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South L.A. Is a Story of Both Segregation and Desegregation
The first big change in South Los Angeles over the last half-century has been the shift of concentrated black communities westward into newer and better housing. The second big change is the...
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The Secret Is Out, South L.A. Is One of the City’s Hottest Housing Markets
Buying real estate in South L.A. is not as easy now as it used to be. The market is packed with buyers eager to get in on one of the last most affordable, most convenient, and most charming...
View ArticleAlki the Town of Dreams
Facing east towards water, a dozen porch benches overlook an isle of skyscrapers; but nearer, a strip of gray beach sand, a pier house selling hairy muscles each second, then one long hour of bike...
View ArticleThe Gilded Age Lives on in Manhattan’s Mansions
Sixty-six floors above Midtown Manhattan, Donald J. Trump lives in a fantasy world copied from the French royalty of the 18th century. His residence, an enormous three-story penthouse that has been...
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When the Idea of Home Was Key to American Identity
Like viewers using an old-fashioned stereoscope, historians look at the past from two slightly different angles—then and now. The past is its own country, different from today. But we can only see...
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The Black-Owned Alabama Plantation That Taught Me the Value of Home
By the time I was eight years old, in 1948, my parents, my sister, and I had lived in five different states and had moved more often than that. My grandparents had emigrated from Europe to America...
View ArticleHome Away from Home
In his photo series Home Away from Home, the Gaza-born Franco-Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji explores and documents the daily lives of people dwelling in intermediate states—between the land of...
View ArticleWhere I Go: Penasquitos Gardens
I haven’t brought my wife or son to see where I mostly grew up. I keep meaning to. But even though it’s less than a mile from my father’s condo in Rancho Peñasquitos in northern San Diego County, the...
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Coming Home to the Holocaust
In the town hall of Fischach, a village in southern Germany with a population of 2,500, I am staring at a glass display case holding the detritus of the Jews who once lived here. It is July 2019, eight...
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Where I Go: Seeking Peace on the Upper Slopes of Mount Shasta
“Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the heart of the great black forests of Northern California.” —Joaquin Miller, from his 1873 autobiographical...
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