New York Magazine October 28-November 10, 2019

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Gabriel Debenedetti, Jonathan Chait, Olivia Nuzzi, and Madison Malone Kircher examined the state of the impeachment inquiry (“The World After the Whistle-blower,” October 14–27). The giant-peach cover caught many eyes: “Such an epic cover,” ameliadimz wrote on Instagram. “Finally, indeed!” added alisha39. “Thing is, it won’t happen,” prisonescapee cautioned. Ad Age’s Ann-Christine Diaz wrote, “A symbol that many of us associate with a childhood literary treasure now takes a gruesome turn.” Of Chait’s proposed articles of impeachment, Jack D. Weiss wrote, “This article should be sent to Nancy Pelosi and all members of the Senate and House. All they have to do is read, copy and paste.” Many readers responded to Nuzzi’s dispatch on how Republicans are viewing the proceedings with some level…

“DO A FRANK PENTANGELI.” That’s what Donald Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone urged an associate who was set to testify against him to do, according to a federal indictment. During the 2016 campaign, Stone was in contact with WikiLeaks, which had obtained stolen Democratic emails from Russian hackers through an intermediary named Randy Credico. In 2017, Stone falsely testified to Congress that he had no records of his discussions with Credico. When he learned Credico planned to testify, he texted and emailed him on multiple occasions, once counseling him to “start practicing” his Pentangeli. “You should do Pantagela [sic] on Erin Burnett,” Stone wrote soon after. Pentangeli was a capo of the Corleone family in The Godfather: Part II who planned to testify against Michael Corleone but was threatened into…

MARCO SAAVEDRA HAS BEEN preparing for November 7, 2019, for the past seven years. Instead of working at his family’s Bronx restaurant, he’ll head to 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, where he’ll have his final amnesty hearing to gain asylum status and stay in the U.S. The hearing is the culmination of his unapologetic activism, which has taken him from political offices to a deportation center to his family’s restaurant in Mott Haven. Opened in 2009, La Morada has become a destination for Oaxacan cooking and a hub for immigrant activism. “We’ve done fund-raisers, open mics, opened this up as a safe space for everybody,” Saavedra, 29, says. “As undocumented people, we felt so persecuted for so long that we kind of had to extend that hospitality elsewhere.” One afternoon…

THERE IS LIKELY no career coach in the world with a better pitch for disaffected millennials than Megan Hellerer, whose list of past clients includes a 28-year-old bartender who became a United States congresswoman. Before we met for a session on a recent Wednesday morning, I couldn’t help but imagine all the potential Hellerer would unlock in me at 29: Would I also become a politician? Write a book? Finally stop biting my nails? Hellerer, 35, calls herself the Conscious Career Coach. She works only with women, more specifically “underfulfilled overachievers”: high-performing teacher’s-pet types who have followed every mandate for success and remain desperately unhappy. In addition to private coaching and workshops, she has an eight-week online course called “WTF Am I Doing With My Life?” (The price is $900,…

THE REVOLVING DOORS still revolve, the greeters still greet, but the mood at Barneys is glum. The department store—where Andy Warhol and Carrie Bradshaw both shopped—is in bankruptcy. Once upon a time, Barneys was shorthand for a kind of sophistication that didn’t take itself too seriously, a place where New Yorkers would go to seek solace or celebration in spending. At the moment, it is a cautionary tale, mismanaged and overextended, flattened and floated on hedge-fund dollars. This August, following a lengthy dispute and arbitration with its landlord over a rent hike on the Madison Avenue flagship, Barneys filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In late October, shoppers milled under a cloud. What will happen? some were overheard to say. And, a little more shrewdly, Is anything on sale? It is…

NEW YORK HAS FINALLY DECIDED THAT tossing troubled people into a dungeon, ensuring they come out even more deeply wounded than they went in, shames our nominally civilized city. The warren of cells, pens, yards, and trailers on Rikers Island—“a penal colony in the middle of the East River,” as City Council Speaker Corey Johnson puts it—has been sentenced to close as part of a criminal-justice-system overhaul that aims to halve the jail population by 2026. All of this seems hopeful, hugely expensive, and possibly quixotic. The city is betting big on architecture. At the heart of the transformation is a plan to distribute detainees among four new high-rises close to the courthouses of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. It will take an estimated seven years and nearly $9…