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

1 For New York’s latest issue, editor-at-large Stella Bugbee introduced readers to the surging New York–centric style in dress: Zizmorcore (“Thank You, Dr. Zizmor,” March 1–14). Bloomberg’s Pat Regnier responded, “The story that explained to me why, after 48 years of not being a Hat Guy and not really liking baseball, I’ve been wearing a corny Brooklyn Dodgers hat since this summer.” Polly Mosendz wrote, “I’ve bought literally dozens of pieces of New York City local business merch during the pandemic year. I absolutely love this story, which I read while wearing my Gem Spa hat and my dry cleaner’s T-shirt.” Journalist Ben Adler joked, “I was wearing a Yankees hat and T-shirts from Sahadi’s and Roma’s before it was cool.” Some readers pushed back against Bugbee’s trendspotting. @ShanleySmalls countered,…

ONE RECENT MORNING, I zipped toward the Bronx in a Lyft outfitted with a murder room’s worth of plastic. My task: to seek the meaning of solitude from an elderly female who has lived alone, more or less, for 15 years. Her name is Happy, and she is an Asian elephant. Happy was captured, along with six others, in the early 1970s, “probably in Thailand,” according to The Atlantic. The calves, named after Disney’s seven dwarves, were sent to the U.S. and dispersed among zoos and circuses. Happy and a companion, Grumpy, ended up at the Bronx Zoo. The facility has had a number of elephants over the years, but they have mostly died off, and today there are just two: Happy and a second Elephas maximus named Patty. Owing…

At the end of January, I found myself living through an acute bout of a very modern panic: fear of the air around me. Both my girlfriend and my dad, with whom we were living, had just tested positive for COVID. He felt okay, for now, but she was miserable. Somehow, I had tested negative twice. We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Kansas City, and the patients quarantined themselves into bedrooms at opposite ends. I hunkered down in the middle, delivering food while wearing a pair of masks, opening the windows every now and then even though it was freezing, and trying to fall asleep on a pullout couch while keeping a nervous eye on the air-conditioning vents. With each cough and sneeze, it felt like only a…

KEUKMI ALI, Journalist, and LENNOX ALI, Retired What did you see? KEUKMI ALI: Nomadland. We had interest in it because it’s about people our age, after retirement. Well, I’m not retired yet; I write for a Japanese newspaper. But my husband is. He worked in transit. What did it feel like to be in a theater? K.A.: Okay. I know the pandemic is still happening and people should stay home, but we needed to go out, to not lose the courage to go out. Plus, Lennox already got the first shot. How did you two meet? K.A.: He was the best man at my sister’s wedding. Before that, I was living in Japan. Then I moved to New York to be with him. Since, I’ve taken him…

TO COMMEMORATE THE anniversary of lockdown, this month’s theme is insomnia. I’m not a doctor (uh, obviously), but I’ve discovered a few tricks: Lie in bed and pretend you’re a slowly decomposing fruit. Take an Epsom-salts bath and imagine the liquid magnesium sulfate osmosing through your skin, saying “Sweet dreams’’ to each body part. Or you could just read (see below) by candlelight. The flickering offers a visual lullaby. SIGN UP for the newsletter at vulture.com/read. WTRN* The Decagon House Murders BY YUKITO AYATSUJI (FICTION, 1987) ➽ Behold, the perfect escapist drug! If I could crush this book into a powder and snort it, I would. It is a cult-classic Japanese mystery loosely based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. What you should know first is that the…

SOUTH FLORIDA HAS LONG been a seasonal destination for New Yorkers, but in the year of COVID, it began to seem like a one-percenter exodus was taking place. Miami, bristling with starchitected high-rises, islands packed with waterfront mansions, and an art scene that has become world-class in the past 20 years thanks to Art Basel, was eager and prepared to graduate from flashy getaway to permanent home. Palm Beach, roughly the same physical and aesthetic distance from Miami as the Hamptons are from Manhattan, was already the winter home of Wall Street grandees as well as whoever wanted to cozy up at Mar-a-Lago. “December was one of the busiest months of our careers,” says high-end real-estate broker Jill Hertzberg of Coldwell Banker’s Jills Zeder Group. Art galleries opened branches to…

WHEN JIM AND TIM CLEMENTE were growing up in Queens, their mother, a nurse, hoped they would go into medicine. Her sons had other ideas. It was the late 1960s, and gruff, heroic cops were always on TV, sprinting down alleys and tackling suspects. The brothers were temperamentally distinct—Jim was the thoughtful outsider, inclined to think his way through problems, while Tim was the adrenaline junkie with an uncanny ability to withstand pain. But they both agreed that catching bad guys seemed like a fun thing to do for a living. “Jim wanted to be a detective,” Tim told me. “I wanted to be a cop.” The brothers eventually got their way, and by the 1990s, both were working as FBI agents. Although their career paths were similar, their differences…

➸ FLATWARE IS NOT especially easy to shop for online—or in general, for that matter. There is just a lot to consider: weight, style, materials, dishwashability … and much of it looks so similar. We decided to piece together a guide that would both help a novice know where to start (if you’re not going with actual silver, we found, it’s best to try pieces made with 18/10 stainless steel—“the safest option if you want heft and something that will stand up to daily abuse,” according to Kelsey Keith, the editorial director for Herman Miller) and surface unusual sets for those who want something beyond the basics for a wedding registry or cutlery-drawer refresh. The latter include some rainbow-colored utensils beloved by writer Chloe Malle and the official flatware of…

How did you two meet? VEDIKA BASAVATIA: I met Tapiwa virtually at this “tea” event that our college hosted; I’m a first-year at Barnard. Then she got a group of us out to see Minari tonight. It’s been tough to meet people, so this was pretty great. And I’ll stay friends with Tapiwa for sure. We have so much in common. We both love meaningful films. Was it weird? DAN DURAN: I had a whole range of emotions. I had the virus last year at Paris Fashion Week and was really sick, and I still have such an intense fear of getting it or giving it to anyone. But it was really good once we saw how distanced it was. And if this is the new normal, then that’s okay.…

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW what’s going on with YouTubers or anybody else with a modicum of influence online, you’ve got two options. You can watch their videos and scour Instagram—or you can get thee to a YouTube drama channel. And no one does a channel quite like D’Angelo Wallace. The Texas-based 22-year-old packs his superlong explainer videos (many of them run over an hour) with timelines, charts, and commentary—a hybrid model that perfectly encapsulates the messiness of the influencers he covers. He now has more than 2.18 million subscribers. “I will say it’s not necessarily a case of me always striving to have the best research, or I’m always going to be 100 percent correct,” Wallace said. “I just am obsessed with the storytelling of it all.” Your approach…

… ABSORB the history of sumptuary law from Richard Thompson Ford’s book Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History? … PROWL the Lower East Side with Richard Price in Lush Life? Nobody writes a better procedural! … SCREAM  into a pillow about how much your dumb job sucks and then collapse into Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing As an Easy Job, which is about a woman who performs similar activities but in Japan? … BLEND two scoops of Roald Dahl with one cup of The Twilight Zone, add a pinch of Jeffrey Archer, pour it into a pie crust, bake 45 minutes, and dig in—to John Lanchester’s Reality and Other Stories? … SLIP into The Tribes of Palos Verdes, by Joy Nicholson, an understated coming-of-age tale set…

SHE CAN PICTURE HIM. He sleeps shirtless and in boxers. She can picture the print of the sheets, the color, the smell of just-washed. The pile of library books on his nightstand. The color of the walls. They picked it out together: Eggshell Bavarian Cream. What’s he reading these days? He says: “Just tell me you are okay.” She says: “I am okay.” She thought she was calling him to talk about the raid, the neighbor woman. Turns out she has nothing to say about that. Also turns out: sobriety is a daily exercise, especially at night. She pictures her nightstand of just a year ago: crushed OxyContins, grapey cough syrup to send her pain-free into morning. A kind of prayer. She pulls the covers to her chin. Wonders what…

JOEL WERTHEIMER took a job in Andrew Cuomo’s administration in February 2017, straight from his position in Barack Obama’s White House. He came on alongside almost 30 other new hires, many of whom had also worked for the outgoing president or on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and were seeking a progressive professional path through the Trump years. Some saw New York State government as a bulwark against what they feared Trumpism would bring. Others hoped it could be a laboratory for ideas that might become a model for federal policy. Early in their employment, a few of these staffers were invited to a party at the governor’s mansion in Albany. Partway through the bash, there was a roast of Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, then the chief of staff but soon…

EVEN BEFORE THE BEAR-SPRAY RESIDUE and splintered glass had been cleaned up, it was clear how January 6, 2021, would be remembered. Most Americans will think of it as the date of democracy’s attempted murder, though some will cling to the myth of a heroic last stand. It was the ultimate commemorable event, confined to one building and one day, replete with rhetoric, rich with historical resonance and physical mementos: flags, logos, helmets, baseball bats, zip ties, armored vests, shattered windows, pelts, and red caps, all ready to be labeled for an exhibition. The COVIDpandemic is the insurrection’s opposite. Silent and invisible, it has permeated everywhere and may never die out. It has no battlefields, no spasm of glory, no indelible footage of flames, not even any universally acknowledged villains.…

A Knife With a Circular Head Takenobu Igarashi Tsubame Shinko TI-1 Round-Headed Dinner Knife (19.5 cm), $19 at ebay.com “I couldn’t help myself when I found this knife,” says Van Dusen. While it has a circular blade, she says, “it doesn’t rotate like a pizza cutter” and is meant to be used like a traditional knife. A Soup Spoon Hand-painted Soup Spoons by Wing On Wo & Co., from $4 at wingonwoand.co “Stunning and unique” is how Jing Gao, the founder of condiments brand Fly by Jing, describes the hand-painted Chinese-style soup spoons from Wing On Wo & Co., which she says is the oldest operating store in New York City’s Chinatown. A Tiny Fork for Eating Tinned Fish Crate & Barrel Caesna Mirror Canapé Fork, $4 at crateandbarrel.com The…

WHEN NEIGHBORHOOD blog West Side Rag broke the news last month that Harlem stalwart and fried-chicken virtuoso Charles Gabriel would be expanding to West 72nd Street, the comments section erupted in cheers. “YES!!!” roared commenter MQue. “So happy for Charles,” exulted OMG. A bullish UWS_lifer reflected, “It’s like 72nd Street is becoming a serious foodie destination spot.” The jubilation is understandable. Charles Gabriel, 73, has spent most of his life obsessively tending to manhole-size skillets of chicken sizzling in oil and preparing the southern-style food (collard greens, smothered pork chops, mac ’n’ cheese) he learned from his mother in rural North Carolina, and in the process, he has become a beloved neighborhood culinary fixture in a city and time increasingly short on them. The forthcoming Upper West Side outpost of…

THE FIRST TIME Elizabeth Marvel saw Bill Camp, he was a college dropout, and she was a 15-year-old girl making drawings on the floor. It was the mid-’80s, and Beth (he calls her Beth) was a student at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. At this point, Bill had left the University of Vermont and been accepted at Juilliard, but before he went back to school, he and some buddies took a road trip out West to live in a tepee in Colorado. Along the way, they dropped in unannounced on an old pal from UVM who happened to be Beth’s teacher. She was struck by these 20-something guys, the way their long hair and camo shorts seemed like the height of cool. He barely noticed her. The first time Bill…