Spring 2024

I had been called for jury duty before, and the results were always the same: everyone in the room where the lawyers questioned prospective jurors would laugh when I said that I worked for the Democratic Socialists of America or …

Signs and portents abounded that Good Friday in New Orleans as our group of New York City high school students, parents, and teachers rolled in to spend the spring break doing “relief” work. Lawns and green median strips sprouted campaign …

A couple of years ago I picked up my fifth-grade daughter from an after-school rehearsal for her East Harlem school’s chorus. The mother of two other children was late, and I agreed to wait with them until she arrived. I …

A stranger smiled at me on Broadway the other day and I smiled back at him. This shouldn’t be unusual, but in New York City it is. What made me reflect on this brief encounter was the ease I now …

When it died last April, at age fifty-two, the liberal Christian magazine Christianity & Crisis left a host of mourners. The symbolism of its demise occurring close to Easter was not lost on them, and there was speculation about whether …

A familiar scene. Tired mother returns from work. Picks up two-year-old from day-care center. Arrives home to find eight-year-old and ten-year-old locked in mortal combat. Separates them and screams at everyone. Goes in kitchen to start supper. Two-year-old whines. Fight …

Who among us would insist that our children repeat the miseries—real or imagined—of our childhoods? Why, then, do we tolerate other people’s children suffering more than most of us will ever do in a lifetime? The answers lie in a …

Headlines in late spring announced that at least half the states had started cutting government food allotments in the WIC program (Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, Children), which provides milk, cereal, cheese, and juice for poor women and …

In the early 1970s, when I worked for a child welfare agency, a Catholic colleague told me that she became prochoice the day she was called to find foster homes for five children whose mother had just died from a …

Mayor Koch’s face stared out from the bus poster. “I want you to have my children,” the caption read, part of a stepped-up campaign to recruit badly needed foster homes. After six years of the Koch administration, its brazenness should …