Innholdsfortegnelse for June 21-July 4, 2021 i New York Magazine

Pat Kiernan wanted the bagels. It was January 15, 2020—National Bagel Day—and the crew of NY1’s morning show, Mornings on 1, had already pillaged the breakfast platter in the control room when word came down that it was being requested on set. The bagels had been sent to weekend anchor Kristen Shaughnessy, but Kiernan didn’t ask where they’d come from until he and his co-anchors were under the lights, ready to go live. “The second he heard that it was Kristen, it was like, Do not touch—it’s poison,” says a colleague. “They literally dropped the bagels,” says a former producer. ¶ Shaughnessy and Kiernan had worked together at NY1 for more than two decades. On 9/11, Shaughnessy reported live with Kiernan as the south tower collapsed, Kiernan from the anchor…

BROCK FORSBLOM IS NO MINIMALIST, but he’s trying. “I don’t know how the Judds of the world really did it,” the designer tells me while describing his latest experiment: a 3,000-square-foot downtown Manhattan loft that he and his husband bought last year just before the pandemic and are trying to keep a bit spare. “Our old rental apartment”—a 700-square-foot 1950s one-bedroom in the West Village—“was very straightforward, with arches and rooms and doors,” he says. “And I decorated every inch of it, and I loved it.” Forsblom believed that the new apartment would unleash in him a new aesthetic, in which his penchant for “things on things” would be washed away. “I soon realized that I could play the loft game in a different way.” Forsblom’s way was to edit…

ASCONE IS A SCONE is a scone. But the new strawberries-and-cream scone at Daily Provisions, permeated with fresh and dehydrated fruit and slathered with crème fraîche, is more than that: It marks the return of Claudia Fleming to the restaurant group where she made her name as a legendary pastry chef when she opened Gramercy Tavern with Tom Colicchio and Danny Meyer in 1994. Fleming’s work there—emphasizing seasonality in the style of her West Coast role models; prizing flavor over elaborate presentation; borrowing ingredients from the savory kitchen; treating dessert as of a piece with all that came before—influenced the cooks who worked under her (Karen DeMasco, Gina DePalma, Shuna Lydon, Daniel Skurnick, and Deborah Racicot among them) and set a standard that endures today. Her seminal 2001 cookbook, The…

PORTOROSSO, THE FICTIONAL setting of the new Pixar movie, Luca, is a bright daydream of Italy. Cobblestoned streets wind their way up hills; residents pepper their speech with ejaculations like “Santa Mozzarella!”; and each year the kids compete in a triathlon of swimming, cycling, and pasta eating. The pastoral charm doesn’t stop at the shoreline. Underwater, sea monsters live in a community that’s just as quaint, herding sheeplike fish and cultivating rows of kelp. They keep out of sight of the “land monsters,” who have an alarming habit of hoisting harpoons and decorating their plaza with images of fishermen defeating oceanic menaces. But how could anything dark happen in an animated world so mild? When Luca (Jacob Tremblay), the movie’s young sea-monster protagonist, first gets yanked out onto the sand…

WHEN NICKI MINAJ RELEASED the album Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded in spring 2012, it was a bold experiment, one-half slick dance-pop songs like “Pound the Alarm” and one-half killer-rhyme workouts like “Come on a Cone” and “Beez in the Trap.” It was a peculiar time for mainstream hip-hop: Billboard was just starting to tabulate streaming data, Black music’s grip on the charts seemed to be slipping, and elsewhere, big-tent EDM was ascending. This sent savvy commercial artists like Usher and Rihanna lurching for club hits. Nicki’s glossy lead single, “Starships,” charted globally, though not without complaint from hip-hop fans, who felt she was pandering. Nicki would never push that far again on a studio album, but others who followed have taken cues from what she learned. Pop, rap, R&B, and…

AFTER LOSING TO the Democrats in 2020, Republicans are working feverishly to win their next battle. Their efforts include no revision of their platform or message. Instead, the plan consists of enacting new restrictions on voting (from limits on early voting to forbidding volunteers from giving water to people waiting in line) and consolidating partisan control over election results. In Georgia, the party has stripped the secretary of state’s office of jurisdiction over elections, and in Arizona, it is trying to shift election authority from the Democratic secretary of state to the Republican attorney general. Their goal is not to avoid a repeat of the sort of crisis Donald Trump initiated but to win the next one. The Democratic Party has made little use of the respite. Despite controlling Congress…

AFTER GETTING MY FIRST vaccine in late April, I re-downloaded various dating apps on my phone to discover that everybody—at least straight males ages 27 to 36 in my three-mile Brooklyn radius—seemed ready to abolish capitalism. One night, while sitting on my couch swiping through Hinge, where users are asked to respond to cutesy prompts about their hobbies and interests, I found Enzo, a man with a mustache and a professional headshot who identified his “Love Language” as “the decommodification of food, housing, and healthcare.” Shortly after, I came across a guy named Jordan whose profile said, “Together, we could: Make art, dismantle the system, and eat grapes at the park.” He was followed by Carl, who, posing with a yellow Labrador retriever, said he wanted to “watch the collapse…

IN LATE MAY, the Parks Department quietly posted leaflets around Washington Square Park warning that from Friday to Sunday during Memorial Day weekend, it would officially close two hours early, at 10 p.m. Angry New Yorkers blasted the closure on social media and, in the coming weeks, flooded the park in protest (the police have only intermittently enforced the curfew). Although it seemed like a hasty decision, it was actually months in the making, the culmination of lower Fifth Avenue residents regularly complaining about large raucous crowds outside their windows (going back to last summer, after Black Lives Matter protests were held in the park) and recent stories (mostly in the New York Post) that painted a disturbing picture of Washington Square as a trash-strewn, anarchical space where open-air drug…

IT’S LIKE LAST YEAR never happened,” somebody said after we had been sitting for a minute or two in the refreshingly loud, refreshingly crowded dining room at the new Williamsburg destination Francie. There were no masks in sight, except on the staff, and servers were dressed in the kind of familiar bistro uniforms (aprons, pressed white shirts, etc.) that made them look as if they’d been recruited by Danny Meyer himself. With its tastefully muted color tones and haute brasserie style (horseshoe banquettes along both walls, a bustling open kitchen in the back), the room had a nostalgic, pre-pandemic look to it, as did the menu, which included all sorts of dimly recalled delicacies, like soufflé cakes topped with caviar, rounds of ravioli stuffed with lobster, and an elaborate “crown…

IT’S A RAINY June afternoon, and most of the cast members of the new Gossip Girl are lining up to hit their cues for the Thanksgiving episode. It’s a classic Gossip Girl setup: a holiday designed to sow discord while supposedly being about gratitude. Zoya, played by Whitney Peak, the middle-class (and therefore comparatively underprivileged) freshman scholarship student who just moved to town, has found herself improbably rising in the school’s social ranks, which are ruled by her half-sister, Julien, played by Jordan Alexander. Zoya answers a series of knocks on her rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment’s door to reveal, much to her surprise, a steady stream of friends and enemies, some at war with one another. Eleven actors float in the door and out of frame in one continuous…

KEVIN CAN F**K HIMSELF is out now on AMC and AMC+. FOUR YEARS AGO, Valerie Armstrong was listening to a discussion on a podcast about how funny, talented actresses still get stuck auditioning for generic sitcom-wife roles when the opening scene of a television pilot started to stream in her head. “The first image came to me, which was just a sitcom wife walking offscreen with a thing of laundry and the audience laughing in the background,” she recalls. “But when she walks through the swinging door into the kitchen, we don’t stay with the funny husband. We follow her. The laugh track cuts, and we’re straight on her face and she’s miserable. I just saw her looking straight into the camera and saying, ‘I fucking hate my husband.’” That…

THIS PAST MAY, Oscar Nuñez (DJ Oscar Nñ) got ready to play his first live show after 15 months. “I placed all these expectations on myself,” he recalls. “Like, What am I going to wear? What’s the first song I’m going to play? It set me up for an anxiety attack.” When Nuñez got to the venue, he did breathing exercises to calm down. “As soon as I stepped into the decks, it was like I flipped a switch. Like, I’m fucking home.” The first track he played? Nicki Minaj’s “Itty Bitty Piggy.” Pre-pandemic, for a certain slice of Brooklyn—the mostly Black and brown creative types who congregate in Bed-Stuy, shop at Sincerely, Tommy, and get drinks with friends at Cafe Erzulie—there was a roster of clubs and parties where…

NETFLIX’S STREAMING SUPREMACY is being challenged as never before. The digital TV universe has dramatically expanded over the past 18 months with the launch of well-funded platforms from conglomerates old (Disney, WarnerMedia, Comcast) and new (Apple). These upstarts are attracting subscribers and competing for buzz, but do they pose a legitimate threat to Netflix’s crown? To figure out where things stand in the battle for dominance, we evaluated seven major streamers (that have been operating for at least one year) according to five different metrics, from overall heft to what folks in Hollywood and on Wall Street are saying. We ranked them all within each category—assigning seven points for first, six for second, and so on—then tallied all those scores to come up with a final overall standing. There may…

FOR A STRETCH of the early aughts, screenwriting partners Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul struggled to sell scripts. It was an effort made no easier by their unorthodox style of pitching to executives. They’d go into a chilly glass office, explain the premise and characters, outline story beats, and start to sing. Daurio insists this wasn’t as weird as it sounds. “In comedy, the big set pieces are often linked to music,” he explains. “Or something funny happening around music.” “We’d just perform that moment,” says Paul. “Singing those parts in harmony.” “Sometimes it was real awkward,” Daurio says. “You’d see people, like”—he mimes leaning away, palms up, looking worried—“Uhhhhh …” Sometimes the duo delighted their audience; sometimes they finished to crickets. Once, after pitching the head of Warner Bros.,…

YOU’RE NEVER THAT FAR from an advertisement at the Shed, the enormous culture building that sits at the top of the High Line. For one thing, even when you’re technically inside it, you’re still aware that it’s part of a shopping center. The Shed’s McCourt venue is a huge glass box, a lobbylike plaza on the south end of Hudson Yards that can be covered when necessary by the Shed’s massive, telescoping shell. The glass walls mean the world is never shut out: Look in one direction and you see through to the buildings on 30th Street; look in another and you see the Shops at Hudson Yards. So although performances in the McCourt may want to turn your thoughts to higher things, all that mall signage outside stays forever…

MOVIES 1. See Zola “The greatest saga ever tweeted.” In theaters June 30. That raucous Twitter about a “ho trip” gone wrong has been turned into a shrewd movie about storytelling and trauma by director Janicza Bravo and co-writer Jeremy O. Harris. Zola (Taylour Paige) heads to Florida with new friend Stefani (Riley Keough, going big) to dance. As things start to go wrong, the gap between Zola’s online narration and her onscreen experiences becomes a space to explore the power of getting to reframe a story. ALISON WILLMORE TV 2. Watch Conan Finale Team Coco is forever. TBS, June 24. The TBS talk show that gave Conan O’Brien a place to land after The Tonight Show debacle of 2010 airs its final episode. But do not cry for Coco—he…