New York Magazine June 8-21, 2020

The killing of George Floyd magnified the worst excesses of police brutality and set off protests and demonstrations that have only intensified. Here, we listen to the voices of the people out in the streets and those who will help the country chart a path forward, including Ilhan Omar on how Minneapolis’s inequality was a tinderbox, John Lewis on the necessity of optimism, shop owners commited to staying open for their community, the protesters who’ve been galvanized by what they’re seeing, the police officers they’re marching against, and Stacey Abrams, Cory Booker, and Maxine Waters on where we go from here. 16…

1 New York’s latest issue was dedicated to listening to the very old. Many readers responded to the special issue by emphasizing the importance of their elderly friends and family. Andie MacDowell wrote, “It’s been interesting to watch how people speak about older people during the pandemic. I have felt in the last few years that society no longer respected the elderly—not in the way that I was taught as a child. I hope that we come through this with a deep respect and reverence towards our elderly.” @lisascrandall added, “We didn’t do nearly enough to protect them—it’s maybe one of our greatest failures during this pandemic.” On Instagram, @rlaarthur wrote, “Anything I’ve ever learned that was worth knowing, I learned from someone older than me.” In the accompanying essay,…

A LITTLE MORE THAN a year ago, President Trump made one of the most terrifying and prophetic statements of his presidency. “You know, the left plays a tougher game; it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher,” he told Breitbart. “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point and then it would be very bad, very bad.” There are two remarkable things about this statement. One is Trump’s casual conflation of the state security forces (police, military) with extremely unofficial political activists (“Bikers for Trump”). In his mind, they all…

How often are you leaving your home?  Have you felt more comfortable leaving your home over the past few weeks? Are you sheltering in place somewhere that’s not your primary residence? NO NO: 88.5% YES YES: 11.5% If so, where are you staying? A family member’s home ......................................... 60% A friend’s home.................................................................7% A second home that you own .......................................... 9% A short-term rental ...........................................................4% A significant other’s home .............................................. 17% Other.................................................................................3% How would you describe your emotional state right now? Do you have a “quarantine pod” or “quarantine bubble”? (a group of friends or family you’ve agreed to exclusively spend time with) No 63.7% Yes 36.3% If so, who is in your pod and what ground rules do you have? “Five close friends and a woman I pretend is my…

I HAVE THIS PET THEORY about book recommendations. They feel good to solicit, good to mete out, but someone at some point has to get down to the business of reading. And there, between giving and receiving, lies a great gulf. No one can quite account for what happens—reading, hopefully, but you never can be sure. It’s that time again. Race is happening. Never mind that race is always happening, but it is especially happening now, urgently happening, and God help you if you’re not paying attention (though history will probably pardon your procrastination, for history too is belated). I should clarify that “happening” here indicates an agreement, a collective bargain that something has risen to the level of a thing by degrees of egregiousness or luck. It applies to…

OVER THE PAST WEEK, protests and riots in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have been met with increasingly menacing calls to restore order. But chaos isn’t going anywhere soon. Order, in this context, just means forcing chaos back where it belongs. There are positive signs for the near future, especially if one understands the dissent as aimed primarily at reducing police violence. Public sentiment is on the side of the dissidents; a recent Monmouth poll found that more than half of Americans thought the torching of the Minneapolis police’s Third Precinct station on May 28 was at least partly justified. Repudiations of Floyd’s manner of death, under the knee of now former officer Derek Chauvin, have been mostly bipartisan. Minneapolis schools have kicked out the…