The New York Times Magazine

“History’s first draft is almost always wrong — but we still have to try and write it.”

“For the Zulu Club, a black social organization in New Orleans, Mardi Gras was a joy. The coronavirus made it a tragedy.”

Forced to shutter Prune, I’ve been revisiting my original dreams for it — and wondering if there will still be a place for it in the New York of the future.

As Coronavirus leads to a rise in racism, Cathy Park Hong, author of the essay collection, “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” reviews the history of slurs and hate crimes against Asians in America, and catalogues the growing number of them here and around the world — including her own experience of being called a “Chinese bitch” by a Latino delivery man.

Dr. Helen Ouyang reports from front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. “It’s no longer getting through this day or this week; we are in the deep now, the interminable. For doctors to survive this pandemic, we have to feel each moment — even if it makes each moment more difficult to endure.”

James Cai’s case was completely new to his doctors. When he grew severely ill, he tapped a network of Chinese and Chinese-American medical colleagues who helped save his life.

In their own words, workers across the country who have no choice but to confront the pandemic describe life in a changed world.

In this braided essay, Jazmine Hughes contemplates her resistance to both learning to swim and coming out, and the empowerment each experience offers her when she finally surrenders to them.

“You shouldn’t stay here,” he says, but he gets more frightened as night comes, dreading the long hours of fever and soaking sweats and shivering and terrible aches. “This thing grinds you like a mortar,” he says.

Surprise: women’s empowerment harnessed to American-style capitalism delivers more inequality, and an Instagram wall can’t fix it.