Innholdsfortegnelse for August 3-16, 2020 i New York Magazine

Ariel Levy (writer): He was not so much your editor as your guru. I didn’t just trust him to tell me what to do with a story; I trusted him to tell me what to do with my life. Joe Hagan (writer): He was a vision-quest editor: He gave you a mandate, in this oracular style that’s hard to describe. When I was tired, depressed, demoralized, he’d say, “Oh, this is the sport of kings, man! We’re lucky! This is the great fortune—the world is ours to go have fun with!” Then you’d turn in a manuscript and he’d always say the same thing: “It’s gonna be great!” And it’s the worst thing you can say, but it also gives you hope! Gabriel Sherman (writer): “It’s gonna be great!” Which…

the NYC Department of Education, as part of its planning for school reopening in the fall, asked every principal in the system to measure their buildings. Armed with floor plans and laser pointers, the principals visited each classroom, noted which ones had windows, and figured out if any other spaces could be converted into classrooms. Then, after dividing the total space by the number of students, they were expected to come up with a reopening plan that would meet social-distancing guidelines—all in less than a month. To Medi Ford, a high-school teacher in Brooklyn, this seemed crazy. Her principal was smart, creative, and a former science teacher, but she was not a public-health specialist or an epidemiologist. Ford had been in the public-school system long enough to know that there…

➽ FOR YEARS, we’ve asked famous people to talk about the mundane things they buy over and over again: their favorite thickening hair spray, say, or high-octane electric toothbrush. This month, eBay, in partnership with the Strategist, decided to host an auction that turns this premise around. We went back to some of our favorite celebrity shoppers to ask them about items they can live without and would be willing to sell at auction for charity, with all proceeds going to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (eBay is receiving and donating all proceeds and matching every dollar the auction earns). Our group of donors is not donating anything humdrum, though—every object (from a Betsey Johnson wedding dress to Pepa’s “Push It”–themed snowboard) is entirely one of a kind.…

DALE DEGROFF MAY BE best known for running the influential bar at the Rainbow Room (and for popularizing the polarizing term mixologist). But he should be more properly credited with building the foundation for the craft-cocktail revival: excavating the history, prioritizing the use of fresh juices, perfecting the technique, and, especially, inspiring and training the new generation of craftspeople (most notably Audrey Saunders) who went on to transform the national scene. Many more absorbed his wisdom, a unique distillate of mechanics and humanity, by reading his seminal The Craft of the Cocktail, first published in 2002. It’s a testament to how much has changed in the worlds of bartending and booze that DeGroff has seen fit to revise that guide after 18 hardcover printings. The New Craft of the Cocktail…

These windows look west, across the rooftops of Brooklyn, taking in the Manhattan skyline. Marshall took this photograph when she lived in Paris. “I gave myself a mandatory two-hour-a-day walking tour to take photographs, and this was taken from the top of the Pompidou Centre.” She also hung a light box with slides on the wall. Marshall’s circa-2018 portrait of Linda Jones, who is a postpartum doula and birth-justice activist in East Oakland, California. The “Clamshell” iBook is circa 2000. “My husband loves his antique technology.” The leather-upholstered armchair is from Pottery Barn. “I did a story for them, and they paid me in furniture.” “My brother used to work in film in L.A.,” Marshall says, “and he found rolls and rolls of these Obama posters in a factory warehouse…

WHITE SITCOMS HAVE of late united, disavowing the misbegotten race play of television’s recent past. Contrary to prior negligence, shows such as Scrubs and 30 Rock have pulled episodes featuring blackface from streaming platforms as a way of making amends. Even episodes like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s “Dee Reynolds: Shaping America’s Youth,” which cracks wise about the absurdities of racial performance, got the ax. I was something akin to relieved upon my Seinfeld rewatch to find Michael Richards’s scorched visage, grinning like Sambo, still intact on the episode “The Wife.” Exorcisms are boring these days—that is, exorcisms of a PR sort, which give the impression that race arrives only when we perceive it and evaporates with every redacted slur. After all, the American sitcom, like so many national institutions,…

GENERAL-ELECTION SEASON typically announces itself with a handful of reliable signposts—veepstakes rumors, dueling party conventions, more frequent campaign rallies in contested states. The presidency of Donald Trump has occasioned a new one: the deployment of militarized federal forces on American soil. Their presence in Portland, Oregon (and at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018), is more than a flex of authoritarian muscle. It marks, for Trump, the establishment of an election-year ritual, a political strategy ripe for replication anytime he faces the will of the voters. Especially if he thinks he might lose. With three months to go until Election Day, the president is seeing some of the worst polling numbers of his tenure. Eight in ten Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction, and just 38 percent…

JOE BIDEN AND ELIZABETH WARREN didn’t know each other extremely well until March. They’d been crossing paths for well over a decade, most uncomfortably in 2005 at a Capitol Hill hearing, where they collided over bankruptcy law and the Delaware senator called the Harvard Law professor’s argument “very compelling and mildly demagogic,” and most closely ten years later at Biden’s official residence in D.C. There, the VP secretly told Senator Warren he would want her as his running mate if he ran for president in 2016. For all their mutual respect, when they finally shared a debate stage in September 2019, it wasn’t exactly chummy. So when Warren and Biden spoke on the phone shortly before she dropped out of the presidential race early this year, there was every reason…

NETHERLANDS Students use a gangway to avoid crowded exits after elementary schools reopened in May. THAILAND The government mandated that all students wear face masks when schools reopened on July 1. For added protection, desks at a school in Sam Khok were outfitted with old ballot boxes repurposed as partitions. SENEGAL A Red Cross worker sprays a student with disinfectant at a school in Dakar on June 25, the first day students returned to examination classes. BRAZIL Maura Silva, a teacher in Rio de Janeiro, places a “hug kit” she created on her student Yasmin de Jesus Ramos before embracing her. Educators in the city are making home visits while they wait for public schools to reopen. NORTH KOREA The government mandated masks for all students and added washing stations…

THE RAPPER FLO MILLI had given herself a deadline: She was going to be famous by 18. Not rapping by 18—famous by then. “It was like an obsession for me,” Milli, now all of 20 years old, tells me one July afternoon, dressed in full glam in her Atlanta apartment. As a tween, she’d seen Nicki Minaj rapping on BET’s 106 & Park. She’d grown up around music—the women in her family singing in church choirs, her mom playing Jill Scott tracks on the way to school—but Flo (real name Tamia Monique Carter) didn’t trust her own singing voice. She decided to get a pen and paper and be a rapper instead. College was a backup plan she didn’t want to explore: “I was praying to God, like, ‘God, please…

ALMOST A YEAR AGO, Taylor Swift released Lover, a lively course correction intended, in part, to craft a more measured and mature style for the singer, whose previous album, reputation, had used withering sarcasm and hip-hop production elements to wage war with Swift’s crumbling goody-two-shoes image and the enemies poking holes in the narrative. In the January Netflix documentary Miss Americana, which chronicled the Lover sessions and revisited key career moves in the preceding decade, Swift admitted to being driven, on a certain level, by a hunger for public approval: “My entire moral code is a need to be thought of as good,” she said. 1989’s pop turn was really a quest to be seen as the total package in music, an overcorrection for the embarrassment at the 2009 MTV…

BETHAN GWYNDAF, the teenage protagonist of In My Skin, is a spectacular liar. She lies to her best friends, her teachers, and the girl she develops a crush on, spinning tales of a better-than-normal home life that sound credible. Her mother works in human resources, and her father is a tax officer, she says. She gets in trouble with them when she comes home too late, and they want to watch TV with her when she’s actually there. If Bethan backs out of plans with a friend, it’s because her parents want to do something special with her, like go to the ballet. But none of that is true. As displayed throughout the five episodes of In My Skin, a BBC series that has been released in the U.S. on…

FERGUSON POLICE OFFICER Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown around this time of year, when the high summer sun in Missouri heats the pavement to temperatures that sear the skin. There are concerts, and at night the riverfront lights up with fireworks. Around this time, Lezley McSpadden’s mind usually turns to the logistics of honoring her late son, whom she called “Mike Mike.” Usually, she is planning an annual foundation gala to benefit mothers who have lost children to violence or preparing a visit to Brown’s grave site on the anniversary of his death, August 9. But this summer brought with it a new climate, with protesters calling out the names of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and, still, Mike Brown. Seeing officers indicted, a…

IT’S AN AUDACIOUS CHOICE to pause in front of an Applebee’s restaurant on Flatbush Avenue and grant an impromptu interview to a video journalist shortly before you allegedly throw a Molotov cocktail into a police car. But the city was out of its collective mind that night, the Friday after the Monday George Floyd was killed. Urooj Rahman faced the camera looking high-strung and distracted, answering questions as her hands waved and flitted around her body and in front of her face as if they were birds escaping from a box. Rahman emigrated from Pakistan when she was 4 and now lives with her elderly mother in Bay Ridge; she works as an attorney at Legal Services in the Bronx, representing tenants without means in eviction proceedings. “This shit won’t…

BLACK IS KING is out July 31 on Disney+. IN 2011, Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter severed professional ties with her father and former manager, MathewKnowles, who’d had a strong hand in controlling her image. In the nine years since, she has evolved her public presentation frequently and dramatically—more so, probably, than any other figure, culturally or otherwise. And for the most part, she has avoided talking about it, letting the images do the work. 2011: Mother Beyoncé’s performance here is incandescent and high energy in the ways we’ve come to expect from her. The lasting image arrives at the end of the show: The singing is over, the backup dancers are cast in shadow, and Beyoncé is in the spotlight. She drops her mic, unbuttons her glittering purple blazer, and…

TIME HAS BEEN doing wild things over the past few months, but in some ways it has been easier to mark its passing since the pandemic began. This is because there are landmarks. One landmark is the Day You Started Using Your Shirtsleeve to Cover Your Thumb Before Pressing an ATM Button. Another is the Day That a Majority of People Started Wearing Masks. Maybe there is the Day That Someone You Know Got Sick. Or worse, You Got Sick. Or worse, Someone You Know Died. Time speeds up and slows down, but it is divided into discrete stages so our experience of it is both psychedelic and delineated. This is the ruling aesthetic of Intimations, Zadie Smith’s small book of essays, all written in the spring and zipped into…

TV 1. Watch Lovecraft Country Haunted and haunting. HBO, August 16. Misha Green developed this series centered on Atticus (Jonathan Majors), a Black man searching for his missing father (Michael Kenneth Williams) in the Jim Crow South of the ’50s with help from his friend (Jurnee Smollett) and his uncle (Courtney B. Vance). As in Matt Ruff’s source novel, the horrors they encounter are both racist and supernatural. Given that, it’s no surprise that Jordan Peele is an executive producer. JEN CHANEY BOOKS 2. Read The Death of Vivek Oji From a rising star. Riverhead Books. One of the year’s most anticipated releases, Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, set in a town in southeastern Nigeria, concerns a family mourning the mysterious death of their child. THEATER/FESTIVALS 3. See Edinburgh Fringe Festival…