New York Magazine August 30-September 12, 2021

1 New York’s latest cover story, by Andrew Rice and Laura Nahmias, chronicled how Andrew Cuomo lost the governorship and included his first interview since announcing his resignation (“New York Touch,” August 16–29). “This is an exceptionally good and illuminating story on Andrew Cuomo, but the headline should have been simply ‘He’s a Dick,’ ” tweeted Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post. Andrew Donovan, a TV news reporter in Syracuse, called the piece a “career obituary” that was “a combination of fascinating, unforgiving, uncomfortable and sarcastic.” David Sirota, a former adviser to Bernie Sanders, wrote, “Just a psychopathic level of narcissism and nihilism on display here—hiding thousands of nursing home deaths, shielding health care donors from liability, raking in $5 mil for a book ghostwritten by public employees, sex pesting…

IF YOU WANT TO CONTEMPLATE the legacy of 9/11 20 years later, the logical place to begin might be the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. It bills itself as “the country’s principal institution concerned with exploring 9/11, documenting its impact, and examining its continuing significance.” And so it is, though not necessarily in the way its proponents had imagined. Battered by COVID, whose New York City body count is thus far well over ten times that at ground zero, the museum was staring down a $45 million deficit and laid off nearly 60 percent of its staff during its pandemic closure. Its aspirations for special 20th-anniversary events have been downsized or scuttled. The guest list for the annual memorial ceremony is again limited to families of the dead, spurning the firefighters,…

AMERICA ILLEGALLY invaded Iraq in 2003, occupied and destabilized and flattened it, and then never left. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and millions more have been made refugees or internally displaced persons. The consequences for the population are almost beyond comprehension: After decades of conflict, more than 2 million Iraqis are disabled, while the PTSD is inescapable. Entire generations have been left unable to look at the sky the same way. The Iraqi people must be added, alongside the American dead and their families, to the register of 9/11’s victims, after that day’s events were used as a justification for war. The atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, the bombardment of Fallujah, the attack on civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square by the military contractor Blackwater—these events are a…

The year after the Twin Towers fell, P. Diddy stood in front of Madison Square Garden wearing a Yankees cap and matching letterman jacket. “We still here!” he barked defiantly. “And we building four more new towers!” The Harlem rap mogul was appearing in the music video for Jermaine Dupri’s “Welcome to Atlanta” remix, which featured Diddy on a verse celebrating his hometown. It was mostly clichés—“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!”—but his nod to September 11 marked something new. Ever since Al Qaeda operatives crashed two hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, a patriotic fervor had gripped the country. The destruction of those buildings was taken personally, an affront to everything that made people in the United States good and free. Diddy bought…

IN 1989, WHEN HE was 14, Harry Villareal learned he’d been selected as a U.S. Open ball person. “I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t too hard,’” he says. “It’s just sort of, Run, get the ball.” This week, as he returns to Flushing for his 33rd straight Open, he knows there’s far more to the job—such as mastering the infinite ways one might hand Venus Williams or Roger Federer a towel. “Some players are like, ‘Just spread it out,’” Villareal says. “They take it with their palm, and it collapses around their hand. Sometimes you have the tournament towels, which are slightly different. It’s floppier on one side. They want that side facing them, so they’ll put their hand in the back.” The U.S. Open is the only Grand Slam…

THE WRITER Isaac Fitzgerald was walking across a parking lot one day this summer when he looked up to find an airplane falling out of the sky. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he cried. (“Excuse my language,” he added primly.) It was a small blue propeller plane, but in that moment it most resembled a leaf tumbling end over end. After a sickening interval—that moment when vastly divergent futures have yet to fork—the stunt plane finally righted itself. It flew onward. Then it began a yet-more-tortuous series of swoops and twists. It was an apt metaphor for the year he, and many of us, had just lived through: unpredictable, surreal, plunging, soaring. As an essayist and editor, Fitzgerald had long served as a kind of genial barkeep of the literary internet—an avuncular,…