New York Magazine March 18-31, 2019

1 In New York’s latest issue, Simon van Zuylen-Wood asked, “When Did Everyone Become a Socialist?” (March 4–17). Susan Simon responded, “The answer to your cover question … resides on the cover of your [Hudson Yards] issue,” which featured stories that portrayed the new development as a gilded community for the one percent. Of the socialism feature, Armin Rosen wrote, “Man, this is good. Really illustrates the weirdness of environments where everyone more or less thinks the same.” Others took exception to the focus of the story, which opened at a party. Maya Kosoff tweeted, “A more honest and incisive and less decadent story would have been one about organizers in New York and not media people at a party.” Emily Cameron wrote, “The stereotypes of ‘the nearly all-Caucasian DSA…

SHORTLY AFTER NEWS broke this month that Bill Shine would resign as the White House communications director and deputy chief of staff, a person knowledgeable about his decision told me the former Fox News exec had come to understand the counterintuitive dynamic that defines many of Donald Trump’s relationships: Proximity can be meaningless, as those who have his ear are often out of his sight. “When you talk to him at night, you’re gonna have more impact than sitting in a room with six people,” the person said, referencing the president’s after-dark practice of calling and fielding calls from a vast network of informal advisers. Trump abides by what I call the “Groucho Marx Law of Fraternization,” meaning anyone choosing to be near him is suspect, while everyone else gets…

With Nancy Pelosi recently taking impeachment off the table—leading to consternation among some Democrats—and the completion of the Mueller investigation looking imminent, the question of how Trump’s presidency will and should end has never been more contested, and more unknowable. We canvassed 100 people on the streets of New York—at the Oculus,Washington Square Park, and Union Square—to find out how they thought this would end. Here’s what they told us.…

What do you know about American politics today that you didn’t know on the day Donald Trump was inaugurated? I think I underestimated the left’s response to Trump. I definitely underestimated the Democratic Party’s response. I get this rap for being pessimistic, but it’s inspiring to see. It’s really inspiring to see. You can certainly see that movement in how mainstream Democrats talk about race and approach questions of criminal justice. That said, right now Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are two of the leading contenders for the party’s 2020 nomination—both politicians who embraced some version of “tough-on-crime liberalism” earlier in their careers. Is it possible for them to earn the votes of those who value racial justice? Let me start by stipulating that I’m always gonna be the guy…

Governor (The job she wanted most.) Senator (The job Chuck Schumer wants her to run for.) Veep (The job another white guy might want her for.) President  I AM SITTING IN A CAR with former Georgia House Minority Leader and recent gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. She’s just invited me in from the cold outside Manhattan’s Gramercy Theatre—where she’s soon to go onstage for an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes—but Abrams is signaling in some ineffable way that she’s not in the mood to talk. She’s checking her phone and, every once in a while, peering through the tinted windows at the long line of people hopping up and down in the February chill and in anticipation of seeing her. The event, for Hayes’s podcast Why Is This Happening?, sold out…

WHEN YOU FIRST HEARD about podcasts, do you remember how excited you weren’t? Do you recall the first person who said, “Did you know you can now download audio files of people talking?” To which you might have replied, “Talking about … what?” To which they might have replied, “About … anything!”—at which point you realized that podcasts seemed like radio but more amateurish, which wasn’t the most compelling sales pitch. I’m going to guess you’ve listened to a podcast since then, maybe even a few. And I’m going to guess that you’ve even become obsessed with one or two. There are now an estimated 660,000 podcasts in production (that’s a real number, not some comically inflated figure I invented to communicate “a lot”), offering up roughly 28 million individual…