New York Magazine 5/15-5/28/17

1 Jada Yuan’s cover story on Aziz Ansari (“Aziz Ansari Is From a Red State, Too,” May 1–14 ) left many readers impressed with the comedian’s dogged work ethic: “Aziz Ansari doesn’t do things by half,” wrote Sarah at Lainey Gossip. Commenter Big-Guy wrote, “Not many people intensively study the language of the country they will be visiting beforehand. Aziz does that over and over.” Others were taken with the fact that Ansari was able to achieve success on his terms, without having to resort to playing Indian stock characters. “What was cool to me about Aziz when he started out was that he never felt the burden to address his otherness,” tweeted @ fauxbeatpoet. “He was just him.” Commenter MyLifeInPlastic added, “Most importantly, his stories and characters are authentic—they…

“Okay, and how about your secretary?” “The best way we can find to make money is to be Muhammad Ali,” wrote Frederick Allen, in his introduction to one of New York’s surveys of who takes home how much. “The second-best way to earn a living is to sue Muhammad Ali for divorce.” The salaries issue was an absolute smash when it first arrived in the spring of 1972. It was gossipy, un-putdownable, and patchily useful (if you were negotiating your own pay). Most of all, it answered a nearly atavistic question: What do your neighbors make? “Every aspect of life was evaluated by so many of us—the caste, the class, the salaries,” recalls Gail Sheehy, a frequent contributor to the magazine in that era. “I remember the uproar when the…

THE DISORIENTING QUALITY of the Donald Trump administration lies in the tension between the vastness of the threat it poses to the health of the republic and the smallness of the president himself. That juxtaposition of the terrifying and the ridiculous has been on display from the very beginning, when Trump personally attempted to bully the acting director of the National Park Service into vouchsafing obviously fake estimates of attendees at his inauguration. Every week brings new confusing episodes that could signal either a tantrum or a coup, and this has had a numbing effect on all of us observing his recent assault on the integrity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And yet for all the farcical qualities on the surface, Trump’s bid to manipulate the nation’s highest law-enforcement…

THE EVENING THAT Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey, plunging Washington into chaos and possibly propelling the nation toward a constitutional crisis, the president’s most persistent legal antagonist was flying high above America. On a cross-country JetBlue flight, Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York State, was watching a seat-back TV when he learned the news the way almost everyone else—including Comey—did, with a shocking flash. “There was a group of lawyers on the plane who recognized me,” Schneider-man said the next day. As the news spread through the cabin, he began to feel glances directed his way. The usual decorum fell away, and one passenger leaned over to Schneiderman. “I bet you can’t wait for the plane to land,” he said. It wouldn’t be fair to say…

WHEN RUPERT MURDOCH left his office on a recent Monday afternoon, the 86-year-old mogul was ambushed by a BBC reporter seeking comment on the ongoing scandals at Fox News. “Nothing’s happening at Fox News, nothing,” Murdoch declared. The response was practically Trumpian in its breathtaking denial, down to Murdoch’s insistence that Fox is getting “record ratings.” In reality, in the ten months since Murdoch fired former Fox News chief Roger Ailes after dozens of women accused Ailes of sexual harassment, the network’s parent company has spent $45 million to settle sexual-harassment claims. More than 20 minority employees are suing for racial discrimination. Megyn Kelly quit for NBC, Bill O’Reilly was fired, and co-president Bill Shine resigned under pressure. Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation of the network and have…

ONE OF THE MORE absurd, madcap musical chairs of recent Mets vintage—and, boy howdy, have there been plenty—was April’s foofaraw involving an injury to pitcher Noah Syndergaard. Last year, the Asgardian ace threw his fastball harder on average than any starter in baseball, a blazing, terrifying, thatdoesn’t-really-seem-fair thunderbolt that consistently ran to an almost-impossible-to-believe 97.6 mph, the highest in baseball history. This spring, he showed up to training camp boasting that he’d added 17 pounds of muscle that would allow him to throw still harder. And he was as good out of the gate as any Met has been in decades (three starts, 19 IP, 2 ER, 20 K, 0 BB). Then he began complaining of a “dead arm” but refused to submit to an MRI, declaring that he knew…