This week’s New York Magazine features two covers: Keanu Reeves as Neo from The Matrix, for a package on the movie’s enduring influence, and singer Lizzo covering the Cut’s takeover of the flip side for the spring fashion issue. “The Matrix Is Everywhere” features writers including Mark Harris, Max Read, Andrea Long Chu, Emily Yoshida, Adam Sternbergh, and Bilge Ebiri on the 20-year-old movie that got everything right. “The concept for the package — that The Matrix predicted (almost) everything about 2019 two decades early — probably originated with Trump or Kanye or one of the many other people who, like the movie, asks us to suspend belief in basic facts of existence,” says New York culture editor Lane Brown. “And when you go looking for Matrixisms these days, you can see them everywhere: Elon Musk believes we live in a computer simulation, the Kardashians are wearing tiny sunglasses, and Obama has compared life after being president to slow-motion bullet time. Also, on my way to the office to close the issue last week, I saw a guy dressed exactly like Morpheus on Canal Street.”
The theme of the Cut’s fashion issue is influence, with the site’s president and editor-in-chief Stella Bugbee asking in her editor’s letter, “Is anybody truly distinctive, or are we all just amalgamations of our own petty aesthetic thievery? And does it even matter if we’re all living in the Matrix?”