Innholdsfortegnelse for May 11-24, 2020 i New York Magazine

THE LAW OF ENTROPY states (more or less) that when a place is left alone, things start to get weird, and at around 12:30 a.m. on an April night in Times Square, they did. Bikers from around the tristate area roared into the empty plaza. Jonathan Mena is the sergeant at arms of the Gonobikerreas, a Colombian crew with around 50 local members. Their PPE took the form of Blue-tooth helmets that, Mena says, “close completely, so you don’t get exposed.” With fewer cars on the road, it’s easier than ever to cruise. “We take the New Jersey Turnpike,” he says. “It took like 25 or 30 minutes to get there, and there wasn’t any traffic.” Also in Times Square that night was Benjamin Rahanaev and members of the Brooklyn…

The mythical American curtain-raiser to adulthood, the four (or so) years of finding-yourself freedom and higher learning, is having a reckoning. May 1, the date when most colleges ask that the students to whom they’ve offered admission declare their intentions for the fall, has come and gone with many students (and their parents) unsure of what they should do. Facing the prospect of mass deferrals, many schools are granting families extra mull time because nobody, not the schools, not the families, not public-health experts or politicians, knows whether it will be safe or wise (or legal) to be on campus in September. The financial wreckage from that uncertainty could be massive. Already, the University of Michigan anticipates losses of $400 million to $1 billion this year across its three campuses.…

To find out which teeth need extra attention GUM Red-Cote Disclosing Plaque Tablets, $10 at walmart.com ➸ PLAQUE-DISCLOSING TABLETS can help improve routine brushing by showing you the areas you’ve been missing, says dentist Elisa Mello. Chew up a tablet, swish it around your mouth, then spit it out. It’ll temporarily dye plaque spots on your teeth red so you can see where to spend a little more time brushing. To reduce gum inflammation Waterpik Aquarius Water Flosser, $70 at amazon.com ➸ SAYS DENTIST Elliot Eskenazi: “Use of a Waterpik reduces inflammation of the gums, which will decrease or eliminate bleeding from the gums.” This is most important, says dentist Sonya Krasilnikov, “if you have bridges, implants, or gum disease.” To get to hard-to-reach spots GUM Proxabrush $4 at amazon.com…

MY PRIMARY ASSOCIATIONS with Swedish people come from my mother, who is of Swedish blood and looks it. (Picture a blonde garden gnome, but beautiful.) I think of Swedes as pragmatists with a streak of whimsy, nature-loving, uncommonly skilled at digesting dairy products. The author Patrik Svensson, a Swedish man, embodies all of these traits except possibly the dairy one, which I can’t verify from his Book of Eels but suspect to be true. How do you feel about eels? For reasons that aren’t the eel’s fault—its shape, color, lateral movements, nocturnal nature—you may feel the way I do, which is: Yuck. Svensson is the most recent thinker to contend with what scientists call, I’m not kidding, the “Eel Question.” I was drawn to his book the way a child…

TV 1. Watch Snowpiercer Dystopian fun. TNT, May 17. The 2013 Bong Joon Ho film, based on a graphic novel, inspired this long-gestating TV version, which, like its source material, is a postapocalyptic thriller set in a climate-change-ravished world where a perpetually speeding train provides the only refuge for survivors. Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly are among the stars. JEN CHANEY ART 2. See Homegrown Greetings from the Hauser & Wirth family. hauserwirth.com, through July 18. Yup, it’s huge, bloated, and seems to suck up a lot of artists from other galleries, but that doesn’t mean a megagallery like Hauser & Wirth doesn’t do boatloads of good. Here comes Homegrown, a new platform dedicated to the sale of artworks by the gallery’s staff, immediate family members, and freelancers, gathered by…

THERE WAS A BRIEF SILENCE, and then a muffling sound, and then Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s voice came through clearly, on the scratchier side of her vocal spectrum but unmistakable. The justice was calling from her hospital bed, where she was being treated for a gallbladder infection, on the third day of the Supreme Court’s historic experiment in conference calling. The pandemic had dragged the Court into at least the 20th century. In March, oral arguments had been postponed for the first time since the 1918 Spanish flu and, before that, 18th-century yellow-fever outbreaks. The justices have for decades refused any kind of live broadcast of their proceedings, leaving access to the elite or the longtime line-waiters. (“The day you see a camera coming into our courtroom, it is going to…

As soon as my wife and I started sheltering in place, I got concerned emails and queries on social media: “Jerry, how are you eating and drinking coffee during this?” I haven’t seen anyone else asked this. These queries were specific to me and my wife, Roberta Smith, also an art critic. We’ve made no secret of her battling cancer since 2014. Today she’s doing well on immunotherapy drugs, though she is in several high-risk categories for COVID-19 and our sheltering in place has a lot of moving parts. But people asked us about food and coffee for reasons other than these. Namely, that anyone who has ever heard about how we eat and drink thinks we are insane. First, coffee. In normal times, every few nights I buy six…

Stick them in a specialized tub Booster Bath Elevated Dog Bathing and Grooming Center, $149 at chewy.com “It comes with a harness that gently holds your pet in place while you get 360-degree access to wash them quickly.” —DOMINIQUE PARISO, STRATEGIST WRITER Lather them up TropiClean 2-in-1 Papaya & Coconut Pet Shampoo and Conditioner, $14 at chewy.com “Your pet will carry the scent of this for days. And it’s a two-in-one, so it’ll get the job done fast.” —SAMANTHA SCHWAB, RESIDENT PET EXPERT AT CHEWY Demattify their fur Chris Christensen Big K Slicker, $64 at amazon.com “This brush’s long pins will penetrate into the deepest layers of your dog’s coat.” —KRIZ KHOON-AROON, GROOMER AT RELEASH NYC Clip their overgrown nails Safari Professional Nail Trimmer, $13 at amazon.com “This trimmer allows…

COCKROACHES Victor M256 Poison-Free Insect Magnet Traps, $21 at amazon.com “We use thousands every year,” says Mike Deutsch, an exterminator at Arrow Exterminating Company, of these sticky traps. BEDBUGS The ZappBug Oven 2, $350 at amazon.com On small items that can’t be washed or dried, you can use a hair dryer to kill bedbugs, says Gil Bloom, president of Standard Pest Management. But for larger belongings, like luggage, he recommends a heat tent, like the ZappBug Oven, which he calls “very effective.” It can also be used for books, files, or paperwork. MICE Catchmaster Baited Mouse Traps, $18 at amazon.com These glue boards work extremely well, according to Timothy Wong, founder of M&M Pest Control. They should be placed only along walls on paths where mice have been seen traveling…

Everything in collector and curator Pierre Apraxine’s West Village apartment has a life of its own. BOOKS, JOKES PIERRE APRAXINE, who has a lot of them, are “like a flood. Slowly, slowly there are more and more, and by the time you find a place for them, it’s too late.” He laughs when he says this; of course, he loves books—he is a scholar and curator. His two-bedroom in a classic West Village Bing & Bing building is full of them, cohabitating with his eclectic and erudite collection of art, furniture, and artifacts. “What you see now are basically the things which have passed through my hands and stayed,” he says. “Most of the things that I ‘collected’ found their place in museums and institutions and so on, but the…

TAINTED IN THE PUBLIC imagination by misfortune, miscalculation, and lack of transparency, the 1991 experiment in sustainable living known as Biosphere 2 went from being viewed as the coolest thing ever, to a scam perpetrated by a New Age cult, to—most ignominiously—the basis of a Pauly Shore comedy, Bio-Dome. Matt Wolf ’s sympathetic, intermittently cringe-inducing but very entertaining documentary Spaceship Earth sets out not so much to correct the record as to liberate Biosphere 2’s architects and participants from their fate as a punch line. Yes, this hermetically sealed three-acre terrarium for eight humans and an ark-load of animals and plants in the Arizona desert had its off days, and the personalities inside that formidable glass structure and in the nearby mission control were a tad eccentric. Maybe more than…

ANDRÉ LEON TALLEY’S LIFE in quarantine is not so different from the time before. He loves his house in White Plains and spends the days reading and watching Netflix in his UGG boots and trademark caftans in various shades of black and burgundy and olive green. Before our phone call, he warmed up a shepherd’s pie brought to him the night before by Alexandra Kotur, the creative director of Town & Country, which he ate on a “beautiful plate by Ralph Lauren.” He telephones regularly: Sandra Bernhard every day, Carolina Herrera every other, and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, whom he calls his “missing sister.” He refers to everyone by their full name each time so there can be no confusion. He would love to hear from Anna Wintour, but…

WHEN FOURTH-TERM SENATOR Joe Biden built his Wilmington, Delaware, home in 1996, he had no plans to turn it into a backup office, let alone a presidential-campaign isolation bunker from which to plan a crisis presidency an order of magnitude more expansive than anything in the past half-century. Now, nearly every morning, Biden spins through an early Peloton ride in the upstairs weight room, dresses (formally, no sweatpants), drinks his breakfast shake, and sits at the phone in his study awaiting the latest updates on the world’s misery. Then, sometimes looking at the small lake abutting his backyard that bulges out from Little Mill Creek, the self-conscious man in the Democratic middle—mocked by the activist left throughout the primary campaign as hopelessly retrograde—considers the present calamity and plots a presidency…

Colleges and universities are scrambling to figure out what to do next year if students can’t come back to campus. Half the schools have pushed back their May 1 deadlines for accepting seats. What do you expect to happen over the next month? There’s a recognition that education—the value, the price, the product—has fundamentally shifted. The value of education has been substantially degraded. There’s the education certification and then there’s the experience part of college. The experience part of it is down to zero, and the education part has been dramatically reduced. You get a degree that, over time, will be reduced in value as we realize it’s not the same to be a graduate of a liberal-arts college if you never went to campus. You can see already how…

Download a vision app ➸ Eye Handbook offers free vision tests for measuring visual acuity, color vision, contrast sensitivity, and macular health, says ophthalmologist Sophia Saleem. It also offers a Snellen standard eye chart to test far vision. Set up your space ➸ Wear your glasses or lenses, and, if using an app, turn the phone’s brightness up. If you’re using a Snellen, hang it ten feet from where you’re sitting. Get a prescription online ➸ If you need a new or updated glasses prescription so you can order a pair from online retailers, Warby Parker is currently offering an online exam that allows an eye doctor to review your vision and write one for you.…

After New York banned nonessential gatherings, some Jewish tweens preparing for their bar or bat mitzvah began (begrudgingly) moving their ceremonies to Zoom. Kayla Levy, a Park Slope–based b’nai-mitzvah tutor and Strategist writer, spoke to clergy members from six synagogues across the city and six bar and bat mitzvahs about how to pull off this important rite of passage remotely, from implementing virtual l’dor v’dors to tracking down Torahs from shuttered shtiebels. Get your hands on a tikkun korim or chumash. Reading from the Torah is the focal point of a bar or bat mitzvah, but since getting access to an in-temple ark is going to be difficult at this point, most rabbis say that your best bet for reading from a physical text in quarantine is a tikkun korim…

THE NEWS THAT the great Ukrainian diner Veselka is back in business with a limited menu for takeout and delivery has not escaped the notice of the national pierogi cognoscenti. “I live in Boulder, Colorado,” writes @chrissy_aitch on Instagram. “Am I located in the delivery zone?” Local borscht mavens are pretty excited about it, too. And so is the Underground Gourmet, who over the years has developed a thing for a Veselka sandwich called the Baczynsky: ham plus salami and cheese on a roll. On paper, that combo does not sound like the last word on the subject of sandwiches. And it’s doubtful that, unless ballot boxes were stuffed or judges bribed, the Baczynsky would ever win any awards. But we love it. The ingredients come from the Ukrainian butcher…

IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I watched a new TV series that confounded and infuriated me quite as much as Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series, Hollywood. I’ll admit I have a weird fondness for truly insulting stinkers: There’s something pleasurable about trying to sift through the shambolic wreckage of The Witcher to figure out how it got to be this way; similarly, I would love to be able to stop watching Quibi, and yet I gave it many, many hours of my time. This club is where Murphy’s Hollywood belongs. It is a baffling Hindenburg of TV. Hollywood is part seedy-underbelly story, part alternate history of the first Hollywood Golden Age, based loosely on Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the…