Important

A Habit of Return

by Haley Bliss Easter in New York begins, as many things do, with a street closed to traffic and open to interpretation. The Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue—less a parade than a slow, ornamental drift between St. Patrick’s Cathedral and polite confusion—looks, at first glance, like tradition in its Sunday best. Bonnets bloom into improbable architectures. Dogs wear tulle. Someone, inevitably, dresses as a rabbit with the exhausted dignity of a seasonal worker. It feels old. It feels continuous. It feels, if not sacred, at least rehearsed. But tradition here is always curated. What passes as continuity is often a loop: Victorian spectacle imported, secularized, and rebranded for a city that distrusts anything it cannot monetize or...

A Habit of Return

by Haley Bliss Easter in New York begins, as many things do, with a street closed to traffic and open to interpretation. The Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue—less a parade than a slow, ornamental drift between St. Patrick’s Cathedral and polite confusion—looks, at first glance, like tradition in its Sunday best. Bonnets bloom into improbable architectures. Dogs wear tulle. Someone, inevitably, dresses as a rabbit with the exhausted dignity of a seasonal worker. It feels old. It feels continuous. It feels, if not sacred, at least rehearsed. But tradition here is always curated. What passes as continuity is often a loop: Victorian spectacle imported, secularized, and rebranded for a city that distrusts anything it cannot monetize or...