New York Magazine March 4-17, 2019

1 In New York’s most recent issue, Justin Davidson surveyed Hudson Yards, “a privatized idyll, where the concept of public good stops at the property line,” and Carl Swanson introduced us to the developer behind it, Stephen Ross (“I Have a Feeling We’re Not in New York Anymore,” February 18–March 3). James A. Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, explained, “Dripping with irony in this Amazonian age is the fact that there has been no public outcry over Hudson Yards. This monument to excess and elitism courtesy of Related and other mega-developers benefits from billions in public subsidies and tax breaks. The biggest billionaire developer on the dole, Stephen Ross’s Related, has been waging war on construction…

THE PERSISTENT SKEPTICISM that has surrounded President Trump’s legal travails arose again toward the end of February when news reports claimed that special counsel Robert Mueller would soon finish his final report. If Mueller was almost done, the thinking went, he couldn’t have much more. The chances of anything touching Trump directly started to appear lower than the nearly two-year investigation’s ending with a whimper. Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee all but destroyed that presumption. Trump’s former attorney and fixer alleged not only systematic criminality by his former boss but deep culpability in the Russia scandal itself. In the wake of that hearing, it seems inevitable that Trump will face impeachment in the House (though, given his party’s continued loyalty and the need to obtain the votes…

IN 2010, THE WRITER Hugh Ryan, incensed by the Smithsonian’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from display, created the Pop Up Museum of Queer History in his Bushwick loft. The experiment was enough of a success (and a fire hazard—the police shut it down on opening night when 300 people showed up) that Ryan was inspired to dig deeper into his adopted borough’s own gay history. His research became the new book When Brooklyn Was Queer. The story starts with Walt Whitman’s depictions of gay cruising in Leaves of Grass, likely the first in American letters, and continues through to the queering of Sands Street between the World Wars and the demolition of landmarks of gay life during Robert Moses’s construction of the BQE in…

HERE, IN BRIEF, is Rob Delaney’s last five years: He moved his family from Los Angeles to London to take a chance on a new job, a TV show he expected would get canceled in six months. It turned out to be pretty much universally beloved, and Delaney, who had spent a decade working under the radar, saw his career reach fantastic new heights. His face was on billboards and subway ads. Just when things could not be going any better, his youngest son, Henry, fell ill before his 1st birthday. Delaney took him to doctor after doctor until a specialist discovered that Henry had a malignant brain tumor. He had surgery to remove it and spent over a year in the hospital recovering. Then, the tumor returned. In January…

It’s the Friday after Valentine’s Day. The radical publishing house Verso Books is throwing its annual Red Party, an anti-romance-themed banger. Like a lot of the best lefty parties, it takes place in Verso’s book-lined Jay Street loft, ten stories above cobblestoned Dumbo. The view of the East River is splendid, the DJ is good, and the beers cost three bucks. The roster tonight is heavy on extremely online political-media types. The podcaster and performer Katie Halper tells me she’s a fourth-generation socialist from the Upper West Side who used to attend a summer camp once affiliated with a communist organization called the International Workers Order. The hosts of the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House are not here, but Eli Valley, the gonzo artist who illustrated their book, is, as…

Are you a socialist? In America, yes. In Denmark, no. What issue do you care most about? Our broken and unjust food system and its catastrophic impact on the environment. What’s your biggest problem with the Democratic party? There’s nothing democratic about two huge parties keeping other parties out of the conversation. Politics shouldn’t be a sports match. What did you talk about? I was pretty lit. Um … let’s see, we talked about how I wanted to meet more cool guys who don’t want to talk about Pod Save America. What did you talk about at the party? I did the dating game. The first question was a “Kill Fuck Marry”: Fuck Mao, marry Marx, and kill Lenin. What did you talk about? One of my friends was commenting…