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    Jimmy Kimmel Misses the Old Facebook

    Kimmel reminisced about the days when the social media app was “just a safe place to lose your house in a pyramid scheme.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Angry Face EmojiOn Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel noted that Facebook hasn’t been getting a lot of likes lately, citing damning reports from inside the social media company.“I miss when Facebook was just a safe place to lose your house in a pyramid scheme,” Jimmy Kimmel joked on Tuesday.“This week is so bad for Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg was, like, ‘Facebook? No, that’s not me. That was started by the Winklevii.’” — TREVOR NOAH“I mentioned last night a trove of confidential internal documents were leaked to the press. The gist of them is that Facebook knew its technology was amplifying hate speech and misinformation. There was an internal memo written in 2019 that says, ‘We also have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as vitality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why these types of speech flourish on the platform.’ Their core product mechanics. That means hate and lies are baked directly into Facebook, like the cheese in a stuffed crust pizza from Pizza Hut.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And another interesting detail is that Facebook engineers — they will prioritize the posts that get a lot of emoji reactions, including the anger emoji by 5-1 over just the regular like. The hate and the lies on Facebook — it’s like the nicotine in a cigarette: It’s not what you come for, but it’s why you stick around.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yeah, that’s right, Facebook knew it was rewarding [expletive] posts as long as they generated an emotional response. And I’ll be honest, when I first heard about this, I was shocked because I couldn’t believe that Mark Zuckerberg knows what emotions are.” — TREVOR NOAH“Although it does make sense because in regular life, we all put more value on things that produce an emotional response in us. You know, it’s why Donald Trump became president and Jeb Bush works at a Quiznos now.” — TREVOR NOAH“Of course, everyone’s been talking about Facebook lately, and Mark Zuckerberg just announced that he’s ‘retooling’ the social media platform toward young adults and away from older users. Honestly, just make it a little harder to sign in, and you will never see an old person on Facebook.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Six Flags Edition)“I heard about a guy who bought a Six Flags annual pass. How about this deal: You get the Six Flags annual pass, right? That allows you to get unlimited food for $150. He’s eaten nearly all of his meals at Six Flags ever since. Of course, all the money he saved is now going to doctors to get his cholesterol down from 1,000.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, that dude fed himself for 50 cents a day. Genius! We should get him to fix all the world’s economies before he dies from gout.” — TREVOR NOAH“Right now the Democrats are struggling to figure out how to pay for health care. This guy — this guy would solve it. He’d probably just come in and be like, ‘All you have to do is go to the first-aid tent at Six Flags and tell them the roller coaster gave you lupus. Boom! Free health care.’” — TREVOR NOAH“And by the way, how are amusement parks both the cheapest and most expensive places on earth? Like, eat for a year: $150. A mouse pad with a picture of you on a roller coaster: $3,000. No in between!” — TREVOR NOAH“But I will say, man, props to this guy for gaming the system. This is the kind of [expletive] you can only get away with at Six Flags, you know, because they’re a chilled amusement park. If you tried this at Disney, oh man, Mickey wouldn’t mess around. He’d have you hanging by your thumbs in the castle dungeon.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Tuesday’s “Late Show,” Katie Couric shared the story of meeting her idol, Jane Pauley, for the first time.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightDan Levy will promote the book “Best Wishes, Warmest Regards: The Story of Schitt’s Creek” — which he co-wrote with his father, Eugene — on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Understand the Facebook PapersCard 1 of 6A tech giant in trouble. More

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    in Theater

    Review: ‘The Mother’ Rises Up Again in the Name of Revolution

    The Wooster Group’s production will prompt discussions about the company’s vision for Brecht’s “learning play.”There’s a bit of an echo when the actors in the Wooster Group’s production of “The Mother” speak. At first I assumed that their voices were being digitally filtered. This would have been par for the course for the company, whose longstanding affinity for technological wizardry is well known. And it would have been an ingenious idea for a Bertolt Brecht play, reinforcing the alienation effect the playwright sought by subtly reminding us we were watching a show.Soon, though, I realized it was wizardry of another kind: For much of the time the actors were miming their own recorded lines. Unlike Deirdre O’Connell’s performance in “Dana H.” on Broadway, where lip-syncing never gets in the way of a devastating emotional realism, the Woosters go for an arch theatricality in the service of the story’s agitprop roots. Since they mostly sing the show’s brief numbers live, I found myself looking out for the transitions between what was recorded and what was not.In Brecht’s “The Mother” — not to be confused with his own “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which it predates by seven years — an apolitical woman named Pelagea Vlasov (Kate Valk, magnetic as ever) is pulled into communist activism after her son (Gareth Hobbs) is jailed for fighting on behalf of factory workers.The show, first produced in Germany in 1932, was inspired by a 1906 Russian novel by Maxim Gorky and Brecht conceived it as a “learning play.” A narrator (Jim Fletcher) helpfully fills us in on the historical and literary background in a prologue, and pops up again at regular intervals to essentially provide footnotes. It’s as if we are watching a play and reading its CliffsNotes at the same time, extending the learning process to the directing style.The Wooster Group, now in its 46th year, has acquired a reputation for cerebral, often opaque productions, and it’s true that the company’s shows can be puzzling. This one, directed, like most of them, by Elizabeth LeCompte, is no exception. (It premiered in June at the Vienna Festival.)But the process often has a degree of transparency because the company is not shy about listing its sources and regularly uploads to its website a variety of informative videos, including excerpts from rehearsals, that help contextualize what audience members end up seeing. In one of the videos for “The Mother,” for example, Valk says that the company was attracted to the story of a woman who becomes radicalized in her 60s. It is hard not to think of LeCompte, 77, and Valk, 65, who continue to explore theater with an energy and inquisitiveness people a third of their age might envy.It might be fair to say (warn?) that some of the Wooster Group shows, like its head-scratching “Hamlet,” in which they repurposed Richard Burton’s performance from 1964, can be less involving to experience than to discuss with your friends in a doomed attempt to figure out what the company was trying to do.And so it goes with “The Mother.” The production both hews to the original text and honors the theatrical traditions that birthed it, and then it tweaks them. Hanns Eisler’s original score is sometimes juxtaposed with a new one by Amir ElSaffar, for example, and in some scenes ElSaffar’s jazzy music combines with the actors’ staccato delivery to create something akin to a 1930s Warner Bros. noir about the workers’ struggle. Why the Woosters went for that effect — well, we could meet over a drink and talk about it for a few hours.The MotherThrough Nov. 6 at the Performing Garage, Manhattan; thewoostergroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    Martha Henry, a Leading Stage Actress in Canada, Dies at 83

    For decades her performances at the Stratford Festival drew acclaim. She gave her last performance just days before her death.For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.She died of the disease on Thursday at her home in Stratford, the festival announced. She was 83.The effort Ms. Henry put into her final role — A is a dying woman, mean and prone to bursts of both laughing and crying — was, by all accounts, something to see. The performance “shows the veteran actor at her monstrous best,” J. Kelly Nestruck, the chief theater critic for The Globe and Mail of Toronto, wrote in August.“It’s unforgettable — which I mean both as praise and as a warning,” he added. “You might not want the woman she plays stuck in your head.”Ms. Henry had been known for memorable performances at Stratford for decades. She first appeared there in 1962 in a production of “The Tempest,” and her association with the festival continued, with a few gaps, to the present. She acted in more than 70 productions and directed 14 others.“Her sense of responsibility to the theater was so profound that it enabled her to endure pain and face down her terminal disease to complete an astoundingly truthful performance as a dying woman in ‘Three Tall Women,’” Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s artistic director, said in a statement. “Her life became art.”Ms. Henry with Brian Bedford in “Much Ado About Nothing,” a Stratford Festival production staged at New York City Center in 1998. She acted in more than 70 Stratford productions and directed 14 others.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMartha Kathleen Buhs was born on Feb. 17, 1938, in Detroit. Her parents, Lloyd and Kathleen (Hatch) Buhs, divorced when she was 5. Her mother was a pianist who played cocktail lounges and was often working at night, so Martha was raised by her grandparents until she was 14. She was interested in acting at a young age.“I joined a Brownie troop because they were doing a play,” she told The Pittsburgh Press in 1968.As a teenager she rejoined her mother, who had become part of a traveling entertainment troupe. She would often go on the road with her, enjoying the company of the other performers.“On the same bill there’d be a comic — my mother would fill in as the straight woman — a ventriloquist, a snake charmer, a tap dancer,” Ms. Henry told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta in 1996, when she was playing the same role in “Three Tall Women” in an Edmonton production. “I grew up with show people. They were so good to me.”She enrolled at what is now the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama in Pittsburgh, choosing it over several other colleges because, as she told The Press, “it was the only one that held auditions, to see what you could really do.”The drama department did four Shakespeare plays while she was there, she said, but this future star of numerous Shakespeare productions didn’t get into any of them. After graduating in 1959, she did summer stock in Ontario and worked with the Crest Theater in Toronto. Then she enrolled in the National Theater School in Montreal when it was established in 1960, and went on to become its first acting graduate: Halfway through the three-year course, as she told The Press, the directors told her that she was ready for a professional career.Six weeks later she was a member of the Stratford troupe; her debut there was as Miranda in “The Tempest.” One critic called her “the find of the season.”She had married a fellow student at the theater school, Donnelly Rhodes Henry. The marriage didn’t stick, but the last name did (though not for him — he performed professionally as Donnelly Rhodes). A later marriage, to the actor Douglas Rain in 1968, ended in divorce in 1988. In 1989 she married the actor Rod Beattie, who survives her, along with a daughter from her second marriage, Emma Rain.At Stratford, Ms. Henry’s Isabella in “Measure for Measure” in 1975, her Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1998 and her Mary in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1994 were among her most acclaimed performances. She was also artistic director of the Grand Theater in London, Ontario, from 1988 to 1994.Ms. Henry made the occasional film or television appearance and performed on many stages beyond Stratford, including some in New York. But she said she was never tempted, as a young actress, to try to make it in Manhattan.“I knew exactly what would happen there,” she told The Journal. “I wasn’t exactly shy, but I wasn’t pushy. I was no great beauty. I could see myself getting an apartment and just staying in it.”Canada offered what she wanted, she said.“I just wanted to work, and I felt that any country that could produce a Stratford had to be the most wonderful place. And I was right.” More

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    A Playwright Has a Message: Anti-Asian Hate Isn’t New

    Lionelle Hamanaka wrote “Covid Crime” to bring the conversation surrounding such attacks to her neighbors in Manhattan.On Sunday afternoon, a pigeon flew through a performance of “Covid Crime,” a one-act play taking place at a Manhattan intersection, where yellow taxis whizzed by against the backdrop of a halal food cart.The show, written by Lionelle Hamanaka and directed by Howard Pflanzer, was unfolding in Richard Tucker Park, a tiny cobblestone triangle on the Upper West Side. It was more of a reading than a staging — its seven actors sat in metal folding chairs, as did the audience of about 50 people.“I saw this TV coverage of a woman being assaulted on a bus with an umbrella. She was an older woman, an older Asian American,” Hamanaka said last week, before the play. “I thought it would be interesting to see how the community’s affected by it. Because we see the outside story, but we don’t necessarily see every case.”At the start of the pandemic, the coalition Stop AAPI Hate — AAPI stands for Asian American Pacific Islander — formed and began its own tally of such attacks. From March 19, 2020 to June 30, 2021, the group received 9,081 reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans across the United States. That number was not just a mere statistic to Hamanaka, who is Japanese American.“My parents were in the concentration camps, and of course that caused a great deal of hardship for our family,” she said, referring to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “My grandparents both had businesses, and they had to sell them in one week. They had to pack up all their things and leave. And that leaves a scar in your mind.”The playwright Lionelle Hamanaka spoke to the crowd ahead of her show, “Covid Crime.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesSo Hamanaka, a playwright and onetime jazz singer who describes herself as a senior, funneled her frustration into art. She’s written a series of plays about Covid-19, including “Covid 10,366,” about the April 2020 spike in Covid-19 deaths, and “The Spitter,” about a supermarket dispute over mask wearing. But this is the first time she has addressed the recent rise in anti-Asian American hate crimes in her work.Hamanaka noticed that much of the organizing surrounding the #StopAsianHate movement in New York was taking place in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where about 33 percent of the population identified as Asian in 2019, according to the N.Y.U. Furman Center, which studies housing and urban policy.She wanted to bring the movement to her neighborhood, the Upper West Side, where about 10 percent of the population identified as Asian. “Then the people who are there have to look around and look at Asian Americans in a slightly different way,” Hamanaka said. “‘Like, ‘Have I excluded them? Do I treat them as a foreigner?’”“Covid Crime” was presented by Crossways Theater, a group formed in 2018 by Hamanaka and Pflanzer. It aims to develop playwrights that reflect the diversity of their neighborhood.“The idea is to bring the audience closer to these issues,” said Pflanzer, 77. “Get them to engage and participate in understanding and being aware of this very important issue of anti-Asian hate in our communities.”In the play, the character Dr. Leo Chan (John Bernos) arrives home from a shift at Bellevue Hospital. He lives with his mother, Chunhua (Hamanaka), who is asleep on the couch in the living room.“It’s just me, Ma,” Leo says. Chunhua grunts, and he notices a bandage on her head.“What’s that?” he asks. “What happened?”“Woman hit me with umbrella,” Chunhua says.“Where?” Leo asks.“On a bus,” Chunhua replies. “She say I bring Chinese virus to New York. Now everybody dying.”Bernos, a Filipino American actor from Ann Arbor, Mich., drove nine hours to New York for “Covid Crime.” After the performance, an audience member asked him about the hardest part of the role.About 50 people attended the performance, which was followed by a community forum.An Rong Xu for The New York Times“I’ve had my share of having a person tell me to go back to China,” Bernos said. “It wasn’t cool. So I think the hardest part is having to dig back into that memory and face that again. It’s always tough.”Though the play revolves around Chunhua’s assault, it also features Dylan Omori McCombs as Corky Lee, the only character in the play based explicitly on a real person. Lee was a Chinese American photographer, journalist and activist from Queens. (He died in January at age 73 after Covid-19 complications.).css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“The sad part is that, the more I researched him as much as I could, the more I really wished that he was someone that I had learned about in my history textbooks,” said McCombs, wearing a hoodie that read “Not Your Model Minority.” “He obviously is of the caliber of someone that would be very much worthy of that.”“Covid Crime” ends on a rally set in Chinatown’s Columbus Park.“We’re here today because of the attacks against Asian Americans,” Lee says. “That’s been news in the pandemic, and the news is my business. My photos are proof that we exist — that we do a lot of things.”The performance was followed by a community forum. Shirley Ng, a community organizer at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Jacqueline Wang, the head of marketing and communications at Welcome to Chinatown, both spoke to the small crowd.“Just like the play, many seniors will come home and not know what to do,” Ng said. “They could’ve gone to the police precinct or called 911, but there’s always this fear that they may get turned away, because they don’t have someone who speaks their language, or there’s just this fear of stepping in and not knowing — what is the process?”“Covid Crime” was presented by Crossways Theater, which aims to develop playwrights that reflect the diversity of the Upper West Side.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe fund, a 47-year-old national organization based in New York, works to protect and promote the civil rights of Asian Americans — including encouraging seniors to report any hate crimes that may occur. Welcome to Chinatown, founded last year, is a grass roots initiative that supports Chinatown’s businesses and amplifies its voices.“Another thing covered by this play is that, when you don’t know someone — you don’t look like them, you don’t speak their language, you don’t know their culture, you don’t eat the same things — it’s really easy to just label them as ‘other,’” Wang said. “That’s something not new to the pandemic, but something that was exacerbated and highlighted.”In the last act of “Covid Crime,” Dr. Leo Chan speaks a common Chinese phrase. “We have a saying, ‘Swallow bitterness.’ Leave that behind. Won’t work these days!” More

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    ‘Succession’ Renewed for Season 4

    The Emmy-winning HBO drama will be back. The premiere date has yet to be announced.HBO announced Tuesday that it has officially renewed “Succession,” its cutthroat drama about a media mogul’s children who strive to become either his favorite, or his destroyer, for a fourth season.Because of the pandemic, the show, which was created by Jesse Armstrong, was on hiatus for two years before returning for its third, nine-episode season earlier this month. It won seven Emmy Awards last year, including best drama series.“Succession” tells the story of the fictional Roy family members and their jockeying for power of the world’s fifth-largest media conglomerate, Waystar Royco.Brian Cox stars as the media mogul and gruff octogenarian patriarch Logan Roy, with Jeremy Strong (Kendall), Sarah Snook (Siobhan), Kieran Culkin (Roman) and Alan Ruck (Connor) playing his four grown children. Nicholas Braun has also become a fan favorite in his breakout role as Cousin Greg.The Season 3 premiere, which aired on HBO and was available to stream on HBO Max, drew more than 1.4 million viewers across all platforms, a high for the series and the best premiere night of any HBO original series since the launch of HBO Max, according to the network. Its renewal is not surprising, but had not been announced before Tuesday.The New York Times chief television critic James Poniewozik wrote that the new season — which he called “scabrously funny” — highlights the growing gulf between the superrich and the rest of the population.“The good guys are not going to win; the good guys are not even in the game,” he added. “You can only hope to see a terrible person do something terrible to a more terrible person.”A premiere date has not yet been announced. More

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    Tavi Gevinson Finds Comfort in Legal Pads, Canned Fish and Rumi

    Writing for magazines while acting in “Gossip Girl” and “Assassins” has the 25-year-old staying up too late and looking for ways to quiet her mind.At 25, Tavi Gevinson finds herself caught between worlds.There’s the world of acting — where, starring in both Classic Stage Company’s upcoming “Assassins” revival and HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot, she already straddles stage and screen — and the world of writing. Launched into the public eye in 2010 when she founded the now-defunct fashion blog Rookie, she continues to write for herself and for magazines, notably when expressing her regrets in Vulture for working with the abusive producer Scott Rudin.But the preternaturally busy digital native is also at a crossroads when it comes to how to best use her time. She says she longs for the 3 a.m. sleepovers of her childhood, an hour which now sees her “sitting at my desk and working on different projects that no one asked for.”It’s not surprising then, that on a video call from her apartment in Brooklyn, Gevinson discussed 10 things that ease her mind and help her feel productive. (An earlier list she’d shared before our conversation was meant to be satirical, but she wasn’t sure how well a shout-out to “rugged individual queen” Ayn Rand would read, and recanted.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Canned fish Once I realized I was the first person ever to try canned fish — and that it’s such an easy way to feel like I’ve made something, even though I haven’t done much — it became very pleasurable. It gives me a lot of energy, which is kind of annoying, because when it turns out things are good for me, I’m like, “Damn it, now I have to keep doing this.”2. Google Keep It’s basically Google’s Notes app, but I feel like the Notes app has become such a loaded medium: It makes me feel like I’m writing an apology, and I have nothing to apologize for. So I needed a different app to trick myself into writing by starting on my phone, instead of sitting down at my computer and seeing a blank document and getting freaked out. Plus, Google really needs our help, and really needs the shout-out, so I wanted to include them.3. Legal pads Journals give me anxiety, especially if they’re really nice; even picking out a new journal can take all the fun out of keeping one for me. These are more like my diary. When I was in high school, I would write my diary during class, in my notebooks, and then tear out the pages and compile them. “Books” would be a strong word for what they are.4. The are.na app and website It’s sort of like Tumblr, but more organized; you create different channels, and then you upload blocks with photos, videos, links to articles, PDFs, anything. I don’t know if the good people at are.na would object to this, but the easiest way to describe it is actually as a kind of Pinterest for ideas. I follow channels where people compile readings about subjects I’m interested in, or images that follow a certain theme. Then I use it to organize ideas for things I’m writing. It’s very calming to use.5. Turning childhood keepsakes into jewelry I’ve never made my own clothes or anything, but I found these broken necklaces I made when I was a kid and realized it would be pretty simple to fix them. So I got supplies from a bead store across from Bryant Park, and now I can wear these necklaces I made when I was 5, but have turtles on them. I kind of pile up a lot of DIY projects that sound nice in theory and then rarely follow through.6. Upcycling brands The Series and ThereIsNoMoreStudio! on Etsy are brands that upcycle materials they find, while Samavai makes dresses and shirts out of saris. I have a couple of things from each, and it feels special to wear something that has a built-in history and that someone has very creatively reinvented.I don’t do a lot of browsing on Etsy, though, because I think it’s kind of stressful. More than once, I’ve bought a piece of furniture and then realized, once it came, that it was for a doll house.7. Abandoning books I started finishing a lot more books once I started abandoning ones that I wasn’t compelled to finish, but would just carry around with all of this guilt, and then I would end up looking at my phone instead. So, if by page 30, I’m not interested in turning the page, or I feel I’m not being enriched, then I let it go and I trust that it will either come back to me at the right time, or I’ll die never having read it.8. Conair face steamer A makeup artist on “Gossip Girl” gave this to me and I went, “OK, Amy …” but then I found it really helpful and soothing. You use it and it’s like, “Am I in a spa, or am I on my toilet?” It also seems to be good for your skin — which is the point, yes — but the ritual is also really pleasant to me and feels like it’s helping my skin even more.9. Running to slow songs If I listen to fast songs, I try to run at the pace of the music and can’t keep up. So I like to listen to songs that go at a steady clip, or ideally craft a playlist that starts a little more hyper and then reaches some kind of slow catharsis, with everyone in Prospect Park loving and understanding that I’m having a meaningful experience.Some of the music is excruciatingly sincere, singer-songwriter music. Some is ambient and wonky — Brian Eno is reliable. Sometimes I do show tunes, too, and I’m mortified that people can hear it, and see that I’m angrily running to “The Light in the Piazza.”10. “Don’t Go Back to Sleep” I came across this Rumi poem a few weeks ago in the “Reality Streaming” Substack by Hawa Arsala. Whenever I’d hear people say that they wrote, or made art, in the morning, I would be like, “Well, good for you.” I was resistant to the idea of there being an advantage to waking up early, but I recently tasked myself with trying it for a week and, annoyingly enough, it is very magical to write in the morning. It feels like you have some kind of secret or something.This poem makes me much more eager to go toward that magical little space, because nothing else really gives me that feeling I get out of working alone. It isn’t really fair to be an unpleasant wench all the time, just because I’m mad that I didn’t spend enough time writing, so … yeah, that poem. More

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    Behind the 'Boo!': How Haunted House Actors Scare Guests

    SurfacingWhen ‘Boo!’ Is Only the BeginningWhat does it take to scare the candy corn out of someone? Performers at two of New York’s hallowed haunted attractions explain the secrets behind the shocks.Keenan Loughney, who portrays a nurse at Headless Horseman in Ulster Park, N.Y.Angie Hansen knows what she wants: energy, professionalism, a gift for ad-lib. “And then somebody that really likes to scare people,” she said cheerfully.As the creative director of Blood Manor, a 10,000-square-foot haunted house nestled inside a TriBeCa skyscraper, Hansen assembles 60 performers annually, many of them Blood Manor veterans. She sorts the newcomers into appropriate roles — clowns, killers, corpse brides, victims weeping silicone wounds. In just three or four days of rehearsal, she teaches them to terrify the thousand or so guests who enter Blood Manor, a Halloween staple since 2005, each weekend evening.About two hours north, at Headless Horseman in Ulster Park, N.Y., David Berman leads acting workshops for seasonal scare actors. Because it takes more than ghoulish makeup and vibrating vocal cords to make ticket holders scream.“To just jump out of a closet and just yell, it doesn’t do anything,” Berman said.Nicole Borbone plays a reanimated corpse at Blood Manor.Such haunts — the industry term for a variety of haunted attractions — became popular in the 1980s. Spencer Terry, the president of the Haunted Attractions Association, a trade group, estimates that there are about 1,800 professional haunts in the United States this year. While horror now thrives in sundry forms, these destinations offer something entirely immersive, a 360-degree experience in which audiences can star in their worst nightmares.William Burton is Blood Manor’s mortician.Even as professional attractions move toward more extreme effects — animatronic monsters, plummeting elevators, rippling walls — most still depend on the potential of the human body alone. (Well, the human body and some terrifying face painting.) “Yes, you can scare folks with jump scares, or even puffs of air,” said Beth Kattelman, a professor of performance at Ohio State University. “But what people really remember are the characters, the special things that folks do.”Before Michael Jubie opened Headless Horseman nearly 30 years ago, he worked as a commander of a mounted police unit in Kingston, N.Y. He still projects extreme stoicism, and yet, his actors regularly frighten him. “Oh, I’ve been scared,” he said. “Oh, yes.”Shamia Diaz, a Blood Manor regular, plays the Bride, an asylum escapee. In the weeks leading up to Halloween, we spoke to some of the actors of Blood Manor, amid the hustle of New York City, and Headless Horseman — which operates escape rooms, haunted houses and a very scary corn maze on 65 acres a half-hour drive from the nearest train station — about how they make those scares happen.While some haunted houses use trained actors, most fill their ranks with enthusiastic amateurs. Before the pandemic, applicants came in for interviews and auditions. Now they typically audition remotely, scaring the camera. What makes a great haunt actor? “There has to be at least a little something off about you,” said Will Szigethy, a longtime Headless Horseman actor. But not too off. Most haunts run background checks.Scott Taylor, a packaging engineer for Avon by day, has worked at Headless Horseman for 10 years, with nine of them spent playing a very unsettling clown. “You can tell the people whose heart is in it,” he said. “And you can tell the people that are here just for a paycheck. Those people don’t usually last very long.”Scott Taylor has worked at Headless Horseman for 10 years, playing a clown for most of that time.Veterans take first-timers under their wings, helping them improve their personae and teaching them to scream without shredding their throats. (The trick: Howl from the diaphragm.) Over the course of a season, newcomers will refine characters based on their environment — a morgue, a cemetery, a sideshow — finding distinctive ways to move, to scream, to wield a chain saw or an ax. They will also find their rhythms: a horror variant on comic timing, with a shriek in place of a punchline.Shamia Diaz, a Blood Manor regular, plays the Bride, an asylum escapee. In her blood-smeared hands, the role involves a lot of shaking, a lot of screaming, a lot of encouraging attendees to read scripture from the book of Satan. “You have to find your own mojo, your own vibe,” she said. “Because once you find what works for you, you’re unstoppable.”Jose Torres as Jack, Blood Manor’s masked serial killer.For Dominique Peres, who joined Headless Horseman five years ago as a painfully shy teenager, mojo meant creating a character called Jacket, an exuberant take on a psycho killer. “Jacket is crazy, has an ax, runs rampant, likes candy, likes to make friends,” she said.Some performers specialize in jump scares, popping out from unexpected corners. Others prefer more psychological scares, sidling up to ticket holders, whispering in their ears. (Before Covid-19, some haunts allowed performers to do more than just whisper, but Blood Manor and Headless Horseman have always maintained strict no-contact policies.) Others are more versatile. Amateur psychologists, they vary the scare depending on the mood in the room.Jose Torres, who plays Jack, Blood Manor’s masked serial killer, adjusts his attitude for each new group. “It’s just a connected energy that comes between you and the people walking through,” Torres said.David Berman leads acting workshops at Headless Horseman.That energy, however connected, can be difficult to maintain. While a stage actor will perform once or twice per day, a haunt actor may replay the same scene 10 times an hour, for six to eight hours at a stretch. “It is physically strenuous,” said Meagan Donovan, who oversees a haunted house on the Headless Horseman property. “You’re swinging an ax around all night or just hiding in a small space, being loud.”But the adrenaline rush of eliciting scream after scream keeps performers swinging. “It’s better than a roller coaster,” said Hansen, who spent years playing a Blood Manor victim. “It’s better than sex. It’s better than then the best meal you’ve ever had. The feeling of scaring somebody is what makes you want to do it again and again and again.”Ketara Adolphus plays a character named Stressedgod at Blood Manor.This brand of acting rewards performers in other ways, too. Putting on the makeup and picking up a fake weapon allows them a sense of freedom and disinhibition they may not feel otherwise. “For me, the experience has been very empowering,” Diaz said.Many also treat haunt acting as a form of stress relief. “They use it as a kind of therapy,” said Berman, who plays a gross-out character named Dewey Tewey at Headless Horseman. “You can’t, in your regular day job, tell somebody you’re going to rip their arms and legs off and toss them into the woods.”As Reff, Hector Vega Toro prowls the depths of Blood Manor.Every so often an actor goes too far, continuing to scare a ticket holder who is obviously already petrified. But most know when to quit or even how to lend a helping, blood-covered hand, scooting people out of a room without breaking character. Besides, the best scares, many performers said, are the ones they really have to work for.Nicole Borbone and William Burton, recent college graduates, perform a scene set in Blood Manor’s sinew-stained morgue. They begin with a jump scare, then move into a sequence in which Borbone’s corpse suddenly rises from the table and begs attendees to help her. Burton likes to lock eyes with the customers who look like they’d be tough to scare; Borbone tends to lunge for them. Usually she gets the reaction she wants.“When I make a grown man scream and fall on his knees,” she said, “I’ve done my job.”Dominique Peres performs as Jacket, an exuberant psycho killer.Surfacing is a column that explores the intersection of art and life, produced by Alicia DeSantis, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick. More

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    How to Decorate Your Apartment Like an Artistic Director

    When Charlotte Moore moved into John McMartin’s Upper West Side co-op, it was ‘not pretty.’ Nearly five decades later, that’s been fixed.In 1971, Charlotte Moore auditioned for “A Little Night Music” on the stage of the Winter Garden Theater, where the musical “Follies” was playing. (Readers will soon see that this is not an irrelevant detail.)Ms. Moore, who tends toward the dramatic, a trait that has likely served her well as a founder and the artistic director of the Irish Repertory Theater, insists to this day that her tryout, in front of the director Harold Prince, was “a disaster, a complete disaster — I was in tears and ruins, absolute ruins, embarrassed and humiliated.”But maybe not such a disaster. A year later, Mr. Prince phoned her with an invitation to join the fledgling New Phoenix Repertory Company. “When I decided to throw everything away and come here without knowing anyone at all, it was a ridiculous idea,” said Ms. Moore, whose adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s “The Streets of New York,” originally staged by her at the Irish Rep in 2001, begins performances there again, under her direction, on Dec. 4.“I knew nothing. But I just did it,” continued Ms. Moore, who grew up in a small farming community in Illinois, the granddaughter of Irish immigrants, and studied theater at Washington University in St. Louis.“I wanted very much for Jack to be comfortable,” said Charlotte Moore, who shared a one-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side with her partner, the actor John McMartin, for more than 40 years.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesShe rented an apartment on Riverside Drive and began to settle in. Not long after signing the lease, Ms. Moore met John McMartin, one of the stars of “Follies,” which had recently closed. Now he, too, was part of the New Phoenix troupe.“I was madly in love with him on Day 1, although I didn’t know anything about him and hadn’t seen him in anything. I didn’t see ‘Follies,’ to my horror,” said the now 80-ish Ms. Moore.That lapse was apparently forgiven. A bit more than a year later, she moved in with Mr. McMartin, a divorcé who owned a large one-bedroom co-op with a private entrance on West End Avenue.She is still there. Mr. McMartin, who died in 2016, bequeathed the apartment to his two children, Ms. Moore said, “but he said specifically in his will that I am to be here as long as I want, and I would never leave.”During her first days in residence, she took the measure of her new home and found it wanting. “Jack had been living the bachelor’s life there since his divorce, and it was not pretty,” she said. “When I say, ‘Not pretty,’ that’s a gross understatement.”There was, for starters, a bed in the living room, mounted on two-by-fours. “Oh, my God, I was stunned,” she said. “I was stunned.”Charlotte Moore, 80-ishOccupation: Actor, co-founder and artistic director of the Irish Repertory TheaterMaking room: “We never did any structural work on the apartment. All I did was kind of refurnish the place, and arranged the spaces the way they were supposed to be.”Forty-five years on, the apartment is structurally as Ms. Moore found it. But she has determinedly changed it from crash pad to adult home.When outfitting the living room, she took her cues from her mother. “She hated modernity and loved classic rooms,” Ms. Moore said. Thus, the pale-green-and-gray velvet sofa with leaf patterning, the accent chair in a floral print, the nicely faded Persian rug and the four high-backed dining chairs that she inherited from her grandmother. Ms. Moore cleverly turned the foyer into a cozy TV room — she disapproves of televisions in living rooms, never mind beds — with a pair of chocolate-brown leather club chairs.Dark wood bookcases in the living room and TV room hold Ms. Moore’s many books about Napoleon (“I don’t know why, but I’m a Napoleon freak”); her books on Ireland (“Obviously, I have lots of books about Ireland”); and a mass of tiny glass and plastic pigs.Ms. Moore converted the foyer of the apartment to a TV room.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“I collect pigs, and Jack McMartin bought me a pig every birthday,” she said. “Napoleon and pigs — I don’t know why they go together.”While Ms. Moore summarily chucked some offending pieces when she moved in — goodbye to the hulking cabinet in the middle of the kitchen — she didn’t completely clean house. A much-loved breakfast table that was surrounded by a pair of rattan chairs and a curved banquette is still there. So is a hutch that holds her substantial cache of delft pitchers, vases, platters, cups and plates. Hanging above is a framed trio of Beatrix Potter illustrations featuring a rabbit, a gift from Mr. McMartin.Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of Ms. Moore’s favorite pieces in the apartment — the two flowered cushions on the banquette, the large, square wood coffee table in the living room and the vintage baby grand — are from stage sets. The piano has a particularly winning provenance: It was part of the scenery in the 1983 touring production of “Private Lives” that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and featured John Cullum and Ms. Moore.“I’m not swearing to this, but I might have said, ‘You know, Richard, the only thing I hate to leave in this show is the damn piano. I love it so much. I think it’s so beautiful,’” said Ms. Moore, who composed the songs for “The Streets of New York” on that very instrument. “Well, one day, there it was, at the door of my apartment.”“All I did was kind of refurnish the place,” Ms. Moore said.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesMr. McMartin is very much a presence. He smiles from photographs. His books, many inscribed, still line the shelves. The gloves that were part of his costume in a Broadway production of “Chemin de Fer” hang in a frame near the living room. On a recent morning, Ms. Moore reached behind a bookcase and pulled out the cane that Mr. McMartin wielded during the shattering “Live, Laugh, Love” production number at the end of “Follies.”“Jack Cassidy came in here one time,” Ms. Moore said, referring to the Tony-winning actor. “And he said, ‘John, it’s time you did something with this place, because it’s a special place.’ I felt that way about it, too.”“I wanted very much for him to be comfortable and live in a pretty place,” she continued. “No, that’s not it. I wanted to live in a pretty place. I grew up in a nice house — a lovely house, actually — and I wanted this apartment to be wonderful. For both of us.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More