Features

Would two inches really make a difference? No, I wasn’t taking a sex quiz. I was buying a new beach chair. After my first trip to the Jersey Shore this June, I had to admit I could no longer get up from my sand chair without a struggle. Another sign of getting older.  My neighbor […]

In 1968, a friend of Dr. Alec Pruchnicki returned from study abroad with a revelation: in Italy, healthcare doesn’t require insurance. “They don’t ask how you’re going to pay”, Pruchnicki’s friend told him, “they just take care of you.” That moment inspired Pruchnicki’s decades-long advocacy to bring that very system to the United States. Last

I was a Person of the Village many years ago, when graffiti slathered the subways, fires devoured the Bronx, doggy doo marbled the streets, and a weirdo named Son of Sam ran around killing people, and the city was “broke as a fish,” as my grandfather used to say. But people were connected, they talked

At six in the morning, long after last call, Daniel Root is most at home. The dive bars and restaurants are closed and empty and no one is there to notice he’s taking photographs. Even if someone did, they wouldn’t care. Root drifts around the Village, and when something reveals itself, he photographs it. This

On Sunday, May. 17, Hellenic food, dancing, and music held sway at Congregation Kehila Kedosha Janina’s 11th annual Greek Jewish Festival, which took up the length of Broome Street between Allen and Eldridge Streets on the Lower East Side. The festival lasted six hours, and several thousand people braved the 85-degree heat to attend. Familiar

It’s 3:30 pm, April 7, 2026, less than five hours before an entire civilization may be eliminated, according to the peeling Orange in Charge. It’s also Taco Tuesday, so we shall see. Last night, Monday night, I had dinner with my brother Paul at Via Carota. 9:30 pm. The place was eerily empty. I think

I can’t get anything done. I can’t write. I can’t take a Zoom meeting. I can’t even make a phone call. I can’t stretch out on the couch and take a nap. I can’t step out of my bathroom naked. I can’t relax. All I can do is escape from my apartment while they drill

High Times a documentary short about the magazine and its founder Tom Forçade is now on Hulu as part of 4X20: Quick Hits, an anthology of 20-minute documentaries about weed culture produced by Jimmy Kimmel. As I walk from the licensed cannabis dispensary along New York sidewalks scented with the ubiquitous smell of weed, it’s

Barbara Kopple’s 1976 film Harlan County, USA, chronicling the literal life-or-death effort to establish a coal miners’ union in rural Kentucky, is a masterpiece of documentary cinema. It’s human and humane and, despite its age, crackles with the urgency of collectivism and class consciousness. So monumental is the film that her follow-up feature—American Dream from

Robert Leslie’s audience is typically transient. They’ll pause to take in a song or two, maybe shoot a quick video, or take a moment to dance. But eventually they move on, quickly replaced by a new set of curious faces. As the sun sank in the sky over Tompkins Square Park on April 11, however,