Featured Articles
Selected stories, prominently featured (ie not news, not lifestyle, etc.).
Free female products reduce ‘period poverty’
By Ashanty Rosario In New York City, the demand for menstrual products in shelters, schools, and street outreach vans keep rising but the supply doesn’t keep up. With about 350,000 individuals – a third of them being women and girls – unhoused and inflation pushing basic goods out of reach, advocates for these women urge […]
How selfies reshape the concert experience
By Cailyn Williams Concert-goers Lara Afolayanka and Ashley Simplice steadied their cellphones, positioning the camera lens to capture the Barclays Center display screen as it shifted from a WNBA player advertising an upcoming game to a banner touting that evening’s Brooklyn stop on Tyler the Creator’s sold-out Chromakopia tour. “I definitely went on Pinterest and […]
Braiding hair, for cash and culture
By Kelsi Bowen A woman with brown micro-locs sat in the second of eight chairs stretching from the door to the back wall of Latifa Natural Hair Salon. The woman wore a multi-colored orange, yellow, red, blue and green silk chiffon maxi dress she had made in Senegal, where she was born. Oval-shaped, faux gold […]
Melting pot in a barbershop
By Asma Aouissi Meant as a gag when it was created in the 1940s, the barber shop sign aimed to attract a melting pot of customers. It announced: “We speak: Italian · Russian · Farsi · Spanish · French · Polish · Uzbek · Greek · Moroccan · Portuguese · Romanian · Bengali · And […]
Learning English to make an American life
By Sophia Lian At the U-shaped table, six adult students looked intently at their classwork with their pencils in their hands, ready to learn a life-changing skill. Those students come to that Lower East Side location from Sudan, Guinea, and Haiti. And they do so for one reason: to study a new language. “If you […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
One church’s 132 years of justice, arts activism
By Jordan Gay Pointing to a decades-old fountain on the corner of Washington Square South and Thompson Street, Keen Berger, 80, gives some background on Judson Memorial Church, the congregation she joined 42 years ago. “That little corner thing that has the spigot, it used to have water,” said Berger, who chairs Judson’s board of […]
Skateboarders demanded a space of their own
By Tarak Jayachandran It’s 5 p.m on a Friday in July in the East Village. The sky is overcast. The National Weather Service has registered the day’s high at 96 degrees, 10 degrees above the norm for this time of year in New York City. The skaters pile in, mainly guys, but also one girl. […]
From selling weed to peddling roses
By Madison Kim A white industrial bucket holds an assortment of fox tails, honeycombs and purple mists. Two green planters hold cat tails, daisies and pink panthers, wildflowers sourced from a friend’s farm in New Jersey. These things Martin Fritsche sells to NYU students and other steady customers. “I’ve seen him around the area while […]
A worker-owned LGBTQ bookstore
By Carl Tsegah The air is crisp as Merlin Sabal opens the door to the BlueStockings Cooperative Bookstore. The morning sun illuminates a flag near the entrance whose rainbow colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, signifying the LGBTQ community. Sabal, 28, has spent the last four years as one of the owners […]
In Nigeria, Brooklyn and Other Points Abroad, Ancient Art of Tie-Dye Thrives
By Oluwatobi Oyinloye Adesina Adeseye dips a sponge into wax that was boiling in a tin pot sitting directly on top of a cylinder of propane gas. Quickly, he moves the sponge across plain white fabric, making whirls, swirls, straight lines, dots and all sorts of asymmetrical shapes. When the wax dries, he dunks the […]
Son Rallies for Mom Killed by Cop
By Marian Caballo Spectrum staff The first time he heard a protester shout his murdered mother’s name, Andrew Ocasio broke down. “I was balling, with tears. It really hit me that day,” he said, remembering what happened after he spoke at a June Black Lives Matter rally. He’d started showing up at those rallies to […]
Virtual Class Tough on Kids, Teachers
By Rachel Todd Spectrum staff A music teacher went viral after posting a video of herself describing virtual learning: Hey, so, some of you guys might know, I’m a music teacher. And I’ve found that one of the best ways that I can process the whole transition to online learning is to write a song […]
Reporting Assault Allegations Online
By Kirah Tianga Spectrum staff “He told me he wanted to have sex, but I expressed my uneasiness because I was worried his mom would come down. He told me it was fine, and he pulled me onto the floor and started pushing my dress up.”
Young Adults Tackle Justice Reform
By Zegale Talmadge Staff writer Eight years ago, when he was 17, Alex Davis was convicted of robbery and assault. Instead of being sent to prison, he spent a month at Rikers Island Correctional Facility and, afterward, began seven years on parole. “I was really depressed when I came out,” Davis said. “I had a […]
Peddling Poetry–On Demand
By Mikaela Querido Staff Writer Mira Rosenkotz’s handwritten sign, made of poster board and Magic Marker, announces what she’s peddling. “POEMS …Your topic…Your price.” A customer asks Rosenkotz to convey her first impressions of the stranger standing in front of her. Rosenkotz pauses, getting her bearings. She begins, her fingers working the keyboard. Tch-tch-cha-tch-tch-cha … […]
A “City of Gold” that Doesn’t Shine
By Ashley Quinonez Spectrum staff Valentin Peralta eased the Sidewalk Tacos food truck into a space on West Fourth Street, put the gear in park and began doing what he does at the start of every workday. The boxes of avocados, tomatoes, cilantro, tortillas and other ingredients for cooking Mexican dishes were the first things […]
Washington Square Park, A Constant Amid Change
By Annie Li Spectrum staff Back when Victoria Larkin was growing up, the rent her single mom—a part-time actress and liquor store cashier—paid for the family’s Upper West Side apartment was $340. Today, it’s $4,000. “Somebody like her could never make it here, now,” fiftysomething Larkin said of her working-class mother. “And that is just […]
Brown Comics Spotlight Whiteness in the Entertainment World
By Mina Mohammadi Spectrum staff Of all the racial and ethnic minorities wanting to work up front in the entertainment industry, Muslims and Middle Easterners–groups often wrongly lumped together–are especially racing to catch up and make sure their communities’ experiences get captured on stage and screen. There have been some mixed successes. The television series […]