nu t 57

January 20–February 2, 2020 Ž

Two weeks until Iowa, the race has narrowed.

One of these people could beat Trump, right?

By Gabriel Debenedetti

january 20–february 2, 2020

features

Just Another Iowa Caucus to Determine the Future of the Campaign, the Party, and Quite Possibly the Republic It’s time to choose someone.

By Gabriel Debenedetti 20

In Conversation: Frank Gehry

Nearly 91, the starchitect with the soul of an artist does not know how to retire.

By Justin Davidson 26

The Voice of a Generation

The Daily, bolstered by host Michael Barbaro, is remaking the podcast industry— and the paper of record.

By Matthew Schneier 34

Architect Frank Gehry in Los Angeles.

Photograph by Amanda Demme

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

3

9

The National Interest The GOP’s fanatical lack of curiosity

By Jonathan Chait 12

The City

All the dogs, raccoons, and turkeys delaying your morning commute

By Jose Martinez 14

From the Cut

How the Telfar bag became the new status symbol

By Devine Blacksher 16

Select All

What does Peter Thiel actually believe?

By Max Read

strategist 41

Best Bets

Experts on the warmest gear for the freezing cold 44

The One-Page Guide

To having a good shvitz 45

Look Book

Ringing in the New Year at the Met Opera 48

Design Hunting

A 450-square-foot studio’s genius upgrade

By Wendy Goodman 52

Food

Platt on Portale; Egyptian fare in Nolita

january 20–february 2, 2020

the culture pages 57

“I’m Not Nice!”

Inside the prison of Aidy Bryant’s charms

By Allison P. Davis

62

A Hater’s Guide to the Best Picture Nominees

What movie will be this year’s Oscar villain?

By Nate Jones 64

Still Gazing in Awe at Jude Law

The staying power of The New Pope star

By E. Alex Jung 68

‘Medea’ in Brooklyn

Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale, lovers playing fighters onstage

By Jackson McHenry

72

Critics

pop

by Craig Jenkins Selena Gomez is back with her best album yet tv

by Jen Chaney What is going on in The Outsider? theater

by Helen Shaw Just read My Name Is Lucy Barton instead 76

To Do

Twenty-five picks for the next two weeks

6 Comments 86 New York Crossword,

by Matt Gaffney 88 The Approval Matrix

on t illust ow. this page: Jude Law in London. Photographs by Louie Banks for New York Magazine.

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Comments

After a flood of allegations that launched a movement, Harvey We nstein will finally face rape and sexual assault charges But noth ng in the c se has been simple By Irin Carmon

100Women.

22

Ashley Judd says he appeared in his bathrobe and asked for a massage at a breakfast meeting in the late 1990s.

Tara Subkoff says she was up for a part in a Weinstein film in the 1990s when he made unwanted sexual advances toward her at a party.

Erika Rosenbaum says he masturbated in front of her in the 2000s.

ne Trial

Sarah Ann Masse says he conducted a 2008 job interview in his underwear and, as she was leaving, hugged her and told her he loved her.

Jasmine Lobe says he propositioned her and pulled up her dress in 2013.

Portfolio by

Amanda Demme

but incomplete to say that the word of one woman was not enough to bring down the law on Harvey Weinstein The full truth is uglier In the spring of 2015, Wein stein’s own admissions of groping a woman nt, first overheard by officers and then caught on tape, weren’t enough for prosecutors to bring charges t is true

Dominique Huett says he sexually assaulted her during a business meeting in 2010.

Lucia Evans says he forced her to perform oral sex on him in an office in 2004.

Rowena Chiu says he attempted to rape her in 1998.

Paula Williams says he exposed himself to her in 1990.

Melissa Sagemiller says he forcibly kissed her at a work meeting in 2000.

24

In New York’s latest issue, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reflected on her consequential first year in Congress (“One Year In,” January 6–19). MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle tweeted, “If you read one thing today, make it this.” Columbia Law School’s Kumar Rao added, “Did you know that in her first year in office, @AOC has sponsored 15 pieces of legislation and missed only two of 701 roll-call votes? A fascinating profile.” But Robert Isler questioned why “someone who got all of 16,000 votes to win her district’s nomination before going on to defeat her Republican challenger is receiving such outsized media attention while the voices of a bumper crop of accomplished first-term congresswomen are virtually ignored.” Many took note of Ocasio-Cortez’s comment “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” including the former vice-president: In an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt, Biden responded, “The 1

differences in the party have always existed … I’ve always had broad support within the party, and I think this tent is plenty big for both of us.” @JonReinish

tweeted, “Someone please tell @aoc that without ‘Joe Biden’ Democrats she’d be in the congressional minority right now with a tiny sliver of ideologically pure colleagues forming a caucus from a few big cities.” But the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel wrote,

“This is just a politically sophisticated analysis … In the rest of the developed world, the ‘universal hc costs too much’ candidate would be in a conservative part he a

dem a ce ht party, and a bunch of smaller parties which can hold different amounts of power in coalitions. We’re the odd guys

Larissa Gomes says he made unwanted sexual advances toward her during a meeting to discuss film roles around 2000.

Rosanna Arquette says he threatened career consequences when she refused his sexual advances in the early 1990s.

Caitlin Dulany says he exposed himself to her and sexually assaulted her in 1996.

26

Dawn Dunning says he offered her contracts on the condition that she would have a threesome with him in 2003.

Daryl Hannah says he made unwanted sexual advances toward her several times in the early 2000s.

Louise Godbold says he made unwanted sexual advances toward her in an empty conference room in the 1990s.

out, with a left party that didn’t grow out of labor movements.” The Nation’s John Nichols added, “The genius of @AOC is that she recognizes the value of dissent and the importance of pushing the Democratic Party to the left.”

2 On the eve of Harvey Weinstein’s trial, Amanda Demme photographed 21 of his accusers for New York, and Irin Carmon wrote about the complexity of the case against him (“100 Women. One Trial.,” January 6–19). Many shared words of support for the women involved. U.S. Representative Carolyn B. Maloney said, “I’m thankful for these brave women for speaking out & rejecting a culture that so often silences survivors and sympathizes with abusers.” The co-founder of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund Fatima Goss Graves wrote, “Irin is reminding us who is at the

center of this trial. Hint: It’s the dozens of women who have given us the gift of their stories.” Sheila Katz wrote, “Regardless of

the verdict, these women shifted public conversation & created a global reckoning that has impacted our culture, making our workplaces & communities safer and more equitable. I’m forever grateful for their courage.” In a follow-up story published online, Carmon unveiled the 57-page PowerPoint that Weinstein’s team has been sending to reporters, which includes oppo research on his accusers, arguments that the alleged encounters were consensual, and implorations that Weinstein has a “huge heart.” Aminatou Sow tweeted,

“ s been sending reporter ntended to smear his accusers and exonerate him. The media people all sat on it. Make your own con-

clusions as to why. When @irin got it, she

6 new york | january 20–february 2, 2020

Jessica Barth says he asked her in 2011 to give him a naked massage in bed and became aggressive when she wouldn’t comply.

Lauren Sivan says he trapped her in the hallway of a restaurant around 2007 and masturbated.

Katherine Kendall says that in 1993, he took off his clothes, chased her around his apartment, and asked to see her breasts.

Louisette Geiss says that during a 2008 meeting, he changed into a bathrobe and made sexual advances toward her.

Rose McGowan says he raped her in a hotel room in 1997, after which she was paid $100,000 to keep silent.

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez was 22 when she reported later, in 2017, Gutierrez chose to break her NDA, playing to the NYPD that, earlier that day at a business meeting, the Weinstein recording for The New Yorker’s Ronan Farthe superstar Hollywood producer had grabbed her row. “I hope the other girls get justice,” she told him. breasts and put his hands up her skirt. As she sat with Her account to Farrow, along with dozens of others in The Special Victims detectives, Weinstein called her and New Yorker, the New York Times, and elsewhere, was enough police heard him acknowledge touching her breasts. Guti- to finally shame law enforcement into action. As of this writerrez was distraught, but she agreed to wear a wire to ing, at least 100 women have come forward with allegations meet Weinstein the next day in the lobby of the Tribeca of sexual assault or harassment against Weinstein; over a Grand, where he asked her to come to his hotel room dozen made formal complaints to the NYPD. This month, while he took a shower. Gutierrez repeatedly said she the same Manhattan DA who declined to pursue Gutierrez’s wanted to leave, then demanded to know why he had allegations will finally put Weinstein on trial. He has been groped her breasts. Weinstein replied, “Oh please, I’m charged with five counts of rape and sexual assault of two women—former production assistant Mimi Haleyi and an sorry, just come on in … I’m used to that.”

He was also used to what hapunnamed woman who says he pened to him after he was hauled in raped her in a midtown-Manhattan By our count, 100 women have come forward hotel room in 2013. for questioning, which was nothwith allegations of sexual harassment ing. The producer assembled a Several other women are or assault against Harvey Weinstein, who has expected to testify to Weinstein’s team of well-connected advocates, denied any criminal wrongdoing. In addition to the 21 photographed here, they are: predation. The hope of prosecutors from Rudy Giuliani to the former is that the cumulative effect of the chief of the Manhattan district accusers’ testimony will establish a attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, Linda Cynthia Burr says he Amber Anderson says in forced her to 2013 he promised her Fairstein. Tabloids battered Gutierpattern harder to dismiss than any perform oral sex on career opportunities if rez’s reputation. “Page Six” referred one woman’s account. In that way, him in the 1970s. she agreed to a “personal” relationship then, the trial will be yet another to Weinstein as a “married dad of Liza Campbell says with him. test of the strength of the larger Me five” and quoted an anonymous he asked her to take a bath with him Lysette Anthony says Too reckoning. “This sort of testisource dismissing the case as extorduring a hotel-room he raped her in the tion. Detectives later said prosecumony is really powerful,” said attormeeting in the late 1980s. mid-1990s. tors in Manhattan DA Cyrus ney Douglas Wigdor, whose anonyAsia Argento says he Vance’s office had grilled Gutierrez mous client plans to testify at trial Alexandra Canosa sexually assaulted her says he sexually in 1997. about whether she was a sex that Weinstein sexually assaulted assaulted and raped her worker. Days later, they announced her in 2005. “It just takes the wind multiple times Kate Beckinsale says beginning in 2010. rejecting him in the out of the sails of the defense team.” they would bring no charges. early 1990s With no other recourse, GutierIt’s the same strategy that Emma de Caunes says “undoubtedly harmed he exposed himself my career.” rez decided that accepting payworked in the case against Bill to her during a meeting ment from Weinstein ($1 million, Cosby. When he was tried in June in 2010, demanding she Juls Bindi says he groped lie on his bed. her during a massage2017 for assaulting Andrea Conshe has said) in exchange for her therapy session in 2010. stand, only one other accuser was silence was the least-worst option.

Marisa Coughlan says she was offered a lead role in Zoë Brock says he She couldn’t have known at the allowed to testify; the proceedings exchange for becoming made unwanted ended in a mistrial. A year later, time how many other women had one of his “special sexual advances toward friends” in 1999. her in 1998. five women testified. This time, faced the same decision. Two years january 6–19, 2020 | new york

29

published it. It is as gross and damning as you can imagine.” @JonathanCohn wrote, “Good on NY Mag for making Weinstein’s team’s actions the story (and not accepting the stories they were trying to feed).”

In “What Will Happen to the Trump Toadies?” (January 6–19), Frank Rich looked to President Nixon’s defenders and the Vichy collaborators of WWII to predict the future of President Trump’s loyal partisans. @vanbadham tweeted, “This article is a juicy long read—and extraordinary.” Actor Evan Handler added, “Highly articulate in equating Trump’s enablers with Nazi-era cowards & opportunists.” Others doubted the “Vichy Republicans” will face any consequences; podonnell commented, “The fact that 3

you can turn on your TV and see any number of GWB staffers and hangers-on being given airtime to talk about Iran kind of puts the lie to it. As crass as the

Trump administration has been, the human toll of the GWB presidency was much higher and still continues today, and as far as I can tell basically no one has suffered any damage to their career (and in fact Trump has helped rehabilitate their image in many cases).” @laurmasi tweeted, “Good article, but bottom line—these guys do not care about history/posterity/ their legacy.” And @btaylorgarcia joked, “They will all get book deals and become Fox News contributors.” correction: The photograph of Anne Beatts (pp. 54–55) in the January 6–19 issue was incorrectly credited. It should have read © Lynn Goldsmith 1976.

L Send correspondence to comments@nymag.com.

Or go to nymag.com to respond to individual stories.

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inside: The cult of the “Bushwick Birkin” / The animals that slow the subway / Peter Thiel’s political evolution

P H OTO G R A P H S : U. S. H O U S E O F R E P R E S E N TAT I V E S

Lev Parnas’s handwritten notes, released by the House Intelligence Committee.

The National Interest: Jonathan Chait Republicans Don’t Even Know hat They’re Covering Up But the latest revelations are explosive.

by the time the House voted to impeach Donald Trump in mid-December, a grim anti-climactic feel had settled upon the proceedings. Senate Republicans, unimpressed by hundreds of pages of testimony and documents establishing the president’s scheme to extort Ukraine to smear his domestic opponents, would dispatch the articles of impeachment quickly and—as these things go—quietly. This was their strategy all along: Strip away the drama and turn impeachment into yet another partisan squabble, rather than a historic judgment on Trump’s unfitness for office. Their plan is to smother it with sheer boredom.

They may still succeed. But a series of revelations in the intervening month has opened up surprising new avenues of inquiry, forcing Republicans either to allow new evidence at the Senate trial or to openly cooperate in a cover-up.

So far, Republicans have dismissed the new evidence with juvenile logic games. “If the existing case is strong, there’s no need for january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

9

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the judge and jury to reopen the investigation. If the existing case is weak, House Democrats should not have impeached in the first place,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (Obviously, the strength of evidence is a continuum, not a binary choice of either “strong” or “weak.” It can be strong enough to satisfy House Democrats yet not strong enough for Senate Republicans, in which case the higher bar merits additional evidence.) Senator Susan Collins expressed her lack of interest in new documents furnished in January by wondering “why the House did not put that into the record and it’s only now being revealed.” When a reporter replied that the documents had been blocked until then, she shot back, “Well, doesn’t that suggest that the House did an incomplete job, then?” The more new evidence of guilt that is revealed, the more evidence there is that the prosecution is weak. Therefore, it should be ignored.

Trump’s impeachment articles have two counts: First, abuse of power by manipulating foreign policy for personal gain, and second, obstruction of Congress by wholesale stonewalling. House Republicans essentially used the second count to negate the first. By seizing on tiny gaps in the evidentiary record—gaps that existed because Trump refused to release any testimony or documents—they denied Trump had withheld a meeting and military aid from Ukraine in order to force investigations.

Since then, evidence, some pried loose by lawsuits, has dismantled those defenses. A batch of emails released in late December showed the Office of Management and Budget ordered a freeze on aid almost immediately after Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president. Then, in January, another tranche of emails found the Defense Department raising concerns about the freeze’s legality. Weeks later, the Government Accountability Office deemed the freeze illegal, making moot the defense that Trump hadn’t technically violated laws. Also this month, former national-security adviser John Bolton, who had refused to testify before the House, announced his willingness to testify in a Senate trial.

The most explosive revelations came from a trove of documents turned over by Lev Parnas, a small-time hustler who was recruited by Rudy Giuliani to help run Trump’s extortion scheme. Parnas’s documents—thousands of pages of texts, WhatsApp messages, notes, and letters—widen the scope of suspected misconduct in Ukraine. They show him explicitly discussing firing the U.S. ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, in return for then Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko’s supplying dirt on Biden, whom Lutsenko describes frankly and revealingly as “your opponent.”

The texts also introduce another participant in the scheme: Robert Hyde, a former Marine, whose texts with Parnas indicated he was surveilling Yovanovitch (“this bitch,” he called her in one) and hinted at plans to threaten or commit violence. Hyde, a Republican congressional candidate from Connecticut, has a history of erratic behavior, including alleged stalking and harassment, and was involuntarily committed to psychiatric treatment after an incident at the Trump National Doral resort in May. Parnas has dismissed those texts as unserious boasts—perhaps because they were, or perhaps because they incriminate him in a violent plot. Yovanovitch fled Ukraine on the next plane after being warned of an imminent threat. Hyde has also ou een ph phed wit eig s. The lved details of how Parnas got involved, and who paid for his work if he did any, might be illuminating.

10 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

A Chilling Message Hyde on Yovanovitch

Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch.

I’ll get right in [sic?] that.

They know she’s a political puppet.

They will let me know when she’s on the move They are willing to help if you/we would like a price.

Guess you can do anything in the Ukraine with money … what I was told.

Parnas’s physical evidence also corroborates his claims in the media that Trump approved his activities. “President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” he said in a primetime interview with Rachel Maddow on January 15. Based on his sensational claims alone, Parnas may come off as an unreliable narrator, someone looking for a life raft after a federal indictment. But Parnas’s WhatsApp messages prove he was in the loop. He sent the text of an op-ed by John Solomon (a right-wing journalist who worked closely with Trump’s allies) to Lutsenko four days before it was published and knew about Yovanovitch’s firing a day in advance. (“The bomb is dropping tomorrow,” he wrote in a message to another Giuliani associate, GOP donor Harry Sargeant III.) He has a letter from Trump attorney Jay Sekulow to former Trump lawyer John Dowd saying, “The president consents to allowing your representation of Mr. Parnas.”

The White House has predictably dismissed Parnas’s credibility in the same terms it uses when other Trump flunkies rat him out. “This is a man who is under indictment and who’s actually out on bail,” said White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. “This is a man who owns a company called Fraud, Inc.” (On a federal politicalcontributions form, Parnas actually listed his employer as “Fraud Guarantee” rather than “Fraud, Inc.,” which sounds only slightly more savory.) Perhaps the most damning specimen in the Parnas collection is a letter of introduction from Giuliani to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Giuliani wrote that he was representing Trump “as a private citizen, not as President of the United States,” and that he was doing so “with his knowledge and consent.” Perhaps sensing that the arrangement would strike Zelensky as untoward, Giuliani assured him it is “quite common under American law.”

It is, of course, extremely uncommon under American law for the president to have a private attorney negotiate on his behalf with a foreign head of state. One reason is that a personal lawyer might use the foreign-policy capital of the U.S. government not on behalf of the national interest but for the president’s personal gain. Another reason is that a private lawyer, not being paid or vetted by the government, might be beholden to some other financial interest. Giuliani represented Trump for “free” but was paid half a million dollars by Parnas’s company. In turn, Parnas received a million dollars from Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch closely linked to Vladimir Putin and the Russian mob.

At one point during the Watergate scandal, President Nixon discussed funneling hush money to the burglars.

White House counsel John Dean cautioned him, “People around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, and things like that … we are not criminals and not used to dealing in that business.” Trump is not so encumbered. His career was spent working with New York mobsters, bringing in mobbed-up figures like Michael Cohen and Felix Sater and relying on money launderers for cash.

The Republican Party’s boredom strategy requires its members to maintain an aggressive, almost fanatical lack of curiosity about the growing roster of goons surrounding the president and a money trail that leads to Moscow. There have always been plenty of lowlifes hanging around Trump.

His hangers-on seem to absorb his character. One thing the impeachment trial will measure is the degree to which this ■ process has taken hold of the entire Republican Party.

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The City: Blame the Possums

It’s not just signal problems and sick passengers that slow the subway. Animals can also ruin a commute.

By Jose Martinez

In 2019, animals delayed

107

238 trains

2

by turkeys

18

by dogs

by possums

Eric Loegel, vicepresident of rapid-transit operations for TWU Local 100, said animal strikes can set off trains’ emergency brakes, causing “a solid 20- or 30-minute delay, sometimes more.”

87

by raccoons

2

by cats

6

by birds

16

Some critters were more annoying than others.

On January 2, one DOG on the Williamsburg Bridge caused …

s

RACCOONS delayed

One raccoon hung out on the Nevins Street platforms for months.

Nicknamed Chepe, he was dubbed the “new pizza rat.”

383% more trains in 2019 than 2018

On June 13, a TURKEY delayed the morning rush …

by geese

N

By mid-December, there were …

… after getting loose near the Eighth Avenue station in Sunset Park.

11

A GOOSE on the tracks near the Parkside Avenue stop in Flatbush caused …

❝ The Brighton Beach line … has had

16

raccoons and possums getting run over by trains for years. It’s just now

I NC I DE NTS CAU S E D

BY A N I M A L S

39 2 14

raccoons are showing up on platforms. It’s probably from all the food

v e

s

… on the Q and B lines last February until police could remove it.

customers throw on the floors.❞ —Train operator Canella Gomez

Of the 900 animal-related delays since 2016, dogs and cats were usually to blame. ❝ God forbid your dog gets loose on the tracks,” said Lucy

Blair, 29, carrying her French-bulldog

aB “ a dog to be as responsible as you are.❞

443 Dog delay

6

Cat delays since 2016

42

in 2018

Here, kitty kitty …

A pair of kittens famously disrupted Q and B service in August 2013. Former MTA chairman Joe Lhota, who was running for mayor at the time, said he would have kept the trains running,

in 2018

12

172

resulting in a screaming “Die Kitties Die!” front page in the Daily News.

This story was produced in collaboration with THE CITY, an independent, nonprofit newsroom for New York.

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From the Cut: The Bushwick Birkin

Telfar’s ‘‘genderless, democratic, and transformative’’ bag, and the people who tote it around.

By Devine Blacksher

Candice Saint Williams, nightlife and programming director S T Y L I N G B Y D E V I N E B L AC K S H E R ; S E T D E S I G N B Y V I K I R U T S C H ; H A I R B Y S U H A I L A H WA L I O F S U H S T U D I O S U S I N G J A S S P R O D U C T S ; M A K E U P B Y E R N E S T R O B I N S O N

“i have always felt super-black, like black as fuck, but I feel extra black as fuck when I wear this bag,” says Raven Baker, age 24, a video producer and social-media editor living in Brooklyn. She’s talking about Telfar’s Shopping Bag, of which she owns four. A simple, boxy carryall with double shoulder straps and top handles, it comes in three sizes, costs between $150 and $257, and has become a symbol of group identity for young, creative New Yorkers, especially queer people and people of color. The bag has been carried by artists like Solange, Selena Gomez, and A$AP Ferg. It appeared at the Met Gala on Moonlight actor Ashton Sanders, who was accompanying Telfar Clemens, the bag’s designer. But the real power comes from its many young fans, who jokingly call it “the Bushwick Birkin.”

Clemens launched the bag during Telfar’s autumn-winter 2014 collection, but it wasn’t until 2017 that it started to gain momentum.

That year, Clemens won the top prize of $400,000 at the CFDA–Vogue Fashion Fund Awards—a sign of mainstream recognition for the young Liberian-American and Queens native, who’d been making clothes for over a decade by that point. He invested his winnings in revamping the bag, adding sizing and color options. Clemens describes his brand as “genderless, democratic, and transformative.” In 2005, when he started the line at 19, “someone like me wasn’t thought of as a fashion customer,” Clemens says. So he set out to reverse that.

Kiara Ventura, a 23-year-old curator from the Bronx, says she’s proud to be carrying a bag by a black designer. “When I look at ads for Telfar, I see black and brown people, I see queer people,” says Ventura. “I think it’s about time the world supports a genuinely inclusive brand.”

“It’s about more than fashion. It visibility and power,” Clemens tells m mething very different from the trend for diversity without change that we see elsewhere in the ■ industry, and people recognize that.”

Alvin Walker, model

Nick Hadad, DJ and producer

Cheyenne Beam, publicist

Courtney Yates, photographer Isa’ah, model

Kala McFarlane, artist

Raven Baker, video producer and social-media editor

Oyinda, singer

Photograph by Justin French

Parker Kit Hill, model and social-media influencer

Samirah, model Banna Nega, brand consultant

Alexis Ruby, model Michael Lew, server

Gobi-Kla Vonan, visual merchandiser Isioma Iyamah, creative director Kiara Ventura, curator

Chucky, dancer

Marcelo Gutierrez, makeup artist and director

Marcos Bonilla, student

Daria Harper, model and writer

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

15

Select All: Max Read Peter Thiel’s Latest Venture Is the American Government How the VC learned to love Big Brother.

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in mid-january, at the conclusion of a special meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, the venerable free-market organization, after appearances by Condoleezza Rice and Niall Ferguson, Peter Thiel was slated to give closing remarks on “Big Tech and the Question of Scale.” The keynote was the latest in a series of public remarks and interviews in which the PayPal founder and Facebook investor showed his prominence in conservative politics.

Thiel has long been a political donor; in 2016, he gave $4 million across various campaigns, including $1 million to a superpac supporting Trump, on whose behalf Thiel spoke at the Republican National Convention. He’s known to have funded right-wing hoaxer James O’Keefe and has been an enthusiastic sponsor of organizations for activists and intellectuals, like The Stanford Review, a conservative publication he founded in the 1980s. Earlier this month, he announced an investment in a Midwest-focused venture-capital fund led by Hillbilly Elegy

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author and social conservative J. D. Vance.

But unlike other major right-wing donors, Thiel seems intent on being known for his intellect as much as his wallet. Over the past year, he has played the role of outraged patriot, endorsing Trump’s trade war and bizarrely accusing Google of “seemingly treasonous” behavior in its China dealings. He intermittently lectures at Stanford. Vanity Fair has written about his hot-ticket L.A. dinner parties, where guests (including, at least once, the president) hold “deep discussions” about the issues of the day. Last year, George Mason University professor and economist Tyler Cowen called Thiel “the most influential conservative intellectual with other conservative and libertarian intellectuals.”

This emerging Republican macher is a far cry from the ultralibertarian seditionist who used to encourage entrepreneurs to exit the United States and start their own countries at sea. But Thiel is no stranger to inconsistency. For decades, he cultivated a reputation as a radical Silicon Valley anti-statist; in 2009, he wrote that Facebook, in which he was an early investor, might “create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states.” Yet, six years earlier, he had co-founded the most aggressively “statist” company in the 21st century: Palantir, the global surveillance company used, for example, to monitor Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal. Can you really claim to uphold individual freedom if you’re profiting from a mass-surveillance government contractor? Are you really a libertarian if you’re a prominent supporter of Trump?

It would be easy enough to chalk up the seeming contradiction of Thiel’s thought to opportunism or pettiness (he famously funded a lawsuit, in secret, to bankrupt Gawker, my former employer) or perhaps even a mind less ambidextrous than incoherent. But it’s worth trying to understand his political journey. Thiel’s increasing prominence as both an intellectual in and benefactor of the conservative movement— and his status as a legend in Silicon Valley— makes him at least as important as more public tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, he still holds sway over Zuckerberg: Recent reports suggest Thiel was the most influential voice in Facebook’s decision to allow politicians to lie in ads on its platform.

What Thiel believes now is likely to influence the next generation of conservative and libertarian thinkers—if not what the president believes the next day.

How to square Thiel’s post-national techno-libertarianism with his bloodthirsty authoritarian nationalism? Strangely, he wants both. Today’s Thielism is a libertari-

anism with an abstract commitment to personal freedom but no particular affection for democracy—or even for “politics” as a process by which people might make collective decisions about the distribution of power and resources. Thiel has wed himself to state power not in an effort to participate in the political process but as an end run around it.

If we wanted to construct a genealogy of late Thielism, one place to start might be a relatively little-read essay Thiel wrote in 2015 for the conservative religious journal First Things. Thiel is a Christian, though clearly a heterodox believer, and in “Against Edenism,” he makes the case that “science and technology are natural allies” to what he sees as the inborn “optimism” of Christianity.

Christians are natural utopians, Thiel believes, and because “there will be no returning” to the prelapsarian paradise of Eden, they should support technological progress, although it may mean joining with “atheist optimists,” personified in the essay by Goethe’s Faust. At least Faust was “motivated to try to do something about everything that was wrong with the world,” even if he did, you know, sell his immortal soul to the Devil.

Thiel suggests that growth is essentially a religious obligation—“building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth”—and that stagnation is, well, demonic—the chaotic sea “where the demon Leviathan lives.”

This binary appears frequently in Thiel’s writing, where “progress” is always aligned with technology and the individual, and “chaos” with politics and the masses. If Thiel has an apocalyptic fear of stasis, you can begin to see why his politics have changed over the past few years, as it has become less clear whether the booming technology industry has actually added much to the economy or to human happiness, let alone demonstrated “progress.”

Where some of his fellow libertarians have moved toward the center, attempting to build a “liberaltarianism” with a relatively strong welfare state and mass democratic

How to square Thiel’s technolibertarianism with bloodthirsty authoritarianism?

Strangely, he wants both.

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appeal, others have found themselves articulating a version of what Tyler Cowen, in a recent blog post, called “state capacity libertarianism,” a concept he says was influenced

by Thiel’s thinking. In its essence, it’s the admission that “strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets.” Where Thiel would differ with state-capacity libertarians like Cowen is that he isn’t merely a believer in strong states in the abstract as agents of economic progress.

He is purported to be a specifically American “national conservative,” at least per his conference-keynote schedule. Thiel has suggested in the past that such a conservative nationalism is the only thing that can provide the cohesion necessary to re-create a strong state. “Identity politics,” he suggested in an address at the Manhattan Institute, the free-market think tank, is a distraction that stops us from acting at “the scale that we need to be focusing on for this country.” maga politics is the only way to grow.

This is the context in which it makes sense for a gay, cosmopolitan libertarian like Thiel to throw his support behind a redmeat conservative like Senate candidate Kris Kobach of Kansas. The technological progress Thiel associates with his own personal freedom and power is threatened by market failure and political chaos. A strong centralized state can restore order, breed progress, and open up new technologies, markets, and financial instruments from which Thiel might profit. And as long as it allows Thiel to make money and host dinner parties, who cares if its borders are cruelly and ruthlessly enforced? Who cares if its leader is an autocrat? Who cares, for that matter, if it’s democratic? In fact, it might be better if it weren’t: If the left’s commitment to “identity politics” is divisive enough to prevent technological advancement, its threat outstrips the kind of bellicose religious authoritarianism that Kobach represents. A Thielist government would be aggressive toward China, a country Thiel is obsessed with—while also seeming, in its centralized authority and close ties between government and industry, very much like it.

There is, of course, another context in which it makes sense for Thiel to join forces with social conservatives and nationalists: his bank account. Thiel’s ideological shifts have matched his financial self-interest at every turn. His newfound patriotism is probably best understood as an alliance of convenience. The U.S. government is the vessel best suited for reaching his immortal techno-libertarian future (and a lower tax rate), and he is happy to ride it as long as it and he are traveling in the same direction.

And if it doesn’t work out, well, he did effec■ tively buy New Zealand citizenship.

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Just Another

Iowa

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a Caucus the Party, ented four-way deadlock. Ready, set, go!

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Gabriel Debenedetti Photographs by

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the final days before the Iowa caucuses every four years, it’s typical for campaign aides and reporters, and baristas and taxi drivers, and any Iowan who’s ever turned on a television or heard a radio ad, to try predicting which presidential candidates will win and which ones will fall flat. But this year is different. Just two weeks out, as the outcome of the race should be taking shape, almost no one in the state—much less the campaign operatives paid to project confidence to anyone who’ll listen—is comfortable even hazarding a shadow of a guess about the Democratic caucuses. This is, in part, the product of a hangover from the 2016 experience there,

when Donald Trump happened and Ted Cruz won the Republican caucuses anyway, and when Bernie Sanders shocked the country by effectively tying Hillary Clinton. But even more than that, it’s about how unusually tight this year’s race is— and how much of the rest of the primary campaign seems to hang on its, for now, totally wide-open outcome.

Come February 4, more than two-thirds of Democrats will be at Biden narrowly leading, with Sanders in second; Sanders barely least some amount of disappointed by who wins Iowa, with a whole leading, with Elizabeth Warren in second; and Biden and Sanders lot of them much more panicked than that: If, after a year of seem- tied with Pete Buttigieg, with Warren just behind. The campaigns ingly nonstop campaigning, none of the candidates has really pulled are in a frenzy, and nobody working on them believes the winner will in front, how confident can you be, they might ask, that any of them be clear before Caucus Night, when Iowans will gather across the could actually take down Trump? The campaigns know this, and state to pick their favorites and then, in many cases, ditch them for know that after Iowa the field of real contenders is likely to narrow their second or third options—an even-more-complicated-toeven further—which is why they are all, even the most ideological predict second- or third-order political calculus. candidates, so focused on February 3 as a way of demonstrating And that’s just the voters who have preferences. The four leadelectability. Because the first and ers combined for just 68 percent of the vote in the most last thing every voter is asking recent Des Moines Register poll, and fewer than one-third themselves right now is, Who of respondents to the latest CBS News survey reported can win in November? being “definitely” committed to their chosen candidate. If From the outside, the race this is hard to believe as an engaged political observer who for the nomination can look sees the candidates’ differences clearly even from a distance, exhaustingly (or maddeningly) it can be even harder once you’ve set foot in Iowa, given the stable—Sanders and Joe Biden complete saturation of campaign advertising and the canare nearly exactly where they didates’ all-out sprint to give personal attention to every last were in national polling a year caucusgoer. Since personal attention is at such a premium, ago, before either even entered and the impeachment trial is forcing the senators back to the race. But the four leading Washington, Sanders has thought about flying to Iowa for candidates have, in fact, been nighttime events after the day’s proceedings in D.C. and trading places atop wilAmy Klobuchar (trying to make a final push to surprise) dered first-to-caucus polls told me she might Skype into events. And in part because— for months, most often within unusually—none of the leading candidates has established the margin of error. The three a stronghold in a particular part of the state, the campaign most recent surveys have seen geography is in total disarray too, which means it’s not tulsi gabbard

“We don’t mind the k

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uncommon to run into candidates unexpectedly while on the phone with others, as I’ve done a number of times this cycle, most recently twice in a three-block and two-hour range in Des Moines’s East Village neighborhood on a recent Wednesday morning. And it’s even worse on TV: Without changing the channel over the course of about 15 minutes on one January Monday night downtown, I caught two spots each from Biden, Warren, and Klobuchar (who’s in fifth place) and one each from Sanders, Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, Tom Steyer (who’s spent the most), and Cory Booker, who soon after dropped out. Iowa has experienced almost as much television-ad spending—close to $50 million—as it did over the course of the full 2016 election cycle, when there were two parties competing.

Of course, this is not the first time Iowa has been tight. In 1988, six Democratic candidates were clustered together, and John Kerry’s 2004 victory was a surprise. 2008 and 2016 were nailbiters too. But a four-way dead heat with the rest of the primary season hanging in the balance? Even the state’s oldest veterans admit they’ve never seen a contest quite like this one. This year’s caucuses appear poised to be the first with four candidates breaking the 15 percent support threshold to gain delegates that the national party imposed for the 1992 caucuses. And unsure of their standing and terrified of underperforming, the teams are all desperate to manage expectations downward—not just in Iowa but in New Hampshire, which is a toss-up, and Nevada, which is also close (South Carolina is practically a nonevent with Biden so far ahead). Senior Democrats have urged the campaigns to get more serious about planning for what happens next, but most campaigns are still focused on Iowa, hoping the first result reshuffles the board before March, at least in part because one of the scenarios they’re taking seri-

by the two most left-wing campaigns—and so pulled the document from circulation. Warren, meanwhile, made no secret of being angry about those talking points. Then came the reports that Warren said privately that Sanders had told her in 2018 he didn’t believe a woman could win the election (which he denied, later pointing out he deferred to her before deciding to run in 2016).

To some in Sanders’s camp, the timing was fishy: Why would Warren have kept quiet for more than a year, praising Sanders the whole time, some of the senator’s top aides grumbled, if she believed him to hold this view, only for it to come out right before the Des Moines debate? But Warren’s team, unsure how to respond at first, appeared genuinely caught off guard by the development, unamused to have the senator’s closing argument to Iowa voters be clouded by an ugly fight with Sanders. Both staffs publicly sought de-escalation, but the hostility between the candidates showed up on-camera after the debate, when Warren accused Sanders of calling her a liar (and he replied in kind). It will be hard to put that kind of bitterness back in the bottle before the caucuses.

After the debate, one Sanders adviser made sure reporters understood that the candidates were more “D.C. friends” than real ones.

Nearby, an aide to one of the rival candidates shrugged, perfectly content to see the lefties at war with less than three weeks until the caucuses. “We don’t mind the kids fighting,” the aide said.

On January 7, party insiders across Washington opened

their in-boxes to find a memo from Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank, titled “Bernie Sanders and ‘Electability.’ ” The two-

ids fighting,”the aide said. ously has the tycoon former mayor of New York outspending them into oblivion on Super Tuesday.

In earlier Iowas, the candidates often maintained clusters of support, which could theoretically grow by drawing voters from a variety of places. But, as plenty of operatives in the state not associated with Buttigieg will tell you, this campaign is unmistakably and tightly sorted by lanes on the ideological spectrum. Picture it: Sanders-Warren-Buttigieg-Biden. The campaigns andrew acknowledge all most voters want is to beat Trump, and few voters openly speak of ideology, but nobody sees obvious opportunities at this point to draw many voters from anywhere but their adjacent rivals, even though Iowans’ politics are far from predictable. (Thirty-one counties in the state voted for Barack Obama, then Trump, and whereas an early 2016 poll found over four in ten Democratic caucusgoers describing themselves as “socialist,” a late 2019 survey found over half preferring a Democrat who is more moderate than most of the party to one who is more liberal.)

This has all made things very chippy, very abruptly, in the late going. Early in January, with the final pre-caucuses debate in Des Moines looming, Sanders’s advisers dreaded having to answer for campaign talking points for canvassers that Politico uncovered depicting Warren as an “elite” candidate unable to expand the party’s electorate. Many of them believe this, and want progressives on the fence between the pair to believe it, too, but they bristled at the way the case was presented—as a departure from a nonaggression pact

yang

page document opened by informing recipients, “A January 1984 Gallup poll had Walter Mondale tied with Ronald Reagan. Eleven months later, Reagan crushed Mondale 59-41%, winning by the biggest Electoral College margin ever.” It highlighted national poll numbers indicating the unpopularity of socialism and issued a reminder that no Sanders-style lefty has ever won the presidency.

Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Establishment was now realizing in a panic, could win this whole thing.

Sanders and his advisers have found watching this revelation take hold to be a hilarious experience. After all, it’s not like he’s been hiding his game plan or his confidence that he can build on his base of 2016 supporters and new, young voters by reaching out to disaffected working-class communities. And to listen to those in the senator’s D.C. headquarters, all has been going very much accordjanuary 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

23

ing to plan: This month’s CBS poll put him in first place among first-time caucusgoers, and a week later the Register poll showed him in first overall, with the paper plastering its front page with an image of Sanders at the front of a sled with his rivals behind him, above the words sanders ahead. He then hopes to replicate his 2016 New Hampshire win. From there, his staff believes, with a conviction supported by some polling data and bordering on prophetic faith, he’ll win Nevada largely based on his significant Latino and union-worker backing, his biggest-in-the-field organization there, and his momentum from the first two states. Then, after an assumed loss to Biden in South Carolina, they project that he’ll be positioned to break out in the Super Tuesday states, especially in California, where he’s done more public events and spent more time and resources than any of his rivals—and where polls show him competing with (or even leading) Biden. “After Super Tuesday in 2016, we were in a significant delegate-deficit position, which we were almost able to climb out of,” said the senator’s longest-serving political adviser, Jeff Weaver, who managed his last campaign.

“This time, the calendar is more favorable.”

In internal conversations with top advisers in recent months, Sanders has made clear how much he wants from Iowa, which he now expects to win. But while both his rivals and neutral party observers are terrified of underestimating Sanders after his overperformance in 2016, and many believe Iowa turnout could exceed the 2008 record of 240,000 voters, they’re also just not sure what to make of the campaign’s confidence. “No one wants to say Bernie’s not doing well because of what happened last time, and the polls, but we see nothing from them,” one high-ranking

“Bern app” to help them reach unexpected voters, including in rural corners of the state, and of their 250-plus-person in-state organization, not to mention support from outside groups like the Sunrise Movement and Our Revolution. But they also can’t shake the worry about relying too much on disaffected voters—who might turn to Sanders out of frustration with conventional politics, then fail to show up to caucus out of the same frustration. Keeping those voters engaged is one reason he keeps bringing up Biden’s Iraq War vote in the closing weeks.

Even in the best-case scenario, it will be a long slog from here.

Success in Iowa and New Hampshire won’t necessarily translate on Super Tuesday for Sanders without a standout performance in the next two states. Of the two, Sanders talks far more about Nevada, which makes sense, given how unlikely it seems that anyone will make a dent in Biden’s South Carolina lead and how much he’s spent on organizing Nevada, another caucus state where he’s now near Biden in polling. Members of Nevada’s highly influential Culinary Union are opposed to Medicare for All and the union could endorse a rival, but Sanders has kept in touch with Nevada’s traditional kingmaker, Harry Reid, who has been ill but nonetheless visited Sanders in the hospital after his heart attack and who used to employ two of Sanders’s top aides, campaign manager Faiz Shakir and his deputy Ari Rabin-Havt. “If you look at it right now, without any bank shots, if Senator Sanders wins two to four early states, he’s going to be well on his way,” said Weaver.

Ask just about anyone on Team Biden and they’ll tell you—

without their name attached—that while Trump’s Iranian offensive

“If Senator Sanders wins two t was an obvious mistake, it couldn’t have come at Iowa Democrat told me—meaning a better time. “What we need,” the former vicethere is not enough evidence on the president said in an uncharacteristically forceful ground or in polling of the momenburst at a town hall inside Davenport’s minortum Sanders has claimed. league-baseball stadium earlier this month, “is a None of the traditional gatekeeppresident who can provide steady leadership on ers in the state quite know what to day one when they’re elected.” And much of think of the confidence of the SandBiden’s focus in the Iowa homestretch is assuring ers campaign, either. They seldom the moderate, often older, Buttigieg-curious causee Sanders’s team wooing the usual cusgoers that now is no time for risk-taking. “The power brokers and figured Sanders most important thing, frankly, is that voters conwould be far less of a factor after he tinue to see him as the candidate best positioned reshaped the upper levels of his stutto beat Donald Trump in November of this year,” tering Iowa operation this fall (while said Pete Kavanaugh, Biden’s deputy campaign replacing his state director in New manager, who recently relocated to Iowa. “You Hampshire). Then there was his can look at any piece of data in any state—Iowa, heart attack, and the concerns he’s nationally, or otherwise—and that is the thing just too far left and just too old. The voters care most about. They will put any other campaign itself doesn’t seem worried difference aside, ideological or anything else.” about either concern and expresses This, according to nearly a dozen campaign confidence that, after older minority deval patrick insiders, is what the Biden brain trust in Wilvoters rejected him four years ago, he can compete for them this time—in fact, Sanders’s significant mington and Washington, and at the campaign’s Philadelphia investments in Latino outreach have gone mostly unmatched by headquarters, sees as its silver bullet nationwide, and its reason to other candidates. But in rival camps, nobody has yet come up with be confident that the very high number of undecided voters, includsatisfactory ways to model the turnout surge Sanders says he’s ing Iowans, will ultimately break its way. “If you look at the number expecting in their own internal polls. They think he may just be of people who are willing to change their mind, or willing to consider another candidate, it is really remarkable,” Kavanaugh told operating on hope.

Internally, Sanders staffers seem to believe in the power of their me. This is especially important in Iowa, where supporters of 24 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

lower-performing candidates (especially Klobuchar, or perhaps even Buttigieg) could gravitate toward Biden in the closing days or after their first choices are eliminated at the caucus sites on February 3. It’s why the Biden faithful see no need to make tightly targeted strategic choices about what demographic groups or parts of the state to focus on—“It would be a mistake to be very, very narrow in any sort of targeting strategy, so many voters are still on the table,” insisted Becca Siegel, Biden’s chief analytics officer—and why some Democrats close to him are even coming around to the idea that it wouldn’t even be so bad if Buttigieg won the state and derailed either Warren or Sanders. A few months ago, Buttigieg seemed like a more direct threat; now, given his enduring struggles to pick up minority voters anywhere in the country, the Biden campaign is happy to have him pick up momentum in Iowa, so sure he’ll lose it as soon as South Carolina.

In fact, to Biden’s top aides, the path ahead hasn’t looked this straightforward in months.

and early fall, when party leaders in the state grew concerned enough about how slowly Biden was staffing up and warned he might be humiliated—his campaign’s state director wouldn’t even tell Bloomberg News if he lived in the state.

Now, though, to the extent that Biden’s staff worries about anything, it’s that a rougher-than-expected start in Iowa could expose the 77-year-old gaffe machine to yet another political storm, this time in the form of his own party finally zeroing in on his ability to actually win. But for Biden’s rivals, the last year has been a lesson in “nothing matters,” as they’ve seen the frontrunner maintain his standing through disagreements, like over his Iraq War vote or his comments about working with segregationist senators, that they universally believe should have long ago taken him down.

When impeachment talk picked up, many expected it would be catastrophic for Biden—his name and his son’s in a constant loop not just on Fox News but CNN. It hasn’t taken its toll. For a front-runner, he’s a weak one and hasn’t

o four early states, he’s going to be well on his way.”

In private, they simply throw their hands up when reporters or allies ask for the real game plan, as if it’s not obvious.

Biden’s standing—in the state and nationally—doesn’t look quite as robust as it did last summer. But he has not exactly fallen back to the pack, either. And the campaign plan is to sail along on that remaining strength.

Early-state voters have “seen the vice-president take punches in this race from all sides, from Trump and others, and he’s still standing,” Tom Vilsack, the former secretary of Agriculture and Iowa governor who’s backing Biden, told me, distilling the case. “We really don’t know if these other folks can take a punch.”

“Other candidates have had to throw everything at Iowa. Their intent is that the whole country focuses on that. That’s their whole strategy,” said Siegel. Biden’s plan is more broad-minded: make a decent showing, at least, in Iowa and New Hampshire, then go on to the much more diverse states, where he holds a commanding advantage, especially with minority voters. “As we’ve been saying from the beginning, we don’t think either [Iowa or New Hampshire] is a must-win,” Kavanaugh added.

But another senior Biden aide who’s part of high-level strategy discussions described the campaign’s Iowa posture as “all in”— a sign of not just strategic disagreements within his leadership team but something more like an if-it-ain’t-broke-why-fix-it staff attitude. The campaign seems divided about Iowa’s importance.

Some of this mixed messaging is left over from the late summer

yet demonstrated an ability to get much past a quarter of national Democratic support.

But for a weak front-runner, michael bloomberg he’s a stable one, with endorsements rolling in by the day as the party as a whole starts to make strategic bets with an eye toward November.

Elizabeth Warren was sitting in Santa Monica, and the House was minutes away from impeaching the president, but the Massachusetts senator was still thinking about Iowa. It was December, and she was taking her time to consider what it meant for her candidacy that caucusgoers had, in recent months, started thinking like pundits: It was now common to hear them expounding specifically on “the electability question.” That didn’t always work in her favor, especially not recently, with voters telling pollsters and reporters that they found Warren too far left, not clear enough about her healthcare plan, too hectoring, sometimes simply too female. She leaned back, her sneakers perched on the hotel-room coffee table. “I remember when Barack Obama wasn’t ‘electable’! I remember when Donald Trump wasn’t ‘electable’! And here we are,” she told me. She paused. “I hear it—this question—as born out of an intense desire to make change. That’s what I want to do. Not everyone is in this race to do that.”

Warren abhors talking about polls and horse-race politics—she employs no traditional campaign pollster, which means strategic decisions can seem, when viewed from (Continued on page 84) january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

25

EHRY

In Conversation:

Fully engaged and working nonstop as he turns 91, the most famous architect alive won’t take projects in China or Saudi Arabia (“You don’t get paid”) and is reimagining a big chunk of downtown L.A. Is there a school of Gehry now? “God, no.”

By Justin Davidson Photograph by Amanda Demme 26 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

➞

Has your involvement in the pracWe don’t have publicists, like many tice changed at all? We’ve developed of my friends do. Michael Ovitz an interesting business model over 35 years ago said, “Let me be your the years. It works to everyone’s benagent.” I said, “What would you efit, including our clients’, and that do?” He said, “I’d get you work.” I means everyone gets paid, everyone said, “Architecture’s a gentleman’s gets bonuses and raises. That’s profession. You don’t do that.” important. A lot of my friends don’t Today, everybody’s got one. Did run the office enough like a business, you know that? Adjaye, BIG. I’ve so they struggle, and they take jobs heard Rem is with CAA.3 The culture has changed. in China, where you don’t get paid.

You have the luxury to let the I won’t take a job unless we get fully work come to you. But it wasn’t paid and we like the people.

You won’t work in China? I had a always like that, and I haven’t 1 bad experience there, so it would changed the way I work.

Do clients come to you wanting be hard for me to feel comfortable At his chain-link house with his son Alejandro in 1980. another Disney Hall or Guggenheim going there to do a project.

Is there anywhere else you won’t Bilbao? Some do, yeah. work? We’ve been asked to do stuff in Saudi construction workers were treated on his And have you moved on? Are you doing Arabia. I went there a couple of times, and Louvre Abu Dhabi, and he said there was stuff that’s really different? I hope so. they tried to be nice, but it was somewhat “no problem.” Zaha Hadid said the work- I think so. I’ve always been interested in insulting. They offered me lots of projects, ers who died while building the stadium playing with the light. In Bilbao, you get a and they said, “Pick a project, you design it, she designed in Qatar were not her con- lot of rain and clouds, so I chose the titabring us the design, and if we like it, we’ll cern. Your Guggenheim Abu Dhabi 2 is nium because it glows on gray days. I think finally starting construction soon, after about it like painting; the façade changes pay you.”

Is that the only reason you won’t work in many years of delay. Is this an issue for color with the day. So for the Luma artsSaudi Arabia, because it’s hard to get paid? you? Yes. We have a human-rights lawyer center tower in Arles, France, I wanted to I have my own opinions about the politics, who represents us there. We made that a explore that idea further, and the client was the Khashoggi thing, but I don’t want to condition of our work, and the client receptive but it had to be cost-effective. We make a big thing about it. I don’t want to get agreed. We haven’t built anything there yet, tested a lot of different metals, and we figinto a political thing where I knock MBS. but we’ll monitor that. ured out a way to make a pixelated mounSo the business model is to be very well tain out of five-by-three-foot steel bricks Some of my friends are working for them.

Jean Nouvel took a lot of flak for the way known, do a lot of work, and get paid for it? that are microdeformed.

Footnotes:

1.

In 2012, Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Moshe Safdie, and Jean Nouvel submitted designs for the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. Nouvel won the competition with a glassblock scheme that Gehry felt had been (at the very

2.

least) inspired by his own.

28 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

Gehry was hired in 2006 to design a Guggenheim Museum in

Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island,

a culture center with several museums, hotels, and an NYU campus. In 2011, artists, alarmed that foreign construction workers in the UAE were being exploited, threatened a boycott and the project was halted. Last spring, the Guggenheim Foundation’s Richard Armstrong said construction would restart soon.

3.

The Ghanaian-British Sir David Adjaye designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington; BIG is Bjarke Ingels Group; Rem Koolhaas is the co-founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and author of the 1978 classic Delirious New York.

(Adjaye says he has no agent.)

P H OTO G R A P H S : S U S A N W O O D / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( 1 9 8 0 ) ; R A L P H M O R S E / T H E L I F E P I C T U R E CO L L E C T I O N V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ( 1 9 7 2 ) ; I A I N M A S T E R TO N / A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO ( A B U D H A B I ) ; M AT H E W I M AG I N G / C R A I G M AT H E W ( L . A . P H I L H A R M O N I C ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F G E H RY PA R T N E R S, L L P ( R E M A I N I N G )

ith his 91st birthday (on February 28) a month away, the architect Frank Gehry has made few concessions to life in his tenth decade. Standing on the mezzanine of his vast Los Angeles studio, looking down on a panorama of model neighborhoods, six-foot skyscrapers, and blocky mock-ups as if it’s some dollhouse-scale Gehryland, he clearly relishes the sense of inventiveness and bustle. He takes the occasional Saturday off, but he’s mostly omnipresent, marching up and down the stairs from the studio floor to his office and library and keeping a close eye on the dozens of designs destined for sites on several continents. On his docket is a new Warner Bros. headquarters in Burbank, a mixed-use complex on Grand Avenue in downtown L.A. (across the street from his masterpiece, Disney Hall), a master plan for the Los Angeles River, an apartment tower at Hudson Yards, museums in Taiwan and Tel Aviv, and an art-in-the-schools program called Turnaround Arts.

4.

➞

Each metal sheet is deformed in each dimension, so you get a slight waviness?

Right. You’re not really conscious of the deformations, but when the light hits it, it does things. Now we’re doing a museum of medicine on the campus of the China Medical University in Taichung, Taiwan, and I wanted to use the same metal—not in blocks but free. I’m hoping that’ll be a different kind of painting, and I’m excited about that.

What makes a project exciting for you?

I love doing concert halls. I love classical music. How do you make a building communicate? How do you make the stage conducive to interaction or the orchestra share what the audience is feeling? It has to do with scale, materials, placement of details.

Have your thoughts about how to achieve that changed since Disney Hall? Classical music has changed. While I’m changing, they’re changing. At Disney Hall, they got rid of the orchestra pit to save $3 million, and now they’re desperate to have an orchestra pit because they’re doing operas like Tristan und Isolde, and it never quite works. We did Don Giovanni there—we put the orchestra up on top so the singers could be on the stage, and it made it difficult for Dudamel to conduct them.4 Concert halls need to be able to do a lot of different things now. The Pierre Boulez Saal we did in Berlin5 was a gift to the Divan [the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, co-founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said]. It’s only 700 seats, so it’s easier to make it more intimate. We flew a balcony overhead, floating, and the acoustician said it wasn’t going to work. Now he wants us to do it again every time. It does something really exciting to the relationship [between audience and performers], which I never expected. Sitting in that balcony, you feel very close to the stage.

I’ve heard that’s your favorite among all your buildings. Is that true? No, I can’t say that. What’s your favorite child? Disney Hall would hear that I said that! I like them all.

But I have a special relationship with Berlin because of the program Daniel and Said started to bring kids together from all over the Middle East, including Israelis, to play

At the office in 1972. The desk is from his line of cardboard furniture.

music. I traveled with that group to Argentina for a couple of weeks. They all look alike, they’re friendly all day long, and they play music so beautifully together. That was special. Barenboim is a powerful musician and a great thinker.

I was thinking about your relationship with music and with visual art— They’re the same.

Are they, for you? I don’t play music and I don’t paint, but I always thought architecture was an art and I try to practice it that way.

What does that mean to you, specifically? Architecture is intuitive. It’s humanly

In 2012, the L.A. Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, staged Mozart’s opera with sets by Gehry. With the orchestra on a platform, the chorus off to the side, and singers marching through a crumpled-paper mountain range, “not a minute

5.

Woolfe reported.

Inside the Pierre Boulez Saal.

of the score went by with the singers and the players firmly in sync,” the Times’ Zachary

expressive. You’re putting yourself on the line. You start out not being understood, and you keep going because you have to.

And it’s harder to explain.

Another thing about classical music is that it’s hard to assimilate in one hearing or even in several. I think you could say the same about your buildings. It’s not possible to look at Bilbao, say, from a single vantage point and understand how it works.6 There’s no one image that helps you understand the building. Yeah, that’s true. I never thought about it that way, but I agree.

But architecture is so slow, so mediated, and so expensive. To get from an initial

6.

Gehry’s museum, which transformed a depressed industrial city in northern Spain, has a slippery, mercurial quality. From afar, it looks like a knot of calligraphic swirls.

As you move in, its components appear at once more distinct and more disorienting, its walls and canopies recomposing themselves before your eyes. Navigating it is a series of interior revelations, and sometimes the world outside appears unexpectedly, as if by magic.

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

29

sketch to a fully realized building it can take decades, thousands of people, and hundreds of millions of dollars. How do you protect your original impulse through that whole process? I succeed a lot in doing that.

I like figuring out how to take tightly budgeted commercial projects and turn them into architecture. I’ve always done this. We managed to do that in New York with the Spruce Street tower.7 How? Technology now allows us to do towers with curves. That was unheard of before. We opened the door. We were building it within tight budgets, and the computer allowed us to build the [Spruce Street] tower with no change orders on the skin. It had a humanizing factor. Here, the skin creates a sculptural ensemble with the Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth tower, which is a beautiful building, an icon of New York, with a little funny hat on it.

The first thing we did was we got a local architect who does all the really low-end developer stuff to do a scheme of the most economic building that would fit the pro-

7.

8.

➞

➞

Gehry’s sketches of his 1992 “fish” building in Spain …

gram. We made a model and showed it to the developer, and he said, “I don’t want to do that!” And I said, “No, we’re not planning to do that, but let’s talk about it.” So we started making models—we’ve got 100 of them out there. I wanted to do a metal skin, and I wanted to fold the metal façade so that I could create bay windows. I had no clue how I was going to do it. I was thinking about Bernini’s sculpture of Santa Teresa, with all those sharp, edgy folds.

Michelangelo folds are softer, and they would have been easier, but I thought Bernini folds would be better for this building. We met with the fabricators from Italy and worked with them for two years, and we came up with folds that are the same scale as the terra-cotta panels on the Woolworth Building. Buildings next to each other should talk.

Your best-known works are the house you built for yourself and the buildings you’ve done for large institutions. But it sounds like you have gradually come around to working with developers, even though

Gehry first earned fame as a champion of cheap materials—

chain link, plywood, corrugated metal—with the modest Santa

Monica house he remodeled for himself in the late 1970s.

“There is a harshness to the house at first glance that suggests an intentional jibe at anything that smacks of refinement,” wrote then–Times critic Paul Goldberger in 1979.

30 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

9.

Jeffrey Worthe,

president of Worthe Real Estate, which is building Gehry’s design for a new Warner Bros. headquarters.

10.

… the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin …

their projects come with a lot of constraints. When I started out, I separated the office into the part that was doing developer work to pay the bills and a smaller part for what I really wanted to do. We built the shopping center here [Santa Monica Place, which opened in 1980 and was demolished and rebuilt in 2010], and the president of the Rouse Company came to see me at my chain-link house8 and he said, “Frank, do you like this? You must, since you built it for yourself. Then you can’t possibly like the things you did for us.” And I said, “Well, that’s not as good.” And he said, “Then stop.”

We had two big projects for them in the works, but I looked at him and said, “You’re right.” That was a Friday night. On Monday, I came in and said we’re not going to take this work. I let 40 people go. That was hard.

What’s changed? Now, with the reputation, with having Bilbao earn so much money, there’s more respect for that point of view. When I’m talking to developer types now, like the Burbank guy,9 I know that I have to work within his parameters.

A giant architecture 11. and planning firm that designs everything from office interiors to airports, including the JetBlue terminal at JFK. It’s generally known for efficiency and

thorough competence rather than groundbreaking aesthetics.

Gehry’s set of metal scrims showing scenes from Eisenhower’s life was not universally acclaimed.

Susan Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter, compared its supports to “missile silos.”

George Will groused that the architect had drawn up a monument to himself. After various design compromises, it will open on May 8.

➞

He has to get rent and meet the needs of Warner Bros. But he’s bought into the idea that we can add value. It’s not as sculptural as Bilbao—an office building doesn’t need to be—but it has some heart. It’s a chance to do something that’s used by a lot of people, and if you can raise its level beyond what they usually build, that’s good. There are a few developers I can do that with. The rest of them go to Gensler.10 I get that you’ve gradually accumulated enough power to carry your original idea through to completion, but I still don’t get how that works. Even before you get to the stage where you’re wrestling with developers, there’s the iterative process within your office, right? We build tons of models. I don’t work on the computer. I don’t even know how. I have a hard time with that thing. My way of searching is to have a dream—a fantasy, I guess you’d call it. You start to explore and build models to see if you can achieve it, without knowing that you can.

Can you give me an example? The Eisen-

12.

Until sexual-harassment allegations forced him out of the firm that bears his name last year, the New York architect was a distinguished designer of finely detailed

monochrome modernist buildings,

notably the Getty Museum in L.A. and the trio of West Village towers that kicked off New York’s glass-condo boom of the early aughts.

13.

… and the Luma arts center in Arles.

hower Memorial. The site [on Maryland Avenue, between 4th Street and 6th Street, in Washington, D.C.] is terrible and doesn’t measure up to a guy like Eisenhower. It’s not on the Mall, there’s a lot of traffic, and it’s up against several not-so-great buildings. I was studying tapestries at the time of the competition, for some reason, and I thought we could figure out how to build one [on an architectural scale]. The problem is that the Department of Education looks out on the site and a tapestry would have blocked their view, so you had to be able to see through it.

I had no idea how we were going to solve that. Nobody knew how to do it.

So I showed the project to an artist who’s worked with me over the years, Tomas Osinski, and there’s nothing he can’t do. You throw any project at him and he’ll go and make it. He wove metal wire by hand so that you could see through it.

And I said, “Yeah, that and a quarter will get me a phone call. You’re going to weave a half a mile of this?”

So he invented a knitting machine to

Gehry’s designs rely on the curves found in the body of a fish or an eagle’s flight. To

turn those fluid shapes into instructions for fabricators, his firm made a bespoke version of CATIA, the software used in airplane and car design. “It’s a great tool for modeling and manufacturing, but it requires a lot of training,” says Lawrence Sass, director of the Computation Group at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. Gehry’s firm spun it off in 2002 and sold it to Trimble Consulting in 2014.

14.

make it with stainless steel. He got it approved by the government: They shot a chunk of missile at the mock-up and it didn’t break the welds. You need a 200-year guarantee on the welds. And now it’s being built.

So you don’t know. If you knew where you were going, it would be less interesting.11 Most of the time, though, it’s not binary.

You go over thousands of decisions with your team and with clients, and there are always trade-offs. So how do you know which aspects you’re willing to give up and which sacrifices will erode the core of your design? If you have one idea, then everything’s got to be done that way, because if you compromise, then it’s not the same thing. Take a Richard Meier building.12 If it’s not white, then it’s not Richard Meier.

My work’s not like that.

Meaning that, because it’s so complex, you have more room to compromise?

I don’t think of it as compromise. I think of it as flexibility. If the client said, “We don’t want it white,” I’d say, “Okay, we’ll come up with another color.”

El Peix (“the fish”),

designed for the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.

It’s more sculpture than building, though the superstructure does shelter a waterfront café.

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31

You have a lot of opportunities for flexibility. Sure, but you also have to know what you’re shooting for. You have to keep your eye on that.

Are there concessions you regret making, anything you would do over? Sure, there are things I would do differently. Well, it’s not so much that I would do anything over, it’s that you learn from every phase. In Bilbao, the first time I saw those curves in the rain, glowing warmly, I cried. Once I learned that the metal could express an emotion, I looked for other ways of doing that. I’m trying to capture a feeling.

A feeling? Wow. I mean, as challenging as it is to protect an artistic concept all the way to completion, keeping an emotional impulse alive for all those years must be that much harder. Well, I never said I make things easy on myself.

Or on others! The whole construction industry is based on standardization of practices, so how do you ensure that the craftsmanship and execution come up to your standards? That’s one reason we developed Gehry Technologies.13 The system we created means that everyone can read off the same 3-D files and see exactly how it has to be done. Instead of the contractors taking our designs and figuring out how to build it—then we have to do change orders if they get it wrong, which costs money—this way we can show them exactly how to build it and stay on budget. When I did my first fish building in Barcelona,14 the Italian fabricator called and said, “I can’t build this.” Then we sent him the 3-D files and he called back and he said, “Perfetto.” I’ll never forget it.

It’s ironic that you don’t use a computer yourself but you effectively created a tech firm. And the software has had two distinct kinds of impact: on the practicalities of construction and on the architectural imagination itself. Here’s the game. Someone says, “Hey, guess what. We’re going to build a new concert hall”—or a new cathedral or whatever—“and we just hired Frank Gehry!” Everyone starts saying, “You can’t do that, it’ll break the bank.” I get that all the time, but it’s not true. We use the tools to develop a process that has cost control built in as we design. And we test ideas con-

15.

stantly. At the end of the day, a plain box building costs X, and a building with some humanity in it costs X plus 15 percent. But that’s everybody’s premium, not just Frank Gehry’s. It’s not an ego-driven premium. It’s a reality of making buildings with some sense of humanity. I would put our process up against anyone in the field in terms of cost control.15 You’ve shared that process and the technology with other architects, haven’t you? I called together an open forum of architects in New York. We explained what we were doing and how we were doing it, and we offered to train them in the software. They’ve been slow to accept it, and they’re missing out. Developers and contractors have taken it over, but architects should be the ones in control.

Let’s talk about your relationship with your colleagues. A few years ago, you were quoted as saying, “98 percent of everything that is built and designed today is pure shit,” and the accompanying photograph showed you at a press conference with a raised middle finger. I’m not sure I would disagree with you, but what did that moment do for your reputation? You have to contextualize that. That was in Spain. I had just gotten off a plane, I was tired, I went up to my hotel room to take a nap, got undressed and into bed—and the phone rang. They said, “We’re so sorry.

There’s been a mistake—could you come down to do an interview right now? We have a room set aside.”

So I got dressed and went down, and the room was filled with reporters, and I was on a podium with all kinds of lights and recording devices. A hand went up, ten rows back. And the person said, “What do you say to your critics who say that your buildings are showy?” I looked at him and my right hand was shivering. I felt like Dr. Strangelove. My arm just went up, and there it was. I felt like I had to explain it, so I said, “Why would you ask that question, when 98 percent of the built environment doesn’t even aspire to architecture? Showy?

It’s different. I think you’re asking an insulting question.” And I left it at that.

Later that evening, I was at a cocktail

16.

Whether Gehry has earned his reputation for going over budget depends on what you mean by over and budget, because his unique designs can make cost estimates elusive. When Gehry won the Disney Hall job in 1988, the budget stood at $110 million. As the client’s plans grew more elaborate, construction ground to a halt and more fundraising followed. When it opened in 2003, it had cost $284 million.

32 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

In 1913, Kazimir Malevich decided to make a painting of nothing. The result was Black Square, which over time has become more firmly grounded in physical reality thanks to the crackle of the pigment on its surface.

party with the King of Spain, and he hugged me and said, “Thank you for doing that.”

The architecture world has waged so many aesthetic wars during your lifetime, but I don’t hear people talk about style much these days. I know a lot of architects who proudly claim not to have one. Yours is pretty distinctive, though. Yes, it is, but I don’t know that it’s a style. It’s a personal expression. I don’t consciously think about creating a style that people would follow.

I’m trying to respond to time and place with the God-given abilities I have.

There are stylistic trends you’ve objected to, though. The postmodern thing got exaggerated. It was a moment when nobody knew quite what to do. Modernism was becoming colder and colder. It was like Malevich.16 He did the black square, and he didn’t know where to go from there, so he started doing dresses. That’s how it felt to me. The world had come to a standstill aesthetically, and we were so focused on getting things done, getting people housed.

Then all of a sudden, the coldness, the inhumanity of buildings—that lifeless feeling— hit a rock. And, like Malevich, turned to decoration. Because that was easy.

But we’re not in that period of decorative postmodernism anymore. No, I think we’ve come out of it now.

Thanks to your fish? Partly, yeah. I decided the fish was the model for the future of architecture because it expressed sculptural movement.

Why a fish, though? This was my thinking: We live in a time when everything’s moving very fast. Is there some way to express that movement in architecture, so a building’s not just static volumes?

I didn’t intend to use the word fish, but I got pissed off at a conference where all my architect friends were becoming postmodernists and I said, “Why do you have to go back to anthropomorphism and Greek temples? Why don’t you go back 300 million years all the way to fish?” And I started drawing them and I realized you could express movement and connect with people rather than making a lifeless thing. I’m stuck with the fish thing, but I’d rather do turtles now and go slower. When architecture

17.

If you accept the museum’s figures, its total economic impact on the region—direct and otherwise—is now up to 6 billion euros.

becomes developer driven, it’s hard to be an artist. But slowly, they get it. Bilbao earned 4 or 5 billion euros.17 You put that on the screen, and they say, “Holy shit!” So architecture does make a difference. People respond to it, and they make more money.

Let’s get back to the question of context. Sometimes you’re working with wonderful urban surroundings, but just as often you are creating a new context. The part of Bilbao around the Guggenheim is completely different from the way you found it.

You know, they love me there. They called and said they want to name a bridge after me. They weren’t asking me to design it— they got a local architect instead—just to put my name on it. But, you know, the urban planning around it isn’t that good, and the buildings by [Rafael] Moneo and [César] Pelli aren’t their best.

Maybe it’s not easy to be at your best when the context is a Frank Gehry building. Diller Scofidio + Renfro had to deal with that when they designed the Broad right next to Disney Hall. Yeah.

Now you have to deal with that, with the Colburn School and with the Grand Avenue project, also right near Disney. Grand Avenue’s a pretty tight developer budget, and I didn’t get everything I wanted. But it’ll be okay. I’m hoping to revisit the streetscape there. Disney Hall was under construction, and they said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Gehry, now bye-bye.”

What did you want to do that didn’t happen on the street? There was supposed to be an artwork in front. I hoped it would be the big bow tie by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, but the board didn’t like that. Then it was going to be a Richard Serra: two huge steel plates standing up right in front of the building. Can you imagine that? He hates me. He blames me for killing the idea, but actually I accepted it.

I said okay, then the board rejected that, too. So we never got a work of art out front, but I’d like to revisit that.

The developer of the Grand Avenue project is Related.18 Do they get you? I guess so, because they asked us to do a tower at Hudson Yards, too.

When I think about all the projects that

18.

“When architecture becomes developer driven, it’s hard to be an artist.

But slowly, they get it.”

seemed like they might have happened but then fell apart—Atlantic Yards (later renamed Pacific Park), the Guggenheim in lower Manhattan, the New York Times headquarters—it makes me wonder if New York somehow never quite understood you. When Atlantic Yards died, that was painful. In the whole 2008 disaster, after they canceled the thing, I was having dinner with Bruce Ratner [then the CEO of Forest City Ratner, which was developing both Atlantic Yards and 8 Spruce Street] in Brooklyn, and from there we could see my tower [8 Spruce Street] going up, but it was still just a stump. And Bruce said, “I think that may be as far as we’re going to get.” Later he discovered that it would have cost him just as much not to build it as to finish it, but for a while there it looked like we were done.

Let’s talk a bit about the influences on you and the influence you’ve had on others.

You’ve often spoken about how important Wright, Louis Kahn, and Le Corbusier were to you early on19 as well as the impact of

The Grand, a $1 billion complex containing an apartment tower, a hotel, a shopping and dining center, and a public plaza, is under construction and scheduled to open next year—basically, a mini

Hudson Yards.

19.

painters and sculptors in the L.A. art scene. Do you keep absorbing new influences? As I’ve gotten older, I get focused inwardly more. I do try to keep up with what’s going on, but it’s not as intense as when I was younger.

When you talk about your architecture, it’s usually in personal or pragmatic terms—“Here’s the program, here’s what I was looking at, how I reacted”—but rarely in theoretical terms. You’re suspicious of the academic world, aren’t you?

I think they’re suspicious of me. Years ago, I was at a conference at Princeton to celebrate Michael Graves.20 They got together a bunch of architects, and each of us had 15 minutes to present our work. So I get started, and two minutes in, Robert Maxwell, who was the dean of the architecture school, has his hand high in the air. He interrupts me in the middle of my talk! He says, “Mr. Gehry, do you have nightmares?”

I ignored him and just kept going. Afterward, they cleared the stage for a conversation between me and [art historian] Irving Lavin. We had gone to Europe together and looked at all this Romanesque architecture, and so we start talking and pretty soon we’re getting into all this theory and history.

And Maxwell’s hand shoots up in the air again. And I said, “What is it this time?” He says, “Mr. Gehry, I’d like to apologize.” It was because I was talking to Lavin: Now I was okay. I was in the club.

But also your work is so idiosyncratic; you’re not part of a movement. There’s no school of Gehry. God, no.

Still, a lot of architects have come through your office and gone out on their own. Do they wind up with some commonality, some Gehry DNA? I hope not. I don’t think so. I used to kick them out after five years so they wouldn’t get stuck doing my thing. I don’t do that anymore, but I’m also learning from them. Some of the people we have here are out ahead of me.

But are they channeling you? I don’t think so.

I guess what I’m asking is how much does the firm’s work and future depend on your daily presence? You mean am I going ■ to retire? I wouldn’t know how.

As a young man, Gehry was so steeped in the aesthetics of Frank Lloyd Wright that when he was in the Army, he designed a general’s field latrine in his style. But “Corb is my lightbulb. No. 1 on my hit parade,” he told writer Barbara Isenberg, adding that he visits Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel every year: “It makes me cry … It’s almost perfect.”

20.

The architect and longtime Princeton professor, who died in 2015, was

a leader of the postmodern movement, advocating for a

contemporary, often playful reinterpretation of historical styles. That approach made him popular with the Walt Disney Company, which hired him to design hotels and resorts.

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33

The Voice o a Generation

Michael Barbaro made the New York Times podcast The Daily a raging s ess. Or is it the other way a u ?

By Matthew Schneier

34 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

Photographs by David Williams

of n

ANA ,” says the voice you know by

now, in audible all caps. “ WHEN

DID THE UNITED STATES START TO FEEL A SENSE OF ANXIETY

…” A pregnant pause. “Too much,” he says. And so Michael Barbaro, mes, takes a breath, turns back to the Times reporter Dana Goldstein, and starts again.

This, as Barbaro announces every weekday morning, is The Daily, the Times’ tentpole podcast. In a studio tucked in the back of the New York Times Building on Eighth Avenue, in front of a four-legged spider of microphones, Barbaro spends most days interviewing his fellow Times journalists about a single splashy story of the moment, a deepish dive into the day’s news. Shrewdly edited for commute consumption (episodes hover around 22 to 25 minutes long, just about two minutes shy of the average American’s schlep), The Daily offers, if not wonkish completeness, a kind of cocktail-party competence. “You listen to The Daily and you’re better equipped to speak at a dinner party,” says Jenna Weiss-Berman of the podcast shop Pineapple Street Studios. “And that’s all you really want.”

Podcasting is an intimate medium, and podcasts live or die by their hosts. In the 40-year-old Barbaro, The Daily has found one who connects unusually, even unexpectedly, well. The Daily has turned Barbaro from a career Timesman into a celebrity, one with TV appearances, adoring fans, loving parodies, and a personal life chronicled by “Page Six.” The Daily introduced Barbaro to the wider world; it also introduced him to his fiancée.

In person, he is owlishly handsome (the little round glasses he used to wear amplified the effect, though he has lately swapped them for more rectangular frames), of roughly average height, and indifferently dressed, with a corona of salt-and-pepper curls and a scruffy, too-busy-to-shave beard. In 2017, People magazine named him one of the 15 sexiest newsmen.

But most of Barbaro’s admirers don’t see him. They hear him.

The appeal is the voice and the peculiar prosody that gives The Daily its pulse. (“I think I like the way @mikiebarb says ‘natalie’ more than the way my girlfriend says it?,” Times reporter and sometime Daily guest host Natalie Kitroeff wrote on Twitter.

“Help.”) His delivery sits between the clipped authority of NPR and the pirate-radio shagginess of the archetypal podcaster; it is remarkably free of filler (a beloved grandfather, his story goes, trained the ums and likes out of him) with deliberative pauses that never hit exactly where you expect. These gaps are practical (they make it easy to edit tape), but they’re also stylistic, a soothing, if syncopated, snare-drum beat.

That voice is a development of the show, which is not to say an affectation. Barbaro (BAR-BAR-O; he says each syllable is stressed equally, though on-air it sounds like he’s giving the O short shrift) cops to having undergone “a second pubescence” finding his voice on tape. Now he doesn’t put it on or take it off.

It’s how he orders at Starbucks as much as how he queries his colleagues on the show. “I don’t remember him quite as staccato 36 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

in real life,” says Sam Dolnick, who oversees the Times’ audio programming as well as its film and TV projects and has known Barbaro since their days together in the “Metro” section in 2009.

“But now when you hear him talking, he does do it,” he says. “I have a little bit of trouble listening to The Daily because I know Michael so well,” says Ross Douthat, the Times opinion columnist and a friend since middle school. “I can’t get over listening to him do his radio-host voice, knowing him since he was 13 years old.”

or the times, audio represents, in Dolnick’s words, “the next big opportunity.” The Daily’s audience skews tantalizingly young—three-quarters are under 40, almost a decade younger than the average print reader—and is impressively, even unnervingly, committed. More than one person I interviewed confessed to harboring a romantic interest in Barbaro based on his voice alone. In three years, The Daily has become an integral part of the “report,” as the paper (increasingly not just a paper) calls its coverage. “The Daily is the modern front page of the New York Times,” says Dolnick. In fact, it’s bigger. More than 2 million listeners download each episode, compared with the 443,000 who read the weekday paper in print. “The Daily is a monster hit with an astonishingly valuable audience,” CEO Mark Thompson told investors on an earnings call in November, “and it just continues to grow.”

According to Podtrac, which publishes rankings of the month’s top podcasts by unique U.S. audience, The Daily was the No. 1 podcast every single month of 2019 and in the No. 1 or No. 2 spot for all of 2018. (Podtrac only considers podcasts that participate in its service, which excludes certain monster hits, like The Joe Rogan Experience, that do not opt in.) The Daily was the most downloaded show on Apple Podcasts in 2018. In October, the Times threw a party for its billionth download.

That scale is thanks largely to the work of Barbaro and the editors and producers who make The Daily every day: Lisa Tobin, 34, who runs the Times’ audio team; Theo Balcomb, 32, the executive producer of the show; and the now-30-strong audio team that has mushroomed out of what had been, as recently as 2017, a staff you could count on one hand with room to spare. When, that January, Balcomb arrived from All Things Considered and The Daily began, it was four people in a storage closet on the building’s 16th floor. (Andy Mills, formerly of Radiolab, filled out the original team.) Now 16 or 17 are working on the show at any given time with the rest dispersed on other audio projects.

Every morning, team members gather over MacBooks to plan for the next day, later that week, and beyond, scouring top stories to figure out what will connect with an audio audience, batting around ideas, arguing for passion projects (Taylor Swift was the subject of a recent vigorous debate), and hashing out logistics (who can be reached in Hong Kong in the midst of the protest demonstrations there?). Human interest can sell a story, or an element of shock or surprise, or even just great tape. (One editor announced that a writer covering the climate crisis hadn’t recorded any interviews during the reporting of a piece in the weather-ravaged Florida Keys. The entire room groaned in unison.) The ranks swell nearly weekly as the Times brings in new journalists from public radio and competing podcast companies, who join the shared Google Docs in which the shows are scripted and edited.

Despite the group effort, Barbaro is the public face and, accordingly, gets much of the public credit. The Times, pinnacle of newspapering though it may be—it considers itself the paper of record, not a paper of record—has historically been leery of creating stars. It may pride itself on having the best in the business, but they work for the Times, not the other way around. Jill Abramson, the paper’s former executive editor, laid down the party line while negotiating (and ultimately failing) to keep Nate Silver, the polling guru behind FiveThirtyEight, who in 2013 was considering an exit. “The New York Times,” she told his agent, “is always the prettiest girl at the party.”

Barbaro had been a distinguished reporter for the Times as well as a savvy operator in its internal politics. His is a “tenacity that maybe has shades of ruthlessness,” his old friend Rebecca Angelo, who followed Barbaro into journalism before becoming a screenwriter, puts it. He’d already been a vocal presence in the newsroom, highly regarded by himself and others. He hobnobbed at the paper’s highest echelons, hosting, for instance, a party for his new colleague Maggie Haberman when she joined the Times that was attended by the paper’s elite. The gatherings have only gotten more glittering. Invites for a spring party he hosted last year went to A. G. Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher, and Meredith Kopit Levien, its chief operating officer, in addition to a number of political reporters and editors.

With The Daily, Barbaro has risen above the competitive ranks of reporters elbowing one another for assignments—I was one from 2014 to 2019, though I didn’t know Barbaro—to ascend along a parallel track that, before him, didn’t exist. He now has a bird’s-eye view of a highly segmented newsroom and a rare perch from which he can, like almost no one else inside the institution, elevate a story.

None of this was a given. He went into what could have been a newmedia backwater and, practically overnight, became an unusual thing in the Times firmament: a star whose shine doesn’t dim outside the building’s walls.

Now Barbaro gets booked on Late Night With Seth Meyers; Liev Schreiber played him on Saturday Night Live. (“Nailed it,” Dolnick says.) Vanity Fair has called him “the Ira Glass of the New York Times.” “I feel sad for him, if that’s all he gets,” Glass, a Daily fan, tells me. “I think he aspires to higher.” (“When people ask me what podcast they should be listening to,” he adds, “it’s my go-to.”) The Onion is launching a parody news podcast this month, The Topical, with a fictional host partly inspired by Barbaro. And his is the voice of the house: When you go to an event at TheTimesCenter, where the Times Company stages ticketed lectures, panel discussions, and readings, it’s often Michael Barbaro who pipes out of the speakers asking you to please silence your cell phones.

“He loves it,” says Samantha Henig, who was editorial director of audio for the Times until last year and is now the executive editor for strategy at BuzzFeed. “He’s one of those people who feeds off the energy of people.” She recalls an event The Daily held featuring Barbaro at TheTimesCenter where he stuck

around longer than anyone else to bask in the adoration of fans.

“He just didn’t want to leave,” she says. “The rest of us left, and he was still out there. At some point, I came back out to be like, ‘Michael, come on,’ and he wouldn’t.” “Serene is the word I would use,” says Douthat, “about this weird eminence he has gained.”

That eminence can come in handy. In a tough spot negotiating access? Get MB—as the staff refers to him—to call. “We’ve gotta have Michael do this,” Alexandra Leigh Young, one of The Daily’s producers, said in a meeting about working to get Bernie Sanders’s camp onboard for a series of interviews the show planned to do with the Democratic-primary front-runners. “People respond to Michael.” (Sanders signed on.) Within the Times, too, journalists know that appearing on The Daily can boost their profile, and that their colleagues (and higher-ups) will notice; Dolnick compared it to a public report card. Which is not to say its host has gotten drunk with power, yet. On one of my previous visits to The Daily’s war rooms, Barbaro was off-site, down in Atlanta for the Sanders interview. He called in to a scripting meeting from the local radio station where he would record while on the road, noting that its microphones didn’t have noise-blocking windscreens. “You should pitch a fit,” someone in the room joked. Barbaro sounded amused. “That’s definitely the impression I’d like to leave,” he said dryly. But Tobin jumped in to tease him all the same, imagining a diva tantrum: “ ‘My contract specifies windscreens!’ ” Former colleagues have leveraged their Times success into starring roles, like Brian Stelter, the former Times media reporter who leapfrogged to CNN. But The Daily is tethered to the Times, which it depends on for the stories and storytellers it offers up every day, and Barbaro seems entirely at peace within its walls. He left the NewsGuild of New York, the union that represents the Times, when he started the show, and recently renegotiated his position in light of the podcast’s success, but he hasn’t signed with any of the agents who have called him. “It never occurred to me to not be a Times employee,” Barbaro says. “My abiding goal in life was to become a New York Times reporter. When I became the host of The Daily and the show took off, it never occurred to me to do anything but remain a Times journalist.” he daily is practically the first of its kind: Podcast executives described to me kicking around the idea of daily shows in the past but discarding them as too labor intensive and expensive to be worthwhile, especially given that they were bound to become stale almost immediately. But in the wake of the success of The Daily, rival news organizations have created their own, like NPR’s Up First and Vox’s Today, Explained. (New York is a Vox Media property.) “I welcome the competition,” Balcomb says, as well she might. For the moment, The Daily trounces it.

Still, making The Daily is a huge effort. The days can be punishingly long, and the show eventually instituted a four-day workweek for producers, acknowledging that those staying late into the night to close an episode effectively work two days in one. Technically, Lisa Chow, a Daily editor, explained to me, the show should be finished by 3 a.m., when a sound engineer in London takes over to put on the finishing touches and get it delivered to your phone by 6 a.m. New York time. But on one day that I observed The Daily, during the Sondland hearings, the recording and editing began around 9:30 a.m., and Balcomb didn’t leave until 4:30 a.m. Alex Halpern Levy, a speechwriter and political strategist and one of Barbaro’s best friends, told me Barbaro carries a microphone around with him to rerecord the “what else you need to know today” segments that end every episode, in case of news developments. In order to get clean sound, he has been known to burrow beneath bedcovers.

In this kind of pressurized, all-hands-on-deck atmosphere—we january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

37

are building a culture of editorial rigor, collaboration, healthy communication reads the statement of purpose on one of the staff rooms’ whiteboard walls—intense relationships naturally develop. The most intense is one that no one predicted.

When The Daily began, Barbaro was a married man. He and his husband, Timothy Levin, an educator with a test-prep company, had tied the knot in their Upper West Side apartment in 2014. So it was with some surprise that rumors began to circulate last year that he had started a relationship with a colleague: Lisa Tobin, who herself had been engaged when she arrived at the Times.

The relationship caused some uneasiness in the building, both among The Daily’s staff and among those higher up. Barbaro does not report to Tobin and never did—both report directly to Dolnick— so an explicit power differential was not at play, but the success of the company’s young, still-fragile moneymaker might have hung in the balance. The secrecy surrounding the relationship did not do much to ease fears. When “Page Six” finally published the news that Barbaro and Levin were in divorce proceedings and that he and Tobin were together, the anonymous sources quoted seemed almost palpably relieved. Newsroom romances are not uncommon (Dolnick met his wife in a newsroom, he points out), but usually a paper’s brass can separate the partners to ensure no appearance of bias or favor. “That doesn’t work on The Daily,” Dolnick says. “You couldn’t send one here or the other there. But we’re now well over a year in, and it works.” The couple try to treat each other like colleagues, and nothing more, in front of the rest of the staff.

Yet the show remains stubbornly at the heart of their relationship, at least for now, a fact even Barbaro acknowledges.

“It’s independent and interrelated,” he says, “but it’s not based on the show.” Of all the people in the world Barbaro might have fallen in love with, Tobin is a conspicuous choice, the co-author of his current success—a collaborator but also a Pygmalion.

“She produces him,” one journalist who knows them both says.

In other words, she has coaxed out a brighter, shinier Barbaro both on tape and off.

Barbaro and Tobin are understandably disinclined to discuss the more prurient details of their courtship and relationship. He declines to define his sexual orientation or whether he considers it to have shifted. (Gawker once dinged Out magazine for not including him in its roundup of the “gay mafia” at the Times.) Though even some close friends say they were shocked by the developments in his personal life, “he goes through the world in the same way to me,” one told me. The biggest change may be that he has moved to Brooklyn, where he and Tobin, who are now engaged, bought an apartment together last spring.

T

he day you’re on The Daily, you hear from your friends from elementary school, your college buddies. My mom’s best friend’s daughter gets in touch,” says Dana Goldstein, the education reporter who was on the show in December to discuss America’s anxiety over its high-schoolers’ stagnating standardized-test scores. “My friends don’t typically congratulate me when I have an A1 story”—a Timesism for the front page.

She pulled up a text message from a friend in London whose interest borders on the obsessive. “She said, quote, ‘I noticed the pause between “This” and “is The Daily” is getting longer,’ ” she read. “ ‘I am so fascinated. Tell us everything.’ ” Why does The Daily work? There is, of course, Barbaro’s ASMR, and the medium brings its own intimacy. “It’s hard reading the transcript of a conversation with a person, regardless of how powerful that conversation was,” Tobin says. “It’s not the

38 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

same thing as hearing the tremor in their voice as they answer the question.” The Daily brings in the voices not only of reporters but, often, of their sources or even its own; in narrativizing the news, it makes it both more approachable and more digestible than the front page. And the daily-news format seems to work well for podcasting; Up First is routinely right behind The Daily in Podtrac rankings. But mostly the secret seems to be access to the inner workings of the New York Times. The Daily, like an aural cousin to Spotlight or All the President’s Men, takes care to leave the process in the product. The journalists who come

on the program report back on their stories to Barbaro, who plays the audience stand-in and goads them along with context-establishing, sometimes faux-naïve questions (“What is nato, again?”).

The Daily lets listeners hear the logistical mundanities: the voice of the hotel clerk as Barbaro calls a political reporter on the campaign trail, bars of hold music, the operator at the congressional press room. (All of those details are real, though they can also be ersatz. “Could you just rustle the papers in silence for a minute?,” one producer asked Goldstein during her segment.)

Barbaro, too, leaves much of his own thought process on display.

Generations of reporters have been trained to make themselves invisible in their stories, but Barbaro can end up becoming a character. In a memorable early episode, he was moved to tears and wept audibly, admitting the limitations of his own perspective, while

 A staff meeting of The Daily in December.  From left, Lisa Tobin, Theo Balcomb, and Barbaro.

“The day you’re on The Daily, you hear from your friends from elementary school, your college buddies. My mom’s best friend’s daughter gets in touch.”

interviewing a Kentucky coal miner who was in favor of reviving the mining industry. These moments make good listening and endear Barbaro to fans— one I spoke with cited his “tenderness” in particular as a selling point—but journalists have been warier of them.

On Slate, Susan Matthews called the episode “irresponsible to the point of bordering on unethical.”

This move away from the voice-ofGod newsman represents a change for the paper and a change for Barbaro, for whom Times traditions have always been sacrosanct. (Douthat, who worked with Barbaro on both the highschool newspaper and an anonymous competitor they invented called La Vérité, recalled that Barbaro insisted La Vérité’s layout follow the Times’ exactly.) The son of a firefighter and an elementary-school librarian, Barbaro grew up just outside New Haven, where he and his sister had a paper route for the Register, and after high school at Hamden Hall, a local prep school, he arrived at Yale, where he rose to become the editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News. Even then, he had the kind of concerted ambition that propels one inexorably forward.

After college, Barbaro spent a few years at the Washington Post before joining the Times. He distinguished himself on his first beat, retail, before moving up to a sexier one, covering the Bloomberg administration as a city-hall reporter. From there, it was on to the 2012 and 2016 campaign trails, covering Romney in the former, a succession of GOP candidates in the latter, and finally Donald Trump, earning the none-too-exclusive honor of the future president’s scorn. (“He should resign,” Trump tweeted.)

When Trump was elected, Barbaro’s was one of two names atop the Times’ A1 story announcing it to the world.

Privately, Barbaro was shaken by the outcome of the election, which he, like many at the Times, had not anticipated. “I was humbled by the experience of having covered that race as a national political correspondent and written these very authoritative, sweeping stories about the race and then realizing that my understanding of the race was insufficient and was not correct,” he says. In the aftermath, newly unmoored, he had to find a new place for himself and considered becoming an editor or even getting involved with the Times’ live-events business. Instead, picking up the thread from a side project he’d been a part of during the campaigns, a slapdash Times politics podcast called The Run-Up, he became The Daily. the daily was not part of the Times’ original audio plan. Audio itself was, until very recently, not much of a consideration. A few desks had their own podcasts—The Book Review, Popcast—but they tended to operate as guerrilla endeavors. In 2016, Henig, who had worked on a variety of digital projects at the Times, was tasked (Continued on page 83) with looking into audio opportunities in january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

39

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➸ made with a special blend of polyurethane that can withstand temperatures as low as 76 degrees below zero, these insulated rubber gloves from Japanese manufacturer Dia Rubber Co. ($52 at en.sano.shop) are a favorite of New York sculptor Bill Bywater, who has been carving ice for over 30 years.

“It’s key to keep dry when you’re trying to keep warm, and that’s especially difficult when ice chips are melting all over you during demonstrations,” he says.

The zipper keeps these gloves tight at the wrists, so cold air stays out, and they have a textured grip, excellent for working on slippery sculptures. “Plus, the fleece lining slides out so it can be rinsed and dried thoroughly.

I’ve been using them for 20 years, and there is nothing better for days when it’s wet and cold and you have to carve ice. Or, you know, bring out the garbage.” For more recomm le who wor ld climates, from an Alaskan dogsledder’s mukluks to a lifelong skier’s electric socks, turn the page.

The Rubber Gloves an Ice Sculptor Uses to Keep His Fingers From Freezing

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

41

best bets: the warmest stuff in the world

By Trupti Rami

Recommendations From Six Professionally Cold People The Balaclava a Ship’s Captain Uses to Prevent Windburn in Boston Harbor

The Silk Liners a Finnish Outdoor Guide Uses to Keep Her Breasts Warm “When your breasts get cold in extreme weather, it’s extremely painful. Ruskovilla, a Finnish company, has silk-lined breast warmers ($25 at webshop.ruskovilla.fi) that you can put under your top to help prevent that.”

MIIA VATKA

ski instructor and co-owner of Lost Fox Guiding

The Icelandic Jacket a Northern Lights Tour Guide Layers Over Her Fleece

“This is the down-filled, Icelandicmade top jacket ($612 at zo-on.com) our whole team wears during tours.

Underneath, we wear a fleece and a woolen or synthetic base layer— never cotton, as that absorbs your sweat and can freeze.”

SIGURLAUG LYDÍA GEIRSDÓTTIR

guide with Reykjavik Excursions

“We’re occasionally facing winds over 50 knots, so it’s important that all our skin is covered. This one ($19 at ergodyne.com) has a comfortable feel and is easy to put on in a hurry. If you don’t wear one, you will start to look like an old alcoholic skier. It’s a real aging preventative.”

RYAN LEE HATCH |

captain of the Gateway Endeavor

The Electric Socks a Former Competitive Skier Slips On for Below-Zero Runs Heatperlasts up to 14 hours charge and is regulated via Bluetooth on a smartphone.

“I skied 100 days at Aspen Snowmass last year, and I grew to really like heated socks ($350 at thewarmingstore.com).

These are battery-charged and have three heat settings.

They are machine-washable, thankfully, but definitely don’t put them in the dryer.”

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The Mukluks an Alaskan Dogsledder Wears on the Iditarod

“As a long-distance racer, I often spend days out on the trail in some of Alaska’s toughest conditions.

I wear these ($200 at mukluks.com) frequently at 35 degrees below zero with some toe warmers thrown in, and my feet stay warm and safe from frostbite. Plus, they are very lightweight—which is important, as I run a lot to help the dogs keep moving.”

TRAVIS BEALS

owner of Turning Heads Kennel

The Machine a Golf-Course Manager Uses to Pre-Warm Her Gloves (and Hats and Socks) “We have an outdoor driving range that is open year round. And the ball pickers drive around in a golf cart right on the Hudson River. So when it’s very cold, we bring out our electric boot-and-glove dryer ($100 at walmart.com). We use it to pre-warm our socks an es and hats so everyone is toasty on the course.”

TASHA EDMEAD |

nt general manager at the Golf Club at Chelsea Piers

42 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

The device is also capable of suctioning sweat and odor out of shoes and gloves.

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the one-page

guide to:

Shvitzing

Shvitz is a Yiddish word that’s both a verb and a noun—you can shvitz, as in sweat, or you can go to a shvitz, as in a bathhouse, of which New York has many both storied and brand new. Margaret Rhodes consulted a dozen experts and regulars on how to navigate the city’s (and North Jersey’s) baths, onsens, and 24-hour K-spas.

➽ New shvitzers should start with a day pass, ideally to a place with a standard menu of thermal soaking pools, cold plunge tubs, steam rooms, and dry saunas. There’s the Wall Street Bath & Spa 88 and the 128-year-old Russian & Turkish Baths in the East Village, which are the city’s true banyas: The stone-and-wood rooms are bare-bones but clean.

Wall Street has a grander lounge area, while the Russian & Turkish Baths draw a more diverse crowd, from NYU kids to old Slavic men to, at least recently, Owen Wilson. For a New Age atmosphere—with an Amit Greenberg mural and a flotation tank—go to Bathhouse in Williamsburg, which opened in November. ➽ Pack a swimsuit and an ID for locker rental. Most bathhouses provide towels, robes, clean shower sandals, and, if you’re at a banya, a wool hat to protect your head from the heat. You’ll need a swimsuit if you’re heading to a venue with co-ed rooms and pools (this includes the Mermaid, SoJo, and Bathhouse, below). At King Spa & Sauna and K-Town Sauna, you’ll go naked—policy prohibits any attire in their gender-segregated steam and treatment rooms. ➽ At the Russian & Turkish Baths, check the calendar for “Boris weeks” and “David weeks.” Both owners have retired from East 10th Street, but their heirs continue to run the business on alternating weeks—an arrangement from the 1980s based on a mysterious feud. Bathers on Boris weeks use a paper punch card; those who go on David weeks use a digitized swipe pass and can often find a Groupon deal. Regulars say the rooms are significantly hotter on Boris weeks. ➽ For a more old-world Russian vibe, take the Q train. Brooklyn Banya and the Mermaid Spa, located in Kensington and Sea Gate, respectively, are filled with locals looking to get warm and catch up with friends—not so much for a lush afternoon at the spa. Mermaid, says one Russian regular, is cleaner and known for its food (“Salo is hard to find in New York, so eat that,” he says). ➽ While you’re there, try a platza. The Russian exfoliating treatment takes place in a 180-degree room, where you’ll get smacked with a bundle of oak leaves (called a venik) and lathered up with soap. The oak leaves contain a natural astringent said to remove toxins from the skin; the thwacking boosts circulation. ➽ Spend eight hours at a Korean jjimjilbang. It’s surprisingly easy to do. Traditional K-spas like Spa Castle in Queens and King Spa in Palisades Park, New Jersey (you’ll need a car), are universes unto themselves with several floors and a buffet of saunas, such as a jade room (found at Spa Castle; the walls emit muscle-soothing calcium and magnesium). A regular at both calls Spa Castle more Disneyfied (LED saunas and rowdy bachelorette parties) and King Spa (which plays Korean soap operas on the TVs) more authentic. ➽ Wake up early for SoJo Spa Club, perhaps the handsomest (think lots of blond wood, landscaping) and cleanest of the K-spas.

Located in Edgewater, New Jersey, SoJo runs shuttle buses from midtown. One frequent visitor says if you get there by 9 a.m., the place is fairly empty; he recommends the secret, extremely hot infrared sauna on the fifth floor. ➽ Or head to Koreatown at 2 a.m. Juvenex stays open 24 hours. Most graveyard-shift guests are travelers recuperating after red-eye flights. ➽ Tribeca is home to two of the city’s most upscale bath options. The Shibui Spa in the Greenwich Hotel offers a Japanese onsen experience: A reconstructed Japanese farmhouse holds its pool and lounge area, and the menu includes 30-minute hinoki-mint and cherry-blossom soaking treatments. A couple of blocks over, there’s AIRE Ancient Baths, where six thermal tubs (including the “flotarium,” which has the density of the Dead Sea) are housed in a candlelit brick chamber and changing rooms are stocked with waffle robes and L’Occitane products. ➽ Nonbinary, queer, and trans shvitzers should head to Bushwick. The HotBox Mobile Sauna is a wood-burning Finnish sauna on wheels, currently parked next to popular bar the Narrows. Events include karaoke nights, when you can enjoy kombucha and beer during breaks from the heat, and it recently hosted Bed-Stuy’s Dyke Soccer team for a postgame sweat. ➽ Try a new-generation gay bathhouse. Most historic gay bathhouses (like Man’s Country and New St. Marks Baths) closed with the aids crisis, but the scene is undergoing a revival: Journalist Kevin Phinney says that, per gay chat rooms and apps, the sauna at East Side Club (which has private rooms) is a good bet for a hookup. ➽ And generally, don’t just leave after bathing. Bathhouses are about community, and communities eat. Like the Mermaid Spa, Wall Street has gained a reputation for its Eastern European dishes (“The kharcho is absolutely out of this world,” says Eater’s Ryan Sutton). The all-day café at Williamsburg’s Bathhouse serves borscht, plus salmon toast, beef tartare, and a funky Tempranillo.

44 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

the look book goes to

The New Year’s Gala at the Metropolitan Opera Where patrons enjoyed some Champagne with their La Bohème, Tosca, and Turandot. interviews by katy schneider and jane drinkard

SHARON MEDINA

Psychotherapist, Wisconsin

Tell me about your dress. It’s from Africa.

I’ve been spinning the cape around, and I feel like an African queen.

Of course, I’m soaking it in. I’m drama all the way.

My daughter ordered it for me. I have a really, really great daughter.

She knows I’m having a hard time at my job right now and that, honestly, I’m super-broke. I love the opera and I’m obsessed with New York, so she got us a room at the Hyatt and also the tickets for tonight—on opposite sides of the room because it was very last minute.

Have you met anyone?

Yes. Two handsome men—one black, one white. Since my hus this is the waking up to take note. I w it further, b them were very, very nice. So we’ll see.

Photographs by Kyle Dorosz

45

the look book: opera What does MC. stand for?

“Merrycarol.”

I was born on Christmas, and my mom inexplicably let these nuns in the hospital name me. Then she had to go home and tell her Jewish husband, her Jewish mother, her Jewish father, and her Jewish in-laws what she had done.

ELIZABETH CARR

PEGGY SIEGAL

Musician, Midtown

Publicist, Upper East Side

MC. ROSSOFF-BELFIGLIO

Retired Architectural Designer, Riverdale

You lived in Alaska? Yes,

for 18 years. My background is in fashion in New York: editorials, styling. Tonight, Mercedes Bass said about my dress, “You live in Alaska.

Where would you wear something like that?” I said I still dress, just no one notices. I mean, I have designated snow stilettos.

OLGA ZORIA

Real-Estate Broker, Upper West Side

CHRISTINE A. EAGLESON

Creative Director, Alaska and Soho

BRIGITTA ENGELMANN

Retired Model, Florida

46 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

RICKY WAI

Banker, Financial District

DONALD TOBER

CEO, Upper East Side

ELENA BERLUCCHI

Lawyer, Sutton Place

What kind of law do you study?

I’m a first year at American, so just torts, property, the standards.

I was an internationalaffairs major for undergrad but spent most of my time studying classical voice.

I still sing at home—though I worry about disturbing my neighbors. My voice gets pretty loud.

RUBIN SINGER

GAIL WILKINS

Fashion Designer, Hell’s Kitchen

Interior Designer, North Carolina

MONICA MEDINA

EMILY LEMER

Operations Manager, Montana

Retired Flight Attendant, Gramercy

GREG FRERING

Law Student, Washington, D.C.

IRINA LINKOV

Scientist, Long Island and Upper East Side

What’s the vibe here tonight?

I went to an opera event here in the fall, and it felt like a business event. Tonight, people are really rolling down their pantyhose and cutting a rug.

BARBARA KARRO

Consultant, Lincoln Center

STEVEN FICKINGER

Producer, Los Angeles

SOROSH ROSHAN

Physician, Upper West Side

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

47

design hunting

Shoebox Chic

A new wall of

storage space runs

the length of the apartment.

BEFORE

The renovation of a 450-square-foot Gramercy studio transforms a starter apartment for one sister into a minimalist pied-à-terre for another. by wendy goodman

P

ostwar white-brick studios, with their galley kitchens and low ceilings, are always practical yet rarely inspiring. But Danielle Rago wasn’t about to let that stop her. “I have been around architecture and development my whole life,” she says. Her father is in commercial real estate, and she interned at architecture firms in the city. After getting her master’s degree at the Architectural Association in London, she moved back to New York. T 20 b nd (now husband) got a job in Los Angeles, so they move wes e o-founded a design-consultancy firm, This X That. Still, she missed having a place in New York.

48

Subtle details like replacing all the electrical outlets and switches modernize the look of the space.

AFTER

New Affiliates designed the custom Murphy bed to blend in with a wall devised for storage.

There’s enough room to house bookshelves on either side of the bed.

“Previously, the lighting was via floor lamps. We added wall sconces to bring even light from above,” designer Ivi Diamantopoulou says.

This sconce is from Schoolhouse Electric.

The wall sculpture is Nonlinear Shapes, by Kai Franz.

THE MAIN ROOM “Here, we had to think beyond the specifics of designing a living space.

The apartment was meant to be highly flexible,” designer Jaffer Kolb says. “We installed new flooring all across the apartment. We chose a narrow wood plank that makes the spaces feel more generous.” The pre-finished wood flooring is from Mirage’s Admiration Collection in Red Oak Nordic.

Photographs by Michael Vahrenwald

THE BATHROOM “We kept the bathroom in its original location but enlarged it by

removing an adjoining closet and gaining several

feet of clear space,” Diamantopoulou says.

A frameless mirror, as well as

BEFORE

The Nemo tiles are in Superwhite with Twilight-blue Laticrete grout.

When her sister, who had been living in a studio owned by their family in a white-brick postwar in Gramercy since 2012, adopted a dog and decided she needed more space, Rago thought it might work for her as a pied-à-terre. So she decided to renovate it.

Rago tu to J olb i Diamantopoulou of New Af s (w s al resented by This X That). The project required that the 450-square-foot 50 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

space, which had been dominated by her sister’s bed and sectional sofa, serve as a place for both meetings and entertaining as well as become a minimalist crash pad at night. The keys to the transformation? That ageold, reliable space saver, the Murphy bed, plus a new, custom-designed “pleated” wall built the length of the apartment to conceal new closet space. “We thought of it as a Swiss Army knife,” Kolb says.

AFTER

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y N E W A F F I L I AT E S ( B E F O R E ) ; M I C H A E L VA H R E N WA L D / E S TO ( A F T E R ) ; A R C H I T E C T U R E : I V I D I A M A N TO P O U LO U A N D J A F F E R KO L B / N E W A F F I L I AT E S ; CO N T R AC T W O R K : S A D I K S H A B A J / C R E AT E N YC ; F LO R A L S T Y L I N G : E L E N A S E E G E R S ; W O O D W O R K I N G : P R O P Y L A E A ; F LO O R P L A N : J A S O N L E E

all-new fixtures, adds to the simplicity.

design hunting The overhead cabinets were removed.

All of the

appliances are

by Miele.

BEFORE

THE PLEATED WALL ➸ The hallway is now defined by a newly built-out wall that extends from the kitchen to the back of the space. “The apartment actually had over 55 square feet of storage and closets,” Diamantopoulou

says, “but because most of that was in dedicated walk-in areas, a lot of it was standing room and was far less efficient in terms of capacity per square foot.”

The wall unifies the

components while creating the pantry in the kitchen

and the storage area outside the bathroom, and it contains the Murphy bed with shelving in the living room.

BEFORE

THE KITCHEN The countertops are by Caesarstone in Fresh Concrete.

“We wanted to keep the materials simple, light, and clean,” Kolb says. The new kitchen is in the same place as the old, but a wall and a door were removed to open it up.

KITCHEN

Closet

BATHROOM

AFTER

Pleated wall

LIVING ROOM/ BEDROOM

The floor tiles were replaced with th

dio.

Office

AFTER

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

51

food

Edited by Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

Good-bye to Gotham

Alfred Portale’s second act is a neighborhood spot with more modest ambitions and praiseworthy pasta. by adam platt

M

ost of you reading this col- Portale, which opened a few months ago umn probably don’t think of the on an anonymous stretch of 18th Street stern-faced, spotlessly attired off Sixth Avenue, but it’s apparent from Alfred Portale as one of the wild, the scale and sensibility of the place that bomb-throwing revolutionaries of the he and his new partners have been paying culinary set. But in his day, the recently attention to the populist dining trends of deposed chef and co-owner of that august the past decade or two. In contrast to the Union Square dining destination grandiose space at Gotham, the Gotham Bar and Grill was famous narrow rooms here have a snug, for all sorts of radical notions neighborly feel. There are wooden VERY GOOD and innovations. He was one of rafters and white painted-brick Portale the original pioneers of a certain walls, and the tables and leather126 W. 18th St., downtown Greenmarket cuisine cushioned black metal chairs nr. Sixth Ave.; 917-781-0255; that came to be called “farm to look like something you’d see portalerestaurant .com table” cooking, of course, and the in an upscale airport café. As at father, famously, of the imitated Gotham, there’s an elegant bar up stacked-plating method known as “verti- front serving lavishly priced cocktails, but cal cuisine.” He turned simple prepara- it’s smaller and more intimate than the one tions like seafood salad into the height of back on the mother ship and, while you sip style before gourmet comfort dishes were your cocktail, you snack on meatball slidfashionable, and he let loose the scourge ers costing roughly $8 apiece. of tuna tartare on an unsuspecting dining “Gotham had that classic ’80s vibe. This public after spying a tuna hand roll in a seems like an early-aughts kind of place, local Japanese restaurant. so Portale’s come up a couple of decades,” You won’t find any of these exotic said my guest, a gourmand from one of touches during the course of dinner at the the distant dining regions of Brooklyn chef ’s eponymous post-Gotham venture, who knows a fine meatball slider when he

sees one. There were also bowls of lemony, thickly battered fritto misto among the bar-style “snack” dishes we sampled and a generous salumi butcher board decked with wedges of toasted fettunta, freshly baked in-house just like the pint-size slider buns. This being the early aughts, we also enjoyed some hamachi crudo (garnished with avocado, oranges, and a slightly overbusy basil purée), along with a sip or two of that trendy cocktail of the decade gone by, the Negroni, which comes in four varieties here, including the lavish $28 Maserati, made with blood oranges, a touch of Barolo, and what our bartender accurately described as “top shelf ” gin.

Portale is styling his new venture as an Italian restaurant, which has long been a theme in his particular brand of New American cooking and which remains the most reliably bankable formula in this increasingly formulaic dining era. When I managed to secure a table in the comfortably appointed dining room, the pastas arrived in choreographed waves—flat, ruffle-edged campanelle poured with a rich duck ragù; little foie gras–stuffed tortellini floating in chicken broth with carrots, celery root, and black lentils; elbows of chewy lumache tossed with a sophisticated white Bolognese made with crumblings of pork, short rib, and a soffrito of fennel, garlic, and onions. There were perfectly al dente risottos, too, stirred with various mushrooms and Fontina, and, if you have the resources, I recommend the opulent combination of Parmesan, shaved white Umbrian truffle, and a single poached egg.

key : The rating scale of 0 to 100 reflects our editors’ appraisals of all the tangible and intangible factors that make a restaurant or bar great—or terrible—regardless of price.

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P H OTO G R A P H : L I Z C L AY M A N F O R N E W YO R K M AG A Z I N E

Portale

th e d is h

P H OTO G R A P H : M E L I S S A H O M / N E W YO R K M AG A Z I N E

The larger entrées at Portale were less satisfying and more reminiscent of the stolid, reliable, connect-the-dots gourmet fare beloved by the old regulars at Gotham, and after the rich heaviness of the pasta section, you might want to take a short rest before diving in. Not that I didn’t enjoy my bite of the country-size pork chop (served bone in, with a garnish of sweet peppers and orange mostarda) or the bountiful roast chicken, which was bolstered, on the evening we ordered it, with a chicken gravy speckled with wild mushrooms and a moon-shaped wheel of blue-corn polenta so imposing that we pushed it to the side. For lighter eaters, there are the usual fish options (salmon, branzino, a perhaps overly sturdy fish soup sitting in a scrim of lobster broth), along with a professionally executed seared duck breast that the kitchen enlivened with some sunchokes and a touch of spicy Calabrian honey.

In terms of originality or ambition, does this kind of cooking rival what Chef Portale has done in the distant past, not to mention what his successor, Victoria Blamey, is doing now at the newly revamped Gotham Bar and Grill? No, it does not. Is it worth traveling down from the Upper East Side, say, or Bushwick or Harlem, for a taste of honeyed duck breast or a spoonful of excellent, though not inexpensive, mushroom risotto? A slightly less hearty no to that, too. But if you live nearby (in a general 20-block radius, like your humble critic does, let’s say) or if you happen to be wandering through, and if you’re in the market for a stylish, well-crafted cocktail or an inventive take on a classic Italian dessert (the shiny, chocolate-topped tiramisu, the brûléed panna cotta set over a bed of fresh sliced figs), then this is the restaurant for you.

Koshari Egypt’s food culture may be ancient, but its national dish, koshari, claims more recent origins. The humble hodgepodge of rice, pasta, and legumes with spiced tomato sauce and fried onions is thought to have descended from Indian khichdi via British colonialism, the macaroni a likely contribution of the country’s once-sizable Italian immigrant population. With its bounty of beans and variety of starches, it’s a legit grain bowl ripe for the fast-casual treatment.

London has its Koshari Street, Bay Ridge had its short-lived Kusharista, and at Nolita’s new Zooba, the first American On the menu outpost of the Cairo-based chain, koshari is a feaat Zooba; $12; 100 Kenmare St., tured attraction despite New York head chef Omar at Cleveland Pl.; 646-328-9144 Hegazi’s preopening jitters: “Will people really want to be eating a bowl filled with carbs?” r.r. & r.p.

“There’s no koshari without fried onions,” says Hegazi. “They add texture, sweetness, and a little bitterness.”

Cumin permeates every aspect of the dish, including the tomato sauce.

The first version was gluten free to appeal to the masses, but too-mushy corn pasta has been replaced by conventional spaghetti and tubetti.

scratchpad The chef’s Gotham glory days are over, but familiar Italian fare, a comfortable space, and professional execution all add up to a decent (if slightly pricey) “very good.”

bites IDEAL MEAL: Tortellini en brodo, lumache with Bolognese bianco, roast chicken (or duck), panna cotta. NOTE: The Negronis have th s should tion of after-dinner amari. OPEN: Dinner nightly.

PRICES: Appetizers, $5 to $24; pastas and entrées, $19 to $44.

In addition to three kinds of pasta, the base contains

She’reya is the Egyptian name for fideos, or cut vermicelli.

rice, lentils, and chickpeas.

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

53

food the underground gourmet quick bite

urban forager

Bread Bowls, Neapolitan Style

Herbal Essence

Da Toscano

I

24 Minetta Ln., nr. Sixth Ave.; 212-606-4054

t’s not often that a chef can launch a restaurant, abandon it, and return five years later to find the premises vacant and waiting for him. But such is the case with Michael Toscano and his old Greenwich Village digs, Perla, which relocated and ultimately closed not long after Toscano departed New York to open Le Farfalle in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife, Caitlin. The building’s owner had been holding out for the perfect tenant, and when she contacted Toscano, who’d been looking to expand down South, she made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Now the chef will shuttle between the two kitchens—“I can get a 6 a.m. flight and be at my Thompson Street apartment at eight,” he says—and augment his hearty Italian menu with newfound ingredients and influences.

“My pig farmer Tank is one of my best friends,” says Toscano, who plans to put whole heritage hogs to t wedding soup and the menudo h iners may best remember the veteran of Babbo and Manzo for his way with meat and pasta, and those proclivities endure in dishes like veal-head parmigiana, beef-tongue panino, and agnolotti with lamb neck and drippings.

54 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

Dried Sicilian oregano is the pizzaiolo’s secret weapon. now that pizza has become a fetish object, everyone’s an expert on flour, cheese, sauce—even pepperoni. Yet one ingredient has eluded scrutiny. We’re talking oregano. Not the musty stuff you joggle from an old cheese shaker at your local Joe’s, Sal’s, or Vinnie’s (which could be anything and tastes like nothing). But rather this Filippone oregano from Sicily that comes on the branch in a bunch looking like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree and emitting a heady fragrance that won’t quit: rich, pungent, floral, hot.

A judicious sprinkle finetunes the sweetness of tomato on a marinara pizza—that streamlined, cheeseless classic many consider the pizzaiolo’s pizza—the way salt sharpens the flavor of, say, watermelon or lime. Secondgeneration farmer Gandolfo Filippone grows it high up in Sicily’s Madonie Mountains, hand-harvests it, air-dries it, and then ships it to New York in biodegradable bags—a method that has gained him a following among the local pizza cognoscenti, who tend to rhapsodize about Sicilian oregano the way other pie guys talk about roni cups.

“What’s beautiful to me about the Gandolfo product,” says Bread and Salt’s Rick Easton, who wouldn’t make a pizza rossa without it, “is that it’s not cultivated from a number of sources. It’s one guy growing it and caring for it the whole way.” Superiority Burger’s Brooks Headley calls it “extra-oregano-y” and scatters it over his pizzalike focaccia. “I like to crush it between my fingertips before applying it,” he says. When he flew to Tokyo in December to open a satellite, he was packing “a ton” of Filippone branches in Ziploc storage bags. ($5.95 for a 0.9 oz. bag at Buon’Italia, 75 Ninth Ave.) r.r. & r.p.

Photograph by Hannah Whitaker

P H OTO G R A P H S : M E L I S S A H O M / N E W YO R K M AG A Z I N E

op

en

in

g

italophile chowhounds know the phrase fare la scarpetta (“to make the little shoe”), which describes the act of mopping the plate with a morsel of bread to punctuate the end of a meal. So enamored are Italians with the magic that happens when crusty bread meets tangy ragù that they have another word for it: cuzzetiello. According to our Italian sauce-sopping consultant, cuzzetiello is Neapolitan for plunging the hollowed-out heel of a rustic loaf (called a cafone) into the pot of Sunday sauce when Nonna isn’t looking. A few years ago, gastropreneurs took to the streets of Naples riffing on the tradition, cramming half-loaves with all manner of saucy foodstuffs. And now you can get this street-food-inspired cuzzetiello in New York at the new Mani in Pasta pizza kiosk, where Giuseppe Manco is stuffing sturdy housemade cafone the way cartoon bank robbers stuff greenbacks into sacks marked $$$. Of the three fillings—including Philly cheesesteak and eggplant parm—we’re partial to the meatball with smoked provola cheese. It’s suitably saucy but surprisingly neat: a meatball sub as sturdy and leakproof as a submarine. (At the Deco Food + Drink, 239 W. 39th St., nr. Seventh Ave.)

Filippone oregano from Sicily graces some of New York’s best pizzas.

GR E Y G O O S E . C O M SIP RESPONSIBLY. ©2020 GREY GOOSE, ITS TRADE DRESS, THE GEESE DEVICE AND LIVE VICTORIOUSLY ARE TRADEMARKS. IMPORTED BY GREY GOOSE IMPORTING COMPANY, CORAL GABLES, FL. VODKA 40% ALC. BY VOL. DISTILLED FROM FRENCH WHEAT.

b i ll b o a r d c h e at s / o s c a r v i ll a i n s / p r e t t y p o p e j u d e / w h at ’ s a w i t c h e r ? / b o b b y a n d r o s e / c r i t i c s / t o d o

The CULT RE PAGES “I’m Not Nice!”

With a second season of Shrill and an eighth of SNL, Aidy Bryant has figured out how to get what she wants.

By Allison P. Davis

Photographs by Catherine Servel

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

57

T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

58 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

BY A L A N A S A R D O. P R E V I O U S D R E S S B Y S I M O N E R O C H A ; J AC K E T B Y V E R O N I C A B E A R D.

a folksy way that makes streams of profanity or riffs on dildos seem like a churchcamp sing-along. “There’s a juxtaposition with my sweet face,” Bryant says of her characters, citing “Girlfriends Talk Show,” a recurring sketch with Strong where Bryant plays Morgan, a teen girl supposedly having the time of her life co-hosting a talk show with her best friend but who is actually “just in hell all the time.”

Bryant landed “Girlfriends Talk Show” in her first season, and while it was a breakout moment, early reviews had dubbed Strong the star of the new class. It took several more seasons for Bryant to find her beat and her fan base. In 2018, Bryant earned an Emmy nomination for her work on SNL. The following spring, she starred in Shrill, a Hulu series about a discontented 20-something journalist, Annie, who is hell-bent on improving her life.

The show’s poster featured Bryant in a purple bathing suit, a Portland, Oregon– hipster Venus on the half-shell, broadcasting her intention to not go dark, exactly, but at least shake off some of the bubbly. Annie has an abortion onscreen

PA U L A’ S C H O I C E S K I N C A R E ; H A I R B Y T E T S U YA YA M A K ATA / A R T L I S T U S I N G K E R A S TA S E ; FA S H I O N A S S I S TA N C E

striped T-shirt and black denim miniflares, her long straight hair side-parted like Jan Brady’s—start the scene in wheelchairs and, while trying to angle them, end up in a legfight. On the third run, they’re beginning to find their characters and rely less on cue cards. “AHHHHH, siiiiIIiister,” Bryant says. McKinnon counters with a more dramatic “AHHHHHHH, sister,” in an old-timey voice-off. Bryant grabs McKinnon and pulls her to her bosom, breaking the scene to ask the cameraman, “Does this read as a murdering move to you?” McKinnon shakes with laughter.

Bryant, who is 32, started the same year as McKinnon and Cecily Strong. But whereas Strong excels at the sexy, bitchy villain, and McKinnon veers toward the scene-stealing oddball, Bryant tends to get cast in roles with an insecure middleschool-student energy. Her characters seem innocuously dippy or so innocent that butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, and it takes a minute to realize she has infused them with a vile twist or a chaotic sexual streak that lurks just under the surface. She often delivers the dirtiest lines in

S T Y L I N G B Y Y E YO U N G K I M / D E FAC TO I N C ; M A K E U P B Y A N G E L A DAV I S D E ACO N / D E FAC TO I N C U S I N G

F

r i d a y s a t Saturday Night Live are in some ways harder than Saturdays at Saturday Night Live. Mondays are nerveracking, sure, with writers sitting on the floor of Lorne Michaels’s office, lobbing ideas at him and the celebrity host of the week during a Socratic pressure cooker of a pitch session. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the most fun (neardelirious writing days fueled by snacks and seltzer). But Fridays are when the show has to come together. Writers, cast members, and the production team block out sketches, build sets, choose costumes, rehearse, rewrite, reblock, rechoose costumes, consider camera angles and props, and film pretaped segments, often in a 24-hour workday that involves sleeping in the office, if there’s any sleep at all.

On one of those recent Fridays, when the stage of Studio 8H erupts in manicured chaos—crew members turn piles of wood into elaborate sets and camera operators zoom around on cranes, narrowly missing the heads of performers—Aidy Bryant, a cast member of eight years, is running through jokes for a sketch she cowrote. “The Corporal” stars her and her sometime writing partner, always office wife, Kate McKinnon, as sisters willing to murder each other and their unwittingly hot third sister (that week’s host, Jennifer Lopez) to win the hand of a visiting suitor.

It requires a gilded birdcage big enough to fit a human, two vanities, a rifle, a noose, a martini glass full of pills, a rubber lobster, and a corset that has to fly off J.Lo’s boobs at the exact right beat.

The sketch includes many of Bryant’s signatures: characters inspired by goldenage Hollywood, jokes drenched in murder-y darkness, and a plot that twists the knife into “women’s topics,” in this case playing into anti-feminist tropes with such absurd dedication they come back round to feminist. And she gets to do it all in a funny voice (she loves a funny voice) as one of her favorite types of characters—what she and her co-writer Sudi Green call “baggooo ladies” (said with a warbling, rich-lady modulation)—a fancy woman who enters a room purse first.

McKinnon and Bryant—who wears a

and throws a flowerpot through a car window, both in the name of non-bullshit, tampon-commercial self-acceptance and empowerment. Shrill also gave Bryant a chance to assert herself as a writer and an executive producer. When the series returns in January, Bryant’s character will still be battling to find her self-confidence and see herself clearly, but off-camera, Bryant is already there.

“Q-TIP, Q-TEEP, Q-TIP.” Back on set, Bryant is trying to figure out which pronunciation is absurd but not too absurd.

The process is technical, slow, and precise. Bryant is both relaxed and focused, joking with the crew but also advising a set designer on the placement of mirrors, reminding McKinnon where the wheelchair mark is, and showing the props master the best way to hand her a gun so she can have her finger on the trigger when she puts it in McKinnon’s face. She stops to consider the plastic lobster: How will it read when Lopez has to make out with it? Lopez wanders over for clarification on how the dresser will rip off her bodice. (“Are you so bored?,” Bryant texts

me during a break, adding purple and pink heart emoji.) They run through the sketch a few more times, until they better remember their lines, the right lobster is chosen, they decide to lose the wheelchairs, and Q-TEEP becomes the accepted pronunciation.

When I ask Bryant later how SNL helped prepare her for running her own show, she explains that taking a sketch from pitch meeting to live taping in a week is like a TV-making boot camp. By the time she arrived on the set of Shrill, any worry about not knowing what she was doing was quickly replaced by “Yes, I fucking do.” in september 2012, when news that Bryant had made it as a cast member on SNL’s 38th season broke, a student reporter at the Columbia Chronicle, the newspaper of her alma mater, Columbia College in Chicago, asked her old professors about the comedy star they saw budding within her. The resulting collection of quotes isn’t insulting, but it’s not exactly glowing: “I remember her as being a pleasant young woman. I [couldn’t say], in all

honesty, that I thought she was going to be a comedy star,” said one. Another chimed in with “I was sort of shocked. Not because she is not capable; I just didn’t realize she was going for it like that. I had no idea she would so aggressively pursue this task.”

The reporter concluded, “Most Columbia professors agree that she was a smart and talented, but timid, young girl.”

Bryant may have seemed timid to her professors, but she pursued comedy with the seriousness of a premed student. She graduated from her Phoenix high school in 2005 after four years of improv classes at a local theater; she chose Chicago for college because she wanted to be where people were good at it. By day, she attended theater classes. At night, she took improv classes. At 19, she started at the iO Theater, where she says the shows were bad but the alums were A-list (Tina Fey, Jordan Peele). She was soon asked to join an all-female team made up of comedians ten-to-15 years older than she. Her work there earned her entry into a group at the Annoyance Theatre, an “artsy and nasty” company that focused on turning improv into writing.

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

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T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

By the time she graduated from college in 2009, Second City had asked her to join its summer cruise-ship cast, promoting Bryant from shows that she says made her feel like she was “punishing the audience” (aptly summing up 95 percent of all improv) to performing for actual money.

That meant four months of jokes that were the comedic equivalent of buffet grilled chicken (unseasoned, safe) and fighting norovirus by sanitizing her hands every time she entered a room. “Whenever you walked into a room, someone would sing a song to remind you to spray your hands: ‘You can washy-washy / Washywashy when you walk in a room / You do your washy-washy / We’ll spray your hands / You can washy-washy.’ ” That job quickly taught her what kind of comedian she wasn’t: one with norovirus, but also one who was family friendly enough to appeal to cruise-ship guests.

After the cruise-ship tour, she joined the Second City ensemble. In one breakthrough skit, she played a woman who catches a bird, makes it her boyfriend, and loves it to death (see a recent sketch with Harry Styles that follows a similar plot). During her second year, Bryant was performing when she got word that Lorne Michaels was in the audience scouting for new cast members. That night she knew she had some of her best work: “Dolly Mae Daniels and Her All-Ex-Husband Band,” in which she sang little country ditties to her ex-husbands until she got to her most recent and then unleashed 15 fuck yous in a row, each one increasingly more deranged and physically strenuous.

Afterward, Michaels came backstage in a suit and tie, tiptoeing his way through the 30-year-old piles of props in the dusty, cold, probably rat-infested space, to meet Bryant. “I was just feeling myself.

I was like, I know these are fucking good.”

A few days later, she was offered an audition for SNL. Tim Robinson, another Second City alum who started on SNL in the same season, recognized Bryant’s sense of self even in their first days of improv together. “I feel like it takes people, including myself, a lot of time to distill exactly what you find funny and what you want to do,” he explains. “She had it pretty early on. She knew her sensibility; she knew it was unique.”

On her first SNL episode, Bryant had one scene. She walks up to a couple on a date and babbles with manic conviction about how much she likes the woman’s dress: “I want to become you. Anyway, bye.” Her most notable characters are often similarly young and huggable or are actual children, like travel expert Carrie

Krum. There are lots of horny theater kids in her repertoire. A number of her roles are variations on ones she has complained that casting agents commonly offer her: “nice moms who shop at Walmart” or “nice friends who don’t have boyfriends.”

Niceness is a descriptor that follows her in person, too. When I say to Bryant, “You’re so nice!,” she reflexively swats back with “I’m not nice!” Nice is often coded. To be nice is to be always pleasing or weak or dismissible. For women, it can be a limitation. Nice rarely allows for agency or assertiveness. It means you have a tendency to be underestimated. “It sucks,” she says of the prison of her own charms.

“I’m nice,” she clarifies, “but I’m firm.” the following week, I meet Bryant at a recording studio in the Flatiron District with an on-set caterer and big leather couches. She’s already there in the booth, the sleeves of her neon-green Off-White sweatshirt pulled down over her hands, dubbing lines for Shrill—a

“I always was having cool sex and had boyfriends.”

task that requires her to rewatch scenes of herself until she can pinpoint the moment she said a line weirdly. “I’m a journalist!,” she repeats, until she finds the right cadence. Next is a scene with a marble dildo (no spoilers here), and she has to sigh over and over until the uhs and ahs land in the right spot. After the fourth take, she asks for playback and is sure she needs to do it again.

Shrill, based on Lindy West’s 2016 memoir, Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman, really is Bryant’s show. She agreed to star on the condition that she also write and produce. She co-wrote the pilot and, after Hulu ordered the series, spent her summer break from SNL in Portland shooting the first season. The show touches on many themes related to modern womanhood, but audiences responded most strongly to its respectful portrayal of a fat woman living without diets or body shame. Capturing that required Bryant to fight for her vision. For example, producers wanted Annie to start

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the season wearing dumpy clothes and then go through the classic transformational makeover scene to signal a woman finally gaining self-confidence. Bryant vetoed that. “It was a lot of conference calls with me saying, ‘I think this is condescending, and I’m telling you this is how it has to be. I’ve never been that person, so we don’t want to put that onscreen,’ ” she explains, as we walk to lunch after the recording session.

She brings me to one of her favorite spots, the restaurant in the back of ABC Carpet & Home, during ladies-who-lunch hours. As we wander past $800 doormats and $1,200 crystals, she does a generous but broad impression of the sort of woman found shopping at ABC at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, the kind of woman who desperately needs overpriced healing-crystal tree ornaments.

As she gracefully slides into a seat at the bar, she tells me about adjusting to the new visibility the role of Annie has given her.

“People feel much more emotionally connected and invested in the character but also in me as a person.” In interviews, she’s now asked about her dieting, how she hated herself, how she overcame hating herself, does she still hate herself, and how it is possible for her not to hate herself. She insists she does not, nor has she ever.

“I feel like part of doing this show was to be like, ‘Let me get this out of the way for you. Let’s confront this head-on, and at some point we’ll move on,’ ” she explains.

Bryant is comfortable with the word fat— so comfortable, in fact, that she’s bored of it. And so bored of it, specifically of the questions she is asked about how it makes her feel about herself, that she has become exasperated by it. “I feel like it’s not the only thing I am,” she says. “I feel like I’m a lot more things before that, like friend, wife, daughter, whatever. And I’m fat. I’m also a star! A certified star,” she says, slipping into a 1940s diva voice. “I’m also rich now, so eat shit.”

Sure, she struggled with garden-variety teen self-doubt growing up in the hyperblond, preppy Republican deserts of Arizona. But it wasn’t foundational, she says, more just a sense of it not being her scene.

She went to Xavier College Prep, a fancy allgirls high school in the suburbs that was academically rigorous but so conservative that the Right to Life club got a half-day every Friday to protest in front of a local Planned Parenthood. Meghan McCain, whom she has spoofed on SNL, was a few years ahead of her. Bryant describes her late-high-school self as “art-school kid in bad thrift-store clothes at the Rilo Kiley concert in the back of the art gallery,” the

P H OTO G R A P H S : DAV I D C R OT T Y / P M C ( N A S ) ; DA N I E L TO R O K / P M C ( K H A L E D) ; DAV I D C R OT T Y / P M C ( M A LO N E ) ; X AV I E R CO L L I N / I M AG E P R E S S AG E N C Y / A L M AY ( D R A K E )

kind of teenager who reminded the robots in her class that she was an individual by wearing huge hair clips she made herself by gluing a toy boat to a barrette. “Hoo, baby.

That was taking swings,” she says.

Her parents encouraged her creativity.

“My house was filled with stuff to make you think and feel magic,” Bryant says. Her parents’ marriage set the model for how she expected the world to treat her. “Even when I had boyfriends or whatever, it was like, ‘Oh, you’re actually not going to talk to me that way,’ ” she says.

That’s another thing she had to fight for on Shrill—a boyfriend she had sex with.

“How can you have a story about a person’s body and about their relationship to their selves and not involve sex?,” she says.

“I just always felt like so many fat characters were so sexless, or the sex was hypercartoony, where it was like she jumps on a man and she’s going to break his dick off and suck him until he’s dead or whatever.

But I always was having cool sex and had boyfriends,” she says.

Last year, Bryant married comedian Conner O’Malley, whom she met at the bar of the Annoyance when he complimented her show and she lied about watching his.

She knew she liked him when she lied again about wanting to go to a Batman movie, and she knew she loved him when she got food poisoning, threw up in the sink of a friend’s house, and clogged it.

“Conner, with his bare hands, pulled chunks of my barf out of the sink. And I was like, That’s my fucking man. I love this man. I will marry this man.”

Bryant wrote that moment into the new season of Shrill. The first season had stuck largely to West’s memoir—her career as a writer at an alt-weekly, her relationships, the battles she had with skinny women who wanted her to diet, her mother’s expectations. The second season, which Bryant describes as Annie’s life with her newfound confidence, “post–body stuff,” gave Bryant more freedom to add her own life to the story, moments when her body type is beside the point. “The show didn’t make me think I can wear a fashion dress or whatever,” she says. “It’s made me, like, I’ve got to get things done.”

Behind the scenes, Bryant has learned how better to be both nice and firm. When mistakes are made, she doesn’t just say, “ ‘It’s fine!,’ like a 14-year-old girl,” she explains.

She addresses them. The fights for what goes in have been reduced—especially around sex scenes, which are numerous (and nasty) this season, Bryant says with a sigh. “I write these things, and then I have to film them. I forget it’s going to be actually ■ me and my pussy and my face.”

Y UCKY!

Shameless Schemes to Game the Billboard Charts justin bieber’s new single “Yummy” wasn’t immediately all that appetizing to many listeners. Then he posted instructions to fans explaining how to increase streams and iTunes purchases of the song. (His Instagram post has since been deleted.) The suggestions included putting the song on repeat on Spotify, making sure not to mute it, and buying the song multiple times through a link on Bieber’s website. The strategy didn’t quite work—Compton rap newcomer Roddy Ricch instead got his first No. 1 with “The Box”—but it reignited conversations justin curto about the clever lengths artists go to for a hit.

Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” Remixes THE SCHEME: A remix with Billy Ray Cyrus got “Old Town Road” to the top of “The Hot 100” in the first place. Then a newly yeehaw Diplo remixed it; then yodeling kid Mason Ramsey and Young Thug came in for another remix. DID IT WORK? Yes. After a fourth remix from BTS’s RM, it hit the record for longestrunning No. 1.

DJ Khaled’s Energy-Drink Bundles THE SCHEME: Give away Father of Asahd downloads with energy-drink purchases. DID IT WORK? No. Billboard ended up not counting the bundles, prompting Khaled to threaten a lawsuit after it cost him the No. 1 spot. Instead, Tyler, the Creator topped the chart that week for the first time with Igor—thanks in part to album bundles with everything from T-shirts to lawn signs.

Post Malone’s Looped “Rockstar” Video THE SCHEME: Back when YouTube views were counted far less than regular streams, Post Malone’s video “Rockstar,” with 21 Savage, featured the song’s hook on loop for three minu 30 seconds. DID IT WORK? eners searching for the full song could follow a link from the video to streaming services, where their plays would help make it No. 1.

Drake’s Bloated ‘Scorpion’ Track List THE SCHEME: Drake released the 25-song album in June 2018. Listening to Scorpion once through would net 25 percent more streams than Drake’s previous album, Views. DID IT WORK? Yes. The album broke the record for most American release-week streams with 435 million in just three days; worldwide, it was the first album to top 1 billion release-week streams.

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

61

A Hater’s Guide to the Best Picture Nominees loved on

by nate jones

the Academy Award nominations are out, and the race is on to determine this year’s Oscar villain: the film it becomes the duty of every enlightened movie fan to root against.

Until recently, Oscar villains tended to be movies that triumphed over more worthy contenders (like when Dances With Wolves beat GoodFellas for Best Picture), or movies that felt so strategically “Oscar-y” that their success seemed annoyingly preordained (think The King’s Speech or Argo). But as the Trump era has infused all aspects of American life with intense political polarization, the modern Oscar villain now arises out of a disparity in values between Hollywood progressivism and

8. Little Women

9. Parasite

ALSO NOMINATED FOR:

Actress, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, 2 technicals

➽This may be the easiest rooting decision we’ve seen in years: No movie from South Korea has ever cracked the foreign-language category before, much less broken through all over the ballot.

But even though Bong Joon Ho’s Hitchcockian satire earned six nominations, it remains an underdog, especially since the film received zero acting nods— a sign that the Academy still has a blind spot when it comes to Asian performers.

Politically, the film’s scabrous tale of class rage is pretty unimpeachable too.

➽ Little Women initially seemed destined to be one of this season’s Goliaths, but after sag snubbed Greta Gerwig’s literary adaptation and reports emerged of male Academy members skipping screenings, Twitter began clamoring for Oscar to give the movie its due.

This public-pressure campaign worked, to a point: The film received six nominations, including a spot in Best Picture, but Gerwig was left out of the all-male Best Director lineup, which of course helped solidify its status as the ultimate dark horse.

HATER INDEX:

HATER INDEX:

Directing, Original Screenplay, International Film, and 2 technical categories

Dad Movies

ALSO NOMINATED FOR:

+

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7. Ford v Ferrari

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: 3 technicals

➽ The sheer dad-ness of James Mangold’s autoracing drama has made it the subject of some ribbing.

But, like many real dads, the patriarchal elements of FvF feel more goofily out of touch than truly harmful.

HATER INDEX:

matter: Clowning on its protracted length is such an obvious dunk that it crowds out more political critiques.

(Could we call such an outrageously long movie a sign of masculine entitlement?

Cinematic manspreading?)

Besides, Martin Scorsese has been publicly feuding with comic-book fanboys, a demographic pegged as problematic by default.

HATER INDEX:

+ +

5. 1917

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Directing, Original Screenplay, 7 technicals

+

6. The Irishman

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Directing, Supporting Actor (twice), Adapted Screenplay, 5 technicals

➽ Oddly, this film’s threeand-a-half-hour run time only helps it in this particular

➽ Sam Mendes’s “singletake” World War I thriller broke into the race late, so it hasn’t taken the same level of fire its competitors have.

But if it starts racking up the wins, hold tight for a bevy of conversations about whether this story of human perseverance downplays the

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F S T U D I O S

Unproblematic Faves

Twitter progressivism, and while you can absolutely make valid critiques of both, only one of them gave Best Picture to Green Book.

Nowadays, the year’s Oscar villain is the film whose awards victories feel the most like a psychological reenactment of the 2016 election. If you haven’t spotted this year’s yet, try tweeting a nominee’s name with the eyeroll emoji and see what kind of reaction you get. Or read this guide to the Best Picture race, in which we rank the nominees not by their likelihood of victory but by their likelihood of being crowned this year’s Oscar villain. Come the big night, you may find it fruitful to draft some tweets about how the winner was in fact the worst film of the year.

key from audiences, who don’t get what critics see in it.

GUILT-FREE NOMINEE:

The film has become a cause among progressive movie fans.

CRITICAL BACKLASH:

FESTIVAL FAVORITE:

The film is treated to a backlash from critics, who don’t get what audiences see in it.

The film debuts to much acclaim at a fall festival, building anticipation and setting it up with a target on its back.

RACIAL ISSUES:

PUBLIC BACKLASH:

The film’s perspective on race is incredibly white.

The film is treated to a backlash

GENDER ISSUES:

The film’s perspective on gender is incredibly male.

SANITIZING HISTORY:

The film overtly simplifies a complex historical issue to appeal to mainstream audiences.

UNDESERVING:

The film received a nomination that could have gone to another, “worthier” film.

hated on

horrors of the actual conflict.

If people start accusing it of glorifying war, we’ll know it’s a threat to win Best Picture.

HATER INDEX:

+

Not Gonna Win, So Not Worth Hating

misogyny. But since Marriage Story has faded from the conversation, this wave may have already passed. The movie’s most likely Oscar win should come for Laura Dern, and how can you be mad at Laura Dern?

HATER INDEX:

4. Marriage Story ALSO NOMINATED FOR:

Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, 1 technical

➽ The weekend that Marriage Story debuted on Netflix, what had previously seemed like a widely beloved domestic dramedy was treated to a classic online backlash with many viewers proclaiming it overrated.

Plus, its similarities to director Noah Baumbach’s own divorce turned out to carry quite a bit of political baggage: From there, it didn’t take much effort to paint the movie with accusations of

+ +

3. Jojo Rabbit ALSO NOMINATED FOR:

Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, 3 technicals

➽ While this twee romance between a young boy in the Hitler Youth and the Jewish girl his mother is hiding has received a muted reception from audiences and critics, Oscar voters lieben the Third Reich comedy, so the movie remains a threat in several categories. Also, it’s the film that got Scarlett Johansson a second Oscar nomination in a year when only one woman of color got

an acting nod—more than enough to earn a side-eye, if not outright villainy just yet.

HATER INDEX:

+ + +

1.Joker ALSO NOMINATED FOR:

Directing, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, 7 technicals

Most Oscar Villainous

2. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Directing,

Actor, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, 5 technicals

➽ This film is not overtly political, but you don’t have to scratch too deep to uncover a reactionary streak: Quentin Tarantino’s industry fantasia is marked by its nostalgia for a time when men were men, babes were hot, and hippies were punchable. And Tarantino himself remains a controversial figure. With the movie now looking like the one to beat for Best Picture, expect the grumbling to get louder in the run-up to the awards.

➽ Many films in the awards conversation are problematic for one reason or another, but only one debuted to fears that it would spark actual violence. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance catapulted Joker into the Oscars race; the movie’s incoherent politics and director Todd Phillips’s comments about PC culture have done the same in the Oscar-villain race. What’s worse, it could actually win. It got the most nominations of this year’s field, and Academy members who love the film seem to see no issues with it whatsoever.

If it triumphs, expect to watch the world burn.

HATER INDEX:

HATER INDEX:

+

+ + + +

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

63

Still Gazing in Awe at Jude Law

The 47-year-old actor has played with beauty throughout his career. But it’s never been more chilling than on HBO’s The New Pope. by e. alex jung the new pope is now airing on HBO.

J

ude law is looking at art. I am looking at Jude Law. He walks deliberately and unhurriedly through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as though he’s doling out each step as a treat for the early risers this November morning. When he squints to examine a work, a fine spray of crow’s-feet sprouts alongside his temples. His hair, a fading blond, has grown sparse along his widow’s peak—a testament that no man can survive the erosion of time.

But I think he would agree it’s all for the best, his handsome looks still intact but honeyed with age and freed from the burden of perfection. At 47, Law can now be mortal, a far more interesting place to be as an actor. “People talk about getting into your mid-40s as a turning point, and I really felt it—this sort of ahhh, ability to breathe,” he says.

“It’s not about proving; it’s not about feeling like you need to be cutting edge. You take your time a little more and perhaps feel a little more confident in your own skin and your own little journey, as opposed to the impact you’re gonna make.”

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How ironic, then, that his role as the charismatic, imperious American pontiff, Lenny Belardo, in HBO’s 2016 series The Young Pope and its sequel, The New Pope, leans into his beauty to the point of the absurd. Paolo Sorrentino envisioned an unlikely scenario for the show: The seat of political power in the Catholic Church, a space traditionally for the stooped and gray, would be filled by someone undeniably good-looking. This would be beauty as divine right, a blessing from the heavens that makes the pope float above the mortal coil. Sorrentino imagined an actor like Paul Newman; his wife suggested Law. “Jude doesn’t like the fact that, for the world, he’s a sex symbol,” says Sorrentino.

“I like to be provocative with him and say, ‘I have an idea about the fact that you are a beautiful man.’ He would love to kill me.

But then he says, ‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ ” In Sorrentino’s hands, Law’s own persona becomes an added layer of significance, another opportunity for play. In a teaser for The New Pope, Law struts down the Lido wearing an ecclesiastical-white Speedo, prompting a collective call for smelling salts (and poppers) on the internet. The opening scene goes further: A comatose Lenny lies on a bed, completely naked save for a serviette covering his genitals like a fig leaf, as a nun sponges him down. Overcome by the sight, she masturbates on the couch.

It’s objectification with a smirk, the Holy Father as the ultimate unfulfillable fantasy. Law gamely embraces the part with a verve reminiscent of his youth.

“What does that [boldness] come with?,” he says, laughing, as he recalls filming the scene with the teeny napkin. He pulls out his phone and shows me a photo of Sorrentino cheekily holding up his costume for the day. “With knowing that you’re getting older and you might as well make the most of it while you can, before bits fall off and you get gray and saggy, which is the way of all.” He goes on, “Living with those perceptions means that you’re playing with it, too.”

In Law’s youth, his beauty was blinding. His face had the kind of golden symmetry the ancient Greeks would have gilded with praise, a pulchritude that could inspire you to risk your life. It became a recurring theme in the roles he played, particularly in the late ’90s. In 1997’s Wilde, the titular writer (played by Stephen Fry) goes to prison for his affair with Law’s picturesque but talentless Bosie. In that same year’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, he plays an erratic, tempestuous prostitute whose Photograph by Louie Banks

GROOMING BY ALAIN PICHON

T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

murder sets the stage for the rest of the film. In Gattaca, also in 1997, he is a genetically ideal man; a suave, dancing robot gigolo in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001); and a Dorian Gray–like vampire in Immortality (1998).

Then there’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), in which Law glitters with cruelty as Dickie Greenleaf, a gadabout lounging around the beaches of Italy. He is charismatic because he doesn’t care and doesn’t have to. Law is so incandescently good as Dickie that even though Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley kills him before the halfway mark, his image is burned onto the viewer’s retinas.

He is the embodiment of true privilege: the kind you are born into that can never be taken away. Coveting it costs you a piece of yourself or maybe your sanity. The late director Anthony Minghella innately understood something about Law’s beauty—its glimmer of danger, like a cool blade held against your throat.

Law received his first Oscar nomination for the part (his second, a few years later, was for another collaboration with Minghella, in which he did a heel turn as the taciturn Inman in Cold Mountain). He still thinks of the director as one of the few people who understood who he was as an actor. “Anthony saw my potential and breadth,” he says. “It was like he was looking into my soul. He could ask me to do anything, and I would try and pull it off.”

The long stretch of films that came after Ripley never quite utilized him as interestingly (2013’s Dom Hemingway, for example, is a great performance in a mediocre film).

Law has remained prolific over the years, traversing genre and scale, doing tentpole franchises like Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), Captain Marvel (2019), and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films, while pursuing smaller, stranger movies (most recently, 2018’s Vox Lux and the upcoming Sundance premiere The Nest), perhaps never more so than in 2004, when he appeared in five feature films released over four months. Two of those movies— Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Alfie—were leading-man vehicles that were also critical and box-office bombs.

Alfie in particular felt like an attempt to establish Law as a commercially bankable star (he was on the cover of this very magazine at the time) yet fundamentally misunderstood what was compelling about him to begin with. It was dated from conception (the title character calls his penis “Big Ben”), the sort of post–Sex and the City movie that happens when you confuse aesthetics for the superficial: a shallow portrait of a shallow man.

At the 2005 Oscars ceremony, host Chris

Rock rubbed salt in the wound, joking, “If you can’t get a star, wait. If you want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law, wait!

It’s not the same thing. Who is Jude Law? Why is he in every movie I have seen the last four years?,” before adding, “Next year, he’s playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a movie.”

The dig still stings. “I’m going to be really candid,” Law says. “Chris Rock slagging me off at the Oscars was upsetting. It felt like, Fuck, am I that guy that you point fun at?

Obviously, I’ve realized since that a gag is a gag is a fucking gag. Whatever, it could’ve been anyone.” He pauses, maybe worried that he has said too much. “It was probably a bubble that needed bursting around myself. Like, Oh, this could be brutal. This isn’t all plain sailing.”

In the post-Alfie years, the shallowness of the role seeped into his personal image and became difficult to shake. The films he did often looked right on paper but failed to hit the Zeitgeist (think My Blueberry Nights or

“They say, ‘You are your last film.’

Who am I right now? Where have I gotten to?”

All the King’s Men). Meanwhile, he became daily chum for the British tabloids: His relationship with Sienna Miller (they met on the set of Alfie) and its tumultuous on-again, off-again nature was regularly chronicled on the covers. Jude Law slept with the nanny!

Sienna Miller slept with Daniel Craig! Of course, Law and Miller were just two victims of a much more vast network of cell-phone hacking conducted by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., but the damage had been done.

“You see this Frankenstein’s monster being created, this puppet that has your name and your face attached, and it’s an odd thing,” says Law. “Because you don’t want to say, ‘That’s not true.’ [But] to address it or argue it is giving it limelight. And so over the years, I’ve just retracted. You change your life so you’re not so exposed—what to avoid and how to live a life that’s slightly less obtainable.”

In person, Law is well practiced in the art of avoidance: unfailingly polite but deeply private in a way that has been learned and hard fought. He answers questions at length

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while avoiding specificity, like an athlete running down the clock. He does not have an official Instagram. He isn’t on Twitter.

And the years have made him realistic about the business. “I wouldn’t say that I necessarily do an awful lot of work for money, but there’ve been a couple jobs where I figure, Gosh, I actually need to make some money.

When the work you do is also to put bread and butter on your kids’ table, it has to be,” he says. Law has five children—three with his first wife, Sadie Frost; one with Samantha Burke; and his youngest, with Catherine Harding. “I have quite a big responsibility base that I need to support. That’s just a reality check. I’m constantly going through battles with my relevance, my integrity, or sense of self as an artist.” we’re standing in front of Julie Mehretu’s painting Cairo, a 10-by-24-foot map of many layers: architectural, geographical, sociopolitical, emotional. It’s a “palimpsest” of history, as the curatorial notes put it. Law is particularly taken by the word. “I love this idea that history is made one layer on top of another, erasing itself, consuming itself, inventing something else for the same thing,” he says. It is not unlike the best of what he hopes his work can be, something that manages to capture not only who he is now but what has brought him to that point.

“They say, ‘You are your last film,’ ” he explains. “If you get the opportunity to put yourself out there in a film or television show or a play, it has to be that pound of flesh. It has to be, ‘Who am I right now?

Where have I gotten to?’ ” His role as Lenny (Pope Pius XIII) is a revitalization. A reminder of a young Jude Law, only sedimented with age and complexity. Whereas early in his career, Law’s beauty made him the object of desire, in the The Young Pope it’s the source of his power, like a golden scepter that forces people to submit to his will. Lenny uses it to chillingly authoritarian ends. He wants a conservative Church—one that does not compromise, does not make concessions, but inspires devotion precisely because it is hard. Demagogue or demigod, what’s the difference?

“The beauty of Jude was very helpful for the character because the quintessence of beauty as pope was something, not provocative, but unpredictable,” Sorrentino says.

“Beauty is something that changes the relationship between the pope and all the people around. All the men, all the women. [It] puts the people in a different condition.”

Read in another light, Sorrentino’s shows are a meditation on stan culture and beauty as a social force. We are sad, simple creatures in its presence, reflexively equating looks with a moral good. Sorrentino can

P H OTO G R A P H B Y: K ATA L I N V E R M E S / N E T F L I X

find only the Italian word for it: soggezione, translated as “awe.” “For me, when I meet a man or a woman who is beautiful, I have a sort of strange, instinctive respect,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t know why. I have problems.” And beauty combined with political power of the highest religious magnitude?

We tremble, we weep.

Law’s character spends much of The New Pope in a coma (Pius XIII collapses in the finale of The Young Pope), suspended between life and death. His absence hangs over the rest of the characters (sometimes he visits them as a sexy ghost) and inspires a rabid idolatry in the masses. His followers wear black hoodies emblazoned with Pius’s photo, as though they were at a concert.

Meanwhile, his successor, Sir John Brannox, a British socialite played by John Malkovich, advocates “the middle way,” but the world has been shaped in the image of Pius’s extremism. He has already won.

Law’s performance as Pius is virtuosic.

Power convulses off him not only through what he says but what he doesn’t. He is restrained, forcing his subjects to hang on to every flickering gesture. (In The New Pope, they literally hang on to his every breath.) “It was really lovely playing someone who was so still. In a way, I hope the stillness has somehow offered new insight into the journey I took to become that still,” Law says. “My acting coach, who I’ve been working with for nearly ten years, kept saying to me, ‘You are enough.’ What I recognized finally was that if you do the work, you don’t have to project the work. The work is. I felt a confidence, I suppose, with Lenny—and a demand. There was nowhere to hide with [him].”

Law is interested in the just being–ness of acting. He enjoys pushing his own body to extremes as a way to get in touch with himself. Right now, he’s intermittently fasting, eating only between noon and eight. No booze, very little red meat. “I love restricting what I’m eating, like really starving myself and only drinking water and eating like pulses and vegetables,” he says. “And then I love excessive banquets, trying different types of foods and wines. I mean, we’re only here once, right?”

We walk up to the second floor for the rest of Mehretu’s retrospective. Law loves the idea that he is “just meeting” her now and gets to take in this fully formed artist’s evolution over the past 30 years. It’s a feeling that hits home. What if people were just meeting him now? “I am pleased with The Young Pope and The New Pope,” he says. “Had you asked me about some of the other stuff I’ve done in the last five years, it would make me say, ‘Please go back! Look at the journey, not ■ just at the immediate.’ ”

A guide to Netflix’s aspiring Game of Thrones The Witcher is a lot like its protagonist: large, rugged, and not fond of explaining itself. The fantasy epic stars Henry Cavill as silverhaired monster hunter Geralt of Rivia, a.k.a. the witcher. Based on a series of best-selling Polish novels turned video games, it’s wildly popular but also, somehow, wildly confusing. joshua rivera

So, what’s a witcher?

Wow, we’re really starting at the beginning, huh? A witcher is a monster hunter for hire. They are once-normal humans who got mutated by a combination of medieval science and magic, which made them superhuman and able to take potions too toxic for normal people.

Turning into a witcher is a grueling process called the Trial of the Grasses, and only about a third of those who undergo it survive.

You sound like you’re making this up.

We’re not! The Witcher is based on a series of books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Geralt’s adventures are very popular in Poland—there have been comics, a TV show, a movie, and a tabletop role-playing game all based on Sapkowski’s work. The most successful adaptation, however, is The Witcher trilogy of video games by the studio CD Projekt Red.

How similar is the show to the games?

Quite similar. One of the main elements taken straight from the games is Henry Cavill’s performance—specifically his voice, which is heavily inspired by voice actor Doug Cockle’s take on Geralt.

So where does all this stuff take place?

The Witcher takes place on a continent called … the Continent.

Beg your pardon?

Look, if you thought your continent was the only one, would you name it?

Fair. So there’s a continent and there’s monsters?

Right! The Continent is full of your standard fantasy peoples—elves and dwarves and such—but some time long ago, an event called the Conjunction of the Spheres brought its world into contact with other worlds where creatures of myth lived. So you’ve got monsters like vampires, but also less familiar creatures drawn from Slavic myth.

When does the show take place?

For much of its first season, The Witcher takes place across three timelines.

The earliest follows Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra) on her journey to become a sorceress; the middle timeline takes place decades later and follows Geralt on his adventures; and the latest timeline follows Cirilla (Freya Allan), a princess on the run after her home is invaded by the Nilfgaardian Empire. You get abrupt clues when you see someone who died earlier show up just fine or discover a previously razed kingdom still standing.

I heard this show is like Game of Thrones. Is it?

Kind of. There are numerous kingdoms and factions, each with

their own petty squabbles and grand rivalries. But in Game of Thrones, the power plays were just as thrilling as the battles. In The Witcher, they’re just an engine to get the characters from one place to another.

What show is it like, then?

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Like Hercules in that show, Geralt is mostly

a big, hunky wall for characters with moral dilemmas to bounce off of.

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

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Medea in Brooklyn Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale would like you to please refer to them as “lovers.”

Right now, they’re co-starring in an avant-garde take on a Greek tragedy at BAM.

By Jackson McHenry medea is at BAM through February 23.

I

n a bare room, Rose Byrne approaches Bobby Cannavale with a painting. It’s a gift that is also clearly a ploy to get back into his life. They talk about their kids and vaguely of her recovery from some kind of trauma. She pretends to be better, while he pretends there wasn’t something between them, though their history sizzles in the air. He’s seeing someone else now.

She claims to be over it, yet she can’t help but bring it up. “This isn’t a good conversation,” he says. “It’s not the best, it’s not the worst,” she counters. It’s like watching them pick at a rash when they know they shouldn’t, until it inflames, pustulates, and then kills them.

Byrne, 40, and Cannavale, 49, are rehearsing the first scene in Simon Stone’s adaptation of Medea at bam. When the scene ends, Cannavale, as if to annotate his performance, tells Stone he was “thinking about the way sex is on the table” between the characters. “I feel as if it’s there,” Stone says. “And the sadness of it also not being possible.” Stone, who is directing, too, likes having them run through the scene in rehearsal to develop a sense of their characters’ shared past together.

Then Byrne and Cannavale go off to their home in Brooklyn and their own two kids, since they have a shared present together, too.

Byrne, an Australian expat who, thanks to movies like Bridesmaids, has become more successful in comedy than as a dramatic actor, and Cannavale, a Cuban-Italian New York stage fixture who has 68 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

become a recent favorite of Martin Scorsese’s—currently, he can be seen in The Irishman—started dating in 2012. (They met through mutual friends while Byrne was playing legal psychodrama across from Glenn Close in Damages.) It seemed like no big deal to go from dating to co-starring, and in 2014 they appeared in both the indie Adult Beginners (as a married couple) and a studio remake of Annie, though they disagree about which was filmed first. He says Annie, she says Adult Beginners. “We can’t even agree on this,” she deadpans, almost directly into my voice recorder. They followed those up with roles as villains in the 2015 comedy Spy. Even when they don’t produce hits, their work tends to be critically acclaimed, which has resulted in the two actors occupying a place as a thinking fan’s celebrity couple, best known by people willing to pay for tickets to the theater or premium cable. They feel like a rustic Brooklyn answer to Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker’s Manhattan theater, fashion, and screen combo, of a kind with fellow Brooklynites Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, or Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. Plus, Byrne and Cannavale have symbiotically complementary looks, with his hulking figure and brow and her petite poise and knowing rag-doll eyes. They can make it feel like “sex is on the table” immediately, even in a quiet rehearsal room.

That spark makes you want to know more, even if the two of them find the interest in their personal lives a little strange. “It’s way more interesting for other people than it is for us,” Cannavale admits over lunch at Rucola, a cozy Italian place in Brooklyn with eggplant sandwiches he loves, a few more weeks into rehearsal. They’re a little tired of my questions about being a couple in the public eye, even if those questions come with the territory of promoting a play. “We’re not doing this to do interviews about our relationship,” Byrne says, “even though that’s what we’re doing right now.” She laughs, firm yet charming. “I know you’re just doing your job.”

Medea is Byrne and Cannavale’s first play together, which, considering the plot, is a little like taking your first family vacation to the center of an armed conflict.

Euripides’ telling of the tragedy takes place after Medea, a brilliant sorceress, has helped Jason (of the Argonauts) complete his quest for the Golden Fleece. He abandons her for a king’s daughter, and Medea gets her revenge by killing her and Jason’s own children. In Stone’s version, credited as “after Euripides,” Byrne and Cannavale play contemporary analogues roughly patPhotograph by Daniel Dorsa

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terned on the case of Debora Green, a Kansas physician who pleaded no contest to burning down her family’s home, killing two of her three children, and attempting to poison her husband. So yes, Byrne will be acting out the murder of two of her and Cannavale’s children every night before heading home to their real kids. If not that interesting to them, it’s fascinating for us.

In addition to the fraught story, the two actors have to navigate Stone’s bolder directorial choices. He developed Medea at Toneelgroep Amsterdam, home of fellow classical-theater-wrecking artist Ivo van Hove, who is currently on Broadway with a dismantled West Side Story. In Stone’s staging, the relentless, 80-minute flow of action takes place in a set so bare, sterile, and evenly lit that Cannavale compares it to a big white void slowly filling with ashlike debris as the tragedy advances. “The set’s a bit disorienting when you first see it,” he says. “When the actor’s onstage, it looks like you’re floating.”

The idea of casting Byrne and Cannavale came from David Binder, bam’s artistic director, who asked Cannavale at a gala one evening if the couple would ever consider acting onstage with each other. They had already signed on to do A View From the Bridge in Sydney this December—Byrne likes to return to work in her home country when she can—so why not take on one more big tragedy beforehand?

Cannavale, a true enthusiast who describes himself as loving the theater the way other guys love cars, was especially excited to work with Stone, whose similarly modern update of Yerma was a sensation at the Park Avenue Armory last year. “It was just about convincing her to do it,” Cannavale jokes, elbowing Byrne.

She laughs, deflecting focus to the pragmatic. Of course, she wanted to do Medea.

Of course, she wanted to work with Stone, whom she knew distantly in the way all Australian actors and directors seem to know one another. (In rehearsal, the two of them get distracted catching up on gossip about other theatrical Australians; many of the stories seem to involve Jacki Weaver.) But really, so much depends on just having someone to watch the children. “It’s hard,” Byrne points out. “You have two parents not putting kids to bed.

That’s the biggest part of the decision.”

One thing that is clear to Byrne, however, is that her kids will “always have a relationship with Australia.” Given her connection to the country, she is deeply affected by the ongoing wildfires. “It’s surreal being away and reading about your home country, and devastating to see it, the people losing their lives and the ani-

mals,” she says. She has encouraged people to donate to relief efforts and is proud of fellow Australians who have also raised money. And she’s furious with “the most tone-deaf fucking [prime minister],” Scott Morrison. “It’s a climate crisis, and he won’t address it as that,” she says. “He’s a real piece of work, that one.”

The couple will return to Australia later this year for View, but for now, working on Medea, they are content to be at home in Brooklyn. Rehearsal is within walking distance of their house in Boerum Hill, where they can check in with Rocco, 3, and Rafael, 2. The kids are blissfully too young to understand that their parents are acting out filicide for a living (only recently did they show a glimmer of recognition of their mother in a commercial for Peter Rabbit) and are too focused on being kids to care. “I can come home with my head

“We’re not doing this to do interviews about our relationship, even though that’s what we’re doing right now.”

spinning, and they’re just like, ‘Mama, Mama, tell me a story!,’ ” Byrne says. Then, in the tone of a preening character she might play in a comedy—a mock version of herself she occasionally puts on display— she adds, “Do they know who we are?”

Puffing out his chest, Cannavale joins the bit: “They don’t know who we are!”

Cannavale has been through the process of raising a child before. His son Jake, whom he had with the writer Jenny Lumet, is now 24 and also an actor, appearing alongside his father in Nurse Jackie and playing a bounty hunter in the Star Wars show The Mandalorian. (“He’s a dead bounty hunter now,” his father quips.) When Jake was young, Cannavale was just starting his own career and hustling for jobs. “I’ve basically spent my life since I was 24 actively raising children,” he says, “and it will continue that way until I’m in retirement.” Byrne laughs at the idea of his retiring. “And you’ll do

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what?,” she asks. “Live!,” he announces, as if it’s obvious.

But Cannavale is the planner in the family. He’d like to keep working, though at his current, somewhat anonymous level of fame. “I actively don’t want to not be able to ride the subway,” he insists. So what are Byrne’s plans? “I’m a little bit more moment to moment,” she admits.

“That’s why we’re a good yin and yang.”

There’s a trickster spirit in Byrne that takes its time to reveal itself. You think he’s the goofball but then realize that she’s working her own angle.

There’s some of that play in their working relationship as they figure out where to move for different projects. They relocated to Toronto for a few months last year, when Byrne played Gloria Steinem in an FX series. In a recent interview, Cannavale blurted out that Byrne makes twice as much as he does, which garnered some attention that mystifies them both.

“First of all, that number is wrong. It’s probably a wider gap,” he says. Byrne laughs and slips her wrist inside his elbow, a reflexive gesture she repeats in moments like this. It’s loving but also a nudge that maybe he’s saying too much again. “I’m kidding!,” he continues. “My point is that we’re both lucky enough to be working all the time, and we can go back and forth. I do work in the theater a lot, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that if you’re working in theater, you’re not making as much money as Dwayne Johnson.”

Throughout our conversation, they keep referring to each other as husband and wife, even if one thing you learn pretty quickly from stories about Bobby Cannavale and Rose Byrne (especially from their publicists’ clarifications of those stories) is that they are not married.

“We’re not,” Byrne says. “We were planning to … and then another baby, and then—” “I hate all the other words!,” Cannavale interjects. “It’s just easier to say husband and wife.”

“Boyfriend and girlfriend feels so young,” he adds. “Partner feels so sterile.”

At this point, Byrne has her hand wrapped under his elbow again and peers at him with amusement. “What else could we say?,” he asks, looking right at her. “My lo-ver!” A firm two syllables, heavy with sauce. We’re back inside a bit, where they feel most comfortable—at least with a reporter nearby. She laughs. “Sure. My lover, Bobby,” she says. It sounds especially sarcastic in her Australian accent, almost rhyming: lohvah, Bohbbay. “Who gives a shit?!,” he says. “It’s just funny what people ■ care about.”

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T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S

CRITICS Craig Jenkins on Rare … Jen Chaney on The Outsider …

Helen Shaw on My Name Is Lucy Barton.

P O P / CRAIG JENKINS

Redemption Songs With Rare, Selena Gomez celebrates her newfound peace and independence. the path to Selena Gomez’s third album has been beset on all sides by hardship. Gomez has fought a battle with lupus that led to intensive therapy, kidney-transplant surgery, and cruel internet speculation about fluctuations in her weight. There were makeups and breakups with high-profile exes Justin Bieber and the Weeknd, whose Purpose and My Dear Melancholy albums both had songs that appeared to reference time spent with Gomez. (Imagine going through a split and having your ex release “Call Out My Name,” “Where Are Ü Now,” or “Love Yourself.”) The singer eventually checked in to rehab faciliRARE SELENA GOMEZ. ties to work through depression and anxiety. The trickle of singles INTERSCOPE RECORDS. released in this stretch—the Talking Heads flip “Bad Liar,” the Gucci Mane collaboration “Fetish,” the reggaeton hit “I Can’t Get Enough,” and the folk-pop jams “It Ain’t Me” and “Wolves”—suggested tanta72 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

lizing new directions and then sped off as soon as they started to stick. It’s apparent now that she was trying to get to a place of stability before pulling the trigger on another full-album statement.

This past fall, “Lose You to Love Me” struck a stately balance between the singer’s journey to wellness and the drama in her press clippings. It’s a song about learning to stand up for yourself, about avoiding situations that make you feel like a supporting character in your own story, about reaching the epiphany that your own healing and happiness are just as important as everyone else’s. “Lose You” is assertive without being accusatory, the kind of reflexive breakup song that resonates whether you did dirt or had dirt done to you. (For the excoriating honesty in the lyrics and her monastic choral vocals, Gomez ultimately earned her first Billboard “Hot 100”–chart-topper and, later, a spot on Vulture’s list of the best songs of the year.) A day later, the passive-

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Selena Gomez

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aggressive dance-pop jam “Look at Her Now” pushed the dial back to breakup shade. Rare, Gomez’s new full-length, follows the lead of the second song. The bad times are in the rearview. Rare dramatizes putting yourself back out there after a rough patch, like Usher’s “U Don’t Have to Call.” It’s a whole album’s worth of “I still got it.”

Rare is sleek to a degree that makes 2015’s Revival seem sluggish (in spite of the new one’s being the slightly longer album at 41 minutes). Verses are curt and pithy. “Ring” packs a venomous bite into two lines: “Yeah, I received your message, all 23 / You know I’m Jordan with it, G-OA-T.” Only one song bothers with a third verse, and only to make space for a short, sweet spot from R&B singer 6LACK. The result is pure locomotion, a series of twoand-a-half-to-three-minute radio killers that shoot first and don’t stick around to ask questions. As such, Rare is exactly as strong as its punch lines are sharp, as its beats are buoyant. Results vary. “Vulnerable” ponders opening up to someone to tasteful, muted sonics. “Ring” crosses a melody similar to Camila Cabello’s “Havana” with a lyric that mirrors Jazmine Sullivan’s rage anthem “Bust Your Windows.” “Dance Again” and “Kinda Crazy” work on an antiseptic lite-funk sound that frankly pops best on “Cut You Off.” Everything floats, but not all of it is essential, making the choice to relegate the prerelease hits to big-box-retailer and overseasmarket deluxe editions seem puzzling. If French Montana got away with tacking ancient hits like “Lockjaw” and “No Shopping” onto the end of his Montana album, we ought to at least be able to have “Bad Liar” and “I Can’t Get Enough” here.

Rare is almost inarguably Gomez’s best album. There’s very little in the way of filler, and none of the lesser tunes is allotted enough time to drag. That said, the towering “Lose You to Love Me,” and the closer, “A Sweeter Place”—where Selena and Kid Cudi wonder what it takes to go from living well to living the best possible lives—suggest that even greater writing and deeper reflection would have been possible throughout this album. Rare celebrates Selena’s newfound peace and independence, but it doesn’t say as much about the war to get there, the way a song like Avril Lavigne’s soaring, resolute “Head Above Water” did in recent years.

The production is airtight and hooky, an expression of pop’s genre-melding present that doesn’t take any wild gambles on the future. There’s nothing wrong with that!

But it would be nice to see an artist who hasn’t put out an album in half a decade ■ taking a few more chances.

T V / JEN CHANEY

It’s All a Blur The Outsider starts off strong, but eventually spins out of control. the outsider raises a question that viewers of mysterybox TV often face: Is this show good, or is it just making me curious—or both? The more I watched the new HBO crime thriller, based on the 2018 Stephen King novel, the more confused I became about what exactly was happening. Yet I kept proceeding through the six episodes provided for review (there will be ten total) precisely for that reason: because I wanted to straighten out all the tangles in my brain.

I haven’t read King’s novel—adapted here by fellow novelist Richard Price, co-creator of The Night Of—and at this point, I’m going out of my way to avoid the details of the book’s plot, so it’s impossible for me to say how faithful The Outsider is to its source material. But I can say that what starts off as a relatively standard, well-executed crime drama eventually veers into more supernatural, King-style territory, and the two tones don’t necessarily mix well.

In the first episode, the body of a young boy, Frankie Peterson, is found in a wooded area near a Georgia town. Detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) begins to investigate and discovers evidence, via witnesses and security-camera footage, that implicates Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman), a husband, father, and Little League coach whom Ralph knows personally. Ralph arrests Terry, who swears he didn’t kill Frankie. He does more than swear: He has an alibi that proves he THE OUTSIDER HBO. wasn’t anywhere near the scene of the crime when SUNDAYS, 9 P.M. it happened. Ralph does some more digging and, lo and behold, finds proof that Terry was indeed out of town at a work conference on the day Frankie

Julianne Nicholson and Scarlett Blum.

was murdered. But there’s also proof that he was very much in town and was even spotted covered in blood on the day Frankie died. What is going on here?

That becomes an even more sweeping, relevant question as The Outsider funnel-clouds into something larger and more ominous. Why does Terry’s younger daughter, now under the care of his angry wife and suddenly single mother, Glory (Julianne Nicholson), keep seeing visions of a man with blurry facial features at night? We learn that Ralph and his wife, Jeannie (Mare Winningham), lost their only son not long ago, but what were the circumstances of his death and how, if at all, do they relate to the Peterson case?

Those are just skims off the surface layer of The Outsider, which gets even more unruly once Cynthia Erivo enters the picture as Holly Gibney, a private investigator who’s on the autism spectrum and has some extrasensory-perception skills that guide her toward fresh intel. Holly is a recurring character in King’s fiction, and if Erivo weren’t portraying her, she might seem unbelievably silly. Thankfully, Erivo imbues Holly’s robotic demeanor with a sense of welcome understatement that isn’t always in the arsenals of actors who play these kinds of characters. Erivo’s eyes aren’t always focused, but they’re definitely alive, windows into a brain where synapses are firing at all times. I may not always buy into the plot machinations that involve Holly or some of the decisions she has been scripted to make, but I believe she could exist as a person in the real world.

That’s true of the entire cast, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the names dropped in this review already. As the central figure, consumed with guilt and obsessed by the Maitland case, Mendelsohn is superb. In every scene, no matter what emotions he’s actively navigating, he drops his head and shoulders in a way that conveys just how exhausted Ralph is: overwhelmed with grief, with overwork, and with trying to hold in his feelings. He does an awful lot while doing what looks like a little. That’s true of every supporting player around him, including, among others, Nicholson, Winningham, Bateman (who directed the first two episodes), and Bill Camp, who plays the Maitlands’ lawyer.

The problem with The Outsider is that it begins as a relatively contained mystery that’s based in reality but gradually spins into a story with broader supernatural and mythical implications. The building sense of foreboding is effective at times. Conversations are frequently shot through door frames and from long

distances, implying that someone or something is watching what’s happening from afar. The gray hues and the production details, including sketches of the aforementioned Blurry Face Man, add a creepiness factor that keeps the viewer primed for something awful to happen.

But the show keeps piling on so much information about other crimes that may be related to Frankie’s death, as well as side plots about other players in its large ensemble, that it becomes hard to keep everything straight. It feels like Price had a firm grip on this story at first but, as he added to it, it started to slip through his fingers like wet clay whipping around on a pottery wheel without firm hands to shape it. The Outsider maintains a very strong The Night Of (not shocking) and True

Detective vibe throughout that suggests it has something deeper to say—but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what that is yet.

Still, I want to see how The Outsider resolves itself, simply because I’m not sure how it fully can. As a consumer of stories, I am capable of believing in anything. Hell, a month ago on this very same premium-cable network, Watchmen had me believing that Robert Redford was president and that tiny squid can fall from the sky. But the bizarre is believable only when the storytelling behind it is so authoritative and in control that there are no cracks into which doubt or mistrust can seep. There are a lot of cracks in The Outsider, and not even the glue provided by great acting and skilled directing can ■ completely fill them.

T H E AT E R / HELEN SHAW

Barton Funk Elizabeth Strout’s atmospheric novel comes to the stage as a glum, gray dud. of all the questions flooding through a mutinous brain during My Name Is Lucy Barton, “How did we get here?” has the most obvious answer. Everything about programming the onewoman performance in Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre seems canny. Recent figures tell us that 68 percent of Broadway audiences are women. The average age is 42. And what do 40-muffled-sound-year-old women want? We want rueful stories about mothers and daughters! We want Elizabeth Strout novels! We want Laura Linney! Every Venn-diagram circle about a certain kind of woman—the sort that subscribes to nonprofit theaters, specifically— overlaps in this little sliver.

Yet My Name Is Lucy Barton flops. It doesn’t flop hard—with its limited ambition, it has no height from which to fall. But it does collapse. Twenty minutes in, every card in its deck is already on the table.

It has established its suppressed-tears tone, and it has assured us that there will be no writerly interventions (by adapter Rona Munro) nor staging choices (by Richard Eyre) to make the beautiful book Strout wrote into a functional theater text. What then unfolds is a dull lesson in the difference between what’s needed on the page and on the stage.

Strout’s book is brief; you seem to read it in a single held breath. That particular sensation of private suspension and emotional reservation, though, requires true quiet. (Books are conspiraMY NAME IS LUCY cies between the writer and the single reader.) TheBARTON

BY ELIZABETH ater, on the other hand, even when there’s only one STROUT. ADAPTED BY woman speaking, is existentially noisy: A great big RONA MUNRO. shuffling, coughing, ruminating beast is watching, SAMUEL J. FRIEDMAN THEATRE. THROUGH and it needs to be tamed.

FEBRUARY 29.

Lucy is in the hospital—or at least, she was in the

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hospital, and she is now telling the story of that time with a kind of wonder. Lucy’s mother has come to sit by her bedside for several days, braving New York and the estrangement that has risen up between them since Lucy left Amgash, Illinois, years ago. Despite Lucy’s obvious fragility, her mother is brusque and prickly, telling story after story about women from Amgash who have come to bad ends. Every woman who has tried to leave her small town, or fancied herself in love, or had any level of self-regard, has wound up alone, Lucy’s mother says. Yet her daughter is delighted to listen, since after a yearning, desperate, impoverished childhood, here is the intimacy that Lucy has always craved. She tries to interest her mother in her life, and she fails. She tries to get her to talk about her father’s traumatic and traumatizing behavior, and she’s rebuffed.

Her doctor touches her forehead, and Lucy says she wept with gratitude at his kindness. She tells us about the “ruthlessness” with which she’s gone on to pursue a writing career, but everything—sad brown wig, sad gray cardigan, sad blue voice—insists that she’s actually as vulnerable as a kitten in the rain.

Laura Linney plays Lucy, as she did twice already at the Bridge Theatre in London. There, her performance and Eyre’s production were wildly acclaimed, though neither can have been much different from the gelid work here. Local tastes vary, audiences vary, and oneperson performance relies very heavily on the relationship between speaker and listener. Perhaps that’s it. Or is it that the Friedman is a large, deep house, with stacks of balconies that rise well up and back from the stage? Maybe the Bridge Theatre, with its deeper thrust and closer galleries, made a snugger venue for this very small piece. Its effectiveness might depend on our being closer.

From page one, it’s immediately obvious why Strout’s novel tempted producer Nicholas Hytner into commissioning the adaptation—it’s in the first person, as though Strout’s writing a monologue, and she locates much of the book in a single place. “There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks,” she begins, and I’m sure that visions of a unit set with a hospital bed in it danced in everybody’s heads. In fact, the ugly projectiondependent setting by Bob Crowley, one of the most brilliant maximalists in the business, speaks to the way the creativeteam members are working against their strengths. Linney, with her calm brow and pleading eyes, is tremendous at playing either innocent or sly (she was both in

Laura Linney as Lucy Barton.

The Little Foxes), but here she’s only glum.

Near the end, when she says the simple title line—she’s bravely glum.

It’s this sameness that’s the show-killer.

Dramatic mechanics are made to be tampered with—have at it!—but you must have at least one of the following engines to drive an engaging solo performance: surprise, persuasion, revelation, humor, action, change, seduction, or suspense.

Munro and Eyre and Linney are reverential about keeping to the letter of Strout’s book, which, in the paradoxical way of failed adaptations, means that they miss the point. Strout’s book is atmospheric, full of silence and self-questioning. Loving gestures are guessed at and hoped for but never quite made; it vibrates with things left undone. Yet this immensely static production uses the same words to be plodding, expository, clear.

In the novel, the narrator, an author herself, watches another writer speak.

By this point in the book, we’re several meta-levels down. The plot tempts us into believing that we’re reading a roman à clef: Lucy’s adult life chimes with Strout’s own, from her nickname (Wizzle) to the rough outlines of her career and first marriage. The seeming difference, though, is a backstory of horrifying privation, poverty, and abuse. There’s a dark fantasy unwinding in the book: Could the “current” Strout ever have emerged from this other, darker life? In the novel, Lucy meets an author called Sarah Payne, watches her

speak, and goes to her workshop. Payne, with that evocative last name, seems to be a reflection of a later stage in the writer’s life—easily exhausted but full of wisdom about authorship and its mission. “It’s not my job to make readers know what’s a narrative voice and not the private view of the author,” Payne says. Oh, what challenge and warning is in that line!

This push-me-pull-you of reality and invention is gone in Munro’s adaptation, though she’s careful to leave much of the language intact. It’s not really her fault: She slices out some characters in order to emphasize the maternal relationship, but that’s not what robs the play of its slipperiness. With the book in our hands, we know we’re in contact with the author.

Put it all on a stage, put it in an actor’s mouth, and that electrical connection is cut, leaving only a woman telling a sorrowful story about an interlude. At least the show offers the occasion for a lot of productive thinking. What makes something adaptable? What commands our interest? How do we respond to the single body onstage? If you can’t make it to Broadway for this show that I’m not recommending, you can rest assured that in February, the production will be released as a recording by Penguin Random House Audio. You …could also just get the existing audiobook instead of the audio–dramatic adaptation. But perhaps infinite recursion is your thing? Your name might ■ be Lucy Barton too.

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

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For more culture coverage and event recommendations, see vulture.com.

DENNIS GRIMALDI PRESENTS

T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S

To

Sometimes it’s harder to like someone than it is to love them

“A HOT NEW PLAY! One of the most touching plays on the New York stage.”

- WNBC TV

Twenty-five things to see, hear, watch, and read.

“COMEDY PACKED WITH JOKES OFFERING NUGGETS OF WISDOM.”

JANUARY 22–FEBRUARY 5

TV

1. Watch Awkwafina Is

Nora From Queens Plus an all-star cast.

Comedy Central, January 22.

Coming off her Golden Globe win for The Farewell, Awkwafina plays a millennial living at home with some extremely well-cast relatives: BD Wong as her dad, Lori Tan Chinn as her grandmother, and SNL’s Bowen Yang as her cousin. jen chaney Photos: Maria Barano va

MOVIES

LEN CARIOU CRAIG BIERKO WRITTEN BY

GEORGE EASTMAN

DIRECTED BY

KAREN CARPENTER

Use code NYMAG for a show poster signed by the stars!* New York City Center Stage II 131 W 55th St 212-581-1212 | NYCITYCENTER.org HarryTownsendsLastStand.com *Ticket purchase required. One poster per order.

2. See New York,

New York “Top of the heap.”

Metrograph, January 31 to February 6.

Martin Scorsese’s flop 1977 musical is more than a bit abrasive. The director set out to make a splashy, MGM-style musical with the corrosive psychological underbelly of a, well, Scorsese film. I saw it on opening day, loved the long set piece in which Robert De Niro’s saxophonist seduces Liza Minnelli’s torch singer, and fled after an hour and a half when I couldn’t take more screaming and slapping. Then I walked back in and watched the rest—standing up. It’s a fascinating failed experiment, capped by Minnelli’s introduction of the titular Kander-Ebb song—originally meant to be ironic. david edelstein POP MUSIC

3. See The Loud

Experience

More than 25 years of Loud Records.

Radio City Music Hall, January 30.

Seminal rap label Loud Records was a force in the

’90s, thanks to the vision of co-founders Steve Rifkind and Rich Isaacson and a roster that included heavyweights like Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep, and Three 6 Mafia. The collective will celebrate its rich history with a show featuring Wu, Fat Joe, Beatnuts, dead prez, tributes to the fallen rap legends Prodigy and Big Pun, and more. craig jenkins THEATER

4. & 5. See A Pink Chair

(In Place of a Fake Antique) and The Wooster Group

Double your Wooster, double your fun.

NYU Skirball Center, through February 2; Carriage Trade, 277 Grand Street, 2nd fl., through January 26.

The Wooster Group revives its affecting “encounter” with the (deceased) director Tadeusz Kantor in the reenactment of one of his eerie, deathhaunted pieces, I Shall Never Return. Archival film of the Kantor production and the Wooster’s own reproduction of the Polish original jostle in a weird, lopsided waltz. To really Wooster it up, you should also see the exhibition about the group, with film and images from its own archive. helen shaw ART

6. See Katarina Riesing A sheer visionary.

Asya Geisberg, 537B West 23rd Street, through February 15.

Sizzling segments of the human body are seemingly zeroed in on from a lover’s point of view or by someone regarding themselves with rapture, wonder, and disgust at the fleshiness of it all. In Katarina Riesing’s “Razor Burn,” figurative snippets of body stockings, pantyhose with gaping holes, and other

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CLASSICAL MUSIC

7. Hear Benjamin

Hochman and Friends

Poetry, love letters, and the songs they become.

92nd Street Y, January 24.

A few hundred miles and the First World War separate the two pieces in this program: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a surreal mini-monodrama about a moonstruck naïf, and Janácek’s Diary of One Who Disappeared, a tragedy-soaked song cycle of young love. justin davidson TV

8. Watch The Grammy

Awards

Ariana Grande to perform.

CBS, January 26.

Awards shows proliferate on Sunday-night TV for a stretch, but the Grammys are can’t-miss. Hosted (again) by Alicia Keys, with Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, and Lizzo competing in the big categories. j.c.

MOVIES

9. See Envisioning

2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey A completist’s exhibition.

Museum of the Moving Image, through July 19.

This new exhibit presents artifacts from the obsessive director Stanley Kubrick’s deep research into his pioneering sci-fi epic and the film’s lengthy production process, which involved the creation of revolutionary F/X, costumes, and makeup (remember those apes?). bilge ebiri

ee t w ! e S lov

BOOKS

10. Read Cartier’s Hope

Not an advertorial.

Atria Books, January 28.

M.J. Rose adds luster to a growing collection of historical thrillers with the tale of a muckraking suffragette in the mold of Nellie Bly investigating the cursed-by-greed Hope diamond, which left a trail of death behind it, and a murder closer to home.

TV

11. Watch The Good

Place Finale

So where does that place us in Jeremy Bearimy?

liberator.com

NBC, January 30.

It’s over? This wonderful, existential, hilarious show is forking over? Sadly, it is, but it goes out with a bang, including the last episode and a postshow hosted by Seth Meyers. j.c.

ART

12. See Bill Traylor Distinctively American.

David Zwirner gallery, 34 East 69th Street, through February 1.

Objects of Pleasure | Love Loungers | Erotic Play 78 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

The art of former slave Bill Traylor came to light

through the efforts of numerous small galleries and dedicated collectors and fellow artists. Here, the large collection of the late William Louis-Dreyfus (father of Julia) being sold at a megagallery to benefit, in part, children in Central Harlem is a beautiful sight. j.s.

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OPERA

13. See La Damnation

Eye Refining Treatment

de Faust

Only four, spare presentations.

Metropolitan Opera, opens January 25.

Robert Lepage’s 2008 production of Berlioz’s quasi-opera was so high tech and forward looking that the Met may never stage it again. Instead, it’s performing the piece in concert dress, facing front—just that wild, wizardly score sung by Elina Garanca and Bryan Hymel. j.d.

POP MUSIC

14. Listen to

Have We Met

Crest of Canada’s indie wave.

Merge Records, January 31.

The 12th album from Destroyer, led by Dan Bejar, formerly of the New Pornographers, finds Bejar’s singular voice and poetic lyricism in fine working order, especially on crystalline synth-pop/ New Wave tracks “Crimson Tide” and “It Just Doesn’t Happen.” c.j.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

15. Hear Jörg Widmann

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A warm welcome.

Zankel Hall, January 28.

The 46-year-old composer-conductor-clarinetist, who’s in residence at Carnegie Hall this season, launches his year by doing all three with the International Contemporary Ensemble, careening through chamber works that show off his energy, wit, and playful reverence for the past. j.d.

Jump In

THE 60-SECOND BOOK EXCERPT:

Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick

By Zora Neale Hurston

“she lay awake, gazing upon the debris that cluttered their matrimonial trail. Not an image left standing along the way. Anything like flowers had long ago been drowned in the salty stream that had been pressed from her heart. Her tears, her sweat, her blood. She had brought love to the union and he had brought a longing after the flesh. Two months after the wedding, he had given her the first brutal beating. She had the memory of his numerous trips to Orlando with all of his wages when he had returned to her penniless, even before the first year had passed.

She was young and soft then, but now she thought of her knotty muscled limbs, her harsh knuckly hands, and drew herself up into an unhappy little ball in the middle of the big feather bed.”

(Amistad)

Three days of immersive storytelling and experiences March 13-15 • The Belmont Austin voxmediaevents.com/sxsw

So, David Edelstein, Which Oscar-Nominated Documentaries Are Worth Streaming?

THEATER/FESTIVALS

16. Go to The

Exponential Festival

Our movie critic on 2019’s top docs— and now major Oscar contenders.

A fringe experience.

Various locations, through February 3.

The deep fringe of New York theater-making gets its Brooklyn showcase in this far-flung festival, which contains radical dance double bills at Parallel, a vital smorgasbord evening (on the 25th), an immersive choose-your-own-adventure show in an actual (and secret) box store, a noir-sci-fi thriller at the Doxsee Theater in Sunset Park, and a solemn solo piece by Kareem Lucas, in which he stages his own funeral at the Brick. If you’ve ever felt the wild pioneering days of the theater scene were over, these impassioned, experimental artists will make you clutch your pearls again. h.s.

Start Playing Test your pop culture knowledge and everyday wit with the New York Crossword, now online.

TV

17. Watch

nymag.com/crossword

BoJack Horseman

No more horsin’ around.

Netflix, January 31.

This biting Hollywood satire that has followed a former ’90s-sitcom star for six seasons is coming to a close. Will BoJack, voiced by Will Arnett, finally find some peace? It’s unclear, but we know we will miss this Easter-egg-heavy, brilliant series. j.c.

MOVIES

18. See I Walked With

a Zombie A horror pioneer.

SOLUTION TO LAST ISSUE’S PUZZLE J A V A A R I D

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Quad Cinema, January 22.

Director Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie crossbreeds Jane Eyre with voodoo. It’s a mesmerizing drama that nevertheless sends the occasional chill up your spine. It’s being shown as part of a series programmed by French director Bertrand Bonello, whose Zombi Child starts its theatrical run at the Quad January 24. b.e.

ART

19. & 20. See Janet Sobel

and Pearl Blauvelt

Two self-taught visionaries.

Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 Bowery, through February 22.

If the art world bestowed medals for art-community service, dealer-gallerist Andrew Edlin would merit a silver star for his unflagging commitment to undersung, outsider artists. Here, two massive talents hold forth: Janet Sobel, a visionary figurative painter of almost abstract conglomerations of circus colors, reveals an artist in need of a museum survey; Pearl Blauvelt gives us penciled scenes of exquisite detail, observation, and love. j.s.

“the very best is the cautionary business quasi-comedy American Factory, also the first film to carry the Obamas’ seal of approval vis-à-vis their Netflix deal. The transporting Honeyland (Hulu) centers on a rough-hewn Turkish woman who presides over a fragile ecosystem of bees in an isolated Macedonian valley. The wrenching Syrian cine-diary For Sama can be viewed via its producer, Frontline, at pbs.org. Apollo 11 (Hulu), which is not nominated, is a brilliant reconstruction of mankind’s first giant step onto another orbiting body—see it on the biggest screen you can.”

POP MUSIC

22. Listen to High Road When they go low.

RCA/Kemosabe Records, January 31.

Kesha’s new batch reconnects with the freewheeling spirit of party anthems like “Tik Tok.” She’s in pure pop mode on “Raising Hell,” but still gives out rock and country vibes in “Resentment,” paired with Sturgill Simpson and Brian Wilson. c.j.

MOVIES

23. See The Turning Creepy and creeped-out kids.

In theaters January 24.

Weird-music-video specialist Floria Sigismondi directs this modern-day take on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story rooted in sexual repression. It stars the splendid Mackenzie Davis as the governess who fights a war with unseen entities for the souls of a pair of rich kids. d.e.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

24. Hear American

Symphony Orchestra

Not typically Ludwigian.

Carnegie Hall, January 31.

Beethoven would have turned 250 this year, and the ASO, led by Leon Botstein, takes a typically contrarian approach, performing not-Beethovenat-all but composers who bore the sometimes painful marks of his influence, from close musical kin Spohr and Liszt to the more distantly related Russian modernist Galina Ustvolskaya. j.d.

BOOKS

CLASSICAL MUSIC

25. Go to New York

21. Hear Bang on a Can

Celebrating 20 years of smart books.

At t

e’s Commissioning Fund Concert.

Mer

January 28.

The mother of avant-garde collectives showcases a half-dozen composers, young, old, and dead— including Iceland’s Hildur Guðnadóttir, who won a Golden Globe for her Joker score. j.d.

Review Books 92nd Street Y, January 27.

The New York Review of Books’ side gig, a publishing operation, is 20 years old. Edwin Frank, Marlon James, Leslie Jamison, and Colm Tóibín will read selections of work from NYRB by Josep Pla, Renata Adler, Elizabeth Hardwick, and others.

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The Voice of a Generation

CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 3 9

the wake of Serial’s wild success. “A lot of internal people were kind of like, ‘Yeah, we’ve, like, had this conversation before,’ ” she says. “ ‘And nothing’s going to happen here because that’s how it netted out the last few times.’ ” Dolnick and Henig launched an international search to find a journalist to shore up and run the Times’ audio program, to answer the question, as the job posting had it, of what the New York Times should sound like.

They hired Tobin, who was then a young producer leading development for WBUR in Boston and had already worked on creating a successful Times audio series around the paper’s “Modern Love” column. She arrived at the company in summer 2016 with the high-minded idea of spending months making a narrative series—one that was eventually released as Caliphate, foreign correspondent Rukmini Callimachi’s account of her reporting on isis and the fall of Mosul. But the U.S. election was dominating the news, and Tobin, Dolnick, and Henig landed on a politics show with the reporters covering the campaign, a time-limited, end-stopped production that would serve as a learning experience as much as anything else.

The Run-Up, which launched in August 2016, featured Barbaro as well as guest hosts from the paper’s politics ranks. Barbaro wasn’t the only reporter considered—his colleague Nicholas Confessore had been another possibility—but he stood out early on. Watching tapes of the reporters doing the cable-TV rounds, Tobin was impressed

by Barbaro’s humanity. “He seemed like a real person,” she says. When the election ultimately ended The Run-Up and Barbaro had his dark night of the soul about how to continue as a reporter, there was The Daily.

I ask Barbaro if there was an element of penance in his decision for having missed the Trump ascendancy along with much of the rest of the mainstream media. “My therapist just retired, so I can’t answer this,” he says. “You have to remember, we didn’t understand that The Daily was going to be this model of journalistic transparency. It’s kind of a soul-searching way of telling a story, where you embrace your confusion

and you experience the quest for the answer.”

In its way, it is the first news product generated by and for the Trump era, which demands constant, ever-evolving explanation while simultaneously undermining the concept of certainty around the news at all.

The Daily, which had narrowly missed being called First Up, started less than two weeks after Trump took the oath of office.

BMW signed on as its launch sponsor, and repeat advertisers have included ZipRecruiter, Fidelity, Google, IBM, and Delta— which says something, given that much of podcast advertising still comes from direct-to-consumer businesses like mailorder mattresses and meal kits. Dolnick declined to discuss how lucrative The Daily is to the Times beyond saying it is profitable. A source told Vanity Fair last year that its ad revenue would end up in the low eight figures, though the Times will not confirm this amount.

But going by the rule of thumb for podcast advertising, which is sold on a CPM (cost per thousand, as in per thousand listeners) basis, The Daily looks very profitable. The average CPM for podcasts, several in the industry say, is between $25 and $35.

Even putting The Daily on the low end of that (though surely it is not), a show with an average of 2 million listeners could make $50,000 per ad per episode, and each episode has multiple ad slots (though not all are always filled). Even at a rate of one ad per show, The Daily’s five shows per week would rake in $1 million a month or more, though one person familiar with the inner workings of says the total is significantly higher.

This back-of-the-envelope math doesn’t account for fees The Daily earns and stands to earn from the public-radio stations that have begun broadcasting it over the air.

How to apportion credit for the show’s success is a question that’s impossible to answer (everyone who’s ever had a hand in or near it would like their share). Behind the scenes, Tobin is widely admired in the industry; Dolnick calls her a “visionary.” On the show, Barbaro is a keen and time-tested interviewer, but the guest reporters actually bring the news. “People think they love Barbaro,” one podcast executive tells me. “But I think it could have been anyone else.” And yet, I ask one Daily superfan, does the show suffer when Barbaro is out and a guest host fills in? “Oh yeah,” she says. “What kind of question is that?”

A

t a t i m e w h e n every media company is racing to diversify its revenue streams, Tobin has created the single most successful Times product in a decade or more. The knock on the Times in the broader community is that it has built an infrastruc-

ture for a rich audio department that has not yet arrived, though the paper has used podcasting as a lure to get and keep key talent elsewhere in the newsroom. “I’m almost personally offended that they haven’t launched a ton of podcasts on the success of The Daily,” one outside producer tells me. The most reliable marketing for new shows is promotion on a successful podcast; with The Daily, the Times has the most valuable springboard in the business.

Tobin says she will begin to step back from the daily editing of the flagship show to focus on the expanding slate, but she remains closely, intimately, even unyieldingly involved. Existing podcasts soldier along (besides the Book Review show and the Popcast, there is the culture-focused Still Processing and an opinion-section talkie called The Argument). Some new ones have already been developed, and more are on the way. Tobin and her team have been launching smaller, more selfcontained series, some of which have been met with fanfare. There is 1619, a series spun off from a print project on a pivotal year in the history of slavery by Times Ma ga z i n e s t a ff w r i t e r N i k o l e Hannah-Jones, and The Latest, an afternoon impeachment briefing that is a sister show to The Daily. (In the coming months, Dolnick says, he can envision a kids’ show, an afternoon, a politics show.)

But none approach the reach of The Daily, which, for now, is carrying the rest of the audio department on its back. Even The Weekly, the TV show inspired by the success of The Daily, which began airing on FX and Hulu in 2019, can’t compete with it. While The Weekly contributed nearly $10 million to the Times’ bottom line in the third quarter of 2019, it has struggled to make the impact The Daily has, and FX chairman John Landgraf said this month that he is still considering whether to renew it.

So for the moment, The Daily stands alone. It has shifted the gravity of the paper and of the audio landscape, full stop. Podcasting now, one outside executive told me, bobs in the show’s wake. The Times ranks it alongside its top journalism; it submitted an episode of the show as part of its package of Me Too coverage, which shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2018 with The New Yorker. (In a sign of the times, the Pulitzer board announced it would be adding a separate audio-reporting prize this year.) Meanwhile, the audio team continues to grow; more than 10 people came onboard this month alone. “Everyone will end up working for The Daily,” Kimmie Regler, a producer at Gimlet Media, tells ■ me. “We all will end up at The Daily.”

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

83

Iowa Caucus CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 2 5

the outside, more seat-of-the-pants than in other campaigns, when Warren isn’t simply drafting off conventional wisdom about the race, that is. At the time, the thinking was she was losing leftist supporters to Sanders and rank-and-file liberal backers to Buttigieg. Democrats in Iowa were whispering about parallels to Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, another progressive effort that looked like a winner before crumbling late in the game under sustained fire from his left and moderates.

Her fourth-quarter fund-raising was lagging. It was enough to force Warren and her close clutch of senior aides—some sitting in Boston, some traveling with her—to change tack in the final weeks of 2019 and the early days of 2020.

The first part of the strategy: to take more questions at events where voters invariably invited her to respond to their skepticism. The second part: to address the problem by becoming effectively ubiquitous on television news before the impeachment trial took her off the trail, racking up Rachel Maddow, Seth Meyers, The View, and Sunday-show appearances as soon as January began, hoping to force herself into the consciousness of Iowa voters who want more than just a return to the pre-Trump status quo. This would make her seem more familiar and less risky. But she would also lean into her anti-corruption vision to present herself as a unity candidate, more than solely a purveyor of plans or a left-winger defined by the health-care-reform funding plan she never wanted to talk all that much about in the first place. Julián Castro, who became a Warren surrogate as soon as he dropped out of the race, has made that case on the trail, presenting Warren’s second-choice appeal to different wings of the party as a kind of selling point. Meanwhile, after Kamala Harris dropped out, she’s also started relying more on women surrogates and appearing more in women’s magazines.

Still, her main Iowa bet is one she placed over a year ago, when she made her first hires there: her massive on-the-ground organizing apparatus in the state. The operation has been the envy of all her rivals

for months, even when she fell behind them in the polls late last year—and the reason none of them ever thought she was really out of the race. Individual organizers have been deployed for months to all corners of the state, in many cases fully integrating with local communities to a degree that the state’s political pros marvel at, pointing to the intimate events like book clubs and road races they planned for months before shifting their focus to turnout. “Seeing the enthusiasm folks on the ground have for her organizers [makes me believe that] as things break, I think that’s really going to play to her advantage,” said California congresswoman Katie Porter, a Warren campaign chair and native Iowan who grew up attending caucus events throughout her childhood. The caucuses reward that kind of organization doubly— by getting voters to the polls and helping make sure supporters fight and coordinate on Caucus Night.

Must she win? The Warren team’s shortterm goal, now, is to prove the national naysayers wrong by at least competing with Biden, Buttigieg, and Sanders for first place, and maybe out-organizing them to an outright victory. She is trying to do it by making what she hopes could be a selffulfilling pitch on electability, long seen as a weakness by pundits viewing the race from afar. “I’m the only person on the debate stage who has beaten a popular incumbent Republican any time in the last 25 years,” she told a questioner in Davenport on a recent blustery Sunday—a line she then echoed on January’s debate stage.

Less than a week after an unnerving CBS poll landed showing her in fourth place in the state, she got better news from the Register, which put her just behind Sanders, in a statistical tie for first.

Sanders’s team—some of which is growing more frustrated with Warren by the day—remains worried that her organizing could carry her through, winning over some of the progressive voters deciding between the pair. It’s one reason the campaign recently issued those talking points about Warren. (Sanders, who often refuses to listen to advisers who want him to go negative, has held off on trashing Warren in public, even as some of his surrogates have been criticizing Warren outright.) In her eyes, any stumble from Biden or Sanders by Nevada—where she’s also well organized—would allow her to present herself as the real center of a new Democratic Party by Super Tuesday. In the eyes of her top rivals, a clear defeat in Iowa would produce a media narrative that she’s been in a precipitous plummet since the fall and may just functionally end her campaign.

84 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

W

hen volunteers walk into Buttigieg’s field office in Ames, a strip-mall storefront a few miles from Iowa State University, they’re immediately greeted by a large sign asking “why pete?” On a recent frigid Saturday afternoon, four answers were scrawled in under the prompt: “Executive experience,” “Veteran,” “Change the channel” (a go-to Buttigieg line about change in Washington), and “Chasten” (Buttigieg’s husband’s name and an apparent reference to LGBTQ representation on the campaign trail).

The office’s back wall is plastered with dozens of the campaign’s commit-to-caucus cards—meaning identical printed copies of the candidate’s headshot are staring out into the room—and the wall next to it features a painted reminder of the ten “Rules of the Road” that Buttigieg expects his supporters, having made it this far, to follow: respect, belonging, truth, teamwork, boldness, responsibility, substance, discipline, excellence, and joy. The roughly 20 Iowans sitting inside the office that day were staring at a PowerPoint presentation reminding them of the fine points of the caucus process, drilling them on delegate math, and encouraging them to be polite to supporters of other candidates. Buttigieg’s hyperdisciplined, technocratic campaign can at times resemble a caricature of the candidate himself.

Buttigieg, who’s drawn some of the state’s biggest crowds, is the only candidate whose theoretical path to the nomination essentially relies on a win in Iowa, or maybe a close second-place finish—preferably behind Warren or Sanders, against whom his strategists think he could be an attractive alternative. “I don’t think it’s essential that he wins, but I do think it’s pretty essential that he do well, especially now that expectations are raised,” Virginia representative Don Beyer, Buttigieg’s first Capitol Hill endorser, told me shortly before he flew to Iowa to canvas after yet another poll showed Buttigieg toward the top of the field there. But Beyer is strategically underselling the importance: Buttigieg is close in Iowa, yet is far enough behind in national polls that he absolutely needs a boost from the first caucuses to continue entertaining even a long shot at the nomination.

One result of the campaign’s decision to focus on Iowa and recently New Hampshire is that he hasn’t built up as much of an organization in some Super Tuesday states as some of his rivals. He recently swung through Texas for three days of private fundraisers, for example, but he did no public events. And while Buttigieg began advertising in Nevada in December, and in recent weeks has made a more concerted push to woo black voters in South Carolina, practi-

cally speaking, it’s all in on Iowa. A strong finish in the caucuses, his Iowa state director Brendan McPhillips told me, would “expose him to a lot of new people in other states who are waiting to see who’s out of the gate.

That resets the campaign.” Given that Buttigieg stands barely ahead of Michael Bloomberg nationally, he needs that reset, which campaign aides for months have quietly compared to Obama’s path in 2008.

Of course, Obama had opportunities to gain ground in South Carolina that Buttigieg lacks. Which is one reason why a clear loss in Iowa would suggest a very different path for him, and, in the most recent Register poll, Buttigieg dropped nine points— from a clear lead to, basically, a tie with the other three prime contenders. Behind the scenes, his advisers agree his organizerand-volunteer army’s task now isn’t just to persuade the late deciders to listen to the candidate’s consensus-focused pitch; it must also stop his newest, least-committed backers—many of whom came onboard only in the past few months—from defecting, as both Warren and Biden strive to win them back. The campaign remains confident because of Buttigieg’s high favorability ratings among Iowans, but it understands keenly that the result in Iowa is often judged in the national media less by the final delegate count than by performances against expectations. Unfortunately, they fear, after the raft of positive polls for Buttigieg in December, “the only way for him to beat expectations is to win,” as Patti Solis Doyle, who was Hillary Clinton’s first campaign manager in 2008, put it. “I wish that the [polls] that have him ahead like that came in mid-January, not December,” said Beyer.

“Because now he’s a target.”

And though his opponents are intimidated and even unnerved by Buttigieg’s fund-raising strength, they have a hard time telling a story in which he gains enough support among minorities to represent a genuine long-term threat— perhaps even after a win in Iowa. “Pete is very soft,” predicted a senior adviser to a rival, confidently echoing his team’s private polling analysis. “He will come down a bit.”

Another called his standing “fragile.” It’s why Warren picked fights with him over his wine-cave fund-raising and McKinsey clients, aiming to paint him as a workaday politician willing to cater to entrenched interests, and why Biden has leaned into his experience argument in the homestretch. They believe they can pick off— rather than alienate—his supporters.

This same possibility unsettles Buttigieg’s advisers, who are hoping to take advantage of the impeachment trial with targeted personal visits to the state while his Senate rivals are stuck in Washington. If Biden sees

the Iran mess as a (political) boon, Buttigieg views the impeachment the same way. In fact, in Iowa, the two often seem to be most directly competing, in terms of message if not always for individual voters. And, like Biden, Buttigieg is particularly focused on Obama-to-Trump voters and residents of small industrial cities that resemble South Bend, McPhillips explained. In the estimation of Buttigieg’s top aides, the contest now comes down to a small persuadable group of caucusgoers who will likely remain up for grabs until the final hours.

A

nd then there’s the small army assembling in the old New York Times Building in midtown Manhattan, where Bloomberg is setting up to try and make sure none of this matters. The former mayor’s late entry has the other campaigns at a bit of a loss. “If Bloomberg wants to spend $2 billion on ads to beat us, there’s nothing we can do about it,” one senior strategist for a leading campaign told me. “I don’t have time to think about him,” a top operative for another candidate said, then paused. “But should I?” Ever since Bloomberg announced last year that he was, after all, getting into the race and planning to spend huge to win, there’s been no consensus among his rivals over how to handle him, or even how seriously to take his campaign. For one thing, there’s the short-term money question. As soon as news broke that he was considering running, Biden’s top aides began ringing his biggest fund-raisers to make sure none of them bolted from the former vicepresident’s camp. (Few did, in the end.) In his first two months in the race, though, Bloomberg has already spent over $200 million on ads alone, even buying a Super Bowl spot. There’s also the fact that by skipping the first four states in the process, he’s trying something no one’s ever done successfully. The former mayor is circumventing the part of the contest that’s gotten the most attention and resources for over a year to try to become dominant in Marchvoting states and win their delegates while other candidates focus on the early four.

It’s a strategy that could, in theory, make all of their campaigning entirely redundant, and the pace of Bloomberg’s campaign growth has been like nothing the Democratic-primary process has ever seen. Aiming to build the party’s largest field organization, the mogul has hired over 1,000 staffers in just two months, including around 700 distributed over 30 states, concentrated largely on the Super Tuesday destinations (in North Carolina, for example, he has at least 90 aides working already). He has also promised many of them surprisingly lucrative jobs through

the November election, which means even if Bloomberg’s money can’t carry him to the nomination, his apparatus will be a major force to be reckoned with on the way to someone else’s convention and in the general election. (Some top Democrats quietly believe—or hope—this has been the plan all along.) Even those close to Bloomberg who were at first skeptical— urging him not to run—eventually joined up, some feeling they couldn’t say no and still expect a professional or personal relationship with him to continue. This has been especially frustrating to Biden and Buttigieg, who in many cases wanted their support and cash.

When they are feeling more confident about the threat, staff from rival campaigns point out that, while he’s already hit 5 percent in multiple national polls, Bloomberg will need to hit at least 15 percent in the districts he’s targeting in order to win delegates in states like Texas and Virginia. But those close to Bloomberg are sure he’ll be ready to spend over $1 billion overall, and he’s made no secret in the past of his disdain for Sanders’s and Warren’s politics. He entered the race because he came to believe Biden, his onetime favored candidate, was a weak option, and, according to some close to the mayor, he may still reconsider his plans if Biden emerges from the four early states in control. If not, the big, perhaps paranoid, worry among the other candidates is not that Bloomberg would comfortably win the nomination but that his presence could ultimately force a mathematically unlikely contested convention— or at least that he could effectively extend the messy primary process until deep into the summer, damaging the ultimate winner. Still, no campaign has yet fully turned its fire toward him, given that he may be funding their general-election fight not too long from now.

In recent weeks, they’ve become preoccupied with another wrinkle anyway: the Iowa Democratic Party’s plans to, for the first time this year, report not just the final weighted and calculated Caucus Night results, but also the raw vote totals for both the first Caucus Night “alignment”—when Iowans pick their top choice—and the second, when low-performing candidates are eliminated and their supporters choose their second option. This means the country could get a very muddied picture of Iowa on Caucus Night—perhaps muddied further if a fifth-place finisher (almost certainly Klobuchar) can claim enough momentum to carry on to New Hampshire, too. Nothing, the contenders fear, would dash their hopes for some long-awaited clarity more than three candidates pro■ claiming victory.

january 20–february 2, 2020 | new york

85

Solve This Online!

Paper Trails

Sunday nights for new and vintage puzzles.

1

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New York Crossword by Matt Gaffney 3

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54 Warning to other drivers in Northern California?

56 Visit on a road trip 57 “Knives Out” actress de Armas 58 Run-down 59 Address with an apostrophe 60 Title character of Thomas Hardy’s 62 Originates (from) 63 Painter of Paris cafés 66 Quiz options, often 70 God with wings 72 Brings onboard 73 Milne hopper 74 Feature of Japan’s flag 77 Summertime danger in Canada?

83 Helps on holdups 84 Watches in awe 85 Queued up 86 Tibiae, e.g.

87 Suspect clearer 88 Six Russian czars 89 Person who’s constantly flying out of Logan?

95 Jack’s predecessor 96 Mimic unthinkingly 97 Cut wool from 98 Remini and Rabin, for two

102 106 108 109 112 116 117 118 119 120 121

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86 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

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Across

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Slightly different version State of uncertainty Soprano who never sang “You’re not allowed to do that!” retort Pico de gallo ingredient Like some elephants Student-researcher high in the Rockies?

It borders the province of Que. “Always Be My Maybe” actress Wong Press Gets comfy Highway divisions “Come Dancing” band, with “the” Big bird Prosecuting people (abbr.)

Addictive TV show or video game in Hollywood?

Styled fancily “Skip my turn” Magazine with the same editor since 1988 Tree goo Motivating factor Accustom (to)

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14 15 16 17 18 19 24 29 31 32 34 36 37 38 40 41 42 43

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Not working any longer Be naughty Syllable in “Simpsons” scripts Prepared, as bacon Studying battle flags and coats of arms on the beach?

Fall fun Kayaker’s nook Whoever Eggs on Witherspoon of “The Morning Show” Tennis shot made through one’s own legs

Down

1 “Lincoln” novelist, 1984 2 Train that stops at Penn Station 3 Escaped a thunderstorm 4 Request for payment (abbr.)

5 Partook of 6 Sam and Diane served him 7 Kansas city 8 Behind 9 Diet 10 Prefix with town 11 Economic windfall 12 A single time 13 Foolproof

Refugee’s request Bailiff ’s order Trampoline-park equipment Hellenic H Super-fun Quick point for Serena Ragnarök combatant Plays matchmaker with Person born before you March man Elude Exhumed MDX maker Olympic sport since 1968 Material in filters Olympic sport since 1900 Make happy First British production to win the Tony for Best Musical 44 Valley of vino 45 Designer von Furstenberg 46 Ancient Quechua speakers 49 H.S. students take it 50 Irritants 51 Article 52 Web-forum referees, for short 55 Named at birth 56 Stopped standing 59 Forward from Argentina 61 Two trios playing together, e.g.

62 “Dombey and ___” (Dickens novel of 1848) 63 Care 64 They may be liberal 65 Red-pill swallower 67 UCLA athlete 68 Podiatrist’s problems 69 Finito 71 “The Thomas Crown Affair” actress 72 Sacred figures 74 Temple figure 75 Volume with little mass 76 Thickheaded 77 Silent magician 78 Seneca for “great river” 79 One of the Starks 80 Second or newton 81 Orange feature 82 Play too loud 84 Inverness instrument 90 The birds and the bees, e.g.

91 It winds past Windsor 92 Say from memory 93 Swear words?

94 Most reality-based 99 Build a new bedroom, e.g.

100 “Stormy Weather” singer 101 Less gregarious 102 Mortgage maneuver, briefly 103 Prepare to publish 104 Qatar’s head of state, e.g.

105 Eat in the evening 107 Freighter’s front 109 Gold letters on navy windbreakers 110 Paul or Howard 111 Letters that mean business 113 Part of IPA 114 Harlem’s First ___ Church: Bethel 115 Levi’s rival

The solution to last week’s puzzle appears on page 80.

York, P.O. Box 420306, Palm Coast, FL, 32142-0306. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40612608. Canada returns to be sent to Imex Global Solutions, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON, N6C 6B2. Subscription rates in the United States and possessions: 26 issues, $59.97. For subscription assistance, write to New York Magazine Subscription Department, P.O. Box 420306, Palm Coast, FL, 32142-0306, or call 800-678-0900. Printed in the U.S.A. Copyright © 2020 by New York Media LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. Founding chairman, Bruce Wasserstein; chief executive officer, Jim Bankoff. New York Magazine is not responsible for the return or loss of unsolicited manuscripts. Any submission of a manuscript must be accompanied by an SASE.

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Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.

high brow As more and more revelations about the Ukraine caper come out …

… The probably already fixed Mitch McConnell– overseen impeachment trial begins …

The UWS location of Book Culture is seized by the city marshal over a rent dispute.

Gastrotastrophy looms with Trump’s wine, cheese, and olive-oil tariffs on the menu.

Amazon continues to suck the book business dry, signing up authors like Dean Koontz and Patricia Cornwell to publish itself.

Bernie Sanders vs.

Elizabeth Warren: a lefty Marriage Story.

… But at least there aren’t enough votes to preemptively dismiss it.

Oh la la, mon oncle!

The Definitive Jacques Tati.

Opening Ceremony will be shuttering its cool-kid shops this year.

Is RuPaul’s AJ and the Queen intentionally bad or just bad?

Either way, it’s bad.

Who is … Ken Jennings!

… But at least she’s performing halftime at the Super Bowl.

Cleanness, Garth Greenwell’s love story set in a postcommunist city full of bad wine, homophobia, and stray dogs.

Leslie Jones doesn’t spare her 20-year-old self (or her false eyelashes) in her comedy special Time Machine.

Rick Owens’s one-legged RompHim. Gwyneth Paltrow’s suggestive invites to the deeply suspect Goop Lab.

Your thirst for almond milk is killing billions of honeybees.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s unhinged energy in Netflix’s Goop Lab trailer.

Cheer coach Monica Aldama!

Like a Boss, the grimmest of grim, unfunny January studio movies.

The new tap-and-go OMNY scanners have been double-charging some subway riders … … And the MTA had to take 298 of its newest cars out of circulation because of unreliable doors.

When yo (rath f

l off oes

Bad Boys for Life: deeply unnecessary but somehow still fun to watch.

The cluttered, frantic, and inert Dolittle is anti-cinema.

The Dave Matthews Band wins the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame fan vote by a large margin, but n’t get in …

… Of course, nobody seriously thinks they deserve it except fratty fans.

-d a m ds

lowbrow 88 n e w y o r k | j a n u a r y 2 0 – f e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 2 0

Talea, a woman-run small-batch brewery for people who hate beer but might like Pumpkin Roll Sour IPA.

Joey, bro-king of the addictively dumb catfish-y reality show The Circle. Send Message.

Will Billie Eilish’s Bond theme be enough to convince Gen Z to watch a Bond movie?

bril liant

de sp icabl e

… And male.

Related: J.Lo didn’t get her nomination …

The indomitable, difficult genius of Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Anne-Charlotte Finel’s spooky exhibition “Jacklighting” at the Chimney gallery.

Harry and Meghan announce their escape from the royal family.

Oscars (still) so white …

Beltrán era over before it began.

Anna Wiener’s devastatingly well-observed among-the-tech-bros memoir, Uncanny Valley.

The beautifully scripted The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes … … And Ryan J. Haddad’s almost-too-adorable Falling for Make Believe, both at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival.

Turns out the (heavily subsidized) city ferry riders are … mostly affluent.

The developer of Hudson Yards floats the idea of walling off its second phase from hoi polloi on the High Line with a … parking garage.

Maya Beiser’s Bowie Cello Symphonic: Blackstar.

P H OTO G R A P H S : R O B E R T F. H Y D E C A M PA G N ( R O B E R T H Y D E ) ; F OX N E W S ( M I TC H M CCO N N E L L ) ; A . S AV N / W K M E D A ( W N E TA R F F S ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F B O O K C U LT U R E ( B O O K C U LT U R E ) ; C N N ( B E R N I E A N D WA R R E N ) ; G O D S F R E N D C H U C K / W K M E D A ( N YC F E R RY ) ; R H O D O D E N D R T E S / W K M E D A ( H U D S O N YA R D S ) ; Z A N W M B E R L E Y ( T H E S H A D O W W H O S E P R E Y T H E H U N T E R B ECO M E S ) ; B LO N D E 1 9 6 7/ W I K I M E D I A ( E L I Z A B E T H W U R T Z E L ) ; M A R K J O N E S / W K M E D A ( H A R RY A N D M EG H A N ) ; E R C M CC A N D L E S S / A B C ( K E N J E N N I N G S ) ; O P E N I N G C E R E M O N Y / N S TAG R A M (O P E N N G C E R E M O N Y ) ; B E T H D U B B E R / N E T F L X (A J A N D T H E Q U E E N ) ; N E T F L X (G W Y N E T H PA LT R O W, T H E C I R C L E, C H E E R COAC H ) ; PA R A M O U N T P I C T U R E S ( L I K E A B O S S ) ; N Y 1 (O M N Y ) ; M TAT R A N / W K M E D A ( R 1 7 9 T R A N ) ; C A R L S WA N S O N ( S H O E ) ; R O D R G O S M A S ( DAV E M AT T H E W S B A N D) ; J LO / I N S TAG R A M (J. LO) ; B E N R OT H S T E N / CO LU M B A P C T U R E S ( B A D B OYS F O R L F E ) ; B L L E E L S H / T W T T E R ( B L L E E L S H ) ; F R A N Ç O S G U L LOT / A F P V I A G E T T Y M AG E S ( R I C K O W E N S ) ; A N N E- C H A R LOT T E F I N E L V I A T H E C H I M N E Y G A L L E RY (J AC K L I G H T I N G ) ; U N I V E R S A L P I C T U R E S ( D O L I T T L E ) ; E S P N / YO U T U B E (C A R LO S B E LT R Á N ) ; B I L L G R AY / N E T F L I X ( L E S L I E J O N E S )

THE APPROVAL MATRIX