Corby Kummer

These days, walking through parts of Manhattan feels like occupying two worlds at the same time. In a theoretical universe, you are standing in the nation’s capital of business, commerce, and culture. In the physical universe, the stores are closed, the lights are off, and the windows are plastered with for-lease signs. Long stretches of famous thoroughfares—like Bleecker Street in the West Village and Fifth Avenue in the East 40s—are filled with vacant storefronts. Their dark windows serve as daytime mirrors for rich pedestrians. It’s like the actualization of a Yogi Berra joke: Nobody shops there anymore—it’s too desirable.

A rich ghost town sounds like a capitalist paradox. So what the heck is going on? Behind the darkened windows, there’s a deeper story about money and land, with implications for the future of cities and the rest of the United States.

In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead.

Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality. In South Carolina, where he grew up, he helped defeat a congressional candidate who had openly discussed his teenage struggles with depression by telling reporters that the man had once been “hooked up to jumper cables.” As the campaign manager for then–Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988, when he defeated Michael Dukakis in the general election, Atwater leveraged the issue of race—a specialty for him—by means of the infamous “Willie Horton” TV ad. The explicit message of the commercial was that, as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had been soft on crime by offering furloughs to convicted murderers; Horton ran away while on furlough and then committed new felonies, including rape. The implicit message was the menace posed by hulking, scowling black men—like the Willie Horton who was shown in the commercial.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump did the thing Donald Trump is consummately good at doing: He tweeted something that was at once profoundly petty and sweepingly cruel. The something, this time around, was about Stormy Daniels: The president mocked the fact that a judge had dismissed the defamation case the adult-film star had filed against him. “‘Federal Judge throws out Stormy Danials [sic] lawsuit versus Trump,’” Trump summarized. “‘Trump is entitled to full legal fees.’” He added, in his own voice: “@FoxNews Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas. She will confirm the letter she signed! She knows nothing about me, a total con!”

This was par for the course, of course, for Trump, a leader who has taken the affordances of the bully pulpit extremely literally, and who has demonstrated a particular glee when it comes to insulting women and their appearances: To him, from his presidential platform as well as from other ones, women are either beautiful and thus desirable and thus grabbable, or they are ugly/fat/disgusting/dogs/animals that have an off-putting tendency to bleed out of their wherevers. What made this particular tweet catch on, though, was the bit of innovation it contained: Daniels as “Horseface.” Capital H, to mark it as a name, and the beast and the body part fused insouciantly.

The title of Ariana Grande’s latest album, Sweetener, reclaims the often-used knock on radio-ready sing-alongs as “saccharine.” Perky music doesn’t just make life yummier, in Grande’s view. It makes life bearable. Her first album after the 2017 terrorist attack on one of her concerts, Sweetener arrived with lyrics about responding to bitterness with sugar, dark with light, suffocation with breathing. There were no tears left to cry, and she’d been crying with good reason.

As is almost always the case in pop, though, music could be heard as a rough synonym for love. The sweet/light/air in Grande’s lyrics were presented as stemming from a you, and listeners could envision that you as someone specific: Pete Davidson, the Saturday Night Live comedian Grande began dating in May and got engaged to in June. Calling their relationship “public” would be an understatement. They Instagrammed about their matching tattoos. He joked at length on SNL about being with her. She named a Sweetener song “Pete Davidson.”

The soundtrack to Jamal Khashoggi’s beating, vivisection, and murder lasts just seven minutes, according to Turkish officials who spoke anonymously to several outlets yesterday. By the end of the recording, the screams have subsided, and Khashoggi is dead, although his alleged killer—a Saudi doctor named Salah Muhammed al-Tubaigy—must have continued sawing away at his limbs for some time after. (It takes about two minutes to saw through a human femur with a manual bone saw, and longer than that to dissect the soft tissue around it.)

I hope never to hear this tape. But I want someone to hear it, and soon. The Turkish officials have leaked details of this operation with frustrating caginess. They promise that the tapes exist, and that they were recorded with Khashoggi’s own Apple Watch. They have shared their account of the tapes with journalists and foreign powers, including the United States—but they have not shared the tapes themselves. It’s time for them to end the steady drip of leaks and reveal the source material. By the descriptions we’ve heard so far, that material must be awfully difficult to fake. You can’t exactly go to Craigslist to hire a Jamal Khashoggi impersonator to scream in Saudi dialect as if his fingers are being chopped off.

Alexis Templeton remembers January 12, 2014, as the day the water exploded. A sturdy Pyrex bottle, sealed tight and filled with water, burst like a balloon.

Templeton had just guided her Land Cruiser across the bumpy, rock-strewn floor of Wadi Lawayni, a broad, arid valley that cuts through the mountains of Oman. She parked beside a concrete platform that rose from the ground, marking a recently drilled water well. Templeton uncapped the well and lowered a bottle into its murky depths, hoping to collect a sample of water from 850 feet below the surface.

Wadi Lawayni is enclosed by pinnacles of chocolate-brown rock, hard as ceramic yet rounded and sagging like ancient mud-brick ruins. This fragment of the Earth’s interior, roughly the size of West Virginia, was thrust to the surface through an accident of plate tectonics millions of years ago. These exotic rocks—an anomaly on Earth—had lured Templeton to Oman.

Over just two weeks in September, a limited-liability company calling itself “News for Democracy” spent almost $400,000 on more than 16 million impressions for a network of 14 Facebook pages that hadn’t existed until August. This represented the second-largest political ad buy on Facebook for the period, trailing only Beto O’Rourke’s Texas Senate campaign, and substantially overshadowing the third-place spender, the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to analysis by a team at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, led by Damon McCoy.

From May 7 to October 16—the period that Facebook’s newly created archive of political advertising covers—News for Democracy has paid between $1.2 and $4.6 million dollars to create, at a minimum, 45 million impressions through more than 2,600 ads. (Facebook’s data offers ranges, rather than precise amounts, of dollars spent or impressions generated. In calculating how many people were shown ads, McCoy’s team took the low number of the range, so the number of people who saw these ads is certainly higher, and possibly much higher.)

The alleged killing of a Washington Post columnist on the orders of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has triggered many rethinks—and not least a rethinking of the lavishly flattering journalism that hailed the crown prince’s rise to supreme power.

Among the biggest media boosters of the Saudi crown prince was Bob Woodward in his new book, Fear. Woodward observed that a National Security Council staffer, Derek Harvey, believed that “MBS was the future. MBS saw that transformative change in Saudi Arabia was the only path to survival for the Kingdom.” This is but one of the encomia to MbS in Woodward’s pages—all of them traceable much less to Woodward’s feelings about MbS than to Woodward’s apparent indebtedness to Harvey.

On Tuesday, Popular Mechanics magazine put the cover story of its November issue online: A collection of essays titled “In Defense of Elon Musk,” authored by a mix of staff journalists and technology-industry professionals. “The Tesla and SpaceX maestro is under attack for bad tweets, production woes, and strange behavior,” the introduction said. “But we need people who take risks. We need people who try.”

The collection appeared to be a hit with the Popular Mechanics audience and fans of Elon Musk, which is no surprise: Since 1902, Popular Mechanics has covered, in print and then online, automotive, science, and technology news, and Musk and his many enterprises—Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity—fit squarely in the magazine’s territory. For Muskovites, the collection was a welcome and well-deserved respite from recent news coverage that focused not on car specs or rocket launches, but on an expensive lawsuit with federal regulators, dangerous working conditions on factory floors, and struggles with timely car production and delivery.

Updated on October 17, 2018

Newt Gingrich is an important man, a man of refined tastes, accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and so when he visits the zoo, he does not merely stand with all the other patrons to look at the tortoises—he goes inside the tank.

On this particular afternoon in late March, the former speaker of the House can be found shuffling giddily around a damp, 90‑degree enclosure at the Philadelphia Zoo—a rumpled suit draped over his elephantine frame, plastic booties wrapped around his feet—as he tickles and strokes and paws at the giant shelled reptiles, declaring them “very cool.”

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It’s a weird scene, and after a few minutes, onlookers begin to gather on the other side of the glass—craning their necks and snapping pictures with their phones and asking each other, Is that who I think it is? The attention would be enough to make a lesser man—say, a sweaty magazine writer who followed his subject into the tortoise tank for reasons that are now escaping him—grow self-conscious. But Gingrich, for whom all of this rather closely approximates a natural habitat, barely seems to notice.