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The Making of a Molotov Cocktail
Two lawyers, a summer of unrest, and a bottle of Bud Light. It’s an audacious choice to pause in front of an Applebee’s restaurant on Flatbush Avenue and grant an impromptu interview to a video journalist shortly before you allegedly throw a Molotov cocktail into a police car. But the city was out of its
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The Pandemic Is Putting Parents in an Impossible Situation
As Americans struggle to plan for the fall school term amid a pandemic that isn’t going away, New York City unveiled a preliminary protocol to bring students back and provide some much needed relief for parents. But it isn’t nearly enough. Ben Hart spoke with New York contributing editor Lisa Miller about the limitations of New York’s approach and…
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Two Weeks With Rachel Noerdlinger, the Movement’s Publicist
It was early June when I first spoke to Rachel Noerdlinger, and she was worrying about the casket. George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis was to be held in 48 hours, and she was considering how images of the coffin, conspicuously placed at the front of the university sanctuary, might impact the national psyche after
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The Black Christian Leaders Revolted by Trump’s Bible Stunt
At around the same time police officers outside the White House were spraying tear gas into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in order for the president to limp pugnaciously to a 200-year-old church and pose for a photo holding a Bible like a bowling trophy — or, as someone on my Twitter feed said, “a
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It Hardly Ever Happens But Sometimes It Does
Last spring, about three months after my breast-cancer diagnosis and six weeks after my mastectomy, I received my “oncotype report,” the document that calculated my mortality risk. The report would give me the odds of being healthy for the next decade and help my doctors advise me on what to do next: would I need
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The Spaces Between Us
Some of my best friends own country houses. This is not a new discovery. One of the things I have loved best about my life in New York is exactly this, the wide diversity in the affluence of my friends — if you can call a group of mostly white, mostly college-educated, striving people living
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Our Way of Holding You
A Brooklyn rabbi on what it’s like to officiate a funeral over Zoom. Two weeks ago, Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, New York (where I am a member), performed her first virtual burial service. A member of her congregation had died at home of COVID-19, and because they were quarantined, his
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✴︎ Featured
Two Hours Daily to Sanitize, Two Hours to Cry
An emergency-room doctor struggles to keep it together — and find supplies. In the middle of the night, Emily Wolfe slipped away from her patients and into the break room. She was aching to get out of her mask. The virus was probably everywhere in the break room, all over everything — on the locker
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Walking the Dog Is the Only Time I Feel Sane
This morning I walked the dog. I didn’t sleep much last night (who’s sleeping?) and at 2 a.m. was on the couch texting with a friend about earthquakes and World War II and our sudden mutual alienation from our regular lives that seem, in retrospect, almost silly in their prettiness, but then 8 a.m. rolled
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The Stabbing in Morningside Park
Every generation, a crime tells a new story about New York. The murder of Tessa Majors is ours. At the 26th precinct, the baby-faced boy had to empty his pockets and hand over his backpack. He was holding $6 in cash. In the backpack, he had a small collection of school notebooks, all blank —“You