New York Magazine April 10-23, 2023

1 When New York writer-at-large Rebecca Traister was deciding how to cover the politics of abortion in the post- Dobbs landscape, she came up with several major story ideas, from Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s successful abortion messaging in the 2022 midterms to the Biden administration’s failure to emphasize the issue. In the end, she combined them into one expansive feature that tied all of the threads together, and in the resulting cover story, “Abortion Wins Elections” (March 27–April 9), Traister surveyed how Democrats finally started putting reproductive rights at the center of their agenda. Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, wrote, “Traister’s story is an important read. If the midterms showed us anything, it’s that when you invest consistently in building an infrastructure to mobilize reproductive rights…

INSIDE: Smoking out rats in Brooklyn / A legendary screenwriter’s new digs / The way we divorce now WHEN DONALD TRUMP WAS charged with 34 felony counts for falsifying business records—the legal fallout from the alleged 2016 bribe payment to Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about their affair—and descended on lower Manhattan like a perfectly toasted Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, I remembered how I felt the day Harvey Weinstein was convicted of assault by a jury in 2020. I was meeting a friend for lunch and saw two women embracing in celebration on the street in Tribeca, a neighborhood Weinstein used to dominate, where he had once berated me and assaulted my colleague. My friend greeted me with jubilation: Have you heard?! I had. And I felt nothing. No pleasure; no…

ON A COLD MORNING in December, Elias Schewel enters a community garden in Bushwick followed by his two small dogs, Sundrop and Moonbeam. The dogs tremble with anticipation but not for a game of fetch. They are here to hunt. Schewel bends down to unleash them, and they dart off, weaving around sheds and bushes, using their diminutive size to their advantage in the search for their quarry: the New York City rat. Armed with his two companions and a smoke machine to chase rodents from their burrows, Schewel is a rat hunter, a trade associated more with the 19th century than the 21st. His company, Rat Hunt NYC, provides a valuable service at a time when a “war on rats” has become a top priority for Mayor Adams, who…

PAUL SCHRADER is late and hasn’t eaten. He’s been stuck in his apartment on a Zoom call with Antoine Fuqua of Training Day, trying to get the director to sign on to a new script he’s set on calling Three Guns at Dawn. It follows three brothers—a dirty cop, a serial killer, and a drug dealer—who hate one another. At 1:30, he appears in the restaurant, orders three eggs scrambled and a scoop of cottage cheese, mixes it all together, and huffs it down, his heavy gold bracelet thumping the table. Then he looks around. The space is sterile but tasteful: big windows overlooking Hudson Yards, vaguely mid-century furniture, an open kitchen. Everything smells of jasmine. “Living in this place feels like living on the Cunard Line,” he says. “Sometimes…

WHEN REESE WITHERSPOON announced that she was divorcing her husband of 12 years, Jim Toth, in late March, she did so in the manner we have come to expect from celebrities facing such a challenge: She posted a brief, conciliatory joint statement on Instagram and asked for privacy. “It is with a great deal of care and consideration that we have made the difficult decision to divorce,” read the statement, which dropped on a Friday afternoon—no doubt in order to minimize press coverage. “We have enjoyed so many wonderful years together and are moving forward with deep love, kindness, and mutual respect for everything we have created together.” The post, naturally, was closed to comments. These days, this kind of statement is customary for A-listers going through a separation. But…

STORMY DANIELS saged the room and shuffled the oracle deck. It was the evening of April 1, and the woman at the center of the legal drama that led to the first criminal indictment of a U.S. president had agreed to ask the guides for help to see more clearly the past, the present, and what she calls “the potential or likely outcome.” Daniels doesn’t claim to be a fortune teller. “Nobody can predict the future,” she said. “We all have free will.” But she can for sure identify fortune’s fool. She raised her hands and pressed the empty space between her palms. She spoke quietly. “What can you tell Olivia about Donald Trump?” She waited for a moment. Nothing. “What the fuck?” she said. “That’s weird.” She was having…