At least ten people have been shot at the Empire State Building this morning including an as-yet-unidentified shooter according to a spokesman for the New York City Police Department. The male shooter was killed, but the NYPD says further information about the gunman or his motivations is currently “unknown.”
We’ll update this post as soon as we know more. Read More
Mitt Romney swept a series of northeastern primaries last night, including in New York, where he won 62 percent of a low turnout primary.
Christine Quinn dishes (a little) on her upcoming nuptials.
Add Mike Lupica to the Ray Kelly for mayor bandwagon: “Go back across the history of the city and try to find another police commissioner you think could get a 77% approval rating even serving half as long as Kelly has.”
Top Republicans like Peter King, Michael Grimm and Marty Golden think Kelly should run.
Voters want a new direction for city schools from the next mayor. Read More
After a Park Slope mother complained on a local listserv about the ice cream vendors that are befouling a local playground, her lament went ’round the world with a slew of mostly mocking news stories about the dust-up.
This reaction did not go appreciated by Park Slope parents, and now, the keepers of the listserv have put a kibosh on any more discussion of the frozen dairy treats and their interloping purveyors:
“We are calling a HALT to all discussion of the ice cream thread and the responses it has received,” reads a message sent out by the list’s moderator. “For me the best news is that clearly there isn’t any REAL news to cover or this wouldn’t have received the coverage it did. It is time to focus on spring, holidays, vacations, and the great things our neighborhood has to offer.” Read More
Jon Cooper first met Barack Obama in 2007, a few weeks before Obama announced a run for president and back when he was mostly known as a promising first-term U.S. senator with a gift for oration. At a low-dollar fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan, Mr. Cooper, the president of a large electronics manufacturing company and then the majority leader of the Suffolk County Legislature, stood next to Mr. Obama after he had taken questions from guests. Mr. Cooper pulled out a Christmas card that he had mailed to friends and family and showed it to the Illinois senator.
The card showed Mr. Cooper and Robert Cooper, his domestic partner of 27 years, and the couple’s five adopted children. (Robert Cooper changed his last name when the couple adopted their first child 25 years ago.)
“He told me how beautiful my family looked, and I said to him that I hoped that if you decide to run for president that you will remain a strong and consistent advocate for gay rights and for gay marriage,” Mr. Cooper recalled. Read More
In a 2008 essay in Harper’s Magazine, Vivian Gornick traced the slow development of the Jewish-American voice from the patois of ghetto sentimentality to the outsider yawp of Saul Bellow, making a claim on the latter part of that hyphenated identity, through to Philip Roth’s snarling to break free from the newfound assimilation. The voice is recognizable, she writes, by its “violent rush of words that announced the arrival of a narrating voice whose signature traits were a compulsive brilliance, an exuberant nastiness, and a take-no-prisoners humor edged in self-laceration.”
“At the heart of the enterprise,” Ms. Gornick continues, “lay a self-regard that made the writing rise to unmatched levels of verbal glitter and daring, even as its dangerously narrowed scope ruled out sympathy, much less compassion, for any character on the page other than the narrator himself.” Read More
The most memorable moment from the first major Tea Party rally in front of New York’s City Hall, in April 2009, wasn’t the woman chain-smoking cigarettes by a guard rail, there, she said, to defend “smoker’s rights.” Nor was it the machismo menace that hung in the air, or the “Don’t Tread on Me” signs held by untrod-upon-looking junior insurance executives in for the afternoon from Glen Cove. It wasn’t even the palpable anger at Mayor Bloomberg, who (presumably) sat in his office a few feet away and, his efforts toward gun control and bike paths notwithstanding, was the only chance Republicans had of holding onto City Hall that November.
No, the most memorable moment of that afternoon was the speaker who took to the microphone and urged everyone present to put down their tricorner hats and give a round of applause to the people who had made the rally happen: the New York City Parks Department, the sanitation workers, the police guarding the barricades.
These were “the working people,” the ones lionized by this movement for the screwing they had been taking from the Obama administration and assorted powers-that-be, but they were also government workers, their salaries and pensions paid for with hard-earned taxpayer dollars, their very existence dependent upon public largess.
In the two and a half years since that gathering, there have been hundreds like it across the country. In 2010, Tea Party protesters and their ilk not only took out the Democrats in Congress, but even managed to squelch the ambitions of a few Republicans who were deemed insufficiently conservative by the latest right-wing litmus test.
But by late 2011, Glenn Beck, once the Cassandra of this crowd, had been shuffled off the stage. The town hall meetings that first alerted the mainstream media to this new substrata of the body politic are now filled not with conservatives yelling at Democratic congressmen to keep their government hands off of Medicare but with liberals yelling at the Republican reps to let the Bush tax cuts expire. The debt ceiling has been raised, budgets have been passed. The likely Republican presidential nominee is as far removed from this tumult in the streets as the average CEO is from the jobs he outsourced.
Into this breach have slipped a couple of books that attempt to explain this new world we now find ourselves in. Read More
A little before 9 a.m. Sunday morning, the wind chill was 11 degrees and the line to get into the Abyssinian Baptist Church already stretched down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, and was beginning to turn down 136th Street. And still they came. Out of the subway they marched, in purple puffy jackets, blood orange sneakers, blindingly yellow scarves, in two and threes, like a rainbow coming unspun on the streets of Harlem, exotic cigarettes in one hand, foreign language guidebooks in the other, all pointing them the same direction: Abyssinian. Read More
Tired perhaps of discussing the Jersey Shore’s heteronormativity and its power dynamic, academics at New York University are next taking up the scandal of the summer–the case of former IMF head Dominique Strauss Kahn and his alleged rape of a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in midtown.
Called, “The DSK Scandal: Transatlantic Reflections on Sex, Law, and Politics, the two day conference “aims at interpreting the transatlantic dimensions of this event.”
“On the one hand,” organizers write in an email that went out last week, “The mutual misunderstandings revealed important differences between France and the United States – not only between the legal systems, but also between the media cultures, as well as the political ones. On the other hand, the political dimensions of the story – in terms of gender, class, and race, and even sexuality – did transcend such national differences.” Read More
For a fellow practitioner of the journalism craft, meeting James Wolcott for lunch is a daunting prospect. It’s not just because at various times in a long career the TV critic-turned-movie critic-turned-rock critic-turned-media critic-turned-political blogger has secured regular gigs at such totemic outlets as Harper’s, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, where he now writes a regular column, but more so because the withering quality of his prose is enough evidence to assume the man carries a disemboweling knife in his frontal cortex. Read More
Longtime Assemblyman and Kings County Democratic leader Vito Lopez married the Brooklyn Democratic Party with the Occupy Wall Street protests yesterday, leading a delegation of supporters, political allies, unions and community groups over the Brooklyn Bridge to make common cause with the demonstrations. Read More
