New York Magazine April 11-24, 2022

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Molly Fischer wrote about the sudden popularity of economic historian Adam Tooze (“Galaxy Brain,” March 28–April 10). Glengarry Will Gray called it an “informative profile of someone whose staggering written output far outpaces my capacity to keep up.” Casey Lurtz, a Johns Hopkins history professor, “had no clue that my own recent enthusiasm for Tooze’s older writing on statistics was part of the Zeitgeist.” Victoria University of Wellington professor Van Jackson wrote, “His superpower is not so much storytelling as coalition bridging—he gives an idiom of technocratic policy relevance to the left, while giving left-liberals and moderates a basis to flirt with leftist ideas.” But Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, objected to the article’s focus on the cohort…

AS WE SPEED toward this summer’s Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and with it the likely overturn of Roe v. Wade, there is a lot of bad news coming from states rushing to pass ever-more-totalitarian restrictions on those who seek abortion care. Following the lead of Texas, which last fall passed a six-week ban that deputizes citizens to sue anyone who helps a patient get an abortion, Missouri Republicans in March proposed a law that would authorize citizens to sue anyone who assists a person traveling out of state to terminate a pregnancy. And as if Republicans’ creative decision to sample the Fugitive Slave Act wasn’t chilling enough, April began with the sudden and terrible passage of a near-total ban on abortion in Oklahoma, one that would…

THIRTY-FOUR YEARS after his death at 27, Jean-Michel Basquiat has become something of a mythical apparition, inextricable from our understanding of what it means to be a superstar artist: an effortlessly beautiful, furiously productive inventor of an entire visual system to contain, ward off, and annotate the world, aloof yet seemingly game, fluent in all manner of celebrity, and ultimately tragic. After all the books, documentaries, movies, and retrospectives, the young man himself, whoever he was or could have been, has somehow become ever more remote, especially as his paintings became some of the most expensive objects on the planet. But not to his family. They knew Jean-Michel and held on to their memory of the playful, mischievous, restless person he was, even after he left them behind in Brooklyn for…

I JUST HAVE THAT OCTAVE that doesn’t cut through anything,” says Ocean Vuong when I find him sitting perfectly upright in a booth at the back of the wood-paneled lobby of the Marlton Hotel near Washington Square. The poet, novelist, and certified MacArthur “genius” tends to shy away from anywhere too boisterous, and not only because he’s so soft-spoken. He’d suggested we meet up here to discuss his exquisite new book of poetry (everything about Vuong is a bit exquisite), Time Is a Mother, a lyrical follow-up to his widely acclaimed 2019 best-selling novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in part because the writer Alexander Chee had told him it would be quiet. But I can barely hear him over the rattling of cocktail shakers. Vuong is wearing nerdy-sexy glasses and…

BY THE TIME I arrived in Yamhill, Oregon, Nicholas Kristof’s political career had already ended in a face-plant. “I didn’t feel any burning ambition to be a politician whatsoever,” he told me. Good thing. From start to finish, from his decision to quit the New York Times to the state Supreme Court decision that ruled him ineligible to hold the office, his campaign for governor lasted all of 114 days. Now he was no longer a columnist or a candidate, and about this outcome he claimed to be at peace. It was the afternoon of Friday, March 25, and the sun lit up the hills around the Kristof family estate, accessed via a winding road over rolling fields, past neighboring dairies and a sharp turn up a steep dirt road leading…

WHEN REFUGEES FROM Russia’s war on Ukraine arrive in New York City, there’s a community waiting to take them in: the Ukrainian Village on the Lower East Side. It’s a self-supporting network that’s now more than a century old, made up of churches and credit unions, butcher shops and grocery stores, Scout troops and dance ensembles, restaurants and bars. For our anniversary “Yesteryear” issue, we talked to generations of Ukrainian immigrants about their lives here as a way to excavate one more corner of the city’s past—and celebrate a world of Ukrainian New Yorkers who know how to transform hardship into possibility.…