Cancer cut short the life of my friend Regina. Barely into her 50’s, she had been working on behalf of immigrants in New York City. A lump on her breast turned out to be a malignant tumor. She told me about it on a Sunday autumn afternoon as we sat on a bench in New York’s Bryant Park. T

"They call me the Manhole Cover Lady,” says Diana Stuart, author of Designs Under Foot: The Art of Manhole Covers in New York City (Design Books, 2003). After attending her lecture on what might seem a curious topic, I spoke to her about her book and how she came to write it.Like most New

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. "It is a beautiful honor to die for one’s country.” In this famous line, the Roman poet Horace gave lasting expression to an ideal of republican virtue inherited from an age when citizen soldiers defended their homeland against its enemies. Even

They say you can stay on the subway all night.” So commented a middle-aged homeless man to me on a particularly cold evening at a subway station in the Manhattan neighborhood of East Harlem. Warmly bundled up myself, I was sitting on a bench facing the tracks and noticed him because he was sta

I was startled. One of my Jesuit confreres had just introduced me to a fellow graduate student, not by name but as “our superior.” We were classmates; we lived in a small community, but somehow I had turned from Drew into “Father Superior.” I was no longer an individual. I wa

Taking a subway from one island to another—that is something you can do only in a place like Manhattan. Manhattan itself is an island, and I was going from there to Roosevelt Island just across the East River. Coming up the long escalators from subterranean depths, I was stunned to see the riv