The 234 Apartment

Claudia Angulo and her four children live in Orange Cove, California, a corner of Fresno County known for its citrus. She says when planes fly over the orange grove next to their apartment building and spray pesticides on the trees, she and her family experience headaches , exhaustion and difficulty breathing. But Angulo is concerned about an even more serious health problem in her 11-year-old son Isaac. When she was pregnant with him, she worked at a packing house, handling freshly picked citrus . After Isaac was born, Angulo says she noticed his development seemed slow and strange. “I saw that he didn’t play the same as other kids,” she says. “He didn’t learn the same.” She says his behavior was aggressive and antisocial. And she tells a story about the time he even threatened suicide — when he was only four years old. When he was five, a doctor diagnosed with him ADHD. Angulo says several other pregnant women she worked with at the packing house also had children who developed behav...

My three-year-old cat spends most of her time lounging by the window. It faces the high branches of the tree outside our apartment, and she stares intently out at the rusty- red wood thrushes and brown house sparrows that perch there; her eyes dilating when the occasional squirrel rustles the branches.  She’s a seventh-floor housecat who longs for the outdoors. But even if there was a feasible way of letting her go outside, I wouldn’t let her loose on native wildlife on her own (if you’re not familiar with the war being waged between cats and birds, my colleague Rachel Gross has chronicled it in all its gory detail here). So, as a compromise, last year I bought her a leash. After some initial hiccups, we have settled into a rhythm where I buckle her into her harness, scoop her up and carry her down to the soft grass adjacent to a nearby duck pond . There, I let her down, and her whims dictate our path. Often, people stare. Sometimes, they’re walking their dogs: big ones, small one...

A Queens landlord 's quest to evict a cigarette- puffing single mom and her disabled daughter has gone up in smoke. For three years, rent- controlled tenant Lynn Blue had a case hanging over her, alleging she was a nuisance who needed to leave the Ridgewood apartment where she grew up. Blue not only smoked, but also had people constantly coming and going and left trash, according to the case filed by landlord Milena Jovic . A Queens jury sided with Jovic in 2015 and Blue said the verdict put her on a verge of a breakdown. The trial judge threw out the verdict, and the landlord appealed. But last week, three appellate judges ruled the trial judge was right to toss the jury decision. It was "like a mountain was lifted off me," Blue, 49, told the Daily News on Friday. "It felt like validation, you know. Somebody heard me." Jovic had accused Blue of smoking marijuana and cigarettes. Blue insisted she only us...

An uncaring system putting blameless men behind bars has been a cinematic staple as far back as Alfred Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man" and likely further. But few examples have been as effective as the fact-based "Crown Heights." Winner of Sundance's coveted audience award in dramatic competition, "Crown Heights" is adapted from an episode of public radio's "This American Life" and named after the Brooklyn neighborhood where its main characters live and work. As written and directed by Matt Ruskin, the film is finely balanced between two parallel sets of astonishments. One that an innocent man, Colin Warner, could spend 20 years in prison after being handed a potential life sentence on the flimsiest of evidence. The other, equally amazing, is that people who loved and believed in Warner fought for years against inertia and crushing difficulty to get him out. What the good people do is as powerful as the bad here, and that makes all t...