The Allure—and the Policing—of Subway Surfing Mayor Eric Adams’s administration has wrapped an expansion of invasive surveillance in the apolitical packaging of saving teen-agers from their addled selves. November 8, 2025 For more than a century, people have climbed on top of moving subway trains in search of a thrill. Now social media has attracted a new generation of daredevils. Photograph by Natalie Keyssar / NYT / Redux More pedestrians than not pause at a street memorial under an elevated section of the J and Z lines in North Brooklyn. This behavior is unusual. New York City is full of remorseless individualists who nonetheless stick to some codes very rigidly. When you encounter a memorial during your commute, the paying of respect is the quickening of your walk, the feigning of a blank mind, the averting of your gaze. And yet these pedestrians are forgetting themselves; they are slowing to a complete halt at this one altar because it is a display of something uniquely upse...
