May 17. Back to New York. The city seems decapitated to me. Hotels – all over the country – are as full as they were before the pandemic, but the subway in Manhattan has only forty percent ridership. The world of work – the privileged world of work – seems to have changed irrevocably. Midtown and the Financial District are empty shells. Millions of jobs, millions of livelihoods continue to function just as before: schools, hospitals, restaurants. But what happened in the office towers of Manhattan, in the skyline, is missing. What is to become of this city is as unclear as it was when Berlin was walled in.