Innholdsfortegnelse for December 4-17, 2023 i New York Magazine

1 New York’s latest issue examined how the Israel-Hamas war has caused turmoil within the city (“The War and New York,” November 20–December 3). ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis said, “This issue just arrived in the mail and it’s so well done, exactly what you want from a city magazine in this moment.” And Nick Pinto, co-founder of the outlet Hell Gate, wrote: “In its ambition, and, for the most part, in its execution, the current issue … is a really impressive example of a publication mobilizing its resources to meet a moment.” Online, fights broke out among readers with @sophiekpstone noting that “this comment section is literally proving the point made here (the only point being that divisiveness is worse than ever).” “Right? Is there a stupider, more useless place to…

AS A RULE, judges don’t like to be the center of the story. New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron has found that he doesn’t have much of a choice. This is thanks mostly to one particularly belligerent defendant, but the Bob Dylan–quoting, former Creedence Clearwater Revival–covering drummer and ex-cabbie’s unwillingness to be Donald Trump’s punching bag doesn’t hurt, either. The 74-year-old Engoron, who presides downtown and lives on Long Island, has for three years now been engaged in a low-boil back-and-forth with the former president that’s only recently turned into full-on tabloid bait. His displeasure with Trump’s soliloquies has become obvious: “Please, no speeches,” he warned the ex-president in early November, before turning to one of his lawyers and informing him, “This is not a political rally.” But…

IN SEPTEMBER, 25-year-old knitwear designer and social coordinator Alexis Dougé discovered that her highly coveted and extremely polarizing $1,000 Maison Margiela Tabi Mary Janes had been stolen after a Tinder date slept over. When she went to make contact, she found he had erased his number and all prior communication from her phone. Dougé turned, as one does, to TikTok. The tale of the Tabi swiper rallied millions. A photo was provided of the alleged swiper’s alleged girlfriend wearing the Tabis. The swiper admitted his crime. A shoe return was arranged. “I said, ‘You need psychological help, you need therapy, and you should talk to someone about why you’re stealing from people you just had sex with,’ ” Dougé says she told him during the shoe swap. “Then he rode…

EMILY FISHER LANDAU displayed her tremendous art collection in her own Long Island City museum until 2017. She donated lots of her art to the Whitney, where she was a trustee, but after her death earlier this year at 102, many absolutely blockbuster paintings she had retained came up for auction. Before the Jasper Johns Flags went to a new home for $41 million, each of us could come gawk at the pieces at Sotheby’s. When the company relocates to the Breuer Building, the former home of the Whitney, the line between museum and resale palace will be blurred even further, but at least there will be more for more of us to see for free.…

IT HASN’T exactly been a banner year for New York City public schools. In November, Mayor Adams announced $547 million in budget cuts, even as the system strained to serve more than 20,000 migrant students. But 2023 saw at least one bright spot: In the fall, all DOE schools adopted a daily mindful-breathing practice. The program was initially met with some groaning, but it turns out that requiring children to close their eyes and Zen out for a few minutes is kind of nice. Brittany Barriteau, a third-grade teacher at P.S. 5 in Bed-Stuy, describes the impact on her homeroom: One activity that’s really popular in our classroom is “Butterfly Breathing.” It’s a guided meditation that requires students to visualize a butterfly coming to comfort them. It asks them to…

IN SEPTEMBER, Brooke Shields had been preparing for her one-woman show at Café Carlyle by hydrating—and hydrating and hydrating—until her body was so deprived of sodium that she had a grand mal seizure at L’Artusi in the West Village the Thursday before her show was to open. The scene at L’Artusi was a blur, but Shields later learned the sommelier had called her assistant, who had tried Shields’s husband, Chris Henchy, who was unavailable. The assistant then tried Shields’s friend Bradley Cooper’s assistant, with whom Shields’s assistant is also friends. Luckily, Cooper lives in the neighborhood and was nearby, likely waiting by the phone to do a paparazzi walk in lieu of promoting Maestro, and he rushed over to accompany Shields in the ambulance. The story is a confluence of…

IT’S ALMOST too perfect that Harrison Patrick Smith, better known by his electro-sleaze stage name, the Dare, orders his martini dirty. Very dirty. At the Swan Room, where we meet up, he also asks the bartender for “whatever’s the cheapest gin.” The Dare has built his budding celebrity out of the cheap and dirty. His first single, “Girls,” which he tells me he wrote in 30 minutes in his East Williamsburg bedroom, has been stuck in my head since it came out in August 2022 and went as downtown viral as a case of drug-resistant clap. As the chorus goes, “I like the girls that do drugs/Girls with cigarettes in the back of the club / Girls that hate cops and buy guns.” It rambles on like that for 1:59…

FOUR TIMES Fran Lebowitz went to see the Liberty play, and three times the Liberty triumphed. An internet commentator declared Lebowitz to be the team’s good-luck charm. Her streak was broken when she watched them lose the championship, but she’s unruffled: “New York teams are the best. I don’t care if they’re winning or not.” Knowing nothing about sports, by her own admission, doesn’t lessen the pleasure of attending. “Everyone chanting together, singing crazy songs. I do find it relaxing.”…

DANIELLE AVISSAR’S New York City breaking point came when a bus driver told her that if she wanted to get on, she had to collapse her stroller. Come again? Wake a sleeping 1-year-old, gather his crap, and fold the thing while somehow having a hand free to tap her fare? Avissar’s day job—helping creative agencies land clients—is all about making things happen, and she began recruiting other stroller-pushing activists by lobbying local Facebook groups and speaking at an Upper East Side cocktail party. Members of her army started showing up to MTA meetings to explain their reality. At monthly meetings, Avissar, MTA executives, and other caretakers worked out a solution with drivers and opponents—a group that included some disability activists who weren’t eager to give up their sliver of hard-won…

THE LATEST AND currently only iteration in a tradition of newsletters that arrive after a New Yorkerissue with a shrewd guide to the magazine is Last Week’s New Yorker Review: You get your must-reads, window-shops, and guilt-free skips. “I think in large part it works because I’m not in media. I’m not afraid of offending anyone. I don’t make my money that way. But I don’t have any qualifications,” says the newsletter’s author, a married 26-year-old who publishes under the name Sam Circle. Circle has academic parents and went to high school in Baltimore, worked briefly at the collective Red Emma’s, and now studies experimental film as the only student in an M.F.A. program at New Jersey City University that will end upon Circle’s departure next year. Fewer than 2,000…

. . . . . . . THE LOOK BOOK GOES TO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AN ANIME CONVENTION . . . . . . . . . HOW TO GIFT NEW YORK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .…

HE BOUNDED INTO the room wearing a backpack and a baseball cap. He shook people’s hands. He told them how much this opportunity meant to him, a gangly teenager with a viral rap about statistics under his belt and his sights set on the big leagues: Broadway, Hollywood. Everyone was smitten with Timmy. Timo. Here came a guy who could communicate like an adult, then slip seamlessly into the unpolished charm of the kid he was. Today, Timothée Chalamet is the figurehead for a cohort of sensitive actors who competed for supporting parts in the 2010s and now have top billing. If he was auditioning, there’s a good chance Lucas Hedges and Tom Holland were, too. But Chalamet became the generational icon, the golden god of couture, the cinephile charting…

IN JANUARY 2018, Timothée Chalamet did something almost unthinkable for a 22-year-old actor: He got nominated for an Academy Award. The Oscars, as a rule, don’t go for young men. While we’re used to seeing ingénues like Jennifer Lawrence, Brie Larson, and Emma Stone take home a trophy in their 20s, their male counterparts struggle for recognition against more seasoned stars. The day he made the final five for Call Me by Your Name, Chalamet became the youngest Best Actor nominee since Mickey Rooney in 1940. Since then, he has not cracked another Oscar lineup. He was almost certainly sixth place in Supporting Actor in 2019 for Beautiful Boy, showing up in all the major precursors before losing out to Vice’s Sam Rockwell on nomination morning. A year later, he had…

Holiday Cheer for FUV, Beacon Theatre, December 6. Fordham University’s FUV is a light in local radio. The lineup for the independent operation’s benefit is stacked, including roots rockers the Gaslight Anthem, Grace Potter, Iron & Wine, and doo-wop and R&B revivalists Thee Sacred Souls. Big Freedia’s Christmas in Central City Tour, Brooklyn Bowl, December 8. Louisiana bounce-music icon Big Freedia’s joyful show offers a lively holiday twerk sesh. Also along for the sleigh ride are New Orleans singer Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph and Australian dance-pop trio Haiku Hands. Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas One and All! MSG, December 9 and 17. The queen of vocals and yuletide cheer rouses from her slumber to beckon the masses to the warmth and wonder of the holidays at this joyous revival of Carey’s pre-pandemic…

COULD A MIDWESTERNER have ended the Screen Actors Guild strike? “Oh, I’m sure that the right person certainly could’ve,” Fran Drescher says. Her cheerful unwillingness to entertain needlessly divisive geographical hypotheticals reflects the diplomatic spirit that made Drescher so well suited to lead the union through one of the most fraught American labor disputes of this century and to a new deal. Over the course of the 118-day strike, which, along with the Writers Guild strike, effectively shut down a multibillion-dollar industry throughout the summer and fall, Drescher was cast as the fierce negotiator sitting across the table from the representatives of the one percent, as the thoughtful shepherd of the 160,000-member-strong workforce, and as the forceful yet friendly public face of a movement, telling the execs to “wake up…

IN JUNE, it was mud wrestling in the backyard—onlookers cheered La Loca as she wrestled Bang Girl down to the ground in a sludge-filled inflatable pool. Before that, in February, 300 people had huddled on the coldest night of the year for Ion Pack podcaster and musician Curtis Pawley’s house show. Recently, on a Sunday in mid-October, a Serbian gamelan group played their metallophones for a crowd of city planners, medical students, photographers, architects, artists, and models in the parlor room. The Hancock is a landmarked ten-bedroom Victorian mansion in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It was built for a water-meter magnate; by the time Claudia Moran made a $7,500 down payment on the house in 1986, it was an uninhabitable ruin. In 2018, it was purchased for $6,275,000—the most expensive sale for a…

THE STREET-CORNER WIRE BIN is on its way out, and its replacement is better in almost every functional way. It stacks for transport as its predecessor did not, and it’s sleek and crisp-looking (for a garbage can). The old one weighs 34 pounds empty and a lot more when full, making it a fine means of sending sanitation workers into midlife rotator-cuff surgery; the new one has a lightweight plastic liner that is a far easier lift. But let us offer a little aesthetic appreciation, at least, for the visual toughness and purity of the departing steel-mesh basket, a version of which has populated our streets for nearly a century. Once manufactured upstate by Norwich Wire Works and more recently (and distressingly) by a prison-labor company called Corcraft, it’s the…

ROVING DINNER SERIES aren’t a new concept, and during the pandemic a dizzying number were started by laid-off cooks and servers. Many went dark after restaurants returned, but in the past year, pop-ups have only felt like more of a regular aspect of the restaurant scene. And they’re where you’ll find cooks serving food you just won’t find elsewhere. Here, five new-as-of-2023 ones. BAD LARRY’S Reid Webster and friends create chewy sourdough crusts brushed, outrageously, with compound butter and toppings that verge on heretical (crumbled chicken skin, bacon, ranch powder). • Where to find: December 9 at Five Boroughs Brewing Co. (215 47th St., Sunset Park); December 29 at Gertie (357 Grand St., Williamsburg); previous pop-ups at Other Half Brewing (195 Centre St., Carroll Gardens). EGODEATH Shom Mazumder creates hyperminimalist…

ONE SUNDAY LAST WINTER, Peter Fisher decided to take his one-and-a-half-year-old Boykin spaniel named Waylon for a long walk across the Manhattan Bridge. They often made this journey to Fisher’s girlfriend Olivia McCausland’s place in Chinatown. Waylon started out from their home in Carroll Gardens in his usual good spirits, fluffy hair blowing in the breeze as he strutted the walkway to Manhattan. Waylon had never before noticed the Mahayana Buddhist Temple, guarded at its entrance by a pair of imposing stone lions, just past the bridge. But on this day, he saw the statues and, Fisher says, just froze: “His little animalistic brain was like, Predator alert! We’re about to be eaten.” To make matters worse for him, someone then began chanting through a megaphone beside one of the…

IT STARTED, as so many New York trends do, with Chloë Sevigny. An Instagram post announcing her “Sale of the Century” proclaimed that she had gone through “the depths” of her “perpetual cool girl closet” and would be selling her used clothing in a Noho loft space on Mother’s Day. Genuine pandemonium ensued; the line stretched around the block. There was a think piece about it in The Paris Review.Influencers with heaps of free clothes and other famous people looking to unload their junk took note, and suddenly there seemed to be a new “closet sale” every weekend. Here, some people-slash-fans share what they scored. CHLOË SEVIGNY’S “Sale of the Century” “I haven’t worn it yet, if you can believe it. Any dinner or party I go to seems too…

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to say exactly what saved 65-year-old Tatyana Koltunyuk’s life on August 7 when she was bitten by a shark while swimming in the Rockaways. The EMTs kept her stable on the way to Jamaica Hospital; the surgeons oversaw her seven-plus operations; a thousand GoFundMe donors helped pay for those surgeries. First, though, there was the makeshift tourniquet applied on the beach. It was about two hours before sunset when lifeguard Romeo Ortiz heard Koltunyuk screaming and then saw the shadow of blood in the darkening ocean around her. He swam what he estimated was 20 yards with lifeguard Evan Sheridan to bring Koltunyuk back to shore. “That’s when I noticed that there was a huge wound on her leg,” Ortiz says. “It wasn’t until I saw the wound…

IT LOOKED LIKE college students had thrown and abandoned a party, drawing raccoons up to the walkway wall along Riverside Park, well known for its bountiful animal population. Alex Hodor-Lee, a 31-year-old photographer, was out for a walk between 100th and 116th on Riverside with a friend; it was twilight, give or take. He took a picture, and two young women in Columbia sweatshirts started yelling that his flash would damage their retinas. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I don’t know anything about raccoons, being from New York,’ ” Alex says he told them, and then he went home and Googled and it turns out that isn’t true. His takeaway? “Everyone here loves pizza.”…

ON A SUNDAY in May, the 86-year-old art-world raconteur and man-about-town Anthony Haden-Guest (he’s said to be the inspiration for Peter Fallow in The Bonfire of the Vanities) arrived at his friend Libbie Mugrabi’s Upper East Side mansion for his own funeral. The idea was hatched by Mugrabi—the ex-wife of billionaire David Mugrabi—who made headlines last year for having allegedly threatened her former housekeeper with a knife and mop handle (Mugrabi denies this). In recent years, Mugrabi has become Haden-Guest’s friend and sort-of patron, encouraging him to work on his art and commissioning pieces from him. The two hit it off when she threw a much-criticized 50-person dinner party in Miami in December 2020, during the height of COVID. “For some reason, I think too much wine,” Haden-Guest says, “we…

public transport magazinestarted because Al Mullen, a freelance writer and video editor, decided that it wasn’t funny to go to a comedy show to see comedy but it is funny to experience funny things in unexpected places. He took a cue from the psychic Keano (you know her pamphlets, with the eye in the triangle, tucked into subway ad covers) and decided to make a magazine about the subway that people could only find in the subway. Issue No. 3, currently floating around the system, is a nifty black-and-white zine with jokes, drawings, and a punch-line contest. (“If you swipe your metro card as you’re exiting a turnstile, you’ll be refunded your $2.90 deposit” was in a “Secrets and Tricks” section and easily becomes a lingering intrusive thought.) He prints…

LIKE MANY NEW YORKERS (at least the sentimental ones), I started collecting specific NYC merch over the past few years. There was the Frick baseball cap. The handbag-size Citarella tote. The Café Loup T-shirt that I never bought and that now, four years of eBay alerts later, is my greatest source of non-buyer’s remorse. You can own only so many T-shirts and hats, though. Last spring, I sat on a bench in Central Park adorned with the plaque M.I. WILL YOU MARRY ME? I LOVE YOU, ALAN and thought giving a dedicated park bench might just be the most romantic gift there is. So here, a thoroughly researched guide to some obvious and not-so-obvious ways to purchase pieces of the city itself. ➽Flora and Fauna Brynn Whitfield, a RHONY cast…

THERE’S A NICOTINE light—a warm, dim, dangerous flicker—that suffuses a certain kind of brasserie. Bad decisions are made here gladly. It’s been years since anyone smoked in New York restaurants, but bathe in that luminescence and you can believe, for a second, that you could, maybe even that you should. Never mind that it’s usually the work of highly paid lighting consultants. We flutter like moths to char ourselves in it. If a martini with fries has become the New York Happy Meal, as my colleague E. Alex Jung wrote earlier in the year, this is the New York Tan. That light radiates at Cecchi’s (105 W. 13th St., nr. Sixth Ave.; cecchis.nyc), which opened this past summer on the ashes of the late beloved Café Loup, the West Village stalwart…

IT WAS Miss Stevens that convinced me Timothée Chalamet was going to be a movie star. I’d seen him onscreen before—he had a recurring role in the second season of Homeland— but Julia Hart’s 2016 indie about a high-school drama competition was the first time I’d lingered through the credits to confirm his name. I had a feeling I’d be hearing it a lot. He plays a kid named Billy, the most talented and most troubled of three students being chaperoned by the titular young teacher. At 19, Chalamet was able to put the childlike softness his face still had to great use, coming across as one of the adults or collapsing into boyishness. The movie withholds the sight of Billy performing until late, when he blows the roof off…

CHALAMET BEGAN his rise to boy of the Zeitgeist around 2018, riding the success of the gay movie that fashion people loved and caught in a snowmelt river of clout for publicly straight cisgender men wearing gender-expansive clothing. But even as the clout freshet ebbed, Timothée kept dressing—and it became easier to appreciate that he had been an interesting dresser all along. He’s revealed himself as a sensualist with an appreciation for glossy fabrics and monochrome, the kind of fashion consumer who loves being close to designers. The lore is that Timothée does not have a stylist, which isn’t true; he’s been working with Erin Walsh since 2021. But some of his best, most distinctive looks are pre-Walsh, including that silver Haider Ackermann suit he wore to the premiere of…

IT’S NEVER BEEN a better time to ship a voice-memo series of playful or traumatic anecdotes to a ghostwriter and let ’er rip. The year kicked off with the release of Prince Harry’s explosive Spare, then everyone whom you could conceivably call a legend for one reason or another, from Paris Hilton to Werner Herzog, Barbra Streisand to Julia Fox, got their last autobiographical word in—for now. Here, a brief guide to 2023’s overflowing library of celebrity memoirs (and memoirishes). Headliners The ones that had TMZ and “Page Six” salivating. Spare, by Prince Harry This becoming-a-civilian bombshell detailed everything from Harry’s cold upbringing after his mother’s death to the drama that surrounded his marriage to Meghan Markle, including a story of a physical fight with his brother, William, and skepticism…

THE MAYOR HAD HIS PHONES SEIZED BY THE FBI, rents were never higher, and library hours and 3-K alike found themselves in peril. Also, it rained for eight consecutive weekends. It’s been a mediocre-to-poor year for New York. But every December, this magazine puts out a “Reasons to Love New York” issue, and even during this cursed year, we found 37 particularly excellent reasons why we all should. Did you know there is a Victorian mansion in Bed-Stuy owned by an idiosyncratic hotelier from Georgia (the country) who lets people live in it for free and hosts mud-wrestling parties in the backyard? A modern-day folk-hero couple are sticking it to landlords everywhere by refusing to move out of their hilariously cheap 5,800-square-foot loft? We have not one but two brassy…

IN JULY, BILL DE BLASIO and Chirlane McCray announced a new arrangement. The couple who had captured our fascination with their strong “We like your vibe” energy embraced another Park Slope hallmark: separating, dating apart, still cohabitating. (Apparently too broke to move out, just like us.) The excitement here was not for him. Anybody who has dared to dance in the upper age limits of Tinder knew exactly what a tall, goofball, middle-aged white man was going to do with his freedom. But Chirlane, the cooler, chic-er, more lesbian one? The one who once, when asked if she was still attracted to women, told the reporter “I’m married, I’m monogamous, but I’m not dead.” Fuck yes. De Blasio fulfilled his prophecy: He was spotted blazerless, tieless, chugging white wine, and…

“PEOPLE THAT WORK in government aren’t fun people,” says Chi Ossé, who is 25 and was just reelected to a second term on the City Council, representing parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. “I’m in my 20s. I live in New York City. I’m a gay man. I have to enjoy my life.” But you won’t find him sandwiched between Paris Hilton and Jonathan Cheban on some unknown patron’s dime at Zero Bond, the members-only club where Mayor Adams likes to hold court well into the morning. Ossé instead sips Miller High Lifes at Singers on Kosciuszko Street, a queer bar in Bed-Stuy that hosts events like Twinks vs. Dolls Olympics. (This year, the bar held a wrestling match in an inflatable pool full of spaghetti marinara; Ossé pleads…

EAST WILLIAMSBURG’S 3 Dollar Bill is a venue best known for messy gay parties, but one night in September, performers mounted a re-creation of Wicked, the iconic green-and-pink musical. It was done primarily via lip-sync with elaborate costumes and meticulous mimicry of Joe Mantello’s Broadway staging. The show was part of the mad-genius queen Baby Love’s Fagtasia series of tribute acts to queer (or just beloved by the queers) pop culture—think Rocky Horror, True Blood,even The Hunger Games. But with Wicked, specifically, Fagtasia produced a theatrical coup de grâce. The show started after 11 p.m. and ran for four acts until around 2 a.m. It was a delirious send-up and a tribute to the desire to stand center stage, whether in front of 1,900 tourists or one-fourth that number of…

WHILE THE spring-summer 2024 fashion shows were happening in Europe this fall, it seemed all anyone could talk about was what Taylor Swift and her squad were wearing out to eat. Rather than scurrying through the back door these days, many celebrities are choosing to enter and exit through the front, turning the small patch of sidewalk outside various restaurants into something like a catwalk.…

IT WAS ONE THING for Antonio Reynoso, then a city councilman campaigning for the Brooklyn borough president gig vacated by Eric Adams, to say he would do everything he could to help improve maternal-health outcomes. It was another thing for Reynoso to have to call up the leaders of the major local institutions who are used to receiving millions in capital funding from the BEEP’s office—the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—and tell them they would get nothing this year. To his relief, few balked. It helped, Reynoso says, that “they were all run by women, most of ’em run by Black women. And they’re like, ‘Don’t worry about us one bit. We’ll see you next year.’” One unnamed organization seemed doubtful, he adds, until…

“HE ALWAYS WORE this specific type of black Levi’s and then a work jacket,” Mirabelle Marden says of her father, Brice, the influential post-minimalist painter, who died at 84 this summer. After a career retrospective at MoMA in 2006, he added pointedly functional beanies to the look. The hats—which his daughters and his wife, the artist Helen Marden, bought for him every Christmas at Steven Alan and later Hermès—counterbalanced his new persona as a “distinguished old gentleman,” his younger daughter, Melia, says. He started wearing them all the time, no matter the heat. “The hat became a noticeable thing,” says Mirabelle, despite a black beanie being about the most anonymous garment a person can wear. When a hat started to break down, he would repair it with masking tape; it…

MALIA NOEL High-school student, South Bronx Tell me about the character you’re cosplaying. Celestia Ludenberg from an anime called Danganronpa. She wants to be known as that person who’s very elegant to people, even though her personality is the total opposite. Really, she’s kind of mean. Where did you get the costume? I got the costume itself from Amazon, but I made the headpiece. I bought this really long black wig, and I cut it to make bangs. Then for the ponytails, I used wire and duct tape. It took a week because I got the wrong-color wig and had to dye it a bunch of times and had to look for a specific kind of dye, which really took up a lot of time. And who did you go…

CAFÉ CHELSEA 218 W. 23rd St., nr. Seventh Ave. cafechelseanyc.com The hotel location is un-Odeon, but the menu hits a Franco-American sweet spot: shellfish platters, a textbook chef burger (topped with Mornay sauce), and a wobbly chocolate soufflé for dessert. HOEXTER’S 174 E. 82nd St., nr. Third Ave. hoexters.com The “neighborhood brasserie” is named for a spot from the 1970s. With its low ceiling and tight front-bar room, it looks the part—even if the mortadella plates nod to current culinary trends. L’ABEILLE À CÔTÉ 412 Greenwich St., nr. Laight St. labeilleacote.nyc It’s small—more “private dining room” than proper restaurant—though the “teriyaki” burger and garden salads will appeal to Tribeca families in the mood for “the Odeon but not the Odeon, again.”…

TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET would like you to know he’s French. He brings it up in interviews, attributing to his Frenchness both his curls and his passion for the Saint-Étienne soccer team. You may have seen the video of him rapping in high school: “It’s time to do my dance/Timmy Tim, pull up your pants/ Voulez-vous coucher avec moi / Oui, je suis from France.” Or maybe you witnessed him years later, at the Paris premiere of Little Women, carrying one of those mini Eiffel Tower keychains. But do the French claim him? Chalamet has never lived in France full time, nor has he acted in a French film, though he would like François Ozon to please give him a call. When the actor appears on French TV, news, or radio, he…

IN 2017, E. Alex Jung declared that “Male Stars Are Too Buff!” On the heels of that, a young Timothée Chalamet entered the popular consciousness via Call Me by Your Name. The public appraised him; people took in his long, lean limbs, his “alabaster skin” (Vogue’s phrase), the alien angularity of his facial structure, and, rather than say “Wow, this kid should 100 percent be cast as Colin in a remake of The Secret Garden,” they said, “This is the heartthrob we’ve been waiting for.” He was the antidote to the Marvel-led glut of synthetic, bulging muscles that looked like CGI but were real and the brute brand of masculinity associated with that type of body. Blended with Chalamet’s otherwise standard-issue heartthrob characteristics (white, cis, floppy ’90s hair, pouty lips),…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. TV 1. Watch The Crown Season Six, Volume Two The royal drama comes to a close. Netflix, December 14. After watching the first part of The Crown’s final season, my big question is, Will the ghosts of Diana and Dodi reappear? JEN CHANEY MUSIC 2. Hear Jeremy Denk A tribute to female composers. Merkin Hall, December 7. The MacArthur-winning pianist Jeremy Denk plays a program of music by women, both current and historical: Missy Mazzoli, Phyllis Chen, and Fanny Mendelssohn. JUSTIN DAVIDSON BOOKS 3. Read Prophet Song The latest Booker winner. Atlantic Monthly Press. In an unnervingly realistic Dublin of the near future, a far-right faction seizes control, dismantling civil liberties and arresting its political enemies. Caught in the crisis is…