New York Magazine May 24-June 6, 2021

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Clare Malone spent time with the frontrunner in the mayoral race (“AndrewYang’s Insider Campaign,” May 10–23). The New York Times’ Nicholas Confessore zeroed in on “Yang as a quasi-Bloomberg restoration” and wrote, “In certain circles ‘Bloomberg restoration’ is an insult. But he did win three terms.” Ross Barkan, a former State Senate candidate who was quoted in the piece, tweeted, “This story is very good because it gets at the operator that Yang is, and also how deeply [the strategist Bradley] Tusk and co. have invested in his success and the possible access he’d grant in City Hall.” Jack Mirkinson added, “There are so many quotes like this from big-time Yang supporters—he’s a blank slate! i’m getting on the bandwagon because i’m sure…

JOE BIDEN WOULDN’T PUT IT THIS WAY, but for nearly four months he was lucky. Yes, he had to confront a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a crumbling democracy, a stalled economy, and a cascade of attendant crises. But he seemed to be handling the load in surprisingly deft fashion—which is what made the intrusion of the first foreign calamity of his administration especially jarring. The violence between Israel and Hamas that has left hundreds of people in Gaza and a dozen in Israel dead has tested Biden’s style of governance (deliberate, commit unswervingly to a plan, deliberate some more) in ways that the domestic horror show has not. The Biden administration’s first round of public responses to the conflict felt awkwardly out of sync. The president, whose perceptions of Israel were first…

THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC has been emerging from its pandemic shell in stages, with a mixture of caution and disbelief. Impromptu performances from the back of a pickup truck, a string ensemble in an empty church, the first appearance in front of a tiny audience spread through a huge space at the Shed—these bits of concert life have kept the players faintly tethered to their routines. Soon, 17 members of the orchestra will pop up among the sepulchres at Green-Wood Cemetery as part of the series “Death of Classical.” That might not seem like the obvious location to stage the revival of performance culture, but when Green-Wood opened in 1838, it was intended to be one of New York’s grandest, most verdant, and most romantic public parks. (Today, its permanent…

THE ACTRESS Aida Turturro studies me intently. We are looking at each other from our laptops—she in Connecticut filming a movie in which she plays a 1960s nun involved with a group that provides black-market abortions, me in my New York bedroom wearing one-half of an outfit. “You’re like a new-breed dog with very white teeth,” she declares with glee. “Look at you. I should have straightened my teeth, but I liked them. I was never a coffee drinker, but then I went to Italy and got addicted to the espresso, so I got a Nespresso machine and started making it at home. Now I whiten my teeth, but they’re still not white because the coffee, the coffee, the coffee!” She takes a breath, apologizes for her hair (“My hair…

WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK was filled with sunlight, circus performers, brass bands, and NYU graduates in purple robes and matching mortarboards. It was a Saturday in May, and New York City had burst back into life after a year of lockdowns. And there, sitting quietly on a bench in one corner of the park, wearing a gleaming green dress, a black cardigan, and a “Can you believe this is happening to me?” expression, was Kathryn Garcia. Next to her was Kim Hastreiter, the co-founder of Paper magazine and host of the meet and greet, and Julie Ragolia, a fashion stylist who recently received recognition for dressing LaKeith Stanfield for the Oscars; on the other side of the bench sat Garcia’s sister Molly McIver, who runs an event space in Bushwick, and…

“CHAOS ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE soon,” wrote Zak Cheney-Rice in these pages nearly a year ago, American cities still smoldering after George Floyd’s murder and the protests it inspired. For some, the sight of then–Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for a reported eight minutes and 46 seconds—after the recent, equally horrifying deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery—would spark a year of rageful dissent, 12 more months spent hoarsely demanding justice as the bodies continued to pile up. To others, it would be a year of awkward and painful self-reflection, of appraising all the entitlement that could no longer go unremarked. Others would react to these reactions with hostility and worse. ¶ Floyd’s death reshaped a pandemic and a presidential race and the fabric of American life.…