Innholdsfortegnelse for April 13-26, 2020 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest issue, the magazine transformed into a self-isolation instruction manual with 44 suggestions for getting through uncertain times (“How to Survive This Plague,” March 30–April 12). The cover featured a photograph by Jeremy Cohen of a lone man playing a double bass on his Bushwick rooftop. Many readers praised the cover for capturing our current moment. On Instagram, @evagrayzel wrote, “Thank you … for changing the norm and addressing our … situation with such grace, beauty, and emotion in the photo.” And on Twitter, @groovyhil called the cover “a bit of sunshine in the midst of #CoronavirusPandemic.” Of the contents, Frank Samperi wrote, “This issue encapsulates everything I love most about New York Magazine—your absurd, authentic, critical yet hopeful everything.” Another reader said, “I am 24…

THE EFFECTS OF the coronavirus outbreak have been dire throughout the U.S. economy. About 16.8 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the three weeks that ended April 4, a record pace of job loss several times over. The S&P 500 index of large companies fell 20 percent in the first quarter of 2020, and all of its 11 sectors dropped by double digits—even the least hard-hit, information technology, was down 12 percent. Energy stocks lost half their value. And yet a few companies will emerge stronger from the crisis than they went in. Even in the disastrous first quarter, 30 of the 500 stocks measured in the S&P went up. These firms are either positioned to meet the needs of the pandemic economy or have the resources to outlast…

ON PALM SUNDAY, the Reverend Dr. Johnnie Green put on a black suit, hung a silver cross around his neck, and sat at his dining-room table. The past few weeks had been the most difficult of his 40 years in the ministry. He’d lost seven members of his congregation, six to COVID-19. Twenty had tested positive. Fifteen miles from the New Jersey home where he was quarantined with his wife and one of his two sons, his church, Mount Neboh Baptist in Harlem, was empty. Sitting before his computer, he welcomed worshippers to a Facebook Live service. “We can’t thank God enough for sparing our lives,” he said, smiling broadly at the camera. “I’m thankful to be alive. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m thankful the Lord has…

Baldor MINIMUM: $250. THE GOODS: Everything from foie gras torchon to toilet paper, with a focus on fresh produce. Works with 1,000 farms; offers 6,000-plus items. DELIVERY: New York metro area and Long Island. SPEED: At press time, one week out. Natoora MINIMUM:$60, plus $6 delivery charge. THE GOODS: Highly curated selection of pantry staples, from Spanish olive oil to Ethiopian honey, plus produce grown in the Northeast and California. DELIVERY: Parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Hamptons. SPEED: At press time, one month out.…

IT IS WHAT IT IS is out now. MANY OF THE notable hip-hop, soul, jazz, and funk records of the past decade and a half share a fingerprint. The nexus joining the intricate grooves of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and DAMN.; Kamasi Washington’s Heaven and Earth and The Epic; Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah diptych; Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer; and records by Mac Miller, Flying Lotus, Childish Gambino, Travis Scott, and many more is the fleet six-string fretwork of bassist, producer, and singer-songwriter Stephen Bruner, a.k.a. Thundercat. Thundercat plays notes like pregnant clouds spill sheets of rain. His songs are virtuosic but also playful in the same way that classic funk marries elite musicianship with carefree moods and relatable themes. I met Thundercat on a crisp February day on…

THE APOCALYPSE, IN BOTH its religious and its secular modes, has always appeared in the form of a blinding flash, a sudden intercession of divine or technological power. There is no mythological template to help us make sense of the current mutated form of the end times. We don’t know how to think about it, how to give it the form of myth and story, and so it metastasizes and spreads, a blood sickness in the culture. The slow and insidious doom identified by Enzensberger takes multiple forms, insinuating itself into the most unlikely of places. There is no one cause, no single locus of apocalyptic unease. It’s all horsemen, all the time. (Doubleday, April 14)…

DONALD TRUMP GLANCES up at the TVs on the wall or down at the newspapers on his desk. He sees himself distorted by the fake-news media. He sees his presidency under siege. With the exception of Fox News and its imitators, the coverage is uniformly critical or pessimistic, the headlines and cable segments a bundle of spears he’s unfit to dodge. Each one pricks the skin. He grows angry and annoyed. He begins asking questions, addressing them to no one in particular. “He’s like, ‘Where are my people?!’” a senior White House official tells me, describing a scene the president acts out again and again. “‘I don’t have any fighters. I don’t have any people. Where are they?’” It’s often said that Trump is his own best spokesman. Howard Rubenstein,…

THE BERNIE SANDERS CAMPAIGN was ahead of its time. Had the Democratic primary been held in the year 2040, the socialist’s overwhelming support among millennials and Zoomers would have made him the presumptive nominee by mid-March (for the purposes of this hypothetical, Sanders remains spry at age 98 and human civilization remains a thing in 20 years). Although the Vermont senator ended his 2020 campaign on April 8 with a smaller coalition than he’d assembled four years prior, his resilient hold on a supermajority of voters under 30—combined with that cohort’s exceptionally left-wing views in policy polling—suggests that the moral arc of the Democratic Party bends toward Sandersism. It’s possible that his timing was off not by 20 years but by just a few months. Had our present nightmare come…

THE FIRST week she taught online, Samantha Elkaim planned a lesson on misinformation: Her students collected coronavirus material from social media and analyzed its trustworthiness and accuracy. The second week, they started research papers. “If the thing you’re most curious about right now is coronavirus, write about it,” she told the class. “If you’re really curious about baseball right now because it’s the thing that’s keeping you from going crazy about coronavirus, write about baseball.” She wound up with roughly a 50-50 split between topics coronavirusrelated and not. (One student wanted to write about whether people were going to love technology or hate it when this was all over.) Before the pandemic, Elkaim had been hoping to get to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, but she’s not sure…

➸ OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF WEEKS, newly housebound readers of The Strategist began to reach out with shopping-related queries that went far beyond where to find bottles of hand sanitizer. Repeated requests for the best puzzles and bidets were overshadowed by calls for help to locate comfortable, relatively non-zhlubby, affordable sweatpants. Whether it’s on a Zoom conference call or a FaceTime first date, everyone is now seen from the waist up. Zippers and buttons are a thing of the past, and even those with a more robust rotation of weekendwear are looking to introduce a new pair or two. So we asked dozens of men and women with discerning taste (Garrett Leight and Linda Rodin among them) to tell us their favorites. The following pages contain a 40-piece collection—…

MICHAEL JAMES SCOTT The Genie in Aladdin, home in Los Angeles Where were you when you found out the show was shutting down? We were in a television studio about to film the Tamron Hall show to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Disney on Broadway. Right after we found out, I had to get it together, and we had to do a live performance. I was singing a jazz version of “Friend Like Me” live with four ensemble ladies. What do your days in quarantine look like? Lord, it feels like a weekend every day. A lot of FaceTimes. I’m obsessed with the app Houseparty. Are you still singing? In the evening, around the time I’d normally go onstage, I put in my head that I’m going to my show.…

David Zwirner The megagallery’s Platform: New York hosts an online viewing room for smaller galleries like 47 Canal, Company, and Queer Thoughts. Pace Gallery Pace Online broadcasts artists, curators, etc. in conversation weekly on Instagram Live. Perrotin The gallery’s deep catalogue of artist talks and exhibitions is viewable in its #Unlocked series. Museum of Modern Art Virtual Views holds online exhibitions: Félix Fénéon arrives April 16; Donald Judd, April 23. Rubin Museum of Art The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room is open for a virtual tour, with a two-hour YouTube stream.…

I NOTICE THE SMELL first. I’d been expecting the unnerving thwomps and grunts and the general intensity, but I find on stepping into Gibson Hall, where Navarro College Cheer is holding its practice, it’s the smell that almost knocks me off my feet. It isn’t body odor—though stinky, sweaty people are everywhere—rather a stale, plasticky smell with a soupçon of disinfectant. As I zigzag among the rows of discarded Gatorade bottles, Sonic cups, and energy drinks, my nose is confronted with a specific sense of place. Oh, right, I think, taking another whiff. This is a school gym. La’Darius Marshall shouldn’t be hard to find, but all the throwing and flipping and spinning makes the task a little like doing a Where’s Waldo? puzzle after half a bottle of wine.…

AS THE VIRUS ROLLED in like an invisible, toxic fog, I watched apartment buildings go semi-dark and families pack up SUVs and drive off into the countryside. With planes empty and borders closed, the flow of new arrivals who refresh New York has stopped. Those who could do so made a run for it; the rest are still bravely going to work or stowing themselves out of sight. On warm days, the parks feel distressingly overpopulated, but only because each person now requires an enlarged bubble of personal space. Looking out my living-room window, I see terror saunter down vacant streets, reclaiming a city that had forgotten how to fear. I wonder how long the feeling will linger. Most of those people will return, even if the sense of threat…

Recommended by Women Ijji Sweatpants $120 at ijji.co “I love this tomato-red pairthey’re supersoft, heavier than your usual knit, cozy, but still breathable.” —SHANNON CARTIER LUCY, artist Richer Poorer Fleece Sweatpants $72 at richer-poorer.com “Richer Poorer sweats are not too thick nor too thin. And they have pockets.” —CLARE VIVIER, fashion designer Hara Frankie Flares $75 at harathelabel.com “Very flattering on the butt, with a nice flared leg. And their rich colors are actually derived from plants.” —GABI ABRÃO, artist Entireworld Loop Back Sweatpants $88 at theentireworld.com “These are like a piece you’d find in a day-to-night styling spread in a fashion magazine.” —RACHEL KARTEN, social-media editor Cat & Jack Girls’ Cozy Jogger $15 at target.com “These are from the kids’ section, but I’m short, so a size 14 fits.…

AS NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S Underground Gourmet critics, we’re incredibly lucky to have a job whose chief requirement—currently suspended—is to constantly go to restaurants and stuff ourselves silly. Aside from the great amount of money spent having elastic inserts sewn into trouser waistbands, the only real downside to this arrangement is the lack of opportunity to experience the joy of cooking. We were thinking about this after the city ordered its restaurants to close, as we took a worried inventory of the contents of our refrigerator and cupboards. What we discovered: old pasta, older rice, stale spices, a concrete block of brown sugar, a tin of Brad’s Organic black-eyed peas, a jar of watermelon-seed butter, a bag of Rancho Gordo popping corn, 11 cans of Skyline chili we’d shipped in from…

“I DON’T KNOW IF we’ll ever have an audience again,” Jimmy Fallon says. He’s not happy about this, but he’s trying to be realistic now that he’s about three weeks into quarantining with his family at their house in Sagaponack. “How long has it been?,” he yells to his wife, Nancy Juvonen, who’s in the kitchen with their two daughters. “Twenty-one … Actually, it’s Friday, so 22 days!,” she yells back. I’m in my house in New Jersey; Fallon and his family are in New York. Over the now-ubiquitous Zoom app, Fallon recounts what it’s been like to turn The Tonight Show, a storied 66-year-old studio talk show, into a casual small-scale production from his home. “I miss it,” he says. “I miss the audience already.” But the alternative, which…