Innholdsfortegnelse for September 28 - October 11, 2020 i New York Magazine

BEST SPLURGE-WORTHY HEATER Lava Heat Italia Propane Heater, $1,499 at lavaheat.com JUSTIN GRIMES, THE MANAGING DIRECTOR of nine boutique hotels in Maine, uses Lava Heat Italia’s pyramid-style Capri A-Line heater on his property for outdoor dining. The six-foot-tall unit has “an attractive bronze finish,” he says, that’s rustproof. Outdoor propane heaters like this one emit radiant heat (meaning they warm the people and objects in outdoor areas much in the same way the sun heats our planet) rather than forced-air heat (the system used by most indoor heaters, wherein the heater warms the air around it). This one can cover about 36 square feet, according to Grimes. BEST AFFORDABLE LARGE HEATER Hampton Bay Stainless-Steel Patio Heater, $149 at homedepot.com BRANDI ANDREWS, the CEO of National Air Warehouse, says her favorite…

THE BOYS IN THE BAND debuts on Netflix on September 30. ON SEPTEMBER 30, an invitation to the most famously toxic gay birthday party in the history of New York City will go out once again when Netflix releases its film version of The Boys in the Band. It has been 52 years since Mart Crowley’s open wound of a drama, in which nine gay men get together for a long evening of cocktails, cake, and tearing into one another and themselves, premiered Off Broadway. It was acclaimed, then dismissed as a self-loathing relic of an unenlightened time, then acclaimed again as a milestone of frankness, empathy, and even liberation. This, its latest and most accessible return, should feel like the summit of its rehabilitation as an essential text of…

I ONLY TRIED TO WATCH Black Mirror once. Ten minutes into an episode where a woman (Hayley Atwell) attempts to rebuild her dead boyfriend (Domhnall Gleeson) from his social-media accounts, I had to turn it off. I find the idea of a capital-S Satire about our modern dependence on technology just so exhausting. Especially now that we are living in a world that feels like someone wished for “technological advancement” on a monkey’s paw. But I find “Black Mirror” a useful term when describing anything that makes it feel like we are Icarus flying too close to the sun—but the sun is a MacBook Pro. I’ve been using it a lot since COVID-19 started ravaging our country and forced us to self-isolate. Mostly while watching comedy. Maybe the grumpy stand-up…

EXT. CENTRAL PARK—EARLY MORNING The park glistens in the golden September light. Dogs chase one another across the freshly mowed grass. A few joggers in surgical masks and Day-Glo sneakers lumber by. It might be an ordinary day, but the soundtrack intimates that it’s full of promise. Orchestral music rises like mist off the lawn: quivering strings, a wistful clarinet, a tintinnabulation of crotales. Wait, this isn’t a movie—it only feels like one. I pull off my headphones, and the scene reverts to the dull haze we’ve become accustomed to. Anxious thoughts and shards of preposterous news ping my pre-coffee consciousness. I overhear scraps of conversation and wish I hadn’t: “Swabbing down groceries might be a bit much, but …” “… Now he’s got Barr going after …” “… So…

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death for Senate Democrats to admit to themselves that they may be essentially powerless to stop her replacement. On a private call the next day, a Saturday, they acknowledged the reality that Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans, who hold the majority, could probably hold a party-line vote to approve Donald Trump’s nominee. They knew, too, though, that they still had to do everything they could to try to fight it—even though their best bets, like encouraging a groundswell of public pressure and trying to persuade a few moderate Republicans to hold off on the confirmation until after the election (at which point maybe one or two might have second thoughts on the judge) were, at best, stretches of historic proportions. The…

LATE 2017. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE,the 43-year-old founder of a CrossFit gym in a wealthy Atlanta suburb, hops onto Facebook Live, where she will discuss Moloch, the pagan idol of child sacrifice. Greene is wearing a black top, her blonde hair down. Filming before a blank wall, she looks tired but happy, in her element. “Okay, now,” she says in a pleasant drawl, “have you guys been following 4chan, Q, any of that stuff? Anybody? I’m going to watch for your comments here.” The anonymous persona Q, purportedly a government mole, had begun posting on the right-wing message board 4chan in late October, about a month before Greene’s livestream. Q’s posts formed the nucleus of a collective belief system that became known as QAnon, whose premise was this: Hollywood and the…

1. Eat Sushi Omakase on the Sidewalk How does the traditionally intimate, cloistered experience translate to an outdoor setting? Our restaurant critic Adam Platt finds out. THERE ARE ALL SORTS of good reasons not to indulge in a sushi omakase experience while in the midst of a pandemic emergency, including the usual moral and environmental concerns and the extreme cost (no, we won’t pay $800 for a Masa bento box). But with outdoor dining still in bloom around the city, your humble critic couldn’t resist scrolling through various reservation apps to see if we could get one last taste of fatty tuna, or a perfectly twirled hand roll, before the winter of indoor dining closed in. It turned out a variety of sushi omakase dinners were being offered on the…

FIVE EPISODES INTO the fourth season of Fargo, about a gang war between Blacks and Italians in 1950 Kansas City, there comes a moment that sums up the show’s worst tendencies. In a dingy warehouse, Black gang boss Loy Cannon (Chris Rock) regales corrupt white cop Odis Weff (Jack Huston) with a story about a World War II infantry minesweeper who missed a mine and got an officer killed. “Boom!” Loy hollers. “They gotta send him home in a tureen!” Then Loy glances over his shoulder at his assembled henchmen and explains, “It’s a pot they put soup in.” How does such a cringeworthy moment make it to air? Did an FX Network executive, Chris Rock, or Noah Hawley—Fargo’s showrunner as well as lead writer and director—worry that somebody might…

TV 1. Watch Saturday Night Live The 46th season. NBC, October 3. The pioneering sketch-comedy show will return to Studio 8H, feature Jim Carrey as Joe Biden, and try to figure out how to safely do a live broadcast in the middle of a pandemic. JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 2. Listen to The Rarities Mimi’s vault. Columbia Records, October 2. Mariah Carey, the inimitable R&B and pop diva, shares B-sides and outtakes including a song with Lauryn Hill and a wealth of great tracks that never made her studio albums. CRAIG JENKINS BOOKS 3. Read Leave the World Behind On the National Book Awards longlist. HarperCollins, October 6. A white family is surprised when the Black owners of their Long Island rental show up unexpectedly with news of a blackout…

ALMOST EVERY AFTERNOON for the past three and a half years, a retired septuagenarian named Ed McGinty has ventured out of his little beige ranch house to troll his community’s vast population of Trump supporters. McGinty resides in the Villages, a sprawling central Florida retirement utopia that sells itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown.” He drives for hours, cutting through the humid afternoon, taking in the scents of Spanish moss and sprinkler water, in a golf cart plastered with anti-Trump signs: MAY DONALD TRUMP BURN IN HELL STARTING TODAY and DONALD TRUMP IS WHITE TRASH and FLUSH THE TURD ON NOVEMBER 3RD. McGinty is tall with ruddy cheeks, clear eyes, and strawberry-blond hair bleached by the years, his demeanor all hard feelings and bad attitude. “If you saw my face when…

EVEN IN A MASK, Kirsten Johnson glows like a lighthouse. She walks like one, too: tall and broad-shouldered, her attention sweeping around like a searchlight. “I think of images as relationships, right?” the director says as we wander through Washington Square Park. For 30 years, she has been making films, and that mode doesn’t just switch off. “There’s a thing of the physical proximity you need in order to film something. I could film that man from all the way over here with a telephoto lens and see him close up,” she says, pointing to someone on a bench in the distance. “But the image betrays it is not an intimate relationship. The image will be true if I am sitting next to him.” The truth of an image is…

AGAIN AND AGAIN during this pandemic, unable to actually see art in person, I have time-traveled within myself for sustenance—with the help of the internet, of course. Viewing art online flattens the contextual experience: It is just as easy, or just as difficult, to call up a Renaissance masterpiece as a contemporary painting, and each appears on my computer screen in precisely the same way, without any of the trappings of art-historical importance (gilded frames, museum lighting, grand settings) or contemporary novelty (the vacuum-quiet space of a blue-chip gallery, the buzz of hype). In these sessions of inner priestcraft, I invariably arrive in the past, indeed always the distant past, often the Renaissance. Lately, I’ve been traveling to Rome in 1600, when, at the age of 28, Michelangelo Caravaggio triggered…

THE NEST IS A horror movie from which the actual horror has been drained, leaving behind only the dread and all the ominous trappings. Consider the house that serves as its main location, a cavernous old manor in the Surrey countryside with heavy wood paneling and enough space for a family of four to get lost inside it: There’s nothing supernatural about the place, where, as proud patriarch Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) brags to his wife and children when they first arrive, Led Zeppelin once stayed while working on an album. But there doesn’t really need to be for it to scare the shit out of Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell), the younger of the two kids, who seeks sanctuary at night with his teenage sister, Samantha (Oona Roche), until she kicks…