Innholdsfortegnelse for September 16-29, 2019 i New York Magazine

1 For the cover of New York’s “Fall Preview” issue, Jonathan Van Meter profiled Renée Zellweger (“Renée Zellweger’s Lost Decade,” September 2–15 ), who is soon to star as Judy Garland in the biopic Judy. On Instagram, huntlodge commented, “Good for her! Hollywood uses people up and discards them. She stepped aside and prioritized her life … then came back strong, looking better than ever!” And pietrofhnyc wrote, “She seems so un–Judy Garland–like that I can’t wait to see her play the role. But I hope she captures the innate humor Judy had along with the pathos and insecurity.” But unger_xx chafed at the headline: “I wouldn’t call it a ‘lost’ decade. Time off can be extremely fruitful. Not everything of value in life is public.” Added sophiegruetzner, “Lost decade?…

THE MOMENT THE STRIPED knit shirt switched from utilitarian object to fashion item is uncontested: It was in 1917, when Coco Chanel began selling seaman-inspired nautical tops out of her shop in Normandy. The French quickly fell in line (Brigitte Bardot), then Hollywood (James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause), and then, really, the whole world; Saint James , which has been making Bretons since 1858, has collaborated with everyone from Swedish graffiti artist André Saraiva to Japanese designer Junya Watanabe. In the past five years, no fewer than five stripes-only start-ups (some of whose shirts can be seen wrapped up and twisted above) have launched. And so we’ve thoroughly investigated the striped shirt, from the question of how well it sells at popular New York stores to the theory…

AMEEN KAMLANA, Doctor, London “I got this shirt in San Francisco on my last visit to the U.S. I like stripes because my wife wears them a lot.” DAVID BERNIER, Studio Assistant, Stuyvesant Heights “Stripes, in my mind at least, are casual, classic, and striking.” PAULINE BETHEL, Volunteer, Soho “I’m wearing this today because I’m going to the Bowery Mission, and the people there like it when I look spiffy, like in stripes, instead of not so spiffy in my grubbies.”…

2009 Marimekko collaborates with Comme des Garçons to create a striped shirt. 2010 The striped shirt is all over the spring runways, from Acne to Stella McCartney , whose Bretons are adorned with appliqué flowers. 2013 Popular fashion blogger Nicole Warne posts about her giant collection of Bretons. 2016 Kate Middleton poses for British Vogue’s 100th anniversary in her first-ever magazine shoot; she wears a blue-and-red-striped shirt by Petit Bateau . 2018 A vertical-striped men’s shirt goes viral—it is first seen on Antoni from Queer Eye and eventually gets its own Instagram account: @ thatstripedshirt . 2019 Jean Paul Gaultier, noted stripes obsessive, reissues his famous Le Male fragrance , whose bottle resembles a male torso clad in a striped shirt, in collaboration with Supreme . The new version looks…

“I am a mom of three boys, and I was looking to do something more interesting than mortgage loaning. I loved dressing my boys in stripes and also noticed that there were no mommy-and-me companies for boy moms. So I decided I’d create one. A few months in, Tuckernuck, which is like a Shopbop for preppy people, was considering buying my shirts and ripped me off instead. I wrote about it on Instagram, and the preppy Connecticut blog world went crazy. Tuckernuck took down the shirt. Within four days, my shirt had sold out completely, and I had a wait list of 1,200 people. People love them. I’m seeing tons of boy moms say, ‘Woo-hoo! I can finally match with my littles.’ ”…

“I had just been evicted from my office-work space and saw this beautiful old loft building with glass brick in Chinatown. I put it on my Instagram Stories and said, ‘Who knows what’s up with this building?’ Somebody commented with the broker’s info. A unit had just become available, but the broker strung us along for two months. My mom, a Realtor in Colorado, was like, ‘Why don’t you drop a note by the office?’ I said, ‘That’s the most Boulder thing ever,’ but I did and also made a mood-board deck of what I do. A few days later, the landlord asked me to sign a lease.”…

“Until recently, I was working odd jobs and living with roommates in a dump. I had read about the 80/20 Housing Program and, for the hell of it, applied to a dozen. You put in your name, address, number, and email and pick places that fit in your income bracket. It’s like shopping on FreshDirect. Fast-forward three years: I get this email saying this new building wanted to interview me. That was really stressful. They turn over every stone, I handed in two inches of paperwork. I went deep into the Bronx to interview, and three weeks later they offered me a brand-new studio for $1,050 in the South Bronx. I’m two blocks from the 2 express train. The whole thing was worth doing another four times.”…

I LEARNED ABOUT the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens’ home-sharing program through an email they sent out through the university. It’s essentially an affordable-housing opportunity for both parties with some companionship built in. I didn’t know what to expect, but I also didn’t want to go through the brokering process—I didn’t have credit history or guarantors. The foundation got in touch with me and asked what I was looking for, my budget, and the schedule I follow. Ultimately, I was connected with David, a man nearing his 80s in Rego Park, Queens. We’d sometimes go out to lunch or I’d pick up stuff for him—it saved money for both of us. I went through a similar process to find a second roommate uptown, closer to school. Lee spends most…

ALLAN GEROVITZ Douglas Elliman 347-909-1581, agerovitz @elliman.com KNOWN AS THE go-to broker among Brooklyn media types, Gerovitz is the keeper of Bococa’s most stately brownstone rentals. His knack is finding premarket one-bedrooms for dog owners and tin-ceilinged floorthroughs for young parents. Note: He’s Koch-era New York in the flesh. He’ll grill clients on their seriousness about renting; afterward, he may negotiate rents or waive a fee to those in need.…

WELCOME TO “Read Like the Wind,” New York Magazine and Vulture’s new space for discovering books. I started this as a newsletter a year ago to amplify reading ecstasies in the way that reading ecstasies actually happen—not by scanning best-seller lists or online compendiums of “must read” books, but randomly and on the back of offhand discoveries. For years, I’d been reviewing books professionally (meaning “for money”), but I rarely found my own favorites through reviews. I found them through individuals whose taste intrigued me: Some I knew, some I trailed online. A newsletter seemed like a venue for redistributing my enthusiasm. Now I am the book critic for New York, and my newsletter is coming under its umbrella. The books I endorse in it are both new and old…

WHERE’S MY ROY COHN? opens September 20; BULLY. COWARD. VICTIM. THE STORY OF ROY COHN premieres September 29. IT WASN’T SO long ago that the once-fearsome lawyer Roy Cohn and his infamous career seemed destined to be no more than a colorful footnote to history. Cohn was a gaudy character, for sure—a hustler, a fixer, and an amoral hypocrite of incredible drive—whose life as a closeted man ended in tragic comeuppance when he died of AIDS in 1986, insisting to the last that he couldn’t possibly be dying of that gay disease. Tony Kushner wrote a vivid version of him into Angels in America, and that might have been the last word on Cohn if not for the fact that, in midlife, he had met and started giving legal and…

Start with Mo Willems previewing Who Is the Mystery Reader? 5 MetroTech Commons, 9/21 at 11:30 a.m. Listen to Susan Choi and Meg Wolitzer in conversation 180 Remsen Street, 9/22 at 10 a.m. Take in Benjamin Moser and others discussing Susan Sontag Borough Hall Plaza, 9/22 at 11 a.m. End with Marlon James and Joyce Carol Oates in conversation 157 Montague Street, 9/22 at 5 p.m.…

THREE SUMMERS AGO, a worker stood up at “Q&A,” Facebook’s weekly all-hands, town-hall-style meeting, which is usually held on Friday afternoons in Menlo Park and livestreamed to its offices around the world—and aggressively closed to the public and press—to ask Mark Zuckerberg whether the company had a plan in case the public turned against it, like what had happened to the big banks a few years earlier. ¶ Zuckerberg didn’t even know how to answer the question. That backlash won’t happen , he said, as long as the company keeps shipping products people like . Some conservative commentators had been accusing Facebook, with little evidence, of censoring their voices, but the company remained popular. Hillary Clinton, sure to be the next president, was shaping up to be a great friend…

“THE SIMPLE EXPLANATION is that it’s a visually arresting pattern. But I think it’s more complex. On the surface, stripes represent a kind of casual luxury, an idea of a moneyed summer, which, for a century, people have loved to subvert. They were popular in New Wave films, which we might think of as chic but was actually a time of social upheaval: All the old fashion houses were losing money because the new generation didn’t have the money for them; the striped shirt, its uniform, was a rebellion against the Old Guard of dress. Then there’s punk—Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols loved a striped top. And now, when we’re experiencing economic pressure and there’s a heightened focus on gaudy wealth, the popularity could be explained as a different…

J.Crew has been selling stripes—a lot of stripes—since the brand launched in 1983. “They tend to rank in the top three of our T-shirt sales,” says Lisa Greenwald, J.Crew’s CMO. But sometimes, she says, a surprise trend will emerge: like rainbow stripes, which recently began selling like crazy. Jen Mankins, the owner of the Brooklyn-based boutique Bird, has noticed something similar. “We’ve been seeing lots more colorful stripes, reminiscent of the ’70s and the ’90s. But no matter the style of the stripe, it’ll sell.” That stripes-centric businesses are doing so well right now makes sense too, according to retail strategist Georganne Bender. “In 2019, consumers like companies that have a niche, offer clothing with gender-neutral wares, and emphasize quality,” she says. “Stripes check all those boxes. Plus, Americans are…

JAMAII MELVIN, 18, Florida, Dance When did you find out you got in? The end of March. I missed a call, and then they called my mom, I guess, because I got a text from her saying “Is your phone on? Is everything all right? Did you happen to get any phone calls?” Then I was just sitting around dying and waiting, and finally I got a call from a 212 number. And I thought, OMG, that’s a New York number. How does it feel to be here? Have you ever heard of impostor syndrome? Yes. Well, there seems to be a little bit of that going around in the freshman class. There are only 24 dance students, and thousands and thousands applied. We’ve all been sort of wondering if…

RENTERS WERE RIGHT to rejoice in June, when New York State stunned landlords by approving legislation with powerful tenant protections. Any lease that goes into effect after the laws were signed is subject to new rules: For instance, rent-stabilized apartments no longer can be reclassified as market rate (regardless of a tenant’s income or increases in monthly rent), and landlords may only charge up to $89 for improvements (down from $1,000). There’s also good news for those who aren’t fortunate enough to live in a regulated $800 studio in the West Village, like a cap on security deposits at one month’s rent and a $20 limit on application fees. And landlords are also required to give 30 days’ notice if they plan to raise the rent over 5 percent. But…

The SHABBAT-AND-KOSHER-OBSERVING ONE “I joined SS/SK Classifieds—Apartment/Roommate Info on the recommendation of some of my Jewish friends. The cool thing about apartment hunting when you are in a community of people who keep Shabbat is that it’s likely you’ll have 80 mutual friends on Facebook with every person, which makes it easy to ensure your would-be roommate isn’t the type who’ll murder you.” —JORDYN KAUFMAN, 24, content developer at a Jewish nonprofit The QUEER-TO-QUEER-HOUSING ONE “Queer Housing New York City, a queer/trans-housing Facebook group, is thriving: There are 31,000 active members. It doesn’t allow brokers, or, of course, any sort of intolerance. It also leans toward affordable housing, as it’s meant for a disenfranchised community.” —FRAN TIRADO, deputy editor of OUT The BIGGEST ONE OF THEM ALL “Gypsy Housing, which…

Listings Project Over the past 16 years, what started as a personal, crowdsourced apartment-hunting guide for artist Stephanie Diamond has evolved into a weekly real-estate email that goes out every Wednesday. Diamond and her small team vet potential renters and landlords who post on the newsletter. Luxury Rentals Manhattan As you’d imagine, this site culls listings from luxury buildings across Manhattan (and parts of Brooklyn), where you can search by conventional means (price and neighborhood) and also for specific amenities (like Sub-Zero appliances and in-building bowling alleys, for instance). BABEs List Although long-term rentals are occasionally featured, the bulk of the listings in this weekly curated email list are geared toward itinerant workers in the artist community, meaning sublets or weeks-long transatlantic apartment swaps. Flip.lease This site allows people looking…

“If you go directly to huge management companies like Stonehenge and UDR, you won’t need to pay a broker’s fee. The last time I moved, I just went to Stuy Town’s website—they’re the management company for this group of 110 buildings in the area. Their website shows maps of the buildings and available units. We called them up and said, ‘Hey, we’re interested in this one,’ and they were like, ‘Okay, cool, we’ll take you.’”…

THERE ARE SOME 15 co-living companies—which offer furnished dormlike rentals for adults—currently operating in the city. Opting for a co-living situation eliminates some of the hassle involved in finding and renting an entire apartment or combing through the Craigslist “rooms and shares” section: Most don’t have strict income requirements or require guarantors (plus there are no brokers or additional fees), many come furnished, and some include perks like weekly cleanings, grocery basics, and Netflix and Hulu access. And you’re not tied to a one- or two-year obligation: Some buildings offer 30-day-minimum stays, and many allow residents to move from property to property. OUTPOST CLUB Founded by a trio of Ukrainian expats; rooms go for $690 to $2,390; apartments come with keyless entry, Nest thermostats, twice-weekly cleanings, and household essentials (toilet…

After waiting eons for Con Ed to show up and switch on the gas, the excellent Golden Diner—which has been operating as a breakfast-and-lunch-only electric kitchen since March—is ready to roll up its sleeves and really start cooking. On the just-launched dinner menu: “wontonini” en brodo, Xian-style lamb gyros, tuna melts, and this silky, briny, altogether succulent black bean vongole pasta special. Chef Sam Yoo says the riff on linguine and clams is a nod not only to the restaurant’s Chinatown environs and one of his favorite dishes—Great NY Noodletown’s clams in black-bean sauce—but also an homage to his former bosses and mentors, Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, and their Torrisi Italian Specialties kitchen. Yoo gets the Taiwanese wheat noodles he uses in the dish at a nearby Asian grocery…

How to Do Nothing BY JENNY ODELL NONFICTION, APRIL 9 THIS IS A BLEND of self-help, philosophy, manifesto, and nonfiction magic realism—all genres that I either tend to dislike or that don’t exist but that here congeal into an exhilarating page-turner about the internet, work, leisure, space, time, social media, and (unfathomable though it may seem) more. Read it for the suspense of figuring out how the magician performs her tricks. Or read it to take a dip in her glorious generalist’s brain, which flows from John Muir to Epicurus to communal-living experiments of the 1960s. And then keep reading it for the book’s medicinal effects: Your desiccated attention span will be rehydrated, your anxiety soothed, and your senses of time, space, leisure, flowers, and (unfathomable though it may seem)…

WHEN CENTRAL PARK TOWER at 217 West 57th Street officially tops out at 1,550 feet on September 17, it will (if you don’t count the 400-foot spire atop One World Trade Center) become New York’s tallest building. It has already transformed the skyline, paired with the 1,428-foot residential needle on the next block at 111 West 57th. I recently toured the construction site with the building’s two Chicago architects, Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill. Smith designed the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa in Dubai, as well as the future tallest, the kilometer-high (3,280-foot) Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia. Moving from sidewalk to a gajillionaire’s aerie—a 15,898-square-foot three-floor penthouse—we talked about how a 131-story tower can possibly fit into our city. GORDON GILL: How well do you know the building? JUSTIN…

MY SENIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL, I had three Instagram accounts: a public one, a private one for friends and internet friends, and a private one that was just for me. By this point, I’d had an online audience for six years or so: first for the fashion blog I started when I was 11, and then for Rookie, the online magazine for teenage girls I’d started when I was 15 as an alternative to the getting-a-boyfriend-centric mainstream teen magazines that still existed in 2011. Posts on my public account were mostly dispatches from my in-person life, which still consisted primarily of going to school every day in Oak Park, Illinois, and editing Rookie when I got home. The private account for friends was more of a place to voice…

1. La Ligne The brand: Founded by former Vogue editors. The stripes: 3/ 8 -inch The fit: The short-sleeved Seberg ($95) is boxy but not too large, and the crewneck gives it a camp-counselor vibe. The verdict: It has a nice cut and is high-quality, but the price is also high. The kind of shirt you might pack for vacation when you want your nicest basics. 2. Mon Breton The brand: “Authentic” French stripes made by French artisans in a factory in France. The stripes: 5/ 16 -inch The fit: The fabric on this shirt ($73) is the stiffest of the ones I tried, which gives it a very secure (albeit almost itchy) feeling. The verdict: Though it might take a while to break in, it looks sturdy and dignified…

This was designed for the 2017 “Is Fashion Modern?” exhibit at MoMA. It was a limited edition, and I tracked it down when I started working at the museum. It is a classic Armor Lux, but it has this single red stripe on the left sleeve and a MoMA logo button on the bottom-right corner. This one is from Christophe Lemaire’s first Uniqlo U collection . I love how starchy it is—it’s extremely structured. Kind of like wearing a box. This one has three-quarter sleeves, and is so feminine. The colors are saturated enough, and interesting enough, that I feel like I can wear it casually or dress it up and wear it to work with a white tennis skirt, which I guess is very American-flag-esque . I got this…

“THEY’RE A TRICKY PIECE OF LAUNDRY because they tend to be a mix of white and (in most cases) a darker (red, navy, or black) color. In order to preserve the color of the stripes, you want to make sure to always machine-wash in cold. If your machine allows you to add an extra rinse, do it to get rid of any potential residue that might dull the color stripes. To boost the rinse, add some white vinegar to the fabric-softener compartment. It’ll keep the white white and the colors superbright.”…

What’s your instrument? I started with flute. But then I moved from Yekaterinburg to Moscow, and they were overloaded with flutists. So they offered me trumpet. And as soon as I picked it up, I knew: The trumpet was the instrument I was looking for. Did you expect to get in? Well, I’d gotten rejected before. When they finally let me in, I said, “Are you sure? No take-backsies. They were like, “Yes, no take-backsies!” What’s your audition story? Before the first round, I got lost in a stairwell. Then I must have looked like I’d been sweating a lot, because they offered me water. Have you had any classes yet? Colloquium. It’s required for freshmen; you sit down, relax, and talk about life. Everyone was very mature, and it…

THE STREETLIGHT FLYER OR THE HEALTH-FOOD-STORE BULLETIN BOARD I WAS LIVING IN NEW JERSEY and wanted to move to the city. I was on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights and saw a few signs. One said ‘Room for one person in Jamaica’ in Spanish. Follow your intuition: If it doesn’t feel right, don’t continue; same way when it feels right. My new landlord is not aware of the apps and does things the old-school way, as we do in Latino countries—on the phone, I felt that he was a good person. I’ve been month-to-month ever since.” —KAREN VIRUES, English student and Spanish tutor MY BOYFRIEND AND I HAD BEEN LOOKING in Bushwick—everything was expensive with a weird layout. We went into the Hana health-food store, by the Jefferson stop, and…

A FEW YEARS BACK, while working a part-time office job, doing hair weaving on the side, and singing in clubs on weekends—altogether hustling like crazy to make ends meet and pursuing my dream as a singer—I met a Realtor, a sister, who worked for a Battery Park City apartment complex. I offered a cool perk: I’d weave her hair if she pulled some strings and helped me find a decent apartment. She did—and I did. She got some amazing weaves, and I landed a great pad. It turned out fabulous.”…

“I used to be obsessed with this cul-de-sac street in the Village, Patchin Place. I’d often open the gate and walk down; it’s open to the public because it’s where e.e. cummings lived. One day there was a small sign that had the name and phone number of a real-estate company. It was the number to a woman who’s the Realtor for that block, and it was my ticket in. A few months after I moved in, the other apartment on my floor opened up, and so my best friend moved in next door.”…

AHMED ABDALLAH R New York 646-270-6595 aabdallah@wernewyork.com ABDALLAH KNOWS HIS home turf of Chinatown and Two Bridges, and, after getting tight with the area’s mostly Chinese landlords, helps artists, restaurateurs, and designers like artist Korakrit Arunanondchai and Scarr Pimentel of Scarr’s Pizza secure affordable studios and two-bedrooms. The landlord connections can translate into cheaper rent or even flexibility in the rules, like clearance for Pimentel’s pit bull.…

“When my daughter graduated from college, she was going to share an apartment with three friends. When I went to go see the place, I was horrified—it was brand new, but the girls would’ve been on top of each other. I didn’t want to spoil it, but I said, ‘Chrissie, you have Jupiter in the fourth house for the next year. You should be looking for a large, sunny apartment with a view and unusual closets. Because Jupiter expands everything it touches.’ My daughter told me astrology doesn’t work in Manhattan. Luckily, she didn’t take it, and two months later, she found a duplex on the Lower East Side with an elevator, a large common room, a staircase that twirled up to the second floor, with huge views of lower…

WITHIN MINUTES OF MY MEETING Jonathan Groff, he asks if I would like a slice of cherry pie, and then, only a short time later, if I would like to be eaten by a giant plant. The first I readily accept because Groff and the rest of the cast of Little Shop of Horrors have thoroughly analyzed the desserts they picked up for a bus ride down from New York to the suburban Philadelphia puppet studio where they’re rehearsing for the day, and they’ve all concluded it’s the best option. The idea of being eaten by a plant seems a little less palatable, considering the contortions involved in entering the hippopotamus-esque maw of the man-eating Audrey II, which is operated by several puppeteers, and because I’m not sure if Groff…

… PLAY three-dimensional chess (which is the best number of dimensions) with Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, a novel that takes place at a performing-arts high school and pulls off a “Whoa, dude” plot twist in high literary form? … DIVE into Opioid, Indiana, by Brian Allen Carr, a book about a teen boy in rural Indiana who lives in a world of precarity and opioids and Twitter? … ENJOY Rich in Love, by Josephine Humphreys, if your funny bone needs a good rubbing and your heartstrings need a deft tugging? … VERIFY the seemingly impossible fact that a mere slip of a novel, Reef, by Romesh Gunesekera, is described—accurately—in one of its blurbs as the “Asian Tempest”? … SLIDE into Mrs. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, a book…