1.
“Empire Strikes Back,” February 12–25
In New York’s latest cover story, Reeves Wiedeman profiled Bill Ackman, the billionaire crusading against DEI initiatives and the “liberal elite”. The New York Times’ Matina Stevis-Gridneff called it a “masterclass in the genre.” “Why is it that so many people who are wealthy beyond most people’s dreams have such insecure loser mindsets?” wrote dutchvandal, while venture capitalist Hussein Kanji said, “It’s easy to dismiss Ackman as an out-of-touch billionaire who has decided that reforming higher education would be a fun and easy hobby. But he also comes across as a very in touch billionaire, who is having the time of his life antagonizing people.” Many readers were disturbed by Ackman’s shifting politics. Sociology professor Jeffrey Parker wrote, “The ‘I’ve always considered myself a liberal’ to ‘Maybe we need to purge the intellectual class,’ after getting owned by their kids at Thanksgiving, pipeline remains undefeated.” And newcavendish said, “How to liberate DEI from the defects of its advocates and its enforcers … while saving its essentially liberal and humane values and goals is a real problem. Ackman has tainted a legitimate debate by his veering into the mindless right, but we should not allow that taint to get in the way of a free-ranging and openminded critique of what the DEI movement … has become.”
2.
“The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger”
In this double “Spring Fashion” issue with the Cut, two stories generated a staggering response. In the first, financial-advice columnist Charlotte Cowles wrote about falling victim to an elaborate scam. The cautionary tale was debated on television news shows, the Washington Post and New York Times compiled lists of scam-defense tips, and FTC chair Lina Khan was driven to issue a PSA: “A reminder that nobody from @FTC will ever give you a badge number, ask you to confirm your Social Security number, ask how much money you have in your bank account, transfer you to a CIA agent, or send you texts out of the blue.” Tamron Hall told her audience to consider the “army of people determined to take that money,” which “shows you the depths of the scam world right now.” Nathan Goldwag commented that Cowles “does a very good job of showing how you can be gradually pushed into believing something that, on some level, you intuitively understand is ridiculous.” Some believed the article itself was a scam: National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke wrote, “I have read Cowles’s story four times now, and I must confess that I am still struggling to believe that it is real.” (The magazine independently fact-checked the story and corroborated Cowles’s report.) Many readers were incredulous that anyone with Cowles’s level of expertise could be so fooled. Chris Frank wrote, “a financial advisor thinking the CIA’s two options for solving identity theft are 1) ‘fly down to Langley in person,’ or 2) stuff a shoebox full of $50,000 through the open window of a car is just too much.” Among Cowles’s defenders, Ben Musch wrote, “Happy for everyone getting their little dunks in about how Smart and Never Getting Scammed they are but shame is a huge reason more info on scams isn’t shared.” And on X, journalist Megan McArdle wrote, “I am convinced this couldn’t happen to me and haunted by the fact that she believed the same thing.”
“The Lure of Divorce”
Also for the Cut, Emily Gould wrote about how her disintegrating marriage was rebuilt. “Such a good piece on divorce and marriage and domestic labour and mental illness and ambitions and writing and parenthood and mothering and love. From the undisputed queen of the personal essay,” wrote historian Charlotte Lydia Riley. In his newsletter Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster said, “Emily’s genius is experiencing common life events with the kind of force that makes them national news, and then writing about them with an honesty that can’t be faked.” Other readers were more skeptical. Alec Crisman said, “I get people saying that she doesn’t sugarcoat her behavior, but by the end it does kind of come off like ‘my husband was dedicated and successful, I was a paranoid spendthrift, and we both had to learn how to forgive each other.’ ” Phoebe Maltz Bovy tweeted, “It is a break from the trend of insisting that in all hetero conflicts, the man is in the wrong. ‘She did things wrong’ is not a gotcha to an essay where a woman lays out the things she did wrong.” And memoirist Priyanka Mattoo said, “40-something-working-parent romance (to me) is falling into an emotional trench and choosing to turn toward each other to get out. I love this piece.”
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