The Corner Store in the Digital World

Bodega Culture’s Local Appeal and Global Reach

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 ...
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The Corner Store in the Digital World

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

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

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

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

Bad Medicine

Arbitrary Caps and Cost Shifts Won’t Heal Medicaid

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 ...
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Bad Medicine

Why Nationalism Hurts Us All

Eliminating borders would be revolutionary

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. ...
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Why Nationalism Hurts Us All

Love and Death on the Streets of New York

Why West Side Story is back

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 ...
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Love and Death on the Streets of New York

I am a Migrant

I moved for the first time with my family when I was three years old, for a typical reason often described as “economic opportunity.” This meant, in my father’s case, an editorial position at the newspaper in the city where he was born and raised -- what is known as ...
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I am a Migrant

On Refugees and Innocence

Innocence is now the key qualifier for someone who claims to be a refugee. Paradoxically, as part of this moralized regime, innocence is also claimed by those who grant asylum. The qualification that refugees must be seen as innocent can change their fate at different points. Those requesting asylum may ...
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On Refugees and Innocence

The Climate-Migration-Industrial Complex

This complex is composed of private companies who profit by securitizing nation-states from the effects of climate-related events, including migration. This includes private detention centers, border construction companies, surveillance technology consultants and developers, deportation and transportation contractors, and a growing army of other subcontractors profiting from insecurity more broadly. Every ...
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The Climate-Migration-Industrial Complex