Innholdsfortegnelse for May 13-26, 2019 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s cover story, Ezra Marcus and James D. Walsh reported on a group of college sophomores who fell under the destructive influence of their classmate’s father after he moved into their dorm (“The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence,” April 29–May 12). “This story is bananas on so many levels,” Jessica Valenti tweeted, “but I need to know how this dude was living in a Sarah Lawrence dorm and the school did … nothing?” The school’s alumni were particularly troubled. Jacklyn Grace Lacey tweeted, “I think I’m not the only one asking myself right now ‘What else happened on campus that I normalized or wasn’t visible because of particular energies of SLC’s people & places?’ ” Mitchell Sunderland wrote, “I hope @SarahLawrence hires more mental health experts. The…

THE GREAT HOUSEPLANT INVASION of our times has been dominated by the big three: the fiddle-leaf fig, Monstera deliciosa, and the ZZ. They are the “Allbirds” of the plant kingdom: familiar, innocuous, studiously generic. What’s the next—and perhaps more interesting—flora to take root in every sunlit, subway-tiled habitat? Consider the calamondin tree ($80, amazon.com), whose indoor dwarf version bears fruits that look like little oranges but function more like limes. “They’re super-sour—really good for drinks that would use a lime or lemon, or you can make marmalade with them,” says Karla Chandler-McCord, who curates the Warm Temperate Pavilion at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The trickiest challenge is getting them enough light (some fruit trees need as many as 12 hours of daily direct sun). And when you manage to harvest…

This is your first Cher concert? Yes. I became a true fan after seeing Mamma Mia 2, which I thought of more as Cher Featuring Mamma Mia. How’d you get ready? I studied a YouTube video of an Indonesian lady painting her face to look like Cher. Then I put on my wig, which I bought weeks ago in preparation. Did you get looks on the subway? Yes, but I dress up in full drag most Thursdays for RuPaul’s Drag Race, and I live in a stodgy building on the Upper East Side, so I’m used to old ladies glaring at me. I’ve even heard them whispering that I’m an alcoholic and am with a different guy every night. They’re right about the latter, except those guys are all gay.…

DAYTIME ART SPOTS “Massimo Valsecchi, one of Europe’s most prominent art collectors, bought Palazzo Butera (Via Butera 18) to exhibit his collection (which includes works by Gerhard Richter and Gilbert & George, plus site-specific pieces by Anne and Patrick Poirier) to the public.”—ANDREA MASU, artist in the Alterazioni collective “The Riso museum (Via Vittorio Emanuele 365), located inside a restored Baroque palazzo, has had shows from contemporary Italian artists like Giuseppe Veneziano. It’s in the pedestrianized part of the city, where everyone is out walking these days.” —FRANCESCA BORGHESE, co-founder of cultural-event series Cogito “The once-industrial area of Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa has film festivals and photo shows, and it’s home to ZAC (Via Paolo Gili 4), the center for contemporary art—now a magnet for local creatives. After events, people…

FIRST STOP Panineria Friggitoria Chiluzzo (Piazza Della Kalsa 7) “It’s very simple here—just a stand on the street—but they serve fantastic babbaluci, small snails with parsley, that locals love to eat, especially when threre’s a parade around July 15 for the festival of Santa Rosalia.” SECOND STOP Pani Ca’ Meusa Porta Carbone (Via Cala 62) “The owners make the city’s best pane con la milza, a Palermitan sandwich of veal offal that you order schietta (with lemon) or maritata con formaggio (with cheese). There’s an old-fashioned tiled counter and plastic chairs outside where you can eat with a view of the sea.” THIRD STOP Franco U’ Vastiddaru (Via Vittorio Emanuele 102) “This place is a classic for anything fried, but especially for pane con panelle, a sandwich filled with chickpea…

Anisette Frappe This elegant tray of espresso, club soda, and anisette shaken with sugar over pebble ice is meant to translate the Sambucaspiked caffè corretto into a refreshing aperitif. Aperol Spritz An aperitivi bar is not an aperitivi bar without an Aperol spritz. To keep the orangey-red thirst-quenchers flowing at a steady clip, they’re served here on tap. Bomboloni Italian doughnuts filled with Nutella, pastry cream, or raspberry jam and about the size of a Dunkin’ Munchkin. Bottled Cocktails Americanos, Americano Biancos, and Boulevardiers are ready to drink. Cestino in Legno Unusually handsome trash bins are positioned barside for customer convenience. Cinghialino The iron baby-boar’s head comes from Sodi’s hometown of Barberino di Mugello. (“For good luck,” says Williams.) Dirty Doilies Lace doilies crocheted by a Signora Crespi in Milan…

WRITING COMEDY is not a scientific or mathematical endeavor—except, perhaps, when it comes to devising ways to insult Jonah Ryan, who is played by the extremely tall (six-foot-four) and thin Timothy Simons. “The Jonah insults are probably the most math-y of the insults [we write],” says David Mandel, “because there we are using insulting words hung around the frame of something that’s large or tall or big.” As writer Billy Kimball puts it, “You could make a category of things that are longer than they are wide, and then add an adjective that makes something disgusting more disgusting.” Bam! You’ve got a Jonah insult. The writers keep a running list of all the Jonah put-downs that haven’t been used, either because they got edited out or were suggested but didn’t…

FOR MOVIES IN THE PARK Movies Under the Stars, through June 29 The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment program returns, screening films like Incredibles 2 (May 17 and 18) and Creed II (May 31). FOR SAILORS Fleet Week New York, May 22 to 28 For the 31st year, the city welcomes five U.S. Navy ships, three U.S. Coast Guard cutters, four U.S. Naval Academy Yard patrol boats, one Military Sealift Command ship, and two Royal Canadian Navy vessels. WHEN THE BEACH BECKONS City beaches reopen for swimming on May 25. FOR A HIGHBROW PICNIC Shakespeare in the Park, opens May 21 The Public Theater’s free series begins with Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Tony winner Kenny Leon.…

April 18, 1937: Julia Nussenbaum, a young Juilliard-trained violinist who performed under the name Tania Lubova, was killed with a claw hammer in a Times Square rehearsal studio. The murderer turned out to be a theatrical booker named Mischa Ross, who had been interested in her romantically and would be classified today as a stalker. He was caught the next day—admitting he’d done it but saying she had hit him first—and was later sentenced to 35 years in Sing Sing. In this photo, a detective points out a smear of blood where Nussenbaum’s dying body had been dragged across the rehearsal-room floor.…

May 17, 1937: The driver of this car—who, we can assume from the empty bottles, had been drinking—crashed his automobile into another at the intersection of South Portland and Fulton Streets in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The impact knocked this car into the path of a trolley, flipping the automobile over and crushing it. One passenger, Nelson Wilson, age 24, was killed; the driver and several other riders were hurt. The New York Evening Journal turned it into a lesson, writing, “Look at the pictures again, Mr. Motorist, and remember those empty bottles,” under the headline GRIM REAPER THUMBS A LIFT WHEN YOU ‘GO TO TOWN.’…

INSTEAD OF A PONYTAIL PALM Dracaena Marginata This vertical plant brings visual impact without getting in the way. It’s toxic to animals, but needs just a weekly watering and indirect sunlight. INSTEAD OF A FIDDLE-LEAF FIG Ficus Audrey Rebecca Bullene, owner of Greenery Unlimited, says, “The Ficus Audrey is more adept with filtered light, which is common in cities.” INSTEAD OF A REGULAR ZZ Raven ZZ Developed by Costa Farms, it won Best New Plant at the 2018 Tropical Plant International Expo. “Like its green brother, easy to care for,” says Erin Harding of cleverbloom.com. INSTEAD OF A BIRD-OF-PARADISE Dwarf Banana Tree “The bird-of-paradise can grow unmanageably tall indoors,” says plant writer Jeannie Phan, so go with this small-space-friendly banana tree. INSTEAD OF A PILEA PEPEROMIOIDES Calathea Orbifolia Vanessa Chinga-Haven…

UNTIL FAIRLY RECENTLY, tourists treated the somewhat crumbling seaside city of Palermo as a mere touchdown between other Sicilian destinations: the volcanic Aeolian Islands; the coastal, cobblestoned city of Cefalù; the Greek temples of Agrigento. Spend a night there and get out as quickly as you can. But now they’re deciding to stay a while. The Italian government selected the city as its capital of culture for 2018, and the same year Palermo hosted the Manifesta art festival, boosting its tourist numbers by 10 percent. Meanwhile, the Mafia’s stultifying grip on the city has continued to loosen in the wake of the collective outrage over the murders of judges Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone in 1992. The organization no longer controls local politics and law enforcement and has mostly ceded…

The Mafia in decline More than 20 years ago, a rebellion against the Mafia’s stranglehold produced grassroots movements like Addiopizzo, which united over 1,000 establishments in their refusal to pay the pizzo, or bribe. While the movement took a while to gain traction, one-third fewer Sicilian businesses now pay the pizzo than in the ’90s. The Mafia still has a presence in the city, but it’s been weakened enough so that residents and businesses are able to thrive. The immigrant-friendly mayor Recent elections put anti-immigrant nationalists at the center of Italian politics, but this has only strengthened the city’s resolve to welcome foreigners. Mayor Leoluca Orlando has rejected the xenophobic proposals put forth by the Lega party’s nationalist leader, Matteo Salvini, defying his call for closed borders by inviting rescued…

Artifact-Hunt in Mozia 1.5 hours by bus and shuttle boat The first place the Phoenicians settled in Sicily nearly 3,000 years ago. Visit the Whitaker Museum and its famously beautiful Greek statue from the fifth century B.C., the Mozia Charioteer, and the Tasca D’Almerita vineyard, whose profits help maintain the island. Take the bus from Palermo to Marsala and then another bus to the ferry dock, where a shuttle boat takes you on the five-minute trip to the island. Snorkel Around Ustica 1.5 hours by boat Far less known than the nearby Aeolian Islands, Ustica is closer to Palermo and surrounded by state-protected crystalline waters. The beaches of Scoglitti, Cala Sidoti, and the white-cliff-enclosed Piscine are favorites for swimming and snorkeling. Stop into Rosso di Sera for locally caught seafood,…

THE TABLE READ for the final episode of Veep hasn’t started yet, but the cast is already in tears. ¶ It’s the first Monday in December, and Anna Chlumsky, who plays Amy Brookheimer, the perpetually stressed-out political adviser, is weepy as she hugs colleagues near the bagel spread outside the writers’ room, which is located on the second floor of the two-level Martin Building on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. Timothy Simons, otherwise known as Jonah Ryan, the former White House flunky who became a congressman and then a presidential candidate, is inside, thumbing through the script. He has cried, by his count, three times today. When Julia Louis-Dreyfus—who plays the show’s central power-hungry politician, Selina Meyer—arrives, she’s dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “Oh God,” she says, noticing…

VEEP AIRDATE: May 13, 2012 Senator Bill O’Brien calls for a border wall because his Arizona constituents feel “outnumbered in their own country.” REAL-LIFE EVENT: June 16, 2015 Donald Trump says he is running for president and that he will build a “great, great wall” between the U.S. and Mexico. VEEP AIRDATE: May 4, 2014 Dan tells Jonah he owes his D.C. career to family connections—“because your uncle is Donald Chump.” REAL-LIFE EVENT: November 8, 2016 Donald Trump is elected the 45th president of the United States of America. VEEP AIRDATE: June 8, 2014 Just before Selina is sworn in, a headline announces that Kim Kardashian has taken a selfie with Selina’s daughter. REAL-LIFE EVENT: May 30, 2018 Kim Kardashian discusses criminal-justice reform with Trump. They take a skin-crawlingly awkward…

THE CULTURAL DEBT owed to Joseph Heller’s antiwar satire, Catch-22, becomes clearer when you watch Hulu’s handsomely produced miniseries. It feels familiar, even old hat, because so many subsequent works have borrowed from it. The alphabet-soup acronyms and Marx Brothers malaprops; the “Who’s on first?”–style nonsense conversations; the frat-house slapstick alternating with homosocial tenderness and fathomless horror; the baseline cynicism about whether any war, no matter how nobly justified, can ever be classified as “good.” These and other elements were integral to M*A*S*H, Apocalypse Now, and Full Metal Jacket, and they resonate in recent works like Sorry to Bother You, Atlanta, Archer, Patriot, and the recent HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which showed how the human tendencies toward tribalism, greed, and ass-covering can make anything worse, even a nuclear accident. So in…

LESS THAN TWO MINUTES into our interview, Ani DiFranco says the word fuck for the first time, and it sounds like music. Her f is fricative and percussive, much like DiFranco’s habit of thwacking the side of her acoustic guitar as she plays it. Then comes the vowel sound, which has a gentle lilt that mirrors the way DiFranco sings: in dulcet tones that sometimes release a guttural growl. We’re sitting at a corner table in the Standard Hotel on Cooper Square. Geographically, we’re not far from where DiFranco lived in the East Village for much of her late teens and early 20s, but spiritually the posh café is as far away as you can get from her scene in the 1990s—the decade when she was a vital component of…

May 15, 1937: Helen Tiernan, a single mother of two, was trying to get her boyfriend, a Greek immigrant named George Christodulus—a.k.a. George Christie—to marry her. George (in black hat) didn’t want the kids. So Helen (seen in inset detail, in light-colored coat) told her children they were going on a picnic, took them into the Long Island woods, stabbed both, and set her daughter afire. The girl, who was 7 and also named Helen, died; the son, Jimmy, age 4, survived. The elder Helen got 20 years to life. Her confession let George off the hook, whereupon he was put up for deportation back to Greece. Jimmy went to a foster home. The kids peering into the car are jeering at George after his arrest.…

PRUNING SHEARS Okatsune 103 Bypass Pruner ($36, amazon.com ) Caleb Leech at the Met Cloisters Museum prefers Japanese shears with a latch lock to those with “dial locks.” PRESSURIZED MISTER Solo One-Hand Sprayer ($15, amazon.com ) For a house full of plants, Marc Hachadourian of New York Botanical Garden suggests a “pump style.” ANTI-PEST LADYBUGS Bug Sales Live Ladybugs ($5 for 1,500, amazon.com ) Krissie Nagy of gardening company BK Bumpkin recommends releasing live ladybugs to fight off aphids. CHOPSTICKS Kitchen Art Korean Chopsticks ($6, amazon.com ) “For loosening soil before you water—it’s a thing in the Instagram community,” says “plantfluencer” Darryl Cheng. WORM ALTERNATIVE Unco Industries Fertilizer ($10, amazon.com…

The Botanical Garden “The Orto Botanico [botanical garden] perfectly encapsulates the spirit of Palermo—plants from all over the world were once acclimated here before being sent all over Europe. It was imagined by a Jacobin Frenchman, Léon Dufourny, who came to study Greek architecture in Sicily in the late 1700s, as many architects did. Once you pass through the templelike neoclassical welcome building, you can stroll through greenhouses filled with impossibly lush vegetation, wander through the palm garden dotted with carved marble figures, and marvel at the enormous drooping limbs of the Australian banyan tree here.” The Trio of Baroque Churches “To understand Sicilian Baroque, there are three churches along Via Torremuzza in the historical quarter of Kalsa—Santa Teresa Alla Kalsa, Santa Maria Della Pietà, and the Noviziato dei Crociferi.…

$ OLIVELLA BED & BREAKFAST  olivellabb.it, from $50 “This homey five-room B&B that’s housed in a former silver factory manages to feel modern while also maintaining a lot of original details, like heirloom bed frames, tiled floors, and frescoed ceilings. Plus it’s very central, located right by Teatro Massimo.” —EDOARDO ZAFFUTO, Addiopizzo Travel founder $$ PIAZZA BORSA  piazzaborsa.it, from $125 “Yes, there’s the five-star Villa Igeia, but it’s far from the center. Piazza Borsa is four stars; it’s right by Quattro Canti and in the erstwhile 19th-century stock-exchange building, which has a courtyard and a fountain.” —DOMENICO ARONICA, Palermo Walking Tour $$$ PALAZZO NATOLI  palazzonatoli.com, from $175 “Palermo’s weak spot is its luxury-hotel offerings, but there are small boutique hotels opening to fill the gap, like the…

SEASON ONE Selina Meyer is early in her term as vice-president under President Stuart Hughes, with whom she has little contact. When she fires a Secret Service officer for smiling, the White House investigates, prompting Selina’s staff to release a massive email dump that seems transparent but withholds some key embarrassing facts. Ultimately, her chief of staff becomes the scapegoat for the Secret Service debacle. SEASON TWO Selina is eyeing a potential presidential run but tries to keep it to herself. First she has to deal with a government shutdown and a scandal over a presidential cover-up involving a recently freed hostage in Uzbekistan who was actually working as a spy. As the word impeachment starts being whispered—“I hate impeachments. They’re so ’90s,” says Selina—President Hughes decides he won’t seek…

Who is your favorite Veep character? PETE BUTTIGIEG: Gary. It’s hard to watch, but the bizarre form of loyalty he represents is also hard to look away from because of how it mixes the endearing with the contemptible. ERIC SWALWELL: Richard. Which character is most like someone you know in Washington? BUTTIGIEG: I can think of quite a few people like Ben—under no illusions yet unable to stay away. SWALWELL: Ben. Could Selina Meyer beat Trump in 2020? BUTTIGIEG: Tough to say—they would be well matched. There’s the same level of cynicism and self-orientation—and with both of them, the burning but unanswerable question is the same: Is the president in on the joke? SWALWELL: You mean could China beat Russia? Where does Veep rank among political shows? BUTTIGIEG: The best…

“In my new play, the wonderful Susan Sarandon plays the role I usually write for myself—a troubled, funny, self-hating, arrogant protagonist. These are my favorite types of characters, and I think they’re best presented in theater, where we can’t look away. A few plays are just ending, like Halley Feiffer’s The Pain of My Belligerence, and Clubbed Thumb’s Plano. I’m looking forward to Heidi Schreck’s political opus, What the Constitution Means to Me (The Hayes Theater, through August 24), and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater’s Lockdown (through May 19), which fuses theater with issues of social justice.”…