New York Magazine 5/1-5/14/17

1 For New York’s “Art & Design” issue, Doreen St. Félix profiled Kara Walker nearly three years after her groundbreaking A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby propelled her into the public consciousness (“Kara Walker, After Subtlety,” April 17–30). The novelist Charles Finch tweeted, “Props to New York Mag for putting one of the five greatest living artists on its cover.” Culture Type’s Victoria L. Valentine appreciated how Walker “open[ed] up about the arc of her practice and the source of her obsession with America’s sordid race history.” Many in the art world were giddy at the specifics of Walker’s upcoming installations. Beckett Mufson at Vice’s Creators wrote, “Walker says she’s learned from her experience as an artist-cum-celebrity … and will bring that knowledge to two new public artworks this…

The Grooviest Bed in Town In this issue of New York , the “Strategist” section goes comparison-shopping for mattresses. A field once dominated by similar companies beginning with S (Sealy, Serta, Simmons, Stearns & Foster, Spring Air) has been tossed into turmoil by a whole bunch of non- S start-ups offering exotic, squishy new polymers to replace the steel springs of yore. ¶ As it happens, “The Strategist” takes its name from “The Urban Strategist,” a shoppers’-advice column that appeared in New York often during the magazine’s first decade. (Gloria Steinem, one of the magazine’s founders, named most of the departments and thinks that one may be hers.) And 47 years ago, “The Urban Strategist” looked at another new technology that was challenging the innerspring. This being 1970, it was…

THERE IS NOTHING more disruptive to Hollywood than a movie that makes a ton of money while ignoring every current rule about how a movie makes a ton of money. Pull that off, and you may end up with a moment that not only defines the movie year but lays down some new rules for years to come. Four months into 2017, we may already have that film: Over the past two months, Get Out has messed with Hollywood’s head, and with America’s. Get Out is not the year’s No. 1 movie. That title is currently held by Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, which recently passed the original Star Wars to become one of the ten biggest domestic grossers in history. Beauty and the Beast is huge,…

COVERING THE WALLS at every booth in Elisabeth Moss’s favorite place, Cafe Fiorello, across the street from Lincoln Center, are brass plaques bearing the names of devoted regulars: Katie Couric! Paul Shaffer! Richard Belzer! And soon—major, breaking news—Elisabeth Moss and her mother, Linda, a professional jazz and blues harmonica player. “Isn’t that crazy?!” says Moss, with a breathless excitement that seems to far exceed her thrill at winning a 2014 Golden Globe for her performance as a police detective confronting her dark past in Jane Campion’s SundanceTV series Top of the Lake, or those six Emmy nominations she got for playing Peggy Olson on AMC’s Mad Men. “I mean,” she goes on, “it means so much to us! We’ve been coming here for over 20 years, so to get a…

NEW YORK CITY is entering its tourist season, the annual vendange that, last year, separated 12.7 million international tourists from their freshly exchanged U.S. dollars. Before the election, that number was expected to grow by some 3 percent. But, according to estimates from NYC & Company, Trump’s immigration policies, plus a relatively strong dollar, may dissuade several hundred thousand would-be travelers. The company now expects the number of international visitors to drop by 2 percent this year, to 12.4 million. Standing to lose approximately $120 million in tax revenue, the city recently jumped into action with what amounts to a “Nah, Trump doesn’t mean it” publicity campaign (tagline: “Welcoming the World”). But on an overcast Friday, as a chill wind whistled through Times Square, and Elmos and Elsas stood waiting…

“HOW DID PEOPLE even measure popularity before social media?” I asked idly while a friend was cropping a selfie for Instagram. “They didn’t,” she replied. As she refreshed the app to watch the first wave of “likes” roll in, I felt a stab of nostalgia. Remember when popularity wasn’t quantifiable? Remember when “trends” were subjective, before there were algorithms to calculate them by analyzing words typed into search engines and shared Facebook posts? I miss the days when the most stressful thing about popularity was the sheer uncertainty of the whole enterprise. Back when popularity was cool and aloof, identifiable only by the feelings of desire, envy, and yearning experienced by those who looked upon it. Today, there is no mystery. The metrics of popularity are pervasive and unavoidable. News…