Celebrating Community
I’ve been going to bars lately because it’s cold outside, people in bars have loose tongues, and it’s easy to talk to them. Today I went into the Strong Rope Brewery on the waterfront and asked customers and bartenders a provocative question for the January issue: What are your feelings about the Luigi Mangione phenomenon? For those of you who […]
In our last issue, I wrote about how we (many of us, at least) celebrate Christmas in Sweden. I went through it all, from Dec. 1 and Swedish Public Service’s advent calendar TV show, through the celebration of St. Lucy and bingo on the night before Christmas Eve, to the sales on Boxing Day. And while these are all key […]
2025 has happened. The 21st century has officially begun his quarter life crisis. According to many psychologists, that is a time when young adults enter the real world and experience anxiety, sorrow, insecurity and doubt. In other words, the world has just graduated from college and still does not know what to do for a living. Older generations do not understand these problems, […]
I was working the late shift at the Star-Revue HQ on Van Brunt Street, trying to finish my 2024 Year in Review piece (Spoiler Alert: It Sucked) when an argument about the current drone issue over New Jersey heated up over by the dry bar. It got so noisy that I decided to pick up my things and head over […]
Red Hook Football Club is the highest level soccer team in Brooklyn and its leaders are looking to build a club with social justice at its core. The team plays its home games right at the newly renovated Red Hook Soccer Fields. “This actually started because I needed to find a place to play that was at a decent level,” […]
On October 21st, almost 150 (mostly Ukrainian) intellectuals signed an open letter to Unesco encouraging the international organization to ask President Zelensky to defer some decisions about Odessa’s World Heritage sites until the end of the war. Odessa, in southern Ukraine, is a multicultural city with a strong Russian-speaking component. There has been pressure to remove historical sites connected to […]
On Sept. 15, a driver in Brooklyn was stopped by the New York Police Department after running a red light. In an unexpected turn of events, the officers found 29 Chinese mitten crabs, a crustacean considered one of the world’s most invasive species (it’s number 34 on the Global Invasive Species Database), while searching the vehicle. Environmental Conservation Police Officers […]
Sweden is a place of plenty of holiday celebrations. My American friends usually say midsummer with the fertility pole and the wacky dances when I tell them about Swedish holidays, but to me — and I’d wager few Swedes would argue against this — no holiday is as anticipated as Christmas. Further, I would argue that Swedish Christmas is unlike […]
My son, Baker, was born on October 17th, 2024 at 4:02 am. He cried for the first hour and a half of his life, clearing his lungs, held firmly and safely against my chest. When I first saw him, I recognized him immediately. I’d dreamed of being a mother since I turned thirty, and five years later, becoming a parent […]
According to the Pew Research Center, 97% of Americans own a cellphone. In 2024, nine-in-ten Americans are smartphone users, which is up from 35% in Pew Research Center’s first survey of smartphone ownership from 2011. My own relationship with technology is a standard story for someone born in 1989. I enjoyed my childhood with the most aggressive form of technological […]