New York Magazine 6/25-7/8/18

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Josef Adalian showed readers the inner workings of Netflix, the company that’s swallowing the entertainment industry whole (“Inside the Binge Factory,” June 11–24). Rajiv Nathwani, director of global creative marketing at Netflix, tweeted, “I often get asked what it’s like to work at Netflix. This story gets closer than ever, and provides an inside look at who we are and how we think.” Michael L. Wayne at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev wrote: “As an academic researching marketing within the television industry, I found that Adalian’s article provides significant insights into how Netflix constructs its brand. However, there is ample reason to be skeptical of [Netflix content chief] Ted Sarandos’s insistence that Netflix is not trying to put anyone out of business. In…

Intelligencer WHEN DONALD TRUMP first proposed to ban all Muslim immigrants from the United States two and a half years and a thousand Trump controversies ago, the Republican frontrunner was asked if he would have supported the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. “I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer,” he equivocated, before proceeding to express his general sympathy for the concept. “It’s a tough thing. It’s tough,” he said. “But you know, war is tough. And winning is tough. We don’t win anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We’re not a strong country anymore.” One of the things this comment revealed was Trump’s odd belief that the internment of loyal Japanese-Americans…

HOW MANY SPECIES ARE THERE? 18 Including some baby epaulette sharks, a speckled sandbar named Angus, and a school of all-female blacktip reef sharks. WHICH ONES ARE NATIVE NEW YORKERS? 3 TYPES Sand tigers, sandbars, and nurse sharks. “Though they can be found in New York, we’d never put a great white or a blue shark here,” New York Aquarium director Jon Forrest Dohlin says. “They’re evolved to keep moving in a straight line for long distances. Sand tigers and sandbars are slower swimmers. They’re used to moving in and out of tight spaces.” YOU USE HOW MANY GALLONS OF WATER? 800,000 WHAT’S FOR DINNER? Herring, capelin, and squid. HOW MUCH FOOD DO THEY EAT? 180 POUNDS PER WEEK WHAT’S OFF THE MENU? “We put 500 bony fish in to…

HE WAS A MARVELOUS, graceful boy. We, his lucky family from the moment he arrived at age 10 from Ethiopia, weren’t the only ones to think so. A wide swath of local boyhood fell in love with him, too, migrating to our house, staying off and on, nights and weekends, holidays and road trips … staying, really, until he left us. His name was Fisseha, American nickname Sol. Before he was even speaking English, in the summer of 2004, he began unwittingly to dazzle us with skills that were second nature to him, a goatherd from sub-Saharan Africa. He could spark fires with stones, build small huts, and whistle piercingly through his teeth without using his fingers. He had a gentle knack with animals; on his first walk with the…

BARACK OBAMA WAS SIX MONTHS INTO his post–White House life when Donald Trump found a new way to grab his attention. It was a Tuesday morning deep in the mid-Atlantic summer, and, feeling a world away from the Pennsylvania Avenue grind, the former president was reading the New York Times on his iPad. ¶ The previous evening, Trump had visited West Virginia, where he spoke at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree. Addressing a crowd of roughly 40,000, who were expecting the usual talk about citizenship and service, the president uncorked a political diatribe packed with jabs at Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Washington, D.C., “cesspool”; reminders about the importance of saying “Merry Christmas”; and reminiscences of Election Night 2016 and the pundits he embarrassed. “You remember that incredible night with…

I.  HENRY TAYLOR WAS LEANING ON HIS LONG, low, white kitchen sink in his large but sparsely furnished house in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles as he tried to tell me his ever-evolving theory about how he had found his way into the paint, and the pain. The day before in his car, somewhere between Malibu and Calabasas, Taylor had told me about his search. The time he had spent wandering the halls of his community college in Oxnard, trying to figure out how everything he saw, all that he took in, was going to make its way out of his insides and enter the world. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, years that coincide with the last time that Los Angeles festered in rage and riots, that Henry…