New York Magazine 4/30-5/13/18

1 New York’s latest cover featured Jessica Pressler’s profile of Cynthia Nixon, whose insurgent run for governor has pushed Andrew Cuomo to the left (“Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won,” April 16–29). Politico’s Albany-bureau chief, Jimmy Vielkind, wrote of it, “If you needed any evidence of how @CynthiaNixon’s run for #nygov has more heft than @ Zephyr-Teachout’s in 2014, look at the cover of New York Magazine this week … probably the most comprehensive dive on Nixon’s political biography done so far.” Versha Sharma responded, “The only thing missing in this excellent Cynthia Nixon profile … is an explanation of New York’s crazy closed primary rules, and unreasonable voter registration deadlines, which work in Cuomo’s … favor.” Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of the forthcoming Sex and the City and Us, was,…

HOW LONG DO YOU GIVE IT? ¶ Conversations about Harry and Meghan are among the most popular in the U.K., jostling for the number-one slot with conversations about (a) Trump and (b) Brexit. There is talk of Trump, but no debate. He is a unifying subject, like the weather. A right-wing Conservative MP told me recently that he could think of no British politician, in any party, who would have voted for Trump. So, in Britain, if you want to feel the warm glow of solidarity, you have only to say the word Trump and everyone starts singing from the same song sheet. ¶ But Meghan Markle, like Brexit, seems to divide people. Some argue that she will have a rejuvenating influence on the House of Windsor, dragging it into…

TO HEAR THE media tell it, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is soft on white-collar crime. First came the news that an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had arranged a fund-raiser for Vance after he refused to prosecute them for fraud. Then there was Vance’s decision not to file sexual-assault charges against Harvey Weinstein, even though police had caught the Hollywood mogul on tape confessing to the crime. Last month, spurred by a story in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the state attorney general to investigate Vance’s handling of the case. The incidents have cost the DA: During his uncontested election for a third term in November, 10 percent of voters were so fed up with him that they went to the trouble of writing…

AMID THE AFTERSHOCKS OF DONALD Trump’s firing of James Comey last May, I went to see Angels in America at the same theater in London, the National, where I’d first seen it as a New York Times drama critic some 25 years earlier. The play didn’t transport me quite as far from the lamentable present as I’d hoped. The new production, now on Broadway, doesn’t radically depart in tone or quality (high) from the first. But the play’s center of gravity had shifted. While Tony Kushner’s epic had been seared into my memory by the frail figure of Prior Walter, a young gay man fighting AIDS with almost the entire world aligned against him, this time it was Roy Cohn who dominated: a closeted, homophobic, middle-aged gay man also battling…

MARYANNE TRUMP BARRY (Donald Trump’s sister): Roy got the White House to give her her judgeship. Roy was out and the call came in to tell her she got it. I took the call and called her to tell her. Ten minutes later, Donald called to say thank you. ROGER STONE: Worked with Roy very heavily before and after elections. He was the one, with Roy, to find out the dirt on [Geraldine] Ferraro. Roger did not like Donald Trump or Si Newhousetold me they were losers—but if Roy used them, he would, too. His wife’s name is Bitsy. Roy called them Itsy and Bitsy. Roy was very fond of Roger, and I think he saw a little of himself when he was younger. [Reached for comment, Stone denied…

Q UALIFYING DAY in Georgia: the day when anyone running for an office in the state has to trek to the Capitol Building in Atlanta—the Gold Dome, as it’s known—to fill out some paperwork, shake some hands, and be officially recognized as a candidate. It’s a necessary nonevent. On this day, March 6, Stacey Abrams is qualifying as a Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia. As is always the case with Abrams, whose voluble, Bill Clinton–esque intelligence and ambition have won her national press and big checks from out-of-state donors, today is anything but a nonevent. About 40 people sweep in to watch her register—supporters in STACEY ABRAMS: GOVERNOR T-shirts, a film crew from a local TV station, energized activists, Abrams’s senior staff, members of her large family. Wearing a…