New York Magazine September 2015

1 In the last issue, Lane Brown interviewed the director Quentin Tarantino (“In Conversation: Quentin Tarantino,” August 24–September 6). The story gave readers plenty to pick apart. "It's awesome that someone like Tarantino—who you'd assume would only like old niche films and bizarre B-level Tokyo movies (he does like them)—thinks movies like The Fighter and American Hustle are great and watches a show like How I Met Your Mother," wrote commenter Hendo1sm. "It's a good reminder for people on their cultural high horses to be open to everything." Salon's Anna Silman homed in on Tarantino's television habits as well. “We hope those rumors about Tarantino doing a TV show are true,” she wrote. "Because we would love to see how this combo of influences plays out in his hands. A…

WHEN POPE FRANCIS makes his first trip to the United States this month, he will act on a grand stage much as previous popes have done. There will be a private meeting with the president and public Masses in Washington, D.C.; New York; and Philadelphia. He will address the United Nations. Two aspects of his trip, though, will be unprecedented: He will be the first pope to address Congress, and, equally significant, he will visit homeless people in D.C., underprivileged third-graders in East Harlem, and prisoners in a Philadelphia correctional facility, where he will minister to 100 inmates and their families. Counterbalancing his meetings with world leaders is a classic Francis move and a potent embodiment of his global agenda. In the two and a half years since his election,…

MR. YOUTUBE and Chrybaby Cozie met in 2005 at a basketball game in Harlem. As an announcer chanted "Get the light feet going, get the light," a dance genre—arguably the first to come from our streets since break-dancing—was born. "It was a dance of the community," one early adopter, SpaceMan King of Spank FantasticBoyz, says today. Whereas break-dancing is about getting down on the floor, litefeet is all jumps and fast floaty footwork performed to dance music and chants. (See the basics at right.) Its most visible promoter has been Goofy, leader of the WaffleNYC crew, who turned litefeet into "It's Showtime!" on the subway. Joyful to some commuters, irritating to others, it now gets performers arrested. But the creators have moved on: Goofy has been dancing in ads in…

MOVING IN NEW YORK means at least one morning spent sitting around at home in anticipation of the Time Warner guy. This is what Mary Karr is doing on a Wednesday in late August. Two days ago, the 60-year-old memoirist moved into a one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. Already, impressively, there are no boxes to be seen; she credits this feat of unpacking to a friend. ("I was sitting here with my thumb up my ass, and she just murdered it.") The circumstances demanded speed. In a few days, Karr will be leaving for Syracuse, where she is a literature professor, and from there she heads off on tour to promote her new book, The Art of Memoir. The tour will eventually bring her back to town, and she…

HERE ON PLANET EARTH, things could be going better. The rise in atmospheric temperatures from greenhouse gases poses the most dire threat to humanity, measured on a scale of potential suffering, since Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany launched near-simultaneous wars of conquest. And the problem has turned out to be much harder to solve. It’s not the money. The cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels, measured as a share of the economy, may amount to a fraction of the cost of defeating the Axis powers. Rather, it is the politics that have proved so fiendish. Fighting a war is relatively straightforward: You spend all the money you can to build a giant military and send it off to do battle. Climate change is a problem that politics is almost…

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL FEMALE writer and director in Hollywood lives in a pretty stone house straight out of one of her own films. It's surrounded by lavender and olive trees and filled with comfortable chairs, well-loved books, and vases of fresh flowers. Nancy Meyers's success is striking not just because she is a rare woman director, but because she has produced a stream of hits about a subject Hollywood says no one is interested in: women in late middle age, discussing how they feel. In Meyers's new movie, The Intern, out September 25, the protagonist is younger (played by Anne Hathaway) and her foil is older (Robert De Niro), and it's not a love story. But it is as radical in its insistent focus on the female experience as ever.…