Innholdsfortegnelse for May 24-June 6, 2021 i New York Magazine

THE ACTRESS Aida Turturro studies me intently. We are looking at each other from our laptops—she in Connecticut filming a movie in which she plays a 1960s nun involved with a group that provides black-market abortions, me in my New York bedroom wearing one-half of an outfit. “You’re like a new-breed dog with very white teeth,” she declares with glee. “Look at you. I should have straightened my teeth, but I liked them. I was never a coffee drinker, but then I went to Italy and got addicted to the espresso, so I got a Nespresso machine and started making it at home. Now I whiten my teeth, but they’re still not white because the coffee, the coffee, the coffee!” She takes a breath, apologizes for her hair (“My hair…

MOST OF THEM DON’T DIE. It’s easy to mistake the worst outcome for the most urgent crisis, but the reality is that the vast majority of people who have violent encounters with the police live to tell about it. Meralyn Kirkland has been telling about it, and what it cost her family, since September 19, 2019—when her manager pulled her aside and told her, sorry, there’s someone from your granddaughter’s school on the phone. It had been five years since she’d moved from the Bahamas into a 1,000-square-foot apartment in Orlando, Florida, and six years since Kaia Rolle, all eight gray-blue pounds of her, struggling to breathe, felt her grandmother stroke her shoulder and made her first “funny little squeak sound.” And it was eight months before George Floyd’s last…

IN 1984, DR. FRANCIS SHELTON moved back to Boley, the Oklahoma town where she grew up. She had gotten her degree in another town and worked for years as a biochemist in Oklahoma City; upon returning to Boley, she noticed how many buildings had fallen into disrepair, how commerce had declined. “Our elders were so interested in training us on how to make a living that they didn’t teach us how to make that living here,” says Shelton. She decided to purchase the hardware store, both for the business and to preserve its history: The original owner had helped found Boley in 1903 and served as its first mayor, a post Shelton would take up in 2015. Boley is one of Oklahoma’s 13 remaining all-Black towns. Founded in Indian Territory…

LIKE MOST BUSINESSES in the city, the restaurant industry is filled, these days, with rumors of disruption and change. Will the tourists come back? (Probably.) Will the rents stay low? (Nope.) Will the business lunch ever return to fashion, not to mention the good old lunchtime salad, munched furtively in your messy cubicle? (Hmm.) Does Daniel Humm’s Twitter-shaking announcement that Eleven Madison Park is going to a meatless menu in the immediate post-pandemic future mean the death of haute cuisine as we know it? (Not likely.) Will the $30 all-beef gourmet burger endure during this urgent, newly reimagined era, never mind the fat-cat, expense-account-fueled New York steakhouse, and will the legions of Zoom-addled sushi bros return to their windowless ritualized omakase bunkers and start forking over thousands of dollars for…

BLUEY season two will be available to stream on Disney+ May 28. I’M NOT GREAT at playing with my kids. My 4-year-old loves to hand me stuffed animals and declare they are my new babies. She wants me to cuddle them, whisper to them, devote the next 40 minutes to the all-consuming care of a vaguely unicorn-like, rainbow-tufted sphere. She will be the babysitter, and I am the mama, and we will enter an endless cycle of putting the unicorn-ball baby to bed and waking it up. I can’t fully enter her head-space or shake the part of me that registers how absurd it is. I bristle at the repetition. At the end of most days, my desk is strewn with all the babies I was supposed to care for…

JOE BIDEN WOULDN’T PUT IT THIS WAY, but for nearly four months he was lucky. Yes, he had to confront a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a crumbling democracy, a stalled economy, and a cascade of attendant crises. But he seemed to be handling the load in surprisingly deft fashion—which is what made the intrusion of the first foreign calamity of his administration especially jarring. The violence between Israel and Hamas that has left hundreds of people in Gaza and a dozen in Israel dead has tested Biden’s style of governance (deliberate, commit unswervingly to a plan, deliberate some more) in ways that the domestic horror show has not. The Biden administration’s first round of public responses to the conflict felt awkwardly out of sync. The president, whose perceptions of Israel were first…

AS THE SUN WENT DOWN on May 31, 2020, Kellie Wagner was packing up her Brooklyn apartment when she heard a roar: the chanting of thousands of Black Lives Matter marchers arriving in Fort Greene Park from a nearby rally at Barclays Center. It was the sixth day of nationwide protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, and the NYPD had already made several violent arrests. ¶ Wagner was about to move to California, expecting a slow summer: The pandemic had caused half a million dollars in future business to dry up virtually overnight for Collective, the workplace-diversity consultancy she founded. Companies told her they no longer had the budget for her services. Wagner, who is 35, thought she might have to close up shop for good. Just…

THE THIRD SEASON of Master of None likes to linger. Its five episodes spend extended periods of time on everyday activities: the folding of laundry, the unmaking of a bed, the sight of characters gazing wistfully out of windows. One episode opens with a shot of Lena Waithe’s character, Denise, eating a burger in a parked car for a minute and a half. Its unhurriedness is one of several things that distinguish this season, written by Waithe and series co-creator Aziz Ansari, from the ones that preceded it. While the first two seasons, which dropped in 2015 and 2017, focused primarily on Dev, played by Ansari, the new season is all about Denise and her wife, Alicia (Naomi Ackie). Subtitled Moments in Love, it is at times incredibly moving as…

THE SPRINGTIME TORRENT of production has broken through the shutdown-that-was with thrilling force. On the second weekend in May, folks in New York could go to at least three music-and-theater festivals in Manhattan; on some parts of the island, it was hard to find a place where performance wasn’t. As Broadway waits for September, the more limber (that is, nonprofit) producers are not just ready to present work—they have barrels of the stuff, plenty to fill up an ad hoc festival season. Rows of empty storefronts are less horrifying when communities fill them with temporary art, and the fear that visitors won’t return to prop up New York’s economy seems silly after you’ve been downtown for a while. There was, the other day, an actual line of tourists waiting to…

THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC has been emerging from its pandemic shell in stages, with a mixture of caution and disbelief. Impromptu performances from the back of a pickup truck, a string ensemble in an empty church, the first appearance in front of a tiny audience spread through a huge space at the Shed—these bits of concert life have kept the players faintly tethered to their routines. Soon, 17 members of the orchestra will pop up among the sepulchres at Green-Wood Cemetery as part of the series “Death of Classical.” That might not seem like the obvious location to stage the revival of performance culture, but when Green-Wood opened in 1838, it was intended to be one of New York’s grandest, most verdant, and most romantic public parks. (Today, its permanent…

“CHAOS ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE soon,” wrote Zak Cheney-Rice in these pages nearly a year ago, American cities still smoldering after George Floyd’s murder and the protests it inspired. For some, the sight of then–Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for a reported eight minutes and 46 seconds—after the recent, equally horrifying deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery—would spark a year of rageful dissent, 12 more months spent hoarsely demanding justice as the bodies continued to pile up. To others, it would be a year of awkward and painful self-reflection, of appraising all the entitlement that could no longer go unremarked. Others would react to these reactions with hostility and worse. ¶ Floyd’s death reshaped a pandemic and a presidential race and the fabric of American life.…

BY MID-JUNE, donations were pouring in to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, where Mirella Ceja-Orozco and Elizer Darris, the bail fund’s executive co-directors, watched their cash-strapped operation suddenly strain with more money than they were set up to handle. On the tight budget before George Floyd’s murder: MIRELLA CEJA-OROZCO: I joined the board in December 2019. I was helping to pay bonds for detained immigrants. There were seven or eight of us volunteers along with one and a half paid staff members. We didn’t have an office and met at a conference room at the University of Minnesota. In the years leading up to 2020, we were working with about $150,000 to $200,000 of funding per year. Most of that came from donations, that averaged a few hundred dollars each, and…

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN and Corin Tucker recorded Sleater-Kinney’s tenth album, Path of Wellness, in Portland, Oregon, last summer against a backdrop of unrest. For weeks, protesters marched through the city, demanding racial justice while being tear-gassed by the Portland Police Bureau. Brownstein and Tucker split their time among the numbing routines of life in quarantine, protests, and the studio. “It’s not the summer we were promised,” Brown-stein croons on “Down the Line,” a gritty rocker situated in the closing stretch of the new record. “It’s the summer that we deserve.” For Brownstein and Tucker, the album is a recommitment: the band’s first since 1996 recorded without drummer Janet Weiss, who left Sleater-Kinney in 2019 because she felt she no longer had an equal say in its direction. (Brownstein said at the…

ANGELINA JOLIE has a face made for cinema. It’s those green eyes, which can go from communicating anger to desire imperceptibly. It’s her famous pout, which can unfurl vulgarities and compliments with equal aplomb. But it’s more than just her beauty. It’s her physicality, which is forceful in a way that belies the thinness of her frame, and the overwhelming burst of charisma she brings to the screen. Yet for all her presence, Jolie doesn’t guarantee a good movie. For every film of hers I adore (like her directorial effort By the Sea), there are countless others that don’t rise to the level of her stardom or skill. It’s frustrating to see one of Hollywood’s most fascinating stars often cast in lackluster work. Which is why it was so thrilling…

OPERA 1. See They Still Want to Kill Us A pocket opera and a short film. theystillwanttokillus.com, May 25 through July 31. A year after George Floyd’s murder and a century after deadly white mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, leveled the Black district of Greenwood, this short film by Yoram Savion serves as an urgent memorial to both events. The world premiere of Daniel Bernard Roumain’s composition will be performed by mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges. JUSTIN DAVIDSON TV 2. Watch Lisey’s Story Co-created by Stephen King. Apple TV+, June 4. Stephen King’s 2006 novel becomes an unsettling limited series, which recounts the impact of the sudden death of an author (Clive Owen) on the widow (co-executive producer Julianne Moore) he leaves behind. JEN CHANEY MOVIES 3. See Open Roads: New Italian Cinema…