New York Magazine 11/27-12/10/17

1 In a profile by Allison P. Davis, rapper Cardi B (“Regular, Degular, Shmegular Girl From the Bronx,” November 13–26) waxed lyrical on fame, and her thoughts elicited ecstatic responses—especially for her take on feminism. The rapper’s resistance to the “feminist” label and her succinct characterization of what that term means (“Being a feminist is being equal to do what a man do”) prompted Megan Reynolds at Jezebel to write that Cardi “pokes a hole in the inflated balloon of theory and hand-wringing that accompanies most of the contemporary feminist movement and breaks it down to its very core … Cardi nailed it.” Added Bustle’s Alexis Rhiannon, it “certainly sounds like Cardi B may have gotten the message in the past that feminism wasn’t for her—at least white feminism. But…

Liz Smith, 1923–2017 One day about ten years ago, I had lunch with Liz Smith at Michael’s. For the 40th anniversary of this magazine, my editor had asked me to indulge her in some promiscuous, sweeping reminiscence about her 33-year run as a tabloid gossip columnist. I had known Smith since 1989, when she’d agreed to let me trail her for several weeks so I could write about her for 7 Days magazine. At one point, Smith, who had been catching grief for being too chummy with her subjects, had said defensively to me, “Barbara Walters’s whole career wasn’t made on her talent. It was made on her ability to get access.” When the piece was published, Smith sent me a letter telling me that Walters was furious and that…

A FEW WEEKENDS AGO, at a seersucker-in-November southern horse-racing event I attended with some lovely and friendly people who will nevertheless be the first ones taken out when the revolution comes, a family friend, an older white man, asked me what I, the one sportswriter he knew, thought of the kneeling NFL players. I told him that while I stand for the anthem myself, I supported the players’ right to express themselves politically and encouraged him to worry less about the kneeling and more about what the players were trying to say. He snorted and said he was done with the NFL until “they stand their ass up.” We then drank some bourbon and found something else to talk about. Later on, I spoke with another family friend, one with…

“I was working for people who were crazier than I had thought.” KEEPING SECRETS was my career,” Daniel Ellsberg says. “I didn’t lose the aptitude for that when I put out the Pentagon Papers.” This might come as a shock, considering that the former Defense Department analyst is best known for leaking classified information nearly half a century ago, thus bringing about a landmark legal precedent in favor of press freedom and, indirectly, hastening the end of both the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. But for many years, even as Ellsberg beat prosecution, became a peace activist, and wrote an autobiography titled Secrets, he still had something remarkable left to disclose. It turns out that Ellsberg also took many thousands of pages of documents pertaining to another subject: nuclear…

 REBECCA TRAISTER: Honest to God, what is wrong with people? ROSS DOUTHAT “There’s a predation inherent in liberation.” REBECCA TRAISTER “But that view of sexual liberation almost leaves out the woman, right? ROSS DOUTHAT: Mostly testosterone. RT: I have to say, this part of the news cycle—where everyone is obsessing over whether Al Franken should resign and whether Bill Clinton should have—is really beginning to wear on me. I’m sure a cynic could read that as being defensive about fellow liberals. But while I am all for reevaluating Bill Clinton and for hearing more about Al Franken, I think that is pulling focus away from what should be being revealed here, which is the pervasiveness—the way that the whole culture tells us that jokes about grabbing women’s breasts are funny,…

Twice a day in our house, we turn on a projector that casts cartoon music videos on a blank stretch of wall. The songs are catchy and bright and usually keep our toddler captivated for the amount of time we need him to hold still. “There are no monsters who live in our home,” goes one of my favorites. “There’s only me and my family who live in our home/’Cause there are no monsters that live here.” Up on the wall, two healthy-looking cartoon children learn not to be scared of the dark, while my son clutches my forearm and breathes dutifully into a mask. Sometimes he spots something familiar—an animal with a noise he can make, a color he knows how to say—and rushes to point it out, only…