New York Magazine August 2015

1 Last issue's cover story featured photographs by Amanda Demme and interviews by Noreen Malone with 35 of the women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault (“Thirty-Five Women, On These Pages Alone,” July 27–August 9). The feature made newspaper and television reports around the world—and even inspired a political cartoon by the Washington Post's Michael Cavna, who wrote that the New York cover has "an accumulating power … In its silence, the display is deafening." Many felt the sheer volume of testimony contributed to its impact. "Journalism as a way to bear witness," tweeted Heidi N. Moore, "to shock people into seeing the truth before them." The New York Times' Sydney Ember spoke to one of the featured women, Patricia Leary Steuer, who told her that some of…

TWITTER IS A MESS—everybody says so. Twitter is mostly nonsense. You can't find what you need on Twitter. Twitter is all haystack and no needles, all static and no signal. By the lights of many investors, Twitter is floundering. Its longtime CEO (five years is long in internet time), Dick Costolo, jumped or was pushed in June; the board is scrambling to find a replacement; and Wall Street is sounding the alarm. The company's revenue barely doubled last year, rising to $1.4 billion. Only 300 million people use Twitter every month. Its stock has hit an all-time low. Advice is flowing in torrents: "How Twitter Can Be Fixed"; "Reimagining Twitter." A Washington Post column explains "How to Fix Twitter, As Told via Tweets." Twitter must pivot, must be transformed, must…

NEW YORK CITY Football Club, the $100 million baby born from the union of Manchester City and the Yankees, hopes to bring its fans joy with its newly imported triumvirate: the superstars David Villa (from Spain), Andrea Pirlo (Italy), and Frank Lampard (England). So far, Villa has contributed more than a dozen of his apparently effortless goals, in which the ball seems to pick up speed after it rockets off his instep. Pirlo, at 36, can still see into the future, dropping a pass exactly where his teammate will be when it lands. Lampard has yet to show off his high-octane midfield game: A calf injury delayed his debut until August 1, when he trotted out in the 69th minute to try in vain to rescue his new team from…

THESE ARE LLAMAS," says Lily Tomlin, holding up two furry toy replicas for inspection. "Or they might be alpacas. I can't tell the difference." It's a hot August morning, and Tomlin is giving me a tour of her office—a cozy, cluttered, ground-level apartment on a sleepy street in Studio City. "I don't put much stock in memorabilia," she warns. Not even the oversize rocking chair, official domain of Edith Ann, Tomlin's famous, philosophizing 5-year-old from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In? "Oh, that's at home," she assures me. Tomlin decides the little figurines are alpacas, most likely a keepsake from her desk on The West Wing, where her character, a former alpaca farmer, served as executive assistant to Martin Sheen's President Bartlet for four and a half seasons. We're in the ad…

“I GAVE BIRTH TO TWO PREMATURE KIDS,” said California's Barbara Boxer on the Senate floor last week, during the debate over cutting federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Boxer sounded impatient, irritated. "I just don't like lectures by men about what it's like." Her comment came in response to the furious fight that has erupted over the undercover videos, made by an anti-abortion outfit calling itself the Center for Medical Progress, purporting to show that Planned Parenthood is profiting illegally from the sale of aborted fetal tissue to medical-research companies. So far, the heavily edited videos have offered no clear evidence of wrongdoing but have shown Planned Parenthood doctors and administrators in frank conversations about specific protocols and ethical concerns involved in the donation of fetal tissue, for which consent is…

FASHION HAS QUITE A BIT in common with fairy tales: strangely compelling ideas, lives distilled to extremes, and a desire to leave the banalities of this world for something more fantastic. In this issue, we paired the artist Rachel Feinstein with the author Michael Cunningham to create our own fashion fairy tale: a dark and surrealist exploration of motherhood enacted by a group of women including Sadie Sink, who played Annie on Broadway, Grace Coddington, and Feinstein herself. ¶ Fashion likes a happy story, too, the kind where a young woman with a good idea and a lot of energy can start a global brand from her kitchen table. That's the tale of Natalie Massenet, whose Net-a-Porter, after 15 years in business, is on the doorstep of major change. Erin…