New York Magazine April 12-25, 2021

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Molly Fischer explored how the overwhelming demand for counseling has spawned an array of therapy apps promising services they cannot possibly provide (“The Therapy-App Fantasy,” March 29–April 11). Ingrid Mellor, a licensed creative-arts therapist, wrote to the magazine, “The commodification of therapy into monetized texts and the illusion of 24/7 access is anathema to the very foundation and integrity of the therapeutic profession, in which a trusting relationship is the bedrock from which a client develops their own abilities to cope and thrive outside of sessions. If tech entrepreneurs are truly interested in addressing today’s mental health crisis, perhaps they should look at their own role in creating unsustainable working conditions for their employees and unachievable expectations for their clients.” Run for Something…

HUNTER BIDEN WAS CAREERING above Highway 10 in the Sonoran desert. Eastbound behind the wheel of a rented Lincoln Town Car, exhausted and speeding 80 mph, he’d closed his eyes just long enough to zag off the road and into the air, twirling to land in the opposite lanes. Desert weeds tangled around the underside of the car. He sat there, stunned, as two police cruisers approached. They didn’t even slow down as they passed him by. A tow truck lugged Biden back to a Palm Springs Hertz, where he picked up a Jeep Cherokee and set out again for Sedona. It was the fall of 2016, and he’d been expected to check in to a yogic rehabilitation retreat there 12 days earlier. Instead, he’d gone on a bender, meandering…

“I FEEL VERY MUCH LIKE I’m being welcomed into a circle of excellence,” said Daphne Always, a cabaret performer, model, and musician, before disrobing and stepping gracefully onto a crate. She had been invited by the painter Will Cotton to pose for one of his figure-drawing sessions, which he was hosting en plein air on the roof of Ryan McGinness’s Soho studio. Gathered around Always were a bunch of New York artists—the youngest in their early 20s, the eldest in their 60s—working in a range of styles and mediums. Some, like Rebecca Chamberlain, Inka Essenhigh, and Guy Richards Smit, were old friends who have been attending Cotton’s sessions since 2002, when he began hosting them at his Lower East Side loft. Others, like Joseph Olisaemeka Wilson, were joining for the…

IN 2012, Julia Galef, the host of a podcast called Rationally Speaking, moved from New York to Berkeley to help found a nonprofit called the Center for Applied Rationality. It was the early days of the rationalist movement: a community formed on the internet whose adherents strove to strip their minds of cognitive biases and subject all spheres of life to the glare of scientific thought and probabilistic reasoning. Galef and her CFAR co-founders—mathematician Anna Salamon, research scientist Andrew Critch, and math and science educator Michael Smith—wanted to translate these principles to everyday life. They did this through multiday workshops, where participants could learn to make better decisions using techniques like “goal factoring” (breaking a goal into smaller pieces) and “paired debugging” (in which two people help identify each other’s…

BACK IN THE FALL, I received a text from a man I had just started seeing. “Are u on wikifeet?” I laughed and said “no.” Then he sent me a link to my wikiFeet page. I had never heard of the website—basically an encyclopedia of celebrity-foot photos for fetishists and foot enthusiasts—until that moment. To be clear, I am not a celebrity. I have a decent Twitter following from having reported on politics for more than a decade. But I was shocked to be looking at my own wikiFeet profile, which included my full name, birthday, and photos of me and my exposed feet dating back to 2013. The images seemed to have been lifted from my Instagram page, which I keep public. My feet had a rating of 3.5…

LAST FALL, Scott Stringer wasn’t just confident. “He was cocky,” said one person close to him. “He was very aggressive about it, like, ‘I am going to be the next mayor, and you need to decide if you are with me,’ ” said another. Stringer had reason for optimism: The city comptroller was the only person in the mayoral field who had been elected to citywide office. He was maxing out in fund-raising, had relatively high name recognition with voters, and had collected a pile of chits from four decades in and around New York politics and government. And perhaps most important, he had shrewdly endorsed a number of far-left insurgents who had run against the political Establishment in 2018 and 2020. Nearly all of them won, then promptly lined…