And then, in late 2018, the Standard Hotel in New York’s Meatpacking District announced that it had hired DiSpirito to run the kitchen at its revamped Grill — not as a consulting chef who conceives a menu and leaves his crew to work out the details, but as a fully vested-and-toqued executive chef. Reviews ranged from lukewarm to spirited: “Rocco’s latest gig turns out, somewhat astonishingly,” New York’s Adam Platt wrote, “to be the opposite of a train wreck.”
But just two weeks ago, the Standard Grill announced that the chef was out after less than a year on the job, with a representative telling Page Six that DiSpirito and the Standard were “parting ways mutually and amicably.” A story published in Food & Wine days after that did not shed light on the split, but its final graf teased that it’s not the end of the comeback: “DiSpirito isn’t walking away from the industry,” Kat Kinsman wrote. “Not this time.”
Silverman puts it succinctly, “The myth of Icarus is very central to Rocco’s journey.” So as the restaurant industry, ever-hungry for gossip, chews over DiSpirito’s latest story of nearing the sun and plummeting to earth, the question seems more relevant than ever: Just what did The Restaurant do to Rocco DiSpirito?
As a kid, I didn’t think Ken’s crotch was funny; I found it frustrating. Every ostensibly male doll I came across, and growing up with four younger sisters, there were a lot, I pantsed in the hope of an eyeful of plastic dick. As a kid growing up in the ’80s who very much wanted to look at penises—any penis, even a fake plastic penis would do—it was a rough time. Dicks were even rarer commodities in movies and especially on TV than they are today. It was especially maddening because there were no shortage of boobs to ogle, if only I had wanted to.
A researcher walks into a lab—and no, this isn’t the beginning of a joke in which you realize by the end that the researcher is not a man, but a woman. Remember the one about the father and son who get in a car accident? The one where the father is killed? When the boy is rushed to the hospital for surgery, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate; this is my son.” This stumps people simply because they can’t imagine a female surgeon. I guess this isn’t a joke exactly, but a riddle that gets at our cultural stereotypes about gender.
Another answer to the riddle: people don’t think about the possibility of, say, two dads.
As one grows older and reaches one’s sixties and seventies, the world grows smaller and the air seems to thin, reminding one that mortality hovers. Although all of us sustain losses—of loved ones, friends and acquaintances—at some point in our lives, it is around this time that they begin to accrete, and at an accelerating rate. To be sure, all losses leave holes in the fabric of life, but there are some that suggest, more than others, the passing of an entire realm of discourse, a frame of reference that no longer holds. The one uppermost in my mind today is the end of a distinct period in American letters, when literary culture held sway in the surrounding society, commanding respect and bestowing prestige. It was a world peopled by impressive and varied figures such as Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy, and, in its impassioned involvement with the life of the mind, made my contemporaries dream of gaining admission to it. That sense of an ending comes with a melancholic recognition that everything, including what once seemed to be a vibrant and entrenched style of intellectual engagement, is fleeting.
Nominally an environmental and social history of the Galápagos Islands, Prof. Elizabeth Hennessy lays bare the many intertwined issues that confront us as we attempt conservation efforts in complex situations, while faced with a sweeping ecological crisis.
The tortoises of the Galápagos are "keystone species and ecosystem engineers," and since sailors first began using the islands in 1535, they have been the most obvious barometer of the effect of people on an ecosystem. (Hennessy notes grimly that "three of the fifteen species" that originally populated the islands "exist only as historical records.")
Cahalan’s condition is what in medicine is called a “great pretender”: a disorder that mimics the symptoms of various disorders, confounding doctors and leading them astray. “The Great Pretender” also happens to be the title of Cahalan’s new book, which comes out on Tuesday.
It, too, is a medical detective story, only this time at the heart of the mystery is not a patient or a disease but a member of the profession: David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist and the author of “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” a landmark 1973 study that, by questioning psychiatrists’ ability to diagnose mental illness, plunged the field into a crisis from which it has still not fully recovered.