Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2-15, 2021 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Allie Conti charted the difficulties of adopting a dog during the pandemic (“It’s a Dog’s Market,” July 19—August 1). Writer Lindsay Adler called the article “very wild and I can personally attest that everything about dog culture in New York is deeply psychotic.” Rolling Stone’s Amy X. Wang posted a picture of her pandemic adoptee with the cover, writing that the animal “got a crazy number of applications because 3-legged dogs are ‘coveted for virtue-signaling’ (?!!) in NYC.” Other readers criticized the piece for advancing “the lie that there aren’t enough adoptable dogs to go around,” as film critic Noah Git-tell put it, noting that Animal Care Centers of NYC euthanizes many dogs every year “ because no one wanted them.” On Twitter,…

To hear them tell it, the Broadway professionals whose careers Scott Rudin dominated for decades don’t sound too torn up about his cancellation. “People are really worried about me,” one longtime Rudin collaborator told me rather breezily this summer. “‘Are you going to be okay? You’re so closely linked to Scott.’ I’m not only going to be okay—I’m going to be better because I don’t have to expend the energy to deal with Scott’s personality and quirks and try to manage him.” When I spoke with a prominent Broadway creative figure, someone who has worked with Rudin on multiple shows, he was still offended by a recent Washington Post article suggesting that the Rudin-shaped void in the Theater District would be creatively and financially devastating. “Pardon my French: Go fuck…

WAHLBERG MEN PREFER THESE Ever-Cool Sneakers “Me and my dad, Donnie, share a love of sneakers. Nike Air Jordan 1s (from $100) are an essential in our rotation. They’re timeless, and the silhouette is just cool. I have borrowed my dad’s—sometimes I need to put on two pairs of socks to wear his, depending on the size. My uncle Mark is also a huge fan. My dad, he, and I are always dressed the best. Effortlessly, too—we don’t try hard. But there’s an unspoken rule that we will never be caught twinning in the sneakers.” ELIJAH WAHLBERG THREE GENERATIONS OF MILLERS (INCLUDING SUSAN) LEARNED ASTROLOGY FROM THIS BOOK “My mother, Susan, learned astrology from her mother as a young girl. My grandmother taught her using The New A to…

TED WIEDEKE Retired attorney, Bayville, New Jersey Are you a member here? No. This gentleman I sail with, Bud Brown, asked me to crew on his boatthey’re having a regional regatta here today. I’m a member at the Toms River Yacht Club in New Jersey; my parents joined that club in the ’50s, and I joined in the ’80s. My law firm was willing to pay for it because of the social advantages. How long have you sailed? Since I was 7. I’m 64 years old now. I’m still going up against the pros, but I’m not as strong as I used to be. You know, it’s funny—I had to write a paper in college about competition, about whether or not I was a competitive person. Initially, I was going…

THERE ARE SWEET CHERRIES. There are sour cherries. And now, thanks to Ayesha Nurdjaja, chef at Chelsea’s new Middle Eastern meze and grill house Shukette, there are spicy cherries in the form of a simple summer salad that asks you to look at the pie filling and Manhattan garnish in a new light. Although cherries have long graced Persian pilafs and platters of roast meats, they seldom get their own savory spotlight, as they do here, boldly seasoned with serrano chiles, cilantro, garlic, salt, and lime. But they should: The combination evokes the Mexican art of dusting things like jicama and mango with a tongue-blasting mixture of chile, salt, and lime (a.k.a. Tajín in packaged form). Nurdjaja got the brilliant idea not on a trip south of the border but…

AT THE FIRST REHEARSAL for what will be the first play to open on Broadway since the start of the pandemic, the team members of Pass Over are gathered in a midtown dance studio psyching themselves up. Director Danya Taymor kicks things off with a speech: It’s been three years since the Off Broadway run, and many of them are returning from that production. They’ve always done the play in the summer, she points out, and always during the NBA Finals. “So we’re right in the pocket,” she says. “This project always attracts what it needs and always gives us just enough time to do it.” “Oh, does it!” interjects Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, Pass Over’s playwright and producer, looking up from her Sweetgreen salad. There’s laughter. They have a whole…

IN SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN, the latest novel from Alexandra Kleeman, a starlet finds herself wandering in the California desert, dehydrated and disoriented. The state has depleted its water supply, and residents must sustain themselves on a factory-produced liquid called WAT-R, which Cassidy refuses to drink, even the “triple-milled,” high-end version co-designed by a Finnish installation artist. She thinks she may be hallucinating a figure in the distance, but who is she to judge what’s real? A former child star, her life has been full of fakes—TV dads and false friends who pretend to care and then abscond when the tabloids turn on you. Half of L.A. has had their nose fixed to look like hers. Cassidy cannot abide more forgeries. “I want water, not the knockoff,” she tells…

WHEN CHESA BOUDIN was sworn in as district attorney of San Francisco on January 8, 2020, he seemed perfectly cast for the moment. Since 2016, a new class of progressive prosecutors had been claiming victories in liberal cities from Chicago to St. Louis, pledging to undo decades of tough-on-crime policies. In the process, they sought to change the public’s traditional perception of their role: the DA as anti-crime crusader or, in the words of Larry Krasner, the progressive district attorney of Philadelphia, “Dirty Harry in a suit.” In San Francisco, Boudin repudiated this image and then some. A 39-year-old public defender, he was a son of the old-school American radical left, a Rhodes Scholar with a sensational backstory that involved Marxist-revolutionary parents incarcerated for murder. He campaigned on promises to…

THE SCENT YOU CAN SMELL ON EVERY SPIELBERG “Torn by Henry Rose ($120) is what my mom wears. My sisters and I have always raided her closet. The two youngest: her shoes and makeup. The eldest: her jewelry. Me: her perfumes. But Torn is something all four of us will steal. You never know who is filling the kitchen with its vetiver-and-vanilla scent. My mom is incredibly affectionate, so you could say the scent was already rubbing off on us, literally, before we started using it.” SASHA SPIELBERG EVERYONE IN THE ART-DEALING ZWIRNER FAMILY USES THIS Swiss Shampoo “Rauschshampoo($22) has been a staple in Zwirner-family bathrooms for years. I suspect it originated with my grandfather Rudolf, who is responsible for many of the more European conventions…

I NEVER IMAGINED I WOULD be in a postwar building,” Alexandra Pappas says. Indeed, for 18 years she rented an apartment across the hall from me in the five-story 1854 West Village brownstone where I live still; she threw wonderful parties. “I remember walking into that building on 9th Street and thinking, Oh my God, I found the place of my dreams,” she says. “I loved it there so much.” So I was intrigued when she said she was moving a few blocks but a world away to Butterfield House, designed by Walter Gropius protégés William J. Conklin and James Rossant and built in 1962. Constructed of beige brick with distinctive bay windows, it was lauded for how well it blended in with the historic streetscape and for the graciousness…

THESE ARE UNSETTLING times for tuna-sandwich eaters. You might think that of all the foods on the planet, the humble, mayo-whipped totem of the American lunch box would be the least likely to be cloaked in drama and intrigue. Not so. In January, the Washington Post broke news of the Great Subway Tuna-Hero Scandal. The story went viral, but in case you missed it, here are the pertinent details: Two Bay Area customers sued the sandwich juggernaut, claiming Subway had served them a substance that a lab revealed was not only not tuna, it wasn’t even fish. A slew of clickbait headlines followed. Subway called the lawsuit “reckless,” “without merit,” and “improper.” In February, Inside Edition conducted its own traffic-seeking lab-test investigation: It’s tuna, it concluded. Not to be outdone,…

“THERE IS SOMETHING profound,” Sandra Oh says, “about moving into the mother stage of your career.” In The Chair, the actress plays Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman and the first person of color to chair the English department at a small university. At home, Ji-Yoon is a single mother figuring out how to connect with her adopted daughter, Ju Ju (Everly Carganilla). The Chair co-creator and co-writer Amanda Peet spoke with Oh about one of their shared goals for the show: puncturing the taboos around motherhood that still exist onscreen. SANDRA OH: One of the things I love about you the most is the way you direct—it’s always straight from your vagina. AMANDA PEET: You act from your vagina; I direct from my vagina. It’s where creativity is rooted. S.O.:…

PEOPLE NEVER BELIEVE ME when I explain that I’m a slow reader. They either think I’m being modest or assume I’m lying (why lie about something so mundane?). My rate is about 12 pages per hour; I can churn through a little more if the book is pulpy. I’m able to read at a faster tempo if by read you mean “recognize words,” but that’s not what you mean. Given the fact that I write about books in exchange for money, my reading speed bears on my earning ability. It bears heavily. For this reason, I periodically make an effort to rev things up. I have eliminated subvocalization and used a pen to “set a reading pace.” I have tried conditioning drills to increase my vision span. All pointless! It…

Jigoku-No-Hanazono: Office Royale An action comedy about warring office workers from Japan. Limbo A Hong Kong crime drama about the search for a serial killer. Money Has Four Legs A satirical look at independent filmmaking in Myanmar. Barbarian Invasion Written and directed by Malaysian filmmaker Tan Chui Mui, who plays a retired actor training for her return to the screen after her divorce.…

I. THE NEXT LITERARY SUPERSTAR (YES, HE KNEW HE WAS THE SHIT) HERE’S SOMETHING everyone can agree on. For the occasion of his first book, Afterparties, Anthony Veasna So would have loved it all: the interviews, book tour, readings, attention, praise, pans, myth-making, the opportunity to opine on the treacly queer writers he hates (or at least shade them) and the insufficiency of Asian American identity. He might talk about how he identified as Cambodian American before Asian American and, for that matter, Californian before American, which would have been a way of making space for himself as well as others. Some writers might be tentative about the limelight, but not him. His parents survived the Khmer Rouge genocide, and he survived Stockton, California, so you can be damned sure…

THE HAIM SISTERS  are not the only musicians in the family—their parents played in a band together while the girls were growing up. And whenever they got blisters—on their fingers from the guitar, or just generally—they’d apply Krazy Glue to ease the pain. A lot of our shopping habits develop this way: They’re inherited from our family members, passed down from generation to generation. So we polled 11 particularly interesting clans to find out the things they buy because their families always have—from the (Christopher “Biggie”) Wallaces to the Spielberg sisters.…

DAY 1 ❑6 P.M.: PICK UP YOUR CONVERTIBLE ➽ Hyères is not as touristy as other places on the coast. It remains authentic, and because it hosts the International Festival of Fashion, Photography, and Fashion Accessories every year, it’s also very cultural. The flight to Hyères from Paris is an hour and a half. EasyJet has flights fairly regularly from Charles de Gaulle, and they’re usually around $45–$75 one way. Or take a high-speed train, which is five hours from Gare de Lyon. Once you arrive, rent a car [Sixt has local options in Hyères], because taxis are expensive. Get a mini-convertible. It’s the perfect car for the south of France because it’s cute and parking is a pain. ❑7 P.M.: CHECK IN TO YOUR SEASIDE HOTEL ➽ Drive ten…

NEW YORK HAS always been a land of puppets. From the childhood comforts of Sesame Street to the gleeful pop perversities of Avenue Q, from Basil Twist’s poetic avant-garde effigies to the zodiac-animal glove puppets of the Chinese Theatre Works, puppet-makers and puppeteers have gathered here for generations, honing their craft. In fact, New York is one of the only cities in the country where puppeteer is a civil-service job: We have four, housed at the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre in Central Park. A new show at the Museum of the City of New York captures this heritage. Launched in collaboration with the International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC (which starts on August 11 at the Clemente Center), Puppets of New York will offer a historical look at the development of…