Innholdsfortegnelse for April 12-25, 2021 i New York Magazine

PITY THE FINANCIALLY LITERATE! Imagine their email and SMS in-boxes over the past few months as friends and distant relatives seek guidance through the strange new set of acronyms that define the COVID economy. “Can I buy an NFT?” a parent wants to know. (An NFT is a “non-fungible token”—essentially, a digital asset whose uniqueness, and therefore its value, is stored cryptographically on the digital ledger known as the blockchain.) “Should I invest in GME and AMC?” a cousin wonders. (Those are the ticker symbols for GameStop and the theater chain AMC, two “meme stocks,” a.k.a. “stonks,” that were sent to inexplicably high prices earlier this year by a mass of gleefully irrational investors on Reddit.) “What is a SPAC, and why is it merging with my employer?” a friend…

IN 2020, Leva Bonaparte considered a job opportunity. Bravo had been pursuing the hospitality executive for years in an attempt to get her to join the cast of Southern Charm. The series, which premiered in 2014, featured a group of genteel degenerates living in Charleston, South Carolina. For many seasons, the central tension was the romance between 52-year-old Thomas Ravenel, the former treasurer of South Carolina, who’d resigned after being indicted on drug charges, and his 21-year-old girlfriend and the mother of his two children, Kathryn Calhoun Dennis. (That’s Calhoun as in John C. Calhoun, the proslavery vice-president of the United States of America.) Dennis and Ravenel were drawn to each other in a way that felt authentic but dangerous; as in the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith, it seemed…

THE CAST-IRON GILSEY HOUSE, on the corner of 29th Street and Broadway, sticks in your head. “So I grew up in Manhattan,” says Julie Chartoff, “and I always remembered this building as a teenager. I just loved this building.” Gilsey House opened as a grand hotel in 1871 in the heart of what was then the Theater District, but it had a rough go of it for much of the 20th century until it became a residential co-op in 1980. (Today, the Ace Hotel is right across the street.) In 2004, Chartoff, who is a lawyer, and her wife, Irene Glezos, an actor, moved into the building from a renovated warehouse in Long Island City. They were having a baby and wanted to raise their child in a less industrial…

POP STARS ARE NOT babysitters. Pop music is not wholesome entertainment. If you play mainstream music expecting to have your values affirmed, you will inevitably be disappointed. Pop stars (at least the good ones) push against the boundaries of what’s possible and acceptable, sometimes in the noble interest of challenging prevailing social mores, sometimes just for the devilish thrill of crossing lines, and sometimes because they can’t help it. These people aren’t paragons of justice. Their job is to reflect on their lives and sing about what they have learned. Sometimes those reflections align with our own experiences and we connect with the music on a visceral level; you could argue that the best stars working in any era have a sense for what’s culturally prescient that keeps them in…

Intelligencer’s Jebediah Reed spoke to Scott Galloway, a host of the New York and Vox Media podcasts Pivot and The Prof G Show, respectively, about the transformation of the economy. One of the most valuable living artists is a guy who makes GIFs. A Reddit mob sent GameStop shares soaring. Meanwhile—in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic and an economic crisis—the stock market only goes up. Are these isolated things or part of something bigger? I think it all comes back to one central theme: income inequality. Capitalism is sort of this gangster construct that leverages a species’ selfishness and creates all sorts of prosperity from that selfishness. But the key to successful capitalism has always been a middle class. At the turn of the millennium, America was the only…

In Southern Charm, Leva Bonaparte and Kathryn Dennis struggled to find common ground. Several members of the cast of Vanderpump Rules were let go for racist behavior. In The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the Black Lives Matter movement was front and center during filming. The Real Housewives of Orange County followed Braunwyn Windham-Burke to a Black Lives Matter march. The Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Kandi Burruss produced a roundtable special entitled Race in America. The Real Housewives of Potomac cast members Gizelle Bryant and Wendy Osefo joined Burruss’s special. The Real Housewives of Dallas introduced Dr. Tiffany Moon after Brandi Redmond’s anti-Asian racism was exposed. The Real Housewives of New York added its first Black cast member, television journalist Eboni K. Williams. The season reunion of…

UNLIKE CHEESEBURGERS, say, or twirled platters of spaghetti carbonara, the taco isn’t usually one of those dishes that slides easily into one’s carefully curated Instagram feed, at least not mine. The best tacos are messy by nature and lend themselves less to fussy posing and Photoshopping than to the more elemental, immediate pleasure of stuffing a tasty morsel of food down the back of your throat. But at Xilonen, which opened a few months ago on the bustling northwest corner of McCarren Park, you may find yourself pausing for a moment or two in wonderment as the stately parade of vegan tacos, tamales, and quesadilla creations arrive at the table, each of them more artfully decorated than the last with a rainbow of unexpected things like purple potatoes, rows of…

IN 1964, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, Icek Perel hosted two parties. The first, held on a Friday, was populated by friends from the neighborhood: working-class Belgians with whom he had formed a joyous, if circumstantial, alliance. Over beer, they told jokes in Flemish; his guests, who were also customers at the clothing shop he ran beneath his apartment, hardly knew he and his family were Jewish. The second party, held the next day, mimicked the first but was revived with a few crucial twists: The guests were all fellow Holocaust survivors, the punch lines were delivered in Yiddish, and the beer had been swapped out for vodka. Icek and his wife, Sala, were the sole survivors of their respective families and met on the road to liberation…

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a bit of the vulpine to Michelle Pfeiffer; there are traces of it in the impossible angles of her cheekbones and the potential for sharpness in her smile. But in French Exit, her character, Frances Price, might as well be half-fox with the Upper East Side as her henhouse of choice. She bursts into the movie in a flurry of russet tones and fur, loping down the hallway of a boarding school to extract her young son, Malcolm, against the protests of the flustered administrator. Frances, a notorious Manhattan socialite whose encounters always end with an implied snap of the teeth, doesn’t seem to have been much of a presence in the kid’s life until that point, but she wins his loyalty forever with a sly…

“I FEEL VERY MUCH LIKE I’m being welcomed into a circle of excellence,” said Daphne Always, a cabaret performer, model, and musician, before disrobing and stepping gracefully onto a crate. She had been invited by the painter Will Cotton to pose for one of his figure-drawing sessions, which he was hosting en plein air on the roof of Ryan McGinness’s Soho studio. Gathered around Always were a bunch of New York artists—the youngest in their early 20s, the eldest in their 60s—working in a range of styles and mediums. Some, like Rebecca Chamberlain, Inka Essenhigh, and Guy Richards Smit, were old friends who have been attending Cotton’s sessions since 2002, when he began hosting them at his Lower East Side loft. Others, like Joseph Olisaemeka Wilson, were joining for the…

Since July 2020, nearly 750 companies have gone public, raising more than $200 billion and minting thousands of new paper millionaires. Amid the frenzy, one millennial tech worker on the verge of unexpected wealth shared what was going through her mind. WHEN I JOINED MY COMPANY, I theoretically knew there were only two exit paths—an acquisition or an IPO. And a third, where the company implodes, like WeWork, but you’re hoping for one of the first two. I didn’t really think about it when I signed on. I thought that I’d make a little bit from an IPO, maybe $200,000. You don’t think much about $200,000; it’s not life-changing. After I joined, people would say things like, “I think I’ll retire off this money.” I thought they were delusional. Then,…

RICHARD CARRANZA wasn’t Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first choice to be the city’s schools chancellor. Alberto M. Carvalho, the superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, changed his mind—on live TV, no less—about taking the job at the 11th hour. De Blasio needed a new chancellor fast. ¶ With 1.1 million students, the New York City public-school system is the largest in the country, which ostensibly means that the chancellor’s job is influential and prestigious—an opportunity to change the lives of students and be seen on a national stage. You just have to survive the city’s blood-sport politics, play to its many vocal constituencies, and placate the nitpicking local media, all while staying on the right side of your boss, the mayor, who has his own problems. And when, four days…

DAWOUD BEY’S WORK is both a documentation and an excavation. The photographer is preoccupied with history and its effects; for nearly five decades, he has been chronicling the America that resides in the shadows and bringing it closer to the center. On April 17, the Whitney opens “An American Project,” a retrospective of his portraits, landscapes, and street photography—including this picture, which Bey made in Harlem when he was just starting out. “I WOULD SAY THAT everything that I know about making photographs comes from this photograph. When I saw this man on Sunday morning on 132nd Street near Adam Clayton Powell, he was standing with a group of maybe three other older men having a conversation. He was a clear visualization of Harlem’s past in the contemporary moment. I…

ALICE NEEL WAS THE PAINTER par excellence of New York’s human comedy. She rendered friends, sons, lovers, strangers, addicts, activists, self-anointed shamans, cultural kings and queens, the magical, the lost, and the damned in keyed-up, high harmonies of color. She often outlined people in an electric blue that makes every individual vibrate like an archetype. Her gaze is loving but predatory; she seems to feel with her subjects but never fully for them. This connects to her contemporary Andy Warhol—though instead of Warhol’s candy-colored depictions of the rich and famous, Neel mostly made portraits of our fellow beaten ships of the human soul. I love her work. In March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its magnificent survey “Alice Neel: People Come First” with more than 100 paintings, drawings, and…

TV 1. Watch The 93rd Academy Awards It’s Oscar Night … finally. ABC, April 25. It’s time to honor the best films of 2020. Organizers are doing their best to make the Oscars ceremony look normal—it will be an in-person affair, based mostly in L.A.’s Union Station and Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre with other Oscar “hubs” in London and Paris. We’ll see if it actually feels normal. JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 2. Listen to Ultrapop Sugar and spice. Sargent House, April 16. Detroit’s the Armed follows its breakthrough 2018 set Only Love with Ultrapop, a daring collection that mixes the fury of hardcore punk and the disorienting riffage of math rock with a dollop of accessibility that spices up the hooks without diluting their intensity. The shift is both delicate and…