"Often, the question of which place-names stick is about which ones hit our ears right."
Tag: New York
Babe Ruth’s New York @100
Ruth embodied a new and yet very old phenomenon—celebrity—in a technological era poised to capitalize on him.
Whose Brooklyn?
In 1939, the editors of Fortune planned a special issue of the magazine on New York City. They tasked James Agee—who had recently filed another Fortune assignment, which would culminate in the ...
Public Thinker: Frances Negrón-Muntaner on Puerto Rico, Art, and Decolonial Joy
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an innovative and multimodal thinker and artist, and a professor ...
B-Sides: Paule Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones”
The July 1960 issue of Esquire—dedicated to New York City—included ...
The Breaks of History
Ralph Ellison once suggested that “living with music” provides us with “an orientation in time.” Music, in other words, helps us locate and anchor ourselves within a history that exceeds us. Living ...
Passion and Presence: Maria Irene Fornes, 1930–2018
In 1999, in an interview I conducted with Maria Irene Fornes on the eve of a ...
Watery Roots: The Alex Haley Swimming Pool, Ithaca, NY
The writer Alex Haley was born in the city of Ithaca (just south of Ulysses, NY) ...
No Exit: Recreating George Tooker’s “The Subway”
Late on election night in 2016, I rode the subway home from what I had hoped would be a celebration, but the car was full and quiet and covered by a pall. Perhaps not everyone was thinking of the election ...
The Art of (Not Forgetting) War
Many of the images in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibit World War I and the Visual Arts depict the war in such violent detail that their authors ...
Kill Your Idols
In April of 1966, Andy Warhol held the first of his now infamous Exploding Plastic Inevitable events at the Polski Dom Narodowy on St. Mark’s Place. A healthy buzz had already developed in the ...
From “A New Practical Guide to Rhetorical Gesture and Action”
The National Theater of the United ...
The Gowanus Overpass: Brooklyn, New York
In 2012, I moved into a Sunset Park apartment with a kitchen window nearly perpendicular to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway ...
Police Brutality, a Horror Story
Victor LaValle’s new novella bridges the weird and the ordinary, and reveals the ordinary to be all the more terrifying. LaValle employs the paranormal not to reject reality, but to open a portal ...
“The Night Of” and the Didactic Procedural
Within a few minutes of starting the HBO mini-series The Night Of, any experienced television viewer knows that they are embarking on a crime procedural. The show’s credit ...
Art, Protest, Riot
If we could break America’s spellbound gaze on the presidential election, the pressing question of national politics would be this: will the recent fires ignited by Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives ...
“Every Negro Walk In A Circle”: Commuting With Marlon James
Biking alongside Manhattan’s West Side Highway two winters ago, I ran into a group of demonstrators. That evening Officer Daniel Pantaleo had been acquitted, after infamously choking Eric Garner to ...
HBO Gets High (Maintenance)
The new season of High Maintenance premieres on HBO tonight. For those who don’t know it, the series was created by Katja Blichfeld and her husband, Ben Sinclair, who also stars as the main ...
Commuter Lit: How to Do an MFA on the MTA
When I moved to New York three years ago, to start graduate school at Columbia University, I took pains to rationalize my decision to live in Brooklyn—rather than, say, Morningside Heights or ...
Urban Park Poetics: Summer in Marcus Garvey Park
For city dwellers, summer is park season. Warm weather draws people out of their homes, onto the streets, and, if they’re lucky, into a nearby park to enjoy recreation of all kinds (eating, napping ...