New York Magazine May 10-23, 2021

1 New York’s “Yesteryear” issue revived an annual tradition of marking the magazine’s birthday by celebrating and reconsidering a facet of New York City history (“What Was the Office?” April 26–May 9). State Senator Alessandra Biaggi tweeted, “This is one of the *coolest* issues I’ve ever sifted through.” The New Yorker’s Rachel Syme commented, “I absolutely love a special issue, and this one on the history and fate of the office is no exception.” Martin Lieberman tweeted, “If you didn’t already miss working in an office, this amazing collection of articles in the new issue of @NYMag will surely change that … As Jack Shephard so famously said … We have to go back.” Other readers were less sentimental. Jeff Jarvis tweeted, “I try to forget.” Reader Jane Cutler Yepez…

AT WILMINGTON COUNTRY CLUB recently, after playing his first round of golf as president, Joe Biden engaged in another cherished pastime: He made a gaffe. Speaking to reporters, Biden used the term crisis to refer to the state of the U.S.-Mexico border, where historic numbers of desperate migrants have arrived—urged, in some cases, by smugglers who promise that the new president is unlike the old one, that this one will let them in. “We’re gonna increase the numbers,” Biden said. “The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people, and we couldn’t do two things at once.” This was a casual (and not entirely articulate) break with months of linguistic contortions from his administration, whose officials have insisted…

IN 2016, Nancy Seid, the longtime proprietor of Wing On Wo & Co., a porcelain shop in Chinatown, decided to sell the family business. She had inherited it from her father in 1964 and managed it while working full time at the Department of Health; now, the shop was becoming a burden, and she and her husband were ready to retire. Wing On Wo’s century-long run would have come to an end had it not been for Seid’s grandchild Mei Lum. “Letting go of the space could shift what our block looked like. A luxury tower could go up; a white-box gallery could open,” says Lum, who now runs the store. “That’s what compelled me to take this on with family.” Wing On Wo, the oldest continually operating shop in…

ON NOVEMBER 9, the day that Pfizer announced its coronavirus vaccine was more than 90 percent effective, a video appeared on the Instagram and Twitter feeds of the Wall Street memelord known as Litquidity Capital. It was a fast-tempo mash-up of familiar GIFs from around the web, recaptioned to represent various forces in the markets. In the clip, ecstatic megachurch parishioners are labeled “MFs w/ hella calls”; an NFL player tagged as “the market” somersaults over a defender labeled “Fauci” into an end zone emblazoned ALL TIME HIGHS; a beat-up station wagon representing BEAR CUCKS goes over a cliff. This was market analysis as informative as anything you’d have seen on CNBC that day. The S&P 500 was rocketing to a record high, mom-and-pop traders were buying options with borrowed…

MY QUITTING FANTASIES became most vivid in December. It was the stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a time when, historically, little work gets accomplished anyway. Here’s how I imagined my resignation: I would wait for that familiar feeling to set in, the one in which I’d sooner be swallowed into the Earth’s core than complete one more routine work task. Then, instead of doing it, I’d simply … not. I would not answer the email. Not send my ideas for the pitch meeting. I’d tell my editor, “You know what, actually? Today’s my last day.” Then I’d sign out of Slack, forever. But, of course, I never did. The next day would be better, I told myself, and even if it wasn’t, reality proved unignorable: My wife, like millions of…

FROM THE MOMENT ANDREW YANG SAT down in the back corner of a dark restaurant in the Bronx—brow knitted, wearing an overcoat and scarf that would stay on for the whole lunch—he was not the same cheerful New York City mayoral candidate of our popular conception, the one who cheeses for photos and tweets things like “It’s Friday!” when it’s Friday or shouts “Yankee Stadium!” while standing in front of Yankee Stadium. Politicians are always a little different behind the scenes, their ambition harder to conceal in close quarters, but the man sitting across from me was particularly unfamiliar. Since entering the race in January, Yang has pitched himself as the happy warrior for the Everyman, an energetic presence promising to lead New York out of its grim recent past.…