New York Magazine July 4-17, 2022

For new york’s latest cover story, Elizabeth Weil investigated how one 17-year-old showing a nude photograph of his girlfriend at a party led to his social ostracism and a school in turmoil (“Teenage Justice,” June 20–July 3). “The internet immediately lit up,” Shannon Palus wrote for Slate, describing the response from readers. Many took issue with the magazine’s use of the word canceled, the term the subjects themselves used but that, to some readers, added an unnecessary political valence. In The New Statesman, Sophie McBain wrote, “The funny thing about cancel culture is that people either see it everywhere or believe it doesn’t exist at all, which means now New York Magazine readers are debating whether Diego was ‘cancelled’ or simply ‘facing the consequences’ when really they should be talking…

IN 2004, I COVERED a pro-choice gathering of over a million people in Washington, D.C., called the March for Women’s Lives. I was 28, and most of the speakers and celebrities onstage were much older, many of them veterans of the second-wave feminist movement. I watched with dismay as Whoopi Goldberg waved a coat hanger at the crowd and chided its younger members: “You understand me, young women under 30? This is what we used!” At the time, I wrote that Goldberg “was scolding a generation for its privilege” and thereby committing movement malpractice by alienating young people, blaming them for not knowing about a world into which they were not born. I still think it was bad form; after all, if people in the crowd didn’t know about pre-Roe…

AMID A TERRIBLE WEEK for reproductive rights, there was a small reprieve: On June 27, days after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a Louisiana judge blocked a spate of so-called trigger laws designed to outlaw abortion in the state as soon as Roe fell. Similar injunctions followed in Utah, Kentucky, and Florida, while in Texas a judge blocked a ban that had been on the books before Roe. Together, these rulings are temporarily keeping abortion legal in those states and signaling that there may be a way to jam up the new anti-abortion regime. The injunction in Louisiana took many in the media by surprise, but it’s the product of years of spadework by the Center for Reproductive Rights, whose lawyers co-authored the suit challenging the trigger…

SHORTLY AFTER 11 P.M., Mark Hunter greets me the way that I expect he greets most people on the dance floor: by throwing his camera in my face and taking a blinding flash photo that I’m sure is not going to be very flattering. He credits this technique—“Basically just be the paparazzi’’—for his career: “My style is never to ask for consent before I take a photo. It’s a bit abrasive. But that’s how I get the real photo.” Back in the early aughts, this is what made Hunter, known mostly by his nom de caméra, the Cobrasnake, a niche-famous photographer, a kind of hipster-dork Weegee who zipped between New York and Los Angeles on $99 JetBlue flights, snapping quick-strike photos of famous and almost-famous culture heroes at play and…

BEFORE TRISH ARCARO, a Maine-based real-estate agent, begins a new workweek, she pulls cards from her tarot deck, lights a candle, recites a series of affirmations, and holds her sunstone crystal, which helps to foster abundance and joy. She will occasionally burn palo santo around a new home for a client in order to clear the space of bad energy before the move-in. And when she announces a successful deal on Instagram, she doesn’t put SOLD or PURCHASED on the listing—she puts MANIFESTED! In Minnesota, an agent and coach called the Commission Queen sells a mug that reads WAKE UP. MANIFEST. SELL REAL ESTATE. REPEAT. The Intuitive Realtor-Healer, an agent in Wisconsin, offers to unblock your chakras and create in-home altars for manifesting in addition to a 40-acre piece of…

ACCORDING TO THE AUTHORITIES, as a northbound Q train climbed the Manhattan Bridge one Sunday morning this spring, a 25-year-old passenger named Andrew Abdullah began to pace and mutter. He paused in front of Daniel Enriquez, a Goldman Sachs employee who was on his way to meet his brother for brunch. Abdullah, who had served four months in prison for attempted murder, pulled a 9-mm. pistol from his pocket, pointed it at Enriquez’s chest, and fired. At the Canal Street station, as Enriquez was bleeding to death, Abdullah exited the train and slipped into the streets. In a season of unspeakable crimes, the unprovoked homicide was perhaps the worst. Police launched a citywide manhunt. The next day, May 23, Abdullah’s aunt called Bishop Lamor Miller-Whitehead, who runs the Leaders of…