40 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
budgets. A few months earlier, to pro-
mote a track called “Suburban, Pt. 2,”
he had invited some friends to the BP
gas station across from the Kings
County Hospital Center. A few dozen
people showed up, dancing and mean-
mugging for the camera; the resulting
video accrued about ten million views
on YouTube.
For years, one of the harshest in-
sults in the hip-hop lexicon was “In-
ternet gangsta”—to describe someone
who acted tough online but was never
seen on the streets. Now most rappers
were staying inside, like everybody else.
22Gz recently had to return twenty
thousand dollars in deposits for can-
celled concerts.
The music for his new video came
from a track called “308,” which be-
gins in the first-person plural: “When
we spin through, it’s a D.O.A.” The
video, like many in this era, was first-
person singular. 22Gz, wearing a tur-
quoise “Paid in Full” sweatshirt, used
his iPhone to record himself, first do-
ing a little arm-waving dance in the
shower, then walking down the hall,
then pouring syrup on a Styrofoam
plate stacked with waffles. At one point,
he pointed a can of Lysol at the lens,
as if to dissolve viral membranes
through the phone. There is an art to
projecting this much hip-hop swag-
ger while stuck at home, he reflected:
“It’s kinda boring, but you’ve got to
vibe yourself up.”
J
ust before 2 p.m., a man in a BMW
pulled into an empty parking space
in front of Russ & Daughters, the ven-
erated smoked-fish purveyor on East
Houston Street. Josh Russ Tupper, the
fourth-generation co-owner of the
business, playing an ad-hoc bouncer,
unlocked the door and opened it. “Did
you call in an order?” he said. The man
hadn’t, and drove away. The store has
been around since 1914; in the past
three decades, it has not been closed
for more than a day or two. “During
Sandy, we were open—a friend of mine
brought a generator,” Tupper said from
his post at the glass-fronted door. “And
the blackout—we were open as well.”
In the days after September 11, 2001,
when downtown Manhattan was closed
to traffic, Tupper’s co-owner and cousin,
Niki Russ Federman, walked hand
trucks up to Fourteenth Street with
store staff to meet their delivery drivers,
keeping their counter open and stocked.
In March, the cousins began to
worry about how to adapt the cramped,
tenement-style store to the demands
of social distancing. On the thirtieth,
they decided to close, shifting orders
to their Brooklyn production facil-
ity. The shop was shuttered for two
weeks. It didn’t feel right. On Tuesday,
April 14th, the store reopened, though
no customers were allowed inside—
phone orders only. The next day, the
air was perfumed with a familiar
smell—smoky, briny, yeasty-sweet—
tinged with a jagged note of surface
cleaner. The wire baskets lining the
walls were bare; the bagels were in the
back, ready to be packed up for deliv-
eries. The usually bustling store felt
almost spacious: three employees
worked at set-apart stations, and a pri-
vate courier stood waiting to get an
order into a backpack.
A man in orange safety gloves ap-
peared at the door, pleading his case.
“It’s not a big order,” he said. Call-in
orders only, Tupper said. Next, a cou-
ple, masked, arms linked: no luck. An
older woman appeared, thin and gray-
haired, swaddled in a brown shearling
coat. “I’m picking up an order,” she
said. One of the employees put to-
gether her bag: a bit of smoked fish, a
bit of cream cheese, some babka, a
bagel or two. Tupper regarded the as-
semblage as it came together on the
counter. “This is a small little order,”he said. “But you know, right now, if
someone wants a quarter pound of
whitefish salad, we’re doing whatever
we can.”On the fifth floor of the American
Museum of Natural History, Cheryl
Hayashi unlocked her laboratory door.
In individual containers on a sunnywindowsill, a dozen large garden spi-
ders sat in their webs. Four Western
black widows hunched, nearby, in small
plastic boxes. Everyone but Hayashi
had abandoned the lab on March 13th,
when the museum shut down. Hayashi,
who studies the tensile properties of
spider silks, now leaves her apartment
only to feed her animals.
She carried one of the containers
to a lab table. The occupant, a Pacific
garden spider, a type of orb weaver
with spindly legs and a neon-yellow
back, didn’t move. Near at hand, scores
of tiny brown crickets were crawling
around inside a clear plastic box with
a slotted lid. Hayashi lifted the lid and
reached inside with long tweezers. She
plucked out a cricket, placed it in a lab
dish, and cut off its legs with a straight
razor. When she offered the cricket to
the spider, the spider crawled off, ig-
noring its food. Hayashi placed the
cricket at the center of its web and said,
“She’ll find it.”
Spiders are natural self-isolators, ex-
cept when they mate. In the wild, they
occupy separate bushes, separate trees.
Hayashi was about to prepare another
cricket when the yellow-backed spider
suddenly lunged for its lunch. “There
we go!” Hayashi said. Orb weavers are
the type of predator whose survival de-
pends on strategic patience: “They have
to remain motionless and just wait.”- Shortly after two o’clock, Germaine
Jackson, a group station manager for
the subway system, was wrangling sta-
tion cleaners. “Mr. Williams, are you
able to do four hours?” She was talking
on the phone, a company-issued beast
of a cell. “O.K., do Spring Street on
the Charlie, then Canal Street on the
C.” She wore a high-visibility vest,
and her eyes danced brightly above a
blue mask.
All subway passengers these days
are supposed to be essential workers,
as defined by the statewide stay-at-
home order. A sign you see on plat-
forms makes it simple. “ESSENTIAL
WORKER,” it says across the top, with
one arrow pointing left, to “YES,” and
then down, to “OKAY TO RIDE.” A
second arrow points right, to “NO,”
and then “WHY ARE YOU EVEN here
READING THIS?,” and then “GO