Innholdsfortegnelse for October 26 - November 8, 2020 i New York Magazine

TO UNDERSTAND THE SUBURBS as imagined by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, you first have to understand that neither of them is really talking about the suburbs. They are talking about segregation. “Suburbs are by and large integrated,” Biden claimed at the first presidential debate in Ohio. He was responding to Trump’s warning that the “suburbs would be gone” under a Biden presidency, crushed under the weight of “problems like you’ve never seen before.” Trump’s evocation of suburban decline has become a theme of his reelection campaign. As his job-approval ratings have fallen and Biden maintains a healthy lead over him in national polls, the president has found himself grasping for proof that the foundational pitch of his presidency still has merit—that he’s the only candidate who can guarantee safety…

THE STORY of an awakening must begin with how many had been permitted to sleep in the first place. I often think back to a Saturday Night Live episode from October 2016, which aired after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Lin-Manuel Miranda was the guest host, and in the cold open, he directed a line from his fanatically beloved musical Hamilton at a photo of Donald Trump, declaring with ferocity, “You’re never gonna be president now.” You could feel viewers, Hamilton fans, Democrats, those who for whatever reasons could still afford to believe in norms or justice, laugh with the giddy conviction that a man who grabbed women against their will could never be president, perhaps forgetting that grabbing women against their will had been a habit of…

KIM HASTREITER HAS LIVED in a “kind of vanilla” postwar building overlooking Washington Square Park since 1993. She didn’t love it when she first saw it, but it was highly civilized and, having lived in Soho since 1980—back when it was dangerous—she says, “I wanted to live somewhere where I didn’t have to run for my life when I went out for a newspaper.” At the same time, the New York she moved to was a place of opportunity, a place where people built their dreams out of will and ingenuity. Hastreiter came to the city (driving from California with the performance artist Joey Arias) after art school. She befriended the photographer Bill Cunningham, who urged her to become the style editor at the SoHo Weekly News. In 1984, she…

FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, Sacha Baron Cohen slid the cathartic comic dagger of Borat into the soft tissue where American civility meets American bigotry. His marks were often passive, acquiescent, polite—but then, when their guards lowered in the presence of this dim-witted foreign journalist with his monstrously medieval beliefs, they hanged themselves with their own horrific words and actions. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan landed like a cinematic neutron bomb back in 2006, even launching a series of lawsuits from some of its unsuspecting, humiliated subjects. So now that we’ve fully become a nation of busybodies who outright despise one another, is there any room left for a Borat sequel? Yes and no. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for…

THE 2020 ELECTION is the first presidential contest since perhaps 1864 in which the principal question is democracy itself. The reelection of Donald Trump, unlikely but terrifyingly possible, would hasten America’s evolution into an oligarchy along the lines of Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, whose illiberal leaders Trump admires and who are, in some cases, working to help him secure a second term. School civics lessons have boiled democratic values down to inoffensive mush that we associate with clichés expressing supposedly universal values (“government of the people, by the people, for the people”). But democracy is a radical concept, especially in a society as unequal as ours. The tension between an economic system in which power is concentrated in a few hands and a political system in which power is distributed…

On April 30, 2018, nine top executives from T-Mobile checked in to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., with their names on a list of VIP arrivals. They landed in Washington at a critical moment: Just the day before, T-Mobile had announced plans for a merger with Sprint. To complete the deal, the company needed approval from the Justice Department, one block away on Pennsylvania Avenue. Hanging out in the lobby in his trademark hot-pink-and-black T-Mobile hoodie, then CEO John Legere was instantly recognizable to hotel guests. His company wasn’t just patronizing the president’s hotel. It was advertising that it was doing so. That evening, in a closed-door suite just off the hotel lobby, a small group of political donors got to have dinner with the president of the…

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE PANDEMIC, no one was going anywhere. But as the months went by, and (most) companies stressed that work-from-home policies wouldn’t be ending anytime soon, people realized they were incredibly sick of their houses. Airbnb had houses. The company, which in April had been on the brink of collapse, positioned itself as the ideal alternative to hotels packed with other guests. It touted long-term rentals for people looking to work within four new walls and launched new cleanliness guidelines. It’s now on track to do more business this year than it did last. There are a lot of perfectly acceptable Airbnbs within driving distance of New York City. There are hundreds of properties along the North Fork, in Amish country in Pennsylvania, and thousands upstate, where…

Room, when gentlemen drank their martinis straight up at lunchtime and the most sophisticated couples burned through a pack of cigarettes a day. Lots of places have discontinued the practice in recent years, prefer- LIKE MANY RESTAURANT FANATICS of a certain age, I used to like to grab a pack or two of matches on my way out the door of the places I reviewed or dined at semi-regularly. Since we have a working fireplace at home, there was some practical value to this old habit, which likely goes back to the vanished era of the Stork Club and the Rainbow ring to dispense carefully carved toothpicks, or mini-notepads, or party bags filled with boxes of organic chocolate or granola. In our household, these tend to get lost, or thrown…

MANK opens in select theaters November 13. DAVID FINCHER’S 11TH feature film, Mank, is a passion project like no other on the director’s résumé—a drama, shot in black and white, about the formative years of Hollywood’s sound era, the agony and the ecstasy of what he calls “enforced collaboration” between directors and writers, and the political ruthlessness of Golden Age studios, told through the journey of an unlikely hero: Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), the newspaperman turned screenwriter who co-wrote (or wrote, depending on your POV) the screenplay for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Every frame of the movie brims with the director’s loving but unsentimental view of film history and of filmmaking—and also carries an unexpected wallop of political resonance with media manipulation and the creation of “fake news,” disinformation…

Saturday, 12:30 p.m.: A Wedding on the Long Meadow MING CHANG AND NAOYA HAYASHI “We didn’t want to wait to get married until the pandemic was over, because who knows when that will be. When the reverend made the pronouncement at the end, a lot of people sitting in the grass nearby clapped. It was really sweet.” —Ming Chang Sunday, 2 p.m.: A Weekly Cookout by the Bandshell JEN ROBERTON “I’ve got some merguez sausages going and some kefta. I barely knew how to do this in the beginning. The first time I tried to light it up, it didn’t work, and my boss was here. It was really embarrassing. But at this point, it seems to be doing what it has to do, which is good.” Sunday, 2:30 p.m.:…

Basics LOCATION3211 Church Avenue, Flatbush FOUNDERParis McKenzie OPENED August 12, 2020 NOTABLE ENDORSEMENTS Bella Hadid, Janet Jackson PARIS MCKENZIE DIDN’T PLAN to become the youngest-ever Black owner of a beauty-supply store. Her plan, actually, has always been to become an orthopedic pediatric surgeon: The 16-year-old attends the High School for Health Professions & Human Services and takes sociology classes at Hunter College on the side. “Having my own store wasn’t ever a goal I had on my list,” she says. “It was really like the opportunity was presented to me, and I knew I could do it.” The opportunity came from her mother, Senica Thompson, who owns both Paris Runway Boutique and Paris Hair Studio, which sit across the street from each other on a stretch of Church Avenue filled…

AFTER 9/11, SKEPTICS wondered whether tall office buildings had become too vulnerable to be viable. The answer came quickly: Skyscrapers would do just fine, thank you very much. The urge to compete, expand, and consolidate drove the construction of tens of millions of square feet of offices, rekindled the business district of lower Manhattan, and pushed midtown westward, toward Hudson Yards. Spurred by the desire to replace shabby, low-ceilinged offices in the area around Grand Central with a new crop of corporate headquarters, the city rezoned Midtown East, effectively demoting the Chrysler Building to the status of runt. Now we face a double whammy of doubt—the first a matter of safety, the second of preference. Buildings sit empty because of their ability to collect and distribute a deadly virus, but…

TV 1. Watch The Mandalorian There’s no place like home. Disney+, October 30. Your favorite show co-starring Baby Yoda returns for a second season, in which Mando (Pedro Pascal) sets out to reunite the Child (a.k.a. Baby Yoda) with his fellow Jedi. Road trip! JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 2. Listen to Love Goes Formerly titled To Die For. Capitol Records, October 30. Trailing promising singles including “How Do You Sleep?” and “Dancing With a Stranger,” Sam Smith follows 2017’s The Thrill of It All with Love Goes, which revisits the sleek dance music they were making before “Stay With Me.” Ilya, Shell-back, Steve Mac, Noonie Bao, and more pitch in on production; Labrinth, Normani, and Burna Boy guest on vocals. CRAIG JENKINS MOVIES 3. See Hubie Halloween Letting Adam Sandler…