New York Magazine June 21-July 4, 2021

1 New York’s latest cover marked the city’s reopening, and in an introductory essay, Matthew Schneier wrote about the attendant rise in FOMO (“The Return of Everything,” June 7–20). Writer Ilana Kaplan responded, “I literally thought Saturday that there should be an article about everyone getting FOMO again post-pandemic and well the universe delivered.” Reader Jill Gallagher tweeted, “Feeling this a lot. I want to be both invited everywhere and never leave my house.” And author Emily Gould tweeted, “i just gave myself a good chuckle imagining the parents-of-small-kids version of this FOMO article. i can only have 1 (one) night out w/ friends per week or else for the rest of the week I feel like I just completed a grueling tour of Europe with the Rolling Stones in…

AFTER LOSING TO the Democrats in 2020, Republicans are working feverishly to win their next battle. Their efforts include no revision of their platform or message. Instead, the plan consists of enacting new restrictions on voting (from limits on early voting to forbidding volunteers from giving water to people waiting in line) and consolidating partisan control over election results. In Georgia, the party has stripped the secretary of state’s office of jurisdiction over elections, and in Arizona, it is trying to shift election authority from the Democratic secretary of state to the Republican attorney general. Their goal is not to avoid a repeat of the sort of crisis Donald Trump initiated but to win the next one. The Democratic Party has made little use of the respite. Despite controlling Congress…

THIS PAST MAY, Oscar Nuñez (DJ Oscar Nñ) got ready to play his first live show after 15 months. “I placed all these expectations on myself,” he recalls. “Like, What am I going to wear? What’s the first song I’m going to play? It set me up for an anxiety attack.” When Nuñez got to the venue, he did breathing exercises to calm down. “As soon as I stepped into the decks, it was like I flipped a switch. Like, I’m fucking home.” The first track he played? Nicki Minaj’s “Itty Bitty Piggy.” Pre-pandemic, for a certain slice of Brooklyn—the mostly Black and brown creative types who congregate in Bed-Stuy, shop at Sincerely, Tommy, and get drinks with friends at Cafe Erzulie—there was a roster of clubs and parties where…

ANDREW GIULIANI was holding a silver spoon. He just was. There’s no getting around it. Sitting in a booth at Mansion Diner on 86th and York—about a thousand feet from both of the homes in which he was raised (his mother’s apartment and Gracie Mansion)—he poured a thimble-size packet of whole milk into his third cup of coffee and used the symbolically charged but otherwise ordinary instrument to stir. “New York means something to everybody,” he said. “It evokes a reaction.” Ten days earlier, the Son of Rudy had announced his campaign for governor on the grounds that New York needs a Giuliani restoration to recover from the other dynastic Andrew—and that he can achieve it by scaling his father’s blueprint for the city of the ’90s to address the…

AFTER GETTING MY FIRST vaccine in late April, I re-downloaded various dating apps on my phone to discover that everybody—at least straight males ages 27 to 36 in my three-mile Brooklyn radius—seemed ready to abolish capitalism. One night, while sitting on my couch swiping through Hinge, where users are asked to respond to cutesy prompts about their hobbies and interests, I found Enzo, a man with a mustache and a professional headshot who identified his “Love Language” as “the decommodification of food, housing, and healthcare.” Shortly after, I came across a guy named Jordan whose profile said, “Together, we could: Make art, dismantle the system, and eat grapes at the park.” He was followed by Carl, who, posing with a yellow Labrador retriever, said he wanted to “watch the collapse…

I KNEW MY RELATIONSHIP with The Bachelor was over in February 2021, when Chris Harrison, the host and face of the franchise, showed his true self on national television. I had been a full-time correspondent on Extra since the previous summer, regularly recapping The Bachelor as part of the job. So when there was a chance to speak to Chris about a recent controversy, it was obvious I’d be the one to do it. He patched in from his office, ever the host, sitting in one of his trademark casual suits in front of a mantel of Bachelor memorabilia, including a bobblehead of himself. “What are your thoughts about Rachael Kirkconnell and the allegations attached to her?” I asked. A simple question about a situation that was anything but. Weeks…