|
|
Published |
Caption |
Likes |
Comments |
|
|
![I’m not sure there’s ever been a book like Dear New York. Designed as a gift to the city, one hundred percent of royalties are being reinvested back into the city in the form of public art and donations to NYC charities. I put my whole heart into this one, and early reviews agree: it is the most beautiful, most lovingly created Humans of New York book. At nearly 500 full-color pages, it features hundreds of stories that have never been seen before. I will not be receiving a penny from Dear New York, but I’ve never wanted more badly for you to own a book of mine. It was a labor of love. And nothing would make me happier than for as many of you to experience it as possible. I think for all artists, this is something much more valuable than money. ‘Dear New York’ is coming out next month. If you’re planning to get a copy, please consider pre ordering today through the link in bio.]()
|
2025-09-05 23:03:23
|
I’m not sure ..
|
4,364 -96%
|
61 -97%
|
|
|
![“We started with eight kids from the projects; my son and seven other kids. But that first year we grew to 75 kids. Now we’ve got different teams, different coaches. I pay for a lot of this stuff myself. It’s sad, because some of the parents… well, maybe they just don’t have money. Because I refuse to think that they don’t care. Because if you don’t care, and you just leave them in the street—so much can happen, so easily. And I don’t want that for them. I want them to do something with their life. They count on me. So if they count on me, if they’re able to show up, how does it look for me not to show up for them? I have to show up for them. I have to show up for them. Some of these kids have been with me four years. It’s been a great pleasure to watching them grow: going from not knowing how to catch, to knowing how to catch, to getting baseball ready. But baseball is just the vessel to get them in. As you can see, we don’t just come play baseball and leave. We barbecue every two weeks. We have a lot of events with the kids: trunk-or-treat, Christmas giveaways, birthday parties. It’s not just come play ball, I’ll see you next week. It’s everything. It’s a family. Let’s grow this into where you can have friends for the rest of your life. There’s a lot of troubled kids getting into fights and doing things like that. But if they become your friend, you don’t want to fight with your friend. You want to protect your friend.”]()
|
2025-09-03 23:30:05
|
..
|
35,851 -66%
|
311 -85%
|
|
|
![“One time we were playing in the yard of the school, and the gates were open, and the watchman, he was so precious, he was praying. So we packed our bags and ran for it. There were five of us girls. The watchman saw us and began to call us back, and all of them ran back, except for me. I kept running. The only thing is—I literally had nowhere to go. My uncles worked in the middle of the city. If I went there, they would see me. Nothing ever happens in Gaza City without everyone finding out and everyone talking about it. So I just went home. That’s the thing about this place; it’s the only place I feel like I belong, but it was always so suffocating. There wasn’t even space for a teenager to be rebellious. I think the craziest thing we did was paint on walls. Like all teenagers we were convinced that everything was so dark, and the world was ending. So we’d graffiti Pink Floyd and Cold Play lyrics onto walls: ‘Lights will guide you home.’ Meanwhile home is literally two blocks away, two streets away. The entire neighborhood is rubble now. Honestly I don’t even like to talk about the past because it feels like the world keeps begging us to prove that we’re human beings. And if we could only do that, if we could prove that we once lived in nice houses, and listened to Cold Play, then we could prove that we deserve to live and eat and exist and survive. I hate it. I hate pity so much, because it belittles the person you’re pitying. Please don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t feel sorry for us. We don’t need you, I promise. We don’t need anyone. We have farmers with farmlands, but they cannot harvest their own farmlands without being shot. We have fishermen who can collect fish from the sea, but they’re banned from using the sea. We have these beautiful, beautiful cuisines. We can feed ourselves. Just let us, we’ve reached that point. Just let us. Don’t feel sorry for us. Feel sorry for yourselves, that you’re living in a country that is arming Israel, that is sending weapons overseas to kill children. Your bombs are killing children. If that bothers you, then don’t feel sorry for us. Feel sorry for yourself. That you don’t have enough say in your own country to stop it.”]()
|
2025-09-03 01:49:24
|
..
|
62,216 -42%
|
1,207 -41%
|
|
|
![“At one point, I hated Gaza. I just wanted out. I wanted to study in America and be this big director. I wanted to win an Oscar. All my dreams were overseas. I think I was just mad at how besieged Gaza was—it limits you in so many ways. Some of the men here are so narrow minded. I wanted to throw them all out of Gaza so that they could see the world, and then bring them back, with different views, and different thoughts. But there’s also a brilliance to the people here. Because it would take decades of research to learn what our trauma forces upon us at a very young age. You don’t have the privilege of disassociating from reality. You cannot ignore this shit. The drones, the rubble, the blood, the children fighting for food and water. It’s all around you. A white person living in Europe is able to say they don’t care about politics, because they’re not exposed to the firsthand effects. But if even one of the things that happen on a daily basis in Gaza, was to happen in the West, it would move nations. In political science class we used to learn about things like ethics, and human rights, and international law. But life in Gaza will teach you that these things are just propaganda. Propaganda that fooled us into believing that if only people knew what was going on, they’d stop it. It was this naive notion that led us, at least me and all of my friends, to film and document and speak and share on our stupid Instagrams. But I’ve lost the will. It’s too exhausting. Everyone has disassociated from our reality. We have nothing to eat, but we have these phones. We get to watch our international friends going about their days normally. Who are we even talking to? You cannot rely on the conscience and moral compass of those in power. We’ve tried for so long. It doesn’t work. You have to put pressure on them. You have to disrupt their systems. You have to move and mobilize and obstruct and protest and cost them things. It’s the only thing they listen to. Life in Gaza does teach you. For the longest time I wanted to leave, but now I don’t feel like I could bear living anywhere else in this world. Gaza feels like the only real place left on earth.”]()
|
2025-09-02 23:07:20
|
..
|
96,496 -9%
|
1,136 -44%
|
|
|
![“To raise a son, not from her own body, for thirty years—nobody accepts this easily. But my biological mother was under a lot of stress; I was one of triplets. So my aunt volunteered to raise me as her own. She never got married; it was always just the two of us; that’s why I call her Mom. She was like an angel— she did everything for me, took care of every need. She used to pray for me all the time: ‘Allah yarda ʿalayk.’ This is difficult to translate, but it means: ‘May God be satisfied with you.’ All the time she prayed this. And God was listening. The rest of the family thought she spoiled me too much, and I would never amount to anything. For a while it seemed like they might be right. In university I tried to major in English commerce but I got stuck on it, and failed out of school. It made my Mom look bad. My other siblings were very committed, very religious— so it seemed like she had bad luck raising a kid. But she never gave up on me. She kept praying: ‘Allah yarda ʿalayk.’ When I changed my field to nursing, she tried to discourage me. She’d been a nurse her whole life, so she knew how difficult it was. But I told her: I want to be a nurse too, so I’ll always have something to remind me of you. I did my best and got very good grades. When I got a job at the hospital, I treated many of our relatives. They’d return home and tell my mom: ‘Wow. Yehya took care of us. He got us everything we needed.’ This is what she had always prayed for- for people to say good things about me. It’s all she ever wanted, and she got to see it. With my salary I helped her buy a new house. It’s gone now, it got bombed. But we were able to live there for two years together. She got to meet my daughter Zainab, who I named after her. She got to see all these things. She passed away right before the war, thank God. She would not have been able to handle it. And she died exactly how she wanted to die. It was sudden. Maybe a stroke, or an embolism that stuck in her heart. And I was there; I got to hold her in my arms as she passed away. If you’d have asked how she wanted to die, she would have told you: exactly this way. It’s what she always prayed for. And God was listening.”]()
|
2025-09-01 20:44:27
|
..
|
46,415 -56%
|
332 -84%
|
|
|
![“Her name is Rita. It comes from a poem by a well-known poet of Palestine. It’s a song that I used to sing, and my wife loves it too. So Rita is a product of love between me and my wife. I haven’t seen either of them in a year and a half. When the border opened last year, I sent them both out of the country. I hold a Master’s degree in Burns, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery—and these skills are deeply needed in Gaza. So I chose to stay behind. Now the border is closed, and I couldn’t leave if I wanted to. I do my best to talk to Rita on WhatsApp every day. I’ll ask about kindergarten, and her swimming lessons. I’ll look at her latest drawings, and try to encourage her. But that’s it; I’m a WhatsApp father only. A few days ago she was ignoring me a bit, so I asked: ‘Why don’t you talk to me?’ She told me: ‘I feel like I forgot you a little bit.’ My wife jumped in, and said: ‘No, no, she’s kidding.’ But I said: ‘She doesn’t need to be kidding. She’s saying the truth.’ I’ve been gone most of her life. First with my studies in England, and now with this separation. I do feel guilty, yes. But if I had left, I’d feel even more guilty. There’d be a crack in my heart. It would come to me in my nightmares, every time I saw the suffering of my people. The first stage of this genocide was to destroy the health infrastructure, so there’d be no refuge for the dying. I happen to be part of an organization, Doctors Without Borders, with big abilities and big principles. I knew that if we worked together, and made the right decisions, and did the right things—we’d be able to provide comfort to countless people. And that’s what we’ve done. I’ve co-managed a team that built a field hospital with 120 beds, and three surgical theaters running 24 hours. This is something I’ll be proud of for years and years. And I hope one day Rita will understand. I’ll ask her to read books and watch documentaries about the genocide. I’ll ask her to understand that I couldn’t close my eyes to the suffering of our people. We must resist. And how do we resist? By existing. And how do we exist? By having a value. And in our family, our value is to serve others, more than we serve ourselves.”]()
|
2025-08-28 21:32:17
|
..
|
74,788 -30%
|
1,233 -39%
|
|
|
![“The last thing I heard was the voice of my children playing, then everything went black. When I opened my eyes I thought I’d gone blind. I couldn’t see anything. I could no longer hear their voices. I checked to see if my wife was alive. Her back and legs were fractured, but she was alive. So I turned on the light of my phone and tried to find the children. My three-year-old daughter Julia was calling to me from beneath the rubble: ‘Baba, Baba, where are you?’ I carried her to a safe place then went back for my second son Kareem. He had severe head trauma. He was in a trance. He kept saying: ‘I’m sorry Mama. Please don’t blame me. I’m sorry.’ When I brought them to the hospital, I refused to let my colleagues deal with their injuries. I dealt with them alone. I did the dressing. I removed the sutures. I wanted them to feel: ‘Our dad is taking care of us, maybe he can still protect us. Maybe he’s still our hero.’ We’re doing OK, I guess. My wife is in a wheelchair now; she can’t walk. So I’m everyone’s caregiver. The children’s wounds are healing slowly. But there is a big problem with their brain. They cannot eat well, cannot talk well. Julia is still waking in the night and screaming. Every time she hears a rocket she starts trembling and crying. I used to tell her: ‘Don’t worry. They’re not targeting us.’ It’s a myth that all of us in Gaza tell our children. But it doesn’t work anymore; she knows that it’s a lie. I’m trying to keep myself together, so they can still see me as their hero. But no, I am not strong now. I’m weak. I’m not eating well. I used to wear better clothes. I’m not OK. There’s so much fear. Fear that they will never recover. If there’s another strike, even near us, they will lose their mind. You understand me? And I have so much guilt, because I’m the reason we stayed. We had a chance to leave Gaza, one year ago. But I refused. Because I love my people. I love my patients, so I chose to stay. But I regret all of it. My children had the right to live their life. Not this life I chose for them. I’m not okay. I didn’t do well with my children. I didn’t save them or protect them. We used to be a beautiful family. But now, I don’t know.”]()
|
2025-08-26 00:12:00
|
..
|
112,321 +6%
|
2,488 +22%
|
|
|
![“I cannot forget a minute of that day. When I tell you this, it is like I’m seeing it in front of my face on a movie screen. At 3 AM drones appeared outside the windows of the hospital. Most of my colleagues had already fled. I forgive all of them; few beliefs can override the desire to save one’s own soul. But I could not leave. There were hundreds of patients, and few medical staff remaining. If the last of us left, these patients would have died. The hospital staff assembled in the lobby where we were stripped, handcuffed, blindfolded, and marched into the freezing night. Beneath my blindfold I could see hundreds of fighters with machine guns. I could hear the screams of my colleagues being beaten. My fear was so high I was close to cardiac arrest. Someone speaking weak Arabic put a gun to my head and told me I’d never see my children again. He asked: ‘Where is Hamas? Where are the Hostages?’ I told him: ‘I’m just a nurse; I disagree entirely with October 7th.’ But these guys did not care. They beat us all. The lorries came to transport us to the detention center. At the door of the lorry stood the strongest of their fighters, body-builders. And before entering each detainee received the three hardest punches we will ever receive in our lives. When we arrived we were made to lie on the ground, and they put dogs on us. The dogs had muzzles, but we could not see through our blindfolds. All around me was barking and screaming; I thought my colleagues were being eaten. I was detained for several weeks. The conditions were so bad I prayed to die. One of the prison guards, exactly one, I can accept as my neighbor. The rest had hatred in their eyes. Some spoke English; so I tried to reason with them. I pointed out that half of the detainees had debilitating medical conditions. Some were eighty years old. One man was mentally incapacitated. I asked the guards: ‘How could these people possibly be Hamas?’ But for every claim—they’d have a response. Some reason all of us were guilty. Even when I said: ‘I’m a nurse,’ they replied: ‘Oh, so you treated terrorists.’ To them, every Palestinian deserves to suffer. And nothing you say—nothing— will convince them otherwise.”]()
|
2025-08-22 23:43:16
|
..
|
65,080 -39%
|
1,718 -15%
|
|
|
![When I tried to interview Marwa, the internet in Gaza was so bad I couldn’t hear half of her words. She then sent me a written follow-up, which was so moving, and so beautifully written, that I’ve ditched the interview altogether and am including it here in full: “Israel bombed our house into a pile of rubble and dust. Everyone in it— my mother, my father, my four sisters, my brother, my baby niece— became a memory in the same instant. During the war, the home had become our lifeline. Comfort wasn’t always in words. It was in a shared cup of tea in the dark. It was my mother holding our hands, her presence a silent promise that we were not alone. It was my sisters distracting the children with stories. We would huddle together, our physical closeness a shield against the terrifying sounds outside. It’s probably a mercy that the house is now gone, because I don’t think my heart could bear to see the physical emptiness of the rooms where so much life once existed. It’s the ‘unimportant’ moments, the background noise of a living family, that I miss the most. I miss the sound of my father’s key in the door at the end of the day. I miss my mother’s hand on my forehead, checking for a fever that wasn’t there, just out of habit. I miss arguing with Nour about politics and then laughing about it two minutes later. I miss Mona’s quiet smile from across the room, a look that says: ‘I understand. I miss Ayat bursting into my room to show me a funny video. I miss the boys debating which one of them was the better gamer. Where all that beautiful noise used to be—there is nothing but profound silence. If I had one more moment with each of them, I would simply say: ‘Thank you.’ To my father: ‘Thank you for believing in me more than I ever believed in myself.’ To my mother: ‘Thank you for every silent sacrifice I was too young or too busy to notice.’ To my sisters and brothers: ‘Thank you for being the irreplaceable pieces of my childhood and my heart.’ And if I could sit all of them together one more time, the whole family, I would say to them: ‘I see you. I see everything you did for me, for us. And I am so incredibly grateful.”]()
|
2025-08-21 23:22:40
|
..
|
227,908 +114%
|
4,164 +105%
|
|
|
![“All day I am thinking: your son, your son. You need to do something for your son. Yazan is not a normal boy, he’s very disabled. But he’s the most precious thing I’ve got. Before the war he was improving so much. He was going to therapy. He was making good eye contact. He’s very shy, he cannot express his feelings. But I would take him to visit the neighbors and everyone loved him. He’s a lovely boy: he holds my head, he kisses my cheeks. Right before the war we had a surgery on his legs. At that time he was five years old. When the doctors removed his casts I brought him home from the hospital, and I told my daughters and my wife to close their eyes. When they opened their eyes again, Yazan was walking. We’ll never forget this moment; we had so much hope that he’d be a normal boy. But all the clinics have been closed now for two years. He’s had no therapy. Nothing has been done for him, nothing. Now if he walks three steps he falls down. Before the war he’d started to make sentences with a few words: ‘I need bread, I need water.’ Now if he wants something, he’ll just catch me by the arm and show me. And he’s doing this thing now, where he jerks his arms and legs. This is something we’ve never seen before. We thought we would always go forward. We thought that he would be a normal boy. But now I am watching him deteriorate before my eyes. I have a good job; I work on a medical team. But still, I have no power. It takes all my power just to keep him from dying. Last year he got very bad diarrhea. There was no drinkable water. All of the pharmacies were empty. But I heard of a pharmacy six kilometers away with diarrhea medicine. I was so tired. No car, no fuel, no donkey cart. It was like horrible American action movie: there was bombing, shooting from tanks, shooting from helicopter. But I walked six kilometers, and I got him some medicine. And we managed to stop the diarrhea. Anything he needs, I will do. I have two hands. In one of these hands I carry all the problems of my work, all the problems of the war, raising my four daughters with no food, no water, no shelter, no electricity. And in the other hand, I carry Yazan.” 📸 by nouralsaqa]()
|
2025-08-20 00:13:16
|
..
|
56,878 -47%
|
1,053 -48%
|
|
|
![“Before the war I never thought of getting married— maybe after 30 or something. But when the war started my mind changed. Every night I am awakened by airstrikes. I live near the sea, and the helicopters are coming from the sea. Whenever I hear them, I am thinking: ‘What if this one is for me?” And if these shots are for me—how is it going to feel?’ A few months ago my uncles family—they died, to the very last, including the baby. They were sheltering in a school that got bombed. They say when something like that happens, you don’t feel anything. So if it happens to me, this is what I hope. But sometimes you get trapped beneath the rubble. And it takes a long time to die. It’s very scary to think about. For the first time in my life I’ve started to feel like I need someone— someone to tell me that everything’s going to be okay. Four months ago I became engaged. Her name is Lama. She’s the sister of my best friend Kareem, who was killed in a bombing last year. I was driving to her house today. I’d put on jeans, and was smelling very good, and I started thinking: ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be so happy. Because things are so bad for everyone.’ But if I’m being honest, we are very happy. It is maybe even better than being in love in a normal situation. Sometimes when I wake up from the airstrikes: I’ll send her a very sweet message: ‘I hope you are very good,’ and so on. This is something that is nothing during normal times. But it’s a bit different when you are checking if someone is alive. All these things, which used to seem like nothing, are everything to us now. I visit her two or three times a week. Every time I go to her house, we have like five minutes or so. If she’s upset about Kareem, upset about the situation, afraid of the missiles, I’ll calm her down. I’ll give her a hug. It’s a very great feeling, honestly. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s not going to stop bullets, or bombs, but it makes you feel safe. By that I mean, at least I’m with her and she’s with me. If something happens to me, it is going to happen to her. So we going to be in the same situation. We will live together, or we will die together. And just knowing this, it makes me feel safe.”]()
|
2025-08-18 20:30:11
|
..
|
68,138 -36%
|
1,331 -35%
|
|
|
![“I cannot cry. Before the war— any little thing, it would make me cry. But now I cannot make myself. I want to but I can’t, even when my heart is breaking. I used to be a schoolteacher; I love children. But now I see them walking in the streets with no shoes. They come into our clinic and you can see how tired they are. Some of them are mutilated: they’ve lost a leg, or an arm. You see children crying because they cannot walk again. Yes, there is a lot of children like this now. But even the ones who aren’t injured are changing. Before the war it was not normal to find a child who wasn’t in school. There were organizations that would find the parents and force them to enroll. But now Gaza’s children haven’t been to school in two years. They’re changing. They’re beginning to think: ‘I will never go to school. I will just work to bring my family food or water.’ Even my own daughter; she’s twelve years old. She was a leader in school and she dreamed to be a doctor. She has a cousin in Canada, the same age. They have video calls, and my daughter can see the difference. She sees how far behind she’s fallen, and recently she told me: ‘I won’t be a doctor anymore.’ This broke my heart, but still, I could not cry. It’s like something is blocked in me. I don’t share my pain with anyone. I don’t share with my husband. I don’t share with my mother, or my father, or my sister. Because all these people come to me to feel safe. A few months ago when they bombed the house of my husband’s family—I went to collect the body parts. It was too difficult for my husband. He lost fifteen members of his family that day. His mother, his father, his brother, were beneath the rubble. So I went. I had to start looking: this is the head for who? This arm, this leg, is for who? Afterwards I sat alone, and I tried to cry. I felt that if only I could cry, I will feel better. I will feel less full. But even then, I could not. I have a colleague in the work, who tells me: ‘Kholoud, after the war, you are going to collapse. Because you do not cry.’” 📸 nouralsaqa]()
|
2025-08-16 21:24:55
|
..
|
83,433 -22%
|
1,845 -9%
|
|
|
![“My whole life people have said to me: ‘You are too kind, too sensitive.’ When I interviewed for a schoolteacher position, the principal told me: ‘You will never be able to control the students.’ Because of this I built in my mind that I’m not a very strong person, you know? I decided to focus on my house, my family, my children. When the war started I was working as a data encoder; I spent all day on the laptop. But Doctors Without Borders said to me: ‘Kholoud, there is no one left to ask. We need you to help organize our operations in the North.’ And I’ve done it. I organized a network of people on the ground. Everyone in the organization knows me now, respects me. And I’ve done all of this while raising four children, and another four children who lost their parents. In December we spent fifteen days on the street because there were too many bombs. Nobody could sleep safely inside. I ate nothing during this time, zero. I just drank some water every two days. We were sheltering in a small corridor inside a school yard. My husband left us to look for food, and that’s when the bomb fell. When it falls close to you, you don’t hear anything. You just see the body parts flying through the air: the hand of someone, the leg of someone, the head of someone. My son comes to me and his face is blood. My daughter comes to me and she is clutching her chest. My other two children are holding their legs; I can’t tell how they are injured. There was no hospital left in Gaza City, so I brought them back to our house. Our neighbor is a doctor, so I asked him to come over. We discovered that one of my children had shrapnel in the head. The other three in the leg. There was no anesthesia, no stitches. We put something in the children’s mouth, and I held them down while he removed the shrapnel with the kitchen knife. You cannot imagine how the children were screaming. But we removed the shrapnel. And when we finished, I took the knife, and removed the shrapnel from my own leg. ‘Too kind, too sensitive.’ I heard this my entire life. But I can tell you: another person lives inside you. And if the world forces you, you will find her.” 📸 nouralsaqa]()
|
2025-08-15 19:36:47
|
..
|
125,041 +18%
|
2,861 +41%
|
|
|
![“I’ve closed my social media. From Gaza it’s all bad news: someone’s dying, someone’s been bombed, someone’s been displaced from their home. Then everywhere else in the world, you see things working so smoothly. Everyone is living their lives. Literally the smallest thing that they do: it makes me jealous. The smallest thing, like eating ice cream. This is my favorite food. And I’ve gone two years without any ice cream. I don’t want to feel envious of anyone, so I’m trying not to see it. I’m still trying to treat myself in whatever small ways I can: like doing my hair, or maybe having henna dye on my hands. After work I will try to sit with my sisters, so we can connect, and say about our dreams. One of my dreams is for us all to live on an empty farm, a quiet place outside all the world. Two of our cousins have already passed away in a bombing. Four of my nieces and nephews were injured. I can’t lose anyone else. I can’t, I won’t be able to take it. My family is everything to me. Right now our home is partially destroyed, but we are still living in it. Because we don’t have anywhere else to go. Every day when I come home from work, my two-year old niece is waiting for me at the front door. Her name is Hanan; it means kindness. And when she hugs me it’s like a battery has charged in my heart. Literally all of her life has been in this war. Whenever she hears the sound of a plane, she covers her ears and says: ‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’ She never goes anywhere. She never meets new people. We are her entire world. We do everything we can to protect her, to give her a childhood. Her birthday was two weeks ago. We had dancing all night. There was bombing all around us, but we just turned up the volume and tried to disconnect from all the noise. Sugar is impossible to get in Gaza now; but we gathered all the sugar we could. Everyone contributed. And with this sugar we made a cake, and cinnamon rolls, and sweet tea with mint. Hanan eats nothing but canned food; no snacks, no treats. So when she saw that cake, she started to scream. All the children started to scream; you can’t imagine their joy. It was maybe my best moment ever, in all of the war.”]()
|
2025-08-14 01:20:31
|
..
|
91,631 -14%
|
2,185 +7%
|
|
|
![“My name is Weam. It’s a beautiful name for me, because my mother gave it to me. She died of cancer when I was eight years old— so I love my name, because my mom loved it. It’s also perfect for me because it means ‘peace, love, and harmony.’ And everyone who meets me says that I’m positive energy shining everywhere. I’m a team leader for twenty-three pharmacists. ‘The pharma army,’ we call it. Ask anyone: we are the happiest team in the hospital. After we start our morning meeting, I’ll put on a bit of music for everyone. If they want to dance, they can dance. If they want to sing, they can sing. We are working 24 hours, seven days a week without stopping. They are under so much stress, all the time. There are always mass casualty incidents. And everyone in Gaza is living their own nightmare: with the bombings, the displacements, the hunger. So I’m just trying to make it easier for them. When I help others, it feels like I’m doing something right, that I’m still useful in this life. In Islam, if you speak a good word to someone else, it is also a good thing for you. So if someone smiles, and says: ‘Good job, you did it, you survived another day.’ This is a big deal for us. So I try to keep a smile from ear to ear. But on the inside, no. I am not happy at all. I haven’t slept for more than three hours since the war began. We are all screwed up in this world. Even if you are still alive in this moment, maybe in five minutes you will die. The smallest spark of light can be destroyed in the blink of an eye. How can anyone be happy when they are surrounded by so much death? But there is something that my mother said to me, right before she died. It’s the only memory that I have of her. She told me: ‘Weam, please keep that smile on your face. Because everyone loves your smile.’ So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying. You will find that even when I’m crying, I am smiling.”]()
|
2025-08-13 22:53:41
|
..
|
62,680 -41%
|
1,049 -48%
|
|
|
![“The shift started like any other. I was making my rounds when around 2 pm I heard a bombing; it sounded very close. My family lives relatively near the hospital. Usually, when a bombing is that close, I would call them immediately. But on that day I didn’t call. I don’t know why. Maybe I’d grown desensitized. But after an hour I began to notice that the nurses were acting shifty around me. I was summoned to a case in the emergency room, and as we were walking down the hallway, one of the nurses asked if I’d heard from my family. That’s when I knew. I started running to the ER. The first person I found was my father. He’d been in the explosion area; he was stunned. My sister was next to him, she was also in shock. I asked about my mother and the nurse told me that she was in the ICU. It wasn’t true. But that’s what he told me, so he could get me alone. The ICU is three floors up from the ER, so I immediately began running up the stairs. The nurse ran after me. We passed the first floor, the second floor, and then he stopped me forcefully. He told me: ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you. But your mother is deceased.’ I fell to the floor. And I can’t remember everything here, I was in shock. But they brought me to the forensics room and led me to a giant, white bag. I unzipped it. And I saw her face. She looked as good as alive. She had bled out through her legs, so her face was untouched. And I wanted so bad to kiss her in that moment. So I kissed her. And I began to hug her. But they pulled me away and they covered her again. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the tears. But this is the first time I’ve talked to anyone about this. I have to be strong for my family. Especially because my father is a paraplegic now; it’s a lot of responsibility. I need to be the emotional sponge for everyone else. That’s my focus now: caring for my father, my siblings, my patients. I want to help other people, and be a good Muslim. It’s not that deep. I just have to believe that she’s in a better place. And if I fulfill my responsibilities, then we will meet again. It’s what I have to believe. It’s all the relief I can get.” (2/2)]()
|
2025-08-13 02:44:36
|
..
|
98,844 -7%
|
1,893 -7%
|
|
|
![“We had one chance to leave Gaza, early in the war. At that time our lives had grown very difficult. We’d been displaced. We sat down and had a family discussion, and the consensus in the family was not to leave. We’d just learned that our house was still standing, so we thought: ‘We’re luckier than others.’ One month later the Philadelphi corridor was closed, and the option to leave was exhausted. But we still thought we would be OK. We thought the war would end soon, as we think now, as we thought a year ago, as we thought two years ago. And at least we were together. Our family has always been extremely close. I care for my patients, I care for my friends, but not the way I care for my family. Especially my mother. All people say that their mother is a saint, but she was actually a saint. She hated no one. She loved everyone. When I was a child she worked as a schoolteacher, and her school was next to mine, so in the mornings we would walk to school together. I don’t know why I remember this—but she’d always walk between me and the sun. So that I could stand in her shadow. It’s a simple memory, but it means a lot to me. I was always the most attached to her. Maybe everyone in our family feels the same way, but this is my feeling. I told jokes only for her, so that she would laugh. I specialized in medicine just to make her happy. I was a resilient teenager. I wanted to be a writer. But she confronted me. She told me: ‘Life on Earth is a short journey, and you should help people. Because we believe in God. And we believe there is more than just this life.’ Everything, all the things I have done, I have done to please her. And I let her down. I let her down. Because it was my decision. Three days before she was killed, I evacuated her to a safer place. And the safer place got bombed.” (1/2)]()
|
2025-08-13 00:58:40
|
..
|
158,737 +49%
|
3,806 +87%
|
|
|
![“When I entered Gaza the Israeli military had a rule: I was only allowed to bring in seven pounds of food. As I was weighing out protein bars, trying to get under the limit, I said to my husband: ‘How sinister is this?’ I’m a humanitarian aid worker. Why would there even be a limit on food? I’ve worked in many places with extreme hunger, but what’s so jarring in this context is how cruel it is, how deliberate. I was in Gaza for two months; there’s no way to describe the horror of what’s happening. And I say this as a pediatric ICU doctor who sees children die as part of my work. Among our own staff we have doctors and nurses who are trying to treat patients while hungry, exhausted. They’re living in tents. Some of them have lost fifteen, twenty members of their families. In the hospital there are kids maimed by airstrikes: missing arms, missing legs, third degree burns. Often there’s not enough pain medication. But the children are not screaming about the pain, they’re screaming: ‘I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” I hate to only focus on the kids, because nobody should be starving. But the kids, it just haunts you in a different way. When my two months were finished, I didn’t want to leave. It’s a feeling I haven’t experienced in nearly twenty years of humanitarian assignments. But I felt ashamed. Ashamed to leave my Palestinian colleagues, who were some of the most beautiful and compassionate people that I’ve ever met. I was ashamed as an American, as a human being, that we’ve been unable to stop something that is so clearly a genocide. I remember when our bus pulled out of the buffer zone. Out the window on one side I could see Rafah, which was nothing but rubble. On the other side was lush, green Israel. When we exited the gate, the first thing I saw was a group of Israeli soldiers, sitting at a table, eating lunch. I’ve never felt so nauseous seeing a table full of food.”]()
|
2025-08-11 23:34:14
|
..
|
404,835 +280%
|
10,899 +436%
|
|
|
![“We were young when we had her. I was twenty-three, the mother was twenty; we weren’t planning to have kids yet. I don’t want to say the relationship fell apart because of our daughter. It was mostly us. We were going through a stressful time: I’d just lost my mother, she’d just lost her grandmother. We were going through an eviction and had to move into a shelter. We just handled our stress in different ways. She dealt with it by wanting to be young and dumb and free. We were arguing about everything, and I’m not good at arguing. I don’t like confrontation. I get agitated, antsy. Every time there was an argument, I’d get so angry that I’d have to leave the facility to get some air. I’ve been that way since childhood. My mom and my dad were heavy addicts; they lost custody of me when I was four. I grew up in programs. I didn’t have nobody to show me affection. And it made me angry, I was an angry kid. I saw that other people had love, and understood it, and to be honest, I wasn’t okay with it. There are times where I still feel like that, sometimes even now as a father. But every time I look at her it goes away. It went away the moment she was born. When you held your first kid, did you see a glow around them? Did you ever see a glow? Because I saw a glow. And I felt it. It was like, holy shit. I wanted to cry the first time I felt it, because I wasn’t sure what it was. I was confused. But as it gradually grew on me, I was like: OK, so this is what love is. And it felt beautiful. It made me want to be better. I don’t want my daughter seeing the side of me from when I was young and didn’t know how to cope with my anger. Right now I have her every day after school. There’s a counselor at her school: Mr. Gonzalez. I go to see him once, sometimes twice a week. He’s been very helpful. He’s teaching me how to cope with life, how to handle arguments with my baby’s mother. Now if she texts me twenty paragraphs about things that happened six years ago, I don’t fight back. I just don’t respond, until it’s time to get the baby.”]()
|
2025-08-07 21:52:01
|
..
|
69,264 -35%
|
494 -76%
|
|
|
![I’m looking for NYC photographers who document their own communities to participate in an exhibition being hosted in one of New York City’s most iconic locations. Any documentary photography of people will be considered, but special consideration will be given to street portraiture. I’m looking to feature a diverse group of photographers and communities, so please spread the word to anyone you know who matches this description. Ten photographers will be chosen. Each photographer will receive $10,000 and will also have their work spotlighted on Humans of New York. Photographers: please email a few examples of your work to dearnysubmissions@gmail.com. Please include your website, social media handles, the neighborhood where you live, and a little bit about yourself. What’s your story?]()
|
2025-07-31 23:16:34
|
I’m looking for N..
|
55,279 -48%
|
3,551 +75%
|
|
|
![“The lowest moments usually come from people who love you but don’t understand you. They see you struggling, and say: ‘Why don’t you just stop doing it?’ But if they knew how important it was to me, they would never ask that. I had a little success in my late twenties. I was part of a band that signed to a record label, but we never had any hit music. It was mainly local stuff. Most of my thirties was working two jobs, struggling to pay bills, playing a late-night slot on a Tuesday night in a room with no people there, or maybe just a couple of my friends. It’s not that I felt disrespected, just not noticed. I guess obscure would be a good word. You’re lugging your guitar around everywhere. Nothing’s happening. It feels like you’re trying to hammer a nail with a banana. Those are the years where you say: ‘Man, is this really what I want to be doing? Can I live like this and be happy?’ But every time I tried to put my guitar down, I’d find myself writing a poem, or writing a lyric, or trying to write a riff. Turns out that I did need to be creative to be happy, more than I needed to be successful. It’s been a long journey. It’s like any other small business; you’ve got to build it one brick at a time. Even though my thirties were some tough years, it was during those years that my songwriting began to improve incredibly. Really talented musicians began to notice, and they were like: ‘Man, I love your stuff. I want to be in your band.’ That’s when it all started to come together. My current band is called tentonmojo. We’re playing a show tonight, and there will probably be like 80 or 100 people there. I’m forty-three, and I’m finally putting out stuff that other people are relating to. You know how music has this way of sinking into your memory, and becoming connected to a certain time in your life? I’m hoping that might happen tonight for some of those eighty people. With my music, finally.”]()
|
2025-07-29 20:56:12
|
..
|
43,870 -59%
|
274 -87%
|
|
|
![“I went to Harvard for my Master’s, but still, I’m always thinking: ‘This can end at any moment. At any moment the leadership is going to decide I wasn’t the right black guy.’ It’s always fight-or-flight. It always feels like the platform I’m standing on is crumbling. It’s just a fact: it’s easier for me to lose everything than someone who doesn’t look like me. When those people slip, there will be people who look like them, who have done what they’re trying to do, who can step in to help them. But there aren’t any doctors in my family; my parents were janitors. They didn’t speak English. We lived in section eight housing. When I was taking all these tests, nobody knew what was going on. I had no understanding of how hard it would be to become a surgeon. And I guess that ignorance helped me in a way; it allowed me to start the journey. But imagery is also so important. When you never see a person that looks like you doing something, it’s hard to believe that you deserve to do it. There weren’t many black people in my medical school. So when I got into Columbia’s surgery program, I was like: ‘Lemme see what white people I’m going to be with.’ I turned on the video where they introduce our co-residents, and the first person I saw was a black Dominican woman. I was like: ‘Yes! I got one.’ The second was white. Then an Asian. But then it was: black, black. That made four of us, in a class of seven. We immediately got together and were like: ‘Guys, we need to be so appreciative of what’s going on here. We need to have a pact that we’re all going to make it.’ That‘s one beautiful part of being a minority: when you find somebody that looks like you, there’s this sense of being on their side already. We get dinners, we get drinks sometimes. We have a group chat—I can’t tell you the name of the group chat, but it keeps us going. Residency is a beast, especially surgical residency. All of us have crash outs, and in those moments it’s so nice to have someone who can bring you back. Someone who looks like you: who you can lean on, and be vulnerable with, and ask for help. Someone you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, will never think of you as the dumb black doctor.”]()
|
2025-07-27 21:37:14
|
..
|
106,544 +0%
|
1,559 -23%
|
|
|
![“I remember taking my final exam, getting stuck on an answer, and thinking: ‘Who cares, I’m about to die.’ I knew something was very wrong. Medical school is always tiring, but this was a different kind of tired. I was getting by on multiple cups of coffee, multiple energy drinks. Large lumps had begun to appear in my neck. After the exam I stumbled down the hall to the ER and the doctors told me that my organs were failing. It took eleven weeks to make a diagnosis: a rare disease called Castleman’s. But there was no cure. A priest read me my last rites. I said goodbye to my family and prepared to die. But a last-minute dose of chemotherapy saved my life. Over the next year I relapsed three times. Each one almost killed me. The last was the worst: I spent a month in the ICU, and it took seven different chemotherapies to bring me back. By then I’d reached the maximum dose of chemo a human can tolerate. The doctors told me I was out of options, and the next relapse would certainly kill me. I only had one hope. A tiny hope, but a hope. I had to cure the disease myself. It takes a billion dollars and ten years to create a new drug; I didn’t have the money or time. My only chance was to discover an existing drug that would work. I made spreadsheets of every similar disease and every drug used to treat it. I wrote over 2000 emails to every doctor who’d published a paper on Castleman’s. I started studying samples of my own blood, but I ran out of time. Another relapse put me back in the ICU; from my hospital bed I asked the doctor to cut out one of my lymph nodes. I took it to the lab and discovered a particular protein called mTOR that was sending my immune system into overdrive. And that’s when I knew. I knew from my research that a drug called Sirolimus inhibits mTOR. My doctor was hesitant to prescribe it; there was no research to support my theory. But he took a chance, and within days my symptoms began to disappear. I still take the pill every day, eleven years later. I was able to marry my wife and have two beautiful kids. And through my work I’ve been able to save thousands of lives, by repurposing fourteen different drugs to treat rare diseases.” dfajgenbaum]()
|
2025-07-25 19:37:30
|
“..
|
286,599 +169%
|
3,703 +82%
|
|
|
![“It’s a horrible surgery. They open up your skull and cut out the tumor while you’re awake. In the hallway outside the operating room, I told my dad and sisters: ‘Guys, let’s wipe away our tears. We have to be strong for Mom.’’ But when we walked into the room, before we could even say a word, Mom pointed at the wrap on her head and said: ‘Chiquita Banana Lady.’ And everyone started laughing, and snot crying. I mean, who does that? Who wakes up from brain surgery and thinks: ‘I need a joke that will make my family laugh?’ But that’s who she was. Other people first, always. It was a horrible form of brain cancer. Those last fifteen months we watched it take everything from her. She was paralyzed on one side of her body. She couldn’t walk. The tumor was pressing against the speech center of her brain, so she slowly lost her ability to speak. Words started disappearing. It was very frustrating for her. She’d know what she wanted to say, and she’d reach, and reach, and reach— but it wasn’t there. I couldn’t bear to see her get frustrated. At the time I was a freshman in college. She’d ask me about school, and I’d rush to finish her sentences as soon as she opened her mouth. I’d be like: ‘Mom, do you mean this?’ Our biggest fear was that we’d lose her before she passed away— you know what I mean? But it never happened. The disease ‘took everything,’ but it never touched her soul. Toward the end she was down to just a few words, but two of those words were: ‘unconditional love.” They were unlikely words to hold onto. They weren’t easy to say, so many syllables. But ‘unconditional love’ became her answer to everything. It was her replacement for all the sentences and paragraphs she could not say. I remember our last conversation. I think she was trying to tell me to take care of my sister, but she couldn’t quite get the words out. She got so frustrated that she started to cry. I couldn’t bear to see it, so I just started talking. I told her: ‘Mom, I’m going to dedicate my life to finding treatments for people like you.’ She looked so tired, but she gave me the biggest smile ever. Well, the biggest half-smile ever. And she said: ‘Unconditional Love.’”]()
|
2025-07-24 19:35:48
|
..
|
218,112 +105%
|
1,608 -21%
|
|
|
![Full disclosure: Detra was compensated two over easy eggs, a buttered biscuit, lemon water, and a signed book for this performance. Thank you onewomannyc1 ❤️ If you haven’t already, please consider preordering a copy of Dear New York through the link in bio. It’s the most beautiful of the HONY books, and the first one where the vast majority of photos and stories have never been seen before. 🙏]()
|
2025-07-23 22:48:00
|
Full disclosur..
|
5,039 -95%
|
58 -97%
|
On average, Humans of New York gets 106.4K likes and 2K comments per post. (Historical)
