New York Magazine July 20 - August 2, 2020

1 New York’s latest cover star was Michaela Coel, the creator of I May Destroy You, profiled by E. Alex Jung (“Michaela the Destroyer,” July 6–19). The New Yorker’s Hilton Als wrote, “In a word or eight? Michaela Coel: goddess. Genius. Hero. Inspiration. Quadruple threat. The purest right-on force in entertainment in an age. Check out the excellent New York cover story on Coel.” WNYC’s Rebecca Carroll called the story “a bright, muscular profile of a magnificent Black woman doing amazing, bold and hyper-present things with her willful, creative mind.” British news anchor Charlene White said, “My heart just leapt seeing this … I May Destroy You is layer upon layer of superb writing and directing.” Television writer and director Janet Mock wrote of Coel, “A heroine. A genius. I…

“WE’VE SEEN DEMAND GROWTH flatten recently with the rise of COVID-19 cases,” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian told investors during the company’s latest earnings call on July 14. Delta lost $7 billion in the second quarter of this year and served 93 percent fewer passengers than it had in the same quarter last year. In early June, things had been looking up: Bookings were rapidly accelerating as customers prepared to resume travel. But in recent weeks, demand has, as Bastian notes, “flattened,” with coronavirus surges making customers less eager to fly. Delta, like its competitors American and United, had to pare back its plans to add more flights over the summer. And it’s not just airlines that have seen demand flatten in recent weeks—the once-sharp recovery has stalled across…

IN APRIL, as cheers for essential workers were becoming a 7 p.m. staple, St. James Place in Clinton Hill turned into a dance floor. The party originated with one family: president of the block association Gail Bryan-Vill, 63, whose husband, Jo Vill, 63, and son, Chad Vill, 31, started playing music from their brownstone to accompany the nightly clap. The celebration grew from there, and now, Friday through Sunday nights, crowds of up to 100 people come on bike and foot from Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan to dance, Rollerblade, Hula-Hoop, and blow bubbles. “We’ve come closer as a community because of it,” Chad says. “The opera singers Paul Grosvenor and Imani Mchunu Grosvenor across the street, who have performed at the events, have lived there for two years. We didn’t…

ON ILLINOIS REPRESENTATIVE Lauren Underwood’s first flight during the pandemic back in March, she was the only passenger on the plane to Washington, D.C. The 33-year-old—who is the youngest Black woman ever elected to Congress and also a registered nurse with master’s degrees in nursing and public health—has a heart condition (supraventricular tachycardia) that puts her at elevated risk of complications if she contracts COVID-19. This has meant that doing her job—as both a legislator in a country clawing its way through economic crisis, where the unemployment benefits holding up many American families are about to expire, and a candidate up for reelection in November in the historically conservative district she flipped two years ago—has been trickier than usual. Underwood works mainly while sheltering at home in Naperville, participating in…

THIS IS A SEASON of envy for American cities, as Tokyo subways fill, Berlin museums reopen, and Aucklanders hold weddings. One image from Paris has inspired particular wistfulness: The Rue de Rivoli, until a few months ago a perpetual cloud of diesel and horn-honking, is now a whispering conduit for pedestrians and bicycles. Cutting through Paris’s expensive core from the Marais to Place de la Concorde, it’s an emblem of the future metropolis, what the newly reelected mayor Anne Hidalgo describes as the “15-minute city.” In her vision, no Parisian should need to travel more than a quarter-hour, on foot or by bike, to work or shop or see a doctor. Part of the plan involves prying streets away from cars, and the other involves seeding neighborhoods with options so…

LAST OCTOBER, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security compiled a ranking system to assess the preparedness of 195 countries for the next global pandemic. Twenty-one panel experts across the globe graded each country in 34 categories composed of 140 sub-indices. At the top of the rankings, peering down at 194 countries supposedly less equipped to withstand a pandemic, stood the United States of America. It has since become horrifyingly clear that the experts missed something. The supposed world leader is in fact a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June, after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 25 percent of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new…