Monday
With a capitalist zeal I admire, New York is bribing young kids to get vaccinated, as it bribed their older siblings and parents before them. Not for these under-12s the lame promise of protecting grandma at Thanksgiving next week. Instead, a more reliable incentive: cold, hard cash. For every child who gets a Covid shot at a state school or city-run site, a guaranteed $100 payment. If you catch Covid and wind up on a ventilator, the American healthcare system will come for your house. But at prevention stage it’s all high-fives and free money. By American standards it’s thrilling.
Two weeks after my six-year-olds receive their first vaccine, we head to Times Square to collect our bribe. The city is up to something with its choice of venues. There are 3 million under-18s eligible for the vaccine in New York, and if every one of them claims the cash it will murder the city’s finances. So it is that in each of the five boroughs there is a single, discouraging location from which to collect the pre-loaded debit cards. In Brooklyn it’s an obscure YMCA halfway to Coney Island. In Queens – a huge borough – it’s a single vaccination site in East Flushing. The Manhattan pickup site occupies the most revolting corner of revolting Times Square, a hard-to-spot building where the foot traffic outside looks like a Covid party.
We will not be deterred. We take the bus to 57th street and walk 10 blocks, past the Platinum Dolls pole-dancing club, past the huge advertising hoarding decrying antisemitism, past the baffling line of people waiting to gain entrance to the M&M store. Inside the test site we present ourselves to the vaccine incentive pickup table, show our vaccine cards and collect our winnings.
One hundred dollars is a lot of money for a six-year-old, and in the run-up to collection I have been torn between using it to teach my kids financial literacy and downplaying it to preserve their innocence. As it turns out, I needn’t have fretted. Ten minutes after pickup they’ve both forgotten the whole thing, the excitement having apparently been entirely found in the journey. I activate the cards and start spending the money.
Tuesday
For the last 18 months, Ghislaine Maxwell has been a guest of the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, a facility, her lawyer Bobbi C Sternheim complained, that is “permeated with mould and vermin”, resulting in her client “sustaining hair loss” and other physical impairments. On Tuesday Maxwell appeared in a court in lower Manhattan while prospective jurors were selected for her sex trafficking trial. She had travelled in from Brooklyn in shackles, but appeared before the court unencumbered and in civilian clothing. According to the report in the Guardian, she was “relaxed” and “laughing” with her attorneys. No photos were permitted, but in a drawing by the court artist Maxwell looked like the heroine of a pulp fiction novel, peering slyly over the top of her mask. Her hair looked fulsome.
It was a far cry from the parties of the early 2000s, or those months in 2019 between Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest and her own, which – after a ruling from the judge – the prosecution won’t be permitted to characterise as Maxwell being on the lam. (She wasn’t hiding, her lawyers insist; she was unaware she was being looked for, and it was mere coincidence that during that time she changed phones, email addresses, and ordered packages for delivery using a different person’s name.)
Maxwell’s lawyers also asked the judge to prevent the prosecution from referring to her accusers as “victims”, a request he denied. Since Maxwell is, it’s assumed, intending to fight her case partly on the basis that she herself was exploited by Epstein – “like many people who achieve great power and wealth, Jeffrey Epstein exploited the ‘halo effect’ to surround himself with people who would serve his needs”, her lawyers said in an earlier court filing – Maxwell’s victimisation is surely dependent for its credibility on the wider victimhood of others. Her point, I suppose, is that she wasn’t the one doing the victimising. Like her erstwhile pal Prince Andrew, she may choose to use the defence that when it came to abandoning her friend the financier and sex offender, she was simply too honourable to walk away.
Wednesday
Ripple effects were felt midweek from the latest addition to a small but enjoyable sub-genre of New York stories, the blockbuster divorce. At Sotheby’s an auction triggered by the dissolution of Harry and Linda Macklowe’s marriage resulted in $650m worth of art sales, driven by works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. The pair separated in 2018, whereupon a judge ordered their $2bn fortune be divided and the famous Macklowe collection sold off.
One piece of pop art missing from the auction was the 42ft billboard that Harry Macklowe, who made his fortune in real estate, affixed to the side of a building he owned at 432 Park Avenue a year after his divorce. It featured a photo of him and one of Patricia Landeau, the woman he married in 2019. The purpose of the billboard, he said, was to celebrate his new bride, although it wasn’t lost on observers that his ex-wife had been going to move into 432 Park. Who knows what revenge art this spectacular might have fetched.
Thursday
Most British confectionary imported to the US ends up in the niche British section of the supermarket, but I have high hopes that with Mr Kipling we may finally break through. The manufacturer, Premier Foods, which owns Bisto and Angel Delight, is pushing expansion into the US market after the success of its cake slice rollout in Canada. Unlike Colonel Sanders or Ronald McDonald, Mr Kipling doesn’t even have an avatar, and yet the company’s 80s marketing campaigns must have been very shrewd. Mere mention of the brand and, along with the indelible image of the battenberg squares, the phrase “exceedingly good cakes” wafts up from the past, accompanied by the vague smell of almonds.
Friday
My children have grabbed hold of the term “party bus” and every bus, coach and minivan we pass triggers the question: “Is that a party bus?” Times Square was very busy for this line of inquiry, but it doesn’t let up all week, culminating in the spotting of several party buses at 8am on the school run.
“What do you think is inside a party bus?” I ask, finally. A child considers this carefully. “Wine,” she says. “And chairs.”
