Innholdsfortegnelse for May 6-19, 2024 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Andrew Rice profiled Donald Trump’s then-little-known lead lawyer Todd Blanche (“In Defense of Trump” April 22–May 5). “An absorbing and intriguing profile … that isn’t going to stop that courtroom from appearing in my actual dreams,” said Charles Arrowsmith. Several readers pushed back on the story’s characterization of Blanche as competent. Commenter diggoryvenn wrote, “Blanche’s legal strategy, as revealed yesterday in the opening statement, is to portray Trump as a family man whose only concern was to protect his family, to deny that he had sex with Daniels and McDougal, and to convince the jury that everyone is lying but Trump. This is ‘surprisingly competent’?” On Slate’s news podcast What’s Next, Rice explained that “even the most competent lawyer can’t overcome a self-sabotaging…

ON APRIL 30, armed police officers swarmed the Columbia University campus for the second time in two weeks, shutting down a student occupation of Hamilton Hall and clearing what was left of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Students had first seized part of the South Lawn, then the attention of the entire Columbia community, and then the national political narrative, as imitation protests in support of Palestine erupted at colleges across America. By refusing to leave unless Columbia committed to divest from Israel and cut ties with Tel Aviv University, among other demands, the students were acting in the shadow of 1968, when protesters dramatically took over buildings, including Hamilton, to resist the Vietnam War and the university’s racial politics. Those events established Columbia’s reputation as a hotbed of dissent where…

IT WAS THE SUMMER of 2023, and Matt Bergwall, a skinny 21-year-old University of Miami student, was lounging in an infinity pool in Dubai. Beside him was his girlfriend, a blonde Zeta Tau Alpha. The silver Cuban link chain on his wrist glistened as he held his phone high to snap a selfie, the city’s artificial palm-shaped islands splayed out along the horizon beneath them. Over the next few days, they swam in the pool and posed on their hotel balcony, posting a steady stream of pictures to Instagram. In one, he leans back on the edge of the pool, finger to the sky. “Eventful finals week,” he captioned it. None of Bergwall’s friends at school had a firm grasp of how the sophomore—a self-styled fintech whiz, Marc Andreessen with…

JOHN KELLY Performance and visual artist, Hell’s Kitchen How is it being back at the Pyramid club? It was crazy being on that stage again. The footprint’s exactly the same. But it’s 40 years later, I’m a different person, and the world is vastly different. My generation—half of them are gone. The ’80s were this incredible last gasp of Bohemia in New York that coincided with the AIDS pandemic. In fact, I lost my first partner in 1982 when it wasn’t even called AIDS quite yet. So it was a very loaded scenario to be there, and we paid tribute to those who weren’t with us in the room. Do you have a favorite Pyramid club memory? Opening night was pretty amazing. I performed the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in…

WINE BARS ARE taking over the city, naturally—keeping pace with the natural-wine boom and as a matter of course. There’s no imported trend New York will not digest and then supercharge. The diminutive bars à vin of Paris, where you get a splash of better-than-ever local plonk and a little saucer of saucisson sec, are urban treasures where you can expect grumpy service (in English, at least) and indulge existentialist fantasies. But the influential neo wine bars that began cropping up in New York—Estela in 2013 and the Four Horsemen and Wildair, which followed in 2015—were really wine restaurants, not in the sense of the old Montrachet, with its groaning cellar and white-tablecloth cuisine, but reservation-requiring, full-menu-offering, ambitious renovations of the grubby-casual original. In tweaking the formula, they have scrubbed…

ON AN APRIL afternoon in West Adams, a historically Black neighborhood in South Los Angeles, Normani emerges from a dressing room after several hours of fittings, swathed in cream and white. Andrea, her camo-clad mother, flits about the day’s photo-shoot set like a self-appointed creative director, checking screens to offer sporadic affirmations—“Oh, that’s good, Mani”—or candid styling suggestions— “Push her undies down so they aren’t showing!” The air is thick with banjos and Beyoncé shrieks. Lately, Normani has been listening to just two things: Cowboy Carter, presently playing in full for the second time this afternoon, and Dopamine, her long-delayed debut album set to release on June 14. Despite the throng of people assembled behind the monitor, Normani seems relatively at ease. She’s used to being looked at, after a…

BOTH SIDES IN Donald Trump’s trial say that the case, which technically concerns the crime of falsifying business records, is truly about politics. The prosecution said in its opening argument that Trump had “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.” The following week, Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche said he and his client “very much believe that this is a political persecution, that it’s a political trial.” While that message may resonate with Trump’s audience outside the courtroom, the jury has been hearing a very different kind of story over the past two weeks. The trial narrative is less about any election than it is about secrets—a crime of gossip. The first two major witnesses, David Pecker, the former chief executive of American Media, Inc., which owns the…

➸ PEOPLE WHO THINK umbrellas aren’t worth investing in haven’t experienced the joy of staying perfectly dry in a downpour as all the flimsy ones around them flip inside out. To find such satisfaction, writer Katherine Gillespie tested every umbrella that has been recommended to the Strategist over the years, including Davek’s Elite ($159). It’s lightweight, has a comfortable leather handle, and “opens with a majestic swoosh at the touch of a button,” she says. Once open, the 50-inch canopy is wide enough for two, and the inversion-resistant frame curves to never let in the rain. Ultimately, “it looks and feels like a Bentley,” says Strategist senior writer Liza Corsillo, who has owned the same model for five years.…

BEST OVERALL The Four Horsemen 295 Grand St., Williamsburg; fourhorsemenbk.com INSTITUTION Aldo Sohm Wine Bar 151 W. 51st St.; aldosohm winebar.com NEWCOMER With Others 340 Bedford Ave., Williamsburg; withothers brooklyn.com STALWART Chambers 94 Chambers St.; chambers.nyc SPANISH WINE Bar Vinazo 158 Seventh Ave., Park Slope; barvinazo.com GREEK WINE Stafili Wine Café multiple locations; stafiliwinecafe.com GERMAN WINE Terroir 24 Harrison St.; wineisterroir.com AUSTRIAN WINE Wallsé Next Door 713 Washington St.; nextdoor.wallse.com AUSTRALIAN WINE Sonnyboy 65 Rivington St.; sonnyboynyc.com … AND EVEN BALKAN WINE Ruffian 125 E. 7th St.; ruffiannyc.com…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. TV 1. Watch Bridgerton Season Three Back to our ton. Netflix, May 16. After two years off, the Shondaland series about London high society returns. You’re not going to believe this, but it definitely features a lot of British people wearing fancy clothes while throwing each other knowing glances. JEN CHANEY MUSIC 2. Listen to Britpop Rabbiting with English bangers. New Alias, May 10. This triple album from storied producer A. G. Cook references the ’90s U.K. rock scene that brought you Blur and Pulp, but the early singles “Silver Thread Golden Needle” and “Soulbreaker” suggest his Britpop leans closer to Madchester than Menswear. CRAIG JENKINS TV 3. Watch Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire Season Two The sexy stuff is…

WHAT IS A voice of a generation?” Honor Levy asks me at Corner Bar on Canal Street. “Is it the most controversial voice? The first person to write in the way that everybody writes? The person that most people hate or love?” She’s not quite sure she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with dog), though, as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington College, she knows that is part of the reason people might read (and write about) her. Levy was one of the niche icons of Dimes Square, the scene that bloomed on the little patch of the Lower East Side where we are currently…

Okay, if I were to walk into your bedrooms right now, what would I see? LAUREN RO, writer: We have a king-size bed, and I top it with Company Store’s Premium Alberta Down Light Warmth Comforter (from $339). I change up the cover depending on my mood—I use a linen one from Parachute in dusk (from $290) for a casual, lived-in look and Snowe’s Percale Duvet Cover (from $253) for a polished vibe. It has a border trim that makes it look a bit formal without appearing too fancy. For every setup, I use a fitted sheet, a flat sheet, two standard pillows, two king pillows, and two mini-shams with scalloped flanges. SIMONE KITCHENS, senior editor: I don’t like a sad-looking low duvet. Aesthetically, my bed needs to be pillowy,…

AS HISHAM “HAM” EL-WAYLLY, Anoop Pillarisetti, and Michael Tuiach were putting together the menu for Strange Delight (63 Lafayette Ave., at Fulton St., Fort Greene; strangedelight.nyc), the New Orleans seafood-and-cocktail bar they are set to open May 15, they faced a crucial question: “Do we have too many oyster dishes?” They’re served on the half-shell. There are oysters Rockefeller—made, in the style of Galatoire’s, without bacon or cheese—and fried oysters served with rémoulade. In lieu of po’boys, there’s a fried-oyster loaf à la Casamento’s, here made with thick-sliced milk bread, Duke’s mayo, pickles, and shredded iceberg. Did they really need more? Maybe, they thought, they should ditch the oysters Bienville, an archaic preparation that even they had seen only a few times in the wild. “We were all ready to cut…

12. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story 2022 ➽ Thumbing its nose at pesky biopic mainstays like facts and gravitas, this movie honors the parody artist by staging his origin story as a parody film. Daniel Radcliffe gamely mocks extreme actor transformations while pulling off a totally committed impression. Still, it occasionally plays like a Walk Hard cover band. 11. Rocketman 2019 ➽ When Rocketman is at its best, as when Taron Egerton blasts off from Dodger Stadium into the sky as a literal rocket-man mere seconds after overdosing, it’s as ridiculous and fabulous as Elton John himself. Unfortunately, those moments are too few and far between for the movie to fully congeal. The characterization is generally only surface level, and the plot flies through typical biopic beats. 10. Aline 2021…

Oh, Canada Paul Schrader returns after decades with an adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel Forgone, starring Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi, and Uma Thurman. Megalopolis This epic sci-fi allegory is the self-financed dream project Francis Ford Coppola has been trying to make since the 1980s. A secret screening in Los Angeles in March seemed to tear the town in half. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Mad Max: Fury Road nearly set Cannes on fire in 2015 with its triumphant premiere. Director George Miller has returned to the Croisette with a prequel to that film and the most recent chapter in the Mad Max series. Parthenope Little is known about the plot of Paolo Sorrentino’s new epic, but the director is famous for merging bold stylization and socially charged themes. The Substance A…