The Confrontation That Broke New York

In the spring of 2023, a young Black man stepped onto a subway car in Manhattan.

He screamed, threw garbage at passengers, and announced that he was prepared to die.

New Yorkers often encase themselves in psychological armor on the subway, but for many of the riders in that car, this was too much.

Terror flooded in.

A woman hid her face in a friend’s chest; a mother tried to hide behind her stroller with her toddler.

One man began to pray.

Then a 24-year-old white man, an ex-Marine, grabbed the screaming man and put him in a neck lock, and five minutes later—by mistake? Intentionally?—left that man dead on the floor of the subway car.

To read the new book on that killing, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City , by Anand Giridharadas, is to recognize that the membrane separating safety and fear on the New York City subways appeared in danger of rupturing by 2023.

In the preceding few years, dozens of people had been pushed onto subway tracks, suffering injury or death.

Murder and assault had risen sharply.

The tension between chaos and order—often evident in New York—could be acute.

And in those five minutes, it snapped .

Before anyone could sort out the facts, too many people rushed to impose narratives.

Jordan Neely became the homeless Black man with the too-disposable life; Daniel Penny became the muscular vigilante who grew up in the white-bread suburbs.