Innholdsfortegnelse for June 7-20, 2021 i New York Magazine

THE GOP HOLDS EVERY statewide elective office in Texas, from railroad commissioner to comptroller to governor. The party has controlled the state senate for a quarter-century and its house for 19 years. In November, its voters backed Donald Trump over Joe Biden by nearly six percentage points while sending an overwhelmingly Republican delegation to Congress. And yet the Texas GOP is waging war on the democracy it dominates. Republicans have pushed anti-democratic election “reforms” in states across the country, but Senate Bill 7 lends credence to the claim that everything is bigger in Texas—even partisan attacks on free elections. The bill (which Democrats have stalled for now) doesn’t just feature all of the GOP’s latest innovations in voter suppression (like restrictions on early, absentee, and drive-through voting). It also contains…

AS ANYONE WHO’S DINED OUT while seated next to a plexiglass screen or inside a plastic igloo knows, it’s not the restaurants that went away during the pandemic but the packed dining rooms that give them life and spirit. Finally, in this post-vaccination phase, something resembling normalcy has been restored. If you’ve been away from the scene, cooped up in your apartment subsisting on ghost-kitchen burritos and fried-chicken sandwiches, however, you’ll find that the restaurant landscape looks very different. Exciting new spots have managed to open against the odds; old favorites were transformed by a hopping alfresco ambience; popper-uppers have settled down into a permanent neighborhood groove. There are so many new things to eat, places to go, and chefs to discover that it’s hard to keep track. So we…

THAT CRUELLA IS an atrocity with neither purpose nor soul shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is, after all, part of a long line of IP-mining nostalgia that Disney is more than happy to keep churning out. Hollywood is an industry too myopic to understand its past and too inert to move into a more dynamic future, but the way this tepid film operates, along with its many aesthetic failures, is what makes it galling. The pleasure of Cruella de Vil—first voiced by Betty Lou Gerson in the 1961 animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians and later played by Glenn Close in the 1996 live-action remake—is her outrageous style and cruelty. She is a woman intent on skinning Dalmatians to make herself a coat. Here, Cruella, played by Emma…

ON THE FIRST DAY of June, Peru formally updated its COVID- 19 death toll, nearly tripling a previous estimate and making the country not just the place in the world with the longest and strictest lockdown but also the one with the most lethal pandemic: 180,000 dead in a population of about 33 million. This is the equivalent of almost 2 million American deaths, and it has happened despite Peru’s closed borders, the shuttering of all nonessential businesses, and lockdowns enforced by the military in which citizens were allowed out of their homes only on alternating days of the week. Mask-wearing and driving without permission were policed, too. On Sundays last spring, no one was allowed out at all. A year later, the government abruptly added more than 100,000 names…

“IT’S SUPPOSEDLY HAUNTED,” Amy Chua says brightly as she ushers me into the cavernous antechamber of the New Haven home she shares with fellow Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. Chua helped me find the sprawling Tudor-Gothic stone edifice by noting its “weird chimneys and griffins.” This is the house from which Chua and Rubenfeld—Chubenfeld, as they’re semi-derisively known on campus—once held court. Yale Law, the top ranked in the country, is both intellectual hothouse and finishing school for the American elite, and for the past two decades, the couple was “the self-appointed social center of the entire institution,” as one former friend on the faculty puts it. “They had the ability to create spectacle, to make themselves the center of a conversation.” Yale Law is not only the place…

SOMETIME IN THE NEAR FUTURE, you might just do something that would have been unthinkable a few months ago: go to the movies—in a theater. Maybe it’ll be a long-awaited reunion with friends. Maybe it’ll be a way to pass a lonely Wednesday evening. Maybe it’ll just be a chance to spend two hours in a building with air-conditioning. ¶ After more than a year, Hollywood is about to resume something akin to regular programming with a different big fun studio movie hitting screens every Friday. This summer’s films will attempt to revive the idea of moviegoing as a mainstream communal experience. There will be car chases. There will be superheroes. There will be explosions. (So many explosions.) There will also be counterprogramming: Sundance indies, low-budget horror flicks, artsy documentaries.…

PART I: The latest supertall is a cut above. 111 WEST 57TH STREET  IT’S AN UNCOMFORTABLE thing to fall in love with a building you wish didn’t exist. Of all the supertall towers that have risen like flares, lighting up the city’s excesses and inequities, 111 West 57th Street, designed by SHoP Architects and erected by JDS Development, is by far the most thoughtful. As a statement, it’s infuriating; as architecture, it earns its place on the skyline. There’s nothing new about that contradiction, of course. The mighty and the rich have been dotting the globe with splendors since power and wealth were invented, and the masses have beheld those self-homages with a mixture of resentment, gratitude, and rage. New York is a global principality overlaid on a democratic metropolis,…

THE IRAQ WAR lives in a historical uncanny valley. Its origins feel far enough in the past to be due for reappraisal, yet its dynamics are still so present in our lives that it resists definitive interpretation. In some ways, the haziness of the forever war makes it a perfect subject for Slow Burn, the Slate audio-documentary series that has become one of podcasting’s flagship franchises. “Knowing what we know now, it’s easy to be smug about what the backers of the war got wrong,” says new host Noreen Malone in the first episode of The Road to the Iraq War, the podcast’s fifth and current season. “But lots of people who were following the war closely at the time supported it, and not just Republicans.” Armed with compelling archival…

AFTER GRAND STREET SETTLEMENT, a community center on the Lower East Side, suspended its senior programs in March 2020, 74-year-old Kay Mantin missed the daily t’ai chi classes she had attended for the previous 11 years. “T’ai chi helps with memory,” Mantin says. “It’s important, at our age, to keep our minds alert.” A few months into lockdown, Mantin got a call from her friend and neighbor Alice Cheng, a volunteer instructor at Grand Street. Many of her students also lived in their apartment complex; why not organize a t’ai chi class outdoors? For the past 15 months, the class has gathered nearly every morning at eight (in the winter, they wore puffy jackets). On June 1, Mayor de Blasio announced that New York’s 249 senior centers could finally reopen…

Roanne Adams’s 40th-Birthday Weekend in Palm Springs (With 25 Friends) In April, Roanne Adams—who runs the creative studio RoAndCo—threw a (vaccinated) birthday party in the desert. DAY 1 YOU DON’T HAVE TO STAY AT THE ACE ➽ My husband and I went to Palm Springs a bunch this past year, when we couldn’t travel by air, and we stayed in several Airbnbs until we decided to buy a house to rent out. This time, we wanted to get a big group of old friends together as a coming-out-again party. We stayed with friends at an Airbnb, the Hey Casita (from $614 a night), that sleeps eight people and is so well designed—not kitschy like some other Palm Springs houses. And we used our under-construction house as an event space. There’s…

CONAN O’BRIEN WILL HOST the final episode of his TBS late-night show, Conan, on June 24, marking the end of nearly 28 years that started with Late Night and The Tonight Show. While O’Brien has said he plans to return with a new series on HBO Max, his departure from the traditional late-night format marks the end of an era, during which his willingness to experiment with oddball, writer-driven sketches influenced a generation of comedians. No matter which one of the shows they worked on, his writers agree: Absurdity was always the prerequisite. Robert Smigel Head writer, producer ( Late Night ), 1993–95; occasional writer, performer, 1995–2021 WE USED TO SAY we reacted to Letterman’s penchant for “found humor” by being “the show that makes things up.” A…

scan as funny, but they never bode well. When your audience loses interest, your bargaining power diminishes. We talk a big game about giving artists their flowers, but love doesn’t keep the lights on. According to producer Swizz Beatz, it was in the days following the late DMX’s Verzuz battle—the online matchups between artists streamed over Instagram Live—last summer that the rapper got the drive to make a new album. It had been nearly a decade since his last official studio release (discounting a choppy compilation released against his wishes in 2015)—a rough patch marked by sporadic guest spots, money troubles, and worrying arrests. DMX wanted to prove he still had something to say, to own his status as a 50-year-old survivor, to match wits with peers and successors again.…

TV 1. Watch Tuca & Bertie The birds are back. Adult Swim, June 13. When Netflix canceled Tuca & Bertie back in 2019, it seemed that was the last of the animated birdie BFFs voiced by Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong. Luckily, Adult Swim will air new episodes in which the toucan and the songbird are doing their usual thing: trying to get laid. JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 2. Listen to Path of Wellness Indie punk vets. Mom + Pop Music, June 11. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein return with Sleater-Kinney’s tenth studio album and a body of work recorded amid the tensions of the protests in Portland, Oregon, last summer that seeks solace in companionship and killer rock riffs. CRAIG JENKINS THEATER 3. See I Dream a Dream That…