Would You Buy Registered Sex Offender Anthony Weiner's Beautiful Kitchen Countertops?

Life works in mysterious ways, doling out second chances to those who don’t often deserve them. Your childhood bully who made middle school a living hell is probably working at J.P. Morgan right now. A boss you did not like managed to fall upwards. And Anthony Weiner, a former Congressman who is now a registered sex offender for sending pictures of his actual weiner to teenagers, is enjoying a second life as a kitchen countertop impresario. Imagine that.

Truthfully, I’ve spent little time thinking about Anthony Weiner but a recent piece in the New Yorker informed me that he has made a new, quiet life for himself shilling countertops made of glass and concrete for a company called IceStone, run by former Tweezerman founder Dal LaMagna. LaMagna visited Weiner in prison and was clearly inspired enough by their time together that. he simply offered the former Congressman a job running his kitchen countertop company. Now, Weiner oversees IceStone, which purportedly has a history of working with the “downtrodden,” including formerly incarcerated people, and is enjoying a second life as a man who pushes concrete countertops embedded with recycled glass.

It would be easy to make fun of Weiner for this career pivot, if only because it is so strange, but when I hastened to the IceStone website to see if the shit was as ugly as I thought it might be, I was pleasantly surprised. I’m in no position to be ordering custom countertops for an apartment that I rent, but a lot of these are nice. Setting aside this nightmarish countertop which features the blue and orange of the New York Mets, everything else on the IceStone website seems playful, fun, and in certain lights, chic?

This colorway, called “Sky Pearl,” looks like quartz but is actually concrete and glass, and would be a lovely addition to a kitchen island or even a small peninsula, should your home renovation dreams lead you down that path. I’d also take this in a bathroom—the “mother of pearl” bits in the off-white concrete would look very striking against a bathroom wall painted black. Slap a soaking tub in the corner by the double windows and Bob’s your uncle!

If neutrals are not your vibe, consider “Forest Fern,” a green-flecked material meant to evoke the verdant forests of, uh, I guess, ferns? Not sure what the inspiration is, but I’d take this on a kitchen countertop, even though it looks a little bit like what one might see in a tract house. I don’t mind it! There’s a whiff of new money in a countertop that looks like TV static, and somehow, there’s more warmth in this than a waterfall countertop dripping in Cararra. Maybe I’ve watched too much HGTV, or am simply enamored by the idea of pointing to the massive counter space in my fictional home and telling my many guests that it is from Anthony Weiner’s kitchen counter company before tucking into the chicken parmigiana I’ve spent hours preparing.

All these countertop colorways look like terrazzo, which, technically, they are. And yet, they are not marketed as such, which is confusing, because terrazzo is trendy! Perhaps the marketing copy for Q1 can reflect this. Time for a rebrand, Mr. Weiner, just as you rebranded yourself.