New York Magazine November 25-December 8, 2019

1 New York’s “Future Issue” examined the events of 2019 that provide a window into what life might look like ten years from now (“Today in 2029,” November 11–24). CNET’s Scott Stein wrote, “I really enjoyed browsing through @NYMag’s Future Weirdness issue. The next decade, though, will be nearly impossible to predict from events of the past year. I think it’ll be a lot weirder.” @mishraGkabeta added, “A very Orwellian picture painted here. Societal changes are slow. 2009 isn’t very different from 2019, and 2029 probably won’t be much different from 2019 … Good article for a time capsule.” Other readers glommed on to specific forecasts. @charlottejee tweeted, “Love the way this predicts we’ll drink Champagne from England in 2029. Darling, some of us are doing that already.” Commenter rdibelka…

WHEN GORDON SONDLAND testified at the House impeachment hearings on November 20, having “refreshed” his memory and recalled several incriminating facts that had escaped him the first time around, the ambassador was at pains to explain that he had never supported the scheme in which he had participated. “We all understood that if we refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose an important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine. So we followed the president’s orders,” he said. “At all times, I was acting in good faith … We had no desire to set any conditions on the Ukrainians. Indeed, my own personal view—which I shared repeatedly with others—was that the White House [meeting] and security assistance should have proceeded without preconditions of any kind.…

THE CUT PARTNERED with YouGov for a series of online polls about national political attitudes. Overall, respondents knocked sexism in politics but were on the fence about the women running for president in 2020. Respondents lived in every region of the country and were slightly more female than male. Ages spanned widely, but most were either baby-boomers or millennials. Around two-thirds were white; just above one-quarter had a four-year degree or more. Many people think we’d be better off if more women were in office... 12% say America would be worse off 33% say it would be no better or worse off 44% believe the country would be better off ...And most agree it’s unacceptable for male candidates to... 70% INTERRUPT female candidates or moderators during a debate 88% come…

EVERYONE WHO TEXTS with Rudy Giuliani knows the hands of fate control the fingertips. Digital communication with President Trump’s 75-year-old personal attorney is a delicate exercise in optimism and patience. Or, as one longtime Giuliani associate phrased it, “This is a little bit like a baby with a hammer, or a monkey with a typewriter.” This fall, as Giuliani has emerged as a central figure in the impeachment inquiry, his clumsy phone comportment has often become worldwide news, adding extra absurd wrinkles to the already absurd saga of a quid pro quo in Ukraine and raising questions about how a chronic butt-dialer who wears his AirPods upside down could be a White House cybersecurity adviser. There was the time he accidentally called NBC’s Rich Schapiro and left a voice-mail in…

AS THE DECADE BEGAN, there were reasons to be optimistic: America had elected its first black president, and the world hadn’t cascaded into total financial collapse. Obama-care, for all its flaws, was passed, and then came the Iran deal and the Paris climate accords. Sure, there were danger signs: the anger of the tea party, the slow hollowing out of legacy news media, a troubling sense that somehow the bankers got away with it. But then maybe the immediacy of social media gave some hope, at least if you listened to the chatter of the bright young kids in the Bay Area trying to build a new kind of unmediated citizenship. Maybe everyday celebrity, post-gatekeeper, would change the world for the better. Some of that happened. But we also ended…

IF THE RACIAL POLITICS of the 2010s has a definitive chronicler, it is Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose magisterial 2014 Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations” forced Americans to reckon with slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining. Since the essay’s publication—which eventually prompted a congressional hearing on the subject this year, at which Coates testified—the 44-year-old has won a National Book Award for his 2015 book, Between the World and Me, and was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. More recently, he’s been writing fiction: He scripted a run of Marvel’s Black Panther comic and published his celebrated first novel, The Water Dancer, which concerns an enslaved man gifted with supernatural powers in antebellum Virginia. Coates’s expansive imagination and incisive, historically grounded writing about Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and cultural figures like Kanye West…