I have been reading the New Yorker magazine for about as long as I can remember. I like the cartoons and I read the movie reviews every week, but my favorite are the Personal Histories. I’m not sure what the criteria is for these. Sometimes the writers are famous, sometimes they aren’t. They don’t seem to occur with any regularity, and I sometimes miss them. In fact I see a bunch I hadn’t noticed during the pandemic. In fact, on the web site I see there are two slightly different categories, one subtitled “Essays and Memoirs” (under “culture” in the URL), even thought they all seem to be essays and memoirs. You may need a subscription to read these.

Personal History

Personal History (Essay and Memoirs)

I might have taken more interest in history if this sort of thing was taught is schools. I had never heard of the Astor Place Riot. From Wiki:

The riot resulted in the largest number of civilian casualties due to military action in the United States since the American Revolutionary War, and led to increased police militarization (for example, riot control training and larger, heavier batons). Its ostensible genesis was a dispute between Edwin Forrest, one of the best-known American actors of that time, and William Charles Macready, a similarly notable English actor, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.