In New York’s April 27 - May 10, 2020 issue, the magazine looks at how coronavirus has exacerbated existing inequalities, in the cover package “Are You Rich Enough to Survive This Pandemic?” Features include Zak Cheney-Rice on the vulnerable and the virus; Lisa Miller on quarantine resentment, and the summer houses that expose the lie; Anna Silman on what nannies see, how they’re treated, and what they actually need; Amy Larocca on the wellness epidemic in a pandemic; Eric Levitz on Steven Mnuchin, the poster boy profiteer of the last crisis, and the plutocrat architect of our response to this one; David Wallace-Wells in conversation with Thomas Piketty, the French economist who warned us this was coming; a survey of 1,423 New York Magazine readers on coronavirus, class, and money; and more.
Of this issue’s theme, editor-at-large Carl Swanson says, “As soon as the lockdown began–when our friends with country houses fled the city (in one notorious case, to a compound in Montauk, by chopper), while others we knew were suddenly realizing they were stuck for an indefinite period of time in a stuffy apartment with their kids or anxious roommates–it became clear that this pandemic would be experienced by different people, with different resources, differently. It soon became apparent that these differences weren’t just going to be measured in degrees of comfort, but life and death: the ‘comorbidities’ of this disease mapped racial divisions and socioeconomic status, as did the subway map, with poorer people, many with jobs now deemed ‘essential’, in the further-out-from-Manhattan neighborhoods of New York, disproportionately sicker. As the layoffs and the bailouts came, we looked back at the last financial crisis, which ended up just exaggerating inequality, and asked: will that happen again? So the issue became a tale of two coronas, and we set out to try to answer the question of ‘who lives and who dies and who thrives’ in a pandemic.”
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