New York Magazine

MOST MOTHERS TEACH their kids to brush their teeth and study hard; my mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany, counseled me on strategies for surviving dictatorships. “Never register with the police if you’re required to,” she advised, and also, “It’s a good idea to have more than one passport.” Oddly enough, my mother, who died in 1977, had no passports. After growing up in Hitler’s Berlin, she had no intention of ever leaving what she considered to be the safety of the United States. For years, I felt the same. I was born in West Harlem in 1944. I had seen plenty of the underside of my country’s ideals—I joined the Freedom Riders in 1963 and worked as trade-union organizer in 1968—but I never considered leaving. Then Donald Trump was…

IN THE MONTHS before U.S. troops snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from a military complex, President Trump justified his buildup of forces in the Caribbean as an extension of his “America First” domestic agenda. He was ordering deadly missile strikes in the region because boats were smuggling drugs at Maduro’s behest and those drugs were killing Americans, he claimed. Once the troops had deposited Maduro and Flores at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn—from which they were shuttled to a Manhattan federal court in an armored vehicle for arraignment on “narco-terrorism” and other charges—Trump and his top aides pivoted to bald-faced imperialism, bragging about taking Venezuela’s oil and musing about other countries they might soon put under American control. “Cuba is ready to fall,” the…

PROFESSOR JUSTIN MCDANIEL, the tenured chair of the religious-studies department at the University of Pennsylvania, has found a way to make his students read again. They don’t write papers or take tests; instead, he asks them to follow a strict set of behavioral constraints. They must give up their cell phones and other worldly distractions, including, in one course, sex. In his popular class Existential Despair, the students gather one evening each week for seven or eight hours to read an entire book in total silence, then discuss it in a darkened classroom. Some had never read a whole novel before. “I’d be lucky if I got through one every four years,” said a recent graduate named Ryan, who has floppy hair parted in the middle and a marketing degree…

MARCELLA HYMOWITZ KNEW that she wanted to host a memorable celebration for her husband Gregg’s 60th birthday, but she wasn’t sure what to do for it. Inspiration struck when she was reminiscing about her own prom and Gregg reminded her that he didn’t go to his: “I looked at him and was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s it—we’re going to have a prom! I’m throwing you a prom!’ ” The Hymowitzes are billionaires, so this wasn’t going to take place in a high-school gym. “I wanted to make it the most over-the-top ’80s prom ever,” says Hymowitz, who runs a workout and dance studio for children and adults called the Pearl NYC. “Think Dynasty—elegant, high end—not frizzy hair and neon,” she says. Hymowitz booked ZZ’s Club in Hudson Yards for…

ONE WEEKEND in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie, Flyboys, had opened that weekend to reviews so bad that one of the stars had abruptly checked into the hospital. On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone. “I was terrified when the phone rang and it was Larry Ellison,” Devlin said. Devlin had made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the 1990s—Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla—but he’d struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys, a script about a band of World War I fighter pilots. Then, in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest…

THE PLAN HAD BEEN TO MEET the vegan chef and cookbook author Isa Chandra Moskowitz at one of her old haunts for dinner, but the problem was none of them was left. “That scrambled-tofu heyday is gone. I can’t think of a single fucking place to get tempeh, except, like, maybe Wild Ginger,” she told me, referring to the mid-aughts Pan-Asian mini-chain. You could have gotten it at Modern Love, her vegan comfort spot in Williamsburg, but even she had closed up shop. On the bright side, she was newly available to meet me at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday. Moskowitz is not a conventional celebrity, but she is extraordinarily famous to an extraordinarily small number of people. Mainly, vegans. Specifically, vegans in or rapidly approaching middle age. “If someone…