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features

New Glut City

Commercial landlords are
scrambling to stave off
a real-estate apocalypse.
By Andrew Rice
plus:
Mapping the deserted offices,
big tech’s big pullback,
the mini-crisis on
Third Avenue, and more.
18

Sperm Fever
The big business—and
vexed politics—of
declining male fertility.
By Simon van Zuylen-Wood
32

The Realest
Pair of Jeans
How much would
you pay for an
ancient pair of Levi’s?
By Justine Harman
38

The “mine-found”
Levi’s on display
in Pasadena.

Photograph by Adali Schell j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 1

 intelligencer the culture pages
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
7 63
The System Kit Connor
America runs on policing Wasn’t Ready
By Zak Cheney-Rice Heartstopper’s star
aspires to be more than
10 just the heartthrob-of-
Neighborhood News the-moment
End-times for the By Jackson McHenry
Elizabeth Street Garden
By Matt Stieb 66
Riches From
12 the Swift Vault
192 Minutes With … Ranking the singer’s

CO V E R : P H OTO G R A P H E D F R O M S U M M I T O N E VA N D E R B I LT. AVA I L A B I L I T Y DATA P R O V I D E D B Y CO S TA R . T H I S PAG E : P H OTO G R A P H B Y M E L I N DA S U E G O R D O N / U N I V E R S A L P I C T U R E S.

The actress who went previously
from Ugly Betty to unheard tracks
Barbie, America Ferrera By Nate Jones
By Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz
68
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What Esther Perel taught How Christopher Nolan
me about embracing crafted the world
marital discomfort of Oppenheimer
By Elizabeth Weil By Bilge Ebiri

strategist 74
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Our most-stood-behind breadth of his career
sleep stuff, from By Bilge Ebiri
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24 n e w y o r k | j u l y 3 – 1 6 , 2 0 2 3 Photographs by Hugo Yu july 3–16, 2023 | new york 25

1 3

2
 inside: The fight over a Nolita garden / An unlikely Barbie star / The queen of embracing marital discomfort

The System:
Zak Cheney-Rice bet w een 2019 and 2021, the United States experienced a
crime spike that defied tidy explanations. In 2019, the homi-
cide rate was up 11 percent from 2014, and slightly higher than
in 2018, then jumped another 29 percent in 2020, the biggest
When the Crime single-year increase in a century. The rate rose by 4 percent in
2021—then, just as suddenly, it began to decline, a downward
P H OTO G R A P H : J E E N A H M O O N / R E U T E R S

Wave Recedes slope that prevailed through 2022. We’re still just over halfway
through 2023, but early signs suggest that murders have fallen

The only certainty of by double digits.

There are important caveats to these trends. Other kinds of

America’s urban violent crime, like robberies and burglaries, fluctuated more
than homicides during that period. Murders are up in Memphis

politics is that there compared to the same time last year but down by 30 percent or
more in cities like Atlanta and Minneapolis. Homicides in the

will be more cops. U.S. hit their lowest rate in six decades in 2014, just six years
before the latest spike, but that was still way higher than in any

j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 7
intelligencer
other developed economy. And even with
the current drop, we’re seeing more mur-
ders today than we did in 2019.
Despite these confusing signals, there are
some constants, like the fact that murder
is most common where poverty and its
related despairs are concentrated: poor
Black neighborhoods. Other aspects are
harder to diagnose. The homicide spike
afflicted cities in disparate regions with
little regard for whether they were large or
small, run by Democrats or Republicans,
or patrolled by a “tough on crime” pros-
ecutor or a dovish “progressive.” Murder
rates went up in 2020 in some of the most
heavily policed cities, like Chicago, and are
declining in others with fewer cops than
they had in 2020, like New Orleans.
What has not changed, though, is the
widespread belief that hiring more cops
is the best way to reduce crime, despite
the fact that there is little to no conclusive
evidence this is true. While crime as a policy
issue remains clouded by epistemological
uncertainty, politicians and officials have
never been more confident in the cure—
a contrast that is especially stark now
that the high tide of pandemic-era crime
has receded, leaving us with far greater
resources for policing than we had just a
few years ago.
We actually know very little about what
causes crime to rocket or crater. Even the
big decline that began in the 1990s, and
that continues to make today’s crime rates
among the lowest in decades despite the
recent uptick, is largely a mystery to experts.
Police officials spent years touting the ben-
efits of stop and frisk in New York, only to
watch crime continue to fall after the city
abandoned it. The post–George Floyd social
order is characterized on the one hand by a
steady push for more policing and an inex-
orable climb in police budgets and on the
other by crime trends that are a mountain
range of peaks and valleys, bouncing up and
down with little rhyme or reason.
That’s not to say we’re totally flying
blind. There’s growing evidence that the
crime wave of 2020 stemmed from the
pandemic-driven shuttering of institu-
tions, like schools and community centers,
that offer support to young people in crisis.
There’s also evidence that crime rises after
high-profile incidents of police abuse, like
the murders of Floyd and Tyre Nichols
in Memphis. On the flip side, a more
visible police presence can function as a
deterrent to some offenses. But overall, if
you’re looking for a prescriptive solution,
the available data is frustratingly hazy on
the benefits of more policing.
That hasn’t stopped the political and
pundit classes from insisting on those
8 n e w y o r k | j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
benefits anyway. “Spend this money now,”
President Biden urged municipalities
that got money from his covid-relief bill
last year, encouraging them to hire more
cops. Sure enough, police officials are
more than happy to conflate correlation
with causation, enthusiastically taking
credit for the recent decline. As Acting
NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban told
reporters in July, it was “no coincidence”
that a drop in crime had coincided with his
department’s use of “proactive” policing—
code for Mayor Adams’s revival of stop-
and-frisk-like practices.
What is clear amid so much uncer-
tainty is that the negative effects of more
policing have stayed relatively constant.
Between the height of the 2020 Floyd
protests—when the concept of defunding
and even abolishing the police entered
the lexicon—and the ensuing backlash
that led Democrats at all levels of govern-
ment, from Adams to Biden, to rush to
prove they were “tougher” on crime than
Republicans, the number of people killed
by cops annually had remained steady
and in some measurements had actually
risen; 1,200 people were killed by police
in 2022, 102 more than in 2019. If high-
profile police killings are indeed a cata-
lyst for crime spikes, then the most likely
outcome of this pattern is that crime will
spike again.
What is also clear, however, is that hiring
more cops is politically popular. A Vox poll
from 2019 found that more than 60 percent
of Black, white, and Hispanic Americans
supported increasing the number of police
officers to deal with high crime.
Assuming the inevitability of these
rewards has led politicians into some per-
ilous waters. Residents of Atlanta are effec-
tively split on their support for the city’s
proposal for a new police training center,
Crime trends are a
mountain range of
peaks and valleys,
bouncing up and
down with little
rhyme or reason.
which would cost $90 million and has
been nicknamed “Cop City” by its oppo-
nents. The project gained momentum
amid rising anxiety about crime, which led
the last mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, to
abandon her reelection bid in 2021 and her
successor, Andre Dickens, to win office by
campaigning from her right. But since then,
cops and protesters have clashed at the con-
struction site, resulting in mass arrests and
the slaying of an activist. A recent public-
comment session attracted hundreds of
opponents to the city-council chambers,
belying the notion that Bottoms’s downfall
amounted to a pro-cop mandate.
But for the most part, it appears
Americans have made their choice. As the
last few years snap into greater focus, put-
ting the fading hopes of the Floyd uprising
and the pandemic crime spike in new
context, our politics of crime seem to have
reverted to the mean. The difference is that
voters and politicians alike are more aware
of what the trade-offs are and are at peace
with them.
We’re not just talking about police bru-
tality, though it’s remarkable, if not sur-
prising, how quickly people are willing
to look away from it. Nor is the problem
only that cops are enjoying a windfall just
as the public-safety benefits of nonpolice
entities—like those schools and commu-
nity centers that are now struggling with
post-pandemic cuts—are becoming more
apparent. We’re talking about reinvesting
in a culture of criminalization and pun-
ishment, where all manner of social ill is
addressed using cops and jails.
America leads the world in both the
rate and volume of people it locks away,
which makes mass incarceration the most
obvious consequence of this reinvestment.
But there are also quality-of-life costs for
people forced to live under the law’s con-
stant suspicion and surveillance, and
those are harder to measure. What about
those who can’t move through their own
neighborhoods without being stopped
and searched? What about the millions of
Americans who can’t vote, find housing,
get hired for even menial jobs, or pay for
food because they’re stuck in a legal choke
hold that was first applied by the cops?
It’s not prison, but it’s not freedom
either. At the very least, the drop in
crime should encourage more humility
about what hiring more cops is actually
achieving, now that the pandemic has
revealed how idiosyncratic American
crime trends actually are. Instead, we’ve
thrown out the logic of cause and effect
and accepted that, regardless of what the
data shows, we’ll keep indulging the same
old delusions about the police. ■
My name is Onil.
Could you be my
living kidney donor?

See my story at
IWantToLive.org/Onil

NATIONAL LEADER IN TRANSPLANT

intelligencer

Neighborhood
News:
Big Trouble
in Little Paradise
The decadelong battle
over the Elizabeth Street
Garden nears its end.
By Matt Stieb

at a glass table surrounded by rhodo­

dendrons and a young Japanese maple,
Joseph Reiver, the executive director of
the Elizabeth Street Garden, has taken
a break from mulching a walkway on a
warm summer morning. At 31, he is the
same age as the garden founded by his
father, an antiques dealer who leased a
vacant lot from the city to house his eclec­
tic stoneworks back in 1991. “It defines
me in every way,” Reiver says.
On the half­acre plot of his dominion
in Nolita, guests are paired off under the
gaze of a limestone lion to read, take pic­
tures, and flirt. But these moments may be
the last of their kind. Unless the garden’s
supporters can figure out how to overturn
a universal court ruling handed down in
June, a developer will raze the grounds,
ending a decadelong battle between two
demands of urban life. The city—backed
by local officials, area yimbys, and non­
profits—wants to build 123 studio units of
affordable housing for seniors who make
less than $49,000 a year. Reiver wants the
garden to stay put as a land trust, arguing
that it provides vital green space for
neighborhood residents, including those
living in the affordable housing next door.
Reiver and the garden’s 350 volun­
teers say they have presented alterna­
tive lots that could spare their project.
But supporters of affordable housing say
that this city­owned site has already been
cleared of red tape and that other sites can
be added later to meet the demand of the
roughly 5,000 low­income seniors on the
wait list for housing in this district, which
is otherwise out of reach. One proponent
of tearing down the garden refused even
to call it a garden, telling me it’s just the
“site at issue.”
Team Garden is preparing for desper­
ate measures. Reiver says, “I can’t tell you
how many people say, ‘Let us know when
to chain ourselves to the gate.’” ■

10 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
 Visitors enjoying the garden on a Tuesday morning in July.

Photograph by Sara Messinger j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 11

intelligencer
How the actress, who taught a generation of
women to reject traditional beauty standards,
found her way into the Barbie universe.
W
hat is a doll?” asks America
Ferrera, head tilted to one
side, hands kneading the air.
We’re awaiting her second
iced coffee of the day, and
she’s in the throes of a mini-speech on the
semiotics of the toy. “What, across centuries
and across cultures, across civilizations, has
a doll meant? A doll is a representation of
a woman’s deepest intuition.” The original
question—“Did you, America Ferrera,
whose work represents all that is not Barbie,
have qualms about being in a blockbuster
about Barbie?”—has been forgotten.
Dolls, she reminds me, did not begin with
Barbie but have been integral to female
play, ceremony, and self-actualization for
centuries. Dolls and therefore Barbies and
therefore the Barbie movie reveal “deeper
meanings in our culture and in our psyche,”
she concludes. The coffee comes. Did she
answer the question? she asks.
Ferrera’s doll lecture could be a deleted
scene from Barbie. In the film, she plays
Gloria: mom to a moody teen daughter,
assistant to Mattel’s CEO, and lifetime
Barbie lover who must help save Barbie
Land from the patriarchy. Greta Gerwig,
who had admired Ferrera since watching
Ugly Betty weekly with her friends in
her first post-college apartment, wrote
the role specifically for her (later casting
Ferrera’s real-life husband as Gloria’s).
Still, for Ferrera, getting into the role wasn’t
straightforward. The character plays with
her daughter’s old dolls when she feels
lonely and put-upon by the demands of
motherhood and life; Ferrera, however,
says she never played with Barbies growing
12 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
192 min u tes w ith …
America Ferrera
by sangeeta singh-kurtz
up. The youngest of six children raised by
a single mother in the San Fernando Valley,
she says the toy’s fantastic life had always
felt alien to her. “My cousin had Barbies at
her house, and we’d play with them there,
but everything—from the Dreamhouse to
the Corvette to the pool to the 20 different
outfits—felt so inaccessible.” Not to
mention that Barbie was “blonde-haired
and blue-eyed and perfect. She probably
made me feel bad about myself as a kid.”
It’s a muggy June day in New York, but
we’re tucked into an air-conditioned corner
of the Swan Room, a hotel bar not far from
the downtown apartment Ferrera has lived
in for 15 years. We’re exactly one month out
from the release of the film, which, by this
point, has been promoted in an outrageous
marketing crusade that’s involved more
than 30 brand collaborations, endless
takeovers, and countless photos of Margot
Robbie in archival Barbie outfits. Today,
Ferrera is in a look she calls “edgy Lower
East Side mom-jeans Barbie”—blue jeans,
a white tee, a leather jacket, and a gold
necklace inscribed with the names of her
two children. Questions about them seem
to make her tense, as indicated by a bobbing
left knee that only stills when we move on
to other subjects. Ferrera is, and always
has been, private, a state she maintains
by speaking like a politician, or at least an
empowering Instagram caption, steering
personal questions to generalizations of
what’s “happening in the culture” or “to
us as women.” It’s the language of identity
politics, a topic on which she has edited
a book, and of activism, in which she is
deeply engaged, launching nonprofits and
P H OTO G R A P H : S T Y L I N G B Y J E S S I C A W I L L I S ; H A I R B Y S O N N Y M O L I N A ; M A K E U P B Y L I N DA H AY; S E T D E S I G N B Y WAY O U T S T U D I O S ; M A N I C U R E B Y N O R I YA M A N A K A ;
giving speeches at events like the Women’s
March. When asked if she would ever run
for office, she hasn’t said “no,” and doesn’t
say “no” today, “because you never know
TA I LO R I N G B Y Z U N Y DA WAT S O ; P R O D U C T I O N B Y K I N D LY P R O D U C T I O N S. I N T E R V I E W LO C AT I O N : S WA N R O O M AT N I N E O R C H A R D
anything, right?” It’s a little like being in the
presence of the valedictorian of Hollywood.
If acting hadn’t worked out, her backup
plan was to be a human-rights lawyer.
The Barbie movie might seem like a
strange project for Ferrera, whose work—
her starring role in the 2002 film Real
Women Have Curves, her part as the
“beautiful on the inside” Betty Suarez in
Ugly Betty—has for decades questioned
and critiqued beauty standards. Her book,
American Like Me, opens with an essay
about self-acceptance; it tells the story of
her first crush, who snubbed her in favor
of her blonde-haired, blue-eyed classmate.
In her ted Talk (titled “My Identity
Is a Superpower—Not an Obstacle”),
she discusses how she avoided the sun,
straightened her curls, and tried to lose
weight to please Hollywood.
But, as Ferrera points out, there are
a million versions of the Barbie movie—
some of which we’ve sampled fleetingly in
the film’s belabored, nearly decade-long
journey to theaters. And after cycling
through a number of rumored big names
to helm the project (Diablo Cody, Reese
Witherspoon, Alethea Jones), the spinner
landed on Gerwig. Ferrera was drawn to
her script, she says, because it confronted
the doll’s role in “shaping expectations for
women.” Gerwig’s Barbie Land is a joyful
doll utopia where “all the Barbies are
Barbies, they’re every color and shape,”
and therefore “there is no perfect.” The
Photograph by Emmanuel Monsalve
intelligencer
argument is somewhat undermined by
the fact that everyone in Barbie Land
is beautiful, none more so than Margot
Robbie, who replaced Amy Schumer as
the lead and, as Ferrera notes, “looks more
like Barbie than Barbie looks like Barbie.”
Still, it’s no wonder that Gerwig’s Barbie—
gently feminist, coyly self-aware—spoke to
Ferrera. “After reading the script, I felt like
I was on a mushroom trip,” she says. “I was
like, Barbie is everything.”
F
errera , 39, made her film
debut at 17, when she was cast
in Real Women Have Curves as
Ana, a teen whose domineering
mother constantly reminds her
she would be beautiful if she lost weight.
It premiered at Sundance in 2002 and,
quite suddenly, made Ferrera into a kind
of representative of self-love. Shortly after,
she played Carmen, the only sister in The
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005)
who worries she’s too fat for the magic
jeans. The message of both roles, and later
of Ugly Betty, which would thrust Ferrera
into mainstream fame and make her the
first and last Latina to win a Lead Comedy
Actress Emmy, is that true beauty comes
from within.
But even as she emerged “as a symbol of
embracing your beauty and telling beauty
standards to fuck off,” inside, she felt differ-
ently. “I had internalized self-loathing,” she
says today. Her idea of what was a beautiful
and valuable woman, and the fact that that
was white and thin, had been hammered
into her from girlhood. “I was surrounded
by women who deeply internalized those
standards and expectations and taught
them to me. Movies, musicians, models,
dolls—everything we idolized,” she says,
emphasized that there was one way to be
beautiful and that wasn’t her.
Even after her starring roles, Holly-
wood continued offering Ferrera gigs like
“pregnant chola No. 2” and “gangbanger’s
girlfriend.” Red carpets and photo shoots
fomented her doubts—she would show
up to fittings only to be presented with
racks of sample-size clothes. “It was like,
You know how I am. The movie is called
Real Women Have Curves,” she says. She
tells me she doesn’t remember much of the
press from her years on Ugly Betty, which
she began filming in her early 20s, often
working 20-hour days to the point where
she was “sick all the time,” but much of it
was obsessed with her looks and involved
convoluted descriptions of her body (e.g.,
“less zaftig,” “neither lumpy nor emaci-
ated”). But the press wasn’t the problem.
“In my mind, I felt I wasn’t meeting the
expectations of what an actress should
14 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
look like, or how thin they should be, or
how beautiful.”
Ferrera’s self-possession cracks when
she talks about this period; she says that
“rewiring” herself has been a lifelong
process. Therapy helped, as did finally
getting relief from an old shoulder injury, a
relic of a car accident when she was a teen.
Doctors wrote the injury off, prescribing
her sleeping pills that she trashed, and
by her mid-20s she was “in a debilitating
amount of pain.” Then, in her early 30s,
she started competing in triathlons, which
shifted her relationship with her body
from loathing to acceptance and then
finally “to gratitude.” She’s completed two.
“I had this whole story about being forever
in pain and exercise being about fitting
into something,” she explains. Training
for triathlons—running two hours a day,
swimming in the ocean; things she had
for a long time thought herself incapable of
doing—changed that completely. Still, in
spite of her progress, Ferrera shudders at
the idea of playing a Barbie herself. “My gut
instinct is, Hell, no,” she says. “I would’ve
been way too triggered by the need to
physically play something perfect.”
as a human inoculated against
patriarchy, Gloria’s task is to bring the
Barbies back to feminist consciousness,
a restoration that begins with a speech
that, as Robbie’s character says in the film,
captures “the cognitive dissonance of being
a woman under the patriarchy.” Gerwig
wrote the original monologue, but she
“I would have
been way
too triggered
by the
need to
play something
physically
perfect.”
and Ferrera spent months refining it. “We
would text each other anything related to
it,” says Ferrera, explaining that they made
edits together, drawing on songs, articles,
and movie scenes that got at “what Gloria’s
talking about.”
One thing they referenced was a
notebook entry that Ferrera had written
nine months before joining the project.
Later, I ask if she can say more about it. She’s
calling from L.A., the first stop on Barbie’s
three-week, seven-country press tour.
“No?” she responds, sounding affronted.
Then she pauses for a long 30 seconds.
“Ultimately, it was about giving myself
permission to let go of expectations that
had been placed on me.” She speaks slowly
and reluctantly. “I was trying to meet those
expectations and be my true self. And those
things were at odds, and something had to
give.” That, really, is the thrust of Gloria’s
monologue and of Barbie, which is largely
about the ludicrous expectations placed on
women. The monologue required nearly
30 takes. Gerwig says that during Ferrera’s
performance, everyone on set (“Not just
women—men, too”) was crying. At one
point, an assistant director told Robbie to
get it together. “He said, ‘You don’t need to
cry, you’re not on-camera,’” she says. “And
I was like, ‘I’m not doing it on purpose.’”
In a way, Gloria is the evolution of
Ferrera’s past roles: a grown-up composite
of Ana, Carmen, and Betty, someone
who has processed and overcome her
own struggles and is now in a position
to impart her wisdom to other women.
Next year, Ferrera is set to direct her first
feature film, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican
Daughter, which she shadowed Gerwig to
prepare for and is about a young Mexican
American woman who shirks cultural and
societal expectations. She’s still in touch
with her Sisterhood castmates, particularly
Amber Tamblyn, who lives nearby and
whose daughter is nearly the same age
as Ferrera’s son. “She is so difficult now,”
says Tamblyn of Ferrera. “She’s always
having me pick up her dry cleaning. One
time, she had me come over and organize
her T-shirt drawer,” she says, laughing.
“I haven’t seen her change. Other than
I think she’s become somebody who feels
more confident in their ability to take up
the space they deserve to take up, creatively
and otherwise.”
In June, Mattel released dolls inspired
by characters from Barbie. Despite her
reservations about becoming a doll,
Ferrera’s likeness was transformed into a
petite, smiling Barbie with a bouncy brown
blowout. The Gloria Doll is $50 and, says
Mattel, “commands the room in her three-
piece, all-pink power pantsuit.” ■
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on a recent sunday, our 23rd anniversary, I asked my

Mating: husband to marry me again. This was not romantic. This was
triage, a dose up the nose of marital Narcan. The night before,

Elizabeth Weil Dan had smacked closed his laptop, on which we were watching
that tender, electric meet-cute scene in season two of The Bear.
“Wait,” he said. “Do you think we’re going to be sitting on this couch
watching Netflix until we die? Like, for the next 35 years?”
Banishing the
P H OTO G R A P H : J AC K T I N N E Y / CO N T R I B U TO R

I said “yes.”
In 2000, when we got married, we had two rules: No cheating
Flannel Nightgown and no dying. Back then, nobody talked about ethical nonmonog-
amy, just as nobody talked about gluten. On your wedding day,

What happened when you just put on your fancy clothes, took (took?) your lover as your
spouse, and walked away betrothed. The plan from there was …

I invited Esther Perel into no plan, really. Go to a hotel once in a while? Try not to destroy
each other? Good luck!

bed with my husband. The no-plan plan works well enough at first. Probably because
when you are newly married, you’re not really married anyway.

16 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
You’ve promised to fuse your lives, but you
haven’t done it yet, so everything is floaty
and roomy and easily forgiven.
Then we had a kid and another kid, a
dog and another dog, two cats, a mortgage,
miscarriages, foot surgery, melanoma, tax
bills, black mold. Marriage working “well
enough” began to seem like an idiotically
low bar, almost a form of self-harm for
a compact we’d (1) staked our sexual-
economic-procreative lives on and (2) com-
mitted to forever.
So I bought a stack of books, looking for
a relationship guru, hoping to find someone
to tell me not just how to survive marriage
but love it here and thrive. Let me save you
a lot of time: Don’t do this. There’s little
that’s uplifting in these texts. The general
view seems to be if you work very, very, very
hard—if you make yourself less unruly;
if you sand down enough of your weird
human edges—you can fix yourself/your
spouse/your relationship and make lifelong
pair-bonding tolerable.
I will never get over reading Intimate
Terrorism, by Michael Vincent Miller. In it,
he describes marriage as “a barbaric com-
petition over whose needs get met,” “two
people trying to make a go of it on emotional
and psychological supplies that are only suf-
ficient for one.” Relationship granddaddy
John M. Gottman, in The Seven Principles
for Making Marriage Work: A Practical
Guide From the Country’s Foremost Rela-
tionship Expert, did not make me feel better
either. After extensive research in his Seattle
Love Lab, Gottman discovered what he calls
the Four Horsemen of the Marriage Apoca-
lypse: criticism, contempt, defensiveness,
and stonewalling. Are you kidding me? Just
root those out forever?
Then I found Esther Perel. Perel’s
blockbuster podcast, Where Should We
Begin?, launched in 2017, recently became
part of the New York Magazine family.
Each episode features a couple sitting for
a three-hour session in Perel’s therapy
office, sharing the raw details of their
relationship—the sex they’re not having,
the resentment they feel, the conversations
they have with each other in their heads but
are too scared to voice out loud.
Perel herself is the draw. She’s a magnet:
a 64-year-old psychotherapist who favors
silk camisoles and dangling necklaces;
who speaks nine languages, including her
Belgian-accented English; the daughter of
two Polish Jews who survived the Nazi death
camps—the only people in either of their
families to do so. You can see in her eyes and
hear in her voice that she understands there
are whole galaxies of emotional real estate
between not being dead and living. She’s not
interested in healing that’s built upon people
Perel is not
interested in
healing that’s
built upon
people trying
to become tamer
or lesser
or smaller.
trying to become tamer or lesser or smaller.
She wants you to own all of yourself, includ-
ing the ambivalences and contradictions.
You know, the ones you’ve tried to resolve
by projecting onto your spouse—and then
disagreeing with them.
Perel’s first book, Mating in Captivity:
Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, came out
in 2006. The cover features a black loafer
mounting a red kitten heel (which sounds
terrible but actually works), and the jacket
copy just comes out and asks the question
few in the marriage-industrial complex
want to ask: Can this ever work? “Can we
desire what we already have?”
I read Mating in Captivity in bed, which
Dan did not find comforting. To which
I could hear Perel saying Frenchily, Good!
Comfort is overrated. Comfort is a trap.
Comfort is a box we create and lock our-
selves in—and then complain is claustro-
phobic. Comfort is (horror of horrors to
Perel) “a flannel nightgown.”
“In truth, we never know our partner
as well as we think we do,” Perel wrote.
I underlined this in red. “We narrow down
our partner, ignoring or rejecting essential
parts when they threaten the established
order of our coupledom.” I underlined that
too. I’d put my whole world in this one man’s
hands. I’d made the utterly conventional
(yet weirdly extreme) play of putting all my
eggs in one basket and then watching that
basket. Dan needed to be predictable for my
sanity. Had I edited him to be that way?
Years passed. We threw out our backs.
We watched all of Éric Rohmer’s films
(sexy) and then all of Breaking Bad (not).
I criticized and I stonewalled. I got boring,
pruning myself into the person I thought
my family needed me to be. Dan got boring
too. Every morning, he’d put on one of
his four identical pairs of Levi’s and grind
his 27—always 27—grams of coffee beans
in our same dumb broken grinder. Occa-
sionally, I’d catch myself in my sweatpants
at 6:30 p.m. (this was before the pandemic)
and think about Perel. I agreed with her in
theory: I needed to become bigger and more
wild. I agreed with her that eroticism—in
all its irrational, inefficient grandeur—is the
antidote to death. Sometimes, in my sweat-
pants, I’d think about Perel, how she was
right, and I’d hate her for it, just as I hated
a woman in my running group who used to
say that when she got tired of her pace, she
tried going faster.
In 2017, Perel published her second book,
The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity.
In it, she pushed further her core idea: The
answer to an enduring marriage is not perfect
intimacy. It’s not a wholesale merger. People
need separateness. People need mystery.
People need to feel recklessness—and reck-
lessness, Perel is sorry to say, is tamped
down by caregiving, which is what you’re
doing year after year with your spouse.
It’s been a long few years for everybody.
One of my biggest regrets is how much of
it I spent in emotional flannel. I thought if
I could just retreat far enough inside myself,
if I could just be less, I’d emerge renewed.
It’s easy to tell yourself, amid the dogs and
the taxes, that you can’t shake your union,
that you’ve got to bury what’s causing
bumps. It’s easy to outsource onto your
partner all the ways you’ve failed: You got
boring. You let us get here.
Then you’ll find yourself, two-plus
decades in, sitting on the couch in the room
where you raised your children, shocked
awake by witnessing TV characters falling
in love. At that point, you’ll have a choice.
You can seek out other people. (Hello, Bill
de Blasio and Chirlane McCray!) You can
get divorced. Or you can buck up and take
Perel’s hand. Exhume all your buried parts.
Pray they haven’t rotted. Believe in survival.
You can acknowledge to your Levi’s-
wearing partner, who is still very hand-
some, if more distinguished, that after 23
years you’ve run yourself into an emotional
cul-de-sac, a safe, well-paved suburb where
neither of you ever wanted to live.
“We can’t do this until we die,” I said
to Dan.
He said, “I know.”
We all live in Perel’s world now. It’s
sparkly here and messy, a dirt road through
the mountains with dazzling, fleeting
wildflowers and old majestic Jeffrey pines,
burned by lightning, gnarled by time. What
I want now—in my life, in my marriage—is
to reclaim fullness, not backtrack into youth.
“Are you sure you still want to do this
together?” Dan asked.
“I do.” ■
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 17
 At the newly redeveloped
660 Fifth Avenue, around two-
thirds of the building is still
available. Not a single new lease
deal has been reported this year,
according to CompStak.

18 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
 The panic—and
pivot—of the office
megalandlord.
By Andrew Rice

Photograph by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 19

 rented. Add in sharp hikes in interest rates,
which make refinancing a huge commer-
cial mortgage a potentially ruinous propo-
sition, and you have a crisis that threatens
not just the solvency of office buildings but
the loans that are attached to them and the
banks that hold them and, by extension,
the whole economy.
“We’re crossing a chasm,” Rechler told
me when I visited him at his office at
75 Rockefeller Plaza in early June. More
than any of the city’s other major landlords,
he’s been warning of what he calls a “slow-
moving train wreck.” Like it or not, every-
one suffers if banks collapse. And if you are
a New Yorker, you have a great deal at stake
in the market because of the enormous
public revenue offices generate—21 percent
very time the real-estate market of the city’s property-tax levy—money that
crashes, people say, “This time is different.” When goes to pay for schools, public housing, fire
there’s distress all around, it’s hard to grasp how there trucks, pensions, parks, and so much else
that makes life in New York tolerable.
could ever be an upside. But with the benefit of hind- According to Cushman & Wakefield,
sight, you can see that if you’d had enough money Manhattan’s office-vacancy rate is around
22 percent, the highest recorded since
when things got bad, you could have made a killing market tracking began in 1984. When
by taking the other side of the bet. Let’s go back to you include sublet space, more than
128 buildings in Manhattan currently list
2009. There was calamity as far as the eye could see: more than 200,000 square feet of space
bank bailouts, paralyzed credit markets, a toxic heap as available for lease, according to data
of mortgage debt crushing the world economy. Scott from the firm CoStar. The available space
in these buildings alone amounts to more
Rechler, having fortuitously sold his family’s real-estate than 52 million square feet: the equiva-
company at the top of the market to a competitor for lent of more than 40 skyscrapers the size
of the Chrysler Building. Certain areas
$6 billion, decided it was a good time to go shopping and building types are particularly endan-
for office buildings. After raising more money from sov- gered—the Garment District lofts once
favored by tech start-ups, the generic glass
ereign wealth funds, other institutional investors, and gulch of Third Avenue in the 40s and 50s—
wealthy private individuals overseas, he went on an but the pain is widely distributed. Many
opportunistic buying spree. Over three years, he spent large property owners are now performing
triage, trying to determine which buildings
$4.5 billion on Manhattan office acquisitions. By 2020, are still worth anything like what they paid
his company, RXR, was a major office landlord with for them. In Rechler’s case, this reassess-
ment has taken the form of a process he
more than 22 million square feet of space in the city. calls “Project Kodak,” after the once mighty
film-and-camera company. He classifies
buildings that are worth saving as “digital.”
Today, three years after the pandemic instance, with 5 Times Square, a million- The duds he deems “film.”
emptied office buildings nationwide, square-foot building that 20 years ago was Rechler, 55, is a bald, blunt real-estate
Rechler has been forced to reckon with a gleaming centerpiece of 42nd Street’s dynast. He comes from a Long Island
the possibility that the buildings that were revival? After the departure of its longtime family that turned a small fortune made by
worth so much not so long ago may now anchor tenant and major renovations, it’s his grandfather—he patented the folding
not even be worth keeping. Corporate currently close to empty. aluminum beach chair—into a very large
tenants are typically locked into multiyear Not long ago, real-estate industry leaders one, mostly by building industrial and office
leases, which guarantee stability in the were urging the city’s workers to return to parks in the suburbs. When he was in his
commercial real-estate market for a time. their office buildings. Rechler told me in early 30s, Scott pushed the family company
But every month, more leases expire, giv- 2020 that it was a “civic responsibility.” into Manhattan real estate before he sold it
ing tenants an opportunity to rethink their They’ve since surrendered to the changed in 2007 to SL Green Realty Corp., which is
space, and every day, employers are staring reality. Sometimes tenants are down- now Manhattan’s largest commercial land-
at empty desks. Many companies, which sizing and upgrading to more expensive lord. He took his peak-of-the-market profits
had been trying to squeeze more workers spaces; sometimes they are economizing and set out to build RXR on his own. Like
into less space for years, are not renewing. under the guise of offering flexibility. From any successful commercial-property owner,
That leaves an office landlord facing hard the landlord’s perspective, motive hardly he has hedged his company’s risks by part-
choices. What should Rechler do, for matters—space is space, and it’s got to be nering with other real-estate firms, spend-

20 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3

Rechler (and his Mr. Brainwash) in his office at 75 Rockefeller Plaza.
ing other people’s money—in his case,
mostly from overseas investors—and selling
off bits and pieces of his portfolio at advan-
tageous moments.
Rechler said he began Project Kodak
from a position of relative strength, which
has allowed him to be cold-blooded when
it comes to culling the buildings he owns.
Of course, he would say that: Commercial
real estate is a bluffing business, so it is rare
for its players to admit they are in trouble.
All the big landlords—SL Green, Vornado
Realty Trust, Brookfield Properties, the
old real-estate families—are facing the
same problem of vacancy and shrinking
demand. Where Rechler differs from the
rest, though, is in his relative candor about
the consequences. “Obviously, when we lose
money, it hurts, and in many of these cases
we will lose money,” he said. “You need to
rise to the opportunity and re-create value.”
Rechler casts himself in the mold of
businessmen like Nelson Rockefeller,
Felix Rohatyn, Mike Bloomberg, and Dan
Doctoroff, who have taken charge in times
of distress, at least according to their own
mythology. “There’s been a void of leader-
ship,” Rechler told me. Under Governor
Andrew Cuomo, Rechler played an influen-
tial role on the board of the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey, and he later
Photograph by Bobby Doherty
served as the chairman of the Regional Plan
Association. His desk is equipped with a
ring light and a microphone for his frequent
appearances on podcasts and CNBC, in
which he pleads for action from regula-
tors and policymakers. He speaks against
a backdrop of graffiti art—a pair of pieces
by Mr. Brainwash, collaged images of road
signs and Superman and uplifting spray-
painted slogans (follow your dreams …
nyc is beautiful).
Rechler also sits on a board that over-
sees the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
and has been outspoken about the possi-
bility of economic “contagion” emanating
from distressed commercial-real-estate
debt. Rechler predicts that within two
years, there will be “500 to 1,000 fewer
regional banks” owing to failures and
forced consolidations. He has been advo-
cating, with some success, for action from
banking regulators, who can influence
lenders’ decisions when it comes to trou-
bled loans. He wants lenders to loosen up
the credit markets, which would benefit
the industry in general and Rechler in
particular, though his self-interest doesn’t
make him wrong. “Some people accuse
Scott of speaking his own book,” says one
of his real-estate competitors. “But what
he says is right on the money.”
“I think raising the alarm is important,”
Rechler said. “Government has been really
good at responding to crisis. They’ve been
really poor at proactively trying to prevent
crisis. So we could wait three, four years
until our tax revenues are down 20 or
30 percent, and our transit system once
again is broke and falling apart, and we
have crime on our streets and homelessness
in these dark areas where we have vacant
buildings, or we could try to get ahead of
the game.”
Rechler is confident that, on the other
side of the agony, there will be new oppor-
tunities for his business and for the city.
“I was with Mike Bloomberg yesterday
talking about this,” he said. “How anytime
anyone bets against New York evolving,
they lose that bet.” An inherent part of evo-
lution, though, is elimination. Some real-
estate companies will not survive the crisis.
Office buildings will end up demolished.
A group of people who have long owned
the city, both literally and politically, could
end up making less and mattering less. This
time might really be different. That may
not sound like a tragedy; few New Yorkers
miss their sweaty daily commutes, their
crammed open-plan galleys, their plastic-
packed salads. But what is this city if its
skyline is now obsolete?
L
et’s start excavating the
numbers. In normal times,
Rechler said, making a value
assessment is more straightfor-
ward. The industry’s key metric
is a figure called the “cap rate.”
To understand the cap rate, you have
to think of an office building the way a
real-estate investor does: not as a steel-
and-glass object but as a snowcapped
mountain that creates a river of cash. To
calculate the cap rate, you take the cash
flow and subtract expenses. Whatever is
left is net operating income. Divide that by
the building’s market value as an asset, and
you get its yield, expressed as a percentage:
the cap rate. At the moment, because there
are few transactions outside distress sales,
it’s hard to calculate a building’s underly-
ing value. If you don’t have a denominator,
you can’t figure out the cap rate.
“No one really knows where these
values are,” Rechler said.
Since the mathematical method of
valuation is broken, Project Kodak
involves a more complex and—at least in
Rechler’s description—subjective analysis
of all 17 buildings in his New York office
portfolio. It takes into account factors
like activity, as measured by cell-phone
tracking and security-card-swipe data, and
the quality of amenities. Brokers have been
advancing the hypothesis that the market
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 21
 The Lonely Island
Everyone’s trying to downsize their office space at the same time, AVAILABLE SPACE
which means there’s a giant amount of it on the market. (Congrats to
200–300k sq. ft.
fancy new builds in Hudson Yards; good luck to the old clunkers in
300–450k
the 30s.) From Fidi to midtown, these are the Manhattan towers with
450–750k
the most available square footage (including space for sublease),
750k+
according to data provided by CoStar. By Kim Velsey

5 1 LIBERTY PLZ.
1 867,250
Total sq. ft. available space

• Brookfield, the majority owner

1 60 WALL ST. of this 1970s tower, bought a
49 percent stake back from
1,571,781
Total sq. ft. available space
Blackstone for $1 billion in March,
$500 million less than Blackstone
had paid several years earlier. t.
• Known for its much-mocked, o nS
now-beloved postmodern ds
Hu
atrium, all 1.57 million square
feet of its office space is vacant.
It’s undergoing a renovation
but has yet to lock down any 5
new tenants.

9
9 55 WATER ST.
821,142
Canal

10
Total sq. ft. available space
601 W. 26TH ST.
St.

6
• Manhattan’s largest office
850,235
tower, with nearly 4 million FINANCIAL
square feet and massive floor DISTRICT
plates, 55 Water has about Total sq. ft. available space
20 percent of its space
available, which puts it on par • RXR paid $900 million in 2011
for the Starrett-Lehigh Building, a
with the Manhattan average. 10 80 PINE ST. block-long landmark, and is trying
to reposition it as a vertical campus
748,630
Total sq. ft. available space
for tech and creative tenants.

• In 2020, when a slew of leases ended,

800,000 of the tower’s 1.2 million
square feet were suddenly vacant. So
Rudin Management decided to sink
$100 million into this ’60s office
ALL THE OTHER VERY building. Post-renovation, some
AVAILABLE BUILDINGS space has been leased, but it still has
(from most to least a ton of square feet available.
space on the market):
• 295 Fifth Ave.
• 1 World Trade Center • 222 Broadway • 195 Broadway • 825 Third Ave.
• 2 Park Ave. • 32 Sixth Ave. • 14 Wall St. • 225 Liberty St. • 345 Hudson St. • 3 Times Sq. • 110 William St.
• 1 Penn Plz. • 22 Vanderbilt Ave. • 1540 Broadway • 245 Park Ave. • 622 Third Ave. • 4 World Trade Center • 61 Broadway • 150 E. 42nd St.
• 341 Ninth Ave. • 28 Liberty St. • 1301–1315 Sixth Ave. • 360 Park Ave. S. • 100 Park Ave. • 7 Times Sq. • 437 Madison Ave. • 1133 Sixth Ave.
• 135 W. 50th St. • 750 Third Ave. • 1166 Sixth Ave. • 50 Hudson Yards • 1251 Sixth Ave. • 9 W. 57th St. • 200 Liberty St. • 554–568 Eighth Ave.
• 120 Broadway • 535 W. 46th St. • 220 E. 42nd St. • 3 World Trade Center • 1 Hudson Sq. • 485 Lexington Ave. • 200 Vesey St. • 919 Third Ave.
• 1440 Broadway • 140 Broadway • 30 Hudson Yards • 85 Broad St. • 63 Madison Ave. • 340 Madison Ave. • 3 Park Ave. • 1411 Broadway
• 1 New York Plz. • 200 Madison Ave. • 199 Water St. • 1185 Sixth Ave. • 850 Third Ave. • 450 W. 33rd St. • 151 W. 42nd St. • 1180 Sixth Ave.

22 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 Infographic by Evan Applegate

 7 825 EIGHTH AVE.
850,012
Total sq. ft. available space
2
• One Worldwide Plaza is more
than three decades old—
3 and looks it. One of its largest
7 tenants, a law firm, is
6 downsizing to a newer
building in Hudson Yards.

4
8

MIDTOWN

11

h Ave.
Tent

11 350 FIFTH AVE.

721,246
Total sq. ft. available space
12

• The Empire State Building

finished a $165 million
renovation in 2019. It’s a huge
office tower—2.7 million
square feet—but more than
25 percent is available.
42
34

Ave.
nd
th

Fif t h
St
St

.
.

8 660 FIFTH AVE.

2 2 PENN PLZ.
1,382,093
Total sq. ft. available space
• Vornado Realty Trust recently
renovated this mid-century office
tower to include loggia-style patios
and a rooftop picnic area. Earlier
this year, the company pulled
back from plans to build several
844,241
Total sq. ft. available space
• You may recall when Jared
Kushner panic-sold this building,
12 1290 SIXTH AVE. formerly 666 Fifth, to Brookfield
in 2018. (Kushner still owns
715,015
Total sq. ft. available space
the land.) This mid-century tower
is now nearing the end of
an extensive renovation and is

First
Av e. supertall office towers nearby. • AXA Equitable Life Insurance, 33 percent leased.
the largest tenant in this
Vornado building, and Venable,
a law firm, recently announced
that they’re leaving.
3 66 HUDSON BLVD. 4 5 TIMES SQ.
929,171
Total sq. ft. available space
918,591
Total sq. ft. available space
• Developed by Tishman Speyer • Floors six to 29 are empty,
and designed by Bjarke Ingels but RXR is counting on
Group, the “Spiral” is the type of a $300 million upgrade that
new building that doesn’t have includes David Rockwell–
trouble attracting tenants. designed common areas to
Pfizer, Debevoise & Plimpton, reel in tenants.
and HSBC have all signed leases.

• 767 Fifth Ave.

• 25 Broadway • 220 W. 42nd St. • 11 Times Sq.
• 51 Astor Pl. • 99 Park Ave. • 75 Broad St. • 1345 Sixth Ave. • 90 Park Ave.
• 550 Madison Ave. • 77 Water St. • 420 Lexington Ave. • 237 Park Ave. • 770 Broadway • 101 Greenwich St. • 41 E. 11th St. • 11 Broadway
• 180 Maiden Ln. • 441 Ninth Ave. • 31 W. 52nd St. • 200 Park Ave. • 11 Madison Ave. • 275 Seventh Ave. • 175 Fifth Ave. • 655 Third Ave.
• 611 Broadway • 32 Old Slip • 1501 Broadway • 1675 Broadway • 805 Third Ave. • 229 W. 43rd St. • 1177 Sixth Ave. • 111 W. 33rd St.
• 1 State St. Plz. • 575 Madison Ave. • 405 Lexington Ave. • 423 W. 55th St. • 200 Hudson St. • 360 Madison Ave. • 26 Broadway • 1700 Broadway
• 230 Park Ave. • 60 Hudson St. • 101 Park Ave. • 810 Seventh Ave. • 1 Dag Hammarskjöld • 475 Park Ave. S. • 666 Third Ave. • 1350 Sixth Ave.
• 330 W. 34th St. • 233 Broadway • 12 E. 49th St. • 1 Herald Sq. Plz. • 623 Fifth Ave. • 5 Penn Plz. • 60 E. 42nd St.

j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 23
is seeing a “flight to quality,” in which ten-
ants are relocating to buildings that offer
enticements like cafés, gyms, yoga studios,
and meditation pods. Some spots are more
adaptable to the office-as-spa concept
than others. “We look building by build-
ing,” Rechler said. “What’s the quality of
the tenant and the demand? And then, you
know, can we fix the capital structure?”
That last factor—the existing debt—
weighs heavily. But before he gets to the
loans, Rechler wants to know whether the
buildings are even capable of competing.
“We have broken it up into sort of a
trifurcation of the market,” Rechler said.
“There’s the new-construction class.” This
includes Hudson Yards as well as projects
like SL Green’s skyscraper One Vanderbilt
and all the other supertall office towers
now underway or proposed around Grand
Central, one of which RXR is planning to
build. “That market is in a market by itself,”
Rechler said, “where tenants that want
to be there are still willing to pay $150,
$200 a foot.”
If you’ve got a trophy, you’re keeping it.
The decisions get more complex when it
comes to the next tier, known as “class A”
buildings, which make up most of Rechler’s
portfolio. These buildings used to be in the
premier league, but now they have been
relegated to the second division. There are
said to be around 400 class-A buildings in
New York, though that category is nebu-
lous, a marketing term with no official
parameters. “Within that class A,” Rechler
said, “there’s different gradations in quality.”
Take 5 Times Square, which Rechler
purchased with partners for $1.5 billion
in 2014. After its original anchor tenant,
an accounting firm, announced it was
leaving for Hudson Yards, Rechler spent
$300 million to upgrade the building with
new amenities, including common areas
designed by David Rockwell. Rechler
said the costly renovations make 5 Times
Square a digital building, and last year, a
digital tenant, the streaming-video com-
pany Roku, agreed to lease 240,000 square
feet at a reported rate of around $90 a foot.
“That was a big indicator of tenant demand,
which played into our view,” Rechler said.
In April, however, Roku sought to sublease
some of the space, having reported losses
and laid off employees. Aside from the
sublet space, 5 Times Square currently has
23 of 33 of its office floors empty and avail-
able for lease.
Around 800,000 square feet are listed as
available at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in
Chelsea, including some space that Rechler
said he plans to redeploy for amenities as he
tries to create a “vertical campus” for tech
and creative tenants. RXR purchased the
full-block former freight terminal building
24 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
for $920 million in 2011, a huge sum for
the area at the time, a bet vindicated when
Google and other tech companies moved
into the neighborhood. In the hot market
of 2015, Rechler sold a 49 percent inter-
est in the Starrett-Lehigh and five other
Certain kinds of
buildings to Blackstone, earning a hand- properties are more
some return. Big-tech companies may be
cutting back their real estate now (see side-
doomed than others.
bar, p.28), but at some point, they will pre- Here, four case studies.
sumably grow again, and Starrett-Lehigh
will be waiting with proximity to Hudson
Yards. “The building started at $30, and The Blah Glass
Tower
P H OTO G R A P H S : ( P R E V I O U S S P R E A D) M I K E R O B E R T S / F L I C K R ( 6 0 WA L L S T. ) ; M A X B A I L E N / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( E M P I R E S TAT E B U I L D I N G ) ; G A RY H E R S H O R N / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( 6 6 H U D S O N B LV D. ) ; E D E N ,
now we’re doing $70 a foot,” Rechler said.
It’s important to remember, however,
that these rent figures are not hard num-
bers. It always costs something to entice
J A N I N E A N D J I M / F L I C K R ( 5 T I M E S S Q. ) ; DA N I E L B A R RY / B LO O M B E R G V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ( 1 W O R L D W I D E P L Z . ) ; A M E L I A H A M M O N D ( 6 6 0 F I F T H AV E . ) ; G O O G L E M A P S ( R E M A I N I N G )
a tenant to sign a new lease. Concessions
like build-out costs and months of free
rent eat into the landlord’s income. “What
they call the net-effective rent has gone
down,” Rechler said. “If it was $100 and
the net effective used to be $80, it’s now
$100 and the net-effective rent is $60.”
As you proceed down the list of buildings
in RXR’s portfolio, the considerations get
heavier. What do you do about an older
building with significant vacancy, or one
with a big tenant whose lease is coming up
for renegotiation? Rechler told me he is in
the midst of refinancing $2 billion in debt
on four of his buildings, which will require
a commitment of more than $700 mil- 850 Third Avenue
lion in new capital, part of which will go Built: 1960 / Sq. ft.: 617,000
to renovations like the ones at 5 Times
Square. One of the buildings he is recom- the glass ziggurat at
mitting to is 450 Lexington Avenue, near 850 Third Avenue is the
architectural equivalent of The Man
Grand Central. “It has all the bones,” he
in the Gray Flannel Suit: sharp,
said, which he thinks makes it capable of straitlaced, and way past its prime. Its
competing with some improvements. “It’s 21 stories were the height of corporate
not One Vanderbilt. But you can price it chic when the building first opened;
at half of what One Vanderbilt does and this spring, the Chetrit Group sold the
still do well.” whole thing back to its lenders for
$266 million, roughly $150 million less
By contrast, the quandary facing One
than it had paid only four years prior.
Worldwide Plaza, the 2 million-square- After losing Discovery, Inc., during the
foot Hell’s Kitchen office tower, is more pandemic, a major tenant that rented
challenging. Built by the Zeckendorf fam- 160,000 square feet over seven floors,
ily on a former site of Madison Square the building sits half-empty and brokers
Garden, the complex was originally a say it’s in dire need of a face-lift. The
decline in the building’s fortunes stands
wager that corporate midtown could
in sad contrast to its once-vaunted
expand west of Eighth Avenue. It suffered tenant list, which included the offices
through high vacancy and a prior owner’s of the International Herald Tribune and
default during the financial crisis, after of Emery Roth & Sons, its architect.
which RXR and two other firms acquired
the building. It was near full until recently,
when one of its original tenants, the law
firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, signed a
lease for a smaller, newer space in Hudson
Yards. Another big tenant, the Japanese
bank Nomura, reportedly has an option to
escape its long-term lease in 2027 and has
hired brokers to help it look at its options
to downsize or potentially upgrade else-
where. Citing uncertainty about the sta-
bility of the building’s tenancy, the S&P
 A Typology of
Unwanted Office Buildings
The Shiny New One
Without Tenants
R E N D E R I N G : CO U R T E S Y O F N E O S C A P E , I N C . ( 1 1 1 WA L L S T. ) . P H OTO G R A P H S : ( T H I S S P R E A D) R I C H A R D L E V I N E / A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO ( 8 5 0 T H I R D AV E . ) ;
111 Wall Street
Built: 1966 / Sq. ft.: 1.2 million
G O O G L E M A P S ( 2 9 W. 3 5 T H S T. ) ; L E V R A D I N / PAC I F I C P R E S S / L I G H T R O C K E T V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ( 1 6 0 WAT E R S T. ) .
when nightingale properties
and Wafra Capital Partners (now
InterVest Capital Partners) bought a
$195 million long-term leasehold on this
nondescript office tower in 2020 with plans
for a major upgrade, it was something of
a bold move. Citigroup, which had used
the entire building as a back office
(operations, technology, administrative
work), had vacated the year before. Other
banks, too, were consolidating and moving
their offices uptown. And 111 Wall had never
been a truly top-tier building—when it
opened, the First National City Bank leased
most of it as storage for the batteries that ran
its computers. But while a makeover wasn’t
going to bring back the banks, plenty of tech
and finance firms could, presumably, be
interested in leasing space there. Then
covid hit. Almost three years in, 111 Wall—
and its neighbor 60 Wall—is nearing the
completion of costly renovations; 111 Wall,
which cost $100 million to renovate, will
have a bronze-trimmed glass façade,
herringbone travertine floors, and 45,000
square feet of hospitality-style amenities
for office workers. The two buildings
combined will bring around 2.5 million
square feet of gorgeous new office space to a
business district with a 25.6 percent vacancy
rate. 111 Wall hasn’t signed any leases yet,
according to CoStar, though Nightingale
says it’s in active negotiations with a number
of tenants.
The Mid-Block
Dump
29 West 35th Street
Built: 1911 / Sq. ft.: 85,000
there’s a certain kind of
building that belongs to the side
streets of midtown. Sand-colored or gray
stone façade, dust-smeared windows,
sooty bits of ornament—this is the sturdy,
indefatigable mid-block dump, home to
C-class office space that, while never
exactly desirable, has always been
abundant and convenient and reasonably
cheap, providing respectable digs to
generations of furriers and printshops
and makers of children’s underwear.
The downturn in the commercial market
has been cruel to these properties—what
with their relative lack of amenities and
poor energy efficiency—and it’s been
especially bad for 29 West 35th Street,
a handsome if undistinguished 12-story
office high-rise. At present, the building
appears to be headed for auction after
Paul Sohayegh and Roni Movahedian
defaulted on their $41 million loan last
year. Sadly, the building’s demise is no
more remarkable than the building, yet
for lovers of the area’s oddball urban
fabric, it’s an ominous sign, boding ill for
every seventh-floor leather-repair outpost
and storefront sequin shop from Madison
Square to Columbus Circle.
The Residential
Conversion
160 Water Street
Built: 1972 / Sq. ft.: 525,000
this 24-story Financial District
office building was once home to
international banks and insurance
companies, but by 2019, the glass tower
was showing its age—one of many dated
office buildings clustered around the South
Street Seaport. A few years earlier, the
owner, Vanbarton Group, had converted
180 Water, the tower’s neighbor, into a
luxury rental. After the pandemic, the choice
was obvious: office space no one wanted,
or apartments in a desirable residential
enclave with a new Whole Foods and
Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s food hall?
“There are many factors that go into
determining office versus residential, but
first and foremost, it’s location,” says Robert
Fuller, principal and studio director
at Gensler, the architecture firm that’s
overseeing the building’s conversion
into 588 market-rate studios and
one-bedrooms (there’ll be a few two-
bedrooms). In other ways, 160 Water wasn’t
an ideal candidate for conversion: Modern
office buildings often have deep floor plates
with lightless interiors and glass curtain
walls. But those things can be worked
around. Gensler ran shafts through the
center of the building and replaced drafty
old glass curtain walls with high-end
Skyline windows, which can be opened.
The building will likely be rental rather than
condo (condos require better bones). And
almost half the units will have home offices.
kim velsey and ian volner
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 25
Global recently downgraded a portion of
the publicly traded debt on the building, a
fixed-rate mortgage that will have to be refi-
nanced in the next few years. The building
has 791,000 square feet available.
“It’s going to need a significant capital
plan to make it competitive,” acknowl-
edged Rechler, whose company owns
25 percent of the building. He other-
wise declined to discuss his analysis, but
another real-estate investor sized it up for
me. “Worldwide Plaza is about to be vacant
again,” the investor said. “It’s on Eighth
Avenue, in a bad location, and he has a bad
loan coming due—Kodak.”
eneath class a,
there’s the commodity space: the build-
ings categorized as class B and class
C. Rechler believes they are hopeless.
“That’s the stuff that’s competitively
obsolete,” he said. “Side-street buildings.
Dark buildings. It’s not close to public
transportation, doesn’t have the infrastruc-
ture. Ultimately, that’s a subset of the mar-
ket that will need to be redeveloped, repur-
posed, or torn down.”
With that, he condemned around
70 percent of New York City’s 1,381 office
buildings. That was easy for Rechler to
say—he doesn’t own much of the lower-
rated stock—but his view is widely held. At
a recent event sponsored by the publication
The Real Deal, Jeff Blau, the chief executive
of the Related Companies, advised owners
of such buildings to “take what you can and
run.” Jeffrey Gural, a real-estate investor
who owns a lot in the supposedly obsolete
tier, says the coming shakeout is “going to
separate the men from the boys.” Some
buildings might live on if they can be con-
verted to other uses, like housing, but a sig-
nificant number—not just the decrepit and
old but ones that were considered Class A
until recently—will probably be torn down.
“If you have a building that is half-empty
and a loan coming due,” says Gural, who
adds that he’s not in this position himself,
“odds are you’re going to give the keys back
to the bank.”
For an office landlord, abandoning a
26 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
building can be the best of bad options.
Commercial mortgages on offices are usu-
ally structured as “nonrecourse” loans,
which means that only the building is for-
feited in a default. The bank may end up
the biggest loser, taking over a property
that is worth much less than its mortgage.
It is becoming increasingly common to
see office landlords—even the ones with
billions in assets—walk away. Blackstone
did it last year with an empty office building
on Broadway in midtown. Brookfield gave
up two entire portfolios of buildings in
Washington and Los Angeles.
Owners who purchased four or six or
eight years ago will soon face such choices,
needing to refinance their buildings with
much more expensive loans. Rechler
explained the math in a hypothetical
scenario. Let’s say you bought a million-
square-foot office for $1 billion in 2015.
You took on $600 million in debt at a low
fixed rate, and now your loan term is up and
you have to refinance. The present value of
your building is in the eye of your lender.
In 2023, it does an appraisal and decides it
is now worth only $700 million. But com-
mercial mortgages are usually interest-only
loans, so you still owe that $600 million you
borrowed. The decline in value comes out
of your equity. You’ve just lost $300 million.
And because your bank needs to maintain
its loan-to-value ratio, when you refinance,
you will get a smaller loan, at a higher rate,
and you will have to sink more money into
the building to shore up your equity if you
decide to keep it.
Now, let’s take a non-hypothetical
scenario: an RXR-owned office building at
61 Broadway. When Rechler ran his Project
Kodak exercise, it looked like an obvious
candidate to cut loose. An early-20th-
century building way down in the Financial
District, it was filled before the pandemic
with law and architecture firms, tech com-
panies, and a now-bankrupt co-working
start-up. “We ran the numbers: Where do
we think rents would need to be to make this
work?” Rechler said. He went to his leasing
agents, who assured him there were “five
or six deals” to be done with tenants in the
required range. Rechler told them to lower
the asking rent by 10 percent and come back
if they signed one lease.
“They went out, and none of those deals
bit,” Rechler said. “So you say to yourself,
‘I think the market has told us this is a
film building.’”
For Rechler, choosing default made stra-
tegic sense. He said he had already recovered
his original investment in 61 Broadway by
selling a 49 percent stake in the building to
a Chinese bank in 2016. Refinancing would
have meant putting in additional money
to recapitalize and renovate it. Rechler
said he pitched the lender, a syndicate led
by Aareal Bank, on the idea of converting
the building for residential use. In order to
make the numbers work, though, the bank
would have had to be willing to take a loss,
writing down the value of the loan. “It has to
be a lot cheaper,” Rechler said. “But no one
wants to hear that.”
So Rechler told the lender that he
intended to give 61 Broadway back. This
is where the real-estate industry’s dis-
tress could start to spread to the finan-
cial system. An estimated $1.5 trillion in
commercial-real-estate debt is scheduled
to mature between now and 2025. Banks
have taken note, making it much harder to
persuade bankers to offer new loans, even
on healthy buildings.
“Right now, it’s doomsday,” says the real-
estate investor who sized up Worldwide
Plaza. “There’s no lenders; there’s little ten-
ant demand.” He says he thinks the market
will still muddle through. Banks don’t want
to end up owning a distressed property, so
both parties are incentivized to string loans
along in the hope of a market rebound, a
strategy known in the industry as “extend
and pretend.” They cannot keep up the
charade in every case, though, which means
that a lot of previously profitable build-
ings will likely end up being disposed of in
distress sales.
How will all of that financial misery
make itself felt in the city? The last time
anything comparable to this happened,
in the early 1990s, many developers went
bust, speculatively built glass towers stood
vacant for years, and the assessed values of
office buildings citywide fell by 13 percent,
according to the city comptroller’s office.
There was a glut of supply, created in that
case by lax lending standards and over-
building, and high interest rates, which
made it difficult for property owners to
refinance. The ensuing period of budget
shortfalls, service cuts, and unrest contrib-
uted to the election of Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
The early 1990s downturn lasted around
five years, after which office property values
increased for the next two decades, even
through the dot-com crash, 9/11, and the
Great Recession. Then came the pandemic.
Although the city has recovered nearly all
the jobs it lost in 2020, the office-vacancy
rate has continued to move in the oppo-
site direction. “This time,” says Mary Ann
Tighe, a veteran commercial broker who
is chief executive of the New York region
for the firm CBRE, “I think we are look-
ing at a fundamental reordering of, cer-
tainly, Manhattan.” She says every tenant
she works with is asking whether remote
work can allow for compressed footprints.
Steven Roth, the chairman of the publicly
traded company Vornado, recently told his
investors that Fridays are “dead forever” and
“Monday is touch and go.” Vornado’s stock
has lost almost 75 percent of its value since
the pandemic.
Last year, a team of academics from
Columbia University and NYU published
a paper with the eye-catching title “Work
From Home and the Office Real Estate
Apocalypse.” In it, they estimated that
New York office buildings had lost 39 per-
cent of their long-term value. A couple of
months ago, they revised their projections
based on newer data and came up with an
even steeper decline—44 percent on the
average path.
“If anything, I feel like as time has pro-
gressed, this has started to look more and
more right,” said one of the paper’s co-
authors, Columbia finance professor Stijn
Van Nieuwerburgh, when I went to see him
in June. The Belgian academic’s own office,
in one of the new buildings at Columbia’s
campus extension in Harlem, is pleasant
and private and has a view of the Hudson
River. A large whiteboard was filled with
stochastic equations: the predictive formu-
las that have rattled the real-estate indus-
try. After the first paper was published, the
professor said, one of the city’s large office
landlords summoned him for a grim brief-
ing. “I knew we were on to something here,”
Van Nieuwerburgh said, “because the folks
who breathe this day in and day out for a
living, they are scared.”
“Right now,
it’s doomsday ...
In separate research, Van Nieuwerburgh
has extrapolated the economic conse-
quences of this collapse in value for the
health of cities, forecasting that a decline in
property-tax revenue would create budget
deficits for municipal governments that
would lead to cuts in services like policing
and trash collection, causing a deterioration
in the quality of life. He calls this dynamic an
“urban doom loop,” a phrase that has caught
on. Van Nieuwerburgh told me that the city
comptroller’s office had recently cited his
analysis as a “doomsday” scenario. But even
in the case of a 40 percent decline in values,
the comptroller’s report found, the revenue
decline would be modest in the short term—
only around $1 billion by 2027. With a hint
of amusement, Van Nieuwerburgh ques-
tioned that conclusion. “They call it sort
of the worst-case scenario,” he said, “which
I think is a misinterpretation of our paper.
Our paper is not a worst-case scenario; it’s
the median scenario.” If remote work per-
sists at the current rate, he has projected
a much larger tax hit to the city: around
$6 billion a year.
E
ven so, to many New Yorkers,
office doom sounds tantalizing. Who
cares if a few extraordinarily wealthy
real-estate companies end up with
a marginally shorter stack of Monopoly
money? What’s a few billion here or there
in a $100 billion municipal budget? The
distress of the office market creates a rare
opportunity to create the one real-estate
commodity everyone agrees the city needs:
housing. The civic logic is compelling.
“New York City is facing an existential cri-
sis,” Rechler said. “We have a shortage of
housing, and we have an excess of old office
space.” As he well knows from his experi-
ence with 61 Broadway, the problem is solv-
ing the math. Before the pandemic, office
buildings were trading at prices of around
$1,000 a square foot. Buildings slated for
conversion go for around $300 a square
foot, very roughly. So to make the housing
strategy feasible, banks and landlords have
to accept that once-profitable properties are
worth a fraction of what they once were. Van
Nieuwerburgh and his co-authors recently
published new research that found that
... There’s no lenders;
there’s little tenant
demand.”
some Manhattan buildings have fallen close
to the required threshold. “If the 40 percent
equity gets wiped out,” Van Nieuwerburgh
said, “and then half of the 60 percent debt,
that’s another 30 percent. That’s 70 percent
value destruction. We’re not that far from
that number for class B and class C.”
The conversion proposition is appealing
to policy-makers, including the mayor and
the governor. Last year, their “New” New
York Panel recommended revising building
regulations and zoning to make it easier to
turn offices into apartments. “That was
the most low-hanging of low-hanging
fruit,” says Andrew Kimball, the head of
the city’s Economic Development Corpo-
ration. “That did not happen.” Governor
Hochul incorporated the panel’s recom-
mendations into her housing plan, which
died in the State Assembly partly because
some Democrats wanted concessions on
eviction laws that were radioactive to the
real-estate industry.
Some progressives have argued that
conversion programs should mandate
the inclusion of affordable housing. But
Van Nieuwerburgh says that is impos-
sible without large government subsidies.
Even setting numbers aside, he estimates
that only around 30 percent of Manhattan
buildings have “hope for convertibility.” The
huge buildings with column-free trading
floors for financial firms, which were so
lucrative to build in the 1980s and ’90s, are
now extremely complicated to convert into
apartments because they have so much inte-
rior space without windows. If a landlord
has office tenants, time-consuming negotia-
tions with holdouts may be required. (At the
Real Deal event in June, Blau, the Related
CEO, estimated that 30 percent of tenants
“will never fucking leave.”)
Even when a building does pencil out on
paper, every step in the process is a chal-
lenge. One sunny day in May, I walked over
to the Centre Street courthouse to watch
the auction of the landmarked and vacant
Flatiron Building. The sale had been
ordered by a judge to settle a dispute
between its majority owners, a group led by
Jeffrey Gural, and an embittered partner.
An initial auction in March had descended
into chaos when a mysterious investor
named Jacob Garlick bid $190 million, too
rich for Gural’s taste, then failed to fork over
a 10 percent deposit. “I would think he’s a
fraudster,” Gural, an avuncular 81-year-old,
told reporters. (He has since sued Garlick,
who did not return my phone calls.) On
his second try, Gural won the building by
bidding $161 million and told reporters
that his preferred solution was to turn the
Flatiron into condominiums.
“It’s a perfect candidate,” he later told me
on the phone. A few weeks after the auction,
the landlord’s sister, Jane Gural-Senders,
showed me around the property. The Gurals
had ripped out the interior in anticipation of
renovating it into … something. “We’re not
sold on residential,” Jane said as we walked
through the dusty, triangular 20th-floor
suite once occupied by the chief executive
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 27
of the building’s last tenant, the Macmillan
publishing company. Her brother acknowl-
edged conversion would be “tricky.”
“You need a special permit,” Jeffrey said.
“There are tax considerations.”
The conversions that are already under-
way are mainly concentrated in the Finan-
cial District, which has many older build-
ings with smaller floor plates and favorable
zoning rules. The Gural family’s company
is in the middle of one of the largest resi-

The Teetering
dential conversions on record at 25 Water
Street, a 1.1 million-square-foot building
that was once JPMorgan’s headquarters.
The project involves carving out two inte-

Tech Office
rior courtyards to let in light. “Essentially,
any building, provided it’s in the right area
with the right zoning, can be converted,”
says Nathan Berman, a residential-redevel-
opment specialist who is Gural’s partner in
the venture. Berman says that one “strong Meta and Twitter are shedding square
suit” of his company is carrying out “mixed
conversions,” in which renovations are done
footage, while Amazon and Google aren’t
while office tenants are still in place. Office giving up on the dream.
buildings have centralized bathrooms, so
in order to put in apartments, you have to
drill through the floor and run water and
sewer pipes to the ground. Other than that,
Berman says, “the inconvenience to the ten-
ant is really minimal.”
Gural says he thinks this crisis will work
out as these things always do, to the benefit
of the same people as usual. “What you’re
going to see is a huge opportunity for
these distressed real-estate funds,” he says.
“Goldman Sachs and others, they’re going
to make a fortune.” Van Nieuwerburgh
says he has lately been hearing from hope-
ful vultures. Even as Rechler is consider-
ing cutting some properties loose, he is
looking to invest in what he called “good-
news money” in distressed assets. Going
back to his hypothetical 1 million-square-
foot office building, he envisions a possible
scenario in which he would put up $175 mil-
lion to stabilize the debt and another
$100 million for upgrades and leasing in
return for “preferred equity.” He would get
a guaranteed 15 percent return and then the
existing owner would get half of any income
tech was going to save commercial real estate. At least
above that. “If it does well, you’ll be able to it seemed that way, briefly, in 2020: Apple took more than
recover some of your money,” Rechler said. 100,000 additional square feet at 11 Penn Plaza, TikTok leased
He added that he is already deep in the pro- seven floors in the former 4 Times Square, and Facebook
cess of evaluating some of these deals.
One component of Project Kodak signed the biggest lease of the year in the old post office across
involves analyzing the feasibility of mixed from Penn Station. Then, in 2022, thousands of tech workers
conversions, looking at whether it might across the U.S. were laid off and lower earnings delayed
be possible, for example, to make the skin-
nier upper parts of some of his buildings
moving plans. Meanwhile, many workers who still had jobs
into apartments or hotels. It is not a totally refused to come back to their desks, making it hard to justify
fresh idea: He proposed turning the top ten expensive leases. Still, it’s not entirely doom and gloom—while
floors of 75 Rockefeller Plaza into a hotel some tech companies are off-loading hundreds of thousands
run by Airbnb before the pandemic scuttled
the project. “We have five or six buildings of square feet in space, and a few big ones are hanging on for
that I would put into that category that dear life, others are even expanding. By Adriane Quinlan

28 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 Illustration by Justin Metz

 Leaving
P H OTO G R A P H S : B E T H D I X S O N / A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO ( 1 1 M A D I S O N AV E . ) ; M I C H A E L F I T Z S I M M O N S / A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO ( 1 7 5 G R E E N W I C H S T. ) ; R B L F M R / S H U T T E R S TO C K ( S T. J O H N ' S T E R M I N A L B U I L D I N G ) ; PAT T I M CCO N V I L L E / A L A M Y
YELP
after management
told employees they could
work remotely, data
S TO C K P H OTO ( 6 2 0 E I G H T H AV E . ) ; B A I L E Y- CO O P E R P H OTO G R A P H Y / A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO ( 1 5 0 G R E E N W I C H S T. ) ; G O O G L E M A P S ( R E M A I N I N G ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F T H E B R A N D S ( LO G O S )
showed that workers were using
only about 2 percent of Yelp’s office
space. The company acted on that
last July, getting rid of all its
200,000 square feet across three
floors at 11 Madison and leaving
behind around 50,000 square feet
at 200 Fifth Avenue.
TWITTER
even before the
pandemic, Twitter was
giving up space, subleasing
a floor of its office at 245 West 17th
Street to Lyft. When Elon Musk
took over last year, he fired the
janitors there and subleased the
remaining office space, even
while publicly speaking out against
remote work.
KICKSTARTER
in 2011, the company
used early seed money to
buy and renovate a
building in rapidly gentrifying
Greenpoint (the price:
$3.6 million). After going fully
remote in 2021, Kickstarter put
the building on the market with an
asking price of $25 million.
Shrinking
UBER
in 2019, Uber signed a
lease for seven floors at
175 Greenwich Street with
plans to shut down its other
offices in the city and push those
workers into the 308,000 square
feet of space. A year later, Uber
put a quarter of what it had leased
on the market for a sublease.
These days, employees only need
to come into the office half-time.
META
in august 2020, then-
Facebook gobbled up
730,000 square feet at
390 Ninth Avenue, taking its New
York footprint to 2 million square
feet. As of this spring, it plans to
give up 250,000 square feet across
two Hudson Yards buildings as well
as 200,000 square feet at 225 Park
Avenue South.
SPOTIFY
spotify is one of the
biggest tenants at
150 Greenwich Street,
with 564,000 square feet, but right
before layoffs in June, it
announced it would leave five
floors there and give up about
15 percent—85,666 square feet—
of that space.
Holding On
MICROSOFT
in 2021, Microsoft signed
a lease for half of 122 Fifth
Avenue and moved in
earlier this month. There’s a
private entrance flanked by
columns and crowned with its
logo, and the company has its own
section of the building’s roof
garden as well as a 5,500-square-
foot pavilion. Meanwhile,
Microsoft is giving up older space;
at 11 Times Square, it’s now trying
to sublease about a fifth of its
offices, or 42,000 square feet.
GOOGLE
the company has more
than 7 million square feet
of New York office space,
or about one percent of the entire
office market. In 2021, it spent
$2.1 billion on 1.3 million square
feet across the St. John’s Terminal
building. A year later, it opened
Pier 57, a 630,000-square-foot
office with a public rooftop park.
AMAZON
in march 2020, Jeff
Bezos bought—bought,
not leased—the former
Lord & Taylor building at 424 Fifth
Avenue for around $1 billion. “One
day later they would have killed the
deal,” a source told the New York
Post. It’s set to open this summer
with a dog run and a roof garden.
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
Signing Leases
INDEED
in january 2020,
Indeed signed a lease for a
second office off Bryant
Park at 1155 Sixth Avenue. As the
country started hiring again, the
company that posts jobs renewed
and expanded its original lease
to take 250,000 square feet at
1120 Sixth Avenue. It renovated
some of its offices to fit a new
hybrid work culture, adding
movable walls.
DATADOG
datadog, which helps
companies monitor
databases, has a hybrid
setup that lets some employees
work remotely, but the company
still took on extra office space.
In July 2022, it renewed
and expanded a lease at the
New York Times Building at
620 Eighth Avenue.
CLEAR
clear, the company
creating a VIP lane at
every airport, nearly
tripled its Manhattan
footprint in 2021 with a new
headquarters: 120,000 square
feet at 85 Tenth Avenue, near
Chelsea Market.
29
we’re working on right now, where they
have the right floor plates, they’re zoned
for it today, they have the right access
locations,” he said. “We’re going through
the math.”
And if the math doesn’t add up? At a
recent panel discussion, Van Nieuwer-
burgh went through other alternative
uses, such as medicine. The Memorial
Sloan Kettering Cancer Center bought
more than half of the Lipstick Building
penthouse that once housed the execu-
tive offices of AT&T. When 550 Madison
was commissioned, in 1978, the monopo-
list telecommunications company asked
its architect, Philip Johnson, to make it
a monument; the cover of this magazine
later dubbed the building the “Tower
of Power.” Through the floor-to-ceiling
windows to the east stood 425 Park
Avenue, a new skyscraper anchored by
the hedge fund Citadel, which is paying

Three
on Third Avenue last year (see sidebar, a stratospheric $300 per square foot for
opposite). He mentioned that he had the top of the building. It is a transparent
heard proposals both “crazy” (urban box and near enough that I could spy on

farms) and “even crazier” (shelters for
asylum seekers). “There’s schools, pet
care, mixed use,” he said.
“Wait a second,” interrupted a
Bleak
the neighbors. Eight of its upper floors
appeared to be totally unoccupied.
Although the top end is the strongest
segment of the market, you have to won-

Blocks
commercial-real-estate broker on the der how deep the demand is for these
panel. “Pet care? We’re going to put dogs new towers of power. And the success of
and cats in office space?” a lucky few buildings does not address—

Not all office buildings will go to the
dogs. Brokers express the hope that
demand will soon stabilize as some
workers come back and as hybrid work-
of Third
and in some ways may exacerbate—the
systemic problem of oversupply. After
all, the tenants moving into these prop-
erties were usually vacating space some-

places discover how crowded it gets on
those Wednesdays when everyone shows
up. Thus the desperate industry’s latest
hope: If offices are now optional, maybe
they can be marketed as luxuries.
“It’s just beauty and simple power,”
Erik Horvat, managing director of
Olayan America, said one recent after-
noon as we stood with our necks craned
back to look up at a 48,000-pound stone
hanging 12 feet above the floor of the
vaulted lobby of 550 Madison Avenue.
The titanic blue marble—a sculpture
called Solid Sky—was one of many
expensive flourishes that Horvat’s com-
pany, a subsidiary of a Saudi financial
conglomerate, had added to its rede-
velopment of the 1980s-vintage sky-
scraper. Olayan purchased 550 Madison
for $1.4 billion in 2016 and had spent
another $300 million on renovations
carried out in cooperation with Rechler
and RXR. Horvat swiped his hand under
a biometric scanner, opening a security
gate and summoning an elevator to take
us upstairs.
“It’s about lifestyle,” he said. “How do
you get people to come back to work?”
On the seventh floor, the “club level,”
there was a library curated by Assouline
and a lounge with a glassed-in gas fire-
place. Since 2021, an insurance company
has leased about a quarter of the building
as an anchor tenant with other spaces
going to financial firms and the fashion
brand Hermès. According to the analysis
firm CompStak, the building has been
leasing for around $150 a square foot,
twice the midtown average. Horvat took
me up to a space that’s still available: the
Avenue
where else. More leases were expiring,
meaning more supply was coming,
bringing more distress. Beyond the new
Park Avenue tower, I could glimpse the
skyline of Lexington Avenue, where the
market is soft, and Third Avenue, where
there’s carnage. To the south, there was
660 Fifth Avenue, a midcentury building
that Brookfield spent $400 million to
renovate as a trophy.
Brookfield paid Jared Kushner’s fam-
ily to take control of the debt-burdened
skyscraper—formerly known as
666 Fifth—in 2018 and repositioned it
with the reported backing of sovereign
wealth funds from the Middle East. Its
former aluminum façade was replaced
with sleek glass. 660 Fifth recently
signed an anchor tenant, a financial
firm that allows remote work for “any
reason or no reason at all.” Around two-
thirds of its space remains available,
and leasing lately appears slow. Not a
single new deal has been reported so
far this year, according to CompStak.
Brookfield executive Ben Brown, who
oversees the company’s U.S. office
portfolio, assures me that the company
is “trading papers” with many prospec-
tive tenants. “A lot of stuff is not at a
point where we’ve disclosed it,” he says.
“One of our next leases will take us to
50 percent.”
Tenants have yet to move into the
renovated building. From the penthouse
window, I could make out a tiny human
figure walking across one of the vast open
floors of 660 Fifth. Then the person van-
ished around a corner, leaving the vacant
skyscraper looking empty to the core. ■
The office apocalypse
in miniature.
from afar, the office corridor on
Third Avenue in midtown might
look headed for complete disaster. The
real estate, mostly boxy glass buildings
with no discernible character, was built
as standard-issue office space for white-
collar workers starting in the ’50s. The
strip lacks the glamour of Madison
or Park, with its trophy towers Lever
House and the Seagram Building, and
many of the buildings are in need of
major upgrades. And while it’s by no
means inaccessible, it is more of a schlep
than the buildings right next to Grand
Central. Even before the pandemic, ten-
ants were deserting it for newer towers
on the West Side and lower Manhattan.
The office availability rate on Third
between 42nd and 59th Streets is nearly
10 percent higher than in the rest of
Manhattan, and on one three-block
stretch, from 50th to 53rd Street, it has
hit 43 percent. And many of the leases
are expiring this year—27 percent of all
leased space, according to CompStak.
But zoom in closer and a more compli-
cated picture emerges. kim velsey

30 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 Infographic by Violet Frances for Bryan Christie Design

 8 885 Third:
The site where Bernie
1 880 Third: Madoff once ran his Ponzi
This 1960s office scheme, the red-granite
building, which had tower known as the
a major renovation in Lipstick Building has long
2009, is doing better served as a counterpoint
than most on the strip to the blandness of the rest
at 88.5 percent of Third Avenue. Law firm
leased (WeWork took Latham & Watkins, the
several floors before anchor tenant for more
the pandemic hit). than a decade, moved to a
new office on Sixth Avenue
last year. The building
won’t sit empty, though:
Memorial Sloan Kettering
is buying more than half
1 of it to use for its admin-
istrative and research staff;
2 163–165 East 52nd: 8
in a grim market, medical
This office building offices are one of the few
is full but not because bright spots.
of the demand for
office space. Instead, E. 53rd St.
a 312-room Courtyard
by Marriott hotel and
Memorial Sloan
Kettering Cancer
Third Ave.

Center take up floors

three to 31.
7 875 Third:
7
This tower signed a
27,000-square-foot
lease last year with a
2
large Manhattan law firm
E. 52nd St. that was downsizing
3 850 Third:
from 48,000 square feet
“They haven’t gotten in the Financial
their shit together. District—a win for this
It’s not leasable in its stretch but a loss for
current condition,” the office market overall.
says Nick Farmakis,
vice-chairman 3 6
at real-estate firm
Savills. Its woes
are documented
on p.24.
E. 51st St. 6 845 Third:
“It needs an upgrade.
A 1960s office building
4 830 Third: that just screams at you,
4 ‘I don’t care,’” according
The former headquarters to a broker. The building
of Girl Scouts of the is only 66 percent
USA, this class-B leased, and two major
building sat 40 percent tenants have leases
vacant for a while before 5
expiring this year. One
being sold to Empire 5 of them, K2 Intelligence,
825 Third:
Capital Holdings and moved to 730 Third.
Namdar Realty Group The Durst Organization is (According to the
for $72 million last year. finishing up a $150 million broker, the landlord,
These days, Empire renovation of this 1969 Emery who has owned the
and Namdar are two of Roth & Sons–designed building for decades,
the few investors on building. The Durst family’s can offer deals.)
an office-buying bet: Tenants will come back
spree, snapping up for an environmentally friendly
distressed buildings office with a wraparound
at bargain prices. communal terrace and a full-
amenities floor. The building
is 34 percent full with the
Child Mind Institute just Compiled using leasing data
having signed a lease for from CoStar and CompStak.
81,810 square feet.
 The TANTALIZING
business OPPORTUNITIES and
DISORIENTING
of the
WORLDWIDE DECLINE
in MAN’S MOST PRECIOUS

By SIMON VAN ZUYLEN-WOOD

32 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 Illustration by Adam Maida

ome time after his father,
Abraham, strapped him to an altar and
attempted to sacrifice him to God, Isaac
suffered another misfortune. He and his
wife, Rebekah, struggled to have children.
“Isaac intreatied the Lord for his wife,
because she was barren,” reads the King
James Bible. “And the Lord was intreated
of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.”
But was she barren? Lately, I’ve been
wondering. Rebekah appears to have been
significantly younger than Isaac. They didn’t
wed until he was 40; their children weren’t
born until Isaac was threescore years old.
Studies show that advanced paternal age is
associated with increased risk of miscarriage
and that men contribute to at least a third,
and maybe closer to half, of global cases of
infertility. Plus stress has been shown to
degrade semen quality, and Isaac had had
the whole mountaintop brush with filicide.
Maybe the Bible is wrong. Maybe the prob-
lem was Isaac’s sperm.
Six thousand years later, a 25-year-old
management consultant named Khaled
Kteily spills a tray of scalding Starbucks
teas on his lap. It’s 2014, and he’s on a work
trip in Oklahoma. When he finally gets to a
medical clinic, there’s no burn unit. A few
months later, now enrolled at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government, his inju-
ries have healed—superficially, at least. A
friend is undergoing chemotherapy and
freezes his sperm as a precaution, and it
gets Kteily fretting about his own fertil-
ity. “Imagine I couldn’t be the husband
or father that I want to be,” Kteily says.
“Imagine I meet someone and have to be
like, ‘By the way, you should know: My
balls burned off in a freak tea accident, and
I can never give you children.’”
34 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
Kteily makes an appointment to test and
freeze his semen at a lab in Cambridge,
where the act of watching the clinic’s
pornos and depositing his sample feels like
a degrading counterpoint to the eventual
pursuit of starting a family. “This is one
of the most profound things that I’ve ever
done,” he says. “But the experience I had
was, you know, jerking off in the back of
an alleyway. And I became really fixated on
just how far apart these two feelings were.”
This gives him an idea for a start-up.
It’s 2017 now, and the men’s-health uni-
corns Hims and Roman (now Ro) debut,
creating a lucrative, direct-to-consumer
pipeline for erectile-dysfunction pills.
Kteily thinks, What if men could order a
thoughtfully branded sperm-test kit to
their home, sparing them the discomfort
of interfacing with the medical system? If
the sperm looked bad, he could sell advice
and supplements for improving it. If the
sperm looked good, he could charge cus-
tomers to ice a sample in cryostorage. On
one level, he would be competing in the
embarrassing penis-stuff arena. In a more
meaningful sense, he would be educating
clueless Isaacs and lifting the burden from
blameless Rebekahs.
“If all it takes is for you to masturbate
one time to preserve the ability to have kids,
why isn’t everyone doing this?” Kteily recalls
thinking. “In the future, everyone will freeze
their sperm. It’s going to be a rite of passage.”
He calls his new company Legacy. His faith
in the concept is unshakable. On Legacy’s
website, he promotes fake worldwide
offices. “I put Toronto, Singapore, Geneva,
London, because I’ve always believed that
this is going to be a multibillion-dollar
global type of company,” he says. But the
success of the company is far from assured.
Then, in November of that year, he receives
his own kind of divine intervention.
An academic journal publishes a paper
called “Temporal trends in sperm count:
a systematic review and meta-regression
analysis.” It is written by Hagai Levine of
Hebrew University and Shanna Swan of
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai,
among other veteran epidemiologists. It is
the largest-ever study of sperm counts, ana-
lyzing 185 previous studies of 42,935 men
from 1973 to 2011. They find that overall
counts have declined by 59 percent and that
average concentration has fallen by half,
from around 99 million sperm per milliliter
to 47 million. Anything below 15 million is
regarded as an impediment to reproduc-
tion, to say nothing of zero per milliliter,
where the trend line seems to be heading.
Spermpocalypse headlines proliferate.
Kteily orients his start-up pitch around the
Children of Men scenario of mass sterility
and a client base that will get only more anx-
ious about safeguarding its semen. Legacy
begins to grow. Kteily incubates his com-
pany at the Harvard Innovation Lab, accel-
erates it at Y Combinator, and wins a Tech-
Crunch battle in Berlin. The pandemic, with
its stimulus-flush home shoppers and ambi-
ent health anxiety, brings Legacy into start-
up adolescence. By the end of 2022, the
company has landed contracts with major
insurers, tens of millions in funding from
blue-chip venture-capital firms, and celeb-
rity backing from Justin Bieber, Orlando
Bloom, and the Weeknd. FirstMark’s Rick
Heitzmann, on the Forbes “Midas List” of
golden-touch VCs, leads Legacy’s series-A
fundraising round. “It feels like all the mega-
trends are in that space,” Heitzmann says of
the male-fertility market. “Whether it’s the
megatrend around declining sperm or the
megatrend around people waiting longer to
have children.”
Kteily boasts that Legacy is now testing
and freezing the most semen in the country.
And what used to be a lonely obsession has
become normal to talk about in polite com-
pany. “The average well-read guy has heard
about this,” Kteily says. “Maybe he doesn’t
know the exact details. But he knows that
something is happening with sperm and it’s
bad. That didn’t exist five years ago.”
Then again, neither did the competi-
tion. In the half-decade since the sperm-
crisis study was published, a number of
other at-home sperm-testing kits have hit
the market. There is Yo, and Fellow, and
Path Fertility. Significantly, there is Dadi—
Kteily’s nemesis—which he says once tried
to steal Legacy’s name, and which last year
was bought by Ro for a reported $100 mil-
lion. The European kits have also arrived,
also with euphemistic names. ExSeed
launched in Denmark, Mojo in Britain.
Jack Fertility, from the U.K., is set to debut
this year. Their founders, too, observed a
megatrend and sought to capitalize.
Kteily has staked his claim to the
Zeitgeist, buying the URL spermking.com
and redirecting it to his personal LinkedIn
page. He thought about sending the traffic
to Legacy’s website but decided against it.
“I was like, But no, I am the sperm king.”
T
he sperm king and his rivals
are merely the business end of a
concern that is working its way
through the American psyche with
unpredictable results. The interest has been
stoked at intervals by Swan, who in 2021
wrote Count Down, a book-length expan-
sion on her study. Bearing the arresting sub-
title How Our Modern World Is Threatening
Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female
Reproductive Development, and Imperiling
the Future of the Human Race, it attributes
 the sperm reduction largely to hormone-
disrupting pesticides and plastics. In late
2022, she reunited with Levine to publish
another, even scarier paper. This one found
sperm vanishing not just in Europe and
North America but worldwide and at an
accelerating rate since 2000.
Mainstream awareness of the sperm
problem has brought backlash. Some of
it is the expected scientific quarreling.
Various urologists and fertility specialists
accuse Levine and Swan of alarmism
and clout chasing; others don’t like their
methodology. A group of professors from
Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere attacked the
research from a different angle, arguing
in an academic publication and in Slate
that it emboldens men’s-rights groups
and white nationalists by fomenting
fear of population decrease and ethnic
replacement. (“They’re social scientists,
not scientists,” Swan says in retort.
“They may not understand reproductive
epidemiology.”) Incongruously, these critics
have found common cause with the likes
of Steven Milloy, a climate-change denier
and tobacco-industry advocate, and the
American Chemistry Council, the chemical
industry’s formidable lobbying group. The
former has said Swan is “on a crusade” to
“scare people” and the latter accuses her of
stoking “chemophobia.”
The frothy reception to the sperm
research makes sense when you place it
in the polarized context of the birth-rate
debate. Kteily, whose grandparents are
Palestinian, likes to point out that the
sperm conversation is inherently politi-
cal. “The most Orthodox Jews, who live in
Jerusalem in particular, literally view it as
a moral obligation to have more kids, and
part of the reason they do this is to counter-
balance Palestinians,” he says. “And what
that’s done is take Israel very right wing.” If
ultra-Orthodox Israelis maintain their cur-
rent birth rate of 6.7 children per woman,
they will account for a quarter of the coun-
try’s population in 2050, roughly doubling
P H OTO G R A P H : N OA M G A L A I / G E T T Y I M AG E S F O R T E C H C R U N C H
their voting power today.
ORLANDO BLOOM seemed not
to care about the larger mission
of helping MEN PROCREATE.
“It was like,
‘How much MONEY am I getting?’
‘You’ll make lots of money.’
He’s like, ‘ALL RIGHT.’”
Khaled Kteily, the founder of sperm-test-kit company Legacy, claims he is
testing and freezing the most semen in the country.
Across much of the developed world,
birth rates have fallen below the replace-
ment level of 2.1 children per woman. Kteily
has memorized the stats: Germany, 1.6;
South Korea, 0.8; America, 1.7. “People
don’t understand what that means,” he
says, “which is that in 50 years, South
Korea is barely going to exist.” (Estimates
give South Korea more like 700 years
to go.) Or maybe people do understand
what it means. A half-century ago, biolo-
gist Paul Ehrlich’s infamous depopu-
lation treatise, The Population Bomb,
earned him a reputation as a crank and
a “doomster.” Now, in the late fossil-fuel
era, Malthusian climate pessimism is
fairly mainstream; in liberal circles, it is
unremarkable to voice environmentalist
ambivalence about having children.
The promotion of childbearing, mean-
while, has largely become the province of
the right, whose biggest recent success in
the natalist realm has been the Supreme
Court’s decision striking down Roe v. Wade.
In May, students at Cambridge University
protested the screening of Birthgap, a film
about declining birth rates, on feminist
grounds. The director found a more appre-
ciative audience on Jordan Peterson’s pod-
cast, where the discussion was titled “The
Epidemic That Dare Not Speak Its Name.”
The conservative prime minister of Italy,
Giorgia Meloni, recently called discussion
of natality a “revolutionary act.” Elon Musk,
who has nine known children, voices regular
concern over the matter.
The charged politics of whether the
human species should continue to exist
is naturally intertwined with the subject
of sperm degradation. A progressive who
sympathizes with a couple struggling to
conceive may shrug her shoulders at talk
of a global fertility slump, especially among
men. The former sounds heart-wrenching,
the latter almost indulgent: more male
status anxiety. Yet the contours of the
sperm-count debate are also unpredictable
because the prevailing theory that the crisis
was wrought by chemical pollutants makes
it harder to write off as a purely right-wing
panic. As such, it’s not always obvious who
is going to be a sperm hawk and why. The
neoagrarian right-wing bodybuilders are
tweeting about microplastics; the liberal
stalwart Nicholas Kristof warns in the New
York Times that “something alarming is
happening between our legs.”
There is an all-American quality to this
brand of body paranoia. During the pan-
demic, Nicki Minaj warned that covid
vaccines were rendering men sterile: “My
cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine
cuz his friend got it & became impotent.
His testicles became swollen. His friend
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 35
was weeks away from getting married, now
the girl called off the wedding.” To my ears,
it sounded like a lockdown-era update on
General Jack D. Ripper’s Dr. Strangelove
monologue about the plot to “sap and
impurify all of our precious bodily fluids”
with fluoridated water. Ripper’s lines were a
send-up of the John Birch Society’s fixation
on fluoridation, which had previously been
opposed by Christian Scientists, before the
cause was much later taken up on the left
by Ralph Nader.
The more one delves into the sperm
discourse, the more it seems like a kind
of skeleton key to the reordered politics
of the moment. The topic tends to attract
not typical partisans but dwellers in a
murkier, more alienated zone, where sus-
picion of corporate America meets hyper-
masculinity and ecological concerns col-
lide with fad-diet, clean-living orthorexia.
If that sounds like the middle of a lunatic
A still from Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men, which features
Venn diagram that nobody occupies, con- shirtless bodybuilders and guys exposing their testicles to LED lights.
sider that it’s essentially the niche of Joe
Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster,
who naturally did an interview with Swan mission of helping men procreate. “It was tainer, under which is a gel pad, which
about plummeting sperm in which they like, ‘How much money am I getting?’ ‘You’ll in turn keeps the “transport media” cool,
bemoaned the phthalates in our spaghetti make lots of money.’ He’s like, ‘All right.’” which is contained in another cylinder,
sauce and BPF in our water bottles. Initially, Legacy’s sperm kit came in under which is the sample cup and a bro-
a royal-blue box emblazoned with a prep- chure explaining how to deposit your sam-

K
haled kteily grew up in Beirut,
attending an English-language
prep school before heading to
McGill University in Montreal.
He’s now 34 and unmarried. He has no
children, but he does have 100 vials of his
own frozen semen.“I recently decided 2023
is the year I’ve got to take it more seriously,”
he says of finding a spouse, as we chat in
a café in Williamsburg this spring. “I think
I’m actually having a bit of an age crisis.
Literally, I’m like, my sperm is declining.”
The 100, he admits, is overkill. But he
likes to test his own product, compulsively
ordering and shipping back kits. (Legacy,
now at 40 employees, went remote during
the pandemic, and Kteily relocated from
Boston to New York.) He is a walking
argument for his company: an aspiring but
procrastinating father. He’s giving himself
until 36 to have kids with live sperm, he
says, then will turn to the cryostash.
Kteily himself can feel like an unfrozen
sample—a charismatic, troublemaking
founder from Silicon Valley’s prelapsarian
age, before the falls of Holmes, Kalanick,
and Neumann. On his iPhone, every single
schoolish coat of arms inspired by Viking
mythology and some marketing language
about being a “Swiss bank” for your most
precious asset. Kteily eventually pivoted
to a more discreet, forest-green concept:
less family jewels, more family planning.
Legacy now breaks its suite of products
into tiers. “For Today” buys you a kit with
one at-home sperm test for $375. “For
Tomorrow” includes two semen analyses,
one STI test, and eight vials with up to five
years of cryostorage for $1,195. “Forever”
expands the package indefinitely: 12 vials,
lifetime cryo, for $5,995. (Cigna, Aetna,
and a handful of other insurers will cover
a “For Today,” plus at least a year’s worth of
storage, depending on the plan.)
Legacy shipped a kit to my home.
Matryoshka style, the elegant green cube
opens onto a cylindrical white foam con-
The topic of SPERM tends to attract
dwellers in a more alienated zone,
ple and mail it back to a Legacy lab and
storage facility. At that point, the company
will tell you if your sperm is problematic,
as measured by low marks in volume, con-
centration, count, motility (movement),
or morphology (shape). There is debate
about whether motility or morphology is a
better predictor of fecundity; some swear
by DNA fragmentation analysis, which
Legacy offers for an added fee of $195.
If Kteily’s early struggle was to convince
investors there was a market for his prod-
uct, now he has to convince consumers
that Legacy is the best kit on the market.
The company’s rivals are each a little dif-
ferent: Some freeze, some don’t; some are
lab-based, some analyze a video you take on
your cell phone. But mostly they are com-
peting for the same customer: someone
who’d rather not deposit a sample at a clinic.
P H OTO G R A P H : F OX N AT I O N

app’s icon has been replaced with Legacy’s

little medallion insignia; he’s just memo-
where suspicion of corporate America
rized which corresponds to what. On court-
ing investment from Orlando Bloom, Kteily
meets HYPERMASCULINITY,
says, “I’ve never been less impressed with and ecological concerns collide with
anyone. It was the shittiest conversation.”
Bloom seemed not to care about the larger FAD-DIET, CLEAN-LIVING ORTHOREXIA.
36 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3

Simone and Malcolm Collins, a natalist power couple, at home with their
three children. They hope to expand their brood to a total of 13.
I can relate. I once had my semen tested at
the Columbia University Fertility Center in
midtown Manhattan. I was prompted with
porn on a Windows desktop computer, cat-
egorized by genre and housed in the classic
little pixelated manila folders. Upon fin-
ishing, I passed my cup through a slat in the
wall, which carried some peep-show/glory-
hole connotations. Unpleasant—but also,
at about $200, not as expensive as Kteily
would have you believe.
As the market has become saturated, the
price of Legacy’s test has risen, suggesting
a more premium experience. An entry-level
test kit used to cost $195, nearly the same
price offered by the lower-profile start-up
Fellow, which has found a niche partnering
with clinics. Legacy recognizes the threat.
Once, I Googled Fellow and was presented
with a result for Legacy, which billed itself
as “A Better Choice Than Fellow.” When
I Zoomed with Fellow’s founder and CEO,
Will Matthews, who formerly spearheaded
Playboy’s transition out of nude content,
he shared his computer screen with me to
show me one of Kteily’s recent LinkedIn
posts. In it, Kteily suggested Legacy’s
at-home kit had been proved as effective
as an in-person one conducted at a clinic.
Matthews popped into the comments to
tut-tut Kteily: The study he linked to was
about Fellow’s test, not Legacy’s.
In his professional life, Kteily happily
P H OTO G R A P H : W I N N I E A U
leans into his sperm-king persona, espe-
cially on his “fire” LinkedIn page. But in his
personal life, he sometimes keeps his job
vague. “You say you run a sperm company,
and it’s like the music stops,” he says. “Every
guy, almost without fail, needs to make one
joke. And the first joke is almost inevitably,
like, ‘Oh, so can you guys help me with a
sample?’” he says. Given the fertility impli-
cations for couples, for the world, this grates
on him. “Sperm is funny—until it’s not.”
This is true both for men with actual
issues procreating and a growing army of
culture warriors who view waning counts
as part of a full-blown crisis in masculinity.
Last year, near the height of his influence
at Fox News, Tucker Carlson released a
trailer for a 34-minute documentary called
The End of Men. The aesthetic of the clip
was fascist-camp, with footage of muscular
guys bathing, chopping lumber, and confi-
dently tanning their genitals. These were,
Carlson seemed to be saying, the kind of
men men ought to be. Yet when I watched
the full film, which was released in October
on a Fox streaming service, it was not the
polemic against shifting gender norms that
I expected. Instead, Carlson meant some-
thing more literal by “the end of men.”
The program opens with black-and-
white footage of President John F.
Kennedy lamenting the physical fitness
of the nation’s youth. “There is nothing
I think more unfortunate than to have
soft, chubby, fat-looking children,” he says,
advocating for young people to “participate
fully in a vigorous and adventurous life.”
The film cuts to a present-day interview
with his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
who is currently running for president as
a Democrat, discussing the drop in testos-
terone and sperm counts. The End of Men
turns out to be about physical health more
than ideology. It attributes America’s steady
demasculinization not just to the modern
sedentary lifestyle but to literal environ-
mental estrogens—endocrine-disrupting
chemicals affecting male hormonal com-
position. “Our children are swimming in
a toxic soup, and no one seems to care,”
Carlson narrates. The program includes
sad images of factory-farmed calves; one
speaker praises regenerative agriculture.
If you ignore the shirtless musclemen
drinking tall glasses of raw eggs and pining
for a return to a “natural order,” much of
what’s in here wouldn’t be out of place in a
documentary about Monsanto.
One of the program’s recurring char-
acters is a U.K.-based man who goes by
the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist.
He’s a very online member of several
overlapping cohorts, including the meat-
eating reactionaries known as the Right-
Wing Bodybuilders and the so-called bro
scientists, who can be found tweeting jour-
nal abstracts. Last year, Raw Egg published
a manifesto-cookbook called The Eggs Bene-
dict Option, its title a play on Rod Dreher’s
localist-spiritual tract, The Benedict Option.
(He is indebted, in style and substance, to
Bronze Age Pervert, the alpha poster in this
space.) Raw Egg’s outlook, which marries
antipathy to Big Ag and Big Pharma with a
yearning for bygone virility, is that modern
life has become anti-biological. He regularly
derides “soy globalism”—an update on the
older “soy boy” insult, whereby the real tar-
get isn’t so much the vegan weakling but a
synthetic, corporatized culture in general.
(Anti-vaccine sentiment can be easily shoe-
horned into this paradigm.)
In any case, contemporary sperm politics
is such that Raw Egg’s synopsis of Swan’s
Count Down, published in a Claremont
Institute publication called the American
Mind, sounds virtually indistinguishable
from the version Erin Brockovich wrote for
The Guardian. “Plastics, electronic equip-
ment, packaging, pesticides, cosmetics,
and personal hygiene products all contain
chemicals that are known to interfere with
the body’s hormonal balance,” Raw Egg
wrote. “These chemicals are causing all
manner of reproductive defects, ranging
from malformed genitals to sperm that
can’t swim properly.”
The End of Men captures an anti-modern
strain coursing through what some are
calling the new right. Last month, in
the New Statesman, the right-populist
intellectual Sohrab Ahmari dubbed Raw
Egg and his ilk the “Unabomber right” for
what he sees as their misguided response
to valid concerns over the dehumanizing
effects of industrialization. (Theodore
Kaczynski, who had no children, wrote in
his manifesto, “Revolutionaries should have
as many children as they can.”) “But where
the Unabomber resorted to terrorism to
disrupt what he called the ‘power process,’”
Ahmari wrote, (Continued on page 105)
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 37
 VINTAGE DENIM
has gone from fringe specialty
to the domain of digital
natives everywhere.
In a hype-fueled market,
how much you can get for your
Levi’s depends on
how good a story you’re telling.

THE
le st
ReaPair of

BY J U ST I N E H A R M A N

38 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 Photographs by Adali Schell

 The “mine-found” Levi’s
at the Los Angeles bank vault
where they’re being held.

39

hen larry m c kaughan
was coming up in the ’80s, the golden rules
of denim were simple: Work hard. Don’t
poach customers. Don’t rip people off—
not too badly, anyway. And never reveal
your sources. “It was a little bit rough-
and-tumble. A fistfight was not uncom-
mon,” says 68-year-old McKaughan,
who is known as the King of Vintage and
sells mid-century and earlier pieces from
his collection, Heller’s Café. Originally,
McKaughan was drawn to the grit, the
grind, and the reverence for a bygone
American era. “My father was a machinist.
He used to come home and sweat metal,”
he says. “Clothing had to represent the
values. It had to be durable. It had to be
strong. It had to last.”
Back then, denim dealing was a closed
network of history-obsessed scroungers
and deep-pocketed collectors in Japan.
The story goes like this: Post–World
War II, occupying U.S. soldiers began
upselling their blue jeans abroad. One
collector estimated that more than
70 percent of vintage American denim,
including Levi’s, is currently owned by
private Japanese collectors, a statistic
that is included in an official brand press
release from 2016. “The first guy who
told me about vintage denim swore me
to secrecy,” McKaughan says. “There were
so few people in the United States at that
time that knew about vintage denim.”
The demystification came in waves.
First, eBay put the open-air marketplace
online in the mid-’90s. “Before, you had
to know somebody. You had to get on the
road to go meet people and find stuff,”
McKaughan says. Then, apps like Depop,
Poshmark, and Instagram turned anyone
with access to a thrift store or an estate
sale into a would-be reseller overnight.
It didn’t take long for the once-secretive
specialty to become a garden-variety side
hustle for cash-hungry gig workers. When
chef Carmy in The Bear is short on money,
he turns to—what else?—his collection of
40 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
vintage Levi’s. “This is original, big-E, red-
line selvedge, all right? From 1944,” he says
knowingly. “You can get $1,250 for that on
eBay, tonight.” Jeans are now a corner-
stone of the booming global resale market, Brit Eaton on
expected to be worth $350 billion by 2027. a denim-hunting
With an unprecedented number of expedition in 2008.
sellers who know their big from their
little E’s—from 1936 to 1970, Levi’s was
spelled in all caps on the red back-pocket
tab—top-tier denim hunters have been
forced to specialize. Some have a taste for
jeans from a certain era; New York-based
denim consultant Monique Buzy-Pucheu
prefers 1890s to 1930s pieces. Others
focus on deadstock, product that never
sold in the first place (maybe a store went
bankrupt or a box was never opened). But
scarcity is the most reliable driver of valu-
ation, and of all rare denim, the supply of
original 19th-century Levi’s is almost com-
ically limited. Early manufacturing runs
were small by modern standards, distribu-
tion was mostly national, and a fire after
the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco
wiped out much of the brand’s ware-
house, including the company’s materials
and records dating back to 1866. Many
pairs were destroyed in daily use—and
employed for things like padding packages
and insulating homes.
It’s not uncommon for a rarely traded which brought out the eye-rolling skeptics.
jean to come on the market and sell in “It’s the three-card monte of denim,”
the upper five figures. In 2018, someone says consultant Christine Rucci, a former
reportedly paid nearly $100,000 for a pair RRL Ralph Lauren designer. “You wanna
of 125-year-old Levi’s found preserved in see a jean that’s found in a mine? They
a trunk. The original owner, an Arizona are disintegrated,” she says, holding up
shopkeeper named Solomon Warner, shredded denim pockets and waistbands
“survived being shot by Apache Indians in to her computer camera. “Everyone’s got
1870,” according to the Associated Press. a hustle. A shtick. A scam.” Eaton says
Last fall, even older jeans surfaced otherwise. “Those jeans are legitimate—
when a well-known reseller named Brit end of story,” he says. “I’m the only one in
Eaton unloaded a pair of “mine-found,” the world, or one of a handful of people
one-pocket buckleback Levi’s from the in the world, that is gonna recognize that
19th century, which he insisted were “most kind of a rarity.”
likely the oldest Levi’s that have ever sold at Depending on whom you ask, the jeans
a live auction.” Yes, “mine-found.” In recent are either an investment or an invention.
years, a small group of self-proclaimed And in a self-policing industry chronicled
denim “archaeologists,” armed with little only by its own, the line between the two is
more than headlamps and hubris, has intractably, perhaps intentionally, blurred.
begun rappelling into abandoned silver
mines hoping to score denim left behind E AT O N P I C K S M E U P from the
after a shift, a practice one denim miner Durango–La Plata County Airport in
speculated might have been instituted to southwestern Colorado, where he has lived
minimize bullion theft. “Several of these since his “car broke down” nearly 30 years
guys changed the business in that they ago. Eaton, who is 53 and built like a
unearthed pieces that were not commonly fridge, has come from ice-hockey practice.
traded,” McKaughan says. “They literally Rotting gear—along with Home Depot
put their lives on the line.” receipts and Chewy Bar wrappers—litters
Each big sale prompts a flurry of the floor of his silver 2016 Mercedes-Benz
headlines—and further agitates fissures Sprinter van. On the rear doors, a spray-
in a business that was once guided by painted brontosaurus clutches a tiny pair
expertise, reputation, and working-class of blue jeans in its elegant mouth.
margins. Perhaps no single pair has chafed Eaton has been buying and selling jeans
quite like Eaton’s 19th-century Levi’s, since 1997, when he was first bitten by the

“blue virus.” He has blustering confidence
and a propensity for finding exceedingly
rare jeans in unexpected places—both of
which have made him a star in the busi-
ness. In pursuit of the real deal, Eaton
has begged his way into old farmhouses,
scavenged junkyards, even rappelled into
abandoned mine shafts. “I’m basically self-
taught for everything I do,” he says. “My
record’s 1,000 feet down.” He has a junker’s
sensibility; jeans are but one sliver of his
heaping empire. Everything he unearths,
whether it’s an old pocket or a tattered
waistband, is potentially for sale. “Brit is
notorious for selling these pieces that are
just like threads of a garment,” says Drew
Heifetz, a vintage dealer, podcaster, and
industry chronicler. “If we find something
completely trashed, a garment hanging on
by a thread or a shirt that’s missing an arm,
we call it ‘a Brit piece.’”
Eaton first parlayed his success as a word-
of-mouth reseller into a brick-and-mortar
store in Durango that he named Carpe
Denim. Over time, his hard-won collection
became the blueprint for New York–based
design houses keen to replicate heritage
P H OTO G R A P H : J O S H S I M S
pieces for their lines. “I did a quarter-million
dollars a year selling to Ralph Lauren and
the Gap and Levi’s. Abercrombie & Fitch
was a huge one. I had, like, ten different
designers from Abercrombie I worked
with,” he says. Eaton is the connect, the guy
with the good shit, the showman, but his
influence halts at the point of sale. “When
I pick something up and I’m like, ‘Oh my
gosh, I love this wash,’ Brit’s like, ‘What are
you gonna use it for?’” says former J.Crew
denim director Marie Barbera. “He is
thinking more of these pieces as collectors’
items and for personal wear than for repro-
duction in a modern way.”
In 2008, the New York Times described
Eaton as “a study in rugged masculinity
in his head-to-toe old work clothes” and
supplied a nickname that stuck: Indiana
Jeans. “Perhaps the closest we’ve got to
a fashion archaeologist,” the story sug-
gests. When the short-lived National
Geographic series The World According to
Jeff Goldblum needed a charismatic denim
miner to take the slinky movie star into an
abandoned mine shaft, producers called
on Brit. He has a politician’s bag of stories
to confirm his own legacy. Ralph Lauren,
he says, once named a jean after him.
(“We’re not able to verify,” a Ralph Lauren
spokesperson said, “as we don’t keep these
types of records.”) A single pair he sold to
a designer for Nordstrom’s PRPS label
became the basis for the retailer’s much-
ridiculed $425 pre-muddied “Barracuda”
straight-leg. “They’re not even fashion,”
Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe seethed on
Facebook. “They’re a costume for wealthy
people who see work as ironic—not iconic.”
Eaton loved that one. “It was the best thing
in the world for my customer that Mike
Rowe went and had a sissy fit, a pissy fit,
about it,” he says.
But the 19th-century Levi’s have become
his most famous pair, and those he
didn’t actually discover. They were found
by Michael Harris, an Orange County,
California–based commercial painter and
beekeeper who has become a preeminent
scholar in the world of old jeans. “The first
time I dug up some vintage denim, I had
no idea what it was worth. It just looked
like some old rags,” he told The Guardian.
Harris, who wrote the historical coffee-table
book Jeans of the Old West, unloaded the
pants to Eaton for around $23,000 in 2018
as part of a larger deal. “At the time I bought
’em, I was paying top dollar,” Eaton says.
“I’m critically, acutely, almost proprietarily
aware of how difficult it is to find a pair of
jeans in a mine. Therefore, when one comes
on the market, I try to buy it.”
The drive from the airport to the nine-
acre property housing Eaton’s vast vintage
collection is a Dramamine-worthy 15 min-
utes. Along the way, Eaton identifies things
I should admire, like a peeling Native
American reservation sign on the side of
the highway and a “three-hole shitter”
perched on the edge of a mountain. “I’ve
been in it!” he shouts over the roar of the
van rumbling down Highway 550. “You
poop and it goes down, like, a thousand
feet. It’s the real deal.”
On a hairpin curve in an avalanche-
prone stretch of road known as the Million
Dollar Highway, something catches his
eye. He slows down to get a better look at
a young man holding a yellow sign printed
with the word slow. “Is there something
you need?” the man asks. “I was pushing
you guys through.” Eaton wastes no time.
“What’s that, uh, sweatshirt?” he starts,
leaning across the passenger seat for a
better look. “Whaddya got on your arms
there? You got the dancing bears?” The
man looks confused, then down at the tie-
dyed hoodie pulled tight across his belly.
“Oh,” he says, slightly raising his fluffy
blond eyebrows. “Just a little Grateful Dead
sweatshirt.” Eaton scans the well-worn
garment—hand-dyed, stained black at the
wrists, and from a recent (forgettable, post–
Jerry Garcia) tour. No deal. “Nice,” he says,
his flinty brown eyes already back on the
snaking road ahead. “That’s sick.”
“Well,” the man says with a small, con-
fused shrug. “You guys are good to go.”
Eaton’s property is scattered with silos,
coops, and freestanding structures. Every-
thing is a project—or a potential revenue
stream. “Down here, there’s gonna be a
conference center. And then yurts, like
a retreat, like a yoga place here,” he says,
gesturing to a small clearing of land by
the Animas River. He shows me the spot
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 41

where rafting companies install docking
rigs for $300 a day and the old couch on
cinder-block stilts where he drinks “the
coldest beer in Colorado.” Each structure is
filled, floor to ceiling, with boxes, racks, and
piles of vintage clothing. From a closet he
shares with his wife, Kelly (the couple has
two teenage children), he pulls jerseys he
made for his high-school hockey team and
a lace-up indigo-dyed shirt from the 1870s,
which he calls “the fucking greatest thing
ever.” There is no system. Some boxes are
just labeled unreal or killer shit.
At one point, we are walking up the
side of a hill so steep I grasp for exposed
roots. At another, I am left to mind four
Australian-shepherd-mix puppies while
my host puts a cauliflower-crust pizza
in the oven. Every now and again, a goat
sprays pellets from beneath its shuttlecock
tail. I meet a rooster named Thorax with a
fucked-up foot and let myself into a mining
building Eaton says he paid $25,000 to
relocate after a shoot for Playboy.
“Oh shit,” he says, while showing me a
1966 Scooby-Doo Ford Econoline parked
in the middle of a hangar-size warehouse
with WWII memorabilia dangling from the
rafters. “My pizza’s ready.”
When we sit down in matching brown
leather swivel chairs in a sunroom lined
with vintage leather chaps, he tops his
slices with thick slabs of precut Cracker
Barrel cheddar cheese. “This pizza comes
pretty plain,” he explains. “I spiced it up
with some Sriracha,” which he pronounces
suh-RAH-chee. “Here’s something you
should do a big fucking article on,” he
42 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
says between bites. “Why the fuck are kids
allowed to have their cell phones in the
classroom?” Outside, a goat kicks a dog
out of an Adirondack chair. “Look,” he says
excitedly, “see this pecking order?”
In his cluttered home office, Eaton
shows me old GoPro videos on his PC. In
one, he’s wearing a headlamp and throwing
stones at a rattlesnake, then rattlesnakes,
blocking his path in what appears to be an
abandoned mine shaft. “I don’t want to kill
’em,” he explains, “but I have to kill ’em if
I’m going to keep exploring.” In another,
he’s blindly digging through an under-
ground rat’s nest looking for treasure.
(“He has a lot of stories. Some of them are
tall tales, let me tell you,” says his mother,
Landis Eaton. “But he has had an awful lot
of adventures and misadventures.”)
Onscreen, a triumphant, rat-shit-
covered Brit holds up a pair of decrepit
pants. “Anybody watching this would
think this is fake,” he says. “Haters on the
internet will be like, ‘Oh, that was planted.’
Look at this,” he says. “Look at this fucking
shit. How do you fake this? I sold that pair
for 20,000 bucks.”
“Whoa!” I say, truly impressed.
“Yeah,” he says, similarly awed. “No. Oh
no,” he says, squinting at the screen. “I still
have this pair. Sorry, I still have the pair.”
AS THE NUMBER OF denim hunters
has multiplied, demand for an OG denim
archaeologist has shrunk considerably.
“They may be still spending the same
money, but it’s just the money’s more spread
out,” Eaton says. “Before, they’d have to
come to a guy like me, and there
were only ten people like me.
Now there’s thousands of people
selling on Instagram.” Eaton says he hasn’t
sold to Ralph Lauren in three years.
That financial uncertainty, and reno-
vations in Durango, sparked an idea
that snowballed. “It wasn’t like, I’m
gonna have a Festivus,” Eaton says of
what became a three-day “Woodstock
of Denim” at which he auctioned off the
19th-century Levi’s. “It was more like, Oh
shit, I have a million-dollar bill to pay for
my new warehouse. How could I do that?
I’ll have a big sale. I’ll sell some stuff.”
The name and the slogan of the event—
“For the rest of us”—were ripped directly
from Seinfeld, but Eaton liked the inclu-
sive message. “We’re not douchebag
elitists about who we’re gonna let come to
the Festivus. We’re saying, Hey, you know
what? Unless you’ve proven to be a thief
or you have an absolutely horrific reputa-
tion, we’re gonna let anyone in,” he says.
“You don’t have to be the hoity-toity guy
who’s best friends with Ralph Lauren’s
top buyer to get into our show.”
The marketing, and the anti-
Establishment messaging, was a dog
whistle for a hungry younger generation.
Kyle Haupert, an online reseller who
flips product on IG, attended because he
thought “it was going to be the Fyre Festival
of vintage,” he later told The Wall Street
Journal. Haupert built a loyal following
online with his own Gen-Z brand of self-
mythologizing during covid lockdowns.
With thrift stores shuttered and group
meetups paused, Haupert and his friends
started going into abandoned houses in
search of new items—and filming their
 a b ov e :
Kyle Haupert and
Zip Stevenson with the
hauls. In one clip, set to jeans at Inspiration LA.
a b ov e r i g h t : Collector
and how I looked. I liked
Canned Heat’s Woodstock Yohei Arai and family. to have my own style,
anthem “Going Up the o p p o s i t e pag e : and I liked clothes.” In the
Country,” he and a buddy Vintage enthusiasts. past few years, Haupert has
hunt for clothing as if it were become a staple at the famous
a video game. We never see their faces, only Rose Bowl Flea Market, where he travels in
tattooed wrists and ringed knuckles rum- a pack of similarly drawn, sharp-elbowed
maging through trunks and overstuffed characters, all of whom competitively flip
dressers to reveal their dust-caked con- old clothing for a living. “My closest friends
tents. The frame cuts from the waterlogged are the people I sell vintage with,” he says.
remnants of a bathroom to a blanket-lined “We push each other to go harder. That’s
denim jacket pulled from a wooden chest. what makes it fun.”
A dirt-crusted navy-blue University of The “bando” missions have quickly
Virginia “afterhood,” an outdated method become a new third rail in an industry for-
of stitching a hood onto an existing crew- ever trying to reinvent its inventory. “We’ve
neck, elicits yawps of pleasure. gone from ‘mine finds’ to abandoned
Haupert, 24, grew up in Los Angeles buildings,” McKaughan says. “Where do
County in the aughts, where he spent we go from there? Are we going grave rob-
idle hours perusing garage sales with his bing?” Haupert has heard it all. He also
antiquer dad. “I did not come from a rich knows that rules are invoked only when
family,” he says. “I’m the very opposite of someone breaks them too loudly. “People
that.” In high school, he began checking say, ‘They’re trespassing, breaking and
Depop for clothes that better fit his slim
frame. “I always cared about how I dressed
entering,’ whatever they want to say. But
they don’t see that we’re saving stuff that’s
gonna be thrown away or destroyed. We’re
giving this stuff a new life,” he says. “And
we’re not doing the work that we do to just
give shit away.”
Last September, denim hustlers of all
generations attended Eaton’s first-ever
Durango Vintage Festivus at the Tico
Time River Resort RV park in Aztec, New
Mexico. Haupert and his buddies drove
the 12 hours from San Diego to be there.
Larry McKaughan, Marie Barbera, and
Drew Heifetz also came, along with Eric
Schrader from the 2017 jeans documentary
Blue Gold. Barbera considered it an oppor-
tunity to raid Eaton’s expansive collection.
“I think the appeal of everyone going was
like, ‘Hey, Brit’s gonna pull out some stuff
that he forgot he had,’” she says. A group
of East Coast heads also came to shop. “All
these New York kids rolled up to the festival
with wads of cash. They were, like, 22 years

he inte r net old. I’m like, Who are these people? Where do

ate r s o nt s planted.’ they come from?” Barbera says. “They spent,

“H
, ‘O h, that wa ke this?” like, 20 grand the first night.”
Others came just to see “the Jeans.”
ke fa
will be li his. How do you Listed as “1885–1892 One Pocket Levi’s”
and “mine-found” in the official Durango
t
Look at Vintage Festivus auction catalogue,
they have only one back pocket, a style

“I sold tha the brand abandoned after 1901, and a

buckleback waist instead of belt loops

t p
20,000 buc air for
because belts weren’t yet widely used.
An interior pocket bag bears the brand’s
Chinese Exclusion Act–era slogan, “The

ks.” only kind made from white labor.” There

are tarnished copper rivets, deep whiskers
of wear around the (Continued on page 107)

j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 43
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 T he
G e ne ra ll
Fe eli n g y
B ett e r
E d it ion

Our Sweeping
Sleeping Guide
➸ a good night’s rest has long been a priority for Strategist readers. Over the years, we’ve fielded numerous
niche sleep-related questions, such as “What’s the most stylish alarm clock?” and “What’s the best husband
pillow?” And to keep up with the demand for bedtime-related products, our writers and editors have conducted
extensive reporting on everything from blackout curtains to sound machines, talked to lingerie experts about
the coziest silk pajamas, and chatted with sleep coaches about the plushiest mattress toppers. Collectively, we’ve
tested more than 35 mattresses and slept on more than 20 types of linen sheets. This has all yielded a deep archive
of sleep products, which we recently combed through. On the following pages, we’ve selected some of our most-
stood-behind items, including this adjustable memory-foam pillow from Coop Sleep Goods ($72). Strategist
writer Latifah Miles tried it out and found it to be an “all-around pillow that will gently cradle your head.”

Photograph by Hugo Yu j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 45

 y r
he ll e
T era ett
e n B n
G ling itio
e e Ed Contouring Earplugs
F

won’t -r et u r n a bl e s

The Best of the The wax used in Ohropax’s

Strategist Sleep 100

German plugs molds
to the ear for a better fit.
$7 at amazon.com

Victorian Nightgown

we narrowed down our archive

of the most comfortable, innovative,
and effective sleep products to a list of
100. These are just the first 38. To see
the entire collection, scan the QR code.
From a Brooklyn Heights
boutique that sells old-timey
(but not fusty) sleepwear.
$88 at salter.house

Eye-Sealing Sleep Mask Frette Dupe Giant Sleeping Bag

These sheets from 190-year-old Sleepingo’s two-sleeper has two

Garnier-Thiebaut are a fraction zippers so you can exit without
This Lewis N. Clark model “delivers a Mole Man level of complete darkness,” per one writer. of the cost of Frette’s. disturbing your partner.
From $7 at amazon.com $161 at graciousstyle.com $77 at amazon.com

Timeless Wooden Bed Frame Preferred Body Pillow Footrest for Coach Seats Non-Down Down Every-Sleeper Mattress

Snuggle-Pedic’s cover regulates The Sleepy Ride hooks onto A down-alternative comforter The Classic model is our
The Lenia frame also comes in body temperature, and it’s an airplane tray table, creating available in three weights top mattress for its supportive
a handsome walnut. entirely machine washable. a hammock for your feet. for hot and cold sleepers. yet plush feel.
$999 at article.com From $91 at amazon.com $10 at walmart.com From $209 at brooklinen.com $1,995 at saatva.com

Exceedingly Simple Headphone

Duvet Clippers Sound Machine Headband Extra-Thick Topper Extremely Strong Box Spring
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

These Fresh Ideas clips keep This gadget from Dohm offers The LC-dolida device lets
the comforter well just one surprisingly effective you listen to an audiobook Five inches of very comfortable The easy-to-assemble Zinus
distributed inside its cover. noise: the whir of the fan inside. without anyone else hearing. shredded memory foam. can support up to 700 pounds.
$15 at amazon.com $50 at yogasleep.com $16 at amazon.com $299 at coopsleepgoods.com $140 at amazon.com

46 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
Small-Space Metal Bed Frame Debi Mazar’s Linen Spray Reading Headlamp Best Blackouts Rob Lowe’s Sleep Water

The Alchemy frame has a low With the Lighting Ever, writer Sun Zero’s blackout curtains The actor drinks Dream
platform that gives the illusion Alice Gregory can read all night are insulated to keep sunny Water 20 minutes before bed
of a more open space. without waking her husband. rooms from overheating. as a hangover-free sleep aid.
From $549 at cb2.com $16 at amazon.com $13 at amazon.com $30 at amazon.com

Nancy Meyers’s Family’s

Anti-Snoring Doodad Mushroom Nightlight Favorite Sheets Meditation Headband

Rhinomed’s nose plugs The actress says this A “really delicious” set of sateen It connects to the Muse app;
gently open the airways for orange-blossom water helps Ausaye’s color-changing model sheets that the director’s meditations are customized
less labored breathing. her dream more vividly. is just charming. daughter mistook for Pratesi’s. based on your brain activity.
$15 at amazon.com $35 at us.smnovella.com $10 at amazon.com From $180 at landsend.com $250 at amazon.com

Anti-Snoring Wedge Phantom Thread–ish Pajamas Unlosable Earplugs Travel Alarm Clock Nap-Inducing Pillow

This Wedge Pillow’s sharp The bright neon of these This battery-operated Stuffed with dried Sonoma
incline helps keep the airways One of five sets author Ottessa Honeywell plugs will be easy to Casio fits in your hand and lavender, it’s meant to be
open and snoring at bay. Moshfegh owns from the brand. spot in a bedside drawer. can be tossed in a carry-on. warmed up in the microwave.
$109 at helixsleep.com $98 at jcrew.com $7 at amazon.com $22 at amazon.com $57 at sonomalavender.com

Kathryn Hahn’s
Blue-Light-Blocking Glasses Blue-Light-Blocking Bulb Side-Sleeper-Specific Pillow Silky Slap Cap Favorite Eye Mask

One sleep expert told us she Lighting Science created a This pillow is notched A simple but beloved The cushioning all the
can’t sleep without these warm light that emits fewer to nestle around the head, bonnet nice enough to wear way around this silk mask is
Swanwick Night Swannies. blue waves than any LED. neck, and shoulders. outside the house. perfect for side sleepers.
From $85 at amazon.com $40 at amazon.com From $131 at eliandelm.com $15 at graceeleyae.com $48 at lunya.co

Fast-Hitting Melatonin Under-$100 Air Purifier Adult Sleep Sack Mattress Cooler

This Levoit air purifier is The ChiliSleep turned

Solgar is the preferred brand of whisper quiet and has three Browint’s sleeping-bag liner acts as a barrier between one hot sleeper’s bed into
a neurologist we spoke to. levels of filtration. you and questionable hotel bedding. a “blissful fridge.”
$18 at amazon.com $90 at amazon.com $53 at amazon.com $649 at sleep.me

j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 47
 y r
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T era ett
e n B n
G ling itio
Fe e Ed
best of new york By Arielle Avila

helped me by seeing me spar, hitting without being so woo-woo about it,”

The Best the bag, giving me tips as they’re
walking the floor.” Arana trains five
to six times a week with Don Saxby;
recently, Saxby was unable to attend
Arana’s match in Poughkeepsie, so
Burrell stepped in. “This guy took
time out of his day, his life, and was
like, ‘Nah, we’re rolling up there.
You’re not gonna go by yourself,’”
Arana says. “I was like, ‘Man, this
place is great.’” (From $25.)
For Lots of Options
she says. “Once, I was told that your
mind will tell you that you’re tired
before your body actually is. They
keep it real. I connect more with
that than motivational things that
just sound like a bunch of crap to
me.” (From $38.)
For Technical Advice
at Any Level
SOUTHBOX, 171 Lincoln Ave.,
the Bronx; 347-591-2131;
instagram.com/southboxgym

OVERTHROW BOXING CLUB,


to find the spots on this list, we polled dozens
of stylish and savvy New Yorkers—a reality star, model, and
trainer among them. For more obsessively sourced
recommendations, including the best cheese, butcher, and
bike shops, visit curbed.com.
For One-on-One
Attention
HUDSON BOXING GYM, 406 Broadway;
646-241-1506; hudsonboxinggym.com
ricardo andre opened
Hudson Boxing Gym in a small
basement in Tribeca after training
around the city for over a decade.
The studio has no ring; instead, it’s
set up with heavy bags on one side
and mirrors on the other with room
for warm-up bear crawls and run-
ning drills in the hallway. “To say it is
‘no frills’ is an understatement,” says
Damion Sammarco, who has been
training under Andre for more than
a decade. “You’re there to learn from
the trainers, and these guys can
train you anywhere.” They work
with boxers one-on-one and zero in
on technique. Actress Erica Pappas
says she improved more in just six
weeks at Hudson than in five years
at the boutique boxing gym where
she used to train. A lot of her work
with Andre was “unlearning habits
I had gotten used to,” such as drop-
ping her right hand and flinching.
Andre likes to pair off people at dif-
ferent skill levels so they can learn
from each other. “It’s not some stock
class,” says Sammarco. “They adapt
it for who’s there and what they need
to work on.” (From $35.)
original Bronx location, world
champ Roberto Duran worked out
at its Manhattan outpost, and its
Brooklyn location is where Hilary
Swank trained for Million Dollar
Baby. That same 13,500-square-foot
facility has enough room for four
boxing rings, heavy bags, and 92
trainers, many of whom are former
boxing champions. Personal trainer
Alexis Dreiss works out with pro
boxer Scott Burrell four times a
week in two days of light sparring
and two days of hard sparring. The
latter involves her fighting in the
ring with other pros. That might
sound intimidating, but Dreiss says
Gleason’s is all about community.
“You’re kind of bombarded with a
bunch of seemingly menacing faces,
but when you do get to know them,
they all have hearts of gold,” she says.
Oscar Arana, who has been training
at Gleason’s for two years, says,
“There are coaches who probably
don’t know my name but have
FOR
A FORM OF
THERAPY
TRINITY BOXING CLUB
from southbox’s wall of
9 Bleecker St.; 646-705-0332;
overthrownyc.com street-facing floor-to-ceiling win-
dows, passersby can see clients
if not for the fighters working on the hanging heavy bags
shadowboxing in the street in front or in the boxing ring, all under the
of Overthrow Boxing Club, one watchful eye of a Muhammad Ali
might mistake it for a dive bar. It’s mural. Freelance executive producer
covered in graffiti and fliers, and TVs Kristine Smith has tried a number
and neon illuminate the windows. of boxing gyms throughout the city
Inside, the space is divided between but considers SouthBox her “second
two floors. Upstairs is the ring home” because she’s there so often.
where private training sessions, She appreciates how supportive the
Wednesday-night sparring, and coaches are in teaching her proper
advanced ringwork classes take technique, even though she doesn’t
place. The Boxing Burnout Class, a plan on fighting. She trains with
45-minute workout incorporating Eric Kelly, the gym’s founder, who
the basics of shadowboxing and has taught her how to slow down
heavy-bag work, happens in the her throws so she’s turning over her
basement. A big appeal for Over- knuckles, keeping her arm at the
throw is its scope of offerings. “They proper length, and bending her
meet you where you are,” model knees. Boxer Israel Bailey went in
Olesia Anisimovich says. “A lot of knowing he’d want to compete, so
people go there to get ready for he was set up with a trainer to help
amateur fights, and a lot go to get in him get fight ready. “I’m not gonna
shape and have fun.” Anisimovich, lie: When I first started, it was kind
who has been going to Overthrow of boring,” Bailey says. “I was jump
on and off since 2016, now does roping, doing repetitive exercises
sparring sessions (and the occa- nonstop, but it got me to where I am
sional burnout class) to focus on her now.” He’s since fought in two major
footwork. Designer Antonia Martel fights—the second of which he
solely attends the burnout classes. won. “I’ve only been boxing for a
Unlike the teachers in other fitness year and seven or eight months,” he
classes she’s tried, Overthrow’s says. “But everyone thinks I’ve been
trainers have more of a straight-up fighting longer because the coach
approach while still being encour- turned me into a different type of
aging. “They remind you of things monster.” (From $20.)
since opening in 2004, Trinity Boxing has moved all
around Manhattan, and dedicated clients have moved right
along with it. Former lacrosse player and entrepreneur
Crista Samaras, with the gym from the start, says it’s known
as a safe haven: “If you feel slighted, like you need to rise to a
challenge, this is the place you wanna train.” The owner,
former Gleason’s trainer Martin Snow, who was a recurring,
beloved character on The Real Housewives of New York as
Leah McSweeney’s trainer, does this by making clients face
I L LU S T R AT I O N B Y P E T E G A M L E N

20 Vesey St.; 212-374-9393

For a Real Community
GLEASON’S GYM, 130 Water St.,
Dumbo; 718-797-2872;
gleasonsgym.com
this boxing gym is one of the
most famous in the country—
Muhammad Ali trained at the
trinityboxing.com
their fears. “He’s a psychologist and a trainer,” says
McSweeney, who has boxed with Snow since 2009. “You get
a complete mind, body, and spirit workout.” Sessions consist
of cardio warm-up, shadowboxing, and one-on-one ring work with Snow sharing inspirational advice. He’s
said it’s harder to punch something than take a punch, says McSweeney. “He knows your fears and will use
that to get you to throw the punch. From a woman’s perspective, he helps women really believe in them-
selves.” Snow also teaches kids’ classes three times a week, which Samaras’s two children attend. (From $30.)

48 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
309 Top Docs in 42 specialties*
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and Riverside
2,100+ providers caring for you and your family in 360 locations in New York,
New Jersey and Southern Connecticut..

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Bold coverage of America’s
politics, news and culture
Scan to explore
the FT story
 G ling itio
Fe E

T era ett
en B n
he ll e
e d

y r
the look book goes to

A West Village
Med-Spa
At Ject, clients get everything
from Botox and filler to plasma
under-eye treatments.
interviews by jenna milliner-
waddell and kelsie schrader

MAKENZIE MARINO
Health-care recruiter,
Denver, Colorado
When did you start
getting injections?
I was right out of
college. I was about
21, and I started with
lip filler and then
worked my way up to
Botox. I just wanted
to make my face more
symmetrical. I feel like
when my lips are a little
bit bigger, it kind of
proportions my face
better. And Kylie
Jenner’s friend Stassie—
I loved the way her lips
were kind of pouty. And
I have some fine lines on
my forehead that I’ve
always been a little self-
conscious about.
Have you ever had
anything go wrong?
No, but my best friend
got cheek filler done
somewhere else and
they ended up putting
in way too much and it
migrated all the way
down to the bottom of
her cheeks. And when
she went back and asked
for a correction, they
said she’d have to pay for
it. I was actually kind of
thinking about jaw filler,
then after I saw that,
I was like, You know,
maybe I’ll wait.

Photographs by Frankie Alduino 51

 g
in
e e el n
h o
T ly F diti
ral r E
e e
en t t
G Be the look book: med-spagoers

Do you come
here often?
Yes. I’ve been
getting Botox since
I was 30. I said to
my dermatologist,
“What cream are
you giving me
to get rid of these
wrinkles?” He was
like, “You’re 30.
It’s time for Botox,
girlfriend.” I’m here
today for PRFM,
though. They take
your blood, spin out
the plasma, then put
the plasma under
your eye to puff it up.

VICTORIA BROWN MALLORY MEISER JAIMIE KUSHER

Fitness instructor, Dumbo Chief of staff at a start-up, Bedford-Stuyvesant Senior sales director, Nomad

What made you

want to start
Botox? I’ve always
been the kind of
person where if
Bobbi Brown tells
me something will
make me look
younger, I’ll buy
it. And the kind of
person who, at the
doctor’s office, says
“Don’t tell me how
much I weigh” and
“Do I have to tell you
how old I am?” If that
tells you anything.

SHEILA M CCORMACK JEFF WALD GABRIELLE GARRITANO

Retiree, Springfield, New Jersey Tech entrepreneur, Central Park South Founder and CEO, West Village

LEAH REYNOLDS MEG MARKHAM JAIME M CCORMACK

Model, Nomad Lead underwriter, Chelsea Teacher, Jersey City, New Jersey

52 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
 What are you
having done?
I’m getting married
in September, and
when I walk down
the aisle, I want
everyone to look at
me and say, Wow,
she is glowing. She
looks so natural.
And I want to
obtain that natural
look through very
unnatural means.
Today, I did filler
in my chin and lips.
I have a big divot
in my chin, which
some people think
is cute. I don’t want
that Timmy
Turner vibe.

JERICA PITTS KRISTIN CASSIDY CHANDLER LUSARDI

Media director, Chelsea Account director, Chelsea Investment director, Chelsea

JENNY ROHER ALANA BIAGIOLI MEGHAN ROBERTS

Real-estate adviser, Downtown Brooklyn Brand-partnerships manager, Downtown Brooklyn Model, Chelsea

How old are you?

I’m 25. I feel like
there’s a stigma
around getting
Botox young, but
I’m doing this
preventively. I do
think it’s made me
pay attention to my
face more and
others’. I look
around like, Oh my
God, they really
need Botox. They’re
going to be screwed
in five years. That’s
probably not a great
quality to have.

JOSH MORRIS OLIVIA AMORUSO BROOKLYN BAGWELL

Brand-partnerships manager, Williamsburg CEO advisory consultant, West Village Casting director, Gramercy

j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 53
 design hunting

54 Years on
Washington Square North
The bohemian apartment of John Githens and artist Ingeborg ten Haeff.
by wendy goodman

54 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 Photographs by Annie Schlechter

 The Study’s Fireplace
The painting is by
Bauhaus artist Herbert
Bayer. The tile to the right
on the mantle is by
Cuban artist René
Portocarrero. The relief
of two figures on the
left is by Arline Wingate.

John Githens’s Desk (left)

The sand-cast relief is
one of the maquettes
artist Costantino Nivola
did for a large work
he installed in the
Olivetti showroom in
New York. Above, at
right, is a drawing done
by Willem de Kooning.
 W
ell, i married the apartment,”
John Githens says of his home of
over five decades in a 19th-century
townhouse overlooking Washing-
ton Square Park.
In 1968, Githens was a 30-year-
old professor teaching Russian at Vassar
College when he met and fell in love with the
German-born artist Ingeborg ten Haeff,
whose second husband, the architect Paul
Lester Wiener, had died the year before. “She
was 22 years older than I was,” Githens says.
“But there was nobody like her.” He found
himself spending more and more time in her
Washington Square North apartment and
soon moved in and never left.
Githens is a scholar and translator who also
taught at St. John’s University; he has worked
for unicef as well. The day we met at the
apartment, he was wearing silver sneakers and
had laid out a spread of green tea and biscuits
for our interview—he told me that he and ten
Haeff would host dinner parties twice a week
The Front Room Fireplace
for many years. His head was full of minute
The big painting is Orpheus and Eurydice (1964), by ten Haeff. The chair on the left details of so many stories of their life together.
is by Gilbert Rohde. On the mantle are sculptures by Patricia Martin Smith, Jacques
Lipchitz, Guitou Knoop, François Stahly, Costantino Nivola, and Marc Leuthold.

The Front Room

The red and green tables were
designed by Wiener. The art
between the windows is by
Alfonso Ossorio, and the paintings
on the right wall, from left, are
Sur les Barricades, by Kurt
Seligmann, and Femme, Oiseau,
Soleil, by Joan Miró.
 The Back Room
The tatami daybed was a gift to ten Haeff and
Githens from Fujiwara Kenji. The large painting
above the fireplace is by ten Haeff. The small
desk and nesting table and chair were both designed
by Wiener. The Madonna/Mountain Goddess
over the white desk is from colonial Bolivia.

The Kitchen
“The black plates are by Sylvia Baker, who was our downstairs neighbor and
The apartment he shared with her until
worked at Greenwich House Pottery,” Githens says. “The large ceramic
her death in 2011 is essentially two large goblets on the top shelf are called Cambridge Pottery; we used them for wine.”
rooms: one overlooking the park, next to a
smaller study, and one in the back, next to
the kitchen. There are multiple tables,
chairs, and daybeds because, Githens feels,
“one should sleep in different rooms and eat
in different rooms.”
Wiener had designed many of the pieces
in the apartment, including a deep-red lac-
quered coffee table, green side and nesting
tables, and several of the chairs with chrome
bases. The apartment is filled with artwork
by ten Haeff and friends, including the
sculptor Costantino Nivola and the potter
Trudi Kearl, and pieces by Joan Miró, Kurt
Seligmann, and Jacques Lipchitz, whose
small maquette of the firedogs he made for
Coco Chanel sits on one mantle.
Ten Haeff seems to have cast a spell on
whomever she met. Still, Githens held on
to his $52.90-a-month rent-controlled
apartment on 29th Street for “several
years,” he says, “fearing that perhaps our
relationship might not last. It did, how-
ever, for 43 years.” ■

So Many Sardines
Our diner-at-large looks back on six months of tinned fish,
Little Gem salads, and beef-curry potpies.
I
’ve been eating New York for half
a year now, and while some nights
have come close to perfection—Eyval’s
(25 Bogart St., at Varet St., Bushwick;
eyvalnyc.com) dynamic vision of Per-
sian food; the casual opulence of St. Jardim
(183 W. 10th St., at 4th St.; stjardimnyc
.com) and Place des Fêtes (212 Greene Ave.,
nr. Grand Ave., Clinton Hill; pdfnyc.com)—
many of my dinners have blurred together:
Alt-martinis and glasses of volcanic whites
usher in bread baskets with “house butter”
and rustic Italianate pastas that mark a
midway point before large-format proteins
(“to share”) and a slice of cake or bowl of
custard for dessert. The New American
wine-bar trend—small plates leading to
progressively bigger ones—has become
the New York paradigm. Little Gem is the
“It” lettuce (apologies to kale), while early-
pandemic vestiges such as bean salads
and tinned fish endure amid the pick-me
decadence of caviar, oysters, and seafood
towers. But within the sameness there
is excellence, and I can imagine a meal
that cobbles together the best versions of
some ubiquitous dishes.
I’d start with the collection of breads from
Nura (46 Norman Ave., at Guernsey St.,
Greenpoint; nurabk.com), yeasty warmth
delivered in the form of garlic-coriander
naan from the tandoor oven and Parker
House rolls in rotating flavors like saffron
and perilla. To drink: a martini, the exact
definition of which continues to be
stretched. The cocktails at Oiji Mi
(17 W. 19th St., nr. Fifth Ave.; oijimi.com)
impressed me with their Korean spins on
European drinks; the martini gets a woody
fragrance from pine soju.
In our ongoing canned-fish era, you could
absolutely pay for a tin of sardines at spots
like Le Dive (37 Canal St., at Ludlow St.;
ledivenyc.com) or Pastis (52 Gansevoort St.,
58 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
food
t h e y e ar i ate n e w y ork
by e. alex jung
nr. Greenwich St.; pastisnyc.com)—a
shocking $20 at the latter—but a more
thoughtful preparation of the blue-backed
fish is the sardine escabeche at Le Rock
(45 Rockefeller Plz., at 50th St.; lerocknyc
.com), lightly cured and chilled with a poppy
red-vinegar marinade of fennel and corian-
der and served with pickled carrots, onions,
and skinny guindilla peppers. Meanwhile,
the ideal tartare in my mind’s eye is still at
Ignacio Mattos’s Estela (47 E. Houston St.,
nr. Mott St.; estelanyc.com), now a decade
old. The secret to its lightness has been
known for a while: It’s not beef, it’s bison,
which Mattos mixes with cornichons and
radishes at his more recently opened Corner
Bar (60 Canal St., at Allen St.; cornerbarnyc
.com) as well. It’s good but suffers from living
in the shadow of its hotter, smarter older
sibling. The most inventive steak tartare
I’ve had was at Joomak Banjum (312 Fifth
Ave., nr. 32nd St.; joomakbanjum.com),
where chef Jiho Kim’s French pastry back-
ground is on full display: The raw beef came
striated with a mozzarella chantilly, pickled
mustard seeds, a drizzle of chile oil, and
shards of a wafer-thin gochujang tuile.
Of the Little Gems I’ve had—and there
have been many—my favorite was simple
and herbaceous: The salad at Bar Bête
(263 Smith St., at Degraw St., Carroll Gar-
dens; barbete.com) has spicy-mustard
dressing, tons of dill, and rings of fried
shallots that are like fancy Funyuns. But
I do still love romaine (classic and snappy,
the Marisa Tomei of lettuce), and one of
the most distinctive preparations seemed
the most unassuming: At Yellow Rose (102
Third Ave., nr. 13th St.; yellowrosenyc.com),
the salad involves smoked-tomatillo dress-
ing, little bits of anchovy, and cotija cheese.
At this point in nearly any New York
meal, there is a midcourse of pasta. I didn’t
know what to expect from the lasagna at
Rolo’s (853 Onderdonk Ave., at Cornelia St.,
Ridgewood; rolosnyc.com)—certainly not
a wrinkled green sheet. To be accurate,
there are two green sheets of spinach dough
sandwiching béchamel and Bolognese,
all blistered in a wood-fired oven. At
Raf’s (290 Elizabeth St., nr. Houston St.;
rafsnewyork.com), corrugated ribbons of
mafaldine, generously sauced with braised
rabbit and dyed green with fava-bean pesto,
contain the essence of spring. And one
more: the kalguksu, a.k.a. knife-cut-noodle
soup, that was on the menu (maybe the
most undersung vegetarian tasting menu
in the city) this winter at Naro (Rockefeller
Center, at rink level; naronyc.com) with a
bouquet of mushrooms—enoki, oyster,
maitake—and bracken for a deep, belly-of-
the-earth broth.
Unfortunately, the cavalcade of large-
format proteins—what we used to call
“entrées”—hasn’t delivered the same level of
excitement. I can think of some kitchen
failures (overcooked pork chops, inedible
halibut) I’ve encountered around town,
but I liked chef Emily Yuen’s Japanese
beef-curry potpie at Lingo (27 Greenpoint
Ave., nr. West St., Greenpoint; lingobk
.com), which arrives—sticky and satisfying—
with its marrow bone sticking upright from
the center like a meaty tree stump.
Finally, I’ve been critical of Bad Roman
(10 Columbus Cir., inside the Shops at
Columbus Circle; badromannyc.com),
which takes some wine-bar tropes and
inflates them to match its mall-size ambi-
tions, but I can say that the desserts—
trompe-l’oeil lemon cheesecake fashioned
to resemble fresh-picked citrus, icebox
tiramisu cake that was like the Italian ver-
sion of Fudgie the Whale—were the most
successful encapsulations of what this res-
taurant wants to be: irreverent, playful,
and straightforwardly delicious. ■
Photograph by Hugo Yu
Sardines at
Le Rock.
 food
Meanwhile in Bushwick…
The space is
modeled on a
bar in Sydney.
Danger Danger Revives the Rock Bar
With Roxy Music and Red Bull spritzes.
by margaret rhodes
S
am ross and michael mcilroy are the duo behind
some of the city’s most sophisticated cocktail bars (Attaboy
on the Lower East Side, the reincarnated Temple Bar
in Noho), but obscure Italian amari and lemon-peel
garnishes fashioned just so weren’t going to cut it at their
latest project, Danger Danger (232 Knickerbocker Ave., nr. Starr
St., Bushwick; no website). It’s co-owned by Eddy Buckingham
and Jason Scott, and it’s the spiritual successor to Frankie’s Pizza,
a late-night music venue that Scott owned in Sydney. “It was a
little grungy, a little grimy, and hugely popular,” says Ross, who’s
Australian and spent, in his words, some “epic” nights there. It was
a quick yes to sign on for this follow-up, “a harebrained scheme of
doing a rock club in Bushwick,” Ross says. The place is covered in
zebra-print carpeting, fog-machine mist clouds the air, and two-
60 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
The zebra carpet
was salvaged from
Fashion Week.
dozen stained-glass parrots are perched atop Tiffany chandeliers
hanging over the bar. “I do a lot of late-night eBay searching,” Scott
says. “I showed the parrots to everyone I knew and said, ‘Someday
I’m going to have a place where I can hang them.’”
The parrots are new, but other details carry over from Sydney.
“There’s never going to be a cover charge,” Scott says, “and there
was carpet at Frankie’s, although it was red.”
The soundtrack skews New Wave and 1980s Euro pop—Tom
Tom Club, Duran Duran, Roxy Music—and the setup for live
acts includes amps that Scott picked up from an old sound guy
at Hammerstein Ballroom. “This was their testing equipment,
and they didn’t need it anymore,” he explains. “Everyone who
comes in here says it’s way more sound than what we need,
which is great for us.”
Photographs by Marissa Alper

The signature
drink is a mix
of Red Bull
and mezcal.
The cocktail menu—an eight-foot-tall marquee behind the
bar—matches the mood. It features drinks like the Dirty Double
(vodka and sherry with olives) and an espresso martini made with
reposado tequila, apricot liqueur, and vanilla syrup. “We know
espresso martinis are everywhere, but people want to drink things
that spark them up,” Ross says. “Plus the apricot and vanilla
together will sing.”
Other drinks are simpler. The DD Spritz is a mix of Lopez Real
mezcal, habanero bitters, and Red Bull that’s served over ice with
nothing more than a slice of orange and a little paper umbrella. It
barely qualifies as a spritz (only the Red Bull supplies any bub-
bles), but it works and somehow tastes the way any self-respect-
ing rock club should feel: smoky, stripped down, and maybe a
little bit unsafe. ■
And Everyone
Wants Some Stew
A weekly party is open to anybody who
brings an ingredient for the pot.
by paula aceves
I
t was just before sunset, and a
cautious-looking man was standing in
Fermi Playground holding a potato. “Is
this the stew thing?” he asked, sounding a
bit unsure. “This is the stew thing!” said a
beaming Annie Rauwerda, gesturing toward
her slow cooker. Inside was the Perpetual
Stew: a pot that is endlessly replenished and
offered to anybody who shows up for the
regular gatherings (the schedule is updated at
perpetualstew.club) that Rauwerda started to
host earlier this summer.
She first gained some level of internet fame
as the creator of Depths of Wikipedia: Twit-
ter, Instagram, and TikTok accounts where
she surfaces obscure and absurd Wikipedia
entries (umarell: the Bolognese word for re-
tired Italian men who spend their time gazing
at construction sites). Nearly 800,000 people
follow the Twitter account; on Instagram, it’s
over a million.
Like Depths of Wikipedia, Perpetual Stew
just sort of happened: “She shot up wide
awake at, like, three in the morning and said,
‘I will make a stew, and people will come and
eat it,’” says Rauwerda’s boyfriend, David
Shayne. She put up a few fliers and asked any-
one who came to bring an ingredient for it.
“The next day, someone stopped Annie in the
grocery store and said, ‘Are you the stew girl?’”
Shayne recalls. “She eventually sussed out that
this person had never even heard of Depths of
Wikipedia. She’s, like, pivoting from a Wikipe-
dia influencer to a stew influencer.”
During the second stew night, two women
with handmade cardboard signs—stew
world order, stew or die—said they were
completely unfamiliar with Depths of Wikipe-
dia. They were just looking for “stew vibes.”
“I love Wikipedia, but I do get a little sick of
it,” says Rauwerda, who is writing a book
about the site. “This is a reminder that I don’t
have to be the Wikipedia girl all the time. I can
take a break and be the stew girl.”
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 61
The renowned psychotherapist takes you inside the
real, raw, intimate stories of modern relationships.
New episodes every Monday.
 Kit
Connor
Wasn’t
Ready
The star of Netflix’s
teen rom-com Heartstopper
was forced to come
out by the show’s fans.
He’s not letting
them get to him anymore.
By Jackson McHenry

Photograph by Nadav Kander j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 63

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

feelings to me a little differently. “I think

I felt disappointed,” he tells me, “because
I was really trying, you know. I really was
trying to set that boundary. It was my pri-
vate life, and I can understand why people
would want to know, but I was also, you
know, an 18-year-old kid.”
So in bed, after that long day shooting
last fall, Connor decided to log back on to
Twitter and fire off a message: “back for
it connor made what was possibly the biggest a minute. i’m bi. congrats for forcing an
decision of his life while lying in bed scrolling through Twitter. It was 18-year-old to out himself. i think some
of you missed the point of the show. bye.”
October 31, and the British actor, then 18, was in the middle of shooting
It was an entirely impulsive decision. He
the second season of Heartstopper, the young-adult Netflix romance tweeted it, deleted Twitter off his phone,
series in which he plays Nick Nelson, a bisexual-but-hasn’t-realized-it-yet and went to sleep. “Then, the next morn-
jock who becomes the primary love interest of the central character, the ing, I just realized, Oh God, what did I do?”
gay misfit Charlie (played by Joe Locke). The show is a rose-tinted, and he says. “In my head, I was just like, I want
it to stop. I didn’t think about the reaction.”
often more than a little didactic, depiction of British high-school life, The response to his coming out was
based on the webcomic that became a series of graphic novels by Alice overwhelmingly positive. His cast members
Oseman, which had sold 1 million copies before the release of the TV supported him (“You owe nothing to
adaptation. The story takes place in a universe a few ticks closer to utopia anyone,” tweeted Locke), as did Oseman,
who wrote, “I truly don’t understand how
than ours, where people still experience the hardships of teenagedom people can watch Heartstopper and then
but have the emotional intelligence and the language to overcome them. gleefully spend their time speculating
Characters talk directly, for instance, about the danger of trying to put about sexualities and judging based on
a label on someone like Nick’s sexuality without really knowing them or stereotypes. I hope all those people are
embarrassed as fuck.” Famous members
to pry them out of the closet. It’s all filmed with a layering of soft filters of the entertainment industry publicly and
and edited with fanciful doodling over the screen. privately showed love. Luke Evans, who is
You can find plenty of supercuts, GIFs, “I always thought I would find it easier— out himself, tweeted, “Seems like things
and other fan-made creations online cel- when you’re a kid, you’re thinking, Wow, don’t change.” (“I wouldn’t want to name-
ebrating Nick and Charlie’s romance, I’m going to be famous.” drop,” Connor tells me, Britishly, when
often bleeding into fandom for Locke and Connor doesn’t linger on the level of I ask who messaged him directly.) He was
Connor as actual people. But that kind of scrutiny he started to receive, but it was the subject of op-eds on when digging into
enthusiasm can quickly curdle as it starts intense: A portion of fans fixated on the stars’ personal lives goes awry. “I didn’t
crossing boundaries. When the series question of whether he, like his charac- think it would have the reaction it did,”
debuted in April 2022, Connor tells me, ter, was queer, their tone ranging from Connor says, downplaying the moment
he accumulated millions of followers on demanding to know if he was indeed bi to and his part in it, for not the first time,
Twitter and Instagram within a month and accusing him of being “str8 and benefit- during our walk. “Gave me a lot of hope for
would find himself scrolling through com- ing off a queer project” or being clearly mankind, I suppose.”
ments online—generally positive, though “straight af” but dodging questions with But it was also, of course, all quite jar-
some came with a streak of protectiveness the “perfect amount of woke brand of ring. At the time, Connor was out to close
from lovers of the original work. “There’s political correctness.” Initially, Connor friends and members of his inner circle but
something so exciting about hearing what brushed off the speculation, tweeting a not everyone, so some people he personally
people think,” Connor says, “and then you few weeks after Heartstopper was released knew found out from the tweet, “which
see one negative comment and think, that Twitter “is so funny man. apparently made coming out more interesting,” he
Oh my God, the world’s ending.” some people on here know my sexuality says without elaboration. He’s not anxious
Connor, currently 19 with a swoop of better than I do,” then saying on a podcast about being limited by the label of being
reddish-brown hair that makes him look that he preferred not to label himself. In a “queer actor.” “It shouldn’t matter, and in
like a Burberry creative director’s idea of September, he was photographed on loca- my experience so far, it hasn’t,” he says. “But
a college freshman, gets visibly tense as he tion for Heartstopper holding hands with I want to play roles that are interesting and
describes trying to process the attention a future film co-star, the actress Maia challenging, whether they’re queer roles or
of so many people at once. It’s early June Reficco, which made certain fans all the straight roles.”
of this year, and we’ve been walking more intent on forcing him to disclose his
along the High Line in Chelsea, but we’ve sexuality. He deleted his Twitter account connor grew up in Croydon in South
stopped at a bench facing the Hudson, soon after, writing, “this is a silly silly app,” London—“Londoners will tell you it’s the
where he furrows his brow and squints but the messages got to the point of harass- dumps,” he tells me, though he defends
out toward New Jersey. “I think human ment and stalking—“People would start it—the shy youngest of three siblings. His
beings weren’t meant to meet more than a reaching out to my friends and people parents, who worked in advertising, sent
certain amount of people in their life, know I was close to about it,” as Connor puts it— him to a Saturday drama program to help
a certain amount of people, or be known which set him off. He certainly would have him break out of his shell. From there,
by a certain amount of people,” he says. had cause to be furious, but he couches his he heard about the opportunity to do a

64 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3

Joe Locke and Kit Connor in season two of Heartstopper.
commercial, auditioned for it, and booked
the part. More commercials followed,
including one for the ubiquitous British
supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, then a few
appearances in kids’ roles on British TV.
When he was 8, he had his biggest break,
playing Rafe Spall’s son in a Christmas
movie called Get Santa, which featured
Jim Broadbent as Santa. That brought
him an agent and, for the first time, the
notion that acting was something more
than a hobby. “I thought, This is something
I could do for a living,” he recalls. “I was
also thinking that I was missing so much
school. I never thought I could come back
and go to university.”
Connor’s love of acting was initially
bound up with dreams of Hollywood
grandeur, which he still harbors. He grew
up watching old films and has a soft spot
for movies about movies, like Damien
Chazelle’s Babylon—he’ll wax poetic
about the scene in which Jean Smart tells
Brad Pitt he’ll live forever on celluloid.
After Get Santa, he had small roles in the
films Ready Player One and The Guernsey
Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,
P H OTO G R A P H : CO U R T E S Y O F N E T F L I X
among others, leading to a job in the 2019
Elton John biopic, Rocketman, in which
he played a younger version of the rock
star (Taron Egerton played the adult role).
It meant he had to sing and dance, though
he currently insists he’s not much of
a singer or a dancer. Around the same time,
he filmed the more adult drama Little
Joe, playing the son of Emily Beecham,
who won an acting award at Cannes.
Making those movies, Connor felt like he
was going from child acting—which is to
say mostly reacting to the people around
you as they perform—to making acting
choices himself.
Connor planned to take a year off after
those gigs to refocus on schooling, studying
for the British high-school exams known as
“You see one
negative comment
and think,
Oh my God, the
world’s ending.”
GCSEs and then hopefully returning full
time to the career he’d set his mind to. That
plan reversed itself twice: first when covid
scuttled a stab at a more normal high-
school experience and second in 2021,
when he booked Heartstopper. Connor
originally went in to play Charlie, thinking
that he probably wasn’t going to land the
role of the internally conflicted, recently
outed main character but wanting to find
a way into the project somehow. “I read
him as mentally sort of traumatized,”
Connor tells me of an audition. “I probably
pushed it too far.”
Nick is a more obvious fit for Connor’s
built-in-an-approachable-way looks and
sweet demeanor but an acting challenge
of its own. In the first season, Nick is seen
for the majority of his screen time from
Charlie’s perspective as a near-beatific idol,
just out of reach. “I saw this light in him;
I felt he’s too pure for the world he’s living
in. The only world he’s perfect in is the
Heartstopper world, I suppose,” Connor
tells me. Connor had to live up to that
fantasy while communicating that there is
a real and more complicated person under
the rugby kit. His performance often rests
on small fidgets of discomfort beneath a
placid exterior. You can sense that Nick
is aware both of being watched and, like
Connor himself, of the pressure of living
up to the idealized expectations of the
other characters.
Connor is relieved to say that the way
Nick is portrayed in the second season
brings the character a little closer to earth.
Now in a relationship with Charlie, Nick
tries to figure out how to come out on his
own terms while acknowledging Charlie’s
desire to be out in the open with his boy-
friend. We see more of Nick’s relationship
with his family outside Charlie’s perspec-
tive. He’s got a supportive mother (the great
Olivia Colman, also seen in the first season;
“Doing a scene with her is going to teach
you more than a year of drama school,”
Connor gushes) and a tense dynamic with
a homophobic brother. On a bubblegum-
colored trip to Paris in the early episodes,
Nick is preoccupied by thoughts of his as-
yet-unseen French father, revealing that
Nick speaks excellent French.
Between seasons, Connor spent quite
a lot of time at the gym bulking up. In
his Twitter days, he’d seen a lot of com-
ments saying he wasn’t as tall and buff
as the drawings of Nick. “I wouldn’t say
I was forced into it by fans, but it was me
as a young adult coming to terms with the
body that I had and feeling I wasn’t com-
pletely equipped to play the role,” he says.
“That wasn’t a good way of thinking, but
I was a teenager. I still am.” He now feels
he has a much healthier relationship to his
body and finds working out to be good for
his mental health. Along the way, he has
posted a photo or two of himself on Ins-
tagram showcasing his progress, which,
like his coming-out tweet, have generated
internet buzz, though of a much thirstier
variety. On his press tour for this second
season, he’s adopted an impish approach
to dressing for events, wearing a Chippen-
dales shirt at a Washington, D.C., Pride
parade and posing in front of a drawing
of a penis at a fashion show. Of one shirt-
less shot, he says, “I saw that picture and
I posted it and then I immediately was like,
Oh my God, this is embarrassing.” One
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 65
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
of his Heartstopper co-stars poked fun
at him: “Oh, are we posting thirst traps
now?” Connor insists he doesn’t want to
be “that guy” but also that he’s a teenager
figuring it all out. “Anyone else does it, I’m
like, Yeah, absolutely, body positivity!” he
says. “But when it comes to me, I’m just
like, Absolutely not.”
That resistance to being so image-
forward might be attributable to Connor’s
desire to outgrow his heartthrob-of-the-
moment position. He loves working on
Heartstopper—which has already been
renewed through a third season—but is
opposed to the possibility of ending up like
some actors on American teen soaps who
have pretended to be in high school for
nearly a decade and looks to stars who went
from beloved franchises to edgier work, like
Robert Pattinson, as career models: “I hate
the idea of being a teenager, having your
show blow up, and never developing from
there, potentially acting like a 17-year-old
when you’re 25.”
Stepping outside Heartstopper land,
Connor recently filmed the rom-com
A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow
(another YA adaptation), which led to
all those straight accusations, then got
cast with four days’ notice as the lead of
a “psychological sort of thriller-mystery”
movie called One of Us. He has been
watching a number of mid-century
Hollywood classic films with the likes of
James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Marlon
Brando—a group, he points out, that’s full
of men who were, by most accounts, queer.
Connor talks about building a career with a
seriousness of intention that’s both practical
and, in its way, surprisingly optimistic,
especially for someone who has already
endured so much relentless scrutiny. He’s
been reading Ethan Hawke’s novel A Bright
Ray of Darkness, in which a hotshot young
actor much like a young version of Hawke
tries to right his spiraling career by doing
Shakespeare onstage, a premise that appeals
to Connor. While in New York, he has plans
to catch a bunch of theater with Locke,
eagerly soliciting my suggestions and noting
that they have plans to see Jodie Comer, who
got started in British teen TV, starring in her
Tony-winning role in Prima Facie.
It’s another point in our conversation
in which he finds himself at the juncture
between childhood and adulthood,
shifting between reacting and acting,
being perceived and determining his own
course. “I haven’t done a play, like, as an
adult,” he says. “I’m keen to, hopefully
soon. And once I’ve done that, I’d be ready
to take it to Broadway”—here the self-
deprecation kicks in again—“or maybe Off
Broadway … somewhere!”
66 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
v e r s io n s
Riches From the Swift Vault
Taylor Swift is halfway through rerecording her first six albums to get revenge on her
old label—and each of these releases features a few previously unheard
tracks “from the vault.” While some could’ve stayed locked up, here are the ten best.
by nate jones
the song the album the valuation
➽ Had this track been released in
Speak Now
2010, its sensual imagery would have
10 “I Can See You” (Taylor’s Version)
instantly made it the most adult song
2023
in Swift’s repertoire.
➽ Swift has always been obsessed with
her own inevitable downfall. This song
9 “Castles Crumbling”
reveals that gothic strain with special guest
Hayley Williams adding fitting melodrama.
➽ To commemorate Fall Out
Boy’s influence on this era of
8 “Electric Touch”
her songwriting, she brought
the band in to collaborate on
a big-rock track with an
anthemic hook.
➽ An acid-penned kiss-off sung with Chris
“I Bet You Think
Red Stapleton. She lays on reverse snobbery:
(Taylor’s Version)
About Me”
2021
“I was raised on a farm; no, it wasn’t a mansion.”
Girl, your dad worked for Merrill Lynch.
➽ The best vault track from the Fearless
Fearless rerelease, written all the way back in 2005
“You All
Over Me”
(Taylor’s Version) and given a tasteful country sheen with
P H OTO G R A P H S : J O H N S H E A R E R / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( S P E A K , R E D) ; K E V I N W I N T E R / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( F E A R L E S S )
2021
the help of Maren Morris’s backup vocals.
Speak Now
➽ Young Swift enjoyed imagining
the inner lives of older couples
5 “Timeless” (Taylor’s Version)
she idealized; this one’s about her
2023
grandparents Marjorie and Robert.
➽ Widely assumed to be an
elegy for a high-school
Red
friend who died young.
4 “Forever Winter” (Taylor’s Version)
When she’s faced with a different
2021
type of loss than a romantic
one, her emotions ring true.
➽ A slight duet with
Ed Sheeran that finds them
3 “Run” both scampering on autopilot
through some perfectly
pleasant territory.
➽ Swift hadn’t yet lived through
a public-enemy cycle when she
“Nothing
2 New”
wrote this: “Shoot you down, and
then they sigh/And say, ‘She
looks like she’s been through it.’”
➽ Many fans believe this observant, poetic
Speak Now song is about Swift’s friend Emma Stone.
1
“When Emma
(Taylor’s Version) From now on, anytime an Emma gets
Falls in Love”
2023 married, you know you’re going to hear it.
■
NOW THROUGH AUGUST 27 ONLY! ALL TICKETS $30!

a new play BY directed by

zarina shea margot bordelon
with
(in alphabetical order)
Arielle Goldman Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer Rhea Perlman
Sets: Kristen Robinson Costumes: Sarafina Bush
Lighting: Oliver Wason Sound: Sinan Refik Zafar
Stage Manager: Kaitlin Leigh Marsh

LCT gratefully acknowledges major support for LCT3 from the Howard Gilman Foundation.
The LCT3 season is also made possible, in part, by generous support from the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund and LCT3 Council Members.
Special thanks to the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust for supporting new American plays at LCT.
Endowment support for LCT3 is generously provided by Daryl Roth.
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

An Action Movie Abo

Christopher Nolan’s
Oppenheimer plays out
across the landscapes
of Los Alamos and
of Cillian Murphy’s face.
By Bilge Ebiri

Cillian Murphy
and Christopher
Nolan on set.

68 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
out Scientists Talking

christopher nolan
remembers when he first heard
the name Oppenheimer. It was via
the lyrics of Sting’s 1985 antiwar hit,
“Russians”: “How can I save my little boy
from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?” Like
many in his generation, Nolan was already
obsessed with the end of the world; he
recalls the early-’80s blockades in protest
of the placement of cruise missiles in
England and the growing campaign for
nuclear disarmament. “We were convinced
we were going to die in a nuclear holocaust,”
he says. “Very much the way kids these days
feel about climate change.”
Nolan’s new film is a biopic about
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called
father of the atomic bomb. “When you
watch the movies, it’s very clear what’s
preoccupying Chris at any given moment
in time,” says Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife
and the producer of all his
films. “When our kids were
oppenheimer little, Inception reflected
is in theaters
July 21. his preoccupation with the
importance of family.” And
as one’s kids get older, one
becomes even more preoccupied with what
their future will look like—or if they’ll get to
have one. Oppenheimer might have seemed
like an odd story to tackle in 2021, when
Nolan started the film. Since the Russian
invasion of Ukraine thawed the ghosts of
the Cold War, it has felt blisteringly relevant.
Making it took Nolan far beyond his genre
comfort zones. “Oppenheimer’s story and
Oppenheimer’s spirit have hung over a lot
of my work,” Nolan says. “To finally address
it head-on, it’s just something that I felt
ready to do now.”

j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 69
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
1.
Oppenheimer
Finds His Foil
➽ oppenheimer is based on
Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird’s
Pulitzer Prize–winning 2005
biography, American Prometheus:
The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert
Oppenheimer, a 591-page tome. It
might be Nolan’s fastest-paced film,
hurtling at a speed most blockbusters
would envy—even though it’s packed
with detail and is mostly a movie
about scientists and politicians sitting
in rooms talking. Nolan wrote much
of the script in the first person. “I’ve
never seen that done before,” says
Matt Damon, who plays Lieutenant
General Leslie Groves Jr., the Army
officer in charge of the Manhattan
Project. “Instead of ‘Oppenheimer
walks across the room,’ it’s ‘I walk
across the room.’ This was a way for
him to signal that, Okay, this is what
the movie’s going to feel like. It’s going
to feel immediate.”
But Nolan realized that he had to
bring in another perspective, in part
because much of the film focuses on
Oppenheimer’s troubles with the U.S.
intelligence Establishment during
the McCarthy period. He found
that in the story of Admiral Lewis
Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a former
Admiral Lewis
Strauss (Robert
Downey Jr.) during
his Senate
hearing.
70 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
businessman and chair of the Atomic
Energy Commission who took on
an increasingly contentious role in
Oppenheimer’s life after the war.
The relationship between
Oppenheimer and Strauss reminded
the director of the one between
Mozart and Antonio Salieri in Peter
Shaffer’s Amadeus: the brilliant,
troubled mind and the petty,
powerful man who both admired and
tormented him. The film’s framing
device interweaves Oppenheimer’s
1954 security-clearance hearing and
Strauss’s 1959 Senate confirmation
hearing to become Eisenhower’s
secretary of Commerce—two
mid-century American political
battles that were huge news stories
at the time. (The scenes from
Oppenheimer’s perspective are in
color, while those showing Strauss’s
point of view are in black-and-white.)
“I challenged a little the Mozart-
Salieri of it all,” Downey recalls.
“I said, ‘I’m not sure in some ways
that Strauss isn’t a bit of the
hero here,’ which kind of raised
an eyebrow on Chris.”
2.
A Huge Cast
of Familiar Faces
Matt Damon Emily Blunt
Lieutenant General Kitty Oppenheimer
Leslie Groves Jr.
Rami Malek Kenneth Branagh
David Hill, Niels Bohr,
physicist physicist
➽ an y story about
Oppenheimer has to also be a
story of the many scientists who
came together for the Manhattan
Project—whom Thomas calls
“the rock stars within the scientific
framework of the day.” Nolan
was adamant about not creating
composite characters, and to make
sure audiences could keep track,
he wanted each figure to be played
by an actor with a recognizable or
P H OTO G R A P H , P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : M E L I N DA S U E G O R D O N / U N I V E R S A L P I C T U R E S
distinctive face. For Oppenheimer
himself, a real rock star served as
partial inspiration. Cillian Murphy
says that the director would send
him pictures of David Bowie from
the late 1970s—“when he was so
skinny and kind of emaciated
but had these wonderful tailored
suits with the trousers,” Murphy
says. “That was the Oppenheimer
silhouette.”
Of course, screen time wasn’t
an issue for him; his character
dominates the film. “I’ve played
a physicist before, in a movie for
Danny Boyle called Sunshine,
so I must have resting physicist
face,” Murphy says. “What became
clear to me really quickly was that
there’s no point in me trying to
understand quantum mechanics.
 3.
Rebuilding
Los Alamos
➽ oppenheimer, who was born and raised in New
York, fell in love with New Mexico at a young age. “When
I was a kid, I thought if I could find a way to mix physics and
New Mexico, my life would be perfect,” the character says
early in the film. He gets to do just that when he proposes
that the heart of the Manhattan Project be situated in New
Florence Pugh Benny Safdie Mexico on a sparsely populated mesa known as Los Alamos.
Jean Tatlock, Edward Teller,
psychiatrist physicist To re-create the early days there, Nolan and his production
designer, Ruth De Jong, initially avoided the real location,
which still houses a research laboratory. “It’s got Starbucks,
and it’s all modernized,” De Jong says. “Chris said, ‘I’ve
scouted it. I’m not going there.’” Instead, they effectively
built their own town near Ghost Ranch. (The film did,
however, shoot some of its interiors in the original Los
Alamos locations, including the house Oppenheimer and
Josh Hartnett Matthew Modine
Ernest Lawrence, Vannevar Bush, his family lived in.) They also employed a researcher to dig
physicist presidential science adviser deep into files from the U.S. government and universities to
find both literature and photos to guide their work.
I don’t have the intellectual But the research was the research. When it came time
capability. My job is to go after to building the actual town, Nolan wasn’t a stickler for
the humanity.” Others arrived authenticity. “He kept saying, ‘This is my western,’” De Jong
armed with a surprising amount says. “He really wanted a very natural world, a very honest
of knowledge. Benny Safdie, who
plays Edward Teller (now known
world.” She looked at films like Once Upon a Time in the
West, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Heaven’s Gate, and The Wild
P H OTO G R A P H S : M E L I N DA S U E G O R D O N / U N I V E R S A L P I C T U R E S ; CO U R T E S Y O F U N I V E R S A L P I C T U R E S

as the father of the hydrogen

bomb), studied nuclear physics in Bunch as references as they were location scouting.
high school. “I was working with a
physicist at Columbia University,”
Safdie says. “I was doing cosmic
rays. It is a deep passion of mine.”
Many of the real-life figures had
written books, so cast members
came in with a broad sense of their
lives. Nolan points to a scene in
the office of U.S. secretary of War
Henry Stimson, played by James
Remar, in which a group is picking
targets for the atomic bomb.
Remar learned that his character
had honeymooned in Kyoto, and
it’s a matter of record that the
city was taken off the initial list of
targets—but Remar and Nolan
added a line about the honeymoon
being one of the reasons why. “It
has this bureaucratic quality of a
group of men discussing massive
destruction and how they’re going
Walking down the
to do these awful things. And you’re Main Street
suddenly seeing a human face to in the film's
these negotiations,” Nolan says. "Los Alamos."

j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 71
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

4. 5.
Large Format, The Bomb
Small Scenes Nolan guides an
and Beyond
Imax camera
into position ➽ nolan’s filmography is
above Murphy. replete with machines that must
not be used: a cloning device
built by Nikola Tesla in The
Prestige; a citywide (and very
illegal) sonar Batman creates
out of Gotham’s cell-phone
signals in The Dark Knight.
Machines running on hidden
knowledge that, if revealed,
could upend the world. Often, of

P H OTO G R A P H : M E L I N DA S U E G O R D O N / U N I V E R S A L P I C T U R E S
course, these machines are used,
and the consequences are soul-
destroying for the characters.
But that’s fiction. In real life,
there is no more vivid example
of this than the atomic bomb.
To re-create the Trinity test
explosion—the first time in
world history that a nuclear
weapon was detonated—
the production had to walk
a fine line between the
documented footage and artistic
➽ some of oppenheimer’s more spectacular interpretation. Visual-effects
moments feature simple, frame-filling close-ups of supervisor Andrew Jackson
Murphy in Imax—something viewers are not used to
because Imax was not designed for that. “You could
never, ever put your camera as close as you wanted
to your subject in order to get the close-up,” says
cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. “So we started
to build lenses that gave us that technical possibility to
get much closer.” Kodak also created a black-and-white
Imax film for the production.
Much of the cast was unprepared for how loud the
cameras would be during intimate and dialogue-heavy
scenes. Safdie remembers that when he first heard the
roar of an Imax camera, he thought something had gone
wrong and looked around to see if Nolan was about to call
“Cut!” “It’s a machine that can pull 24 medium-format
photography frames per second through a big gauge,” van
Hoytema says. “And if you have a camera that sounds like
a little diesel engine, it’s very hard to create some sort of
very tender, sensitive, quiet, intimate moment.” Emily
Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, notes that
despite the deafening camera and the technical demands
of individual scenes, Nolan almost always stands close
to the actors, away from the monitor. “When you do the Oppenheimer and
the bomb.
scene, he’s standing by the camera and he’s watching you.
And he’s close. So you really feel you’re in it with him.”

72 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
 6.
Prometheus
Bound
notes that because Nolan wanted
to avoid using too much CGI, they
chose to constrain themselves
in terms of the materials they
could work with. Special-effects
supervisor Scott Fisher and
his team used high explosives
and fuel, mixed to give the
shape of a mushroom cloud,
and then slowed the footage
down to make the explosion
seem bigger. The explosion had
to be not just impressive but
P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F U N I V E R S A L P I C T U R E S

expressive, something whose

fearsome power could function as
a culmination of Oppenheimer’s
quantum visions and fuel his
simmering terror and shame.
“This thing they’re all trying
so hard to achieve is horrific,”
Jackson says. “They’re all
striving for something that no "There’s the whole
shadow of his life playing
one would want.” across those rather
extraordinary eyes
➽ in the wake of the atomic bomb, in every scene,” says Emily
Oppenheimer became one of the most Blunt of Murphy.
famous men in the world, and he
eventually attempted to use his public
perhaps the most significant event
profile to speak out against nuclear
of the 20th century (or, as Damon’s
proliferation. But he doesn’t appear to
character puts it, “the most important
have ever publicly expressed real regret
fucking thing to happen in the history
or apologized for what happened at
of the world”). And yet at its center is
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was, it
a tense, quiet man, pulled on all sides
seems, partly in denial about the role
by various forces, tortured by what
he had played.
he’s unleashed. It’s the very opposite
The protagonist’s emotional conflict
of a Great Man biopic.
often remains beneath the surface,
The film itself is terrified by
presenting a challenge for the actor
Oppenheimer’s accomplishment,
playing him—which is also what drew
reflecting its creator’s own fears
Murphy to the part. “The film actors
for our future. “Culture is a bit limited
that I’ve always loved are the ones that,
as to how many apocalypses they
if they think it, you can feel it,” Murphy
can worry about at one time, which
says. “That stuff, almost inexpressible,
is a problem because all of these
kind of beyond language.” Murphy
things need attention,” Nolan says.
recalls a note Nolan gave him early on
“When I first told one of my kids
during a scene in which Oppenheimer
about what I was working on with
argues with Groves: “I guess I came
Oppenheimer, they literally said
in pretty hard on the scene a couple
to me, ‘Well, no one really worries
of times. Chris took me aside and
anymore about nuclear weapons and
said, ‘He’s not a boxer; he’s a chess
war.’ To which my response was,
player.’ He would use his intellect
‘Well, maybe they should.’” ■
rather than his physical presence,
always, in these situations.”
That is in some ways the captivating
paradox of Oppenheimer. It’s a
massively ambitious film about

j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 73
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

is tough! Especially if you’ve never

been onstage before. She did a huge job
teaching him stagecraft. I just learned to
do like I always do: Take a note; don’t say

‘I Can Do Things
anything. She gave me one note: do not
talk to john david about boy willie.
So I didn’t. She didn’t want me telling

to You
him who I thought Boy Willie was so he
could form his own character. Because my
Boy Willie would be informed by Lloyd

With My Voice’
Richards’s directing. August was still
writing the play when I did it. By the time
it got to Broadway, it was very different
than the play I did at Yale.
That was a pretty long period early in
Fifty-one years of acting.
your career when you were doing stage.
Hundreds of roles. Yeah, quite a long period. My wife and
One Samuel L. Jackson. I moved to New York on Halloween Night
By BIL GE EBIRI 1976. We drove right into the middle of
that parade ’cause we were going to stay
with some friends down in the Village.
secret invasion is now on Disney+.
It was a great time to be an actor or be
a Black actor in New York. I mean, Joe
Papp had the Black-Hispanic Shakespeare
think about some of these iconic movie lines: “I’ve had it Company, and Negro Ensemble Company
was bustling. Billie Holiday Theatre,
with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” Henry Street theater. The Frank Silvera
“What the fuck happened to you, man? Shit, your ass used to Writers’ Workshop was going on. And
be beautiful!” “And that’s the truth, Ruth.” “Yes, they deserved to die, and there was a really, really great group of
I hope they burn in hell!” “Hold on to your butts.” “And you will know my actors running around there that we either
worked together, auditioned together, or
name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.” The words are the went to see each other work all the time.
work of writers. But none of these quotes would have become part of our I was there when Morgan Freeman got
pop-culture lexicon if it weren’t for Samuel L. Jackson’s authoritative, plucked out of the theater world. And
impassioned delivery. ¶ The 74-year-old actor, probably the most bankable Wesley Snipes and Laurence Fishburne.
I remember auditioning for Platoon, but
movie star of our time, is a major part of multiple franchises: the Marvel
Keith David used to always get all the jobs
Cinematic Universe, the Star Wars universe, the MonsterVerse, the Shaft- everybody wanted.
verse, the Kingsman-verse, the Unbreakable-verse, the Tarantino-verse. I don’t know how young people are in
Jackson loves making popcorn flicks. And to hear him talk about Secret New York now, but we were a very big
Invasion, the new Disney+ Marvel series that follows former Avengers family. If I went to an audition that
I knew I wasn’t going to get, I could always
honcho Nick Fury (whom he has been playing since 2008’s Iron Man), it’s call somebody I knew that was better for
clear he has thought long and hard about how to ground the character in it. It wasn’t a dog-eat-dog world. It was a
something resembling reality, no matter how fantastical the story. ¶ The very, very sharing and communal world.
breadth of Jackson’s screen and stage roles remains astonishing. He was I imagine all that time onstage helped
shape the kind of actor you are now.
raised in segregated Chattanooga, Tennessee, and started in the business Totally. I was taught that if my
alternating between serious work and pure entertainment. In many ways, character’s background is not there, give
he hasn’t really stopped, even as the industry has gone all-in on the kinds of him one. How far in school did he go?
blockbusters he regularly stars in. What comes through from watching him, Has he been in the military? Has he been
in jail?
and talking to him, is his profound love and respect for the craft of acting. Even now, with Nick Fury, he had a
I saw you in The Piano Lesson in She had seen the original production whole other life that we hadn’t dealt with.
October. You were in the original Yale in which you starred. Was this a project Having the theatrical background allows
Rep production back in 1987, playing she’d been thinking about for a while? me to imagine what nobody’s ever seen
Boy Willie. What was it like to return Not to my knowledge. She and on film. And whether I talk about it or
to this play as Boy Willie’s uncle? Denzel Washington are really close. not, I carry that information around with
Different. First of all, my wife, He had the responsibility of putting me; I know who that person is or what
LaTanya, was directing it. I didn’t have all those August Wilson plays on film. their history is. When I hit the screen,
the responsibility of being the engine When they started thinking about doing a lot of times audience members go,
that runs the play just being a supporting something, his son John David wanted I want to go with him. Because I’ve got
character. I was more or less a moderator, to do a play; Denzel figured that was a something interesting happening in my
which was fine. good place for him to start. Boy Willie body language or how I present myself.

74 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 Photograph by Jay Kolsch

T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
All those things I learned to do when
I was on the stage.
It’s fascinating reading about how
Marvel projects are planned out years
in advance and the kind of control that
Kevin Feige and other executives exert
over what happens to these characters.
After a point, do you get to have more
input because you’ve been this guy for
so long?
Well, no. Or you would’ve seen my ass
in Wakanda.
Why are you not in Wakanda?
I don’t know! I asked many times,
“When do I get to go to Wakanda?” And
they’re like, “No.” “Why? I know Wakanda
is there. And I know about T’Challa. Why
do I never encounter them?”
What’d they say?
They were like, “We’ll see.” Don Cheadle
and Anthony Mackie—all the Black people
in the Marvel universe are like, “Wakanda.
Do we get to chill in Wakanda?” Until Tony
Stark’s funeral. That’s the only time you’ve
seen Nick Fury and all those guys around
each other at one time.
Your presence gave a gravity and a
legitimacy to the MCU in its early stages.
I remember how excited people got
when Nick Fury showed up. You arrive in
these movies and it’s kind of like, Okay.
This is real.
Better me than David Hasselhoff—is
that what you’re saying? He’s still a little
testy about that.
Did you see his Nick Fury? I haven’t.
Yeah. It was all right. It wasn’t what
I knew.
Nowadays, what does it take to get
you really excited about a role? And has
that changed over the years?
I don’t think so. I still get excited by
action pictures or things that pique my
sense of humor, even though I like
a serious movie. But I’m still looking for
those movies that I like to watch over
and over again. I still got that kind of
thing with me—when I go outdoors to
play, I want to play with people that are
cool. Even in Secret Invasion, with Olivia
Colman, when I walked in that room and
she was there, we both just looked at each
other and started laughing: This is going
to be that kind of day. This is going to be
a great day. And it was.
There’s no other reason to do
something like The Hitman’s Bodyguard
other than wanting to be in that space
with somebody like Ryan Reynolds,
who’s just an enormous amount of fun
to be with. I don’t think The Hitman’s
Bodyguard is an A-list movie in
anybody’s category. But I also know that if
it’s me and Ryan and we’re having a good
76 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
fucking time, a lot of people are going to
watch it and they’re going to be like, This
is fucking great. We changed the tone of
that material because we did it.
Do you still find yourself learning
things from other actors?
Sure. Like you said, my theater training
has me in a kind of thing. I’m on time.
When they call me, I go to set. I hit my
marks. I know my lines. Know most
of everybody else’s lines. Sometimes
you’re doing a scene with an actor and
it’s like, How many different ways is this
motherfucker going to do this shit? Take
two comes and they do some other shit.
And take three comes and they try some
other shit. It’s like, “Why you keep trying
shit? Do you not know what you’re going
to do?” Because I know from page one
to page 151 what I’m going to do in this
movie. Sometimes directors will go, “Well,
you do it your way and then do one my
way.” And I go, “I don’t get to go to the
editing room. And the thing that you
like is the thing that you’re going to look
at first. You may never look at my thing
again. So let’s not do that.”
Making movies is less an actor’s medium
than a director’s medium. And directors
are generally the person on the movie set
with the least amount of experience. A lot
of times, they don’t know specifically what’s
happening. Especially some directors these
days—they’re doing frame composition
and they forget about the story. But
somebody’s got to take care of the words
and intentions. I say sometimes I was
cursed by making Hollywood films with
people like John Frankenheimer and Billy
Friedkin, guys who knew what they were
doing. And they would say, “If you ever
direct, don’t put anything in your movie
you don’t want in it because the studio will
find that piece of footage and they’ll go in
there and they’ll change your shit.” And
they’d say, “And with you, don’t do anything
you don’t want to see in the movie.” So
I learned not to temper my performance
but to hold on to specific things that can’t
be excised. Because I don’t give you a
choice to excise it. It’s me protecting not
just me but the character and the integrity
of the story the way I saw it when I read it.
You’ve done so many movies that
there must have been ones where the
movie you saw in your head was not the
movie that wound up onscreen.
Of course. Those were early films.
In A Time to Kill, when I kill those guys,
I kill them because my daughter needs
to know that those guys are not on the
planet anymore and they will never
hurt her again—that I will do anything
to protect her. That’s how I played that
character throughout. And there were
specific things we shot, things I did to
make sure that she understood that, but
in the editing process, they got taken out.
And it looked like I killed those dudes
and then planned every move to make
sure that I was going to get away with it.
When I saw it, I was sitting there like,
What the fuck?
But also the things they took out
kept me from getting an Oscar. Really,
motherfuckers? You just took that shit
from me? My first day working on that
film, I did a speech in a room with an
actor and the whole fucking set was in
tears when I finished. I was like, Okay.
I’m on the right page. That shit is not
in the movie! And I know why it’s not.
Because it wasn’t my movie, and they
weren’t trying to make me a star. That
was one of the first times that I saw that
The Piano Lesson, 1987.
shit happen. There are things that I’ve
done in other movies where I said, “Wait
a minute. Why did you take that moment
out of the movie?” Because the moment,
in that movie, it’s bigger than the movie.
It sounds like a lot of this is from that
immediate period post–Jungle Fever,
when you were getting studio deals and
stuff like that.
Jungle Fever got me into Hollywood.
I used to call my agent every day to see
if I had any auditions, callbacks, whatever.
And my line to her every day was,
“Hollywood call?” She was like, “No,
sir.” So one day I called and she said,
“As a matter of fact, yeah. They did. You
just won an award at the Cannes Film
Festival.” And I’m like, “What? For what?”
She said, “Jungle Fever.” I said, “They
don’t give Supporting Actor awards at
Cannes.” She’s like, “They made up one
for you.” “Get the fuck out of here!” “And
 consequently, these people in Hollywood
want to see you for this movie
White Sands.” So I took that instead of
Malcolm X, and me and Spike Lee fell out.
White Sands is a part where, early on,
we don’t know how big your character’s
going to be, but you command the
screen in such a way that it’s almost
obvious from the get-go that you’re
going to turn out to be the bad guy.
Because there’s no way they’re going to
cast you to come on and just give a few
lines of instruction.
Well, nobody knew who I was at that
time. I went from there to this Nic Cage
movie, Kiss of Death. One day, these guys
come to set and they go, “Any interest in
being in Die Hard With a Vengeance?”
And I was like, “Yeah. But I’m waiting
to hear about Waterworld,” which I’d
auditioned for. And they say, “Someone
Die Hard With a Vengeance, 1995.
already has that job.” I was like, “What?
How do you know?” They’re like, “Believe
me—you’re not getting that job.” I’m like,
“Oh, shit. Die Hard. You think I can get
E V E R E T T CO L L E C T I O N ( D I E ) ; M A R V E L S T U D I O S / D I S N E Y + ( I N VA S I O N )
P H OTO G R A P H S : G E R RY G O O D S T E I N ( P I A N O) ; 2 0 T H C E N T U RY F OX /
a bigger room at the Chateau Marmont?”
And they were like, “Yeah.” So I called
my agents and told them, “I told these
guys I would do Die Hard.” And they
were like, “You made a deal?” I said,
“I didn’t make a deal. I just asked for
a bigger room if I’m going to stay here.”
I did Pulp Fiction. And in the middle
of doing Die Hard, I fly to Cannes with
Bruce Willis; it’s one of my first times
on a private plane. And Bruce was like,
“Yeah, this movie’s going to be great for
you. But Die Hard’s going to make you a
star.” And sure enough, Pulp comes out;
it’s great; people love it. But Die Hard
the next year is the highest-grossing
movie worldwide. All of a sudden, I’m an
international motherfucker.
You’ve said that when you did that
final speech in Pulp Fiction during your
audition, it’s what secured you the role.
That brings to mind something that
maybe an older generation of actors
pays attention to in a way that younger
generations don’t: the quality of voice.
Not just reading the lines but the sense
that your voice is something unique
and powerful.
I grew up in a house where we didn’t
have a TV for a very long time. And
I was listening to radio dramas with my
grandfather. I heard stories, and I had to
see the pictures in my head. Andy Griffith
was an amazing storyteller. I would listen
to Sergeant Preston of the Yukon or Gang
Busters or Amos ’n Andy. I was blessed to
grab hold of it and understand it;
I learned how to use my voice. When
I want you to feel a certain way, I know to
take my voice here. When I want to pull
you along with me, I know to talk a little
faster to get you to do it. Even if you don’t
see me, you are in the story. I can put you
in it. I can make you cold. I can make you
hot. I can do things to you with my voice.
It’s an important tool that I don’t think
they teach. Now, you got your mics in your
wigs and shit.
But when I came through, man, every
director I had used to sit in the back of
the theater in the dark during rehearsal
to make you talk to him. You spoke a
certain way during the play. Then when
you wanted them to get a point, you had
to make them sit forward. It’s part of
the control that the actor has over the
audience. We had actors, even in The
Piano Lesson, that would say, “Well, the
audience is going to dictate how we do the
play.” My wife was like, “Oh, fuck no. The
audience does not take control of my play.
You are in control of the audience; the
audience is not in control of you.” That’s
when you see actors do things—like when
they fall in love with a laugh. And if that
laugh doesn’t come, they get thrown.
After Pulp Fiction and Die Hard, you
basically become a household name. But
I’ve noticed that you’d still do supporting
parts. It didn’t seem like you always had
to be the lead. Was it the fact that you had
spent so much time getting to that point
that you just wanted to keep working?
I am a firm believer of that bullshit
they used to tell us: “There are no small
parts, only small actors.” I just show
up. Sometimes I show up uncredited.
Sometimes it’s a favor or I’m doing
it because I actually think that this
director is going to do something later
and I want to be part of their lexicon.
I used to fight all the time with my
Secret Invasion, 2023.
agents. When I first got to Hollywood,
there was a stigma: You don’t do
television; you’re a movie star. I said,
“No, I’m an actor.” “No, you’re a movie
star.” I said, “But I want to be in this.”
“No. People don’t pay to go to the movies
to see people they see every day or every
week for free.” “The fuck are you talking
about? It’s acting.” That didn’t change
until HBO came along. All of a sudden,
it’s like, “Well, they’re paying to watch
TV now, so you can do some of that.”
I said, “I don’t want to be on any of those.”
What are some films along the way
that didn’t get the reception you’d
hoped for, that you wish you could get
people to watch again?
One Eight Seven, for sure. People
are looking at Eve’s Bayou differently
now. And The Caveman’s Valentine is
interesting. I don’t know, man. I just
do the movies. Shit. ■
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 77
 architecture / podcasts / tv

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

CRITICS
Justin Davidson on David Adjaye … Nicholas Quah on Dua Lipa: At Your Service …
Kathryn VanArendonk on Last Call.

That whole superstructure of adulation

A R C H I T E C T U R E / JUSTIN DAVIDSON collapsed in an instant earlier this month
when the Financial Times published an
This Time, He’s Not Taking Credit explosive article detailing the accusa-
What allegations against David Adjaye tions of three former employees, all Black
women, all single mothers, who variously
reveal about the starchitect system. claim he manipulated, controlled, and
sexually assaulted them. Within hours,
Adjaye issued denials and simultaneously
until this week, David Adjaye was not just the world’s most famous Black “stepped back” from a lengthening list of
P H OTO G R A P H S : S T E P H E N VO S S / R E D U X

architect, or African-born architect, or British architect under 60. He was also boards, organizations, and projects. At
a certified heroic genius, virtually the only one left in architecture whose reputation was first, the story looked like just another
still ascendant. He had a knighthood, much-quoted presidential praise, and the trophy Me Too aftershock, the comeuppance of
case to prove it. Adjaye had not yet won the Pritzker Prize—it must have stung when his a powerful man who didn’t get the mes-
contemporary, the Burkina Faso–born Francis Keré, did last year—but it would likely have sage that times have changed. But the case
rolled in soon enough. The odious and misleading term starchitect, invented for a cohort of also sends righteous tremors through a
his elders, including Frank Gehry (now 94) and Norman Foster (88), applied comfortably frequently exploitative profession. As the
to Adjaye. Although his firm, Adjaye Associates, employs dozens of architects spread out FT article makes clear, Adjaye’s accusers
across offices in London, New York, and Accra, the work they produce is so strongly identi- felt they were always at the boss’s mercy
fied with one man that it seems to have sprung from his imagination alone. with no recourse, few alternatives, and a

78 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
dim future if they crossed him. In that,
they are not alone. A job at a celebrated
firm like his is treated as a privilege that
comes with low pay and can be rescinded
at any time. The reward is anonymous
involvement in major projects and prox-
imity to the profession’s high priests, most
of whom believe in the system even if they
don’t abuse it.
I have mixed feelings about Adjaye’s
work. Like most critics, I praised the
National Museum of African-American
History and Culture. I was less impressed
with his affordable-housing complex in
Harlem. It’s somehow not surprising that
a man allegedly so intent on controlling
others has made a fetish of darkened hall-
ways and thick stone walls. What’s clear
is that no museum, memorial, or condo
building, no matter how refined, can jus-
tify an antiquated system that turns a
designer into a petty potentate. If Adjaye’s
disgrace endures, it will cause plenty of col-
lateral damage: employees who looked to
him for financial and moral support, intel-
lectuals who valued his promotion of Black
architects and African urbanism, admir-
ers who saw him as a champion of socially
engaged architecture, clients who paid for
his prestige, institutions that sought his
counsel. All will pay a portion of the price
for his hubris.
Ayn Rand enshrined the image of the
architect as lone genius, thrusting with
confidence and stylistic fervor. Frank Lloyd
Wright embodied that role, demanding—
and receiving—adoration from acolytes,
women, clients, and the press. The late-
20th century produced a new crop of self-
mythologizing auteurs—including Daniel
Libeskind, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano,
Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, Gehry, and
Foster—whose stylistic quirks permeated
work they sometimes hardly touched. All
have had loyalists and minions to translate
their sketches into fully realized buildings,
often with computer software that the stars
never learned how to use. (Richard Meier,
now 88, removed himself from the firm
talking to their lieutenants or map out plans
of succession as they age. For Adjaye, it’s all
about Adjaye. One clue to his imperious
attitude came up in his response to the FT’s
report: He denies taking nearly $800 out of
an ATM in Accra to pay off a woman he had
just assaulted; he withdrew the cash, his
lawyer claimed, “to pay for a police escort
to assist with driving through traffic.”
In recent years, critics, prize commit-
tees, and even clients have become more
attuned to the collaborative nature of
architecture—to the “associates” or “part-
ners” lumped together in corporate ano-
nymity after the chief’s full name. In 2010,
Polshek Partnership, named for its founder,
James Polshek, rebaptized itself Ennead
Architects after its nine principal part-
ners. A few months ago, Deborah Berke
Partners became TenBerke to emphasize
the firm’s multiple points of view.
Even so, the junior architect’s trajectory
from student years through the licensing
process, to stable employment, indepen-
dence, and perhaps a measure of respect,
remains a treacherous one. In a tight-
knit and harshly competitive world shot
through with informal relationships and
old grudges, a negative word from an ex-
employer, or even just a grimace, can make
someone virtually unemployable. For
architects of color, who have barely begun
to penetrate the ranks of European and
P O D C A S T S / NICHOLAS QUAH
Pop Intellectual
Dua Lipa would rather be the one
doing the interviewing.
American firms, a career path can be even
narrower. Adjaye Associates is one of the
few international companies with a repu-
tation for cultivating Black talent—which
makes the allegations that he targeted
three Black women all the more dispiriting.
A global business that runs on whim,
long hours, free or low-paid labor, and
star power is a petri dish for abuse. One
lesson of the Adjaye affair should be the
need for architects to organize. Many of
the industry’s luminaries have explained
to me all the ways that unions are incom-
patible with their practices. Margins are
thin, success unpredictable. Deadlines
can require all-night sessions; scarce cli-
ents are scared off by the specter of labor
unrest; firms must be able to add or shed
personnel as the market for their services
fluctuates; new graduates don’t know
enough about the profession they’ve cho-
sen and must be trained on the job. And
so on. Yet employees at Bernheimer Archi-
tects formed the country’s first union last
year, winning voluntary recognition from
management. A group of Snøhetta staff-
ers attempted, but failed, to do the same.
Unionizing architects won’t solve all prob-
lems or tame all abusive bosses, but it could
help inculcate a supposedly enlightened
profession with one quality it seems to
consider a frill: respect for the people who
do the work. ■
P H OTO G R A P H : CO U R T E S Y O F D U A L I PA / @ D U A L I PA / I N S TAG R A M ( D U A )

that bears his name in 2018 after multiple
sexual-harassment accusations.)
At Adjaye Associates, the founder has
played his guru role to the hilt. He gives
all the interviews, takes all the credit, and
limits his collaborators’ autonomy. That’s
true of many high-profile firms but not all.
Some charismatic figures, notably Rem
Koolhaas and the Office for Metropoli-
tan Architecture, have cultivated talented
young people who eventually spun off their
own outfits. Joshua Ramus formed rex,
Dan Wood and Amale Andraos started
WorkAC together, Bjarke Ingels launched
BIG, Kate Orff created scape. Many big-
name artistes get clients comfortable
there’s a studied quality to the questions Dua Lipa asks
on her podcast, Dua Lipa: At Your Service. She tends to reach
for gravitas while underscoring her own status as a global celebrity—
someone whose life story you may already know. “You grew up in a South
Asian family with parents who emigrated from Pakistan in the 1970s,”
she says in the opening volley of her interview with Riz Ahmed. “I’m
really interested in families that have what you call a hyphenated iden-
tity, coming from one myself.”
Dua Lipa is excellent at being a pop star. After leaving home at 15 to
pursue a music career in London and willing herself
into fame in part via SoundCloud and YouTube, the
British and Kosovar Albanian artist ascended to DUA LIPA:
AT YOUR SERVICE
megastar status with her 2020 sophomore album, SERVICE95 AND
PERSEPHONICA
Future Nostalgia, serving up dance-pop bangers FOR BBC.
you’re unlikely to escape no matter how deep under-
ground your bunker may be: “Don’t Start Now,”

80 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
“Levitating,” “Break My Heart.” But to be
a celebrity is to diversify. An indie-music
star is also a best-selling memoirist. A pro
athlete is also a movie producer. Here, the
pop star is something akin to a middle-
brow public intellectual—with a podcast
that aims to be a kind of “Fresh Air” for
the jet set.
A media brand is par for the course, and
in February 2022 Lipa launched hers, a
lifestyle-media company called Service95.
Now comprising a weekly newsletter, At
Your Service, a website, and a book club,
it aims to feel heftier than your garden-
variety vanity project.
She places a heavy emphasis on poli-
tics and activism, which she’s made pil-
lars of her public image: She’s used her
fame to express support for Palestinians,
champion LGBTQ rights, and establish
a philanthropic organization in Pristina,
the capital of Kosovo; last year, the Kos-
ovar president named her an honorary
ambassador. Her newsletter foregrounds
that—while also framing itself as a lifestyle
product, inspired by Lipa’s love for making
recommendations lists of books, food, or
fashion for her friends. The blend can be
jarring. A list of the five best vintage stores
in New York City appears next to a piece
arguing for the need to decolonize western
health-care systems. A dispatch in May
paired Lipa’s list of favored wines with a
story about Black women shaping the wine
industry, both of which are bundled with
commissioned stories about adaptive fash-
ion and an explainer on the “Love Jihad”
conspiracy theory.
The corresponding podcast seems to
possess similar high-low ambitions. Now
produced with the BBC, At Your Service
is a longform interview show, and while
celebrity-hosted podcasts are a dime a
dozen these days, Lipa’s feels distinct:
World-beating pop star hosts conventional
talk show for public broadcaster. Much
like her newsletter, the guest roster on At
Your Service is idiosyncratic. You have the
Hollywood types, like Bowen Yang and
Pedro Almodóvar, but also novelists, such
as Min Jin Lee and Hanya Yanagihara,
and activists, including gun-safety advo-
cate and Pulse-shooting survivor Brandon
Wolf and Iraqi Nobel Peace Prize winner
Nadia Murad. In an unexpected turn, the
second season closed with an interview
with Dean Baquet, the former executive
editor of the New York Times, in which
Baquet ended up inviting Lipa to sit in on
a front-page meeting. This season, she has
brought in Billie Eilish, Jennie Kim from
Blackpink, Penn Badgley, and Esther
Perel. The famous guests often come with
a message; the not-so famous ones are
usually the message themselves. And At
Your Service still makes space for lifestyle
influencing: The podcast released a three-
part summer miniseries featuring Lipa in
pseudo-Goop mode, including a recipe for
a no-recipe roast chicken. In some epi-
sodes, she’ll respond to listener emails,
accentuating her accessibility.
 This is not a baggy hangout show pre-
mised on listening to a bunch of famous peo-
ple running over each other while trading
stories. Lipa is a solid interviewer. She may
be eager to evoke her own experiences in
conversation, but she also knows how to
save some space for guests to express and
be. And while her style leaves little room for
surprise—the pursuit of self-actualization
is a constant theme—the guest curation is
editorially alive. Greta Gerwig’s appear-
ance on the show in November featured one
of the earliest previews of how the writer-
director was thinking about her upcoming
Barbie movie. Lipa’s conversation with
Edward Enninful, then the editor-in-chief
of British Vogue—in which they discussed
his career and struggles as a Black gay man
in prestige publishing—turned out to be
one of the last extended interviews he gave
before stepping down from the role, a devel-
opment still shrouded in palace intrigue.
It doesn’t always feel as responsive to the
real world as you might want. The episode
with Trevor Noah, released around the
same time tabloid gossip started bubbling
up about a romantic relationship between
him and Lipa, contains no reference to the
meta-text whatsoever. And, curiously, the T V / KATHRYN VANARENDONK
one category of guest that feels scarce on
At Your Service is pop stars. The show has
featured several, including Megan Thee
True Crime Is Tragedy
Stallion, the South Korean rapper CL, And Last Call makes you wonder
and Elton John, with whom Lipa had col-
laborated on the single “Cold Heart.” It’s
why it doesn’t always seem that way.
just that you’d expect her to include more.
Maybe the fact that she rarely focuses
on pop stars is meant to emphasize Lipa’s on the surface, Last Call looks like dozens of other true-
self-definition as a wide-ranging cultural crime series. All the familiar visual language is in place: re-creat-
authority, feeding into the ideals behind ed scenes, lots of talking heads, timelines that flash across the screen, piles
Service95. When she does talk to other of documents and police evidence. Most true-crime docuseries use this
singers, she ends up sharing the kind kind of material to add up to proof of guilt or to draw out the pleasurable
of details only a fellow pop icon would frustration of a mystery that hasn’t yet been solved. Last Call has those
understand—and there’s some appeal to things but deploys them with a marked lack of fanfare. Given the course
that, even when it sounds familiar. “A rou- of a story that’s subtitled When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York,
tine is great,” she says in the episode with it’s necessary to identify a killer and to consider that person’s life and the
Charlie XCX, reflecting on their shared details of their crimes, yet Last Call treats those narrative tropes with near
globe-trotting lifestyle. “But also having reluctance. Yes, these things are important, but other things matter more.
to create a new routine in every single city, Directed by Anthony Caronna and adapted from the book of the same
and trying to figure out what your favorite name by Elon Green, Last Call makes a suggestive companion to the
place is, waking up in a new room, where recent Black Mirror episode “Loch Henry,” which casts a sardonic eye
do you like to go to grab a coffee—it’s not on the true-crime genre: its promise of sensitivity and the result of naked
actually a routine.” sensationalism. As a story about a serial killer who murdered several queer
Every interview show ultimately tells men in New York in the early ’90s, Last Call could very easily have been
a story about the interviewer, a tale com- exactly the kind of true crime “Loch Henry” sneers at, a dime-a-dozen
municated through their choice of guests streaming thriller full of shock and disgust and obsession with a killer’s
and topics. The story that unspools around mind. But it’s more interested in the lives of the victims than the killer,
Dua Lipa in At Your Service is one of the more concerned with history and cultural context than the repetition of
pop star as hustler and thinker, curious violent details, and vastly more curious about systems
P H OTO G R A P H : M A X (C A L L )

and politically engaged. It’s a tricky proj- of bias than individual criminality. It’s gentle, careful,
ect: In the cynical world of celebrity, the and immensely loving, even when it’s full of palpable
line between activism and the perfor- fury—everything true crime so rarely understands LAST CALL
HBO AND MAX.
mance of activism is thin. With At Your how to be.
Service, Lipa argues it’s a distinction with- The series’ four episodes, which began rolling out
out a difference. ■ on HBO and Max July 9, spend significant time with

82 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
the victims’ families, friends, and lovers, and
their accounts become multifaceted por-
traits of who these men were. Because the
victims were queer men, and because not all
of them were out to everyone in their lives,
the varied, overlapping perspectives resist
any simplistic reading of who they were and
how they’re remembered. Thomas Mulca-
hy’s daughter talks about how loving he was
and about the pain of losing him in young
adulthood, just as she was beginning to get
to know him as a person rather than just as
her father. Peter Anderson’s lover describes
the depth of their yearslong relationship
and what it was like to keep their sexuality
a secret for all that time.
Last Call’s humanizing impulse perme-
ates the entire series, but it’s most striking in
the treatment of Anthony Marrero, a Puerto
Rican sex worker whose story stands in con-
trast to those of the killer’s more economi-
cally privileged white victims. The show
includes some of the contemporaneous
coverage of Marrero’s murder, which was
dismissive at best and occasionally glib.
Rather than stopping there, though, with an
uninterrogated pat on the back for how far
we’ve come, Last Call digs in with lengthy
interviews with Marrero’s brother, who still
can’t acknowledge that part of his sibling’s
life; with a friend who knew him well; and
with his great-nephew, who’s trying to push
back against Marrero’s erasure within his
own family. The result is not trying to be—
cannot be—an exhaustive picture of who
Marrero was. But it makes him a person,
memorable and complicated, someone loyal
with an incredible capacity to charm, a man
with a sense of style who is not easily reduc-
ible to a homophobic headline or an item on
a list of more white-coded names.
Last Call does this for as many of the
victims as it can with as much attention to
multiple areas of each person’s life as it can
possibly muster. At the same time, the series
does tell the story of the investigation into
who killed these men through interviews
with law-enforcement officers, but many
then and some even now struggle with how
to find a killer who targeted a community of
gay men. In one especially telling interview
early in the series, we hear the director, off-
camera, ask two former Pennsylvania State
Police officers who investigated one of the
murders if there are any questions the
production team should have asked but
did not. One of them replies, “Why is the
emphasis on the gay part?”
Again and again, the show finds ways
to answer that question. The most direct
response is simply that if police officers
can’t see gay life, they’ll inevitably fail to
see the details of these crimes. Beyond
people who knew the victims, the most
prominent voices in Last Call are activists
who struggled to illuminate and eradicate
anti-gay violence in the city during the
’80s and ’90s, especially New York City
Anti-Violence Project members Bea Han-
son and Matt Foreman. Because of their
presence in the docuseries, Last Call can
continually return to emphasize New York
City as a site of violence but also a crucial
haven for gay life. As much as anything,
Last Call is about the ways each of these
men had joy in his life and the tragedy of
their violent ends.
The most surprising thing about watch-
ing Last Call is that it is deeply, intensely
sad, but that surprise is odd. Surely all
documentaries about murder are sad.
Why should this one be different? It is,
though, and that surprise comes from the
slow-rolling realization of how rare it is to
leave a true-crime production with feel-
ings of grief instead of shock or disbelief
or giddy, thrilled disgust. There’s another
sadness too: More true-crime stories
could be told this way but aren’t. It’s not
a loss on the same scale as the murders
of Peter Anderson, Thomas Mulcahy,
Anthony Marrero, and Michael Sakara,
but it’s a loss all the same. ■
 13.
11.
8.
16.
21.

For more culture Eminem (8 Mile), and Ice Cube (Ghosts of Mars),
coverage and among others. alison willmore
streaming PODCASTS
recommendations,
see vulture.com. 7.Listen to
T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S Fiasco: Vigilante
To
Fever pitch.
Prologue Projects and Audible, July 27.
Taking on the shifting politics around violent-
crime rates in the country, Leon Neyfakh revisits
a striking moment from 1984, when 37-year-old
repairman Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teen-
agers on the 2 train—and received a public out-
pouring of support for the act. nicholas quah
TV

8. Watch Dark Winds

Season Two
Leaphorn and Chee are back on the case.
AMC+, July 30.
Zahn McClarnon finally has the starring role he
deserves in this series based on Tony Hillerman’s
Twenty-five novels, which continues its noir-meets-mysticism
things to see, approach by setting McClarnon’s Leaphorn against
hear, watch, a new racist villain who claims to know secrets
and read. about the Navajo officer’s past. The series boasts a
predominantly Indigenous cast. Kiowa Gordon
J U LY 1 9 – AU G U S T 2
and Jessica Matten also return. roxana hadadi
BOOKS
TV cast women. Edan Lepucki’s latest novel is an
9. Read I Will Greet
intergenerational tale about an inherited gift that
1. Watch begins to look like a curse. emma alpern

Reservation Dogs MOVIES the Sun Again

A heat map of longing, shame, and resilience.
Season Three 4. See The Apartment Hogarth, August 1.
Don’t miss it. Upper West Side affairs. Khashayar J. Khabushani’s debut novel—told
Hulu, August 2. Film Forum, July 29 and 30, August 3. from the perspective of an Iranian American boy
This will be the final season of the show that all Fact: Billy Wilder wrote and directed some of the whose immigrant parents are struggling to build
three Vulture TV critics picked as one of the best a life in L.A.—is a brutally intimate reckoning

of 2022. Maybe more than any other series on TV
this summer, Reservation Dogs is the show you
owe it to yourself to spend some time with. Soak
up its gorgeous, astonishing wit before the series
takes a final bow this fall.
kathryn vanarendonk
ART
2. See Brigid Berlin
Behind the muse.
Vito Schnabel Gallery, 43 Clarkson Street;
through August 18.
Brigid Berlin came from an ultraprivileged home,
as did much of Andy Warhol’s entourage. She was
a force of nature who could drink anybody at
Max’s Kansas City under the table, including
Rauschenberg and de Kooning. This show,
curated by writer Alison M. Gingeras, re-creates
her apartment and includes Berlin’s letters, her
own artwork, and much more. jerry saltz
BOOKS
greatest films of all time. Opinion: This Best Pic-
ture–winning rom-com, with Jack Lemmon and
Shirley MacLaine, might be the best thing he did.
Fact: You should see it on a big screen, as part of
a massive Wilder retrospective. bilge ebiri
TV
5. Watch Praise Petey
Congratulations! You’re now in charge of a cult.
Freeform, July 21.
Former Saturday Night Live head writer Anna
Drezen created this animated series about a Man-
hattan woman named Petey (Annie Murphy),
who discovers that her estranged father has
died and left her a southern town called New
Utopia, which reveals itself to be a community
built around a cult he founded. She is expected
to lead it. jen chaney
MOVIES
6. Go to Real Rap:
Hip-Hop Star Power
P H OTO G R A P H : PA R A M O U N T + ( L I O N E S S ) ; S TA R Z ( H E E L S, M I N X ) ; P E ACO C K ( T W I S T E D M E TA L ) ; A M C ( DA R K W I N D S )
with coming of age as a Muslim after 9/11, the
confusion of navigating conflicting worlds, and
the burning desire to belong. jasmine vojdani
THEATER
10. See Back to the
Future: The Musical
You built a Broadway show out of a DeLorean?
In previews for an August 3 opening.
Yes, it’s easy to be weary of yet another IP play,
but this musical got reviews in London that sug-
gest it’s cleverly written. Tony winner Roger Bart
stars as Doc. If our calculations are correct, when
this baby hits 88 mph, you’re going to see some
serious shit. christopher bonanos
TV
11. Watch Heels
Season Two
Time to get thrown around the ring.

3. Read Time’s Mouth on Screen Starz, July 28.

Time keeps on slipping.
Counterpoint, August 1.
In the ’50s, a teen named Sharon runs away from
her abusive home and disappears into the forest
outside Santa Cruz, where her ability to meditate
herself into the past earns her a following of out-
From behind the mic to in front of the camera.
Museum of the Moving Image, July 28 to October 21.
Rappers have an solid track record when it
comes to acting, as proved by this fun series,
which highlights star turns from Queen Latifah
(Just Wright), Tupac Shakur (Poetic Justice),
Starz continues to quietly put out some of the
most unexpected workplace dramas, including
Heels, about two brothers and rivals in profes-
sional wrestling. The first season was immersive,
challenging, and fun. Whether this small-town
wrestling league can support new faces and new
competitors is the focus now. r.h.

84 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
OPERA

12. Hear Henri VIII

A grand rarity.
Fisher Center, Bard College, opens July 21. “Th CK &
Saint-Saëns’s grandest opera was an 1880s hit— – New York Stage Review
then mysteriously vanished. Leon Botstein, invet-

“I SISTIB
erate excavator of rarities, revives it in a new pro-
duction by Jean-Romain Vesperini starring
bass-baritone Alfred Walker. justin davidson
TV – TheaterMania
13. Watch Twisted Metal
Hit the gas.
Peacock, July 27.
The Last of Us had great success earlier this year
turning a video game into a gripping television
narrative. Maybe the same can happen for this
show based on the PlayStation game. Anthony
Mackie stars as a milkman charged with deliver-
ing a mysterious package in a postapocalyptic
version of America. j.c.
MUSIC

14. Hear Magos Herrera

and The Knights
Get out to listen in.
Bryant Park, July 21.
The Mexican jazz singer with a voice like smoky
mezcal joins the chamber orchestra for music from
her new album, Aire, penned during the pandemic.
j.d.
CLASSICAL MUSIC

15. Hear
The Mostly Mozart
Festival Orchestra
Canon for a reason.
Damrosch Park, July 22.
Before conductor Louis Langrée departs and the
festival he’s directed for 21 years dissolves, Mostly
Mozart splits its program between Vienna and
Seoul. Composer Soo Yeon Lyuh takes the solo
part in her own haegeum concerto Dudurim, and
flutist Jasmine Choi performs Mozart’s second
flute concerto. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7
swings the balance decidedly to Europe. j.d.
TV
RockAndRollManTheMusical.com
NEW WORLD STAGES 340 W. 50TH ST.
16. Watch Special Ops:
Lioness
Your next summertime hate watch is here.
Paramount+, July 23.

Get Lost
In this series inspired by a real U.S. military pro-
gram, CIA op Joe (Zoe Saldaña) works under-
cover to prevent terrorist attacks. Thematically, Every day,
the show looks like it’s picking up where the delivered right
Islamophobia of Taylor’s Sheridan’s Sicario: Day
of the Soldado left off. r.h. to your inbox.
MOVIES

17. See The Unknown

Country
Finding yourself while on the road.
One Great Story sign up now
In select theaters, July 28.
Lily Gladstone’s about to have a big fall thanks to nymag.com/ogs
her star-making turn in Killers of the Flower
Moon, but before then, you can catch her in a more
intimate role as a woman who, after the loss of her
grandmother, reconnects with her Oglala Lakota
relatives and embarks on a road trip. a.w.
MUSIC
18. See King Krule
Tasty tones.
Kings Theatre, August 1 and 2.
Singer-songwriter and producer Archy Marshall
makes moonlit, amorphous indie rock and fore-
boding, atmospheric hip-hop beats, and his new
album, Space Heavy, his fifth as King Krule, is a
trove of keen observations you can watch him
unpack in the flesh. craig jenkins
MOVIES
19. See The Dreamers
Bande à part.
IFC Center, July 27, 31.
As part of “When the Lights Go Down,” its 21-film
tribute to sex scenes, IFC Films is showing
35-mm. prints of Bernardo Bertolucci’s beguiling,
nostalgia-soaked, sex-infused tribute to the New
Wave and the May ’68 riots in Paris, starring Eva
Green, Michael Pitt, and Louis Garrel. b.e.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
20. Hear Acis
and Galatea
Garden listening.
Caramoor, July 23.
Handel’s one-act pastoral masque was written to
be performed at a gracious country estate with
elaborate gardens rather like Caramoor. The Phil-
harmonia Baroque Orchestra performs a staged
So, Saint Mela,
What Indie Shows Are You
Going to This Summer?
The Brooklyn pop band—which will play
tracks from their latest EP, i have no
fantasies to sell you, at the Sultan Room
(234 Starr St., Bushwick) August 24—
shares their calendar.
“we’re excited for Untitled Queen’s
latest event, ‘Untitled (Art Star): the
search for Brooklyn’s next drag art star,’
at C’mon Everybody (325 Franklin Ave.,
Bed-Stuy) on 7/21. The unapologetically
genre-bending Fusilier will be playing
TV Eye (1647 Weirfield St., Ridgewood)
on 7/27—he performs moody, nervy rock
with gut-punch dynamics and kinetic
urgency. We fell for Crosslegged’s tex-
tured, delicate approach to songwriting
at a house show. She plays Elsewhere
(599 Johnson Ave., Bushwick) on 8/2.”
production directed by Aria Umezawa and con-
ducted by Richard Egarr with tenor Nicholas
Mulroy and soprano Hera Hyesang Park as the
mythical lovers. j.d.
TV
21. Watch Minx
Season Two
“Vulgar and patriotic.”
Starz, July 21.
Minx, the Paul Feig–produced comedy about a
fictional feminist erotic magazine in the ’70s, was
dropped by Max after its first season, then res-
cued by Starz. It picks up again with more confi-
dence, a stronger sense of itself, and better stories
for Lennon Parham and Jessica Lowe, who play
the two best characters on the show. k.v.a.
MUSIC
22. Go to It’s All
a Blur Tour
Get sticky.
Barclays Center, July 17, 18, 20, and 21;
Madison Square Garden, July 23, 25, and 26.
This Drake summer tour is a no-brainer, a chance
to shout your way through several dozen of the
biggest radio hits of the last decade, to feel ways
during “Feel No Ways,” and to count the real or
imagined M’s in your bank account with Her Loss
co-conspirator 21 Savage. c.j.
ART
23. See Jim Dine
Monuments in bronze.
Templon, 293 Tenth Avenue; through July 28.
This show gives us the proto-Pop artist at 87 and
still cranking out all manner of things, including
these great gnarly bronze forms that look like
buildings or ships, some paintings, and other
sculptures. All attest to an artist of insatiable curi-
osity, energy, and nerve. j.s.
MUSIC
24. Listen to Blackbox
Life Recorder 21f/
in a room7 F760
Ambient jewels.
Warp Records, July 28.
Electronic music titan Richard James revisits his
legendary Aphex Twin nom de plume for his first
EP of new material since 2018’s Collapse. Early
previews suggest a crowd-pleaser, a rare treat from
a producer possessing vast but mercurial talent.
c.j.
BOOKS
25. Read Anansi’s Gold
An expansive true-crime chronicle.
P H OTO G R A P H : L I Z M A N E Y ( M E L A )
Bloomsbury, August 1.
Journalist Yepoka Yeebo tells the story of John
Ackah Blay-Miezah, a con man who claimed
to oversee a fund belonging to Ghana’s first
president. With the help of government offi-
cials and Nixon’s former attorney general, and
with FBI investigators on his tail, he recruited
investors to invest millions for a payout that
would never come. e.a.
@
 NEW YORK METRO
TOP DOCTORS 2023
When it comes to your health and the health of your family, seeing a doctor

that fits your needs is important. Our list of Castle Connolly Top Doctors in New York

makes it easy to find and connect you with the right doctor. Our goal is to take the

guesswork out of finding the best and most qualified medical practitioners, so you

can feel confident about your healthcare.

1
 For the full list of Castle Connolly Top Doctors in the New York
Metro area and nationwide, please visit castleconnolly.com.

With over 30 years’ experience researching, reviewing, and selecting Top Doctors, Castle Connolly is a trusted and credible
healthcare research and information company. Our mission is to help people find the best healthcare by connecting patients
with best-in-class healthcare providers.

Castle Connolly’s physician-led team of researchers follows a rigorous screening process to select top doctors on both
the national and regional levels. Its online nomination process is open to all licensed physicians in America who are able
to nominate physicians in any medical specialty and in any part of the country, as well as indicate whether the nominated
physician(s) is, in their opinion, among the best in their region in their medical specialty or among the best in the nation in
their medical specialty. Then, Castle Connolly’s research team thoroughly vets each physician’s professional qualifications,
education, hospital and faculty appointments, research leadership, professional reputation, disciplinary history and if available,
outcomes data. Additionally, a physician’s interpersonal skills such as listening and communicating effectively, demonstrating
empathy, and instilling trust and confidence, are also considered in the review process. The Castle Connolly Doctor
Directory is the largest network of peer-nominated physicians in the nation.

In addition to Top Doctors, Castle Connolly’s research team also identifies Rising Stars, early career doctors who are
emerging leaders in the medical community.

Physicians selected for inclusion in this magazine’s “Top Doctors” and “Rising Stars” feature may also appear online at
www.castleconnolly.com, or in conjunction with other Castle Connolly Top Doctors databases online and/or in print.

Castle Connolly is part of Everyday Health Group, a recognized leader in patient and provider education, attracting an
engaged audience of over 82 million health consumers and over 900,000 U.S. practicing physicians and clinicians to
its premier health and wellness digital properties. Our mission is to drive better clinical and health outcomes through
decision-making informed by highly relevant information, data, and analytics. We empower healthcare providers
and consumers with trusted content and services
delivered through Everyday Health Group’s
world-class brands.

For more information, please visit

www.castleconnolly.com or everydayhealthgroup.com.

2
 NEW YORK METRO
TOP DOCTORS 2023
Douglas J. Melman, MD
DERMATOLOGY
Aesthetic Dermatology, LLC
800 Woodbury Rd.
Woodbury, NY 11797
aestheticdermatology.com
516.496.9400
Ariel Ostad, MD
COSMETIC DERMATOLOGY &
SKIN CANCER SURGERY
Botox, Fillers, Lasers, Liposuction
897 Lexington Ave
New York, NY 10065
www.drarielostad.com
212.517.7900
Arash Akhavan, MD
DERMATOLOGY
The Dermatology & Laser Group
200 W 57th St., Suite 510
New York, NY 10019
110 E 60th St., Suite 606
New York, NY 10022
dermatologyandlasergroup.com
212.444.8204
Brian S. Glatt, MD, FACS
PLASTIC SURGERY
Aesthetic Surgery of the
Breast, Body & Face
drbrianglatt.com
973.889.9300
Dermatology | Plastic Surgery | Otolaryngology
Jeffrey A. Sklar, MD
DERMATOLOGY
Aesthetic Dermatology, LLC
800 Woodbury Rd.
Woodbury, NY 11797
aestheticdermatology.com
516.496.9400
Derek V. Chan, MD/PhD
DERMATOLOGY
All Dermis Dermatology
245 5th Ave, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10016
www.alldermis.com
212.606.3780
Carin Gribetz, MD
DERMATOLOGY
Carin Gribetz Dermatology
969 Park Avenue, Suite 1C
New York, NY 10028
Castle Connolly Top Doctor-10 Years
www.drcaringribetz.com
212.289.3300
George Ferzli Jr. M.D., FACS
OTOLARYNGOLOGY-FACIAL
PLASTIC SURGERY
Ferzli Facial Plastic Surgery
135 East 74th Street, New York, NY 10021
ferzlifacialplasticsurgery.com
212.475.8100
Lilly-Rose Paraskevas, MD
DERMATOLOGY
Rose Dermatology
30-16 30th Drive, Mezzanine Level
Astoria, NY 11102
Rosederm.com
718.728.3376
Lance H. Brown MD
DERMATOLOGY AND DERMATOLOGIC
SURGERY
Lasers, Botox & Fillers, Mohs Surgery,
Cosmetics, Facial Rejuvenation
drlancebrown.com
212.924.7546
Bruce Katz, MD
RATED TOP COSMETIC DERMATOLOGIST
BY CASTLE CONNOLLY &
NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE
JUVA Skin & Laser Center,
60 East 56th Street, Suite 2
New York, NY 10022
www.juvaskin.com | 212.688.5882
Julie V. Vasile, MD
PLASTIC SURGERY
Perforator Flap Breast Reconstruction
(DIEP, extended DIEP, TDAP, PAP, GAP,
and combined flaps)
666 Lexington Avenue, Suite 207B
Mt. Kisco, NY 10549
www.julievasilemd.com
914.218.8400
Jody A. Levine, MD
DERMATOLOGY &
DERMATOLOGIC SURGERY
Dermatology of NYC PLLC
35A East 84th Street,
New York, NY 10028
plasticsandderm.com
212.988.1800
Janet H. Prystowsky MD, PhD
DERMATOLOGY
3010 Westchester Avenue, Suite 207
Purchase, NY 10577
110 East 55th Street, 19th Floor
New York, NY 10022
janetprystowskymd.com
914.340.3453 | 212.230.1212
Leah Ansell, MD
COSMETIC AND MEDICAL
DERMATOLOGY
Treiber Dermatology Associates
175 Purchase Street
Rye, NY 10580
www.treiberderm.com
914.967.2153
Johnny Mao, MD
OTOLARYNGOLOGY/
FACIAL PLASTIC SURGERY
Mao Facial Plastic Surgery
200 South Orange Center Road
Orange, CT 06477
www.maofacialplastics.com
203.907.0501
3
 NEW YORK METRO
TOP DOCTORS 2023
Plastic Surgery | Otolaryngology

Kaveh Alizadeh, MD, MSC, FACS Elie Levine, MD Lyle S. Leipziger, MD, FACS Bryan G. Forley, MD, FACS
PLASTIC SURGERY PLASTIC & PLASTIC SURGERY PLASTIC SURGERY
RECONSTRUCTIVE SURGERY 900 Northern Boulevard, Suite 130
Cosmoplastic Surgery Surgical & Non-Surgical Procedures
Plastic Surgery & Great Neck, NY 11021
1165 Park Avenue, Suite 1B Dermatology of NYC PLLC 516.465.8787 Face, Eyes, Nose, Breast & Body
New York, NY 10128 35A East 84th Street, 630 Park Ave New York, NY 10065 drforley.com
www.doctoralizadeh.com New York, NY 10028 212.249.4500
plasticsandderm.com | 212.988.1800 drleipziger.com 212.861.3757
646.291.2220

Tommaso Addona, MD, FACS
PLASTIC SURGERY
New York City, Garden City,
Babylon, Westchester
nyplasticsurgical.com
516.962.2271
Jennifer M. Levine, MD
FACIAL PLASTIC SURGERY
240 East 79th Street, Suite B
New York, NY 10075
www.drjenniferlevine.com
212.517.9400
Allen D. Rosen, MD, FACS Eric K. Cha, MD
Valerie J. Ablaza, MD, FACS PLASTIC SURGERY
THE PLASTIC SURGERY GROUP
895 Park Avenue
37 North Fullerton Avenue
Montclair, NJ 07042
New York, NY 10028
plasticsurgerygroupnewjersey.com www.fifthaveplasticsurgery.com
212.717.2222
973.233.1933

Congratulations to 2023 Castle Connolly Top Doctor

Randall S. Feingold, MD, FACS

Dr. Randall Feingold is a founding partner of NYBRA Plastic Surgery, the Director
of Plastic Surgery at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, NY and Clinical Associate
Professor of Surgery in the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell.
He specializes in aesthetic surgery of the face, nose, breast and body including
explant surgery and microsurgical breast reconstruction.

NYBRA Plastic Surgery 833 Northern Blvd, Suite 160, Great Neck, NY 11021 | 516.498.8400 • nybra.com
4
 TO VIEW THE FULL LIST OF 2023 TOP DOCTORS,
scan this code or visit www.CastleConnolly.com

Plastic Surgery | Otolaryngology

Adam R. Kolker, MD, FACS David Shafer, MD, FACS
PLASTIC SURGERY Dendy Engelman, MD, FAAD
Aesthetic Surgery of the Face, PLASTIC SURGERY/DERMATOLOGY
Breast, and Body 535 Fifth Avenue
drkolker.com 212.888.7770
www.ShaferClinic.com
212.744.6500 @ShaferClinic | @DrDendy
info@ShaferClinic.com
Homayoun Sasson, MD, FACS
PLASTIC SURGERY
1000 Northern Blvd, Suite 370
Great Neck, NY 11021
SassonPlasticSurgery.com
516.487.5017
Adam Schaffner, MD, FACS
PLASTIC SURGERY
Aesthetic Surgery of the Face,
Breast & Body
590 5th Avenue, 11th Floor, NYC
www.PlasticSurgeonInNYC.com
212.481.6696

David Passaretti, MD, FACS Anthony N. LaBruna, MD Michael Setzen, MD, FACS Michelle Zweifler, MD
PLASTIC SURGERY PLASTIC SURGERY RHINOPLASTY/SINUS SURGERY PLASTIC SURGERY

722 Post Road #201
Darien, CT 06820
DavidPassarettiMD.com
203.656.9999
Manhattan Plastic Surgery 600 Northern Blvd, Suite 113, 800-A 5th Ave, Suite 302
45 E 85th Street, Suite 1A Great Neck, NY, 11021 New York, NY 10065
New York, NY 10028 130 East 77th St., New York, NY 10075 www.drmichellezweifler.com
www.labrunamd.com MichaelSetzen.com 212.355.0500
212.584.7001 516.829.0045

Leo R Otake, MD, PhD, FACS
PLASTIC SURGERY
The Aesthetic Center
Plastic Surgery & Medical Spa
722 Post Road, Suite 202
Darien, CT 06820
www.theaestheticcenter.com
203.683.3128
Neil Tanna, MD, FACS
NORTHWELL HEALTH
PLASTIC SURGERY
600 Northern Blvd., Suite 310
Great Neck, NY 11021
neiltanna.com
516.321.8900
Norman M. Rowe, MD
PLASTIC SURGERY
Rowe Plastic Surgery
820 Park Avenue, Suite 1B
New York, NY 10021
www.roweplasticsurgery.com
212.628.7300
Charles A. Pierce, DO
PLASTIC SURGERY
Rowe Plastic Surgery
820 Park Avenue, Suite 1B
New York, NY 10021
www.roweplasticsurgery.com
212.628.7300

Darrick Antell, MD FACS Hani Sbitany, MD Alexes Hazen, MD Monica Tadros, MD, FACS
PLASTIC SURGERY PLASTIC SURGERY PLASTIC SURGERY OTOLARYNGOLOGY/FACIAL
850 Park Ave Mount Sinai Medical Center 535 5th Avenue, 29th Floor PLASTIC SURGERY
Dual Deep Plane Facelift 425 W. 59th Street, 7th Floor New York, NY 10017 911 Park Avenue, Suite 1C
New York, NY 10019 New York, NY 10075
antell-md.com www.alexeshazenmd.com
www.nycbreastrecon.com DrMonicaTadros.com
212.988.4040 917.301.6563
212.523.8700 212.532.4590
5
 NEW YORK METRO
TOP DOCTORS 2023
Cardiology

Satjit Bhusri, MD, FACC

Upper East Side Cardiology
and Vein Institute
Advanced Cardiovascular 45 East End Avenue
Disease and Varicose Vein New York, NY 10028
212.752.3464
Treatment
www.bhusriheart.com

Apostolos K. Tassiopoulos, MD, FACS Ellen Mellow, MD

VASCULAR & ENDOVASCULAR SURGERY
Stony Brook Medicine
Vascular Center
23 South Howell Avenue, Bldg 2 - Suite G
Centereach, NY 11720
www.stonybrookmedicine.edu
631.638.1670
CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE
184 East 70th Street
New York, NY 10021
www.ellenmellowmd.com
212.287.7342

At Columbia, we believe that quality

surgical care should be within reach for

CARE
everyone. Our Top Doctor honorees are
world-class surgeons, here for you and
Anthony Saleh, MD
WITHIN your loved ones whenever you need us. Samin K. Sharma, MD
INTERVENTIONAL CARDIOLOGY PULMONARY DISEASE

REACH The Mount Sinai Hospital

1190 5th Ave, Rm GP1 - South
7206 7th Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11209
New York, NY 10029
www.mountsinai.org/cathlab 718.745.1200
212.241.0884
6
 TO VIEW THE FULL LIST OF 2023 TOP DOCTORS,
scan this code or visit www.CastleConnolly.com

Thoracic Surgery

Mount Sinai would like to

CONGRATULATE
Our Thoracic Surgery Department,
the greatest number of Top Surgeons in the Tri State Area

Shahriyour Andaz Raja Flores Vanessa Gibson Ardeshir Hakami-Kermani

Brian Housman Andrew Kaufman Daniel Laskey Dong-Seok Lee

Daniel G Nicastri Scott Scheinin Kimberly Song Andrea Wolf

L E ARN M O RE AT
Mountsinai.org/care/thoracic-surgery

7
 NEW YORK METRO
TOP DOCTORS 2023
Specialists | Surgery

Mount Sinai Department of Orthopedic Surgery

These physicians are among the Top Doctors in the nation as selected by Castle Connolly.

Edward M. Adler, Shawn G. Anthony, Steven J. Arsht, Eugene M. Bulkin, Paul J. Cagle, Joseph A. Bax, Michael J. Bronson,
MD MD MD MD MD DO MD

Wesley H. Bronson, Darwin Chen, Samuel K. Cho, Alexis C. Colvin, Evan L. Flatow, David A. Forsh, Leesa M. Galatz,
MD MD MD MD MD MD MD

James N. Gladstone, Ilya Iofin, Michael R. Hausman, Andrew C. Hecht, Donald M. Jaehon M. Kim, Kasey Komperda,
MD MD MD MD Kastenbaum, MD MD MD

Melissa D. Leber, Alexander J. Lee, Baron S. Lonner, Calin S. Moucha, Bradford O. Parsons, David J. Perna, Aruna M.
MD MD MD MD MD MD Seneviratne, MD

For more info visit

Mountsinai.org/Orthopedics
Sheena C. Ranade, Benjamin E. Robert J. Ziets,
MD Rosenstadt, MD MD

@mountsinaiortho @mountsinaiorthopedics Mount Sinai Orthopedics

Orthopedics at The Mount Sinai Hospital | 212.241.8892 • The Spine Hospital at Mount Sinai | 212.241.8947
The Orthopedic Center at Mount Sinai West | 877.636.7846 • Orthopedics at Mount Sinai Union Square | 212.844.6400

8

Steven B. Zelicof, MD, PhD
ORTHOPAEDIC SURGERY
Knee/Hip Replacement & Revision,
Joint Preservation, Robotic Surgery
SpecialtyOrthoNY.com
914.686.0111
Sean McCance, MD
ORTHOPEDIC SPINE SURGERY
Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery
Revision Spine Surgery
Scoliosis Surgery
mccancemd.com
212.360.6500
Steven J. Lee, MD
ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY
NY Orthopedics: 159 E 74th Street, Fl 2
New York, NY 10021
2 Overhill Rd, Suite 330
Scarsdale, NY 10583
www.STEVENJLEEMD.COM
212.737.3301
Jason E. Lowenstein, MD
ADULT AND PEDIATRIC
SPINE AND SCOLIOSIS SURGERY
305 2nd Ave., #19
New York, NY 10003
www.jasonlowensteinmd.com
212.228.7700
TO VIEW THE FULL LIST OF 2023 TOP DOCTORS,
scan this code or visit www.CastleConnolly.com
Specialists | Surgery
Saad B. Chaudhary, MD Joshua S. Dines, MD Neil S. Roth, MD
ORTHOPAEDIC SPINE SURGERY ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY/SPORTS
Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery, MEDICINE
HSS Sports Medicine Institute
Disc Replacement Surgery, 610 West 58th Street, 3rd Floor Arthroscopic Shoulder/Knee
Endoscopic, Complex and Robotic
Spine Surgery New York, NY 10019 Surgery, Rotator Cuff, ACL, Meniscus
mountsinai.org/profiles/saad-b-chaudhary2 dinesorthopedics.com NYSportsMedicineInstitute.com
212.241.3909 212.744.2474 212.861.2300
Sanjeev Suratwala, MD, MBA Andrew C. Hecht, MD Mark J. Mohrmann, MD
ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY Chief, Spine Surgery, Mount Sinai ORTHOPAEDIC CONCIERGE MEDICINE
Health System
Northwell Health Same Day In-Person or Telemedicine
Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery,
New York Orthopaedic & Spine Center Disc Replacement, Spine Injuries 16 Park Place
833 Northern Blvd., Suite 220 in Athletes New York NY 10007
Great Neck, NY 11021 mountsinai.org/profiles/andrew-c-hecht www.mjmmd.com
Tel: 516.622.7930 Fax: 516.498.9385 212.241.0735
Kenneth R. Zaslav, MD, FAAOS Gary R. Gecelter, MD, FACS, FACG
KNEE AND SHOULDER SURGERY,
SPORTS MEDICINE CHAIRMAN OF SURGERY ST. FRANCIS HOSPITAL
SYSTEM CHAIR, SURGICAL SERVICES CATHOLIC HEALTH
Director of Center for Regenerative
Orthopedic Medicine Lenox Hill LAPAROSCOPIC SURGICAL ONCOLOGY
Hospital Northwell Health
www.KenZaslavMD
212.434.4324 Mitchell I. Chorost, Daniel Ari Popowich,
MD, FACS MD, FACS, FACTS
CHIEF OF SURGICAL CHIEF, COLON &
ONCOLOGY RECTAL SURGERY
Eugene Rubach, George DeNoto, III,
M.D., FACS MD, FACS
VICE CHAIR, CHIEF, GENERAL
DEPARTMENT OF SURGERY AT
Michael F. Pizzillo, MD SURGERY ST. FRANCIS HOSPITAL
HAND SURGERY
Englewood Orthopedic Associates
910 Sylvan Avenue 2200 Northern Boulevard 485 Madison Avenue
Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632 Suite 125 21st floor
www.englewoodortho.com East Hills, NY 11548 New York, NY 10022
201.569.2770
5 16 .6 27.5 262 | 5 16. 3 25.75 8 5 9
 NEW YORK METRO
TOP DOCTORS 2023
Neurology
Jenkins NeuroSpine
646.499.0488 | jenkinsneurospine.com

65 E 96th St, Ste 1B 31 River Road, Suite 100

New York, NY 10128 Cos Cob, CT 06807

Arthur Jenkins, MD Dr. Jenkins is fellowship trained in Bennie W. Chiles III, MD, FAANS, FACS Sumul N. Raval, MD, DABPN
NEUROLOGICAL & SPINE SURGERY NEUROLOGY/NEURO-ONCOLOGY
complex spinal neurosurgery from the
280 N Central Ave, Ste 235, Garden State Neurology &
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Neuro-Oncology
Hartsdale, NY 10530 100 State Highway 36 East, Suite 1A
He practices the full spectrum of spinal
wsbsonline.com West Long Branch, NJ 07764
surgery in both his offices in Manhattan GSNeurology.com
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and Greenwich, Connecticut. 732.229.6200
Board Certification: Neurological Surgery
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NYU Langone Health - NYU Winthrop
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& METABOLISM
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PAIN MEDICINE
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Glenn L. Stoller, MD John S. Kung, MD David A. Schlessinger, MD, FAACS Aryeh L. Pollack, MD
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G e nt i l e Re ti na .c om

Barbara Dawn Bartlik, MD
PSYCHIATRY/INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE
200 West 57th Street, Suite 200
New York, NY 10019
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16

Sperm
Fever
CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 3 7
“today’s rightists mostly dabble in edgy
memes and lifestyle escapism: the dream
that weightlifting, ‘clean eating’ and the like
are how you resist Davos Man.” Somewhat
more sympathetically, in Vanity Fair,
James Pogue described The End of Men
and its protagonists as reacting against
forces that had severed “our connection to
our corporeality.”
As if by algorithmic decree, the hosts of
the Red Scare podcast have also weighed
in on sperm decline and its Cassandras. As
one of them summed up the Carlson pro-
gram, “All this stuff used to be associated
with leftist hippies and is now associated
with right-wing nationalists.”
Arguably, it’s more mixed up than that.
In December, shortly after the most recent
spermpocalypse study was published,
Carlson invited Kteily to appear on his Fox
News show. Kteily hemmed and hawed.
On one hand, here was a massive platform
hosted by someone worried about sperm. On
the other hand, the nature of that platform
would make it challenging to talk about
his product in a way that wouldn’t alienate
potential customers. The transgender
market, it turns out, is a critical segment of
Legacy’s clientele. As the number of male-
to-female gender transitions increases,
so does the demand for sperm freezing,
as clients want to preserve their chance at
conception after a medical procedure. He
played out the worst-case scenario. “I say
‘people with sperm,’ and he’d be like, ‘Oh,
you mean men?’ And then that’d put me in a
situation where I bring up trans people and
then he goes to town on me and I probably
fumble.” Kteily turned down the invitation.
G
lobal semen quality is not
exclusively the concern of oppor-
tunistic start-ups and the under-
ground right. Malcolm and Simone
Collins are perhaps best described as the
tech world’s preeminent pronatalist power
couple. Malcolm used to work as a venture
capitalist in South Korea; Simone was the
managing director of Dialog, a social club
co-founded by Peter Thiel. They have three
kids, are aiming for seven to 13, and lead
numerous initiatives aimed at reversing
birth-rate decline.
We met in Manhattan for drinks recently,
and Malcolm ordered a light beer. Simone,
feeding a bottle to their infant daughter,
Titan, explained that he was trying to limit
alcohol intake on the grounds that too much
might impair sperm health. She mentioned
a Swan study that found that phthalates in
the urine of women in the early stages of
pregnancy correlated with reduced “ano-
genital distance”—the area between the
scrotum and anus—in boys they gave birth
to. (AGD has been linked to low sperm
counts. The Financial Times, in a June pro-
file of the octogenarian Swan, primly noted
her use of the terms ass-ball connector, taint,
gooch, and grundle.) “The same people who
encourage us to fundraise for pro-natalism,”
Simone said, “are also encouraging us to
fundraise for active research in endocrine
disruptors and declining fertility.”
Both the Collinses and Raw Egg
Nationalist are scheduled to appear at
Natal, a pro-procreation conference taking
place in Austin this December. But they
don’t quite share the politics of The End
of Men crowd. They consider themselves
more socially tolerant, and their preferred
solutions are not macho lifestyle hacks but
tech-accelerationist moonshots: artificial
wombs and in vitro gametogenesis, the
turning of various human cells into sperm
or eggs. (One notable IVG start-up is
Conception, backed by OpenAI co-founder
Sam Altman.) Last year, an Insider reporter
asked the Collinses what distinguished
their objective from that of Gilead, the
breeder dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale. They insist that Gilead is
the danger, not the goal; in the novel, mass
infertility is wrought partly by pollutants.
Pro-growth centrists such as Tyler
Cowen and Matt Yglesias—author of the
more-people-is-good book One Billion
Americans—worry about the effect of
fertility decline on economic stagnation.
Skittish East Asian governments are
spending heavily on programs to incen-
tivize childbearing. Yet to many on the
left, there remains something discomfit-
ing about the subject. The Collinses have
been called “hipster eugenicists,” partly
because they did genetic testing on their
embryos before conceiving and partly
because of the “Great Replacement”
connotations. (For what it’s worth, the
Collinses are not hipsters but fairly conspic-
uous exurban squares.) Malcolm argues his
liberal critics have it backward. Politically,
he says, the left needs to start reproducing
more or else they will be replaced. “Their
fertility rate is so low,” Malcolm says. “This
urban monoculture that dominates our
political and economic life today is tem-
porary. We believe in cultural pluralism, so
we’re out here recruiting.”
When I started looking into the start-
ups endeavoring to address sperm health,
I often heard them described in progressive
terms. In the spring, I met a Brooklyn
health-tech investor named Leslie Schrock.
(She has a stake in Legacy.) Schrock, who
has two boys, and who has had three
miscarriages, makes a point of focusing on
sperm in her latest book, Fertility Rules.
Far from a manosphere preoccupation,
she sees sperm as something we don’t
talk about enough, a word that elicits
squirms or puerile jokes in a way that
talk of ovaries does not. (This taboo may
explain why TikTok keeps blocking Legacy
from advertising sperm-freezing on its
platform, offering shifting explanations
for why.) “Nothing’s going to change in
women’s health until men take fertility
more seriously,” she says, as we chat on the
Brooklyn Heights Promenade. In other
words, men roam the earth assuming
their sperm is healthy, while their female
partners are downing prenatal vitamins,
cutting out booze, freezing their eggs, and
generally trying to optimize their ability
to bear children. “Women are acting as
treatment surrogates for men in assisted
reproduction. They’re getting unnecessary
IVF treatments for sure.”
Gender parity aside, there is the Silent
Spring of it all. Recently, the New York
Times published an op-ed about the
unreal proliferation of microplastics—in
our clothes, in the Mariana Trench, in our
bowel movements, atop Mount Everest. The
author argued that the issue had something
for everyone: birth-rate concerns for con-
servatives, ecological ones for liberals. The
journalist Anna Sussman, in her review
of Swan’s Count Down in the New York
Review of Books, argued such a distinction
was false—that the standard right-left labels
simply don’t apply to a problem this big.
“Women in coastal Bangladesh are report-
ing higher rates of miscarriage, which has
been linked to the increased salinity of their
drinking water caused by sea-level rise; chil-
dren of pesticide applicators are born with
higher rates of birth defects,” she wrote.
“In such conditions, the prospect of repro-
ductive ‘choice’ becomes moot. Unlike the
middle-class American activists choosing
childlessness,” in these vulnerable popula-
tions “childlessness is choosing them.”
A
ll this agita presupposes that
Spermageddon is actually hap-
pening. As long as there has been
sperm-decline research, there have
been sperm-decline skeptics. Harry Fisch,
a urologist and former longtime male-
fertility expert at Columbia University, has
been railing against suspected Chicken
Littles since the 1990s, when an earlier
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 105
scary-sperm-crisis paper dropped. When
we spoke, Fisch volunteered a rather
creative rebuttal to the latest research.
Perhaps because Swan and Levine stud-
ied subjects who were unaware of their
fertility status—a supposed strength of
the study—oblivious college-aged men
were overrepresented. Fisch thought of
his sons. What do college-age men do?
They drink and smoke weed and do other
potentially sperm-degrading activities.
Paul Turek, a renowned Beverly Hills
urologist (and an adviser to Legacy), says
he hasn’t noticed any systemic decline
in his practice. But if it is real, it makes
evolutionary sense. “If you look at mon-
keys and chimps who are polyamorous,
they have big testicles, bigger than
humans, with sperm counts in the one
billion sperm per ejaculate” because
there’s a war among males for females. In
contrast, orangutans and gorillas occupy
harems in which one male dominates,
and their counts are closer to 20 mil-
lion per ejaculate. In other words, Turek
seems to be saying, sperm is trending
downward because men aren’t in fierce
competition to spread their seed widely.
Turek hypothesizes that there is a divide
between clinicians like him and “Ph.D.’s
who run statistics” from above. “I think
those of us on the ground don’t see it,” he
says. “I’m a surgeon. I don’t get alarmed.”
When he sees sperm problems, he attri-
butes it to behavioral factors. “Sometimes
it’s a hot tub, or obesity, or tobacco,” he says.
“Sometimes it’s hormonal; sometimes it’s a
flu, fever, covid. But I would say 90 per-
cent of the time I can figure it out.”
In February, the blog Astral Codex Ten,
written by the pseudonymous rational-
ist blogger Scott Alexander, published an
exhaustive review of the academic litera-
ture around sperm counts. Applying cold,
left-brained analysis to the subject matter,
he laid out the implications: If the decrease
is real, “people will point to the hundreds
of studies demonstrating it and presti-
gious scientists pushing it. Doubters will
be compared to global-warming denialists,
ignoring science in order to continue their
fantasy of consequence-free pollution.” If it
isn’t real, it will seem like a “classic panic of
fragile masculinity.” He concluded that in
retrospect “it will feel obvious that one side
was right all along.” At the end of several
thousand words, Alexander couldn’t make
up his mind which side was right.
Perhaps the strongest argument against
the doom and gloom is that sperm counts
alone are not a good predictor of fertility
potential, at least until one gets below a
very low threshold. Kteily, who has a vested
interest in exactly the opposite narrative,
will concede the point. “I don’t think you
106 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
can confidently say low sperm counts are
leading to the birth-rate decline,” he says,
ticking off a number of contributing factors.
“We’re choosing to lead more individualistic
lives; chemicals are affecting our ability to
reproduce; it’s more expensive than ever to
have children.”
Kteily thinks the trend lines are worri-
some enough to justify buying a backup
plan. Besides, maybe Legacy can one day
transcend its current offerings. Sperm
is understood as a biomarker for over-
all health, and the semen in cryostorage
might contain valuable data. “Imagine we
could tell you, ‘Hey, you smoke. You stop
smoking, your sperm motility is going to
go up by 10 percent. And we know this
because we have 100 people like you,’ ”
Kteily figures. Still, he anticipates the criti-
cism. “Look, the worst angle you can take
on us is, like, we’re a for-profit company
trying to make science sound worse than
it is in order to make money.”
Like the other kits, Legacy has created
a convenient diagnostic—an entry
point into conception. But should that
diagnostic lead one to pursue a form of
assisted reproduction, such as intrauterine
insemination (placing healthy, “washed”
sperm in the uterus around the time of
ovulation) or intracytoplasmic sperm
injection (a form of in-vitro fertilization in
which a single spermatozoon is implanted
into an egg), one would likely have to test
all over again at a clinic. If the situation is
not so dire, improvements in diet or lifestyle
may do the trick. Legacy offers supplements,
but even Kteily calls them “the least exciting
thing we do.”
If existential sperm deterioration is
uncertain, but a testing kit can’t really
help you if it is real, where does that
leave Legacy? At first, the leader of the
sperm-kit pack, with its earlier and more
impressive rounds of fundraising, was
arguably Dadi—not Legacy. When Ro, the
telehealth giant, bought Dadi last May, it
seemed like bad news for Kteily. But when
I visited Ro’s website this spring, there
were no sperm kits to be found and the
equivalent of an under construction,
pardon our dust sign under the male-
fertility tab. By the summer, I learned, it
had shelved the product. A Ro spokes-
person told me the company had “paused
the relaunch” of its male-fertility offerings
and was devoting more of its attention to
weight-loss drugs. Was this a Ro problem?
Or did it spell trouble for the industry?
Recently, Kteily and I met at a natural-
wine bar near his West Village apartment.
He is all but singing, “Ding-dong! The witch
is dead!” “They shut it down,” he says, con-
vinced of his rival’s collapse. “They shut it
down.” He didn’t seem too worried about a
sperm-kit-pocalypse. Not only could Legacy
now consolidate control over the market,
but Dadi’s disappearance may just mean he
figured something out that Dadi hadn’t.
The core of Legacy’s business, the profit-
driver, isn’t supplements, and it isn’t test-
ing. It’s freezing. Initially, the company had
trained its marketing on fertility-curious
single men, before shifting its emphasis
to couples. The advantage of the pivot,
Kteily found, was that they were freezing
at a higher rate. The disadvantage: Couples
trying to conceive were, well, trying to con-
ceive. They tended to ask Legacy to unfreeze
the samples and prepare them for use,
which cost more time and money than he
had hoped. “So now you have, like, flurries
of emails back and forth to clinics across the
country,” Kteily says. He faced a paradox:
The more frequently customers used the
service, the less money the company made.
More useful to him were customers who
weren’t necessarily conceiving and instead
using Legacy as a kind of insurance policy.
Couples still use the product plenty,
but a more unusual coalition generates
the meaningful cash. In addition to trans-
gender customers, who bring in about a
fifth of the company’s revenue, another 20
percent comes from people with medical
conditions or who work “dangerous jobs”—
including servicemembers—who freeze
sperm as a genetic safety net. Another fifth
of the pie comes from vasectomy patients
who are preserving semen in case they
change their minds, and a reversal fails.
(Kteily says this clientele has shot up in the
aftermath of Roe’s demise, as more men are
using vasectomies as birth control.) For all
its outward emphasis on sperm calamity, in
other words, the company has found itself
capitalizing on entirely unrelated aspects of
modern life. Despite the egg-drinkers and
natalists poring over Count Down, Kteily
is following the money toward different
sperm-anxious constituencies altogether.
Still, it can’t hurt the bottom line when the
headlines move men to contemplate their
fertility. In February, a team of Harvard-
affiliated researchers published a paper,
promoted in a news release with the Onion-
esque summary: “Study Shows Higher
Sperm Counts in Men Who Lift Heavy
Objects.” Accompanying the release was a
photo of a man in a flannel shirt, holding a
yellow hard hat, standing in front of excava-
tors. Studying 377 men who sought fertility
treatment at a Boston facility between 2005
and 2019, the team found that the typical
office worker had about half the sperm of a
guy performing rigorous labor on the job.
The study was made possible by funding
from the National Institutes of Health, the
National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences—and Legacy. ■

The Realest
Pair of
Jeans
CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 4 3
knees and pockets, and a color-matched
patch whipstitched to one leg. Their entire
front is covered in 150-year-old candle-
wax spatter.
Eaton, who adopted the persona “MC
Festivus” for the occasion, hopped atop
a wooden podium wearing a stiff denim
button-down, destroyed khakis, and a
puffy conductor’s hat. For several min-
utes, he spoke about his great-great-
grandfather Luzerne Britten Eaton, a
grubstaker in Nevada. Then, in the next
breath, he said, “I’m still waiting for
the call from the Met”—meaning the
Metropolitan Museum of Art was plan-
ning a bid—“but the dude’s asleep in Paris.
What’re you gonna do?” The crowd chuck-
led. It felt a little far-fetched, but you really
never know with Eaton. Next to him, an
auctioneer dressed like a rancher wove the
microphone cord through his knuckles like
a cattle lead. It had been a long three days
at the Festivus, and one can enjoy only so
many Truly spiked seltzers before dusk.
“I never wanted to sell these, by the way,”
Eaton continued. “I only put them in the
auction for … what? Who knows what?”
His teenage daughter, seated toward the
back and filming from her iPhone, took
the bait. “Publicity!” she deadpanned.
“She’s got it!” Eaton said with a
Cheshire-cat smile. “Publicity. For the
Festivus. I did it for the freaking spirit of
the Festivus.” A few people cheered. Some-
one cracked a fresh Truly.
The bidding began at $50,000. “We all
know the pedigree on these beautiful jeans,
but let’s go over it one more time,” the
auctioneer spun. “1885–1892 one-pocket
Levi’s, 36-inch waist, 30-inch inseam …
Mine-found jeans, guys. This is a once-in-
a-lifetime opportunity. Let’s buy now.”
At $62,500, a man in a white rollneck
sweater and a Beatles haircut bailed.
Eaton whispered something in his ear,
but it made no difference. “I’m done,” the
man said, shaking his head. “I’m done.”
The auctioneer reminded him, “The Met
will call you and pay you more than that
tomorrow,” and Rollneck reconsidered. “All
right,” he said, “$65,000,” which happened
to meet the item’s reserve price.
People hooted and hollered. Eaton did a
happy dance across the front row. A triangle
chimed in the near distance.
Wearing duck camo, Buzy-Pucheu, who
recently spent five years consulting for
Alexander Wang, summoned the handler.
“Come here,” she implored, clapping her
hands impatiently. Buzy-Pucheu took one
look at the jeans and lifted her paddle:
$67,000. As she celebrated in her seat, in
the row directly behind her, Zip Stevenson,
a veteran L.A.-based clothing-store owner
whose clients include Brad Pitt and Jason
Momoa, lifted one meaty hand, revealing a
hole in the armpit of his tattered gray long-
sleeve. “I’m partnering with someone,” he
said, nodding toward Haupert.
Buzy-Pucheu soon went up to $75,000,
and Stevenson came right back—bam—
$76,000. She was stunned. “Who the—”
she asked before tossing her paddle to
give Stevenson the middle finger. “Let him
take it,” she snarled. “You fucking take it,
motherfucker.”
“Going once, going twice,” the auctioneer
said. “And we’re sold!”
“They kind of prolonged the ‘going once,
going twice’ thing. I got a little bee in my
bonnet about that,” Buzy-Pucheu told me
later. “I licked my wounds after—I did.”
Haupert laced one thin, tattooed arm
around Stevenson. His silver rings glinted
under the flashing lights. The final sale
price—including the 15 percent buyer’s
premium fee—was $87,400. He agreed to
pay 90 percent, more than $78,000. Ste-
venson pressed the jeans to his chest and
snapped a selfie.
“It’s a Festivus,” Eaton shouted. “For the
rest of us!” the crowd hollered back.
A
s eaton predicted, the sale
made the news—and caused a stir
among detractors online. Every
article published reinforced the
rare jeans’ hagiography: “Like a Pollock
canvas,” The Wall Street Journal piece
begins, “the pants legs are speckled in
wax from the candles miners employed
to light the way.” Fox Business called the
jeans “an artifact of the nation’s troubled
history,” while NPR ran a piece about the
anti-Chinese-labor interior pocket, which
included a mea culpa from Levi’s: “Across
our history, we have strived to do good in
and beyond our business and to be a posi-
tive force for equality and racial justice,” a
brand spokesperson said. “There have been
times when we’ve fallen short.” Stevenson
pinned the article to his Instagram with
some pride; he grew up listening to NPR.
Many dealers were shocked by the union of
an upstart like Haupert and an established
player like Stevenson. “You never really
know who’s holding the bag, who’s holding
the cash,” Heifetz says.
At Hollywood Trading Company, his
shop located on a stretch of blanched
Downtown Los Angeles, Stevenson tells
me he got a “smoking deal” on the jeans,
of which there “might only be ten or less
of this quality that are this old or older,” he
estimates. Of his unlikely partnership with
Haupert, he says, “Kyle had the where-
withal but not the confidence. I had the
confidence but not really the wherewithal
at the moment.” A young sales associate
with auburn ringlets, Audie Mayhue, brags
that he got to hold the jeans multiple times.
“They just have an aura to them,” he says.
“I’m not gonna lie.”
In Stevenson’s appointment-only store
at 1 p.m. on a Monday, the customers
include a very handsome bartender at
a members-only L.A. club, a commer-
cial stylist, and a 36-year-old consultant
from Tokyo named Yohei Arai who fell for
vintage in the early aughts when he “had
no money.” (Arai doesn’t speak English;
Stevenson translates where he can during
the visit.) Today, he will buy a blanket-
lined Levi’s jacket from the 1950s for
$10,000. “I think it is amazing and valu-
able that denim from nearly 100 years
ago still exists in a wearable condition,”
he later says via email. “It is a wonder-
ful experience to be able to have the ‘real
thing’ and wear it on a daily basis.” Another
of Stevenson’s regular customers, Kelly
Virchow, a 58-year-old consultant who
sold his family’s commercial-truck-repair
company in 2021 and has been buying
jeans from Stevenson for over a decade,
says he likes how the clothing reflects the
passage of time. “I think, for me, wearing
a 1960s pair of big-E redline jeans, it’s
got the patina, it’s got maybe some paint
marks on it. The little pockets are worn,” he
says. True vintage lovers tend to be obses-
sive, idealistic, and perhaps a little dam-
aged, just like the product. “It’s a passion.
It’s a sickness,” says Buzy-Pucheu. Offers
McKaughan, “Having to have something is
kind of an addiction, right?” I ask Virchow
which personality trait unites all denim
junkies, and he struggles a little. “I want to
give a really cool answer, and I don’t really
have a cool answer,” he says. “I think it just
clicks. I think it’s just, you walk in and you
go, Wow, Daddy’s home. I love this.”
At Hollywood Trading Company, the
conversation eventually turns back to
the 19th-century jeans. Despite being a
minority investor, Stevenson is calling the
shots. He plans to wait to sell, he says, on
the advice of some trusted associates. “You
can try to sell right away but only up incre-
mentally,” he explains. “If you hold on to it
for a couple years, you can kind of redefine
the value.”
Not everyone is so certain. Former RRL
j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 107
designer Rucci, who often punctuates her
posts with #BlueTruth, is a vocal critic of
the jeans. “What do you do when you’re in
a depression? You make propaganda. You
make marketing, and you get people to
believe, Wow, that’s an old jean,” she says.
“If it was that old, Levi’s would’ve bought
it. It would not have been at an auction.”
At one point, Rucci leaves me an impas-
sioned voice memo dripping with a native
New Yorker’s disdain: “The best-of-the-best
dealers all agree. This was staged. The jean’s
not that old. And these are bit players trying
to get into the spotlight.”
Eaton has a response for everything. He
denies that the auction was staged or that
the jeans are an expertly soiled reproduc-
tion. He tells me The Wall Street Journal,
which reported that the jeans had been
“found in an abandoned mineshaft in
the American West,” failed to fact-check
its reporting with him specifically. (A
spokesperson for The Wall Street Journal
said, “We stand by our reporting.”) When
I point out that the word mine-found was
featured heavily in official Festivus event
materials, Eaton ties the Ouroboros knot
tighter. “I don’t know where the jeans
were found,” he says, “because I didn’t
find them.”
Michael Harris, the antiquer who
originally discovered the jeans, declined
an interview and would say only, “We
don’t give information about the loca-
tion we find jeans.” Since talking to The
Guardian in 2015, he seems frustrated
with the way he was portrayed in the first-
person article, titled “I Mine for 100-Year-
Old Jeans.” He stopped giving interviews
“years ago,” he says.
Eaton seems similarly done with cap-
ital-I institutions and vehemently denies
inventing the interest from the Met.
“I think some people thought that I was
making it up, but I wasn’t at all,” he says.
“I have a feeling that they think there was
some sort of collusion between me, Kyle,
and Zip.” Later, Eaton conferences me
in with a client-support associate from
LiveAuctioneers, the platform that hosted
the sale, who provides a screenshot of the
evening’s bid log, which includes the win-
ning bid of $76,000 and then one more:
a bid for $80,000 that was logged sec-
onds later but ignored. The bidder’s email
domain: @metmuseum.org. A Met spokes-
person also confirmed that, though the
asleep-in-Paris bit was “absolutely incor-
rect,” the museum had been “at one point
interested in the jeans.” Eaton laments that
his friend who served as auction clerk and
failed to notice the bid “completely screwed
me out of another $10,000.”
When I ask Eaton whether he really got
paid $76,000 for a single pair of jeans, he
108 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
flushes. “Let me make it very, very clear.
Very clear. On the record,” he says. “I am not
gonna live to my full life expectancy because
of what I do every day to build my collec-
tion. I won’t live to my full life expectancy.
Do you really think I’m gonna let something
like that out of my hands without payment
in full? Not on your life. Not on your life.
Mic drop. I got paid.”
T
he jeans, meanwhile, are still
waiting for their forever home.
Despite their digs being upgraded
from a dusty old mine shaft
(maybe) to an armored bank vault in
Los Angeles, they are the same earnest,
hardworking, interiorly racist jeans they
have always been—with one significant
difference. There is now a kidney-shaped
hole in one leg. Stevenson, a professional
repairer, removed the color-matched
patch. “I know that, on average, my cus-
tomers want me to restore things back
to their most pristine condition,” he says,
noting that he tucked the patch into a back
pocket should a prospective buyer want it
reattached. “It’s an ‘eye of the beholder’
kind of a thing, I guess.”
To Eaton, this is sacrilege. When I bring
up the missing patch during my visit, he
practically swerves the van—“I can’t
believe they fucking did that! You can
print that. You can print that. I’m apo-
plectic,” he shouts. “I will tell you every-
thing you want to know about Zip and
how I feel about him: The fact he took that
fucking patch off those jeans, a collector
does not do that. A collector respects the
history in the item that they’re collecting.
It’s called ‘provenance.’ ” He says this in a
vaguely French accent.
Moments later, he puts his anger aside
to plug this year’s Festivus. “I’m gonna sell
the oldest Levi’s in the world,” he says. At
the airport, he lets me see his latest spec-
tacle, which has been chilling in a dust bag
in the trunk with two other pairs. Eaton
says these jeans, which are in remarkably
good condition, date back to 1873, the first
of the brand’s many years with an exclu-
sive patent on riveted pockets. If they’re
authentic, they would rival the oldest pair
in Levi’s own archive. Later, he tells me he
expects them to go for $250,000. I take a
closer look at the label on another elderly
pair of Levi’s—two horses trying to pull
apart a pair of jeans—and Eaton smacks
my hand away. “You never touch the label,”
he says firmly. “Never.”
The same week I visited Eaton, I got
to see the jeans in person at Inspiration
LA, an annual upscale convention hosted
by fashion editor Rin Tanaka. When
I arrived, two assistants were huddled
around a display case in Stevenson’s booth.
How exactly do you make an $87,000
pair of jeans look expensive? They first
tried suspending the pants from a simple
wooden hanger hooked onto a length of
twine. But the line sagged, which made
the seat pooch, which looked bad. A jacket
was added to hide the twine, but the whole
denim-on-denim look was giving Big
Invisible Scarecrow, which was also bad.
Eventually, someone managed to pull the
rope tight, hoisting the jeans to eye level
where discerning shoppers like Dave star
Travis Bennett and Tyler, the Creator,
could better appreciate the 150-year-old
details: the candle wax, the buckleback,
the calcified buttons.
Since buying the jeans, Haupert has
more followers, more clients, even more
selling power. (Auction platform Bidstitch
recently named him the “biggest IG seller”
of 2023.) At the Starbucks next door to
Inspiration, two young men with lami-
nated event-day passes audibly gasped
while scrolling Instagram. The navy “after-
hood” Haupert found in a plastic bag in the
attic of a bando had just sold. (For $6,000,
he later admits.)
Despite a near-constant digital pres-
ence, Haupert is hard to pin down. He
hardly answers my DMs or texts. “We
didn’t really bring the jeans here to sell,”
he finally says after we lock eyes across
the convention center for a third time.
While we chat, two of his Licorice Pizza–
looking buddies crouch nearby. Feet away,
at Stevenson’s booth, a security guard in
a too-tight suit does doughnuts around
the jeans. “If we do sell, it’s gonna be for
a lot,” he says, his yellow-blue eyes never
once leaving the few customers haunting
his racks. “It could be anywhere from half
a million to—who knows?—$2 million.”
(The very next day, Stevenson texts that
he and Haupert are now “60-40 partners.”
Haupert remains majority owner.)
Arai, Stevenson’s Japanese client, has
come to Pasadena from West Los Angeles,
where he lives with his wife and young
daughter. For hours, the family of three
carefully comb the booths of candy-colored
collegiate sweatshirts, novelty tees, and pre-
owned memorabilia in search of the perfect
item in the perfect size. Before leaving to
put their toddler down for a nap, they stop
to get a closer look at the jeans. “I am not
buying denim for investment purposes, but
I feel it is a great investment,” Arai later says
via email. “Not only do you get a return on
your money; you get to share a special
experience with many people. People who
see it will be moved.”
Up close and under the glare of double-
paned glass, the ancient pants look earnest.
American. Hardworking. They look a little
beat up. They look like jeans. ■
 g a m es

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That Would Be Cool By Matt Gaffney

6
7
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Go without
“Just as I predicted!”
Tasteless-joke response
9 Say the same things as

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 11 Barrister’s field
12 “Be right there”
20 21 22
13 Astronomical wonders
23 24 25
14 Homer’s watering hole
15 Prom garment
26 27 28 29 30 16 “At Last” singer James
17 Fashion magnate Marc who
31 32 33 34 35 36 never gets any credit?
18 Fools
37 38 39 40 41
19 Shows up for
42 43 44 45 46 47
24 Pungent fruits
29 Key hit with CTRL and ALT
48 49 50 51 33 155, one way
34 Suffix with Islam and Hyder
52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 35 Indian lentil dish
37 Put money on it
61 62 63 64 65 66
38 Ryan or Shaq
39 Economics stat
67 68 69 70 71 72
40 ___-di-dah (pretentious)
41 Anticipate

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 77 78
42 Country named for a line
79 80 81 82 43 Too lightly edited, as a film
44 Musical sequel focused on
83 84 85 86 87 88 89 Jean Valjean’s footwear?
47 Prime minister before Rabin
90 91 92 93 94 95
49 “You catch my ___?”
96 97 98 99
54 Best Picture nominee of 2023
55 When repeated, tropical islands
100 101 102 103 104 105 56 Defeat
57 2028 Olympics host
106 107 108 109 110 111 112 59 Joint with jamón serrano
60 Shrink
113 114 115 116 117 118
63 Russell in “The Diplomat”
119 120 121
64 Opposite of “sans”
65 Peaceful and centered
122 123 124 66 Part of SATB
68 Lady with a tilde
70 Musical taste
71 This is what it sounds like
when doves cry
Across 52 Chapel Hill sch. 97 How a slab of pavement 74 Bat, cat, hat, or rat, say
1 “Six Feet Under” vehicles 53 Tisch School of the ___ might introduce itself? 77 Great Plains metropolis
8 Kevin of “SNL” fame 55 See 50-Across 100 “Praising You” singer 80 Get out of jail, maybe
14 Mediterranean volcano 58 Meta property, casually 101 Bagel option 81 He can be biting
20 Cost 61 “That didn’t ___ well” 102 One way to sunbathe 84 Photo
21 93 at the pump, often 62 Thomas in pools 103 Liverpool lang. 85 Skating Nathan
22 Score more runs than 63 Easy-to-play instruments 106 Mustard amounts 86 ___ and haw
23 Put a nice waxy cover on 66 ___ horse (gift best declined) 108 New driver, usually 87 Gives off
a spider’s home? 67 ___ track (insulting song) 109 Chum 89 Emeril Lagasse’s word
25 Surviving, as a document 69 Promotional giveaway of 110 Societal listlessness 90 Having a positive impact on
26 Santa’s ride designer jackets? 113 Uninspired album tracks 91 Zelenskyy’s nation
27 Eerie sky sight 72 Valley known for vino 115 Dream of many New Yorkers 92 Eager to listen
28 Brewskis 73 “The Sixth Sense” actor in summertime; we’ve done it 93 “Wish you could unsay that”
30 Green Gables girl 75 Stadiums to this puzzle’s theme entries 94 Tablet
31 Spielbergian visitors 76 Yoko who moved upstate 119 County with Rome and Utica 98 Surgical knife
32 Pale-brown shade in spring 120 Make changes to 99 Casino employee
34 She released “30” in 2021 78 Cartoon frame 121 Album with “The Long and 103 Gives off
36 Extended family 79 African beast Winding Road” 104 Mythological weeper
37 Screen legend Lauren, 80 Mayor Adams 122 Prepare for a big day 105 Trait influencers
racking up strikes and spares? 81 Destruction 123 Vein insertions 107 Narrow opening
41 Said “guilty,” say 82 Kid of jazz 124 Stabs in the back 108 Leave without escape
42 Barkin from Queens 83 Miso and pho, e.g. 109 Attention-getting hiss
45 Destructive type 85 She hit No. 1 with “Believe” Down 111 Finland joined it in Apr.
46 Like smooth transitions 88 Learned group 1 “Steppenwolf ” novelist 112 Redding or Williams
48 Candy-___ 90 Picasso antiwar masterpiece 2 Revel (in) 114 www.bard.___
50 With 55-Across: Show with 93 All over ___ (ranting) 3 After, to Macron 116 “So ___ heard!”
20 Emmy wins 95 Attacks 4 Mortgage maneuver 117 Diarist Anaïs
51 Oakland baseball team 96 Slimy vegetable 5 Unanticipated problem 118 Letters in company names

110 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 The solutions to last issue’s puzzles appear on page 109.

 the vulture 10x10

Across
1 Like a fact in the 17 “___ City” (classic THE PERFORMANCE PUZZLE Down
1 Couple shipped 15 Sit-up muscles
“Trivia” section example of the By Malaika Handa aggressively by 18 “Birds of a feather
of IMDb “20-something 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 fans (abbr.) flock together,”
8 With 4-Down, girlies have 2 DJ Rekha genre for one
upcoming comedy adventures in 3 Agrees to do ads 19 Setting of the first
8
about a “thespian NYC” genre) for Amazon Prime, and last scenes
paradise” 20 Reddit initialism say in “Pulp Fiction”
9 10
9 Award won meaning “This is 4 See 8-Across 22 Item on the back
by “Triangle new info for me!” 5 Great Basin people of a Jeep
11 12 13 14
of Sadness” 21 ___ Arabia 6 Renovated 24 England’s capital
and “Titane” (country that 7 Slowly wash away (abbr.)
11 Comp-sci field is paying Messi 15 16 10 Designations for 25 ___ Tomé and
that informed millions of euros “No Hard Feelings” Príncipe (second-
ChatGPT to post Instas) 17 18 19 20 and “Deadpool” smallest African
12 Actor Elba 22 ___Tok (Kesha 13 “Looks great!” country)
of “Cats” song played at 21 22 14 City with an MLB
15 Main legal thousands of team and an NHL
advisers (abbr.) middle-school 23 24 25 team, but no
16 Gave a hand? dances) NBA team
23 Proof of relaxing 26
beach vacations
26 Stacey Abrams’s
27
home state
27 Che’s first name

Across
1 “Futurama” robot 22 “Futurama” THE NEW NEW YORK PUZZLE Down
1 Rum-soaked cake 9 “The Lake Isle
7 “Futurama” character who’s By Stella Zawistowski 2 “___ Cowgirls of Innisfree” poet
character who named after 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Get the Blues” 16 “V” alien
was frozen for a Messiaen 3 Speaker with 18 Color favored by
a millennium symphony a Google Assistant Velma Dinkley
10 11
10 Loath 23 Dua Lipa and 4 Hanukkah game 19 Drugstore makeup
11 “Parasite” actor Anwar Hadid, once that gets brand
12 13
___ Sun-kyun 27 Little ___ (Brit its own song 20 Clear off in winter
12 Attacks from girl group) 5 Superlative ending 21 Drives up the wall
all sides 28 Topic of choice 14 15 16 6 The White Lotus, 24 Chance to play on
13 “when will u be for David for one “Wheel of Fortune”
here?” Attenborough 17 18 7 “Sweeney Todd: 25 Lake at one end of
14 Rihanna album 30 Shohei Ohtani, The Demon the Niagara River
that features for one 19 20 21 Barber of ___ 26 Drink brewed by
“Work” 31 “If everybody Street” Dylan Sprouse
15 Not hidden at all wants you, why 22 23 24 25 26 8 Like the 29 ___ carte menu
17 Snacks with isn’t anybody Analogue Pocket
Cool Ranch and calling” Laura 27 28 29 gaming console
Flamas varieties Branigan song
19 Promos across 32 Last word 30 31
the pond of James Joyce’s
“Ulysses”
32 33
33 The E in ERA

Across
1 Horse hoof ’s sound 20 Solid ___ (“Metal THE MANHATTAN PUZZLE Down
1 Shoe that might be 9 To this day
5 “___ Dog” (Akira Gear” character) By Stella Zawistowski accessorized with 15 Tom Kazansky in
Kurosawa film) 23 Quality of a color 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Jibbitz charms “Top Gun”
10 “___ Man” or sound 2 Zachary who 17 Emerges, as an
(Alex Cox film) 24 A question of 10 11
played Shazam annoying ad
11 Stage of method 3 Gem with the 18 Answer to
development 25 See 14-Across power of water “Where are you?”
12 13
12 Shape of the 27 In the style of in “Tears of the 19 One of many in
president’s office 28 Emerges, Kingdom” Yellowstone
14 15
13 Number of crayons as an issue 4 Kevin of National Park
in a pack, often 29 Standard for “The Marvelous 20 Fitness magazine
14 With 25-Across, Rory McIlroy 16 17 18 19 Mrs. Maisel” that stopped print
actor who plays 30 PBS series 5 Give an address issues in 2021
the title role in since 1982 20 21 22 23 6 “The ___ Red 21 Christopher
“Oppenheimer” 31 “Days That ___ Line” (Jim who directed
16 “Oh noes!” in Why” (Morgan 24 25 26 Caviezel film) “Oppenheimer”
17 Wilbur of Wallen song) 7 What an old 22 ESPY, for one
literature 32 Biblical outcast 27 28 T-shirt might 23 Overused
or Babe of film become 26 River through
29 30 8 Pokémon trainer Russia and
whose journey Kazakhstan
31 32
ends in 2023

Find new puzzles daily at nymag.com/games. j u ly 17– 3 0 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 111

 THE APPROVAL MATRIX Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.
compiled by dominique pariso and chris stanton

highbr ow

( W H I T E H E A D, M A D I E V S K , D O V I A K ) ; M TA ( R A I L ) ; M O R G A N L I B R A RY (C E N D R A R S ) ; C A R A M O O R ( DA K H A B R A K H A ) ; D R A DA N C E . O R G ( DA N C E ) ; S P H E R E E N T E R TA I N M E N T ( S P H E R E ) ; PA R A M O U N T P I C T U R E S ( M I S S I O N ) ; F X ( VA M P I R E S ) ; B R AVO (C R E E K ) ; COYOT Y / F L I C K R ( P H O N E ) ; R OYA L C A R I B B E A N ( I CO N ) ; U S F W S ( P LO V E R ) ; M M G

Violent flash floods George Santos At Ryan Lee Gallery,
hit New York and Yu & Me Books will Emma Amos’s Odyssey,

P H OTO G R A P H S : G E T T Y I M AG E S ( F LO O D, VO LC A N O, S C A B ; T I A F O E , E U B A N K S, S COT T, H I L L ) ; D O M I N I C M I LTO N T R OT T / F L I C K R ( P O W D E R ) ; S P U R E K A R / F L I C K R ( D E L I V E RY ) ; A L A N L E V I N E / F L I C K R ( F RY ) ; Y U & M E B O O K S ( F I R E ) ; RYA N L E E G A L L E RY ( A M O S ) ; C L A S S I C A L T H E AT E R ( M A LVO L I O) ; P E N G U I N R A N D O M H O U S E

says he’s like
Vermont … Rosa Parks. survive its recent fire, not shown for 20 years,
thanks to donations. depicts a century of
… While a volcano family history.
erupts after intense
earthquakes near
Reykjavik …
… And the
Southwest fries Crook Manifesto,
in its blistering Colson Whitehead’s
new normal. hilarious, powerful
Classical Theater of follow-up to
Harlem’s Malvolio, an Harlem Shuffle.
unexpectedly charming
sequel to Twelfth Night. Ruth Madievsky’s
Ex–Auburn coach gripping debut
blocks top Marines Right before delivery novel, All-Night
appointment because workers were to get a Pharmacy.
he doesn’t want higher minimum wage, a
servicemembers to Manhattan judge shoved
receive paid leave for a stick in the spokes. New rail tunnels are
abortion travel. coming … by 2035.

Iowa The Blaise

Republicans Cendrars show
schedule election at the Morgan
Apparently it’s illegal Library.
to have powdery fun caucuses on
in the White House. Martin Luther
King Jr. Day.
The Fire Island
Dance Festival
returns to the beach.

Innovation in The scenic Rooftop Ukrainian folk-

tech has at Pier 17 is the best music quartet
American Horror
des picable

come down

bri lliant
Story: The Scab place to catch a DakhaBrakha storms
to cloning summer concert. the lawn of Caramoor.
will be ready soon. Twitter.

RIP Ink, the

33-year-old East
Village newsstand. Barbenheimer will Rascal noir Lowdown
either save movies or Road, by Scott Von
Travis Scott to debut lay waste to us all. Doviak, drives
his album at the lightning fast through
pyramids in Giza the summer of ’74.
because he can. U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service offers reward
for creeps who stole
piping-plover eggs
in the Rockaways.

The Borscht Belt Fest THE SPHERE.

I Sodi, now on comes to Ellenville to
Reneé Rapp won’t Bleecker Street, is celebrate Catskills
be walking at bigger and resort culture.
graduation; exits better than ever.

( S WA M P ) ; P R I M E ( E N E R GY ) ; M A X ( R A P P ) ; G O O G L E M A P S ( I N K ) ; V I N C E N T B R O W N / F L I C K R (G I Z A )
The Sex Lives of
College Girls before 2023 will be remembered
Schumer wants season four. for its swamp-ass season.
the FDA to
investigate Prime
energy drinks. A new AI Jennifer Frances Tiafoe becomes
Boomers will Lopez being used as the third Black American
stop at nothing. a digital invite for to make it to the men’s top
adults-only cruises ten in tennis …
seems disorienting …
… At least AI makes … While underdog
for a good villain Chris Eubanks reached
The world’s largest, in the new Mission: improbable heights
gaudiest cruise ship Impossible. at Wimbledon.
will test its 5,610
passengers against
the orcas in 2024.

Our beloved Ex-Housewives

Jonah Hill stands up People seem to think Staten Island
for men who think of Luann and Sonja’s
it’s okay now to vampires reality version of
manipulation as throw their phones return to TV.
having “boundaries.” Schitt’s Creek is the
at pop stars. best show on Bravo.

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112 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 7 – 3 0 , 2 0 2 3
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