New York Magazine 2/5-2/18/18

1 “To date, 390 women are planning to run for the House of Representatives, a figure that’s higher than at any time in American history,” Rebecca Traister reported in New York’s latest cover story (“The Other Women’s March on Washington,” January 22–February 4). Senator Patty Murray responded, “I see a passion among women who understand that if you sit at home and don’t go out and participate, you lose what’s important to you. Proud of all the women who are making their voices heard.” Abby Finkenauer, whose run for Congress was featured in Traister’s story, wrote, “It’s time to not just watch but to get involved: no race is too small and no challenge is too big.” One of the voices championing the story was Time’s national correspondent Charlotte Alter,…

Predatory business practices “As he joined the discussion about family life, Casablancas talked about his seventeen-year-old daughter, Cecile. He said Cecile had been solicited by a photographer last summer on a beach in Ibiza. The photographer asked her to pose on a rock in her bikini … ‘She’s got a great little body,’ he told his models.” The speaker was John Casablancas, founder of Elite Model Management, and the quote comes from Dinah Prince’s profile of him, a cover story that ran in New York almost exactly 30 years ago. It makes for timely reading, side-by-side with “Can Fashion Ever Be an Ethical Business?” on page 40 of the current issue, about the abuses models face in the fashion industry. Casablancas spoke and behaved in ways that were already—and certainly…

IN SNOWCAPPED DAVOS last month, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin casually diverged from two decades of U.S. fiscal orthodoxy and accidentally tipped the value of the dollar further into a spiral with a single sentence. “Obviously,” he said, “a weaker dollar is good for us as it relates to trade and opportunities.” “It was distressing to me because it just shows a disregard for basic competence in governing,” said a former top economic official in Democratic administrations—referring specifically to the Treasury secretary’s not seeming to know he had any obligations beyond giving voice to his own personal preferences about things like, oh, say, monetary policy. That a weak dollar was not, actually, the policy goal of the government made it an obvious gaffe. But it was also a phenomenon…

ABOUT A YEAR AGO, stylish young Korean women began visiting the London Review of Books’ Bloomsbury bookshop in droves. They weren’t Jenny Diski fans—rather, they were after the canvas tote bags for sale by the register. Then the phone calls started: people from South Korea asking to buy hundreds of the bags at once. “I assume they were selling them,” says Claire Williams, event coordinator at the store. “Because no one needs that many totes.” Upon further investigation, she found that the Korean tag for the bookstore on Instagram turned up pages and pages of photographs of the bag slung over chic shoulders: Evidently, the shop’s nondescript tote had become a thing. No one knows exactly who started it or what it is about the plain canvas bags that fed…

WHY NOT SIT in your mother’s basement and eat Cheetos and play video games and watch pornography?” Jordan Peterson asks me. For the record, he means it rhetorically, as the existential plight of modern man; my mother doesn’t even have a basement. We’re on the balcony of an Airbnb in a luxury loft in downtown Los Angeles, overlooking an unpopulated swimming pool. “That’s a perfectly valid question,” he says. “It’s certainly pleasurable, and not very onerous, moment to moment.” We’re roughly four uninterrupted minutes into the answer to my first question: What about this particular historical moment has made Peterson, a University of Toronto professor in L.A. to lecture to a sold-out crowd at the Orpheum Theatre, a sudden celebrity as the author of a best-selling new book, 12 Rules…

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