Cubicles in the Sky

Norman Foster is one of the world’s quintessential starchitects, and his reputation, for better and worse, has been defined by his work for corporate clients. He has designed some of the most iconic office buildings and corporate campuses of the modern era—from the HSBC building in Hong Kong to the Hearst Tower in New York. His projects have all been highly referential, capable of evoking both postmodernism and Art Deco and everything in between. And his firm, Foster and Partners, has become a familiar presence in New York City. Now it is tackling a new building for J.P. Morgan Chase at 270 Park Avenue. A 60-story office tower that replaces the bank’s previous home, it rises high above the street almost as if it were suspended above it. Writing in the July/August section of Books & the Arts, Karrie Jacobs considers what Foster’s glossy style can offer in an era when the very idea of the office building is in flux but also finds that what originally was appealing—especially in his Hong Kong HSBC building—has gone missing in 270 Park. For while the HSBC building transformed a corporate office park into a quasi-public space, the new building appears to seek to stand apart from the city. “Openness,” she notes, “is hard to come by in a post-9/11, post-Covid, increasingly post-­democracy world.” Read “Norman Foster’s 270 Park and the Rise of the New Office Building”

Life and Death

Organized crime, in film and TV, has long been mythologized as the darker side of the American dream—of the drive to hustle and succeed, to create your own opportunities whatever it takes. Deli Boys, a new crime comedy on Hulu created by Abdullah Saeed, is of this tradition, and self-consciously so: Its image of organized crime is empathetic and slapstick. Tossing comedy and ethnicity into a blender with the standard Mafia and drug-dealing tropes, Deli Boys is at once a succession story, a riches-to-rags tale, and, perhaps most important, a buddy comedy following two hapless brothers, Mir and Raj Dar, who inherit their father’s convenience-store empire only to immediately lose it. “The series,” Jorge Cotte writes in his review for Books & the Arts, “is really about how they rebuild that business, which turns out to be not at all what they expected, because the stores were merely fronts for the sale and distribution of cocaine.” Read “The Slapstick Criminality of Hulu’s “Deli Boys””