New York Magazine May 25 - June 7, 2020

1 In the latest issue, New York explored how the current crisis will reshape higher education (“What Is College Without the Campus?,” May 11–24). As part of this special report, James D. Walsh spoke with NYU Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway about his predictions for a future marriage of elite universities and big tech. Bonnie Keeler, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, tweeted, “This is the best thing I’ve read about the future of college, in times of COVID and beyond.” @ardalis added, “Long before the pandemic, it was clear to me that the current costs of higher education were going to reach a tipping point where they simply exceeded their value. So is this another area where tech will swoop in and disrupt?” @DagomarDegroot challenged…

THE MORE WE LEARN ABOUT COVID-19 and the best practices with which to combat it, the clearer it is that we are living still in a valley of pandemic ignorance. Americans are suffering and dying at historic rates, but the laws governing the ebb and flow of the virus remain maddeningly inscrutable. Even when the news is good—with case rates stabilizing through a period of “reopening,” for instance—we don’t really know how to explain it. And when the news is scary—as it was when a new syndrome suddenly arose, affecting kids long thought practically invulnerable—we struggle to contextualize it. Just weeks ago, no one outside a few hospitals had even heard of such a thing as a “pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome,” or heard it described as “Kawasaki-like” and “COVID- related.”…

NEW YORK CITY TRANSIT interim president Sarah Feinberg, 42, turns her camera for a moment to show me how deserted the 30th floor of 2 Broadway is. “It’s myself, the guy who sits at the front and lets people through the locked door,” she narrates as she pans MTA headquarters. “A woman who basically runs the office is here some days. And then our NYPD liaison is here most days. And that’s it.” The NYCTA, whose very density has been blamed for New York City’s being the epicenter of the coronavirus, is being run from a ghost town. She swivels back to her nondescript workspace: beige shades, a monitor behind her head, cherry-veneer cabinetry. Feinberg started in the office on March 2—five days before Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state…

TO CLARIFY: ERIC ADAMS has indeed left Borough Hall in the past six weeks. The Brooklyn borough president goes for walks across the street in Columbus Park, and “every day, I spend a lot of time in our hospitals and our schools—oftentimes people don’t realize those on the front lines are in constant need of supplies, and those supplies don’t get there unless someone is dropping them off.” But at night he doesn’t go back to his place in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he lives on his own. Instead, he’s set up a mattress in front of his desk and brought in fitness gear, some spices, and his NutriBullet blender. Apart from making a couple of laundry runs, he hasn’t been home since the staff began working remotely in March. He’s not…

“THE LAST DAY I WORKED was on March 14, the Saturday before Governor Cuomo closed New York down. I rent a workspace in Brooklyn, and no one in my building was on the same page about hygiene protocols. I was also nervous about taking the train to get there. I knew there was no way I could say for sure that none of my clients would get infected at an appointment. So I was just like, “I can’t do this,” and I canceled all the next day’s appointments. Shutting down my business was terrifying financially. And the irony is I was just getting to a good place money-wise. About a year ago, I got a divorce, and that process was finally ending. I’d also doubled my business revenue, which allowed…

EACH DAY’S HEADLINES jolt us with the same unnerving reality: There has never, in the history of the Republic, been a stranger time to be old. We live in a kind of gerontocracy that feels both accidental and deeply entrenched. Our best hope for unseating the about-to-turn-74-year-old in the White House, whose reign is propped up by a terrifyingly powerful cable network that serves as the plaything of an ultrarich 89-year-old, is a former vice-president who, at 77, won the Democratic nomination over a 78-year-old senator whom young people preferred during the primaries. If elected, he will, one hopes, work effectively with the 80-year-old Speaker of the House or may, one worries, be thwarted by the truculent 78-year-old Senate majority leader. Until then, several crucial rights, including access to health…