Village Voice

Journalist Donna Minkowitz apologizes 25 years after breaking the story of Brandon Teena, transgender murder victim and subject of the film Boys Don’t Cry. Retroactively realizing it was “the most insensitive and inaccurate piece of journalism I have ever written,” Minkowitz examines what she sees now as her own internalized homophobia and ignorance of trans issues. 

In 1995, a Manhattan-bound J train crossing the Williamsburg Bridge rear-ended an M train, killing the J train operator and injuring more than fifty passengers. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has run the trains at suboptimal speeds ever since, while publicly blaming the systemwide slowdown on budget cuts and euphemisms for overcrowding. Village Voice transit reporter Aaron Gordon traces how the response to this single accident two decades ago set New York City’s transit system on a path to disaster.

Who are the most interesting women and men in the world? The archivists, guardians of our forgotten stories.

From commissioning limited edition prints to designing issues so their spines combined to create a single image, for thirty-three years this bilingual arts journal aimed to engage and shape arts culture in a more active way than most magazines.

An essay on the importance of embracing in literature the conflict and destruction likely to arise in America in the coming four years. The piece is written from the perspective of a Bosnian-born novelist who got stuck in the United States in 1992 because of conflict in his native country that upended everything he felt sure of.

“Truck after truck slowly makes its way through traffic, trailing exhaust. Kids run across a busy street to play with the wary chickens in a community garden. Nearby, an entire alley is filled with murals: One depicts a figure crouching in a gas mask, surrounded by garbage and smog.” How unregulated emissions and a political turf war is destroying the health of a Newark, New Jersey community.

Forget the police—Is copyright the next legal battle for graffiti artists?

After ninety years on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, can the last family-owned American matzo factory reinvent itself upstate?

A profile of the late journalist Steven Sotloff, tracing his path from funny, rebellious middle-class kid in Florida to war reporter in the Middle East. Sotloff was executed by ISIS last year.

The late Ellen Willis—a legendary feminist and cultural critic—writes about loneliness, human connection and aging radicals in the context of a solo cross-country Greyhound bus trip. The essay originally appeared as a 1981 cover story in the Village Voice, and was later reprinted in The Essential Ellen Willis.