New York Magazine January 21-February 3, 2019

1 Would seeing what the Border Patrol does change your mind about the border? Mattathias Schwartz went to McAllen, Texas, to find out (“‘Come On Down to the Rio Grande Valley. I’ll Show You Around,’” January 7–20). Former DHS official Scott Shuchart tweeted, “This … article on Border Patrol culture is superb. ‘The agents want to be the gunslinging border cops,’ and are miserable that their actual job is helping distressed women and children.” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias pointed to the fact that the Border Patrol is majority Latino by highlighting, “Important theme running through [Schwartz’s] great report on the Border Patrol is that Latino political identity is often not what Democratic Party professionals and white liberals would like it to be.” Ricky Garza, a staff attorney for the Texas Civil…

IN THE MIDDLE OF January, the Russia investigation as we understand it ceased to be merely an inquiry into “collusion.” It was revealed as something far more portentous: an inquiry into whether President Trump, as the New York Times put it in one of the more breathtaking clauses it has ever published, “had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” The discovery that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had opened a counterintelligence investigation into the president of the United States did contain a caveat: “No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.” Yet, the very next day, the Washington Post reported that Trump had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his discussions with Vladimir Putin secret.…

IN 1930, when Walter Chrysler opened the showy new headquarters building for his auto company, it was (briefly) the tallest in the world. Its early tenants included Texaco and Time Inc. During New York’s collapse in the 1970s, it was down to a 17 percent occupancy rate, so broke that its owners couldn’t pay for garbage pickup. (They just piled everything in the basement for months.) Today the building is in far better shape and nearly full, and the current owners, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and Tishman Speyer, have put it up for sale. Chrysler and Texaco left long ago, and the Abu Dhabians and Tishmanites won’t share the list of tenants the buyer will inherit—but we’ve assembled a nearly complete roster. GROUND FLOOR ➔ IS AMAZON NEXT? The…

BY THE TIME WE MEET, at 11 on a Wednesday morning in December, Shaun King, masterful activator of instant-react liberal anger and would-be digital-media titan, has already retweeted a double-digit string of articles to his 1 million followers on everything from the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi to the much-critiqued arrest of Jazmine Headley, a Brooklyn mother who was videotaped clutching her 1-year-old at a public-benefits office before police forced her hands behind her back. (“Shame shame shame on this city for the trauma they caused this wonderful mother and baby boy.”) Sitting at a table in Lula, a cozy Bed-Stuy coffee shop, King is still mulling over that last incident: “I’m just trying to figure out how did she spend four nights in Rikers because she was sitting…

We have no reliable figures on just how many priests in the Catholic Church are gay. The Vatican has conducted many studies on its own clergy but never on this subject. In the United States, however, where there are 37,000 priests, no independent study has found fewer than 15 percent to be gay, and some have found as many as 60 percent. The consensus in my own research over the past few months converged on around 30 to 40 percent among parish priests and considerably more than that—as many as 60 percent or higher—among religious orders like the Franciscans or the Jesuits. This fact hangs in the air as a giant, unsustainable paradox. A church that, since 2005, bans priests with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” and officially teaches that gay men…

WHEN I TOOK the reins of the New York Times in 2011, it was during a period of convulsive change and financial struggle, when the pace of the great digital disruption had intensified after the introduction of the iPhone and Facebook’s News Feed. The decade that followed, which culminated in Donald Trump’s election, transformed everything about how the news was reported and delivered. On their smart-phones, people expected news to be instantaneous, even if the stories were erroneous. The old business model—advertising and circulation—was shattered by the new mantra that news had to be free. News was global, and could be manipulated by foreign powers, as the world learned in the 2016 election. As executive editor of the Times, I had the best ringside seat to the digital transformation of…