New York Magazine 7/10-7/23/17

1 In New York’s latest issue, Frank Rich laid out the case for how “the parallels between Watergate and now run deeper than you might think” (“Just Wait,” June 26–July 9 ). Slate’s Michelle Goldberg responded, “The most salient parallel between the Trump-Russia scandal and Watergate might lie in the frustrating, stop-start way it is unfolding and the collective uncertainty about who it will ensnare … It’s worth remembering this in the twitchy interregnum between revelations when people on both the right and the left are arguing that the Trump-Russia scandal is an elite preoccupation distant from the concerns of the electorate.” Leonard H. Gordy asked, “Why would Democrats want to replace Trump with someone more competent and doctrinaire? Would the Watergate aftermath have turned out differently if Agnew was…

New Yorkers by Nature The cover of the issue you’re reading takes inspiration (as anyone of a certain age will recognize) from the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture manual first published by Stewart Brand in 1968. It was a how-to book for people with an urge to go back to the land, giving basic instructions to citified folks about operating wood stoves and drilling wells and such. ¶ Richard Goldstein, a longtime editor at The Village Voice, was a frequent contributor to New York in its early years, and he knew many New Yorkers who were feeling the need to get out of town. “There was,” he explains today, “a lot of hostility coming from the police, who just regarded hippies as baby seals who could be clubbed. I saw…

WHEN BENJAMIN WITTES meets me for lunch at the century-old Tabard Inn in Washington, D.C.—the city’s original boutique hotel—he’s just wrapping up a phone call. “I was talking to a friend,” he says. “A personal friend.” I ask if it was Jim Comey. “It was not Jim Comey.” You never know. After the FBI director was fired in May, Wittes relayed to the New York Times a bombshell conversation he’d had with Comey about Trump’s apparent attempts to sway the bureau’s Russia investigation. Then Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he’d asked a close friend to disclose yet more Trumpian impropriety to the Times. “And that was Mr. Wittes?” asked Senator Susan Collins. It wasn’t, but no matter. Suddenly, he was D.C. famous; the very next day, Collins…

THE FIRST TIME Camilo José Vergara pointed his camera at the corner of 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, it was 1989. Most of the upper floors of the building he photographed had been bricked up. But it was highly functional at street level. “Count how many small businesses are in this building,” says Griffin Hansbury, a.k.a. Jeremiah Moss, the blogger behind Vanishing New York and now author of a book by the same name. “This is a building that, had it been brought back to life instead of destroyed, you could theoretically have more than a dozen small businesses and people living over that.” As for its replacement, it’s mostly “a glass box with a Whole Foods and a bank.” The store opens on July 21. Men’s Walkers, one…

“I’m proud of the fact that the people who say they love Glenn aren’t Asians.” YOU CAUGHT ME at a better time,” the actor Steven Yeun says as we sit down for eggs and potatoes one morning at Locanda Verde. Last fall, Yeun’s Walking Dead character, Glenn Rhee, erstwhile pizza-delivery boy and Everyman, met a violent end in the season-seven premiere. Glenn was one of the few characters to have survived since the first season, and his death triggered mass hysteria among viewers. (Many vowed to quit the show entirely, and ratings have slipped considerably since his exit.) Yeun, however, is proud his character went out with a bang. “If Glenn had continued on, knowing how things usually shake out, I could totally foresee a situation where he just slowly,…

FIGURE 1 In the jungles of Costa Rica, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out. FIGURE 2 In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. I Doomsday PEERING BEYOND SCIENTIFIC RETICENCE. I T IS, I PROMISE, WORSE THAN YOU THINK. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible,…