New York Magazine May 9-22, 2022

1 After the first mass shooting on the New York City subway in nearly 40 years, Reeves Wiedeman went underground to capture the percolating fear (“The Subway Is Scary Again. To Some People. Sometimes.” April 25–May 8). Street Plans co-founder Mike Lydon responded, “This is a well written article, but ‘you’re far more likely to be hit by a car in New York City than pushed in front of a train.’Who’swritingthatstoryandputting it on the cover?” Commenter cags added, “I’m more afraid of getting creamed in one of the bicycle lanes by an electric bike.” Journalist Olivia Messer wrote, “I was always embarrassed by how much the subway scared me. I was groped on my way to work, caught in the crossfire of a physical fight that left me bruised, and…

about how to end pregnancies are going to require calculations they have rarely had to do before: about their own risks of criminal prosecution and about state-enforced systems that are there not to work on their behalf but to limit and punish their choices. And don’t be fooled: While scrutiny will be sharpest on poor and Black and brown people, women and people with uteruses of every race are going to be questioned not only about their unintended pregnancies but about the miscarriages of their wanted pregnancies. In states where post-Roe trigger bans begin at conception, various forms of birth control—including IUDs—could be considered abortifacients, and there will be strenuous attempts to make them inaccessible or illegal. For similar reasons, people undergoing IVF treatments may find that their embryos have…

AT 7:40 A.M. ON a Saturday morning earlier this year, Neesha Davé answered a knock at her door. A process server handed her a stack of papers. The documents called her “the leader of an organization that helps women in Texas abort their unborn children.” Davé is the deputy director of Lilith Fund, an abortion fund in Texas. It stood accused of having “knowingly and intentionally aided or abetted at least one post-heartbeat abortion in violation of the Texas Heartbeat Act,” or SB8, which allows anyone to sue anyone else who facilitates an abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy and which the Supreme Court allowed to go into effect last fall. A local woman named Sadie Weldon was demanding she sit for a deposition and provide the names of…

THREE DAYS AFTER the Supreme Court leak heard round the world, the crowd at Alison Leiby’s one-woman show about abortion was ready to laugh. “My mom told me to kill it tonight,” the 38-year-old comedian deadpanned as she took the stage at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village. “I already did.” The theater was packed, the buzzy crowd a near-even split of men and women, from college students to well-dressed senior citizens posing for photographs in the lobby. Out front, I spotted Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski as well as Midori Francis from The Sex Lives of College Girls. Nearby, three young women discussed egg freezing—“Are you gonna?” “Yassss!” “My friend did”—and everywhere I turned there were more spring dresses than visible dread. Jasmine Holloway, 31, manages a boutique…

FOR THE PAST COUPLE of years, the corporate members of the Partnership for New York City have been fond of paraphrasing Mark Twain in stating that reports of the metropolis’s demise, as measured by vacant storefronts and empty office buildings, are greatly exaggerated. Now, as masks in the city have largely come off indoors and out, the executives in the organization are trying to broadcast another message: It’s high time New Yorkers go back to work in person. Many of them have already issued a similar directive to their own employees, whether as an ultimatum or something softer. “We have a lot of type A people, and they figure out pretty quickly what it takes to get ahead here,” says Henry Kravis, executive co-chairman of KKR, the private-equity giant, who…

WHEN OLÚFEMI TÁÍWÒ was an undergraduate at Indiana University, he traveled with his parents to their homeland, Nigeria, for his grandfather’s funeral in the southwestern city of Abeokuta. To reach the family compound where they would be staying, the travelers chartered a convoy and an armed escort. “At that point, it was some of the most concentrated poverty I’d ever seen in my life,” Táíwò, who is 32, told me. He spent most of that night in a nauseated daze—malaria, he thinks—and was shocked to wake up in midair. Armed men were storming the compound, and Táíwò’s father had thrown him out of bed in a futile effort to escape. The family was held at gunpoint for hours while the burglars rummaged for goods and cash. Nobody was injured, but…