New York Magazine September 28 - October 11, 2020

1 Jonathan Chait’s cover story in the last issue argued that Donald Trump must be prosecuted if the country is to move forward (“Lock Him Up?” September 14–27). In Washington Monthly magazine, Nancy LeTourneau suggested that prosecuting Trump “will be necessary, but not sufficient to complete the task. Many of the ways that Trump has corrupted our democracy don’t constitute crimes that can be prosecuted in court. Some of those could be addressed for the future by passing new laws, such as requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns and a more complete requirement for divestment from business interests.” Washington Post columnist Max Boot agreed with Chait and pointed to his previous writing on the president’s malfeasance: “I am now convinced that Trump’s wrongdoing is so pervasive and brazen…

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death for Senate Democrats to admit to themselves that they may be essentially powerless to stop her replacement. On a private call the next day, a Saturday, they acknowledged the reality that Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans, who hold the majority, could probably hold a party-line vote to approve Donald Trump’s nominee. They knew, too, though, that they still had to do everything they could to try to fight it—even though their best bets, like encouraging a groundswell of public pressure and trying to persuade a few moderate Republicans to hold off on the confirmation until after the election (at which point maybe one or two might have second thoughts on the judge) were, at best, stretches of historic proportions. The…

“I’M COMING OUT as a millennial,” a young woman announces, eyes locked on her iPhone camera. Soon her background morphs into a photograph of Hillary Clinton, whom she kisses on the cheek before picking up a tablet streaming The Office. “Ahahaha, Michael,” she mock-laughs. Created by @glamdemon2004, the video is one of many that cropped up on TikTok this summer showing Gen Z’s concerted ridicule of millennials. Sure, the roasts are meant to be funny—playfully chiding the generation for eating avocado toast and thinking that enjoying Harry Potter movies are a personality trait. But like all jokes, these hinge on truth: that every generation is ripe for taunting and desperate to define itself in opposition to its near elders. Not unlike the deadpan dismissal “OK, boomer,” these microfights are Gen…

BREONNA TAYLOR HAS led a singular afterlife. Since March 13, when the 26-year-old died in a hail of police gunfire inside her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment, she has become a rarity, a Black woman whose unjust death became a national cause célèbre. The protest movement that has gripped the United States for much of the past decade has sought to lift deaths like Taylor’s from obscurity to the status of an emergency, and yet hers has unusual contours: Stars from the film Hellboy and the TV show Riverdale have called for her killers to be arrested, in the latter case using a semi-nude Instagram photo as a vehicle; a Formula 1 racing champion issued the same demand from the winner’s podium in Tuscany. Much of the media has followed suit. An…

LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY long enough and eventually you will come to know a Century 21 bride, just as you will a rent-control lifer and the original Original Ray’s. I know two, women whom no aisle could cow into paying full price. It was a New York place for New York people—those who live here and those who only visit—a “secret handshake,” in the words of my colleague Christopher Bonanos, for those too in the know to overpay. The discount chain, founded in 1961 by Al and Sonny Gindi, Syrian American cousins from an émigré Jewish family, had grown into an empire stretching as far south as Florida and west to Philadelphia and Jersey. But its heart and roots were in New York, especially its sprawling, congested Cortlandt Street…

ALMOST EVERY AFTERNOON for the past three and a half years, a retired septuagenarian named Ed McGinty has ventured out of his little beige ranch house to troll his community’s vast population of Trump supporters. McGinty resides in the Villages, a sprawling central Florida retirement utopia that sells itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown.” He drives for hours, cutting through the humid afternoon, taking in the scents of Spanish moss and sprinkler water, in a golf cart plastered with anti-Trump signs: MAY DONALD TRUMP BURN IN HELL STARTING TODAY and DONALD TRUMP IS WHITE TRASH and FLUSH THE TURD ON NOVEMBER 3RD. McGinty is tall with ruddy cheeks, clear eyes, and strawberry-blond hair bleached by the years, his demeanor all hard feelings and bad attitude. “If you saw my face when…