Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2-15, 2019 i New York Magazine

1 In “Our Lesser Islands” (August 19–September 1), photographer Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao and writer Robert Sullivan explored the overlooked islands of New York Harbor. Many readers were intrigued to learn more about our urban archipelago, with Whitney Hurst tweeting, “I had a view of U Thant Island [which was featured on the cover] for years and never knew the whole story behind it.” Gregg D. Merksamer called the feature “a truly fascinating window into city places most 21st-century Gothamites never see or even think about unless they’re seafarers.” Others added their own New York–island knowledge: @antisocialite wrote, “Hart Island was also part of Season 2 of @poseonfx. Many who passed during the AIDS epidemic were buried there when their bio families wouldn’t claim them and their chosen families couldn’t. Another…

IT’S A WILDFIRE-HOT AUGUST afternoon in Topanga Canyon, the air so dry and still you can practically hear the sagebrush gathering itself for the conflagration. Everyone’s gulping down great lashings of CBD water, including Renée Zellweger, who can’t hydrate fast enough. We have been hanging out now for nearly two hours on the patio of Topanga Living, a little café that’s one of Zellweger’s regular joints. ¶ As she heads inside for more supplies—bottles of turmeric juice, tea, and more fancy water—a young dude a couple of tables away leans over. “I don’t mean to make this weird,” he says, “but is that Renée Zellweger?” The actress, meanwhile, has stopped to talk to a lesbian couple with a tiny dog sitting near the door. They are earnest in the extreme…

No.1 For ambitious entrepreneurs, Stanford isn’t just a college; it’s the mother of all tech incubators. “I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of more friends starting companies than have gotten mononucleosis.” —JULIAN ALVAREZ, CLASS OF ’17, M.A. IN PHILOSOPHY ’19 “By the time you got to 200-level classes, sometimes your classes were fully or partially funded by companies. In CS 210, a class where you built applications in partnership with companies, after the second quarter of working on the project, you could fly out to present to them (if they weren’t located in the Bay).” —CS MAJOR, CLASS OF ’16 “VCs actively reach out to students who are known to be very good CS majors.” —SYMBOLIC-SYSTEMS MAJOR, CLASS OF ’17 No. 2 For start-ups, there’s money everywhere. “At one CS event,…

Seat Belt Jim Lambie, a Glasgow-based contemporary artist who has shown his mixed-media sculptures everywhere from the Museum of Modern Art to the New Museum to Tate Britain, handcrafted the belts that form this chair out of steel and acrylic paint. Hermaphroditee This hanging chair, which visitors can sit inside with their legs hanging out, was fashioned out of gypsum by Rogan Gregory, a clothing designer turned sculptor who focuses on biomorphic and geologic forms. Untitled Artist Katherine Bernhardt’s paintings prominently feature electric shades of pink and recurring 2-D-style imagery of parrots and bananas, so this vaguely tropical resin-and-fiberglass seat/objet feels right at home in her body of work.…

Tell me about your teddy bear. He’s the fluffiest of all my toys. Fluffy-Wuffy is his name. And I have another one named Fluffy. What’s on the agenda for the day? We prayed for all the human beings. I’m here with people from my Buddhist culture center in Queens. Every month, we do prayers, but it’s the same day as the picnic, so we just did it here. What’s in the bag? I brought a ham sandwich; my wife went with a bagel with cream cheese. We’re going to a Mets game today—we thought it was at one, but it’s actually at seven. So we’re going to eat it here on a park bench. What brought you to the park? My niece’s birthday. The whole family’s here, and they’re gossiping—it’s…

Big Tech’s Takeover Canada has courted highly skilled workers with fast-tracked visas since 2017, making it much easier for Silicon Valley staples like Uber, Amazon, and Google to set up shop in Toronto. According to a report by CBRE Group, Inc., the city’s tech sector is now ranked right behind San Francisco’s and Seattle’s. While some are praising Toronto’s position as a prime destination for engineers, others worry about its impact on homegrown businesses and housing costs. Gun Violence Toronto is on track to set a record for its highest number of shootings in a single year since 2004. A spike over the summer resulted in $4.5 million of government funding, an expanded task force on guns and gangs, and a growing debate over gun control. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau…

FOR MID-SIZE LIVE SHOWS The Phoenix Concert Theatre (410 Sherbourne St.) “This room can soar. The best show I saw here was actually Phoenix at the Phoenix when they were blowing up.” FOR NEW BANDS AND SAISONS Burdock (1184 Bloor St. W) “A place for musicians to try out tunes on a small stage. It serves its own beer, which is up there with the city’s best DIY breweries.” FOR THE BEST JUKEBOX IN TOWN Communist’s Daughter (1149 Dundas St. W) “Michael Johnson hosts a great Monday vinyl night. You play the A side of an album, and then he asks if people want to hear the B side or choose a mystery album. A classic Toronto evening.”…

IF YOU HAPPEN to be in Gramercy and find yourself craving ice cream or coffee, you could always dart into Danny Meyer’s Daily Provisions, or his Maialino, or head a couple blocks north to his Caffe Marchio. But Meyer is about to get some very friendly competition: His 26-year-old daughter Hallie is opening her own, unaffiliated café-bargelateria in the very same neck of the woods. The younger Meyer, who has cooked and worked in food-related ventures for much of her life, has apparently inherited the hospitality gene. “I always wanted to open an ice-cream shop,” says Hallie. She began as a hobbyist and started churning professionally last year at a Mott Haven pop-up near the elementary school where she was serving as an AmeriCorps volunteer. That led to debuts at…

MIKAELA STRAUS IS UPSTATE, riding a horse. She’d been scheduled for an interview right now, yet the information didn’t make its way to her. “I’m quite literally still at the barn,” she apologizes moments later over the phone, “but I could FaceTime you from my grandma’s house in 45 minutes?” The 20-year-old singer-songwriter who records as King Princess lives in L.A., and she’s currently visiting family in Saratoga Springs. Straus was raised in Brooklyn. Her father, sound engineer Oliver Straus, has a recording studio in Williamsburg, and her family is a storied New York one (her great-great-great-grandfather co-founded Macy’s and went down on the Titanic); she attended the private high school Avenues, next to the High Line. Straus grew up around music recording, so it’s a lucky thing she’s super-talented…

THEATER DIRECTOR Ivo van Hove isn’t known for small gestures in his often merciless productions. Blood rains from the ceiling. Wolves stalk across the stage. At 60 years old, van Hove, who is Belgian, has run the largest repertory theater in the Netherlands for 18 years while simultaneously staging hypermodern takes on classic plays, operas, and even novels and films around the world. This December, he’s bringing what he calls “a West Side Story for the 21st century” to Broadway. Is there something you’re always looking for in a project? I have a saying that if you were to look at every production again, you could see who I was when I was 20, who I was when I was 35, who I am now when I’m 60—very personal, and…

YOU MIGHT BE FORGIVEN for some skepticism upon hearing that this year’s would-be blockbuster was a first novel the author was born to write. But you can’t manufacture a birth name for the sake of book PR, and Lara Prescott came by hers honestly: Her parents were obsessed with Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s 1957 samizdat Soviet novel, which wedded a story of doomed love (between the doctor and Lara Antipova) with a political subplot so subversive no one in Pasternak’s homeland was allowed to read it. The Secrets We Kept is indeed the novel to which Knopf is pinning its hopes in 2019, with a 200,000-copy first printing, but Prescott, a 37-year-old former political consultant, didn’t imagine she was writing a book every publisher would want to buy. She just…

Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie (Random House; 9/3) To paraphrase the unnamed target of Rushdie’s satire, some people are saying this is the best Rushdie in a long time. The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese; 9/10) Hulu took its liberties with the adventures of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, but Atwood is at long last publishing her own sequel. The Booker Prize has already deemed it worthy of its 2019 long list. Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson (Riverhead; 9/17) A National Book Award finalist for adult fiction and a winner for children’s fiction, Woodson returns to the brownstone setting of her last adult novel, Another Brooklyn, for this intricate family drama. Sontag: Her Life and Work, by Benjamin Moser…

ONCE UPON A TIME, they were called radio dramas, and everyone tuned in. But television killed them off. Now they’re back in the form of fiction podcasts, which you can listen to whenever you want, wherever you are. The return of audio fiction storytelling was initially led by a DIY cottage industry, but as it’s become more popular, it’s become more corporate. Bigger entertainment companies have brought along marketing pull and star power—resulting in podcasts like Gimlet Media’s Homecoming, which starred Catherine Keener and Oscar Isaac, and QCODE’s Blackout, featuring Rami Malek. Radiotopia’s Passenger List is the product of these new ambitions. It’s a serialized fiction podcast series that revolves around a flight that goes missing over the Atlantic and the stories of the people onboard. While the show has an…

Patient Zero (New Hampshire Public Radio; 8/15) Fresh off Bear Brook, its thoughtful exercise in true crime, New Hampshire Public Radio’s narrative project is switching gears. With Patient Zero, host Taylor Quimby and producer Sam Evans-Brown will explore Lyme disease. Scam Goddess With Laci Mosley (Earwolf; 10/1) Scams, scams, scams: It’s true crime without the bodies (mostly). In each episode of this weekly podcast, Laci Mosley—a.k.a. Scam Goddess—will pair up with special guests to break down some of the world’s oldest and most enduring scams. The nature of humanity and human history—that’s a lot to go through. Moonface (Independent; 10/9) Created and directed by James Kim, the co-host of the wonderfully quirky The Competition, Moonface is a bilingual serialized audio dramedy that tells the story of Paul, a second-generation Asian-American…

AVEDON ADVERTISING will be published by Abrams on October 8. WE ALL KNOW THE Richard Avedon style of portraiture: pure-white backdrop, classical pose, a Kissinger or Monroe (or even a man covered with bees) before the lens. But he also shot thousands of advertisements, many in color, most very different from his editorial work. His first was for a department-store line, Salymil Junior by Milgrim, in 1944, and his last was for Harry Winston in 2004. In the American century—so named by Time and Life, where some of these ads appeared—Avedon was one of the principal figures who showed us how he and his clients thought it ought to look. According to the first survey of his ads, Ave-don Advertising (by Rebecca Arnold, James Martin, and Avedon’s daughter-in-law Laura Avedon),…

Class of ’17 Brex ($2.5b valuation) Class of ’13 Robinhood ($7.6b valuation) / DoorDash ($12.6b valuation) Class of ’11 Snapchat ($21b market capitalization) / GoodRx ($2.6b valuation) Class of ’10 Instagram (bought for $1b) Class of ’09 WhatsApp (bought for $21.8b) Class of ’08 Cloudera ($1.89b market cap) / Yammer (bought for $1.2b) Class of ’06 Zillow ($6.84b market cap) Class of ’05 YouTube (bought for $1.65b) Class of ’04 Palantir ($20b valuation) Class of ’02 LinkedIn (bought for $26.2b) Class of ’99 PayPal ($126b market cap) Class of ’98 Google ($809b market cap) / Akamai ($14.4b market cap)…

Bleached Denim Chair $1,300 at urbanoutfitters.com LikeMindedObjects, known for its squiggly floor lamps, produced this discarded-blue-jean chair for Urban Outfitters. Ruby Slipper Chair $180 at westelm.com While the dimensions and palette read slightly SpongeBob, this West Elm number feels blobby yet refined. Pillow Chair $1,500 at pillowchair.nyc Created by ASH NYC, the pillow chair is inspired by the Italian Riviera of the 1960s and made from Schumacher textiles. M’Afrique Shadowy Armchair $1,700 at store.moma.org This indoor-outdoor chair, whose tall back offers shade, was designed by Tord Boontje and fabricated from steel and woven wire at workshops in Dakar, Senegal. Stuffed Chair $2,500 at 1stdibs.com Katie Stout has been creating “stuffed chairs” like this one (with fabric, found materials, embroidery, and beading) for the past several years. Inflatable Empire Chair $26…

LONG CONSIDERED THE CENTER of Canada’s self-contained universe, Toronto has seen considerable growth, culturally and commercially, over the past decade. Or, to quote hometown hero Drake, “Shit is hot up in the 6 right now.” And not just because of the Raptors’ recent NBA championship or the Museum of Contemporary Art’s multimillion-dollar makeover. Researchers at Ryerson University declared Toronto the continent’s fastest-growing city earlier this summer, with new-arrival numbers (around 77,000 people last year) far outpacing those of Phoenix, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Seattle. But much like North America’s other top-ten cities in terms of population totals and pressing redevelopment plans (Houston, L.A., New York), Ontario’s capital is often caught between its steadfast ambition and looming concerns over affordability and sustainability. That doesn’t seem to be deterring residents from…

“A lot of pubs are near one another. One of the biggest is Real Sports Bar & Grill (15 York St.). It’s right by the Scotiabank Arena, where the Raptors and Maple Leafs play. They have TVs everywhere—even in the bathroom—so you won’t miss a thing. Nearby is the Rec Room (255 Bremner St.), which is a kind of arcade for adults. They hold something called Puck Talks. They’re intimate shoot-the-breeze sessions with former hockey players and insiders, usually about 30 minutes before the game starts.”…

Canal Street Oysters 380 Canal St. A stupendous limestone bar is the focal point of brothers Anthony and Tom Martignetti’s latest restaurant project. On the bar go oysters—Bluepoints, Wellfleets, Malpeques, Beausoleils, raw on the half-shell—plus whelks, clams, and sea urchin. John Dory Oyster Bar vet Charlene Santiago’s cooked dishes expand on the theme. There’s razor clams on the plancha, fried fish sticks, and squid-ink paella for two. The sprawling space, once home to live-music venue the Canal Room, was built for a crowd. Sept. Night Music 111 E. 7th St. Ravi DeRossi’s unceasing struggle to turn the East Village into a swinging vegan Shangri-La by means of opening assorted meat-and-dairy-free bars, restaurants, and lounges at a rate of about four per hour continues with Night Music, a vegan Indian restaurant…

EVERYBODY’S LIKE, ‘What’s your passion? What do you want to do?,’” Roselyn Keo tells me as she curls up on a big brown recliner at the SoJo Spa Club in Edgewater, New Jersey. “Honestly, my passion was just to make money.” Keo’s brain is an archive of all sorts of knowledge, which served her well in her former life: she knows credit cards inside and out—by color, by credit limit, maybe even by weight. She’s talking about credit cards the way some people talk about their favorite NBA team. It’s like in Casino, how Robert De Niro’s character knows the ways basketballs bounce on different kinds of wood, because it helps him make better bets. In 2014, Keo was convicted of drugging Wall Street guys, luring them into strip clubs,…

JEFF TWEEDY is aware that some fans think he made his best album 20 years ago, but he’s most proud of whatever he’s working on now. He’s especially proud of Ode to Joy, Wilco’s upcoming 11th album. It’s the first Wilco album in over a decade that has teeth. Baby teeth, but still: Listening to these aching, minimalist songs is like revisiting a growing pain you thought you took care of long ago that has come back in a new and frightening way. In honor of the old and new, here’s Tweedy engaging with some of the most and least and best and worst of Wilco. Best Wilco Song As far as evaluating older songs and songs that I’ve already written, I’m not the best at it. [But off the…

ISN’T A TIME-TRAVELING, gender-fluid, indigenous sex goddess exactly what art needs right about now? The Met seems to think so and has commissioned the Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman, whose work often features his alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, to produce a pair of 11-by-22-foot paintings titled mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) for its Great Hall (opens December 19). Monkman, 54, gave up abstraction to communicate ideas about the history of colonial settlement in North America to a more mainstream audience, and somehow as a result he has become “about as famous as a living painter can be” in Canada (according to the Globe and Mail). Created in part in the spirit of the carnivalesque “history paintings” of Robert Colescott, the Met commissions are pastiches that draw on works in…

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO’S second book, In the Dream House (Gray-wolf Press, 11/5), is unlikely to resemble anything you’ve read before. It’s both a memoir of her toxic relationship with her first girlfriend and a history of queer domestic violence with chapters that dance between genres. Some read like fairy tales, others like horror stories; there’s a choose-your-own-adventure section. While her story will resonate deeply with some, others may feel that whatever Machado says her ex-girlfriend subjected her to (manipulation, deceit, screaming rages) didn’t rise to the level of abuse. Machado is well aware of this. “It’s inevitable,” she told me. As she showed in her dazzling 2017 debut, the story collection Her Body and Other Parties, she explores subjects many would rather avoid. “I speak into the silence,” she writes…

AT THE HEART OF Egypt’s ancient history is the 14th-century-BCE pharaoh Akhenaten, a leader depicted with full lips, a long nose, and evident breasts. At the heart of the visual cornucopia in Philip Glass’s 1983 opera Akhnaten is Anthony Roth Costanzo, a slender singer with full lips, a long nose, and a voice so high and clear it seems implausible coming from a man’s throat. There’s a lot of uncertainty around the historical figure, who is almost as famous for the woman he married (Nefertiti) as for his own accomplishments, which were considerable: He forced his nation to jettison the old gods and worship a single deity, making him the first great leader of monotheism; later rulers found his radicalism so extreme they all but obliterated him from the historical…

THIS POWDER-COATED STEEL SEAT by the Brooklyn-based artist Serban Ionescu is one of around 50 chairs that will be on display at R & Company (64 White St.) beginning September 10. The exhibit, curated by collector Raquel Cayre, is the latest among a handful to focus on surrealist seats. In April, the Future Perfect displayed a selection at its new New York showroom, the design fair Object & Thing popped up in East Williamsburg with a dedicated chair section, and even the kids at RISD had their own weird-chair show this spring. As Eames and Risom fatigue have started to settle in among design-minded folks, a chair made entirely of striped pillows is a not-too-drastic way to infuse some wacky design into an otherwise not-so-daring apartment. Though many of the…

TENZIN WOESER, 19, Student and Army Reservist, East Rutherford, New Jersey Who are the Doritos and the pea crisps for? We’re having a potluck with people from my old hometown—Mundgodin India. There was a big monsoon there, so we’re collecting money to send back. We moved from Tibet to India as political refugees. My family sold knockoff sweaters. It was sort of like a carnival traveling wherever there was business. When I was 6, we came here. Do you remember what that was like? It was the summer, and we landed in Newark. We were outside by the taxis, and I breathed in the air. I thought it was the coolest place ever. My brother and I had our faces glued to the window. It was a long drive to…

Avoid Crowds in a Former Tank House CORKIN GALLERY “The Distillery District, just southeast of downtown, is a bit of a tourist destination, but I love this big space (7 Tank House Ln.)—a 10,000-square-foot former tank house—because it’s a refuge from the hordes, and its nooks and crannies are a great backdrop for large-scale work like last spring’s Leopold Plotek exhibit.” Visit a Museum Inside a Museum THE HENRY MOORE SCULPTURE CENTRE AT THE ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO “It’s the only permanent gallery I always visit when I’m at the AGO (317 Dundas St. W), and it’s one of the largest public collections of Moore’s work. It’s usually very quiet and serene here and feels like I have a private audience with all the pieces.” See the World’s Only Airport-Installed…

A custom six-pack from Left Field Brewery This craft brewery (36 Wagstaff Dr.) specializes in hoppy and hazy IPAs but also dabbles in dynamic one-offs like a Mojito Sour. Gender-neutral clothing from In Objects We Trust Head down a back alley for the showroom (1190 Queen St.) of this unisex brand known for bold pieces that wouldn’t look out of place at Opening Ceremony. Cheese-free Canadiana from Drake General Store The Drake Hotel’s gift shop (1150 Queen St. W) sells a popular line of onesies and milk-bag pins.…

FOR SOME, the arrival of a 7,500-square-foot outpost of Brooklyn Heights’s venerable Middle Eastern market at Industry City and all the bulk nuts and hummus tubs that come with it are reason enough to venture to Sunset Park. Those who require extra incentive can find it in new additions to the third-generation family business, including a liquor license, 80 seats for dining in, and bread baked in-house, some on a domed griddle called a saj, which is used in Lebanon to produce thinner-than-pita flatbread that’s rolled around its contents rather than stuffed. The fillings include your to-be-expected falafel and shawarma along with options like harissa salmon with bitter greens and preserved-lemon vinaigrette (below). And, as a sign of these fast-casual times and the next-gen Sahadi’s’ eagerness to embrace them, any of…

With 2015’s The Witch, Robert Eggers showed that there was nothing quite so frightening as the Puritan mind. By replicating the setting and vernacular of 17th-century Plymouth, his thriller about a family settling in the wilderness immersed us in a particular mind-set and belief system; suddenly, witches were real. Now, with the bleakly gorgeous and impossibly tense The Lighthouse, opening October 18, he places us in a remote late-19th-century lighthouse, where two men—an old sailor played by Willem Dafoe and a novice played by Robert Pattinson—find themselves at odds, driven by drink, savage weather, and mysterious visions. What comes first for you—the period and the setting or the story? I tend to imagine the atmosphere of the film before the story. The reason why it became this period in The…

THERE HE IS,” Regina King says in her familiar soft contralto as we approach a small black-and-white photo of Tupac Shakur with his middle finger casually pointed toward the sky. “You could just get lost in his eyes. You could feel like you saw all the pain, all the joy, all the everything. All at the same time.” We’re meandering through “Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop” at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. The photo was taken at Club Amazon in 1993, shortly after King first met Shakur during the table read for the John Singleton film Poetic Justice. King had gotten into a car accident on the way to the set, hydroplaning into a pole. Shakur chauffeured her around for the rest of the day.…

WITH HIS deep-set eyes and slight build, Irish actor Cillian Murphy is a chameleon who would’ve been a natural second lead in Old Hollywood, perhaps playing the police informant who gets whacked at the end of Act Two or the suitor who doesn’t get the girl. But his alertness, intelligence, and endless capacity for surprise have helped him defy potential typecasting. He’s played a dazzling array of parts, including roles in 28 Days Later, Breakfast on Pluto, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (as Scarecrow), and Dunkirk (as an anonymous infantryman billed only as “Shivering Soldier”). He’s equally convincing as a subtle, introverted lead (particularly in Ken Loach’s IRA drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley) and a lit-fuse villain who can turbocharge modest B-pictures like Wes Craven’s Red Eye. But he…

IN MANY THINGS that I’ve been in, I find myself in the position of uniting the archetypes of Madonna and whore,” says Marisa Tomei when we meet up after she finishes a long day of rehearsals for The Rose Tattoo,“making a passageway for us all to hold in our minds. These are not two separate things.” The Rose Tattoo is among the less-performed Tennessee Williams plays. “It’s probably on the B-list or something,” Tomei says. She stars in it as Serafina Delle Rose, a grieving Sicilian-immigrant wife and mother, and even though the 1955 film adaptation earned Anna Magnani her Oscar for the role, Serafina is less familiar to audiences than Amanda Wingfield or Blanche DuBois. The melodrama starts with the death of a husband, withers toward catastrophe, and then…