Innholdsfortegnelse for August 30-September 12, 2021 i New York Magazine

1 New York’s latest cover story, by Andrew Rice and Laura Nahmias, chronicled how Andrew Cuomo lost the governorship and included his first interview since announcing his resignation (“New York Touch,” August 16–29). “This is an exceptionally good and illuminating story on Andrew Cuomo, but the headline should have been simply ‘He’s a Dick,’ ” tweeted Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post. Andrew Donovan, a TV news reporter in Syracuse, called the piece a “career obituary” that was “a combination of fascinating, unforgiving, uncomfortable and sarcastic.” David Sirota, a former adviser to Bernie Sanders, wrote, “Just a psychopathic level of narcissism and nihilism on display here—hiding thousands of nursing home deaths, shielding health care donors from liability, raking in $5 mil for a book ghostwritten by public employees, sex pesting…

The year after the Twin Towers fell, P. Diddy stood in front of Madison Square Garden wearing a Yankees cap and matching letterman jacket. “We still here!” he barked defiantly. “And we building four more new towers!” The Harlem rap mogul was appearing in the music video for Jermaine Dupri’s “Welcome to Atlanta” remix, which featured Diddy on a verse celebrating his hometown. It was mostly clichés—“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!”—but his nod to September 11 marked something new. Ever since Al Qaeda operatives crashed two hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, a patriotic fervor had gripped the country. The destruction of those buildings was taken personally, an affront to everything that made people in the United States good and free. Diddy bought…

DOMINICK HALL Pret a Manger manager, East Harlem What brought you to Margaritaville? I had two days off, so I booked one night for me and my girlfriend. I loved it, so I booked another night. I went back to the front desk and said, “I need another night.” And they were like, “Oh, Okay!” So how was the room? It feels like you’re on a ship. Everything is beautiful: the walls, the paintings, the bathroom, even the drawers in the dresser. Speaking of the dresser, even though I’m a local, the way I packed my bag was as if I were going to Florida—shorts, sandals, slippers, and towels (which they already have at the hotel, but, you know, just in case).…

JOHN CHO HAD MANY HOURS to think about Spike Spiegel, the slick, droll, wild-haired intergalactic bounty hunter in the upcoming Netflix live-action remake of the genre-bending neo-noir space-Western Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop. It began with the pilot script, of course, but then there was an unexpected hiatus when the entire production went on hold after he tore his ACL a couple of episodes in. They had been shooting long into the night when he took a slight misstep—he’s still not sure exactly what happened—and went down. He had to get surgery and spent the ensuing months of physical therapy thinking about his character. “I’m at home doing these knee exercises, coming off the drugs, and I was thinking about Cowboy Bebop. Every day,” says the 49-year-old actor. “I don’t think…

YOU NEVER KNOW where Pablo Larraín is going next. In 2016, the Chilean director gave the biopic genre a much-needed jolt with the thrillingly unorthodox Jackie and Neruda, both of which zeroed in on singular chapters in the lives of their subjects, Jacqueline Kennedy and the poet Pablo Neruda. This fall—after his relationship melodrama Ema, released in August—Larraín will release the much-anticipated Spencer, in which Kristen Stewart plays Princess Diana. The film follows her over the course of the 1991 Christmas holiday, during which she decides to leave Charles. If the haunting close-ups in Jackie and the noirish lyricism of Neruda are any indication, Spencer will be another mood-driven interpretation of its subject (including a score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and cinematography by Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Claire…

FOR COMMITTED FESTIVALGOERS … Bonnaroo, September 2–5, Manchester, Tennessee As a return to festivals, Bonnaroo is baptism by fire: a long weekend of camping, intoxication, and music, all on a farm an hour outside Nashville. Megan Thee Stallion, Foo Fighters, and Tyler, the Creator to perform. FOR THE INDECISIVE … Summerfest, September 1–4, 9–11, and 16–18, Milwaukee Major music festivals promise something for everyone, and Summerfest delivers. Each weekend is a grab bag of top performers—what other ticket can get you the Jonas Brothers, Chris Stapleton, and Dave Chappelle? FOR INDIE NERDS … Pitchfork Music Festival,September 10–12, Chicago With one of the more reliably idiosyncratic lineups, this year’s festival features a headlining set by neo-soul pioneer Erykah Badu and a reunion of rock weirdos the Fiery Furnaces. FOR THE YOUNG…

ONLY SO MANY add-it-to-my-tabs can keep a girl comfortable at Bemelmans on a Friday. The piano man is thrashing his keys, but it’s a waste of time; everyone is sloshed, and the crowd—a blur of polos, pastels, and wedge heels—suggests we’ve come upon a midsummer bacchanal for permanent Hamptonites. “I love that about New York—everyone is having a situation,” says Marlowe Granados, the 29-year-old filmmaker and artist whose debut novel, Happy Hour, will be published in September by Verso. But the chances of baptism by martini are simply too high, and no sooner had we entered did we seek refuge in the lobby of the Carlyle. Granados—who wears a black slip and Fendi sandals that click-clack as she walks—slides her ponytail aside to take a sip of her drink, making…

THE CITY HAS BEEN so sweet this summer, ripening on the bough with alfresco performances and pedestrianized boulevards and city-sponsored pop-up shows. Even in the still-dark places, it has been a season of sowing and watering and tending; this fall, we hope, will be the harvest. Of the 41 theaters in the Broadway League, almost every one is booked. The Theater District’s streets have lost that stunned Night of the Living Dead silence, even if the city’s financial recovery has been a little sluggish. Tourism numbers are still low, but at least the place feels full. Autumn 2021 will be a historic season, with the customary avalanche of musicals (Mrs. Doubtfire, Company, Intimate Apparel) slowed, for once, with a wall of straight plays. With the normal rules suspended, some experimental…

1 Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930–1950 (Whitney Museum of American Art, opens October 9) In the early part of the 20th century, as European artists belched out manifestos calling for the end of painting and museums, white America was just starting to feel great about itself. It looked around and saw skyscrapers, flappers, jazz bands, Hollywood—everything except, of course, its racism. That’s when Europe began to self-immolate and abstract artists such as Piet Mondrian, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Max Beckmann, and waves more immigrated to our shores. They triggered a chain reaction; an American art world came into being, a sort of international American Baroque and Classicism. Art history was rewritten. Imperfectly. The modest show “Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction” is a much-needed step…

A YEAR AGO, with concert halls and opera houses shut and most professional singers reduced to performing for their pets, baritone Will Liver-man received a life-changing phone call. The Metropolitan Opera planned to reopen with Terence Blanchard’s 2019 adaptation of Charles Blow’s memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Live auditions were out of the question. Could Liverman record the opening aria? “The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears,” Blow writes, and the opera, like his book, is a tough tale of sexual abuse, poverty, racism, and violent threats during his upbringing in Louisiana. Liverman turned to the aria and read the line “Prepare to die, motherfucker.” “I thought, What am I getting myself into?” he recalls. “A few days later, we signed the…

Frankie Fang Patternmaker, Prabal Gurung Began tailoring in China in 1985; has worked in the Garment District since 1998. Men’s shirts and pants are easy, but the dress and the gown are hard. The designers always ask me to work with crazy patterns. Once, I made more than 100 pattern pieces for one dress. It was the only thing I made that week. Before that, I worked at DVF for more than 15 years, where I made clothes for all of the famous movie stars. My favorite is a sexy dress. You know, something crazy, something that looks beautiful when you’re walking, and you finish it and put it on the model and you’re like, “Oh, it’s beautiful!” Hardeo “Harry” Samaroo Specialized Tailor, Calvin Klein Began tailoring in Guyana in…

THE MOMENT’S MOST important fashion accessory is svelte and transparent in design, costs less than $4, and makes you burp: Topo Chico. I first spotted the sparkling water in the hands of my most fashionable friends back in May, and it has since taken over the city’s streets, clubs, bodegas, even Gossip Girl’s fictional social club, Dumbo Hall. Topo Chico isn’t exactly new. With origins dating to 1895 in Monterrey, Mexico, the mineral-water was a Texas cult favorite; it was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 2017 for a refreshing $220 million and is now available in all 50 states. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Topo Chico in the wild. I was at Honey’s in Bushwick, and my friend Kim Possible (not her real name, but she…

FOR YEARS NOW, the Black plastic surgeon Dr. Charles Boyd has noticed a common request among his white millennial patients. They want bigger lips, yes, but specifically a top lip that is the same size as the bottom, instead of the industry-standard recommendation of lip proportions of one-third to two-thirds, top to bottom. Through his work as a plastic surgeon and educator, Boyd knows that this 50-50 ratio is usually found on Black women. He started highlighting that fact for his colleagues, other physicians and practitioners whom he trains to create those lips via injections. “That one-third–two-thirds thing came from [the aesthetics industry] only studying white women who had thin lips, and that’s the proportion they had. But that’s not what’s desired anymore,” says Boyd, whose practice is based in…

JOHNNY CIRILLO, the photographer behind @watchingnewyork, has been documenting stylish pedestrians for the past five years. (Since the day Bill Cunningham died, in fact, when he went out with his camera in tribute.) Trends have come and gone, but one thing remains consistent: New Yorkers love to wear the color black all year round. Or at least they did a lot more before the pandemic. “There’s no denying that colors are outrageous now,” said Cirillo. Through his long, paparazzi-style lens, he’s seeing a lot of bubblegum pink but also bright blues and neons. “I think the colors came dribbling in around the same time people were getting vaccinated and thought, We’re through it,” he said. No more black leggings and hoodies. Instead, “it felt like a celebration.” Of course, Cirillo…

IF YOU WANT TO CONTEMPLATE the legacy of 9/11 20 years later, the logical place to begin might be the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. It bills itself as “the country’s principal institution concerned with exploring 9/11, documenting its impact, and examining its continuing significance.” And so it is, though not necessarily in the way its proponents had imagined. Battered by COVID, whose New York City body count is thus far well over ten times that at ground zero, the museum was staring down a $45 million deficit and laid off nearly 60 percent of its staff during its pandemic closure. Its aspirations for special 20th-anniversary events have been downsized or scuttled. The guest list for the annual memorial ceremony is again limited to families of the dead, spurning the firefighters,…

1. Kendall In the final minutes of season two, Kendall betrays his father via press conference. It’s the ultimate power move, a show of strength against someone needling his son to be stronger. 2. Stewy He riled up the company’s shareholders, who are currently in open revolt against Logan. With Kendall’s knife in Logan’s back, Stewy’s in an enviable position to gut the patriarch. 3. Roman With Kendall out of the Waystar fold, maybe Succession’s resident slime puppy takes his top spot—or maybe there’s another rocket to go down in flames. 4. Gerri Gerri has to mitigate the fallout from Kendall’s presser, but it seems to be the perfect position for a savvy operator: She prefers being on the right side of the person in power. 5. Shiv The top…

DURING THE WINTER of 2020, it seemed like women’spant trends were veering away from the high-waisted crop to the early-aughts low-rider. But then, of course, came spring 2020 to summer 2021—18 months of pretty much only sweatpants. Now, with (some) schools and offices reopening, we’re in the midst of something of a pants paralysis. What style to buy? And which are worth it? So we asked 60 well-dressed women about the pants they’re wearing right now and what they’ve seen (and especially liked) out in the world. From that, we pieced together a pants-picking guide focusing on what is actually popular at this moment—namely, jeans that feel good to sit in, loud-pattern pants (like those seen here from Barcelona-based brand Paloma Wool), and sexy pants with cut-outs or, you know,…

Had you ever been to a Margaritaville before? No, and I’m not really a Jimmy Buffett fan. I thought of Parrot Heads as people who liked to booze and party. But you don’t really have to be a party animal to be here; I’m evidence of that. I don’t drink. I don’t do weed. What did you think of the hotel? What I love most is you get the whole Times Square atmosphere outside, but as soon as you enter, you have to sit back and think, Wait, where am I? As soon as I walked in, I was like, Where are my flip-flops? That being said, I can get into that state of mind pretty much whenever I want to. I have a Margaritaville margarita-maker at home. What brings…

IS THIS A ROOM, by Tina Satter and her company, Half Straddle, has wended its way from the performance-art space the Kitchen to Off Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre and now will open at the Lyceum on Broadway in September. With a script drawn entirely from the FBI recording of Reality Winner’s arrest at her house in Georgia, the show balances on the extremely downtown, never-before-on-Broadway star Emily Davis as Reality. When did you hear that you’re going to Broadway? About a month ago. A month ago? That’s all? Yeah. We’re doing auditions next week and then we’ll start, I think, in late September. Which is insane. You’re laughing because maybe you think that’s really soon! To me, that’s like, I guess it’s how it works? And then—I’m terrified. How do you…

WHAT UNITES SETH ROGEN’S work is a vibe—equal parts soulful, sweet, and stoner. That vibe is present in his latest venture, a new podcast with Stitcher called Storytime With Seth Rogen. The idea, he tells me, is that everybody probably has at least one big crazy story in their lives to talk about; his goal is to render them as cinematically as possible with the help of the creatively bombastic producer Richard Parks III of Richard’s Famous Food Podcast, who deploys quick editing, archival tape, and psychedelic sound loops. Harnessing the rambling curiosity of the weed connoisseur, Rogen takes what could have been straightforward interviews—with both celebrities and regular people—and blows them up into something more unexpected. How would you describe what you’re trying to do with Storytime? The most…

SEP. Verdi’s Requiem Metropolitan Opera, September 11 Twenty years after Kurt Masur led the New York Philharmonic in a memorable post-9/11 performance of Brahms’s Requiem, Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct that work’s Italian counterpart in concert, with soprano Ailyn Pérez, mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca, tenor Matthew Polenzani, and bass-baritone Eric Owens. Sun & Sea BAM, September 15 to September 26 The surprise hit of the 2019 Venice Biennale turned out to be a Lithuanian opera set at the beach with a cast of singing sunbathers. The music by Lina Lapelyté is gentle, the riptides quiet but menacing. New York Philharmonic Alice Tully Hall, September 17 As Geffen Hall is being renovated, music director Jaap van Zweden goes next door with music both whispered (Anna Clyne’s Within Her Arms,…

AMERICA ILLEGALLY invaded Iraq in 2003, occupied and destabilized and flattened it, and then never left. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and millions more have been made refugees or internally displaced persons. The consequences for the population are almost beyond comprehension: After decades of conflict, more than 2 million Iraqis are disabled, while the PTSD is inescapable. Entire generations have been left unable to look at the sky the same way. The Iraqi people must be added, alongside the American dead and their families, to the register of 9/11’s victims, after that day’s events were used as a justification for war. The atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, the bombardment of Fallujah, the attack on civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square by the military contractor Blackwater—these events are a…

THE WRITER Isaac Fitzgerald was walking across a parking lot one day this summer when he looked up to find an airplane falling out of the sky. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he cried. (“Excuse my language,” he added primly.) It was a small blue propeller plane, but in that moment it most resembled a leaf tumbling end over end. After a sickening interval—that moment when vastly divergent futures have yet to fork—the stunt plane finally righted itself. It flew onward. Then it began a yet-more-tortuous series of swoops and twists. It was an apt metaphor for the year he, and many of us, had just lived through: unpredictable, surreal, plunging, soaring. As an essayist and editor, Fitzgerald had long served as a kind of genial barkeep of the literary internet—an avuncular,…

LOUD PANTS Paloma Wool No. 479 Claudia Pants $175 Writer Emma Orlow says she has seen these squiggly pants all over Instagram—and is coveting them. Writer Laura Reilly’s been spotting them, too, and predicts this marbley pattern is poised to take the place of the omnipresent checkerboard print. PolkaPants Signature Polka Dot $143 “I’ve spent so long dressing for a top-up view I want to let my legs have a little fun,” says Strategist U.K. senior editor Ailbhe Malone. She’s been eyeing this dotted pair from PolkaPants, a brand that designs specifically for female chefs. Staud Fama Pants $165 These flared color-block pants from Staud are on makeup artist Risa Miyamoto’s want-list now that she is back to working on set. “I can wear these on a shoot where I…

PENN BADGLEY SPENDS a lot of time thinking about a just end for the serial killer he plays on TV, if justice were ever to exist in the universe of You. His character is Joe Goldberg, a bookish, seemingly nice guy who has a habit of stalking and killing the women he loves and anyone who gets in his way. So far, Joe has eluded any attempts to thwart his bloodshed, slipping from a literary New York in the first season to a health-food-and-crystals Los Angeles in the second. When You returns for its third season this October, Joe is a golly-gee young father living in a fictional Bay Area suburb populated by tech billionaires, anti-vaxxers, and mommy bloggers. His new wife, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), is just as willing…

IT’S A BRIGHT DAY in Los Angeles, and I’m sitting in a plush hotel lobby talking to the actress Ruth Negga about what it feels like to desire something you can’t have. At 40, she slots herself within a group of Black actresses who have perhaps had to “fight harder, wait longer, be more available” in order to clear a path for multidimensional roles. She feels she has sacrificed, missed weddings and funerals, put her personal life on hold. Then again, she counters, she still believes there’s “something exquisite” about longing—about not getting what you might think you want. She’s got an amused, faraway look in her eyes now, as if she has remembered an ancient joke about the nature of existence. “We do forget that, don’t we?” she says.…

OVER THE COURSE OF, SAY, FOUR MINUTES, I witness Gabi Wilson hop from a Rhodes piano stacked on its suitcase to a synth across the studio, on which she begins banging out the riff from Coldplay’s “Clocks,” before moving to a drum kit, whaling on the thing without mercy. Her grin gets wider as she builds momentum, curls flying as she headbangs. Maybe it’s because this is the first bit of live music I’ve seen in 17 months, or because Wilson—better known as H.E.R.—is about to rehearse for her first IRL set in the same time frame, or because we’re due for a reappraisal of mid-career Coldplay as part of the latest resurgence of all things early aughts. Whatever the case, this shit unequivocally slaps. Wilson runs through this “Clocks”…

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD is one of my literary heroes. This distresses many of my female, queer, and trans friends: Torrey, you have every woman writer in the world available to admire, but you won’t shut up about a tall, handsome Nordic-dad dude who spends five pages explaining how to turn on a stove? Guilty. The stereotype of the Knausgaard fan is of a thwarted literary man eager to tell you about his own idea for a systems novel, but there are many of us out there who don’t fit that description and are obsessed—to the exasperation of our loved ones—with a writer best known for an epic six-volume work called My Struggle (yes, the same title as Hitler’s memoir; yes, it’s intentional). Knausgaard has become a byword for a certain…

ON NOVEMBER 6, 2019, the night before she opened in the starring role of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, Adrienne Warren developed a herniated disk in her back—though she didn’t know it yet. She just knew she was in pain. Her friends came over to her house and put her into a hot bath, then an ice bath to soothe her muscles. They fed her chicken to get her protein. “I was crying,” she remembers, “because I knew that Tina was there, and Oprah was coming, and all these people were counting on me, and I couldn’t walk.” Her doctor helped, but there wasn’t time for diagnostic tests, so the next day, Warren made it to the theater, barely. Backstage, Daniel J. Watts, who plays Ike Turner, held her upright.…

SEP. 33 1/3 Spotify The noted book series, which dedicates each entry to unpacking a specific album or musician, is getting the podcast treatment. Hosted by esteemed producer Prince Paul, each episode will highlight a different story in the series and expand the discussion with a guest from the world of the album. 9/12 Pineapple Street Studios, Amazon Music, and Wondery Dan Taberski (Running From COPS, Missing Richard Simmons), one of the finest audio documentarians working today, is set to take on the past 20 years with his latest project: What happened the day after 9/11 and all the days after that? Most important, what did it all mean? 544 Days Crooked Media, A24, and Gimlet In 2015, Jason Rezaian, then the Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief,…

AS A BLACK GIRL growing up in Wisconsin, I papered my bedroom walls with a collage of images cut out of the pages of Vogue, Essence, Teen Vogue, and Ebony magazines. I loved that the photos felt like an escape from life in the Midwest and was attracted to how fashion was more than just pieces of clothing—it told a story. I never saw myself in most of the images that weren’t from Black publications, but that didn’t soften my love for them. Still, I was aware of the disconnect, that something I loved so much was clearly not made for someone like me. A couple of decades later, I was given a much better understanding of why I felt that way. In August 2018, as a fashion editor at…

EVERYTHING OLD is new again,” Kitson owner Fraser Ross said with a sigh over the phone from West Hollywood in August. We were discussing the booming nostalgia market that is churning out early-aughts fashion and pop-culture trends for renewed consumption two decades later: low-rise jeans, mini-backpacks, Paris Hilton, Bennifer. They’re all back in the Zeitgeist, with only slight tweaks. Ross opened Kitson, what he called a “general store for the rich,” on Robertson Boulevard in 2000, selling everything from designer cashmere to graphic tees, Swarovski-encrusted hairbrushes, and diet books. Ten years before the launch of Instagram, when celebrities still relied on People’s “Star Tracks” to publish their candid photos, they would pop into Kitson for a new set of True Religion flares before lunch on the patio at the Ivy.…