The Cut - Full-time Job, Zero Formal Child Care

“It didn’t start this crazy,” says Alexa Luna, a physician’s assistant in Oradell, New Jersey. She tells me her convoluted child-care arrangement began as “a temporary fix” to get through the pandemic. To enable her to work three weekly 12-hour shifts at a hospital 40 minutes away, her husband, Sebastian, a biomedical engineer, drops their two daughters — 3-year-old Violet and 7-month-old Liliana — at her parents’ home on his way to his own workplace two hours away. But Alexa’s parents both have paid jobs of their own. Her mother, Rose, works one 90-minute shift as a school crossing guard in the morning and another in the afternoon. Her father, Max, works full-time for a bank on a hybrid schedule. The grandparents also have a shared side hustle as security staff at MetLife Stadium. When the girls are at their house, Max watches them during Rose’s work shifts. (Both Rose and Max opted to use pseudonyms for this interview, as Max’s employer has communicated that remote employees shouldn’t have child-care duties during working hours.)

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Eric Adams has a straw donor problem — read Intel’s guide to the scandal here. Thank you for your service, D.A. McCoy. Kids need to play, but they don’t need to play contact sports. Truman Capote is back in the Zeitgeist thanks to Feud, so you might as well read “La Côte Basque, 1965” in Esquire and then read Liz Smith on Capote biting the hands that fed him in an archival issue of New York. And who could have predicted that the wasteful, ridiculous NYPD robot wouldn’t be a huge success?

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