Innholdsfortegnelse for January 17-30, 20222 i New York Magazine

ON SEPTEMBER 4, 2018, Nauman Hussain, a 28-year-old professional paintball player, was working at his family’s business when a state inspector arrived for a routine visit. Nauman’s father owned Prestige Limousine, a small company touting “modern, classy vehicles” for “exquisite wedding, prom, event, and special occasion” transportation in the Albany area, and Nauman operated it day to day, sometimes answering to his father’s name. The inspector examined Prestige’s vehicles and placed an orange-and-white sticker roughly the size of a license plate on the windshield of its workhorse, a Ford Excursion. “OUT-OF-SERVICE,” it read. “This motor vehicle has been declared UNSERVICEABLE.” The Excursion was a beast, a 10,000-pound SUV that had been chopped in half and welded back together with 12 extra feet of carriage in the middle, effectively turning it…

Best Overall Coat 1. Carhartt Chore Coat, $45 Carhartt’s chore coat for dogs comes recommended by Greenpoint dog mom Kelly Mittendorf, Strategist editor Maxine Builder, Yena Kim (owner of Shiba Inu Bodhi and Jindo Luc), and dog walker Will Ferman. Ferman likes that it keeps larger dogs warm without limiting their range of motion. Kim appreciates how the sleeveless design doesn’t snag on the fur of dogs’ armpits. Plus it saves time by keeping mud off rambunctious dogs like Luc, who rolls around at the park. Best Overall Rain Jacket 2. Ruffwear Sun Shower Dog Raincoat, $60 Kate Anello, a project manager for Apple, compares this coat to one from Patagonia. Tory Waxman, co-founder of Sundays dog food, is another fan, especially for the rain. It…

IT WAS LATE in ’64 when I finally had a little income that I decided, Okay, now I can get rid of Mother’s castoffs,” says Andrew Alpern on a tour of the one-bedroom co-op in the Penn South middle-income complex in Chelsea he’s lived in since 1962, when it was new. “And I went to B. Altman”—the long-gone department store whose genteel building still stands on 34th and Fifth—“and bought that couch you are sitting on. I paid $468, on sale, which back then was a lot of money.” Alpern, 83, often digresses in the course of conversation, one thing leading to another that reminds him of any number of references and stories relating back to his original topic, because he is an expert in excavating the history of life…

LAST SEPTEMBER, Chitra Agrawal started getting messages from excited friends and customers regarding what appeared to be her latest retail expansion. The founder, with her husband, Ben Garthus, of a line of Indian-inspired condiments and simmer sauces called Brooklyn Delhi had been growing the brand for seven years, from a stand at holiday markets to national shelf space at Whole Foods and a partnership with Blue Apron. And now her fans were curious: Was Brooklyn Delhi private-labeling its garlic achaar—an intricately balanced, chile-spiked Indian condiment—for Trader Joe’s? No, it wasn’t. Trader Joe’s garlic achaar was unrelated to Brooklyn Delhi’s garlic achaar. But there was more to the story, as Agrawal revealed on Instagram. “I wasn’t going to post about this but I’ve been tagged enough to realize that either people…

WHEN I MEET Agnieszka Pilat, a pixieish Polish émigré who has become the court painter of the potentates of Silicon Valley, she has just returned from Necker Island, the private Caribbean domain of Richard Branson. “I’m always the poorest person in the room” at places like that, she says with a laugh, curling her paint-flecked Yves Saint Laurent sneakers beneath her on the couch as she absentmindedly twists and untwists her hair. We’ve met up in her Chelsea studio, in which paintings of robotic limbs in repose dot the concrete walls. She has another studio in San Francisco. In each, she kennels a duplicate Spot, her 70-pound emergency-yellow cybernetic dog, muse, studio assistant (it paints, too), and, in some sense, protector, both on loan to her from Boston Dynamics, where…

ASGHAR FARHADI’S A Hero is a moral fable and a mousetrap, a drama that plays like a thriller—the gripping, often infuriating tale of a beleaguered Good Samaritan who learns that no good deed goes unpunished. Farhadi is one of the world’s great filmmakers; as a further demonstration of his ability to build stomach-gnawing suspense out of everyday interactions, this movie is well worth seeing. But the generosity of spirit that was so pivotal to his earlier work seems to be in retreat. A Hero’s story is set in motion while Rahim (Amir Jadidi), an inmate at a debtors’ prison, is on a two-day leave. His girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), finds a handbag full of 17 gold coins, and Rahim decides to return it. The gold could have gone some way…

“I’M GOING TO put in long hours—no one in this city is going to outwork me,” Eric Adams said on day one, and he went on to rack up at least 47 public appearances in his first ten days as mayor—traveling to work on a Citi Bike and the subway, shoveling snow off the steps of his Brooklyn brownstone, sliding down the pole at a firehouse, making guest appearances on national news programs, and solemnly attending a vigil in the Bronx following a horrific fire that claimed 17 lives. “It’s not about showmanship—it’s about showing up,” he said in his first address to the city. Like Mayor Ed Koch, who took the reins at City Hall four decades ago in the shadow of a fiscal crisis that required massive layoffs…

OUR GOVERNMENT just dropped a hot new quarter featuring Maya Angelou with her arms dramatically aloft, posed before a bird’s giant wingspan. It’s the first of a series, each depicting women on the back. (George Washington is still on the front.) Arrival of the long-planned quarter was met with joy tempered with bafflement. Hey—aren’t we in a coin shortage? The answer is complicated. For some time now, the United States of America, among her other struggles, has indeed been in the silvery throes of a slow-moving crisis of coin. It became apparent in the spring of 2020, when our sudden lack of desire to get breathed on forced many of us to stop transacting money IRL. The Federal Reserve found that in April 2020, only a third of Americans had…

SO HOW DO YOU enjoy a lavish feast from the south of India while dining indoors (because at Semma there’s a “hospital-quality air-filter system” but currently no outdoor dining) during the great Omicron spike with your KN95 mask firmly affixed to your face? “You don’t, Dad,” said one daughter as we waited, a bit apprehensively, for dinner to arrive at the latest Chintan Pandya–Roni Mazumdar operation, which has been open for a couple of months now on Greenwich Avenue in the West Village. “I think we scarf everything down really quickly, like we’re in the Army, Dad, and then we get out of here,” said the other daughter as alluring, though possibly messy, platters of mung-bean pancakes, great three-cornered dosas, and delicate helpings of stewed goat intestines (kudal varuval) began…

IN THE TIME OF COVID, one man’s empty dining room is another’s hoshigaki parlor. At least that’s what visitors to the West Village tearoom Té Company might have surmised when they stopped in for a takeout order in December only to look up and see the ceiling hung with neat rows of slowly drying hachiya persimmons, each acorn-shaped fruit attached to a beam with a length of red-and-white butcher twine knotted around a screw embedded in its top. Frederico Ribeiro, the chef who owns Té with his wife, the tea maven Elena Liao, first encountered the traditional preservation technique as a sous-chef at Per Se, where the fruit was aged in dry storage and paired with cheese, and he began experimenting with it himself at Té. But it wasn’t until…

Few things scare actors more than mangling an accent—so say their dialect coaches. Here, the pros offer a few words of advice for perfecting every single vowel, consonant, and diphthong. DONE PROPERLY, the work of a dialect coach is everywhere and nowhere at once. Done wrong, a so-called dialect disaster will preoccupy viewers to distraction. This awards season, accents have become the topic du jour on the press circuit. Exhibit A: director Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. The $75 million biographical drama features a mishmash of Italian accents, including Jared Leto saying, “He’s-ah no-ah spring chicken-ah!” while Jeremy Irons elocutes in quasi-English Chiantishire diction. Lady Gaga—who worked with a personal dialect coach for six months prior to production—speaks in an accent another coach on the film later derided as sounding…

THE PAST FEW Januarys have not been kind. 2020 arrived under a pall of fear about a new virus wreaking havoc overseas; the first week of 2021 was marred by chaos at the U.S. Capitol and rumors of possible escalation with Iran. This month has barely started, and hundreds of thousands are falling ill each day while we wonder how much future is left for us. The all-consuming darkness of a protracted public-health crisis forces a choice: Lean in or look away. Take stock of the horrors facing us or seek peace in distraction or denial. Pandemic-era pop culture shares this dilemma. Creatives never seem quite sure how thick to lay it on, whether our peaking nihilism is best addressed via dire allegory or brutal directness, whether our entertainment ought…

IN EARLY JANUARY, as New York’s Omicron cases were climbing, Leroy Church, who has acted in Disney’s The Lion King on and off since 2013, flew back to the city from the show’s tour to find that three men in the Broadway cast couldn’t perform that night. Church would have to fill in for the part of the Bird Man, which involves an elaborate costume and a solo dance. At the hour call before the show, the dance supervisor taught him the choreography. “I’m doing everything Ican to be the last one standing,” Church says. “I keep knocking on wood.” So far, he has tested negative. Church is what is known in theater parlance as a “swing”: an actor who fills in the gaps when other performers are absent. Unlike…

➸ IT’S UNLIKELY THAT anyone hoping to shed a few pounds this New Year is considering eating more health salad. Health salad, for the uninitiated, is a Jewish-deli staple consisting primarily of shredded cabbage and carrots thoroughly sloshed with a slightly sweet white-vinegar dressing. (The kitchen at 2nd Ave Deli adds green peppers, celery, and chives to the mix; up at Zabar’s, the deli-case crew is partial to cucumbers.) One reason health salad is considered healthy is because, unlike its cousin coleslaw, it forgoes mayo. The reason it may not be considered healthy is guilt by association: It runs with a rough and calorific crowd, including pastrami, blintzes, potato pancakes, noodle kugel, and chopped liver. No one goes to a deli for their health, after all, let alone just to…

A CHICKEN. A cornfield. A tractor with a faded American flag flapping in the foreground. As this montage plays, Connie Conway croons a ’50s tune called “Kansas State Line” about how he has never left home but is a “rover at heart.” After this opening to Somebody Somewhere—the new HBO series created by and starring comedian and cabaret singer Bridget Everett—there’s a hard cut to someone whose dream of leaving has failed: Sam Miller (Everett), who sits in a fluorescent-lit room, marking a standardized-test booklet and filing it among a sad stack of folders. Sam does not fit in her hometown of Manhattan, Kansas. She may have tried to get out for a while. Now she’s in her 40s, with a job she dislikes, disconnected from everyone and unsure of…

TV 1. Watch Pam & Tommy The tale of the sex tape. Hulu, February 2. You might think you are mentally prepared to watch this limited series about the relationship between Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee and the stir caused by their leaked sex tape. But having watched some of the episodes, please know: You are probably not prepared for what you’re about to see. JEN CHANEY BOOKS 2. Read Fuccboi Championed by the late Giancarlo DiTrapano. Little, Brown and Company, January 25. This nervy, blustering first novel by Sean Thor Conroe examines the life of a 20-something, also named Sean, who makes bike deliveries, keeps a shifting roster of “baes,” and obsesses over his literary influences. Eerily true to anyone ever ghosted by a fuccboi of their…