This Montreal group is flying dangerously close to Christine and the Queens in their francophone song with “Queens” in the name, but no one’s complaining. Its psychedelic catchiness chills you out while pulling you in, meandering through an account of “an evening in Queens, dancing among strangers, time moving backwards in slow motion and falling in love.” Carry that energy into your Friday, and then look out for their forthcoming album, out in October.

To track the pandemic in rich-people media cycles: First we had the “why I left New York” essay. Then we had the “New York is dead” essay. Now we have the “New York is dead” rebuttal piece. TV writers, New York media who aren’t old enough to be collecting that quarter-mil, and even Jerry Seinfeld are all up in arms about how dickish and misguided it is to say the city is over, and their points are really not that hard to anticipate: If your life depends on only rich-people things, like other rich people and the service at expensive restaurants, your New York is certainly interrupted. But whether or not you are here, the city has gone nowhere, and the people who actually live here not only still do, but are having a pretty good time. We’ve got jazz bands playing in every park, block-by-block dance parties, and happy cyclists taking advantage of new pedestrian streets. All of which are cited as evidence in the Intelligencer’s “Obviously, New York is a Fiery Hellscape of Crime, Anarchy and Misery,” which also serves as confirmation for defectors who only read the headlines.

But is New York, like, quantitatively waning? The answer is a big fat “NO” from Jeff Andrews, the Curbed data journalist who’s debunking those exodus theories that people can’t seem to resist. While it’s true that Manhattan’s vacancies are rising, he says, that was happening already because the borough had become unsustainably expensive (same re: San Francisco). How about the undeniable rush to suburban real estate? The suburbs are just catching up from several lockdown months of not being able to sell houses, actually. Furthermore, suburban houses aren’t selling faster, or more often above their list price, than urban homes. What we’re learning here is something we supposedly learned in high school: that correlation and causation are different— and maybe, if we’re reporting news for a VERY hyped-up public, we should lean into those fact checks.

Obviously, things are different, though. And of course, New Yorkers of all eras like to reminisce about ~before~. Leaning at once into nostalgia and the future, here’s a pandemic-time short by Lorem reader and fellow New Yorker Naz Riahi about the bookseller Erik DuRon. I have no idea what his real life is like, but in the film, all his friends have escaped, and Fast Company says his loneliness paints “the beauty of New York during a moment of existential crisis.” If you, too, need a friend, meet Erik.