New York Magazine June 7-20, 2021

1 New York’s latest issue attempted to make sense of what has happened in the year since George Floyd was murdered (“Reckoning With a Reckoning,” May 24–June 6). In the Times, Ben Smith singled out the magazine for praise: “The challenge for editors and writers across media is how to make journalism inclusive as well as riveting and provocative, rather than just a corporate media exercise in box-checking … Complicated, surprising stories are often the best ones, as illustrated by the superb ‘Reckoning With a Reckoning’ issue.” Meredith O’Brien wrote, “I’ve been moved & outraged by each piece I read. Thank you for shining an unflinching light.” As part of this special issue, Imani Perry profiled Samaria Rice, whose 12-year-old son, Tamir, was killed by Cleveland police in 2014 (“Stop…

ON THE FIRST DAY of June, Peru formally updated its COVID- 19 death toll, nearly tripling a previous estimate and making the country not just the place in the world with the longest and strictest lockdown but also the one with the most lethal pandemic: 180,000 dead in a population of about 33 million. This is the equivalent of almost 2 million American deaths, and it has happened despite Peru’s closed borders, the shuttering of all nonessential businesses, and lockdowns enforced by the military in which citizens were allowed out of their homes only on alternating days of the week. Mask-wearing and driving without permission were policed, too. On Sundays last spring, no one was allowed out at all. A year later, the government abruptly added more than 100,000 names…

AFTER GRAND STREET SETTLEMENT, a community center on the Lower East Side, suspended its senior programs in March 2020, 74-year-old Kay Mantin missed the daily t’ai chi classes she had attended for the previous 11 years. “T’ai chi helps with memory,” Mantin says. “It’s important, at our age, to keep our minds alert.” A few months into lockdown, Mantin got a call from her friend and neighbor Alice Cheng, a volunteer instructor at Grand Street. Many of her students also lived in their apartment complex; why not organize a t’ai chi class outdoors? For the past 15 months, the class has gathered nearly every morning at eight (in the winter, they wore puffy jackets). On June 1, Mayor de Blasio announced that New York’s 249 senior centers could finally reopen…

THE GOP HOLDS EVERY statewide elective office in Texas, from railroad commissioner to comptroller to governor. The party has controlled the state senate for a quarter-century and its house for 19 years. In November, its voters backed Donald Trump over Joe Biden by nearly six percentage points while sending an overwhelmingly Republican delegation to Congress. And yet the Texas GOP is waging war on the democracy it dominates. Republicans have pushed anti-democratic election “reforms” in states across the country, but Senate Bill 7 lends credence to the claim that everything is bigger in Texas—even partisan attacks on free elections. The bill (which Democrats have stalled for now) doesn’t just feature all of the GOP’s latest innovations in voter suppression (like restrictions on early, absentee, and drive-through voting). It also contains…

I’M ON A TENNIS COURT in Brooklyn on a Tuesday afternoon. My friend Hunter is 78 feet away. They toss the ball in the air, readying their serve. The ball flies toward me; I see it, I hit it, it zooms into the net. (It’s okay, I’ll get better.) I feel my feet in my Adidas, my face grows flushed, my legs begin to throb. Yoga is meditative, CrossFit is all body, but tennis is both soma and psyche, the perfect balance of muscle memory and mental agility. When those two things combine, it feels like sex but better. Here is the place where I feel most like myself, as in fully embodied, present, automatic. And here is the place where I most feel myself, as in the Nicki Minaj…

ZOLA MAYBE NOTICES HER BECAUSE of the neon-green rhinestoned leotard she’s wearing, or maybe it has something to do with the campy, USO-lite theme that permeates her stage persona, or it could be her beret, a quirky choice even here at the Clermont Lounge, where dollar-throwers come more for the kitsch than the sex appeal of the dancer. Or it’s possible that she’s adhering to that subclause of the laws of attraction, the one dictating that on any given night in any strip club in America, someone will fall a little bit in love. But tonight, at this dive bar–cum–strip club where Zola is sipping a gin-and-tonic, waiting for the room to fill and the energy to surge, she has just noticed a dancer, Amira, the woman who will temporarily…