- Lizzie Widdicombe: Defending the accused after a giant Mob bust.
It’s a common refrain, among the city’s armchair criminologists, that the Mob is dead in New York. So last Thursday’s giant federal Mob bust—a hundred and twenty-seven people, encompassing seven crime families—elicited a special fascination. It seemed almost nostalgic . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Scott Stringer, Scarlett Johansson, and New York’s mayoral race.
One of the many collateral effects of Anthony Weiner’s political demise—besides immortalizing the direct-messaging function on Twitter—was to blow open the race to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City. Officially, campaigning won’t start for at least another year . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Silvia Killingsworth: Tortilleria Nixtamal, in Queens.
8220;You can’t get good Mexican food in New York” is a common refrain in this city, and, for the most part, it’s true—you can get Mexican food that isn’t very good, or good food that isn’t very Mexican . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: You’ve Got Mail
Moral-reasoning pop quiz: There’s a film coming out—a thinly disguised portrayal of a media mogul—and word is that if it’s released it will hurt the mogul’s reputation. Powerful people intervene: they call a meeting and offer the movie studio . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: How top chefs fly with their knives.
Here’s a travel story that will send you back: Some years ago, Eric Ripert, the executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, was returning to New York from Washington, D.C., where he’d cooked for a charity event. He put his carry-on bag through the . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Mitt Romney’s psychic reading.
Mitt Romney’s victories in Wisconsin, Maryland, and D.C. last week lent the primaries a new statistical fervor. Pundits who’d been talking about mood and narrative switched to hard numbers—delegates, probabilities. Useful, but it was enough to make the mind crave a more metaphysical reading . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Roberta’s, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">This gourmet pizza place, located amid a desolate-looking stretch of warehouses in Bushwick, is often described as a D.I.Y. enterprise. The label is slightly ambiguous—aren’t a lot of other restaurant entrepreneurs doing it themselves, too? Carlo Mirarchi, the chef at Roberta’ . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: France’s First Lady takes a tour of N.Y.U.
The other day, students in New York University’s visual-arts program received an e-mail advising them to be in their studios the following Monday afternoon. “They said that somebody famous was coming,” Robert Leonardi, a senior, recalled, “and that anything could happen.” A . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Van Cleef & Arpels diamonds on display.
Paris, France, sometime in the nineteen-fifties. A woman walks into Van Cleef & Arpels and falls in love with a diamond necklace. It’s expensive—say, four hundred thousand francs. “Listen,” she tells the jeweller, “tomorrow I’m going to come with my . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Gwyneth Paltrow, from movie star to domestic goddess.
It’s tough for some people to accept Gwyneth Paltrow’s transformation from movie star to domestic goddess. Something about the combination of her willowy looks, her glam life style (she is married to Chris Martin, the Coldplay front man), and the unlikely food tips in her e . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Matador tailor Justo Algaba and the Metropolitan Opera’s “Carmen.”
Justo Algaba, one of the world’s most respected matador tailors, was in town the other day from Madrid, where he has a two-story shop devoted to the production of matador outfits, called trajes de luce (“suits of light”), because of their shimmery, multicolored adornments. Algaba . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Young Professionals United for Change watch the State of the Union.
Four years ago, the Young Professionals United for Change—three thousand black banker and lawyer types under the age of forty—held a formal gala in Washington to celebrate Barack Obama’s Inauguration. By contrast, the group’s State of the Union “watch party,” . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Bohemian, in NoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">New York does exclusivity well, but Tokyo does it better. There is a Japanese phrase, “Ichigensama okotowari,” that’s used by owners of certain discriminating restaurants and shops, and means, roughly, “We respectfully decline first-time visitors.” In other words: walk-ins . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Bohemian, in NoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">New York does exclusivity well, but Tokyo does it better. There is a Japanese phrase, “Ichigensama okotowari,” that’s used by owners of certain discriminating restaurants and shops, and means, roughly, “We respectfully decline first-time visitors.” In other words: walk-ins . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: The taxi-driver’s advocate.
On Houston Street at Avenue A the other day, a woman stuck out her hand to hail a taxi. It was cold and drizzly—hyper-competitive cab-hailing conditions—but she was likely to have better luck than most people. The woman was Bhairavi Desai, the executive director . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Colin Firth on being English.
Alert your mother: Colin Firth was in town last week. The British actor best known for playing variations on the repressed-but-sexy English gentleman, such as the aloof Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice,” and the uptight, but still eligible, Mark Darcy, foil . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: America’s homemade fallout shelters through the years.
If you stopped by the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center last week, you may have noticed, tucked among the minimalist mirrors and squiggly light fixtures, a booth containing shelves packed with more practical goods—toilet paper, anchovies, bottled water, powdered Jell-O. This was a fallout . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Ben Walker plays Andrew Jackson in eyeliner.
The high-camp American-history rock musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” has been extended through June at the Public Theatre—good news for the packs of teen-age girls who can be seen hovering outside the lobby. They’re not all students of nineteenth-century populism . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: A pedicab ride with the actor Jesse Eisenberg.
Who’s the biggest nerd in the movies? Jesse Eisenberg, who played the older brother in “The Squid and the Whale” and starred in “Adventureland,” might seem like an outside contender, but he has three films opening this month—“Solitary Man” (with . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Occupy Wall Street, a culture of its own.
Visiting the site of Occupy Wall Street last week—a month after the protest began, and shortly before Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s threatened and aborted cleanup—was a bit like visiting a civilization at its peak: Paris in the twenties, Rome in the second century, or, at . . ....
- Burkhard Bilger: New York City’s canine police force.
The weapons were housed in Long Island City, in a low-slung, prefabricated building on Northern Boulevard. I could hear them growling and yammering in the dark. I’d arrived well before dawn on a wet, chilly October morning, and still wasn’t sure how to proceed. A . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: Cole Porter rides the waves.
In the difficult and fiscally depressed years that linked the momentous Stonewall riots, of 1969, to the Daily News’s notorious 1975 headline (misquoting the President at the time), “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” Manhattan’s culture and fashion industries underwent a decisive change. Turning away . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: New York rallies for Haiti.
One of the effects that the earthquake in Haiti has produced in New York is the unfamiliar feeling of total geographic irrelevance: for the first few days, when damaged roads and ruined cell-phone towers made the island impenetrable, New York City seemed like a helpless, remote archipelago. And yet . . ....
- Connie Bruck: How Eli Broad bought downtown L.A.
Eli Broad, a multibillionaire who made his money in the decidedly unglamorous businesses of tract housing and insurance, is the Lorenzo de’ Medici of Los Angeles—the city’s singular patron, especially of the arts. On the evening of November 13th, nine hundred of the city’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Nick Laird: “Epithalamium.”
You’re beeswax and I’m bird shit.
I’m mostly harmless. You’re irrational.
If I’m iniquity then you’re theft.
One of us is supercalifragilistic.
If I’m the most insane disgusting filth
you’re hardly curiosa.
You’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Nick Laird: “Epithalamium.”
You’re beeswax and I’m bird shit.
I’m mostly harmless. You’re irrational.
If I’m iniquity then you’re theft.
One of us is supercalifragilistic.
If I’m the most insane disgusting filth
you’re hardly curiosa.
You’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Patti Smith, Jonathan Lethem, and Steven Soderbergh finally get degrees.
Last Monday, Pratt Institute held its graduation ceremony at Radio City Music Hall. At 10 A.M., giddy graduates and their families milled around the auditorium, while, backstage, a breakfast buffet had been laid out for professors, administrators, and a handful of people with distinguished careers in the arts who were . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: David Burke Kitchen in SoHo.
David Burke Kitchen, in the James Hotel, in SoHo, is the place to see David Burke—the man who brought cheesecake lollipop trees to Bloomingdale’s and pupu platters to the Hawaiian Tropic Zone, in Times Square—get on board with the farm-to-table craze. If . . ....
