Tag: lower east side
The States Have Never Been United
Is it news that people are angry with Marjorie Taylor Greene?
This week, the Georgia Republican took advantage of Twitter’s newly liberalized character restrictions to do what she does best: suggest something unhinged, and sit back while her political opponents’ heads explode in white-hot rage.
“We need a national divorce,” she tweeted. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.” The next day, she followed up
The Problem With Mothers and Daughters
The evening before my mother slipped into the fugue state she was in until she died, I said goodnight with my usual “I love you, Mom.” “But do you?” she murmured. “Of course I do,” I said, automatically. And that was that, her one invitation to have that conversation, declined.
But what should I have said? “I admire you”? It was true. “It’s complicated”? Also true. A lot of things were true. There was love, anger, guilt, regret. How
Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?
New York in the summer is a noisy place, especially if you don’t have money. The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine. The bourgeoisie are safely shielded by the hum of their central air, their petite cousins by the roar of their window units. But for the broke—the have-littles and have-nots—summer means an open window, through which the clatter of the city becomes the soundtrack to life: motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: ‘A Substitution,’ a Short Story
Three days before opening night, the lead actress quits my play to do summer-stock theater in the Catskills. “Occupational hazard,” the director tells me, meaning this is what happens when no one’s getting paid for two weeks of rehearsal for one performance only in a basement on the Lower East Side that seats 40 on folding chairs. In other words, opening night is the same as closing night. Never mind that I’ve put my heart and soul into this
Casa Adela and the Dreams of Loisaida
The poet Tato Laviera once composed an ode to the tripe soup and pig’s feet at Casa Adela, a Puerto Rican restaurant on the Lower East Side: “we walked into adela’s five- / thirty morning mountain smell / of madrugada simmering concrete,” he wrote, in his poem “criollo story.” Casa Adela’s founder and namesake, Adelina (Adela) Fargas, moved to New York in the nineteen-seventies, when she was nearly forty. “I was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico,” she once told a