Innholdsfortegnelse for February 3-16, 2020 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover, national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti followed the Democratic front-runners across Iowa in the weeks leading up to the caucuses (“Just Another Iowa Caucus to Determine the Future of the Campaign, the Party, and Quite Possibly the Republic,” January 20–February 2). @jerry_jtaylor tweeted, “Excellent insiders view of how each of the leading campaigns (Sanders, Biden, Warren, Buttigieg) sees Iowa shaping up and the subsequent road to the nomination. One thing’s for sure: Sanders’s people are awful confident.” Many readers speculated on the contenders’ ability to beat President Trump in the general election. Hhcrum commented, “Trump will eviscerate any of the four leaders … He did not beat Hillary because he was liked. He beat Hillary because she was more disliked than he was. The same will…

Sex Poisoned  you have romantic interest in someone you objectively do not. Maybe the sex poisoner is 20 years younger than you and took you home to his basement apartment, where he sleeps on a bare mattress on the floor. Perhaps he spent the next morning telling you about his problems with his mother, Adderall, or being expected to correctly pronounce “foreign” words. You remember that when you were gathering your clothes you saw a copy of The Game slung on his sticky bedroom floor, that he used the word gay as a term of abuse—but when you’ve been sex poisoned, it doesn’t matter. It’s like you’ve been hit on the head by a sexual hammer; you forget all the terrible things about him. You make excuses for his bad…

Meet the Monk: Shoukei Matsumoto, a 41-year-old Hokkaido native, studied Western philosophy at the University of Tokyo and began living as a monk of the Jodo Shinshu school in 2003. TOOLS FOR CLEANING OUTDOORS: “Even when I began living as a monk, I didn’t fully understand the importance of cleaning. Whatever the school, monks work hard to keep their temple very tidy. In Japanese Buddhism, we don’t separate the outdoor world from the inner world. If you keep your environment clean and tidy, you keep your inner world—your mind—clean and tidy. 1 Outdoor broom for the steps: You should never use the broom you use outside for cleaning inside; we consider that dirty, just like going inside a house with shoes on. For outside, the brush should be bigger, and…

VISIT AN UNRUINED DIVE “Danny’s Baboquivari Lounge (2910 E. Fort Lowell Rd.) is a classic watering hole, named after my favorite mountain in southern Arizona, and has charismatic bartenders and a great patio. In the era of shows like Bar Rescue, it breaks my heart watching classic bars being converted into half-hearted man caves. Danny’s still has their timeless cowboy wallpaper, hand-drawn cactus sign out front, and weird outsider-art robot structure out back.” —BRYAN EICHHORST, drink programmer at Owls Club ATTEND A STAR PARTY “Kitt Peak National Observatory and Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter observatory both have nighttime programs that are great—from explorations of the moon to overnight telescope observing sessions where you get a full tour of the cosmos that lasts right up until sunrise. There’s also the Tucson Amateur Astronomy…

THE DOWNTOWN CLIFTON (485 S. Stone Ave.) “A newly renovated motor lodge with a Western, mid-century, Pendleton-blanket kind of vibe, located just south of downtown. It’s also home to the Red Light Lounge, which features Sonoraninspired cocktails, food, and little bites like delicious masa pretzels.” THE FIG (BARRIO VIEJO) (Location provided upon booking.) “An updated, four-bedroom historic adobe. It’s in the charming historic district, Barrio Viejo, and is the place to stay if you want to experience Tucson like a local. You might run into Diane Keaton, who recently bought a house nearby.” POSADA (Location provided upon booking.) “A truly gorgeous lodge-style inn with a modern Sonoran feel. Right at the edge of Saguaro National Park, it’s a 30-minute drive from downtown and perfectly located for hiking and exploring the…

FOR HEIRESS VINTAGE: “Tom’s Fine Furniture and Collectables (5454 E. Pima St.) has a mishmash of antiques and jewelry. He once bought the estate from the heiress to the Fry’s grocery-store chain. There was like 30 years’ worth of Chanel in there.” —SALIMA BOUFELFEL AND ROBERTO COWAN, owners of Desert Vintage FOR EPHEMERA ON A RANCH: “The Antique and Vintage Fair at Medella Vina Ranch (4450 S. Houghton Rd.) is the first Sunday of the month and has a great cross section of vintage clothes, books, jewelry, and odds and ends. And it’s beautiful out there on the fields.” —S.B. AND R.C. FOR NATIVE AMERICAN SEEDS: “Native Seeds/SEARCH (3061 N. Campbell Ave.) is likely the only place to buy tepary beans and mesquite cutting boards while supporting a nonprofit dedicated…

AH, FINALLY, FEBRUARY IS HERE. The news of the world may be bad and getting worse, but like we say, February has arrived. Why does this excite us? February, after all, is cold and gray and miserable. Although it’s the shortest month, it seems like the longest. It slithers on. It persists. If February were March, it would come in like a banana slug and go out like a blobfish. But February is also the month of hot chocolate and, since its 1992 debut, the City Bakery Hot Chocolate Festival. And although the City Bakery is done, having closed in October owing to financial hardship, its founder Maury Rubin, a.k.a. Mr. February, is not. In fact, Rubin has decided to usher in his favorite month by launching the Wonderbon Chocolate…

LIKE MOST HOLIDAYS, Valentine’s Day is a nationally recognized occasion to overdose on sugar and feel lonesome. I do not fight the momentum. Stocking up on seasonal drugstore junk—a fistful of strawberry-crème hearts, a bushel of “bakery fresh” Kupid Kakes—is one of the year’s highlights. Nothing makes me happier than assembling a pile of glucose and steadily working through it as I read, my eyes and jaw working in terrible harmony. I’m 99 percent certain that I owe this fondness for eating while reading to my habit of staring at cereal boxes as a kid, which trained me (and many others) to associate feeding with distraction. Healthy? No. American? Yes. Too late to undo? Haven’t tried. Anyway, books contain all the qualities that I seek in a romantic partner: They…

JACK O’GRADY Student, North Carolina Is this where you normally get your hair cut? No. So I’m on a surprise trip from Cary, where we live, with my dad. We’re going snowboarding after, and I needed a haircut so I could see. My dad took me here because his mom took him here like 35 years ago, so he wanted me to come too. How’d you decide on the cut? I was deciding between this and a fade. But my dad thought this would be the best thing for me, so that’s how I decided. I’ve had a lot of haircuts. One where it was really long on the left and short on the right. Once I got it—what’s it called?—buzzed and then no one knew who I was at…

START AT The Welcome Diner (902 E. Broadway Blvd.). “A wonderful example of restored Googie architecture.” THEN HEAD EAST TO The Sunshine Mile (east along Broadway Blvd. from the Welcome Diner to Country Club Rd.). “You’ll see clusters of incredibly intact storefronts by local mid-century legend Bernard Friedman: the sculptural former Valley National Bank Building (3033 E. Broadway Blvd.), which was built in 1971, then Hirsh’s Shoes, built in 1954 (2934 E. Broadway Blvd.), which is one of the few surviving examples of this type of commercial architecture in the country.” TRAVEL NORTH ALONG COUNTRY CLUB TO Catalina American Baptist Church (1900 N. Country Club Rd.), designed by Charles Cox. “Cox did a few churches. This one has an angled, hyperbolic-paraboloid thin-shell roof and is on the National Register of…

“Room-temperature fermenting is where the magic is, where the art is, where the wildness comes from,” says Mangieri, who makes his dough simply from flour, water, and sea salt. For the sauce, Mangieri cuts off the tips of his San Marzano DOP tomatoes before crushing them because “they’re too bitter.” Mangieri sources pepperoni from Ezzo in Columbus and Tempesta in Chicago. Buffalo-mozzarella shipments from Jersey-based importer Lioni Latticini arrive every Thursday. Strewing a pizza pie with pepperoni isn’t an inherently radical act—unless you’re Anthony Mangieri, owner of Una Pizza Napoletana. The Jersey-born, Naples-inspired dough savant has hewed to stricter-than-Neapolitan standards for nearly a quarter-century, politely declining requests to slice pies or offer optional toppings, let alone besmirch the surface of a tender, springy, naturally leavened pizza with something as ignoble…

THIS YEAR’S Sundance Film Festival had some big deals—including $17,500,000.69 for the Andy Samberg comedy Palm Springs, the biggest acquisition in festival history, beating out 2016’s The Birth of a Nation by 69 cents (nice)—but it was largely defined by how comparatively low-key and hype free it was. And for people more interested in the future of film, rather than prefab buzz, that’s a good thing. This year, the excitement usually came after the movies premiered. With Harvey Weinstein on trial in far-off Manhattan, and one of the festival’s most-talked-about films, Kitty Green’s The Assistant, showing how so much of the industry is a machine built to protect predators, the focus, and tone, has shifted. Not coincidentally, this was also probably the most inclusive slate of films in Sundance history,…

… PONDER WHETHER Amity and Prosperity, a 336-page book about fracking, will be riveting enough to get you through a five-hour flight when the poor man next to you is retching uncontrollably into his, and eventually your, barf bag? (Based on a sample size of Molly Young: Yes.) … CAUTERIZE YOURSELF ON In a Free State, proof that a real asshole can make art that will smack the reservations right out of you? … TEST-DRIVE American Nations, an irresistible dissection that explains why America is the way it is? … RUE THE FACT THAT despite all your rage, you’re still just a rat in a cage by identifying with the late-capitalist doom of Seasonal Associate? … SWAY ABOUT IN The Western Wind, which is like if…

Brooklyn Museum, 6 p.m., 200 Eastern Parkway The inaugural Toni Morrison Festival honoring her life and legacy with Pulitzer winners in tow. The Center for Fiction, 6:30 p.m., 15 Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene A screening of the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. A talk with director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths follows. 92nd Street Y, 8 p.m., 1395 Lexington Avenue A live reading of Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard with André Holland and Phylicia Rashad.…

Itchy Teeth The restless urge to explode your own life by doing something that can’t easily be undone. Like getting married, moving out of state, getting pregnant, or starting a fistfight. Lesser teeth-itchers: a dramatic haircut, a different job, a large tattoo. Rickitickitembo The wilted feeling of realizing that you’ve bullshitted your friends enough about how great they’re doing and how beautiful they look that you no longer believe anything anyone says, pretty much. Liegasm The sick pleasure of knowing you’re lying and getting away with it. You feel it a little bit in your bellybutton. A quickening of the heart; a bit of bile in the throat; a hot, wicked shame. Yesokasity The feeling of knowing you have to do something and, instead of putting it off, you just…

BEST BETS The Dustpan a Monk Recommends to Clean Up Any Mess ➸ SHOUKEI MATSUMOTO, a Japanese Buddhist monk (and the author of A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind), cleans for two hours most days at his temple in Tokyo. “When it’s raining,” he says, “I polish stuff for holy rituals; when it’s sunny, I go clean the courtyard, sweep up leaves.” While many Buddhist monks in Tokyo and farther afield in Japan do actually use modern appliances (vacuums and even Roombas) to tidy, Matsumoto says he prefers tools made of natural materials, things that are “symbolic of a simple life,” like this dustpan and brush ($46 at etsy.com) made by Los Angeles–based tools-and-accessories line RT1home from bamboo and washi, a Japanese paper used in screen-making. For…

TUCSON’S NEVER REALLY HAD an official nickname. There’s “Old Pueblo,” meant to evoke the city’s ancient roots—it was settled by 17th-century Spanish missionaries on prehistoric Hohokam land. Some locals reject it as sounding too sleepy or because it was coined as a marketing ploy to siphon tourists from other southwestern cities (like Santa Fe, the long-reigning popular girl of the Southwest). Recently, such tactics have become unnecessary. In 2015, Tucson was the first “city of gastronomy” to be named in the U.S. by the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. The body chose Tucson for its agricultural history (it has been continuously cultivated for 4,000 years—the longest in North America) and wide variety of cultural influences (take the popular bacon-wrapped Sonoran hot dog). All of a sudden, restaurants and bars…

Bring up … Phoenix To an outsider, Tucson and Phoenix may seem indistinguishable. Confusing Tucson with its rival 90 minutes to the north, however, will result in a terse correction from a local. Fueling the grudge are the bitter sports rivalries between the state’s two biggest colleges—the University of Arizona in Tucson and Arizona State University. Then there’s the tendency for Tucsonans to look down their noses at Phoenix’s moneyed sprawl. Though no stranger to resorts, Tucson thinks of itself as more accepting of its natural desert habitat—bland dirt, rocks, and all. The Immigration Crisis The city is home to anti-deportation human-rights groups like No More Deaths, which has long provided water and food to immigrants crossing the harsh Sonoran Desert on foot. No More Deaths volunteer Scott Warren became…

INTERIOR DESIGNER RUSSELL PICCIONE has a scavenger’s eye. Six years ago, he spied a massive concave mirror in the window of the Chloé boutique on Madison Avenue—an Olafur Eliasson–esque prop, then facing the end of its shopper-beguiling life. Now it’s the unavoidable glittery thing in the sitting room of the Murray Hill brownstone he rents with his partner, Antonio Haslauer. The 14-foot ceilings of his parlor floor dwarfed even his painting from the studio of Veronese, but this would surely pack a punch when juxtaposed with the settee upholstered in sapphire-blue mohair velvet, which he’d bought at auction because it was, he thought, “such a strong example of the period and the idea of furniture as ‘fantasy architecture.’ ” This five-story, 25-room house from the 1890s “has a lot of…

1 L.A. Burdick 156 Prince St. The Soho boutique chocolatier offers several choices—including single-origin varieties—but the standout is the dark drinking chocolate. Dense and deep yet eminently sippable, its velvety texture, clean chocolate flavor, and espresso undertones border on addictive. 2 Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain 513 Henry St., Carroll Gardens The version at this retro soda fountain is elegant and understated—all the better to go overboard with extravagant toppings. Choose a sticky, snowball-size scoop of housemade marshmallow fluff plopped, root-beer-float style, into the cup. 3 MarieBelle 484 Broome St. The Aztec (65 percent cacao) hot chocolate at this posh chocolatier is surely the most decadent of the bunch—thick and molten. Opt for the small, which, at four ounces, satisfies without overwhelming. 4 Obsessive Chocolate Disorder…

ROBERT ANDY COOMBS is showing at the Palm Springs Art Museum through March 29. THE PHOTOGRAPHER Robert Andy Coombs cannot hold his own camera. Mostly paralyzed from the shoulders down after a trampoline accident at age 21, he relies on assistance, and his art takes time to produce. He uses a wheelchair and controls his digital camera via a joystick operated by his mouth. His is among the most unshakable new work, by a new voice, I have come across in years. At the end of 2019, I included Coombs on a top-ten list of the year’s best; in the month since, I haven’t been able to get his work out of my head. Coombs’s photographs give us a gorgeous orchidology of sexual desire. In them, you can see crescendos…

TWO DAYS BEFORE the 2019 Grammys, much to the chagrin of her team, Janelle Monáe went skydiving. Her album Dirty Computer was nominated for Album of the Year, she was scheduled to perform, and still she and some adventurous friends drove two hours outside Los Angeles on a clear and sunny afternoon. They watched a training video about the inherent risks of throwing yourself from a plane with only a parachute to bring you safely back to earth. As Monáe waited at 14,000 feet, preparing to dive into the great wide blue below her, she was ready. If she died, she thought, at least she would die doing what she wanted. She stared down and marveled at how small the world seemed—tiny houses, tiny cars, tiny people—and in that moment,…