Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/1-10/14/18 i New York Magazine

1 In New York, Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of Woody Allen and the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow, broke her silence three decades after being at the center of Allen and Farrow’s very public, acrimonious breakup (“Introducing Soon-Yi Previn,” September 17–30). In the story, written by Daphne Merkin, Previn talks about years of what she claims was mistreatment at the hands of Farrow, the inception of her own relationship with Allen, and her now 20-year marriage to the director. In the Guardian, Hadley Freeman wrote, “The first, and most obvious, thing to say is that Soon-Yi Previn has every right to tell her story, and any publication has the right to publish it … I admire Previn for finally speaking out after having been spoken about for so long. But…

IMAGINE THAT A WOMAN accused of a crime shows up for a Senate hearing and mostly cries and shouts about how persecuted she feels. Imagine she loses her temper several times during her opening statement and refuses to answer yes-or-no questions. Imagine she evades follow-up questions by talking about how often she went to her friends’ houses and how good her grades were in high school and college. Now imagine that a black man is accused of a crime, but when he’s asked if he’d like there to be a further investigation to clear his name, he stammers, “I’m innocent!” and “They sprung it on me!” Imagine this man repeatedly states that he liked beer when he was younger and he still likes beer. “Do you like beer?” he interrupts…

HE REALLY IS A BRETT. In the midst of an endangered job interview for arguably the most prestigious job in America, Kavanaugh seemed—when he wasn’t yelling into the microphone—almost gleeful about the chance to remind everyone about what a sweet bro he’d been, as if the matter under debate wasn’t whether he’d assaulted a woman but what degree of cool he’d been. Top of his class, and all those service projects, too; or at least that one having to do with—he strained to remember—that time he went to a … soup kitchen, was it? Eager to point out what a good Catholic he’d been (a virgin, even). But still able to make time for ’skis with PJ and Mark, or taking Suzanne to the movies or BEACH WEEK. He liked—still…

THE ANONYMOUS MAN WORE the T-shirt over a collared dress shirt. Both were tucked into a pair of khakis. He had a black bracelet that read LOYALTY on his wrist. WOMEN FOR KAVANAUGH, he blared. The image was shared thousands of times throughout the day, and it looked, to many watching online, like a sartorial complement to the role prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was playing in the proceedings—blatant protection against accusations of sexism and misogyny. But of course, T-shirt guy did not come across as someone particularly committed to his so-labeled cause. A person who woke up Thursday morning intending to wear that tee wouldn’t have worn another shirt beneath it. Instead, it’s the look of someone who isn’t fooling anybody. Someone trying to stir up drama or simply steal clout.…

DURING HIS TESTIMONY, Kavanaugh wore his résumé as a suit of armor, as if his affiliations, his past proximity to Important People, were proof of his good character. When Senator Mazie Hirono asked Kavanaugh whether he was a “sloppy drunk” at Yale, he responded with disbelief. “Senator, you were asking about college? I got into Yale Law School. That’s the No. 1 law school in the country.” This presumption, that elites are elite because they deserve to be, is more than the pernicious self-mythology of the successful. It is an alternate reality—a high-walled fortress that preserves and protects the false correlation between status and good character and, worse, establishes an authority intolerant of dissent. No one who doesn’t live inside is allowed to criticize those who do, and all who…

1896 THE HAUNTED CASTLE It’s only about three minutes long, but Georges Méliès’s handmade cavalcade of creepy effects—skeletons materializing out of nowhere and turning into bats, etc.—offers one of the earliest examples of horror as a genre and the supernatural thrills that come with it. (BE) 1920 THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI Robert Wiene’s pioneering German Expressionist classic threw down the gauntlet for subsequent entries in the emerging genre of horror, particularly with its unsettling scene of the haunted somnambulist Cesare attempting to stab the sleeping heroine. (BE) 1922 HÄXAN A hybrid narrative “documentary” about the evolution of witchcraft, this edgy demonstration of the evils of the occult was decades ahead of its time. It’s part history lesson, part exploitation flick; the reenactments and the wickedly effective visuals served to…

EXPENSIVE THINGS ARE SOMETIMES things we come to regret. Other times, though, years later, they are the things that one feels wisest about having sprung for. What is it that makes such pieces truly worth it? Perhaps it’s the pure, decadent indulgence of the items—only trotted out for the most special of occasions. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that even the most ephemeral of such pleasures will endure in one’s memory. Sometimes it’s more quantifiable: knowing that you have used/worn/wrapped yourself in/inhaled this pricey thing so many times, and will use it so many more, that it has paid for itself five, ten, 100 times over.…

NOBODY NEEDS FANCY SOAP. Soap has one job, and most will do that job. Spending $38 on a small orb of soap is not, therefore, something I endorse—unless you repurpose it into something much more valuable. Let me explain. A year ago, I bought a $38 soap from an old perfume company called Krigler. Krigler is known for heady, high-quality, smell-it-from-across-the-room scents. But instead of using my soap for its intended ephemeral purpose, I dropped it into my lingerie drawer to scent my delicates. Wrapped in its original plastic, the soap emitted a strikingly lovely smell that permeated my underthings. It was like an old-fashioned sachet on meth. I expanded the soap’s itinerary through all of my dresser drawers. In turn, my clothes no longer smell like detergent but instead…

LAST SUMMER, I watched the NBA Awards dinner as Kemba Walker of the Charlotte Hornets won the NBA Sportsmanship Award, given to the player who best “exemplifies the ideals of sportsmanship on the court—ethical behavior, fair play, and integrity.” Walker wore a fitted gray suit with light checkers bordered by a slight baby-blue stitch and a black polo shirt buttoned to the top. On his feet were a pair of low-top bone-white sneakers. I thought he looked fresh as fuck. Walker’s freshness solved two intersecting dilemmas I had. Months earlier, I’d bought a Lazio gray herringbone suit from Suitsupply similar in cut and fit to Walker’s, and I’d been curious how it would look with sneakers. Also, I’d been looking for a pair of sneakers that I could wear with…

IN THE WANING DAYS OF MY PUBLISHING CAREER, I started making money buying and selling Porsches. I found this one—a 1960 Porsche 356B Roadster—on Staten Island. I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the Roadster—it’s a cousin of the iconic Speedster, which people like James Dean drove. But better: The Speedster is cool but hard to tour in because of its low-cut windshield. The Roadster has a taller windshield and roll-up windows. I couldn’t afford it, so my friend, who also traded Porsches, came and bought it instead. A couple of months later, he called to complain that he couldn’t sell it. I made him a deal: a Miami Vice–ish Porsche ’73 911S I owned, plus an undriveable Roadster I’d recently found in a guy’s backyard in…

AT 80 BOTTLES and counting, I have what you might call a modest fragrance addiction. But my favorite scent—the one I covet and hoard and pay ridiculously large sums of money for ridiculously small quantities of—is oud. Dark, syrupy, rich, exotic oud. In its most basic form, oud is an aromatic resin scraped from a diseased tree. Depending on where that tree is grown (India, Cambodia, etc.), its bark goes by many names (e.g., agarwood, gharuwood, and jinko). The timber is among the most valuable wood in the world because of its rarity. Oud has been used in religious ceremonies for thousands of years and is considered precious throughout the Middle East and Asia, worn by sultans and commoners alike. Although oud and its synthetic impostors are popular in designer…

YOU MAY THINK you know a Starbucks addict, but have you ever been to your Starbucks barista’s wedding? After going to the Starbucks at the bottom of my hill every single day for the past 15 years for a Grande Caffè Latte, I got to know my local crew pretty well and, as a result, have been to their baby showers, birthday parties, and, once, even a funeral. Then I stumbled upon a line of multi-thousand-dollar coffee machines by Jura at my local Sur La Table that claimed to do everything my local Starbucks could. I laughed my ass off at their price tags. My mind immediately thrust these machines into the category of ostentatious items that wealthy people buy simply because they can. But then I did some math.…

WHO DOESN’T LOVE the club? It looks great, like a special-occasion BLT, and it’s got everything you could ask for in a sandwich: multitudes of texture, nuances of sweet-salty flavor, toothpicks (often frilly) holding it together. It’s a sandwich that falls solidly under the heading of Good Even When Bad. And yet there’s an inherent architectural problem with the club. Once you remove the toothpicks, that’s it. Things fall out, structural integrity is lost, chaos reigns. Some folks embrace the messiness as part of the club experience. Others, like the late great James Beard, do not. Beard preferred his club sandwiches made with two slices of toast, calling the three-slice version “a horror.” Existing Conditions chef Josh Eden would beg to differ. “A club is not a club without three…

IN HIGH SCHOOL, Michael Urie used to do an exaggerated “gay voice” as a joke. It was sibilant and effeminate, but in suburban Plano, Texas, in the early ’90s, where nobody would admit to knowing anyone who was gay, it got laughs. Urie was good at the gay voice—it was “really an extension of myself, I realize now”—and he liked the attention it got him, until one popular girl laughed too hard and told him, “You’re too good at that.” “It wasn’t an insult,” Urie remembers, but a sort of warning: “You can do that, and you can be really good at that, as long as you’re straight.” Urie, now 38 and in rehearsals for the Broadway revival of the landmark gay drama Torch Song, tells me the story over…

TANA FRENCH is an author of murder mysteries who is less concerned with whodunit than with the inner lives of her detectives. In her first book, In the Woods, which came out in 2007, she let what actually happened to a pair of vanished children remain a mystery because she didn’t think her detective was equipped to face the truth. French, a Dubliner who originally trained as a stage actor, has published six more books since, each one further cementing her reputation as a writer of “cultic devotion,” as The New Yorker put it. The announcement of her latest, this spring, was met with feverish anticipation and a scramble for advance copies—the novelist Jeff VanderMeer pleaded on Twitter: “Who do I have to offer bird seed and bark butter to…

OF THE LIES THAT Brett Kavanaugh told the committee, the one that sticks in my head is “Devil’s triangle,” a phrase that appeared in Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook and that on Thursday he claimed had referred to a “drinking game.” I think it sticks with me because in a different circumstance—were I 17, say—the testimony might have seemed incredibly funny to me. “Devil’s triangle” is a phrase immediately familiar to anyone who’s been a gross teenager: It’s a threesome with two male and one female participants. Funny enough to slip it by your teachers into a yearbook with a convincing tale. But can you imagine getting it by a bunch of senators? On national TV? I lied a lot as a teenager. I think a lot of teenagers lie. When you’re…

MORE THAN A quarter-century later, it feels as if very little has changed since Clarence Thomas was elevated to the court, #MeToo notwithstanding. Had Blasey Ford not been white—and from the professional class—you have to wonder whether the Republican men on the committee would have completely dropped their patently phony pretense of concern for her welfare and stabbed her in the front instead of the back. What will follow now, regardless of whatever FBI investigation takes place, is a national tsunami of rage much as there was after the sliming of Anita Hill. And the aggrieved will not just be those “suburban women” politicos keep pigeonholing, but most women, and more and more men. We have to hope that this rage will sweep more women into office, as it did…

YES, SHE WOLF BAKERY’S MICHE can be purchased by the $5.50 quarter-loaf. But we say forget practicality and surrender to the aesthetic allure of the whole supercolossal four-pound wheel. It’s bread as symbol of abundance and generosity and a testament to the baker’s craft. And a bigger loaf means bigger flavor and a longer shelf life. We love the faint but persistent sourness of the moist crumb, contrasted with all those toasty, caramel-y, nutty, Maillard-reaction flavors of the crackly crust; the resounding crunch when you take a serrated blade to the 18-inch diameter; the edible link to an old-world tradition that extends back centuries. How can something made up of only flour, water, salt, and natural leaven cost that much? In fact, fewer ingredients (like freshly milled Farmer Ground flours)…

YEARS AGO, ON THANKSGIVING, my father fell and broke his hip minutes before the meal was scheduled to start. Family members dispersed as soon as the EMTs drove away. I threw a midnight dinner party to deal with the mountains of food, and because I was a line cook, my replacement guests were all industry people. One had a knob of fresh wasabi—he’d spared it from his restaurant—and grated it over the dark meat. Fresh wasabi rules. The rhizome (the plant’s root) exudes a groundswell of isothiocyanates, the compounds that storm nasal passages with wonderful, prickly heat. By comparison, standard-issue wasabi doled out in pasty blobs is really just powdered horseradish with a bad dye job. The sort of Very Informed Person who extols deluxe A5 Wagyu may suggest that…

THESE BUDS ARE PARTICULARLY outstanding for travel—recently, while sharing an Airbnb loft with a friend who had a 2:30 a.m. conference call with her Hong Kong team, I marveled at my ability to block out any negotiations. But, as they say, that’s not all: Their rechargeable battery lasts up to 16 hours, and their case (with magnetic inserts) makes them easy to keep track of. The Bose Sleep app is a little clunky but does the trick; with a few taps, I can choose among ten noise tracks. And if you’re sharing the bed with an equally light sleeper, you can wake up guilt-free to an alarm that only you can hear. Once you’ve gotten over the sticker shock, you’ll throw out your foam earplugs and wonder how you ever…

AS IF IT NEEDS SAYING, it was a low moment. Money was tight. This birthday money had been given to me to spend on practical stuff: insurance or travel to see my ailing parents. But from the moment my aunt handed me the check, I knew what it would go toward. I had been stalking the nightgown, you see, for weeks. It was the simplest nightgown you could imagine: just the thinnest cotton voile. The cut was bias; the bodice was made up of a series of gentle tucks. If you looked at your hand from under the hem, you could still make out its gauzy outlines and fluctuations of color. It was heart-printed—a print so girlie I would have disdained it even as a little girl. Yet somehow now…

MY ORIGINAL PLAN was to pick up a new duvet at Bed Bath & Beyond like any other civilian, but the path I took to its store took me by Hästens in Soho. You may know it by the giant $44,000 gingham beds stored in the window. I decided to go inside just to get an idea of which style I might try to find at BB&B. I could sense it was foolish. Reckless, even! Minutes later, charmed with specifics, like a history of catering to royals and a weaving structure that keeps you ventilated, BB&B was a distant memory. As was a month’s rent. At home, I unfurled the duvet onto the bed, and I swear it looked underwhelmed by its new surroundings. Surely a sentient Hästens product would’ve…

1 Oatmeal  LLAMITA 80 Carmine St. Oatmeal is often more like penance than breakfast, but the stuff being dished out at Llamita is sort of the anti-oatmeal. First of all, it’s satisfyingly clumpy rather than smooth. Second, it’s doused with milk and further enriched with gobs of melting butter. The deeply flavored unrefined cane syrup called chancaca drips down the slope of grain to sweeten the deal, like some postgraduate-level version of Christina Tosi’s cereal milk. To finish it off: an abundance of toasted walnuts and superrich sunflower-seed butter. Some might say this is dessert, not breakfast; we see it as porridge achieving its full potential ($7). 2 Pork Buns  BÀO TEA HOUSE 140 W. 4th St. These sugar-crumbed mouthwaterers come two per order in flavors like cumin beef, buffalo…

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM called Christine Blasey Ford a “nice lady.” A nice lady is not a “nasty woman.” A nice lady gets up in the morning and curls her hair. A nice lady talks in a sweet voice. A nice lady sips from her bottle of Coke. A nice lady can’t find the best place to put her glasses. A nice lady makes sure her documents are laminated in case she cries. A nice lady studies her documents and makes corrections. A nice lady offers to “host” Senator Grassley in her house in California. A nice lady “quibbles” with her husband. A nice lady sits in her car in a Walgreens parking lot so her parents don’t have to hear that she is interviewing lawyers. A nice lady retreats so…

IN THE MORNING, his prospects suffered what felt like fatal damage by Christine Blasey Ford’s highly credible charge of attempted rape. By afternoon, Brett Kavanaugh’s show of raw partisan animosity had thrilled his patrons. “Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him,” exulted Trump. “This was why he nominated him from the beginning,” Kellyanne Conway told Gabriel Sherman. Fox & Friends praised Kavanaugh’s “very Trumpian” opening remarks. Part of what made Kavanaugh’s speech very Trumpian was how it revealed what Trump accomplished in 2016: Both tapped deeply into the conservative soul, and in that soul is rage. Kavanaugh’s snarling, unhinged partisan rant ought to have been a disqualification but instead, somehow, became a qualification. He dispensed with any pretense of law as a neutral value. Everything was reduced to…

ICOULDN’T IN GOOD FAITH choose between Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh about something that allegedly happened 36 years ago, but I will say this: To the extent that the hearing revolved around the accusation of sexual assault, of course that demands to be taken seriously. But to the extent that the hearing went beyond the specifics of Blasey Ford’s allegations and sought to humiliate and discredit Kavanaugh for who he was as a teenager nearly four decades ago, it was deeply concerning. When public life means the ransacking of people’s private lives, even when they were in high school, we are circling a deeply illiberal drain. A civilized society observes a distinction between public and private, and this distinction is integral to individual freedom. The Founders were obsessed with this. They…

THE SCRIPT was set ten days earlier: Fresh off the phone with Brett Kavanaugh, Orrin Hatch called Christine Blasey Ford “mistaken” and “mixed up” in her belief that the Supreme Court nominee tried to rape her when they were teenagers. When the hearing came, Kavanaugh looked out at the senators and, though he didn’t go as far as to pin the act on another guy, said, “I am not questioning that Dr. Ford may have been sexually assaulted by some person in some place at some time.” It was the pseudo-empathic version of “Bitch set me up.” No matter that Blasey Ford told the committee she was 100 percent sure it was Kavanaugh who clapped a hand over her mouth, or that she insisted she was no one’s pawn. The…

THERE’S AN inspirational vibe surrounding the scary new Halloween sequel (called, unhelpfully, Halloween), which is especially weird when you consider that John Carpenter’s 1978 original had the nasty working title The Babysitter Murders. But for Jamie Lee Curtis, the star of both films, talking about her character, Laurie Strode, means also addressing #MeToo and PTSD and ways of connecting the horror genre—which, despite its unprecedented box-office ascendance, she knows to be disreputable—with healing. Take the panel she did at this summer’s San Diego Comic-Con, in which she revealed that Laurie, 40 years later the lone survivor of a trio of teenage girls, would now be a prepper with an arsenal of weapons, justifiably paranoid that the bogeyman, Michael Myers, would return and aiming to “take back the narrative of her…

THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG, very wrong, with Israeli testicles. A few years ago, an army major named Hagai Levine began to be concerned. Israeli men were growing tumors on their gonads at a record clip—rates had doubled since the 1980s—and no one knew why. It wasn’t just the tumors; Israeli men were having trouble making babies, too. A few decades earlier, when infertile couples went for treatment at the country’s clinics, roughly one in four were diagnosed with problems stemming from the would-be dads. More recent data showed this proportion had risen to one-half. And while Israel’s population had been growing overall—its fertility rate exceeds that of any other wealthy nation—it was also true that Israelis run through more cycles of in vitro fertilization than any other people in the…

I COVERED JEWELRY AS AN EDITOR in New York for over 12 years, which means I’ve seen many, many beautiful things. But now that I’m removed from it all (I left for Northern California a couple of years ago), James de Givenchy’s pieces (taffin.com; price upon request) are the ones I go back to. He would save a stone for years—like, 20 years in the safe—until he felt it had the right life for itself. What I like about the ceramic element is that it adds a bit of whimsy to a piece of jewelry that would otherwise be so serious—you have a major stone paired with something that’s a notch or two down. But they still feel timeless to me: I’ve sent friends to get wedding rings from him.…

NOT LONG AFTER the birth of my child, I learned that if I ever again hoped to have any time to myself, beyond the walls of the diaper-exploding apartment, it would have to be in the early morning. I began to take walks along the Hudson River greenway at 4 a.m. As the temperatures plummeted, so too did my hopes of maintaining this meditative ritual. That is, until I had the chance to interview a landscape painter named Ellen Altfest. She told me about her beloved Himalayan Suit, and how its 800-fill goose-down insulation served to make a February cold snap feel like an autumn afternoon. She also revealed that it costs nearly $1,000. I could not justify such an expense—my job did not require me to be in, say,…

LIKE MOST CATS, my two tabbies are relatively low-maintenance creatures—besides some irritating behaviors that remind me they aren’t too far removed on the evolutionary chain from their feline ancestors. These include their natural desire to perch at high elevation, such as on the edge of my shelf full of easily shattered wineglasses. I’ve bought multilevel cat trees at big-box pet stores before, which the cats have used, but their ugly beige carpeting and cardboard, which ended up strewn across the floor, left much to be desired. I first discovered Pet Tree Houses in the pages of Cat Fancy—yes, I was a longtime subscriber of a feline-dedicated monthly—and learned that they’d won the magazine’s editors’ choice six times. Further research revealed that the trees are handcrafted by a woman named Shelley…

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, I attended the glamorous wedding of a beloved friend, the writer Nana-Ama Danquah, in Ghana. Nana-Ama arranged for one of her chic cousins to escort foreign wedding guests to Accra’s best dealer in kente cloth, a modest storefront behind which we examined an array of colored fabrics that would put any rainbow to shame. One of the largest pieces of cloth, made of silk and cotton, was the one with colors that sang to me; at $2,000, it was also one of the most expensive. Pink, green, yellow, and white, it fairly glittered on the counter. It had come from the Akan people of the Ashanti Kingdom. I dithered briefly, solicited comments from the other wedding guests, then decided to go for it. I knew that it…

THREE YEARS AGO, when my husband returned from a cycling trip in Italy, what he seemed to spend the most time talking about was not the beauty of the Tuscan hills but the shower he had in the Munich airport. Because he’d gotten a rare upgrade to a business-class seat, he had been granted access to the Lufthansa Senator Lounge, where he waited out a layover. Most Stateside lounges are fairly generic, offering the same bananas and bottled water—but the Lufthansa lounge, he told me with shining eyes, had a distinctly Teutonic flavor. He raved about the weisswurst, the pretzels and mustard, the Weihenstephaner wheat beer on tap. But what captivated him most were the showers. After signing in with a sturdy, gruff attendant dressed in clinical whites, he was…

THE ONLY thing greater than the number of obscure regional Italian pastas is the desire among Italophile chefs to discover an unheralded new one. That’s what happened to Hillary Sterling of Vic’s while she was traveling in Emilia-Romagna a few years ago. There, at the venerable Trattoria La Buca in Zibello, was something called occhi: round, elegant little ravioli served in brodo. Since then, Sterling has served a brothless version at Vic’s filled with everything from chicken liver to potato and mascarpone. For a while, Sterling had the local monopoly on this bit of Emilia-Romagna arcana. But last month, her former A Voce boss Missy Robbins opened her Williamsburg pasta joint, Misi, and debuted her own ricotta-stuffed occhi. This is no mere coincidence. “Missy and I were traveling together,” says…

IT’S A FEW DAYS into filming the first episode of Jane the Virgin’s final season, and the show is on location at a cemetery in Los Angeles’s Morningside Park. Extras wander the grounds in elaborate Day of the Dead makeup. In the distance, striding briskly among the palm trees and headstones, is Jane’s showrunner, Jennie Snyder Urman, absorbed in a thick packet of paper. She’s approving the final script for the season’s second episode, occasionally popping over to weigh in on the minutiae of the set. How much greenery should we see in the bouquet? How long should a young actress pause before turning her head? But Urman still has to get through this script, which she absolutely cannot do while sitting still. In the three days I spend with…

Private Life Alice Tully Hall, October 3 Tamara Jenkins’s first film since The Savages features Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti struggling to make or adopt babies (see “Encounter” in this issue). Roma Alice Tully Hall and Walter Reade Theater, October 5 and 6 Alfonso Cuarón’s story of a middle-class Mexico City family has blown everyone away. If Beale Street Could Talk Apollo Theater, October 9; Alice Tully Hall, October 11 Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel has lush romance on top and hyperrealistic despair just beneath the surface. The Other Side of the Wind Alice Tully Hall, October 10 Was there a movie in the pieces Orson Welles left behind for his semi-autobiographical story of an aged director (played by John Huston)? Something has been cut together. At Eternity’s…