March 27–April 9, 2023

The fight to make

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Democratic Party’s
2024 agenda.
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 m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3

Emily Henry at home.

features

Abortion Wins The Women Are Smart. The New Light

Elections The Men Are Sincere. Is Bad
Democrats consider And the Ending LED bulbs promised
a once-untouchable idea: Is Always Happy. a bright future. So why
putting reproductive rights How Emily Henry helped do they make everything
at the center of their agenda. redefine the romance novel. look worse?
By Rebecca Traister By Allison P. Davis By Tom Scocca
18 32
26

Photograph by Holly Andres m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 3

 m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3

T H I S PAG E : H A I R B Y D I D I E R M A L I G E F O R L E O N O R G R E Y L AT A R T PA R T N E R ; M A K E U P B Y TA K A S H I A S H I Z AWA
intelligencer strategist 52 62 complete with Endless
Food Nan Goldin’s Happy Ending Summer Vacation
Our diner-at-large goes The photographer enters podcasts by Nicholas
8 39 in search of soy-marinated her post-Oscars era Quah Holy Week
The National Interest Best Bets crab; Koloman’s By Kate Dwyer explores what followed
How Trump’s legal woes Less-terrible LED bulbs. flammable cocktail MLK’s assassination
will help him score Plus: Employee-approved 66 tv by Kathryn
points against DeSantis J.Crew, a Laundress The Fall Out Boys VanArendonk
By Jonathan Chait alternative, and the culture pages
Are Back in Town In its final season,
unexpected Easter- A pop-punk band’s revival Succession still surprises
10 basket stuffers. 57 By Justin Curto
Neighborhood News Obsessed With Her 78
The Hot Dog King’s Alamo 42
In Swarm, Dominique 68 To Do
outside the Met Best of New York Fishback pushes The Opera Ghost Twenty-five picks
By Chris Crowley At-your-own-pace devotion past its limits Is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s for the next two weeks
yoga studios By Madeline work more exuberance
12 Leung Coleman than excellence?
On With Kara Swisher 43 By Andrea Long Chu
What makes OpenAI The Look Book 60 6 Comments
co-founder Sam Altman Plays mahjong at The Stans and 74 94 Games: New York
“super-nervous” the Ace Hotel What They Stand For Critics Crossword,
Internet fandoms, music by Craig Jenkins by Matt Gaffney;
14 46 explained Miley Cyrus’s the Vulture 10x10s
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By Adam Platt By Wendy Goodman this page: Nan Goldin. Photograph by Norman Jean Roy for New York Magazine.

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 ® March 13-26, 2023

“I’ve
never
shared
this
with
anyone…”
17 of the most
accomplished
women in
broadcast
journalism
dish
(respectfully!)
about
Barbara
Walters
by irin carmon
Portfolio by
Brigitte Lacombe

3
Become a living organ donor with
a national leader in transplant.
See Adriana and Nicole’s story at
liveandletlive.com/adriana
 inside: Alamo at the hot-dog cart / Sam Altman has a lot to answer for / Immersed in the world of immersive art

Protesters near Mar-a-Lago.

The National Interest: in march, as donald trump put out word that he was
P H OTO G R A P H : G I O R G I O V I E R A / A F P V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S

about to be arrested—by a “soros backed animal” for “a crime

Jonathan Chait that doesn’t exist”—Florida governor Ron DeSantis floated a

subtle contrast. “Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush
money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged
affair. I just—I can’t speak to that,” he told reporters, alluding to
The Grievance Gap Trump’s very extant crime.
To emphasize his own, porn-star-free marriage, DeSantis gave

How Trump’s an interview to Piers Morgan in the New York Post. The Post, like
most of the Murdoch media empire, has been operating almost

legal troubles give indistinguishably from DeSantis’s proto-campaign for president.

(“We see him as the future of the party,” a Fox News producer wrote

him an edge in an email a few years ago.) This article fawned over DeSantis’s
family, showing the devoted couple and their adorable children in

over Ron DeSantis. a series of photos. And yet the weak point in this pitch turned out
to be the candidate himself, whose attempted paeans to marital

8 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
bliss were alarmingly devoid of anything
resembling emotion.
“She’d let it be known that she was happy
and that we were ready to go to the next
level, so I don’t think it was a super-shock,
but it was good to get that one in the win
column, and I don’t think I could have done
any better in life,” DeSantis recalled of their
engagement. “Not just to have a friend—we
have three wonderful kids, she’s a great
mother, she’s a great First Lady. She’s really
the whole package.”
Here was a friendly media organ trying
desperately to gin up some Camelot mys-
tique on his behalf, only for DeSantis to
display less passion about his marriage
than he musters for the subject of capital-
gains taxation. DeSantis’s description of
his wife (the total package, great at being
First Lady, big win for Ron) sounds like
a series of bullet points written for him
by a staffer. You can see why DeSantis
believed, in the abstract, this message
would work in his favor. But you also
wonder if it can compete on an emotional
level with Trump’s hysterical denuncia-
tion of the endless “witch hunt.”
The DeSantis campaign has been an
exercise in trying to wean the base off
its Trump addiction and onto what the
Republican elite regards as a healthier
substitute. DeSantis has worked tirelessly
to identify and replicate the components
of Trump’s appeal, from his mannerisms
to his policies. And while DeSantis’s syn-
thetic version of Trumpism has won over
plenty of converts, it has not managed
to fully replace the touch and feel of the
genuine article.
As the two leading Republican candi-
dates have begun circling each other, they
have adopted largely similar platforms:
denouncing “wokeism”, questioning Joe
Biden’s support for Ukraine, promising to
crush their liberal enemies. The main sub-
stantive contrast to date has come on two
issues. On vaccines, DeSantis has depicted
the jabs as dangerous, refused to endorse
giving them to kids, and opened an inves-
tigation into alleged wrongdoing by phar-
maceutical firms. He has so successfully
transformed Trump’s once-glimmering
achievement Operation Warp Speed into
a political liability that Trump not only has
declined to take credit for a program that
saved millions of lives but is now reminding
his fans that DeSantis used to believe in the
covid vaccine himself.
The other issue contrast is DeSantis’s
record of endorsing cutting and privatizing
Medicare and Social Security. One of
Trump’s innovations as a late-in-life political
candidate was to recognize that the Repub-
lican base, much of which is getting on in
years, does not share the conservative elite’s
hatred for the New Deal. DeSantis has not
yet even defended his positions, which he
co-opted at the height of the tea-party wave.
So each candidate has one favorable
issue to use against the other. But both of
them seem to sense the race is not likely to
be determined on the basis of issues. The
biggest matter that currently divides them
is Trump’s enormous legal jeopardy.
The former president is staring down
four potential criminal indictments. The
first, which provoked Trump’s claim he
was about to be frog-marched into prison,
concerns the Manhattan district attorney’s
probe into his payoffs to a woman with
whom he had an affair. This investigation
employs a shaky legal theory and could well
result in acquittal. The second is a Georgia
investigation into Trump’s efforts to pres-
sure state officials into discarding the elec-
tion results and declaring him the winner.
The remaining two potential charges are
being investigated by Justice Department
special counsel Jack Smith. One concerns
Trump taking, refusing to give back, and
allegedly lying about and concealing clas-
sified documents (the legal case seems
cut and dried). The other is for potentially
inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021
(the relevant law in this case is a little less
clear since presidents whipping up crazy
mobs is not something lawmakers thought
they had to directly ban).
How Republicans respond to these legal
charges, should any or all of them mate-
rialize, will likely determine the outcome
of the race. DeSantis’s pitch to the base is
that he can endorse more or less the same
DeSantis’s
synthetic version
of Trumpism
has not managed
to fully replace
the touch and
feel of the
genuine article.
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
positions as Trump and attack all the
same enemies but do so more effectively
and without all of Trump’s baggage. He is
a winner, and Trump is a loser. It doesn’t
matter if they think Trump lost because
Biden, antifa, and Dominion Voting
Systems stole the election. DeSantis
refuses even to say Trump legitimately lost.
All he needs to get across is that Trump did
lose in the undeniable sense that he no
longer occupies the White House.
By this way of thinking, Trump’s crimi-
nal exposure only makes him even more of
a loser. DeSantis will almost surely speak
of Trump’s legal predicament in sympa-
thetic terms. Liberal prosecutors and the
“Biden regime” (as DeSantis calls it) are
abusing their power and persecuting law-
abiding citizens like poor Donald. That
said, wouldn’t Republicans rather have a
nominee who has avoided this misfortune?
One with the freedom to run a traditional
campaign and who will not be potentially
confined to communicating to the public
via collect calls from prison?
Trump’s message will work at the emo-
tional level. They are after him because he
is so dangerous to their power. The fact
that DeSantis is not the target of a witch
hunt does not make him more clever or
more innocent. It shows he is “controlled
opposition,” as Donald Jr. put it. Trump
has linked DeSantis to Republicans like
Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush—sellouts in the
eyes of his base. The fact that DeSantis
will be able to stump the Midwest without
an electronic-monitoring bracelet shows
he is less dangerous to the Establishment,
not more.
Trump’s theory of the case relies on a
series of paranoid fantasies, but that does
not necessarily make it any less viable in a
Republican primary than DeSantis’s more
straightforward rationale. Trump has
repeatedly used his own misconduct to bind
his supporters more tightly to his cause.
DeSantis is obviously aware of the
dynamic, and he has diligently worked to
make the libs hate him as much as they
hate Trump. He has even conjured his
own legal trouble, having overstepped his
authority in Florida repeatedly (allegedly
misappropriating funds to lure migrants
to Martha’s Vineyard, illegally firing a pros-
ecutor, violating the First Amendment with
his Stop woke law). You can almost imag-
ine a future DeSantis holding a press con-
ference outside a liquor store he just robbed
in a bid to get his own mug shot.
All this painstaking work has generated
a real upsurge in support for the Florida
governor. And yet he may discover that
manufactured passion never feels quite like
the real thing. ■
9
intelligencer

Neighborhood
News:
In a Van Down
by the Met
The last stand
of the Hot Dog King.
By Chris Crowley

since he showed up with a cart outside the

Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 16 years
ago, Dan Rossi has been fighting with local
officials over his right to sell hot dogs along
what is arguably the most lucrative stretch of
sidewalk in Manhattan.
Back then, in 2007, a vending company was
paying the city more than half a million dollars
per year for the exclusive right to conduct
business outside the museum. Eventually,
Rossi argued that as a disabled veteran, he was
exempt from such fees—citing a post–Civil War
policy—and he refused to leave. It worked, and
before covid, he could average $1,500 on a nice
day of selling $4 hot dogs ($7 for jumbos).
During the second Obama administration,
Rossi started sleeping outside the Met to
maintain his spot, as the plaza was saturated
with vendors. He set up a folding chair behind
the griddle, then began spending nights in
a nearby van.
Now the city is trying to squeeze out the man
whom the Daily News called the “Hot Dog
King of New York.” He’s not going to simply
roll away. “This is like the Alamo,” he declares.
On January 27, a Health Department
inspector stripped the letter-grade decals off his
carts. Soon after, he was told that one of his two
carts was too close to a crosswalk. “It showed us
what was happening as far as trying to get us
away from here,” Rossi contends.
In February, one of Rossi’s daughters filed
a petition on Change.org asking the city to
allow Rossi to leave his cart overnight so he can
get “a good night’s sleep in his bed, at home!”
Although the petition has garnered more than
50,000 signatures, the Health Department
appears unswayed.
Rossi believes that the government is
enforcing policies for someone else’s benefit.
Whose, exactly? “Who knows?” he says. “People
are looking to get a piece of the action for them-
selves. When they shut me down a few weeks
ago, everything was exposed—everything.” And
what happens if someone else moves into his
spot? “They’re never going to leave.” ■

10 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 Photograph by Alexei Hay

 Dan Rossi in his van parked outside
the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 11
intelligencer
On With Kara Swisher:
Sam Altman
OpenAI’s co-founder has become the public face of the
AI revolution, alternately evangelical and circumspect about
the force he has helped unleash on the world. Following
the unveiling of OpenAI’s GPT-4, Altman spoke
with Swisher about what makes him “super-nervous.”
12 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
KARA SWISHER: In almost every interview
you do, you’re asked about the dangers of
releasing AI products and you say it’s
better to test it gradually, when the stakes
are relatively low. Can you expand on that?
Why aren’t the stakes high right now?
SAM ALTMAN: Relatively is the key word.
KS: Right. What happens to the stakes if
it’s not controlled now?
SA: Well, these systems are now much
more powerful than they were a few years
ago, and we are much more cautious than
we were a few years ago in terms of how
we deploy them. We’ve tried to learn what
we can learn. We’ve made some improve-
ments, and we’ve found ways that people
want to use this. In this interview (and
I totally get why), I think we’re mostly
talking about all of the downsides, but—
KS:No, I’m going to ask you about the
upsides.
SA: But we’ve also found ways to improve
the upsides by learning, too. So mitigate
downsides, maximize upsides. That
sounds good. And it’s not that the stakes
are that low anymore. In fact, I think we’re
in a different world than we were a few
years ago. I still think they’re relatively low
to where we’ll be a few years from now.
These systems still have classes of prob-
lems, but there are things that are totally
out of reach that we know they’ll be capa-
ble of. And the learnings we have now, the
feedback we get now, seeing the ways
people hack, jailbreak, whatever—that’s
super-valuable. I’m curious how you think
we’re doing.
KS: I think you’re saying the right things.
SA: Not saying—how do you think
we’re doing as you look at the trajectory of
our releases?
KS: I think the reason people are so
worried—and I think it’s a legitimate
worry—is because the way the early inter­
net rolled out, it was “Gee whiz” almost
the whole time: “Gee whiz, look at these
rich guys. Isn’t this great?” And they
missed every single consequence.
I remember seeing Facebook Live, and
P H OTO G R A P H : J I M W I L S O N / T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S / R E D U X
I mentioned, “Well, what about people
who kill each other on it? What about sui­
cides? What about …” And they called me
a bummer.
SA: A bummer.
KS: The same thing happened with the
Google founders. They were trying to
buy Yahoo many years ago, and I said, “At
least Microsoft knew they were thugs.”
And they called me and they said, “That’s
really hurtful. We’re really nice.” I said,
“I’m not worried about you—I’m worried
about the next guy. I don’t know who
runs your company in 20 years with all
that information on everybody.”
And so if you don’t know what it’s going
to be, while you can think of all the
amazing things it’s going to do and it’d
probably be a net positive for society—net
positive isn’t so great either sometimes,
right? The internet is a net positive like
electricity’s a net positive. It’s a famous
quote: When you invent electricity, you
invent the electric chair. And so what
would be the greatest thing here? Does it
outweigh some of the dangers?
SA: I think that’s going to be the funda-
mental tension we face that we have to
wrestle with, that the field as a whole has
to wrestle with, society has to wrestle with.
KS: Especially in this world we live in now,
which I think we can all agree has not
gone forward. It’s spinning backward
a little bit in terms of authoritarians
using this—
SA: Yeah. I am super-nervous about that.
KS: What’s the greatest thing it can
do you can think of ? Now, you and
I are not creative enough to think of
all the things—
SA: We are not. Not even close.
KS: What, from your perspective—and
don’t do term papers; don’t do dad jokes.
What do you think?
SA: Is that what you thought I would say
for the greatest thing?
KS: No, not at all. But I don’t care that it can
write a press release. Fine, sounds fan­
tastic. I don’t read them anyway.
SA: What I am personally most excited
about is helping us greatly expand our sci-
entific knowledge. I am a believer that a
lot of our forward progress comes from
increasing scientific discovery over a long
period of time.
KS: In any area?
SA: All of the areas. I think that’s just what’s
driven humanity forward. And if these sys-
tems can help us in many different ways, to
greatly increase the rate of scientific
understanding, curing diseases is an obvi-
ous example.
KS: AI has already moved in that
direction—folding proteins and things
like that.
SA: So that’s the one that I’m personally
most excited about.
KS:What sort of regulations does AI
need in America? Lay them out. I know
you’ve been meeting with regulators
and lawmakers.
SA: I haven’t done that many.
KS: Well, they call me when you do. They
want to say they’ve seen you, I guess.
SA: What do they say?
KS: Well, you’re, like, the guy to know.
They like to say, “I was with Sam Altman.
He seems nice.” I go, “He is nice. I don’t
know what to tell you.”
SA:Yeah, I did a three-day trip to D.C.
earlier this year.
KS: So tell me what you think the regula­
tions were and what are you telling them.
And do you find them savvy as a group?
I think they’re savvier than people think.
SA: Some of them are quite, quite excep-
tional. I think the thing that I would like
to see happen immediately is just much
more insight into what companies like
ours are doing, companies that are training
above a certain level of capability at a
minimum. A thing that I think could
happen now is the government should
just have insight into the capabilities of
our latest stuff, released or not, what our
internal-audit procedures and external
audits we use look like, how we collect our
The internet is
a net positive like
electricity’s a
net positive. It’s
a famous quote:
When you
invent electricity,
you invent
the electric chair.
data, how we’re red-teaming these systems,
what we expect to happen, which we may
be totally wrong about. We could hit a wall
anytime, but our internal road-map docu-
ments, when we start a big training run,
I think there could be government insight
into that. And then if that can start now …
I do think good regulation takes a long time
to develop. It’s a real process. They can fig-
ure out how they want to have oversight.
KS: Reid Hoffman has suggested a blue­
ribbon panel so they learn up on this
stuff, which—
SA: Panels are fine. We could do that, too,
but what I mean is government auditors
sitting in our buildings.
KS: Congressman Ted Lieu said there
needs to be an agency dedicated specifi­
cally to regulating AI. Is that a good idea?
SA: Ithink there’s two things you want to
do. This is way out of my area of expertise,
but you’re asking, so I’ll try. I think people
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
like us who are creating these very power-
ful systems that could become something
properly called AGI at some point—
KS: Explain what that is.
SA: Artificial general intelligence, but
what people mean is just above some
threshold where it’s really good. Those
efforts probably do need a new regulatory
effort, and I think it needs to be a global
regulatory body. And then people who are
using AI, like we talked about, the medi-
cal adviser, I think the FDA can give prob-
ably very great medical regulation, but
they’ll have to update it for the inclusion
of AI. But I would say creation of the
systems and having something like an
IAEA that regulates that is one thing and
then having existing industry regulators
still do their regulation.
KS:Who should head that agency in the
U.S.?
SA: I don’t know.
KS: Okay. So one of the things that’s
going to happen, though, is the less intel­
ligent ones, of which there are many, are
going to seize on things like they’ve done
with TikTok, possibly deservedly, but
other things. Like Snap released a chat­
bot powered by GPT that reportedly told
a 15­year­old how to mask the smell of
weed and alcohol and a 13­year­old how
to set the mood for sex with an adult.
They’re going to seize on this stuff. And
the question is, Who’s liable if this is true
when a teen uses those instructions? And
Section 230 doesn’t seem to cover gen­
erative AI. Is that a problem?
SA: I think we will need a new law for use
of this stuff, and I think the liability will
need to have a few different frameworks.
If someone is tweaking the models them-
selves, I think it’s going to have to be the
last person who touches it has the liability,
and that’s—
But there’d be liability. It’s not full
KS:
immunity that the platform’s getting.
SA: I don’t think we should have full immu-
nity. Now, that said, I understand why you
want limits on it, why you do want com-
panies to be able to experiment with this,
you want users to be able to get the experi-
ence they want—but the idea of no one
having any limits for generative AI, for AI
in general, that feels super-wrong. ■
This interview has been edited for length
and clarity.
scan the qr code to listen
to the full episode of On With Kara
Swisher, a New York Magazine
podcast. New episodes drop every
Monday and Thursday.
13
intelligencer

The Artechouse immersive experience.

“is this the end of the movie or the beginning?” I heard

Seen: someone say. We were in the Hall des Lumières, the new name
of a landmarked former bank building on Chambers Street, and

Adam Platt I too was attempting to orient myself in its trippy gloom. On a
continuous loop, projectors were beaming strange cucumber-
shaped whales onto the ceiling of the great vaulted room, and
images of sunflowers and forests flecked with gold shone on the
Give Me the Full walls. Viennese waltzes played from speakers. This was “Gustav
Klimt: Gold in Motion,” one of the latest cultural exhibitions
Immersive!
P H OTO G R A P H : D O L LY FA I B Y S H E V

(and surely not the last) to advertise itself with the two ubiqui-
tous words immersive experience.

Submitting to the The space was half-filled with the characters you tend to see at
galleries and museums on rainy weekday afternoons: distracted

spectacles encroaching parents, pods of teenagers, tourists wearing dazed expressions

and matching flannel shirts. Unlike at most traditional art venues,

on real museums’ turf. however, many of them were sprawled on the hall’s cold marble
floor in various attitudes of contemplation and wonder, and a few

14 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
of them, like me, may have even briefly been
asleep. There was also an entire room dedi-
cated to Klimt selfies.
An older, bearded gentleman frowned
silently when I asked what he thought of
the show. But a younger patron from Miami
named Isha, whose phone was alight with
TikToks of her Klimting, told me she liked
feeling “inside the artist’s mind.” This was
her first immersive, she said with a gleam,
but she and her friends were already
planning to visit many more.
That wouldn’t be difficult. These kinds
of shows have been around for years, but
lately they’ve been blooming at an almost
alarming rate—in high art, tourist schlock,
and many blurry regions in between. New
York has recently hosted “Beyond King
Tut: The Immersive Experience,” “Monet’s
Garden: The Immersive Experience,” and
“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,”
which is not to be confused with “Immer-
sive van Gogh.” Also “Frida Kahlo: The
Life of an Icon” (“An immersive biogra-
phy”), “Magentaverse NYC” (“Explore the
boundless sights, sounds, feelings and
inspirations of the Pantone Color of the
Year 2023”), and “INTER_” (“Ancient
wisdom meets tech-enabled art”). Tourist
guides promote immersive activities at
the museums of Broadway, Ice Cream,
Illusions, and Sex, and the haughtier bas-
tions of culture are scrambling to install
their own experiential exhibits. MoMA has
Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised,” and David
Zwirner will unveil a Yayoi Kusama “infin-
ity mirrored room” in May.
Spend enough time at these increasingly
inescapable spectacles and you’ll notice
two things. The first is the exorbitant price
of your ticket: “Gold in Motion” cost $34,
which is $4 more than the Met and $9 more
than the Neue Galerie, both of which have
actual Klimts. And the second thing, I can
report with some surprise after immersing
myself in quite a few, is the easy, dreamy,
slightly addictive quality of the shows. As
you move from one pleasantly distracting set
piece to another, pondering when to ingest
the lemon-flavored edible in your pocket, it
feels like playing hooky—a reprieve from the
hushed, ponderous solemnity of the Estab-
lishment museums and galleries.
“these shows are connecting with
people, and we have many stories to tell,”
says Mark Lach. We’re meeting one morning
at the echoing pier space where “Beyond
King Tut” recently ended its holiday run.
Lach, 65, is the King Tut show’s creative pro-
ducer and the president of a company called
Immersive, which produced the project
with National Geographic. Like many in
this mushrooming industry, he began his
career in theatrical management, staging
big-hair rock shows, and has multisensory
exhibits to his credit on topics from Satur-
day Night Live to Cleopatra to the Titanic.
The immersive craze began with a series
of van Gogh shows that originated in France
in the mid-aughts, which proved that con-
sumers would pay more to see re-creations
of art in event halls than they would to view
oil-on-canvas originals at proper museums.
But only in the past few years have these
exhibits truly proliferated, thanks to the
confluence of several trends. Social media
stoked a bottomless appetite for filming
ourselves in maximalist settings; digital-
video and sound technology got better and
cheaper; and covid created a glut of empty,
inexpensive urban real estate.
Most conventional exhibits unfold along
a linear path planned painstakingly by
curators. The classic immersive experience
is a nonlinear environment that people
can move in and out of like schools of fish
without having to worry about a beginning,
middle, or end. Usually, there is no original
artwork, and all of the stimulus is generated
digitally through projectors and speakers.
“People say, ‘Why not just go see the van
Gogh hanging on the wall? Why do we
need to see it 20 feet tall?’” Lach says. “But
I don’t see this as an either/or proposition.”
Whether it’s a projection of Irises or King
Tut’s collection of walking sticks, the idea
of a multisensory experience is to enhance,
rather than duplicate, what Lach calls “the
magical experience of coming face-to-face
with the original artifact.” He’s a populist.
If people have never been to Egypt, his
immersion room can give them a taste of
the deserts and the pyramids, and if it’s all a
little schmaltzy, so be it.
Until recently, immersive shows, espe-
cially in the U.S., tended to be like con-
certs or circuses: They would pop up in
one city, play until demand fell, then move
on. But this model is changing. The Hall
“It’s much easier
to send a single
hard drive across
the Atlantic
than a whole
series of precious,
expensively
insured paintings.”
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
des Lumières, which opened in September,
is part of a joint venture by the American
entertainment company IMG and France’s
Culturespaces, the industry’s most notable
pioneer. They’re creating a network of per-
manent museum-style locations in cities
from New York to Paris to Seoul that feature
a stream of what the company describes as
“bespoke digital art experiences.”
The shows are complex. “Beyond King
Tut,” for example, requires several dozen
speakers and projectors, along with hun-
dreds of lighting instruments. But the
exhibits can operate with minuscule staffs,
and development costs can amortize to
nothing the longer a tour goes on. As one
immersive veteran told me, “It’s much
easier to send a single hard drive across the
Atlantic than a whole series of precious,
expensively insured paintings.”
In London, a company called Light-
room has taken a lease on a new building
in King’s Cross. For the opening act,
Mark Grimmer, one of the directors of
59 Productions, a London-based inter-
disciplinary design company, spent the
past three years collaborating with the
Instagram-friendly David Hockney to pro-
duce one of the first immersive blockbusters
by a living artist. “David Hockney: Bigger
& Closer (not smaller and further away)”
opened in late February. Reviews have been
predictably scathing (“an overwhelming
blast of passionless kitsch”), but the spec-
tacle has been mobbed by patrons willing
to pay upwards of £25 per ticket.
According to Grimmer, one of the most
talked-about digital experiences in London
is the $175 million show known as “ABBA
Voyage,” which is priced like a live con-
cert, with many tickets above £100, but
stars digitized avatars of the original band.
After the Hockney show ends, Lightroom
plans to present all sorts of collaborations
beyond the visual arts. It’s not hard to
imagine a near future in which immortal
AI approximations of cultural icons and
their work (from Jeff Koons to Ai Weiwei
to Led Zeppelin) loop endlessly in immer-
sion venues around the globe, erasing the
distinction between art and performance.
It would make the economics of the old
museum game seem small.
the met, though, doesn’t have any-
thing quite so loud and disheveled as
“Beyond King Tut.” When I visited, the
galleries were divided in some places not
by walls but by flimsy black curtains. The
most boring section was Lach’s supposedly
immersive hall with generic shots of camels
and shimmering desert suns rising over the
pyramids. The most interesting area by far
was the last, where for an extra $15 you
15
intelligencer
could rent a pair of virtual-reality goggles,
recline in what looked like a chair heisted
from the business-class section of EgyptAir,
and peer inside Tut’s tomb as if you were a
time traveler, seeing a tiled floor below your
feet, the ceiling above, and all of the boy
king’s favorite things (a chariot, his canes,
jars of honey and smoked ox tongue) neatly
stacked along the walls.
Later that afternoon, I walked across the
Manhattan Bridge to Dumbo to saturate
myself in “Frida Kahlo.” A dazzled, slightly
more artsy-looking crowd took selfies in
a series of subterranean rooms filled with
the piped-in sounds of tropical birds, and
images of peacocks and flowers bloomed
across the walls. The strangely medita-
tive show featured a series of multimedia
exhibits devoted to stages of Kahlo’s life,
including her debilitating bus crash and
long convalescence, represented by a large
hospital bed. I stood and watched in a kind
of stupor for minutes, or possibly hours, as
it sprouted leaves and changed colors.
There were VR goggles here, too, though
you had to be much higher than I was to
appreciate the squadrons of watermelons
and skull-headed mariachi bands flying
through the air. Unlike most of the immer-
sion halls I toured, this one was filled with
artful moving images that told a coherent
story of Kahlo’s life and work with Diego
Rivera. At one point, I found myself in a
kind of Mexican courtyard, decorated with
flower boxes and hung with colorful paper
cutouts. Groups of young Brooklyn profes-
sionals were sitting at a long wooden table,
earnestly coloring in famous Kahlo images
with crayons, the way I’d seen school-
children do in more traditional museums.
“I think it’s a work team-building thing,” one
of the gallerists said. And so I sat at one of
the tables and started coloring, too.
The big museums have grudgingly
acknowledged that they need to get into this
game. Michael Connor, a curator with long
experience in the digital arts—he’s the co-
executive director of Rhizome, which works
with the New Museum—has a diplomatic
take. “The immersive van Gogh exhibit, it
looks like maybe a pleasant place to visit,
but it doesn’t feel like it’s altering the cultural
palate,” he says. “But it’s also establishing a
kind of benchmark. It’s popular. People
are paying money to see it, so artists have
to work harder to do something weird and
interesting and experimental to be part of it.
Refik is an example of this, and I’m excited
to see how other artists go beyond, or mess
with, or subvert this moment.”
Connor is referring to Anadol, the
immersive star who recently unveiled
“Unsupervised” at MoMA, which osten-
sibly uses AI “to interpret and transform
16 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
“It doesn’t feel
like it’s altering
the cultural
palate. But it’s
also establishing
a kind of
benchmark.
It’s popular.”
more than 200 years of art.” Reviews have
been almost as bad as Hockney’s; New
York’s Jerry Saltz compared it to being in
the presence of a giant lava lamp. But when
I dropped in, there were many more people
sitting goggle-eyed in front of Anadol’s
exhibit than there were wandering the
lavishly curated Ellsworth Kelly celebration
just up the stairs.
“People want to do more than just look
at art passively on the wall these days,” says
Tati Pastukhova, whose Washington, D.C.–
based venture, Artechouse, has developed
a variety of digitally inspired multimedia
projects. “There’s a bit of a boom on to
curate experiences that are a little more
theatrical and that pique people’s curiosity.”
In 2019, Artechouse leased a former
boiler room on the corner of Chelsea
Market and opened an enterprise showing
immersive pieces by a series of digital
artists. Recent spectacles have included
“Magentaverse” (created with Pantone) and
“Life of a Neuron” (affiliated with the Society
for Neuroscience), as well as a popular digi-
tized pageant called “Spectacular Factory:
Holiday Multiverse,” featuring digital pack-
ages and wreaths spinning through the air.
Like most of the immersion entrepre-
neurs I talked to, Pastukhova was cagey
about profit. She would clearly rather have
Artechouse seen as an artistic endeavor
than a commercial one, but there’s no
reason you can’t have both. When I took
in the holiday show, the tickets cost $17 to
$30; there was a bar upstairs selling
cocktails and a small merch area with
Artechouse hoodies priced at $60. As colors
climbed the walls in metronomic fashion,
a steady stream of new customers trickled
in from the masses of tourists and fressers
who flock through Chelsea Market most
hours of the day and night.
Grimmer says the immersion model
depends on the endless flow of crowds and
on telling stories in what he calls a “demo-
cratic” way. He points out that thanks to
“Bigger & Closer,” more people may get
a taste of Hockney than will see the more
canonical megaretrospective that opened
in 2017 and is still slowly making its way
around the museums of the world. Pierre
Battu, who spent years in the immersive
business before becoming the general
manager of Hall des Lumières, agrees. “We
are opening people’s eyes to the wonders of
the fine arts,” he says. “You have the music,
you have the movement. You don’t neces-
sarily need a background in the artist to
appreciate it. You feel things right away.
And afterward, we’ve found, people are
much more likely to go to traditional muse-
ums to continue the journey.”
my own immersive journey ended
with a visit to “Monet’s Garden” on Wall
Street. Since it opened in the fall, it had been
“extended” several times, which is a com-
mon tactic in this stage of the immersion
game, Battu said, to manufacture a sense
of urgency. My ticket cost $35. The person
who took it said that roughly 200 people
had already come through the gates that
afternoon and that on peak weekend days
the show saw an average of 1,000 visitors.
“I could explain to you why Monet was
the greatest artist who ever lived, but this
might not be the place to do it,” Jerry Saltz
said as we ascended the escalator toward the
gardens, which were planted with lengths
of artificial grass and plasticated flora. This
was Jerry’s first immersive, and I wanted to
get his professional critic’s opinion.
Visitors were taking selfies on a replica
of the famous Japanese footbridge that
the Impressionist painted obsessively in
his gardens at Giverny. There was also
a coloring room and a place where your
own water-lily designs could be captured
and projected alongside the artist’s. Jerry
sat under a wall of fake ivy, attempting to
process the meaning or non-meaning of
the digital-art phenomenon with a slightly
perplexed look on his face. “So far, nothing
has happened on your interior, but I guess
we’re okay with that,” Jerry said after we
moved to the main immersion hall, where
disjointed images of crows and purple hay-
stacks swirled around.
We met a Wilton, Connecticut, couple,
devout culture connoisseurs who said they
enjoyed immersive shows and visited them
regularly. Did they think this was the end
of traditional museumgoing and high cul-
ture as we know it? Of course not. It was a
distraction and an entertainment and a way
to experience the work of “artists we know
and love.” We walked out into the rain. “Let’s
do one more of these today,” Jerry said. “Let’s
do a doubleheader.” ■
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Dobbs Upended Everything We Know
and Opened a Path to Legaliz

Illustration by Pentagram
 he question,” new york
representative Shirley Chisholm
declared in 1969, “is not: can we
justify abortions, but can we jus-
tify compulsory pregnancy?”
The first Black woman elected
to the United States Congress,
Chisholm had recently been named
the first honorary co-president of
naral. She was both frank and
morally assured in the remarks
she delivered to the Republican
Task Force on Earth Resources
and Population, asking pointedly,
“What is more immoral, granting
an abortion or forcing a young
girl … to assume the responsibilities
of an adult while she is still a child?”
Chisholm was speaking during
the last period in this country’s
history in which American lawmakers were facing the open and
urgent question of how to expand access to abortion care via legis-
lative means, though at the time it was not clear which party was
going to lead the charge. Chisholm’s 1969 remarks survive in part
because they so impressed the chair of the committee, Texas rep-
resentative George H.W. Bush, that he made the unusual move of
entering them into the Congressional Record, explaining that they
“deserve widespread attention.”
Two years earlier, California governor Ronald Reagan had
signed one of the country’s most liberal abortion laws, permitting
“therapeutic” abortions in cases of rape, incest, and threat to the
20 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
life of the mother. In 1970, New York decriminalized the procedure
for any reason prior to the 24th week of pregnancy, and activists
won similar victories in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii with
support from both sides of the aisle. That same year, the first bill to
legalize abortion federally was introduced to the Senate by Oregon
Republican Bob Packwood, a man who would fight vociferously for
abortion access until he resigned in 1995 amid allegations of serial
sexual assault and harassment.
Though Packwood’s Senate bill went nowhere, it was emblem-
atic of an era of partisan realignment and social upheaval in
which the civil-rights movements of the mid-20th century had
created unprecedented political possibilities. By 1972, Chisholm
was making a historic run for the presidency, and the issue of
abortion came to a head at the Democratic Convention in Miami,
where the newly formed National Women’s Political Caucus was
not supporting her but instead hoping to win concessions on
abortion from the man who was to be the nominee, South Dakota
senator George McGovern.
Nora Ephron, then a journalist covering the convention for
Esquire, reported that the proposed abortion plank “produced the
most emotional floor fight of the convention.” McGovern refused to
support legalization, a stance he viewed as perilous to his candidacy,
but women’s-caucus leaders believed they had at least extracted an
assurance from him that he would reject anti-abortion rhetoric.
California representative Barbara Lee, who attended the con-
vention as a Chisholm delegate, remembered asking these feminist
activists, “You guys believe this man?” Lee’s skepticism proved war-
ranted. At the last minute, McGovern’s campaign invited an oppo-
nent of abortion rights to give a seconding speech from the floor.
Gloria Steinem, a founding member of the caucus, was
furious. By the end of that bad night, she was tearfully yelling
P H OTO G R A P H : B E T T Y E L A N E / S C H L E S I N G E R L I B R A RY, H A R VA R D R A D C L I F F E I N S T I T U T E
at McGovern’s campaign manager, Gary Hart, “You promised us was the preeminent issue for voters. “Democrats should have gotten
you would not take the low road, you bastards.” The next day, she wiped out,” said the pollster Tom Bonier. “But they overperformed.
raged to Ephron while walking down a Miami street: “I’m just When you look at where they overperformed, it’s in places where
tired of being screwed, and being screwed by my friends.” In the choice was most present in the election, either literally on the ballot,
fall of 2022, Steinem would recall to me, in more sanguine terms, like Michigan and Kentucky, or effectively in terms of the perceived
“McGovern was a good guy, but he was nowhere on women’s stakes and the extent to which the candidates were talking about
issues. We were trying to educate him, but he just didn’t get it.” abortion, like Pennsylvania.”
The Australian feminist Germaine Greer, writing about the con- “I don’t think Democrats have fully processed that this country
vention for Harper’s, felt McGovern had made not just a moral is now 10 to 15 percent more pro-choice than it was before Dobbs
mistake but a strategic one. “If the ‘abortion’ plank had been in state after state and national data,” said pollster Celinda Lake.
adopted as part of the party platform,” she wrote, “thousands of The Democrats, in other words, are the bewildered dog that has
people with energy and experience would have campaigned for caught the bus. A motivated base has turned to them for leader-
McGovern in a positive and intense way, just as they had done in ship on abortion while they are staring down a Republican House
the primaries; they might lose, but they would lose honorably.” majority, a Senate filibuster, and an obdurate Supreme Court. Upon
McGovern lost in a landslide. hearing that I was writing about their party’s plan to tackle abor-
Then, less than three months after his defeat by Richard Nixon, tion post-Dobbs, more than one Democratic staffer, and at least one
the Supreme Court handed down a surprise decision legalizing elected official, silently mouthed to me, “There is no plan.”
abortion. Overnight, the legislative push became moot; the Court What Democrats have is incentive: One of their most urgent
had settled the issue, saving members of both parties from the policy issues has just shown itself to be their most politically
daunting and complex process of figuring out how to guarantee effective. And they are undergoing a generational turnover that
abortion access on state and federal levels. During the decades that has already started to reshape the party and its approach to the
Roe v. Wade held, the parties became rigidly divided on the topic, battle—a dawning, in the midst of cataclysm, of a new era of
with Republicans converting or purging their pro-choice moder- political possibility.
ates and Democrats forcing most of their anti-abortion hard-liners
to get on the side of abortion rights.
For decades, Democrats touted a commitment to “choice,” At the state level, the face of a new approach to abortion
largely in reference to their efforts to cultivate an abortion- politics is indisputably Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. “If
friendly judiciary and, when in executive power, the veto. Mean- you look at what happened across the country, there was no more
while, Republicans worked every anti-abortion angle, building profound outcome than in the state of Michigan,” Whitmer told
spidery networks of local and state anti-abortion legislators, me two days before her State of the State address in January. “We
creating a judicial pipeline through the Federalist Society, and won all the constitutional offices; we flipped both chambers of our
getting fat on the language of faith and family values. The right legislature for the first time in 40 years. It’s only happened four
dreamed up ever more imaginative trap laws that shut down times in 130 years in the state.”
clinics based on building-code requirements related to hallway Democrats’ success was owed in large part to the presence on
width. The GOP enforced waiting periods and circulated litera- the ballot of Prop 3, a citizen-driven constitutional amendment
ture making fictionalized claims about links between cancer and that protected abortion rights in the state. Whitmer and her fellow
abortion. Republicans used the House floor as a stage to vote Michigan Democrats were unique in that they had been running
again and again to defund Planned Parenthood—understanding on abortion before Dobbs and continued to do so even when, in
that, even as they lost, they sent a dramatic public message to the the months before the November elections, Democratic leaders
very people most motivated to organize for them. and strategists cautioned them to ratchet it down a notch. Their
When the Supreme Court, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health gamble paid off: According to Bonier, the gender gap in Michigan
Organization, overturned Roe last year, it not only inflicted grievous in favor of Democrats was even higher than it had been in 2018,
harm but ensured that the job of protecting abortion rights and when it had hit a historic peak. And Whitmer—or “Big Gretch,” as
access must once again be undertaken legislatively. It’s different she was appreciatively nicknamed by Detroit rapper Gmac Cash in
work than it was in 1972: Medication abortion, data- 2020—was at the forefront of channeling that raw
tracking technology, and hyperpolarization have all ➝ support into an agenda. “I was so associated with the
altered the terrain. But even if that were not the case, 1972: issue I don’t know how you pull it apart” from other
Representative
Democrats would have no useful road map for this Shirley Chisholm
aspects of the platform, she said.
moment, no muscle memory. Because, in fact, the speaking at an abortion Big Gretch, 51, has Ava Gardner bone structure,
party has simply not applied much legislative muscle demonstration a flat midwestern cadence, and a fondness for
to this task before. in Union Square. athletic metaphor (before politics, she had
But Dobbs also catalyzed a revolution in the politics planned to go into sports broadcasting). She is
of abortion. And now it’s not just some loud activists widely referred to as a possible future presidential
and marginalized lady pols telling Democrats to move quickly and contender. And she is selling abortion as both a practical, voter-
assertively to figure out how to make abortion available again across friendly issue and an inalienable human right at the center of a
the country: It’s voters. Voters who just saved the Democratic Party galaxy of related concerns.
during a midterm year in which inflation and gas prices should At the Michigan State of the State, she did not treat abortion as
have meant a drubbing for the incumbent president’s party but Democrats often do, as if it’s slightly icky and private, damp and sad.
instead resulted in a historic success for Democrats, who retained She did not cordon it off in its own dolorous corner separate from
control of all their state legislatures, flipped Republican chambers all the rousing stuff about creating a mighty Michigan economy.
in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and, at the federal level, gained a Rather, she led with it, weaving it into a business-forward spiel
Senate seat and kept House losses to the single digits. called “Make It in Michigan,” suggesting that prioritizing abor-
Multiple factors, including a slate of ghoulish right-wing can- tion rights and LGBTQ+ protections would help bring businesses
didates, helped Democrats, but there is no question that abortion and expertise back to her former manufacturing state. States with

previous spread: Buttons by Emily Oberman and Laura Berglund, Renee Freiha, Samantha Infante, Mira Khandpur, Anastasia Kharchenko,
Katherine Killeffer, Kaycie Lyn Matsukado, Elizabeth McMann, Mira Steinzor, Meredith Zerby: Pentagram.
anti-abortion and anti-trans laws, she told her audience, “are losing
talent and investment because bigotry is bad for business.” Then
she went ahead and cast these issues as universal family values.
“Every parent,” Whitmer said, “Republican, Democrat, or indepen-
dent, wants our kids to stay in Michigan. Let’s give them reasons
to stay; let’s … protect funda-
mental freedoms.”
The speech was aggres-
sive to the point of being in-
“I don’t think
Democrats
your-face competitive, like a
football game except about
civil rights (“I want anyone
have fully
living in a state that wants
to control your body or deny
your existence to know that
processed that
Michigan has a place for
you … I’m looking at you,
Ohio and Indiana!”). It was
a little discombobulating for
anyone who has grown up in a world in which
politicians—even those who cared about pro-
this country
is now 10 to
tecting abortion rights and access—simply
did not speak this way. Whitmer’s commit-
ment to reproductive freedom was integrated
15 percent more
into everything we have come to recognize as
political meat and potatoes (the creation of a
pre-K program and affordable college options,
pro-choice
for example), and she spoke with the winking
assuredness of a politician on the winning side.
Spending time with Michigan’s newly elected
governing majority is a little like landing on a
planet where no white men are in charge. When
than it was
before Dobbs.”
Whitmer stood at the dais, she was flanked by
Joe Tate, the first Black Speaker of the Michigan
House; Winnie Brinks, the first female majority
leader; and Garlin Gilchrist, entering his second
term alongside Whitmer as the state’s first Black
lieutenant governor. Michigan’s attorney general is Dana Nessel,
the first openly gay person elected to statewide office there, and the
secretary of state is Jocelyn Benson.
This group’s version of Democratic politics feels different from
what has come before. That’s not because it’s left-leaning, exactly;
when Whitmer first ran for governor in 2018, she was the moder-
ate in the Democratic primary. The day after her speech, she told
me, “I think 80 percent of what I said last night was not partisan,
not ideological. It was economic development, skills training, and
infrastructure.” It’s a fascinating experiment: What if you wrested
away issues that Democrats have long ceded as fundamentally
feminized, fringe, radical, or dangerous and presented them as
unapologetic centerpieces of a forward-looking, morally robust
economic agenda?
This experiment was born in a recent historical moment that
has gone underappreciated in the political press: the galvanization
of all kinds of voters, but especially women, in response to the
presidency of Donald Trump. Often mocked as being part of the
pussy-hat-wearing hashtag resistance, a new generation of politi-
cians and voters is in the midst of correcting one of the Democratic
Party’s signature failures of the Roe era: its lack of investment in
state government.
Since the mid-’80s, anti-abortion Republicans have run for
unsexy offices on school boards and city councils, building the army
of legislators who soon controlled courts and voter rolls, who made
punitive state laws and gerrymandered districts in order to keep
their majorities—all while the Democratic Party was distracted by
22 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
the shiny objects of the presidency and the Senate. For decades,
Democrats in state races have been wildly outspent by their oppo-
nents. But Hillary Clinton’s loss spurred a mass awakening that
swept through the 2018 elections and gave Democrats the biggest
midterm victory since the Ford administration, putting a historic
new class of candidates in office.
Mallory McMorrow was an industrial designer
who had worked for Hot Wheels and Gawker
before moving to Royal Oak, Michigan, in 2015.
In the week after Trump’s victory, she was sent
the viral video of fifth-graders chanting “Build
that wall” at a Latina student. It was from Royal
Oak Elementary, the polling place where she’d
cast her vote for Clinton. “I Googled, ‘How to run
for office,’” she told me, and she was not alone.
“There was one city in my district where you could
vote a woman ticket all the way down to county
commissioner, which was very cool.” McMorrow
flipped her state-senate
district in 2018; she is now
majority whip and the
star of a viral video of her
own: Her vigorous 2022
rebuttal to a senate col-
league who had accused
her of “grooming” school-
children has been watched
by 16 million people. “Our
class, we’re never going
to forget the 2016 cycle,”
McMorrow told me.
Laurie Pohutsky, a
microbiologist working at
start-ups in Ann Arbor,
was 28 when Clinton lost to
Trump. “There were things
that became clear to me
post-2016,” she told me, sitting in her office at the State Capitol,
which is decorated with old Ms. magazine covers and action figures
of Clinton, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren. She went to the Women’s
March in Washington and heard a speaker exhort those gathered
there to run for school board, city council, anything that might be
a good fit. “I remember this feeling of dread just washing over me,”
Pohutsky said, “because I was like, I know that I am going to end up
doing this, but it sounds impossible.” Pohutsky flipped her gerry-
mandered House district from red to blue on a campaign that led
with reproductive rights and state single-payer health care.
2018 was the year that Whitmer, who had served in the state
legislature, was first elected governor. It was the year that Nessel
and Benson came to office. (Nessel’s campaign, launched at the
height of Me Too, featured an ad that opened, “When you’re
choosing Michigan’s next attorney general, ask yourself this: Who
can you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional set-
ting? Is it the candidate who doesn’t have a penis?”) It was the year
that Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, Elissa Slotkin, and Haley Stevens
were elected to the House of Representatives. The Democratic
power structure in Michigan is overwhelmingly the class of 2018.
“Gretchen and Jocelyn and Dana were elected, and we went
from one Democratic woman in the state senate to eight,”
said State Senator Erika Geiss. Geiss, who is 52, was born in
Brooklyn. Her grandparents, she said, had been close friends of
Shirley Chisholm’s. “I guess I must have been breathing all this
in,” she said with a laugh. As a state representative in 2017, Geiss
took a hard look at a 1931 law criminalizing abortion that was
still on the books and could spring back to life if Roe fell. She
thought it might be a good idea to repeal it.
“There was pushback” from others in her party, Geiss said,
“because the belief was ‘You don’t want to remind them that it
exists.’” The messaging gap, she said, originated with “higher-ups”
who felt that after Roe, “‘We don’t have to deal with this now.’ The
conversation stopped.” And with it, any attempt to craft a coherent
worldview that might encompass other political necessities. “Child
care never happened,” said Geiss. “The Equal Rights Amendment
still hasn’t happened. There are all these things attached to the issue
of abortion, and we got lazy.” This willful lassitude, she said, was part
of a broad Democratic blindness to the right-wing anti-abortion
project and the ways in which state laws were rendering Roe ever
less protective for millions. “trap laws, mandatory waiting periods,
requiring ultrasounds—it’s been so insidious,” she said.
After getting elected to the state senate in 2018, Geiss reintro-
duced her bill to repeal the 1931 law, partnering with Pohutsky in
the House. They were told by the Legislative Service Bureau that,
if they were serious, they’d need to take a close look at everything
the 1931 bill touched.
That included rules rooted in so-called Comstock regulations,
conceived in the 1870s, that made it illegal to circulate material
deemed “obscene, lewd or lascivious”; in Michigan, the remnants of
Comstock applied to language not only about abortion and contra-
ception but relief from menstrual cramps and hot flashes. There
were economic fines placed on schools and universities that men-
tioned abortion—a startling genre of free-speech restriction reig-
niting around the country.
By 2022, with the conservative-led Supreme Court strongly sig-
naling that Roe was a goner, the 1931 law was on everyone’s radar,
and Whitmer made the unusual choice to file a lawsuit asking her
state’s Supreme Court to find it unconstitutional. The lawsuit was
far from a sure bet. When I asked her at the time whether she was
anxious about taking a risk on an issue Democrats had historically
treated gingerly, she told me, “The scariest thing is not taking action.”
Preemptive legal maneuvering by Whitmer and Nessel meant
that after Dobbs, the 1931 law, which would have made advertising
abortion services a misdemeanor and providing one a felony, did
not take hold. This had tangible consequences for the human
beings who live in Michigan: There was not a single 24-hour period
between Dobbs and the November election during which you could
not get abortion care in the state.
In the aftermath of Dobbs, activists on the ground immediately
started gathering signatures for a ballot amendment. Bonier recalled
that he landed in Michigan within days of the ruling: “I got out of a
car in this little town and had someone walk up right away to ask if
I would sign the petition. They were organized, and they were ready.”
Prop 3 gathered a historic 750,000-plus signatures, far more
than enough to put it on the midterm ballot. Yet as the election
approached, consultants, opinion columnists, and Democratic
Party insiders were telling Michigan Democrats to stop leaning so
heavily into abortion and instead focus on economics. Gilchrist said,
“It was ridiculous. Reporters would ask us, ‘What do you think is
more important to people? Abortion or things being expensive?’ It’s
like, Do you have children? I have three. They’re expensive.”
“I don’t have a poker face, so you could see immediately that
I was irritated by those questions,” Whitmer concurred. “If you
don’t think abortion is an economic issue, you probably don’t have
a uterus. I said that at one point, and my communications staff was
like, ‘Oh God.’”
Prop 3 won by 13 points, enshrining a broadly defined right to
“reproductive freedom” in the state’s constitution. The referendum
did a shade better than Whitmer, who beat Tudor Dixon—an anti-
abortion zealot who argued that a forced pregnancy in the case
of rape would entail “healing through that baby”—by 11 points.
But among the many lessons of the past 50 years is that stop-
ping at a single victory is a mistake. Geiss acknowledged that
there is no model for how to make expansive abortion protections
legislatively. “We have to build it,” she said. One of the first steps
is cleaning out all the corners and crevices into where abortion
criminalization has crept over the years. “We need to go through
with a fine-tooth comb and figure out all the other places it
touches and repeal those: all of those things that stymie access to
abortion and the ability of childbearing people to safely get to a
provider or have access to medication abortion,” she said.
“Any right that is conferred by basis of substantive due processes
is now very much at risk,” said Whitmer. “That’s why it’s not just
getting the abortion zombie laws off the books; it’s any law that
penalizes same-sex relationships, marital privacy, contraception.
All of these things could very well fall, depending on when the
Supreme Court’s got these cases teed up. We’re taking a fresh
look at everything that’s been codified, whether it’s in practice or
enforced or not.”
That they have a plan and a mandate does not mean Democratic
leadership in Michigan has an easy path ahead. Less than three
weeks after Whitmer’s State of the State, a shooter killed three
people and wounded five on Michigan State’s campus. Whitmer
pressed forward with plans to enact universal background checks
and red-flag laws. Like abortion protections, these are measures
supported by clear majorities of voters, but also like abortion
laws, spending political capital on them often provokes extremist
responses, a nontheoretical reality in Michigan, where Whitmer
was the subject of a violent kidnapping plot in 2020 and armed
protesters breached the State Capitol months before the January 6
insurrection. In 2021, the Michigan state chair of the Republican
Party referred to Whitmer, Nessel, and Benson as “three witches”
who should be “burning at the stake.” Everyone is keenly aware of
the high-wire act they are performing. Pohutsky has a tattoo on the
inside of her wrist that reads don’t look down.
More mundanely, Whitmer and her colleagues are aware of the
evanescence of their authority. “We can’t make the mistake that
predecessors did,” Whitmer told me, “that just because we’ve made
an advancement that it’s the new floor.” Majorities change. Leaders
move on. Whitmer says she’s working with an eye toward what
happens when “you get a different legislature and governor, that
they don’t try to bring that back to life again.”
Perhaps this too is a generational shift, the awareness of the
fallibility of our governing institutions, which means making the
most of the time in power and preparing for what follows. “We
amended the constitution of Michigan; we are safe for now,” said
Whitmer. “But if there’s a national ban, we’re back in the soup.
We’ve got to make sure people understand that this fight is not
over. It is happening state by state right now, but it’s going to
continue to be a national fight. People in solidly blue states who
think, Abortion is safe in my town or in my state? It’s not.”
What is happening in Michigan —an empowered
Democratic-controlled government, a mechanism for changing the
state constitution via direct referendum, a leadership class com-
mitted to adopting abortion rights as a central plank of its agenda—
obviously cannot be replicated everywhere, which leaves millions
of people in red states in particular without access to abortion care.
These elements are also notably missing in Washington, D.C.,
where the onus is on federal lawmakers to protect and expand abor-
tion care in a terrifying post-Roe world. Democrats must remain on
top of the onslaught of draconian restrictions in the wake of Dobbs,
enforce every regulatory option through the executive branch, and
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 23
give the appearance to voters of fighting fiercely while working in
the minority in the House, against an insuperable filibuster in the
Senate and in the shadow of a judiciary shaped by Trump. And
they must do it all within the context of a federal party structure in
which—unlike Michigan—the next generation is most assuredly
not yet in charge.
It is chaos. Mayhem in the face of mayhem, all part of the anti-
abortion right’s goal of confusing and stupefying the opposition. If
Michigan felt like a different political planet, Washington offered
bumpy reentry to the gravitational limitations of Earth.
Central to the tensions in Washington is the fact that Joe Biden,
the president tasked with leading his party into this potentially era-
defining battle, is a Catholic boy from Scranton, first sworn into
the Senate weeks before Roe was decided in 1973, who spent the
early decades of his career as an opponent of abortion rights. He
was one of several Democratic senators who helped pass the Hyde
Amendment, which has since the 1970s banned federal insurance
programs from paying for abortion, making the procedure essen-
tially inaccessible to poor women. Biden has worked mightily to
evolve on the issue, becoming more solidly pro-choice than many
could have imagined. Though he was caught flat-footed by Dobbs,
he has since empowered people in his administration to make
fighting back a full-time job. “The administration has shifted a lot,”
said Deirdre Schifeling, political director at the ACLU, who has
worked at Planned Parenthood and in the Biden administration.
“It used to be hard to get a lot of focus on repro inside the admin-
istration, but after Dobbs, that’s really changed.” Jennifer Klein, co-
chair of the White House’s Gender Policy Council, said there are
people in the White House who are “waking up every day thinking
about this.”
It also remains clear that Biden doesn’t really care to talk a lot
about abortion, let alone hold it up as a central value. In February,
he gave his finest State of the Union—pugilistic and playful and
bold—in which he somehow managed to choke out only four
bland sentences about
abortion 5,200 words into a
“I am so sick
7,200-word speech.
Maybe Biden’s lack of per-
formed enthusiasm doesn’t
of people
matter. “It just matters what
he does,” said Schifeling. “And
he has given the green light
talking about
for the administration to do
whatever they can actually
legally do to facilitate access.”
Perhaps most con-
sequentially, Biden has
a 30-year plan
for abortion.
played catch-up with the
Republicans on filling the
judiciary, appointing more
judges in the federal courts
I want to
than any president since
John Kennedy. The White House has also taken
meaningful action on abortion access itself, most
mifepristone—a form of medication abortion—
have a two-
notably in January, when Biden’s FDA ordered that
year plan
be sold at retail pharmacies. In December, the
Department of Justice cleared postal workers to
deliver medication abortion through the mail,
for abortion.”
even to abortion-restricted states. In a reversal of
its previous policy, the Department of Veterans
Affairs now provides abortion counseling and some
abortions. The administration’s current priority is
fighting a lawsuit brought in Texas, to be decided by
24 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
virulently anti-abortion judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, which is trying
to force mifepristone off shelves based on the farcical claim that
the medication wasn’t tested rigorously enough before its approval
23 years ago.
In mid-March, Biden put out the third budget in a row that did
not include the Hyde Amendment (though the budget will not pass
the Republican-controlled House without it). This came after years
of pressure from activists and progressive Democrats, including
Barbara Lee. “We negotiated that,” Lee told me of the long struggle
to excise Hyde from the budget. “His people were squeamish, but
we got it done.”
Lee is sympathetic to the president’s position. “It was difficult for
him, but he has moved on it,” she said. In 2021, after she publicly
told her own story of having had an abortion as a teen, Biden
phoned her. “We talked about him being a Catholic, me being raised
a Catholic,” she said. “It takes time. To have him say he supports
repealing Hyde? Look, this man … he didn’t quite understand. I’m
not defending him, I’m just telling what I know.”
Yet there remains a significant disconnect between a party that
just won on this issue and a president who is constitutionally inca-
pable of giving it the warm, expressive embrace the moment calls
for, of showing voters that he understands the post-Dobbs landscape
to be a legal perversion, a four-alarm public-health emergency, a
chilling rollback of human rights, and even—in mercenary terms—a
tremendously rich political opportunity. The pollster Tresa Undem
found that Dobbs had the biggest impact on women of reproductive
age (18 to 44), an integral part of the Democratic base. “Few policy
events have such a profound personal impact,” she said, emphasizing
that abortion is a visceral, energizing, potent electoral force. It thus
carries a danger for Democrats: For young voters—some of whom
went to the polls for the first time because of Dobbs—a perceived
lack of commitment from the people they voted for “may demotivate
them” for future elections, Undem said.
Perhaps the administration’s loudest voice on abortion belongs
to Vice-President Kamala Harris. When she was
competing against Biden in the 2020 presiden-
tial primary, Harris proposed that states wishing
to pass restrictions on reproductive-health care
come before the Justice Department for review
and approval. It was a pre-clearance approach that
would have never made it through the filibuster and
would surely have been ruled unconstitutional by
the Supreme Court, as in Shelby County v. Holder,
another pre-clearance proposition. But it was inven-
tive and bellicose, the kind of flex that seems a more
natural match for this moment than Biden’s labored
evolution. Even before Dobbs, in the wake of Texas’s
2021 SB8 bounty-hunting abortion ban, Harris had
convened abortion providers at the White House,
likely the first such gathering in history.
Sources inside and outside the administration
told me that Harris, who cam-
paigned energetically on abor-
tion through the fall of 2022,
regularly pushes the White
House to exhaustively explore
every legal avenue and has met
with more than 200 state and
local leaders on the topic, which
one administration source
credits with reaffirming her
sense that abortion remains
a top priority for Democratic
voters on the ground.
 Over the phone, Harris described to me how “bla-
tantly paternalistic and offensive to the autonomy of
women” the post-Dobbs reality is for millions. “As a
former prosecutor who specialized in violence against
women and children, knowing what it means for
women who have endured a violation of their body,
depriving women of their autonomy and dignity? All
these issues cut to the core of so much of the work
I’ve done my entire career,” she said. When I asked
whether the conventional wisdom in Washington last
fall that abortion might not motivate voters gave her
pause, she replied, “My perspective was … well, not
a polite word that I would speak. That’s how I felt.”
Harris is at ease, in a way her boss simply is not,
with casting abortion as “an attribute of democ-
racy,” as she put it to me, one linked to other moral
and patriotic obligations. On the 50th anniversary
of Roe in January, Harris delivered a speech in
Tallahassee, Florida, two miles from Governor Ron
DeSantis’s mansion, in which she connected abor-
tion rights to the promises made in the Declaration
of Independence: “These rights were not bestowed
on us. They belong to us. As Americans.” In oblique reference to daunting. “It’s a tremendous amount of pressure because there are
DeSantis, she told me, “These extremist so-called leaders, what gall a lot of solutions that sound really nice,” said Klein. “But my job is,
they have to talk about the vanguard of freedom when they con- was, and will continue to be to evaluate everything and figure out
tinue to take away the right to reproductive freedom.” whether it’s legally viable and whether it would actually work to
help people, or if in the long run it would do more harm than good.”
But caution has its drawbacks: After all, the alternative can’t be
The tension between a calcified leadership that to let Republicans run rampant. Warren emphasized that “dozens
remains ambivalent about making abortion access truly central of lawmakers, legal experts, and advocates have put forward legal
to a Democratic rhetorical and policy framework, and frustrated and impactful ideas for executive actions to protect abortion
politicians who see the fight for reproductive autonomy as both access” and applauded the president for having “already adopted
a moral and strategic linchpin, is evident in the White House’s and implemented many of them.” She went on, “With the health
relationship to Democrats in Congress. and welfare of millions of women in jeopardy, he should continue
Although Democrats may not have a plan, there is no short- to act boldly and use every tool at his disposal to the fullest extent
age of ideas. In February, Texas representative Lizzie Fletcher possible.” In the more pointed words of one congressional aide,
introduced a bill that would protect patients’ constitutional right “Democrats need to spend time demonstrating that we’re willing
to cross state lines to obtain abortion care. Senator Tina Smith to fight like hell to protect women’s rights and less time coming up
and Representative Cori Bush have reintroduced their bill to pro- with reasons not to act.”
tect access to medication abortion. Smith is also thinking about Especially now that it is clear the triumph of Dobbs did not
codifying legal access to contraception ahead of any potential roll- break the stride of powerful factions on the anti-abortion right.
back of the Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut. In Kansas, which voted overwhelmingly to protect abortion rights
And Senator Elizabeth Warren regularly pelts the adminis- last summer, a Republican lawmaker has suggested that indi-
tration with public calls to exercise more executive authority by, vidual cities might criminalize it. The Florida legislature is taking
among other things, invoking the prep Act (an emergency health up a six-week abortion ban, a move that would cut off access to
law that would enable providers in blue states to dispense medica- millions of patients in the American South. In South Carolina,
tion abortion to women in red states); ensuring that health infor- some Republicans have sought to classify abortion as homicide.
mation and data cannot be shared with law enforce- In response to threats from right-wing attorneys
ment; and instructing federal agencies to explore the general, Walgreens announced it was preemptively
➝

2022:
possibility of financing travel, child care, and vouchers Michigan governor deciding not to stock mifepristone in certain states,
to those who need to travel for abortion care. including some where abortion remains legal. Texas
P H OTO G R A P H : J E F F KO WA L S K Y / A F P / G E T T Y I M AG E S

Gretchen Whitmer
Some of these proposals are the subject of intense made a big bet on wants to rescind tax breaks for companies that pay
behind-the-scenes examination at the White House, abortion in the for their employees’ abortion care, and one man’s
midterms—and won.
which has rejected or expressed skepticism about lawsuit against his ex-wife’s friends for helping her
several of the showiest notions—including the prep get an abortion may create a model for criminal pros-
Act—on the grounds that they might ultimately create more danger ecution. In Nebraska, a teenager and her mother being criminally
for patients than they would alleviate, by inviting legal challenges tried for getting abortion care are facing data evidence that was
in conservative courts that could leave patients with less access to handed over by Facebook.
care than they have now, as in the Texas case currently in front of This omnidirectional storm invites some kind of unified response
Kacsmaryk. “The other side is trying to do everything they can to from congressional Democrats, but the caucus has not historically
limit access, almost precisely because this is where most women been capable of asserting itself on the issue. “Before Dobbs, we just
are trying to get abortions post-Dobbs and because of the success hadn’t had all Democrats voting to protect abortion,” said Pramila
that we have had in increasing access to mifepristone,” said Klein. Jayapal, head of the Progressive Caucus. “It has not been a clear
Figuring out the balance of risk, reward, and consequence is winner to the party. Often when we raised (Continued on page 90)

m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 25
 The

Are
SMART.
The

Are
SINCERE.
And the

Is
ALWAYS
.
Emily Henry
cracked the modern
ROMANCE
NOVEL.

By ALLISON P. DAVIS
Photograph by Holly Andres

26

OON AFTER
Emily Henry left Hope College, a small,
Christian-values-lite school in a tiny town
in Michigan, she found herself living
back in Cincinnati, trapped in her first
postcollege job doing technical writing
for the city’s phone-and-cable company.
She’d always liked creative writing, but it
seemed as plausible a career choice as her
childhood dream of being a WNBA player.
However, she discovered while spending
her days writing company manuals and
handbooks for set-top boxes that nothing
makes the creative spirit bloom more than
a mind-numbing job.
So she woke up early before work and
started churning out a YA novel. When
it was done, she Googled agents until she
found Lana Popovic Harper, who agreed to
represent her. Henry wrote four books in
three years, teenage coming-of-age stories
full of darkish magic realism. The books
were well received and sold modestly,
but the back-to-back pace left her feeling
burned out and uninspired. “I didn’t have
much more to say about teenagers at that
point,” she explains, settling into her writing
couch at her home in Cincinnati, legs
crossed, elbows on knees; in the position of
eternal adolescence.
She was also approaching 30 and found
herself wrestling with the bumps and lumps
of a second coming of age, one that was a lot
less optimistic than her first. This was 2019.
Faced with another nail-biting presidential
election, and aging, and an increasingly
sedentary lifestyle, Henry realized how
little control she had over her world. “I was
not doing great,” she says. “I wasn’t prop-
erly medicated at the time, which was part
28 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
of it. I was just so stressed out and anxious.”
She’d always preferred darker stories and
sci-fi to explore existential questions, but
suddenly she couldn’t bear the darkness.
She had writer’s block, so she decided to try
her hand at something lighter.
“It was just my secret little thing I would
go into my office and write,” she says. In
the story she eventually produced, January
Andrews, a millennial romance writer who
can’t write, is unlucky in love and grieving
the death of her father. Too broke to pay
rent, she moves into the lake house he left
her on the shores of Lake Michigan, where
she is reunited with her college nemesis,
Augustus Everett, a successful “serious
literary writer” who also can’t write his
next book, about survivors of a local death
cult. Naturally, they fall in love (and finish
their books).
It’s a standard romance, but embedded
in the enemies-to-lovers, small-town, and
opposites-attract tropes is a not-so-subtle
manifesto dressed up as smoldering banter.
January and Augustus have “will they or
won’t they” arguments about the merits
of romance that seem to address a body of
invisible, internalized critics whom Henry
foresaw dismissing her novel as trash.
Henry writes this rant for her heroine:
If you swapped out all my Jessicas
for Johns do you know what you’d
get? Fiction. Just fiction … but
somehow by being a woman who
writes about women, I’ve eliminated
half of the Earth’s population from
my potential readers, and you
know what? I don’t feel ashamed
of that. I feel pissed.
An impassioned prelude to a prelude to
a kiss (things burn slow in EmHen world),
it was also Henry’s way of reassuring her-
self that wanting to write romance in all
its sincere, vulnerable glory was worthy of
respect. In the end, January not only gets
the guy but learns that he’s always respected
her writing, even when she thought he
didn’t. Even when she didn’t.
Although there’s a happy ending and
a love story, the resulting book was a lot
heavier than she expected. She meant
to write something purely lighthearted,
and she wound up with grief and familial
betrayal and cults, but also kissing. When
Henry started writing it, she saved the
document as “Beach Read.” She’d intended
to change the title and then realized it
served as a cheeky joke about “our precon-
ceptions about the genre.”
When Henry was done, she put the
manuscript away, taking it out just once
to show to Harper, who liked it but didn’t
really know what to do with it. It was hard
to find a place in the market for a romance
that prominently features a B-plot about a
death cult.
A lot can happen in a two-year span.
Henry went on Zoloft and started to feel
better, and the pandemic forced millions
inside, where they began losing their
minds in their own unique ways. Among
the trapped were a legion of Gen-Zers,
some recently graduated and craving light-
hearted, nonacademic reading, some just
depressed and seeking nourishing distrac-
tions. Millennials had tried decorating
with soft pink throw pillows and basic
acts of maintenance they called “adulting.”
These new adults looked around and saw
an inhospitable world that was hard to
manage, inhabited by people so jaded by
a decade of slogging through swipes on
dating apps that they’d conditioned them-
selves into near psychopathy instead of
admitting they just wanted to spoon.
Amid the loneliness and disconnection
and confusing sexual politics, romance—a
genre that honored big feelings and crying
jags and a nice, soft world where people
were free to be corny and earnest and
direct—became a balm. Once denigrated
as a guilty pleasure for the desperate, horny
housewife, to Gen-Zers, romance wasn’t
embarrassing at all. In fact, they loved it.
And when Beach Read finally came out in
May 2020, those young readers put their
hearts in Henry’s hands. She has since sold
2.4 million books collectively and spent a
cumulative 145 weeks on the New York
Times best-sellers list. Her second book,
People We Meet on Vacation, was recently
optioned for film. Her fourth romance
novel, Happy Place, comes out next
month. She’s already working on her fifth.
LOVE IS EMBARRASSING. Every aspect
of it requires maximum humiliation. And
while it’s human nature to love, to want
love, it’s mortifying to be caught in the
act of it: putting yourself out there for it,
asking for it. It is embarrassing to receive
it, to open yourself up to it. Love is like a
high-school bully, poking at tender spots,
forcing a response, reducing us to—what?
Softies! Simps! People who want to gaze
and smile and sigh and melt. Who feel a
spark and sit with it long enough to let it
catch fire. Who luxuriate in silences and
sexual tension. Who exchange little kisses,
not just in dark bars but on the street, in
the grocery store, in front of their friends.
Who hold hands. Who nickname. Who
interlace fingers and stroke hair and make
up excuses to brush their person’s eyebrow
because they like to touch their person’s
eyebrow, but that’s so weird, haha. It’s all
so cringey! To call someone “your person.”
To be caught singing a little song because
you’re in love. Or doing a little dance …
together? Oh my God. Touching knees?
Biting lips? Having your special li’l nook
under their arm? Tearing up over gestures
both grand and mundane? Oh my God,
please, wow, nope, don’t look at me.
Romance? Is there a witness-protection
program for little bitches? Sign me up.
“But that’s the joy of romance,” exclaims
Henry. “Dating is humiliating. Sex is funny
and embarrassing. I think there’s so much
beauty in having a genre that’s like, You’re
going on the most vulnerable journey a
human can go on with a fake person. You’re
going to imagine what it’s like to fall in
love.” When Henry started writing, she
had to—and, she admits, still has to—“race
through those puppies” in order to over-
come the embarrassment of writing about
love enough to write about it. She had to
learn to manipulate fights and maintain
blind hope in the face of heartbreak, squirm
through earnestness, and, finally, land the
big declaration that leads to a believable,
satisfying happily ever after, contractually
guaranteed. She finished that first manu-
script in six weeks, writing so quickly she
left sentences unfinished. She had to write
the way people in romance novels fall for
each other: breathlessly, jumping in fast
enough to get swept away before they start
to second-guess themselves.
Henry is in the periwinkle vintage-diner-
inspired kitchen, rocking back and forth
on her red-socked feet, trying to make an
espresso while keeping up a steady flow
of conversation. She lives in a friendly cul-
de-sac on the outskirts of Cincinnati in the
mid-century-modern rancher she shares
with her husband and a deaf American bully
named Dottie, a cookies-and-cream-colored
“goblin angel” who greets you enthusiasti-
cally (but can’t hear when you ask her to
stop licking your face). She chats about The
Bachelorette, then interrupts herself to won-
der if she’s doing the espresso right, then
interrupts herself to explain what kind of
milk she has, then to tell me she vacuumed
earlier, then cuts herself off one last time to
assure me the lid of the garbage can isn’t
gross. She will later DM me to apologize for
making a mediocre espresso.
As she flits about the kitchen, she’s her
own novels’ Everywoman come to life:
a lanky honey blonde in blue jeans and a
pink-and-yellowish checked sweater. The
type of woman who manages to still pull off
a 2009 wispy-bang topknot, who projects
“real,” and “lovely,” and “charmingly
goofy” without it feeling like a bit. She’s
like the coolest friend at the Nashvegas
bachelorette party.
On Instagram, she promotes her books
with heartfelt captions about what the
work means to her and plugs the books of
other romance novelists. She posts photos
of Dottie with self-deprecating captions
that insinuate the dog thinks she’s a dumb
human. She likes bright and whimsical
prints and red lipstick and bold winged
eyeliner. She’s aware her tiny nose ring
might look like a booger, so her bio reads,
“it’s just my nose ring.” During a round of
press for her first book, she was interviewed
by Entertainment Weekly, and the resulting
headline was “Emily Henry’s Beach Read
was built on yogurt and good lighting.”
She was slightly mortified that she seemed
so boring. She does love yogurt, but more
than that she “loves not making decisions,”
she explains before admitting, “Earlier
today, I was, like, cleaning to impress you,
and I started marching around the house
chanting, ‘Yogurt break! Yogurt break!’
Then I went to the fridge, and I had one
yogurt left, and I was like, I hope this
doesn’t come up because I’m going to look
like a fraud.”
Once DENIGRATED as a
guilty pleasure for the desperate,
HORNY HOUSEWIFE,
to Gen-Zers, romance wasn’t
embarrassing at all.
In fact, they LOVED IT.
Henry has since realized that this accessi-
bility and familiarity, bordering on basic, is
sort of her superpower. When she launched
her Substack last year, she called it Emily’s
Grocery List; the first post was an extended
riff on, you guessed it, why she likes yogurt
and the agony of having her tastes and
personality reduced to “Yogurt Queen of
the Ohio River Valley,” but, hoping to be
useful, she also shared two recommenda-
tions for yogurts she likes. Her characters
talk like she talks. (“Is there anything bet-
ter than iced coffee and a bookstore on a
sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee
and a bookstore on a rainy day,” says Nora,
the protagonist in her third romance novel,
Book Lovers.) Their worlds are littered with
familiar, just-hip-enough modern prod-
ucts (they sip from Estelle wine glasses,
for example), and the clothes they wear
are Nordstrom accessible, not SSENSE
intimidating. They shop at Trader Joe’s.
You sense that, like Henry, they absolutely
listen to Taylor Swift. In fact, these books
give off the energy of having been written
in a multiverse where Swift didn’t pick up
a guitar and instead chose romance novels
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
as the medium to express her yearnings.
As with a good Swift song, someone could
read her books and feel comforted by the
fact that a woman who really likes yogurt
can be seen and chosen and adored by a
perfectly calibrated love interest.
“I’ve very, very recently realized that
every time I put out a book, I have basi-
cally the same fear right beforehand,
which is how the heroine will be received,”
says Henry. “It’s funny. It’s always a differ-
ent reason.” She was worried that readers
would be annoyed that January was so
emotional and cried a lot. She worried that
people would think Poppy from People We
Meet on Vacation told too many jokes, or
consider Nora from Book Lovers a bitch,
or find her latest protagonist, Harriet
from Happy Place, “too spineless” or a
“people pleaser,” she explains. “There was
a moment where I just came full circle and
my head popped off and rolled across the
floor because I realized, Oh, I’m afraid
of how people see me. It does feel like I’m
putting this little part of myself into these
characters. If people don’t like that thing
about her, reject that thing about her, I am
probably going to take it too personally.
But there’s always women who relate to it.”
Henry pauses and carefully corrects her-
self: “There’s always readers, regardless of
gender, who relate to these characters.”
The relatability tour continues as we
move from the kitchen through the rest of
the house, full of mid-century décor that’s
slightly more whimsical than West Elm:
lots of records and vintage furniture, bright
printed area rugs. Wooden birds hang on
one wall in a flying V formation; a mural
painted by Henry’s friend is on another.
Each day, after Wordle and Spelling Bee
confirms her genius, Henry starts writing
from her living room, lying on her couch
like a frail Victorian poetess except with
a laptop on her chest instead of a piece of
parchment. She’ll rotate couches when she
wants a different view: the fire, the yard.
Sometimes she’ll move to the guest bed-
room, where there’s a walking treadmill
and some hand weights. Only occasion-
29
ally does she work from the emerald-green
velvet couch in her office, which func-
tions more as a trophy room: boxes of her
books and shelves lined with international
editions. She points out titles in Polish,
French, Italian, and Spanish. “It’s my ver-
sion of Duolingo,” she jokes. She avoids the
room when she’s trying to work; the bound
and complete copies just taunt her with
her own success. “Every time I’m writing a
book, I keep thinking, I don’t know about
this one,” she jokes. She’s sort of waiting for
the flop.
T WASN’T UNTIL after she began
writing Beach Read that Henry
started reading more romance:
research, mostly, to find her place
in it. Romance is a parachute-size
genre, big enough to fit any and all
desires. Within that vastness, it splits off
into many branches, the biggest of which
are contemporary romance, historical
romance, and paranormal romance, catego-
ries that are distinct enough that, for exam-
ple, when writer Jayne Ann Krentz strays
from her usual contemporary romance,
she uses different pen names (Amanda
Quick for historical and Jayne Castle for
paranormal). Within those buckets, there
are sub-subgenres (suspense, Regency era,
monster) and sub-sub-subgenres (kidnap-
ping, female rake, werewolf) and on and on
until you find your hyperspecific yum.
Henry’s own journey started with Sally
Thorne’s The Hating Game (an enemies-
to-lovers, workplace-set contemporary
romance that was recently adapted into a
movie) and soon discovered Helen Hoang’s
The Bride Test and Jasmine Guillory’s The
Wedding Date. The books are fun and
frothy, but they also deal with “real stuff,”
she says. The writers can ruminate on ill-
ness or death or grief or other heavy aspects
of life so long as they have the safety net
of a happily ever after. And because they
aren’t set in Regency England, love, sex,
and power dynamics play out in a way that
feels, if not applicable, at least aspirational.
The characters’ problems are familiar, they
look like people in the world (i.e., some of
In an EMHEN BOOK, the men not only
have voices that “undo your
spine like a zipper,” they also GO TO
THERAPY and get on meds.
30 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
them aren’t white, straight, or thin), and
they have jobs and cell phones and listen
to Miley Cyrus and talk about their IUDs
and antidepressants and consent. It isn’t for
everyone (my friend Jen wants no iPhones
or dating-app mishaps in her romance
novels; she wants her bodice ripped), but it
was exactly what Henry needed, and what
she realized she was writing.
Henry was discovering this subgenre
just as Guillory’s books were gaining main-
stream popularity. The spicy romances
(the ones with more fucking) that had
grown in popularity in the 2010s—thanks
both to the rise of e-books, which granted
readers more privacy, and the explosion of
E.L. James and Fifty Shades of Grey—had
waned. These new romance novels had
more emotional buildup, and the nasty,
naughty, freaky stuff happened off the
page. These were the books drawing in
new readers.
Leah Koch, the co-owner of the Ripped
Bodice, a Los Angeles–based romance
bookstore, has noticed these new romance
dabblers, who come in asking for things
they’ve seen on BookTok: Colleen Hoover’s
It Ends With Us or Henry’s Book Lovers.
Articles dissecting the sudden appearance
of Gen Z in the genre come prepared with
the preemptive defense against people who
deride romance—an oft-cited string of stats
tells a story of a hugely profitable, if contin-
uously disrespected, genre (romance novels
generate more than $1 billion each year,
while the rest of the publishing industry’s
sales decline; 46 percent of romance fans
read at least one book a week).
These stories go on to declare that this is
not their mother’s romance. In some cases,
though, it is. What it isn’t is their mother’s
attitude toward romance. These new
readers don’t need to be convinced it’s okay
to read about love. Koch points out that the
“collective consciousness of misogyny in
general” has created a better environment
for romance. “People have a better under-
standing of how previous societal attitudes
about romance were rooted in misogyny,
as opposed to, say, discussions of quality,”
she says. “So more and more women in
general—not only women, but for the most
part—are feeling, I think, more comfortable
reading romance more widely, discussing
romance more widely, and giving less of a
shit about other people’s opinions.”
These readers are also expanding the
philosophical and political benefits of
reading “books with kissing.” Sanjana
Basker is a New York–based grad student
who applies her sex, gender, and women’s-
health studies to review romance novels on
TikTok, where she goes by BaskinSuns. As
she explained recently on the podcast Care
So Much, “The notion of being earnestly
devoted to something is really difficult to
engage with for a lot of people, especially
academics or self-described intellectuals,”
especially in a way that resembles a young
woman’s dramatic and intense emotional
life. “Emotions make people antsy. I think
it makes them uncomfortable to think
about love with any seriousness.” Romance
is all about the willingness to fall and let
yourself be caught, about learning how to
be vulnerable with another person. “If you
read it right, it challenges a lot of ideas and
structural problems,” she said, so long as
people could get over what she’s diagnosed
as “our societal problem with sincerity.”
A Henry fan, Basker tells me what she really
responds to is Henry’s ability to be earnest.
“That earnestness and sincerity is the
thing that sparks off the page,” Basker says.
“You don’t have romance without earnest-
ness and optimism and sincerity. It just
doesn’t work.”
In romance, as in all genre fiction, there
is a contract between the writer and the
reader that the material will go a certain
way. A romance requires a central love story
and a happy ending. Koch adds a third
requirement: The author and the publisher
have to say it’s a romance. (Considering
Normal People, Sally Rooney’s epic love
story, sold some 740,000 trade-paperback
copies even with a Hulu adaptation, while
Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation has
sold over 1 million, these authors may want
to rethink their marketing strategies.)
The current iteration of contemporary
romance, specifically the rom-com Henry
writes, is reminiscent of a genre that fell out
of favor in the early aughts: chick lit. Those
big paperback books with high heels and
knocked-over cocktail glasses on the cover
and women who fight at sample sales and
publicists who flirt with their domineering
bosses. Books by Jane Green and Jennifer
Weiner and Sophie Kinsella that were in
lockstep with a feminism that just loved to
take pole-dancing classes at Crunch Fitness
(but kind of looked down on sex workers).
There was very little explicit sex, but you
knew everyone was getting laid.
“The market is being cyclical on this,”
 explains Sarah Younger, a literary agent
at Nancy Yost who represents several
women’s-fiction authors. “It’s like we lost A Highly Subjective
rom-coms in the film space, and now they’re
getting a chance to live again.” But chick lit
didn’t really die; the genre just “became
pejorative,” as Younger puts it, and so those
kinds of books got hoovered back up into
contemporary romance. “It’s mostly a name PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION
change,” Younger continues. “There are
some updates to how the stories are being
told and what the characters are doing.”
What was relegated to chick lit in lit-
erary fiction is a “gateway” to romance.
Henry offers a gentle, non-alienating
introduction to the genre, a way to decide
if you like romance and want more, like
romance and want more but different, or
hate romance altogether. (My gateway
writer was Green and her 2000 chick-lit
masterpiece, Jemima J. I kept going down
the path, taking hard left turns until I found
my home in dark erotic romance. Welcome.
I’ve lived here for years.) Claire McLaughlin,
a.k.a. Claire Reads Books, a die-hard
romance reader and popular BookTuber,
has noticed more of her friends coming to
Henry and her cohorts like Guillory and
Ali Hazelwood: “It’s been a gateway for a
lot of women who think of themselves as
too smart and then read these books and
think, Oh, I actually like this type of story
too.” She points to one friend who previ-
ously read only “super-hard-core history
stuff” but now identifies as an EmHen fan.
In an EmHen book, the men not only have
voices that “undo your spine like a zipper,”
they not only have “one curl that hangs over
S O U R C E : C I R C A N A B O O K S C A N U. S. T R A D E PA P E R B AC K S A L E S ; CO V E R S : CO U R T E S Y O F P E N G U I N R A N D O M H O U S E
their eye,” they don’t just growl “You fucking
undo me” right before they bone, they also
go to therapy and get on meds, even if they
are from hardy midwestern families. When
a new romance reader comes into the
Ripped Bodice, someone who has encoun-
tered Henry and is looking for more, Koch
will ask for a distillation of what it is they
liked about her books. Is it the banter?
The steady, nice men who see a therapist?
“Books where the hero goes to therapy are
people’s favorite,” says Koch. “When I hear
gaggles of people who come into the store,
someone has read the book and they’re like,
‘Oh my God. You have to read this. The hero
is so cute. He’s such a cinnamon roll’”—a
term borrowed from fan fiction that means
the male love interest is “really sweet, but
he’s not a pushover.”
“Love and respect actually do go hand in
hand,” Henry says, “and I’m not sure that’s
something that was modeled much in our
media growing up. There was even that
whole craze where they were like, ‘Women
need love, and men need respect.’ I need
both, and if I’m choosing, I maybe even
need respect more.”
Ranking of the
Emily Henry
Romantic Oeuvre
1.
(May 2021)
➽ Poppy and Alex
are the new When
Harry Met Sally …,
two BFFs who find
they may be more
than friends when
their vacation turns
into a total disaster.
copies sold as of
march 11, 2023:
1,039,009
2.
HAPPY PLACE
(April 2023)
➽ On a trip to
Maine with their
college friends,
a recently
split couple so
convincingly
pretend to still be
engaged that they
fall back in love.
3.
BEACH READ
(May 2020)
➽ Two depressed
authors in a slump
challenge each other
to finish writing
their books but get
distracted by
how much they want
to make out
with each other.
copies sold:
728,045
4.
BOOK LOVERS
(May 2022)
➽ A cutthroat New
York City literary
agent agrees to spend
the summer in a
small town with her
pregnant sister. She
runs into a grumpy
(but secretly soft)
book editor she hates,
and their professional
beef soon turns into
a sweet Hallmark-
movie romance.
copies sold:
635,312
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
Henry writes in familiar tropes, respect-
fully, whether in People We Meet on Vaca-
tion (city girl, friends to strangers to lovers,
opposites attract, forced proximity, there’s
only one bed) or Book Lovers (enemies to
lovers, fish out of water, small town) or
Happy Place (second chances, fake engage-
ments, forced proximity, there’s only one
bed). “It’s a translation of a translation of a
good rom-com,” explains Maddie Caldwell,
an editor who runs a popular romance book
club at Word Bookstore in Greenpoint.
Henry’s not trying to subvert these tropes,
just wink at them. Caldwell understands the
appeal of the relationships Henry creates.
“They’re really respectful. They’re really
nonconfrontational and unproblematic. It’s
the opposite of Colleen Hoover, who is kind
of digging into the dark places of romance
and letting you be a voyeur into some of the
darker moments, but Emily Henry, I think,
is giving you the Platonic ideal of a relation-
ship right now.”
That ideal is a throwback to the rom-
com virtues of yore, when foreplay wasn’t
an obstacle-free rush to hit the sheets. In
an EmHen book, there won’t be a random
blowjob on page 25, I learned after reading
her books, because you have to emotion-
ally earn the blowjob. For the hard-core
romance readers, the dearth of explicit
sex can be an annoyance—sex is part of
what they come to romance to luxuriate in.
(“I will say, as a romance reader, I do think
that sometimes falling more into the gray
area between romance and relationship fic-
tion, it can get a little bit frustrating,” says
Caroline Green, a.k.a. @salty_caroline_
reads, a San Antonio BookToker. Emily
Henry isn’t who she goes to for sex.) Koch
insists that these relationship-forward
books don’t indicate Gen Z doesn’t like a
horny erotic novel, but, she points out, even
readers fresh off Fifty Shades of Grey tend
to say what they liked most about the book
was the intricate details of a relationship
they might want for themselves.
For Henry, the choice is in part about
trying to avoid the trap of the blasé “smart
cool woman” who’s “allowed to be horny”
but isn’t allowed to mix horniness with
romanticism. She still gets uncomfortable
when she has to go over the mechanics of a
sex scene in detail with the copy editors, she
says. What Henry excels at, though, is the
buildup before the sex: Foreplay begins by
making sure your values align and evolves
with every step, with every date, with every
first kiss, with every boundary clearly set.
Then comes the yearning, the heat-filled
kisses before you wait to retrieve a con-
dom. There are often conversations about
birth control in Henry’s sex scenes because
she likes to have at least one “levelheaded
character.” (Continued on page 89)
31
The

New

Light

There’s something off about LED bulbs—which will soon be,

32 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
 Is

Bad
thanks to a federal ban, the only kind you can buy. by tom scocca
Photograph by Beth Sacca
 T
he lightbulb was flickering over my head. Not the
idealized cartoon lightbulb, the universal symbol for a flash
of inspiration, but a Philips-brand 800-lumen A19 LED bulb.
I’d put one in the bedroom-ceiling fixture only a few months before.
In theory, it should have been the last I would put up there for years,
maybe even a decade. Instead, the bulb was a dim, dull orange,
its levels of brightness visibly fluttering through the frosted dome.
LED bulbs do this to me all the time. sleeved pack of Hungarian-made GE of simplicity (“How many people does it
The two in my youngest son’s bedroom Básica bulbs or a yellow pack of GE Blanco take to change a lightbulb?”) has become an
went near dark not long after I installed Suaves, both with a bold stamp on the side ever-branching set of complications. Where
them. When I left them alone for a week, reading, not for sale for use in the before I would pick up a pack of 60-watt
they inexplicably came back on at full blast. united states. soft-white incandescents at the hardware
At story time, the LED in the clamp light Years ago, I got a head start, joining the store, I now search the internet for the
on his bunk revolts if you cycle the power LED revolution with fervor. Screwing one highest-rated equivalent LEDs, then sys-
too fast. It sits there feebly glimmering, its into a socket vacated by an incandescent tematically cross-check those equivalences
perimeter a semicircle of white jelly-bean felt like the easiest good-citizen points I’d point by point. Everything you used to know
light blobs, until you turn it off and wait ever earned, as if I could keep on doing about indoor illumination is outmoded. For
a while. things exactly as before but with better and 60 watts’ worth of incandescent light, you’re
For most of my life, I expected energy- greener results. And the light coming out looking for about 800 lumens of LED out-
saving lighting to be bad. Traditional fluo- of the things was—well, it was light, right? put. To make that light come out the approx-
rescents, buzzing in grim-colored tubes, I don’t remember how long it took to notice, imate color that the old bulb generated, you
were synonymous with institutional or think I had noticed, a series of letdowns: need to check the listed bulb temperature
austerity and migraines. A new genera- a faded look to the page of a storybook, a and make sure it’s 2,700 degrees Kelvin.
tion of streetlamps somehow made city flicker in the corner of the eye, those sud- Got it? Hang on. If you want the objects
nights seem darker; CFLs shattered into den unexplained failures or half-failures. A that the light shines on to look the same,
mercury-flecked shards. New lighting tech slate-blue sock that was indistinguishable you’re getting into a different color ques-
was something people resented and worked from a charcoal-gray one till I brought them tion, specifically the color-rendering index.
around. My generation, presented with over by the window. A certain unreality was Your incandescent bulb—a glowing ana-
thrifty overhead fluorescents in ’90s dorms, creeping in. log object, its light coming from a heated
countered by plugging in the newly popular We were renovating our apartment, and wire—had a CRI of 100 for a full unbroken
halogen torchieres, whose 300 blazing watts one day our contractor summoned me to spectrum. Your typical LED bulb, shining
would incinerate wayward moths or occa- the bathroom in dismay. He adjusted the with cold digital electroluminescence, will
sionally a stray curtain along with the uni- dimmer switch he’d just installed, and a new not. Some colors will be missing or just
versity’s planned energy savings. LED fixture began strobing like we were in different. If you’re lucky, the LED will have
LEDs were going to be different. Their a seven-by-eight-foot basement dance club. a CRI of 90 or higher. The box may not list
widespread appearance on store shelves was We gave up and had him install a normal any CRI at all.
supposed to mark not another depressing switch. The quirks were becoming mal- Oh, but: Experts agree that the color-
trade-off but rather a Nobel-worthy break- functions were becoming betrayals. Things rendering index doesn’t really index how
through: They provided brilliant illumina- I might once have ignored caught my eye. colors are rendered. Some bulbs with a
tion at a fraction of the old energy costs and Out in the world, I noticed more and more 90 CRI make things look wan; some with
were nearly immortal by the old tungsten public spaces had a frigid cast and a liminal an 80 are passable. There are better, more P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : M I N I AT U R E S E T D E S I G N B Y P H I L L I P N U V E E N
standard. The federal government has fully flicker. The interiors of bubble-tea shops useful metrics, but you can’t have them.
committed. Some rearguard action by the and ice-cream parlors took on a queasy Nobody puts them on the packaging. One
Trump administration delayed the pro- aspect. Getting up in the early-morning lighting professional—an LED advocate,
cess, but a new lighting-efficiency standard darkness in a San Francisco Airbnb, I could no less—told me he sometimes calls up the
has finally taken effect. The Department see the bedside lamplight trembling. manufacturer and asks to talk to an engi-
of Energy is scheduled to start penalizing I started to confide in people that I was neer to get the real specs.
incandescent distributors and retailers this seeing things, that the light was wrong, and To study this stuff, to attempt to stare at
month, levying fines of as much as $542 per usually they knew exactly what I was talking light and understand it, makes you suspi-
illicit bulb, with full enforcement of the ban about. Over lunch, a friend unspooled an cious of any claims to objective truth. Snap
beginning in August. epic account of his quest for dimmable a picture of an oddly tinted space and
The plan is for LEDs to be the only avail- bulbs that would actually dim. A stranger in Apple’s software will convert the image
able form of artificial lighting. Already, a shared taxi forwarded me a blog post he’d according to what it has machine-learned
the old bulbs are dwindling to nothing on written about his conviction that the color that white ought to be. The eye-brain sys-
retailers’ shelves. You have to know where of objects lit by LEDs was washed out and tem does its own constant white balancing,
to look—mom-and-pop hardware stores, about his incredulity at how fast they failed. too. I downloaded an extremely erratic
mostly—to get your hands on a beige- A technology that was once the epitome color-temperature app to try to get some

34 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
grounding, an amateur feel for what pro-
fessionals are trained to spot. I interrogated
lighting designers, engineers, decorators,
and researchers.
Most of them were enthusiasts about
the technology. They praised LEDs,
at their best, for their unmatched effi-
ciency, precision, and practical power.
They also said things like “There’s a lot of
nonperformance” and “Super–beta phase”
and “Don’t give up on beauty” and “You’re
going to spend $200 on four bulbs at Home
Depot” and “You start seeing grayness.”
Grayness—I was definitely seeing gray-
ness. There ought to be a term for what
happens when the light gets weaker and
everyone acts as if it’s as strong as always.
By the science, by the ethics, even by law,
the reign of the LED is a certainty. It is
taking the place of the most standard and
omnipresent technology we know. And yet,
when you flip the light switch, you don’t
know what’s going to happen.
E
cologically, the case for leds
is unassailable. Economically and
practically, too, they’re a godsend.
Integrated LED fixtures are little miracles:
In our kitchen and living room, which
were gloomy and fixtureless, respectively,
the contractor put in can lights without
the can, thin as saucers, brilliant, and
free from the oppressive heat of recessed
incandescents.
The heat! Most of the watts of electricity
that flow into an incandescent bulb don’t
come out as visible light at all but as infra-
red. It’s a handy feature if you’re using a bulb
to incubate chicken eggs or power an Easy-
Bake Oven but otherwise pure waste.
Every LED that replaces an incandescent
reduces that baseline waste by as much as
90 percent. Multiplied by dozens of sock-
ets in a household, 125 million households
in the country—the difference is millions
of metric tons of carbon. As habit, inertia,
and malfeasance keep the planet’s carbon-
consumption graphs veering upward
toward collapse, the change from incandes-
cent to digital lighting is one thing pulling
measurably downward on the curve. And
joining in will save the average American
M
home an estimated $225 a year. LEDs, in
this light, start to seem almost Promethean.
Walk by a film shoot on Henry Street and
you’re no longer stepping over cables run-
ning from a generator truck. The lighting
crews don’t need to haul their own power
supply with them anymore. In place of
sweltering fire-hazard tungsten lights,
they can now hold fixtures in their hands,
right on top of the actors.
This change happened incred-
ibly quickly. Less than a decade after the
Nobel physics committee honored Isamu
Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji
Nakamura for using gallium nitride to
create powerful and efficient blue LEDs,
their breakthrough work is everywhere:
in headlights, streetlights, and flashlights;
in construction-site tripods and Broadway
rigging; in regal architectural coffers and
the exploratory ends of colonoscopes.
And in my home. When they shine,
that is. When they don’t—when this basic
piece of household equipment gets finicky
or when the colors of things start slipping
away—I feel my thoughts flickering some-
where darker, too. It’s embarrassing to
resent a product that’s doing this much
good, knowing all the while how griev-
ance politics has dragged energy efficiency
into the culture wars to the point where
people who don’t even cook are fetishizing
gas stoves. It’s literally a Donald Trump
rally line: “I say, ‘Why do I always look so
orange?’ ” The broken clock, twice a day.
“You know why. Because of the new light.
They’re terrible. You look terrible.”
There is a world, almost within reach,
in which LED lighting could be aestheti-
cally fabulous. But right now, it’s one
more thing that overpromises and under-
delivers. What we’re starting to glimpse
is a new phase in which good light, once
easy to achieve and available to everyone,
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
becomes a luxury product or the province
of technological obsessives. The rest of the
world will look a little more faded.
etropolitan museum of art.
Second floor, European Paint-
ings, Gallery 614. I was standing
in front of Jacques-Louis David’s 1816 por-
trait of General Étienne-Maurice Gérard,
and I was gazing not at the depicted light
falling on Gérard’s pale brow, or at the
muddled play of clouds and gold in the sky
behind him, but past the frame to the ceil-
ing. Up there, mounted behind the glass of
a frosted laylight, were rows of LED spot-
lights forming bright blurry circles. They
should have been uniform. Some were
white; others were turning a sickly magenta
or green. The person who had directed my
attention to them was Amy Nelson, the
museum’s head of lighting design. “The
quality of the light,” she said, “is just not
what we want it to be.”
Nelson is in charge of the Met’s ambi-
tious project to overhaul the museum’s
lighting for the LED age—a long, piece-
meal process that can involve anything
from workers simply swapping out bulbs to
architects and designers entirely rebuilding
displays. Among the goals, Nelson said, is to
eventually fill the museum with a standard
white light—3,000 degrees Kelvin, slightly
crisper and cooler than the 2,700 of a soft-
white incandescent bulb.
That was the theory. Now we were
looking up at the reality of one of the Met’s
early LED installations from the mid-2010s.
“The galleries looked beautiful when they
opened,” Nelson said. But the lamps had
gone screwy. They were meant to have a life
span of at least seven years, but even before
that, their color had started to visibly decay.
We walked on, through more of European
Paintings, under still more fixtures that were
shining past their point of practical failure.
“It just looks like Christmas lights up there,”
Nelson said.
What Nelson had discovered is that LEDs
are not good or bad but more like weird. The
finickiness reflects the fundamental nature
of the product. The LED bulb is the shape of
an old lightbulb, and it fits into a lightbulb
socket, and it gives off light, but it’s not so
much a lightbulb as a lightbulb emulator.
What it is is a computer.
Where an old-fashioned tungsten fila-
ment can generally be trusted to be either
intact or broken, the drivers and diodes
inside the new bulbs are subject to the kinds
of glitches and compatibility errors you get
from other electronics, especially once dim-
mers get involved. They can crash or hang,
or audibly buzz from electromagnetic inter-
ference, or go haywire from being fed the
wrong kind of power signal.
35
 LEDs, in other words, can be broken even
when they appear to be working. “It’s still
on. You still have light coming out,” Nelson
said. “They don’t just fail or burn out like
a halogen source does. Oftentimes, there’s
light loss or there’s color shift.” When an
LED bulb package says it’s supposed to last
a certain number of years, that doesn’t tell
you when the light will go dark. It’s a guess
about an arc of degradation. The end date is
when the bulb is estimated to be 70 percent
as bright as it started out.
The impetus is on you to decide when
things have started to look uncanny. “I wish
that would be addressed by the industry—
like, maybe if it reached a certain light-loss
factor, it would just shut down, you know?”
Nelson said. “Or if it shifted in color past a
certain point, it went into failure mode.”
Earlier, in a gallery of ancient Chinese
F
objects lit by halogens, Nelson showed me
a Shang-dynasty bronze in a display case.
When the setup was created, her designers
were able to get focused four-degree spot-
lights to isolate items from their back-
grounds. But lighting manufacturers are
abandoning halogen as an obsolete tech-
nology, creating a shortage of reliable parts
as they retool for an all-LED future. “Now,
the tightest beam we can find is a 12-degree,”
Nelson said. The bronze sat in a loose
puddle of light, making the sides and back
of the display as bright as the object itself,
and stray purple rays spilled out of the halo-
gens on the ceiling. “It’s very hard to come by
quality,” she said.
ONE BULB, THREE TEMPERATURES
Illuminating a doll-size I Love Lucy kitchen.
3,000 Kelvin
36 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
In some places, newer and more finely
tuned LEDs work magic. Nelson pointed
out a Winslow Homer with watercolor
oceans in stunning blues, brought to vibrant
life even at the low foot-candle output
required to protect the art. But not every-
body, of course, has the Met’s resources.
And once you know what to look for, you
can’t unsee it. A few weeks after I visited
the museum, I watched a small ensemble
of musicians run through new pieces by
teen composers in a midtown studio. The
facility was built 11 years ago, and the
room still looked brand new, but when my
eye went up to the ceiling, I could see the
same color decay as at the Met. The shad-
ows on the floor, pointing this way and
that, were in pinks and greens. The light
was coming apart.
or something you may assume is
universal and constant, light turns
out to be a culturally mediated and
often paradoxical phenomenon. Our ideas
about it start 93 million miles away—eight
minutes and 20 seconds as the photon
flies—with our friend the sun. The sun
is close to what physicists call an ideal
Planckian blackbody radiator, delivering a
smooth and broad electromagnetic spec-
trum from radio waves up through infra-
red, visible light, ultraviolet, and X-rays. A
hot tungsten wire does the same, only with
a much narrower range of output tilted
toward the red and infrared.
But here, unfortunately for the layperson,
4,500 Kelvin
the terminology reaches a point that is
profoundly counterintuitive. In physi-
cal light-emission terms, blue is a hotter
temperature than red. The sun looks yel-
low up in the sky, but with a surface tem-
perature of 5,772 degrees Kelvin, or about
10,000degrees Fahrenheit, it has much
more blue in it than an incandescent fila-
ment at 2,700 degrees Kelvin does. (A red-
hot steel bar, in turn, would be somewhere
down around 1,000 degrees Kelvin.) The
higher the color temperature, the colder, in
everyday speech, we say the light looks.
“Warm” colors are the colors of the things
humans experience as being warm. Obvi-
ously enough, through millennia of human
existence, the point of reference for artificial
illumination was firelight or lamplight. But
they don’t burn at the same temperature
as a star. If you bring a light source that
is actually the color of the sun indoors, it
stops looking golden and appears strikingly,
severely blue. What to do about this fact is a
debate that’s been unresolved for well over
a century: Should the ideal artificial light
approximate the sun, or should it approxi-
mate a flame?
From an engineer’s point of view, the
answer seems clear. Blue light is rational:
These are the literal technical specifications
of our ultimate light source. A bulb “with its
proper proportions of violet light as deter-
mined by our natural illuminant the sun is
to be desired and not avoided,” declared a
piece in the July 10, 1897, issue of the jour-
nal Western Electrician. But with certain
6,000 Kelvin
exceptions—the incursion of fluorescent
tubes, the creation of blue-tinged “daylight”
incandescents—it was the warm-light fac-
tion that ruled most of the electric age. The
tones of a standard incandescent bulb may
have been too warm, scientifically speaking,
spilling emissions right off the bottom of the
visible spectrum into useless waves of heat,
but they were what the lightbulb-using
public expected.
Still, today, this preference for orangish
light over bluish is not universal. Hervé
Descottes, the founder of the high-end
lighting-design firm L’Observatoire Inter-
national, told me that he once worked on
two projects at the same time: a museum
in Helsinki and a shopping center in Hong
Kong. He flew to Helsinki for a meeting,
“and in the meeting room, in the center
of the table, they light a candle,” he said.
“It’s very Scandinavian, you know. Get the
warmth.” He then flew to Hong Kong,
where the temperature and humidity, he
recalled, were both in the 90s. That meeting
was held in a space with no windows and
ceiling lamps cranking out 5,000 degrees
Kelvin. “Because when we’ve put in cool
light, we feel that it’s cooler outside,” he said.
Another time, in Singapore, Descottes found
himself arguing with clients who wanted the
coldest, brightest lighting for the executive
floors of a tower to signify abundance.
Medical science, surprisingly, comes
down on the side of the cozy candle-burning
romantics. The body’s internal clock is tuned
to sunlight, and when artificial light imitates
the sun, as the warnings about using your
phone at bedtime tell you, things start going
wrong. At the start of this century, biologists
pinned down the workings of intrinsically
photosensitive retinal ganglion cells—a
whole separate sensing apparatus in the
human eye beyond the brightness-sensing
rods and the color-sensing cones you learn
about in school. As with the taste buds that
detect umami, the retinal ganglion cells
were there, but generations of scientists had
left them out of their perceptual models.
These cells are keyed to light between blue
and green, with a peak sensitivity to wave-
lengths of about 480 nanometers, around
cyan. “They’re not actually connecting to
our visual cortex,” said Michael Royer, a
color expert at the Department of Energy’s
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
“They’re going to other parts of our brain—
the prefrontal cortex, the hypothalamus,
these parts of the brain that are really criti-
cal to all our other functioning. And they’re
just sending signals: Hey, it’s daytime right
now, so it’s time to be alert.”
If blue light is overstimulating and
clammy, it’d be better for our brains to have
less of it in indoors, especially late at night.
But blue light is also cheaper. Adding warm
tones to a blue LED requires extra material
and effort. To get something in the whitish
color range of traditional indoor lighting,
manufacturers coat the underlying blue ele-
ments with phosphor, which shifts some of
the photons to longer wavelengths—that is,
greens and yellows and reds. (This coating
partly explains why LED color varies over
time. As the diode heats and cools again and
again, “maybe the phosphor will curl a little
bit,” says Royer. “And those tiny changes will
allow a different amount of blue photons to
escape versus yellow.”)
Last year, the New York Times warned in
a front-page story that “lower-end retailers
like dollar stores or convenience shops still
extensively stock their shelves with tradi-
tional or halogen incandescent bulbs, even
as stores serving more affluent communi-
ties have shifted to selling far more efficient
LEDs.” This was, the Times fretted, pre-
venting poorer people from receiving the
benefits of energy efficiency. The studies
the newspaper cited, finding incandescent
bulbs on discount-store shelves, were both
a few years old. I checked my nearest dollar
store and discovered that there were plenty
of LED bulbs to be had there. Their color
temperature was 6,400 Kelvin—the harsh-
est, cheapest possible light, a light so blue
that when I Googled it, what came up were
grow bulbs. The efficient future of lighting
now includes poor people; it just does it by
making lighting one more form of privation.
C
hecking for spares in my mom’s
basement recently, I discovered that
she had picked up a pack of 5,000
Kelvin bulbs to replace her living-room
floodlights. Of all the people to have made
this mistake! Mom used to teach school-
children about color perception, showing
them how that part of their vision faded
in the periphery or how a wheel of colored
panels mounted on a salad spinner would
turn gray. But she had no idea what 5,000
Kelvin meant, and the package had no
color-rendering index at all. Had she ever
put the things into her ceiling, she’d have
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
ended up with a living room that looked like
the inside of a refrigerator.
It’s true that CRI numbers are kind of
useless. All else being equal, if light on an
object gets dimmer—if you start with an
object outdoors, in full sunlight, then bring
it indoors to that same daylight, but less
of it, now coming through a window—the
object will appear more gray. The way color
rendering is defined, the diminished light is
performing at the same level as it did out-
side. The color-rendering index scores it the
same. But the object looks worse.
In lower light, people prefer to see the
vividness of colors boosted, especially in the
reds. Incandescent lights naturally boost
reds as they get dimmer and the tempera-
ture of their filament gets lower. LEDs,
again, operate in a fundamentally different
way. Many cannot dim at
all; those that are advertised
as dimmable do not reduce
their temperature or even turn
☞
reduce the intensity of the the page
light they put out. Instead, for our
best bulb
a common method is to advice
adjust how frequently they
switch off and on, which is
dozens of times per second. Extra-sensitive
people can sometimes detect this flicker or
find themselves with unexplained head-
aches and dizziness. For everyone, the light
gets even duller looking than before.
Royer is a fellow at the Illuminating
Engineering Society (motto: “Improving
Life Through Quality of Light”), which
has created an elaborate alternative to CRI
called TM-30. In this scheme, bulbs are
classified under three separate but inter-
related categories: P, V, and F, for prefer-
ence, vividness, and fidelity, each of which
is further broken down into subcategories
indicating performance level. Manufactur-
ers and retailers have not agreed to this new
scoring system. “They don’t want to provide
a lot of information that might confuse con-
sumers,” Royer said. “But consumers aren’t
going to understand information until it’s
provided to them.” (Continued on page 92)
37
City Limits

A special series on how to save

American cities in crisis.
t h e l o o k b o o k g o e s t o m a h j o n g n i g h t at t h e a c e h o t e l . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . h a r d - c o r e k o r e a n f o o d

STRATEGIST

➸ as tom scocca
writes (see p.32),
most LED bulbs
make everything
look … well, bone-
chillingly awful. And in
a few months, when
incandescents are
banned, they’ll be our
only option. So Strategist
writer Erin Schwartz
spoke to architects,
designers, and LED
best bets enthusiasts to find the best
lightbulb in a sea of bad
options—ideally, one that’s

The
dimmable and affordable
(in the past, they’ve been
neither) and casts an

Best
actually bearable, pleasant
glow. For a standard
screw-in bulb that
mimics the warmth of

Bad
incandescent light, our
experts say the Philips
LED Dimmable A21 Soft-
White Lightbulb ($20)

Bulb
is the top choice. It has
a five-year life span, is
dimmable (but doesn’t buzz
or flicker), and manages to
emit a soft-white glow that
Schwartz says is “cooler
than the old-school halogen
burning in my living room
yet still warm enough to
make the previous bulb,
an inexpensive Feit
Electric LED, seem
gray and clammy.”

Photograph by Marcus McDonald m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 39

 steal my registry

Best
a collection of expert-
vetted, spotted-around-town,
or otherwise just especially What L’Appartement
excellent products that recently

Bets
appeared on thestrategist.com. 4F Co-owner
To shop all these items—plus
the lightbulb—in one Ashley Coiffard Got
place, scan the QR code.
for Her Wedding
Laguiole Laiton Steak
this thing’s incredible Knives With Gift Box
(Set of Four), $114
“Laguiole makes the best

I Only Drink Tall Boys knives. Gautier, my

husband, told me they

of This Diet Root Beer used to put a Band-Aid

in with the knives
because they’re so sharp.
Sprecher Brewery Low-Cal Root Beer Soda Cans, $32 for 12 And they come in such a
a longtime mission in my life is finding the best diet beautiful wooden box.”
root beer. That ineffable mix of vanilla, licorice, and winter-
green flavors, a little bit of anise or nutmeg, perhaps—it’s
a liquefied spice cake of a drink. Despite its being an East June Japanese Fluted
Plates, from $22
Coast invention, I’ve found it difficult to obtain a quality root
“I originally wanted

P H OTO G R A P H S : G E T T Y I M AG E S ( LO W E , M O N S O O N , WAYA N S ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F T H E V E N D O R S ( R E M A I N I N G ) . I L LU S T R AT I O N : T H E E L L A P H A N T I N T H E R O O M .
beer in Brooklyn. Diet Barq’s was my favorite until recently,
when I was introduced to Sprecher’s Low-Cal Root Beer. Rinka plates, but they’re
It goes down like velvet but has the gentlest sparkle on the really expensive. These
tongue. The sweetness (and the 45 calories) comes from are way cheaper, also
“pure Wisconsin honey,” whatever that means, but it tastes made in Japan, and have
less artificial than others. According to the Sprecher website, the fluting detail. They’re
a mysterious brewmaster “combines a host of flavors in a gas- super-durable and
fired brew kettle, then ages it just long enough to achieve peak dishwasher safe.”
flavor.” Yum! The only downside is it’s not easy to find. I’ve
been ordering it from the brewery’s website, where a 12-pack
June Brighton Water
goes for $32. This price may seem exorbitant, but the soda
Glasses, $18
comes in 16-ounce cans. So I suppose it is more bang for my
“They’re very vintage-
buck, and Sprecher is worth it. leah finnegan
feeling: I love that
they have the ribbing
and that they have the
stem. And they are
celebrity shopping very, very sturdy.”

One-Gallon Water Bottle With our shopping cart

Time Marker and Straw, $23
“This is my baby. On set, they’ll be like, ‘Where’s
➸ the baby? Has anybody seen Rob’s baby?’ If I’m
being good, I get through one a day. It’s very
durable; it’s reusable. It has cute delineations:
keep drinking! you’re doing great! And
Rob Lowe’s they do help me realize if I’m on pace or behind.”
Motivational Water Bottle
The Element Encyclopedia of 1000 Spells,
by Judika Illes, $12
“For me, witchcraft works as an extension of
therapy. I like to look up a spell to help with
➸ what I’m going through. I put my attention
and focus into that spell, and it takes away my
anxiety. I have a ton of spell books, but I always
Jinkx Monsoon’s start with The Element Encyclopedia—it points
me in the direction of which book I need next.”
Spell Book
Jordan 1 Retro High Bred Toe, $399
“I always told myself I’d work hard enough to
afford a pair of Jordans. Now I own about 1,200
➸ sneakers. Out of all of them, the OG Jordan 1’s
in black and red are my favorite. I’ve been
performing in them since I started. No matter
how sick or tired I am during a show, I’ll look
Marlon Wayans’s down at my Jordans and feel like I can be the
Jordans best version of me. I give it my all.”
We Found a
Laundress Alternative
Dirty Labs Bio Enzyme Laundry Detergent,
$14
for anyone looking for a fancy deter-
gent that won’t irritate your skin, this is it.
I’ve been buying Dirty Labs’ signature scent
for about six months now, and I’ve noticed
fewer eczema flare-ups and random rashes
since making the switch from
Tide Free & Gentle. Even if that’s
purely coincidental, this stuff
makes my clothes smell so
good. It has an earthy and
slightly floral scent that is
never overpowering. It’s also
better for the environment,
since it’s completely bio-
degradable (which
isn’t the case for most
detergents).
arielle avila

40 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
 gifts they will actually want this thing’s incredible

Easter-Basket Ideas for

Every Type of Kid
easter baskets are the Christmas stockings of spring, and there’s an art to filling them with a
variety of delightful surprises and practical goodies without overspending, whether you’re shopping
for a toddler, an 8-year-old, a full-fledged teen, or all three. As both a parent of two kids and a
Strategist editor whose job involves thinking about gift-giving all day long, I deeply understand this
challenge, so I’ve compiled a list of excellent Easter-basket fillers for every type of kid. jen trolio

Baby Baggu, $12 Nantucket Bike Basket Co.

For someone in college, make
a “basket” out of a Baggu: Fill
it with their favorite snacks
and send them back to school
with a new bag that is as good-
looking as it is functional.
Children’s D-Shape Basket,
$38
Use this bike basket to present
the Easter gifts, then buckle it
to their handlebars so they can
haul a water bottle and snack.

Fujifilm Instax Mini 11 LEGO 3-in-1 White Rabbit

Instant Camera, $77 Animal Toy, $20 Skateboarder Dickies Are
I like smaller LEGO sets
Our top pick for best instant
camera comes in five colors that tuck nicely into a basket the Only Pants I Want to Wear
and is a wonderful (if and don’t take long to build. Dickies Skateboarding
splurgy) Easter gift for This bunny-and-carrot duo Regular-Fit Twill Pants, $45
a tween or teen. is right on theme.
i bought my first pair last summer while
searching online for medium-blue pants
SmartSweets Sweet Fish, $17 Crayola Washable Palm- that weren’t jeans; they’re made from the
Ward off candy overload Grasp Crayons, $19 brand’s signature twill, a tightly woven, rigid
with these Swedish Fish These egg-shaped crayons fabric composed of 65 percent polyester
doppelgängers from help develop fine motor skills, and 35 percent cotton. They quickly became
SmartSweets that contain but they’re also nice for a my favorite pants—plausibly nice enough
just three grams of sugar child who tends to be rough to wear out or to work, slouchy and crisp in
per serving. with traditional crayons. the right places. They’re a dusty blue, the
color of antique Levi’s found in abandoned
mine shafts. The pants hang nicely over
retail secrets pretty much any shoe, from Vibram-soled
Chelsea boots to chunky dad sneakers.
The Things Worth Buying at J.Crew, Recently, I caved and bought a second pair,
in black. Since they arrived, a pair of black
According to J.Crew Employees Carhartt jeans that never fit quite right have
languished at the bottom of the drawer.
j.crew has gone through many phases, and it’s continuing to evolve erin schwartz
with Noah co-founder Brendon Babenzien at the helm. But there
are some facts about shopping at J.Crew that have stood the test of time. 2x2
Here, employees share their tips. by chloe anello

MEN’S SWEATERS ARE JUST … STRETCHY CAMERONS ARE STOCK UP ON TISSUE

Serving Dishes
by emma wartzman
BETTER THAN WOMEN’S THE BEST WORK PANTS TURTLENECKS
PLATTERS BOWLS
OVER $100

Heath Ceramics
Lost Quarry Marbled Medium Covered
P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E V E N D O R S

Fields Oval Platter, Serving Dish,

There’s no scientific proof
here, but the associates
I spoke with think the
men’s sweaters are made
Work pants were the
second-most-
recommended item by the
associates I consulted, with
$200 $183
It’s an excellent base layer
for winter dressing that
comes in nearly two dozen
vibrant colors, neutrals,
UNDER $100

better. They feel thicker,
more focused on material
than style.
Heritage Cotton Crewneck
Sweater, $90
the Cameron in “four-
season stretch” being the
favorite. Made with an
elastane blend, they have a
forgiving fit and relaxed feel
without looking sloppy.
Cameron Pant, $118
and seasonal patterns, and
the lightweight shirt looks
flattering on most body
types—it even goes
up to a 3X.
Tissue Turtleneck, $40
Bordallo Pinheiro Porta Flor Round
Cabbage Platter, Serving Bowl,
$72 $84

m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 41
 best of new york By Mia Adorante and Kitty Guo

The Best
 to find the spots on this list, we polled dozens
of stylish and savvy New Yorkers—painters, photogra-
phers, and ballerinas among them. For more obsessively
sourced recommendations, including the best movie
theaters, nail salons, and piercers, visit curbed.com.
For Less-Oppressive
Hot Yoga
LYONS DEN POWER YOGA
267 W. 17th St., second fl.; 646-
964-4583; lyonsdenpoweryoga.com
unlike bikram yoga studios,
which are steam-heated to
105 degrees, Lyons Den is warmed
with infrared light to 90-to-95
degrees. Its 60-minute power vin-
yasa classes are designed to quickly
build strength and endurance.
Tatiana Boncompagni, founder of
food-delivery service Eat Sunny,
who is also a certified personal
trainer, was surprised by how tough
it was. “Not every yoga class is a
workout,” she says. “I remember
doing a crow pose three-quarters of
the way through and hearing sweat
run off the top of my head and hit
the mat like rain. I had never felt so
physically challenged and inspired
by yoga. I was hooked.” The
90-minute Sunday Service, often
taught by founder Bethany Lyons,
has since become Boncompagni’s
weekly reset. Lyons offers hands-on
physical adjustments and energizes
the room by reading poems or play-
ing songs. “Something about the
practice is so spiritual,” Boncom-
pagni says. “People sometimes cry.
We all walk out transformed.”
baby-wearing basics, another on the
essentials of modern birth), Prema
Yoga has a standout prenatal yoga
class. It’s explicitly meant to prepare
expectant mothers for birth, and is
taught by Gayle Lemke, a certified
yoga instructor and doula with
25 years experience. “A lot of the
flow is to encourage flexibility and
opening of the pelvic floor,
stretching the hips,” says content
strategist Cristina Cala, who started
the class at 25 weeks pregnant.
“When we do warrior pose, she has
us press our palms on the sacrum
and press downward to aid labor.”
Cala adds the moves were doable
through her third trimester and
Lemke didn’t judge her for needing
modifications: “It made me feel bet-
ter about what my body can do
during pregnancy instead of feeling
bad about what it can’t do.” After
class, there’s time to connect with
other expectant parents. The very
intentionally fostered community
FOR
DONATION-BASED
CLASSES
spirit has been invaluable to her; one
classmate suggested an acupunc-
turist who helped turn Cala’s baby
out of the breech position.
For Unhurried Sessions
KULA YOGA PROJECT
85 N. 3rd St., No. 113,
Williamsburg; 917-472-7499;
kulayoga.com
no class in this cozy, dark-
paneled space is shorter than an
hour, and the focus remains a wide
variety of yoga styles. Photographer
Thea Traff, a student here since
2015, describes it as a “true yoga”
studio. There’s a three-hour Mysore
Ashtanga class, in which students do
a specific set of poses at their own
pace; open-level Iyengar yoga; pre-
natal instruction; and Kula Reset,
a restorative practice. Traff says the
longer classes make her experience
even more Zen. Her favorite is
Honey Flow, held on Friday eve-
nings; it’s an hour of vinyasa fol-
lowed by 30 minutes of Yin yoga
during which poses are held for five
minutes for the deepest stretch. Traff
says, “It feels like the perfect way to
close a week or start the weekend.”
For a Mat Beside
Phoebe Bridgers
SKY TING YOGA
17 Allen St., No. 7; 212-203-5786;
skyting.com
since 2015, sky ting has
expanded from a small Chinatown
studio into a yoga empire with a
library of online courses, European
retreats, a full merch line, and a
celebrity-heavy clientele (Phoebe
Bridgers and Tommy Dorfman are
both regulars). “They’ve done an
incredible job curating an aesthetic,”
says musician Abner James. He
started attending classes at Sky Ting
in 2022 and has since made it part
of his daily routine. “As I’ve become
after moving to its sunny, exposed-brick Queens
studio in 2010 with $5 classes, the class price has only
risen to a still exceedingly reasonable $10. “You get
everyone from very advanced yoga practitioners to
newbies,” says painter Omar Chacon, who’s been a
regular at Yoga Agora since it opened. Though the
clientele is very close-knit, he adds, it has “never been
a bit more experienced, I feel like
I’m able to bring more to class, but
I never felt like I couldn’t participate
because I was a beginner,” James
says. “It sounds cliché, but I feel
like there is something for everyone
there and that the collection
of classes offers a holistic, well-
rounded approach.” The namesake
flow combines multiple disciplines,
including vinyasa, Katonah, Taoist
theory, Iyengar, kundalini, and
hatha principles. For ballet dancer
Jenelle Manzi, it’s one instructor in
particular that makes her a regular.
She hits a few yoga classes a week
around the city, but her hands-down
favorite is with co-founder Krissy
Jones. “Between the plants, the
light-filled space, and Krissy’s voice
guiding you through the move-
ments, I end up feeling so rejuve-
nated and aligned,” Manzi says.
For Meditation, Too
THREE JEWELS
5 E. 3rd St.; 646-964-5736;
threejewels.org
every class in this tiny,
Buddhist-inspired East Village stu-
dio, hidden behind a mirrored wall
in the back of Three Jewels café,
ends with a guided meditation. Each
is tailored to a specific theme such
as self-care or letting go of patterns
that don’t serve you. And the prac-
tice begins with a Dharma talk, an
intention-setting discussion for
students to mull over as they move.
“Those things are missing, inten-
tionally or not, from a lot of yoga
practices,” says Jessie Lucking, a
Parsley Health coach. She recently
took a breath-focused class at
Three Jewels. “The talk was about
self-care and serving others,”
Lucking says. It lasted only about
five minutes, but “the instructor
offered to let us stay if we wanted to
dig into the topic more deeply. I love
that they incorporate mindfulness
and meditation with movement.”
I L LU S T R AT I O N B Y P E T E G A M L E N

YOGA AGORA cliquey. It has a family vibe.” The studio offers a pay-
33-02 Broadway, as-you-wish class every morning—these enticed
For Moms-to-Be second floor, Astoria caterer Benjamin Gordon to try one in 2018, and they
PREMA YOGA BROOKLYN
718-626-0680; yogaagora.com have been attending three times a week ever since.
976 Fulton St., Clinton Hill; 718- “The people there are dedicated to the place,” they say.
622-2373; premayogabrooklyn.com
“I’ve taken fitness classes where I felt like if I wasn’t keeping up, I was falling behind. But I’ve never
felt that at Yoga Agora, even in the tougher classes. You don’t feel like you’re showing up to perform.”
on top of its wide array of
new-mom classes (a seminar on

42 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
 the look book goes to

Mahjong
Night at the
Ace Hotel
Over 300 people RSVP’d
for Chop Suey Club’s
first event of the year.
interviews by kelsie schrader
and jenna milliner-waddell

JENN LAM
Marketing and brand-
partnerships manager,
Bedford-Stuyvesant
What is your experience
playing mahjong? My
grandparents played the
game pretty much every
day that I’ve known them.
So while I was growing
up, at every family
gathering the table and
tiles came out. I was never
really taught because
I think in Chinese culture
they’re a bit impatient, so
they just have you sit on
the side and absorb
through osmosis. It wasn’t
until I was an adult that
I asked my parents to
teach me formal strategy,
but by that point,
obviously I knew the
game already. I specifically
know how to play Hong
Kong style.
How does Hong Kong–
style mahjong differ
from others? I think
American mahjong is
really different because
a new scorecard comes
out every year, which
is very American—you
need to buy a new one to
continue to play the game.

Photographs by DeSean McClinton-Holland 43

 the look book: mahjong players

How did you pick

your outfit? I collect
vintage qipaos.
This one is from the
1950s. I never plan
my outfits, but the
next thing you know
Mahjong Night is
announced, and I’m
like, It’s my sixth
sense telling me to
buy that. I stayed
up for a couple
of nights altering
the dress and made
it just in time.

FREDDY ESCORBORES NANCY LAU JESSICA ZHENG

Front-desk agent, East Flatbush Retiree, Riverdale Student, Staten Island

How did you hear

about tonight? My
friend. I moved to
New York from
China in February
to model. But I’m
homesick. It’s hard
to get jobs, and my
English is not good
so I don’t hang out
much. I only know
a few Chinese
friends. I kind of
want to go home.
Tonight was
enjoyable, though.
I met two people.

RUOYI JIANG CHENGWEI DONG TEAONNA BOYKINS

Founder and director, Lower East Side Model, Williamsburg Fashion designer, Crown Heights

MIMI HONG MARIE VAN EERSEL MU TIEN LIU

Freelance photographer, Chinatown Cultural programmer, Greenpoint Stylist, Bushwick

44 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
 Who did you
come with? My
brother. We started
playing last year for
the first time, which
is funny considering
I’m 39 and he’s 41
and our parents
have been playing,
you know, our
entire lives. Now,
every time we go
home, we always
play. My dad is
basically the master
of mahjong, and he
is not patient with
me. He’s like,
“Helen, if you can’t
keep up, I’m not
playing with you.”

JUSTIN TENG KA YEE CHAN HELEN NG

Store manager, Bushwick Freelance event coordinator, Sunset Park Vice-president of investor relations, Upper West Side

MIKO TIU-LAUREL MARIA FRANCISCO JILL LI

Artist and model, Upper West Side Assistant general manager, Bushwick Grants-management specialist, Soho

What do you like

about the game?
My grandma’s been
playing for 65 years,
and seeing her skill,
I was like, I wanna
get to that level.
When I put down
a tile, she’s like, “Are
you sure you want
to do that?” She’s
so sharp she knows
what other tiles
I have. I usually play
in a house, so the
first thing I thought
when I walked in
here was Oh, vibe.

CAROLINE CHOU KATHIE AHN HEJRAN DARYA

Student, Crown Heights Therapist, Ridgewood Conversation designer, Prospect Heights

m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 45
The Living Room
In the evening, Grimanesa
Amorós’s living room is lit by
candles and her glowing light
installations. The floor piece
on the right is Light Between
the Islands, inspired by the
sea-foam that washes up on
the Peruvian seashore.

Photographs by Annie Schlechter

 design hunting

A Tribeca Loft Full

of Mood and Mystery
“Everything changes in this house,” says its owner, Grimanesa Amorós.
by wendy goodman

m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 47
 design hunting

he first time i visited the loft Grimanesa

Amorós shares with her husband, William
Grant Fleischer, and daughter Shammiel, it
was on the occasion of a dinner party. The vast
living room atop a wonderful old Tribeca
building was lit only by candles and Amorós’s
light sculptures, which rest on the floor or float
through the air the way jellyfish do through water, pulsing
in different colors and appearing to shift shapes.
Amorós was born and raised in Lima, Peru, and the
loft is populated with a mix of art and furnishings from
her childhood and later travels: rugs from India and
Morocco, a coffee table from Indonesia, a bird boat from
Myanmar, 17th- and 18th-century lanterns and wooden
chests. No two sofas are alike, and during the party,
guests drifted among islands of gathering places centered
beneath candelabras—many from Peru—or sat around
the fireplace or at the wooden table. At one end of the
room is a centuries-old convent door. To the side of that,
hanging from a ceiling beam by the kitchen, is an indoor
swing that Amorós made from a piece of wood.
The loft itself has a history that had to be revealed.
“The brick walls were covered with thick layers of plaster
and many coats of paint, and the floor was covered in
cement,” Amorós recalls. “People were in here with jack-
hammers for ten days because there was so much. The
wood underneath was very well protected by black paper
and tar and more paper.” The tin ceiling, in disrepair, was
removed to reveal the wooden beams.
During a midmorning visit, the room takes on a differ-
ent character. “This settee was bloodred,” Amorós says,
“and it turned salmon from the sun,” which comes in

The Fireplace
She put in the wood-burning
fireplace years ago, and it’s
a focal point of the room. The
salmon-colored chaise, formerly
dark red, was faded by the sun
coming through the skylight.

The Kitchen
“I have loved swings since I was
a little girl growing up in Peru;
it was my way of connecting with
the wind and sky and loving how
it felt,” Amorós says. She made
this one out of a ceiling beam.

The Dining Area

The wooden table seats
eight, but at a large dinner
party, guests sit around the
room in smaller groups on
the various sofas.

48 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
 design hunting
Her Art Studio
The piece on the right is from her installation Light
Between the Islands; the other, Aureum, is the first in a
series in which “I use light metaphorically,” she says.
“The golden lighting sequence is constantly changing.”
through the skylights. The same is true for the colors of all
the rugs on the living-room floor; she takes a corner of one
in her fingers and flips it over to reveal a more intense
color. “Once upon a time, they were like that, but that is
the beauty also,” she says. “Everything changes in this
house. I like to use it.”
Change and the love of adventure have been constants
in Amorós’s life. She came to America from Peru in 1984.
“I got a ticket one way, I grabbed two bags, and I left for
New York,” she says. Her father had encouraged her to
study to become a psychologist, but she left university
three months before graduation: “I knew I was never
going to use that degree. I also knew I would never be
starving because I know how to draw, so I could always
sit on the street and do portraits.” In New York, she
studied at the Art Students League from 1985 to 1988.
After many shared studios on the Bowery, Amorós met
Fleischer, and they married on a boat near the Statue of
Liberty in 1988. They lived briefly in Forest Hills, then
found space in their current building. Amorós initially
50 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
attempted to add a studio inside the living space. Soon,
she says, she found “it wasn’t a good idea. I was too dis-
tracted.” She discovered a separate studio in the building
in 1993, and they moved into the duplex apartment
around 2009, before the renovation was complete.
Amorós turned from painting and sculpture to creating
light installations after seeing the northern lights during
a trip to Iceland in 2001. But her childhood in Lima and
all the natural wonders around her are what have always
captivated her imagination and remain most relevant to
her work today, like the patterns and iridescence of the
sea-foam along the shore. She also made a practice of
drawing and memorizing maps of various countries. Her
sculptures today bring forward the ephemeral mystery of
light using LED and 3-D technology.
Her work has been exhibited around the world, from
Times Square to the Venice Biennale to the Noor Riyadh
festival of light and art in Saudi Arabia. “I always compare
my life to how a river moves,” she explains. “Water cannot
be stopped; it will always find a little hole to make it to the
other side. So I always have that metaphorical way of
seeing my life—that it always keeps going.” ■
The Big Door
Once the entrance to a convent, it was brought in
through a skylight in two pieces. It leads to the study.
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 51
 food

t h e y e ar i ate n e w y ork

Hard-core Korean
Marinated crab goes mainstream.
by e. alex jung

E
very asian baddie I know has
been talking about Rice Thief, a
ghost kitchen in Sunnyside that
turns out batches of ganjang gejang,
a classic recipe of raw crab marinated
in soy sauce and aromatics. News of the
Korean delicacy’s arrival last year spread
through group chats: “Study this menu,”
said one friend, who dropped in the PDF.
Another quickly responded, “If you don’t
invite me, I will drown myself in soy sauce.”
It wasn’t just the people in my immediate
vicinity, either: Social media has a way of
seizing on weirdly specific things, and raw
crab has become an unexpected star of
mukbangs and TikToks, like a clip posted
by a dietitian named Blair Cooley, who
tried a super-spicy version from H Mart—
made with gochugaru marinade—for the
first time only to declare, “I don’t know
how I feel about, like, the fishiness taste.”
Gejang is not for the timid. There is a
return-to-the-sea barbarism about crack-
ing, squeezing, and extracting the uncooked
meat of a crab from its exoskeleton—an
inescapable reminder that you are eating a
large bug. As a rule, females are preferred
because of the stashes of bright-orange roe
they carry inside: briny, pure ecstatic plea-
sure, as though you were eating the ocean’s
flesh. Koreans like to ask if you “know” how
to eat something—and watching non-
Korean influencers delicately pick apart
soy-soaked shells, it’s clear that knowledge
eludes some. To this longtime lover of gan-
jang gejang, its social-media ascent is like
seeing a beloved indie musician get the call
version of the dish is at Soban in Los Ange- chanshop.com), which puts a great deal of
les. Anytime I’m in the city, I stop by the little care into dishes often taken for granted:
shop on Olympic Boulevard to get my fix. It Sticky, chewy strands of dried squid and
sets a high bar for Rice Thief to clear. strips of fish cake doused in sesame disap-
I planned for a Sunday-brunch delivery with peared immediately.
six friends who understand that eating well My itch, however, remained unscratched,
means abandoning one’s vanity. the pangs made more acute by the fact that
I placed my order a week early through gejang is still hard to come by in New York.
Instagram—WeChat is also an option— There’s a spicy version at the undisputed
and was rewarded for planning ahead: best Korean restaurant in town, Cho Dang
The kitchen is a three-person operation, Gol (55 W. 35th St., nr. Sixth Ave.; chodang-
and I could sense a harried energy as they golnyc.com), and I like it, but the soy-based
dealt with their surging popularity. By recipe is a purer preparation because of its
Tuesday afternoon, they’d posted that they relative simplicity. I needed to find some,
were already sold out for the week ahead. and I figured that wouldn’t happen on Ins-
Prone to fears there would not be enough tagram. So I gathered another group for a
food, I had ordered wild Argentine red weeknight outing to Murray Hill, Queens,
shrimp, abalone, Hokkaido scallops, and which is a 30-minute walk from the last
jokbal (pig’s trotters) in addition to the stop on the 7, where there is an entire eco-
crab. I enlisted my friend Jodie, who lives system of Korean restaurants and cafés.
in Queens, to bring nearly $400 in cash to Our destination was Hahm Ji Bach (40-
make the exchange at a takeout hub called 11 149th Pl., nr. Roosevelt Ave., Murray Hill;
Sunnyside Eats. hahmjibach.com), a 24-hour Korean barbe-
I’m sorry to report that the crab at Rice cue with an expansive menu that includes
Thief did not fulfill my Korean-feast fanta- crowd-pleasing items such as seafood pan-
sies. The problem was clear from the out- cakes as well as rarer ones like braised
set: The crabs hadn’t marinated long monkfish, barley rice with pickled radish
enough. The flesh was too white and too tops, and, yes, gejang. The restaurant was
firm, as though the crustaceans had just full for a Wednesday night but not packed.
taken a quick dip. Moreover, the gills We tried some of the more uncommon bar-
hadn’t been removed, nor the belly cut into becue options—like black pig, a Jeju-island
segments, so we needed to use our own specialty known for its richer flavor—before
kitchen scissors to get to the meat. The we got to the crab, which, for $23, came
meal became a high-labor, low-reward af- with a bubbling side of doenjang jjigae. Two
ternoon. Still, greedy and persistent little blue crabs were properly cut into pieces,
grub that I am, I used the top half of the with a scattering of sesame seeds. I tasted
shell like a bowl for rice to soak up any lin- the liquid—spicy, garlicky, good—and
P H OTO G R A P H : H A I Q I Y U

to open for Harry Styles: Well, I listened to
Mitski before Be the Cowboy.
While it would have been absolutely
metal if my mom had packed raw crab in my
school lunch, I did not eat it until I was an
adult living in Korea. These days, my favorite
gering morsels of meat or roe, af-
firming gejang’s reputation as a
dish that “steals” all of the rice on
the table. The real revelation was
Little Banchan Shop (5-28 49th
Ave., Long Island City; littleban-
sucked on a leg. I watched as two
Rice Thief
aunties, one wearing a red rhine-
accepts orders stone jacket, sat down at a table
via Instagram next to us and got an order to
or WeChat. share. I knew this would hold me
over until my next trip to L.A. ■

52 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3

o pe ni n g s
A Very New
Veggie Burger
“It’s a little Nigerian
and a little American.”
➽ when funso akinya moved to
Brooklyn from Nigeria two decades ago,
his first job was cooking at a McDonald’s
in Sheepshead Bay. There, he gained some
crucial insight into this country’s palate:
“Americans like mayonnaise, they like
pickles, they like garlic,” he says. “I studied
it to know what fast food is all about.”
It took time, but he is now putting what
he learned to work at his first restaurant,
Akara House (642 Nostrand Ave., nr.
Dean St., Crown Heights; akarahouse.com).
In addition to West African staples such as
suya and jollof rice, Akinya takes akara
sandwiches—made with his shop’s namesake
fritters and common in Nigeria—and turns
them into burgers, an idea he had after
chicken sandwiches and “plant based” patties
exploded in popularity. “It’s a little Nigerian
and a little American,” he says. Akinya starts
by seasoning the akara with garlic and ginger
in addition to the usual onion and chile.
They’re fried to order and stuffed into agege,
a white bread that Akinya gets from a baker
in Atlanta. Next, he adds a slick of mayo,
homemade pickles, and slices of American
cheese or mozzarella. The $6 sandwiches are
crunchy, creamy, and a little bit sweet—
a combination that will make sense to
anyone who’s ever eaten a McChicken.
Recently, Akinya was back home, where
he decided to offer his friends and family
a taste. How did they take to the mayo and
pickles? “They thought I was crazy,” he says.
“They were just looking at me like, What
are you doing?” chris crowley
54 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
food
ba r s
One Drink,
Five Alarms
A cocktail that mixes coffee, rum,
and a spray of flame.
by robert simonson
F
ifteen years after the Peni-
cillin and Benton’s old-fashioned
appeared on the city’s cocktail
menus, drink names can still feel
like a secret code. Take the sea-
sonal lists at Koloman (16 W. 29th St.,
nr. Broadway), chef Markus Glock-
er’s upscale French restaurant inside
Nomad’s Ace Hotel. There was the
Jacqueline Rose, which an educated
drinker could understand to be a riff
on the apple-brandy classic Jack Rose;
the Tennessee Gentleman signaled a
drink made with Tennessee whiskey;
and now there’s the curiosity known as
the Trummer.
“Um,” I asked Meg Lazar, the head
bartender, as I looked up from the
menu one recent night, “is this drink set
on fire?”
Yes, she confirmed. Yes, it is.
The Trummer is named for Albert
Trummer, the Austrian-born bar-
tender whom fans know as a leading
light in New York’s cocktail revival,
having spearheaded the drink pro-
grams at aughts-era favorites such as
Danube and Town. Other people may
know Trummer’s name because he
tended to make headlines.
The zenith of his early career came at
Apotheke, a hidden bar with a phar-
macy theme tucked into the elbow of
Doyers Street in Chinatown. His trade-
mark drink was homemade absinthe
concocted with high-proof alcohol,
herbs, and fire—a process that
momentarily (and memorably) left the
bar top in flames. Eventually, city fire
marshals took a dim view of this pre-
sentation and Trummer was arrested.
It was Lazar who first thought to
make the Trummer cocktail. “The
initial idea came from me wanting to
put a Spanish coffee on the menu,” she
says. Spanish coffee is an old-school
form of flaming cocktail in which the
fiery show is conjured by a combina-
tion of overproof liquor and healthy
showers of cinnamon. It can get
messy. “The bar gets perpetually cov-
ered in cinnamon,” Lazar says. “I
wanted to make a Spanish coffee that
wasn’t a mess.”
Her fix involves a mister, which she
uses to spray 160-proof Austrian rum
into a glass rimmed with cinnamon
and sugar. Then she lights the fire,
spraying more rum to amplify the
flames—which are controlled but
soaring—and rotating the glass to cara-
melize the rim. The finished drink con-
tains dark rum, crème de cacao, strong
coffee, and whipped cream laced with
the spiced liqueur Velvet Falernum.
After she demonstrated the drink to
Glocker and beverage director Katja
Scharnagl—both of whom are also
from Austria—they had the same
thought. “We have to call it the
Trummer,” Scharnagl recalls saying.
“There is no other way.”
P H OTO G R A P H : M A R C U S M C D O N A L D ( A K A R A )
Glocker didn’t ask Trummer himself
for permission to use his name (“I’ve
known him long enough,” he explains),
but the man soon came in to dine.
Lazar made a Trummer for Trummer,
and luckily he maintains a sense of
humor about his combustible past. “He
laughed the whole time,” Lazar says.
“I’m very proud,” Trummer reports.
He knows the name came about
because “they were thinking of the good
old times at Apotheke.” ■
Photograph by Tonje Thilesen
Meg Lazar prepares
a Trummer.
 Hosted by Elie Honig

Who Killed Al Bruno?

NEW EPISODES EVERY WEDNESDAY

 P H OTO G R A P H : S T Y L I N G B Y M A D I S O N G U E S T, H A I R B Y M A R C I A H A M I LTO N , M A K E U P B Y B I L L I E G E N E

Photograph by Gabriel S. Lopez

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

no one will confirm it. Glover told me that

Ni’Jah “wasn’t just Beyoncé” but that the
Swarm was inspired by her fans because
“they’re the most galvanized—they move
the most like a hive to me.” (Not everyone
agrees; after the show came out, Twitter
was full of people arguing its subculture
t doesn’t not look like Beyoncé, except you know Beyoncé reminded them more of Nicki Minaj’s stans,
the Barbz.)
would never wear a wig this bad. It has the deep-brown eyes, the brows As we gazed upon wax Bey, I asked
arched high, the arm outstretched and hip swirled right, knees cocked in Fishback the obvious. A flash of frustra-
frozen forever choreo—they got it past scary, just short of uncanny. The tion crossed her face. “Oh, God. I mean, it’s
lips are closed, and they are glossy. The gaze is fixed, and it is dead, dead, not her,” she said. “It’s an alternate universe
where Ni’Jah has done similar things to
dead. And we can’t really tell: Did they make Beyoncé orange? Or is it just what Beyoncé has done.” To her, Dre’s quest
the shit lighting at the Hollywood Madame Tussauds? ¶ Dominique is more about finding a replacement for
Fishback stepped back to appraise. It was early March, and we’d spent the Marissa than it is about the celebrity at its
past hour wending through the chambers of the wax museum as Fishback center. “I had to be present,” she said, “and
let her have her one main objective.”
dashed up to various figures, mugging with wax Morgan Freeman “That being to meet Ni’Jah?” I asked.
(“I’d love to work with you one day”) and wax Jim Carrey and wax the Rock. “To be with the one person that’s going
To wax Marlene Dietrich: “I don’t know her.” To wax Vivien Leigh: to make her feel like she has somebody,”
“My girl!” At wax Angela Bassett, all in red and head thrown back, Fishback said Fishback.
squealed and jumped in for a photo: “Oh my God, this looks just like her. fishback grew up in East New York,
They killed that.” She was probably the only one there who could follow it living in a two-story, multi-apartment
with “I got to put it up with the real one that I have of me and her.” house her family owned with her mother
The reason we’re here with the fake every scene. Fishback has played other and grandmother and aunts and their kids.
Beyoncé is Fishback’s lead role in the women in brutal situations, like the Black When she was tiny, her dad would sit her
new Donald Glover–Janine Nabers series Panther Deborah Johnson in Judas and the down on the back of one of his Rottweilers
Swarm as Dre, an obsessive, damaged Black Messiah, who witnesses the murder of and parade her through the neighborhood.
Houstonian fan of a pop star named Ni’Jah. her partner, Fred Hampton, but this is both She loved hanging with the boys and playing
The show begins in 2016, and Ni’Jah is … her first lead role in a series and the first time basketball with her cousins and watching
familiar. She drops a visual album. Her she’s inflicting the violence herself. She roots what was then called the WWF. She wanted
rapper husband fights her sister in an the character in gesture—the swivel of a to be like the wrestler Lita with the Hardy
elevator. Someone bites her at a party. Her chin, a stiff-kneed walk, eyes that dart from Boyz, the lone girl in the crew.
fans call themselves the Swarm. But Dre is side to side. We learn Dre was a foster kid By 8, Dominique knew she wanted
who we follow, a lonely young woman glued who met Marissa when her parents took her to be an actor. There was a kids’ theater
to her phone and her Ni’Jah stan account. in for a few years. If Dre is Odysseus, Ni’Jah group she’d heard about; maybe she could
That devotion is rivaled only by her love for do that? She tried out once, twice, three
her sister, Marissa (Chloe Bailey), her sole times—nothing. When she was finishing
family and friend in the world—and when up middle school, she decided to audition
Marissa dies, Dre snaps. Lost in grief, she “I was like, for La Guardia, the famous arts high school.
fixates on meeting Ni’Jah and becomes Dominique mentioned this to her school’s
convinced the star needs protection from Girl, I don’t know guidance counselor, and the woman told
the haters. Soon, Dre starts killing people what you’re her she didn’t have “the ‘It’ factor.” “I walked
who insult Ni’Jah. A lot of them. She heads through East New York, and I was crying
out on a cross-country spree, on which she doing and why my heart out. Crying my heart out.
runs up against everyone from shit-talking you’re doing it.” I remember walking down the block, and
strippers to overeager white liberals to, this guy—he passed away young; his name
eventually, Ni’Jah herself. was Kirk—was like, ‘Who did it, Dom? I’ll
It’s a blown-out, Twitter-brained satire handle it.’ ” That familiarity, the promise to
full of Easter eggs and stunt casting—catch is Ithaca, a dream of safety Dre can barely handle it: That’s East New York to her.
Billie Eilish as the leader of a white-woman articulate. Fishback plays that longing like Not getting into La Guardia “made me
self-improvement cult, Rickey Thompson a broken, bloody homesickness. the artist I am,” she said. She stayed closer to
as a mall employee, and Paris Jackson, That the show takes so much from one home, going to high school in Brownsville
daughter of Michael, as a lily-white stripper standom in particular twirled its creators, and finding a youth theater group in
who insists her dad was Black. (There was a and Fishback, into a waltz of evasive PR. Manhattan. She went on to study theater
little stunt casting in the writers’ room, too: Early interviews could sound like everyone at Pace, where her thesis project was a one-
Malia Obama worked on the show, credited was workshopping how to not talk about woman show she wrote and performed Off
as Malia Ann.) While the scenery and the Beyoncé. Glover has collaborated with her; Broadway called Subverted. In it, she played
characters shift from episode to episode, Dre Fishback played Jay-Z’s mom in the video 20 characters, all based on herself and the
remains the wildly unpredictable, barely for his song “Smile.” One might assume people she grew up around. It didn’t take
verbal through-line, appearing in nearly the show has Bey’s seal of approval, even if long after graduation to start landing small

58 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3

Dre eating pie after her first kill.
TV parts on The Americans and The Affair.
David Simon, creator of The Wire, gave her
a big break in 2014 when he cast her as a
rebellious teen turned exhausted single
mother in his ’80s-public-housing drama
Show Me a Hero, her first recurring role,
followed by another in his series about ’70s
porn, The Deuce.
Fishback was thrown when Glover
asked her to meet to discuss Swarm and
then followed up by requesting she watch
Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher—
the 2001 Michael Haneke film in which
Huppert plays a woman in twisted erotic
relation to both her mother and her lover.
“When it took that masochistic turn, it made
me question the type of actor I thought I was
and whether I was brave or not,” Fishback
said. She read the pilot and got so worked up
over whether she wanted to play Dre she was
taken aback when Glover said he wanted
her to play Marissa instead. If Fishback was
going to do this, she wanted the hard part.
She insisted, and Glover agreed. Then she
started “spiraling a little bit. Why did I ask
for this?”
It was the darkness that gave her pause.
Fishback has witnessed violence in real life.
Around the time she was preparing to do
The Deuce, she was walking in East New
York one morning, picking up a bacon-egg-
P H OTO G R A P H : A M A ZO N S T U D I O S
and-cheese, when a man she didn’t know
was shot three times in front of her. Fishback
was one of the people to call the ambulance.
After that, she started going to therapy.
“I realize you don’t need a big reason to go,”
she said. “That was a big reason—I needed
to go talk about it because I feel like these
things are not necessarily normal.” She sees
her instinct to seek help as one of the many
differences between herself and her Swarm
character: “Dre is moving forward without
the wherewithal to know that things are
affecting her. For me, thankfully, I’m aware
things I don’t even remember happening
are affecting me to this day.”
Fishback also journals and has some-
times prepared for roles by writing in char-
acter. That didn’t feel right for Swarm. The
script’s description of Dre was minimal: how
she moves, how she does or does not emote,
what’s going through her mind to make
her act the way she does—Fishback had to
figure all that out herself. “I couldn’t connect
the threads psychologically. I thought, with
how specific the show was, they were going
to be very meticulous about things, and
they weren’t,” she said, referring to Glover
and Nabers. “When I was first reading the
script, I was frustrated because I was like,
Girl, I don’t know what you’re doing and
why you’re doing it. I kept asking them, ‘So,
is she this? Is she this?’”
Glover said they purposefully did not talk
to Fishback about her character’s backstory.
“I kept telling her, ‘You’re not regular people.
You don’t have to find the humanity in your
character. That’s the audience’s job,’ ” he
said. He acknowledged that made it harder
for her: “She really was lost a lot of the time.”
He said he told Fishback, “Think of it more
like an animal and less like a person.”
“Actors in general, they want to get
layered performances. And I don’t think
Dre is that layered,” he told me. “I wanted
her performance to be brutal. It reminds
me of how I have a fear with dogs because
I’m like, ‘You’re not looking at me in the
eye, I don’t know what you’re capable of.’”
We find out quick. By the end of the pilot,
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
Dre commits her first murder: Marissa’s
cocky boyfriend, Khalid, played by Damson
Idris, best known for his role as a drug king-
pin on the show Snowfall. Fishback was ner-
vous. It didn’t help that Glover was directing
and wanted the wide shot of the murder
done in a single take; they did most of the
show on 16-mm., and all the blood splatter
involved would mean a lengthy reset if they
didn’t nail it. She was nervous for other rea-
sons, too. “The energy or the place that the
character has to go to do that, I don’t know
how it’s going to affect me,” she said.
She and Idris ran through the beats of the
scene. She’d asked the showrunners to get
a therapist on set, and they agreed to have
someone there for kill days—an experiment
in demanding what you need. She asked a
close friend to join her, too. They sat at a
table for a while, talking and praying. Fish-
back has a photo of herself at 10 years old she
especially loves; she calls it a “picture of my
inner child.” The Dom in the picture is the
one who wanted to perform so bad but had
not yet won an audition. As she prepared,
she thought about that version of herself:
“I was like, Okay, this is what you wanted
to do. You better act.” Then she got out there
and whacked Khalid with a salt lamp.
when fishback and I made it out of
Madame Tussauds, the sun was high in the
sky. We were walking west on Hollywood
Boulevard, passing tourists snapping
selfies with big foam Oscars, when some-
thing caught her eye. “Oh! Look at me!” she
said, stopping short. “This is the first time
I’m seeing me!” It was a poster for Swarm,
pasted on a wall across the street.
We ran over to take a picture of her
with it and found a couple of 30-ish guys
hanging out in front. “That’s her,” I said to
one of them. “I know,” he said and turned
to Fishback. “You kill me on the show.”
Fishback’s eyes widened. “That’s right—
hey!” she said. “This is the boyfriend in the
second episode!” It was Fishback’s cast-
mate, Casey Mills, there with a skateboard,
trying to get a video of himself doing a wall
ride on the poster. (He plays a character
named Sir whom Dre bludgeons with a
dumbbell.) Fishback, excited: “Can you
teach me how to skateboard?”
As Mills stood behind her, she stepped
gingerly onto the board. With one foot,
she gave herself a gentle push and went
“Wheee!” Too gentle: The board barely
made it from one sidewalk star to another.
Fishback laughed as Mills picked up the
board and carried it back for her to try
again. She ran back, got into position,
grabbed his hand and got ready. “All
good,” she said. “I just gotta get a little
more momentum.” ■
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 T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

ARIANA MARIAH
SHAKIRA’S GRANDE’S CAREY’S

The
SHAKIFANS ARIANATORS LAMBILY
CALLING CARD: CALLING CARD: CALLING CARD:
(For 2009’s She Wolf.) HOW FAR THEY’LL GO: HOW FAR THEY’LL GO: In

Stans
HOW FAR THEY’LL GO:
Following “Bzrp Music
Sessions, Vol. 53,” her
new name-dropping
diss track about her ex
Gerard Piqué allegedly
In 2019, a stan used
her Nintendo 3DS,
Wii U, and an LG
smart refrigerator in
a desperate attempt
to keep tweeting from
2016, Demi Lovato
suggested that Mariah
is a lower-quality
version of Ariana
Grande and called
her treatment of J.Lo

and
cheating on her, one
stan who owns a
restaurant reportedly
asked Piqué and his new
girlfriend to leave his
establishment. A stan’s
her Arianator account
after her mother took
her phone away. That
same year, fans spewed
so much vitriol at a
writer who criticized
“nasty.” The backlash
from the Lambs was so
bad that, within a week,
Demi had temporarily
quit both Instagram
and Twitter.

What
false claim that Shakira Ariana that the singer LIKES: Christmas, the time
gave computer lessons allegedly apologized on of year when her fans
to Bill Gates went so their behalf. are most powerful; her
viral news outlets had LIKES: The Wicked movie twins, “Dem Babies”;
to fact-check it. (because they suspect it TikTok, for making “It’s
LIKES: Her son Milan, helped her improve her a Wrap” go viral and

They
who wanted her to singing enunciation). giving them a new EP.
work with Bizarrap on DISLIKES: The Wicked DISLIKES: The U.S. Patent
the diss track. movie (because and Trademark
DISLIKES: Piqué, for cheating they suspect it may Office, for denying her
them out of the music make her forget she’s application to officially

Stand
she could’ve made a pop star). own the “Queen of
if she hadn’t prioritized Christmas” title.
family life.

follows them online

For
ultradedicated music fans
HARRY
STYLES’S
HARRIES
CALLING CARD:
HOW FAR THEY’LL GO:
can use their collective power Stans accused internet
for charity and activism—K-pop personality Brittany
Broski, who has
devotees once spammed police, professed her love
who were looking for videos for Harry and was
of protesters, with fan-cams— invited to meet him,
of clout-chasing
or they can go to impressive and taking away
(and sometimes unhinged) opportunities from
real fans after he
lengths to defend or promote didn’t make the top
their favorite artists. It’s five in her 2022
Eminem, Spotify “Wrapped.”
the originator all or nothing all the time. LIKES: The Recording
of stan. While it would be impossible Academy for his Album
of the Year win; Anne
to list every single standom, this
RIHANNA’S
NAVY
CALLING CARD:
HOW FAR THEY’LL GO:
SELENA
GOMEZ’S
SELENATORS
CALLING CARD:
(Our unofficial pick,
Forced the notoriously because they certainly
unapologetic Stephen do keep an eye out
A. Smith to tweet a for “Selene-r.”)
three-minute apology HOW FAR THEY’LL GO:
this year for suggesting Convinced that
that Rih was not as Kylie Jenner (whom
good as Beyoncé. Selena dethroned as
In 2018, stans deleted Instagram’s most-
Snapchat because followed woman) and
Rih was displeased Hailey Bieber (who is
with an ad that married to Selena’s ex
appeared to reference Justin) were making fun
her domestic abuse. of Selena, stans made so
LIKES: Black Panther: many TikToks about the
Wakanda Forever, for alleged beef that Kylie
ending a six-year music and Hailey had to deny
P H OTO G R A P H S : G E T T Y I M AG E S

and Gemma, his mother drought; Barbados, for throwing shade.

guide can help you better identify and sister.
DISLIKES: All that
some of the major players right now.
drama around Don’t DISLIKES: A$AP Rocky,
Proceed with caution. Worry Darling; the
By JENNIFER ZHAN concertgoers who
throw things at Harry,
including Skittles and
a chicken nugget.
recognizing her as a LIKES: Only Murders in
national hero. the Building; her close
friend Taylor Swift.
because they want her DISLIKES: Selena’s longtime
to be pregnant with a BFFs, Raquelle Stevens
new album, not another and Francia Raisa—
baby. Kidding, kidding! fans questioned their
Unless … friendships after her
doc, My Mind & Me.

60 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
 BILLIE
BLACKPINK’S EILISH
BLINKS STANS
CALLING CARD: CALLING CARD:
HOW FAR THEY’LL GO: HOW FAR THEY’LL GO:
Hired protest trucks to Billie has requested
drive around their label restraining orders
YG Entertainment’s against multiple stans,
building, blasting in the literal definition
Blackpink songs and by Eminem—she’s had
using an LED screen stalker fans visit her
to display demands family home several
for more music and times. Others have
promotional activities. expressed concern
Like many K-pop about the power
standoms, they’ve also dynamics between
worked to reverse- the 21-year-old
engineer YouTube’s and her current
algorithm. boyfriend, who is 31.
LIKES: Coachella, for LIKES: Her brother
booking Blackpink to and close musical
perform in 2019—and collaborator, Finneas;
again in 2023 as the making fan edits of her
first K-pop act to acting debut in Donald
headline the festival. Glover’s Swarm.
DISLIKES: The Weeknd DISLIKES: Anyone who
and Sam Levinson, for participated in the
allegedly giving Jennie a creepy countdown to
tiny role in The Idol. her 18th birthday.
LADY
BAD GAGA’S
BUNNY LITTLE
STANS MONSTERS
CALLING CARD: CALLING CARD:
HOW FAR THEY’LL GO: (From her command
Stans have climbed to put their “paws up!”
onto cars and rushed the in a claw gesture
stage to get to Benito, during concerts.)
who has sometimes HOW FAR THEY’LL GO:
rewarded them with Once collectively
kisses. Ticketmaster disguised their accounts
also claimed that so and pretended to be
many people showed up “soccer moms” who
with counterfeit tickets loved Lady Gaga in
to one of his shows that hopes of tricking radio
scanning systems broke hosts into playing
and began identifying her music. They also
legitimate tickets as spread a fake Starbucks
fake ones. promotion to get people
LIKES: The Macy’s to stream “Shallow.”
Thanksgiving Day LIKES: The one person in
P H OTO G R A P H S : G E T T Y I M AG E S
Parade, for giving the the room who believes
heart from his Un in her even when
Verano Sin Ti album 99 people don’t. (That’s
its very own float; Bradley Cooper, but
Coachella, since also Tony Bennett.)
he’ll be the first Latin DISLIKES: The people who
artist to headline. allegedly tried to get
DISLIKES: Kendall Jenner, rich by stealing her dogs
for allegedly and shooting her dog
dating Benito. walker.
CARDI B’S
BARDI BEYONCÉ’S BTS’S
GANG BEYHIVE ARMY
CALLING CARD: CALLING CARD: CALLING CARDS: ,
HOW FAR THEY’LL GO: In HOW FAR THEY’LL GO: They a symbol of their love,
April 2022, her own reportedly hacked and the number 7, for all
stans dragged her for designer Rachel Roy, the members.
skipping the Grammys believing she was HOW FAR THEY’LL GO: Have
and not dropping Jay-Z’s alleged forced several people
music. After people mistress, a.k.a. “Becky to apologize—and even
started mentioning with the good hair” once found someone’s
her children, Cardi (chef Rachael Ray was workplace and got them
temporarily deactivated swarmed on socials by fired—for disrespecting
her account. stans who forgot to the group.
LIKES: Her unlikely friend check their spelling). LIKES: BT21, a collection
Penn Badgley and her Another woman got of cartoon characters
series of community- death threats after she co-created by BTS that
service selfies. leaned over Beyoncé to has its own lore, merch,
DISLIKES: Bloggers—like chat with Jay-Z at an and 12.6 million Twitter
the one she successfully NBA game. followers; the monthly
sued for more than LIKES: Blue Ivy, Sir, Rumi, #ARMYSelcaDay, when
$4 million—who lie because everything Bey stans post selfies and
about her or generally makes is art, including hype one another up.
portray her in a negative her kids. DISLIKES: Mandatory
light; Nicki Minaj, DISLIKES: The Grammys, military service in South
because their beef is for consistently Korea, because it means
so bad that Cardi once snubbing her for each member will leave
tried to physically fight AOTY; Ticketmaster to spend 18 months
the leader of the Barbz; fees; waiting for the with a very different
waiting around for her Renaissance visuals. type of army.
sophomore album.
follows them home
BRITNEY
SPEARS’S TAYLOR NICKI
BRITNEY SWIFT’S MINAJ’S
ARMY SWIFTIES BARBZ
CALLING CARD: CALLING CARD: Adding CALLING CARD:
(Britney’s fave.) “(Taylor’s Version)” to HOW FAR THEY’LL GO:
HOW FAR THEY’LL GO: the end of their display After a pop-culture
A stan famously begged name (to indicate she commentator criticized
people to “Leave owns them). her lyrics, Nicki
Britney Alone” amid HOW FAR THEY’LL GO: commanded stans in a
media scrutiny in Prompted a lawsuit and since-deleted tweet to
2007; the Free Britney federal investigations “Go beat dat n----- like
movement brought into Ticketmaster he stole smthn.” He
national attention to over her Eras Tour. claimed the Barbz then
her conservatorship; In 2019, they allegedly leaked his address and
a concerned fan sent Scooter Braun phone number, sending
reportedly called the “numerous death so much hate he started
police to conduct threats.” Some doxed a GoFundMe to fight
a wellness check after a Pitchfork journalist the “bullying.” At least
a now-freed Britney over a “negative” two other times, Nicki’s
temporarily folklore review. tweets (or likes) have
deactivated Instagram. LIKES: Her cats; Joe Alwyn encouraged Barbz to
LIKES: Her lawyer, Mathew (though they may attack her critics.
Rosengart; her also want to fight him LIKES: Sachin, the Barb
longtime friend Paris to be with her); who once did a mock
Hilton; her husband, Mama Swift; Tree job interview with Nicki
Sam Asghari (unless Paine, Tay’s publicist. on Instagram Live and
they’re of the belief he’s DISLIKES: Ye, Kim, Scott told her to focus on
controlling her). Borchetta; anyone still getting her music done
DISLIKES: Pretty much the making that “joke” that on time; her friend
entire Spears family. Oh, she writes too many Ariana Grande.
and Justin Timberlake. songs about her exes. DISLIKES: Nicki's rap foes.
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 61
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
Nan Goldin’s
Happy Ending
The demimonde photographer has long
considered herself a filmmaker.
What happened when a movie was made about her?
B y K ATE DWYE R
M
y work has always been
about making the private
public but to a very
limited audience,” says
the photographer Nan
Goldin, ashing an American Spirit. We are
sitting in her sunny living room in Clinton
Hill, treetops visible through the window.
On the coffee table are cans of La Croix on
Hilma af Klint coasters from the gift shop
at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which
recently showed six of Goldin’s slideshows
and video installations in a retrospective
titled “This Will Not End Well.” Peter Hujar’s
black-and-white portrait of her friend the
artist and activist David Wojnarowicz hangs
above the mantel.
The show in Sweden (Amsterdam is
the next stop) isn’t what’s making Goldin
anxious; instead, it’s Laura Poitras’s docu-
mentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,
which tells the intertwined stories of
Goldin’s art and activism. The movie didn’t
win the Oscar it was nominated for but is
now streaming on HBO Max. “Think about
if there was a two-hour film about you in
the world,” Goldin says. “It’s an ambivalent
experience. There’s a lot of good feelings
and bad feelings.” She feels in her body
the vulnerability of being exposed to such
a large audience: “It’s in my skin. It’s not
about thinking how people respond; it’s not
about worrying about the audience reac-
tion. It’s about my own reaction.”
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed pre-
miered in September at the Venice Film
Festival, winning the Golden Lion that now
sits on Goldin’s mantel. The film powerfully
connects the story of her life—her alien-
ation from her parents’ conformist culture,
her sister’s suicide, the bohemian world she
documented in her photographs (which
was shattered by the aids epidemic),
and her more recent opioid activism. She
founded the group P.A.I.N. on the model
62
of ACT UP to call attention to the overdose
crisis brought on by Big Pharma’s mar-
keting of opioids and to fight the influence
of the billionaire Sackler family, whose
company produced OxyContin; Goldin
herself became addicted to it following sur-
gery. The Sacklers are also a very powerful
philanthropic family, and fund many of the
museums showing her work.
“This Will Not End Well” gives a com-
prehensive overview of Goldin’s career
with thousands of images in nearly two
and a half hours’ worth of slideshows with
musical accompaniment—this is how she
prefers they be shown. “I’m getting old,” she
says. “So it’s time to put together my work in
a retrospective manner.”
Both the exhibit and the film are exer-
cises in politicizing the personal through
the “public disclosure of a private reality,”
as Wojnarowicz wrote in the catalogue
for the 1989 Goldin-curated group show
“Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” which
included artists affected by, and many
dying of, aids. The exhibition was one of
the flash points in the culture wars at the
time, with the National Endowment for the
Arts pulling its funding.
to look at a Nan Goldin photo is to par-
ticipate in a conspiracy. You get the sense
that she observes with a level of depth
other people do not and invites viewers
to share her gaze, if only for the duration
of a slideshow. “I’m careful not to betray
people,” Goldin tells me. That’s one reason
set designer and P.A.I.N. member Noemi
Bonazzi was drawn to Goldin 38 years
ago. They met in the early 1980s, while
Bonazzi was working at a gallery; Goldin
handed her a flyer and invited her to one
of her slideshows presented at a bar. “I just
couldn’t believe she could be that close to
people and people could be so trusting,”
Bonazzi said. “So that also propelled my
Photograph by Norman Jean Roy
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 63
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
friendship. I just thought, Okay, this is a
person who can be trusted. Clearly, people
feel they can entrust her with their secrets
or their most vulnerable moments, and
that’s how we became friends.” Bonazzi and
her family were later Goldin’s subjects. “You
feel that her gaze holds you,” Bonazzi said.
“She’s not going to drop you and hurt you.”
Goldin has always been able to cap-
ture her subjects in unguarded moments:
applying makeup, getting dressed,
showering, urinating, having sex. She
did this, of course, decades before digital
photography and the internet were
created, much less social media. She was
taking pictures of her friends and lovers at
a time when, said her first gallerist, Marvin
Heiferman, “people were not responsible
for their own representation, like they are
now.” Yet Goldin allowed her subjects to
strike any photos they objected to, and
today she has banned visitors’ photography
in galleries where her slideshows are on
display. “There’s sensitive stuff in those,” she
says. And she is exacting in how she con-
structs their narrative context.
She refuses to collaborate with galleries
that tell her which pieces to show or how
large to make her prints. In the case of her
retrospective, she had originally planned to
produce it with London’s National Portrait
Gallery, which she threatened to boycott
in 2019 if it accepted a Sackler donation.
A month later, it became the first major
art institution to turn down a Sackler
grant, but she still didn’t end up working
with that museum. “I wanted exclusively
slideshows. I wanted to be shown as a
filmmaker,” Goldin says, so she switched
to the Moderna Museet because its chief
curator, Fredrik Liew, shared her vision.
“I care about my books and my slideshows”
more than prints, she says. “That’s the two
mediums that my work belongs in.” Which
is to say: It belongs in context.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,
Goldin’s nearly 700-slide meditation on
levels of autonomy in relationships, is not
a fixed set of photographs matched with
music but rather a body of work she has
continually reordered, added to, and sub-
tracted from. “I love editing,” she says. “It’s
a pleasure.” At the beginning, she showed
her slides at bars and clubs; many of the
people depicted in the photos would be
right there dancing and reacting. Goldin
made her edits based on their responses.
Today, nine museums and foundations
own a version of The Ballad, and each copy
is different.
Over the years, as Goldin has reedited
this work, the slideshow has gotten subtler,
darker, more knowing, and is about desire
and loss in equal measure, Heiferman told
64 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
me. “There’s no happy endings, right? The
show ends in death,” he said. The chapters—
on topics including couples, feminine
power, masculine power, domestic violence,
women fighting back, female friendship,
sex work, marriage, children, friends, night-
life, “happy” couples, sex, ambivalence, and
death—have remained the same since 1987,
as has the soundtrack, which features the
Velvet Underground, Yoko Ono, and Lou
Reed. “The slides relate to the narrative of
the lyrics,” Goldin says, but they’re open to
interpretation. “What pulls it all together
is her willingness to look at vulnerability—
her own and everybody else’s—and put it
out in the world in a way that other people
can look at it too and not be intimidated or
embarrassed,” says Heiferman.
The Ballad and The Other Side, a slide-
show featuring Goldin’s transgender
friends, are presented in analog with
Kodak carousels in “This Will Not End
Well,” while the other works are digital. All
were reedited for this retrospective. Goldin
“I didn’t think
I cared about the
Oscars, but as
it was coming up,
I got excited.”
found a place in Germany, the last in the
world where you can “re-dupe,” or copy,
physical slides. “So I’m going to re-dupe
everything analog for the last time because
they have the last material,” she said of the
lab at a press conference in October. I ask
Goldin whether it’s accurate to say the
show’s cuts of The Ballad and The Other
Side will be the definitive ones. “I guess it
is accurate,” she says, her voice deflating.
But she is open to editing them again “in
the far future, if anyone else develops the
ability to dupe them analog. In Sweden,
they’re digital dupes, but analog dupes are
so much more beautiful.”
Goldin has now started a new chapter
in her career. Since adolescence, she has
wanted to make a film, and there are a few
novels she has long wanted to adapt (she
wouldn’t tell me which ones); the success
of the documentary has made her think
that now is the time to try to do so. She has
another photographic project in the works
and is going to reedit Scopophilia, a 2010
piece commissioned by the Louvre, for
which she wandered its galleries after hours,
photographing art from the collections.
“I literally fell in love with several women in
the paintings, and I would go back to visit
them every week,” she says. “Scopophilia is a
word Peter Hujar always used, meaning ‘the
pleasure of looking.’ ‘The consuming plea-
sure of looking’ is how he and I define it.”
“i’m used to having full control of my
work; that’s why the film is strange for me,”
Goldin says of All the Beauty and the Blood-
shed. “Or difficult for me, ’cause I didn’t have
full control” and she can’t go back to reedit
it. Poitras did the final cut, though the pair
call the project a collaboration.
Goldin granted Poitras several months
of audio interviews, during which they
came to an agreement that Goldin could
redact what she’d said about some of the
more sensitive topics. When she previewed
a rough cut of it last year, she worked “very
intensely” with her assistant, Alex Kwartler,
to show her photos “the way they were
meant to be used,” she says. “And I made
sure that I’m speaking my truth and not
someone else’s version, which was the most
important thing to me.” She “made a lot of
changes” with Kwartler: “Originally, there
were voice-overs and all sorts of stuff.
I don’t think there was an understanding
that the slideshows were pieces unto them-
selves.” Poitras “did the right thing,” Goldin
adds. “She earned my trust. She kept her
word.” Even so, Goldin avoided watching
the final cut until recently and has no plans
to see it on HBO Max.
For a year and a half, Goldin and
P.A.I.N. had been producing their own
documentary about the Sackler protests
and working with another director. But
after a 2019 meeting to discuss a different
activist project, Poitras volunteered to come
onboard. “I’ve always been just really com-
pelled to be able to create historical records
in real time,” Poitras tells me.
In an initial conversation with the artist,
Poitras said she realized that “Witnesses:
Against Our Vanishing” would be central
to the film because the NEA controversy
was a clear example of “the larger historical
parallels and government failures” between
the aids crisis and the overdose crisis. In
both instances, Goldin emerged “on the
right side of history despite the risks and
pushback in the beginning,” Poitras said.
And once she saw a digital version of Sisters,
Saints, and Sibyls, a 2004 slideshow about
Goldin’s sister, Barbara, she asked if Goldin
would be open to including Barbara in All
the Beauty and the Bloodshed.
“Had it been just a movie about our work
against the Sacklers, I don’t think it would
have been that interesting,” Bonazzi said.
But Goldin’s life story anchored it in pathos:
“The pain that brought her to go out there
and shame the Sacklers was on her skin.
 The message is doubly important and valu-
able because it’s someone who has lost so
much to drugs.” P.A.I.N. organizer Megan
Kapler said she hadn’t “ever witnessed
someone so willing to put their personal
story on the line for a cause.”
The film begins and ends at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, on
March 10, 2018, Goldin and P.A.I.N. tossed
orange plastic bottles into the reflecting
pool surrounding the Temple of Dendur
and staged a die-in to bring attention to the
links between the Sackler family’s name
on the galleries, the source of their for-
tune, and the opioid crisis. One protester
in the film carries a tote bag printed with
silence=death, the logo of ACT UP.
According to Daniel Weiss, the Met’s
president and chief executive, the museum
had been quietly deliberating “issues asso-
ciated with opioids” for several months,
and “Nan’s activism, without question,
helped to raise the visibility of the issue of
opioids and the connection of opioids to
P H OTO G R A P H : T H O R A S I E M S E N ; P R E V I O U S S P R E A D, H A I R B Y D I D I E R M A L I G E F O R L E O N O R G R E Y L AT A R T PA R T N E R , M A K E U P B Y TA K A S H I A S H I Z AWA

cultural institutions through the philan-

thropy of the Sacklers.” Because the pro-
test didn’t significantly impact either the
art or the other visitors, Weiss said, he was
“perfectly happy for the museum to be a
place where these important issues are
being discussed.”
P.A.I.N. considers the film its latest
activist project. Just as the group has
brought its work to cultural institutions
and bankruptcy courts, it discussed the
effectiveness of overdose-prevention centers
with harm-reduction organizations like
VOCAL-NY, Housing Works, and OnPoint
NYC in the lead-up to the Academy Awards.
Goldin at this year’s Academy Awards.
Goldin believes that P.A.I.N.’s success she explains. “I sought her out. There were
came from its solidarity and that progres- a lot of designers who came to me, but
sives need to stick together, especially I sought her out.”
online. “The least political thing you can Throughout the evening, Hollywood
do is destroy other people because they types approached Goldin to thank her for
didn’t agree with you,” she says, “and it’s her work. “How many films have we seen
just cruel.” With the film offering P.A.I.N. that directly or indirectly quote Nan’s sense
as a blueprint, she hopes to galvanize other of the look of a person or the mood of a

G
ol di n i s a r ig orou s
person to talk with. She
challenges you relentlessly
by insisting on discipline in
your language and concepts,
and at other times she veers into critique
of millennials. (“All this text talk. People
can’t write end of day or thank you?
Everything’s abbreviated. And that, to
me, is destroying the language.”) She
believes the world would be different if
thinkers like Wojnarowicz were still here.
“The kind of cultural reality that’s been
prescribed would not have gone so far if
my people were alive,” she says.
She hopes she won’t be canceled “because
my language is not your language,” she
says. “I think someone tried to read me
on Twitter once as being transphobic. Me.
One of the first people to ever show and
represent trans people in a beautiful way
in the ’70s. And somebody just shut them
down and said, ‘What are you talking
about? Nan is the O.G.’”
grassroots movements. “I think everyone
has to get on the street and find their fight.
Everyone.” She takes a drag on her cigarette.
“It’s really dark times,” she adds, exhaling.
There’s another upside to going main-
stream with All the Beauty and the Blood-
shed. Even before the HBO Max release,
she says, “Kids come to me and tell me—not
just kids, adults—that the film really helped
them deal with a lot of things: their own
histories and the overdose crisis and the
Sacklers. I put the work out to destigmatize
things” such as drug use and mental illness.
“So if it results in that, it’s great.”
On Oscars Night, with her coiffure
flawless, Goldin got dressed up in a red
gown and black evening jacket. “It was
harkening back to the golden age of
Hollywood,” she says of the look. Back in
the ’70s, when she lived with drag queens
in Boston, she recalls, “We were buying
gowns we could hardly afford at Goodwill,
and now people are making gowns for me.”
This one was by Elena Dawson, “a British
designer who’s not well enough known,”
room?” Bonazzi said.
Was Goldin disappointed not to win?
“I didn’t think I cared about the Oscars, but
by the end, as it was coming up, I got excited
about it,” she admits. Winning the Golden
Lion meant more: “I found that very
elegant because it’s by a jury of intelligent
writers and filmmakers and actors.
I was really touched by that award and what
Julianne Moore said, particularly that it
was a unanimous decision as a jury because
it touched everyone so deeply. So that was
really big for me.”
After the announcement, her team
decamped to the “black carpet,” the
indoor-outdoor room where smokers
congregate. “That’s where we met great
people,” she says, like the groups behind
nominees EO and All That Breathes, along
with her awards-circuit pal Paul Mescal,
with whom she hopes to collaborate.
But was she relieved? “The relief is
that I didn’t have to give 1 million more
interviews,” she says. “If I’d won, I’d have to
give a million more. Now it’s quieter.” ■

m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 65
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

scene report

The Fall Out Boys

Are Back in Town
The band’s new album returns
to where it all started 20 years ago.
B y J US T I N C U RT O

The so much for (tour) dust tour begins June 21.

the first time Fall Out Boy headlined beloved If the band wishes to make a return to aughts form, now’s the
Chicago rock club Metro could’ve been their last. For time. The sound they helped define is a hot commodity once more
a band that, until then, had been a bare-bones project, with a wave of pop-punk nostalgia cresting early in the new decade.
the gig was a substantial step: top billing at a venue But Fall Out Boy views Stardust as a chance to give up worrying
where they’d seen all their heroes. It was February 2003; they had about where they fall between pop and rock. “There’s kids that got
just solidified their lineup (singer and guitarist Patrick Stump, into us because of the Big Hero 6 soundtrack, then there’s kids that
bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz, lead guitarist Joe Trohman, and got into us because we played on Warped Tour,” Wentz says. “How
drummer Andy Hurley) and were preparing to prototype emo do we mix those two in a way that doesn’t feel patronizing and is
pop with their debut, Take This to Your Grave, in a few months. organic, artistic, and very modern?” They haven’t abandoned pop
Stump and Wentz hoped booking such an important show would touches; they’re just using them more intentionally—a piano loop
persuade their families to allow them to do music instead of school. here, a synth track there. More notably, Stardust has some of the
“We were like, ‘How do we get some group’s most unabashed rock music
production?’ ” says Wentz. “We in at least a decade. Lead single “Love
couldn’t really afford anything. So we From the Other Side,” which reflects
had these giant inflatables,” Wentz on the restlessness of the pandemic
continues, “and they were penis- and fame, is one of their loudest
shaped.” And taller than the whole songs, full-stop, and their first No. 1
(famously short) band, in fact. That on the alternative charts.
night, some made their way up to the Trohman was integral to this
balcony. One whacked Wentz’s mom; direction—he called Stardust “the
another, Stump’s grandmother. “This guitar-heavier album I had been
is actually insane,” Wentz thought. fighting for us to make for almost a
“After that, it was the first time my decade” in his 2022 memoir, None of
parents were like, ‘Well, maybe This Rocks. But the same day FOB
you should just take a year off from released “Other Side,” Trohman
college and do that.’” announced he was taking a break for
P H OTO G R A P H ( T H I S PAG E ) : S COT T G R I E S / G E T T Y I M AG E S

Stump, Trohman, Hurley, and Wentz on

In January, nearly two decades MTV’s Total Request Live in 2005. his mental health. He is, however,
later, the band went back to their old still in the band. “I was really
haunt for their eighth album, So Much (for) Stardust. It reunites frustrated at first when people would ask me about it and imply
Fall Out Boy with Fueled by Ramen, the tastemaking label that that he wasn’t there,” Stump says. “I’m like, ‘No, no, no. He’s exactly
released their first album but from which they departed for Island as much a part of it as any of us.’”
Records for 2005’s From Under the Cork Tree. It also brings back When Wentz, Stump, and Hurley arrived at Metro for sound
longtime producer Neal Avron. With the hits “Sugar, We’re Goin check on a recent afternoon, there were already dozens of fans
Down” and “Dance, Dance,” Cork Tree turned Fall Out Boy from lined up, braving the winter slush for their 46th, 31st, 24th, or even
DIY upstarts into emo-punk heroes. 2007’s Infinity on High only first FOB show. “People often have nostalgic fomo, like, Wow,
increased their stardom. Those songs built on their basement- I wasn’t old enough or I didn’t live in the right city,” Wentz says.
show roots with throttling guitars and Wentz’s screams, but they And as much as the band wanted to push forward, they were
also had the big sing-along choruses that would become standard looking for a taste of the past too: Would playing “Other Side” in
in pop punk. A streak of divisive experimental albums (and a mid- their favorite venue feel the same as playing some of their earliest
career hiatus) followed, bringing soul, synth, rap, and power pop songs there? What did it feel like back then? Wentz later
into their music. considered. “It felt exactly like this.” ■

66 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 Photograph by Brittany Sowacke

 Fall Out Boy
(sans Trohman)
at Chicago's
Metro in 2023.
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

The Opera Ghost

The Phantom of the Opera was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
manifesto for what musical theater should be and, ultimately,
what it would become: a shrine to the power of song.
By ANDREA L ONG CHU

the phantom of the opera will end its 35-year Broadway run on April 16.

n 1988, new york magazine ran a cover story about the arrival Christine across a fog-covered sub-
of a new Broadway show. Described as an “old-fashioned, romantic terranean lake, relies on body doubles
musical that assaults the senses,” The Phantom of the Opera told and prerecorded vocals. Only the famous
chandelier still thrills: Its ominous ascent
the tale of a deformed composer—the masked Phantom—who falls during the organ overture (also likely pre-
tragically in love with a beautiful soprano. The actual composer, taped) remains a true coup de théâtre. It
Andrew Lloyd Webber, had written it for his mistress turned wife, Sarah hangs menacingly over the orchestra sec-
Brightman; their affair had been all over the tabloids back in London. tion, a Chekhov’s light fixture; but at the
Interviewed at the couple’s $5.5 million duplex in Trump Tower, Lloyd act break, it will “fall” lightly back onto
the stage like Peter visiting the Darlings.
Webber called the show his “favorite” to date, all due respect to Evita, Why did anyone ever like this? To dismiss
and, in any case, it was hard to argue with a record-breaking $17 million Phantom as just another spectacle for a
in advance tickets. Phantom might have been a British musical based spectacular age (one could just as easily
on a French novel, but the show’s fin de siècle grandeur fit perfectly with praise it for this, and many did) would be
to contradict the Phantom himself. Lloyd
the decadence of the Reagan years: opulent architecture, sexual nos-
Webber’s previous work, such as the gaudy
talgia, rock-and-roll pyrotechnics. (Plans to release a flock of live pigeons colossus Cats, had earned him the reputa-
had been scrapped before the London premiere.) Even the unforgiving tion of an opportunist with few principles
Frank Rich, in an otherwise negative review for the New York Times, beyond the British pound. By comparison,
admitted, “It may be possible to have a terrible time at The Phantom of Phantom was an almost intellectual work,
an artist’s statement from a man whom few
the Opera, but you’ll have to work at it.” ¶ Now Phantom is finally closing.
had ever accused of artistry. The Phantom
(To ensure brand continuity, Lloyd Webber’s first new Broadway show in was no entertainer, preferring to compose
almost a decade, Bad Cinderella, has opened around the block—to savage in literal obscurity beneath the opera house
reviews.) In its 35-year run, the longest in Broadway history, Phantom rather than betray his belief in music as the
has grossed over $1.3 billion and exceeded 20 million viewers; two weeks highest expression of the human spirit; he
stood for devotion, not diversion.
ago, it brought in a record-setting $3 million from ticket holders eager Through Phantom, Lloyd Webber
to attend the wake. The official cause of death is the pandemic, but the presented an argument for the destiny
fact is that having a terrible time at Phantom today takes no effort at all. of musical theater itself. The operatic
The production is simply miserable, succumbing in its old age to anemic tradition had always been divided over the
tempos and wretched acting; there is a shocking amount of dead air for relationship between music and drama,
and this debate had reemerged in Lloyd
a show in which the performers never stop singing. Emilie Kouatchou, Webber’s day. His contemporary Stephen
marketed a little too proudly as the first Black actress to play Christine Sondheim was a studied modernist who
on Broadway, is a capable soprano doomed to a thankless role that often brought dramatic heft to musical theater
involves begging men to “guide” her. It is hard to ignore that Phantom in the 1970s. By contrast, Lloyd Webber
has always been a classic rape fantasy; its appeal hinges entirely on the had no ear for drama; his characters sim-
ply declaimed their emotions directly into
charisma of its titular bodice ripper, a self-described ugly virgin who the audience, as if by T-shirt cannon. What
plots violent attacks on the public from his basement. Fans have long he offered was something different: an
speculated that the extravagant title song, in which the Phantom ferries experience of sheer musical transcendence.

68 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 Illustration by Philip Burke

T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S
This emphasis on the musical part of musi-
cal theater served as both a defense of his
earlier endeavors, which by this reasoning
could be considered serious works of art,
and a vision for the future of Broadway.
Night after night, the Phantom promised
the audience that, for two and a half hours,
nothing—neither plot nor character, not
social issues, not even good taste—would be
more important than what happened when
that invisible beam of music shot across the
darkened theater into their souls.
L
loyd webber was born in
postwar London to a family
of music lovers. His father, an
accomplished organist and
little-known composer, taught
composition at the Royal College of Music in
London, while his mother was a successful
piano teacher frustrated with her husband’s
professional complacency. As a teenager,
Lloyd Webber wept with emotion upon
hearing a radio broadcast of Tosca, the 1900
opera by Puccini. “This was truly theatre
music that I never dreamed possible,” he
writes in his 2018 memoir, Unmasked. The
young man was under considerable pres-
sure to distinguish himself musically. His
mother became so morbidly obsessed with
a piano prodigy that she effectively adopted
him into the family; meanwhile, her actual
son planned a halfhearted suicide attempt.
Lloyd Webber still vividly remembers the
time his father played him a recording of
“Some Enchanted Evening,” a love song
from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South
Pacific. “Andrew,” his father told him, “if you
ever write a tune half as good as this, I shall
be very, very proud of you.”
Let no one say he didn’t try. Lloyd
Webber’s first produced musical, Joseph
and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,
sounded like a Sunday-school pantomime
written by a teenager, because it was. But
by his father’s death in 1982, Lloyd Webber
had several smash hits under his belt: Jesus
Christ Superstar, a rock opera; Evita, a
sympathetic look at fascism in Argentina;
and, of course, Cats. He had practically
defined the British megamusical of the
1980s: breathtaking visuals, timeless
themes, and above all a fully sung-through
structure, usually with a strong pop influ-
ence. His work divided critics, but Lloyd
Webber himself, a merry populist with a
growing Pre-Raphaelite art collection, saw
no contradiction between artistic integrity
and commercial appeal. Early on, he had
learned to promote his music by releasing
concept albums and lead singles—“Don’t
Cry for Me Argentina” from Evita reached
No. 1 on the U.K. singles charts in 1977—
and his shows were so profitable that
70 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
Margaret Thatcher, when challenged on
her government’s cuts to public funding
for the theater, replied, “Look at Andrew
Lloyd Webber!” Indeed, given the huge
moving sets and live sound mixing—a
practice Lloyd Webber pioneered for the
theater—it was hard to look away. His
next hit, Starlight Express, was a synth-
pop nightmare about racing trains that
featured androidlike actors who zoomed
around the audience on roller skates. That
production’s director, Trevor Nunn, who
had also worked on Cats, told the press it
was like going to Disneyland: “Here is my
money. Hit me with the experience.”
Still, Lloyd Webber longed to be
thought of as a serious composer. He was
proud that Cats was built around a fugue,
and, like Rachmaninoff before him, he
wrote variations on Paganini’s Caprice
No. 24. He had become obsessed with the
“mesmeric possibilities” of the unusual
7/8 time signature after hearing it in one
of Prokofiev’s piano sonatas as a youth, and
he would make a self-impressed point of
putting a juddering 7/8 section into every
score. Yet there was something labored and
prosaic about Lloyd Webber’s music. His
father is said to have asked his composition
pupils, “Why write six pages when six bars
will do?” But the younger Lloyd Webber, a
self-described “maximalist,” preferred to
elongate his melodic lines far beyond their
natural conclusions, and he was slavishly
devoted to the downbeat.
This schoolboy approach did make
Lloyd Webber a passable writer of
pastiche: rock and pop mostly, without
a hint of jazz, and the classical music his
father had schooled him in. The tune for
“Memory” from Cats was originally ersatz
Puccini, intended for a show about a cut
song from the opera La Bohème. The elder
Lloyd Webber, an “acknowledged expert
on Puccini,” loved it—though the song
also recalled Ravel’s Boléro, slowed down
and played in a maudlin 12/8 time. Critics
noticed this sort of thing a lot. The favorite
ballad from Superstar, “I Don’t Know How
to Love Him,” appeared to take its plaintive
melody from the second movement of
Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, and
underneath “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,”
one could hear the Paraguayan harp
plucking something like Bach’s Prelude in
C major. The most puzzling thing about
these borrowings was their apparent
insouciance: The composer simply did
not seem to care. Lloyd Webber’s longtime
orchestrator would defend him on the
grounds that there simply “aren’t that
many notes.” But as the drama critic John
Simon put it for New York, “It’s not so much
that Lloyd Webber lacks an ear for melody
as that he has too much of one for other
people’s melodies.”
In truth, Lloyd Webber was borrowing
more than music. At 21, he had fallen in
love with a “deliciously open-faced” 16-year-
old girl named Sarah Hugill, marrying her
just weeks after her 18th birthday; now he
was leaving her for Brightman, a former
Cats actress 12 years his junior whom the
tabloids dubbed “Sarah II.” Guilty over the
divorce and eager to challenge himself artis-
tically, Lloyd Webber landed on the idea of
Requiem, a Requiem Mass dedicated to his
late father—with a soloist part that would
show off Brightman’s three-octave lyric
soprano, which was clearly in demand.
On a hot summer’s night in 1984, Lloyd
Webber went with his new wife to see a
fledgling musical by the director Ken Hill,
who wanted Brightman for his female lead.
The production, which concerned a pretty
soprano and the tortured composer who
is in love with her, featured classic opera
arias with new lyrics by Hill. Brightman,
then eyeing actual opera, was unconvinced,
but Lloyd Webber thought the show had
potential as a “Rocky Horror Picture–type
musical” and agreed to produce it and com-
pose an original title song. It was called The
Phantom of the Opera.
In his memoir, Lloyd Webber is at
pains to minimize the role played by Hill’s
Phantom in the genesis of his own, though
he briskly acknowledges that the demo
he recorded for Hill was an early version
of the song “The Phantom of the Opera,”
down to the iconic organ chords. His pre-
ferred origin story is that, during rehears-
als for Requiem, he happened to pick up a
50-cent copy of Gaston Leroux’s original
1910 novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra on Fifth
Avenue, suddenly realizing that it could fur-
nish the “high romance” he wanted to write
for Brightman. The novel, set at the Opéra
Garnier in 1880s Paris, is about an ingénue
named Christine Daaé who believes she is
being tutored by an unseen angel sent by
her dead father; in fact, her teacher is the
rumored Opera Ghost, a disfigured but
very human composer named Erik who
has fallen dangerously in love with her.
The story had already been adapted many
times, including as a classic 1925 silent film
starring Lon Chaney; later films depicted
the Phantom as (ironically) an enraged
victim of musical plagiarism. But Lloyd
Webber saw something else: a man in love
with a voice. His Phantom would be an
inverted Orpheus, beckoning his beloved
to the underworld with music; here was
an opportunity for passion, for real gravity.
Indeed, for the first time in his career, it
seemed to Lloyd Webber that he might have
something to say.
T
he phantom of the opera
opened on the West End in
1986. To an extent, it did what
Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate
had done for Shakespeare: It
provided a night at the opera for people
who, as a rule, did not go to the opera.
In the English-speaking world, opera is
kept alive by an elite donor class whose
tastes rarely venture beyond the 19th cen-
tury. (The composer Pierre Boulez once
remarked that the best way to modernize
opera would be to “blow the opera houses
up.”) What Lloyd Webber offered, alterna-
tively, was a pleasing impression of opera—
continuous singing, throbbing vibrato,
very high notes—without the infamous
longueurs or unintelligible vowels. Critics
agreed that the score was his most mature,
incorporating modest experiments along-
side the opera pastiche; here and there,
one caught a glimpse of genuine musical
intelligence. But the true star of Phantom
was music itself; there was simply so much
of it. It was the first show for which Lloyd
Webber shared a book credit, and his
characters discussed music incessantly:
who should sing it, how to market it, what
gave it value. In essence, Lloyd Webber
had written a reply to critics who saw him
(positively or not) as a purveyor of thea-
trical delights, countering that the experi-
ence of listening to music was a matter of
grave artistic importance.
Opera had a significant concep-
tual role to play in Phantom. Act One
began with a lumbering rehearsal for
Hannibal, a fictional caricature of 19th-
century grand opéra complete with dancing
slave girls and a large fake elephant. Lloyd
Webber’s stated target of parody was the
hugely successful Giacomo Meyerbeer,
remembered today for his elaborate stage
effects. The direct parallels between the
two men—Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète had
even featured roller skates back in 1849—
might not have escaped Lloyd Webber
himself. This, Phantom assured its audi-
ence, was opera at its most tedious, and
it was perfectly natural to dislike it. A
great deal of the plot was devoted to the
Phantom’s attempts to replace Carlotta,
a fussy coloratura soprano with a thick
Italian accent, with his beloved Christine.
“We smile because she represents the old
way with opera, but she is not a figure of
fun,” Lloyd Webber writes of Carlotta,
whose interpretation of a Hannibal aria
is turgid and self-indulgent. By contrast,
Christine’s rendition has a clearer, poppier
quality, helped along by the fact that the
melody bears more resemblance to a Linda
Ronstadt ballad than a Meyerbeer aria. For
the Phantom, only Christine’s voice offers a
way out of opera and into “a new sound”—
even if that sound happens to be 1980s pop.
There was a touch of history in this. In
late-19th-century Paris, the true phantom
was grand opéra itself, treading the boards
even as successors emerged both at home
and across the Atlantic. French and English
operettas were becoming wildly popular in
America—a parody of opera for a nation
with little native operatic tradition—and
by the early 20th century, comic opera had
come together with minstrelsy and vaude-
ville to form the basis of what today we call
musical theater. At first, the musical comedy
resembled a plotless revue—until the arrival
of Show Boat in 1927, a melodrama about
miscegenation with lofty aspirations. “Is
there a form of musical play tucked away
somewhere in the realm of possibilities
which could attain the heights of grand
opera and still keep sufficiently human to
be entertaining?” wondered its playwright
and lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II. In
Phantom was an artist’s
statement from a man whom few
had ever accused of artistry.
his later “book musicals” with composer
Richard Rodgers, resurrecting opera came
to mean something very specific: smoothly
integrating the music into the play to
produce a single dramatic whole. “Some
Enchanted Evening” might have sounded
like a sweeping love song when played in
one’s sitting room, but in the context of
South Pacific, it was a widower’s tongue-
tied expression of affection for a woman he
barely knew.
For Lloyd Webber, the benefit of drama
was to give definite shape to the abstract
emotionality of music: A melody might
sound sad, but only a lament could be
tragic. But for this very reason, the music
in Phantom rarely served a dramatic
end—rather, it strutted around the stage
like it owned the place. As lyricist Charles
Hart reported, director Hal Prince was so
focused on making Phantom into a crowd-
pleaser that “any actor looking for motiva-
tion had to look elsewhere as far as Prince
was concerned.” Lloyd Webber evidently
felt the same about Hart’s lyrics, recalling
with amusement how the beleaguered
lyricist ended up tossing the word somehow
into “Wishing You Were Somehow Here
Again” to sop up the extra notes. But Lloyd
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
Webber preferred for the music to talk over
the words, as when the Phantom showed up
at the masquerade ball; the revelers, having
just got done singing about how good masks
are at hiding faces, nevertheless recognize
him instantly thanks to the massive organ
chords that introduce him—which, diegeti-
cally speaking, they cannot hear.
The debate over these competing
priorities—music and drama—was as old
as opera itself. “In an opera, the poetry
simply has to be the obedient daughter
of the music,” Mozart wrote in 1781,
arguing that Italian opera had overcome
its “miserable librettos” by ensuring that
“music reigns supreme and everything
else is forgotten.” Other composers, like
the imperious Richard Wagner, saw
music as a powerful organ of expression
with no inherent content—that is, music
was very good at saying things but had
nothing to say. In his 1851 polemic Opera
and Drama, Wagner contended that
the worst opera composers used music
to produce “effects without causes,” for-
going dramatic action to send impres-
sions of feeling straight into the listener’s
ears. In the American musical-theater
tradition, this tension would be borne out by
Rodgers’s own career as a composer. In his
earlier partnership with the lyricist Lorenz
Hart, Rodgers had written the melodies
first, crafting sparkling tunes for forgettable
plays, whereas with Hammerstein, the
words came first, requiring a more mature
Rodgers to compose music with a clear
dramatic purpose in mind. (The former
duo produced classic songs; only the latter
produced classic musicals.)
In one telling, Hammerstein’s vision won
out. For the 1957 musical West Side Story,
the classically trained Leonard Bernstein
wrote a complex, often operatic score
around a recurring musical interval—the
tritone, as immortalized in the melody for
“Maria.” But when it came time to write a
“mad aria” for Maria to sing over her lover’s
dead body, Bernstein recalled that he
“never got past six bars,” realizing that the
tragic climax called for precisely no music
at all. To be clear, drama didn’t have to be
Shakespearean in order to have structural
71
T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

priority: Meredith Willson’s The Music Evening.”) Bernstein agreed: “An F sharp to be such a brilliant musician,” a woman
Man, also from 1957, was a fully integrated doesn’t have to be considered in the mind; once asked Lloyd Webber, “why does he

musical with a corn-fed plot. Nor did a
show have to be full of action in order to be
dramatic, as with the thematically linked
vignettes of Sondheim’s Company. The
point is simply that, in all these cases, music
served at drama’s pleasure. Sondheim, him-
self a protégé of Hammerstein, took this to
extremes in the ’70s, veering away from the
traditional song form in favor of accretive
it is a direct hit.” Even Sondheim, who
admitted to being “not a huge fan of the
human voice,” wrote a pretty aria for his
silly barber. Later in the original Sweeney
Todd score, the triumphant orchestral
blast that ended Sweeney’s murderous
“Epiphany” was abruptly undercut by a soft,
sickly chord, thus tingeing his elation with
moral uncertainty. But for the national
P H OTO G R A P H S : B E T T M A N N / G E T T Y I M AG E S (C AT S, J E S U S ) ; WA LT E R M C B R I D E / W I R E I M AG E ( S C H O O L O F R O C K ) ; D E N N I S CO O P E R /
write such horrible music?” As for “The
Music of the Night” itself, no single Lloyd
Webber melody has been more accused of
plagiarism: Its opening notes recall both
Tosca and Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon,
followed by a long, indisputable borrowing
from Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West. This
means that, even as he demanded that
Christine submit to his music, the Phantom

harmonic shapes that provided rich subtext
for his lyrics—so much so that critics began
complaining of having nothing to hum.
The prickly composer seemed to mock this
criticism in his 1979 masterpiece, Sweeney
tour, the sickly chord would be omitted—
not for dramatic reasons but presumably
because this allowed the singer, who had
just pulled off a musical tour de force, to be
rewarded with applause.
S H U T T E R S TO C K ( P H A N TO M ) ; M AT T H E W M U R P H Y A N D E VA N Z I M M E R M A N ( B A D C I N D E R E L L A )
was singing someone else’s.
But if the Puccini operas he admired
had placed music over drama, it was Lloyd
Webber’s innovation to install music loving
over music itself. The Phantom was not a

Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,
in which a flamboyant Italian barber is so
distracted by his own melodiousness that
he loses a shaving contest to Sweeney, who
remains perfectly silent.
At the same time, musical theater had
always grappled with a kind of royalist
impulse, one that aspired to set music atop
its rightful throne. By the ’80s, it was as
if Lloyd Webber, ever the Tory, had sent
the megamusical to America to reclaim
the colonies for the crown, armed with
terroristically hummable tunes. Wagner
had long ago despaired of the effects of the
“naked, ear-delighting, absolute-melodic
melody” on the operagoing public—what
we could call an earworm. (Sure enough,
as soon as South Pacific opened in 1949,
Frank Sinatra and Perry Como had both
released covers of “Some Enchanted
T
his is what The Phantom of
the Opera stood for: not opera
itself, for which it had lim-
ited patience, but rather what
it imagined to be operatic
values, in particular the elevation of melody
over everything else. If Hammerstein had
wanted to dig up opera’s bones, Lloyd Web-
ber, whose hero had always been Rodgers
anyway, wanted to raise its spirit. But he
was so focused on musical effects that he
seemed to cut corners when it came to the
actual music. For all the banging on about
it, the Phantom never even bothered to
clarify what his “music of the night” actually
was. He cannot have meant his pallid avant-
garde opera, which better resembled a chil-
dren’s piano exercise than a work of French
modernism. “If the Phantom is supposed
musical genius but an aficionado. “Close
your eyes and surrender to your darkest
dreams!” he urged the audience, pontif-
icating on the virtues of music apprecia-
tion. That’s what the music of the night
really meant: music heard in the dark,
such that its sole quality became its effect
on the listener. This conveniently obviated
the need for music that was actually good,
as far as the critics were concerned. After
all, the Phantom himself was hideous;
what mattered was that his music had
irresistible emotional power over a practi-
cally orgasmic Christine. “You cannot win
her love by making her your prisoner!”
Christine’s aristocratic lover cried out to
the Phantom. Yet this had always been
Lloyd Webber’s strategy as a composer: not
to persuade but to overwhelm. In this way,
Lloyd Webber was musical theater’s irre-

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR

(1971)

Lloyd EVITA
(1979) Patti
Webber’s JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING
TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT (1982)
Star Patti LuPone
said later that the
LuPone

Reign CATS
show “could only
have been written
(1982)
by a man who
although he later SONG AND DANCE hates women.”
(1985)
suffered a rash of
flops, the longevity STARLIGHT EXPRESS
(1987)
of Phantom and Recycled Lloyd
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
a healthy helping (1988)
Webber’s Paganini
variations. He
of revivals have ASPECTS OF LOVE would recycle
guaranteed Lloyd (1990) them again in
School of Rock.
Webber a permanent SUNSET BOULEVARD
home on Broadway. (1994)

In 2017, he had BY JEEVES

The
(2001)
four shows playing original
Broadway
simultaneously: THE WOMAN IN WHITE
(2005) Joseph
School of Rock,
SCHOOL OF ROCK
Cats, Sunset (2015)
Boulevard, and, of BAD CINDERELLA
course, Phantom. (2023)
1970 1975 1980 1985

72 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
pressible id, emerging from the orchestra
pit to insist that at the form’s core lay pure
musical enthusiasm.
He wasn’t entirely wrong. For centuries,
people had come to the theater out of a desire
to be overpowered by music; even American
plots to dethrone the megamusical could
not change this. The grungy social realism
of Jonathan Larson’s 1996 rock opera,
Rent, was largely a feint; if anything, Rent
was good evidence that theater music may
be even less suited to political statements
than to drama. The show wore its Puccini
influences on its tattoo sleeve, and its aids-
era anti-Establishment message sounded
as generic as that of the alt-rock genre from
which it borrowed; at a certain point, one
wished the crazy kids would stop trying to
say something and just sing. A more artful
approach would arrive in Jason Robert
Brown’s 1998 score for Parade, in which an
unjust guilty verdict is read over a jaunty
cakewalk and a Confederate march, played
simultaneously and at different tempos.
Even then, as my colleague Jackson
McHenry noted of the recent revival, one left
the theater humming the “wrong” tune: a
pretty hymn to the antebellum South. A few
years later, ABBA’s Mamma Mia! arrived on
Broadway, unleashing the ongoing torrent
of jukebox musicals that have forgone the
hard labor of plagiarism in favor of stringing
together the exact songs into which people
actually do break out in real life.
The past decade has seen an even
stranger heir to Phantom: the message
“Cats is a dog,”
wrote one critic
Lost $2.6 million
despite running
for three years. Still
won the Tony for
Best Musical.
(There was one Glenn
Close
other nominee.)
1990 1995 2000
musical. Atop the form, like a mad king,
sits Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 hip-hop
opera, Hamilton; its much-discussed
decision to cast actors of color as the
Founding Fathers concealed the fact
that its cantatalike structure and R&B
pastiche brought it closer to Cats than to
Company. (Lloyd Webber, horribly, credits
the first rap in musical theater to Starlight
Express, which is practically a work of
minstrelsy.) But at least Cats was about
cats; the message musical has taken Lloyd
Webber’s philosophy and affixed it, with
the dramatic equivalent of spirit gum, to its
earnest social causes. The British musical
Six, a girl-power pop concert presented
by the wives of Henry VIII, should be a
simple excuse to hear decent impressions
of Beyoncé and Adele; its needless gesture
at feminist historiography is so limp that
the characters openly admit it. At the
logical end of this trend lies the current
jukebox musical & Juliet, an excruciating
retelling of Romeo and Juliet in which
a transfeminine character is made to
tearfully croak Britney Spears’s “I’m Not
a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.” It is enough to
make one long for the music of the night;
at least the Phantom’s message was that
music shouldn’t have one.
Today, it is clear that Phantom suc-
ceeded in remaking the musical in its own
image. Not only did Lloyd Webber set
Broadway on its current path of chintzy
commercial nihilism, but he also reminded
us, through his peculiar naïveté, that the
in 1982.
A reworking of the
disastrous 1975
production. Of the
original, Hal Prince
told Lloyd Webber,
“Remember, you
can’t listen to a
original
musical if you
Broadway
can’t look at it.” Phantom
2005 2010
greatest obstacle to musical theater as a
dramatic art is music itself. Perhaps this is
why we love it. Yet Lloyd Webber himself
has rarely brought a hit to Broadway since.
(His 500-page memoir peters out in 1986,
sparing him the embarrassment of flops
like the execrable Love Never Dies, a sequel
to Phantom.) Curiously, his new Broadway
show, Bad Cinderella, is a message musi-
cal; the classic story has been carved, like a
stepsister’s heel, into a deeply misogynistic
satire of beauty standards. The title song
contains an almost note-for-note quota-
tion from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
“In My Own Little Corner”—from their
own Cinderella. It is as if, having finally
accepted that he will never write a tune
half as good as Rodgers, Lloyd Webber has
settled for writing a tune half-composed by
him. But what’s really notable about Bad
Cinderella is its lack of ambition: It is an
old-fashioned book musical with plenty of
dialogue and a forgettable score. It is not a
train wreck, just a train. There is something
pitiful about this. It’s odd to be lectured on
beauty by a man who has spent his entire
career blindly devoted to it. The Phantom,
at least, had the courage of his convictions;
he was an enlightened philistine, willing
to murder in the name of beautiful music
while lacking a single opinion about what
made a piece of music beautiful. In the twi-
light of his career, Lloyd Webber has sent
the ghost back to his underground lagoon,
and the theater feels small and empty now.
It could use a little opera. ■
Love Never Dies,
the originally planned
2010 Phantom
sequel that confirms
Christine and the
Phantom banged,
was canceled before
it premiered
on Broadway.
The
His new show
features the
song “Easy to
Be Me,”
which sounds
like the
saxophone
riff in George
Michael’s
“Careless
Whisper.”
2015 2020 today
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 73
 m u s i c / p o d c a s t s / t v

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

CRITICS
Craig Jenkins on Miley Cyrus’s Endless Summer Vacation …
Nicholas Quah on Holy Week … Kathryn VanArendonk on Succession.

the 2022 Super Bowl Music Fest—offers

a clinic in the singer-songwriter’s dueling
M U S I C / CRAIG JENKINS
urges to impress and confuse a crowd.
Dreams of Californication After a jarring opening stretch that zooms
through a mash-up of Bangerz hits and alt-
Miley hopped off the plane at LAX and rock covers, Cyrus pauses to address the
audience, joking that surely many of them
never looked back. Her new album seals it. showed up a little too early for headliner
Green Day and happened into the spectacle
of her set. She thanks fans for bearing with
in the past decade on the run from her own perception, Miley Cyrus “all of those identities that I was trying on
shape-shifted her way through fantastic achievements and exacting dilemmas, and seeing if they fit me,” stressing that at
going to great lengths to express that she knew how to party back when everyone had the root of every experiment was honesty.
her pegged as the squeaky-clean Disney kid. Then, when that posturing started to rub You could respect the mind connecting
people the wrong way, she dived into psychedelia with the Flaming Lips. Ever eager to the dots from Madonna to Cher to Dolly
prove how delightfully weird or reassuringly trad she is from one era to the next, she Parton to Sinéad O’Connor, women who
P H OTO G R A P H : J O N N I E C H A M B E R S

felt calculated and hard to pin down musically. This perfectly suited a pop career full continue to catch hell for provocative
of surprises but created suspicions about her intentions as a visitor to the far-reaching lyrics, personal lives, fashions, and politics.
subgenres her albums wandered through. A good bit of that drift is It’s just dicey positioning a seven-minute
completely germane to sticking a microphone in anyone’s face at “Party in the U.S.A.” into that lineage.
various points in their teens and 20s, when we figure ourselves out ENDLESS SUMMER Cyrus has worked tirelessly to thread her
one mistake at a time. VACATION
MILEY CYRUS.
interests in pop, rock, rap, country, and
But some of it seemed to communicate that Cyrus simply thrives COLUMBIA RECORDS. dance music to make something only her
on throwing us off and winning us over once again. Last spring’s palette of experiences and sensibilities
Attention: Miley Live—largely a document of her performance at could come up with, to varying degrees of

74 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
success. The best arguments for the merits
of Cyrus’s musical molting occur during
her Backyard Sessions series, in which the
breadth of her tastes and connections sets
the scene for effortless fun—like a cozy,
costumed 2015 duet with Ariana Grande
on New Zealand rockers Crowded House’s
’86 hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” or her
smoky 2020 MTV Unplugged take on the
Velvet Underground’s 1969 gem “Sweet
Jane” that plays up the spectral vocal affec-
tations of the 1988 Cowboy Junkies cover
on its way to a booming climax. Those
moments reveal a preternaturally gifted
vocalist leaning into the possibilities her
instrument offers while cruising through
the back pages of music history.
Backyard Sessions plays an integral part
in Cyrus’s newest evolution. This year’s itera-
tion, Miley Cyrus—Endless Summer Vaca-
tion (Backyard Sessions), is a Disney+ affair.
Returning to the fold all these years after
Hannah Montana, brunette roots and rear
locks symbolically overtaking a platinum-
blonde outcrop, the singer calls Endless
Summer Vacation, her eighth studio album,
a “Cinderella shoe,” a vehicle designed
expressly to fit her. Pulling in friends
from different fields—Americana trouba-
dour Brandi Carlile, trap producer Mike
WiLL Made-It, Spring Breakers director
Harmony Korine, Harry Styles collab-
orators Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson,
and Liily drummer Maxx Morando—and
eschewing the expected tension and twists
for slicker transitions, Endless Summer
charts a careful course through sounds this
star’s catalogue tends to cordon off.
At its strongest, the album finds the
artist evaluating her complexities as she
talks herself into having fun again after
divorcing actor Liam Hemsworth, moving
on via painful tunes like the Carlile duet
“Thousand Miles.” It’s a storm of pop-
country licks, gossamer synths, and grizzled
maturity that took some exquisite fuck-ups
over the years to arrive at. “I’m not always
right, but still I ain’t got time for what went
wrong/Where I end up, I don’t really care,”
she sings. In the special, Cyrus reveals that
the song was written after the death of a
friend’s sister and tearfully shares its devas-
tating original first verse. But her pop-star
instincts reactivate as she dabs her eyes and
looks into the camera, asking, “My makeup
still beat?” The album showcases a more
unified and refined version of Cyrus. It’s
also meticulously crafted to soundtrack the
summer, an ambition that sometimes over-
rides its moodier sentiments.
The idyllic Endless Summer is a lattice-
work of vibrant sensory information,
breezes blowing on L.A. palm trees, loud
colors, and warbling flange and chorus
effects on bright guitar and synthesizer
notes. The crackle of a vinyl record and the of phrase. They cut to the quick, but this
phase-modulated guitar noodles intro- subjects them to cliché. The “Jaded” ex is
ducing the album and the international lonely, and she “hates it,” and the T-shirt she
smash “Flowers” signal an attention to kept is “faded.” “Island,” the gooey retro-pop
the details. The detuned guitars in the sad ballad that Backyard Sessions frames as an
song “Jaded” mirror both the sweltering analogy grasping at the isolating experi-
heaviness of heat waves and the sound of ence of fame, loses sight of that message the
the Doppler effect, making notes appear to better the tropical groove and the evocative
bend as music blares out from cars whiz- chorus (“Am I stranded on an island /Or
zing past us. Summer is smoldering antici- have I landed in paradise?”) mesh, and you
pation, this album insinuates through wonder whether we’re really talking about
dance-pop jams like “River” and “Violet pouting on private beaches. “Muddy Feet”
Chemistry” and pop-rock confections like with Sia wields its conversational lyrics like
“Rose Colored Lenses,” whose excitement weapons: “I don’t know/Who the hell you
about a new flame explodes into a free- think you’re messin’ with/Get the fuck out
jazz saxophone solo constituting one of of my house with that shit/Get the fuck out
the most exhilarating minutes of music in of my life with that shit.”
Cyrus’s oeuvre. “Handstand,” with Korine and Morando,
Endless Summer approaches its titular stages an uneven experiment, a pile of
subject from two angles, touching on pleasing tones paired with a lyric sheet
finding romance after heartbreak in the that reads like a spicy trip diary, the slight
informal “AM” section and cycling through return of the kind of psychedelic impulsive-
dance-floor reverie and late-night intro- ness the Dead Petz era hedged its bets on.
spection in the “PM” half. Like Taylor “River,” a stream of sensual water images,
Swift’s Midnights, it peeks in on Cyrus’s is more intriguing as a tacit admission
older incarnations in a bid to show growth. that many people still crave bubbly dance
“Thousand Miles” pairs hip-hop drum pat- music from this artist than it is as a racy
terns and country-pop sensibilities with love song, though the explanation of the
greater restraint than Bangerz dared. The motives behind it in the Disney+ special—
way “River” tiptoes around the melody from “They don’t want me to talk about how the
Dead or Alive’s synth-pop hit “You Spin Me fact the song is about [bleep]”—is one of a
Round (Like a Record)” (and Lizzo’s “About few moments when you see Cyrus delight
Damn Time”), as well as the glimmer of in the potential of pushing buttons, though
“I Will Survive” on “Flowers,” is evidence “Handstand” and “Muddy Feet” don’t make
that the spirited anachronisms of 2020’s the broadcast.
Plastic Hearts endure even when Endless She gets how to attract and provoke a
Summer wrenches the dial back toward crowd, how to craft party anthems and
the sleek, businesslike pure pop the singer tearjerkers and head-scratchers, and she’s
was selling around 2009’s The Time of Our choosing to bring these narratives to upbeat
Lives and 2010’s Can’t Be Tamed. conclusions. The approach is earning Cyrus
The sound is pliable and chewy, and the record-breaking streaming weeks; you
lyrics are unpretentious, to both our benefit wonder how long it’ll be before she gets
and our detriment, depending on the turn bored of it. ■
P O D C A S T S / NICHOLAS QUAH
This Is America, Still
The Atlantic and Vann R. Newkirk II
untangle more half-told Black history.
it can be said that the struggle over Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.’s legacy has been largely settled for a long time to
the detriment of history. “What do you make of the fact that, after
that assassination, some version of him is made to be an untouch-
able hero? How does that happen?” asks the journalist Vann R.
Newkirk II. “Because he’s dead,” replies John Burl Smith, a community
organizer and one of the last people to meet with King before his 1968
murder. “He can’t do any more damage.”
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 75
 Posed quietly, Newkirk’s question is both
leading and sincere. He likely already knows
the answer, of course, but that’s beside the
point. The question is worth raising again
and again with respect to how King and
the civil-rights movement are preserved
in American cultural memory—now espe-
cially, as right-wing forces conspire to keep
the full, complicated picture out of educa-
tional syllabi or at least strip those histories
of political teeth.
The exchange between Newkirk and
Smith comes near the end of Holy Week,
a magisterial new narrative podcast from
The Atlantic, so named for the burst of
grief, fury, and violence that washed over
the country in the immediate wake of King’s
murder just before Easter. It follows 2020’s
Floodlines, which Newkirk also hosted,
carrying over a contiguous feel and spirit.
Where Floodlines waded into the unre-
solved history around Hurricane Katrina,
Holy Week applies the same lens to the
American failure to internalize the full
scope of the civil-rights movement. This
project intends to honor what made King
dangerous while he was alive.
Like its predecessor, Holy Week has an
ear for the present. It may well be a cliché to
ruminate on the cyclical nature of history,
on how events and political currents seem
to rhyme even as the world changes, mod-
ernizes, and “progresses.” But just because
the move is familiar doesn’t make it any less
true. Loosely structured around the brief
period between King’s death and funeral,
the series frequently pulls the frame back to
provide necessary layers of context, offering
76 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
threads that lead to our current moment at across the country from his murder in
almost every turn. Those include the prom- Memphis to his funeral in Georgia—it opts
inence of the Student Nonviolent Coordi- to render Black America’s reaction to his
nating Committee, a crucial civil-rights death through one location: Washington,
protest organization of the era, and the D.C., specifically the Black neighborhood
political rise of Spiro Agnew, whose chan- of Cardozo. To that end, the sixth episode,
neling of the white backlash against the “Kingdom,” is a standout. Here, the series
civil-rights movement vaulted him from takes a breath to sketch a picture of what was
Maryland governor to Richard Nixon’s “the Black enclave within the Black metrop-
vice-president. (Holy Week can be olis,” a space where a healthy Black
broadly viewed as a companion to middle-class experience material-
Bag Man, Rachel Maddow’s pop- ized as white residents fled for the
ular 2018 podcast chronicling the HOLY WEEK
THE ATLANTIC.
suburbs. But as the episode notes,
bribery and extortion ring Agnew the political currents of the ’60s
ran out of Nixon’s White House.) gradually revealed to the city’s
When the second episode, Black residents that their concep-
“Inferno,” opens with an old newscast tion of a socioeconomic paradise was more
covering the Holy Week uprisings, scenes like a “Black limbo.” The rise of TV made
of the streets after George Floyd’s mur- images from the South more present in
der come to mind. And when the podcast their lives and cultivated an urgent sense of
lingers on how the Kerner Commission, political consciousness. After King’s assas-
convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson sination triggered a totalizing, destructive
to investigate the root causes of protests wave of grief within Cardozo and around
held in the previous summer of 1967, the country, their bubble burst.
threw its support behind a “Negro Mar- Holy Week is a striking listen at a time
shall Plan” to systemically combat Black when podcasts are gravitating toward
poverty, it’s not hard to hear traces of smaller budgets and ambitions. It also
what’s now known as critical race theory feels like the crystallization of a distinct
(as in the academic concept, not the polit- style: As in Floodlines, there’s a gorgeous
ical bogeyman). The team behind Holy musicality to the series, brought to life
Week, which includes producers Jocelyn with sound design by David Herman, com-
Frank and Ethan Brooks, handles such positions by Julius Eastman, and perfor-
echoes with a soft touch. mances by the Los Angeles ensemble Wild
Holy Week makes another smart choice Up. The score is rich with jazz-inflected
in the way it explores the Holy Week upris- minimalist ambience, heavy on brass
ings in a localized context. While the pod- and evoking a vivid melancholia. This is
cast treats the story of King’s assassination complemented by Newkirk’s dependably
with the necessary sense of scope—cutting engaging voice—quiet, inquiring, duti-
ful. We’re treated to occasional flashes
of a warmer interior, particularly when a
scene begins with Newkirk making small
talk with interviewees. Those are some of
his best moments as host.
A through-line in Holy Week is the
story of one woman, Vanessa Lawson,
who was a child in D.C. when the uprisings
broke out. Her testimony turns on a trag-
edy of the chaos: Her brother, Vincent, ven-
tured out the night after King’s death
to loot a department store in search of
stockings for their mother; he never
returned. Lawson’s recollections serve
P H OTO G R A P H : S T E P H E N F. S O M E R S T E I N / G E T T Y I M AG E S
as the series’ emotional backbone and
thematic endpoint, as Newkirk and the
team start and conclude their journey
with her. That structure directly mirrors
the shape of Floodlines, which told
its story around one woman, Le-Ann
Williams, who was a teenager in New
Orleans when Katrina struck. Both arcs
give weight and tangibility to the pod-
casts’ journalism. The repetition may
well portend the beginnings of some
sort of Newkirkean formula, but the
approach remains potent. ■

T V / KATHRYN
Knives Out
The war for Waystar comes
to a showstopping end.
succession’s fourth and
final season is a shining example
of the best qualities of longform storytelling
and of narrative TV in particular. When we
live with characters for many years, there’s
a sense that we know them well. This is no
movie-length fling. It’s a drawn-out rela-
tionship that creates messy, complex invest-
ment in characters and invites obsessive
close reading. They are pinned down and
picked apart; every line and glance and odd
way of sitting in chairs is noted and charted
and considered. We see them. (We, uh, hear
for them.) They belong to us. That closeness
is a kind of intimacy, but it’s also a way to be
lulled into false confidence. How could we
be taken by surprise when we’ve examined
these people’s every move? And yet, as the
Roy family has illustrated, there’s no better
time to zig than the precise moment when
everything is lined up for a big zag.
Succession has consistently performed
that pattern in character combinations
that rapidly shift and coalesce around new
allegiances and stakes. The baseline prem-
ise has remained the same: One of the Roy
children will eventually assume power over
their father Logan Roy’s massive media
corporation. But who? And how? And what
will they have to sacrifice in order to seize
the throne?
P H OTO G R A P H : H B O M A X
Last season ended with a sudden, sharp
reorientation of the power dynamics. After
months of striking out on his own and
refusing to kowtow to his father’s abusive
whims, Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) man-
ages to persuade his younger siblings, Shiv
the Roys are trying to get all their ducks
in a row. Shiv, Kendall, and Roman are
VANARENDONK attempting to suss out the current media
landscape to figure out how to make their
own moves now that Logan has retained
his grip on Waystar Royco and its news
operation, ATN. Logan, meanwhile, is
doubling down, holding everything he has
with renewed vigor and tyranny. There’s
a presidential election coming up. There’s
a massive deal to broker between Waystar
and GoJo, the streaming platform owned by
the Musk-esque Swedish billionaire Lukas
Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård). He’s com-
ing out swinging; so is the next generation
of Roys. It’s not as though either side lacks
ambition, power, or the money to fuel it all.
As ever, the question is less who will end
up on top and more whether any of them
will make peace with what they’ve had to
do in order to get there. The final season’s
beginning is an exercise in defining the new
business-y battlefield while charting the
new emotional terrain. Roman, ever driven
by the need for his father’s approval, finds it
hard to keep pushing against Logan’s cru-
sade for control. Shiv and Kendall stand
together more firmly, but while their moti-
(Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin), vations may often coincide, their end goals
to join forces and make a bid that will at don’t always align.
last unseat their father as head of Waystar At moments, Succession can feel like it
Royco. The coup d’état attempt happens at has tipped too far over the edge of absurdity,
a typical Succession setting: a wedding in especially when its dialogue trends toward
Italy, an event meant to demonstrate the heightened jokiness. The season-four
warmth of familial bonds but also the beau- trailers were full of those lines—Greg
tiful, luxurious surroundings that family (Nicholas Braun) describing Logan lurking
can afford to pay for when they’re sitting around the newsroom floor “like if Santa
atop one of the globe’s dominant media con- Claus was a hit man,” Tom explaining to
glomerates. Instead, it’s a scene of fracture Greg that some business maneuver is “like
and filth. It’s Shiv, Roman, and Kendall in Israel-Palestine, but harder and much more
a moment of grief and sibling unity, which important.” There’s a running joke in the
can happen only next to garbage bins. And first four of those ten episodes that leans
at the moment when they’re meant to be that way too, a faux pas Greg commits at a
ascendant, the twist arrives. They’ve been Roy-family event that seems like it’s there
outmaneuvered by the person they least only as a punch-line-generating engine.
suspected: Shiv’s canny, syco- Those elements are fun, often
phantic, outsider husband, Tom in terrible taste, and easy to love
Wambsgans (Matthew Macfa- because they’re easy to dismiss.
dyen), who has betrayed them in SUCCESSION
HBO. They’re not what Succession
order to get in good with Logan. is at its core, though. Much more
It’s precisely the mechanism than its satire of the wealthy or
Succession likes best. Tom has been its florid insults, what makes Suc-
lurking in the background trying to find cession so fascinating and electric is that
the savviest way to ingratiate himself with terrible, frightening, unmappable space
Logan from the very beginning of the series, between what we think we know and what
but Shiv and her siblings are sure they know we’ve simply assumed. The Roys are con-
him. They know he lacks the confidence and stantly looking at one another, trying to
aggression to make a move without them. gauge what they’re all capable of, trying to
They know he’s on their side and would guess whether the internal emotional reality
never betray Shiv. And because they know it matches the external armor. We do the same
so firmly, the twist that feels absolutely inevi- while watching, and it is a joy to discover all
table is also deliciously shocking. the ways these characters can still sneak
This is roughly where season four begins, up and grab us, all the ways we can still be
in the continuing aftermath of that aston- walloped by a smile, a quick phone call, or a
ishing continental divide. Once again, casual family gathering. ■
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 77
 1.
3.
18.

2.
For more culture sized season—21 episodes!—that brings the ques-
coverage and tion straight through the ’90s. Upcoming episodes
streaming will tackle Pretty Woman, Indecent Proposal, Sha-
recommendations, ron Stone, Madonna, and the rise of sex on TV,
see vulture.com. among so many other things. nicholas quah
CLASSICAL
10. T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S

To 7. Hear Spring Music

Loving the world.
Carnegie Hall, March 31.
Few composers evoke nature as lovingly as
John Luther Adams, whose choral call to take
care of our fragile planet, Vespers of the Blessed
Earth, has its New York premiere, performed
by soprano Ying Fang, the vocal chamber choir
the Crossing, and the Philadelphia Orchestra,
led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Then comes the
proto-environmentalist classic The Rite of Spring,
by Stravinsky. justin davidson
MOVIES

8. Go to New Directors/
Twenty-five New Films
things to see, Celebrating the next big thing.
hear, watch, Lincoln Center, March 29 through April 9.
and read.
There’s so much to see in this year’s showcase of
MARCH 29–APRIL 12 emerging filmmaking talent, but I’m personally
looking forward to Arnold Is a Model Student, a
TV featuring Gillian Jacobs, Corey Stoll, Cory satire about the authoritarian nature of the Thai
Michael Smith, and Lucas Englander. school system; Coconut Head Generation, a docu-
1. Watch Tiny kathryn vanarendonk mentary delving into the life and times of Gen-Z
Nigerians; and Joyland, Saim Sadiq’s film about
Beautiful Things MUSIC
a Lahore man who finds work as a backup

Meet your new favorite advice columnist.
Hulu, April 7.
In this new series based on Cheryl Strayed’s book
of the same name, Kathryn Hahn plays Clare, a
disillusioned wife, mother, and author who gets
recruited to write an advice column. If you think
that dispensing advice might give Clare deeper
insight into her own issues, all I can say is,
“Spoiler alert.” jen chaney
MOVIES
2. See Rye Lane
The rom-com goes abroad.
Hulu, March 31.
It feels like we’re forever declaring the death and
subsequent return of the romantic comedy, but
Raine Allen-Miller’s directorial debut makes the
genre look so light and effortless that you wonder
why we ever fretted about it. Vivian Oparah and
David Jonsson play a pair of 20-somethings who
are both fresh off breakups and spend the day
wandering through South London after a chance
encounter—talking, falling in love, and generally
being delightful.
alison willmore
TV
3. Watch Transatlantic
Get out of Vichy.
Netflix, April 7.
Co-created by Daniel Hendler and Anna Winger,
whose previous miniseries, Unorthodox, was a
breakout success, this period drama follows an
international rescue group that helped evacuate
French refugees during WWII. Shot in Marseille,
P H OTO G R A P H S : H U LU ( T I N Y, RY E ) ; N E T F L I X ( T R A N S AT L A N T I C , B E E F ) ; A P P L E T V + ( S C H M I G A D O O N ) ; YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S ( E R N A U X )
4. Listen to The Love
dancer for a transgender performer he falls in
love with. a.w.
Still Held Me Near ART
Songs of grief and hope.
Still Records, March 31. 9. See Thornton Dial,
Canadian singer-songwriter Dallas Green returns
to his folk project City and Colour for his seventh David Hammons, and
album under the moniker. These new songs med-
itate on the flattening experience of loss and the
Robert Rauschenberg
Wild combinations.
matters that suddenly seem insignificant under a
David Lewis Gallery, 57 Walker Street;
pall of pain. craig jenkins
TV
through April 15.
David Lewis is one of the more rigorous but wel-
5. Watch The Power coming galleries in downtown New York. Here,
works created with the near-at-hand—castoffs,
Girls just wanna electrocute people. garbage, and otherwise unwanted poetic materi-
Prime Video, March 31. als such as fabric, rope, and wood—make you
believe that each of the three artists, Dial, Ham-
In this adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel
mons, and Rauschenberg, are alchemists able to
from an all-female writing and directing crew,
spin mud into sublimities. jerry saltz
girls around the world suddenly develop super-
natural powers that allow them to electrocute
TV
people at will. Take that, bullies, parents, and
other jerks! roxana hadadi
10. Watch Beef
PODCASTS
Road rage takes center stage.
6. Listen to You Must Netflix, April 6.
Neither Steven Yeun or Ali Wong is unfamiliar to
Remember This: dark comedy, and this collaboration expands
Erotic ’90s upon that mastery of genre. After a road-rage
incident between their characters in a home-
We used to be hornier. improvement store’s parking lot, Beef keeps
Independent. upping the ante with a cascading series of lies and
Karina Longworth is finishing off what she started, betrayals that the two inflict upon each other. The
which is to ask, What happened to sexuality in the half-hour run time keeps the episodes snappy, as
movies? The first portion of her inquiry, Erotic do the thoughtful interrogations of classism, the
’80s, unspooled last year. She returns with a super- American Dream, and first-gen guilt. r.h.

78 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
 BOOKS
11. Read
Romantic Comedy
Love from New York …
Random House, April 4.
Sally, a nerdy sketch writer at a late-night com-
edy show called The Night Owls (think SNL
or—okay, it’s SNL), starts a f lirtation with a
musical guest after watching her unexceptional
male co-workers date celebrity after celebrity.
The latest from Curtis Sittenfeld, who wrote
Prep and American Wife, is like fictionalized
celebrity gossip. emma alpern
CLASSICAL
12. Hear Fragments
Discover an undisclosed musical tapestry.
Carnegie Hall, April 1.
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein interweaves a Bach suite
with a set of newly commissioned short pieces,
theatrical lighting, and stage design in a solo road
show that finally makes it to New York. The pro-
gram is secret, the atmosphere intense. j.d.
THEATER
13. See
How to Defend Yourself
Student self-defense goes to the extreme.
New York Theatre Workshop, through April 2.
TERENCE BL ANCHAR D /
LIBRE T TO BY MICHAEL CRIS TOFER
CHAMPION
ON STAGE APR 10 – MAY 13
Don’t miss the dramatic story of boxer Emile Griffith,
starring bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green as the
closeted young prizefighter who kills his rival in the
ring—an act that haunts him for the rest of his life.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the second work by
Terence Blanchard to arrive at the Met.
metopera.org 212.362.6000 Tickets start at $25
ZENITH RICHARDS / MET OPERA
THE 60-SECOND BOOK EXCERPT
Look at the Lights, My Love
By Annie Ernaux
Translated by Alison L. Strayer
in the shopping center,
there are several flights
of escalators going up
and down between levels,
including an inclined
moving walkway that
allows for access with a
shopping cart. There are more inside
the superstore, connecting the two
levels: two going up, but only one going
down. In these moments when we are
forced to stand still, one behind the
other, glances are exchanged between
the people going up and those going
down. We can peer at one another with
frank curiosity, like the passengers of
two trains moving slowly through
a station in opposite directions.
In what way are we present to each
other?
At times, here, I feel like a smooth
surface reflecting other people and
the signs hanging over their heads.
(Yale University Press, April 4)
A group of college students join a self-defense
workshop led by a tightly wound sorority girl
(Talia Ryder) in the wake of a rape on campus in
Liliana Padilla’s hilarious and unsettling play.
Witness hormones gone awry, dance breaks, and
even learn a few practical skills yourself.
jackson mchenry
OPERA
14. Hear Lohengrin
Epic and mysterious.
Metropolitan Opera, through April 1.
It’s been 25 years since Robert Wilson’s ultra-
slow-motion version of Wagner’s opus nudged the
Metropolitan Opera out of the era of opulent real-
ism into starker, more abstract productions. Now
director François Girard cranks up the abstrac-
tion quotient in a new production conducted by
Yannick Nézet-Séguin with tenor Piotr Beczala as
the Swan Knight. j.d.
THEATER
15. See
White Girl in Danger
Musical soap operatics.
Tony Kiser Theater, opens April 10.
Michael R. Jackson, of last year’s Tony-winning
A Strange Loop, is back with a new musical that
follows a Black woman character trying to take
the lead in the world of a soap opera. The maxi-
malist Lileana Blain-Cruz directs. j.m.
 ga me s
TV ing Samantha, a 20-something alcoholic who,
after destroying her career and personal life,
Solutions to 16. Watch Pretty Baby: moves back in with her mother. The series returns
Last Issue’s Puzzles Brooke Shields with the next chapter of Samantha’s growth, a
new collection of guest stars (including Molly
The Blue Lagoon star’s early career, revisited. Ringwald and Busy Philipps), and a question
Computer-Constructed Crossword Hulu, April 3. without an easy answer: Does recovery ever end?
Brooke Shields wasn’t even 12 years old when she r.h.
M I L K I N G G O G A G A D A M S O N
A N Y I D E A A P E X E S I G U A N A
was cast as a young prostitute in the film Pretty ART
Baby. This two-part documentary revisits that
21. See Beatrice Bonino
G U I N E A P I G T E E T H N O S H E S
U R N S T E M A B B A C A N S moment and others from early in her career,
S E G A A M A Z O N I A D O R I A
when the actress and onetime Calvin Klein Crude meets elegance.
G R E E C E P O L A N D T U V A L U
A L L E A R S W E E D D E M I
spokesmodel was attempting to come of age while
Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, 52 Walker Street;
T O O T H A C H E U R I S T E R frequently being publicly sexualized. j.c.
M U S E G O O D P U Z Z L E T H E M E S
through April 15.
MUSIC
E N C O R E A N A I S A S I D E An odd eros echoes through Beatrice Bonino’s
17. Listen to
B A H A N T C R I B S S M L G O T sculptures and otherworldly furniture made of
F R O G S D I C T A M A I L E R
wood, ceramics, rubber sheets, fabric, metals,
Continue As a Guest
G O P L A Y T E T H E R B A L L L A N A
D E I A R M Y E V A L U A T O R
rhinestones, and sundry detritus. This Italian-
T O R O W E A R M E A N E S T born, Paris-based artist gives us over 20 works
Beefy, bookish power pop.
G E T T I N G P R E T T Y T I R E D that capture, on the one hand, a kind of bondage
E T H E L G L O B A L L Y S O D A Merge Records, March 31. and domination of materials and, on the other,
C H E R A S A P R O B B W A D
The New Pornographers are a massive unit burst- societal structures balanced against the imagi-
K A R A T S G I V E P E O P L E T I M E
O N A T I P U N I T A S E A T E N U P ing with unique and intersecting talents: the nation of desire. The results entice but remain
S E P I A S E G G C U P C H A T G P T sharp observations and angular riffs of A.C. New- once removed. j.s.
man, the roots-rock revelations of folk trouba- OPERA
dour Neko Case, the disaffected witticisms of
The Superhero Puzzle former member and Destroyer front man Dan
Bejar. The band’s ninth album serves another
22. Hear Champion
S H A Z A M C A R Roll with the punches.
helping of their signature dish. c.j.
O E D I P U S R E X
Metropolitan Opera, opens April 10.
TV
R E D P E P P E R S The Met capitalizes on its 2021 hit, Fire Shut Up
E D Y S P E S O
18. Watch Schmigadoon! in My Bones, by staging another work by the
same artist, the jazz, film, and opera composer
N E W T
P L O T Season Two Terence Blanchard. Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo
Green gets the ironic title role in that rarest of
B A I T O O P S “The name on everybody’s lips is gonna be …”
creatures, a boxing opera. j.d.
N U R S I N G B R A Apple TV+, April 5.
CLASSICAL
E S C A P E R O O M The movie-musicals parody series returns with
23. Hear Stephen Hough
a new central focus—rather than the Rodgers
O H H S T E E D S
and Hammerstein era, it’s musicals of the ’70s.
This time, leads Cecily Strong and Keegan- A polymath in the flesh.
The Rumors Puzzle Michael Key stumble into the darker world of 92nd Street Y, March 30.
Schmicago, which means maybe this season Spring finds the pianist in retrospective mode:
D A I S Y S H U there’ll be murders! k.v.a. Having recently published a memoir, Enough:
A N C H O L A O S MOVIES Scenes From a Childhood, he performs his own
S T E A M S I T E Sonatina Nostalgica. But it’s not all about him:
H I P V A L I D 19. See The Last His recital program ranges across mountainous
scores by Scriabin, Debussy, and Liszt. j.d.
I R A
A L I
H
E N
I T O N
R H O
Temptation of Christ MUSIC
An alternative biblical history.
S C A L Y M E W
Roxy Cinema, April 8, 12, and 15. 24. See Shygirl
T I C S M A O R I
Celebrate Easter with a 35-mm. print of Martin Collaboration queen.
A S E A A D O R E Scorsese’s controversial masterpiece—the film Webster Hall, April 8 and 9.
B T S J O N E S that many believe helped set off the culture wars
On her debut album last year, U.K. singer, rapper,
back in 1988. It’s an enormously tender tale of
producer, and DJ Shygirl made good on a trail of
Jesus (Willem Dafoe) trying to reconcile his
The Ghostface Puzzle exciting guest features, from Lady Gaga’s Dawn
humanity with his divine destiny, going so far as
of Chromatica remix album to FKA Twigs’s
to imagine himself stepping off the cross and
J E N N A S C A M Caprisongs mixtape, delivering dazzling perfor-
leading a normal life. Needless to say, the Chris-
A B O U T O L G A mances over airy productions co-starring lumi-
tian right was none too happy about that last part.
M O O R E D O R Y naries in electronic music. Catch Shygirl celebrat-
bilge ebiri
ing Nymph’s deluxe edition, which comes with a
I L K S C E O
TV remix EP touting Björk and Tinashe collabs. c.j.
E A S E B A K E R
20. Watch
THEATER
S H O P
T H E O R T E G A
Single Drunk Female 25. See Dancin’
R E W A R D A L L Get out your jazz hands.
I R A I S E S O S Season Two Music Box Theatre, opens March 19.
P O N D E R T W O “Keep coming back.” Wayne Cilento, one of the original dancers in this
Freeform, April 12. revue of Bob Fosse choreography, directs a revival
Find new puzzles daily at This show’s first season, although uneven in pac- of the production. Expect feats of flexibility, iso-
nymag.com/games. ing, introduced us to Sofia Black-D’Elia’s charm- lated body motions, and sultry shimmying. j.m.

80 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
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We teamed up with Martindale-Hubbell®, the gold standard in legal ratings, to leverage their peer-reviewed system embraced by the legal
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All of the lawyers listed below are AV Preeminent Attorneys®. For a complete list of attorneys rated by Martindale-Hubbell,
visit Martindale.com. Attorneys listed below do not constitute the full list of “Top Rated Attorneys”

ABRAMS FENSTERMAN
RoseAnn C. Branda & Samual J. Ferrara* CONNORS & SULLIVAN ATTORNEYS AT LAW, PLLC
www.abramslaw.com Michael N. Connors*
Page 8 www.connorsandsullivan.com
Page 8
ADRIA HILLMAN
Adria Hillman* KATTEN MUCHIN
www.adriashillman.com Joshua S. Rubenstein*
Page 8 www.katten.com
Page 4, 5
BASHIAN PC
Gary E. Bashian* MARKEWICH AND ROSENSTOCK LLP
www.bashian-law.com Eve Rachel Markewich* & Lawrence Rosenstock*
Page 8
www.morellilaw.com
Page 3
CARDI & EDGAR LLP
Dawn M. Cardi* SCHWARTZ, FANG & KEATING
cardiedgarlaw.com Neil B. Fang* & Stephanie M. Reily Keating*
Page 6 www.inheritlawyers.com
Page 7

*Matrindale-Hubbell® AV Preeminent Attorneys

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SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION NEW YORK’S TOP RATED FAMILY LAW & TRUSTS & ESTATES LAWYERS 2023

TRUSTS AND ESTATES LITIGATION AND COMMERCIAL LITIGATION

MARKEWICH AND ROSENSTOCK LLP is a highly regarded litigation and dispute resolution
firm. The Firm is particularly well known and respected for its expertise handling trusts and
estates litigation matters in the Surrogate’s Courts and Supreme Courts.
In addition to its Trusts and
Estates practice, the firm also
has an extensive practice
representing clients in business
litigation matters including
shareholder and partnership
disputes, contract matters, real
estate controversies and
employment matters.
EVE RACHEL MARKEWICH
and LAWRENCE M.
ROSENSTOCK are creative
and hard-working litigators
with compassion for their
clients’ interests and needs. LEGAL LEADERS
As court-room advocates, they
are committed to protecting
their clients’ interests to the
end, and vigorously standing
up for their legal principles
before both judge and jury.
As counselors,
MARKEWICH AND ROSENSTOCK bring to bear their life experiences as professionals,
family members, friends, and business owners.

EVE RACHEL MARKEWICH AND LAWRENCE ROSENSTOCK understand that their clients
are real people or businesses owned by real people, and the firm ensures that their clients
are treated responsibly and with personal care.

Both Ms. Markewich and Mr. Rosenstock are AV Preeminent-rated by Martindale-Hubbell

and consistently have been designated Super Lawyers and/or Best Lawyers.

18 EAST 48TH STREET, TENTH FLOOR, NEW YORK, NY 10017

PH: 212.542.3156 | WWW.MRLAWLLP.COM

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Joshua S. Rubenstein
Partner
New York Office +1.212.940.7150
joshua.rubenstein@katten.com
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NEW YORK’S TOP RATED FAMILY LAW & TRUSTS & ESTATES LAWYERS 2023 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

Cardi & Edgar LLP

DAWN M. CARDI
(212) 481-7770
cardiedgarlaw.com

Jay is laser-focused on efficiently obtaining wins for his clients, who hire him for his seasoned
judgment in dispute resolution both in and out of the courtroom. A trusted counselor, he
has deep expertise representing all types of stakeholders in sophisticated and complex trust
and estate disputes. Jay has significant experience litigating all manner of breach of fiduciary
duty actions in trusts and estates, as well as Will contests and other contested probate mat-
ters. As part of this practice, he counsels private clients in potentially contentious business
and personal matters regarding, among other areas, closely-held businesses, real estate, tax
and insurance. Jay’s practice also includes guardianship actions and other contested elder
law matters. A carefully aggressive advocate, Jay’s clients look to him for their thorniest
matters.
Jay is well-known in his field, and often speaks and writes on fiduciary litigation topics,
including undue influence, no contest clauses, and accounting proceedings. Jay is a Fellow
in the peer-elected American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC). He is pro bono
trust and estate litigation counsel to the New York Public Library. And he is also the chair-
person of the Litigation Committee of Trusts & Estates magazine. Through his network,
Jay provides seamless counsel to his multi-jurisdictional clientele.
Prior to forming Elman Freiberg, Jay was the chairperson of Katten Muchin Rosenman’s
New York fiduciary litigation practice. He was also previously an adjunct professor at Ford-
ham University School of Law, where he taught legal writing. And Jay served as a law clerk
for the Honorable Diane Weiss Sigmund, judge for the US Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania.
Jay resides in Manhattan with his wife and two children. When not with his family or in the
office, he can be found training for his next race. Jay is a veteran of numerous road races and
triathlons and, on happy occasion, makes the podium.
950 Third Avenue, Suite 1600
New York, New York 10022
Phone: 646 780-8108
jfreiberg@ef-law.com
www.ef-law.com

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 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION NEW YORK’S TOP RATED FAMILY LAW & TRUSTS & ESTATES LAWYERS 2023

Schwartz, Fang
& Keating, P.C.
Neil B. Fang
Over 30 Years of Probate & Estate Tax Experience Stephanie M. Reilly Keating

60 Crossways Park Drive West, Suite 301, Woodbury, NY 11797

135 West 50th Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10020
Tel: 516.488.0100 | Toll free: 866-735-3771| Fax: 516.864.2943 | www.inheritlawyers.com

JEWELL LAW, PLLC

MATRIMONIAL & FAMILY LAW

Ken Jewell

In marital strife,
the question to answer is
do you want to be
happy or right?

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NEW YORK’S TOP RATED FAMILY LAW & TRUSTS & ESTATES LAWYERS 2023 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

WILL CONTESTS, ACCOUNTING CONTESTS,

TRUST & ESTATE LITIGATION,
ESTATE & TRUST ADMINISTRATION,
FAMILY BUSINESS & CORPORATE Abrams Fensterman, a premiere full-service

LITIGATION, COMPLEX TRUST & ESTATE & law firm, serves clients throughout New
York from offices in Lake Success, Brooklyn,
HIGH INCOME & HIGH ASSET PRESERVATION, White Plains, Rochester, and Albany.
CORPORATE & BUSINESS LAW & LITIGATION, Executive Partners and Matrimonial and

COMPLEX MATRIMONIAL LITIGATION, Family Law Group Co-Directors RoseAnn C.

Branda and Samuel J. Ferrara lead a highly
COMPLEX GUARDIANSHIP LITIGATION skilled team of lawyers.

The three senior attorneys at RoseAnn C. Branda, an Executive Partner, is an

experienced and skilled lawyer in both settlement
our law firm, Gary E. Bashian, negotiation and, where necessary, aggressive trial
litigation and has proudly served as President of the
Andrew R. Frisenda and Brooklyn Bar Association, Bay Ridge Lawyers
Association and Columbian Lawyers Association of
Michael G. Hanrahan, and Brooklyn, while designated in New York Super
Lawyers since 2007 and New York Best Lawyers
all attorneys in our firm, have since 2018.

over 100 years experience in Samuel J. Ferrara, an Executive Partner, has

experience with contested custody and high net-
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serving as mediation counsel as well as mediator in
to our clients. multiple disciplines and has been named a Top-
Rated Family Lawyer, recognized as a Fellow of the
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York Super Lawyers since 2008, and New York Best
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Emily
Henry
CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 3 1
It’s a romance that has to be safe before
it can be passionate. Henry’s books are full
of people who are messy and know they
need to deal with it before they can be good
partners. And while the books might seem
a little prudish in their adherence to no
assholes, no volatility (isn’t the sex better
in books where toxic assholes roam free?),
this offering of normal and supportive love
is its own kind of radical. Love, as Henry
presents it, is sturdy, long-lasting if cared
for correctly, a low-grade constant warmth
versus a hot, devouring flame. “Love, after
all, was often made not of shiny things but
practical ones. Ones that grew old and
rusted only to be repaired and polished,”
she writes in Beach Read.
“I can imagine reading that for the
first time feels exciting,” says Caldwell. “If
romance is anything, it’s a rubric for female
autonomy and having a space to say what
you want and see what you want written
about in a meaningful way. So I can see
how, for young readers, that would be a
really exciting proposition because they’re
kind of trying to evaluate what a healthy
relationship looks like.”
I
n her cincinnati living room, as
the light shifts from early-afternoon
gray to late-afternoon gray, Henry
puts down glasses of water for both
of us and offers me a Clif Bar from a jar of
them. The glasses, which are adorable and
vintage like everything else in her home,
were a Christmas gift from her husband.
“This sounds depressing, but you know
that thing of getting older where your pres-
ents become really practical and you’re
like, Oh hell yeah!” That’s the kind of thing
a Henry male love interest would absolutely
do: build a table, buy the right glasses,
remember to get blueberry ice cream for
his beloved.
Where do we learn to love? For Henry,
her philosophy of love came from watching
her parents read. When she and her
brothers were kids, they would read to them
every night, sitting in the hallway between
their bedrooms. “My dad would do all the
character’s voices,” she says. “He still does
that for my mom. She’ll fall asleep with her
cpap machine on, and he’ll be reading loud
enough for her to hear it,” she adds, casually
tossing out the most devastatingly romantic
act I’ve heard in some time.
Henry grew up in Kentucky and Ohio
with two older brothers who instilled in
her a tenacity to prove herself, always. Her
mother and father worked at the phone
company. She remembers a girlhood spent
in freedom, reading with a flashlight in the
closet after bedtime and roaming the woods
pretending to be a witch and painting her
face with wild-berry juice until her mother
blew a whistle to call her home. But she
also remembers the pervasive feeling in the
’90s that “girlhood was just embarrassing,”
she says. “Womanhood was embarrassing,
desire was embarrassing, and you weren’t
supposed to feel any of that, engage with
any of that. And liking things that were
deemed traditionally ‘feminine’ ”—air
quotes—“was not cool.”
She was 7, maybe 8, when she had her
first crush. “I wrote him a note that was
probably like a ‘Do you like me? Yes or no.’
His mom found it in his backpack and for
some reason called my mom. And it’s like,
Why?” she says, sitting back on her couch
and messing her Zooey Deschanel wisps
into a curtain to hide behind. “We were tiny
children. I don’t understand what the intent
was. Maybe she thought it was cute. I think
that was probably the first time that I was
just like, Oh, that’s so embarrassing. And it
hadn’t really occurred to me when I wrote
the note that it could be. I don’t think I yet
had that fear of what it would be like for this
boy to say, ‘No, I don’t like you.’”
Her family moved to Cincinnati when
she was in high school, where it took her
more time than she’d care to admit to
make a group of friends. She did, though
they were mostly boys. She describes her-
self as someone who “just kept breaking
her own heart over and over” by finding
someone with the “worst problems” and
offering them her whole heart. That ended
when, at 18, she met her husband, a touring
musician. They started dating while she
was in college, and eventually she moved
back home to end their many years of long
distance. “We met when we were babies,
but we dated for a long time before we
got married. I highly advise it because we
were totally different people from when we
started dating.” Now she’s almost guilty over
how much she loves their life together. “It’s
so great to have a partner where we go to
opposite ends of the house and just work
all day long and leave each other alone and
then afterward be like, ‘And now we can
pick out what we’re going to watch or what
board game we’re going to play.’”
As if on cue, her husband, a mustached,
hoodie-wearing dude, emerges from his
basement studio and interrupts politely.
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
“Sorry,” he says, moving as fast as possible
through the living room. “I’m just putting
away the Green Chef.” And then, just as
suddenly, he is gone. While Henry’s male
protagonists have historically been moody
fixer-uppers with hearts of gold that just
need to be therapized into beating, the
guy she’s writing for her fifth book is more
like her husband. “It’s the most golden-
retriever-ish hero I’ve ever written. Just a
very nice man. I feel like as we get older, we
appreciate nice people way more.”
She thinks a beat. “It’s actually very
Freudian,” she jokes. “My dad is such a kind,
sweet man, and my husband is a kind, sweet
man in the same way. My grandpa is that
magic grandpa where you’re like, ‘You’re so
nice.’ Anyway!” she continues brightly.
Although Henry is seemingly well
adjusted enough not to struggle with
giving and receiving love, she did struggle
with the more overt aspects of being a
woman who desires and has feelings. “You
thought to be smart, you should like things
that are basically marketed toward men.
If you’re not smart, then you like things
that are marketed toward women or girls.
I really unfortunately did buy into that
until college.” She got to college and made
a group of girlfriends who liked rom-coms
and makeup, and that helped her stop
feeling insecure. But it wasn’t until she
started writing and reading romance that
she began to reconsider her relationship
to love and sex, and her “puritanical” rela-
tionship to romance in general. “Sex and
the conversations that sex leads to or that
happen during sex, or the embarrassment
that can come with having sex with some-
one for the first time,” she realized, was an
important part of the story.
Henry’s next book, Happy Place, will be
released in hardcover and has sprawling
intersecting story lines. She takes out
the big corkboard she used to plot it out
and tries to explain the system she used,
struggling to remember which color cor-
responds with which timeline. It’s a book
that seems to be taking Henry further
away from the genre. She uses flashbacks
and an ensemble of friends that each have
clearly defined trajectories. While it does
focus mostly on Harriet (Harry) and Wyn,
a recently separated couple who pretend
to still be engaged during a friend-group
trip, it’s not necessarily a book that will lift
you out of your romantic gloom, even if it
does deliver on the genre’s promise. The
love will sneak up on you. “I think there
are still so many people out there who
don’t know that they would love romance
novels,” she says. “I’m just trying to trick
people into reading them because their
lives are going to be better for it. That’s
my big master plan.” ■
89

Abortion
Politics
CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 2 5
abortion, it would be pitted in some way
against economic issues.”
Between 1989 and 2007, Democrats
had opportunities to pass versions of the
Freedom of Choice Act, which would essen-
tially have codified Roe. As a candidate,
Barack Obama promised that his first act
as president would be to sign the bill, but it
could never garner enough support—even
when he had a supermajority—to hit his
desk. In 2009, Obama said pushing the leg-
islation through was simply “not my highest
legislative priority.” In 2013, California
representative Judy Chu first introduced
the Women’s Health Protection Act, a dif-
ferent attempt to legislatively enshrine
abortion protections; it died in committee
in four consecutive Congresses, passing the
House only in the fall of 2021, just before
oral arguments in Dobbs. In 2015, when
Lee first introduced the each Act, which
would have effectively overturned Hyde,
it had 70 original co-sponsors; when she
reintroduced it in January, there were 168.
“It helped a lot when we started diver-
sifying our members of Congress and we
got younger and more women of color in,”
Jayapal said. “They are not yet in leader-
ship, but this generation are movement
organizers in a way that perhaps the current
generation of power isn’t used to seeing.”
“These members aren’t going to put
up with this old-school stuff,” Lee said,
noting that Massachusetts representa-
tive Ayanna Pressley and New York rep-
resentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
were among those who pushed the Rules
Committee to remove Hyde from the
appropriations bill, where it had long been
a legislative rider, to enable members to
vote against it. Pressley told me that at the
House Democratic Issues Conference in
March, she hosted a session dedicated to
abortion rights and access, scheduled at
8 a.m. at the end of what she called “a brutal
week.” The session had some of “the most
robust attendance” of any at the conference,
she said. “And people were engaged. They
understood that not only are these policies
a matter of life and death but that, also, they
are popular.”
The unpopularity of abortion restrictions,
especially the attacks on medication abor-
90 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
tion, has dramatically changed the politics
on the issue. Celinda Lake has recently done
polling on how the anti-abortion right’s
recent attacks are going over. “The biggest
surprise,” she said, “was that it didn’t matter
if you were in a legal or an illegal or a hostile
state; it didn’t matter if you were a Democrat
or a Republican or an independent. The
unanimity of opposition to restriction of
access to medication abortion was stun-
ning and almost equal across all states. You
would have thought it would have differed
a lot between California and Mississippi,
but it didn’t.” Polling like Lake’s, Schifeling
argued, “opens up a whole world of support
that we can leverage to change the conversa-
tion and put the extremist lawmakers, with
their ever more extreme backdoor bans, on
the back foot.” On some level, Republicans
understand this. It’s why Speaker Kevin
McCarthy’s majority has not yet passed a
federal abortion ban out of the House. But
Republicans are facing their own quandary:
They must find a way to satisfy a ravening
anti-abortion base.
T
he political opportunity is
so great, and the polling so clear,
that a few Democrats I spoke with
see a path to legalization through
Congress—not generations down the line
but in a second Biden term.
“We need a clean bill to meet the moment,
a right to abortion and birth control. We
need to get rid of Comstock once and for
all,” one person who has worked with the
administration told me. “Then Democrats
need to win back a trifecta; they should be
able to win back the House in a presidential
cycle, hold the Senate, reelect the president,
then pass a right to abortion and contracep-
tion in 2025. I am so sick of people talking
about a 30-year plan for abortion. I want to
have a two-year plan for abortion.”
Is such a scenario possible? Even if
reclaiming the House in a presidential-
election year is doable—there are seats ripe
for picking in blue states like New York
and California—Senate Democrats face
what political scientists and poll nerds call
an “unfavorable” electoral map in 2024,
defending far more seats than they can
reasonably expect to pick up. It is possible
that the map is so rigid, and polarization so
entrenched, that Democrats can never get to
the right number of votes. But the past two
midterm contests have broken or exceeded
historical assumptions. Abortion may not be
just a winning issue but a model-exploding
one. “We won big-time on abortion,” Lee
said. “And let me tell you, before the elec-
tion, there was a lot of sentiment: ‘Don’t talk
about abortion. Don’t make it central to the
agenda.’ But afterward, everyone was like,
‘Thank you very much.’”
This strategy means acknowledging
the popularity of a fight for abortion access
and the unpopularity of the right’s extreme
incursions into pharmacies and mailboxes.
It means replacing stalwart supporters of
the filibuster like Kyrsten Sinema and
electing enough Democrats to disem-
power Joe Manchin, a red-state Democrat
the party has relied on as much as it has
reviled. With every Senate seat gained in
2024, 2026, and beyond, “we’re one step
closer to being able to get rid of the fili-
buster, which is when the key turns in the
lock,” Warren told me.
Adjacent to the filibuster is Court reform.
And though few would say so on the record,
some policy-makers cannot discuss abor-
tion protections without looking toward
an inevitable conflict. They say there’s no
working around judicial roadblocks, only
ramming straight into them. Would an
abortion law “tee up a challenge from the
Supreme Court?” said the person who has
worked with the administration. “Yes, there
will likely be an inflection point in terms
of the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.”
While the administration is a very long
way from talking about anything like Court
reform, Harris was willing to go after the
Court itself. “My role models are Thurgood
Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston,
Constance Baker Motley,” she told me,
“who all understood the responsibility of the
highest court in our land to ensure funda-
mental freedoms. The Supreme Court took
a right that had been recognized from the
people of America; it was so foundational
and fundamental.”
Perhaps it is time for Democrats to begin
to use the theater of Congress as aggres-
sively as Republicans have done. “When the
Supreme Court forces women to have preg-
nancies that in some cases are dooming them
to potential death?” asked Representative
Jimmy Gomez of California, founder of
the new Congressional Dads Caucus. “That
should piss people off. Sometimes I don’t
feel that outrage.” Another person who has
worked at a senior level in both federal elec-
toral and advocacy capacities wondered,
“Why aren’t they reintroducing WHPA
every damn week? I realize they’re not in
the majority, but do it as a caucus vote!
Make something up!” There was a plan to
kick off Women’s History Month by reintro-
ducing the WHPA in the House, but it was
held up by procedural delays; according to
a congressional source, it will happen before
March is over. A version was reintroduced in
the Senate on March 8. Meanwhile, Biden
spent the month cementing his reelection
bid’s focus on protecting Medicare, surely
important and more comfortable terrain
for him than abortion but definitely not the
issue that won his party the midterms.
 One lesson from Michigan is to make the
connections between abortion and health
care, child care, economic opportunity,
affordable education, and democracy itself.
When I described how Whitmer is linking
abortion access to pre-K and featuring it
as a centerpiece of a pro-business agenda,
Warren got excited. “It just takes the fight
straight up the middle,” she said.
And as Lake said, many Democratic
leaders have still not grasped “what a strong
frame this is in terms of freedom.” Tina
Smith of Minnesota told me, “There was
this weird idea that voters can only have one
thing in their head at a time.” Campaigning
in her state in the fall, she said, “I saw so
clearly that voters understood the infringe-
ment on personal decision-making, con-
necting that with the other thing that these
crazy radical Republicans are doing, which
is trying to undermine the democracy. In
the minds of the voters in Minnesota, it
came together.”
“The challenge Democrats have had,”
Bonier said, “is in drawing the charge of
extremism to anyone but Trump. And what
happened with Dobbs is that it not only had
the impact as an issue by itself but it actu-
ally made voters look at arguments about
Republican extremism and democracy
denial and January 6 in a way that suddenly
resonated for them.”
As more states attempt to put abortion
measures on their ballots and Republicans
do everything possible to keep this from
happening, the connection between abor-
tion and democracy could grow ever
stronger. This year, lawmakers in Arkansas,
Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota,
and Oklahoma have debated bills meant
to undermine citizen-led ballot initia-
tives. Wisconsin Republicans rejected
Democratic governor Tony Evers’s proposal
that voters cast ballots on abortion in that
state’s crucial April 4 election, which will
determine control of the State Supreme
Court. And in Ohio, where citizens are
already collecting signatures for a consti-
tutional ballot measure, some Republicans
are pushing to make the electoral threshold
for constitutional amendments 60 percent.
To truly reframe the issue moving forward
might mean moving away from one old
frame: Roe itself. Activists have long argued
that it should never have been the ceiling but
the floor. Now that it’s gone, those mourning
its demise can strive to build a more expan-
sive, less vulnerable model dependent not
on legally precarious notions of privacy,
and not tied to gestational age in a way that
permits restriction, and not as exposed to
limitations that hurt the poor most. What-
ever comes next, multiple Democrats sug-
gested to me, should not be modeled on Roe
or try to recapitulate it. “We have a chance
to imagine something much more funda-
mental to women’s futures and rights than
we’ve ever had before,” Jayapal said.
I
n her 1969 speech, Shirley Chisholm
cited a poll showing that 64 percent
of respondents were in favor of abor-
tion decisions being made between a
woman and her doctor. After Roe, survey
after survey turned up a nation irrevocably
divided on the issue: 50-50 for and against.
It got embedded in the very psyche of the
Democratic Party that abortion was a light-
ning rod and that to come too close to it was
to risk electrocution.
Only in the past decade has a new and
more diverse generation of pollsters begun
asking questions about abortion differently.
As Undem has explained, when surveys
asked first whether respondents person-
ally supported abortion and then whether
they believed the government should be
making decisions about it, it became clear
that 60 to 75 percent of Americans believe
abortion should be legal. In other words,
it took more than 50 years to get back to
where Chisholm said we were in 1969.
Chisholm also saw the links between
gender, racial, and economic inequity. “The
poor rely most heavily on the contraceptive
methods which have the highest incidence
of failure,” she said. And just four years
after the nine male Supreme Court justices
who made birth control legal in Griswold
v. Connecticut had not been able to bring
themselves to actually utter the names
of any contraceptive methods, Chisholm
rattled them off: “withdrawal, rhythm,
douche, suppositories, foam as opposed to
the Pill, the diaphragm, coil.”
Chisholm was trying to normalize repro-
ductive health; she was acknowledging the
quotidian human experience of people with
the capacity for pregnancy. When abor-
tion is integrated into our lives, when it is
not placed into its own special and highly
charged category, when it is based on real
stories of real people, a subtle shift occurs,
as if we’re cocking our heads to see a photo-
graph in a different way.
Back in Michigan, Erika Geiss posited
to me that one reason her party had long
struggled to lead on abortion rights was
that “people came up with stupid names
for everything having to do with sexuality,
reproduction, women’s health, periods” and
that this unwillingness to use precise lan-
guage stemmed from a failure to take cer-
tain bodies seriously. Indeed, 11 years ago, a
Michigan legislator was kicked off the floor
for saying the word vagina during an abor-
tion debate.
In Michigan and Washington, I noticed
how frequently elected officials spoke on
the record to me about periods, meno-
m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k
pause, the nauseating pain of IUD inser-
tion. Whitmer and I compared notes about
being women old enough not to have ever
used period-tracking apps. Nessel has told
the story of an early meeting of executive
leadership in 2019 at which she’d gotten
her period unexpectedly; when she asked
if anyone had a tampon, Whitmer replied,
“Madame Attorney General, everyone here
has a tampon.” At a federal level, many of
the most active legislators have told stories
of their own abortions and experiences of
sexual assault. Jimmy Gomez remembered
that as a kid, “we were so poor that we
would gather change to go to the gas station
and buy my sisters’ feminine products out
of the machines.”
It changes the tenor of debate when a
legislative body is populated by the kinds
of bodies that have historically been leg-
islated against. “The reason why we’ve
championed the need for more represen-
tative government was not for contrived
moments of ‘Kumbaya’ or greater visual
diversity in the photos,” said Pressley.
“It’s because of how it shows up in our
policy-making.”
Elected officials at the forefront of this
fight, like Whitmer and Jayapal and Lee
and Pressley, are asking us to conceptu-
alize abortion as part of the complex but
ultimately ordinary warp and weft of
everyday life. What if business development
necessarily entailed abortion protections?
What if family values meant families being
able to make choices about how and when
they form and having access to the health
care they need? What if the protection of
democracy were very clearly tied to access
to reproductive care?
Perhaps this sounds like a stoned con-
versation in a dorm room, but then again,
the kind of strategizing the right has done
since the late-20th century has also sounded
like a stoned conversation in a dorm room.
What if we said the clinic hallways had to
be a certain width, dudes? What if we force
doctors to tell patients there’s a link between
breast cancer and abortion? What if we
behaved like second-trimester fetuses had
the chubby cheeks of 6-month-olds?
For some Democrats, the project ahead
may mean casting abortion as a draw
for employers, businesses, and students
deciding where to attend schools. For others,
abortion may land smack in the middle of a
series of health-care priorities that should
support Americans from birth to death. For
still others, it is one of the many civil rights
that generations of Americans fought for,
part of the inclusive vision of the American
promise that Republicans are eager to tear
up. In every case, Democrats should present
abortion as simply and plainly integral to
an American ideal, a promise made without
91
apology but also without fetishization.
In the same years that availability
of abortion in the United States has
decreased, battles for greater access in
other nations have succeeded. Abortion has
been decriminalized in Mexico, Argentina,
and Colombia as part of Latin America’s
so-called Green Wave, in which protesters
have made green bandannas their symbol,
a color choice that stemmed in part, as one
Argentine activist told the Washington
Post, from the conviction that “the term
‘life’ should return to us.” In 2018, Irish
voters elected to make the procedure legal
there, and in 2021 the Constitutional Court
decriminalized it in South Korea.
Lawmakers and activists around the
world have focused not simply on privacy
or individual decision-making (a matter
between a woman and her doctor, as
Democrats often said in the days of Roe)
but on abortion as a human right strongly
tied to democracy reform, resistance to
authoritarianism, and violence against
women. In Colombia, reproductive-rights
proponents pointed to the cruel absurdity
of regulating abortion through the crimi-
nal code, an argument that will be ever
more relevant in the U.S. as states move to
charge both abortion providers and seekers
with crimes. In nations where restrictions
remain tight, advocates have pushed to
recognize those who help patients get
abortions as human-rights defenders,
ensuring them legal representation.
Creative strategies and political practices
that the Democratic Party failed to develop
over the past 50 years have blossomed else-
where. The most successful of them have
been holistic, connecting the dots between
health care, good governance, maternal
mortality, workforce participation, climate
justice, economic inequality, and criminal-
justice reform.
Catalina Martínez Coral, regional
director at the Center for Reproductive
Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean,
wrote last year after the victory in Colombia,
“It wasn’t enough to change our laws. How
people thought and talked about abortion
had to evolve too.” However long it may
take to undo the damage of Dobbs and the
decades of erosion that preceded it, the
longer and deeper project—of revising not
just the way we legislate but the way we
think—will remain.
This is one of the most important post-
Roe lessons. It was never pass-fail or win-
lose. There should never have been a pause
in thinking, fighting, arguing, debating,
being creative. Democrats are now late to
this project. Yet it is also early. As Barbara
Lee told me, “If you are in this thing just for
a minute? Good-bye. You just have to figure
out how to keep at it.” ■ gleamed and a row of double-magnum bot-
92 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
The New
Light Is Bad
CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 3 7
If you don’t mind spending extra
money—say, three or four times as much
per bulb, plus a $60 controller—and fooling
around inside an app, you can get color-
tunable lightbulbs today. They have differ-
ent colored LEDs inside, instead of simply
phosphor-treated blue ones. The Depart-
ment of Energy notes that programming
the bulb controls “may not be intuitive,” that
tunable whites won’t necessarily match any
other whites, and that colors may come out
“cartoonlike.” And they won’t save as much
electricity. The LED industry is still trying
to develop an efficient green LED to go
with the red, blue, and amber ones. Royer
remains hopeful and is encouraged by the
continued search for improvement. Tunable
LEDs may overtake phosphor-converted
bulbs in efficiency by the 2030s.
Until then, there’s amber nail polish.
Ordinary, transparent amber from the
drugstore. “I highly recommend every per-
son who reads this story buy this nail polish
and start painting it on their LED bulbs,”
said Robin Standefer. “It is a game changer.”
Standefer is one of the founders of Roman
and Williams Buildings and Interiors, a
design company that works with Descottes
and L’Observatoire. We were talking on
Zoom, and behind her was a paper Noguchi
lamp. “It’s the most beautiful light in the
world,” she said, “but you put an LED in and
it’s not that beautiful.” To compensate, she’d
wrapped the bulb in a filter.
I wanted to see the best possible appli-
cation of LED lighting, so Standefer said
I had to go downtown. At dusk, I took a
blazingly lit N train (my light-meter app
reported 4,292 Kelvin) to the Roman and
Williams Guild and La Mercerie, their
combined retail store and restaurant on
Howard Street. The light inside was opu-
lent and gorgeous. Tall candles flickered
on the dining tables, but everything else
was LED. As I studied the fixtures in the
store—in burnished bronzes with glass
that was dark and pearly, or a delicate
nude pink, and with prices starting in the
low four figures—I realized that the sur-
rounding lighting had subtly dimmed and
warmed, shifting its Kelvin temperature for
nighttime. In the restaurant, copper pans
tles of rosé glowed extra pink. The bread’s
crust was shaded in lush browns. Stacked
white towels were creamy, and spotlights
from tracks overhead threw the shadows of
the candles this way and that on the tables.
It was sublime. And if I really wanted to
experience LEDs at their most exquisite,
Standefer said, I should see what Descottes
and Roman and Williams had done at Le
Coucou, another client. I walked two blocks
east and stepped inside. The restaurant
was wonderfully dim, the dimness alive
with color and warmth. Huge chandeliers
hung with rings of dozens of flame-tipped
bulbs in rose-pink inverted glass cups. That
glass, Standefer had told me, was Roman
and Williams’s special formula for LED
bulbs, the work of a septuagenarian glass-
blower in Brooklyn. “If she stops blowing
this glass, I don’t know what I’ll do, because
she’s been the only person to achieve a very
beautiful color in the glass,” she said.
Inside the bulbs were the little V’s of fila-
ments. You can do remarkable things with
LED filaments these days, reviving old-
timey clear bulb shapes with all sorts of
whorls or zigzags. I swore they looked just
like the real thing.
I was trying to figure out how to describe
the particular color the light made on the
white ductwork above—the color of the
flesh of a white peach, I decided—when
I ran into John Barclay, the facilities man-
ager for Le Coucou and its sister restau-
rants. Barclay studied theater lighting in
college before going into hospitality, and
when LEDs arrived, he gave himself a
crash education in the technical ins and
outs. Now he was near evangelical about
the LEDs. He ran through the interplay of
the lighting sources: The chandeliers were
at about 1,700 Kelvin, he said, while spot-
lights above the tables were at 2,400 and
task lighting in the kitchen was slightly
colder, at 2,700, to give the staff a precise
look at the plated food on the way out.
I’d been told I had to see the rest-
room. I went to see the restroom. The all-
pervading glow was so honeyed I couldn’t
tell if the grab bar by the toilet was mere
steel or luxurious brass.
Maybe I was wrong about LEDs. Maybe
I just had to be patient—to wait and let
this luminous future trickle down to the rest
of us. Later, upon follow-up questioning,
I learned that the warmly glowing filaments
in the Le Coucou chandeliers are not, in fact,
LEDs. They are hot wire filaments. Inside
the LED-optimized glass of the chandelier
fittings, the LED-forward restaurant is still
using incandescents for that ineffable and as
yet irreplaceable glow.
I asked Barclay how he would navigate
the future. “In the near term,” he said, “I have
a large stock of those bulbs.” ■
IT TAKES A LOT
TO SURVIVE IN
New york city.
New Yorkers are a distinct breed. We live here not because it’s easy but because it’s
the greatest place in the world where anything is possible. We don’t wait around for
somebody else to come and save the day, we take it upon ourselves to step up and
overcome any and every obstacle that gets thrown our way.

Today, in that spirit, we launch , a campaign created to remind all New

Yorkers of our greatest strength: each other.

Time and again, we have come to the rescue of our city as a collective superpower.
Not “me” but “WE.”

Consider this a rallying cry for all New Yorkers to act! Whether it’s volunteering,
helping a neighbor or even simply picking up a piece of trash, no action is too small.

The city won’t fix itself. Let’s get to work.

Learn more at welovenyc.nyc

welovenyc.nyc
 ES the new york crossword
M
GA

Best Pic
By Matt Gaffney
7
8
9
Not from a bottle
Tail movements
Abbr. on tubes of toothpaste
10 Part of PBR

address changes to New York Magazine, P.O. Box 37130, Boone, IA, 50037. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40612608. Canada returns to be sent to The Mail Group, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON, N6C 6B2. Subscription rates in the United States and
possessions: 26 issues, $70. For subscription assistance, write to New York Magazine Subscription Department, P.O. Box 37130, Boone, IA, 50037, or call 800-678-0900. Printed in the U.S.A. Copyright © 2023 by Vox Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. Founding
11 Make less valuable, as a

March 27–April 9, 2023. VOL. 56, NO. 7. New York Magazine (ISSN 0028-7369) is published biweekly by Vox Media, LLC, 250 Vesey Street, New York, N.Y., 10281. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. Editorial and business offices: 212-508-0700. Postmaster: Send
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 currency
12 Pothead
20 21 22
13 Name that reverses to a fruit
14 Feature of lions and giraffes
23 24 25
15 Dog’s bark, in cartoons
26 27 28 29 30 16 “All right, tell me the rest of
the story …”
31 32 33 34 35 17 Cause to feel sketched out
18 L.A. area that’s Spanish for
36 37 38 39 40 105-Across
19 Gymnastics great Mary Lou
41 42 43 44
24 “When will you get here?”
45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52
29 Holds tight
32 Bite between meals
53 54 55 56 57 58 34 Big Island garland
35 Enthusiasm
59 60 61 62 37 Cash holder
38 Bhagavad ___ (Hindu text)
63 64 65 66 67
39 Bird on Canadian coins
40 Chess tactic

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.
68 69 70 71
42 Bask in the sun
72 73 74 75 76 43 Part of MIT
46 “Around the Horn” channel
77 78 79 80 47 Late comedian O’Neal
48 Short, as a play
81 82 83 84 85 86
49 Singing show, briefly
50 Moved swiftly, as a fish
87 88 89 90 91 92 93
51 Rainbow color
94 95 96 97 98 99 52 Reply to a parental request
53 Irresponsible
100 101 102 103 104 105 54 Words before a hypothetical
55 Bulk chain
106 107 108 109 110
56 Part of LBJ
58 Poetic rejection
111 112 113
62 Cinnamon-flavored gum
114 115 116
64 Pool stick
65 Finite
66 U. of Tennessee players
67 “Swan Lake” garment
69 The Kraken’s home
Across 53 Extreme incaution 95 Boutonniere’s place 70 Title pig of a 1995 film
1 Switzerland’s third-largest city 57 Nonsensical 96 Big 12 squad, briefly 73 Bridge measurement
6 Unlikely firefighters 59 Former Bolivian president 99 Ending for opal or lumin 74 Ending for a big lizard
13 One sending a BCC (2006–19) Morales 100 Surrounded by 75 Pitiful cry
20 Ghana’s capital 60 Choose (to) 101 “I’ve ___ Love Before” (1987 76 “The Prince of Tides” actor
21 Trying to lose, in a way 61 Used, as paper plates pop hit) 79 Future CEO’s degree
22 Dietrich in 1936’s “Desire” 62 Overseeing committees 103 Rice-___ 81 Got too old for Webelos, e.g.
23 Classic 1929 film about a 63 Mix of salad greens 105 Acorn producer 82 The sun
ventriloquist 66 All over your Twitter feed, as 106 Like Archie Bunker 84 Tommy who coached the
25 Vary your voice a meme 108 1954 agreement that sought Dodgers
26 Money you’ve waited for 67 “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” peace in Southeast Asia 85 “Joan of ___” (aughts drama)
27 Book with Bucharest and singer 111 Payment each January, maybe 86 Has as one’s intention
Budapest 68 Grasp easily 112 Low-calorie dessert 87 Take a ___ it (attempt to)
28 Rigid bracelet 69 Speedy hedgehog 113 Terminate a relationship 88 Weasel that can change color
30 Liverpudlian, e.g. 70 Irritate 114 Exam takers 89 Rules
31 “___ Go” (travel-guide series) 71 Driving force 115 Surfing or skiing highlights 90 “Dinner is served!”
33 Scary snake 72 “Attack, doggie!” 116 Film that won Best Picture 91 For one item
34 Runner-up, harshly 73 Picks out of a hat, say this year, for short; it’s also 92 Caitlyn or Kris
35 Bruce Liu’s forte 77 Airport south of SEA the vowel pattern found in 96 Diana on piano
36 “In any ___ …” 78 Stalemate our six theme entries 97 Enjoys the tub
38 George C. Scott won Best Actor 80 Grandpa, in Guatemala 98 Chapel Hill sch.
for portraying him in 1970 81 Single opportunity Down 101 ___ noire
41 Throw off course 82 Mystery novelist Grafton 1 Fought tooth and nail 102 Possessive in the freezer
43 Number for a second sequel 83 J.R. Ewing’s show 2 Pull off 103 Sneaker brand
44 Idaho’s capital 87 Highest enlisted rank in the 3 Royal symbol of power 104 Drink with a polar bear mascot
45 User of services U.S. Army 4 Unit of energy 107 Even score
47 Assassin’s supply 93 Be starstruck, maybe 5 Croft who raids tombs 109 Classic record label
50 Home-improvement letters 94 Trapped up high 6 Hot ___ (some walk on them) 110 Indivisible

94 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 The solutions to last issue’s puzzles appear on page 80.

 the vulture 10x10

Across
1 With 17-Across, 17 See 1-Across THE GREYHOUNDS PUZZLE Down
1 ___ Tesfaye, a.k.a. 13 With 23-Across,
team that’s going 20 Kate who’s By Stella Zawistowski the Weeknd coach of 1-Across
to the Premier married to Steven 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
2 Any of three sisters 15 Term of affection
League in season Spielberg in Disney’s between drag
three 22 Network that aired “Hercules” queens
8 9 10
4 “Wife ___” (show “True Blood” 3 Ohio theme park 18 Prince of
that involved 23 See 13-Down that’s the Broadway?
11 12 13
trading spouses) 27 Tolerate self-proclaimed 19 Sound of
8 Sweetie 30 Beatles song with roller-coaster a chef ’s kiss
9 Furniture piece an exclamation 14 15 16 capital of the world 20 One who wins it
that may have point in the title 4 Lilo’s, uh, “dog” all (abbr.)
leaves 31 Underage one 17 18 19 that’s actually 21 Cornish of “Three
11 Airport posting 32 Toni Morrison’s an alien Billboards Outside
(abbr.) forte, for short 20 21 5 Drained of color Ebbing, Missouri”
12 Part of “RuPaul’s 33 ___ Luger 6 Targets of an 24 Flip a house
Drag Race” (noted loser of a 22 23 24 25 26 Annabel Lucinda 25 La Perla purchase
Reading Challenge “Michelin” star) TikTok workout 26 Makes a decision
14 Absolute minimum 34 Vinyl lovers’ 27 28 29 30
7 Disney doggo 28 Faline in “Bambi,”
16 Accessory dropped collections (abbr.) 10 “The Perfect for one
on business-casual Couple” author 29 Make a mistake
31 32
day Hilderbrand
33 34

Across
1 ___ Gilbert 17 Trail behind THE REVENGE PUZZLE 1
Down
or 18 “I might, or
(Ghostbuster 18 Sum won by an By Stella Zawistowski 2 Many a “Spartacus” I might not”
played by “Amazing Race” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
character 19 Material in
Kristen Wiig) pair, for short 3 Sending Slack a Vera Wang
5 Kindergarten 19 Wee bit msgs, e.g. design, often
10 11
adhesive 22 “Never Tear 4 Chace’s “Gossip 20 Oscar-winning
10 Where to see Us ___” (1987 Girl” role role for Rita
Picasso’s “Les INXS hit) 12 13 5 Where Theranos Moreno and
Demoiselles 24 Game with had its Ariana DeBose
d’Avignon,” Reverse and 14 15 headquarters 21 Charitable giver
for short Skip cards 6 “Ride ___” (Ice 22 Tony-winning
11 Ease fears 25 See 14-Across 16 17 Cube–Kevin Hart role for Heather
12 Leave out 27 Company with a franchise) Headley
13 French wine valley Creative Cloud 18 19 20 21 7 Lost traction 23 Walk with great
14 With 25-Across, 28 Cher or Adele, 8 “The War Widow” effort
“Grace and vocally 22 23 24 author Moss 25 Ally McBeal’s field
Frankie” duo who 29 Walked in water 9 “The Pale Blue 26 “Diary of a ___
team up again in 30 Word in the name ___” (2022 Black Woman”
25 26
“Moving On” of an advice Christian Bale
16 Finance company column, often movie)
27 28
that once 15 Used pickup lines,
sponsored the perhaps
NYC Marathon 29 30

Across
1 Class of Regé-Jean 19 “This is the ideal THE D&D PUZZLE Down
1 “Cyberchase” ntwk. 15 Spotify or Shazam
Page’s character male body. You By Malaika Handa 2 “___ You My 16 Heads up
in “Dungeons & may not like it, but 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Mother?” (classic 17 Deck with
Dragons: Honor this is what ___ children’s book) “the Moon” and
Among Thieves” performance looks 8 9 10
3 Jean-___ Picard “the Sun” cards
8 Five-foot-five like.” (caption on 4 Inuit garment 18 1995 Martin
singer who an image of Shrek) that can be made Scorsese film
11
typically wears 20 Cooking channel from sealskin 20 Spider-Man
a cool hat owned by BuzzFeed 5 Person called to portrayer Maguire
12 13 14
11 Like Joy in 21 Sign at a golf action by one of 22 Meme name for
“Everything course those “Joe Biden a Shiba Inu
Everywhere All 22 ___ and don’ts 15 16 17 18 here” text messages 24 Blot
at Once” or Meilin 23 Extinct creatures 6 Letterboxd 25 Participated in
in “Turning Red” once native to 19 20 competitor a marathon
(abbr.) Mauritius 7 Pester 26 Run-___ (“Mary,
12 Lowe who hosted 28 Lady Gaga or 21 22 9 Takes a nap Mary” group)
“Mental Samurai” Fergie 10 Laugh aggressively 27 Notice
13 2022 SZA album 29 Singer who 23 24 25 26 27 14 Sneaky
15 Where Josh leaves performed in front
Rebecca in “Crazy of a “FEMINIST” 28
Ex-Girlfriend” sign during her
18 2017 SZA album 2016 tour
29

Find new puzzles daily at nymag.com/games. m a r c h 2 7– a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3 | n e w y o r k 95

 THE APPROVAL MATRIX Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.
compiled by dominique pariso and chris stanton

highbr ow

P H OTO G R A P H S : N I C K E LO D E O N ( M E T ) ; G E T T Y I M AG E S ( T R U M P, R ACCO O N , A S TO R , H E D G E S, FA I S T, S W I F T, S M I T H , K A U F M A N , B E N N I F E R , M U R D O C H , PA LT R O W, P E N C E , A D D E R A L L , S L I C E ) ; J O B S F O R F E LO N S H U B / F L I C K R ( P E R P ) ; N E W YO R K S TAT E D E PA R T M E N T O F E CO N O M I C D E V E LO P M E N T ( N YC ) ; J OA N M A R C U S ( D E F E N D) ;

A S T R A H O U S E ( Y I ) ; X I N A N H E L E N R A N ( E S S E X ) ; D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S ( WA R K ) ; R O O M O N B R OA D WAY ( R O O M ) ; S H O N A M C A N D R E W / C H A R T G A L L E RY ( M C A N D R E W ) ; AG AT E S U R R E Y ( H E N F LU E N C E ) ; D O G S H O W R E CO R D S / AT L A N T I C R E CO R D S ( 1 0 0 G E C S ) ; L I O N S G AT E ( W I C K ) ; F O C U S F E AT U R E S ( I N S I D E ) ; T H E L A S T O F U S /
A “monument to Xinan Helen Ran’s
the unborn” at the Donald Trump is New York Theatre show at Essex Flowers
Arkansas state eager to capitalize Workshop’s How to captures the
capitol is endorsed on the drama of a Defend Yourself American terror of
by Governor perp walk. expresses the sexual Chinese invasion.
Huckabee Sanders. anxieties of college
students. Esther Yi’s Y/N,
The NYPD has already a surrealist yarn about
spent its overtime fandom culture.
budget, which was to last
through September.

Under the Henfluence

At least 1,109 relics in clocks our obsession
Furious strikers fail with chicken-keeping.
the Met’s collection to torch Macron’s
found to be tied to imperious
antiquities government.
trafficking.

Shona McAndrew
shows ten great
A phenomenally bad Hard at work on McKenzie Wark’s paintings at Chart
news cycle for fixing housing, Raving spotlights the Gallery.
raccoon dogs. Mayor Adams underground queer
Online scalper nightlife scene.
busted for selling wonders, Do
bedrooms really Cue the devastating
reservations to pedal steel guitar:
Michelin-starred need windows?
Lucas Hedges and The Astor Place
restaurants. Mike Faist are taking cube is expected
Brokeback Mountain to spin again this
Broadway’s Room Clearing Gallery to the West End. summer.
caves before ditches Bushwick
previews. for the Bowery.

“We ♥️ NYC” designers

clearly think Republican focus
desp icable

Microsoft Paint is up CDC warns of a

bri lliant
deadly, quick- groups brutally declare
to the task. it’s “retirement time”
spreading fungus …
for Mike Pence.

… Which feels a little Sofia Coppola’s

Neil’s Coffee Shop, teenage daughter
the avatar of New too on the nose after Keep flopping your way
The Last of Us. into extinction, drops an Oscar-
York dinerness, worthy film on
closes after 80 years. superhero movies.
TikTok.
Metrograph
Inside wastes the showcases the
titillating premise haunted films of
of Willem Dafoe Ursula Meier.
trapped in a
penthouse. Swifties are
livestreaming
Taylor’s three-
hour concert for
fans who couldn’t
score tickets …
100 Gecs gets
geccier on
… While the Cure’s 10,000 Gecs.
Where is the Robert Smith shames
focus on the Ticketmaster into small
Adderall The cherry
blossoms are refunds for some fans.
shortage???
just opening.
Maybe fifth
time’s the
charm, Rupert. Die-hard fans
Gwyneth Paltrow’s know better than
glowingly reviews to get too excited
“rectal ozone when the Knicks
S O N Y E N T E R TA I N M E N T ( L A S T ) ; G O O G L E M A P S ( N E I L’ S )

therapy,” which is are good.

what it sounds like … If you see rapper
Rick Ross’s escape-
artist buffalo on
… And a serial pooper the loose, “give it an
reportedly lets loose apple,” he says.
on the night Hillary
Clinton came to the
Shubert Theatre. Can’t someone
help Bennifer
The dollar slice is decide which Andy Kaufman to join Just give the
going extinct: The mansion to buy? Snoop Dogg and John Wick 4
original 2 Bros has The Donald in WWE stunt team all
raised its prices. Hall of Fame?! the awards.

lowbr ow
96 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 2 7 – a p r i l 9 , 2 0 2 3
 NEW YORK CEREMONY
See the winners,
watch the highlights,
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 “
SENDS UP SPARKS OF SHARP HUMOR!
LET IT DO WHAT ANY TRAIN SHOULD —
MOVE YOU.”
“
BRILLIANT AND LUMINOUS.
A FUNNY, MOVING DRAMATIC JEWEL THAT IS AS WITTY AS IT IS DEEP.
” A MUST-SEE!
“ A BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN PLAY ABOUT THE TRAILS
”

LINCOLN CENTER THEATER

THROUGH APRIL 16 ONLY • TELECHARGE.COM • 212-239-6200 • LCT.ORG
LCT’s production season is generously supported by the LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust.
LCT also thanks the Howard Gilman Foundation for their thoughtful generosity.
This production is made possible in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council,
and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and New York State Legislature.