New York Magazine December 2-15, 2024

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Simon van Zuylen-Wood tried to find out why the city has swung so hard toward Donald Trump (“The Reddening of New York,” November 18–December 1). Ben Yelin, co-host of the Caveat podcast, called it “the best post-election read I’ve seen so far. Combination of compelling reporting and great analysis. And frankly, it’s a tough read.” Journalist Sonny Bunch noted, “One takeaway from this should be that people care about illegal immigration and vote accordingly.” Shari Tucker said, “the democrats are dead in the water because they’ve been in denial that most of their policies hurt workers and small business and have since Bill Clinton was in office. They only play to people like me.” Gary Hilborn argued, “I’m sensitive to those among us…

INSIDE: Banana on the wall / The return of Gwen Whiting / A breakup with the in-laws “THEY SAY ANGER is a secondary emotion,” someone who has much to fear from the incoming administration told me last week. “So whatever’s under that is …” He paused. He had, throughout our conversation, veered relentlessly toward the general, away from the intensity of his experience. “Whether it’s fear, some sense of injustice, or a need being deprived, it’s hard.” The man for whom it is hard is a straitlaced middle-aged former official who spent decades working in government, a small percentage of that time having been devoted to national-security and legal concerns surrounding Donald Trump. He was an insider until he wasn’t. “People aren’t thinking creatively enough,” Andrew McCabe told Politico in…

SEVEN YEARS AGO, as New York neared its 50th anniversary, we asked 50 artists to create celebratory posters. For one of them, Maurizio Cattelan photographed a banana stuck to a wall with bright-red tape. It was, Cattelan told us, partly a riff on New Yorkers’ patched-with-duct-tape living quarters. (“In my apartment, the pipes are held together with it,” he said.) In 2019, he created a similar work, with silver-gray tape and titled Comedian, in an edition of three. At the Art Basel Miami fair, they sold for $120,000 to $150,000 each. What buyers got was not merely a rapidly browning piece of fruit but a license to replace it. What Cattelan got would more than pay for better pipes. This past November 20, one of the three Comedians went to…

JUST BEFORE Thanksgiving in 2022, Gwen Whiting was getting her hair done when a friend forwarded her an Instagram post about the Laundress, the line of upscale, plant-derived, low-preservative ecoconscious products that Whiting co-founded in 2002. In 2019, she had sold the company to Unilever for a reported $100 million; two years later, she had finished her employment contract under the conglomerate, which promptly terminated her company email address. Which is why Whiting found out only through her DMs that her former start-up was warning customers to immediately stop using all of its products. Two weeks later, the Laundress recalled some 8 million items: They potentially contained dangerous bacteria that gave consumers unsightly rashes and posed serious infection risks for the immunocompromised. Under Whiting, the Laundress had fostered a devoted…

I HAVEN’T TALKED to my in-laws for some time. A period of mutual silence stretched, glacial and peaceful, for seven years. Then just before the election, in late October, I received a letter from my mother-in-law, written on behalf of them both, asking if there was a path to reconciliation. My in-laws are white, from the South and Midwest. My father-in-law, now retired, was a pastor in a Southern Baptist church. My mother-in-law was a nurse. They are dramatically conservative. I learned this over many years, gradually and in starker moments. One afternoon in 2017, when my husband and I were ten years into our marriage and we were sitting with his parents at our dining-room table in our apartment in California, my father-in-law began to lecture me about my…

THERE’S NOT MUCH in New York that has staying power. Every other day, a new scandal outscandals whatever we were just scandalized by; every few years, a hotter, scarier downtown set emerges; the yoga studio up the block from your apartment that used to be a coffee shop has now become a hybrid drug front and yarn store. Sometimes it’s like living in whatever the opposite of Groundhog Day is, waking up each morning in a new and unfamiliar city. That makes it a little bit easier to spot the things that have stood the test of time. This year, Saturday Night Live entered its 50th season, still defiantly delirious, still doing sketches that shouldn’t resonate further than Hoboken, still helmed by the same guy who, 50 years ago, pitched…