Most people don’t DM celebrities expecting a reply. Even fewer slide in hoping to land a job. But in 2016 when Sage Adams sent Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter SZA a message on Instagram complimenting her outfit, the two hit it off, and Adams, a gender non-conforming artist and curator, wound up being the creative director on SZA’s 2017 album “Ctrl”—at just 19. “I did creative direction for her album and all her tours,” Adams told Brooklyn Magazine during a live interview at DUMBO House earlier this year. “How I got the job was being really good at collaborating.”

Adams, who still works with SZA (the two created a limited-edition sweatshirt and poster for American Express Members last month) has more recently appeared in a Nike advertising campaign called Women Coach LA. Adams is also a founder of Art Hoe Collective, a platform that promotes works by queer artists of color and other marginalized people through Instagram and gallery shows. Art Hoe Collective has adopted a grant model in which the group gives small grants to curated artists. Adams, who was featured in the 2016 coming-of-age documentary “All This Panic,” is an artist in their own right, dabbling in drawing, watercolor and hand-dyeing.

Designer Moshood Afariogun, an immigrant originally from Lagos, Nigeria, opened Moshood Creations in Fort Greene in 1994. In the intervening 27 years, the name “Moshood” has become synonymous with Brooklyn streetwear with his signature wrap skirts, dashikis and especially his tribal-print logo, which appears on t-shirts and hoodies. After nearly a quarter century in Fort Greene, though, Afariogun was forced out due to high rents, and subsequently re-opened in Bed-Stuy with a fashion show ribbon-cutting attended by hundreds in July 2019.

“A fixture from the neighborhood’s days as a mecca for young Black creatives, Moshood’s Afrocentric aesthetic has been embraced by the likes of Erykah Badu, who used to live in the apartment above the shop, and Stevie Wonder,” writes Black-Owned Brooklyn in their recent profile of the press-shy Afariogun. Chaka Khan has been known to rock Moshood, and so have Tyson Beckford and Maxi Priest. With a global clientele, some of Moshood’s local fans include New York Attorney General Letitia James, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, among others.

Covid-19 laid bare many inequities in American society, but perhaps none as starkly as those baked into the country’s health and social safety nets, particularly in urban areas. The idea that cities should be healthy places to live shouldn’t be revolutionary, but it can feel that way.

Fortunately (or, perhaps, unfortunately) the pandemic validated Cityblock’s core approach and philosophy: A Brooklyn-based startup working to improve community health, foster health justice and repair trust, the company is shifting the incentive structure for taking care of low-income patients with complex healthcare needs.

Toyin Ajayi and her partners started the company in low-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and have since expanded into Connecticut, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. A Stanford grad with an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a medical degree from King’s College London School of Medicine, Ajayi previously served as chief medical officer of Commonwealth Care Alliance, a health plan for individuals dually-eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. While there, she wanted paramedics to deliver certain services in-home, rather than in the hospital, but was told this just wasn’t how things were done. So she teamed up with her co-founder Iyah Romm to launch a pilot community paramedicine program run out of the department. Emboldened by its success, they went to Alphabet’s incubator Sidewalk Labs, where they met cofounder Bay Gross and started the company that would become Cityblock.

Founded in 2017, the company contracts with insurers to take care of some of their most costly patients, provide virtual care, in-home attention and social support. The model prioritizes spending more time with patients rather than having to rush through appointments in order to log more visits. Cityblock pairs community outreach, local clinics and virtual care with a software core that helps surface medical and social-care issues before they spiral out of control and drive up costs. Some 80 percent of the company’s 75,000 members have at least three chronic conditions. Two-thirds are people of color, a group hit particularly hard by Covid-19.

“Improving community health starts with addressing all of the factors that impact people’s health,” she told TEDMED in 2018. “So we built a tech-enabled, innovative care model that directly meets the whole-person needs of our members.”

The idea seems to resonating: In March, Cityblock announced it raised a $192 million Series C extension led by Tiger Global Management. That is on top of the $160 million it had already raised in December, which at that point had valued the company at over $1 billion.

Zakiyah Ansari is a parent organizer and advocacy director for the New York State Alliance for Quality Education, an organization focused on educational justice issues. She has spent two decades on the frontlines fighting against education inequity and the oppression of Black and brown people.

She is also a founding member of The Resistance Revival Chorus, a collective of more than 60 women and non-binary singers who sing songs of resistance and uplift, born in the fraught months following the 2016 election of Donald Trump. The group carries on the tradition of the civil rights protest song—at scale: Over the past four years, the RRC or its individual members have performed at Black Lives Matter demonstrations, women’s marches, LGBTQ+ rallies, on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “Saturday Night Live” and more.

“We quote Toi Derricotte, who says, ‘Joy is an act of resistance’,” Ansari tells Brooklyn Magazine. “We’ve sung through joy, through grief, through the pandemic, inside and outside.”

And now they’ve sung on wax, too. The RRC’s debut album, “This Joy,” a collection of historic traditional protest songs, covers and originals with a who’s who of guest artists, was released in October.

There is an old saying that goes, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s funny, but one of its assumptions is that “dancing about” architecture is an absurd idea. Yamilée Toussaint Beach would argue otherwise.

Beach uses dance to inspire and support young women of color from low-income backgrounds to develop the confidence, skills and awareness to obtain STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) degrees. Using seed funding won from Teach For America’s Social Innovation Award, she launched the non-profit STEM From Dance in 2012. Through the program’s school residencies and summer camps, girls choreograph routines that incorporate elements of technology into dance performances. Over the pandemic year alone, girls performed virtually in LED pants that they designed and coded, and they used code to animate names of victims of police brutality in a dance for Black Lives Matter.

Growing up on Long Island, Beach excelled in math and science in school, and after class also dedicated herself to jazz, ballet and modern dance. She would graduate from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering, one of two Black women in the department. She wanted to know why there weren’t more people who looked like her in Cambridge.

Beyond that, fewer than 4 percent of the STEM workforce today are Black or Latina women. This conundrum drove Beach to teach high school algebra in East New York, through Teach For America. It was there that she came face-to-face with the lack of access her students had—to opportunities, resources, encouragement—all adding up to immeasurable loss of potential.

She started STEM From Dance to bring the joy girls derived from dance into some STEM atmospheres that don’t always feel so joyful. In its 2020 annual report, the group announced it has served more than 600 girls to date, from more than 100 schools, 11 states and four countries.

Sometimes good things are born out of adversity. Sometimes they are the products of boredom. Good Co. was born out of a little of both: Early in the summer of 2020, when the coronavirus lockdown had already dragged on for a couple months with no end in sight, Andrew Bennett decided to go on a bike ride. He put out a call on social media asking anyone who was interested to meet him at the steps of the Brooklyn Museum. Seventeen people showed up and the Good Company Bike Club was born.

A social bike club comprising predominantly young professionals of color, Good Co. today averages three rides a week to sightsee, explore the city and patronize Black-owned businesses. They’ve gone up across the George Washington Bridge into the Palisades; they’ve traversed the borough to Shirley Chisholm State Park; they’ve agitated for better roads and access in lower income neighborhoods under the slogan “We bike too.” And now, as Good Co. Bike Club turned a year old this month, it’s a membership organization with 200 riders on a tiered plan. It’s an LLC; they sell merch.

“It’s taken off in a good way,” Bennett said in an episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” early this year. “It’s a true testament that when you do what you love, everything tends to fall into place.”

Justin Brannan is not your average New York City councilmember. For starters, he probably has more tattoos than all of them combined, ever.

Before entering politics, he was a founding member of two successful hardcore punk bands: Indecision and Most Precious Blood. Despite playing music that sounds like “a refrigerator falling down the stairs”—his words—both bands were known for their commitments to social issues. And vegetarianism. That socially conscious bent stemmed from Brannan’s own childhood and adolescence growing up in Bay Ridge, where he would stand out in the 1980s as the straight edge kid with activist proclivities.

Today Brannan reps the area where he grew up. The 43rd District includes Bay Ridge as well as Bath Beach, Dyker Heights and Portions of Bensonhurst. With the primaries behind him, he is now one of several council members eyeing the speaker’s chair.

“As a lot of people rightfully point out the pandemic has exposed and magnified inequity in our city and our state and our country that was always there,” he said on a recent episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “But now it would be malpractice for us to ignore it. In a sense it would be malpractice for us to put it back as broken as it was.”

Hardly a progressive monolith, the 43rd District is among the more politically diverse in New York City. Brannan’s constituents are cops and firemen, and they are also Black Lives Matter supporters and immigrants. And yet he’s earned himself a reputation as being extremely accessible and can be found frequently responding online, in Facebook groups and dropping dad jokes on Twitter. (When a local woman’s tortoise went missing earlier this year, he joined the search party.)

“It’s no secret that my district doesn’t always agree politically, and I think that’s fine … But you also had a lot of demagogues at work who want people at each others’ throats during what was already a highly combustible time,” he says. “Ultimately my job is to be a public servant.”

Odds are pretty good you’ve seen a piece of Mona Chalabi’s data journalism without realizing she was the one behind it (and odds are pretty good she could create a compelling infographic about the odds you’ve seen her work without realizing it).

If your eyes glaze over at the words “data journalism” maybe that’s because it’s been done one way for so long: with a stupefying array of numbers. As the data editor for the Guardian US, Chalabi de-stupifies numbers through charming hand-drawn charts and graphics about some of the day’s most vexing issues. And she does so in ways that are simple to understand—but not simplistic. She tackles Middle East conflict, Covid vaccination rates, police brutality, violence against women, income disparity and more, often with a progressive or activist bent. The results are easily digestible images that contextualize numbers (statistics, money spent, people killed) while humanizing abstract problems. They’ve been shared millions times on her personal Instagram account.

Her work “100 New Yorkers,” which was on display at The Westfield World Trade Center site late last year, distilled census data to visualize what the city’s population would look like if it were presented as 100 distinct individuals—and to show how the effects of the pandemic varied as a result of inequities baked into the city’s infrastructure (e.g., 19 of the 100 are impoverished; 17 live in overcrowded housing).

Chalabi, who is of Iraqi descent, was born in London and is also a writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine and more. She has also written for radio and TV, including Netflix (“The Fix”), BBC (“Is Britain Racist?” and Radio 4) and National Geographic (“StarTalk”).

One of the best—and oddly least obvious—Brooklyn novelists, Susan Choi has been on an epic two-decade run. Born in South Bend, Indiana, to a Korean father and Jewish mother, Choi’s first novel, “The Foreign Student,” based on her dad’s experiences in the Korean war, scooped up the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second, “American Woman,” short-listed for a 2004 Pulitzer, is set during the 1970s antiwar movement. “A Person of Interest,” her third, was inspired by Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. “My Eduction,” about an affair between a student and her professor’s wife, nabbed a 2014 Lambda Literary Award for best LGBTQ book. And most recently, “Trust Exercise,” her fifth novel,” won the National Book Award for fiction in 2019. 

Set in a performing arts high school in the 1980s, “Trust Exercise” throbs with themes of coercion and consent, with surprise twist after more-surprising twist: Choi takes the unreliable narrator trope and somehow makes it more even less reliable. Yet, more compelling. So much so that she is set to adapt the novel as a TV series, which should be interesting given that the novel is defined by rigorous experimentation and an amorphous cast of characters. Choi has said that the book largely took shape before the #MeToo movement took root, in spite of many female students’ relationships with the professor Mr. Kingsley (who conducts more than one type of “trust exercise”).

Choi’s first book for children, “Camp Tiger,” was also published in 2019. More recently, her short story “Flashlight” debuted in The New Yorker last August. It is another twisty narrative she has suggested she might not be finished with yet. The wife of New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, Choi also teaches fiction writing at Yale, her alma mater.

At the peak of early pandemic lockdown, Jeremy Cohen, a photographer and videographer who works frequently with brands, captured the attention of the homebound hoards scrolling through Instagram when he posted a series of photos of his neighbors out on their rooftops. Just like the rest of us, they were only trying to stay sane and safely escape the confines of their quarters. There they were, on scattered Brooklyn rooftops, exercising, reading, flying kites, making TikTok videos, and, you know, playing the double-bass cello. That last image landed on the cover of New York Magazine. But that was only the first act of Cohen’s pandemic-era story.

Another time when shooting rooftop Brooklynites, he noticed a nearby woman and was intrigued. He waved; she waved back. He taped a note with his phone number and “text me?” to a drone and flew it to her. She—Tori Cignarella—did indeed text back. He ended up making a video series out of their quarantine courtship, which went viral: The two went on a socially-distanced date, with him inside a giant inflatable beach ball, à la John Travolta as “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.” It was just the sort of adorkable antidote our darkest days required, and got both Cohen and Cignarella influencer gigs (with MeUndies and Snap).

The rooftop series was an offshoot of Cohen’s other passion project, “Today I Photographed,” in which he has taken a photo of a stranger every single day for two years. And he’s used his online fame to launch a podcast, “Ask (Not) Me Anything!,”where he (and his listeners) interview  interesting New Yorkers. He recently had Cignarella on as a guest and revealed their relationship status. (Spoiler: They gave it a shot but aren’t dating.)

Bene Coopersmith never really intended to open a record store, which is maybe why he never got around to giving it an actual name. It’s just called … Record Shop. Coopersmith, a carpenter by trade, opened the store in 2015 when he realized he risked getting crushed by his own personal vinyl stacks, hoarder-style. The Van Brunt Street shop in Red Hook is as charmingly oddball as he (and the surrounding enclave) is. It is also Red Hook’s only source for vinyl.

In warmer seasons, like now, you can usually find the beatific Coopersmith lounging unpretentiously on the sidewalk out front with friends, passersby, collectors and neighborhood weirdos. A DJ booth in the window provides the tunes. The record selection itself is eclectic and informed (don’t be surprised to find yourself rubbing elbows with hardcore diggers like Large Professor or Omar-S). But the prices are surprisingly reasonable for the occasionally grippy New York record store scene. Before the pandemic, the shop would host live music and serve as a practice space for local musicians.

What makes Coopersmith extra compelling is his acting side gig. This charismatically laid back dude with a wonky eye is sometimes a movie star. Well, “star” may be a stretch, but among his three film credits is a role in the 2017 film “Person to Person,” in which he plays an exaggerated version of himself alongside Michael Cera, Tavi Gevinson and Abbi Jacobson.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Amy Cunningham was a magazine journalist, writing for the likes of Glamour, Mademoiselle, McCall’s and Lear’s. She was inspired to change careers at the age of 54, though, after attending a powerful memorial service for her father, who passed away at 94. She got her New York State funeral director license in 2012 and would go on to found Fitting Tribute Funeral Services, which specializes in green burials, home funerals and witness cremation services at Green-Wood Cemetery.

During the past year of social distancing, every aspect of our lives was disrupted by the pandemic. One thing that not a lot of people like to talk about—but everyone must go through at some point—is how we die … and mourn for our loved ones. As the funeral industry struggled to keep up with the surge in deaths from Covid-19, funeral directors were also forced to update their practices. Memorials went virtual—to Zoom and on Facebook Live—and funerals were often held without a body present.

Cunningham has been at the forefront of helping cultivate a new understanding of what a modern funeral can look like—especially as younger generations want more authentic and involved experiences in planning their funerals—and how families can better wrap their heads around grief. For Green-Wood Cemetery, Cunningham has also been running a dynamic curriculum around dying and grieving.

“The conversation surrounding death is now unavoidable,” Cunningham told Brooklyn Magazine in March. “The novel coronavirus crisis shocked every American into seeing that—in truth and for real—death could occur for anyone, at any time. Now, people in good health are phoning funeral directors and seeking good consumer advice and advanced arrangements.”

As the co-founder and managing director of the Red Hook Art Project, Tiffiney Davis has spent the past dozen years nurturing, counseling, fighting for and agitating on behalf of the neighborhood’s kids: At any given moment the Red Hook Art Project, or RHAP, provides 25 to 50  children from lower-income families free visual art and music lessons after school, homework help and stress-management techniques. It’s a sanctuary and a community that allows kids to be kids, and keeps them safe.

“Art is a human right,” she tells Brooklyn Magazine. “It allows you to be a part of the community.”

The Red Hook Art Project was born when local artist Deirdre Swords saw artistic potential in Davis’ son. She and Davis began working with him after school, helping him get a portfolio together and mentoring him—and ultimately his friends—to excel in high school and beyond. From there, Davis and Swords would fashion RHAP into a hub to keep Red Hook’s kids engaged and to help them to break through systemic barriers that kept them from excelling.

“What I’m trying to do is create that bridge and create a space where conversations can continue to happen,” says Davis. She could have used something like RHAP as a child: Raised in Bed-Stuy by a single mom who was an addict at the peak of the crack epidemic, Davis herself became a mother at just 14, and lived in a series of public housing and homeless shelters around the borough and in the Bronx.

When the pandemic shut down the city, Davis saw it as a crisis especially for families with fewer resources. So Davis and RHAP pivoted and literally began feeding the neighborhood. Over the course of the pandemic, they’ve given away more than $200,000 worth of hot meals, PPE gear, diapers and other essential items.

“Once I realized school was shutting down,” she says, “I knew that life was getting absolutely real.”

For as far back as she could remember, growing up in San Jose, California, Angela Dimayuga wanted to be a chef. The fifth of six children of Filipino parents who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s, she was convinced by her father, a retired McDonald’s regional manager (who invented the Extra Value Meal), to go to college instead of culinary school. She gamely complied before moving to Brooklyn to begin her second education as a line chef at Vinegar Hill House under chef Jean Adamson. After five years she would receive a career-changing phone call from Danny Bowien; he wanted her to help open the first New York City iteration of his San Francisco restaurant, Mission Chinese Food.

Pairing her passion for design, aesthetics and presentation along with her talent for cooking, Dimayuga would ultimately help create the look and feel of NYC’s Mission Chinese Food, with a hand in everything from menu design to lighting to interiors, creating a portal to another place and time. She would leave Mission Chinese in 2017, under a cloud of controversy, despite having won an array of accolades: The New York Times awarded MCF with two stars and named it “Restaurant of the Year” in 2012; in 2015, she was named “Best Chef” by New York Magazine; The James Beard Foundation named her a “rising star chef” in 2016.

In 2018 she began a stint as corporate-level creative director of food and culture at Standard Hotels, where she helped launch No Bar, a queer, inclusive nightlife space.

The pandemic afforded her time at home alone to work on her forthcoming cookbook, “Filipinx: Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora,” out in October. She says she is carving out a space for representation for people like her, who feel solidarity with the Latinx and queer communities. The book will be part biography and part cookbook, offering 100 personal, yet accessible recipes—like the ones she’s popularized in her writing for Bon Appétit, Vice and The New York Times Cooking.

This entry has been updated to reflect information that was brought to our attention after publication.

Bill Frisell likes to keep busy. Not only did the beloved jazz guitarist put out his latest album, “Valentine,” in the middle of a pandemic, he even managed to play some live shows. Sort of. Along with a few fellow musician friends, Frisell performed a handful of pop-up shows on scattered Brooklyn stoops to the delight of stir-crazy neighbors.

Frisell, whose career spans four decades, is an understated bandleader who blends folk, rock and country into his spare and often haunting performances. And now, after many months of waiting, Frisell is back on stage. He had his first official (sold-out) Brooklyn gig in May, in Industry City, after a brief jaunt out west. In early July he headlined a fundraiser for the jazz community at Collab Fabrication Lab & Innovation Studio in Bushwick.

For a master of his instrument—he’s collaborated with everyone from Elvis Costello to John Zorn to Allen Toussaint to Lucinda Williams to Paul Simon to Paul Motian—Frisell remains admirably humble as he passes the torch: “I’m just trying to keep learning,” he told Brooklyn Magazine last month. “The people that I play with, I know they’re younger than me, but they’re like my teachers, you know? I choose them because I want to learn from them.”

Doreen Garner is a sculptor and tattoo artist whose work explores society’s relationship with—and destruction of—female Black bodies. In her sculpture, she has challenged the assumptions of the disposability of those bodies. And as a tattoo artist, her work is permanent (or at least as permanent as the person it’s tattooed onto).

As a sculptor, perhaps her most visceral work is 2017’s  “White Man On a Pedestal,” which took a deeply critical look at the legacy of J. Marion Sims, a white doctor whose advances in modern gynecology came at the expense of the enslaved Black women he experimented on, often without anesthesia. With her partner Kenya (Robinson), she created elaborate and surreal sculptures of twisted and ruptured bodies made of silicone, which incorporated elements like Swarovskly crystals to signify fat cells.

For 2016’s “The Observatory,” she explored the exploitation of women by placing a performer inside a glass box to maintain eye contact with viewers while immersed in grotesque organic-looking detritus. Her work is not designed to make the viewer feel comfortable.

Garner got into tattoo artistry in 2016 after noticing that the Black experience was never depicted on the walls of tattoo shops. She rejects the assumption that it’s simply “easier” to tattoo on white skin or that tattoos look better on a lighter surface. “When people say it’s more difficult to tattoo Black skin, it’s basically them admitting they prefer to work on white and pale-skinned clients. Every physical body is different and every person’s type of skin is different. Your approach to tattooing shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all,” she said in a 2020 interview with Inked magazine. Today, you can book a private appointment through her Instagram page.

When “We Are: The Brooklyn Saints,” a four-part Netflix docu-series, came out in January, it provided a smidgeon of escapism and joy in the depths of our winter pandemic. “Saints” tells the story of a boys’ youth football program in East New York. In it, we meet a group of inner-city kids, aged 7 to 13, learning the fundamentals and hoping for a shot at the championship in Florida.

If you think you know where this story is going, you’re probably wrong. “We Are: The Brooklyn Saints” is about community, character, love, fraternity, fatherhood and resilience. It just so happens the conduit to all of those things is football—which keeps the kids off the streets, committed to each other and hopeful for a shot at higher education.

And in a cast of compelling real-life characters, by far the most dynamic and heart-filled is Edwin Gawuala, who coaches the 9-and-under team. Only, Gawuala isn’t there merely to teach his “young men” how to play the game. A human Monster drink of potent (and sweet) energy, Gawuala is a father-figure, hype man, cheerleader, role model and the inventor of both the program’s three-tap handshake, and its mantra of “ADD”—“Any Darn Day.”

In one of his chants, Gawuala yells, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And the team responds, “You already know!”

“We teach the kids fundamentals of football. We teach them how to be young men,” he says in the series. “They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, the Brooklyn Saints is that village.”

In some ways, Gawuala is filling a void left by the death of his own son. Raised by a single mother along with his five siblings, he explains early in the series about how he was “lost in life” and “reckless” as a child.

Spoiler alert for those who haven’t watched, yet: In the series finale, we learn that Gawuala, who had lost his maintenance job, was offered a new position that might make it impossible for him to coach the following season. A man’s got to work and watching him make the decision is heart-breaking. The good news is, according to the series director Rudy Valdez, Gawuala’s employers threw him a little party when they saw the series and learned about Gawuala’s volunteer work—and were more than happy to find a way to let him stay involved with the Saints.

If you’ve ever walked up Marcus Garvey Boulevard from Fulton Street, chances are you’ve run into Gizmo Vintage Honey (the only name she will answer to, honey). A bedazzled ball of energy, Honey is the proprietor of Lulu Vintage Clothing, a secondhand shop that mixes old-school stoop sale vibes with savvy and sassy social media smarts. For two years now, Honey has set up her standalone shop along the sidewalk. Two overflowing racks, filled with one-of-a-kind secondhand items, are watched over by her only employee: a yorkie named Poopie Butt.

“We need you’s not views,” a hand-drawn cardboard sign announced on one recent visit. Still, Honey gets views. With 32,000 followers on Instagram (thanks in no small part to shoutouts from New York Nico), Honey frequently models her items online and during the pandemic began hosting auctions on Instagram Live. She’ll hold up items, name a price and let her viewers outbid each other—or haggle her down. As a result, her reach extends well beyond her Bed-Stuy sidewalk: Honey has customers all over the States, in Canada, the U.K., Africa and beyond.

Increasingly she has used her own influence to highlight struggling local businesses on her feed. All because, she says, she is “authentik with a K.”

It’s hard to find someone in the comedy world quite as well-liked as Josh Gondelman. A stand-up comic, unlikely writer for Showtime’s “Desus & Mero,” and host of the positivity-driven comedy game show podcast “Make My Day,” Gondelman is also the author of the essay collection “Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results,” and a frequent guest on NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” (listen to the episode with T-Pain if you haven’t yet—we can wait).

His vibe is upbeat and generous, which makes the makes it all the more delightful when the knives come out.

“Let’s find the warmth and goodness in the world in a fun way—sometimes tongue-in-cheek,” he tells Brooklyn Magazine. “Because I have a very friendly affect and demeanor and personality, people—sometimes in a fun way—don’t realize that I can say sharp-edged things or write sharp-edged things. Sometimes it lies under the radar because I say it all friendly.”

Gondelman was half the team behind the parody Twitter account @SeinfeldToday, which amassed nearly a million followers by coming up with contemporary scenarios that could conceivably play out on the show in the 2010s. He leveraged his viral Twitter fame and considerable writing chops to join the staff at “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” where he would pick up an Emmy and two Peabody Awards. Since 2019 he has been a writer and producer for the wildly popular “Desus & Mero” (which may not be where you’d expect a self-described doofus from the Boston suburbs to land), which is back in in-person production after a year filming at home and over Zoom.

“There is a lot we have in common in terms of comedic sensibility and what we think is funny,” Gondelman says. “People also underestimate the ways in which Desus and Mero’s comedy is very warm and inviting and generous in a lot of ways.”

You’d be forgiven for assuming the name “Ital” kitchen is short for “italicized,” especially since the plant-based food it serves is emphatically bold and fresh. But “Ital” comes from the word vital without the “v” and is a Rastafarian term for being natural—and boosting energy as a result. Everything chef Michael Gordon does leans into that natural perspective. He has owned Ital Kitchen in Crown Heights since 2013, serving vegan dishes of all organic ingredients.

Gordon was born in Jamaica, where he adopted both veganism and Rastafarianism, before moving to Queens. In 2010, he completed his culinary training at Le Cordon Bleu, where he studied French cuisine and mastered his concepts for vegan cuisine. Today you can find hints of his French training in his island-inspired Caribbean cuisine in dishes like a Thai curry stew of oyster mushrooms, bok choy, chickpeas, red beans and tomato, or a “Noxtail” made from portobello mushrooms, chickpeas and sun-dried tomatoes in a coq au vin sauce.

“Something I see with Rastas is we start things, and we don’t take it to the next level,” he told Black-Owned Brooklyn in February 2020. “That’s kind of my mission with this. I’m not saying I’m fancy—but I do have a little swag.”

Her real name is Elizabeth Eaton. Probably. Though she goes by Elizabeth Sweetheart. But if you know her at all, it’s as the Green Lady of Carroll Gardens. For the past quarter century, the Green Lady has been a Brooklyn fixture, draped entirely in lime green—from overalls to Underoos–emanating an elvish good vibe to everyone who greets her.

The Green Lady came to Brooklyn by way of Canada, long before she was eternally emerald. Born in a small mining town in Nova Scotia and raised by her grandparents, the Green Lady’s grandmother taught her to paint and make clothing. It took. After studying under Canadian painter Alex Colville, she thumbed her way down to New York in the 1960s to work in the garment industry and try to break out as an artist: Over the years, Eaton has hand-painted prints for top designers from Michael Kors to Liz Claiborne to Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.

She also makes tiny painted watercolors. But it turns out life itself is the most evocative canvas.

The green thing really took root around 2000, she told The New York Times in 2015. She has said the green she envelopes herself in probably reminds her of the pastures of home. Not only is her wardrobe—and her hair—entirely verdant, but so is just about every accessory and everything in her home.

But the Green Lady has also always been an entrepreneur. She ran her own design company, Sweet Pea Design Studio, for 15 years, starting in 1987 and subsequently sold fabrics from her extensive vintage collection. Who said it’s not easy being … multifaceted?

For more than three decades, Mark Winston Griffith has led a combination of social justice organizations, cooperative institutions, community organizing campaigns and economic justice projects in Central Brooklyn. A second-generation Jamaican-American and third-generation Central Brooklynite, Griffith was the founding executive director of the Central Brooklyn Partnership and co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union in the early 1990s.

Today, as the executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, he oversees a series of what he calls “campaigns” against street harassment—and for environmental justice and police accountability. His Brooklyn Deep project at the BMC is a citizen-journalism platform dedicated to telling stories about neighborhood change in Central Brooklyn. There he leverages his own background as a journalist on the BMC podcast “School Colors,” which he co-hosts with fellow local journalist Max Freedman Together, they  dig deep into the region’s history of race, class and education.

Griffith has been an adjunct professor of urban reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and is a frequent guest on WNYC. He still teaches a graduate course in community organizing at CUNY’s Murphy Institute.

He’s  also a founding board member of the Central Brooklyn Food Co-op. The mission: “To utilize our collective strength to ensure access to affordable and fresh food within the mostly-of-color, low- and moderate-income communities of Central Brooklyn.”

Mil Mundos—a café, community center and Bushwick’s first bilingual bookstore—began as an idea in 2018 when encroaching gentrification in the neighborhood prompted Maria Herron to create a new sort of space. One that could cater to the locals who had been there for generations, and invite them in to hold conversations about Black, Latinx and indigenous heritage. It’s collectively run by a group of six who reflect that diversity. 

More than half—55 percent—of Bushwick’s population is Hispanic, and the school district is made up of 56 percent Latinx students. But, Herron tells Brooklyn Magazine, “Nobody ever considers the Spanish-speaking population when opening a new business here.”

Herron works with schools in the district to provide field trip programming, charging $15 a student—a price that includes a trip and a book. (One elementary school Mil Mundos worked with  had only taken one school trip the year before—to a police precinct.) During the pandemic, Mil Mundos became a mutual aid depot for the local community, too, accepting and distributing essential items to families in need in the Bushwick area.

Murray Hill is an old-school glad-handing comedian cut from the same cloth of the Catskills and late Las Vegas legends like Don Rickles and Jackie Gleason. His is a retro lounge emcee persona that he fully inhabits, in a Burgundy tux, slicked -back hair, pinky ring and pencil mustache—a look and an act he honed in both bougie straight downtown hipster lounges and underground Lower East Side queer clubs like Casanova in the 1990s.

The easy shorthand is to call Hill “the RuPaul of drag kings.” But it’s a label he himself avoids, preferring simply “comedian,” or “Murray” if you’re nasty—just your ordinary heavy-set middle-aged guy who can work a room between acts.

Hill also eschews gender labels, feeling more comfortable inhabiting a planet of one in the New York burlesque world. “You either get beat up or you make ’em laugh,” Hill once said on the Queery podcast about his origin story. “So I started cracking jokes to make day-to-day life a little easier.” It seems to be working: In addition to the clubs where he had been a fixture until the pandemic shut things down, Hill has been racking up TV and film appearances as himself. Most recently he was spotted shooting with Amy Schumer for her upcoming Hulu comedy series “Life and Beth.”

His persona feels fully baked and utterly original—testament to his belief that if you don’t see yourself represented, go out and represent yourself.

As the co-founder of bklyn boihood, a collective of queer and trans people of color, Holmes has been working to create safe, celebratory spaces in Brooklyn for more than 10 years. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Maryland, Holmes has said that they felt constrained by rigid gender norms, despite growing up in a largely supportive Black family. “Tomboy” and even “lesbian” didn’t quite resonate as labels, and they struggled to get comfortable with their queerness.

Bklyn boihood would start in Bed-Stuy in 2009 when Holmes and artist Genesis Tramaine (who is no longer affiliated) bonded over a desire to feel understood as masculine-of-center queer and trans people of color. The initial idea: create a calendar celebrating the representation of that queerness with a diversity of models, photographers and designers. In the intervening years, bklyn boihood has amassed more than 50,000 online followers, published six calendars, and released an award- winning anthology called “Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity.”

By day, Holmes is a communications strategist at the female-led firm Resonance, a creative consultant, youth mentor and event producer. Holmes had previously been the director of community programs at the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts (MoCADA). The through-line in all of their work is creating “pathways for expression, community, love as wealth.”

Edy’s Grocer in Greenpoint has won heaps of love thanks to its owner’s culinary wizardry and seemingly boundless ambition. And the story behind it reveals multitudes about the history of the neighborhood, immigration patterns in America, gentrification—and amazing food.

Edouard Massih wears a close-cropped beard and glasses that make him look like a longtime Brooklyner, but in fact he is himself a relative newcomer. His parents moved their family from a small Lebanese fishing village about 10 miles from Tripoli to Canton, Massachusetts, when he was 10. When Massih landed in Greenpoint in 2015 at barely 20, just after finishing culinary school, he was attracted to its immigrant heritage and its mom-and-pop charms. What he especially loved was Maria’s Deli, a Polish American joint run by Maria Puk, who made cutlet heroes and fish sandwiches he would stand on line for.

Massih and Puk became fast and unlikely friends. She is some 40 years his senior and from an entirely different part of the world. But their love of authentic cuisine—and of Greenpoint—sealed their bond. During Covid, Puk was forced to close Maria’s temporarily. Massih offered to take over the space and let her finally retire to Florida. She took him up on his offer and he opened Edy’s, a blast of lemon-and-garlic Lebanese freshness that was an instant hit in the neighborhood.

In a nod to the enclave’s Polish roots, and out of respect for Puk, he kept a few of her classic items on the menu, like the potato pancakes. But the real stars are items like marinated shankleesh (a mezze cheese), Lahm bi Ajin (meat pie) and baked za’atar egg cups.

Next on his to-do list: write a cookbook before he turns 30. Shouldn’t be too hard considering he was spotted on NBC’s TODAY show earlier this month teaching viewers how to make grilled corn and halloumi salad ahead of Independence Day.

Yves Mathieu pays the bills as a full-time model. But it’s what he does off the runway and outside of photoshoots that sets him apart.

Much of his free time is spent volunteering in LGBTQ runaway centers, senior facilities and homeless shelters, a passion he picked up at 18. He donates his time and energy as a way to engage in therapy and serve something bigger than himself, he says. (Check out the video interview he did last year for The Jed Foundation, a non-profit organization that protects mental health for teens and young adults.) He is a tireless advocate for trans women rights; images he posted to Instagram from 2018’s Women’s March—of him holding a sign that read “TRANS WOMEN, TOO!”—went super-viral. Now in his mid-20s, he says he hopes to show queer kids what it looks like to be an adult who has survived and even thrived—Mathieu is himself a former addict, who used from the ages of 12 or 13 to 17.

Born in Brooklyn to a Black father and Asian mother, Mathieu was adopted and raised by a white family in Florida. His  looks are all the more striking for the fact that he is nearly entirely covered in tattoos: his hands, neck, face, torso, all of it. He’s walked the runway for Pyer Moss. And after going viral for his support of trans women, he received an email from Beyonce’s team asking to include him in last October’s Drip 2 athleisure campaign for Adidas and Ivy Park. This month he graced the cover of both Alt Press and the first-ever book by Kloss Films, a project of British Vogue Digital Creative Director-at-Large Alec Maxwell.

When he’s not doing all that, he’s fostering rescued pitbulls and finding them forever homes … and releasing his own music: “Bops From A Beautiful Broken Hearted Black Boy,” his second album, came out last year. You might have seen him perform songs from it at the epic Pride Oasis Pool Party last month at the 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge.

When Leon Michels first sat down to make a record with the Mighty Imperials in 1999, he was just 16. That album, “Thunder Chicken,” was a pitch-perfect homage to the super heavy funk sound of James Brown and Meters, with Michels on organ.

While putting the finishing touches on “Thunder Chicken,” Michels began touring and recording with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, a relationship that would last seven years. By 2004 he was recording under the name El Michels Affair and releasing eclectic homespun funk like “Sounding Out the City,” which he put out on his own label, Truth & Soul Records.

The success of his new sound landed him a touring gig with members of the Wu-Tang Clan, an experience that would inspire him to record the Wu-Tang instrumental homage “Enter the 37th Chamber,” which itself would ironically be sampled by the likes of Ghostface Killah, Jay-Z, J Dilla, J. Cole and more. Michels also helped found The Menahan Street Band, co-produced Aloe Blacc’s smash LP “Good Things,” and received a writer credit on Adele’s Grammy-nominated album, “19.”

In 2016, Michels co-founded Big Crown Records with Danny Akalapse, which has churned out a dizzying array of sophisticated funk, soul and other sounds, many produced by Michels himself. In 2020, he released a fourth album under the El Michels Affair moniker. “Adult Themes” is “the soundtrack to an imaginary movie,” according to Michels, and it is the perfect, lush backdrop for your own grown-up evenings, however you define them. In March he dropped “Yeti Season,” which takes a hard turn into Turkish-influenced pop and funk.

Nothing in Ivy Mix’s background—except maybe her name—would suggest she’d turn out to be one of the most celebrated bartenders in the country by her early 30s. The co-owner and head bartender of the Latin-inspired Leyenda, Mix grew up in tiny Tunbridge, Vermont. Her first ambition was to be an Olympic horseback rider.

Mezcal would change all that. While traveling in Guatemala at age 19, she amassed a large tab at a local ex-pat hangout that ran on the honor system. She paid it off bartending, and in the process got her first taste of behind-the-bar culture. And her first taste of mezcal, which she actually began smuggling over the border from Mexico.

After moving to New York in 2008 (and a miserable stint working at the Gagosian Gallery), Mix became a cocktail waitress and began apprenticing as a bartender. As she mastered the art of mixology, she couldn’t help noticing that the majority of the people in her field were, well, dudes.

“Everyone has curly-cue mustaches and the beards and the fucking pork pie hat and suspenders,” she tells Brooklyn Magazine.

So she and a partner launched Speed Rack, an all-female high-speed bartending competition designed to highlight up-and-coming women in the cocktail industry. In the decade since, Speed Rack has raised more than $1 million for breast cancer research.

In 2015, Mix would co-found Leyenda on Smith Street, a Brooklyn bar and restaurant that pulls from her Latin American experience and mezcal expertise, that in 2019 would be nominated for a James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program. All of this would go in to her first book, which came out during the peak lockdown months of the pandemic. “Spirits of Latin America: A Celebration of Culture & Cocktails, With 100 Recipes From Leyenda & Beyond” is as much a travelogue as it is a recipe book, though, which afforded some small taste of escapism for its readers.

And this year, as if she didn’t have enough going on, she opened Fiasco!, in Crown Heights with two partners—a bottle shop with an emphasis on female, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ producers, as well as local favorites, sustainable brands and some hard-to-find drinks. (It’s called Fiasco! because Mix and her partners couldn’t open the store for 13 months after they signed their lease due to Covid.)

MonoNeon (born Dwyane Thomas Jr.) was one of the last musicians to collaborate with Prince. That may not be how you’re familiar with him, though, if at all. A mind-bending bass player, MonoNeon has gained viral notoriety for finding oddball clips of people talking (or ranting or getting high), transcribing them to music and then playing along with the speakers, note for note on his bass. (One of his favorite people to mimic is Cardi B—especially her social media musings.) His Instagram posts have gotten shoutouts from Questlove and Eddie Murphy for the comedic punch they deliver. But they couldn’t have been pulled off at all were it not for his technical wizardry.

Himself the son of a bass guitarist, Thompson began playing at 4, and before he turned 13 had played with Bar-Kays before briefly attending the Berklee School of Music. It wasn’t before long that his idiosyncratic style (he plays the bass upside-down, right-handed, with heavy psychedelic-funk influences) caught Prince’s ear. The Purple One hired him to join Paisley Park’s house band and recorded the track “RUFF ENUFF” with him.

More recently, Thompson contributed to “All Bad” on Nas’ Grammy-winning “King’s Disease” album, and played on Grammy-nominee Jacob Collier’s song “In My Bones.” His own releases have veered towards the silly (yet funky) on jams like “Hot Cheetos” and “Women, Water and Weed.”

Earlier this year, he dropped “Supermane,” his most fully-realized solo work, an EP loaded with P-Funk sounds filtered through ’80s synth pop and general weirdness. Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, no slouch himself, has called Thompson “the greatest fucking electric bass player.”

Born in Brooklyn to Costa Rica-born immigrant parents and raised in Prospect Lefferts Gardens affordable housing, Zellnor Myrie reps his home turf. It’s an odd one, District 20. It hooks awkwardly north from Sunset Park through Park Slope and Gowanus, around Prospect Park and into Prospect Heights, Prospect Lefferts, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy and Brownsville. But Myrie navigates it as well as he has his inchoate political career.

After earning a masters in urban studies from Fordham and a law degree from Cornell, Myrie went to work for the global law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he would rock Jordans and listen to Migos around the office. He would also offer pro bono services to fight police brutality, aid victims of domestic violence and assist asylum seekers—all work that would come in handy as a state senator.

Zyrie left the law firm to run his first race in 2018, handily defeating Jesse Hamilton. In 2019 he scored his first big legislative win in the shape of broad pro-tenant reforms meant to protect nearly half of the city’s renters. Last May he took to the streets to attend protests against police brutality at Barclays Center—where he would be pepper-sprayed in the face and arrested despite having said he and his fellow demonstrators had been trying to comply with police. Last month he and assembly member Diana Richardson became the latest to sue the NYPD for its treatment of them.

Also last this month, Myrie sponsored a package of gun-control bills, including a first-in-the-nation attempt to open firearms manufacturers to liability for some deaths caused by their products. “I’m tired of going to funerals, I’m tired of seeing candles on the block, I’m tired of having to hold a grieving mother, I’m tired of having to look into the eyes of a teenager who’s paralyzed because of a gunshot,” he said at the time the senate passed the reforms.

Nicolas Heller may never have become New York Nico if he didn’t move to L.A. To be sure, Heller’s bona fides are about as on point as it gets: The filmmaker, videographer and self-styled “unofficial talent scout of New York” grew up in Union Square and went to school in the West Village; his father a longtime art director at The New York Times, his mother a brand creative.

He moved to Los Angeles after obtaining a film degree to become a video music director. It didn’t pan out—and he found the city stifling. It’s when he moved back to New York that he appreciated what he had left, but still struggled to find real direction. Hanging out in Washington Square Park, he became fascinated by the local personalities in the area—people like Larry the Bird Man, street performer Matthew Silver and Wendell the Homeless Fashion Designer. Heller launched a YouTube series of five- or six-minute video documentaries about these characters called “No Your City,” which didn’t gain the traction he felt it deserved. That changed when Instagram began letting people upload minute-long videos to their feeds.

Over the past few years, Nico has become ubiquitous. He’s amassed some 678,000 (and counting) followers on Instagram through photos, videos and mini-interviews of the most offbeat and authentic of New Yorkers (some of whom he suggested for this list). As his platform grew—and especially when the pandemic hit—he began using it for good. Through his #MomNPopDrop series, he began highlighting beloved but struggling local businesses including Astor Place Hairstylists, Army & Navy Bag, Ray’s Candy Store and others. Heller also held a super-viral contest to find the “best New York accent” that would garner the participation of celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Michael Rappaport, Debi Mazar and Princess Nokia—and would be covered by national media outlets.

Last November, Heller announced a venture with the MTA to enlist celebrities and notable New Yorkers to record messages for use in public transit, recruiting iconic voices like Fran Lebowitz, Whoopi Goldberg, Jerry Seinfeld and many others. More recently, he teamed up with New York magazine to interview every mayoral candidate. Today he spends time at his day job creating content for hire (for brands including JetBlue, Facebook, the New York Knicks, Marc Jacobs and Red Bull), but still maintains his passion project, regularly checking in with—and documenting—friends like Tiger Hood, Big Mike and the Green Lady throughout the city.

Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster is a rarity in his field: A 30-year beer veteran, Garrett Oliver is one of a very few Black faces in the industry. A 2019 survey by the Brewer’s Association found that 89 percent of brewers and 76.2 percent of production staff working within the beer industry are white.

Oliver is using his platform to change that. Feeling a sense of urgency to do something after the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing summer of unrest last year, Oliver unveiled the Michael Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling last August to award scholarships to people of color looking to get into the industry.

“Garret Oliver is a legend in our industry and without his leadership in craft beer during its infancy, the landscape of beer would look entirely different than it looks today,” Matt Monahan, co-founder of Other Half, told Wine Enthusiast at the time of the announcement.

In addition to his role as brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery (where he has been since 1994), Oliver is also the author of “The Brewmaster’s Table” and the editor-in-chief of “The Oxford Companion to Beer.” In 2014 he picked up a prestigious James Beard Award, rare for a brewer, for his flavorful interpretations of traditional brewing styles.

He wasn’t necessarily destined for beer, though. While attending college in Boston, he organized concerts and stage-managed bands including R.E.M., The English Beat and The Ramones (whom he took bowling), before moving on to film school.

At 23, it looks like Chi Ossé will be New York City Council’s youngest member in the upcoming session.

Which is surprising, considering that he never thought he would be a politician. A self-described Black, queer, college dropout, Osse was working freelance jobs in nightlife when the pandemic hit. By the summer he found himself leading Black Lives Matter demonstrations that took over the borough following the murder of George Floyd. From there, Ossé and several other engaged protestors formed Warriors In The Garden, a social justice collective that organizes peaceful protests and other public programming related to racial injustice. It didn’t take long—on Juneteenth 2020, to be precise—before Ossé announced his candidacy for New York City Council as a representative of District 36.

“From one protest to another I started finding my voice and refining my voice. I took this leap of faith and jumped into the city council race,” Ossé tells Brooklyn magazine. “People get hung up on the fact that they want to help, they have to save the world. The world is too big to save, but what we can do is help someone next door or across the street or in our community. That’s something that Warriors in the Garden tried to do.”

To be sure, Ossé has only officially won the primary. Still, the seat is all but his, given the makeup of the district. And this election is by any measure completely reconfiguring city government—producing huge gains for gender equity and diversity on city council—the Gen Z Ossé represents the future as much he does his district. But it’s also worth noting that he has a proud family history of community engagement: His father, the late Reggie Ossé, also known as Combat Jack, was a trailblazing hip-hop activist, lawyer, journalist and entrepreneur.

A 28-year-old non-binary activist, rapper and artist, Paperboy Love Prince was be the youngest candidate to appear on the mayoral ballot at last month’s mayoral primary. They were also the most flamboyant and most likely to freestyle 20, 30 bars unprompted.

Prince, who lives in Bushwick (pronouns: they/them/God/Goddess), says their top priority is to “spread love.” But that doesn’t mean you should dismiss them as mere theater.

“When people say, ‘Is this a performance?,’ part of me sometimes takes offense to it, if I’m being honest … I’m like, ‘Yo, my performance art is way better than this campaign!,’” Prince told Brooklyn Magazine ahead of the primary.

Prince’s platform embraced an anti-establishment ethos: They want to see $2,000 monthly universal-basic-income payments for every resident. Free healthcare. Reparations for the drug war. Reparations for slavery. To abolish the police and legalize drugs. Plus, they want to set up “Love Centers” where residents can get therapy, classes, hugs and more. And in order to get people to listen, Prince will put on a show.

“It’s hard to have these conversations if I’m not a playful character,” Prince said. “I’m getting people excited who have been left out of traditional politics for so long.”

For all their boisterous flamboyance, Prince is no political neophyte: They have held internships at the U.S. House of Representatives and the Supreme Court, and supported Andrew Yang in his presidential bid. Last year, Prince won 20 percent of the vote in the Seventh District congressional primary against incumbent Nydia Velazquez. It was a loss, but the showing was impressive enough for people to take notice—something Prince has proven themselves incredibly adept at doing.

Prince finished 11th in the mayoral contest, which was no tremendous surprise. What would be a surprise is if they just disappeared. Pay a visit some time to their headquarters, Love Gallery, a pink storefront on Myrtle Avenue, which continues to operate as a vintage store and community space.

In 2019, Barry Petchesky was fired as acting editor-in-chief of the irreverent sports (and politics and pop culture and lifestyle) site Deadspin, where he had worked for a decade, “for not sticking to sports,” he wrote in a tweet that ricocheted throughout the media world.

Petchesky’s shitcanning came one day after a staff memo from Jim Rich, the editorial director of Deadspin’s new parent company G/O Media, mandated that the site only write about sports “and that which is relevant to sports in some way.” The next day Deadspin ran all non-sports stories with each article captioned “stick to sports.”

What happened next was delicious: After Petchesky’s ouster, all of Deadspin’s writers would subsequently quit in solidarity. In July of 2020, they collectively announced a new subscription-based sports website, Defector Media, with 19 employees, each of whom own approximately 5 percent of the company. The site racked up 10,000 subscriptions on its first day. Six months in, Defector was reportedly paying more than 20 staffers a minimum salary of $50,000, and has continued to expand. The next big moment of truth for Petchesky and team comes this month, when that first round of subscriptions come up for renewal.

In the meantime they can all take solace in the fact that G/O Media’s Rich abruptly left the company last week in a clash with private equity ownership, just 18 months after taking the job.

Zara Rahim started her career at the the top: She parlayed a college internship on Barack Obama’s re-election campaign into a full time job and eventually landed on the administration’s digital team, helping to get the White House more established on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. That first job would serve her well in ways she could never have foreseen: Rahim left the White House to follow Obama administration alums to work at Uber, where she would work on legislation around ride sharing. Having done her time in Silicon Valley, she was glad to return to politics when another Obama vet asked her to join the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.

She has characterized Clinton’s loss as a crushing one, but her old Rolodex came in handy again when she was invited to come work at Vogue, of all places, where the communications director also had Obama ties. Rahim herself would be made communications director after just six months on the job.

After a restructuring at Condé Nast, Rahim was tapped as the first comms hire at the Wing, a beleaguered women’s coworking space. Her political allegiances got her into hot water when she wished death upon President Trump after his Covid diagnosis last year—though her outspokenness may have won her more friends than foes in her world. It certainly didn’t keep her from serving as a consultant and advisor to Mariah Carey on her acclaimed 2020 memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” the subsequent book tour and social impact campaign.

Today, after counting Obama, Clinton, Anna Wintour and Mariah Carey as bosses, Rahim works for herself as a communications and policy consultant. She is also a talent producer for (fellow Brooklyn 50-er) Ziwe Fumidoh’s eponymous show on Showtime. When cultural commentator and author Fran Lebowitz appeared on the inaugural episode of “Ziwe”—unaware of what she was getting into—she said of Rahim: “She wouldn’t take no for an answer.” Not a bad endorsement for LinkedIn. Not that she needs it.

As president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership from 2012-2016, Tucker Reed took a formerly dysfunctional non-profit business improvement district and made it function. Under his watch, more than 10,000 apartments were either built or planned in Downtown Brooklyn, hitherto unheard of for the third largest central business district in New York City. Historically a commercial and civic center, Downtown Brooklyn’s ongoing reinvention was made possible by a 2004 rezoning plan that made way for denser residential development—and not a little gentrification. It was under Reed’s guidance that the district began to take shape.

Reed left the Partnership in 2016 and co-founded Totem, a Brooklyn-based development firm. His team has acquired a 20,000-square-foot low-rise site on Fourth Avenue in Greenwood Heights (currently home to a Dunkin’ Donuts). In April, Totem received the city’s green light for its not-completely-uncontroversial plan to build a 14-story mixed-use complex comprising retail space and housing, with “nearly 40 permanently affordable apartments” pledged.

And, just last week, Community Board 3 approved Totem’s also-not-uncontroversial plans to build a new 17-story, fully-electric building at 1045 Atlantic Avenue, between Franklin and Classon Avenues.

Reed is a graduate of Wesleyan, where his freshman dorm roommate was Lin-Manuel Miranda. Despite appearing in Miranda’s directorial debut there, Reed would start his career in development as the founding executive director of the DUMBO Improvement District. After two years, he would ship off to Iraq in 2008 to serve as chief of staff of the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team. There, he helped build schools and roads, set up a fire department and rebuilt the sanitation system—all apparently excellent training for the battleground of Brooklyn real estate.

Karen Rose is a pioneer in herbalism education who has been bringing vibes to Brooklyn for 12 years. Born in Guyana, she moved to Ditmas Park when she was 14 and would attend middle school just blocks away from the future location of Sacred Vibes Apothecary, the shop she would open in 2009.

Noting a lack of resources, education and access for Black herbalists in the area, she also launched an apprenticeship program in 2010. The shop itself has become a destination for herbal remedies based on traditions from the Caribbean, West Africa and India.

Demand for her services has only grown since the onset of the pandemic. On Instagram, she saw the number of her followers balloon to 69,000 over the past year, stoked by anxiety around the coronavirus and a desire to support Black businesses. There she offers a soothing resource for advice, education, recipes and astrological readings—like her take on the recent lunar eclipse in Sagittarius: “This eclipse will highlight matters of faith and trust in your home—matters of faith and trust in your heart, in your relationships—in your community and your family.”

She has more recently expanded her local foothold by opening Sacred Botanica, for more magical and spiritual needs, and Sacred Spice, where she sells bulk spices, teas, oils and more.

Oana Stănescu first got interested in architecture as a high school student in her hometown of Reșița, Romania. At the time she couldn’t imagine it could be a viable career option for a woman. But it turns out Stănescu has a knack for shattering norms. After graduating from the Polytechnic University of Timișoara, she would gain a second, global education interning at acclaimed architecture firm REX (formerly known as OMA New York, where she would meet her future partner Dong-Ping Wong), followed by stints in Tokyo, South Africa and Switzerland.

When she returned to work at OMA full-time, she met Kanye West, who commissioned the firm to design a seven-screen movie experience for “Cruel Summer” and, later, the sets for his Yeezus tour. She would leave OMA, though, to launch her own firm with Wong, Family New York, in 2009. From there she would rack up a dizzying number of collaborations, with everyone from Virgil Abloh, for whose Off-White flagship store she would rewrite the book on retail design, to Nike to the New Museum, to the Storefront for Art and Architecture and more.

After amicably dissolving Family New York, Stănescu started her own eponymous design studio and began teaching at Harvard and Columbia.

In a current collaboration with Abloh, Nóra Al Haider and the Legal Design Lab at Stanford University, she is working to rethink what architecture can do to humanize the justice system. With Wong and two other partners, Stănescu has secured permission from New York City to plonk an Olympic-sized plus-shaped pool in the East River that will filter more than 600,000 of polluted water every day. That should be completed in about two years and will float off the shore of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

But she hasn’t completely lost track of the ambitious girl from Reșița. One current project is following through on her 2007 thesis by designing a massive High Line-style elevated park through her native town. The thesis she wrote, as it happens, predated the opening of the New York High Line by two years.

If a bookstore in your neighborhood closed down, chances are you’d mourn a little and move on with your life. That’s not how Emma Straub rolls. When her beloved Book Court—a Cobble Hill institution—shut down in 2016, she had a choice to make: “This sounds absolutely bonkers because it is: We could either open a bookstore or we could move to be closer to a different bookstore,” she says. And so she and her husband Michael opened Books are Magic, which itself has become a neighborhood beacon.

In addition to selling other people’s books, Straub writes her own; she is The New York Times-bestselling author of four compulsively readable novels and a short story collection. Her books include “Modern Lovers” (set in Ditmas Park), “The Vacationers,” “Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures” and “Other People We Married.” Straub’s latest, “All Adults Here,” is newly out in paperback, a year after its release in the early months of the pandemic. It tells the story of three generations of the Strick family, all of whom have little secrets they’ve been keeping from each other.

In conversation Straub is as charming, easygoing and accessible as her writing—and like her writing she can be sly and wry and almost sneakily profound. Next up? “I started something new in October which was all of a sudden a book about time travel and a 40- year-old woman with a dying father,” she tells Brooklyn Magazine. “It’s strange to say I’ve written a book about time travel and it’s my most autobiographical book yet. And yet it’s true.”

Founded in 2010 by political writer Bhaskar Sunkara, the influential quarterly magazine Jacobin offers left-wing perspectives on politics, economics and culture similar to those popularized by the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It has paid print circulation of 60,000, and its website boasts 2 million views a month.

Sunkara credits his own political awakening to reading Orwell and Trotsky as a teenager. By 17, he was editor of The Activist, the youth blog for the Democratic Socialists of America. He would launch Jacobin while still at George Washington University. Within three years, The New York Times was commenting on Jacobin’s unexpected successful engagement with mainstream liberalism. Even more surprising, last year Fortune magazine—nothing if not a safe place for unrepentant capitalists—put Sunkara on its 40 Under 40 list.

Sunkara is the author of 2019’s “The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality” He’s at work at another book and his writing can also be found in Vice, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Washington Post.

There are cat ladies and then there’s Heidi Systo. A Pratt-trained photographer by day, Heidi spends the bulk of her free time rescuing and socializing feral kittens in the borough. New York City is home to some 300,000 stray cats, many thousands of which are in Brooklyn. Systo, who lives in Bed-Stuy, is one of many volunteers certified in a program called TNRM (trap/neuter/return/monitor), through which she traps stray cats around Brooklyn and arranges to have them spayed or neutered before returning them to their feral environment. From there she monitors the cats and provides shelter as needed.

For Systo, it all goes down adorably on Instagram. A self-described “cat wrangler,” she uses the platform—and her photography chops—to showcase the many cats she rescues, fosters and socializes. At her apartment’s most crowded, she may have up to 10 cats and kittens scattered throughout her small space. Systo also uses the platform to educate people who are themselves interested in getting into rescuing or fostering.

“If I am the difference between [a cat] living on the street and dying an early death, versus, you know, being indoors, being loved and happy and warm for the rest of its life,” she told Cheddar TV, “that I get a lot out of.”

Don’t follow Clay Williams on Instagram if you don’t want to get really hungry. A Brooklyn-based photographer specializing in food, drinks and events, Williams is a prolific shooter for The New York Times, The James Beard Foundation and Zagat. Williams is also a founder of Black Food Folks — “a fellowship of Black professionals in food and drink, promoting and supporting one another for mutual success” — with his partner Colleen Vincent. They host meet-ups and virtual info sessions, and last year announced they would be offering $5,000 in grants to 10 food professionals.

Established in 2019, before the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, because the restaurant industry has historically overlooked the contributions of Black people, Black Food Folks seeks to counterbalance tokenism and empty promises in the industry. “Until there are Black decision-makers throughout the food world, all of this will just be the latest trend that can be forgotten in a month or a year,” Williams told Edible Brooklyn. “That’s why we’re here, so we don’t have to depend on ‘being topical’ to be heard.”

If there’s anyone in the borough we’d like to grab a drink with, it would be the guy who literally wrote the book on drinking. A couple of them, actually. One of the top spirits writers in the country, David Wondrich is the author of “Imbibe!” and “Punch,” both on the history of the cocktail. But they’re also about so much more: they’re about who poured the drinks, who populated the bars and speakeasies. Through his research, Wondrich, the senior drinks columnist at The Daily Beast, has brought previously extinct cocktails back into circulation.

“So much bar history was lost because bartenders never wrote anything down,” Clover Club and Leyanda co-founder Julie Reiner tells Brooklyn Magazine. “David is the guy who looks at old microfiche at the library, searching for the word ‘cocktail’ in pre-Prohibition newspapers.” In fact, Wondrich even advised Reiner on how to put her own stamp on the Clover Club cocktail that she named her bar for.

For the past decade, Wondrich has been buried back in the microfiche to produce a massive, 1,200-entry “Oxford Companion to Drink” that will likely become the definitive text on the subject. There is an almost frightening academic rigor to his work—which might have something to do with the fact that he holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature.

An actor with an impressive résumé by any measurement, Jeffrey Wright can currently be seen in the Netflix movie “Monster” along with Jennifer Hudson and A$AP Rocky, and will play Commissioner Gordon in the next Batman movie. He has a Tony, Golden Globe and Emmy for his role as Belize in the Broadway production “Angels in America” and its HBO miniseries adaptation. He has also starred as Jean-Michel Basquiat in “Basquiat,” Felix Leiter in several James Bond films, and appeared in the “Hunger Games.” On TV he’s had roles in “Boardwalk Empire” and “Westworld.”

But how he spent the early months of the pandemic has arguably been his important role yet. It started when he learned that the company that provides food to the Brooklyn Hospital cafeteria was forced to downsize, meaning it could only feed patients. Staff —including the nurses and doctors caring for the people who were the most sick—no longer had access to meals (especially when everything else was shut down). He called up two of his friends—the owners of Brooklyn Moon Cafe in Fort Greene and Graziella’s in Clinton Hill—and together they launched an initiative called Brooklyn for Life.

With the help of a GoFundMe campaign and other fundraisers, Brooklyn for Life grew far beyond its initial ambition: Wright has helped raise more than $1.5 million and BFL has delivered more than 170,000 meals to hospitals and FDNY EMS stations around the borough. The meals were provided by 50 mom-and-pop eateries, some of which themselves may have closed had it not been for the support.

Bowen Yang was voted “Most Likely to Be a Cast Member on ‘Saturday Night Live’” by his high school classmates. Still, there would be no straight line from his home in Colorado to 30 Rock. But nothing he does is all that straight anyway.

Born in Brisbane, Australia, where his parents emigrated from China so his father could get a doctorate in mining explosives, Yang grew up always feeling a little on the outside: He would move with his family to Canada and then the U.S. at 9. One story that he’s told in interviews recounts how his parents discovered their son was gay: by finding an AOL Instant Messenger chat window he left open on the family computer. Despite being scientists, his parents insisted he go to conversion therapy in megachurch-land Colorado. He gamely went along to make them happy, but it hardly took. Yang moved to New York after high school to attend NYU—arguably one of the least-straight schools in the Lower 48—to study pre-med. That didn’t take either.

At NYU, he started the comedy podcast “Las Culturistas,” with classmate Matt Rogers, which currently streams on Will Ferrell’s Big Money Players podcast network with iHeart Radio. In 2018, Yang was hired as a staff writer on “Saturday Night Live.” He had honed his chops with stints at Upright Citizens Brigade and on the improv team Dangerbox. He landed appearances in “Broad City” and ”High Maintenance,” while routinely going viral for his lip-sync videos in which he reenacts dramatic monologues like Sandra Oh’s pleading on “Grey’s Anatomy” and Meryl Streep channeling Anna Wintour in “The Devil Wears Prada.”

In 2019, he was promoted to featured cast member on “SNL,” making him one of the  few openly gay men to ever star on the show, and its first Chinese-American star, period. He was an instant standout for performances as former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, then-presidential candidate Andrew Yang, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and, our favorite, the iceberg that sank the Titanic. And Yang famously co-wrote the uber-queer Sara Lee sketch in which he had to reprimand guest star Harry Styles for mixing up the company’s Instagram with his own account, posting comments like “wreck me, daddy” and “destroy me, king” on celeb accounts.

Yang—who is set to co-star in the Jane Austen-inspired comedy “Fire Island” with Joel Kim Booster—received plaudits for using the “SNL” platform last season to denounce the surge in violent attacks against Asian-Americans during a “Weekend Update” monologue. He told viewers to “fuel up” and do more for Asian-American allies: “I don’t know what’s helpful to say to everyone, but that’s what I say to myself: Fuel up, do more,” he said. “It’s the Year of the Metal Ox, which basically means a car. So everybody get in, buckle up, there’s no pee breaks—we ride at dawn, grandmas!”

Michelle Zauner is better known as the musician Japanese Breakfast, who has drawn acclaim for her genre-bending rock and indie pop. But she’s also a food connoisseur, especially of the Korean variety, inheriting a love of the cuisine from her late Korean mother.

In April she published her much-anticipated “Crying in H Mart,” what she calls a “food memoir,” about her early family life, her troubled teenage years and her process of reckoning with her mother’s early death from cancer—all paired with her intense and complicated relationship to Korean food, which acts as an unbreakable tie to her mother and eventually a tool to help her heal. H Mart is the Korean supermarket chain with over 80 locations across the U.S.; an essay Zauner wrote with the same title appeared in The New Yorker in 2018 and had her swarmed with attention from the literary world. (She had written about food before, though, and even hosted a short-lived food show for Vice’s Munchies vertical.)

Her love of eating, of course, is also present in her stage name. About that name: A decade ago, Zauner had a Tumblr that she would upload her music to, and she found aesthetically pleasing images of Japanese breakfasts to accompany each song. At that point, she says she had never been asked about her Korean heritage, and she wasn’t keen on talking about it. But if she could start over, she’d choose a different name today.

“I am waiting for the moment that someone leads a tirade to cancel the shit out of me,” she tells Brooklyn Magazine. It’s going to be a while.

The co-founder and artistic director of Coney Island USA, the arts nonprofit behind the Mermaid Parade, the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, and the Coney Island Museum and Burlesque at the Beach, Dick Zigun is also the self-appointed, non-elected Coney Island mayor for life.

He traces his path from Bridgeport to Coney Island by way of Yale Drama School, where he studied playwriting under David Mamet and Charles Ludlam in the class of ’78. After a brief stint in LA, he landed in New York, not on Broadway but among the freaks, weirdos, barkers, performance artists and burlesque along the boardwalk. You know, the fun people.

“I wanted to make popular culture. Everything I knew was wrong. People did not appreciate the irony of performance art. People did not want to pay even a few dollars to go into a theater and hear world music. They turned out to like drag performances and freaks quite a bit,” he told Brooklyn Magazine in January. “I wanted to pay the rent and that’s what people wanted.”

Zigun can tell you in great detail how Coney Island has changed since the early 1980s (back in the day, he partied with Lou Reed and sparred with Fred Trump) and how it had already changed several times over in the preceding 100 years. While 2020 was hard on him and his beloved boardwalk, you can catch him smiling outside today: His beloved Mermaid Parade is returning to the boardwalk in September. If you see him there, buy him a Nathan’s hot dog.

Ziwe is on track to become her generation’s next one-name star. The biting comedian and writer stars in and executive-produces the Showtime variety show “Ziwe,” a six-episode series that debuted in May, featuring sketches and musical numbers as well as highly meme-able interviews with notables including Andrew Yang, Fran Lebowitz and Gloria Steinem.

But Ziwerekoru Fumudoh didn’t come out of nowhere. Born to parents who emigrated from Nigeria, Ziwe grew up in Massachusetts, where she would attend Phillips Academy before going to Northwestern—experiences she says honed her ability to navigate awkward conversations about race and class.

Fans who have been paying attention know her from her YouTube show “Baited with Ziwe,” in which she tries to trick her friends into saying something racist. In the early days of the pandemic, she took a version of “Baited” to Instagram Live and attracted an increasingly more-famous list of guests. Which was surprising, given how frequently they found themselves saying stupid things—especially in response to questions like, “What do you qualitatively like about Black people?” The live component added a torturous element of tension and awkwardness to the mix.

Ziwe has also been a writer on the “Desus and Mero” show, and has written for The New Yorker, Vulture, Stephen Colbert and The Onion. Her first collection of essays will be out in early 2022. The working title? “The Book of Ziwe,” naturally.