I’m Vanity Fair staff writer Dan Adler, filling in for Julia Black this week. As I celebrated Memorial Day and the New York Knicks’ advancement to their first NBA finals since 1999, Pope Leo XIV interrupted my festivities with some stark warnings about a future just over the horizon.
With Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah standing by his side, the pope cautioned that artificial intelligence needs to be “disarmed”—and that “new digital slaveries” might be upon us at this looming moral crossroads. Lisa Gelobter’s challenges might not be quite so existential, as she explained to my colleague Julia, but New York City’s new chief technology officer has her hands full trying to improve the day-to-day lives of New Yorkers. Within Zohran Mamdani’sfirst 100 days in office, Gelobter’s team released something both simple and somewhat unthinkable in the city’s prior eras of clunky bureaucratic interfaces: a first-of-its-kind childcare map.
My reporting on the billionaire class tends to focus on its intersections with pop culture, politics, and crime, but one thing I learned a few years ago, when riding along with Michael Rubin, is that the ways in which tech and business overlap in our free-for-all era are endless: Of course Jay-Z never misses Rubin’s annual Hamptons White Party, but neither does Jack Dorsey. I only vaguely remember experiencing the Knicks’ last finals appearance as a child in Brooklyn, and I’m counting on Gelobter and the rest of Mamdani’s administration to make hay of the moment. “@NYCSanitation,” the mayor wrote on X last night after the Knicks comprehensively brushed aside the Cleveland Cavaliers, “I’d like to report a sweep.”
Mentioned in this issue: Zohran Mamdani, TikTok, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem, Proton Mail, and more… | 
