Monthly Archives: July 2023
Vietnam veteran’s street art and backstory bring him friends, finance and a home
By Munazza Choudhury An elderly man sits atop a dented and dinged motorized red scooter that he relies on to get around. An injury has made his 79-year-old legs too weak for walking. Spackle and paint are splattered on his white T-shirt and blue jeans. He has propped a bag of pale blue tiles on […]
Jazz has a post-pandemic rebound
By Kai Russell When she was 19-years-old, Rie Yamaguchi-Borden started work as a cleaning person at the Smalls Jazz Club. She had no idea she would find her passion and career there. “It sucked me in strong enough that I started to take piano lessons, I started to sing, I started to play drums,” said […]
Gender, sexuality labels confuse some, give clarity to others
By Jayden Perera Male, female, transgender, gender neutral, non-binary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, two-spirit, third gender … Those are some of the labels for sexual identity and gender identity, which are two different categories. Some people say they understand some but not all of the labels. Some people accept all the labels. Some think some of […]
Weighing whether to grow old in New York
By Juan Colon During the six months he spent recovering from back surgery in 2020, Ralph Steiber, 76, couldn’t walk up the five flights of stairs leading to the Lower East Side apartment he’s lived in since 1975. “I couldn’t live here … ” Steiber said. “I had to rent out an apartment building with […]
Women taxi drivers are 1/10th of workforce
By Ishani Konar Of the 80,000 people driving taxis, limousines, Ubers, Lyfts and other ride-share vehicles in New York City, women are behind the wheel of only a few. Sixty-year-old Adalgisa Sanchez is one of those 8,000 women. With her son and daughter, single mother Sanchez moved to New York from the Dominican Republic in […]
Clotheslines save costs, help the environment
By Shafiul Haque For the immigrant Guventurks of Middle Village, Queens, hanging clothes out to dry is a family tradition. “My wife is from the countryside in Ireland and they always hang the clothes outside,” said Ufuk “Fred” Guventurk, 59, a Verizon technician who lives on 81st Street. “Clotheslines have also existed in my family […]
Fed up New Yorkers fight litter
By Kennedy Gayle Two weeks ago, Myles Smutney watched a man chuck a bottle out of a car. Responding to that offense, she picked up the bottle and gestured for him to roll down his car window. She threw the bottle back into the vehicle. She and the man exchanged a few words, she said. […]
Repair, Reuse, Recycle: What to do with old phones?
By Mirabelle Zhang For six years, Bonnie Soon has been using the same iPhone 8. In her closet, five of her old cellphones are collecting dust. “Oh my God … I don’t know where to throw [them] out,” she said recently, while walking her dog in Washington Square Park. According to a 2015 report from […]
Building community at the coffee shop
By Erin Yoon The customer was going on and on about how good the juice was. For two consecutive days, the man explained, he had bought that juice three or four times. “I guess I’ll be seeing you frequently then,” said barista Breslin Logan, 27, as his customer grabbed that pineapple juice and walked out […]
“Chalking back” to street harassment
By Cameron Alleyne In one Instagram post, a 13-year-old spoke out about a man who, first, asked her for directions and then flashed her as she turned to answer. In another, a woman shared that she was berated after not acknowledging a man who was catcalling her. On sidewalks around the world, girls and women […]
NYU labs help diversify STEM fields
By Sophie Gao Standing before a roundtable of 13 high school, college and graduate students considering careers in engineering, Ollintzin Mortera explained his latest three-dimensional design. “I’m working on inter-meshed steel connections. And we’re basically modeling it and making it scalable, so we can use it in different applications, like robotics. And so that we […]
‘Drag Story Hour’ combats homophobia, gender-identity biases
By Huria Ali The hate she received when she was 22, made Gloria Sotelo Quijano feel like she should stop being Lori Lu, the drag artist she turned into for performances and bookings for Drag Story Hour. “They will say very misogynistic, homophobic and even sometimes transphobic comments towards me … I got very, very […]
Innovating with 3-D digital fashion design
By Derek Sun Instead of sketching with a pencil and paper, Karina Ochoa designs her various clothing collections on a computer, using a special three-dimensional software that simulates real-life textures and colors of fabric and lets her skip what used to be the usual step of making a garment: Seeing if that fabric was suitable, […]
By opening up, youth lessen mental health stigmas
By Justin Miranda When he was 13, his 15-year-old best friend raped him. His parents made sure the police pressed criminal charges but that 15-year-old wasn’t convicted. “I wasn’t shocked with him being released because he is white and rich,” said the now 19-year-old, whose mother is Korean and father is Black. Because his crime […]
The good and bad of Instagram influencers
By Julianna Nunez Rows of millennium pink-colored display tables are at the center and line the walls of beauty store Glossier’s SoHo location. Its floor-to-floor ceiling archways frame a back wall whose design puts shoppers in the mind of New York City subways. Wall tiles of different shapes spell out “You Look Good” and, under […]
Books can provide escape, lessen stress
By Autumn Turner Jordyn Oksenstein, 16, sticks a blue Post-it on each page of author Emily Henry’s “Beach Read” which marks a favorite moment for January Andrews, the main character of that novel, one of the 13 books Oksenstein expects to read this year. That character, a romance writer, loses her faith in love after […]
Oh, the pressure! (To get into a top college)
By Isabella Alvarez-Gomez On a typical school day, Aryan Vadlamudi, 16, dashes through the front doors of Troy Athens High School at 7:20 a.m. From then until 3 p.m., he trips from class to class: AP chemistry, AP US history, honors pre-calculus and honors English. When classes end, he dives into his duties as treasurer […]
Masking still, despite pandemic’s official end
By Isabella Konecky As she waited at an East 14th Street bus stop, Lynn Chealander had her KN-95 plastered around her mouth and nose. Diagnosed with COVID-19 in 2020, Chealander hasn’t fully recovered. She considers herself “mildly disabled” from long-COVID. A manager for a tech company, the 35-year-old said she’s lucky to work from home. […]
Street performers aim to inspire and uplift
Street Performing in NYC By Anthony Jose Urena On a patch of concrete in Washington Square Park, Adjua Ajamu lays down his paisley-printed red carpet and, on top of that, a tip jar and a cube-shaped speaker that is connected to his phone. It powers the synthetic music that is the background for his singing. […]