New York Magazine April 13-26, 2020

1 For New York’s latest issue, the magazine transformed into a self-isolation instruction manual with 44 suggestions for getting through uncertain times (“How to Survive This Plague,” March 30–April 12). The cover featured a photograph by Jeremy Cohen of a lone man playing a double bass on his Bushwick rooftop. Many readers praised the cover for capturing our current moment. On Instagram, @evagrayzel wrote, “Thank you … for changing the norm and addressing our … situation with such grace, beauty, and emotion in the photo.” And on Twitter, @groovyhil called the cover “a bit of sunshine in the midst of #CoronavirusPandemic.” Of the contents, Frank Samperi wrote, “This issue encapsulates everything I love most about New York Magazine—your absurd, authentic, critical yet hopeful everything.” Another reader said, “I am 24…

DONALD TRUMP GLANCES up at the TVs on the wall or down at the newspapers on his desk. He sees himself distorted by the fake-news media. He sees his presidency under siege. With the exception of Fox News and its imitators, the coverage is uniformly critical or pessimistic, the headlines and cable segments a bundle of spears he’s unfit to dodge. Each one pricks the skin. He grows angry and annoyed. He begins asking questions, addressing them to no one in particular. “He’s like, ‘Where are my people?!’” a senior White House official tells me, describing a scene the president acts out again and again. “‘I don’t have any fighters. I don’t have any people. Where are they?’” It’s often said that Trump is his own best spokesman. Howard Rubenstein,…

I NOTICE THE SMELL first. I’d been expecting the unnerving thwomps and grunts and the general intensity, but I find on stepping into Gibson Hall, where Navarro College Cheer is holding its practice, it’s the smell that almost knocks me off my feet. It isn’t body odor—though stinky, sweaty people are everywhere—rather a stale, plasticky smell with a soupçon of disinfectant. As I zigzag among the rows of discarded Gatorade bottles, Sonic cups, and energy drinks, my nose is confronted with a specific sense of place. Oh, right, I think, taking another whiff. This is a school gym. La’Darius Marshall shouldn’t be hard to find, but all the throwing and flipping and spinning makes the task a little like doing a Where’s Waldo? puzzle after half a bottle of wine.…

THE EFFECTS OF the coronavirus outbreak have been dire throughout the U.S. economy. About 16.8 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the three weeks that ended April 4, a record pace of job loss several times over. The S&P 500 index of large companies fell 20 percent in the first quarter of 2020, and all of its 11 sectors dropped by double digits—even the least hard-hit, information technology, was down 12 percent. Energy stocks lost half their value. And yet a few companies will emerge stronger from the crisis than they went in. Even in the disastrous first quarter, 30 of the 500 stocks measured in the S&P went up. These firms are either positioned to meet the needs of the pandemic economy or have the resources to outlast…

THE BERNIE SANDERS CAMPAIGN was ahead of its time. Had the Democratic primary been held in the year 2040, the socialist’s overwhelming support among millennials and Zoomers would have made him the presumptive nominee by mid-March (for the purposes of this hypothetical, Sanders remains spry at age 98 and human civilization remains a thing in 20 years). Although the Vermont senator ended his 2020 campaign on April 8 with a smaller coalition than he’d assembled four years prior, his resilient hold on a supermajority of voters under 30—combined with that cohort’s exceptionally left-wing views in policy polling—suggests that the moral arc of the Democratic Party bends toward Sandersism. It’s possible that his timing was off not by 20 years but by just a few months. Had our present nightmare come…

AS THE VIRUS ROLLED in like an invisible, toxic fog, I watched apartment buildings go semi-dark and families pack up SUVs and drive off into the countryside. With planes empty and borders closed, the flow of new arrivals who refresh New York has stopped. Those who could do so made a run for it; the rest are still bravely going to work or stowing themselves out of sight. On warm days, the parks feel distressingly overpopulated, but only because each person now requires an enlarged bubble of personal space. Looking out my living-room window, I see terror saunter down vacant streets, reclaiming a city that had forgotten how to fear. I wonder how long the feeling will linger. Most of those people will return, even if the sense of threat…