A running joke on social media among New Yorkers who stayed put for the pandemic roller coaster ride these last seven months is to match evidence of joyful city life that has exploded everywhere against proclamations of the city’s death. “New York Is Dead!” run the headlines next to photos of streets teeming with outdoor diners and shots of Central Park’s Great Lawn full of masked New Yorkers socially distanced in the late autumn sun. This outcry kicks into overdrive every time the president gets in on the doomsday action, as he did again during Thursday’s debate: “Take a look…

GEN asked two writers to explore what it means to stay in New York, and what it’s like to leave. Meghan Daum left New York to quarantine in Appalachia. Glynnis MacNicol stayed in the city:

New York City is not as deserted as the pictures will lead you to believe.

After recently undergoing two weeks of isolation for Covid-19-like symptoms, I emerged from my apartment expecting to find, like the man in the famous Twilight Zone episode who accidentally survives an atomic blast in the bank vault where he works, that New York had disappeared while I’d been waiting things…

A few months before my 42nd birthday, I was out to dinner with friends and found myself seated next to a well-known older male writer.

I happened to be in the final stages of finishing a proposal for a memoir about being a single woman over 40 without children and was inwardly marveling at the timing of our encounter. I was a fan of his. Perhaps he might offer some wisdom? Words of encouragement?

As drinks were delivered I sketched the outline of the story: No one had prepared me for how exhilarating life could be on my own. I…

For someone who has always been bad at math, I have a weird fixation on numbers.

Take my mother’s death. Officially my mother died on March 20. A Monday. This is the date on her death certificate and the date on her gravestone. This is also what the staff at the nursing home north of Toronto, where my mother had lived for the past 26 months, told my father when they called him at seven that morning. My mother, they said, had died overnight.

I wanted more details, though. “Overnight” felt too nebulous. When my sister, Alexis, and I arrived…

As the snow settles from the Blizzard of 2015, that wasn’t (at least in New York, New England is another story) it’s becoming clear that Monday night’s historic shutdown of the New York City Subway system had less to do with public safety than Governor Andrew Cuomo’s power-hungry ego.

There is some comfort in this revelation. New York has had its fair share of megalomaniac political leaders; they are a familiar beast to the citizens of Gotham. You may recall Giuliani announced he was divorcing his wife during a press conference, before bothering to announce it to her.

Of course…

When I was growing up my childhood devotion was split between two women: Princess Leia and Laura Ingalls.

At first glance these may seem like divergent idols: One a fictional, intergalactic princess, the other a real-life 19th century pioneer girl. But to my mind they were two sides of the same coin, sharing the most important qualities a woman could possess: fierce independence, a deep sense of adventure, and really fantastic hair.

That last bit is important, by the way. I was not a tomboy growing up. I was an energetic, active, often bossy, athletic girl who loved adventure and…

The other day I came across a 45-year-old issue of New York magazine. I quickly cracked it open and eagerly paged through expecting to find some journalistic gems. New York in 1969 was in the early golden days of its legendary Clay Felker era. Begun as an insert in the Sunday New York Herald Tribune, Felker and illustrator Milton Glaser had launched New York as a standalone magazine in 1968. Over the next decade Felker’s New York would redefine both the city to itself, magazine journalism in general, and launch the careers of the likes of Gloria Steinem, Tom Wolfe…

In the annals of strange summer jobs held by teenage girls my high school stint as a “hot walker” at the racetrack from age 16-19 must rank near the top. It’s not unusual for girls to go through horse-crazy phases. My particular version of it, however, was perhaps less horse than a little bit crazy.

When I was 16, through a specific sort of teenage perseverance (which mostly involved ignoring concerns about whether the backside of the racetrack was an appropriate place for a teenage girl to spend the summer) I landed a job “walking hots,” (translation: walking hot racehorses…