New York Magazine April 25 - May 22, 2022

1 For New York’s annual “Yesteryear” issue, the magazine revisited more than a century of life in Little Ukraine (“When Kyiv Arrived on 7th Street,” April 11–24). Eddy Portnoy called Christopher Bonanos’s history of the neighborhood a “fantastic and, really, long overdue article on Little Ukraine, one of NYC’s largely unknown ethnic neighborhoods.” @Matt-VTyler said, “Always love reading on how immigration patterns have impacted the neighborhoods/cultural fabric of American cities. This is good stuff.” David Swatling praised Jason Diamond’s recollection of eating his way through the neighborhood in his 20s (“A Journey Down the Borscht River”), saying, “My tastebuds are tingling with all the memories. The borscht I make today is a blending of all those delicious 2nd Avenue bowls.” @Tschades called it a “tender and charming memoir of Eastern…

IT’S BEEN seven or eight years since a wave of illiberal norms around the discussion of race and gender began to hit an expanding array of progressive institutions. The name for this phenomenon kept changing, from political correctness to call-out culture to cancel culture to wokeness, because every time a new label came along, Republicans would slap it on literally anything that wasn’t right wing. (Mitt Romney recently blamed President Biden’s economic policies on his “woke advisers.”) What remained of the liberal left would have to clarify that, no, what they were critiquing was stuff that was really far out there: impenetrable jargon, irrational mobs, struggle sessions, creepy forced apologies, absurd firings. In certain quarters, a deep fatalism set in about the survival of liberal values, articulated by critics including…

THE VALUE OF the windswept bus stop across the street from Amazon’s sprawling JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, and around the corner from its smaller LDJ5 sorting facility, is that it’s public property. Amazon does not control it, which means the organizers of Amazon Labor Union, fresh off their successful drive to unionize the 8,000 workers at JFK8, can use it as a hub to prepare for a union vote at LDJ5 that began April 25. The bus stop is festooned with flyers in four languages explaining the dues process to prospective members. It’s a statement that Amazon doesn’t control its workers, no matter how hard the retail giant may try. ALU’s president, Chris Smalls, knows how ruthless Amazon can be. Smeared as “not smart or articulate” by Amazon’s…

ON THE NIGHT before Easter, dressed in the closest approximation I could throw together of Gloria Steinem when she went undercover to write about being a Playboy Bunny in 1963, I showed up at NSFW (that would be the New Society for Wellness) sexquarters for an upscale holiday orgy, costumes encouraged. The invite had read, “Long before Easter became synonymous with the return of Christ, it was the festival of Eostre, a Germanic goddess of the dawn. A celebration for the return of the sun, the festival is noted for signs of birth. Bunnies, eggs, and chickies are a common sign of this equinox celebration”— in other words, a bunch of things I’d never really associated with the idea of a sex party, which for me calls to mind dank…

DICK HARPOOTLIAN SLIPPED out of the South Carolina General Assembly on April 20 to tell me why people on death row should be allowed to die by firing squad. “My experience in this area probably exceeds most people’s,” he said, noting the death penalty cases he had handled during his time as a prosecutor, on and off, between 1975 and 1995. His most famous was that of Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, who had already been convicted of murdering nine people when Harpootlian charged him with a tenth murder in 1983. Gaskins got sent to the electric chair in 1991. Harpootlian chose not to watch him die—“There are plenty of prosecutors who relish the idea of executing somebody,” he told me. “I’m not one of them”—but the stories still haunt him.…

ON THE third Saturday night in April, four days after the first mass shooting on the New York City subway in nearly 40 years, the West 4th Street station felt mostly like it always has. Half a dozen NYU students walked in from Sixth Avenue carrying cans of Four Loko and blasting music from a speaker. A stocky bro punched a digital billboard that already had a spiderweb crack obscuring an MTA public-service announcement encouraging passengers to say something if they see something. Guitar Dennis, who busks there most weekend nights, riffed on “Another One Bites the Dust” but was drowned out by a trash train that barreled past, disappointing everyone who’d hoped it was their ride home. Elsewhere, a man who didn’t seem to have his wits about him…