New York Magazine July 19-August 1, 2021

1 New York’s latest issue marked six months since the Capitol insurrection (“Before, During, After January 6,” July 5–18). In “His Longest, Dumbest Day”— an excerpt from the new book Landslide— Michael Wolff took readers inside Donald J. Trump’s White House while the events unfolded. Commenter joanie1 wrote, “Wolff gets DJT in a way many writers don’t. They want to think, ‘I have to take him seriously cause he’s POTUS and I’m a political writer. If I point and laugh then what does that make me here?’ [Wolff] just looks at him and sees what’s there.” Others wished Wolff had been more skeptical of his sources’ motivations, with smarticat commenting, “He’s used another bunch of Trump associates desperately trying to rewrite the history of this Presidency and their association with…

HARRY HOPKINS, a close adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt, is said to have summarized the administration’s political strategy like so: “We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect.” It worked quite well for the Democrats well past FDR’s time. But around the mid-1960s, as the taxes began to bite into middle-class wallets and many white voters came to see the spending as benefiting people who didn’t look like them, the formula stopped working. At some point, “tax and spend” became a hackneyed insult of the Democratic agenda, with the third part—“elect”—dropped from the mantra. Biden’s ambition for an FDR-size presidency died on November 3, when the election delivered a narrow governing margin in Congress that seemed to bode a Clinton- or Carter-size presidency instead. But…

WHAT DOES A STRAWBERRY TASTE LIKE? It depends. Do you mean a fresh strawberry, a ripe strawberry, a jammy strawberry? Because it matters, says Elaine Kellman, a flavorist at Citromax in Carlstadt, New Jersey, who has spent the past 30 years breaking down taste sensations into their chemical parts. To capture the full-bodied sweetness of an ultraripe strawberry, “you would take a strawberry flavor and add chemicals like maltol and furaneol,” whereas a jammy one might need a hint of jasmine, and a fresh one might require a dash of grassy cis-3-hexenal. There are, by most estimates, only about 500 flavorists in the U.S., and if you have eaten food from a box in America, you have certainly tasted their work. Flavorists are responsible for the end of the ingredients…

ON A SWELTERING summer afternoon, a welter of yelps rose from the playground in the northeastern corner of Greenpoint’s leafy, tidy Monsignor McGolrick Park. The playground had been lined with a sturdy foam in 2018 to soften the landings of children—but there were still injuries to be had. And the heat would not deter the meeting of the Greenpoint Fight Club, a group of 5-to-7-year-olds that gathers after school on most days for combat with the approval of the parents. Had this been a true fight club, of course, it would have remained secret. As any passing fan of Chuck Palahniuk knows, the first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. (It is also the second rule.) But then, on an early Thursday evening in…

THE PAST SIX MONTHS have been good to the book-publishing industry. Book sales, helped along by pandemic-induced lock-downs, are up. Adult-fiction sales have risen 30 percent year over year. And most of all, Trump hasn’t been in office. “Postelection, there’s been a breath of Thank God, we don’t have to do Trump books anymore,” one editor told me. The lull has come to an end. After a brief reprieve from the dishy ticktocks that emerged from the turbulence of the Trump era, publishers are gearing up for a flurry of books detailing the final days and aftermath of his presidency. The Wall Street Journal reporter Michael C. Bender’s Frankly, We Did Win This Election and Michael Wolff ’s third Trump book, Landslide, kicked things off on July 13. A week…

It was a rainy Sunday in June, and Danielle had fallen in love. The 23-year-old paralegal spent the first part of her afternoon in McCarren Park, envying the happy dog owners with their furry companions. Then she stumbled upon an adoption event in a North Brooklyn beer garden, where a beagle mix being paraded out of the rescue van reminded her of the dog she grew up with, Snickers. It all felt like fate, so she filled out an application on the spot. She was then joined by her best friend and roommate, Alexa, in sitting across from a serious-looking young woman with a ponytail who was searching for a reason to break her heart. Danielle and Alexa were confident they would be leaving with Millie that day: After all,…