New York Magazine 12/24-1/6/19

1 For our 14th annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue, we asked a wide range of New Yorkers (and some frequent visitors) to share their very favorite places across the boroughs—with even more spots featured online (December 10–23). Grace Segers gushed, “Oh man, I love everything about this piece and so many of the places listed in it. That weird curvy street near 191st! The David H. Koch Theater! Lee’s Tavern!” And @AbbyMCarney tweeted, “Always down for a love song to NYC. This place stole my heart when I was but a tween … It’s still so magical to me, and I think it always will be.” Journalist Tim Murphy wrote, “Everything here is great. Zephyr Teachout’s entry [Veselka] is very on-brand.” Kate Gustafson recommended adding “Valentino Pier on…

IN LATE NOVEMBER, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet where the only real things were the ads. The scammers infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites—“empty websites designed for bot traffic” that would serve up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad exchanges but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques for imitating humans: Bots…

“At some point, I began to feel like I was in a dream. Or that I was half-awake, unable to distinguish the virtual from the real, the local from the global, a product from a Photoshop image, the sincere from the insincere.” —Jenny Odell, in the New York Times, after she investigated an Amazon reseller that had bought goods from other Amazon resellers and resold them, again on Amazon, at higher prices using an elaborate network of fake price-gouging, copyright-stealing businesses.…

“NOTHING, nothing, nothing,” Christo exclaims, gesturing first toward the boats clustered in Pelican Harbor and then to the high-rises crowding the shoreline. “There was nothing existing then.” It’s a brilliant December morning, and we’re cruising across Miami’s Biscayne Bay toward the several low islets he and his collaborator-wife, Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, made famous 35 years ago as the Surrounded Islands. “As Jeanne-Claude would always say, ‘We return to the scene of the crime!’” Christo announces with delight. “That’s always part of it we like to see. The places change so much—that’s reality.” As our boat approaches the small sandy mass now dubbed Pelican Island but back then simply called No. 8, he points to the aluminum dock and wooden roofs peeking out of the mangrove canopy: “There was…

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA SLUMPS into a chair, exhausted. For an instant. Then he’s gleefully leaping on top of the chair to demonstrate a Dick Van Dyke dance move. The whiplash moment fits the exhilarating and strange point at which Miranda finds himself: chugging through the meat grinder of international publicity appearances for Mary Poppins Returns while eagerly looking ahead to two other returns—to starring in Hamilton, in Puerto Rico in January, to benefit hurricane-recovery efforts, and to his Washington Heights apartment in February, where he can start writing one of “three big ideas. It’s too early to know what form they will take—stage, film, or TV.” Tomorrow he flies to Mexico City, followed by Paris, then London, and finally Miami. For now, though, Miranda is fully, happily present in this Central…

WHEN SHE WAS 45, at around the same time her menstrual periods became irregular, Janet developed an obsession with a man at work. Now 61, Janet has the same job she had back then, managing the chemistry-department stockroom at a small northeastern college. But at the time, she was studying for a master’s degree and living in a suburb with her husband and teenage daughter, and Jim was a new addition to the chemistry faculty. He had a quiet, sensitive nervousness that appealed to Janet, and she felt from the outset that they had a bond. The first time Janet began to feel seriously off was in the spring of 2001, when she was taking Jim’s inorganic chemistry class. Sitting in the lecture hall, listening to Jim talk about metals…