Lifestyle & Culture
Finding community and calm on regional hiking trails
By Jalen Long In a city known for its crowded streets, packed subway cars and nonstop pace, one hiking club is helping New Yorkers slow down and reconnect with nature and each other. What began as a small getaway among friends has grown into a thriving outdoor community. Founded in 2024, the Down to Earth […]
‘Griot Circle’ is a haven for Black LGBTQ elders
By Justus Wilhoit The night they met in 2005, Regina Shavers offered Sandie Green an opportunity. Green, queer and Black like Shavers, immediately agreed to volunteer — on a full-time basis — to organize what now is a 30-year-old center reserved for LGBTQ people who look like them. “It’s very hard when it comes to […]
Training young adults with autism to bake
By Ehvan Fennell Parents Nigel Thompson and Qiana Daniels have had some challenges in navigating the world of needs facing their son, who is moderately autistic. Especially when he was younger, they had to make sure he had such essential things as physical therapy and occupational therapy. But there was more. “What would his future […]
Food, fellowship and Black male mental health
By Robert Doyle They dub their monthly potluck “The Medicine.” On Father’s Day, they provide free acupuncture and haircuts. They do sound baths for those interested in it. They provide supplies for fathers and their children to do arts and crafts together. Because of what they offer, they named their organization Men at Work Healing. […]
Preserving and highlighting Harlem’s history
By Marcus Craig Harlem’s Convent Avenue Baptist is a majority Black church in a mainly Black neighborhood. But on a recent Wednesday afternoon, white people filled up most of the seats. They’d paid to hear seven singers, a pianist and a drummer perform black gospel music. I’m a soldier in the army of the Lord […]
For Gen-Z men, a surge in religious faith
By Danny Chung-A-Fung Health, relationships, finances, spirituality. Of those four self-professed pillars of 30-year-old Alex Gittens’ life, the last is what’s first in his heart and mind. It has not always been that way for Gittens. Especially while working three jobs to help pay his way through college, his faith fell through the cracks. He […]
‘Shirley Chisholm’ 5K races toward good health
By Xavier Board In 2021, the Shirley Chisholm 5K Trail run started as a simple way to foster community. Five years later, the event has increased its count and diversity of runners, while also upholding its tandem goals of improving public health and spotlighting the first Black female congresswoman and first Black person to vie […]
A church music ministry for the moment
By Nicholas Gunn — The music inside the sanctuary of Church of the Advent Hope was a long way from the solitary organ and choir more typical of what’s been played at Seventh-day Adventist churches. “I’ve visited a lot of Adventist churches but the music often feels stuck in the past. No drums, no […]
Cadence’s vegan chefs reimagine soul food
By Jon David Regis — Executive chefs Haley Duren and Shenarri Freeman place themselves and their East Village restaurant in a camp of plant-based eaters that extends back to pre-enslavement West Africa and, in the United States, includes civil rights and nutrition activist Dick Gregory, who died in 2017, and Queen Afua, a holistic […]
South to North, chasing artistic dreams
By Corey Leathers Jr. — Eighteen months. That’s how long it took a transplant from South Carolina to go from being a broke college dropout to paying New York City rent with what he’s earned selling his rap records, designing clothes for his BoofNYC brand and walking the runway at New York Fashion Week. […]