New York Magazine 6/12-6/25/17

1 “A competent woman losing a job to an incompetent man is not an anomalous Election Day surprise; it is Tuesday in America,” Rebecca Traister wrote in the first major profile of Hillary Clinton since her defeat (“Citizen Clinton,” May 29–June 11). Unsurprisingly, the profile elicited an outpouring of reactions (as Alex Shephard at the New Republic wrote, it “stirred the hornets’ nest that appears to follow Clinton wherever she goes”), including a fair bit of vitriol from the lock-her-up crowd. Commenter PolsciProfessor55 responded to this, writing, “I think one of the main reasons for the nasty comments is the misogynistic attitudes many men and a good number of women hold. I told my husband years ago, we would have a black man for president long before we would have…

Unfulfilling Forty-one years before Maureen O’Connor dove into Pornhub’s user data for this issue’s cover story, Molly Haskell found herself in her local movie theater on 86th Street, two seats away from a man who was enthusiastically masturbating. Onscreen was an X-rated movie titled Inserts, which had made its way into conventional distribution channels. We’ve all read stories about the gradual mainstreaming of porn, but the early 1970s were really when it first happened: The explicit films Deep Throat and I Am Curious (Yellow) had survived legal challenges to their exhibition, and the old definition of hard-core pornography established a decade earlier by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart—“I know it when I see it”—had begun to get, as Haskell says today, “blurrier and blurrier.” Down on 42nd Street, porn and…

IF ONE RATES the Russia scandal on an impeachability scale of one to ten, with ten being a videotape of Donald Trump speaking in Russian to his handlers from the Kremlin, like Kevin Costner in the last scene in No Way Out, we’re currently at about 7.5. So far, the following events have been credibly reported: No fewer than five Trump associates (Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, and Jared Kushner) have obscured or outright lied about their financial ties to or meetings with Russian officials. Kushner asked a Russian official during the presidential transition to communicate via a secret communications line. Trump himself appointed a campaign manager who had previously run overseas campaign operations on behalf of Moscow; appeared on-camera during the campaign asking Russia to hack…

WHEN RACHEL LINDSAY— star of this season of The Bachelorette and the first black Bachelor or Bachelorette ever—arrives at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood just before the current season (now several episodes deep) kicks off, she’s dressed in perfect Los Angeles athleisure: off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, cropped workout pants, Nike sneakers. I was half-expecting her to show up in Bachelorette fatigues—shimmering eye shadow, a sequined gown—but the unofficial L.A. uniform of SoulCycle and Sugar-fish feels equally appropriate. Shortly after hugging me hello (“I’m a hugger now!”), Lindsay turns to the producer sitting next to her and asks if she can “spill the tea.” The producer nods. “I am very happy. I am very much so in love. And I am very much so engaged!” She raises her arms over her head, squeal-screams,…

GARY COHN, the current head of the National Economic Council, likes to say he is a fan of bad decisions. “I’m really good at making mistakes,” he told business-school students at Sacred Heart University last year. And at American University, his alma mater, in 2009: “I always saw 95 percent of my great decisions start out as bad decisions.” Last November, when Cohn walked into Trump Tower, he didn’t expect to be making decisions of any kind. He was there, like Floyd Mayweather before and Kanye West after him, because he had been summoned. In his case, to impart the macroeconomic wisdom he possessed as president of Goldman Sachs onto the newly elected president of the United States: Donald Trump, the man the smart money said would never win. “It…

WAKING UP on a Sunday morning, I received a text about what happened after I left the previous night’s party. “Everyone got high and we played truth or dare. Ted and Ivan docked.” “Are you serious?” I replied. “I thought that only happened in porn.” Defined by Urban Dictionary as “the act of placing the head of one’s penis inside the foreskin of another’s penis,” docking is an act that, until that fateful night, nobody at the party had attempted or witnessed firsthand. (Or so they claimed.) But once you know a thing is a thing, sometimes you can’t get it out of your mind. And in a fit of libidinous boredom, or idle curiosity, or lust, or who even knows why anyone does anything anyway—you do that thing. Because…