New York Magazine 5/14-5/27/18

1 Frank Rich reminded New York readers that before the city’s Establishment aided and abetted Donald Trump, it enabled the misdeeds of his mentor and onetime lawyer Roy Cohn (“The Original Donald Trump,” April 30–May 13). Among those praising the story was Yoko Ono, who wrote, “Thank you Frank Rich for your courageous writing. We have all benefited from it.” Ellen Schrecker, a prominent historian of McCarthyism in America, wrote, “Frank Rich’s chilling piece about how the Big Apple’s bigwigs facilitated the rise of Donald Trump recalls the similar service the Establishment performed for Joe McCarthy, the sleaziest of Roy Cohn’s early employers. Though the Wisconsin senator’s lies were as flagrant as those of our current president, he was encouraged by the most respectable politicians in the U.S. Meanwhile, liberals…

TWO DAYS AFTER Vladimir Putin won reelection on March 18, Donald Trump called to congratulate him on the victory. Within hours, someone with access to Trump’s briefing papers leaked word that his staff had provided him with explicit advice—in all caps—not to do so: “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” It’s understandable that his advisers would have wanted him to bite his tongue. Why staffers might have leaked that advice is a different question: The congratulations had been extended, so the leak couldn’t influence a pending policy outcome. In terms of lending democratic legitimacy to an autocratic leader, the damage was done. If the intention was to air organizational disarray, well, even the most-dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters get that it isn’t smooth sailing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s hard to see the utility, even…

NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD FLYNN MCGARRY has spent about half his life as America’s Teen Chef, working at world-class restaurants and running his own pop-up dinners. After Vogue called him “the Justin Bieber of food,” the label stuck. Now he’s opened Gem—with his sister Paris, who is 23 and old enough to get a liquor license—where the $155 tasting menu is cooked and served with excruciating care. Foie gras is sandwiched between Ritz-like crackers. Tiny fried artichokes blossom like high-end Bloomin’ Onions. All sorts of things are done to beets. It’s an ambitious menu for any chef, let alone someone six months shy of his 20th birthday. Now the food world wants to see if McGarry can fulfill his destiny as a culinary prodigy, or if he suffers a kind of Bieber-like meltdown.…

SO FAR, the biggest perceived effect of the most important data-privacy law ever has been a sharp increase in emails from social networks and web services alerting me that those endless contractual walls of text you thoughtlessly click OKAY on—privacy policies, data policies, and/or terms of service—will change, most of them conspicuously on the same date, May 25, 2018. Almost none of them mention what, exactly, has led to this mass update: the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. GDPR becomes law, as keen deductive minds might gather, on May 25, two years after it was adopted by the European Parliament and just a few months after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal turned data privacy into a top issue for every ambitious politician and excitable journalist in the U.S.…

I ’M DRIVING DOWN the San Diego freeway, searching for my exit, feeling jumpy and a little bit lost. I’m hoping a few wrong turns early in my drive won’t make me late. I still need time to stop off at a strip mall with a Starbucks and a big parking lot—someplace I can put on deodorant and maybe a little makeup after my cross-country flight. I prefer to think this is because I want to appear professional to the human man I’m on my way to see: Matt McMullen, the founder of Abyss Creations and its offshoot robotics company, Realbotix. But once I find a place to park and start brushing my hair, I realize that some deranged sliver of myself feels as if I’m primping for romance. This…

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Sean Hannity broadcasts live at 9 p.m. on Fox News, usually from Studio J in midtown, where the network is headquartered, but sometimes from a remote studio on Long Island, where he was raised and now lives. All White House phone numbers begin with the same six digits: 202-456. Hannity calls the White House switchboard, a number listed publicly, and reaches an operator. The operator refers to a list of cleared callers, a few dozen friends and family members outside the administration who may contact President Donald Trump through this official channel—among them his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr.; private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman; media billionaire Rupert Murdoch; real-estate billionaire Tom Barrack; Patriots owner and also-billionaire Robert Kraft; and Hannity. The operator then dials the…