New York Magazine 1/8-1/21/18

1 For New York, writer Mattathias Schwartz and photographer Matt Black spent weeks in Puerto Rico this fall documenting the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria (“100 Days of Darkness,” December 25, 2017–January 7, 2018). BuzzFeed’s Matt Ortile wrote that “this week’s cover from New York is putting me through the wringer—heartbreaking photography with a quote up top that makes me want to vomit.” And Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum responded, “We need this administration to finally show some compassion.” Thomas J. Field, a spokesperson for the Army’s power-restoration task force in Puerto Rico—who was quoted in the story saying, “Just because you ask for something doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. FEMA has a responsibility to the taxpayer,” in response to an unfulfilled request to have a new generator delivered…

Maura B. Jacobson, constructor of New York’s crossword puzzle from 1980 to 2011, died on Christmas Day at the age of 91. During her 1,400-puzzle tenure, she presided over one of the most well-loved and popular features in the magazine. In those three decades (until she dropped back to alternating weeks in her final year as our constructor), she never skipped an issue, not once. Her longtime friend Will Shortz, the New York Times’ puzzle editor, called her “a national treasure”—a distinction owed mostly to her knack for creating crossword grids that were unusually dense with theme clues, shot through with a distinctive and sometimes antic whimsy. Often, she’d build the grid around a funny rhymed verse that revealed itself as the puzzle was filled in. We have a memorial…

FOUR YEARS AGO, my then-five-months-pregnant wife, in the family room of the new home we had just poured much of our life savings into buying, changed the diaper of a screaming toddler and watched a man on television tell her that her husband, half the planet away, was probably about to get blown up. The Texas Republican House representative Michael McCaul, merely the Homeland Security Committee chairman, was talking about Sochi, Russia, where I, along with thousands of other journalists, was covering the 2014 Winter Olympics. “I’ve never seen a greater threat, certainly in my lifetime,” he said on Fox News Sunday. “I think there’s a high degree of probability that something will detonate, something will go off, but I do think it’s probably most likely to happen outside of…

1. Where Does He Find These People? The president’s first national-security adviser was a paid agent of the Turkish government; his second communications director raised more awareness about auto-fellatio than about the Republican agenda. Trump’s hires in lower-profile positions have been equally interesting: David Friedman, ambassador to Israel: Trump’s former bankruptcy lawyer, Friedman believes that Barack Obama is anti-Semitic; that Israel has a legal right to annex the occupied West Bank; that liberal American Jews who disagree with him are “far worse than kapos,” i.e., Jews who carried out Nazi orders during the Holocaust. The Reverend Jamie Johnson, director of community outreach, Department of Homeland Security: To work with skeptical faith-based communities, Trump picked Johnson, a conservative talk-radio host who’d argued that “Islam is not our friend” and…

THE QUIZ DADDY is not, by his own admission, a pub-quiz guy. (He’s not much of a drinker.) Nevertheless, he is here at Amity Hall, an Irish pub in Greenwich Village, trying to remember the ship that took Charles Darwin to the Galápagos. “HMS Majesty?” the Quiz Daddy ventures. “No, not that. Darwin’s ship …” He trails off, and we sit in hard-thinking, pub-quiz silence. This is an unfamiliar position for the Quiz Daddy. He is by trade an asker, not an answerer, of questions. In 90 minutes, at 9 p.m., 700,000 people will pick up their phones and open an app called HQ Trivia to play the second of two daily live games. The Quiz Daddy—born Scott Rogowsky—will be their host. For now, though, he’s simply another contestant at…

On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans. Conway, the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election—of this she was sure—but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers. She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies…