The Lost Art of Date Night |
Something was off the other night as my wife and I sat in the corner banquette at Four Twenty Five on Park Avenue, just a few streets shy of the Upper East Side. As we ate the last of the season's tomatoes and admired the army of light fixtures dangling from the high ceiling of the sixty-second restaurant opened by chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, I asked Emily if she knew why it was different. She looked around at a dining room packed with men out on dates with much younger women, and then she joked it was because I appeared too young to be there, and she—seven years younger than me—was too old. But that wasn't it, I told her. As I watched our food make its way from the kitchen to our table, I nervously checked my phone again. The deal with our dinners is that we try our best to block everything out—not look at our phones or talk too much about work. A dinner date is supposed to be just us and nobody else. I was breaking the rules because somebody new had come into the picture. No, it wasn't an affair, nor did we become one of those Brooklyn couples that turned into a throuple. We became one of those Brooklyn couples that had a baby. |
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Kamala Harris Never Had a Chance |
Donald Trump's victory lays bare the troubling-to-the-max truth that Vice President Kamala Harris never had a realistic shot to become the next president, that millions upon millions of Americans had predetermined to vote, at all costs, on behalf of white power/supremacy. That it mattered little-to-not-one-motherfucking-iota how much the vice president's backstory affirmed the so-called American dream, or how excellent or qualified or experienced she was, or the fact that she has a clean criminal record and no bankruptcies. Her landslide loss made plain the truth that there was no policy she could propose to persuade a majority of white people, that it didn't matter how much she preached about unity and peace and hope, that it mattered none the number of times she flashed her bright smile or how charismatic she was on SNL, that I was naive as fuck to think any of that would have ever been enough. Trump's decisive win proves that most white folks, and those who covet proximity to them (the worst white supremacists are the ones who aren't white, says my former colleague Dr. Shanee Wallace), were in fact single-issue voters whose single issue was ratifying a great myth of whiteness: The worst white man is more worthy than the best of anybody else. |
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How to Buy Genuinely Great Dress Shoes for Less Than $400 |
Like most handmade shoes from Northampton, England, Crocket & Jones' footwear is beautiful and will last you a lifetime. I have visited the company's factory, and it's exactly what you expect from a 145-year-old English shoemaker: hulking and grand in a Dickensian way; scented by rich leathers and suedes, strong breakfast tea, and motor oil; staffed by highly skilled people that have plied their trade since they were teenagers. But the shoes start at around $650 and go up to almost $1,500. For most people that price is hard to even comprehend, let alone justify. So why does luxury footwear cost so much? And is there a way to find high quality without breaking the bank? |
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The 25 Best Clint Eastwood Movies, Ranked |
At 94, Clint Eastwood is still working with the energy of a man half his age. His latest movie, Juror #2, is a tense legal thriller starring Nicholas Hoult as a jury member wrestling with an impossible moral dilemma. And while the screen legend doesn't appear in front of the camera in the film, it would make a fitting bookend to a seven-decade career that began with an uncredited walk-on part in 1955's inauspiciously-titled cheapie, Revenge of the Creature. In 1959, Eastwood signed on to become a regular cast member on the hit TV series Rawhide, earning $700 a week. From there, it was off to Spain, where he would topline a trilogy of iconic Italian spaghetti westerns that would make him an international superstar. You can probably take it from there. Through it all, Eastwood has stuck to his guns while forging a singular path in Hollywood on both sides of the camera (long before that sort of thing was common). And he's racked up four Academy Awards in the process. With so many movies on his resume, coming up with a list of his twenty-five best is hardly an easy assignment. But we love a challenge. Which is why we went back and programmed our own living-room Clint-a-palooza and started making some tough choices. See if you agree with our ranking of the screen legend's twenty-five best movies, ranked from worst (but still really good) to best. |
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With the Election of Donald Trump, Our Fellow Citizens Are About to Get Exactly What They Want | There will be no asterisk this time around. Donald J. Trump is the president-elect of the United States. The asterisk came at the suggestion of my wife. In 2016, I was struggling with a way to describe a president whose ascent came via what I believed to be dubious means. Four years of typing some elaborate and derisive descriptive seemed like a dreadful prospect. So when my wife suggested the asterisk, it seemed so brilliant in its simplicity, and so popular once it appeared, that it was clear that it had been a magnificent choice. Not this time. The asterisk is not coming back. Donald J. Trump is the chosen president-elect of the United States in every possible way you can be, a winner in the popular vote and a winner in that marble mausoleum called the Electoral College. The asterisk is not coming back, because this time I am absolutely sure that a majority of my fellow citizens will get exactly what they want. They will get pardons for the January 6 insurrectionists and an end to any federal prosecution of the incoming president, now and forever. They will get attacks on the free press and on political dissent that they have been slavering for. They will get validation for their rage, and an outlet for their promised vengeance, beyond their wildest fantasies. They will get the chaos for which they voted, and which they apparently fervently desire. And there is absolutely nothing that God, man, or the Constitution can do about it, because we did it to ourselves. |
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The Night R.E.M.'s Drummer Almost Died Onstage |
The Perth Entertainment Centre, January 13, 1995. The first moments of the first night of the world tour. When the arena lights flicked off, a vast roar filled the blackness. Eight thousand Australians standing up and going waaaaaaaahhhh! The moment lingered and expanded on itself. So much at hand, so much at stake. Onstage, they could feel a solid wall of noise coming at them, the power humming in the amps. The musicians slipped into their places, instruments in hand, the electricity in their fingertips. This moment they'd first anticipated in the spring of 1993, that they'd hoped for and dreaded, that they'd dreamed of, that they'd argued about, that they'd been planning and preparing for, was right here, right now. Peter Buck, his left hand holding the neck of his guitar, took a breath, then raked a pick over the strings, sending a loud buzzing chord into the air. Then another chord, tripping a blast of drums and a bolt of clear light revealing five musicians and R.E.M.'s lead singer, Michael Stipe, shouting a single word into his microphone. |
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