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 when it comes to sus...

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 school. Educated an...

My grandparents fled from Jewish villages in Central and Eastern Europe around the turn of the 20th Century. The Cossacks and whoever else chased both my par...

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 anyone is completely fr...

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 am so hung up. I di...

When police shot and killed Saheed Vassell in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, earlier this year, terribly on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assass...

I've been thinking about what people mean when they talk about gentrification. Not the scholars or journalists. Rather, how do people affected by gentrificat...

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 to come down. In 198...

➜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, where I live. The pa...

Nineteen-year-old and unarmed Timothy Stansbury Jr. died on January 24, 2004, shot and killed just three short blocks from where I live now, in Bed-Stuy, Bro...

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 station. Sunday aftern...