Innholdsfortegnelse for September 25-October 8, 2023 i New York Magazine

OLIVIA HUSSEY WAS 15 years old when Franco Zeffirelli cast her in his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. She had been a working stage actor for a few years but was unknown in the world of film and had no agent or manager. Her parents had split up when she was 1, and she hadn’t seen her father, an Argentine singer, since she was 7; her mother, a British secretary who worked three jobs, wasn’t around on set. To make the film, Olivia, along with her co-star, Leonard Whiting, moved in with the director in his villa outside Rome. Hussey was in awe of Zeffirelli. “When he comes into the room and speaks, no one else says anything,” she told a journalist at the time. “No one else can compete…

I BOUGHT Z-COILS in the midst of an existential crisis. A month after increasing my testosterone dose, I felt acutely uncomfortable in my skin. My clothes felt wrong, like bad disguises—femme clothes that felt too femme, masc clothes that were featureless and ill-fitting. And then it was my shoes. I like being taller, so I’d worn heels; when I started transitioning, I switched to sneakers. Now, I felt stuck between two bad options: I resented the flat-shoes-only thing, which I was forcing myself to do out of a sense of obligation to dress masc, but the idea of sexy Camper heels sounded worse. While researching an amorphous category I started to call “masc heels”—clogs, cowboy boots, Nike Shox, Rick Owens knockoffs—I made an offer on eBay of $62 for a…

THE SAD, SWEAT-SOAKED flannel is the first thing I clock when I walk through the sunny open field turned parking lot to the BankNH Pavilion in Gilford, New Hampshire, where Gen Z’s New England royalty, Noah Kahan, is playing his first of two sold-out headline shows for a crowd of 9,000 a pop amid an early-September heat wave. That number may be a drop in the bucket compared to his 1.5 million followers on TikTok, but Kahan is a long way from where he was last year, playing for crowds of a couple hundred at small festivals. And his pop-inflected folk hits different in front of Northeasterners who have claimed him as their own. Kahan sings from a perspective situated inside a childhood bedroom or from a passenger seat, staring…

THE new york CROSSWORD Shirt Happens By Matt Gaffney Across 1 Hourglass filler5 Keep ’em in stitches?9 Tevye’s wife14 Mediterranean party island19 Title derived from “caesar”20 Falco of “Bupkis”21 Diarist Nin22 Make fun of, maybe23 Occupy the shotgun seat25 Kafka character Gregor ___26 Sharp, as a pain27 Tailor’s lucky find?30 Gumshoes31 Choose not to outlaw32 Poi basis33 They went to med school35 Important papers, briefly38 “About the Author” sections40 Their keys don’t turn43 Tailor’s admonishment to a trainee who can’t sew?48 Emerge victorious50 Rein in, as enthusiasm51 Whitman or West52 Moshe with an eye patch53 Slight lead54 Part of EGOT55 Explore, as a river58 Fatally friendly bird59 2006 Winter Olympics city61 “My bad”63 Metered tributes65 Letters in destroyer names66 With 75-Across: Pronouncement from a tailor who’s been bored at work?71…

IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD this past spring, the Parks Department was digging up and distributing spent tulip bulbs to anyone who wanted them. I got on line next to a woman who looked to be about 60. As we waited for our bales of bulbs, she cheerfully recounted to me the story of how she had first planted tulips one fall day when she was pregnant with her first child some 30 years earlier. She’d been on hands and knees, digging in the ground, when her husband had come outside and seen her. He’d scoffed meanly, she remembered, and told her that she looked like a bus—ugly and base, down in the dirt like that. By the time the tulips bloomed the next spring, her baby had arrived and she had…

MY FAVORITE SOCIAL-MEDIA CONTROVERSY of recent vintage was a September 15 post on X (the rebranded Twitter) by the esteemed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami that read, “As a writer, you can write as much as you want until forty or so, while youth is on your side. But after that, it’s common for people to lose energy, and their writing suffers as a result. Generally speaking.” Many of those on the wrong side of that magic number took grave offense. “Almost every hour of TV I gave to HBO came between 40 and 60, so nah, I’ll be pumping good pages when I’m gumming food and falling down stairs,” huffed The Wire’s David Simon. When people weren’t cataloguing the achievements Toni Morrison, John le Carré, and other luminaries had notched…

THIS PAST SPRING, SAM ALTMAN, the 38-year-old CEO of OpenAI, sat down with Silicon Valley’s favorite Buddhist monk, Jack Kornfield. This was at Wisdom 2.0, a low-stakes event at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a forum dedicated to merging wisdom and “the great technologies of our age.” The two men occupied huge white upholstered chairs on a dark mandala-backed stage. Even the moderator seemed confused by Altman’s presence. “What brought you here?” he asked. “Yeah, um, look,” Altman said. “I’m definitely interested in this topic”—officially, mindfulness and AI. “But, ah, meeting Jack has been one of the great joys of my life. I’d be delighted to come hang out with Jack for literally any topic.” It was only when Kornfield—who is 78 and whose books, including The…

DORY FANTASMAGORY: CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT YOU is out September 26 from Dial Books for Young Readers. WHEN ABBY HANLON was publishing her first children’s book, Ralph Tells a Story, she got a note from the art director: The teeth on her drawings were too pointy. The characters looked like vampires and elves rather than kids. So Hanlon went about rounding the teeth and ears. After she handed in the book, she found herself doodling vampires and elves. If her drawings already looked too elfin, she might as well go with it. Meanwhile, at home, her own children, 5-year-old twins, were growing obsessed with Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “They wanted to read the gruesome ones. They liked being scared,” she says, slouched on a beanbag chair in the backyard shed, barely wider…

THEATER / SARA HOLDREN Minutes of Infinity Annie Baker continues to ruffle feathers with the calmest of breezes. I HAVE A VISCERAL memory of sobbing on the couch in my mother’s arms at 5 or 6 years old, saying over and over again, “I don’t want to die.” Nothing had happened. I had simply reached the understanding that one day, I would no longer exist. I also have a memory—I’m less certain about the year—of reading Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting and realizing, somewhere quiet at the back of my mind, how nightmarish the idea of living forever actually is. How incommensurate with our small, breakable animal bodies—this awful, awesome notion, the infinite. From the name onward, nothing in Annie Baker’s fearless new production, Infinite Life, is laboriously explained; everything is…

IT HAS BEEN a rough stretch for a certain kind of New York sports fan, capped by Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers blowing out his Achilles tendon on just his fourth snap at the Meadowlands. But go to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center to see the New York Liberty and the energy is electric. The WNBA team had a breakthrough 32-8 season and cruised into the postseason with triple-digit percentage growth in ticket sales. During a sold-out playoff game, head coach Sandy Brondello attempted to participate in an interview with ESPN and couldn’t even hear the announcer’s questions in her earpiece. “Damn, it’s so loud in there!” the upbeat Aussie tells me after a team practice the following Sunday. “In the time-outs, I had to yell.” Barclays, starting guard Sabrina Ionescu says, has…

After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Fox News—to the surprise of many, including founder Rupert Murdoch, who loathed Trump—became more successful than it had ever been in its already very profitable history. It had survived not only the loss of its longtime boss Roger Ailes, ousted the same year in a sexual-harassment scandal, but that of its former ratings leader Bill O’Reilly in another harassment scandal and that of Megyn Kelly, the anchor who the Murdochs had hoped might lead the network to a not-so-right-wing future. Now President Trump was its star, a change so big that it demanded a reshuffling of the prime-time lineup. Sean Hannity, the former ratings laggard who had revived his career with an unquestioning devotion to Trump—and emerged as one of Trump’s…

WHEN ANESTHESIOLOGIST John Martins and a director of legal tech sales, Zorik Pesochinsky, bought this two-bedroom apartment in a perfectly practical but entirely unglamorous brick mid-century co-op building near Lincoln Center, “it looked like it hadn’t been touched in decades,” Martins says. The ceilings were low, the parquet floors worn, and the track lighting out-of-date. There wasn’t much light either, though from some windows you can peek at the Lincoln Center Plaza and the pretty old church next door. But they had a vision for it: a luxurious, Halston-esque cocktails-and-conversation entertainment cocoon. So they brought in the designer Darren Jett, says Pesochinsky, “to give us permission to make the bold choices that our gut instinct wanted but we were far too afraid to make.” Jett adds, “Something provocative and sensual.”…

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG is in previews now at the Hudson Theatre. IN NOVEMBER 1981, Merrily We Roll Along made its Broadway debut. Sixteen performances later, it famously closed as a flop. Created by Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince, the show follows three plucky young friends—Frank, a composer; Charley, a playwright; and Mary, a writer—who, over time, slowly start to resent one another. Notably, the story is told backward, spanning two decades from their 40s, when they’re embittered adults, back down to their 20s, when they’re aspirational artists hanging out on a roof. The 2016 documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened chronicled the lives of the original production’s actors—a cast of 16-to-25-year-olds—while painting a picture of how the show is widely perceived. “One of the lessons of…