Innholdsfortegnelse for July 5-18, 2021 i New York Magazine

HERE IN THE DARK COCOON of her parlor, Jennifer Coolidge comes alive. All day, the New Orleans heat made her leaden and itchy, but now that the sunlight has drained from the sky and the moisture has been wicked from the air, the actress is ready and alert. She asks me to fix us another round of tequila cocktails as she shuffles around her home in puffy pink slippers, closing doors and turning off lights to set the mood. She has been waiting for hours to unveil what she calls “the surprise.” I arrived early in the afternoon at her home in the Lower Garden District, where she greeted me at the cast-iron gate, wearing a black slip and a sheer fuchsia-and-gold bolero, as her rescue dog, Chewy (short for…

DAYS AFTER THE storming of the Capitol on January 6, an image began spreading widely across the encrypted chat app Telegram and other bastions of right-wing digital conversation. It was a “battle flag” depicting Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old woman who was shot by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to enter the building, as a spooky-looking white-on-black idealized feminine figure, not unlike a more martial version of the Starbucks logo. On the flag, a drop of blood dangles from Babbitt’s neck against a crimson Capitol dome. Variations on this flag include the Capitol stamped with a Star of David, the word VENGEANCE written below it in a gothic font. The Babbitt flag was used to advertise an abortive “Million Martyr March” scheduled for Inauguration Day. Ever since, white-supremacist groups…

MICHAEL BELANGER remembers driving by this 1959 ranch-style house on Mt. Merino just south of Hudson “literally as the Realtor was hammering the FOR SALE sign into the lawn. I screeched on the brakes, and that was that.” At the time, his find was the “ugliest house on Mt. Merino,” he says, laughing. That was almost 20 years ago. It took a while for Belanger and his husband, Jeff Hayenga, to get around to fixing it up, much less moving into it. Belanger, an artist-designer and former modern and antiques dealer, and Hayenga, an actor, have been together for 24 years; they are serial renovators. There was the barn in Livingston, the water-tank house in Germantown, as well as another mid-century house in Los Angeles, where they moved for five…

THE TRENDLET Consider Cooked Oysters LIKE THE REST of the restaurant-supply industry, oyster farmers lost most of their wholesale accounts during the pandemic. (A dozen Blue Points on the half-shell don’t deliver as well as a pepperoni pizza, after all.) With restrictions lifted, though, chefs are making up for lost time. And rather than resort to the raw bar, they’re cooking their shellfish in a variety of ways: grilled with oreganata butter and a dash of nostalgia at Andrew Carmellini’s Seaport chophouse Carne Mare; roasted in a wood-fired oven and garnished with scallion oil and peanuts at Outer-space in East Williamsburg; spooned with green Chartreuse hollandaise and theatrically set aflame at Dame. And that eternal New Orleans classic oysters Rockefeller has found two worthy New York homes—Le Pavillon in a…

DOG-BASED PROGRAMMING used to be extremely niche, a schedule filler for daytime slots on Animal Planet. Maybe you’d catch the odd episode of Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan or Pit Bulls & Parolees. Suddenly, though, dog reality shows are front and center on every major streamer and airing in prime time on ABC, pandering to young professionals with just enough money to adopt a pet but not enough to pay off their loans or ever retire. Now, celeb hosts are taking a back seat to very telegenic dogs while the pups do tricks, solve puzzles, and get makeovers. We sorted through the series to find the leader of the pack—with categories inspired by the dog-show circuit. TOY GROUP These series are all about pretty looks and winning personalities. In other…

A DECADE AGO, a ragtag group of rabble-rousing artists, skaters, and jokesters from Southern California called Odd Future stormed the gates of the rap game. The collective’s open contempt for tastemakers and A-listers ran counter to the charm offensive that got you a career in hip-hop back then, when legends were built one blog post, one famous co-sign, and one guest spot at a time. Odd Future was a self-contained unit housing all the rappers, singers, and producers needed to make records, and members featured heavily on each other’s songs, taking a page from the Wu-Tang playbook. As crabby as it was savvy, the group built a vast catalogue, lashing out at icons, idols, and influencers high and low. Its members waged a campaign of deliberate transgression that netted support…

GUY VELELLA WAS THE kind of colorful politician who represents a different era in New York City. A Bronx Republican state senator from 1986 to 2004, he led the borough’s Republican Party as it slid into irrelevance, failing to back Rudy Giuliani or Mike Bloomberg in their mayoral runs. The married father of four kept an “Albany wife,” as the saying used to go, had an out-of-wedlock daughter with her, and steered a $24,000 pension payment to his mistress’s mother. After a career marked by ethical lapses, he was sent to Rikers Island in 2004 for accepting bribes but was released a few months later after an obscure panel packed with political appointees recommended he and his cronies be let go, saying they seemed “distraught.” Velella died in 2011, but…

AT ITS MOST PEACEFUL, the United States is an exceptionally murderous nation. In 2014, America recorded the lowest homicide rate in its history—and the highest homicide rate of any comparably prosperous country. That year, Americans were more than three times as likely to die by murder than Western Europeans were. Like most things in the U.S., this aberrantly high risk of homicide was not equally distributed. Residents of Washington, D.C., were murdered at eight times the rate of those in Iowa. Within the district, as in virtually all major U.S. cities, killing was largely quarantined to a select group of politically disempowered, economically dispossessed neighborhoods. Poor Black people did the bulk of the dying. America’s distribution of violent death has changed little over the past seven years, but the sum…

The government has accused more than 500 people of committing crimes at the Capitol on January 6. The following allegations are drawn from indictments and affidavits filed in federal court. Additional contextual details are drawn from public databases and reporting. Lonnie Coffman, 71 Falkville, Alabama A few blocks from the Capitol, police say they found the following in Coffman’s pickup: a handgun, an assault rifle, a crossbow, several machetes, and 11Mason jars filled with what Coffman said was a solution of “melted styrofoam and gasoline”—a kind of homemade napalm. He has pleaded not guilty. Jeffrey Sabol, 51 Kittredge, Colorado Ageophysicist,Sabolhasbeenaccused of dragging a police officer down the stairs of the Capitol and beating him. One photo appears to show him looming over another prone officer with the officer’s baton in…

CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD’S recent novel The Life of the Mind—a bleak, funny tour of academia’s outer fringe—offers a lament for the state of email. Dorothy, the book’s grad-student heroine, “used to love email, used to have long, meaningful, occasionally thrilling email correspondences that involved the testing of ideas and the exchange of videos and music links.” Emails had been the way Dorothy and her friends “crafted personas, narrated events, made sense of their lives,” Smallwood writes. “That way of life, alas, had ended.” Now the emails they exchange are perfunctory, businesslike, “and if you wanted to know what someone was doing, you could usually find out on social media.” Still, the craving for digital connection persists. “Dorothy had not stopped checking, expecting, or wishing that a good message might be out…

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, some sunscreen manufacturers have been getting vocal about their formulas’ ability to block blue light—the light range emitted by our phones, computers, and TV screens (as well as the sun). And given the panic about potential eye damage that has led to mass purchases of blue-light-blocking glasses, it’s reasonable to wonder whether you may need to care about its effects on your skin. According to dermatologist Dr. Corey L. Hartman, blue-light-blocking sunscreen isn’t a necessity for everyone. Although, according to one study, exposure to blue-light rays can break down skin cells, “the damage they cause may not really be visible to the naked eye,” says aesthetician Karen Fernandez. But there are a couple of scenarios in which experts say it’s worth it, such as if…

IN A TOWN FILLED with old and venerable dining institutions, Gage & Tollner, which began life as an oyster house near the Brooklyn waterfront in 1879, is one of the oldest and most venerable. The dark-toned, beer-hall-style dining room on Fulton Street was also one of the earliest landmarked interiors in the city (only the New York Public Library and Grant’s Tomb came before it). The original owners sold out in 1911, which is a good run for any restaurateur, but according to the restaurant’s informative, museum-quality website, Eugene Tollner kept up his daily rounds for years before dying on the way to work at the age of 85. Edna Lewis famously ran the kitchen there during the late 1980s, and thanks to a series of diligent owners, the rituals…

IN OCTOBER 1995, a 500-pound safe was stolen from the garage of a Malibu mansion. Inside, the thief (or thieves) found guns, jewelry, and a piece of treasure far more valuable than they could have imagined: a private video made by the newlyweds Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. Most of the nearly hour-long Hi8 cassette was mundane. Anderson, then the star of Baywatch, gets a tattoo; Lee, the drummer for Mötley Crüe, gets his nails done. There’s blurry, almost inaudible footage of their wedding. They play with their dogs and talk about the tomatoes growing in their driveway. But there’s also six minutes of fucking. While Lee is driving, Anderson gives him a blow job, and on a yacht, they screw each other rather frantically, declaring their love for one…

LAST OCTOBER, architecture student Zalmai Levrat approached restaurateur Yudai Kanayama with a proposal. He had been dining regularly at Kanayama’s new Chinatown Hokkaido restaurant, Dr. Clark, and the two had bonded over a love of soccer. Levrat’s idea: If he could get a team together, would Kanayama sponsor a Dr. Clark Football Club? They struck a deal—Levrat would build a roster, and Kanayama would handle team and league fees. Levrat hit the phones, signing up the best soccer players he knew; he had grown up playing on the Lower East Side, and he and his friends (many of whom have been on professional teams in Europe and the U.S.) often played pickup games. His father was brought in as coach. Kanayama had access to an empty apartment and offered it…

JUST IN CASE you haven’t had enough of elections, the show now at the Park Avenue Armory, Enemy of the People, invites you to cast a few more votes. Isn’t it fun to pick a future with limited information? Doesn’t all that individual choice make you feel informed and optimistic? At various moments in Enemy of the People, audience members seated at scattered tables are asked to choose between two options by hitting a big X button or a big O button. Brisk discussion is encouraged (a menu-size tabletop screen features a countdown clock), so the whole room buzzes like a restaurant. In the background, Mikaal Sulaiman’s score plays, a convincing dupe of the tension music from shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. High in the vaulted Park…

THE PURGE SERIES was born in rage, and to rage it must return. In interviews, writer and director James DeMonaco has traced the origin of the movies to a fistfight he once got into when a deranged drunk driver nearly killed him and his wife on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Afterward, DeMonaco recalled, his wife—an otherwise sweet doctor—said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we all had one free one a year?” He emerged from the experience with the premise of a dystopian but outwardly peaceful United States where, every year for 12 hours, pretty much all crime is legal and citizens are allowed to kill, rape, and pillage at will. The first film, 2013’s The Purge, used that idea mostly as a nifty but vague backdrop for a fun, slightly futuristic…

MOVIES 1. See Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain You are missed. In theaters July 16. What made Anthony Bourdain so compelling was his restlessness, the way he made his own uncertainty and anxiety about the world so vivid in how he went about exploring other cities and cultures. Morgan Neville’s moving documentary charts Bourdain’s wild career through the late chef’s own words, observations from his closest friends, and, of course, the immense amount of footage he left behind. BILGE EBIRI TV 2. Watch Gossip Girl A glitzy continuation. HBO Max, July 8. The CW series gets rebooted with a slightly more diverse cast of upper-crusty New York teens and the presence of a new super-nosy, anonymous Gossip Girl, still voiced by Kristen Bell. But in this iteration, social media…