New York Magazine July 22-August 4, 2019

1 The most recent cover of New York— “An Entire Issue With Nothing About Trump!” (July 8–21)—raised more than a few eyebrows, with HuffPost declaring, “Donald Trump Will Totally Hate the Latest Edition of New York Magazine.” The French newsmagazine L’Obs took notice as well and pointed out that it would be a nice break for readers: “Histoire, sans doute, d’accorder un peu de répit à ses lecteurs, à l’approche des vacances.” Noel Nichols agreed, telling us, “He injects himself in all my media sources. Time to exclude all distractions from summer joy.” Randy Bach-man wrote, “I just purchased the current copy of New York Magazine. It is the first one that I have ever purchased. The promise of an entire magazine without anything Trump was simply too good to…

SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, I saw a young woman on the subway accidentally dump a full cup of iced coffee onto the seat next to her. To the rescue came every single other female in the car—digging into their bags, producing tissues and napkins, towels and wipes. Meanwhile, the men, each and every one, edged away from the scene and sat looking uncomfortably at their phones. Working together, the women on the train turned the puddle of coffee into a mountain of coffee-soaked paper, which the spiller took with her, smiling, triumphant, when she disembarked at Wall Street. The incident left me thinking about whose job it is to clean up spills, the literal and also the metaphorical ones: the uncomfortable incidents that arise at work or at home. Why does…

ANDREA CATSIMATIDIS suggested we meet at Avra Madison, the clubstaurant of choice for conservatives in New York City on nights when they aren’t knocking back pineapple martinis at Del Frisco’s. My first trip to Avra Madison, in 2017, was to meet Anthony Scaramucci, who was holding court with a rogues’ gallery of political misfits connected, in one way or another, to Donald Trump: There was Kimberly Guilfoyle, South Jersey Democratic boss George Norcross, and former NYPD detective and sometime right-wing personality Bo Dietl. (Roger Stone was said to be on his way.) My second trip there was with Catsimatidis, who became the chair of the Manhattan Republican Party in 2017 and occupies a Norm-like role in the Cheers-ian universe of the Establishment. At one point during our dinner, she looked…

POLLY MURRAY, in the 1960s and ’70s, was a mother of four with an old house on several acres in Lyme, Connecticut. In the summer, her kids built forts in the woods; they ice-skated on frozen cow ponds in the winter. The Murrays had an idyllic life in the country. They also had enormous rashes, strange joint swellings, and recurrent fevers. One son wound up in the infirmary at boarding school, unable to lift his leg. Another had to have the fluid drained from his knee. Murray was constantly taking herself or her husband or one of her kids to a doctor—but none of the doctors ever had answers, nor did they seem especially interested in finding any. So Murray took the search upon herself. In The Widening Circle, her…

PERHAPS, AT LONG LAST, A SERIAL RAPIST AND PEDOPHILE MAY BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE, more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won’t change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity. For decades, important, influential, “serious” people attended Epstein’s dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: They got something in exchange from him, whether it was a free ride on that airborne “Lolita…

.................................Names found in Epstein’s black book...........................Names found on Epstein’s private-jet log. ALLEN, WOODY Director. Epstein kept a photo of his friend Allen, the sexual pariah, on his wall and was photographed walking with him on the Upper East Side. They had more than a neighborhood in common. For years before his relationship with Mia Farrow, Allen had carried on with a 16-year-old girl he’d met at Elaine’s named Babi Christina Engelhardt. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter,she wondered if she was the inspiration for Manhattan, Allen’s 1979 movie about a man in his 40s who dates a high-school student, which was nominated for two Academy Awards. Engelhardt had sex with Allen more than 100 times, she says, sometimes with Farrow. “The whole thing was a game that was being…