New York Magazine November 9-22, 2020

New York asked 48 artists and designers to create I VOTED stickers for the millions of Americans who voted early or by mail this year, and in partnership with the organization I Am a Voter, the magazine distributed another 500,000 stickers for free at stores, bookshops, and museums across the country. As soon as the magazine came out, readers started sharing their stickers with us and on social media: Here’s just a sampling of what we saw leading up to the election.…

I The End of an Error The one-term reign of the man who never should’ve won. BY JONATHAN CHAIT DONALD TRUMP DESTROYED many things in his single term as president. The quickest one Joe Biden can repair may be the measure of self-respect Trump robbed the country of through four years of national humiliation. Of all the endless lies made by and for Trump, the most insidiously effective is the one his daughter Ivanka uttered at his nominating convention in August, when she described him as “the people’s president.” One would think that a precondition for being a “people’s president”—and not just a duly elected holder of the office—would be gaining the support of a plurality of the electorate. But after four years of relentless pseudo-populist propaganda, this absurd claim…

ON OCTOBER 23, ELEVEN DAYS BEFORE the presidential election, Manohla Dargis, one of the movie critics at the New York Times, popped in to the #newsroom-feedback channel on the company’s Slack to pose an existential query. “Friendly question,” Dargis wrote to more than 2,000 of her colleagues. “What is this channel now?” The #newsroom-feedback channel had been created in June, after the Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas arguing for the deployment of the military to quell nationwide protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd. The column was quickly lambasted: for factual errors, an inflammatory headline—“Send in the Troops”—and a feeling that the Times should not be in the business of publishing arguments for the use of American troops to crack down on…

WE CREMATED MY GRANDFATHER the week I was supposed to get married. The white dress I bought a year ago still hangs in my closet, next to the black dress I brought home with me to Virginia. I’d flown back from New York the first week in September, when he was still alive, when there was still a chance he could stay that way. But we all knew the odds. The black dress was a precaution and a reminder of how badly things had gone awry. I’d bought it when I still thought I would wear it to work in the summer. Then the pandemic happened, and it’s a funeral dress now. My grandfather died from complications of COVID-19. The last time I saw him, I wore gloves and a…

GROWING UP IN ARIZONA in the 1990s, Justin Posey wanted to be Indiana Jones. At age 9, he started wearing the archaeologist-adventurer’s trademark khaki pants, Stetson, and leather jacket and carrying a bullwhip nearly every day. When other kids bullied him, his mother gently suggested he dress more normally. “He wouldn’t have any part of it,” his mother, Lorri, remembers. He carried the whip until he was 13. “I got pretty good with that thing,” he says. “Of course, they wouldn’t let me bring it to school.” Posey’s parents were both railroad engineers, and during summers at the family’s cabin in Montana, where his grandfather was a fish-and-game warden, his favorite thing to do was get out in the hills with a metal detector. He collected books of magic and…

As I have gone alone in there And with my treasures bold, I can keep my secret where, And hint of riches new and old. Begin it where warm waters halt And take it in the canyon down, Not far, but too far to walk. Put in below the home of Brown. From there it’s no place for the meek, The end is ever drawing nigh; There’ll be no paddle up your creek, Just heavy loads and water high. If you’ve been wise and found the blaze Look quickly down, your quest to cease, But tarry scant with marvel gaze, Just take the chest and go in peace. So why is it that I must go And leave my trove for all to seek? The answers I already know, I’ve…