Innholdsfortegnelse for May 23 - June 5, 2022 i New York Magazine

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, Laila Gohar has been delighting and unnerving guests at things like the Frieze Art Fair and Vogue’s pre–Met Gala party with installations that fall somewhere between finger food and conceptual art: challah thrones, jellied mochi breasts, and fish-shaped butter sculptures, among other curiosities. It’s as if the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington had a side hustle as a caterer. “When you put my work into these spaces, it’s sort of like an equalizer,” Laila, 33, says. “Everyone is equally confused.” Now the confusion comes home. Laila and her painter sister, Nadia, 32, are introducing a line of odd housewares called Gohar World. To launch the collection, they are throwing a rooftop-garden party in a tucked-away part of Rockefeller Center, with a snack buffet in the shadow of St.…

RAFFI GESSEN-GOULD, age 6, is an expert on these topics: Greek gods, international currency exchange, sharks, geology, when his father will go bald (when Raffi is a teenager), invisibility cloaks, waffles, slingshotting stretchy rubber snakes across the living room, making slime without his mom, and the benefits of getting slime stains on the couch (they feel good to touch). He is the second-tallest kid in his class. He can jump the farthest. He sleeps on the top bunk. The longest book he has ever read is 199 pages. He has not read his father’s new book, Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, which is 241 pages, and he does not seem in any hurry to do so. He did ask if he was responsible for the bad crayon drawing on…

NINETEEN STATES have either trigger laws that would prohibit abortion almost immediately or strict bans that could then be enforced. SIX OTHER STATES would likely move to prohibit abortion, either through pre-Roe bans or new legislation. FIVE POSSIBLE ABORTION SCENARIOS 1. CALIFORNIA:  he state would see jump in people seeking abortions. An estimated 1.3 million patients may need to drive from Arizona to California to ind their nearest abortion provider 2. ILLINOIS: Illinois would see the greatest increase in abortion seekers from out of state: ore than 8. million people—8,651 percent more patients—ma need to drive from the 12 surrounding states to access abortion. 3. LOUISIANA:  patient in Louisiana would have to travel the greatest additional distance to abortion care: on average, 630 more miles. 4. MISSISSIPPI:  person in Mississippi…

WITH EVERY NEW SPIKE in infections, it’s clear the COVID era will be with us a little while longer, but you can already tell that chefs and restaurateurs have formed strong opinions about what their customers seem to want (or not to want) after subsisting on pantry recipes and packets of ramen in their darkened apartments. Modestly priced, comfort-oriented home cooking is most obviously in fashion (unless you’re a member of the increasingly furtive underground thousand-dollar omakase sushi-bro set), and if you happen to have a beloved family cook to name your new venture after, that’s even better. The talented Cantonese American chef Calvin Eng named his excellent new Williamsburg brasserie for his mother (Bonnie’s), and Victoria Blamey, at her excellent new downtown restaurant, gave the honor to her Chilean…

TOP GUN: MAVERICK is in theaters May 24. I’D NEVER NOTICED the curiously melancholy overtones of Harold Faltermeyer’s famous Top Gun theme until the opening moments of the brand-new Top Gun: Maverick. Maybe it was the distance in time. Back in 1986, those gongs and synth chords felt like a fairly standard New Wave–y intro; today, they register as a mournful dirge. Even the ensuing guitar riffs, which once seemed so triumphantly badass, now have a sad echo to them. ¶ What’s even weirder: Maverick appears to recognize this. The sequel, directed by Joseph Kosinski, begins pretty much exactly as the first picture did, with a modified version of Faltermeyer’s theme playing against onscreen text introducing us to the elite training program for the Navy’s best pilots. That theme is…

LATELY WHEN I walk into a movie theater, I am desperate to feel. Film, at the height of its powers, isn’t just a material, aesthetic, and visual experience but a spiritual one, and the writer-director Alex Garland has met my expectations before. As the screenwriter of the fiery, closed-quarters Sunshine and the zombie treatise 28 Days Later, Garland moved through the ecstatic wonders of genre fiction before turning his attention to directing with the slippery, imperfect Ex Machina. That 2014 science-fiction film was equal parts beguiling and frustrating. Not until 2018’s Annihilation was Garland able to create—alongside cinematographer Rob Hardy and stars like Natalie Portman—a work of potent complication. Nestled into its scenes of body mangling and its formal experimentation is a story about depression and loss, which Garland and…

LET’S ROLE-PLAY. It’s March 2021. You’re 23, a year out of college. Your last semester was ruined by the pandemic, but now you’ve got a job with a firm that’s “reinventing commerce” in a loft with reclaimed wood and catered lunches. Bars are open, your friends are coming back to the city, and your bank balance looks good, healthy even: COVID means living cheap, with free cash from the government and no student-loan payments. You lease an apartment and begin dabbling in the markets—they’re all surging. You pick up tips on Reddit, trade on Robinhood, buy crypto. One of your tokens turns a modest stake into real money almost overnight. By summer, your college crew is planning a reunion, and it’s time to invest in an adult wardrobe to signal…

KENDRICK LAMAR is in a tight spot. People want the guy who wrote “Alright” and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and “The Blacker the Berry” to come back and tell us we have what it takes to survive the conflicts of our time, to save the soul of a divided nation. But he wants to be a better partner and father and son and nephew and cousin—a more present person in the relationships that matter most to him. He wants to unpack generational trauma and unlearn toxic thought patterns. The Gospel of Matthew says no man can serve two masters; K. Dot peaced on us, got himself a therapist, and came back to share what he learned, redraw some boundaries, and refuse the titles of Voice of a…

THE FIRST TIME Frances and Nick kiss in Conversations With Friends, the outside world goes silent. All that can be heard is the gentle smack of lips pressing together and the shuddery breaths that pass between the two leads as they give in to an attraction they’ve been resisting. Nick is married, and not to Frances. But the scene doesn’t register as gratuitous. It feels intimate and private. There’s something almost sacred in the way this kiss is filmed. That sexual frankness is key to what makes this 12-episode adaptation of Sally Rooney’s debut novel such an absorbing exploration of commitment, friendship, and romantic love. This quality will sound familiar to anyone who watched Normal People, the 2020 adaptation of Rooney’s second novel, which was brought to the screen in…

PODCASTS 1. Listen to Slow Burn: Roe v. Wade Before-times. Slate, June 1. This four-part miniseries hosted by Susan Matthews covers the landmark abortion-rights ruling Roe v. Wade, diving into events that laid the foundation for it—including the case of the first woman in the country to be convicted of manslaughter owing to an abortion. NICHOLAS QUAH TV 2. Watch Stranger Things Once more unto the Upside Down. Netflix, May 27. The show that made a generation of tweens feel nostalgic about the 1980s even though they never lived through them returns six months after the battle at Starcourt Mall, which was supposed to put an end to weird creatures emerging from the Upside Down but clearly did not, because here we are again. The second part of the fourth…

THE PARIS REVIEW has come a long way from its founding team of “Tall Young Men,” in the words of Irwin Shaw, a man solicited by the Review because, according to the first managing editor, he was a “hard-drinking writer with a good-looking wife.” The magazine’s early parties included “call girls for decoration,” as Gay Talese noted, a louche legacy that endured through the editorship of Lorin Stein, who resigned in 2017 following reports of sexual misconduct and was replaced by the novelist Emily Nemens. Now, under recently appointed editor Emily Stokes, the Review has experienced an overhaul with changes ranging from the staffing (it has an almost entirely new editorial team) to the furniture (gone is the office pool table upon which Stein used to stand and make toasts).…

There’s a Backup Plan, Right? ON A TUESDAY EVENING in April, nearly half a century after Joe Biden first publicly mused about running for president, an unsettled cross section of the Democratic Establishment assembled at Pinehurst, a golf resort in North Carolina. Inflation was at a 40-year high, Biden’s disapproval rating sat at 56 percent, and editors at the New York Times were readying a front-page report about how his signature achievement—$1.9 trillion in coronavirus-relief spending—has “barely registered with voters.” The lobbyists, donors, staffers, and elected officials were gathering for the spring policy meeting of the Democratic Governors Association, and the scheduled sessions concerned such topics as health care and diversity in governance. But between panel discussions, in the hallways and at the cocktail reception on the lawn, conversation shifted…

There are roughly 600 abortion clinics currently operational in the U. S. SEVEN RECENT ABORTION STORIES 1. SEATTLE: MADI, 25 When called the clinic, the asked if wanted medication or surgical abortion. he said with surgical,you have a 100 percent success rate of expelling the tissue, but it’s expensive—it was about $1,000 versus $600 for the pill. So went for the pill. 2. PHOENIX: BREANNA, 30 I ended up going to a private clinic. They do it first come, first served, and all the online reviews said to get there at 3 a.m., before they open at eight. So I called out of work and got there at 4:30 a.m. It’s January in Arizona, and you have to sit outside in a line that wraps around the building. Everybody’s shivering…

I WAS PROBABLY conceived in the building,” says the architect, critic, and author Joseph Giovannini of this circa-1890 three-story Los Angeles commercial structure his family has owned since the 1930s, when Lincoln Heights was predominantly an Italian neighborhood. “It was also one of the first buildings to show movies to the public,” he adds. At other times, it’s been used as a radio station run by a movie personality named Leo Carrillo and a wedding-banquet hall. The Giovanninis “moved out in 1949, when I was a toddler, to Arcadia,” he says. In the 1970s, his brother wanted to open a discotheque in it, but the plan didn’t work out. “It’s basically a Soho loft building in Los Angeles.” These days, it’s home to a number of artists and photographers who…

WHEN YOUR FIRST restaurant is a cubbyhole in a Jackson Heights subway station, a six-table East Village storefront with outdoor seating feels like a major expansion. For the family behind Queens’s Yun Café & Asian Mart and the new Little Myanmar, the Manhattan outpost has given them not only ground-floor exposure but the chance to augment their menu with street food, a category they thought would befit a neighborhood that has been bereft of Burmese cuisine since Village Mingala closed in 2010. One particularly notable addition, the Burmese pancake, is listed under appetizers; in its homeland, the rice-flour crêpe goes by the name lan thaye mote, and according to chef-owner Thidar Kyaw, it is otherwise known as a gangster dosa or gangster snack because of the milieu in which it’s…

I KNOW I’M IN the right place when I see a large crowd of people dressed in what I’m calling “seventh-grade alternative”: black-and-white checkerboard belts slung over low-rise flares, midriff-baring baby tees with maxi skirts, tiny bags with gigantic boots, bucket hats, and more than one cosplay wig. They’re here to see the 21-year-old internet-famous artist PinkPantheress make her live New York debut at (Le) Poisson Rouge. Later, onstage, she looks down at her fandom in amazement. “You guys all look so good!” she says. It’s Friday the 13th and a miserable one at that, white-gray and opaque with heavy, humid fog. It is apt weather for listening to someone like PinkPantheress, who makes the kind of yearning, melancholy garage music that leaves you wistful for a time and place…