The New York of the nineteen-eighties was, warily, a city in transition. The frightening “Taxi Driver” New York of the previous decade—steaming manholes, blackouts, riots—still hung over the town, but ...

“At one in the afternoon On December 22, 1984,” writes Thompson, “as Bernie Goetz was zipping up his thin windbreaker and heading down into the subway station,” four teens from the Morrisania section ...

The sharpened screwdrivers, memorable and imaginary, tell a lot of the story. Three days before Christmas 1984, Bernhard Goetz, a 37-year-old electrical engineer living on 14th Street, got on a ...

Two new books return to the ’80s-era saga of Bernie Goetz to consider the 21st-century intersections of race, crime and sensationalism. By David Segal Bernie Goetz is still here. The white man who ...

Historian Heather Ann Thompson had been in the midst of writing a book in 2023 when she realized she needed to stop and start a new one. With Donald Trump on course to return to the White House, ...

One Saturday afternoon in December 1984, a man got onto the number 2 train going downtown at West 14th Street in Greenwich Village. Blond, glasses-wearing, and scrawny, he did not fit anyone’s ...

New York in the 1980s was a downtrodden city with visions of upward mobility. Manhattan’s Greenwich Village was still a moist, low-rent bohemia of working-class punks and poets. Some South Bronx ...

Without Trumpism, Democrats and anti–Donald Trump conservatives tell themselves, America can once again be the nation it always was. This political moment, many feel certain, is an aberration, an ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...