Innholdsfortegnelse for 5/15-5/28/17 i New York Magazine

1 Jada Yuan’s cover story on Aziz Ansari (“Aziz Ansari Is From a Red State, Too,” May 1–14 ) left many readers impressed with the comedian’s dogged work ethic: “Aziz Ansari doesn’t do things by half,” wrote Sarah at Lainey Gossip. Commenter Big-Guy wrote, “Not many people intensively study the language of the country they will be visiting beforehand. Aziz does that over and over.” Others were taken with the fact that Ansari was able to achieve success on his terms, without having to resort to playing Indian stock characters. “What was cool to me about Aziz when he started out was that he never felt the burden to address his otherness,” tweeted @ fauxbeatpoet. “He was just him.” Commenter MyLifeInPlastic added, “Most importantly, his stories and characters are authentic—they…

THE EVENING THAT Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey, plunging Washington into chaos and possibly propelling the nation toward a constitutional crisis, the president’s most persistent legal antagonist was flying high above America. On a cross-country JetBlue flight, Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York State, was watching a seat-back TV when he learned the news the way almost everyone else—including Comey—did, with a shocking flash. “There was a group of lawyers on the plane who recognized me,” Schneider-man said the next day. As the news spread through the cabin, he began to feel glances directed his way. The usual decorum fell away, and one passenger leaned over to Schneiderman. “I bet you can’t wait for the plane to land,” he said. It wouldn’t be fair to say…

THE ACCOUNTANT Who Tries to Keep CELEBRITIES FROM GOING BROKE  THEY DON’T live in the real world. They don’t understand anything about how normal, everyday stuff works. This one wants a private plane, and another decided to redecorate their house but they need help picking out colors, and this one fired somebody and wants me to hire a replacement, and the next says, “I need you to review a tour budget. Oh, and my dog’s sick. What do I do?” or, “I want a new car. What should I buy?” The hard part is when you try to help people and they won’t let you. We try to rein them in. We go, “Do you really need a custom-made suit of armor for $50,000 that you’ll never wear?” “Do you…

KEVIN WALZ Designer Cool sneakers. My two daughters think it’s fun to dress their father. They love buying me clothes and daring me to wear them. These are from Supreme. Do your daughters live here? One lives in Germantown and the other in Brooklyn. They were born in New York City but grew up in Rome. How come? My wife died of breast cancer in 1990, and during that period, I went to see a psychic and she told me, “I think you’re moving to Italy.” I said, “Italy? Why would I be moving to Italy? I’m a New Yorker!” Two years later, I got the Rome Prize. I threw the kids in Italian public schools, and after eight weeks, I thought, Why would I ever leave? We stayed there…

“Nonstop NYC to Milan for $130 round trip. I saw someone post on a message board about a mistake fare from a Norwegian affiliate of United Airlines. I immediately convinced a friend to come, and we had an amazing trip—skiing in the Alps and hanging out at Lake Como. The Norwegian affiliate fixed the error about ten minutes after I booked.” —Scott Keyes of Scott’s Cheap Flights “I used 90,000 American AAdvantage miles to book Etihad’s first-class apartment from New York to Abu Dhabi. After a stopover, I continued on to Kathmandu. On my day of travel, the seat was priced at $22,009 one way! Separate bed, shower, and onboard chef weren’t bad.” —Adam Morvitz of Juicy Miles “My greatest deals stretch award-ticket-routing rules to the max. Last year, before…

1 Curry Cauliflower MADE NICE 8 W. 28th St. Many have tried to make healthy food fast, casual, and craveable, and many—make that most—have failed. Which is why we were gob-smacked by a visit to Daniel Humm’s new quick-service joint. Every dish was beautifully plated and mind-bogglingly good, including this mingling of curried cauliflower and fluffy couscous, with soft tofu, fat raisins, and slivered almonds ($11; pictured). It’s too early to say—and scalability, if that’s the plan, is another matter—but this place already feels like a game changer. 2 Cheesecake Babka BREADS BAKERY 18 E. 16th St. It’s a cheesecake disguised as a babka. Or is it a babka that thinks it’s a cheesecake? If you can stop at one slice, you possess superhuman self-restraint or you just…

ON NOVEMBER 4, 2015, David Hallberg posted a photograph of himself on Twitter, though the person in the photo did not much resemble the David Hallberg his thousands of followers knew. In the photo, Hallberg—a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre and the first American to hold that title simultaneously at the renowned Bolshoi Ballet—sat hunched on a Chelsea stoop, holding a coffee cup and, out of frame, a cigarette. His head was shaved and his stare piercing; he looked a bit like Eminem. “Goodbye New York,” he wrote in the caption. “There’s some stuff I have to take care of once and for all.” The day after taking that photo, Hallberg flew to Australia with one suitcase, on a one-way ticket, unsure if he would ever dance again. “Everyone…

WHERE ELSE can you go, if not New York? As the early-aughts New York revival faded to static, the center of gravity in indie rock reverted to its default provincial location: somewhere in the countryside, but not too far away. Suburbs and campuses have always been the genre’s traditional spawning grounds: Even in the New York scene, schools provided a vital space for potential band members to coalesce. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs formed at Oberlin; an NYU philosophy course assisted in the creation of Interpol. The Strokes? Put in touch through a set of elite private high schools, plus NYU. Ultimately, though, the heart of indie music has traditionally resided outside New York. After the early-aughts rock boom went bust, that heart moved all the way out of America. It…

MOVIES 1. See Logan Noir Tony, stark. Alamo Drafthouse, May 16. Say what you will about James Mangold’s mournful, Götterdämmerung-like Logan, but it was impressively stark. Because Marvel can do anything, an even starker, black-and-white Logan Noir will screen for one night at 26 theaters across the country, with a live-stream Mangold Q&A. One catch: You’ll be asked to wear black and white only. DAVID EDELSTEIN FESTIVALS 2. Go to Vulture Festival It’s big! It’s really big! Various locations, May 20 and 21. Vulture’s fourth annual festival of all things culture returns with a stellar lineup, including Trump impersonator and The President Show star Anthony Atamanuik onstage with our own Gabriel Sherman; early screenings of summer movies Band-Aid, Dean, and The Little Hours; a TV panel with the cast of…

“Okay, and how about your secretary?” “The best way we can find to make money is to be Muhammad Ali,” wrote Frederick Allen, in his introduction to one of New York’s surveys of who takes home how much. “The second-best way to earn a living is to sue Muhammad Ali for divorce.” The salaries issue was an absolute smash when it first arrived in the spring of 1972. It was gossipy, un-putdownable, and patchily useful (if you were negotiating your own pay). Most of all, it answered a nearly atavistic question: What do your neighbors make? “Every aspect of life was evaluated by so many of us—the caste, the class, the salaries,” recalls Gail Sheehy, a frequent contributor to the magazine in that era. “I remember the uproar when the…

Laila Gohar, chef If you could be outfitted by one designer for the rest of your life, who would it be? Ossie Clark. What was the last website you looked at? Baldorfood.com, where you order wholesale food for restaurants. If you had only three things you could eat for the rest of your life, what would they be? Bread, olive oil, and fish. ON LAILA: Gucci printed silk dress, $2,700 at 725 Fifth Ave.; 212-826-2600. Kokie Childers, model and biology student Sneakers or slippers? Slippers, because they’re easier to get on and I’m a lazy person. Fuck/Marry/Kill? James Dean/James Dean, again/I’m not a vengeful person. If you could tell Donald Trump one thing and make sure he would listen, what would it be? “Try to have some empathy.” ON KOKIE:…

BUYING A PLANE TICKET has never been easier—or more complicated. Online travel agencies claim to offer the greatest fares; fare aggregators claim to offer the greatest selection of online travel agencies. Low-cost carriers promise to fly you to the moon for a pittance—but, oh, you want to check a bag and pick a seat too? That’ll be $100 extra. The legacy airlines want you to be loyal and book direct, but they’re constantly shifting the goalposts on miles hounds. Miles hounds, in turn, take to deep-dive hobbyist forums like FlyerTalk to rap in Klingon about their juiciest airline hacks. It’s all so dizzyingly complex you would be forgiven for wanting to punch your monitor every time you search for a flight. And that’s just the ticket purchase. As the recent…

Key: Stopover city Final destination QATAR AIRWAYS Allows stopovers up to 96 hours. ICELANDAIR Allows for free stays up to seven nights en route to 26 European destinations. ETIHAD AIRWAYS Brokers free overnight stays at five-star hotels for its business and first-class passengers. EMIRATES Allows multiple stopovers, so technically a three-for-one. ROYAL AIR MAROC Final-destination options also include London, Amsterdam, Moscow, and many others. TAP PORTUGAL Allows free stays up to 72 hours in Lisbon and Porto (OPO). HAWAIIAN AIRLINES Stopover length is unlimited, on a case-by-case basis. CHINA SOUTHERN AIRLINES Beijing and Shanghai are also options. Consider Stewart International  When you’re dealing with multi-airport cities, deciding which one to fly into or out of is an imprecise art. “The rule of thumb is to search them all,” says Stefan…

OVER THE LAST decade, Delhi-born Gaurav Anand has brought Punjabi kebabs to Curry Hill at Bhatti Indian Grill, delivered Mughlai butter chicken to the Upper East Side at Moti Mahal Delux, and delved into sealed-lid dum pukht cookery at the Upper West Side’s Awadh. Now, at aRoqa in Chelsea, the chef-owner has cast off the shackles of culinary authenticity to fuse Indian and Western flavors and techniques, giving rise to such whimsies as kataifi-wrapped mushrooms with goat-cheese relish, pork dumplings with bacon crumble and vindaloo sauce, and chicken chops flambéed in Old Monk Rum. Alcohol also works its way into creative cocktails, which incorporate such unlikely ingredients as olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and vegetables like snap peas and Swiss chard. AND … Raw-fish provocateur David Bouhadana has departed Sushi on…

Snatched In this 2017 comedy starring stand-up comedian Amy Schumer, a woman (Schumer) invites her mother (Goldie Hawn) to accompany her on a resort vacation. Things go awry when the two women are kidnapped by bandits, who'll release them—for a price. Snatch In this 2000 crime caper starring former competitive diver Jason Statham, a boxing promoter (Statham) faces off with gangsters in a race to find a priceless diamond. Things go awry whenever Brad Pitt is onscreen, employing a comically indecipherable accent. Snitch In this 2013 thriller starring former professional wrestler Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, a father (Johnson) decides to go undercover for the DEA to help his imprisoned son. Things go awry when the ruthless cartel for whom he is working starts to suspect his duplicitous role. Sneetch In…

JOSHUA FERRIS ACHIEVED something of a pop-lit crossover hit ten years ago with his first novel, Then We Came to the End. The title was borrowed from the opening line of Don DeLillo’s first book, Americana, and like the first half of that book it was a comedy about life in a corporate office—a Chicago advertising firm where DeLillo had a New York TV network. As with Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, the narration was first-person plural, a device used to channel the dwindling collective of cubicle-bound bottom-feeders through successive massacres of downsizing. In The New York Times Book Review, James Poniewozik, then TV critic for Time, greeted it warmly with a comparison to The Office (American and British versions). There were both screen-ready set pieces—an office attack by a…

An illustrated visual guide to more than 100 subcultures throughout history, from the pachucos of 1930s El Paso to the B-boys of the 1970s Bronx (below).…

THE DISORIENTING QUALITY of the Donald Trump administration lies in the tension between the vastness of the threat it poses to the health of the republic and the smallness of the president himself. That juxtaposition of the terrifying and the ridiculous has been on display from the very beginning, when Trump personally attempted to bully the acting director of the National Park Service into vouchsafing obviously fake estimates of attendees at his inauguration. Every week brings new confusing episodes that could signal either a tantrum or a coup, and this has had a numbing effect on all of us observing his recent assault on the integrity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And yet for all the farcical qualities on the surface, Trump’s bid to manipulate the nation’s highest law-enforcement…

ONE OF THE MORE absurd, madcap musical chairs of recent Mets vintage—and, boy howdy, have there been plenty—was April’s foofaraw involving an injury to pitcher Noah Syndergaard. Last year, the Asgardian ace threw his fastball harder on average than any starter in baseball, a blazing, terrifying, thatdoesn’t-really-seem-fair thunderbolt that consistently ran to an almost-impossible-to-believe 97.6 mph, the highest in baseball history. This spring, he showed up to training camp boasting that he’d added 17 pounds of muscle that would allow him to throw still harder. And he was as good out of the gate as any Met has been in decades (three starts, 19 IP, 2 ER, 20 K, 0 BB). Then he began complaining of a “dead arm” but refused to submit to an MRI, declaring that he knew…

IT’S THE NIGHT of the Tyson-Spinks fight: June 27, 1988. Twenty-two-thousand people crammed into the Atlantic City Convention Hall. Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Oprah Winfrey, Madonna—all the big shots. And someone else as well: little Ivanka Trump, 6 years old, with a bow in her hair and a ringside seat. ¶ Why would anyone bring a little girl to a prizefight? This is a childhood constructed out of mores and experiences not immediately recognizable to most Americans as enriching for a young child, although they ultimately were—deeply enriching, in their strange way. It’s four years before Ms. magazine will invent Take Our Daughters to Work feminism, but the Trumps are way ahead of the game and Ivanka is in the middle of the revolution, her vivid memory of the night…

THE BEST DISHWASHING gloves are from a Korean brand called Mamison ($7 at Amazon) , which translates to “Mommy Hands,” according to Rachel Khong, author of the cookbook All About Eggs and the forthcoming novel Goodbye, Vitamin. “In gloves, I want a glide, to be able to slide into them like I’d slide off a dolphin’s back, and these gloves do just that. They’re not just all one texture, however; they’re ribbed on the back-of-hand area and stippled in the finger area, giving you maximum grippiness. And the gloves are thick, meaning you can get the water incredibly hot. Once I turned the water on so hot that I warped a takeout container. My hands, sheathed in Mommy Hands, remained protected, intact, and unburned.” FIRST LOOK On May 15, Chicago-based…

NOTABLE EXCEPTION: Follow @JetBlueCheeps on Twitter for #JetBlueFlashFares, which are one-way tickets starting at $20. These can sell out within the hour, leaving no time for third-party aggregation. Rewards Members: Hire These Nerds Many airline pros will help you get the most out of your miles ( for a fee, of course). Award Expert ( awardexpert.com ) Matthew Klint and his merry band of miles gurus are research maniacs. Services start at $150 for the first traveler. Kick in an extra $50 per ticket and they’ll also take care of booking. Award Magic ( awardmagic.com ) All-inclusive miles/points booking service co-founded by Tahsir Ahsan, a.k.a. the Bengali Miles Guru. Standard one-way and round-trip tickets (including one stopover) cost $159 per person; awards involving three…

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS DIRT-CHEAP LAST-MINUTE TICKETS? Not really. Years ago, airlines would slash prices shortly before a flight in order to meet capacity. Now they do the opposite: jack up the fares to nail last-minute business travelers who’ll likely expense the tickets anyway. The exception to this is booking last-minute award tickets, which do not fluctuate the way cash tickets do. When Matthew Klint of Award Expert had to fly from Los Angeles to Seattle at the 11th hour, one-way retail tickets cost $385. Instead, he used 7,500 British Airways miles and paid $5.60 in taxes, booking with less than 24 hours to go. HOW FAR IN ADVANCE SHOULD I BOOK? The ideal time to buy retail tickets is one to three months before you fly. Matthew…

Has there ever been a more New York ice cream than the one Portland, Oregon’s Salt & Straw has custom-churned for Daily Provisions, Danny Meyer’s new bakery and canteen? The rye flavor comes from bread that’s been crumbed and steeped; swirled strawberry jam and liquid poppy-seed cheesecake evoke Lindy’s and Junior’s. It’s one of four flavors that the café will start scooping May 18 and represents Salt & Straw’s first foothold in New York—the natural evolution of a relationship that took root when the creamery’s owners, cousins Kim and Tyler Malek, made Meyer’s Setting the Table required employee reading. The cousins have used bread before, but now “we really wanted to lean into that flavor,” says Taylor. On the menu at Daily Provisions; $5 a scoop or $7 a double;…

ONE RECENT EVENING, as we sat in the Tapas Bar at La Sirena , we pondered the journey of the shishito pepper in New York—from somewhat obscure Japanese snack first cited in the Times in the 1990s, to tapas-bar sensation in the aughts, to Bon Appétit’s list of “Food Trends We Hope Disappear in 2017.” We did this, it should be said, as we nibbled our way through a plate of shishitos sauced with Huancaína, Parmesan, and walnuts—an ingredient combo more often applied to cold Peruvian potatoes than hot Japanese peppers. But shishitos have largely outgrown their cultural origins, becoming variably spiced fodder for inventive chefs everywhere. (See also Paowalla’s shishito pakoras, Empellón Cocina’s shishito tacos, and Lalito’s shishitos en nogada, a play on stuffed poblanos.) This is all a…