New York Magazine 8/6-8/19/18

1 In New York’s latest issue, Rebecca Traister points to Elizabeth Warren as the candidate-of-the-moment to take on Trump (“Leader of the Persistence,” July 23–August 5). Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe tweeted, “Great profile of … my good friend and brilliant former colleague with humble roots and with a fierce commitment to struggling working-class and middle-class Americans, dreamers, asylum-seekers, and vulnerable families.” Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer added, “No one describes the current state of American politics and really America better than [Traister].” Protect Democracy’s Aditi Juneja wrote, “The one thing that she didn’t spend a ton of time on that I think makes [Warren] a strong candidate is her ability to explain complicated ideas simply. I used to send her clip from The Daily Show to folks as an example.”…

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of burning lately. In late July, wildfires broke out in the Arctic Circle, where temperatures reached almost 90 degrees and roiled northern Sweden. Farther south, wildfires swept along the Greek seaside, outside Athens, killing at least 91 and hospitalizing almost 200. At one resort, dozens tried to escape the flames by descending a narrow stone staircase into the Aegean, only to be engulfed along the way, dying literally in each other’s arms. In the American West, 89 major wildfires have burned this year, including one, in California, that grew at the rate of 1,000 acres each hour and another, in Colorado, that produced a volcanolike 300-foot eruption of flames, swallowing an entire subdivision and leading to the invention of a new term—“fire tsunami.” Then came…

MANAGEMENT AT THE New York Daily News laid off half the paper’s editorial staff on July 23. Though the News will keep going, weakened and threatened, this is awful for obvious reasons, not least of all because a two-vigorous-tabloid town is a very good thing. Day to day, there’s a battle fought on the Daily News and Post front pages—“the wood,” in tabloid-speak. Which grabs your attention? Which makes the better joke about de Blasio? Sometimes one fronts the Yankees as the other goes with international news. The wood reveals more than just straightforward competition. Going back decades, one sees a visual manifestation of fundamentally distinct voices in New York. The News put the legalization of same-sex marriage on the wood (“U.S. GAY!”) as the Post ran a story about…

JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON is spinning a story about his father. He has a lot of them, but this one, from when he was 4 or 5, is really lodged in there. “He did Glory, and I remember being on set for the big scene when he dies,” he says, telling it the way you only do with formative childhood memories—hazily, with dicey detail. He recalls sitting in video village with his mom when his dad came “out of the darkness and smoke, on a hill, in a blue suit. He looks at me and says: ‘Son, you want to come down here, check out the set?’” For whatever reason, presumably to protect him from watching his dad die take after take, his mom said, “No.” But it didn’t matter; something…

SOMETIMES YOU DON’T KNOW how deep the hole is until you try to fill it. In 2009, staring down what looked to anyone with a calculator like the biggest financial crisis since 1929, the federal government poured $830 billion into the economy—a spending stimulus bigger, by some measures, than the entire New Deal—and the country barely noticed. ¶ It registered the crisis, though. The generation that came of age in the Great Depression was indelibly shaped by that experience of deprivation, even though what followed was what Henry Luce famously called, in 1941, “the American Century.” He meant the 20th, and, to judge from our present politics, at least—“Make America Great Again” on one side of the aisle; on the other, the suspicion that the president is a political suicide…

“On top of all the inequality in our country, we are going overseas and murdering people. Everything was rigged, and while we were all complaining that the system is corrupt, we just went on with our lives, feeling powerless. Of course I still have class rage. I have never had money.” —Mickey Smith, Occupy Wall Street protester, photographed in 2011 and interviewed in 2018. IF YOU WERE standing in the smoldering ashes of 9/11 trying to peer into the future, you might have been overjoyed to discover this happy snapshot of 2018: There has been no subsequent major terrorist attack on America from Al Qaeda or its heirs. American troops are not committed en masse to any ground war. American workers are enjoying a blissful 4 percent unemployment rate.…