New York Magazine May 23 - June 5, 2022

1 New York’s latest issue featured a special section on the Supreme Court leak signaling the imminent demise of Roe v. Wade (“The Post-Roe World Has Begun,” May 9–22). For the cover, artist Barbara Kruger reimagined her 1989 silk-screen portrait Untitled (Your body is a battleground). The creative hub Typeroom wrote, “Kruger’s art remains relevant, although it shouldn’t. Using a determiner ‘Your,’ Kruger connects the viewer and focuses the attention on the hot topic of reproductive rights.” For Artnet, Sarah Cascone noted, “This isn’t the first time Your body is a battleground has made headlines in recent years. In late 2020, the piece became a symbol of protest against restrictive new Polish abortion laws.” Inside the magazine, Rebecca Traister wrote about how the fall of Roe will affect everyone in…

LET’S ROLE-PLAY. It’s March 2021. You’re 23, a year out of college. Your last semester was ruined by the pandemic, but now you’ve got a job with a firm that’s “reinventing commerce” in a loft with reclaimed wood and catered lunches. Bars are open, your friends are coming back to the city, and your bank balance looks good, healthy even: COVID means living cheap, with free cash from the government and no student-loan payments. You lease an apartment and begin dabbling in the markets—they’re all surging. You pick up tips on Reddit, trade on Robinhood, buy crypto. One of your tokens turns a modest stake into real money almost overnight. By summer, your college crew is planning a reunion, and it’s time to invest in an adult wardrobe to signal…

THE PARIS REVIEW has come a long way from its founding team of “Tall Young Men,” in the words of Irwin Shaw, a man solicited by the Review because, according to the first managing editor, he was a “hard-drinking writer with a good-looking wife.” The magazine’s early parties included “call girls for decoration,” as Gay Talese noted, a louche legacy that endured through the editorship of Lorin Stein, who resigned in 2017 following reports of sexual misconduct and was replaced by the novelist Emily Nemens. Now, under recently appointed editor Emily Stokes, the Review has experienced an overhaul with changes ranging from the staffing (it has an almost entirely new editorial team) to the furniture (gone is the office pool table upon which Stein used to stand and make toasts).…

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, Laila Gohar has been delighting and unnerving guests at things like the Frieze Art Fair and Vogue’s pre–Met Gala party with installations that fall somewhere between finger food and conceptual art: challah thrones, jellied mochi breasts, and fish-shaped butter sculptures, among other curiosities. It’s as if the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington had a side hustle as a caterer. “When you put my work into these spaces, it’s sort of like an equalizer,” Laila, 33, says. “Everyone is equally confused.” Now the confusion comes home. Laila and her painter sister, Nadia, 32, are introducing a line of odd housewares called Gohar World. To launch the collection, they are throwing a rooftop-garden party in a tucked-away part of Rockefeller Center, with a snack buffet in the shadow of St.…

ON MAY 18, the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz reported on the disastrous rollout of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board. Announced on April 27 with a hazy remit to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security,” the initiative generated an immediate fierce backlash from conservative pundits and politicians, who compared it to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. The expert tapped to lead the board, Nina Jankowicz, faced a wave of ferocious, viral, and often personal attacks online as well as scrutiny for past statements that seemed to betray her partisan sympathies. Now, just three weeks after its launch, the Disinformation Governance Board is no more and Jankowicz has resigned. According to Lorenz and her sources (other disinformation researchers as well as staffers in the DHS…

There’s a Backup Plan, Right? ON A TUESDAY EVENING in April, nearly half a century after Joe Biden first publicly mused about running for president, an unsettled cross section of the Democratic Establishment assembled at Pinehurst, a golf resort in North Carolina. Inflation was at a 40-year high, Biden’s disapproval rating sat at 56 percent, and editors at the New York Times were readying a front-page report about how his signature achievement—$1.9 trillion in coronavirus-relief spending—has “barely registered with voters.” The lobbyists, donors, staffers, and elected officials were gathering for the spring policy meeting of the Democratic Governors Association, and the scheduled sessions concerned such topics as health care and diversity in governance. But between panel discussions, in the hallways and at the cocktail reception on the lawn, conversation shifted…