Here at The Common, we’re all about place, so we’ve been experimenting with more ways for readers to experience the locations of our pieces. Using this map, you can explore all the dispatches we’ve published set in New York City. Get to know Eli the Seltzer Man, the nighthawks on the Upper West Side, and more!
MARVIN GARBEH DAVIS SR.
A sudden hum, a soft pulse through the walls, and the bulbs bloom again: white, merciful, blinding, as if mercy itself has switched on the lights. You can hear the city rejoice. Someone shouts, “Current don come!” Radios click on. Pots clatter. Even the roosters seem to crow out of turn. The sound of the generator fades, its duties relieved.
JEFFREY WOLF
The fjords sit back and cast their spell. They rise from the ocean like the backs of sleeping beasts. For eons, they’ve waited. Layer after layer, gray upon gray, so deep and infinite that I start to feel afraid. Surely this is where the darkness lives.
BETHANY BRUNO
Outside my office window, trucks rumbled past loaded with pallets of equipment. The air always smelled faintly of dust and jet fuel. I thought about how this patch of land in northern Alabama, once a cotton field, then a proving ground, then a missile test site, was about to become home to something even bigger.
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