Mrs. Maisel and Mrs. Jacobs
I'm bad at watching TV. That is to say, I can watch basketball, and I'll watch kid shows with my daughter (often while I'm reading). But...
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Is Denial a River Running Through New York?
A friend and I were having a beer after work one Friday. He's a white man, a bit younger than me, middle class, also with a kid in public...
How the Suburbs Became White
My grandparents fled from Jewish villages in Central and Eastern Europe around the turn of the 20th Century. The Cossacks and whoever...
The Paradox of Nostalgia
James T. and Karla L. Murray's "Mom and Pops of the Lower East Side," 2018. Nostalgia can be a pernicious social disease. I wonder if...
Death and the Living
Aretha’s death has kind of wrecked me. I’ve been listening to her non-stop, making playlists, watching videos, but I cannot explain why I...
Calling 911 While Becky
When police shot and killed Saheed Vassell in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, earlier this year, terribly on the 50th anniversary of Martin...
The Latte Class and Asymmetrical Buildings
I've been thinking about what people mean when they talk about gentrification. Not the scholars or journalists. Rather, how do people...
Notorious
Last year, the 2015 Biggie Smalls' "King of New York" mural, on the corner of Bedford Avenue and Quincy Street in Bed-Stuy, was supposed...
Whose City is It?
➜Of course the answer is, it's everyone's city. Isn't it? Or is it? ➜Williamsburg is the Brooklyn neighborhood to the north of Bed-Stuy,...
The Murder of Timothy Stansbury Jr.
Nineteen-year-old and unarmed Timothy Stansbury Jr. died on January 24, 2004, shot and killed just three short blocks from where I live...
The Man Who Hit Me
He punched me in the face. Twice. It hurt. The second time he punched me, he knocked off my glasses. Lucy and I had just exited subway...