Spring is a good time for tanning salon owners. People are eager to shed their winter sweaters and soak up warmer rays—and it’s also a time when they’re starting to fret about their vampire-pale skin.

On a typical day, République’s Gothic-style dining room hums with the din of clinking glasses, scraping forks, and conversations over eclectic fare such as kimchi fried rice with beef short rib and heirloom tomato salad. As an all-day restaurant in Los Angeles that shifts from morning pastry pick-ups to business lunch breaks to celebratory dinners, silence is a rare guest at République—until a pandemic completely shut down the city’s dining scene. 

An entrepreneurial 13-year-old hoped to earn money for school clothes by selling hot dogs, chips, and sodas in front of his Minneapolis home this summer. But someone sent a complaint to the city’s health department because Jaequan Faulkner’s stand was technically illegal without a vendor’s license.

Kolkata (once known as Calcutta) is infamous for Sonagachi, one of the largest red light districts in Asia. About 10,000 women, trapped in the sex trade, live within a labyrinthine tangle of streets. Many are victims of human trafficking, young village girls lured to the city by false promises of a job or marriage, then sold on the doorstep of a brothel. Others enter the pain factories out of desperation and poverty.

A New York moment: 

Last week a longtime used book store on the Upper West Side, Westsider Books, announced it was closing. Locals were heartbroken: another cherished shop driven out by rising rents. You might have seen the bookstore at some point on the big screen. The narrow, dusty shop has appeared in movies like 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? and 2017’s Wonderstruck.

A New York moment: 

Workers just put up the dreaded scaffolding outside of my apartment building. Under a 1980 law, passed after a piece of falling facade killed a pedestrian, all city buildings must have periodic facade inspections. Indeed just last year, two blocks from me, a huge chunk of a facade fell onto the sidewalk—thankfully injuring no one. 

LOS ANGELES—When Weird Wave Coffee opened doors between a pawnshop and a check-cashing agency in the mostly Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights, its owners envisioned someplace different from Starbucks or hausfrau coffee bars. They wanted to create a cozy communal space for the community—but they didn’t anticipate that the community might not have space for them.