New York Magazine 4/17-4/30/17

1 Rebecca Traister’s profile of Kirsten Gillibrand raised plenty of eyebrows—especially for the junior U.S. senator from New York’s liberal use of the word fuck (“Kirsten Gillibrand Is an Enthusiastic No,” April 3–16 ). “This Senate is rated ‘M,’ for ‘mature,’” tweeted Carl Quintanilla. But Upworthy’s Parker Molloy argued that Gillibrand’s language choice was getting far more attention than another aspect of Traister’s article: Susan Collins’s and Gilli-brand’s support for each other. Molloy wrote, “Gillibrand and Collins represent something important in any profession: what it looks like when women have each other’s backs.” Some journalists raised questions about different aspects of the piece, though. The Times’ Maggie Haberman tweeted, “Gillibrand has more in common with Sanders than Clinton? Seriously?” (For the record, Traister wrote that she has much in common…

All That Room Living in a loft—as the New Yorkers on page 90 of this design issue do—is so ubiquitous now that it’s easy to forget that it had to be invented, and the place where it was invented was downtown New York. By the 1960s, the factory floors and warehouses of the 19th century were no longer the nation’s main source of shirts and bouillon cubes and leather goods; they were too small for contemporary manufacturing, and it was a lot easier to truck everything out from an elevatorless shed next to a suburban highway. But those old buildings turned out to be great places to make art and live life, albeit sometimes only semi-legally. By 1970, the loft boom was on, and real-estate pressure was already increasing on…

OF ALL THE explanations for Donald Trump’s sudden foreign-policy about-face—from America First noninterventionist who coldly proposed to cooperate with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to humanitarian interventionist of sorts—the one that makes the most sense is that supplied by Trump himself. “That attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me—big impact,” he said at a press conference on April 5, the day after Assad allegedly launched a horrific chemical attack on civilians in northern Syria. “That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I’ve been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn’t get any worse than that.” Trump saw something on television that upset him, so he cast aside his position and formulated a new one, which neither Trump nor his advisers could articulate, driven by his newfound, apparently…

I’M SO CONFUSED, because I was in Fire Island last summer and I was like, When the fuck did they film that?” Andrew Rannells says. We’re talking about gay representation on TV, and I’ve just asked him if he’s watched the trailer for Fire Island, the new reality-TV show on Logo that follows six friends as they summer in “gay Disneyland.” The Girls actor—who gets to unleash his 20-something id as Elijah Krantz, Hannah Horvath’s ex-boyfriend turned gay best friend and roommate—is more interested in the logistics of the shoot than anything else. “Do they go to Tea?” He’s talking about the big party—the party—that starts every afternoon in the Pines at a bar near the ferry dock. I confess that I’ve never been to Fire Island. “Oh, it’s the…

A FEW YEARS AGO, on my way from eastern Oregon to Salt Lake City, I pulled off I-84 in Boise, Idaho, a place I knew only from a Lynyrd Skynyrd lyric. I strolled downtown and, in a farmers’ market smelling of lemon sage and lavender, found the best artisanal granola bars west of Burlington, Vermont. As I scanned the pale young crowd and noted the vendors’ earnestly precious names (Hoot ’n’ Holler Urban Farm, Blue Feather Bakery), it occurred to me how much the scene resembled a Saturday morning at Smorgasburg, or at Ferry Plaza in San Francisco, or in Boulder, Sante Fe, or Portland, Maine. The vibe was relaxed, prosperous, and gently urban. Around that time, the real-estate blog Estately ranked Boise fifth on its list of best cities…

THE SO-CALLED sanctuary movement began in the mid-1980s, when hundreds of thousands of refugees from the U.S.-funded civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala began crossing the border into Arizona and Texas (in 1984, less than 3 percent were granted asylum, compared with 60 percent of Iranians and 40 percent of Afghans). Following the lead of a Presbyterian minister in Tucson, hundreds of churches, synagogues, and college campuses across the U.S. proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries” and began sheltering and transporting thousands of refugees. In 1989, San Francisco became the first city to label itself a “sanctuary city” and banned the use of city resources to assist federal immigration authorities. Today, there’s still no set definition of a “sanctuary city,” though they all limit their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in…