New York Magazine November 23 - December 6, 2020

1 New York’s latest issue commemorated Joe Biden’s election to the presidency (“Exhale, America,” November 9–22). On Instagram, @danistargem remarked on Mark Peterson’s cover photograph, “It’ll be nice to see a President with light in his eyes, rather than venom.” For other readers, the cover and the moment were an opportunity for relief. Nicki Sacco Chacon tweeted, “I just exhaled for the first time in four years. Didn’t realize I had been holding my breath.” Inside the magazine, our writers responded to the news: In “The End of an Error,” Jonathan Chait argued that America was always better than Donald Trump. Daily Kos’s Greg Dworkin called it “one of the best things [Chait] has written.” But Terry Bell cautioned that Chait’s “read makes it hard to account for the significant…

IN HIS ADDRESS to the Democratic National Convention in August, Barack Obama warned that the Trump administration “has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win.” Kamala Harris began her first speech as vice-president-elect by saying “America’s democracy is not guaranteed.” Some may have dismissed this as mere hyperventilated campaign rhetoric. But in the days that followed the election, Trump fulfilled the stark prophecies. He has seized whatever powers he still has in his grasp to rattle the system and to take vengeance against his successor by leaving him with a ruin. Trump has attempted to retain power much as he wielded it throughout his term: with a comic ineptitude of his means that made it difficult to absorb the seriousness of his ends.…

FOR THE FIRST TIME since its inception in 1933, there will be no Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. For a New York holiday season, this is akin to Santa himself taking the year off. He works hard, but the Rockettes work harder: 300 kicks per show, up to four shows a day—after six weeks of rehearsal, six days a week, for six hours a day. Those were the days before COVID-19 shut down Radio City. The usual 80-woman company has not been hired this year; they have dispersed or stayed home, keeping up their offseason gigs as exercise instructors, real-estate agents, students, and accountants. But a skeleton crew of Rockettes are training for the events they can do: 18 for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a dozen for…

AT THE DOOR OF A dignified apartment on the Upper East Side: Hugh. Among David Sedaris’s devoted fans, the ones who read his pieces in The New Yorker and make his books best sellers and flocked to the 50-city live tours he did each year before the pandemic paused them, he’s just Hugh—the way Sedaris’s sister Amy (comedian, crafter, all-time-great Letterman guest) is just Amy. David writes sketch dispatches from the Sedaris clan with himself at the center as nebbish-raconteur. He has made his family the main characters of a decades-long, clearly very profitable, and reliably amusing page-and-stage act. Everyone in Sedaris’s ambit ends up sounding a little bit off-kilter in that very Sedaris way, at least as reported by David. Or at least everyone save one: his boyfriend, Hugh.…

IN THE MATH-ADDLED HOURS after the polls closed on Election Day, as the New York Times’ needle tipped delicately toward blue in Georgia, the nation’s attention followed, homing in on one of its most transformative political figures: Stacey Abrams. Abrams—who served as minority leader in Georgia’s house of representatives for seven years before running for governor in 2018, losing narrowly to then–Secretary of State Brian Kemp in one of the most flagrantly voter-suppressed elections in recent memory—has been working to turn her state from red to blue for more than a decade. Now that her promise has (this time at least) been made manifest, many people in the Democratic Party are looking to Abrams as a kind of silver bullet: a figure who can be installed—in the Cabinet or as…

IT’S 2 A.M., OR, PER THE GUY sitting next to me, “the hour where nothing is awkward,” on a Friday night less than two weeks before the presidential election and three weeks before COVID-19 positivity rates would creep back toward 3 percent in New York, prompting a series of new lockdown measures—a night and moment that, in retrospect, would be the twilight of New York’s pandemic reprieve. On the teeny back patio of a vacant industrial warehouse on the border of Bushwick and Williamsburg, at a covert party named, fittingly, “Dirty Dark Underground,” I can find only one person out of a couple dozen revelers who appears to even own a mask, though his is currently dangling under his chin. If you happened to wander into this party, lured from…