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    On ‘Top Chef’, Kristen Kish Takes Over as Host

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    One day last week, a vase spilling over with white lilies and roses arrived in Kristen Kish’s dressing room in Milwaukee, where “Top Chef” is shooting its 21st season.Padma Lakshmi, the model and author who became a household name during the 17 years she hosted the cooking-competition show, had sent them, along with a note: “Break a leg. I’m so proud of you kiddo!”For Ms. Kish, who was so nervous her first day on the set as Ms. Lakshmi’s replacement that she thought she might throw up, the flowers were a balm.“I know my job is to simply be me,” Ms. Kish said, “but I feel like I am not going to be impressive enough to hold my own space and follow in Padma’s footsteps.”Truth is, the aging “Top Chef” franchise, which has had its share of stumbles in an increasingly crowded constellation of food shows, needs her as much as she needs it. At 39, Ms. Kish represents a third wave of chef celebrity, far removed from pioneers like Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay, and the generation of tattooed, mostly white kitchen bros who followed.Ms. Kish is a gay Korean adoptee and a proud product of the Midwest. She hits the notes sung by culinary stars before her: She co-wrote a cookbook, opened a restaurant and makes much of her living on camera, a skill she polished on several other shows before landing the “Top Chef” job in July. On social media, she toggles seamlessly between charming brand promotions, food tips and sincere declarations — about love, self-care and even self-doubt — that can border on oversharing.Under all her casual confidence, she says, is a foundation of crushing insecurity.Ms. Kish has been on “Top Chef” as a contestant and judge, and is comfortable on the set in Milwaukee.Lyndon French for The New York Times“I have severe social anxiety and I’m on television, which is wild,” she said. “I know I’m a walking contradiction.”That’s hard to buy when you see her stride onto the set with the command of a model (which she once was). The show’s stylist selected heeled boots and wide pants for her tall, lean body as a way to project authority. She broke into a goofy dance one moment, then hit her mark perfectly the next. The first time she uttered, “Please pack your knives and go” — the chilling phrase Ms. Lakshmi delivered when a contestant was eliminated — the crew applauded.“Kristen is a megawatt,” said Dana Cowin, the former editor in chief of Food & Wine and a “Top Chef” judge for seven seasons. She recently watched Ms. Kish confess her personal fears as she demonstrated how to make Korean-style corn dogs for a rapt audience at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colo. “She was just so vulnerable and open.”If Ms. Kish had a brand, it might be wrapped in millennial pink and laced with the ideals of a generation that values earnestness, diversity and being nice.“She’s been on a huge journey defining how we can be a chef in the post-celebrity-chef era and how we can think about our global community in a bigger way,” said her friend Gregory Gourdet, the Portland, Ore., chef who was both a judge on the show and a finalist.The Heir ApparentIt all started when Ms. Kish won “Top Chef” in 2013.“She is completely a creature of the franchise,” said Francis Lam, a frequent guest host and the vice president and editor in chief of Clarkson Potter, which published “Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques” in 2017. “On some level she can be a little bit of a cipher. People can put a lot on her based on their assumptions.”When Ms. Lakshmi announced that she would not renew her contract as the show’s host and executive producer, Ms. Kish was the clear choice, said Casey Kriley, a chief executive of Magical Elves, the unscripted-production company that created the show. Executives at NBCUniversal, which owns Bravo, the network it airs on, never interviewed anyone else, said Ryan Flynn, a senior vice president.“She checks all the boxes,” he said.Ms. Kish battled Brooke Williamson in Seattle to win Season 10 of “Top Chef” in 2013.David Moir/BravoMs. Kish got word that “Top Chef” wanted her while flying back to the East Coast with her wife, Bianca Dusic, after doing promotional work for a hotel in Thailand.“I was shocked,” she said. “I really wasn’t pushing for this because I never thought it was actually a possibility.”Ms. Lakshmi was the first person she called. “I hope I’ve been a sounding board for her over the last decade,” Ms. Lakshmi wrote in an email. “I’ve made it my mission to mentor young women like her because I didn’t have that coming up.”Ms. Lakshmi, a victim of sexual assault, often spoke out about sexual harassment in the restaurant industry, including accusations against a “Top Chef” winner, and pushed to make the show less Eurocentric.Ms. Kish said that although she will have no problem being blunt if she needs to, she intends to focus on the work, not the politics.“TV is populated by people who love to hear their own voice,” said Hugh Acheson, a chef who made his name with restaurants in Georgia and was a judge on the show for six seasons. “And that isn’t Kristen at all.”Tom Colicchio, the chef who serves as the show’s head judge, said he was excited to have someone new in the mix, especially an experienced chef. “She knows what she’s doing,” he said.Gail Simmons, the show’s other judge and a close friend of Ms. Kish, didn’t think she needed much advice: “The only concern I had was her own self-doubt.”Gail Simmons and Tom Colicchio, Ms. Kish’s new co-workers on “Top Chef,” said they she didn’t need much advice before shooting Season 21.Lyndon French for The New York TimesUnder ControlA precise and focused cook with French and Italian influences, Ms. Kish has long relied on organization to counter her anxiety. Growing up in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., she kept a whiteboard in her room to keep track of her schoolwork, piano lessons and sports. Her older brother, Jonathan, an automotive engineer, gave her a cordless vacuum as a housewarming present when she recently moved to Connecticut with the Australian-born Ms. Dusic. She uses it every day she’s home.Ms. Kish is much looser about what she eats and wears. She prefers hoodies and a ball cap turned backward. Her favorite cosmetic is Carmex. She’d just as soon eat chicken tenders, sour candy and squares of presliced Colby-Jack cheese on a saltine.The Hamburger Helper that brought her joy as a child inspired a pasta dish of curly edged mafaldine tossed with mushrooms and pearl onions that is popular at her Austin restaurant, Arlo Grey.This baffles her mother, Judy Kish. “I truly did not use Hamburger Helper very often,” she said during a recent family interview on Zoom. “I really don’t understand why it’s so vivid in her memory, to tell you the truth.”The elder Ms. Kish was a high school teacher, and her husband, Michael, was an engineer at a company that made corrugated cardboard boxes. In 1984, the couple adopted the four-month-old Kristen, who had been abandoned shortly after birth at a clinic outside Seoul.They strove to keep her connected to her birth country, making sure she tasted kimchi, introducing her to a Korean exchange student and reading her “The Korean Cinderella” by Shirley Climo. (Ms. Kish had the story spray-painted on the restroom walls of her restaurant. Speakers softly play a recording of a woman reading it in Korean.)A young Ms. Kish giving her mother, Judy, a ride on a tractor. Courtesy of Clarkson PotterFor a long time, Ms. Kish tried not to think about her Korean roots. “I put it aside because I was scared that I was going to find out something that I didn’t want to find out about where I actually came from,” she said.Still, in her 20s, she had her Korean name and adoption case number inked on her wrist — the first of many tattoos marking important moments in her life.After she won “Top Chef,” she vowed to use some of the $125,000 prize money to visit South Korea, but couldn’t go through with it. Nine years later, Netflix sent her to Seoul on a five-day promotional trip tied to her work as a host on “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend.” She didn’t search out orphanages, as some adoptees do. Instead, she focused on learning about the food.Can someone who didn’t grow up in a Korean family legitimately cook the cuisine? It’s a question she grapples with.“I’m trying to own that side of me so it doesn’t feel like I’m appropriating a culture that doesn’t belong to me,” she said. “I clearly can have a point of view about Korean American food. There is a connection. I’m allowed to explore it. But for a long time I felt guilty about it.”An Education in FameDespite her shyness as a child, she had a lot of friends. By high school she was firmly ensconced with the preps.“We had Abercrombie clothes, and I had purple contacts,” she said. “I was trying to be everything except me. I wanted to hide.”Especially, she said, her budding attraction to women.Her grades weren’t good enough to get into Michigan State University, where her brother and both her parents graduated. She spent a year at Grand Valley State University, but didn’t go back. Her parents, who said she always had a creative streak with food, sent her to Chicago to attend Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts. She loved it and graduated, but also discovered cocaine and the bars.“A lot of it was trying to mask and self-medicate my social anxiety and my sexuality,” she said. Ms. Kish convinced herself that being successful couldn’t include being gay.Ms. Kish brings her longtime hairstylist to the set, and likes to have a candle and candy in her dressing room. Lyndon French for The New York TimesShe kept partying, turning down jobs she thought were beneath her. Finally, her parents stopped paying for her nice apartment. She moved back home, depressed and defeated.They gave her one more chance. They knew of a room for rent in Boston, and offered to help pay for it if she found a job within three weeks.She did, cooking in a series of kitchens that led to a job at Stir, a cookbook store and demonstration kitchen owned by the chef and restaurateur Barbara Lynch. Ms. Lynch became a mentor, passing her name to producers who had called looking for new “Top Chef” contestants.Ms. Lynch wrote a letter that Ms. Kish had in her back pocket when she won. “So very proud of you,” it read. “Breathe and most of all enjoy the experience!!”Ms. Kish doesn’t have much to say about recent reports that Ms. Lynch verbally and physically harassed workers at her restaurants.“I had been removed from her company for 10 years, so I don’t know,” Ms. Kish said. “What I do know is that if she never said, ‘Kristen, you can win Top Chef,’ none of this would be happening. And that’s a fact.”Over a cheeseburger at Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan last month, Ms. Kish pondered how to navigate her fast-rising fame. She guards the name of the town where she lives, and is careful what she says when she’s out somewhere, because people eavesdrop. She is trying to get better at responding to the strangers who approach her in places like the supermarket.Bianca Dusic, Ms. Kish’s wife, often travels with her to jobs, and is close with Ms. Kish’s family.Lyndon French for The New York Times“When I get insecure and uncomfortable and socially anxious, I kind of become, for lack of a better term, a bitch,” Ms. Kish said. Ms. Dusic prompts her to snap out of it with a code phrase: “Nasty Nancy’s here.”The two met when Ms. Dusic was the corporate executive assigned to help Ms. Kish open her Austin restaurant in the LINE Hotel in 2018. After six months of intense work side by side, they shared a high-five that lasted a little longer than they expected.They were married in their backyard in April 2021. As with their engagement, Ms. Kish announced it on Instagram.Ms. Dusic, 44, left the restaurant industry when the stress of working during the Covid shutdowns and grief over her father’s death from cancer made her sick. Now she is a “mind-set and transformation coach” who offers breath work and other therapies, which she uses to help Ms. Kish. She also has persuaded Ms. Kish to stop ordering so much takeout.Ms. Dusic frequently accompanies Ms. Kish when she works. At home, they putter in the garden, drink tea and are in bed by 10 p.m. It’s all about managing a life that just keeps getting bigger.“This was never the plan,” Ms. Kish said. “The plan would have been for me to just work in a little restaurant, making ends meet, doing my life and just keep trucking along.”Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      Justin H. Min, Travel Writer? The Path Not Taken for a Rising Star

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      Success came relatively easy — until he tried acting. For a moment, journalism seemed more viable. But now he’s the lead in “Shortcomings.”Five years after Justin H. Min began pursuing acting by Googling “how to pursue acting,” he thought he was getting the hang of it. He had made a viral commercial, and he was in contention for three major roles.He landed none of them.“I was not nervous and I did everything I wanted to,” Min recalled of the auditions. “And that’s the most devastating because you’re like, ‘I guess I just don’t have it.’”It was in this less-than-healthy head space that Min decided to pivot to a different unstable profession: travel writing. He had caught on with a British magazine and it seemed he might cobble together full-time work as a freelance writer if he got on a plane to London.So Min told his manager he was moving. But rather than beg him to stay (as Min had secretly hoped), the manager gave his full blessing. Before Min could head for the airport, though, a fellow actor urged him to reconsider — timely encouragement that set Min, now 34, on the path to “a star-making performance,” as a critic for The Times put it, in the new comedy “Shortcomings,” as well as fan-favorite turns in the Netflix series “Beef” and “The Umbrella Academy.”“This sounds absurd, but I don’t think I’ve really ever struggled with failure until I started to pursue acting,” Min said in a prestrike interview. “So I will absolutely savor this.”INDEED, EVERYTHING IN the first 20-ish years of Min’s life had come to him with relative ease. He concedes this only very sheepishly and with many disclaimers about how fortunate he feels.In Cerritos, Calif., the predominantly Asian suburb where he grew up, Min felt little sense of difference. He found that most success was attainable through application. Min was class president all four years of high school and elected king of the winter formal. He was so good in speech and debate competitions that he won thousands of dollars in prize money that helped pay for a Cornell education. Given his gifts, he thought he might become a lawyer — or maybe a politician.But on the day Min was to graduate from college, he woke up to nine missed calls. His grandfather, who had flown in for the occasion, had died that morning. And so Min’s commencement walk ended in a teary embrace with his family.The death of Min’s grandfather pushed him to reflect during a solo, cross-country road trip back home to Cerritos.“What do I really want to do?” Min recalled asking himself. Life was fleeting, he now understood. Becoming a lawyer or a politician just didn’t feel right anymore. He liked public speaking, writing and storytelling. And back under his parents’ roof, he was near Los Angeles anyway. He decided to give acting a shot.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” said his fellow actor Amy Okuda.Tracy Nguyen for The New York TimesHe soon discovered, however, how hard the business of acting really was and that applying himself would not be enough.When he ran into college friends and they asked about his acting career, “I remember feeling so shattered and so lost in terms of what to say or how to present myself because I no longer could stand on accomplishments,” he said. “I didn’t have that anymore.”IT WAS SLOW going at first. Min dove into Reddit threads, took classes, searched for agents and discovered Wong Fu Productions, a content company run by young Asian Americans that would become a popular part of Asian American media as YouTube blossomed in the 2010s. The guys running it asked Min to audition for what he said they called a “narrative thing, but like branded content.”The “narrative thing” was essentially an eight-minute advertisement for a Simplehuman trash can. But it was built around an exploration of adulting, and the video received tens of millions of views.That work didn’t pay much, and Min began to dabble in journalism as a side hustle. He was a good writer and his photography, like most things in his life, had drawn praise.He traveled to Mexico City to interview the chef Enrique Olvera at Pujol; and to Chicago to pick the brain of Grant Achatz at Alinea. What was not to like about work trips to two of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants?Which helps explain why Min was willing to give writing a full go when he got those back-to-back-to-back acting rejections. But as he pondered his next move, Min had dinner with a friend, the actress Amy Okuda. She tapped the brakes on his travel plans.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” Okuda said in a prestrike interview. So she sent a note about Min to her own manager, Joshua Pasch, who got in touch with him almost immediately; Pasch even had Min submit an audition tape for “The Umbrella Academy” before the pair met.“The rest is history,” Pasch said. “He was on the show a month later.”MIN HAD LANDED THE ROLE of Ben Hargreeves on what would become a hit for Netflix. His part was modest at first — a dead brother in a superhuman sibling squad who occasionally shows up as a ghostlike figure that only the drug-addled sibling, Klaus, can see. The character had very little screen time, and Min was not a series regular initially.Min, left, on “The Umbrella Academy.” He landed the role after a friend urged him to stick with acting.NetflixBut Ben became surprisingly popular in Min’s hands. Steve Blackman, the showrunner, came up with a way to expand the role and even bring Ben back to life as a different, meaner version of himself in later seasons.“The character of Ben doesn’t really exist that much in the graphic novel” on which “Umbrella Academy” is based, Blackman said. “I wrote Ben in to be someone that Klaus could talk to and only Klaus could see.”But, he added, “the minute Justin embodied the character, I’m like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do so much more.’”“The Umbrella Academy,” which premiered in 2019, was an “I made it” moment for Min. But he would also earn acclaim two years later for his thoughtful, sincere portrayal of the titular robot in “After Yang,” a quiet sci-fi drama starring Colin Farrell.“He had such a rich life before he became an actor,” Kogonada, who directed “After Yang,” said of Min. “Like all the great actors, he is consumed with his craft. But I feel like I’m getting to know him better through the different roles that he plays.”Then came “Beef,” and the part of Edwin, an irritatingly perfect leader of a Korean church.Lee Sung Jin, the director of “Beef,” was best friends with Min’s brother, Jason, in college. Lee said in an interview that he had called Jason Min, an admired praise leader, into the writers’ room to help craft the character of Edwin. It was a role Lee said he had always intended for Justin to fill.Both Min and Lee recalled being in Las Vegas years earlier for Jason’s bachelor party and promising each other that they were going to make it in Hollywood, and that they would work together when they did.“Drunk confidence,” Lee said.NOW MIN IS PLAYING another Ben. This one, the main character in “Shortcomings,” is not a ghost but a very flawed would-be filmmaker who, in the words of a girlfriend, is brimming with “anger, depression, your weird self-hatred issues and just the relentless negativity.”Min “is probably the only person who could have played him in the way that he did, with such nuance,” Ally Maki, who plays the girlfriend, Miko, said in a prestrike interview.Min recalled reading the script and saying to himself: “I understand this guy because I was this guy” and “parts of me are still this guy.”When he initially read the first scene — in which Ben complains about a “Crazy Rich Asians”-style movie that everyone else liked — Min said the words felt natural tumbling out of his mouth.Ben is dealing with the gap between his elevated tastes and his lack of career success, he said, “and that disparity is crippling. I remember when I started off in this business, I felt the same disparity. I felt such a chasm between the projects I was doing and the projects that I wanted to do.”“It results in a lot of dissatisfaction. It results in a lot of cynicism,” he continued, recalling how, at one point, “I sort of prided myself in being sort of this funny, cynical, dry kind of guy the way that Ben is. And then through many years of therapy, I realized that that was simply a defense mechanism for me to hide and shield myself from the actual pain of feeling like I had failed at this industry that I so wanted to succeed in.”Min holds onto one particular memory from the movie. Ben is sprinting through the West Village — that classic movie moment when the hero tries to salvage the relationship before it’s gone forever. In the midst of the scene, he thought, “This is crazy that I am in New York in the middle of this busy West Village street, running as the lead of this movie,” he said. And he remembered how some of his favorite movies had iconic running shots. “I never thought that I was going to be the guy who was running.” More

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      Two Creative Directors on Sports, Hip-Hop and Faith

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      For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.The birth of the partnership between the creative directors Free Richardson and Phil Cho hinged on, of all things, their shared faith. In 2018, Mr. Cho, the founder of NoLedge Productions, pitched a collaboration between his company and Mr. Richardson’s creative agency the Compound.“I go to slide two, and he goes, ‘Yo. Turn that off,’” Mr. Cho recently recalled. “He’s like, ‘Do you love God?’ I was like, ‘Yeah. I’m a believer,’ and he goes, ‘All right. We’re good.’”Of course, it wasn’t just spirituality that brought them together. Mr. Richardson also was impressed with the effort Mr. Cho showed when documenting an event through photos and videos at the Compound’s art gallery. “Phil has something special about him,” Mr. Richardson said recently. “You can just feel a good presence of energy.”The two companies are now a major force in the world of marketing, particularly around the intersection of sports and hip-hop. Together, they have curated an impressive portfolio of campaigns for brands including the shoe company Clarks, ESPN, the software company Niantic and DraftKings. Last year, the duo won three Cannes Lions advertising awards and five Muse Creative Awards, given for inspirational marketing campaigns. Last month, they won 12 Clio Awards, given for creativity in advertising.Mr. Richardson, 50, also known as Set Free, is African American and was born in the Bronx. He grew up in Queens and Philadelphia and was deeply involved in the hip-hop community and the world of street basketball culture. In 1998, he created the AND1 Mixtape Tour, a traveling basketball competition, and in 2007, he founded the Compound.Mr. Richardson’s story has helped shape and inspire many, including Mr. Cho.Born and raised in Edison, N.J., Mr. Cho, 33, is Korean American and grew up with a passion for both basketball and hip-hop music. He was a middle school student when the AND1 Mixtape Tour debuted. (“Some moms in Korea probably know about AND1,” Mr. Cho said about the tour’s reach.) Since starting NoLedge at the age of 26, he has collaborated with a variety of brands including Toyota, the record label 300 Entertainment and musicians like Akon and Year of the Ox.Today, Mr. Richardson and Mr. Cho are innovators in the crowded landscape of creative marketing, and consider themselves family as they “navigate the invisible handcuffs of corporate rule,” as Mr. Richardson put it.“Authenticity is a word that gets thrown around a lot in our industry,” Ari Weiss, chief creative officer at the advertising agency DDB Worldwide, wrote in an email. But “you’re either authentic or you’re not. Mr. Free Richardson and Mr. Phil Cho are pure authenticity.”The two spoke at the Compound’s headquarters in Brooklyn to discuss remaining authentic to their craft, being relevant and their shared faith. The conversation has been edited and condensed.Adriana BelletHow do you stay current?FREE RICHARDSON I think it always goes back to staying authentic and storytelling. Everybody has a story, and you can tell it through A.I., pictures, music, all the creative elements. Look at the NFT [nonfungible token] world. It came, and though it’s not gone, the whole time, I was like, I’m still going to go with touchable, feel-able art. Authenticity within. Look at a tree. The leaves will die before the root of the tree dies. A lot of things are happening through technology, and a lot of things are going to happen, but I don’t know anything that is bigger than the Mona Lisa. No matter what happens in technology, the root of creativity will always be around.PHIL CHO The root of what we are is: It’s always been about relationships. When I walk into the Compound, and I see all this artwork, like Jonni Cheatwood, and you see how long it took for them to come up with these ideas and wasn’t A.I.-generated, I feel like that’s what drives more value.RICHARDSON Yeah, I think it’s a lot of relationships. That’s with everything. The two things in life are communication and relationships. If we don’t communicate, you can’t make the relationship. Creativity is a revolving door. I still work with people that I worked with 20 years ago. It’s the reason we still hear Fleetwood Mac and Marvin Gaye songs in the same rotation that you hear Drake. And so when things are authentic and true, the creativity never goes away.How are you navigating challenges and opportunities facing the advertising industry?RICHARDSON I think the ratio of African Americans and Asians is very small. I don’t blame everything on race, but I think it’s a tougher role for me and Phil being a minority, because there’s not a lot of dominance of minorities in the advertising agency world, especially with Fortune 500 companies, C-suite level and businesses, especially small ones. [According to a 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, of workers in “advertising, public relations, and related services,” 7.8 percent were African American and 6.6 percent were Asian American.] We’re kind of small, SWAT-style — boutique-small. That’s what I consider Compound and NoLedge. It’s a strategic partnership that executes some of the same things that big advertising agencies execute, without the red tape.CHO Before doing Compound, there weren’t people telling me how to facilitate production, and I felt like I had to just learn from trial and error. And a lot of the people that I would meet, they did happen to be white. So again, I’m not trying to make it a race thing either, but I just felt like there’s not a lot of people with my skin tone that are doing this and can help me out. So I think even merging with the Compound, it was a whole new world for me of just trying to be confident in what I’m doing and understanding that. What’s a lesson that you learned from your staff, team or peers?RICHARDSON At the end of the day, everybody makes mistakes. And myself, just looking people in the eye and just being like, “All of us are the same.” I think learning and working with NoLedge, it takes time. Everybody needs time — to execute a task, to learn, to communicate, to talk. To respect time and respect people and giving them time. Not to where you just want to get them to or the client, but just everybody needs time.CHO With the guys that are in NoLedge, for me, it’s patience. I’ll say this, but it’s harder to practice it. You might be able to do X, Y and Z, and you want the same from your guys, but you got to understand that they also need to learn X, Y and Z first. So you can’t expect people to move how you move. Adriana BelletHow do you keep campaigns authentic and meaningful?RICHARDSON I try to give everybody their own white box. When you go look at an apartment, you’d rather see the apartment empty so you can dream of how you’re going to decorate and design it. But if you go into a home that’s already furnished, it already blocks you in. You can’t really put your ideas on it. And so walking into brands and working with companies, I try to give them the white box and tell them, “How do you want to design this?”And then my job after that is just to put a magnifying glass on your ideas. You’re there to help the brand, not really to put your ideas on their brands. And doing it that way, it always helps expand what the goal is. The goal is not for my ideas to be presented. The goal is for my ideas to latch onto your ideas and make them bigger.CHO I really do feel like Free kind of sets his own trend. And I think that’s what a real creative is, right? To me, the better creative director you are, the more you don’t care about what other people think about you, and I think that’s given me confidence, too. It’s just what comes out of when we facilitate a project — just do what we feel would be dope. Just be comfortable with it.What are the challenges of a partnership?RICHARDSON Time. We can’t do everything we want to do. I mean, you have to understand what you’re going into with partnerships. It’s like a marriage. Phil, I love him. He’s my brother, my little cousin and a son. Then there’s times that he’s my uncle. I got to look up to him in certain areas. CHO It’s always about communicating. People have different work flows. It’s not like mine is exactly the same as Free’s. But I think the reason this works is so many young guys want to run the ship, right? So even while doing production, there’s certain things that I would do differently if I was shooting. But at the same time, a good leader is a good follower. I feel like these years right now, I’m soaking up the game. The same way Free was talking about clients and how you got to support their vision. I’m kind of doing a similar thing with Free. I’m supporting his vision. How do you stay inspired?RICHARDSON God. I want the world to understand that. He’s just the creator of all. If you can’t be inspired by thinking of that, I don’t know what else you’re going to be inspired by. God is my source of creativity.CHO I agree. All the stories in this world from different people and backgrounds — he’s the biggest artist. More

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      Book Review: ‘Y/N,’ by Esther Yi

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      In Esther Yi’s weird and wondrous ‘Y/N,’ a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.Y/N, by Esther Yi“We’re more popular than Jesus,” John Lennon infamously said of the Beatles. As houses of worship shut down in droves while pop music fandom grows ever more extreme, it seems unfair anew that he got such a drubbing.“We no longer go to church once a week; we attend a stadium concert once a year,” declares Masterson, one of several minor characters given excellent Dickensian names in Esther Yi’s wondrous and strange first novel, “Y/N.” It’s a short book — just over 200 pages — but with big themes, like the precarity of love, and how the modern self is forged less in community than mass consumption.Though he’s oblivious to its implications, Masterson has just discovered evidence that his sort-of girlfriend, an anonymous narrator, has become obsessed with the youngest member of a Korean boy band. The star is called, with an inevitable echo of the Unification Church founder, Moon. His oldest bandmate is Sun, of course, with Jupiter, Mercuryand Venus rounding out the quintet. “There are so many lowercase gods in this secular, cynical era,”Masterson pontificates, waxing on about how philosophy has been supplanted by data, religion has become “a vending machine for manifestation and fulfillment,” and so on. Many of us have dated a Masterson.“Y/N” refers not to yes/no, as Moon will assume, but to the practice in fan fiction of leaving a space for Your/Name, so that readers can Mad Lib themselves into the narrative. But this abbreviation, too, has extra resonance. “He seemed to be asking ‘why’ of my existence,” the narrator thinks when Moon reads aloud the first letter in the elaborate fanfic she’s written for him. “‘Why’ I was what I was.”When another supporting character, who manufactures shoe soles and goes by O (shades of the erotic classic published under the pen name Pauline Réage), asks the narrator what letter she’d like to be, she chooses N, reasoning that “the two prongs of M perfectly captured Moon’s bipedal stability” — he’s an exceptional dancer, with a background in ballet — and she is comparatively “doddering.”Esther Yi, the author of “Y/N.”Sharon ChoiSwirling around in this alphabet soup of identity is the idea that a parasocial relationship might be as fulfilling as, or anyway no less delusional than, traditional monogamy. Reading the narrator’s obsessive Moon ruminations, I remembered more than once the weird intensity of Jerry Maguire’s line “you complete me.” During a livestream, she imagines another fan, a vegan, actually wishing to be “masticated by Moon.”What we learn about this unnamed narrator — let’s call her U.N. — is delightful in its specificity. A Korean American living in Berlin, she works as a copywriter for a canned-artichoke-heart business. “I don’t want my life to change,” she tells the flatmate she met online, who’s proselytizing for the band, “I want my life to stay in one place and be one thing as intensely as possible.” But though leery of fandom, she falls hard and fast after one concert. Not for nothing is fame now near-synonymous with “virality”; to be struck by its power is indeed a kind of sickness.Troubled by the news that Moon is retiring, U.N. consults on Zoom with a therapist in Los Angeles named Dr. Fishwife. “The best way to fall out of love,” he advises her, “is to realize there exists no love out of which to fall.” (“Y/N” is packed like a can of artichoke hearts with such useful epigrams.) Undaunted, she books a one-way ticket to Seoul, where she has an uncle, to track down and confront the object of her obsession, staying in an apartment building whose first floor contains, and this rings all too true, “a coffee shop where one could sit, and a coffee shop where one could not sit.”There’s also a pilgrimage to the Polygon Plaza, HQ of the entertainment company that masterminded the boy band, where a Music Professor, the president, does a bit of waxing herself about how “people were running around in circles and indulging their small adorable freedoms, like wearing this or that outfit or sleeping with this or that person. They confused their navigation through the stunning variety of meaningless choices as an expression of their individuality.” It’s a stinging indictment of what it’s become fashionable to call “late capitalism,” as if anyone had an idea of its endpoint.The main pleasure of “Y/N” is not so much its somewhat skeletal plot, which floats in and out of surreality like an adult “Phantom Tollbooth,” as its corkscrew turns of language (also Tollboothian). I loved how Yi animates objects and reduces humans to collections of cells. The celestial group refers to its fans as “livers” — maybe because it sounds like “lovers,” but more because “we kept them alive,” the narrator notes, “like critical organs.”Shelves of books snake through a dark library “in a disorderly line, not unlike intestines.” Electronic door locks emit “smug beeps.” Cosmetic sheet masks, a 30-day skin regimen packaged with images of the boy band, stay on way longer than they should. “In a month, my dead skin cells will fall away, and I’ll be left with the juicier cells underneath,” U.N. states flatly. “Then I’ll be closer to who I really am.”(This is how Sephora makes billions.)In real life, K-pop fans are a sprawling entity, bigger and more online than Gaga’s Monsters or Beyoncé’s Hive: “armies” that have increasingly made incursions into politics and faced government censure. In its clever compactness, “Y/N” resists the junkiness of the internet where they reside, the fanfics and the livestreams and endless comments.All that writing, that global “content,” is now so ubiquitous, so endless, so cheap — ChatGPT, bonjour — it comes to seem like a toxic cloud, against which a well-formed novel like this counteracts, a blast of cleansing heat.Y/N | By Esther Yi | 224 pp. | Astra House | $26 More

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      ‘Free Chol Soo Lee’ Review: An Indictment of the Justice System

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      Activists helped free a Korean immigrant, and this documentary explores the wrongful conviction and its ripple effect.“Free Chol Soo Lee” tells the story of a wrongfully convicted man who, after spending nearly a decade in prison, was ultimately vindicated in court.But it isn’t an uplifting movie. As much as it celebrates the exoneration of its subject, a Korean immigrant in California named Chol Soo Lee, this documentary, directed by Julie Ha and Eugene Yi, is concerned with how the consequences of the failure of justice rippled through the rest of his life. It also considers whether the expectations of those who helped him, and his brief moment of celebrity, may have weighed him down. Just because Lee was innocent doesn’t mean he was perfect.Born in 1952 during the Korean War, Lee was eventually taken by his mother to San Francisco. Having lived, by the movie’s account, somewhat aimlessly, he was convicted of a 1973 killing in Chinatown. Persistent advocacy by K.W. Lee, an investigative reporter for The Sacramento Union, and a coalition of activists drew attention to significant flaws in the case. The process took years, and a separate death penalty case against Chol Soo Lee, for a prison-yard killing, only complicated matters.“Free Chol Soo Lee” takes its cues from Lee’s own words, read as narration by Sebastian Yoon, and from the recollections of his supporters. Archival material involving K.W. Lee, who said he saw a “very thin line” between himself and the man he was covering, is especially poignant. But “Free Chol Soo Lee” is somewhat dry and, as criminal-justice documentaries go, sadly familiar when it strays from Lee’s unique and grim perspective, which includes details of his struggles with prison life and depression. In a passage used as voice-over, he described death row as a system “designed so that the condemned man would kill himself before his execution.”Free Chol Soo LeeNot rated. In English and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      Greta Lee Is Still a Pool Shark

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      The actress, who stars in “Russian Doll,” visits her favorite Koreatown haunts.“I like to find the most impossible shot and then get really disappointed when it doesn’t happen,” the actress Greta Lee said, leaning over a billiards table in the Koreatown section of Manhattan. “I don’t know what that says about me.”She aimed at a solid red ball, which obediently dropped into a center pocket. Ms. Lee allowed herself a brief celebration: “Mommy’s still got it, OK?”This was on a recent Wednesday evening, just before the premiere of the second season of the Netflix drama “Russian Doll,” in which Ms. Lee, 39, stars as Maxine, a best friend of Natasha Lyonne’s time-trapped Nadia. A standout of the first season (people approach her on the street, parroting Maxine’s tag line, “Sweet birthday baybeeee”), Ms. Lee returns with a deeper performance, in delirious outfits and statement eyeliner.She is also a star of the Apple TV+ drama “The Morning Show, in which she plays Stella Bak, a tech genius and network president who favors Balenciaga and vintage Chanel.For this outing, she had dressed down — wide-legged pants and diaphanous blouse, worn under a daffodil duster, with a Prada fanny pack to match — and had taken a car to this block of West 32nd Street where she and her husband, the comedy writer Russ Armstrong, had passed a lot of hazy evenings in their 20s. The couple, who relocated to Los Angeles during the pandemic, have two sons, 3 and 5, so the nights are hazy for different reasons.Ms. Lee began the night at the Korean grocery H Mart. In her 20s, as a California transplant making her Broadway debut, she had prowled its aisles for delicacies that reminded her of home. On this night, she filled her cart with an orange drink, an Asian pear drink, a sponge cake.“This is where you cross the threshold with your white friends who say they love Korean food and then you serve them this,” she said, pointing to some fried anchovies. Then she went in search of strawberry Pocky and dried squid.With Natasha Lyonne in a scene from Season 2 of “Russian Doll.”NetflixMr. Armstrong, who had been catching up on work, met her in the snack aisle, just as she was reaching for a bag of sweet corn chips. “We have an industrial supply of these at home,” he said approvingly.Groceries paid for, they made their way down the block to Woorijip, a popular cafe that serves premade Korean comfort foods. “Any time of night, it could give you everything you needed,” Mr. Armstrong said nostalgically.The cafe had made a few improvements since they last frequented it. “I have mixed feelings about this,” Ms. Lee said. “Because it’s so much nicer than it used to be.”They loaded a tray with Korean sushi, an omelet, a kimchi stew. “This stew tastes exactly the same,” Mr. Armstrong said. “It’s 5 percent saltier than it should be, which is exactly how I like it.”Ms. Lee dipped a spoon in. “Oh yeah,” she said. “There’s so much MSG. Just how our grandmothers intended.”Fortified, they headed to Space Billiards, a 12th floor pool hall hung with orange lanterns. They tried to order Korean beers, but they were sold out, so they settled at a table with a Heineken and a Budweiser. Ms. Lee tested out a cue. She said that she hadn’t played in a while.“Mommy’s still got it, OK?” said Ms. Lee, who played a lot of billards when she was growing up in Los Angeles. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesShe played a lot as a Los Angeles teenager, mostly in Koreatown pool halls, trying to impress Koreatown boys. As a student at Harvard-Westlake, a prestigious secondary school, she learned code switching early on, wearing poofy dresses to her white friends’ sweet 16 birthday parties and giant cargo pants to the pool halls after.That ability to inhabit different roles has served her career well, in supporting roles in shows such as “Inside Amy Schumer,” “High Maintenance” and “Girls.” She has a particular talent for satirizing privilege and entitlement.As an oddball character actress, she has rarely played roles that felt true to her own experience, she said. That will change with “Past Lives,” a romantic drama due later this year, in which Ms. Lee plays a first-generation immigrant who reconnects with a childhood sweetheart. She is also developing the essay collection “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning” for series television. She plans to star in it.“I’m not hiding,” she said of her work on “Past Lives.” “And that is really scary for me, because maybe I’ve been hiding a part of myself behind these characters. And I don’t know if people are going to be receptive to this version of me.”For now, Ms. Lee had a different role to play: pool shark. She is a devotee of Jeanette Lee, the Korean American professional pool player. “I’m going to act like I know what I’m doing,” she said.Feasting on Korean comfort food with her husband, Russ Armstrong, at Woorijip.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesMr. Armstrong broke. Ms. Lee sunk a ball. They traded shots back and forth, her long red nails gripping the cue. “With your nails and the full outfit it’s an intimidation thing,” Mr. Armstrong said.But her performance was not so threatening. “I’m trying to make all of those K-Town boys proud,” Ms. Lee said as she lined up a shot. She missed. “Never do anything to try to impress someone else,” she said.She undershot. Then she overshot. “I was so good at geometry,” she said. “What happened to me?”It look her a few rounds of 8-ball, but she seemed to hit her stride. “No more messing around, let’s do this,” she said, aiming for the corner pocket. She soon cleared the table as Mr. Armstrong, who had several balls remaining, looked on approvingly.“I didn’t think I was going to win,” Ms. Lee said.“I knew you were going to win,” Mr. Armstrong said, congratulating her. “I always bet on you.” More

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      First Asian American Muppet Arrives on ‘Sesame Street’

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      Ji-Young, a guitar-playing Korean American character, will bring rock music and conversations about racism to the long-running children’s show starting on Thanksgiving Day.“Sesame Street” is welcoming its first Asian American muppet to the neighborhood. Ji-Young, a Korean American 7-year-old who loves playing her electric guitar and skateboarding, will make her debut next week.Ji-Young won’t just be sharing her love for rock music and tteokbokki, or Korean rice cakes, on the show. She will also play a role in countering anti-Asian bias and harassment at a time of heightened awareness around the issue.Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces “Sesame Street,” said it created Ji-Young to support families of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage as part of its racial justice initiative, Coming Together. Sesame Workshop introduced the initiative in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and as racism and violence targeting Asians and Asian Americans surged during the pandemic.“Sesame Street” has been on air for more than 50 years, but Ji-Young is its first Asian American muppet.The show has had human characters and guests of Asian descent, including Alan Muraoka, who is Japanese American and owns the fictional Hooper’s Store. In June, “Sesame Street” released a video called “Proud of Your Eyes,” in which Mr. Muraoka helped Analyn, a Filipino American girl, after she was teased about the shape of her eyes. Muraoka and Wes, a muppet, told Analyn that her eyes were beautiful and part of what made her who she was.Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociology professor at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., and an expert on race and racism in Hollywood, said that when she first immigrated to the United States from Taiwan at age 5, she learned more English from “Sesame Street” than from the E.S.L. classes at her school.The show was more diverse than most children’s programming of the time, but Ms. Yuen said it was missing characters who looked like her when she was growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s.“I think having this muppet who is more culturally specific and is able to speak another language, especially in the current time of rising anti-Asian hate, is so essential to representation,” she said.Kathleen Kim, Ji-Young’s puppeteer, with the finished muppet.Zach Hyman/Sesame WorkshopJi-Young made her television debut on the “Today” show on NBC on Monday. “You know what’s really cool about ‘Sesame Street’ is that no matter what you look like, or how you play or where you come from, you belong, and that’s really cool,” Ji-Young said.She will be introduced on “Sesame Street” during a special episode on Thanksgiving Day on HBO Max and on local PBS stations. The show, “See Us Coming Together: A Sesame Street Special,” will also feature Simu Liu and Naomi Osaka.Mr. Liu, who plays the title character in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings,” welcomed Ji-Young to “Sesame Street” on Twitter on Monday, after The Associated Press reported on the new muppet’s debut.“I’ve had the privilege of experiencing so many incredible things over the past couple of years, but this definitely sticks out,” Mr. Liu said. “Welcome to Sesame Street, Ji-Young! I’m so glad I got to hang out with you.”In the special episode, the residents of Sesame Street celebrate Neighbor Day, a community event with food, music and games. Someone offscreen tells Ji-Young to “go back home,” and then the other residents, guest stars and friends, like Elmo, offer her support.Ji-Young’s puppeteer is Kathleen Kim, who is Korean American. “My one hope, obviously, is to actually help teach what racism is, help teach kids to be able to recognize it and then speak out against it,” Ms. Kim, 41, told The A.P. “But then my other hope for Ji-Young is that she just normalizes seeing different kinds of looking kids on TV.” More

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      Artist David Choe on His New FX and Hulu Show

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      An hour into our interview, the artist David Choe admits that he lied about something.He said he had turned down two offers to do a television show many years ago, one from the producer Scott Rudin, the other from the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain. He had said the same thing during his first burst of media attention nearly 10 years ago; and he said it again during a Zoom call last week from his home in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. More

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      in Music

      When Her Mother Died, She Found Solace at a Korean Grocery

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      Michelle Zauner, a musician who performs under the name Japanese Breakfast, is making her book debut with “Crying in H Mart.”After an hour of discussing her mother, the afterlife and the shamelessness sometimes required in producing art, Michelle Zauner adjusted her video camera to show her Bushwick apartment. Her coffee table, suddenly in view, was covered with Jolly Pong Cereal Snack, NongShim Shrimp Crackers, Lotte Malang Cow Milk Candies and other Asian junk food.“This whole time we’ve been talking,” she said, “you’ve been in front of these snacks.”These are her favorite selections from H Mart, the Korean-American supermarket chain that for her serves as both muse and refuge. Zauner, best known for her music project Japanese Breakfast, wrote about the “beautiful, holy place” and the death of her mother, Chongmi, in a 2018 essay for The New Yorker, “Crying in H Mart,” which led to a memoir by the same name that Knopf is publishing on Tuesday.In the essay, which is the first chapter of her book, she relayed her grief, her appetite and her fear that, after losing Chongmi to cancer in 2014, “am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?” The rest of the memoir explores her identity as a biracial Asian-American, the bonds that food can forge and her efforts to understand and remember her mother.Zauner at home in Brooklyn with a painting by her mother.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesZauner’s parents met in Seoul in the early 1980s, when her father, Joel, moved there from the United States to sell cars to the American and Canadian military. Chongmi was working at the hotel where he stayed. They married after three months of dating and traveled through Japan, Germany and South Korea again before landing in Eugene, Ore., where Michelle Zauner grew up. In early drafts of the book, she said during our interview, she tried to imagine what it was like for her mother to marry so quickly, to face a language barrier with her husband, to uproot herself over and over. When she asked her father questions like “Do you remember how she was feeling?,” he answered with geographical facts and figures.As with many immigration stories, scarcity threaded its way through a lot of what Zauner found while writing the book: In their family, her father was so focused on providing that he couldn’t give her the emotional support she sought, while her mother viewed identity crises almost as a waste of energy. “I feel like she’d be moved by parts of the book,” Zauner said, “but I think there are parts she’d think, ‘I don’t know why you had to go on about this for the whole book when you’re just like an American kid.’”Zauner, 32, writes about their volatile relationship, contrasting her mother’s poised restraint with her need to express herself, her sense of urgency that “no one could possibly understand what I went through and I needed everyone to know.”After graduating from Bryn Mawr, she threw herself into the Philadelphia rock band Little Big League in 2011 before striking out on her own as Japanese Breakfast. Her first two solo albums, like her memoir, focused on grief: “Psychopomp,” in 2016, and “Soft Sounds From Another Planet,” in 2017. Her next one, “Jubilee,” is scheduled for release in June, and it is more joyful, influenced by Kate Bush, Björk and Randy Newman. In between these projects, she worked on video game soundtracks, directed music videos and crashed into the literary world, reflecting her maximalist and, yes, shameless approach to creativity.“The thing about Michelle is you just need to give her a little push in that direction — an affirmation — and suddenly she’s just flying,” said Daniel Torday, a novelist and the director of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr, who has been a mentor to Zauner.For her the artistic process, whether it is in her music or her writing, often feels all-consuming and anxiety-producing, something she handles by working through it. “If I’m going to take the time to go in on something,” Zauner said, “I want to be terrified of it.”And there are terrifying parts she confronts when retracing the last few months of her mother’s life. It is not exactly the cancer — in the book, she describes the disease with polish, crushing Vicodin for her mother with a spoon and scattering its blue crumbs over scoops of ice cream “like narcotic sprinkles.” It is that Chongmi was dying just as their relationship was at its best, “a sort of renaissance period, where we were really getting to enjoy each other’s company and know each other as adults,” Zauner said.In 2014, she moved back home to help care for her. Chongmi died that October, two weeks after Michelle Zauner married Peter Bradley, a fellow musician. By Christmas, he joined her and her father in Eugene, navigating the first heavy moment of their new life together — “like a baptism of adulthood,” Bradley said.“Crying in H Mart” is out on April 20.She and her father haven’t been in contact for more than a year, save for an attempt at therapy over Zoom. After her mother died, “our grief couldn’t come together in this way where we could experience it together,” Zauner said. “He started wearing this big ruby in his ear and then got a big tattoo, lost 40 pounds, started dating this young woman, and it felt like kind of a second death.”In an essay for Harper’s Bazaar published earlier this month, she wrote about the pain of that experience, then searching for a way to make peace with him and his new relationship, which has since ended.Joel Zauner, in a phone interview, expressed sadness about their estrangement. He avoided reading “Crying in H Mart” for months (Michelle Zauner sent him an advance copy), but when he did, he wept throughout and was stung that he wasn’t included in the acknowledgments. The tattoo was done on the anniversary of Chongmi’s death, he said, and is of her name in Korean, with the Korean word for “sweetheart” underneath.“I’m not a perfect guy,” he said. “But I certainly deserve more than I was given in both the article and the book.”Today, Zauner feels ready to shake this period of loss and just tour, and there is still more she wants to unpack about being Korean, possibly by living there for a year. “I think there’s a big part of my sense of belonging that is missing because I don’t speak the language fluently,” she said, and she is determined to preserve the thread she has to the Korean side of her family.She became engrossed at one point with Emily Kim, who as Maangchi is known as “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child,” finding peace in the way she peeled Korean pears — “the Korean way,” Kim wrote in an email — using the knife to remove the skin in one long strip, the way Chongmi used to. In 2019, the two starred in a Vice video that explored the effects of migration on cuisine, and on Zauner’s 30th birthday, Kim made her dinner. “She’s a real Korean daughter,” Kim said.Zauner feels wary, however, about her work in any conjunction with the anti-Asian attacks in the past year. “I’m fearful of using this tragedy to try and promote anything I’ve created,” she said over email the day after the Atlanta shootings. “It’s a little hard to encapsulate my feelings on such a heavy thing with a few words.”Her belief system these days has become more nuanced than before. She is an atheist, “but then there has to be some smudging of the edges for me,” she said. “In some ways it is impossible for me to not feel like my mother was looking out for me because of the serendipitous, fateful way that things happened in my life.”Almost a year ago, when she finished writing “Crying in H Mart,” she posted a photo of herself in her living room with her eyes closed and a peaceful smile, holding the book’s draft in her hands, with the caption “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.”There are instances when even though it goes against everything you believe, it’s important, Zauner said, to create an ambiguous space for things.“Like when I leave flowers on her grave, I know technically what I am doing is I’m leaving the flowers for myself. I’m creating a ritual and commemorating her with my time by doing this. But that is not enough for me to feel OK about it,” she said. “I need to kind of believe that she knows that they’re there.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More