The latest issue of The New Yorker features “April 15th, 2020,” a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York, which has become an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. In it, dozens of the magazine’s writers and contributors capture snapshots of life—on the streets, on fire escapes and tugboats, and in hospitals, apartments, attics, and subways. The result is a fractal portrait of the city, and Chris Ware’s cover is a fitting complement. Ware recently wrote to us about his relationship to New York:

“Having lived in Chicago for thirty years, I’ve only ever been a visitor to New York, but I love it like no other city. Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense—or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense. We’re at low tide, but, as my wife, a biology teacher, said to me this morning, ‘For a while, we get to just step back and look.’ And really, when you do, it is pretty marvellous.”

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