With jobs in jeopardy and investments limping, it’s understandable that Main Street takes comfort in finding a bogeyman to blame for the country’s current economic miseries. And last month, when the New York State comptroller announced that Wall Street handed out $18.4 billion in bonuses for 2008, Main Street didn’t even have to get up Read More
I spoke to Alex Mawbrey, a professor at Queensborough Community College, whose radical theories of journalism are found on his blog, http://www.mediabrainstorm.com.
Sparrow: What is the future of journalism?
Professor Mawbrey: In a word, volunteerism. Throughout the United States are choirs and choruses, some of them first-rate. Virtually none of them Read More
Though New York could not claim John Updike as a native son, nor even an adopted one (he preferred the flinty seaports of New England to our glittering streets), surely the greatest concentration of his devotees live here. Perhaps in the excruciatingly detailed depiction of suburban malaise that filled his best, or at least his Read More
Governor David Paterson’s decision-making process may have been flawed, but his choice of Kirsten Gillibrand as New York’s new junior senator ought to be applauded for several reasons, not the least of which is geography. Upstate New York has been suffering a long economic decline for years now. Not coincidentally, perhaps, downstate has monopolized New Read More
Against the hodgepodge of spring 2009 fashion—eccentric prints, sweatshirt material, crumpled and rumpled looks, space-warrior wares and butterfly prints and embellishment—Israeli-born fashion designer’s Nili Lotan’s collection stands out as a beacon of sexy minimalism. Inspired by Woodstock and the Paris student rallies of May 1968, it includes frocks superimposed with pictures from these events: awareness-raising, Read More
Swept up in what the city and country witnessed on a biting cold January day—a pilot landing a 50-ton airliner in a freezing river as smoothly as he might have put a Cessna down in a cornfield, with no loss of life or serious injury—Governor David Paterson echoed the gratitude felt around the world when Read More
There were, in Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, faint echoes of two of his predecessors—perhaps not surprisingly, they shared with Mr. Obama a gift for language and imagery. When Mr. Obama delivered a rhetorical jab at those “who question the scale of ambitions,” a careful listener heard the sunny tones of Ronald Reagan, who argued against Read More
Prosecutorial power is great, and when abused, can cause great damage. The U.S. attorney’s decision to drop fraud charges against David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former budget director, in connection with his performance as former chief executive of Collins & Aikman, the bankrupt auto-parts maker, is a victory for common sense and restraint. But few pause Read More
The football season ended all too abruptly in New York, so after a brief period of mourning, sports fans will begin to focus on what promises to be a remarkable 2009 baseball season. We are about 10 weeks away from the opening of two dazzling ballparks—Citi Field in Queens and the new Yankee Stadium in Read More
Meet a movie mensch? We hate to be the ones to tell you, but the weekend’s excitement is pretty much confined to the Upper West Side, specifically, the Jewish Film Festival up at Lincoln Center, where today’s screenings include Two Lives Plus One, about “a Parisian schoolteacher in midlife crisis … who escapes to a Read More
