A Politics of Ambition
Politics cannot just be about consensus. It must also be about conflict. More important, it must always be about asking for more.
Spring 2025
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Who Benefits from Public Land in the Bronx?
FreshDirect’s move to an already heavily polluted neighborhood begs the question: who benefits from public land in a borough that is at once an industrial sacrifice zone and the target of aggressive gentrification?
A Book as Big as Life
City on Fire—Garth Risk Hallberg’s massive and elaborately constructed novel about New York in the 1970s—offers the contours of the great social novel. But it struggles to reveal the ways in which power actually works.
Close Encounters
How can widespread inequality progress alongside widespread concern about its ill effects?
De Blasio’s New York
As admirable as de Blasio’s early achievements have been, they have only begun to address the massive problems the majority of New Yorkers face: poverty, unemployment, low wages, exorbitant housing costs, educational failure, and the disproportionate harassment of young men of color.
Film the Police!
In August people filled the streets in Ferguson, Missouri, following black teenager Michael Brown’s death by police shooting in the city. Hundreds of protestors in New York and across the country gathered to show solidarity with protesters in St. Louis …
From Zero Tolerance to Cure Violence:
Is New York City Shifting on Gun Crime?
On the evening of Sunday, July 29, two “violence interrupters”—staff members of the Brooklyn-based organization Man Up! Inc.—rushed to the borough’s Brookdale University Hospital. A man had been shot in the face outside a Quickmart in East New York, and …
The Climate Movement Has Arrived
This post originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. Less than two weeks have passed and yet it isn’t too early to say it: the People’s Climate March changed the social map—many maps, in fact, since hundreds of smaller marches took place in 162 …
Can New York City Survive the Sea?
How did the largest city in the United States become the most prone to flooding?
More Horror Than Hope: The Comic Art of World War 3 Illustrated
Since the late 1970s, World War 3 Illustrated has channeled comic artists’ outrage at a world of endless war, ecological exploitation, and the brutalization of social relations.
Hurling the Little Streets Against the Great: Marshall Berman’s Perennial Modernism
For Marshall Berman, the street was not just the site where modernism was enacted; it was modernism incarnate.
Subsidizing Inequality: New York City’s Crooked Development Agenda
For far too long, New York City development projects have heavily subsidized corporations and big banks at the expense of small businesses and low-wage workers. Will Bill de Blasio do anything to change that?
The Souls of Black Teachers: Reading José Luis Vilson with W. E. B. Du Bois
The schools of New York are now more segregated than at any point in the state’s history, and are the most segregated schools in the nation. New York City math teacher José Luis Vilson’s This Is Not A Test is a powerful account of how today’s resegregation holds back students of color—and how black and Latino teachers can fight back.
