Body Politic
Protest movements, New York City mayoral elections, and James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village”
Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Bodies Upon the Gears
[August 1968]
“The ghastly things we do to our own people, the ghastly things we do to other people—these must at last compel us to look searchingly at ourselves and our society before hatred and violence rush us on to more evil and finally tear our nation apart.”
Read “America 1968” by Arthur Meier Schlesinger
[May 2015]
“After Congress relaxed the Posse Comitatus Act, which was intended to keep military and domestic policing separate, there was a massive flow of military-grade tanks, helicopters, bomb-sniffing robots, and assault rifles to local police.”
Read “Beyond the Broken Window” by Petra Bartosiewicz
[May 2020]
The radical imagination of the Hong Kong protest movement.
Read “Dream State” by Yi-Ling Liu
[May 2025]
“In colonial India, in the Jim Crow South, and in Palestine, the goal of nonviolent resistance was to leverage one’s sacrifices, to use one’s courage when faced with the repressive violence of the state as a tool for moral awakening, to move people of conscience to act … What they hadn’t counted on was the utter lack of real democracy in the West.”
Read “After Nonviolence” by Ben Ehrenreich
Ghosts of Mayoral Elections Past
[July 1961]
“‘Why is it,’ Hal asked, ‘that the Reform Groups have not yet agreed on a candidate of their own for Mayor?’”
Read “New York Is Different” by Marion K. Sanders
[August 1998]
From an interview with Fran Lebowitz in the June 1 issue of The New York Observer. In May, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani imposed new regulations on the city's taxi industry, including higher fines for traffic violations and rudeness to passengers, that were met with protests by cabdrivers.
Read “Road and Rudy Rage”
[February 2014]
“For more than two decades it has been taken as an article of faith that New York City voters prefer social liberals who will nonetheless protect the interests of wealthy Manhattanites.”
Read “Change in the Air” by Jeff Madrick
[April 2017]
Bill de Blasio gambles on doing the right thing.
Read “Defender of the Community” by Alan Feuer
[January 2023]
“Fighting crime, fighting inequality, fighting rats is something that we are focused on. Everyone that knows me knows one thing: I hate rats.”
Read “Ratman Begins”
On “Stranger in the Village”
In our June issue, Harmony Holiday’s essay meditates on James Baldwin’s testimony in images. “In 1962, a short documentary film, Un étranger dans le village, was produced during one of Jimmy’s trips to this postcard town. (Its title translates that of his earliest entry in this magazine, “Stranger in the Village,” an essay of 1953.) It’s his first official film appearance and one of the most striking,” writes Holiday. “The camera follows his pensive visage as he navigates the town by train and on foot, or visits the local church. He’s chaperoned by lights and a crew through snowy mountains, into taverns where the locals’ merriment proceeds as if he were not there, and finally through the train station, as he trails a porter who pushes his luggage.”
[October 1953]
“The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive.”
Read “Stranger in the Village” by James Baldwin
