Is there a writing life than can safely dispense with categories like identity and commitment, which count so much in how we live now?
Tag: New York City
B-Sides: Fran Ross’s Oreo
“Oreo” is not the easiest read, but it is a book that is, in many ways, written against ease.
Why Renters Fought NYC’s Push for Ownership
“Doesn’t every New Yorker really want to own a co-op?,” a realtor asked a crowd of tenants in 1972. But this provoked only “a chorus of noes.”
B-Sides: Lucy R. Lippard’s “I See/You Mean”
“Few libraries list it among their holdings, and sometimes I have wondered if the book in my possession actually exists.”
“Streets Like Rivers”: Talking New York City with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
"Often, the question of which place-names stick is about which ones hit our ears right."
Art and Culture in Schorske’s Century
With decades of creativity—that ended with World War I—Vienna jolted Western art and culture forward into high modernity. But how?
A Beacon of Futurity and a Balm of Security
Guadalupe Maravilla makes multimedia art to grapple with his “traumatic experiences” as a unaccompanied child and undocumented migrant.
Getting Upsold by Real Estate
When prospective home buyers hire a real estate agent, they may end up getting more than they had pictured themselves bargaining for.
B-Sides: Gary Indiana’s “Horse Crazy”
For Indiana, disaster is both imminent and ambient, both apocalyptic and manifested in everyday ordinariness.
Picturing the Lost
In segregated neighborhoods throughout New York, memorials to those claimed by COVID-19 have appeared and evolved.
The Violence of Urban Vacancy
Houses without people, people without homes: New York has invested in empty storefronts and empty districts, even as most New Yorkers suffer.
Writing the Latinx Bildungsroman
Before our eyes, US Latinx writers are inventing a new form of the novel. The classic bildungsroman, or novel of education and development, typically ...
Public Thinker: Kim Phillips-Fein on Austerity and the Fall of New York
With New York City teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse at the end of 1975, Congress passed ...
The Big Picture: Trump’s New York
The lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, right next door to Grand Central Terminal, presents a generic corporate luxury—an aesthetic of high ceilings, sleek fountains of black ...
Immigration’s Daughters
The voices of the six Chinese American girls who narrate the short stories in Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart collectively convey the emotional texture—and often the burden—of striving. What does it mean to believe that life can and will improve? …
No Peace for Refugees
This past June, the Supreme Court temporarily reinstated a version of President Trump’s ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries. The “Muslim ban” made good on Trump’s campaign promise to ...
5,000 Years of Climate Fiction
Kim Stanley Robinson is not the first to write about Manhattan under water. Others, notably Nathaniel Rich in Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), have also ...
Rising Tides, Rising Profits
In New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson takes on one of the almost unimaginable yet probable outcomes of climate change: that in the foreseeable future, some ...
The Art of Subways
On January 1, 2017, after nearly a century of anticipation and setbacks, the Second Avenue subway opened for its inaugural ride. Riders flooded the three new stations of the East Side Q extension and ...
Visible Cities
We’ve seen a lot of maps in the past six months, but a multitude of maps doesn’t necessarily translate into an expanded sense of the territory. It can be awfully hard to find one’s place. During last ...