New York Magazine December 7-20, 2020

1 For NewYork’s latest cover story, Brock Colyar went underground to report on the city’s nightlife scene (“Fear vs. Fun,” November 23–December 6). The story’s depiction of illicit partying drew the ire of many readers, along with praise for the reporting; @arcadecompos commented, “These people are contributing to the pandemic raging on in NYC, while many other people are losing their jobs, their apartments, and in many cases winding up in the hospital. Shameful.” Kristen Parisi wrote, “First off—f*ck the people in this article with the privilege of going on as if we’re not in the middle of a pandemic. Second—read it now.” Zachary Lipez praised Colyar for being able “to draw out their subjects in a way that I’m straight up jealous of.” Some critiqued the reporter for being…

YOU MAY BE surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend and was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human. It was more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States. By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already…

BACK IN JULY, BEST FRIENDS and Lower East Side denizens Claire Banse, 23, and Gutes Guterman, also 23, were sitting in Tompkins Square Park one afternoon drinking Aperol spritzes (their quar to-go drink of choice) and flipping through a particularly juicy Daily News when, as they retell it, “genius” struck. Why wasn’t there a hyperlocal publication servicing the downtown area of “Dimes Square,” or the triangle where Canal and East Broadway meet, as it is called by the community of stylish 20-something art types and skaters who frequent it? Banse and Guterman saw a need for a print newspaper (not a zine) that treated “the inside joke that is downtown New York” as a serious subject and cultural trends like “FOMO” worth investigating—it often reads like Instagram’s Close Friends feature,…

OVER THE SUMMER, protective-masks-as-fashion reached something of a fever pitch. Patterned, fringed, lace-adorned, and silken masks proliferated. But for a certain set, the most appealing option wasn’t embellished at all. It was simple and cheap: a black surgical mask. The sleeker cousin of the blue surgical mask, it has been spotted on everyone from Hailey and Justin Bieber to Kaia Gerber to K-pop group BTS and Kanye. Its popularity is on display around the city, too, as worn by people picnicking in Fort Greene Park and down around the chins of those drinking martinis outdoors at the Odeon and waiting in line outside Sincerely, Tommy, in Bed-Stuy. Will Anderson, formerly a senior product designer at Artsy, says he has been wearing one since early September. When asked how he would…

IN EARLY QUARANTINE, stripped of our typical distractions, bored by our lockdowns but unable to stop the game of self-comparison, we began to scrutinize one another for sport. I remember getting a text from a friend criticizing someone for documenting their exercise habits on Instagram. Normally she wouldn’t have cared, but now the depictions of their outdoorsy life felt tone-deaf. The exchange made me wonder if my posts were the subject of such texts. I shared a beautiful spread of food, only to take it off my Instagram Stories a few hours later, lest it be seen as insensitive to those who were suffering food insecurity. And even as I was having that thought, I knew it wasn’t just that I was afraid of causing pain directly but also of…

IF YOU LIVE IN NEW YORK long enough—and it doesn’t have to be very long—it gradually becomes unrecognizable. And maybe, you begin to realize, it’s for someone else entirely, someone new or from somewhere else, someone perhaps with more money, more energy: someone circumstantially or possibly constitutionally ignorant of what you took to be authentic about this place when it felt like it was yours. (Nothing makes you feel old like listening to someone talk about what you know to be an upstart as iconic.) It’s too big a city to live in all of it, so you find your corners, your go-tos. Sometimes they are long-running, but mostly they come and they go. It’s part of the Darwinian, self-alienating thrill of the place: More often than not, you outlive…