Innholdsfortegnelse for November 23 - December 6, 2020 i New York Magazine

Brother Vellies Something Special Subscription Service, $35 at brothervellies.com “Subscription boxes, and their endless parade of unasked-for nothings, are not usually my cup of tea. But Brother Vellies’ commitment to artisan design practices gives this one a more enticing touch. While I’ve certainly loved some of my somethings more than others, all of them—from a terra-cotta mug to a hand-sculpted flowerpot—do indeed feel special.” —VERENA VON PFETTEN…

BASICALLY, I WAS STARING at a brick wall for seven years,” architect Alexander Gorlin says of the Upper East Side rental he’d moved into after his divorce—a refuge he thought would be temporary until inertia set in. Finally, a year and a half ago, he set out to shake that off and find a place to buy, preferably one from which he could walk to work and ideally—though he was pretty sure he couldn’t afford it—in the West Village. He found this “hidden jewel,” an apartment that hadn’t been touched in 30 years, back when it had been victim of an ill-conceived renovation. “It was not only a wreck,” Gorlin recalls, “but the owner had encroached onto the view with closets and a Murphy bed and dropped ceilings so that…

Chasing Flavor (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35) LORING PLACE’S Dan Kluger is an inveterate Greenmarketer and a master of textures both purée-smooth and crunchy-granola. His modular, multicomponent recipes may seem intimidating, but they spare the reader the indignity of the dreaded buried subrecipe, and his “takeaway” tips make persuasive arguments for adding vodka to tempura batter, roasting vegetables on a wire rack, and spritzing crudités with kombuorange mist. His first book reveals the secrets of house signatures like the winter-chicories salad (grill the dates) and grandma pizza (fry the garlic). Restaurant report: currently open for indoor and outdoor dining, delivery. Xi’an Famous Foods (Abrams, $35) PART COOKBOOK, part memoir, Jason Wang’s lively chronicle of his family’s winding journey from Northwest China to a New York restaurant empire is a tale as…

DO YOU FEEL CONFINED by the expectations of the era you were born into? Are your desires repressed, both literally and metaphorically, under several layers of thick fabric? Do you often stare out across a cold, gray windswept beach and wish for more? Odds are good you might be stuck inside the plot of a serious lesbian period drama. Perhaps it’s something like the great French romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire or the English fossil-filled Ammonite. Does this sound like what is happening to you? Work through this checklist to be sure. CLUE 1 You are stuck at a remote beach for a prolonged period. Remote beaches—often foggy and near picturesque cliffs, with plenty of space for socially distanced eye-fucking—are where everything happens. Especially if you happen to…

Missy Big Mouth ➽ After Jenny Slate announced she would no longer voice Missy, Big Mouth co-creators Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett released a statement apologizing for the decision to cast a white actor in the role, saying, “We made a mistake, took our privilege for granted, and we’re working hard to do better moving forward.” Cleveland Brown Family Guy ➽ After 18 seasons, the mainstay Fox animated series recast the voice of Cleveland Brown this year. Arif Zahir, a YouTuber, replaces Mike Henry starting in season 19. Zahir gained popularity on YouTube for his impressions, including one of Brown himself. Molly Tillerman Central Park ➽ Apple’s Central Park made the decision to recast the biracial character Molly Tillerman in…

THE SEAGULL ON THE SIMS 4 NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP. AVAILABLE ON NYTW’S YOUTUBE CHANNEL. “WE MUST HAVE new forms,” says Konstantin, the tormented writer hero of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Desperate for approval, Konstantin (Kostya to his friends) boils with guy-from-my-M.F.A. energy. He’s sure he’s underappreciated, though his aesthetic revolution sounds a lot like unoriginal dreck. You can see him, can’t you—glasses, a little beard, a T-shirt with a skull on it? At least that was the Konstantin collaboratively assembled in Celine Song’s (actually revolutionary) The Seagull on The Sims 4. One of the offerings from New York Theatre Workshop’s virtual season, Song’s two-night, nearly six-hour Seagull was head and wings above other experiments in digital theater. It was often deeply absorbing, if in its second half occasionally exhausting.…

IN THE MATH-ADDLED HOURS after the polls closed on Election Day, as the New York Times’ needle tipped delicately toward blue in Georgia, the nation’s attention followed, homing in on one of its most transformative political figures: Stacey Abrams. Abrams—who served as minority leader in Georgia’s house of representatives for seven years before running for governor in 2018, losing narrowly to then–Secretary of State Brian Kemp in one of the most flagrantly voter-suppressed elections in recent memory—has been working to turn her state from red to blue for more than a decade. Now that her promise has (this time at least) been made manifest, many people in the Democratic Party are looking to Abrams as a kind of silver bullet: a figure who can be installed—in the Cabinet or as…

ON THE LAST FRIDAY in September, two-dozen protesters descended on the co-op 740 Park Avenue, laying crosses, small Stars of David, and Islamic crescents on the grassy median in front of the building, each one symbolizing another thousand of New York’s COVID dead. They chose this building, an imposing Art Deco behemoth known in the tabloids as the “Tower of Power,” because it is home to the highest concentration of billionaires in the United States. “Billionaires are experts at social distancing, and they are excluded from the communities that they have an impact on, and so we are bringing our rage and our suffering to them because they are so complicit in what is happening in New York right now,” said Alice Nascimento, one of the protest’s organizers. “They get…

Heléne Yorke’s City Scooter 2020 Vespa Primavera 150, $5,349 at vespabk.com “An adorable and surprisingly cost-effective way to get around. I love pulling up to sidewalk dinners and hearing my friends be like, ‘Oh my gawd!’” —HELÉNE YORKE, actress Pat LaFrieda’s Country Pickup Ford F-150 Raptor, from $53,455 at ford.com “I have owned and/or leased just about every vehicle, but none has been as fun to drive as this. It has four doors, seats five or six, and has a covered bed that can store just about anything. I took my two kids to a drive-in movie theater in it during the peak of COVID. They laid down bedding and made one big sofa out of the rear of the truck.” —PAT LAFRIEDA, CEO, Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors…

Basics LOCATION 219 Thompson Street FOUNDER Imad Khachan OPENED IN 1995 NOTABLE CUSTOMERS Oliver Stone, Julia Roberts, Liv Tyler FOR SALE Ebony-and-bird’s-eye-maple chessboards ($299), archangel chessmen ($99) IMAD KHACHAN: My name is Imad Khachan, and I’m the humble owner of Chess Forum. I welcome you to the place in its 25th year. I opened in September ’95. Before that, it was a printing place. One of the early victims, I think, of the internet. But before that, starting in 1975, it was a chess space. The original chess place in New York, it was here. NICOLAS HELLER: They were called chess parlors, right? I.K. Yes. It was opened by a Ukrainian grand master, the real deal, named Nicolas Rossolimo. It was called Rossolimo’s Chess Studio. N.H. Did you ever come…

WHETHER YOU’RE EATING a samosa in Jackson Heights or ingesting a bowl of noodles in one of the city’s many Chinatowns, dining out in New York has always provided the illusion of travel to faraway lands. Even now, when we’re all living in our tiny, ever-narrowing COVID orbits, I would argue that this is still true. Just in the past few weeks, I’ve been teleported, briefly, to the duck houses of northern China (the “mandarin duck” at Milu) and the pizza temples of Naples (the classic margherita at Ribalta), so when news arrived, not long ago, of a newly opened Texan canteen called Yellow Rose on lower Third Avenue, I put on my wool cap and two layers of foul-weather gear and ambled over to the East Village to have…

SOME NIGHTS JUST unfurl before you. There’s the getting-ready phase, face crooked in the mirror, smearing on eye shadow or blush. Should I wear this shoe or that shoe? There’s the last-minute adjustment, a nervous fretting and fussing over the glittering look, and a rushing out the door. Who all’s gonna be there? The loose energy of a crowded party draws you in with the anticipation of shimmying up close to someone’s ear or sipping something pleasantly strong. There’s a momentum to this type of night out, the way one song pushes into the next, pulls you to the center of the room. There’s an amorous mood, like anything could happen, like something good certainly will. Remember going out? Remember nights so radiant, so alive with wanting, you could float…

SIGN UP for the newsletter at vulture.com/read. FOR REASONS that are uninteresting, I wound up on Martha’s Vineyard alone for a few days this past month, staying at an obscure inn that offered a free breakfast of “hard-boiled egg, waffles, blueberry bagel, or all three.” (This is why I love obscure inns: You get direct access to the petty affinities and prejudices of the owner.) After harvesting my breakfast (all three, sir!) on day one, I learned that another of the owner’s prejudices was against thin-skinned wimps who can’t deal with the elements. In other words, all the rooms were unheated. The problem was that this wimp had simply not packed enough clothes for an unheated room. First, I tried to think about the temperature as an ascetic challenge: What…

MANK DIRECTED BY DAVID FINCHER. NETFLIX. R. LIKE A LOT OF OTHER journalists, novelists, and playwrights who headed to Hollywood looking for showbiz success or just to sell out, Herman Mankiewicz believed the movies to be a fundamentally unserious occupation. He was a writer, one who had cut his teeth as a reporter before becoming a drama critic and a fleeting member of the Algonquin Round Table, and then, in 1926, he took a job with Paramount, where he turned out title cards for silents and then scripts for talkies. There’s a line from a famous telegram he sent his friend Ben Hecht back in New York—one that makes an appearance in Mank, the ungainly new film from David Fincher—that sums up Mankiewicz’s feelings about the blossoming business in which…

Benedict Morelli and his team of experienced litigators have done it all. From auto and truck accidents, to construction injuries, to complex employment discrimination, they are prepared to handle a wide variety of cases. But, experience is just half of the story. Since founding the firm, Mr. Morelli and team have also racked up an impressive list of jury verdicts and settlements that stand out in the industry. In fact, they have delivered more than a billion dollars on behalf of their clients. Impressive firm results include a $95M jury verdict in a sexual harassment case involving Aaron’s Inc., as well as a $62M verdict for a construction worker who fell from a roof and suffered a brain injury. One critical reason for this success is that unlike many firms,…

FOR THE FIRST TIME since its inception in 1933, there will be no Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. For a New York holiday season, this is akin to Santa himself taking the year off. He works hard, but the Rockettes work harder: 300 kicks per show, up to four shows a day—after six weeks of rehearsal, six days a week, for six hours a day. Those were the days before COVID-19 shut down Radio City. The usual 80-woman company has not been hired this year; they have dispersed or stayed home, keeping up their offseason gigs as exercise instructors, real-estate agents, students, and accountants. But a skeleton crew of Rockettes are training for the events they can do: 18 for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a dozen for…

IT’S 2 A.M., OR, PER THE GUY sitting next to me, “the hour where nothing is awkward,” on a Friday night less than two weeks before the presidential election and three weeks before COVID-19 positivity rates would creep back toward 3 percent in New York, prompting a series of new lockdown measures—a night and moment that, in retrospect, would be the twilight of New York’s pandemic reprieve. On the teeny back patio of a vacant industrial warehouse on the border of Bushwick and Williamsburg, at a covert party named, fittingly, “Dirty Dark Underground,” I can find only one person out of a couple dozen revelers who appears to even own a mask, though his is currently dangling under his chin. If you happened to wander into this party, lured from…

STARTING ON APRIL 6, a bearded and earnest neuroscientist at the University of Oregon named Philip Fisher began to send a digital questionnaire—at first weekly, and then, beginning in August, biweekly—to a representative group of a thousand American families with young children. He’s curious about how they and their kids are doing. They aren’t doing so well. ¶ At first, writing into blank spaces on the questionnaire as if they were diaries, parents conveyed a fresh sense of surprise at their new reality. They observed their kids’ sudden regressions and general nervousness as novelties. Toilet-trained children were wetting their beds, and kids who once went to sleep easily became hard to soothe, waking at night or crawling in with their parents. “My son is suddenly scared of everything,” one Ohio…

GREEN Yuzu Kosho Green Paste, $10 at umamimart.com “This spicy green paste makes literally everything you put it on—avocado toast, eggs, plain rice, meat, buttery-cheesy-but-otherwise-plain pasta—taste better.” —VERENA VON PFETTEN, co-founder, Gossamer YELLOW Diaspora Co. Pragati Turmeric, from $12 at diasporaco.com “After getting COVID-19, my eating shifted to completely anti-inflammatory. I’m flying through my turmeric stash. Diaspora’s is truly the best.” —REBEKAH PEPPLER, food stylist, writer RED Shaquanda’s Hot Pepper Sauce, $10 at shaquandawillfeedyou.com “It has a balanced combination of spice and heat and can go on everything from fish to chicken to eggs.” —TAYO GIWA…

Mr. Bing Chili Crisp MR. BING PARTNER Brian Goldberg started out selling the Beijing-style stuffed crêpes called jianbing, a.k.a. bings. People liked Mr. Bing’s bings well enough, but they liked the chile sauce that came with them more. Now, having closed his restaurants, Goldberg’s focus is entirely on condiments, particularly Chili Crisp. The orangey-brown sludge is nice and thick, like rocky beach sand, and a little sweet ➸ ($12 for 7-oz. jar at mr-bing.com). Sze Daddy Chili Oil 886 OWNER ERIC SZE’S hot sauce is inspired by Taiwanese sha-cha sauce, which itself is derived from Southeast Asian saté sauce. Whatever you call it, it’s on the hot side, with a plush texture that bucks the crunchy trend. (Rather than fry his alliums to a crisp, he con-fits them with spices.)…

THE CROWN NETFLIX. EPISODE TWO OF The Crown’s fourth season is called “The Balmoral Test,” and it lays out the two through-lines of the season in a precisely balanced, extremely satisfying way. Elizabeth and Philip, played once again by Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies, are at the family vacation home way out in the Scottish Highlands with the rest of the royal family. There are guests on this vacation trip. First, there’s the newly elected prime minister, Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson), and her husband, Denis (Stephen Boxer). After the Thatchers leave, Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin) arrives, ready to be inspected as a potential wife for Charles (Josh O’Connor). They’re all being subjected to the infamous “Balmoral Test,” a term for what happens when new people receive an invitation to the…

TV 1. Watch Euphoria Christmas Episode Break out your glitter eye shadow. HBO, December 6. The pandemic made it impossible to shoot the second season of Euphoria, but we will get two stand-alone episodes, including this holiday-set one that focuses on what happens to Rue (Emmy winner Zendaya) after the events of the season-one finale. JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 2. Listen to Good News Hot Girl Meg’s debut. 1501 Certified Entertainment/300 Entertainment. Megan Thee Stallion has seen dizzying highs and lows this year. Her “Savage” remix, which featured Beyoncé, and her Cardi B collab, “WAP,” were her first and second No. 1 hits. Over the summer, she was shot in the foot, allegedly by Toronto singer Tory Lanez. Her debut set attempts a graceful dismount after a wild ride. Expect…