Earlier in the spring, while riding my bike and delivering fruit around Bogotá, Colombia, I passed by dozens of ...
When a Union soldier from upstate New York marched through Manhattan, Kansas, during the dismal Civil ...
We may feel isolated now, in our homes, or apart in parks, or behind plexiglass shields in stores. But we are never alone ...
When I needed to donate a box of vegetables recently, I called a nonprofit in my neighborhood in Queens, New York, that organizes low-wage immigrant workers. As we arranged the pickup, the organizer, Will Rodriguez, said, “You know, Rinku, we don’t usually do this stuff, but we just had to jump in because the need is so great. People are suffering so much.”
By “this stuff,” he meant mutual aid, in which members of a community work together to meet each other’s urgent needs. Normally, the day laborers and domestic workers who are members of his organization, New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), work together on direct ...
Early one morning in 2012, Subhi Nahas woke up in a hospital bed near Idlib, Syria. The bright, boyishly handsome 22-year-old couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. The day before, his father had slammed Nahas’s head into the kitchen counter so hard that he had to be carried to the emergency room.
Around this time, a militia group called the Nusra Front, with ties to al-Qaida, had formed near Nahas’s town. He had heard rumors that they’d kidnapped and killed several gay men.
Nahas, who had near perfect grades in his third year of college, stopped going to school, fearful ...
