Innholdsfortegnelse for September 27-October 10, 2021 i New York Magazine

1 New York’s latest cover story, a collaboration with The Verge, reported on the revolt of delivery workers in “Ride Like Hell,” an account of how 65,000 laborers are fighting back after years of mistreatment (September 13–26). Bloomberg’s Mark Gongloff wrote, “Ultimately this is a story of how marginalized workers we have called heroes for the past 18 months had to band together to fend for themselves against a hostile city and industry.” Journalist Edward Ongweso Jr. tweeted, “Only a handful of pieces bother centering workers this much and this long so that you see the infrastructure they cobble together to survive despite deeply exploitative & unsafe conditions.” BuzzFeed’s Melissa Segura pointed out the story “is as much about delivery workers as it is about police” and noted that “inequality…

HASAN PIKER was in a rage. A million tabs were pinched together like sardines at the top of his browser. His jittery cursor bounced between them, summoning network-news chyrons, YouTube rants, viral tweets, and TikTok memes. The day’s trending topic? Piker, who is 30 years old, had purchased a $2.7 million house in West Hollywood. An ordinary Twitch streamer’s housing wouldn’t make headlines, but over the past five years, Piker has become one of the most prominent socialist pundits in America. The controversy about the purchase had made it to Fox News and Breitbart, and Piker was prepared to take on the interlopers who logged on to see the fireworks. (“The only reason my house is expensive is because of the area I live in,” he growled. “Are you guys…

How’d the day go? It was really hard because I kept getting paired with teenagers. When I’m in situations like that, I just get a little scared. I’m like, Oh, great, I’m going to lose. What I learned at the tournament is that if you see a move that works, don’t be afraid to play it. Don’t be a sloppy mess. What’s your favorite piece? The knight. It has something that’s unique to it because it’s able to walk, turn, and sort of jump over other pieces. If you have a knight in the center of the board, it’s almost like a giant octopus. How long have you been playing? Like a year now. The pandemic sucked, and we had nothing to do, so I just took advantage and learned…

SHENARRI “GREENS” FREEMAN, the executive chef at Cadence, a new soul-food restaurant in the East Village, contemplates her masterpiece: two golden batons of deep-fried lasagna atop a reddish-orange tomato sauce. “I’m really proud of this dish,” she says. “It’s innovative and futuristic.” Like everything at Cadence, which is owned by serial restaurateur Ravi DeRossi, the southern-fried lasagna is vegan. “I was passionate about having it on the menu,” says Freeman, who graduated from the Institute of Culinary Education’s newly launched plant-forward Health-Supportive Culinary Arts program in June. “Lasagna is something I grew up eating in Richmond, Virginia, something my mother could make that would last the entire week.” Of course, unlike Cadence’s iteration, Freeman’s childhood lasagna was full of ground beef and cheddar cheese. Her professional version is equally indulgent:…

ONE NIGHT IN 1986, while standing at the top ramp of a Guggenheim Museum opening as an art-world wannabe, peering down at this social universe that seemed so distant and magical to me, I found myself standing next to an older man. He seemed to be doing the same thing. Both of us were in our own worlds. After a while, he turned at me and said, “Hello, Jerry.” I was surprised. I looked at him blankly. After a pause, I said, “I am sorry. What is your name?” He said, “My name is Jasper Johns.” It was a perfect picture of my unchecked egoism and his imperturbability, modesty, and honesty. And he answered exactly what I asked. It felt like proof that by then, Johns was being seen as…

Georgia Anne Muldrow, at Blue Note, 9/29 and 30; $25. The West Coast singer-songwriter, producer, and rapper traverses the worlds of funk, soul, jazz, and hip-hop in a room worthy of her impressive talent. Erykah Badu, at Radio City Music Hall, 9/30; from $60. The Texas hip-hop-soul icon pulls out classics: “Tyrone,” “Window Seat,” etc. With Questlove and Westside Gunn. Lil Baby, at Prudential Center, 10/6; Barclays Center, 10/7; from $37. Be prepared for smash hits and thug tears as the newly minted Atlanta hip-hop heavyweight performs hits like “On Me” and “The Bigger Picture” in Brooklyn. Chris Stapleton, at MSG, 10/8; from $70. The venerable country crooner brings powerful belters Yola and Marcus King to his long-running roadshow. James Blake, at Radio City Music Hall, 10/9; from $85. Delicate,…

I KEEP ASKING William Mullan if he’s sure he’s comfortable. “We don’t have to go through with this,” I say. “It’s not too late to reconsider!” But he assures me he’s ready as he unfurls a turquoise rope ladder and removes a long fruit-picking claw from his tote bag. We’re on an elevated footpath that runs parallel to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in South Williamsburg on Yom Kippur, which means the neighborhood’s streets are even busier than usual. Below us, cars pummel their way down the sunken highway, their whirring tires and nonstop honking amplified by the BQE’s canyonlike design. Mullan is wearing pearl earrings, a crop top, jean cutoffs, and a pair of Timberlands. “The last time I was here, I stepped in shit, and it smelled so bad I…

DAVID CHASE IS TELLING STORIES AGAIN. The 76-year-old creator of The Sopranos is seated at the kitchen table of a production office in Santa Monica, eating takeout Mexican food and telling me about the time his paternal grandfather, Joseph Fusco, confessed to killing a man. Fusco told the story to a then-12-year-old Chase, who had been sent to Fusco’s apple farm in Hudson, New York, for a week during summer vacation. They were sitting in the kitchen one night after dinner, green apples piled in a bowl between them. “He was telling me he murdered a guy in Buffalo,” Chase recalls. “They got in an argument in a bar. They went outside.” Things escalated—Fusco hit him in the head with a brick. The other guy was a romano— Roman—though not…

DAY 1 MY FRIEND PAM AND I BOOKED ONE-WAY tickets from JFK to Montego Bay on American Airlines. We went through Customs quickly and got a taxi at the airport for the hour-and-a-half drive to Rockhouse Hotel & Spa (from $125), which is along the coastline and is filled with lush, gorgeous greenery. ❑4 P.M.: SETTLE IN, SIP LOCAL RUM ➽ We got to the hotel and immediately put on our bikinis. We decompressed and ordered dinner to our room. They have incredible fish, so starting that night, we were eating a lot of red snapper. It’s Jamaica, where they have some of the best rum in the world, so I had Appleton Estate–rum punch. DAY 2 ❑1 P.M.: BOOK A MASSAGE ➽ We stayed in Rockhouse’s premium villas, which…

AFTER A DECADE LIVING in an apartment near his studio in Bushwick, artist Adrian Nivola wanted to buy a house big enough to work in. But it had to be just the right one with northern light and a garden. He had been “visiting enough houses that I felt my real-estate agent began to suspect me of wasting her time,” he says. “She was French, and she seemed to think I was absurd because I didn’t like so many of the houses that I was supposed to fall in love with, and the same was true with neighborhoods.” In 2019, he finally found this Bedford-Stuyvesant house that had been happily neglected (so many houses he saw had their charm undone by renovation), with light streaming in through the kitchen, a…

IT’S 8:21 ON A CRISP September morning at the Union Square Greenmarket, and Brooks Headley, chef-owner of the East Village’s Superiority Burger, is already running late. Granted, that’s because he’s waiting on a pair of groggy reporters who have persuaded him to let them tag along on his shopping rounds and interrogate him about the impending relocation of his five-seat cult-favorite destination hole-in-the-wall to a much larger space around the corner on Avenue A, the former home of the Odessa diner. For Headley, a punk-rock drummer turned Del Posto pastry chef turned produce-for-the-people restaurateur, there are few things worse than chefs who use the market as a prop to advertise their overblown local-and-seasonal quotient to fawning journalists. In fact, he lambasted these chefs in an essay in his first cookbook,…

Brutus Bakeshop’s Guava–Passion-Fruit Pop-Tart $8; at Ursula, 724 Sterling Pl., Crown Heights LANI HALLIDAY’S sprinkle-spangled Pop-Tarts debuted at a 2020 Maison Yaki pop-up to much-deserved fanfare. These days, devotees of their snappy pastry (Halliday cuts the pie crust with coconut yogurt, which crisps up the texture and imparts a subtle hint of coconut flavor), bright and balanced guava filling, and breezy passion-fruit glaze can find them in the pastry case of the vegan-friendly café Ursula. Erin McKenna’s Bakery’s Iced Lemon Tea Cake $5 per slice, $40 per loaf; 248 Broome St. THE LEMON tea cake at this pioneering Lower East Side vegan and gluten-free bakery has a slightly crackly exterior that conceals a plush, citrus-forward crumb. (Applesauce swirled into the batter is the secret behind the decadent texture.) And the…

SIMONE BILES HAS a keen air sense, the ability to let muscle memory pilot against the brain’s logical judgment. She can clear her mind and think of absolutely nothing. Catlike in her reflexes, she locates herself in space and lands on her feet every time. This has been the mark of her genius since childhood, the thing that made her different. Watching her is like trying to catch light. You think, Did that just happen? She flies higher and is more nimble than her competition, with more room for failure because what she attempts is that much more difficult. She has beaten the records of her idols—Nastia Liukin, Shawn Johnson, Alicia Sacramone—and they think she’s the undeniable greatest too. She’s what superheroes are made of, except she’s made of bones…

AT SOME POINT during a home renovation, designer Leanne Ford decided the olive-green color of the oven she had ordered no longer fit the overall aesthetic. Her first thought was to paint it. Her brother Steve Ford had another idea: Wrap it like a car in 3M vinyl. With a custom-color sheet (you can order rolls online), a utility knife, and a felt squeegee (to smooth out any bubbles), she quickly transformed the oven color into a warm terra-cotta. A few months later, using the same technique, the siblings covered the front panel of a run-of-the-mill stainless-steel dishwasher with a muted pistachio. (We tried it ourselves—this bright-red refrigerator was once a stained white.) There are many such ways to improve a kitchen without taking it down to the studs, which…

ANNA KORNEEVA Sixth-grader, Sheepshead Bay How was the tournament? It was amazing for me personally. I won three out of six. I mostly lost to people who have a lot higher rating than me. But I rematched the first guy I lost to. And won. My third game, I blundered. I blundered a lot. Why? Because of the tournament. It got on my nerves because it had clocks timing ten minutes per player. I usually like to think a lot to make sure that I don’t blunder, but the time counting was just so pressuring. How did you start playing? In my local library. That’s where I met my chess teacher. He told me that I was so good, and he called a nearby club on Brighton Beach, White Rook.…

A FEW YEARS AGO, Brock Middleton was just another former real-estate-finance guy in Dallas running a sourdough side hustle out of his house. Today, after training with chef-fermenter Misti Norris (of Petra & the Beast in Dallas) and joining the Eleven Madison Park team as a cook shortly before the pandemic and quickly rising in the ranks, the tall 31-year-old moves about the library-quiet kitchen as the newly vegan restaurant’s first fermentation sous-chef. “I don’t know who came up with the title,” says Middleton. “It’s above my pay grade.” Regardless of what it’s called, a dedicated pickler is not novel. David Chang had one (Dan Felder). Noma’s—David Zilber—wrote a best-selling book about fermentation. But the position is perhaps more key at a vegan restaurant. “When you’re not using animal protein,”…