The New Republic

The weather during mid-summer in Manhattan is frequently unpleasant, particularly the viscosity of the air--the feeling that one is breathing and moving through water at least as much as air. Perhaps that is why today, as I was walking to the subway and feeling oppressed by the dull, cloudy light and the general muddiness of the atmosphere, I began to think, as a kind of consolation, of the glorious weather in September, when summer is ending and autumn has not yet taken its place. READ MORE >>

I was yearning to see the flowers that I love most this time of year--peonies--and it was a particularly lovely spring day, so my husband and I took the subway to Brooklyn to visit the botanical gardens there. Perhaps because it had been a rather cool spring, it turned out that we had arrived too early; the feathery blooms of the peonies were still tightly bound up in perfectly rounded, silky orbs. READ MORE >>

"Wearing Nothing but Attitude" --New York Times, May 1, 2005 READ MORE >>

It was a glorious spring day so my husband and I took the subway up to 104th Street to visit one of our favorite places in the city--the formal gardens in Central Park. They are not nearly so expansive or well known as the Brooklyn Botanic Garden or those in the Bronx, but they are particularly lovely, tucked away in that part of the park that is so far north that even many of the most ardent park lovers are unaware of their existence. READ MORE >>

Even though the Terri Schiavo controversy has all but vanished from the news these days, the family's graphic amateur videos of Schiavo's body lying helpless in her hospice bed and broadcast all over the country still occasionally come back to me, especially the frozen image of Schiavo's mother supporting her once-lovely daughter's head with its now vacant eyes, slack, slightly opened mouth, and neck scarred from what appeared to be a tracheotomy incision. READ MORE >>

Ever since the staggering pictures of naked Iraqi men being brutalized by young men and women in American uniform at Abu Ghraib first surfaced last April, only to be followed by the stunning news of torture and murder of prisoners not only in Iraqi detention camps but also in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and now, most recently, the astonishing reports of American operatives abducting suspected foreign terrorists and sending them to our "allies" in Syria and Egypt to torture them on our behalf--with its corny, yet horrifying Orwellian name, "extraordinary rendition"--I repeatedly find myself READ MORE >>

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Looking up at the towering, massive, early twentieth-century skyscraper that is the Municipal Building, I saw the names of my beloved city carved in Roman letters in a continuous line in blocks of stone: NEW AMSTERDAM MDCXXVI / MANAHATTA / NEW YORK MDCLXIV. Manahatta--what a beautiful name, I thought, so much more lyrical than New Amsterdam or New York or our present-day Manhattan, a name so lyrical that Whitman had written a lovely ode to it: READ MORE >>

The acclaimed "Aztec Empire" exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was going to close in just over a week so my husband and I met a friend uptown to see it. For me, the word "Aztec" immediately brings to mind two distinct impressions: elegant, "primitive," proto-modernist objects; and terrifying ritual human sacrifice, most notoriously, ripping the beating heart out of the chest of a still-living victim. READ MORE >>

The other day, as I was walking to the grocery store, I strategically moved toward the far edge of the sidewalk to put distance between myself and a pile of large, black trash bags haphazardly stacked against the side of a building. This sight is common in downtown Manhattan, as was the rustling I heard among the bags, which nevertheless made me start. Rats or mice, I thought, as I instinctively crossed the street to avoid them, but it was still light out, too early, it seemed to me, for these nocturnal creatures to be rummaging for food. READ MORE >>