New York Magazine February 28-March 13, 2022

1 In an excerpt from New York’s new book, Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC, Lisa Miller chronicled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s meteoric rise from bartender to face of the resurgent left (“Adrift, Broke, and Disillusioned,” February 14–27). Miriam Bensman of the Queens DSA wrote, “terrific excerpt from what must be a terrific bio, traces AOC’s path before her run for office,” while Adam Fetcher said it was “a totally incredible story. Thank you @AOC for reminding us what public service looks like, and for leaving the door open behind you for others who might also say ‘People like me don’t run for office.’” Some readers thought the magazine had overstated Ocasio-Cortez’s impact: “I love AOC, but reshape? Kind of a stretch. I don’t feel like I’ve seen any real legislative accomplishments,”…

WHEN PRESIDENT BIDEN addressed the nation on February 24 from the White House, Russian soldiers were already well on the way to Ukraine’s largest cities and scores of people were being killed on both sides. The response from the U.S. and the other G7 countries was to fashion the global financial system they control into a weapon and unleash it on Moscow. “Some of the most powerful impacts of our actions will come over time, as we squeeze Russia’s access to finances and technology for strategic sectors of its economy and degrade its industrial capacity for years to come,” Biden said, using the tough but bloodless language of war by other means. Finance has long been a way to control states, particularly in the post–Cold War era. Limiting access to…

WHEN HE STARTED pouring drinks at Bemelmans Bar in 1989, Luis Serrano couldn’t have known he’d be working at what’s become the hottest joint in town. Yet a weird sort-ofpost-COVID Renaissance has hit the Upper East Side: Young New Yorkers hungry for the New York–iest New York experiences have found the Carlyle hotel’s bar, named for its murals by the author of Madeline, en masse. “I’ve never seen lines like this for the bar, ever, ever, in my life,” says Serrano, 58, who was here before the new crowd was born. And they will wait, all for a $24 martini and some live jazz. With the Waldorf closed for renovations and the Roosevelt lost to time, the last of New York’s great prewar-hotel bars—the King Cole Bar at the St.…

THE ACTOR Ben McKenzie is sitting in the den of his Brooklyn Heights townhouse, summarizing a 24-part MIT lecture series about the blockchain by SEC chair Gary Gensler. “Gensler talks about finance being the intermediation of risk and capital,” he explains before whipping me through the reliability of state-held currencies, the dangers of speculation, and the history of encryption from the Merkle tree (an early method of computer encryption) to ethereum (the biggest cryptocurrency after bitcoin). Once he gets through the three sides of the fraud triangle and the definition of securities, he takes a sip of tea. “It’s really good that you’re here talking to me,” McKenzie says. “Now my wife can say, ‘Thank God, for one day, I don’t have to listen to this shit.’” It’s a February…

TO THE LIST of obvious firsts, a Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would add another: the first former public defender to sit on the Supreme Court. It’s an entry on her résumé that a few years ago might have been politically unthinkable for a nominee to the highest court but is now, thanks to years of work by the progressive legal movement and criminal-justice reformers, a boon. Jackson served as a public defender for only two and a half years, but that’s more experience than any previous justice—ironic given that the Court in 1963 declared that “lawyers in criminal courts are necessities, not luxuries,” requiring states to provide attorneys to those who can’t afford them. From her longer stints at the U.S. Sentencing Commission all the way back to her Harvard…

IN AUGUST 2019, New York State attorney general Letitia James was on a boat, fishing, with Andrew Cuomo. The then-governor had asked her to take a tourism-boosting trip to Lake Ontario. It was almost a year into her first term, which she had won in part thanks to his decision to throw his political weight behind her 2018 primary bid. It wasn’t well known at the time, but Cuomo and James had recently experienced a bumpy patch. In June, James had overridden Cuomo’s wishes by issuing a statement supporting the Green Light bill, which granted undocumented New York residents the ability to legally apply for driver’s licenses. Cuomo publicly favored the measure but, according to James and members of her staff, privately wanted her office to rule it unconstitutional. At…