On Gentrification, and Guilt

Browsing along in Curbed the other day, I came across a video that of course I, being a quasi-hipster, potentially-yuppie, near-suburban (although I’ve never lived in the suburbs, I have lived in the Midwest), organic-loving person would logically adore: Streetfilm’s Williamsburg Walks. The event, which opens up Bedford Avenue to pedestrians for a day, is [...]

Learn-a-Palooza: Knowledge Bonanza and Community Extravaganza!

This past May in Washington, D.C., people came together in the neighborhoods of Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle to teach each other everything they know. Literally.
Learn-a-Palooza is a one-day event in which temporary classrooms are set up across D.C., and regular people share their knowledge and skills with their neighbors for free. This [...]

Religion Beat: What do Religion and Belief have to do with Action?

In a country where the larger part of our population is religious, and where our current president believes that social change should come about through religious organizations, Former NYU Professor James Carse’s message might be hard for some to swallow: religion, he argues, has very little to do with belief.

To Carse, religion is [...]

The Religion Beat: Riverside Church

The first time that I visited Riverside Church, the speaker was none other than Hillary Clinton.
I hail from the heartland, so even though two years have passed since then and I’ve learned to look unimpressed, I haven’t mastered the part where I am actually not impressed by finding a national personality (and a personal hero) [...]

Guest Blogger: CITYarts

by Rebecca Grodofsky
an art student at Oberlin College, class of 2009
intern at CITYarts
“Now, what is the color of beauty?” asks Duda, the longhaired, paint-spackled, Brazilian-American artist in the front of the room. The students start hollering.
“Pink!” “Red!” “Nah man, it’s blue.”
They take a vote. Red wins. We have already determined that peace is blue and [...]

Living Green in the Concrete Jungle

New Yorkers are pretty well-known for their over-scheduled, hectic lives. I, for one, am no different, but whenever I have extra time for relaxation, I seemingly forgo my feminist roots and focus on… that’s right: domesticity.
Maybe it’s the amount of concrete in the city that makes me want to paint it all grassy-green [...]