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1. New York’s latest issue featured our 12th annual “Reasons to Love New York” — 47 compelling reasons to love New York City, right now, more than ever — from the Knicks center who grew up playing pickup games at P.S. 149 in Queens to the high-school students leaving class to protest Trump. The first reason, “Because the City Is Still Ours” (even after Trump’s election), was an ode to the so-called bubble that is New York, by David Wallace-Wells (“Trump May Have America, But the City Is Still Ours,” December 12–25). Commenter moneyp highlighted the story of how the writer’s wife’s family landed in New York. “Thank you for the small reminders of how people came to America. I think a large portion of the population would like to think their forbears arrived on cruising yachts. They were mostly immigrants who fled hardship and sought a better life that America could give them, just like many Mexicans and Muslims today. Remember that.” Some readers felt the article excluded the 20 percent of New York voters who weren’t “with her.” “For the record, I did not vote for Donald Trump last month,” wrote jjnyc01. “But I am a conservative … and I am a New Yorker just like the author of this article. So what if this city voted 80 percent Democratic … It is not solely your city. The 20 percent of us who voted otherwise — perhaps for Trump, perhaps merely against Clinton — live here and share the city too. Two cars’ worth of passengers on every subway train didn’t vote for Hillary. Some 10,000 spectators at every well-attended Yankees game didn’t vote for her. Statistically, one out of five of your friends didn’t vote for her — though you may never know for sure; we tend to keep silent to maintain friendships around here.” Overall, though, readers felt that Wallace-Wells accurately captured the sentiment and strength of the city. “This,” tweeted ESPN’s Kavitha Davidson, “is one of the most beautiful essays I’ve ever read about NYC — born of such an ugly day.” One of the ugliest developments since then has been the documented rise in hate-related events around the United States, and in discussing the racist incidents in the city itself, Wallace-Wells recounted the story of a Baruch student in a hijab who said she was harassed on the 6 train. However, after the issue was published, police charged the woman with making a false report and now believe she made the story up.
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2. Reason No. 24 featured a photo portfolio of dozens of immigrant New Yorkers by Platon (“Because New York Would Never Dream of Building a Wall,” December 12–25). Readers were deeply moved by the stories shared, which were available in expanded form online. “This is beautiful,” tweeted @jmtorr. “Made me tear up.” “Proud to be part of this NYMag immigrant portfolio and so proud to be a New Yorker,” tweeted writer Porochista Khakpour, who was featured in the story. “Echo your sentiments about NYC,” responded the novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee. “Only people who are okay being squished with others (e.g., subway) can live here.” “I hope we can still feel this way in the future here,” wrote back Khakpour. The article moved one self-professed Trump supporter, AlmostThere, to respond, “I in no way agree with his immigration policies. I believe in a free country, which means anyone is free to come and go from America as they please.” Even Mayor de Blasio weighed in: “They’re part of our communities. We’re going to respect and protect them. #AlwaysNewYork.”
3. “The idea that fights over reproductive freedom, sexual assault and harassment, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, criminal-justice reform, and gender and racial bias can be somehow separated from larger progressive economic stances is a fiction,” Rebecca Traister wrote in her column (“The Economics of Identity Politics,” December 12–25). “The right is great at rebranding civil rights into what even some on the left are tricked into thinking are secondary matters,” responded commenter WillaM. “In [claiming] that people fighting for civil rights such as police accountability, voting rights, equal pay for equal work, etc. … are simply engaging in ‘Identity Politics,’ they have somehow managed to trivialize these issues as vanity projects rather than the actual matters of life or death or the constitutional violations that they are.” Other readers took issue with which Democratic contender for president had done a better job of unifying identity politics and progressive economics in the first place. “If only there was someone … who said these things … while running for president,” tweeted Vice’s Noah Kulwin. “What goes unsaid here,” wrote The Week’s Jeff Spross, “is that Clinton basically argued economics was a distraction from identity issues. I suppose retconning the Dem primary is a small price to pay to get libs onboard with bold lefty econ pushes. But I’m still a tad grumpy.”