New York Magazine’s latest cover feature by Ryu Spaeth is a profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose writing fueled a reckoning on race in America, and who now, with his new book The Message, wants to change the way we think about Israel and Palestine. Coates writes, “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”
“As soon as I learned that Coates’s book was in the pipeline, I knew we should profile him,” said Spaeth. “He’s the preeminent Black writer in America today — perhaps the preeminent nonfiction writer, period — and it felt like a way we could explore the especially difficult subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a new way and in all its complexity.”
The cover portrait was photographed by Andres Serrano.
Elsewhere in the issue, Caitlin Moscatello writes on Ruby Franke, a Mormon mother of six who built a devoted following by broadcasting her family’s wholesome life on YouTube and ended up abusing her children. Max Read examines how our endless need to scroll is fueling AI hustlers who flood the internet with garbage.