A young transplant is drawn to the lively and fast-changing New York neighborhood a great-great-grandfather left behind. Cringe if you want, but we wouldn’t have been the first to turn a shiva into an open house. We’d all like to believe that our legacies are larger than a rent-controlled apartment, but this is New York, […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Kendrick Lamar, Hip-Hop’s Newest Old-School Star
The young M.C. is on a quest to become the best rapper in the world. ‘Everybody just wants to have fun, be with the scene,” Kendrick Lamar said when we met in his cramped quarters inside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn last fall. “Certain people get backstage, people that you would never expect. . . […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Mr. and Mrs. B
When Alexander Chee was a struggling young writer, working as a cater-waiter for William F. and Pat Buckley.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why So Many Bottled and Canned Coffee Drinks Taste So Bad
It took Blue Bottle a year and a half to get to the point where they could regularly produce iced coffee at this scale. The seed of the idea was a can of cold cappuccino that James Freeman had on a plane to New York in late 2011. “I got this canned cappucino for, like, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Common Core, in 9-Year-Old Eyes
A fourth grader at Public School 397 in Brooklyn struggles as he prepares for the exams aligned with the Common Core standards. Ms. Alcindor did not know what to do about his academic difficulties. Her English was too limited to be of much help with homework, and she had never heard of the Common Core. […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Woo Cho Bang Bang
In Brownsville, Brooklyn kids are joining gangs whose territories are based on the housing projects where they grew up. The warring gangs have helped made Brownsville the “murder capital of New York”: Prosecutors and detectives still don’t know when the battle of Brownsville started or what it was over. Some think it grew out of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
Giving Visibility to the Invisible: An Interview With Photographer Ruddy Roye
“I want to introduce white America to people who they might never have met, and I want them to fall in love too.”
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List
When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What It's Like to Watch a Version of Yourself on TV
At Matter, the real-life Larry Smith talks about the other true story behind Orange Is the New Black—the one about Piper’s husband. As the show began to come together, Jenji asked us a question: Could she call the main characters Piper and Larry? Tough choice. If the show works, it’s great to be “the real […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List
When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]
