1.
“The Campaign Is Going Great,” December 18–31
For New York’s latest cover story, Gabriel Debenedetti reported on the unnerving calm at President Biden’s 2024 headquarters. Pollster Adam Carlson called it “probably the best and most comprehensive summary of where things are at.” Former Bloomberg Businessweek editor Megan Murphy praised it as a “strong piece from a strong reporter. One of the things I wish I had done differently in 2016 — and that list is long — is to push back harder on the Clinton campaign where their messaging was clearly failing. We let them get away with blowing it off.” Discussing the story on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough noted that despite abysmal polling, Biden is “keeping all the people that ran his campaign in 2020 inside the White House. What does the Biden team know that nobody else knows?” Al Sharpton voiced concern about the campaign’s belief that the president’s supporters will inevitably consolidate closer to the election. “Base voters are paying attention now — and influencers of young people, of Blacks, of Latinos, of women,” he said. “If they turn them off, those are the people that can really weigh in against them later because they’re saying, These people are not sincere.” Others were quick to point out what they thought were the organization’s blind spots. Waleed Shahid, a former spokesperson for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, said, “The Biden campaign is telling everyone that the election will be like 2020 when all signs point to the fundamentals looking a lot more like 2016,” while the author and statistician Nate Silver said, “The Biden staffers don’t come across badly in this story by any means, but I do think they’re a little bit too confident in the ‘let’s just run back 2020’ plan because Biden is the incumbent now and that makes this a very different race.”
2.
“The Age Gappers”
Lila Shapiro spoke to dozens of intergenerational couples to probe why, particularly online, these relationships have become so controversial. Vanity Fair’s Delia Cai called the story “provocative” and @TheSignOfFive said it was a “sensitively written, absorbing, brilliant read.” “This article is gonna kill the Puriteens,” joked @verucasaltamish. And perhaps predictably many arguments broke out on social media about the propriety of the relationships in the story. “So … she was 19 and he was 38? It was the past life connection I’m sure,” TV writer and producer Azie Dungey wrote. Artist Maayan Zilberman asked “how we’d feel seeing bedtime photos of some of the couples when they met—a teen girl with a grown man decades older. This feels a bit more complicated than a cute love story.” And brand consultant Chrissy Rutherford wrote, “I think we should stop fetishizing age-gap relationships but that’s just me!” @talderwitch countered, “The judgment in these comments is astounding but unsurprising. Not every age gap couple is the result of an old man hitting on a hot young woman. Can we stop being so judgmental of grown ass adults in consensual relationships?” Some shared personal experiences with @joekreisberg writing: “My mother was 26 when she had me and my dad was 47. There was a bit of social navigating we learned to do early (‘Oh is this your grandpa?’) but my brother and I remember our childhood as a happy one … They had normal relationship up and downs, at least from our lenses, and were married until her death at 48 from breast cancer. The fact that she died first in a 21-year gap marriage was the cruelest lesson for us that you truly can’t plan life.”
3.
“An American Girlhood in the Ozempic Era”
Lisa Miller wrote about how Maggie Ervie, a 15-year-old from Missouri, decided to undergo a divisive new treatment for pediatric weight loss. Dr. Aaron S. Kelly, whose research on the treatment of childhood obesity was discussed in the article, wrote Miller “did a really nice job in exposing the human side of this issue and conveying the science behind the disease,” but he was “put off by the subtle insinuations and interwoven tone throughout the piece suggesting that there is some sort of conspiracy between the drug companies and the American Academy of Pediatrics, Obesity Action Coalition, and the selfless healthcare providers who prescribe anti-obesity medications.” Pharmacist Ted Kyle, whose blog closely covers childhood obesity in the U.S., wrote that the article “does something that is sadly rare in the sensational reporting about Ozempic and similar medicines. It tells the human story of a young person and her medical condition that popular culture often distorts grossly. Where much of the discourse about obesity in youth is moralistic or condescending, Miller neatly delivers sympathetic and sober insight.”
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