New York Magazine October 24 - November 6, 2022

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Rebecca Traister interviewed John Fetterman about the headwinds facing his Senate bid (“The Convalescence Campaign,” October 10–23). HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn said, “It’s so hard to capture the humanity of a candidate for office, let alone link that humanity to what’s at stake in the campaign. @rtraister does both of those things in this terrific profile.” Columnist Connie Schultz, the wife of U.S. senator Sherrod Brown, wrote, “Highly recommend this honest, deeply reported story … She documents Fetterman’s challenges & strengths & rightly notes: ‘the willingness with which the political press took up the frame offered by the Oz campaign has been startling.’ ” Fox News derided the feature as a “glossy profile piece,” and The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr pushed back on…

Ask any three kids... what the future will be like and you’ll get three completely different answers. That’s the beauty of a child’s imagination: It’s limitless, and never is that more apparent than during creative play. Spontaneous, unstructured playtime fosters innovation, problem-solving, and confidence, in addition to helping children develop fine motor skills and learn to cope with their feelings. In fact, 95 percent of children in the LEGO® 2022 Playwell Study said creative play helps them try out new ideas. As a reminder of what the world could be like if only we dreamed it, we gave three kids piles and piles (and piles) of LEGO bricks and let their imaginations run wild. With the help of a LEGO Master Builder (yes, that’s a real job), they created everything…

INSIDE: The open-mic night Chinese censors hate / A driving instructor to the private-school stars / Eric Adams’s shadow administration THE REPUBLICAN PARTY is poised to win back the House in November with the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight giving the GOP a greater than 70 percent chance of flipping Congress’s lower chamber. One source of the party’s strength is unambiguous: Surveys consistently find that rising prices are far and away the public’s top concern and that Republicans are widely seen as more credible inflation fighters than Democrats. Asked which party they trust more to handle inflation, voters in a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll favored the GOP by 19 points. On one level, this makes sense. The Democrats are the party in power, and prices have risen sharply on their watch.…

ONE SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON in a dim theater on the Lower East Side, an industrial designer named Susan Zhang was making a joke about sex toys. The ones in China are too quiet, she said: “It’s as if your vibrator was telling you, ‘Be like me; be a quiet, good Chinese woman.’ ” The show’s name, “女子主意,” can be translated as “Women’s Ideas” or “Good Ideas,” and it has strong claims to both. As the only feminist-led, Chinese-language stand-up-comedy open mic in New York, it has become a coveted monthly treat for Chinese students and professionals. Each show is sold out within days, and there’s a waiting list for performers. “It really surprised us,” said Feilin Yang, the 31-year-old co-founder of the show, which launched in March. Yang came to New…

ON A RECENT Thursday afternoon at the corner of 86th and Park, a 2021 Honda Accord is idling, kneepadded with bumper guards. Contained inside, barely, is a compact Guyanese woman of 60 with a hasty slash of pink lipstick wearing a Calvin Klein sweatshirt. This is Shanti Gooljar, and this is her fief. Shanti (she refers to herself by first name only, so I must too) has, over the past two decades, virtually cornered the market on driving instruction for the city’s teen elite, commanding a privileged swath that stretches from Brearley and Spence on the East Side to Heschel and Columbia Prep on the West and north to Fieldston and Horace Mann. “I got them all locked down,” Shanti says. It’s a truth often honked that Manhattan kids are…

AS LEADER OF THE nation’s largest school system, Chancellor David Banks already had an outsize portion of influence and visibility. He recently kicked things up another notch by proposing to his longtime girlfriend, Deputy Mayor for Strategic Initiatives Sheena Wright, who is widely expected to be elevated to first deputy mayor by Eric Adams early next year. Banks laughed when I asked about the betrothal. “It happened about three weeks ago,” he said. “It only took me ten years.” With Banks running schools from the Tweed Courthouse; his fiancée soon to be overseeing day-to-day operations next door at City Hall; and his brother, Phil Banks, a few blocks away at 375 Pearl Street quarterbacking anti-crime efforts as deputy mayor for public safety, the wisecrack in political circles is that Adams’s…