Features

Undocumented Workers at the World Trade Center

United States policy toward Mexican immigration is suddenly on the table again. The Bush administration is talking about a new amnesty for undocumented Mexicans living in this country, as well as an expanded guest-worker program. One suspects that these initiatives have more to do with wooing Latino voters than with any recognition that the current […]

G ary and Virginia have lived at Berkeley Place in lower Park Slope, Brooklyn, for the past 29 years, almost since moving to the United States from Trinidad in the late 1960s. It’s a peaceful neighborhood of oak trees and brownstones, a neighborhood of middle-class homeowners near the park and immigrant renters farther west, families […]

In the category of good intentions gone awry, it is hard to beat the Americanpublic housing program. Public housing was born in the 1930s when liberal pressure groups helped starta quintessential New Deal program that was intended not just to help the poor butto put the construction industry back to work. After a couple of […]

I n most city neighborhoods, the flight to the suburbs continues–with families leaving the city the moment they acquire the means. However, in a handful of trendy cities, there’s been a movement in the opposite direction. This may be just what the cities thought they wanted, but it often leaves the poor with nowhere to […]

Last year, without warning, a close friend and gifted writer committed suicide. She was 75 and affluent, facing major surgery, a wheelchair, permanent incapacity; she declined that new life as unambiguously as she could. Several nights later, still raw from the news, I received a letter from the hotel-turned-assisted-living-facility–let us call it Shangri-la–where my 76-year-old […]

Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, Michael A. Bellesiles. Alfred A. Knopf, 603 pages, $30.00. It is as if Michael A. Bellesiles has overturned a table on which rested everything we thought we knew about guns in early America. The image of the rifle hanging over every American mantel, of settlers depending […]