As many visitors to this website may know, Lantern Books is situated on the southwest corner of Union Square in Manhattan. It’s a great location—an opportunity to see protests, skateboarders, dogs being put up for adoption and running in the dog run, the Green Market, and all sorts of hucksters, pleaders, pleasure-seekers, and others exercising their rights and liberties.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Union Square and what it might mean for a re-imagined United States. I put some of these ideas in an article I wrote for Satya magazine called “A More Perfect Union.” Over the next few months, I’m going to be interviewing a selection of people who live and work and have their being around Union Square to ask them what Union Square means to them, and in the process, perhaps, provide a little micro-history of this fragile and much put-upon democracy. Naturally, you may have your own theories and experiences of Union Square—whether this particular square, or other squares where the people come together throughout the U.S. or the world. We’d love to discuss it in the Lantern Books forum.