Innholdsfortegnelse for October 11-24, 2021 i New York Magazine

KUMAIL NANJIANI would like to remind everyone about his brain, but I’ve brought him to the gym to talk about his muscles. He gets that this is all people—especially men—have wanted to talk about since the photos. You’ve seen them. He strikes a superhero pose, his shirtless torso slicked with baby oil, displaying branching veins that crisscross his arms like a complex irrigation system. Brows arched, he gazes at something in the middle distance—more muscles? He posted them from the set of Eternals in December 2019, the culmination of a 14-month process that began almost immediately after the director Chloé Zhao cast him in the movie as a (roughly) 7,000-year-old Earth defender named Kingo. There was no mandate from Zhao or the studio to remake his body in the mold…

➸ IT’S NOT AS IF one year ago it would have been impossible to find a place to stay the night in the Catskills. Since the early 2010s, a slow trickle of boutique hotels have moved into an area once dominated by rentable riverside bungalows and somehow still-functioning Borscht Belt resorts. But in the past couple of months, as the real-estate market upstate has exploded, a genuine onslaught of amenity-rich hotels have opened, or are soon to—among them wellness retreats and five-star farm stays. Piaule, a Japanese-and-Scandinavian-inspired retreat, offers Thai yoga bodywork and a menu curated by a Noma alum (Frank Ocean has already visited). Nearby, Taavo Somer has opened a hotel–slash–golf club, and an outpost of the $1,000-plus-a-night midtown hotel the Chatwal will soon spring up. We’ve parsed all…

Piaule: 403 Mesh Shorts, $99 These Rowing Blazers–esque mesh shorts are perpetually sold out online. Callicoon Hills: Weld MFG Eggshell Bucket Hat, $28 The most popular items in the hotel’s new store, apparently, are these plain, tonal hemp bucket hats. Norsdale: Samantha Dry Bouquet, $85 Sherbet-colored bouquets can be found in the Magenta room. Inness: Marisha Falkovich Spoons, $35 Inness is one of just two retailers (the other is Brooklyn shop Thank You Have a Good Day) to sell Falkovich’s ceramic serving spoons.…

THE UNDERGROUND GOURMET QUICK BITE Tuck in to a torta. A LOT OF TORTAS you get in New York are so comically meaty and overstuffed that should you manage to actually finish one, the tortería should commission a plaque commemorating the occasion and nail it to the wall. By comparison, the Mexico City–style tortas that Chicago superchef Rick Bayless serves at his new Nomad tortería, Tortazo, look svelte. Which is not to say they’re lacking or insubstantial or anything but absolutely delicious. Of the six on offer ($12.75 to $14.50), we especially like the Cubana (smoked pork loin, bacon, avocado, chipotle mustard, crema) and the cochinita pibil: slow-cooked pork shoulder with pickled red onion and a habanero salsa that will light your tongue on fire and cause steam to shoot…

FOR YEARS AFTER Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck broke up, it was treated as common knowledge that the relationship had almost ruined the actor’s career. “If I have a regret, it was doing the music video,” said Affleck in 2008, after he made his directorial debut with Gone Baby Gone. He was referring to his appearance in 2002’s “Jenny From the Block,” which featured Affleck and Lopez being surveilled by paparazzi while trying to live their fabulous lives, something they were also doing for real.¶ This brand of fame—gossip fame, inland fame—is not one to which serious actors expose themselves. Matt Damon, who has largely managed to avoid that kind of spotlight, returned to the narrative about his old friend in a recent New York Times Magazine profile: By Damon’s…

IN HER 2020 HBO comedy special, Momma, I Made It!, Yvonne Orji stands in front of an appreciative audience in Washington, D.C., telling jokes about her life. She is a confident, charismatic performer who can slip in and out of the characters she creates onstage so that she is with them, against them, laughing at them, illuminating them, all in the course of the same story. When Orji, who is Nigerian American, tells a joke about haggling at a Lagos market, she is three characters at once: the shopper pushing for the lowest price, the insulted seller, and Yvonne Orji the narrator, laughing at all of it. Then the scene cuts, and now the camera is following Orji as she and a friend wander past market stalls in Lagos, looking…

EVEN AS HE PREPARES for an all-but-certain victory in the November mayoral election, Eric Adams is facing a problem: His honeymoon is almost over before it has even officially begun. Thanks to the peculiarities of the political calendar, the minute Adams won the Democratic primary in July, he became the favorite to win the race for mayor. But it’s also the first time in modern history that New York has held a mayoral primary so early in the year. (In the past, the primaries were held in September.) In a city where Democrats have an overwhelming registration advantage, Adams is basically a lock. Betting and prediction markets give him a 97 percent chance of winning. The current mayor, Bill de Blasio, has more or less checked out of the job,…

WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, a friend died, and for weeks afterward, I thought I saw him everywhere. I didn’t suspect him of haunting me; it was more that people resembled him so strongly I believed, temporarily, that he was still alive. In September, when I learned another young friend had died in a tragic accident, I wondered if I’d see him, too. Human beings are uncomfortable with absence. We like to find patterns, fill in blanks. An individual death creates a void in reality, and almost two years of constant death has left most of us groping in the dark. By the start of October, more than 700,000 people had died of COVID-19 in the United States. A recent memorial on the National Mall takes this absence and renders…

Where Frank Ocean Takes Sound Baths: Piaule Open date: July 2021 Where: Catskill Price: From $399 What it’s like: Luxury forest bathing. Twenty-four private cedar cabins sit on stilts in the woods, each with a glass wall overlooking the treetops. Rooms are small, but the spa is giant. All told, it’s as if the compound from Ex Machina got a woodsy redesign. The project was dreamed up by Nolan McHugh and Trevor Briggs, founders of the homeware brand Piaule, which is famous for its linens and tableware. Frank Ocean has already been up for a stay. Amenities: Spa and wellness center, in-room heated stone floor, breakfast, cold plunge pool, sound baths, yoga, massages, Piaule towels and custom-made quilts everywhere. Who’s behind it: The Piaule guys, plus Brooklyn firm Garrison Architects…

ONCE UPON A time, the guests who accompanied your humble critic on his lordly processions through the fancier dining destinations around town behaved in a certain mannered, almost choreographed way. They were grateful, even giddy to be asked out to dinner at a “gourmet” restaurant. Seated in the hushed room, they talked among themselves in polite, whispering tones as the imperious servers ghosted to and fro. When the food arrived, they murmured with somber appreciation as one carefully tweezered or foraged or sauced preparation gave way to another. They weren’t paying for dinner, so why quibble about the ridiculous price of the tuna belly or the egregiously marked-up Bordeaux? After all, wasn’t this type of high-caliber cooking supposed to be expensive? Not anymore. “How much can eggplant cost?!” cried my…

“THIS NEVER HAPPENED to the other fella.” George Lazenby’s quip in the opening sequence of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) has become the rallying cry for the Daniel Craig era of Bond pictures, which began with the hero as an inexperienced, impulsive agent just earning his license to kill and now ends with him as a weathered, embittered man who’s desperately in love. In retrospect, it feels as if Lazenby’s cute, fourth-wall-breaking acknowledgment (reportedly the star’s own ad-lib) that his post-Connery turn might be a different Bond liberated the series: Once that line landed, nobody had to worry about consistency between the Bond actors or even the individual movies. Of course, within the Craig cycle, the inter-film callbacks, echoes, and through-lines have been nonstop—and not always for the best.…

TV 1. Watch Succession Who’s up for some Boar on the Floor? HBO, October 17. The third season of Succession begins with Logan Roy (Brian Cox) freaking out about his future, his son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) plotting moves, and everyone in the Roy family scheming and saying mean things to each other. JEN CHANEY MOVIES 2. See Dune Part one, technically. In theaters and HBO Max, October 22. Frank Herbert’s space saga has gotten the adaptation it deserves—gorgeous, vast, unfriendly as all hell. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune has manipulative psychic covens, sandworms that look like butt-holes, and a cast that includes Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. ALISON WILLMORE POP MUSIC 3. Listen to Optimist From Billie’s big bro. Interscope Records, October 15. Finneas is a singer-songwriter and producer best known for his…

MADISON SUTTON HAD been a real-estate agent for less than a year when the city shut down. Sutton, now 25, was surviving on a trickle of leads and started posting apartment tours to TikTok. A few months later, she was getting so many inquiries—up to 500 a day—that she ended up hiring a team of two agents to help field them. “I was doing 25,000 to 30,000 steps per day,” said Sutton, who now has almost 95,000 followers. “I had to start wearing knee braces because I was going to so many walk-ups.” Her posts vary from straightforward walk-throughs to comedic takes on the Murray Hill dating scene. (If he can’t commit to a full wall in his apartment, he can’t commit to you.) It turns out that TikTok, famous…

At Morandi Calvin Klein and Kyra Sedgwick in 2009, Sarah Jessica Parker in 2009, and Malcolm Gladwell in 2013. At the original Pastis Usher in 2011, Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce in 2005, Beyoncé in 2009, and Marc Jacobs in 2012. At Balthazar Julianne Moore in 2014, Victoria Beckham in 2016, Oprah Winfrey and Anna Wintour in 1998, and Katie Holmes in 2009.…

WHEN DINING SCHOLARS sift through the ashes of this grim era for clues on how to survive the next Great Plague, the case of the little seafood spot called Dame, which has been open in one form or another since last year, will be one to study. As any fan can tell you, it began life in March 2020 as a pop-up in a Lower East Side coffee shop, then emerged a few months later in Greenwich Village as Dame Summer Club, a seasonal operation serving chef Ed Szymanski’s deliciously high-minded (and for thousands of cooped-up Instagram addicts, delicious-looking) version of fish and chips. In time, there were more attention-getting pop-up events and then, over the winter, after signing a long-term lease on their dream restaurant, Szymanski and his partner,…

WHEN I FIRST stepped into the void of David Geffen Hall—now a year or so from next fall’s reopening night—I had the impression of a room that had been stripped to bare concrete. On closer inspection, virtually every component was new: the stage with its risers and lifts and high shell, the reconfigured walls and balconies, even the raked floor. Only the chevroned ceiling remained from Avery Fisher Hall, and it will soon be hidden by a cloud of metal mesh. All these elements add up to a $550 million gamble that, after decades of making do, the next iteration of this troubled room will be acoustically superb. If a concert hall is doing its job, the strings are swaddled in warm cashmere, the brass glistens and blends without sounding…

A YOUNG BLACK MAN RAGES by the side of the road, aims a pistol, and bellows a gangster line: “Prepare to die, mothafucka.” Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which relaunched the Metropolitan Opera on September 27, opens in a blaze of fury, the orchestra seething with such force that it threatens to overpower the story before it even begins. Immediately, we understand two things: (1) We will spend the next few hours learning what’s drawn Charles to the lip of murder, and (2) he won’t deliver on his threat. We know this because Charles’s last name is Blow, and the author of the memoir that inspired the opera is a columnist at the New York Times, not a convict on death row. To their immense credit, librettist Kasi Lemmons…