New York Magazine 3/20-4/2/17

1 David Marchese’s interview with David Letterman on everything from the old late-night wars to the man he calls “Trumpy” (“In Conversation: David Letterman,” March 6–19 ) was just the prompt many readers needed to convey how much they miss him. “I would pay good money for an app that I could turn on at any time and listen to Dave endlessly rant,” wrote commenter Fritzo. “Dave, whether you accept it or not, you are an American treasure!” added DanteB1. “Please, please, please find a media outlet—a podcast, a once-a-week show, or anything in between.” Not everyone remembered Letterman so fondly, though. “I stopped watching Letterman years ago after he made crude jokes about Sarah Pal-in’s daughter being ‘knocked up’ by A-Rod on his show … Denigrating a woman on…

From sympathy … In the first year of the Reagan-era homelessness crisis, we called it “the shame of the city.” MAURICE HAS A face like Michelangelo’s statue of Moses, angry eyes glowing out from the midst of white glaring hair, a patriarchal beard touching his chest, a beaklike nose, and a high-domed forehead. Long ago, he taught physics at one of the city’s major universities. And now, from the depths of his illness, his language and manner parody a professor’s. A reporter is writing about the homeless, he is told. Would he mind answering some questions? “Well, it’s the robbery rate. It’s the problem of finding something to eat,” he begins, ticking off the points on his fingertips. Suddenly, he seizes a reporter’s notebook and writes across it the word…

A FEW WEEKS AGO, a group of conservative students at Middlebury College in Vermont invited the highly controversial author Charles Murray to speak on campus about his book Coming Apart, an analysis of the growing inequality and distance between wealthy and poor white Americans. His talk was shut down by organized chanting in its original venue, and disrupted when it was shifted to a nearby room and livestreamed. When Murray and his faculty interlocutor, the political scientist Allison Stanger, then left to go to their car, they were surrounded by a mob, which tried to stop them from leaving the campus. Someone in the mêlée grabbed Stanger by the hair and twisted her neck so badly she had to go to the emergency room (she is still suffering from a…

“I feel like the disclaimer should just say: ‘White people, you may be offended.’ ” THEY’RE PROBABLY HAPPY here now that Trump is president,” the Kid Mero says, attempting to empathize with the sea lions in front of him. We’re at the Bronx Zoo, watching the gray-whiskered creatures swim around and flop on the rocks, and it’s taken a total of four minutes for the president to invade the conversation. “They’re like, ‘Yo, we’re safe in here, they’re feeding us fish, we won’t get deported.’” His friend and collaborator Desus Nice disagrees. “Trump would shut this place down. Like, ‘No, it’s animal welfare. Make them try to get jobs. Release them into the streets.’” “ ‘Get them outta here,’ ” Mero continues. “‘These seals need to be working to earn…

Instead of studying how to talk to “real people,” might Democrats start talking like real people? ON THE MORNING AFTER, traumatized liberals set out hunting for answers as if Election Day were 9/11 all over again. The ubiquitous question of 15 years earlier—“Why do they hate us?”—was repurposed for Donald Trump’s demolition of the political order. Why did white working-class voters reject Hillary Clinton and the Democrats? Why did they fall for a billionaire con man? Why do they hate us? There were, of course, many other culprits in the election’s outcome. Comey, the Kremlin, the cable-news networks that beamed Trump 24/7, Jill Stein, a Clinton campaign that (among other blunders) ignored frantic on-the-ground pleas for help in Wisconsin and Michigan, and the candidate herself have all come in for…

What is it about the white working class that has such a strong hold on American politics? We have a racialized definition of workers, which is much older than this past election. For instance, when historians or normal people talk about America before the Civil War, they don’t tend to talk about enslaved workers as workers. They are units of race—they’re not unpaid workers with no rights. If you include those people in your concept of the American working class, it changes the generalizations and it changes the history. A similar example is the migration of Southerners out of the South during the First World War and after. This occurred for southern people generally, both white and black. But most people don’t pay attention to the Great Migration of white…