My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, […]
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A Twee Grows In Brooklyn
It’s as if the tumor of hipster culture that formed when the cool kids moved to Williamsburg had metastasized into a cluster of cysts pressing down on parts of the borough’s brain. Around the militantly organic Park Slope Co-op, for example, or Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, where you can buy rings glued to typewriter […]
Sir Roger’s Run
Today it is as hard to keep up with Sir Roger Bannister’s mind as it once was to keep up with his feet. With the offer of tea and biscuits out of the way, Sir Roger, 82, sits down at the table in the living room of his Oxford flat, takes up his pencil and […]
To Heaven by Subway
On this Memorial Day weekend, travel back to August 1938 to New York City’s Coney Island on a hot summer Sunday. The article profiles the narrow strip of land where Brooklyn meets the Atlantic and thousands of New Yorkers still pour out of the subway to eat hot dogs, ride roller coasters, visit bathhouses and […]
Homelessness in the Age of Bloomberg
We had four options: join Ready Willing and Able’s program, which prepared men to become street sweepers and janitors; sign up for a Bloomberg administration program which presents participants with a one-way ticket out of town, so long as the applicants could provide a contact person in the destination city who would agree to host […]
Almost Amis
And so Martin Amis and his wife, the author Isabel Fonseca, are coming to Cobble Hill. And what’s it like being a writer in Brooklyn? “I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan,” Colson Whitehead once wrote in The New York Times, “but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when […]
A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison
There was no crusading journalist, no nonprofit group taking up his cause, just Inmate 95A2646, a high-school dropout from Brooklyn, alone in a computerless prison law library. Jabbar Collins pried documents from wary prosecutors, tracked down reluctant witnesses and persuaded them, at least once through trickery, to reveal what allegedly went on before and at […]
Signposts in a Strange Land: Writers Roundtable on New Orleans
“The Bywater, two neighborhoods down from the French Quarter, where I live and work, is the most active new art scene—it’s totally exploded recently. We’ve been calling it Williamsburg South because we keep meeting kids from Brooklyn and we can’t keep up with the new writers and artists who’ve been moving into the neighborhood. New […]
The Right Way to Pray?
“Prayer is like other activities,” the Rev. Daniel Henderson told me when we met at the tabernacle the week before Easter. He was visiting Brooklyn with a group of seminary students from Virginia. “You learn from people who are already good at it.”
From Brooklyn to Worthington, Minnesota
Novelist Tim O’Brien revisits his past to come to terms with his rural hometown
