New York Magazine February 14-27, 2022

1 In a special issue marking the ten years since Trayvon Martin was killed, New York examined what has changed, what hasn’t, and whether Black lives are any safer a decade later (“After Trayvon,” January 31–February 13). Longreads praised how “a collection of outstanding contributors tell the story of BLM’s first 10 years … At various points, contributors branch off into essays, telling deeper stories about the controversies, symbols, and individual lives that have molded BLM’s legacy. This is an essential historical document and a creative triumph.” Journalist Kenya Evelyn said the issue was “a powerful yet sobering unpacking of where we are and what we have/haven’t learned in the decade since Trayvon Martin’s murder—esp how movements are co-opted by individuals and institutions more focused on the appearance of, than…

LATE LAST YEAR, once it was clear that Phil Murphy would win a squeaker of a campaign and be reelected as governor of New Jersey, he set out to learn why his race had been so unexpectedly close. Private focus groups revealed that it wasn’t just the Democratic Party’s dim reputation a year into the Joe Biden experience but that a far broader malaise afflicted his constituents. Even his supporters were exhausted by the pandemic and just wanted their lives to return to some version of normal. And that was before the Omicron variant ruined everyone’s holidays. Recently, Murphy joined a small group of governors at the White House to level with President Biden. COVID-19 is here to stay, they said. Can you help us plan for an endemic, not…

TO EARN A SPOT in the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, one needs to do more than demonstrate a willingness to charge into the icy waters of the Atlantic. Out of the dozens of swimmers who try to join every year, the club generally admits around five. Membership currently hovers around 170 people, in part for insurance reasons, and even those selected through an annual lottery must complete 12 swims and pass a vote of existing members. In the late 1980s, soon after he first joined the Polar Bears, Dennis Thomas would show up on Sunday afternoons in the winter to see only a handful of other swimmers, most of whom he thought of as “the old weird guys.” The club, founded in 1903 and the oldest winter bathing organization…

OKAY, SO HERE’S the thing,” Art Spiegelman says into the phone as he paces his cavernous Soho studio, humming with anxiety. “I don’t know what happened. I’m almost positive I took them with me. I put them into a sleeve so they wouldn’t crush in my pocket. I thought I did.” On the other end of the line is his wife and collaborator of more than four decades, New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly, who is trying to help him find his glasses. He mined his past for clues: Yes, we had dined for nearly an hour at his beloved Fanelli’s, a 175-year-old pub around the corner—but we had already looked there. Then he’d returned to the studio: Nothing there, either. Yes, he says, he checked his coat pockets already.…

ABOUT A YEAR AGO, my 8-year-old niece was giving me a tour of her at-home desk setup, where, among glitter pens and cookie-shaped erasers, I spotted a big red stress ball. “Is that mom’s?” I asked, recognizing it as the kind of thing usually found in adults’ offices. It turned out it belonged to her, and when I wondered what she needed it for, she explained, “I’m so stressed out right now.” I don’t have kids, but it wasn’t long before I noticed that the homes of people who did were full of things their children could squeeze, pull, punch, and poke, ostensibly to help them relieve stress. At a toddler’s house, I came across a ten-pack of Squish-mallows, squeezable stress balls disguised as animals. Back at my aunt’s, a…

EVEN HER HATERS call her a “generational talent,” a disparagement candy-wrapped as a compliment, the implication being that the astonishing rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was somehow encoded in her DNA. Frame a thing as expected and it can be discounted. But rewind five years and it becomes clear just how unprecedented her rise has been. “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” she said at the start of her journey to Washington. She was only stating facts. Months before AOC became the new face of the Democratic Party, she was working in a bar where she was expected to look “hot,” riding the 6 train, fretting about health insurance, and not really sure what she wanted to do with her life. Her victory on June 26, 2018, over…