New York Magazine 1/22-2/4/18

1 New York’s excerpt of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, on the chaotic first days of the Trump administration (“Sick of Winning,” January 8–21), quickly upended Washington—author Jared Yates Sexton called it “as must-read as must-read gets,” and The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf wrote, “Some of what is described here is the moral equivalent of treason.” The revelations also quickly received pushback from the White House: The day it was published, the president released a statement saying, “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” and he later tweeted that Wolff is “mentally deranged.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed it as “some trash [peddled by] an author that no one…

ON JANUARY 20, 2017, Donald Trump took the oath of office and delivered an inaugural speech that is remembered mostly for being “dark,” as an instant media consensus proclaimed, or “some weird shit,” as George W. Bush remarked. The passage of a year’s time reveals that the speech was something else, too: impossibly grandiose. While those who oppose the president have debated whether he is criminally complicit in a foreign adversary’s election tampering, or whether he is mentally deranged, the country has lost sight of the standard of success Trump set for himself, which rests quite a bit higher than non-treasonous and dementia-free. Trump presented himself as a populist revolutionary who would reverse decades of decline. His speech reads now as a comic litany of failure. Trump made a series…

“IT SEEMS SO OBVIOUS,” says the artist Hank Willis Thomas, who created the ALL LI_ES MATTER poster shown above, “that many people are lying when they say ‘All lives matter.’ If you believe all lives matter, then you’d also acknowledge that black lives matter, and those same people would be marching alongside if they believed that.” Obvious, perhaps, but certainly not universally believed, which is why Thomas applied his signature approach (eliminated letters, missing type) to that bland yet brutal slogan. His is among the visual statements contributed by 50 artists to New York as part of a project marking the magazine’s 50th-birthday year. The first of them, by the nonagenarian Alex Katz, appeared on our cover last fall, and is a drawing he did on the subway, an echo…

JANE BIRKIN DIDN’T much like the terribly sophisticated Serge Gainsbourg, 18 years older than she and already a famous singer, when she met him after being cast in the French film Slogan in 1968—she found him arrogant and snobbish. Or perhaps more to the point, she was convinced that he didn’t think much of her, a 21-year-old English actress who’d blown up after appearing, full frontal, in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which was quite scandalous at the time. But she fell for him when they went out dancing, she’s always said. He kept stepping on her toes. “To find out that, in fact, he was extraordinarily timid and, yes, it was all just pretense,” recalls Birkin on a bright winter afternoon in the empty nightclub atop the Standard High Line, opened to…

THE OPRAH IDEA was, admittedly, imperfect. The antitoxin for one rich celebrity president is not likely to be a different rich celebrity president (albeit an infinitely smarter and more humane one). But the alacrity with which America took to the possibility that the former talk-show host and secular deity might be the one to vanquish Donald Trump was not wholly at odds with an actual phenomenon. Over the past terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad year, an unprecedented number of women have been motivated to dive into politics for the first time, many with the hope of defeating or succeeding men who’ve held the bulk of America’s political power for centuries. To date, 390 women are planning to run for the House of Representatives, a figure that’s higher than at any time…

Laura Moser  Running for: U.S. House State: Texas A journalist and founder of the political group Daily Action, Moser became briefly internet-famous as the mother of the toddler who threw a tantrum on the floor of Obama’s office. She’s gotten loads of national attention for her race to replace nine-term incumbent John Culberson in a district that’s been red since the 1960s—but some major groups, like EMILY’s List, are backing one of her primary challengers, Houston lawyer Lizzie Fletcher. Stacey Abrams  Running for: Governor State: Georgia A tax lawyer, romance novelist, and former minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, Abrams has spent years registering new voters in her state. She’s campaigning in 2018 to become the first black female governor in the U.S. but has a formidable primary…