New York Magazine February 10-23, 2025

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Brock Colyar wrote about affluent young Trump supporters gleefully welcoming the new administration (“Red Dawn,” January 27–February 9), generating an outsize response. Calling it a “fascinating almost anthropological study of a growing group of young Americans who really don’t get enough attention in the media,” journalist Don Lemon said on his YouTube channel that “they are people who don’t believe in good-faith arguments, they don’t believe in the truth, they are here to mock, to discredit, and to revel in the downfall of institutions they claim to despise but secretly need to maintain their own power and their own relevance.” Jezebel’s Kylie Cheung tweeted, “The GOP has devoted massive effort to infiltrating the media ecosystems young people consume to court them … you…

INSIDE: New Yorkers protest ICE / Spencer Pratt, after the fires / A wayward American in Colombia IN THE MOMENTS BEFORE an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River on January 29, killing 67, an air-traffic controller at Reagan National Airport repeatedly alerted the helicopter to the presence of the jet. The Black Hawk pilots replied that they had the plane “in sight.” In the audio, there is an eerie, workaday calm to these exchanges. There is no panic; nothing seems amiss except, perhaps, the quickening pace. As the trajectories of the two aircrafts converge, the control tower instructs the helicopter to “pass behind” the jet. Seconds later, you can hear the controllers react to the collision: “Ooh! Oh my—” The audio cuts out…

THE RAIDS BEGAN IN New York on January 28. Kristi Noem, the new secretary of Homeland Security, joined the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for a ride-along photo op. Although plenty of these sweeps took place under Joe Biden, ICE’s powers have been expanded, and the perception the Trump administration created was one of a newly jacked-up, militarized toughness. Noem wrote that the 100 or so people picked up in New York over the course of a week and hauled off to detention were “dirt bags.” The point was to sow fear, and it worked. The City reported that a food-cart garage in Manhattan was atypically full at midday. The operators were afraid to hit the streets. About one in three New Yorkers is foreign born; nearly half a million…

ON A BEACH in Santa Barbara, the former reality-TV star Spencer Pratt is sipping a skinny margarita and recounting how he and his wife, fellow reality veteran Heidi Montag, lost everything. His son Gunner’s art, Montag’s collection of Hermès espresso cups. His own collection of crystals. His hummingbird sanctuary. His chargers. His gym equipment. The giant Martin Schoeller portraits of Pratt and Montag that once hung in their living room. All a pile of toxic ash, destroyed in the Palisades firestorm. “It was so scary,” Pratt says over FaceTime, wearing a PALISADES STRONG hat and a TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT sweatshirt, of the day the fires broke out. On the morning of January 7, Montag evacuated with their children from their house in the hillside down to Pratt’s parents’ house on…

DURING THE PANDEMIC, I bought an apartment in Colombia. Since then, I’ve been spending winter and spring there, working toward my Colombian residency, building a potential escape from the U.S. that I hope I will never need. I don’t have any previous ties to Colombia, no clear reason to choose this country, except that I feel weirdly at home; it feels like visiting America’s distant future, a beautiful country torn apart by a century of failed politics. In Colombia now is the peace after our coming civil war. To avoid the news at the start of the second Trump administration, I decided to ride a small motorcycle east along the Caribbean coast to La Guajira, a desert on the border of Venezuela. I was scared to do it—people kept telling…

THE FIRST TIME it happens, you’re surprised. One day, your friend with the roommates and the wobbly employment and the busted phone—they buy an apartment. They tell you they’re moving, then they admit they’re buying, and suddenly you’re standing in the living room they own. It’s not that you’d never talked about money, if you count the years spent passing $17 back and forth on Venmo; it’s just that you thought you were on the same track. That when you said “broke,” you understood it to mean the same thing. It’s as if you were both paddling aimlessly in New York’s sea of downward mobility when your friend burst out of the water and stumbled onto the beach. ¶ The source of the apartment is not a mystery. It’s parent…