New York Magazine chronicles the ideas, people, and cultural events that are forever reshaping our world.

New York Magazine

A secret terrorist attack or something out of this world?

CIA has been escalating its efforts to determine why dozens of US officials have experienced bizarre symptoms like headaches, pain or pressure in the head, vertigo, and vision problems whilst stationed abroad. 

Matt Stieb tries to understand the phenomenon, looking at the leading theories and what the new government task force will focus on to get to the bottom of one of the country’s biggest mysteries.

Mark Deakins

The Havana syndrome mystery and how the US plans to solve it

From Stanford to Facebook.

No matter your politics, or views on tech, Peter Thiel is someone everyone needs to understand. His businesses are among the biggest and most powerful in the world, and his politics may be somewhat marginal, but they are on the rise.

This excerpt of Max Chafkin's biography "The Contrarian" charts Thiel's rise to becoming the enigmatic, controversial, and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business, and politics.

"Thiel despises the counterculture (he dates the precise beginning of American decline to Woodstock) and is contemptuous of the notion of creativity for its own sake. For Thiel, the purpose of founding a company is to control your own destiny. "A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery," he wrote. A new generation of entrepreneurs, coming of age in the wake of the financial crisis, embraced his ideas. Thiel told them to flout norms and seek lucre, not impact. "Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival," he wrote. "Monopoly profits." Perhaps his single best student has been Mark Zuckerberg, who built a monopoly in his industry and used it to crush competitors and charge progressively higher fees to advertisers — all while telling the world that this essentially predatory behavior was a social good."

Sean Crisden

Peter Thiel’s origin story

Meet Ian Freeman, the bitcoin billionaire that never was.

He was at the centre of the cryptocurrencies' hype before they became as popular and accessible as they are today. But for Freeman, it was never about the money. Instead, he did it "for the libertarian ideals he believes it represents." Some ten years later, he now hosts one of the Top-30 most influential radio shows in America but also faces spending the rest of his life in prison.

What happened? The government alleged he "had been running a sophisticated multimillion-dollar racket that enabled 'hordes of cyber criminals' to scam victims and launder money." In this striking profile by Simon van Zuylen-Wood, we get a first-hand account of the motives and ideologies behind Freeman's actions.

"Freeman and his crunchy partners represent bitcoin’s founding politics — its anti-state origins, which have been all but forgotten thanks to the asset class’s vertiginous price swings; its overnight minting of a new and poorly understood set of billionaires; and sideshow manias like the one for NFTs. That side of bitcoin is all over CNBC. In the antigovernment enclaves of New Hampshire, though, Freeman and his co-defendants have become a cause célèbre, martyrs dubbed the Crypto Six."

Michael Satow

The High Priest of Cryptopia regrets nothing

The former Goldman Sachs partner on his crypto empire.

Jen Wieczner interviews the bitcoin billionaire Mike Novogratz. They discuss how he ended up with a large proportion of his net worth crypto, and why he hasn’t got a handle on NFTs and why capitalism is broken.

A Bitcoin billionaire on when to sell vs. HODL and dogecoin ‘nihilism’

“I constantly ask myself, do I deserve this money?”

Since July 2020, nearly 750 companies have gone public, raising more than $200 billion and making thousands of new paper millionaires. Amid the frenzy, one anonymous millennial tech worker on the verge of unexpected wealth shared what was going through their mind.

Sarah Naughton

Confessions of an overnight millionaire

The war on climate denial has been won — and that’s not the only good news.

Just a decade ago business giants did not consider decarbonization a worthy investment. Now, it appears too good a deal to pass up. Climate change specialist, David Wallace-Wells, explores in New York magazine how the ‘plague year’ of 2020 has provided a positive turning point for climate change.

"The price of solar energy has fallen ninefold over the past decade, as has the price of lithium batteries, critical to the growth of electric cars. The costs of utility-scale batteries, which could solve the 'intermittency' (ie. cloudy day) problem of renewables and help power whole cities in relatively short order, have fallen 70 percent since just 2015. Wind power is 40 percent cheaper than it was a decade ago, with offshore wind experiencing an even steeper decline. Overall, renewable energy is less expensive than dirty energy almost everywhere on the planet, and in many places it is simply cheaper to build new renewable capacity than to continue running the old fossil-fuel infrastructure. Oil demand and carbon emissions may both have peaked this year. Eighty percent of coal plants planned in Asia’s developing countries have been shelved."