New York Magazine September 13-26, 2021

1 For the cover of New York’s “Fall Preview” issue, Hunter Harris spent two weeks in Italy with the cast and crew of Succession as they filmed the show’s much-anticipated third season (“The Roys Summer in Italy,” August 30–September 12). CGTN’s Nathan King called it a “great piece—just so rich in detail and dripping in the zeitgeist of our age.” Commenter veenessaboo wrote, “I didn’t realize how much I needed this piece. This was so enjoyable to read and so well-structured, taking us through each of the actors’ processes and their characters.” Journalist Matthew Zeitlin appreciated how Harris “really dug into how tv works both on a ‘don’t people get sweaty when they shoot outside in italy in the summer’ level and on the mechanics of how to make an…

OVER THE SUMMER, Joe Biden threw his presidency behind a $3.5 trillion social-policy bill that would address everything from climate change to health care to child care. One strategy Biden proposed to help finance this agenda was to repair the tax code’s scandalously lax treatment of the rich—specifically, by closing a notorious loophole allowing capital gains to escape any tax at all as long as the owners pass the asset on to their heirs before it is sold. The provision, colloquially called the “Angel of Death loophole,” was described five months ago by former North Dakota Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp as “one of the biggest scams in the history of forever,” a view that comports with the analysis of economists on both the left and the right. (Even Republicans like…

THE EMERSON STRING QUARTET, which for 45 years has dominated the genre with playing that ranges from tripping elegance to brutal stomp, will spend the next two years saying good-bye. That leaves time for at least one more New York premiere, an all-Beethoven road show, a European tour, and an entire valedictory season: “A huge crescendo, then a subito piano,” violinist Philip Setzer says with relish. “We all know artists who said they were going to retire and just kept going and going,” adds fellow violinist Eugene Drucker. “We’re not going to do that.” All four players insist they’re not done with chamber music or with one another, just with the relentless travel and logistics. In a typical season, they spend nearly half the year on the road performing and…

“I BELIEVE NEW YORK’S downtown always needs a magazine,” writes Ripley Soprano, 29, in the editor’s letter of a new downtown magazine, called Dirty, devoted to “the people whose lives revolve around sex, drugs, and style.” Founded during quarantine, Dirty is a defiantly retro thing animated by a mythic 1990s pre-digital idea of downtown—the era of early Vice magazine, when the Cock was on Avenue A, Bush-wick was still years away from being gentrified, and nobody had heard of something called “Dimes Square.” Dirty’s tagline is “Be what you wanna jack off to,” and at a pop-up event it hosted in August, copies of the magazine were handed out along with doses of Narcan and little metal cards (useful for chopping up a line). The magazine isn’t afraid of sex…

WHEN FINANCIAL REGULATORS demonstrate that they hold generous views of bitcoin—that, contrary to the prevailing mood in Washington, they believe digital currencies could be more than a conduit for laundering money and buying fentanyl online—the crypto faithful honor them with affectionate nicknames. J. Christopher Giancarlo, who, as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, green-lit bitcoin derivatives, became Crypto Dad. At the Securities and Exchange Commission, the libertarian-leaning Hester Peirce got tagged Crypto Mom, and her colleague Valerie Szczepanik is the Crypto Czar. In January, upon the news that the Biden administration wanted the SEC to be chaired by Gary Gensler, a Goldman Sachs alum turned regulator who had taught blockchain and crypto courses at MIT for years, a similar term of endearment seemed imminent. Professor Crypto, perhaps? Before long,…

The Willis Avenue Bridge, a 3,000-foot stretch of asphalt and beige-painted steel connecting Manhattan and the Bronx, is the perfect place for an ambush. The narrow bike path along its west side is poorly lit; darkened trash-strewn alcoves on either end are useful for lying in wait. All summer, food-delivery workers returning home after their shifts have been violently attacked there for their bikes: by gunmen pulling up on motorcycles, by knife-wielding thieves leaping from the recesses, by muggers blocking the path with Citi Bikes and brandishing broken bottles. “Once you go onto that bridge, it’s another world,” one frequent crosser said. “You ever see wildlife with the wildebeest trying to cross with the crocodiles? That’s the crocodiles over there. We’re the wildebeests just trying to get by.” Lately, delivery…