New York Magazine March 2-15, 2020

1 For New York’s latest issue, literary critic Molly Young explored the seemingly unstoppable spread of corporate-speak (“Garbage Language,” February 17–March 1). Many people who work in industries inundated with “garbage language” contributed their own experiences. “Recalls to mind Goethe’s quote: When ideas fail, words come handy,” commenter LaliZ wrote, explaining that as an editor in the financial industry, “I do battle against garbage language every day. Sometimes I even win.” Kelleyalison wrote, “I hate how this garbage language has seeped into academia, so that ‘on-boarding,’ ‘think partners,’ etc. are now in fairly common usage even at the Ivy League school where I work.” Patrick Porter elaborated on that: “For the rest of us, some of whom work in education, garbage business speak is worse than demoralizing. It relentlessly promotes…

AS A PRIVATE GERMOPHOBE and very public xenophobe, Donald Trump has the intuitive disposition to grasp the severity of a global epidemic that originated in China. And yet in the early stages of what may explode into a full-blown crisis, Trump is making it clear that he is not the Churchill of the coronavirus. Whatever attributes he possesses that suit him to the task are overwhelmed by negative qualities: profound superficiality, a paranoid fixation on loyalty, and a near-pathological focus on short-term gratification. Trump inherited from his predecessor a large and capable corps of disease-prevention experts, including ones who guided the country through the 2014 Ebola outbreak and deliberately pared it back. Several officials in charge of pandemic response—Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert; Dr. Luciana Borio, the National Security Council…

Cordoning off the five boroughs with the NYPD and National Guardsmen is logistically inconceivable and, more importantly, ineffective. Even a voluntary quarantine is unlikely because there is no reason to believe New Yorkers would cooperate. Either people will flee in anticipation or they will “von Trapp it out of the city,” says Kelly Hills, a bioethicist who studies quarantines. During the 2003 SARS outbreak, Toronto attempted to quarantine 23,000 people—but only 57 percent complied. More recently, the mayor of Wuhan estimated that almost half of the city’s population left before the quarantine was enacted.…

WHEN Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster met Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss last year, it was inevitable that they would have a lot to talk about. Both sets of siblings are twins. Both had been rowers. Both had founded companies to make money in the world of blockchain technology. In other words, both are literal, actual tech bros. “We were telling them this story about how we realized we could get a lot more out of teaming up as twin brothers working together,” Griffin recalled of the Cock Foster–Winklevoss summit. “And they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we hear you on that.’ ” The Winklevosses—Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard schoolmates, immortalized in The Social Network, who famously sued him for stealing Facebook and later became bitcoin billionaires—were then about to buy the 24-year-old Cock…

AS HOLLYWOOD REALIGNS itself in the wake of Me Too, new questions are being asked about the ethics of power within the entertainment industry. Last year, a survey called #PayUpHollywood, examining the treatment of Hollywood’s assistants, revealed that nightmare stories were not exactly rare. In an industry that lacks standards for how assistants’ roles are defined, let alone compensated, many entry-level workers reported going without health care and having to file for unemployment-insurance benefits between seasons of shows they’d worked on. As part of a new series, “Anonymous in Hollywood,” five former assistants shared their experiences working in the industry. Want to anonymously share a story about working in Hollywood? Email us at anonymousinhollywood@vulture.com. An assistant to ... a television show writer: “The executive producer forced me to become…

THE MORNING AFTER PRESIDENT TRUMP delivered his self-congratulatory State of the Union speech while still in the midst of impeachment, several reporters are waiting in a Providence, Rhode Island, vegan café for Michael Bloomberg. Most of them came from Philadelphia last night, where they covered his nighttime rally that had a laser-light show, buffet, open bar, and rap performance. Like the rest of the media at the time, they have been caught up in a kind of fever dream in which, suddenly, in the brief interval between the Iowa collapse of Joe Biden and the appearance of Bloomberg himself on a Nevada debate stage, it seems possible that a plutocrat could waltz his way to the Democratic nomination as comfortably as he had to the New York City mayoralty, including…