New York Magazine August 5-18, 2019

1 New York’s latest cover story—“Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling?” (July 22–August 4)—took a detailed look at the celebrities, CEOs, and presidents who orbited the sex offender. Many readers were furious at the elite’s perceived complicity in Epstein’s crimes, with @AndBrent calling the report an “infuriating rundown of the gilded class’s insidious connections.” Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, “This is the kind of wide-branching scandal somebody would invent to foment class rage, and it comes at a moment when class politics is closer to the surface of American discourse than it has been in a while.” Many noted the relationships between Epstein and other prominent men who have been accused of sexual misconduct, including Woody Allen and Charlie Rose: @CStrait2 tweeted, “Let’s hope this lays to rest any hopes for Charlie Rose…

WHAT IF TRUMP FAILS to win the Electoral College in 2020? Would he refuse to accept the results of an election? The first thing to remember is that he already has. Back when Hillary Clinton was viewed as 2016’s likely victor, one widely expressed fear was that Donald Trump would not abide by the outcome, threatening the tradition of peaceful transfer of power that has survived more than two centuries. What happened instead was something nobody anticipated: Trump won—and still refused to accept the election results. He has never stopped insisting that the national vote, which his opponent carried by nearly 3 million ballots, was stolen. He has periodically charged that millions of undocumented immigrants cast votes for Clinton and that this fraud was carried out, for some reason, in…

JUST 90 MINUTES into the first day of the inaugural Fortnite World Cup, 12-year-old H1ghSky1 has a problem. The video-game prodigy is the youngest member of the e-sports organization FaZe Clan, which is holding a pop-up at a sneaker store just off Canal Street. The event, if it had gone as planned, would have lasted all afternoon. Fans of pro gamers would meet their idols and pick up limited-edition merch. But turnout has been larger than anticipated, the kind you might see for a new line of Yeezys—if Kanye were also in attendance. Die-hards camped out overnight before the event, and police had to shut down the street to prevent the store from being mobbed. The store isn’t happy, and the manager pulls FaZe CEO Lee Trink aside to notify…

ON JULY 25, Warren B. Kanders, a.k.a. the “tear-gas CEO,” quit the Whitney Museum board after months of protests culminating in several artists’ deciding to withdraw their work from the Biennial halfway through its run. It was just the latest callout to rock arts institutions, which—at least since the age of the Medici—have relied on the largesse of the very wealthy. (Today there are also tax advantages.) “Boards of museums in New York and the rest of the country have been washing machines for reputations,” says Michael Gross, author of Rogues’ Gallery, a social history of the Metropolitan Museum. “Traditionally, New York has not cared if you’re red or blue as long as your money is green.” But this laissez-faire attitude is under fire: Kanders’s resignation comes after Mortimer D.A.…

AROUND 5 P.M. on a recent weekday, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer was rapidly disappearing from a $696 cooler at Snow Peak’s Soho location. In the past few years, the Japanese outdoor store has become an unlikely watering hole, bringing together urban foragers, downtown artists, and the fashion set. It’s the kind of place where one might bump into Jenna Lyons and her son preparing to outfit her upstate house for tented sleepovers. “We have models come in, and I’m like, ‘Oh, shoot! What are you doing here?,’ ” said Akil County, 26, a Brooklyn native who’d never been camping before he started working for the brand two years ago. “But it makes sense because it’s an ‘If you know, you know’ kind of thing.” Some customers might walk in off…

FOUR YEARS AFTER Donald Trump emerged as the most nakedly authoritarian candidate in American history, it’s tempting to view the threat he once seemed to pose as overblown. Upon his election, some panicked that he would be a proto-dictator, trampling every democratic institution in the fascist manner imported from Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. Others saw merely a malign, illiberal incompetent who would probably amount to nothing too threatening—or believed that America’s democratic institutions and strong Constitution would surely survive Trump’s strongman posturing, however menacing it appeared in the abstract. Many contended that his manifest criminality meant he would be dispatched in short order, with impeachment simply a matter of time. It was all, unavoidably, unknown and unknowable—and so we cast around for historical analogies to guide us. Was this…