New York Magazine July 31-August 13, 2023

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Andrew Rice investigated the post-pandemic real-estate panic that’s causing megalandlords to sell off their commercial properties (“New Glut City,” July 17–30). ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis said it was “deeply reported” and “definitive,” while Rob Schwartz, the founder of ad agency TBWA, called the article “clarifying, insightful, and sobering … We need to radically rethink the city.” “If you had told someone five years ago that Manhattan office buildings would be considered ‘worthless,’ ” the showrunner and writer Julie Bush noted, “no one would have believed you. You’d be thought insane.” Journalist Helen Barrett highlighted how “one developer told New Yorkers it was their ‘civic responsibility’ to get back to the office—that’s the level of market desperation.” Many readers engaged with the complicated proposition of…

INSIDE: Women’s World Cup fever / A new Democratic power broker / The ultimate beach read THE SCANDAL ISN’T what’s illegal, Michael Kinsley once wrote; the scandal is what’s legal. The point of the aphorism is that, in American politics, the worst abuses by powerful people usually involve clever ways to exploit the law without committing crimes. That notion has grown a bit outdated for an era in which a mobbed-up real-estate crook turned professional swindler can be elected president of the United States. But it remains the case that a large amount of outrageous behavior is perfectly legal. This problem describes the ongoing ethics scandals of both the Supreme Court and Hunter Biden. The dilemma with Hunter Biden is the mismatch between his sleaze, which is vast, and his…

“I’M OVERSTIMULATED,” said Jessica Scaparro after watching Daniëlle van de Donk of the Netherlands land a crunching tackle on the U.S.’s Lindsey Horan. The crash and the fiery exchange that ensued, in which Horan shoved van de Donk, were replayed on the jumbotron and dozens of screens at Pig Beach BBQ in Astoria, where a packed crowd of hundreds of U.S. supporters (and about a dozen Dutch ones) had gathered to catch one of the most anticipated matches of the Women’s World Cup being held in Australia and New Zealand. Despite the heat advisory, there was a breeze, and at the start of play, the smell of barbecued pork wafting through the air felt like a harbinger of victory for the Americans. “I’m oddly not nervous,” said Sara Ach 30…

ONE AFTERNOON IN late July, J. B. Pritzker reclined in a conference room high above Chicago and considered the curious case of Ron DeSantis. Pritzker, the 58-year-old governor of Illinois, was in light-blue shirtsleeves and a neatly knotted bright-pink tie— “My Barbie tie,” he quipped to business leaders earlier, revealing he’d watched the movie with his wife and daughter. He was slightly bewildered by the Florida governor’s misfortunes in the GOP presidential primary, which had recently led DeSantis to lay off a huge chunk of his staff amid cratering poll numbers. “I had never really paid a lot of attention to his manner and his personality so much, only to his policies and his hype and the extremist positions,” Pritzker told me, speaking carefully as he settled into pundit mode.…

I CAN SPOT IT a mile away out here,” says Vivian, who has spent her summers in the Hamptons for decades. “I noticed the grift when I was a kid working in Westhampton. These kids come in from the city, drink a lot, befriend someone, and stay for the night—then a week.” She saw it again this summer at a pop-up in East Hampton: The woman was “acting a little strange, chatting everyone up.” Soon enough, they were talking about Vivian’s house. Then came the ask: Just a night, won’t be a bother. Vivian isn’t the only one who can recognize the type—which is maybe why it seems like everyone in the Hamptons is reading The Guest, Emma Cline’s new novel about a young woman named Alex who drifts from…

IT’S BAD NEWS when your university creates a committee to ensure that you don’t publish any research papers without its approval. It’s worse news if the only other person facing similar scrutiny is a man investigating alien abductions. This was the situation facing the trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk in the mid-’90s when Harvard Medical School informed him that all of his future publications would be vetted for quality control. The other professor Harvard had slapped with a similar degree of oversight was psychiatrist John Mack, who had spent years studying people who claimed to have been taken by aliens and, by the mid-’90s, ended up believing them. At the time, van der Kolk was in his early 50s and an academic star who looked the part: tall and…