New York Magazine March 28-April 10, 2022

1 New York’s latest issue told the story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through the eyes of 30 young people living through the war (“Sixteen Days in Ukraine,” March 14–27). Author Edwin Hayward called the oral history “an incredible read. A vivid reminder that the people caught up in the invasion of Ukraine had lives that were just like everyone else’s—and then they didn’t.” This American Life’s Ben Calhoun found the package “devastating and illuminating, and unique within the coverage of the war. My thoughts are with those who shared their stories here, and my admiration to those who elevated their voices with this.” Sbunker co-founder Agon Maliqi had “been reading this stream of captivating testimonials for almost an hour and … damn! You’ll be hard pressed to find any…

LIVE LONG ENOUGH in a pandemic and you will see the entire narrative landscape shift, even flip, sometimes more than once. As recently as a month ago, Americans of a certain cast of mind could have still looked to China—and indeed all of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania—with some plausible pandemic envy. Those early lockdowns in Wuhan were brutal, yes; some of the surveillance testing, contact tracing, and quarantine measures imposed in places like South Korea and Singapore were very restrictive, true; closed borders and reentry policies in Australia and New Zealand went further than those of any country in Europe or the Americas; and while the Sinovac vaccines weren’t as effective as those made by Moderna or Pfizer, the success of true “zero COVID” policies through the region meant…

THE KITCHEN at Dhamaka—the Indian establishment at Essex Crossing with a monthlong waiting list—is about the size of a large storage container. At tightly packed stations, cooks work, if not back-to-back, then close enough to pass ingredients without taking a step. To make the pulao, a rice dish, chef de cuisine Eric Valdez uses a portable butane burner, which takes up less space than a stove. “I’ve camped, I’ve cooked with this before,” says Valdez. “But in a professional kitchen? This is my first time.” Dhamaka, which opened in February 2021, is known for its unadulterated representation of regional Indian dishes less familiar to diners abroad: Gujarati stuffed peppers with peanuts and chickpea-flour masala; a pig’s-head salad from the country’s northeast. It’s become a destination to members of the South Asian…

THESE DAYS, PETE BUTTIGIEG is concerned about the future of democracy. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the last time fascism was fashionable in certain corners of this country’s political class, one of the things they said for Mussolini is he made the trains run on time—it was a transportation example,” he tells me in his spacious office overlooking the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. “Which by the way, importantly, was not actually true,” he is quick to add, his eyes suddenly widening. He brings up China and the narrative of “their order versus our chaos,” which the Chinese bolster with enormous infrastructure investments. “Part of what motivates me in this work is that the workaday things that we’re focused on, it’s right back to some really profound issues we’re…

WHEN WESTERN GOVERNMENTS imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, seeking to sever Vladimir Putin’s banks and billionaires from global capital, Sam Bankman-Fried knew his company would have to comply. The 30-year-old, who is a billionaire 20 times over, runs FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s incorporated in Antigua, headquartered in the Bahamas, and regulated in the U.S. Crypto itself may be a borderless, supranational abstraction, but the companies that have sprung up around it are domiciled in places with laws, and they don’t get to pick and choose which ones to obey. But after Bankman-Fried responded to the new rules, he went a step further. The American decided to block all Russian banks—even unsanctioned ones—from FTX, the better to ensure that the company’s platforms couldn’t…

HENRY WILLIAMS was 7 in 2008, and what he remembers about 2008 is that his dad lost his job. Henry’s suburban childhood was comfortable, but even so, it was shadowed by an awareness of precarity. For a time when Henry was growing up, an aunt in her 20s lived with his family while she was between jobs. The aunt had gotten an M.F.A. in film. In the years to come, an M.F.A. in film would seem like a bad plan to Henry. When Henry Williams arrived at college, he was a STEM guy: Computers were what you did to be practical. Eventually, he imagined, he might get a Ph.D. in physics. But his undergraduate career at Columbia was still young when other events intervened. Freshman year, he and a friend started…