Humans of New York

they both have a million dollars. But more important than that, they have a path for their dreams. That was me paying my spiritual debts.” Those were the only two friends he has raised money for, he said.

Stanton still struggles with his professional identity. He had tried calling himself a journalist, but it never felt right. When he called himself a writer, the writers piled on. “‘No, you’re not a writer. This isn’t writing,’” Stanton said, imitating them. “‘This guy’s being celebrated as a photographer, but he’s not a good photographer.’ What do I tell my mom I am? Every time I try on those clothes, they don’t fit right.”

In our conversations, he referred to himself as an “artist,” but recently he’s also been inspired by the idea of becoming a “channel for blessings.” After his brush with mortality, he is reconnecting with the idea that inspired him as a young man: that God is everywhere and God is love and that he can be part of it. (“I’ve got that mission feeling,” he texted me a few days after our trip to the Ginjan Café.) “I just think about when you pray for something good to happen to somebody. The obvious question is ‘Why don’t you try to be the answer to their prayer instead of just echoing their prayer?’ ” Stanton said. “I have felt God the most when He’s sent people into my life at the times I’ve needed Him most. Why not try to be that for other people?”

One evening, I asked Stanton by text which artists he most admires. Norman Rockwell, he replied, and he sent me an image of The Art Critic, in which an effete sophisticate puts a magnifying glass up to the portrait of a handsome young woman. When I asked Stanton why he likes the painting, he demurred. “Haha I’ll take my lead from the painting itself and won’t look at it under a magnifying glass,” he wrote with a laughing-crying emoji. Then, by way of further explanation, he sent me the Rudyard Kipling poem “The Conundrum of the Workshops,” a complaint about the shallowness of critics. But what is it about the painting that you like? I asked again. “Oh cmon, did you read the poem? It’s not subtle”—three cockeyed emoji—“and neither is Rockwell.”

As soon as it succeeded, Humans of New York was satirized, its wide-eyed earnestness mocked by parody accounts like Lizard People of New York and Goats of Bangladesh. (“I’ve been in hiding for months,” said a caption from the account Millennials of New York. “Leaving my life was painful, but I had no choice. All my friends started doing CrossFit.”) But the most durable criticism implicates Stanton for his refusal to engage in political debate. This critique took hold especially in the aftermath of his travels on behalf of the U.N. In 2015, a master’s student named Melissa Smyth pointed out that Stanton’s mission to “humanize” ordinary people all over the world presumed that the people were not human to begin with. A USC graduate student named Paromita Sengupta later argued that hony’s unrelenting wholesomeness whitewashed inequities: “The culture of positivity on hony demanded an attitude of uncritical niceness, without acknowledging that individuals are positioned differently on the axes of oppression.”

Stanton said he learned the hazards of taking sides in 2014, when he photographed a Sudanese woman with a Hasidic man. The two didn’t know each other but agreed to pose together. The woman was beautiful and young—“There is a very distinct beauty among people from the Sudan,” Stanton wrote in the post—and, as he was looking down at his viewfinder, he heard the man whispering. When Stanton looked up, the woman was crying and the man was walking away. “He just offered me $500 to go out with him … When I said no, he offered me $1,000,” she said. When Stanton posted the photo, he told the story of the man propositioning the woman. This was a mistake, he said. The social-media mob gathered. “It started with just ‘Let’s find this guy!’ Massive anger toward the man,” Stanton remembers. But then the rage veered toward Stanton; he was labeled an anti-Semite, and Stanton received an email saying the man’s son had attempted suicide. Distressed, Stanton took the post down, and “that’s when the pain started. Because I silenced the voice of a Black woman in favor of a white man.” Commenters started calling him racist—“And I knew right then that the internet was not the place to adjudicate moral disputes.”

Remaining apolitical became a guiding principle of hony. And Stanton chided his followers when he perceived that they had crossed the line, as when, in 2014, a woman named Brianna Cox (who now goes by Brianna Meeks) entered the comments section to offer an alternative perspective to the one articulated by Stanton’s subject, a white schoolteacher in Harlem. The teacher worried that his students didn’t live in a “culture of expectation,” but Meeks, who is Black, saw the problem differently: When parents live “in a culture of, ‘I work 16 hours a day,’” expectations mean something else. The comments turned into a brawl, and Stanton’s assistants blocked Meeks from commenting further.

Stanton doesn’t like being criticized, but he was also guarding his brand. How could he persuade strangers to unlock their secrets if they feared being eviscerated on his blog? And, more pragmatically, how could Stanton perform his job if he was occupied full time as a referee? Over the years, he developed a stratagem that helped his subjects feel protected while liberating him from the mess of having to make ethical judgments. By the start of the pandemic, he was giving his subjects total approval over the stories he wrote in their voice. He shows them the story before publication, and he will delete whatever details they want to omit and rewrite their quotations as they prefer. If they ever want a post taken down, he’ll delete it. On hony, the stories that go viral often begin by plunging deep into his subjects’ despair, but if it ever felt to readers that Stanton somehow benefited from lingering in their pain, he could point to the fact that the subject was in control the whole time. “My subjects have more agency over the outcome than just about anybody else who’s a nonfiction storyteller,” he told me.

Before we met with the Diallos, I went with Stanton to interview a middle-aged white woman whose name had come to him from a hony reader. The woman had left her husband by the side of an Arkansas highway after decades in an abusive marriage in a strict Christian sect. She now lived in Harlem and had found safety and community there.

Stanton’s interview technique involves something he has described as “following the heat,” in which he finds his subject’s most tender spots and probes until he elicits something deep. And in this first conversation with the woman from Arkansas, he focused on why she would have felt so powerless when her husband was not hitting or explicitly threatening her. “Most men control women through fear of violence or psychological abuse,” he told her. What specific thing was her husband doing to control her? She described how her husband would make her eat ice cream when she was trying to lose weight and how, during a visit to her parents, he bullied her into saying she loved him more than she did them. When she described how she groveled at her husband’s feet, begging forgiveness, Stanton continued to press. As it continued, Stanton’s interrogation started to feel both oppressive and naïve. He said, “In every story, I want to understand—”

“Why I let him?” the woman interrupted. “—What was it that was keeping you in place.”

So she talked about how her husband was a pastor and her father and grandfather had been too. In leaving her family, she had betrayed everything she had been taught to love. She spoke about wanting to die in an accident or through illness so she wouldn’t be tempted to kill herself and smear the name of Jesus. The woman’s eyes brimmed with tears. Stanton leaned over and clumsily clapped his hand over hers. “This is amazing,” he said. “Through your own sheer will you’ve come through.” He told her he could see the potential for an amazing story. The three of us walked up and down the block so Stanton could take pictures. As we did, he continued: “Everything bad that’s happened to you, when you look back on it, will make you more powerful.”

As I watched him work, it seemed to me that Stanton was already molding this woman’s life into a heroic tale of survival and grit. Having witnessed her distress, I became uneasy. Stanton and I have much in common, including our claims to compassion and our cravenness: the way we muck about in the emotional cavities of strangers and draw conclusions out of what’s there. But in that moment, his unremitting focus on individual gumption felt too myopic and his valorization of suffering too pat. I wanted to step outside my observer role and confront him with my own reaction to her story: Beyond this woman’s bravery, there were laws and a misogynistic culture handed down through generations that had shaped her life. He was planning to lift up the story of someone who had escaped, but these circumstances remained unchanged.

Over weeks of conversations and text exchanges, Stanton had withdrawn from my attempts to parse the power dynamics of the empire he’d built. As the sole proprietor of an economy of good, he could elevate his friends, his acquaintances, and strangers as everyday heroes; focus the generous attention of 30 million followers; and enrich his subjects, all the while insisting that his own values and politics did not come into play. Sometimes he’d evade my questions; other times, he’d grow upset or defensive. As the subject of a profile, the narrative was out of his control—and he hated it: “You sit in judgment of my life, my work, and my many mistakes and shortcomings,” he texted me early one morning. Later, when I brought up my discomfort with the way he interviewed the woman from Arkansas, he argued that his subjects “aren’t walking around thinking about their lives in terms of politics. That’s how journalists and professors look at the world, but my job is to express a person’s perspective of how they live their life. I don’t try to do it from 10,000 feet up in the air and get a hundred different opinions.”

Stanton admits he has amassed enormous power, but when faced with the question of what it all means—the new responsibilities that come with his project’s maturity—he gets brittle and repeats that he’s just trying to give power away. “Would you say that final approval is the greatest amount of power a storyteller can give to his/her subject?” he texted me one night. But even the way he constructed this argument—the storyteller bestowing agency upon the subject or withholding it—bothered me, and so I continued to press. When he responded, Stanton would sometimes lecture and, at other times, holler. Our disagreements grew so tense that, one day, in the middle of the street at lunchtime with traffic whizzing all around us, he spun around and stalked off, as if we were on a bad date.

The arkansas woman’s first encounter with Stanton was “one of the most exciting days of my life,” she told me later. She loved watching his mind work as she was speaking to him. After ten years, “he knows how to craft for an audience. I could see the little gears and the big gears in his brain. I knew what he was looking for, and I knew I had the answers.”

After the interview, she said, she cried on and off all afternoon. The appearance of Stanton in her life feels like a miracle: “There is a reason, an incredible fucking reason. I think it’s going to change my life in a dramatic way.” She would like to start a foundation for women who want to leave their marriages but do not neatly fit in the domestic-abuse category. But, also, she’s just grateful to be heard. Her story is “going to go all over the world. That’s kind of a redemption, if you will.”

On January 26, Stanton published 12 Instagram posts on the Diallos. “Annnnnnnd I will be canceling my day now,” wrote @alexakay47 in the comments. “My heart is already going to be broken,” wrote @lilicandifornia. Written in Mohammed’s voice, the posts told of how, as a teenager, his parents sent him to Atlanta for a short visit with family friends, which turned into a permanent stay owing to political violence in Guinea; how Rahim arrived in the U.S. several years later at age 15; how Mohammed—unable to support him—sent him away; how Rahim was picked up by immigration officials on a bus to Canada and placed in detention for a year; how their sister died in Guinea of sickle-cell anemia, and their father died thereafter. In the comments after the 12th frame, Stanton weighed in. “Anyone who would like to support Mo and Rahim can click on the link in bio to purchase refreshing, revitalizing and (soon to be) world famous Ginjan juice,” he wrote. “They’ve come this far with nothing to lean on but their own talent and determination. Let’s put some wind beneath their wings.”

Two days later, I visited the café. Mohammed was brimming with gratitude. “I didn’t think I had more tears to cry,” he told me. Then he showed me his laptop, on which he was tracking orders. In the past 48 hours, they had received 10,000 orders and sold 15,000 bottles of juice, more than they’d sold in sum over the past six years. (Coffee was just a fraction of sales.) The brothers had spent the whole day mesmerized by the world-map graphic on their tracker, where dots lit up when an order was placed and left a shooting-star-type trail when an order shipped to places as far away as Australia.

But it wasn’t just the purchases that overwhelmed the Diallos. It was also the outpouring of empathy. When Stanton first approached them, Rahim had worried a little that he might be packaging their suffering as a sales pitch. And he was glad Mohammed had been the one to give Stanton the lengthy, emotionally draining interviews and to fight with him over what would appear in the final story. But it was Rahim, the more reticent brother, who, over the next several days, continued to forward me the messages from strangers. A mother who bought the juice for her 10-year-old daughter after teaching her about bias against Muslims after 9/11. The director of outreach at a federal-prison program who commended the brothers for not giving up. “I loved it,” Rahim told me. “We are living in a society where everything is supposed to be perfect. No one is supposed to be in pain.” In retrospect, Rahim felt happy to offer up his pain to give solace. “How much therapy do you have to go to and pay for to get that feeling?” he asked me.

There had been a moment in the middle of publication day when it looked like the juice-marketing plan might collapse. Even before Stanton had posted the purchase link, readers had found Ginjan through search, and the ordering started immediately. The Diallos’ shopping-cart tool flooded, broke down. Stanton had warned them about this possibility. In the meeting six weeks earlier, he told them the link had to work perfectly because people inspired to buy juice on emotional impulse wouldn’t try twice, and Rahim, trained as an engineer, thought he had the technology covered. Then, in the middle of the hoped-for sales surge, Rahim had to swap out the old cart with the one Stanton had recommended. Rahim laughed, remembering. They didn’t panic: “We said, ‘Listen to the wise man, and do what he says.’”