Innholdsfortegnelse for July 6-19, 2020 i New York Magazine

LAST YEAR, Scott Gairdner, a comedy writer and director who had worked on Conan and created the animated series Moonbeam City, went to the Hollywood offices of the new streaming platform Quibi for a pitch meeting. He is also the co-creator of a viral Adult Swim video called Live at the Necropolis: Lords of Synth, which Quibi was considering adapting. Gairdner was provisionally excited. In a business where new players pop up only to evaporate, he was used to deals never quite materializing. But a new, deep-pocketed buyer was cause for optimism. ¶ Quibi, the brainchild of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney studio head and DreamWorks co-founder, had promised to reinvent television by streaming high-quality content in ten-minute-or-less chunks to “the TV in your pocket.” (Quibi, which rhymes with Libby,…

Billions Axe is last seen going full Godfather as he prepares to go to war with his latest rival. Also unresolved: Wendy’s relationship with macho artist Nico Tanner and how far Chuck will go to get his dad a kidney. Empire The biggest story thread left hanging was Jamal’s; the finale ends with the family together minus him. Also unresolved: Becky’s cocaine addiction, and we don’t actually see Andre reunite with his son (though it’s implied that he does). The Good Fight In what had to be unintentional kismet, its final shot is literally dangling—a slow pan in on a cryogenic tank containing Jeffrey Epstein’s frozen penis. Also unresolved: the origin of a mysterious, all-powerful memo.…

1. Keep your desk, table, and couch away from the window. “These are the warmest areas; large furniture obstructs breezes and prevents your apartment from allowing hot air to flow out and cool air to flow in,” says Petty. 2. Never leave any larger appliances, like guitar amps, desktop computers, or televisions, on or plugged in when you’re not using them. “Especially if they’re older,” says Fiks. “As appliances age, they get hotter and hotter.” Interior designer Neffi Walker recommends you use large appliances like laundry units and ovens only at night. 3. Put fitted sheets and blankets in the freezer for a few minutes. Says Welch: “I leave them in for a few minutes, then pull them out and remake the bed. It won’t last all night, but it’ll…

1 Bar-Seat Wolves Predatory seat coveters who want to expedite the move onto your bar-stool perch by anxiously hovering so close behind you that you can feel their hot breath on your neck. Especially pestiferous while eating something unwieldy like spaghetti carbonara or a torta Cubana. 2 Obsessive Napkin Folding Rather than returning from the loo to discover your napkin meticulously contorted into a Bishop’s Cap, the Artichoke, or any number of other origami-like whimsies, prepare to find your crumpled-up serviette exactly where you tossed it. 3 The Town Crier of Specials Should the ritual of the dramatic daily-specials recitation outlive the coronavirus, at least we now have masks to mitigate the effects of endless, spittle-spewing soliloquies whose content we never could remember anyway. 4 Topper Offers Serial wine refillers…

1968 WAS A BRAINBUSTER, an election year in which the choices were Richard Nixon, a “law and order” Republican who appealed to a “silent majority,” and Hubert Humphrey, an Establishment Democrat appealing to America’s sense of decency. An economic crisis loomed while a flu pandemic crept in from overseas. Tensions over racial justice exploded into the streets following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., inspiring protests and riots in over 100 American cities. Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., burned. Chicago mayor Richard Daley authorized the police to “shoot to kill any arsonist … shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting”; by summer’s end, the CPD had killed a 17-year-old protester in a demonstration at the Democratic National Convention, one of many to die during the violent struggles with…

BOOKS 1. Read Sex and Vanity A new trilogy begins. Doubleday. Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan’s latest novel is an homage to E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View. It follows Lucie Churchill, a half-Chinese woman, amid an identity crisis. MOVIES/POP MUSIC 2. & 3. See and Listen to Eurovision Song Contest Infectious tunes. Netflix; Arista Records/Maisie Music Publishing. Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams play hapless Icelandic contestants at the annual competition of kitschy music. The filmmakers have re-created the world of Eurovision, complete with hilarious pop songs, and captured its go-for-broke melodrama, which helps sell Ferrell’s antics. The soundtrack is bound to be a karaoke favorite—if we ever have karaoke again. BILGE EBIRI TV 4. Watch The Broken and the Bad If Breaking Bad were a doc. AMC.com,…

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON on the last Monday in June, 430 Democrats, who had paid up to $100,000 each, clicked into a private, Texas-themed Zoom call organized by Joe Biden’s campaign. They were greeted by former Planned Parenthood chief Cecile Richards, whose mother, Ann, was the state’s last Democratic governor. They heard from Julián Castro and Beto O’Rourke, and they were treated to a performance by Willie Nelson, who sang a song with his son Lukas called “Vote ’Em Out.” It began, “If you don’t like who’s in there, vote ’em out./That’s what Election Day is all about./The biggest gun we’ve got is called the ballot box.” And they heard from Biden, who—just four days after a Fox News poll showed him narrowly ahead of Donald Trump in the state…

IT WAS EARLY JUNE when I first spoke to Rachel Noerdlinger, and she was worrying about the casket. George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis was to be held in 48 hours, and she was considering how images of the coffin, conspicuously placed at the front of the university sanctuary, might impact the national psyche after ten days of protests. It was the family’s call, of course, but she fretted that they might want the casket to be open, as it had been in the case of Sean Bell. (“I can still picture his face,” Noerdlinger says now. “It’s just blech.”) But Noerdlinger wanted to ensure that Floyd remained in the public mind as long as possible, as “a human being, not a lifeless vessel.” Noerdlinger was in hyperdrive. Officially, she…

MICHAELA COEL IS NOT A Christian anymore, but the spirit has never left her. The Bible is the reason she started writing. Her first poem, “Beautiful,” was inspired by Psalm 139, and it’s still as clear as crystal. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” she recites. When she writes, she gets the same feeling she did one Sunday when she was 18 years old and her hand shot into the air during the altar call. She ran to the pulpit, tears streaming down her face, ready to accept Jesus Christ as her personal lord and savior. She cries and cries and cries as she writes because it all feels so big—the pain, the ecstasy—and whether you call that thing God or the cosmos or simply inspiration she isn’t sure, but…

1 Newton auditioned for what would be her debut role after a back injury derailed her plans for a career in dance. She was 16 when she landed the female romantic lead in John Duigan’s Flirting (1991) alongside Noah Taylor, Nicole Kidman, and Naomi Watts. 2 Eve Ensler, also known as V, is an award-winning playwright, performer, and activist best known for The Vagina Monologues, which premiered in 1996. In 2006, the New York Times dubbed it “probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade.” 3 Newton has publicly spoken about the sexual abuse and exploitation she suffered as a young actress. Newton was 16 when Duigan—who was 39 at the time—began grooming her on the set of Flirting. “I was a very shy, very sweet…

THE RESIDENTIAL AIR-CONDITIONING industry has long been dominated by appliance bigwigs like Frigidaire, GE, and LG. Their window units, recognizable to most any city dweller, are bulky (often weighing close to 100 pounds) and have sharp edges capable of shredding careless fingers. Installing them is notoriously difficult—if you can’t comfortably lift one into a window (over a sidewalk teeming with life), the only option is to spend a day waiting for a handyperson, who’ll then have to return three months later to remove the thing. The industry has long been considered stagnant, but disruption has finally arrived: In the past few months, several direct-to-consumer air-conditioning brands, including July, Kapsul, and Windmill, have come to the market with polished designs that would fit in easily beside a Quip toothbrush and an…

Basics LOCATION 315 Meserole Street FOUNDER Naj Austin OPENED IN November 2019 PAST EVENTS Listening session with violinist Sudan Archives; writing workshop with Najya Williams; yoga class with Rachael Junard INVESTORS Roxane Gay, Hannibal Buress, former NFL player Ronnie Lott ETHEL’S CLUB HAD BEEN open only four months when it was forced to shut down. Back in November, the launch of “the first private social and wellness club designed with people of color in mind” had been—to put it mildly—eagerly anticipated. In fact, when founder Naj Austin, the former head of operations at a real-estate start-up, first opened the club to applications, the site promptly crashed (“Ethel Club’s site is down,” tweeted actor Coral Peña. “That’s how you know it’s about to be lit”). For a brief but exhilarating while,…

TRIBULATION, SHOCK, gravitas, confusion, silent states of being, psyches agape—it is perhaps the most dramatic moment in Western history. This is the cosmic hour of despair in which Jesus announces that one of the 12 disciples gathered for the Last Supper will betray him that night and that this is the last time he will dine with them on this Earth. He bestows the Eucharist on humanity with a primitive, cannibalistic “Take, eat; this is my body”; “Drink … this is my blood.” He offers a new commandment, “Love one another,” and makes one of his apostles the new son of his mother. How is an artist to get all this into a painting? In this time, overwhelmed and dizzied, I find myself going back to Renaissance masterworks for reasons…

WITH LUCK, either you will grow old or you already have. That is my ambition and probably yours, yet with each year we survive, we face a crescendo of mockery, disdain, and neglect. Ageism is the most paradoxical form of bigotry. Rather than expressing contempt for others, it lashes out at our own futures. It expresses itself in innumerable ways—in the eagerness to sacrifice the elderly on the altar of the economy, in the willingness to keep them confined while everyone else emerges, and in a popular culture that sees old age (when it sees it at all) as a purgatory of bingo nights. In this country, we have erected a vast apparatus of last-stop living arrangements that, during the pandemic, have proved remarkably successful at killing the very people…

NO ONE HAS done more to propagate the myth of the hero cop than the writers of network-television police procedurals. On Law & Order and its many, many offspring, you might occasionally see a stray bad apple, but they never spoil the barrel, and cops who break the rules are most often portrayed as crusaders for a greater good. Here, confessions from the writers, directors, and producers of these shows. A writer on a procedural cop drama → I WAS TOLD pretty early on to avoid dirty cops as story points. Policing is presented as a morally good cause. We have heroes who are definitely molded after the shake-you-down, stop-and-frisk, throw-you-up-against-the-wall kind of cop. There are instances when, through our characters, we straight up glorify what should be illegal police…

IN ORDER TO UNEARTH slightly more unexpected ways to cool down an apartment, we asked 11 experts, from interior designers to smart-appliance installers, for their most effective alternative techniques. 1 Avoid incandescent bulbs. Philips Medium LED 100-Watt Equivalent Daylight Bulb $15 at acehardware.com “Without knowing it, your lightbulbs might be causing more heat in your apartment than you think,” designer Alison Petty advises. Adds smart-home consultant Eugene Fiks, “If someone is using your average incandescent bulbs, they’re disseminating heat.” Instead, he says, use climate-friendly LED bulbs to keep your space far cooler without having to turn off any lights. “You’ll also notice energy savings on your bill,” says Fiks. 2 A dehumidifier will get rid of sticky summer air. Pro Breeze Electric Dehumidifier $80 at amazon.com If you…

ONE OF THE LAST TIMES the Underground Gourmet ate at a sidewalk café was at lunch last summer at Bar Pitti. It was a lovely June afternoon. The sky was a bright periwinkle blue, the sun was shining, the birds were tweeting, and although the intelligent-looking dachshund seated next to us (whose name we learned was Rolo) kept staring at our rigatoni Pitti, he was otherwise the soul of propriety. Even the construction site set up about ten feet from our table and blocking the view of traffic on Sixth Avenue was on a quiet lunch break of its own. Then all hell broke loose. The construction crew materialized and a pair of Cat multi-terrain loaders suddenly engaged in a sort of monster-truck rally. Dust blew, engines roared, Rolo howled.…

HAROLD RAMIS DIDN’T set out to make a religious parable when he directed 1993’s Groundhog Day. Viewers from Buddhists to Jesuit priests, however, have claimed to see aspects of their faiths reflected in its story of a man doomed to live the same day over and over. The journey of Phil Connors, asshole weatherman, really is a kind of nondenominational spiritual rebirth that takes him from liberation to despair to generosity. (His periodic havoc-wreaking and attempts to get laid just enhance the experience.) Groundhog Day didn’t invent the temporal loop, but it did cement the concept in American pop culture as a multipurpose limbo, and the idea of a character who improves by being passed repeatedly through the same stretch of time, like water through a Brita filter, has turned…