New York Magazine 6/26-7/9/17

1 For New York’s latest issue, Maureen O’Connor broke down ten years’ worth of Pornhub data explore how streaming pornography has infiltrated our sexual imagination, creating a kind of infinite erotic feedback loop (“Pornhub Is the Kinsey Report of Our Time,” June 12–25 ). Digg posted the cover story, writing, “We’re all on a crazy, gross and sexy spectrum.” And Laura Italiano at the New York Post wrote, “Thanks not only for all the smut, but for all the stats, as well.” Not all readers found the statistics illuminating: “Porn is not creative. It’s built on the back of sex-trafficked girls and boys. It’s shame, humiliation and commodification of the soul,” tweeted @DebraBailey. Many commenters focused on the viewing habits of women. Paisley Gilmour at Cosmopolitan U.K. wrote, “Women are…

The Wait ON JUNE 17, a jury in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, was unable to reach a verdict in a criminal sexual-assault case against Bill Cosby: Andrea Constand claimed that in 2004 Cosby had given her pills that rendered her unable to protest, then digitally penetrated her against her wishes. After days of deliberation in the courtroom outside Philadelphia, the judge declared a mistrial—ABC reports that there were two not-guilty holdouts among the 12, who are required to reach a unanimous verdict—and District Attorney Kevin R. Steele announced that he would retry the case as soon as possible. Cosby’s team took the lack of a verdict as a victory: “Mr. Cosby’s power is back,” declared spokesman Andrew Wyatt. The details of Constand’s allegations were hauntingly familiar to those who had followed the…

LAST WEEK , DONALD Trump appeared before a rally in Iowa, where he regaled a crowd of supporters with stories of the great wealth of his inner circle of advisers. “When you get the president—this is the president of Goldman Sachs—smart!—having him represent us, he went from massive paydays to peanuts!” he boasted. The crowd applauded, as people passionate enough about a politician to attend a rally are wont to do. But the thing about Trump’s core supporters is that Trump doesn’t have enough of them. To win the election, he had to pry away some former Obama voters in the Midwest, and he did it by positioning himself to his opponent’s left on economics. “Hillary will never reform Wall Street. She is owned by Wall Street!” he warned. “I’m…

IT WAS KIND of a week of WTF,” says Susan Rice. “Or two. Because it’s something made up out of whole cloth.” Rice is sitting in her office on the American University campus in the leafy neighborhood about four and a half miles northwest of the building—the White House—where, until five months ago, she worked as national-security adviser. She’s talking about the moment President Trump suggested to the New York Times she was a criminal for seeking the names of Trump-transition officials who’d come up in surveillance of foreign agents. The room is filled with Star Wars posters and figurines; Rice, a distinguished visiting research fellow in the School of International Service, quickly notes that they belong to a male colleague on sabbatical and that this was the best available…

“We didn’t have an instruction manual. It was just: Let’s reach people.” THE TUESDAY PARTY for Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District was hopping long after Ossoff had given his concession speech. While many pundits were diagnosing the Democrat’s loss to Republican Karen Handel as a defeat of America’s burgeoning resistance movement, some of the most die-hard members of that resistance—who had just spent months working their, uh, osses off—did not appear despondent. After the race had been called and Ossoff had addressed the crowd, the Westin hotel didn’t empty. Many supporters kept dancing and pouring Champagne. Some were hoping to say hello to Georgia’s House minority leader and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who was also lingering; others were already planning their next moves forward into what they felt,…

“LET OTHERS WALLOW IN WATERGATE, we are going to do our job,” said Richard Nixon with typical unearned self-righteousness in July 1973. By then, more than a year had passed since a slapstick posse of five had been caught in a bungled burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex. It had been nine months since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported in the Washington Post that the break-in was part of a “massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” conducted by all the president’s men against most of their political opponents. Now the nation was emerging from two solid months of Senate Watergate hearings, a riveting cavalcade of White House misfits and misdeeds viewed live by 71 percent of the public. Even so, Nixon had some…