New York Magazine December 21, 2020-January 3, 2021

1 New York’s 16th annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue was a remembrance of 500 places that have closed since the start of the pandemic (“Reasons We’ve Loved New York,” December 7–20). Readers responded with their own mix of grief and nostalgia for the bars, restaurants, galleries, gyms, and other places we’ve spent our lives. Daniela Bernal wrote, “Didn’t know I was going to cry on a Monday morning because of a NY Mag cover, but here we are.” The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein called the tribute a “near perfect magazine issue. Read it in print. Had me in tears on several occasions.” Many readers highlighted their own experiences with the businesses listed: Sam Sheppard tweeted, “I’ve been so focused on the impact of COVID in my immediate…

THERE WAS NEVER REALLY any question whether Pete Buttigieg would get some sort of job in Joe Biden’s administration—just where, exactly, he would be a good fit. For a while, the thinking was that the 38-year-old might make an exciting ambassador to the United Nations, but that never actually made much sense—Biden is determined to reassert American influence abroad using experienced diplomats—no matter how many languages Buttigieg speaks. And when some people close to Biden floated the idea of the former presidential candidate relocating to Beijing as the ambassador to China, it was swiftly shot down as unrealistic and maybe a little offensive. But Transportation secretary? Now there was a job for an infrastructure obsessive! Who could possibly object to that far-from-the-headlines posting? When many criticized the pick, however, it…

FOLLOWING A STRING OF E-BIKE ROBBERIES in the spring, Gustavo Ajche, a delivery worker from Guatemala, was messaging his fellow deliveristas in a WhatsApp group chat of workers in their neighborhood about how they could protect one another (those bikes, which they have to pay for themselves, can cost up to $2,000). The conversation shifted to how their already poor working conditions had worsened during the pandemic: a lack of PPE, nowhere to take breaks during lockdown, and meager pay. For these workers—who are considered independent contractors and sometimes paid below minimum wage—determining one’s take-home pay is often a confusing endeavor, as earnings vary wildly for each service: DoorDash lists its base pay as a range from $2 to about $10 per order (though some workers claim it’s often more…

AMY, LET’S CALL HER, IS the Regina George of the moms in Kelly’s upper-middle-class Pittsburgh neighborhood. (Some names have been changed.) She’s the one with the pool and the biggest house who throws the most over-the-top Christmas party every year, and she wields more power than God or Tony Fauci when it comes to determining the group’s social calendar. So when Amy started acting like COVID was over this summer, it was a green light for all the other moms (except Kelly) to start socializing again. Back in the spring, Kelly, who works as a researcher at a nearby hospital, formed a remote-learning pod for her first-grade son with two other neighborhood families (not Amy’s), and they had strict rules about socializing to make sure they didn’t risk exposing anyone…

WHEN IT CAME TIME to relocate from near D.C. to the New York tristate area, Fareed Hayat thought, I’m certainly going to Brooklyn. It was the summer of 2017. He and his wife, Norrinda Brown Hayat, had both gotten new jobs—he would be teaching criminal law at CUNY, and she had taken a position as the director of the Civil Justice Clinic at Rutgers—and Fareed had dreams of brownstones fueled by a viewing of Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It reboot on Netflix. They considered whether the city could be a suitable substitute for their suburban existence in Maryland, but while looking at homes with their two young sons, the eldest, Kingston, kept asking questions like “Where is the other floor to the house?” and “Are all of the houses…

ARRIVING IN ATLANTA on a recent Sunday afternoon, I turned on my hotel room’s TV and soon saw, staring back at me, the patrician face of David Perdue. Georgia’s Republican senior senator was the target of an attack ad paid for by his opponent, Jon Ossoff, in a runoff campaign for his seat; it suggested that Perdue had traded stocks with insider knowledge of the pandemic. A few minutes later, Ossoff, who at 33 is attempting to become the youngest U.S. senator in four decades, appeared in a sunnier TV spot, talking about how he would work with President-elect Joe Biden. This was followed immediately by an attack ad on the Democratic candidate in a second Georgia Senate runoff—the Reverend Raphael Warnock of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. I walked away…