1 For its latest cover, New York commissioned a custom-made banner reading MISS U to fly over the city (October 12–25). The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted, “Kudos to @NYMag for chartering two airplanes to make their beautiful cover this week. I love big magazine thinking.” Podcaster Greg Young said it was “a reminder that old-fashioned magazine design can still be the most effective artwork on the planet.” For others, the cover was touching. Dyan Flores tweeted, “Sorry I was late for that meeting, I was busy crying at a New York magazine cover.” And Lia Miller wrote, “This is so perfect. Beautiful, heavy and light with a touch of surreal.” But writer Kaitlin Phillips bristled at the cover’s sentimentality: “The slogan ‘miss you’ means nothing to me … Is the implication that a lot of New York magazine readers are still getting takeout all day every day, stuck inside, doing lil puzzles?”
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2 Inside, the magazine marked the relaunch of Curbed as part of New York Magazine with a look at how the pandemic has transformed the city (“New York on the Brink … of Something …,” October 12–25). Andrew Rice examined what would happen to the city’s finances if office buildings stay empty (“The Panic Attack of the Power Brokers”). The Daily Beast’s Harry Siegel called the report “the best single thing I’ve read about what a deep hole New York City is in and how much is at stake in our 2021 June primary, when registered Democrats will very likely determine our path over the next decade.” Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall wrote, “As someone whose company is still being jacked for rent for office space we haven’t been able to use since March I really couldn’t be happier.” And reader Mike Flowers responded, “What do you think happens when you get panic attacks instead of leadership from the front and emergency management professionalism? The death count, overall misery levels and the looming economic disaster(s) are the metrics.” In “The Next Mayor’s Next City,” architecture critic Justin Davidson wrote about the pitfalls and possibilities New York’s incoming leaders will inherit. WNYC’s Kate Hinds called the story a “great and important read about how next year’s municipal elections offer a chance to chart a course for NYC’s moral future.” Ben Kabak, of the transit blog Second Ave. Sagas, cautioned, “Justin’s article makes me more optimistic about the on-the-ground ideas, but I’m still thinking about how industry leaders are kowtowing to the governor by talking up the LGA AirTrain as part of NYC’s ‘recovery’ rather than the variety of better ideas.”
3 Miriam Elder took readers inside a showdown on the Upper West Side, where local residents sought to kick homeless men out of a neighborhood hotel that had been sheltering them during the pandemic (“When NIMBY Met MAGA,” October 12–25). Alex Kliment called the report a “superb vignette of how being a ‘good liberal’ is often just a performance that falls apart the moment there’s something at stake.” Slate’s Jordan Weissmann said it was “one of those stories where every single person involved — except for the one homeless man interviewed — looks terrible.” Other readers pointed out that similar situations are playing out in other parts of the country: Mother Jones’s Nathalie Baptiste wrote, “It could be about any town or city with lots of wealthy white liberals who think they couldn’t possibly be racist because they vote for candidates with a D next to their names.” On October 19, a judge issued a temporary restraining order ruling that the city could not move the men from the Lucerne to the Financial District for the time being.
4 In “The Entire Presidency Is a Superspreading Event,” Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi reported on President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis and the surreal ten days that followed in the West Wing (October 12–25). On MSNBC, Yasmin Vossoughian responded, “As I was reading this, I thought to myself, Then what are you doing there? Why do you continue to work in this White House? How do you wake up every day?” On Twitter, journalist Elon James White joked, “You know how in the movies someone has a near death experience and it makes them reevaluate their life choices and really appreciate the time they have here. It makes them want to be a better person. Too bad this is real life.”
Corrections: “The Entire Presidency Is a Superspreading Event” (October 12–25) incorrectly stated that Donald Trump didn’t attend his brother Fred Jr.’s funeral. Rather, he didn’t visit him in the hospital when he was dying and instead went to the movies. Because of an editing error, “QAnon Goes to Washington” (September 28–October 11) incorrectly stated that of the 24 QAnon candidates on the federal ballot in November, two of them are Democrats. Those candidates are independents.
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