A small story with broad implications: the other shrouded building at Ground Zero, CUNY’s Fiterman Hall, won’t be torn down anytime soon. The Daily News reported over the long weekend that the state Dormitory Authority rejected all bids for its demolition because they did not fully address environmental issues. Silverstein Properties has blamed the Read More
Hyperbolic titles invite dissent. So here’s mine: What makes Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” “the poem that changed America,” as the cover of this essay collection proclaims?
Ginsberg might’ve responded by saying, as he did in a 1986 essay included here, that when San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore published “Howl” 50 years ago, changing America Read More
Despite the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in the Kelo case last June, battles over eminent domain are certainly not going away any time soon.
As The New York Times reported this week, there are plenty of critics in both parties.
In a rare display of unanimity that cuts across partisan and geographic lines, Read MoreOne could be forgiven for thinking the city’s financial condition is in pretty great shape these days. Recent articles about the local economy have been filled with cheerful words such as “recovery,” “surplus” and “surge.” When it was announced last month that the city would end this fiscal year with an unexpected $3.3 billion surplus, Read More
The old debate about the value of a journalism degree became slightly more interesting with the creation of the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, and the Monday-afternoon appointment of Stephen B. Shepard, the current editor in chief of BusinessWeek, as its new dean.
The school is scheduled to Read More
New York’s Republican Party has a big problem. The party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate this year was humiliated. Democrats hold all of New York’s statewide offices except Governor. And the man who holds that job, George Pataki, is not expected to seek a fourth term in 2006. State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a popular Read More
Administrators at the City University of New York announced recently that they would open a graduate program of journalism some time next year. That’s good news for aspiring journalists who can’t afford pricey degrees from places like Columbia University, where they offer instruction in not giving offense.
Officials described the program as a one-year “boot Read More
On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense , by David Brooks. Simon and Schuster, 304 pages, $25.
He’s back again: Intrepid explorer David Brooks has returned from that faraway place known as suburban America, a fantastic land where cars are big, malls bigger and super-value meals tremendous. Read More
Against Love: A Polemic , by Laura Kipnis. Pantheon, 224 pages, $24.
If scandals have their seasons, nothing suits summer like a steamy dose of adultery. This season we celebrate a cuckold, Hillary Clinton, whose top-dollar memoir renewed interest in the most delicious illicit affair of the 90′s. And we malign an adulterer (and accused Read More
A number of ideologues-in-training at City University’s law school thought it would be, like, cool and radical to honor the egregious Lynne Stewart as its public-interest lawyer of the year. Ms. Stewart is under federal indictment for assisting her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, organize terrorism from his prison cell. The sheik was convicted in Read More
