Innholdsfortegnelse for January 31-February 13, 2022 i New York Magazine

1 In New York’s latest cover story, Lila Shapiro examined the career of Joss Whedon, the Hollywood force behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Avengers, whom collaborators have accused of misconduct and misogyny (“TheUndoing of Joss Whedon,” January 17–30). Television critic Emily St. James called the feature “a tremendous piece of cultural journalism that allows a man to damn himself” and praised its writing as “worth reading on a pure craft level.” Reader Mel Shamie said, “This is so, so well done: A clearly well-researched piece that paints Joss Whedon neither as superhero nor villain, just human.” The Guardian’s video-games editor, Keza MacDonald, wrote that the article was “morbidly fascinating—a portrait of a particular kind of manipulative male-feminist nerd known well to all women who have ever engaged with…

THE DAY GEORGE ZIMMERMAN WAS ACQUITTED was the end of a very brief moment in which I gave America the benefit of the doubt. Six days later, Barack Obama, the man responsible for that temporary suspension of disbelief, gave a speech that drove home for me how foolish I had been. The president acknowledged the pain many of us felt, but, ever the peddler of hope, he stressed that “as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better.” I didn’t believe it when he said it, and it sounds even sillier to me now so many years later. Obama brought up his daughters. “Each successive generation seems to be making progress in…

June 17, 2015 Dylann Roof murders nine Black people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. After the shooting, investigators find a handwritten journal in Roof ’s car that details his motivations. “MY NAME IS Dylann Storm Roof. I was born on the third day of April, 1994 in Columbia, South Carolina. I was not raised in a racist home or enviroment [sic]. Living in the South, almost every White person has a small amount of racial awareness, simply because of the number of negroes in this part of the country. But it is a superficial awareness … The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the…

BEFORE DANA SCHUTZ’S Open Casket (2016) came to the Whitney Biennial, the painting was displayed nearly 4,000 miles away at a commercial gallery in Berlin. It was part of a solo exhibition titled “Waiting for the Barbarians,” some of whose works—the gallery noted—Schutz had created in response to the “increasingly blurred” lines between “fact and fiction” in American culture. This collection of works would “reflect real events.” The painting, equally clinical and tempestuous, depicts Emmett Till. Factually, Emmett was 14 years old when he was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Factually, the child’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, then Mamie Till, had sent her son from Chicago to visit family in Money, Mississippi. Factually, Emmett was kidnapped. His mutilated body was later sent home to Chicago and displayed in an open…

May 25, 2020 George Floyd, 46, accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes, is held down by police officers in Minneapolis during an arrest. One of the officers, Derek Chauvin, kneels on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, killing Floyd. Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old Black girl, films the murder. Overnight, she posts the video on her Facebook page. May 26, 2020 In the early hours of the morning, the Minneapolis Police Department publishes an “investigative update” titled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” In response, Darnella posts, “Medical incident??? Watch outtt they killed him and the proof is clearlyyyy there!!” By the end of the day, her video has gone viral, protests have started in Minneapolis, and the police chief has fired the four…

TWO WEEKS AFTER uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd left Atlanta littered with ashes, protesters flooded the city’s streets once more. The police had killed again, and this time the victim was an Atlantan: 27-year-old father and music lover Rayshard Brooks, shot in the back twice by Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe. The Wendy’s where Rolfe killed Brooks the day before went up in flames, lighting up the night as protesters chanted and mourned, decrying a system that disproportionately takes the lives of Black people as a matter of course. “You are disgracing our city,” Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had declared when the protests broke out two weeks earlier. Bottoms’s admonishment was celebrated by pundits and politicians, winning her a national profile. “If you care about this city,…

IN MARCH 2012, with George Zimmerman still not charged for the killing of Trayvon Martin, three former student activists, Phillip Agnew, Ahmad Abuznaid, and Gabriel Pendas, issued a call to action on Facebook. Nailah Summers, then a student at the University of Florida, was on the conference call set up to discuss what could be done; she had gone on a school trip to Mississippi, and the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was still present in her mind. Social-justice history has often been made by the young: Members of the Black Panther Party were on average around 20 years old. The Little Rock Nine were high-school students, and the Greensboro Four were college students. The group on that call soon organized a march from Daytona Beach to Sanford,…

STRATEGIST ➸ THESE PAST FEW YEARS, facing the ongoing pandemic, a return of urban firestorms, and now “atmospheric rivers,” many have found their emergency-preparedness stashes insufficient (after Hurricane Ida hit New York, for example, Google searches for sump pumps spiked 600 percent). As things don’t exactly look like they’ll be improving, we conferred with cleanup professionals, survivalists, and emergency experts to identify the best versions of products in seven categories you may want to keep on hand, including a wet/dry vac capable of sucking up 16 gallons of water.…

STEPHANIE PARILLA Behavioral therapist, Williamsburg Do you ski or snowboard? Snowboard. I started two years ago when I went to Mountain Creek in New Jersey with some friends. I’m a very cautious person. Like, I mean, I love my life—I didn’t want to die. But I went for it. And not to be cocky, but I’ve gotten a lot better. I recently boarded on one of those ramps and landed some shit. What does being a behavioral therapist entail? I work with kids on the spectrum, which can be very complicated but can also be amazing. I analyze their behaviors, then work with them to increase some and decrease others. And you have to use clinical judgment to put things in a hierarchy—What do we need to prioritize right now?…

MOST PEOPLE KNOW Quinta Brunson as “the Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date” or the BuzzFeed Meme Girl. She got her start as a stand-up comedian but found her audience by memeing well, as she puts it, playing characters like “the girl who could Milly Rock on any block” and the woman who, shocked by her date’s ability to afford a large popcorn, yells, “He got money!” So when Brunson’s sitcom Abbott Elementary debuted on ABC this past December, much of Twitter exclaimed, “The ‘He Got Money Girl’ is on TV now? I love that for her!” unaware that she is also the show’s creator, writer, and executive producer. Brunson, 32, isn’t bothered by those who think being the subject of BuzzFeed videos was what launched her to…

Jennifer’s Body, Prime Video  Yellowjackets executive producer Karyn Kusama’s 2009 film is a modern horror classic and stars Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried. For more female-gaze high-school horror, try this. Now and Then, HBO Max  Yellowjackets is ultimately just grim-dark Now and Then. Both flit among four adult women in the present day and their period-piece adolescence 25 years prior. Also: tiny Christina Ricci. Raw, Netflix Julia Ducournau’s precursor to Titane has all of the gory elements that made you watch Yellowjackets with your hands over your eyes while likewise putting a fresh spin on the teen-girl-coming-of-age story. Santa Clarita Diet, Netflix This gone-too-soon comedy series stars Drew Barrymore as an undead suburban mom who develops the need to consume human flesh. Plus Liv Hewson (Yellowjackets’s…

February 26, 2012 Trayvon Martin, 17, leaves his relative’s home in Sanford, Florida, to go to a local 7-Eleven for a bag of Skittles and a beverage. As he is walking home, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch captain, calls 911 and reports seeing a person who looks “suspicious.” Zimmerman then confronts Trayvon and shoots and kills him. February 28, 2012 Trayvon’s family retains Benjamin Crump, a lawyer known for representing the parents of Martin Lee Anderson, a Black 14-year-old who died at a Florida Juvenile Justice boot camp for teens in 2006 after being beaten and suffocated by guards. Crump had helped the Andersons reach a $5 million settlement with the state. March 8, 2012 Crump and Trayvon’s family file a wrongful-death lawsuit and demand that law enforcement hand over 911…

IN TONI MORRISON’S novel Beloved, a stunning scene unfolds when a community of freedmen former slaves assembles in the woods. After a moment of prayer, Baby Suggs slams her stick on the ground and beckons everyone to let loose. A frenzy ensues. Children laugh. Men dance. Women wail. And, before long, their twisting hips and roaring laughter and salty tears melt into an ecstatic choreography of praise and protest. After the earth settles, Baby Suggs—the 70-year-old “unchurched” preacher—addresses the multitude who, every Saturday afternoon, carry their scarred backs and calloused hands into the clearing. “Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” The sermon is short and the message is clear: Only…

JOHNETTA ELZIE WANTS to remind you that she—and not DeRay Mckesson—was there first. Ever since Elzie left Campaign Zero, the police-reform organization she and Mckesson founded along with Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Samuel Sinyangwe, she has refused to give on-the-record interviews about what went wrong. But now, she says, she’s ready to be blunt and honest—qualities Elzie argues have been “missing from the movement for a very long time.” On August 9, 2014, Elzie was on the scene in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, shortly after Michael Brown was shot; she was there when his body was still on the ground. “I saw a tweet from someone who said there was a Black man who got shot by the cops and was left dead in broad daylight,” Elzie,…

ANDREW SMITH HAD HIS ARMS in the air when NYPD officer Michael Sher forcibly snatched down his face mask and fired pepper spray into his eyes. Smith and hundreds of others had gathered at the corner of Bedford and Tilden Avenues in Flatbush to peacefully protest police violence and racial injustice, as millions across the country were doing in the days after George Floyd’s murder. “I made sure my hands [were] exaggeratedly almost in a ‘YMCA’ stance,” Smith told the Daily News, “to make clear that I’m not here to make an issue.” His compliance didn’t matter. White people protesting alongside Smith also had their hands up, but Sher singled out the 31-year-old Black Brooklyn resident. “I ripped the shit off, and I used it,” Sher boasted of the incident…

“LET TODAY BE the last day that you ever doubt Black trans power,” I cried into a microphone in the summer of 2020. I was addressing a crowd of nearly 15,000 people dressed in varying shades of white outside the Brooklyn Museum. Our uniform paid homage to a 1917 NAACP silent march for Black lynching victims. Now, more than a century later, we had gathered to honor the Black transgender people murdered during the coronavirus pandemic and before it. We chanted the often overlooked names of folks like Layleen Polanco, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, and Riah Milton. We imagined a world where Black trans people didn’t have to fight so hard to exist. The Black Trans Lives Matter rally sprang from the unrest that followed the murder…

ON FEBRUARY 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, because as a Black boy walking in a gated community, he was deemed “suspicious.” Zimmerman’s acquittal appalled a nation often willfully blind to the vulnerability of living while Black. Ten years later, “BLACK LIVES MATTER” has grown from a hashtag to a protester’s cry to a cultural force that has reshaped American politics, society, and daily life. It is, at the same time, a specific collection of organizations and people whose decisions have attracted both applause and criticism; whose actions have been a source of intrigue; whose personal relationships have both strengthened and splintered under the stress and exposure. This special issue attempts to tell the story of the first decade of Black…

THE HISTORY OF THE HOODIE aligns with America’s divisions of class, race, and identity. It has served as a vehicle for both this country’s dreams (athleticism, higher education, luxury) and denials (counterculture, anti-Establishment, racial injustice). It was born in the 1930s at Champion when the clothing company that made sweatshirts attached a hood. It soon became popular with athletes and laborers in the Northeast because the added fabric served as a form of protection against the elements and later with high-school athletes, who would wear their schools’ logos and crests on their chests. Then, in 1973, the beat dropped in the Bronx, and the hoodie became the uniform of MCs, stickup kids, graffiti artists, and b-boys. A staple of hip-hop culture, the hoodie represented defiance, the down low, discretion, and…

RAMSEY ORTA WAS A FRIEND OF ERIC GARNER’S for five years. He watched as police officers Justin D’Amico and Daniel Pantaleo stopped Garner and attempted to arrest him on July 17, 2014. He was recording as Pantaleo held Garner in a choke hold that was banned by the NYPD and as his friend uttered his final words: “I can’t breathe.” Orta has since had a series of run-ins with the judicial system, facing numerous arrests and serving prison time on drug and gun charges. Orta alleges that police have been trying to get revenge on him. In 2021, Orta published a book, A Shot in History: the Poisoned System. i had just gotten home from work, and from picking up my daughter, and was on my way to get something…

UNLESS YOU KNOW what to look for, it’s not clear why the photo is notable, let alone historic. It shows a football field, Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, before the start of a game. The teams are on their respective sidelines. Nothing is happening. The playing surface is still smooth, and if anything stands out, it’s the 50-yard-line logo: SF, for San Francisco. If you aren’t looking closely for the player wearing No. 7, the only one sitting down, you’ll probably miss him. But he’s there, a red speck near the bottom of the frame. Colin Kaepernick’s protest would soon upend the world of professional sports, though nine months earlier, his body had betrayed him. He had lost his starting-quarterback gig to a younger player and suffered a season-ending…

MAYBE I AM NOT in a good place. Maybe it’s mood or hormones. Maybe it’s pandemic life. Maybe I’m too old, been Black in America for too long. Maybe I’m simply too tired of all of it. Whatever the reason, I found it very hard to recently watch for the first time Rest in Power, the 2018 Jay-Z-produced documentary about the death of Trayvon Martin, the trial of George Zimmerman, and the aftermath. I skipped it then for the same reason a person who has survived a shark attack might skip Shark Week. Nonetheless, it remains the only legitimate documentary about Trayvon. Could it offer me something in the way of inspiration or a sense of validated identity from seeing this story told well? At first, all I thought it…

BETWEEN 7:06 AND 7:11 P.M. on June 1, 2020, equipped only with a Bible and the long, muscular arm of history, Donald Trump became a hero. As fumes from the chemical compound approved by his accomplices—officials from the Secret Service; the U.S. Park Police; the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department; the D.C. National Guard; the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the U.S. Marshals Service; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the attorney general of the United States; and the top two commanders of the mightiest military force on the planet—began to irritate the eyes, throats, lungs, and skin of nonviolent protesters, the conquering hero posed in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church and hoisted a Bible to the heavens. The president of the United States…

WHEN ASHLEY BURCH remembers her friend Trayvon Martin, she thinks of him walking around Carol City, the neighborhood north of Miami where they were teenagers together. They weren’t old enough to drive, so Trayvon walked nearly everywhere when he couldn’t catch the bus, sometimes so far that he would call Ashley to come pick him up. “With what?” Ashley would ask. He would joke that his Cadillac was in the shop—the nickname he had for his bicycle. That Trayvon liked walking was among Burch’s first thoughts a decade ago when she heard how and where he had been killed. She would spend the next few days, months, and years getting angry over her friend’s death and how the people on TV, in the news, and in public would twist their…

THE CITY HAS GROWN OLD. More specifically, 1.2 million New Yorkers are now over the age of 65, a senior population that has gone up by nearly 30 percent in the past decade. This is an increasingly diverse group with a wide array of needs and preferences when it comes to where to live: About half of seniors speak one of 90 languages other than English at home, a quarter have advanced degrees, and thousands are part of the LGBTQ community. Fortunately, new housing options have begun to proliferate over the past few years. On one hand, a plethora of very high-end assisted-living apartment buildings have emerged to serve the wealthiest of aging boomers. These places tend to eschew beige meals and snoozy game nights for page-long seasonal menus, classes…

JULIAN FELLOWES’S new historical confection, The Gilded Age, is as towering and empty as an untouched croquembouche meant only for display. In this ornate standoff among the women of late-19th-century New York high society, a heavy-hitter cast of dames—Carrie Coon, Christine Baranski, Audra McDonald, Cynthia Nixon, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Donna Murphy, Linda Emond—plays characters arrayed along a sliding social scale of status, from old money to new money to none. They jockey for position: Who will attend the arriviste’s open house? Will that couple really permit their niece to take a walk with that powerless young lawyer? Mrs. Astor is hosting a charity bazaar—who will be allowed to stand at the booths? The Gilded Age is about the incursion of new railroad money into genteel, well-bred New York. Bertha and George…