Innholdsfortegnelse for October 28-November 10, 2019 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Gabriel Debenedetti, Jonathan Chait, Olivia Nuzzi, and Madison Malone Kircher examined the state of the impeachment inquiry (“The World After the Whistle-blower,” October 14–27). The giant-peach cover caught many eyes: “Such an epic cover,” ameliadimz wrote on Instagram. “Finally, indeed!” added alisha39. “Thing is, it won’t happen,” prisonescapee cautioned. Ad Age’s Ann-Christine Diaz wrote, “A symbol that many of us associate with a childhood literary treasure now takes a gruesome turn.” Of Chait’s proposed articles of impeachment, Jack D. Weiss wrote, “This article should be sent to Nancy Pelosi and all members of the Senate and House. All they have to do is read, copy and paste.” Many readers responded to Nuzzi’s dispatch on how Republicans are viewing the proceedings with some level…

THERE IS LIKELY no career coach in the world with a better pitch for disaffected millennials than Megan Hellerer, whose list of past clients includes a 28-year-old bartender who became a United States congresswoman. Before we met for a session on a recent Wednesday morning, I couldn’t help but imagine all the potential Hellerer would unlock in me at 29: Would I also become a politician? Write a book? Finally stop biting my nails? Hellerer, 35, calls herself the Conscious Career Coach. She works only with women, more specifically “underfulfilled overachievers”: high-performing teacher’s-pet types who have followed every mandate for success and remain desperately unhappy. In addition to private coaching and workshops, she has an eight-week online course called “WTF Am I Doing With My Life?” (The price is $900,…

LIKE CRUISE-SHIP CAPTAINS and candy-makers, restaurant critics are often told they have the best job in the world, even if the darker side of the daily grind—the health issues, the struggles with finding a thousand different words for “delicious,” the Groundhog Day sense of monotony as one familiar baked-salmon entrée succeeds the next—makes many things about the job less glamorous than they seem. This mantra becomes one of the quiet perks of the job, however, and it’s often followed by questions about how we got into the business and how one should train for, or even possibly obtain, such a dream occupation. A background in cooking is helpful, I always say, although since I’m not much of a cook, I add that your job as a critic is to sample…

Have you ever had a passenger not pay? Only once in five years. Two teenagers, they jumped out and ran. But it’s okay. They’re teens; they don’t know better. Have you ever had to reprimand a passenger? Once, halfway through the ride, a couple wanted to have fun in my car. I said, “No! You cannot do this in my office! There are hotels everywhere, but not here!” Ever picked up a celebrity? Once, the prime minister of Canada’s sister. When I drove a limo, Ivana Trump, the Yahoo founder, and Jack Black—he didn’t talk to me. Would you ever work for Uber? Well, it’s all headed that way, whether yellow-cab drivers like it or not. But the percentage they take from you—I wouldn’t do it.…

Lucy Cohu The Queen’s Sister (2005) This British TV movie, made just several years after Princess Margaret’s death, details her salacious, only somewhat factual adventures in the years following her father’s death. Ramona Marquez The King’s Speech (2010) The royal revels in her prepuberty years by cuddling corgis and making her dad, George VI (Colin Firth), devise bedtime stories about penguins. Oh, sorry, bedtime stories about the king transforming into a penguin. Bel Powley A Royal Night Out (2015) After Britain’s World War II victory, Margaret and Elizabeth’s parents let them out for one night to enjoy VE Day celebrations—which involve checking out brothels, gambling, and grinding in nightclubs. Vanessa Kirby The Crown SEASONS ONE AND TWO (2016–17) Kirby was so excited to be replaced with…

When the Oscar-nominated film The Help is released in 2011, the book it is based on is widely condemned for its genteel depiction of racial violence. Ablene Cooper accuses the author of stealing her life story and takes issue with many details, including the depiction of one character’s skin tone, which is compared to the color of a cockroach. The conversation reaches a fever pitch in 2016 in the children’s-and-young-adultfiction world when multiple books are pulled from shelves or delayed after accusations of racism. After being called out for using colonialist tropes, Keira Drake delays the publication of her YA debut, The Continent, and works with sensitivity readers, releasing a rewritten version in 2018. We Need to Talk About Kevin author Lionel Shriver decries the idea of cultural appropriation in…

BEEF WELLINGTON A British dish of meat wrapped in pastry, but a helluva lot more impressive than a Cornish pasty. Said meat is typically fillet of beef topped with duxelles. The dish was named after Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, of Napoleon-quashing and tall-rubber-boot fame. Aside from him, Richard Nixon, Julia Child, and Don Draper were big fans. At TAK Room (20 Hudson Yards, fifth floor), it’s carved tableside and given a superrich pour of périgourdine sauce. MARTINI No other cocktail has been as associated with the well-chronicled Wasp drinking habits. Though debates might rage regarding proportion, technique, and garnish, the drink is the ultimate classic, best consumed in equally classic surroundings, and few places fit the bill better than Bemelmans Bar (35 E. 76th St.), where the glow is…

IF YOU ASK THE AVERAGE TOURIST to list four things about the Irish capital, that person is likely to fire off the following: Guinness, James Joyce, Molly Malone, and rain. All true, the rain particularly. Ireland’s most populous city is in the midst of massive change; a decade after the 2008 recession, a graffiti-centric arts scene has emerged, as has a newfound social awareness (the country recently repealed the Eighth Amendment, an abortion ban, and in 2017 Ireland became the first country to legalize gay marriage by vote). While the city’s cultural history remains one of its main draws (the massive Museum of Literature opened in late September), people across the world have found themselves obsessed with a new crop of Irish cultural exports (Derry Girls and novels from Tana…

A few years ago, a writer named Ashima Saigal witnessed an incident on a bus in which a group of black kids were mistreated by the police. She was disturbed, and soon after, she wrote about it. Later, reading over what she’d written, she realized the story wasn’t working. She’d tried to write from one of the kids’ perspectives, but Saigal, who is Indian-American, wasn’t sure that she had the skill or the knowledge to write from the point of view of a black child. She decided to sign up for an online creative-writing course called “Writing the Other.” The course was founded by the speculative-fiction writers Nisi Shawl, who is black, and Cynthia Ward, who is white, nearly 20 years ago. While imagining the lives of people who are…

“Do you have any advice for writing about people who are not like you?” Over the past few years, this question has been a mainstay at literary events. Online, it’s one of those fights with no seeming end. But the question is a Trojan horse, posing as reasonable artistic discourse when, in fact, many writers are not really asking for advice—they are asking if it is okay to find a way to continue as they have. They don’t want an answer; they want permission. So when I get asked this question, I don’t answer with writing advice. I answer with three questions. Why do you want to write from this character’s point of view? Our sense of story is formed by the stories we’ve read. But for most of us,…

GEORGE C. PARVU 30 years driving What year did you start? 1989. Less than a year in, a woman gave birth in the back of my taxi. She got into the car, and I started driving, then I hear her say, “The baby’s coming!” I notified my dispatcher over the radio to send an ambulance, jumped in the back seat, told her to push, push, push, then the head was coming out and I grabbed it, pulled it out with my own hands. The water came all over my body. Wow. What are your hours? I used to work 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., but nowadays I have to do noon to midnight. Because of Uber. Early in the morning and late in the evening, Uber takes over. Do you…

ELENA BONHAM CARTER looks the teensiest H bit bored. It’s a gray afternoon in England, and we’re in an impeccably neat garden on the set of The Crown. The Netflix series, which illustrates the tensions between the royal family’s private lives and public personae, necessarily involves many sequences full of dull protocol. Her role today: walking down a staircase. (Later she will describe it as a day in which she was essentially a “paid extra.”) When she clocks me from several yards away, Bonham Carter appears momentarily roused. Across the production’s busy membrane of actual extras, cameras, and cables stationed between us, she begins miming energetically, first at herself and then back at me as if to say, Are you the one who’s here for me? Then places are called,…

The Sensitivity Read Jennifer Weiner, In Her Shoes “ In my 2004 book, Little Earthquakes, one of the characters is a woman of color. Looking back, what I probably did is I imagined a privileged white woman and poured this black woman inside of her. My last book was the first I’ve worked on with a sensitivity reader. Harold, an African-American character in Mrs. Everything, is one of my women’s happy endings. I’d look at blogs and social media and talk to black friends. The sensitivity reader pushed me on the specifics: When my character’s in bed with him, what is his body like? What is his hair like? Because that’s going to be different than it is with a white guy. You have to put who you are…

THANKS TO THE MOVIE JOKER, a steep outdoor staircase located off Shakespeare Avenue in the Bronx has become an Instagram meme. Visitors show up in droves—much to the annoyance of some residents—to take photos, many imitating Joaquin Phoenix’s limb-flailing, crotch-thrusting dance from the film. One afternoon in mid-October, Sakina, a young woman from Jersey City decked out in full Joker regalia, had a tiny speaker and was trying to shoot a video re-creating the dance, which she’d learned that morning. She’d been to Joker three times already, but not everybody here was obsessed with the movie: Two teenagers from Dallas, who’d come to the Bronx with their dad while the rest of their family took a nap, hadn’t even seen it yet. Nor had a pair of college students from…