Celebrating Community
Tessa Williams isn’t your average business owner. In a world focused on maximizing profits and efficiency, she centers her work on art and community. Recently, she was packing a pair of delicate vases to be shipped when she noticed that the online order was from a nearby address. She called the customer, explained the situation, then refunded the delivery fee, […]
Tale #1: Sometime around the turn of the century, I was in love. She may have been too. Or maybe it was just a dysfunctional period of mutually assured destruction we’d suffered together. Anyway, we made each other laugh, which is nearly always how my problems began. Neither of us was involved with anyone else, but, because of what then […]
In 1980 I moved to a rooming house in Manhattan. Three feet of my room was below ground level. One morning I woke up, opened my eyes, and saw a cat staring at me from less than a foot away. Our eyes lock. I’m terrified. Afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. It’s calmly studying me. Is it the Devil? When […]
The Barnacle Parade has become an annual celebration in Red Hook, which began on the first anniversary of Hurricane Sandy in 2013. The parade celebrates the community’s resiliency and a tradition of the parade is that it ends at Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies (185 Van Dyke St.,) where the family business gives members of the procession free key lime […]
This past October, I walked into the Wythe Hotel eager to see the screening of the film and docuseries, Foster Care Film. I could feel the anticipation in the room, I had heard a few things about the Foster Care Film episode, Absence Presence, but nothing prepared me to be as moved and inspired as I was watching the film […]
Telephone pranks are usually seen as an entertainment for kids – but international politics has actually discovered that it could also be a very serious issue, moreover if the victim is Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, a front-runner of Ukrainian support. On November 1st, a Russian comic duo, Vovan and Lexus, released online the audio of a prank where Meloni was […]
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in October, about a dozen transportation enthusiasts assembled at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering in Downtown Brooklyn, their predominantly male bodies warming the room and filling it with the scent of body odor. Each room had a different scheduled presentation or discussion topic as part of 2023 Transportation Camp—a conference for those passionate about transportation—and […]
Part One: The Person I Most Admire. Back when The Great Trumpkin first descended the escalator, we were visiting Grandma Miriama at her house in the Slope, at first, she softly growled in gradually ascending volume and then she spat out, “I know his type well; I remember when they marched into Poland.” Miriam recalled “The Prime Minister announced we […]
All major European tourist destination are filled with German tourists. Not young ones, but mostly the elderly, in groups, walking the streets slowly, driven by their guide talking to them through headphones. This situation gets worse in the mountains, where every European camping spot and hiking route is invaded by German tourists of any age, fully equipped, moreso than any […]
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind In today’s sharply divided political world, Hannah Arendt’s words, (in reference to the Holocaust) ring true. Arendt’s assertion that people are not inherently evil is an optimistic worldview – the real […]