New York Magazine 8/21-9/3/17

1 New York’s “Fall Fashion” issue turned its focus to the plus-size market and the women who design the clothes, model them, and buy them. The cover featured Jada Yuan’s story on Ashley Graham, who herself disdains the term plus-size (“It’s like, ‘Plus what?’” she says) and is paving the way for a new generation of “curve” models (“Now, This Is a Supermodel,” August 7–20 ). Such a model on a fashion-issue cover is still a somewhat rare occurrence, and readers took note. Charles Monagan, who spent 24 years as the editor of Connecticut magazine, wrote: “About 15 years ago, we thought it would be a good idea to put a plus-size model on the cover. Readers seemed to think it was great, but a lot of the advertisers hated…

“This isn’t tennis.” The “Fall Preview” package in this issue spotlights the most anticipated new things of the season, and among the movie highlights for September is Battle of the Sexes, a comedy about the mad 1973 tennis match in which Billie Jean King, the reigning Wimbledon singles champion two years running, played an exhibition match against Bobby Riggs, the trash-talking Wimbledon men’s champ of 1939. (Emma Stone and Steve Carell will star in the film.) The quasi-championship, aired in prime time on ABC, was a circus. King was borne onto the court on a litter, lifted by beefy shirtless guys; Riggs presented her with a giant Sugar Daddy lollipop, whose corporate logo also appeared on his jacket. She beat him 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, in what was played in the…

ON AUGUST 12, when a coalition of white-nationalist groups scheduled a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, it was intended to demonstrate their strength. The actual event instead demonstrated the opposite, at least in its initial effects. Despite drawing upon supporters nationwide, attendance topped out in the mid–three figures. The attacks on counterprotesters that killed one and injured dozens horrified the nation. But what transmuted the failed rally into a rousing success was the response by President Trump, who, in a pair of rage-addled rants before the news media, drew the white-nationalist movement into the Republican coalition and gave it a legitimacy it could never have dreamed of. The rally’s marchers were summoned by posters depicting marchers in Confederate uniforms with Nazi eagles; they chanted “Blood and soil!” and “Jews will not…

“I describe them as segregationists. In the United States, they’re people who believe not only that black people are inferior and pathological, but that people of color should be segregated, incarcerated, enslaved, eliminated. They stand in contrast to the assimilationists, who also believe people of color are inferior, but they attempt to civilize, develop, and educate these people.” IBRAM X. KENDI, AUTHOR OF STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS IN AMERICA “It’s clarifying to call them (or some of them) white supremacists. I believe there are many people in America today who are consciously or unconsciously racist; they hold negative views about people of races besides their own—particularly of blacks. But to be a white supremacist means to favor a political and legal system that enshrines…

DAN DOCTOROFF AND I are standing on the 26th floor of the first tower to open in Hudson Yards, in the buzzy open-plan offices of a Google offshoot called Sidewalk Labs, for which he serves as CEO. Mostly young people, jacked up on free Joyride Coffee, are collaborating all around us, some putting Post-its on the floor-to-ceiling windows. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, calls its start-ups like Sidewalk “bets.” (Waymo, the self-driving-car company, is another one.) What Google is betting on is that its technologists can and should mediate our lives, for the good of all. In the case of Sidewalk, the goal is to make a better city, and the company is in search of a municipality to partner with on building a digitally optimized district from the ground up:…

 EXCEPT FOR THE FEW PEOPLE who were privy to Michiko Kakutani’s growing estrangement from her job as the country’s most powerful book critic, many readers were surprised by her July decision to take a buyout after 38 years at the New York Times. But one book publicist did have a premonition. She had emailed Kakutani about a controversial political book for the fall and hadn’t heard back with a request for an early copy. Books that break news are zealously guarded from most reporters and critics, but when Kakutani asked, you just mailed it off and bit your nails waiting for the verdict. “I saw Michiko Kakutani once at a party and it was like spotting a unicorn.” It’s usually overreaching to call any critic’s departure the end of an…