On a recent visit to Vape Town, a purveyor of e-cigarettes in Manhattan’s West Village, I find a culture in flux. The store is equal parts Game of Thrones and The Matrix. One display features slender white boxes, so minimally branded they could easily house an eco-chic skin-care elixir; another is lined with squat little apothecary bottles boasting lurid labels of demonic warlords and filled with tinctures of liquid nicotine in flavors like Unicorn Milk and Ménage à Trois.

If I were just seeking any old vape shop, there’d be no need to leave my Brooklyn neighborhood. Rare is the five-borough block where one can’t be found these days. But Vape Town distinguishes itself as the site of New York City’s first Juul Workbench. The Genius Bar–like destination promises to repair your Juul, the best-selling vape on the market—and it’s currently unattended. Deep into a reconnaissance mission, I gesture toward the ponytailed clerk at the cash register for service. Vape in one hand, iPhone blaring YouTube videos in the other, he shrugs; not his problem.

Created by a pair of Stanford design students, the Juul is an e-cigarette that looks a lot like a USB drive—and not much like many other nicotine vapes, which tend to be robot-ic simulacra of a cigarette, or outlandishly steampunk “tiny spaceships”—how fashion writer Anna Gray, an enthusiastic Juuler, describes them to me. (Leonardo DiCaprio, Holly-wood’s most notorious vaper, has been known to wield the latter at awards shows.)

I’ve become aware of low-key Juuling incidents in my own life ever since I watched Dave Chappelle’s 2017 Netflix special, Equanimity, in which the comedian intermittently puffs on one throughout his set. At a recent Brooklyn apartment-warming, the type of party at which lighting a cigarette might be an eviction-level offense, a journalist I admire casually brandished her Juul, taking drags of crème brûlée–flavored e-liquid as we discussed the #MeToo movement.

The writer Nadja Spiegelman has been Juuling—and not smoking—for a year now, she tells me, and even carries a second device for curious friends who want to bum hits. This is part of the appeal of the Juul and similar gadgets, I quickly learn. Designed to heat up flavored nicotine to create an inhalable aerosol, they produce neither the smoke nor the tar that a cigarette does when tobacco is burned. Vapes can also be helpful for weaning yourself off a more insidious smoking habit, as most e-liquids come in different strengths, allowing users to titrate down. (While Juul Labs, the company behind the Juul, is working on offering lower concentrations, its nicotine pods are currently available only as 5 percent solutions—roughly equivalent to one pack of cigarettes). But adults are drawn to the Juul for many of the same reasons as teenagers, who have started sneaking them into classrooms, sparking a national debate. It’s sleek, techie, tidy, and can be discreetly used in places where smoking is banned. The concern among parents and legislators is that it could also hook a new generation on nicotine, providing a gateway back to cigarettes and mucking up teen-smoking rates, which have been on the decline since the nineties.