Innholdsfortegnelse for September 25, 2023 i The New Yorker

Rachel Syme (“The Suitor,” p. 40), a staff writer, has covered style, culture, and Hollywood for The New Yorker since 2012. Sam Knight (“Designing the Apocalypse,” p. 22) is a staff writer based in London. His first book, “The Premonitions Bureau,” was published in 2022. Rebecca Mead (“Bloomsbury Chic,” p. 32) has been a staff writer since 1997. She is the author of, most recently, “Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return.” Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari (Photographs, pp. 40-57) founded TOILETPAPER, an image-only magazine and a creative studio, in 2010. Diana Ejaita (Cover), a 2023 fellow at Villa Romana, is an artist and a textile designer based in Berlin. W. S. Di Piero (Poem, p. 65) most recently published “Fat: New and Uncollected Prose” and “The Complaints,” a book of poems.…

New York is a phenomenal restaurant city, but rarely is it a thrillingly innovative one. As usual, we can blame capital: the cost of operating a food business in this viciously expensive town makes risktaking far too risky. So it’s exhilarating to have a meal that’s genuinely interesting. At Foxface Natural, a chic little restaurant in the East Village, the owners, Sivan Lahat and Ori Kushnir, are doing something almost rebellious in their apparent lack of regard for trends, or social media, or financial success. The secret to this creative freedom is, let’s be plain, more capital. Lahat and Kushnir are devoted gastronomes; they’re also former techies who earned enough money to quit their day jobs and opened an idiosyncratic sandwich shop called Foxface—because they wanted to, and because they…

A couple of weeks ago, Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the election-related racketeering case against Donald Trump and eighteen co-defendants in Georgia, issued a surprising ruling: the trials would be streamed online and broadcast live on television. This was a departure from the criminal proceedings against Trump in New York and Florida. McAfee said the ruling was “in line with the spirit of transparency.” Some worried that it could allow Trump to turn the case into a televised spectacle. But the skeptics may be underestimating McAfee. A review of his body of work reveals an entertainer with a knack for surprising his audience. See, for example, the What-A-Man pageant, for performative young men, held annually in the early two-thousands, at North Cobb High School, in Kennesaw, Georgia. Contestants offered their…

Every new employee of the American fashion designer Thom Browne receives a “starter kit” of his brand’s clothing worth some ten thousand dollars retail, including, among other items, two gray suits, five white oxford shirts, one gray wool tie, and one white pocket square. An eleven-page PDF lays out, through visual aids and bullet points, the rules for how to wear what Browne refers to as “uniform” (never “the uniform” or “a uniform”). Top buttons must remain undone. Shirts are not to be ironed. Neckties, a required accessory, should be tucked tightly into waistbands. Suit pants may be swapped out for a pleated skirt, regardless of one’s gender; Browne, a proponent of androgynous dressing, has been putting men in skirts for more than a decade. Exceptions to the rules are…

ACROSS 1 Stitched line5 In-box clutter9 Grp. concerned with toy safety?14 Hotel chain with a hibiscus logo15 Anxiously walk around16 The Rockies’ ___ Field17 Places of worship for many Tibetans20 Fat sometimes added to bird feed21 Intense vexation22 Part of a scholar’s e-mail address23 Features of some margaritas27 Something unpleasant in the air28 Goody Two-Shoes29 Valuable hole card in Texas hold ’em30 Demean31 Page to visit before calling a help desk32 Docs’ bloc33 “Once ___ a Mattress”34 Parameters for a construction project… or, read another way, what the last words of 17-, 23-, 49-, and 54- Across might be used for?39 Actress and activist King who was the first openly transgender competitor on “America’s Next Top Model”40 Bill at a bar41 Ages and ages43 Put the ___ to the metal45…

Call it the first wave of the endemic, a bona-fide covid bump. The statistics may be hard to parse—the United States stopped systematically collecting data on coronavirus cases months ago—but, almost certainly, growing numbers of Americans are coming down with covid. In recent weeks, Jill Biden went into isolation after testing positive, and John McEnroe missed calling much of the U.S. Open on account of an infection. The virus is increasingly turning up in wastewater, especially in the Northeast, and since late June covid hospitalizations nationwide have nearly tripled. In historical terms, though, the rise is more ripple than wave—a viral burst softened by three years of infections and vaccines, and by bodies that remember what they’ve seen. Despite the increase in cases, covid hospitalizations still stand at roughly an…

“Who wants to live in New York?” the three frenemies in Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” wonder. Happily, Maria Friedman does. Friedman, a British singer and actress, is directing a new version of that musical, soon to open on Broadway. “Here, the elevator man has as much right as you do,” she said one day last week, sitting in the café behind the Loeb Boathouse, in Central Park. “Everything is like these quick-witted, fast one-liners.” She snapped her fingers to emphasize her point. It was late on a sultry afternoon. The temperature was past ninety, but Friedman, who had just finished nine hours of rehearsal with Daniel Radcliffe (Charley), Jonathan Groff (Franklin), and Lindsay Mendez (Mary) for the mid-September transfer from New York Theatre Workshop (sold out) to the…

Unfortunately, I am on wikiFeet. For those who do not know, wikiFeet is a photo-sharing foot-fetish site dedicated to celebrities’ feet. I found out that I was on it in 2019, at a time when I would not have described myself as a celebrity. A friend forwarded my rating to me, insisting that I had “made it.” The idea that anyone would invest time and energy ogling my feet was beyond my comprehension, but it was true—I was featured on a Web site that averaged more than ten million visitors a month. I do not judge the sexual proclivities of members of the wikiFeet community. But, personally, my sexual proclivity is that no one look at my feet, ever. To my horror, I learned that I had a wikiFeet rating…

In “The Antipodes,” Annie Baker’s deadpan satire from 2017, the playwright, having spent some time writing for television, showed us her version of Hell. It looks a lot like a Los Angeles writers’ room, where a table of seven men and one frequently interrupted woman generate plot ideas by relaying intimate anecdotes from their own lives. The entertainment industry’s appetite for narrative is bottomless, and, as the writers keep offering up private stories to feed it, the auto-cannibalizing starts to go wrong. A Biblical storm rises outside, and reality cracks open, as it sometimes does in a Baker play, to let the uncanny come through. Baker’s latest comic drama, the much anticipated and pandemic-delayed “Infinite Life,” at the Atlantic, is “Antipodes”’s exact opposite: arid where the 2017 play is flooded;…

In lower Manhattan, a long-mysterious construction, which emerged slowly amid One World Trade, the Oculus, and the 9/11 Memorial—“the final piece of the puzzle” in the complex, its benefactor Mike Bloomberg said—will open for its first public performance on September 19th. Having revealed itself, the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC), designed by Joshua Ramus and his firm, REX, retains an air of mystery: it’s a giant marble-sheathed cube, beige and opaque by day and warmly aglow by night, fronted by a two-story staircase that evokes the approach to a Mayan temple or the gangway to an alien spacecraft. What’s inside? Ramus recently met up with PAC NYC’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, to show a neighbor around. Ramus, who worked with Rem Koolhaas before starting REX, in 2006, is tall…

On a Saturday afternoon in August, while the Red Sox were trouncing the Yankees in the Bronx on the way to a series sweep, members of the Baseball Project, a supergroup that sings about baseball, were settling into the greenroom of the Sinclair, a small venue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not too far from Fenway Park. The night before, they’d performed in Brooklyn—Yankees territory, more or less. “They were yelling for ‘The Yankee Flipper,’” Scott Mc-Caughey, one of the band’s guitarists and singers, said. He was referring to a ballad he wrote about the time Jack (Black Jack) McDowell, the former Yankees ace, got drunk with members of R.E.M.—including McCaughey and one of his Baseball Project bandmates, Mike Mills. “Sorry,” McCaughey joked in the greenroom. “We don’t know how to play…

In 2010, Emily Weiss was working on a Vogue photo shoot in Miami when she and Doutzen Kroes got to talking about self-tanner. Weiss was, at the time, an assistant to a freelance stylist. Kroes was among the highest-paid models in the world, and (it emerged) a big fan of L’Oréal Sublime Bronze ProPerfect Salon Airbrush Self-Tanning Mist. “She was like, ‘All the other ones are crazy,’” Weiss later recalled. This one, Kroes insisted, was different—she said it didn’t even smell. Weiss picked up a bottle at the drugstore and was converted. She pitched a Vogue beauty editor and wrote up the recommendation, in what became her first byline for the magazine. The episode contained, in miniature, the forces Weiss would harness in her career. There was the fast, casual…

Published in 1969, Agatha Christie’s “Hallowe’en Party” is largely set in the fictional town of Woodleigh Common, “an ordinary sort of place,” thirty or forty miles from London. Thanks to the director Kenneth Branagh and his screenwriter, Michael Green, the book has become a new film, “A Haunting in Venice,” and the action has shifted to Italy in 1947. Now, that’s an adaptation—a bolder metamorphosis than anything essayed by Branagh and Green in “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) or “Death on the Nile” (2022). I’m already looking forward to their next reworking of Christie: “The Body in the Library,” perhaps, relocated to the freezer aisle of a Walmart. Branagh returns as Hercule Poirot, who has retired to a Venetian fastness. There, ignoring the pleas of the importunate, who bug…