Contributors
Shaun Pierson is a photographer based in New Haven, Conn. He is currently an M.F.A.
candidate at the Yale School of Art.Joshua Rashaad McFadden is a visual artist and photographer and an assistant
professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Their latest book, ‘‘Joshua Rashaad
McFadden: I Believe I’ll Run On,’’ chronicles the intimacies of Black life in America.Jaime Lowe is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of ‘‘Breathing Fire:
Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires.’’Lauren Hilgers is a writer based in New York. She is the author of ‘‘Patriot Number One:
A Chinese Rebel Comes to America.’’Julia Carmel is a native New Yorker who reports on nightlife, culture and queer
communities for The Times’s Metro desk.Alexander Samaha is an editorial assistant at the magazine. For this issue, he
crisscrossed all five boroughs of New York City by subway, commuter rail, bus and ferry.
‘‘The whole time I was writing these articles, I was also dealing with an active rat
infestation in front of my basement apartment. Every time I’d leave for a reporting trip,
I’d open my door to a rat. It felt as if New York was testing me and wasn’t even bothering
to be subtle about it. But talking to hundreds of New Yorkers affirmed my faith in the city.
The sheer diversity of human life here is both exciting and humbling. As long as I live in
this city, I will always have more to learn.’’‘‘Perfect Strangers,’’
Page 26‘‘Safe Harbor,’’
Page 46‘‘Visions of Cannabis,’’
Page 20‘‘Safe Harbor,’’
Page 46‘‘Perfect Strangers,’’
Page 26‘‘I Moved to New York
for... ’’ (throughout issue)
and ‘‘Perfect Strangers,’’
Page 26Shaun Pierson
Joshua Rashaad
McFadden
Jaime Lowe
Lauren Hilgers
Julia Carmel
Alexander Samaha
Behind the Scenes
Gail Bichler, creative director: ‘‘For the
cover of this New York Issue, we wanted to
convey the range of reasons people come
to the city. We decided to borrow the visual
language of moving boxes, and we actually
made 40 of these cardboard sheets with our
logo and cover design silk-screened onto them.
Megumi Emoto, the prop stylist, showed up
with a suitcase full of tools to distress the
cardboard, as well as tons of pens and diff erent
kinds of tape. A lot of what we do in shoots
like this is try to make things look eff ortlessly
real — and that takes a lot of eff ort.’’
6
Photograph by Victoria Escobar/The New York Times6.5.