Habitats Archives - Page 2 of 17

Habitats

Some Notes on the Earth Seen From Space

We have turned the sky into a mirror of our persistence and our forgetting

February 4, 2026 • by Laurie Sheck

1. It has been almost 58 years since astronaut William Anders lifted his Hasselblad camera toward the window of Apollo 8 and captured the now-iconic image of Earth hovering beyond the gray, desolate edge of the moon, blue-white and small and fragile, hanging in the pure blackness of space. How beautiful ...

Education

The Words We Learn to Fear

How authoritarianism begins with the policing of language

December 4, 2025 • by Maria B. Olujic

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz once wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” I didn’t understand that line until my own country broke apart. Now I see what he meant—when people learn to fear their own words, it is its own form of exile. Two of my uncles learned this early: ...

New York City

What Makes Cities Go BANANA?

On zoning, New York City’s housing crisis, and Abundance

November 4, 2025 • by Achilles Kallergis

The nearly hundred-year-old Holland Tunnel, the first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular tunnel, opened in 1927 after just seven years of work. By contrast, the humble subway station elevators unveiled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2020 took three years and approximately $80 million to realize. (The MTA, sensing commuter suspicion, even made ...

New York City

A Mayor Who Promises the Moon

Canvassing for Mamdani

October 29, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

In the run-up to this year’s election for New York City’s next mayor, I’ve spent several days canvassing for Zohran Mamdani. On every occasion I’ve been as much as a half-century older than the rest of my young, white comrades. Unlike most of them, I’m also a native New Yorker, ...

Climate & Ecology

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

A city holding its breath

October 14, 2025 • by Uswa Shamail

Environmental crises are often narrated in statistics, satellite images, and policy briefings, but what they obscure are the intimate ways in which ecological collapse infiltrates daily life. In South Asia, climate change is not an abstract future—it is a suffocating present that shapes how parents care for their children, how ...

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

Migration

Immigration Is Imperative

Without migrants, the US would be in dire economic straits

September 25, 2025 • by Purushottam Bhandare and Katerina Canyon

Donald Trump's accusation, in the 2024 presidential debate, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were "eating pets" may have quickly proven false, but it still led to sweeping policy action. Soon after Trump was inaugurated, the administration abruptly terminated the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) humanitarian parole programs, pulling the ...

History

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades

September 16, 2025 • by Catherine Simpson Bueker

Catherine Simpson Bueker explores the legacy of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act and how Vietnamese refugees in America reshaped US society....

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

Activism

On “Reconnecting with Nature” as a City-Dweller

An education in wheelbarrows, pin oaks, and herring gulls

September 10, 2025 • by Chrisaleen Ciro

A few weeks into my time here in NYC back in the fall of 2021, I volunteered at an urban farm in East Harlem. The crew of volunteers was diverse—some of us had experience growing food and others didn’t. At the time, I had worked on farms and market gardens ...

On “Reconnecting with Nature” as a City-Dweller

Europe & Central Asia

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

In an ancient forest, tourists and people on the move walk parallel paths

June 26, 2025 • by Inga Hajdarowicz

On the narrow roads of the Białowieża Forest, the last primeval forest in Europe, military vehicles occupy the space with the roar of their engines. A line of cars on the forest road signals the presence of a mobile police checkpoint at the Polish-Belarusian borderland. A border guard carefully stares ...

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

Genocide

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Reflections of a genocide survivor

June 24, 2025 • by Anonymous

As a genocide survivor who had relocated to New York from an open-air prison in Gaza in August 2024, I wondered what it would mean to be a Palestinian from the perspective of Palestinian Americans. Was there a space in America that kept them connected with their Palestinian identity? Where was ...

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Migration

Trump Versus Los Angeles, Immigrants, and the Rule of Law

The ICE raids in Los Angeles were the first step in Trump’s plan to impose martial law

June 12, 2025 • by Peter Dreier

Ten observations on the ongoing anti-ICE protests and Trump's misuse of our military to thwart legal protest: The ICE raids in Los Angeles were the first step in Trump’s goal to impose martial law and consolidate his power. This is hardly far-fetched. Even Congresswoman Laura Friedman said that the other day. ...

Trump Versus Los Angeles, Immigrants, and the Rule of Law

Literature

The Blue House

An excerpt from The Ocean in the Next Room

May 28, 2025 • by Sarah V. Schweig

I'm still here in the city I entered years ago.I've been in the city all this time.I don't look up and around much anymore.I've been studying philosophy and having a sonand killing time. I follow my son from roomto room in our two-room rental. While he sleeps,I kill a roach ...