New York Magazine December 5-18, 2022

ANYONE IN MAGAZINES knows what it takes to wrangle a celebrity for a photo shoot. There are weeks of phone calls, issues of timing and availability and vanity. So what happens when you want 72? Therein lay the challenge for this issue’s cover photograph by Pelle Cass, who’s known for multiple-exposure composed images, shot from one spot and then set down, digitally, into one frame. They are intense projects, requiring thousands of identically framed exposures shot over hours and a camera tripod that absolutely. Can. Not. Move. ¶ Jody Quon, New York’s photo director, with her deputy, Liana Blum, and a team of editors, made an enormous list of names, then reached out to a huge swath of staff to start making calls. They and Cass chose a particularly New…

1 New York’s latest cover story explored the $32 billion collapse of the crypto empire of Sam Bankman-Fried’s (“The Virtue Was the Con,” November 21–December 4). CoinDesk’s David Z. Morris wrote, “A lot of mainstream media getting shit on for their kid-gloves treatment of SBF, but I want to shout out really good work by @NYMag. Their package title is an accurate representation of their rigor and seriousness.” Journalist and crypto skeptic Jacob Silverman added, “A big improvement over the ‘normie’s guide to becoming a crypto person’ that they published almost exactly a year ago.” Rachel Lin, CEO of the trading platform SynFutures, said it was “the best piece on FTX I’ve read so far from mainstream media, at least trying to deep dive into SBF’s upbringing, social and political…

INSIDE: Life after Elon / U.S. soccer’s biggest fan / Mashed potatoes meet Monet ON A RECENT Sunday in November, Herschel Walker traveled to Carrollton, a farming town in western Georgia, and delivered a screed about gender. “They don’t know the definition of a woman,” the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate said. “They trying to tell you a man could get pregnant.” He blamed his opponent, incumbent Raphael Warnock, for “bringing pronouns into our military” and proclaimed that “men shouldn’t be in women’s sports.” The next day, he released an ad featuring a trans swimmer whom Walker referred to as a “biological male.” Warnock is “afraid to stand up for female athletes,” Walker claimed. Walker’s transphobia has become the norm for the GOP, but his remarks were all the more…

NEARLY A YEAR after Elon Musk first teased the idea of buying Twitter; after he made an official offer to board members in April only to spend the summer trying to weasel his way out of it; after the company sued the richest man in the world and he caved and agreed to a deal worth $44 billion; after reports emerged that he wanted to lay off 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500-member workforce and after he then proceeded to do just that or something close to it; after thousands of employees were suddenly unable to log in to their work spaces or received emails saying, “Today is your last working day at the company”; after all of that, Tweeps—the gooey nickname the company’s employees use to refer to one another—deserved…

I’M HUMANLY falling apart,” says Roger Bennett, co-host of the soccer podcast Men in Blazers, who is sitting in a red leather banquette in a train station turned pizza bar next to the Metro-North stop in Mount Kisco. He’s back for a 36-hour window between stops on the show’s tour for the World Cup, rejoicing with fans across the country over the U.S. men’s team’s breaking into the elimination stage for the first time in eight years. He was hoping to get some rest at his home in Westchester, but upon arrival from Austin late the previous night, his dog, a Lagotto Romagnolo named Martin Scorsese, took a dump in its crate. Between the cleanup, the bath, and preparation for the three episodes he needed to record that day, Bennett…

ON OCTOBER 14, climate activists Phoebe Plummer, 21, and Anna Holland, 20, shocked the world by splashing tomato soup over van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London’s National Gallery. Wearing JUST STOP OIL T-shirts, they then glued themselves to the picture. One asked, “What is worth more, art or life?” Plummer later explained that they were motivated by a “sense of fear” brought on by global warming. They despaired that humanity was not doing enough to preempt its worst effects and decided to try “a media-grabbing action to get people talking.” Talk they did. Activists around the world have recently engaged in similar actions, tossing mashed potatoes and other substances at, or gluing themselves to, works by Vermeer, Klimt, Botticelli, da Vinci, Monet, Goya, Constable, Warhol, and Charles Ray. The answer to…