New York Magazine 10/15-10/28/18

1 For New York, David Edelstein profiled Jamie Lee Curtis, whose performance in the latest Halloween installment exemplifies why horror has become the genre of our time (“Revenge of Jamie Lee Curtis,” October 1–14). Readers took the opportunity to voice their love for the actress, including @RobCurrieMusic, who tweeted, “Read the first two paragraphs … and try to tell me that [Curtis] is not the awesomest of the awesome women.” Mariannabare commented, “She seems egoless. I love that about her.” And Alexandra West, co-host of the Faculty of Horror podcast, wrote, “Curtis is not only a Hollywood icon but also the horror community’s perhaps most beloved Scream Queen. David Edelstein’s story is a testament to not only her iconic status but also the warmth she exudes, which fans (and Edelstein…

AROUND 12:20 p.m., I was on my way out of the White House after a series of meetings in the West Wing. I was reporting on a question that has hung over this administration for months: How has chief of staff John Kelly managed to keep his job in spite of convincing and persistent rumors that the president is unhappy with him and he is unhappy in his job? I noticed I had a missed call. It was press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She sounded very serious. She asked me if I had left yet. When I said no, she asked me to come back inside. I didn’t understand. Maybe I didn’t quite hear her. Then she told me President Trump wanted to speak to me. I entered the Oval…

OVER THE YEARS, I was hoping to forget it,” says Ian Schrager in his Brooklyn rasp, between bites of chopped salad and across-the-table reaches to touch my arm. He’s talking about Studio 54, the mythic discotheque he opened with an irrepressible college buddy named Steve Rubell in 1977. The two of them ran the club for 30 manically publicized months, before being busted for failing to pay taxes on all the money they skimmed off all the money they made there and going to jail for 13 months. “I was always embarrassed by it.” But Rubell has been dead for almost 30 years now—like so many people who worked for and danced at Studio 54, of AIDS—while Schrager is a pashalike 72 and has done quite nicely for himself. (So…

WHEN I RING the novelist John Wray’s doorbell on a blindingly hot September morning, the sound of howling wolves fills the air. “It’s permanently on the Halloween setting,” Wray explains. Slender, with the slight stoop of a tall person who spends a lot of time bent over a writing table, he is wearing an inside-out Violent Femmes T-shirt and looks more like the indie-rock musician he started out as than the 46-year-old owner of a Park Slope townhouse. He bought the place in 2011 as a “wreck and a ruin” with neither plumbing nor electricity and spent the next few years painstakingly renovating it. The downstairs bathroom, with bright geometric wallpaper and a round mirror like a portal, is an homage to the David Bowie movie The Man Who Fell…

In 2018, there is no earthly reason, biological or otherwise, why men should have more power than women. YOU HAVE POWER when so many women are powerless!” said a sexual-assault survivor as she confronted senator Jeff Flake. The woman who spoke these words was, at that moment, pinning him into the corner of an elevator. He looked stricken and ashamed, like a boy caught with one foot out the bedroom window. Maria Gallagher’s fury dominated the space as she commanded Senator Jeff Flake, “Look at me when I am talking to you!” And when the story gets told, she, and not Flake, will be remembered more as the hero who never wavered and who might have diverted the course of history. So, judging from the videotape alone, who in that…

“Did I have a flashback? No. But I cannot tell you how many people told me they were sick, literally sick, watching the Kavanaugh hearings.”—ANITA HILL PROFESSOR AT BRANDEIS / Testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings / Portrayed by Kerry Washington in HBO’s Confirmation “IN MANY WAYS, the Kavanaugh hearings did feel like a repeat of 1991. The process is his word against hers. You’d hope the two parties would come as equals, but in this case, you have a woman against members of the Judiciary Committee who’ve already expressed antagonism for her, who’ve made it known that they don’t think Dr. Blasey Ford is being truthful. And you have public statements by the president that suggest she’s lying.…