New York Magazine January 26-February 8, 2026

ON THE TENTH DAY of Jorie Kraus’s life—all of which had been spent in the NICU at the Mayo Clinic—a rapid-genomic-sequencing test showed she had DeSanto-Shinawi syndrome, or DESSH, as the syndrome is sometimes called. It’s an extremely rare incurable disorder marked by abnormalities in the WAC gene, which is thought to play a crucial role in neurodevelopment. Those with the syndrome often have motor challenges, intellectual differences, and sometimes behavioral and social ones. They tend to have muscle weakness and may struggle to walk, sit up straight, eat, or even breathe. There are few treatment options available beyond Band-Aids like physical therapy for symptom management. Her parents, Joanie and Dave, took their daughter home and figured out how to work her gastric-feeding tube (until she was strong enough to…

FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, thousands of unionized ironworkers, carpenters, and operating engineers from Sunset Park have been constructing a colossal wind farm in an 80,000-acre expanse of the Atlantic Ocean south of Long Island. A football-field-size barge, ushered along by tugboats, has been laying cable along the seafloor, installing a power line so massive that Hugh McElroen, an electrician working on the project, compares it to a “tree trunk.” And though the finished infrastructure would be barely visible from the shoreline—turbines nearly 900 feet tall poking the horizon like matchsticks—it could eventually supply all the energy for nearly half of Brooklyn’s housing stock. Despite its hulking size and ambition, the raising of this renewable infrastructure has been something of a covert operation. The Trump administration is openly hostile to…

A FEW YEARS AGO, Chris Black reached out to Max Stein, whom he’d come across years earlier when Stein was a downtown scenester and self-described “loyal devotee of the late-era Beatrice Inn.” In the intervening period, Stein had refashioned himself as a manager for a certain kind of multi-hyphenate tastemaker. “I was like, ‘Hey, I think we’re leaving money on the table,’ ” Black says. “And then he called me and was basically like, ‘You are.’” Black is a co-host of the How Long Gone podcast, a creative consultant for various clothing brands, and a magazine columnist, which made him a perfect client for Stein. “He’s a manager for people who don’t really know what they need managed because they’re sort of strange creatives,” as one fashion writer puts it.…

WHEN THE OSCAR NOMINATIONS were announced on January 22, Timothée Chalamet, as most bet, made the Best Actor list for his performance in Marty Supreme. His nomination capped months of two-pronged campaigning to viewers inside and outside the entertainment-tastemaker sphere. In the hyperactive march to the opening of the table-tennis period piece, Chalamet boasted about his craft like a boxer (“It’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed top-of-the-line performances”), collaborated with sketch comic and rapper whisperer Druski, dropped a guest verse on U.K. rhymer EsDeeKid’s “4 Raws,” and claimed “unc” status on his 30th birthday. In other words, he ticked off the interests and affectations of the textbook millennial molded by Black culture. It’s a move that seems to have…

FOR LIMITED DURATIONS, in isolated contexts, it’s a party. On a Thursday morning the number of protesters outside the brutalist building from which ICE conducts its menace in Minneapolis swells from 25 to at least 100 by early afternoon. Spirits are high. At times there is topical music (“Fortunate Son”; Ray Charles’s “America the Beautiful”); now and then someone will dance in the street. There is a dog in booties wearing a serape, led around by a man in a cape with a cardboard sign that reads SHAME. There is a quiet clown and a loud man in a wide-brimmed hat waving a giant American flag. “ICE out,” shouts someone next to me over and over into his megaphone; his beanie reads ABORTION YOU BETCHA. Whipple is what we call…

“HE’S ALWAYS AWAKE, ALWAYS ALERT.” — WILL SCHARF “Nobody can stay up with him.” — A TRUMP DOCTOR “A level of energy unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” — ERIC TRUMP “It’s not human, not at that age.” — STEVE BANNON “He’s working harder now than he did in his entire life.”  — KAROLINE LEAVITT “I’m exhausted at the end of the workday trying to keep up with the president.” — STEVEN CHEUNG “IT DOESN’T SEEM LIKE HE’S CHANGED AT ALL.” — ARI EMANUEL “This guy is too healthy.” — MARCO RUBIO “He looked like an athlete.” — RONNY JACKSON WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE Oval Office in December to talk to Donald Trump about his health, the president was standing next to a couple of men clutching pieces of paper labeled TALKING POINTS. “These are two doctors,” Trump…