Innholdsfortegnelse for April 27 - May 10, 2020 i New York Magazine

1 New York’s latest cover featured Alexei Hay’s photograph of a hushed and nearly empty Times Square (“Covid Capital of the World,” April 13–26). NY1’s Jamie Stelter said of Hay’s portfolio, “They look like scenes from a movie. We keep saying that. But they’re beautiful. It’s important to see this. It’s important to remember these images.” Pat Kiernan added, “These are the things we will remember 20 years from now—50 years from now. When we look back at this time, some of those images will be the most powerful.” On Instagram, @musiconlyus commented, “This picture is so devastating, it’s the contrast between the reality and the memories of whom ever visited, lived or loved NYC.” Many readers noticed one Times Square fixture that hasn’t disappeared since the pandemic: @amandalambdalambda joked,…

ONE OF MY ENDURING party tricks—not terribly well loved, though forever delightful to me—is my habit, when drunk, of reciting the opening 18 lines of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote”: the beginnings of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, when April showers bring the spring after March’s drought. I don’t know if the practice remains, but when I was in high school, it was taught to us by rote, the better for us to get a feel for the cotton-mouth cadence of Chaucer’s Middle English, a language that is legible and incomprehensible at once. Shakespeare’s English, 200 years later, was thorny and gorgeous, riddled with unfamiliar vocabulary, but with the help of endnotes and…

“Am I judging people? Maybe … just a little. I am appalled at some of my friends whose wealth insulates them from it all. They like to tell me about their recent call with their broker or financial adviser: ‘He said I should be fine, maybe even better off, when this is over.’ They fill conversations with talk of what their gardener wants to do to their rose garden or how the painter messed up (again!) on the sunroom woodwork.” – “I’ve dropped every ‘luxury’ I can think of. I’m terrified of getting sick, not for my health but because of the costs.” – “All my friends are losing their jobs, and I feel this insane survivor’s guilt. I’m trying to buy my way out by Venmoing [them] like I’m…

➸ SHELF-STABLE food items have, needless to say, never been more popular. The bean business, in particular, is booming—according to recent reports, sales on some of Goya’s products have increased nearly 400 percent. But for those whose legume repertoires are beginning to feel a tad stale, it might be worth considering other areas of the canned and tinned universe, many of which are also quickly gaining traction. Anchovies, long the topping “held” from a dish, are taking center stage on Instagram (in sandwiches, on heaps of linguine), and humble canned tuna h a s shifted from the back of the pantry to the front. Not to mention the fact that there’s something specifically delightful about eating a perfectly salty, spicy, or sweet item (whether it’s a smoked oyster or a…

➸ Of the new families flooding Graham Court in recent years, one tenant says, “They don’t have money for Westchester, so this is the new place.” ➸ According to court records, former Knicks player Melvyn Davis is embroiled in a long-lasting litigation with the landlord and his own subtenants. ➸ When tenants need “someone with power to get anything done in the neighborhood,” they’ll go, says one, to Clyde Williams, the former national policy director of the DNC. ➸ One resident lives down the hall from what he believes to be the apartment of an heir to the Cabot Creamery fortune. “He got his lease for next to nothing,” the tenant says, “then did a massive renovation.” Plus: “He has parties, and I haven’t been to one, but I hear they’re…

“Many of the drug addicts in the park across the street, which was closed because of COVID-19, were camping out in front of our gate—then the drug pushers joined them and were using it as a drug-selling station. It was like the Harlem of the ’70s and ’80s on steroids. The pushers and the addicts were not distancing, many were sickly. In mid-April, it got a bit better—we think people got word that the city was fining.” WILLIAM ALLEN “I’ve been inside for about two months—my niece is incarcerating me here. She brings me food from a Spanish restaurant—yellow rice, beans. The tenants seem all right. One woman’s in the hospital. You can’t help but run into people, but they’re sensible, so they follow the rules.” LACONIA SMEDLEY “Some folks…

WITH RESTAURANTS STILL CLOSED and our regular ranking of the best new things to eat and drink on hiatus, the Underground Gourmet has been spending a lot of time in the kitchen, thumbing through cookbooks and brooding over restaurant dishes we have known and loved. Here, a few attempts at conjuring up those fading memories with an emphasis on comfort and ease of cleanup. R.R. & R.P. 1 Jersey Omelet Eggs If ever there were a time to perfect your classic French-omelet technique, it would be now, right? But after a few messy attempts at channeling our inner Jacques Pépin, we said screw it and made Kenny Shopsin’s Jersey Omelet Eggs (Eat Me; Knopf). All you do is beat three eggs in a bowl, pour them into a hot…

CALL ME A FASCIST, but I love statements that start with, “There are two types of people …” Someone once told me, “There are two types of people: those who run out of toilet paper and those who never do.” (These days: not much of a choice.) Another person hit me with, “There are two types of people: people who lose things and people who break things.” Here’s a third that I’ve personally observed to be true: There is one kind of person who, when she is in a sad mood, will listen to sad music as a way of ratifying her emotion, while others will listen to happy music for its counteractive qualities. There are books here for both types of sad people. If you want verification of your…

I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO You’re Wrong About, a podcast that challenges our commonly held cultural narratives, particularly about maligned women of the recent past. The Tonya Harding episodes are particularly engaging. If the grounded magic of Chosen Ones appeals to you, I also recommend Vita Nostra, by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (Harper Voyager), about a young woman attending a dark, weird philosophical magic school. And what I’m looking forward to on the YA side: Court of Lions, by Somaiya Daud (Flatiron Books, August 4), a tale of political intrigue (and romance) in a unique sci-fi Moroccan setting. It’s a sequel, so you can get started with the first installment, Mirage, while you wait.…

STEVE MNUCHIN KNOWS his way around a crisis. Twelve years ago, the Treasury secretary was still a middling multimillionaire of little renown or historical import. But whenever God closes a door on an underwater homeowner, he opens a window to an unscrupulous speculator, and in 2008, the Big Man began closing a lot of doors. Mnuchin didn’t miss his opening. He may have been just a humble Goldman Sachs nepotism hire turned Hollywood financier back then, but he had a few million dollars to play with and a few friends with many millions more. Together, they bought up a failing mortgage lender, rapidly foreclosed on thousands of borrowers, and resold the homes at a nifty profit. By the end of his tenure as a bank CEO, Mnuchin had earned himself…

IF BERNIE SANDERS is the politician Occupy Wall Street dreamed of, Thomas Piketty is the closest thing we’ve gotten to the great theoretician of our era of inequality (and the populism and political dysfunction it has produced). Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which came out in France in 2013 and in the U.S. six months later, was the biggest best seller Harvard University Press had ever published (despite being nearly 700 dense pages long); it managed to smuggle an abstract equation into quasi-pop discourse (r>g, Piketty’s shorthand for the fact that the returns to capital have been greater than the growth of the economy as a whole) and is now the subject of a surprisingly light documentary of the same name (in which Piketty stars). It’s not every day an…

1. Underwood Deviled Ham Spread, $5 at walmart.com “One of my favorite sandwiches as a child was this stuff on Pepperidge Farm bread with butter. If you close your eyes, the deviled-ham spread is like a ‘poor man’s jambonbeurre.’ ” —PHOEBE COLESMITH, chef and farmer 2. Whole Artichoke Hearts, $6 at cucinaandamore.com “All Cucina & Amore products are good, but my favorite is the grilled and marinated artichoke hearts. They’re briny and gorgeously charred and make a great addition to omelets.” —LEAH KOENIG, food writer 3. Campbell’s Cream of Celery, $2 at walmart.com “It’s the Ferrari of canned soups, since you can use it anywhere that you’d use heavy cream: casseroles, gratins, pasta, sauces. It’s a big part of my life.”…

ADDRESS 1921 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard APARTMENTS There are 100 in the building, spread out over eight floors and four distinct structures. Likely a few dozen are rent controlled and rent stabilized. PRICES $3,094 a month is the average current rate for an apartment. ($400 a month was the typical rent-stabilized cost for a tenant in the ’90s, per one resident, and $900 a year was the starting rental price for an apartment with six-to-11 rooms when it opened in 1901.) NOTABLE RESIDENTS, PAST AND PRESENT Zora Neale Hurston, Danny Glover, Hugh Masekela, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, Marcella Lowery CURRENT OWNER Graham Court Owners Corp.…

➸ THE LAST AVAILABLE UNIT WAS APARTMENT 5G—a $4,850 three-bedroom (with two fireplaces), which was temporarily taken off the market on March 13. The real-estate agent who has rented many of the recently available apartments is Jason Lax, who posts them on StreetEasy. The more coveted apartments—the ones that retain their full Gilded Age charm—rarely make it on there. For access to those, you’ll have to be more resourceful. Clyde Williams, who moved into a three-bedroom in 2010, “called everybody under the sun: the property manager, the owners. Finally, somebody called us back.” Kevin Harter, the VP of integrated marketing and fashion direction for Bloomingdale’s, describes a similar process when he started trying to move in, in 2016. “I had to work it,” he says. “I gave gifts. There are…

IT WAS THE 28TH DAY of quarantine in New York City. Or was it the 16th? Or the 43rd? On my daily ration of one “going outside,” I saw a squat, grumpy dog—one of those dogs that look like a guy who played football in high school but wasn’t tall enough to play in college and is now a personal trainer at a Gold’s Gym in the town you grew up in—try to bite a couple on their daily walk. At the last second, the owner pulled her dog back. There was a pause. And then the owner looked at the couple … and screamed at them for not wearing masks. At this point, I decided I was done with the world for the day. Home, I turned on Netflix…

LaBrava BY ELMORE LEONARD (FICTION, 1983) ➽ The local library is closed, of course, but it’s got a no-contact book sale going on that works like this: There’s a shelf of books that vary extravagantly in quality and condition. You approach the shelf, browse, select your books, pick a few more because who knows how long you’ll be indoors, and shove your total (25 cents per title) into the book-return slot. This isn’t a COVID-19-specific innovation; the system has been in place for at least a decade. Perhaps your local library runs a similar operation. At any rate, I zeroed in on this Elmore Leonard book but didn’t have money with me, so I decided to walk home, fetch a coin, and return. On my way, it started raining. Long…

FOR YEARS, CDs have arrived each week by the dozen, their styles, careers, and time periods all competing for my attention. I would get to them all eventually, I told myself—when I was idled or sick or housebound. But in these past weeks, I’ve found I have no appetite for exploration, no urge to be shaken by novel sonorities or huge orchestral dramas. Lighthearted distractions don’t distract. Instead, my musical desires have narrowed to a tiny illuminated point: a handful of Schubert’s last pieces. In the piano sonatas and chamber works he wrote a little less than 200 years ago, I hear a distillation of the world we’re all suddenly trapped in, vast and sad and radically confining. Franz Schubert led a short but sociable life in Vienna, where he…

– “[Being in quarantine] is like being in jail. It’s mostly because I’ve been wearing the same clothes for ten days and everyone in here is gay.” —Ellen DeGeneres, broadcasting from her multimillion-dollar Southern California home – At 1:22 p.m. on March 14, East Hampton real-estate agent Joseph Kazickas sends out the following email: “Dear Homeowners, Virus fears are driving an early start to the rental season.” The response was immediate. “Quite a large number of homeowners responded,” he says. “I would say the email was well received.” – Blade (Uber, but for helicopters) in late March begins offering delivery of supplies from the city, including prescriptions, food for specialized diets, and school notebooks. – “It’s a lot of mail and a lot of packages. It’s a lot of groceries,…

As this year began, I was deep in revisions for a draft of a book I’m writing about the burgeoning consumer-spirituality industry of supplements, pulsating colonics, silent retreats—the entire intermittent–juicefasting–sleep–hygiene–SoulCycle–Moon Juice–Ashwagandha Gesamtkunstwerk of trying to feel okay, which had taken over the lives of many people I know. I called it the “wellness epidemic.” At my last face-to-face meeting with my editor in February, I sort of flapped my hand before her furrowed brow and said “Eh, a global pandemic is not where my anxieties live.” And it wasn’t, then. As news of COVID became more ominous, my in-box and  Instagram feed were flooded with opportunities to buy my way out of my fear. Was this what the wellness world had been preparing for all along? Superpowers to survive a…

SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS own country houses. This is not a new discovery. One of the things I have loved best about my life in New York is exactly this, the wide diversity in the affluence of my friends—if you can call a group of mostly white, mostly college-educated, striving people living in Brooklyn and Manhattan “diverse.” Some of my best friends own country houses and some don’t have a pot to piss in, and before this pandemic, we all hung out together—sometimes at those country houses and sometimes at the precious restaurants we all love or at shitty bars—because even though we could observe the income discrepancies between us, we mostly pretended they did not exist. Our affinity (in taste, politics, humor, parenting concerns) superseded what we told…

How did you feel when you found out you’d be home the rest of the year? Well, I was having a really good first semester, but second semester I was starting to feel pretty overwhelmed socially. I felt all this pressure to be complex and interesting and I don’t know—I guess what I’m saying is I felt a little relief. What’s it like being back? I’m reverting to a bit of a high-school dynamic. It’s obviously not true, but I sort of feel like I’m grounded: I can’t see my friends, can’t hang out with my girlfriend. Actually, when I first got home, me and my girlfriend were seeing each other. But then our moms talked and decided we couldn’t do that anymore. Like, they had a phone call? Yes.…

Sheila Bridges, interior designer and author: “A friend of mine from Brown lived in Graham Court, and he was able to convince the owners of the building to rent a number of apartments that they were warehousing for photo shoots and film production to all these young black professionals who would be willing to pay market rent. That’s how I got here.” Kathy Frazier, wealth adviser: “Our friend from Brown organized it. Eleven of us moved in with Ivy League degrees—five of us still live here today—and the change probably began then. I don’t want to sound saviorish, but when 11 black Ivy League graduates move into a building at the same time, it denotes something. We hoped to purchase our apartments once the building went co-op—our goal wasn’t to…

LIKE MOST THINGS these days, the quotidian act of going out for groceries suddenly feels like uncharted territory. Nowhere is this change more apparent than at the Park Slope Food Coop. Over its 47-year history, brownstone Brooklyn’s bastion of 1970s idealism has stayed remarkably resilient. But the coronavirus has shaken the community-minded store to its very foundation. The most obvious change? The day after Governor Cuomo mandated that nonessential workers stay home, the co-op’s leadership suspended members’ mandatory work shifts for the first time ever, hiring 55 temporary employees to manage stocking, checkout, bulk-food packaging, and maintenance. “We didn’t think the governor was suggesting that all of our 17,000 member-workers were essential,” said Ann Herpel, one of the co-op’s general coordinators. “And it wasn’t safe to expose our staff to…

A TEN-PART documentary centered on the final season of Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls dynasty, The Last Dance, presents something many of us never thought we’d see—acres of unguarded, behind-the-scenes footage of the press-shy (and usually quite controlling) Jordan and his teammates at a momentous time in their lives. That raw footage had been sitting virtually unseen in the NBA’s vaults for two decades. How did the documentary happen, and why is it finally seeing the light of day? Producers Andy Thompson and Gregg Winik walk us through the project. How did you gain Michael Jordan’s trust? ANDY THOMPSON: I first met Michael Jordan when I produced a feature on him with NBA Inside Stuff host Ahmad Rashad. While I was setting up for the shoot, Ahmad turned to Michael and…

… GIVE YOURSELF THE CREEPS with some help from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle? … EXPERIENCE CATHARSIS the old-fashioned way—with Shakespeare? Macbeth did it for me. Something I discovered while rereading it is that hautboys doesn’t mean what you hope it means. … FROLIC among the chintzy furnishings and knotty mind of Iris Murdoch beginning with Under the Net? … TRY Read Me, by Leo Benedictus, a novel that replicates the feeling of going to bed at 8 p.m. because you can no longer bear to be conscious? … DIP INTO Devils in Daylight, by Junichiro Tanizaki, a suspenseful tale about the underbelly of Tokyo? … INDULGE IN Tapping the Source, by Kem Nunn, the 1980s surf thriller that Point Break, the classic Keanu…