New York Magazine December 9-22, 2019

1 New York’s most recent issue looked back at the past decade through the eyes of six people who defined it (“Who Were the 2010s?,” November 25–December 8). The cover featured Kim Kardashian West in an interview with Jonathan Van Meter about fame, her husband, and her political activism (“Reality TV Altered Reality,” November 25–December 8). On Instagram, @payshhh wrote, “I think it’s hard to argue that anyone was more ubiquitous this decade than Kim K and her family. They shaped the decade whether we’d like to admit it or not.” Journalist Olivia Petter tweeted, “This Kim K interview is as glorious as you’d expect, but the undisputed highlight is when she calls her ‘mom’ to ask what to tell the journalist before asking the journalist not to write that…

Richard Nixon inadvertently helped New York grow up. The magazine was founded in 1968, the year he was elected to the presidency. A few years later, coverage of the Watergate scandal launched New York into the business of covering national affairs regularly. In those years, he appeared on our cover ten times. ¶ In their new book Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines, Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard—who first collaborated in 1968 as New York’s founding design director and art director, and continue to do so today—recount their decades of editorial work, here and elsewhere. We asked about the covers they conceived and assigned when Tricky Dick, rather than Tiny Hands, was the man sweating out the prospect of impeachment. JUNE 10, 1968 Will Nixon Trip Over Nixon Again?…

THE CALLS STARTED EARLY on a Thursday evening last month, moments after the New York Times reported Michael Bloomberg was expected to jump into the 2020 race. On one end were a handful of Joe Biden’s top campaign aides and allies; on the other were some of his highest-priority current and prospective donors. The former wanted to reassure the latter about Biden’s place in the race and to preempt any second thoughts about their loyalty to the former vice-president, according to Democrats familiar with the conversations. It seemed clear, then, that the Biden team and, to a lesser extent, Pete Buttigieg’s had reason to be “very worried,” as one veteran Manhattan Democrat who is wired into Biden’s fundraising orbit said to me that week. Bloomberg had reversed his springtime decision…

➸ LAST MONTH, as Sacha Baron Cohen was delivering his made-for-social-media anti-social-media diatribe at the Anti-Defamation League, Tim Berners-Lee, the literal inventor of the World Wide Web, was preparing to step out from the shadows to acknowledge that, well, things online hadn’t gone exactly how he’d hoped—that the internet was at a “tipping point” and in need of root-and-branch remodeling. But Berners-Lee isn’t alone. In fact, it can seem these days like tech apostates might outnumber evangelists in Silicon Valley, which once looked from afar like a practical cult of sunny-side-up solutionism but now offers a new opportunity for self-promotional branding: pivoting to tech-flagellation. Here, a survey of which of those new turncoats are most likely to make an impact, which are speaking out as a salve to their own…

THE WORLD ACCORDING to Rick Owens—punk brat of Porterville, California, turned health-goth of Paris—is at once brutal and beautiful. His clothes (like his Mad Max leather jackets and clomping mega-sneakers) and his stores (like the one in Paris that famously features a sculpture of the man himself urinating) have always insisted on it; it’s the world that has caught up. Now, at 57, the designer has a strong claim to be one of fashion’s éminences grises, bottle-black locks notwithstanding. But as a rare independent in an ever more corporatized fashion world, Owens is far from going gentle into that good night: After winning the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, he was named its Menswear Designer of the Year in 2019. For the Cut’s new…

2013 For his spring collection, he casts step dancers to model the clothes and perform at his show, literally shaking the industry. 2015 Owens sends women down the Paris runway in the spring carrying fellow models like surreal cargo: a comment on the support and strength of community. 2017 The influence of glam pioneer Larry LeGaspi hovers over Owens’s work. Owens wrote a book about LeGaspi and his designs (like this one, on Anna Cleveland) this year. 2018 In September, Owens puts on a show with fearsome models bearing torches. He references the Tower of Babel, and Vogue calls it fashion’s “first knock-down, drag-out Me Too collection.”…