Innholdsfortegnelse for March 16-29, 2020 i New York Magazine

1 Days before Mike Bloomberg abandoned his $6 million-a-day presidential bid and endorsed Joe Biden, Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote an in-depth examination of his quixotic campaign (“Nevertheless, He Persists,” March 2–15). In an interview with Bloomberg spokesperson Sabrina Singh, CNN’s Brian Stelter asked, “Look at the New York Magazine cover that’s coming out tomorrow: It says, ‘He’s Buying.’ Do you think this message that he’s the one spending all this money, is it damaging, is it bad for your candidate?” Singh replied, “Mike is his only donor. He doesn’t take money from anyone. And so the money he is spending is the money he has earned and the money we are putting out on-air. We also got into this race late … We have a lot of time to catch up…

“MAD PEOPLE make the best stuff,” Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian, tells me on March 10, as voters in six states are going to the polls. Anti-Establishment candidates inspire more handmade paraphernalia, he explains, like tees, hats, and beer koozies. This was true for Bernie Sanders in 2016, and the offerings have expanded this time around. Especially now, there’s something by and for every kind of Berner out there, whether you’re a Grateful Dead fan, or feel the force of Baby Bernie Yoda, or just find Sanders rendered as a cactus kind of cute. One friend, feeling a sense of urgency to show her support for Sanders before voting in New York in April, bought a RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE T-shirt with the senator’s face on…

MY PRIVATE principle of subway etiquette has always gone something like this: Pretend you’re not a body, and help others do the same. I try not to touch; I try not to smell. I don’t eat. I don’t groom. I am eyes and ears only, compact and quiet, moving toward the center of the car as best I can. It’s a pretense required to enjoy what I want to enjoy about living in New York: the simultaneous experience of proximity and privacy, watching and being watched without quite acknowledging either—the ability to indulge in solitude without isolation. It’s a pretense that, suddenly, has grown untenable. The truth, now unignorable: We were all bodies all along, no matter if we’d never clip our fingernails on the train. Whatever thin, invisible barriers…

AT 1 P.M. ON Wednesday at the Queensbridge Houses, America’s largest public-housing development, seven senior citizens gathered at an on-site senior center for a thrice-monthly discussion about community issues, led by an employee of the Department for the Aging named Frank McCrea. All the attendees were black women, and their ages ranged from 64 to 79. There were fewer people at the meeting, and at the center, than usual. This week, they would discuss the coronavirus. The mood, when the meeting began, was not heavy. McCrea read from a fact sheet: “Wash your hands, don’t touch your face.” The women bantered and traded rumors. Somebody had heard the president’s son has the virus. Another said a guy was spraying people with Lysol on the subway. Another had recently returned from…

MARCH 10 WAS JUST a few days ago, but it already feels very far away—before the NBA season was suspended, Tom Hanks tested positive, and a national state of emergency was declared. On that date, Think Global Health, which is a project of the Council on Foreign Relations, produced a report that includes a data table that tells us how many people in the United States might ultimately die from COVID-19 under a variety of different assumptions. In the top-left corner, the table shows a scenario where 0.1 percent of people in the U.S. contract the virus and 0.1 percent of those die from it, leading to a bit more than 300 deaths. That’s the best corner of the table. We like that corner. What we don’t like is the…

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) A young woman falls in love with a soldier during the 1918 Spanish-flu pandemic. MICHAEL CRICHTON The Andromeda Strain (1969) A group of scientists deal with an epidemic caused by a constantly evolving extraterrestrial micro-organism that has no precedent in human history. GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) A tale of star-crossed lovers where death is never far from the reader’s mind. “Plagues are like imponderable dangers that surprise people,” Márquez told the New York Times in 1988. “They seem to have a quality of destiny.” GEOFF RYMAN The Child Garden (1989) Envisions a futuristic society in which viruses are used as a tool to benefit and educate humans. MARIO BELLATIN Beauty Salon (1994)…

SALMAN TOOR’s “How Will I Know” opens at the Whitney Museum March 20. SALMAN TOOR LIVES, and paints, between worlds—Lahore, Pakistan, where he grew up fascinated with his grandmother’s framed Gainsborough prints and refused, much to the befuddlement of his parents, to draw cars or planes and other things deemed gender appropriate, and New York, where he moved in 2006 after going to Ohio Wesleyan. “I was just completely speechless for the first year because I hadn’t really been to the States, and I was like, ‘What is going on?,’” he tells me, laughing, when I arrive at his Bushwick studio with the iced coffee he requested despite its being rather icy out. After Ohio, he got into graduate school at Pratt, where he befuddled his professors with his interest…

ON AN ANCIENT leather couch tucked in the back of Rough Draft, a cozy bookstore and café in Kingston, New York, Luann de Lesseps is country-house chic in a white puffy vest with a fur-trimmed hood over a gray sweater and nary a statement necklace (her signature) in sight. There is something unaccountably regal about her, though maybe that’s just good posture. A fixture of The Real Housewives of New York City since its debut in 2008, she’s a red giant in Bravo’s galaxy of reality-TV stars. That’s no small achievement: The network currently airs seven Real Housewives series, fuels a cottage industry of “Bravolebrity”-branded products (Vanderpump rosé from Beverly Hills, SparkleDog pink dog food from Dallas), and welcomed thousands of attendees to the first-ever BravoCon in Manhattan this past…

SUNDAY, MARCH 1 ● A Manhattan health-care worker becomes the first public case of the novel coronavirus in New York City. MONDAY, MARCH 2 ● A Manhattan lawyer who lives in New Rochelle becomes the state’s second case. Nine people connected with him will soon test positive. After surviving its worst week since the 2008 financial crash, the Dow posts its biggest single-day point gain in history. TUESDAY, MARCH 3 ● Ralph Lauren cancels his fall/winter fashion show. ● The Federal Reserve slashes interest rates by half a point. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4 ● The House reaches an $8.3 billion emergency-funding deal. ● Brian Keyser, who owns Casellula Cheese & Wine Café in Hell’s Kitchen, takes an electronic thermometer to work. Staff will have to have their temperature taken before starting…

WHEN I FIRST MET Inigo Philbrick in 2012, he was all of 25, looked an awful lot like Justin Timberlake, and was running an art gallery called Modern Collections in London’s Mayfair district. Despite sounding like a spinoff of Bed Bath & Beyond, it was backed by the astute and prescient art insider Jay Jopling, who’d founded White Cube gallery and helped give the world the careers of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst—for better or worse. I was immediately smitten, professionally and personally; Phil-brick was sharp, fun, and funny. He was slim, neither short nor tall, with closely cropped gingerish curls and carefully manicured stubble to the point just shy of reaching a fully fledged beard. He was American but vaguely posh accented, with an English-educated art-museum-curator father, Harry Philbrick,…

ADDA Lamb Chops 31-31 Thomson Ave., Long Island City ANTON’S Angel-Hair Francese 570 Hudson St. ASH ROOM AT SUSHI NOZ Sushi Omakase 181 E. 78th St. ATOMIX Stuffed Chicken Wings 104 E. 30th St. BANGKLYN EAST HARLEM Pad Thai 2051 Second Ave. BARNEY GREENGRASS LEO 541 Amsterdam Ave. BAZ BAGEL & RESTAURANT Blintzes 181 Grand St. THE BEATRICE INN Fried Chicken 285 W. 12th St. BENNO Garganelli Verde 7 E. 27th St. BEP GA Pho Ga 70 Forsyth St. BIRRIA-LANDIA Tacos Roosevelt Ave. at 78th St., Jackson Heights BREADS BAKERY Chocolate Babka Multiple locations BUVETTE Anchoïade Tartine 42 Grove St. CAFE DUSHANBE Kurutob Salad 1788 Sheepshead Bay Rd., Sheepshead Bay CAFFÈ PANNA Affogato Sundae 77 Irving Pl. CAMPO ROSSO Chicories Union Square Greenmarket CASELLA’S Prosciutto Speciale At Saxelby Cheesemongers, 75…

“In 2018, President Trump abolished the White House office on pandemic preparedness, so there was a whole bunch of people who were supposed to be getting ready for this event, and we got rid of them. That didn’t help. The president has cut the Centers for Disease Control, the people who were supposed to find these diseases around the world. He cut three-quarters of those offices. So we were less prepared to deal with [the coronavirus] the day it arrived than we were three years earlier.”…

If You’re a Public-Radio Lifer THE NPR POLITICS PODCAST ➸ Now publishing every weekday as primary season heats up, each NPR Politics Podcast episode serves up gloriously succinct recaps of what happened that day. It’s the obvious choice for public-radio households. Since its launch in 2015, it has become something of a talent pipeline for the industry: Sam Sanders, for example, the host of NPR podcast-radio-show hybrid It’s Been a Minute, grew in prominence during his time hosting NPR Politics. If You Really Miss the “Old Days” HACKS ON TAP WITH DAVID AXELROD AND MIKE MURPHY ➸ Put nicely, Hacks on Tap is a digital watering hole for the politically nostalgic. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod is a creature of the Democratic Establishment. Mike Murphy, meanwhile, is a Republican consultant…

THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS you are Very Much Not Supposed to Do at times like this, and Andrew Cuomo was doing them. He was shaking hands. He was touching his face. And not in an index-finger-on-the-temple kind of a way but full-on, in the way of a very tired, very frustrated person. He squeezed the bridge of his nose. He rubbed his eyes with his palms. The governor was camped in a conference room in Albany on Tuesday afternoon, March 10, just as, down in Washington, D.C., Donald Trump was telling reporters, “Just stay calm, it will go away,” while his top health official was saying that, in point of fact, Americans should prepare for a long and debilitating crisis. Cuomo was on the phone, calling various hospital administrators and…

SALES OF Station Eleven are suddenly up. In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 blockbuster hit, the “Georgia flu” wipes out over 99 percent of humanity—it moves so quickly that within 24 hours of the virus reaching America, all air travel is shut down. Cell lines jam, and phones stop working within two days. In under a week, television stations have gone to static as entire production crews die out. Spread via tiny aerosol particles, the Georgia flu is like our seasonal one and, yes, the coronavirus, on steroids—mercury-popping fevers, rattling coughs, respiratory distress, followed by death. “I don’t know who in their right mind would want to read Station Eleven during a pandemic,” the perplexed author wrote on Twitter, to which her readers replied: We would. Inhaling a novel about…

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST will be published March 17. JERRY SALTZ AND I first met the third week of May 1986. He came with his new girlfriend—my best friend, Roberta Smith—to meet our newborn daughter, balancing a bright-orange vintage Eames rocker on his head. While I was thrilled to receive our first piece of mid-century furniture, I was not so thrilled with Roberta’s choice of boyfriend, and I’d let her know my reservations. She was the newly appointed art critic at the New York Times. He was a lapsed artist, current long-distance truck driver, and hadn’t yet written a word about art, though he seemed obsessed with the subject. His main talents appeared to be memorizing long passages from Dante’s Inferno as well as reciting accent-appropriate dialogue from Apocalypse…

Six, Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St. The cheeky musical that reimagines the Tudor queens of Henry VIII as pop stars opens (appropriately) during Women’s History Month. The Minutes, Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St. Tracy Letts acts as playwright and the star in a one-act dark comedy. It’s already been a Pulitzer finalist and now has Armie Hammer among its cast. Hangmen, opens March 19, Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St. Three Billboards writer Martin McDonagh’s slick, morbidly funny show makes its Broadway debut with Dan Stevens as its new lead. Nollywood Dreams, opens March 19, The Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, 511 W. 52nd St. Jocelyn Bioh’s latest work at MCC—remember 2017’s School Girls?—is a showbiz rom-com set in 1990s Lagos. Company, opens March 22, Bernard…