From the current New York issue’s package on drill music comes this urgent, saddening profile of Jayquan McKenley, a sweethearted teenager and burgeoning artist whose murder sparked a new wave of handwringing around the rap subgenre. Even to drill’s defenders, it seemed clear that social media had sped up a cycle of retaliatory shootings; the Bronx’s […]
New York City
Posted inEditor's Pick
Extraordinary Circumstances
Kenneth Watkins’s son, Kenny, was 6 days old when he was taken away by ACS, New York City’s child-welfare agency. Kenny was then placed with an affluent foster family. To regain custody, Watkins had to prove that being poor didn’t make him a bad father. Despite Watkins’ constant efforts, it took years to get Kenny […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How the Taxi Workers Won
“Then, in 2011, Uber arrived in New York. Lyft followed in 2014. Tens of thousands of additional cars flooded the streets, and yellow cab ridership fell by half. In late 2014, the medallion bubble burst. By 2018, medallions were selling for as little as $160,000. Seeing an opportunity to make a profit, Marblegate Asset Management, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Marathon Men Who Can’t Go Home
“Each had come to America with the hope of making life-changing money that they could send back home to their families. What they found was an often desperate existence in their adopted homeland.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Living in New York’s Unloved Neighborhood
“But the neighborhood used to feel to me like a rough part of a softer place, and nowadays the roughness feels more general, and this makes it harder to cheer for a neighborhood that is so loud and dirty and uninterested in or unfit for human life.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Death and Life of the Greatest American City
“The city feels simultaneously attacked, abandoned, and bereft of competent leadership. It also feels very, very alive.” In an essay at GEN, Glynnis MacNicol explores New York City’s #NoFilter era.
Posted inArts & Culture, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
Life in the Chelsea Hotel During Pandemic
The remaining residents face isolation, and the challenges of preserving their history while enduring the present.
Posted inNonfiction
Lloyd’s Mattress
Scott Korb contemplates disgust — his own, yours — at the kind of magical thinking that promises (with fingers crossed) to protect us from all the causes of dying.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The New York You Once Knew Is Gone. The One You Loved Remains.
In this pandemic-inspired variation on the Goodbye to All That essay, Glynnis MacNicol writes about what it’s like to have stayed in the current ghost town version of New York City when so many other New Yorkers have departed for greener pastures, and considers the city’s, and city-dwellers’ history of resilience through hard times.
Posted inEditor's Pick
I’ve Fled New York with My Wife, Kids and Dog – Just as my Ancestors Fled the 1918 Pandemic
After covering the plights of refugees around the world as a journalist, Bryan Mealer finds himself a refugee, fleeing New York City for his childhood home of west Texas — where his great-grandmother and her oldest daughter died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.