New York Magazine August 19-September 1, 2019

1 Vanessa Grigoriadis interviewed 60 friends and colleagues of the First Daughter to find out what the post-presidency will have in store for her and who, at the end of the day, she really is (“Ivanka Aeternum,” August 5–18). The cover, a nod to the Daily News’ 1975 FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD headline, prodded @NicholasGazin to tweet, “I was thinking the other day how Trump has a ‘Ford to New York: Drop Dead’ moment at least weekly and how strange that would be to the people of the ’70s.” Many readers took note of conservative commentator Doug Wead’s assessment of Ivanka, with Cristina Maza tweeting, “Throwing up a little after reading Doug Wead say that very few women in history have been both brilliant and beautiful.” The New Yorker’s…

LOOKING BACK, Sam Patten knew he was fucked the moment the men in suits came looking for him. He returned from vacation to a report from his son, who said strange men who looked like the Feds had knocked on the door but wouldn’t reveal their identification or why they were after his father. “I started to get a real bad sense then,” Patten told me. He’d seen enough movies. The second visit came late one morning just after Easter 2018. His Siberian husky, Pepper, began to go “berserk.” Patten, a 48-year-old Republican political operative who was about to be dragged right into the center of the Robert Mueller investigation, could hear a commotion from the basement of his Capitol Hill townhouse, where he was working in the cluttered office…

IT’S A WEIRD TIME to be a liberal billionaire. Almost all of the Democratic presidential candidates have sworn off help from super-PACs and made a big show of rejecting cash from a wide range of potential donors: lobbyists, corporate PACs, and pharma execs included. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have ruled out headlining closed-door fund-raisers altogether. But that doesn’t mean the moguls of the left aren’t watching the race closely. Some rich progressives are looking at ways to sway the primaries, and others are biding their time until a nominee emerges. Still, while Hillary Clinton had decades-long relationships with some of the party’s biggest contributors last time around—like investor Haim Saban, who has sent Democrats tens of millions of dollars over the years and stayed in close touch with Clinton…

IN 1953, VIC SEIXAS had a year that most tennis players not named Roger, Serena, Novak, or Rafael could only dream of. He started the season by making the semifinals at the Australian Championships, then took second at Roland Garros, won Wimbledon, and was the runner-up at the U.S. National Championships in Queens. This was before tennis’s “Open Era,” when the sport got rid of the distinction between professionals and amateurs, like Seixas, who could play the most prestigious events but didn’t make any money doing so. That’s why the tournament names look a little funny—the U.S. National Championships became the U.S. Open in 1968—and why Seixas’s dream year didn’t make him rich. Novak Djokovic and Simona Halep each received $2.9 million for winning Wimbledon this year. When Seixas won,…

I AM FLOATING UP THE SHORES of the Arthur Kill, the brown-water tidal strait that separates Staten Island from New Jersey, with Rob Buchanan, a teacher and boatbuilder. On the bedraggled green edge of Staten Island, the water’s end of Victory Boulevard, we pass a plastic chair, the universal marker of a secret water-viewing sanctuary, and the Pratt Industries paper mill, recycling New York City paper into boxes for Home Depot. On the port side, we see rows of oil refineries, along with an Amazon fulfillment center. The landscape is that of nature bathed in the smog of highway, refinery, and Newark airport. Just past the CITGO refinery, we come to a crook in the Arthur Kill, in which sits a parenthesis-shaped roughly 100-acre spit of land. “Pralls Island up…

ARTHUR KILL 1. Pralls 2. Shooters 3. Isle of Meadows LOWER BAY 4. Hoffman 5. Swinburne UPPER BAY 6. Liberty 7. Ellis 8. Governors JAMAICA BAY 9. White 10. Barren 11. Ruffle Bar 12. Little Egg Marsh 13. Big Egg Marsh 14. Yellow Bar 15. Silver Hole Marsh EAST RIVER 16. U Thant (Belmont) 17. Roosevelt 18. Mill Rock 19. Heel Tap Rock 20. Randalls 21. North Brother 22. South Brother 23. Rikers LONG ISLAND SOUND 24. Cuban Ledge 25. City 26. High 27. Chimney Sweeps 28. Columbia 29. Pea 30. Nonations 31. Hart 32. Rat 33. Twin 34. Hunter 35. Hog 36. Two Tree 37. The Blauzes 38. Danny Hat 39. Machaux Rock…