Innholdsfortegnelse for 3/6-3/19/17 i New York Magazine

1 Gabriel Sherman’s profile of John McCain in New York’s most recent issue detailed how the so-called maverick is ambivalently, agonizingly taking on Trump (“How Many Chances Do You Get to Be an American Hero?,” February 20–March 5). Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, thought the story demonstrated that “John McCain’s loss in 2008 could be the country’s gain now.” Nichols wrote, “While McCain is right that he can’t be ‘the car alarm that always goes off,’ he is, in fact, one of the last moral lodestones left in a party that has been whipsawed by President Trump’s kaleidoscopic change of positions. McCain was pilloried for lack of principle as both a senator and a candidate but now has the seniority and the scars—physical and political—to…

“I want to get my hands dirty and do some gardening. I want to design pinball machines.” RYAN ADAMS BURSTS through the door of Rivington Guitars, the tiny East Village instrument shop where he’s asked me to meet him, and immediately launches into a conversation with the owner, Howie, about the red 1983 Les Paul he bought there last November. “Dude, [the Smiths’] Johnny Marr’s guitar tech sent me a DM on Instagram and goes, ‘You chose wisely—that’s the same guitar I bought for Johnny,’” says Adams, 42, wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt under a leather jacket with an Iron Maiden logo on the back. “He told me to go on YouTube and watch [the Smiths] play ‘How Soon Is Now?’ on Top of the Pops. It’s the exact model…

1. Most famous bearded poet. 2. American painter who began as a photorealist, then adopted a dappled, pixelated style after becoming paralyzed in 1988. No resemblance to Letterman. 3. Actually it was the other way around. In a 2007 playoff game, a swarm of midges from Lake Erie caused Yankees reliever Joba Chamberlain to blow the game with a few wild pitches. 4. The chair-throwing longtime Indiana Hoosiers men’sbasketball coach. 5. In 2000, Pence’s gubernatorial-campaign website stated that resources should be directed toward institutions that “provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” In 2016, Pence’s spokesman told the Times that the statement was not referring to the “pray the gay away” psychotherapy known as “conversion therapy.” 6. In February, the Trump administration reversed the Obama administration’s directive…

A FEW WEEKS AGO, in an empty dining room of what used to be The Four Seasons restaurant, Jeff Zalaznick arrived late to a meeting with his business partners, the chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi. He was winded and his cheeks flushed beneath his beard. Normally, his attire consists of open-collared shirts, limited-edition Nikes, and drawstring pants. But today, he wore a blue Tom Ford suit. He had just been interviewed live on television, where he was asked to explain how their six-year-old restaurant group, which had given downtown New York no fewer than six meticulously orchestrated new destinations, with two Michelin stars among them and ten stars cumulatively from the New York Times, would remake one of America’s most historic restaurants. For the past 20 months, the three…

WE INTERRUPT THE NEWS of shuttering institutions—Carnegie Deli, BookCourt, Other Music—to bring you our annual “Best of New York” roundup. The list continues to spotlight the most impressive new (or under-the-radar) shops, restaurants, and services—shoemakers, calzone bakers, and Elvis impersonators among them. And as always, it draws on our obsessive, year-round coverage of the city’s retail- and food-scape as well as the wisdom of our in-the-know associates. For the second year, we also anoint the absolute best (newness be damned) in a number of categories—this time, we’ve ranked ten different cuisines, plus three types of bars—with a much wider assortment ever evolving at nymag.com.…

Winter Mini-Golf SHIPWRECKED MINIATURE GOLF 621 Court St., Red Hook; 718-852-4653 During warmer months, the city has so many outdoor putt-putt places you’d think you’re in the burbs. But come rain or winter, there’s only one game in town: Shipwrecked, the city’s sole indoor mini-golf spot for all ages. Opened last April by a pair of theater-designer pals renowned for their over-the-top holiday light shows in South Slope, this 18-hole course is nestled on the second floor of an old warehouse and features a campy pirate story line that takes players through four exquisitely crafted rooms, including a luminescent underwater wonderland and a snazzy subway car. Weekends attract the family crowd, while evenings host lots of date nights. Once its beer-and-wine license is approved, it’s sure to be even more…

Niche Asian Beauty UME COSME 318 E. 9th St., nr. Second Ave. 646-964-4348 There’s no shortage of sprawling Asian beauty emporiums in K-Town and Flushing (Tonymoly, Besfren Beauty), but relatively few in this part of town. And what Ume Cosme lacks in square footage it makes up for in curation, packing a surprisingly large array of high-quality brands onto its petite shelves: Skin Prestige Crème d’Escargot anti-aging snail creams ($60), Creamy Cleansing Foam from Japanese luxury line the Ginza ($90), and long-lasting Missha lip tints ($12), among countless other brightly packaged delights. The staff can be hit-or-miss, alternating between chatty and monosyllabic, but most of the products have English translations on the labels if you’re having a tough time figuring out which peel-off face mask is right for you. Color…

MOST DIVISIVE A Life’s Work (2001) Cusk’s elegy for her pre-motherhood self infuriates mothers and critics alike. “This isn’t what it’s like to have a baby; it’s what it’s like for a depressed and melodramatic novelist to have a baby.” (THE SUNDAY TIMES) Aftermath (2012) An unsentimental look at her divorce from her stay-at-home husband. “This is writerly greed, swooping on everything and wringing meaning from it, transforming it into something else rather than just letting it be.” (THE GUARDIAN) “Every experience, from having a tooth extracted to Cusk’s daughters’ hamsters’ inability to live together, is turned into another metaphor for the author’s anguish.” (THE INDEPENDENT) MOST ACCLAIMED Saving Agnes (1993) Cusk’s Whitbread-winning debut is a highbrow Bridget Jones. “Although some plot lines are infinitely recyclable—indeed, even irresistible and forgivable—for…

MOVIES 1. See Logan Prepare to be gobsmacked. In theaters now. The new Marvel number is deservedly R-rated for splatter, dismemberment, disembowelment, decapitation, and the bleakest story line this side of Manchester by the Sea. Is it good? Yes, but if you think studios never dump major characters for fear of ending so-called franchises—boy, do you have some surprises in store. DAVID EDELSTEIN TV 2. Watch Underground Forging ahead. WGN, March 8. Season one of this action thriller about slave rebellion ended mainly in frustration, leavened by notes of hope: Most of the Macon 7 were recaptured, injured, or killed, but one made it out and allied herself with abolitionist Harriet Tubman (Aisha Hinds). Essentially Roots by way of Prison Break, this is a series that found itself as it…

ON THE DAY I met Camille Paglia for lunch, I arrived early at the Greek restaurant she had selected and let the hostess guide me to a table in the back. To me, this seemed like a perfectly fine table. Paglia, who arrived a few minutes later, disagreed. It was a booth. And there were people right beside us. There was a table near the front, Paglia said, where she had taken meetings before; perhaps we could sit there. Accompanied by the hostess, we walked to the new table and considered it. Paglia allowed that probably the hostess could not grant the two of us this six-top. We needed a smaller table—but one that was quiet, and private. By this point, a second restaurant employee had joined us. Another booth…

Salad EDDA BAR 47 S. 5th St., nr. Wythe Ave., Williamsburg 929-337-6792 Is there a foodstuff on this planet that a Nordic chef hasn’t attempted to smoke, cure, or pickle? Nothing is safe. Even salad. Which explains why Fredrik Berselius’s whole heads of young lettuce on the bar menu of his tasting room, Aska, only appear to be plucked from nature. In fact, they’re subject to multiple labor-intensive manipulations: creamy whipped house-smoked hake piped between the leaves, a vinaigrette made from smoked oil and preserved ramp seeds, and a final flourish of dill powder and preserved ramp flowers. It’s land meets sea, cured meets raw, and all it requires is a knife, a fork, and a suspension of all modern-day salad-bar presumptions. Steak FLORA BAR 945 Madison Ave., at 75th…

PUB 1 Swift Hibernian Lounge  34 E. 4th St., nr. Bowery; 212-260-3600 It’s a favorite of bartenders, in part thanks to its reliable 4 a.m. close time, even on Christmas. And invariably, when you take a place at the bar, you’ll be seated next to a group like a trio of young Irish men discussing how they can’t remember when they left the bar the night before. The beer list is long and varied, but what you want is a Guinness; those particular about how that stout is poured flock here. 2 Cronin & Phelan’s  38-14 Broadway, Astoria; 718-545-8999 It’s a bit like the sitcom version of a pub: an older crowd, mostly men; wives drop in occasionally to say hello or pick their charges up for dinner at home.…

Dog-Food Delivery THE FARMER’S DOG thefarmersdog.com It’s like Blue Apron, but for spoiled pups: You fill out an online form with your canine’s age, size, actual weight, ideal weight, and activity level, and you’re sent, from a kitchen in Westchester, a box every three weeks full of pouches of custom-made, puréed, “human-grade” food. It basically looks like hash—heat it up and crack an egg on it and you might be tempted to serve it to your people friends for brunch. The box comes with chicken, beef, and turkey pouches, so the dog gets to switch it up and won’t get bored with the same-old-same-old. It’s not cheap—prices start at $20 a week. But one staffer with a finicky older dog who was getting both fat and listless swears by the…

THE RECENT NEWS that Denis Villeneuve, the Oscar-nominated director of Arrival, will helm a big-screen adaptation of Dune is a good-news-bad-news proposition. The good news: Villeneuve has an excellent track record. The bad news: Dune, the 1965 science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, has long intrigued talented directors, only to leave their dreams in tatters. In the past 50 years, no less than Ridley Scott, David Lynch, and Alejandro Jodorowsky have taken runs at the sprawling novel, with disappointing, and occasionally catastrophic, results. Here, we present a time line of the pitfalls, near bankruptcies, and premature deaths that have greeted those foolhardy enough to tackle it. 1965 Frank Herbert writes Dune, an award-winning epic about interstellar factions feuding over a precious “spice.” 1971 Film producer Arthur P. Jacobs, responsible for the…

IT’S NO SURPRISE that Robert De Niro plays a prominent role in the exhibit “Martin Scorsese”—the duo are contemporary cinema’s most famous, and arguably most fruitful, director-actor combination. They’ve made eight feature films together, with a ninth, The Irishman, set to begin filming this year. The exhibit spans Scorsese’s unparalleled filmology, from a storyboard he drew at age 11 for an unproduced sword-and-sandals epic titled The Eternal City through Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and more. But perhaps no image on display is more striking than this simple continuity photo, taken during the production of Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear, in which De Niro plays the psychopath Max Cady. (The headline above is a quote from the film.) The purpose of the photo is to document the design…

Seth Meyers “I’m about 300 pages into A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, and that’s a really fast, good beach read.” Lewis Black “You know what I’d read again on spring break? Slaughterhouse-Five, because it always applies. What [Kurt Vonnegut] wrote applies more now.” Alex Gibney “Insane Clown President, by Matt Taibbi, and you can pretty much guess why.” Jill Kargman “I’m reading Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist right now. I just got it at the airport yesterday, and I’m almost done in one sitting. You really get inside of her mind, and I didn’t realize until she was gone that I had a Princess Leia–shaped hole in my heart.” Joel Fields (showrunner, The Americans) “Everyone in the office right now is obsessed with Sapiens: A Brief History of…

SINCE RETIRING FROM The Late Show two years ago, David Letterman has kept a low public profile—aided by the growth of a truly impressive beard. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been as fixated on politics as the rest of us. “If I still had a show,” says the 69-year-old, dressed in a baggy sweater and cargo pants and sitting high above midtown in a conference room at his publicist’s offices, “people would have to come and take me off the stage. ‘Dave, that’s enough about Trump. We’ve run out of tape.’ It’s all I’d be talking about. I’d be exhausted.” Late-night TV comedy has offered some of the sharpest—and most-remarked-upon—responses to the Trump presidency. But despite the work of Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Saturday Night Live, and the rest,…

POSTELECTION REACTION ➽CONAN O’BRIEN: Two things happened last night: Donald Trump got elected president, and my job just got easier for the next four years. • SETH MEYERS: Donald Trump won the presidential election last night, and then, out of habit, Kellyanne Conway said, “No, he didn’t!” • JOHN OLIVER: Instead of showing our daughters that they could someday be president, America proved that no grandpa is too racist to be leader of the free world. • CRISTELA ALONZO: I was a little bummed after the election, but I thought I was going to be okay until the day after, when I started getting all these phone calls and texts from my white friends making sure I was okay. Nothing scares the hell out of you like white people being worried about your…

IF YOU’RE UP on your Best of New York archives, you’ll recognize that here before you is another installment of a special feature we’ve come to call the Absolute Best of New York. What, some might ask, is the difference between regular Best of New York and Absolute Best of New York? Is Best no longer up to snuff? Not to worry. Best is still “best.” The difference, you see, is that with the eating and drinking components of the regular Best of New York, the focus, as always, is on things and places that are, if not brand-spanking-new, then newish, having debuted within the past year. Nothing wrong with that. Who doesn’t want to know what the latest and greatest things to eat, drink, and do are? But where…

Restaurant Plates NOBLE PLATEWARE 87 19th St., nr. Third Ave., Gowanus 347-683-8781 Ceramicist Wynne Noble makes much of the understated dinnerware you see at Contra, Momofuku Ko, and Gramercy Tavern, among other restaurants. She’s been honing her craft for decades, rolling and pinching clay slabs (as opposed to throwing on a wheel) into organic shapes with natural textures and colors. Her wide, shallow Sapphire bowls ($11 to $31) are glazed in their namesake hue; roughly textured taco holders ($35 for a set of two) mimic the curvy shape of the food they’re intended for. After years in Dumbo, Noble recently relocated her studio to a larger space in industrial Gowanus, which is open to the public by appointment and for the occasional walk-in. It’s probably not the kind of place…

RACHEL CUSK IS TALL. She does not take milk. She does not play card games, possibly because she associates them with her childhood, about which she feels ambivalent. She taught writing for nearly a decade and then quit. She believes fate is a female system of self-deception. She does not understand computers. She likes chess because it involves two people and thus resembles sex or war. She has never written a book without a dog in it; in real life, she is allergic to dogs. She hasn’t spoken to her parents in two years. She believes satire promotes political powerlessness; “Once you laugh,” she says, “it’s over.” She sees writing as a job. She is attracted to situations where it’s hard to agree on a common version of events. She…