My conclusion? When you see a passage in quotation marks in a New Yorker article, you should not expect it to be a truthful representation of anything that the alleged speaker ever actually said. Rather, you should take it as the author’s expression of what they want you to believe that the speaker meant. In some cases, these unquotations are “poetically true”, that is, they give an insightful impression of the speaker’s feelings and attitudes, although the writer knows that the words are not original. In other cases, the unquotations are an honest misrepresentation, in the sense that they’re genuinely what the author understood (or at least, remembers) the speaker to have meant to say. And sometimes, the unquotations are completely fictional, in the sense that the author doesn’t care at all what the alleged speaker either said or meant, but puts words in their mouth in order to advance the narrative.