Innholdsfortegnelse for March 4-17, 2019 i New York Magazine

1 In New York’s most recent issue, Justin Davidson surveyed Hudson Yards, “a privatized idyll, where the concept of public good stops at the property line,” and Carl Swanson introduced us to the developer behind it, Stephen Ross (“I Have a Feeling We’re Not in New York Anymore,” February 18–March 3). James A. Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, explained, “Dripping with irony in this Amazonian age is the fact that there has been no public outcry over Hudson Yards. This monument to excess and elitism courtesy of Related and other mega-developers benefits from billions in public subsidies and tax breaks. The biggest billionaire developer on the dole, Stephen Ross’s Related, has been waging war on construction…

HERE, IN BRIEF, is Rob Delaney’s last five years: He moved his family from Los Angeles to London to take a chance on a new job, a TV show he expected would get canceled in six months. It turned out to be pretty much universally beloved, and Delaney, who had spent a decade working under the radar, saw his career reach fantastic new heights. His face was on billboards and subway ads. Just when things could not be going any better, his youngest son, Henry, fell ill before his 1st birthday. Delaney took him to doctor after doctor until a specialist discovered that Henry had a malignant brain tumor. He had surgery to remove it and spent over a year in the hospital recovering. Then, the tumor returned. In January…

THE PLAYERS AOC You’ve heard of her. • BERNIE SANDERS Him too. • JULIA SALAZAR The then-27-year-old DSA member who ran to represent Bushwick and Williamsburg in the State Senate. Contrary to her campaign literature, she was not an immigrant, did not grow up poor, did not graduate from Columbia, and may have once tried to impersonate the ex-wife of Keith Hernandez in a voice message. She won anyway. • DSA Founded in 1982 by anti-poverty crusader Michael Harrington, the group sought to influence the Democratic Party from the “left wing of the possible.” A marginal group at best until its membership exploded to 50,000 after Trump’s election. • JUSTICE DEMOCRATS The PAC pushing the Democratic Party to the left by primarying boring, white incumbents in safe blue districts. It is copying the tea…

THE SUN HAD JUST SET, and before heading home, Ramaine Hill kissed his girlfriend, Kaprice, and hugged their 2-year-old son, RJ. He hopped on his nephew’s BMX bike, which he rode standing up since it was too small for his five-foot-11 frame. He always listened to music, mostly Lil Wayne that summer of 2013, and so he put in his earbuds. This was when Ramaine felt most at peace. By himself, with his music. He began the three-block ride home. A sleepy-eyed, open-faced 22-year-old, Ramaine had a quiet demeanor, a shyness. He felt uncomfortable around people he didn’t know well, which included just about everyone except for his family and Kaprice. One time, when his grandfather, whom he’d never met, visited, Ramaine disappeared upstairs, slipped onto the roof, and left…

WHETHER WE’RE ORDERING copper pots from Amazon Prime, pho on Caviar, or grenache from any one of those subway-advertised wine-delivery start-ups, New Yorkers are really just a couple of apps away from being complete shut-ins. And yet there’s still so much to do in this town—like sampling garammasala-spiked lamb chops in Long Island City, trying on leopard-print Alaïa coats in the Seaport, sipping fresh-pressed sake in Industry City, and scrambling up the city’s tallest rock-climbing walls in Bushwick. (You’ll find those and more here in our yearly best-of review.) If that’s not enough to lure you out of the house, a slew of great drop-by services is available too: Redo your bedroom with block-print sticker wallpaper, book a visit from an energy healer, or, for those in need of hand-holding,…

Gen-Z Garb DEPOP 168 Mott St., nr. Broome St.; 646-609-4311 The front of Depop—the brick-and-mortar iteration of the popular-with-the-kids resale appis dedicated to vintage wares from a curated group of vendors, which currently includes Nicole Saldaña, a shoe designer who sells secondhand on the side. The selection here is small but reasonably priced—and filled with treasures. One visit unearthed a vintage pearlescent Oscar de la Renta top for $110, a bright-yellow beaded purse for $65, and a smattering of narrow Prada and Armani sunglasses (from $95). The back of the shop is something different altogether: a fully functioning studio where Depop sellers can photograph their wares against a white brick wall or, if they prefer, paper backdrops in pretty much any color. And since it’s 2019, several Instagrammable features are…

Museum-Quality Upholsterer H&A UPHOLSTERY 800-341-8776 When a Met curator needed to spruce up a 19th-century Biedermeier sofa and the Brooklyn Museum acquired an Isamu Noguchi “cloud” sofa in a slight state of disrepair, they called up Hector and Ana Barbacone’s Brooklyn Heights–based H&A Upholstery. They’re also beloved among big design firms, like textile giant Cowtan & Tout. While this family business is known mostly for “fancier” work—like salvaging horsehair antiques—it’s equally great at breathing new life into thrift-found footstools and mid-century Scandinavian club chairs. With your own fabric, a dining chair starts at $120, and a three-seat camelback sofa might go for $2,500. Sticker-Wallpaper Applier MERENDA WALLPAPER 646-431-2472 Sticker wallpaper—for those who don’t want to commit or pay a premium for expensive sheets of the regular stuff—has seen a boom…

Americanah , by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie “Seeing myself in a book is … uncommon. Americanah, though, is where I saw an undeniable version of myself in the pages.” CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, QUEENIE (GALLERY/SCOUT PRESS; MARCH 19) Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott “I’ve been revisiting novels that I loved when I was a kid but as an adult have read very differently. Today I see the influences of Alcott’s father, a major figure in transcendentalism and a seriously pathetic money manager.” LISA SEE, THE ISLAND OF SEA WOMEN (SCRIBNER) We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby “Samantha Irby is one of our country’s most fierce and foulmouthed authors, whose literary takes on sex, family, and the body are singularly unique in their comedic…

ERIC LEVITZ: Jon, three years ago you wrote an article titled “Reminder: Liberalism Is Working, and Marxism Has Always Failed.” Bhaskar, you’ve spent your entire adult life arguing something close to the opposite. So I thought we could start by discussing whether liberalism has proved itself adequate to our nation’s current challenges. JONATHAN CHAIT: Liberalism is a somewhat unique American term to describe a center-left that sees itself between socialism and laissez-faire. It’s a term that has run from the Progressive Era or arguably the New Deal to the present day and that advocates social and economic pluralism through a mixed economy. Over time, American politics has swung between that vision and an anti-government politics that defends existing social hierarchies. The country has moved closer to the former view,…

PETER BOGDANOVICH is often held up as a cautionary tale of Hollywood arrogance, Icarus with big frames and a neckerchief. In a hurry since adolescence, at 16 he talked his way into acting classes with Stella Adler; at 20, he persuaded Clifford Odets to let him direct one of his plays Off Broadway; and he went on to befriend and write about the golden-age movie directors he idolized, like Orson Welles, John Ford, and William Wyler. As soon as Bogdanovich became a director in his own right, his self-assurance didn’t endear him to some of the town’s young auteurs or old legends. “I don’t judge myself on the basis of my contemporaries,” he told the New York Times in 1971. “I judge myself against the directors I admire—Hawks, Lubitsch, Buster…

Pizza Slice JOE & PAT’S 168 First Ave., nr. 10th St. 212-677-4992 Getting a slice of pizza used to be a breeze. With the exception of Di Fara, where the waits were epic (and still are), you got your grease fix with a minimal amount of effort and hardly any wear and tear on your feet and your psyche. That’s changed. Now the trend in pizza slices is toward pain and suffering. If you want to tuck into a slab from Prince Street or Paulie Gee’s or Upside or Mama’s Too!, you’ve got to get in line like a Black Tap–milkshake addict, then fight for a sliver of space in which to eat it. Sure, the quality has improved, but what price pepperoni slice? The antidote to this masochistic movement…

Roving Wine-and-Dance Party SANTÉ MOTHERF*CKERS Follow @santemf for dates and locations At this juncture in New York nightlife, there’s plenty of natural wine to drink and plenty of electro-disco to dance to, but rarely can you do both at once—unless you find yourself at a Santé Motherf*ckers pop-up party. Jules Dressner of Louis/Dressner wine importers, who is close to the Four Horsemen–DFA Records crew, throws the party every two months or so at rotating venues like Chinatown lounge Mr. Fong’s or Easy Lover in Williamsburg. He usually mans the turntables, while co-host and wine rep Tess Drumheller bartends from tubs of funky pét-nat, orange, or glouglou red wines, fueling a dancingin-your-friend’s-living-room feeling that you don’t get with a Budweiser-and-shots crowd. Indoor Soccer SOCCEROOF 14B 53rd St., nr. First Ave., Sunset…

IN THE WINTER of 2015, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris decided to write Slave Play as a bit of a dare. He was at a holiday party in Prospect Heights, where he got into a heated debate with a group of writers about “erotics, desire, and who gets to own fantasy.” One of them, a straight white guy, said he had recently enjoyed enacting a rape fantasy with a partner. Feeling his Socratic self, Harris decided to troll him. “You could rape anyone, any day,” he said. “You probably have raped someone. What does that mean that you’re owning this?” Then he took it further, asking if the guy would feel the same about rape play if his partner were black. “Everything got really tense for everyone,” Harris recalls. “I…

WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME begins previews at the Helen Hayes Theater on March 14 and will open on March 31. In late 2018, when Heidi Schreck’s play What the Constitution Means to Me was produced at New York Theatre Workshop, New York’s drama critic, Sara Holdren, called it the best thing she’d reviewed all year. It’s an unusual drama—mostly a monologue in which Schreck recounts her life as a teenage debater in American Legion competitions and intertwines those experiences with those of her adult self. Tony Kushner, the world-spinning playwright best known for Angels in America, appears to have agreed with our critic, because he’s seen it three times. In advance of Constitution’s transfer to Broadway, Kushner and Schreck spoke with Holdren about the play and its reverberations…

IN 2010, THE WRITER Hugh Ryan, incensed by the Smithsonian’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from display, created the Pop Up Museum of Queer History in his Bushwick loft. The experiment was enough of a success (and a fire hazard—the police shut it down on opening night when 300 people showed up) that Ryan was inspired to dig deeper into his adopted borough’s own gay history. His research became the new book When Brooklyn Was Queer. The story starts with Walt Whitman’s depictions of gay cruising in Leaves of Grass, likely the first in American letters, and continues through to the queering of Sands Street between the World Wars and the demolition of landmarks of gay life during Robert Moses’s construction of the BQE in…

Are you a socialist? In America, yes. In Denmark, no. What issue do you care most about? Our broken and unjust food system and its catastrophic impact on the environment. What’s your biggest problem with the Democratic party? There’s nothing democratic about two huge parties keeping other parties out of the conversation. Politics shouldn’t be a sports match. What did you talk about? I was pretty lit. Um … let’s see, we talked about how I wanted to meet more cool guys who don’t want to talk about Pod Save America. What did you talk about at the party? I did the dating game. The first question was a “Kill Fuck Marry”: Fuck Mao, marry Marx, and kill Lenin. What did you talk about? One of my friends was commenting…

HETEROFLEXIBLE, 23, HE/HIM. LibSoc, currently in poly relationship with 27F. Seeking partner(s) 20–28 to make vegan food w/ and build Mad Max -style warband if we can’t stop climate change from ending the Earth. DM me the story of how you got radicalized. NYC. 21, SHE/HER, DYKE, SOCIALIST, WEEPYGEMINI.Looking to evade neoliberal expectations by writhing in bed, talking w/o goals/motives. Will give back scratches, emotional advice. Ideal partner: woke w/o moralizing, h8s cap’ism, plans to fight it. 21, GAY MAN, MARXIST LENINIST, CURRENT ENGLISH LIT MAJOR. And house show fiend. big fan of midwest emo, skrams, and validation. vegan if it comes to that. looking to be more than comrades. PA. U CAN’T SPELL BDSM WOUT BDS! Libertarian socialist (28, she/her) seeks similar (27–35, he/him) to join forces against nonconsensual…

1 Borislav Bogdanovich (1899–1970) was also a pianist. At 33, he met Peter’s mother, Herma, when she was his 13-year-old piano student. 2 Roger Corman hired Bogdanovich to create a film using mostly old footage of Boris Karloff. Bogdanovich made 1968’s Targets, about a Vietnam vet who goes on a shooting spree. 3 Leachman and Johnson won Oscars for Best Supporting Actress and Actor in The Last Picture Show (beating Burstyn and Jeff Bridges). In her speech, Leachman thanked “Rose Lorenz, my dancing teacher in Des Moines,” but not Bogdanovich or the Academy. 4 Citizen Kane (and Welles) won only one Oscar, for Best Original Screenplay. 5 Bogdanovich and Platt maintained a fragile détente through two more films after their split. “I’ve offered him a divorce,” Platt told the New…

IN THE SPIRIT OF DESIGNATING BESTS, here’s a peek at the top 100 restaurants in New York according to nymag.com’s brand-new numerical rating system, the Thousand Best. There’s a lot of great food out there, and to make it easier for you to find, we’ve painstakingly created a dynamic, searchable list of our favorite spots, ranked on a scale of 1 (Unfortunate) to 100 (Nirvana). Find critical opinions about the restaurants listed below—plus 900 more excellent places to eat and drink—at nymag.com/listings/search.…

Head Spa HEAD SPA AT MASA.KANAI 570 Columbus Ave., nr. 88th St. 917-409-2432 Often compared to a facial, but for your scalp, the popular-in-Japan “head spa” has recently made its way to the U.S. One of its main proselytizers, Ritsuko Borges, has been kneading, cleansing, and steaming happy heads in the back room of an Upper West Side salon since last March. The Ayurvedainfluenced massage-slash-cleanse is meant to stimulate blood flow and in turn help balance scalps dealing with dandruff, psoriasis, or hair loss. Borges, who did all this for about a decade in Japan, starts by rubbing her client’s head with a wandlike doodad that projects a magnified image of the scalp onto a computer screen in all its damaged, often yellowed glory. She then creates a cleansing concoction…