Innholdsfortegnelse for October 24 - November 6, 2022 i New York Magazine

ONE SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON in a dim theater on the Lower East Side, an industrial designer named Susan Zhang was making a joke about sex toys. The ones in China are too quiet, she said: “It’s as if your vibrator was telling you, ‘Be like me; be a quiet, good Chinese woman.’ ” The show’s name, “女子主意,” can be translated as “Women’s Ideas” or “Good Ideas,” and it has strong claims to both. As the only feminist-led, Chinese-language stand-up-comedy open mic in New York, it has become a coveted monthly treat for Chinese students and professionals. Each show is sold out within days, and there’s a waiting list for performers. “It really surprised us,” said Feilin Yang, the 31-year-old co-founder of the show, which launched in March. Yang came to New…

LONG AFTER THE SHUTDOWN of indoor dining and the advent of socially distanced picnicking; after takeout cocktails and “Cuomo sandwiches”; after to-go-box trash ziggurats and $69 delivery-app veal parms from Carbone; after Jersey-barriered roadway cafés and tabletop hand sanitizer and QR-code menus and a wave of shuttered restaurants; after the run on PPE, the rush for PPP, 25 percent capacity indoor dining, contact tracers, and Plexiglas; after masking up to pee and unmasking to eat; after vaccines, vaccine mandates, Excelsior Passes, and easily faked screenshots of Excelsior Passes; after a vaccine brawl at Carmine’s and a germ-shedding Sarah Palin at Elio’s; after subzero date nights under feeble electric heaters in yurts, igloos, and corporate-branded “winter villages”; after the return of full-capacity indoor dining; after Delta and Omicron, after boosters and…

CRITICS Jen Chaney on The Watcher … Rob Weinert-Kendt on Death of a Salesman … Alison Willmore on Aftersun. THE WATCHER NETFLIX. “IT KNOWS WHAT scares you” was the tagline for 1982’s Poltergeist, a horror classic and a cautionary tale of desirable suburban real estate. The Watcher, the new Netflix limited series by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, is also a suburban-real-estate parable that knows what scares you. More than that, though, it knows what obsesses you. Based loosely on a story Reeves Wiedeman wrote for this magazine about a couple who buy their dream house in Westfield, New Jersey, only to be terrorized by letters from someone who creepily signs them “The Watcher,” this show is a commentary on a variety of contemporary fixations. Among them: the housing market,…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. OCTOBER 26–NOVEMBER 9 MUSIC 1. See GWARoween There could be ( fake) blood. Irving Plaza, October 31. Up the block from the Village Halloween Parade and a potpourri of garishly dressed locals will be GWAR, whose costumed concerts attack the senses with pummeling riffs and visual putrescence. The band’s fourth annual Halloween spectacular provides as good a reason as any to trudge into their mouth of madness for both tricks and treats. CRAIG JENKINS MOVIES 2. See Drácula Una classica espooky. Roxy Cinema, October 29. The Spanish-language Drácula, filmed on the same sets and with the same script and released the same year as the iconic Bela Lugosi movie, returns to the screen with a live musical performance by the veteran…

THE new york CROSSWORD Must Be 21 to Play By Matt Gaffney Across 1 Tortilla’s cousin5 Suffix with Kazakh9 Puddle-loving pig14 Tribal leader19 Angel-costume part20 Mention, as a source21 Ne’er-do-well22 Mel in a “Seinfeld” episode23 Concern at the GrandCanyon27 NBA great Steve Nash’sheight28 “Alice in Wonderland” cakewords29 Saying nothing30 Cat with no tail31 Borden spokescow32 Croft played by Angelina Jolie33 Jordan’s capital36 Spanish for “warning”37 Announcement on the fly?38 Enormous42 The thwarting of enemy spies47 They keep the party going48 Break in activity49 Wintour and Faris, e.g.50 Hatred51 Elvis who sings “Alison”54 Educator Collins57 Neil or Paul59 Mayberry boy60 Completely lacking63 Ripken and Eldred64 How Freud treated patients69 “Check that out!”70 Whatchamacallits71 Magnate Musk72 Have ___ for life74 Physics Nobelist Bohr75 Celebs other celebs gawk at79 “Unh-unh”80 Water-filter maker83 Penne…

ON A RECENT Thursday afternoon at the corner of 86th and Park, a 2021 Honda Accord is idling, kneepadded with bumper guards. Contained inside, barely, is a compact Guyanese woman of 60 with a hasty slash of pink lipstick wearing a Calvin Klein sweatshirt. This is Shanti Gooljar, and this is her fief. Shanti (she refers to herself by first name only, so I must too) has, over the past two decades, virtually cornered the market on driving instruction for the city’s teen elite, commanding a privileged swath that stretches from Brearley and Spence on the East Side to Heschel and Columbia Prep on the West and north to Fieldston and Horace Mann. “I got them all locked down,” Shanti says. It’s a truth often honked that Manhattan kids are…

FIVE YEARS AGO, on a Wednesday morning in October, an editor and writer at The New Republic named Moira Donegan sent a handful of women who worked in media a link to a Google spreadsheet titled “Shitty Media Men.” Those women sent it to other women, who sent it to other women. By the end of that night, dozens of users had signed into the document, their anonymous animal avatars crowding the top right corner of the page. They were compiling the names of editors, publishers, and writers who had allegedly harassed or assaulted women. The accusations ranged from “Creepy af in the DM’s” to rape. When the list was taken offline around midnight, more than 70 names had been added. “It was a frenetic moment,” one woman who entered…

WE OFTEN ASK PEOPLE whose taste we trust to tell us about their favorite things. But this process has its limitations, namely the ability to actually see said products in situ. So we came up with a solution: We reached out to various artists, writers, designers, photographers, and chefs who really love their sofa (a particularly difficult product to buy online, it should be noted) and asked them to take a self-portrait while sitting on it. The result is a sort of catalogue of couches, all in their natural habitats. For 20 more, visit thestrategist.com. Chen Chen DESIGNER I’ve wanted a Togo since I was in design school. A few years ago, I was finally able to afford one and was surprised by how light it is. It’s just a…

THERE WAS A TIME when people asked me for restaurant recommendations. Now, everyone just wants to talk about how expensive it is to go out. And look, prices are going up everywhere for everything. Do you want a hamburger? A very good hamburger from the kind of restaurant that also sells whole branzino for $50? Destination-worthy burgers that once might have cost $15 or $25 are now much more—and they’re a useful way to look at the perilous state of restaurant economics. Take the legendary Black Label Burger at Minetta Tavern (113 MacDougal St., at Minetta Ln.), which currently costs $38. That’s $2 more than it was a year ago and $1 more than the restaurant’s arctic char “à la Grenobloise.” After tax and the standard 20 percent tip, you’re…

MICHAEL AND SUSAN HORT’S three-story, 10,000-plus-square-foot home in Tribeca is alive with art. It’s simply everywhere: on every wall, up and down the stairs, on every table (some of which were made by artists too), and, in the case of one Sarah Sze, in a closet. Some of it you can sit on; there’s a 1993 Franz West sofa by the fireplace and a Nari Ward piece, Tired Seats, from the same year. It has to be the most cozily lived-in all-star contemporary-art museum in the world. And it’s ever changing. The couple are constantly switching out what’s on display, drawing from their 5,000-piece collection—and counting—of works by emerging artists they’ve built over the past 37 years. Susan is the president of their century-old family printing business, Earth Enterprise, but…

AT THE JUNE 2005 premiere of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, it didn’t matter that Brad Pitt was casually rocking a shock of peroxide-blond hair, distressed jeans, and a deep-brown leather jacket, all working hard to distract from his ecstasy of a smile. He was a vision, and so was Angelina Jolie. When she charged from the back of a limo in a black gown (also leather), tits hiked to the heavens, chestnut-brown hair slicked back off her face, it’s no wonder the crowd swelled in volume. Pitt and Jolie never actually got that close to each other at the event; in most of the pictures taken of them, others fill the frame. But one photographer did manage to capture them together. Physically they remain apart, his body facing the opposite…

INSIDE: The open-mic night Chinese censors hate / A driving instructor to the private-school stars / Eric Adams’s shadow administration THE REPUBLICAN PARTY is poised to win back the House in November with the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight giving the GOP a greater than 70 percent chance of flipping Congress’s lower chamber. One source of the party’s strength is unambiguous: Surveys consistently find that rising prices are far and away the public’s top concern and that Republicans are widely seen as more credible inflation fighters than Democrats. Asked which party they trust more to handle inflation, voters in a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll favored the GOP by 19 points. On one level, this makes sense. The Democrats are the party in power, and prices have risen sharply on their watch.…

AS LEADER OF THE nation’s largest school system, Chancellor David Banks already had an outsize portion of influence and visibility. He recently kicked things up another notch by proposing to his longtime girlfriend, Deputy Mayor for Strategic Initiatives Sheena Wright, who is widely expected to be elevated to first deputy mayor by Eric Adams early next year. Banks laughed when I asked about the betrothal. “It happened about three weeks ago,” he said. “It only took me ten years.” With Banks running schools from the Tweed Courthouse; his fiancée soon to be overseeing day-to-day operations next door at City Hall; and his brother, Phil Banks, a few blocks away at 375 Pearl Street quarterbacking anti-crime efforts as deputy mayor for public safety, the wisecrack in political circles is that Adams’s…

AT HIS NEW restaurant, Mischa (157 E. 53rd St., at Third Ave.), chef Alex Stupak will swap out the Mexican flavors of his Empellón kitchens for a menu that celebrates American cooking. Or Stupak’s vision of American cooking. He’s avoiding a traditional Eurocentric gaze in favor of an approach that accounts for the cultural variety of real American identity. Pastas, for example, include kasha varnishkes and apple varenyky but no spaghetti (“It was very important to me to have a pasta section without Italian food in it,” Stupak says), and a $29 appetizer called Seven Vegetables is really a set of chilled salads, all intended to be shared. “Call it antipasti, call it salatim, call it whatever you want,” Stupak says. “Our goal was to globalize it a bit and…

THE NEW BROADWAY revival of the musical 1776, directed by Diane Paulus and Jeffrey Page, cast women and trans and nonbinary people of various races as the Founding Fathers. It co-stars Sara Porkalob, known for her “Dragon Cycle” trilogy of musicals, as South Carolina’s pro-slavery delegate Edward Rutledge. Porkalob spends much of the musical smiling—until she explodes with “Molasses to Rum,” a song that sneers at the North’s push to put an anti-slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence. When this conversation appeared in Vulture on October 14, her comments inspired a polarized response and a furious post from Page indirectly calling her “fake-woke,” “rotten to the core,” and “ungrateful and unwise.” Would you describe 1776’s casting as color-blind? I guess my role was colorblind. Diane saw me in Dragon…

AFTERSUN DIRECTED BY CHARLOTTE WELLS. MUBI/A24. R. CALUM IS A young dad, young enough that when he’s out with 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio), people assume they’re siblings rather than parent and child. Someone makes this mistake not long into Aftersun, and you half-expect Calum to let it pass uncommented on or to be embarrassed when he has to explain the truth. He is, after all, played by Paul Mescal, prince of the charming, unreliable heartthrobs, and with his rumpled looks and empty pockets, he comes across as someone more at home carousing with his boys at the pub than periodically reapplying sunscreen to his daughter’s back to ensure that she doesn’t burn. And yet Calum, for all the other ways that things have not worked out as he’s planned, is…