“It feels like we are selling toilet paper” Small seed company owner Mike Dunton to New York Times reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis, describing the recent spike in demand for seeds. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only altered our relationship with grocery shopping and restaurants—it’s also coincided with the start of spring planting season. In a time…

As our current public health crisis rages, the importance of carework comes into focus more clearly than ever before. As social theorist Nancy Fraser put it in a recent interview, COVID-19 “puts the spotlight on people’s interior lives and what it takes under these conditions to keep a household running.” Work that was previously overlooked…

The fashion and clothing industry answered the call. At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in New York, when it was clear that there was going to be an alarming shortage of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, designer Christian Siriano responded directly to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plea for private businesses to help…

John Corbino’s 1944 painting Carmen Jones, in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, depicts the Broadway musical-turned-Hollywood-hit of the same title. Corbino’s expressionist, abstracted rendering portrays the dynamism, energy, and movement of the live performance. Yet even as Carmen Jones was marketed as a celebration of African American life and culture, the painting and the…