Innholdsfortegnelse for November 25-December 8, 2019 i New York Magazine

1 New York’s “Future Issue” examined the events of 2019 that provide a window into what life might look like ten years from now (“Today in 2029,” November 11–24). CNET’s Scott Stein wrote, “I really enjoyed browsing through @NYMag’s Future Weirdness issue. The next decade, though, will be nearly impossible to predict from events of the past year. I think it’ll be a lot weirder.” @mishraGkabeta added, “A very Orwellian picture painted here. Societal changes are slow. 2009 isn’t very different from 2019, and 2029 probably won’t be much different from 2019 … Good article for a time capsule.” Other readers glommed on to specific forecasts. @charlottejee tweeted, “Love the way this predicts we’ll drink Champagne from England in 2029. Darling, some of us are doing that already.” Commenter rdibelka…

EVERYONE WHO TEXTS with Rudy Giuliani knows the hands of fate control the fingertips. Digital communication with President Trump’s 75-year-old personal attorney is a delicate exercise in optimism and patience. Or, as one longtime Giuliani associate phrased it, “This is a little bit like a baby with a hammer, or a monkey with a typewriter.” This fall, as Giuliani has emerged as a central figure in the impeachment inquiry, his clumsy phone comportment has often become worldwide news, adding extra absurd wrinkles to the already absurd saga of a quid pro quo in Ukraine and raising questions about how a chronic butt-dialer who wears his AirPods upside down could be a White House cybersecurity adviser. There was the time he accidentally called NBC’s Rich Schapiro and left a voice-mail in…

1 Over the course of his presidency, Obama and Coates seemed to be engaged in a running debate about the pace of American progress on race. At times, the conversation was direct. 2 A tea-party rally in 2010. 3 The white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. 4 Wallace lost in his first run for governor of Alabama in 1958 to John Malcolm Patterson, but he would go on to become one of the most prominent segregationist politicians, campaigning for president four times in the Democratic primaries. 5 Jenkins wrote and directed 2016’s Moonlight, which won the Oscar for Best Picture. Two years later, his adapted screenplay for If Beale Street Could Talk was nominated but lost to BlacKkKlansman. 6 Ward’s 2011 novel follows Esch, who is 15 and pregnant,…

Exactly one month after Keeping Up With the Kardashians wrapped its first season on E!, Senator Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses. Both would become juggernauts, setting the tone for much of the coming decade. Kim Kardashian West, the show’s star, not only understood the changes that were just beginning to disrupt much of the culture; she herself demonstrably shifted it, altering the way we understand fame and even the internet. And by filtering her own very particular reality through technology, she utterly changed the beauty business and also our idea of what a mogul is. Meanwhile, the Kardashian-Jenners presented a fascinating version of the modern blended American family, one that started conversations about everything from trans rights to mental health to addiction to cultural appropriation at what seemed like…

Lady Oracle is both the title of a Margaret Atwood novel (1976, very funny) and the author’s unofficial epithet. Crack open a news source today and you’ll find something that Atwood speculated about a decade or three ago in one of her novels: lab-grown meat, environmental catastrophe, state surveillance, the diminishment of reproductive autonomy, antimicrobial clothes. Atwood isn’t thrilled about her reputation as a cheerful eschatologist and has pointed out that it rests on a misunderstanding of dystopian fiction, which, she argues, isn’t a prediction of the future (dummies), it’s an interpretation of the present. In other words: If you’re not seeing what I’m seeing, you’re not paying attention. Just as she squirms away from the mantle of prophesy, Atwood rejects ideological labels, most institutional affiliations, and the idea that…

THE PSYCHIC SAID she’d be fine. Better than fine, actually. Alexa Demie was nervous about starting work on Waves, maybe her most demanding project to date, so a few days before she flew to the movie’s Florida set, she went to see a psychic in her hometown of Los Angeles. “[She] was like, ‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’ Like, ‘Acting is in your DNA. You’re meant to do this, just trust it, and it’s gonna be one of your best, best roles.’ So I was like, ‘Okay!,’ ” she says, laughing as she recounts the session over tea. We’re in a corner spot at the Crosby Bar in Soho, which is mostly empty except for a few other famous people—Paul Rudd, truly ageless in real life, is at the…

“We were living in a bubble. We could do things, experiment, and people were like, ‘What are you doing?’ And a handful of people got us.”JIM RASH Dean Pelton “I get reactions all the time. People saying, ‘You’re just like me and my best friend.’ Or people will be like, ‘Hey, Parks and Rec,’ and I’ll be like, ‘Wrong show, but thanks. We’ll take it.’ ”DANNY PUDI Abed Nadir “The greatest gift of Community for me has been getting to watch all of these people at the beginning of their greatness. I ran into Alison [Brie] at the Golden Globes! And she’s nominated!”YVETTE NICOLE BROWN Shirley Bennett VULTURE FESTIVAL 2019. The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and NeueHouse Madison Square, November 9 and 10. “I remember there was an episode where I’m…

AS THE DECADE BEGAN, there were reasons to be optimistic: America had elected its first black president, and the world hadn’t cascaded into total financial collapse. Obama-care, for all its flaws, was passed, and then came the Iran deal and the Paris climate accords. Sure, there were danger signs: the anger of the tea party, the slow hollowing out of legacy news media, a troubling sense that somehow the bankers got away with it. But then maybe the immediacy of social media gave some hope, at least if you listened to the chatter of the bright young kids in the Bay Area trying to build a new kind of unmediated citizenship. Maybe everyday celebrity, post-gatekeeper, would change the world for the better. Some of that happened. But we also ended…

The man who unleashed Instagram on the world stands six-foot-five-inches tall and has the careful demeanor of someone who knows people are listening closely to what he’s saying. Talking to him, one gets the sense that he’s a step ahead—that for him, conversation is a game and he’s mapping out potential outcomes. That’s why, for example, he won’t be baited into reckless proclamations about impending class wars or Mark Zuckerberg’s complicated relationship to politics. At the same time, he possesses the excited curiosity of a kid discovering the solar system. This is a man who co-founded a company at 26 that made him a billionaire by the time he was 32 (today he’s 35). Even after a decade that has left many people confused by the role of social media…

1 Kardashian West has said Kanye didn’t know who she was when they first met around 2003 on a music-video set. “Who is Kim Kardajan?” Kardashian West remembers Kanye asking his friends. She married NBA player Kris Humphries in 2011,  and the marriage lasted for 72 days. Shortly afterward, Kanye invited her to Paris to see his fashion show. 2 The National reported 3,000 people in attendance. 3 4 Kardashian first met with Donald Trump in May 2018 on behalf of Alice Marie Johnson, a then-63-year-old grandmother who was serving a life sentence without parole for a first-time nonviolent drug offense. Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence a week after their meeting. Kardashian has since returned to the White House to promote a ride-sharing program to help the formerly incarcerated, played a…

“I heard WeGrow, the preschool, is being shut down,” Jonah Peretti says, sitting in a conference room in BuzzFeed’s New York offices. “How do you explain that to your 4-year-old?” He affects a gently parental tone: “‘There’s this guy Adam Neumann, and he’s very charismatic …’ ” Like Neumann, Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, took money from the Japanese investment giant Soft-Bank—not the company’s Saudi-backed Vision Fund, he’s careful to clarify—early in his start-up’s life. Unlike WeWork, though, BuzzFeed has managed to keep its head above water for 13 years in an industry with much worse prospects than those of real estate. Since its founding in 2006 and especially since the creation of its news division in 2012, BuzzFeed has led the transformation of a media industry threatened by tech…

1 Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel imagines a future theocracy called Gilead where women become reproductive slaves. It became a TV series that premiered in 2017. 2 Atwood’s 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale follows a group of activists attempting to overthrow the government of Gilead. 4 The financier, who had ties to Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, among many others, was accused of running a sex-trafficking ring that ensnared dozens of underage girls. He committed suicide in jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial. 6 Alek Minassian identified with incels, “involuntarily celibate” men who believe they are entitled to women’s affection and sometimes resort to violence when they don’t receive it. 8 The vegan burger’s meaty taste comes from plant DNA: It’s extracted from soy roots, combined with yeast,…

WHEN ARIANA GRANDE recently tweeted out references to her little-known 2015 EP Christmas & Chill, which details the specific ways in which Christmas sexually arouses her, the record quickly skyrocketed to the iTunes charts. It eventually surpassed even Thank U, Next as her current most-streamed album, bringing joy to the singer, who claims it was her “fav project.” Allow us to walk you through this surreal six-song compendium, so you too can make your holidays 700 percent more libidinous. “Intro” ➽ Christmas & Chill begins with Grande welcoming her listeners “to Christmas”—which, she helpfully explains, “only comes one time a year”— then shares that she will be spending said holiday “singing, ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’” This is the least explicit song on the album, so if you’re already feeling uncomfortable…

WE TALK OFTEN of longevity in actors, but it’s almost always the result of hardheadedness—Tom Cruise finding new ways to do Tom Cruise things, even as the times change—or a slow slide into supporting work. Laura Dern has, over the years, become a bigger and bigger star, but there isn’t one role, or type of role, or even a style of performance one can point to as the reason for her decades-long success. She doesn’t even insist on being the star. She has played lawyers, drug addicts, documentarians, and jingle-contest winners. She has appeared in small dramas and wild satires. She was chased by dinosaurs for Steven Spielberg and sacrificed herself for the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. And she has been David Lynch’s go-to actor for…

MARY MAGDALENE IS the New Testament’s most enigmatic figure. The Gospel According to Luke introduces her as a woman who (after being possessed by seven demons, then cured) helped finance the disciples’ ministries. Matthew places her at the Crucifixion, and Mark has her in the party that discovers Christ’s open tomb three days afterward. John says she later encounters a newly risen Jesus, who sends her to deliver word of his resurrection. That’s a crucial role, but little else is said of it in the Bible, where women are encouraged to be cheerful assistants and celebrated for their courage and faithfulness but always in the shadow of a man. (Speculation about Mary’s life runs hot: Early Church brass dismissed her as a prostitute, but perceptions later softened considerably.) The new…

IF THE RACIAL POLITICS of the 2010s has a definitive chronicler, it is Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose magisterial 2014 Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations” forced Americans to reckon with slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining. Since the essay’s publication—which eventually prompted a congressional hearing on the subject this year, at which Coates testified—the 44-year-old has won a National Book Award for his 2015 book, Between the World and Me, and was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. More recently, he’s been writing fiction: He scripted a run of Marvel’s Black Panther comic and published his celebrated first novel, The Water Dancer, which concerns an enslaved man gifted with supernatural powers in antebellum Virginia. Coates’s expansive imagination and incisive, historically grounded writing about Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and cultural figures like Kanye West…

FEW AMERICAN SOCIAL movements shaped the 2010s as definitively as Black Lives Matter, and few of its activists have proved to be as galvanizing—and controversial—as DeRay Mckesson. The then-29-year-old school administrator drove from Minneapolis to Missouri in August 2014 to join the protests against the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. He quickly became one of BLM’s best-known voices, playing a key role in updating the rest of the country about what was happening on the ground, all while being teargassed and hounded by local law enforcement. But with the attention came criticism: Mckesson was dismissed as an unaccountable showboat by some fellow activists and cast as “public enemy No. 1” by BLM’s detractors in government, right-wing media, and the…

1 For a few days in 2015, this photo of a dress—which looks either blue and black or white and gold, depending on how your eyes work—seemed to restore the American monoculture. 2 An early success was horsemaning— a photography trick that went viral and eventually made its way to the Today show—in which one person poses with their head obscured and another exposes only their head, giving the illusion of decapitation. 3 One of BuzzFeed News’s first moves was to hire a young reporter named Andrew Kaczynski, whose primary project was finding damning historical material that often exposed politicians as flip-floppers and hypocrites. 4 In the book, Joshua Green quotes Bannon saying Peretti was “walking me through the tech side of the business.” (“Guy’s a genius,” he added.) 5…

TYPICALLY, we share recommendations for the best products, period—it doesn’t matter when they came out as long as they are exceptionally useful, beautiful, surprising, or otherwise worth recommending. In these pages, we have gone in a different direction, focusing almost entirely on the world of the new. Here, you’ll find a wide assortment of recently released things for every person on your list, from mood music for a plant owner (a rerelease of a 1976 record that apparently helps monsteras and ZZ’s grow) to a big-dog-specific tote for a pit-bull parent. Plus, of course, hundreds of other ideas, from a vase that grows an avocado (seen here, $45 from ilexstudio.com) to a handful of eerily realistic ceramic peanuts to a Lucite cat bed that could easily double as a side…

“BILL TRAYLOR” is at David Zwirner through February 15. THE ART OF Bill Traylor comes to us with the ghosts of slave ships, lynchings, chain gangs, Jim Crow, justice denied—an American nightmare without end. Born in Alabama in 1853, Traylor was 9 years old when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and 12 when slavery was abolished with the 13th Amendment. He bore his owner’s name for life and resided for 55 years near the plantation where he was born; then he moved to nearby Montgomery County, where he remained until his death in 1949. In 1927 or 1928, he moved alone to the city of Montgomery, and in 1929, his son was killed by police. Ten years later, when Traylor was 85 and essentially homeless, he began to draw and…