Innholdsfortegnelse for January 4-17, 2021 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Allison P. Davis wrote about what happened in the months after a white woman in the liberal enclave of Montclair, New Jersey, called the cops on her Black neighbors (“Living With Karens,” December 21, 2020–January 3, 2021). Jen Rice, a journalist in Houston, wrote that Davis “crafted a flawless portrait of the stress and anxiety of living among white supremacy at this precise moment in time.” Tati Chin wrote that the story represented “what we don’t talk about: the shame and embarrassment after these incidents. The constant explaining. Your life becoming a spectacle on top of the original offense.” And Julia McCarthy tweeted, “I’ve spent a lot of my life in Montclair, including working at their small local bookstore. For all its good,…

DEATH WAS THE MAIN CHARACTER of the past year, and, like knife fodder in a slasher film, we ran, hid, and isolated in the hope of clinching the crown of final girl: the one who survives the carnage. We woke up every day and read, fretted, and argued about death. We obsessed over mortality rates. We mourned personal friends and public figures. We united—to the extent that such a thing remained possible in a society splintering into fiefdoms of accepted and unaccepted truths—around the question of how to carry ourselves in the shadow of certain doom. Revelers partied in defiance of it; distancing flourished because of it. Auteurs made art that, to use one of the year’s favored turns of phrase, “hit different” because of our circumstances. Last month, Paul…

TV 1. Watch Mr. Mayor Nice to see you again, Ted Danson. NBC, January 7. Ted Danson hasn’t starred in a sitcom since, well, The Good Place ended a year ago, and that’s too long. He’s back on NBC, this time as a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles in a series co-created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. JEN CHANEY ART 2. See JR: The Chronicles of New York City The self-described “photograffeur.” Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, through February 14. For a blast of fresh air and abstract love, enter the atrium at the Brooklyn Museum. There, you will be engulfed by and surrounded in about the largest wraparound mural you likely have ever seen. From the legendary anonymous French photographer, this wildly collaged panorama presents 1,128 individual…

THE LAST TIME I VISITED my grandparents’ hometown, I was researching an article about lynching. In 1918, a white mob tore through Valdosta, Georgia, and the neighboring county and murdered at least 11 Black people, including Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant and found suspended by her ankles and disemboweled. My cousin is a history buff and offered to show me around. Crossing town in his pickup truck, we drove down a leafy street where, according to local lore, the mob went door-to-door looking for a Black man accused of killing his white employer and allegedly shot residents who failed to disclose his whereabouts. The goal of my story was to investigate a personal connection. One of the lynch mob’s victims, Eugene Rice, shared my family’s name and was…

1. The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, were recovered and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 2. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli’s team brought the RaTG13 sample, sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several times in recent years for unspecified reasons. 3. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which first reported signs of the novel coronavirus in hospital patients. 4. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, an early suspected origin of the pandemic, where the first major outbreak occurred.…

THE LAST TIME Jennifer Freyd saw her parents was in December 1990. At 33, Jennifer was a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the mother of two young boys. Her folks, Peter and Pamela Freyd, were coming for a visit over Christmas. In years past, Jennifer’s sister, Gwen, would have been there too. But that fall, a few months before their parents were scheduled to arrive, Gwen had called Jennifer to say she wouldn’t be coming. Something, she said, was deeply wrong with their family. ¶ By then, Peter Freyd, a renowned mathematician, had been through rehab at Silver Hill, an elite psychiatric hospital in Connecticut favored by the famous and the wealthy. Still, Peter’s years of heavy drinking weighed especially on Gwen, who is six…

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I’ve not had furniture in storage in 20 years,” says Thomas Gensemer, a globe-trotting adman who met his peripatetic match in Gabe Brotman, then an executive at Politico. “Between the two of us, we’ve had places in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, London, and Brussels,” says Brotman. And in the process, “we just collect too much stuff.” By 2018, they knew they had to make a home together in the same city, and Gensemer’s Brooklyn Heights one-bedroom wasn’t going to be big enough for the two of them, not to mention the family they are planning to start. They had been looking at houses in Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant when a listing caught their eye. “Embarrassingly,” Gensemer recalls, “it was literally 3 a.m., coming home…

PRETEND IT’S A CITY debuts on Netflix January 8. THE FIRST THING I asked Fran Lebowitz was, Could we meet at her apartment for this interview? Before I’d even finished the sentence, she said no. This was not surprising. Lebowitz has an apartment with enough room for her 12,000-book library and for which she paid, she will tell you, as she does in Martin Scorsese’s delightfully acerbic and wise documentary series Pretend It’s a City, approximately three times what she could actually afford. She says the real-estate broker asked her if she needed space to throw parties, but her answer to the broker was the same one she gave me: She just doesn’t have people over. That’s not for her—never has been. So we talked on the phone, a landline…

THE PAST YEAR HAS SEEN a stampede of theatrical projects leaping into the movies. Classics like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom are vaulting onscreen; recent Broadway ventures are getting Hollywood makeovers (The Prom and The Boys in the Band); filmed events are even popping up in popular streaming queues—American Utopia, What the Constitution Means to Me, Hamilton. It’s an irony during a time that has threatened live performance with total destruction that our screens are hungrier than ever for theater turned film. Kemp Powers’s 2013 play, One Night in Miami, was not an obvious candidate for filming. For one thing, it observes the unities: a single location, a single span of time, a single action. In adapting this compact script for the screen, director Regina King interleaves a few scenes that…

EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION has a combative relationship with the White House press corps, but during the Trump administration, the tension increased considerably. In four years, the job of press secretary was held by four different people—one of whom gave no formal briefings at all—but no matter who stood at the podium, it was a theater for conflict, with the president as the star antagonist. Any event could become the scene of a fight if Trump was in the mood for it, which he often was. Some reporters shrewdly viewed this as an opportunity for brand building and needled the president to elicit made-for-TV moments, but more often, Trump’s predictably unpredictable nature leveled the playing field for the wider cohort. “Correspondents who had been covering the White House for decades suddenly…

I. Flask Monsters WHAT HAPPENED WAS fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.¶ Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or…

This chart measures the genetic similarity of known viruses to the novel coronavirus (which appears in yellow). By far the closest is the bat virus RaTG13, which appears in blue, and which was recovered in 2013 and brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The first SARS, marked in red, is a much more distant relative.…

THE Individual Solarium These petite solaria are house-shaped structures meant for single parties. With a metal framework and glass or clear-plastic sides, the Individual Solarium offers near-complete protection from the elements and has been known to feature amenities such as electric tabletop space heaters, AstroTurf, and festive winter décor. WHERE TO FIND IT: Black Forest Brooklyn, American Brass, Malii Thai Kitchen, Lea, Peaches HotHouse THE Urban Yurt Native to casually high-end restaurants, the Urban Yurt is a round tent with a pointed roof. Generally constructed by stretching canvas across a wooden lattice framework, Yurts tend to appear in clusters sometimes called “villages,” with their soft interior glow visible from the street. Though often equipped with an overhead heat source, they also embrace preindustrial warming solutions, such as blankets. WHERE TO…

TWENTY MINUTES INTO his Netflix adaptation of the Broadway musical The Prom, it becomes clear what kind of movie Ryan Murphy thinks he has made. Broadway diva Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep) and fellow star and very gay friend Barry Glickman (James Corden) are on the bus to Indiana, where they plan to raise hell in defense of a lesbian teen denied the right to take her girlfriend to the prom—a publicity stunt designed to repair their damaged reputations. No sooner do we learn this than Barry says, sincerely, that he has always dreamed of showing up his childhood bullies by doing “something important.” Dee Dee curls up next to him and coos, “That’s exactly what we are doing—something important.” The original musical had a straightforward premise, one as old…

DO YOU REMEMBER when Parasite won those Oscars, and the whole world went into lockdown, and George Floyd was killed? Do you remember the presidential election, and what it felt like to spend a lot of time on Zoom, and the most recent season of The Crown? Great! You are all caught up and have no need to watch Netflix’s end-of-the-year comedy special, Death to 2020. If the special, which was produced by Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, had taken greater advantage of its many celebrity participants or added a new perspective to its observational humor—or even just pushed its juvenility a little further—it might have been more appealing. As it is, though, Death to 2020 is a limp, unimaginative recap of a year surely few viewers…