In February 2002, when the body of the man I murdered washed up on a Brooklyn beach, I called my mom and told her to come see me. I was locked up on Rikers, New York City’s island of jails where people await the resolution of their criminal cases. I had a few—one for selling drugs, one for packing a gun, and another for driving drunk—and had taken plea deals for all three. At that point, I was waiting to be bused upstate to serve a few years in prison. I was twenty-four, an arch criminal. Back then, Mom was a real estate broker, but she had always been street smart.
When Mom visited, we sat in a packed room that could’ve been mistaken for a cafeteria if half of us weren’t wearing gray jumpsuits. She looked at me with concern and disgust. Before I started talking, Mom placed her index finger over her lips. She had an instinct for secrecy. She waved me forward, and I leaned over the table and whispered in her ear that I would probably be indicted for the body on the beach.
Watch who I talked to in here, she told me, and watch what I said over the phone. She also told me something I needed to hear in that moment. Everything would be okay.
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It has achieved epidemic status, it is damaging an information ecosystem whose health bar is already red and flashing, and it is working my last goddamn nerve. In recent weeks, inexplicably much more than ever, social-media feeds have been awash in screenshots of demented Donald Trump social-media screeds that are not real, and users are sharing them freely without taking a moment to verify them. In many cases, these posts are obviously not real, and in every case they’re just about at the same level of dementedness as the actual screeds he’s posting at an ever more furious pace, so who even knows why it’s happening?
The good news is that it is very easy to spot a fake Donald Trump social-media post, and taking that one extra second to eyeball the one in your feed before you disseminate it further is one tiny thing you can do to help save our democracy from speeding off a cliff. Fake presidential posts are toxic to our culture, like chlorofluorocarbons were to the ozone layer before we smartened up and banned that shit, and it is incumbent upon each of us to stem the flow of misinformation. I have been prepared to die on this hill for a minute; now I am just about ready to kill on it.
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When I first met Leonard Logsdail, I was deep in the costume design beat, writing about the often under-appreciated world of storytelling through clothes. Everyone I spoke with was top of their craft, costuming for shows like Succession, or working as longtime collaborators of Martin Scorsese. And everyone I met had one go-to guy for suits: Leonard Logsdail.
Being the suiting wonk that I am, my interest was piqued, but the more I learned about Leonard, the more intimidated I became. Calling Leonard the go-to guy for the best costume designers in the business was, as it turned out, an understatement. Leonard, I would learn, is the go-to tailor for some of the world’s best dressed men. When I had the chance to talk to him, I was still relatively young in the menswear world, and he would be the first Savile Row tailor I met. I was a mess with nerves. But as soon as we got on the phone, I was disarmed. He was warm, funny, down to earth. Confident and assured in his work, to be sure, but without the arrogance or insular disposition I expected of someone with his reputation.
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It was about 4 p.m. on a Tuesday or a Thursday. I can’t remember exactly when, only what I felt: drained. I hadn’t just hit the proverbial afternoon wall—I was slammed against it, pancaked by a car. If you drove in reverse, I would fold out like a paper accordion. Green tea and expensive smoothies didn’t feel up to snuff, and the thought of a third cup of mocha from the break room coffee machine sounded unappetizing.
Without giving it any real thought, I wandered to our office bar—a perk of working for a lifestyle magazine—and plundered the minifridge. I assumed I would find a chilled Diet Coke left behind from our many end-of-week happy hours. That’s when I saw it: a can of cold beer. Could I really drink a beer at work? I asked myself. It felt absurd. But then, my eyes fixed on what was printed on the side: “0.0% alcohol.”
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Making a Maine lobster roll is a simple thing. Heat up the grill. Melt some butter in a split-top bun. Pack in a quarter pound of claw meat, a slap of mayo, and warm lemon butter, and mix in a proprietary seafood seasoning. In 2010, this was my routine. I worked at the original Luke’s Lobster location in New York City’s East Village. The shop was the size of a closet. Customers hung out at the counter. Questlove tipped 50 bucks; James Murphy filled out a whole Lobsta Mobsta frequent-buyer card. As I blissfully hustled in that tiny restaurant, I didn’t know I was working in the heyday of authentic, chef-driven, fast-casual dining.
The initial pitch that launched Luke’s Lobster in 2009 matched the locavore times. Cofounder Luke Holden’s father, Jeff, owned Portland Shellfish. He would buy the catch off the docks in Maine and send it south to Luke. In this era, the East Village was an epicenter for this kind of fresh, high-quality meal. Momofuku’s David Chang was number three on Esquire’s list of the most influential people of the 21st century. Baohaus’s Eddie Huang was doing interviews at Bonnaroo, underscoring the rock ’n’ roll nature of the scene.
Many of these spots have been phased out. Although Luke’s maintains shops around the city, the original location shut down in 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic was the final nail in the takeout box. Restaurants closed down or pivoted to online orders and delivery to survive. Even Momofuku pared back its once relentless presence. Armed with corporate supply chains and national infrastructure, faceless yet ubiquitous “slop bowl” restaurants like Cava, Sweetgreen, and Chipotle took over lunch tables. Unlike a typical customer-facing chain like Applebees or Chili’s, slop bowl spots require you to stand in front of an assembly line, making itemized choices that culminate in an ultimately indiscernible bowl of mush.
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Jack Thorne has been thinking a lot lately about the evil that men do. It tends to start with boys, and it’s nourished by misunderstanding. The screenwriter’s new adaptation of Lord of the Flies has much to say about both.
Thorne penned last year’s groundbreaking and devastating series Adolescence, which shocked viewers with its exploration of a 13-year-old boy accused of unspeakable violence. What leads someone so young and seemingly innocent so far astray? It’s an enduringly vital question, one that also haunted the late Lord of the Flies author William Golding, whose 1954 novel focused on a group of boys marooned on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. With no surviving adults, and no rescue in sight, the boys form a crude society that all too soon succumbs to cruelty and bloodshed.
Thorne’s four-part series just debuted on Netflix, and it’s a testament to the power of Golding’s narrative that the story still has the power to rouse controversy 70 years after its debut.
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