New York Magazine May 13-26, 2019

1 For New York’s cover story, Ezra Marcus and James D. Walsh reported on a group of college sophomores who fell under the destructive influence of their classmate’s father after he moved into their dorm (“The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence,” April 29–May 12). “This story is bananas on so many levels,” Jessica Valenti tweeted, “but I need to know how this dude was living in a Sarah Lawrence dorm and the school did … nothing?” The school’s alumni were particularly troubled. Jacklyn Grace Lacey tweeted, “I think I’m not the only one asking myself right now ‘What else happened on campus that I normalized or wasn’t visible because of particular energies of SLC’s people & places?’ ” Mitchell Sunderland wrote, “I hope @SarahLawrence hires more mental health experts. The…

OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, the Democratic Party has seemed to race leftward so fast that its recent standard-bearers are considered no longer qualified to lead it. Bill Clinton? An embarrassment not welcome on the campaign trail. Barack Obama? A neoliberal whose half-measures should not be repeated. Nor does the new crowd of Democrats qualify by the stringent standards of ideological purity: Cory Booker has ties to Wall Street; Kamala Harris was a prosecutor; Beto O’Rourke once mused about cutting Social Security. But nobody is thought of as more retrograde than Joe Biden—“a deeply flawed candidate who’s out of step with the mood of his party,” Politico wrote last year. Biden’s heresies are comprehensive: on foreign policy (supporting the Iraq War), social policy (his dismissive treatment of Anita Hill, harsh…

LESS THAN TWO MINUTES into our interview, Ani DiFranco says the word fuck for the first time, and it sounds like music. Her f is fricative and percussive, much like DiFranco’s habit of thwacking the side of her acoustic guitar as she plays it. Then comes the vowel sound, which has a gentle lilt that mirrors the way DiFranco sings: in dulcet tones that sometimes release a guttural growl. We’re sitting at a corner table in the Standard Hotel on Cooper Square. Geographically, we’re not far from where DiFranco lived in the East Village for much of her late teens and early 20s, but spiritually the posh café is as far away as you can get from her scene in the 1990s—the decade when she was a vital component of…

“CRUISE” SEASON FASHION SHOWS often require multiple tickets for entry, and maybe even a passport. Louis Vuitton—a brand known for its logo-emblazoned travel trunks—has in past years taken showgoers to particularly far-flung locations: a suspension bridge outside Kyoto, a cliff in Rio de Janeiro, and the Principality of Monaco, to name a few. For its 2020 cruise show, however, the likes of Emma Stone, Cate Blanchett, and Ruth Negga were invited to the slightly less glamorous John F. Kennedy airport in Queens. The TWA Flight Center, Eero Saarinen’s swooping concrete structure, was the epitome of forward-looking style when it opened in 1962. It hit financial trouble in the 1980s, and it has sat vacant since 2001 near the JetBlue terminal. On May 15, it will reopen as the TWA Hotel,…

DEPENDING ON HOW you count, I’m in up to 18 active group chats, across a half-dozen different apps, that occupy most of my time on my phone. Right now, I’m in one called “Ramius’s Boys,” which is devoted to sharing quotes from the film The Hunt for Red October and submarine-related links; another called “News and Politics Discussion Group,” for arranging Mario Kart matches and, most important, talking shit; and a third, “No More Furry Nudes I Promise”—though, to be fair, that one probably shouldn’t be counted as “active,” because no one trusted the promise its creator made in the title. A friend told me she’s in a group chat dedicated to sharing photographs of Cobb salads called, naturally, “COBB COBB.” In some ways, group chat feels like a return…

YOU COULD SEE THE SMOKE FROM SPACE. The plume from last November’s Woolsey fire swept out toward Catalina and into the Pacific beyond by the same Santa Ana winds that had carried the flames all the way down the Malibu mountainside to the beach. The aftermath was eerie, the sunsets gorgeous, toxic ash falling from the sky in heavy lumps. Horses and alpacas and a giraffe wandered the sand, having fled flames that tore through local stables and ranches and a vineyard’s private zoo. The burn scar on the land, when the smoke cleared, stretched 152 square miles through Point Dume and Malibu and up to Calabasas and Westlake Village: 96,000 densely populated acres burned, 300,000 people evacuated from 100,000 homes, a city of 10 million terrorized in ways both…