Innholdsfortegnelse for May 22-June 4, 2023 i New York Magazine

ANDREW VLADECK keeps four weather apps on his phone and checks them at intervals throughout the day. In temperatures higher than 36 degrees, he can still strum his guitar, but much colder and his fingers freeze. “Suddenly drizzling!” he once texted me as I was en route to a show. “The weather app said no rain and now it’s raining and there are two people here.” But a recent Tuesday was ideal: sunny, mid-60s, the trees in bloom. About 50 caregivers and children gathered in Underwood Park, in Clinton Hill, to enjoy Vladeck’s set. Preschoolers mobbed the stage—pogoing, shimmying, and singing along; one skidded into and nearly toppled Vladeck’s cymbal stand—while some of the tiniest kids, mere babies, sat on laps and cried. “Who can clap?” he asked after a…

YOU BEGIN SHOPPING for your future the moment you become an adult in New York City. Rich and well-furnished lives are aggressively paraded about. Parlor windows reveal Noguchi lamps the size of small horses, couples sit for brunch, families haul exploding bags of farmers’-market produce back to their lairs. People are furiously refreshing Resy to pay $27 for spaghetti pomodoro (!) and going, constantly, to Mexico City. Looking at these lives can feel cozily aspirational until the trap door falls open and you find out what it actually costs: the stalks of carrots on the plates on that brownstone dining-room table, the dining table itself, pediatric dental work when your 4-year-old chips his tooth on his carrot, food for the dog underfoot, surgery for the dog underfoot when his shoulder…

THERE IS A CERTAIN hierarchy between Wednesday, night one of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, and Thursday, night two. I heard it first on the Delta flight from JFK to Stockholm as the members of an almost entirely Black—and almost entirely Beyoncé-bound—boarding group took their seats. One man asked another which night he was seeing the show. “Thursday!” the guy answered. Night two, or, as far as his seatmate was concerned, night last. I swear I could hear the reply sizzle as it hit skin: “Ohhhh. Well, it will still be fun!” For two nights in May, Stockholm became the capital of Black Planet, the epicenter of all internet activity, when the Renaissance tour—Beyoncé’s first solo tour in seven years and two(ish) albums—took over the city. After a viral TikTok tipped…

TV / NICHOLAS QUAH IP From Heaven A tale ripped from comics and Chinese lore gets the Disney treatment. FOR THE MOST PART, Jin Wang is a typical high-school kid. He has a solid manga collection, aspires to join the soccer team, and is deep into the mumbling phase that comes with figuring out who you’re going to be. When we first meet Jin, played by a winning Ben Wang, he’s about to start tenth grade and finds himself engaged in the age-old teen ritual of shopping for clothes with his mother, whose picks give him something to chafe against. His parents, Christine and Simon (Yeo Yann Yann and Chin Han), are having identity crises too: Both Chinese immigrants in California, they’re grappling with frustrations over their own lost youth.…

INSIDE: A skyscraper on ballerina’s toes / The hardest-working cowboy musician in Brooklyn / The hollowing out of San Francisco THE FIRST MENTION of artificial intelligence in the Congressional Record dates back to 1964, when Senator Hubert Humphrey marveled at machines “that read, that remember, that improve their performance.” Even in that innocent time, politicians had canned takes about such technology. “The computer age is young; but already, let us admit, some laymen in policymaking positions have tended to make three types of speeches on the computer,” Humphrey said. There are speeches of “sheer awe.” Then there are those touting the hours of leisure and convenience computers would provide their human masters. And then the doomsayers: “Good-bye jobs; hello breadlines.” It turns out that the doomsayers may have had a…

IN THE SPRING OF 2019, Marc Benioff surveyed his kingdom and it looked good. He stood on the top floor of the Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco, named after his company, then the largest employer in San Francisco. You could see every part of the city and out across the bay. The UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and the Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland (to which Benioff had donated $250 million). The site of a 200-bed Navigation Center for the homeless (which Benioff had defended in the face of other rich—but less rich—San Franciscans who tried to fight it off). The city looked sun-kissed and thriving from this view: the elegant Golden Gate Bridge, Twin Peaks, the surreal green of the Marin Headlands. “It’s cool up here, right?”…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, Andrew Rossi attended a rough-cut screening of the documentary Startup.com at the brownstone owned by the filmmakers D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus on the Upper West Side. “I just thought that was such a wonderful way to work,” Rossi recalls. “To live in a brownstone and to be able to work there, too—such an intimate and creatively fertile environment.” Rossi is a film and television writer and director whose The Andy Warhol Diaries streamed on Netflix last year. He’s married to another filmmaker, Kate Novack, whose André Leon Talley documentary, The Gospel According to André, came out in 2018. These days, after a decade in a South Williamsburg loft that they left because of ongoing repairs to the building, they live with their two children in…

WHEN THE CITY rezoned the area around Grand Central Terminal in 2017, the idea was that the neighborhood would get a makeover. Most buildings in Midtown East are either stolid masonry prewar offices and hotels—typically about 20 to 40 stories tall, built in the same era as the terminal itself—or the postwar generation of steel-and-glass skyscrapers. The former group (the theory went) would be replaced with sleek new spaces, drawing first-rate tenants back from downtown and beyond. Few people imagined that the 700-foot tower at 270 Park Avenue, dating to only 1960, would be among the first to come down. But it’s gone now—the second-tallest building ever demolished not by a terrorist act—and JPMorgan Chase is well on the way toward supplanting it with 1,400 feet of brawn. Its form,…

On AN ICY MORNING in February, Machaela Cavanaugh, a Nebraska state senator, woke up with strep throat at the Cornhusker Hotel. She took some cold medicine and drove to the Nebraska Capitol Building in Lincoln, where her colleagues, sitting at rows of black-walnut desks beneath a gold frieze depicting cattlemen and homesteaders arriving in the state, had gathered for the 33rd day of the 90-day legislative session. “I felt like shit and I got on the floor and I made a speech that I do not remember, except for that it circulated the internets,” she recalled. Among other things, she announced that she intended to “burn the session down to the ground.” Five weeks earlier, a Republican colleague had introduced LB 574, the “Let Them Grow” bill, which would ban…

Never Have I Ever Season four (Netflix, June 8) ➽ Thanks to Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s wonderful lead performance as Devi, we see high school in all its glory: fun but also shitty. And horny. And then fun and shitty again. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season two (Paramount+, June 15) ➽ This deliciously old-school series went from mildly interesting to surprisingly solid in its first season, then tipped all the way over into “Wait, are you guys seeing how great this is?” territory. The Bear Season two (FX, June 22) ➽ Last summer, this hit burst out of nowhere, spawning endless thirst posts of Jeremy Allen White. Now that Carmy, Sydney, Richie, Marcus, and the rest of the crew have the money to start their own place, can they actually work…

Pepón Osorio: “My Beating Heart/Mi corazón latiente” New Museum (June 29–September 17) ➽ A retrospective of Osorio’s large-scale multimedia installations, which are parade floats of stuff: tables, chairs, police tape, couches. Osorio, who was born in Puerto Rico and has lived in the Northeast since the 1970s, gives us a theater of anti-transcendence, a palpable reality that feels like a dream discarded. “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” Metropolitan Museum of Art (through August 27) ➽ When you see a van Gogh, you see sunflowers. You see shoes. A starry night. And cypress trees—always cypress trees. In light and darkness, in shades of violet, in moonlight, in the windy distance, umbilical to the earth, reaching to the sky. Now you can see some 40 works together—paintings, drawings, and letters—that show us van Gogh’s…

THE NEW YORK CROSSWORD Rodent Trip By Matt Gaffney Across 1 Winter wrap6 Maidenform products10 ___ Hashanah14 Home to Craters of the Moon National Monument19 Sulu, in real life20 Move, in real-estate lingo21 “___ the whole thing!”22 Lawn leveler23 Out of the way24 M. Friedman’s field25 ___ Pet (“The pottery that grows”)26 Some helicopters, for short27 Stop wrestling with a rodent?31 Jacob’s twin32 Ending with meteor33 Plane-patrolling org.34 Hall of Fame pitcher Jim35 In the manner of38 “___ for Burglar” (Sue Grafton novel)40 Vulgarity43 Many New Orleanians45 Rodent-flavored Ben & Jerry’s offering?50 Get ___ of your own medicine51 Org. with rinks52 Spike in attendance at film festivals53 Famous cookie man54 Free (of )55 You, long ago57 Hoops60 Part of NCAA62 Chemistry suffix63 Become inedible64 Woman who married 1950s child actor…