Envy Apartment

“Does this mean there’s no apartment?” I stood in the Strawberry Fields meadow and stared at John. He had called me during work to come meet a realtor at the corner of 72nd and Central Park West . We had talked of moving in together and John promised me he had found the ideal apartment. “Two bedrooms, two baths, steps from the park, in our range!” Could it be true? I was suspicious. I had learned there is no “perfect” apartment in New York. Something is always missing (size, no doorman location, light, etc.). Not that I was a vision of perfection, anyway. Unlike anyone in my family before me, I was born with a condition called “ectrodactyly.” To my parents’ utter shock, I had only one finger on each hand, shortened forearms and one toe on each foot. These were the days before sonograms could prepare excited parents for the unexpected. I emerged during a winter blizzard in a peaceful state, appearing to stare calmly at everyone as they stared back in confusion. Whether I would be abl...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...