Tom Colicchio climbed the gray staircase from the basement kitchen and made his way toward New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s table. Colicchio is compact and lean, and he moves with purpose. You could spot him easily enough in his white chef’s jacket with “T.C.” on the left breast, under a special-edition apron embroidered with “25” to mark a quarter century since the opening of this, his signature restaurant, Craft. The anniversary had just passed, in March. For all those years, the restaurant has been the anchor of Colicchio’s reputation—the James Beard Award winner for Best New Restaurant in 2002; three stars from The New York Times. A PBS spot on the opening of the restaurant caught the eye of producers at Bravo who were looking for a head judge for a new show called Top Chef.
Today he’s probably more famous for who he is on television and for his best-selling books than who he is in the kitchen, but he never took that as an opportunity to leave life as a working chef behind. Colicchio has opened (and closed) other restaurants across the country, including alter egos of Craft in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta, but this is the one where he’s continued to show up and cook, several nights a week.
When Colicchio reached the mayor’s table, he didn’t untie his apron. After his election as mayor, and the recent primary-election victories of many of his handpicked candidates in local races—and, sure, give him the Knicks too—Mamdani’s stock has never been higher. But this dining room was Colicchio’s domain. And here he was to congratulate Mamdani, who was seated across from his wife, Rama, on yet another victory. The city’s Rent Guidelines Board had just voted in support of the mayor’s proposal—and most well-known campaign promise—to freeze the rent on leases paid by more than a million New Yorkers. “Maybe if you’d done something similar for commercial real estate,” Colicchio joked, “I wouldn’t be closing tomorrow.”
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“These are the original bells,” Mission Dolores curator Andrew Galvan told a group of Catholic school fourth graders in smart tartan uniforms on a Friday morning in April. Galvan is an elfin man with a preference for Johnny Cash–black outfits who, after suffering a stroke last year, often uses a wheelchair. Seated beneath the bells, he flashed a mercurial grin: “They are old and tired. Just like me.”
Within earshot of the mission's bells, change has been a constant. Natural forces have compelled San Francisco to rebuild itself. Market forces have compelled it to remake itself. The city has assumed a role as a serial boomtown, a place spawned by lust for gold and sustained by lust for everything else. If you’re running from something, this is about the furthest west you can go without getting wet. But it’s also a place to run to, with big ideas, for a big job, or simply to be who you are.
And all of that history is wrapped up in the mission. “Everything in San Francisco,” Galvan says, “takes its name from this place.” Honorees awarded the key to San Francisco, he notes, were actually given a gussied-up replica of the key to the mission’s hulking front door. The history of San Francisco’s mission and the surrounding Mission District that sprouted beneath these tolling bells is the story of an American city—and, in many ways, America. The bells arrived in 1794, but the mission was founded in 1776. It is as old as the country, but it tells a different story from the one emanating from Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
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The law is a system far from perfection, but it is a system that human beings create so that they can live together in communities more peacefully and productively.
I’m worried about people being too divided in this country. I’m worried about people not listening to each other. I’m worried about their going to extremes in rudeness and lack of stability.
In Covid, groups of people came around to see if old people were getting on all right. And not just Cambridge. In St. Louis, San Diego, you name it. Americans can get together. They can and do try to help each other.
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On the western bank of the Mississippi River, about an hour-and-half drive north from Baton Rouge, sits Vidalia, Louisiana. A city of around 18,000, it’s the site of the “Sandbar Fight” of 1827 that nearly killed folk hero James Bowie and, more recently (and peacefully), the annual Jim Bowie Festival and Barbecue Throwdown.
But for denim obsessives, Vidalia will always be synonymous with the dashed hope of reviving large-scale selvedge production on U.S. soil. In 2019, armed with millions of dollars in loans, a former Fruit of the Loom distribution center turned factory, and a fleet of hallowed looms, Vidalia Mills offered the promise of renewed jobs, redeemed pride, and the reshoring of a totemic American product. But by Thanksgiving of 2024, Vidalia’s employees had been sent home, its looms silent and its creditors circling.
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"Before I came to Al-Anon, I was a cook. I mean, I’m still a cook, I’m just a different kind of cook, I guess."
The key to understanding The Bear’s series finale, which aired last week, is the beginning of a seven-minute monologue from its season 1 bow, "Braciole." It’s when Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), hair disheveled, stops and stutters his way through the scars he's never dared to describe aloud. How he would cook with his brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), how they were best friends, and how that changed when Mikey started using drugs. Mikey had a restaurant, but he stopped letting Carmy inside. Cut him off cold. So the aching little brother, feeling rejected and lame and shitty, spends years leveling himself up into a world-class chef, even though it nearly kills him. But it's Mikey who dies—he kills himself—sabotaging Carmy's grand plan: "I just wanted him to be like, 'Good job!'"
Since then, The Bear has fired its last order.
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People think gooners are all creeps or pervs. But most of us are just normal people with everyday jobs and everyday lives, from working class to upper class. There are married people who goon as couples and people like me who are virgins. Recently I’ve seen a lot more goonnettes, women who goon. It’s a really diverse community of regular people pursuing sexual pleasure and satisfaction and exploring our fantasies.
My parents used to ask me about dating and marriage, but now they just don’t. Society pressures people to get married and have kids, but I wish people realized they can have another type of sex life. We don’t shame people who have sex multiple times a day while in a relationship. We think that’s a really good thing. So why do we shame single people who have the same sex drive but turn to porn and sex toys?
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