New York Magazine January 27-February 9, 2025

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Lila Shapiro wrote about best-selling author Neil Gaiman and the women who have accused him of sexual assault, coercion, and abuse (“There Is No Safe Word,” January 13–26). Gaiman had declined to speak to Shapiro but wrote in a lengthy blog reply, “As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever … Like most of us, I’m learning, and I’m trying to do the work needed … I hope that with the help of good people I’ll continue to grow.” He added, “At…

INSIDE: Confessions of a prominent internet addict / Will AI upend the Oscars race? DONALD TRUMP’S JANUARY 6 pardon spree is, without question, a captivating shiny object. Love what he’s done or hate it (and even some Republicans acknowledge the lunacy), it’s impossible not to gawk: clemency for, essentially, everyone—from seditious conspirators to 170-plus defendants who attacked cops with weapons to nonviolent insurrection-curious Capitol meanderers. Over 1,000 convictions were wiped off the books, all pending prosecutions were dismissed, and about 400 offenders were ordered to be released from prison. Despite prior insinuations from Trump and others about moderation, almost no lines were drawn. They all skated. But the pardon bonanza, for all its shock value and undeniable historical import, obscured a series of momentous policy changes initiated through an avalanche…

CHRIS HAYES CUTS a peculiar figure in the media landscape. He is omnivorously inquisitive, his owlish frames imparting the sense that he is always on the lookout for new information to hunt down and digest. He is an archetypal social-media know-it-all, equally confident dispensing his thoughts on sports, culture, and politics. And he is the rare pundit to have truly important insights into the workings of the world, predicting our anti-Establishment era in his 2012 book, Twilight of the Elites. Yet somehow he has ended up in cable news, as the host of MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes, making him an object of curiosity for those journalists who turn their noses up at the talking-head roundtable, the election countdown clock, and the sensationalist chyron. Is he one of us…

WHEN PETER JACKSON’S Beatles documentary, Get Back, debuted in 2021, the fact that Jackson had used artificial intelligence to clean up previously unusable audio was greeted with enthusiasm from tech geeks and crickets from most everyone else. But a lot has changed over the past few years, and when the story broke in mid-January that Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist had used AI behind the scenes, reactions on social media ranged from “I’m afraid The Brutalist can kiss my arse” and “Get fucked” to simply “Evil.” The controversy sprang from an interview the film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, gave to an outlet called RedShark News in which he spoke of using an AI voice-cloning tool, Respeecher, to tweak Adrien Brody’s and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian dialogue. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world…

IT’S MONDAY, JANUARY 20, the first night of Donald Trump’s second presidency, and just a couple blocks from the Capitol Building that his now-pardoned MAGA army swarmed four years and 14 days ago, there is, as there has been for the past several nights in restaurants, hotel ballrooms, and lobbying offices, a party for people who have never been happier about the direction in which this country is heading. They are drinking, smoking, flirting, networking, but mostly congratulating one another on their big win. This party is at Butterworth’s, a new dimly lit bistro that has become a hot spot for the right in part because one of its investors is Raheem Kassam, once the editor-in-chief of the U.K. edition of Breitbart. On the menu are themed cocktails with names…

NOT LONG AFTER ARRIVING in New York, Sarah McNally, a devoted vegetarian, tried oysters for the first time with the family of a boyfriend. She loved them—25 years later and still vegetarian, she still makes an exception for them—but she equally loved their craggy, opalescent shells, which she gathered up afterward and, to the polite horror of her hosts, stuffed into her purse. At 49, McNally has a soft, fluty voice (with a trace of rounded Canadian oars: “Soary,” she would apologize) and a wide-eyed manner. She’s too direct to be a classic bullshitter, but the oyster story painted a portrait almost too fanciful to believe. It felt like something out of a 19th-century novel: The provincial innocent from the North making her way in the sophisticated city, the magpie…