Innholdsfortegnelse for 5/1-5/14/17 i New York Magazine

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…

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…

RYAN, ~5 The child’s toy-unboxing channel, “Ryan ToysReview,” is the eighth-most-viewed YouTube channel, with ten videos surpassing 100 million views. DAN BILZERIAN, 36 The self-described professional poker player and socialite has amassed 22 million Instagram followers by documenting a lifestyle full of cars, bikes, bikini-clad women, and guns. KAYLA ITSINES, 25 The Australian fitness trainer posts “before and after” fitness photos, food photography, and inspirational quotes and has 6.8 million followers on Instagram. ANGELINA WORETH, 16 The de facto leader of Paris fashion clique “Gucci Gang” has nearly 30,000 Instagram followers and has been written about in Vogue, Refinery29, and the New York Times .…

IMMIGRANTS New arrivals diluting the imagined racial purity of nation-states. GLOBALISTS Promoters of free trade, exchange, and movement across borders. SNOWFLAKES College students and Twitter users offended by racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes. FEMINISTS Women who insist on equal treatment and equal rights. INTERVENTIONISTS Bleeding hearts disturbing the sovereignty of foreign states. JOURNALISTS Clueless, out-of-touch, hopelessly liberal media. ELITES The rich puppet-masters of a decadent West.…

Dissatisfaction with the Establishment doesn’t always force people rightward. The surprisingly successful candidacies of old-school lefties like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon are evidence of an active contemporary “alt-left”: “alt” as in alternative to the corporate-friendly liberalism of the diminishing center-left (see surging membership in Democratic Socialists of America), “alt” as in irony-fluent, and meme-adept (see the dirtbag-left podcast Chapo Trap House), and “alt” as in dismissive of, if not abjectly cruel toward, any identity politics that doesn’t place class at the center. The alt-left hates nothing more than being called the alt-left. I MET CHARLES KESLER in March on an idyllic sunny day in Pasadena, California, where he lives. He’s a soft-spoken, thoughtful figure, with a shock of white hair and a bemused smile on his face.…

Moon Man Racist rapping cartoon. In 1986, Mac Tonight was a bright-white, sunglasses-wearing, crescent-moon-headed McDonald’s advertising character. In 2017, he is “Moon Man,” a rapper character used as a kind of collective pseudonym by anonymous members of the alt-right, who upload obscenely racist rap parodies to YouTube and credit them to the cartoon pitchman. It’s likely because he bears an incredibly vague resemblance to a hooded Klansman. Trash Dove Disputed territory. Trash Dove is, depending on who you talk to, either a cute Facebook sticker adopted by liberals as a Pepe-like meme mascot; a cute Facebook sticker ironically appropriated by the alt-right because it was adopted by liberals; a cute Facebook sticker earnestly identified by liberals as an alt-right hate symbol even though it was actually ironically appropriated by the…

Marcus Aurelius, ‘Meditations’: The unfashionable “dead white men” are heroes to the alt-right. Joseph de Maistre, ‘On the Pope’: The Catholic authoritarian and the original anti-Enlightenment blogger. Julius Evola, ‘Revolt Against the Modern World’: Quasi-fascist esoteric weirdo who pretended to be a baron and sported a monocle. H.L. Mencken: One of American history’s most influential writers and also a racist, elitist isolationist highly skeptical of democracy. Oswald Spengler, ‘The Decline of the West’ Weimar-era historian who predicted that liberal democracy would be replaced by the year 2000 by a Caesarism brought on by fear of foreign barbarians. Only off by 16 years! Jean Raspail, ‘The Camp of the Saints’: A shockingly racist 1970s pulp novel about the invasion of Europe by immigrants. Beloved by Steve Bannon, among others. ‘Fight Club,’…

JACK DONOVAN—A 42-YEAR-OLD SKINHEAD icon and right-wing extremist—lived the gay life, once. It was in the ’90s, after he left his parents’ blue-collar home in rural Pennsylvania to study fine art in New York City, when he danced go-go and hung out with drag queens and marched for gay pride. But then he dropped out, learned how to use tools, studied MMA, and decided he wasn’t gay—just “an unrepentant masculinist.” “I am not gay because the word gay connotes so much more than same-sex desire,” Donovan announced, under a pseudonym, in 2006’s Androphilia: A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity . “The word gay describes a whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics.” He appropriated the term androphile to describe a man…

Paul Joseph Watson The YouTube sensation. He calls himself a member of the “New Right.” He thinks multiculturalism “doesn’t work” and that Islam is bad; he is pro-Brexit, anti-feminism, and anti–Black Lives Matter. He despises modern art. He’s in his mid-30s, articulate and charismatic, and his YouTube channel has more than 900,000 subscribers. Watson has claimed that he is “red-pilling a generation”; he’s arguably the contemporary right’s biggest celebrity. Just a few years back, he came across very differently. Terrorist attacks, now proof that Islam is “not a religion of peace,” were once CIAbacked false-flag operations. In a video from 2012, “How the Illuminati Controls the Music Industry,” Watson explains that pop music is loaded with “Illuminati symbolism” and “satanic symbolism.” Watson is the most famous protégé of Prison Planet…

BREITBART IS THE media voice most closely aligned with Donald Trump’s candidacy. (Steve Bannon was, until last summer, its executive chair.) But it’s since turned against the administration’s agenda on several occasions. So how should we be reading Breitbart now? New York’s Gabriel Sherman spoke with Breitbart’s editor-in-chief, Alex Marlow. Is Breitbart the voice of the Trump White House? It’s hard for us to be the voice of the Trump White House when health care, his biggest legislative push, we’ve opposed. Breitbart was seen as instrumental to the takedown of the Obamacare-lite bill. So are you willing to run stories that would complicate things for Bannon in the White House? As much as I respect Steve—and I think Steve understands the conservative, populist nationalist movement globally better than any individual…

“INCREASINGLY, there are only two basic human types populating this planet,” the far-right cult thinker Nick Land wrote in 2014. “There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else.” In Silicon Valley, where Land has a significant constituency, certain people believe that the future of our species involves shedding our humanity in a merger with technology (mostly in the form of AI). This is known as “transhumanism,” and it has not unreasonably been called a new tech religion. But there is a sub-faith, allied online especially with forces of the right, that could be useful to think of as “dark transhumanism.” For these futurists, as for the neo-reactionaries from whom they take their…

She has over 21 million rabid followers, most ages 13 to 24. HAVE YOU SEEN the one where Lele Pons farts in front of her crush? The 30-second video got 11.5 million views on Instagram a few months ago. It goes like this: Lele walks out of an apartment building with this gorgeous guy and then, pffrrt . Nightmare. The guy totally hears it, but Lele blames her girlfriend across the way, who starts beatboxing fart sounds. Suddenly, a whole crew of Lele’s friends shows up, rapping and dancing along to a defiant chorus of “She didn’t pass gas.” The guy starts dancing, too. Lele is saved. But then, caught up in the flatulent celebration, the guy farts. LOL! Eww. “How to save yourself when farting in front of your…

LISBON HAS LONG been an international city, full of immigrants from Portugal’s former colonies (mainly Brazil, Cape Verde, and Angola). Now it’s young Europeans making the move there. In the past few years, creative types (the same sort who would have moved to Berlin ten years ago) have been turning up in the hilly city. It’s easy to see why. The sun is out pretty much all the time, unlike in Berlin. It’s on the Tagus River and under an hour from the ocean. The city is old-world beautiful but full of galleries and underground music venues and has a newly thriving tech scene. Crucially, the cost of living is still among the lowest in Western Europe. And when much of the West lurched toward the political right, Portugal picked…

TIP NO. 1 Ask Directly for a Discount Nick Robinson prefers the old “Can you do any better?” line. I tried this at Coco-Mat, and it worked immediately. After testing out its $4,000 Proteas mattress, I asked if there was any flexibility and was told that since it was the end of the month, the store could offer 15 percent off, a free pillow, and a free linen set. At Mattress Firm, I used the line on a queen Beautyrest Hart-field, and it was swiftly dropped from the $750 listed price to $600 with the delivery fee reduced by half, to $40. TIP NO. 2 Reference the Start-ups Traditional mattress stores have made changes to compete with the Caspers of the world. When I referenced Casper’s generous return policy during…

COCO-MAT’s starter mattress is the Afroditi ($1,340 for a full at Coco-Mat, 49 Mercer St.), made with about five inches of natural latex and a cotton cover. But latex alone is very soft; other Coco-Mats have coconut fiber, seaweed, and horsehair for firmness. The inside of the ZENHAVEN mattress ($1,699 at zenhaven.com) is made of layers of talalay latex that are sandwiched between New Zealand wool and wrapped in a cotton cover. A 120-day home trial is offered. The SPINDLE mattress ($1,150 at spindlemattress.com) arrives at your door with three latex layers, each in its own box, and an inch of wool from the Pacific Northwest that you stack and stuff into the cotton twill cover yourself. Launched in 2015, the AVOCADO GREEN MATTRESS ($1,199 at avocadogreenmattress.com) is made of…

IT CAN Brew Coffee Eight Sleep’s Smart Mattress ($950 for a full at eightsleep.com) connects to Wi-Fi-enabled devices to do things like start brewing your coffee when you hit snooze or tell Amazon’s Alexa when to start warming up the bed. It’ll also give you a sleep report in the morning with stats on breathing rate and body movements. (The mattress includes a sleep-tracking smart cover that you can throw over any existing bed; you can buy it separately for $399.) IT CAN Train You for a Triathlon Designed specifically for athletes, the ReST Bed (from $2,799 at restperformance.com) has five zones—head, shoulder, lumbar, hips, and legs—and monitors almost 2,000 pressure points. Using a pump below the mattress, the bed automatically adjusts each zone to desired firmness levels, even as…

VENISON CUMBERLAND. Spring Chicken à la Queen. Lobster à la Newberg. Filet mignon Florentine. Avocado crab Louis. Must be some recipes from an old Charles Ranhofer cookbook. Or maybe it’s an early edition of The Joy of Cooking. No, wait, it’s the new menu from the Grill, Major Food Group’s mid-century-American-chophouse remake of the Grill Room, and phase one of its $30 million Seagram Building project. So is the burgeoning restaurant powerhouse, formerly known as the Torrisi Boys, up to the challenge of reinventing the clubbiest clubhouse of all? Can executive chef Mario Carbone do for mock-turtle soup and Amish ham steak what he did for rigatoni alla vodka? Will Major Food alienate the lunch-crazed power geezers with its brash millennial ways and Tom Ford uniforms? Or will the boys…

“If I didn’t create ‘Master of None,’ I don’t think many people would’ve thought, ‘Aziz can do that part.’ ” WHERE IS Aziz’s phone? That seems to be the most frequently asked question on the set of Master of None’s season two, most frequently by Aziz Ansari, the show’s star and co-creator. “I try not to keep my phone on me because I need to keep all distractions out of my face when I’m trying to do all of this shit,” he says. So he makes a point of handing it off to his assistant, Jessica, whose main job seems to be to keep Ansari’s phone charged and to run across this Brooklyn soundstage and fetch it whenever he wants it, which turns out to be always, and then to…

SINCE WE FELL will be published on May 9 by Ecco. DENNIS LEHANE moved from Boston to Southern California “three years, nine months, and two days ago,” he says, and the specificity of his answer gives him away. He knows it; he’s not hiding anything. But he is feeling a bit unsettled. It’s a brisk Friday afternoon in Santa Monica, and he has no obvious reason to be at loose ends: His 14th novel, Since We Fell, is due out any minute; he’s working with David E. Kelley ( Ally McBeal, Big Little Lies ) on a ten-episode adaptation of Stephen King’s 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes ; he’s got a vacation to Hawaii coming up, and he has nothing pressing he needs to finish. And yet that’s the problem, or…

Joe DiMaggio, according to teammate Lefty Gomez, was famous for running down a pitcher’s mistakes. As a rookie, though, the usually tight-lipped Yankee Clipper told his much younger friend Dr. Rock Positano, he made some of his own. “Back in 1936, my rookie year, [there] was a big story in one of the papers about Tris Speaker [that] called him the greatest center fielder who ever lived. I read that Tris played very shallow and still could go back on the ball. Later that Sunday, I caught a ride with Lefty … I told him that I would be the greatest center fielder who ever played the game. I said that I could play real shallow and go back on the ball, too. We were playing a doubleheader that day…

MEMORIAL DAY May 29 Memorial Day commemoration kicks off a day early in Washington, DC each year. On the Sunday before the holiday, salute riders at the Rolling Thunder Rally as thousands of motorcycles roar through the National Mall to pay tribute to American prisoners of war and those who went missing in action. That night, PBS hosts the National Memorial Day Concert with the National Symphony Orchestra on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, which includes celebrities and is free. While thousands pay homage to fallen American heroes on the National Mall every day of the year, on Memorial Day you can attend wreath-laying ceremonies at sights like the National World War II Memorial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. Grab the kids, line up along Constitution…

JUNE Capital Pride June 8-11 | Citywide Join the local LGBTQ community for a celebration complete with street festivals, concerts and a much-anticipated parade. DC Jazz Festival June 10-19 | Citywide Some of the world’s best jazz musicians get together in DC for more than a week of performances across the city. ‘Marlene Dietrich: Dressed for the Image’ June 16 – April 15, 2018 | National Portrait Gallery Photos, film clips and letters from this gender-bending, early Hollywood star comprise this exhibition. Giant National Capital Barbecue Battle June 24-25 | Pennsylvania Avenue Chefs compete in the 25th anniversary of this annual food and music fest. JULY ‘An Octoroon’ July 18 – Aug. 6 | Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Tackling issues of race and slavery, this highly charged, Obie Award-winning comedy…

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…

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…

Germany Alternative for Germany Alternative for Germany’s leader, Frauke Petry, has suggested German border police should have the right to shoot refugees illegally crossing the border. Last year, her party doubled its representation in regional parliaments. Greece Golden Dawn Campaigning on a promise to “rid the land of filth,” the anti-immigrant, violent Golden Dawn became the country’s third-largest party after the 2015 elections. Italy Northern League Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right Northern League, wants to expel all undocumented immigrants and has reportedly praised the “good work” of Benito Mussolini. (Salvini claims Trump hopes he becomes Italy’s next prime minister.) Hungary Jobbik Hungary’s second-largest party, Jobbik was the first to propose a border wall to block refugees; it also wants to ban Budapest’s gay-pride parade and suggests the Roma…

Lana Lokteff Looks-obsessed eugenicist. Sweden is the Western European capital of the alt-right, boasting a host of racist media personalities, including Lana Lokteff, a striking blonde of Russian-American descent. Lokteff’s video commentaries frequently tackle-—in addition to the “laziness” of “incoming invaders”—the superiority of beautiful people over ugly people. “The alt-right [is] a very attractive, very sexy bunch … Matches are being made left and right of beautiful, intelligent couples. It’s a eugenic process.” Malik Obama Unlikely birther. Malik, the best man at his half-brother Barack’s wedding—who now holds a grudge against the former president for, apparently, the death of Muammar Qaddafi—questioned the previous president’s true birthplace, improbably enough, and announced his support for Donald Trump early on. He now cracks Pepe jokes, wears a MAGA hat, and pals around with…

Possibly because its members tend to be rejected by them. First came the pickup artists, men who thought of women as conquests and shared tips on how to bed as many of them as possible, culminating in Neil Strauss’s official PUA manual, The Game. Eventually, as the PUA community drifted onto Reddit, members began to spend less time sharing seduction techniques and more time lodging bilious grievances against women. PUAs advocated a practiced machismo that would teach beleaguered males to combat a “feminized” society that sought to neuter them. When Donald Trump won the presidency, manosphere blogger Roosh V, who advocates the repeal of women’s suffrage, wrote, “I’m in a state of exuberance that we now have a President who rates women on a 1–10 scale in the same way…

ON MARCH 22, Representative Devin Nunes says that during the presidential transition, intelligence officials “unmasked” the identities of Trump associates who were “incidentally” recorded in routine surveillance of foreign nationals. NINE DAYS LATER, Fox News reporter Adam Housley tweets that the “unmasking” was ordered by someone “very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world” with the goal of “hurting and embarrassing Trump.” THE NEXT MORNING, Trump tweets: “Wow, @›FoxNews just reporting big news. Source: ‘Official behind unmasking is high up. Known Intel official is responsible. Some unmasked…’” ON APRIL 2, the alt-right blogger Mike Cernovich writes that Susan Rice, Obama’s former national-security adviser, ordered the unmasking. He says his source is a spy inside the mainstream media. THE DAY AFTER Cernovich’s article, Fox & Friends reports:…

Robert and Rebekah Mercer The new Koch brothers. Breitbart investors; eccentric billionaires. Robert, a hedge-fund titan, owns a $2.7 million model-train set. Rebekah, his daughter, homeschools her children according to the teachings of a sheep farmer and climate denier. In 2016, they funded a pro–Ted Cruz super-PAC run by Kellyanne Conway, then, after Cruz flamed out, switched their allegiances to Trump. Postelection, Rebekah landed on the campaign’s transition team and recommended since-deposed Michael Flynn as national-security adviser. The Mercers are said to be chiefly motivated by a disdain for elites and a desire to incinerate the American political Establishment. Palmer Luckey Boy billionaire. A shy 24-year-old who created Oculus Rift, the virtual-reality headset bought by Facebook for $2 billion. In 2016, he began funding Nimble America, a 501(c)(4) devoted to…

THE GOAL: Find the best air purifier for allergy season. Allergists guided us away from ionizing filters (which can release allergenic particles back into the air) and toward HEPA-rated options that clear away 99.97 percent of even the smallest pollen particles. THE VERDICT: Rabbit Air’s BioGS 2.0 ($370 at amazon.com) is the Mercedes of purifiers. It runs at five very quiet speeds—the lowest is barely detectable—that adjust with a pleasing electronic ping. It’s fully automated, so it sends a reminder when filters need to be replaced (about every 18 months) and seamlessly changes speeds depending on the pollutants it senses in the environment. The catch is that it’s about the size of a side table, but anything smaller couldn’t handle all the air in your living room. CLUSTER Japanese sneaker…

IT’S NOT CRAZY—faintly ridiculous maybe, but not crazy—to suggest that we are living in what amounts to a golden age of mattresses. Never before have so many quality mattresses been available for so little—or so much. If you are the kind of person for whom a Lamborghini is too conspicuous a display of wealth, there is a mattress like the $150,000 Vividus from Hästens. If you are the kind of person who wants to buy a mattress that costs 187 times less than Hästens’ handmade, all-organic, somewhat imperious product but is certainly not 187 times less comfortable, there are hundreds of options. And if you are the kind of person who finds so many options overwhelming, there is a cohort of new and innovative e-commerce mattress companies that make mattress…

1. AVIYA An innerspring and foam-hybrid mattress with a semi-curious selling point: “Strong edges for a larger feel.” ($849 at aviyamattress.com) // 2. BEAR MATTRESS Another mattress for athletes: Bear’s topmost “Celliant” layer “absorbs the body’s natural heat and reflects far infrared back to the skin” to aid in recovery from physical activity. ($750 at bearmattress.com) // 3. BED IN A BOX The granddaddy of the e-commerce mattress business, Bed in a Box has been offering, yes, beds shipped in a box—made with the instructively named CoolRest and SureAlign foams—since the early aughts. ($799 at bedinabox.com) // 4. BRENTWOOD HOME Latex, spring, and foam mattresses with a “California ethos.” So that’s why the models are all named things like Pacifica and Sequoia. ($695 at brentwoodhome.com) // 5. COCOON BED…

“I found out about the Bloomingdale’s mattress outlet in Wayne, New Jersey (469 Route 46), through a friend—he and his wife are crazy bed people. They’ll go to a hotel, and if the bed’s not good enough, they’ll check out. Anytime we were invited to spend the weekend at their home, we always slept exceptionally well. Mattresses—especially high-end ones—get returned all the time for various reasons, and many times they’ve never been used. The outlet takes them. King-size mattresses here can sell for around $1,000. I am partial to Shifman (which are handmade and can retail for as much as $30,000), but the outlet also carries Stearns and Foster, Kluft, and Astra. On holiday weekends, there are promotions and sales, like free box springs, or an extra 10 or 20…

CHEFS AIDAN O’NEAL and Jake Leiber cooked for the likes of Hugue Dufour and Jonathan Waxman, respectively, before working together in the kitchen of Café Altro Paradiso. Now they’ve teamed up with Brooklyn restaurateur Josh Cohen to remake Cohen’s former Jimmy’s Diner into Chez Ma Tante. Canadians might recognize the name; it’s O’Neal’s tribute to a legendary hot-dog-and-French-fry shack in Montreal, where he lived before decamping for Queens to help Dufour open M. Wells. Yes, there will be franks at lunch, eventually, but the dinner menu is a bit more refined, with categories devoted to raw and cooked shellfish (oysters and parsley, left), charcuterie (headcheese, country pâté), salads and vegetables, and mains like skate wing with sabayon and leeks. Desserts nod to both the season and the surroundings (rhubarb custard…

NEIL GAIMAN got his start writing thoughtful twists on superhero comics in his native England, then broke out with the surreal comic The Sandman in the late 1980s. He’s amassed a worldwide following for such novels as American Gods, which has just been turned into a TV show: It follows Shadow Moon, a racially mixed ex-convict who wanders a decaying America encountering gods from an array of pantheons living in exile. Given all that, you probably think you know Neil Gaiman pretty well. You do not. Abraham Riesman spoke with him to help clear up your misconceptions. TRUE OR FALSE? Neil Gaiman wrote American Gods as an allegory about immigration. TRUE: “American Gods was written about America as a country of immigrants, of people who either…

TV 1. Watch The Handmaid’s Tale Blessed be this show’s fruits. Hulu. If you’ve already seen the first three episodes of this striking adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, now’s the time for another weekly deep dive into this intense vision of a totalitarian, misogynistic America. Yes, it’s fiction. Why do you ask? ART 2. See Bernard Buffet: Paintings From 1956 to 1999 An art-world pariah returns. Venus Over Manhattan, 980 Madison Ave., through May 27. The French painter Bernard Buffet (1928–1999) was seen as the epitome of bad taste since his 1950s heyday of still lifes, nudes, and animals. This wild show lets you decide if history was right or if Buffet’s reputation can be resurrected. JERRY SALTZ MOVIES 3. See Last Men in Aleppo Essential viewing. Metrograph, May 3.…

1 Experience pioneering art at the Renwick Gallery. Through Aug. 27, you can marvel at the trendsetting and inventive enamel work of artist June Schwarcz inside the Invention and Variation exhibit. The recently renovated Renwick is also a work of art itself. 2 Run, hike, bike, play tennis or ride horses in Rock Creek Park. The 4.4-square-mile natural oasis runs through the heart of the District, and serves as a wonderful contrast to the city’s many architectural marvels. 3 Catch a free show! The Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage has been offering free performances from artists in an array of genres for 20 years. Help the venue celebrate by attending a concert on any night of the week at 6 p.m. 4 Discover fascinating Native American history at the National Museum…

WHEN DID THE RIGHT WING get so bizarre? Consider: For a brief and confusing moment earlier this year, milk somehow became a charged symbol of both white supremacy and support for Donald Trump. The details are postmodern, absurdist, and ominous—not unlike the forces that brought them about. In January, the actor Shia LaBeouf mounted an art installation designed to protest the president. The next month, neo-Nazis who organized on the message board 4chan crashed the show, where they started chugging from milk jugs—because northern Europeans digest milk well, or because milk is … white. In other words, an innocent dairy beverage as old as time had been conscripted as a Donald Trump surrogate on the internet. It was yet another message-board in-joke—freighted with political meaning—suddenly in the news. But weirdness,…

There is a literal army of dissatisfied, disenchanted, mostly male young adults ripe for radicalization. FOR MOST OF LAST YEAR, it was hard to avoid the sensation that something had broken somewhere and the internet was leaking into real life. The world seemed to have taken on the punchy, disorderly, darkly playful quality of a message-board fight, in part because the president-to-be insisted on communicating mainly in tweets assembled from detritus found in a Breitbart-comments scrapyard. The subcultures and folkways of the internet had become powerful enough that the entire election apparatus was obligated to attend to and dissect them. In January, the Republican consultant Rick Wilson dismissed a portion of Trump supporters as “childless single men who masturbate to anime”; by September, the Clinton campaign was concerned enough with…

AROUND THE time that Steve Bannon lost his National Security Council spot, America’s most powerful alt-righter “vented to us about Jared [Kushner] being a ‘globalist’ and a ‘cuck,’” a White House official told the Daily Beast. And there it was, the moment when a niche neologism moved, fully and incontrovertibly, into the mainstream—and explained the neurotically masculinist world whence it came. Cuckservative, the portmanteau that insults moderate Republicans by accusing them of being cuckolds—men whose wives cheat on them—started trending in the alt-right two years ago. The metaphor gained momentum when Rush Limbaugh marveled at Trump’s refusal to become an “average, ordinary, cuckolded Republican.” In the last decade, the archaic term has enjoyed a resurgence in online fetish porn, where it functions as an emasculating subgenre of partner-swapping. As a…

White supremacy. Pure and simple. “These are the same kind of folks who used to be called white supremacists, renamed themselves in the ’80s as white nationalists to sound less bad, and now have renamed themselves to look more like they’re part of the right wing. Until the Trump run, most of the people in this movement had no time for either political party. They basically felt like neither of the parties were appealing to their racial interests. Dog whistling wasn’t enough for them.” —HEIDI BEIRICH, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project With a new name to blur old hate … “The term alt-right has strategic ambiguity. It’s not 100 percent clear who is the alt-right and who isn’t. It allows people to take on and discard…

Before 28-year-old Lucian Wintrich became White House correspondent for the paranoiac website Gateway Pundit, he went the more typical Bard-graduate route of staging art exhibitions. Wintrich, who is gay and says that Bard pushed him to rebel against a liberal, PC worldview, curated a photo series called “Twinks4Trump”— lithe young men in #MAGA gear (see left)—and “#DaddyWillSaveUs,” a pro-Trump art show at a New York gallery that didn’t allow him to publicize its name. Milo Yiannopoulos, then still a Breitbart personality, sat in a bathtub filled with cow’s blood, smoking a cigarette. “Good art should be transgressive,” Wintrich explained.…

LIGHTNING ROUND Neighborhood: “I live right under the Empire State Building.” Favorite restaurant: Indochine. Favorite street: “Park Avenue! I love Park Avenue.” Currently watching: “The Hugh Hefner documentary series on Amazon.” Facebook or Instagram? “Neither. I don’t get involved in any of that. I just got my first cell phone and computer two years ago.” SANDRA LONG Antiques Dealer Nice jacket! And hat. And bag. And necklace. And shoes … I get almost everything at antique-clothing fairs, usually the Manhattan Vintage Clothing Show at the Metropolitan Pavilion. What’s your trick for finding stuff? Please! There’s no tricks. You either have style or you don’t have style. These boots I’m wearing, actually, are not vintage. They’re Manolo Blahniks. They’re like walking on magic. One…

MATTRESS NO. 1 Simmons Beautyrest Recharge Signature Select Hartfield Luxury, Firm At Mattress Firm (the company that bought Sleepy’s and renamed all the stores), my boyfriend and I lie listening to a mom burp her baby and I’m distracted by the massage settings of this model’s adjustable base (sold separately). At the sixth minute, my outlook changes. It isn’t that I’m more relaxed but that I can actually feel the way my body hits the mattress. The goal for a mattress, according to the experts, is pressure relief—to have your entire spine hit it evenly, no one part sinking lower than the next, and it is only after the five-minute mark that I feel settled enough to be mindful of that. This mattress feels good. ($650 for a full) MATTRESS…

D›O YOU FEEL like you’re weightless?” asks Soy, a young salesperson here at the Hästens bed company’s showroom in Manhattan. I’m lying on the regally named Vividus model in the cozy and serene space, home to about a dozen mattresses famous for their yet-to-be-surpassed prices, each covered in blue-and-white-checked ticking. Soy, dressed in a crisp white shirt, black ankle-length skirt, and bejeweled black head wrap, smiles down at me. “The most common reaction to the Vividus,” she says in the same soothing tones as the electronica burbling from the store’s speakers, “is that people feel like they’re floating on a cloud.” The Vividus costs $150,000, bed frame included. I tell Soy that the price tag seems crazy. Why shouldn’t I just go with a Casper or a Leesa? She hears…

M›Y MATTRESS DILEMMA came into my life disguised as a gift. One day last summer, I walked onto my apartment landing to find a gorgeous, $1,900 cherrywood platform bed frame my neighbor was just giving away. All I had to do was upgrade my ancient, hand-me-down mattress from a full to a queen. Soon I was staying up all night scouring mattress-review sites and online message boards—and spiraling into an existential crisis. Every option seemed like a determiner of my core identity. Was I a memory-foam person or an innerspring person? A hybrid compromiser? Or maybe a latex rebel? Was gel padding brilliant or basic? What was my coil-count limit? Did I need them to be pocketed? If I’ve never had a pillow top, is that because pillow tops aren’t…

One thing Enrique Olvera and Daniela Soto-Innes have been particularly vocal about regarding their new Mexican-inspired café, Atla, is that it’s not intended to be a destination restaurant but a neighborhood joint. The problem with this plan is that the chefs have created a menu full of dishes you might call destination-worthy. Take, for instance, this fish Milanese: an exceedingly fresh fillet of local gray sole, dipped in egg and buttermilk, cloaked in panko, pan-fried in garlic oil, and basted in butter until it reaches a level of delicate crispness we didn’t think possible. It’s simple, yet transcendent—a neighborhood-restaurant dish in spirit, but one wholly worth leaving your neighborhood for. On the menu at Atla; $18; 372 Lafayette St., at Great Jones St.; no phone SCRATCHPAD LITTLE TONG: One star…

DIANE ARBUS: IN THE PARK will be exhibited at Lévy Gorvy starting on May 2. IN THE 1940S AND ’50S, as a newlywed fashion photographer collaborating with her husband, Diane Arbus lived near Central Park. After their marriage broke up in 1959, Arbus moved downtown, within a few blocks’ walk of Washington Square. In both parks, she would meet and photograph people, catching them on foot or at rest. Arbus herself cut a memorable figure: a small, pixieish woman, weighed down by several bulky cameras and flash guns, coaxing passersby to pause and pose. Sometimes she’d persuade them to continue the portrait sessions at their homes afterward. If (as many have said) the play between portraitist and subject has a kind of sexual undercurrent, Arbus loved a pickup. Several of…