New York Magazine January 16-29, 2023

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Olivia Nuzzi reported on Donald J. Trump’s listless reelection effort (“The Final Campaign,” January 2–15). Politico called it a “rollicking look under the hood of the Trump 2024 campaign” with an “incisive” interview of the candidate. Journalist Eamonn Forde wrote, “This Trump profile … unearths a peculiar bleakness, loneliness and emptiness behind the desperately deflective bluster.” Nuzzi detailed Trump’s obsession with the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, leading the Washington Post’s Karen Heller to interview its sole surviving main cast member, Nancy Olson Livingston, who said she was “surprised he likes it so much. He’s missing something in the movie, while he relates it to stardom. Every character in ‘Sunset Blvd.’ is tragic. Movie stars did not have happy lives.” Trump himself lashed out…

INSIDE: The East River bone rush / Do you even lift? / The homeless crisis in the ER ONE OF THE CURIOUS things about the recent revolt by far-right House Republicans is that it was led by some of the party’s Trumpiest figures, yet they were essentially insisting that Congress return to the time before Donald Trump. The Republican-rebel demands—that their leaders stage shutdowns and debt-ceiling threats in the service of bug-eyed hysteria over the budget deficit—“harken back to the tea-party era,” noted Politico. Before the symbol of the right became guys in red hats warning that immigrants and the deep state were destroying the country, it was guys in tricorne hats warning that the stimulus and Obamacare were destroying the country. And now they are back. When Trump won…

A LESSON IN how podcasts for guys work: When a fossil hunter goes on The Joe Rogan Experience to chat about a 50-ton cache of woolly-mammoth remains that the American Museum of Natural History allegedly dumped in the East River, mainly in the 1940s, believe him when he says there’s going to be a “bone rush.” “I was ecstatic,” says Rogan listener Connor Rogers. “This is what we do.” Rogers works with his father at a family surveying company in southern Staten Island, mapping the floors of New York’s harbors and rivers. After convincing his dad to hear out the fossil collector’s just-believable-enough story, he checked the riverbed of the alleged site off East 65th Street in a boat named for his grandfather Red. There were no obvious signs of…

IN A TIKTOK VIDEO she made to promote Liftoff, her beginners’ step-by-step weight-lifting manual, fitness writer Casey Johnston demonstrates the way she used to pick up a 40-pound box of kitty litter and carry it into her apartment. In this “before” scene, she goes through a series of painfully familiar contortions, scuttling, scrambling, and finally pushing the box through the door wheelbarrow style, butt in the air. The “after” video is about two seconds long; Johnston simply reaches down, picks up the box, and carries it inside. The clip is simple but encapsulates what makes Johnston such an effective teacher, one who has convinced her readers that bulking up, not slimming down, is a worthy fitness goal: her willingness to put her imperfections on display to get her message across,…

ABOUT 3,400 PEOPLE sleep on the streets or subways of New York each night, and the week after Christmas, EMTs dropped off one of them, a young white woman, at a Brooklyn emergency room. She had overdosed on an assortment of meds and called 911 on herself. Now she was, as the ER psych nurse on duty that night put it, “decompensating”—her mind running the familiar course from okay to unraveled to not coherent at all. The woman was focused on the subject of her boyfriend, her companion on the street, convinced that he was duplicitous and “trying to be slick.” At the thought, her voice rose to a sharp, panicked pitch. “If he really cared about me, why didn’t he ride in the ambulance with me?” And then, as…

In April 2022, Elon Musk acquired a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder, and was offered a seat on the board. Luke Simon, a senior engineering director at Twitter, was ecstatic. “Elon Musk is a brilliant engineer and scientist, and he has a track record of having a Midas touch, when it comes to growing the companies he’s helped lead,” he wrote in Slack. Twitter had been defined by the catatonic leadership of Jack Dorsey, a co-founder who simultaneously served as CEO of the payments business Block (formerly Square). Dorsey, who was known for going on long meditation retreats, fasting 22 hours a day, and walking five miles to the office, acted as an absentee landlord, leaving Twitter’s strategy and daily operations to a handful…