New York Magazine 7/23-8/5/18

1 In his cover story, Jonathan Chait put forth a worst-case scenario of Trump’s Kremlin connections, even asking whether it’s possible the president has been a Russian asset for decades (“Collusion,” July 9–22). Max Bergmann, director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Moscow Project, wrote, “Like the presidency of Donald Trump, the Russia scandal once seemed utterly implausible. But the fact pattern has become undeniable and it is increasingly apparent that the president of the United States conspired with a hostile foreign intelligence service to win the 2016 election. Jonathan Chait’s piece effectively captures the urgent need to stop treating the Russia story as a series of individual developments and begin looking at the bigger picture.” John Dean, former Nixon White House counsel, described the story as “a…

IN A LONG INTERVIEW published on July 18, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted to explain to Recode’s Kara Swisher why his platform wouldn’t ban Holocaust deniers: ZUCKERBERG: At the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down, because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think— SWISHER: In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead. ZUCKERBERG: It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we…

“My goal here is to create a governance structure around the content and the community that reflects more what people in the community want than what short-term-oriented shareholders might want. And if we do that well, then I think that could really break ground on governance for an internet community … You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world.”…

“I’M FROM CALIFORNIA,” Matthew Shain says, “and the Civil War was very academic to me.” That all changed when he traveled for the first time to New Orleans, where statues of generals and slaveholders stood all over town. Then the monuments started to vanish, as, over the past few years, cities and their governments belatedly realized that they had to reckon with the representations of white supremacists their civic forefathers had cast in bronze and zinc. And as the statues came off their pedestals—sometimes with official sanction, sometimes disruptively—Shain observed that “these symbols were being removed, rewriting our collective history, without having new symbols put in their place. It’s a transitional time, trying to find more inclusive and equitable ways of telling the story.” After all, he adds, “a lot…

IT’S 8:50 P.M., ten minutes before closing, and Michiko Kakutani is riffling through vinyl at A1 Records on East 6th Street, searching in vain for a copy of Beggars Banquet. “The Stones are my all-time favorite,” she says. “I wonder if they have any other Keith stuff here.” Kakutani worships Keith Richards. “I think he’s the heart and the soul of the Stones,” she explains. “He’s just inhaled all blues and musical history and he really wants to pass that knowledge on. I thought his memoir was totally amazing.” Her opinion of that book is more important than yours, or mine, or anyone’s. That’s because in 2010, as chief book critic for the New York Times, she reviewed it. For three decades, hers was the most influential voice in publishing,…

IT WAS UNREMITTINGLY HOT AT the farm in Natick, Massachusetts, where 1,500 people had gathered on the Sunday after the Fourth of July. Remarkably, this crowd had assembled under a blistering sun not for a free concert, or outdoor theater, or even a protest, exactly. They’d come for an open-air town hall with their sitting senator, a 69-year-old woman widely expected to win reelection to her second term this fall. Standing at the back of the sweaty throng, I’d seen her introduced from the stage, then heard cheers greeting her entrance, but couldn’t for the life of me lay eyes on her. Not until I climbed onto the seat of my folding chair in the press section. There she was, jogging 75 yards down a hill in open-toed mules, her…