New York Magazine November 21-December 4, 2022

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Kerry Howley visited Britney Spears’s hometown to discover why the pop star’s father forced her into a yearslong conservatorship (“The Curse of Kentwood,” November 7–20). Julianne Escobedo Shepherd commented that Howley “is consistently brilliant at transforming feature reporting into narrative art, which makes this incredibly sad and infuriating story of patriarchal control that much more impactful.” Dominic Dean wrote, “A lot has already been said about the background to Britney’s conservatorship, and most media has moved on, but this deep dive into the family story is a very powerful piece of reporting, and worth reading. Warning: It is dark, even darker than you think.” Vanity Fair’s Erin Vanderhoof said the feature “really draws out the most discomfiting part of Britney’s conservatorship: common abusive…

IT’S POSSIBLE THAT you don’t fully understand what Sam Bankman-Fried did or what transpired at his company FTX. This may help. Explain it to me like I’m … 5 years old. A silly-haired wizard sold magic beans. The villagers loved it! Until they stopped believing in magic and demanded their money back, only to find out that the wizard had already spent it. Explain it to me like I’m … 10. A really smart guy owned a bank. He was also a terrible poker player. He used made-up money to buy his way into a high-stakes game and then he lost, so he paid his casino tab by robbing his own bank (allegedly). When his customers heard about his gambling losses, they stormed the bank to pull their money out,…

SBF: THE VIRTUE WAS THE CON IT’S EARLY NOVEMBER. You’re into crypto. It has probably been a rough few months—prices have fallen and some seemingly solid projects recently collapsed. You’ve got some assets tied up with FTX, the crypto concern founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s one of the largest exchanges on earth and is run by a heavily connected industry heavyweight, a media darling with an interest in philanthropy who collects celebrity endorsements and investments. Soon, however, warning signs start flashing. FTX is in free fall. SBF is tweeting nonsense. You’ve finally realized you have to pull your money off FTX, but when you try, you see it’s too late. The exchange has frozen withdrawals. Customer service isn’t responding, your apps aren’t even working anymore, and press coverage is confusing,…

SBF: THE VIRTUE WAS THE CON ON NOVEMBER 3, DAYS before his cryptocurrency empire collapsed, Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted a hearty FTX welcome to a promising new customer base. “Hello, West Africa!” he wrote, sharing the news that FTX was accepting a new currency, West African CFA francs, and that anyone in the region looking for somewhere to park their money and trade a bit of crypto could now open an account with his company. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for just 2 percent of global cryptocurrency trading, but adoption has picked up in recent years, and crypto enthusiasts have long seen the continent as a proving ground for some of crypto’s practical applications, like facilitating remittances. Many FTX users in Africa didn’t trade bitcoin or ethereum and instead used the platform simply…

EVERYONE IN NASSAU is talking about it: At Café Matisse, an upscale restaurant near Parliament, two men loudly discuss the fallout from Sam Bankman-Fried’s leveled $32 billion business. At a small coffee shop in a mall across the street from the site where FTX planned to build a new headquarters, a local businessman approaches me to ask if I am “the FTX guy.” (I’m a white guy with dark curly hair, but come on). Local radio stations report the news at the top of each broadcast. Rumors are everywhere about who got supersize donations, the blowout parties at Bankman-Fried’s apartment held before the crash, luxury condos bought for multiples over asking price. “The Realtors here never made so much money in their life,” one developer tells me. Gone, though, are…

IF YOU GO to Crystal Springs Uplands School, it’s both difficult to truly succeed (as in exceeding expectations) and difficult to fail. You know the kind of place. The floor is so high, the net is so secure. You’re born with a feeling your intelligence is a gift to society, a confidence that you can do no wrong. Everyone’s parent is either a Stanford professor or a tech mogul or Steve Jobs, whose son attended the school at the same time as Sam Bankman-Fried, who graduated in 2010. “There was one kid who was like the youngest global chess champion ever when he was, like, 11 years old,” one SBF-era alumnus of Crystal Springs Uplands School told me. (This was Daniel Naroditsky, class of ’14.) “Another girl from the school…