New York Magazine 12/10-12/23/18

1 New York’s art critic, Jerry Saltz, shared his 33 rules for becoming an artist—or for just living more creatively—and posed as artistic legends for three different covers (“How to Be an Artist,” November 26–December 9). @RyanTylerThomas wrote, “This … article is worth at least as much as an art degree.” Artist Robin Herrick commented, “He’s so right about getting past blocks and developing a workmanlike attitude towards creativity.” Painter Margery Gosnell-Qua added, “I stayed up reading it, and I couldn’t put it down. Many truths, and funny, too.” The story also had resonance for readers outside the art world, with Pacific Standard’s Nicholas Jackson writing that Saltz’s advice “is really just a guide to being a better human, and y’all should read it.” Of the covers, stephengregoryartist wrote, “Looooove…

EVEN BY THE STANDARDS of a Republican-run state, Wisconsin’s legislature is gerrymandered so ruthlessly that the 2018 elections, in which voters supported Democrats by a 54-to-46-percent margin in the State Assembly, nonetheless delivered Republicans 64 percent of the seats. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, asked about the gerrymander, argued that it was perfectly fair. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” he told reporters after the election. In Vos’s mind, the fact that many Democratic voters resided in the state’s two largest cities rendered them undeserving of equal representation. Indeed, as Vos saw it, if there was anything unfair about the system, it was the process for electing the governor. Democrat Tony Evers had defeated incumbent Republican Scott Walker by…

SETTLING INTO a small meeting room in the seventh-floor office he inherited from Barack Obama in 2009, U.S. senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio clasps his hands, creases his brow, and doesn’t exactly deny that this is a slightly strange, and very busy, time for him—the unpolished, suddenly great, gritty hope among all the bright, shiny things that make up the overflowing 2020 Democratic presidential field. “It is unexpected. I mean, we all go into elections thinking we’re going to win,” he says, “and I guess I did. And I thought it’d be a nice celebration, then go back to work.” In case you haven’t noticed: There’s a bit of a messy civil war going on in the Democratic Party, and one of the more boisterous battles is between those who…

ON NOVEMBER 29, Tucker Carlson, his brow furrowed in perfect imitation of a human facial expression, devoted a segment to the beloved children’s Christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the possibility that some liberals found it “problematic.” Joined by Libertarian YouTuber Dave Rubin, Carlson investigated a short video HuffPost had made displaying a handful of joking tweets about Rudolph’s being politically regressive. “Reassure me,” Carlson said to Rubin, “this is real.” It was real, Rubin confirmed—and, worse, HuffPost was “trying to take” Rudolph “away from you.” At the risk of giving away the game: HuffPost has no desire to take Rudolph away from you. So why did Carlson devote so much valuable airtime to a video showcasing a few possibly sarcastic tweets? One answer may be that he is…

SOME PEOPLE MIGHT COMPLAIN that the Content Cycle is corrosive and demeaning—that it’s cynical, even fraudulent, to strip minor joking tweets of their context and present them to audiences solely to generate outsize emotional reactions. But you can see from this description how vital the cycle is to our natural media environment. It sustains not just major cable hosts like Carlson but also HuffPost bloggers; not just aggregation-happy media conglomerates like Verizon Media Group but also vast social networks like Twitter. People like to discuss social media’s ill effects in spreading misinformation, but the Content Cycle demonstrates the deep, almost biological connection between the megaplatforms of the internet and legacy media like television in a complex ecosystem of aggregation, outrage, performance, and attention. And what a beautiful, healthy ecosystem it…

Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site For good and bad, New York is notoriously unsentimental when it comes to preserving historic sites (there is no past or future in the city, only an unending transactional present: Case in point, who needs a museum devoted to Andy Warhol’s Factory in Union Square when that same space could accommodate a Petco?). My favorite exception is the brownstone on East 20th Street devoted to the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt (technically, the house is a re-creation from 1923, the original demolished in 1916, even furthering the unlikelihood of its survival). Roosevelt isn’t my favorite president, and I have a firm policy against exotic taxidermy, but this inconspicuous jewel of a museum is such a beautiful, sober sanctuary with its displays of bewildering artifacts. In…