Innholdsfortegnelse for August 16-29, 2021 i New York Magazine

THE PENTHOUSE that gossip built looms above Park Avenue guarded by a one-and-a-half-year-old Yorkie, Jellybean, who was sososososososoexcited to have a guest, and a 91-year-old New York Post columnist, Cindy Adams, who was not. “What is it you’re looking for?” she asked me. “What do you want?!” The occasion for my visit was Gossip, the four-part Showtime documentary series, out August 22, in which director Jenny Carchman tells the story of the New York Post and the Murdochization of American media through the newspaper’s most enduring star, who has for almost 40 years devoted five hours a day, six days a week, to crafting her column. “I would never leave the Post,” Adams told me, “because I’m very loyal and because the New York Post is the flavor of New York.…

WE COULD EAT here for days,” my friend the barbecue loon said with tremors of joy in his voice as we stood in line not long ago at the Hudson Smokehouse in the South Bronx and contemplated the bounty up on the great blackboard menu. There were slabs of brisket and smoked turkey breast sold by the half-pound, full and half-racks of pork ribs, and supersize helpings of freshly sizzled pork cracklings seasoned with chile pepper for $6 apiece. There was a house smash burger, and there were eight kinds of sandwiches—one the daunting “Hat Trick” made with three kinds of pork, including the aforementioned cracklings. I think I counted seven varieties of chicken wing, which are smoked and then finished in the fryer (Buffalo, jerk, and barbecue, to name…

THIS SUMMER, TELEVISION became preoccupied with a question: What should happen to men? Not all men—TV has not been inundated with stories about Black men, migrant men, trans men, men who struggle to make ends meet by holding down three gig-economy micro-jobs. One conundrum has kept cropping up in various genres and iterations: The white guys who used to be default protagonists on TV and in American life, all of the beleaguered dads, bad bosses, authoritative leaders, and wild-card mavericks, are no longer the main characters. So what happens to that guy now? Should he be erased? Can he be rehabilitated, his entitlement washed away? Where is he supposed to go? Series from this summer have found various answers to that question. Perhaps the white guy has a meltdown, or…

DIRECTOR JAMES GUNN’S The Suicide Squad—equal parts sequel to and reboot of 2016’s widely reviled but ultimately profitable Suicide Squad—offers so much rapid-fire irreverence that it’s sometimes hard to figure out if it’s even supposed to be a movie. With its incessant profanity, ridiculous body count, and trollish sense of humor, Gunn’s film often seems content to exist in a constant state of rug-pulling. Lots of fun but little forward momentum. It kills off supposedly major characters with abandon, and it upends noble superhero virtues with such indulgent glee that it can feel repetitive at times. But sometimes the low-hanging fruit is also the sweetest. It’s hard to hate a movie in which Sylvester Stallone voices a giant talking shark who pretends to read a book so people will think…

IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, as the Delta variant began driving coronavirus caseloads back to levels Americans believed they would never see again, Missouri senator Josh Hawley introduced an amendment to the Senate budget resolution addressing what he sensed to be one of his party’s most urgent priorities. Hawley called for restricting federal funding to K–12 schools that mandate COVID-19 vaccines for students, mandate students wear masks, or do not resume in-person instruction. As school districts around the country scramble to figure out how to reopen, Hawley’s plan for public education is to demand in-person schooling while banning any efforts to make it safe. (Hopefully, nobody will tell Hawley about ventilation lest he ban that too.) Hawley is merely following a partywide stampede into a new form of COVID denialism,…

AN INVESTIGATION by The Wall Street Journal in July sent a shiver through the millennial and zoomer class. The story, “‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off,” dug through Department of Education data to highlight master’s programs at prestigious private universities whose alumni were struggling under mountains of debt. Columbia turns out to be the worst offender, with 14 of 32 programs in which median student debt exceeded median income two years after graduation. One student reported taking a car ride with three friends from the film program, during which “they calculated they collectively owed $1.5 million in loans to the federal government.” Despite the scope of the Journal’s investigation, its focus on Columbia’s film program—a stupendous outlier with median debt some six times higher…

I’D LOST MY PHONE. To be more specific, I drank too much tequila, went to a party I didn’t like, drank more tequila, and, somewhere between an Uber and the front steps of my apartment, lost my new iPhone. The next morning, hung-over and depressed, I make my way to Jacob Riis beach with one of my first queer friends in New York, a bag of White Claws in hand, hoping it would somehow make everything better. Riis is the city’s most democratically queer beach, named in 1914 after the muckraking journalist (then recently deceased) who campaigned (using language that admittedly can seem a bit questionable today) to improve the lives of the city’s immigrant communities. It’s not as easy to get to by subway as, say, Coney Island or…

WHAT DOES A 21st-century cinnamon bun owe its public? Are goo and glaze enough? For Brooklyn baker Sarah Magid, who launched Knead Love Bakery from her Greenpoint apartment in 2019, the pastry should also be whole grain, nutrient-dense, naturally fermented for four to eight hours, and incorporate enough local ingredients to support the regional economy and merit a new stand at the Union Square Greenmarket. Magid’s Cinny Bun is all these things. And, like the rest of her repertoire, it is gluten free, which has made the baker a bit of a cult hero for those who follow that diet. But that shouldn’t deter anyone else. In fact, two non-vegan gluten-eating cinnamon-bun aficionados tried the thing the other day and were pretty much blown away. You should know that comparing…

ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY is available August 17 on the Criterion Collection. HOLLYWOOD HAS A LONG HISTORY of making beloved movies about the backstage machinations of Broadway. A short list would include films as various as Warner Bros.’ Depression-era fable 42nd Street, Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon, Mel Brooks’s The Producers, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, and, at the head of the class, Joseph Mankiewicz’s acid-tinged valentine to Broadway’s postwar golden age, All About Eve. They were mostly made in Los Angeles. But some of the best films about the Broadway theater are documentaries made in New York and not nearly as well known as they should be, in part because they have been only sporadically available (if at all) on commercial video. They were the work of D.A. Pennebaker,…

BILLIE EILISH’S METEORIC ASCENT has seen much turbulence, both avoidable and unavoidable. By the time she entered the final year of her teens, in December 2020, she had already gone platinum, swept the major categories at the Grammys, topped both the “Billboard 200” and “Hot 100” charts, sang the theme song for a (still yet to be released) Bond film, starred in a documentary about her life, and struck up a friendship with her childhood idol, Justin Bieber. Parallel to all this, unfair criticism of her body and legitimate pushback for her feistier music takes seemed to throw the young star into a defensive position. She fell back for a sec, then began to renegotiate her relationship with the public. She ditched the jet-black mop with slime-green roots that had…

TV 1. Watch The Chair With showrunner Amanda Peet. Netflix, August 20. Sandra Oh stars in this dramedy as the new chair of the English department at a university where enrollments are down, systems are antiquated, the professors have problems, and she’s been tasked with fixing it all ASAP. Which should be simple enough, since institutions averse to change are always incredibly easy to reshape. JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 2. Listen to Solar Power “A weed album.” Universal, August 20. The 24-year-old singer-songwriter Lorde, in a new set produced by Jack Antonoff, balances sprightly tunes like the lead single/title track with the dark reflections of the follow-up single, “Stoned at the Nail Salon.” CRAIG JENKINS THEATER 3. See Feinstein’s/54 Below Life is a cabaret. Feinstein’s/54 Below, 254 West 54th Street.…

GAWKER’S BACK, riding a very bloggy moment in media—down with editors, up with newsletters, the world’s a mess, and no topic is too small. Founded in 2002, murdered by a well-funded lawsuit in 2016, the site returns under Bustle Digital Group and the furious and hilarious editor-in-chief Leah Finnegan. This new bratty pack has lots in common with those of us who wrote for Gawker previously. They want to have a laugh—and they don’t believe in a long future. “I consulted a few different people to ask if this was a terrible mistake. I ultimately came to the conclusion that it was too rare of an opportunity to pass up,” says staff writer Jenny G. Zhang. “I figured, worst case, at least I’ll have had an interesting experience.” “It’s very…

IN 2001, AS HE SET OUT on his first, disastrous campaign for public office, Andrew Cuomo invited a columnist for this magazine to join him for a car ride through New York City. Bill Clinton had just departed office, leaving Washington in Republican hands after being impeached over his sexual relationship with an intern who worked for him, and Cuomo, the youngest member of his Cabinet, was impatiently angling to run for governor against George Pataki, the man who had defeated his father, the liberal giant Mario Cuomo. The story’s dynastic elements were irresistible, but the younger Cuomo sought to downplay them, portraying Clinton as his true model, emphasizing what he had learned from watching the master tactician. In the back seat of his car, Cuomo deconstructed Clinton’s use of…

I FIRST VISITED Han Feng’s Flower District loft for one of her spectacular multicourse dinner parties, where she would always have a mix of fashion, theater, and art people from her circle. Back then, it was drenched with light from a series of windows looking east. She grew up in Nanjing and Hangzhou during the Cultural Revolution in China—“I was thinking I should get a factory job,” she says—and studied graphic design at the China Academy of Art. She came to New York in 1985. In 1993 she launched a ready-to-wear line, and in 1997 she rented this sunny loft, which she would later buy. Along the way, she designed the costumes for Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly, which debuted in London with the English National Opera in 2005 and was…

ROCK AND ROLL and soul music are brothers from another mother, and few performers have dedicated their careers to accentuating the closeness of the genres as much as Daryl Hall. He cut his teeth on the Philadelphia soul scene in the 1960s before meeting John Oates, a fellow Temple University student who sang and played guitar. The two became fast friends, roommates, and eventually bandmates who flourished in the ’70s. By the ’80s, Hall & Oates were accomplished hitmakers with a pliable sound, capable of balancing bubbly love songs with angular New Wave jams. This month, the duo embarks on a tour that was originally meant to start last year, alongside English rockers Squeeze (“Tempted,” “Cool for Cats,” “Black Coffee in Bed,” “Another Nail in My Heart”) and Scottish singer-songwriter…

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK is back! And let me lay aside the critical monocle for a minute and say the experience of going to Merry Wives is entirely glorious. Even the heaviest summer sky is beautiful over the Delacorte as a much-missed civic ritual slots back into its seasonal groove. The sense of collective celebration in the theater is positively medieval: Afterward, had they asked us, we could have raised a barn. It’s not just release, though. The production has been chosen to feel like a leap upward: Merry Wives is Jocelyn Bioh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s farce The Merry Wives of Windsor, which she and director Saheem Ali have deftly shifted to a Ghanaian and Nigerian community in Harlem. It’s not the first all-Black cast in Shakespeare in the Park—that…