New York Magazine’s July 3–16 cover story is a feature by writer-at-large Rebecca Traister on the disturbing candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the scion of our nation’s most famous political family and a conspiracy theorist who is challenging President Biden for the Democratic nomination.
“In thinking about Kennedy’s candidacy, I was curious about his presentation as an outsider and how that squared with his history as part of this country’s most storied political family, and the horseshoe coalition around him,” said Traister. “So much of his stated appeal is as someone who has been silenced and censored, yet his voice has actually been loudly projected for years, and now on podcasts that reach millions.”
“There is an unmistakably Trumpian phenomenon playing out in this emerging campaign, where a candidate’s celebrity and self-styled truth-telling is seducing otherwise ‘serious’ people,” says Editor-in-Chief David Haskell. “Though he does not, at the moment, pose a credible threat to Biden’s primary campaign, it would be a mistake to condescend to Kennedy’s supporters, who include some of the country’s richest and most powerful leaders in business and media. Rebecca’s subject in this article is not just Kennedy himself but the Establishment that is dangerously titillated by his rise.”
Elsewhere in the issue, Reeves Wiedeman writes on the curious case of Domenic Broccoli, who set out to expand his IHOP empire to upstate New York and found a grave site that started a war, and Brock Colyar dives into Bode, a vintage-inspired, shockingly expensive, mostly upcycled menswear brand and what happened when TikTokers ruined it. Additionally, the Grub Street team releases a summer food package with a list of 33 restaurants across the metro region that are worth traveling to. The team spent months trekking across the five boroughs and beyond to come up with this list of eating-and-drinking expeditions and launched a new interactive map feature plotting their findings for readers to enjoy.