Apartment Choice

Utility worker jumps onto subway tracks, saves man just before train’s arrival Last week there was a news account of a woman crashing her car in New England as she swerved off of the road into a tree with an approximate three foot girth and with such force that it broke its top off twenty feet above her car from the impact of her collision. The car, then, caught fire. Driving by at the time was a man in his eighties with EMT ( Emergency Medical Technicians ) training. He stopped his car and ran down the hill to her vehicle while knowing fully well that at any moment the gas tank could blow up and kill him. He went forward anyway. The smoke was so thick that he nearly passed out from lack of oxygen and he couldn’t see the car’s occupant. So he felt around for her with his hands through the smoke and dragged her out of the car by the shoulders. My father undertook a similar action. He was near Albany, NY, USA. He saw a farmer’s truck carrying hay burst into flames on a bridge with the d...

Editor’s note: The following has been excerpted from a longer chapter featuring the Arroyo family : Maria Ayala Arroyo (46), Pedro Ayala Hernandez (55) and Guadalupe Ayala Arroyo (21). Read more oral histories like it in Chasing the Harvest by Gabriel Thompson (2017 Verso Press). Read our interview with Thompson here. Farmwork is often a family affair. Parents bring their children to labor alongside them in the fields. Workers learn about a job opening and tell their relatives, the word spreading quickly from uncle to aunt to cousin. If a crew sticks together long enough, it may find that most members are related to each other in one way or another. Such is the case for the crew of the Arroyo- Hernandez family . Maria and Pedro came to the United States in 1994, 10 days after getting married in Mexico. Their plan was to stay for a couple of years, save money, and return to Mexico to open a business. Then they had their first child, Guadalupe, and those plans changed. For more tha...

Imagine being away from home for the first time, just a teenager in a new state, surrounded by a bunch of people you don’t know. Now picture a few months into your time in your new state, a state where you are slow to trust those around you, not one, but two of your best friends are murdered less than a month apart. That’s the real world nightmare Antonio Brown faced when he arrived in Durham in the winter of 2014. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Brown grew up in an area where, as he put it, people were trying to make a name for themselves by any means. Those means weren’t always positive. Sometimes a way out, or a way to become well known was sports. Other times, more times than not, it was through violence, earning a reputation on the streets one way or another. “It’s not a lot of stuff for us to do, period,” Brown said. “Especially not positive. Most of the kids down there see ball or rapping as their only way of getting out. At my high school not even football is a way out, so...

Good morning and welcome to the Saturday Morning Quilt Break ! Today I’d like to tell you a story, one that I’ve wanted to tell almost since the day I started working here seven years ago except I didn’t have an ending until a few months ago. If I were the hero of a quilting comic book series , I believe this would be considered my origin story. So settle in with your beverage of choice because I’m going to take you back a ways. A long time ago, during my senior year of high school, my parents offered to allow me to take a gap year between high school and college as long as I spent my time doing something worthwhile. As they put it, “You can live at home and volunteer at a homeless shelter if you want, but you can’t just spend a year working at Robinson’s-May,” which is where I was working at the time. For almost my entire childhood, my parents, younger brother and I lived in a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom condo in Van Nuys, which is smack-dab in the middle of the sprawling San Ferna...

When American doctor Stephen Yoon thinks of North Korea, he does not think of ballistic missile tests or the threat of nuclear war. He remembers instead a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, who suffered from spastic quadriplegia that made her unable to stand or sit. Five years ago, she went to Yoon's developmental-disability program at Pyongyang Medical University Hospital , where she received treatments from Yoon and his team of local doctors. After almost a year of exercise therapy and some surgeries, she walked out of the hospital on her own. The event was heralded in North Korean state media as a national victory, but it received no notice in the U.S., where few people even know about the roughly 200 Americans like Yoon who work and live under the rule of Kim Jong Un. Carefully monitored by the regime, they have come and gone for years, doing educational, medical or infrastructural work, and sometimes raising families in a nation that has been officially at war with the ...