New york

Thursday

Adam Begley

New Yorkers talk the talk

New York in a nutshell? No way. New York in a New York minute? Forget about it. The city contains multitudes: it contradicts itself, wantonly. Any attempt to summarise will fail. Not even Craig Taylor’s delightful cacophony of voices, dozens and dozens of them spilling their New York stories, can compass its vastness and variety. But what a tasty slice Taylor serves up! Until you can fly into JFK and see, hear and smell for yourself, savour the grit, sweat in the choking humidity and shiver in the canyoned midtown winds — until then, his New Yorkers is just the ticket. This is Taylor’s second anthology of urban voices. It follows more or less exactly in the footsteps of Londoners (2011) which was widely and warmly praised.

Tuesday

Damian Reilly

Elon Musk is too funny for Saturday Night Live

From our US edition

My secret hope is that Elon Musk uses his Saturday Night Live platform this weekend to launch a comedic assault on political correctness so brutal it is seared forever onto the collective retina of the biggest audience the show has had in decades. Provided he used SNL to tear with equal vigor into each faction of the intersectional oppression spectrum — ethnic minorities, LGBTQIAA+ folk, fat activists, the blue-haired and non-binary, flat-earthers and feminists — and managed while doing so to be undeniably funny, I believe Musk could get away with it. He could also create a cultural moment the value of which as a non-fungible token would be more than perhaps even he could afford.

elon musk

Friday

Stephen L. Miller

Andrew Cuomo will get away with it all

From our US edition

Andrew Cuomo could murder thousands of senior citizens in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter. Earlier this week the New York governor got up in front of local TV cameras for the first time in several months since his non-apology apology to respond to more allegations of sexual harassment. (The national media has apparently checked out.) Instead of feigning regret or acting contrite, Cuomo did a complete 180, saying his accusers were ‘jealous’ and digging in by defiantly declaring ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’ In one sense, it’s all been going wrong for Andrew. There was another damaging report from the New York Times that Cuomo’s top aides concealed more nursing home deaths than previously thought.

cuomo

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

A tale of two tapas

From our US edition

In 146 BC, Scipio Aemilianus laid siege to and destroyed the city of Carthage, thus bringing the third Punic War to an end. Scipio made a gift of what remained of the Carthaginian library to the kings of Numidia, Rome’s old ally against Carthage. At the direction of the Senate, however, he held back one book, the agricultural treatise of Mago, which he sent back to Rome. It was duly translated into Latin, but all that remains are fragments, which is too bad, for Mago apparently had a lot to say about many exigent matters, including the cultivation of grapes and making of wine. It appears that it was the Phoenician precursors of the Carthaginians who, around 1500 bc, first planted grapes in the Iberian peninsula.

Tapas bar

Thursday

Taki

We need Voltaire more than ever

New York The high life has gone with the wind because of you know what. The last time I went to a glittering ball, Marie Antoinette still had a head on her shoulders, or so it seems, and sweats and leggings are now ubiquitous at intimate dinner parties. Here in the Bagel fashion has followed the street for a long time, making high fashion seem as irrelevant and obscene as Anna Wintour being paid millions to kiss the ass of celebrities. No sweats, no leggings was my only rule for an intimate dinner for Prince Pavlos, expertly cooked by Michael Mailer and attended by Arki Busson and three youngsters of the female persuasion.

Thursday

Taki

My return to New York is a mixed blessing

New York Ha, ha! What London turned down, the Bagel accepted with alacrity, namely the poor little Greek boy. And it took ten minutes max after disembarking to go through customs and collect my luggage. Kennedy had fewer people than a gay wedding in Saudi, and then some. Mind you, the Upper East Side, where I live, is also as quiet as a grave, the only sound being the occasional ambulance with its siren on racing for a tea break. Central Park, now devoid of tourists, has never looked better, weeping willows with recently sprouted leaves, birds singing the length of an empty Park Avenue, long green lawns stretching out northwards, cherry blossom galore — it makes one feel swell to be alive.

Friday

Ross Clark

Show us the money

From our US edition

No one likes to waste a good crisis, and the digital-payments industry is certainly trying its hardest to spin the narrative that COVID-19 is about to deliver the coup de grâce to cash. Various lobbying efforts culminated in a recent CNBC report claiming we have all switched to payment apps to avoid catching the disease from dollar bills. A ‘cashless customer’, Heima Sritharan, supposedly speaks for the entire millennial generation: ‘Not that I was using cash that much before, but I find that during Covid especially, I just don’t want to use cash as much because of the germs aspect.’ The report quotes a figure from the Pew Research Center suggesting that 34 percent of consumers under the age of 50 went the previous week without making a single purchase with cash.

money cash cashless

Tuesday

Ed Zotti

The city that never dies

From our US edition

Peggy Noonan, in a recent Wall Street Journal column, offers a bleak take on the pandemic’s impact on American society, or at any rate the subset that lives in New York. New York vies with London as one of the most prodigious aggregations of talent on the planet, and has survived a previous pandemic, multiple financial crises and a terrorist assault. Noonan’s argument — and she’s far from the only one to make it — is that NYC is headed over a cliff because corporate managers have awakened to the advantages of the Zoom call. I can understand how such dark notions arise. Given the breadth and scale of the present catastrophe, it’s not unreasonable to think the world has changed irreversibly for the worse. But I don’t think it has, at least not due to coronavirus.

new york

Thursday

Roger Kimball

Georgians on my mind

From our US edition

Long before Achilles chased Hector around Troy and Homer wrote about the οἶνοψ πόντος, the ‘wine-dark sea’, people living in what is today the republic of Georgia were making wine. Archaeologists have found evidence of wine making there dating from 8000 BC: an impressive statement to the inventiveness to which necessity gives birth. Stretching from the Black Sea to the Caucasus Mountains, Georgia is home to a wide variety of climates, types of soil and geographical physiognomies. Today it is home to some 500 varietals, few of which are familiar to westerners (even though many if not most western grapes probably have precursors in Georgia and the Black Sea ‘cradle of wine’).

georgian wine

Sunday

Matt Purple

Andrew Cuomo: the Princess Di of the Plague

From our US edition

Over the weekend, the two-hundred-and-forty-second woman to accuse Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment came forward. That number is no less true for being inaccurate. It seems you can’t open a newspaper these days without reading about some horrible Cuomo come-on at an Albany Christmas party or a Manhattan cocktail hour. How’s it going for Democrats seeking a left-wing foil to Donald Trump? They seem to have gotten all of the vices with none of the humor. Of course, Cuomo deserves his due process like everyone else. But the accusations do seem credible and certainly fit with his hard-charging bull-in-a-bodega persona. There’s also the matter of the governor’s other scandal, which has been swept under the rug despite it involving the mass death of old people.

cuomo di

Wednesday

Chadwick Moore

Time for Tudorbethan

From our US edition

You’ll find them all over the boroughs of New York City. Multiple-dwelling buildings, usually large apartment blocks, slapped with a faux-Tudor façade defined by fake gables hiding a flat roof. They aren’t particularly attractive buildings. Even 100 years after most were built, they come off as self-conscious, a bit tacky, imparting to the viewer a dreaded feeling of secret working-class shame — a befuddling reproduction of a reproduction. They say New Yorkers never look up. But even during short journeys through Queens or parts of Brooklyn, New Yorkers are bound to have noticed examples, even if they don’t give it much thought.

tudorbethan
grüner
Mary Kate Skehan

Why Grüner is my go-to

From our US edition

The first person ever to tell me something true about wine was my first real boss, a generous and wise woman who toted me along to the Frankfurt Book Fair with her for several years in my early twenties. At the time I drank mostly sweet red blends that came in denominations of ‘box’ or ‘jug’. When she sensed (or perhaps shared) my fear of humiliating us both when I was asked for my wine order at a long, formal luncheon in a rather famous hotel, she leaned across the many forks of her place setting and whispered to me, ‘Get the Grüner.’ She elaborated that the American white wines I’d had were probably sweet or buttery, but German whites, like dry Rieslings and Grüner Veltliner, were mineral and fresh and lovely. They paired well with all foods.

Tuesday

Bill Kauffman

Steve Hawley and the case for two New Yorks

From our US edition

Whenever New York governor Andrew Cuomo — that churning mass of grating sanctimony, unwarranted arrogance and personal nastiness — hurls petty edicts (No gatherings greater than 10 at Thanksgiving! Chicken wings don’t count as food in restaurants!) at his subjects, Steve Hawley, erstwhile pig farmer and our assemblyman, is usually there to throw them back. I spoke recently with Hawley while sitting on a bench outside his insurance office in the Genesee Country Mall. An imbiber at the fountain of youth, he looks a good 15 years younger than his age of 73, and the imp within coexists easily with his role as deputy minority leader of the New York State Assembly’s Republicans.

hawley

Monday

Chadwick Moore

2 masks, 2 furious

From our US edition

There are two women leaning against a railing overlooking the medieval armor exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on a Sunday afternoon. Both have shoulder-length, proudly gray hair, are resplendent in wooden jewelry and draped in clashing layers of flowing tapestry ranging from clay to marigold to topaz, some with vaguely ethnic-inspired patterning. The two women are in conversation, six feet apart down to the inch and laughing. They’re having a good time. The tableau is a sort of variation on a theme, an aesthetic we might call Santa Fe Art Mom and they are exactly the sort of person you’d expect, as they are, to be wearing two face masks, each.

double masks

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Cuomo’s problem isn’t #MeToo. It’s killing old people

From our US edition

New York governor Andrew Cuomo is finally getting his comeuppance. Oddly, however, it’s not for killing thousands of nursing home residents. Instead, the press has decided that the real story is Cuomo being slightly creepy toward to young women. Cuomo's comments to two former aides are icky, no doubt. However, the media has also piled on with other spurious accusations that they insist are proof of a pattern of abusive behavior. In one, a young woman says Cuomo touched the small of her back at a wedding and then grabbed her face and asked if he could kiss her. She is visibly uncomfortable in a photo of the incident, but what attractive woman hasn't had a weird old dude make a poorly strategized advance at an event with alcohol?

andrew cuomo

Thursday

Becca Rothfeld

Savage aperçus: Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler, reviewed

Lauren Oyler is viral and vicious. A critic with a reputation for pulling no punches, she is known for delivering refreshingly sane judgments of overhyped, commercially successful books. She is not alone in her ruthlessness — there are a number of critics who are at least equally ferocious about deflating promotional balloons, among them Merve Emre and Christian Lorentzen — but she is the hater who makes the greatest waves on the internet. She specialises in skewering vapid writing that takes its cues from social media, and her 2020 take-down of Jia Tolentino’s popular essay collection was shared so many times that the London Review of Books website crashed in the aftermath.

Monday

John Fund

Is this the end for New York’s Democratic darling?

In a matter of two weeks, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s reputation has slid from that of smug Emmy Award winner to mastermind of a cover-up of Covid-19 deaths in New York nursing homes. The state’s political world was rocked earlier this month when Michelle DeRosa, the governor’s top aide, was recorded telling state legislators that the Cuomo administration had stonewalled their demand for the real number of nursing-home deaths. DeRosa admitted that 'basically, we froze' out of fear of a US Justice Department investigation into how thousands of nursing home patients had died. A ProPublica investigation had found that Cuomo’s 25 March mandate that state nursing homes admit coronavirus patients was akin to 'introducing fire to dry grass’.

Friday

John Fund

Now we know the extent of Cuomo’s nursing-home disgrace

From our US edition

For the duration of the COVID pandemic, New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been the living embodiment of hubris. As early as last July, he released a commemorative poster touting his handling of the crisis. It resembled a liberal version of Soviet-style propaganda posters from the Cold War era. He eagerly accepted an International Emmy award for his 'masterful' daily briefings on the pandemic. 'He effectively created television shows, with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure,' Emmy Award CEO Bruce Paisner explained. And in October, Cuomo released his book American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

andrew cuomo nursing home

Thursday

Toby Young

Quarantine heralds the death of Mid-Atlantic Man

As an ambitious journalist making my way in Fleet Street, I dreamed of becoming a Mid-Atlantic Man. Tom Wolfe came up with the term in the mid-1960s to describe someone who divided his life between London and New York. Not for social reasons, but because his career required him to spend time in both cities. Wolfe said the typical Mid-Atlantic Man worked in a field like advertising, public relations, television, commercial art, motion pictures or consulting. But journalists could join this exalted tribe too. David Frost, who was a kind of journalist, was the ultimate Mid-Atlantic Man. He practically had a permanent berth on Concorde. I failed, obviously, but for a couple of years I came tantalisingly close.

Robert Jackman

Is the hottest new podcast, The Apology Line, worth sticking with?

With the arts world still largely in hibernation, the launch of a big podcast is as close as we get to a big cultural event these days. Such is the case with The Apology Line, the latest serial podcast from Amazon-owned Wondery, which shot to the top of the ‘most downloaded’ charts last week and has sat there comfortably since. The Apology Line tells the story of a 1980s experimental art project in which a Manhattan-based provocateur, Allan Bridge, issued an open invitation to the city’s criminals (‘amateurs, professionals, white collar, blue collar’) to record their anonymised confessions to an unmanned phone line.