 Jackson McHenry
The Look Book Pictures From
Meets the newest Home, without
EMT graduates the acute focus
movies by
48 Alison Willmore
Design Hunting Magic Mike’s
Vertical versatility Last Dance
in a Noho triplex lacks mojo
By Wendy Goodman
72
52 To Do
Food Twenty-five
Chef Brooks Headley picks for the
(slowly) readies the new next two weeks
Superiority Burger; batched
cocktails from Via Carota

6 Comments on the cover: Kyrie Irving.

78 Games: New York Photograph by
Crossword, Ellington Hammond.
by Matt Gaffney; this page: Brooks Headley.
the Vulture 10x10s Photograph by Dolly Faibyshev
80 The Approval Matrix for New York Magazine.

4 n e w y o r k | nymag.com For customer service, call 800-678-0900

 Photos by Matthew Murphy

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HADESTOWN.COM • WALTER KERR THEATRE • 219 W. 48TH ST.
 Comments

PYER MOSS
January 30–February 12, 2023

KERBY
JEAN-RAYMOND
A S P E C I A L I SSU E
®

IS EVERYBODY
was one
of fashion’s
most
celebrated
young

TIPPING 25% ON
designers.

BOTTLED WATER?
WHAT DO I DO IF I GAVE MY BOSS COVID? THE
Glory Be! The Incredible Rise of the Rapper
PROMISE

G LOR I L L A
CAN I DISCIPLINE MY FRIEND’S CHILDREN?
OF
HOW DO I RECOVER FROM MISGENDERING SOMEONE?
CAN I ASK HOW MUCH THEY PAID FOR THEIR APARTMENT?
Then what
SHOULD I TELL THEM I ALREADY SAW IT ON ZILLOW? By Tirhakah Love
happened?
P H O T O G R A P H S by E R I C J O H N S O N
DOES “NO GIFTS” SECRETLY MEAN “YES GIFTS”?
CAN I SLACK A CO-WORKER AT MIDNIGHT?
DO I HAVE TO HEART THEIR HEART EMOJI?
JA NUARY 30–FEBRUARY 12, 2023

194
UPDATED RULES
ON HOW TO
TIP, TEXT, GHOST, HOST, Cathy Horyn on the Woman Who Became McQUEEN / In the Bronx With ICE SPICE
PLUS:

What Happened to PYER MOSS? / The Things ANDRÉ LEON TALLEY Left Behind By
AND POLITELY DEAL A ND: The Great FILLER MIGRATION / The Laundress’ DIRTY SECRET TAHIRAH
WITH STRANGERS HAIRSTON
p.26

56 Photograph by ROG AND BEE WALKER, PAPER MONDAY

1 New York’s most recent cover story selfish: It’s about self-soothing.” The story was an aspect of it that felt like we’re tear-
asked readers, “Do You Know How to became a segment on The View: “One of ing down this Black man … Like, why him?
Behave?” (January 30–February 12). Its them said that in a group of two or more Why now?” And BuzzFeed’s Ade Onibada
194 rules prompted much debate, with women, you shouldn’t call them ladies,” said advised, “That Pyer Moss article is … com-
Susan Brannigan joking, “I’m so glad we’ve Ana Navarro. When Joy Behar asked “Why plex. Anyone who reaches a decisive con-
moved on from arguing about nepo babies not?,” she replied, “I know. I think it’s a hell clusion after one pass-through should
to arguing about etiquette.” Christian of a lot better than bitches.” probably take a step back and … reread it.”
Brown wrote that what makes this “new
etiquette guide so good is reading and nod- 2 The magazine also featured the Cut’s 3 In “Reality Check,” Reeves Wiedeman
ding along like yep yep that’s normal yep of “Spring Fashion” issue with a cover wrote about the documentary-film
course yep and suddenly: bam, you’re told showcasing Memphis rapper GloRilla. industry’s internal reckoning. On the pod-
you have to text your friends three hours Journalist Nicolas-Tyrell Scott said, cast The Town, Matthew Belloni said the
after you hang out to confirm that you “GloRilla on The Cut? Whoever made that story articulated “what many in the docu-
still like them.” BuzzFeed published its own happen did something different.” As part of mentary world have felt over the past five to
“Terminally Online Version of New York the special issue, Tahirah Hairston investi- seven years, which is it’s never been a better
Magazine’s Etiquette Rules,” featuring gated what happened to Pyer Moss’s Kerby time to make these kinds of films, and yet at
61 social-media guidelines, while the Jean-Raymond (“The Promise of Pyer the same time … there’s been this mixing of
Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi offered her Moss”). The story caused considerable the tenets of documentary filmmaking with
advice for “those of us who lead rather more discussion within the fashion world. The the economic interests and the ethos of
mundane lives.” On Slate’s Culture Gabfest, Guardian’s Gloria Oladipo asked, “Where reality television.” Lydia Polgreen, the for-
Julia Turner said she “was surprised that were you when you read The Cut’s article on mer head of content at Gimlet Media,
the internet response to it was so big. I guess Pyer Moss?” Bianca Vivion Brooks said the tweeted, “A lot of this is true about pod-
people were dying for a set of rules of response took her back “to 2018 when I casting too, just on a miniature scale.”
behavior to both appreciate and argue wrote a very inflammatory NYT opinion Rod Blackhurst, who co-directed Netflix’s
with.” Some readers criticized rules they called ‘It Takes More Than Skin Color’ Amanda Knox, noted, “There is seemingly
found classist or written from a privileged where I argued that representation was not always some other ‘director’ willing to
position. CNN’s Ariel Edwards-Levy wrote, a measure of artistic substance & we should make the ‘content’—to bend the rules and
“Starting off with ‘you don’t have to read be more discerning as a culture about who ethics.” Emmy-nominated producer
all of your acquaintances’ new books’ is we platform.” Rechelle Dennis, co-founder Mynette Louie added, “If it’s any consola-
such an incredible tell about its presump- of Girls United, a community platform for tion, the streamers screwed up narrative
tive audience.” Of the instruction not to young Black women, cautioned, “White features too!”
“foist your allergies onto a dinner party,” entrepreneurs are free to fail, learn, raise
Corey Ann Haydu countered, “This is so more money or move on, sometimes all correction: “The Promise of Pyer Moss”
offensive … A person with a severe allergy of the above without personally charged incorrectly stated that Raphael Saadiq
cannot just be all chill and not inform think pieces and people applauding curated the music for the “American,
ppl making them dinner.” In his Substack someone’s downfall.” On the podcast The Also. Lesson 2—Normal” show at the
newsletter, Very Serious, Josh Barro argued, Run-Through With Vogue, Chioma Nnadi Weeksville Heritage Center.
“Etiquette is for setting other people at said, “You so rarely see success stories in Send correspondence to comments@nymag.com.
ease … New York’s conception of etiquette is fashion around Black creators, and there Or go to nymag.com to respond to individual stories.

6 new york | february 13–26, 2023

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 inside: A beached-whale mystery / Jonathan Majors, movie star and poet / Crack-ups at the Oculus

the biden presidency is over now. Or, at least, since

The National Interest: Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives, its

Jonathan Chait legislative-accomplishments phase is. If we go by either modern

history or the professed goals of the House Republican majority,
P H OTO G R A P H : M A R I O TA M A / G E T T Y I M AG E S

the remainder of Biden’s first term will be spent fending off debt-
ceiling blackmail, government shutdowns, sundry investigations,
Joe Biden’s Limited and possibly some revenge impeachment.
Of course, there’s always the chance that the pattern will
Liberal Legacy break. In addition to his winning a second term, his party
could conceivably regain full control of Congress. Still, in all

At the two-year likelihood, Biden’s legislative record is close to completed, and

it’s not too early to venture some assessments as to how he did.

mark, his presidency The ledger suggests he has had success—though not in the way
he and his supporters expected and not as much as they would

comes into focus. like you to believe.

The bar was set impossibly high from the outset when,

Illustration by Tim O’Brien february 13–26, 2023 | new york 9

intelligencer
after securing the nomination, Biden
began likening his ambitions to Franklin
Roosevelt’s and outlined a sweeping
domestic reform agenda, including a
public option for health care, a lower
eligibility age for Medicare, closing the
Medicaid gap, universal prekindergarten
and child care, and an expansion of the
Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax
Credits, among other reforms.
Elated Democrats have since described
his works as though he came close to
achieving an FDR-size legacy. “The only
dispute: Is it the most productive two years
in 50 years since the Great Society, or the
most productive in 100 years since the
New Deal?” asked Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer. “He has done everything
he has said he was going to do and more.
And he doesn’t get the credit he deserves,”
claimed South Carolina Democratic Party
chairman Trav Robertson. Happy days are
here again!
The truth is that Biden fulfilled a small
fraction of his campaign goals. The biggest
surprise of his presidency may be that he
has left almost no mark at all on the social
safety net. Since Roosevelt’s time, the cre-
ation of durable new benefits has generally
been the main measure of a Democratic
presidency. Bill Clinton’s administration
expanded the EITC and created the child
tax credit and a children’s health-insurance
program. Barack Obama’s administra-
tion permanently expanded all three of
Clinton’s programs in addition to creating
the Affordable Care Act, which bolstered
Medicaid for the poor and created a new
regulated, subsidized insurance market for
people who couldn’t get insurance through
their job. It was, as Biden said at the time,
a big fucking deal.
Biden had a grand vision to complete
the welfare state, but as Joe Manchin and
other centrists lowered the ceiling for new
social spending, Democrats couldn’t decide
which initiatives to keep and which to
scrap. They wound up abandoning nearly
all of them when Biden’s Build Back Better
program floundered in the Senate. Instead,
he settled for a scaled-down program to
allow Medicare to negotiate the cost of
some prescription drugs and an incre-
mental hike in subsidies for Obamacare
insurance plans, and even those will expire
within a few years unless extended by Con-
gress. It is a small fucking deal.
Where Biden has enjoyed unexpected
success is in driving new public investment.
Three huge laws—the chips and Science
Act, the Infrastructure Investment and
Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act—
plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into
funding for scientific research; the manu-
The biggest
surprise
of Biden’s
presidency may
be that he
has left almost
no mark at
all on the social
safety net.
facturing of semiconductors, advanced bat-
teries, and other items; and the internet,
public transit, and electric-vehicle chargers.
The first two of these measures passed with
support from Republicans, reflecting a con-
sensus on the need to make the American
economy more self-reliant and to rebuild its
manufacturing capacity.
What is most ironic about this is that it
was Donald Trump who campaigned on
grandiose promises of reopening the fac-
tories that began closing in the 1970s and
turned towns across the middle of the coun-
try into economic wastelands. But Trump
delivered only culture war for his hopeful
and desperate supporters, while Biden
devised and passed measures to actually
bring that vision of new opportunities for
blue-collar workers into reality. As a col-
umn in the conservative City Journal notes,
Biden’s program has already “sparked big
new investments in plants and workers by
businesses,” many in red states.
While Biden fell short in those aspects
of the presidency where Obama and even
Clinton succeeded, he succeeded where
Trump had failed. He has turned out to
be a mediocre liberal but a surprisingly
competent nationalist.
This turnabout has visibly flummoxed
the opposition. After Biden touted his
bipartisan accomplishments in the State
of the Union address, his critics seemed
to recognize that he had captured the high
ground. The speech “concentrated on a
doubtless poll-tested economic agenda,”
sniffed a National Review editorial. “Poll-
tested” is what you say when you’re trying
to turn “popular” into an insult.
Whether this political identity trans-
lates into public support depends on the
fate of the ongoing recovery from the
pandemic. Biden initially bet his presi-
dency on a huge economic stimulus plan
in his first few weeks. At first, it seemed
triumphant—rather than suffer the pain-
fully slow recovery that hampered Obama,
Biden would immediately pump enough
demand into the economy to launch a
boom. As months went by, this began to
look like a ghastly miscalculation, as racing
demand for goods and services outpaced
the economy’s ability to supply them and
inflation (which didn’t seriously concern
Biden’s advisers) returned.
More recently, however, his fortunes
have improved. Biden deftly worked the
levers available to him to manage inflation,
smoothing out the supply chain and using
the strategic petroleum reserve to stabilize
gasoline prices. Prices have settled back
down even as job growth has remained
strong. Just four months ago, Republicans
were gloating over a recession most econo-
mists thought unavoidable. (In October,
the Bloomberg model, which obviously
consulted no epistemologists, somehow
forecast a 100 percent chance of recession
within a year.)
It now seems possible, perhaps even
likely, that the Federal Reserve will suc-
ceed in bringing inflation down for a soft
landing and that the recovery will proceed.
There are already hints of what this could
look like: Unemployment is at its lowest
level since the 1960s, giving workers the
bargaining power to demand and receive
better wages and working conditions, and
the inflation that has perturbed the middle
class is receding.
Obviously, none of this would even
slightly curtail the Republican Party’s
endemic derangement. (The last time a
Democrat presided over peace and broad-
based prosperity, he was impeached.) And
it would not create the kind of transforma-
tional change Biden had hoped for. But it
might at least affirm the core promise he
made to the country. His presidency could
prove that, contrary to the toxic lies spread
by his predecessor, democracy still works.
A president can advance the interests of
the entire country—not just wage tribal
political conflict—govern competently,
and make life better. ■
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intelligencer

Neighborhood
News:
A Whale Beaches
in the Rockaways
Why are so many leviathans
washing up on the shore?
By Laura Thompson

on december 13 , a 32-foot sperm whale

swam to Rockaway Beach to die. When she
beached around 8 a.m., surfers tried to push
her flailing, charcoal body back to sea. But
she was visibly battered, and her movements
slowed. When a team from the Atlantic
Marine Conservation Society arrived a few
hours later, she was dead.
During a typical week, amseas might
conduct aerial surveys of seal populations
or recover cold-stunned sea turtles. But this
winter, the group has been crisscrossing
Long Island in an effort to keep up with
a surge of beached whales.
The Rockaways whale was one of ten to
die within two months on area beaches. She
was carved into blubbery panels so amseas
could perform a necropsy—the animal ver-
sion of an autopsy—as part of an investiga-
tion into an uptick in whale deaths along
the East Coast. Just a week earlier, a dead
31-foot humpback whale had washed up on
an Amagansett beach.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration has been tracking an
“unusual mortality event” for humpbacks
since 2016. Of the 181 humpback whales to
die, only about half underwent necropsies.
Of those, 40 percent were found to have
suffered from some sort of human interac-
tion, like colliding with a ship.
Pundits and conservative lawmakers
have hypothesized that construction of
offshore wind farms may be to blame—a
claim noaa has said is unsupported. The
increase in beached whales could be an
indication that the whale population as a
whole is growing. Or, less optimistically,
rising water temperatures could be changing
the hunting and migration patterns of
whales, pushing them into areas where
they’re more likely to become injured by
human activity. Until amseas releases
its necropsy report, we’re left with what we
started with: a mystery. ■

12 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3 Photograph by Thomas Prior

february 13–26, 2023 | new york 13
intelligencer
135 min u tes w ith …
Jonathan Majors
Everyone seems to be in love with the newest MCU star.
But he’s more than a pretty face.
by tahirah hairston
onathan majors has an idea.
J We’re at the Whitney Museum to
view the Edward Hopper exhibit,
and he really thinks we should
bring in our drinks. I am sure this
isn’t allowed, but then again, this is the
perfect setup for a rom-com-style first date.
And have you seen Majors? The 33-year-old
actor is irresistible: He’s tall and muscular
(which means he’s a great hugger), he’s fine
(a chiseled jawline; a striking nose; and full,
pillowy lips), he’s a dog lover (he has four:
Hero, Magi, Poet, and Captain), and he has
a goofy personality that seems to make him
unaware of his effect on you. How could
I say “no”?
It’s settled: We will attempt to smuggle
our coffees into the exhibition. I’m hiding my
chai latte behind my purse. He’s obscuring
his decaf coffee, which he poured into a tiny
ceramic cup he brought with him, so that
the staff member at the elevator won’t see it.
We make it up to the fifth floor, and the coast
is clear. Majors is the ideal co-conspirator,
both cautious (he’s on the lookout for any-
one who might be coming our way to inquire
about our contraband) and motivating (“Are
you even drinking yours?” he asks, to which
I answer with a chug). He’s committed to
our game plan: not being caught or at least
finishing our drinks before we are.
Majors is someone who fully commits.
The Yale-trained actor seems to live inside of
his characters, whether he’s playing a pecu-
liar young playwright, as he did in the 2019
film The Last Black Man in San Francisco,
or an amateur bodybuilder fueled by rage
and ambition in the recent Magazine
Dreams. For that role, he ate 6,100 calo-
ries and worked out three times per day,
refusing to use fake weights during workout
scenes. In February, he enters the Marvel
Cinematic Universe as time-traveling
supervillain Kang the Conqueror in Ant-
Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. Later,
he’ll star alongside Michael B. Jordan in
Creed III as antagonist Damian Anderson.
To prepare for that, he worked with a
14 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
professional-boxing and MMA trainer
for three months. “There’s a version of not
going all the way there, you know what
I mean? And that to me is just acting. That’s
pretending,” he says.
If being yourself is the hottest thing you
can be, Majors excels. Since a Vogue camera
crew followed the actor for 24 hours in 2020
to reveal how he spends his days (he wakes
up, meditates, drinks tea, walks his dogs,
takes a nap, plays his guitar, rides his bike,
and does his skin-care routine), most of the
women I know have been convinced that
the actor would be their ideal man. A guy
who takes such good care of himself would
most likely treat you well, too—and, more
important, you wouldn’t have to take care
of him. A real grown-up. Majors proves my
theory when he tells me about the meal he’d
cook to impress a date: “I’d probably bake
a chicken, do some homemade frites where
I buy the potatoes and chop them up, some
nice fruit, a green salad, and a good wine.”
In magazine spreads, Majors is typically
showing off his ripped body, as he did for
recent covers of Men’s Health and Ebony.
There he is, shirtless and glistening as he
comes out of a pool, shirtless and making
eggs in the kitchen, shirtless and juggling
oranges, shirtless and holding a bouquet of
roses—you get the idea. He used to hate
being photographed (“the height of celebrity
fuckery”) until he realized it was another
chance for him to totally commit to a char-
acter. For this magazine’s photo shoot,
Majors tells me he saw himself as “an
unrequited lover.”
In conversation, Majors ebbs and flows
between being sensual and cerebral. You
may be surprised to learn he is a poet, having
recently published two poems in The New
Republic. (“I don’t want to know if you liked
it or not. I really care more that you took the
time to read it,” he says when I tell him I’m
familiar with his work.) That ceramic mug
he snuck into the exhibition is his thing;
he’s been carrying around a cup of some
sort for the past five years because it brings
him comfort. “It does determine what coats
I buy. It’s got to fit in there,” he says.
And yet, for all his smarts, he says he gen-
uinely does not know why everyone seems
to be in love with him. “It’s a mystery,” he
says. “It’s so strange because growing up in
my neighborhood, people would say, ‘Oh,
J with the big nose and the big lips.’ I was
just not that guy.”
Majors, who claims to “fall in love every
day” and “cry probably a few times a week,”
wants to star in a romantic comedy, some-
thing lighter after these recent strenuous,
body-focused roles. “Life is so beautiful. Love
is everywhere,” he says. His favorite roman-
tic films include The Notebook, Love Jones,
Blue Valentine, and Love & Basketball, and
we agree that romance-movie soundtracks
are just not as good as they used to be.
It turns out Majors does know a thing or
two about his effect on people, which comes
through when he talks about how he might
use movies and music to end a relation-
ship or seal the deal. For a surefire way to
fall in love in 48 hours: “Send a text mes-
sage with a song. My song of choice would
be ‘Come Over,’ by Aaliyah. Then only wear
sweatpants. You then have to watch Love
Jones–slash–Love & Basketball. After that,
the song you should be playing is ‘Whenever
Wherever Whatever,’ by Maxwell. The next
day, send them another song by Maxwell
with ‘I thought you’d like this.’ And it works
both ways. If a woman did that to me, I’d lose
my mind.” For a foolproof breakup: “First,
play ‘Creep,’ by TLC, on repeat, then hum it
in the morning, then watch Blue Valentine
with your partner and your cat. Then play
‘No Scrubs,’ at which point you would’ve
completely ended your relationship.”
I’m reminded that he is single. “I’m dating,
but I’m not dating anyone,” he tells me, still
attempting to conceal his smuggled-in mug.
One of the staffers clocks us and asks if we
had any idea about the rules, to which we
feign innocence. Majors encourages me to
gulp the rest of my latte.
Before the end of our museum date,
Majors makes a bet. There’s a painting by
Hopper that we’re looking for—one of his
most famous works, Nighthawks—but we
can’t find it. If the painting is here, Majors
promises to send me flowers. I suggest we
get lunch together instead, because who
wouldn’t want to spend more time with
Jonathan Majors?
We ask a museum staffer about
Nighthawks, and to my chagrin, I won’t be
breaking bread with my crush. The Whitney
didn’t borrow it from the Art Institute of
Chicago for this exhibition. But because
Majors can’t resist being a chivalrous rom-
com character come to life, he takes me to
lunch anyway. ■
Photograph by Clifford Prince King
intelligencer

Cityscape: look up when you walk through the World Trade Center
Oculus, and you can forgive almost everything: the $4 billion

Christopher Bonanos bill as the rest of the transit system starved, the skylight that was
supposed to open but doesn’t because the rubber seal ripped,
the underperforming mall with its dumpy little kiosks selling
dumpy little souvenirs. Enter that hall, and it does what Santiago
Why Is the Floor of Calatrava said it would. Your eye is drawn up the marble walls
P H OTO G R A P H S : C H R I S TO P H E R B O N A N O S

and the white ribs, and you are reminded of the nave of a great
the Oculus Crumbling? cathedral. You can experience, as a commuter, a moment’s uplift.
Cast your eye downward, though, and you’re back in busted-up
Seven years in, the New York.
The white slabs making up the floor of the concourse are chipped

marble slabs are chipping and flaked at the edges. Corners are broken, and thousands of
scuffing soles have ground dirt into the rough spots, blackening

and flaking. It didn’t them. Some slabs have been replaced, and they’re whiter and shinier
than the rest. The building opened only seven years ago, in March

have to be this way. 2016, and the rest of it still looks crisp and new. The floor does not.
Grand Central Terminal just turned 110, and its Tennessee-marble

16 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 A piece by

Pina Bausch
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Season Sponsor: Leadership support for

programming in the
Howard Gilman Opera House
provided by:
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Academy of Music®, Everybooty®, Next Wave® and Teknopolis® are trademarks of Brooklyn Academy of Music, Inc.
intelligencer
floor is arguably in better shape.
I asked the Port Authority of New York
and New Jersey about the replacement
work, some of which I saw going on last
year. Its representatives offered a statement:
“Normal wear and tear of the Oculus floor is
being addressed by systematically repairing
and/or replacing damaged tiles,” adding
that work had stopped for the holidays and
“will resume later this year.” Calatrava’s office
declined to comment. Neither would talk in
any detail about the beat-up floor.
The easiest guess, though not necessarily
the correct one, is to blame the stone. It’s
Lasa marble, quarried in Italy and brought
in by a Vermont importer, fine-grained
and lightly translucent. On the Mohs
scale, which you may remember from your
Earth-science classes, it’s about a 3 or a 4:
soft but not too soft. (Granite is about a 7.)
The slabs are one and three-sixteenths of
an inch thick. Monuments all over Europe
are made of Lasa marble, and so are about
90,000 American soldiers’ grave markers.
Raffie Samach, an architect who worked
on the early stages of the project (and
remains an admirer of Calatrava’s, calling
the architect and the building “extraor-
dinary”), offered this: “I was surprised by
the choice of material. It isn’t what I would
use in a public space, though we all have to
concede that it’s beautiful.” However, he was
quick to add, “I can also say that, whatever
materials were proposed, they were vetted
by the Port Authority—and they were very
picky about durability.” Civic agencies,
I suggested, tend to be conservative about
choices like that. “Obsessively so.”
I decided to do a little comparative test,
so I got my hands on one sample from the
Oculus’s floor and another from Grand
Central’s. (Never mind how.) They’re about
the same thickness, and the texture of the
grain seems similar. When I rubbed the
rough sides against one another, though,
the difference became obvious. The beige
stone from Grand Central remained intact.
The white Lasa marble shed crystalline
crumbs that looked like sugar all over my
desk. It’s clearly more fragile.
But it’s not a piece of pastry—it’s still
rock. The smooth top surface of my sample
doesn’t chip when you knock anything
against it. Certainly it should be able to deal
with Louboutins and wheelie bags, no?
Part of the problem is that we can see
every little chip. The New York Public
Library is also made of white marble, albeit
from Vermont, and it’s a little melty around
the edges after a century of urban wear
and tear and acid rain. Yet it looks good
because it’s a Beaux-Arts building, full of
filigree and detail. The weathering is part
of its beauty. Calatrava’s designs, being geo-
18 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
metrically pure, show even small dings not
as patina but as damage, and your eye goes
right to every one.
But that’s not all that’s going on here.
Matthew Crawford, superintendent at a
company called Gem Roofing and Water-
proofing, oversaw a lot of the floor’s installa-
tion and maintenance. He mostly brushed
aside my suggestion that the stone was the
fundamental problem, though he agreed
that it’s “not the most resilient. There are
millions of little hammers, every single day,
pounding on that floor. I’d see a woman with
stiletto heels running there, and I’d cringe.”
The deeper problem, he explained, is there’s
a radiant-heating system underneath. Thin
pipes snake back and forth atop a layer of
insulation, and they’re filled with a glycol
solution that is warmed up and pumped
around to heat the room. Radiant heat
has many advantages (evenness, silence, no
Calatrava’s
designs, being so
pure, show dings
not as patina
but as damage.
vents to collect dirt or blow dust), and a
warmish stone floor is pleasant in winter. As
it warms up, the stone expands. The edges
press on one another, harder and harder,
and eventually they shatter.
Engineers usually accommodate that
movement with expansion joints—small
gaps that can stretch and shrink as needed—
and there are indeed some on the floor
here. “We recommended one-eighth inch
between the joints with caulking,” Crawford
said. But the team rejected that idea, he
told me; wider gaps would have changed
the alignment of the stones, after which
“the seams wouldn’t line up with the joints
on the walls,” as the architects had speci-
fied. Instead, he said, the engineers stuck
by their plan for relatively few relief joints,
widely spaced: “There’s one every ten-by-ten
stones, pretty much.”
But, I suggested to Crawford, couldn’t
they have trimmed a sliver from all the edges
of each stone slab and thus preserved the
alignment? “Yes, but that would have added
cost.” Could the stone have been installed
more firmly so it moved less? “Yes, with
a thicker setting bed,” the mortar under-
neath would have limited its movement,
“but that wouldn’t give them the R-value
they wanted”—that is, less heat would
come through the floor, compromising the
building’s energy-efficiency goals. (The PA
said the design wasn’t aiming for a specific
efficiency target.) As an aside, he mentioned
that there have been glycol leaks in the
heating system, leaving brown stains on the
floor. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,”
Crawford said ruefully, “but we told them.”
There exists, in the Oculus, a proof of con-
cept. Crawford’s company got permission to
re-lay one section of floor, one that lacked
heating pipes, with a thick bed of mortar, as
he’d recommended. It’s in front of a freight
elevator at the northeast corner of the con-
course, where seasonal displays and heavy
equipment are brought into the building.
It’s probably the most trafficked area in the
place, he said, and “I go by and check on it
every time I’m in there.” The other day, I did
the same. It remains nearly undamaged.
The Port Authority appears to have taken
some of this advice belatedly. Most of the
newly laid replacement stones seem to have
been caulked in rather than grouted. That’s
a costly set of repairs, though, and until the
whole floor is rehoned—a multistep process
akin to sanding down a hardwood floor—it
will look a little patchy and uneven.
Did the PA indeed brush away some real-
world concerns in the service of Calatrava’s
aesthetic? Speaking to Samach reminded
me of the public mood around the site in
the years after 9/11. New York was in agony,
wounded and desperate to get its sense of
power back. The instinct among some,
during the planning of the Oculus, was that
almost no expense was too great, that no
P H OTO G R A P H : R OY R O C H L I N / G E T T Y I M AG E S
detail was too much to ask. We were going
to have something perfect there, the very
best in the world. And although that inten-
sity of feeling faced a lot of practical con-
cerns and cost overruns and political fights
and a gradual understanding that maybe
this project wasn’t going to do everything we
were hanging on it, the core spirit lingered:
It was going to be beautiful, and maybe, this
one time, we could let practicality slip aside.
But to accept that today, you have to avert
your eyes. Just … look up. ■
 FEB 15 26

Enchantment
Returns This Winter
GLOBAL SPONSOR
NYCBALLET.COM/SLEEPINGBEAUT Y
212-496-0600

A RTWO RK BY ST EELWO R K S
 KYRIE IRVING ARRIVED IN BROOKLYN AS A BONA FIDE WEIRDO.
FOUR FRUSTRATING SEASONS,
ONE ANTISEMITISM SCANDAL,
AND ZERO COVID SHOTS LATER,
HE LEAVES ON EVEN STRANGER TERMS.
BY SIMON VAN ZUYLEN-WOOD

20 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3 Photograph by Ellington Hammond

LAST FALL, SEPTEMBER 11
FELL ON A SUNDAY, AND KYRIE
IRVING SPENT MUCH
OF IT AT HOME IN WEST ORANGE,
NEW JERSEY, PLAYING
VIDEO GAMES.
It was rainy and quiet, and his life was
uncharacteristically lacking in drama.
Irving had won an epic standoff with the
Brooklyn Nets and the mayor of New York
over his refusal to get vaccinated for covid-
19. His teammate and fellow oddball super-
star Kevin Durant had withdrawn a recent
trade request to stick by his side. Nike was
preparing to release the ninth edition of his
best-selling sneaker. On his Xbox, Irving
fired up NBA 2K23 and activated a geeky,
khaki-clad, one-inch-taller avatar of him-
self. He also began to livestream on Twitch,
monologuing dreamily for three hours and
40 minutes to an audience of a few thou-
sand total strangers.
9/11: a notable date for suspicious
thinkers in general and an emotional one
for Irving in particular. In 2001, when
the first plane hit, his father, Drederick
Irving, a financier and former basketball
player, was on an escalator beneath the
World Trade Center and had to fight his
way through a jam at the revolving doors
to escape. At school in New Jersey, 9-year-
old Kyrie, who’d already lost his mother,
spent hours not knowing if he had become
an orphan. “Your life is worth living,”
he told his Twitch audience, advising
those struggling with loss to seek help.
He addressed the crowd repeatedly as a
“tribe” and a “family,” thanking them for
providing a “safe space for me to speak”
on their shared “journey.”
While he promised not to give up his day
job as a point guard—eight-time All-Star;
arguably the most skilled ball handler and
finisher ever to play basketball; launcher of
maybe the biggest shot in NBA history—
Irving indulged the possibility of a new
career playing video games professionally, in
which he could commune in quietude with
his digital followers. He had mused before
about buying a rural 200-acre plot where he
could live and farm with friends and fam-
ily, where everything they needed would be
obtainable from a “wooden store.” (“Are you
familiar with the Jonestown Massacre?”
a teammate asked him.) This gamer society
sounded something like that society, except
22 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
it would exist on the internet, where increas-
ingly Kyrie Irving seemed to live.
During postgame press conferences,
Irving often comes off as curt, defensive,
and bored, as if to make himself even less
scrutable to what he calls the “pawns” in
the media. But on Twitch, where Irving
could ask big questions, rather than answer
annoying ones, he was loose: doing voices,
humming, giggling. One NBA source, who
knows him from Irving’s unhappy two years
as a Boston Celtic, described his general
demeanor to me as “lost in the canyons of
his own mind.” Well, here he was, leading us
around the dark parts of the map.
Irving talked about astrology, burning
sage, bodily autonomy, holistic health,
being “socially awkward for mad long,” and
his faith. This he described as “omnist,”
drawing on Buddhism, Christianity,
Islam, and Judaism. “I’m genreless,” he
said. “I don’t mind being in this position
as one of the liberators and one of the
consciousness shifters. And I don’t say it
as if I’m this guru with all the answers and
you can come to me for everything. I just
know the world is shifting.”
He moved on to heavier subjects, like
the subjugation of Indigenous and African
American people. “When you hear about
genocide and you hear about people get-
ting murdered for lands, that’s what hap-
pened in my family,” he said. “I had to go
through some transformational changes to
forgive the people that murdered my ances-
tors.” Irving’s alienation from the main-
stream was evident and also indiscrimi-
nate. “What’s going on now in our world is
blatant. What’s going on now in Jackson,
Mississippi—a lot of stuff is blatant.” He was
referring to news of the city’s tainted water
supply. “They’re not hiding it anymore,” he
continued. “Movies that praise all these
demonic forces. And video games. And all
these symbols.”
Deep into the livestream, Irving took a
call from his wife, Marlene Wilkerson, a
YouTuber who posts about health and spir-
ituality. She was pregnant with their sec-
ond son, whom they would name Elohim.
Irving joked that he couldn’t be disturbed.
“When 2K comes out, I’m on the journey
with the fellas,” he told her.
“Who’s on the chat?” Wilkerson asked.
“Nah, it’s just Twitch chat,” Irving
said a little sheepishly, as if he’d been
P H OTO G R A P H S : S T E V E TO B E R / S I D E L I N E C H AT T E R ( 2 0 0 7 ) ; S T E V E B OY L E ( 2 0 0 9 ) ; J E S S E D. G A R R A B R A N T / N B A E ( 2 0 1 1 ) ; T I M C L AY TO N / S P O R T S I L LU S T R AT E D ( 2 0 1 4 ) ; B A R T YO U N G / N B A E ( 2 0 1 9 ) ; E R E N A B D U L L A H O G U L L A R I /
caught talking to an imaginary friend.
She mumbled something about maybe
spending “less than two hours on the virtual
reality” and hung up.
Kyrie switched from NBA 2K23 to Call of
Duty: Black Ops, and as he picked off Nazi
zombie hounds, he told his viewers to put
an infinity sign in the chat to connect with
one another. “I’m built to lead a tribe,” he
said. “Yes, I’m going to be one of the great-
est basketball players ever to do it. That’s
cemented. But I’m also going to be remem-
bered as having a great community … I’m
going to impact way more people when I’m
done playing basketball than I will playing
it.” Less than five months later, Irving would
immolate the Nets.
T
HE CRISIS BEGAN in late
October, when Irving tweeted
a link to a documentary titled
Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up
Black America. The 2018 film
puts forward the belief system of a group
called the Hebrew Israelites, who claim that
Africans and other people of color were the
real chosen people of the Old Testament and
that their identities have been appropriated
by modern-day Jews. It includes some Holo-
A N A D O LU AG E N C Y ( 2 0 2 2 ) ; K A I 1 1 X I R V I N G / T W I TC H ( 2 0 2 2 AVATA R ) ; DA L L A S M AV E R I C K S / YO U T U B E ( 2 0 2 3 )
caust denial and quotations from the likes of
Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford, a few of them
fabricated. Facing intense criticism, Irving
distanced himself from the film’s “unfortu-
nate falsehoods” but balked at denouncing
it unequivocally. The Nets suspended him,
and Nike dropped him.
As with his vaccine holdout, during which
he missed nearly half a season, Irving had
inflamed a wider debate about the bounds
of acceptable behavior in pro sports; about
whether public figures should be repri-
manded for platforming fringe ideas; about
whether, on a galactic scale, RTs = Endorse-
ment. Celtics star Jaylen Brown called his
suspension “uncharted territory,” marvel-
ing that no distinction was being made
“between what somebody says versus what
somebody posts.”
Irving eventually apologized and
returned to the bleak gray-on-gray of the
Barclays Center hardwood in late Novem-
ber. The Nets beat the Grizzlies that night
and continued to pulverize their oppo-
nents, winning 12 in a row at one point to
vault into the league’s elite ranks. But signs
of his discontent were visible, as he started
blacking out the Swooshes on his sneakers
 2009:
… And his
second.

2007:
At his first
high school …

2014:
Protesting
police brutality.

2021:
2011: Anti-vaxx
With his father at protesters outside
the NBA draft. Barclays Center.

2022: 2023:
His avatar As a Dallas
on NBA Maverick.
2K23.

2019:
As a Brooklyn Net.
and scrawling on messages like i am free
thank you god … i am. Durant tweaked
his knee—the latest in an endless series
of injuries that had kept the team’s stars
from playing together much—and the Nets
began to founder. Irving’s contract was set
to expire at the end of the season, and the
antisemitism furor gave the team further
reason to doubt his stability. Management
resisted offering him the fat four-year con-
tract extension he wanted. Irving, insulted,
demanded a trade.
The news rocked the NBA. “Well, what do
you make of this disaster?” said a longtime
team executive when I called him. Another
front-office figure texted that when it comes
to Irving, “it’s never rational.” Out of spite or
self-interest or both, the Nets shipped Irving
to the Dallas Mavericks instead of the des-
tination he reportedly preferred, the Los
Angeles Lakers. The New York tabloids said
good riddance: you can mav him, brayed
the Post.
IRVING’S CAMP PARSED THE BREAKUP IN EMO TERMS,
SAYING THE NETS WEREN’T A “RIDE-OR-DIE” FRIEND
TO WHOM “YOU CAN TELL YOUR DEEPEST, DARKEST SECRETS.”
Irving explained himself at his first press
conference as a Maverick. “I want to be
places where I’m celebrated and not just
tolerated,” he said. A source close to Irving
parsed the breakup in similarly emo terms,
comparing the Nets to a friend who might
use you to get ahead in their career, rather
than a “ride or die” to whom “you can tell
your deepest, darkest secrets.”
The Nets, cooked, immediately dealt
Durant too, officially ending the super-
friends era in Brooklyn and leaving fans as
baffled as ever by one of the most talented
and self-destructive athletes they’ve known.
Irving was probably the Nets’ most daz-
zling showman since Julius Erving half a
century ago; he also played in just 143 of
270 regular-season games. In four seasons,
he produced bottomless agita and a single
playoff-series win. A year and a half ago, the
Times announced the Nets in a headline as
“(Possibly) the Greatest Basketball Team
of All Time”; this month, The Wall Street
Journal was eulogizing them as “basketball’s
strangest, most desolate” franchise.
If Irving is a once-in-a-generation talent
on the court, he’s also deeply of his genera-
tion off it—fed by algorithms, drawn to con-
spiracy, distrustful of a machine even as it
makes him rich, more alienated than ever.
Irving arrived in Brooklyn considered one
24 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
of the most enigmatic figures in the NBA,
with a mind so internet-pilled and recondite
as to be unclassifiable. But he left as a famil-
iar archetype: the loner, the dot-connecting
freethinker, clicking around the internet.
The kind of person who feels most comfort-
able when he’s talking to strangers online.
I
RVING’S FIRST YEARS in the
NBA could hardly have gone bet-
ter, and yet they led him to misery.
Drafted No. 1 overall by the Cleve-
land Cavaliers in 2011, he was
Rookie of the Year; he signed with Pepsi
and Nike; he dated a pop star and a beauty
queen. “I really mean this when I say it: I’ve
never seen in person a more skilled player,”
says Daniel “Booby” Gibson, who shared
the backcourt with Irving. “I’ve guarded
Kobe. Elbow, iso, post-up, fadeaway, switch-
pivot—Kobe got all of it. Kyrie’s got that and
the handle.” It’s practically telekinetic. Irving
doesn’t so much keep the ball on a string as
operate a magnet right above it—the bas-
ketball equivalent of Lionel Messi snaking
impossibly through packs of defenders.
In the deciding game of the 2016 Finals,
with the score tied and just over a minute
left in the fourth quarter, Cleveland’s coach
drew up a play not for LeBron James but
for Irving. Marked by the Warriors’ Steph
Curry, he stutter-stepped, rose up, and
drilled a three from the wing. Never so late
in an elimination game had a shot so swung
a team’s fortunes: According to statistical
models, Irving’s basket increased the odds of
his team’s winning the NBA title by a greater
margin than any other in league history.
Victory only opened up a void. “It was like
climbing up one of the tallest mountains in
the world, winning a championship,” he
said on a podcast years later. “It feels good,
it feels great to add that to the career, but
I felt empty. After I done traveled, after
I done partied, after I done spent a bunch of
money, after I done asked for more deals—
you know, we all been through it. So feeling
on top of the mountain, after a while, I just
felt like I didn’t really know who I was.”
Irving has, by anyone’s standards, a com-
plex origin story. His father grew up in the
Mitchel Houses, a public-housing project
in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the
Bronx, and got a basketball scholarship to
Boston University, where he became the all-
time leading scorer. His mother, Elizabeth
Larson, was part of the Standing Rock Sioux
tribe. When she was a few weeks old, she
was adopted by a white couple—a Lutheran
minister and his wife, a nurse, who raised
her in a suburb of Tacoma, Washington. Lar-
son gave birth to Kyrie in Australia, where
Dred was playing professionally, but when
the marriage broke up, she decided to live
in Washington State while Dred took Kyrie
and his sister, Asia, to New York. Working
as a bond broker for Cantor Fitzgerald and
Thomson Reuters, he raised the children in
the New Jersey suburbs.
When Kyrie was 4, Elizabeth died in a
Tacoma hospital. Throughout his career,
the cause of death has been reported as
sepsis. But Irving said on his 9/11 Twitch
stream that he had lost his mother, his
“native queen,” to “drugs in the streets.”
After the championship in Cleveland,
Irving began to inquire about his mother’s
Indigenous roots. “It shook my world up,”
he once said. “When you find your iden-
tity, you’re not walking confused out here,
trying to piece yourself together from other
peoples’ knowledge of who you are.” Irving
began to voice support for the anti-pipeline
protests at Standing Rock and traveled to
South Dakota for a naming ceremony. He
was granted the name Hélà—“Little Moun-
tain” in Lakota—which he still uses to sign
his posts on social media. That awakening
seemed to bleed into an all-purpose distrust
of the Establishment.
In early 2017, Irving’s teammates
Channing Frye and Richard Jefferson cre-
ated Road Trippin’, a podcast they’d record
while flying on the team plane. Irving regu-
larly joined in, providing the wider world
with an unfiltered window into his free-
associative mind. He riffed on the possibil-
ity of a faked moon landing and noted that
JFK’s murder took place just days after he
tried to “end the bank cartel.” He recom-
mended a book by the Bhagwan Shree
Rajneesh, who would gain notoriety as an
alleged cult leader via the Netflix documen-
tary Wild Wild Country. Most famously, he
posited that the Earth might be flat. Irving
was 24 and sounded exactly like the person
he probably was: staying up too late, riding
the YouTube algorithm. “Did you ever grow
up with a guy in high school who smoked
a ton of weed, who is constantly thinking
about shit all the time?” says one NBA agent.
That was Irving.
Just months into the Trump years, Irving
was advocating for the merits of extremely
open-ended inquiry at the exact moment
the country’s mainstream institutions began
to question the wisdom of doing so. In one
podcast episode, Jefferson and Frye began
debating the Illuminati. Another host,
the sideline reporter Allie Clifton, tried to
change the subject, but Irving stopped her.
“It’s okay, this feeling you’re getting in your
stomach,” he said.
Irving was spending his time with a pretty
small circle. He lived in a Cleveland high-
rise with his best friend and all-purpose
business manager, a high-school classmate
with the portentous name of Alex Jones, and
didn’t have many friends in the locker room.
In March 2017, the Cavaliers got rid of a role
player named Jordan McRae, whom Irving
described as “one of the few people I hung
out with.” Talking to Jefferson and Frye, he
described a dream he had upon hearing the
news: McRae entered his hotel room to say
good-bye, but Irving couldn’t wake up to tell
him he loved him.
Irving wanted out. The Cavs were James’s
team, and Irving itched to lead one of his
own. In 2017, he requested a trade and land-
ed in Boston, the city where his parents had
met. In Irving’s first year, the Celtics got off
to a scorching 16-2 start, but he missed the
end of the season and the playoffs with an
injury. Not long after, his maternal grand-
father died. Irving later said that it spun
him into depression and “some of the worst
mental-health issues of my life.”
Jones had moved to Boston to live with
him, and there was concern that the two
were spending the dark Massachusetts
winters isolated at home, bingeing You-
Tube. Someone who knew Irving at the time
brought up the flat-Earth theory with him
and Jones. “Alex is like, ‘I don’t know, man.
We don’t know the Earth is round. Kyrie and
I have been watching stuff,’” the source said.
“Kyrie kept asking if we knew for sure that
it was ‘constitutionally’ round.” The conclu-
sion: “Oh, shit. They really believe that.” (To
be fair to Irving, it’s never been entirely clear
he does. He once gave an onstage apology to
“all the science teachers … coming up to me
like, ‘You know I’ve got to reteach my whole
curriculum?!’”)
In February 2019, footage emerged of
Irving chatting up Durant at the NBA All-
Star game, and internet sleuths wondered
if they were plotting to play together some-
where the following season. They were right.
On the first day of free agency, both signed
with Brooklyn, instantly transforming the
Nets into a powerhouse. Irving had grown
up a Nets fan in New Jersey and couched
his decision to return home in nostalgic
terms. Celtics fans were incensed; Irving
had reneged on a public pledge to stay for
the long haul. The move also recast his deci-
sion to leave Cleveland: Here was a potential
killer of teams.
But how could Brooklyn say “no”? Ever
since LeBron James had assembled his
championship squad in Miami, teams
had embraced multi-superstar rosters,
whatever the risks of divahood. Irving
had essentially knocked on the door of the
Barclays Center arm in arm with one of the
NBA’s other indescribable talents. Their
promise was enough to persuade the Nets
to sign yet another friend, the declining
DeAndre Jordan. If the team could keep
them happy, there was no limit to how
much they could win.
RVING’S FIRST season
in Brooklyn saw the arrival
of a pandemic and a racial-
justice reckoning. Newly
elected as a vice-president
of the players union, he
attempted to organize a
boycott of the league’s zero-
covid “bubble” at Disney
World to raise awareness
about police killings. His colleagues shot
it down. Irving was injured at the time,
so he wouldn’t be in Florida anyway; he
also had more financial wherewithal than
most to weather lost paychecks. “It’s easy
to say that when you’ve made what you’ve
made and you’ve got the Nike money,” his
journeyman teammate Garrett Temple told
Matt Sullivan, a journalist who was writing
a book about that year’s Nets team.
Irving defended his bubble-busting
gambit, repeating Maya Angelou’s quote
that “one person standing on the Word of
God is the majority,” and ramped up his
activism. That summer, he co-produced a
TV special on the death of Breonna Taylor,
bought a home for the family of George
Floyd, and pledged a seven-figure donation
to supplement the lost income of WNBA
players sitting out their own covid bubble.
Irving kept Forrest Gump–ing himself into
political consciousness. In January 2021,
on a night the rest of the Nets were playing
the Nuggets, he showed up on a campaign
Zoom for the progressive Manhattan DA
candidate Tahanie Aboushi, appearing in a
little window under Cynthia Nixon.
Increasingly consumed with social jus-
tice, he was following a familiar arc of online
polarization. A tweet from August 2012:
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
“This is cool, I just did it, you should too.
Donate $10 to @BarackObama, text GIVE
to 62262.” Nine years later: “Only a matter
of time until all Natives Africans Asians
completely stop producing and entertain-
ing for Racist America and Racist Europe.
Only a matter of time … God judges all of
their evil actions.”
When he was on the court, Irving was
thriving. Having painstakingly assembled
a squad of scrappy, likable, team-first,
analytically sound underdogs, general man-
ager Sean Marks jettisoned them to land a
third superstar to play alongside Irving and
Durant, the cold-blooded scoring machine
James Harden. It was a joyless move, and it
worked really well. Up two games to none
against the eventual champion Milwaukee
Bucks in the 2021 playoffs, the Nets were
an offensive juggernaut rolling to a title.
But then Irving hurt his ankle, a potentially
series-winning shot by Durant was ruled a
two-pointer, not a three, and they were out.
The season was over, and soon, so was the
fantasy that Irving’s mercurial tendencies
could be kept from derailing the team.
That August, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio
mandated that private-sector workers
in the city be vaccinated against covid.
Irving refused to get the shot. He resisted
unpacking his stance in public, though has
said on livestreams that his position came
from “questioning the Establishment.”
He was barred from playing home games
at Barclays.
Depending on one’s perspective, he was
either a martyr to bureaucratic absurdity
(under the rules, unvaccinated athletes
from visiting teams were free to play) or a
knucklehead torpedoing his team. Under
the controversy was a familiar cultural
scaffolding: the Trump-to-pandemic-era
flourishing of internet bullshit and the
corresponding neurotic vigilance of those
absorbed with rooting it out. For Irving, that
tension fed on itself. He believed himself to
be excavating and exposing hidden truths,
and any effort by a corrupt elite to police
his beliefs must have felt like validation. He
was taking counsel from a shrinking pool
of people: He’d recently fired his agent and
hired his former stepmother, Shetellia Riley
Irving, to represent him.
Harden got so frustrated that he half-
joked that he wanted to give Irving the
injection himself. (He ended up asking
for a trade.) But many other NBA players
saw something to admire. The Warriors’
(vaccinated) Draymond Green praised
Irving for “standing his ground.” Doing so
cost him about $11.4 million in uncollected
pay. “So many players just love Kyrie as a
player and love what he represents,” says
ESPN’s Nets beat reporter Nick Friedell.
“He’s this rebel. He’s not going to conform.”
25
W
HAT, EXACTLY, is in
Irving’s head? In late
January, I got a call from
Drederick Irving, who
had become concerned
by my efforts to find out. Retired from
finance, he said, he dabbles in real estate but
is largely occupied with overseeing aspects
of his son’s career. The two are extremely
close. Dred frequently sat courtside at
Barclays, and Irving, when asked to name
the best player he’s faced, invariably names
his father.
Dred had heard that I’d emailed a
Baltimore man named Anthony Browder,
an author who runs an Afrocentric educa-
tional institute. He also gives tours about the
supposed hidden influence of Egypt on the
buildings of Washington, D.C. Kyrie Irving
met up with Browder last year while in town
to play the Wizards and has publicly cited
his work and ideas. This past May, recording
a podcast episode, he brought the host a
copy of Browder’s self-published 1996 book,
Survival Strategies for Africans in America:
13 Steps to Freedom.
It’s easy to see why someone with Irving’s
tendencies would gravitate toward Browder.
The gist of the 1996 book is that western cul-
ture was built on Egyptian and other Pan-
African contributions, appropriating them
as its own. American society, Browder says,
is invested in diminishing that fact and thus
paints Black identity in a malevolent light.
That’s where the book begins to get weird.
In addition to delving into the political and
economic disenfranchisement of African
Americans, Browder engages in tenuous
close readings of pop-culture symbols, like
an ABC sitcom called Good & Evil in which
Good is written in white text and Evil in
black. An impossible-to-follow eight-page
stretch begins by analyzing the eye on the
pyramid on the dollar bill and concludes,
“When you add 1776 (one plus seven plus
seven plus six), you get 21, the age of rea-
son and adulthood as acknowledged in the
United States of America.”
“HE LOST HIS MOTHER AT A VERY YOUNG
AGE. HE’S CONSTANTLY TRYING TO FIND
HIS LINEAGE, LOOKING FOR
INFORMATION TO SATIATE THIS BURNING
DESIRE TO UNDERSTAND HIMSELF.”
26 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
Browder’s interests make appearances in
Irving’s late-night rambles and posts, from
numerology to Egyptian culture. Even
Browder’s health tips (e.g., avoid exposure
to electromagnetic fields) fit within the New
Age tab of Irving’s ideological portfolio.
Browder is only one of several uncon-
ventional scholars Irving has been reading.
Last spring, while streaming Grand Theft
Auto on Twitch, he name-checked the late
Frances Cress Welsing. “She’s one of those
goats for me,” Irving said. “One of those
authors that represents a new paradigm of
surviving the world of white people versus
nonwhite people.” Welsing’s stuff, imbued
with psychosexual dart-throwing, is even
wilder than Browder’s. In one of her books,
she writes about Black people dominat-
ing sports with “large, brown balls” such as
basketball and football, with white people
favoring those with small, white ones, like
golf. Welsing also floats a theory about white
men who give their mothers boxes of choco-
lates on Valentine’s Day because of a latent
desire to ingest “chocolate with nuts.”
Irving may not endorse, or even be aware
of, every aspect of her work. But his interest
in such authors helps explain why he would
soon gravitate to a more infamous piece
of content, positing the African roots of
Eurocentric culture. “Kyrie is an inquisitive
person, right? He lost his mother at a very
young age,” someone close to Irving told
me. “He’s constantly trying to find his lin-
eage, looking for information to satiate this
burning desire to understand himself.”
By his own account, Irving went online
one day last fall to research the meaning of
his first name. “It’s a title given to Christ,” he
told an interviewer. “Philippians 2:11. And
my name translates into Hebrew language
as ‘Yahweh.’ So I went on to Amazon Prime,
and I was like, ‘You know what? Let me see
if there are any documentaries on Yahweh.’”
Up came Hebrews to Negroes.
Until Irving tweeted out the film’s URL
on Amazon Prime, hardly anyone had seen
it. Made for $8,000 by Ronald Dalton Jr.,
who wrote a 2014 book by the same name,
it draws heavily from the margins of the
Hebrew Israelite movement. Some early
adherents were late-19th-century African
Americans who identified, spiritually
and/or ancestrally, as Jewish. Much of the
connection stemmed from a hyperspecific
reading of Deuteronomy 28:68 and a
line about slaves being sent “in ships” to
Egypt. In the 1960s and ’70s, more radical
Harlem-based Israelites known as One
Westers began breaking away from their
version of Judaism, identifying with Jesus
Christ and accusing Jews of usurping their
identity; they also overemphasized the
minute Jewish role in slavery and generally
said Jews were attempting to undermine
people of color.
Dalton’s take on it all is as inchoate as it
is offensive, as likely to confound as it is to
radicalize. A quotation claiming the Holo-
caust is one of “five major Jewish false-
hoods” is attributed to a Jewish man who
never said it; a hot take by Adolf Hitler that
“Negroes Are the Real Children of Israel” is
also invented. Much of the film consists of
interminable analyses of linguistic patterns
and Bible verses backed by gravelly voice-
overs and stock imagery.
After Irving shared it with his 4.7 million
Twitter followers, the blowback was imme-
diate. He’d tapped into a gale-force news
cycle that began with Kanye West, who’d
recently tweeted “I’m a bit sleepy tonight
but when I wake up I’m going death con
3 on jewish people” and then “I actu-
ally can’t be Anti Semitic because black
people are actually Jew.” At a postgame
press conference on October 29, a Post
reporter threw Irving a lifeline: Maybe he
hadn’t actually watched the documentary?
Irving, stubbornly, said he had, in addition
to reading a “whole bunch of good and bad
about the truth of our world” while he was
sidelined during his vaccine holdout.
The furor kept growing. Irving reiter-
ated his ecumenical omnist beliefs, but in
combative media appearances, he seemed
to gesture at some of the documentary’s
themes. “Am I going out and saying I hate
one specific group of people?” he said. “I’m
not comparing Jews to Blacks. I’m not com-
paring white to Black. I’m not doing that.
That conversation is dismissive and it con-
stantly revolves around the rhetoric of ‘Who
are the chosen people of God?’”
During a scrum at the Nets practice
facility in Sunset Park, ESPN’s Friedell cut
to the chase and told Irving that people
wanted to hear “a yes or no” on whether he
was antisemitic. Irving replied, “I cannot be
antisemitic if I know where I come from.”
The answer immediately entered the pan-
theon of failed sports non-denial denials,
alongside Mark McGwire’s steroid-era “I’m

not here to talk about the past.” The Nets
suspended him that day.
Kyrie’s defenders explain his stone-
walling as exasperation. “Kyrie felt almost
P H OTO G R A P H S : D U S T I N S AT LO F F / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( I A M + LO G O H E R E ) ; L AY N E M U R D O C H J R . / N B A E ( A N C E S TO R S ) ; J A M I E S Q U I R E /
insulted, like, ‘Man, you guys think I’m
racist? I’m not even entertaining that,’ ”
says Phil Handy, a mentor from his time
G E T T Y I M AG E S ( A F R A K A N ) ; M I C H A E L R E AV E S / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( M O O R I S H ) ; K E VO R K DJ A N S E Z I A N / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( F R E E )
with the Cavaliers, now an assistant coach
with the Lakers. (Ethan Sherwood Strauss,
an NBA writer on Substack, compares
Irving to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the
Scrivener.” Vaccines, public apologies: He
prefers not to.) Irving eventually met with
Nets owner Joe Tsai and NBA commis-
sioner Adam Silver, who publicly declared
their confidence that Irving did not harbor
antisemitic beliefs. Eight games after his
suspension, Irving was reinstated.
After the scandal had blown over, a close
ally of Irving’s gave me his side of the story.
For one, the documentary appealed to his
interest in ancestry. “It’s like, Oh my God, we
were the original tribes of Israel? This seems
even more, like, We’re kings and queens.”
They also suggested Irving hadn’t seen the
entirety of the nearly four-hour film. “He
watched little parts of it and probably fell
asleep,” they said. “It is not a really good,
put-together film. At one point, you really
do go, ‘There’s something fucked up with
this documentary,’ and that’s when they
quoted Hitler. But that happened toward
the end of the movie!”
A number of agents, executives, and
assorted NBA figures professed their non-
chalance about the saga. “Was I surprised
that he tweeted out a random antisemitic
documentary? Yeah, a little bit. Then again,
if you know the YouTube or Instagram
Irving’s sneakers after he was
dropped by Nike.
algorithm, what kinds of things get fed to
a conspiracy-minded guy like him …,” said
one team front-office figure, who happens
to be Jewish. “I feel like the antisemitism
thing is such a footnote to the whole Kyrie
story, another example of him spouting
off on things he doesn’t know about. He
thinks he’s discovered something nobody
else knows.”
Before returning to the Nets, Irving
offered an apology during a televised SNY
interview. When he had claimed he couldn’t
be antisemitic because “I know where
I come from,” he said, he wasn’t referring
to a lost tribe of Israel. He said he meant
suburban New Jersey.
O
N A RECENT SUNDAY,
I drove to the gym in North
Jersey where a teenage Kyrie
Irving spent four years hon-
ing his game: the Young
Men’s and Women’s Hebrew Association of
Union County. In the parking lot, Orthodox
Jewish families were exiting minivans, and
inside, I passed wall paintings of Israel and
a portrayal of Theodor Herzl, the founder of
modern Zionism.
Irving trained here for countless nights,
playing one-on-one games to 100 with a leg-
endary AAU coach named Sandy Pyonin,
who has guided some three dozen players to
the pros. Dressed in sweatpants and purple
high-top sneakers, Pyonin, who never gives
his age, led me to his photo-filled wall of
fame to show who Irving used to hang out
with. “This is one of his close friends—that’s
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
Alex Rosenberg, who is Jewish,” he said. “He
used to stay over at his house. Alex played at
Columbia University, also played for Israel.”
Pyonin motioned to a picture of another
of Irving’s buddies, who went on to be the
basketball coach at Joseph Kushner Hebrew
Academy, a Yeshiva day school in Livingston
named after Jared Kushner’s grandfather.
Pyonin was being trailed by two locals,
Chris Markowitz and Joshua Green, who
are producing a documentary about him.
Markowitz was wearing a pair of Kyries.
Green’s older brother played in high school
with Kyrie, and their family was something
of a surrogate unit for him. Kyrie often ate
dinner and stayed over at the Greens’ home
in nearby Elizabeth. Green, whose father is
a Baptist preacher, told me he once asked
Kyrie why he kept referring to his mother—
Ms. Green—as “Mom.” Kyrie replied, “Your
mom is basically my mom.”
Pyonin, who is Jewish, was bothered
when Irving tweeted about Hebrews
to Negroes but was certain he wasn’t
antisemitic. “He’s a little bit of a genius.
Geniuses can’t understand the simplest
thing,” he said. “So he made a mistake with
the Jewish community and realized how big
it is.” Pyonin’s own story gets at an important
dynamic underlying the controversy. He
was raised working class in Elizabeth in
the 1950s and ’60s and began developing
his basketball program in the wake of the
1967 Newark riots. It made him a small link
between Jewish and Black communities
that were being pulled apart.
An urban, northeastern sport with roots
in New York–area YMHAs going back to the
late-19th century, (Continued on page 76)
27
 t was the last monday
in January 2022 when Jeff
Zucker realized his world was
about to come crashing down.
The semi-secret romance he’d
been having with his deputy,
Allison Gollust, was going to become
public. He was being forced to resign
from his job as president of CNN. His
$300 million legacy project, the CNN+
streaming service, would be orphaned.
And Zucker’s former friends, the Cuomo
brothers, were out for blood.
What to do? He huddled at his apart-
ment with Gary Ginsberg, the media
executive and former Rupert Murdoch
adviser whom he’d known for years.
Ginsberg told him he needed Risa
Heller. A 43-year-old Brooklyn Heights
mother of three, Heller has become the
crisis-communications warrior of choice
for the city’s most cancellable elites.
“I didn’t know her,” Zucker tells me.
“The first time I ever met her was the
day she walked into my apartment
the day before my departure was
announced. And she ended up sitting
in my kitchen for like the better part of
the next 72 hours.”
“The thing about Risa is she’s a bit of
a character,” he says. “She comes in, sets
her coffee down, takes over the room,
and comes out with that accent that
I can’t even figure out where it’s from—
I’m not quite sure if it’s Bloomfield Hills
or Long Island or Brooklyn or what.”
And then she demands you tell her the
entire truth about how things got to the
point that you had to call her, before
telling you what to expect and helping
you navigate it.
How badly does Zucker think it
would have gone for him without
Heller? “That’s an impossible question
to answer,” he says. “But I think she abso-
lutely made one of the worst weeks of my
life a tiny bit easier.”
Even if this is the first time you’re
hearing of her, you’ve likely already
been spun by Heller. “Is there anybody
who has stepped in shit who does not
call her to clean their shoes?” says Evan
Smith, co-founder of the Texas Tribune,
who has sought her advice, albeit not for
any particular shit-stepping he’d done.
Heller’s services don’t come cheap, but
why risk not calling her?
Way back in 2011, she helped
Anthony Weiner survive his first
dick-pic scandal. She also worked
for Kushner Companies when Jared
was running it. She represented the
Estée Lauder executive whose life Risa Heller
was blown up after he posted a meme in her office.
on Instagram that depicted Big Bird

28 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 If you’re JEFF ZUCKER
or MARIO BATALI
or JARED KUSHNER and
you’re trying to survive
a bout of very bad press,
SHE’S THE ONE YOU CALL.

By Shawn McCreesh

Photograph by Jason Nocito february 13–26, 2023 | new york 29

wearing a mask while standing next to
Mr. Snuffleupagus and saying “My n---a
Snuffy done got the ’rona at a Chingy con-
cert.” Speaking of Sesame Street, the voice
of Elmo hired Heller when he faced allega-
tions that he had sex with teens (the cases
were dismissed). The chef Mario Batali hit
up Heller after he was accused of grop-
ing women, as did Arcade Fire front man
Win Butler, who, according to an exposé
published in Pitchfork, sexually pressured
several younger fans. A Goldman Sachs
banker who was arrested on rape charges
in the Hamptons brought her in (he was
later found not guilty). New Yorker writer
Jeffrey Toobin called her for advice when he
was caught masturbating on a work Zoom.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the former publisher
of the New York Times, hired Heller when
“Page Six” was reporting that his soon-to-
be ex was accusing him of not living up to
their prenup. Remember that trendy L.A.
restaurant Sqirl that caught flack after a
picture of its moldy jam went viral? It too
hired Heller. Right now, Heller is represent-
ing Sam Bankman-Fried’s law-professor
parents, who have seen their reputations
damaged by association with his.
These are just some of her clients;
many, probably most, remain anonymous.
Helping out a very powerful person who
suddenly doesn’t know what to do requires
discretion. “It’s really hard, even if you’re in
the business of dealing with the press on a
daily basis, to understand that when you’re
the subject of the press, it’s probably better
to get some help,” says Zucker.
ne friday morning in January,
O almost exactly one year after Zuck-
er’s downfall, I meet Heller at her
office in the Woolworth Building.
There’s a commanding view of City Hall,
the Brooklyn Bridge, and that windy
stretch of downtown known a century ago
as Newspaper Row. (Now it has a lineup of
luxury condos.) The carpet is red, the walls
and exposed ceilings white, and the sofa
and chairs a bright blue; a foot-tall golden
gnome raises a middle finger on a shiny
white side table. There are print copies of
City & State and Commercial Observer and
The Real Deal and The Hollywood Reporter
and The Wall Street Journal and the New
York Times and this magazine scattered
around. A yellow metal New York Post box
sits against one wall, very dinged up and
displaying an old copy of the tabloid. The
wood, y go to work?, accompanied an
unflattering picture of then–Mayor de Bla-
sio caught at the gym in Park Slope.
Dressed all in black, Heller picks up that
day’s Times from her desk. “When I read
something that’s really in the news and
I don’t get to be involved with it, I’m like,
30 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
Why aren’t I in this? I feel a little upset,”
she says, tapping on the front page with her
red fingernails. “If a story is knotty, I always
want to work on it.” Leaning against the
wall atop a bookshelf behind her desk is a
framed picture of a person dressed as Won-
der Woman taking out the trash in an apart-
ment complex. “It speaks to me,” says Heller.
Nothing about the office, one suspects,
is off-message. I notice a miniature model
newsstand encased in a Lucite box. Inside,
teensy tabloids scream teensy headlines:
subway perv scourge, reads the itty-bitty
Daily News. I ask her if she uses it to practice
some form of media voodoo. She just smiles.
Heller tells me she thinks of her job as
simply “adding context” to a story. When
the reporter and the editor—and maybe the
internet itself—seem ready to render a sum-
mary verdict, she will provide them with
facts and contingencies that might gener-
ate reasonable doubt. She dangles spicy,
distracting information; she argues; she
appeals to better angels; she invites you to
please get off your high horse because, really,
is anybody involved in this story unsullied?
She invites you into the gray zone.
I got my first dose of Heller a year ago,
when I (and half the media) was looking to
write about Zucker and we met for coffee
in Tribeca. She looked at me and narrowed
her eyes and said something along the lines
of: Here’s what’s going to happen: You’re
going to tell me all your questions. I’ll write
them down and we’ll talk again. I expected
she’d be combative or at least unnerved, but
instead there was something ever so slightly
condescending in the way she seemed to
half-smile to herself as she jotted down what
I thought were my hard-hitting queries. She
also seemed to be having fun.
Her personality, and her tactics, have
proved a good match for these times. As the
culture of who is held accountable for what
has changed in the past few years, powerful
people have become more frightened than
ever. “It used to be that when a CEO made
a mistake or got in trouble or was being
investigated or whatever it was,” says Heller,
“the chattering classes would look at them
and say, ‘What a jerk,’ or ‘That woman’s
the worst,’ or ‘That guy’s an asshole.’” Now,
she says, “with cancel culture or whatever,
people get thrown out with the trash, and
I just don’t agree with that. I’m a big believer
in second chances.”
What Heller is, or aspires to be, is not
new, exactly. The city has always had its
fixers and powerful press agents. Howard
Rubenstein was a legend; he whispered
in the ears of politicians, media barons,
and developers. For a while, early on, he
worked out of the Woolworth Building too.
Rubenstein arguably created the playbook
that Heller follows.
“She’s much more bubbly than Howard,”
says Senator Chuck Schumer, her former
boss, who also knew Rubenstein, “but she
has the same understanding of both politics
and substance and is able to weave the two
together in a great tapestry.”
Like Rubenstein’s company, which is
now run by his son Steven, as well as other
city comms firms such as BerlinRosen, she
has a lot of developers for clients. “Real
estate is the closest thing to politics in New
York,” she notes. Competitors say firms like
hers typically get paid on retainer—say,
around $10,000 a month—which keeps
the lights on and her growing staff paid.
Short-term crisis duty presumably can run
much more. But Heller wouldn’t discuss,
much less confirm, anything about what
she charges who and for what.
But it is her crisis work that has made
her well known. “When you’ve got these
high-profile clients with really high-profile
problems, you’ve got leverage, and she
knows how to use leverage,” says Ginsberg.
“You don’t want to cross her. If you renege
on a promise, she can be really fierce. She
knows who your editor is, and she won’t give
you that next story.”
Journalism is about finding out the
truth, but it’s often played like a game, one
in which the most interesting story with the
juiciest and most convincing details wins.
Heller understands what a reporter needs.
As Evan Smith put it to me: “It’s like what
they say about the Devil—the greatest trick
Risa ever pulled was convincing us that she’s
one of us.”
despite her aura of hard-boiled, Sweet
Smell of Success New York–iness, Heller
is a transplant. She was raised in West
Bloomfield, Michigan, outside Detroit. Her
father is a lawyer, and her mother was a
special-education teacher. In high school,
says Heller, “I was obviously the class gossip.”
She double majored in psychology and
Hebrew and Jewish cultural studies at
the University of Michigan, but when she
graduated in 2001, she couldn’t land any
jobs. Then her former roommate happened
to be seated on a plane next to the head of
the Anti-Defamation League’s D.C. office,
and she mentioned Heller’s lack of career
prospects. Heller landed an internship at
the ADL.
Before long, she began to work for the
then–California Democratic representative
Jane Harman, which led to a job as Chuck
Schumer’s New York City–based press secre-
tary. “I would be nobody, nothing, nowhere
without Chuck,” says Heller. “There’s this
notion that he always hires the smartest
people. That’s not true. He hires people that
he thinks he can teach.”
Flacks tend to take on the characteristics
 of whomever they flack for. Cuomo’s were
belittling toward reporters, and de Blasio’s
whiny. Bloomberg’s spoke the language
of wonkery and didn’t seem to care so
much about what anybody wrote. But the
Schumer flack got into the nitty-gritty of
not only what the story was, but how it was
written and where it ran. “The Schumer spe-
cies are a sixth-sensed species that have been
all over the jungle,” says Angelo Roefaro,
the Senate majority leader’s current chief
spokesperson. “They do not just stay in the
sunny treetops. They know what’s happen-
ing on the jungle floor. Chuck finds these
people and they start their journey in the
jungle. Risa is probably the one who under-
stands that ecosystem better than anyone.”
Shortly after Heller began working for
Schumer, a story appeared that mentioned
his family—“A scummy, bullshit thing to
do,” says Heller—so she called the reporter
and picked a fight. “I remember being in the
office at seven in the morning and I was like,
‘Look at this thing. I called him, I screamed
RISA’S
HOT POT
P H OTO G R A P H S F O R P H OTO - I L LU S T R AT I O N : G E T T Y I M AG E S
Clockwise from Elmo: Kevin Clash, Jeff Zucker, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Jeffrey Toobin, David
Paterson, Anthony Weiner, Mario Batali, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Harvey Weinstein.
Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow
at him. Don’t worry.’ Chuck looked at me
and goes, ‘Okay, now call him back and
apologize.’ I was like, ‘No, I’m not doing that.
He fucked us.’ He’s like, ‘You better call him.
Call him right now. You need him more than
he needs you.’” She did as instructed.
Ben Smith, the former Times media
columnist turned Semafor co-founder,
recalls running into Schumer at the NY1
studios circa 2005. Smith says he “sand-
bagged him with the then-controversial
issue of gay marriage, which he had been
avoiding taking a position on.” As they
were leaving, a young Heller “stopped and
reamed me out for ambushing him, and
when she finished yelling at me, she looked
around and said, ‘Where the fuck is the car?’
I said, ‘Oh, I think he left.’ She pulls out her
phone, and in the same tone she had just
taken with me, she began yelling, ‘Where
the hell did you go, just leaving me here on
the sidewalk? Who do you think you are?’
I said to her, ‘I can’t believe you would talk to
the driver that way,’ and she said, ‘What are
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
you talking about? That was Chuck.’” (He
doubled back to fetch her.)
“Yeah, she spoke her mind,” says Schumer
when I recounted this anecdote. “That’s why
she’s so good. She’ll go right at you.” Heller
says one of “the great things about working
for Chuck” is that “you could yell at him and
tell him the truth. If you have that job when
you’re very young—it’s never occurred to me
that I shouldn’t tell a powerful person that
they’re wrong.”
when she was 27, Heller left Schumer’s
office to take a job at the corporate-
communications firm Global Strategy
Group, which advised Eliot Spitzer. Six
months later, Spitzer was caught with a
prostitute, and suddenly his lieutenant
governor, David Paterson, was thrust into
a job that he never seemed to even want.
Heller became his communications direc-
tor. “There were a lot of fireworks,” says
Heller—the onset of the Great Recession,
the naming of a replacement for the Sen-
ate seat Hillary Clinton had left, and even
the fact that Paterson’s chief aide, whom
he was uncommonly dependent on, had to
resign after it was revealed he owed nearly
$300,000 in back taxes. “We had a very
robust and competitive press corps” at the
time, she recalls. “It was different from
how it is now. Every outlet in the state
basically had at least one reporter in the
Capitol covering the governor. You’d wake
up every morning and see the cover of the
Post and gasp.”
She lasted a year, then took some time
off. She checked out some corporate jobs,
but “they all seemed boring to me.” She
was about to turn 30, and wanted to learn
how to cook a chicken, she says. She mar-
ried Ryan Toohey, whom she’d met when
he worked for Spitzer and she worked for
Schumer but got to know as a co-worker at
Global Strategy Group. In 2010, she started
Risa Heller Communications.
The next year, she had her first crisis
project at the new firm—Anthony Weiner.
He was still a congressman then, caught
sending a dick pic. “There were people
who told me that this was going to ruin my
career,” says Heller, “but he was an old friend
of mine and there was no chance I was going
to leave him in the lurch.”
She began developing what has become
her specialty. Ginsberg compares her to
“a combination of a Jewish mother and
Whitey Bulger.”
“She does not lose her cool,” says Zucker.
“She’s confident but not cocky, strong but
not an asshole.” She’ll tell a big shot under
fire whether he ought to confess, apolo-
gize, lie low, or fight back. Some hire her
before a potential problem ever becomes
public, just in case.
31
 “I spend a lot of time explaining how the
media works,” she says. “‘Here’s the process,
here’s how someone might have gotten that
information, here’s why they won’t tell me
who told them what. Fake news isn’t a thing.’
They don’t actually understand the notion
that a reporter is coming to this theoretically
with an empty notebook and they’re trying
to figure out how to fill it.”
She also has to set expectations with her
clients. For instance, don’t expect her to get
a story killed. “Very hard to do,” says Heller.
“I spend a lot of time saying to people, ‘You
cannot kill a story.’ You can if it’s untrue,
perhaps, if it is based on something that
is fundamentally incorrect, perhaps, but
it’s very hard to get a story killed. It’s like a
unicorn. You almost never see it.” But some
of her clients boasted to me about how she’s
gotten unsavory (or, in their eyes, “unfair”)
details excised.
“It’s all about trying to figure out the
arguments” that resonate with a particular
reporter, she says. She points at a cup in her
office. “If you come to me and say, ‘This cup
is blue,’ and I’m like, ‘No, Shawn, it’s clear,’
we’ll have to have a debate about what is
blue and what is clear. I’m always game
to have the debate. Sometimes it’s a fight.
Sometimes it’s nice.” The cup is clear.
ast october, Heller hosted a
L book party for Times star reporter
Maggie Haberman at her apart-
ment in a former industrial building
with views of the East River. (Zillow esti-
mates its resale value to be a bit under
$5 million.) Haberman’s colleagues, includ-
ing Jodi Kantor, Michael Barbaro, Jeremy
Peters, Carolyn Ryan, Elisabeth Bumiller,
and Rebecca Blumenstein (now the NBC
News boss) mingled alongside Zucker,
Ginsberg, and ex-colleague Ben Smith.
Haberman’s editor was hunched over his
laptop in a hallway beside the bathroom
editing her next report, which would go live
while the party was underway.
Haberman and Heller first met while
Haberman was covering local politics for the
New York Post, then became friendly, and
then friends. “A lot has changed in the last
18 years, but many things haven’t,” Heller
said in a speech at the party. “Every time
we’ve ever had a meal together, her com-
puter is on the table with the food. I don’t
think she’s ever once had her car washed.
And I’ve never won a single argument
about even just, like, the tiniest little point
in a story with her.” Heller called her the
greatest of all time and added, “Apologies to
every reporter in this room.”
Heller has made a sport of befriending
journalists. “She will go toe to toe with a
reporter, kick their ass, yell at their editor,
and then be invited to be the godmother of
32 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
their child, and I’m only exaggerating a little
bit,” says Heller’s friend Jonathan Rosen,
co-founder of rival communications firm
BerlinRosen. “I’ve often wondered how she
does this.” One Times reporter tells me later
that she’s so tight with Heller that she didn’t
feel comfortable putting down a deposit
on a wedding dress without consulting her
first. Others say they call Heller for career
advice, for story ideas, to do yoga with, and
sometimes to find out what’s happening
inside their own newsroom. “There will be a
minor personnel move at the Times and I’ll
call her to gossip about it and she’ll be like,
‘Oh, yeah, of course I knew that,’” says one.
But few will go on the record compliment-
ing a flack. It could be viewed as compro-
mising for the people charged with holding
power to account to be praising the person
powerful people hire to avoid account-
ability. (Haberman declined to comment
about Heller.)
This is where the pragmatism of her
relationship building runs up against jour-
nalistic conflicts of interest. Last fall, New
GOT ON E RUL E,” says Z u cker.
“SHE’S
NO M ATTE R H OW B A D it is, and
Yorker writer Clare Malone began working
on a profile of editor Jon Kelly (who was
also at the book party) and his publication,
Puck. Kelly called up Heller to run interfer-
ence. I asked Kelly how Heller can spin for
his frequent reporting targets like Zucker
and Sam Bankman-Fried’s family while
also spinning for him. “We are friends,
and we are also professionals who respect
each other,” Kelly tells me. “She has a cli-
ent that she represents, and I have a busi-
ness to run, and we make sure that things
are always kosher. And that respect is part
of the friendship. It happens.” (In a piece
about SBF that was published January 18,
Puck quoted Heller’s defense of SBF’s par-
ents, who are her clients, and, in the same
paragraph, acknowledged that “Heller has
represented Puck.”)
The journalists I spoke to about Heller,
both on and off the record, felt she never
outright lied to them. This sets Heller
apart from some other practitioners of
her craft. “She’s got one rule,” says Zucker.
“She wants you to tell her everything, no
matter how bad it is, and she’s not going to
lie to the press.” But that means she’s only
as good as her clients’ word. Occasionally,
one can spot Heller struggling to find the
ground she needs to stand on. At one point
when she represented Weiner, she added a
disclaimer that hadn’t been there before:
“According to Congressman Weiner …” As
in not according to Heller.
I ask Heller which journalist she most
fears. She thinks for a while and says, “There
used to be this reporter who worked at the
Daily News. He now works for The City.
Greg Smith is his name. He would call me
every Friday at 3 p.m. about something, and
I’d be like, Oh, fuck. This ain’t going to be
good. And then there are certain reporters,
who I will not name, who I find difficult to
make a point to. Those are the ones I don’t
like getting calls from.”
Some reporters confess they actually
enjoy being spun by Heller. She makes
strategic use of you-can’t-quote-her-
on-this candor along the lines of Listen,
I know he’s a pompous asshole, but here’s
what’s happening, or Okay, she’s acting
nuts, but she’s going through some seri-
ous shit right now. “You know it’s a thing
she’s pulling on you,” says a reporter who
wrote about one of Heller’s clients recently,
“but you still can’t help but like it anyway
because you know you’re both playing
the game.”
Amy Chozick, a Times journalist turned
television showrunner, once found herself
the subject of a Twitter pile-on and called
Heller to commiserate. “I just wanted to
crawl into a hole,” says Chozick, “and then
she drops off at my house a novelty beard
and mustache and goes, ‘Put on your big-
boy pants. What do you think your male
colleagues would do if a Twitter mob was
coming after them? They’d use it to sell
fucking books.’”
A few months after Haberman’s book
party, I watch Heller literally feed treats
to the media. She has an annual office
cookie-baking contest at Christmastime
at which her employees (she’s got 18) each
bake something different. A panel of guest
judges hand picked by Heller samples
the cookies and picks a winner. This past
December, the panel included Ben Smith
and Jon Kelly along with the mayor’s
then–chief of staff, Frank Carone, and the
former city comptroller Scott Stringer.
 risis comms can be amoral
C work. I ask Heller how she decides
whether to take on clients. “I believe
generally people deserve to have
their story told,” she says. Everyone has a
right to an attorney, but should everyone
have the right to the ministrations of a spin
doctor? “People come to me at their lowest
moments and say, ‘I need your help.’ I listen
to them, I see if there’s a way for us to help
them, and if there is, if I think there’s a story
to tell, I’ll do it. If I don’t think there’s a story
to tell, I don’t do it. I use my gut.”
In 2015, Harvey Weinstein hired Heller
to defend him against accusations made by
the Italian model Ambra Battilana. “We are
pleased this episode is behind us,” Heller
told the Times on her then-client’s behalf.
Does she regret working for him? “It
was three weeks in 2015,” she says. “It was
a totally different time. We had three people
that worked at this company. But certainly
if I knew then what I know now, would
I have worked for him? No.” I ask whether
that made her question her gut. She tries
HING,
nts you to tell her EV E RY T
“She wa to the press.”
SHE’S NO T GO IN G T O LIE
to add context. “I use my gut. Has it been
wrong? It has, it has been wrong, but is it
mostly right? Yes.” What was it like to work
for him? “I only met him once. Can I go
off the record or no?” No. “I only met him
once.” Has she ever smeared a woman to
help a man? “No.”
Then I bring up her working for Jared
Kushner and Ivanka Trump. “I told her
I didn’t approve of that,” recalls Schumer. It
was before the 2016 presidential race had
really begun in earnest that Heller took
on Kushner Companies. As Kushner and
Trump decided to go into the administra-
tion, Heller was supposed to handle press
around his divestiture from the family busi-
ness. But it all got politicized pretty quick.
Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox recalls
meeting Heller for the first time in
December 2016 after publishing a story
that examined Kushner’s stewardship of
the New York Observer. Heller asked to
meet with Fox at the Vanity Fair office in
One World Trade Center on a Friday night.
“She didn’t yell,” recalled Fox, “but she had
this strategy of being very quiet and asking
direct questions in a monotone way that was
so much worse than someone yelling. I was
young and writing aggressively about her
clients, so she was sizing me up. And there’s
nothing more intimidating than the air of
‘Who do you think you are?’ when you’re a
baby reporter. All the best flacks are psycho-
logically profiling reporters all the time.”
Once Kushner and Trump got to
Washington, the couple beefed up with a
larger PR apparatus. Heller didn’t follow
them into the White House, but she wasn’t
fully out of the picture. In one instance,
she was literally in the picture: Heller was
snapped by the paparazzi at Ivanka Trump’s
house during the interview with Gayle King
in which the First Daughter was asked
about being “complicit.” Heller’s liberal
friends back in New York started to wonder
about her complicity. What had become of
that Schumer Democrat they thought they
knew? Was she a mercenary all along?
In her office, Heller squirms when I ask
her about the Kushners. “My politics were
never those,” she says. “They were always
very clearly not those, and it was certainly a
challenge. I don’t really want to get into the
details of my clients on the record. I don’t
think it’s the right thing to do.”
Still, the couple were one hell of a story,
and working for Kushner Companies meant
Heller got to do what she loves best: play.
She played on big front-page stories and
triple-bylined investigations into Chinese
influence over the firm. I suggest that it was
too much fun for her to resist. “I think you
are asking a fair question of whether the
white-hot fun is too exciting for me,” she
says with a shrug.
“She’s not weighed down by big meta-
physical questions,” says Alex Levy, a friend
and fellow former Schumerite who now
has his own comms shop. “She’s an athlete
playing a sport.”
one of heller’s friends told me about
the time she wrote a book, had to do press
to promote it, and called Heller for advice.
“She told me to bring my baby in a stroller
to the interview to get a more sympathetic
result,” said the friend.
The story comes to mind when Heller
invites me over for a family dinner. She is
cooking chicken while her youngest, 4,
talks about Disney on Ice; her middle child,
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
8, plays with Legos, and her eldest, 11, asks
about Prince Harry. “Come give me a hug!”
Heller shouts at one point.
Her husband, Toohey, 47, is now a partner
at Dentons Global Advisors. He pours me a
glass of pét-nat while I pull out my notepad.
“How much wine have you had, Ry?” inter-
jects Heller. “Do you think you can answer
these questions?”
I ask him if his wife ever tries to spin him.
“No,” they both answer at the same time. But
two flacks under one roof—it’s got to be like
Mr. and Mrs. Smith. “No, there’s no spin at
all,” spins Heller. “We fought about how to
make a tuna melt,” says Toohey. Who won
that one? Heller points at herself. What
does Toohey make of his wife’s love for the
canceled? “I think she comes from a hugely
empathetic place, just in life in general,” he
answers a bit nervously but on message.
Climbing to the top of the media heap
while raising three children hasn’t been easy.
She took on Weiner when she was 39 weeks
pregnant. She says that after the congress-
man drafted his resignation letter to then–
House Speaker John Boehner, “I sent it out
to all the reporters, then went up to the hos-
pital and had a baby.” (Her pregnancy was
covered in “Page Six.”) One reporter recalled
being shocked to run into Heller days after
she had given birth to her second child at
a rally targeting one of her clients, Airbnb,
outside City Hall. “She was just standing
there in her wrap coat,” said the reporter,
“and she was like, ‘What? I got bored.’”
“You can’t say to your client, ‘I’m having
a baby; I’ll see you in three months.’ It’s just
not permissible,” says Heller. “If it means
that I’m going to be on the phone for an
hour, I’ll be on the phone for an hour or
whatever it is. I just do it. It’s very much a
part of my life. It’s not a thing that you can
turn off.” She tells me she wants to take on
more clients in L.A. and would like to open
an office there.
But her days also clearly center on her
family. Heller is rarely out on the town at
night; she’s up early taking her kids to school.
“My life is total chaos,” she says. “I love going
to work and love coming home from work.
My kids bring me an amount of joy and
delight that never seemed possible, and my
oldest daughter even reads the tabs!”
Nonetheless, she took on the Zucker job
just as her mother was dying of complica-
tions from multiple sclerosis. “I ended up
talking to her as she was stepping out of her
mom’s room at the hospital,” says Zucker.
“It was a really unfortunate time for her
personally, and yet I can say I don’t think
there was ever a moment where she wasn’t
always available to me.”
For Heller, this is just her being profes-
sional. “I really don’t like leaving people in
the lurch,” she says. ■
33
 of the

An ancient bull’s head

once in Steinhardt’s
collection that had been
looted from Lebanon.

34 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 A network of tomb raiders, crooked art dealers, and
museum curators fed M I C H A E L ST E I N H A R DT ’s addiction
to ancient artifacts. Many also happened to be stolen.
BY G R E G D O N A H U E

ust before dawn on
January 5, 2018, a team
of armed federal agents
from Homeland Security
Investigations arrived at
1158 Fifth Avenue, a luxury co-op over-
looking Central Park. After securing the
building’s exits and entrances, the agents
headed to the top floor, where they posi-
tioned themselves around the door to the
penthouse apartment. At the head of the
column, Matthew Bogdanos, a prosecutor
with the Manhattan district attorney’s office,
listened for movement before knocking.
The apartment belonged to Michael
Steinhardt, a retired billionaire hedge-
fund manager and one of the world’s most
powerful philanthropists. Born in Brooklyn
to a high-stakes gambler with ties to the
Gambino crime family, Steinhardt had
become one of the most influential inves-
tors of his day, competing for top earnings
with the likes of George Soros and Julian
Robertson and battling with Warren
Buffett for control of entire airlines. His
fortune had bought him a taste of immor-
tality. Steinhardt’s name decorated the
walls of some of New York’s most famous
institutions: a gallery of Greek art at the
Met, a conservatory of Old and New World
plants at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden,
and a school at NYU. In Israel, he estab-
lished a natural-history museum in Tel
Aviv designed to look like Noah’s ark and
co-founded Birthright Israel, a nonprofit
that has sponsored free trips for some
800,000 young adults. Over the years, he
also had multiple run-ins with the Secu-
rities and Exchange Commission, but on
that January morning, those allegations
weren’t what had drawn the authorities to
his apartment. It was his art collection.
Starting in the late 1980s, Steinhardt
amassed one of the world’s great collections
of antiquities. Renowned for both their
breadth and quality, his private holdings
spanned centuries and rivaled those of
many museums, with an estimated value
of more than $200 million. According to
Bogdanos, much of it was stolen property.
Steinhardt, he believed, was the principal
buyer in some of the world’s most prolific
antiquities-trafficking networks—criminal
operations that smuggled ancient artifacts
from their countries of origin into museums,
auction houses, and private collections. For
his part, Steinhardt has long maintained
that he was nothing more than a collector
36 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
duped by dealers who had misled him about
the pieces’ provenance.
When he opened the door a few
moments later, Steinhardt seemed more
angry than surprised. “You’re much shorter
than I thought you would be,” he said to
Bogdanos as he stepped aside to let the
agents enter. Inside, they saw marble busts
on bedside tables and terra-cotta vases
covering the windowsills. Ancient Greek
wine jugs, 2,500 years old, were stuffed into
the space between the kitchen cabinets and
the ceiling, and sculptures from the same
era were tucked away on shelves in the
bathroom. A few objects had been left to
endure the elements on the terrace.
Over the next four years, agents would
return 11 times to Steinhardt’s home and
office. They seized frescoes and ceremo-
nial drinking vessels, amulets, idols, and
Neolithic masks, as well as invoices, let-
ters, and photographs that detailed his col-
lecting practices over three decades. What
emerged was a picture of a global supply
chain that began in the tombs of Italy and
the caves of the Fertile Crescent and passed
through auction houses, art fairs, and even
the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and
which time and again reached its final stop
at Steinhardt’s penthouse. He was “on the
top of Mount Olympus,” as Bogdanos put it.
But it appeared that his rapacious appetite
had finally caught up with him.
steinhardt’s ancient-art collec-
tion had begun with the 1987 purchase of
a first-century marble sculpture depicting
the Greek god Pan. It’s unclear how much
he paid for it, but then the price was prob-
ably an afterthought. He was already one of
the richest men in the country.
Twenty years earlier, with two fellow
graduates of Wharton, Steinhardt had
founded one of Wall Street’s first modern
hedge funds—Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz
& Co. His first investments were bank-
rolled with $100 bills from his father, Sol,
who had gone to prison for his involve-
ment in a Madison Avenue jewelry-store
theft. “We were the gunslingers, the wise-
guys, the people who screwed up markets,”
Steinhardt later told a reporter. Many
old-school Wall Streeters saw short selling
stocks, a major part of Steinhardt’s business
model, as anti-growth, even anti-American,
but it was hard to argue with the returns.
By the end of their first full year, Steinhardt
and his partners were millionaires.
A portly chain-smoker with a push-
broom mustache, Steinhardt resembled
Wilford Brimley more than he did Gordon
Gekko, but as an investor, he was cutthroat
and unconstrained. He was notorious for
his volcanic temper: Employees described
themselves to an organizational therapist
as “battered children.” He was also known
to push the limits of legality. In 1976,
Steinhardt signed an SEC order prohibiting
him from stock manipulation, the result of
a six-year investigation. (Twenty years later,
his company would pay $40 million in fines
resulting from another SEC investigation.)
Throughout the 1980s, Steinhardt deployed
a network of informants who kept his phone
ringing day and night with tips on industry
moves; he called the fruits of this intelli-
gence network “fancy information,” though
to his competitors it sounded more like
insider trading.
By 1987, Steinhardt’s fortune had swelled
into the hundreds of millions. He and his
wife, Judy, were regulars on the Côte d’Azur,
where they stayed at La Réserve de Beaulieu,
a favorite hotel of royalty. Yet Steinhardt
suffered from a certain restlessness. He
wasn’t much for the Upper East Side social
circuit, and already in his late 40s, he was
a generation older than the Masters of the
Universe: the young, ego-and-greed-driven
stockbrokers described by Tom Wolfe in
The Bonfire of the Vanities. While his flashier
contemporaries were buying estates in the
Hamptons, Steinhardt found himself
searching for a purpose beyond simply accu-
P H OTO G R A P H S, P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E M A N H AT TA N DA ( B U L L’ S H E A D) ; E VA N AG O S T I N I / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( S T E I N H A R DT )
mulating wealth. During a sabbatical year
in the late 1970s, he’d wandered the city’s
museums hoping to be struck by artistic
inspiration, but that left him wanting too.
“There’d be periods when I’d wake up and
didn’t have an activity,” he said at the time.
“And I’d be desperate.”
It was around then that Steinhardt began
collecting. He brought to it the same devo-
tion that powered his career on Wall Street:
Once he identified a subject of interest, he
lost “all sense of proportion,” as he put it. He
bought watercolors, drawings, and paintings
by contemporary masters and enhanced
the grounds of his country home in Bedford
with one of the world’s most encyclopedic
collections of Japanese maples. Peruvian
textiles, Judaica, and a menagerie of exotic
animals, including zebras, camels, and
rare birds, followed. But ancient art held a
particular allure. In his 2001 memoir, No
Bull, Steinhardt wrote that ancient objects
capture the “tangible elements of the history
of humanity.” To possess them was a means
to position oneself within the long history
they represent.
His newfound obsession was perfectly
timed. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the
antiquities market in New York was hum-
ming. Ancient-art fairs filled the Park
Avenue Armory with hundreds of collectors
and dealers, and the New York Times ran
glowing features on the latest gallery exhibi-
tions. Antiquities were a fashionable way for
the city’s rich to signal both their spending
power and their worldliness. At auction

houses, vases and marble busts sparked
bidding wars among wealthy collectors and
buyers for cultural institutions, each vying
for the chance to acquire the finest pieces.
“It’s hard to resist the objects and their his-
tories, if you can afford them,” said Hicham
Aboutaam, an antiquities dealer who began
selling to Steinhardt in the 1990s. “And if
you want to be the next J.P. Morgan or the
next J. Paul Getty, why not?”
Determined to be more than another
dilettante, Steinhardt built up a library of
reference books on antiquities and sub-
P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E M A N H AT TA N DA ( S TO N E S K U L L , A M P H O R A ) ; S T R E E T E A S Y ( A PA R T M E N T )
scribed to archaeology magazines. He
scoured catalogues from Christie’s and
Sotheby’s and developed fast relation-
ships with prominent dealers. “He struck
me as someone who has a fine eye,” said
Aboutaam, that is, an innate sense for which
objects held particular significance. Before
long, he was spending millions of dollars
a year on bronze figurines and Roman
mosaics, terra-cotta idols and stone skulls.
At the time, the antiquities trade was
almost entirely unregulated. Fake arti-
facts were common, as were unscrupulous
dealers who had developed numerous
methods, including straw purchases and
forged paperwork, to skirt patrimony laws
designed to keep cultural property from
being smuggled out of its country of origin.
In 1973, John D. Cooney, a renowned cura-
tor at the Cleveland Museum of Art, told
the New York Times that “95 percent of
the ancient art material in this country has
been smuggled in.” Anybody who thought
otherwise, he added, would have to be
“naïve or not very bright.”
Steinhardt was unconcerned. “My over-
whelming motivation in buying ancient art
was their aesthetics,” he once said in a depo-
sition. “And aesthetics had almost nothing
to do with provenance.” He boldly admitted
that he would buy pieces that were “fresh,”
i.e., taken straight out of the ground, and
said he was willing to accept the risk that
those purchases might have broken the law.
As an investor, mastering risk had brought
him wealth and prestige. Why should
antiquities be different?
in 1980, an extraordinary artifact
appeared on the market: a 24-karat gold
libation bowl used by the ancient Greeks to
honor their gods. Crafted in the 4th century
BCE, the bowl, known as a phiale, began as
two pounds of solid gold before being ham-
mered by a master artisan into a shallow
platter and then patterned with the shapes
of acorns, beechnuts, and bees. In the
center, a round knob symbolized the myth-
ical navel of the universe. The phiale was
held by Vincenzo Cammarata, a flamboy-
ant art collector who claimed the piece had
been discovered by a team of utility workers
outside Palermo, Sicily, while they were
digging holes for power lines. The find was
made on the grounds of a state-run archae-
ological site, but the workers never alerted
the Italian authorities.
Instead, for the next decade, Cammarata
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
A stone skull, ca. 7,000 BCE,
and an Attic black-figure
amphora, ca. 550 BCE,
as seen in DA’s office photos
and real-estate listings
of Steinhardt’s apartment.
kept the phiale tucked away in his villa,
quietly showing it to scholars and curators
who could authenticate it as well as Italian
dealers. The best offer he got for it was
$100,000, but he wanted more. Finally, in
1991, he traded the phiale to a Hungarian
dealer based in Switzerland who enlisted
Robert Haber, a prominent New York
dealer, to find an American buyer. Haber in
turn set up a meeting with Steinhardt, who
agreed to buy the phiale for $1.2 million.
Because it hadn’t initially been registered
with the Italian authorities and its move-
ments on the black market were never
recorded, few people even knew of its exis-
tence. For the next four years, Steinhardt
displayed it prominently on his grand piano.
In 1994, Italian authorities investigating
the disappearance of artifacts from a small
Sicilian museum stumbled upon photos of
the phiale among the museum director’s
belongings. Upon interrogation, the direc-
tor admitted not only to selling items from
the museum’s collection but also to helping
Cammarata authenticate his extraordi-
nary gold platter.
The Italians began tracing the phiale’s
journey. Cammarata, they learned,
had made deep inroads with the local
37
tombaroli—tomb robbers—who tracked
visiting archaeologists and returned to
their dig sites after dark to plunder artifacts.
The tombaroli were managed by capizona,
regional bosses connected to the Sicilian
Mafia. The customs forms used to transport
the platter to the U.S. were suspect: Haber
had listed the phiale’s country of origin as
Switzerland rather than Italy. He had also
listed the sale value at $250,000, nearly a
million dollars less than the actual one. In
February 1995, the Italian government for-
mally requested the phiale be returned, and
a U.S. judge agreed. On November 9, while
he was away on vacation with his family,
U.S. Customs agents entered Steinhardt’s
apartment and seized the piece.
The Steinhardts were furious. “I was hor-
rified that people could enter our apartment
without permission and take an object from
our home,” Judy said years later. The intru-
sion soured her on antiquities forever. Her
husband, however, was emboldened. He
challenged the seizure, his lawyers arguing
the “innocent owner” defense: The phiale
shouldn’t be seized because, regardless
of any questions about its importation,
Steinhardt hadn’t known it was stolen prop-
erty when he bought it. The judge wasn’t
convinced. In the purchase agreement for
the phiale, Steinhardt had included a clause
guaranteeing him a refund if the phiale was
“confiscated … by any country or govern-
mental agency whatsoever.” To the judge, it
was a clear suggestion that he had at least
considered the possibility that the phiale
was being illicitly trafficked. He appealed
twice, and lost twice, before the Supreme
Court declined to hear the case. By his own
account, the legal battles cost him another
million dollars.
The Steinhardt case, as it became known,
set a legal precedent: Artifacts falsely
described on customs forms were now sub-
ject to civil forfeiture. But more important,
it was one of the rare times U.S. authorities
had agreed to confiscate an object based
on another country’s patrimony laws. The
implication left museums reeling: If the
phiale was fair game for seizure, the same
might be true of the unprovenanced objects
in their own collections. Fearing a pos-
sible avalanche of patrimony claims from
foreign countries, the American Association
of Museums filed a brief with the courts in
support of Steinhardt’s efforts. When he lost,
a board member at the Met said the case “in
one fell swoop has taken an important step
toward criminalizing the antiquities field.”
The publicity surrounding the phiale’s
repatriation, along with the 1995 dis-
covery by Italian authorities of thousands
of photographs of looted objects in a ware-
house belonging to Giacomo Medici, a pro-
lific black marketeer, exposed the scale of
38 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
antiquities trafficking to the world. And for
the first time, museums began to seriously
interrogate their own collections for stolen
material. In 2008, the Cleveland Museum
returned 14 pieces to Italy that had trav-
eled through the Medici pipeline, and the
Getty agreed to return 40. When it was
revealed that the Euphronios krater, one
of the world’s most famous antiquities, had
been stolen from an Etruscan tomb, the
Met returned it to Italy in 2008 along with
20 other items from its collection.
In the wake of these repatriations, Stein-
hardt doubled down. “It should have turned
me off antiquities,” he said of the phiale
debacle. “But it’s like an addiction to me.”
He had retired from Wall Street in 1995
but continued acquiring artifacts at a rapid
rate, and his reputation for buying unprov-
enanced works was well known. In 2011,
Customs agents used the precedent set by
the phiale case to seize a looted Italian fresco
being shipped to him under falsified
customs information. In 2014, a Sardinian
idol belonging to Steinhardt was pulled
from auction at Christie’s after a researcher
identified it as trafficked. Up to that
point, federal prosecutors had generally
employed a policy known as “seize and
send”: Trafficked objects were returned to
their home countries, the cases were kept
open, but no criminal charges were filed.
Antiquities trafficking remained a largely
civil matter. This status quo suited Stein-
hardt just fine. To him, plausible deniability
was a tenet of faith. “I am simply a collector,”
he said later. “That doesn’t mean that
I should be knowledgeable about areas that
are so specific and so distant from me.”
M
at t h e w b o g d a n o s
first heard Steinhardt’s
name in the early aughts.
At the time, he was
working as a prosecutor
for the Manhattan district
attorney’s office, but his
enduring obsession lay in
the field of antiquities. When he was 12, his
mother had given him a copy of the Iliad,
which he saw as a “travel guide for life”;
he went on to earn both a bachelor’s and a
master’s degree in classics. Even today, his
speech is littered with references to Julius
Caesar and Greek mythology.
After 9/11, Bogdanos was called to active
duty by the Marine Reserves and sent to
Afghanistan and Iraq, where he persuaded
his superiors to let him track down artifacts
that had been looted from the National
Museum in Baghdad. The highly publi-
cized mission earned Bogdanos a dose of
fame, and upon returning to the DA’s office
in 2006, he tried to convince his bosses
to create an antiquities-trafficking unit in
New York. Although they said no, he began
to develop sources anyway—attending
auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, joining
panels at U.N. conferences, and meeting
fellow law-enforcement officers who had
handled art-crime investigations.
Within a few years, Bogdanos had
strung together a series of high-profile
busts, including the 2012 arrest of a rare-
coin dealer at a conference at the Waldorf-
Astoria and the 2016 arrest of renowned
gallerist and Asian-art dealer Nancy
Wiener. In those cases, Bogdanos employed
an obscure provision in New York State law
asserting that an experienced buyer needed
to have made a “reasonable inquiry” into
an object’s legality—otherwise, the buyer
was presumed to know that it was stolen.
(Willful ignorance, in short, was indistin-
guishable from guilt.) And as Bogdanos’s
reputation grew, so did the number of tips
he received. One name seemed to be on
the tongue of every archaeologist and aca-
demic he spoke to: “Steinhardt, Steinhardt,
Steinhardt—you gotta look at Steinhardt,”
Bogdanos recalled.
In February 2017, a case landed on his
desk concerning an artifact on loan to the
Met: a marble sculpture of a bull’s head
dating from the fourth century BCE. The
piece showed all the nuance of the finest
Greek sculpture—rolling folds in the neck,
anatomically accurate veins, the sense of a
skull under the marble skin. A few months
earlier, the director of the Met had sent
a letter to Lebanon’s director general of
antiquities explaining that the bull’s head
appeared to have been stolen decades earlier
from a storage depot north of Beirut; Met
staff had pulled the piece from the floor and
packed it away in storage. The Lebanese
government wanted help getting it back.
By then, Bogdanos had enlisted two HSI
agents, two analysts, and one detective to
help with antiquities investigations. (The
DA’s office would formally announce the
creation of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit,
the ATU, that same year.) Their first priority
was to establish that the bull’s head was, in
fact, stolen. They began to trace its history:
It had been excavated from the Temple of
Eshmun in Lebanon by a French archaeolo-
gist in the 1960s before disappearing in 1981
when Phalangist militants raided the medi-
eval citadel where it was stored. In the 1990s,
after it had circulated on the black market
for more than a decade, a British antiqui-
ties dealer sold it to a Colorado couple, the
Beierwaltes, who were tech entrepreneurs
and longtime antiquities collectors.
But while paging through a cache of
internal memos obtained from the Met,
Bogdanos noticed something curious: The
Beierwaltes owned the bull’s head, but they
weren’t the collectors who had loaned it
 “YOU SEE THIS PIECE?” he said.
“There’s no provenance for it. If I see a piece
and I like it, THEN I BUY IT.”
to the museum. Michael Steinhardt was.
It turned out he had bought the sculpture
from the Beierwaltes in 2010 before selling
it back to the couple in 2014.
Why was Steinhardt’s brief ownership
of the bull’s head erased? Bogdanos soon
found the answer in a series of emails. In
P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E M A N H AT TA N DA ( KO U R O S, H Y D R I A , P H I A L E , F U N E R A RY C H E S T,
April 2014, nearly three years before the
Met contacted the Lebanese government,
Carlos Picón, the curator in charge of the
museum’s Greek and Roman department,
had recognized the piece from a picture in
an archaeological study of Eshmun antiqui-
ties that noted the object had disappeared
decades earlier. Picón contacted the dealer
L I O N V E S S E L ) ; R E M O C A S I L L I / R E U T E R S / A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO ( F R E S CO)
who had arranged the loan on behalf of
Steinhardt and had the sculpture pulled
from the floor—giving Steinhardt, a promi-
nent donor, the chance to unwind the sale
from the Beierwaltes and get his money
back before word got out that the piece was
stolen property. And because Steinhardt
would technically no longer be the owner,
there was no case to be made against him.
One Saturday night a few months after
his discovery, however, Bogdanos was
flipping through a 1998 issue of House
& Garden magazine that featured the
Beierwaltes’ home collection. On a hunch,
he put in a call to the director of the Beirut
National Museum asking if she recog-
nized any of the other pieces on display.
“Oh my God, I have to talk to you!” she
quickly wrote back. A marble torso of a
calf-bearer, which had been photographed
in the Beierwaltes’ bathroom, had been
stolen from the same temple as the bull’s
head. “That’s nice, but where is it now?”
Bogdanos remembered thinking. It took
the ATU analysts months to find it. “Is it
in Tokyo? Is it in Paris? Is it in Geneva? Is
it in Maastricht?” Bogdanos said. “Um, no,
it’s in Michael Steinhardt’s Fifth Avenue
apartment.” Unlike the bull’s head, the calf-
bearer was still in Steinhardt’s possession;
he owned it, which meant law enforcement
could get a warrant to search his home.
In October 2017, J.P. Labbat, the HSI
agent assigned to the investigation, arrived
at Steinhardt’s apartment. “He was furious,”
Labbat said. Inside, objects were every-
where. “There were artifacts on the floor,
artifacts on the windows,” Labbat recalled.
He took photos of the apartment, and when
he returned to the office, he began sending
them to scholars around the world to iden-
tify other pieces that might have been stolen.
One of the experts enlisted was Christos
Tsirogiannis, a forensic archaeologist and
leading scholar of antiquities trafficking
based in the U.K. In a way, he had been
waiting for this call for years. He was the
researcher who in 2014 had identified the
trafficked Sardinian idol Steinhardt put
up for auction. He was also one of the few
people outside Italian law enforcement with
full access to the Medici Archive, the trove of
photos that had spurred repatriations and
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
Artifacts removed from Steinhardt’s
collection. Clockwise from left: A kouros
sculpture, 560 BCE; the Ercolano Fresco
of Hercules as a child fighting a serpent,
50 CE; a Cretan larnax funerary chest,
ca. 1400–1200 BCE; a Corinthian lion
vessel, ca. 600–550 BCE; a gold phiale
of Sicilian origin, fourth century BCE; and
an Antimenes hydria, ca. 515–510 BCE.
reform in the mid-aughts. As Tsirogiannis
cross-checked Labbat’s photos against the
pictures in the archive, he found object after
object that matched, eventually identifying
some 50 pieces that had likely been looted.
With that evidence in hand, Bogdanos
was able to persuade a judge to sign off
on another search warrant, this time for
the January 5 raid that brought the dozen
agents to Steinhardt’s penthouse door.
the evidence bogdanos had been
searching for was now all around him. The
ATU had seized Steinhardt’s hard drives
and the binders his personal curators had
assembled over the past few decades to
organize his collection. What they found
was astonishing. There were photos of
objects still covered in dirt and a letter
from a dealer detailing where tomb raiders
had unearthed particular objects, even a
fax from a dealer cautioning Steinhardt to
“appear as dumb as possible” if questions of
provenance ever came up.
Any lingering notion among authorities
that Steinhardt was an innocent owner
quickly evaporated. (Continued on page 77)
39
 AN INTIMATE FAMILY
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Toothpaste
whenever i travel, the item I find
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Supernatural Plant-Based
From gorgeous European heritage
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Felder’s students use these Japan (that are not just for kids), there
as their palette on fresh are so many trends to notice and curi-
snow. They’re safe osities to try. Below, a few of my favorites.
for both the environment caroline weaver
$14 and consumption
(the inevitably eaten ice).

Sarah’s Silks Rainbow Streamer
Myllicent Felder, founder of
the nature-based outdoor
day-care program Sidney Ridge
Nature Playschool, says these
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a hit with young children all year,
but “we especially love using
them in the winter, as they
encourage gross motor movement
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celebrity shopping
Æ had the same ones ever since. I was washing
Carson Kressley’s
Bath Towels
Æ they’re good for everybody—sometimes my
Kristin Chenoweth’s
Throat Lozenges
Æ It just makes any environment more cozy
Gracie Abrams’s
Heating Pad
I L LU S T R AT I O N : G R A H A M R O U M I E U. P H OTO G R A P H S : G E T T Y I M AG E S ( K R E S S L E Y, C H E N O W E T H , A B R A M S ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F T H E V E N D O R S ( R E M A I N I N G ) .
FROM JAPAN
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$10 Made completely of foam, was much more nuanced
this lightweight disc glides than I had anticipated. It
effortlessly across water, snow, leads with a gentle mint but
and ice and is recommended is a little sweet and fruity and
by Toy Association content has a whisper of something
developer Jennifer Lynch. earthy and floral.”
Kids can invent games with it
Kao Clear Clean
or use it “like a jumbo hockey Nextdent Whitening
puck” or “to create their own Toothpaste, $10
version of curling,” she says.
FROM ITALY
“This does actually taste
like a Sicilian-lemon
Gotham Cotton Bath Towels, $68 confection with a hint of
“I bought these 20 years ago when I got herbal cough drop.”
my apartment in New York City. I went to
Pasta del Capitano 1905
Waterworks, got them monogrammed, and have
Sicily Lemon Toothpaste, $13
them the other day and thought, Wait, how long
FROM INDIA
have I had these? They’ve held up beautifully. The
monograms add an extra layer of personalization, “First-time users will be
and it makes you feel like you’re in a fancy hotel.” surprised to find that it
has the color and texture
of clay and tastes as earthy
Fontus Dry-Mouth Lozenges, $15 and fragrant as an Indian
“As a singer, I find they’re very long-lasting spice shop smells because it
and moisturizing for the throat. I use them contains 18 different herbs
before I go onstage or when I’m on a plane. But and barks. It’s delicious
and leaves my mouth feeling
extraordinarily clean.”
mom will get a jagged cough out of nowhere,
and she just pops one of these and it helps. I just Vicco Vajradanti Ayurvedic
have to have them. I keep them in every purse. Toothpaste, $22 for three
I’ve even gotten Ariana Grande on them.”
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“Babushka Agafia has an
CVS Health Series 100 Mini Heating Pad, $21 impressive selection of
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I bring it with me. It’s maybe half–heating pad, Recipes of Babushka Agafia
half–security blanket at this point.” Toothpaste, $3

42 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 the str at egist 10 0
The Kitchen Edition
dining writer Emma Wartzman pored over the dozens
and dozens of cooking items we’ve surfaced through the years.
Below, a few from her definitive kitchen-essentials roundup.
Perfect-rice rice cooker.
Zojirushi, $200
Non-boring oven mitts.
Dusen Dusen, $24
Unwarpable cutting board.
Material, $35
this thing’s incredible
This Electric Brush Destroyed the Mold
and Grime in My Rental
Super Sonic Scrubber Brush, $28
the windowless bathroom
in my London flat is small and
slightly moldy, visibly worn down
by years of successive tenants.
P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E V E N D O R S
Hours of scrubbing with bleach
and a toothbrush barely made
a difference to the black mold,
rings of limescale, and stubborn
hard-water stains. I was cleaning
the bathroom, sure, but it never
looked clean. Then online I came
across the Super Sonic Scrubber,
a small electric brush with four
interchangeable nylon heads.
All I needed was an arsenal of
cleaning products. Black-mold
spray along the bottom of the
please advise
What’s an
Airport Fit That’s
Not Too Schleppy?
in his l atest column,
Chris Black responded to
a reader who was heading to
London and Stockholm and
wanted to look semi-presentable
for his long-haul flight.
Statement Here, three of his suggestions.
pepper mill.
Æ
Greek Mills, Ostrya Torpid Black
from $95 Down Jacket, $478
For something that feels and looks
more technical but still provides
warmth, go with this zip-up down
jacket from Montreal’s Ostrya. It
isn’t too puffy to sit in, and it stuffs
into its own pocket for storage.
Æ
COS Black Straight-Leg
Twill Pants, $135
These twill pants from COS are
a nice understated option. The fit
is roomy without being sloppy,
Highly effective garlic mincer. which will help you stay
Chef’n, $17 comfortable on your journey but
also let you go straight into
any situation when you land.
Æ
Birkenstock Black Boston
Smooth Leather, $155
If you must wear slip-ons because
you still haven’t set aside time with
our friends at the TSA to get
Colored-glass
PreCheck, go with the Birkenstock
cake stand.
Mosser Glass, Boston in black leather. It’s more
from $44 durable and less cheugy than the
popular taupe suede.
2x2
Weight Benches
by jeremy rellosa
FOLDABLE STATIONARY
UNDER 75 LBS.
shower doors and around the
rim of the basin eliminated mold
when paired with one of the tiny
round brush heads. What would
Flybird Adjustable
normally take about an hour of Deracy Adjustable Weight
Weight Bench, $196 Bench, $300
manual scrubbing was blitzed by
the brush in around ten minutes.
Bleach and the same bristly brush
head destroyed the yellowing base
OVER 75 LBS.
around the sink’s tap. Over the
next week, I experimented with
the scrubber’s brush heads on
my washing-machine tray and
around my hobs, then freshened
up the grout between tiles with
the tapered head.
rachael griffiths Rogue Fitness Adjustable Rep Fitness AB-3000 2.0 FID
Bench 3.0, $595 Adjustable Bench, $320
february 13–26, 2023 | new york 43

The Best
PET-SUPPLY
STORES
€
to find the spots on this list, we polled dozens of
savvy New Yorkers—animal trainers, interior designers,
and pet-shrimp owners among them. For more obsessively
sourced recommendations, including the best movers,
bookstores, and caterers, visit curbed.com.
For Every Kind of
Apartment Pet
PETQUA
2604 Broadway; 212-865-7500;
petqua.com
€shoppers entering Petqua,
a 20-year-old UWS pet shop, are
greeted by the resident parrot,
Panama. In back, they’ll find
George the tortoise eating mixed
greens. In between, “it has the most
extensive variety of things,” says
animal trainer Lydia DesRoche,
owner of a parrot, Guillermo; a dog,
Grace; and three bunnies, Asaka,
Ti Moune, and Armand. In
addition to the usual supplies,
Petqua stocks crickets and roaches
to feed geckos, cages for parakeets,
hay for rabbits, and aquariums
filled with red-eyed tree frogs and
royal pleco fish. And in the rare
case its shelves come up short, Sam
and Ed, who run the store, step in.
“Whenever I’ve said, ‘Oh, I’d like to
try this,’ they’ll order it,” DesRoche
says. “Like when the Nina Ottosson
dog puzzles came out, they were
like, ‘Oh, we’ll get them.’ Whatever
I want them to get, they get.”
For ‘Chewy Vuiton’
Dog Bowls
CANINE STYLES
1195 Lexington Ave.;
212-472-9440; caninestyles.com
€the windows of this dog-
apparel and grooming shop are
44 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
best of new york
filled with puppy mannequins in
gold-accented Italian-leather
collars and lavender-plaid horse-
blanket coats. Inside, the shelves
are stacked with faux-python
dog carriers, ceramic food bowls,
and plush toys emblazoned with
chewy vuiton. “If you wear
Brunello Cucinelli and want your
dog to match, you can find a
version at Canine Styles,” says
freelance interior designer Karen
Elizabeth Marx. Whenever she
visits, she “gets white-glove service”
(an employee, in a glance,
pinpointed the right-size sweater
her Norwich terrier, Willie Nelson,
needed). Former cosmetics
executive John Demsey’s eight
dogs—two goldendoodles, three
pugs, and three French bulldogs—
often dress in the shop’s 100
percent cashmere sweaters.
FOR
FRESH-HAY
DELIVERY
PET ARK
3458 Broadway
212-368-8200
petarkharlem.com
styptic powder (used to stanch bleeding), Timothy hay, and healthy rabbit treats. “It’s a mom-and-pop
store that covers every pet out there,” she adds. Since moving farther away, Biggs takes advantage of
Pet Ark’s speedy same-day-delivery service (available to clientele in Harlem and the Bronx) to get fresh
bales of hay dropped at her door—her order usually shows up about half an hour after she’s placed it.
By Kitty Guo
For Reptiles elephant grass, and leashes upcycled
from rock-climbing ropes, which
NATURE’S REEF AND REPTILE are made in house. Photos of the
124-11 Jamaica Ave., Jamaica; 917-
300-2293; naturesreefandreptile.com craftswomen are on display above
kente bandannas and chew toys
€billing itself “NYC’s only shaped like onigiri and piñatas.
exotic reptile store,” Nature’s Reef Go Kasai, a PR consultant, and his
and Reptile stocks everything from Yorkie, Leonidas, first encountered
tank heaters to terrarium plants and Gone to the Dogs at a Fort Greene
feeder insects, like the crickets, farmers’ market. He recently bought
mealworms, and roaches that Leonidas a pretzel-shaped toy; after
forensic photographer Jolene Lupo his Yorkie destroys it, Kasai plans
buys her two leopard geckos. Live to return the remnants to the store,
fish are for sale as well as snakes, which will recycle the scraps and
geckos, and the popular bearded give him a discount on a new one.
dragon. Store owner Naz Rhiman,
who breeds the animals himself,
guarantees they come with a clean For Amateur
Aquascapers
bill of health. With its burbling blue
aquariums and shaded, leafy
enclosures, the store doubles as a
PACIFIC AQUARIUM
46 Delancey St.; 212-995-5895
shooting location for Starz’s Power
Book III: Raising Kanan, a crime €being inside Pacific Aquarium
drama about drug smuggling. “In is like being underwater: Upon
the show, it’s supposed to be a front,” entrance, there’s a waterfall; the
Lupo says. The store closes during walls are painted baby blue. It
filming, so check out its Instagram features an entire aquatic-plant
(@nature_reef_reptile) before section, aquascape materials, and
you go to make sure it’s open. aquariums filled with dwarf pea
puffers and angelfish. The 41-year-
old establishment is an “eclectic
For Sustainably Made cave of wonder” where every
Dog Gear “square inch is maximized with
fish tanks, plants, or supplies,” says
GONE TO THE DOGS
architectural designer Madeleine
103 Seventh Ave., Park Slope;
gonetothedogs.co Eggers. “You don’t see any sad snails
or nearly dead shrimp in hiding.
€in 2021, Santos Agustin and They’re all happy.” Eggers visited
Jennifer Wong opened a brick-and- the shop after two failed attempts
mortar location of Gone to the Dogs at setting up a freshwater tank
after years of selling handmade for her pet shrimp. The owner,
goods at pop-ups. As you enter, you’ll Chi, explained “everything that
see a Polaroid wall of puppy patrons was wrong with our previous
and, in the back of the workshop, aquariums,” she says. “He was like,
a neon sign reading dog goods ‘Oh, you didn’t have enough good
that do good (the sustainable bacteria. Don’t change the water
merchandise is by female artisans all at once.’” He sent her off with
from low-income and immigrant three shrimp and a pet snail;
communities the world over). The a few months later, she had 18 baby
shelves are filled with compostable shrimp and the vegetation in the
felt toys, dog-bed baskets made of tank was flourishing.
€pet ark’s narrow storefront, sandwiched
between a grocery store and a wire-transfer chain, is
easy to miss. But in an area where there are few pet-
supply shops, the Harlem emporium is well
appreciated. The store focuses on dogs, cats, and fish
but also has a “thoughtful” bird selection and plenty
of bunny and reptile gear, according to Caroline
Biggs, a market editor at Business of Home, who
used to live across the street. She owns two rabbits,
I L LU S T R AT I O N B Y P E T E G A M L E N
Dennis Hopper and Daffodil, and first stumbled into
Pet Ark “in a bind, panicking,” because she had
trimmed a bunny nail too short. She walked out with
 the look book goes to

EMS Training CONNOR HOBAN

Belle Harbor
The FDNY’s newest emergency Why’d you decide to
medical technicians gathered for do this? I had a lot
their final day of instruction of other jobs. I did a lot
at Fort Totten. of DoorDash; I worked
interviews by kelsie schrader at the gym as a trainer.
and jenna milliner-waddell But I wanted a real,
stable job, and I wanted
something that was
noble. My grandfather
had a stroke in the
summer, and seeing the
way the EMTs were so
nice to him and made
him feel real good
made me want to do
that for others.
Was the training
intense? Very. It was
paramilitary training.
We had to be clean
shaven, do push-ups,
planking, running—it
all sucked. It hurt and
was painful. But then,
all of a sudden, it’s the
last day and you’re ready
to graduate and the drill
instructors are saying
that we’ve blossomed.

Photographs by DeSean McClinton-Holland 45

 the look book: new fdny emts

What made you

want to be an EMT?
I lost my father when
I was 4. My sisters
and I wanted to do
our part. One works
as a physician’s
assistant; my other
sister is about to join
the NYPD. My mom’s
a nurse, and I liked
the medical field,
but college wasn’t
for me. So I decided
I wanted to be on an
ambulance, bringing
them to the people
like my mother.

CHRISTOPHER O’CONNOR PATRICK MINIHANE SERENITY FORD

Lake Ronkonkoma Broad Channel Laurelton

What was the

most memorable
day of training?
Well, before I started,
I lost 80 pounds just
to be prepared. But in
actual training? Had
to be the day they
simulated an arterial
bleed and we had to
respond. They created
a whole scene where
someone pretended
to slit their wrists—
fake blood down
the hallway
and everything.

ROBERT MALDONADO BRITTANI WILLIAMS-FELL JUSTIN PEDRO

Times Square Harlem Canarsie

AHSAN ABDULLAH COLLEEN ONDERDONK DEVIN VANSTEEKELENBURG

Jersey City Stony Point Holtsville

46 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 How do you
unwind after
training? Fishing.
I usually go around
Sheepshead Bay. We
rent a charter boat
and just go out and
go fish. There are
flounder, sea bass,
porgies. It’s a lot:
Every call we get,
that’s the worst day
of someone’s life.

ANTHONY SALEME IVAN MELO ALVAREZ JOSE LAGUDA

Roslyn Heights Williamsburg Bensonhurst

VICTORIA BRADFORD IYANLA EDWARDS JUNON JEAN BAPTISTE

Broad Channel Castle Hill East Flatbush

What’d you think

of all the rules? The
point was to emphasize
teamwork, so if one
person messes up,
everybody messes up,
and we have to run to
the other side of the
parade grounds and
drop into push-up
position. Once, I forgot
my safety vest and
had to do push-ups
by myself. The drill
instructors took mercy
on my classmates.

CHRISTOPHER CASTIGLIONE COLIN HARRISON JOHN PAUL CARRILLO

Holtsville Port Jervis Ridgewood

february 13–26, 2023 | new york 47

 design hunting

48
The Façade
The large steel-framed windows by Optimum Window
Manufacturing replaced the glass bricks and smaller windows.

The Mezzanine
The Eames chair
was a wedding gift
to Peter Vits and
Zoe Vidali.

The Cellar Floor

They’re working with
Elias Samuel Grover on
developing an indoor
garden. The sectional
and most of the other
pieces of furniture
are from a previous
apartment of the
couple’s. The image of
the flower is projected
onto the wall; they also
screen movies there.
Let the Light In
Peter Vits and Zoe Vidali opened up their
Noho triplex with a 27-foot-high atrium.
by wendy goodman
Photographs by Annie Schlechter

The Kitchen Table

“This was from an Italian company
called Fantoni,” Vits says. “I was selling
these tables, and Bloomberg L.P.
bought a lot for the offices.”
 t’s almost like a townhouse within
a building,” Peter Vits says of the three-
story Noho space in an 1858 cast-iron
building that he and his wife, the
architect Zoe Vidali, first moved into in
2015. The 4,200-square-foot loft
hadn’t been redone since the 1980s,
when it had been the home, studio, and
gallery of an artist who was one of the original
tenants of the building when it became a
co-op. The artist had put in three spindly spiral
staircases and a Jacuzzi bathtub in the middle
of the bedroom on the lowest of the floors. The
only source of natural light was a back wall of
glass bricks and a high window.
It was a bit like a casino with the real world
blocked out. Still, Vits and Vidali didn’t start
renovating immediately. “I think you have to
live in the space before you start the work,”
Vidali says. “Then we started working on the
drawings a year later.”
Vits was born in Belgium, studied business, The Atrium
and came to New York in 1999 to crash on the Vidali and Vits’s Bedroom Vidali, center, chats
couch of an old roommate. Vidali grew up in It overlooks the 27-foot- with Vits, standing on
high atrium. The painting
Greece, studied architecture and engineering, the mezzanine level.
is by Shiho Amano, the
and moved to New York in 2001 after a few steel doors from De Rooy.
years in Los Angeles. The two met and set up
a showroom for Vits’s furniture-importing
business, Wing Partners, in their shared apart-
ment in Chelsea in 2004.

The Sauna
Vidali designed it extra large because “I want to share it
with friends after a workout or a yoga session,” says Vits.
“Yoga is not happening yet, but hopefully soon.”

50 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 design hunting
The Kitchen
It was designed by Vidali with Key
Cucine fixtures, and the cabinets
feature a built-in herb garden. The
wood beams are repurposed from the
renovation. The black-and-white print
is by Yiannis Iliakis.
Then, with the help of Vidali, Vits
pivoted Wing to the business of interior
glass walls. “You can sell a glass wall, but
then you have to install it,” Vits says. “So
that means you have to measure it and
know Autocad, for starters.” Vidali had the
know-how. “We were already a couple
then,” Vits says. “I said, ‘Let’s jump on this
together; I cannot do it without you,’ and it
worked out perfectly.” The products they
sold to others were also useful in
illuminating the dark space they had set
about renovating.
The living room, media room, bar, and
sauna are on the cellar level. The main
floor—kitchen and dining—is at ground
level. And their bedroom and office are on
the mezzanine upstairs.
Half of the floor toward the Crosby
Street side was eliminated to create a
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
27-foot-tall “triple height” in the living
room. “The new main structural-steel
beams were installed before removing
the original floor structure,” Vidali says.
Some of those original wood beams were
then reused to support the new floors;
they repurposed much of the rest deco-
ratively. The process was a complicated
ballet. “A majority of construction took
place while the original main floor was in
place, as the contractor was using it in-
stead of scaffolding in the open area, Vi-
dali adds. “Once removed, it was a great
reveal. And we could finally see the true
extent of the three-level height of the
space that had only existed in our mind’s
eye and in renderings.”
Before the renovation, she says, “our
bedroom was on the lower level, where
the garden is today. There was no glass
wall or access to the areaway, just a few
feet of glass-brick clerestory.”
Once they got to thinking about the
alterations to the back façade, where the
large windows have replaced the glass
bricks, Vidali contacted Prendergast
Laurel Architects, which had helped redo
the façade of the building years ago, so as
the architect of record for the renova-
tions, the firm would be familiar with the
historic-district stipulations. ■
51
 food

Brooks Headley
Loves Every
Inch of His
Restaurant
The new Superiority Burger
is close—he swears.
by chris crowley

I
t’s early on a Friday night in Williamsburg, and one person
is dancing at Union Pool. A version of the late-’70s power-pop
anthem “Starry Eyes,” performed by the Japanese quartet the
Tweezers, plays on the speakers. “Classy as hell cover!” the set’s
DJ, Brooks Headley, tells me. “No one in the room is going to
care about the music we’re playing, which is what we want. We’re
just trying to have fun for ourselves and the seven of our friends that
actually show up.” Headley, in loose-fitting work pants and a baggy
sweatshirt, is here mostly because he likes to keep busy. “If I’m not
working, I go insane,” he says. “For me, not having a 16-hour-a-day
kind of job made me go a little batty.”
Headley has been filling his hours waiting for Superiority Burger
to reopen. The original incarnation of his vegetarian counter spot, a
240-square-foot white-tiled hole-in-the-wall on 9th Street near
Tompkins Square Park, closed for good in November 2021, a few
months after Headley announced he was moving the restaurant to
a far larger location a block and a half away.
The first Superiority Burger opened in 2015 and came together in
11 weeks. To make it happen, Headley and his partners used what-
ever equipment was available, like a half-size oven that either baked
focaccia perfectly or completely crapped out halfway through. A few
school desks were used as tables, and if Headley had to work the
ice-cream machine, he did so right next to the counter. “We outgrew
the space on the first day,” he says.
At the outset, the menu was supposed to be very tight (veggie
burgers, broccoli salad, ice cream, and sorbet), but it kept growing
as the restaurant’s popularity took off and Headley offered dozens
of new items on a rotating basis: Monday nights brought “tofu-fried
tofu” sandwiches; Tuesdays, “fancy desserts.” Sundays were for hero general manager Sheryl Heefner and the musician Matt Sweeney—
sandwiches that changed every week. It was like no other restau- revealed that they would move Superiority Burger to the space that
rant in the city—specials would often be added to the menu in the had previously housed the East Village late-night staple Odessa, a
middle of service, for example—and to Headley’s friends, like the plan that Headley understood might bother the Vanishing New
pastry chef Shuna Lydon, that’s why it worked: “My sense was that York types but would be done in part out of respect for the
Superiority Burger was him as a whole.” Ukrainian diner’s legacy. “The city, it changes. I loved going to
The place also helped bring about an era of great meat-free junk Odessa. That’s why I did everything in my power to get the lease,”
food. Headley’s foil-wrapped grain-and-legume patties were crum- Headley says, pointing out that Odessa’s former owners are now
pled and smashed in a manner that perfectly replicated roadside his landlords.
burgers, and they predated the arrival of Impossible Burgers in He thought it would take five months. Today, a year and a half
New York by 13 months. Critics loved them, and crowds—lines of later, he has started referring to the new Superiority Burger as “the
customers waiting to order as well as people taking food to eat on theoretical vegetable restaurant,” though there are some indica-
the sidewalk—became a regular presence outside. tions that it’s getting close to opening. For the past few months,
In the summer of 2021, Headley and his business partners—the Headley has teased the return on Instagram with a slow drip of

52 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3 Photographs by Dolly Faibyshev


photos, like shots of vegan tutti-frutti pie and a golden, flaky round
of potato-and-lentil pastie. One recent picture prompted a fan to
comment, “Brooks (or whoever has social access) I am personally
begging you to open.” As the pace of posts increased throughout
January, so did the desperation among the commenters. In
response to a photo of fruit cobbler, one person wrote, “Stop! For
the sake of my sanity, please fucking stop!!”
Headley would like to be open by now, really, but he blames the
delay on the usual bureaucratic headaches. Plus there are still some
details to figure out (will music be played in the entire space?
Should banquettes remain distressed or be fixed up?). Whenever
it opens, the new location on Avenue A will take Superiority Burger
up to roughly 80 seats from its previous count of about six. It will
be open almost all day, with a liquor license that doesn’t require
Headley, cleaning up at Superiority Burger’s new location.
the restaurant to close until 4 a.m. The savory menu will be two to
three times longer (Headley seems particularly excited about a
cucumber sandwich; he texts me one day that it’s “for the daytime
‘tea menu’—haha”), and for the first time, there’s a full pastry team,
led by Darcy Spence, who has been assembling a roster of vege-
tarian desserts to fit the diner aesthetic: ricotta pie with “oranged”
apricot, berry pies, and mango pie with vegan coconut custard.
“They are destroying R&D,” Headley says. “They’re getting to the
point where I’ve got to stop being like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve
ever fucking tasted.’ I’ve got to calm down.”
The menu development is taking place inside the original
Superiority Burger while the new space is being finished. Currently,
the windows at the new address are papered over, and there’s a
coming soon sign posted out front. Inside, a pastry case, ready to
february 13–26, 2023 | new york 53
 food

be filled with all of those pies and cakes, con- Headley would invite musicians in to eat
tains a plate of plastic spaghetti that Headley while they were touring through town,
brought back from a trip to Japan. A friend treating them like VIPs, and he soon became
who uses a wheelchair came in to help ensure known as “the punk-rock pastry chef,” a title
that the place is accessible, and the bathroom that didn’t accurately capture his style; he
is lined in soft-pink floral wallpaper. “I was was influenced by, among others, Claudia d rin k s
shooting for, like, a 1971 grandma’s powder Fleming, who is known for refined versions
room,” Headley says, “and I think I got it
pretty close.”
of homestyle desserts.
At the same time, Headley was nurturing Via Carota’s
growing up outside Baltimore, Headley
would make frequent trips with his mother to
a recreational obsession with veggie burgers.
He cooked them for friends and hosted pop-
ups. Eventually, it became clear that he
Negronis …
visit his uncles in Hoboken. They introduced
him to bands—the B-52’s, Talking Heads—
should look for investors and turn this fas-
cination into a business. Sweeney, a record
Without
and restaurants. In 1992, Headley dropped
out of Towson University to work at a Kinko’s
in Richmond, Virginia, and to tour with his
producer and guitarist, got involved after
tasting a two-week-old burger that Headley
had stashed in a friend’s freezer.
the Wait
band, Born Against. (The Kinko’s gig was Æfor those
helpful for printing out flyers.) Even though on the day Headley invites me into the nights when wading
Headley cooked at the time, he had no inter- new Superiority Burger, he’s worried about through throngs of
est in becoming a chef. “I would make food- finding an adequate supplier of vegan
related presents for buns—“We’re in a pur- tourists feels just
people. I would make gatory stage with the a little too much,
the worst focaccia buns!”—and about the Rita Sodi and Jody
ever and wrap it with soundtrack. There is Williams have
a bow,” he says, “but music playing from
it was never a plan to Turkish radio streamed
launched Via Carota
work in restaurants— via a service that lets you Craft Cocktails
a lot of people just fall listen to stations from (drinkviacarota.com),
into it.” around the world. “We a new line of bottled
After touring, he found a tango channel
went back to finish from Reggio Emilia
classics: a gentle
school before moving that fucking slays,” he martini, negronis both
Cauliflower-salad sandwiches
to Washington, D.C., on vegan bread.
tells me. red and white, a sharp
where he got an office He says he’s keeping Manhattan, a stiff
job organizing files. He quit a few weeks later, the original space and has a plan for it but
finding work instead at Galileo, an acclaimed won’t reveal anything else. I ask Headley
old-fashioned, and
Dupont Circle Italian spot, and the Ritz- whether, given Superiority Burger’s instant yes, even an espresso
Carlton. A move west for another band called success and its seemingly straightforward martini. “If I got this at
Wrangler Brutes meant finding another job, model to replicate, he has considered further the bar at Via Carota,
and he landed at Campanile, a Cali-Italian expansion or—perish the thought—franchis- I’d be happy,” said
institution led by chef Nancy Silverton. ing. “I don’t want to have an empire of restau-
By 2008, Headley had moved back east rants,” he says. “I just want to have one busy- one taster after a sip
and learned that Del Posto, which had as-shit, fun, kind of disjointed place in the of a chilled negroni.
opened a few years earlier, was looking for a East Village.” (There is one other Superiority Each bell-shaped,
P H OTO G R A P H : LO B M E Y R G L A S S E S CO U R T E S Y O F S T I L L F R I E D

new pastry chef. He had no formal training Burger, in Tokyo, run by two customers who chevron-patterned
beyond his work experience, and little New had a hard time finding vegan food in the
York experience, but he wrote a letter anyway city. Headley and his cooks helped open it in crystal bottle costs
and was called in. “I guess I was just very 2019, and he still makes regular trips there, $39 and contains the
enthusiastic,” he says. mostly as an excuse to visit Japan, one of his equivalent of four to
After three tastings, Headley was hired and favorite places in the world.) six drinks (depending
quickly reshaped the restaurant’s desserts, The problem with expanding in a serious
eschewing the intricate presentations typical way is simply, he says, that “I never wanted to
on your pour). If the
of fine dining for subtler creations like butter- miss anything.” In the past when he was launch goes well, the
scotch semifreddo, brown-butter panna traveling, if he landed in New York at 6 p.m., duo already has its next
cotta, and goat-cheese mousse with celery he could be at the restaurant by 7:15. “It was product planned: “We
sorbet. He was given free rein, far more than my little hive,” he says. “I just want to work
is typical for a pastry chef at an established here and fucking die. I’m going to tell every-
want to offer a spritz,”
restaurant, mostly because Del Posto’s head one that if I drop dead, keep working. Don’t says Williams, “a
chef, Mark Ladner, was a fast fan. even close that day—just keep going.” ■ negroni sbagliato.” c.c.

54 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3 Photograph by Marcus McDonald

A Manhattan,
a martini,
and a negroni.
The CULTURE PAGES

Caroline Polachek
Loves Mess
For her mucky, bold, feminine
new album, the singer gets primal.
By Rachel Handler
 Caroline Polachek and Kurt,
the cloned Przewalski’s horse, at the
San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

Photograph by Lindsay Ellary february 13–26, 2023 | new york 57

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

says. “It’s the attitude of a mess rather than

the actuality of it.” She wanted the album to
sound that way too—mucky, bold, feminine,
contradictory. “Diva gets thrown around as
an insult,” she says, “but the diva archetype
is capable of conveying vitality and comfort
aroline polachek wasn’t out to scandalize the zoo. at the same time. I’ve been thinking about
She made the three-hour journey from Los Angeles, where she was deep how to do my own version of that.”
We’ve just reached our destination when
in final-edit mode for her new album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, the zoo informs us that we’re not allowed
to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, a wildlife preserve in Escondido, with to touch Kurt or let him touch us, in hopes
the purest of intentions: She wanted to see Kurt. He’s the world’s first that he will start behaving less like a clone
successfully cloned Przewalski’s horse, an endangered breed with a fun and more like a horse born of the Lord’s
will. “He needs to learn how to be a wild
little mohawk that needed some scientific intervention to survive. As a horse,” explains one affable staffer. “He
self-proclaimed Connecticut “horse girl” who obsessed over and rode doesn’t need to know how to be a person’s
horses until she was 15, Polachek hoped to spend a couple of hours learning horse.” Polachek nods agreeably, pulling off
about Kurt’s unconventional genesis and marveling at his unnatural a black leather jacket and cargo pants to
reveal a sort of deconstructed equestrian
splendor. “It feels kind of symbolic and beautiful to do this,” she tells me look: a red mesh bodysuit paired with
from the back of a truck, riding bumpily to Kurt’s habitat. a gold 1980s Issey Miyake corset, sheer
The mood is cheerful, for now: she and “I get told quite often when I meet people tights, and thigh-high leather waders.
I, two extremely polite zoo staff members, that I’m shorter than they think I am and She tells me the ensemble, which she put
and a photographer. Polachek is particularly that I’m funnier than they think I am,” she together earlier in the week with stylist Kat
moved by the mud around us, which has says. (For the record, she is five-foot-six.) Typaldos, was inspired by “girls at clubs in
oozed and twisted into new shapes after Polachek, 37, has spent nearly two Ibiza in the ’70s.” It’s laced with the same
the recent torrential rains; the zoo team decades in the music industry, seamlessly graceful, provocative insouciance that she
describes this as “a mess,” but she longingly shifting from early-aughts indie-band girl projects in Desire’s music videos, in which
calls it “mud architecture.” “A lot of the (she co-headlined Chairlift, a quirky synth- she wears things like a “normcore baseball
motifs I’m playing with on this record are pop band we both agree could have existed cap” with a white apron that exposes the
about using elemental, primal textures. Dirt only during the brief, naïve hopefulness of top of her ass cheeks. (“Ass cleavage is in
and the earth coming up in different ways— the Obama era) to esteemed songwriter for 2023,” she jokes.)
volcanoes, especially—as a metaphor for and producer (she co-wrote Beyoncé’s “No “Oh, you’re really changing!” remarks
the subconscious and for everything we’ve Angel” as well as songs for Charli XCX, one of the staff members, visibly alarmed.
repressed during the pandemic,” Polachek Travis Scott, and Pentatonix spinoff Super- Polachek smiles serenely. The photog-
says. “The elemental vitality that springs fruit) to concept-album artist (one-off rapher directs her to kneel on top of the
up again.” I ask if she’s referring to the thick experimental ambient releases under the truck’s cab so we can capture Kurt roaming
brown lava that she graphically vomits up aliases Ramona Lisa and CEP) to a solo cloneishly in the distance. She vogues while
in the video for the album’s fourth single, artist writing and producing avant-garde simultaneously asking questions of the
“Welcome to My Island.” She laughs. electro-pop under her government name, increasingly anxious zoo employees (“Does
“I mean, literally, yes.” all while singing arias and starring in Loewe Kurt ever exhibit behaviors that you haven’t
Where her last album, 2019’s yearning, campaigns on the side. She has an effort- introduced him to?”) and weighing in on
hyperintense Pang, chronicled falling in less, slightly haunted prettiness that’s been various aspects of the photo shoot (“I feel
love long-distance, Desire is freer, looser, historically difficult for music journalists to like we’re getting enough ambient bounce
weirder, and campier. On the Spanish- describe without sounding as if they want from here”). Polachek directs and manages
guitar-tinged “Sunset,” she’s “wearing black to kidnap her. (Previous attempts to do so like this all day. She does the same thing
to mourn the sudden loss of innocence,” include phrases like “siren,” “synth fairy behind the scenes of her musical output,
but that’s “all right, because it hides the dirt princess,” “elf queen,” “final girl,” “unearthly producing and compiling her own vocals,
and hides the wine”; she brings up Wayne’s apparition,” and “surreal species of Disney co-directing and editing all of her music
World on “Crude Drawing of an Angel”; princess.”) When I list these descriptors videos, even clipping them into bite-size
she’s “sexting sonnets under the table” in aloud, she raises her eyebrows. “I feel like, versions for Instagram and TikTok. “At the
“Billions.” The title “Welcome to My Island” as a woman artist, it’s always a struggle to beginning, it was something I had to do,
refers to a “sarcastic phrase” she’ll some- be thought of as human,” she says. but it was also something I loved,” she says.
times use in conversation to “make fun of Polachek thought about this constantly “I think it’s an act of feminist agency to know
my own solitude.” The video for the song while making Desire, whose wide- your tools because then you can speak the
begins, she explains, with “me having an ranging visuals riff on bodily fluids, language that everyone understands.”
orgasm on a cracked terra-cotta floor.” It’s Greek mythology—something that has “You have excellent taste,” says the
a sonorous orgasm—Polachek, who sounds fascinated her since she named her photographer, and Polachek replies,
like Dolores O’Riordan swallowed Enya and childhood horse Ariadne and that she “Thanks, queen.”
Björk, stretches her otherworldly, haters- comes back to throughout her art—Italian With Desire, she wanted to unclench that
will-say-it’s-Auto-Tuned vocals over each photographer Teresa Ciocia’s work, and steering wheel a little. She describes Pang as
ecstatic note. It’s deliberately exaggerated, Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography. “Pedro “precise, crystal cut, finely sanded” and says
cheeky even, telegraphing a kind of irrever- captures the contradictions that can exist Desire was about “unlearning technique”
ence for which Polachek rarely gets credit. within women in a very human way,” she and feeling lost inside the songs. She wrote

58 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 and recorded it mainly with her trusted
producer, Danny L Harle (of PC Music
fame), in bits and pieces over the course of
three years: while living in London during
lockdown with her boyfriend, visual artist
Matt Copson; while touring Pang on her
own and with Dua Lipa; and with friends at
Italian Airbnbs at the foot of Mt. Etna. She
found the cathartic tone that ties the album
together after the 2020 death of her father
from covid-19. “I had been pretty depressed
after that happened, but being in Italy was a
complete energy reset,” she says. It inspired
a new sort of Ray of Light–era vibrancy for
Polachek, who mixed acoustic instruments
and electronic production to create a free-
wheeling, energetic sound she describes as
“Tantric.” “Feeling so connected to antiquity
and all the plagues that have happened over
and over and how resilient art and artists
have been brought me back to life,” she says.
“It gave me a spiritual road map to finishing
the album.” She listened to ’90s dance music
and Timbaland productions, trying to make
songs without “a Taylor Swift chorus, where
suddenly you’re in this massive anthemic
moment—instead, you’re just coasting.”
At the zoo, the staffers request that
Polachek please get off the hood of
the truck and maybe put on a jacket.
“Normally, we wouldn’t have something
like this, where you’re not wearing a lot of
clothes in the area,” says one. “I appreci-
ate the artisticness, but it’s not the image
we usually portray. I’m not sure if there’s
something we can do to make it look more
P H OTO G R A P H : S T Y L I N G B Y K AT T Y PA L D O S ; H A I R B Y A N T H O N Y R O N Q U I L LO ; M A K E U P B Y L E O C H A PA R R O
… normal?” There isn’t. The photographs
look both surreal and high fashion, like
Polachek is beckoning the viewer into a
Hayao Miyazaki–style dream world. Her
Polachek in the “Welcome to My Island” video.
connection with Kurt’s ilk stretches back to
her early days in Greenwich, Connecticut,
where she moved after a childhood stint in
Tokyo and where, as a “really tiny” kid, she
would sit in the library researching prehis-
toric horse genealogy before hitting the sta-
bles. Decades later, when crafting the visual
tone of Desire, Polachek immersed herself
in ancient cave paintings and was surprised
to find that many feature what appear to be
Przewalski’s horses, descendants of one of
the earliest domesticated breeds. She gazes
at Kurt from the side of the truck, and he
pees suddenly, forcefully.
“No one could hear
a song like
‘So Hot You’re
Hurting My Feelings’
and think
I’m not joking.”
The staff member clears her throat. “Is
there any shot you can get with her more
clothed or with a jacket?” she asks again.
I look at Kurt, himself nude, quietly wan-
dering the grass with no concept of human
shame. Polachek and the photographer
apologize, but the other staffer is not
appeased. “I think we’re done,” he says.
Polachek nods. “No one wants a scandal,”
she tells me moments later in the bathroom.
We retreat to a nearby park to finish the
photo shoot, hopping into a big white van
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
with her team. In the coming weeks, in the
midst of doing tech and choreo and deciding
on outfits and putting together backdrop
video animations for an onstage “theatrical
volcanoscape,” Polachek will be wrapping
up a song she made for an A24 film. I ask
if, like many artists nowadays, she’s finding
it financially difficult to tour, and she looks
me in the eye. “Full disclosure: I’m taking
my European tour at a loss,” she says. “But
it’s worth it for me. I’ve always leaned to the
slightly riskier side of reinvestment back
into the project than maybe would be wise.
But it’s because I believe in it.”
At the park, Polachek directs Typaldos
to take video of her running across a high-
way that slices the grounds in half. A man
on her team—who is wearing a cowboy hat
and a Royal Tenenbaums–esque red track
jacket and introduces himself as a “TikTok
mercenary”—silently trails Polachek across
the mud and grass, occasionally asking her
to do something strange (to dangle a carrot
in front of her face, to stand in the middle
of a puddle).
At one point, she swings the carrot car-
toonishly and he stops her: “You’re doing too
much.” She laughs wryly. “As ever,” she says.
Polachek displays a casual savviness with
social media. Her “So Hot You’re Hurting
My Feelings,” from Pang, went viral on Tik-
Tok during the pandemic with its goofy,
flirty choreo, and her online persona is
off the cuff and self-deprecating. In mid-
January, she inexplicably went live for
five straight minutes on Instagram, eating
an entire plate of pasta to the sounds of
Frank Sinatra. Like any avant-garde art-
ist, she sometimes misses her audience in
translation. The week before we meet, she
tweeted, “while I realize it’s a huge compli-
ment, i’m endlessly fucking annoyed by
being told i’m ‘this generation’s Kate Bush.’
she is our generation’s Kate Bush, she is an
active artist who’s topping the charts, and is
irreplaceable. I, meanwhile, am this genera-
tion’s Caroline Polachek.” The dunking and
memeing began immediately. Although she
was indeed referencing a recent interview
in which she was referred to as “Gen Z’s
Kate Bush,” people fixated on what they saw
as her self-aggrandizement.
“I love the conceit of calling myself
‘the Caroline Polachek of our generation’
because people automatically assumed
I was really blowing my own horn,” she
says. I ask if it’s frustrating to be seen as so
self-serious, even humorless. “No one could
hear a song like ‘So Hot You’re Hurting My
Feelings’ and think I’m not joking,” she says
shortly before dropping down on all fours in
the grass for the camera. “But maybe people
want a more sincere version of me because
it’s easier to process.” ■
59
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

Lorraine
Hansberry
Saw It
Coming
Her nearly forgotten
play resurfaces at
BAM, current as ever.
By JA C K S O N M C H E N RY

the sign in sidney

brustein’s window
is at the BAM Harvey Theater
through March 24.

only two of Lorraine

Hansberry’s plays were staged
during her lifetime. You’re
probably familiar with the first,
A Raisin in the Sun; Hansberry
was just 28 when her story
about a Black Chicago family hit
Broadway in 1959, launching
her to fame. But you may never
have heard of The Sign in
Sidney Brustein’s Window,
which premiered on Broadway
in 1964 and closed a few days
before the playwright’s death
in 1965. While fellow artists,
including James Baldwin and
Mike Nichols, campaigned to
keep the show open, some critics
seemed to think it was too much
of a departure: They expected
Hansberry to write about
working-class Black families.
This was about Greenwich
Village bohemians, and only one
character was specified as Black.
This month, The Sign gets its
first New York revival since
1972. A new production at bam,
directed by Anne Kauffman
and still set in the 1960s, stars
Oscar Isaac as Sidney, an
idealistic alt-press publisher,
and Rachel Brosnahan as his
wife, the struggling actress Iris.

60 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3 Photographs by Philip Montgomery

Brosnahan and Isaac, who had never worked together before, had to build the tempestuous dynamic between
Iris and Sidney. “We’ve had a lot of fun finding all the colors of the relationship together,” Brosnahan says.

february 13–26, 2023 | new york 61

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

The play follows Sidney as he

gets involved with the campaign
of a seemingly progressive
politician (thus the sign
in the window) and strains
his marriage. Neither Isaac nor
Brosnahan—who was coming
off her title role in the series
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—
knew much about the play
before being approached for it.
Both actors say they see
Hansberry as exploring the
limits of self-proclaimed allies.
“It’s very much a play of
its time,” says Isaac. “But
you hear this prophetic voice
that’s speaking to things that
are about to unfold in the
civil-rights movement and
the psychedelic movement
with the kind of division
and fatigue that’s happening
now. Everyone in the
audience gets provoked.” ■

top left
Brosnahan listens to Joan Baez
as she gets into character.
“Iris is described as very childlike,
so I’ve been doing a lot of
movement to loosen my body
and let go of the center,” she says.

top right
Backstage, Isaac prepares for his
performances with vocal exercises
and a “super-mellow” playlist
made by a friend who does tea
ceremonies. “I’ve got pictures of
my family everywhere,” he says.
“I used to feel like I wanted to go
away from my life to understand
a different life, and I’m playing with
what happens when both sides
come together.” He lives nearby and
commutes to the theater by bike.

bottom left
Brosnahan makes her entrance as
Iris. “I was thinking this would be
a nice respite from the exhaustion
of Mrs. Maisel,” she says, “but it’s a
totally different kind.”

bottom right
Isaac says Sidney and Iris are
“playful with each other and really
vicious.” He adds, “It’s been about
finding the facility between those
things and building trust.”

62 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
february 13–26, 2023 | new york 63
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
close read
Can Prestige TV Be a Video Game?
HBO turned The Last of Us into unmissable television.
So why does it feel like something’s missing?
By andrea long chu
in the third episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, a pair of
postapocalyptic travelers search through an abandoned gas
station ten miles outside Boston. “No way!” exclaims Ellie (Bella
Ramsey), the savvy teenage girl whom gruff smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal)
is tasked with transporting across the country. Most of the population has
been infected by a parasitic fungus that transforms its victims into killing
machines. But in this brief moment of repose, Ellie spots a relic of a more
civilized era. “I had a friend who knew everything about this game,” she
tells Joel breathlessly, mashing the buttons of a busted arcade unit for
Midway Games’ 1993 fighting game Mortal Kombat II. “There’s this one
character named Mileena who takes off her mask and she has monster
teeth and then she swallows you whole and barfs out your bones!” ¶ It’s a
slyly self-referential moment for The Last of Us, which co-creators Neil
Druckmann and Craig Mazin have lovingly adapted from developer
Naughty Dog’s critically acclaimed 2013 video game. In the game,
Joel is a hard-bitten survivor whose daughter was shot on Outbreak
64 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
Day; Ellie’s mysterious immunity to the fun-
gus may hold the key to a vaccine. As they
make their way west, through bombed-out
city blocks and overgrown interstates, past
echolocating zombies and desperate human
beings like themselves, they begin to regard
each other as father and daughter. Widely
considered a masterpiece of the video-game
form, The Last of Us boasted a story whose
strong characters and disturbing moral con-
flicts had all the makings of a buzzy televi-
sion drama—so much so that The New
Yorker asked in its preview of the series,
“Can a Video Game Be Prestige TV?”
The answer is obviously yes. Before it
premiered in January, critics had already
crowned The Last of Us the best video-game
adaptation ever made. In itself, this was no
great honor: Outside a few fine kids’ movies,
competition for the title has been limited to
Illustration by Leonardo Santamaria
dreck like Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, or the
limp Halo series on Paramount+. Attempts
to imitate gameplay directly have yielded
almost universally ridiculous results (the
nauseating first-person-shooter sequence
from Doom lurches to mind). But, really,
video-game adaptations have sucked for
the same reason many movies suck: low
budgets, terrible scripts, and an often comi-
cal misunderstanding of their own material.
The solitary exception to this rule, until now,
was 2021’s Werewolves Within, an amiable
horror comedy that, tellingly, bears even
less resemblance to the virtual party game
on which it is based than 1985’s Clue bears
to the board game Clue.
The Last of Us’s showrunners have
wisely exchanged action sequences for
extended character beats, and thanks to the
chemistry between Pascal and Ramsey, the
series remains grounded in the deepening
relationship between Joel and Ellie. Asked
ad nauseam about the curse of the video-
game adaptation, Mazin took to replying
he had “cheated” by picking the best story
the medium had to offer. What he prob-
ably meant was he had chosen a title whose
actual gameplay, a fine but standard mix of
third-person stealth and combat, mostly
acted as a system of gates between one nar-
rative sequence and the next. In this sense,
HBO’s The Last of Us represents a superb
realization of a modest goal: to adapt
the narrative of a video game without
attempting to adapt the game itself.
It’s worth remembering that this is stan-
dard operating procedure for prestige tele-
vision, which regularly makes a point to
bestow literary qualities—realism, lyricism,
characterization—onto middling works of
genre fiction. (An obvious example is Big
Little Lies, elevated from beach read to seri-
ous drama by its naturalist approach and
moody shots of the ocean.) That this for-
mula should have finally been applied to a
video game, and a good one, is a matter less
of artistic innovation than of budget. “One of
the highest compliments I can pay the show
is that I wouldn’t have guessed that Joel and
Ellie’s mordant, spiritedly macabre adven-
tures first began in pixelated form,” negged
Inkoo Kang in The New Yorker. But the
question was never whether The Last of Us
would make for compelling television, since
anyone who had played it could tell you it
basically already was that. The real question,
buried in the praise, was why a story with
such cinematic ambitions had bothered
being a video game to begin with.
To answer it, one would first need to know
what a video game is. Despite enjoying a
higher level of prestige than ever in their
relatively brief history, video games are
still reviewed largely for their recreational
value—that is to say, as toys. But the chief
obstacle to serious criticism is not that we
fail to recognize video games can be art,
which is usually just a desperate shorthand
for “capable of evoking a strong response.”
It’s that we presume to know what kind of
art they would be. The first is merely a lack
of attention; the second is a genuine error
of judgment.
Look no further than the broad caricature
of video games as “interactive,” a quality that
supposedly distinguishes them from more
“passive” media like television or the novel.
Regarding a long, claustrophobic shot from
inside a moving car as Joel flees the zombie
outbreak with his daughter, Sarah (Nico
Parker), one otherwise admiring critic
reproached The Last of Us for aping the
interactive format of a game, noting it was
“hard to resist the feeling that you should
have a controller in your hand to choose
which way they should turn next.” Yet in the
nearly identical sequence from the game’s
One may care
about a character
on television,
but one must care
for a character
in a video game.
prologue, the player is responsible not for
the car but just for the in-world virtual
camera, which they may swivel uselessly
from Sarah’s terrified face to the dark road
ahead to a neighbor’s house burning in the
distance. Indeed, the feeling of helplessness
is the whole point.
The mistake here, common enough even
among those literate in video games, is the
breezy conflation of interactivity with con-
trol, as if the simple fact of player choice
were any surer guarantee of efficacy than the
existence of choice in real life. It’s true you
can’t alter the content of a television show
just by watching it, but too great an empha-
sis on this will obscure the fact that the same
is true of many video games. The Last of Us
has sometimes been called an “interac-
tive movie” by fans and detractors alike—
a faintly damning term that implies, ironi-
cally, a dearth of consequential interaction
between players and the game. And it’s true:
As a game about difficult moral choices, it
gives the player none. There are no plot deci-
sions, no dialogue options; there is no open
world. The weight of choice is felt instead
during the mundane task of inventory man-
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
agement, where every bullet and clean rag
is precious. Meanwhile, Joel is Joel, violent
and gentle, and players cannot overrule his
decisions short of turning off the game and
going outside to play.
To an extent, The Last of Us was an
outlier by design, one that left a choice-
shaped hole in player experience that
reflected Joel’s uncompromising commit-
ment to protecting Ellie. Yet even in the
most liberal of narrative video games, the
majority of choices available to players are
either cosmetic or mechanical. The classic
example is a suit of armor that increases
the computing number associated with
one’s defense while also lending a desir-
able visual panache. These things matter
deeply to how a game plays: Gamers were
so appalled by the clothing system of Cyber-
punk 2077, in which combat bonuses could
be reaped only by rocking truly hideous
pieces of streetwear, that developer CD Pro-
jekt RED later added an option for players
to stick with one acceptable outfit without
falling behind in their armor class. But none
of this had any effect on the game’s narra-
tive, which despite its many branching
plotlines, romance options, and endings
was still just one story that could be told
only a finite number of ways. There is a
big difference, in other words, between
mere customization and true narrative
control—if such a thing even exists.
A video game, then, is emphatically not a
story you get to change; in its most elemen-
tal form, it is not a story at all. The highly
visual aspect of video games can mask the
fact that, as computer programs, they are
naturally far more abstract than film or tele-
vision. In Left Behind, a short companion to
The Last of Us released in 2014, Ellie’s crush
Riley takes her to a deserted mall in Boston,
where she shows Ellie an arcade cabinet
for a Mortal Kombat–style fighting game.
The unit is long dead, but at her crush’s
insistence, Ellie closes her eyes and slams
the buttons while Riley describes a round
of gleefully gory combat. It’s an ingenious
comment on the nature of video games:
The narration is all but divorced from the
gameplay, a mini-game in which the player
may press their own buttons in order to help
Ellie’s imaginary avatar “defeat” her equally
imaginary opponent. But the actual game
takes place only inside Ellie’s mind, her
delighted face illuminated by the static glow
of the defunct machine.
The lesson here is that, even in longform-
narrative video games like The Last of Us,
no predetermined relation exists between
gameplay, as a real-time system of poten-
tial inputs and outputs, and traditional
film elements like character, narration, or
image. In theory, if one happened to strike
65
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
the right buttons at the right time, one could
play through a video game in its entirety
without a single thought to what was
transpiring onscreen, like a monkey typing
out Shakespeare. The long-standing appeal
of Mortal Kombat II, for instance, was that
it really could be played by blindly mash-
ing the buttons, with the game smoothly
converting even the most anarchic style
of play into a potentially deadly flurry of
punches and kicks.
This doesn’t mean video games shouldn’t
tell stories, a pseudo-formalist position
occasionally staked out by sour game-
studies types, any more than cinema
should limit its focus to the passage of light
through a lens. The resistance of gameplay
to being narrativized, and of stories to being
gamified—what game bloggers sometimes
call “ludonarrative dissonance”—can never
be eliminated, only managed; the first
question for any narrative video game is
therefore how it plans to forge this formal
contradiction into a compelling aesthetic
experience. In fact, many of the most inter-
esting video games tend to amplify ludo-
narrative dissonance, allowing form to poke
stylishly through the envelope of narrative
content. Valve’s puzzle-platformer Portal
famously ends by revealing the protagonist
is trapped in a gamelike research facility run
by a homicidal computer whose sardonic
directions the player must disobey to escape.
Here was a darkly comic acknowledgment
that a life wholly composed of jumping,
shooting, and pushing boxes around—the
life of many video-game characters—would
in the real world be nothing short of torture.
To return to our initial question, then:
It’s true that The Last of Us often resembles
a game that doesn’t want to be one. But
this tension, which the television adapta-
tion is at pains to relieve, is precisely what
made the original game such a compelling
study in powerlessness. Its protagonist,
after all, also doesn’t want to be one. In
early cutscenes, Joel is vehemently opposed
to becoming Ellie’s keeper, his fatherly
grief masked as stony pragmatism; when
gameplay resumes, players may feel they
are pushing Joel forward against his will,
overriding his reluctance with their own
desire to progress in the game. Even as Joel
softens to his precocious young charge,
The Last of Us gives players meager few
opportunities to make their Joel stronger or
faster: a slight increase in his health bar, per-
haps, or a new gun whose bullets are rarer
than usual. Instead, the same ludic architec-
ture that at first makes players to do things
Joel doesn’t want to do—linear level design,
few upgrades, scarce resources—slowly
comes to reflect Joel’s terrifyingly limited
ability to protect Ellie.
66 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
What The Last of Us does let you do,
as often as you would like, is die. In itself,
this is unremarkable. The need for a death
mechanic is almost as old as video games
themselves. “Finish him,” a voice booms
in the HBO series as Riley (Storm Reid),
playing as the bone-barfing Mileena, bests
Ellie in a fully functional game of Mortal
Kombat II. “Do not finish me!” Ellie yells,
but soon the girls are slotting in more quar-
ters, bribing death with pocket change. The
arcade industry’s pay-to-stay-alive system,
which in its golden age brought in as much
as $8 billion a year in quarters alone, faded
with the rise of home consoles, where player
death usually just meant respawning at the
last checkpoint. Today, many video-game
protagonists are zombies after a fashion,
their bodies hijacked by an alien intelligence
with crude control over their motor systems
and an unlimited ability to resurrect. The
studio behind last year’s role-playing game
Elden Ring has built its entire punishing
Love, at its
most monstrous,
can have the
unyielding structure
of a video game.
aesthetic around death, giving players a
single nerve-racking chance to return to the
site of their demise to collect lost experience
points. Recent games like Hades or Death-
loop have integrated this concept on a
narrative level, not only providing canoni-
cal explanations for why exactly the player
keeps coming back to life but also using this
de facto immortality as an opportunity for
character development. (“I guess you want
to die again?” purrs your ex-girlfriend in
Hades after murdering you for the eighth or
ninth time.)
What distinguishes The Last of Us is the
way the player character dies. In the series,
Pascal’s soulful Joel is keenly aware of his
own mortality—his bad knees, his hearing
loss. But in the video game, Joel actually
does die over and over. Each time, the game
snatches back control of the camera, forc-
ing players to watch as he is shot, stabbed,
burned alive, beaten with a lead pipe; as
shrieking zombies gouge out his eyes, snap
his jaw apart, rip glistening red sinew from
his neck. These cutscenes, animated with a
gruesome realism far more disturbing than
the blood-and-guts approach typical to the
genre, often have the quality of jump scares,
pouncing just as the player thinks they’re
safe. As in most games, Joel’s deaths are
shunted off into a noncanonical universe;
the player retakes control of Joel at the lat-
est checkpoint, and he has no memory of his
latest fatality. But the player does, and this
visceral sense of Joel’s death—something
that, speaking strictly from the narrative
point of view, never happens—comes to
define their relationship to both Joel and
the game as a whole.
Players thus experience two Joels: the
Joel presented in the story, a powerful father
figure propelled to heroic heights by grief
and love, and the version of Joel controlled
by the player, a terrified man with poor aim,
little endurance, and a perilously high mor-
tality rate. As many viewers have already
joked, no amount of fidelity will allow the
HBO show to capture the frustration of
watching Joel be repeatedly eviscerated by
the same zombie. Druckmann has said the
game was designed to give players the same
protective relationship to Ellie that Joel
develops, and this is true, in a sense: Ellie
can die in just as grisly a fashion as Joel if
the player misses a window to rescue her.
“That’s why men like you and me are here,”
a fellow survivor tells Joel in the show, urg-
ing him to give his life meaning by finding
someone to keep safe. For Joel, this person
is Ellie; but for the player, this person is Joel,
and when he is gravely wounded late in the
game, player control will shockingly pass to
Ellie, who must now protect her protector
in the most brutal stretch of gameplay yet.
This was the game’s masterstroke. Form
erupts into content, the player’s ludic rela-
tionship to Joel at last given narrative flesh
in the person of Ellie, whose bitter determi-
nation to keep Joel alive leads to a horrific
loss of innocence from which—as players
of The Last of Us Part II already know—she
may never recover. Here, we may rightly
speak of interactivity: One may care about
a character on television, but one must care
for a character in a video game. In fact, The
Last of Us suggested that care, by definition,
means choosing to have no choice, holding
onto another person so tightly their sur-
vival becomes an inescapable necessity. Of
course, a TV show may treat these themes
too, and the adaptation acquits itself admi-
rably; the point is not that a video game,
like other art forms, can show us something
about love, but that love, at its most mon-
strous, can have the unyielding structure of
a video game. This only a video game can
teach. That’s not a knock on the HBO show,
which has genuinely demonstrated that
you may adapt a video game for television
by taking its story and swallowing it whole.
But you’ll still have to spit out the bones. ■
 I once spoke to you about doing
comedy after 9/11, and you
said, “There was no ‘too soon,’ ”
and that comedy was a way of
“processing” the tragedy. Did
talking about Lynn feel similar?
I’m not sure I was right about
that. I processed my second
divorce in a one-man show
that was not ready to be seen.
It was raw and terrible. But
some people like that shit. Louie
Katz, a comic, said, “Man, that
helped me. I was going through a
breakup, and I listened to it
a lot.” I was like, “Thank God!
You might be the only one!”
If you’re a funny person and you
need comedy to process, comedy’s
gonna make you feel better. Even
if it is in poor taste, it’s going to
save your life—mentally, certainly;
emotionally, possibly. In the
special, I take it to the edge of
good taste, but I own it, and this is
what I needed to do. There’s a line
in there that might seem callous,
but it was so perfect in terms of
what we were heading into: “It
was the most horrible thing that’s
ever happened to me … and I’m
sure to her.”
It’s one of the jokiest jokes
I can think of in your entire
Good One: career. It’s like an old-school
misdirect joke.
When I watched it, I was like,
Marc Maron That’s the spirit of comedy in me.
So when you finally were in
front of audiences for the first
Joking about his time, were you like, “Well, I’m
gonna talk about this first”?
It was me just talking about
girlfriend’s death what was happening. I’ll see what
comes out of me onstage, and if it
sticks, it gets repeated. I don’t know
was the only where the gumption or the courage
came from, but it’s not unlike me
in the sense that I’m going to take
way to process it. chances. The chance I was taking
was that I was going to bum them
out or not be able to manage my
own sadness. When I had the
By jesse david fox support of a small audience where
I could stretch out, I could start to
i t ’s a t rope for supposedly transgressive find things. I could have emotions.
comedians to show how willing they are to go there During shows I was doing at
Dynasty Typewriter in L.A., if I got
by introducing a word they are not supposed to say, choked up or I couldn’t process it
then saying it a bunch of times. In his new HBO special, properly, that was okay. I could sit
From Bleak to Dark, the comedian, actor, and podcaster in it because the space was held by
my fans. That’s when I began to
Marc Maron offers an alternate vision of what difficult process the grief and find relief in
material looks like—by talking, and making jokes, about talking about it in a funny way.
the unexpected death of his girlfriend and collaborator, the Comedians have told stories
director Lynn Shelton. She died of undiagnosed leukemia about how, around your
divorces, you would just vent
in May 2020, and in the special’s centerpiece, Maron offers onstage. Do you feel you’ve
a portrait of grief that explores the possibilities that she was matured, where now, when
reincarnated as a hummingbird and was haunting him you’re doing it, it’s not as
through theater-lighting systems. Getting people to laugh uncontrolled?
No. [Laughs.]
at how social distancing made the mourning process lonely It does feel like a balance
and awkward: Now that’s provocative. between getting the audience
Illustration by Agnès Ricart february 13–26, 2023 | new york
to laugh and self-exploring
onstage.
It is, and it’s constantly evolving.
Until two days ago, I’m not sure
I would have considered myself a
“dark” comedian. I always saw it
like, This is all pretty reasonable
stuff! Then I realized I’ve always
been this. This is the area I live in.
I can do light stuff—I talk about
my cats! But when you have all
these anti-woke hacks around
crying about not being able to
publicly speak about the same
three things, I realized that this is
the real edge. Whatever I did on
this special, those are the real risks.
There is an element that
feels like you are saying to
them and their fans, “This
is what actually challenging
material looks like.” What were
you hoping to communicate?
I’m just saying that they’re hacks.
That’s really the big unsaid thing—
that anti-woke is the new hack.
You’ve got like-minded people who
fill these rooms because they don’t
know how to assess funny unless
it’s bullying or unless it’s in totally
bad taste. There’s no nuance to it. A
lot of people who are not innately
funny become comics, and they
can become good comics if they
can figure it out. But this is just an
excuse to ride the momentum of an
audience that’s been built on these
premises. That ideological place is a
front, and it’s enabling a lot of really
untalented people to perform.
Did you ever wonder if it
was okay to do material about
Lynn’s death and your grief?
Oddly, what I learned is
something the anti-woke guys kind
of profess, and that is you can do
jokes about anything. There are
no “right” or “wrong” jokes. But it
is your responsibility to try to find
balance and not hurt or disrespect
people, unless you want to. It’s up
to you. You do have that right.
But it did have that feeling of,
Is this wrong? Is this disrespectful?
It was a specific thing, and I wasn’t
talking about a marginalized
group—unless you think of the
dead as a marginalized group.
I had a joke years ago about a plane
crash. There was a moment when
I was doing it in a bowling alley in
Cranston, Rhode Island, and some
woman screamed, “Stop talking
about plane crashes!” I knew the jig
was up. And I said, “Did you lose
somebody in a plane crash?” and
she goes, “Yes.” And I go, “I’m so
sorry. I’ll do my cancer chunk now.”
And that relieved the tension. ■
Ò listen to the
full conversation
on Vulture’s
Good One podcast.
67
 music / theater / movies

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

CRITICS
Craig Jenkins on Raven … Jackson McHenry on Pictures From Home …
Alison Willmore on Magic Mike’s Last Dance.

by a maelstrom of clattering high hats and

M U S I C / CRAIG JENKINS chopped-up vocals.
Kelela workshopped new songs
Kelela Knows How to Interrupt a Groove reflecting her wide-ranging interests. Her
effortless electronic R&B curios gestured
She could fill a dance floor if to the abrasive sound design of the under-
ground and the tuneful ease of contem-
she wanted to, but she’s got other plans. porary soul. These were tiny revolutions,
excursions into dance music in the years
when artists caught hell for EDM moves,
in our consumerist dystopia, where the spoils belong to the boldest players after “Turn Up the Music” but before
in the data business and corporations adopt the language of community activism, “Break My Soul.” On her 2017 debut full-
mass culture can feel inescapable. It’s getting dicey to be different, wondering whether length, Take Me Apart, she made pretty
P H OTO G R A P H : WA R P R E CO R D S ( K E L E L A )

everyone else feels suffocated by political schisms, constricting social mores, and broken songs from odd materials, deconstructing
allyship pledges. How do you chart your course in a sea of sameness? dubstep wubs in “Blue Light” and using the
A decade or so ago, when flashing a streak of creativity within a mile of the radio netted Roland synth that gave “Jupiter” its name—
you labels like alternative and mysterious, telemarketer Kelela Mizanekristos wrecked an instrument famous for its blaring
her car and spent the insurance money making a mixtape. She’d leads—to play sultry chiptune instead.
dabbled in a few genres already, having, she says, grown up “listening We’ve discussed Black ingenuity under
to R&B, jazz, and Björk.” During a stint as a café singer, she expressed RAVEN
duress, how vital subgenres of electronic
a love of standards she’d picked up from her father; later, she joined KELELA. music were birthed in working-class
WARP RECORDS.
the rock band Dizzy Spells. But interest from listeners was elusive. metropolitan communities. But it’s white
It wasn’t until she released “Go All Night,” from her 2013 mixtape, artists who get accolades for the stuff. It
Cut 4 Me, that her art started to connect, her rich vibrato buffeted wasn’t until this year that a Black woman

68 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 won the award for Best Dance/Electronic
Album at the Grammys. Booking Black
dance artists has been a trouble spot for
ages, enough so for a “Make Techno Black
Again” initiative to have popped up a few
years ago. Kelela just put out her long-
gestating sophomore album, Raven; as she
worked on it, she shared reference mate-
rials with her collaborators that included
writing on these subjects. She’s very seri-
ous about this: In 2020, she sent letters
to peers and business partners stating
her needs and asking them to take stock
of what they were doing for Black women
in entertainment. She worried the ges-
ture would make her seem difficult. Black
women’s assertiveness in the face of adver-
sity is often palmed off as rage. Nonethe-
less, she said the responses to her letters, or
lack thereof, later inspired her to end her
publishing contract with Sony.
Raven sweeps between anticipation
and frustration. It hosts a dozen ways to
voice your intentions, whether you aim to
invite a person to bed or eject them from
your life, and the slipperiness of sexual
power dynamics is subtly but poignantly
queer. In September, Kelela shared that
she’d been reading bell hooks’s book
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity,
and Love, and Raven’s stream of reas-
suring whispers—“You love it when I’m
comin’ on strong”; “Put the sword down,
you can’t fight it”; “Open up, babe, I am
the one”—nudges its intended audi-
ence toward a more confident expres-
sion of sexual desire. At other times, it
takes the drained and resolute tone of a
person growing weary of the dance. Like
SZA’s SOS, Raven’s aquatic sonics and
references have an underlying theme of
romantic drift. But where SZA uses her
latest album to showcase her ease in
adapting to genres, Kelela treats musical
traditions like flotsam and jetsam, the
mess surrounding a shipwreck. She picks
over pieces of familiar structures, figuring
out how they can be repurposed at sea.
Cycling through hazy, minimalist R&B,
P H OTO G R A P H : J U L I E TA C E R VA N T E S ( P I C T U R E S F R O M H O M E )
art and electronic music from Stevie Raven is as notable for its tunefulness
Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Sun Ra as for all the ways it corrodes and compli-
to Janelle Monáe, Solange, and Beyoncé. cates. As the artist attempts to resuscitate
Kelela pitches herself somewhere between love connections, the disorienting noises
Drexciya and Aaliyah. “Let It Go,” a jam that envelop her warm vocals imagine a
about abandoning anxiety to embrace race against time. She is literally going
trust, stacks brittle piles of sounds, building under, melting into the echoing keys of the
to a booming beat only to send it crashing. droning “Holier” and the cavernous bass
“Fooley” and “Sorbet” dabble in the moon- and string notes of “Divorce.” Raven wages
lit confessions of mid-2010s Drake hits, war with a world that wants the artist to ask
but the drums keep falling apart, and the for less, to take up less space in the culture.
synths croak and bray like living creatures. Kelela is painstaking, building albums out
The title track spends three minutes noo- like someone who isn’t sure she will get
dling with gliding keyboard notes before another chance to hold the floor. She seeks
dropping a massive beat that immediately agency in inaccessibility and quietude.
dissolves into “Bruises,” which could be this She wants to bring you along for the ride,
album’s most conventional dance-floor if you can muster the love and honesty she
offering—if it weren’t for the synth line requires. And if you can’t, “Bruises” sends
that keeps poking into the mix, clashing a warning: “I changed my fate, and my girl
with the other melodies. did the same/And we came to destroy.” ■
T H E AT E R / JACKSON M C HENRY
Tableau Without the Vivant
Larry Sultan’s photographs pack more
punch than the play they inspired.
when we meet Larry Sultan, played by Danny Burstein with
a clipped, urbane drawl, he is eight years into a photography
project he doesn’t quite have his head around yet. It’s
the late 1980s, and he’s a photography professor who
PICTURES FROM
lives with his wife and kids in the Bay Area but keeps HOME
BY SHARR WHITE.
traveling down to the San Fernando Valley to spend DIRECTED BY
time with his parents, played by Nathan Lane and Zoë BARTLETT SHER.
STUDIO 54.
Wanamaker. They moved to Los Angeles and climbed
the ladder of success in the middle of the century and

house music, and Baltimore club jams,

Raven teases out the beauty in decay and
in detuned synthesizers. The new songs
make wise use of collaborators including
Asmara from Fade to Mind’s Nguzunguzu,
Philly DJ and producer lsdxoxo,
German ambient duo OCA, and Toronto
DJ Bambii. Together, they conjure an apoc-
alyptic scene in which the detritus of the
Old World juts out like a reminder of the
people we used to be. Raven understands
its place in the pantheon of Black art, how
the vitality of dance courses through Ernie
Barnes’s The Sugar Shack and Funkadelic’s
“One Nation Under a Groove” and You Got
Served. It joins the line of Black futurist

february 13–26, 2023 | new york 69

are now semi-retired, so they sit in the
golden glow of Southern California and
bicker. In Sharr White’s play Pictures From
Home, we sit with Larry and his parents,
too, and we wait for something to happen.
Sultan is a real person, and his unfin-
ished project will eventually become his
acclaimed 1992 photo memoir of the
same name—though White’s play, based
on and basically in thrall to the book, situ-
ates itself at a moment when Sultan has
hit only glancingly at his conceptual goal.
The aim, as Larry says up front like a pro-
fessor stating the thesis of his lecture, is to
tell the truth about his parents beyond the
signifiers of greatest-generation stability
and prosperity they like to project. He
found an old collection of home videos in
storage one day, he explains, and became
fascinated by the way they regurgitated
common myths of a booming post–World
War II America: a heroic move west-
ward, his father’s rise up the ranks of the
Schick razor company, the growing family
frolicking in a green backyard. Yet Larry’s
parents have told him a different, grim-
mer story about his father, Irving, expe-
riencing antisemitism at work, sobbing
while scrounging for jobs in Los Angeles,
and trying to get ahead by pounding Dale
Carnegie lessons into his brain. Larry is
interested in the discrepancy between the
fiction and reality; his parents, especially
Irving, are not. While Larry describes a
photograph he likes—of his father asleep
and vulnerable on a couch, for instance—
Irving interrupts to declare it awful.
As Larry discusses his photos, they’re
projected onto Michael Yeargan’s set,
which evokes a kind of lime-green mid-
century California (with a few trendy
postwar Polynesian touches like a couch
covered in a palm-frond print). There’s
the picture of his father sleeping; another
depicts his mother, a successful Realtor,
heading off to a showing, seemingly
anxious about her own success; and there
are both parents fighting in the hallway.
Yet White’s script can’t quite live up to the
pictures’ immediacy. He provides us with a
series of vignettes, often about Larry trying
to coax his parents into letting down their
guard enough for him to make the photo
he wants, but the drama tends to reveal less
than the images do—and it takes longer.
There’s an extended scene in which Larry
tries to get Irving to replicate one of his
sales pitches, but his father keeps resisting,
striking a power pose and falling back on
buzzwords. The scene conveys a certain
fragile masculine peacocking, and Lane
and Burstein play off each other well. Then
you see the real photo of the real Irving,
worn and frustrated, indicating some
corporatespeak without much enthusi-
70 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
asm, and it’s all there. Pictures From Home reminding everyone). Bartlett Sher, who
the play ends up being a very good argu- also directs those massive Lincoln Center
ment for Pictures From Home the memoir Theater musical revivals (Camelot’s
but not much of one for itself. coming this spring), summons one
In the show’s favor, however, is Lane, bravura visual change here. He opens up
who storms onstage wielding a golf club the interior set to reveal an orangey back-
and wearing a gray wig and that wry smile yard view of the mountains at sunset for
that tells you he’s going to get the most out a scene in which Larry and Irving have a
of every harrumph. Lane’s got a classic proxy fight about how to grill hamburgers.
patter that befits his character, and he can The effect lies somewhere between stately
level up from prodding his son with BB- and static, and the play’s nearly timeless
like asides to a bellowing cannonade when memory-based structure does not help
it’s time to land a punch line (“I know what the forward momentum. The characters
a fucking metaphor is,” he shouts). He’s got speak across decades yet seem to repeat
an able partner in Burstein, who seems to discoveries from scene to scene across
know to cede some of the stage to Lane Pictures From Home’s intermissionless
but maintains a steady exasperation of his hour and 45 minutes. This captures the
own. Wanamaker, as the precisely coiffed way that hours blur together when you’re
Jean, toils to keep the entente between spending time with family, but it blurs the
father and son while cloaking her own drama, too.
financial success to avoid emasculating her The most tantalizing thread of all is
husband. The play depicts that dynamic the notion that there’s something self-
but doesn’t find a way to get past it, so Jean infantilizing in Larry’s process. He keeps
never comes into sharp focus. going to see his parents, ostensibly to cap-
In fact, the script spends a lot of time ture them as they really are but also to revert
acknowledging the family’s behavioral to a childish petulance—recapitulating
patterns while keeping its distance from the same arguments they’ve been having
them. White puts a lot of potential mate- for years and getting some pleasure out
rial on the table, then leaves it there. of doing so. But instead of adding ten-
Larry mentions the backdrop of Ronald sion, this underexamined current saps
Reagan’s America, but we don’t hear much some of the ruthlessness from his pho-
about his parents’ politics, if indeed they tos, substituting a layer of nostalgia that
have any. There are a few asides about the does the play no good. A sense of boomer
way Larry is replicating his father’s actions awe toward greatest-generation parents
by spending time away from his own chil- creeps in, which then, given the Broadway
dren, hinting at a potential conflict that audience, doubles outward into the room.
never comes to a head. Larry’s visits occur Filial reverence dominates, and that’s not
across an indeterminate timeline, and what the pictures themselves are getting
the most pivotal action is the looming at. Perhaps that proves the whole project’s
threat of his parents’ move to Palm Desert larger point: It is awfully hard to color-
(not Palm Springs, as his father keeps correct with a rose-tinted lens. ■
M O V I E S / ALISON WILLMORE
What Do Himbos Want?
Channing Tatum takes it all off—
this time for good.
mike lane used to seem more like a person. Back in 2012,
Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike introduced Channing Tatum’s
character as a genial hustler who knows the perils of staying too long at
the party—a raucous Sunshine State answer to the
New York escort played by Sasha Grey in an earlier,
more aloof Soderbergh movie, 2009’s The Girlfriend MAGICDANCE MIKE’S LAST
Experience. Both films are about the complexities of DIRECTED BY STEVEN
SODERBERGH.
the business of intimacy (or at least the illusion of it) WARNER BROS. R.
and hum with fiscal anxiety: Grey’s character strug-
gles with the pressures of offering a high-end service
 during a downturn, while Mike tries to save
enough money to start his own business and
get out of dancing, an industry in which he
sees no future. But when Magic Mike got a
sequel in 2015—Magic Mike XXL, directed
by Gregory Jacobs—that economic context
got dumped, which turned out to be the
best thing that could have happened to the
series. Mike was transformed from a guy
with struggles and ambitions to a figure no
one knew they needed: the magical himbo
performing not for money but for the sheer
gratification of making women shriek and
smile. That’s the Mike we meet again in
Magic Mike’s Last Dance.
Tatum has made an art of playing meat-
heads with hearts of gold. In these movies,
that might feel self-indulgent if it weren’t so
radical. The first film centers on male char-
acters who view catering to the needs and
longings of women as a cheat code to easy
P H OTO G R A P H : WA R N E R B R O S. P I C T U R E S ( M AG I C M I K E ’ S L A S T DA N C E )
cash and eager company. But in the second,
it becomes a near-sacred calling, one that is
as much about attention as it is about lust—
from Joe Manganiello’s epic Backstreet
Boys–soundtracked display for a bored
mini-mart cashier to the chaste flirtation
Mike keeps up with a photographer. It’s not
often that a character is improved by having
less interiority, but Mike, built like a brick
shithouse and possessed of a genius-level
EQ, is far more interesting as a fantasy fig-
ure than as a conventional protagonist. He’s
a self-aware sex object, masculinity without
the toxicity, and basic wish fulfillment:
someone both smoking hot and solicitous.
Once you turn a character into a lens
for female desire, it’s hard to go back.
Soderbergh reclaimed the director’s chair
for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, and the
movie he has made hovers awkwardly
between the modes of its predecessors,
unsure how to treat its loose-hipped hero.
Mike’s done with stripping when the film
begins. He’s also done with his dream of
being a furniture designer—it’s implied
he lost his company during the pan-
demic—and now he’s broke and drifting
at the age of 40. Magic Mike’s Last Dance
knows enough to steer clear of midlife
male malaise. Instead, it flings Mike into
the path of Maxandra Mendoza (Salma
Hayek Pinault), the estranged wife of a
moneyed British media mogul who wants
out of her stifling marriage, though not
her luxurious life. While bartending at a
fundraiser Max is holding at her Miami
mansion, Mike ends up giving her a glori-
ously over-the-top private dance involving
a blindfold and, almost as an afterthought,
decorously off-screen sex. Max decides she
wants Mike to direct a revue at a theater
she owns, partly as a “fuck you” to her
cheating husband, whose family name
adorns the venue, and partly because she
wants to give other women an experience
like the one she had. She whisks him off
to London for a monthlong paid engage-
ment she swears will be platonic.
Despite being part “Let’s put on a show”
movie and part romantic comedy—two
genres dedicated to delight—Magic Mike’s
Last Dance never achieves satisfaction.
Where the original Magic Mike drew inspi-
ration from Tatum’s own stint as a stripper,
the new one draws from the Magic Mike
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
Live stage show Tatum created with an
ensemble made up of a blur of professional
dancers. (His cohort from the previous
films, the Kings of Tampa, get consigned
to a cameo on a Zoom call.) The dancing
skews toward feats of choreography rather
than lascivious communing with the audi-
ence, and the film suffers from a “tell, don’t
show” approach. Reid Carolin’s script
includes blunt lines like “This is about
women!” while Max’s precocious daughter,
Zadie (Jemelia George), dryly comments
on the connection between love and dance
in a voice-over. No matter how winking,
the intellectualizing drains the mojo.
But the real problem is Mike. Although
Tatum and Hayek are plenty hot, the
by-product of Mike’s becoming more
concept than character is that he can’t
hold up his side of a love story. Mike is the
holy hunk, and his own desires feel inci-
dental—tough stuff when you’re supposed
to be showing a grand passion. Max is the
one with the inner turmoil and everything
to lose, while Mike provides a service by
helping her get through a rough patch and
back in touch with herself before he turns
to his next patient.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance is supposedly
the last of these films (though it’s worth
noting that Magic Mike XXL was also
marketed as one last hurrah). It’s a little
too easy to imagine Tatum doing this
forever with Mike going gray but otherwise
unchanged. He could just keep performing
for an audience that wants to be seen—as
long as what they need for that is to watch
him grind to “Pony.” ■
71
 8.
24.
7. 1. 2.

For more culture 15. poser Valentin Silvestrov’s Prayer for Ukraine,
coverage and Mozart’s Requiem, and Beethoven’s pane-rattling
streaming Fifth Symphony. justin davidson
recommendations, TV
see vulture.com.
7. Watch Star Trek:
T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S
Picard Season Three
To Going boldly.
Paramount+, February 16.
Of all the attempts to extend the Star Trek fran-
chise into the streaming world, Picard has been
the most frustrating. Its first two seasons were
misguided at best. But its third and final season is
a startling improvement, a move the show pulls
off largely by becoming what it should’ve been all
along: a space-romping fan-service reunion of the
TNG cast. kathryn vanarendonk

P H OTO G R A P H : P R I M E V I D E O ( T H E CO N S U LTA N T, C A R N I VA L R O W ) ; O P E N R OA D F I L M S ( M A R LO W E ) ; PA R A M O U N T + ( S TA R T R E K : P I C A R D) ; D I S N E Y + ( T H E M A N DA LO R I A N ) ; S O N Y ( R E T U R N TO S E O U L )
MOVIES

8. See Return to Seoul

Trying on different selves in South Korea.
In select theaters, February 17.
Twenty-five First-timer Park Ji-min may not have gotten an
things to see, Oscar nomination, but she definitely gives one of
hear, watch, 2022’s best performances in Davy Chou’s film.
and read. She stars as a mercurial adoptee who travels to
Korea with the aim of finding, if not her roots, a
FEBRUARY 15–MARCH 1 sense of self; her journey’s moody, dryly funny,
and always surprising. alison willmore
TV PODCASTS
ART

1. Watch The Consultant 4. Listen to Unreformed 9. See Brenda Goodman

A late-stage-capitalism nightmare.
Prime Video, February 24.
Since twice winning the Oscar for Supporting
Actor, Christoph Waltz has made difficult-to-
predict, appreciably odd choices in projects. That
trend continues with The Consultant, in which
Waltz plays the titular character brought in to
improve a gaming-app company. In the trailer, his
Regus Patoff clips his nose hair at work, smells his
team, and is possibly involved in some kind of
heist-and-hostage scenario. Employees played by
Nat Wolff and Brittany O’Grady have their work
cut out for them.
roxana hadadi
MOVIES
2. See Marlowe
A hard-boiled detective in Hollywood.
In select theaters, February 15.
A new Neil Jordan film is always to be celebrated,
and his latest—a period crime drama set in Holly-
wood, starring Liam Neeson as the iconic Philip
Marlowe, and based on John Banville’s novel The
Black-Eyed Blonde—seems like a perfect match
for a director whose films are often filled with
atmosphere and rueful portraits of broken
masculinity. bilge ebiri
THEATER
The history of a racist institution.
iHeartMedia.
The criminal-justice reporter Josie Duffy Rice
digs into the history of the Alabama Industrial
School for Negro Children, a century-old state-
run reform school outside Montgomery originally
meant to be a “safe haven” for Black children that,
by the ’60s, devolved into something approximat-
ing a modern-day slave camp. nicholas quah
TV
5. Watch Party Down
Season Three
They’re back and still dishing out hors d’oeuvre.
Starz, February 24.
It’s taken 13 years for the catering crew from Party
Down to reconvene for a third season. The good
news about the return, which features almost all
of the original cast members, including Adam
Scott, Ken Marino, Jane Lynch and Martin Starr:
The show is as funny as ever. jen chaney
CLASSICAL
6. Hear For Ukraine:
A Concert of
Remembrance
Abstract geometry.
Sikkema Jenkins, 530 West 22 Street;
through March 11.
This new work by an expert old hand at geomet-
ric and allover abstraction shows an artist
homing in on her skill set. Witness densities of
color with juxtaposing shapes that all seem to
sing the song of their own making from where
they lie on the surface. It’s like watching a chess
game come suddenly into focus. jerry saltz
BOOKS
10. Read Every Man
a King
Action in all five boroughs.
Mulholland Books, February 21.
Coiled-spring-of-a-PI King Oliver—a cop until he
was unjustly incarcerated on Rikers—is almost
relieved when his latest case, involving the
Musk-like figure Alfred X. Quiller, drops him into
the clutches of a white-supremacist gang. His
reasoning: As a Black man, “you would always lose
against the system,” but against these punks,
he’s “got a shot.” Guess who comes out on top in
Walter Mosley’s compelling novel? carl rosen
MOVIES

3. See Endgame and Hope 11. See Titanic

Bickering in the wasteland.
Irish Repertory Theatre, through March 12.
John Douglas Thompson and Bill Irwin, two
Off Broadway heavy hitters, play a blind man
and his bumbling servant carrying on after the
apocalypse in Samuel Beckett’s dark, hilarious,
absurd play. jackson mchenry
A year after the Russian invasion.
Metropolitan Opera, February 24.
As war began, the Met threw its prestige behind
Kyiv and banned Putin-affiliated musicians.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the company’s fine
ensemble in a program that segues from death
to memory to stormy optimism: Ukrainian com-
Never let go.
In select theaters.
James Cameron isn’t done making money: Hot
on the heels of his Avatar: The Way of Water
bonanza, he’s remastered Titanic, and now that’s
back in theaters too. And there’s no better way to
experience the director’s spellbinding 1997

72 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 disaster-movie romance—still one of the all-time
greatest Hollywood spectacles. b.e.
TV
12. Watch True Lies
The Schwarzenegger movie gets the CBS series
treatment.
CBS, March 1.
The James Cameron action movie about a hus-
band keeping his spy career secret from his wife
gets translated for broadcast-network audiences.
Here, Harry, the Arnold Schwarzenegger char-
acter, is played by Steve Howey (Shameless),
while Ginger Gonzaga (She-Hulk: Attorney-at
Law) takes over as Helen, the wife of Harry
previously played by Jamie Lee Curtis. And yes,
there is an homage to the famous helicopter
scene in the first episode. j.c.
PODCASTS
13. Listen to
Bear Brook Season 2:
A True Crime Story
Back to the Granite State.
New Hampshire Public Radio,
February 20.
While very much a procedural, the first Bear
Brook was uncommonly thoughtful in its
approach to a story of bodies recovered in a New
Hampshire state park. The team returns with
another cold case, exploring the lingering effects
WAGNER
LOHENGRIN
ON STAGE FEB 26 – APR 1
Don’t miss the Wagner event of the season when
Lohengrin returns to the Met stage in François Girard’s
richly atmospheric new production, conducted by
Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Tenor Piotr Beczała stars as the
swan knight opposite sopranos Tamara Wilson and
Christine Goerke.
metopera.org 212.362.6000
Tickets start at $25
ƩƚƨƥƚƤƮƝƚƜƤƢ/ƦƞƭƨƩƞƫƚ
of a three-decade-old murder—and an emerging
counternarrative that’s sparking a modern reas-
sessment of what originally happened. n.q.
MOVIES
14. See Suzhou River
A dreamy noir set in Shanghai’s ragged
outskirts.
Film Forum, February 17 through February 23.
Lou Ye’s newly restored, always fantastic 2000
movie tells the tale of two tragic couples whose
romances eventually collide. A videographer
becomes entranced by a performer at a seedy bar,
while a petty criminal falls for a businessman’s
daughter, with Zhou Xun playing both women in
a dual role that’s elusive and heartbreaking. a.w.
TV
15. Watch Carnival Row
Season Two
Murder, magic, and war.
Prime Video, February 17.
More than three years ago—an eternity in TV
terms—Prime Video released its ambitious series
Carnival Row, about a striated society in which
humans treat magical fae beings as second-class
citizens and a detective (played by Orlando
Bloom) tries to straddle both sides of the divide.
Its steampunk-meets-fantasy aesthetic was beau-
tiful, but the acting was uneven, and this second
(and final) season looks similarly contradictory.
Still, Bloom is a better leading man than many
might give him credit for, if you can find him
amid all the CGI. r.h.
MOVIES
16. Go to Lives of
Performers: The Films
of Yvonne Rainer
A pioneer of the personal as avant-garde.
Metrograph, February 17 through 19 and
February 25 and 26.
Dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne
Rainer, now 88 years old, is getting a New York
retrospective that includes all seven of her
features, from her 1972 debut Lives of Performers,
an experimental exploration of a love triangle, to
1996’s MURDER and murder, a form-busting
portrait of a relationship between two women
from different backgrounds. a.w.
ART
17. See Warren Isensee
Delightful symmetry.
Miles McEnery, 515 West 22 Street;
through March 11.
Warren Isensee’s tightly rendered wobbly shapes
always seem to breathe with the pleasure of their
own making, even winking at you over how
strange their compressed state is. Bright colors
and rich, creamy surfaces keep the eye moving in
admiration of shape, scale, and texture. j.s.
 gam es MOVIES

Solutions to 18. See Poetic Justice THE 60-SECOND BOOK EXCERPT

Last Issue’s Puzzles A 20-year-old classic on 35-mm. Sink

Roxy Cinema, February 17. By Joseph Earl Thomas
John Singleton’s sophomore directorial effort—a
Doublespeak follow-up to his epochal Boyz N the Hood—was s o m e s u m m e r s Tia
A R M O U R A D M I R E G A S M A S K derided by many back when it came out. But it’s and Joey went on adven-
T H O R P E D O E S I T O N E A W A Y one of his best films: ambitious, stylish, funny, tures. They listened to
H I N D I S H I N D I G S O N A R O L L and featuring all-time performances from Janet Linkin Park, Chevelle,
O N O T E N T T O Y E D K L E E
S E P S A W B E A U A L B E E
Jackson and Tupac Shakur. b.e. and Slipknot riding down
L A T I N C O N G R A T U L A T I N G THEATER too-steep hills on Dyno
D E A L I N O T R O R I C E R L O O trick bikes with pegs on
A R N I E
C R E E S C R E E N S H O T
I M H O O I N K S
S U I
C O I
S S E
F
19. See A Bright the front and back. They
stopped at basketball courts listening to
A S S N
A K
C O R R
I N
I N T O P
S N O
S T E E R
T R A Y New Boise Beenie Man and Sean Paul, played two-
N O R T E Y U C C A S H E A J P O P Big-box question. on-two with older boys who were always
O H Y E A H T H A I S H O R T H A I R S trying to fuck Tia, and stole, maybe for the
T A D S A S T E R A E R O Y I P E S
Signature Theatre, through March 12.
last time one summer, that last time they
I R E L I T E S A C E S I D L E S T This early play from Samuel D. Hunter (A Case
F A R S I F A R S I G H T E D N E S S
might be mistaken for children, snacks
for the Existence of God and the recently adapted
P E A R L B E A M E M S M G R and toys from Kmart. All through Frank-
The Whale) now making its Off Broadway
F A C E W Y D E N E B A Y O L E ford and Mayfair and the Greater North-
A L L E G R A U R D U T U R D U C K E N premiere is set in an Idaho Hobby Lobby, a good
east, they dug up dirt. They played knock
R E A C T O R D I A N A S A S S E N T enough place as any to think about faith and
knock zoom zoom where white folks
R E D H O T S E A S I L Y Y E A R N S capitalism. j.m.
owned houses and trimmed hedges and,
BOOKS whenever the knocking and the zooming
The Unholy Puzzle wasn’t quick enough, answered the door
20. Read A Country with shotguns for those pesky kids. Every-
M A S S G L A S S
O M I T L I M I T You Can Leave body was escalating. It made Joey and Tia
laugh; they could hit harder, run faster,
D A T E O L I V E The latest exiles to the Golden State. lust more deeply but probably never again
P U R S A W MCD, February 21. for each other.
A Russian immigrant mother and her Black teen- (Grand Central, February 21.)
S A M S M I T H
age daughter plant unsteady roots in a California
E R A P A W
trailer park, one of many homes they’ve passed
C R I B S O I L S through together. Asale Angel-Ajani’s first
white carnivalesque character who appears
R I S E M A D E A novel—she’s also written about the international
throughout Muslimova’s work, shown here taking
E V I E O C E A N drug trade—captures the defensive chill of their
risks and exhibiting great shows of strength
T E E S T A N D relationship. emma alpern
against startling blocks of color. Playfully pushed
MUSIC to the limit, Fatebe’s orifices expel, expand, inhale,
and overflow. jasmine vojdani
The Scooby Puzzle 21. Listen to TV
V E
I C
L M A
I E R
O W L
R A I
S
L
Cracker Island 24. Watch The
Cartoon electro-pop returns.
C O M I
A T O N
C
D
B Y T E
I N E D
Warner Records, February 24. Mandalorian
R O N T A T E R
Far-flung musical genres swirl like the flavors in a
rainbow sorbet on the eighth full-length from Blur Season Three
front man Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz. Albarn and Time for a father-son road trip.
U C O N N M O B
producer Greg Kurstin barrel through disco, New Disney+, March 1.
E R E C T G A T E
Wave, synth-pop, and reggae tunes, flanked by star For The Last of Us fans looking to watch Pedro
P I L E T U N I C
guests Bad Bunny, Stevie Nicks, Thundercat, Beck, Pascal in both his father-figure roles at the same
I S L A B L O C K Tame Impala, and many others. craig jenkins time, The Mandalorian is coming back. Star
C M O N S P R A Y THEATER Wars continues its interconnected era with a
third season of The Mandalorian that relies on
The Retreat Puzzle 22. See black odyssey information from The Book of Boba Fett, so
viewers will need to catch up on that before
P H OTO G R A P H : G R A N D C E N T R A L P U B L I S H I N G ( T H O M A S )

A classical voyage to Harlem.

K N O C K S A T watching Mando, Grogu, and all their friends and
Classic Stage Company, opens February 27. foes head back to Mandalore. r.h.
I N F R A A U R A Playwright Marcus Gardley melds the Odysseus MOVIES
L E T O N L I C K myth with a story about a Black soldier named
O D E S A T T H E Ulysses trying to reunite with his family. j.m. 25. See Crouching Tiger,
I N S I T U
Hidden Dragon
ART
W E E Z E R
O N T A P A S A P
23. See Ebecho In a 4K restoration.
P O O L A R T I E Muslimova In select theaters, February 17.
Ang Lee’s martial-arts epic from 2000 turned
P I N K F R A M E An acrobatic alter ego. longtime Hong Kong stars Michelle Yeoh and
O R E C A B I N Magenta Plains, 149 Canal Street; through February 25. Chow Yun-Fat into household names in the U.S.
These paintings animate delicate balancing acts It’s still one of the most mournful of wuxia films.
Find new puzzles daily at between freedom and defiance, vulnerability and It also looks and sounds great with breathtaking
nymag.com/games. humor, through the figure of Fatebe, a black-and- action scenes. b.e.

74 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
NEW YORK 2022

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Head
Games
CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 2 7
basketball can be understood as a cultural
common ground for both groups. Pyonin
suggested that his program, or his class, or
his Jewish identity, or some combination
of the three, has allowed him to transcend
racial barriers. “When I go to the Newark
kids’ homes,” he said, referring to former
pupils, “I’m not white.”
I get what he’s trying to say. But with
all due respect to New York Knick Ossie
Schechtman, who scored the first two
points in what later became the NBA,
Jewish representation in the sport is
concentrated not among players but
more managerial figures: owners, agents,
and executives, as well as its last two
commissioners, who have presided for
a combined 39 years. Today, roughly 70
percent of players are Black, while only
one team has a Black majority owner—
Michael Jordan.
If there’s a film that explores this tension,
it’s not the crackpot documentary Irving
tweeted but rather Josh and Benny Safdie’s
Uncut Gems. The 2019 drama concerns
a rare opal mined by Ethiopian Jews,
which a Diamond District jeweler named
Howard Ratner sells to the Celtics star
Kevin Garnett (who plays himself ). In a
film absorbed with questions of race and
exploitation, it is telling that their power
struggle over the opal is set against the
backdrop of the NBA. Ratner wears a 1973
Knicks championship ring, as if he had
somehow been involved in winning the
title. “What the fuck is it with you Jewish
niggas and basketball, anyway?” his Black
associate asks him. Ratner venerates and
resents Garnett’s talent, comparing a bet he
places on the Celtics to the actual contest.
“KG, this is no different than that,” Ratner
says. “I’m not a fucking athlete. This is my
fucking way. This is how I win.”
The affinities and frictions of the Black
and Jewish communities in New York
are well documented. “The hymns, the
texts, and the most favored legends of
the devout Negro are all Old Testament
and therefore Jewish in origin,” James
Baldwin wrote 75 years ago. Yet because
Harlem’s tradespeople were often Jews,
they were associated with “the American
business tradition of exploiting Negroes.”
76 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
In 1991, the year before Irving was born,
a car in a prominent rabbi’s motorcade
struck and killed the 7-year-old child of a
Guyanese immigrant in Crown Heights.
The riots that ensued dominated the next
mayoral election. In 1996, the year after
Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March,
Cornel West and Michael Lerner published
Jews and Blacks, a series of dialogues that
became a national best seller. “To be a Jew
means to be oppressed, to be struggling,
to be a certain moral conscience of the
nation and so forth,” West argued. “Certain
elements of the black world are saying, ‘Is it
not the case that in the United States, Black
folk more readily meet these criteria than
Jews of European descent?’”
The Barclays Center sits a single
neighborhood over from Crown Heights.
Early in Irving’s tenure, a Rockland County
rabbi was stabbed by a reportedly mentally
ill Black assailant and later died. The Nets
partnered with the Anti-Defamation
League to distribute hate stops here
T-shirts to players. According to Sullivan,
the journalist writing a book on the team,
only one of the squad’s Black players, a
benchwarmer named Theo Pinson, put
one on. “There are a lot of things that
have been happening over the course
of this entire country’s history,” Garrett
Temple told Sullivan in the locker room,
referencing police brutality. “And there
were no shirts specifically for that.” Irving,
sitting nearby, said, “That’s what’s up.”
In November, as the Hebrews to Negroes
controversy was still boiling, LeBron
James wondered why reporters weren’t
asking him about photos that had recently
surfaced of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry
Jones at a 1957 desegregation protest in
Arkansas. I don’t know if Irving has read
Jews and Blacks, but at one point, speak-
ing to reporters, he echoed a version of
West’s argument: “I’ve been growing up in
a country that told me I wasn’t worth any-
thing, that I came from a slave class, that
I come from a people that are meant to be
treated the way we get treated. Every day.
So I’m not here to compare anyone’s atroci-
ties, or tragic events that their families have
dealt with for generations.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s Jona-
than Greenblatt, who rejected a $500,000
pledge from Irving, was unmoved. “This is
not some guy playing for a team in any ran-
dom city. This is Brooklyn. This is ground
zero,” he said. “It’s also Kyrie Irving! My kids
have his jersey and his shoes. He’s Kyrie.”
t his first press conference as a
A Dallas Maverick, Irving seemed to
characterize his time in Brooklyn
as a success. “I left them in fourth
place. I did what I was supposed to do,” he
said. (The team went 5-9 in games that
Durant missed.) “I was incredibly selfless
in my approach to leading.”
Since 2017, Irving has contributed
to the disruption of three teams in
increasingly dramatic fashion. He has
tested the boundaries of permissible
athlete behavior in ways that have begun
to repeatedly keep him off the court.
And to judge by his social-media output,
his mind is only moving in a stranger
direction. Mark Cuban, the owner of the
Mavericks, who is Jewish, looked at that
track record and said: Yes, please! (Plenty
of other franchises would have traded
for him too.) One way to interpret this is
that nothing matters—that Irving’s talent
will always seduce teams into looking
past his eccentricities. In a similar vein,
there’s a gap between Irving’s portrayal in
much of the media—as a kind of trollish
internet villain and kook for late-night
hosts to make fun of—and his reputation
among fans. They seem less scandalized
by Irving’s attraction to alternative facts
and maybe even hostile to the scolding
he gets because of it. Two months after
the conclusion of a saga many predicted
would end his NBA career, Irving was
selected as a starter for the 2023 All-Star
Game. Players, fans, and members of
the media all get to vote with a weighted
scoring system. Journalists put Irving at
No. 4. Players and fans—4.4 million of
them—put him at No. 1.
The people who love watching Irving
play extend him a lot of sympathy. One
longtime agent surmises that Irving is
forever searching for the love of the mother
he never knew: “Sometimes you do terrible
things to test people, to see if they still
love you. That’s all it is.” A front-office
executive who knows him says it’s more
basic: “This is a guy who is feeling things
a lot, but he doesn’t understand why he’s
feeling them. Then he finds an external
reason for Why do I have so much angst
and unhappiness?”
There’s another way to look at Irving
too. He’s often treated as a Neptunian, but
many of his qualities are, at heart, pretty
familiar for a 30-year-old American who
spent much of the pandemic staring at a
screen: a borderline solipsistic obsession
with his identity, a vague distrust of
the country’s political Establishment, a
radicalization on matters of social justice.
With a background like Irving’s, who
wouldn’t ask questions? The problem is
that sometimes the internet doesn’t give
you the right answers. Off the court, at
least, Irving is far from unknowable. In
his own way, he can even be considered—
and here’s a word no one has ever used to
describe him—ordinary. ■

Crime
of the
Centuries
CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 3 9
“Steinhardt was different from any other
collector,” Labbat said. His files lacked any
notations of concern—not a question mark
or a red flag about an object’s provenance.
He had once purchased an inscribed lime-
stone slab known as the Heliodorus Stele
that had been pilfered from the same cave
complex in Israel that sometimes hosted
visits from young people on Birthright
trips. Another time, whether he knew it or
not, Steinhardt bought an object so fresh it
had to be cleaned by the dealer in a hotel
bathtub before being delivered to his apart-
ment. And these weren’t just the decades-
old purchases that Bogdanos’s critics some-
times accused him of targeting. Steinhardt
was buying trafficked pieces well into the
2010s. He was shameless about his own
lack of diligence during an early meeting
with Labbat when he angrily pointed at a
Cretan larnax—an ornate funerary chest—
he had purchased from a Bulgarian dealer
with ties to organized crime. “You see this
piece?” he said. “There’s no provenance for
it. If I see a piece and I like it, then I buy it.”
As the investigation unfolded, pressure
mounted from outside the DA’s office.
One day, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, then
Bogdanos’s supervisor, received a call
from a prominent New York power broker
asking her not to prosecute Steinhardt in
light of his outsize role as a philanthropist.
Agnifilo was unfazed, but the exchange
underscored Steinhardt’s wealth and con-
nections, both of which had insulated him
from scandal before. He had been sanc-
tioned by a judge for insider trading as
recently as 2012, and in 2019, a New York
Times and ProPublica exposé contained
accusations of sexual harassment from
six women at Jewish organizations he had
helped fund. He released a statement apol-
ogizing for behavior he called “boorish,
disrespectful, and just plain dumb,” while
denying many of the specific accusations
against him. A few months later, NYU’s
board of trustees decided not to remove
his name from the school. (Steinhardt
would later resign from the NYU board
as a result of the antiquities investigation.)
Bogdanos was determined not to let
Steinhardt skate. The case against him
had come to include more than six dozen
witnesses from 11 countries, and the sheer
number of trafficking networks involved
was astounding. “Some of them are in com-
petition with each other, they all dislike each
other, yet they all came to the same place in
the end,” Bogdanos said of Steinhardt’s pent-
house. “The only other example I can give
you that is close to that is the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.” In the end, the ATU deter-
mined it could prove beyond a reasonable
doubt that 180 objects in Steinhardt’s col-
lection had been stolen. Together, the pieces
were valued at some $70 million.
Still, the number of artifacts left Bogdanos
and the DA’s office with a difficult decision.
In order to charge Steinhardt with posses-
sion of stolen property, the illicit nature
of each object would have to be proved
before a grand jury. “Essentially, you’ve got
180 crimes,” Bogdanos said. “So you have
180 mini-trials.” Hearsay isn’t allowed as
evidence in New York, so witnesses from
around the world would have to be flown
in to testify, which was virtually impossible
with pandemic restrictions. At the same
time, Steinhardt’s lawyers were pushing for
a settlement, arguing that he’d been misled
by dealers and citing, among other reasons,
his “philanthropic status” to avoid trial.
In December 2021, the DA’s office
announced that an agreement had been
reached. Steinhardt would not be pros-
ecuted for any crimes as long as he imme-
diately surrendered the 180 stolen objects
for repatriation. He also agreed to a life-
time ban on collecting, the first of its kind
ever handed down in the world of antiq-
uities. He would, however, be allowed to
keep the remainder of his collection, more
than 90 percent of which, according to the
ATU, lacked any kind of detailed owner-
ship history. Bogdanos and his team simply
couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt
that those pieces had been stolen. (“Michael
is pleased that items wrongfully taken by
others are being returned to their native
countries,” his attorneys said in a state-
ment, and he maintains he did not commit
any crimes related to antiquities. “As for the
dealers who lied to Michael, he has reserved
his rights to sue them as it was their false
information that got Michael caught up in
this.”) When I asked Bogdanos about the
terms of the agreement, he couldn’t hide
a degree of ambivalence. He had previ-
ously claimed that a stint in prison for an
unscrupulous dealer might be the only
way to clean up the antiquities trade. But
Steinhardt walked free. “Would the analysis
have been the same but for covid?” he said
of the deal. “That’s a good question.”
the repatriations began six weeks
later. Fourteen objects from Steinhardt’s
collection were returned to Turkey. A
february 13–26, 2023 | new york
month later, 47 objects were returned to
Greece, and in the months that followed,
dozens more were sent to Bulgaria, Israel,
and Egypt. In January 2023, some 60 arti-
facts valued at nearly $20 million, some of
which came from Steinhardt’s collection,
were returned to Rome. The repatriations
to Italy are so frequent that the government
there has opened a Museum of Rescued
Art, where previously looted pieces will go
on display before being transferred to their
region of origin.
The enduring question now is whether
the antiquities trade can continue at all, con-
sidering that once-common practices have
essentially been criminalized. Since the raid
on Steinhardt’s apartment, the ATU has
gone on to indict Subhash Kapoor, alleged
to be one of India’s largest antiquities traf-
fickers, and seized marble busts from the
sales floor at Christie’s. Just last year, it repa-
triated 27 items that were once on display
at the Met. (According to a spokesperson,
the museum has since agreed to return to
Steinhardt the majority of the pieces from
his collection currently on loan.) Shelby
White, whose antiquities collection with
her late husband, Wall Street investor Leon
Levy, was perhaps the only one in the world
to rival Steinhardt’s, appears to be the ATU’s
next major target. Bogdanos won’t discuss
the ongoing investigation, but White has
already relinquished nearly two dozen
objects valued at least at $20 million.
Still, Bogdanos’s efforts haven’t entirely
resolved the legal complexities of the antiq-
uities trade. In 2017, the Turkish govern-
ment sued both Steinhardt and Christie’s
in a civil action in order to force the repa-
triation of an Anatolian idol known as the
Guennol Stargazer. For the first time, an
antiquities case against Steinhardt went
all the way to trial, and in 2021, he won.
The judge ruled that Turkey “inexcus-
ably slept” on its rights by waiting so long
to sue and that Steinhardt was merely a
private collector who “had no obligation
to investigate the provenance” of his pur-
chase. The Stargazer is once again a part of
Steinhardt’s collection.
Wherever the antiquities trade goes from
here, though, it will proceed without one of
its most powerful figures. The lifetime ban
against Steinhardt, now 82, has effectively
removed both him and his money from the
market. “He’s in a bad mood about this,”
said Svyatoslav Konkin, a Russian dealer
who has also been targeted by Bogdanos
and recently spoke to Steinhardt over
the phone. “It’s not good times.” If it’s any
consolation, Steinhardt can always head
to the Greek and Roman wing of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, where an
airy, sun-dappled gallery just off the main
concourse still bears his name. ■
77
 ES the new york crossword
M
GA

I’m With the Band By Matt Gaffney

7
8
9
Journalist’s success
Wrath
Guinea pig

February 13–26, 2023. VOL. 56, NO. 4. 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 address
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11 Picked not long ago

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 12 “My good fellow”
13 Functions
19 20 21 22
14 Keep repressed, as feelings
23 24 25 26
15 Pal, in Provence
16 Elza Soares’s music
27 28 29 30 31 17 Silicon Valley investor Peter
18 Hall collaborator
32 33 34 35 36 37 38 24 “A Man Called ___” (2022
Tom Hanks movie)
39 40 41 42 43
25 Word before bar or torch
30 First son of Seth
44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53
32 Former Connecticut senator
54 55 56 57 33 Easy-to-stack treats
34 Incite, as outrage
58 59 60 61 36 Have common cause
37 Relaxes
62 63 64 65 66 38 Got together
41 Second half of a saying about
67 68 69 70 71 72
individualism
45 Game with batters but no

chairman, Bruce Wasserstein; chief executive officer, Jim Bankoff. New York Magazine is not responsible for the return or loss of unsolicited manuscripts. Any submission of a manuscript must be accompanied by an SASE.
73 74 75 76
strikeouts
77 78 79 80 81 82 83 47 Lyon’s river
48 Creator of Hercule and Jane
84 85 86 87 88 49 Online magazine since 1996
51 Drive back
89 90 91 92
52 Cara or Dunne
93 94 95 96 97 98
53 It’s for the ___ (what haters
will think of this crossword)
99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 55 Restaurant
56 No pro
107 108 109 110 111 57 Peninsular country
61 Soccer great Bale
112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119
63 Common dinner hour
64 Prepares to propose
120 121 122 123
65 Brooklyn stereotype
124 125 126 127
67 Late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve
68 It was good for da Vinci
69 Wading bird
70 Town north of Fire Island
71 States of mind
Across 57 Information-seeking note 98 Do a bad thing 72 Work at home, say
1 “Star Wars” universe cuties 58 Hotel amenity 99 Duck a band’s phone calls? 78 Nonsense
6 “You sure about that?” 59 Gel-creating plant 105 Put into words 79 “Giles Goat-Boy” novelist John
10 “Were that to happen …” 60 Goat sounds 107 Obama Cabinet member 80 Bloomberg, e.g.
14 Lacks other options 61 Ball hit between two outfielders Steven 82 Belt’s place
19 Way too energized 62 Open the door for 108 Drink you “take” 83 Putting Palmer, to pals
20 Part of a farm 64 Comedian Williams 109 Sitcom producer Norman 85 Having an Airbnb listing, e.g.
21 Odyssey 65 Bowler or boater 110 Furniture-maker, at times 86 Very, very few
22 Great Plains city 66 Finish line 112 Poem on a scroll, often 87 Not broadly known
23 What people say about 67 Encouraging words for a band? 114 Keep a band’s hair groomed? 88 Email-program button
a band’s favorite restaurant? 73 Hardwood-floor cover 120 Headlamp wearer 90 Prong on a fork
26 Upper boundary 74 SAT cousin 121 B-side of 1969’s “Bad Moon 94 Bring back to the store
27 “___ Deep” (Genesis hit) 75 “I can’t ___ thing” Rising” 95 Ark parker
28 Quinceañera guests, often 76 Play with music 122 Enthusiast 97 Fails to be
29 Cabernet, say 77 Deserving 123 Email attachment 99 Ordinary person
31 Gathering with spelling 79 Cheese named for a color 124 Heart, for one 100 Committee head
32 Watched Weimaraners, e.g. 80 60 percent, say 125 Flock creators 101 Wishing you could recant
35 Crowd a band onto a tiny stage? 81 Former flier 126 Hasn’t paid yet 102 Keep away from
39 “Either you do it, ___ will!” 84 Like krypton and xenon 127 Craft often mastered at 103 Expats from Agra, e.g.
40 Manute ___ (NBA giant) 85 Get a band thrown in jail on summer camp 104 Call to end an acting exercise
42 Moo goo ___ pan flimsy evidence? 106 Word used with “therapy”
43 Make amends 89 “It wasn’t me” Down 111 Wants an answer from
44 Al ___ (pasta spec) 90 U. of Maryland squad 1 IV inserter, often 113 Volcano west of Hilo
46 Blows it 91 Org. at 11 Wall Street 2 Mocking sound to a complainer 115 Make a boat go
48 Nitwits 92 Shoe service 3 12 months old 116 “___ about that!”
50 Windy City paper 93 Computer command 4 New Zealanders 117 Kal ___ pet foods
54 Increase a band’s size from 95 Modern day, as a prefix 5 Painter-filmmaker Julian 118 Driving force
five to ten members? 96 ___ Grande 6 1995 Kenneth Branagh role 119 “Told ya!”

78 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3 The solutions to last issue’s puzzles appear on page 74.

 the vulture 10x10

Across Down
1 Drug taken by 18 “Star Wars” THE CHAOS PUZZLE 1 Winter hrs. 17 Play about
bear in 1985 … and character By Malaika Handa in Chicago mathematicians
in a February played by Kelly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2 “___ the ramparts 18 Voice of Huey
2023 adaptation Marie Tran we watched …” and Riley on
of the incident 19 Really 8 9 3 Small island “The Boondocks”
8 Animal also 20 Extend 4 “Double Jeopardy” 20 Singer Studdard
known as marine 21 Former basketball actress Judd who won the
10 11
gastropod mollusk player Ming 5 Including second season
10 “That’s not good 22 Tea holder everything of “American Idol”
12 13 14
enough!” 23 Extinct creatures 6 Channing Tatum 22 “The Secret Diary
12 Type of business similar to ostriches or Jonah Hill, in of Adrian ___,
15 16 17 18
entity (abbr.) 28 final_draft_2_ “21 Jump Street” Aged 13 3/4”
13 Ingredient in some ACTUALLY_ 7 Fast-breaking 24 Guacamole or pico
masks FINAL.doc, e.g. 19 20 holiday de gallo
15 Inspire 29 Atonement 9 Liz on “30 Rock” 25 Sought elected
21 22 11 Trick office
14 Morning droplets 26 “Christmas in
23 24 25 26 27 15 ___ Park Hollis” act
(Beyoncé’s fashion Run-___
28 line) 27 Notice
16 Medieval honey
29
wine

Across Down
1 Mughal emperor 19 “Mulan” actress THE HORROR PUZZLE 1 “Los Espookys” 15 Glam rock?
whose name Rosalind By Malaika Handa showrunner 16 Get 100 percent
translates to “great” 20 Sphere 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Fabrega 17 Setting of
6 Sushirrito, e.g. 23 Topic of discussion 2 With 22-Down, “Kung Fu Panda”
10 East African for Tony Soprano 10 11
director of 18 Late
grilled goat meat and his therapist, “Skinamarink” 20 Cookie sometimes
12 Some often 3 Oscar ___ (war crushed to make
12
13 Visitors from 26 Movie remade movies, e.g.) cheesecake crust
space (abbr.) with Lily James 4 Qtys. 21 Depend
13 14
14 Some cards in 27 Rihanna song 5 “___ in Mi 22 See 2-Down
“Settlers of Catan” with the lyric Kitchen” 23 Loos, for short
15 Company that “Something in 15 (UB40 hit) 24 Second-largest
sponsored cycle the way you move 6 “The One ___ country in Africa
20 of “America’s makes me feel 16 17 18 Ross Finds Out” (abbr.)
Next Top Model” like I can’t live (iconic “Friends” 25 “The Extraordinary
16 Performed in without you” 19 20 21 22 episode) Secrets of April,
a play 28 In a shy way 7 Wizard garments ___, and June”
23 24 25 8 Not right
9 Tap gently
26 11 Jean Jacket’s
hiding place in
27 28
much of “Nope”

Across Down
1 “Pirates of the 18 “___ the THE CRUSHCRUSHCRUSH PUZZLE 1 Make like 15 What it is when
Caribbean” Unknown” By Stella Zawistowski Hermann Maier the moon hits
surname (“Frozen II” song) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2 Oscar nominee for your eye like a big
8 Character who 19 Let in or let on “The Irishman” pizza pie
said, “I am not 20 Church mocked in 8 3 Shawkat of 16 Clears (of )
nice, I am not “The Book of “Search Party” 17 Yardstick (abbr.)
kind, and I am Mormon” (abbr.) 9 4 Took ten 19 Composer
not wonderful!” 22 “The Fairly 5 Prêt-à-porter, in Piazzolla of tango
9 New album from ___Parents” 10 11
fashion (abbr.) fame
27-Across 23 Some Pixar 6 “Tell me more!” 21 ___ Judi Dench
10 Soup that might employees 7 Like Tig Notaro’s 23 Telegram or
12 13 14 15 16 17
be garnished 27 See 9-Across humor Instagram, for
with mint 28 “Star Trek” 8 “Let it all out” example
18 19
11 Heathcliff of weapons Tears for Fears 24 “Not for me,
comics, for one frequently set song thanks”
12 Riyadh native on “stun” 20 21 22 9 “Stranger ___ 25 Levin who wrote
14 Servings of corn Fiction” (Will “The Stepford
23 24 25 26 Ferrell film) Wives”
10 Letter before 26 Places to go under
27 omega the knife, for short
13 Cabbage-leaf-
28 wrapped treats

Find new puzzles daily at nymag.com/games. february 13–26, 2023 | new york 79
THE APPROVAL MATRIX Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.
compiled by dominique pariso and chris stanton

highbrow

P H OTO G R A P H S : G O O G L E M A P S ( S A H A D I ’ S, C A N DY ) ; G E T T Y I M AG E S ( S A N TO S, B A L LO O N , J A M E S, B E YO N C É , S A M B E R G , S M A R T, F L A M I N G O, CO S T N E R ) ; L I O N S G AT E ( L A ) ; A N Y U L R I VA S / F L I C K R ( D U DA M E L ) ; COYOT E PA R K ( PA R K ) ; N YC B ( P E C K ) ; T H E M O R G A N L I B R A RY ( K ATC H A D O U R I A N ) ; M AC M I L L A N ( TA B O R ) ; L I T T L E , B R O W N

George Santos, Choreographer
famous liar, denies Gustavo Dudamel Justin Peck’s joyous
sexual-harassment swims against the Copland Dance
allegations. current from L.A. to Episodes at New
Fake Sahadi’s! York City Ballet.
Scammers net take over the New York Coyote Park’s
$100,000 by Philharmonic. “I Love You Like
impersonating Mirrors Do” at the
the beloved Leslie-Lohman
grocery store. Inept white
Just 12 of the 89 NYPD supremacists Museum of Art.
cops charged with tried to destroy
significant misconduct Baltimore’s
in the George Floyd electrical grid.
protests have been Nina Katchadourian
disciplined. rummages through the
Nick Tabor’s
Africatown, on the Morgan Library for a
last group of daring new exhibition.

A N D CO. ( H A R R I S ) ; V I K I N G ( S T R E I S A N D) ; N E T F L I X ( PA M E L A ) ; S H O W T I M E ( M U R D E R ) ; TO E I A N I M AT I O N ( M O O N ) ; G A L L E RY B O O K S (G AY ) ; U N I V E R S A L P I C T U R E S (C A B I N ) ; M S C H F ( B O OT S ) ; A M A ZO N P R I M E ( S U M M E R ) ; P O R T K E Y G A M E S ( H O G WA R T S ) ; B B C ( FAW LT Y )
enslaved people
Balloon boy. brought to America
Chinese spy and their enduring
balloon. Is there community.
ever good Malcolm Harris’s epic
balloon Palo Alto: A History of
Governor Hochul discourse? California, Capitalism,
wants to loan half a and the World.
billion to the state’s
failing horse-racing
industry. Loser bet!
Foxes, otters, Haymarket makes Barbra Streisand’s
and bears some Black history memoir will clock in
Earthquake e-books free to
devastation in are getting at 1,040 pages—
bird flu. undermine Florida’s almost as long as
Turkey and Syria. attack on African Infinite Jest.
American studies.

Famous whip
performer Jack
La La Land on Lepiarz has quit
Broadway? Fine. LeBron James
despicable

Gawker got killed Boston’s WBUR to breaks the

brilliant
again. Sure. join the circus. NBA’s all-time
scoring
record.

Fawlty Towers plans In Love, Pamela

to return, offering and Pamela, a
Murder in Big Horn Love Story,
John Cleese more shows our chronic
opportunities to Anderson sets
Sorry to dads, but lack of success in the record
tarnish his legacy. Kevin Costner might solving cases of straight.
be quiet-quitting missing Indigenous
his job as the lead of women and girls.
Yellowstone.

Heather Gay’s Bad

Mormon pulls back
the curtain on
LDS–and–Real
Housewife–hood.
Stripper Web,
a forum for Beyoncé lost … But still wins
performers for over An AI-controlled Album of the Year big at the The sweet relief of
20 years, took its Seinfeld parody was (again) … Grammy Awards. the 18 recently
last pole dance. banned from Twitch reopened MTA
for making an ironic bathrooms.
transphobic joke …

… And the new

Hogwarts Legacy Economy Candy You can only watch
game’s minor trans opens a second China’s hit show
character won’t location in Three-Body on
rehabilitate Chelsea Market. Rakuten Viki
J. K. Rowling. streaming, but
science nerds
should try.
AMC’s dastardly new Anyone wearing … But Jimmy Choo’s
variable-pricing MSCHF’s Astro Boy– line of Sailor Moon–
plan, which charges inspired red boots collaboration shoes A rom-com where
more for movie seats deserves a wedgie … is magical. Andy Samberg gets
with a decent view. frozen for 42.6 years,
then reconnects with
his ex, Jean Smart?
Looks like Flamingo, We’ll be there.
the pigeon likely They’re M. Night Shyamalan’s
turned pink for a rebooting I Know Knock at the Cabin
gender reveal, died What You Did Last has more interesting
from the dye. Summer again. gay politics than Bros.

l owbrow
80 n e w y o r k | f e b r u a r y 1 3 – 2 6 , 2 0 2 3
 P R E V I E W S B E G I N F E B R U A RY 1 6
YO U N E V E R K N OW
H OW YO U R L I F E M I G H T C H A N G E . . .
ILLUSTRATION BY MIRKO ILIĆ

A New Play By Keith Bunin

DIRECTED By TYNE RAFAELI
WITH (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)
MIA BARRON CAMILA CANÓ-FLAVIÁ RHYS COIRO WILL HARRISON JON NORMAN SCHNEIDER MICHELLE WILSON
SETS COSTUMES LIGHTING ORIGINAL MUSIC AND SOUND PROJECTIONS STAGE MANAGER
ARNULFO MALDONADO ÁSTA BENNIE HOSTETTER LAP CHI CHU DANIEL KLUGER 59 PRODUCTIONS MELISSA CHACÓN

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER

T E L EC H A R G E . CO M 2 1 2-2 3 9 - 6 2 0 0 LC T.O R G
LCT’s production season is generously supported by the LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust.
Special thanks to the Howard Gilman Foundation for their thoughtful generosity.
The Mitzi E. Newhouse season is made possible, in part, by public funds from
The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council,
and the New York State Council on the Arts
with the support of the Office of the Governor and New York State Legislature.
 K
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The March T

to Liberation
A CELEBRATION OF THE MUSICAL HERITAGE OF BLACK CULTURE

Thursday, March 2, 7:30pm Courtney BRYAN & Tazewell THOMPSON Gathering Song
(World Premiere–New York Philharmonic Commission)
Saturday, March 4, 8:00pm
STILL Symphony No. 2, Song of a New Race
Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall Adolphus HAILSTORK Done Made My Vow, A Ceremony

NYPHIL.ORG/LIBERATION | 212.875.5656
LIBERATION is presented by Judith and Stewart Colton. The March to Liberation is part of the Wu Tsai Series Inaugural Season. The performances of Courtney Bryan & Tazewell Thompson’s Gathering Song are made possible with generous
support from the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts. Programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Conductors, soloists,
programs, prices, and sale dates are correct at the date of printing and are subject to change. © 2023 New York Philharmonic. All rights reserved. Photo Credits: Ryan Speedo Green by Jiyang Chen, Janinah Burnett by John Keon, Courtney
Bryan by Elizabeth Leitzell, William Grant Still by Carl Van Vechten Collection/Getty Images, Tazewell Thompson by Fabian Obispo.