Portfolio at NYU

Social Issue/Policy

by Shahan Mufti
Shahan Mufti was a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and GlobalPost and reported from Pakistan between 2007 and 2009. His work has also appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, the Boston Globe, , Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. He has been a guest on many radio and television shows on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CBS, BBC, and NPR. He served as a Fulbright scholar to India and has a master's degree in journalism from New York University and a bachelor's degree in International Political Economy from Middlebury College in Vermont. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at New York University and Marymount Manhattan College.

Selected Works
by Neil Parmar
This selection of work stems from my time as a graduate student within New York University's "portfolio" program, a two-semester honors track where articles focus on a subject area or theme. After creating a beat centered around New Yorkers with a mental or physical disability, I broadened my scope to look at deviations from the societal "norm."

For a collection of more recent works, please visit www.neilparmar.ca

The 2009 Mayoral Campaign: Not a Race, but a Game
by Julie Sobel
Next year New York will hold its quadrennial mayoral election. Mayor Bloomberg will seek to extend his reign to twelve years, a feat accomplished by only three of his predecessors in the city's history; and one that already has required him to change the rules of the game. With a number of potential opponents waiting in the wings, a city in crisis, and a political season already off to a colorful start, the 2009 mayoral election promises to provide a rich source of material to explore. I am interested in stories of the election both visible and invisible – the campaign that we see (the race) and the campaign that we don't (the game).

Navigating the Urban Fringe
by Matt Schwarzfeld
In this project I will look at how government interacts with marginal communities in New York City. How do the two forces respond to one another? How does public policy create and destroy opportunities for the urban poor? How do communities innovate or subvert policy when necessary? What recourse does the urban poor have against distant tides of power and change?

Queer Politics
by Thomas Rogers
The successes of the gay rights movement have led to the mainstreaming of much of gay culture but, until recently, transgendered people, queer people of color and elderly queers have remained on its margins. Now these groups are making their voices heard. With this in mind, I'll be looking at
the organizations and the people that are changing the New York City queer community.

General assignment
by Vidya Padmanabhan
Most of my stories here were written for the Daily Record of Morris County, New Jersey, where I covered the Madison-Chathams beat. Also included are a couple of stories from other publications, written during my time at NYU.

Mental Health: Policy and Law
by Freda Moon
My portfolio topic, mental health and the law, was a look at the experiences of those with serious mental illness in the American criminal justice system. The beat took me inside Riker's Island to interview inmates, into New York's treatment-centered mental health courts to observe reforms at work and into the homes of families with a mentally ill member in long-term solitary confinement.

Collateral Damage: The impact of incarceration on American families
by Abigail Kramer
Thirty-five years after New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws inspired a national wave of mandatory-minimum sentencing statutes, America continues to lock up more people per capita than any other country.

I'm interested in how the nation's prolonged incarceration craze impacts American families. How do families maintain relationships when a member goes to prison? What happens when they don't? What's the impact on communities already destabilized by poverty and violence? What role does family disruption play in creating intergenerational cycles of incarceration?

Where the criminal justice and child welfare systems collide, there erupts a series of policy and practice that defy research, logic and common consensus, ricocheting chaos into the lives of prisoners, their children and their communities. In this body of work, I'll tell the stories of families trying to survive, down the rabbit hole.

by Little Baby, III

Bright Lights, Big City
by Janelle Nanos
A collection of my work at New York Magazine and other freelance assignments.

Sharing America
by Jason Boog
A Guatemalan boy asked me once, "Do people die in the United States too?" He'd seen too many people die in his poor village and imagined that life was somehow perfect here. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans come to the U.S. chasing after equally unrealistic dreams about America. But when I read about racial tensions dividing neighborhoods in Queens or the immigrant fight to earn a living wage, I think that U.S. citizens have some equally harmful misconceptions and attitudes about these new arrivals as well. My portfolio will explore fantasies and stereotypes from both sides, focusing on how we learn to share America.

The First Amendment
by Kersten Swinyard
The interplay among the five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment (freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition) form the core of speech protection in the United States. Those freedoms are also at the crux of popular culture, court cases, and a million invocations of the First Amendment in causes from hard-core pornography to religious pamphleteering. I am studying the intersection of the First Amendment and daily life--the junction of historical lore and present application.

Fourth Wave Feminism
by Julie Leupold
No one can pinpoint quite when it started. But somewhere before women won the right to vote and after the God created the world, feminism was born. Throughout the evolution of this broad social movement, women haven't always agreed on the principles they were fighting for, with perhaps the exception of one – equality of the sexes. By the time the Baby Boomer generation dominated the workforce, women could vote, register for credit cards, join the military, pile up higher education degrees and run multi-million dollar companies. In the most fundamental analysis, parity between the sexes had been achieved. Now comes my generation. Many women today aren't satisfied with being equal to men – they want to be men. From casual sex to cutthroat boardroom deals, the little girls who were "sugar and spice and everything nice," grew up to be anything but. Below you will find a serious of articles tracing women in all stages of the feminist movement, culminating in an examination of my "sex in the city" generation in an attempt to define fourth wave feminism.

Eggs
by Caroline Binham
My portfolio project is centered on the theme of egg donation and assisted reproduction. Despite ads featuring smiling, chubby babies — who, after all, are meant to be the process' end product — egg donation can be a murky, unregulated underworld of gene transaction, where babies remain just that — products.