Innholdsfortegnelse for July 19-August 1, 2021 i New York Magazine

THE FIRST TIME I read the word Aack! was in the global syndication of the daily comic strip “Cathy,” nestled between “Garfield” and “The Far Side” in the English-language newspapers in Malaysia, where I grew up. I lived half a world away from the creator of “Cathy,” Cathy Guisewite, but the main character’s catchphrase imprinted itself onto my brain anyway—a testament to the strip’s power in the ’80s and ’90s. “Cathy” is now typically evoked with mixed feelings, denigrated for what it is half-remembered to represent: the angst of a distinctly boomerish upper-middle-class white woman exasperated by her attempts to “have it all” (a man, a white-collar job, a body that fits with conventional beauty standards) and wracked with guilt about the whole thing. The comic ran in newspapers for…

POP MUSIC 1. Listen to For Free The title track is a Joni Mitchell cover. BMG, July 23. Folk-rock lifer David Crosby had a rough 2020. The inability to tour pinched his finances. The Crosby, Stills & Nash legend channeled his frustrations in music. For Free, Croz’s eighth studio album, keeps his late-career hot streak alive with ten plush, stately folk songs touting collaborations with Michael McDonald, Donald Fagen, Sarah Jarosz, and his eldest son, James Raymond. CRAIG JENKINS TV 2. Watch Summer Olympics Games on. NBC, July 23. The Tokyo Games apparently cannot be stopped: That means the opening ceremony, airing live at the ripe hour of 6:55 a.m. ET, will take place with pomp, pageantry, and the usual very long parade/ flag-identification quiz. JEN CHANEY BOOKS 3. Read…

HARRY HOPKINS, a close adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt, is said to have summarized the administration’s political strategy like so: “We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect.” It worked quite well for the Democrats well past FDR’s time. But around the mid-1960s, as the taxes began to bite into middle-class wallets and many white voters came to see the spending as benefiting people who didn’t look like them, the formula stopped working. At some point, “tax and spend” became a hackneyed insult of the Democratic agenda, with the third part—“elect”—dropped from the mantra. Biden’s ambition for an FDR-size presidency died on November 3, when the election delivered a narrow governing margin in Congress that seemed to bode a Clinton- or Carter-size presidency instead. But…

THE PAST SIX MONTHS have been good to the book-publishing industry. Book sales, helped along by pandemic-induced lock-downs, are up. Adult-fiction sales have risen 30 percent year over year. And most of all, Trump hasn’t been in office. “Postelection, there’s been a breath of Thank God, we don’t have to do Trump books anymore,” one editor told me. The lull has come to an end. After a brief reprieve from the dishy ticktocks that emerged from the turbulence of the Trump era, publishers are gearing up for a flurry of books detailing the final days and aftermath of his presidency. The Wall Street Journal reporter Michael C. Bender’s Frankly, We Did Win This Election and Michael Wolff ’s third Trump book, Landslide, kicked things off on July 13. A week…

LATE ON A FALL afternoon ten years ago, Cheryl and Troy walked into a room and shook hands. It was a small space at the Justice Center in Portland, Oregon, almost entirely taken up by a conference table and chairs. Beads of rain covered the room’s one long window. Cheryl sat next to it so she could look out, which helped remind her to breathe. She had barely eaten that day, just enough so she wouldn’t be sick to her stomach. Cheryl and Troy were strangers, though, in one sense, they knew each other well. For years, Cheryl had been in a string of violent relationships, and Troy had a long history of getting drunk and abusing his partners. In 2005, he went to prison for 22 months for choking…

YOU’RE REALLY SEEING this apartment on a good day,” says Daniel King of the two-bedroom Rockaway condo where he and Emma Hastil live and from which they run their design business, Locus of Occult. Their dining table is more often than not used as a worktable, and patterns and drop cloths are usually all over the living-room floor. King moved here two and a half years ago from the Lower East Side, following friends who wanted to live in a “beach town full of artistic people and different cultures” that just happens to have subway access to the rest of the city. He grew up in Australia and loved being able to walk in his wet suit to go surfing. He met Hastil through a mutual friend who had stopped…

OUTDOOR THEATER IS one of our city’s purest traditions: gorgeous performances in green surroundings, free for all. Certainly this summer, open-air productions are a civic lifeline—but at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, the gathering has taken on an even more intense sense of mission. For years, CTH’s Uptown Shakespeare in the Park at Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park presented the European canon, including Antigone, Romeo and Juliet, and The Bacchae. This summer, though, producing artistic director Ty Jones has put up a new classic, Will Power’s Seize the King, a contemporary verse play built on old bones. A decade before Hamilton, in plays like Flow (2003) and The Seven (2006), Power established a hip-hop theater tradition. With Seize the King, he engages an older lyric strategy, slicing through…

WHAT DOES A STRAWBERRY TASTE LIKE? It depends. Do you mean a fresh strawberry, a ripe strawberry, a jammy strawberry? Because it matters, says Elaine Kellman, a flavorist at Citromax in Carlstadt, New Jersey, who has spent the past 30 years breaking down taste sensations into their chemical parts. To capture the full-bodied sweetness of an ultraripe strawberry, “you would take a strawberry flavor and add chemicals like maltol and furaneol,” whereas a jammy one might need a hint of jasmine, and a fresh one might require a dash of grassy cis-3-hexenal. There are, by most estimates, only about 500 flavorists in the U.S., and if you have eaten food from a box in America, you have certainly tasted their work. Flavorists are responsible for the end of the ingredients…

IT HAS BEEN ABOUT A MONTH since the chef Daniel Humm unveiled the newest menu at his extravagant, almost comically luxurious Manhattan restaurant Eleven Madison Park. The big news, of course, is that this latest iteration of EMP (which was once known for dishes like lavender-glazed duck and opulent blocks of slow-cooked pork) eschews animal products, instead offering a fully plant-based meal. Does it live up to the hype and the price? Food critic Adam Platt and Grub Street’s writer Rachel Sugar weigh in. Rachel Sugar: Before we get to the actual meal, which cost $729.46 for two people plus $168.76 for drinks, let’s clarify that our main goal was to get two different perspectives—mine as a vegan and yours as a longtime restaurant critic—on the new food at Daniel…

THE SOUND OF A TENNIS BALL hitting a racquet or bouncing off a court’s surface over and over, forehand after forehand, is as fundamental to Naomi Osaka as her own heartbeat. In Naomi Osaka, the Netflix docuseries about perhaps the most successful tennis champion of her generation, director Garrett Bradley amplifies that metronomic rhythm. In scenes when the 23-year-old is playing the game and some when she isn’t, the sound is as relentless, urgent, and inescapable as the athlete’s high standards for herself. It is also reflective of Bradley’s immersive and intimate approach—one that extends beyond attempting to explain who Osaka is in order to make the audience feel how it feels to be her. Naomi Osaka is divided into three episodes—“Rise,” “Champion Mentality,” and “New Blueprint”—that reflect the arc…

“ATHLETES ACTING, that never goes well.” This throwaway joke uttered by LeBron James in Space Jam: A New Legacy may be the film’s only pseudo-acknowledgment that the original Space Jam wasn’t an unimpeachable masterpiece. For years, the 1996 hit, in which Michael Jordan, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and a variety of Looney Tunes characters are forced to play an intergalactic game of basketball, was one of those movies kids adored and parents forced themselves to sit through. James, who was 11 when Space Jam came out, was reportedly one of those kids and has now replaced Jordan as the star of the franchise, perhaps setting the stage for a lucrative post-NBA career. Here’s the good news for King James: Questions about who’s the better player aside, he is certainly a…