New York Magazine

INSIDE: The Swifties take New Jersey / Bones for sale in Bushwick / The solution to Manhattan’s traffic nightmare IN MAY 2017, Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey, crashing through the first of many important democratic norms. While FBI directors technically can be fired, they generally serve ten-year terms for the express purpose of ensuring their political independence and to ward off the inherent danger of an unscrupulous president turning the bureau into a partisan weapon to protect his friends and harass his enemies. There were banner headlines and special reports invoking Nixon’s infamous Saturday Night Massacre. Conservatives uneasily justified the extraordinary maneuver as a necessary onetime response to Comey’s messy involvement in the 2016 election. “Given the recent controversies surrounding the director, I believe a fresh start will serve the…

“FOLLOW THE SEQUINS!” a girl shouted as the horde of Taylor Swift fans at Penn Station searched for the right train. The assembled crowd—ranging from millennials to preschoolers to chaperone parents—surged toward the track in a heaving mass of glitter. Those not headed to the Meadowlands for the MetLife portion of Swift’s Eras Tour were frustrated. They had not seen commuters like these before. For one 15-year-old who said she “came out of the womb a Swiftie,” the journey started on a Long Island Rail Road train to Penn Station in the early afternoon, followed by an NJ Transit train to Secaucus, then the special-event ride to the Meadowlands. The significance of this 13-minute final leg of the trip was not lost on the fans, many of whom had Swift’s signature…

THE SMALL BRIGHT showroom is tucked inside a graffiti-covered Bushwick warehouse. The furniture is mid-century modern. A bergamot-and-lavender candle is burning. “Our motivation was, How could we do things differently?” the young CEO in a blue chore coat says. The space is your typical direct-to-consumer start-up headquarters complete with earnest disrupter, except the products being disrupted aren’t sheets, mattresses, glasses, or bed frames. They are human bones: a tooth for $14, a vertebra for $50, a 19th-century skeleton for $6,600. On one wall hangs a massive collection of spines arranged in an ombré pattern; on the other, a Jo Malone diffuser sits atop a display case of skulls. Jon “Jon Jon” Pichaya Ferry, a lanky 23-year-old, is shaking up the bones business. His company, JonsBones, sells “responsibly sourced human osteology,” a.k.a.…

TWO THINGS NEW YORKERS can agree on: There’s too much traffic, and it’s someone else’s fault. I’ve listened to cabbies blame bike lanes for gobbling up space, been yelled at by drivers for crossing the street, heard passengers fulminate at immobilized buses, and found myself biking in a narrowing slot canyon between SUVs. Congestion pricing, that euphemism for a midtown and lower Manhattan vehicular-entry fee, will finally mitigate the snarl and maybe even quell the snarling. I was in favor of the Bloomberg administration’s first proposal back in 2007, and we need it even more urgently now. The essence is simple: Make drivers subsidize public transit. In a well-tuned system, the relatively few who must—or feel they must—steer their vehicles into Manhattan, anywhere from Central Park to Battery Park, will…

Drew BARRYMORE IS barreling barefoot down the hallway to make it to the studio on time. It’s a Wednesday morning in April, and this is the first of today’s two episode tapings for The Drew Barrymore Show. The screams from audience members at Studio 41 get louder as the emcee whips them into a frenzy—Drew is right there! She can hear you!—before leading them in an increasingly rapid call-and-response: “Are you ready?” “Yeah!” Her costume designer, Lee Harris, is waiting at the threshold with chunky beige platform heels. This is a variation of her daytime uniform: a pantsuit with legs so wide you could strap a child to each calf, a silk blouse with a pussy bow, and thick pumps. “Feel that,” she tells Harris, lifting the leg of her pants…

If YOU CALL A slew of Hollywood’s most powerful show-runners, studio chiefs, agents, and operators and ask them to describe the state of the television business, they will say things like: “This is the single worst time to be making anything in the history of the medium. It’s just as dark as it’s ever been.” “It’s such a fucking disaster, isn’t it?” “It’s like the entire system has snapped.” “These companies took what was an extraordinarily successful economic model and they destroyed it in favor of a model that may or may not work—but almost certainly won’t work as well as the old model.” “Everything became big tech—the Amazon model of ‘We don’t actually have to make money; we just have to show shareholder growth.’ Everyone said, ‘Great. That seems like the thing to do.’…