New York Magazine November 18-December 1, 2024

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Rachel Handler spoke to anxious New Yorkers about how they were coping with stress in the waning days of the presidential campaign (“Election Fright,” November 4–17). Commenter twizzlers22 said, “the vibes are fine, just another day in the post apocalyptic hell hole timeline.” Kevin Walsh, the webmaster of Forgotten New York, said, “whoever wins, wins,” while stephen.stirling wrote, “What on earth is the point of worrying about something you can’t control? That’s just fate, and is what it is. No wonder liberals win the ‘I am depressed and anxious’ sweepstakes!” Commenter aruffer wrote, “On Tuesday night? I’m taking several edibles, playing video games until my brain can’t process anymore, and passing out early to await our fate.” On Instagram, stacyparkerlemelle wrote, “More interested…

INSIDE: The city ablaze / A club for recreational dullness I WATCHED THE 2016 election returns at a friend’s co-op house in Brooklyn with dozens of millennial leftists. You can imagine the pitiful shape of the night: blasé confidence giving way to nervous titters to gallows humor to dread-filled silence. People cried. I got drunk and called my mom. The days that followed were filled with frenetic activity, urgency, and reevaluation. My girlfriend and I broke up; we were unhappy, and the rote hope that had sustained us seemed naïve, delusional in the face of history’s reproach. Things, we realized, did not simply get better. Meanwhile, my days filled up with meetings: tactical confabs–cum–therapy sessions where fellow activists, many of us newly minted, processed and prepared for what might be…

AROUND 6:40 P.M. on November 8, two acres of Prospect Park began to burn. The fire started in or near the Nethermead, at the center of the park, and about 100 of the FDNY’s people put it out by midnight; one firefighter was slightly injured. The next morning, cars parked in Prospect Heights were dusted with sooty ash. You could smell smoke all over Brooklyn and as far away as midtown Manhattan. Or was that Jersey we were picking up? Because a swath of the Palisades had burned that same day. The air was “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” a phrase just specific enough to reassure no one. A couple of days later, out west by Greenwood Lake, a village on the border with New Jersey, more than 2,000 acres were…

OVER THE SUMMER, EVERYONE I know went to Greece. From Greece, everyone I know posted one picture: octopus suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea. The picture was a picture of an octopus (suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea), but it was also a subtle message that the person behind the camera was (1) traveling, (2) traveling to Greece, the summer-vacation spot of 2024, and not Puglia, the summer-vacation spot of 2023, and (3) not taking a selfie, but (4) you know, not just taking a picture of the Aegean Sea, which would be basic, unlike this one, which (5) managed a sort of high-low effect, given the octopus was dead and clipped to a clothesline. It would have been the perfect picture of an…

KEY Dozens of neighborhoods across the five boroughs became more red in the 2024 election. The greater the shift, the larger the circle. THE MORE CAMOUFLAGE HARRIS-WALZ trucker hats I saw around Brooklyn, the greater my sense of foreboding. “Courting disaster,” I texted a colleague, half-joking, as I walked to my Fort Greene polling site on Election Day. Scanning as working class, the hats seemed to be worn exclusively by people who didn’t match that description. They reminded me of the Big Buck Hunter arcade game at a bar near the campus of my elite college, which lent wry “authenticity” to the setting and whose plastic rifles were the only kind most of us had any interest in handling. I wondered if some of the hat wearers were in on…

A LITTLE AFTER 3 A.M. on October 29, one week before the election, Steve Bannon walked out the gates of FCI Danbury, a low-security federal prison in Connecticut. He was wearing the only personal clothes he had: his workout outfit, a baggy gray sweat suit. He carried a few plastic bags jammed with papers and some commissary items he was keeping as reminders: a bowl, a spoon, a plastic coffee mug. For four eventful months, Bannon—a man of constant chaotic action—had been penned up as he served a sentence for contempt of Congress. Bannon’s daughter Maureen, who had run his multi-platform media company in his absence, had come to greet him. She threw her arms open wide outside the prison’s razor-wired fence. Later that morning, she would post a photo…