New York Magazine July 6-19, 2020

1 For New York’s latest cover story, David Freedlander chronicled how quickly Bill de Blasio lost the city in “Everybody Hates Bill” (June 22–July 5). To capture people’s feelings about the mayor, the magazine pasted portraits of him across all five boroughs, and photographer Marcus Russell Price captured how New Yorkers responded. On NY1, Jamie Stelter said, “We should say admittedly: When you hang up a poster of anyone’s face in the city, it has a good chance of getting defaced in some way, especially in this moment when New Yorkers don’t seem particularly happy with the mayor.” The writer Otegha K. Uwagba praised the project: “This is pretty inspired, as cover ideas go.” And Dan Zedek wrote, “Interactive design at its finest.” Others were surprised to learn the portraits…

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON on the last Monday in June, 430 Democrats, who had paid up to $100,000 each, clicked into a private, Texas-themed Zoom call organized by Joe Biden’s campaign. They were greeted by former Planned Parenthood chief Cecile Richards, whose mother, Ann, was the state’s last Democratic governor. They heard from Julián Castro and Beto O’Rourke, and they were treated to a performance by Willie Nelson, who sang a song with his son Lukas called “Vote ’Em Out.” It began, “If you don’t like who’s in there, vote ’em out./That’s what Election Day is all about./The biggest gun we’ve got is called the ballot box.” And they heard from Biden, who—just four days after a Fox News poll showed him narrowly ahead of Donald Trump in the state…

IF THEY’RE TALENTED AND THEY’RE LUCKY, designer-artist-creators get to lob an icon out into the larger culture—the ultrafamiliar shape of Leo Fender’s Stratocaster guitar, say, or Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster. If they’re great, maybe they create two. Milton Glaser, though, operated on another plane—he just kept hitting the bull’s-eye, again and again, throughout his seven decades as an illustrator, graphic designer, art director, and visual philosopher and paterfamilias. He loved New York City and celebrated it in multiple ways: with a magazine, with posters, and (most visibly of all) with the three-letters-and-a-red-heart slogan he created. Almost incidentally, he also changed the way you eat. Milton Glaser died on June 26, his 91st birthday, of natural causes after an extremely long and productive career. Around our office, of course, he will…

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IT WAS EARLY JUNE when I first spoke to Rachel Noerdlinger, and she was worrying about the casket. George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis was to be held in 48 hours, and she was considering how images of the coffin, conspicuously placed at the front of the university sanctuary, might impact the national psyche after ten days of protests. It was the family’s call, of course, but she fretted that they might want the casket to be open, as it had been in the case of Sean Bell. (“I can still picture his face,” Noerdlinger says now. “It’s just blech.”) But Noerdlinger wanted to ensure that Floyd remained in the public mind as long as possible, as “a human being, not a lifeless vessel.” Noerdlinger was in hyperdrive. Officially, she…

WITH LUCK, either you will grow old or you already have. That is my ambition and probably yours, yet with each year we survive, we face a crescendo of mockery, disdain, and neglect. Ageism is the most paradoxical form of bigotry. Rather than expressing contempt for others, it lashes out at our own futures. It expresses itself in innumerable ways—in the eagerness to sacrifice the elderly on the altar of the economy, in the willingness to keep them confined while everyone else emerges, and in a popular culture that sees old age (when it sees it at all) as a purgatory of bingo nights. In this country, we have erected a vast apparatus of last-stop living arrangements that, during the pandemic, have proved remarkably successful at killing the very people…