Bobo — as I knew him, beatboxxx69 on Reddit — stood me up for our online interview. When he sent me another encrypted video link later that night, he followed up with “my bad. Can you join now? I think this chat will be really useful.” I was in my pajamas, but nonetheless spent an […]
May 2025 Edition
Welcome to Shoeleather Magazine! We publish timely longform work by Honors students at NYU Journalism.
Hooked on a Feeling: The Blood, Pain, and Beauty of Hanging from Skin
The hooks are bigger in person. Four millimeters thick by three centimeters wide. I try to picture one passing through the flesh just above my knee, disappearing under my skin and emerging three centimeters away, and find I can’t. One hook lays on my left knee, point facing inward. Johnny Pearce, piercer and suspension facilitator, […]
Dry Harvest: New York City’s Community Gardens Face a Perilous Future
“I write this poem for all the poems from you I must leave unwritten. All the beginnings we will not stop seeking. Why, when there are such green beginnings yet to come, do they choose the gray end?” Brian Vogel, a long-time visitor to Little Italy’s Elizabeth Street Garden, recited his ode “To a Garden […]
Shall Make No Law: Polarized Campus Politics and the Illusion of Academic Freedom
On a Saturday evening in March, Mahmoud Khalil and his wife, Noor Abdalla, went out for dinner. Abdalla, 28, is a Midwest-born dentist expecting her first child with Khalil, age 30, a Syrian-born Palestinian studying at Columbia University. The couple returned to their home on the university’s campus only to be met with agents from […]
Closing Curtains: Why Broadway Is Heading for Trouble and How We Can Fix It
Othello is currently in a limited engagement on Broadway starring Denzel Washington as the title character and Jake Gyllenhaal as the antagonist, Iago. Tickets are selling from $216 to $921. This caught the attention of Johnny Oleksinski, the entertainment critic for the New York Post, who noted the outsized price in an article aptly titled […]