New York Magazine August 2-15, 2021

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Allie Conti charted the difficulties of adopting a dog during the pandemic (“It’s a Dog’s Market,” July 19—August 1). Writer Lindsay Adler called the article “very wild and I can personally attest that everything about dog culture in New York is deeply psychotic.” Rolling Stone’s Amy X. Wang posted a picture of her pandemic adoptee with the cover, writing that the animal “got a crazy number of applications because 3-legged dogs are ‘coveted for virtue-signaling’ (?!!) in NYC.” Other readers criticized the piece for advancing “the lie that there aren’t enough adoptable dogs to go around,” as film critic Noah Git-tell put it, noting that Animal Care Centers of NYC euthanizes many dogs every year “ because no one wanted them.” On Twitter,…

JOE BIDEN WON by promising less. Vocal factions in the Democratic Party and beyond saw Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat as evidence that Americans were hungry for something bold and transformative from the left. But the former vice-president made a more modest bet in 2020: that people mostly wanted Donald Trump’s presidency to be over and a more competent response to the pandemic. It paid off. And to the surprise of many voters and activists who had lowered their expectations, the president has shown flashes of bold vision in office, signing a big stimulus package praised by Bernie Sanders himself as “the single most significant piece of legislation for working-class people that has been passed since the 1960s.” The decline in poverty rates that his American Rescue Plan has helped accelerate—across…

IT’S EASY TO convince yourself, after a year in virtual space, that most of the world’s knowledge is either online or can be acquired with a couple of Amazon clicks. Spend five minutes with Julie Golia—curator of history, social sciences, and government information at the New York Public Library—and you’ll realize how wildly wrong that is. “One thing that historians learned this year is that digitization can never replace the archives,” she says. A single collection (out of many at the NYPL) “will have tens of thousands of pieces of material.” Billions of pages are a long way from being scanned. But also, their physicality is information: what was filed next to what, who’s next to whom, which pages are most worn from handling. “That’s information that digitization wipes away.”…

BUT FOR 7,197 VOTES—less than one percentage point—Kathryn Garcia would be the next mayor of New York City. As it stood, Garcia had plenty of time to meet me for a morning coffee in Park Slope 12 days after she conceded to Eric Adams in the topsy-turvy Democratic primary. Adams had spent the intervening days going to the White House and considering his Gracie Mansion move-in. Garcia, meanwhile, had gotten her first post-pandemic manicure (a subtle buff pink), seen Springsteen on Broadway, spent some quality time with HGTV, made a triumphant return to the gym, and dealt with a “major plumbing issue.” Despite her recent life of leisure, she came to coffee dressed for work in a gnarled-tweed dress, wedges, and a red lip. A gold KATHRYN nameplate hung around…

WHEN I WAS A KID growing up in lower Manhattan, my father would always tell us, “The parking gods are on our side.” Circling the blocks around our apartment after running an errand, he never failed to find a spot—a skill he has passed down to me. A friend once described my ability to parallel park in New York City as “sexy,” and I agree: It is sexy, like being able to handle a power tool. Which is why, a few weeks ago, when I managed to fit my car into the smallest spot I had ever attempted, I felt a sense of pride. So I posted a photo of my parked car on Twitter, where I have 25,000-plus followers, with the obviously hyperbolic caption “not to brag but i…

I. THE NEXT LITERARY SUPERSTAR (YES, HE KNEW HE WAS THE SHIT) HERE’S SOMETHING everyone can agree on. For the occasion of his first book, Afterparties, Anthony Veasna So would have loved it all: the interviews, book tour, readings, attention, praise, pans, myth-making, the opportunity to opine on the treacly queer writers he hates (or at least shade them) and the insufficiency of Asian American identity. He might talk about how he identified as Cambodian American before Asian American and, for that matter, Californian before American, which would have been a way of making space for himself as well as others. Some writers might be tentative about the limelight, but not him. His parents survived the Khmer Rouge genocide, and he survived Stockton, California, so you can be damned sure…