New York Magazine September 11-24, 2023

1 For New York’s “Fall Preview” issue, Rachel Handler profiled the trio who created the year’s most unlikely, delightfully dumb comedy (“Power Bottoms,” August 28–September 10). The cover, which described the film as a “horny, bloody lesbian incel comedy,” provoked fierce debate online, and in a widely shared tweet, @holdenford-focus wrote, “incel has really lost all meaning huh.” On Instagram, Joe Rosenthal agreed, adding, “Uncomfortable with ‘incel’ being used this way given how dangerous actual incels are, and I think it’s something that intrinsically describes cishet men.” Meredith Modzelewski pushed back: “A woman originated the term about her own life and experiences so perhaps reconsider that ‘intrinsic’ characterization.” In a letter to the magazine, Julia Himberg, author of The New Gay for Pay, said she “especially appreciated the article’s attention…

INSIDE: A crack on Fifth Avenue / The Fetterman literally putting out fires / Getting hooked on phonics IT SEEMS CLEAR ENOUGH that Joe Biden is up to the job of being president. The economy is booming, especially for the poor and working class; he has signed more bipartisan legislation (on infrastructure, guns, and domestic manufacturing) than anybody expected; and he has held together the western alliance while maintaining a dogged defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty after Russia expected to swallow up its smaller neighbor. But whether Biden is up to the task of running for president is another matter. The national polls show a virtual tie with Biden leading Donald Trump, on average, by less than a point. Since the Electoral College has given Trump a substantial edge in each…

WHEN PATRICK MCMULLAN, the photographer, came home from a trip in February, he found the front door of his Greenwich Village apartment askew. The frame had shifted so wildly that the latch wouldn’t shut. Inside, he found dust all over and a big crack going through the ceiling as if there had been an earthquake. He called the super, who told him, “You don’t understand. The whole building moved.” While McMullan was away, an adjacent apartment building, 10 Fifth Avenue, had been evacuated. The Department of Buildings found cracks running across the façade and a three-inch separation between it and McMullan’s at 12 Fifth. Though the DOB is still investigating what happened, the obvious culprit seemed to be the construction project next door: a 19-story ultraluxury condo tower designed by…

I HAVE A FACE THAT people think they can say anything to me,” Gisele Barreto Fetterman says, dipping a plastic knife into soft serve at a Burger King near Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. (There are no spoons.) Before she became recognizable as the magnificently browed Brazilian-born five-foot-nine wife of the state’s six-foot-eight junior senator, she says mothers who heard her speak Portuguese with her three kids addressed her as if she were the nanny. There were many such cases of mistaken identity—as when a woman thought she was staff at a book signing the couple hosted in 2015. “There were 200 people in my house. I was just overwhelmed, and I snuck into the pantry,” Fetterman tells me. “I went to have a glass of wine. This woman came…

AT A MEETING WITH parents in May, Elizabeth Phillips, a longtime principal at P.S. 321, a highly sought-after elementary school in Park Slope, didn’t mince words about the new reading curricula being implemented across the city this fall by Mayor Eric Adams’s administration. Not only did she refer to the trio of options selected by Schools Chancellor David Banks and the mayor’s Cabinet as “three bad choices,” she also shared her plans to resist. “We are definitely pushing back against it,” she said, “and many principals in the district are. And our superintendent understands that we are not going to do it with fidelity, that we are going to keep doing what has worked for us.” Phillips (who did not respond to interview requests; the spring meeting was recorded) is…

Over the past three years, all but two of Sasha’s core group of high-school friends have had children, and of her core group of college friends, half of them have had children and others are in various stages of family planning. In that time, Sasha has been trying to start a family too, struggling through failed IVF cycles. Sometimes, admittedly, she found it difficult to stay close to her friends who were successfully starting families while she suffered through infertility. But the distance also grew as her day-to-day life and theirs became too much and the time they had to give each other became too little. Sometimes it felt like all anybody would talk about was their children and their adorable developmental milestones, and she couldn’t relate. She would text,…