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When Elissa Slotkin narrowly won her Senate seat in Michigan last fall, she was one of only four Democratic senators to claim victory in a state that voted for Donald Trump. It made other Democrats take note: since then, the Party has turned to her as someone who can bridge the red state–blue state divide. In March, Slotkin delivered the Democrats’ rebuttal to Trump’s speech before Congress, and she’s been making headlines for criticizing her own party’s attempts to rein in the President and the Republican Party. She thinks Democrats need to start projecting “alpha energy,” that identity politics “needs to go the way of the dodo,” and that Democrats should drop the word “oligarchy” from their vocabulary entirely.

Slotkin prides herself on her bipartisanship, and she believes that Democrats must use old-school collegial collaboration in Congress. And, as different Democratic leaders have appeared on The New Yorker Radio Hour in the past few months, discussing what the next four years might have in store, Slotkin tells David Remnick about a different path forward.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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A year ago, Percival Everett published his twenty-fourth novel, “James,” and it became a literary phenomenon. It won the National Book Award, and, just this week, was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “James” offers a radically different perspective on the classic Mark Twain novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: Everett centers his story on the character of Jim, who is escaping slavery. The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas is a longtime Everett fan, and talked with the novelist just after “James” was released. “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas. “The Jim that’s represented in ‘Huck Finn’ is simple.”

This segment originally aired on March 22, 2024.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Early on Wednesday morning, India launched military strikes against Pakistan, killing more than thirty people, according to the Pakistani government. Yesterday, the Indian government claimed that Pakistan had responded with extensive drone strikes of its own. It is the largest military confrontation between India and Pakistan in decades. The two countries have been in conflict with each other for more than seventy-five years; this latest volley was set off when twenty-five Indian tourists were killed in a terrorist attack last month in the territory of Jammu and Kashmir. (A local Kashmiri resident was also killed.) The Kashmir region has a long history of militant activity, some of it funded and sponsored by Pakistan, and of opposition to Indian rule. The majority of Kashmir acceded to India after the 1947 Partition, and the Indian government has committed extensive human-rights violations there. In 2019, Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister, revoked Kashmir’s special status under the Indian constitution, which it was granted as the only state in India with a Muslim majority. Since then, India has further cracked down on dissent in the region, while at the same time increasing tourism there. Now there is considerable fear that the conflict between India and Pakistan, both of which have nuclear weapons, could escalate.

I recently spoke by phone with Sushant Singh, a lecturer in South Asian studies at Yale, and a consulting editor with The Caravan magazine, about the current situation. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed how the political dynamics in both India and Pakistan could contribute to a widening of the conflict, the Indian government’s long-term failures in Kashmir, and why the world’s embrace of Modi has made him less likely to seek peace.

What about this situation feels new or different, for either Indians or Pakistanis or Kashmiris?

The one big difference this time was visible in Kashmir, after these tourists were shot down. For the first time in a long, long while, we saw Kashmiris come out in significant numbers and protest against killings. There were candlelight marches, there were protests, there were people publicly condemning it. It has been very difficult over the past thirty or thirty-five years to have Kashmiris come out in support of India, in a certain sense, or against armed militants who have been advocating separatism or pro-Pakistan politics in Kashmir. It was a great opportunity for Mr. Modi’s government, but Mr. Modi’s government did not take that opportunity. They continued with their policies of demolition of houses of suspected militants, and oppressive security operations to arrest a large number of young men, which clearly does not help anything. It was a great opportunity for him to take advantage of, which he did not take.

How do you understand this response from the Kashmiris?

Tourism has been a big feature of the Kashmiri economy and Kashmiri society, and tourists have always been seen as guests. To see tourists being picked out and killed in these numbers was a reversal of everything that they have stood for over the years. Not only in terms of Kashmiriyat, one aspect of which is the idea of tourists being guests, but also in terms of the economic damage that it causes.

You described this as an opportunity that you think Modi has missed. What exactly was that opportunity, and what do you think the Indian government wants to do instead?

So the opportunity was very simple. He could have announced certain steps to politically engage with the state, and to support tourism, because Indian tourists are not going to go to Kashmir now. There’ve been a large number of cancellations that have happened. He could have announced some form of subsidy, some form of economic support for the hotels and tourist guides and for other people who are associated with local tourism. He could have highlighted the fact that a young Kashmiri man was killed while trying to save Indian tourists. He could have also highlighted that a large number of Kashmiri taxi-drivers and hospital workers, etc., went out of their way to help the Indian tourists after this heinous attack. He did not do any of that. He could have even taken this moment to announce some bold steps like the restoration of statehood to Kashmir, or empowering Kashmir in a big way. There could have been small tactical steps, which would have helped in an administrative manner but also large, bold political steps to engage the Kashmiris and try and win them over.

But just to be clear: He turned down this opportunity not because he is insufficiently bold or because he’s cowardly, but, rather, because he does not want to take this opportunity for ideological reasons, correct?

Absolutely. Hindutva ideology, which Modi subscribes to, sees Kashmir as a land rather than a people. Whereas, fundamentally, what I am arguing is that Kashmir is about the people more than the land. We should try and win over the Kashmiris, and not just look at how we can control the land.

What feels different or not different this time about the dynamic between India and Pakistan?

There is a strong similarity to what happened in 2019, when Indian troops were killed in Pulwama by a young suicide bomber, and then Indian Air Force fighter jets tried to strike a seminary in Balakot, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan. Pakistan retaliated, and there was an aerial clash, an Indian MiG-21 plane was shot down, an Indian pilot was captured, a fighter jet was allegedly shot down, and the Indians shot down their own helicopter, and so on and so forth.

But what is most stunning here is the range of targets chosen by India and where those targets are. These nine targets which India claims to have hit have been chosen not only in Pakistani Kashmir but also in Punjab. Now, Balakot was also outside Kashmir, but it was in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is a tribal area, and not really seen as part of the Pakistani heartland. Whereas Punjab is the heartland of Pakistan. It is the most dominant province, it is the most populous province, it is politically the most powerful province. And even within Punjab, one of these strikes actually targeted Muridke, which is just outside of Lahore. To take one of the biggest cities in South Asia and have your military strike it with some form of weaponry is something that has not been seen outside of full-fledged wars. So that is the big difference. And all of these places essentially are madrassas, or Islamic seminaries. So these targets can be thought of as provocative and escalatory in nature.

But I must also clarify that in all of the statements that the Indian government has put out, it has tried to say that these strikes were precise, very targeted, and non-escalatory. They’ve been emphasizing the non-escalatory nature of strikes constantly, even in conversation with foreign diplomats. I think there’s some fear in Mr. Modi’s government, that these strikes should not lead to an escalation which gets out of hand.

But then how do you understand that contradiction, which is that they struck targets in Punjab, but at the same time they are trying to prevent escalation?

Yeah, so there’s definitely a contradiction and a tension here, and a very high risk. There will always be a risk of escalation. But they are highlighting the fact that they have only gone for non-military targets, have said that they are not trying to target civilians, that these targets are just terror infrastructure, and were only bombed at night to limit the casualties. And as media reports have suggested, these madrassas or seminaries had already been vacated earlier. So the way they have tried to manage it is by minimizing the number of casualties and by messaging. But does it really help? Does it really allow them to bridge the contradiction, or to ride two boats at the same time? Only time will tell.

What are the Modi government’s long-term goals here? It sounds like what you’re saying, to read between the lines, is that they want to have some sort of strike that establishes deterrence or nationalist bona fides, but at the same time doesn’t lead to a larger war, right?

Yeah, but I would not call it deterrence. There would be no deterrence unless you target the Pakistani military. Deterrence cannot be established by targeting some seminaries. I think the main purpose of these strikes is to strengthen his own nationalist bona fides, and to satisfy and assuage the very heightened emotion that India’s mass media has generated over the past two weeks at the behest of the government.

Right, I was about to say that the heightened emotion and the press coverage seem to be occurring, in part, thanks to the ruling party.

Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. It is at the behest of Mr. Modi’s government, and they’re doing it willingly as an accomplice, as propagandists. It is manufactured, but it also taps into something and builds a narrative and helps build Mr. Modi’s image as this strongman and as a bold leader, as a heroic leader who has taken this great decision [to strike Pakistan]. Is there a strategic view to this? Will it deter future violent incidents by militants or gunmen or terrorists, whatever you wish to call them? No. Clearly no. 2019 has already shown us that it is not possible to create deterrence like this. If there was a strategic view, then India would already have a larger gamut of options going in various domains. More broadly, and not just in terms of this week, India would probably be engaging on the economic front, on the diplomatic front, on the cultural front, on the people-to-people front, and on the military front with both punishment and reward.

They have restricted their options only to the military domain. Statecraft demands having a wider range of options in various domains where you can do both reward and punishment. If Pakistan does something that you like, you want to encourage it, and you would want to reward it. Instead we have punitive military strikes to satisfy the heightened emotions of your citizenry.

Let’s turn to the Pakistani side. Pakistan’s Army chief, Asim Munir, who is the most powerful person in the country, gave a pretty striking speech last month. I was hoping you could talk about it, and then also just the current political situation in Pakistan.

Asim Munir is one of those people who was commissioned in the Pakistani Army during the Zia years, in the nineteen-eighties, when General Zia was the Army chief and the military dictator of Pakistan. He turned the Pakistani Army into a more religious and conservative force. And a lot of these people who were recruited at that time are known as Zia’s Recruits. Munir’s reputation has always been as this very dry and nonhumorous, very rigid person. I have never met him personally, but people who have met him and whom I’ve interacted with have described him in that manner. He, of course, fell out with Imran Khan, who unfortunately happens to be the most popular political leader in Pakistan, and is behind bars. Munir is the most powerful person in Pakistan, and the Pakistani Army is the most powerful institution in the country. It controls almost all the levers of power, particularly with respect to foreign policy and especially with respect to India.

The speech that you referenced, which occurred about a week before the killings in Kashmir, was essentially a reiteration of what we have seen many Pakistani leaders and generals say since the nineteen-fifties: that Kashmir is a “jugular vein” of Pakistan. The two-nation theory, under which Pakistan was formed—that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations, and that Pakistan is a country for the Muslim nation, and India is a country for the Hindu nation—is something that has also been reiterated. This is the theory that Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, promulgated. What Munir said was not something new; it has been spoken by any number of Pakistani leaders over the last seventy-five years. But the manner in which he spoke, and the timing, and the fact that it was followed by this massacre in Pahalgam has, of course, brought it to the fore.

Was the speech really not at all different from those given by the more recent military leaders in Pakistan?

Not really. Musharraf himself used the phrase “jugular vein” for Kashmir. Virtually every single Army chief has used it. And on the two-nation theory, even someone as erudite and as smart as retired General Khalid Kidwai, who handled the nuclear stuff and has worked closely with the United States, has said the same thing, namely that Modi’s rise proves the two-nation theory was right. So we’ve seen enough leaders, military or civilian, say these things.

Probably the fact that both these things were said together in the same speech—Kashmir as the jugular vein and the two-nation theory—made it look more powerful or more radical. The fact that he put those two things together.

You mentioned Imran Khan, and the Pakistani military has been facing a real nationalist backlash at home over its decision to lock him up. Imran Khan was a nationalist leader himself, who was very closely allied with the military before their falling out. So do they have more reason to be aggressive now and try to fan nationalist flames themselves?

Oh, definitely. I’m no fan of Imran Khan in terms of the way he speaks about the Taliban or Islamist militancy and his other conservative views. But the fact of the matter is that he’s the most popular leader in Pakistan at this point in time, and by all accounts he won the previous elections despite his party being banned. So that’s pretty disturbing.

The credibility of the Army as an institution and of Munir as an Army chief is on the line. Munir is, I think, under some pressure from the core commanders and other senior officers of the Pakistani Army—he is being pushed to act more forcefully than he would have had he not been on such a politically weak wicket. Moreover, he has to respond forcefully because he has to show that he’s doing more than what his predecessor, General Bajwa, did. Under Bajwa, in 2019, Pakistanis retaliated by firing some things at Indian Kashmir. Munir has to do much more than what Bajwa did, because Bajwa is pretty unpopular, in Pakistan’s Army and otherwise, because he is seen as someone who was almost bending over backward to be friendly with India and got nothing from India in return.

What has changed in terms of Pakistani calculations vis-à-vis India now that Pakistan’s most important ally is China, not the United States?

China was always a very important ally for Pakistan, but right now it is the most important. Eighty per cent of Pakistan’s military imports now come from China. Virtually everything, including fighter jets, long-range missiles, main battle tanks, artillery, guns, everything that the Pakistani military is now using is coming from China. That’s a big shift. Most modern weaponry is coming from China. What changed? Essentially the U.S. lost interest in Pakistan in a certain sense, not because the U.S. was selfish in some way, although of course it was selfish, but because Pakistani behavior in Afghanistan really put off a large number of American officials. They feel that Pakistan behaved in such a way, when NATO forces were inside Afghanistan, that did not allow various U.S. Administrations to achieve what they could have. Pakistan lost a lot of credibility and a lot of friendship and a lot of leeway in the United States. And that has essentially pushed it closer to China.

You have described a situation where it is hard to see, even if all-out war is avoided, any real positive medium-term steps being taken.

I agree with you fully on that. There is no long-term view of engaging with each other, or to help the Kashmiris.

This all raises an interesting question about Modi, because there is some precedent—with Nixon going to China being the most famous—of people who are perceived as hard-line making deals. Reagan eventually negotiated with Gorbachev, etc. Do you sense any of that in Modi around something like Kashmir, or any of the people around him? Or are these people just much too ideological to deliver any sort of positive change in the medium term?

He tried something in 2015, when he went to Nawaz Sharif’s granddaughter’s wedding celebrations outside Lahore on his return from Afghanistan. But other than that, all we have seen is that Mr. Modi and his party and all his supporters are too ideological to be looking at engaging with Pakistan and finding a peaceful solution. The fact is that the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has not met for almost a decade because India does not want to engage with Pakistan and does not allow it to happen. So even other smaller countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, etc., suffer in the bargain because this regional grouping is unable to meet.

The fact is that India is hailed diplomatically, whether by the Biden Administration or by the Trump Administration, and Mr. Modi is welcomed and a red carpet is laid for him, and India feels that it has arrived and it’s a winner in this game. Whereas Pakistan has been completely marginalized. There is no Western interest in Pakistan whatsoever. The international credibility and standing of Pakistan as a country, with its very weak economy and all the political mess it is in with the Afghan Taliban and with Iran, is very low. Whereas Mr. Modi is personally hailed by the Europeans, by the Americans, by the Russians, virtually by everyone. So what is the incentive for India to engage with Pakistan in that kind of a scenario? ♦

With the election of Robert Francis Prevost as Pope, Donald Trump is now the second most powerful American in the world. So said a seasoned Italian broadcaster to me, a few minutes after Prevost, who was born in Chicago in 1955, and who has now taken the name Leo XIV, delivered his first address from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica. “The American Pope” is an appellation long attached to Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York from 1939 to 1967, who enjoyed great power in Rome and led the U.S. bishops in support of this country’s wars in Korea and Vietnam and its military actions in Cold War “spheres of influence.” Now the tag is affixed to an actual American Pope. Overnight commentators, working from scant information, have parsed the nature of the new Pope’s Americanness. It has been pointed out that he gave his benediction (“La pace sia con tutti voi,” it began: “Peace be with all of you”) in Italian, Latin, and Spanish, but not English, his first language. The short biographical sketches of him have noted that he went to Peru as a missionary in 1985, at the age of thirty, and has scarcely lived in the U.S. since. He has been touted as a Villanova graduate (B.S., mathematics, 1977), and there was tussling online about whether he roots for the White Sox or the Cubs. (His brother John finally settled the matter, confirming that the new Pope is a Sox fan.) Reports also emerged—in the Black Catholic Messenger, on nola.com, and in the Times—of Prevost’s ancestry among Creole people of color in New Orleans, indicating that his heritage runs through the oppression, strife, and controversy over race that characterize the history of the U.S.

All of that is important, and it is likely to become more so as specifics of this little-known figure’s life and work emerge. But his personal circumstances may turn out to be less significant than the circumstances in which he has taken office. The first American Pope is also a wartime Pope, and the first phase of his pontificate will likely be defined by whether and how he brings the armature of peace to the violent conflicts currently rending the globe.

“The wartime Pope” is a phrase that usually refers to Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, the Italian who served as the head of the Roman Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958. Pacelli, who became a cardinal in 1929, was appointed Vatican Secretary of State the next year, and in 1933 he crafted a concordat with Adolf Hitler’s government, in Germany, whereby the Nazis would respect the Church’s autonomy in religious matters and, in return, the Vatican would effectively grant the Third Reich legitimacy, allowing it to require a loyalty oath of bishops and to forbid priests from engaging in political activity. (The concordat resembled a 1929 pact with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government, in Italy.) When Pacelli was elected Pope, on March 2, 1939, the world was embroiled in several conflicts. A civil war in Spain had led to the rise of Francisco Franco’s Nationalists (with German military support). Hitler had spoken publicly about the prospect of “the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe”; he would soon annex Czechoslovakia, invade Poland, and erect new concentration camps. The United States maintained its neutrality. In India, meanwhile, Mahatma Gandhi undertook a long fast in an effort to influence British colonial rule—as if to underscore that the global political order was larger and more complicated than continental statecraft acknowledged.

Eighty-six years later, the world is once again at war—“a Third World War in pieces,” as Pope Francis called it. In retrospect, this may be one of the most significant insights of his pontificate—the frank recognition that the number and gravity of violent conflicts constitute a world war that has largely gone unrecognized. Francis named those conflicts in his final public act, the Urbi et Orbi blessing he gave on Easter Sunday: the war between Israel and Palestine; the decade-long civil war in Yemen, stoked by other countries, which has led to “prolonged humanitarian crises”; the situation in Ukraine, which has been “devastated by war” by Russia (that latter country left unnamed): the ongoing strife between Armenia and Azerbaijan; the surging tensions in “the western Balkans” between Kosovo and Serbia; the clashes between military governments and armed rebel groups in “the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Sudan and South Sudan . . . in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the Great Lakes region”; and the “long years of armed conflict” plaguing Myanmar. Francis also remembered “prisoners of war and political prisoners,” and noted “the growing climate of antisemitism.”

That was Sunday, April 20th. Since then, Israel has announced a plan to intensify its war on Gaza. India has fired missiles at Pakistani positions within the country, including the contested region of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, prompting a vow of retaliation from Pakistan. President Trump has stuck with his intention for the U.S. to annex Greenland, using military force if necessary.

What is a Pope to do? It is fair to say that Pope Francis’s words and gestures on behalf of peace (his denunciation of “the arms trade” as an industry “drenched in blood, often innocent blood” in an address to the U.S. Congress in 2015, to take one example) had little effect. The same could be said of his recent predecessors: Pope John Paul II, who met with or wrote to half a dozen world leaders and activists in 2003 in an effort to forestall the U.S.-led war in Iraq, and Pope Benedict, who spoke against the war then in progress in 2006. Edward Luce, the author of a new biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish-born diplomat who served as President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, contends that Brzezinski’s friendship with the Polish Pope, John Paul II, “proved critical in late 1980 in dissuading the Soviets from invading Poland, where the Solidarity movement had just emerged as a serious challenge to the Communist government.” But only Pope John XXIII—whose fraternal letter to President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is thought to have eased the Cuban missile crisis—can be credited with an act of statecraft that helped preserve peace between nations. The judgment of history is that the policy of Pius XII, the original “wartime Pope,” of officious neutrality in the Second World War—and silence about the Holocaust—not only failed to bring peace but enabled the Nazis to murder six million Jews with impunity.

So the record is not encouraging. Yet, in the circumstances, a “Pope of Peace”—a tag already being applied to Leo in the Italian press—is precisely what is needed. Peace can never have enough advocates in high places. The Vatican’s commitment to negotiation as a means of resolving international conflicts and its concern for the effects of wars on poor people are the basis for a consistent doctrine of peace set forth by recent Popes. And a global order that, for all its drawbacks, has made world war more of a prospect than a fact for several decades is now subject to the whims of President Trump, who has developed the most incoherent of positions: that of the bellicose unilateral noninterventionist.

It’s possible that Trump and his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, will seek to uproot the freshly planted American papacy and graft it onto their own projects, the way that Vance paid a hasty visit to the ailing Francis during Holy Week, and the way the White House profaned the papal interregnum by circulating a chintzy mockup of Trump as an imperial Pope. But the new Pope Leo XIV’s profile gives reason to hope that he will stand firm. Opinion pieces reposted on his social-media account suggest that he opposes Trump’s anti-immigration policies. And during a long public interview at St. Jude Catholic Church in New Lenox, Illinois, last August, then Cardinal Prevost aligned himself with Pope Francis’s commitment to justice, signalling his support for “justice in terms of seeking, you know, true justice, for all people, especially for the downtrodden, reaching out to help the poor and the suffering and the immigrants and those who most need the mercy of God, who most need the Church, perhaps.”

Now Leo is in a position to carry forward the late Pope Francis’s efforts with vigor. Of the references to peace in his first address, the most striking was the one to the peace of Christ as “an unarmed and disarming peace, humble and persevering.” This idea of peace is itself disarming, especially coming from a Pope, and an American one at that. ♦

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“Only in New York” may be a cliché, but only because it’s so true. For Goings On, in our New York-themed centenary issue, we asked staff writers to share some of their favorite spots that can be found . . . only in New York. These are places that are indelibly charming in their specificity—places that you never knew you needed but once you discover you’d be sad if they were gone—often thanks, especially, to the fascinating characters who created them and to the dedicated people who keep them running. Many of these spots are decades in the making, vestiges of another time, insistent on bringing history into the present day; all represent a sense of community that wouldn’t exist without them.

Illustration by Subin Yang

This issue is full of New York City characters; you will find them in pieces from Julian Lucas, on the artist Lorna Simpson, whose latest works were inspired by a meteorite she bought from “some guy upstate”; Ian Frazier, on the toll our city takes on the feet of its iconic pigeons; Lena Dunham, on being an uneasy native; and Molly Fischer, on Keith McNally’s new memoir, detailing the Balthazar restaurateur’s obsession with good lighting, getting the perfect wall color, and dishing on Instagram. In a gorgeous portfolio, Gillian Laub captures New York City power players in their living rooms; as Naomi Fry writes, “even the more modest parlors teem with meaning.”—Shauna Lyon

Photograph by Robert K. Chin / Alamy

New York City is a ghost town of my favorite places, of treasured spots that no longer exist. But next best is a vestige, a vital one, of a community nearly vanished from the neighborhood that it once defined. The charcuterie and specialty shop Schaller & Weber has, since 1937, occupied a storefront on Second Avenue near Eighty-sixth Street, in a part of town that had been predominantly German since the nineteenth century. When I moved there, in 1985, its main streets were still packed with German businesses—restaurants, bakeries, a marzipan shop, even a department store. Since then, the area has become a homogenized part of the Upper East Side, but Schaller & Weber, one of the neighborhood’s few surviving German places, remains a bustling outpost of traditional delicacies. An elder butcher, noting my academic pronunciation of such enticing wares as Lachsschinken and Krakauer Wurst, used to heartily greet me as “junger Mann” whenever I entered the store, and nudged my college German to colloquial speed. He’s long retired, but his colleagues still serve up those treats and others (tongue in aspic, headcheese, double-smoked bacon) along with packaged goods (zwieback, marzipan, jarred fruits) that blend reminiscences of European travels with the gemütlichkeit of home.—Richard Brody

When I told some friends that I wanted to brush up on my French, one of them suggested a church on the Upper East Side. Church? Had my accent lapsed so much that divine intervention was required? Peut-être. Miraculously, Église Française du Saint-Esprit, an Episcopal church founded by Huguenots, has been offering free French classes since 1884. On a recent Sunday morning, I crawled out of bed and made my way to East Sixtieth Street to atone for forgetting the subjunctive tense. The church describes itself as “for Francophones and Francophiles,” and also hosts a book club for language learners. (They last discussed “Amérique,” by Jean Baudrillard, and next will turn to “Les Impatients,” by the Cameroonian author Djaïli Amadou Amal.) My class—led by the church rector, Nigel Massey, a boyish-looking Brit who studied theology at Oxford—was focussed on the subjunctive as used to express uncertainty. Massey provided a timely Easter example: “I will be holding communion until Christ returns to Earth,” he said, with a devilish grin.—Jennifer Wilson

Red Hook keeps its secrets well. The neighborhood is home to Brooklyn’s largest public-housing complex, a Tesla dealership, the only IKEA in the five boroughs, and modern brutalist condos alongside weathered cottages, remnants of the nineteenth-century maritime trade. It’s not easy to get there, which gives the neighborhood a tight-knit, provincial feel. Bene Coopersmith opened Record Shop in 2015. The Google-hostile name makes it a hard place to find, but Coopersmith has attracted a crowd drawn to great music and even better ambience. Old-timers from the neighborhood sit around reading or gossiping, clapping along to whatever music is playing on the system, often at volumes so loud that Coopersmith and his guys have to shout to each other while pricing records. There are two pianos; salvaged art about Robert F. Kennedy; a small, eclectic collection of books curated by Coopersmith’s wife, the writer Sousan Hammad. On some nights, the records are pushed out of the way for raucous improv jazz or noise shows. A set of speakers is always angled toward the street, an invitation to come join the party. In the middle of it all is the playfully gruff Coopersmith, greeting customers with hugs and handshakes, maybe an invitation for some leftover birthday cake. Suddenly, the name makes sense. It’s just a record shop—but it’s the people Coopersmith collects who turn it into a refuge, a community center, a collective dream state, a makeshift town square. A condo went up next door, but the skylight still gets a lot of sun. No matter what, it’s always bright inside.—Hua Hsu

The most carefully caffeinated part of the city is the area where East Williamsburg meets Bushwick. The coffee corridor is ludicrously oversupplied with great java. Start at SEY, a serious but friendly café and roaster that specializes in coffee often described as “bright,” “floral,” or “acidic”—three adjectives that may help explain why this light roasting style remains an acquired taste, and one that is probably best appreciated in a plain cup of drip coffee. (If you prefer milky drinks, you may be happier with the darker, more chocolatey styles that predominate just about everywhere else.) A few blocks across Flushing Avenue lies Dayglow, which is both a café and a retailer, with an unmatched selection of bagged coffee from around the world; the shelves often include fresh offerings from Tanat (in Paris) and Dak (in Amsterdam), adventurous roasters known for delicious and strange coffees, sometimes processed to accentuate intense fruit flavors. Choose wisely, then head northeast, through Maria Hernandez Park, to the local roasting facility of La Cabra, an exacting Danish coffee company that also has a couple of outposts in downtown Manhattan. There is only so much coffee a person can drink in one outing, which is why it’s a good idea to pack a small thermos; fill it with whatever they’re brewing and drink it at home, whenever you feel the jitters subsiding, and the old lethargy returning.—Kelefa Sanneh

I have an intense fondness for New York City shops that have managed, somehow, to endure the real-estate churn and remain open for business as the last of their kind. I like to call them “dino-stores.” Perhaps my most beloved of the tenacious local longtimers is the Fountain Pen Hospital, in Tribeca—in business since 1946. Its modest storefront opens into a deceptively cavernous space, where you can get your fountain-pen fix, up front, or fixed, lovingly, in back. Owned by two brothers who took it over from their father, who inherited it from his father, the highly perusable store is part pen emporium, part tinkerer’s workshop—all incredibly charming. The goods inside are exactly as advertised: fine fountain pens of all prices (you can find starter models like the Pilot Metropolitan, which costs around $25, and also ornate Viscontis that retail for thousands). Sure, they sell other writing implements—ballpoints, rollerballs, mechanical pencils—but you can get those elsewhere. Jimmy, the longtime head salesman, administers the front desk with an expert, affable approach. I recently explained that I was on the hunt for a wet-writing flexible nib; Jimmy considered the request for all of two minutes before saying he had just the thing. From the back repair room he produced a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the nineteen-twenties that was, magically, in my limited price range. “This, this, is the pen for you,” he said. He was right.—Rachel Syme

Greenwich Locksmiths storefront in the West Village.Photograph by Jon Bilous / Alamy

Philip Mortillaro grew up on Elizabeth Street, and learned how to be a locksmith at age fourteen. In 1980, he bought a tiny triangular building in the West Village for twenty thousand dollars, from a guy who’d been renting it to a fortune-teller, and Greenwich Locksmiths was born. Back then, the block was mostly gas stations. Now his shop is next to a chic griddle-cake restaurant, where twentysomethings line up on weekends. Like his kiosk—the smallest freestanding building in New York—Mortillaro, who is seventy-four, with a gray Rasputin beard, has become a grungy neighborhood staple. Fifteen years ago, he festooned the Seventh Avenue façade with “Starry Night”-like swirls made of keys. Mortillaro’s son, Phil, Jr., is his sole employee. He’s made keys for celebrities—Shel Silverstein, Bette Midler, Frank Stella—and for locals going through all kinds of troubles, from robberies to divorces. (He’s also helped landlords get into apartments when someone has died.) He said recently, “I had a good boss who told me, ‘Listen, Phil, when you do a job—somebody’s locked out, or somebody’s changing the locks because they’re throwing somebody out—they’re not going to be happy, so give ’em a lot of leeway.’ ”—Michael Schulman

If you follow Brighton Second Street south, under the rusted overpass, you’ll reach the boardwalk—and a public bathroom that feels like a homemade cathedral. The steel-blue walls are draped with tinsel, adorned with red curtains. Laminated posters offer encouragement (“Sorrow keeps you human”); cocktail-napkin humor (“Of course women don’t work as hard as men, they get it right the first time”); tributes (Michael Jackson, Harambe); glimpses of the sublime (a photo of starlings flocking at sunset). All this is the painstaking work of Hazel Chatman, now in her late seventies, who’s been a public employee for forty-seven years and a caretaker of the city’s beach bathrooms for thirty. She buys the supplies and prints the posters herself. One recent morning, she appeared with the authority of an oracle, wearing a camouflage parka, gold earrings, and a forest-green baseball cap cut open at the back to make room for her braids. She does this work for God, she told me, though the bathroom, which had Passover decorations above the sinks, is creed-agnostic: “We all bleed the same,” Chatman said. A woman once told her that she’d been planning on jumping off the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge that day, but had just decided not to, because of what she’d read on one of the posters. The words on the walls, like the bathroom itself, urge us to make something beautiful out of nothing. “We’re in the world, but we’re not of the world,” Chatman told me. “We’re just passing through.”—Jia Tolentino

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Radio Around the World
• Best friends make the best podcasts
• Is there such a thing as too much pickle?