“Pretty much every place I go, I look for the anarchist bookstore,” says Jason Dean, who wears dark-rimmed glasses and a black winter jacket. Dean fumbles with his new purchase, Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story collection The Unreal and the Real, and explains to me that he’s on a cross-country road trip. Dean started from his home in Washington State and is now making his way down the Atlantic coast in a camper van. Thursday is his last day in New York, and he doesn’t miss the opportunity to stop into the new location of Bluestockings, a radical bookstore, café and activist center that, for many, is a Lower East Side institution.   More →

Since it opened in 2017, Lockwood Paper has stocked political-themed cards and trinkets alongside the usual greeting, Get Well Soon, and holiday cards. Walk into the Astoria stationery shop today and you might find a scented candle that claims to smell like “Is it over yet?”—a reference both to the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasingly high-stress political battleground in the U.S. There are items bearing an image of Kamala Harris with the phrase “Stay Nasty,” and “2020” stickers printed with a cartoon-style rendering of a dumpster fire—a best-selling graphic across products ranging from birthday cards to tea towels. More →