nybooks

In 1984, the year before Brazil transitioned from a military dictatorship to a tenuous democracy, a young woman named Gabriela Leite attended a national meeting for sex workers held by a progressive ministry of the Catholic Church. There she shocked those assembled by taking the microphone and unabashedly calling herself a prostitute. As she recalled […]

Kate Millett would never be more active or more in demand than she was in 1972. Two summers earlier, her debut book had made her a household name. Begun as her thesis for a literature Ph.D., Sexual Politics swelled into a wide-ranging examination of sex as a terrain of political contest and patriarchy as a […]

As an artist in the second half of the twentieth century, Jerry Moriarty did everything you weren’t supposed to do: he painted people, he painted places, and, perhaps worst of all, he told stories with pictures. It’s important to note how not-accepted this was between the 1950s and 1970s, in the messy aftermath of abstract […]

On the evening of June 25, minutes after New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze the rent for a million rent-stabilized apartments across the five boroughs, I caught up with a tenant I know named Josie Wells. Standing outside the auditorium in East Harlem where the vote had just occurred, we spoke about […]

On my last visit to Tripoli, this past June, the city often felt as if it had left the protracted conflicts of Libya’s post-Qaddafi era behind. At night, families were out in the streets catching a respite from the heat of the day. The occasional blasts were not gunfire but fireworks at wedding celebrations. Incoming […]