Innehållsförteckning för April 11-24, 2022 från New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Molly Fischer wrote about the sudden popularity of economic historian Adam Tooze (“Galaxy Brain,” March 28–April 10). Glengarry Will Gray called it an “informative profile of someone whose staggering written output far outpaces my capacity to keep up.” Casey Lurtz, a Johns Hopkins history professor, “had no clue that my own recent enthusiasm for Tooze’s older writing on statistics was part of the Zeitgeist.” Victoria University of Wellington professor Van Jackson wrote, “His superpower is not so much storytelling as coalition bridging—he gives an idiom of technocratic policy relevance to the left, while giving left-liberals and moderates a basis to flirt with leftist ideas.” But Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, objected to the article’s focus on the cohort…

In 1931, a writer named George Tichenor made his way from his home on West 21st Street down to the Lower East Side to see a play. Galicia Aflame, by the Ukrainian American playwright William Chopinsky, was perhaps not deathless theater, but it was sturdy activist work. (Sample dialogue: “By a workers’ and peasants’ government, I mean a government formed from all of our people.”) It was staged in front of 2,000 viewers at the Manhattan Lyceum, a big barn of a room on East 4th Street. Tichenor wanted to interview the playwright, and after the show he went out into the neighborhood to look for him. Around the corner at the Ukrainian National Home, they were celebrating Ukrainian Independence Day. Tichenor watched a performance by a traditional folk chorus,…

THAT TIME WHEN My Grandfather Ran the Show Markian Surmach, 60, was of the third generation to operate Surma Book & Music Co. My grandfather, Myron Sr., came from Ukraine with a third-grade education. He ended up in the coal mines in Pennsylvania, but that didn’t last long—he knew he would die there. He moved to New York City. His neighbors were getting letters they couldn’t read, and he became the go-to guy to read letters from people in Ukraine. He became a center of the community, and the idea of the store in part came about from that. He was a born entrepreneur. The store was entirely his creation, and he ran the show. He started with Ukrainian books and sheet music. He would import the Ukrainian-language newspaper, and…

Décor Wolfum Paloma Cornhole Set $290 at wolfum.com This outdoorsy gift “earns a grin” from all who see it, according to Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur, hosts of the A Thing or Two podcast. Philippe Malouin Ace Stool $223 at philippemalouin.com Noa Santos, the founder of interior-design firm Nainoa, wanted his registry to be full of things he wouldn’t buy for himself, like this terra-cotta stool that was originally designed for the lobby and rooms at Ace Hotels. Mid Tower Mother & Child Candle Set $64 at shopgoodfriend.com Hand-poured with recycled wax by artists Sara Gernsbacher and JPW3. Baba Tree Woven Bicycle Basket $115 at goodeeworld.com Kiyanna Stewart, co-founder of Blk Mkt Vintage, added this handsome made-in-Ghana bicycle basket to her wedding registry last spring for rides across Brooklyn and…

I’M TIRED OF food stuff,” says Sean Rembold. “I’m tired of it just being about food or about someone’s name.” Hardly the sentiment you’d expect from a New York chef who recently opened his first restaurant after decades spent working his way up the culinary ladder, culminating in an 11-year stint running the locavore kitchens at Williamsburg’s Diner, Marlow & Sons, and Reynard. He left that post in 2017, fed up with the volume-crazed restaurant-group grind. But on a family trip to the coast of Ireland, he found fresh inspiration over potted prawns and raw oysters at a local landmark called Nancy’s, a quintessential pub where the food—“So simple, so good,” Rembold says—mattered less to him than the neighborly spirit and true sense of community. “I was like, Why can’t…

IMAGINE THE character of Cyrano de Bergerac, and what you see first is probably his nose—the thing that keeps him from his love, Roxane. Then perhaps you envision the feathered 17th-century cap and the rapier. James McAvoy, starring in an updated version of Edmond Rostand’s play about the legendary French raconteur, has none of those things—just his native Scottish accent, a buzz cut, and a smoldering glare. Director Jamie Lloyd, famous for paring back the classics (especially Pinter) on the West End, reconceptualized Cyrano in an attempt to see how far he could push an audience to look past the stodgy, expected trappings of a period drama in verse and focus on the language itself. (A recent musical film starring Peter Dinklage did away with the schnoz too but kept…

AS WE SPEED toward this summer’s Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and with it the likely overturn of Roe v. Wade, there is a lot of bad news coming from states rushing to pass ever-more-totalitarian restrictions on those who seek abortion care. Following the lead of Texas, which last fall passed a six-week ban that deputizes citizens to sue anyone who helps a patient get an abortion, Missouri Republicans in March proposed a law that would authorize citizens to sue anyone who assists a person traveling out of state to terminate a pregnancy. And as if Republicans’ creative decision to sample the Fugitive Slave Act wasn’t chilling enough, April began with the sudden and terrible passage of a near-total ban on abortion in Oklahoma, one…

You start with a raw egg and an instrument with a wooden handle and a copper funnel. You put in a little beeswax—because no other wax darkens—and you heat it with a candle flame. It’s hot. You can really burn your fingers. The colors go light to dark: white, yellow, orange, red, black. We say that we write on the egg: You wax the areas that you want to be white. The wax protects the shell that’s underneath so that when you dip the egg into the yellow dye, it becomes yellow, but the part of the shell that was covered up remains white. And then on the yellow shell, you wax the areas that you want to be yellow and dip the egg into the next dye. Section by…

RESTAURANT COOKING is an itinerant business, especially these days, and over the past several years, few cooks have traveled more widely around the city (or had their travels chronicled more avidly) than Victoria Blamey. After working in a series of high-profile kitchens, including Corton and Atera, the Chilean-born chef made her mark the way many chefs used to do, with an elegantly imagined beefburger at the reboot of the old West Village bar Chumley’s (“an erotic poem on the theme of fat,” Pete Wells called it). From there, it was on to Gotham Bar and Grill for a brief but well-reviewed stint, followed, once the COVID tsunami hit, by a series of “residencies”—one in Connecticut, another at the Fulgurances Laundromat in Greenpoint, and a third at the Stone Barns Center…

F FOR THE PAST five years, the artist Sam Roeck has lived in an elegantly worn walk-up apartment building in Williamsburg, and his neighbors include friends he’s accumulated over his time in New York and even a former boyfriend or two. Growing up in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, Roeck was encouraged by his mother, an artist, printmaker, and teacher, to “draw and make things, and that’s where my sense of You can come up with any idea and make it comes from.” He went to art school in Maryland before moving to New York. He’s worked as studio manager for various artists as well as exhibited at downtown galleries including OCDChinatown and Situations (for one show, he molded a sculpture of an old rotary telephone out of Rice Krispies Treats, which…

HOW’S THIS FOR a fantasy: It’s 1988, and you pick up a copy of Mother Jones to read about Fatal Attraction, the blockbuster everyone’s been obsessively discussing. Glenn Close stars as Alex Forrest, a hot, successful book editor who can wear a full-length leather trench coat like a dark angel. She meets Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), and after one weekend of hot sex, she’s smitten and he’s out the door. What happens next is probably 100 minutes of a man’s worst nightmare: the woman who will not go away. The woman who threatens his happy domestic life with his beautiful wife and child, though he jeopardized it in the first place. The woman who boils the fluffy bunny as casually as she would cook a box of Annie’s Mac &…

GUADALUPE MARAVILLA: TIERRA BLANCA JOVEN is on view at the Brooklyn Museum. IN MAY 2017, Guadalupe Maravilla visited a shelter just north of New York City to help run an art workshop for undocumented teenagers. Most of the kids, whom the government had placed there while they waited for court appearances that would determine whether they could stay in the country, were originally from Central America. That gave Maravilla a point of connection: Born in El Salvador, the artist traveled to the U.S. alone in 1984, when he was 8, joining other members of his family who had fled civil war. “A lot of the boys in this center come from gang violence—it’s a whole other thing that I’m not familiar with,” he says. “Some got caught at the border.…

THIRTY-FOUR YEARS after his death at 27, Jean-Michel Basquiat has become something of a mythical apparition, inextricable from our understanding of what it means to be a superstar artist: an effortlessly beautiful, furiously productive inventor of an entire visual system to contain, ward off, and annotate the world, aloof yet seemingly game, fluent in all manner of celebrity, and ultimately tragic. After all the books, documentaries, movies, and retrospectives, the young man himself, whoever he was or could have been, has somehow become ever more remote, especially as his paintings became some of the most expensive objects on the planet. But not to his family. They knew Jean-Michel and held on to their memory of the playful, mischievous, restless person he was, even after he left them behind in Brooklyn…

work itself is good. For better and worse, “Quiet As It’s Kept” is a black mirror of our times. Two telling exclusions complicate things, however. The diligent curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, omit what may be the most impactful video made in the 21st century. This is the ten-minute-and-nine-second continuous sequence made by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. There is a powerful precedent for its inclusion: George Holliday’s recording of the beating of Rodney King was a cornerstone of the 1993 Biennial, a show the curators praise. Breslin and Edwards had good reasons not to show the Floyd video—out of respect for both viewers who may have seen one too many images of violence against Black people circulating online and Floyd himself. The irony of…

WHEN YOU GO THUMBING THROUGH Broadway listings of the yonder years, one thing jumps out: Infidelity and wonky-marriage plots were once reliable moneymakers among the non-musicals. Adult farces were so prevalent when William Goldman wrote about the 1967–68 season that he dedicated an entire chapter just to sex comedies. It’s hard to imagine now. Watching the revival of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite at the Hudson Theatre, you do at least get a window into why. I don’t mean that Plaza Suite is sexy. This particular PLAZA SUITE BY NEIL SIMON. DIRECTED BY JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY.AT THE HUDSON THEATRE THROUGH JUNE 26. production has little of that sort of heat thanks to the specific energies of its stars, the married couple Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick. And in all three…

TV 1. Watch Better Call Saul This fine drama is near the end. AMC, April 18. The first half of the final season of Saul Goodman’s origin story picks up with tensions high between the Salamanca and Fring drug operations and Jimmy/Saul (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn) trying to pull off an extra-risky scam. JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 2. Listen to (watch my moves) Kurt Vile’s ninth solo set. Verve Records, April 15. On the spectrum of modern psychedelic slacker rock, Kurt Vile sits somewhere between the lackadaisical ennui of Mac DeMarco and the roots-rock sprawl of the War on Drugs, which Vile co-founded. The headspace is stressed in this new set, recorded at Vile’s Mount Airy home studio. Songs like “Fo Sho” and “Flyin (like a fast train)”…