Habitats Archives - Page 12 of 16

New York City

For the Love of Strangers

Meditations from the epicenter

April 9, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

My own favorite anecdote is in the same mode. A friend was wearing beloved red, clown-like shoes on the subway one day and she soon realized that someone sitting across from her was eyeing them. The person then looked up at her and said: “I could be friends with you.” Strangers ...

Migration

Essential Services

The Unique, Unadressed Plight of Undocumented Immigrants in the COVID Crisis

April 7, 2020 • by José Ángel Navejas

What makes the current crisis familiar is the sense of foreboding, of knowing oneself disposable at any moment. What makes it contradictory is the impossibility of staying put. For most of us, staying home is as unnatural as it is illogical. A violation of our faith in universal principles. If ...

Climate & Ecology

Enduring the Chernobyl Disaster

An interview with Kate Brown

April 7, 2020 • by Damian Roos and Kate Brown

Damien Roos [DR]: This is your second book centered on the topic of nuclear energy. Did you set out with a suspicion that the impact of the Chernobyl disaster had been underreported? Kate Brown [KB]: I did, yes. In some ways, this book is a sequel to this first book I ...

Climate & Ecology

A Promiscuous Formalist

An Interview With Brian Teare

March 29, 2020 • by Brian Teare and Richard Sharpe

Richard Sharp [RS]: In “Clear Water Renga” you place each stanza on the page to create what looks like a river flowing downstream. How do you decide on forming your work and how does it impact the message specific to that poem overall? Brian Teare [BT]: I’m a promiscuous formalist. Promiscuous ...

New York City

The Corner Store in the Digital World

Bodega Culture’s Local Appeal and Global Reach

March 11, 2020 • by Quizayra Gonzalez

Products of the great post-World War II Puerto Rican migration to New York and the Northeast (“bodega” is a repurposing of the Spanish word for wine cellar), bodegas today reflect shifting demographic trends. Lamb over rice is on offer at my local Yemeni-owned bodega; two blocks away, I can buy ...

Film & Performing Arts

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

How a hit Broadway musical was born in New York’s post-war bohemia

March 2, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

We print this excerpt from Julia L. Foulkes, A Place for Us: “West Side Story” and New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) in celebration of the new Broadway production of West Side Story that opened at The Broadway Theater on February 20, 2020. The choreographer Jerome Robbins and the actor Montgomery ...

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

New York City

Are de Blasio’s Rezonings a Trojan Horse for Gentrification?

Probably Not.

February 22, 2020 • by Alex Schwartz

Mandatory inclusionary zoning applies to neighborhoods that are rezoned for higher densities and also to individual sites granted higher-density zoning variances. It offers developers several options, all of which specify minimum percentages of units that must be provided to households earning various percentages of what is known as “area median ...

Are de Blasio’s Rezonings a Trojan Horse for Gentrification?

New York City

Time for a Real Look at How the New York State Workers’ Compensation System Treats Workers

February 16, 2020 • by James Parrott

Improvements in reducing workplace injuries have slowed in many industries, particularly those employing low-wage workers, and New York has seen a disturbing rise in fatal workplace injuries in recent years. More than half of those receiving payments for lost worktime injuries are low-wage workers, and, prior to injury, three-fourths earned ...

Time for a Real Look at How the New York State Workers’ Compensation System Treats Workers

New York City

Bad Medicine

Arbitrary Caps and Cost Shifts Won’t Heal Medicaid

February 15, 2020 • by James Parrott

Instead, gimmicks such as moving some spending forward by a few days into the next fiscal year, as was done the past two years with Medicaid, served to mainly obscure the steady rise in Medicaid spending and pushed a reckoning down the road. That reckoning is no longer avoidable. Six million ...

New York City

A System that Sets Families Up To Fail Badly Needs Reform

February 8, 2020 • by Jim Purcell

Jim Purcell is the President and CEO of the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies. This article was originally published by Urban Matters.

A System that Sets Families Up To Fail Badly Needs Reform

Migration

Why Nationalism Hurts Us All

Eliminating borders would be revolutionary

February 7, 2020 • by Nandita Sharma

Nationalism is central to the maintenance -- and expansion -- of border control regimes. Defense of laws denying freedom of mobility across national territorial borders animate large swaths of those defined as the nation-state’s “citizens.” Anti-migrant politics is sold as an effective response to experiences of impoverishment, expropriation, and exploitation. ...

New York City

Love and Death on the Streets of New York

Why West Side Story is back

February 3, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

But that may be about to change. A radically new production of West Side Story will open on Broadway next month. And a new West Side Story movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and using locations in Harlem and Paterson, NJ, is to come to the screen later this year. Urban ...