New York Magazine April 27 - May 10, 2020

1 New York’s latest cover featured Alexei Hay’s photograph of a hushed and nearly empty Times Square (“Covid Capital of the World,” April 13–26). NY1’s Jamie Stelter said of Hay’s portfolio, “They look like scenes from a movie. We keep saying that. But they’re beautiful. It’s important to see this. It’s important to remember these images.” Pat Kiernan added, “These are the things we will remember 20 years from now—50 years from now. When we look back at this time, some of those images will be the most powerful.” On Instagram, @musiconlyus commented, “This picture is so devastating, it’s the contrast between the reality and the memories of whom ever visited, lived or loved NYC.” Many readers noticed one Times Square fixture that hasn’t disappeared since the pandemic: @amandalambdalambda joked,…

ONE NIGHT IN LATE MARCH, President Trump, seized by one of his periodic bouts of dismay with his public-health officials, sought out a second opinion on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. He called Arthur Laffer. After missing the president’s first three calls, the 79-year-old Laffer finally answered, and the two men connected for what Laffer described as “a very serious conversation,” shortly after which Trump tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” Trump gravitated back to his public-health advisers, but he is again lurching toward the opposite pole—one anchored by Laffer and his close allies: National Economic Council head Lawrence Kudlow and economic adviser Stephen Moore. They have seized on their historic role as the antagonists to the administration’s public-health wing because they have…

MANDY MOORE IS AT HOME recording fan greetings on Cameo, the social platform where, for a fee, you can request personalized video shout-outs from your favorite celebrities, athletes, and viral stars. Tomi Lahren, Flavor Flav, Snoop Dogg (priced at $420, naturally), The Bachelor’s Chris Harrison, and Survivor’s Jeff Probst are doing it too. For $200, you can hire Lindsay Lohan to film herself wishing your brother or mom or boss a happy birthday. Lohan signed on at the beginning of March; Moore joined a week later. In an unexpected side effect of stay-at-home orders, Cameo is booming, resulting in three of the company’s best weeks since it launched in 2016. “Our business was almost tailor-made for the social-distancing era. The whole idea of Cameo is how do you get a…

ONE OF MY ENDURING party tricks—not terribly well loved, though forever delightful to me—is my habit, when drunk, of reciting the opening 18 lines of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote”: the beginnings of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, when April showers bring the spring after March’s drought. I don’t know if the practice remains, but when I was in high school, it was taught to us by rote, the better for us to get a feel for the cotton-mouth cadence of Chaucer’s Middle English, a language that is legible and incomprehensible at once. Shakespeare’s English, 200 years later, was thorny and gorgeous, riddled with unfamiliar vocabulary, but with the help of endnotes and…

THERE WAS THE PANDEMIC, then there was the storm. Of all the natural disasters, tornadoes lend themselves the most to being read as Providence. Like hurricanes and wildfires, they can level everything in their path, but those paths can also be narrow enough, forgiving enough, to grind one house into debris while leaving the neighboring structure untouched. Metaphors become redundant in the face of such calamity; the thing to which you’d otherwise be comparing it is, too often, what it already is. But when disaster looms, we grasp for deeper meaning. When the disaster is unfamiliar, our imaginations retreat to more familiar terms, even primordial ones, as with the notion that celestial forces control our fate. The need to ascribe our misfortunes to some grand plan makes it hard not…

– “[Being in quarantine] is like being in jail. It’s mostly because I’ve been wearing the same clothes for ten days and everyone in here is gay.” —Ellen DeGeneres, broadcasting from her multimillion-dollar Southern California home – At 1:22 p.m. on March 14, East Hampton real-estate agent Joseph Kazickas sends out the following email: “Dear Homeowners, Virus fears are driving an early start to the rental season.” The response was immediate. “Quite a large number of homeowners responded,” he says. “I would say the email was well received.” – Blade (Uber, but for helicopters) in late March begins offering delivery of supplies from the city, including prescriptions, food for specialized diets, and school notebooks. – “It’s a lot of mail and a lot of packages. It’s a lot of groceries,…