Fending Off the Package Pirates

Shortly after moving into their renovated brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, at the end of 2019, Jordan Slocum and Barry Bordelon began experiencing a problem that now consumes many urban dwellers: package theft. “It was three or four packages, over the course of a few months,” said Mr. Bordelon, 40. The issue was compounded when Mr.…

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What Kind of Flag Can I Fly Outside My House?

The First Amendment prohibits the government from infringing on a citizen’s right to free speech, but homeowners associations aren’t government entities. Their ability to censor expression is much broader. “For a constitutional violation to occur, you need a state actor,” Mr. Rovinsky said. “Yes, you do have freedom of speech, but while the government can’t…

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What Makes a Home ‘Sexy’?

When Jolita Leonas-Arzbaecher was planning her new penthouse apartment in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, she gave her design team some very specific instructions. “My home has to be as unique, dramatic and one of a kind as I am,” she told them. “Dramatic in the sense of being fascinating, unexpected and powerful.” The…

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What Should Museums Do With the Bones of the Enslaved?

The Morton Cranial Collection, assembled by the 19th-century physician and anatomist Samuel George Morton, is one of the more complicated holdings of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Consisting of some 1,300 skulls gathered around the world, it provided the foundation for Morton’s influential racist theories of differences in intelligence among races,…

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