New York Magazine March 29-April 11, 2021

1 Rebecca Traister spoke to dozens of former employees of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s about their experiences in his “toxic” workplace for New York’s latest cover story (“Abuse and Power,” March 15–28). On the evening the report was published, New York senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer joined dozens of other New York Democrats in calling for Cuomo to resign. Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers discussed the story on their evening shows, with Meyers commenting on the anecdote about Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, not knowing her colleagues: “Can you imagine that happening at any other workplace? A senior manager joking about not knowing anyone’s name?” On his New York Times podcast, Ezra Klein called the piece “extraordinary” and said it exemplifies “the way we’ve come to…

AS JOE BIDEN TOOK OFFICE, the Republican Party had no specific plan to discredit the genial and popular new president, but it did have one clean line of attack: Biden would be too beholden to teachers unions to permit a reopening of public schools. “‘Unions Above Children’ is the new motto of the Democrats’ plan to reopen schools,” proclaimed the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It all made perfect sense. Teachers unions had lavished Democrats with donations and votes, and Biden had repeatedly promised during the campaign to give teachers (including, as he often mentioned, his wife) a strong hand in his education agenda. And indeed, Biden has broadly pleased his party’s left flank. He has given former Bernie Sanders staffers important posts and pushed aggressively for a generous stimulus bill…

THE SUNDAY AFTER eight people, six of them Asian women, were killed in Atlanta, hundreds of New Yorkers descended on Columbus Park in Manhattan’s Chinatown. In the crowd were Vivian Li, 59, and her daughter Megan, 29. MEGAN: I was born here in the city, but our family has been back and forth between here and China since the 1850s, 1860s. We had an ancestor who was part of the railroad Chinese, and after finishing the railroad, he took it across the country to New York and lived in the Five Points. VIVIAN: I was born in northern China and came here in 1982. I worked at a factory at the beginning and studied English at night and on weekends. MEGAN: My mom lived in Flatbush when she first arrived…

ONE DAY IN FEBRUARY, Christian Walker, a junior at UCLA and the son of Hall of Fame football player Herschel Walker, opened TikTok to find that his account with more than 400,000 followers had been suspended. For the past eight months, he had been recording sassy, highly stylized screeds on familiar right-wing talking points, from immigration and election fraud to cancel culture and bathroom bills, which would then ricochet across the internet in the form of righteous backlash, supportive shares, and one angry dunk from Kathy Griffin. When his TikTok got reactivated a few days later, Walker uploaded a video of himself pulling into his driveway in a Mercedes G-Wagon, scored by Doja Cat. Caption: “GUESS WHO’S BACK #american #conservative.” “Because I’m right about my political commentary, leftists, who are…

AT THE END OF HIS SHIFT on March 12, 2020, Raúl Hernández, a sous-chef at Balthazar, decided to bring his lucky white coat—the one he was wearing the time he cooked for Leonardo DiCaprio—home, rather than leave it in his locker. The staff had just learned the restaurant would be closing, and Hernández, who had helped open Balthazar in 1997, didn’t know when he’d be back. In its 23 years, Keith McNally’s brasserie brought power-breakfasting to Soho, played host to movie premieres and Fashion Week launches, and witnessed the transformation of the neighborhood into a capital for the finance, fashion, and digital elite. Thirteen of Balthazar’s 119 employees have worked there since the day it opened; last year, most found themselves unemployed, some for the first time in their lives.…

WHEN ANDREW YANG dropped off his petition signatures at the city’s Board of Elections—something all candidates must do to appear on the ballot—he ran through a gauntlet of supporters, slapping elbows all the way. He announced to the crowd how many he had gathered (more than 9,400) by singing to the tune of “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent: “How many signatures could you get in a year?” He dared anyone there to guess exactly how much all those petitions weighed, as cameras clicked and reporters live-tweeted the spectacle. Yang wasn’t the only candidate to invite the press to watch a drop-off of signatures, and the total number he gathered was smaller than that of many others in the field, a few of whom submitted over 20,000. But he…