Pretend It’s a City

Scene report. One afternoon early in 2021, another day on Zoom, I stepped outside my apartment1 and saw a group of four women approaching on foot from the direction of Broome Street. I was struck less by their flouting of public-health guidelines — protocols had become muddled, but virtually everyone in New York still masked in transit; schools would remain closed for another nine months — than by how loudly they did it, cackling and traipsing down the sidewalk like punch-drunk teens. I recognized the tallest of the quartet, Kaitlin Phillips, a right-wing provocateur who’d drawn national press for staging well-publicized media parties during the city’s barely-enforced stay-at-home orders.