New York Magazine 12/11-12/24/17

Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa, his wife, have performed together since the ’80s, but usually with the E Street Band in stadiums packed with many thousands of people. Which is why it feels special to see their intimacy up close at Springsteen on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre (capacity: 948), in which they duet sans band. On a stage designed to look like a concert venue’s innards, littered with gearboxes and exposed brick, the couple sidles up and sings across a single microphone. It feels like a stolen moment, a husband and wife enjoying each other’s voices in the nighttime calm. Since October, Scialfa has joined Springsteen five nights a week to perform his 1987 singles “Brilliant Disguise” and “Tougher Than the Rest,” the former a crushing musing on…

1 Jen Gann documented her heartbreak at learning that her son, Dudley, has cystic fibrosis—and at the painful realization that to win a “wrongful birth” lawsuit to help pay for his medical care, she would have to argue that he should never have been born (“Every Parent Wants to Protect Their Child. I Never Got the Chance,” November 27–December 10). @Alirosa tweeted, “I haven’t found a more honest account of motherhood or disease,” and Deadspin’s Lindsey Adler described it as a “masterpiece of compassion and conviction.” The story elicited an outpouring of responses from members of the CF community. Rebecca Mueller of Philadelphia wrote, “As a 36-year-old with cystic fibrosis who also happens to be a genetic counselor by training, I am deeply sorry that Gann and her husband were…

1968 The Cloisters · People-watching in the Garment District · The mod plastic furniture at B. Altman · TGI Friday’s · Wearing all black · Wearing all white 1969 Zoltan Mason’s astrology bookshop · The ladies’ room at Tiffany’s · The idea of placing a glass dome over Times Square • Joe Namath 1970 The gift-exchange policy at Saks · Bella Abzug · Halvah City · The Yiddish glossary in the French edition of Portnoy’s Complaint 1971 Lüchow’s Christmas goose · The non-gender-specific pronoun · Taxidermy classes · Dame Judith Anderson as Hamlet 1972 Típico music · Milt Zelman and Bruce Martire’s quiche Lorraine · The Basement Coffee House at Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church 1973 The Boys on the Bus · Diana Vreeland’s dinner party for 500 · Corduroy ·…

IT WOULD BE EASY—a hard kind of easy—to understand the painful news happening all around us to be about sexual assault. After all, for weeks now, each day has brought fresh, lurid tales. And if our typically prurient American interests have led us to focus on the carnal nitty-gritty, the degree of sexual harm sustained, the vital questions of consent, that’s fair enough; there has been, we are really absorbing for the first time, a hell of a lot of sexual damage done. But in the midst of our great national calculus, in which we are determining which punishments fit which sexual crimes, it’s possible that we’re missing the bigger picture altogether: that this reckoning is not, at its heart, about sex at all—or at least not wholly. What it’s…

Horny R&B, like the rest of us, just isn’t as horny in this political climate. MIGUEL, THE petite singer who makes electro-R&B with the sexual potency of a hundred dozen oysters, stands contemplatively in front of an art exhibition titled “White Man on a Pedestal.” He is on the vast main floor of Red Hook’s Pioneer Works, a converted Civil War–era factory building turned incubator–performance space–art gallery–scene epicenter. His hands are in the front pouch of his pink hoodie, his eyes squinting in focus as he carefully reads line after line of the exhibition’s explanatory copy, trying his best to fully absorb how white male heteronormativity has damaged our society. Miguel, born Miguel Jontel Pimentel, is here to learn. Well, technically, the 32-year-old is here to give a private tour…

 IF THERE WAS any single event that would cause the Republican elite to openly revolt against the ongoing Trumpification of their party, it would be the nomination of Roy Moore for U.S. Senate in Alabama. Even prior to the allegations of child molestation, Moore had discovered innovative new realms of extremism that had never occurred to even his most ideologically fervent colleagues. He proposed banning Muslims from serving in elected office, called for the criminalization of homosexuality, and defied court rulings and declared his own biblical jurisprudence the sole valid legal authority. The next step in the sequence from incomprehensible to inevitable is almost insultingly obvious. And if that revolt was going to begin anywhere, it would likely be in Utah. The state’s Mormon culture recoiled from Donald Trump’s libidinous…