As much as I love the New Yorker, my fondest hope is that one day the N.Y.C. media will free themselves from whatever repressive authoritarian soul compels them to put those dots in every single acronym and initialism, when the rest of the country abandoned the dots long ago.
They even put them in names that once were initialisms but now are genuine names on their own: they insist on I.B.M. even though the official company name is simply IBM. And F.B.I. even though the FBI's own website calls it the FBI.
As an old ham radio operator, the one that really got me was when they wrote about S.O.S. - when in fact SOS never was an initialism at all! No experienced radio operator would ever have sent "S O S" as three separate letters in Morse code:
dit dit dit (pause) dah dah dah (pause) dit dit dit
("S" is dit dit dit in Morse, and "O" is "dah dah dah".)
SOS has always been a "prosign", that is, a single Morse code unit with no pauses in the middle:
dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit
In fact, SOS is properly written with an overscore above the letters to indicate that it is sent as a single unit. Of course that is not always possible given the limitations of modern typography, but it is never transmitted as if it were the three separate letters "S O S".
Why does the N.Y.C. media follow such an authoritarian rule even when it is factually wrong? It is a mystery to me.