The first of the five times Alexandra (a pseudonym) was arrested for prostitution and brought to the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Court, she was 17 and had zero interest in counseling. “I was telling the pimp I was with, ‘I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna go,’” she tells Gothamist. “And he was like, ‘You have to go because this is what they mandated and you don’t wanna go to jail.’”

Socorro Toribio emerged into bright sunshine on a recent Wednesday morning in July after spending four days in her bedridden client’s Lower East Side apartment...Despite feeling sleep-deprived, Toribio didn’t head home after work that day. Instead, she took the train to Downtown Brooklyn to the headquarters of the state Department of Labor, where home health aides held signs in Spanish, Chinese, and English denouncing the state policy under which they are allowed to be paid for just thirteen hours of their 24-hour shifts.

When COVID-19 swept through the Rockaway peninsula last spring, St. John’s Episcopal Hospital was alone to weather the storm. While the spotlight was on St. John’s pandemic heroics, the hospital was quietly dealing with another crisis behind the scenes.

New underground spaces are still popping up all the time. But as Ahearn told VICE in an interview, “I’m less worried about how someone runs a space for one or two years in the current climate and more worried about how someone builds a decades-long, multi-generational arts community."

Waiting on line for a drink in front of a black-and-white-vinyl-covered wall in the Dreamhouse’s backroom Saturday night, Alex Crousillat, 31, observed that being there was a bit like traveling back in time. That’s not just because of the chandeliers and other touches of faded grandeur left over from when it was the Wyckoff Manor catering hall, or even the fact that people were smoking inside.

The focus on social equity has somewhat obscured that New York’s marijuana market will be highly competitive. Picture glossy celebrity weed brands and Wall Street vets-turned-cannapreneurs. Here is a sampling of the monied contenders that may be vying to profit off of New York’s cannabis industry, and how they got here.

With New York’s legalization of marijuana in March, JP and his business partner, both Hispanic, are strategizing on how to gain a foothold in the adult-use market—a space that elsewhere in the country has remained overwhelmingly white.

To afford therapy on top of her rent and other expenses, Miller has had to get creative. She has started taking gigs walking dogs, babysitting, and cat-sitting to supplement her income. The alternative medicine practitioners who Miller says also contribute to her peace of mind--a bodyworker and an herbalist--have agreed to accept help with marketing and logo design in exchange for their services. But with her therapist, bartering is not an option.

When Christina Sparrock skipped multiple sessions with her psychiatrist earlier this year, her doctor became alarmed and called a mobile crisis team to visit her apartment. The two mental health practitioners who arrived (the teams are usually staffed by social workers) quickly set about assessing her well-being. “They were examining my apartment, my appearance, asking whether I took medication, how I was resting, what’s your support system, when’s your next doctor’s appointment,” recalls Sparrock.

The strange sensation of numbness and discomfort in Daniel Martinez’s right leg first drove him to see a doctor to figure out what was wrong last May. A neurologist in Westchester, near where Martinez works as an engineer at IBM, conducted a series of tests involving little electric shocks that resulted in a diagnosis with severe neuropathy, or nerve damage, and a bill for $624.

When the de Blasio administration 
announced its HealingNYC initiative in March to lower the death toll from opioid overdoses, Police Commissioner James O’Neill lauded the plan, saying “We can’t arrest our way out of this problem.” But the police department will be getting millions of dollars a year to do just that, according to a city budget document.

Long before Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Compassionate Care Act in July 2014 legalizing medical marijuana, the buyers club was on a mission to bring relief to sick patients. The club has weathered changing marijuana policies, arrests and even a gunpoint robbery.

“We have been successful at negotiating good quality health care for many of our members and many don’t pay for health care right now,” said Fran Turner, director of legislative and political action at the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA), which represents 300,000 members and retirees throughout the state. “This plan would impose a cost they are not used to paying.”

Zeesy Stern lay unconscious on an operating table at NYU Langone Medical Center as a surgeon removed a section of her jaw where a golf-ball-size tumor had begun to displace the teeth on the left side of her mouth. Another doctor, meanwhile, worked to extract a piece of her fibula that would be fitted like a puzzle piece into the space where her jaw once was. The goal was to remove the growth and create a new, fully functioning jaw, a feat that once took three operations over 18 months and left some patients with trouble chewing and disfigurement. But the doctors at NYU Langone had pioneered a new approach, one they dubbed “jaw in a day.” The tool that made it possible: not a scalpel, but a 3-D printer.

In his compact cell, furnished with a toilet and cot, Nazario had little space to move, he recalled in a recent interview. "I just talked to myself, answering myself, pacing back and forth.” After years of criticism from advocates, the city’s practice of isolating detainees through punitive segregation has come under scrutiny from lawmakers and city officials.

Christian health-care-sharing ministries are nonprofit cooperatives that mimic health-insurance companies. But Ms. Andersen bought a service that seems to be flying under the radar of New York state insurance regulators. And she is paying more for less coverage than is available under the Affordable Care Act.