Patrick Semansk/AP/File

Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers speaks with reporters outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Feb. 28, 2023. Thousands of Nebraskans with felony convictions could be denied voting rights under an opinion from Mr. Hilgers, now under review by the Nebraska Supreme Court.

Four months ago, and 15 years after he got out of prison, Thomas Moore voted in his first presidential election.

He picked former President Donald Trump in Nebraska’s Republican primary, and he told everyone he knew that he’d voted. It took a trip through a washing machine to get the “I Voted” sticker off his shirt. Over the past 15 years, Mr. Moore’s earned a Ph.D. and opened and sold three businesses. He now co-owns a mental health agency in Florida and teaches courses on entrepreneurship in prisons and at a local community college in Lincoln, Nebraska.

But with Nebraska pushing back against allowing those with felony convictions to have a newly regained right to vote, Dr. Moore says he is afraid to vote in the upcoming general election. Voting, if that right is revoked, could bring criminal charges. 

So is participating in democracy worth the risk of destroying the life he’s rebuilt?

“The benefits don’t outweigh the costs,” he says in a telephone interview. “To risk being convicted of a crime to go vote, I’d rather just not vote.”

Nebraska is already in the news because of Republican efforts to shake up its electoral map. But this voter rights issue, a separate controversy, has also drawn attention to the Cornhusker State. 

Dr. Moore is one of millions of Americans with felony convictions who have had their voting rights restored in recent decades. But he is also one of tens of thousands of Nebraskans now unsure about whether those rights have been taken away months before a pivotal presidential election. The issue is now before the Nebraska Supreme Court, but it could have broader implications. 

While there is little evidence of widespread election fraud – from Russian interference, to mail-in voting, to noncitizen voters – the integrity of American elections has become a heightened concern. Meanwhile, a parallel push for protecting voter access has also gained momentum in recent years. That’s playing out in a growing number of states like Nebraska, where tens of thousands of people with felony convictions like Dr. Moore have recently cast ballots for the first time. 

Rebecca S. Gratz/AP/File

Nebraska resident Steven Scott, who owns and operates Re-Gen Fitness and Recovery, told The Associated Press that long waiting periods and other conditions after parole from prison are barriers for those trying to reenter society, Feb. 23, 2023, in Omaha, Nebraska.

For those Nebraskans trying to start fresh after serving sentences, some say feelings of joy after regaining full citizenship have been replaced by fear and caution. At a time when U.S. democracy feels especially fragile, the Nebraska case weighs the redemptive power that the right to vote can have on those who’ve lost it, with the principle that voting rights come with responsibility, in order to protect the integrity of elections.

“It gets to the very fundamental nature of democracy,” says Danielle Jefferis, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law. “Who has a right to cast a ballot? Who, and when, gets to decide who has that right?”

Who can restore voting rights?

The history of voting rights reform in Nebraska is one of conflict between the state’s legislative and executive branches.

A trio of governors has raised constitutional concerns with felony reenfranchisement legislation, with two of them issuing vetoes. The Legislature has nevertheless pressed on – in bipartisan fashion – insistent that its actions are lawful.

First, in 2005, lawmakers eliminated Nebraska’s policy of lifetime felony disenfranchisement by passing LB 53. The governor vetoed it, but the Legislature overrode the veto.

In 2017, the next governor vetoed a law that would have eliminated a two-year waiting period required by LB 53. A legislative override failed then, but earlier this year lawmakers passed LB 20, which would remove the waiting period.

Current Gov. Jim Pillen didn’t veto the law, but he didn’t sign it, either, referencing “significant potential constitutional infirmities.” Months later, and two days before the law was to take effect, Attorney General Mike Hilgers described those infirmities in an advisory opinion.

Rebecca S. Gratz/AP/File

State Sen. Justin Wayne (center) speaks during a hearing at the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska, on behalf of LB 20, a bill to provide restoration of voting rights upon completion of a felony sentence or probation, Feb. 22, 2023.

Both LB 53 and LB 20 are unconstitutional, he argued, because the power to restore voting rights to Nebraskans with felony records belongs exclusively to the Board of Pardons – a state body made up of him, Governor Pillen, and Secretary of State Robert Evnen. While the opinion isn’t legally binding, that same day Secretary Evnen instructed county election offices to stop registering residents with past felony convictions.  

“If this policy is the right one, the only democratic way to implement it is through a constitutional amendment,” wrote Mr. Hilgers and Secretary Evnen in an op-ed last month.

Any other process, they added, is “inconsistent with over 100 years of our state’s history.”

Thousands of Nebraskans with felony convictions could now be denied voting rights under the opinion from Mr. Hilgers, now under review by the Nebraska Supreme Court.

But there are questions. The state constitution says the Board of Pardons has the power to restore civil rights to people with past convictions, but it doesn’t say the board has exclusive power to do so. The state Supreme Court has also held that statutes restoring some civil rights but not others don’t conflict with the board’s broader pardon power.

A pardon “nullifies all the legal consequences that might come with a felony conviction,” argued Jane Seu of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska before the Supreme Court last month.

“Here, we’re just talking about voting rights and the restoration of voting rights,” she added. That “coexists with the executive pardon process.”

A ruling from Nebraska’s Supreme Court is expected soon – perhaps this week. But the clock is ticking. Nebraska’s voter registration deadline is Oct. 25.

Reenfranchisement and reform 

Decades of research suggests that allowing individuals with past felony convictions to vote again makes them less likely to return to prison, easing their reintegration into society while increasing public safety.

In Minnesota, a study found that people with past felony convictions who voted in the 1996 election were only half as likely to be rearrested from 1997 to 2000 as those who didn’t vote. In a 2012 survey of disenfranchised citizens in Florida, almost 4 in 10 “directly connected their inability to vote to their perceived ability to remain law-abiding.”

For Dr. Moore – who also works for RISE, a nonprofit reentry program in Nebraska that campaigned for LB 20 – reenfranchisement “gives people ... a sense of, ‘Yes, I can be a productive citizen after I made a bad decision.’” 

But a felony is a serious crime, and an increasingly common argument is that restoring voting rights for someone with a felony conviction is too important to be automatic.

In their op-ed, Mr. Hilgers and Secretary Evnen wrote that determining if someone should get their voting rights restored “can be assessed only on an individualized basis.”

Hurdles to voting

Officials in other states have come to similar conclusions in recent years. Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia are among the states that have added requirements for citizens with past felony convictions to meet before they can register to vote, including getting individual permission or paying a number of fines and fees. In Tennessee, for example, people have to pay thousands of dollars before they get voting rights restored.

So while over 2 million Americans with felony convictions have regained the right to vote since 1997, according to The Sentencing Project, as of 2022 more than 4 million of America’s 300 million citizens were still ineligible due to disenfranchisement laws. Furthermore, only a fraction of citizens with felony convictions who were eligible to vote in the 2020 election made it back onto voter rolls, according to a Marshall Project/USA Today analysis of four states. 

SOURCE:

National Conference of State Legislatures, Movement Advancement Project, Voting Rights Lab

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Jacob Turcotte and Henry Gass/Staff

“It has been very challenging for people with felony convictions to get their voting rights back,” says Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy at The Sentencing Project.

This now includes upward of 100,000 Nebraskans, including many who, due to LB 53, have been voting for years. Whether they will be able to vote this November now depends on the state Supreme Court.

It’s a state of affairs that rankles Dr. Moore. But his biggest concern is not the future of his right to vote, but whether two state officials will be allowed to unilaterally refuse to enforce a state law.

“This is an issue, to me, of abuse of power more than it is voting rights,” he says.

“If [someone] can just throw a wrench in the election just by saying he decides it’s unethical and not right, that’s a bigger issue,” he adds. “If that is permitted, what’s next?”

Day after day, the piles of shucked shells slowly become tiny mountains behind Bluffton Oyster Co., a gray clapboard shack where a crew of fast hands pries away at oysters and crabs, a bounty bound for local markets and eateries.

In many ways, Bluffton’s May River waterfront here is a throwback to bygone days when local fishermen and fish houses provided most of America’s seafood. Now, like a pearl inside an oyster, the smooth, shiny prospect of renewal – of sustainability and food self-sufficiency – awaits discovery.

Helming the charge for renewal is Bluffton, South Carolina’s new Mayor Larry Toomer, the oyster shack’s owner, who sees as his mandate preserving and linking a working waterfront to the region’s growing suburbs. Why does this gambit matter beyond America’s Low Country? Because the seafood unloaded here plays a crucial role in the nation’s health and security, Mayor Toomer says.

“I used to think nuclear war was our biggest threat,” he says. “Now I think it’s our ability to feed ourselves if something goes wrong.” 

Aside from coastal recreational opportunities, Americans have become largely disconnected from the ocean’s riches. In fact, the United States is the world’s second-biggest commercial fishery. But the White House National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health doesn’t even mention seafood as an asset.

Experts say that “blue food” isn’t a part of a broader conversation about America’s food security or food system transformation largely because of a common public perception that fish, oysters, and shrimp are a luxury, not a necessity. At the same time, the gap between fish catchers and fish eaters – no more “my neighbor is a shrimper” – has widened.

The challenge, says Mayor Toomer, is a sense among local fishers that “we’ve basically been left to die” even as seafood consumption has risen from 12 pounds to 20 pounds per capita in the past 30 years.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Shrimper-turned-mayor Larry Toomer stands by his shrimp boat in downtown Bluffton, South Carolina. Local seafood plays a crucial role in the nation’s health and security, Mayor Toomer says.

Independence “not beyond reach”

While the U.S. has traditionally been one of the world’s largest food producers – particularly of corn, soybeans, and wheat – it has become increasingly reliant on foreign countries for seafood, now considered a healthy diet staple. Despite its capacity to rely solely on the seafood it produces, the nation exports the majority of it and imports 80% to 90% of the seafood Americans consume.

The U.S. is still a global fishing superpower, but with more people eating fish as part of a regular diet, America’s fishers now produce an amount equal to only 76% of the nation’s seafood demand. In 1979, New England reached 179% self-sufficiency; as of 2021, the region is only 36% self-sufficient, according to a study published in Nature magazine this summer.

Still, researchers at the University of Maine in Orono recently found that U.S. seafood independence is “not beyond reach.” 

Change will require investment in domestic processing and working waterfronts, researchers say, as well as a more expansive view by Americans of what ocean fare is edible.

At the same time, there is growing awareness that U.S. seas can be sustainably harvested at higher levels than they currently are, says Ray Hilborn, a fisheries biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Today, the U.S. fishing fleet captures only 70% of the sustainable catch. Norway and Iceland? Nearly 100%.

“U.S. regulatory agencies have adopted very precautionary management,” says Dr. Hilborn. “The irony, then, is that we end up importing fish from countries that have few environmental protections.”

Rough-looking characters – or caretakers?

Most important, “if we want to achieve seafood security, there has to be a consumer reference shift,” says Tolulope Oyikeke, a researcher at the University of Maine.

When one of Pete Halmay’s friends entered the words “commercial fisherman” into an AI program, the computer spit out images that both amused and dismayed Mr. Halmay, who has been a sea urchin diver for 50 years.

The result was “some rough-looking characters,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Wow, here’s where we start from. This is what people think.’”

His home port of San Diego shares the same story. Once home to a massive tuna boat fleet, the fishery collapsed. Boats dispersed. Yet small-boat fishermen still work the waters for a variety of catch, from mackerel to yellowfin tuna.

Making a living had become difficult, given consolidation of processor power, vanishing dock space, and fishery policies that created private fishing rights for popular species – including wreckfish, quahogs, and tanner crabs – that are bought and traded in “catch shares.”

A decade ago, Mr. Halmay had an idea to fight back. He set up a dockside market where fishermen sold their catch right off their boats. The legislature had to rewrite law to allow fishers to display and cut fish on the dock.

A decade later, hundreds of people visit San Diego’s Tuna Harbor Dockside Market each Saturday, buying yellowfin tuna for as little as $5 a pound, a quarter of the price in grocery stores. In July, the dockside market introduced a new auction to move even larger amounts of fish. 

The key has been giving consumers the chance to connect the catch to the fisher. 

“If it’s thrown into a commodity, everything is the same, so why should I pay special attention to it?” says Mr. Halmay. “But if you make fishermen responsible for it, they take better care of it.”

Robert F. Bukaty/AP

A lobster fishing boat goes out to sea under the dawn sky on Casco Bay in South Portland, Maine. There is growing awareness that U.S. seas can be sustainably harvested at higher levels than they currently are.

Leadership on local waterfronts

Karen Bell is the scion of a Florida fishing family that spans three generations. Her hometown fishing village, Cortez, has seen ups and downs, but its survival against global and domestic forces, Ms. Bell says, is largely because of its resilient fishers.

“It’s an environment where people seem to thrive and where your focus is more on just being happy, loving what you do, and doing it,” says Ms. Bell, who owns A.P. Bell Fish Co.

As part of that spirit, she says, a local fishers’ consortium recently bought a piece of marshland at the edge of the village to protect it from development – and showcase its value to the fishery. 

Still, she has to balance nostalgia with reality. A number of her boats are stuck at dock, thanks to tight snapper quotas. “It’s hard to even think about getting rid of ‘the girls,’” as she calls the boats, all named after women in her family.

But when asked if the U.S. can supply all its own fish, she answers as a seafood self-reliance skeptic. “I don’t know if it’s feasible,” says Ms. Bell. “Today you would need a pile of money to get into this. But the tide turns.”

In Alaska, regulators are fighting to reserve catch shares for younger fishers and community groups. In Point Judith, Rhode Island, the Town Dock is a major domestic supplier of calamari. In Tybee Island, Georgia, the Tybee Oyster Co. opened the state’s first floating oyster farm, the result of a legislative change. Briny “salt bomb” oysters are a hit with locals and visitors.

And here in Bluffton, Mayor Toomer and the city council are focused on waterfront improvements to not only preserve but also to showcase what he calls “this incredible, sustainable treasure.”

To move toward sustainability and food self-reliance, “One thing that’s absolutely important is leadership,” says Mr. Halmay, the sea urchin diver. “If your little area doesn’t have a leader willing to stick their neck out, it’s not going to work.”

Sophie Neiman

Jean Ndayambaje, shown here July 11, 2024, has buried two of his young children since fleeing fighting in his village in eastern Congo in 2022.

Justin was the first of the Ndayambajes’ children to die.  

Last year, the 7-year-old was helping his mother gather firewood outside their displacement camp in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo when he was struck by a stray bullet from militia fighters doing target practice in the area. 

Residents of a neighboring village brought his small body back to his family’s tent as his mother trailed behind in tears. 

At a roadside stall, his father, Jean Ndayambaje, selected a minuscule coffin. Then, on the grounds of a crowded cemetery thick with purple wildflowers, he dug Justin’s grave himself. Two hundred mourners gathered at the plot to sing and pray. 

Many of those who came to the funeral had known similar losses themselves. Over the last two years, a Rwandan government-backed rebellion by guerrilla forces known as the March 23 Movement (M23) has uprooted 1.7 million civilians in eastern Congo. Thousands have died, either directly because of the fighting or from the hunger and illness that have followed in its wake. 

For many here, mourning with dignity is a way to remind themselves that even if their loved ones’ deaths were senseless and random, their lives still meant something. 

“He was very kind, and never made trouble,” says Mr. Ndayambaje of Justin, whose grave site he visits every second week to clean. “Whenever the other children wanted to fight with him, he came straight to tell his papa.”

No life unnoticed 

In a worn blue notebook, Gilbert Maombi Sebuhoro keeps a list of the dead. 

By the time he added Justin’s, there were already hundreds of names inscribed there. For each one, he noted the age and cause of death in sloping handwriting, a careful archive of lives cut short by war. 

Mr. Sebuhoro is the secretary of the displacement camp where the Ndayambajes live, a dense tangle of tents made from frayed plastic and bits of wood on the edge of the lakeside city of Goma. 

Moses Sawasawa/AP

People displaced by the ongoing fighting gather at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Goma, Congo, July 11, 2024.

Since 2022, tens of thousands of people have taken shelter on the city’s edges, which have become the last safe place left to run to as fighting between M23, the Congolese army, and various government-aligned militias escalates.

Mr. Sebuhoro, who arrived shortly after the conflict began, chronicles deaths in 118 displacement sites near Goma. Today, his list has over 1,000 entries. He says it is essential that no matter how many people die, no life goes unnoticed. 

“If someone is dead here, I can’t stay in my tent,” he says. “We call every neighbor and family member, and we spend the night at the place where the dead man lived.” 

Crafting coffins   

Denise Iru Kahambu also knows what it is like to mourn someone you love. 

In 1997, during the First Congo War, her husband died fighting on behalf of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, leaving her to raise their children alone. Eventually, to support them, Ms. Kahambu started a small business selling coffins in Goma. 

“I have mercy for the displaced people,” she says, surrounded by neat stacks of white painted caskets. “I feel sorry for them.” 

For that reason, she gives coffins away to any uprooted family that asks her for one – about a dozen of them every week. 

Sophie Neiman

Denise Iru Kahambu is a coffin seller in Goma, who has an agreement with the government to provide free coffins for displaced people, July 11, 2024.

The Congolese government is supposed to reimburse her, but when the Monitor visited her in July, Ms. Kahumbu said that she was still owed the cost of 60 coffins.

Meanwhile, the price of timber is soaring as conflict blocks the roads leading in and out of Goma, with rebels and government soldiers alike demanding payment from merchants brave enough to cross checkpoints with their wares. The price of wood has gone up 40% since the war began, according to local merchants. 

This makes it harder for Ms. Kahambu to buy materials for her coffins, or make a profit from the ones she does not give away. Sometimes, she wonders how long she will be able to continue her work. 

“I want to keep providing coffins, but at a certain point I won’t be able to,” she says. 

Far from home

Still, the need continues to grow. 

While he was still mourning the loss of his son, Mr. Ndayambaje’s 6-year-old daughter, Neema, became ill with typhoid from drinking dirty water. 

In June, he laid her to rest in the same cemetery as her brother. 

Afterward, his friends gathered outside the family’s tent to mourn. Mr. Ndayambaje had to borrow money to pay for drinks for them. He does not know how he will pay it back. 

Sophie Neiman

A man carries timber through a market in Goma, Congo, where prices have almost doubled as a result of violence, July 12, 2024.

The pain of his daughter’s death is compounded, he adds, by having to leave his children in graves so far from where they were born. 

“You feel a bit more comfortable when you bury your relatives nearby your home, because you can always see the place,” Mr. Ndayambaje says, watching other children scrambling over loose rocks as they chase each other through the camp. “When you bury someone far from home, you will never see [the grave] again. It’s very sad.”

Mr. Ndayambaje’s sentiments are echoed by Jean-Bosco Simbahunga, another resident of the camp, whose aging father died after an illness in April. 

“We’d like to go back to our village and even be buried in our village,” Mr. Simbahunga says. “I feel as if we are all going to die here and be buried here.”

Mr. Simbahunga says his father was a kind man who valued education and eagerly volunteered in his church. 

In the rush to bury him, Mr. Simbahunga forgot to study exactly where the grave site was within a sprawling cemetery allocated for displaced people.

Since then, he has not been able to find his father again. 

Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Andres Kudacki/AP

Gabriela Durham uses her phone to listen to music in her room Jan. 27, 2024, in New York. With social media's harmful effects documented, more parents are using limits or blanket bans on children's smartphone use. Some teens are spending time without their smartphones – or social media “cleanses” – to boost both mental health and grades.

Nestled just blocks between Harvard and MIT, Faro Cafe has become a watering hole for college students who chatter excitedly, and at one table near some leafy plants, discuss the latest in the mobile phones. This development, they say, would help them work with increased productivity and focus on priorities.

The students aren’t discussing Apple’s new artificial intelligence program.  In this cafe, where Zoom conferences take a back seat to face-to-face chats, they’re talking about the Light Phone III, a phone designed to be used less, not more. And it’s just one example of the quietly growing, countercultural “dumbphone” industry.

Visvajit Sriramrajan, a 23-year-old college grad from Massachusetts,  began the move from smartphone to dumbphone in 2021  after realizing that he was on his phone more than five hours a day.

“Over the course of a week of seven days, that’s 35 hours,’’ he says. “Over the course of a month, that’s 140 hours. Over the course of a year, that’s 1,680 hours. If someone asked me, ‘Do you want 1,680 hours of your life back?’ I think most people would say ‘yes.’”

These new low-tech phones offer a way to reclaim that time, market experts say.

Often devoid of internet browsers, social media, and email, these dumbphones allow the user to take more control of their time. Companies such as Light, Techless, and Boringphone, which produce the low-tech phones, are reporting strong year-over-year growth, with figures as high as 200%, and thousands of sales in cities across the country, from New York to Seattle. Meanwhile, while it continues to show steady growth overall, during the first quarter of 2024, Apple faced a 13% decline in year-over-year sales, hitting a six-year low in new smartphone activations, according to researchers.

Google searches for the term “dumbphone” have increased more than 300% over the past year, while TikTok hashtags like “#bringbackflipphones” and “#dumbphones” have tens of millions of views each.

Smartphones may still be largely ascendant in society. But these trends, along with interviews for this article, suggest that many young adults who grew up with smartphones and social media are now seeking tech-free ways to protect their mental health, productivity, and free time. 

“Social media can be good if you're very intentional about your usage,’’ says Laura Marciano, a researcher at the Harvard Chan T.H. School of Public Health who studies the connection between technology and mental health. She said she is not surprised that young people are noticing the link between the two and trying to find ways to unplug. “If you're using it to call people and you're using it to really develop relationships’’ then it can be positive. “But if you're not intentional, it can lead to doomscrolling.’’

Courtesy of Gabriela Nguyen

The display, or home screen, of a "dumbphone" offers simple graphics and basic information. A growing number of Americans are looking for something with more functionality than a flip phone, but that's less addictive than a smartphone.

For young adults who have lower impulse control, she says, extensive social media and phone use often result in negative effects on mental health. 

Samantha Tillett, a 21-year-old medical secretary from Virginia, switched to a dumbphone after finding her mental health and college grades declining as she became dependent on her smartphone.

“[The] alarm goes off and, immediately, I’m on my phone,’’ she says. “And that could go anywhere from just being on my phone for 20 minutes to being on my phone for the first three or four hours of my day.’’

Sometimes, the distraction went unchecked. “I would log into my school and sit on Zoom with no face screen on and just scroll, not listening to what was going on in class. My grades definitely struggled, and it was because I could not disconnect,” Ms. Tillet said. “It’s definitely a sort of addiction.”

Ms. Tillet has since switched to a flip phone, and her average screen time has dropped from 11 hours a day to just three or four. With newfound free time she’s begun to paint, crochet, and read. 

Still, the switch to a dumbphone is not always easy, says Mr. Sriramrajan. Without Spotify on his phone, he can no longer play songs on the fly. Now, he has to wait to download the music. 

“Do I want to mindlessly adopt the most convenient way to do something, knowing that, as a result, I am losing my ability to remember things, to be in the moment, to be present, to cherish what I have?” he asks.

Matthew Meyers, a 36-year-old neuropsychiatrist, describes having both kinds of phones and desperately hoping for something with more functionality than his Lightphone but less addictive than his iPhone. 

“The important thing is that we, as a society, are aware of the costs and benefits of this technology and don’t just mindlessly engage,” says Mr. Meyers. “There is a place in our brains just for recognizing faces. We are deeply wired for connection with other humans.”

Los Angeles had Laurel Canyon. San Francisco had Haight-Ashbury. And New York City had Greenwich Village. Their respective music scenes shaped the 1960s. Greenwich Village came first. 

Two new books capture the cultural impact of the lower Manhattan neighborhood that sits almost 30 blocks south of Times Square. Sarah Seltzer’s debut novel, “The Singer Sisters,” is about a songwriter, Judy, who arrives in the Village in 1965. David Browne’s nonfiction “Talkin’ Greenwich Village” is a history of the bohemian locale. Originally a hub for writers and, later, beat poets, its clubs birthed the cool jazz of Miles Davis. It also incubated modern folk music. 

It was a neighborhood where the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and the trio Peter, Paul and Mary could develop their singular musical styles, says Mr. Browne, a journalist at Rolling Stone. That certainly describes Ms. Seltzer’s fictional character, who becomes the matriarch of a folk rock dynasty.

The Monitor convened the two New York writers on a video call to discuss Greenwich Village’s legacy. This interview has been condensed and edited. 

Can you describe what your books are about?

Ms. Seltzer: It’s a family saga about two generations of folk rock singers in the ’60s and the ’90s. And their secret betrayals and brushes with fame and infamy, and mostly about their relationships and how those are expressed through song. 

Mr. Browne: My book is a history of the rise and heyday and gradual crumbling of the legendary Greenwich Village music scene. And how, over those decades, it fostered all kinds of talents and iconoclasts and musical rebels in many genres. And became an iconic ... gathering place. 

Bettmann/Getty Images/File

A couple chat at the Cock and Bull bar in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1959. In 1961, the Cock and Bull became The Bitter End, a venue that hosted performances by Joan Baez and Curtis Mayfield, among many others. The Bitter End bills itself as the oldest rock club in New York.

What was your response to each other’s book? 

Ms. Seltzer: I’ve been thinking about how important setting is. And using place as an organizing principle for a nonfiction book is really cool. ... But what’s so interesting about this book is how the locus of what was cool and the public spaces where new music was being fostered were also shifting around, even within the space of a few blocks. And that really resonated with me just as a New Yorker myself. As someone who’s made pilgrimages down to that part of the city my whole life, seeing how it changes and how the cool spot can change from one year to another – that’s really captured so well in this book. 

Mr. Browne: It was fascinating to see some of the places that I wrote about, some of those clubs that are mentioned, like the Bottom Line and the Washington Square Hotel, which was a gathering place for musicians, kind of seedy back then. That blend of fiction and nonfiction reminded me of a book like E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” which I read when I was a kid and just loved. But I also love the alternating stories of two generations of musicians and how they each embodied their eras. [The character of] Judy captures a certain ’60s and ’70s moment in music and the singer-songwriter thing. And [her daughter] Emma captures that ’90s kind of a Lilith Fair vibe, which was very much an inheritor of the previous generation. I joked to Sarah when she told me about the book, “Oh, it’ll be like if Joan Baez gave birth to Jewel.” 

Who were some of the real-life musicians who influenced your characters in “The Sister Singers”?

Ms. Seltzer: Some touchstones are obviously the Wainwright-McGarrigle [family] and Roche mega family and all their drama. There’s Joan Baez and her sisters. Carly Simon and her sister [Lucy] were in a band together, The Simon Sisters, and they did folk music at first. Joni Mitchell, obviously, as well. I also read a biography of Janis Joplin while I was researching. I found that really helpful in different ways, like her relationship with her family. While she was rebelling against them in this very serious way, she was also writing these heartfelt letters back and forth to them. That really helped thinking about the emotional tenor of the family relationship [in my novel].

Actor Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic “A Complete Unknown.” It’s set in Greenwich Village during the ’60s. Why does that era still have such a powerful hold on popular culture?

Ms. Seltzer: There’s so much ferment in the ’60s in New York. It’s political; it’s cultural; it’s musical. And it’s a beautiful neighborhood. ... It exerts its call on every generation of artists because they know what happened there. I have a book my parents got me when I was a teenager [about] literary Greenwich Village in the 1920s and ’30s. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dylan Thomas were hanging out in these same places before the people that David wrote about. I hope the movie’s really good. And I hope that people discover Dylan’s music. It’s for every generation.

Mr. Browne: It’s been fascinating over the last decade or so to see the Village come back a bit more into pop culture, with [the Coen brothers’ movie] “Inside Llewyn Davis,” of course, and [the streaming series] “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” [Midge Maisel] starts off her career as a comedian in the Gaslight and hanging out with Lenny Bruce. And now leading up to this movie, it really shows the ongoing allure of that neighborhood, not just the music that came out of it, because those songs really endure. Not just Dylan’s [songs], but “Four Strong Winds” by [the folk duo] Ian and Sylvia, and “Reason To Believe” by Tim Hardin, and “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega. 

These days, if you go to the Village, it’s all [marijuana] dispensaries and drugstores and banks. If you’re young and you go down there, the idea that there was all this stuff happening and all these little basements and storefronts and things, I think it’s very romantic. It’s very tantalizing. 

Years ago, Taylor Swift briefly rented an apartment in Greenwich Village on Cornelia Street – and wrote a song by that name. What would you tell Swifties about the musical lineage of the neighborhood?

Mr. Browne: I have a friend who lives on Cornelia Street right next to that building. He sees the Swifties. They gather in front of that building and have their photos taken. What made [the area] special was just a combination of things. Within less than a mile, there were a half a dozen or more clubs. You could just pop in from one to the next, and you could see jazz here and folk here and some blues rock there. We think of the Village as [associated with] protest songs, and it really wasn’t. A lot of the songwriters, even back in the ’60s, were writing about what was going on in their minds and relationships. 

Ms. Seltzer: I was like, should I have my book [release] party down there? Because it’s kind of touristy now. As my brother was coming to the party, he texted me Counting Crows’ lyrics [for] “Sullivan Street” because he was crossing Sullivan Street. In that radius, there are more songs with the names of streets. So there’s [Taylor Swift’s] “Cornelia Street.” There’s “Bleecker Street” by Simon and Garfunkel. Dar Williams is my favorite folk rock singer from the ’90s and 2000s. She has a song called “Spring Street” that is so good. There’s [Dylan’s] “Positively Fourth Street.” 

I can’t think of anywhere else that’s like that, you know? Even with all the waves of decay that David describes so well in his book, and reinvention, it still feels really special.

Which performers do you hope gain greater recognition as a result of “Talkin’ Greenwich Village”?

Mr. Browne: When people think of the Village, they think of Bob Dylan – and they think of some of his peers back then, Phil Ochs or Tom Paxton – but it often doesn’t go beyond that. There were a whole raft of people of color on the scene. Folk singers who have been forgotten. Len Chandler being one of the big ones. He was a peer of Dylan’s and the first folk singer to sing in the Gaslight Cafe. He never quite got his due. I tracked down a woman named Delores Dixon, who was a Black folk singer in the Village, who was in a group called The New World Singers. They did the first cover of “Blowin’ in the Wind” before Peter, Paul and Mary. Most people don’t remember her. 

What role did Greenwich Village play in helping the culture accept gay rights?

Mr. Browne: There was a lot of gay entertainment in the Village in these little bars and clubs back in the ’20s and ’30s. All of them got shut down pretty quickly because they were raided. But it continued. There were these tea rooms where gay women would gather. I discovered a place called the Page Three, which was on Seventh Avenue South and had cross-dressing clientele in the ’50s. That was an amazing thing for me to discover and to talk to some of the performers. The Stonewall riot in 1969 in the Village was such a horrific thing, but also an important moment for gay rights. Even the Village People, as silly as that seems, grew out of the West Village. Those [music] producers going to gay bars and seeing all these people dressed in different outfits and thinking, “Oh, there’s this audience. They love this kind of music. Let’s concoct a group and even name it the Village People.” So the Village paralleled the emergence of gay rights.  

When you were each doing research, what surprised you?

Ms. Seltzer: Reading in David’s book – and then I also read “Folk City” [by Stephen Petrus and Ronald Cohen] and a couple of others – about the women who were so instrumental in hosting gatherings and bringing male artists to the attention of record labels. There’s always those women in any kind of scene making connections happen, and whose names have been forgotten. 

Mr. Browne: When I was interviewing John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful, he lived in a building on Washington Square West. He was one of the few musicians who actually was from Greenwich Village. And, briefly, his neighbor was Eleanor Roosevelt. There was a movement in the ’50s ... to run a highway through Washington Square Park. One of the people who really publicly advocated against that plan was Eleanor Roosevelt. Woody Guthrie sometimes crashed in John Sebastian’s family’s apartment because John Sebastian’s father was a classical harmonica player. So the idea that in this one building, at one point, you had the future leader of The Lovin’ Spoonful, Woody Guthrie, and Eleanor Roosevelt – that just captured the whole crazy quilt of the Village arts and politics scene.

Reuters

A woman in Shenzhen, China, lays flowers outside a school following the Sept. 18 stabbing death of a 10-year-old Japanese child.

Official ties between Japan and China keep fraying, especially after recent incursions by a Chinese aircraft carrier and military plane in Japan’s coastal zones. The incursions are another sign of Beijing’s drive for dominance in East Asia. Yet a closer look at informal ties between the two peoples reveals a less dire picture of rising tensions.

A good example is the outpouring of grief, affection, and remorse among many Chinese after a 10-year-old Japanese national was stabbed Sept. 18. The boy was walking to a school for Japanese children in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, a hub for high-tech companies. Police detained a Chinese man at the scene as the alleged assailant.

The killing, coming months after a similar attack on a Japanese family in another city, drew particular attention because of the date. Sept. 18 is the anniversary of imperial Japan’s bombing of a railroad track in northeastern China in 1931 that it then used as an excuse to invade its neighbor.

The anniversary has long been used by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to boost anti-Japanese propaganda and stoke hateful nationalism as a tool for party control. In online postings after the boy’s killing – many of them later censored – Chinese citizens blamed the official rhetoric against Japan for the attack, although the assailant’s motive remains unclear.

“We should stop history education that triggers such vengeful thoughts,” one Chinese woman in Shenzhen told the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri.

Hundreds of people have visited the entrance of the Japanese school in Shenzhen to lay flowers and leave notes of apology to the boy. In Tokyo last week, dozens of Chinese nationals showed up for a vigil after the killing. The whole incident, stated Yomiuri, “has prompted criticism among Chinese people against their own country.”

One poignant reaction came in a letter apparently written by the boy’s father and circulated briefly online before being censored. It called for no hate between Japan and China. The father vowed to continue his work at a Japanese trading company in Shenzhen as a “bridge” between the two countries, according to Nikkei news. “My only hope is for this type of tragedy to not repeat itself,” he supposedly stated.

After reading the letter, one Chinese internet user wrote, “The high level of civility that this family represents is much higher than that of the government which represents 1.4 billion people.”