New York Magazine January 31-February 13, 2022

1 In New York’s latest cover story, Lila Shapiro examined the career of Joss Whedon, the Hollywood force behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Avengers, whom collaborators have accused of misconduct and misogyny (“TheUndoing of Joss Whedon,” January 17–30). Television critic Emily St. James called the feature “a tremendous piece of cultural journalism that allows a man to damn himself” and praised its writing as “worth reading on a pure craft level.” Reader Mel Shamie said, “This is so, so well done: A clearly well-researched piece that paints Joss Whedon neither as superhero nor villain, just human.” The Guardian’s video-games editor, Keza MacDonald, wrote that the article was “morbidly fascinating—a portrait of a particular kind of manipulative male-feminist nerd known well to all women who have ever engaged with…

“OMICRON IS IN RETREAT,” declared the January 19 headline of the New York Times’ Morning Newsletter, by David Leonhardt, which reaches millions of inboxes each weekday. That same Wednesday, according to Our World in Data, 3,830 new deaths were reported in the country—not just the highest figure in the Omicron wave but, putting aside a one-day post-Thanksgiving reporting anomaly, the highest since January 2021. In the week that followed, the deaths continued: A few days later, according to the Times, the figure was 3,866. A few days after that, 3,895. These are higher figures than were ever recorded during the Delta surge, which killed more than 200,000 Americans July through December, and they rank among the ten deadliest days of the entire pandemic. The thing is Leonhardt wasn’t wrong. The…

JESSICA DUNN ROVINELLI found it on Craigslist: a four-unit building in East Williamsburg with a perpetually broken front door. Over the next decade, as the other tenants cycled in and out, Rovinelli, a filmmaker and film editor, stayed put; the building became a home base as she established her career and underwent gender transition. When the pandemic hit, everyone but her moved out, leaving three empty units with deflated rents. Rovinelli, whom I met on a dating app years ago, told me about the building, and in early 2021, I moved into the second floor along with two other trans people looking for housing: April Clark, a comedian, and Charlie Markbreiter, an editor and writer. A few months later, I went on a date with Natalie Hiehle, a trans girl…

THE ARTIST Wendy MacNaughton handed me a pencil and a sheet of white paper and gave me simple instructions: Keep my pencil on the paper and my eyes on her face. Don’t glance down, don’t lift the pencil. Just look—really look—for 60 seconds and draw her portrait in one continuous line. “It’s going to be terrible—I promise!” she said. “Don’t worry!” MacNaughton and I were sitting in her studio at the Marsh, a community performance space on Valencia Street in San Francisco. The set, outfitted with a seven-foot-tall papier-mâché paintbrush and eight-foot-long cardboard scissors, was all oversize and handmade. This was where MacNaughton filmed the past 12 episodes of DrawTogether, her streaming art show for kids that feels like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, if Fred Rogers drank six cups of coffee,…

TOWARD THE END, you could hear it in Stephen Breyer’s voice. His meandering questions in oral argument often telegraphed exasperation, the sort you get from a man convinced of the loftiness of his own intelligence, but lately that had given way to incredulity. Listening to conservative arguments that once would have been deemed beyond the pale of the Supreme Court, Breyer “on occasion just holds his head,” reported NPR’s Nina Totenberg. He retired because he knew the clock was ticking on Democratic prospects of filling his seat with a liberal; he retired because he is 83 years old. But Breyer also may well have retired because the self-styled consensus builder found himself on a Court with few takers. The man who declared in 2020 that “a dissent is a failure”…

ON FEBRUARY 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, because as a Black boy walking in a gated community, he was deemed “suspicious.” Zimmerman’s acquittal appalled a nation often willfully blind to the vulnerability of living while Black. Ten years later, “BLACK LIVES MATTER” has grown from a hashtag to a protester’s cry to a cultural force that has reshaped American politics, society, and daily life. It is, at the same time, a specific collection of organizations and people whose decisions have attracted both applause and criticism; whose actions have been a source of intrigue; whose personal relationships have both strengthened and splintered under the stress and exposure. This special issue attempts to tell the story of the first decade of Black…