I wasn’t thinking about terrorism, life and death, or whether I would see my family again. I was thinking about breakfast.

I put a bagel in the toaster.

Twenty-five years later, that small detail stays with me because it represents the life I had before everything changed. I believed this was simply another Tuesday, not knowing that within minutes, I would be running for my life.

Then the building shook violently beneath me. The explosion thundered through the tower, rattling the walls, shattering the ordinary rhythm of the morning, and sending a jolt of terror through my body.

Within weeks of arriving at Seton Hall University, my brother was surrounded by credit card offers. Companies set up tables on campus, filled his inbox and pitched their cards as free money, free rewards and freedom itself.

He signed up.

It didn’t feel like a decision with consequences. It felt like something everyone around him was doing. Only later, when the bill and interest came due, did he understand what he had agreed to.

My brother’s experience shows why Newark students should be required to take a personal finance course before graduating from high school.

Some may argue that Newark does not have enough room for protected bike lanes or that changes would reduce parking and hurt businesses. But streets are public spaces and should serve everyone, not only drivers. Better-organized roads can reduce dangerous encounters among motorists, cyclists and pedestrians.

New Jersey now expects e-bike riders to be licensed, registered and responsible on the road. Newark must provide streets where we can meet those responsibilities safely.

During May 2026 in West Orange, town employees were instructed to powerwash the rainbow flag off the Town Hall steps. The belated, nonsensical explanation referenced America 250, stating the steps needed to be fixed for the Memorial Day celebration as part of the 250th Anniversary events. Sure, repairing masonry might require a thorough cleaning first; however, it was clear the town had no plan to put it back after the repairs. The unwritten part of the explanation was that someone (the Mayor, the Memorial Day planners, bigots?) didn’t want to see a rainbow flag in their America 250 Memorial Day photos.

To understand Delaney Hall’s growth and conditions, one has to go back to the 1980s, when the United States began rapidly expanding its prison system, and governments turned to private corporations to meet demand. This spread to immigration policy, resulting in the detention of Cuban refugees in the Mariel boatlift and Chinese migrants in the Golden Venture shipwreck. GEO Group had been in charge of the facility from 2011 to 2017, housing 450 immigration detaineesduring that period.

The throughline that activists are calling for is a moratorium, but the four-point plan only proves to them that their needs aren’t being heard. “We asked for a moratorium, and [Governor Sherrill]’s just recycling things that were already in the process in the State House anyway,” said Casey Palmer, South Jersey Progressive Democrats member who has been protesting a data center local to her in New Jersey’s Monroe Township. At one Monroe Township Council meeting, she recalled, the data centers were not even on the agenda, “but people still went and spoke anyway because they see through the lines.”

Reports from the field by Ryan Novosielski:

5.29.26

A week ago, Delaney Hall became ground zero for grassroots resistance in support of a hunger and labor strike inside the facility. Detainees launched the strike to demand an end to the egregious and inhumane conditions inside the facility. The crowds have grown, and the tension has heightened over the last couple of days. It’s Friday, and protesters are making the same calls to the wider community to join them on the ground in support of the detainees' calls to end their detention.

Newark just held another no‑contest election in which 11.89% of registered voters decided who governs a city of more than 320,000 people. 

This is not an anomaly, but the operating condition of a democracy that has learned how to function without its citizens.

They founded RCSG in 2017, and now, nearly a decade later, they’ve built a space where returning citizens can transition back into their communities. RCSG is both a resource-sharing organization and a union that advocates for humane conditions and rights for people who are incarcerated, having successfully advocated for several new laws under former Governor Phil Murphy, including restoring voting rights to people on probation and parole and allowing former felons to serve on juries.