Welcome to New York

We were just entering the final stages of putting together our New York issue earlier this summer when news broke that Jordan Neely, a lifelong New Yorker known among friends for his effervescent Michael Jackson impersonations who lately had been struggling with the city's paired epidemics of homelessness and mental illness, was choked to death on an F train stopped at the Broadway-Lafayette station in Noho. The fact that other passengers ignored the incident, moved away, or even helped pin Neely's arms down as he fought for his life revived the age-old question of what we owe each other as inhabitants of one of the densest and most diverse cities in the world.

The killing of Jordan Neely is just the latest low point in New York's twisting and torturous recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and the attendant troubles of the last few years. Entire floors of office towers remain empty while housing costs have reached record highs. There are roughly one hundred thousand people residing in the shelter system, a staggering number that has been elevated by the thousands of migrants who have arrived over the last year. The protests for racial justice in 2020 were rebuffed a year later by the election of a mayor who, as a former captain with the NYPD, offers few solutions for the city besides miserable promises to increase funding for a systemically unjust law enforcement and carceral system.

When we began conceiving our New York issue last year, we wanted to celebrate a city that has offered us so much inspiration, education, and support. Our four cover subjects, the actors Hari Nef and Anthony Ramos, the designer Peter Do, and the theater producer Jordan Roth, reflect New York's vitality and spirit as a place that serves as a constant source of creativity, and the rest of the stories in this issue all touch on aspects of the urban experience, which can be so rewarding and frustrating at the same time. And as the four local activists we are featuring demonstrate, it is exactly because this city has given us so much that we must strive to give something back.

We have organized this issue into four chapters, reflecting four different spaces that bring together the city's invigorating blend of public and private lives. Whether we are At Home, On the Street, In the Studio, or On the Stage, our lives as New Yorkers are almost always in some way on display. In a place that is both so dense and so divided, New York's structural inequities should be difficult to ignore as we go about our daily lives and come into close contact with so many others unlike ourselves, all of us united by the city we call home. New York prides itself as a bastion of liberal ideals but the past few years have demonstrated how shallow our self-regard can be in many ways. Just as the pandemic magnified the disparities of income, education, opportunity, and resources that define and shape New York, the recent movements for social justice have helped bring necessary and difficult conversations to the fore. The city today, however, is sliding back too comfortably into its old ways, its populace fragmented and splintered by our self-absorption. As Neely's tragic fatal encounter on the subway reminded us, by living here we have an imperative to do better, to live better, to be better. It's what we owe ourselves, each other, and the city.

Read this story and many more in print by ordering our sixth issue here.

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