[...] “Smoking is back,” said Isabel Rower, a 24-year-old sculptor, one of the spirited Americans outside Clearing. “Weirdly, in the last year or two, all my friends who didn’t smoke, now smoke. I don’t know why. No one is really addicted to it. It’s more of a pleasure activity.” Across New York City, as the pandemic waxes and wanes, a social activity that had seemed diminished, or replaced (with vapes, cannabis and education), seems to have reappeared. Have cigarettes, those filthy, cancer-causing things — and still the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — lost their taboo?