Series
Public Streets
In Public Streets, our urban observation series, writers reflect on spaces and places.
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Making Migrant Spaces: 34th Avenue, Queens
Thirty-Fourth Avenue is a reminder that displacement from one location, perhaps at a far remove, can instantiate emplacement elsewhere.
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Between the Book Club and BookTok: Community Reading in Montreal
Page Break, a weekly hour of silent reading hosted by Montreal’s De Stiil bookstore, reveals broad generational differences in forms of literary community.
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Pieces of the Past at the Doctors House: Glendale, California
The house may appear as a mere physical artifact, but it contains larger stories of American migration and growth, reckonings with exclusion, and the advent of new technologies.
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Women’s Land and Language: Huntington, Vermont
In the physical space of HOWL, a feminist and separatist living community, discussion of feminist ideas takes on urgency when confronted with the immediate practicalities of daily living.
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Cracks in the Louvre Abu Dhabi
The museum has made its splash, but if it wants to be more than a work of starchitecture, it requires deeper collections and bolder curatorial vision.
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Jewish Havens: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
For centuries, the city’s Sephardim adhered to Jewish law within the community, but also had secular lives in the relatively lax Dutch state.
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Elvis’s Missing Belt: Tel Aviv, Israel
“As a teenager, I also worked at HaMeshulash for several months. It’s quite possible that I was the worst waiter in the history of the café.”
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A Statue Gives Romans a Voice: 2021, Rome, Italy
The people of Rome have been leaving notes on the Pasquino statue for over 500 years. And this practice continued in the pandemic, fortunately.
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Apocalypse and Anticlimax: The Petrified Forest, Calistoga, CA
Unlike us today, the Victorians who discovered this stone forest were less afraid of the future than they were of forgetting the past.
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What Folklore Erases: Under Columbus, Georgia
The current owner of the Lion House is happy to let rumors about his property’s basement passageway simmer.
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Literary and Manual Labors: Pittsfield, Massachusetts
“I have been building some shanties of houses …,” wrote Melville to Hawthorne, “and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays.”[none-for-homepage]
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A Quiet Disaster: Mexico City, Mexico
Apocalyptic writers would be surprised by the suddenness with which Mexico City, during the pandemic, took on the guise of a ghost town.
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The New Silk Road: Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
At the largest bazaar in Central Asia, an informal secondhand market has become something like a metropolis unto itself.[none-for-homepage]
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The Floating Park: Parc de Belleville, Paris
“It is rare, on a summer evening in Paris, to find this sort of quiet along with the sensation of having the city at your feet.”
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The Enduring City: Jakarta, Indonesia
In the parts of the city left behind is a Jakarta free from the globalized sameness of so many of the world’s megacities.
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One Border, Two Walls: Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora
The sun is setting behind the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation, and …
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“There Is Always a Norther North”: Highway 1, Alaska
There’s a fire burning by Swan Lake. For the sixth time in the last 20 years …
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“Kingdom of Dolls”: Sonneberg, Germany
In her mid-19th-century children’s book, Memoirs of a Doll, Julie Gouraud warns her readers not to unstitch their dolls looking for origins and inner workings …
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Fill the Halls: Space and Possibility in Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore today can feel like a city of security checks and gated passages, tall walls and …
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Risky Choices: Women and Cabs in Hyderabad, India
The arrival of app-based ride-hailing in Indian cities has made a significant difference in the way the middle class, especially young men and women …
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The Afronaut Archives: Reports from a Future Zambia
“Most Westerners don’t even know whereabouts in Africa we are.” So said …
