New York Magazine January 17-30, 20222

1 In New York’s latest cover story, Bliss Broyard and Lisa Riordan Seville memorialized the 15 Rikers detainees who died last year (“ ‘My Dad Wasn’t Just a Nobody,’ ” January 3–16). “I forced myself to read all of them ,” tweeted Genius Guild’s Stacey Ferguson. “Thank you for telling their stories.” Commenter crsulli called the tales “sickening. Being incarcerated at Rikers without ever having been convicted is on a par with a death sentence for these poor souls.” Commenter imspeaking4000+ wrote, “NYC saw almost 500 murders this year. I think analyzing and trying to correct the issues at Rikers is important, but this publication feels really biased in always thinking about people that commit crimes. You don’t just end up at Rikers. I’m feeling so much more compassion for…

“I’M GOING TO put in long hours—no one in this city is going to outwork me,” Eric Adams said on day one, and he went on to rack up at least 47 public appearances in his first ten days as mayor—traveling to work on a Citi Bike and the subway, shoveling snow off the steps of his Brooklyn brownstone, sliding down the pole at a firehouse, making guest appearances on national news programs, and solemnly attending a vigil in the Bronx following a horrific fire that claimed 17 lives. “It’s not about showmanship—it’s about showing up,” he said in his first address to the city. Like Mayor Ed Koch, who took the reins at City Hall four decades ago in the shadow of a fiscal crisis that required massive layoffs…

IN EARLY JANUARY, as New York’s Omicron cases were climbing, Leroy Church, who has acted in Disney’s The Lion King on and off since 2013, flew back to the city from the show’s tour to find that three men in the Broadway cast couldn’t perform that night. Church would have to fill in for the part of the Bird Man, which involves an elaborate costume and a solo dance. At the hour call before the show, the dance supervisor taught him the choreography. “I’m doing everything Ican to be the last one standing,” Church says. “I keep knocking on wood.” So far, he has tested negative. Church is what is known in theater parlance as a “swing”: an actor who fills in the gaps when other performers are absent. Unlike…

IN THE SUMMER of 2019, Connor Pardoe was trying to persuade Life Time, Inc., a health-club chain and the largest private operator of tennis courts in the U.S., to embrace a different game. Pardoe, then 26, was peddling pickleball: a racquet sport similar to tennis but played on a much smaller surface, over a slightly lower net, with a squarish paddle and a perforated plastic ball. The year before, Pardoe had left his family’s real-estate business to build the Professional Pickleball Association. As he hunted for tournament venues, he went straight for the flashiest sites in pro tennis. “We started big, reaching out to the Miami Open, the Lindner Family Tennis Center, where they play Western & Southern. A lot of those guys weren’t too interested,” he says. After all,…

OUR GOVERNMENT just dropped a hot new quarter featuring Maya Angelou with her arms dramatically aloft, posed before a bird’s giant wingspan. It’s the first of a series, each depicting women on the back. (George Washington is still on the front.) Arrival of the long-planned quarter was met with joy tempered with bafflement. Hey—aren’t we in a coin shortage? The answer is complicated. For some time now, the United States of America, among her other struggles, has indeed been in the silvery throes of a slow-moving crisis of coin. It became apparent in the spring of 2020, when our sudden lack of desire to get breathed on forced many of us to stop transacting money IRL. The Federal Reserve found that in April 2020, only a third of Americans had…

IN THE FALL OF 2002, 160 scholars convened at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. They were an eclectic group—theologians, philosophers, linguists, film professors—and they had descended on the medieval city for a conference dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cult television show about a teenage girl who fights monsters while attending high school in Southern California. It was not a typical academic gathering. There were life-size cutouts of the eponymous heroine as well as Buffy-themed chocolates, action figures, and, in the welcome bags, exfoliating moisturizers (“Buffy the Backside Slayer”). Professors stalked around in long black leather coats like the vampire Spike, Buffy’s enemy and, later, her lover. If the line between scholarship and fandom was vanishingly thin, so was the line between fandom and worship. On…