I was born in Queens in 1975—the year of the infamous New York Post cover “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” when New York City was about to declare municipal bankruptcy, and the federal government was desperately trying to divorce urban America...
When Ingrid Betancourt was taken hostage on February 23, 2002, by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC as this fifty-year-old nationalist and peasant movement is better known, she was a feisty, outspoken, and rather...
When painter Benjamin Haydon took John Keats to the British Museum to visit the newly unveiled statuary plundered from the Greek Parthenon by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, the young poet was struck dumb—not just by the artistic...
Photographer Andre Lambertson and I visited Haiti together four times during 2010. We spent a week there on each occasion. We were there to learn and tell the story of HIV/AIDS in Haiti after the earthquake. Three hundred thousand Haitians...
Perched atop the Moqattam Cliffs, where Pharaonic slaves cut limestone for the pyramids, the Monastery of Saint Simon and its accompanying cathedral boast a commanding view of Cairo. On a smog free day, if you peek around the cliffs to the...
Every day, Venezuelan newspapers across the political spectrum publish front-page articles on the most recent invasiones, the illegal occupation of property by squatters. In Caracas, invasions often begin with swift, surreptitious, and...
One October afternoon in downtown Miami, I met up for a Sunday drive with Peter Zalewski, a condo-slinger whose company, Condo Vultures, has been feeding on the remains of Miami’s real estate implosion. “This is the pit,” he said. “New York...
