Innholdsfortegnelse for November 18-December 1, 2024 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Rachel Handler spoke to anxious New Yorkers about how they were coping with stress in the waning days of the presidential campaign (“Election Fright,” November 4–17). Commenter twizzlers22 said, “the vibes are fine, just another day in the post apocalyptic hell hole timeline.” Kevin Walsh, the webmaster of Forgotten New York, said, “whoever wins, wins,” while stephen.stirling wrote, “What on earth is the point of worrying about something you can’t control? That’s just fate, and is what it is. No wonder liberals win the ‘I am depressed and anxious’ sweepstakes!” Commenter aruffer wrote, “On Tuesday night? I’m taking several edibles, playing video games until my brain can’t process anymore, and passing out early to await our fate.” On Instagram, stacyparkerlemelle wrote, “More interested…

OVER THE SUMMER, EVERYONE I know went to Greece. From Greece, everyone I know posted one picture: octopus suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea. The picture was a picture of an octopus (suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea), but it was also a subtle message that the person behind the camera was (1) traveling, (2) traveling to Greece, the summer-vacation spot of 2024, and not Puglia, the summer-vacation spot of 2023, and (3) not taking a selfie, but (4) you know, not just taking a picture of the Aegean Sea, which would be basic, unlike this one, which (5) managed a sort of high-low effect, given the octopus was dead and clipped to a clothesline. It would have been the perfect picture of an…

IN JANUARY 2023, Terrence Boyce was hired by the deli-meat maker Boar’s Head to straighten out some problems in one of the company’s nine U.S. processing plants. Boyce is a sanitation manager who advises food producers on how to improve their cleaning procedures, and Boar’s Head’s factory in Jarratt, Virginia, was filthy. State inspectors contracted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service had found mold, leaky pipes, rusty machinery, and live insects, among other things you don’t want touching your lunch meat. A few months earlier, the agency had warned Boar’s Head that the facility’s conditions amounted to an “imminent threat” to anyone who ate the beef and pork cold cuts processed there. But when he arrived at work, Boyce didn’t sense much urgency. For starters,…

WHILE I AM LOUD ONLINE about the things I would let Rachel Weisz do to my body, I still sometimes feel like I’m finding my personal style as a former heterosexual, now full-time queer femme, part-time bottom. There’s coming out and then there is settling in, and sometimes it takes a second—and sifting through a few ex-girlfriends’ closets—to finally feel at home in your queer presentation. For some queer women, gay signaling looks like a carabiner heavy with a haphazard collection of keys clipped to a belt loop. For others, like a shag haircut or skinny glasses or hands with tattoos, short nails, and silver rings. For me, the Citizens of Humanity Horseshoe jeans ($290) do much of the heavy lifting. Citizens of Humanity hit its stride back in the early…

FOR ALL ITS protestations of humility—it’s just a little “corner store”—the Corner Store has, in short order, become basically out of reach for the average diner. Good luck popping in. By 5 p.m. on a recent night, a line had formed down West Broadway filled with people hoping for the mere possibility of cancellations or no-shows, and when I’d tried my luck around 5:15 p.m. on a Sunday evening not long before, a polite but firm security guard stationed at the door informed me that there would be no cancellations at all. A hostess, similarly polite, similarly firm, regretted her inability to help. There was, she said, literally no way to take a number, a name: no wait list, no nothing. Such is the power of any place Taylor Swift…

IT’S A TRUISM THAT the Irish cast a long shadow over English-language literature. James Joyce appears near the top of most lists of influential writers, and more recently, Sally Rooney discourse clogs our feeds with every new book. Last year, four Irish writers were longlisted for the Booker Prize. Considering that heritage, we asked a small group of writers and editors to choose the best Irish novels of the past 15 years. The process was mostly democratic; the more appearances a book made on our critics’ lists, the higher it ranked. Why 15 years? It was enough time to encompass Colm Toibin’s bestseller Brooklyn; the post–Celtic Tiger downturn, when Ireland’s economy cratered in the midst of a global recession and fueled the sardonic opuses of Paul Murray; and Anna Burns’s…

England’s Ealing Studios made more than just funny movies, but the films it produced in the postwar era (many of them starring the great Alec Guinness) practically defined what we now know as black comedy. Here, some highlights from Film Forum’s latest retrospective. The Lavender Hill Mob, November 20, 22, 24, and 26 One of the greatest heist movies ever made, this uproarious, ingenious comedy has mild-mannered bank clerk Guinness concocting a plan to smuggle gold bullion out of the U.K. It’s like a Hitchcock thriller gone haywire. The Ladykillers, November 24 and 26 Ignore the people who try to tell you the Coen brothers’ remake of this is any good. See the glorious original about a group of hoodlums (led by Guinness) attempting to kill the nice old landlady who has…

TODAY, DOORMEN ACCEPT OUR Amazon packages, gift cards materialize in our email, and we track our Temu and TikTok Shop orders on our phones. But not even that long ago, New York was a department-store town. Holiday shopping meant a trip uptown to Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, or Bergdorf Goodman, where baskets on the seventh floor brimmed with glass Christmas ornaments and you could—if you paid enough—walk out with a fully decorated tree. Best & Co., Bonwit Teller, and Henri Bendel (those brown-and-white striped bags!) all had their own niches, clientele, devotees. Downtown, there was Barneys, first downscale and later on very, very upscale, with its celebrity-themed holiday windows and mannequin renditions of everyone from Madonna to Margaret Thatcher. (If you couldn’t afford Barneys, you could walk a couple of…

KEY Dozens of neighborhoods across the five boroughs became more red in the 2024 election. The greater the shift, the larger the circle. THE MORE CAMOUFLAGE HARRIS-WALZ trucker hats I saw around Brooklyn, the greater my sense of foreboding. “Courting disaster,” I texted a colleague, half-joking, as I walked to my Fort Greene polling site on Election Day. Scanning as working class, the hats seemed to be worn exclusively by people who didn’t match that description. They reminded me of the Big Buck Hunter arcade game at a bar near the campus of my elite college, which lent wry “authenticity” to the setting and whose plastic rifles were the only kind most of us had any interest in handling. I wondered if some of the hat wearers were in on…

IT WAS St. Patrick’s Day weekend 2024, and it was so crowded inside the Gagosian showroom that had taken over Mary Boone’s old gallery on West 24th Street that I could barely see the paintings. Downtown rats, art-school students, several generations of art stars, musicians, Hypebeast editors, collectors, writers, academics, Harold Ancart, Leo Fitzpatrick (bumming out cigs), Jennifer Lawrence—all there for Jamian Juliano-Villani’s solo show. There was a line down the block. Juliano-Villani, a head shorter than most, entered with “I need a fuckin’ drink!” in her Newport 100’s New Jersey growl. Matt Dillon followed, arm in arm with her mom. There was art, too: big, expensive (up to $200,000 apiece), ironic oil paintings. A portrait of Henry Kissinger against an I Spy background; another that read STEAMY LITTLE JEWISH…

BEN BARBRO Bagpiper, Caldwell, New Jersey I’m curious how you got started with the bagpipe. Are you Scottish? I have Scottish ancestry, but I’m not from Scotland. There’s no connection in that way. I felt compelled to learn about 25 years ago when I met a guy who was in the Canadian Army in World War II. Bagpipe was his passion, and he taught me how to play. Is this your full-time job? Occasionally, I play a paid gig, but typically it’s me doing it just because I love it. My day job is at a pharmaceutical company. You were playing outside to welcome everyone. How did that go? I was kind of like the Scottish beacon. People could hear bagpipes and knew, Okay, that’s the way to the event.…

WHEN WAS THE moment Ireland became cool? Was it in December 2018, when Derry Girls hit Netflix, introducing a global audience to Northern Ireland’s ’90s pop-culture ephemera? Or was it a few months later, when Sally Rooney’s Normal People arrived in the U.S., occasioning multiple glowing New York Times reviews and spurring the first wave of trend pieces about “the cult of Sally Rooney”? Either way, by the time The Banshees of Inisherin was released in 2022, a full-on Irish cultural invasion was underway. Call them the Craic Pack: Authors such as Anna Burns and Paul Lynch won major prizes. Actors Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy and singer-songwriter Hozier stepped back into the spotlight. Barry Keoghan went from art-film weirdo to pop-star boyfriend. Even brands got swept up in it:…

IN THE EARLY YEARS of his life as an actor, Anthony Boyle made the strategic decision not to play what he called the “Belfast lad”—the kind of rough-and-tumble Northern Irish guy, fond of a pint and a good yarn and not to be crossed, familiar in a lot of media from the British Isles and perhaps not too dissimilar from Boyle himself. He grew up in West Belfast, dropped out of school at 16, and worked a series of odd jobs—including bartending and performing on ghost tours—before going to drama school in Wales. He had a breakout moment playing the very posh, very blond son of Draco Malfoy in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, first in London (where he won an Olivier Award), then on Broadway. He…

➸ DANSK’S Købenstyle Baker ($135) is not only particularly good-looking but beloved by many cooks, including the Strategist’s kitchen and dining writer Emma Wartzman, who tested five pieces of bakeware to land on the most versatile dish. It has a lightweight-carbon-steel core, which, similar to cast iron, makes it excellent at conducting heat. While she has used it on a lower heat setting to give certain foods (like fish and tomatoes) a gentler bake, it’s also exceptionally good at browning. She has roasted chicken and potatoes to crackly, golden perfection. Writer and cookbook author Anna Hezel says you end up with “really crispy browned corners” when you make something that touches the sides, like lasagna. Still, the enamel coating is easy to clean, and Wartzman is confident the baker will…

➽ THESE ARE GRAND times for the Irish at the Oscars. Cork’s Cillian Murphy is the reigning Best Actor winner. Last year, Belfast’s Ross White, along with Tom Berkeley, won the Live-Action Short prize for An Irish Goodbye. Colin Farrell, Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley, Kerry Condon, Brendan Gleeson, and Barry Keoghan have all been nominated recently. ¶ As luck would have it, a few of those former nominees are back in the awards conversation again. First, there’s Murphy, who stars in the drama Small Things Like These, adapted from the book by Claire Keegan. It’s a tiny film, but reviews at the Berlin Film Festival were positive—The Telegraph praised the leading man’s “hypnotic grace”—and there’s plenty of room in Best Actor if voters want to hand him a victory-lap nomination.…

➽ FOR Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy practiced impersonating the creator of the atomic bomb’s voice by walking around in circles talking to himself and won an Oscar for his effort. To play the young Scottish father in Aftersun, Paul Mescal imitated the Edinburgh sounds he’s admitted to having struggled with in drama school. And Andrew Scott’s Emmy-nominated performance in Ripley perfected the accent of an American who speaks pretty good Italian. “I think it’s a very Irish thing to do accents,” said Saoirse Ronan in a 2018 interview. She’s also something of an accent savant, having convincingly played a teenager from Sacramento and a recovering Scottish alcoholic in the course of her career. “When you’re telling a story, you just naturally go into the character’s accent. I had grown up with…

NOVEMBER 20–DECEMBER 4 For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. TV 1. Watch The Agency Undercover. Paramount+ with Showtime, November 29. If you’re wondering what to indulge in on this streamer that isn’t Yellowjackets, a Taylor Sheridan show, or a Tom Cruise movie, here’s your answer. This adaptation of the French drama Le Bureau des Légendes follows a CIA agent forced to return to London who unexpectedly reunites there with a former lover; how long can he keep up the divisions between his personal, professional, real, and fake lives? The cast is exciting: Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith, John Magaro, and Adam Nagaitis. ROXANA HADADI MUSIC 2. Hear Catalyst Quartet Crossroads of culture. 92 NY, November 22. During the last century, Paris was where Spanish composers learned…

Chwast produced many illustrations for New York in its early years (his first cover was a portrait of Johnny Carson in 1968), and now, at 93, he returns for an encore. Of the fellow on this cover: “I thought, What can you do with a gift box?—and came up with a dancing man, inspired by Busby Berkeley films from the 1930s.” A Nonsense Machine That’s what artist Martin Smith calls this doodad, which fires confetti-bursting party poppers. ($1,250; artofplay.com)…