New York Magazine October 26 - November 8, 2020

1 For its latest cover, New York commissioned a custom-made banner reading MISS U to fly over the city (October 12–25). The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted, “Kudos to @NYMag for chartering two airplanes to make their beautiful cover this week. I love big magazine thinking.” Podcaster Greg Young said it was “a reminder that old-fashioned magazine design can still be the most effective artwork on the planet.” For others, the cover was touching. Dyan Flores tweeted, “Sorry I was late for that meeting, I was busy crying at a New York magazine cover.” And Lia Miller wrote, “This is so perfect. Beautiful, heavy and light with a touch of surreal.” But writer Kaitlin Phillips bristled at the cover’s sentimentality: “The slogan ‘miss you’ means nothing to me … Is the…

THE 2020 ELECTION is the first presidential contest since perhaps 1864 in which the principal question is democracy itself. The reelection of Donald Trump, unlikely but terrifyingly possible, would hasten America’s evolution into an oligarchy along the lines of Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, whose illiberal leaders Trump admires and who are, in some cases, working to help him secure a second term. School civics lessons have boiled democratic values down to inoffensive mush that we associate with clichés expressing supposedly universal values (“government of the people, by the people, for the people”). But democracy is a radical concept, especially in a society as unequal as ours. The tension between an economic system in which power is concentrated in a few hands and a political system in which power is distributed…

Saturday, 12:30 p.m.: A Wedding on the Long Meadow MING CHANG AND NAOYA HAYASHI “We didn’t want to wait to get married until the pandemic was over, because who knows when that will be. When the reverend made the pronouncement at the end, a lot of people sitting in the grass nearby clapped. It was really sweet.” —Ming Chang Sunday, 2 p.m.: A Weekly Cookout by the Bandshell JEN ROBERTON “I’ve got some merguez sausages going and some kefta. I barely knew how to do this in the beginning. The first time I tried to light it up, it didn’t work, and my boss was here. It was really embarrassing. But at this point, it seems to be doing what it has to do, which is good.” Sunday, 2:30 p.m.:…

TO UNDERSTAND THE SUBURBS as imagined by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, you first have to understand that neither of them is really talking about the suburbs. They are talking about segregation. “Suburbs are by and large integrated,” Biden claimed at the first presidential debate in Ohio. He was responding to Trump’s warning that the “suburbs would be gone” under a Biden presidency, crushed under the weight of “problems like you’ve never seen before.” Trump’s evocation of suburban decline has become a theme of his reelection campaign. As his job-approval ratings have fallen and Biden maintains a healthy lead over him in national polls, the president has found himself grasping for proof that the foundational pitch of his presidency still has merit—that he’s the only candidate who can guarantee safety…

THE DATE WAS APRIL 20, 1978. The scene: the Great Hall of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. On the stage sat the Italian modernist Massimo Vignelli and the cartographer John Tauranac, combatants in the Great Subway Map Debate. Six years earlier, Vignelli’s firm had reimagined the New York subway map as a rainbowlike diagram. Tauranac was the head of a committee that had engaged Michael Hertz Associates to re-redraw it. Vignelli’s diagram was a joy to look at and was nearly useless as an aboveground navigation tool; Hertz and Tauranac’s map got you around town pretty well but inspired little delight. By the end of the night, the aesthetes sensed they were going to lose, and indeed Hertz’s practical problem-solving work replaced Vignelli’s the following…

ONE AFTERNOON this year, a Washington Republican wove through packs of tourists on the Mall and considered, as he often did, the collapse of America. How would all of this appear from a distance? He looked at the monuments, lucent in the sun, and pictured them disfigured by centuries of neglect and carnage. “Do you ever think about how, 2,000 years from now, people are going to do what we’re doing right now how they do it in the Forum in Rome?” he said. “Unless it’s destroyed, the ruins of the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial”—he gestured over there and over there, where the future ruins would be crawling with Jetsons—“they’ll have their headsets, which will probably be a chip in their brain.” While growing up in a coastal…