New York Magazine December 23, 2019-January 5, 2020

1 For our 15th annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue (December 9–22), photographer Daniel Featherstone and six New York–based novelists documented some of the inspiringly singular people we encounter every day on the city’s streets. Ann-Marie Alcántara wrote, “This is my favorite thing all year, reminding me about everything that’s good about this place and why I’m so lucky and happy to call it home.” @RosalieCJonker added, “I was at breakfast with friends this weekend and we were all sort of moaning about how physically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, financially exhausting it is to live here but then … it’s worth it, it’s all worth it.” @tantrumette tweeted, “These photographs and stories are so encouraging, how significant our individual lives and personalities are, how much remains to look forward to.…

THAT PRESIDENT TRUMP’S Ukraine policy led to articles of impeachment against him was largely a matter of chance. A CIA official decided to collect evidence that the administration’s foreign policy was being used as a domestic oppo-research shakedown. The director of national intelligence suppressed the complaint, but Congress managed to find out about it just before Ukraine’s president was set to announce investigations into Trump’s domestic opponents, improbably foiling the scheme. This unlucky sequence explains Trump’s fixation on the whistle-blower, but for whom Ukraine would be just another Trump scandal sitting in plain sight. “Frankly,” a close Trump adviser recently confided to CNN, “I think he’s a little surprised it’s the Ukraine thing that’s done it.” Another scandal, posing a far more dire threat, has unfolded mostly in public without…

THE INTERNET IS a lot like the ocean—there’s tons of garbage in it, and 90 percent of the species that inhabit it are undiscovered. Internet archetypes are much more varied than they were at the start of the information age, when there was one type of stereotypical internet user (basement dwelling, unclean, probably a dude). Now there exists a whole phylum of user types, each with its own aesthetics and community, building presences on every type of platform. Here, some you might have encountered in 2019. VSCO Girl FIND HER ON: TikTok WITH: A scrunchie, a Hydro Flask and a vaguely alt attitude The VSCO Girl is, at her essence, a teenager who tries very hard to look like she’s not really trying. She wears oversize T-shirts, carries a Hydro…

BOBBI SALVÖR MENUEZ is standing on a table at Lee’s, an event space in Chinatown, in toe socks and a Fear Factor T-shirt, carefully sprinkling pigeon feathers around the place settings. “They’re from a friend’s rooftop coop in Bushwick,” they say, nudging a feather toward the centerpiece, a carefully considered mess of dirt, daisies, and metal containers, with a foot. Behind Menuez, 26, the artist Precious Okoyomon deposits a tray full of greenish globes into the freezer. “That’s for the sixth course,” Menuez says. “The cold-pressed-cucumber ball gags.” The artist, model, and actor (most recently seen on HBO’s Euphoria) is preparing for a convening of the MSG Club, a conceptual dinner series founded by L.A.-based artist Glenn Kaino and chef Niki Nakayama, and Menuez’s new queer food project, Spiral Theory…

THERE’S DRUNK SHOPPING, and there’s Drunk! Shopping! The former is a truly pedestrian experience: tipsily shopping online from bed only to receive, a day or two later, a large mystery package that contains a single electric-toothbrush replacement head. But Drunk! Shopping! is something different. Something beautiful, really. It’s me in the shoe department at the new seven-floor, 320,000-square-foot Nordstrom flagship at 12:03 p.m. on a weekday, sipping my third “Greenwich Village,” a prosecco-based cocktail that guarantees I will have a hangover by three. Since the store opened in midtown Manhattan in October, most of the reviews have mentioned a feature that sounds more like an urban legend. Following an afternoon spent testing the limits, I can assure you the mentions are true: This new Nordstrom has a liquor license. In…

When Dylann Storm Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, he joined the Bible-study class before gunning down nine African-Americans as they prayed.¶ Roof still communicates with his admirers on the outside. In jail, he began exchanging letters with a man in Arkansas named Billy Roper. A former schoolteacher and the son and grandson of Klansmen, Roper leads the Shield Wall Network, a group of several dozen white nationalists who organize rallies and conferences—often collaborating with neighboring hate groups—with the goal of building a white ethno-state. “I have a lot of empathy for him. I’m 47, and he’s young enough to be my son,” Roper said of Roof when interviewed recently for this project. “These millennials and now, I guess, Gen-Zers that are coming…