New York Magazine October 25-November 7, 2021

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Greg Donahue reported on an alleged serial killer at Brooklyn’s Woodson Houses (“The Murders Down the Hall,” October 11–24). Julia Dahl, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote, “Need an example of how our ‘justice’ system deems some deaths unworthy of their time? Look no further.” The Los Angeles Times’ Laura J. Nelson tweeted, “As their neighbors were murdered, elderly residents of a New York City housing complex begged city officials to install security cameras and the cops to investigate the most obvious suspect. So many institutional failures in this infuriating story.” The Write Pitch founder Britni Danielle added, “This absolutely wouldn’t have happened to elderly white victims. And yet, when these elderly Black & Brown people were being killed, police were…

DURING THE PAST year of COVID-induced market mania, cryptocurrencies have gone up so much—bitcoin is up about sixfold, while many other crypto projects are up far, far more—that even reluctant Wall Street institutions have started tiptoeing into the arena. A blazing rally that began this month has seen bitcoin shoot up 50 percent in a few weeks. But doubters remain, and their ranks just happen to include many of the same prominent investors who saw the financial crisis of 2008 coming. Hedge-fund mogul John Paulson, who was behind “the greatest trade ever”—he made $4 billion on his short of subprime mortgages—thinks cryptocurrencies will prove to be “worthless.” Michael Burry, the quirky hedge-fund manager made famous in The Big Short movie, complains that no one is paying attention to crypto’s leverage.…

THE BRONX SCIENCE Speech & Debate Team, one of the winningest teams in the U.S. and currently ranked No. 1 in the country, operates on a policy of no tryouts and no cuts: Just come to a meeting. Getting a leadership position, however, is harder. “It’s a full-on application process with an interview, résumé, merit check, grades check,” says senior Ellington Fagan. “It was like submitting my tax returns, if I even do those.” Ellington is one of 12 team captains of the sprawling squad, which has about 300 members this season, roughly 10 percent of the school’s student body. His specialty is Congressional Debate, in which students mimic a legislative body. According to him, that category tends to attract jacks-of-all-trades who have other interests too (he happens to be…

LINA KHAN WAS AN associate professor at Columbia Law, working remotely from Texas, when she found out that President Joe Biden wanted her on the Federal Trade Commission. She was 32, just a handful of years out of law school, and the prospect of being one of five commissioners on the panel was a coup. Then the record skipped. At some point after her confirmation hearing, Khan says, she was “pretty startled” to learn that the administration would tap her to chair the commission—a century-old agency with 1,100 employees, a $384 million budget, and, she’d argue, a set of priorities that went disastrously astray some 40 years ago. “I think it’s fair to say that my tenure here represents change in a whole host of dimensions,” Khan told me. “And…

SEVEN YEARS AGO, when I started talking incessantly about the climate crisis, my parents thought I was having a mental breakdown. It was 2014, and the drought in California that summer was particularly bad—the driest year in nearly a century before that record was surpassed this past summer. My dread stretched beyond what I saw in my suburban Los Angeles surroundings, in the crunchy grass and smoggy skies. After staying up into the night reading about melting ice sheets, I began having nightmares about tsunami waves swallowing my family’s house. My parents sent me to my therapist, Ken, who gently suggested my condition was related to post-traumatic-stress disorder from a sudden loss a few years earlier, and that made a comforting kind of sense. In September, I asked Ken if,…

IN THE WEEKS before the publication of her memoir, Going There, Katie Couric and I would play a dark little game called Funny or Fucked Up? Over coffee, lunch, and Zoom calls, I would bring up an anecdote from the book—like, say, the first sentence, which is about the time she ate so many carrots in the summer after college that her skin turned orange—and ask her what, exactly, her reader was supposed to make of it. The carrots were on account of the Scarsdale Diet, the deprivational fad to which the 22-year-old Couric had committed because her plan “was to look as good as possible for my wet hot American summer” before “finding a job—maybe even a career—in TV news.” That career would wind up being a blockbuster. At…