New York Magazine August 29-Septebmer 11, 2022

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Jen Wieczner documented the implosion of Su Zhu and Kyle Davies’s multibillion-dollar crypto fund (“The Three Arrows Guys Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” August 15–28). Fortune’s Jeff Roberts said the report was “every bit as delicious as I expected.” Protocol called it “almost too unbelievable, and you can already sense the limited-time HBO series or feature film Hollywood producers might try to cook up from these details.” Noting Zhu and Davies’s time at Andover, the Los Angeles Times’ Matt Brennan wrote, “From the boarding school that brought you the Iraq War, a new and somehow even more astounding scam.” For Futurism, Maggie Harrison wrote, “3AC’s success was built on two of the flimsiest things around: social media influence and heavy borrowing.” Reporter Nick Statt…

FOR MORE THAN FIVE YEARS, the legal campaign against Donald Trump has followed a boom-and-bust cycle. First, some shocking information is reported or a significant development occurs in the various investigations of Trump. Second, national media outlets, assisted by the anti-Trump legal commentariat, explain how Trump might be criminally prosecuted. Then in the end, for some reason or another, Trump remains a free man, the threat he poses to the Republic more potent than ever. Depending on your disposition, the news on August 8 that the Justice Department had searched Trump’s home at Mara-Lago—as part of a criminal investigation into the unlawful retention and destruction of sensitive government documents—means either that we are at the start of another of these cycles or that we may finally break free of them.…

IN WILLIAMSBURG, ON A dead-end waterfront street known as Van Alley, their hulking shapes rest comfortably against the skyline. One van’s dust-streaked windows are adorned with baby-pink-and-yellow leis. Inside another, a glass bong is the pièce de résistance among piles of laundry. Benefiting from the area’s lively bar scene and gyms that “only sometimes” require a membership to use their showers, Van Alley “has a unique sense of community that a lot of other van-life hubs or hot spots haven’t had,” says resident Drew Reister. Reister has been here for close to a year. Slade Guillory runs a full-service salon from his van, a sleek black number with a spinning barber pole fixed to its side. Rob Walker has lived here off and on since 2019, making him something like…

CHUCK SCHUMER had the ease of someone already on summer vacation. “I’d much rather be in New York than Washington any day of the week,” he said during a Zoom conversation from his Manhattan office in mid-August. The Senate Democrats had just passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a climate and tax law that constitutes the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s reform agenda, and as the majority leader responsible for saving this legislation— and, perhaps with it, Biden’s presidency—from what appeared to be certain defeat, Schumer could be forgiven for not merely taking a well-earned break but also resting on his laurels a bit. “People are just so positive,” he gushed, claiming that Democratic incumbents in battleground states are thrilled to run on the IRA in the upcoming midterms. “They said they’ve…

MY MOTHER, VERONICA, is 80. She used to be popular. In one of my earliest memories, she sits at a kitchen table in Queens, spilling her mug of instant coffee as she cackles with her best friend. When, later, we moved to New Jersey, her work pals from the local real-estate agency popped by in the afternoon to gossip and listen to Billy Joel. “I’m movin’ out!” Veronica would sing with a fist pump. In 1990, my parents divorced and Mom, at the age of 48, found a whole new set of salty middle-aged singles who could borrow her Anne Klein leather miniskirt for dates with divorced men. Before COVID-19, and before her second husband fell off a ladder and died in September 2020, she was known for hosting spontaneous…

ONE NIGHT in 2016, Laura Modi was facing an acute episode of an eternal parenting problem: trying to get your infant to eat. Modi had just given birth to her first child, a girl, and she was attempting to breastfeed, in part because she wanted to and in part because the American Academy of Pediatrics encouraged it. But Modi was struggling to produce milk and dealing with mastitis, a painful breast-tissue inflammation that can lead to infection—just two of the many medical, professional, and societal obstacles that can make breastfeeding impossible. Like three out of four new parents, Modi was going to have to use formula to keep her infant fed. As Modi paced the aisle of a pharmacy in San Francisco, where she worked as Airbnb’s director of hospitality,…