Innholdsfortegnelse for August 17-30, 2020 i New York Magazine

FOR THE TWO AND A HALF YEARS that he was in charge, a Brad Parscale sighting was always news at Trump campaign headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia. Parscale is six-foot-eight with a dagger of a beard and thorns for ears that give his head the shape of a spiked club, like a medieval morning star. So you can’t really miss him. But “there were times Brad might not be there for two to three weeks,” one campaign official told me. “If he wasn’t meeting with the president or going on the road, you weren’t seeing him. He was only around for the high-profile, celebrity things.” “Is it a mess? Yeah. Everybody’s in chaos.” “He was never there,” a senior White House official said. “He’d make phone calls from his house in…

➸ FINDING THE “BEST” PRODUCT really depends on whom you ask—which is why we’ve devoted a new series to unearthing as many informed, trustworthy opinions as possible. And we’ve come up with over a dozen ways to do this, such as surfacing reader reviews from across the internet, taking quick polls (among our friends and fellow shopping-obsessed Strategist editors), and engaging in some advanced web snooping. On the following pages, you’ll find a lot of “best” desks, according to a lot of people. Our recommendations range from a facsimile of Bob Boilen’s “Tiny Desk” desk to a direct-to-consumer standing option with over 2,000 glowing reviews. Visit thestrategist.com to read more. SNOOPING Interior Designer Justina Blakeney’s Desk-Slash-Bar AllModern Barry Floating Desk, $137 at allmodern.com ➸ WHEN BLAKENEY REMODELED her Los Angeles…

THERE’S A WEED THAT IS growing rampant around the castle, and it’s this incredibly delicious, spicy arugula,” says surfer and restaurateur David Selig, pointing to the green tufts poking through the concrete cracks in the driveway of the 1913 whitewashed granite house by the sea where he has been living with his partner, the fashion entrepreneur and Visionaire co-founder Cecilia Dean. His theory: “It originates from the time of Frank Busto, the original builder,” an Italian immigrant who made good and erected his dream palazzo for the then-princely sum of about $40,000, following the success of his restaurant at 45 Beaver Street in the early 1900s, and “grew basil and arugula for his own use.” Apparently, it stuck around. Selig started coming out to the Rockaways in 2004 after his…

NORTH BROOKLYN MAY BE (RELATIVELY) BLESSED with waterside parks, from Domino up to WNYC Transmitter, but none compares to landlocked McCarren Park for square footage, a necessity in this socially distanced age. McCarren, which straddles the borders of the culinarily diverse neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, also has the advantage of centrality and access to restaurants offering a vast array of picnic-friendly fare to go, including everything from Norwegian sweet buns to Polish gazpacho. 1 Bakeri 150 Wythe Ave., nr. N. 8th St.; 718-388-8037 There is no prettier picnic sandwich in the vicinity than Bakeri’s smørrebrød-inspired smoked salmon with preserved-lemon labne, radish, and fennel on house-baked sourdough rye. For dessert, get the skolebrød—sweet Norwegian custard buns sprinkled with powdered sugar and shredded coconut and said to resemble the sun…

MONSTERS ARE EVERYWHERE in Lovecraft Country. In HBO’s new period piece from writer-producer Misha Green (Underground), based on Matt Ruff ’s novel about a Black Korean War veteran trying to find his missing father in segregated America, monsters emerge from dark forests, they block roads, and they smash through windows and doors. Some have tentacles, razor-sharp teeth, dozens of eyes, and slimy, grayish skin. Others are human: cops enforcing sundown policies, white business owners who won’t serve Black people, white families who support the Ku Klux Klan and segregation and who prefer Black Americans to fall into three categories—servile, invisible, or dead. The word monster is flexibly defined, blurring the boundaries that tend to separate straight drama from science fiction and fantasy and applying it to the main characters’ inner…

TV 1. Watch I May Destroy You Finale Making sense of the senseless. HBO, August 24. From the talented Michaela Coel, one of the best and buzziest shows of the year ends with a superb episode that tries to bring closure to the story of Arabella, a woman attempting to piece together the events that led to her being raped. JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 2. Listen to Club Future Nostalgia Dance it out. Warner Records, August 21. The remix album of Dua Lipa’s sophomore set, Future Nostalgia, features fresh takes on familiar faves with guests including Gwen Stefani, Missy Elliott, and Madonna. CRAIG JENKINS BOOKS 3. Read The Lying Life of Adults Marisa Tomei narrates the audiobook. Europa Editions, September 1. Elena Ferrante’s first novel after the Neapolitan quartet has…

SUMMERTIME IN HARLEM is a carnival of sound. It’s the praise choruses of excited pigeons in the morning and the low ululations of cicadas at night. It’s parties and fights, church bake sales and tenant-association cookouts. It’s treble rising from children’s voices as they charge through playgrounds made of stone. It’s the delicate tones of bodega-counter flirts and the quick, sarcastic retorts of their regulars. It’s the unexpected fzzt and belated pop of unseen fireworks. It’s motorcycle and ATV engines bleating in the streets like electric sheep. It’s car horns blaring in the late-day Yankee Stadium gridlock. It’s cop-car sirens slicing through the air like knives. It’s music traveling on every gust of wind. It’s Frankie Beverly and Maze’s “Before I Let Go.” It’s SWV’s “You’re the One.” It’s Oro…

THE VIDEO BEGAN like so many others. YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer, in the glow of camera-friendly lighting, staring into the lens. But this time, instead of energetically updating their roughly 1 million subscribers (over 700,000 on Myka’s YouTube channel and over 300,000 on the family’s vlog, The Stauffer Life) on their “kiddos” or Myka’s “mommy morning routine” or vegan-meal ideas, the couple had somber expressions. “This is by far the hardest video James and I have ever publicly had to make,” said Myka. Wearing white shirts that matched the linens on the bed where they sat, the Stauffers revealed that they had placed Huxley, their then almost 5-year-old autistic son from China—whose adoption process and life they had documented for more than three years—with “his now new forever family.”…

Basics LOCATION786 Prospect Avenue, the Bronx FOUNDERMiguel Angel “Mike” Amadeo OPENED1941 NOTABLE CLIENTS Celia Cruz, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Eddie Palmieri, Willie Colón DESCRIBED AS “A microcosm of the Puerto Rican experience in New York” by the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. ON A RECENT JULY AFTERNOON, a customer walked into Casa Amadeo, a record store in the Longwood section of the Bronx belonging to the 86-year-old musician Miguel Angel “Mike” Amadeo. It had been a month since he’d reopened after a three-month closure. “I’m looking for that song that goes ‘Y no hago más na’,’” the guy told Amadeo, who immediately knew what he was referring to. The song is from the salsa orchestra El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, Amadeo said, and while he hummed another of…

I HAVE THESE WEIRD bouts of insomnia,” says Conor Oberst, sitting in his living room in Omaha, his hometown. “Usually, it’ll pass.” At 40, the indie-rock elder has a youthful air, but today he looks beat. For three days in a row, he has been sleeping just two hours a night. Still, he’s in good Midwest humor. At least the weather’s nice, he says. Lack of sleep aside, Oberst appears healthier than the “nicotine-stained” front man who last spoke to this magazine four years ago, following a 2015 health scare that forced him to cancel a tour with one of his bands, Desaparecidos, and return to Nebraska to rest. This year was meant to be a comeback of sorts—right now, he should be on tour for the first Bright Eyes…

MIDWAY THROUGH Boys State, Robert MacDougall confesses that, despite having just given a speech insisting babies are being killed before they have a chance in the world, he isn’t actually anti-abortion. A strapping 18-year-old with the luxuriant mane of a Richard Linklater protagonist and the undented self-assurance of someone who has gotten everything he’s wanted so far in life, Robert is running for office in a mock-government program. And he’s out to win—which, for him, means trading in his personal beliefs for ones that will play better with what he perceives his audience to be. “This is a very, very conservative group we have here,” he informs the camera in an aside of a private interview. “My stance on abortion would not line up well with the guys out there,…

What are your clients most curious about? And what are they most worried about? Their families .......... 57 Theeconomy................................................27 COVID-19......................................................8 The 2020 election ......................................... 7 “The calls tend to be frantic. People absolutely tearing their hair out being with their loved ones 24/7. They’re asking questions about how to deal with their kids. We’re not therapists, but we fill that role.” —MARY MILLER, CLAIRVOYANT TAROT READER And what do they want advice on? ARE YOU TELLING THEM IT’S A GOOD TIME TO CHANGE CAREERS? YES..................................................................71 OR TO FALL IN LOVE? YES.............................................................70 “Not to say the pandemic’s good, but the pandemic was a good nudge for people to look in their mirrors and do something about it. It’s time to change things that aren’t working.” —LITANY BURNS, CLAIRVOYANT-MEDIUM HAS A CLIENT…

IF YOU HAD WALKED the streets of Lisbon at the end of last year, just after Portugal voted to reelect its surprisingly successful center-left coalition government, it wouldn’t have taken long for you to notice something strange. The people spilling out of the capital’s beautiful old apartment buildings were very often, very obviously, tourists—not locals on their way to work but usually groups of well-to-do 20-somethings looking for an upscale café or jumping on electric Uber bicycles to find some attraction. When you did see the rare old woman still living downtown in the ancient city, she was usually trailed by a young man with an expensive camera trying to get a shot of the workaday Portuguese life that had all but vanished. As Lisbon rapidly transformed into a tourist…

“WHAT TIME DO YOU get up in the morning?” is not the most inspired question a reporter can ask a Green-market farmer. No one ever says, “Around ten-ish.” But we couldn’t help ourselves the other day while talking to Kellie Quarton of Quarton Farm in Sullivan County, 112 miles north of the city. And as it turned out, her response surprised us. “I set the alarm at 1:38, because ‘138’ is a Misfits song and I have a thing about numbers that I make into something,” said Quarton, who likes hardcore punk and once did a stint at Deathwish records outside Boston. “But if I’m being lazy,” she said, “I set it at 2:12, because 2-1-2 is Manhattan’s area code. I leave for the city at 3:30. If I’m running…

WITH ITS CONSTANTLY shifting release date and director Christopher Nolan’s insistence that it open only in theaters, Tenet has dominated the summer movie discourse. Now it’s finally arriving. (Maybe.) The film will open in some countries August 26 and in some U.S. states in September. (Maybe.) But we still don’t even know what it’s about. So I consulted my colleagues to hear their theories. It’s about preventing 9/11 or some kind of quantum cold war. ➽ In May, a theory circulated that Tenet is about stopping 9/11. “Obviously, it is a biopic about George Tenet, head of the CIA from 1996 through 2004, and the catastrophic intelligence failures that led to the Iraq War,” Christopher Bonanos, New York Magazine city editor, told me. “It’s the feel-good movie of the pandemic.”…

BRANDY NORWOOD has had ups and downs in nearly three decades as a singer-songwriter and producer, a television personality and film and stage actress, and a model and role model. Her small-screen debut as Danesha on Thea Vidale’s beloved (if short-lived) 1993 ABC sitcom Thea set the pace for a decade spent raising the profile of Black girls and teens on television. Many Black shows featured a wisecracking daughter or little sister, but Brandy’s starring role in the 1996 UPN show Moesha, which made its long-overdue Netflix debut this month, centered her character’s struggles as a caring, considerate girl navigating high school, joining shows like Sister, Sister in giving Black girls the kind of dimensionality that, up until that point, had mostly been reserved for the boys. What was true…