New York Magazine July 28-August 10, 2025

1 For the latest issue of New York, Simon van Zuylen-Wood ventured north to report on how furious our once-friendliest neighbors are at the U.S. (“Canada Is Not for Sale,” July 14–27). In an interview with Canada’s National Post, he said, “I totally tried to Method-act and really put myself in the shoes of a Canadian … I tried to become one.” Cindy BLaw tweeted, “It’s personal, it’s political, it’s national, it’s global. America has failed. To The Hague with you! Criminals! Monsters!” Also on X, Rod Mickleburgh, a former correspondent for the Globe and Mail, said, “it’s not anti-American … it’s anti-being ridiculed and punished economically by the president of the United States … picking on Canada, which has limited ability to fight back, other than buying Canadian and…

WHEN I WAS A federal prosecutor with the Southern District of New York, I worked with all manner of frightful cooperating witnesses—fraudsters, gangsters, killers—and even I can’t imagine a scenario in which the U.S. Department of Justice comes to a legitimate deal with Ghislaine Maxwell. But that’s the Trump administration’s latest volley in its frantic effort to quell the uproar from the president’s base over what is, or is not, hidden in government files about the late convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. It’s a flawed plan but perhaps an understandable one for Trump’s cronies to have seized on amid a crisis they have brought on themselves. Virtually as soon as she became U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi started dangling the public release of more salacious and damning material about Epstein,…

IT’S 9 A.M. ON A SUNNY spring morning in London, and Yael Cohen is in a basement-level room a few blocks from Selfridges rubbing numbing cream on her arms. “I’m terrified of needles,” she says, though she’s about to spend the next two hours with a cannula in each arm. The former wife of megamanager Scooter Braun is now the CEO of Clarify Clinics, a British-based start-up offering a procedure it claims can remove microplastics from one’s blood—for around $13,000. After having the “Clari procedure” done on herself for the first time in January, Cohen wrote on Instagram that she saw “a 90 percent reduction in microplastics after just one session” and posted screenshots of her before-and-after bloodwork. This is her second go-round. The clinic has been open since the…

IF YOU HAPPENED to find yourself in Portland, Maine, on Friday, July 18, you might have noticed a curious influx of visitors: couples in their 40s—the men in slick athleisure, the women wearing designer sunglasses—passing through the lobby of the Press Hotel and eating meals at Scales, a select seafood restaurant on the waterfront. They traveled from places like the Upper East Side and Chappaqua. They all seemed to know one another. The dads congregated in hotel bars. The moms had flawless manicures. On Saturday morning at 7 a.m., they piled into their cars—Escalades, Rivians, G-Wagons—to drive north on the highway, eventually turning onto dusty, bumpy wooded roads, passing signs with names like Camp Vega, Camp Takajo, Camp Mataponi, Camp Laurel, Camp Androscoggin, Camp Matoaka, and Tripp Lake Camp. Once…

LAURA STILL wonders how different things would be if she and her husband, Mark, had simply chosen another camp. It was June 2021, and after months of virtual kindergarten, they sent their then-almost-6-year-old daughter to a summer program at a local school. The camp would be a brief reprieve before Amelia, an only child, started first grade, and Laura was sure she would love it. She was outgoing, the kind of kid who didn’t hesitate to approach someone new on the playground and start a game. So Laura was surprised when, after the first day, Amelia told her she didn’t want to go back. At pickup a few days later, she pleaded again not to return. She said the woman who ran the camp often yelled and, at lunchtime, wouldn’t…

Andrew first met Matthew Christopher Pietras in September 2019 at the opening-night gala for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Porgy and Bess. A professional piano tuner, Andrew knew plenty of opera patrons, but there was something different about Pietras. At 34, he was considerably younger than the other wealthy donors, not to mention handsome—tall, slim, and stylish. “A friend introduced us. I was intrigued,” Andrew says. “You never know who you’re going to meet at these things. They could be a prince.” Soon after, Andrew was pleasantly surprised to find an email from Pietras inviting him to dinner. They went to an Italian restaurant in the Village. Pietras was chatty and impulsive, ordering a few of the most expensive dishes on the menu for them to share. After that night,…