Innholdsfortegnelse for June 22 - July 5, 2020 i New York Magazine

1 New York’s latest cover was dedicated to documenting this convulsive moment in American history. It featured a photograph from a Black Lives Matter protest by Michael Christopher Brown (“George Floyd’s America,” June 8–21). Though many readers found it to be a powerful and inspiring representation of the national conversation—Kate White commented on Instagram, “This cover is monumental”—many others were disappointed that it was taken by a white photographer. Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner wrote on Instagram, “I saw this new … cover and was like love,” but when she saw who shot it, she felt it was a missed opportunity. “Now i’m not saying all work about black people has to be shot by black people,” she continued. “But as someone who used to work at nymag and…

LAST MONTH, for the first time, I climbed out my living-room window and onto the roof. It felt miraculous to be so suddenly someplace new. As outdoor spaces go, this one was not especially picturesque or legal, but still: What had taken me so long? Why weren’t we out here all the time? We could be sitting out here, reading out here, eating dinner out here, whatever. Feeling pleased with my discovery, I looked around. The roof would be the secret to the summer, I told my husband. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ve been out on the roof before.” This was news. In the five years we’d lived together in this apartment, I had never once seen him go out on the roof or heard him acknowledge it was possible…

“I have learned that my mother-in-law pretty much conquers any game she plays on the first go.”—Jessica Solomon THE FIRST THING they told us, at the special school for “language-based learning differences,” was that we were never to interfere with their teaching process. They were adamant at Curriculum Night: The multisensory approach for teaching reading doesn’t resemble how we’d learned, so no matter how much we wanted to bust out the phonics flash cards, we mustn’t. We were not to help our son with homework, ever. We weren’t supposed to make him try to read anything, lest we unlay the carefully sequenced track they were working on. The first year, he didn’t appear to be a much better reader, but he no longer came home saying people thought he was…

FOR NINE YEARS NOW, Brownie darling, you have given us your alert attention and poured oceans of love upon us, cleaving in two when we come home, barking shrilly at anyone who dares to ring our buzzer. Your world is defined by our sofa, our voices, our comings and goings. In fact, you’re obsessed with us, and all we have to do is come home to you. But now, we’re all at home and all on the couch. Except for those magical occasions, three or four times a day, when you and I go for a walk. Nowadays, Brownie, these constitutionals are the high points of my day, too. I realize I have been so wrong to limit the stopping and starting and sniffing, all to rush you along so…

AS STATES LIFT STAY-AT-HOME ORDERS, the humble RV is, for many, suddenly looking like the perfect solution for a socially distanced vacation (or gas-station-bathroom-less road trip). Dealers, in turn, are noticing a surge in sales—“as much as 170 percent over a similar period last May,” says the RV Industry Association’s Craig Kirby. Seasoned RVers recommend that rookies rent before buying to figure out how much space they need (city dwellers seeking weekend escape might be content piling into a compact camper van, whereas RVers with preschoolers may require bunk beds) and to see if they prefer driving or towing (peer-to-peer rental services RVShare and Outdoorsy make that possible). On the following pages: the best RVs for everyone, from nervous drivers to those looking to replicate an on-the-road two-bedroom condo.…

“Pearl Lake State Park in Colorado is in the middle of a pine forest surrounded by peaks and contains a rather warm alpine lake. The 36 campsites (no hookups) are suitable for RVs up to 30 feet in length. Reserve any site between 24 and 33 in the lower loopthey’re 150 feet from the water so you can kayak, paddleboard, or fish for trout all day.” —MEGAN BARBER, news editor at Curbed “The campsites at White Spar (which may open in early July), tucked inside Arizona’s Prescott National Forest, are shrouded in vegetation—it makes the whole place feel very secluded. Watson Lake, surrounded by granite boulders, is a 15-minute drive; the hike to Goldwater Lake is less than a mile. As a bonus, you’re likely to run into a javelina—tusked…

JEFF PHILLIPS Marketing director, Prospect Heights WESLEY VAN HEEST Video producer, Clinton Hill What have your days been like? Getting back to the basics: running, listening to music, cooking. I deleted my social media for a while; it was too draining. I’m a Black male, so a lot of things that people are now posting has been my reality my whole life. It’s not new information. JERAMEY HAMPTON Photographer, Crown Heights LUC LEROY Artist, Crown Heights Is that eucalyptus? Yes. I’m going to hang it in the shower; it’s good for steaming. I’ve been getting really into herbalism lately, how it relates to chakras. I’m very sensitive to energy. Sometimes I find myself feeling feelings that I know aren’t my own. So I’m trying to stay balanced. I stretch. I…

I LAST WENT to the Metropolitan Opera on March 6, and the anxious sensation that viral clouds might be pulsing through the hall, borne on waves of Wagner, convinced me it was past time for the city’s cultural life to go dormant. A couple of days later, it did. Now, as New York reawakens, the performing-arts world is desperate for clues to its future. The city’s status as a cultural capital depends on a world-spanning arts machine that sucks up talent and pumps out performances night after night. The sudden halt, followed by protracted slumber, could leave a lot of wreckage: artists who change careers or retire prematurely, audiences that drift away, donors who decide they’d rather fund social causes and medical research, organizations that can’t afford their mortgages. According…

ALMOST AS SOON as the first marches to protest the killing of George Floyd began, in Minneapolis on May 26, conservatives and COVID contrarians seized on the rallies as a case study of liberal coronavirus hypocrisy. If the disease spread rapidly through the assembled protesters, they felt, it would show that those who’d spent the spring scolding Americans for resisting lockdowns didn’t care as much about public health as they did about advancing their own set of political values. (Liberals, of course, would put it differently: that the cause was worth the risk.) If there were relatively few new cases, the thinking went, it would demonstrate that the lockdowns themselves were unnecessary. Three weeks later, we have the first results from the natural experiment: Across the country, from Minneapolis to…

“I have learned that my partner thinks he is an interior designer–decoratorpainter–Ikea builder, but he’s not.”—Carly Nathan RUTH, MY BEST FRIEND, has always been an expert on living alone. She’s a self-contained and self-sustaining ecosystem who budgets and composts and keeps track of her to-dos on a whiteboard. Especially since I got married and had children, I’ve loved coming over to her apartment, a place where my family is not. It was a feature I thought we both enjoyed in equal measure. For the first few weeks of quarantine, I missed Ruth deeply but from the opposite side of what’s become a polarizing divide—between child-free adults quarantining in total solitude and married people with young kids, never alone. Joining forces seemed like the only thing that could keep that distance…

MICHAEL ROVNER: She came to the relationship with zero kitchen appliances, pots, pans, knives, cookbooks, kitchen tools, dishes, or even cutlery. Never did she mention family recipes from her childhood that she couldn’t wait for me to try. Before quarantine, I’d never even seen her toast a piece of bread. KEISHA ROVNER: His cooking was the main reason I agreed to marry him. His enthusiasm to feed us—from recipe research to menu planning, to shopping, and the way he tries to get everyone involved—it’s like he’s selling us the specials. I even enjoy watching him trying to disable the smoke alarm. From the very beginning, I said “I don’t cook.” But I didn’t mislead him, really. I just never wanted to participate. MR: There have been so many times over…

IT HELPED THAT I did not grow up in Maryland—my parents moved there a decade ago—so there was none of that sleeping-in-your-childhood-bedroom backsliding. Our quarantine relationship was something new, something we built together. We watched a lot of movies, took a lot of walks, and got into the habit of driving into Annapolis to gawk at all the people refusing to wear masks—a way to direct all our judgment at an external source, instead of at each other. On my last Friday, we took beach chairs down to the Bay. It was a perfect night: The tide was coming in, and some neighbors were making a bonfire out of their kids’ old textbooks. I asked my parents what they’d learned about me in our time together. They were surprised, they…

HEARTH Marco Canora not only makes the pasta—he mills the damn flour. You get a choice of two sauce-hogging whole-grain shapes (curvy maccheroni or flouncy radiatore, the Ruffles potato chip of pasta shapes) and four sauces. Kits for two are $11 to $15 at restauranthearth .com ; pickup only. REZDÔRA Stefano Secchi got into the kit biz back in April with neat packaging, detailed instruction cards, and a choice of four or five fresh pastas that would do any pasta granny proud. Kits for two are $39 to $42; pickup or delivery at rezdora.nyc. PORSENA Sara Jenkins’s Porsena crew offers two $32 kits for two: a crinkly chitarra that comes with chopped garlic, cherry tomatoes, Parmigiano, and basil; and a thick pappardelle with corn and pancetta. Pickup or delivery; porsena.com.…

SIGN UP for the newsletter at vulture.com/read. RECOMMENDING summer books at a time of national grief is like interrupting a funeral to ask the bereaved if they were aware that they can save 15 percent or more on car insurance. I won’t blame you if you’d like to file this away for another time—a time when escaping into a book feels more like a delight than an abdication. However, you may be yearning to carve out a moment for imaginative therapy, and dropping $25 on a set of bound pages is a reasonably cheap method of doing it. Either way, I wish you safety and solace.…

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN a woman on the verge of a gun. My anger is quiet. Reserved. But I feel so close to the edge of a trigger I can feel the metal cool and codify in my hand. I grip a pen instead of a song, or a skillet, or a trigger; I do not consider this strategy for assassination a passive action. It is hard to tell the story of who black girls are without a hidden massacre. The dark is our beauty but it is also the lot to which we have been cast: to the shadows, to the margins, to the places most people shield their eyes because they do not want to see. (Harper Perennial, June 30)…

THE PROTESTERS lined up, hundreds deep, hoping to rally on the steps of City Hall and raise a ruckus loud enough for the mayor to hear from his corner office. They hoisted signs that read BDB: WHAT HAPPENED TO BEING THE FAIREST CITY? and STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE and NO RACIST POLICE. They chanted about how they wanted justice, chanted about when they wanted it and about what they would do if they didn’t get it now: “Shut! It! Down!” Unlike most of the tens of thousands of protesters who have poured onto city streets over the past several weeks, the members of this group could probably have just told the mayor himself, or at least sent an email. They were his former and current administration employees, people who worked…

CLAIRE, 5: “She bakes and delivers cookies. And she does homework at her work. She doesn’t do kid homework. She does grown-up homework. She works for cookies.” PARENT: Nicole Halsey, chief of staff to Mayor de Blasio and owner of These Little Cookies. CELIA, 11: “My mom does a lot of calls during the day and talks to a bunch of different people. I don’t think she realizes how loud her voice gets. Like today, she was just walking around and talking while holding her computer to get steps for her Fitbit. And I was telling her, ‘Be quiet! I’m trying to work.’” PARENT: Karen Rundlet, journalism-program director at the Knight Foundation. CECILIA, 6: “She works for sales. She sells technology, but I don’t know what kind. She uses a…

IN MY OFFICE, while on the phone with my best friend, she pauses and softly laughs. “Is that C?” she asks, referring to the voice floating through the half-open door. “He sounds like such a teacher.” My husband has, as of this spring, been a high-school English teacher for a full academic year. He has spent his first year out of his former job as a college guidance counselor, a position he held for almost 15 years, anxiously hoping that he is doing right by his students. Now I hear how he is. As we work from our house, me in my office, and him on the dining-room table, I overhear his lectures and guidance, his joke-cracking and enthusiasm. According to the pre-pandemic criteria, a few of his students, owing…

KENDALL DANCES FOR AN HOUR every day in our East Village apartment, usually in just his underwear. He’s been doing it for—how long have we been stuck inside now? This isn’t an entirely new thing: He used to sometimes dance in the middle of the afternoon while I was at the office. (I know this because a neighbor complained to the landlord about the noise; also, he nearly stamped a crop circle in our fluffy white flokati rug.) But I was never there to see him do it. We’ve been together for nine years, almost all of that time living together in this entirely too cozy one-bedroom, though, before now, never actually here together (at least while both awake) all that often. One, or both, of us was out most…

A Super-Compact Vacuum ➩ Shark Rocket Ultra-Light Corded Bagless Vacuum, $172 at amazon.com Toilet Paper That Won’t Clog ➩ Scott Rapid-Dissolving Toilet Paper, $8 for eight rolls at walmart.com Replacement Showerhead (for Better Pressure) Oxygenics Fury RV Handheld Showerhead, $55 at amazon.com S’mores-Scented Bathroom Spray ➩ Poo~Pourri Before-You-Go Toilet Spray, $10 at poopourri.com Extremely Stable Trash Receptacle ➩ Camco Tear-Resistant Pop-Up Utility Container, $25 at amazon.com Unbreakable Glasses Maars Drinkware Stainless-Steel Stemless Wineglass Tumbler With Lid, $10 at amazon.com Dirt-Reducing Patio Mat CGear RV Sand-Free Mat, $135 at amazon.com Easy-to-Tote Grill Blackstone Tabletop Grill, from $97 at amazon.com An On-the-Go Firepit Outland Living Firebowl Portable Propane-Gas Firepit, $262 at amazon.com Popular-With-RVers Chaise Lounge Zero Gravity Lounge Chairs, from $139 for two at amazon.com…

CHIAKA LEILAH DURUAKU Student, Canarsie What brings you here today? My sister and I were in the area to meet someone she met online. This woman was getting rid of some vines that could be propagated into new plants. I’m 16, so my mom was suspicious and came with us. It turned out to be just a nice woman with a lot of plants. Now we’re here to buy soil. How have the last few weeks been? I haven’t been to any of the Black Lives Matter protests. My mom doesn’t want me to join; she’s afraid I’ll get infected or hurt. I’ve felt a little dissociated. My parents are angry, much angrier than me, which I’ve been thinking about a lot. Even after they turn off the TV, the…

IN FEBRUARY, six weeks before COVID-19 forced the city to shut down, Rawlston Williams transplanted his Crown Heights Caribbean restaurant, the Food Sermon, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We spoke to him by phone at the new space, where he’s been doing catering jobs while gearing up to reopen in mid-July. How did you end up in the new food hall at Building 77? The Navy Yard approached us with a handwritten note and on Instagram, but I totally ignored them. Then I got an email from the City Council: “Hey, Rawlston, please give us a call. We have an opportunity for you.” I thought they wanted me to cook breakfast or something. I called expecting a catering order, and they were like, “Hey, the Navy Yard has been trying…

1 The Queensboro The Queensboro has adapted to the times by offering large-format family meals like pork shoulder pernil-style, rice-crusted fluke with watermelon curry, and chicken mole. ➡ 80-02 Northern Blvd., Jackson Heights; 929-296-0038; thequeensboro.com 2 Addictive Bánh Mì The most addictive bánh mì at Addictive Bánh Mì? The classic: ground pork, peppery pork-belly salami, Vietnamese meat loaf, chicken-liver pâté, and pickled veggies on a baguette with butter and mayo. ➡ 32-64 87th St., Jackson Heights; 718-255-6772 3 Farine Baking Company A recently streamlined menu focuses on sandwiches and burgers including El Chimi: chef Danny Ventura’s Dominican-inspired patty seasoned with adobo and topped with green tomato, grilled onion, and sautéed red cabbage on a sweet pan de agua roll. ➡ 74-24 37th Ave., Jackson Heights; 718-433-9830; farinebakingcompany…

Lakewood BY MEGAN GIDDINGS (FICTION, MARCH 24) ➽ Lena Johnson needs money. The situation is this: Her mom is sick with a slippery ailment, bills of every size and variety are piling up, and Lena’s only job opportunity is dressing up as a blue-corn chip for $9.25 an hour at a local fast-casual restaurant called Burrito Town. And then (spooky theremin soundtrack kicks in): She receives a mysterious letter in the mail on thick stock inviting her to participate in a series of research studies in exchange for housing, a stipend, and health insurance for her whole family. Lena’s first thought is that it’s a scam. Her second is that the remote chance of legitimacy is worth a shot. Off she goes to an anonymous building, where she is cloaked…

EUROVISION SONG CONTEST premieres on Netflix June 26. EVERY YEAR SINCE 1956, usually in May, the nations of Europe have gathered to determine which of them has the most exuberantly kitschy, delightfully overproduced infectious pop song. In 2019, 41 countries competed, including Azerbaijan, Russia, and even Australia, and around 180 million viewers watched the televised contest, but most Americans don’t know much about it. This spring was to be your chance to understand what all those electronic drumbeats mean: Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, starring Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams as a hapless Icelandic singing duo, was supposed to open theatrically in late May to coincide with the actual event. But with Eurovision itself canceled, Eurovision the movie not only has to stand on its own (on…