New York Magazine August 1-14-2022

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Wes Enzinna chronicled the rise of Chris Smalls and his organizing efforts (“What Will the Amazon Slayer Do Next?” July 18–31). Leah Borden called it an “excellent story showing the tension between the pressure on Smalls to be the public face of the union and the challenge of ALU not even having won a contract and depending on the talents of a few other individuals.” Sociology professor and labor writer Jake Rosenfeld said the profile “is troubling, and highlights the necessity of durable, stable organizations to lock in the initial successes Smalls helped inspire. There is no viable path forward through one person, and one person alone.” @blajje was less impressed, writing, “no hate on chris smalls or any of his efforts, its…

INSIDE: New York’s shark patrol / Alex Jones parties with the post-left / Decoding Elon Musk POLITICAL NEWS RARELY gets much grimmer than it did for Joe Biden on July 26, when he was greeted by a surprise poll showing that, were he to run again in a contested primary in New Hampshire, he might command less than one-fifth of the vote. It was a far-fetched hypothetical—the likes of Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren won’t challenge him if he runs for reelection—but the dearth of support for a sitting president was still galling. And yet, improbably, the news was even worse for his presumptive heir: Kamala Harris was all the way down in the single digits. The vice-presidency is, by definition, a nearly impossible job. There’s the prestige and the…

FOR MOST LOCAL beachgoers, the return of apex predators is hair-raising news. The first nibble came in June when a man swimming at Jones Beach suffered a “possible shark bite” to the leg; this incident was quickly followed by five more reports of shark bites happening off Long Island in a three-week span. (Mercifully, none of the recent bites has resulted in serious injury.) But for Greg Metzger, the chief field coordinator of the SOFO Shark Research and Education Program, evidence of a thriving New York shark population has been found here for a while. “We’ve been seeing more sharks for nearly ten years now,” says Metzger, a high-school science teacher who spends his summers captaining boatloads of shark researchers. “As sad as it is that these individuals had a…

IT’S NOON IN AUSTIN, fully 100 degrees out, and the documentarian Alex Lee Moyer is sitting in a downtown hotel a few hours before the premiere of her new film. Alex’s War is an access-driven portrait of the muscle-bound conspiracist Alex Jones, and yesterday Moyer traded places with her subject, appearing on his Infowars show to plug it. “Every time there was a commercial break, they were really trying to push his boner pills,” she says. “He’s like, ‘The globalists are trying to ruin the American family. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have children.’ ” Having spent months recording Jones, Moyer mimics his hoarse, manic drawl with affection. Moyer’s own expression is generally deadpan, and at times it’s hard to tell if she’s masking worry or ennui.…

IN JANUARY 2018, Tesla announced details of a new contract with its CEO, Elon Musk, that sounded less like an executive-compensation package and more like the premise of a game show. Under the deal, Musk would take no salary but could earn large bundles of stock options each time he raised the company’s value by $50 billion. If it went up by a mere $49,999,999,999, he would leave empty-handed. The contract’s top prize could be unlocked only if the company’s market cap hit $650 billion by 2028, a 13-fold increase. Tesla was bleeding so much money—it was among the most shorted stocks on Wall Street—that growing its value that significantly in a decade, or ever, seemed hopeless. The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin described the feat as “laughably impossible.”…

PART I 60 Days Left IT’S A COMMONPLACE that New Yorkers only want to talk only about real estate, but in my experience, this isn’t true. Sometimes they want to talk about things that are wholly unrelated to housing. I, unfortunately, have lost the ability to discuss anything else since learning this past spring—while I was sick with COVID—that my landlords were putting my apartment up for sale. A mad scramble ensued, some of which was documented in this very magazine.1 Long story short, we could not afford to buy our apartment at the top of the bubble, but some other dum-dums could, and last week, they did. We now have 60 days to find a new place, which is, I realize, not the worst thing that’s ever happened to…