New York Magazine March 10-23, 2025

1 New York’s latest cover featured a set of stories detailing the destructive start of the new administration (“Trump’s Purge of Washington,” February 24-March 9). Andrew Rice wrote about how Trump loyalist Kash Patel, the recently appointed director of the FBI, might deal with the bureau that had led investigations into the president (“Vengeance Is His”). Commenter stephen.stirling asked, “Why is anyone surprised … and shocked, shocked! … that they’re doing precisely what they said they’d do during the campaign? Did you think they weren’t serious? That they didn’t really mean it?” Tailline News wondered on X, “Why would someone be worried about payback if the original action was justified? If it wasn’t, it’s not really payback, but justice. Maybe they should be worried about justice?” Commenter venturagirl said, “Patel…

INSIDE: Downtown with Mamdani / A puzzler back in the game / Federal workers under pressure A FEW WEEKS INTO Donald Trump’s second term, a MAGA-supporting acquaintance asked me why the left seemed “so unbelievably demoralized.” He was not (merely) gloating; he was curious. “I’m sure it won’t last,” he told me, “but for now it’s just sort of a bewildering sensation to feel like you’re doing politics with no opposition.” There was a note of pity in his voice. He wasn’t wrong. The first signs of life from the dazed Democrats following the inauguration were not exactly encouraging: Joining a protest outside the Treasury on February 4, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer held hands with California representative Maxine Waters—an icon of the resistance to Trump’s first term—and chanted “We…

IT COULD HAVE BEEN anything. An Aimé Leon Dore pop-up? A Deuxmoi-reported sighting of Chappell Roan? Somethingsomething sneakers? But no, the line outside Night Club 101 that wrapped around East 7th was in fact for democratic-socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. The anti-billionaire, pro-Palestine assemblymember for northwestern Queens had shouldered his way into second place in a recent poll of Democratic-primary candidates, and if tonight looked and felt different from most political fundraisers, it was because—as the actress Rowan Blanchard, one of the hosts, said to me—“he’s different.” “We knew people were experiencing a kind of political malaise,” said the artist Aria Dean, who helped plan the event. “So many events get written about because there’s a huge line outside.” Why not, she said, “mobilize the clout bomb”? That they had…

IN FEBRUARY 2024, the New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz was sitting at his desk in Pleasantville, hard at work around 11 p.m., when he shifted to the left and found he couldn’t shift back. The side of his mouth was drooling. Shortz recognized the signs: He was having a stroke. Later, at the hospital, he had a second, larger stroke and then, after thrombolysis to dissolve the clot that caused it, a brain bleed—a rare and serious complication. He spent ten days in intensive care, prognosis uncertain, before he was stable enough to move to an inpatient rehab center, where he would begin the long work of recovery. Early on, Shortz said, the doctors offered him a sliver of good news: The strokes had affected the right hemisphere…

LAUREN WAS AT HER DESK when the email arrived, as bland and curt as it was apocalyptic. “Good morning, CFPB staff,” it read. “Employees should stand down from performing any work task. Thank you for your attention on this matter.” It was a few minutes before 9 a.m. on Monday, February 10. “I just got physically nauseated,” Lauren told me. (I’ve used a pseudonym to protect her privacy.) The message was from Russell Vought, the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where Lauren had been an exceptional performer for more than a decade. Since Donald Trump’s reelection, she had been reassuring her staff that their work would go on; sure, the new administration would instruct them to quit some projects, but perfectly valid ones would take their place.…

IN FEBRUARY 2024, dairy farmers in the northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle noticed that their herds were getting sick. A cow’s temperature would spike, and she would stop eating. Soon, her milk would dry up or turn thick—tests would reveal the milk had twice the normal number of white blood cells. The feverish cows would barely drink any water. As they grew dehydrated, their eyes sank into their heads. Nearly all of them had mastitis: a swollen, painful udder and teats, which made milking difficult. ¶ The disease seemed to be spreading; veterinarians in the region heard from colleagues in Kansas and New Mexico who reported the same constellation of symptoms. On March 14, a group of them got on a conference call with animal-health specialists from around the…