New york

Wednesday

Robert S. Erickson

The Some Like It Hot revival is cream-puff theater

The new Some Like It Hot on Broadway has bass player Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), disguised among Big Sue’s Society Syncopators as “Daphne” to hide from the Chicago mob, decide to embrace the drag lifestyle and elope with his elderly suitor Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila) by the show’s end. (The 1959 film closes with Jerry straining to extract himself from Osgood’s clutches.) Many theatergoers will not expect this update, setting up a bit of dramatic irony too delicious to be unintentional. What’s a drag show, after all, without a few surprises? To my knowledge, this irony has gone entirely uncapitalized by headline-writers across the nation. Some Like a Hot Dog! Speakeasy, Don’t Tell! Billy, but Wilder! Jack’s Lemon!

some like it hot

Thursday

Cockburn

George Santos makes politics worth paying attention to

As the Republicans' on-again-off-again, will-they-won’t-they romance with Kevin McCarthy drags on, Cockburn has found refuge in a genuinely entertaining drama. Each day offers another layer to the George Santos tall-tale trifle — and as the mainstream media purports to be shocked that a politician would lie about something (gasp!), Cockburn is gobbling it up. Just yesterday, for instance, Cockburn learned the Republican congressman from New York lied about being a “‘star player’ on the volleyball team for a college [CUNY Baruch] that he did not attend” (per Business Insider). Cockburn also enjoyed hearing how Santos was involved in a Ponzi scheme fewer than two years ago.

george santos

Tuesday

William Newton

Edward Hopper’s America

With a new show at the Whitney, Edward Hopper’s New York; a new documentary film from director Phil Grabsky, Hopper: An American Love Story; and a recent exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the work of one of the most popular yet seemingly inscrutable American artists of the twentieth century is receiving a great deal of renewed attention. In his paintings, Hopper’s hard-edged realism, impressionistic plays of light and passages of intensely saturated color compete for attention. What has always captured the public imagination is the relative isolation of the figures that appear in his work. Search for articles about Edward Hopper online, and many will describe his art as an exploration of loneliness.

hopper
voting
Bill Kauffman

Voting with a vengeance

Weeks have passed since I voted in the November election, and I'm still ticked off. You would be too if it happened to you. Once upon a time — that is, before 2022 — New York was one of the friendlier states toward third parties. Whether Green, Constitution, Socialist Workers, Libertarian or Communist, all were welcome on the ballot so long as they passed an easily surmountable petition threshold. This pro-participation access was called “democracy.

Tuesday

David Marcus

How New Yorkers took over the Democratic Party

Start spreading the news. As party leadership for the upcoming 118th Congress shapes up, we now know that Democrats will have not only New Yorkers but Brooklynites as their top men in both the Senate and the House. Chuck Schumer is poised to maintain his position as Senate majority leader after Republicans’ miserable results in the upper body. And with the departure of Nancy Pelosi as House head honcho, it will be Representative Hakeem Jeffries taking her place and hoping one day to be speaker himself. So what will an all-Empire State Democrat leadership mean for the rest of the nation? To get a sense of this, it's worth looking at the unexpected and outsized role that New York played in the recent midterm elections.

Wednesday

Ben Kew

Pro-lifers were the midterms’ biggest losers

When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in favor of the overturning of Roe v. Wade back in June, thus ending a woman's federal right to an abortion, the pro-life movement was jubilant. The decision was the culmination of decades of campaigning by conservative and anti-abortion activists to send the issue back to the states. Republican-controlled legislatures across the country moved immediately to place restrictions on abortion, and for the first time in decades, the pro-life movement finally felt like it had the upper hand. Fast-forward five months to the morning after the midterm elections and much of that optimism must have dissipated.

abortion
lee zeldin
David Marcus

Another blue day for red New Yorkers

Lee Zeldin’s fairytale run for governor of New York fell short on Tuesday as he lost by roughly five points to incumbent Kathy Hochul. The race began months ago, and at first seemed out of reach for the Long Island congressman. But a strong campaign focused on crime pulled him to within striking distance before petering out. To put the race in perspective, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, whom Hochul replaced after his resignation in 2021, won the governorship by twenty-two points in 2018, and most prognosticators saw a similar romp in the cards for Hochul when the 2022 cycle began. But in the end, though he captured the imagination of the nation, Zeldin could not capture the governor’s mansion in Albany.

Monday

David Marcus

A Republican takes the lead in… New York?

After two weeks of tightening polls in the race for governor of New York, a survey released Friday showed a one point lead for Republican challenger Lee Zeldin in his race against incumbent Kathy Hochul. This is a political bombshell in the making, and one would have expected some kind of major pivot or shakeup from the Democrats. But thus far, at least on the issues that matter most, Hochul’s tank has been empty, despite a weak effort on Saturday to address rising crime in the subway. This past week, Hochul was on Long Island, not far from Zeldin’s home, to talk about a state initiative to fix potholes. Yes, potholes.

Wednesday

Cockburn

You, too, can ban James Corden from your restaurant

The restaurant world was devastated this week after learning a fact our cousins across the Pond have been telling us for some time: that James Corden is a huge douchebag. The Late Late Show host found himself on the blacklist of swanky New York haunt Balthazar, after owner Keith McNally described the Brit as his “most abusive customer.” Now, one enterprising company that provides signage to restaurants is offering its clients a “free digital sign” to Iet Corden know he’s banned from their establishments too. Australia-based Mandoe Media breathlessly rushed the signs out in a press release. A bit too quickly for Cockburn’s liking, as the company appears to have skipped the spell-checking stage. One reads, “DONT BE LIKE JAMES: TREAT STAFF WITH RESPECT!

james corden

Tuesday

David Marcus

Tish James doesn’t care about violent crime anymore

New York attorney general Letitia “Tish” James has a lot on her plate just now. Sadly none of it has anything to do with fighting the surging crime throughout the state and the nation’s largest city. Instead James has her sights narrowly set on a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump and his family. She even found the time last week to fire off a tweet angrily complaining that a Yankees game was not being broadcast live. Clearly keeping New Yorkers safe is not on James’s agenda. In fairness, James’s persecution of the Trump clan is a campaign promise kept. On the night she won the AG race in 2018 she told her adoring crowd that, “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.

tish james

Wednesday

Peter Van Buren

The ‘jail Trump’ mania reaches its sad end

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, three of his adult children, and other senior members of the Trump Organization on Wednesday. Her suit alleges business and insurance fraud as well as conspiracy for the same, and marks the end of a three-year investigation into Trump and his business. The civil suit is basically a civil version of the criminal indictments the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and the Manhattan and New York State attorneys general have failed to generate at the federal and state levels.

blogger

Tuesday

Bill Kauffman

The downfall of Niagara Falls

If ever I pee on the grave of an American it will be that of Robert Moses, the highwayman whose roadbuilding and neighborhood-obliterating projects in New York City and New York State threw half a million people out of their homes, as Robert Caro estimated in his biographical masterpiece The Power Broker. To those who had the temerity to object to their ejection, the monster Moses hissed, “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. I’m just going to keep right on building. You do the best you can to stop it.” So it was with teeth gnashing that I drove down Robert Moses Parkway in the city of Niagara Falls, New York, en route to the annual Armenian festival at St. Hagop Armenian Apostolic Church.

niagara

Monday

Ann Coulter

My New York nightmare

Throughout the Covid shutdowns, I felt like Wendy Kroy in The Last Seduction. If you’ve never seen the movie, the only thing you need to know is that a running theme is that the protagonist, hiding out upstate after stealing a lot of money, has got to get back to New York. Even the alias she uses is “New York” spelled backwards (sort of). For nearly two years, every morning I’d wake up thinking, I’ve got to get back to New York. Well, I’m back, and this isn’t what I meant at all. I wanted to be in the city that never sleeps, where I could walk around carefree, even at night, take the subway, and live within a few blocks of every possible convenience. Instead, this happened.

New York
only murders in the building
Peter Tonguette

The delight of Only Murders in the Building

We live in an age in which everything sounds so grave. Our democracy is in peril! Covid numbers are going up! It’s a cause for rejoicing, then, that one of the best new series treats that most serious of subjects — namely, homicide — with such a deft and delightful touch. Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, which was created by co-star Steve Martin and John Hoffman, expands the honorable tradition of the Thin Man series and Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, movies that used the murder-mystery format as a pretext for their sophisticated urbanites to poke around in other people’s residences and speculate wittily on who done it. The series wraps up its second season on Tuesday.

Sunday

Robert S. Erickson

Robert Icke’s smart pairing

On a Saturday in August, stuck in Manhattan  and growing less enamored of the thought, I holed up at the Park Avenue Armory to catch English director Robert Icke’s Hamlet (2015) and Oresteia (2017), playing in repertory. Icke is a darling young thing on the British theater scene, “acclaimed,” as the program informs us, “for his intelligent and accessible productions” of classic texts. Hamlet runs for three hours and forty minutes, Oresteia for three fifteen, which gives you some idea of what is meant (or not) by “accessible.” These are big, bold productions. But for what it’s worth, the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall proved accessible to a packed crowd.

hamlet

Friday

Alexander Larman

The attack on Salman Rushdie is an ominous warning

The news coming from New York State that the author Salman Rushdie has been stabbed onstage is both frightening and grim. It is frightening because, without full details of how seriously injured Rushdie has been, it is tempting to fear the worst. Media reports initially suggested that Rushdie was well enough to walk off stage, but the news that he has been transported by air ambulance to a hospital after being stabbed in the neck suggests his injuries are severe. It is grim because any violence being done to a public figure is abhorrent, but in the case of Rushdie, it is almost inevitable that this particular incident has been occasioned by one of the most notorious cause celébrès that has ever been seen in the publishing world, namely the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.

Wednesday

David Marcus

Requiem for the New York Karen

I saw the look on the Uber driver’s face as he dutifully started putting on his mask. “You don’t have to do that for me, buddy,” I let him know. “Thank God,” he smiled, and we were off. Sitting on the parking lot we New Yorkers ironically call the Brooklyn Queens Expressway I thought back to a hungover morning in the winter of 2020, when an email popped up amid my coffee and cigarette. It was from Lyft: there was a picture of me in it, maskless, and a stern warning not to do it again. What a difference two years makes. Today in Gotham, for all intents and purposes, Covid is over. To any sane person, this sounds like good news, but not to the New York Times: the Gray Lady is worried.

new york city karen

Thursday

Robert S. Erickson

Throwing curveballs

"This mob is not the people,” declared Henry J. Raymond in his paper, the New York Times, about the Draft Riots in July 1863. Blue-collar workers in New York, mostly Irish, had begun by protesting a new conscription law, but anti-war sentiment quickly became a pretext for widespread destruction, looting and racial violence. Blacks were hunted, their homes and businesses trashed, and scores of them lynched. Raymond wanted no quarter for the rioters: “Give them grape[shot] and plenty of it.” The new musical Paradise Square imagines a “little bit of Eden” in the Five Points slum of downtown Manhattan, July 1863, where, we are told, blacks and Irish did not just coexist peacefully for a time but flourished.

paradise
Ukrainian
Kelly Jane Torrance

Walking around the Ukrainian Village

When I heard that long lines had begun forming to get into Veselka after Russia invaded Ukraine, I almost rolled my eyes. I’ve been patronizing the restaurant, in the heart of New York City’s Ukrainian Village, for years, and there’s often a queue — at the height of brunch, the line can stretch for a block. But there’s no denying it’s seen an uptick in traffic as New Yorkers aware of the brutal images from Bucha and Mariupol want to feel they’re doing something to help. “Eat borscht, stand with Ukraine” reads a sign; the restaurant is donating all proceeds from sales of its hearty beet soup to Razom for Ukraine, a nonprofit. The Ukrainian Village, or Little Ukraine, is an enclave of Manhattan’s East Village.

Sunday

Peter Van Buren

Trump isn’t guilty in Georgia either

One of my kids is studying law, and I've read a bit over her shoulder as she preps for exams. Two critical things stand out. First, unlike in literature, words in the law have very specific meanings (lie, fraud, possess, assault). And second, intent matters quite a bit. That latter part is very important because people say things all the time they do not mean, such as "If Joe in Sales misses that deadline, I'm gonna kill him." No one's life is actually in danger, we all understand. Misunderstanding words when you pull them out of a conversation and try to bring them to court, and determining intent based on what you "believe," are at the root of the ever-growing string of failed legal actions against Donald Trump (there are some 19 still pending).