Envy Apartment

When Young Huh left for college in the 1980s, she brought “one giant poster of The Cure, bedding from the local bed-and-bath store and maybe some desk accessories.” Like so many Gen-Xers, her one creative touch was asking a supermarket for leftover milk crates to use as bookshelves. Now an interior designer , she has helped her own children decorate their dorm rooms, and she’s amazed at the design expectations among college students . “It’s a level of decorating that did not even exist in my world view when I was in school,” Huh said. Today, there are lots of products “that cater entirely to the college crowd,” she said. Interior designer Jon Call sees the same phenomenon: While his main business is designing luxury homes in Manhattan, he also gets asked to design college living spaces . “This new generation has grown up under the influence of home magazines, HGTV and the virtues of ‘ democratic design .’ They understand the value of creating unique spaces for themselves,” he sai...

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 ...