Innholdsfortegnelse for October 5, 2015 i New York Magazine

THERE IS A PHOTO BY Pete Souza, the White House's canny and peripatetic photographer, that surfaces from time to time online. The setting is Marine One, and it features a modest cast of five. Valerie Jarrett, dressed in a suit of blazing pink, is staring at her cell phone. Barack Obama, twisted around in his seat, is listening to a conversation between his then–body guy, Reggie Love, and Patrick Gaspard, one of his then–top advisers. Obama's former deputy press secretary, Bill Burton, is looking on too, with just the mildest hint of a grin on his face. In many ways, it's a banal shot—just another photo for the White House Instagram feed, showing the president and his aides busily attending to matters of state. Stare at it a second longer,…

YOU CAN REST ASSURED that the trio of giddy gals occupying the center table at the Tuscan Gun one recent Friday night didn't road-trip in from South Jersey just for a plate of crostini. No, they made the pilgrimage to Windsor Terrace to ogle and pose for selfies with one Gabriele Corcos, the lanky, ebullient, Italian-accented Cooking Channel chef who was hosting the meal. The Tuscan Gun, Corcos would have you know, is not a restaurant but rather, as the storefront window proclaims, OFFICINE and ALIMENTARI. This translates roughly to "workshop" and "grocery," but the establishment is closer in practice to a café-slash-supper-club-slash-brand-expansion, because these days, any self-respecting small-screen culinary personality needs a physical home base in which to test recipes and sell autographed cookbooks. Since it appeared in May…

MOSTLY NEW YORK–BASED interior designer Juan Montoya, who calls a one-bedroom near the Morgan Library home, realized he needed his own apartment in Bogotá back in the 1980s. On his return trips home to the Colombian capital, he says, "I decided to buy an apartment to be independent from the family but close enough to visit them frequently." He found a new building still under construction in the high-up Rosales neighborhood, coveted for its views. As it was still being built, he was able to halt some of the finishing touches—for instance, he asked the contractor to leave the walls without their final coat of paint, then he whitewashed them to create a raw and uneven texture. The apartment has the warmth of a traditional Colombian home with layered textiles…

FINE ARTIST TURNED furniture and interior designer Laura Kirar was at a wedding in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula with her husband, Richard Frazier, when they decided to take a drive. "We saw a smokestack in the distance, so we went to see what was there," Kirar recalls. "We found what looked like an abandoned hacienda; we climbed the stone walls and saw these beautiful ruins." The couple wandered around the property, when "suddenly there was a sun shower, and, I'm not kidding, a rainbow appeared. I said, ‘This is a sign we should live here.'" Kirar and Frazier, who live in a Williamsburg loft, now visit the 40-acre Hacienda Subin, outside of Mérida, several times a year. On Saturdays, they go into the city for the Slow Food market. "We buy…

Terry O’Neill’s new book, Two Days That Rocked the World: Elton John Live at Dodger Stadium, documents the rock superstar’s October 1975 career-peak concerts. But the photographer didn’t know at the time that John was about to enter a valley. “He used to go onstage and give absolutely everything,” says O’Neill, talking about the photograph seen here of John having just woken up in his bed aboard his private plane. “I found out that he’d tried to kill himself not long after these shows. He was spent. Those days were fab, but there was a dark side to it all.”…

THÉRÈSE RAQUIN opens October 29 at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54. “Come on, mother,” Keira Knightley jokingly says as she helps Judith Light to her feet in a quiet room at the Studio 54 theater. It’s the day before previews begin for Knightley’s Broadway debut as the title character in an adaptation of Zola’s dark romantic novel Thérèse Raquin. (Light plays Thérèse’s aunt and caretaker.) “She’s so free,” Light raves of Knightley. “She’ll interrupt rehearsal to say, ‘Wait, what are we doing here?’ It gives the rest of us permission to do that too. She’s fearless.” Knightley bursts into laughter: “Am I giving that impression?”…

99 HOMES goes into wide release on October 9. 99 Homes illustrates something about American society that’s rarely portrayed onscreen, which is how the upper class persuades lower-income people to vote against their own best interests. [Deep sigh.] Too heavy too soon? I love it. It makes me feel … how does it make me feel? Please carry on, sorry. The character you play ought to be rioting against a system that screws over lower-income people like him, but there’s this carrot on a stick offered by the rich: Don’t tear down the system, because wealth could be just around the corner. Is that what you responded to when you were asked to join this movie? Yeah, in a much less articulate way. I didn’t think I was…

THE PLAYFULLY dead-serious drama Experimenter depicts the life of Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), the Yale social scientist who, in 1961, directed his subjects ("teachers") to deliver shocks of escalating severity to a "learner" in order to gauge their level of obedience to "malevolent authority." The writer-director, Michael Almereyda, clearly sees his protagonist as a master of stagecraft as well as psychology, and he gives the movie a whiff of the circus—a gorgeous, photorealist circus, often against tinted black-and-white backdrops that push its ringmaster into the foreground. Milgram talks to us, shows us things. He puts his work in historical context. He expounds on the role of obedience in turning individuals into instruments of the state—as in Nazi Germany. The word reflective suggests a slowdown or cessation of action proper, but…

ON JULY 14, a conservative group began releasing a series of undercover videos showing officials from Planned Parenthood negotiating, in blunt and sometimes callous terms, the sale of fetal tissue for medical research. The videos set off a chain of events that culminated, strangely enough, in John Boehner's resignation as Speaker of the House of Representatives. And so a journalistic sting operation intended to expose the alleged depravity of social liberalism instead wound up exposing the fragile psyche of the American right, which remains unable to handle the realities of holding partial power in a divided government without regularly freaking out. The intermediary steps in that bizarre sequence involved a now-familiar procession of political rituals. The videos instantly catapulted Planned Parenthood to the top of conservative activists' hierarchy of intolerable…

IT IS NOT ONLY POSSIBLE, it has in fact happened that a woman who vaginally conceived a child, then vaginally delivered her, had Protective Services threaten to take the child when a maternity test showed she was not, in fact, the mother. Nor was she the mother of her second child, genetically. Or her third, whom she was still carrying throughout the dispute with her estranged boyfriend—the man who, those same tests proved, was definitively the father. Only later did Lydia Fairchild discover that the true mother of all three of her children was her twin—if twin is really the word for one human embryo more or less swallowed by another before birth. The eggs that produced those babies had been with Fairchild her whole life, but genetically they belonged…

I NEVER WANTED TO be the guy wearing a T-shirt that read ASK ME ABOUT MY NOVEL," says Garth Risk Hall-berg. One August evening in 2012, he was that guy. He'd been invited to the wedding of writer-banker Gary Sernovitz and academic Molly Pulda at the Bowery Hotel. Among his tablemates were Diana Miller, his future editor; Tom Bissell, whom he'd just reviewed in the Times; and Chris Parris-Lamb, a young literary agent whose recent success with Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding was well known to all—including the writer seated across from him. A souvenir "dictionary" defined each guest. Hallberg's entry read: "Critic-novelist certain he will win the Postmodernist Fiction Trivia Contest to be held in the men's bathroom at 11:59 tonight." At the time, the "novelist" part was…

CLUSTER Two mattress start-ups—the one-model-only Casper and high-tech Wright—join South Soho’s Sleep District. Airweave: Mattress toppers with entwined-resin fibers (498 Broome St.). Hästens: $112,000 beds with horsetail hair (75 Grand St.). Savoir Beds: Hand-tufted with hand-teased horsehair (54 Greene St.). CoCo-Mat: Metal-free with flexible rubber for pull-out couches (49 Mercer St.). Casper showroom: Three layers of latex, memory, and support foams (45 Bond St.). Wright: Five layers of viscoelastic memory foam with side vents (188 Lafayette St.). Keetsa: Ecofriendly with green-tea-embedded foam (69 Mercer St.). 2X2 Abstract side tables A little neoplasticism for the entryway. ASK A SHOP CLERK Desiree Verdejo left her law career to open one of Harlem’s first high-end cosmetics stores, Vivrant Beauty (220 Saint Nicholas Ave.). Why the switch? Over the past few years,…

MONTOYA WAS on his way to Charles de Gaulle when "a good friend called me up to say he had found ‘a jewel of an apartment.'" He agreed to stop in for a five-minute look. Despite the fact that the Rue Jacob apartment, in the Sixth Arrondissement, was "completely destroyed, and all chopped up into little rooms that didn't make sense," he was taken with its 14-foot ceilings and two "wonderful doors" that open onto a terrace. "I was able to analyze the space, make sense of it, and said, ‘I'll buy it.'" He realized it was a good idea for him to have a place in Paris, as he has so many clients in Europe, and it's a convenient stopover for trips to Sweden, where he and his partner,…

REVIVAL will be released on October 9. THERE’S ONLY ONE person on the cover of Selena Gomez's new album, but the liner notes list 37 other songwriters and producers. That includes Scandinavian production teams, Charli XCX, and the guy who got "Good for You" ready for A$AP Rocky. This is the village that it took to make the 16-track deluxe edition of the pop starlet's Revival.…

SUBMISSION: A NOVEL will be published October 20. ENGLISH TRANSLATION "It was arousing, in a way, to pick a Muslim, given the overall political situation." THE SCENE Here, the book's protagonist, François, a professor who specializes in decadent 19th-century writer J. K. Huysmans, is choosing a prostitute online in the year 2022. THE PROBLEM "The translation was finding its rhythm," says Stein. "But very near to the end of the book, there was this sentence that hadn't seemed funny to me and that I couldn't translate." He discussed the problem with his editor, Mitzi Angel, who grew up speaking French. THE FIRST, FAILED ATTEMPT "At first I wrote, ‘Given the political situation, choosing a Muslim turned me on.' But this was very un-Houellebecqian. It's too fast, the emphasis falls at…

Drake & Future’s WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE is available now. IN LATE SEPTEMBER, The Fader published Drake's first major magazine interview in a year and a half, which is how long it's been since Rolling Stone had pulled his promised cover at the last minute and instead eulogized Philip Seymour Hoffman. ("RIP to Phillip Seymour Hoffman [sic]," Drake tweeted about this perceived injustice. "All respect due. But the press is evil.") In the Fader profile, the artist formerly known as Jimmy Brooks speaks candidly about his creative process. One of the interview's most revealing moments comes when Drake explains why he likes to remix hit songs by up-and-coming artists like Migos and, more recently, Mississauga crooner Ramriddlz. "I'll hear people's stuff," Drake said, "and ... It's just, literally,…

JAY LENO’S GARAGE premieres October 7 on CNBC. JAY LENO was driving through Coldwater Canyon His brand-new BMW had a flat. He pulled over that he did not, in fact, need to take the car to the says. "He thought doing that was the coolest CNBC car-talk, stunts, and auto-investments that's home to the 65-year-old's 140 automobiles thing," the former Tonight Show host says, from "and I figured I'd want to do a car show." He eases test out a 2015 Tesla Model S P90D, and the topic Leno’s Garage. "His middle name is for Henry horse [on the Ford Mustang logo] was originally Alger: Go West, young man. I want the horse facrecently when he spotted a guy with a classic L.A. problem: to help, which mostly consisted of…

IT’S ONLY FITTING that Atlantic Records is releasing its recording of Hamilton in a variety of formats that, like the hit musical itself, rewind history. The download went on sale September 25; the CD comes out October 16. According to a tweet from Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show's author, there will also be an actual LP, that throwback medium embedding the topography of a score in warpy spirals of vinyl. The LP, should it happen, would return us nearly to the dawn of the original-cast-album era, when Decca managed to fit not quite all of Oklahoma! on six ten-inch double-sided 78-rpm platters. As much as the technology has changed since 1943, the business model for original cast recordings—call them OCRs, but not soundtracks, please—has changed even more. In the old days,…

Barry Diller Then chairman of Paramount Pictures, coming off a monster year that included Raiders of the Lost Ark and Reds. Calvin Klein Had just aired the most unforgettable TV commercial in the history of fashion: Brooke Shields, in perfectly fitted denim, cooing, "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." The underwear business lay just ahead. Sandy Gallin Already the manager of Dolly Parton, Cher, and Richard Pryor, he was a few years away from signing the biggest pop star on Earth: Michael Jackson. David Geffen Had, the previous year, started Geffen Records, signing two huge artists: Donna Summer, at the height of her "Bad Girls" disco fame, and John Lennon, just before his comeback and subsequent assassination. WHEN SHE MADE this photograph in 1981,…

IN 1981, in an incident that attracted international attention and spurred a citywide existential crisis, a 26-year-old man from Connecticut was set upon, stripped naked, and chased by a jeering, bottle-throwing crowd in Times Square at night—"shadowy figures, drug peddlers, con artists, vagrants," as the Times would later describe the area's inhabitants—into a subway station, then onto the tracks, where he died. In 2015, I'm watching the modern-day equivalent of that scenario play out, the only differences being that it's the middle of the afternoon, no one's throwing bottles, the victim is not really in mortal danger, and the crowd she's being set upon by consists of Iron Man, two Minnie Mice, Elsa from Frozen, and Elmo. I've just arrived in Times Square to investigate the seemingly lawless chaos that…

STEVE HUFFMAN was on his couch when Reddit mutinied. Huffman had co-founded the popular news-ranking site with Alexis Ohanian in 2005 and left in 2009 after selling it to Condé Nast. In the years since, he had watched from afar with a mix of pride, as the site grew into the 11th largest in the U.S.; remorse, for selling too early; and frustration, as Reddit failed to mature and was repeatedly wracked by disruptive forces. Reddit is, above all, a collection of nearly 10,000 bulletin boards called sub-Reddits, which range from the general, like Politics and Technology and Food, to the more particular, like one called Whalebait, where people post snapshots of everyone's favorite cetacean. Users can vote posts up or down, and through crowd curation the most favored items…

1 A Neon Loft by the Beach WHEN NEW YORK WINTERS BECOME UNBEARABLE, THIS UPPER EAST SIDE COUPLE FLEES TO SANTA MONICA. WHEN INTERIOR DECORATOR Jessica Ayromloo's clients, a Manhattan couple with a duplex on the Upper East Side, first visited this Santa Monica loft one block from the beach, it was hard for them to get beyond the stuffy décor. "There were overbearing, floor-to-ceiling drapes everywhere. And so much beige," Ayromloo says. The owners, who come to L.A. about once every six weeks or so, were going for an industrial, youthful vibe. So Ayromloo commissioned local artists to make installations out of perforated metal and a kitchen island of reclaimed wood. "Because we hired people in the neighborhood, the owners were actually able to meet every person behind their…

BEING MY OWN CLIENT was very strange," New York architect Luca Andrisani says. "So I really went crazy with the concept—because I was able to." That concept, for his loftlike North Miami Beach getaway, which he tries to visit monthly, was '60s Italian design ("I'm reconnecting to my roots," says Andrisani, a native Italian), and the craziness comes in via the Vietri tile, designed by Gio Ponti. The tile is everywhere, both in the apartment and on the terrace. "I went with it," says Andrisani, who lives in a mostly cream-and-brown-hued Hell's Kitchen apartment. "I still think of it as a minimalist approach, because I just used one material." The rooms pick up the blues of Ponti's design, in the window treatments, the kitchen cabinetry, and the upholstery throughout. "Ponti…

THE KNICK’s second season debuts October 16 on Cinemax. STEVEN SODERBERGH is in motion. It's a warm day in Greenpoint, and the 52-year-old director, cinematographer, editor, and executive producer of Cinemax's late-Victorian-era hospital drama The Knick is on the show's main set, camera in hand, circling a table in a surgical theater, blocking a scene in which a patient's gallbladder is removed. Soderbergh speaks softly. The cast and crew hang on every word. Then he starts shooting. He is moving, pausing, repositioning the actors, and moving some more. Technicians and writers gather just out of camera range, staring at an iPad that's patched into Soderbergh's camera via wireless, as the scene is sculpted and refined in real time. If you watch the screen, you can see aesthetic questions being asked…

TV 1. Watch American Horror Story: Hotel Fifth season, still a fright. FX, October 7 at 10 p.m. The horror anthology returns with a narratively (and geographically) tighter focus: the Hotel Cortez in L.A., owned by guest star Lady Gaga and possibly the center of action for the mysterious Ten Commandments Killer. Look for connections between new stories and earlier ones: The Murder House from season one makes a cameo, along with regulars like Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, and Sarah Paulson. MATT ZOLLER SEITZ POP 2. Listen to Chvrches’ Every Open Eye Like Pat Benatar in another galaxy. Glassnote. This Scottish synth-pop trio stormed the scene about two years ago with their sleek, infectious debut. Their latest improves on that winning formula, marrying the aerodynamic sheen of modern electronic music…

The Good Life THE CAYMAN ISLANDS 212-889-9009 | caymanislands.ky WHILE MOST Caribbean destinations offer miles of white sandy beaches and calm cerulean seas, few are considered as welcoming and friendly as the Cayman Islands. The destination’s unique “Caymankind” culture truly sets it apart from anywhere else in the world. From the islands’ people and cultural traditions to its hospitality and impeccable service, the “Caymankind” way of life is what keeps visitors returning year after year. The islands are easily accessible in under four hours and hassle-free for those traveling from New York City and Newark, NJ, with several nonstop flights departing via Cayman Airways, JetBlue, or United Airlines to Grand Cayman. The Cayman Islands presents the perfect getaway for any type of traveler or occasion. With vibrant coral…