Aboubacar Ndiaye

How did it come to be a socially acceptable fact of New York life that enjoying something popular involves waiting for over an hour? There have long been serpentine lines in New York City for the sorts of experiences you can't get anywhere else: Broadway tickets, skyscraper observation decks, Cronuts. This summer's lines, though, can seem borderline ludicrous: three to a street, blocks long, often for the types of things you can get almost anywhere in the city, like bagels, pizza, and pastries. They emerged slowly over the past few years and then, like a flood, a cumulative effect of TikTok constantly showing all of us what we are missing out on in our very own boroughs. The temptation is almost too strong — why not take the train 15 minutes to figure out if that slice of pizza is as good as everyone on your “For You” page is telling you it is? “It’s herd mentality,” one young woman, nearly rolling her eyes at herself for joining the hype, told Brock Colyar at Myka, a froyo chain. Now, especially along the Brooklyn waterfront and much of downtown, people wait for an ever-diversifying assortment of viral sweet treats, all the while petting each other's dogs, gossiping, minding their toddlers, checking Slack, and scrolling their remaining time in line away. Naturally, some New Yorkers are getting persnickety about the situation. As the haters’ thinking goes: waiting in line is lemming-like tourist behavior, what you do pissily at Disney World. (At least there you can pay for a fast pass.) Others champion the line people. “I don’t like when people make fun of the people who stand around in long lines,” the downtown writer known as Sotce recently wrote on her Substack. “Some people read Substack, some people wait in a line. Some people have vintage denim and read books by dead people. And really we all die.” For our latest cover story, Brock Colyar tackles the city's overwhelming line culture — talking to the people who revile the lines, the people who revere them, and the business owners who get hate mail over them even as their livelihoods depend on them. Read it, while you inevitably wait in line yourself: nymag.visitlink.me/YOVOIg