Innholdsfortegnelse for February 15-28, 2021 i New York Magazine

IF THERE’S ONE MOVIE that will give you wanderlust in the confined COVID existence of winter 2021, it’s Nomadland. When the protagonist, Fern (Frances McDormand), loses her job, she begins traveling across the American West—to a nomadic gathering in Arizona, a cooking job in South Dakota, a beet harvest in Nebraska. Here, what director Chloé Zhao and her team discovered on some key stops on the road. 1 Empire, Nevada Fern’s journey begins when the U.S. Gypsum plant in Empire closes down. Nomadland’s creative team found its way into the town by befriending the locals, crucially Brandy Wilber, who appears in a scene at a sporting-goods store with her daughters. When Zhao and her partner, cinematographer Joshua James Richards, arrived with the crew, they realized they had to adapt…

IT HAS NEVER been an easy time to be Lana Del Rey. The patron saint of Hollywood sadcore burst onto the music scene a decade ago to near-instantaneous backlash, and it has been tumultuous ever since. Although her aesthetic has barely wavered, she’s been alternately held up as an anti-feminist symbol, an inspiration for young women, and an exemplar of out-of-touch whiteness. Sometimes the conversation about Del Rey has overshadowed her actual output. With a new album, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, expected in March and already kicking up controversy, her meaning in the culture is shifting again, much to the frustration of the artist herself. 2011 Backlash Bait DEL REY BROKE out with her song “Video Games” in the summer of 2011, a time so far in the past…

HERE’S THE TRUTH. To watch footage of Fred Hampton—the Illinois Black Panther Party chairman slain by the twin forces of the FBI and the Chicago Police Department in 1969 at a mere 21 years of age—is to be pulled in by a magnetism as expansive as his politics. Whether making speeches or debating with other organizers, Hampton blended earthy intimacy with the patter of a Baptist preacher. His approach to community organizing was bold, undergirded by a belief in the power of and need for cross-racial, cross-cultural solidarity. He was intelligent, able to imagine a necessary socialist future. It’s for this reason that he was a threat to the racist, imperialist power structures that govern this country. Hampton also had all the complexities that make us human. Yet there was…

MOVIES 1. See I Care a Lot Rosamund Pike scammer film. Netflix, February 19. Rosamund Pike is back with her Gone Girl haircut and penchant for grifting, but now she’s Marla Grayson, a con artist masquerading as a conservator who sticks perfectly healthy senior citizens into a rest home and drains their assets. It’s a good gig until she’s caught by a cunning underground businessman played to great effect by Peter Dinklage. SANGEETA SINGH-KURTZ POP MUSIC 2. Listen to Little Oblivions Beyond boygenius. Matador, February 26. Julien Baker, the Tennessee singer-songwriter and erstwhile member of the indie-rock super-group boygenius, follows up 2017’s Turn Out the Lights with Little Oblivions, mixing lush folk sounds and catchy electric-guitar riffs underneath her wispy vocals and reflective lyrics and evolving from the chilling quietude…

SINCE ALMOST THE BEGINNING of the pandemic, Harvard’s Michael Mina has been among the country’s most outspoken epidemiologists, urging the public-health apparatus toward a more responsive and creative approach to managing the crisis. In particular—despite maddening resistance from the medical Establishment—he has advocated for a mass deployment of rapid tests, similar to home pregnancy tests, to help curb the spread of the virus. We spoke in mid-February with vaccine distribution in full swing—and the threat of new strains on the horizon. How do you see the state of things? I’m having a hard time juggling the bad news about strains versus the good news about vaccines. My personal feeling is we are seeing the benefits of seasonality hit, which I know some of my colleagues don’t necessarily agree with. But…

RYAN SERHANT WANTED to elevate. On an unseasonably beautiful winter morning, the real-estate broker was gliding around the rooftop terrace of a penthouse in Soho, trailed by a two-man camera crew and sizing up the angles. He hoisted himself above the terrace wall, placing one Prada boot on a planter, the other on a piece of wicker furniture. “This way,” he said, “I’m in the sun.” Serhant wore a light-blue pin-striped suit, a baby-blue Hermès tie, and a brilliant white smile, which I could see because he had stripped off his navy-blue mask, which was branded with an S. From the knees down, he was contorting to hold himself steady. But his upper half was bathed in light, with the Empire State Building framed over his shoulder. Serhant, who is…

ACCORDING TO A HARRIS POLL, 68 percent of Americans felt stressed out in the weeks leading up to the presidential election, and on that day, many took steps to combat their anxiety. Some went for long walks. Some practiced deep-breathing exercises. Some went offline. Some threw their phones in the river. And Hillary Sterling, chef-partner at Vic’s restaurant in Noho, made a lasagna. It was the first lasagna that Sterling, who’s known for her pasta, had ever tackled as a professional chef. These days, she spends mornings alone in the kitchen with her pasta-production guy, and on November 3, they needed a project—preferably a labor-intensive, time-consuming one—to take their minds off the possibility of a second Trump term. So besciamella, Bolognese, tomato sauce, and yards of fresh pasta sheets it…

THE NO. 1 SONG in the U.S. right now—Disney Channel star Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License,” an archetypal 21st-century sad piano ballad—has achieved an unusual feat: It’s a debut single that reached the top of Billboard’s “Hot 100” chart after its first week out. The last time this occurred with any regularity was in the early aughts, when the first postshow singles by American Idol winners Fantasia Barrino, Clay Aiken, Carrie Underwood, and Taylor Hicks arrived to nationwide attention after weeks of exposure to the prime-time audiences of one of the most-watched shows on television. It takes a big media apparatus to propel a new artist to the forefront of the American streaming charts. What gave Rodrigo the juice? Are people simply that enthralled with her work as Nini from Disney+’s…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2019, Jeffrey Wernick, then a 63-year-old investor and self-described anarcho-capitalist, was living above a hotel in midtown Manhattan and hosting regular lunches at Freds at Barneys, where he’d extol bitcoin and rue the sunset of free speech in America. It was at one of these gatherings that he got to talking with John Matze, 26, the libertarian who had recently founded Parler—a Twitter alternative for conservatives fed up with what they considered to be the suppressive policies of mainstream social media. Wernick doesn’t particularly like social media (“It’s antisocial,” he told me), but he appreciated Parler’s purity: The platform showed posts in simple chronological order with rather laissez-faire content moderation. A few months after the encounter, Wernick invested in the start-up and became a strategic adviser.…

1 Blanket Coat, $1,050: “The first iterations of these were made from textiles that my mother had given me years ago, and they sold out almost immediately. We continue to source vintage textiles and wool blankets—everything is handpicked for quality, weight, colors, and patterns,” says Yates.2 Patchwork Denim Floor Cushions, from $425: “These are made out of vintage Levi’s, mostly from the 1940s and ’50s. Everyone is really charmed by them.”3 Vintage Calco Workwear Coveralls, $425: “The more patina the better, in our eyes, and these ’40s coveralls have been worn to perfection.”4 Tart Vinegar, $24: “Christina Crawford is in Red Hook, a few blocks from the store, and she’ll ride by on her bike with a case of her vinegar for me whenever she has extra, then it’s gone—it sells out within…

I MEAN, YOU HAVE to understand,” Lisa Robinson tells me. “I was on the road from the ’70s all the way through the ’90s. It’s like I wasn’t domestic. I didn’t have time; I didn’t care!” She and her late husband, Richard, a radio host turned music producer turned magician, rented this two-bedroom on the Upper East Side in 1976, and it has stayed pretty much the same ever since. “We painted. We did the floors. We moved in, period,” she says. The couple had one of those always-on-the-go, all-access-pass New York lives together, with late nights, limos, and private jets, which is clear reading her memoir, There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll. Robinson grew up on the Upper West Side, where “we always had music in…

ASK ANY Hollywood insider if they know somebody who has pulled strings to get an early dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and the answer is almost always a quick “no”—followed immediately by a confession that, well, they do know someone who knows someone who chartered a private jet to fly to another state for just that purpose. Some share stories of celebrities volunteering at vaccination centers just to get a leftover inoculation at the end of the day, or showrunners asking doctors to hook up their cast and crew so they can keep filming. Everyone in Hollywood wants immunity, and lots of people are looking into what it would take to get it—but they are also terrified of potential public shaming. If the college-admissions scandal that sent Lori Loughlin and…

THE SNOOPY SHOW understands that Snoopy isn’t a mere cartoon beagle or the pet of famous perpetual failure Charlie Brown. He is a canine stand-in for the power of the imagination. The new series on Apple TV+ (a platform that, not coincidentally, now streams many of the old Peanuts specials and movies) consists of six 22-minute episodes, each one a trio of thematically related shorts that follow Snoopy as he imagines himself in increasingly fantastical settings that are out of sync with the banal ones that surround him. More often than not, he’s got Woodstock, his BBFF—that’s “best bird friend forever”—by his side. In some of the most widely watched Peanuts animated classics, Snoopy’s story has been the B-plot—his battle with the Red Baron is secondary to the main action…