New York Magazine November 8-21, 2021

1 For New York’s latest cover story, David Freedlander profiled Eric Adams on the eve of his mayoralty (“It’s His Town Now,” October 25–November 7). Journalist Devon Heinen called it a “definitive profile,” and CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere said the story was “another illuminating chapter in the cat-and-mouse of Freedlander trying to pin down Eric Adams on … well, almost everything.” In a letter to New York, Democratic strategist Bruce Gyory argued, “Any attempts to limit Eric Adams to a single political or governing lane are a fool’s errand. Like many Mayors of New York before him, as varied as La Guardia and Lindsay, not to mention Koch and Bloomberg, Adams has the political wingspan to connect with different voters on different levels, utilizing different messages. That should be seen as…

ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, 24 hours later than expected, news organizations announced that Phil Murphy had been reelected governor of New Jersey. The narrow victory the day after Election Day was a dumbfounding rebuke of the state’s Democrats, who went into the election with the drink-clinking serenity of the ensemble in the first act of The Poseidon Adventure. With the exception of one or two outliers, the polls showed Murphy winning by eight or more points. Instead, his party got smacked by a Republican wave. Murphy managed to win by a whisker, thanks to late-arriving results from machine-run North Jersey counties. But there were shocking outcomes down the ballot. In South Jersey, the president of the state senate, an ally of the state’s most powerful political boss, lost to a truck…

IN EARLY NOVEMBER, after 46 days of picketing and 15 days of hunger strike, members of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance won what they deserved all along: a measure of relief from the vast debts incurred when the inflated value of their city-issued medallions crashed in recent years. Under a three-way agreement among the NYTWA, the de Blasio administration, and the city’s largest medallion lender, drivers—who owe, on average, $550,000 each—will see their debt written down to $170,000 and amortized so that monthly payments don’t exceed $1,122. Most important, the city will guarantee each of these rescue loans in the event of default. It was only fair that the city agree to back the loans. The Taxi and Limousine Commission had, in recent decades, driven the value of a medallion…

HUMA ABEDIN AND I have arranged to meet in a Westchester parking lot at 10 a.m., and I’m stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway, 31 miles away. Abedin is a lot of things, but first and foremost she has been, for 25 years, the keeper of details, optics, and logistics for Hillary Clinton. She knows it takes 90 minutes to do Hillary’s hair and makeup and about ten to walk briskly from Hillary’s old Senate office to the floor. She has wrangled visas, commissioned airplanes, and organized clandestine meetings between Hillary and Barack Obama using decoy cars. No one better comprehends the value of an on-time arrival than Abedin. Now Siri is recalculating my arrival time again. East Side, West Side, the roads are a mess. Is it…

WHEN GOLDMAN SACHS analysts were sent home early in the pandemic, they figured their jobs would stay largely the same. The same 80-hour weeks, the same urgent but menial tasks, and, to get through it all, the same sustenance Goldman had always provided: Seamless. In the in-office era, they had been able to expense around $60 on late nights. For analysts—the bank’s youngest employees, enrolled in essentially a two-year boot camp—the meal allowance was sacrosanct, less a privilege than an entitlement. And so when Goldman eliminated the Seamless stipend in the spring of 2020, the reactions came in shades of outrage. “When we went work-from-home, they gave us nothing—literally nothing,” a Goldman analyst who quit last year told me. The bank had a reason: Meals at home, where workers had kitchens,…

I. What Is Owed THE MATH IS AS SIMPLE AS THE moral claim. We know how much carbon has been emitted and by which countries, which means we know who is most responsible and who will suffer most and that they are not the same. We know that the burden imposed on the world’s poorest by its richest is gruesome, that it is growing, and that it represents a climate apartheid demanding reparation—or should know it. We know we can remove some of that carbon from the atmosphere and undo at least some of the damage. We know the cost of doing so using tools we have today. And we know that unless we use them, the problem will never go away. Carbon dioxide is a gas, but it doesn’t dissipate immediately like…