New York Magazine June 22 - July 5, 2020

1 New York’s latest cover was dedicated to documenting this convulsive moment in American history. It featured a photograph from a Black Lives Matter protest by Michael Christopher Brown (“George Floyd’s America,” June 8–21). Though many readers found it to be a powerful and inspiring representation of the national conversation—Kate White commented on Instagram, “This cover is monumental”—many others were disappointed that it was taken by a white photographer. Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner wrote on Instagram, “I saw this new … cover and was like love,” but when she saw who shot it, she felt it was a missed opportunity. “Now i’m not saying all work about black people has to be shot by black people,” she continued. “But as someone who used to work at nymag and…

ALMOST AS SOON as the first marches to protest the killing of George Floyd began, in Minneapolis on May 26, conservatives and COVID contrarians seized on the rallies as a case study of liberal coronavirus hypocrisy. If the disease spread rapidly through the assembled protesters, they felt, it would show that those who’d spent the spring scolding Americans for resisting lockdowns didn’t care as much about public health as they did about advancing their own set of political values. (Liberals, of course, would put it differently: that the cause was worth the risk.) If there were relatively few new cases, the thinking went, it would demonstrate that the lockdowns themselves were unnecessary. Three weeks later, we have the first results from the natural experiment: Across the country, from Minneapolis to…

IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, it has become increasingly common to remember the origin of Pride not as a party but as a literal uprising at the Stonewall Inn. On a bright-blue Sunday, June 14, at the steps of the Brooklyn Museum, a march for Black trans lives brought out an estimated 15,000 people dressed in white, an homage to a 1917 NAACP protest. “What we saw on Sunday was a callback,” said Ianne Fields Stewart, a Black transfeminine activist and speaker at the event. “Not to call other Prides frivolous, but that joy was grounded in a greater sense of purpose.” The idea for the protest began with West Dakota, a Brooklyn drag queen inspired by recent Black Lives Matter activism. The event remembered lives that have been lost,…

MARC ELIAS hears the question constantly: “Is Donald Trump going to try to cancel, or move, the election?” He has an answer ready: No, he can’t. It’s some of the other nightmare scenarios he’s worried about. Elias, 51, leads a sprawling team of attorneys who, together with official Democratic Party committees, super- PACs, and progressive organizations, have been appearing remotely in court hearings around the country, and their litigation list keeps growing. By last count, they have at least one active case in 18 states, including each of the six core swing states. A handful of Democrats’ nightmare scenarios seem close to inevitable: With a massive influx of mail-in votes, we almost certainly won’t know the full results of the election on the night of November 3, and it’s not…

A FEW WEEKS AGO, as protesters rallied around the world against systemic racism and police brutality, 12 board members of the National Book Critics Circle, an organization of some 800 critics that gives out a number of annual awards, began to draft a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Noting that the publishing industry has long been overwhelmingly white from top to bottom, they wrote of their “culpability in this system of erasure” of Black and indigenous voices from the cultural conversation and outlined a series of steps their organization could take to support critics of color. Just 30 percent of last year’s winners and finalists were writers of color. “We can and must do better,” they wrote. “It was really exciting,” Ismail Muhammad, a Black writer…

THE PROTESTERS lined up, hundreds deep, hoping to rally on the steps of City Hall and raise a ruckus loud enough for the mayor to hear from his corner office. They hoisted signs that read BDB: WHAT HAPPENED TO BEING THE FAIREST CITY? and STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE and NO RACIST POLICE. They chanted about how they wanted justice, chanted about when they wanted it and about what they would do if they didn’t get it now: “Shut! It! Down!” Unlike most of the tens of thousands of protesters who have poured onto city streets over the past several weeks, the members of this group could probably have just told the mayor himself, or at least sent an email. They were his former and current administration employees, people who worked…