New York magazine - October 07-20, 2024

In this issue

City Haul: Just how corrupt is the Eric Adams administration? Inside a disintegrating mayoralty.

The Accidental Day Care in My Living Room: After our sons’ nursery was suddenly closed, a temporary solution dragged
on for months.

Inside the Patriot Wing: Some of January 6’s most violent rioters are locked up together in a surreal section of the D.C. Jail.

The System: Zak Cheney-Rice - Kamala's Comedown How the Harris campaign became a grim slog.

After an exuberant summer, an autumn chill has descended on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The joyous rallies that were all over the news between mid-July, when Harris replaced Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, and the August convention, where she and Tim Walz accepted the party nomination, have quieted into more familiar spectacles. Her once-ascendant polling numbers have stalled and her campaign has become cautious, granting TV interviews mostly to a handful of local news channels in swing states. If the first month of her candidacy was an exhalation after the suffocating defeatism under Biden, the last weeks before Election Day have felt like a collective holding of breath.

6 mins

Neighborhood News: The World's Largest Plumbing Repair - New York City's principal water-supply aqueduct gets a bypass operation.

The Delaware aqueduct, 85 miles end to end, is the longest tunnel in the world. It invisibly brings about half of New York City’s water, just over 500 million gallons per day, down from the Catskills to a holding basin in Yonkers. It’s about as old as Joe Biden, and it has not been drained for repairs since he was in high school. The stretch where it crosses under the Hudson (from Newburgh to Wappinger) passes through crumbly limestone, and it has been leaking for decades, now losing up to 35 million gallons of water daily. The best solution has been, as with many aging circulatory systems, bypass surgery. Getting down there required digging a pair of holes, 900 and 700 feet deep, then boring two and a half miles across to connect them. Two billion dollars and a decade later, that new tunnel is ready to connect to the old, and that means shutting the aqueduct off for eight months. Even just draining it so work can begin is a huge job. This summer, there were practice “dewatering events,” as the Department of Environmental Protection calls them. It’s a winter project because we use less water then.

1 min

103 MINUTES WITH ...Owen Thiele

The ultimate L.A. nepo friend” sold a show about his own life.

5 mins

Life Choices: Esme Benjamin Time for Canada?

Heading into the election, a cottage industry of expatriation consultants has emerged.

5 mins

HOW MUCH LONGER CAN THE ERIC ADAMS MACHINE LAST? CITY HAUL

In mid-september, shortly after the New York City police chief resigned amid a federal criminal investigation and Mayor Eric Adams’s chief counsel quit, apparently because her client wasn’t heeding legal advice, and a couple of retired Fire Department officials were arrested on bribery charges, Ingrid Lewis-Martin disappeared from City Hall.

10+ mins

THE ACCIDENTAL DAY CARE IN MY LIVING ROOM

When our sons' Brooklyn nursery lost its license, we figured we could host the children at home until the problem was resolved. How long could it take?

10+ mins

Inside the Patriot Wing - January 6 rioters are running their jail block like a gang. They're leaving more adicalized than ever

Early in the evening of July 13 in an isolated cell block of the D.C. Jail, about two miles east of the Capitol Building, a dozen detainees charged with some of the most violent crimes committed on January 6, 2021, were participating in a thousand-burpee challenge. The group made up roughly half of the inmates held in the block, a special unit sequestered from the jail’s other prisoners and known to its residents as “the Patriot Wing.” The challenge was in honor of a former resident of the unit, a fitness evangelist, who had recently been transferred out to serve a five-year prison sentence for attacking police officers with a floor lamp, a shoe, a nightstick, and a spiked club made from a broken table leg and nails.

10+ mins

They Moved to Sutton Place

After 18 years in a Noho loft and three in a Paul Rudolph pleasure palace, Christine and John Gachot decided to try a prewar classic seven.

3 mins

A Cantonese Comeback

Cha Cha Tang can be frustrating, but it offers moments of excellence.

3 mins

Eleven Madison Park Goes Casual, Sort Of

Daniel Humm is serving truffled tofu and negroni coladas at Clemente Bar.

1 min

Boy Meets World - Actor Mark Eydelshteyn's first English-speaking role is a vape-smoking, frenzied son of a billionaire in Sean Baker's fairy tale gone wrong.

Mark eydelshteyn and I are in a car zooming down a mountain road on the first day of the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. The young actor sits in front, while I’m in the back with two of the film’s publicists. His eyes light up as the driver informs him that his seat has a massager; he can’t believe such a thing exists. A few minutes later, he exclaims, “Guys, it really works! Let’s stop in a few minutes and change seats so you can try it out.” ¶ About half an hour later, as we settle in for our conversation in a restaurant with a dramatic view of the valley below, his buoyant mood has changed somewhat. He looks at me and asks quietly, “In your eyes, who am I?” ¶ Even stranger is what he says next: “I’m nothing.”

9 mins

The City's Newest Music Festival Was a Gay Dream

All Things Go brought young queer fans in front of many of their idols (just not Chappell Roan).

5 mins

A Body of Horrors - How The Substance turned Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley into one of the year's best movie monsters.

Coralie Fargeat's outré satire about modern beauty standards is a cautionary tale and 2024's wildest psychodrama, in which Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley slowly transform into a modern Frankensteined wonder. When Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), a 50-year-old actress turned TV fitness instructor, is fired by a network executive who deems her too old, she makes a Faustian bargain, injecting herself with neon-green plasma that lets her live every other week as a sexy, spotless 20-something named Sue (Qualley). But each time Sue overstays her welcome, parts of Elisabeth's body age at punishing rates. Soon enough, she will become Monstro Elisasue, a distorted ogress who looks like Anjelica Huston in The Witches, if that movie had been 17 times more sinister.

4 mins

Too Close to the Sun

With 143, Katy Perry joins the cursed ranks of pop flameouts this year.

5 mins

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New York magazine Magazine Description:

CULTURE, POLITICS, FOOD, FASHION: A NEW YORK POINT OF VIEW. With assertive reporting and sophisticated design, New York chronicles the people and events that shape the city that shapes the world.