Innholdsfortegnelse for October 12-25, 2020 i New York Magazine

WHEN NEW YORK MAGAZINE was founded in 1968, its absolute focus was New York City life: its politics, accents, art, social dynamics, and best lo mein. In 2020, the magazine still has New York City at its center—but the purview has expanded to the entire country, if not the world. New York’s online coverage of the specifics of city life has, in recent years, been distributed across its websites; so has its writing on architecture, urbanism, real estate, and design. Now, you’ll be reading a lot more of it on Curbed. This week, the pioneering website Curbed is joining New York as our home for coverage of cities and city life. We can’t imagine a better fit. For almost 16 years, we at New York have watched as Curbed documented,…

TEN MONTHS SINCE China acknowledged the first outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, and seven months since the WHO declared it a global pandemic, there’s nowhere on the planet that’s been hit harder than New York State, where almost 33,000 people have died, most of them during a terrifying surge in March and April. This week, Governor Andrew Cuomo publishes American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic. And while that may look to New Yorkers like the height of chutzpah—the guy who presided over a period of historic suffering and unparalleled death putting out a self-lionizing memoir—it’s not as presumptuous a gambit as it at first seems. Through the spring and summer, as President Trump essentially ignored the coronavirus, Cuomo played a kind of alternate-reality president for information-hungry liberals…

FOR THOSE WHO THINK walking a dog is drudgery and keeping a cat is a chore, a smaller, if slimier, companion has slid onto the scene: the humble snail. Over the past few months, it seems that one man’s pest has become another man’s … pet. Mollusks are suddenly everywhere: popping up on the popular Instagram feed @aleia, where a snail named Velveeta can be seen painting at an easel in a studio; helping advertise jewelry designer Sophie Buhai’s spring-summer 2021 collection; and in the homes of people like Yoko Koide, a butcher at Marlow & Daughters, and the artist Chloe Wise. This snail boom is bizarre but not altogether illogical: Snails don’t ask much of you (care-wise, they’re only one step up from a fiddle-leaf fig), and the fact…

If you want to take in a snail you find on a stem of arugula, that may be perfectly aboveboard. But if you want to order one online, that is a different story: It’s often illegal to buy snails from out of state because many are invasive species. This doesn’t mean snail sites don’t exist: Snailpets.com, which is run by a mother-daughter duo, ships them in a ventilated container with some lettuce ($18), and there are legions of black-market snails on sites like eBay and Etsy. But your best bet, if you want to avoid the legal issues surrounding snail-ordering, is to go look for one under a log in the park.…

I like the gingham. It’s one of my favorite things that I own. I used to wear it so rarely (it was my 21st-birthday outfit), but now I feel like leaving the house is a great excuse to get as dressed up as possible. Every time I go for a walk, I try to dress up, even if the only person who sees me is the man at the bodega. What’s your quarantine style? I don’t even know. I’ve just been sitting in my house in a bikini. It’s like my uniform. Everything I do is in a bikini. What brought you here? My friend told me about it. There are a lot of cool people in New York, and it’s interesting to see what they’re getting rid of. I…

FOR A WHILE, it was James Comey. Then it was Robert Mueller. For a brief moment, the internet’s liberal pundits speculated that perhaps Melania Trump herself could be the truth-teller we needed to stand up to Donald Trump. But one seemingly unhappy marriage isn’t the basis for popular liberation, and neither, it turns out, are two former directors of the FBI. The prayer candles and the rumor-mongering about the president’s imminent downfall all came to nothing. The resistance—or at least, the faction that spends altogether too much of its time online—rode on in search of a new savior. It has settled on Claudia Conway, the 15-year-old daughter of George and Kellyanne Conway, former counselor to the president. When Claudia announced on TikTok recently that her mother had tested positive for…

Why Snails? Why Now? 1946 According to an entry in the “Metropolitan Diary” of the New York Times, people in Bed-Stuy flock to Putnam Avenue, where word has gotten around that you can buy a pet snail for a penny. 1957 Patricia Highsmith publishes Deep Water, a thriller about a villain who lavishes attention on his pet snails. (Turns out Highsmith was absolutely obsessed with snails and kept about 300 as pets.) 1966 A boy smuggles three giant African land snails from Hawaii to his home in Miami to keep as pets. His grandmother releases the snails into her garden, and they spread, breeding over 18,000 descendants and causing more than $1 million in removal costs. 2014 New York artist Anicka Yi injects snails with oxytocin for her exhibition “Divorce”…

Tanks Pepper Apollo, who has owned thousands of snails, says she uses glass aquariums (from $13 at petco.com). A good rule of thumb, she says, is that a garden snail needs “one gallon per one adult snail. Smaller species can get away with less.” Tank Accessories Lindsey Cormack recommends putting coconut fiber ($8 at petco.com) on the bottom of the tank—it absorbs and breaks down waste. “On top of the substrate, put down some sphagnum moss ($7 at amazon .com )—they like to nibble on it.” Food Baby and adult snails alike need calcium to ensure their shells grow large and strong. Several of the owners we spoke to recommended putting a cuttlebone ($3 at petsmart .com ) in the tank so the snail can absorb its minerals.…

MILEY CYRUS HAS long recognized the power of a good cover and has the voice to back it up, bending songs to her will for the better part of a decade. With her new cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” now streaming and a “Backyard Sessions” special on MTV Unplugged premiering October 16, here are Cyrus’s top five. 5. “Don’t Dream It’s Over” 2015 (Crowded House) with Ariana Grande The “Backyard Sessions” take of this cover is the definition of casual, with Cyrus and Ariana Grande wearing onesies and hanging out like longtime friends, talking during the instrumental break and messing up their lines. They’re a good match musically, too: Grande’s silky vocals balance Cyrus’s smokier tone. When they revived the cover at Grande’s “One Love Manchester” concert, it…

LATE ’80S AND EARLY ’90S: Budding Stardom After a steady string of Australian film roles, Kidman breaks out as a young wife in peril in Dead Calm. She goes to Hollywood, gets cast in many girlfriend parts, and, oh yeah, marries Tom Cruise. Though seven years older, Grant has to wait longer for his big break; at this point, he is known mostly for supporting performances in period pieces. MID-’90S: Full Flower With her darkly comic role in To Die For, Kidman cements herself as a lead actress. Grant does the same in Four Weddings and a Funeral, in a different mode. Where she’s breathy and seductive, he’s bashful and neurotic. Their relationships (Grant is dating Elizabeth Hurley) establish them as tabloid staples. LATE ’90S: Intermission Then some personal crises:…

JARED KUSHNER DIDN’T TRUST Adam Neumann when they first met, as aspiring New York real-estate moguls in the early 2010s. But they eventually connected as self-identified disruptors in an industry averse to newcomers, and WeWork leased space in several Kushner-owned buildings. Neumann and Kushner settled one negotiation with an arm-wrestling match in Neumann’s office while several WeWork employees looked on. “I used to arm wrestle all the time in the Navy,” Neumann told Kushner. When Neumann won, Kushner complained that Neumann’s elbow had come off the table; they clasped their opposite hands for a rematch, but Neumann won again. (Little, Brown & Co., October 20)…

ONE LATE-AUGUST MORNING, I met former New York governor Eliot Spitzer at Hudson Yards, the lavishly subsidized $25 billion real-estate development that will one day house Facebook offices, investment funds, and the pharmaceutical firm Pfizer. I found him at the base of an unfinished skyscraper, where a marketing banner draped across the scaffolding read RESET EXPECTATIONS. Spitzer was wearing a mask, a green gingham shirt, and bookish horn-rimmed glasses. The former governor is now a builder, having returned to his family’s real-estate business after self-destructing in politics. He had been talking to me intermittently since the middle of the summer, analyzing the pandemic as someone with a deep personal investment in the health of the city. “I don’t know when people are coming back to these buildings,” Spitzer said as…

SOMETIME SOON, even as office workers still give each other latitude and exchange muffled greetings through their masks, you may find yourself waiting for an elevator. If the building is old, with a cramped lobby, the line begins outside, where it crisscrosses other ones, so that the sidewalk resembles Thanksgiving check-in at JFK. You maneuver to avoid vendors and delivery guys, maybe even the first returning tourists, all overflowing the sidewalk. The morning jam-up becomes severe enough that local businesses petition to ban private vehicles from that block, possibly neighboring ones, too. Employers start staggering workday hours, and pressure mounts to impose the congestion pricing that was intended to thin traffic but then deferred. That, in turn, means overhauling the inchoate mess of bridge and tunnel tolls. With the subway…

DEC 2019 Mira Moore, a server at Ops in Bushwick, also finds a snail in a box of arugula. Moore, who had previously owned rats, decides to take it home and names him Rocket. MAR 2020 Artist Okimoto finds snails in her yard in Queens and asks her friend Moore if they make good pets. Affirmed, she keeps one and hands out several via contactless pickup. MAR 2020 Construction estimator Ramona Sadiq takes two from Okimoto. “They’re blobby,” she says. “Like those blobby ceramics. Maybe we’re just into blobby shapes.” MAR 30, 2020 BuzzFeed News strategist Maggie Schultz was on Instagram and “saw Okimoto was giving some away. My former colleague at BuzzFeed had snails, and they were kind of cuddly and seemed easy to care for. So I adopted…

HILTON DRESDEN Writer, Greenpoint Did you buy anything? Sadly, I did not. I’m a writer, but I’m unemployed, so money has been a little tight. I saw some great leather pants, Helmut Lang, but then I realized I was already wearing leather pants. Where are those from? Prada, from a thrift store. The fanny pack is from a thrift store in Houston. It was $5. The sweater is Isaac Mizrahi, from another thrift store. It came with a pair of matching leggings. The leather shirt is Banana Republic, from a thrift store in Bushwick, and the sunglasses are Gucci, new, a gift from my partner, Tom. Wow, I sound so bougie saying all of that out loud. But these are literally all of the fancy things I own.…

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NEW YORK is on sale October 20. EVEN IF AN idea does not strictly start here, New York is, disproportionately often, the place where it is dropped off, trimmed to size, matted and framed, and displayed to everyone with an explanatory wall text. Certain types of people are drawn to a place like this. They tend to be young, smart, and ambitious. Definitionally, they are dissatisfied with their hometowns. (Otherwise, why leave?) Home to authors and academics and musicians, art galleries and fashion houses—how exactly did this majestic confluence of creativity appear here? One explanation is New York’s sheer size: Big ideas are magnetic, and in a big town rather than a small one, you can gather enough Trotskyites or avant-garde poets at an event to make…

“Carol’s fingers tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped in Therese again as if it were only a continuation of the moment when Carol had slipped her arm under her neck last night. I love you, Therese wanted to say again, and then the words were erased by the tingling and terrifying pleasure that spread in waves from Carol’s lips over her neck, her shoulders, that rushed suddenly, the length of her body. Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of Carol’s hand that slid along her ribs, Carol’s hair that brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow.…