Innholdsfortegnelse for December 18-31, 2023 i New York Magazine

1 The magazine’s annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue featured everything from a newly single former First Lady to a lost dog found through the kindness of strangers. “Reasons to Love New York was entertaining, as always, except for the item about ordering a takeout martini from Nobu, which was spectacular,” wrote Judith Coyne in a letter.“I thought you would’ve balanced the roundup with some serious substance, such as one of your excellent reporting pieces. But no, instead you piled on with a long takeout on Timothée Chalamet. 10 pages! I loved all of it. Please carry on giving me the stories I need, not just the stories I think I need.”The City’s Katie Honan commended the “good showing from Queens including the first and second slots. This is…

WHEN A JURY found the cryptocurrency crook Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of money laundering and fraud in November, Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, did something unusual. Standing in front of the federal courthouse on Pearl Street with a posse of unsmiling aides, Williams departed from his normally reserved demeanor to read the riot act to would-be criminals. “When I became U.S. Attorney, I promised that we would be relentless in rooting out corruption in our financial markets,” he said. “This is what relentless looks like.” It was a coming-out moment for an official who, after two years of quietly leading the most powerful prosecutorial office in America, is getting comfortable in the spotlight. “There should not be two standards of justice in this country,…

Buying for children age 2 and under is difficult. What have you guys done well with? WINNIE YANG, Senior Editor: Babies will play with garbage. They would rather have the wrapping paper than the thing in the package, but something that makes them feel like a grown-up is good. So that’s a good age to get a kid a scooter or a balance bike. LIZA CORSILLO, Senior Writer: Yes—my parents are getting Arlo, my 1-year-old, the Scuttlebug, and we’re very excited about that. ALEXIS SWERDLOFF, Deputy Editor: Does anyone have that Rody? That is one of the things I have been contemplating getting Eve, who is 2. W.Y.: We have Rody! Two is a great age for Rody. There’s something about its round, bulbous shape and its rubberiness, as well…

A VISIT TO EULALIE begins, inevitably, with an outgoing voice-mail message. That alone may be disqualifying for whole swaths of would-be diners; Eulalie is on no reservation apps and has no official website. “You have found us in the wonderful and historic Tribeca,” announces the voice of Tina Vaughn, who, with her husband, Chip Smith, runs Eulalie in the address recently vacated by Bâtard. This is not a short message. It comes with news (it is fully booked), rules (“We do so appreciate your best in terms of attire … think more Mad Men and less Grubhub”), and an invitation to leave a message and be called back because, as Vaughn says, “we are so looking forward to welcoming you.” She means it, too. “Welcome to the house!” Vaughn crowed…

1. Marc Maron, From Bleak to Dark (Max) Maron’s previous special was about how to live in an apocalyptic moment; From Bleak to Dark is about what happens when the apocalypse arrives and you find yourself still standing. The core is Maron discussing the death of his partner, Lynn Shelton, and though the material is not light, it has an appreciative quality to it, a sense of delight from Maron almost in spite of himself. 2. Beth Stelling, If You Didn’t Want Me Then (Netflix) Stelling’s persona, which ticks between disaffection and full-throated weirdness, is especially effective in this special, which she recorded in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio. It’s full of reflections on her childhood, and the highlight is a stretch of jokes about her father, culminating in an…

1. “VAMPIRE,” OLIVIA RODRIGO Calling an ex a bloodsucker and fame fucker is one thing, but telling him “You can’t love anyone ’cause that would mean you had a heart” is ice cold. 2. “BOY’S A LIAR PT. 2,” PINKPANTHERESS AND ICE SPICE A perfect on-paper and in-practice matchup that doesn’t jettison the original song’s mojo. 3. “A&W,” LANA DEL REY The famously on-the-nose artist laments “the experience of bein’ an American whore.” 4. “DUSTIES,” MAIYA THE DON “If I let you near me, then you lucky,” the Brooklyn rapper sharply snarls over a Lil’ Kim sample. 5. “BLACK EARTH, WI,” RATBOYS Only a midwestern rock band could pull such beauty from getting lost on the highway. 6. “SHAKIRA: BZRP MUSIC SESSIONS, VOL. 53,” SHAKIRA AND BIZARRAP The superstar goes…

1. BALDUR’S GATE 3 Your Dungeons & Dragons character’s actions will literally be decided by the rolling of a 20-sided die as you navigate misadventures in Faerûn. 2. STREET FIGHTER 6 A new control scheme vastly simplifies special-move inputs, allowing all of our old thumbs to summon up a Shoryuken. 3. ALAN WAKE II A psychological detective adventure; you investigate the eldritch disappearance of the namesake author (and obvious Stephen King stand-in). 4. TEARS OF THE KINGDOM Nintendo has totally reinvented Zelda twice in six years, and both times it wound up with a new classic. 5. SYSTEM SHOCK It turns out the spirit of the 1994 original was always indelible; it just needed a fresh coat of paint. 6. PIZZA TOWER Wario is replaced with a madcap pizza chef…

1. Henry Taylor, “B Side,” Whitney Museum of American Art With a sweeping grasp of history, art history, and everyday life in this country, Taylor provided a Whitney retrospective that channeled rage, pain, love, and suffering—the long American night done in vivid color and bold strokes. 2. Tracey Emin, “Lovers Grave,” White Cube Powerful, scrawled, half-mad, brilliantly rendered images of Emin in bed, opening herself up, being blown apart by unseen forces, reconstituting herself, and making love in rooms filled with ghosts and coffins. Emin is our Edvard Munch with a profound seer’s soul. 3. Dana Schutz, “Jupiter’s Lottery,” David Zwirner Gallery It was amazing to see Schutz reach visionary heights in this eye-burning exhibition. There were gigantic narratives of struggle between cosmic social forces, lurid spirits, ghouls, twisted beings,…

Start with ➽ The Vitali’s classic Yuletide wonderland on 84th Street between Tenth and 11th Avenues. Move on to ➽ Sudsy fake snow and hot-chocolate trucks at the corner of 84th and Tenth. Pause for ➽ Cannoli and an all-green house on 83rd Street between 11th and 12th. Luxuriate in ➽ The spirit of “Harmonious Family Everything” on 84th, near 13th Avenue. Loop back and end with ➽ The most light-studded block—84th between 11th and 12th—including Lucy Spata’s famous toy-soldier-spangled yard.…

ADELINE F. Third-grader, Ridgewood, New Jersey Whose idea was it to go see The Nutcracker? My mom and my dad’s. It was basically kind of a surprise. That morning, they were like, “Hey, we’re going to go do something really special. Get a little dressed up.” So I really didn’t know too much about it, but I knew we were doing something special. Any plans for the holidays? My mom goes to a pottery studio, and one of her friends at the studio has a dog, so we’re going to be dog-sitting that dog. Do you have any dogs of your own? No, but soon we might get a dog. What kind do you want? Well, I want a Cavalier King, but we’re not going to get one. Have you…

. . . . THE LOOK BOOK GOES TO the nutcracker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A NEW OLD-SEEMING RESTAURANT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .…

DURING THE PANDEMIC, Inna Khidekel and Bert van der Walt hatched a plan to move to Florida. They both work in finance—she is senior managing director and global co-head of client solutions at Bridge Investment Group, he the co-founding partner and portfolio manager of Tectonic Investors—and had been renting a loft in Tribeca that would be too small with their second child on the way. But after they found a house in Miami, Khidekel’s company asked that she stay put, so they went looking for a new place in Manhattan. “This was actually our first purchase in the city,” Khidekel says of the Tribeca duplex they bought in early 2022. It’s in an 1881 cast-iron building that had once been a textile factory and was redone by the Pritzker Prize–winning…

1. BEAU IS AFRAID (Ari Aster) A superlong, super-crazy, super-funny movie about one man’s mental breakdown with a cast better than Around the World in 80 Days’: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Parker Posey, Nathan Lane. It’s a laugh riot from hell you’ll never forget, even if you want to. 2. A PRINCE (Pierre Creton) You’ve never heard of this one, but I’d never heard of Super Mario Bros.when it came out either, so there. A most unlikely gay movie about a gerontophilic hot male farmer and his two old-man lovers who drop dead for no apparent reason other than being “embarrassed by youth and beauty.” It’s dirty in a soil-like way. Dicks turn into mythic creatures; men howl like dogs. Slow, spooky, and poetically fucked up. In other words, perfect.…

1. Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein Leftist writer Naomi Klein investigates the red-pilling of fellow author Naomi Wolf, with whom she’s constantly confused—then uses that as a jumping-off point to explore the disinformation shadow world that exists alongside our own. 2. Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad This astonishing second novel tells the story of a London-based Palestinian actress who is enlisted to play Gertrude in an Arabic staging of Hamlet to be performed in the West Bank. In the shadow of IDF checkpoints and interrogations, the cast mounts a production infused with subtext. 3. When Crack Was King, by Donovan X. Ramsey A deeply researched and deeply felt nonfiction debut about the 1980s crack epidemic, alternating between legal and cultural detail and the personal stories of four people whose lives were…

1. The Retrievals (New York Times and Serial Productions) It was a real-life nightmare: A nurse at the Yale Fertility Center was found to have routinely swapped out fentanyl with saline, thus subjecting patients to the full pain of egg-retrieval procedures. The Retrievals could’ve been a series that fixated on the luridity of the crime, but reporter Susan Burton cedes much of the floor to the patients themselves and leaves room at the edges for other thorny subject matter, such as the tension between bodily autonomy and motherhood. 2. You Didn’t See Nothin (USG Audio and the Invisible Institute) Chicago writer Yohance Lacour, looking to settle a kind of spiritual score, revisits a hate crime that took place in the late ’90s: A young Black boy, Lenard Clark, was beaten…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. MOVIES 1. See Carol Time for your favorite tragic holiday story. Metrograph, December 23. The mesmerizing 2015 drama of forbidden desire in 35-mm. has become a Christmas tradition at the Metrograph with good reason. Todd Haynes and cinematographer Edward Lachman’s richly textured images envelop us in the heartbreaking mid-century romance of a wealthy woman (Cate Blanchett) and a young, aspiring photographer (Rooney Mara). BILGE EBIRI TV 2. Watch Dr. Death Season Two Medical malpractice. Peacock, December 21. Health-care-related fraud is a particular horror. This series, based on a podcast of the same name, focuses on thoracic surgeon Paolo Macchiarini (played by Edgar Ramírez), whose misleading research led to patients’ deaths. Mandy Moore costars as a journalist who begins asking questions Paolo…