by Angela Starita Driving through Journal Square in Jersey City with a friend, we’re both amazed by the construction that has happened there in the last two years. In this case, amazement is a form of horror: the new buildings, an array of towers, are grotesquely out of scale with the rest of the city.…

by David Winner Unusual circumstances have given me an odd relationship with bodies, with nakedness.  My father wouldn’t have been caught dead at a nude beach and would have been utterly perplexed if anyone described him as a nudist but tended to walk around the top floor of our Charlottesville home with his lower half exposed. …

by David Winner After  Giselle died, I wanted to define the role that she played in my life, an uncommon relationship, a step-grandmother. Her existence had been presented to me by my parents as a fait accompli, an addendum to my list of older relatives: Baba and Jeta, my maternal grandparents from Prague who ran…

by Angela Starita Beauty supply shops are a mostly extinct category of small business. My father owned one in Jersey City, NJ, and I’d think of him every time I went to one on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s the right kind of street for a beauty supply store: a busy, rundown shopping area, with…

by David Winner Angela, my wife, and I are over-educated middle-class white New Yorkers of a certain age. When Angela taught at a GED program run out of a housing project on Avenue D in Manhattan’s East Village in the early nineties, she was known as blanquita, little white girl, an accurate and affectionate diminutive…

by Angela Starita In October, I received a jury summons for Kings County Supreme Court. The first day—exactly two weeks before the presidential election—lawyers vetted potential jurors for a case made against the defendant, David Cruz, who was on trial for second-degree murder and related gun charges. Looking down at my hands when the charges…

by David Winner I’m writing on Halloween, but by the time this is published the election will have passed, and we may even know the identity of our next president. Whether she’s won or lost, I wanted to suggest something that I think could have helped Kamala. But first a little background. In the Charlottesville,…

by Angela Starita During the pandemic, my 11-year-old neighbor, a lonely headstrong child from Bangladesh, came to my place daily. She’d walk right into the house and upstairs to my office once she realized that we rarely locked up in those months of seclusion. At first, I’d encouraged her visits hoping I could help her…

by David Winner Is it like that first moment when you touch certain parts of yourself as a child and find pleasure in it?  Or that first drink, that first cigarette? When I opened Facebook the morning after Trump got shot in Pennsylvania, several Facebook friends who share my basic politics were questioning what had…

by Angela Starita Captains back from Barbados, manor houses, sugar plantations, slavery. This is the economic backdrop of a Jane Austen novel. But New Jersey, central New Jersey, was, it turns out, a locus of this trade too. Or more accurate to say, it was a locus of the fruits of the sugar trade. A…

by David Winner Throughout most of my life, I periodically napped in the back sitting room of my parent’s house in Charlottesville, gazing at an enormous shelf of my father’s books. Why I am a Jew was an unlikely title to find.   Though my father was most certainly a Jew, he was fiercely disconnected from…

by Angela Starita A few months ago, I visited Freehold, NJ, an hour’s drive south of Manhattan. The town has serious Revolutionary War credentials as the site of the Battle of Monmouth, a tactical mixed bag from the American perspective but a definite win for local identity. I grew up in the town just south…

by David Winner My history textbooks in junior high school in 1970s Virginia presented history pretty much as I understood it from what would have been the point of view of my parents, standard liberal white academics.  America’s racial original sins would have been muted but not ignored: slavery, indigenous genocide, Japanese internment camps.  But…

by David Winner  Coming from a Jewish family that arrived in America between the Slave Trade and the Holocaust, I thought that we were ethically in the clear, but researching my family story for Master Lovers, a book about my great-aunt Dorle’s love life in the 1930s, brought me face to face with famously fraught…

by David Winner 1976 All sixth-grade summer, the name of the Greek historian Xenophon pounded in my ears like a minor chord banged upon a piano.  I had borrowed a book by him from my father’s shelves but misplaced it in the last days of school. Fearing the wrenching disappointment that accompanied misplaced articles and forgotten…

by Angela Starita New York magazine published a story about two sisters who decide to leave civilization and try surviving in the outdoors of Colorado. One has a 14-year-old son, and she brings him too. In fact, much of her motivation appears to be protecting him from dangers she perceives, existing ones and more she…

by David Winner “Forget skyscrapers, ice water, drinks, stockmakers, New York, half chewed cigars, and statues of liberty.  Think of camel bells, cyclamen and the last lions,” wrote Bill Barker, the commander of the northern province of mandate Palestine to his lover, my great Aunt Dorle in 1934, trying to encourage her to move from…

by Angela Starita Before I’d seen “Barbie,” my sister told me she’d liked it but hated the last scene, which she went on to describe. Oblivious to the concept of “spoiler alerts,” she spoke with considerable disgust about the lunacy of a doll who lived in a perfect world of clothes, sparkling beaches, and dance…

by David Winner  São Luís: Far Northeast of Brazil People crowd around a samba band playing on a crumbling colonial staircase. A man in his early twenties lightly touches my shoulder as I climb upwards, whispering something in Portuguese that I don’t understand.  I don’t think he’s trying to sell me anything. I stick out,…