In April, 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade made it legal nationwide, New York passed the most expansive abortion law in the U.S. Three other states passed similar bills in the same year, but New York’s was of particular national significance because it allowed patients to get an abortion even if they weren’t residents. This made the state a hub for people from other parts of the country seeking to safely end their pregnancies. That role has become a lasting element of New York’s political id

In the spring of 2019, the filmmakers Guillaume Fournier, Samuel Matteau, and Yannick Nolin travelled from Quebec to Louisiana to shoot the final installment in a trio of short documentaries. The three films are all centered on Cajun-French culture in Acadiana, a twenty-two-parish region in the southern part of Louisiana. An estimated hundred thousand to three hundred thousand people in the state speak some form of French, a total that has dropped from roughly a million in the nineteen-sixties.

Last spring, the filmmaker Christian Cargill drove roughly six hours from London to the Teifi valley in western Wales to meet a septuagenarian shepherd living in the remote village of Cellan and explain why he wanted to make a film about him. Cargill found Wilf Davies eating lunch in his van and introduced himself. In the course of forty minutes, Davies listened while Cargill explained how moved he had been by a Guardian article that he’d read about Davies a few weeks earlier, and how much he wa

One afternoon in May of 2020, Seantell Campbell dropped off a few loaves of bread at a fridge plugged in on the sidewalk, at a street corner near Morningside Park. Anyone could leave food in the fridge, and anyone could stop by to take something they needed. It had been placed there a few weeks earlier—one of many community fridges that mutual-aid organizers and other volunteers were installing around the city in an effort to address the spike in food insecurity caused by the pandemic. Food bank

One night in May of last year, the animator Marcie LaCerte dreamed that she found herself in the middle of a crowded Gap without a face mask. The scene brought on a familiar panic; the classic dream distress of being naked in public, with the faux pas updated to fit pandemic life. LaCerte animated the dream, along with a series of others, for the film above, “Invisible Monsters and Tomato Soup,” produced by Stevie Borrello and Meghan McDonough. The idea for the film arose during the early weeks

On March 16th, when Walt Disney World Resort, in Orlando, shut down in response to the threat posed by COVID-19, the pandemic’s spread through the South had just begun: all of the Floridians who tested positive that day could have just about fit on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. When the park reopened, on July 11th, numbers in the state were surging dramatically, with more than ten thousand new cases reported that day. For the past month and a half, Disney World has been operating, with prec

Last October, a fire tore through the apartment complex in Stockton, California, where Laura Kidd-Plummer had lived for five years. Nearly a decade earlier, Kidd-Plummer, who will turn seventy this year, had retired from her job in the wardrobe department at the Oakland Coliseum, where she had worked for twenty-one years. She eventually moved to Stockton in search of cheaper rent. After the fire, she and her dog, Poopee, a Pomeranian-Yorkie mix, were left homeless. Ever since, she told me, “I’m

On March 11th, two days after the Grand Princess cruise ship docked in Oakland and its passengers prepared to enter quarantine, Reem Assil celebrated the opening of the second location of her bakery, Reem’s California, in the Mission District of San Francisco, with a post on Instagram. “Blurry eyed and exhausted as many can prob see” she wrote, alongside images of stacked cakes, flatbreads, and brightly colored bowls of dip, “but finally ready to open our doors and have folks bless the space.” B

Since winning her seat in Congress on November 6th, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been using social media —particularly Instagram Stories —to provide a detailed, comprehensive and often humorous breakdown of her process of preparing to take office in January. In the first post from a pinned Instagram Story titled “Congress Camp 1” Ocasio-Cortez asks, “So you get elected to Congress…now what?” She has shared images and videos from Congressional field trips and other orientation events, explained

Next week, 27-year-old Safiya Wazir could become the first former refugee to hold public office in New Hampshire. In September, she defeated four-term State Rep. Dick Patten in the primary in Ward 8, an area in Concord known as the Heights. Although her race was small-scale — she received 329 votes while Patten got 143 — her success echoes recent primary wins nationally for young, progressive women of color. Wazir fled Afghanistan with her family when she was six-years-old. After spending 10 ye