- Margaret Talbot: Why Anthony Weiner resigned.
Last week, when Anthony Weiner’s congressional colleagues succeeded in getting him to resign, his constituents were not in the same hurry to show him the door. Surely they were embarrassed for him—it was difficult not to be—but a majority of the voters in his . . ....
- 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: 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: 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 . . ....
- Goings on About Town: On the Horizon
THE THEATRE
FAMILIAL LOVE
Dec. 28
Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson star in a revival of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” directed by Gregory Mosher, at the Cort. Schreiber plays a Brooklyn dockworker, and Johansson, in her Broadway début, plays his teen . . ....
- 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: 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: 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.)...
- Goings on About Town: Theatre
class=goatTitle-->MOVIE-STAR WATTAGE
Empirical evidence is mounting for the case that you can’t have a Broadway show these days without a marquee name attached. Scarlett Johansson, in her Broadway début, and Liev Schreiber star in Arthur Miller’s 1955 classic, “A View . . ....
- Andrea K. Scott: Untitled
paragraph class="noindent">The first words diners encounter at Danny Meyer’s new basement-level outpost at the Whitney Museum don’t appear on the menu; they’re painted on the wall, in a conceptual text piece by Lawrence Weiner. An excerpt: “Away from it all . . ....
- 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: 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 . . ....
- 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: 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: 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: 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 . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Sasha Frere-Jones: Singer-songwriter Tracey Thorn turns semi-pro.
The widely reported demise of the music business isn’t necessarily going to be bad for music. The forty-seven-year-old British singer Tracey Thorn, who has removed herself from a race she once ran—and ran well—has added a fantastic album, “Love and . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Why voters will blame Obama.
Franklin Roosevelt was a lucky man and, in 1932, a lucky candidate. Start with the name—or, as today’s political marketers would say, the brand. F.D.R.’s name paired that of the twinkly, kindly philosopher of the American Revolution—the Uncle of His Country— . . ....
- Jennifer Kahn: A digital pioneer questions what technology has wrought.
One day in June, Jaron Lanier was lounging barefoot in the living room of his house in the Berkeley hills. Stretching back on a worn sofa, he began musing about the connection between Representative Anthony Weiner’s tweeting of lewd photos and Facebook’s controversial deployment of facial . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ellis Weiner: “What We’re Doing.”
You may have heard about the product recalls we’ve had to make lately. Well, I’d like to bring you up to date on them and then tell you what we’re doing to make things right for you and your family.
Recently, we decided to . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Trash talk from the 2008 campaign.
8220;Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (Harper; $27.99), has come along just in time. The nation’s political and political-commenting classes, whose nervous systems atrophy without a reliable supply of . . ....
- Ryuji Miyamoto @ Amador
Miyamoto’s black-and-white photographs of buildings damaged by the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, are almost completely devoid of people, which makes it easier to see the devastation as sculptural—elements in some massive scatter piece. The pictures are understated and unemotional—they might have come from a newspaper’s files—but they also have the uncanny...
