| In today’s newsletter, Rachel Monroe reports on the right-wing citizen journalists who spread anti-immigrant news. But, first, Adam Iscoe with an update on why getting into New York’s hottest restaurants might be about to get easier. Plus: • Trump’s Cabinet picks go to Washington
• Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan impersonation
• Brady Corbet’s brutalist epic | | | |
| Adam Iscoe
New Yorker contributor Lately, it’s felt more impossible than ever to snag a tough restaurant reservation in big cities like New York. One reason is because college kids are making seventy thousand dollars a year using custom-programmed bots—and even their parents’ Amex black cards—to scoop up tables and resell them online. Yesterday, Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, signed a first-in-the-nation bill intended to stop the practice. “We’re putting an end to the predatory black market for restaurant reservations,” she said. The legislation’s author, Assemblymember Alex Bores, whose district includes midtown, told me that my article from earlier this year on bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers inspired the bill. (The owners of many high-end New York restaurants—and American Express, which owns Resy—later pushed for it.) “Consumers weren’t benefitting,” Bores told me, “unless you paid an arm and a leg.” He added, “Good riddance!” When I asked the reservation guru Ben Leventhal—the co-founder of Resy, who now runs a different hospitality startup called Blackbird—what he thought about the new law, he told me, “It certainly can’t hurt.” But he also cautioned, “Laws don’t stop black markets from operating; they just make it harder for them.” Jonas Frey, who runs Appointment Trader, an online marketplace for people to buy and sell reservations, wasn’t pleased by the news: “I’ve received better Christmas gifts in my life.” Frey went on, “Should they force us to shut down in New York, nothing will change except that reservations will be traded by other people on illegal platforms.” Frey said he’ll continue listing reservations online until the law takes effect. Tonight, on his Web site, a bid for a table for two at Carbone goes for about two hundred and fifty dollars. To dine last minute at the Polo Bar, one of New York’s toughest reservations, someone could offer up more than six hundred dollars and pray. Or, better yet, try their luck with a reservationist on the phone. | | | |
Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today.  Photograph by Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call / Getty What does parading nominees around Capitol Hill before their confirmation hearings actually accomplish? Antonia Hitchens reports » | | | |
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| P.S. Arlene Croce, the longtime New Yorker dance critic, who died this week at the age of ninety, once defined the “task of the choreographer” as creating a link from past to future, or, as she put it, “imagining a nonexistent past, resummoning the energies of previous choreographers whose dances have decayed or disappeared from memory.” 🩰 | | | |
Ian Crouch contributed to this edition. | | | |
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