On the Cover: Andrew Huberman's Mechanisms of Control

New York’s latest cover story is a deep dive on Andrew Huberman, one of the biggest podcasters on the planet and a tenured Stanford professor who has attracted millions of acolytes by preaching self-discipline and healthy lifestyle habits. Features writer Kerry Howley finds in his Huberman Lab podcast “a world in which the soft art of self-care is made concrete, in which Goop-adjacent platitudes find solidity in peer review,” dubious product endorsements alongside genuinely helpful lifestyle advice that she and her family benefited from. Howley also finds a wide gap between Huberman’s public persona, presented on his own podcast and as a guest on others, and how he conducts his private life. “In private, he could sometimes seem less concerned about patriarchy [than he did on his podcast],” Howley writes. “Multiple women recall him saying he preferred the kind of relationship in which the woman was monogamous but the man was not.” From the story he tells about his childhood to the state of his lab at Stanford, there’s a distance between his podcast persona and what Howley’s reporting shows.

“We talk a lot about parasocial relationships from the perspective of an adoring audience and less about the relationship in the other direction,” says Howley. “A giant platform is an opportunity to craft and control a narrow persona; how does that affect relationships outside of the performance?”

Howley has written for New York since 2015 and been on staff since 2021; her features on Marjorie Dannenfelser, January 6 insurrectionists, and Larry Nassar were finalists for National Magazine Awards. She is the screenwriter of Winner, a film starring Emilia Jones, Connie Britton, and Zach Galifianakis that debuted at Sundance in 2024.

Elsewhere in the issue, David Freedlander profiles Frank Carone, former chief of staff to Mayor Eric Adams and master practitioner of a brazenly transactional era of government in New York City; Michael Wolff looks at former CNN and NBCUniversal leader Jeff Zucker’s Fleet Street misadventure; and the Cut premieres the Fashion Pages, a new occasional feature with the inaugural edition highlighting the women who run Harlem’s major cultural institutions.